tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168032811171270072024-03-17T22:03:12.437-05:00notes on linguistic curiosities and oddities.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger110125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-81260885857265725752016-04-30T17:38:00.001-05:002016-04-30T17:38:32.882-05:00NJ: A Lack of OnslaughtI moved to New Jersey last July. I was hoping for an onslaught of linguistic curiosities to throw me for a whirl and provide fodder for the blog, but to my surprise, the only linguistic oddity (read: annoyance) that hit me over the head was the incessant use of the phrase “you’re all set?” or “I’m all set.” People use this to mean: “Have you had a chance to review the menu, or do you need more time?” “Do you need gas in your car?” “How’s the project coming?” or “There’s nothing else you can help me with, thank you.” “I’m not interested in seconds; I’ve had enough, thank you.” “I’m ready to go now, please.”<br />
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I've not realized that not only is it the pan-answer, it's also the giveaway clue. This is how you can tell the internet startup you're supporting was founded by a Yankee. The checkout screen looks like this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHzCjU8rT8KR3EyX82ClNR3F9DVS5vvl_Hq61goklhJjCnWyXedN6ovbls4ygzLHEofq-83rn_xkFEJhIan0irtoL6lnCxiYblYPDtYHKKQKQXQbbZ0dY6B59cVoHLCnkH4SG45KextojH/s1600/all-set.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHzCjU8rT8KR3EyX82ClNR3F9DVS5vvl_Hq61goklhJjCnWyXedN6ovbls4ygzLHEofq-83rn_xkFEJhIan0irtoL6lnCxiYblYPDtYHKKQKQXQbbZ0dY6B59cVoHLCnkH4SG45KextojH/s400/all-set.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Ugh.</div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-87258299186471043482014-09-16T23:23:00.000-05:002014-09-16T23:23:25.293-05:00False Cognates and False FriendsThere´s a guy in Michael´s Spanish classes who is entirely too enthusiastic about participating in class. I´m hesitant to say he´s enthusiastic about <i>learning </i>Spanish--because maybe he´d be smarter about his choices??<br />
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He seems to blurt out everything that comes into his head, no matter how incredibly wrong and illogical it may be. <b>I absolutely love hearing stories about him.</b><br />
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They use different scenarios in their textbooks to learn grammar and vocabulary. For example, in one unit they´re doing charity work in a South American country, and, having used all their tools and construction vocabulary, they´re finished building a house. Then, they go to a furniture store to furnish the house. <br />
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<b>The sentence is: No se adonde empezar. Adonde esta el mostrador de servicio?</b><br />
<b>He translates: I don´t know where to begin. Where is THE SERVICE MONSTER?</b><br />
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I die when I hear this story.<br />
Mostrador de servicio means service <b>counter</b>.<br />
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A new favorite hit from this kid:<br />
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<b>The sentence is: Quiero una boda pequeña. Que solo estemos nosotros dos, y dos testigos.</b><br />
<b>He translates: I want a small wedding. Just us two, AND TWO TESTICLES.</b><br />
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I can´t even.<br />
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I can´t.<br />
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Testigos means <b>witnesses</b>. I´m sure it has the same root at <b>testify</b>! Idiot.<br />
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I mean, come on. Sure, those words *might* sound alike (they don´t really), but wouldn´t your head do a double check?? A small wedding, just us two and two ___. Even without a word of reference to fill in the blank, wouldn´t your mind automatically hope for "witnesses" or "guests" or something wedding-related?!<br />
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I´d say he´s fallen into the trap of false cognates, or "falsos amigos" as the Spanish teacher calls it--but it turns out<b> false cognates and false friends are two different things.</b> <br />
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<ul>
<li>Plain-old cognates are words that come from the same root--that is, they´re etymologically related. </li>
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<ul>
