Maria Sereda has a Facebook post (in Russian) describing a phenomenon she’d learned about on a trip to Bishkek (Bishkek/Pishpek): in Kyrgyz, you can form an emphatic adjective by repeating the first syllable and adding -p-, and bilinguals do the same thing in Russian, creating, e.g., сипсиний [sipsinii] ‘very blue’ from синий [sinii] ‘(dark) blue.’ Commenters say the same is true of Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and “all of Central Asia,” and one says Turkish has the same phenomenon: sarı ‘yellow’ sapsarı, yeşil ‘green’ yemyeşil. As you can see, that last has -m- rather than -p-. I did some digging and found Andrew Wedel, “Turkish Emphatic Reduplication,” whose introduction begins “Emphatic variants of some Turkish adjectives are historically derived by prefixing a CVC syllable in which the initial CV are identical to the word-initial CV of the base of affixation, while the final C is taken from the set {p, s, m, r}.”
I also found Yılmaz Köylü, “Abstract knowledge of emphatic reduplication in Turkish” (Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 5 [2020]: 86–96), whose abstract says:
This study investigated whether native speakers of Turkish have abstract knowledge regarding the principles guiding the selection of appropriate reduplicative forms in emphatic reduplication in Turkish. […] The participants were asked to reduplicate 48 non-words in 4 experimental conditions where the number of segments and the phonological features of the word forms were manipulated. […] The results indicated that the interpolated consonant in Turkish was taken from the set of {p, m, s}. Moreover, the interpolated consonant was sometimes identical to the second consonant of the base, but never to the first consonant. The most frequently produced interpolated consonant was {p}. […] The results demonstrate that Turkish native speakers were able to extend the reduplication strategies they employed in real words to non-words.
I find this an interesting phenomenon and am curious to see what the Hattery has to say.
Previously at Language Hat: Reduplicated Compounds in Turkish?, also touched on in You’re Ironing My Head!. But the two papers cited in this post don’t seem to have been mentioned here before.
Ah yes, and in the second comment Christopher Straughn said:
Needless to say, I’d forgotten all about it; I’m glad you remembered!
There are some forms that even add more than one syllable; e.g., çırılçıplak (“barenaked”) from çıplak (“naked”).
“CVC”
But there is also appak/apak < ak
A similar phenomenon exists in Mongolian.
цав цагаан (tsav tsagaan) ‘very white’. ᠴᠠᠪ ᠴᠠᠭᠠᠨ
шав шар (shav shar) ‘very yellow’ ᠱᠠᠪ ᠰᠢᠷᠠ
хав хар (hav har) ‘very black’ (pitch black) ᠬᠠᠪ ᠬᠠᠷᠠ
нов ногоо (nov nogoo) ‘very green’ ᠨᠣᠪ ᠨᠣᠭᠣᠭᠠᠨ
хав халуун (hav haluun) ‘very hot’ ᠬᠠᠪ ᠬᠠᠯᠠᠭᠤᠨ
тов тодорхой (tov todorhoi) ‘very clear, distinct’ (clear as a bell) ᠲᠣᠪ ᠳᠣᠳᠣᠷᠬᠠᠢ
(I hope I got the Mongol bichig right)
For an example in English, the most standard etymological theory for “teetotal” is “total” with emphatic reduplication of the opening phoneme, or maybe implying something like “Total with a Capital T.” Are there other examples? It seems like the sort of thing you could do on a nonce-coinage basis and with a little bit of context Anglophones could grok what you were trying to express. See also lyrics like:
“[Chorus]
Bad to the bone
B-b-b-b-b-b-b-bad
B-b-b-b-b-b-b-bad
B-b-b-b-b-b-b-bad
Bad to the bone”
“teetotal”
Extraordinary. How could I have got so far through life thinking that was spelled “teatotal”?
As in tea is the total of what they drink, no alcohol.
Have I ever seen the word written? Possibly not. BTW UrbanDictionary at least allows either spelling.
Teetotal is not phonological reduplication. It’s a phonetic spelling of t-total, as in the letter t.
I used to guess “tea, total” as the origin of “teetotal” as well, but in fact the adverb “tee-totally” is recorded earlier, and with general application, nothing specific to alcohol; it seems to have been jocular and associated with rustic-bumpkin characters, e.g. in an 1821 novel, “for I’ll be teetotally d—d, if Matt. Higgins shall allow either a tailor or any other loblolly to enter his crew without his knowledge”. The association of “teetotal” with abstinence from alcohol began apparently in 1833 and spread very quickly. See Wordorigins and Wordhistories for lots more.
My impression from these posts is that Turkish reduplication is different from English in that it’s not playful, silly, or bumpkinish, they’re just regular words that can be used in any register. Is that right?
That’s right. Turkish reduplication is an intensifier like “-issimo” in Italian. It’s perfectly standard as far as I know.
I lived for several years in Kazakhstan and for a brief time in Kyrgyzstan. I can’t say I ever noticed Russian speakers of Kazakh or Kyrgyz nationality using reduplication. But I assume it’s not a new phenomenon. I wonder if that speech form was considered socially unacceptable in mixed society in Soviet times, but has since moved into mainstream educated speech now that it is no longer considered so admirable or desirable to strive for Russian approval?
The fact that Turkic emphatic reduplication (mostly) makes use of a labial “linking” consonant /p/ or /m/ may have areal connections: cf. My remarks on this thread, relating to another kind of reduplication in that part of the world, which may be of interest to some…
http://blog.bulbul.sk/2009/06/shm.html
Vanya: Sociolinguistically, your guess makes perfect sense to me.
Kusaal has various kinds of ideophone, basically functioning syntactically as manner-adverbs, intensifiers of adjectives, or predicative adjectives. They are often reduplicated:
Li anɛ sabilig zim zim.
“It’s deep black.”
In addition, “normal” manner adverbs reduplicate as an intensifier: bi’el bi’el “a very little”, also found with the distributive meaning “little by little” (reduplication with nouns and quantifiers is distributive: “day by day”, “three by three” etc.)
The “higgledy-piggledy” kind of reduplication seems to be completely absent, and there is nothing at all resembling this Turkish non-initial variation, either.
As far as I can tell, this is true pretty widely in West Africa: reduplication is common, and quite often syntactically productive, but never does these consonant-varying things.
(Grammars tend to treat ideophones very sketchily, but the quite extensive descriptions in Paul Newman’s encyclopedic Hausa grammar and the late Stefan Elders’ magisterial Kulango grammar, at least, agree with Kusaal in this.)
There is a good bit of partial reduplication, though, like e.g. Hausa samɓalɓal, an ideophone emphasising “tall slim straightness” (of a person.) [The “supermodel” ideophone …]
Well, as for me, I don’t code-switch all the time not because I strive for approval of present English speakers.
So, the hokey-pokey is what it’s all about?
Then there’s mishmash, zigzag, riprap, and riff-raff. The first two are Germanic, the last two are from Middle French.
I think there are similar Turkic words with a similar meaning, that is, it is not C2 which is replaced in them.
Is not there something similar to shakshouka? Chakchuk, something like that.
Shakshouka is an example of a widespread Semitic reduplication pattern.
See also the Egyptian honey-semolina cake called basbousa, similar to the Turkish-Sephardi tişpişti = tezpişti.
Etienne,
I knew it sounded familiar! Thanks for digging it up.
@ Etienne
My remarks on this thread, relating to another kind of reduplication in that part of the world
You were referring to reduplication where the reduplicated word started with an ‘m’, with the meaning ‘X and that sort of thing’. We’ve covered that somewhere at LH, too (I can’t find it at the moment), where I pointed out that Mongolian has exactly the same type of reduplication. E.g., талх малх (talh malh): “bread and stuff, basic foodstuffs”, адуу мадуу (aduu maduu) “horses and other livestock”.
Although the Altaic hypothesis has been widely rejected, it is uncanny how Mongolian is similar to Turkic languages in many ways. I think the Altaic language family hypothesis has been replaced by the view that these languages historically had wide and prolonged mutual contact.
My impression from these posts is that Turkish reduplication is different from English
We have only one or two examples in English. (I think “double-damned” is another? Or was your orthography merely showing ‘dashed’?) And since the primary example’s modus operandi had completely passed me by, I’m inclined to say reduplication is not a thing in English at all.
t-totally what? I have to ask of the abstinence movement. Shouldn’t you be emphasising no-nothing alcoholic? It’s not as if alcoholics don’t drink tea — they might even put brandy in it.
t-total Temperance would at least pair alliteration with reduplication. Or aye-absolute Abstinence.
But the 1833 dude (“T-total Temperance Turner” as he failed to identify himself) seems to have epically evaded all paronomastic playful ‘portunities. Dour lot. Don’t have a bar of them.
Bathrobe: “We’ve covered that somewhere at LH, too (I can’t find it at the moment), where I pointed out that Mongolian has exactly the same type of reduplication.”
Are you thinking of your comment on Reduplicated Compounds in Turkish?, linked above? You said then: “The use of expressions like үхэр мүхэр ‘cattle and stuff’ is extremely common in spoken Mongolian.”
Also worth revisiting: the link from that thread to “twitter-mwitter” at Language Log.
An even earlier mention of Mongolian m-reduplication appeared here in 2012: “nam mam (party or whatever), nom mom (book or whatever)” from read (native Mongolian speaker), followed by mention of the Mongolian and Turkic superlative reduplication, and jokes that I don’t get about translating it into Russian.
it is uncanny how Mongolian is similar to Turkic languages in many ways. I think the Altaic language family hypothesis has been replaced by the view that these languages historically had wide and prolonged mutual contact
I remember reading that by far the most of the “Mongol Hordes” that conquered the world were actually Turkic speakers.
