unbibium

So I got home intending to start making my own literature translations in a wiki dedicated to English without French/Latin/Greek loanwords, so that my favorite Python sketches and 4chan copypasta could exist in the same weird parallel universe as the Banded Folkdoms of Americksland.

Thanks to some discussion I had on #xkcd, I was inspired to run across the street to Whole Foods and try some raw milk cheese for the first time. I bought two such cheeses: one raw milk swiss, and one "naked goat", and bought a third pasteurized cheese because I couldn't pass up "Pepper Garlic Feta from Black Mesa".

By the time I was done with that, the novelty of Anglish had started to wear off a bit.

Someone on Twitter posted "the Greek Font Society". It was through friendfeed so the link that was no doubt included was lost, so I googled it.

Many many Greek fonts, grouped by century. Apparently the greek letter Ξ has three forms: three disconnected lines, three lines connected by a single vertical strike-through, and three lines drawn with diagonal lines connecting them, as if the first form were written without taking the pen off the page. It's this last form that was present in the Refrigerator Magnet Alphabet that a co-worker brought me from Greece back during the 2004 Olympics project.

What I really want to see, though, are Greek novelty fonts. The kind used by Old West shows and Chinese restaurants, and heavy metal bands when they're not using English.

It must be strange to live in a parallel universe of letters, where Η is a vowel and only the Slavic people agree with you on what Ρ sounds like.

In "The Riches", you get to hear how people would talk if they were allowed to say "shit" as often as they like, but never "fuck".

In "Battlestar Galactica", you get to hear how people would talk if they were allowed to say "fuck" if they said it wrong, and they never said any of the other six forbidden words.

I'm used to normal television, where people don't swear at all and just use cute euphemisms for everything. Or radio, where people are talking normally and then suddenly it's 30 seconds in the future and everyone's laughing and you have to guess what you missed.

And I can handle "frak" when it's just people screaming or being inarticulate to each other. "Clusterfrak" last night was a nice touch. But when it's a deep dramatic scene where Starbuck is trying to talk all slutty to her husband? Fuck that. I dare anyone, male or female, to use "frak" in bed.

I might have felt better about it if they'd kept the rest of the vocabulary from the 70's show. All the funky time measurements, and definitely "felgerkarb", because I find that "bullshit" is a much more useful word than "fuck" any day of the week.

The Medieval Helpdesk sketch from YouTube is not on dotsub yet -- a website specifically created for subtitled works.

Probably because it's from a real TV show and dotsub makes you pick a distribution license, and you'd then have to confess to dotsub that your video is neither CC nor public domain, and you don't really have the right to assign a dotSUB license to it.

So you have to go to Youtube and read the blurry subtitles.

So everyone on TV is saying "vajayjay" now.

Sounds good to the ear, but it doesn't look good in print.

I suppose it's making headlines because it's the only word for the snatch that hasn't been stamped out by TV censors the instant its usage became common.

In fact, I was very surprised to learn the word's supposed origin, in a medical drama. A medical drama. A MEDICAL DRAMA, WHERE THE WRITERS HAD TO USE BABY-TALK INSTEAD OF THE CLINICAL TERM.

I was about to despair about the puritan ways of American broadcasting, when I continued onto the article's cameo by my favorite linguist, John H. McWhorter, whom I first remember from his appearance on P&TBS, and later his lecture series about human language. Here he offers a different angle:

“The reason that vajayjay has caught on, I think, is because there is a black — Southern especially — naming tradition, which is to have names like Ray Ray and Boo Boo and things like that,” Dr. McWhorter said. “It sounds warm and familiar and it almost makes the vagina feel like a little cartoon character with eyes that walks around.”

Don't bother trying to draw that character. Someone would just Rule 34 it.

There are two aspects of the French language that they apparently still don't teach in schools. The first is that nobody says "nous" anymore, people say "on" when they're talking about their group. So, insteal of "Nous nous rendons," say "On se rend." And the second is that they've figured out that "ne ___ pas" is a bit redundant, so people don't say "ne" aloud very often in their negatives. So after you've attempted to order your dinner, your waiter will say simply "Je comprends pas".

I have a little trouble with this second one, because it means I have to pay a bit more attention. Four negative expressions come immediately to mind. Two of them are easy, because they don't mean anything else most of the time. But the other two are still used as positive words, but they flip over.

