Ra, Set, Russkiy!

  I don't have any profound spiritual commentary for the end of 2009, so in terms of another year around the Sun, this news seems appropriate. The Russians have devised a scheme to try alter the orbit of Apophis, the near-Earth asteroid which in 2004 was calculated to have a 1-in-37 chance of hitting the Earth (That figure was later revised to less panic-inducing odds). The timing of this announcement, just as NASA's shuttle program is expiring, appears to be a bid for the space portion of the news cycle, and fits well with Russia's "muscular patriotism". The plan does sound heavily inspired by movies, but then many space scientists have been inspired by science-fiction movies and stories, and quite a few science fiction authors have worked for NASA. On the positive side, Russia is the country over which the "path of risk" is imminent and the only country in which a large meteorite has exploded in recent times (I do not believe that the Tunguska Explosion was an exploding alien spacecraft). That experience does give it a little more authority than other nations in this matter, just as Japan has more authority than other nations when it comes to suffering nuclear attack.

Apophis appears to be an appropriately menacing name for the asteroid, but is less so if one has sufficient familiarity with Egyptian mythology. The namers of the asteroid seem to be bigger fans of Stargate than Sinuhe. Apophis is the Greek name for the Apep serpent, the cosmic embodiment of all that is evil, which threatens the sun god Ra as travels nightly through the Duat, but is always defeated by the god Sutekh/Set - despite his use as a Satan-equivalent in fiction, that is not his primary role in Egyptian cosmology-cosmography. Sometimes the struggles of Ra, Sutekh, and the Apep serpent resulted in earthquakes, storms, and eclipses when the Apep serpent got the upper hand, but Ra was ever victorious.Apophis, therefore, is a good name for an object in the darkness, be it Duat or Outer Space, which periodically threatens, but never prevails.

Skating on the Holidays

On the day before Christmas, I went with my uncle, aunt, and cousin to skate at the Squaw Valley Olympic rink. Only my cousin and I intended to skate; she is an figure skater, while I use hockey skates. We took the gondola up. I cannot call it a cable car, since 'cable car' indicates something else to me as a San Franciscan. The gondola which was packed tight with a melange of nationalities, including Russian who were either temperamental or merely sounded that way due to the harshness of the Scythian tongue. The gondola scaled the cliff over the houses until it became vertical and swang over the precipice, then dipped slightly, and went over the next precipice. I am profoundly glad that I do not have vertigo, but the tiniest touch of dizziness while staring down at the candid abyss is quite thrilling.

Once we arrived at the open air ice rink, I rented some K2 hockey skates, which were too soft to do proper crossovers, as well as locked in terms of the top fastener, although my inability to skate backwards is entirely my fault. I handed over my camera to my uncle and aunt, but few of the pictures came out, through a combination of sun and ice. Fortunately, I have upgraded to a digital camera, despite lingering Luddite tendencies (the dislike, rather than the smashing), so the surviving pictures were quite sufficient. As my cousin and I circled the rink, always in the same direction - I would have expected that the direction would be changed after the zamboni had smoothed the ice - we had a nice chance to chat. My other, older cousins had a chance to play together up at Tahoe, but this one was too young, and my parents too wearied, to enjoy this experience.

That night, Dad and I went the 9:00 Christmas Eve carol service, which involved candles in a cup and no communion (although Christ the King Lutheran does not celebrate communion as often as the Episcopal Church). Pastor Chip is a good preacher, but his sermon was middling in content as well as delivery. After three other services I can't fault him on weaker delivery, but I can understand why Won Jae Hur, the interim pastor at my church in San Francisco, chose to have guest preachers throughout the Advent season.

Christmas Day itself is a matter for the family alone, so I shall say no more about it.

On the feast of Stephen, or Boxing Day, we breakfasted late but well. I once again went to Squaw with my cousin. Instead of going to open air rink at the top of the mountain, however, we went to the minuscule rink which is part of the Resort at Squaw Creek (over dinner, my brother explained who owned which bits at Squaw). At first I forgot to specify hockey skates, and the apathetic Russian teenage attendant gave me figure skates - I had forgotten that guys who do not skate regularly use generic ice skates, not hockey skates. After two changes of skates, I finally found a pair that suited me. The circumference of the rink was restricted, but I could adjust to that circumstance. The scarring of the ice, however, was so severe that more than one person remarked that the skating was better outside the rink than in it. I tried skating on the inside of the rink rather than the periphery, but it was not much better and it was much tighter - I'm a hockey player, not a figure skater! My cousin took little girls in hand and became absorbed in teaching them. I did a fair bit of skating, but I also watched the Squaw Valley dog sled take off. The dogs were barking and bouncing up and down, but once the signal was given, they disappeared in a flash. We supped that night at the Six Peaks Grille at the Resort, which was considerably fancier than the places I favor, but it was delicious and filling, and what more can you ask of a good meal?

CASES IN CRASIS!

Although I do not regret the speculation on the "ablative" in which I indulged, it seemed unsatisfactory: I had established the reason for the prepositions me and e taking the nominative case, but the rest of the case system for singular persons were mysterious in origin. The existence of pronominal cases only in the singular number suggests a recent origin; languages which have attenuated their case systems possess a variety of cases for the plural pronouns, even if they are not quite as numerous, just as nominal declensions have fewer forms in the plural.

