Flashlight Hike 2010

This Saturday, a few (a very few) hearty souls set out for the Marin Headlands. The day was cloudy, but not particularly cold and free of rain. We ascended the first hill to the battery, where they have filled in the gun emplacement where once strange fish swam in dark waters. The view of the ocean was spectacular, and the crab boats did not seem so far apart from that lofty height. We continued to climb; the light began to dim, and the crab boats transformed from black dots to distant phosphorescent jellyfish. The path above the main road runs along the ridge, passing by the magazines filled with darkness and dank pools of water, lookout posts bereft of camouflage netting, and the collapsed roofs of old military shelters. These relics of coastal defense were the ideal sights for boys not yet brainwashed by the aggressively pacifist educational philosophy of our time. We continued to climb, and reached the Nike missile base. The fallen slabs of concrete platforms, which were in evidence last year, had been removed, and the site was safer, if no less windy, than it had been. After we had supped, we descended and increased our pace on the second leg of the trip. The trail was free of ruts, but noetheless steep in sections. Fortunately, we made the right choice at the fork where a wrong turn would double our overall travel distance. When we were walking along the side of the road, the party bus stopped for us, but we declined such softness and ease in favor of the long path to doughnuts and cocoa.

Gender Matters

All too often, English-speaking students of European languages detest the "gender" (really noun class) systems of the language, and in seeking to dismiss that which they neither understand nor love, declare the system irrelevant. A system of noun classes, whether composed of three or fifteen sections, may be confusing to second-language learners, but the distinct features of a language are never irrelevant to its native speakers. Pope Benedict XVI's recent announcement about the use of condoms illustrates this point. The original book was written in German, the native tongue of the Pontiff, but translated into Italian. In the German, the word used to indicate rentboys and their ilk is "der Prostituierte", a masculine noun, but in Italian, "la prostituta", a femina noun. The use of the masculine noun in German led some to assume the Pope was referring solely to the members of the Theban Legion, while the Italian use suggests it applies to women alone (since Italian, true to its sensual nature has specific words for male companions). Although a quick glance at LEO reveals that the German masculine noun may encompass both genders, much to the dismay of the feminists and Riistoj, this error in understanding shows the distinctions which noun classes provide to their tongues.

(For those of you who must know, the Pope said his comments applied equally to the sexes, and condom use is merely a lesser evil than sentencing a fellow human being to a slow death through your own carelessness).

Camaldoli, Camaldola!

On Sunday, I met a monk, and not just a monk but a genuine hermit who had reentered the wicked world to write a book and share his knowledge with the world. This anchorite was a member of an obscure branch, the Camaldolese, of the Benedictine Order. This branch, about which I previously knew nothing, had been influenced by the Cluniac reforms, but did not take the step of forsaking their Benedictine brothers, as the Cistercians did. Though few in number, the members are filled with faith, if this monk was any indication. We had a pleasant chat about the desert fathers and eremitical training; the life of a hermit is one which cannot be assumed lightly or without much thought and prayer. It is not a life to which I aspire, but God calls us all in different ways!

O Pioneers!

While waiting for the Junior Woodchucks to organize themselves one Saturday morning, the tourists, joggers, and general vagabonds were passing by and descending to the Temple of Knowledge or entering San Francisco's sacred groves. One gentleman, however, of robust years stopped and seemed glad to see our merry band. His reason, however, was different from the usual one; he was not contemplating Scouts and Scouting, but rather the Young Pioneers the Communist doppelganger of Scouting. This gentleman grew up in East Germany, a thoroughly Communist state, and apparently missed the sight of uniformed patriotic youth. The differences between Pioneers and Boy Scouts were apparent in his misunderstanding of Scouts; or perhaps he was overlaying his experiences on a quite different program. His emphasis was on joyful and enthusiastic patriotism, rather more strongly than ever was said in our legion.

Most of my knowledge about Pioneers comes from two sources: a book on Scouting and similar programs throughout the world, my college Russian teachers, and (believe it or not) the Russian fantasy series Nightwatch. The emphasis on patriotism instilled in Young Pioneers (their uniforms are neat, but then Nazi uniforms look sharp also) is the self-same jingoism that the president demanded and the BSA refused during the war years of the 20th century. In other countries, such as the Maldives, the patriotic angle may come into play more; certainly, all these organizations, if well-run, contain an element of outdoorsmanship, and potential leadership.

I was too distracted by my duty in loco parentis to engage in extended conversation with the German gentleman, but it would be fascinating to hear from someone who actually was a member of the Young Pioneers.

West Saxon Side Story

After the Beowulf performance, I found myself doubting my memory about certain features of the Anglo-Saxon language (I dislike the term Old English, as it implies more comprehensibility than it ought). So I took myself to the library to refresh my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon grammar and phonology. The most peculiar feature of Anglo-Saxon, in comparison to other Germanic tongues, is something called "vowel breaking", which affects the already rounded vowels /ae/, /e/, and /i/. By virtue of this process, the aforementioned vowels gain a following schwa and the new spellings /ea/, /eo/, and /io/, orthographic sequences which contribute the written aesthetic of the Anglo-Saxon tongue and confound the poor freshman studying pre-Norman history.

After I had relearned the constructed pronunciation of these diphthongs, both short and long, it occurred to me the peculiar (to my ear) vowels of West Country English owe much to vowel breaking. West Country English derives from the West Saxon dialect of Anglo-Saxon and it was that dialect which had the greatest degree of vowel breaking. When I was at boarding school, I had many opportunities to hear the staff using their West Country dialect, which I did not understand but nonetheless did not hold in contempt. At that time, I knew little about it except that these dialects tended to give voice to the voiceless consonants at the beginnings of English words; thus "fox" comes from the main dialect of Middle English, but "vixen" (a female "fox") comes from the West Country.

More recently, it also occurred to me that the perennial problem of English-speakers learning a Continental tongue, that is, the ubiquitous admonition of teachers and textbooks to pronounce long vowels as "pure" rather than with the characteristic semi-vocalic glide of the Englishman, may have its origin in vowel breaking. Although West Saxon exhibited the greatest degree of vowel breaking, none of the Anglo-Saxon dialects lacked it. This is speculation, however, and I do not presume to have evidence sufficient for a conference presentation.

Shadow Caitlin

Recently, I went to a new science fiction book club, for which I had read Robert J. Sawyer's WWW:Wake, whose human protagonist is a blind teenage girl. Although the book itself was mediocre, I found the assertiveness of the blind girl to be realistic, even while her genius was not. The world of blindness is filled with dangers, ranging from the annoying to the deadly, and those who must navigate such a world often develop superb analytical skills. They also often develop an assertiveness bordering on rudeness, since most sighted people have never had consider the challenges the blind face. As my uncle once told me (in more colorful terms than I dare post here), you can't put one over on a blind person; reading non-visual cues is a way of survival.

The genius of the protagonist did irritate me slightly. Although all teenagers, at least part of the time, think that they are the smartest person on Earth, the tendency for any computer-savvy teen in a work of fiction to be a genius is absurd. The temporal exigencies of television programs mandate a facile ease with computing, but a written book need not bow to that god. Perhaps this is a example of Clarke's Law, not between men and godlike aliens, but between author and much younger character?

Hwaet!: Review of Beowulf

Sometimes I forget how blessed I am to live in the Bay Area, with its plethora of theatrical options. On Friday night, I went with L. to Beowulf. I had planned to meet up with a fellow member of the SF Language Lovers Meetup group, but the exigencies of getting to the theater prevented this. The performer, Benjamin Bagby (whose name makes me think of the Hobbit), sat on a spare stage. A screen with supertitles hung over him; I am not sure which translation he had chosen. The performance was abbreviated to 90 minutes, since a full retelling of Beowulf would require the time my ancestors only had in the miserable wet winters. Bagby's voice was resonant and varied according to character and timbre of conversation - this is not an easy task while maintaining the metrics of epic poetry. Bagby took frequent breaks to refresh his throat, but the pauses were well worth the results. As Bagby continued to recite, I began to recognize more words without reference to the supertitles; this task was made easier by my familiarity with the plot. The performance was old-fashioned story-telling at its best.

Election Day

Today is election day. I have already voted, but some reflections on voting are in order. Voting is both a privilege and a duty. The deprivation of voting privileges in circumstances were others do not suffer the same disability is painful, especially when the decisions affect you. Think back to your childhood: were there not times when your parents overruled your desires? Were you not frustrated by this? This denial of will, however, is appropriate for parents, since the child is not wise enough to make an informed choice. It is no accident that many systems which lack elections invoke the parental model of governance. The Little Father of Russia brooked no subordination.

If the right to vote is granted to the people, then they are not political children, but political adults. The inventors of democracy, the Athenians, understood this: our word "idiot" comes from the term for a citizen who refused to participate in the affairs of the city. As political adults, it is the duty of citizens to be as informed as possible about the decisions of this election cycle. This reason, along with the possibility of fraud, is why I do not support same day registration. The ballot, especially that of California, is complex, so I would give dispensation if someone did not vote for every position and proposition, as long as the ones on which the citizen voted are ones about which the citizen has informed himself as best he can.