West Africa is in many ways one big happy Sprachbund. Hausa and Kusaal, for example, are completely unrelated genetically (short of some proto-World thing), extremely different in phonology, morphology and phrase-level syntax, yet show huge overlap in semantics and in the way the low-level stuff is integrated into discourse structure: very similar focus constructions, very similar narrative uses of aspects, very similar idiomatic turns of phrase … you name it, really. All this without there ever having been any significant number of Hausa-Kusaal bilinguals, too, it seems.
t-totally what?
“T” for “total”, as in “total abstainer.” The best kind of abstainer. The homophony with “tea” is just an accident.
“Total abstainer” is an actual term, in the language of those who subscribe to such aberrant beliefs. [It always reminds me of Jock McCannon’s (possibly wind-up) characterisation of Stephen Daker (who isn’t) in the altogether brilliant A Very Peculiar Practice.]
@ ktschwarz
Of course, that was the thread! I thought I’d seen it somewhere…. (!)
@ DE
I remember reading that by far the most of the “Mongol Hordes” that conquered the world were actually Turkic speakers.
One of the recurrent themes in certain posts/threads on Mongolian history is a strong desire by some Turkish netizens to assert their identity as fellow “steppe warriors” who took part in the Mongol expansion, and violent rejection by Mongolians. It is, of course, a scenario of competing modern nationalisms. One of the fault lines in Central Asia lies between the Mongols, who are Buddhist, and the Turkic peoples, who are Muslim. In fact, the Mongolians really don’t identify with the Turkic peoples at all, despite obviously shared historic, cultural (food, nomadic lifestyle, living in yurts, mostly lost among the Turkic peoples) and linguistic connections among them.
One facet of this is the utter rejection of the Turkic-sourced English term “yurt” by Mongolians, who are adamant that the Mongolian word “ger” should be used. After all, “yurt” is (presumably) Turkic, via Russian, and is a kind of cultural appropriation from the Mongolian point of view. Anyway, Mongolian “ger” are different from Turkic “yurts”. Well, they are, but I still haven’t got an answer from Mongolians as to what Turkic yurts should be called in Mongolian. (Actually, I’m not sure if the Mongolians are mad at the Turkic peoples or the Russians.)
(Nationalism is a very distorting ideology.)
In the Turkic intensive formation, the accent (stress) is always on the reduplicant syllable in Kyrgyz (and in Turkish), whereas the base adjectives usually just have the normal default final accent: Kyrgyz and Turkish kápkara ‘pitch black’ (kará, black), Turkish tértemiz ‘very clean, spotless, spick-and-span’ (temíz ‘clean’), etc.
I wonder how this interacts with the Russian stress system. All the Russian examples given involve adjectives with unstressed endings, so the stress is sort of free to move about the word in the formation. I wonder what the speakers in question do for adjectives in which the stress is always on the ending, like большой. Two stresses in a word? Во́мбольшо́й? I also wonder how vowel reduction is affected, if these speakers stress only the reduplicant syllable.
(In the case of irregular intensives in Turkish like çırılçıplak ‘buck naked, starkers’ from çıplak ‘naked’, or yapayalnız ‘all alone, all on one’s lonesome’ from yalnız ‘alone’, etc., in my experience the stress usually falls on the second syllable of the reduplicant: çırílçıplak, sırílsıklam, etc., but both yápayalnız and yapáyalnız? I am not sure of the conditions for assignment for yapayalnız and other formations with a light second syllable in the reduplicant. Something to look into. For sırílsıklam ‘sopping wet’ (often heard in sırılsıklam aşık ‘besotted; head-over-heels in love’), no base *sıklam seems to be in use.)
Sorry, I meant to type Бо́мбольшо́й, but it is hard to read the virtual Russian keyboard on my shattered iPhone screen.
@Bathrobe:
For some reason (no idea how) I actually knew that “yurt” was ger in Mongolian, but I had always assumed that “yurt” was ultimately derived from it by some chain of language-to-language mangling-by-borrowing. I now know better. Once again, LanguageHat is educational.
I have no clear idea what sort of actually-found-in-Central-Asia structure a “yurt” would be that’s distinguishable from a “gur.” I associate the English noun “yurt” with structures found in North America or Western Europe in hippie-ish and/or commune-ish contexts, intended for habitation by alternatively-minded white folks who lacked the technical competence to build a geodesic dome and who are perhaps avoiding tipis for cultural-appropriation reasons.
There are some constructive differences between Turkic yurts and Mongolian gers. Ger usually have two wooden sticks supporting the roof, Turkic yurts usually do not have them. Gers usually have wheel like structure at the top, while yurts usually have crossed structure as in Kyrgyz flag.
Tuvan yurts have intermediate design.
Thanks, Nicky. Yes, there are definitely differences. The Mongolians are basically miffed that “yurt” is used for their own “ger” in English; it should be “ger”. But still my question remains unanswered. What is a Kazakh (say) yurt called in Mongolian. If the answer is “ger”, then they are talking through their hat.
This is not their only gripe. Another is why the tögrög is called “tugriks” in English. Of course it’s thanks to the Russians, and only continues to be used through custom, but the fervour of the nationalists is incandescent.
I guess ones with sticks are flatter…
Wiktionary
ger, ger, ger, ger, ger < *ger is weird:))))
I googled казах гэр and guess what. Pictures and text mentions of Kazakh yurts came up. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If Mongolians are going to call Kazakh yurts “ger”, they have no right to complain if English speakers call their ger “yurts “.
Well, not exactly the same.
For English speakers it is an exoticism denoting a specific type of tent found in Asian steppe. Like say “burka” or “hijab”.
For Kazakhs the respective word can be much more generic and mean a house or all sorts of tents (wiktionary infroms me that Kazakh and Kyrgyz words mean “felt house” and “grey house”, while WP says that in Persian it is… châdor) – just as ḥijāb originally means something else than “a headscarf wrapped in whatever fashion is popular among Muslim girls in 21st century and not in the earlier fashion, the Symbol of Oppression of Oriental Women*”.
____
*Sorry for this remark, I just mentioned on some forum that Gulf countries are the leaders in proportion of female students (about two females for one male in Qatar) and someone objected that […]. He used hijab as an example of horrors that befall Muslim girls.
Well, exactly – it’s the symbol. It’s not the entire oppression, nor its worst part, nor does it automatically imply all the others.
Schauen Sie: Es ist alles – sehr – kompliziert.
@DM, are you speaking about traditional ME communities or new meanings assigned to it by modern ideologies (there is also an overlap: new meanings assigned by communities) or the motivation for it in the muslim tradition, starting from the quraan?
(I assume we’re not speaking about the literal translation of “muslim” here…)
For ideologies it definitely is – though I don’t see indications that it’s a symbol of oppression.
One obvious process is rise of interest to religion among Muslims and when a girl from Tatarstan puts it on (and is reprimanded for that), for her it symbolises Islam, also there are feelings associated to self-perception in a headgear and also whatever religious motivation there exists for it (not sure if I understand it).
It is similar in countries like Tunisia.
But then there is politics. Islam represents the hope for change for both people with views similar to mine – and yours – and fundamentalists. You can see that in Syria where it unites sorts of opposition which seem incompatible (so that eventually the West found itself united with al-Qaida).
A firend of mine fought and lost a war for wearing it, so maybe you’ll forgive me when I see anti-hijab sentiment as oppression. I don’t like people who tell women what to wear.
Into militant politics you don’t fail to see how “left” guerillas like Arafat are replaced by “Islamic’ guerillas like Hamas. They too I think impose a certain dress on women – but I guess they are more interested in guns rather than sexism. Just like anti-hijab Tunisians.
maybe you’ll forgive me when I see anti-hijab sentiment as oppression. I don’t like people who tell women what to wear.
That’s a strange thing to say. You don’t mind the people who tell women to wear hijab?
I do. Why would you think I don’t?
I just mean, a “laïc” moron is the same thing for me as fundamentalist moron, that is: a moron.
But: I and my freidns normally deal with the former type.
Ah, I understand.
No, of course this freind – who’s also an Arabic teacher (I mean that’s how she earns money) and who sometimes produces and puts online Arabic videos – also receives ennumerable comments from men (i assume Muslim learners of Arabic) urging her to put hijab on, for else “I can’t look at you”.
She of course can put it on, but she does not think it is honest given that she lost the aforementioned war.
And no I don’t like Hamas of course:) But neither I nor my freinds are in Gaza, else I’d be even more annoyed with it than I am.
All I mean is that my friend is no good girl – no more than you are – and chose to wear it not because she wants to obey men or be suppressed or whatever. It is just a country where the government has a long tradition of fighting with religion (and thus BOTH hijab and Muslim-style beards) in certain spaces (elsewhere hijabs are worn and welcome).
___
And one more clarification: no, I don’t mean that I’m hostile to numerous religions that tell their adherents that those should wear this or that. The question is what happens when someone disagreees.
A complicated situation!
And one more clarification: no, I don’t mean that I’m hostile to numerous religions that tell their adherents that those should wear this or that. The question is what happens when someone disagreees.
I disagree that the French tradition of Laïcité is “moronic.”