I have undertaken an analysis and decided that there are really only two underlying cases, the nominative and the genitive (which, by virtue of its status as "the case which is not the nominative", ought to be labeled the objective case.) The nominative case appears to be composed of a "subject marker" 'o placed before the bare nominatives. The 1st and 3rd person nominative regard the subject marker as optional but enclitic if present, with an excrescent w (since epenthesis is a vocalic phenomenon) in the 1st person; the 2nd person has either grafted the subject marker or confused the first syllable of the nominative with the subject marker. The genitive cases of the personal pronouns have alternate forms, depending on the a-o (herein referred to as the alienable-inalienable) distinction. The most striking facet of these genitives is the homophony between the 1st person nominative case without the subject marker (au) and the inalienable form of the 2nd person genitive case (au). It is possible that the ancestral forms were more distinct, and it is astonishing what degrees of overlap various languages permit without apparent confusion. I could quote some Egyptian examples, but that would overextend this post, verbally and graphically.

The eponymous "cases in crasis" are the possessive and dative cases.These cases are characterized by initial k and n, respectively, but otherwise correspond exactly with the forms of the genitive. This correspondance is no accident, because the forms of the possessive and dative derive from the crasis, or linguistic compression, of propositions with the genitive case forms of the appropriate persons, substantially no different than the "first ablative" ma. The preposition ka/ko means "belonging to", while na/no means "for, concerning, on account of". The corresponding forms, therefore, to the 3rd person genitive ana/ona are possessive kana/kona and dative nana/nona. Perhaps at some point the possessive forms, to pick an example, were the phrases ka ana and ko ona, which provided not only an environment likely to induce crasis, but also reduplicated the culturally significant alienable-inalienable distinction.

The situation of the accusative is more vexing, regarding the enclitic nature of the object marker (since it cannot be a subject marker), the alternation of the two accusative object markers, and mix of the nominative and genitive forms as objects of the preposition i or ia. The only  accusative form with the object marker attached is the 1st person alienable form ia'u. The other accusative forms (ia oe, ia ia) use the alternate (longer) form of the object and are not attached; these use the nominative case for the object of the preposition. The shorter form of the preposition accompanying the inalienable forms (i o'u, i ou, i ona) takes the genitive case. The most vexing point in the accusative case complex is the alienable genitive case in the 1st person, when the equivalent forms in the 2nd and 3rd persons have the nominative. Perhaps *i au or *iau (from *i au or crasis of *ia au) has too much potential confusion with the 2nd person alienable genitive form.

                         1st person                   2nd person                    3rd person
Nominative       'owau, au                      'oe                                'oia, ia
Genitive            a'u, o'u                         au, ou                            ana, ona
Possessive        ka'u, ko'u                     kau, kou                        kana, kona
Dative               na'u, no'u                     nau, nou                         nana, nona
Accusative         ia'u, i o'u nei, la            ia 'oe, i ou la, nei             ia ia, i ona la
Ablative 1          ma o'u la, nei                ma ou la, nei                  ma ona la, nei
Ablative 2          mai o'u aku, mai           mai ou aku, mai              mai ona aku, mai
Ablative 3          me au                          me oe                             me ia
Ablative 4          e au                             e ia                                 e ia

My Very First Christmas Homily

I am not a chruchman, nor do I have the  insolance to presume to the ministry via mail order, but this season seems the appropriate time to write a homily, if I am going to write any this year. I have taken as my theme not a passage from the Bible (although I certainly have many opinions on that), but a point of the Scout Law. The Scout Law is the article of confession which lays out twelve principles for living as a Scout or Scouter. Each of these principles is called a "point" and I have chosen to discuss the twelfth and last: "A Scout is reverent". In our multicultural society, and particularly in a multi-faith troop, this point can diminish to the point of evanescence. A careful treatment of the twelfth point of the Scout Law, it seems to me, divides into three parts, which roughly correspond to childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. This is not necessarily linked to actual physical growth: a "baby Christian", after all, can be a sixty-year-old widower.

Reverence starts first with respect for the beliefs of your family and community. Please note that this is not necessarily the same as your personal beliefs. Your personal beliefs at this stage exist, but are forming and will change slightly or greatly as you gain more experience. The familial and communal environment, nonetheless, for good or ill, affects your world view, even if you reject the tradition in the end. You should strive to understand what your religion believes, no matter how bizarre it may seem, because without understanding you may falter on the next step. In some churches (to use an environment with which I am familiar) there is a great degree of uniformity of opinion, while in others there exists great diversity.

Unless you live in an extremely isolated area, you will meet people who believe differently than the community in which you were raised, and than you yourself believe. These different beliefs may be other sects of the same religion or altogether separate faiths. Reading a book on world religions, such as that of Huston Smith, will help in grasping different perspectives and in allowing you to understand the faith traditions which are absent in your neighborhood, although a book is no substitute for a person of a particular denomination or faith who is willing to explain the "on the ground" perspective of a believer. You will discover that different faith traditions have reached opposite conclusions from the same passages, and the same conclusions from vastly different passages. It is critical while you are doing this investigation that you treat those who are willing to discuss their faith with you that, however bizarre his beliefs seem to you, he believes wholeheartedly in these articles of religion. If the religion demands certain behaviors in greeting worshippers or entering the place of worship, such as not shaking hands and taking off shoes, you should observe these customs out of respect.
If you take your shoes off outside a mosque, you are not turning into a Muslim, but merely respecting that the Muslims within the mosque regard it as a holy place.

