notes on linguistic curiosities and oddities.

Wait, what is a vowel?!

2011-08-01T17:10:00.001-05:00

So here we are; I've finished my first semester as a linguistics major (ok I only took one course), but I still couldn't come up with a succinct answer when Michael Bell asked me: what's the deal with vowels? Is y a vowel or not? You know, when you're a kid, they tell you "a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y." Why?

So I read up on it. He's right. English is one of the languages that isn't really clear about vowels. Big surprise, right?

Phonetically speaking, vowels are sounds that are made with no constriction in the vocal tract. Basically, by pushing air from your lungs out your mouth and only shaping the sound by the way you move your tongue and lips without ever interrupting the air flow.
Phonologically speaking, vowels are the peak of a syllable.
Now here's the issue with English. We have words like little and castle, where that sound is the peak.

The issue with y and w in English, is that they meet the criteria of non-constricted sound, but they happen at the non-peak of words, too, like in yet and wet.

So we can have non-constricted sounds at the non-peak of the word. Not vowels.
Similarly, we have sounds at the peak of a word that are constricted sounds--also not vowels.

Technically speaking, a sound must match both criteria to be officially designated a vowel sound.
---

This picture shows where each sound is produced.

Here is a link to a chart with audio clips of each vowel sound. It's in the International Phonetic Alphabet, so these sounds could go for any language in the world, not just English. The x-axis shows front, central and back--referring to where the sound is produced. The y-axis shows close, mid and open--referring to how close to the roof of the mouth the tongue is when the sound is made.

Doctor or Not?!

2011-08-01T16:50:00.000-05:00

Let's play the game of "Doctor or Not!?" yayyy

Psychiatrist. Psychologist. I can never remember which is which. One's a medical doctor, the other is a therapist.
Hmm. I try to remember by thinking, podiatrist, dermatologist--those are both doctors. That didn't help. Gynecologist. Geriatrist. Neurologist. Still no help.
The truth is, there are a lot more -ologist words in the world than -iatrists, but what's the difference??

Dictionary says...
-ology refers to the science or study of something
-iatry indicates healing or medical treatment

Ok. So etymologically, they could both be doctors, but in this case the psychiatrist is the doctor and the psychologist is not.

What about optometrist and opthalmologist and optician? Opto- obviously means sight from Ancient Greek.

Optometrist - someone licensed to practice optometry (which is the practice of examining the eyes). -metrist is obviously someone who measures, so optometrist literally= someone who measures sight

Opthalmologist - a doctor who practices opthalmology (which is the branch of medical science dealing with the anatomy, functions, and diseases of the eye), so opthalmologist literally= scientist who studies sight

Optician - a maker or seller of optical glass, so optician literally= someone who specializes in sight

So in this case the opthalmologist is the doctor and the optometrist and the optician are not.

Thanks for playing.

Snickers doesn't get it either.

2011-05-22T17:25:00.000-05:00

Remember this post about bad malamanteaus??

Michael Bell found an example of another pretty bad one just the other day, this time in a Snickers wrapper.

V is for Saturday

2011-03-09T03:57:00.001-06:00

The other day Magee and I were talking via text message and he said something along the lines of "but they are closed on V", and I did not understand what he meant. I, personally use the standard university abbreviations for days of the week: MTWRF and I guess I used Sa and Su in my notes for weekend days.

He explained he uses MTWθFVS. θ makes sense for Thursday, S for Sunday. I had no guesses about the V. He explained he looked for a syllabary that had a simple solution, and found the Cypriot syllabary, in which a symbol that looks like a V represents the syllable "sa."

Fair enough.

I came across this wonderfully comprehensive wobsite about writing systems, and started reading. This stuff is endless.*

A syllabary is like an alphabet, except instead of each symbol representing a sound, each symbol represents a syllable.

In terms of syllabaries, Maggs said his decision had come down to using the Cherokee "sa" which is a U with a horizontal line through the middle, or the Cree, which looks like a little chair. I´m assuming he went with the Cypriot V because of it´s accessibility on a standard keyboard. I think he made a good choice, considering the alternatives. (Look here for a compilation of syllabaries.)

They say the Cypriot syllabary descended from Linear A and Linear B and was actually used for the Cypriot dialect of Greek between 800 and 200 BC. In Linear A, "sa" was Y and in Linear B, "sa" was like Y but with two little tear drops on each side. I was surprised he hadn´t chosen the Y from Linear A--seeing as how it´s equally easy to use as the Cypriot V, but it seems the origins of Linear A are too ambiguous for his note-taking standards. Ok.

What he means is that even scholars today are unsure about Linear A and whether its decipherment is correct. I mean, he´s right. Linear A was used between 1800 and 1450 BC, and really, all they can do is start with what they know and go backward. They think Linear B probably evolved from Linear A, but they don´t know how they´re related. Furthermore, these linguists just assigned the same pronunciation that Linear B uses to characters that look similar in Linear A--but that was just guessing, too. There´s no real consensus on Linear A.

Phaistos Disc

Speaking of undecipherables, Linear A isn´t alone. I mean, there are other really old things that are yet undeciphered (like Crete´s Phaistos Disc from 17th century BC seen on the left, and Proto- and Old Elamite used around 3000BC in Persia/modern Iran), but I feel like that makes sense, and is excusable. They´re really old texts.

What is really weird to me is that there are a handful of relatively modern texts that are also undecipherable, namely:

Voynich Manuscript (1404-1438AD, Europe?) - at least carbon dating confirms the dates on this one. The vague general consensus seems to be that it´s a medical or pharmacopeal document. Some think the manuscript is gibberish, and was probably a joke played on Rudolph II, probably made by Roger Bacon. There are lots and lots of theories on this one.***
Rohonc Codex (1530?AD, Hungary) - people have tried and tried to decipher this sucker, and have failed. Most Hungarian scholars seem to have given up, and assume it´s a hoax created by Sámuel Literáti Nemes, who was infamous for his historical forgeries from around that same time period. Some cryptographers think it´s a religious text. The writing might be some variant of paleo- or old- Hungarian.
Rongo Rongo (until 1860sAD, Easter Island) - the language is Rapa Nui, the Polynesian language spoken on Easter Island. There´s debate over whether or not this is actual writing, or if it´s just some notes jotted down for the sake of decorating, or maybe remembering things.

Voynich Manuscript***

Rohonc Codex

Rongo Rongo

--

It´s funny to me how vocabulary and grammar can change in a language so quickly, relatively speaking, and how it seems writing systems change so much more slowly. If you think about the Latin alphabet for instance, the letter W was added to accommodate some German sounds in the Middle Ages, but that´s about it. We don´t really see a lot of changes. I guess since the printing press, and now keyboards worldwide, it would be much more difficult to create or destroy a letter than it is to create or destroy a word.

But it does happen sometimes! I remember when I first started learning German, the teacher made some rules very clear about when to use ß and when to use ss. --although we learned that ß = ss, the rule is:

ß is used after diphthongs (beißen [baɪ̯sən] ‘to bite’))
ß is used after long vowels (grüßen [ɡʁyːsən] ‘to greet’)
ss is used after short vowels (küssen [kʏsən] ‘to kiss’)

Thus it helps to distinguish words like Buße (long vowel) 'penance, fine' and Busse (short vowel) 'buses'. However, the teacher reluctantly informed us that ß is pretty much going out of style, not because of computer keyboards, but because of text messaging. While computers made for Germany do have the ß key, cell phones do not, and kids are basically forgetting all about ß.

Huh.

I also recently heard an article on PRI´s The World that Spanish has decided to get rid of two of their official letters.** WHAT. To the best of my knowledge, in addition to the 26 letters we see in English, Spanish claims/claimed 3 more: ch, ll, and ñ. Now I´m hearing that the Royal Spanish Academy is getting rid of ch and ll as single letters, and my name will now be spelled C-H-E-L-A as opposed to the CH-E-L-A that I loved.

This is crazy. My first initial is no longer Ch and now I must rethink my whole sense of self identity! No, I´m just kidding, but Venezuela´s Hugo Chavez actually seems pretty upset about it. I mean, he´s losing the first initial of his last name--I totally get it. CNN reports:

If the academy no longer considers “ch” a separate letter, Mr. Chávez chortled to his cabinet, then he would henceforth be known simply as “Ávez.”

smh.

--

Now, of course people have suggested and created countless alternate writing systems throughout the years. For instance, Benjamin Franklin took great interest in the promotion of spelling reform. See here and here. He proposed a more phonetic way of writing English, which actually makes a lot of sense, but no one seemed to listen. The only person who really cared for this idea was Noah Webster. Lol.

There are lots of other pretty writing systems, but my two favorites are:

Baduk - based on the Korean board game by the same name, which is based on Go--the Japanese name for an ancient Chinese board game. The alphabet has only 2 characters and one marker to indicate the start of words. Like in Baduk the game, the meaning of one letter is determined by its relative rather than its absolute position.

Colorbet - developed by Vitaly Vetash, a Russian painter and linguist. Basically, he took the idea that the whole variety of colors is based on fusion of 3 main rays (red, yellow and blue), and translated it into sounds, saying the variety of vowel comes from the combination of the triangle of the main sounds (A, I, U). Colors of vowels are: A is red, I - blue, U - green. He then expanded this to consonants, too, saying: vowels, being the most resonant between phonemes, represent clear colors, and consonants have more complicated formant structure, representing complex tints of colors. (This also makes me think of synesthesia? I didn´t even know what that was until... see here.)

(For a good list of constructed scripts, see here.) My cousin actually came up with a writing system, too, years ago. It´s called something like AlienCode 2 Specific or something like that. It´s by no means more efficient than the Latin Alphabet, and only a handful of people know about it. I wonder if thousands of years from now someone will find a sample of it and wonder. But then again, it´s probably very easy for cryptologists to decipher, seeing as how (with a few exceptions) there is one character per Latin letter. It was fun when we were kids anyway, and is still convenient to know... hahaha.

*(Click here to check out the Yi syllabary. It´s the largest standardized syllabary on record, and geez... things like this give me a lot of hope for humanity, to be honest, and man´s mental capacity. If common, normal, run of the mill people can grow up using this writing system and mastering it, surely we are capable of great things.)

**Here´s the article with all the changes announced (but it´s in Spanish): El Pais

***

English is hard to pronounce.

2011-03-01T03:06:00.002-06:00

You know, English is a pretty hard language to read and pronounce.

My mom always said you pretty much have to memorize all the words and the sounds that correspond with them, because while there is a pattern for figuring out sounds, there are almost more exceptions than rules. This has obviously got to be frustrating for a non-native English speaker. I get it. She would always then go on to exclaim how great Spanish is in that every single letter makes exactly one sound, and that any word can be sounded out. Yes, yes, yes.

In my mind, then, every time she would say that, I would always construct a piano keyboard which played, instead of a note, a sound for each key pressed corresponding to a letter in Spanish. I thought that if I were ever a Spanish teacher, I would take this keyboard to class and let the students learn how to pronounce correctly using the keyboard. They could press the keys on the keyboard spelling out a word and listen to the right way to say the word. They could experiment and even create hypothetical Spanish words and be assured the pronunciation the keyboard was assigning was correct.

I always wondered why no one had ever done that.

My mom repeatedly ranting about this triggers a very vivid childhood memory of an I Love Lucy episode I saw in which Ricky is reading a book and explores the many different ways "ough" is pronounced in English.

enough. through. cough. bough. though.

/ənəf. θru. kɑf. baw. ðo./

I think this is one of my earliest childhood memories of being interested in linguistic curiosities and oddities.* I was very young when I saw this episode, and the realization that "ough" could be pronounced in so many ways... just... blew my mind.

I was outraged. I must have been about 5 years old, because I hadn´t yet come across letter combinations with so many possibilities before. I specifically remember after the episode was over, I got a notebook and a pen and wrote down the example words Ricky had used.

I found the clip online just now! --and was surprised to hear Ricky--after the book reading part--exclaim almost word for word what my mom always said about Spanish.

(The noteworthy part starts at minute 2:45.)

Which brings me to this really great thing Nitzkin showed us in class the other day. It´s this project called Anguish Languish--which retells stories, using real English words--but the wrong words--to convey an accents or dialects. Try reading some! It works best if you read it out loud.** Here´s a snippet:

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut
Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.
Wan moaning Ladle Rat Rotten Hut's murder colder inset.
"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainers!"

Funny, something like that could never, ever exist in Spanish. In Spanish, there is no other way to spell any sound than the correct way, and there is no word that could have two different pronunciations. One sound per letter, that´s it. Yes, I know, mama.

Which brings me to the YouTubes´ sensation Kim Dong Won. This video here kind of does the reverse of Anguish Languish.

So I don´t know if he´s reading these Mariah Carey lyrics, or if he´s just replicating the sounds from memory, but it´s really the subtitles that make this video so funny***.

Here is a link to another video of him, but without subtitles, and it is much less funny, because the listener´s mind automatically and instantly atunes to the accent and,--especially because the lyrics to this song are already relatively familiar in the background of Americans´ pop culture minds--it is therefore pretty easy to understand what he is saying.

What´s difficult about reading Anguish Languish is that we have set meanings in our minds associated with these symbols on the page, which are pretty much unrelated to the sounds we hear. Just listening to Anguish Languish (if read correctly) is very easy to understand. But the mind auto-disconnects the sound from the letters on the page when discerning meaning, making reading it silently and understanding practically impossible.

*I think one of my favorite parts of kindergarden was learning to read, and the rules for when vowels were supposed to be long or short. We learned the short and long sounds for each vowel, and then wrote some words with a little scoop over the vowel if it was short and a dash over the vowel if it was long.

The simple rule was that if a vowel was followed by a consonant, and then another vowel, the first vowel was long and the second, silent. Conversely, if the vowel was followed by only one consonant, or more than one consecutive consonant, the vowel would be short.

ie. "bĭt" and "bīke" or "măp" and "māde". I loved drawing the dashes and scoops. I wanted to draw them everywhere. (I think later that week we learned about different vowel combinations, and the sounds they made, but those were tedious and less fun, with no symbols to draw involved.)

On this same day, I distinctly remember we also learned when to pronounce /ði/ or /ðə/. We were walking to recess, and some kid just randomly asked it, and the explanation ensued.

The rule was that if the next word started with a vowel, say /ði/, if it started with a consonant, say /ðə/. Hard, fast rule. I liked this, too.

Of course, immediately someone asked about /eɪ/ and /ə/. The teacher said this was more easily alleviated, not by changing pronunciation, but by changing "a" to "an" if the next word started with a vowel. This annoyed me, because we already knew that.

I really liked my kindergarden teacher, Ms. McMyne, but one other thing that really annoyed me**** was the way they taught us how to put verbs in the past tense. We had already learned how to drop the -e and add -ing for present indicative or whatever the hell tense that is. So I think they were trying to simplify by teaching us to make past tense by dropping the -e and adding -ed.

This DROVE ME NUTS. Why couldn´t they just say "add -d"?!?!? I asked. The teacher placated me, said, "yes, could think of it that way, too", and moved on. My classmates of course took her side when I tried to bring the point up again at recess.

They were really extremely fond of dropping that -e before adding any ending at all, apparently gahdammit, and I just thought it was terribly inefficient to drop an -e and then re-add THAT SAME GAHDAMM -e along with the new -d.

...

Oh well.

**Here is an excellent video clip of Anguish Languish being spoken aloud.

***among many other factors, of course.

****Kind of like that time in third or fourth grade when we were learning our multiplication tables (maybe this doesn´t belong in a language blog?) and we were reviewing before a test or something, and the teacher asked if we wanted to share any helpful hints with the class.

I guess she was hoping someone would point out the gahdamm obvious like "add a 0 behind the number you´re multiplying by 10, like 5 x 10 = 50" but instead I tried to explain my trick for multiplying by 5s:

When multiplying by 5s, you could take half of the number you were multiplying, and just add a 0 behind it if the number was even (like half of 6 is 3, therefore 5 x 6 must= 30), or if the number was odd, use the next even number up, apply the rule I just said, and subtract 5 from the answer (like 7 is odd so half of 8 is 4 so instead of the answer being 40 it must be 40-5. 5 x 7 must= 35).

I tried to explain it was like half of multiplying the number by 10. The teacher was furious. She wasn´t having it.

This was a super FAST and EASY way to multiply, but the teacher looked horrified when I explained it, and tried to get everyone to forget I even spoke so as to avoid confusion and questions about my method. I briefly hated her. Then I felt superior because I had this trick up my sleeve and no one else did because the teacher was too lazy or too stupid to explain my method to the class.

Oh well. I guess this all stems from me not being very good at memorizing. If you know me at all, you know my memory is terrible. I´d much rather calculate quickly than memorize... WHICH IS WHY I LIKE LANGUAGES SO MUCH, I think. They´re just like math, really. Formulaic, generally neat, and calculate-able. Figure-out-able. I guess there were signs of my forthcoming love of linguistics all along.

Dwarves and Elves and Angels

2011-03-01T00:02:00.002-06:00

Ok, when I was growing up, I learned that in Spanish
duende = dwarf and enano* = elf = midget.

I guess I never wondered why Santa's elves and Snow White's dwarves were both enanos*.
Just the other day I happened across this article claiming DUENDE is the single most difficult word to translate from Spanish to English. Read here.

It says,

In 1933 Spanish poet and theater director Federico Garcia Lorca gave a lecture in Buenos Aires titled “Play and Theory of the Duende” in which he addressed the fiery spirit behind what makes great performance stir the emotions:

“The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ”The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation … everything that has black sounds in it, has duende.”

Of course a lot of people who commented on the article said the same as me, that they understood duende to be a dwarf or elf, etc. but there were a few interesting responses as well:

César on February 22, 2011 at 6:13 am
In fact, this use of the word “duende” is more typical of the region of Andalusia, mostly used for “flamenco” dance and music, and is not very extended to other parts of Spain. From what I gather, it means something similar to being posessed by the spirit of the artwork, so that the artist expresses its fiery feelings, like a flame revealing the hotness and lawlessness of the fire.

Mikhail on February 22, 2011 at 5:05 am
In Trinidad and Tobago. A douen (which I presume comes from the same word duende due to our past Spanish Influence) is actually a small childlike creature that wears straw hats and runs around in the bushes on back-to-front feet. They were thought to be the souls of unbaptized children.

Blueberry on February 22, 2011 at 2:49 pm
In Buenos Aires generally people say that someone has “angel”, not duende, when talking about talent.

Which brings me to this phrase I´ve been wanting to mention, just because I like it a lot. In Mexico, tener angel means to be really charismatic. Someone who has a lot of angel is someone who is really likeable. Now I always attributed this phrase to Mexico being super-Catholic, but maybe it´s related to this dwarf-elf spirit.