The confluence of events, or one might say, my wyrd, has conspired that on the very day I am attending a reconstructed live performance of Beowulf, I learned about St. Chad, who is the alleged patron of elections. Ever dutiful in my pursuit of truth, even at the cost of a delightful pun, I looked into this matter. According to truthorfiction.com, there is no patron saint of elections, which is suitable: elections, after all, in the hands of God, preferably via the High Priest using the Urim and Thummim. Saint Chad, or Ceadda, however, is a real person, probably the youngest brother of Cedd (also sanctified), Cynibil, and Caelin. The alliteration of the names is an Anglo-Saxon practice, but their etymology is Celtic, suggesting a mixture of (presumably aristocratic) Celtic blood into the Anglo-Saxon ruling class. All four brothers were ordained, and two (Ceadda and Cedd) became bishops. While the careers of the brothers bishop is worthy of note, the more important data here is the two domains of the paternally-connected patron saints. Ceadda became the patron saint of astronomy, while Cedd became the patron saint of interpreters. The vagaries of English diachronics ensured some confusion between the two, and either could be construed as Chad (note the later spelling), patron saint of elections.

I have been preparing for this evening's live performance of Beowulf by rereading passages from my glossed text of Beowulf. A glossed text is anathema to serious scholars, but has certain advantages. The reader is more engaged in the text than he would be when distracted by paragraph 11.17 of the grammar or technical terms. A glossed text might work better when the reader already knows the story. The glosses in this edition do not resolve the kennings, but rather allow the reader to familiarize himself with the typical components. The actual plot of Beowulf is spare, so much of the beauty of the poem is in the style. The constant variation of components for indicating the same item is a vehicle of poetic utility, but I do wonder if it is not the ancestor of some modern English style. Could the admonition of high school English teachers that one should not use the same word for the same concept multiple times in a row owe some of its force to the love of inventive language seen throughout classic English literature?

People's Republic of Parasitism

In the course of my daily wanderings, I acquired a New Amsterdam Times. The international section contained an article on the latest shipment of food and aid to North Korea from the South.

The amount of food is paltry compared to the needs of the country, but the international implications disturb me. Ordinarily, I would extol feeding the hungry as a virtue, but the discord between the North Korean philosophy of juche and the begging of the North Korean government is stark. The Kim dynasty uses foreign aid as a way to propagate its regime while claiming self-sufficiency. Although the Christian aid groups behind the food delivery have noble hearts, the North Korean distribution mechanisms ensure that the food will go to those whose loyalty matters rather than those who are the hungriest. The suggestion of localized distribution is ananathema to a regime which believes in power and half-hearted Potemkin villages. Clothe the peasants, not the emperor!

A Poem

Westfield dome on Friday night
Near the Playstation exhibit
Fools dancing to neon lights
To Mama Commerce is the profit.

Unto the Third Generation

In light of Kim Jong-Eun's promotion to four-star general and official heir apparent (as official as it's going to get, anyway) and the simultaneous promotion of his aunt, I started thinking about the inherent stability of hereditary tyrannies, of which the government of North Korea is an excellent example, and remain skeptical about the duration of the regime. Regencies are dangerous times for any dynasty, and military support during such times can be a destabilizing force. On the other hand, the North Korea military is in a favored position, so it might contribute to a stable regime.

The history of tyrannies, however, does not inspire optimism. Most tyrannies collapse in the third generation if they have not already been overthrown. There is no chance that the North Korean populace will rebel - in fact North Korea reminds me of Apokalyps - but power struggles are possible even within a one-policy state. The economic structure of the country is so damaged that I suspect it will collapse quickly and messily when the final straw is loaded.

The Doors of Perception

Oct. 21, 2010:
One of the items in the paper today (yes, I still occasionally read the dead tree daily) is the announcement that archaeologists have discovered . what may be the oldest door in Europe. The Methuselan mahogany is estimated at five thousand years old, and hails from Switzerland. The locale of the find is not surprising, since the lakes of the Helvetian Republic have revealed many archaeological treasures. The chief archaeologist, Niels Bleicher, describes the antediluvian door in somewhat effusive terms. Certainly, the door must have been sturdy to weather five millennia of environmental abuse, but I do wonder: how much of the description of ancient artifacts is in self-defense. I prefer stairs to cellar doors, and would hesitate to dismiss an artefact as insignificant due to its basic utility, but hoi polloi might well say, "Who cares? It's just a door, even if it is well-made." Yet it is the simple things of a culture that tell you the most: individually wrapped slices of synthetic cheese and unbiquitous redundant and downright insulting instructions tell you more about American culture than the the abstract of an ivory tower thesis on trash. The facile dismissal of ordinary things, although the result of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, can lead to an equally erroneous reaction of overstatement. The archaeologists, in counteracting the public dismissal, place a greater emphasis than is warranted on their discovery. Although this reaction is not restricted to antiquarians (since everyone who believes in reincarnation wants to be a king, not a catamite), it seems that the more "ordinary" the object, the greater is this tendency.

2010 Canoe Trip

NOTE: This should have preceeded the post on camping in the redwoods.

Last weekend I went the annual canoe trip with the Junior Woodchucks. This account is of necessity redacted and changed to protect the names and identities of the (sometimes not so) innocent. Sadly, there are no postable pictures, even ones of yours truly. The Russian river was its usual temperature and color (warm and slightly green), and the contingent of Woodcraft Indians was smaller than I would have liked. This year, however, lacked the swarming invertebrates of last year's trip. Luch was absurdly early, as usual, but that's the boys' call, not mine. The pullout for the canoes was a little too narrow and steep, and there was not quite enough shade. I pulled some water from the river, trusting in my iodine tablets.

In many spots along the river, there was choice: overhanging bushes where thhe current ran, or shadeless shallows where it did not. Fortunately, I had recently and finally disentangled my broad-brimmed hat (not a petasos, sadly) from my travel wallet, which had had remained in such condition since my return from the western Mediterranean, so the spiders in the bushes did not get in my hair.

There were the usual mishaps characteristic of a river trip, but my new dry bag held up admirably. I did not witness every rescue and recovery on the trip, but the two incidents in which I was involved were resolved satisfactorily. In the former case, all the equipment was recovered, and soon the spirit of the unfortunate pair recovered as well. The latter case was harder, since it involved a swift current and large branch; more than one person lost their grip during the operation and had to fight their way back upstream, but eventually the canoe was freed from the embrace of water and wood.

Some other campers had rather unsportingly taken some of our spots when we returned to our campsite next to the Pomo general store, but I suppose some people just don't have a sense of fair play. In any case, we adapted and consolidated and still had enough table for our food groups. The campfire that night was short, since the skits were done according to food group rather than patrol. Everybody already knew the traditional songs, so I was not as creative as I could have been, but I hope I made up for that on Tuesday.

On Sunday morning, we did not continue down the river, as we once did, but we did have a Scout's Own by the river bank. The seating was uncomfortable, but we had a nice discussion of the wildlife we saw on the trip, led by our own Daniel Carter. A stone skipping contest followed the Scout's Own. The swarming insects through which the stones were bouncing had a peculiar obsession with purely vertical movement which still baffles me.

Merks and Turks

The integration crisis in Europe is continuing, both in France and Germany. The absurd and arbitrary nature of French clothing "restriction" has already been covered in this blog, but the most striking recent comment came from Germany's Angela Merkel, who claimed that the Turks in Germany must assimilate to Germany's Christian culture. The failure of assimilation or cultural synthesis is not in doubt, but what was most astonishing was this: that she claimed Germany's culture was Christian. Everything I have experienced and read about European culture suggests that Germany is not Christian, but secular. The Swiss incident earlier this year involving the minarets reinforces this impression. The French, of course, have turned secularism into a religion, although they have mellowed a little since the days of the Revolutionary calendar.

Recently I had a discussion with a friend, who is very religious and seeks the same. One of the attitudes which drives her batty is "culturally religious", in which the alleged member of a particular religion or sect does not hold the associated beliefs, but even ignores the practices. One cannot look into another heart, but one can examine the deeds.

When Merkel refers to German Christianity, she is using "Christianity" as code for "secularism". Although this secularism does not mesh well with the radicalizing form of Islam which the previously rather secular Turks have adopted, using the term "Christianity" is facile misdirection and as intellectually dishonest as American preachers who use "Christianity" as a term for the insidious "Gospel of Wealth".

Redwood Grove Camping

There's nothing quite like a redwood grove for camping. It might be a bit dark beneath the giants (even the new growth), but the canopy provides the closest thing to a good roof that you'll find in the wild. The sparse ground covering is a blessing when you are clearing the area for your ground cloth, and the patches of redwood duff, if you can find them, are delightfully soft. Redwoods, however, feed off the fog, so make sure you have good rain gear!

Beginner's Assyrian

My New Year's resolution is preceeding in fits and starts (sometimes precipitated by my absent-minded professor habit of forgetting where my books are, and sometimes by the plethora of projects on which I am working) but I have begun Beginners' Assyrian, trusting in the similarities to Biblical Hebrew to give me a leg up, not under any illusion that the differences would present challenges.

The first challenge, of course, was the gross mismatch between the radical-based Semitic morphology of the Assyrian language and the determinative- and syllable-based orthography of cuneiform. One of the motivations for the adoption, if not creation, of the Semitic writing system (I suspect) was this mismatch. It was as if the problem with English transcription and translation in both Chinese and Japanese were combined!

The second challenge was the Assyrian reduction of the proto-Semitic consonants under the influence of Sumerian, which possessed a radically different morphology. I had thought the non-pronounciation of 'aleph and 'ayin in Modern Hebrew (which I had been using as my model for pronouncing Biblical Hebrew) created enough difficulties. Assyrian, on the other hand, witnessed the collapse of six proto-Semitic consonants (and waw) into near-indistinguishable phonological effects. Since Assyrian is a Semitic language, however, the tridical structure applies, even if two of the consonants are so weak as so to disappear entirely!

