It is long-established in the development of color that the first third way to emerge from the binary of black and white, light and dark, is red. From this point, all other colors flow. In the same way aspect begins as a binary: perfective and imperfective. The first views an event as that which is completed, while the second views an event as that which is ongoing. Aspect is decoupled from absolute time, but within this binary there is relative time: the imperfective is not yet perfective. Yet the only ground from which a new aspect can arise to form a trinity is the imperfective. The boundary, the borderlands where the imperfective and perfective touch, is not at the beginning, but the end of imperfective spectrum: it is meet, therefore, that a language with three core aspects would add the cessative rather than the inchoative. The cessative indicates 'to stop doing', an imperfective range on the marches of the perfective, which binds the binary aspects to a more temporal mode. Once the imperfective has borne the cessative, more aspects may come; but it is ironic that the aspect that begins a multiplicity of others should be the one associated with ceasing!
The Smartest Man on 8th Avenue
Monday: Comics, Tuesday: Youth Orgs, Wednesday: Classics, Thursday: Life/Languages, Friday: Science Fiction and Fantasy
Thursday, March 14, 2024
Thursday, March 7, 2024
On the Nose ...
Creole languages are often stereotyped as simpler than the languages from which they are derived (not simpler than the pidgin from which they evolved not the language which the audience happens to speak), but this does not rule out the retention or development of individual complexities. In the case of Haitian Creole, this complexity was attention to the nasality or orality of consonants or entire words. The Creole word janmen 'never' is transparently the French word jamais in which neither vowel is nasal but there is a nasal consonant. I am still not certain from what origin the verb renmen 'to like' possesses. This contrast of orality and nasality is particularly conspicuous in the definite article, whose nasality or orality depends on the commensurate nature of the syllables in the noun. There are five possible articles - a, la, an, lan, and the apparently rare nan, postposed rather than preposed. Examples are mesye a 'the gentleman', liv la 'the book', tifi a 'the girl', tigason an 'the boy', nant lan 'the watch', and dam nan 'the lady'. I do not yet fully understand the parameters of the fourfold (and occassionally fivefold) distinction, but there is no denying that it is more complex than the binary distinction of Continental French.
Thursday, February 29, 2024
U Are Not Alone ...
Haitian Creole is French as she is (was) spoke, which is a great relief to those who had to suffer through French conjugations. Even if one kept the distinction between singular and plural, the subtractive morphology, in which the plural contains a consonant absent in the singular, is unpredictable and complicated from the default direction of pluralization. The simplification of spelling is welcome, but it has one unanticipated side effect: the elimination of u as a singular vowel. In Creole, the solitary vowel u becomes i, as is the fate of most high rounded vowels. A learner who failed to distinguish between orthography and speech might miss this feature altogether.
Monday, February 26, 2024
Amethyst (Amy Reeder, Wonder Comics)
Thursday, February 22, 2024
In Your Eyes I See ...
In Haitian Creole, aka Kre`yol, the official language of the Republic of Haiti, the words for 'man' and 'woman' are not derived from l'homme and la femme, as one might expect from something so deeply French. Instead, the words are gason and fi, an indication of the legacy of oppression. But if 'boy' and 'girl' have become 'man' and 'woman', what does one use for actual boys and girls? An application of the word ti from French petit produces tigason and tifi. This use of diminutives and pejoration does have one happy result: the Creole word for child is timoun, in which the moun comes from French monde '(entire) world'. If a child is one's entire world, perhaps that sentiment allays some bitterness of that country's history.
Monday, February 19, 2024
Ghost Machine
Ghost Machine is a preview anthology of multiple related series. The first character to appear is a preexisting one, Geiger, whose name evokes the post-apocalyptic setting. The Unnamed timeline, however, is expanding the Geiger universe with other immortals and rivals, most notably Redcoat. The immortals include Benedict Arnold, Albert Einstein (shown as a child), Davy Crockett, The Northerner (a Union soldier), Annie Oakley, and Simon Pure, Redcoat himself. War connects these figures and others who are committed to the Unknown War. There is a timeline which includes characters not already mentioned in Ghost Machine, such as American Widow X and the First Ghost. The immortality of the characters in the Unnamed War seems to be less than absolute, since Benedict Arnold is described as the only immortal, other than Redcoat, to survive the Revolutionary War. What litte is said about the encounter between the Northerner and Redcoat suggests that Simon Pure was a Confederate or at least a sympathizer. First Ghost is an intriguing concept: a female veteran goes to space and then becomes president of the United States. Her experience inspires her to become the First Ghost. Given the timeline, she is the last of next-to-last President before the start of the Unknown War.
Rook: Exodus is an extrasolar corporate dystopia; specifically, the dystopia after the corporation's terraforming engine has failed and the corporation has abandoned the Wardens, its own employees. The Wardens are animal-themed and have helmets which control their associated animals - a reversal of the usual functions of a totemic mask. The Wardens disagree on how to handle the dwindling resources and each Warden has oversized animals at their command, so it's clear that a War of the Wardens would be ugly. What is not so clear is why the corporation chose oversized animals to colonize a partially terraformed planet.
The Family Universe is less clear as a shared universe, although Peter J Tomasi is credited on both books. That does inspire confidence. The first title, The Rocketfellers, is about a family from the Twenty-Fifth Century in a temporal witness program in the present day: the future is not secure. It seems a family-friendly series, although it's not clear whether the movie of Junkyard Joe in the final panel is an easter egg or a connection to the timeline of the Unknown War. The other Family Universe series, Hornsby & Halo, seems to be based on the child swap of the New Gods, only set on Earth, involving Heaven & Hell rather than their cosmic analogs, and centered on Little League baseball, Both series are written by Peter J Tomasi, so that is promising on the family front. His depiction of Clark and Jon Kent's relationship was terrific.
The last shared universe, that of Hyde Street and Devour, seems more fluid and ambiguous. The third year definitely-not-Boy-Scout is well designed but almost certainly not his true form. The image on the neckerchief slide is appropriately creepy. Devour seems to be a series about eating disorders, while Hyde Street takes advantage of the repetitiveness of American street names to allow a freedom of location for terror tales.