Dates of posts serve as permalinks.
03.12.21.21:48: The permalinks for all of today's posts have been fixed. (They previously led to last week's archives.)
03.12.22.12:36: IMAANI JAALASTHAANI PATHITAVYAANI
lit. 'these net-places read-to-be [are]'. (The recurring -aani is a neuter nominative plural ending - all three words have the same gender, case, and number.)
= 'These sites ought to be read.'
I'm leaving for O'ahu in a few hours and once I get there, I won't blog much until I get a new laptop. In the meantime, I recommend these netistans (-stans is cognate to Sanskrit sthaani 'places' and English stand):
Henry Mark Holzer: Rediscovered this old Ayn Rand associate while Googling M‘mr 'lqdh'fy. Try his defense of David Horowitz, his attack on the draft, or his juxtaposition of John Galt with ... Bill Clinton!?
If shata-Seraa-satyaani weren't enough, read John Ray's autobio page. Warning: It's long and when I read the earlier, shorter (but still long!) version, I couldn't stop.
My connection is too slow for me to appreciate the Germanizer, but maybe yours is faster. What would the Indian version of it be? The Aryanizer? How un-PC! An optional part of Germanization is an online language course. Even before seeing that site, I was planning to launch a Sanskrit course here. Watch for it later this week, assuming I get my laptop up and running.
Last but not least is my former employer Frits Kortlandt's site. I think there's something to his non-Chomskyan viral theory of linguistics (PDF), but I'm too pooped to say much more than this: Blogging is the newest way to spread the 'disease'.
03.12.22.12:20: SINO-HEBREW (logonotes)*
Reader Robert Talbott wrote this in response to my update to "Judezmo":
good question. i've thought a bit about this myself, and it must have existed at some point along the way because jews always wrote using the chaldean block characters, and it would be really, really interesting to find out how they chose to represent chinese. what makes it more interesting is that each of these judeo-x languages uses the alphabet differently. for instance, in hebrew the characters all represent consonants (with exceptions depending on context and period). yiddish on the other hand has assigned stable full-vowel status to four of the characters. judeo-spanish has done the same thing with the same characters, but it gave them different values. judeo-arabic has shifting consonantal values, some predictable, some not (or so i'm told).
the problem in all of this is that before you can read anything written in this alphabet, you need to be able to speak either the majority language or the dialect before you be able to vocalize the text; without vocalization, you can't identify it, let alone understand it.since vowels are the most common jokers in the pack: there is a formalized system of vowels that modern hebrew uses that's based on the system used the masora, in which written vowels are a punctuation-like after thought. these vowels are typically applied in three cases: poetry, the bible, and text books for non-native speakers. otherwise, no one uses them. many native speakers do not even know what all of these vowels look like because they never see them; they can be fully literate without them. the judeo-dialects have borrowed some of these vowel points, but inconsistently, and like hebrew they occur only in certain settings (there are exceptions, like the yiddish alef with a patah).
my point: just getting to the vocalization of a chinese word written in hebrew characters could be a very , very difficult task, and god knows how tone would be marked. even so 'twould be most interesting to see.
Even if no one attempted to write Chinese in judeographs (?), there must have been Jewish vocabulary that was Sinified by the Jews of Kaifeng, either through calques (substituting Chinese elements for foreign elements) or outright borrowing. Yet nothing I've ever seen on the Jews of China - not even the refugees in the 30s - deals with language.
Even if the technicalities of speech aren't your thing, put yourselves in the shoes of Jews coming to China, either in the remote past or just a few decades ago. How are you going to cope with this new alien world? How far will you assimilate? How many words of your neighbors' tongue will you learn? A few to get by, or the whole thing, including thousands of sinographs?
*LOGONOTES: Chinese borrowings into non-Chinese languages are called 'Sino-X': e.g., Sino-Vietnamese, Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, etc. By analogy, 'Sino-Hebrew' would refer to Chinese borrowings into Hebrew. However, I doubt that Hebrew was the native language of the Jews of Kaifeng (so what was?). Moreover, one wouldn't want to contaminate one's liturgical language with foreignisms. So 'Sino-Hebrew' here refers to Hebrew borrowings into the Chinese spoken by those early Jews. Perhaps a better term might be 'Judeo-Chinese'. Having stayed up all night, I'm not exactly functioning at optimal levels. Hence the first term that came to mind was 'Sino-Hebrew', probably because I'm so used to saying Sino-this, Sino-that. 'Sinoxenic' - the Chinese borrowings in Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese - is one of my specialities in linguistics.
03.12.22.7:30: "THE MORE ILLITERATE THE BETTER"
That's a sentiment Kevin Kusoyama could agree with. Maybe he should get this job:
[M]y college, the Honors College, is starting to mumble about the evil of Western, White dead male literature surveys and discussing hiring someone who is a "specialist" in non-Western literatures--something I'm not necessarily opposed to EXCEPT the established definition of non-Western doesn't really include Asian, especially Chinese, literature or Indian or, in fact, anything that has a long literary tradition of its own, but seeks only literature from previously strictly oral cultures, the more illiterate the better. Chinese, I was told, are not REALLY members of a minority group in the United States--nor are East Indians. "Why," I asked at the Center for Women in Society's executive meeting, "Well, " the director explained contemptuously," after all, they SUCCEED." That said it all.
Es rayt, bra! (That's right, brother!) That's why they must bring in Dr. Kusoyama, the world's foremost expert on disfangkxano* Loko pipo (dysfunctional Loko people) and a haiku poet in his own right. Dr. Kusoyama needs to replace this filthy bigot (emphasis mine):
My second book, Captured, based on the first-person narratives of civilian internees in Japanese internment camps in the Philippines and how they survived, has since received excellent reviews ... but I was turned down repeatedly for grants prior to publication because I was "racist" ; I had, you see, found fault with the Japanese for starving the internees to death--or near death--in the Philippines. I was a "racist" because I was anti-Japanese imperalism and Nipponese racism.
HOW DARE HE CRITICIZE THE GREAT SOLAR EMPIRE!!
REMEMBER, EUROPPRESSORS, ONLY YOU ARE CAPABLE OF EVIL!!
ALL OTHERS (apart from race traitors: oreos, bananas, et al.) ARE EITHER INNOCENT OR DUPED BY THE DEPIGMENTED ONES!!
If you're in the mood to read more Leftist ranting, David Horowitz says reviews of his book Left Illusions contain "instantaneous yowls of progressive pain". That's music to my ears.
*If I had my way, I'd coin a Pijin term like nowakkayn < 'no-work-kind' to translate 'dysfunctional' instead of borrowing from English with minor phonological modifications.
03.12.22.3:57: WHO IS M‘MR 'LQDH'FY?
Happy Dog mocks the lack of a consistent transcription of a certain Libyan's name:
“There are hundreds of idiots using my name, and they misspell it so many ways, nobody knows who the h=ll I am anymore! I get VISA bills for Muammar Khadaffi, Quadafi, Gadaffi, and Qadaffi… I’ve got bill collectors after me from all over the world!" ...
Col. Ghadifi also stated that for sake of simplicity, he is legally changing his name to Bob Jones, or Bhab Jihones according to Reuters, Baab Zhonez to the BBC, Bahab al Ghonis at CNN, and Shish ka Bob at FOX News.
This page provides a more serious look at the subject and includes a Google survey of spelling frequencies. The top spelling for M.K/Q/G. is Gaddafi (though I wonder how well the kh-spellings would have done if they were included). Here is a list of thirty-two possible spellings, not including a letter-for-letter rendition of the vowelless Arabic spelling at the top:
M-‘-M-R '-L-Q-DH-'-F-Y (the original reads from right to left, of course)
The '-L stands for al- 'the'. Apart from the -Y standing for -i and the ' ('alif, not to be confused with ‘, the letter ‘ayn) standing for a, one has to mentally fill in the missing vowels and double the m. If this seems unreasonable to you, try reading English without vowels: e.g., M.K/Q/G.'s nemesis RNLD RGN.