<li>False cognates are when words sound similar but actually <b>have different roots, and end up having similar meanings.</b> I didn´t know this! For example, in French, butterfly is <i>papillon </i>and in Nahuatl <i>papalotl</i>.* Or in Chuvash <i>nĕrtte </i>meaning "awkward, inept" and English <i>nerdy</i>. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate#Examples">Wiki has a wonderful list of examples here.</a></li>
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<ul>
<li>False friends are when words sound similar, <b>used to have the same root a long time ago, but have since diverged in meaning.</b> The most common example we hear is <a href="http://spanish.about.com/cs/culture/a/chevy_nova_2.htm">embarazado and embarrassed.</a> <i>Embarazado </i>in Spanish actually means "pregnant"--but it comes from the same etymological root as embarrassed!** Another example I stumbled upon in my life is the English word <i>preservative </i>and the French and German <i>préservatif </i>and Präservativ, <i>respectively</i>. In English preservative is something that preserves, in French and German these words mean birth control or condom! They´re etymologically related--they´re false friends!***</li>
</ul>
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There are tons of examples of false friends, but this is one of my favorites:</div>
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<tr><td><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUHHRwzpY6DTe_s-1Dt4nLBVFaIElFGEFxMi2xKVgttn6INR6aHu3fLRd0_DDKxGVOHN0Rd3Qx9ODym4oIyM0zc-RCpXZ981NAXOaOrrE75RfWcdhncmfNGCYfjEalfcXgJDuOgfqJuySh/s1600/DutchEnglishfalsefriend.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUHHRwzpY6DTe_s-1Dt4nLBVFaIElFGEFxMi2xKVgttn6INR6aHu3fLRd0_DDKxGVOHN0Rd3Qx9ODym4oIyM0zc-RCpXZ981NAXOaOrrE75RfWcdhncmfNGCYfjEalfcXgJDuOgfqJuySh/s1600/DutchEnglishfalsefriend.png" height="176" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px;">The sign (in Dutch) really says, <br />"Mommy, (I want) that one, that one, that one. Please."</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>So it turns out this idiot guy in class is neither a victim of false cognates nor of false friends.</b> <i>Mostrador </i>and <i>monster </i>have never been etymologically related, nor do they have similar meanings. Same goes for <i>testigos </i>and <i>testicles</i>. He´s just an idiot.</span><br />
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*I had written about <a href="http://www.kyreles.com/2009/06/aztecs-nahuatl.html">Spanish words of Nahuatl origin</a> before but I had missed this one, it seems! I just realized <i>papalotl </i>is where the Spanish word for <i>kite </i>comes from, <i>papalote</i>. So if that´s a Nahuatl word, WHAT did the Spaniards call kites before they came to the new world?<br />
Turns out there were no toy kites before 1660, really. I guess <b>they didn´t have kites </b>before they came to the Americas. What a sad world.<br />
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**From OED and the Spanish Royal Academy:<br />
Embarrass. 1670s, "perplex, throw into doubt," from French embarrasser (16c.), literally "to block," from Italian imbarrazzo, from imbarrare "to bar," from assimilated form of in- "into, upon" + Vulgar Latin *barra "bar". Meaning "to hamper, hinder" is from 1680s. Meaning "<b>make (someone) feel awkward</b>" first recorded 1828. Original sense preserved in embarras de richesse (1751), from French (1726): the condition of having more wealth than one knows what to do with.<br />
The French word was derived from the Spanish embarazar, whose first recorded usage was in 1460 in Cancionero de Stúñiga (Songbook of Stúñiga) by Álvaro de Luna. The Spanish word likely comes from the Portuguese embaraçar, which probably is a combination of the prefix em- (from Latin in- for "in-") with baraça "a noose", or "rope", which makes sense with the synonym encinta ("on noose, on rope" because of the old usage of women to wear a strap of cloth on their dresses when pregnant). The Royal Spanish Academy theorizes that embaraçar originated from Celtic because its root palabra existed before the Romans conquered the Iberian Peninsula.<br />
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***From the OED:<br />