It can most certainly be abused as a tool of repression, providing a “respectable” cover for racist and anti-Islamic bigotry: but “abused” is the word. It has deep and honourable links to the whole modern (i.e. post-Revolution) French concept of their own statehood.
It’s linked with the French colonialist concept that there is no fundamental reason why you can’t be (say) a Black Frenchman: being French is about culture, not genetics.
Obviously this can rapidly turn into simple cultural imperialism, and I am no great fan of the thought processes behind it: but I still recognise a fundamental generosity of spirit in it.
And it compares favourably in many ways with the British concept of “Indirect Rule”, which, far from being a recognition of intrinsically valuable cultural diversity, was predicated on the idea that Lesser Breeds were not actually capable of being integrated into a modern state. (Also, that it was very cheap, compared with a proper mission civilisatrice.)
The main British proponent of Indirect Rule was that abhorrent racist* Frederick Lugard. (Lugard deliberately destroyed the career of a subordinate who had the temerity to point out some of the drawbacks.)
* By the standards of his own day (even); this is not ahistorical unfair projection of 21st century wokeism back to the nineteenth/early twentieth century. He was a highly successful – nasty piece of work.
I disagree that the French tradition of Laïcité is “moronic.”
But drasvi didn’t say that, he was talking about laïc morons, those who fall under your “racist and anti-Islamic bigotry” category.
Fair enough!
Surely the Portuguese showed that you could have a missão civilizadora without the anticlericalismo. And e.g. the former Portuguese Guinea is now almost identical to the former French Guinea on metrics like GDP/capita and Human Development Index and (at present) better than it on metrics like comparative political freedom although admittedly a little bit worse on the “Corruption Perceptions Index.”
Ataturk was an enthusiast for laicite because it was both modern-seeming and authoritarian, and the French adjective “laique” naturally got borrowed into Turkish as “laik.” Which of course raises the question of whether it comes in an emphatically-reduplicated version.
A good question indeed:)
___
I mean a guy (or gal) who would force a woman to take her scarf off (or create problems for her).
But I might be wrong.
“Laïc” is indeed a word well known in Tunisia. But I don’t know there are for example people who organise various events during Ramadan “because they are laïc”. Whatever criticism they may attract from believers, they hardly have anything to do with people I’m speaking about and perhaps people I’m speaking about don’t use the word anyhow often.
And by the way.
What attracts my interest here is neither Islam not any of ideologies (including Western ideologies).
Just the piece of cloth:)
Let’s add that in Chechnya Kadyrov forses women to wear it and in Iran students remind me USSR. Iranian religious ideology is imposed by the government. People (i mean students) are quite fed up and girls try to reveal as much hair as possible – so different from both certain Arabic lands where girls wear it and countries like Tunisia where it is discourage.
So different interpretations. Meanwhile for me it is … just a scarf. All right, Sunni Muslim girls wrap it in a particular way. I saw Russian orthodox girls who seem to imitate it:) Because we see Muslim girls in hijabs in Moscow very frequently and they are beautiful. I mean, not girls – as girls – I mean they really try to make their dress (not limited to scarves) appealing.
Or what I’m talking about? My own ex-wife told that she would love to wear hijab when travelling in an Arab country but is afraid to be disrespectful to locals (because for her – as for me – it is just a piece of fabric).
And recently when she wore a scarf (because of the weather conditions) she spent some time trying to figure out how Muslim girls do it. It’s a fashion after all:) She did not reproduce it for the same reason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GmYRTTbN7g – I think this reflects some of what my Tunisian friend feels about the matter.
My own ex-wife told that she would love to wear hijab when travelling in an Arab country but is afraid to be disrespectful to locals
The scruple does her credit.
Reminds me of a deeply annoying European aid worker I once met in Ghana (his actual work was pushing something that no doubt seemed a brilliant way of helping the locals when it was dreamed up in New York or Geneva, but had no contact at all with the local people’s understanding of their own problems and their own ideas for solving them.)
This chap wandered about Ghana in what he clearly imagined was local dress. This would have been patronising (to say the least) even if he had been right, but in fact what he was wearing was (fairly accurate) local distinctively Muslim dress. He was just too damn ignorant of the local culture to realise this.
I would have told him myself, but he was sort of person who was stuck on “transmit.” (Also, I didn’t like him, and felt no urge to help him.)
@DE, why patronising?
“Patronising” describes some sort of a reason to do so, but I don’t think one must feel patronising to come up with such an idea (a woman especially). Ghana or Russia, you can put on your usual dress or you can put on a local dress….
“does her credit.” – actually for her it is not even about Muslims or Christians or whatever. She believes she does not really understand what is “religion” and how it works.
I’m not sure she even sees Muslims as anyhow exotic for Russia and strangely she is unaffected by Islamophoby (which otherwise I’d say is almost impossible for a Russian, but she’s a counterexample).
Well, not exactly the same.
For English speakers it is an exoticism denoting a specific type of tent found in Asian steppe. Like say “burka” or “hijab”.
For Kazakhs the respective word can be much more generic and mean a house or all sorts of tents (wiktionary infroms me that Kazakh and Kyrgyz words mean “felt house” and “grey house”,
I don’t see your point. “Ger” in Mongolian is also a generic word for house/home. That doesn’t stop Mongolians from demanding that English should rightfully adopt “ger” as a specific term for the type of tent that is found on the Asian steppes (or at least the Mongolian version of this).
For the Mongolians, it’s a nationalistic response to the adoption in English of a non-Mongolian term for something the Mongolians consider to be quintessentially theirs. And part of this is the general Mongolian ignorance / rejection of the common elements of steppe culture. “It’s ours; why are you using this Turkic / Russian word for it? You should use our word.” Yet the Mongolians will happily and hypocritically use their own term for this supposedly “different” and “non-Mongolian” item used in other steppe cultures.
My response is: “Live with it”. “Yurt” is the general English term for the Central Asian and Mongolian versions — sorry, “ger” was passed over — just as “ger” is the general Mongolian term for both the Central Asian and Mongolian felt-covered nomadic dwelling. It’s illogical (although typical of nationalistic sentiment) to complain that English uses a general term (albeit one the Mongolians don’t like) for both types when Mongolian does it too.
Alas, people continue to be illogical.
Well, maybe it is just because she did not attend school.
She does not know how to tell a Jew from a Russian:(
I have some understanding for people who write Polish wodka with w- and Russian vodka with v-.
Or for those who add right number of e’s to whisk.y.
I also have some understanding for people who don’t care.
As I’ve said before–its relevance seems never to exhaust itself–I’ve seen a Cutty Sark carton with SCOTS WHISKEY on the sides and SCOTS WHISKY on the ends.
I mentioned above three envirnoments where headscarf can possibly symbolise “oppression”. As for modern ideologies, I, of course, won’t claim that there are not such ideologies. Moreover, if DM beleives that the scarf is symbol of this, then there must be* some Muslims who feel the same.
All I claim is that I don’t see this in ideologies I’m familiar with.
Then Islam itself: this is simple. I’m not qualified to speak about it. But I did not speak about wearing headgear, I spoke about a particular manner of wrapping it. When I say “hijab” I usually do NOT mean any cloth on female body. I mean the specific manner of wrapping that enables us to recognise a sunni muslim girl and tell her from a French girl in a headgear.
I don’t know where it comes from.
____
* а freind of mine, a militant atheist, once expressed his great annoyment** at “God is love”. That surprised me. He explained that clericals must interpret it as “the only love which is genuine is one which comes from God [and your love is not love, just crap, hear]”. If course “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar” excludes this “reading”. But there MUST be some clericals who read it like he does.
What he needs is zero intersection of ugly religion and beutiful love. He nees religion to retreat into its darkest corner where he can crush it. The true Christian for him is apparently the idiot Christian. But generally views of haters and worst adherents of X on what is “true X” converge: the reading of Islam by ISIS guys matches that of Islamophobes.
Obviously. these are extreme examples, but there must be convergence in the middle.
I don’t mean that DM is a hater, just that if something makes him feel so, then the same thing will make some Muslims feel so and I accept DM as a proof of existence of such people:)
The question remains, whether this group is prominent. If Europeans who feel so are more prominent, the next one: are Europeans who connect sexism and hijab (unintentionally) advertising sexism or (as they intend) fighting against hijab? Connections work both ways, and this is a reason to be careful.
** there are also some enthusiasts of Islam (not many) who cry tears that Umm Kulthum has popularised this un-Muslim saying and now great many Muslims are repeating after Christians. Hor-rible.
And traditional communities:
First see above about (not very traditional) manners of wrapping it. Second, Arab men wear scarves and other sorts of headgear too (it is not a very good idea to walk about with your head uncovered in Arabian climate). Third there are numerous symbolic meanings attached to women’s attire in local cultures: communities where “modesty” marks specific social groups (rich classes as opposed to servants or a specfic ethnicity), selectivity as to before what men you should hide your face (again maybe not before servants).
Fourth… people generally tend to interpret their sexuality in absolutely insane ways. True for Europeans.
But in controlling women’s sexuality (outside of marriage – I don’t know about “Arabs” but the religion is not very prudish in marriage) Arabs reach extremes. This is terrible from our perspective – and from that of local girls too. No, the kind of people you can find among my freinds don’t “reach extremes”, but we are speaking about “very traditional” groups, eh?
It interacts somehow with people’s attires (I don’t know how) but I don’t think it is correct to say that dress symbolises this. And I think maybe fighters with oppression should focus on this component rather than call the whole culture or whole religion or associated attire “oppressive” and lead the attack on the culture/religion/attire instead.