The third challenge was the tendency towards vowel harmony in Assyrian, which appeared also in its sister dialect of Babylonian. Sumerian had vowel harmony, possibly mitigated by tonal differences, but even Hebrew shows evidence of morphologically-specific vowel harmony. Babylonian was the language that replaced Sumerian in that language's ancient heartland, aand thus experienced the greatest level of vowel harmony (although not to the extent that it destroyed the typical Semitic structure), and Hebrew experienced a very low level, but the effect on Assyrian lay between the two. One has to wonder how much of the vowel harmony within the Assyrian Empire was the result of the infamous deportation policies, which mixed many tribes who spoke similar Semitic tongues; thus they shared structural similarities but not necessarily vowels.

Take Me To The Stars

The discovery of a another new planet around Gliese 581, just a score of light-years away from terra firma, shot my mood through the roof. The hyperbole of the astronomer making the announcement (assuming that the journalist did not strategically edit the quote) may be forgiven, since it is tremendously exciting news. The interested public, however, does need a reminder that most life is not on the human scale, and that Kal-El's homeworld probably wasn't in the greatest shape before it exploded.

The casual dismissal of planets unsuitable for sustained human existence, under which category most of the Gliese planets fall, distresses me and strikes me as ridiculously anthropocentric. Already in our system there are worlds covered in ice which may have life in hidden oceans, and if so, it won't be humanoid. Even if such planets lack life until a contaminated probe burrows into their subglacial depths, and even if the worlds of Gliese 581 lack any life, the study of these worlds is valuable in itself. If humanity ever does escape Earth's gravity well, it would be useful to know what sort of resources exist in the great beyond - any interstellar colony would only have what was in the system, after all. Even if humanity remains within the SOlar System and eventually dies out as the nineteenth race on Neptune, study of other worlds would inform us about geology, chemistry, and meteorology. Too bad teleportation is still at the sub-atomic stage!

Snakes, Sinners, and Saints

It's Sunday, so it seemed appropriate that I study the "original language" on this day. I figure the Almighty wouldn't mind if I studied some Hebrew in order to read the words of his book. I am close enough to the end of Ross' "Introducing Biblical Hebrew" that all the reading exercises are taken from the Good Book (in this case, Gen. 2:15-24 at the end of Lesson 49). The repetition of roots in Hebrew oratory seems less absurd than the equivalent King James English. Is this the result of the diversity of forms in Hebrew compared to the paucity of English? Another benefit of reading the passages in Hebrew is the clear identification of prose from verse. This distinction is sometimes lost in the translations into other languages, and prose and poetry often do not fit well into the other genre.

The grammatical form du jour is the Qal passive (herein exemplified by לֻקֳחָה), which the Rabbinic Scholars appear not to have believed to exist, since the standard passive form corresponding to the Qal is the Niph'al. The vocalization for the Qal passive is identical to the Pu'al, but who knows if that's how David would have pronounced it?

On other news, I have moved my "Learn Maltese: Why Not?" (the real title of the book) and its accompanying workbook up to Tahoe. This does not exempt me from including it in my New Year's resolution, but shifts it to next summer's segment of the project. I re-read the grammar sections of the book and understood much more clearly after spending so much of my summer learning Biblical Hebrew.

The Tahoe Tongue: Phonology and Orthography

I wrote this post about half a year ago, so my knowledge of the Washo language and its current state was considerably less, but the sentiments expressed herein remain authentic.

Several years ago, on one of my many visits to the Watson Cabin in Tahoe City, I bought a slim book labeled Beginning Washo, the language of the indigenous tribe which used to camp in summer around Lake Tahoe (in those days, only white people would be crazy enough to live there in winter). I went through the exercises, although too hastily to absorb them. I am afraid that is a common fault of mine, and one of the reason I discuss Washoe here is to pace myself.

More recently, I decided to redo the exercises (there are only twenty-two, after all) slowly and thoroughly, so that I would know the native language of the basin where I spend so much time. My conscience is rather severe about white men learning Native American tongues, especially when the tribe is still extant (as several members of  my favored fraternity know), but all the data I could find on Washo indicated that it was a moribund language. "Moribund" in linguistics, means that a language will soon lack native speakers (the tribe itself still exists). The only website I could find on the Washo language did mention a training camp for the youngsters of the tribe, but it dates from 2000, and the precedents for attempted language revival are extremely depressing. I would rather know something about the language really spoken at Lake Tahoe rather than pretend it never existed.

Another reason I want to learn some Washo properly has to do with the mythology of the Tahoe basin. When I was a child, I was under the impression that there were no native people of the basin, since the Washo, and the same-named lake were clearly in Nevada, and they had only come up in summer. Some of this perception was perhaps due to my custom of spending summers there and winters in San Francisco. The lack of a native mythology bothered me, so I composed some myths about the origins of crawdads and minnows based on the landscape of my summer home. I found the alleged native stories from the mid-20th century Tahoe City World un-credible as authentic stories, as well as patronizing.

When I was quite a bit older, I learned of some of the genuine traditional tales of the Washo, which I appreciated greatly, but I did not become inspired until I found Beginning Washo. My Classical training has taught me about the tight connection of language and culture, and I would not have received a Classics degree if I were not fascinated with language structure.

Solresol

Solresol is an invented language of the 19th century based on the seven notes of the C major scale, although in principle one could use any seven-note scale. This may seem an odd origin for an a priori system, unless one realizes that the inventor, one Francois Sudre, a French patriot, had developed it for military communications before the invention of the telegraph. This musical origin explains the use of relative length and stress in determining gender and plurality, and the profoundly non-anthropic use of a pause after every word. Sudre, a native French speaker, was still bound by the gender and number constraints of his mother tongue. Sudre's musical language was deemed brilliant, but unusable by the French military, which devastated the patriot. Since his system rested on the use of seven distinct units, there was no restriction in principle to the realm of music or speech. Sudre developed Solresol formats based on noise, touch, color and other media. All this creativity took place before Gallatin and the invention of Braille, so a communication system for the blind, the deaf, and the mute was a pressing concern for creators of invented languages or those who serves the disadvantaged communities. Whereas previous a priori languages had categorized concepts in a tree familiar to present-day biology students, Sudre used a series of notes or repetition of the same note to indicate the categories. Since Solresol had to be spoken as well as played and sung, the words were monophonic rather than polyphonic. Solresol suffered from this characteristic flaw of logical languages: the systematic categorization of concepts result in similar concepts sounding too similiar in phonology. This, in fact, may have been one of the reasons for the French military's rejection of Solresol. For some years, Sudre toured Europe promoting his language, but the audiences tended to view Solresol as an ingenious parlor trick rather than a valid method of communication.

Solresol enjoyed a brief popularity at the end of the 19th century, but then died out. Its infamy among those who are interested in logical and creative languages stems from its inherent bizarreness, while other, more conventional spoken systems have been forgotten. The Esperanto Wikipedia, naturally, has an extensive article on it. I suspect it was more tolerable to hear in the days when every cultured person was expected to play an instrument or sing. I suspect there were severe constraints on its flexibility and ability to create new vocabulary, but the current resources I can find on Solresol are so meager it is hard to be sure. There is a grammar (http://mozai.com/writing/not_mine/solresol/sorsoeng.htm), but the dictionary is missing, and somehow I doubt that the early 20th-century Paris address is still valid. I have watched an extraordinary video of the balcony scene in Solresol
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK9lspk0hAM )
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf83Z1rUMCo&feature=related )
and the band Melomane has a song called Solresol
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPISqn7VfNY )
, although the song is neither in Solresol nor, I suspect, translatable into it due to the presence of of flats and sharps in the song. The most famous, if unnoticed, use of Solresol in modern media is its use as the language of the aliens in Encounters of the Third Kind
( http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=encounters+of+the+third+kind ).
This seems to be an homage to the use of Esperanto as a non-descript human language in films set "abroad", and explains why the notes at the end have the feel of a language, despite their brevity.

The Tahoe Tongue: Clusivity vs. Number

One of the features of Washo unfamiliar to speakers of Indo-European languages is the concept of clusivity (whether the addressee is included in the pronoun). Clusivity in natural languages is restricted to the lst person plural, possibly because the plural of 'I' perforce includes another person. The two other grammatical persons available for this purpose are the 2nd ('thou') and 3rd ('he'). Some languages, such as Tok Pisin, do have combinatorial forms with both 2nd and 3rd, but this may be the result of the newness of the language and the ease with which the components of pronouns of Tok Pisin can be self-segregated. Washo has two suffixes, dual -ši and plural -hu, to distinguish the inclusive forms of the indicative from the exclusive (the jussive forms are -še and -hulew). The inclusive indicative suffixes may also be used on nouns. So far, this is not exotic from the linguistic point of view, but the treatment of independent pronouns in Washo shows an transformation of this system from clusivity-based to number-based.