<b>preservative </b>comes from late 14c., from Old French preservatif and directly from Medieval Latin praeservativus, from stem of praeservare (see preserve (v.)). The noun is from early 15c., "a preservative medication;" sense of "chemical added to foods to keep them from rotting" is from 1875.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-25360538873819116992014-09-09T13:05:00.003-05:002014-09-09T13:16:55.459-05:00A tribute to AndwIn honor of having passed my five year blogging anniversary, I want to pay a small tribute to one of my dearest friends and most avid linguistic contributors. Andw´s written some really great comments on my posts--my favorites are about <a href="http://www.kyreles.com/2009/06/last-time-i-went-to-germany-was-2006.html">love</a>, <a href="http://www.kyreles.com/2011/03/english-is-hard-to-pronounce.html">me</a>, <a href="http://www.kyreles.com/2009/11/french-punctuation_05.html">the Oxford comma</a>, <a href="http://www.kyreles.com/2009/08/bull-bullet-bulletin.html">diminuitive forms</a>, <a href="http://www.kyreles.com/2009/06/opposite-prepositions.html">preposition use</a>, <a href="http://www.kyreles.com/2014/02/a-better-past.html">the past tense</a>, and <a href="http://www.kyreles.com/2014/09/brazilian-portuguese-and-translating.html">being descriptivist</a>.<br />
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Even though he might not blog for himself, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/andrew.farrier.35">his Facebook</a> is full of gems. I went back through the last five years of his posts, and have compiled my favorites of his linguistics gems for myself.<br />
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In no particular order.<br />
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<img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgz5yGA4w2inswOA-w5FT2OZs8ZAYXjbY6QaGpUBc4uigUSorlazA43g1xFYyWPkdFo76Z02QBM4EGSEScPwcJkJIZF-C50gvRgIFUBI4hyzw0R5Sv77SUHxKAWzFoQyzd8upLzJEGqRuBB/s1600/1+(4).jpg" height="167" width="320" /></div>
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<a href="http://www.southernrep.com/SEASON/nightoftheiguana.HTM"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipPVX46Y2yTHfofllUd_83SGKgvPPgVZQz5O16wm_6U1oAmWeVHpM2VSQvYhxA1huoaaFcYQdjHHiv0MPgPPKyKUbMbh1Qr85ftzdDMxfiiXoCSRWAa9SDBDAiB_3R2bT24MAK1PiCj_su/s1600/1+(5).jpg" height="169" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/08/hella-ridic-new-words-to-make-you-lolz/"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1VPnb7fOMEM5uytFSKZc9A52eSnLj3-PzAtActuv1IKBwXBv28NIsarqysR7EbePISpf5bhagry3IXL3frDJpMsLVlM3ED3eHhQ3o8b3bQtOMZqj9DJTnwM8-q9ZZm0RCVKqAw928MC0T/s1600/1+(12).jpg" height="219" width="320" /></a></div>
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Love you Andw.</div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-50382470108259274242014-09-03T23:38:00.001-05:002014-09-03T23:39:49.390-05:00Brazilian Portuguese and Translating<div dir="ltr">
<a href="https://sites.google.com/a/lsmsa.edu/link-hall/">Dr. Hall</a> is the sweetest. At the end of his raucous laughter-inducing <a href="http://www.kyreles.blogspot.com/2014/09/i-just-want-to-shout-who.html">response </a>to yesterday´s post, he wrote:</div>
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As always, thank you, Chela, for sharing your verbal musings about verbal matters. Are you taking any more language/linguistics courses these days?</blockquote>
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Well, it´s probably no surprise to you that the answer is yes. I have two projects to report!</div>
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1. I´m learning Portuguese--specifically, the Brazilian kind. </div>
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You avid readers <a href="http://kyreles.blogspot.com/2009/06/yay_22.html">might recall (from this post here)</a> that I´ve tried once before to study a language in a non-traditional setting. It didn´t work. The problem then was that the teacher was my mom (I didn´t tell you that back then because I wanted you to take me seriously). Now don´t get me wrong--she used to be an Italian teacher officially--her skills were not the problem. The problem was that my mom and I love spending time together, and when we´d get together with the intention of having Italian lesson time, we invariably got sidetracked and ended up doing something else entirely. I take full responsibility. We weren´t disciplined about it.</div>
