Dates of posts serve as permalinks.
04.3.27.7:21: SOLDIERS SOLDIER
Sarah takes advantage of the multifunctional
nature of English words in this
post (emphasis mine):
I had a realization today about the deployment ... Deployment is in fact the raison d'être for a soldier. It's the default position ...
In fact, I've heard the word "soldier" used as a verb many times in our short Army career, and all of a sudden it makes more sense.
A soldier is supposed to soldier. In Iraq. Period.
I can't think of any other language in which the effect of "A soldier is supposed to soldier" can be preserved. English allows nouns to be easily converted into verbs (and vice versa) without any changes at all in some (not all) forms. (Soldier's and soldiers' are unambiguously nouns.)
Chinese also allows for noun <> verb conversion, but even it doesn't allow 'soldier' to be used both ways: 'soldier' as a noun is shibing 'gentleman-soldier' (enlisted) or junren 'army-person' whereas the verb to soldier is translated as the phrase dang bing 'serve-as soldier'.
Japanese heishi, Korean pyongsa, and Vietnamese binh si for '(enlisted) soldier' contain the same elements as Mandarin shibing, but in reverse: they literally mean 'soldier-gentleman'. In theory, the Japanese and Korean words for 'soldier' could be made into verbs ... but only if their verbs for 'to do' are suffixed: i.e., heishi-suru, pyongsa-hada. (The latter would be a terrible verb because it would be homophonous with the already existing verb pyongsa-hada 'die of illness' [lit. sick-die-do', corresponding to Japanese byoushi-suru].)
Go to my Unicode page to see the orientographs (East Asian characters) for those words.
English can get away without affixation for 'soldier' as a verb because English word classes are often determined by context. Going back to Sarah's sentence, whatever is followed by "supposed to" has to be a verb. So even if you've never heard of her favorite word grok before, you can tell that it's a verb if I put it in that position: supposed to grok. And whatever follows an article (a, an, the) has to be a noun, so "soldier" in "A soldier" is a noun (unless "A" is a plural noun and "soldier" is a plural verb, but that's highly unlikely). Take the context away, and it's ambiguous whether soldier in isolation is a noun or a verb (though it is more likely to be a noun due to the higher frequency of its usage as a noun). In other languages, nouns and /or verbs may have characteristic endings - e.g., -u in Japanese or -ta/-da in Korean - but in English, location is often more important than phonetic shape in determining how a word is to be interpreted.
This is not to say that English has no characteristic verb endings. You can tell that grokked is a verb because of the final -ed. But notice that the third person singular present verb ending -s is homophonous with the noun plural ending -s and the noun possessive endings -'s and -s'. In spoken English, only context enables one to tell that soldiers/soldier's/soldiers' is a noun or a verb:
The soldiers are supposed to soldier. (Follows the; must be a noun).
He soldiers on. (After the pronoun he and before the adverb on; must be a verb modified by the adverb on. Otherwise the sentence would be verbless and be structurally analogous to He pacifists on [pronoun-noun-adverb], which makes no sense.)
A soldier's duty is to soldier. (Follows a; must be a noun.)
The soldiers' duty is to soldier. (Follows the; must be a noun.)
Word classes can even be distinguished in the title of this post: Soldiers soldier. Anglophones know that third person singular present forms are usually not at the beginning of sentences, so soldiers is most likely a noun rather than a verb. And if it's a noun, then soldier has to be a verb, since there are no other words left in the sentence and complete sentences need verbs.
The title also embodies an apparent paradox of English: -s with nouns (soldiers) indicates plurals whereas -s with singular verbs indicates singulars. Conversely, no ending indicates a singular noun and a plural present verb. It wasn't always that way, though, since in Old English, -as (source of noun -s) was only a plural ending for some masculine nouns and -th was the third person singular ending. Moreover, Old English present plural verbs had an ending -ath. Even so, the multifunctionality of words did exist back then too:
In Modern English, as we know well, nouns can quite often be used as verbs, adjectives as nouns, and prepositions as adverbs: the parts of speech can overlap quite a bit. You will find that the same is true in Old English.
But at least back, endings helped to distinguish some of the classes - and hurt the memory:
Old English verbs can be daunting, for a typical verb appears in more forms than a typical pronoun, noun or adjective. While no noun has more than six distinct forms, most verbs have fourteen. (Modern English verbs, by contrast, normally have four or five forms.) Further, while some nouns, like mann 'man', have two different vowels in the root syllable, some verbs have as many as five. (The Modern English maximum, leaving aside the verb to be, is three.)
But maybe 'hurt' is the wrong word when you consider how many forms Latin verbs have - and even Latin pales next to Sanskrit. No other language I've studied has ever "hurt so good" (in the words of John Cougar Mellencamp).
04.3.26.19:27: AN'GUL*
*Blend of Andorian an- 'our' + Korean -gul 'writing'; the apostrophe signifies a border between two elements in an Andorian compound word.
Spence Hill's non-canoncal (i.e, non-Paramount-approved) writing system for the Andorian aliens of Star Trek reminds me of the Korean hangul alphabet. In hangul, letters for consonants pronounced at the same part of the mouth are written similarly: e.g., all consonants pronounced with the lips (p, ph, m) are written as variants of a box representing the lips. In Andorian script, letters for consonants produced with the same kind of air manipulation (but at different parts of the mouth) are written similarly: e.g.,
- the stops (consonants made by completely blocking airflow at one point or another of the oral cavity) k, t, p are all written with jagged lines in the center.
- the corresponding fricatives (with less than total airflow blockage at various points) ph, th, kh are all written with dots on the right.
Andorian vowel symbols indicate how the vowels are pronounced:
- palatal (i-like vowels: e, ee, i, ii) are symbolized with vertical lines. (Andorian and hangul even share the letter | for the front vowel i with Roman script!)
- vowels pronounced with rounded lips (o, oo, u, uu) are symbolized by circles. (In hangul, T and inverted-T shapes represent rounded vowels and w, the consonantal version of a rounded vowel.)
- the vowel a which is neither palatal nor rounded is written as a horizontal line (not unlike the hangul horizontal line for the non-palatal, non-rounded vowel 'barred i' (written here as a plus sign [+]) halfway between a palatal [i] and a rounded [u] - the u of hangul is actually this 'barred i' [+], not [u]).
Although the Andorian writing system shows a knowledge of phonetic classes, it doesn't seem very practical. I can't imagine anyone writing this at any sort of usable speed without massive cursivization.
Judging from this grammatical sketch, speaking Andorian is not much of a problem. Andorian sounds are not exotic by English standards except for kh (as in Arabic) and Andorian syntax is not as alien as that of Klingon. (The author seems to think Japanese is "stranger" than Andorian, and trust me, Japanese isn't as strange as some other languages out there ... like Klingon which was apparently designed to be as odd as possible.) I'm still trying to figure out what atuhi is, though - it's translated as 'I' and consists of at 'I, we' (infertile) plus some unidentifiable suffix -uhi (there is a suffix -hi for duals which can't be relevant here). Perhaps atuhi is a remnant of an earlier draft of the language.
I'll close with some sample phrases to give you a taste of Andorian structure:
At do iik aad-viz'tel. (I don't understand - look, there's the expected at 'I'!)
lit. 'I not (? - iik is a question marker, but what's it doing in a statement?) present tense-understand (spelled as viz'thel in the dictionary; from viz 'learn' + thel 'know')'
In oh Oog'ong do hood up iip zhaaniir. (May your death-egg never hatch = Goodbye.)
lit. 'your the Death-egg not never (up an error for ud 'perfective'?) desire hatch-desire'
In response, you'd say:
Pum, oh in ngoo ud iip biizh paazhiir phadoo. (And may yours remain forever infertile.)
lit. 'And, the your (what is ngoo? - it seems to contain the 'round' suffix -oo) perfective desire remain (biizh paazh)-desire infertile-round (referring to the egg)'
Samples of more languages (both Trek and non-Trek) invented by the author are here.
Two of them are acknowledged by professional Trek author CJ Cherryh, who used to teach Latin and is still teaching it online! She also has a page of archaic English usage for those who want to avoid modernisms in their historical or fantasy fiction. I have to respect anyone who's heard of "Sanskrit and Middle Voice*" (in "Writerisms and Other Sins", which is advice for us Anglophone writers).
