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.