After you have investigated and sought to understand, then you are ready to decide what you believe. It is important to remember that whatever you come to believe, there will be people who dispute every single point of that belief. It is good to be able to explain what you believe and why you believe it, but do not expect your arguments to compel doubters and antagonists. The best way to show your belief is through its expression in your life - it is curious how behaving as though you were a good person makes you a better person. This faith, however, does not release you from your obligation to treat others' faiths with respect; in fact, you may find that your deeper faith enhances your appreciation for the deeper faith of others, whether within your religion or alternate religions: Benedictines, Franciscans, and Jesuits have radically different approaches to the same Catholic faith.

That's my homily for Christmas. I hope it gave you pleasure and provided you with matters for thought.

Two Gentlemen of Wailua

I wanted to discuss a point about the pronominal system of Hawaiian which is connected to the previous post; I am, however, unwilling to violate the structural integrity of the former post merely to add a minor comment, even if I find it fascinating and instructive. This is an addendum to the previous post, rather than the second part of the originally planned post; that discussion will be posted next Monday and then I will return to the lesson-by-lesson format.

One of the features of the Hawaiian which had perplexed me is the contrast between second person dual 'olua and plural 'oukou, although the dual and plural of  the first and third person are ma'ua and makou and la'ua and lakou. Situations such as this prove the usefulness of the methodology of comparative linguistics, which I have done below. Please note that the Rapanui plural derives from the dual, which is an unusual development, since the normal path to a singular-plural dichotomy is the marginalization of the dual and its eventual abandonment. In Homeric Greek, the dual is infrequent compared to the plural, but nonetheless a viable form; by the time of Pericles, the dual had practically vanished. In Latin, the dual survived only in the forms of the number two and certain forms of the pronouns, such as uter, which incorporated duality into their meaning.

                      Hawaiian             Rapanui            Samoan
1Sg                owau/au              ko au                a'u/ou
2Sg                'oe                      ko koe              'oe/'e
3Sg                oia/ia                   ko ia                'o ia

1DuI             ma'ua                  ko taua              ta'ua
1DuE            ma'ua                  ko maua            ma'ua
2Du              'olua                    ko korua           'oulua
3Du              la'ua                    ko ra'ua             latou

1PlI            kakou                  -                        tatou
1PlE           makou                 -                        matou
2Pl             'oukou                 -                        'outou
3Pl            lakou                    -                        latou

There are two possibilities for the discrepancy: either the Hawaiian 2nd person dual changed from -'ua to -lua under the influence of the Hawaiian number lua 'two' or the Samoan 2nd person dual has changed to 'oulua under the influence of 'outou. There latter seems more likely, given the Rapanui forms ko korua and ko ia which correspond to Hawaiian ('o) 'olua and 'oia (which is a contraction of 'o  + ia, as I shall discuss in the next post. Samoan is more closely related to Hawaiian than Rapanui, but also more influenced by other closely related languages. A further suggestion that the 2nd person dual never fit the rest of the dual pattern is that the 2nd person dual is the only person in which the singular form could be connected to the dual and plural; the singulars au and ia bear no resemblance the dual and plural roots ka-, ma-, and la-. The Samoan alteration of the 2nd person singular forms 'oe and 'e provides an analysis of 'oe as 'o + 'e and the possibility of reconstructing 'olua from 'o + lua. If this be case, of course, then a similar simplification has occurred in Rapanui, which in turn implies that the assumption of the plural function by the dual forms in Rapanui occurred after the reanalysis of an ancestral dual kourua as the new dual korua.

The Two of Us, Part Two

If I'm going to call this blog "The Smartest Man on 8th Avenue", I have to be prepared to think deeply and to do some research. Originally, this post was intended to discuss two matters. The former is an update on the inclusive-exclusive distinction, and the latter is a more detailed look at the origins of the pronominal cases in Hawaiian. Since I have written at length on the inclusive-exclusive distinction, I shall save the origins of pronominal cases for the next post on the Hawaiian language.

I have failed so far to locate my wayward and worn Hawaiian dictionary, in order to clarify which forms are inclusive and which are exclusive. Fortunately, my South Pacific Phrasebook has provided the answer through the miracle of comparative linguistics. One of the benefits (for the Europeans, anyway) of the colonization of the Pacific was the close relationship to each other of the Polynesian languages. In many cases, the kidnapped natives of one island could speak, with moderate effort, to the inhabitants of another island. The relative closeness of Polynesian languages was a boon to the field of linguistics in the nineteenth century, even if there were aborted (and, in hindsight, absurd) attempts to connect the language to Original Language (which, naturally, was something similar to Biblical Hebrew).

I scoured the South Pacific Phrasebook for pronominal paradigms and found two (oddly, neither was under the Hawaiian section): Rapanui (Easter Island) and Samoan. In Rapanui, the menage à
 trois of the grammatical number system appears to have collapsed into the rather prosaic singular-plural distinction. This is a common phenomenon, except in this case the dual (taua, maua, korua, ra'ua) survived as the new plural form rather than the more usual elimination of the dual. One advantage of Rapanui for comparative linguistics is the island's isolation which wrought its environmental Armageddon but beautifully preserved its isolation. The Samoan paradigm maintains the distinction between the dual (ta'ua, ma'ua, 'oulua, la'ua) and the plural (tatou, matou, 'outou, latou), and thus is a closer paradigmatic comparison to Hawaiian, but is linguistically more suspect due to a high level of interisland interaction. The deficiencies of one language balance those of the other; thus I can state with some confidence that the Hawaiian form (according to the 'okina-less orthography of Judd) kaua is the inclusive form of 'we' and maua is the exclusive form.