*I.e., aatmanepada, lit. 'self-for word'. See here.
04.3.26.5:15: "THE MOST IRRESPONSIBLE PASSAGE IN LINGUISTICS"
... was written by none other than Noam Chomsky, according to New York University linguist Paul Postal (last seen here). He dares to take on the ultimate sacred cow of my profession in his Skeptical Linguistics Essays, available online in PDF format. Chomsky not only wins the dubious award of "The Most Irresponsible Passage" (Chapter 11) for implying that "sentences are not real" (Postal's words, p. 5) but also is cited as an example of "Junk Reasoning" (in both Chapters 12 and 13) and "Junk Ethics" (Chapter 9):
"The desired consequence follows from your theory without giving any proof ... They [Chomsky and Lasnik] have asserted it [their belief] aggresively; that is enough." (Ch. 9, p. 2)
No, it ain't. This post - or even Postal's site - isn't enough to topple the trashformational tower. Unfortunately, I'm out of time and need to sleep so I can work all day and night. See y'all when I'm up.
04.3.26.5:18: UPDATE: OK, I couldn't let this pass by before calling it a night. Here's Postal's advice for linguistics students from Chapter 14:
1. Beware.
2. Be skeptical.
04.3.26.4:45: BIGGER BROTHER 'BOT*
Via Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus: Enryuu sanjou! (Rescue Dragon is here!) Is that a cockpit in its chest? I'd love to pilot one of those. Maybe there'll be a combat model that'll be a real-life VOTOMS (Vertical One-man Tank for Offense and Maneuvers)!
(I still have to watch my DVD box of that 21-year-old anime. It's been gathering dust for almost two years now. I still have unwatched anime videotapes dating back to 1997. And my pile of unseen stuff hasn't grown any smaller even after I recently stopped buying anime in favor of old American comics.)
*Title inspired by 'Big Brother', a giant robot piloted by one of the members of Alan Moore's short-lived revision of the Youngblood superhero team.
04.3.26.3:59: BIG BROTHER BUSH
Sarah is rereading 1984. I wonder how she'd react to the Students for an Orwellian Society:
Since the events of 11 September, we have been able to convince a number of figures in national and local politics to help forward our aims ...
Our successes can be shown to fit into the three major ideals of Ingsoc as expressed by Orwell:
War Is Peace ...
Freedom Is Slavery ...
Ignorance Is Strength
WAKE UP, NEOCONAZIS!! Obey Chomsky! Vote for Kerry! Viva la revolución!
04.3.26.3:33: "ISRATINE"
Via Melissa: "ALGathafi speaks ..." (sic) but who's listening? The man of many spellings proposes not only "Isratine"* as "a just and final solution to the persistent ‘Middle East Problem’ " but also offers to solve the problems of Kashmir, Korea, and "the actual crisis the world is passing through about terrorism". His Kashmir solution is also available in Spanish for the benefit of all Espanophones in Pakistan and India.
What will the "Brother Leader of the Revolution" solve next? Global warming? The whole world looks to Libya for inspiration!
*Spelled as 'i-s-r-'-T-y-n in Arabic. (I use 'i to indicate that the hamza sign is below the letter alif. The second ' and the y are 'stand-ins' for the vowels aa and ii, so the name is presumably pronounced ['israaTiin]. Capital T signifies the 'emphatic' t-sound symbolized by the letter Taa' rather than the regular t-sound symbolized by the letter taa'.)
04.3.26.3:06: TATSAMA / TADBHAVA
Reader David Boxenhorn asked:
- How many of the Greek roots in "Metaphrase" are borrowed from Classical Greek?
- And how many of them are inherited from Classical Greek?
In Indian terms, he'd like to know which roots are tatsama-s and which roots are tadbhava-s.
Words of Sanskrit descent in modern Indian languages can be classified as either
tatsama (lit. and cognate to 'that-same'): words / roots resurrected from Sanskrit.
or tadbhava (lit. and cognate to 'that-be'): words / roots inherited from Sanskrit.
(Other usages of the terms exist, but I'm going to stick to these definitions for now.)
Tatsama-s are often (nearly) identical to their Sanskrit originals and can give the false impression that some words have survived unchanged for millennia. On the other hand, tadbhava-s often barely resemble their Sanskrit ancestors due to massive changes through time (e.g., the loss or alteration of sounds and/or the addition of affixes). For instance, in Hindi,
the tatsama daan (< Sanskrit daa-na: 'give' + noun suffix) 'gift' coexists alongside the probable tadbhava de-naa (< ?Sanskrit daa; -naa is a Hindi infinitive suffix) 'to give'
and the tatsama bhraataa (unchanged from Sanskrit) 'brother' coexists alongside the probable tadbhava bhaaii (< ?Sanskrit bhraataa) 'brother'.
(I assume that de- 'give' and bhaaii 'brother' must be tadbhava-s because [1] they do vaguely resemble the most common Sanskrit words for those meanings and [2] I doubt such simple words would be borrowed.)
Since I know almost nothing about the history of Hindi, I find its tadbhava-s to be almost irrecognizable. A Sanskrit monolingual would not be able to understand most of the tadbhava words which comprise the core of Hindi (or of any modern Indo-Aryan [Sanskrit-descended] language like Bengali), and non-Indo-Aryan borrowings from Persian (e.g., hazaar 'thousand'), Arabic (through Persian, e.g., kitaab 'book'), and English (e.g., taiksii 'taxi') would make no sense at all. (Persian hezaar 'thousand' turns out to be cognate to Sanskrit sahasra 'thousand', but the relationship is not obvious.)
The tatsama / tadbhava concept can be applied outside India as well. Let me redefine the terms as follows -
- tatsama: words / roots in language X resurrected from an ancestor of language X
- tadbhava: words / roots in language X inherited from an ancestor of language X
- and then go back to David's question. I am not a Greek expert and I know even less about modern Greek than I do about classical Greek. But based on the high degree of recognizability of most of the roots, the majority might be tatsama-s rather than tadbhava-s, though the distinction is blurrier than in Hindi.
Obviously, some roots are neither tatsama nor tadbhava: e.g., pasta in odontopasta 'toothpaste' looks like a borrowing from Latin pasta (or its descendant in a Romance language). (There is no Classical Greek pasta 'paste'.)
Sab(b)ato 'Saturday' is an interesting case. It's either descended or borrowed from Biblical Greek Sabbaton (which in turn was borrowed from Hebrew), but in either case it's not inherited in the same way that, say, modern Greek mati 'eye' is the tadbhava descendant of Classical Greek ommation 'little eye'. It might be a late (or Lamarckian!) inheritance rather than a native inheritance.
Klephtes (pronounced [kleftis]) 'thief' (from Classical kleptes without an -h-) is still recognizable, but it's a tadbhava because it has undergone the change pt > pht [ft], whereas the tatsama kleptomania (self-explanatory; probably imported from European psychological jargon) maintains the ancient pt sequence.
My impression is that the tatsama/tadbhava distinction in Greek is not as blatant as it is in Indo-Aryan languages. I assume that everyday words like megalos 'big' and mikros 'small' must be tadbhavas, as it seems unlikely that people would borrow classical words for such banal uses. They are indistinguishable from probable tatsama-s in megalomania and mikroskopio 'microscope'.
Romance languages are full of tatsama/tadbhava pairs such as:
Spanish facción (< Latin factio) : hecho 'fact' (< Latin factum 'deed')
Spanish benefactor (< Latin benefactor) : bueno 'good' (< Latin bonus 'good')
French spirituel (< Latin spiritualis) : esprit (< Latin spiritus)
French capital (< Latin capitalis) : chef (< Latin caput 'head')
Italian visione (< Latin visio) : vedere 'to see' (< Latin videre 'to see')
Italian diario (< Latin diarium) : giorno 'day' (< Latin diurnus 'daily')
Note that the tadbhava-s were subject to changes (partly marked in bold; e.g., f > h in Spanish) that are absent in their tatsama counterparts. Moreover, the tatsama-s are similar to Latin loans in English, whereas the tadbhava-s are harder or even impossible to recognize: e.g., how many could guess that French eau 'water' (< Latin aqua) is the tadbhava counterpart of aqua- in the French tatsama aquarium (< Latin aquarium)?