This is another example someone gave on wordreference.com:

In Andalucia you say someone "tiene AGE" that really refers to "tiene ANGEL" when someone is very artistic. For example when a dancer dances very well you say "tiene age (angel)." Hope this helps.

which sounds like what the aforementioned article said about DUENDE. Maybe angels and dwarves are all descended from the same creature, which just evolved into having various names, depending on what part of the Spanish speaking world they finds themselves in.

*Or in this case, enanitos, the diminuitive form.

Face

2011-01-24T23:15:00.001-06:00

My linguistics teacher seems to have studied Yucatec Maya extensively, and he shared this tidbit:

In Mayan, "uts" means "good" and "uts so wich" means "how are you?" but literally means "how´s your face?" This made me laugh. Although I can´t find any evidence of this being true (the webweb shows lots of different ways to say it, not surprisingly), I believe him.

It´s funny that the Mayans identified themselves as their faces, literally,

which made me think of this:

I see this at work all the time and it also makes me chuckle. It´s our copier.

They all say face up, face up, face up--until we get to the Spanish, literally "mouth up" (well, the German says picture up, but that makes sense because it´s a copier). Curious that the Spanish define the front half of the body by the mouth and not the face.

[I don´t know what the Japanese say or WHY there would be 2 in Japanese, and Khya´s not home. I´ll have to ask him once he gets here.]

--

Edit: Ok, Khya came home and woke me up to answer my question. The top one says "copy side placed up" more or less, and the bottom one says "transmission [fax] side placed up"--so neither of these are really metaphorical at all, just more descriptive of what to do with the sheet of paper you have in your hands before you turn it over to the machine.

As to WHY there would be two in Japanese and only one in every other language, we can only safely guess, either A) it´s a Japanese machine so Japanese language takes precedence or B) Japanese users of this machine must be so dumb they can´t figure out what to do with their fax even if they know what to do with their copy.
jk.

Edit part 2: I emailed Nitzkin about the Mayan phrase above. He responded:

Remember, I said there are 22 mayan languages! You were probably looking at qiche or yucatec. I was talking about kaqchikel; the phrase is "la, utz a wach" with unlauts over the "u" and the second "a", pronounced "la, ootz a wuch" (wuch pron. Like "butch"). Literally, It means "hey, how's your face?"

Many of those 22 languages are actually as different as french from italian or more. Kaqchikel is the 3rd largest, and is spoken in the mountains of guatemala. Most people when they say mayan, mean yucatec, which is spoken all over yucatan (where most tourists go).

And then he said:

Excuse me, actually, most literally it means "hey, good your face?"

And then he said:

Oops, excuse me again--that's 22 in guatemala alone. Don't want to mislead you!

Translating Animals

2011-01-24T17:22:00.000-06:00

Ok, so you know I'm studying linguistics officially, right, and I'm in this Languages of the World (really like an intro to linguistics) course. There are really interesting tidbits all the time--like on day 1, Nitzkin told us how humans are different from other animals in our ability to speak, and communicate about not only the concrete, but the abstract as well.

While other animals communicate to each other, this is generally done through instinctual sounds being made in response to some threat or stimulus. Then perhaps other animals respond to that sound, instinctually. There´s obviously no chatting involved.

But I was thinking about that awesome movie from my childhood, Project X (starring a very young Helen Hunt and an even younger Matthew Broderick), and about all those chimps that supposedly learned sign language. What about them??

Well, I read this article on NPR about how humans are linguistically different from monkeys, and it says, first of all, monkeys´ vocal chords are shaped differently from those of humans, so they´ll never really be able to make the sounds we do--obviously--which is why scientists went on and gave sign language a go. To summarize about the sign language obsession researchers had in the 60s and 70s, monkeys are smart enough to make certain shapes with their hands in response to certain stimuli (like twisting a fist by the corner of the mouth when shown an apple), but still, the number of words they learn seems to peak at about 300.

But by the end of high school, we have about 60,000 words, the average human. And every chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, they all sort of hit the wall at two to 300 words, which is also where a dog hits the wall, or a parrot. So there's something really different about us. And it's not to say they don't communicate - of course they communicate. And of course they have communication that can say very specific, surprising things, but it's not language. [...] And what became clear to the researchers doing this was that the human infant had a language, a vocabulary explosion at a very young age that never occurs with chimps.

So Nitzkin was right in saying no monkey has ever spoken better than a 2 year old child.

WHAT I DIDN´T KNOW is that although monkeys´ DNA matches like 97% of ours, cognitively, dolphins might be more similar to humans. Studies show that dolphins are the only animals that can communicate about things not in their immediate surrounding, such as past and future events.*

I read on dolphin-world.com (that´s right) that dolphins have a greater brain-to-body-weight ratio than any other mammal besides homo sapiens and that because dolphins tend to stay within their own pods, they have trouble understanding “foreign” dolphins. This might be an indicator that they have different dolphin "languages" in different parts of the world, even though they are the same species--if in fact they use language at all.

Well, anyway, it´s probably for the best animals don´t seem to really use language the way we do. LEST THIS HAPPEN:

lolol

*Ok, I found this wobsite, and I can´t decide if it´s for real or not. It´s called SpeakDolphin.com, and well... they have a running list for if they ever do get to talk to dolphins, what are the questions they would ask. Look. You can submit yours here.

World's First "Promercial"

2011-01-15T15:35:00.000-06:00

So a few months back I blogged about this new word I heard, "prosumer." In that post I learned, in the context that I heard the word, prosumer = professional + consumer.

So what about "promercial"? A commercial for prosumers? The New York Times claims it's actually promotion + commercial. Now, maybe I'm mistaken here but aren't commericals ALL promotions? Come on, now.
What they actually mean is that not only will there continue to be product placement in tv shows we watch, but now there will be a commercial before said tv episode, promoting both the product that will be placed and the episode itself.

Obviously, this is happening because of the prevalence of TiVo-type devices that very easily allow viewers to fast foward through commercials. ABC did it first. A triple punch. 1) The upcoming episode of Cougar Town was going to have Diet Dr. Pepper all up in it. 2) Throughout the day, leading up to that episode, they aired promercials--previews for that night's episode--particularly the part of the episode that includes the product pitch. 3) On their wobsite, they featured extended footage from said episode--but of course before you can watch the clip you have to watch a Diet Dr. Pepper commercial.

You can watch this historic event here.

Lol I agree with Time's Graeme McMillan, "If this kind of thing continues, how long before we get a prepromercial to let us know that there might be an advertisement to tell us about the advertisement hidden in real content somewhere in our future?"

New classes!

2011-01-13T00:14:00.000-06:00

So I´m taking some classes for fun this semester! Woooooooooo
Remember this post?

They each meet once a week, so the sessions are long--perfect for discussion. I definitely plan to update my blag much more regularly now, seeing as how I´ll want to jot down here interesting tidbits I pick up along the way--for my own sake. You know.

These are the classes I´m taking.

HD

2010-11-22T12:13:00.000-06:00

When my cousin Joaquin was in town a couple of weeks ago, he told me about this curious, hilarious, embarrasing linguistic trend happening in Mexico among some [lesser educated] people...

So HD TVs are more and more commonplace everywhere, and therefore the demand for high def channels has increased as well. He says there are a few of the big channels that are offered in high def for free--accessible to the whole nation.

In the corner of the TV channel, just like here, it says "HD".

People know this means "alta definicion" (literally "high definition") but they do not know how to spell ALTA. Since all Hs are silent in Spanish, they assume HD stands for "halta definicion"--which is hilarious, and sad.

I found this ad (with prices listed in Euros, so this linguistic phenomenon must be happening in Spain, too).

I can only assume this is how language and spelling evolves. Once it becomes common enough in the populus' vernacular, it becomes correct. We have examples of this all over the place.

I'm secretly afraid English speakers will eventually forget "lite" is not the correct spelling of "light."

I don´t think they get it.

2010-08-20T23:29:00.001-05:00

So there´s this brand of diet frozen meals called Michelina´s Lean Gourmet. Remember when we blogged about malamanteaus? Here´s the link.
I think Michelina´s is trying to make some malamanteaus on the insides of their cardboard boxes, but... I don´t think they get it. I don´t think they get how these are supposed to work.

Here are some good malamanteaus:

spork
skort
Brangelina
blog
liger
muppet
smog
televangelist
WiFi

Here are some bad ones:

I will continue to post these as I find them, because they´re terrible.

The meals are delicious and cheap; their advertising... is low budget.

Muffaletta

2010-08-12T23:28:00.000-05:00

(Answering Jon.)

Muffuletta

pronounced MUFF A LOT UH

or maybe MOOF A LOT UH

They´re a New Orleans specialty. They´re delicious. The people at Central Grocery on Decateur claim to be the originators, since 1906.

Italian immigrant, Signor Lupo Salvatore, owner of the Central Grocery, started making the sandwiches for the men who worked the nearby wharves and produce stalls of the French Market. The sign over the covered sidewalk proudly proclaims, home of “The Original Muffuletta.”

The sandwich consists of the round loaf of crusty Italian bread, split and filled with layers of sliced Provolone cheese, Genoa salami and Cappicola ham, topped with Olive Salad: a chopped mixture of green, unstuffed olives, pimientos, celery, garlic, cocktail onions, capers, oregano, parsley, olive oil, red-wine vinegar, salt and pepper.

Marie Lupo Tusa, daughter of the The Central Grocery's founder, tells the story of the sandwich's origin in her 1980 cookbook, Marie's Melting Pot:

Most of the farmers who sold their produce there were Sicilian. Every day they used to come of my father's grocery for lunch.

They would order some salami, some ham, a piece of cheese, a little olive salad, and either long braided Italian bread or round muffuletta bread. In typical Sicilian fashion they ate everything separately.

The farmers used to sit on crates or barrels and try to eat while precariously balancing their small trays covered with food on their knees. My father suggested that it would be easier for the farmers if he cut the bread and put everything on it like a sandwich; even if it was not typical Sicilian fashion.

He experimented and found that the ticker, braided Italian bread was too hard to bite but the softer round muffuletta was ideal for his sandwich. In very little time, the farmers came to merely ask for a "muffuletta" for their lunch.

Central Grocery is a big tourist attraction now. What I really want to know is how the Muffuletta got its name.

Who created the first muffuletta is still a matter of dispute, but food critic and historian Gene Bourg uncovered a likely scenario. He interviewed elderly Sicilians who lived in the French Quarter for many years. "They told me vendors used to sell them on the streets, as did Italian groceries," he says. "The name refers to the shape of the bread. 'Muffuletta' means 'little muffin.' Italian bakers made muffuletta loaves and sold them to Italian delis. The delis then wrapped the sandwiches in the same paper the bread came in, so the sandwich took on the name."

I read that in a 2004 issue of Southern Living. Makes sense.

According to Mirriam Webster:
Etymology: probably from Italian dial., from Italian muffoletta little muff, diminutive of muffola muff, from French moufle, from Middle French

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Alot

2010-08-08T02:33:00.000-05:00

Have I mentioned I like this ALOT?

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

My name gets mispronounced a lot.

2010-08-08T02:24:00.004-05:00

Shee-luh.
Shay-luh.
Chee-luh.
Chay-luh.
Shellondra (no joke--this actually happened--at the UA SHC)
Kee-luh.
Kay-luh.

Even when I started working at my current place of employment, one of my managers called my Shay-luh for about a month. At one of my previous jobs in college, my boss´ boss (with whom I admittedly did not work with very often) called me Chee-luh for an entire semester when I was in his class even though I had worked in his office for two years.

It´s ok. I´m used to it. I´m usually genuinely surprised when someone guesses correctly. Cheh-luh. That´s how you say it. Yes, like a cello but with an a. Yes, I get that a lot.
When I go to restaurants or places where I have to give my name, I always use Rachel, my middle name, to avoid confusion.

Enough.
Anyway.

My coworker Marvin started jokingly/affectionately calling me Sheh-lay-lee. I never dreamed this was a real word. Indeed, it is. Thought I´d share.

shil·le·lagh /ʃəˈleɪli, -lə/

Also, shil·la·la, shil·la·lah, shil·le·lah.

–noun (esp. in Ireland)

a cudgel, traditionally of blackthorn or oak.

Origin:

1670–80; < Ir Síol Éiligh town in Co. Wicklow;

the adjoining forest provided wood for the clubs.

From Irish Gaelic sail (cudgel) + éille (leash, thong)

I went to Wicklow back in 08.

Girlfriend

2010-08-08T01:19:00.003-05:00

So... I just found out Avril Lavigne *groan* recorded the chorus of this Girlfriend song *GROAN* in a bunch of different languages. It´s just about 24 seconds in each language, but GAH she sounds like she´s purposely trying to pronounce the words as terribly as possible.

My only guess is that this did not go over well considering I never heard about it until now--when I was looking up Shakira translations for the Waka Waka post.

There are two videos I want you to watch. The first is a short clip of her talking and setting the scene for how terrible this whole project is going to sound. The second--if you can stomach it--is 25 seconds or so in each language, with subtitles, back to back.

As far as pronunciations go, I think the Mandarin and the Portuguese sound especially terrible. In the initial video she says she´s going to record French, Portuguese, German, Hindi, Italian, but in actuality they nixed the Hindi and added Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.

Even though I don´t speak all these languages, it´s pretty obvious someone in charge of this project said, "ok, we want literal, exact translations as much as possible" as opposed to coming up with translations that capture the meaning, if not word for word.

HOWEVER, some translations are straight up WRONG.

In Spanish, instead of saying "I know that you like me" she says "I know that I like you."
In Italian she says "I don´t love your girlfriend" instead of "I don´t like your girlfriend" (which is a throwback to this post).
In Chinese she says "You´re not a secret."
In Japanese she uses "that girl" instead of "girlfriend."

I just wonder who they got to do these translations? and what kind of language coaches? and why they failed in even translating correctly? Even MTV was able to assemble a ragtag team of foreign language experts to have a panel discussion about this project.* If MTV could do it, why couldn´t Avril?

I don´t even know what the purpose of this all really was, aside from a way for Avril to have fun... in which case I guess she didn´t really care too much about the accuracy either. Whatev.

*Watch the video of the panel discussion here.

ummerkin

2010-07-18T11:05:00.000-05:00

I keep thinking of ways to celebrate the Fourth of July. I feel like as long as we're still in July, it's still appropriate to celebrate.

Related to my previous post about Ummerka, I would be remiss if I didn't also include the definition of a merkin--as Dubya so graciously called us.

mer·kin /ˈmɜrkən/

–noun

false hair for the female pudenda

You can buy a merkin here.

I also happened across* the origin of

Yankee
first recorded in 1683, a name applied disparagingly by Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam (New York) to English colonists in neighboring Connecticut.
It may be from Dutch Janke, literally "Little John," diminuitive of common personal name Jan; or it may be from Jan Kes familiar form of "John Cornelius," or perhaps an alt. of Jan Kees, dial. variant of Jan Kaas, lit. "John Cheese," the generic nickname the Flemings used for Dutchmen.
It originally seems to have been applied insultingly to Dutch, especially freebooters, before they turned around and slapped it on the English.

*OED, © 2010 Douglas Harper

This time for Africa? WAKA WAKA.

2010-07-16T00:03:00.005-05:00

This is for Messy Marv.

I know the World Cup's over, and this probably applies to most Ummerkins:

so I have to do this post quickly, before this song is forgotten completely.

I watched most of the World Cup games live on my Droid Incredible because I was at work during most of them. I used VCast Videos and had the option of watching them in English or Spanish. As we all know, the Spanish speaking commentators are far more poetic and exciting that the stupid American ones, so I watched them all in Spanish. Before and after the games, this Waka Waka Shakira song played incessantly. --in Spanish. I later learned there is an English version, too.

What is this WAKA WAKA? Soungs pretty goofy. I sure freakin hope it means something to the South African people at least, and that it's not just Shakira's attempt at sounding African and making some fake shit up. That'd be dumb, and probably offensive, seeing as how there are countless African languages that sound lovely whose words she could have stolen from her song to be equally nonsensical to the listeners worldwide.

Let's find out.

A quick Wiki search tells me Waka does mean something in a few languages, such as:

Waka (canoe), canoes of the Maori of New Zealand
Waka (poetry), a genre of Japanese poetry
Waka music, a musical genre from Yorubaland of Nigeria
El Perú (Maya site), also known as Waka', Maya ruins in Guatemala
Huaca or wak'a, in Quechua, a class of sacred objects
-waka, a Swahili term meaning "be lighted"

Whatever. That doesn´t matter.
The refrain in her song (the part that is presumably African) says,

Tsamina mina

Zangalewa

Cuz this is Africa

Tsamina mina eh eh

Waka Waka eh eh

Tsamina mina zangalewa

Anawa aa

This time for Africa

Turns out the lyrics are in a Cameroonian dialect called Fang, sampled from a Cameroonian song first recorded in 1986, called "Zangaléwa," that was hugely popular in Shakira's native Colombia, (not to mention all over Africa).

Roughly translated:

Come, let´s do it!

Who sent you?

It´s mine!

A great rallying cry, if I do say so myself.

Yeah, this song has been sampled a lot. Here´s one clip.

Gunabee says:

"Zangaléwa" was recorded by a makossa group from Cameroon called Golden Sounds who were beloved throughout the continent for their silly dances and costumes. The song was such a hit for Golden Sounds that they eventually changed their name to Zangaléwa, too. The men in the group often dressed in military uniforms, wearing pith helmets and stuffing their clothes with pillows to appear like they had a swollen butts from riding the train and fat stomachs from eating too much. The song, music historians say, is a criticism of black military officers who were in league with whites to oppress their own people. Or at least, some of it was. Some of it, as far was we can surmise, is gibberish.

Shakira was brilliant for choosing to sample this song because it's both a tribute to African music, with the World Cup being held in South Africa, and a nod to the folks back home who've partied to this song since way back in 1987 when the song rose to prominence thanks to West African DJ's in Cartagena.

There was, of course, a bit of controversy about this song being the official World Cup song. (To be honest, the last World Cup song I even remember was really Ricky Martin's The Cup of Life in 1998.) The New York Times reports many South African people wanted it to be an African musician to do the song--but in my opinion, soccer is the world´s sport*--and it´s heart is really with Latin America. Who better to represent Latin America--and the world!?--than Shakira? I have no problem with her being the official chanteuse. Besides, she did feature the South African musical group Freshlyground so no one can say a word about not including Africans, come on now.**

Some people also took issue with the lyrics themselves--the English ones (particularly the first verse). Now this I do agree with, but on a bigger scale. I know she always writes her songs [that end up being recorded in both languages] in Spanish first, and then she tries to come up with a translation into English for them. I´ve got to say, I love Shakira´s lyrics in Spanish. They are true and beautiful poetry. BUT that just doesn´t translate very well, and I will be the first to say she sounds downright silly in A LOT of her English lyrics. English is just not poetic enough of a langauge to be a supple host for her allusive lyrics.