Further confirmation of this conclusion, other than the unaltered form of maua, comes from the two registers of Samoan. A register is a social level of language selected for the appropriate degree of sollemnity or familiarity. The clearest example in the United States of different registers is the young woman who uses ethnically appropriate urban slang with her friends and family, but "business English" when she is answering the phone at the office. In Samoan, there are two registers: the t-style and the k-style, of which the former is formal and the latter familiar. The t-style is the one in which the words in the phrasebook are written, but a visitor might hear phrases in the k-style as well when they visit the Kingdom of Samoa or the American territory. Notable features of the transformation from t-style to k-style are the eponymous conversion of t to k and n to g (pronounced as ng in sing); I leave out the pronunciation of r as l because that distinction was a missionary innovation, whereas pre-colonial words have minimum pairs contained t and k, and n and g. These two transformations are particularly interesting because the linguistic evolution of Hawaiian derives contemporary k from ancestral t (as in Samoan) and n from both n and ng (the opposite result, but the same conflation as Samoan). One of the features of the Kauai dialect was the continued use of t while the dialect of the other islands had switched to k; there was no extensive conflation of k- and t-words, however, since the change from t to k was part of a linguistic change which included a change of k to the 'okina, the apostrophe which seems to be arbitrarily absent in Judd. This absence of the linguistic change in the Kauai dialect may explain the mockery which the peasants of the interior Waimea canyon received for alleged overuse the 'okina. Cook first landed on Kauai at Waimea, and therefore introduced the forms ti and taro into English, rather than the official Hawaiian forms of ki and kalo.  Since borrowed words usually do not include personal pronouns, kaua is the Hawaiian form of taua (except on "Tauai").

A Little Foggy On The "Good Turn" Concept

Recently I heard a story on NPR about Scouts about which I have ambivalent feeling. According to this report, a thief (not the Boy Scout) stole a wallet, removed the money, and abandoned it. The thief, who obviously was not a particularly competent thief, did not check the other compartments, in which there was cash in excess of the easily accessible amount. The aforementioned Boy Scout found the wallet and returned it to the owner. I have no issue with that sort of honesty; what bothers me is his acceptance of the $100 reward, which is against the Scout code.

The story of how the Boy Scouts were established in the United States goes as follows: American publishers W.D. Boyce was on a business trip to London when he became lost in the "fog" (since we would now call it smog) and recieved help from a Scout, who refused the tip which Boyce offered. Although the legend differs from the truth (the truth of fact and the truth of legend serve different purposes), the fundamental point remains the same: Boyce was impressed by the boy's refusal of the tip and his willingness to help without promise of monetary compensation. One of the founding policies of the Boy Scouts of America was that one should do good deeds for their own sake, not for compensation. I do not believe in the either/or model of motivation, so I do concede that it is possible to do something because it is the right thing to do and recieve money, but the Boy Scouts of America, in order to prevent any confusion on the motivation of their members, requires that Boy Scouts not accept rewards. This is especially true when members are in uniform.


I shall relate something which occurred a bit more recently, so that my readers do not think that this policy is some sort of "rotten borough". When the Troop was on a recent camping trip (the SRH, for those in the know), one of the boys discovered a cell phone dropped on the trail. We called the number and arranged to meet the relieved owner in the parking lot of a certain supermarket chain. When we had finished the hike and were returning home, we stopped at the aforementioned parking lot and waited a short while. The owner eventually arrived and tried to reward us, and we found it somewhat difficult to convince him that we could not take the reward - hence my lack of surprise at the approving tone of the recent news story and its discrepancy from BSA policy.

Chorus Girls!

On Thursday night, I accompanied my mother to the University Club to hear the San Francisco Girls' Chorus, since my progenitor was feeling indisposed and two tickets had already been purchased. The University Club is located near my original alma mater, Cathedral School for Boys, whose construction proceeds apace. This Club looks like a real Club, complete with cute hatcheck girls, although the secret door from the library to the former brothel has been closed forever. I'm glad to see that they finally labeled (for the sexes) the restrooms which they have disguised as, or converted from, mirrored coat closets, even if the handles are forbiddingly stiff. I have to confess that after I had stopped at the restroom on the 3rd floor, I got confused and initially entered the wrong holiday party (the Princeton one). I could have sworn I had heard or read the name of the person (L., One of the Levi-Strauss line?) behind me in the check-in line of the Princeton party.

Once I had ascended to the fourth floor, where the party I was supposed to be attending was, I found the bar and ordered a wine spritzer. I  met a member of the Club, a white-haired gentleman named Murray. He regularly attends the Charles Fracchia lectures on the history of San Francisco, which I cannot attend (to my regret) because the Troop meets the same night. He, too, is an Eagle Scout (even many Scouts forget that Eagle is the only rank you retain as a adult).

The San Francisco Girls' Chorus event was a participatory event, a sing-along, but they must have been singing quietly or taken a break from singing, since I knew we had arrived in the middle of the event yet I did not hear them when I first arrived. There were some sing-along sheets, but the extras were placed, rather unwisely, directly in front of the chorus, where no latecomer (who would be most in need of a quick update) could possibly grab one. The chorus performed with quality, which is no less than I expect from San Francisco artistic institutions. Speculation on whether any of the chorus members were relatives of one of my Scouts (and if so, which ones) briefly distracted me. This is a small city, after all.