03.12.22.12:26: UPDATE: Bull Moose asked:
Does anyone else wonder why Col. Ghadafi never promoted himself to general?
And I ask - what's it like for a Libyan general to take orders from a mere colonel?
03.12.21.22:31: "DO SOME CAVE PAINTINGS WITH THEIR INSIDES"
Amazing coincidence dept.: James Hudnall
is angry about airport security:
All I will say is, every time I travel through airports I get pulled aside and have to go through all that nonsense where I gave to empty my pockets and take off my shoes. It p!sses me off. I used to tell my friends everytime that happens I want to bomb Iraq. Of course, what I mean is, I'd like to hunt down these al-Qaeda clowns and do some cave paintings with their insides.
And guess who has to deal with "all that nonsense" tomorrow. I'm flying back home to O'ahu for winter break.
I just remembered that s*c*r*ty cut open my last lock on the way back from LA last month, so I have to get a new one in less than 18 hours! ARGH!!
Aham api atiiva kupitah!
'I also very angry'
03.12.21.22:52: UPDATE: Hud also uvaaca (said):
I wrote a long post about the high security alert we're in and then my browser crashed and I lost it.
One reason I blog using PageMill (and, theoretically, Notepad if this program ever dies) is stability. I can't remember PM ever crashing on me. Maybe once or twice over the past 3+ years at most. Both my PC and office Mek (it only looks like a Mac) browsers crash all the time (which is an odd phrase, since 'all the time' literally implies 'perpetually' rather than 'frequently'). This discourages me from leaving too many comments at others' sites (with the exception of Blog-O-Rama). I usually select and copy the text of a comment before I post it so I can repaste it in case the browser crashes, but sometimes I forget - or my computer doesn't acknowledge the copying and pastes nothing.
03.12.22.00:02: UPDATE II: Dr. Walid Phares defends the high security alert in "Code Orange: The Reason Why".
03.12.21.21:59: "WE COULD HAVE USED SANCTIONS"
In his JWR
column, 
James
Lileks applies hilarious 20/20,000 hindsight to the capture
of Saddam:
For that matter, one wonders why he had to be dragged out at all. We could have used sanctions to force him out in seven months. He had only three-quarter mil in cash; eventually he'd tire of having pizza delivered every night, and he'd come out on his own.
Maybe the paranoid Right was right for once:
He [Dean] believes it is the obligation of the United States to beg the United Nations for a "mother-may-I" first.
In the '90s, the flaming nutcases on the right were convinced that Bill Clinton wanted to relinquish sovereignty to the United Nations. Now the worst fear of the hard-right crazies is a campaign promise from the Democrats' front-runner. Look for Dean to start taking helicopters to his campaign appearances. Black ones!
What's that whirring noise I hear?
03.12.21.21:46: JUDEZMO
... is yet another Judeo-Indo-European language (YIE?) I've never heard of until now. In response to my post on Italkian, reader Robert Talbott (last seen here) uvaaca (said):
For the record, Jews during the Middle Ages tended to have their own dialects of majority languages: Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-French, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino was the liturgical, Judezmo was the spoken (or maybe it's the other way around?)), the spectrum of Yiddish (in the west more Germanic, in the east more Slavic), and many, many more, most of which are dead. Sadly, there was no Judeo-English dialect (disregarding Yinglish, since it's not a dialect).
He recommended jewish-languages.org to me. Unfortunately, it's down right now. Otherwise, I'd be looking for Judeo-Sinitic there. Jews have been in China for centuries and their descendants still live today:
Although Gabow said the Chinese Jews had some distinctive physical features, the differences were "not noticeable unless you really looked." One of the reasons, he said, is that they had become biologically and culturally assimilated.
Today only a few pillars and stones remain among the ruins of the Kaifeng synagogue, rebuilt for the final time in 1653. Some historians believe it was originally built by Jews [in 1163] who arrived in 1127 from India or Persia.
Although I've never heard of a Jewish language unique to China, surely the Chinese spoken by those early Jews must have had some interesting non-Chinese loanwords.
Much more on Jews in China (including the Jewish refugees of 20th century Shanghai) here.
03.12.21.21:51: UPDATE: This just occurred to me ... did any of the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng try to write Chinese in the Hebrew alphabet?
03.12.21.16:54: GIVE ME A BREAK FOR CHRISTMAS
If only that were possible ... John Stossel's book of that title is coming out next month! Its subtitle is How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...:
In GIVE ME A BREAK, Stossel explains how ambitious bureaucrats, intellectually lazy reporters, and greedy lawyers make your life worse even as they claim to protect your interests. Taking on such sacred cows as the FDA, the War on Drugs, and scaremongering environmental activists -- and backing up his trademark irreverence with careful reasoning and research -- he shows how the problems that government tries and fails to fix can be solved better by the extraordinary power of the free market.
Arrrgh. It would have made a fine Christmas gift.
But in the meantime, I'll just have to read his site. (Still have no TV in Hilo, and don't want one, either. I already have too much stuff to take back with me when I move out.) One of his recent stories is "Toy Trouble" (emphasis mine):
You may think the worst is over once you survive the crowds and chaos of holiday shopping in the stores. But I think the worst happens when you get home, and try to assemble the toys ...
"We're used to being tortured by products," said Bill Gribbons, who runs the lab [the Design and Usability Testing Center at Bentley College in Massachusetts]. He says companies often design products for their own convenience, rather than consumers, and consumers then blame themselves when they have a hard time putting stuff together. "They've come to expect if they make a mistake, it's their fault and not the fault of the product," Gribbons said.
Somebody out there would argue that "There oughta be a law ..." But Stossel wouldn't. Nor would I. Both of us started out thinking that government force would protect consumers, but we changed our minds along the way. I've been a fan of Stossel's before his 'conversion' to the Daaark Side.
So what might be the NonGov solution be to this problem? Common sense. Don't buy toys that look too complicated for you to build. If your kids whine for a torture toy, tell them no. Eventually the companies will get the message and stop making them.
I used to be a big construction toy freak. I loved Lego, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, building blocks, etc. I still do, and if I had more disposable income, I'd open up my collection and add to it. (Being on the move between jobs is a big deterrent for collecting anything. Even transporting DVD boxes is troublesome.) But oddly these toys are less construction-oriented than before, with more prefab parts. That gets to me. Where's the creativity if something's already partially made for you? One-use-only parts limit the possibilities for building other models. So I'm surprised to hear about this new wave of complicated toys. If construction were the in thing, surely Lego and other manufacturers would be making their products more complex. Maybe this is some kind of experiment in the other direction.
Going back further in the archives, I couldn't help but look at this:
While beauty itself may be only skin deep, studies show our perception of beauty may be hard-wired in our brains.
That may include a height preference:
To see if the women would go for short guys who were successful, ABCNEWS' Lynn Sherr created extraordinary résumés for the shorter men. She told the women that the shorter men included a doctor, a best-selling author, a champion skier, a venture capitalist who'd made millions by the age of 25.
Nothing worked. The women always chose the tall men. Sherr asked whether there'd be anything she could say that would make the shortest of the men, who was 5 feet, irresistible. One of the women replied, "Maybe the only thing you could say is that the other four are murderers." Another backed her up, saying that had the taller men had a criminal record she might have been swayed to choose a shorter man. Another said she'd have considered the shorter men, if the taller men had been described as "child molesters."
Not exactly heart-warming for me to read (I'm 5'5")!
Stossel concludes:
We should add the bias of "lookism" to sexism and racism. It's just as bad but we don't need a federal program.
How about a state program? Just joking!
Who was it that came up with the idea of handicapping the beautiful? Was Vonnegut the first? In "Harrison Bergeron", he wrote:
She [a ballerina] must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous ...
And to offset his good looks, the H-G [Handicapper General] men required that he [Harrison Bergeron] wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.