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Well, that was five years ago and neither my brain nor my heart can turn off this passion for languages, and I was aching for something new. I recently went to China to visit Khya (he lives in Shanghai) and I was completely impressed by his massive Mandarin and Shanghainese skills.* I know he studied Chinese in college, but I also know that was a slow-moving process. When he learned he was probably moving to China just over three years ago, he started doing the Mandarin Rosetta Stone. He was completely dedicated and would sit at his desk for at least an hour each night repeating and repeating the lessons. Well, I know three years have passed, but I would think for the average person it´d take more time than that to be as good as he is at Chinese. Let me tell you, he´s good.</div>
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And so while there I was inspired to pick up a Rosetta Stone course. I seriously considered starting Mandarin--but who are we kidding? By the time I´m ready to use it conversationally, Khya probably will have moved somewhere else. I´m trying to stay ahead of the curve, here. Word on the street is that he might move to Brazil. I´d definitely visit him there. Portuguese it is.</div>
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This also makes me more marketable in my job search. I saw <a href="http://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=f009ea96ada82c2e&from=tellafriend&utm_source=jobseeker_emails&utm_medium=email&cd%20-=tell_a_friend">this job listing here</a> and thought, "yeah! This is the perfect job for me--and I´m the perfect candidate for this job!"--except for the Portuguese part. I mean, I´ve accidentally read Portuguese countless times. Being fluent in Spanish and French allows me to read Portuguese, no problem. But, man! Whenever I hear it spoken, I don´t understand a thing! I applied for the job anyway. Haven´t heard back.</div>
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So Michael got me the Rosetta Stone for Brazilian Portuguese, and I´m trying my best at working on it regularly. It´s been a week or so, and most days I´ve gotten my full hour in. But let me tell you, learning a language this way is WEIRD. </div>
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Before this, I´ve only ever learned languages in the traditional classroom setting. I started learning French in second grade, and speaking Spanish at home made that one a breeze. I started learning <a href="http://lsmsa.edu/content.cfm?id=58">German at LSMSA</a>, and the teacher there had a methodology pretty opposite to Rosetta Stone. We learned German grammar to it´s fullest and most complex extent in two years, but along the way forgot about vocabulary and oral practice** almost completely. And so when I went to college intending to double major in German, I took the placement test and only tested out of the first semester of the first level. I was really mad about this! But I knew they were right in placing me there. I only knew the most basic vocabulary. But <a href="https://sites.google.com/a/lsmsa.edu/kolson/">Dr. Olsen</a> had drilled charts upon charts of grammar into our heads. I knew it backward and forward. Now don´t get me wrong--I loved it at the time. I´m a mathematical, analytical person at heart, and this approach was just fine by me. Anyway. No use in crying over spilt milk. I continued studying both French and German throughout college, and studied abroad a few times, in France and Germany respectively--at language academies***--which were wonderful. I now consider myself fluent in French and highly proficient in German.</div>
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But Rosetta Stone has no charts. No grammar. No rules. No tests. I guess most people would like that, but it stresses me out. It´s unbelievably repetitive. This annoys me. I just want to say, "yes, yes, I know all this, we´ve done it a thousand times, skip this, let´s learn something new!" But I can´t. Due to the "no charts and no tests" approach, I guess they´re hoping it´ll all just stick due to the "brute force of repetition" approach. I guess it´s working. I know a lot of basic words and phrases already. And in my mind I´m making conjugation charts.</div>
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2. My second announcement is that in January I´m starting this translation certification program at Loyola (provided I pass the interview and placement test in December--I´ll let you know). It´s called a <a href="http://www.loyno.edu/professional-studies/certificate-programs/certificate-translation-and-interpreting">Certificate in Translation and Interpreting</a>. I could choose the Legal track or the Healthcare track, or both and well--yeah, I´m doing both. It´ll only be three semesters. I´ve told myself this´ll be useful in the job hunt, too. The truth is, I´ve always considered translating one of my dream jobs. More specifically, I´ve dreamed of translating novels, poetry, plays--but I guess starting in the healthcare or legal industries won´t hurt. Plus, good ol´ <a href="http://responsibility.verizon.com/engaging-employees/2013">Verizon is footing the bill</a> so... yeah. I´m obviously really happy about this. </div>