After the singing had ended and the singers had filed out one by one, I went out to the south-facing (downhill) balcony so I could take in the sights of the downtown. The balcony is sufficiently vertiginous from the slope of Nob Hill without alcoholic contributions.One of the towers, possibly one of the Embarcadero Center ones, was lit up in green,  outshining the building outlined in yellow and the relatively tiny red pinprick of the Transamerica Pyramid, still visible from Presidio Heights in my childhood.

He Buys Kona Coffee, He Makes Kana Coffee

I have decided to talk about only one lesson in this post because the distinction which it introduces is one to which I have referred several times before, namely the o-a distinction. Hawaiian is far removed from the vowel-based grammatical content of the Semitic languages (since the consonants bear the semantic load) and even the ablaut grades of Classical Greek, but in this instance, the contrast between prepositions and pronouns with o or a is the key to a semantic distinction not made in English. Its expressed absence in English, of course, does not mean that English speakers cannot perceive the distinction. The contrast can be expressed most effectively by the Christmas wreath (ka lei kalikimaka)  I bought from the youth group at church Sunday morning. The important fact here is that I bought the wreath, therefore it would be ko'u lei kalikimaka (my Christmas wreath, the one which I bought). If I had made the wreath myself rather than supporting the youth group mission trip, the wreath would be ka'u lei kalikimaka (my Christmas wreath, the one which I made). Thus the forms with a are more intimate than those with o; the detailed classification is more complicated than this simple description, but presumably no more baffling to native speakers of Hawaiian than the "cities and small islands" rule of the Latin locative.

On other matters, I have decided that Monday will be the regular posting dating for this most unlikely of columns, which still lacks a catchy overall name. Any suggestions in this matter are welcome.


Lesson 11
1. Ke ike nei oukou i ka wai maemae. You will see the clean water.
2. Ke kali nei lakou ma ka hale kahiko. They waited by the old house.
3. E pii kakou i ka hale loihi. We shall climb to the tall house.
4. Ua ai makou i ka uala kahiki a me ka i'a maloo. We have eaten the Irish potato with the dried fish.
5. Ke waiho nei oia i ka eke ko paa ma ka papahele. She puts her secure bag (purse?) on the floor. (Note that ko indicates she did not make the bag.)
6. Ke ike nei au i kona papale maemae  ma ka pakaukau. I see his clean hat (which he bought) on the table.
7. He kanaka naauao a kaulana loa ke kanaka mai Kahiki mai. The man from Kahiki is a very educated man.
8. He wahi maemae loa keia, aka, he wahi paumaele loa kela wahi. This place is very clean, but that place is very dirty.

My Dude Ranch Vacation

I have just returned from a vacation with most of my family to the border of Arizona. Yes, I will post pictures. I did not ride as much as I would have liked, since my beloved Amy was with me. Initially, I thought that she would miss out on the enjoyment of riding a horse, but the head wrangler George insisted that he find a time when he could lead her. Once she had gotten on a horse, she became much more enthusiastic.

One of the problems of selling the experience to someone who has not ridden in that part of the country is twofold. The first is that describing riding horses does not evoke the kind of excitement and thrill which would persuade people to try it. It is not true, incidentally, that you just sit there and let the horse do all the work. You have to control and direct the beast who is much larger and stronger than you. If you don't take control, he'll be tearing up shrubbery left and right and stopping at random. The second reason that riding horses is a hard sell is the dissonance between the description of the desert (particularly when it is not in full bloom) and the actual experience of the desert. The sand and the dirt and the ubiquitous spiky bushes, the heat and the lose rocks and the dust, they all individually appear unappealing in prospect but somehow the combination produces a wonderful and heady experience, much like malodorous ingredients in composition produce exquisite perfume.

We rode through arroyos, the normally dry ditches which fill flush with the rains. Camping in a river bed is the prime example of outdoors stupidity. We rode across former floodplains where relic riparian trees were stranded, orphaned of their ecological soulmates, the beavers. I can't say I am entirely sorrowful about the absence of beavers: since I was a child, beavers have returned to Lake Tahoe and brought giardia in their wake. We rode across the fields of short grass which are the poor and stunted reflection of the tall grass of the settlers' prairie. The cattle consumed the tall grass, which allowed erosion of the soil; the erosion of the soil choked the streams that fed the floodplains. We rode up the rocky mountains to petroglyphs left by the Hohokam culture, whose legacy all the tribes of the Southwest claim, with varying degrees of legitimacy. When I was on a mission to Navajoland, I visited one of their rock shelter dwellings.

Desolation On My Mind

Those who know me well are aware of my morbid predilection with movies portraying totalitarian societies or post-apocalyptic wastelands (yes, I include 1970's New York in that category), so they will not be shocked that I watched The Road (even though I found the idea of reading the book too depressing even for me) and am reading Collapse by Jared Diamond (the Silver Age successor to Steven Jay Gould).

The Road is based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, whose Southwestern novels I have read; I am not a fan of that genre. I did once read a Louis Lamour book once, but it did not compel me to pick up any others, and Western movies never grabbed me, even though I watched plenty of Paladin as a young kid. The Road, on the other hand, seemed like the bleak despairing movie I would enjoy, even if it did not seem appropriate for popcorn and a soda: the 2008 cut was not issued because it was too bleak and depressing. I suppose modern movie goers have not been inoculated with enough Ingmar Bergman. Viggo Mortenson was a good choice for the Man (as usual, someone of whom I had never heard played the juvenile lead), but the flashbacks and the tacked on feel-good ending presented problems. I suppose that the flashbacks served much the same function as the "satyr play" of a tragic trilogy, namely, to provide a brief respite to the sense of doom. The ending of the movie was marginally hopeful, which is the best one could expect from such a depressing setting. The inclusion of certain analogues to the Boy makes some sense, but the other companion of the adults at the end stretched credulity.

