Pedantry

Mourning in America

Please, dear God, tell me that it isn't true that some network actually called their coverage of the Reagan funeral Mourning in America.

Reconstructing the original migration out of Africa

John McWhorter is restrainedly enthusiastic about a recently published paper linking an isolated language of Nepal to the languages of the Andaman islands. Now, as I have recently pointed out, I am not terribly specialised in historical linguistics. The last thing I read on the historical linguistics of Papuan languages was Wurm's book from the mid-70's. Even when I read it over a decade ago, the very idea that the Andaman languages had any particular connection to the languages of Papua was considered controvertial.

Thus, I am ill-equipped to judge the connecting hypothesis - that if this Nepalese language is related to Andamanese languages and Andamanese languages are related to Papuan languages and Papua has been settled for some 75,000 years, then this link is reconstructing an 80,000 year old linguistic connection. But, it seems to me that I'd need to be convinced of the intermediate steps before considering the basic claim.

Proof positive that being black is no barrier to being a nitwit

Via Silentio, the Republican candidate for Congress in the North Carolina 5th congressional district has come to my attention. Vernon Robinson is, rather unusually for a Republican in general and a southern Republican Congressional candidate in particular, black. Setting aside the deeply troubling notion of a black southerner who is "honored [...] to be compared to Jesse Helms", setting aside his actual stances on issues - Neanderthal would be my choice of adjective - the real proof of nitwithood in my book is in this extract from his anti-immigration ad:

"The aliens are here, but they didn't come in a spaceship," an announcer says over the theme to "The Twilight Zone." "They've filled our criminal courtrooms and clogged our schools ... They sponge off the American taxpayer ... they've even taken over the DMV. These aliens commit heinous crimes ... You walk into a McDonald's restaurant to order a Big Mac, and find to your horror that the employees don't speak English."

Oh the horror! Fast food staff who can't speak English! Why right now, there are Americans going through drive-thrus, receiving medium sized orders when they asked for super-size! My God, the Republic must be saved!

One of my in-laws likes to complain that she can't understand black people when they speak. Now, when she says that, she doesn't mean that she doesn't always understand what people are saying when she goes to some inner city neighbourhood. I don't always understand conversations in the more remote American dialects, and I remember being in Detroit once as a teenager and having a very hard time understanding the colloquial language of the inner city. That would be a totally understandable admission. No, what she means is that she can't understand Will Smith in old Fresh Prince reruns. I wonder what she would make of Mr Robinson's English?

(BTW - I saw a Fresh Prince rerun in German a few weeks ago. There is something incredibly amusing about seeing German come out of Will Smith's mouth. I'm not sure I can explain it.)

McDonald's business practices are designed to minimise ambiguity in customer/employee communications. Menus are numbered. At every counter there is a menu in photo form, so that you need merely point at what you want. Braille menus are avaiable on request. The choices are few and most Americans have them memorised by age 6. Furthermore, it's not like the vocabulary of ordering at McDonald's is terribly complicated. "A Big Mac and a Coke, please." "You want fries with that?" "*grunt*" "That'll be five fifty."

I have ordered at McDonalds in Asia where I could neither speak nor read the language and where the employees spoke no English whatsoever. Tourists come to America who speak no English at all, and yet manage to place and receive orders at McDonald's all the time.

McDonald's has been designed based on the assumption that all the employees, the customers and the managers are complete idiots. In order to be unable to place an order at McDonald's you have to be simultaneously blind, deaf, dumb and ignorant of Arabic numerals. And yet, Mr Robinson has difficulty getting a quarter pounder in North Carolina and then blames immigrants. What does that tell us about Mr Robinson?

Update: Corrected a truly heinous typo and added a sentence cuz I realised I started making a point in the fourth paragraph and then never made it.

Libertarianism is the Socialism of Lawyers

I lifted this line from Kieran Healy. It's a good line, and I'm going to have to use it. Alas, the attached discussion on CT is fair to middling worthless, although perversely enough Sebastian Holsclaw's mother makes a good point about the persistence of religion in the absence of belief.