The Greek and Latin words in English are not tatsama-s (in my narrow usage) because they are not borrowed from an earlier stage of English. Lexicons of languages that don't draw upon their own ancient resources (e.g., English, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese) have few or no tatsama-s and are mostly or wholly composed of tadbhava-s and external borrowings. (A rare example of a Japanese tatsama is the rare izuko 'where', a modernized pronunciation of earlier *induku which evolved into the colloquial tadbhava doko 'where'.)
Conversely, any living descendant of a classical language should have tatsama-s and tadbhava-s unless it has a 'don't look back' policy (e.g., Urdu speakers have the same tadbhava-s as Hindi but prefer to draw upon Persian and Arabic rather than Sanskrit). Written Chinese is possibly the tatsama king of the world because it abounds in archaisms for even the simplest words: e.g., the Mandarin tatsama zhi and the tadbhava de both meaning 'of'.
Actually, that particular example is really bizarre, since the colloquial pronunciation de was probably maintained intact from c. 3,000 years ago whereas the 'classical' pronuncation zhi is a c. 1,800-year-old 'innovation', so one could argue that it's the other way around - de is the tatsama and zhi is the tadbhava! Yet the spelling of zhi is older than the spelling of de. Dichotomies don't work out too well in real-life, do they? Argh!
04.3.25.18:24: METAPHRASE*
While hanging out at this online modern Greek dictionary, I had fun seeing familiar roots in novel places. See if you can guess the meanings of the following modern Greek words. Click on the links for the answers.
autokineto (think kinetic; piloted by an autokinetistes)
diktatoria tou proletariatou (-ship is native English, not Greek)
Enomenes Politeies (hint: ... tes Amerikes)
kinematographophilos (hint: 'moving-picture-lover')
klephtes (just one root; think kleptomaniac)
paragogos (-agogos corresponds to English -agogue; for cognates and more see here)
podosphairo (hint: -pod + sphere; loved by a podosphairophilos)
portopholi (not portfolio, but still portable)
Repoumplikaniko Komma (vs. the Demokratiko Komma which doesn't have its own entry; Greek -mp- is pronounced as [b])
teleorase or telopsia (hint: -vision is Latin, not Greek)
telephono (both roots are Greek, so this was to be expected; amazingly, the dictionary has an entry for '[guess what] has become an instrument of corruption')
xenodokheio (lit. 'strange-container').
Lastly, what could this set of seven words be (the sixth is not helpful, but the rest should be guessable):
Kyriake, Deutera (cf. English Deuteronomy), Trite (not related to English trite), Tetarte (cf. English tetra-), Pempte, Paraskeue (not the expected Ekte; cf. English hexa-), Sab(b)ato
*Modern Greek for 'translation'.
Note that I transcribe modern Greek more or less letter-by-letter. This makes identifying roots easier. Using modern Greek transcription (i.e., writing pronunciations rather than spellings) would disguise words beyond recognition: e.g., tele- would be transcribed as tile- (the letter eta is now pronounced as 'ee' like iota), xeno- would be kseno-, etc.
04.3.25.17:39: ICY HONOLULU
Those two words can go together. It never snows here at my parents' house on O'ahu, but there is snow on the Big Island*. It's even possible to snowboard atop Mauna Kea. Unfortunately, not a single flake falls upon Hilo. That's where I've been living and working since January 2003, though that's probably going to change very soon ... for better or for worse.
*Confusingly also called Hawai'i. Not to be confused with the Hawaiian archipelago.
04.3.25.14:20: "PLEASE IGNORE ME"
No thanks to those who littered his site with unfunny rubbish, Noam Chomsky has shut down his comments section. Nonetheless, his site is still worth a glance for its unintentional humor. Saith* the false prophet:
So those who prefer to ignore the real world are also saying: "please ignore me." And they will achieve that result.
If only that applied to Chomsky, who prefers "to ignore the real world" of language. He's practically screaming, "IGNORE ME!!" - yet he remains the linguistic world's center of attention. And by linking to him, maybe I'm compounding the problem. Maybe it would be best if I looked away. But I can't, not when too many (e.g., "20,000 people in Vancouver") take claims like these seriously:
Obviously no one expects the same turnout in a mass effort to prevent a war and in a later mass effort to compel the occupiers to grant Iraqis authentic sovereignty, along with a host of other highly significant concerns.
How could Iraqis get "authentic sovereignty" WITHOUT "a war"? That's the sort of comment that should have been on his site, not mindless copying and pasting. It would have been fun to watch Chomsky evade the question. What could he have said? That Saddam could have granted 'his' people "authentic sovereignty" if only the UN had asked him nicely?
Or maybe the Iraqis already had "authentic sovereignty" that was taken from them by Halliburton, et al. After all, Saddam did get 100% of the vote. He was the people's choice! As if they had a choice:
In London, the Foreign Office painted a stark picture of the "choice" facing the Iraqi voters:
"You can't have free elections when the electorate goes to the polls in the knowledge that they have only one candidate, that candidate routinely murders and tortures opponents of the regime and the penalty for slandering that sole candidate is to have one's tongue cut out."
*04.3.25.17:24: UPDATE: Oops, forgot to insert this note: saith corresponds to Dutch zegt and German sagt (both 'says'). The -i- in said and saith is probably all that's left of an earlier g. Other cases of g to i (or y) reduction in English include:
English day : Dutch dag, German Tag (German t < earlier d)
English yard : Dutch gaarden (obsolete; the current equivalents are tuin and hof), German Garten (again, German t < earlier d)
Note that Dutch g is pronounced like German ch, not English or German [g]: e.g., Dutch dag sounds like 'Dach' (in Germanized spelling).
A similar change can be found in Swedish pronunciation (though not spelling): written g is sometimes pronounced [y] as in gift 'poison' (last seen here).
04.3.25.4:00: NAVAPADA*: "LOGIZOMECHANOPHOBIA"
*nava 'new' + pada 'foot; word' (neuter).
Found that coinage here. It refers to a fear of computers. Mechano and phobia are self-explanatory to anyone with a decent English vocabulary, but the zo after logi surprised me. I expected logico- from Greek logikos 'logical'. (The root word is logos 'word' [itself derived from lego 'I say'; NOT my favorite Danish toy!] and the corresponding noun is logike 'logic', a feminine noun due to the final -e also in Athene 'Athena' and even tekhne 'art, skill'. The endings of Greek nouns are correlated with their genders.) The zo is probably from logizomai 'I count', so logizomechanophobia means 'counting-machine fear'.
I wondered if modern Greeks call computers 'counting-machines': i.e., logizomechano-something. Nope - here's what I got from this dictionary:
computer: elektronikos ypologistes (not cognate to apologist, but apparently from hypo- 'below' [which lost its h- in modern Greek; hypodermic means 'under-skin'] + logistes 'bookkeeper' [i.e., counter; there's that log-root again]).
computer programme: programma elektronikou ypologiste (or programma E/Y)
laptop computer: phoretos (lit. 'portable') mikroypologistes
computer virus: ios (lit. 'venom', as in Classical Greek).
Sometimes one forgets that Greek is still a living language.
04.3.25.4:06: UPDATE: Forgot to mention the English relatives of Greek logos, et al.: native leech and a ton of leg/lec/lex-words via Greek and Latin, all from a Proto-Indo-European root *leg 'to collect'.
04.3.25.3:17: ASYLUM FOR THE ARMED
Do you think Bush would implement
Kim
du Toit's Martin Plan?
If we can offer political asylum for people in other countries who are being harassed by their governments for exercising their natural rights (eg. speaking out against foul b@st@rds like ZimPres Robert Mugabe, or Christian Iranians), why shouldn't we do the same for, say, Brits, who are being persecuted by their government for exercising their natural right to self-defense?
We could call it the "Martin Plan", after hero Tony Martin.
I doubt it, but I'm sure Kerry wouldn't!
Kim was inspired by this incident in which a man defended himself with a sword against a gang with a gun. Guess who got eight years in prison. I doubt the three surviving gang members are going to spend an equal amount of time behind bars. Is that British justice?
04.3.24.19:54: RED TIDE
Look who started a blog while I was sick in bed (via LGF)!
Noam Chomsky's Turning the Tide has the initials TTT - possibly for Transformational Theoretical Trash.
evariste uvaaca (said),
Amritas, you should link to him in a post that also links to your Chomsky critique, just to "be like dat".