I mean, come on: everything in the world is intertwined and interrelated somehow. So maybe everything is evil (because something is) and let us smite everything? Or europeanise everything? No, hijab is not “everything” but is it a random element of eveything connected by loose chain of associations with anything else or have we determined already that it exists in a relation of mutual reinforcement with what I’m speaking about? A headscarf? In a community where men wear them too?
Another matter is that this method (“europeanise everyting”) works. All local issues dissolve and new ones arise. And other methods might not really work. Say: “stop controlling sexuality of females!” You’ll look as if you’re saying “I want your females”, if you’re a man. Getting rid of honour culture is… dishonourable per se. And see how efficient you are in convincing China to behave better (not sure you’re not making them behave worse).
Within pretty much my own lifetime (although the shift was probably already starting when I was an infant so it’s not like I have clear personal memories of the “before”), females ubiquitously wearing some sort of headcovering when attending church shifted from being a perfectly mainstream phenomenon in American Christianity to a quite marginal one — if you go to a church these days where most women have something on their heads it will likely either be markedly theologically old-fashioned or dominated by some non-majority racial/ethnic group that has not been culturally assimilated to current mainstream practice, or both. This rise in uncovered-in-church female heads broadly coincided with all sorts of other shifts in the role of women in secular American society and the general perceived reduction of perceived oppression, and that is probably not a coincidence. But groups where women also wear their suitable-for-church headgear when out and about in public the other six days of the week are even rarer at present and were at least by the 20th century if not earlier rare in the U.S. in general. I assume much of the agita about Muslim headscarf practices is because the custom is not limited to mosque attendance.
I don’t know how that currently works in Russia. Are there younger-than-babushka-age non-Muslim Russian women who commonly wear headscarves in public when they aren’t attending church?
One branch of my wife’s family are (Plymouth) Brethren; the good kind of so-called “Open” Brethren , which is Scotland especially are of a somewhat different historical origin and markedly different outlook from the much less numerous Darbyite kinds, which others generally take as being the archetypal Brethren. (I think Edmund Gosse’s father was the “Open” kind, but I haven’t actually read Father and Son. Gosse fils is not an altogether reliable witness, I gather.)
Be that as it may, on the few occasions I have ever been to a Brethren assembly, all the women wore hats. (I can’t remember where my wife found one.)
Mind you, the last time was a good few years back. Maybe they’ve got with the program now. (I hope not, though. Resist the Steamroller of Modernity!)
Related to that, it’s ironic how among conservatives here the headscarve went from being an attribute of chaste German maidens and demure German housewives (not only during the Third Reich, but into the 50s and 60s) to a marker of alienness, with Kopftuchmädchen “headscarve girl” becoming a slur.
Did the headscarf become outdated at different times in East and West Germany (or later, eastern and western)?
(I think Edmund Gosse’s father was the “Open” kind, but I haven’t actually read Father and Son. Gosse fils is not an altogether reliable witness, I gather.)
Well, then read it as a novel, like The Way of All Flesh. In her 2002 review of it, Ann Thwaite (she wrote a biography of Gosse in 1984) writes: “I was amused, when searching out a copy of the current edition, to find it on the fiction shelves at Foyles”.
It’s very proper to worry about reliable witnesses in these Virtual Times, but you need not don the hair shirt.
Everything everywhere all at once. 🙂
No idea (though given the different impact of The Sixties it’s not unlikely); but what I can say for sure is that in the west it became outdated for different generations at different times. Young women wearing headscarves seem to have been unimaginable by the 70s (but outright common in the early 60s); old women wearing headscarves were still unremarkable in the 90s.
“I don’t know how that currently works in Russia. Are there younger-than-babushka-age non-Muslim Russian women who commonly wear headscarves in public when they aren’t attending church?”
JWB, I think uncovered heads are a marker of urbanisation (quick and total in the case of USSR).
It makes sense: in countryside you spend lots of time outdoors.
Consider our situation with clothes in general (as opposed to Africa): (1) we need clothes (2) we make a habit of wearing them (3) we make a custom of wearing them (4) we force people wear them (5) brutally.
Consider Tuareg men. Hiding your face from strangers can only have a social function (because the condition is social) but I don’t think the custom would have arisen without often having to cover your face (and constantly wearing headgear which allows this!) because of weather conditions: wind carrying sand into your face, I think.
I think headscarves were common in 50s. Also LH can tell how common they were on Moscow streets.
In the USSR which I know girls rarely wore them, middle-aged women wore them sometimes, older women wore them very often. In villages more younger women wore them.
When USSR fell apart middle-aged women ceased to wear them. Abruptly.
And that’s why my perplexion at attacks on hijabs: seeing women in headscarves is just how I grew up!
I wrote above about Islam and Arabs, but my sense of insanity of these attacks comes from this. And the general idea “a woman can wear what she wants”.
Yes, ours are wrapped differently. More similar to what they wear in Caucasus (various religions) and Iran.
Ours are squares which form triangles when folded, in the Caucasus it’s a long beautuful scarf, but the Sunni hijab which became fashionable recently – what you imagine when I say “hijab” – makes faces elliptical.
Is this a BIG, BIG fucking-fucking-fapfucking deal of difference?
Also LH can tell how common they were on Moscow streets.
Yes, babushkas were definitely wearing them in the early ’70s. Don’t remember about younger women.
@LH, same later, but as I said middle-aged women could wear them sometimes.
If my ex-wife can wear something similar now (because she spends a couple hours each day in a park: she was pregnant. See above about “outdoors”) then the same is true and much more true for Soviet times. “It is windy today, I need some headgear”. Then the question is what headgear.
Sorry, fupfucking.
Russian accent.
“I was amused, when searching out a copy of the current edition, to find it on the fiction shelves at Foyles”.
Foyles is legendary for its almost random/utterly foxing filing methods. Don’t attribute to whimsicality what can be adequately explained by outright incompetence (and employing foreign/barely English-speaking students because cheap).
Machiavelli filed at the start of the ‘M’s because the name is obviously Scots.
In Eastern Orthodox parishes in the U.S. there tends to be a very local specific norm of either headscarf-wearing or its absence, not necessarily with complete uniformity but with it being unusual for let’s say more than 15% of adult females present to deviate from whichever is the local majority norm (excluding any nuns present from both numerator and denominator since they’ve got their own thing going on). But earlier this Lent I was at a special service at the Ukrainian Orthodox cathedral down on Broome St. in Lower Manhattan and the fairly large crowd was pretty close to 50/50 on female headscarf usage, which was unusual and interesting, in a nice and pleasant sort of way. I expect it was because the special occasion (a visit by a famous-in-some-circles allegedly-wonderworking icon that you’d otherwise have to make a pilgrimage to the Anthracite Country of NE Pennsylvania to encounter) had drawn people from a wide variety of different home parishes and everyone was just defaulting to her own usual-Sunday-morning thing. (I do have the impression that some ladies, when visiting a parish they don’t usually attend, may pack a headscarf in their purse and then pause in the narthex to size up the crowd before deciding whether or not to put it on; not unlike the way in which I sometimes, in these days of declining formality, head to an event with a necktie rolled up in my jacket pocket and then take my cue from the menfolk in the crowd as to whether or not to actually put it on.)
I recall going to a Brethren assembly with my wife and her sisters many years ago, and them all getting quite excited at the idea of getting to wear hats (and enthusiastically digging some out); but that was pretty certainly because none of them actually attended Brethren services regularly. (It can get a bit draggy: they did the Quaker thing of refusing to plan in advance, but waiting for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit – at every point.)
@JWB, I sleep in church:(
I’m “intelligentsia”, obviously and so is my circle. And religious Orthodox Christians in my “circle” are intelligentsia fed up with Soviet atheism in search of faith.
Now, some of them are sympathetic of the more restrictive side of religion (traditions etc.) others are repelled by it and interested in faith as such. As I’m this type, so are my freinds.
(Perhaps there is also a third component, that is folk religion, practices which, in Islam, Saudi Arabia is fighting against because they see polytheism there, educated Orthodox Christians interpret it so too, but fortunately don’t fight as fiercely:))
So what happened in 90s is arguments about women’s heads and pants. The reason is not feminism. It is just that they hate the idea of NEW “traditions” which has decisively nothing to do with faith as such but limit access to it. How, say, “skirts” can be a “Russian tradition” not to say “Christian”?
I know a girl who obtained a bishop’s approval for going to church with her head uncovered (“because unmarried”) and in pants. Not sure if anyone objected to the idea that married women should cover heads.
At present: girls wear scarves (as I noted even sunni muslim fashions affect them) and also they offer cloth imitating a long skirt to women in pants at the entrance. Which I suppose is good in that every woman can enter a church irrespectively of how she’s dressed this moment.
And men in turn should NOT cover their heads:) I like the idea of a man taking his hat off and putting it on his female companion’s head before entering a church.
P.S. Also I think, Muslim men should not expose the part of the body between the navel and knees. Even alone (unless they need to). (unless it is a particular madhhab that teaches this, I’m not sure).
I remember they were talking in the news about malnutrition and other horrible things in Yemen, and as they couldn’t reach some particularly troubled part of the country, they were filming refugees, specifically a well and girls washing clothes there. One of them, 8 y.o. maybe, dressed in proper burka (I doubt they did that before) playfully lifted the veil then hid her face again, then lifted it again, and so on, as the correspondent was talkign about malnutrition and other horrible things in Yemen.