If you can't elevate everyone, bring everyone down to your level. Or lower, so that you can be 'superior' and rule over them. An LCD (lowest common denominator) society would be an evil illusion. Equality is eternally elusive.
03.12.21.6:55: SARVAAN ASMADROGINO HANMAH (logonotes)*
lit. 'all our-patients kill-we'
"We kill all our patients" was a phrase I saw tonight on the way home from dinner. It adorned a building under a pest control test.
Some of my students might say
Sa sarvaan tacchishyaan hanti.
lit. 'he all his-students kills'
after they see their grades. I have no compunctions against flunking those who deserve it.
I just electronically filed grades for one class (after the online program deleted them twice!) and finished grading one set of finals over dinner tonight. When I wake up I have to finish grading one last set of finals and tabulate the grades for my other two classes so I can submit them by Monday afternoon. This would have been easier if much of my grading data weren't trapped on DVD-Eater, my all-but-dead older laptop. Lesson for the cybercentric: print out all essential documents. Tonight I converted the files from WordPerfect to Word format on D-E (which couldn't stay turned on longer than ten minutes!) and transferred them via a floppy to Freezie, my newer laptop - which hasn't lived up to its name yet tonight - and which can't view the files properly! (I don't have an XP version of Word on this machine, so I have to open all .docs in WordPad, which wreaks havoc on tables.) I'll find some way to work around this during the next thirty-odd hours while somehow squeezing in time to pack for my flight on the edge of evening. This takes priority over everything else. So ...
Biblaagishyaami; kimtu na shaknomi.
lit. 'blog-want-I; but not can-I'
I will try to post a little between scoring marathons, but don't expect anything major. Then again, most of the posts here start off as one-paragraphers that bloat into ... something like this. So who knows, you could get lucky and read something substantial here after all. Nah ...
Mama kaalo na asti.
lit. 'my time not is' = 'I have no time' (Sanskrit has no word for 'have').
(Kaalo < kaalas, nominative singular of kaala 'time' with -as > -o before n, can also mean 'death' or the 'god of death'! Since I don't have death ...
Aham amrito 'smi!
< Aham amritas asmi!
lit. 'I immortal am!')
sarvaan: adjective modifying asmadrogino; both are masculine accusative (direct object) plural.
asmadrogino < asmad-roginas:
asmad: cognate to us; prefix version of vayam, cognate to we. Can be interpreted in many different ways (e.g., 'for us' [dative], 'from us' [ablative]) but is genitive [possessive] here: 'of us, our' (equivalent to long independent word asmaakam or the shorter but still independent word nas [cognate to French nous, and even identical in function as well as form to Russian nas 'our']).
roginas: 'patients' < rogin 'patient' (masculine; lit. 'break-posessing'):
rog-, strengthened version of the root ruj 'break', which I used a lot when I was sick (rugna; lit. 'broken') last summer.
-in: masculine possessive suffix.
-as is the accusative plural ending telling us that 'patients' are the objects of the verb; -as becomes -o if followed by h.
hanmah < hanmas: 1st person plural of han 'kill'; no pronoun is needed since the verb indicates who the subject is; -s becomes -h if nothing follows.
tacchishyaan < tad-shishyaan:
tat < tad: cognate to that; prefix version of sa 'he' / saa 'she' / tad 'it'; -d-sh- becomes -c-ch. As with asmad- above, potentially subject to many interpretations (e.g., 'for him', 'from her' ...) but here is equivalent to tasya 'his'.
shishyaan: accusative plural of shishya 'student' (masculine):
shis: short form of shaas 'teach' (also 'rule'); s becomes sh between i and y.
-ya: noun suffix; shish-ya could be thought of as the 'taught-one' = 'student'.
Biblaagishyaami: desiderative (desire-form) of blaag: 'I want to blog':
bi-: partial, imperfect reduplication (copy) of blaag.
blaag: the root.
-i-: inserted between the root and the next suffix.
-shya- < -sya-: 'want to'; the desiderative suffix; s becomes sh between i and y (see also shishya 'student' above).
-mi: 'I'; 1st person singular active ending; lengthens preceding a.
na: cognate to and meaning 'not'.
shaknomi: 'I can':
shakno: strong present stem of shak 'can'.
mi: see above.
03.12.20.4:31: SHATASERAASATYAANI
< shata 'hundred' + Seraa 'Sarah' + satya 'truth' (< sat 'being' [cognate to is] + -ya noun suffix) + -ani (neuter plural suffix; for other endings, see here).
Sarah
has put up a
hundred facts about herself, including a photo. Saa paramam
sundarii!*
Sovaaca (< saa 'she' + uvaaca 'said'):
I'd post it to give you something to think about while blogging is light for the next two weeks. Hopefully after reading all this, you'll still come back in January...
Pratyaayaasyaami!**
LOGONOTES:
*Saa paramam sundarii!
'she supremely beautiful [is]'
Parama 'supreme' (-m makes it an adverb) is the superlative of para 'extreme'. More details here.
**Pratyaayaasyaami!
< prati-aa-yaa-sya-mi (causes preceding -a to lenghthen)
'back-(motion reverser prefix)-go-will-I'
'I will come back.'
03.12.20.4:04: ITALKIAN
... is not a typo. It's to Italian what Yiddish is to German (or Ladino to Spanish):
Italkian was spoken mainly in urban areas in Rome and in central and northern Italy (especially in Livorno) from the 10th to the 17th centuries in Italy. Described as a mix between Italian and Hebrew, it is estimated that only a tiny number of people speak Italkian fluently today and less than 4,000 people still use it in their everyday speech.
More details here. Even more at this site, which includes a description of Primo Levi's "Lead", a story with built-in appeal to me:
"Lead" is a fantasy that necessarily involved a great deal of research in historical linguistics.
The narrator of the story, Rodmund, who searches for and processes lead, begins as follows: "My country is called Thiuda; at least we call it that, but our neighbors, that is, our enemies, use different names for us - Saksa, Nemet, Aleman"(p. 79). He is talking about a Germanic tribe; we can recognize cognates of Teuton, Saxon, Allemagne, and the Slavic and Hungarian word for "deaf-mute" which was applied to German and Germans. Rodmund moves to another area and says of the people that "they called mountains 'pen,' meadows 'tza,' the snow of summer 'roisa,' sheep 'fea,' their houses "bait,'...."(p. 85). He is probably referring to a pre-Roman language spoken in northern Italy. [The dead non-Indo-European language Etruscan, or something totally made up? -AMR]
Speaking of "made up", I found this article via the front page of italian.about.com:
Taylor is failing her Math 111 and Italian classes.
"Of the three languages that I've taken, this is by far the hardest," Taylor says. "A bunch of drunk fat guys drinking vino got together and made this language."
What would the other two languages have been? Spanish and French? She should try Sanskrit, which was seemingly invented by a bunch of soma-drinkers:
soma Meaning m[asc]. (fr. {su} ['press' + noun suffix -ma: i.e., 'the pressed' - AMR]) juice , extract , (esp.) the juice of the Soma plant, (also) the Soma plant itself ... the stalks ... of which were pressed between stones ... by the priests ... and then offered in libations to the gods [in this respect corresponding with the ritual of the Iranian Avesta [of Zoroastrianism - AMR]] or was drunk by the Brahmans, by both of whom its exhilarating effect was supposed to be prized ... it is personified as one of the most important of Vedic gods ... Soma is identified with the moon [as the receptacle of the other beverage of the gods called Amrita or as the lord of plants] ...
Yes, that's my namesake up there.