Here comes the critique that started it all (in bold), followed by some of its sequels in mostly chronological order:
"Pariah against a Prophet" (I am a professor of linguistics now, though I wasn't when I wrote that.)
"Colour without Cash" (predates "Pariah"), "Intensity", and "Invisible Verbs"
"Amritas vs. al-Chom" and "Amritas vs. al-Chom: Clash of the Comments"
"Carnie-val of Transformations" and "A Slashworthy Theory" (Chomsky's disciple dissected)
"Mittsu tomoe" and "Triskelions" (Chomskyanism as failed idealism)
"Linguistics à la Uri Geller" (Jacques Guy said that, not me, but I love the quote too much to leave it out)
And (thanks to rumcrook's inspiration) coming someday: "Noamway".
If you don't have time to read all that (or "Forty-Four Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken" by Gross and Navega), here's what's wrong with Chomskyanism: Real science is testable, and testability requires falsifiability:
For an assertion to be falsifiable, in principle it must be possible to make an observation or do a physical experiment that would show the assertion to be false.
Chomskyanism is not falsifiable because of its reliance on transformations. According to Chomskyans, there are 'underlying' forms in the mind which are transformed into 'surface' forms that we speak and write. Obviously, there is language in the brain, but how do we know what those 'underlying' forms are like without observations or physical experiments? Chomskyans' 'underlying' forms can only be accepted on faith - a concept foreign to real science. Moreover, transformations are an omnipotent cop-out that can change hard evidence (the observed 'surface' forms) to fit the theory (the predicted 'underlying forms').
If we practiced 'Chomskyan math', it might work like this (inspired by a post on Free Republic):
- All numbers are 'underlyingly' 42 (the universal number).
- There is a 'surface' diversity of numbers: -1, 0, 1, 2, 3 ...
- However, this diversity is only superficial, because all of these numbers are really 'transformed' versions of 42:
e.g., 1 is 42 divided by 42, 2 is ((42/42) + (42/42)), etc.
But why do all numbers have to be 42? Why not 41 or 43?
Here's the linguistic version:
- All languages have the same innate 'underlying' structure (universal grammar).
- There is a 'surface' diversity of grammars.
- However, this diversity is only superficial, because all of these grammars are really 'transformed' versions of variants of universal grammar:
e.g., Irish verb-subject-object order is 'really' subject-verb-object order (just like English! - details here)
Summing up, Chomskyanism says all
languages are 'really' the 'same'. But are they? As Joanne
Jacobs (who endured a Chomskyan linguistics class) asked back
in 2002 (the link no longer works, but you can ask her if
you don't believe me),
Why do we believe this is true? Just because Chomsky says so? How do we know he's right?
Scientists should create independently replicable results. If something is real, then one can discover it without the declarations of a guru. Would a mathematician who had never heard of the quadragintaduoists (42-freaks) find the same 'universal number'? Would a linguist who had never heard of Chomsky or his followers find the same 'universal grammar'? The question is not whether there is a biological basis for language or whether there are linguistic universals. Linguists have known that before Chomsky. The question is whether Chomsky's methodology used to find 'universal grammar' is any good. Assertion by authority is no substitute for empirical realism. It is, however, the foundation of religions. BELIEVE ME.
I am a student of linguistics. Or rather, I WAS, before your nonsensical theorizing that passes for science drove me away from it. You, Chomsky, have singlehandedly ruined my career.
And neither will I!
04.3.24.1:51: TELEPHONOS: LONG DISTANCE DEATH?
The previous post resulted from my surprise at the number of entries that came up when I looked up 'murderer' at Perseus. (I was double-checking my memory of phonos 'murder' while writing this post.) One strength of Perseus is not simply its sheer number of entries but its frequency figures which indicate which entries are more commonly used than others. There is no guarantee that all of the 21 words for 'murderer' are equally common.
I wish there were a similar online dictionary for Sanskrit. I love the online version of Monier-Williams' classic Sanskrit-English dictionary, but it won't explicitly tell me which words are frequent, which ones are rare, and which ones are lexicographers' inventions. (One can usually make a guess based on the number of citations, but that requires looking at each entry, whereas Perseus supplies statistical evidence for multiple entries at a glance.) I found 25 words for 'murderer' but among them, I only recognize hantri 'killer' and the two suffixes -ghna and -han (both '-killer'). Some are quite specialized (e.g., striihantri 'murderer of a woman (strii) and others of the pattern 'type of victim' + 'murderer' (-hantri/-ghna/-han)). Yet others are obscure (e.g., jiivaantaka < jiiva 'life' + antaka 'end (anta)-causing'). The order of words doesn't help, since the rare words guruhan 'guru-murderer' and jiivaantaka 'life-ender' are listed first and second while the common hantri 'killer' is in 16th and 17th place (with two entries, one accented on the first syllable and the other on the second). Picking a word simply because it's at the top might result in odd-sounding if not incomprehensible Sanskrit. It's like blindly choosing a word from a thesaurus. Synonyms are not equal. (But - gasp! - lexical discrimination is un-PC!)
Learning a language requires more than just memorizing a dictionary. One has to know when to use a given word. Prosaic utterances demand prosaic monosyllables, whereas other contexts may require poetic circumlocution or erudite polysyllabic 'synonyms'. Water falling from the sky is rain in most cases but is precipitation when we want to sound scientific. One might think that there is a universal correlation between length and 'height': i.e., the longer the word, the more 'uppity' it is, but in fact in East Asia, the reverse is true: shorter is 'better'. Colloquial Chinese and native (non-Chinese) Japanese and Korean words are often longer than their literary and scientific counterparts borrowed from Classical Chinese: e.g., native Japanese matsurigoto ('government'; five syllables) vs. Sino-Japanese seiji (same thing; two syllables). (Matsurigoto and seiji are not interchangeable, but you could've guessed that.)
One also might think that borrowed words and word pieces (morphemes) from a 'higher' language might not make their way into even the simplest speech, but this is not quite true: e.g., every English speaker knows telephone from Greek tele- 'far' + phone 'sound'. (English speakers could've used an all-native coinage like farspeaker - cf. German Fernsprecher - but they don't. Similarly, Japanese use disyllabic Sino-Japanese denwa 'lightning-speech' for 'telephone' rather than an all-native seven-syllable inazumabanashi 'lightning-speech'.)
In spite of the title of this post, phone 'sound' has nothing to do with Greek phonos 'murder'. The resemblance between these two words is partly a byproduct of the romanization I use on this site. In Greek spelling, phone is spelled phi-omega ('o big'; long o)-nu-eta, whereas phonos is spelled phi-omicron ('o small'; short o)-nu-omicron-sigma. I could write classical Greek long vowels with doubled vowel symbols: e.g., phoonee (eta was a long e), but that would look like a typo to most readers. Moreover, the spellings oo and ee look as if they should be pronounced 'ooh' and 'ee', even though they are actually lengthened 'aw' ('open o') and 'eh'. So I've decided to avoid marking vowel length for either Greek or Latin, though I will always mark it for Sanskrit a, i, u, and ri (pronounced 'er', despite the spelling*) as aa, ii, uu, and rii ('errr'). (Sanskrit e and o are always long 'ehhh' and 'ohhh', so ee and oo would be redundant as well as misleading.)
Maybe the post title is relevant after all, considering the difficulties I've had getting online tonight. For some reason, my ISP would die on me at random moments. It claimed I was still 'online', though I couldn't download any mail or view any pages. At one point it wouldn't let me disconnect and I had to cut myself off the old-fashioned way by disconnecting the phone cord, and even then it took my computer a while to figure out what had happened. I fear that DSL or cable would be just as unreliable as my current dial-up connection. Nonetheless, I will upgrade when I settle down ... but where am I going to do that?
I'm too tired ... too sick ... to answer that now. I woke up at 5 PM and have been sneezing in bed since. It's time to hang up. Good night.
*The spelling ri reflects one modern Indian pronunciation of ancient 'er'. Using the spelling er might lead people into thinking it was pronounced as Sanskrit e ('ehhh') plus r. Furthermore, one can pronounce ri as 'ree' and be understood. I suppose I could have spelled ri as r without a vowel - e.g., amrtas 'immortal' - but this is amritas.com, so I'm sticking with the ri-spelling.