Consider Tuareg men. Hiding your face from strangers can only have a social function (because the condition is social) but I don’t think the custom would have arisen without often having to cover your face (and constantly wearing headgear which allows this!) because of weather conditions: wind carrying sand into your face, I think
I’ve read that the usual local “explanation” of the custom is that “what comes out of the mouth can be as foul as what comes out of the anus”; be that as it may, it’s specifically a mouth taboo. (No idea why it doesn’t apply to women on that basis. Maybe they just don’t talk shit as much as men.)
The ethnic-Fulɓe rulers of the old Caliphate of Sokoto adopted the mouth veil from the Tuaregs, but for them it’s purely a status thing: they don’t actually have the mouth taboo.
The rules among Arab Bedouin women for veiling are actually not what most people would imagine. It’s a respect thing: you don’t veil in front of a male servant, for example.
The Christian thing about women covering their heads in church is not plucked out of the blue, and it’s not cultural in origin, or at least it’s not originally from any recent European culture: it’s based on 1 Corinthians 11:2-16. The passage has a lot of other baggage regarding sex roles associated with it, and at least some Christian women deliberately don’t wear hats in church, not out of modern fashion sense, but because they specifically deny the Paul is saying anything in that passage that wasn’t just a feature of the culture of that specific time and place, so it’s an actual theological error to interpret it as a general rule for Christian worship. (I agree, not that they are likely to ask my opinion on the matter.)
“The rules among Arab Bedouin women for veiling are actually not what most people would imagine. It’s a respect thing: you don’t veil in front of a male servant, for example.”
Yes. Veiled Sentiments is anthropological classics… and one of those random books I used for practicing English-to Russian translation (not to become better at it, just to learn more about the two lnaguages:)) so I remember “…It is so accurate that when a young woman married into our community, some of the first questions she asked her husband’s young kinswomen concerned who taḥashshams from whom. This was her way of finding out about the status hierarchy in the community….” vividly.
Cf. also about Turkmenistan here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yashmak .
It – and also headgear – definitely has numerous symbolic meanings in “traditional” communities, even different meanings in different communities. I just don’t know enough about them:)
My Arab freinds are maybe not as far removed from “traditional” communities as my Russian freinds (after all they do go to the countryside often and my Russian freinds do not) but still quite removed.
Much has been written about Orthodox Jewish headwear, and I know very little about it. One story I heard, though, was about a suicide bomber who tried to disguise himself as a religious Jew, but was discovered and disarmed because of the hairpin he used to fasten his yarmulke to his hair. He had the wavy part facing up, as women do. To the trained eye, that was like being in drag.
“very little”
Once I was asked about traditional Russian female headgear. I googled.
Seems there were zillions of them (just one) and I … never heard about this:/
And I read that headscarves replaced them not long before the revolution.
That wa seven greter shock than learning about wooden statues in Russian churches (cf. Breton churches) destroyed in 19th century because they are Wrong.
Young women wearing headscarves seem to have been unimaginable by the 70s
Depends on how young. I remember my mother and her friends, who were in their late 20s / early 30s in the 70s, on occasions wearing headscarves with typical 70s color schemes and patterns into the late 70s. But I guess hers is the last cohort to whom wearing headscarves came naturally; a teenager or a woman in her early 20s wearing a headscarve would already have been unimaginable indeed.
Well, “we can do it!” girl is wearing it.
I understand that in her case it is functional (and that putting rivets is not what a woman from 1001 nights is supposed to be doing) – but as I said, one thing abut this specific headgear is exactly that it is functional. Differently functional here and in Aravia of course.
And Bardot. One more aspect is fashion.
Sorry, fupfucking.
Russian accent.
Drasvi, “fap” is also an English word.
Machiavelli filed at the start of the ‘M’s because the name is obviously Scots.
The public library where I once worked did the same thing. Because Consistency.
I had assumed that drasvi had identified “fup” as the proper syllable to add for Turkic emphatic reduplication purposes but then mistyped it.
Machiavelli filed at the start of the ‘M’s
Reminds me of the famous Scottish “AI”, McHinery.
@Rodger C, yes, it even entered Russian internet slang, fapat’ “to fap”, not sure about the stress (but not usual Russian where masturbation is called “onanism”).
@JWB, yes. Usually for Russians English u is just [a].
There was a long period of time when I always wrote “wovel” (contamination by wolv-?) then corrected myself.
fapfucking
I love fapfucking! Much better than fupfucking, because fap, obviously.
About Arabic and translations. I have been wandering on Arabic musical youtube for a while, sometimes, again, trying to translate to Russian. While usually it is love, for quite a while youtube offers songs about emigration and only those. Occasionaly I send a link to a guy I usually listen to various “strange” music with, so today when evaluating yet another song I realised that the song is about political emigration and the guy is political emigration. Perhaps we should take the Arab example and sing.
the French adjective “laique” naturally got borrowed into Turkish as “laik.” Which of course raises the question of whether it comes in an emphatically-reduplicated version
A few examples (both from one commenter?):
Comment on a video of what sounds like a haughty, middle-aged, close-minded Turkish nationalist woman (‘dinosaur’) verbally attacking a Syrian refugee on a bus in Turkey (video available here or here). The poster’s comment, with a quick free translation:
Similarly, this comment (video here or here), with a quick free translation:
The other site, instead of saying yere serdi ‘spread (him) on the ground, laid (him) low’, says denize döktü, ‘dumped him in the sea’ (a politically loaded phrase, used especially of Atatürk’s success in pushing Greek forces out of Anatolia in 1922, but now also apparently of ridding yourself of giaours and Crusaders in general).
My impression from my time in Lebanon is that every Arabic pop song obligatorily must contain the word Habibi, prominently and repeated, whatever its topic.
My impression from these posts is that Turkish reduplication is different from English in that it’s not playful, silly, or bumpkinish, they’re just regular words that can be used in any register.
To illustrate, here is Selahattin Demirtaş, imprisoned political opposition leader, using yepyeni ‘entirely new, brand new’ (from yeni ‘new’) in an important statement written from prison before the 2023 Turkish presidential and parliamentary elections:
(Translation quickly ripped from the Internet to illustrate. Demirtaş’s optimism was misplaced. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the 2023 presidential election, despite the deep cost-of-living crisis in Turkey and his government’s response to the earthquake, widely criticized as mismanaged and inadequate. Most of my friends ascribe Erdoğan win to the chaotic disunity, self-serving, squabbling, shifting, and scheming in the largest alliance of opposition parties—and especially because of the intransigence of Turkish nationalist parties within the alliance on Kurdish issues. No one in the opposition alliance was willing to invite the main Kurdish party, the HDP (Demirtaş’s party, reliably 11–15% of the national vote), to the table.)
I chose a passage from Demirtaş’s statements because I felt that in 2015, after the shooting death of prominent human rights lawyer Tahir Elçi in Diyarbakir, Demirtaş’s speeches calling for peaceful action and a calm response to the event were the main reason that some of the people I know decided not to engage in violent protests. Demirtaş advocated the vote over violence, and his words were very effective at the time.
@Hans, the one about political emigration does contain 7abibti. Modernity….
But yes, I remember how I was thinking with some fascination if there is a song by Fairouz (the singer to be listened to in mornings) without a habibi in the first line. E.g. ana la habibi is from the Song of Songs.
It also helps in the context of political emigration that blyadi (that’s what “my country” sounds like to a Russian ear) means “whores” in Russian.
I just drove through Bukovina and Romanian Moldova this morning and older rural women are still wearing headscarves. And for that matter vests and long flowery skirts, looking exactly like I remember older Eastern European women looking 30 years ago. Which is a bit odd since 30 years ago presumably some of these women were still in their early 30s and were dressing the way I remember Romanian women my age dressing in the 1990s. I wonder at what age East European women decide to change into babushkas?
I appreciate Xerîb’s demonstration of in-the-wild usage of “laplaik” in answer to my prior question.
if there is a song by Fairouz (the singer to be listened to in mornings) without a habibi in the first line.
Well, there is Li Beirut, which doesn’t have the word at all, in contradiction to what I said above 🙂
By the way, I assume you know
Kanou ya habibi? I was surprised when I first heard it; I never had expected Fairouz to cover a Russian folk song.
Not actually a folk song (but often thought to be one even by Russians).
@Hans, yes, I was quite surprised:)
This version has video with Lebanese…. er. Let’s call them Cossacks? dancing to коробочка.
I jumped even higher when I heard ya ana.
I love Fairouz dearly.
“which doesn’t have the word at all, ”
It is implied. Arabic is generally a very simple language. Lesson one: “habibi”.
Now, after getting familiar with the lexicon, let’s talk about the grammar. But do we need grammar?
You’re not going to pluralise habibi, are you?
…is that the song the Tetris tune is from?
By the way, a picture I used in the discussion about women’s education: link.
“Female Zurich students harass male waiters in a pub, parody on women studying at Zurich University“
They seem like nice girls to me.
Also, brains and beauty!
(On the other hand, Swiss. Well, nobody’s perfect.)
DE, waiters are Swiss. Girls are Russian citizens (not sure about ethnicity).
To my surprise, Russian girls were the leaders. The cartoon is 1872, in 1873 a quarter of students were female, among them 109 from Russia and 5 others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_at_German_universities
I really don’t know what it says about my country (given that here they weren’t allowed to study): are were the avant-garde or are we backwards?