03.12.20.3:54: SA BHAVISHYADVAADII NA ASTI (logonotes)*
James Randi gives us a skeptic's take on Saddam's capture (emphasis his):
Well, Saddam is now caught and locked up, to my total amazement. I have always believed that Saddam and his sons were killed way back at the start of the attack on Baghdad! How could I have doubted that, when the statement of "psychic" Riley G. Matthews, Jr. — who advertises himself as a close friend of Uri Geller — confidently predicted in a March 24th, 2003, press release, referring to himself in the third person [ah, always the mark of humility - AMR] ... Of course, I'm sure you've noticed that not one "psychic" predicted anything about Saddam's capture (except Riley, who said it would never happen) and now we can await the swarm of claims from the psychically uninformed about how they had a "feeling" or a "hunch," but just didn't publish it. So what else is new?
Consider that this Riley guy's press release couldn't even spell Saddam's name right! I mean ... "Suddam"!? How DUMB!! (OK, it was spelled correctly in the rest of the piece, but still ...)
Here's a real-life psychic joke from one of Randi's readers:
One day we were sitting in the [fire] station and a commercial came on TV for one of these psychic readers. I had mentioned how these readings are bogus. To prove it I called the 800 number and when they asked me for my credit card number I said "you're the psychic, you tell me what my number is." They hung up on me and the guys at the station couldn't stop laughing.
Why bother with psychics at all, wonders Paul Walker-Bright (is he a Bright?):
The attraction of paranormal mumbo-jumbo and claimed special abilities obviously provide one answer. Another answer might be money — it can be considerably more expensive to obtain therapy from a psychiatrist or other licensed professional than it is to visit your local psychic/astrologer/tarot reader/etc ...
The average person probably is not well equipped to distinguish between the gibberish of the psychic and that of the psychiatrist (both can be seen as claiming special skills and abilities that allow them insight into people's psyches), and so has no incentive to seek out the more expensive treatment. The same holds true for "alternative" medicines. The task is to educate people to recognize the difference between treatments that have been scientifically validated and those that have not — regardless of whether or not those treatments are explicitly paranormal in nature.
Nah, let's just force-feed people PC pablum instead in the name of e-duh-cation. Psychics are just differently abled, that's all ... able to rip us off.
Look at this e-duh-cator - a headmaster, no less!:
I was in my senior year of high school. It was a private, Anglican school, so the students had to attend bi-weekly chapel services. Mostly these were pretty quick sessions, a couple of hymns and a reading or two, and we'd be on our way [kinda like the weekly chapel services at my junior and senior high school - AMR]. One day, though, the headmaster went up to the front and gave a little presentation.
The gist of it was that, as the Mayan astrologers predicted, either the world will end in 2012, or ... [I'm not reprinting the rest of this rubbish. Besides, the world will really end in 2014. Trust me!*]
*AMR: I used to be obsessed with the idea that a great disaster (e.g., the destruction of the Earth) would occur fifteen years after I graduated from high school. Why fifteen and why my graduation as a reference point? Na jaanaami ('not know-I'; na jaanaami is cognate with Eng not know / Russian ne znaju 'I don't know'). Things just pop into my head from seemingly nowhere. Cosmic bursts of enlightenment (ooh!) or something more mundane? I report, you decide.
Fortunately, some paranormal e-duh-cation is conducted in small languages that prevent the memes from spreading too far:
I was just traveling from Finland to Italy with Finnair and noticed a magazine in the front pocket of the flight seat. The magazine is the common type which I suppose most of the airlines have which contains all kinds of information about traveling locations etc., a magazine called "Lento" (translates to "Flight"). It also contained various ways (in Finnish) to relieve "Stress during the flight." [New Age nonsense excised - AMR]
I just wonder if Finnair (www.finnair.fi) uses similar "scientific" methods to maintain their airplanes. Hopefully not. Luckily there are only about 5 million of us Finnish-speaking people, so the brainwashing does not contaminate more people.
The last line's a kicker (in English translation - not mine):
If you are embarrassed to make these movements [to reduce stress during a flight] in front of others, you can do the movements also in your mind. Amazingly enough, research results show that the effect is almost as good as when you make the actual exercises.
Zero equals zero!
03.12.20.3:56: UPDATE: Forgot to stick this in: Why does Randi think "Scooby-Doo rules"?
Sa bhavishyadvaadii na asti:
'he be-will-speak-having not is'
'He is not a prophet.'
Sa < Sas: 'he' (masculine nominative singular); drops -s before any consonant.
bhavishyadvaadii: masculine nominative singular (matching sa 'he' above, since they refer to the same male) of bhavishyadvaadin:
bhavishyad < bhavishyat: 'future' < '(what) will be' < bhavishya-, future stem of bhuu, cognate to and meaning 'be':
bhav-: strenghthened form of the root bhuu.
-i-: vowel linking root and suffix.
-shya- < -sya-: future suffix; s becomes sh between i and y.
-d < -t: suffix added to roots ending in vowels to make noun stems; becomes -d before v-.
-vaadin: 'speaker' (masculine):
vaada: 'speech, doctrine' (masculine), as in Theravaada (Pali: 'senior-doctrine') Buddhism.
vaad: strengthened form of root vad 'speak'.
-a: noun suffix.
-in: possessive adjective suffix - to have speaking is to be a speaker.
na: cognate to and meaning 'not'.
asti: cognate to and meaning 'is'.
03.12.20.2:39: HIGH COO: "HEMA EN SIKO"
While Googling the Italian phrases il poeta / i poeti 'the poet / the poets', I found this and Porcelized it through Google's translator:
The American poet has been defined from Poet News: "the more important living poet d?America... "and: "its job, deeply felt, it echoes compassion, intelligence and beauty ". Hirschman comes considered one of the greater "political" poets Americans. Personage-symbol of the left American, above all Californian [Left = California!? -AMR], poet, translator, have published, also boycotted from the cultural market American, more than 80 books.
Expelled, for its the firm and active opposition to the war of the Vietnam, dall?Università of Los Angeles, where it taught, has become member of the CLP (Communist Labor Party) and of its successive transformations. "Jack Hirschman is fighting in order to recompose the modern English language, indeed it invents a new language [Newspeak? - AMR], or at least a sincopato rhythm whose lascerà dissonance not to sleep the liberal consciences or those of anyone other, because it is music in order to make to squeak our senses."
I've never heard of signor
Hirschman ('Mr.'
is not capitalized in Italian), but I'm sure Kevin
Kusoyama's senses have been squeaked by his (its?)
poesia. Hawai'i State University's greatest scholar came
up with this Pijin haiku
off the top of his head in the shower tonight:
Hema en siko / Hammer and sickle
Simboz av libarexan / Symbols of liberation
Fo o Hawai'i / For all Hawai'i
(Hawai'i is a three-syllable word: ha-wai-'i. The apostrophe represents a glottal stop - the sound between uh and oh in uh-oh.)
Right now, Dr. Kusoyama is pretty upset about his buddy Baltasar Porcel. As the Axis of Porcel put it,
Ah so! Me from Cathay-lonia. Me likey oriental stereotypes long time!
But let's turn a blind eye to that lapse and focus on this deep philosophical question involving the great Europatriarch:
Who is Zeus? I do not know it, but it beats to us secular.
03.12.20.1:32: CHI È «IL LUMINOSO»?
(Who is 'the Luminous'?)
I just found a reference to Dyaus pitri 'Sky-Father' (last seen below) in Italian as il «Luminoso» in a description of Vedismo (which is part of a bigger site on Induismo). (Many sites including that one list him as Dyaus pitaa [the nominative singular]; pitri is the stem form.)
His feminine counterpart is Prith(i)vii, la «Vasta» (one might expect la Terra, but Prith(i)vii is the feminine of the adjective prithu 'broad' [which has a double meaning in English!] - the vast earth is a broad broad!).
Oddly, la Luna is listed as "Kandra" (sic); the proper spelling is Candra (pronounced 'chun-druh'). An Italianized spelling would be Ciandra (ci = [ch]).
I never thought of Kaama (lit. 'desire' [masc.] < kam 'love' + noun suffix -a) as "il Cupido vedico".