04.3.23.20:10: ARE WHITE MEN PHONEIS? (logonotes)*
I'm glad that Kevin
Kutabare Kusoyama doesn't know any languages besides Pijin
and English, because otherwise this blog would be littered with
posts like these:
As all endarkened people know, the Greeks stole their civilization from
EgyptKemet. (Why else do you think Athens has so many pyramids? Never went there - why would I want to leave the Sovereign Kingdom™? - but I assume it does.) How did an inferior, melanin-deprived Europpressor tribe outwit their black, BLACK, BLACK superiors? Perhaps it was through sheer savagery, the one trait which ice people are best known for to this very day (look at Bu$chitler). The evidence lies in this online Greek dictionary. Look at how many words the hellish Hellenes had for 'murderer'. While Kemetians thought of nothing but PEACE, Greeks couldn't think at all. Their minds were preprogrammed for murder. Every other word in their barbarous tongue meant 'kill' or 'killer'.
Actually, the entries that the Perseus dictionary digs up contain 'murderer' but the headwords themselves don't necessarily mean 'murderer': e.g., kteino is a verb meaning 'I kill' (verbs are cited in their first person singular present forms), not a noun 'murderer'. (Kteino came up because of a derived form ktanon 'murderer' [masculine].)
Moreover, one could make an equally silly argument that Greeks were pacifists. Looking up 'peace' results in 35 words which occur 2,924 times in Perseus' textual database, whereas 'murderer' results in only 21 words which occur 1,567 times (and only two of those 21 are frequent: the verb kteino 'kill' [1,242 instances] and the noun phoneus 'murderer' [152 instances]). And among all these words, AFAIK, the only one that has left any trace in English is eirene 'peace; the goddess of peace' (feminine, the most common of the peace-words), the source of the name Irene (but not of Eire, which is a native Irish derivative of Proto-Indo-European *peiH- 'fat' and is cognate to English fat**).
Appearances are often deceiving. The Sanskrit equivalent of phoneus 'murderer' is hantri from han 'kill' (cognate to Greek phon-) plus the suffix -tri '-er'. It is pronounced like English hunter (ri is used to romanize the 'er' sound of Sanskrit) but has nothing to do with hunt, which is unrelated (and, if from Proto-Indo-European, would have come from something like *k...nd due to Grimm's Law which dictates that English h < PIE *k and English t < PIE *d). One must take account of changes in the languages being compared to determine whether two forms are related or not. Otherwise, one confuses coincidental convergences (e.g., Sanskrit hantri 'killer' and English hunter) with divergences from a common prototype which may no longer look alike (e.g., Eire and fat). Only the latter count as true cognates - the former are but lookalikes.
*LOGONOTES: Phoneis is one possible nominative plural form of phoneus 'murderer' (masculine), related to phonos 'murder' (last seen here). The resemblance to English phony is coincidental, for phony is from Irish, not Greek.
**Irish lost initial *p-, whereas the Proto-Germanic ancestor of English shifted *p- to f-. Greek pion 'fat' kept the original *p-, as did Sanskrit piiva 'fat'.
04.3.23.4:28: ALLLGEBRA
Nelson
Ascher gives a quick lesson in defeatist math:
... [T]he death of each Hamasnik [Hamasniks - a neat Arab-Russian hybrid!] will make a hundred more Hamasniks rise and take their places ...
Say Israel kills 10 of them the first week.
Then, by the next week, there will be a thousand of them.
Then, those thousand new Hamasniks are killed in their turn and give place to 100.000.
If Israel manages to kill all those 100.000 new Hamasniks, all of them legitimate targets, they, in theory, would be substituted by 10 million others.
It happens that that’s the two or three times as much as the whole Palestinian population ... [I guess they could recruit aLLLies from abroad. -A]
Will the Palestinians sink to this level?
It’s like the end of WW2 when the Germans had to recruit teenagers and old men to fight and these were killed like flies.
Imperial Japan had ... similar ideas:
From early 1945, it had become increasingly apparent that Japan could not win the war ... In the humid early summer days, there was more and more talk of a last-ditch ground battle in which everyone was a potential combatant. One rallying cry was "ichioku gyokusai"--"the 100 million as a shattered jewel," referring to the people of Japan and the fate they faced ...
In the spring of 1945, civilians were given instructions on how to kill American soldiers if they invaded. Stab them in the stomach with bamboo spears, people were told. Use kitchen knives, or whatever weapons are at hand. Women tied up their kimono sleeves with thin sashes and practiced skewering straw dummies with bamboo spears. "Savage Americans!" they were told to shout as they did so ... [As if they'd be understood! -A]
In June, the government ordered the mobilization of all Japanese men under age 60 as "volunteers." Their weapons: spears, bows and arrows, iron pipes ...
Japan's leaders might have hoped a display of fierce fanaticism on the part of civilians would prevent the American military from embarking on a land invasion.
How would the Israeli military react to similar Palestinian tactics?
04.3.23.2:43: FROM EMIGRATION TO EXPULSION TO EXECUTION
An Amnesty International director writes - in The Wall Street Journal, of all places! - that the Nazi invasion of the USSR led to der 'Endlosung der Judenfrage' (the Final-Solution of-the Jewish-Question):
Within six months after the German invasion, Mr. Browning estimates, nearly 800,000 Jews were murdered on Soviet territory alone ...
There were even instances of "execution tourism," when "on or off duty" Germans would watch the open-air massacres and take pictures. [What did those Germans do with those pictures? Are they proud of them now? -A]
It is now believed that of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, no fewer than 2 1/2 million were killed on Soviet territory ...
Expulsion was no longer realistic under wartime conditions. But shooting proved to be difficult, too. Even Nazi officers worried that such a method would turn their men into "either neurotics or savages." Different methods, "more efficient, detached, and secret," were needed ...
It was then that Hitler recalled the euthanasia program.
'Euthanasia' is from the Greek word for an 'easy, happy death'. Eu- means 'good' and thanasia is cognate to thanatos 'death'. I don't think we should use such a euphemism to refer to Nazi murders. I suggest cacothanasia from the Greek word for a 'miserable death' - or phonos 'murder, slaughter, homicide' (cognate to Sanskrit hanana 'killing' and English bane - more related words here).
04.3.23.1:30: WHAT'S HEBREW FOR 'JIHAD'?
And by asking that, I mean: Is there a Hebrew word with a scope of meanings comparable to jihad? I assume that if there were such a word, it would be on the lips of every anti-Semite by now.
That question came to mind when I read excerpts from the Covenant of Hamas (via Blueshift; alas, the full text link is broken). This line stood out like a flashlight in the dark:
There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.
And I don't think they mean peaceful struggle:
Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.
Can anyone find equivalent lines in any Israeli government documents? Something comparable would help to bolster the case of the moral equivalence cultists. Come on, folks, where's the evidence? Surely the neoconazis can't cover it all up. After all, they can't be too bright if they take orders from Dumbya.
Where are the Israeli prisoners released from Palestinian jails who vow to kill again? Where are the Israeli children with ski masks and machine gun toys? ["Toys"? Charles Johnson doesn't think so.]
If the [Palestinians] consider these photos of young children amidst masked terrorists fit for publication, it makes you wonder what photos the [Palestinians] don't let the West see.
Just three years ago, I too was more or less the way Sarah used to be -
When I was in college, my views on Israel were of the fingers-in-ears variety ... I didn't want to even think about it ... Without doing a single piece of research, it seemed to me that both sides had merit ...
- except that if I were forced to choose a side, I would've picked the Palestinians. Not anymore. No, not after reading LGF, Nelson Ascher, my blogfather's site, and so many other jaalasthaani (websites)*.
"Time to take sides" - The Dissident Frogman
"You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror." - George W. Bush
Many Palestinians have made their choice (LGF MPG link) - and so have I.
*From Sanskrit jaala 'net' (neuter) + the plural of sthaana 'place' (neuter), cognate to English stand and the -stan of Pakistan, etc. which is Persian and not Arabic in origin. Modern Persian still preserves the Proto-Indo-European root *staa 'stand' in istaadan 'to stand'. (Click here to see a surprising Polish cognate.)
