languagehat.com

I have resumed reading Anastasia Karakasidou’s book Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990, which is described in this earlier post, and what is fascinating me at the moment is the concept of ethnicity not as an immutable aspect of identity (as we tend to think of it) but as a garment chosen to suit an occasion or a preferred lifestyle. Here is the quote that struck me (I remind the reader that she is writing about a village in Greek Macedonia, part of the Ottoman Empire until the Balkan War of 1912):

Nearly everyone in the Guvezna area spoke Turkish during the late Ottoman era. Yet by the mid-eighteenth-century Greek had become the language of the marketplace throughout the Balkans. As Stoianovich* puts it, “Balkan merchants, regardless of their ethnic origin, generally spoke Greek and assumed Greek names.”

*Trajan Stoianovich, “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. XX, No. 2, June 1960, p. 291

She later adds: “The bakal (Turkish: ‘grocer’), on the other hand, was generally known as a Greek, regardless of what language he spoke.” This reminded me of the situation in Central Asia before the Bolshevik occupation, where urban merchants of any ethnic background spoke Persian (the variety now known as “Tajik”) in the course of their professional activities and were known as “Sarts”; the term disappeared once the inhabitants of the region were forced to choose a “nationality” for their Soviet identity cards. The same thing happened to the term “Macedonian” in the old sense once the Greeks and Bulgarians began violently competing for the territory and enforcing their new ideas of nationality once it had been divided up; as Karakasidou says, “The imposition of new national categories meand that Slavic-speakers were now either Greeks or Bulgarians. In Guvezna, being a ‘Macedonian’ was simply not an option.” Thus the triumph of the nation state means the end of older, more complex identities (and the greater tolerance for difference that accompanied them).

A very different form of chosen ethnicity is exhibited by the Abayudaya (a clearer orthography would be abaYudaya, the aba- being a prefix meaning ‘people’) of Uganda, who in the years immediately following World War I chose to become Jews; despite their devoted adherence to ritual laws and courageous resistence to government pressure, the state of Israel has refused to recognize them; the New York Times ran a story on the situation this week.

Addendum. A striking illustration of the elective nature of ethnicity is given in this sentence from Karakasidou (quoting Duncan Perry’s The Politics of Terror): “Cases of families divided are extant in which, because one brother was educated in a Bulgarian school, another in a Greek school, and a third in a Serbian school, each adopted a different nationality.” Such divisions of families were not uncommon in Central Asia at the time of forced division into “Tajik,” “Uzbek,” and other Soviet-created nationalities, and presumably in similar situations elsewhere (e.g., Rwanda and Burundi). Note also the discussion of “Ted Yannas” in the Addendum to the earlier post linked at the start of this one.

A list of Hawaiian “Idioms, Catch Phrases, Expletives and Interjections,” both lively and (to all appearances) accurate. (Thanks, Songdog!)

Addendum. And here are a linguists’ site for Hawaiian Creole (“pidgin“) and a review of a pidgin translation of the New Testament (Da Jesus Book), courtesy of the same canine.

From Desbladet, these thoughtful lyrics from Down Under:

Maybe I’m knotty veneer
Hagger nigh telephime reely reel?
Hadder Y. Noah Fimere?
… Wunker nawlwye stell; yegger nawlwye snow
If you’re reelor yerony dreaming;
Yellopoff the topoff your nirra stow
A new wafer the sander the screaming.

–Afferbeck Lauder

Alistair Morrison coined the term “Strine” for the idiosyncratic form of English spoken in Australia; his 1965 book Let Stalk Strine, written under the pseudonym Afferbeck Lauder (“alphabetical order”), popularized the term. If anyone can’t figure out the text of the ditty, say so in the comments and I’ll translate.

That’s “Languagehat” in Welsh, courtesy of Pat. Just thought you’d want to know.

In making my way through the Nov. 21 NYRB, I’ve reached Brent D. Shaw‘s review (only the first few paragraphs available without paying, alas) of Peter Brown‘s book Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman Empire, which collects three essays on the transition from the ancient idea of poverty (the poor to be helped are those like you, in your community) to the more inclusive Christian one, which, however, by and large omitted two large classes: people outside urban areas—as Brown says, historians “must remember that mass poverty in both ancient and modern preindustrial societies was (and still is) overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon”—and slaves.

What struck me most, however, and impelled me to write about it here, is the section discussing the “extended argument about the place the new images of the poor and poverty had in the mainstream ideologies of Late Antiquity.”

Brown’s claim is that the Mediterranean-wide discourse on the poor that emerged in this period was strongly related to the new needs of the new imperial state to assert its presence. A hugely powerful and distant emperor and imperial court were simultaneously more present and more invasive at a local level than was the Roman state of the Augustan Age. Its officials and administrators were everywhere, regulating and reporting down to minute levels. What was needed was a discourse in which these extremes of power could be linked. The pervasive tyranny of the new imperial court needed a human face; its subjects needed to believe in the efficacy of its local presence.

The new Christian language of poverty was the most widespread Mediterranean discourse of entitlement, affecting all persons down to the most indigent; and so it was the most suitable, the most powerful, and the most effective rhetoric in which the weak and the suppliant could converse with the more powerful. The presence of God in all human beings, but especially in the most humble of them, was the touchstone of the dialogue’s authenticity. The ideological consequence of all of this, Brown argues, is that the intense debates over the nature of the Christian God that raged among bishops and their councils between the fourth and sixth centuries—the murderous in-fighting that created mortal enemies in Arian and Monophysite heretics (and others)—were not just arid theological disputes over the essence of the supreme deity. They were part of a reformation of the language in which this new society could speak about itself.