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More updates to come!</div>
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*Andw can relate a story from when <a href="http://www.kyreles.blogspot.com/2013/10/andrew-in-chinese.html">he went to visit Khya last year</a> and they met some guys who were surprised to see a white guy speaking Mandarin. Then Khya switched to their native Japanese, then the local dialect, Shanghainese--all with ease. They were understandably astounded.</div>
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**For listening practice, we mainly just watched movies in German. The selection was excellent, but my favorite was watching Mozart´s The Magic Flute. Dr. Olsen teaches German and Russian, but his degrees are in Fine Art, and I love that he found reason for us to watch an opera in German class. Well, the singing was in German, so of course this would help in our pursuit of German fluency...</div>
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***In France I went to <a href="http://www.institutdetouraine.com/en">L´Institut de Touraine</a>; in Germany I attended the <a href="http://www.sit-sis.de/en/home.html">Sprachinstitut Tübingen.</a> Both were quite excellent.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-23683452999466915402014-09-02T00:05:00.000-05:002014-09-04T18:27:30.797-05:00I just want to shout, "WHO?!"I know I´ve touched before on words that aren´t words becoming words. <a href="http://kyreles.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-fast-can-word-become-legit.html">This post here</a> was <b>over four years ago</b>! I was young and foolish then. "If it acts like a word we might as well let it be one," I said. I guess I´ve become more of a prescriptivist in my old age. I´m aware of this now because Michael asks me about once a week if I consider myself more of a prescriptivist or descriptivist. I always tend toward prescriptivist but, I of course know that language isn´t unchanging or frozen. I just like rules, and grammar, and knowing how to speak correctly. I know that modern English isn´t what it was 500 years ago and language is always evolving, but come on! We can´t lean too far descriptivist, either. We can´t just take a jumble of sounds and say, this is what this means now. And quite frankly, sometimes I really just say "huh?"--I sincerely didn´t understand what that jumble of sounds that you just made was supposed to mean and I refuse to start using said jumble in the way that you say, on a stupid whim! "Turn down for what" doesn´t <i>mean </i>anything. It makes no sense! It´s not even a clever reference to anything. I´m not doing it.*<br />
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I know I lean prescriptivist now because when people speak or write incorrectly IT MAKES ME ANGRY. I understand the difference between stylistic choices and just plain wrong. I do. "Supposably" is never a stylistic choice. Capitalizing the first letter of random words in a sentence "for emphasis" is not stylistic. It´s not fancy. It´s just plain wrong. <br />
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When I was younger, I liked cultural and geographical linguistic anomalies--I liked how they marked a person to be from a certain place--how they implied a history and a culture. I still do. I used to really, really wish I had a typical New Orleans accent. I wish my accent gave me away as a New Orleanian. I wish it were so plainly stamped on my forehead. I love this city and with pride would wear that stamp. But I don´t have it. I try to use some New Orleanian phrases sometimes, but I do so <i>very </i>intentionally--despite it sounding wrong in my head. "I´ll go by her house tonight." "Yeah, you right." These have a history. They´re cultural--stylistic, even. It´s different.<br />
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I remember moving to Natchitoches when I was 15, and never having heard anyone ever before use "could" so liberally as they did. "I might could do that." "She might could´ve come." "I used to could play the piano." I <i>hated </i>it. Hated it hated it. It was like nails on chalkboard for me to hear "could" thrown about this way, and yet I was forced to hear it daily. But you know, they wore me down, in time, all those country-talking kids. When I would go home to New Orleans my friends started to say I sounded country, and I kind of liked sounding different, and I started using "could" in the way I had hated. I thought it was funny. Like my own personal secret joke.<br />