After I had finished Memoirs of a Geisha, I started reading Jared Diamond's Collapse. Reading it is a bit like reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant if Lord Foul had won: every time you think the book could not become more depressing, it exceeds itself (someone actually lived on Henderson?). The general results of ecological abuse seems to be same: ecological genocide, a barren wasteland, and near or total extinction of the human population. The horrifying aspect of these tales is that these were not people who were using intentionally destructive practices and just didn't care, but rather people who were just trying to feed themselves and their families.

I've never been to Iceland or Easter Island, but I have seen the effects of overpopulation, deforestation, and overgrazing firsthand in Malta, right before it surrendered its currency to the Euro. Malta is not a wasteland (it's actually quite lovely), and was never isolated in the way of Easter Island or Greenland, but it is a far cry from the "low wooded isle" with streams it presumably was in the days of Odysseus. In addition to the usual rainwater problems of a Mediterranean island in a dry climate, the remaining topsoil is so precious that it is recycled from site to site, vexing the archaeologists, and there are no permanent lakes or rivers.

Rain, Rain Go Away: An Economic Perspective

As I sit here, peering out my window at the precipitous skies, I naturally fall towards this thought: my misery here is my benefit elsewhere. My migratory work habits have allowed me to witness this phenomenon. When it rains here in the city in winter, I dislike traveling and try to find bus stops which have shelters and the MUNI feed, but I cannot resent the weather too much on a personal level. The rain which passes over this fair City, casting a kind of melancholic beauty provided one is inside, becomes ethereally beautiful snow in the Sierra Nevada, where shoveling the pathways on the property of my clients provides extra income in a dry economic season.

Test Cases

Since I have read Judd's Lessons 9 & 10, I'll concede that Hawaiian does indeed have cases to a greater extent than English, although not to a much greater extent. You may protest that English does not have cases, and you would be wrong. English has cases, but is not a case language. A case language has a systematic declensional system used for virtually all nouns (even Latin has some defective declensions, such as nihil), but a language which possesses cases need only possess them in a few words. The refuge of moribund cases is often the conservative arena of pronouns, relative and pronominal, and thus it stands with English. Although there have been rumors of the death of whom, the English cases (nominative, genitive, and accusative) still reside most strongly in the personal pronouns (I, my/mine, me; you, your/yours, you; he, his, him; she, her/hers, her; we, our/ours, us; they, their/theirs, them; who, whose, whom). It is not surprising, therefore, that the best evidence of cases in Hawaiian comes from that language's personal pronouns. The legitimate cases for Hawaiian appear to be: nominative, genitive, possessive, dative, and accusative. The genitive-possessive case distinction, incidently, does not seem to be the same as the o-a distinction. Judd claims that there is also an ablative case, but I am not convinced. Even if he had called it a prepositional case, such as exists vestigially in Russian, there is too much variation in the markers (ma, mai, me, e) for it to constitute a legitimate case. Judd not only undermines his own system of presentation, but even descends into grammatical gibberish in Lesson 10 when he says that the first two forms of the ablative (ma, mai) take the genitive case, whereas the latter two (me, e) take the nominative case. What Judd is describing is various prepositions plus the appropriate case for the object of the preposition, rather than a separate case.

Prepositions taking the nominative case seem a little strange, so let us examine more closely why me and e would take the nominative case. The preposition me means "with", which indeed would take the ablative in Latin; the concepts of "with" and "and", however, are closely connected, and sometimes the latter is derived from the former. If the underlying concept of me is conjunction ("and") rather than accompaniment ("with"), the use of the nominative would be appropriate. The other preposition which takes the nominative, e, indicates the agent of a "passive" verb (although, per usual, Judd neglects to provide an example). Since the object of the preposition performs the action, this use of the nominative makes sense as a contextual practice, even though the recipient of the action (the contextual direct object) is the grammatical subject, and therefore is in the nominative case.

So Hawaiian has five cases in the personal pronouns, whereas  English has either three or four, depending on whether my and mine are separate English case forms.

Lesson 9
1. Ke waiho nei au i ka o ma ka pakaukau. I place the fork on the table.
2. Ke hiamoe nei ia ma kahi moe. He sleeps in the sleeping place.
3. Ke kolo nei oia ma ka papahele. He crawls on the floor.
4. Ke pii nei lakou. They climb.
5. Ke kali nei oia no makou. They wait for us.
6. Ua hana lakou i ke kukui. They have made the torch.
7. E hakaka lakou. They will fight.
8. Ua holo lakou mai ka hale pohaku aku. They have run away from the stone house (bonitos can't run).
9. Ke ku nei laua ma ka puka aniani. They two stand at the window.
10. Ua ike makou i ka wahie. We have seen the firewood.