Many Native American languages, among which Washo is included, treat grammatical number as optional; many plurals have a different shade from the corresponding singular. There are occasions, however, when it is necessary to be more specific about the person and number of the subject or object. In these cases, Washo does have a series of independent pronouns. I suspect that the prefixed pronouns of the Washo verb developed from a prior series of independent pronouns without number distinction, but I will save the detailed analysis of that phenomenon for another post. The independent pronouns of current Washo are based on the following stem: 1st person lé:, 2nd person mí:, 3rd person subject gí:, and 3rd person object gé:. The 1st and 2nd persons lack a subject/object distinction, depending on the subject-object prefix of the verb to disambiguate. The 1st person dual pronoun is léši. Note that it is not automatically parsed as inclusive. The suffix -ši has changed from a marker of inclusivity to one of duality. Even if the 2nd person dual pronoun míši acquired -ši as a sign of proxy clusivity, it has come to mean to indicate duality, since the 1st person dual has an extended form léšiši, in which the -ši suffix is attached to léši; this form means "we two (inclusive)".

There is no such reanalysis of the verbal suffix. The verbal form "you two are singing" is the same as "thou art singing" or "you-all are singing". All of these forms would be míšmi. Even though the clusivity suffixes do not have an absolute slot in the series of verbal suffixes, they always appear relatively close to the verbal root, and therefore do not have the flexibility of the independent pronouns.

Korean Number Woes

Current varieties of English find one set of numbers sufficient. I exclude binary on the pirnciple that it is not used for counting except as a geeky in-joke. I must specify current English because there were rural systems of counting, in formerly Welsh areas such as Cumbria; the non-English system was restricted to counting herd animals, a limited but very important semantic domain for the local culture. In Korean, and I believe Japanese also, there are two counting systems: one native, and one adopted and adapted from the Chinese spoken at the time of contact. A comparison that might make more sense to those who only know Indo-European languages: this situation is as if Slavic-speakers counted numbers using Slavic numerals, but counted things using Greek.

I can more readily recognize the Sino-Korean numbers, thanks to the small amount of Chinese I learned (sadly, the lack of oral practice has made the tones nigh-impossible). Most of the numbers are easily recognizable, although I did briefly find the Sino-Korean vs. native Korean distracting. The use of Sino-Korean numerals as count nouns accords with the isolating, SVO, head-final nature of Chinese, while the agglutinative, SOV, head-final structure of Korean precludes count nouns except as a borrowing from culture languages of the area (i.e., Chinese). The head-final feature of Korean, however, does provide a convenient location for the count noun. The optionality of the plural suffix - a not uncommon feature of non-Indo-European languages - in Korean also makes the count nouns welcome.

More Hebrew

I have mastered the chapter on the I-Yod, I-Waw, I-Waw/III-Guttural verbs and the one on III-He' verbs. The next challenge is the Doubly-Weak verbs. The exercises are moving more towards actual Biblical content! That is a good thing, not just because it is my goal to read the Tanakh in the original Hebrew, but also because it provides a check on my many errors without a teachers' guide. I managed, however, to get through the exercises with only one point of confusion. The last translation exercise in the III-He' chapter was composed of four verses from Jeremiah (4:23-26) - I've never been more excited reading about desolation and depopulation! I have also noticed increasing signs of etymological two-letter roots among the roots with "weaker" consonants, and more words of high frequency. This is not surprising, since the most common verbs of a language are often irregular - or if regular, use an uncommon pattern. The number of synonyms for generic Biblical actions and feelings is also increasing, while leads me to believe that the recitation of the Tanakh in Hebrew is less snooze-inducing (at least in terms of the variety of roots) than the standard English translation.

Birthday Trip

It's been five days and I have the pictures, so I suppose I should write about my birthday trip.

This year the whole family, minus the younger brother, headed down the hill into the desert towards Pyramid Lake. There was some trouble along Mount Rose, so we went down via Truckee instead, past the old power plant. Once we headed north from Reno, we began to enter the real Nevada and it was easy to see why the region had been settled by family bands rather than larger units. The destruction of the pinyon trees and the consequent desertification of the landscape did no good, either.

We reached Pyramid Lake and I was astonished at the shade of blue. I was assured that it was a frequent color for desert lakes. The eponymous Pyramid, an island-rock, lay next to Anaho Island on which the pelicans (I was initially surprised that Washo had a word for them) lived with many other breeding colonies. I had to indulge my inner anthropologist and take notes on the information sign. The simplistic and inaccurate orthography of the sign, pandering the linguistically illiterate, somewhat annoyed me, but the sign did provide substantial detail for the size of its font. Each Paiute band (since Pyramid Lake was Paiute rather than Washo territory) was centered around a water source and named after a characteristic food. In the case of Pyramid Lake, that food was the cui-ui, an archaic-looking indigenous fish, which was stranded there as the enormous glacial lake evaporated. Puff, who had been somewhat listless from the heat, found the environment of Pyramid Lake congenial, and wanted to explore the doubtless rattlesnake-infested bushes. There were groups of people day-tripping by the lake (which requires a permit from Nixon) and the the road north abruptly degenrated into bone-jarring rocks. I do mean rocks, not gravel. So we turned around.

We went through the surprisingly charming town of Nixon (headquarters of the Pyramid Lake Reservation) and headed east towards Fallon. The towns were conspicuously greener than the surrounding desert, but the area near the road showed evidence of water. It was not deep desert. Before we reached Fallon, we headed back towards the Lahontan Reservoir. It was larger than I had realized, but the outskirts of the adjacent town had a shabbiness typical of Nevada towns. On the way to Carson City - which is the capital of Nevada, not Reno or Las Vegas- we passed the Kit Kat Ranch and the Bunny Ranch, since Nevada is a land where many bad habits can be indulged without fear of prosecution. Dad expressed an urge to take the now-completed railroad line from Carson City to Virginia City. That would be fun, but it will have to wait until next year. Carson City itself is quite charming, and illustrated the virtue of having separate commercial and capital metropoleis. It would be worth a day visit. We returned to the mountains, and celebrated at home in the evening.

The shade of blue in this photo is slightly darker than

in real life.

You can see the Pyramid to the left of Anaho Island

Not a desert dog, but happy nonetheless

(Ex)clusive Amator

Often the minor details of languages and the quirks of their dialects fascinate me - and I mean that in its root sense of bewitching so that the bewitched must think about his love, be it a grammatical feature or nubile young maiden. In this case, what has bewitched me is not some Thessalian hussy, but a regional clusivity distinction in the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese (which, incidentally, is not quite the same as Standard Mandarin Chinese). Clusivity, as I have written elsewhere, is the distinction between the inclusion of the addressee or his exclusion from the first person pronoun. It is an open question whether one would prefer the blunt clarity of the exclusive pronoun ("zan2men" vs. "wo3men"), or the awkward correction of the meaning of the first person plural in languages which lack a clusivity distinction. In the languages of East Asia, all of which appear to have or have had forms specific to status as well as person, some of the distinctions may have arisen as a separation of plural forms into distinct semantic spheres, although I suppose phonological change could have disguised related roots. Certainly, it took me a moment to connect Sino-Korean 'ku' and Mandarin Chinese 'jiu3' as the number '9'. The clusive forms of Tok Pisin (yumi vs. mipela) are, unsurprisingly, morphologically transparent, but sufficient time could disguise its origins. It is noticeable that the Mandarin exclusive form (the one which is clearly and analogically related to the first person singular "wo3") is the one favored by speakers who do not make the distinction. This is a case of analogical levelling, encouraged by the transparent system of plural formation. It makes me wonder whether the "men" of the Chinese plural is not generic plural marker that somehow became restricted to pronouns.

A Persistent Gadfly, or a Linguistic Socrates

I do not know why this bothers me so, but ever since I read about this linguistic feature, the mystery of its origin has haunted me. I understand the rest of the sandhi rules for the Bahasa Melayu verbal prefix meng-, but the rule regarding the voiceless plosives (p, t, c, k) baffles me. I could be content with knowing the rule by which it functions in contemporary language, but anyone familiar with ceaseless linguistic curiosity would find that unlikely. I am probably the only person to regard a German grammar review as appropriate airplane and airport reading when I am not going to Germany nor am I preparing for a graduate oral exam. So I still want to know the origin.

When the verbal prefix meng- is placed before the initial consonant of a BM root, certain changes take place. If the initial consonant is nasal (m, n, ng), the velar nasal of the verbal prefix disappears in favor the nasal initial consonant. This does not surprise me, since assimilation of the -ng- is the path of least resistance, and the marked preference in BM for CV syllables would encourage degemination of the sequence of two nasals. If the initial consonant is a voiced plosive (b, d, g), the velar nasal of the verbal prefix first assimilates to the place of articulation, then bonds with the plosive to form a prenasalized voiced plosive. This process also does not surprise me. If the initial consonant is a voiceless plosive (p, t, k), however, the plosive disappears after the expected assimilation to the place of articulation; this is a behavior I would have thought more apt to the voiced plosives. Since prenasalized voiceless plosives (the expected intermediate step) are permissible within roots such as nampak, perhaps the difference has something to with the morpheme boundary of meng- and the relevant root; but so far I cannot construct the sequence of phonological adjustments.

Korean Question

I was studying Korean on a Byki program and came across this sentence fragment "...ko shipeundeyo" means "I would like ...". Fair enough. But Korean is an inflected language, like Latin or German, so it is necessary to know what suffix the word for the desired object would use. There are too possibilities here: one is that the desired object requires the accusative suffix (-reul or -eul); if so, the sentence "I would like a rabbit" would be "Tokkireul ko shipeundeyo". The other possibility, which I am inclined to favor in the absence of a grammar, is that the "ko" is the direct object of "shipeundeyo" and that the desired object would take the topic suffix (-ga or -i). Thus "I would like a rabbit" would be translated as "Tokkiga ko shipeundeyo", which is literally "As for the rabbit, I would like it." This structure, if correct, would be parallel to the structure of the question "Where is the hotel", which is "Hoteri eodi isseoyo", literally, "As for the hotel, where is [it]?". But if somebody who speaks Korean could clarify this for me, I would greatly appreciate it.