Let´s take a look. I´ll put three versions of the first verse here:

Her actual Spanish lyrics in Waka Waka:

Llegó el momento,

caen las murallas

Va a comenzar

la unica justa

de las batallas

No duele el golpe,

no existe el miedo

Quitate el polvo,

ponte de pie

y vuelves al ruedo

Y la presión, se siente

Espera en ti tu gente

Ahora vamos por todo

Y te acompaña la suerte

My translation of them (obviously not fit for song rhythm):

The moment has come

The walls fall

The only fair battle

Is going to begin

Wounds don´t hurt

Fear doesn´t exist

Shake off the dirt

Back on your feet

It´s your turn again

And the pressure can be felt

Your people hope in you

We´re in it for everything [we´ve got]

And luck is on your side

Her translation for the English version of Waka Waka:

You're a good soldier

Choosing your battles

Pick yourself up

And dust yourself off

And back in the saddle

You're on the frontline

Everyone's watching

You know it's serious

We're getting closer

This isnt over

The pressure is on

You feel it

But you've got it all

Believe it

Yeah, so that may be a tad culturally insensitive. African nations are always at war and stuff, and referring to these people as being good soldiers and being on the frontline with everyone watching... yeah, I guess it could have been worded better.

*It´s all about unity anyway, right? The soccer players featured in her video are Argentinan (Lionel Messi), Brazilian (Daniel Alves), Mexican (Rafael Marquez), Spanish (Gerard Piqué) and Cameroonian (Carlos Kameni). I think that distribution pretty much reflects the world´s interest in soccer´s distribution, too.

**Ricky Martin was--ahem--equally culturally inclusive in his anthem. He, too, recorded the song in English and Spanish (yeah I like the Spanish lyrics better here, too. He talks about having passion, heart, fighting for your star with honor, together, tu y yo! The world is on it´s feet. Here we go!) and since the World Cup was in France that year, he even had part of the refrain be in French!
Allez! Allez! Allez!

Productivity for Prosumers

2010-07-14T10:20:00.000-05:00

As the launch of the beautiful Droid X approaches, we get emails from corporate every day with little tidbits and facts about the device that we ("wireless solutions experts") can use to further promote it.

Today we got an email "Droid X, Fact 8: Enterprise Ready" that went on to descibe the corporate features that make the device adventageous. One of the heading was "Productivity for Prosumers." I had never heard this term before, and assumed Verizon had made it up, as they are oft known to do.

My thought process was: Pro-sumer, as opposed to Con-sumer. That's funny. Pro is the opposite of con. Clever. A positive spin on our corporate customers.

Then I did a bit of Googling and found this is actually an established term, however my initial assumption of its origins were proved incorrect.
Accoring to World Wide Words, this term actually first appeared in 1980! There seem to be two acceptable definitions of the term.

It was coined in 1980 by the futurist Alvin Toffler — in his book The Third Wave — as a blend of producer and consumer. He used it to describe a possible future type of consumer who would become involved in the design and manufacture of products, so they could be made to individual specification. He argued that we would then no longer be a passive market upon which industry dumped consumer goods but a part of the creative process.
In the alternate definition, the word is a blend of professional and consumer. Prosumers of this sort are famed for their enthusiasm for new products and their tolerance of flaws and, from the marketing point of view, have much in common with early adopters. This usage is common among those selling video equipment, digital cameras, and electronics. Professional consumer.

I guess, then, that VZW was using the second definition, and I guessed that the first definition wasn't so common. But then I came across the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, and they use prosumer extensively, for example, page 125, where it discusses the social video game Second Life as being created by its customers. when customers are also the producers, you have the phenomenon: Prosumer.

Yes, indeed.

I really love bubble tea.

2010-07-03T20:53:00.148-05:00

I first discovered bubble tea years ago with Freau at this delicious Vietnamese place here in New Orleans, called Frosty's. She said it was like a fruit smoothie with tapioca balls in the bottom. I tasted one and was intruiged by the chewy tapioca--and actually really liked it. Then when I went off to college, Badass Coffee on the Strip turned into Wickles Wicked Bean and then to Strip Teas. I can't remember which, but one of these claimed to have bubble tea, but they were "out of pearls" almost every time I asked for it. I assumed the bubbles and the pearls were both actually the tapioca balls.

THEN! I went to Chicago's Chinatown with the AAQT and we stopped into a place whose name we can't remember. We stopped into a place that sold boba tea. I wondered if it was the same as the bubble tea I had experienced, and if so, if it was a deliberate misspelling or simply an alternate spelling.

I skimmed over the history of bubble tea. Looks like it originated in Taiwan in the 1980s and has become immensely popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong since then. HOWEVER, it was originally just tea with different fruit flavors mixed in and shaken up. The shaking made the bubbles, and it became known as bubble tea. Not until the mid-80s were tapioca pearls added to the tea. The tapioca pearls looked like bubbles, so this reinforced the already popular name. But really, bubble tea can be bubble tea even if it doesn't have the pearls.

There are lots of different names for this drink all over the world. Some interesting ones?

タピオカドリンク (Japanese): transliterated tapiokadorinku translated "tapioca drink"
Suco de Pobá (Portuguese): transliterated "boba juice" from interpretation of boba
QQ: means chewy. Huh? (I found a great blagpost about this.) Q (pronounced kiu) is a common Taiwanese morpheme that no one seems to know how to write in Chinese characters. This Taiwanese "Q" meaning "chewy" can be intensified by doubling, hence "QQ糖" ("chewy-chewy candy" or "really chewy candy"). Thus Q is clearly well established in Taiwanese as meaning "chewy," and it has been picked up on the Mainland with the same meaning (especially in advertisements). Since I've never been able to determine a cognate for this "Q" in other Sinitic languages than Taiwanese and no one has ever been able to tell me how to write this Q morpheme with a Chinese character, I have sometimes wondered whether it might not have come from English "chewy" itself.

(Here are some noodles that are presumably al dente, or "chewy.")

But what about this word BOBA?!

I've read a couple of different things.
1. As I suspected! BOBA - From the Chinese word 泡沫, which is in turn derived phonetically from the English word bubble.

2. However, I also read this! Boba, a Cantonese slang, literally means the "dominatrix of breasts", connoting the image of a busty woman. "Bo" (波) is a slang for the breast which refers to the milk.

How true are these?!?! I used Khya's secret infallible tool, YellowBridge.

1. This word, 泡沫, is actually pàomò--which doesn't really sound like "bubble" very much. The first part, 泡 (pào) means to bubble, to foam, to blister, or to get off with [a sexual partner]. ! The second part, 沫 (mò) means foam, suds or froth.
This all sounds like a good name for what we've described as bubble tea, however, I'm still not convinced it's where we get BOBA from.

2. Bō, 波 means wave, ripple, surge, storm. Ok, I can see the stretch by which this could mean breasts.

Let's break it down further. (Chinese is fun!) Remember mò above? Put mò and bō and side by side. 沫 and 波. The little front part that looks like a sideways Y with two eyelashes is common to both of them! That part, 氵 means water! It's the second part that's different in these two characters. In mò, 末 means end, insignificant... which sounds right for making suds or foam. Water + insignificant = froth. Check. In bō, the second part of the character, 皮 means skin, hide, fur or feather (basically any exterior of the body). I'm not sure that water + skin = wave, but water + exterior could= wave or storm.

More importantly, if in the Chinese subconscious 波 denotes wave or surge but connotes skin, I definitely see how it could come to be slang for breasts.

So in this 2nd argument BOBA referring to breasts and milk and bubble tea, what does the BA mean? This is just my guess but I found two possibilities.

把 (bǎ) means to hold or to grasp, particularly with the second half of this character, 巴 meaning to greatly desire (this is a pictographic character, picture of a snake! whatttt)
拔 (bá) means to pull up, draw out by suction. This is probably the right one.

Ding ding ding do we have a winner?! I think so.
Bō (meaning storm but implying boobs/milk) + bá (drawn up by suction) must= bubble tea!

DELICIOUS.

McIntosh Apples

2010-06-20T12:51:00.002-05:00

(Answering Jon)

Why is Macintosh called Macintosh? Did Steve Jobs come up with that? Ummmm... I don't know.
What even came first? The Mac or the Apple?

Apple Computers, Inc. was established in 1976 (not until 2007 did they change the name to Apple Inc.) and the first computer Steves Jobs and Wozniak built was called the Apple I.
Why Apple, though?? I'm still not sure. Various answers float about the internet, such as:

(WikiAnswers) Steve gave his team members one day time to think about a good name of his company otherwise he will put the company name A for Apple.He got so many name at the end of the day but didn't like any one so he kept Apple.
In referenced to Sir Isaac Newton.
In honor of the Beatles and their Apple Records. I haven't read anything solid about this being true, although we do know that he is a big fan of the Beatles. He was quoted saying:

My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other's negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.

(According to Khya, a new manager at an Apple store) "because it was Steve Job's favoirte fruit, yo." And later, "At least that's what Steve said when I texted him."

The first Macintosh was not introduced until 1984. Jobs wanted to name it after his favorite apple, the McIntosh, but had to change the spelling to Macintosh because there was an audio equipment company already named McIntosh.

McIntosh apples are actually really common in North America, used for applesauce, cider and pies. They're the ones that are red and green! There are internet rumors that Jobs used to work in an apple orchard, but I highly doubt it.

International Linguistic Olympiad

2010-06-09T00:27:00.002-05:00

I was at the NAQT HSNCT two weekends ago in Chicago and Andw and I got to talking about linguistics with one of the teams. They were really excited because they had recently started a Linguistics Olympiad team at their school.

I had never heard of this, so I looked into it. Looks like the North American Linguistic Olympiad is part of the International Linguistic Olympiad (ILO), which is in turn part of the International Science Olympiad, which is really neat. I love languages because they're the perfect blend of math and art. This makes so much sense. I love it when things make sense.

Here's some info about how the Olympiad works (according to their Wiki article):

This olympiad furthers the field of mathematical, theoretical and descriptive linguistics. Like all science olympiads, its problems are translated and completed in several languages and as such must be written free of any native language constraints. In practice, this is often difficult and competitors may gain some advantage if they are familiar with one or more of the language groups which are the subject of some of the assignments. However, the most helpful ability is analytic and deductive thinking, as all solutions must include clear reasoning and justification (as in solving mathematical problems).

The individual contest consists of 5 problems which must be solved in 6 hours. The problems cover the main fields of theoretical, mathematical and applied linguistics – phonetics, morphology, semantics, etc.

Since the 2nd ILO, the team contest has consisted of one extremely difficult and time-consuming problem. Teams, which generally consist of 4 students, are given 3–4 hours to solve this problem.

ILO 5 (2007) was held in St. Petersburg, Russia. The five problems at the individual contest were in Braille, Movima, Georgian, Ndom, and correspondences between Turkish and Tatar. The team problem was in Hawaiian and focused on genealogical terms.

ILO 6 (2008) was held in Slantchev Bryag, Bulgaria. The five individual problems were in Micmac, Old Norse poetry (specificially, drottkvætt), Drehu and Cemuhî correspondences, Copainalá Zoque, and Inuktitut. The team problem was about correspondences between Mandarin and Cantonese using the fanqie system.

ILO 7 (2009) was held in Wrocław, Poland, from July 26 to July 30. The subject matter of the five individual problems covered: numerals in the Sulka language, Maninka and Bamana languages in the N'Ko and Latin scripts, traditional Burmese names and their relation with dates of birth, stress position in Old Indic and the relation between grammar and morphology in classical Nahuatl. The team problem was in Vietnamese.

I'm going to look for some sample questions/problems. I'll post them here and attempt to work them out, with your help!

How fast can a word become legit?

2010-06-03T17:52:00.002-05:00

As I had mentioned before (here and here), I guess I had forgotten that *not* everyone reads xkcd. But THEY SHOULD! http://www.xkcd.com/

Back in May, we saw this image:

To be clear: this Wikipedia page did not exist at the time, but it now does, and redirects to xkcd. I mean, I heard some people created it right away when this xkcd was posted, but then Wiki deleted it.

What does it actually mean?
Actually malamanteau is a combination of two words malapropism and portmanteau.

Malapropism means to use a word in place of another word that makes the same sound, but doesn’t deliver an appropriate meaning, for example, odorous for odious, comprehended for apprehended and auspicious for suspicious and benefactors for malefactors. All these are malapropos of each other.
Portmanteau means to merge two words with each other in such a way that the sounds of the two words become merged as well as their meanings. In this case malamanteau is a portmanteau of portmanteau and malapropism, whereas malamanteau is also a malapropos of portmanteau.

I love that this little comic strip caused so much rukus!
Within hours of its posting, malamanteau was already defined in http://www.wordnik.com/ and Urban Dictionary [although there, it’s “a word defined to infuriate Wikipedia editors”]. Time from the word’s debut in a comic strip to appearance in a dictionary: less than half a day.

Whether you consider malamanteau to be a real word or an elaborate joke, it is a classic example of the kind of word that people argue about when they argue about what makes a word real.

If we leave the circumstances of its birth aside, malamanteau already has a number of the qualities we associate with real words. It has a clearly defined meaning, and seems to be fairly useful (we all recognize the real-world phenomenon that it attempts to describe). It has been used, or at least looked up, by thousands of people. On May 12 it made the top 10 list on Google Trends.

Its comic-strip origins may cast a shadow on its credibility, but comics have given us a number of new words — brainiac, goon, and skunkworks were all either coined or popularized in comics.

So: Is malamanteau a “real” word? It may depend on what you consider real — does a word’s “realness” comes from its use, or from its pedigree? For some, malamanteau will only become real when it’s used, unconsciously, by someone who’s never heard of xkcd. Every old word was a new word once, and at some point “silly word prank” may yet turn into “etymology.” It’s possible that day will never come, but until then, I say, if it acts like a word, we might as well let it be one.

Linguistics!

2010-05-28T23:59:00.002-05:00

I had this professor once--back in college--who taught an honors seminar on Eastern Philosophies or something like that. I loved this guy--he claimed to have inadvertently gotten something stupid like 11 bachelor's degrees, 3 master's and one doctorate degree along his path of taking classes that looked interesting.
Since he told us that, I decided I want to do it, too. --Just take classes on and off throughout life, accidentally accumulating degrees. Why not?

So I work for Verizon Wireless nowadays [we never stop working for you], and I've decided to take advantage of their tuition assistance program. I'm enrolling at Tulane University* in the fall, here in New Orleans, and am going to take a couple of linguistics classes each semester. Why not?

Check out a rough listing of Tulane's linguistics courses here.

I'm soooo excited! I can't wait! I've never taken an official linguistics class before.**

*My alterior motive is to join their quizbowl team and finagle NAQT into having the ICT in New Orleans again next year.
**Of course I'm not forgetting Dr. Hall's Studies of the English Language (aka "Slang") class I took back in 2003 at LSMSA. He's what got me started in all this in the first place!

ORANGED!

2010-05-25T17:05:00.001-05:00

So Khya and I work on basic Spanish throughout the day, and it was called to my attention how strange the word "anaranjado" is. In Spanish, NARANJA means orange (fruit), and in some countries they use the same word for the adjective (color), but in Mexico, the color is ANARANJADO which could be literally translated to "oranged." It's the past tense verb form of orange, as if "to orange" were a verb, but it's not, really.

My Honduran co-worker also says anaranjado for the color; my Cuban co-worker didn't know how to say orange in Spanish and my El Salvadorian co-worker says naranja.

The funny thing is that no other color name is in that past-tense verb form. But then again, none of those words double in meaning for some other noun. In fact, if you do see a color word in that verb form, it means a derivation of that color. For instance, azulado from azul connotes "bluish." I also found blancuzco from blanco, verdáceo from verde and violáceo from violeta--but I've never heard those used in real life.

My best guess is that we only use the different form for the color orange to differentiate it from the noun.

I did some research. We have Orange in English, French and German; Naranja in Spanish; Arancia in Italian and Laranja in Portuguese. Where does this word even come from?

According to the dictionary, From Arabic نارنج (nāranj), from Persian نارنگ (nārang), from Sanskrit नारङ्ग (nāraṅga), “‘orange tree’”), itself of uncertain origin, possibly Dravidian.

I got the following from that same Etymologically Speaking guy. Like I said before, some of his stuff sounds outlandish, but everything I double checked elsewhere was in fact, true. However, this I can't seem to find any support for, except that he himself has been quoted countless times all over the interbutt.*

Interestingly, none of these terms come from the Latin word for orange, citrus aurentium; instead, they all come from the ancient Sanskrit naga ranga, which literally means "fatal indigestion for elephants."

In certain traditions the orange, not the apple, is the fruit responsible for original sin.

There was an ancient Malay fable--which made its way into the Sanskrit tongue around the Seventh or Eighth Centuries B.C.--that links the orange to the sin of gluttony** and has an elephant as the culprit. Apparently, one day an elephant was passing through the forest, when he found a tree unknown to him in a clearing, bowed downward by its weight of beautiful, tempting oranges; as a result, the elephant ate so many that he burst. Many years later a man stumbled upon the scene and noticed the fossilized remains of the elephant with many orange trees growing from what had been its stomach. The man then exclaimed, "Amazing! What a naga ranga (fatal indigestion for elephants)!"

*Bradshaw of the Future seems to think it's false, but his jump from pume orenge to melarancio presents a problem for me. That particular jump is the key, but I see no support for it.

**Now this I do believe--oranges being the sinful fruits in cultural myths. Here's why: it's probably a translation issue. In many languages, oranges are, implicitly or explicitly, referred to as a type of apple, specifically a golden apple or a Chinese apple.

For example, the Greek χρυσομηλιά (chrysomelia) and Latin pomum aurantium both literally describe oranges as golden apples. In other languages like German, Finnish, Polish, or Russian the terms for the bitter orange (a related species) are derived from Latin pomum aurantium. Additionally, the Hebrew word תפוז (tapuz) is a shortened form of תפוח זהב (tapuakh zahav), or golden apple.

In Dutch, sweet oranges are called sinaasappel, which is derived from China's apple. The Latvian apelsīns, Icelandic appelsína, Swedish apelsin, Finnish appelsiini, Russian апельсин (apelsin) and North-German Apfelsine share similar etymology.

Hm.