Unlike other major Romance languages, Italian doesn't mark plurals with -s; it usually changes the final vowel (if any). Theoretically, Italian could apply this strategy to foreign words: e.g., asura 'demon' (masc.) could be Italo-pluralized as asure (like a feminine noun: cf. casa / case 'house(s)') or asuri (like a masculine noun: cf. poeta / poeti 'poet(s)') but on this page, the Sanskrit nouns are left intact and the burden of marking singular or plural is left solely to the definite article: "gli asura" (the demons [masc.]) - gli is used before masculine plural nouns with initial vowels. (More details on Italian definite articles here.)
Sanskrit has no words solely functioning as definite articles, but it does allow some of its words for 'that' to also do double duty for 'the':
masculine: so 'surah 'the demon', taav asurau 'the two demons', te 'suraah 'the demons' (three or more). (The initial a- of asura disappears after so and te.)
feminine: saa devii 'the goddess', te devyau 'the two goddesses', taa devyah 'the goddesses' (three or more).
neuter: tan mitram 'the friend', te mitre 'the two friends', taani mitraani 'the friends' (three or more).
(and no, those aren't all the possible forms of 'the' - it changes not only for case [all of the above are in the nominative] but - sort of as in Italian - according to what the initial sound of the following noun is: e.g., tan [neut. nom./acc. sg.] can also be tat, tad, tac, or taj.)
Number is redundantly marked on both the definite article and the noun itself. English marks only the noun: the never changes for singular or plural (or dual - or gender). Confusingly, te (which is cognate to and also means 'they') does triple duty as 'the' for masculine plural, neuter dual, and feminine dual nouns. Fortunately, 'the' is far from obligatory in Sanskrit. You may have noticed that 'the' has always corresponded to nothing in the Sanskrit phrases and sentences on this site.
Many languages in the world get along just fine without definite articles: e.g., East and Southeast Asian languages. I've never taught ESL, but I would imagine that the usage of the must be hard to teach to Asian language speakers - yet native speakers never think about it! Not that 'the'-lessness is necessarily non-European. What we and many other Europhones take for granted would have puzzled a Roman. (Unlike its descendants, Latin had no word for 'the'. The Romance languages developed their words for 'the' from Latin demonstratives [mostly ille/illa 'that'].)
03.12.20.1:59: UPDATE: One thing that puzzles me about Pijin is its use of definite articles. Why bother with da 'the' at all, since few early Pijin speakers had languages with 'the'-equivalents? Was it an influence from Hawaiian ka/ke 'the' < earlier *te (albeit in Anglicized garb)? And stranger still, where did Pijin speakers get the idea to use da as an intensifier: e.g., da hat 'so hot' (not 'the hot')? Is that da from 'the', or is it a homophonous, unrelated word?
03.12.20.2:05: UPDATE II: If most Romance articles are from Latin ille 'that' (masc.) and illa 'that' (feminine), whatever happened to illud 'that' (neuter)? A reader sent me the answer (Latin forms are in capitals):
[Y]es, ILLUD did survive in a number of Romance dialects, but not as a marker of a separate neuter gender, which in any case only really survived in Romanian. Rather, a reflex of ILLUD is most often used as a "mass/abstract"-marking article: for example, in many Southern Italian dialects a reflex of ILLUM [masc.] is used as the definite article to designate a concrete object and a reflex of ILLUD is used as the definite article to designate the object in the abstract. It's impossible to tell whether Romanian preserves reflexes of ILLUD: in many Southern Italian dialects ILLUM and ILLUD have merged (in Naples, both are realized as /o/) and are kept distinct solely by the fact the reflex of ILLUD still triggers gemination [doubling] of the consonant of the following noun (historically, this is due to assimilation of the final -D of ILLUD to the following consonant), unlike the reflex of ILLUM (whose final /m/ certainly disappeared at an early date: no traces of it are found anywhere in Romance). Unfortunately geminate consonants have been eliminated in the history of Romanian, so that BUNUL TIMP "the good time" [lit. 'good-the time'] might be derived either from BONUM ILLUM TEMPUS or BONUM ILLUD TEMPUS.
03.12.19.23:27: "I AM VERY INSENSITIVE"
Via John Ray: Rudhirasrun mastishkam (Bleeding Brain - see here) needs some D-hab (diversity rehabilitation) - or does he?
I am very insensitive.
I was walking down a city street when I came across a Hindu temple ...
I wasn't offended.
You read that right...I wasn't offended by the displays of religious activity.
I just can't bring myself to be offended by other people's prayers.
I went further down the road and saw a Buddhist temple ...
I wasn't offended at all ...
I cannot for the life of me see why people are offended by the public display of the nativity scene at Christmas time.
What kind of a sour, bulging-eyed frantic loser would a person have to be when lodging a complaint regarding the displays of faith of other people?
Message to bulging-eyed frantic losers:
GET A LIFE.
Judging from John's PC Watch, there are a lot of BEFLs out there. The Christmas season is the Christophobic scene.
As an atheist with no religion, I'm not disturbed by the nativity scene. Am I insensitive? Yes.
What would make me sensitive? Being forced to pay for religions one doesn't believe in. Worse yet, being forced to convert. Worst of all, being harmed mentally or physically in the name of faith. It takes a lot to push me over the edge. You won't see me getting angry about statues of the Greek gods. Only a BEFL would feel oppressed by the presence of the ultimate Europatriarch.*
*LOGONOTE: Zeus' Roman counterpart, Jupiter, has a name derived from Proto-Indo-European *dieeus pHteer 'sky father' (equivalent to Sanskrit Dyaus pitri and Greek Zeus pater). I'm surprised no feminist has come up with 'Terramater' (Sanskrit Prithviimaatri?) or the like as an alternative.
03.12.19.6:35: NO WHITE MALES NEED ATTEND?
Unless one is differently abled or isn't hetero, I suppose ...
DiversityBusiness.com (formerly Div2000.com) invites you to attend the Fourth National Multicultural Business Conference taking place on March 17-18, 2004 at the beautiful Foxwoods Resort Casino located in Mashantucket, CT.
Got that spam yesterday. It's not the first I've received from the DB people. Was I put on a list because of my surname? Would I have been spared if I had a non-Hispanic Euro-sounding last name?
Strangely, the "About Us" section of the DB site mentions nothing about race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. DB touts itself as "the nation's primary resource portal for small businesses and large organizational buyers." Again, no mention of those overrated markers of identity. So is its name merely PC? doubleplusgood PC PR? Are white males welcome?
LOGONOTES: I'd have rendered the title in Sanskrit as:
Sitapumbhir na aagantavyam
< sita-pumbhis na aa-gan-tavyam
'white-men-by [masc. inst. pl.] not (motion verb reverser prefix)-go-is-to-be [neut. nom. sg.]'
lit. 'it is not to be come by white men'
'White men shouldn't come.'
See here for an analysis of sita 'white'.
Pumbhis (whose -s becomes -r before n) 'men' (masculine instrumental plural) has a unique paradigm with three stems: pumaams (strong), pums (middle), and pum (weak). (Words for 'woman' don't have their own special paradigms. Sexism? Just joking!) The instrumental plural has the weak stem (pum-bhis) but the nominative plural has the strong stem (pumaams-as) and the accusative plural has the middle stem (pums-as). Compare how English uses just one form (men) where Sanskrit uses three (I haven't applied any sandhi [euphonic] rules):
Pum-bhis pumaams-as drishyante.
lit. 'men-by [inst. pl.] men [nom. pl.] seen-are'
'Men (pumaams-as) are seen by men (pum-bhis).'
Pumaams-as pums-as pashyanti.
lit. 'men [nom. pl.] men [acc pl.] see'
'Men (pumaams-as) see men (pums-as).'
(And note how the passive of pashyanti 'see' is drishyante 'are seen' with an entirely different root [drish instead of pash, which is cognate to spy!].)
Longtime readers knows that gan < gam 'go' is cognate to English come. The prefix aa- reverses the direction of the verb: aa-gam 'come' is the reverse of gam 'go'. The final -m of gam becomes n before the suffix -tavyam '-is-to-be' (neuter nominative singular).