Palawa Kani

I am an enthusiast of languages, especially those that are moribund or reconstructed, but Palawa Kani is one of a kind. The individual features of the language are not extraordinary: many languages are creoles, or the language of post-colonial aborigines, or treated as cultural artifacts, or inspired by a need for cultural unity. I have never seen a language that combines these features in such a way, and I am simultaneously impressed and skeptical of its success.

Palawa Kani is a Aboriginal Tasmanian creole intended as a cultural language for the descendants of pure-blooded Tasmanians; it is constructed from the extant words of the Tasmanian languages and set to English word order. The Tasmanian government, in a fit of either white guilt or mainland cultural envy, is willing to support the idea. Once the idea of the savage has been abandoned, governments often promote the idea of the noble savage.

The paucity of extant Tasmanian Aboriginal words is a boon here; several endangered languages of the world do not help themselves by debating which of the dialects, all with too few people, should be the official one. The two camps of the Cornish revivalists have reconciled warring orthography (but two pronunciations) and issued official workbooks for their new Welsh-style creches, but then it's hard to get EU funding without official materials. A language that has been gutted, such as one of the languages of the California coast, may have no option, lacking sufficient grammar, other than making sacred the few remaining words.

The Tasmanian adoption of English seems to have left the languages bereft of current technological terms, although the technological level of the aboriginal population at the time of the European arrival suggests that the terms never existed. Avoidance of neologisms is a quick way to kill a fragile language; even if the language is intended as a second language and meant to place emphasis on the differences, such as the deliberately hamstrung Toki Pona, a healthy language must be able to coin new phrases, if not new words. The phrases will wear down to words later. One of the difficulties that Welsh, otherwise a relatively healthy minority language, faces is the use of Welsh in only certain contexts, even though the Cymrophones could use it in other situations.

The characterization of Palawa Kani as a creole is linguistic rather than judgmental, and the extant resources and speakers suggest a creole as the realistic option, but the associations of the word 'creole' are a liability. Creoles in Australia have names like Broken, indicating the low esteem in which they were held, and the breeding grounds were miserable camps. The use of English word order (SVO, modifier before modified word) is not far off from the syntax of global creoles (even though English IMO never was a creole), and if divergent word order is sufficient to break with tradition, then the SVO order of Modern Hebrew indicates it is not a "true" descendant of Biblical Hebrew, in which the word order is VSO. The absence of grammatical number in the 2nd personal pronoun, however, seems a little odd outside of English or a tongue which dispenses entirely with the plural; most languages which do not mandate a plural form at least possess a way of forming one if it is absolutely necessary. The holes in the grammar presumably are the result of a developing project.

This is a very new tongue, but unlike the Native American languages, it seems to have some funding and enthusiastic participants. When I first examined Washo, it seemed in a more perilous state than now. I look forward to seeing how Palawa Kani develops and thrives.

I'd Hate To Be A Boy At Hebrew School on the Weekend

I have reached the chapters in my Biblical Hebrew book which deal with irregular verbs; these appear to compose the bulk of the book. Now I can see why the rabbis felt the need to put vowel points; the “tense” can remain recognizable while the correct pronunciation is still hidden, the opposite of European languages. That semantic transparency is also one of the beauties of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the study of which I have been neglecting while I concentrate on Hebrew.


As I have progressed in Hebrew, I have discovered the underlying reason why the Semitic languages are described as “heavily lexicalized”, i.e., you have to know the language well to read it. The interwoven structure of consonants and vowels makes unnecessary (at least for the fluent L1 speaker) many of the prefixes, suffixes, and qualifiers found in other languages. There is no grace period in which the foreigner with stumbling tongue can recognize affixes by which he may find meaning. I suppose I should be glad I am not studying Arabic, with its plethora of broken plurals and guttural consonants that are actually pronounced.

Losing Cases, Retaining Cases

I have finished the exercises in the Modern Greek book which had sat on my shelf for many years. I realize that written exercises are no substitute for actual conversations, but in the contemporary world it is useful to know a substantial amount of grammar before joining an online language group. It is extraordinarily embarassing to abort a conversation that has barely begun.




Modern Greek (by which I mean here Δημοτική, Καθαραίβουσα, and the actual language of the street) has several features immediately familiar to the student of Homer and Herodotus: one of these is the case system.



The case system (less the dative) has survived which pleases me, but surely appalls others. The survival of the case system in Modern Greek and its loss in the Romance tongues might be the result of the stress-and-pitch patterns of Greek and Latin. Greek started with a pitch accent, which eventually shifted to a stress accent; a process which was accelerated by the increase in non-native speaker during the period of the dialects of Κοινή. Latin appears to have always possessed a stress accent, but it shifted from a universal first-syllable stress (presumably the effect of the Etruscans, who had an even stronger version of initial stress) to the penultimate/antepenultimate system of Classical times. After pitch accent and many cases of vowel length had been sacrificed on the altar of expediency, the striking differencebetween the Greek and Latin stress systems was the absence of any accents on the ultimate syllable in Latin. The movement from a primarily case system to an analytic system occurred in both languages, but the evanescence of the Greek case system was retarded by the existence of nouns stressed on the final syllable. Stressed syllables are more resilient in the face of impending doom that unstressed ones, and can provide a paradigm for replacing or repairing ending of words accented on the penultimate and antepenultimate syllables. Latin, lacking this reinforcement mechanism, could not halt the accelerating pace of grammatical reanalysis.

The Tahoe Tongue: Stand Up, Y'All!

The second form of Washo which Jacobsen presents is the imperative prefix (the command form) on vowel-initial stems. Just as the prefixes of the previous lesson disregard the distinction between singular and plural, so too does this prefix ignore grammatical number. Another feature which has carried over from the previous lesson is “vowel coloring”; the imperative prefix ge- changes íme' 'drink' into géme', but á:hu 'stand' (plural) keeps its a in gá :hu. The vowel coloring which changes the i to e normally ends at the first consonant (including h), but the glottal stop lacks sufficient vigor to prevent further change. The imperative, therefore of the root í'is 'to hold, take, bring', is gé'es, and that of í'iw 'eat (something)' is gé'ew.

The most interesting feature introduced in this lesson is one which the Anglophone who is less experienced with non-Western languages might miss; yet it is a characteristic feature of Washo. The verb form á:hu means 'stand', but only with a plural subject.; there is a separate singular form, which will be introduced later. The imperative gásaw 'laugh!' can be addressed to one or many, but gá:hu 'stand!' can only refer to more than one. Languages which do this are said to have 'pluractionality', which may seem strange, but if some languages indicate grammatical number on both the subject and the verb, and some only on the subject, why shouldn't some indicate it only on the verb?

The Very Eσσence of You (Singular)

As the wheels of progress in Modern Greek became bogged in the mud slough of the passive (something with which, no doubt, any students of Classical or Koine Greek can identify), it was amusing that Hellenophones, ever resistant to the collapse of conjugations, such as occurred in French and English, have restored, once again, the sigma to the second person singular forms of the passive.

The change of [s] to [h] and thence to oblivion is a common process in the history of languages, and but this change affects Indo-European languages (of which Greek is one) particularly severely because the [s] marks the difference between the second and third persons, i.e., between 'you' and 'he'. Languages which which lose the sound sense between these two forms (and possible examples of such appear as early as the Hittite Empire) must make presonal pronouns obligatory; the guardians of the Greek tongue strenuously resist this aspect of analytical languages. Classical Greek uses the sigma, in various positions, as the marker of second personal singular, the future, and the aorist. The second person singular of the present active form (λυεις, “you loose”) is already a restoration of the consonant from the second person singular of the imperfect form (ελυες, “you were loosing”), although the resurrected sigma, like a borrowed letter of the alphabet, was placed after the new long vowel (ει) rather than between the two former short vowels where it had existed before (*εσι). The sigma of the future was restored in the empty position (sigmata?) between the vowels of the verb on the analogy of the sigmas which followed consonants, but not for every verb.

The damage, however, that the disappearance of future sigma caused does not compare to the jarring contractions from the absence of sigma in the present and imperfect of the medio-passive verb. This disruption appears most clearly in the student recitation of verbal endings, in a singsong voice and with frequently wrong syllabic stress, when the pleasant symmetry of the trisyllabic first and third person forms fails to appear in the second person and contracts (ηι < *εσαι, ου < *εσο), thereby hiding the characteristic vowels of these particular conjugations. Classical Greek possesses many contracted forms of verbs (three classes, in fact), but usually all six forms are contracted, not just one. The historian Herodotus' Ionic dialect shuns most contractions (and some contractions are probably the result of Attic or Atticizing editors), but even there the asigmatic second person (εαι) causes the tongue to stumble.

The preservation of the (medio)passive form in Modern Greek is not startling, given the large number of mediopassive and deponent verbs in Classical Greek, but the restoration of the sigma in the second person form (in the linguistically historical form εσαι, no less, even if the pronunciation has slightly changed) provides a symmetry and sensibility of the passive forms, and fits well with the extensive analogical remodeling of the Greek verbal system.