I know what. Russia was not a boring place🙂
Also an interesting parallel to the present situation. The top 5 in f/m in education:
1. Qatar 2. Kuwait …. 4. Bahrain 5. Oman.
Tunisia, Algeria, KSA, Palestine are somewhat below. Arab world as the whole are the leaders, 1.94 female to 1 male university student in Qatar, 1.48 Palestine.
Of course not the same as in 19th century Russia: it seems Gulf countries encourage this, while Russia did not. But it is the Gulf countries that seem the most backwards to a Westerner, and they are well ahead of Tunisia (1.55)
waiters are Swiss. Girls are Russian citizens
That’s all right then. I apologise to them for my baseless insinuation of Helvetitude. (I thought that they didn’t look much like Heidi.)
Girls are Russian citizens
Нигилистки!
Let’s hope the same is true for Qatar:)
Once I was skiing with my freind (we spent several hourse each day skiing) and was mumbling a song, which began with words:
“Хуй, анархисточка, хуй…. Хуй, сбоку кисточка, хуй….” (I have no idea what in winter Russian forest could make me think about анархисточка. Хуй is the main Russian word and does not need an explanation) … and mostly contained verses in the form ABAACA, where A is an one-syllable word (пей, пой, лей, даль) and B and C 5-syllable words (or occasionaly phrases).
Like пей (or пой?), ненаглядная, пей.
Sometimes verses converged in a story, sometimes were nonsensical. Now it is playing in my head again:/
Нигилистки!
The Raskolnikov girls …
Not actually a folk song
Yes, something at the back of my brain was tugging at my sleeves when I wrote “folk song”, saying “that’s not correct”, but it was bedtime and I didn’t check. So thanks for doing the digging for me!
@drasvi: That video was actually the one which the friend who told me about Fairouz’s version linked to, almost 20 years ago. Nice seeing it again.
Hans, correction: коробушка, not коробочка:)
And I don’t think anyone here can name an actual Russian folk song, me included (I believe in J1M though).
Most of course are 19th century, not 20th.
Yeah, it’s surprising how little “folk” anything there is; most of it was invented/created in the 19th century.
Well, the 19th century is when intellectuals and power-seekers in many places got self-consciously interested in das Volk as a potential legitimating basis for ideology and political ambition, thus creating demand for Authentic Folklore. I may have remarked before that the U.S. “folk music” boom of circa 1960 bears a family resemblance to the Narodnik movement in 19th century Russia, in that it was largely a confection of urban cafe-socialist intelligentsia who for some reason became obsessed with (a naive and quasi-Marxist conception of) the Authentic People living way out in the hinterlands beyond Greenwich Village, without much prior acquaintance with those people.
Not sure that’s fair — a lot of those folk singers (especially in the ’40s and ’50s, before the boom) were by no means urban cafe-socialist intelligentsia but musicians who genuinely loved (what they considered, and had no reason to feel otherwise) the “music of the people” and went around the country seeking it out. The existence of poseurs and bandwagon-jumpers does not invalidate a phenomenon.
In the context of the various 19th-century nationalists looking for a politically-useful “Nation,” I expect there were already eccentric niche hobbyists interested in folkloric topics out of pure or apolitical motives, but the growing political market for the possible results and applications of their hobbyist research changed the context rather dramatically. The early apolitical enthusiasts for vernacular regional music who roamed the country and/or collected rare old 78’s maybe didn’t attract bandwagon-jumpers so much as the “jumpers” or “poseurs” created the bandwagon they would not necessarily have come up with on their own.
For an earlier U.S. example with different political valence, there are revisionist claims (whose accuracy and handling of evidence I have frankly not investigated) that “square dancing” as we have come to know it was to a large extent a politically-motivated creation of the 1920’s, albeit drawing on preceding vernacular regional customs, pushed by those who were worried about recent mass immigration swamping the traditional American identity and who thus thought that the WASP population needed more, or at least more nationally standardized, Authentic Folkloric Customs than they actually possessed in practice. And indeed a half-century later when I was in maybe 4th grade at ASIJ I was one of a bunch of American kids who knew nothing from family or neighborhood etc. about square dancing but who were taught how to do it from scratch in the school gym so that we could properly demonstrate our Authentic American Folkloric Customs as part of a cultural exchange when we went up to visit some regular Japanese school in, um … maybe Fukushima?
@drasvi. “She does not know how to tell a Jew from a Russian:(”
How does one tell a Jew from a Russian (or a Russian from a Jew)?
“And I don’t think anyone here can name an actual Russian folk song, me included”
Do these count:
https://www.youtube.com/@vekchannel
Reminded: “Я евреям не даю / я в ладу с эпохою / я их сразу узнаю / по носу и по хую”
(Guberman)
“I don’t put out to Jews, / I [added for rhyme] / I recognise them immediately / by nose and by dick”
where [added for rhyme] is literally “‘m in harmony with the epoch”
@M, face, surname, accent. Also in the school I attended everyone was assumed to be a Jew.
Most of the time I did not remember that I’m Russian – I took all Jewish jokes (which are most frequently told by Jews themselves) as jokes about myself.
What it means is that you maybe you can’t always determine ancestry (I remind that “Jew” in Moscow does not mean the religion, Jewish Christians are still “Jewish”) with certainty, but your education, background, interests – in this case interest to mathematics – are an indicator.
She did not go to school, and seldom talked to other children when she was a child. The town where she grew up is not exactly a town where Jews were welcomed by the Party.
Jews were “mythical creatures” (like say “Arab women” for every Russian). People who she – as she thought – never met, but who’re exceptionally good at math. She dreamt about meeting one. Then she studied math in MSU and of course met and befriended great many of them, but she simply did not know they’re Jewish and kept dreeming of meeting a Jew, like those in fairy tales.
Once in a corridor in IUM we spotted Bershtein (video) and Merzon (jpg, another) discussing problems for children in some sort of math club they’re running, both with different but characteristically Jewish faces, both mathematicians (as a schoolboy B won three gold medals at the international math olimpiad – this is basically enough to assume he’s a Jew.), B. also with thick accent – I giggled.
“Such concentrated Jewishness” noted I. “How!?!?!?!? How do you recognise them?” asked she.
And explained what I wrote about her. “But, B stayed in your kitchen for years… Did you know he’s a Jew?” “I did not at first. Later someone told me, but I still have no idea how do you know that”. “But the three gold medals!…” “…” “But he even has an accent!” “…” “So what, you kept dreaming of meeting a Jew, with Bershtein in your own kitchen?” “Yes”.
PS. Also until a certain age all girls I liked turned out to have some Jewish blood (which I did not know beforehand and which certainly was not a sort of a criterion that could be intentional:)) which I can explain only with that people or men possibly tend to fell in love with people who look instinctively familiar.
Nearly all girls I could see around as I grew up were half-Jewish.
That Bershtein story is hilarious!
Well, actually he identifies as khokhol.
Also, you know, Germans are very right when they force every child go to school.
That’s why we all should study in school, to learn to tell a Russian from a Jew and Islamophoby.
khokhol
An ethnophaulic ! The opposite of an ethnophallic, gewissermaßen, aka ethnophilic.
@JWB, LH, I believe both things are true for Pete Seeger or Joan Baez.
Of course they’re urban cafe-socialist intelligentsia, who else.
@JWB, there might be a political dimension, but there is also a musical one.
For Russia the situation is that numerous songs with lyrics written by a known 19th century poet and music composed by a known 19th century composer are now thought of as “Russian folk songs” and are actually sung by Russians.
That is, the model “we listen/sing along to Britney Spears and hard rock and other commercialised stuff distributed by modern means, but we also know the previous musical tradition, which we can’t maintain anymore” is false, we’re ignorant of the tradition in question.
@drasvi
How can you be 100% sure the poets and composers did not help themselves to existing non-copyrighted material? I don’t think the Russian folksingers up to, say, mid 19C used printed broadsheet or newspaper material, and as far as I understand, the monasteries, which had formerly collected material like this in manuscripts or even printed collections, had stopped doing so at some point, in some silly campaign to discourage people from singing anything other than church music.
Apart from this, why are a poet and a composer not folk (the same could be asked for Ms. Baez and Mr. Seeger)? If folksingers accept (and adapt) the material, for me it makes the transition. The Third Reich was unable to suppress singing of “die Lorelei” by folksingers, so it was printed as “Verfasser unbekannt”, i.e., without author credit.
“When someone told me that the Beatles wrote Yellow Submarine, I didn’t believe them. Like I flat out insisted this was false. I KNEW it was a folk song and I wasn’t going to be fooled by people trying to prank me into gullibly believing that it was written by the Beatles.”
@PP, no, I don’t mean that educated people of 19th century dd not base their compositions among other things on Russian folk songs.
One problem is simply a misconception. We distinguish between such compositions and “folk songs” and we believe we’re familiar with both, and we are not.
The other is change/replacement itself. I think we can compare a musical tradition to a language. It is possible to analyse it. Some elements change with fashion. Some elements are common to all songs, others are individual and make us identify something as “the same” song (though then we find that such “individual” elements can often be found in many songs:)).
Compare it to Arabic “syllable structure”, “vowel patterns of grammatical forms” and “roots”. When Arabic words are borrowed into Russian CuCCuC is recognisable as “Greek-to Arabic-to Russian” loans. Well, maybe ṣundūq, bunduq/funduq, quṭrub (not borrowed in Russian) are recognisable as Greek loans in Arabic.
Some elements are borrowed. Speakers form towns and villages where somewhat different songs are sung, yet there is exchange between cities and villages.