Etymologically Speaking

2010-05-25T08:46:00.017-05:00

I happened upon this great website called Etymologically Speaking written by Stephen Morgan Freidman. He's happened upon *quite a few* interesting etymological discoveries, so I thought I'd copy and paste my favorites here. I'm putting them into categories for you. Some of them seemed too outlandish to be true, but I've double checked a lot of them in the OED and they are all solid, believe it or not.

Marriage and Women:

Gorilla
New Latin from Greek Gorillai, for a tribe of hairy women, from Hanno's account of his voyage along the N.W. coast of Africa, c.500 B.C.E. (Check line 18 here.)

Husband
Comes from the Old German words hus and bunda, which mean "house" and "owner," respectively. The word originally had nothing to do with marital status, except for the fact that home ownership made husbands extremely desirable marriage partners.

Food and Drink:

Companion; Compañero (Spanish); Copain (French) Companion
From the Latin "Companionem," "Con" (with) and "Pan" (bread) -- presumably, your "companion" was someone with whom you would "break bread.
This one is so obvious! How did I never see it before?!

Gin; Ginebra (Spanish); Genievre (French)

The English word "gin" comes from the French word genievre, which means "juniper," the name of the berry which gives gin its distinctive, bitter flavor. Incidentally, the term "juniper" comes from the Celtic word jenupus, meaning "bitter." The Swiss city Geneva also stems from the same source. Apparently, the countryside around Geneva had originally been filled with wild juniper plants.

Groggy

Comes from the description of the feeling that many British sailors experienced when they would drink too much "grog," a mixture of rum and water. Grog is said to have taken its name from the nickname of "Old Grog" given to British Admiral Vernon by his sailors; much like Lord Mountbatten later, he was in the habit of wearing a kind of heavy coat of grogram, a coarse weatherproof fabric (the word comes from the French gros-grain). The sailors started to apply their nickname for him in a rather derisive way to their rations of rum, after he mandated in 1740 that they be diluted with water.

Vinegar

Comes from the Latin vin aigre, meaning "sour wine."

Biscuit
From the mediaeval French 'Bis + cuit' meaning 'cooked twice'

Gods and such:

Witness
From the pre-Christian, Germanic term "witan", which means wise, tribal elders (literally, those who follow the way of the Norse god "Wodin" or "Odin").

Work and Business:

Slogan
from 2 Celtic words: "slaugh" and "gheun" which mean, respectively, "battle" and "cry".

Essay
The English noun essay comes from the French verb "essayer," to try. Early intellectuals believed their papers to be only a modest attempt to put their ideas on paper.
I always wondered about this one.

Cravate (French); Krawatte (German); Corbata (Spanish) Tie
The term "Krawatte" (German), "cravate" (French) and "corbata" (Spanish), which all mean a man's "tie", first originated in the Napoleonic Wars when French troops were entering the territory of Crotia, which, at that time, was part of the Holy Roman Empire. Apparently the Croatians were so estatic to be rid of the German Habsburg yoke that they showered the triumphant French troops with flowers and ran up to them and tucked squares of red cloth in the collars of their uniforms as a gesture of goodwill. From them on the term "Croat" or a variation thereof seems to have stuck in may parts of Continental Europe.

Quizballers:

Trivia
The derivation of the word trivia comes from the Latin for "crossroads": "tri-" + "via", which means three streets. This is because in ancient times, at an intersection of three streeets in Rome, they would have a type of kiosk where ancillary information was listed. You might be interested in it, you might not, hence they were bits of "trivia."

Huh! and Well of course:

Barbarian
From the Greek "barbaroi," meaning "babblers," used to mean non-Greeks, i.e., people who didn't speak Greek; from the sound that the Greeks thought they were making: "bar bar bar bar..."

Pedigree
From the French "Ped de gru," which means or meant, "Crane's foot," the /|\ symbol "used to denote succession in a genealogical table.

Denim/Jeans
The tough cloth used in jeans was originally made in Nimes, France, as well as Genoa, Italy (hence "jeans"). It was called Serge di Nimes--later shortened to di Nimes, which became denim.

Assassin
From the old Arabic word "hashshshin," which meant, "someone who is addicted to hash," that is, marijuana. Originally refered to a group of warriors who would smoke up before battle.

Alarm
From the Italian, "All'arme" -- "To arms!"

Escape
In Latin, escape means "out of cape." The ancient Romans would often avoid capture by throwing off their capes when fleeing.

Malaria
From the medieval Italian "mal'" (bad) and "aria" (air), describing the miasma from the swamps around Rome in the summer months, believed to be the cause of fevers.

Thermostat
"Therma" (hot) is from the Greek city of Therma, known for its hot springs. Among the most healing yet radioactive springs in the world, look.

Debonair
French for "of good air." In the Middle Ages, people's health was judged partly by how they smelled. A person who gave off "good air" was presumed healthier and happier.

Derive
From the Latin "De Rivus," "From a stream."

Elite
From the Latin elire, meaning "to choose," from which we also get the modern Spanish word meaning the same, elegir.

Tennis
"Tennis," a sport which first developed in France, was originally "tenez" (pronounced tuh-nay) which is the French verb "tenir" conjugated at the second person of the plural as a polite imperative verb (translated in this case by something like "there you go"). They were saying "tenez" when they hit the ball so as to say :"there, try to get this one". But tennis lost popularity in France and gained popularity in England at the same time. So, English people were still using the word "tenez" each time they hit the ball, but saying it with the English accent which sounded more like tennis, and which eventually took this new spelling. Then the sport gained popularity world wide and got picked up by many languages, including French.

The Circle of Life!

2010-04-24T16:44:00.006-05:00

I recently downloaded the African chant from the beginning of The Circle of Life as my ringtone. It's awesome.

People laugh when I sing along... and CJ asked me what the lyrics translate to. I don't know. Let's look it up. I knew it's in Zulu. I read the chant was created by Lebo M., who is from South Africa. The rest of the song is music by Elton John, lyrics by Tim Rice:

Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba

Sithi uhm ingonyama

Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba

Sithi uhhmm ingonyama

Ingonyama

Siyo Nqoba

Ingonyama

Ingonyama nengw' enamabala

Translates to:

Here comes a lion, Father

Oh yes, it's a lion

Here comes a lion, Father

Oh yes, it's a lion

A lion

We're going to conquer

A lion and a leopard come to this open place

I think the Zulu lyrics sound a lot more impressive.

I noticed this Baba meaning father, and it rings a bell. Isn't baba the word for father in a few other languages? Sure is!

Language develops from function and necessity. Seeing as how baba is one of the easiest syllables for babies to pronounce, along with "mama," "papa" and "dada," it has become the word for father in a lot of languages like Albanian, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Bangla, Persian, Swahili, Turkish.

The Middle Eastern word "baba" (as in Ali Baba) is rather a term of endearment, and is ultimately derived from Persian بابا (bābā), “‘father’”) (from Old Persian pāpa; as opposed to the Arabic words ابو (’ábu) and أب (’ab), as well as the Turkish word ata; see also Papak) , and is linguistically related to the common European word papa and the word pope, having the same Indo-European origin.

It's a great ringtone.

LingLing and Sean

2010-04-23T14:53:00.012-05:00

I have a lovely co-worker named Collying. (It's ok to reveal her identity because if you Google just the first name Collying, she's the fifth result.) It's pronounced coʊ - lin' (like "coco"), not cɑ - leen "Colleen". She's really pretty and she's from Honduras but customers at the store all the time mistakingly think she's Asian somehow.

She doesn't really look very Asian at all. I think her nametag throws the customers for a loop. I overheard a customer once ask her, "Is Coll your first name and Ying your last name?" What an ass. --but visually, you know, at first glance... I understand spotting the ying.

Because she's Hispanic, of course her mother has the same name as her. (See post below.) Aside from that, though, there seems to be no other record of anyone ever named Collying. Ling says her mom--or her grandmother, I guess--read a character in a book named Collying and liked it, but I have found no such character in any such book. According to the official White Pages, there is only one Collying listed in the whole country. I'm assuming that is her mother, because she's listed in Louisiana. (There are 415 Chelas.)

Having lived in Ireland for a while, and having been exposed to some of their outrageous and lovely names, I noticed a lot of their traditional names end in -ing so I made the connection and assumed Collying was a traditional variation of the Irish name Colleen. OR SO I THOUGHT. I came home, searched and searched and searched. Turns out, the only Irish name I can think of with -ing is Aisling, pronounced "ash-ling"--but I think it such a pretty name, it must have stuck in my mind.

The fact that collying--as in "to colly", pronounced /ˈkɒlin/ is an actual verb [meaning to blacken with coal dust; begrime], it was tough to search around that. In Irish and Irish English I actually found no record whatsoever of the name Collying ever existing. There is no evidence--in fact there is evidence to the contrary--that Collying is in any way a derivation of Colleen. The Irish spelling of Colleen is Cailin (meaning "girl"), but if anything, that became Americanized to Kaylin or Cailin.

So really, I was all wrong. -ing is not really a common Irish name ending, and Collying is in no way related to Colleen. I think they just made it up.

---

Sean likes to argue. A lot. About everything. On a recent trip to Chicago, the question came up: "Is Sean more of an Irish name or Scottish? You should blog about it." Ugg. Thanks, Maggs. Ok.
WAIT. Did you know Sean is the Irish form of the name John?! I had no idea. The anglicization of Sean is Shane; and Shaina and Shanna are the female forms.

According to the last census done in Ireland by the Central Statistics Office, An Phriomh-Oifig Staidrimh, Sean is currently the most popular male name in Ireland (followed by Jack, Conor, Adam and James. The female names: Sarah, Emma, Katie, Aoife [How do you pronounce this?!] and Sophie).

Turns out Sean is in no way a Scottish name. There are no records of it as a derivation of any traditional Scottish name. Only recently in Scottland has Sean become popular in part as a result of the fame of Sean Connery (whose first name is actually Thomas). Sean was the 24th most popular boys' name to be registered in Scottland in 1999 with Shaun 51st.

In summary: Collying is not Irish and Sean is not Scottish. The end.

Cat language, pt. 2

2010-04-18T14:33:00.002-05:00

This one's for Mrs. Chris, per request.

As seen earlier, cats pervade the English language. Have you ever thought about putting something cat-a-corner to something else? Or is it catty-corner? Or wait, kitty-corner? Why are all these cats in the corner here?!?!

This phrase actually has nothing to do with cats. It's derived from cater-corner which comes from the french quatre which means four--derived from the Latin, quattuor--meaning cornered.

The expression first appeared in English as the name for the four in dice, soon Anglicised to cater. The standard placement of the four dots at the corners of a square almost certainly introduced the idea of diagonals. From this came a verb cater, to place something diagonally opposite another or to move diagonally, which can be found in the sixteenth century.

Some English dialects had it as an adverb in compounds such as caterways or caterwise. By the early years of the nineteenth century it was beginning to be recorded in the USA in the compound form of cater-cornered. It had by then lost any link with the French word; people invented spellings in attempts to make sense of it, often thinking it had something to do with cats, which is why we have forms like kitty-corner. But they were wrong.

Cat language, pt. 1

2010-04-18T09:38:00.007-05:00

Women have been compared to cats for a long time. In ancient Egypt, people used to refer to their partners as cats. A woman associated with a cat is usually a good thing, with one unfortunate exception, as we will see here.

The term sex kitten was popularized in the 1950s, referring to Brigitte Bardot and Ann Margaret. A sex kitten typically refers to a younger woman who is sexually provocative or aggressive.

There are countless examples of sexy catwomen; we can't forget Catwoman. Wanting to give his Batman comic books sex appeal and someone who could appeal to female readers as a female Batman, Kane and writer Bill Finger created a "friendly foe who committed crimes but was also a romantic interest in Batman's rather sterile life."

As for using cat imagery with their Catwoman, Batman's creator, Bob Kane states he and Bill Finger saw cats "were kind of the antithesis of bats."

"I felt that women were feline creatures and men were more like dogs. While dogs are faithful and friendly, cats are cool, detached, and unreliable. I felt much warmer with dogs around me--cats are as hard to understand as women are. Men feel more sure of themselves with a male friend than a woman. You always need to keep women at arm's length. We don't want anyone taking over our souls, and women have a habit of doing that. So there's a love-resentment thing with women. I guess women will feel that I'm being chauvinistic to speak this way, but I do feel that I've had better relationships with male friends than women. With women, once the romance is over, somehow they never remain my friends."

The term cougar was first seen on this website. Cougar typically refers to a woman at least in her 40s who is sexually attracted to much younger men. According to that website, a cougar in training who is in her 30s is called a puma and in her 20s is called a cougar cub. (I didn't realize that in real-life feline terms, cougars and pumas are the same thing: puma, mountain lion, mountain cat, catamount and panther are all the same animal. The name varies depending on the region.) It seems that puma is accepted across-the-board as a term for cougars in training; however, according to some other sources, cub is often the term for the young man who is dating the cougar.* This video explains the modern-day cougar pretty well.

We even have the group of pop singers and dancers, the Pussycat Dolls. This is obviously a reference to the crude slang pussy, referring to a woman's vagina. I'm pretty sure this came from calling a woman a sex kitten or pussy cat--which eventually degenerated into the slang we have today.

But what about the cat lady?!

The poor cat lady got the only bad cat-related reputation of the bunch. See this video. A cat lady is often a spinster who loves her cat. Crazy cat lady is a pejorative term referring to a woman who hoardes cats and often cannot take care of them all properly. According to that documentary, "these may be people who have a very hard time expressing themselves to other people. They may find the human need for affection is met most easily through a relationship with a pet." This devotion can sometimes signal mental or emotional issues such as depression. According to the book, Outing the Cat Lady: Embracing your Feline Addiction with Style, you might be a cat lady if:

Chapter 1: You have ever actually exchanged money for a cat.

Chapter 2: Your several cats are all named "Kitty."

Chapter 3: Most of your wardrobe consists of cat-themed fleece.

Chapter 5: Even though you live alone, you require a king-size bed just for you and your cats.

Bummer.

*The animal equivalents for gay men seem less flattering, in my opinion. A cub is still the young man dating someone older, in the gay community, the older man is the bear or the chicken-hawk. Other variations include chicken queen and chicken plucker. ugg.

Where does my name come from!?

2010-04-15T02:14:00.004-05:00

My name is Chela. I've been asked a hundred bazillion times where my name comes from. The answer's always the same. "It's a Spanish name, short for Graciela, which is the Spanish name for Grace. It's actually my mom's name and my grandmother's too." Sometimes I toss in some lagniappe, "it's actually a pretty common name in Spanish." --and then if it happens to come up "you know what's funny? In Mexico, Chela is a slang term for beer. I don't know why."

I never bothered to look it up. Until recently, I met this guy--I don't remember his name... I don't remember where he's from either. But he's Hispanic! And his skin tone is really light for being from--wherever he said he was from--and he told me his nickname is el Chele, which means blonde or fair. And that reminded me someone along the way told me Chela really referred to light beer. But in Mexico, anyway, it's used for beer across the board, from what I've gathered. But then again, Mexican slang is nuts.

So I found out. Go with me, here.
Cerveza means “beer” in Spanish, originally came from the medieval French word cervoise. Derived from Latin, this was used in honor of Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest. Before 1482, the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula had used the completely-unrelated ancient Iberian word ceria or celia, meaning "fermented wheat." All I can do is infer that THIS is where Chela meaning beer came from. And if it's wheat we're talking about, it makes sense for it to be light in color as opposed to dark.

I also remember from time to time that Prem would always tell me "Chela means disciple [in Hindi]." I forget that one all the time but I think it's really great. I did a little bit of research and found that to be a chela implies a peculiar degree of loyalty to one's chosen teacher and to the principles underlying his teachings. It also, and more particularly, implies a realization of the sacredness of the bond between the chela and his spiritual teacher.

They use the word chelaship almost interchangeably with discipleship, which sounds funny to me. Almost as funny as JT regularly exclaiming CHELABULOUS! Oh JT...

***
But wait! The French call it biere not cervoise!
It is interesting to note that just about the time that the Spanish were adopting the term cerveza (aroung 1482), the French started to drop cervoise in favor of the term biere– from the Germanic term Bier (from the Latin biber, “to drink”), which was the term that was more popular in northern Europe, where the climate was more favorable to the production of the grains that were used to make the beverage.

The Britney Spears of Death Note

2010-04-05T01:00:00.007-05:00

We've all been unfortunate enough to hear that catchy* Britney Spears song, If You Seek Amy. The song, of course, contains a double entendre--"if you seek amy" sounds like "f-u-c-k me."

Ok.

My friends and I have recently started a Death Note marathon. About half-way through the series, the opening song changes. We're talking about the second opening song here.

I originally watched the show with my cousin in Mexico, and the subtitles were in Spanish done by a fan group. For the opening songs, every other episode, the subtitles would be either the romanji of the Japanese lyrics, or the translation into Spanish. [You have to watch the video below for this post to make sense, beginning at 0:42 for the part I'm talking about here.] When it was in the romanji, the subtitles read "hey, hey a ningen sucker, a ningen ningen fucker."

The version my friends and I are watching now is the official version, subtitled officially into English. Khya is a big all-things-Japanese/anything-Asian,-really buff and when we watch this show, he has his Japanese dictionary on the coffee table, and throughout each episode he'll insist on pausing or rewinding to a certain phrase so he can look it up in his dictionary, exactly.

Needless to say, we've already come to many interesting linguistic conclusions and observations because of this. My comprehension of Japanese language function has increased slightly, too. --but only in theory.

When we came to this song, I was, of course, singing along. (--can't deny it's a great song.) The subtitles were only translated into English (no romanji), and he said, "Chela, they're not saying 'sucker' and 'fucker' in Japanese. That kind of u sound doesn't exist. They can't be. Let's listen again." And so we did, over and over again, and he concluded that they were not actually saying sucker and fucker. "They're doing the Britney Spears. This is the If You Seek Amy of Death Note."

Indeed, we looked up the romanji. They're saying Hey Hey Ningen sanka ai nige ningen fuan ka? Our English subtitles said HEY HEY! Human paean, does love escaping make humans nervous? which is what threw us off. The words here, "sanka" and "fuan ka" work with the theme of the song in translation. However, it is obvious that the artist chose these words specifically for the double entendre with the English words sucker and fucker.

I also later noticed, instead of saying WHAT UP, people?! they say WHAT'S UP fuanzai ippai.

Very clever, indeed.
It's a great show. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes to think.

---

*That stupid If You Seek Amy song was written by the same two guys who wrote the even worse Three song she does. If we want to discuss good pop song writing, we should discuss Lady Gaga. Gaga originally wrote "Telephone" for Britney Spears, however, Spears' label rejected it and Gaga recorded the song as a collaboration with Beyoncé Knowles for The Fame Monster. Additionally, the guest vocalist was originally going to be Spears, but for an "unknown" reason, Gaga made Knowles the featured vocalist instead. My guess is that because Britney's probably opposed to wearing rotary telephones on her head.