It is remarkably hard to find a real libertarian who hasn't made a career in some aspect of the legal trade. If there were no government, I do wonder what most of them would end up doing for a living. There is a word in English for something that works to destroy the source of its own survival. We call them parasites, and it's one of the reasons why I tend to prefer small "c" conservatives over anarcho-capitalist libertarians with any form of capitalisation.

Incompatibility issues

Had some issues with the new anti-spam measures at AFOE. The problem is gone now, it's possible to make comments again. A tip of the hat to Aidan for catching it. I though I was just getting less traffic with school out.

Traitors in Academia

Since I see that accusations of betrayal and treasonous disloyalty are back in fashion, I thought I ought to point to the latest on Abu Aardvark:

In my previous post, I attacked Daniel Pipes a bit, and suggested that his article being published in the Middle East Quarterly did not augur well for the future reputation of that journal. But then this bit of deliciousness dropped into my lap. Martin Kramer tells us that his replacement as the editor of the Middle East Quarterly has been named. And it is none other than Michael Rubin. Yes, that Michael Rubin - the person most frequently cited as most likely to be the guy who leaked classified information to Ahmed Chalabi, and hence to the Iranians.

I am shocked - shocked! - to find that Middle Eastern studies in America has been so inflitrated by probable traitors and enemy spies. Why should our hard earned tax dollars support this sort of filth? I propose that government monitor federally supported area studies programmes and withdraw funding for those hiring neoconservatives. Why, I think I'll write my Congressman!

Oh yeah, I don't pay American taxes and can't vote in American elections. Oh well.

Did okay in Russian too

Got a 69. Call it a C+. It's really irritating to see only 8 points of difference between Russian and Chinese despite an enormous difference in work.

Anyway, I have a busy week ahead. There will be very little from me for the immediate future.

Did okay in Chinese

I finished with a 77 - I guess basically a solid B. Russian grades are delayed. I'll know by tomorrow. I've had to drop Dutch. I just haven't the time for it this summer. And, I've seen the new Harry Potter. No review. It was okay, but it plays like a middle movie. Cuaron did okay though. The camera effects were a cute touch. If you're into Potter, you're going to go see it anyway. If you hate Potter, there's nothing here to change your mind.

Proud to be a Canadian

My family's traditional party, the New Democratic Party, is running a hijab-wearing woman in the upcoming Federal election. She is young - younger than me - and working on a Master's in Women's Studies at UBC. Alas, she is running in Delta-Richmond East, a resolutely Tory riding, which means she is a sacrificial candidate.

Update: From the comments I learn that Monia Mazigh, Maher Arar's wife, is running in Ottawa South. For those of you who've forgotten, Maher Arar is the Syrian-born Canadian that the US deported to Syria while he was transitting the US on his way home from a trip to see his family in Tunisia, even though he had not broken any laws in the US or elsewhere. In short, this is probably the most anti-Bush candidate in Canada.

I like the thought that a vote for the NDP is a vote against Bush. It lets us Canadians participate in our own small way in the coming American elections.

Ottawa South is John Manley's district, but he's retiring. The district looks pretty Liberal. But, it seems the district is a lot more Middle Eastern than it was at the last election, and people are pretty pissed at the Liberals. It's just at the outer limit of possible that she could win although I'd say the odds are against it.

Man, I wish I got CBC. I am so out of touch with Canada.

Cussing in Hebrew

Geoffrey Pullum is struck by a passage in the latest New Yorker in which young Jewish settlers in the West Bank use particularly foul language to express their lack of common feeling towards their Arab neighbours. What he finds most striking is the use of the Arabic word for "cunt."

Pullum's sentiment - particularly the futility of looking for a linguistic solution to ethnic hatred - is right on. However, the use of Arabic obscenities by these young Hebrew-speaking men is not terribly surprising. Modern Hebrew is a language that came into being quite recently and which was originally defined in a very artificial way. The language has been transformed by being adopted by many Yiddish, Ladino and Arabic speakers over the last century and much of its real structure and vocabulary comes from those roots.