When someone composes a song, she uses these elements and also elements of language and also elements of culture, and then when other repeat it it changes, and not at random.
If we can distinguish between an African song and a composition by educated Russian from 19th century, why can’t we the same way distinguish between a Russian folk song and a composition of educated Russian from 19th century?
Speaking of “Beatles”, I’ve heard a story that someone sneaked “Girl” on one of the Soviet vinyl collections of something or other under the designation “English folk song”. And I clearly remember a story about Yuliy Kim (told by the man himself) that one of his songs featured in a Soviet movie was given credit as “Russian folk song”. When, after the first showing, a friend called him, he answered the phone with “Russian people speaking”.
https://beatlesvinyl.com.ua/ru/33d_20227.html
Девушка (муз. и сл. нар.) — квартет «Битлз»
PS I think “girl” is an untranslatable word (and so is девушка). I can’t imagine someone singing “девушка” in Russian:)
For Russia the situation is that numerous songs with lyrics written by a known 19th century poet and music composed by a known 19th century composer are now thought of as “Russian folk songs” and are actually sung by Russians.
True for Germany as well; one example is the “Lorelei” Paddy mentioned (but Heine got credited again after the thousand years were over). How much people still sing these songs outside of professional and amateur choirs is a question I’m not sure I’m able to answer – it certainly depends on the age cohort.
@JWB – In Germany, nationalism started as a project of the educated middle classes and was initially actively opposed by the governments; the princes liked their states and didn’t see the need for a united Germany, thankyouverymuch. Collecting folk songs was mostly tolerated as a harmless endeavor by those governments, but it was not part of an overarching strategy by the ruling elites. Simplifying somewhat, it was only in the second half of the 19th century that Bismarck co-opted the nationalists in his drive to make Prussia the hegemon of Germany; by then the work of the folk music collectors was already mostly done.
I guess the Anglo-Saxon world, which got relatively representative governments before the wave of nationalism, tends to underestimate how much nationalism was driven from below*) in much of continental Europe, where it was bound up with notions of representation and political participation and actually resisted by the old monarchies (the poison inside nationalism then came to the fore when the nationalists took over or were co-opted by the old elites).
*) For a certain value of below – as mentioned, it was initially mostly a project of the educated middle class.
@Hans: I guess the question is to what extent it does or does not make sense to conceptualize those from-below educated-middle-class folks as an aspirational/alternative ruling-elite-in-waiting hoping for a change of regime rather than co-optation. Maybe that sort of specific political ambition describes some but not others and the actual song-collectors were in a third category. And there were always third options – one of my great-great-grandfathers reacted to the tumult of 1848 in his corner of non-unified Germany by deciding he didn’t actually want to take up arms for either side but would prefer to relocate to the United States and open a bakery thankyouverymuch.
@drasvi But it is the Gulf countries that seem the most backwards to a Westerner, and they are well ahead of Tunisia (1.55)
I spend a lot of time in the GCC for work. Europeans, at least, tend to see the Gulf as less backwards than North Africa or the Levant, particularly since Dubai is a top vacation and business destination but also because there is, sadly, an increasing amount of friction in many European countries with immigrants from the latter regions. I would be surprised if the average American has any opinion on the subject whatsoever.
That said, I’m not sure I would see the f/m ratio in education in Bahrain as a sign of being more progressive. I suspect it is the case that families feel that it is worth the money to send their sons abroad but the local university is “good enough” for the daughters. I have a (Lebanese) colleague resident in Bahrain who has exactly that attitude.
@J. W. Brewer: Where I grew up, German surnames are much more common on the north shore of the Ohio than on the south shore, because (I’m told) the 1848 Germans wouldn’t settle in slave territory.
Yeah, a lot of them fought for the Union. Good people.
guess the question is to what extent it does or does not make sense to conceptualize those from-below educated-middle-class folks as an aspirational/alternative ruling-elite-in-waiting hoping for a change of regime rather than co-optation. Maybe that sort of specific political ambition describes some but not others and the actual song-collectors were in a third category.
That looks to me like moving the goalposts… if what you’re doing is not part of a government scheme, it still is because you want it to be part of a future government’s scheme? This borders on not being refutable at all.
I guess there were two points I wanted to make – 1) that the projects of Romantic nationalism did not necessarily start off being imposed as part of a government agenda even if they were co-opted or used for that later on, and that 2) they were co-opted and used precisely because they were genuinely popular, so that even a cynical Prussian Junker like Bismarck who didn’t give a flying fuck for folk traditions or Romantic ideas of the German nation saw the value in using them for his purposes, instead of fighting them like his fellow member’s of the ruling caste had done before him.
If your ancestor emigrated in order not to take sides, he ended up together with those who were on the losing side and escaped persecution or simply decided that hope for change was lost and it was better to start a new life in a free country. It would make sense for such people to not want to support slavery after having fought feudal subjugation.
That German ancestor FWIW ended up so far north of the Ohio and/or Mason-Dixon line that he eventually settled down in a county (Jefferson Co., N.Y.) whose northwestern boundary is marked by the St. Lawrence River and thus the border with Canada. Although he’d still moved a bit south as part of the lateral shift west since his place of origin (Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen) was at a higher latitude than e.g. Ottawa is. One of the side effects of 1848 was the eventual loss of autonomy by H-S, with its last ruling prince finding it expedient to allow the place to be taken over as an exclave of the Kingdom of Prussia, ruled by a more powerful distant cousin. I think my ancestor had already skipped town by them, but when he was subsequently naturalized as a U.S. citizen he had to formally abjure his allegiance to the King of Prussia even though he had never lived in that monarch’s allegiance while still on the other side of the ocean.
A bunch of 48er Germans went to Texas, which was a slave jurisdiction at the time. But the counties they settled in in the Hill Country became a hotbed of Unionist sentiments at a time when the Unionist cause did not fare so well statewide. My own family tree within the U.S. is overwhelmingly northern, with a notable exception being some early Pennsylvania Germans who had worked their way south along the inland route through the Shenandoah etc. until they got to the Piedmont region of North Carolina sometime prior to 1776. By no later than 1810 the relevant three-greats-grandfather* had left North Carolina for free territory and was getting married in Preble County, Ohio. I don’t think that was a very “Butternuttish” part of Ohio, to judge by 19th-century voting patterns, but Rodger C. might know better than I do. And of course lots of the Southern-origin “Butternut” settlers of the lower Midwest retained broadly Southern political views and affiliations and were hostile to abolitionism in their new home states even though they had found it personally tolerable to move to a free state for whatever other motives they may have had.
*Surname “Starr,” which is hypothesized to be an Anglicization of Stöhr/Stoehr, although I wouldn’t necessarily take that to the bank.
I like that. “The Plain People of Ireland; hello?”
@Vanya, I mean cultural conservatism specifically, it is of coruse understood that Morocco is poorer. Polygamy is weird for a European, but can’t be argued to be “wrong”, forbidding women to drive cars can be argued to be wrong. But you can be right. In Russia they are seen as barbarians with oil, who use oil to stay in the Middle Ages. This perception is changing because of Dubai… but Oman is a different country. In my circle Saudi Arabia is a laughing stock. Yet when I mention it to Westerners, my impression is that for them KSA is not a stock example of idiotic restrictions..
“I suspect it is the case that families feel that it is worth the money to send their sons abroad but the local university is “good enough” for the daughters.‘
Aha, thanks. True or not, it did not occur to me. Tunisia, Algeria, KSA and Palestine are also high, f/m 1.5
@Vanya, Qatar
Total outbound internationally mobile tertiary students studying abroad, 2017 to 2022:
6 583 9 023 (‡) 8 588 (‡) 8 054 (‡) 7 795 ..
Enrolment in tertiary education, all programmes:
31 277 33 668 34 941 36 612 40 973 44 180
(‡) means “UNESCO Institute for Statistics estimation”
Bahrain:
5 901 5 824 (‡) 5 267 (‡) 5 303 (‡) 5 238
42 717 44 940 47 193 48 541 51 248 54 092
Kuwait:
23 021 24 699 (‡) 24 207 (‡) 24 401 (‡) 24 099
116 742 116 336 117 945 128 762 121 840
Oman:
16 284 16 307 (‡) 15 818 (‡) 15 743 (‡) 16 005
121 289 119 722 119 184 121 284 113 528
Emirates:
11 261 12 289 (‡) 13 352 (‡) 14 705 (‡) 16 926
191 794 .. 295 626 295 957 .. ..
KSA:
84 244 77 410 (‡) 67 084 (‡) 58 880 (‡) 49 857
1 680 913 1 620 491 1 653 069 1 602 603 1 573 268 1 572 022
http://data.uis.unesco.org
This story from today’s NY Times (archived) seems relevant:
“But we wore miniskirts — the top was the Arab version, the bottom was the Japanese version!”