The Tahoe Tongue: Blankets, Blood, and Bone

The first "grammatical" chapter of Jacobsen's Washo grammar - it seems to be a language learning book tradition to treat proper pronunciation as a section before a chapter - discusses possessive prefixes on vowel-initial stems. A complete Washo "word" always begins with a consonant, of which the glottal stop is one. The expected three persons, a grammatical trinity appear here, with a fourth, more neutral, form, but there is no distinction of number. The ways of plurality and duality will be revealed in later chapters, but the idea of plurality seems less central to Washo than English. This, I am given to understand, is fairly common among North American indigenous languages, and certainly many Spanish and Chinese primary language speakers drop the English plural and find context sufficient.

The method by which the language indicates a possessor is prefixation. Thus 'my house' is láŋal, 'your house' is máŋal, and 'his/her/its/their house' is ťáŋal. Since Washo is a language in the real world, naturally this elegant system comes with a few notes. The first person prefix is not l-, but le-, in which the superscript e indicates that the /i/ of a root becomes /e/ after the first person prefix. This 'vowel coloring' will appear in later prefixed forms. What is necessary now is to note that the series 'my blanket, your blanket, his blanket' appears in Washo as lépi?, mípi?, ťípi?, in which the root is 'blanket' ípi?. The other caveat about these forms is that there exists a fourth form, d-, which indicates no particular possessor. The d- prefix, however, does not occur on every form. Vowel-initial stems for words which indicate physical relationships or parts of the body that would identify the species must take ť-. The physical relationship requirement is the clearer of the two categories; íyeš means 'daughter-in-law', and one must be a daughter-in-law in relation to someone else. The latter category can be best illustrated by two roots: ášaŋ, 'blood', and á:daš, 'meat'. The source of blood, prior to the modern era, was not immediately identifiable if the source had departed, but the source of meat could be identified by the meat itself. Rattlesnake tastes different (and worse, so I'm told) than venison. Thus dášaŋ and ťášaŋ are valid forms, but ťá:daš is the only valid form for its root.

Aloha Judd

I have decided, with much reluctance, to abandon Judd's Hawaiian grammar. Neither the antiquity of the book nor the paucity of the 'okina has forced this decision; the former has a certain appeal to me, and the latter provides a more realistic way that English speakers would render words and places in Hawaiian. The rising complexity of the grammar, however, has proven difficult without an answer key in the back of the book or a native speaker, and I find learning material in the wrong way a more grievous sin against the goddess Grammar than learning it correctly after a delay. As I have noted, this is a painful and disappointing decision, given the fascinating features further down the path, but I feel it is the right one. But fear not! I shall not abandon my linguistic browsing, but merely seek sustenance in other fields.

How Stupid Is "You"?

One of the infuriating aspects of translation exercises in which one of the languages is English is the ambivalence of "you". Although the standard varieties of English are content with this ambiguity, an informal style which arose from an excess of formality, the common language is not, as the proliferation of forms such as  "yous", "y'all", and "yinz" attests. If the exercise in question involves English only, the ambiguity remains a minor annoyance. If another language which does not treat familiar forms so cavalierly enters the situation, the :"you" problem becomes critical. Many European languages use the second person plural as a polite singular, and others retain the simple singular/plural distinction. Often I use "thou" in my language notes, thereby transforming the familiar term to a technical one, and eschewing the hideous parenthesis (pl). This method, however, is analogous to the abbreviations we all have used in note taking - it suitable for private use, but would confuse and annoy those from whom we recieve grades. In Latin and Greek learning texts, the distinction is clearly marked, and expected to be noted, but in more casual texts of the modern languages, the poor Anglophone does not know which to use. At least in European countries politeness is the criterion rather than ethnicity!

Easter Adjustment: Perhaps This Is the 2012 Big Change

This year and next, the Western and the Eastern Churches celebrate Easter on the same weekend rather than one or two weeks apart. Although one of the advantages from my (admittedly selfishly aesthetic) perspective of the Easter schedule differential is the ability to fulfill my obligations and also attend an Orthodox service (even an ordinary Orthodox service is worth experiencing once), this calendrical concordance presents an opportunity to harmonize the Easter dates. Such an action has precedent; there were far more than two dates for Easter in the ancient Christian world, just as there were multiple dates for Passover within the Roman Imperium. The discordant dates (thankfully now reduced to two) appeared again when Pope Gregory consulted his astronomers and found that the Western Calendar had slipped 11 days; so he decided that the year would lack 11 days (calendrical and orthographical reform are two of the few benefits of autocracy). The change was not adopted all at once; the Catholic countries adopted it, but the Protestants were not about to change their calendars at the word of someone whom they deemed the Anti-Christ. The Protestant businessmen, who had Catholic contacts, eventually prevailed upon their respective governments to adopt the Gregorian reform. The difference in calendars had become entrenched by the time the Russian government decided to change, but by the end of the twentieth century, the only area in which the Easter date remained different was the Orthodox calendar.

It would be a great show of Christian unity if the Easter calendar could be made to harmonize. It is not dependent on a point of theology (then, neither, is the celibacy of Catholic priests), so the many disputes are moot. The past half-century has seen much smoothing over of previously prickly arguments. Next year is also a "shared" year, so the time is short for harmonization.

Who would lead in this adjustment of the calculation of Easter? Ideally, it would be a conference between Protestant leaders, the Pope, and the Eastern Metropolitans, but the recent outbreak of priestly child abuse has the Pope and the arthritic national churches of Europe distracted. If anyone is going to lead this drive, it should be the Metropolitans and the Protestants, but the final decision needs to be agreed upon by all the denominations.

I Found My Heart in San Fran-βρίσκω

One of my resolutions for this year (and possibly next!) is to work through all the Teach Yourself books and pamphlets which line my shelf. Unlike certain fraudulent intellectuals, I feel guilty about having books on my shelf which I have not read, and I love doing grammar exercises (I recite declensions and conjugations as a concentration/anti-drowsiness tool). So I have made the above resolution, although I should note that I am exempting the phrasebooks, because they lack the exercises I find essential to learning a foreign language. If anyobody has lsuccessfully learned a language from a phrasebook, I would love to hear how you managed.

I did Malay last summer, and Washo this spring (check out the University of Chicago Washo Language Revival website here), and am now working on Modern Greek. It is my eternal shame that I, a Classical Languages major, have not yet been to Greece, and although I am more interested in the ancient than the modern, I can't talk to modern Greeks in Classical or Koine! The first adjustment, of course, was the abundance of "i" in Modern Greek; but if you actually scutinize the vowel system of Modern Greek without the overlying archaic orthography, it is a standard five vowel system. Greek has experienced similar analogical pressures and analytical tendencies as the Romance languages (or any system that is moving away from a highly developed system of conjugations and declensions), but its conjugations and declensions have weathered the process better than those of the Romance languages, at least Dhimotiki - Tsakonian dialect apparently has gone further down the analytical path.

One of the delights of learning a later version of a language when you have learned an earlier stage (and I do not wish to get into the language/different language argument) is the pleasant surprise of discovering that the unfamiliar word is familiar after all, a sort of diachronic déjà vu.The formation of the future of δουλεύω with a ψ was a little surprising, but made sense given the consonantal pronunciation of υ in former υ-second diphthongs. Even that knowledge did not prepare me to immediately recognize βρίσκω and βρήκα as descendants of Archimedes' bathtime revelation. In hindsight, this is what naturally would have happened to any verb that seemed to have an augment (ε is the the default) in the present, where no augment ought to be, and, in truth, the augment was less firmly attached in ancient poetry than in prose.

Recent Reading: Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

Since the movie adaptation of the first book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians is opening next Friday, providing an excuse to get the kids out of the house so that the parents can enjoy the Friday night of Singles Awareness Day weekend, I thought I should write up a short review of the second book in the series, Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters. The sequel uses a comparatively slower narrative pace, but then the author (Rick Riordan) could afford to place his chess pieces more carefully once the first book had sold well. His conceit about the nature of monsters pays off well in a series format, since there are a limited number of canonical monsters of myth (although far more than most moderns know). Another key conceit, what I would call "indefinite geography", serves as an anchor between the mundane and mythical worlds; the tendency to place wacky magical movies and television series in my own hometown makes this conceit particularly familiar and dear to me. If the world were as this series describes, the placement of the Sea of Monsters is perfectly logical.

One of the joys of reading this series as an adult Classics major is the recognition of story elements, and this installment does not disappoint. The choice of boss monster in this book telegraphs the stratagem of the hero, but a good story is always fun, and the particularly twisted version of La Belle et Le Bête (or perhaps Hercules and the Queen of the Amazons) which serves as the book's mcguffin is amusing on many levels, not all of which would be appropriate to explain to grade school kids.

I do not want to give away the conclusion (it's the second of five books: of course our hero wins the battle), but the way in which the success of the mission of the second book leads into the mission of the third book feels natural, an important feat for the sequel in an incomplete series. If I were teaching middle school, I would use these books quite happily to instill a love of mythology in my students - I come by that love naturally, but I understand many do not.

Hangeul, or No Dyslexic Elves

Recently, I decided that I should learn some Korean, since I spend a great deal of time in a Korean-owned cafe. At the very least, I could learn the basic pleasantries associated with cafe life. Hangeul, the Korean script, is well known for being linguistically sound and astonishingly perceptive, although that language, it must be admitted, is the language of 15th century Korea. The official history has King Sejong as the inventor of the script, although some more recent studies have suggested a connection between Hangeul and 'Phags-pa script, invented in Tibet under Kublai Khan as an international script.