03.12.19.5:45: NO TURNING BACK, OR 'THE COLONIZED MIND'
Why I don't want
to live in the past. Kathleen
Parker uvaaca (said):
What today would be statutory rape was perfectly legal in 1925 when the black family maid gave birth to Thurmond's daughter. The cutoff for consent in those days was age 14.
Funny, one might think the age of consent would have been lowered over the decades (especially since puberty is starting increasingly early - though some want to change that). I don't know what to do with ages of consent. I'm against adult-child sex, but where does one draw the line between the two categories? Different people mature at different rates. Some never grow up. So I can't say I feel strongly about the cutoff point being 14 or 16 or whatever.
However, that passage did make me reflect briefly on how far female rights have come since then. Rape wasn't viewed the way it is today. I would hate to be a man 78 years ago. Being a woman back then would have been even worse!
DISCLAIMER: Linking to this column does not constitute an endorsement of Strom Thurmond. To ward off any such accusations, I'll quote Andrew Sullivan:
There is a racial closet as well as a sexual one. In the case of Thurmond, both closets were combined ... Fascinating also that Thurmond fought so long to maintain miscegenation laws he himself violated so early in his life. He was fighting against himself, against his own daughter, against his own country.
Thurmond was a microcosm of American racist 'contradictions'. I put 'contradictions' in square quotes because racism is usually assumed to be purely negative. Yet contrary to popular belief, racists can hold (falsely) positive as well as negative beliefs about groups. As long as these alleged positive and negative traits are in complementary distribution (e.g., mental inferiority coupled with sexual superiority), there is no contradiction. (However, a lack of contradiction does not justify racism!) I see this kind of love-hate racism in Hawai'i, where mostly Asian and Pacific Islander Lokos simultaneously resent and envy haoles (whites). The H-creatures are bad yet somehow better in some ways. It is this underlying belief that has partly undermined the development of an independent Pijin language. Even if Kevin Kusoyama's xenophobic dream came partially true and every standard English-speaking haole were banished from Hawai'i, the prestige of the haoles' language would still cast a shadow upon Pijin. This would be part of the phenomenon I call 'the colonized mind'. (Formerly) colonized peoples with TCM emulate their enemies.
Islamists have a massive case of TCM. As Mark Steyn uvaaca:
One of the things I'd feel humiliated about if I lived in the Arab world is that almost all the forms of expression of my anti-Westernism are themselves Western in origin ...
There's something pathetic about a culture so ignorant even its pathologies have to be imported. But what do you expect? The telling detail of the vanishing penis hysteria is that it was spread by text messaging. You can own a cell phone, yet still believe that foreigners are able with a mere handshake to cause your penis to melt away.
And who invented cell phones? Infidel foreigners!
People with TCM feel inferior but can't admit it. So they proclaim their superiority at the top of their lungs to compensate for their dependency on foreigners. No matter how loud they scream, deep down inside they're never convinced. It wouldn't be so bad if only others didn't have to pay a high price for their pathologies.
03.12.19.3:15: DJ TORTURE
At last my bad taste in music might be put to use! Let me have a go at Saddam with these MP3s selected for maximum aural pain by iowahawk!
LOGONOTES: Komun is Sino-Korean for 'torture' (lit. 'flog-ask'). It is equivalent to Mandarin kaowen and Sino-Japanese goumon (Vietnamese uses the first half of the word, khao).
The first graph ('flog, beat') is a semanto-phonetic compound of 'hand' (semantic) and 'study' (phonetic: Sino-Kor ko, Md kao, Sino-Jpn kou) - 'flog' sounds like 'study' (and I suppose you could consider studying to be a form of torture!).
The second graph ('ask') is a semano-phonetic compound of 'gate' (phonetic: Sino-Kor mun, Md men [as in Tian'anmen 'Gate of Heavenly Peace'], Sino-Jpn mon) and 'mouth' (semantic).
Perhaps a new graph could be devised combining 'ear' (semantic) with 'study' (phonetic). DJ Torture doesn't need to lay a hand on Saddam to make him hurt.
03.12.18.23:12: "BUSH MUST PAY"
Via Sarah:
A
Lileks Newhouse column that I missed! Envision this commercial:
Imagine the stuck-pig peals we'd hear if Bush displayed a counter of the Iraqis who'd be dead today if we hadn't knocked over Saddam Hussein. Tagline: "If Howard Dean had been president, Iraqis would be tortured to death by their government today, and their graves never marked." The Voyager probe would pick up the howls of protest -- even though the assertion would be true.
Somebody probably already made that into a Flash file. Several somebodies, perhaps. And they're all jamming Lileks' inbox with their creations! I must get a minute fraction of the e-mail he does. (My inbox has 1,571 messages - mostly from mailing lists.)
I wonder what hate mail he's getting for having written this:
But the Democrats want revenge. For Florida. For Bush's refusal to let France and Germany decide American foreign policy. For invading poor, helpless, never-hurt-a-fly Iraq. For making the Dixie Chicks feel uncomfortable. Not for drilling in ANWR, but for wanting to. For this and a thousand other sins, Bush must pay -- and if al-Qaida detonates a nuke in the Baltimore harbor during President Dean's term, it'll be Bush's fault for toppling the fascists of Iraq without the approval of Syria and China.
How COULD der Buschitler not care about what those moral titans think!? And let us not forget Libya, that shining beacon of true liberty! (Even Human Rights Watch frowns on Libya! Shame on them for toeing the reactionary Republican line! The Rightist conspiracy is everywhere!)
Watch out, Dumbya! The world is far smarter than you are! They will remember each and every transgression! Your karma will haunt your Reich! Just you wait and see!
Seriously, when will the extreme Left see that the Islamists want them dead too?
They will hate Bush more than Osama bin Laden, right up until the day the Islamists target mixed-gender schools, abortion clinics and gay-rights counseling centers.
Then they might finally realize it's not only their war too -- it always has been.
Tat sarvajanaanaam yuddham asti.
'it [neut. nom. sg.] all-people-of [masc. gen. pl.] war [neut. nom. sg.] is.'
It's everyone's war.
ADDENDUM: Meanwhile, back at the Bleat, this boy must have learned how to torture mice from his animal-murdering mother. Somebody call PETA! (Click while you still can.)
03.12.18.21:32: TRASHNATIONAL WRATH
You probably already
read this
Steven Den Beste megapost on Saddam's trial. You may have
picked up these supadaani
(emphasis mine):
The transnationalists have reached the point now where their pronouncements no longer even pass the horselaugh test ... And overall support for their political position has drastically eroded, especially in critical "mindshare markets" like the US.
Unable to cope with this crisis, some Leftists are succumbing to incoherent rage. SDB uvaaca (said):
That's a common reaction to unresolved cognitive dissonance.
The link leads to this great quote which applies to Chomskyanism and other cults of fake 'depth':
the more obscure and convoluted the subject, the more profound it must be. This has of course been exploited for years to persuade us of the existence of the emperor's clothes, particularly by French "intellectuals". (I recently came across the wonderful phrase "intellectual flatulence" which perfectly describes such rubbish)
Adhiraajno vastram na asti.
< Adhi-raajnas vastram na asti.
'over-king-of [masc.] clothes [neut.] not is.' (Sanskrit has no verb for 'to have'.)
'The emperor has no clothes.' (See here for an analysis of vastram.)
Time's up for Leftist frauds. As jake put it,
Saddam’s capture is not the end of the beginning; it is the beginning of the end.
Saddamagraha aadyanto na asti; so 'ntaadir asti.
< Saddama-grahas [masc.] aadi-antas [masc.] na nasti; sas [masc.] anta-aadis [masc.] asti.
'Saddam-capture beginning-end not is; it end-beginning is.'