Like niqabitches I referenced above🙂
Outside of Indonesia, this clip from a 1975 episode of the BBC’s long-running live-rock-music program The Old Grey Whistle Test features what may be the most modestly-dressed female singer in the program’s entire run. This was during the “Islamic Years,” as fans call them, when Linda Thompson and her then-husband-and-musical-partner Richard had ended up living in some sort of weirdo commune of English ex-hippies turned Sufi converts. So without any specifically Orientalist-looking pieces in the wardrobe, Linda is in fact not only wearing a headscarf but an entire wardrobe specifically designed to comply with Islamic notions of female modesty. I think she looks great; not only is her voice amazing but the obscuring of all other potentially bare skin other than her hands highlights how beautiful her face is. But Linda has made it clear in more recent interviews that she does not recall life in that commune with fondness. Which is perfectly fair (many folks did stuff in the Seventies they came to regret …), although I don’t know how high wardrobe constraints do or don’t rank in that lack of fondness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDWWRqZ9pgY
About the figures I give above. I am confused. When calling them leaders I meant this:
“Gross graduation ratio from first degree programmes (ISCED 6 and 7) in tertiary education, adjusted gender parity index (GPIA):”
Qatar: (+) 1.93 (+) 1.94 (+) 1.94 (+) 1.94 (+) 1.91 (+) 1.92
Oman: (+) 1.74 (+) 1.68 (+) 1.66 (+) 1.62 (+) 1.70 ..
That’s where Qatar is the first with 1.94 and Oman is the fourth with 1.62 (National Estimation).
So I wanted to see how much these 8k Qatari students studying abroad can change it if they are predominately male. But their enrollment figures are wastly different:/
Enrolment
ISCED 6 and 7: Qatar: 20568f / 6873m (2.99!) Oman: 63493f / 45324m (1.4)
all programmes: Qatar: 26007f / 10605m Oman: 69530f / 51754m
Given what Vanya points at and given that I don’t understand the nature of their numbers, I guess leadership of the Gulf countries is not unquestionable. On the other hand, perhaps many of their students abroad are girls too. Who knows.
Also countries like Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine are still among the leaders. If Qatar moves down into this range then instead of “Gulf countries” with unusually many female students we still have “Arab countries”.
P.S. The problem with foreign education I suppose is not that it is better (so that local education could be “good enough for girls”).
No, this “enough” may well reflect Western and not Arab attitudes to women.
The problme is that it is Western.
@LH, this article takes a somewhat unexpected turn for me.
“…a more conservative interpretation of Islam — one that disapproves of young women in hijabs playing heavy metal. …”
” … The band offended many Muslim men who believed women wearing hijabs should be docile, not head banging to metal. …”
I wonder if the Beijing correspondent Sui-Lee Wee is trying to problematise what for Indonesia is unremarkable (headscarves) or some people actually get triggered by this mismatch of attire and behaviour/music.
Hijab, the symbol of teenage rebellion, hijab the imposed, hijab the symbol of oppression of Oriental women (and of Islamisation of Europe/Russia) are all familiar to me, but “if you want to play metal, don’t dress like this (dress like a Christian?)” is something new:)
I once read a long text on some Russian Muslim site dedicted to the question whether it is acceptable or not for Muslims to listen to music. While anti-musical interpretations of religion do have some place in the historical practice of specifically Islam, the conclusion seems truly ecumenical: “you can listen to music, but to classical music, not to metal etc.”.
The bass player clawed at her guitar
As a bass player I found this offensive. These women are actually very good musicians. The bassist is finger plucking just like Jaco Pastorius or Geddy Lee, who are never accused of “clawing at” their guitars. Watching their videos the bassist has pretty good technique, a lot better than the kids in the punk or metal bands I grew up with, who generally used picks, just played 8th notes on the root and didn’t mute correctly. The writer is being condescending or maybe doesn’t really get “metal”’.
She clawed at her guitar in an attempt to withstand the shockwave from the cymblas crashed by the drummer.
In my circle Saudi Arabia is a laughing stock.
Reminds me of my trip on the Trans-Mongolian in 1991. As we crossed into China my Soviet fellow passengers took great glee in pointing out how backwards and poor China was compared to the USSR.
In the West most progressive thinkers have a lot of contempt for Saudi’s horrific human rights record and nasty foreign policy. On the other hand, at least in Germany/Austria, the business community loves Saudi. I am constantly hearing glowing reports from business travelers about how much nicer Riyadh has become, how much more free and liberal society is compared to the pre MBS era, how plentiful business opportunities are, etc. In the GCC admiration for MBS seems to be almost universal, even among people who don’t care for the Saudis. He’s viewed as a modern Atatürk.
Also countries like Tunisia, Algeria, Palestine are still among the leaders.
Can confirm, as they say. It’s a global trend, actually – even in the US women are more likely to go to university – but it seems noticeably stronger in the Arab world. When teenage girls are expected to stay at home while teenage boys are expected to go outside and leave the home to the girls, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the girls end up putting more energy into their homework.
some people actually get triggered by this mismatch of attire and behaviour/music.
Dunno how many people really get triggered by heavy metal hijabis, but hijab+miniskirt is a combination pretty well guaranteed to trigger a fair few people.
In the GCC admiration for MBS seems to be almost universal, even among people who don’t care for the Saudis. He’s viewed as a modern Atatürk.
I’ve spent enought time in the Gulf to say the first sentence is far from true, and the second sentence is a big part of the reason why. Although it’s a bit unfair to compare a guy who, whatever his other flaws, did step up to successfully defend his country from the prospect of annihilation with a guy who got his position simply by having the right ancestors and jailing the competition.
“When teenage girls are expected to stay at home while teenage boys are expected to go outside and leave the home to the girls, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the girls end up putting more energy into their homework.”
Well, in some ways, this is what I can see with my own eyes.
It is even one of my very first thoughts/impressions, from long before I saw any stats. Given how small is the number of people I know, it looks too naïve for a theory, but it is also simple and humane and thus my most promicing candidate for a theory.
Though I’m not sure how exactly “expected” works for both.
Actually, I even once saw how a Middle-Eastern lady said that hanging around at home is bad for men and one should drive them out:) But that was online and the lady was Kurdish (or Iranian).
@Vanya, I am very willing to agree that Russians are no better than people of Saudi Arabia.
But I’ll laugh at them all the same, and not because Yemen or Somalia are “more advanced”.
I have read that the Mandaeans (the only remaining real Gnostics) regard all music without exception as Satanic, which seems logical.
The only one I’ve ever actually met seemed cool with it, though.
To one of Vanya’s points, there are obviously certain risks when you have a generic “Southeast Asia bureau head” covering a story where a bit of specialized knowledge of a specialized area could be useful. Although what with the internet you’d think they could have gotten input, if only in the form of advice on how to avoid lazy cliches, from one of the NYC-based music-coverage specialists. If Indonesia suddenly had a currency crisis with exchange rates for the rupiah fluctuating wildly there would probably be someone from the business section back at HQ that would get involved to help the reporter on the ground get the story right or at least avoid rookie mistakes.
Apparently there’s the NYT is so sclerotic/gerontocratic at present that Jon Pareles is still officially the “chief pop music critic,” a post he has held for half his life. (He’s now 70 and got that title the year he turned 35.) I don’t think of Pareles as much of a metal guy, but he might have been able to recommend against “clawing.” But to a large extent this is just part of a much broader and long-running trend of mainstream journalistic coverage of various rock-music subgenres as being essentially sociological – interested in the bands and/or their audience as social types while being incurious about the music-qua-music. Note also the interesting editing choice of devoting characters or pixels to the description of System of a Down as “Armenian-American.” Maybe that sort of exoticizing label is relevant to the assumed readership, but if you are focused on the story’s nominal subjects, the idea that adolescent girls with no prior familiarity with Western metal styles who were impressed by the track they heard would be interested in the ethnicity of that band’s members — as opposed to focusing at most on them being “American” or “Californian” – is risible.
As a bass player I found this offensive. These women are actually very good musicians.
While of course I sympathize, I think you’re overreacting/overinterpreting. I’m pretty sure the author of the piece would agree that they’re very good musicians; it’s just an attempt at “colorful” writing, something journalists have always been fatally drawn to.
I am separately intrigued by the detail that VoBaceprot’s lyrics are tri-lingual, and would like more information about how that works out in practice. Are some songs in one language and others in others, or is there a macaronic alternation or other less-patterned code-switching within songs? Do certain sorts of topics or themes in the lyrics correlate with a particular language?
Not especially relevant, but fun (courtesy of bulbul on FB): DAM – EMTA NJAWZAK YAMMA – ايمتى نجوزك يما (‘When are you getting married?”).
“not as virgin as Mary” (Voice of Baceprot) sounds provocative in English.
Seems pretty orthodox. “More virgin than Mary” would be the way to go for épating the bourgeois. (Here to help.)
I think in English it playfully suggests that she is not a virgin at all.
Only if you drop the “not” part.
I asked a fellow I know who is a keen follower of the Japanese-all-girl-metal-band scene (which is a whole niche market, with only some of the American fans seeming like creepy old men with impure motives) if he was familiar with Voice of Baceprot, and he was all “if you followed so-and-so [apparently some British dude with a youtube channel who is a respected authority on breaking trends in Far Eastern girl metal] like I do, you would have heard about VoB at least three years ago.” The NYT article does not suggest any Japanese influence, but my informant suspects that there may be some Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere dynamics behind the scenes here.
“you would have heard about VoB at least three years ago”
I’m sure that’s true. I saw on YouTube they played at the Middle East in Cambridge a year ago, so the hipsters have been on to them for at least that long.
Lots of music venues that were around back in the Eighties are long gone, in the Boston metro area and elsewhere. That’s the nature of the business and not worth getting too upset over, but I am delighted that the Middle East is still there. I haven’t actually gone to a show there in recent decades, but I believe my second-born child (now in college in that metro area) has. Maybe her boyfriend’s band played there last year opening for someone else?
It seems there was a series of pubications in English about VoB in 2017. First South China Morning Post and then various newspapers including the Guardian and metal sites.
Girls (16-17 years old) look differntly and dress differently.