PI DAY

2010-03-19T22:58:00.002-05:00

(I know I'm a couple of days late, but better late than never!)

The FoFo and I went to this restaurant the other day, called "πie." I don't even know how to pronounce that! I mean, they call it "Pie" and think they're clever, but I think just the opposite.
In fact, I was hoping the i would be i and the e would be e. THAT WOULD BE CLEVER. I would eat there all the time. I still wouldn't know how to pronounce the name.

So Pi Day officially happened in the US last Sunday, because it was March 14th, but I got to wondering--what about ALL those countries that put the day first, and then the month? WHEN do they celebrate Pi Day?

Since pi is approximated to 3.14159... people in the US celebrate it March 14 as in 3/14, but countries that do DD/MM don't celebrate Pi Day on the 31st of April, they celebrate on July 22, that is, 22/7, a more precise approximation for pi.

Other days when pi is celebrated:

March 4: When 14% of the 3rd month has elapsed.
April 26: The Earth has traveled two radians of its orbit on this day (April 25 in leap years), reckoning from the start of the calendar year on January 1. The distance travelled through the entire orbit around the sun, divided by the average distance to the sun, equals 2π; two radians equals 1⁄π of our orbit. This is celebrated exactly on the 41st second of the 23rd minute of the 4th hour on April 26 or the 116th day. (In leap years, it is celebrated exactly on the 3rd second of the 2nd minute of the 12th hour on April 25 or the 116th day.) This celebration is not a Pi Approximation Day.

November 10: The 314th day of the year (November 9 in leap years).

December 21, 1:13 p.m.: The 355th day of the year (December 20 in leap years), celebrated at 1:13 for the Chinese approximation 355/113.

DID YOU KNOW!?

Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879.

Wives and Snakes.

2010-03-09T00:43:00.008-06:00

So I was in Mexico recently, and I was telling the awful story of the PoPo on Mardi Gras day, and came across the word I had to use for handcuffs. ESPOSAS. Do you know what that means?! Wives. Handcuffs, in Spanish, are literally WIVES.
This doesn't happen in any other languages that I know of.

Was this just slang that gained popularity or what?! No, no. There are two explanations of this that deviate from the same root.

We can agree on:
SPONSUS is the Latin meaning pledged, as in a business contract or agreement--or later, as in marriage. Hence the word spouse in English and epouser (v to marry) in French, along with esposo and esposa (husband and wife, respectively) in Spanish.

So it can be said that from there, the word evolved into meaning wife, and also, separately, into meaning handcuffs--as in something binding--like that contract.

However, some believe that because in ancient marriage rituals, wives would cross their hands in the same position prisoners would get handcuffed in, or because husbands and wives would, in some traditions, symbollically have their hands tied together during the ceremony, this was a more literal evolution into actual handcuffs being called ESPOSAS.
Either way, I'm sure some feminist group out there is pissed about this.

I also happened upon some Venezuelan Spanish slang. (This is kind of akin to our BITCH in English):
CUAIMA is a slang term for a woman who, according to my googling, is "trained since childhood to screw men over and to be suspicious, jealous, possessive, manipulative, dominating, controlling, fear-inducing."
Cuaima is actually a kind of very poisonous snake.

Your wife. That's right.

She's an ACTOR.

2010-03-08T13:33:00.008-06:00

I live with a bunch of actors. Helen is a working female actor--she thinks the term "actress" is limiting to women acting in female roles. "Actor" is an all-encompassing term for both men and women playing both male and female roles. She quoted Whoopi Goldberg, “An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor, I can play anything.”

I didn't realize there was so much real debate over this. I was watching the Academy Awards last night, and noted the diction. They call the category "Best Actress in a Leading Role" and so on, but I recall also watching the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the category they have is "Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role" and personally, I think they have it right. The diction is so much more precise. (Or maybe they're both precise and I just like what the SAG honors better.) The Academy is honoring the actress; the SAG honors the performance.

In the days of the Motion Picture Production Code (between the 1930s and 60s), the gender-neutral term "player" was encouraged, but now is deemed archaic when referencing an actor. We still see this term, though, in acting groups or companies, such as Tulane's Patchwork Players.

Anyway, let's look at where ACTRESS comes from.
First used in English in the mid-1800s as a combination of the word ACTOR (first used in English in the mid 1300s, from Latin āctor, from āctus, past participle of agere, to drive, do) and the feminine noun ending -ess.

-ESS, -ENNE, -ETTE, -TRIX
have all been present in English at some point, but are being done away with to varying degrees. (These all obviously come from French, except for -trix which comes from Latin.)

-ESS was first used for noble titles such as countess, princess, duchess. Lots of these nouns were created in the 14th century, and didn't start to sharply decline until the latter half of the 20th century. Of course. We no longer use devouress or dwelleress. --but I wish we did.

In the fourth edition of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (1977) was the first time we really started seeing these genderless job-titles. Flight attendant popped up instead of steward and stewardess. Authoress, poetess, scultpress, editress all disappeared in exchange for their formerly masculine now gender-neutral counterparts author, poet, sculptor, editor.
According to the OED, very few of these -ess terms are still current. Among these: actress, adventuress, enchantress, hostess (though women TV and radio show hosts are just hosts), seamstress, seductress, sorceress, temptress, and waitress (the gender-neutral server is now also looked down upon).
Some of these feminine forms took on different meanings all together during their evolution. Ambassadress, mayoress, and governess all disappeared in their political forms, but because governess took on the connotation of childcare, it remained in use. Also, mistress remains in use though master now also has a gender-neutral use. Imagine if we said: She is a financial planning mistress. lolololololollololololol

-ENNE. We don't have a whole lot of these and the OED says using this usually isn't derogative. Equestrian has the form equestrienne; pedestrian has no corresponding feminine term. Although we have both comedienne and tragedienne, there is no feminine variant for thespian.

-ETTE really isn't used for people anymore except for bachelorette and brunette, I guess since it's not only a feminine suffix but also diminutive. We don't see majorette, farmerette, suffragette or usherette but we do see cigarette, kitchenette and etiquette--which are all really derived as smaller forms of their bigger nouns.

-TIRX. We don't see this one a whole lot either--mainly only remains in legalese, like administratrix, executrix, inheritrix. ... I don't know why we like dominatrix but not aviatrix or oratrix.

Sooo... looking at this from a strictly statistical standpoint, the term ACTRESS should be on its way out.

Half-way related: Kim Elsesser's New York Times Op-Ed article. She argues in favor of gender-neutral acting awards.

WHO DAT?!

2010-02-07T22:56:00.017-06:00

The New Orleans Saints just won the Super Bowl.

We cheer:

WHO DAT?! WHO DAT?!

WHO DAT SAY DEY GONNA BEAT DEM SAINTS?!

WHERE did that come from? I remember being a little kid going to the Saints games with my dad and always cheering "who dat?!" For as far back as my New Orleanian memory serves me, that's been the Saints' cheer.

There was some controversy recently over the ownership/trademarking of the phrase WHO DAT. I'm not here to discuss the issues of word and phrase ownership, but I am here to tell you about the history of WHO DAT.

What about before football?
The first reference to "Who Dat?" can be found in the 19th Century. A featured song in E.E. Rice's "Summer Nights" is the song "Who Dat Say Chicken In dis Crowd", with lyrics by poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

A common tag line in the days of Negro minstrel shows was: "Who dat?" answered by "Who dat say who dat?"

WHO DAT was supposedly used in minstrel shows to scare away ghosts as part of a comedy routine. I've been told the Marx Brothers even incorporate this kind of classic sketch into A Day at the Races, but seeing as how I've never seen the film, I can't say for sure. (None of the youTube videos I saw had it in there either.) Many different blackfaced gags played off that opening. Vaudeville performer Mantan Moreland was known for the routine.

1938 saw a cartoon called Lil Ol Bosko in Bagdad (which has now of course been banned as racist) where we definitely see evidence of this. Check it out! [specifically, minute 1:18]

Another example is "Swing Wedding," a 1930s Harman-Ising cartoon musical, which caricatured Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ethel Waters, and the Mills Brothers as frogs in a swamp performing minstrel show jokes and jazz tunes. The frogs used the phrase "who dat?" around minute 6:19 look!

In the football world, though...

There are a few different ideas as to where this came from:

Some claim it began with Southern University fans either in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Southern is a traditionally black university in Baton Rouge, LA and their mascot is the jaguar. Their cheer says, "Who dat say dey gonna beat dem Jags?!" Ok, possible. I don't know much more about this, though.

The more likely claim is that the cheer originated at Patterson High School in Patterson, Louisiana (home of Saints running back Dalton Hilliard). In the late 70's/early 80's, Hilliard's high school team made it all the way to the Superdome for the state championship against John Curtis. Rumor has it that the Patterson Lumberjack fans brought a chant to New Orleans with them of "Who Dat say dey gonna beat dem Jacks". The chant followed Hilliard everywhere he went. After 4 years at LSU where the chant scored some popularity, Hilliard was drafted by the Saints. It is said that the chant followed him to New Orleans and spread like wildfire amongst the fans. By 1983, the New Orleans Saints organization officially adopted it during the tenure of coach Bum Phillips, and Aaron Neville recorded a version of "When the Saints Go Marching In" that incorporated the chant (performed by a group of Saints players) that became a major local hit, due in part to the support of sportscaster Ron Swoboda and the fact that Saints fans had been using the chant already.

The Cincinnati Bengals? The entire chant is: "Who dey! Who dey! Who dey think gonna beat dem Bengals?" The answer screamed in unison, "Nobody!" They've since altered the spelling, and I think the chant is different enough. I have found no evidence of these two being actually related.

According to Bobby Hebert, formerly a Saints quarterback and currently a sports commentator in New Orleans, the term "Who Dat Nation" originated after a highly anticipated 2006 game between the Saints and the favored Dallas Cowboys, which the Saints won; after the game, listeners from a wide geographic range called in to Hebert's radio show on WWL (AM), and Hebert commented, "Man, there's a whole Who Dat Nation out there." You can listen to the article here.

soy milk and almond milk ARE NOT MILK

2010-01-19T02:33:00.007-06:00

So we all remember Lewis Black's bit about soy milk.

Soy milk. There's no such thing as soy milk. It's soy juice, but they couldn't sell soy juice because any time you say soy juice, you actually start to gag. ... We all know there is no soy milk because there is no soy titty, is there?

But honestly, he's right, isn't he?

Khya recently bought some AlmondMilk. Did he mean almond flavored soy milk? or almond flavored real milk? No, just almond milk. Milk made from almonds. But there is no almond titty either, so what in the world is he talking about?

I was so confused, and it didn't taste very good at all. But what I realized was, actually, it was more gratifying if you didn't go into the tasting experience with the milk-expectation. I insisted they think of it as juice and it would taste better. For me it did, anyway.

But what makes something a milk and what makes something a juice? Juice is always fat free? That's why coconut __ is coconut milk. ? Perhaps. Or maybe the only stipulation for being a milk is that it looks like milk. moocowfuckmilk, that is.

According to the dictionary,

milk is:

1. an opaque white or bluish-white liquid secreted by the mammary glands of female mammals, serving for the nourishment of their young.

2. this liquid as secreted by cows, goats, or certain other animals and used by humans for food or as a source of butter, cheeses, yogurt, etc.

3. any liquid resembling this, as the liquid within a coconut, the juice or sap of certain plants, or various pharmaceutical preparations.
juice is:
1. the natural fluid, fluid content, or liquid part that can be extracted from a plant or one of its parts, esp. of a fruit: orange juice.
2. the liquid part or contents of plant or animal substance.
3. the natural fluids of an animal body: gastric juices.
4. any extracted liquid.
So it seems like technically, according to definition #4 of juice, milk must be a subset of juice.
I looked for anything that might be called almond juice instead of almond milk. I found a Chinese product called LOLO Almond Juice, but it has the same ingredients as almond milk--ground almonds and water blended together.
Wiki also issues this warning: users should be cautious not to use bitter almonds, since the combination of bitter almonds and water releases cyanide.
... And coconut juice redirects to coconut water, which is completely different. Coconut water is the clear liquid inside young coconuts (fruits of the coconut palm), not to be confused with coconut milk. As the fruit matures, the coconut water gradually is replaced by the coconut meat and air. A very young coconut has very little meat, and the meat is very tender, almost a gel. Coconut milk is a sweet, milky white cooking base derived from the meat of a mature coconut.
I *guess* we can call it almond milk... but I think you'll have a better time if you think of it as almond juice.

BREAKFAST BLAGGGGGGGGGG

2010-01-17T10:43:00.005-06:00

My wonderful roommate Maffo made me some French toast this morning!
The result: a whole slew of blag ideas! and a delicious morning.

I asked, is French toast really French? He said, I think so. In French, it's called pain perdu. That means lost bread. WHY is it called that?

Also, powdered sugar. He met a Spanish girl in Finland who didn't know what powdered sugar was. Do they have powdered sugar in Spain?? I don't know! But in Mexico, they do. It's called azucar glas. WHAT? Why?

Ok, here we go.

According to the International House of Pancakes--that's right, IHOP, French toast is not necessarily French in origin; it is likely that the recipe dates back to medieval times and may have been a logical “invention” by different peoples, akin to battering and frying any food. Supposedly it was originally known in England and America as "German toast", prior to the First World War, when it was changed because of anti-German sentiment.

But I think it's even older than that. A version appears in the 4th century Roman cookbook, often attributed to Apicius, "Aliter dulcia: siligineos rasos frangis, et buccellas maiores facies. in lacte infundis, frigis [et] in oleo, mel superfundis et inferes." - "Another sweet: Break grated Sigilines (a kind of wheat bread), and make larger bites. Soak in milk, fry in oil, douse in honey and serve."

It turns out now, variations of French toast are popular all over the world. The names also vary from country to country; however, "lost bread" seems to be a popular name for it in countries' respective languages. In France and other Francophone places, it is called pain perdu, or "lost bread", since it is a way to reclaim stale, "lost", bread: hard bread is softened by dipping in a mixture of milk and eggs, then deep fried.

About powdered sugar. Well, first of all, in reading the variations of French bread around the world, I read that in Spain, it is called torrijas and is typically made during Lent, out of thick slices of bread soaked in milk or wine, dipped in egg, fried and then drenched in spiced honey. No mention of powdered sugar... so I *guess* I'll buy that they just don't have any there.

Powdered sugar is essentially sugar that has been pulverized--made into a powder. I translated around to a handful of languages and the respective names for powdered sugar all reflect this. EXCEPT IN SPANISH. It's called azucar glas. Why? Glas in this case is short for glaseado, which means glazed--which makes a lot of sense seeing as how the primary purpose of powdered sugar is for making glazes and frostings, really.

Glas is really the Spanishization of the French word glace (pronounced the same way) which means frozen. Like frosting. Zomg it all comes together now.

Jeep

2010-01-17T09:34:00.004-06:00

Butterflies flutter by.

2009-12-17T23:32:00.010-06:00

So I told Ms. Chris about my blag and she had one pressing etymological question: Where does "butterfly" come from? I had never thought about it, but she had been wondering for years, apparently.

And then I realized, the word for butterfly is vastly different in every language I could think of off the top of my head.

The most likely origin of the English word seems to be

based on the old notion that the insects (or witches disguised as butterflies) consume butter or milk that is left uncovered

although some people also think it is based on the color and consistency of butterfly excrement. This explanation is highly unlikely. Now, I don't know about you, but I had never really looked at butterfly excrement before.

What about in other languages?

Off the top of my head:

Spanish - Mariposa - from "la Santa Maria posa" = "the Virgin Mary alights/rests" ?

French - Papillon - this actually comes from the Latin papilio meaning butterfly. Our English word pavilion comes from the same root... a canopy spread out like wings.

German - Schmetterling - from "Schmetten", an Upper Saxon dialect loan-word first used 16 & 17th C, from Czech "smetana", both meaning "cream", referring to butterflies' proclivity to hover around milkpails, butterchurns, etc. Folk belief had it that the butterflies were really witches out to steal the cream.

Tagfalter is another name for butterfly, perhaps meaning "day-hinge" or "day-folder", and Nachtfalter is a moth.

Italian - Farfalla - This also comes from the Latin. (Eventually I'm going to do a post about how p's became f's and f's became h's. ...later.) This is also the English word for those bow-tie pasta things that look like butterflies.

Notably, a few others:

Norwegian and Yiddish both call it a "summerbird," sommerfugl and zomerfeygele respectively.

Babochka in Russian. This means "butterfly" or "bow tie." Go with me here. Baba or Babka means woman or grandmother. Babushka can mean grandmother or grandmother-like-thing, like a grandmother-like-handkercheif, like one that can be tied to the shape of a butterfly, babochka.

a linguistic phenomenon from Facebook

2009-12-16T14:21:00.003-06:00

from Andw:

So I received this FB message about an Under 40 Mixer for one of the mayoral candidates. It's a decent idea, I guess, for marketing to the young crowd-- but CHECK OUT THE WORDS THEY USE. It's awesome.

--Andrew

Townsend Jordan sent a message to the members of Under 40 Mixer!

--------------------

Subject: HOTTIES & TROOPERS: RAIN or SHINE, Park at Windsor Court

BRING YOUR A-GAME. JUST FOR TROOPERS AND HOTTIES.

To get out of the rain all you have to do is to park right there at Windsor Court- The Polo Lounge validates!

OPEN DOOR & OPEN BAR. Get Excited.
(Yes, the mixer's FREE!- OPEN BAR AND FREE HORS D'OEUVRES!)

TOP FLOOR, WINDSOR COURT Chinoisserie Ballroom
5:30pm-7:00pm. Come from work!

AFTER PARTY TO FOLLOW IN POLO LOUNGE!
If you cannot make mixer, join us later. There be a slew of us hamming it up in the Polo Lounge for a while. GET NICE.

Yes, the MAYORAL DEBATE will be on! Watch it with us.

QUICK FACTS:
What: Under 40 Mixer for Jackie Clarkson, Council-At-Large
When: Tuesday Dec 15, 5:30PM-7:00PM
Where: Windsor Court - Chinoiserie Ballroom- 23rd Floor
RSVP: Townsend Jordan, Campaign Manager
townsend@jackieclarkson.com
504-710-1203

Come One. Come All.

--------------------

Rejected Reindeer

2009-12-12T01:44:00.005-06:00

So I recently did a post about the Rejected Dwarf names, and today heard that good old Rudolph song on the radio, and got to wondering where these names came from?