This gives me an insight into something I had always wondered about, the tremendous importance given by the wielders of worldly power to those church councils and the persecution of “heretics”; it also reminds me uncomfortably of the discourses promoted in this new age of “extremes of power.”

On this day in 1964 began the trial of Iosif Brodsky for parasitism (tuneyadstvo); famous exchanges with the judge include:

“Why haven’t you been working?”
“I have been working. I’ve written poetry.”
“That doesn’t interest us.”

and

“Who included you among the ranks of the poets?”
“Who included me among the ranks of the human race?”

Five years later, on this day in 1969, was the premiere of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev at the Dom Kino in Moscow, one of the great moments of world cinema.

I am watching the Nova special on Tibetan art in Mustang, and I had to share the following sentence with you: “There are many words for ‘mud’ in Lo Monthang, but none of them are as important as gyang.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard the English word “mud” mentioned so many times in an hour. Mustang is truly the Land of Mud. (The language, Lopa, is a Tibetan dialect; Ethnologue says: “The inhabitants of Lo are called ‘Lopa’. Their capital is Manthang, called Mustang by outsiders.”)

This strange page, part of a strange Australian site that advocates sustainability, limited liability, and “7 prinsipls to improve present spelling NOW,” purports to recount the history of Russian spelling reform. After a quick dash through tsarist times they arrive at the Bolshevik revolution and get down to business: the 1919 Decree on Illiteracy, the postrevolutionary reform of orthography that “simplified spelling and eliminated surplus letters,” and Stalin’s literacy campaign of the ’30s. Then things take a turn for the bizarre: “After 1945, spelling reform was predictably again on the agenda of reconstruction of a war-ravaged society. By the 1960s doubled letters without functions had been dropped. It was claimed that 90 tons of paper were saved annually by now spelling Kommunist as Komunist.” Leaving aside the question of whether “predictably” is heavy irony or simple insanity, there was no such reform. The word kommunist is, was, and probably always will be spelled kommunist. This makes me a bit suspicious of whatever other information and nostrums they purvey (as it does Avva, who suggests that it may be a voice from an alternate universe, and from whom I swiped this link).

I just ran across this protein-filled piece on phonology written by Professor Edward Vajda (editor of Word) for his Linguistics 201 class at Western Washington University. It contains all sorts of gems (including, for those of you who took part in the discussion of “nucular” a few days ago, this: “Metathesis rule reorders the segments that are present: ask/aks; nuclear, ‘nucular’… These are examples of a rule randomly applied”); I was particularly struck by this:

A more striking example of a morphological constraint on phonetic distribution is to be found in Cherokee. Cherokee has a sound [m] that contrasts with other sounds to create changes in meaning: ama ‘salt’; ada ‘baby bird’; ana ‘strawberry’; ata ‘young girl’. However, the sound [m] appears in only about 10 morphemes: ugama ‘soup’; kamama ‘butterfly’; gugama ‘cucumber.’ Although most of these words seem to be foreign borrowings, no new words using [m] seem to be entering the language. Nor do new words containing [m] seem be made in Cherokee on any regular basis. Thus, the sound [m], which definitely would be considered a phoneme in the phoneme theory of phonology, is highly restricted in its distribution, at least as far as concerns the present state of Cherokee. The restriction is random: the sound [m] only appears in a small collection of words with no specific meaning in common. Yet the restriction on the distribution of [m] is morphological rather than phonological: [m] is restricted to a specific and limited set of words.

An even more extreme example is to be found in Quileute, a Native American language from the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State. The sound [g] appears in only one word in the entire language: hága’y ‘frog.’ Thus, this sound, which is in contrastive distribution with other phonemes, is entirely restricted in function to being able to contribute to the makeup of a single phoneme, the word for ‘frog.’ It is even possible to say that [g] in Quileute has a specific function: to contribute to the morpheme meaning ‘frog.’

Some things just don’t translate well. Regardless of how you feel about France’s position in the current international crisis, you have to admit Groundskeeper Willie’s line about “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” is pretty funny. But not when dragged, kicking and screaming, into French:

If such language is proving a headache for the diplomats, then spare a thought for the French translators, who have struggled for words to convey the full force of the venom. “Cheese-eating surrender monkeys”—a phrase coined by Bart Simpson but made acceptable in official diplomatic channels around the globe by Jonah Goldberg, a columnist for the rightwing weekly National Review (according to Goldberg)—was finally rendered: “Primates capitulards et toujours en quête de fromages”. And the New York Post’s “axis of weasel” lost much of its venom when translated as a limp “axe de faux jetons” (literally, “axis of devious characters” [actually, I believe, ‘axis of hypocrites’—LH]).

(From a Guardian article by Gary Younge and Jon Henley, February 11, 2003; at the end of the article appears the following delightful correction: “The description of the French as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ was not coined by Bart Simpson. It comes from the Simpsons character Groundskeeper Willie, the Scottish immigrant who takes care of custodial matters at the elementary school.”)

Fair balance. I will hereby provide equal time in the arena of memorable insults; wood s lot directed me to a Ben Tripp article from Counterpunch that contains this remarkable sentence: “You see, if there’s a clear loser in the pending savagery, it’s George W. Bush and his administration of barking scrotum monsters.” Barking scrotum monsters! Now, that deserves a niche right up there beside the primates capitulards.

Addendum. Jumping Jehoshaphat, in just a few days those damn monkeys have overtaken the Romanian gymnasts in my referrer logs and at the present rate will soon threaten the all-time champ, Charlie Ravioli! I guess the secret to getting hits is to mention as many catchphrases of the day as humanly possible. This may seem obvious to you, but my brain was formed during the ENIAC era, so it takes me a while to catch on. Excuse me while I run out to buy some popular periodicals to find out what people are talking about. I trust the Saturday Evening Post is still the cynosure of the common man…