The basic principles of Hangeul were that each block should be square, in order that it look like "proper", i.e., Chinese, writing, and that the block be composed of the consonants which make up a syllable. Although Hangeul looks like a string of Chinese characters, it is much easier to disentangle the parts. The progress of time, both in phonetic change, assimilation, and increasing stylization of the "characters", has created some difficulties, but they are hardly insurmountable. My goal, for now, is to master the jamo (some of which are phonetically complex, but treated as a single graphic unit). The more I examine the jamo, the more I understand why the lovely Miss Moon grasped the principles of my Egyptian hieroglyph homework so quickly.

The systematic structure of the jamo may be linguistically inspired, but as some wag said of Tolkien's tengwar, there is no such thing as a dyslexic elf (I'm sure Tolkien would have found Hangeul fascinating). Some of the diacritics which are used to distinguish various vowels in Korean are minimal, even after the most recent reform of the script, a luxury which small linguistic communities can manage more easily than large democratic ones. It's easy for the Anglophone, accustomed to letters more distinct in shape, to confuse /a/ and /eo/. I can recognize the dental series (d, t, tt) but my brain appears to want that series to open in the same direction as the velar (g, k, kk); this is probably a conflict between the accurate picture of tongue placement and orthographic consistency. If I did not desire regularity in writing, Hangeul would not fascinate me so much! My greatest difficulty, however, is differentiating /oe/, /wi/, and /ui/; I have mastered the regular and iotated forms. The cafeteria method of learning Korean does not enlighten me on the rules of vowel harmony in Korean, leaving some vocalic pronunciations a mystery.

Lesson 15: Mai, Aku, La, Nei

The completion of Lesson 15 yielded no interesting grammatical gems (or even semantic), so rather than complain about the high level of ambiguity in Hawaiian particles (what can you expect from a language which has so few phonemes?), so I'll take the opportunity to explain a feature of Hawaiian unfamiliar to most English speakers: deictic particles. What is a deictic particle? It is simply an "adverbial" word that indicates direction. The old English words "where, whither, whence" illustrate a pronominal use of directionality, since the meanings are "at which place, to which place, from which place". Greek has a "deictic iota" or "deictic i" in its dramatic register. The abundant use of the deictic iota arises from the lack of stage directions (or even  indications of change of speaker!) in Greek drama. The absence of stage directions as we know them does not mean that the plays were not blocked - Greek tragedy does derive from a choral performance, after all. So where could the dramatist put the directions? He incorporated them into the text. In some cases, the direction was explicit, if one of the characters already on stage announced he could see the king approaching, but in other cases, the dramatist tacked the deictic iota onto the noun of his choice. The addition of the deictic iota indicated a "hey pay attention to this" response to the part of the players and the audience.

So far, the most striking Hawaiian deictic particles are mai, aku, la, and nei. The particle mai indicates movement away from the speaker; thus, whether the topic of discussion is coming or going does not determine the use of mai. The particle aku is the counterpart of mai, and can indicate temporal distinctions as well as physical ones - but I have not progressed far enough to say any more on the temporal uses. The particle la is a general indicator, and seems to be some sort of pan-Pacific, pan-East Asian deictic, since it is found in that use from China to Ni'ihau. In Hawaiian, la appears to be the antithesis of nei, a particle which is used quite vigorously in Hawaiian, but seems to indicate a high degree of immediacy, intimacy, and affection. I suspect that the intimate aspect of nei explains not only the use of nei as part of the present tense (what could be more relevant than what you are doing right now?) and the past with aku (only slightly less relevant than the present), and its absence when aku is used to indicate future time (irrelevant if you're an Australian Prime Minister and have just been eaten by a shark). This overlap of temporal and spatial terms is typical of natural human languages, although I am unsure what that indicates about human perception. These four deictic particle (there are others) provide additional information to allow the addressee (2nd person) to place the topic of discussion (3rd person) within a physical framework.

Movie Review: Avatar (but mostly Na'vi)

Those who know my obsession with languages, real or imagined, will not be astonished that I went twice to Avatar, once for the experience and once for the language (and the 3D). I do this with rented movies, too, rewatching them with the commentary on - as archaeologists well know, sometimes there are nuggets among the trash; of course, it's a lot cheaper with rented movies!

I shall first say that I was pleasantly surprised by the additional information and coherence that a second viewing of Avatar afforded (although the particulars would betray the plot too much). I may actually read the novelization of the movie for the extra anthropological/linguistic/historical information. What most interested me, of course, was the alien language, Na'vi, which was constructed with care by an accredited linguist. One thing that irks me about poorly written fantasy novels, such as that written by Tolstoy's great-greandson, even more than the hackneyed plots is the lack of effort which goes into the creation of believable languages. I would not expect anyone to top Tolkien, a genuine language professor, but it seems to me that if you wain the want to use a fictional language and are uninterested  in the details, you should crib a grammar of a real, possibly obscure, language rather than half-heartedly attempting to make one up, or else settle on differences in dialect and prosody to distinguish your fantasy races.

I was pleased at the extensive (for a film) use of Na'vi, by characters who would find it useful or necessary, even if the biosphere (and language) seemed a bit "It was raining on Mongo that day". Soldiers and anthropologists have competing but compelling reasons to learn the native tongue. Once I had seen Avatar once, I looked up the Na'vi language on Wikipedia, and was pleased and amused to see the list of features which were combined to form a language which humans could learn, but was unlike any human language. Na'vi features clusivity (which would make some the insider/outsider dialog of the movie particularly interesting), three grammatical numbers (singular, dual, and trial), Celtic-like lenition, Russian-like short forms (in combination with lenition!), Algonquin-style infixation, the bane of the English settlers of the New World. One can sympathize with the complaints of the protagonist about the difficulties of learning Na'vi! This particular combination of features renders the language natural but not transparent, which is one of the risks of a lazy movie linguist. The lyrics of the songs were in Na'vi, no doubt inspired by the use of Quenya and Sindarin in the LOTR movie trilogy, although there are songwriters here and there who have felt moved to sing in a language of their own. I would be interested to see the dialog of the Na'vi-speaking actors, since the use of clusivity and "attitude" infixes would make the disposition and political orientation of the Na'vi actors much clearly in their native tongue.

Bias

Given certain recent misunderstandings, I feel it imperative that I explain my position more clearly regarding the liberal bias of the majority of the media.

As an historian and classicist, and an attentive student of Mr Honick's high school history class, I am well aware that unbiased information does not exist. Even the most sterile scientific data has a bias, since human beings decided which data to collect, where it would be collected, and at what intervals the measurements would be taken. News scavengers have to choose which data to collect, and out of that information which data to present and how to present it (hard news? fluff story? scare tactics?). I actually have a soft spot for ancient historians, who wore their hearts on their sleeves; for the same reason, I feel more comfortable with Fox News than "liberal" networks and fundamentalist Christians than some "tolerant" liberals; I know where I stand with them, and I am sufficiently comfortable with my own opinions to not waver.

The existence of bias, however, does not means it is a positive thing, just as the existence of evil does not make it a perverse form of good. I take issue with extreme bias of all forms; despite the rather provocative sentence in the preceding paragraph, I am not a fan of either Fox news or fundamentalism. The difference is that the bias on the liberal side is better hidden, and therefore harder to ameliorate. The crevasses in Antarctica are dangerous because you can't spot them.

The increasing fragmentation of media makes the general populace ever more vulnerable to news that is heavily weighted to a single viewpoint. The weakness of human beings to a "confirmation bias", in which one listens more carefully to something with which one agrees, is well-known in media and advertising circles ("confirmation bias" doesn't seem evolutionarily beneficial, but that's a topic for another day). It's easy to become addicted to one news source, whether that be Fox or CNN or NPR, and let it color your world view.

Satire, although it is an ancient and potent solution and therefore dear to the heart of this Classics major, is only a partial solution. Satire is useful in several ways: it can be used even if (especially if) the satirist possesses the opposite bias of the satirized, and satire's acerbic nature makes it memorable. Satire, however, is a parasitic genre: it depends on its audience knowing something about the subject it satirizes, or else descends into uninformed invective, which is no better than listening to a non-satiric programs which shares the bias of the satirist.

The only solution (ut opinor) for avoiding bias as much as possible in an increasingly fragmented media landscape is a diligent effort to read news sources from different viewpoints. The problem here, of course, is that it takes mental effort to synthesize any thesis and its antithesis, and many people are unwilling to expend that effort, when it is easier and simpler to hold onto their beliefs.

Lesson 14: Interrogative Pronouns

 As the angels say unto men, "Do not fear!", for I have not abandoned my Hawaiian project. Lesson 14 is the interrogative pronouns. An interrogative pronouns is not one which strings you up for the bastinado, although the sorts who would do that do use a lot of interrogative pronouns; an interrogative pronoun is simply one that asks a question. Some of the "pronouns" in Judd strike me more as adverbs than pronouns, especially in a language with such a tenuous case system, but let us not quibble. The most striking feature of the pronouns in this lesson is the predominance of the element hea. This element is the latter component of a compound of which the former is a preposition or functioning prepositionally. The word heaha "what?" appears to display the inverse situation, but alas this is an illusion, and heaha is composed of he aha, in which he is the indefinite pronoun, and aha indicates "why?what?". The use of the indefinite here contrasts with the use of the definite ke in another interrogative, no ke aha, "why?", which is literally "for the what?", a phrase which corresponds in form and meaning with the archaic English interrogative "wherefore", whereof I have an inordinate fondness.