"Il [ne] marche pas." "He doesn't walk." (Originally "not a step", now "not at all")

"Il [n']a rien." "He doesn't have anything, he has nothing." (Originally "not a thing", now "nothing")

"Il [ne] mange plus." "He's not eating any more." ("plus" actually still means "more")

"Il [n']y a personne." "There's nobody there." ("personne" actually still means "person")

Years ago, that last one made me wear out my VCR when French in Action tried to teach me that concept. They'd show a guy and say "C'est une personne," and then an empty stage and say, "C'est personne." I rewound it over and over trying to make sense of it. I eventually checked that sentence on Babelfish, and sacre merde, it really does mean "It's nobody." So one of these days, I'll have to parse that in a more complicated sentence.

I was fortunate enough to get ahold of John McWhorter's lecture series, "The Story of Human Language", in which he explained how French got its weird negatives, through terms of emphasis that ended up taking over, as an example of "grammaticalization". As in the list above, "pas" used to mean "step", so people started saying "ne marche pas" for "doesn't walk a step", as "ne marche" was still correct but boring. Next thing you know, Fred didn't eat a step today, and Billy didn't work a step all year, and Ricardo doesn't drink a step because of what happened to his brother. But French doesn't have a big meaty word like "didn't" or "doesn't" or even "not"; it has a weak consonant and a weak vowel, so you might as well say Fred eats step, Billy works step, Ricardo drinks step.

It makes more sense if I substitute "jack", which is pretty damn close to "pas" in that it means "not" but used to be a noun, and eventually it meant "not" so much that it no longer needs the real "not". So Fred ate jack today, Billy worked jack all year, and Ricardo drinks jack because of what happened to his brother. Notice how one of these expressions is suddenly ambiguous?

Well, it's got to work in the long run, because France hasn't sank into the ocean yet. Probably the same way England didn't sink into the ocean from all the people who pronounce "can't" and "can" almost the same way.

Incidentally, has anyone here ever read an email where someone left out the word "not" entirely, and you could only tell because that sentence seemed to contradict everything else?

Super-incidentally, isn't it neat how the Japanese language saves the negative for the very end of the sentence, so you can have a long flowery sentence and then Wayne's World the whole thing?

For those of you who study foreign languages, can you translate the following phrases into them:

1. "You might as well finish it."
2. "It happened to be on a Tuesday."

These are both simple sentences, but with very nuanced meaning, and I must say I don't really know where to begin with either of them in any language.  Or, for that matter, how someone speaking English as a foreign language might come to arrive at these sentences at the right time.

note to self: watch this video on planned languages when I get home: http://community.livejournal.com/esperanto/141667.html

How do you translate "cool" to other languages?

I refer, of course, to the "cool" invented in 1950's America by Fonzie. In people, it denotes emotional detachment; in objects, it denotes a refined expression of the personality of the owner. Both meanings indicate an impressive presence that turns heads, and perhaps magically turns on jukeboxes.

I remember watching some South Park episodes translated into French. "Cool" was apparently appropriated directly from English, which is unfortunate because "cul" was often used to mean "ass". But it got me to wondering whether they had to use a loanword because there's something cultural going on. French kids might say something different when they're impressed. And if they're impressed by different traits, then they certainly mean something different. Just because Cartman's Trapper Keeper might be "cool" in English doesn't mean it would be, say, "super" in French. Something "super" in French might actually be quite lame to an American.

I checked Snopes today, and found they had a new entry about Richard Lamm's instructions on how to destroy America through illegal immigration.

The most amusing part: he submitted a "revised version" of his speech... in all caps, with underlined words aplenty.

The argument wasn't that coherent to begin with. He tries to support his argument with some selective history, but he forgets that England, the nation that grew into an enormous empire, was among the most multicultural in Europe for much of its life. Northern England was, for a time, an English Quebec, due to the heavy Norse influence after that particular invasion over a thousand years ago. The Norman invasion a few centuries later turned the native people into the servant class, separated by both class and language, much in the way Mexicans are here in the Southwest. What eventually happened was that the Normans assimilated, not necessarily by becoming more Anglo-Saxon, but by being rejected by the new culture that was evolving in France.

The statement I disagree with the most is: "Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our educational system and national cohesiveness." That's not quite accurate -- if there were really 100 languages competing on equal footing, immigrants would be learning English out of necessity to communicate with each other. Consider New York, which was where immigrants typically first landed while Ellis Island was still operating, and where immigrant communities thrive. What we actually have today, in most of the country, are only two competing languages. And the incoming Hispanics aren't very well-motivated to learn English, because everyone in their neighborhood speaks Spanish anyway. Hence, they are isolated from the English-speaking world, even when we start moving into each other's neighborhoods.

In general, I find this pattern of argument quite lazy: insisting that the list of things that piss you off is actually what someone would come up with, from scratch, if they wanted to spread misery. It turns the problem into a caricature, and ignores the root of any legitimate problem that might exist.