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen. And we all recall the most famous reindeer of all: Rudolph

Are there any rejected reindeer names?!? YES!

Most sources will tell you that the original eight reindeer names came from the "Twas the Night Before Christmas" poem written in 1893 by Clement Clarke Moore. However, sources now seem to think Henry Livingston Jr. in 1808.* Either way, whoever wrote it just made up the original eight reindeer names!

The name Dasher means to be quick or a name of speed.
Dancer and Prancer describe names that are graceful and elegant. Vixen is a female fox, which also symbolizes speed or swiftness.
Comet is a large ball of fire that travels through space at a very high speed.
Cupid also has to do with flying since he has wings.
The last two reindeer names are Donner and Blitzen. Dunder and Blixem were the original names, which mean Thunder and Lightning in Dutch. Of course, thunder and lightning means power and force.

But then in 1939, Robert May was working for Montgomery Ward Department Stores and he wrote a promotional holiday pamphlet that was given to 2 million customers. He penned a story of an underdog reindeer, taunted for a his abnormal nose, which glows bright red. Original name ideas, Rollo and Reginald, were rejected for being too cheerful and too British, respectively. (I hate British reindeer, too. I mean WHAT)

And so, Rudolph was born.

He didn't really become popular, though, until in 1949, Robert's brother-in-law, Johnny Marks wrote the song, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, " based on Robert's book. In 1948, on New York radio, Harry Brannon was the first person to sing this song. This was the year before Gene Autry recorded it in 1949. By 1950 it was the most popular Christmas song on the radio.

In the song, the phrase “All of the other reindeer” has been misinterpreted as “Olive the other reindeer.” Olive is another fictional character that was created afterward. He's the most popular other reindeer, but for more, see this list.

*To see this poem in German, click here.

factoid

2009-12-11T14:41:00.003-06:00

What's the difference between "fact" and "factoid"?

My inclination was to say that "factoid" was a smaller little tidbit of a fact. Andw's inclination was that "factoid" was more interesting and requiring a more elaborate story behind it.

Let's see.

FACT: something that actually exists; reality; truth.

comes from the Latin factum > factus > facere

facere means "to do" in Latin, like "faire" in French, "fare" in Italian, "fazer" in Portuguese or "hacer" in Spanish. (I'm working on a post RIGHT NOW about how f became h somewhere along the Latin to Spanish lines.)

FACTOID: an insignificant or trivial fact OR something fictitious or unsubstantiated that is presented as fact, devised esp. to gain publicity and accepted because of constant repetition

-OID is a suffix meaning “resembling,” “like,” used in the formation of adjectives and nouns (and often implying an incomplete or imperfect resemblance to what is indicated by the preceding element)

I like the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language because it makes ridiculous assertions... like:

73% of their official English language usage panel approve of and understand "factoid" to mean: a piece of information that seems to be true simply due to its repition
only 43% of that panel approve of using "factoid" as a brief, somewhat interesting fact and that it might better have been called a factette.

jajaja

lol

2009-12-11T13:01:00.008-06:00

I've always laughed in Spanish. I type "jajaja" which is pronounced /hɑhɑhɑ/ because in Spanish, the letter H is silent, so "hahaha" would be pronounced /aaa/.
Years and years ago, Tina said "If you say 'jajaja,' I should say 'xaxaxa.'" She's Greek.
Khya's silly. He jokingly says "five five five!"

What?

Apparently, the number 5 in Thai is pronounced /hɑ/ so people typing type 555.

How do people type their laughter-sound in other languages?

Hebrew: The letter ח is pronounced 'kh' and ה is pronounced 'h'. Putting them together (usually three or more in a row) makes the word khakhakha or hahaha (since vowels in Hebrew are generally not written).
Chinese - although 大笑 (da xiao; "big laugh") is used, a more widespread usage is "哈哈哈" /ha ha ha/ on internet forums.
Arabic: هاها: The character هـــا makes the sound "ha," and is strung together to create the sound /haha/.

How do people abbreviate their laughter?

English: lol - "laugh out loud"
French: mdr - "mort de rire" that roughly translated means "dying of laughter"
Swedish: asg - "Asgarv" meaning intense laughter
Danish: g - abbreviation of the word "griner", which means "laughing" in Danish
Portuguese - rsrsrs - being an abbreviation of "risos", the plural of "laugh"
Dari (Afghanistan): mkm - "ma khanda mikonom" means "I am laughing"
Japanese - traditionally the kanji for laugh in parenthesis was used in the same way as lol; （笑）. It can be read as wara and so just w has taken over as the abbreviation. It is often strung together in long strings denoting the strength of the laugh (as in ちょｗｗｗ), and then interspersed between the characters in a word to denote laughing while trying to speak (as in みｗなｗぎｗっｗてｗきｗたｗｗｗ).

Here's the best news:

Lol is a Dutch word which, coincidentally, means "fun" ("lollig" means "funny").
In Welsh, lol means "nonsense" – e.g., if a person wanted to say "utter nonsense" in Welsh, they would say "rwtsh lol"

Handi-Capable

2009-12-08T18:41:00.009-06:00

Khya has recently been hired by Target, and in a training he was learning about how to attend to handicapped aka handi-capable customers. I said, "capable is not the opposite of cap."

But then I got to thinking... maybe it is! What does "handicap" even mean? Where does this come from!?

In the dictionary, the very first definition of handicap is

1. a race or other contest in which certain disadvantages or advantages of weight, distance, time, etc., are placed upon competitors to equalize their chances of winning.

I immediately thought of horse-racing, where the horses have to have a certain handicap put on them--which is an amount of weight they have to carry so that all the horses will weigh the same at the start of the race?? I don't know. No.

A handicap race is a horse race where horses carry different weights. A better horse will carry a heavier weight in order to make the race more fair. This allows for more skill in betting.

Handicap races are also common in clubs which encourage all levels of participants such as a swimming club or in cycling races as well. All the participants are clocked in a time trial before the races, known as the handicap. In the race itself, the participants don't start at go, but the starts are staggered based on the handicaps. The slowest swimmer/cyclist starts the earliest and the fastest starts the latest, making the end of the race really close. An ideal handicap race is one in which all participants finish at the same time. The one to win is the person that beats his/her own time. Isn't that a lovely concept?

Ok so does all this give us a better pointer as to where the word "handicap" actually came from? Yes.

In the 1600s there was a betting game with three participants. Two players and one referee. The two players would put some money into the pot--originally, a literal, physical cap/hat. Then they would put a valuable items up for betting and the referee would tell them how much money each must supply in order for their bets to be of equal value. NOW, the players had the option to either supply that money or not. They were basically calling each other's bluffs.

Both traders put their hands into the cap, and draw them out at the same time. An open hand is an agreement to trade and a closed hand is a refusal to trade. Hence the name of the game: hand-in-cap.

If they both had open hands, they would exchange goods and the referee would keep the cash.
If both had closed hands, the referee would keep the money and the goods would not be exchanged.
If only one had an open hand, he got the money and the goods were not exchanged.

Handicapping thus became a term for leveling out the field by making the stronger contestant bear a penalty. A term which had made the jump from a game's name to 'way to equalize a contest' from there became synonymous with 'imposed impediment.' and then just 'impediment.'

So is "handi-capable" a more politically correct term than "handicapped"? I guess so... I guess you could even stretch the imagination and say yes, because one definition of cap is:

9. a maximum limit, as one set by law or agreement on prices, wages, spending, etc., during a certain period of time; ceiling: a 9 percent cap on pay increases for this year.

a limit, essentially. So, if someone is capped, they have limits, and you coulllllldddd say if they are capable then they are free of such limits...

stupid P.C. bullshit.

The Rejected Dwarves

2009-12-04T23:57:00.008-06:00

Helen, Andw and I went to the New Orleans Museum of Art's Disney's Dreams Come True exhibit today.

We came upon the dwarf names that were rejected for the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

WHAT DOES NEURTSY MEAN?! I have no idea.

All I can guess is that he's kind of neurotic.

Also, I really wish there had been a Sleazy dwarf.

Shorthand and Speedwriting

2009-11-24T23:55:00.003-06:00

My mom recently got into a conversation during which the difference between shorthand and speedwriting were assumed to be obvious. She related this conversation to me and I told her honestly, I had never heard of speedwriting. I had to look it all up.

Shorthand typically refers to any method of writing that uses symbols for common phrases, words or sounds. Some methods of shorthand use abbreviations for words. In either case, someone well trained in shorthand should be able to take dictation as fast as someone else is speaking. Obviously, shorthand is generally used with the intention of transcribing it to longhand... but some people like Samuel Pepys don't ever do that.

There are looooots of different kinds of shorthand, including geometric systems, script, and geometric-script. Turns out speedwriting is just one of maaaaaany shorthand writing systems.

Non-symbol systems often supplement alphabetic characters by using punctuation marks as additional characters, giving special significance to capitalised letters, and sometimes using additional non-alphabetic symbols. Examples of such systems include Stenoscript, Stenospeed, Speedwriting, Forkner shorthand, Quickhand and Alpha Hand. However, there are some pure alphabetic systems, including Personal Shorthand, SuperWrite, Easy Script Speed Writing, and Agiliwriting, which limit their symbols to purely alphabetic characters. These have the added advantage that they can also be typed - for instance, onto a computer, PDA, or cellphone. Early editions of Speedwriting were also adapted so that they could be written on a typewriter, and therefore would possess the same advantage.

This is an example of the Lord's Prayer written in a bunch of different shorthand systems.

About speedwriting specifically:

Speedwriting is phonetic with a ‘k’ used for a hard c, ‘C’ for ‘ch’, ‘j’ for ‘g’ in ‘age’. It condenses words by omitting silent letters and only writing long vowels, and initial short vowels. Sentences are ended with ‘\’ and a ‘/’ is used for omitted syllables. There are other abbreviating devices, including capitalisation, and the use of punctuation marks to denote combinations of sounds. It uses around 100 abbreviations for common words and suffixes.

Speedwriting uses a stylized script made in 1942 for faster handwriting, in which the ‘t’ is uncrossed (l is looped to distinguish them), ‘i’ is not dotted, ‘m’ is a simple curve like a stretched ‘n’ and 'w' is also a simple curve like a stretched 'u'.

Speedwriting is more than twice as fast as longhand, due to using half the letters, but it is nowhere near as fast as symbolic shorthand systems. Speeds of up to 120 words a minute are possible for short periods of time, with speeds of 80 words a minute being regularly attained. It is therefore more useful for someone wanting a simple system to speed up handwritten note taking than for reporting.

Here's what it looks like:

I think we should all just type real fast and forget about all this abbreviated non-sense. Writing things by hand holds nothing more than aesthetic value for me. Yes, having said that, I really like my handwriting.

French Punctuation

2009-11-05T21:43:00.003-06:00

I really like KMarsh's blog. Probably--at least partially--because I really like KMarsh.

He had a post the other day about hating the serial comma, in which he proudly used an interrobang. In all my years, I had never seen it. Can you believe it‽ Even my spell-checking device currently thinks I've made a mistake.

So I started looking into unusual punctuation, and discovered... surprise! the French. They really are the people most enthusiastic about their own language I've ever witnessed. This includes the punctuation marks they've made up for themselves.

Brief history of punctuation:

Punctuation of course developed when people started making lots of copies of the Bible--which was meant to be read aloud. They put dots and marks to help the reader, and they invented capital letters, too!

Punctuation didn't really become standardized until printing came about, and typewriters even regulated trends: for the most part, punctuation was minimized because a period or a comma took up as much valuable ribbon space as a letter.

I guess once computers came into common usage, people started using punctuation more freely.

We generally assume that punctuation marks all serve the same purpose in every language, but they do vary slightly from region to region.

In Western languages, a period marks a full stop with only slight variations.

“Carefree” means “free from care or anxiety.” (American style)

“Carefree” means “free from care or anxiety”. (British style)

In some Asian languages, notably Chinese and Japanese, a small circle is used instead of a solid dot: "。"
In the Devanagari script used to write Hindi, Sanskrit and some other Indian languages a vertical line “|” is used to mark the end of a sentence.
In Thai, no symbol corresponding to full stop is used as sentence marker. A sentence is written without spaces and a space is typically used to mark the end of a clause or sentence.

More interesting than periods:

Quotation Marks. Interlingually, they trip me out.

In English, quotation marks are most commonly used to quote someone. It is unfortunate that many English speakers do not know what other functions quotation marks may serve.

Quotation marks may be used for irony.

He shared his “wisdom” with me.
The lunch lady plopped a glob of “food” onto my tray.

It is incorrect to use quotation marks for emphasis. I don't know why people think it's ok. It's not. Check out this blog.

In a lot of languages, we use these funny angle quotes. «…» In Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, French, Swiss, German, Greek, Italian, Latvian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukranian. I don't know why.

What's even weirder is that whether languages use the angle quotes or the comma quotes SOMETIMES THEY POINT IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS.

„…“

Don't ask me to explain it.

Ok so back to funny looking question marks and the French.

Not only do they embrace the interrobang as relatively standard, they also have what's called an irony mark. ؟ The French are silly.

In other news…

Soo... how many spaces do you put after a sentence? I always put two. Before typewriters, all European languages has a long tradition of using spaces of varying widths for the express purpose of enhancing readability.

Once stuff got more standardized, French spacing inserted spaces around most punctuation marks, but single-spaced after sentences, colons, and semicolons. English spacing removed spaces around most punctuation marks, but double-spaced after sentences, colons, and semicolons.

Money makes the world go 'round.

The reasons were predominantly commercial rather than stylistic. A key change in the publishing industry from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century was the enormous growth of mass-produced books and magazines. Increasing commercial pressure to reduce the costs, complexity, and lead-time of printing deeply affected the industry, leading to a widening gap between commercial printing and fine printing.

The underlying reasons for the changes were:

ease and speed, since far less physical type and more importantly far less skilled effort was required
cost, since fewer man-hours were required and the condensed text required less paper. The bulk of the cost saving was typesetting-related rather than paper-use-related
cultural, since new typesetters (and readers) had grown up with typewriters and the standard typists' spacing approximations of good typesetting

But then, what was French spacing became English spacing, and vice versa.

The earliest use of this inversion was apparently 1994 by the University of Chicago Press. By the mid-2000s this usage had been widely asserted on the internet.

It is not clear why this reversal occurred.

It is possible that it was an attempt to discourage the practice by labeling it alien.

The moral of the story is:

I really love the French—and how much they love their language.

heart

2009-10-04T20:50:00.013-05:00

I noticed a handful of years ago, it became the fad to say "I heart you" aloud, even though we had been writing

for ages.

Maybe people always said that and I just hadn't noticed.

Anyway... what is it called in linguistics when you put a picture in place of a word? I can't remember.

is read aloud "I heart you" --

then what does this say??

jajaja!

I had forgotten about this until KMarsh reminded me.

Dixie's Land

2009-09-29T22:33:00.013-05:00

My Uncle Mike is one of the funniest people I know. He's not funny in that he's cracking jokes every second--he's more like... just a comical person... a highly amusing person to be around. I love Uncle Mike.

Tonight he said, "Do you know where they got 'Dixieland' from?" I never know if he's really serious in what he's about to tell me. "The word, 'Dixieland,' do you know where it came from?" Two things happened. A. I was surprised because I'm pretty sure Uncle Mike is clueless about my interest in linguistic trivia, and B. I stopped to think about it, and realized I had never thought about it before. Where does the word "Dixie" come from?

He said something along the lines of: You know, the French used to own this area, the South, and you know what their word for "ten" is? That's right. Dix. --and they had paper money with 10 on it, and we became Dixieland.

The ten dollar notes were issued by private banks in Louisiana, and colloquially referred to as "dixies" by English-speaking Southerners, and the area around New Orleans and the Cajun-speaking parts of Louisiana became known as "Dixieland."

I had no idea! But it makes sense. I came home to research it. Turns out, that is only one of three etymological explanations. The actual origin of the term is not necessarily known.

A lot of transcriptions say "Dixie's Land" instead of "Dixieland."

There is a story about a slave owner whose name was Dixy, and he was very "kind" to his slaves, and when he died, his slaves mourned his death intensely. Thus Dixie's Land became a synonym for "paradise" and during the Civil War, the minstrel song "Dixie's Land," written by Daniel D. Emmett became popular among the slaves.

You can listen to the song here.

The dictionary says the word origin comes from the Mason-Dixon line, which for the most part, separated free and slave states.

I guess that could be it, too.

I'm honestly most inclined to believe the first explanation, strictly due to geographical references. The money explanation has New Orleans/French Louisiana as it's center. The "kind" Dixy in the second story was actually a slave-owner in Manhattan, NY--even though the song became popular in the South during the Civil War. And the Mason-Dixon line, well, yes it separated the North from the South but... isn't New Orleans the heart of Dixie?

We have Dixie beer brewed here, and Winn-Dixie supermarkets. Ok, ok. Dixie Beer is actually currently brewed in Heuber Brewery in Wisconsin (but only since Katrina flooded the brewery here), and Winn-Dixie supermarkets are based out of Jacksonville, FL and have stores in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Mississippi.

Why do I think that New Orleans is the heart of Dixie, then?

The Dixie Chicks are from Dallas, TX--and they got their name from a Little Feat album, Dixie Chickens. Which brings me to the music! Dixieland Jazz aka New Orleans Jazz is the earliest style of recorded jazz ever. It's all about the music! The term Dixieland became widely used after the advent of the first million-selling hit records of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917.

Louis Armstrong's trumpet is often thought of as the definitive sound of Dixieland. There are now several "styles" of Dixieland Jazz, including Chicago-style, and West-Coast revival. There are even international dixieland jazz music festivals, like the one in Dresden, Germany and the one in Catalonia, Spain.

How fun would it be to go to one of those? and say, "I live in the heart of Dixie."

the worst bank.

2009-09-27T22:54:00.004-05:00

So I happen to work on the Worst Bank of New Orleans. aka the "West Bank."

The culture there is so radically different from New Orleans itself, and even that--of course--can be subdivided into countless cultures--which some people can pinpoint down to the subdivision you grew up in or high school you attended.

as I'm sure it is with all places.

ANYWAY

The West Bank culture is very curious to me, and comical.

I've discovered they find verbs unnecessary.

"This phone a piece of crap!"

"My momma at home!"

I recently received a text message from one of my co-workers, which I absolutely LOVED.

She managed to fit that verb in just fine:

"We on are way."

Ummerka.

2009-09-25T00:11:00.004-05:00

Um. Some people make fun of the way George W. Bush says "America." And... some people like to then continuously say "ummerka" --as if it were an "amen."

...

Well, someone recently told me "you know 'umerka' actually means something." ...but when I asked her what, she didn't remember.