Lesson 10
1. Ke waiho nei oia i ka barena ma ka pahu. I place the bread in the box.
2. Ke inu nei ia i ka waiu. He drinks milk.
3. Ua ai oia i ka eke laiki. He has eaten the rice bag.
4. Ua ai lakou i ka uhapuaa. They have eaten the ham.
5. Ke komo nei oia i ka hale laau. He enters the frame house.
6. Ua ike makou i ka alani, ka ipu pu a me ka ipu haole. We have seen the present for the chief (or god), a squash, and a watermelon.
7. Ua waiho lakou i ka pahu huamoa ma ka papa aina. They have placed the box of hen's eggs on the ground
8. Ke hele nei makou i ka lanai.We walk to the porch.
9. Ua nalo na lanahu o ke ahi. The coals of the fire have vanished.
10. Ua nana makou i ka pakaukau. We have gazed at the table.

Cathedral at the Foreign Cinema

On Thursday, my first alma mater, Cathedral School for Boys, held a party down in Mission at the Foreign Cinema, whose name perplexed me when I looked into the matter. It wasn't a cinema (although it does project movies), but I couldn't tell what fraction was a bar and what fraction a restaurant without a personal inspection.

Once I arrived at Foreign Cinema, I realized that I had passed the door on several other occasions, but had dismissed it as the entrance to a (possibly abandoned) seedy industrial bar, since one could only see a long empty corridor through the windows. I suppose solid urban construction is not my aesthetic taste. The part of the bar in which the Cathedral party occurred was a large box with a concrete floor, suitable for an industrial dance party. As usual, the normal decibel level of an event space was a bit too loud for me - my guess is that the restaurant portion is better for conversation. The bartender, it turned out, was a student at SFSU, another of my almae matres (if a plural here is allowed!). It was very nice to see some of my old teachers, including Madame Terraciano, who buys at the same cafe as I do but keeps a different coffee schedule, and Mrs. Peskin (I'm sorry, I still find The Golden Key creepy rather than beautiful). Cocktail parties aren't my thing, and the scene was dominated by alumni parents, so I did not remain until the end, but rather left after I had talked sufficiently with the people whom I knew.

Flashlight Hike 2009

This year's flashlight hike was the route along the north edge of Rodeo Lagoon, where I and many other Cathedral alumni have gone for our 6th grade week at a nature program (I should still have a proto-journal of that week somewhere). We gathered in the parking lot before we started up the hill to Battery Townsley. The hole in the battery, which once was a black pit of water, has been covered up for safety reasons. The world becomes "safer", but less interesting, every year; staring into the Stygian pit was a highlight of this route. We ascended the "mini-Half Dome" staircase, as somebody put it, and admired the views during a snack break. The ascent to the radar station seemed shorter than usual (perhaps because we had not spent too much time at the Battery), but the nearer tower had collapsed like a section of the Bay Bridge; someone had defaced the largest slab with a giant black heart. If that has a particular significance, I would like to hear from you.

After we had dined while looking at the lights of our beautiful city, which I appreciated more after attending Lost Landscapes 4, we continued along the trail, which has improved markedly since the park banned mountain bikers on the Miwok Trail. There was a lesson in astronomy, which has become easier since the days of pretending you can tell where someone's finger is pointing. The final descent coincided with a sudden drop in temperature, and then single file along the north side of the lagoon. I remember one year where we walked along the south side of the lagoon and across the sandbar to the parking lot, but that took place earlier in the day and was quite a slog. It's entirely possible that the south trail has collapsed into the lagoon. There was a supply of hot cocoa and donuts, as usual, and a sophisticated telescope for seeing the Galilean moons.

 

Lost Landscapes 4

On Friday, I went down to Lost Landscapes 4, at the Herbst Theater, on the protest-unfriendly side of City Hall. I only had one ticket, which illustrates a vexing conundrum: when I want to go to an event where tickets are scarce, I need to buy the tickets early, but I don't like paying the price of two tickets without trustworthy confirmation that I will have a companion for the event. Some people might suggest scalping the extra ticket, but I have neither the talent nor the inclination to do this successfully. So I bought one ticket - but it was numbered so that I could not add a companion at a later date in an adjacent seat.

The actual presentation of Lost Landscapes was an intriguing mix of event footage and home films. I may have been better prepared in some regards than other members of the audience thanks to many talks with senior alumni of my troop, but there were plenty of surprises, and sights of things known but never seen. San Francisco archivists have benefited from the nearly concurrent development of early photography and the expansion of San Francisco, as well as the ubiquitous desire of tourists to document their holiday. Several things which I learned from this: the traffic on Market has always been bad; the first transportation battle in the city was between horses and horseless carriages; hats used to be an acceptable substitute (predecessor?) for placards. I really do wonder at that last point: did the strikers feel that waving a hat was sufficient to indicate their cause?

O Plastic Tree, thy leaves are so unchanging!

On Monday, the Calvary bible study group which I attend (although I confess my absence at the previous meeting) participated in the "Hanging of the Greens", a tradition with which I was not familiar. Apparently, it's a fancy term for Christmas decoration volunteer labor. Don't get the wrong idea: working on a task together is highly enjoyable, but it's still labor. I'm no cook, so my contribution to the potluck was made by others. The amount of decoration provided seemed excessive to me, but this is a thought I have every year. The leader of the work detail, however, was an expert Christmas tree decorator, and knew how to drape the voluminous ribbons.
Decoration, of course, is easier when the tree is made of plastic. I understand the appeal of a fake tree for institutions (such as Calvary) which need to vacuum acres of carpet and respect the sensitivities of the hypoallergenic congregants, but it still doesn't provide the same satisfaction.