Another intriguing feature of the interrogative pronouns is the incorporation of time into the forms of the question "when?". Hawaiian does not depend on the tense of the verb to indicate the time of the question, but rather uses ahea for future time and inahea for past time; the present form has yet to appear. Although placing the burden of temporality on the interrogative pronoun may seem peculiar to the native English speaker, this placement is the most logical: the question is about time, after all, and without a doubt the existence of the future and past interrogatives allow a greater semantic load on the basic pronoun.

Now here's the proof 

Lesson 14
1. Hola ehia keia? How many hours is this?
2. E hele ana oe ihea i keia kakahiaka? Where (Whither) are you walking this morning?
3. Ua hiki mai lakou i Waikiki i keia awakea. They have arrived (towards the speaker)  in Waikiki this afternoon. (Still no sign of any past parfect ua ... e!)
4. Mahea oe i hele aku i keia ahiahi? Where are you running (away from the speaker) this evening?
5. Auhea oukou, e na ho[a]aloha o ka pono? Where are you-all, o friends of righteousness?
6. Mai hea mai oukou i keia auina la? From what place (whence, towards the speaker) are you-all this afternoon? (la here is "sun", not the deictic particle)
7. Pehea oe i keia wanaao maikai loa? How are you this very beautiful dawn?
8. He kakahiaka ino loa keia. This is a very bad morning.
9. Heaha keia mau mea iloko o keia mau pahu? What are these things inside my boxes?
10. No ke aha la oe e hana nei i keia mea? Why are you doing this thing (away from the speaker).

Fred DIckson: A Eulogy

I'm not a particularly eloquent eulogizer, but I feel ought to try on behalf the late Fred Dickson. I have not spent as many years as Fred as an Assistant Scoutmaster, but I can identify with his comfort in being a second banana to his Scouting partner and friend, Joe Ehrman, whose Distinguished Eagle Scout Award ceremony I attended last night at the Marines Memorial Club. Despite the aggression of contemporary society, not everybody feels the need to be dominant, and the position of executive officer to the commander or good cop to the bad cop is an important balance.

I remember talking to Fred many times in the old Troop Room, before the earthquake retrofit and the room's reestablishment in the diagonally opposite corner. When you entered the spacious Troop Room, there was counter on the left and behind it was Fred, always friendly and helpful - that counter was a less intimidating barrier than the physically less substantial one in front of you behind which loomed Joe's desk. Fred always had a piece of candy and friendly advice for any Scout who needed it, and was especially helpful in the transition from six to eight patrols which occurred the year I switched from the Flying Eagles to the Falcons.
Many problems, both disciplinarian and organizational, were resolved before they reached the Scoutmaster's desk thanks to Fred.

On the outings and at camp, Fred was friendly and helpful, qualities which do not solely apply to the Scouts of the troop. He was a major promoters of the annual horseshoe competition, a Royaneh tradition which has fallen into abeyance since his departure from camp; I remember the loud clanking of the horseshoes in the chapel, and the trepidation in crossing the field of competition - sure, the participants had stopped, but how much would you trust the twitchy arm of your fellow seventh-grader? Another area in which Fred's participation was greatly appreciated was the campfire program, and especially his promotion of the traditional songs of the troop. Then there was Kady-language, the troop's own Pig Latin: there was much discussion of it last night, and I must confess that it hasn't been heard around the troop campfires in quite a while. Many remembered how to use Kady-language, but nobody remembered all the lyrics to the song from which it was derived. In honor of Fred, I would like to recover the tune and the words for posterity.

One of the coolest things, especially to a boy, about Fred was his military experience as a World War II fighter pilot. An organization such as the troop places a great emphasis on tradition and history, and Fred's personal description of World War II provided a link to an earlier era which was becoming remote even by my days in the troop.

I shall always be thankful for Fred's generosity and good spirits, his ability to tie together generations of troop members, and his example of how to support the troop without being an A-type personality.

Lesson 13: Mind Your Pi's and Ke's

  I have gone over the particulars of Lesson 13, in which Judd presents the rules for using ka and ke as the as the singular definite article of the Hawaiian language. The form of the singular definite article in PNP (Proto-Nuclear Polynesian) is te, as in the name of the Maori opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, so I first tried to derive a rule whereby ke became ka under certain conditions (the definite ka has a short vowel, whereas the a-class possessive ka has a long vowel). Dissimilation of ke to ka before words which begin with front vowels (e, i) and occasionally the lower central vowel (a) makes evolutionary sense, but that cannot be the underlying model at the time Judd composed his grammar, since the back vowels also use ka. It is worth noting that Judd’s ‘okina-less orthography  does not appear to disguise a distinction between the two forms dependent on the presence or absence of the ‘okina for words with an initial u, but perhaps does for words with an initial o. The use of ke before words beginning with k appears to be linguistic conservation in a “potassium-rich” environment, and the use of both ka and ke before words beginning with p preserves a useful semantic distinction between ka pa ‘the yard’ and ke pa ‘the dish’ (both have a long vowel).  This utility hypothesis, however, is called into question by the widespread semantic homophony elsewhere in the Hawaiian language.

The rule which Na Puke Wehewehe ‘Olelo Hawai’i lists is the following: ke is used before words beginning with a, e, o, and k, and sometimes p and the ‘okina. I am not certain whether the use of ke or ka preserves any semantic distinction for the words beginning with the ‘okina, or whether the mixture there is due to the slide from historical and Kauai k to Hawai’i ‘okina. The rule I can derive from this is: the vowel of ke is lowered to ka before the high vowels i and u, and vowel of ke is preserved before any consonant other than k. The consonants p and the ‘okina are the logical outliers for this rule, since (quite aside from the semantic distinction between pa and pa) the ‘okina is the last step before a bare vowel, and the labial plosive p is often tied to the velar plosive k: examples include the development of Welsh pedwar ‘four’ from the Brythonic root kwet-, similar to Latin quattuor,. More generally, velars and labials are related: note the change of the Sumerian (nasal) velar g~ into a labial m in the Emesal, or women’s dialect.  Na Puke Wehewehe ‘Olelo Hawai’i also notes the pre-1850 documents in Hawaiian, before any official grammar had been published, allowed ke before consonants which were neither p nor k - sadly, it does not mention whether this situation also pertained to the ‘okina. This difference between the pre-1850 records and the official Hawaiian of today suggests the use of ka spread from the words beginning with vowels and perhaps the ‘okina to the other consonants. The use of both ka and ke in front of the ‘okina would be critical for the reanalysis, since it would give speakers “permission” to use ka in front of consonants. I also suspect that the influence of English grammar, specifically a more rigid distinction between verbal and nominal forms, may have pushed the educated Hawaiian speakers towards a more frequent use of ka with nouns, since ke is used in several verbal constructions. 

1. Ua ike makou i ka uila. We have known the lightning.
2. Ua lohe makou i ka hekili. We have heard the thunder.
3. Ke hoopaa nei oia i ka ukana. He ties fast the cargo.
4. Ke noho nei oia ma ke one. He sits in the sand.
5. Ua hiki mai ka elele. The messenger has arrived.
6. Ua hele mai ke kanaka mai Maui mai. The man has moved from Maui.
7. Ke hahai nei ka ilio i kona kahu. The dog pursues his provider.
8. Pehea oukou i keia mau la. How are you-all?

Our Doomed Century on the Onion

(This was composed the week of Jan 3-9, 2010)

It's been Apocalypse Week on the History Channel, which means I've been drawn to it like Mothra to a nuclear flame. I have an impatient fascination with the 2012/Nostradamus material, although it does provide a ready source of mockable material,  but my stronger, morbid fascination is reserved for the shows on asteroid impact (especially Apophis), gamma ray bursts, and other forms of environmental extinction or collapse.

I'm excited for the new season of Life After People, in which we will see what happens to a modern house without maintenance. Apocalypse Man seems like a series in embryo, a sort of bowdlerised television counterpart to The Road, but the show which most chilled my blood was Earth 2100. The narrative conceit of a single life makes sense outside of a setting, such as science fiction novels, in which multi-generational perspectives are possible and easier to portray. The shrill, strident tone is justified to some degree because the producers intended to portray a worst-case scenario, so that it might stick in the minds of the audience. One of the difficulties in persuading human beings to act is the rigid "flight or fight" response (the third option, giving up completely, is a literal dead end). Most people fail to react to creeping change (that's why you don't notice your own sibling aging as much as someone else's), so the most effective way to trigger the fight response is an atmosphere of threat. The fight response, however, was a development to allow survival when attacked, and does not last long. In terms of the energy spike, that is a blessing, since permanent panic would turn humanity into bipedal ground squirrels, but the brevity also means that the lesson is lost quickly and in the worst case engenders apathy or disbelief. The "Sleepers wake!" portion of the message is insufficient without a further portion outlining what steps may be taken to mitigate disaster. In this way, the gospel of environmentalism (after all, there is a green bible) is similar to other religions: faiths and philosophies which provide no guide on appropriate actions once you have accepted their premises are seeds which fall on rocky ground. Earth 2100 is a good first step, but I would welcome a series or special which provided methods of survival and eventual renewal.