So here's the answer:

Amurca /əˈmɜrkə/

–noun

the lees or sediment of olive oil.

you can listen to how it's pronounced here.

also,

Merca /ˈmɛrkɑ/

–noun

a city in S Somalia.

That's it.

I also... can't pass up mentioning that when I youtubed videos of George W. Bush, a lot of the related video links were of Miss Teen USA 2007 South Carolina. This video will never get old.

Lafayette, LA

2009-09-24T21:34:00.008-05:00

My friend Quentin is from Lafayette, LA. Lafayette was founded by a French-speaking Acadian named Jean Mouton (aka Jean Sheep)--therefore, Lafayette developed as the Cajun center of Louisiana. We've talked about the Cajuns before, and a lot of Cajun phrases are completely new to me, so I enjoy hearing about them.

Q insists people will say "to my house" instead of "at my house"--presumably coming as a direct translation of "c'est a ma maison" where the preposition "a" can be translated as "to" or "at."

Considering Cajuns say all kinds of crazy things like "making groceries" (to shop for groceries, a calque of the Cajun French faire des groceries) and "my eye!" or "my foot!" to mean "no way!"--in French, it's pretty common to say "mon oeil!" or "mon pied!" to express disbelief-- so this doesn't surprise me.

I had just never heard it before.

Also, here is a map of where Cajun English is spoken.

I'll also go ahead and mention that Q makes it a point to refer to his people as Creole, not Cajun. I mean, that's understandable, because they actually are Creole, not Cajun--but to people who aren't either, there aren't really any real connotations either way. But Quentin talks about how Cajun carries so many negative implications that Creole doesn't... which is funny to me.

Creole is derived from the Latin word “crear”, which meant, “create.” In 1590, Father J. de Acosta decided that the mixed breeds born in the New World were neither Spanish, African, Indian, but various mixtures of all three, thus a created race. So he identified them as "Criollos".

Creoles also have their own brand of French. Over time, the black Créoles and Africans created a French and West African hybrid language called Créole French or Louisiana Creole French. It was used in some circumstances by slaves, planters and free people of color alike. It is still spoken today in central Louisiana.

People who are neither Cajun nor Creole often have trouble identifying the differences between the two. Culturally, they started off very differently, but as Spanish and then French Catholics took over the region, the cultural blending progressed.

Creoles were the first European settlers in New Orleans and the Mississippi river plantations. The considered themselves of aristocratic decent. Their heritage was of France, Spanish or Portuguese origins. Creoles were considered to be very wealthy. Some were given high political appointments by the crown. Creole holdings involved shipping, banking and plantation ownership. Their businesses faltered after the Civil War without slave labor.

Acadians (Cajuns) originating from the West coast of France (Brittny/Normandy) first settled Nova Scotia in 1604. Most were of peasant descent with little or no education, who worked with their hands. After being loaded on ships by the British, who expelled they from Nova Scotia, they began arriving in Louisiana about 1765. Cajuns mostly settled the bayous and open prairies where they could continue their trades of trapping, fishing and farming.

It seems--by Quentin's attitude anyway--that a little bit of snobbery still lingers. How curious!

Hundreds and Thousands!

2009-09-23T23:29:00.007-05:00

Andw told me something wonderful yesterday.

Ready?

In the UK, as well as in Australia and New Zealand...

SPRINKLES ARE CALLED

"HUNDREDS AND THOUSANDS."

aaaah I can't contain my giggles!

Wiki of course has a whole article devoted to sprinkle-nomenclature. It goes on to say that "hundreds and thousands" typically refer to the spherical type of sprinkles, while "sugar strands" are... just that.

Hebrew and Yiddish

2009-09-23T20:19:00.005-05:00

Soo we always make fun of my friend Magee for being a Jew. He's not actually Jewish, he just fits a lot of the negative stereotypes.

Anyway, one day he texted me "Mazel Tov" when I called him a Jew, which I knew to be a completely inappropriate response. I didn't say anything, but he soon replied "After looking up yiddish phrases, I think 'ikh hob dir in drerd' is more appropriate." and then "Or even better: a kholeryeh."

This all looked surprisingly German to me--so I started wondering what the connection/difference between Hebrew and Yiddish is. I asked ChaCha, who responded "Hebrew is the ancient language of the Jews. Yiddish is a modern language, more similar to German, that uses the Hebrew alphabet." As I suspected!

So Hebrew came first, obviously. Modern Hebrew is currently spoken in Israel, and classical Hebrew is spoken around the world in Jewish communities.

Linguistically, Hebrew is related to Arabic and Aramaic (during the Babylonian captivity, more Aramaic got mixed in there. But... culturally speaking... Aramaic represented the hated language of slavery, conquest, and occupation, while Hebrew remained the language of Israel's history and national pride. Preserved largely by Israel proper, Hebrew continued to be a thriving language until shortly before the Byzantine era.)

Anyway, proper Hebrew became scholarly, and between the 2nd and 19th centuries, dialects formed all over the place, seeing as how there were Jews all over the place. These dialects included Ladino (aka Judezmo aka Judeo-Spanish), Yiddish and a slew of Judeo-Arabic tongues.

The Second Aliyah refers to when a bunch of Jews--mostly from Russia and Poland--came to Ottoman Palestine. Due to this, around this time (early 1900s) a lot of those other Hebrew dialects died out and traditional Hebrew was re-vamped to include a bunch of that stuff left over from those dialects, as well as more Arabic and Aramaic, not to mention English and other European languages. In 1948 Hebrew became the official language of Israel.

So where did Yiddish come from!?

Well... the Ashkenazi Jews are the ones that came from the Rhineland valley (in the west of Germany) and northern France around the 10th century... when all those dialects were spreading. Hasidic Jews still grow up speaking Yiddish today.

Traces remain in the contemporary Yiddish vocabulary: for example, בענטשן (bentshn, to bless), from the Latin benedicere; and the personal name Anshl, cognate to Angel or Angelo. Western Yiddish includes additional words of Latin derivation (but still very few): for example, orn (to pray), cf. Latin "orare."

But it seems to have really been born out of a mix of German with Hebrew words tossed in. The big difference is that it was always written with the Hebrew alphabet. Not until the 15th century could you even really say that German and Yiddish were two different languages if you heard them spoken. So really, Yiddish developed as a transliteration of German into the Hebrew alphabet. How cool!

Example

Yiddish:

גוּט טַק אִים בְּטַגְֿא שְ וַיר דִּיש מַחֲזֹור אִין בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ טְרַגְֿא

Transliterated:

gut tak im betage se vaer dis makhazor in beis hakneses trage

Translated:

May a good day come to him who carries this prayer book into the synagogue.

How wild!

So... "Mazel Tov" did indeed come from Yiddish... as did all of these other words now considered part of the English language.

There are also some words that Yiddish speakers who live in English speaking countries have adopted into their vocabulary. They call this YINGLISH!

Etymological Epiphany, from Khya

2009-08-27T21:43:00.004-05:00

Khya texted me today.

(I doubt he'll ever blag on his own, so I've taken him on as a contributor to my blag. Jaja yes!)

So I had another etymological epiphany: EXACT. Ex-meaning "out of," and Act-as in "what takes place." So when used nowaday, we mean it so to say "that which comes directly from the action/source." So an "exact copy" is a mirror image because it comes out of the act, the source.

That gives you the willies?

2009-08-26T22:28:00.007-05:00

To give you the willies... where did that expression come from, anyway? Walker asked.

I HAVE NO IDEA.

No one does.

Every source I've found says that the origin of the phrase is unknown, but there seem to be a few postulate theories out there. I've collected 4 of them. The last one is my favorite.

sissy - Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, traces "the willies" to the slang expression "willie-boy," meaning "sissy" -- presumably the sort who would be prone to the "willies."
sprite - The Serbo-Croatian word "vila" (in English pronounced /wi-li/) meaning a wood-nymph or fairy usually refers to the spirit of a betrothed girl who died after being jilted by her lover. It seems entirely possible to me that "willi," the spirit or ghost, became the "willies," the feeling that something creepy is going on.
woollies - 2001 Douglas Harper Etymology Dictionary also says its origin is unknown, but that it's perhaps from the woollies, a dialectal term for "nervous uneasiness," probably in reference to the itchiness of wool garments. In the dictionary, woolly also means: a. Lacking sharp detail or clarity. b. Mentally or intellectually disorganized or unclear. c. Having the characteristics of the rough, generally lawless atmosphere of the American frontier.
avalanche- This is pretty wild. On Monday night, Aug. 28, 1826, an avalanche rampaged down isolated Crawford Notch, N.H., in the heart of the White Mountains, burying seven members of the Willey family and two hired men. Had the victims stayed in their house, which stood directly in the path of the avalanche, they would have been spared; incredibly, a boulder divided the landslide directly behind the house so that the debris streamed past on either side. (Reference: OUT OF NOWHERE Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains By Eric Purchase Johns Hopkins University Press) Check this out. Some people suspect that is the origin of the phrase...

Take your pick.

Japanese is a silly language, pt. 1.

2009-08-25T22:56:00.009-05:00

There are these things called "counter words." In English, they're not too common, but examples of them are like the word "sheet" in "two sheets of paper" or "cup" in "two cups of coffee."

Now, these should not be mistaken with:

collective nouns - These refer to a group of objects as a single noun. For example, a "flock of geese" or a "pride of lions". Correctly, we use singluar verb conjugations with these words, like "The team is working." There are all kinds of specifications and technicalities here, too, which are pretty funny.* For a full list of collective nouns in English, click here.
collective number - In English, a word is singular unless marked (usually with an -s) otherwise to indicate it's plural. In some languages, like Welsh, some nouns have collective number, which means they are plural unless indicated singular with some vowel changes and stuff.
mass nouns - These cannot be directly modified by a numeral without specifying a unit of measurement, and that they cannot combine with an indefinite article (a or an). Some examples are "furniture" and "cutlery." Also, when you add some furniture to some more furniture, you still just have "furniture." The word form doesn't change--or more technically, these words have cumulative reference.
count nouns - This is the opposite of a mass noun. This can be counted, like "a chair." "One chair," "two chairs." If you have one chair and then get another chair, you now have "two chairs." The word form does change. Simple enough.

Ok we know what counter words aren't... but what are they?

Japanese isn't the only language that uses them** but they are pretty rare in European languages. We don't have it because with count nouns we can just say "two leaves" and with mass nouns we use other word like "one grain of sand"--you can't say "one sand."

BUT in Japanese, you don't have to "worry" about all that. There are special counter words (I'll say CW) for nearly everything. You must say "threeCW students" or "twoCW birds" or "over 9000CW trees."

So really, to prove that you're not a total n00b, you have to know the right counter words for everything. Good luck. That is, except for when you don't. It seems that if you use the wrong counter word for a certain kind of small animal, and use a counter word for any other kind of animal, that's ok. But if you get to bigger animals, like horses, they don't let you slide. ...yeah, good luck. If you really don't know the counter word for a certain thing, and if you happen to want to say some number between 1 and 10, you can use the traditional numbers without a counter word, and that's ok. After that, you're on your own.

Also, if you want to make a funny, you can use the wrong counter word intentionally to achieve the effect. Wiki's example of this is: one might say 男一匹なのに (Otoko ippiki nano ni; "I am only one man..."). Using the counter hiki (匹), the counter for small animals, humorously suggests that the person is overpowered by massive obstacles.

Khya hates counter words. ...and I don't blame him.

*"Herd" can properly refer to a group of wild horses, but not to a group of domestic horses. A "paddling of ducks" only refers to ducks on water. A group of geese on the ground is referred to as a "gaggle of geese" while a "skein of geese" would refer to them in flight.

**Counter words are part of the grammar of most Asian languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Malay, Burmese, Thai, Hmong, Bengali, and the Munda languages just to the west of this area. Among indigenous languages of the Americas measure words occur in the Pacific Northwest, especially among the Tsimshianic languages, and in many languages of Mesoamerica, including Classic Maya. They also occur in some languages of the Amazon Basin (most famously Yagua) and a very small number of West African languages.

red red wine

2009-08-24T22:18:00.005-05:00

Syrah and Petite Syrah grapes, respectively.

A few months back, my cousin and I were discussing how much we like red wine but don't know much about it. He likes to try lots of different kinds--and recently discovered he likes Petite Syrah wine. He saw it on a wine list, and because his girlfriend's name is Sarah, he thought it cute to get a wine "named after her." Turns out, it is delicious.

What I do know is that wine names like Merlot or Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Grigiot are all grape varieties. Further names are going to be brand names. Petite Syrah is also a grape variety, just a less common one.

I had Petite Syrah that one time in Mexico, and since then, have had trouble finding it. I saw Petite Sirah once and I see Shiraz all over the place and wonder if that's related to Syrah--and how different that is from Petite Syrah. Soooo let's blog to find out.

Shiraz is actually a large city in Iran--where the oldest wine samples ever discovered were. They've been making wine in Shiraz for over 7000 years.

Syrah is a grape variety, also known as Shiraz, that has grown in France for many centuries, and more recently, also in Australia. It's called Syrah in Europe, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and the United States. In Australia, South Africa and Canada it's more commonly known as Shiraz. But it is, in fact, the same grape.*

Where the grape originated before it was in France is hard to say. People speculate it came from Shiraz, Iran--but there are other ideas, too.**

We definitely know how it got to Australia: In 1831, the Scotsman James Busby, often called "the Father of Australian viticulture", cut samples of it from Europe and brought it back to Australia. The plant was an established Australian variety by the 1860s.

Shiraz and Syrah are in fact the same grape, but it seems the nomenclature has varied implications, anyway:

Winemakers (or wine marketers) sometimes choose either Syrah or Shiraz to signify a stylistic difference in the wine they have made. "Syrah"-labelled wines are sometimes thought to be more similar to classic Northern Rhône reds; presumably more elegant, tannic, smoke-flavoured and restrained with respect to their fruit component. "Shiraz"-labelled wines, on the other hand, would then be more similar to archetypical Australian or other New World examples; presumably made from riper berries, more fruit-driven, higher in alcohol, less obviously tannic, peppery rather than smokey, usually more easily approached when young, and possibly slightly sweetish in impression. It must however be realized that this rule of thumb is unevenly applied.

None of this mentions Petite Syrah or Petite Sirah. Turns out that's a different grape variety all together. The grape is actually called Durif, which came from crossing the Syrah and Peloursin grapes, which didn't happen until the 1880s. California and Australia are now the two leading producers of Durif. The grape can also be found in Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico.

According to wiki, compared to Syrah, [Petite Sirah] wine is noticeably more dark and purplish in color, and typically rounder and fuller in the mouth, and offers a brightness that Syrah lacks.

*Other names for the same grape include Schiras, Sirac, Syra, Syrac, Serine, and Sereine.

**Another legend of the grape variety's origin, based on the name Syrah, is that it was brought from Syracuse by the legions of Roman Emperor Probus sometime after AD 280. This legend also lacks documentary evidence and is inconsistent with ampelographic findings.

pretty interesting

2009-08-16T23:31:00.000-05:00

thanks to @anaraug

http://www.xys.org/forum/db/4/155/242.html

music in foreign languages

2009-08-07T00:16:00.008-05:00

Ok so obviously I've been on a Sound-of-Music-in-translation kick.

Which got me wondering about solfege in foreign languages. (Which reminded me of the conversation about which the previous post was.)

do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti

(with a chromatic scale of ascending di, ri, fi, si, li

and descending te, le, se, me, ra)

First of all, where did this come from?

In the eleventh century, the music theorist Guido of Arezzo developed a six-note ascending scale that went as follows: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la. A seventh note, "si" was added shortly after. The notes were taken from the first verse of a Latin hymn below (where the sounds fell on the scale), and later "ut" and "si" were changed to flow with the other notes.

Ut queant laxis resonāre fibris

Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,

Solve polluti labii reatum,

Sancte Iohannes.

Some people think that the real origin is from the Arabs (dal, ra, mim, fa, sad, lam, ta) from back in the Middle Ages. Either way.

Is solfege international?

In the Romance countries of Europe and Latin America, these seven syllables have come to be used to name the notes of the scale, instead of the letters C, D, E, F, G, A and B. (For example, they would say, "Beethoven's ninth symphony is in Re minor". Weirdos.)

In Germanic countries, the letters are used for this purpose, and the solfège syllables are encountered only for their use in sight-singing and ear training. (We would say, "Beethoven's ninth symphony is in D minor".)

Japan uses traditional kana order (iroha) to correspond to Anglo-American note names.

Note:

In Anglo-Saxon countries, "si" was changed to "ti" by Sarah Glover in the nineteenth century so that every syllable might begin with a different letter.

I didn't know

in some countries, "do" always corresponds to C, "re" D, etc. This is the case in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Belgium, Romania and Latin American countries, as well as countries such as China, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Greece, Iran, Lebanon, Israel and Japan.

When I learned, I learned

not that C was always "do" but that the tonic was "do" and you just moved up from there. It seems that in Australia, Ireland, the UK, the USA, the Hong Kong SAR and English-speaking Canada that's the way they learn it. Wiki says it's called "moveable do" and that originally it was used throughout continental Europe as well, but in the mid-nineteenth century was phased out by fixed do in Romance countries.

Therefore,

yes, solfege is international, yet its usage varies between the two methods. Of course, there is controversy over which method is better.

Or you can go really crazy and make a whole solfege language.

math in foreign languages

2009-08-06T23:35:00.003-05:00

Less than a year ago, but before I started this blog, my friend Magee asked me about the names of math things in other languages. We were hoping they would be universal, as the should be... and it turns out, for the most part, they are.

Actually, I only looked through trig function names, because that's what he asked about specifically.

The short answer is: you'll be able to figure it out, I promise.

In most languages the abbreviations are sin, cos, tan, sec, csc, cot.
In Asturian, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, they use sen instead of sin.
In most Germanic languages it seems like they use kos and kot, but not actually in German.
Беларуская and Hrvatski use tg and ctg instead of tan and cot. Italian and Esperanto give you this option as well.

As far as non-Cyrillic-alphabet-languages... good luck. They don't seem to use the Cyrillic abbreviations.

Lies. and Well, no wonder.

2009-08-06T23:03:00.007-05:00

In the post below, I claimed that the German lyrics were saying "tut schnell" but that really doesn't make sense... I wracked my brain last night trying to figure out what in the world they were actually saying... and gave up and had to finish the post and figured no one would call me out on it before I found a real answer.

I asked my German-expert friend what the heck they were saying and he said:

Matt Wehner: It's Dutch. I tried to look up the lyrics, no idea. lol on the acting though!

Well, duh. It didn't make sense in German, because it's not in German.