Budge Like An Egyptian

On Friday night, after Thanksgiving, I went to the Egyptian performance,"Psalms of Ra", at the DeYoung. It was fortunate that I had decided to go that evening, since it was the last performance of the year by the DeYoung's artist in residence, Gregangelo, and the Velocity Circus. I had wanted to go to an earlier performance, but some event (I don't remember which) prohibited such revelry. Despite the attractive cost (free) of the event, I had some hesitation. I had not been to anything with "Circus" in its name since I burned out on the pretentiousness of Cirque du Soleil several years ago.

Like a fanboy at a Dan Brown conspiracy movie, I took my copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (Budge's edition) with me. I have been reading it occasionally lest I forget my hieroglyphic writing. The transliteration (as opposed to translation) of Ancient Egyptian is contentious and involves rapid evolution. The net result is that Budge's system of transliteration is quite different from that which I learned last spring at San Francisco State University, which in turn varied slightly from the version I had learned back in 2000.

I ate dinner in the dip between the DeYoung and the California Academy of Sciences where the seals used to live and read my Book of the Dead, although I used the academic pronunciation which I had been taught, as far as I could. I may be an Egypt geek, but even I was not going to lug my Middle Egyptian dictionary to the park with me. After I had supped, I went up to the DeYoung and walked through the exhibit of the artist in residence. This did nothing to alleviate my skepticism, since it was all glitter and illusion - fun but not as thought-provoking as traditional art. Gregangelo appears to enjoy creating portmanteaux, since his exhibit shared that feature with his stage name. At least there wasn't any of the Black Athena nonsense, and my ability to read hieroglyphs did impress my companions in the entrance line.

The performance itself, viewed from the perilously steep seating arrangements of the theater, was a mixed bag. The incorporation of Mongolian hand dancing was inevitable, given the provenance of three of the members of Velocity Circus, but I found it hard to accept until I had thought about it after the performance. Several of the rather short numbers featured the transcription and translation of the Egyptian lyrics of the dance number, but were there presumably for visual sitimulation alone, since I could not read them before the screen changed. I suppose I have been spoiled by the supertitles at the opera One of the later pieces was too flush with neon; overall, however, I enjoyed the performance. My attitude is that I have come to enjoy a show and I will! When it comes to performances with themes of ancient cultures and languages, sometimes you have to be grateful that they exist at all.

But I suppose I'll have to write the Etruscan language mob drama myself.

The More Than Missing Perfect

I am beginning to wonder whether Judd did not "invent" the pluperfect out of a desire for symmetry in his Westernized linguistic scheme; the pluperfect form was introduced in Chapter 6, but fails to appear in Chapters 7 and 8. This addition is not as an absurd notion as it might seem: the full system of Devanagari writing (which is used for Sanskrit) includes some signs which are present not because they are used in the language itself, but rather because the Sanskrit scholars were the ultimate marriage of grammar geeks and series completists and could not stand holes in their neatly arranged phonetic system, even though imperfect symmetry is typical of natural language systems. Hawaiian, incidentally, has a particularly asymmetric phonology. The Hawaiian future tense is introduced in Chapter 7, but does not appear in the exercises until the next chapter; thus if the pluperfect (introduced in Chapter 6) had appeared in the exercise for Chapter 7, no longer would I remain perplexed.

Chapter 8 introduces a full set of prepositions to complement the hitherto isolated i. Several of these possess distinct form with either o or a, but Judd has decided to refrain from further explication in this chapter. The use of each preposition with the noun ka hale, "house", appears as a 'declension'. Although this style of presentation is economical, an important consideration for Judd, and useful in distinguishing between the 'genitive' and the 'possessive', I am not convinced that 'case' is a valid concept here; it seems to me a table of prepositions and their direct object. I willingly admit that I could be mistaken in this matter, since I seem to remember that Japanese has a similar "case system". Possibly the difference between my perception and that of Judd merely illustrates the ambiguous boundaries of grammatical categories. The next several chapters introduce the "case system" of the personal pronouns, which should serve as a sufficient test for the presence of cases in Hawaiian.

Chapter 7
1. Ke nana nei lakou i ka omole. They gaze at the bottle.
2. Ua ike au i ke kii. I have seen the picture.
3. Ke noho nei oia. He sits.
4. Ke oki nei oia i ka eke. He cuts the bag in two.
5. Ke hana nei lakou i ka pahu. They made the curtain.
6. Ke haule nei ka pakeke. The bucket falls.
7.  Ua oki oia i ka paku. He has cut the curtain in two.
8. Ke ike nei kakou i kukui.  We see the torch.
9. Ke hoopaa nei oia i ka pulumi. They make fast the umbrella.

Chapter 8
1. Ke ike nei au i ka pahi ma ka pakaukau. I see the knife on the table.
2. Ua hana makou i ke ahi ma ke kapuahi. We have made a fire in the fireplace.
3. Ua lohe makou i ka mahu. We have heard the steam.
4. E hele kakou i ka hale. We shall walk to the house.
5. Ke moe nei lakou ma ka papahele. They lie down along the floor.
6. Ke ku nei lakou ma ka puka o ka hale. They stand by the entrance of the house.
7. Ke ike nei au i ka wai wela ma ke kapuahi. I see the hot water in the fireplace.
8. Ke haule nei ke kiaha mai ka papaaina. The tumbler falls from the dining table.
9. Ke kali nei kakou no ka wai huihui. We wait on account of the cold water.
10. Ua ike makou i ka umu. We have seen the outdoor oven.