The consequences of this sort of creolisation were related to me by my Jewish vice principal in high school who tried to order a glass of water in a restaurant in Tel Aviv using his rather rusty Hebrew. It seems that Americans who mispronounce the Hebrew word for water often end up producing something that sounds like the Arabic word that translates as "cunt." Everyone in Israel knows that word because nearly all Hebrew obscenities have been borrowed from Levantine Arabic.

The Day After Tomorrow: An Anti-Review

Roland Emmerich is the Anti-Tarantino. There is in this notion a Master's thesis in film theory for somebody, I'm sure of it. But it isn't going to be me, so I open it up to anyone who want to take the job on. These two men belong to the same generation, and both could be avatars of postmodern film-making. Having grown up on the genre films of the 70s, they are both in the business of making films which are only comprehensible to audiences who share those same cultural signifiers. Just as Tarantino's Kill Bill can only be understood and enjoyed in the light of a whole generation of martial arts movies and westerns, Roland Emmerich's latest work - The Day After Tomorrow - is indigestible without the Pepto-Bismal of a lifetime of disaster science fiction.

Read the rest of my review over at A Fistful of Euros.

Hi, honey. Enjoying the Microsoft conference?

I note from the comments bar that the wife has been reading my blog. Alas, there is little I can do to allay her concerns at this time.

I dunno honey, would you like to go to Latin America this fall? I mean, you're over in San Diego without me. *sniff*

As for my exams, I'll find out the second of June how they went. Same day the new Harry Potter movie opens.

And as for taking languages in the fall... you may have a point. I tell you what, I'll just take Chinese, but then you have to take French. Okay? I have worked too hard on my Chinese to give up.

And lastly, have you given any thought to the matter in your last e-mail? I owe you one, but it'll help if I have a year or two to prepare if it involves anything long distance.

As for everybody else, I just got back from seeing The Day after Tomorrow and I'm going to try to get a review up on AFOE tonight or in the morning, before it opens in the US tomorrow night.

Café sans frontières

Mark Liberman over at Language Log confronts the rather distinctive bipartite division of coffees in Montreal: velouté or corsé? I was a student when I lived in Montreal. The answer was always corsé. Montreal coffee culture is a bit different. Instead of Starbucks, Van Houtte is the place for du vrai corsé.

But what makes this really funny to me is that I had the same experience in reverse.

Survived another exam season

My last exam - the Chinese oral - was tonight. I am done with exams for a few weeks, until I do my Dutch final. I'm not stressing over Dutch. I think I passed everything, and but I think my Russian grade will be close enough to the line that I won't be able to take much joy from it.

You don't advance in a language by getting A's. You advance by not failing. This is important to understand when you take a language: There will come a point when it will just start to gel in your mind, and you'll start learning very quickly. You have to hold out and keep paying attention until you get to that point.

The only problem is that now I wish I had done Spanish instead of Russian.

Bingo

When I talk about SF being about the possibility of a different world, this is the kind of thing I mean. John Brunner could be horrifyingly depressing. Consider, for example, The Sheep Look Up - the prototype of the environmental catastrophy novel. But, this was the same man who wrote Stand on Zanzibar a novel which one reviewer (Thomas Disch I think) said described an absolutely horrible world which is nonetheless better in almost every respect than the one we have.

What I most prize in an SF story is to find a world which I couldn't imagine wanting to live in, but which is still credibly better than this one. The only thing still better is a world which seems to fit my intentions and sucks even worse than this world. The first makes me dream, the second makes me think.

There will be no SF in my life for a little while. My Russian exam starts at 6pm tonight. Then, it's Chinese tomorrow night, and my Russian oral on Wednesday. I've decided to register for the one month intensive Dutch if, as advertised, they really will be doing level 3 Dutch. Thursday is the beginning of a four-day weekend. I'll need it. My new Dutch class will be starting Tuesday and my Chinese oral is Wednesday next week. Then, it's back to work in a big way. Big project, gotta be done by October.