That whole freaking thing is in Dutch, not German. They just sound that much alike that I thought the parts I didn't understand were just because I wasn't catching the German.

Why do I keep accidentally understanding languages I don't actually know?!

So long, farewell!

2009-08-06T00:21:00.009-05:00

I'm dumb.

ADIEU.

Walker asked "what language is that?" I immediately said "German," and then "no, wait. That's French. In French it means 'to God' just like adios in Spanish." (It's a shortening of a Dieu vous commant (“I commend you to God”).) But my inclination was to say that German people say adieu. I had no idea why I felt this way, knowing that the farewell in French is au revoir and in German is auf wiedersehen--both of which mean "until we see each other again."

Still, this feeling of German people saying adieu persisted.

And then I figured it out.

IT'S FROM THE SOUND OF MUSIC.

It seems I've watched that movie/musical so many times it's just been assimilated as a source of truth and fact in my brain without my knowing it.

The kid says "adieu, adieu, to you and you and you" and he's supposed to be German.

Well, shit.

Lol sorry Walker. Adieu is French. duh.

But this did lead to something a bit more interesting:

(I'm refering to that song in the Sound of Music where the kids are saying goodnight to the dinner party, and they say the little tag over and over again before each kid sings his/her verse, in case you haven't seen it a million times, like I obviously have.)

Here's a link to it in English.

In English, they sing:

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodnight
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu
So long, farewell, au revoir, auf wiedersehen
So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

BUT THEN I FOUND IT IN GERMAN! Here's the link.*

In German, I'm not sure of this but it sounds like they sing:

Tut schnell, farewell, ??, gute nacht
Tut schnell, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu
Tut schnell, farewell, bon soir, au revoir
Tut schnell, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye
Goodbye, tut schnell, auf wiedersehen, farewell
Farewell, farewell, farewell.

And just because it's also the language in question, h ere it is in French.

They say the same thing every time:

Goodbye, farewell, auf wiedersehen, bon soir.
...
Au revoir, au revoir, au revoir.

I also found it in Spanish, and it seems they say "adios, adios, buenas noches, adios" every single time.

I also found it in Norwegian. It sounds a lot like German.

*Yes, when I found this, I laughed out loud. --a lot.

Paper Cuts

2009-08-05T23:28:00.004-05:00

I was reading The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards (boo don't bother) and came across "scherenschnitte." Sounds German but they were using it in English. It sounds too German to be used in English, to me, but apparently it is. It's this art form of cutting paper into super intricate designs.

In English it's pronounced shear-n-SNIT-a and in German it's pronounced share-n-shnitt. In English it still refers to this art form, but in German, it currently means silhouette.

Tweet Correction

2009-08-05T00:58:00.007-05:00

On July 1st at 8:47am, sirgeoph tweeted:

Only three words have entered English from Czech: polka, pilsner, and robot.

I wondered if he was right. Turns out, he's not! I really like the Czech Republic so here's what you need to know:

Words that we really use in English that came from Czech:

dollar - from High German thaler, a nickname for the silver coins that were minted from the ore found in Jáchymov in western Bohemia, called Joachimsthal in German.
pilsner - after Pilsen, the German name of Plzeň, a Czech city. The name of the city is derived from Old Czech Plz.
pistol - from píšťala, an 15th century Hussite firearm.
pram - comes via Dutch from the Czech word prám, referring to such a vessel, though this is interesting since the Czech homeland has no seacoast.
polka - from Polák or polský, a Czech dance named in remembrance of the November Uprising of 1830; or from Půlka, in English half because of its tempo.
robot - from Czech robota (labour, drudgery), introduced in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. from the 1920s.

Not to mention:

Budweiser - after Budweis, the German name of Budějovice, a city in southern Bohemia.

Ok, he was close.

Bull, Bullet, Bulletin

2009-08-05T00:09:00.004-05:00

Do they all come from the same root word?

Kind of! All but the animal are related:

Bull (refering to the animal and all that) --comes from Old English bula "a steer" which came from Old Norse boli "bull", both of which came from bullon, the Germanic stem which means to roar. This is also the root of the English word boulder.

Bull (refering to the papal declaration)--comes from teh Latin bulla "sealed document" (which used to be the word for the seal itself), coming from Latin bulla meaning "round thing, knob" which might have come from Gaulish. Words like buttocks, bubble, boil, bowl and even bag might have come from this same root.

Which leads into...

Bullet--This comes from that same aforementioned Latin bulla. It went into French, balle meaning "ball" got the diminuitive ending -ette for "little ball" and tada! Note: boulette in Modern French means "cannon ball."

Bulletin--This came from when the Latin bulla meant bill (Medieval Latin) and took the French and Italian diminuitive forms -ette and -ino. ! Note: Popularized by their use in the Napoleonic Wars as the name for dispatches sent from the front meant for the home public (which led to the proverbial expression "as false as a bulletin"). The first record of bulletin-board is from 1831.

Italian Lesson Update #2

2009-07-23T00:04:00.005-05:00

Well, when I first looked over the Italian alphabet, I immediately noticed there is no j! When I came back to it and tried to recite the alphabet, I noticed there is also no w, x or y!

What is going on here?!

I mean, I know Italian is the closest modern descendant of Latin we have, and Latin didn't really have j, but other Romance Languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French, Romanian and Catalan all have j.

As a matter of fact, those languages all also have w, x and y!

The story of j.

J started off as a swash variation of i. That's it. 1524 is the oldest recorded use of two distinct sounds for i and j. As a matter of fact, Gian Giorgio Trissino was the first to do it, and he was an Italian dude. He was writing about linguistic development in Italian, even, but I guess it just never caught on in Italian. You only see j in Italian when it's in a proper Latin noun--therefore, a lot of Italian city names have j in them, like Boljano, Jelsi and Pietraroja.

It did, however, catch on in other Romance Languages, and developed a different sound in each. In French, Portuguese and Romanian it makes a /ʒ/ sound. Catalan is pretty close to Spanish and it makes a /ʑ/ sound (like the h in help). Spanish is the only one of those that de-voiced it, and turned it into a /x ~ h/ sound, which is a lot like that Catalan pronunciation.

In a lot of non-European languages like Turkish, Azerbaijani and Tatar, the j makes the /ʒ/ sound, too. Like Taj Mahal.

The sound we get for our English j comes from the French j, which turned into a /dʒ/ sound for us. We first saw it happen in writing in English, in 1634. BUT we still see it do some funny sounds, like in the word Hallelujah and Taj Mahal.

Germanic languages embraced it fully, though. German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian all use it to make a /j/ sound (which is like the English word yet.)

And as a note, j is not used in Celtic or Native American languages at all.

What about w, x and y?

Well, in English we used to see just vv instead of w, and eventually, they got crossed together in the middle. We're talking about the 7th century, here. And as far as Romance Languages are concerned, w is still really only used for foreign words, like le week-end and le kiwi in French.

X has been around forever, because it comes from the Ancient Greek: Chi X in Western Greek and Xi Ξ in Eastern Greek. It might even be older than that according to some hyroglyphs and stuff, but whatever. This is where the /ks/ sound came from. In French, it came into usage as a plural form that used to be -us, but then people started writing it pretty and it turned into x. In French, it's generally silent. In Catalan, it can be pronounced either /ʃ/ or /ks/ or /s/. This plus /z/ is true for Portuguese. In Spanish, it makes a hard /x/ sound and in spelling is often interchanged with j because j makes a very similar sound. Like Mexico can also be spelled Mejico.

Y is pretty straightforward, too. It also came from the Greek: Upsilon Y. (Hence Latin not really having it.) As a matter of fact, Old English called y "Greek U" and in Spanish, Catalan, French and Romanian, it is still called "Greek I" (referring to y) and i is called "Latin I" (referring to i). In almost every case it's /i/ or /j/ but in German it's always /ʏ/. Spanish does something similar and usually pronounces it /ʝ/. Italian only uses it in loanwords.

And that's that.

The Germans aren't as bad as the French.

2009-07-22T23:37:00.002-05:00

The French are really really anti-letting non-French words pollute their vernacular.

The German are not so self-centered:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8163541.stm

Cigar Lingo: Part 1

2009-07-21T23:41:00.007-05:00

What about OSCURO cigars? (Nope. You never hear "obscuro cigars." Don't ask me. All I know is in the post below.)

I'm not much of a cigar smoker myself, but as it turns out, the outer wrapping of a cigar is a tobacco leaf as well. ! Who knew? Not I. The wrapper determines much of the cigar's character and flavor, and as such its color is often used to describe the cigar as a whole. Colors are designated as follows, from lightest to darkest (Yep, these are all in Spanish):

Double Claro - very light, slightly greenish (also called Candela, American Market Selection or jade); achieved by picking leaves before maturity and drying quickly; often grown in Connecticut.
Claro - light tan or yellowish. Indicative of shade-grown tobacco.
Colorado - reddish-brown (also called Rosado or "Corojo").
Colorado Claro - mid-brown; particularly associated with tobacco grown in the Dominican Republic or in Cuba.
Colorado Maduro - dark brown; particularly associated with Honduran or Cuba-grown tobacco.
Natural - light brown to brown; generally sun-grown.
Maduro - dark brown to very dark brown.
Oscuro - a.k.a. "Double Maduro", black, often oily in appearance; mainly grown in Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil, Mexico, and Connecticut, USA.

Dark and Obscure

2009-07-21T21:08:00.009-05:00

The word in Spanish for dark is oscuro. It's also obscuro.

OR SO THEY SAY.

I had always asked around about this, and all the native-Spanish speakers I had talked to all told me that they're synonyms, with no different connotations or anything.

STRANGE.

Why is this?

ob⋅scure /əbˈskyʊər/ appeared in [Middle] English around 1350–1400 from the Old French oscur, obscur which came from the Latin for dark, obscūrus.

HOWEVER, when it first entered the English language, in 1481 obscurity was recorded in sense of "absence of light" and not until 1619 with meaning "condition of being unknown."

Looking further into the Latin, we're looking at ob- "over" + -scurus "covered". So really, we're looking at the same problem in French, with both oscur and obscur meaning the same thing. BUT in Modern French, the word oscurer no longer exists. Looks like it was last used in the 1500s. It's been replaced by obscurer. Both still exist in Modern Spanish.

Summary:

In English, dark and obscure have different connotations.

In Spanish, oscuro and obscuro are used interchangable to mean both dark and obscure.

In French, obscurer is used to mean both dark and obscure.

And really, in English, OBSCURE can mean both unclear/vague and physcially dark.

Italian Lesson Update #1

2009-07-08T23:25:00.003-05:00

There are too many languages in my head.

I can do this.

We started with basic verbs and such--for instance, "to be" = ESSERE.

She said "conjugate ESSERE" but she said it in Spanish because my teacher speaks Spanish, and I thought "we haven't learned to eat yet" because I was thinking of essen in German.

Jaja I have to remind myself to think of this as a whole new language. NOT as a variation of French or Spanish and ESPECIALLY NOT German because I haven't found any similarities with German at all.

That's going to be the hardest part of all, methinks.

But this is soooo much fun!

Sing!

2009-07-05T23:12:00.009-05:00

So when you're a kid and you watch Disney's The Little Mermaid, you assume Ursula's spell that she casts on Ariel is just a bunch of jibberish like bibbidi bobbidi boo*. But you're wrong!

At the end of Poor Unfortunate Souls, she commands Ariel to sing. She casts a spell and takes her voice away! The spells she says is:

Beluga sevruga

Come winds of the Caspian Sea

Larengix glossitis/glaucitis (?)

Et max laryngitis

La voce to me

And what does ALL THIS mean?!

Beluga is a whale also known as a Sea Canary for it's high pitched twitter singing.
Sevruga is a kind of caviar from the Caspian Sea, according to Wiki, "eclipsed in cost only by the Beluga and Ossetra varieties."
The Caspian Sea. Well, we know where that is. But it's not known for being particularly windy. And we can't presume the story is set there becasue in the opening scene of the movie, Prince Eric is caught in a hurricane, and there are no hurricanes in the Caspian Sea. Oh well, we'll let this one slide.
Ok we know that larynx comes from the Greek lárynx, which is in the upper part of the human trachea where the vocal chords are located.
Glossitis is actually an inflamation of the tongue, coming from the Greek root gloss- meaning voice.
Glaucus is an ancient Greek sea-god. According to Ovid, Glaucus was a normal fisherman who one day discovered an herb that would make the fish he caught come back to life. He tried eating this herb himself, and it made him an immortal merman.
Laryngitis is, of course, an illness which causes you to lose your voice when your larynx becomes inflamed.
And last but not least, voce means voice in Italian.

I don't know who came up with this stuff, but it's genius. No wonder they won so many awards.

*Maybe for my next trick, I'll figure out where that came from!

Flotsam, Jetsam, now I've got her, boys. The boss is on a roll!

2009-07-05T22:26:00.006-05:00

Ok, this is kind of embarrasing. I just recently realized "flotsam and jetsam" were not just the names of the two evil eels in the Little Mermaid. I grew up with the movie and never thought twice about it.

The dictionary has a usage note that says:

In maritime law, flotsam applies to wreckage or cargo left floating on the sea after a shipwreck. Jetsam applies to cargo or equipment thrown overboard from a ship in distress and either sunk or washed ashore. The common phrase flotsam and jetsam is now used loosely to describe any objects found floating or washed ashore. (Also related is lagan, which is debris that sinks.)

They have both undergone several spelling changes through the decades, but etymologically,

Flotsam comes from flotasion/floating/floater, spelled flotsen til the mid 19th century, when -some was being added to many English words.
Jetsam is a syncopated variation of jettison, which comes from the French, jeter, meaning to throw.

The phrase has been used for many other things in popular culture aside from these characters. Obviously.

Cajun Trash?

2009-07-05T21:57:00.006-05:00

I walked into a work meeting and someone asked me "Chela, do you know what /pa do/ means?" I said no, and he couldn't believe that no one had heard his expression. Apparently no one was as Cajun as him in the room.

Having studied French, and growing up in Louisiana, I've had surprisingly little contact with Cajun French--practically none at all--only a very few expressions here and there that get eventually assimilated into the New Orleans dialect.

But this one, he said implies "white Cajun trash" but I have NO idea what words he was actually saying. I asked him and he didn't know where it came from, either.

French is the WORST language for figuring things out phoenetically because /pa do/ could be:

pas d'eau
pas do
pas don
pas deux (if he really meant/if it came from /pa dœ/)
pas de
pas d'eux
anything else the silly Cajuns just made up...

Does anyone have a clue??

I complain about French, but English is just as funny.

How common is "halcyon"?

2009-07-05T21:45:00.005-05:00

hal⋅cy⋅on /ˈhælsiən/

–adjective Also, hal⋅cy⋅o⋅ni⋅an /ˌhælsiˈoʊniən/

hal⋅cy⋅on⋅ic /ˌhælsiˈɒnɪk/

1. calm; peaceful; tranquil: halcyon weather.

2. rich; wealthy; prosperous: halcyon times of peace.

3. happy; joyful; carefree: halcyon days of youth.

4. of or pertaining to the halcyon or kingfisher.

–noun

5. a mythical bird, usually identified with the kingfisher, said to breed about the time of the winter solstice in a nest floating on the sea, and to have the power of charming winds and waves into calmness.

6. any of various kingfishers, esp. of the genus Halcyon.

7. (initial capital letter) Classical Mythology. Alcyone (def. 2).

Origin:

1350–1400; L to Gk halkyn, pseudo-etymological var. of alkyn kingfisher; r. ME alceon, alicion to L alcyōn to Gk

Synonyms:

1. serene, placid, pacific, untroubled.

---

Al⋅cy⋅o⋅ne /ælˈsaɪəˌni/

–noun

1. a third-magnitude star in the constellation Taurus: brightest star in the Pleiades.

2. Also, Halcyon, Halcyone. Classical Mythology. a daughter of Aeolus who, with her husband, Ceyx, was transformed into a kingfisher.

halcyon days

Definition: a period of peace and happiness; an idyllic time; also, a period of calm weather during the winter solstice

Etymology: Greek Alkyone a legend of fourteen windless days

---

Hal⋅ci⋅on /ˈhælsiˌɒn/

Trademark. a benzodiazepine, used as a sleeping drug and as an anxiolytic.

Inspired by "Arabesque"

2009-06-30T12:02:00.002-05:00

http://anaraug.xanga.com/706004461/greyface-vs-plato/

Arabesque

2009-06-29T22:40:00.007-05:00

Soo... I'm in an adult beginner's ballet class. I've always loved and wanted to learn ballet, and now that I have the time, I'm taking an adult beginner's class. I'm certain that what we're learning is very basic, and I'm certain it must be odd for the teacher to be working with grown people for whom these movements are not instinctual.

She tries to explain the feelings of certain movements, and sometimes she succeeds. Most ballet terms are in French, which makes them all easy for me to remember.

Today, we worked on the three arabesque positions. She reminded us not to put our hands in front of our eyes. She said the movement was based on the classic cherub angel imagery, where the angels are flying. We, as ballerinas, are supposed to be reminiscent of these angels. The angels can't have their hands in front of their eyes--if they did, they wouldn't be able to see where they were flying!

For some reason, in class, this all made sense to me. I could even picture the angels.

So I came home trying to link the two: flying cherub angels and arabesque positions in ballet.

I'm not doing too well.

I started by even looking for paintings of angels in the arabesque positions, but even that has caused me trouble.

In ballet, they look like this:

1st arabesque

2nd arabesque

3rd arabesque

I've found a few angels in ... positions similar enough:

But WHY did this come to be known as "arabesque"? In French, all it means is "Arabian" or "in Arabian fashion" and these kinds of angels certainly don't come from the Arabian/Islamic art tradition. This style is considered traditional Islamic art:

So I looked into the word etymology. The dictionary says:

ar⋅a⋅besque /ˌærəˈbɛsk/

–noun

Fine Arts. a sinuous, spiraling, undulating, or serpentine line or linear motif.
a pose in ballet in which the dancer stands on one leg with one arm extended in front and the other leg and arm extended behind.
a short, fanciful musical piece, typically for piano.
any ornament or ornamental object, as a rug or mosaic, in which flowers, foliage, fruits, vases, animals, and figures are represented in a fancifully combined pattern.

Note: It was employed in Roman imperial ornamentation, and appeared, without the animal figures, in Moorish and Arabic decorative art. (See Moresque.) The arabesques of the Renaissance were founded on Greco-Roman work.

And here, I believe, we have our answer. It's probably a combination of the fact that this particular body movement is somewhat undulating. But more importantly, I guess it came from the angels in the Greco-Roman art in the Renaissance movement.

I guess.