04.3.23.2:13: UPDATE: Bret Stephens writes:
To date, there has not been a single instance in which a Hamas leader sent one of his own sons or daughters on a suicide mission. I once interviewed a Hamas leader, since deceased, as he bounced his one-year-old girl on his knee. Contrary to myth, this was not a man who was afraid of nothing. Unsparing as he was with the lives of others, he was circumspect when it came to the lives of his own.
Read on to see who gets to be shahiids:
Indeed, when one looks closely at just who the suicide bombers are (or were), often they turn out to be society's outcasts.
04.3.22.23:59: KAPII (MONKEYS) (logonotes)*
When I tried to go to bed last
night, I ended up tossing and turning, so I decided to try out
the region 1 DVDs I've been buying in Hilo. I can't watch them
there because both of my surviving laptops (Coma the Compaq and
Freezie the HP) are set to region 2 for my Japanese tokusatsu
(live-action fantasy) and anime DVDs. However, I have an R1 machine
here on O'ahu, so I fast-forwarded through a bunch of movies,
most notably John
Carpenter's They Live.
If Michael Moore wanted to make a horror movie, he should update that satire of the Reagan era. The film's premise is that skeletal aliens in disguise as Republicans (not named, but it's obvious) and yuppies have taken over America and only Roddy Piper (yes, the pro wrestler) can literally see through their human appearances with a pair of special sunglasses.
Piper's nameless character 'Nada' (Spanish for 'nothing'), armed with a gun in a bank full of aliens: "I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick @$$ ... and I'm all out of bubble gum" (ad-libbed!)
I can see it now ... some Leftist actor puts on the glasses, looks at Powell and Rice, and exclaims, "They're not black ... or white! They're not even human!"
I confess that I enjoyed that movie as a liberal in high school and I still thought it was fun even now ... though I'd turn the tables and reveal Chomsky and humyns like these as aLLLiens preaching 'peace' so they can conquer us. They've already taken over the uni-farce-ities, and society at large is next! Everywhere you look, there are signs with subliminal messages like "BUSH KNEW", BUSH LIED", "WHY DO THEY HATE US?", "LET'S GIVE THEM A STATE", etc. The title of this sequel/remake should be obvious: They Still Live.
Eventually I collapsed and woke up past 2 PM! ARGH!! Another day lost. I've been here three days and I haven't done much to show for it beyond what you see here.
At least I didn't wake up to a-not-so-'horrorshow' (in the Clockwork Orange sense) horror show on LGF. After learning of the death of 'Saruman' last night, I was expecting massive retaliation. But so far, there have been nothing but demands for revenge. I'm surprised there are no inch-high Chinese characters for 'revenge' at the Light of Islam site tonight (last seen here). And tonight's cartoon ignores not only current events but even the actual English balloons! (The balloons are translated out of order, and the left balloon is mistranslated as "Have you already told them this?")
The name Saruman (used by Macker and Sarah - who started it?) at first looked like a blend of Japanese saru 'monkey' with Sanskrit Hanuman, a heroic monkey from the Ramayana. But since that's too flattering, I decided to think of Saruman as saru 'monkey' plus Korean -man 'only', so Saru-man is 'just a monkey'. (What was Tolkien's etymology for the name?)
Tonight, I discovered another monkey: Kofi Annan, whose name sounds like
Hebrew kof 'monkey' + -i 'my' = 'my monkey'.
Hebrew `anan 'cloud'
These coincidences were pointed out by WriterMom, who said,
Don't take advice from monkey clouds.
She also coined one of my favorite phrases: "Ein Academy, Ein LLL Mindset, Ein Brain Cell."
The Roman letter Q is from the extinct Greek letter qoppa, which I think is named after a Phoenician qop 'ape' (cognate to modern Hebrew kof). Not to be confused with the still living kappa, which is from a Phoenician kapp 'palm of the hand'.
*LOGONOTES: kapii is the nominative dual of Sanskrit kapi 'monkey' (masculine). The two kapii are 'Saruman' and Kofi. The resemblance of kapi to Kofi is coincidental, as is - I think - the resemblance to English ape. (Grimm's Law predicts a theoretical English cognate of Sanskrit api like hafe with h < earlier *k and f < earlier *p. The theoretical Sanskrit cognate of ape would be something like aba, with a b corresponding to English p. Sanskrit preserved Proto-Indo-European *b, whereas the Proto-Germanic ancestor of English shifted it to p.)
04.3.22.1:40: CHOMSKY FOR KERRY
Even the master of the nonexistent realm of 'underlying forms' has to kowtow to reality:
Noam Chomsky, the political theorist and leftwing guru, yesterday gave his reluctant endorsement to the Democratic party's presidential contender, John Kerry, calling him "Bush-lite", but a "fraction" better than his rival.
He realizes that Kerry is far more viable than Kucinich or Nader. Better Kerry than Bush or his"cruel and savage" accomplices
... deeply committed to dismantling the achievements of popular struggle through the past century no matter what the cost to the general population.
Yes, "deeply committed" to destroying such "achievements of popular struggle" like democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq! People want to be oppressed! Why do you think they struggle against Bu$chitler!? They don't want change as much as they want chains! Only Noam and the inteLLLigentsia hear their call! When will the neoconazis learn to listen to the voices of the masses demanding shari`ah NOW!?
04.3.22.1:28: LAMM-BASTING AMERICA
Almost twenty years ago, when I was a Leftist, I read a long editorial by Richard Lamm prophesying doom for America. I cut it out and saved it until recently. (I think I threw it away three years ago when I cleaned my house.) Maybe I liked it because I wanted to see America fall. I can't remember what his points were then, and how much they overlap with his current nine-point prescription for destruction (the author of the article counts eight):
1. "Turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bicultural country."
2 and 3. "Invent 'multiculturalism' and encourage immigrants to maintain their own culture."
4. "... I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least educated."
5. "... [G]et big foundations and business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of 'Victimology'."
6. "... [D]ual citizenship and promote divided loyalties."
7. "... [M]ake it taboo to talk about anything against the cult of 'diversity'."
8. "...[M]ake it impossible to enforce our immigration laws."
9. "Lastly, I would censor Victor Hanson Davis's book Mexifornia. His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to destroy America. If you feel America deserves to be destroyed, don't read that book."
Ah, the power of reverse psychology. I put Mexifornia in my Amazon.com shopping cart. This quote made it irresistible:
"I have a fantasy that somewhere in some secretive laboratory in Montana a white supremacist and a crackpot racist [As if they're different? Aren't they two of a kind? -A] got together, brewed the germs of our present school curriculum, concocted the virus of La Raza separatist and racist mythology, and then released these pathogens by night in aerosol form to be inhaled by unsuspecting Californians, who then proceeded unknowingly to destroy the aspirations of millions of desperately poor aliens."
Kevin Kutabare Kusoyama knows a good idea when he sees one. Coming after spring break to Hawai'i State University: Ka Laka*!
*A Hawaiianization of La Raza. Ka is one of three Hawaiian equivalents for 'the'. (The others are ke and na. The choice of ka or ke usually depends on the initial sound of the following singular noun. Na precedes plural nouns.)
Does Kusoyama know that laka already exists as a Hawaiian word meaning "Tame, domesticated, gentle, docile"? Perfect for dhimmis and pacifists!
04.3.22.0:36: SECRET WARS
Comics fans will recognize the title from the 1984 miniseries Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars featuring the company's biggest stars in a battle so big ... that I can't remember what it was about. And to think I actually regretted not buying it at the time! Hah! (Borrowed it from a friend and have no need to see it again.) Who need fantasies with predictable endings, when reality is so much more complex and fascinating?
In the past, Nelson
Ascher has said that
... those of us who have access only to open sources of information, who are not insiders, are acquainted at most with 20% of what's really going on.
His latest post reminded me of that point. I don't claim to know 20% or even 10%. And I know nothing about this real-life secret war:
... [I]t seems pretty obvious that there's a real war going on between many secret services, and I don't mean just the one between the Western ones and the Islamists' ...
The whole WMD affair could be seen not as a simple mistake but as some kind of trap, though made by whom I don't know.
Now, this intelligence vs. counterintelligence thing flows both ways, doesn't it?
The West no longer exists except as a vague generalization. Each country is on its own side in this war. And you know where my loyalties lie.
04.3.22.0:00: "WAR IS OBSOLETE"
But Leftism never goes out of style, right? Found that slogan at a collection of San Francisco protest photos, which in turn is part of a massive archive.