03.12.18.17:10: TATRA SERAA AASA (logonotes)*
Revisionism**: We've all heard about it, but how many of us have actually seen the real event firsthand, only to encounter distortions later?
teasing1 claims that this photo filed under the "Iraq War 2003" category (lots of pleasant pics there) is of an "anti-war protest, and a protest that george bush was coming to this country [Sweden] to propagate about 'his' war against terrorism to our democratic chosen politicians."
Sarah knows better. She
was there!
I was living in Sweden at the time, and we happened to already have a trip to Gothenburg planned for the same day that President Bush would be showing up in Sweden. What happened was that all hell broke loose ...
\Seeing as this happened in June 2001, that would make it before September 11 and having ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH ANTI-WAR. Even the Socialist Youth Movement website says it was a protest against "third world debt, the destruction of the environment, human rights abuses and for a more democratic EU." But there's no need to cloud the issue with the facts, right?
Nope, none whatsoever.
03.12.19.2:33: UPDATE: Sarah sets the record straight.
*LOGONOTES:
Tatra Seraa aasa: Sanskrit: 'Sarah was there'.
tatra: 'there' < ta- 'that' + -tra (suffix for places).
Seraa: the grokitrii.
aasa: 'was'; 3rd person singular perfect (a kind of past tense in Sanskrit) of as, cognate to 'is'.
**I need to come up with a Sanskrit navapada (new-word) for this. But I also need to go. Let me channel Ah-nold for a second: "I'll be bahck."
03.12.18.16:45: AVIVASTRAGUUDHAVRIKA (logonotes)*
(Translation: 'A wolf hidden in sheep's clothing.')
A puzzle within a puzzle. No translations you can see - use the logonotes and fall back on selecting blank lines if you have to.
From this Kenneth L. Pike page: What English phrase does WOWOLFOL represent?
Api avim drashtum shaknoshi?
(Translation: 'Can you see the sheep?')
*LOGONOTES:
The samaasa ('together-sit' = 'compound') avivastraguudhavrika 'sheep-clothing-hidden-wolf' could be paraphrased (dissolved) as:
Aver vastre guudho vrikah:
'sheep-of clothing-in hidden wolf'
aver < aves: 'of sheep'; genitive singular of avis 'sheep' (masculine), cognate to English ewe and Latin ovis 'sheep'. -es becomes -er before v.
vastre: 'in clothing'; locative singular of vastra 'clothing' (neuter):
vas: cognate to and meaning 'wear' (English r is sometimes from an earlier s). Another cognate via Latin is vest.
-tra: suffix indicating something used to do an action; a vas-tra is what is worn (vas).
guudho < guudhas: 'hidden'; masculine nominative singular of guudha. Derivative of guh 'hide' (itself from an probable earlier ?gudh, with dh weakened to h) plus suffix -a. -as becomes -o before v-.
vrikah < vrikas, nominative singular of vrika: cognate to and meaning 'wolf' (masculine). Possibly a derivative of vrashch 'to tear, cut up': i.e., 'the tearer'? -s becomes -h if nothing follows.
Api avim drashtum shaknoshi?
'question sheep(-object) see can-you?'
api: added to statements to turn them into questions; cf. Mandarin ma, Japanese ka, Korean kka in terms of function (but not location, since api is at the beginnings of sentences, rather than at their ends as in East Asian languages.
avim: accusative singular of avis 'sheep' (see above); object of the following verb.
drashtum: '(to) see'; infinitive of drish 'see'. Cannot hold up a sentence by itself; needs to accompany another verb - namely ...
shaknoshi: '(you) can':
shakno: present stem of shak 'can, be able' with the suffix -no characteristic of its class. Forms not built upon the present stem need no no: e.g., past forms like shashakishe 'you were able' (the perfect) and ashakas 'you were able' (the second aorist).
-shi < -si: 'you ...'; second person singular ending; s becomes sh between o and another vowel.
03.12.18.4:34: "THE SHORTEST Q------- IN HISTORY"
I'm not going to spell out the
Q-word. I'm sick of it. So is Thomas
Sowell:
This should be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest quagmire in history. Nothing is easier than to sit on the sidelines and demand that there be a "plan" showing what will be done when and how — as if wars can be run on a timetable, like a railroad.
Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.
I like his take on the death of a despot:
Do we want some French judge to sentence Saddam to so many hours of community service?
For that matter, do we even want American laws applied in a country with such wholly different traditions? Certainly we do not need some lawyer like Johnnie Cochran to obfuscate the issues or — heaven help us — a 5 to 4 decision by our Supreme Court, after years of innumerable appeals.
Since stoning people to death is a tradition in parts of the Middle East, that might be the most appropriate way to execute Saddam Hussein.
If each relative of someone murdered by Saddam were allowed to throw a stone, the line might stretch back for miles. Television pictures of that line, broadcast throughout the Arab world, could completely undermine any notion that this is just an American vendetta against Moslems.
"Completely"? Sowell is too optimistic. Don't worry, Leftists. Some 'reporter' will Photoshop some AmeriKKKan stormtroopers into pictures of the line to 'prove' that Iraqis were forced to kill their beloved Great Leader™ at gunpoint. It doesn't matter if any United Satans soldiers were actually there or not. It's the press' job to propagate Truth™ - as interpreted and invented by our omniscient elites!
03.12.18.4:09: MASSACRE MATH
Larry Elder measures deaths:
Celebrity anti-war protestors like Mike Farrell supported President Clinton's war in Kosovo, waged for humanitarian purposes, despite Clinton's lack of a congressional or U.N. resolution. Clinton implied "tens of thousands" of lives lost, but later reports placed the number at less than 5,000. Meanwhile, murders under the Saddam Hussein regime range from 300,000 to perhaps a million! Yet the same military-for-humanitarian-purposes crowd denounces the Bush effort in Iraq. Consistency, anyone?
How about the ability to count?
Above, he parodies Leftist sympathy for Saddam:
"Let me tell you about a friend of mine. They found him in a hole in Tikrit. He hadn't slept in the same bed in 10 months. Clearly in need of medical attention, he lived in soiled clothing, his hair covered with lice. As you can imagine, Saddam Hussein's prescription drug costs were sky-high. Under the Democratic plan, his medical care would be completely covered. Under the Republican plan, they'd arrest him and try him as a war criminal."
03.12.18.3:56: BUSCHITLER COULD DO 'BETTER'
Some nightmarish regime we live in. No one at, say, the New York Times worries about disappearing in the middle of the night. That sort of fear may still be very real outside the borders of das Busch-Reich. Cinderella Bloggerfeller translates:
Since Ukraine won its independence 40 journalists have died in mysterious circumstances.
In a later post, he links to a BBC story on the recognition of the Armenian genocide:
The Swiss lower house of parliament has voted to describe the mass killings of Armenians during the last years of the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
The article is accompanied by a photo with the caption "Fifteen countries have now recognise [sic; should be "recognised"] the killings as genocide". One can't even trust the BBC's English anymore.
But is America among the fifteen? I don't know, but I doubt it. I'm surprised the story doesn't take a gratuitous shot at the US, though it does include a link to "Armenians say US failed them" from almost a year ago. A thirst for allies can make the US appallingly tolerant (think Saudi Arabia).
03.12.18.3:33: DATES
Via Sarah of trying to grok: Sam of Hammorabi has an interesting conspiracy theory involving dates of two kinds.
BTW, the Arabic text in his logo can be transliterated as Y-B-?-R-W-M-H (Arabic is read from right to left). The first a and the second m are not written; one has to just know they are there. W stands for the vowel o. (Both sounds involve lip-rounding. W is the consonant version of u, which is similar to o.) ? is a glottal stop (the sound between uh and oh in uh-oh), not a question mark, and it represents a. The final Y stands for the similar-sounding vowel i. (Y is the consonant version of i.)