What is wrong with these turtledoves?
Are they that oblivious to evil? Do they understand what
evil is? Do they think they can negotiate with the enemy?
Fine. Why don't they send 'diplomats' (say, Chomsky and some other
smaaaart people) to al-Qaeda, Kim Jong Il, et al. and negotiate
peeeeace (not to be confused with peace) between the bad
guys morally different humyns and the Union of
Soviet Socialist States of Amerika (i.e., the 99.9% which didn't
vote for Bu$chitler). Then they can be happy little dhimmis donating
their income to terrorists freedom fighters,
The Legitimate State of Palestine™, and other 'noble causes'.
These models
(NUDE PHOTOS; NOT SAFE FOR WORK) might amuse Kim Jong Il by spelling
out
with their multicolored bodies. Arteeeests can always find a way to make a living under Great Leaders™ - just like aca-dumb-ics. Nothing legitimizes a dictator more than scores of ivory tower pro-farcers declaring his ideology to be the epitome of humyn intellectual achievement. Statues and symphonies for Saddams come a close second. If the eliiiite adore their Great Leaders™, surely the masses should follow their example!
Have AmeriKKKan aca-dumbics and pro-farcers sunken that low yet? No, at this point they're just enablers. What if they got their ideal 'people's republic'? Then we'll see them remain true to their pacifist principles by appeasing their new masters. They only 'rebel' now because they know that the Bu$chitler they 'fear' so much is not going to send them to a concentration camp. How brave they are! When they put on red stars and buttons with the faces of their Führer (yes, Hitler was a Leftist!), they will continue their 'heroic' pretense without interruption. But they were villains all along.
04.3.21.22:59: SA YANTRAPUTRAH
= 'He [is] Machine-Son'. (See the logonotes at the end of this post.)
Yantraputra (no need for the final -h in citation) was my sort-of-translation of the name of Machine Man, one of the many 'Kreations' (sic) of Jack Kirby, the king of American comics. (Kirby's MM is not to be confused with the 1984 live-action superhero of the same name created by Ishinomori Shoutarou, founder of the sentai [Power Rangers] genre). I was trying to come up with a Sanskrit name that had some sort of equivalent to the alliteration of the original. Putra 'son' doesn't mean 'man', but it did end in -tra just like yantra 'machine'. The name does bug me on second thought because MM thinks of himself as Aaron Stack, the 'son' of Dr. Abel Stack. Orphaned by the US government that funded his creation, raised as human but far more than human, can MM find a niche in a world that rejects him? MM is the latest of a long series of alienated loner characters that remind me of myself.
Right now as I type this, my DVDs of the 1984 SF anime Super Dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross are playing in the background. I've skipped the first half of the series so I could jump into the later arc centering on Seifriet Weiss, a human soldier forced to fight for his alien captors and now back among 'his own' people who hate him (translation from the subs with alterations by me):
Seifriet (looking at a model of the alien robot he once piloted): Sorry, but I don't remember.
Eddie, a human soldier (grabs head off the model): Seifriet, you better not say you don't remember. You used to pilot this! (Approaches Seifriet holding the detached head) Well? How were we on the battlefield? ... How was my kid brother in his final moments!? ... Say something!
Seifriet: Sumannai (I'm sorry).
Eddie (punches out Seifriet): Bakayarou (You idiot)!
Seifriet (later, thinking to himself): Regaining your memories isn't going to change what you have done. I've killed fellow Glorians [= human colonists of the planet Glorie]. What can I possibly do to help?
Am I really like Seifriet? On one level, I too am alone. But those around me are not 'my' people. They're aca-dumb-ics who think I'm a neoconazi. Ralph Peters (via Bunker Mulligan) sums up how I feel about them:
A room filled with university professors makes me nostalgic for the Khmer Rouge. Since I value intellect, I dislike intellectuals – those men and women, freed from the necessity of labor, who prefer theory to reality and who footnote while others fight our nation’s battles ... Absurd theories killed vastly more human beings in the twentieth century than did the most terrible weapons.
Where are the real WMDs? Right here in our own uni-farce-ities. IDEAS KILL. Kevin Kutabare Kusoyama and his kolleagues (sic; they sure ain't mine!) will insure that socialism will 'live' forever, even if real human beings must die in the name of the sacred THEORY. Who cares if the theory doesn't work? They're not the ones who have to suffer. They get to dictate their fantasies from the comfort of their offices at Kim Il Sung University or its Western equivalents while the proletariat perishes in pursuit of an 'ideal' that can never be. When confronted with the failure of Leftism, the aca-dumb-ics will scream that they meant 'well'. But do the 'well-meaning' really advocate policies that are known to kill the masses they claim to loooove? Are they unwilling to learn from history, or just unable to do so? If the latter is the case, then are they really so smart? If they're stupid, why are we letting them indoctrinate our youth in the name of 'education'? Because they hold the sacred duh-grees? Possession of toilet paper is no excuse.
No, unlike Seifriet, I don't regret what I've done. I was not under Dumbyan mind control. I chose to advocate war while the turtledoves chanted for 'peace' (I'd rather call it a word that rhymes with hiss). I could face an Iraqi like Ays (via Alexis Z; how can Iraqis write English so well!?):
Back to you ‘protestors’, last year my salary was 1.5$, last year my parents were about to go mad cause we were almost broke, last year I had to obey the mean and disgusting orders of Saddam’s officers cause I had to join the conscription, last year I couldn’t watch what’s happening now on the TV cause I used to watch SH [Saddam Hussein] laughing at us, last year I couldn’t write what I’m writing now, last year thousands were being executed, last year hundreds of doctors, engineers and educated people were being arrested and tortured cause they dared to try to travel last year ... Now, what do you think? Just give me a way to get all the above without a war …
Just tell me what’s your ‘great idea’ that should have been used to get rid of Saddam and put an end to his regime?
What about the turtledoves? What could they say? "We'd let Saddam kill you because we cared about you?" Or, more likely, "France could have saved you, along with Germany and the rest of the mighty UN, except for AmeriKKKa and its evil ally I$rael! VIVE LA FRANCE!! (Warning: Clicking on the link will result in an outpouring of toxic textual sludge.) Resolution 666666 will do the trick, enforced by WORDS, not weapons! Saddam will 'promise' to kill 1% fewer people and we'll just look the other way! Problem 'solved'!"
So, for those who don’t agree with the war on Iraq I want to tell them if we depended on the UN and other countries who refused the war decision we would still live under Saddam with his thugs for the rest of our lives!
Ah, who cares about real Iraqi people when the abstract ideal of 'peace' is all that matters? While thugs run amok, close your eyes and chant for peeeeace. Then Kim Jong Il and his buddies will smile, ignore you useful idiots, and continue doing what they do best: democide. Behind your back, Kevin Kutabare Kusoyama will wave at you with a bloody hand. "MAHALO!!" (Thanks!)
04.3.21.23:13: UPDATE: Are Machine Man and other Jack Kirby Kreations metaphors for Jews?
Discrimination and persecution were central themes of "X-Men" and "Machine Man."
"He told me that when he did his comics, he always let the good guys win," Paskow said. "He was so proud of Israel because he was harassed as a kid and in the army for being Jewish."
04.3.21.21:05: BEYOND THE GATES OF KIM JONG IL
Here's my translation of the contents
of A Comics
Introduction to Kim Jong Il: The Truth about the North Korean
General taken from its
Amazon.co.jp page. Don't you feel as if you're missing
out on something? I sure do.
The Truth about the Criminal State of North Korea
Kim Jong Il's Birth and Boyhood
Entering Kim Il Sung University
Behind the Scenes of a Super-Speed Promotion
Hell for the Losers: The Struggle for Succession
Taking Control of the Military Kim Jong Il-Style
How to Become a Great Leader of the Party and the People
Those Who Support the Kim Jong Il System
Anti-South Activity Exposed
The True State of a Rotten Republic
Kim Jong Il's Women
Kim Jong Il's Dilemma and a Script for Fear
There may have been more, but this book's Amazon.co.jp page is no longer viewable. Has it been taken down in response to complaints? If so, why is the page for the sequel still up? Is it next for deletion? There is no table of contents there, but there is a review praising the first volume, blasting the second as partly fikushon, and suggesting that North Korea is sending agents disguised as refugees into the PRC.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Kim Jong Il-ul cugyora (Kill Kim Jong Il)! That sentiment only got four hits at Google. Here's one of them from an online novel in Korean:
"Overthrow Kim Jong Il!"
"Let's avenge decades of living through oppression!"
"'Now let's make North Korea a people's nation!"
"Kill Kim Jong Il!"
"Now as long as he remains, there is no hope for our North Korea!"
Logonotes and more on my Unicode page.
04.3.21.2:36: "ARE WE REALLY MUSLIMS?"
You don't need to be literate in Chinese to understand this cartoon at the Light of Islam (Yisilan zhi guang) site. The caption surprisingly says nothing about Jews. It merely asks the Muslims of the world to review the Qur'an "in the face of this reality" (depicted by the cartoon) and ends with the title question which I dissect on my Unicode page where you can also learn the Chinese names for Islam and Muhammad.
04.3.21.2:36: ENTERING THE GATES OF KIM JONG IL
Here are two manga (Japanese
comics) that I'd like to read (via
Far Outliers): Lee U-jong's
Manga Kimu Jon'iru nyuumon: Kita Chousen shougun-sama no shinjitsu (A Comics Introduction to Kim Jong Il: The Truth about the North Korean General; Amazon.co.jp page)
Manga Kimu Jon'iru nyuumon 2: Kita Chousen shougun-sama no akumu (Nightmare of the North Korean General; Amazon.co.jp page)
Both were translated into Japanese by Lee Young-hwa. (Strange, because Lee U-jong is a Japanese-born Korean whose first language is almost certainly Japanese. He now lives in South Korea, so he must have written the comics in his second language - though ironically the books are banned in South Korea and presumably can only be read in translation, unless underground copies are circulating in Korean!)
I'd love to translate these. But since I don't have them yet, I'll just do their tables of contents later today. For now, see my Unicode page for logonotes on the above titles and names.
ADDENDUM: Coincidentally, manga
rewriter and letterer James
Hudnall put up a post on Japanese comics. Didn't know he's
now rewriting manhwa (with -hw-) as well! Manhwa
is the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters for manga.
Hud has also rewritten and lettered two Hong Kong maanwa
(the Cantonese pronunciation of those graphs, equivalent to Mandarin
manhua), Lungfu ngsai (Mandarin Longhu wushi, lit.
'Dragon Tiger Five Generation') and Siumosan (Mandarin
Xiaomoshen, lit. 'Little Devil God').
04.3.20.23:59: KO YANTRAPUTRA?
Packing took a lot longer than I expected. Wasn't done until around four in the morning, and even then I still had to burn backup CD-ROMs which took yet another hour. (So glad that the days of CDs that took three hours each to burn are way behind me.) I did consider burning the CDs after I woke up, but I didn't want to take my chances. I saw myself waking up just minutes before I needed to call a taxi.
Turned out that I woke up after eight without the help of any alarms. Since I was 99% done with packing and I didn't want to add or update any files on my computer that wouldn't be on my backup CDs, I went back to sleep for another hour.
After the alarm awakened me for good, I deactivated it and the secondary alarm, lest it beep like mad in my absence. (I once made the mistake of forgetting to do that and I got a complaint from my landlord while I was gone.) I should have unplugged the clock, period, but I forgot. I just hope that the clock doesn't start a fire. If it did, it wouldn't make front page news here on O'ahu, where I'm writing this now. I wouldn't know until I flew back and found a smoking crater where my apartment building had been. (Seriously, my building is adjacent to the remains of what used to be the core of the complex - before it burned out. Wonder what started that fire.)
Dragged my luggage down two flights of stairs - what elevator? - it's not just the 'differently abled' who could use them - to find my taxi waiting for me. Usually taxis take fifteen minutes or longer to show up even in a small town like Hilo, but this guy definitely earned his tip.
Arrived at the airport on time. Things went a bit awry after that. My suitcase made the weight sensor at the ticket counter go bonkers. The initial readout said my black box weighed something like 110 pounds (50 kg)! Impossible, since I carried the thing down all by myself, and I weigh exactly that much. After several weighings, the sensor settled on slightly over 62 pounds (28kg) - 12 (5 kg) pounds over the airline's limit. I was asked if I could either take 12 pounds out or pay $25. Although the latter might have cost more than mailing the stuff to O'ahu by boat, I paid up since handcarrying that much stuff plus my laptop bag and bag of empty food containers that my mother had lent me would lead to problems in the passenger cabin. Good thing I had the cash on hand.
I then towed my suitcase into security and unlocked it. I noticed that none of the other suitcases with zippers had any locks at all. Did people think zippers were enough to keep their stuff in one piece from Hilo to Honolulu. Probably, but I wasn't going to take any chances, so I relocked my suitcase.
While waiting for it to be inspected, I got called back to the ticket counter. Were they going to retroactively tell me that my suitcase was too heavy to be accepted at all? No, I got my boarding pass back. I had dropped it on the floor on the way to security. ARGH!! That never happened to me before, though I've seen it happen to a friend (who found his lost ticket on his own in time to board - close call!).
Walked back to security and found that my suitcase didn't even go through the X-ray scanner. In fact, nobody did anything to it apart from dumping it on the conveyor belt leading to the plane. Fortunately, I'm no terrorist. But what if I were another James Yee - or worse?
(There are, by the way, ethnic Chinese Muslims in the PRC whose ancestors converted to Yisilan [a.k.a. Huijiao, lit. 'the turning teachings'] centuries ago. Just discovered an article mentioning magazine published by Chinese Muslim students in Tokyo in 1908! Reading on, I've learned a new term: Zhong-A xuexiao 'Sino-Arabic schools' [Zhong is literally 'center' and A is short for Alabo 'Arab']. Sounds like the kind of cross-cultural piece I'd find covered at Far Outliers which has been running excerpts from Ian Buruma's excellent Bad Elements.)
Passed through security without any problems, though the people around me weren't so lucky. The couple ahead of me were told to check in their lighter (!?) with their baggage and the well-behaved blonde, blue-eyed woman behind me was taken aside for ... what? She had less than ten minutes left to board, and I bet she never made it at all. This sounds like such a Leftist thing to say, but context is everything: Is America any safer?
Read the comic book adventures of Yantraputra as I stood in line to board and during the hours that followed, both in the plane and on O'ahu. Ko Yantraputrah (Who [is] Yantraputra)? Hints:
1. The English version of the name contains alliteration.
2. Yantra is 'machine' (neuter) from the root yam 'support' plus the suffix -tra for instruments.
3. Putrah < putras, nominative singular of putra 'son' (masculine; no surprise; etymology unclear to me*); -s > -h if nothing follows.
Comics are more relevant to the war than you might think. Check out my next two posts.
*04.3.21.00:21: UPDATE: Perhaps the word is from put (cognate to Latin putus 'boy' [masculine]) plus the noun suffix -ra (found in Rudra 'the Roarer' [masculine; the god of tempests] < rud 'roar' + -ra). If so, then put in turn is from the Indo-European root *pu(u) 'boy' plus -t. This root is also found in
- native English few and foal (English f is from earlier *p via Grimm's Law).
- paucity, pauper, poor, poverty, and puerile, ultimately from Latin (which did not shift *p to f).
- Greek-based peda-/pedo- words in English (e.g., pedagogy, pedophile) and Paideia 'education' (i.e., 'rearing of a child'), a name that should ring a bell to Strikeforce Morituri fans.
(If that site is correct, Carl Potts now owns Morituri [Latin for 'those who will die' (masculine)]. Since when!? Doesn't seem fair since Potts edited the comic but didn't create it - that honor goes to Peter Gillis and Brent Anderson. I wonder if ex-Morituri scribe James Hudnall [who got on board after the Gillis-Anderson duo departed] knows about this. I became a fan of Hud's through Morituri and if it weren't for that comic, I would never have found Hud's blog and been inspired to found Amaravati. Yeah, it's possible that I would've come to blog for some other reason, but I think the actual chain of events is pretty cool.)
For older posts, go to my archives.
© Copyright 2004 Marc H. Miyake; Ideon © 1980 Nippon Sunrise, Tokyu Agency, TV Tokyo (then Tokyo Channel 12).