03.12.18.1:30: QTL
If it were really possible for people to learn modern standard Arabic in six weeks, they'd be easily rattling off paradigms like these in no time (from Kaye in Comrie 1987: 681):
Triconsontal root: Q-T-L 'kill' - notice how these three consonants remain a constant throughout all the many forms:
| singular | dual | plural | |
| 1st person: 'I ...' | ?aqtulu ([?] = glottal stop, NOT a question mark) 'I kill' | (none) | naqtulu 'we kill' |
| 2nd person: 'you' (masculine) | taqtulu 'you kill' | taqtulaani 'the two of you kill' (masc. or fem.) | taqtuluuna 'the three or more of you (masc.) kill' |
| 2nd person: 'you' (feminine) | taqtuliina 'you kill' | taqtulna 'the three or more of you (fem.) kill' | |
| 3rd person: 'he' (masculine) | yaqtulu 'he kills' | yaqtulaani 'the two of them (masc.) kill' | yaqtuluuna 'the three or more of them (masc.) killed' |
| 3rd person: 'she' (feminine) | taqtulu 'she kills' | taqtulaani 'the two of them (fem.) kill' | yaqtulna 'the three or more of them (fem.) killed' |
Apart from the absence of a neuter (there is no 'it' in Arabic), there's enough here to fry an Anglophonic brain for an hour or more:
- the foreign sound q (which is NOT just a weird way to spell [k], but a different consonant).
- the use of prefixes (?a-, na-, ta-, ya-) as well as suffixes (-u, -iina ...) to signify person and number.
- a gender distinction in the second as well as third person.
- a dual/plural distinction.
And that's not the whole paradigm - there's also a perfect form (e.g., qataltu 'I killed') and an imperative (e.g., ?uqtul! 'kill!'), among others.
For comparison, English kill only has the following forms: kill, kills, killed, killing. (I am not counting combinations with auxiliary verbs: e.g., has killed.)
I haven't even mentioned nouns (with unpredictable 'broken plurals' like buyuutun 'houses' for baytun 'house') or syntax.
Arabic can't kill its learners, but it can hurt their heads.
ADDENDUM: The word qitaal 'fighting', another derivative of Q-T-L, is equivalent to 'jihad', says Adil of muslimpundit.com:
[I]t is common in works of Islamic literature, especially classical, to find that the word “jihad” is used synonymously with the Arabic word “qitaal”. Whereas “jihad” means “fighting to make God’s word superior”, that is to say, sacred fighting, the word “qitaal” simply means, unconditionally, “fighting”. Notably, from the same tri-consonantal root of “qitaal” [i.e. q-t-l], emerge terms for “murdering” and “killing” – again for unconditional usage for speakers of Arabic. It is, therefore, not unusual to find the definition of “jihad” expressed in terms of the word “qitaal”, after being conditioned to fit into the well-established Islamic concept of sacred combat. Functionally speaking, “jihad” is a conditional form of “qitaal”. Where the Islamic context tends to be already obvious to the Arabic writer, the common Islamic saying, “jihad fi-sabil-Allah” (sacred warfare in the path of God), is more or less synonymous with the phrase, “qitaal fi-sabil-Allah” (fighting in the path of God). Thus, as a case in point, an Islamic classical jurist, al-Hanbiliyyah, defining jihad in this manner, succinctly states: “al-Jihad is al-qitaal and to sacrifice all strength in it to raise the Word of Allah.” [Matalib Uliyan-Nahi, Volume 2, p. 497].
03.12.18.00:50: KIMARTHAM ANYABHAASHAAH SHIKSHANIIYAAH? (logonotes)*
A joke from the late linguist Kenneth L. Pike, as recalled by Koreanist David Silva:
So the mouse ran into the hole, frightened with all its life. "There is a cat outside!" he said to the second mouse. The second mouse said, "Don't worry about that." They could hear the cat outside the mouse hole. So the second mouse stood by the side of the hole. "Woof, Woof, Woof!" The cat took off. And the second mouse said, "See, I told you it pays to learn a second language."
Foreign languages are essential in the war on terror. We need linguists (in the sense of 'polyglots')* to listen to Islamists - to read their writings and to interrogate them. Unfortunately, acquiring near-native proficiency in a language - or even better yet, what I call the 'impersonation' level of skill - is neither quick nor easy for most of us.
*Many linguists (in the sense of 'scholars of language') are monoglots with a smattering at best of foreign tongues. If polyglots are race car drivers, some linguists are car mechanics who can't drive. And some linguists are pseudo-car mechanics who wouldn't know an imported auto part if they saw one. Such is the sad state of linguistics in the Anglocentric Chomskyan age.
It doesn't help that the languages of Islamism are distant from our own (e.g., Persian)** or wholly unrelated (e.g., Arabic).
**Don't be fooled by the Arabic script - Persian is related to English, though this has been obscured by millennia of changes in both languages. Avestan, a very early form of Persian (and the language of Zoroastrianism), still looks very much like Sanskrit: compare Avestan dug@dar (pronounced 'doo-guh-dahr') with Sanskrit duhitri 'daughter'. (And all three resemble modern Persian doxtar even now.)
The Defense Language Institute considered Arabic to be one of the four hardest languages (the others being Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) in 1973 (and I doubt Arabic has become any easier since then). So this proposal by LGF reader marymary is, sad to say, a fantasy (emphasis mine):
May I humbly suggest that the NSA or Pentagon initiate a civilian linguists reserve? ...
1) Offer language learning aptitude tests to persons who already have sensitive jobs (public safety workers, gov't employees with clearances.)
2) Send qualified enlistees to a six week total immersion language bookcamp at Monterrey Defense Language Institute. Use the Muslim translators here to train native-born Americans.
3) Send them back to their jobs and have them study and meet on a regular basis with other members of the linguist reserves.
4) Send them to immersion bootcamp for a couple of weeks every year to keep them sharp.
Six weeks for the first time, with annual two week bursts after that!? What good is that going to do!? marymary meant well, but she doesn't seem to have any idea how difficult foreign language learning is. Ever seen those "Learn a language in ____" ads? They're all BS. The naivete of Americans (and Japanese, among others) toward language learning is laughable to those of us who have tried (and often failed) to pick up other tongues. Amazingly, not one comment pointed out how unrealistic this proposal was.
This comment by Al-Larry also pushed my credulity to the limit (emphasis mine):
I learned an Arabic dialect while in the United States Peace Corps. It took a little over three months to be proficient enough to teach college.
Unless Al-Larry is a language genius or he means 'three months of extra training after years of experience with Arabic' or 'teach college in English with Arabic phrases here and there', this is highly improbable. Let me put it this way: If an Arabic speaker who knew no English were taken to the US, could he "be proficient enough to teach college" after three months? Come on.
You may be upset about the nasty tone I'm taking here. Tough. Language is a weapon. It cannot be entrusted to amateurs with nice intentions. Mistranslations can kill. No sense in pretending the hurdle is lower than it is. It's high!
Kimartham anyabhaashaah shikshaniiyah?
'What-purpose other-languages learned-should-be?'
'Why should other languages be learned?'
Kimartham: 'why':
Kim: 'what'.
artham: accusative singular of artha 'purpose' (masculine).
anyabhaashaah < anyabhaashaas: nominative plural of anyabhaashaa 'other-language' (feminine); -s becomes -h before sh-.
anya-: 'other'.
bhaashaa: 'language' (feminine) < bhaash 'speak' + -aa (noun suffix).
shikshaniiyaah < shikshaniiyaas: feminine nominative plural of shikshaniiya 'should be learned'; final -s becomes -h.
siksha: 'learn'; desiderative stem of shak 'be able': to want to be able, one must learn:
< ?contraction of shi- (partial reduplication [copy] of shak) + shak 'be able' + sa (desiderative suffix; becomes sha after k).
-niiya: 'should be ...-ed': prescriptive passive participle suffix.
For older posts, go to my archives.
© Copyright 2003 Marc H. Miyake; Ideon © 1980 Nippon Sunrise, Tokyu Agency, TV Tokyo (then Tokyo Channel 12).