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<i>Fortunately</i>, it´s fallen out of my vernacular, but when I hear someone else say it (which is rare in New Orleans), I smile fondly at the memory of my time in small-town Louisiana.<br />
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I live in New Orleans again, but this time as a conscientious adult. I pick and choose very carefully the local-speak I let into my diction. I´m in an environment that is flooded with incorrect English, I try to just let the mistakes wash over me and I try to let it go--but I have to tell you. My latest pet peeve that I <i>cannot </i>let go is "they have" or "they got" instead of "there is" or "there are." For example, instead of "There are a lot of cars on the highway today," I too often hear "They got a lot of cars on the highway today." I just want to shout <b>WHO?!</b> WHO has a lot of cars on the highway today?! All day long I shout in my head WHO?! and the only reason I don´t correct people is--not because I think that´s a jerk thing to do--oh no--it´s because I don´t even think they know they´re making this mistake. They wouldn´t understand my question. It wouldn´t be a simple fix. It would take time and explanation, but I´m on the edge. I´m on the verge of verbalizing my internal WHO a thousand times a day. I feel it coming. They´re not going to win me over on this one. I hate it.<br />
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*I tried to understand it. I really did. I even listened to this song in its entirety in hopes that hearing more lyrics would clarify the meaning. THERE ARE NO OTHER LYRICS. It just says "turn down for what" over and over again. I´m not doing it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-52203625834251845302014-05-25T19:51:00.000-05:002014-05-26T08:57:36.387-05:00Let It Go Translations<div style="margin: 0cm;">
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<span lang="EN-US">(This post is only tangentially linguistically
themed.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br />
So, I´ve been a big fan of Idina Menzel and her voice for a long time--since I
discovered her, and RENT--probably around the year 2000. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/_118BHpkli8?rel=0" width="480"></iframe><o:p></o:p></span><br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">To me, she´s always been a big star, being discovered
in RENT and then being part of the smash Broadway hit Wicked, I thought for
sure she was a household name. Turns out, boy was I wrong. Among
musical theatre fans, sure, they all know her--but around the average Joe Blow,
not at all. Not until the Disney movie Frozen, anyway!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">It seems she doesn´t even think of herself as a big
star, even now. This is crazy to me because as far as Broadway goes, I
think there´s very little room for her to get bigger in fame than she already
is/was before Frozen. I follow her on social media, and she seems to be
the average cute girl next door--with a job that she loves and precious kids and
she´s going through a divorce, it´s really sad, and OHMYGAHD she was invited to
sing at the Oscars and she was freaking out! Continuously posting about
how nervous<sup>1</sup><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>she was
about this! I couldn´t believe it! Her job—which she is arguably
one of the best in the world at—is performing perfectly live on stage in front
of audiences night after night. How could she possibly be nervous about
the Oscars?! She does this all the time, without the help of autotune or
time zone corrections *cough* *Mariah Carey* *cough*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<sup><span lang="EN-US"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/mSIbTT9B6eM?rel=0" width="560"></iframe><o:p></o:p></span></sup><br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Well,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/low_concept/2014/03/john_travolta_called_idina_menzel_adele_dazeem_what_s_your_travolta_name.html" target="_blank">the infamous Adele Dazeem thing happened</a>,
and I think she sang well, but it wasn´t her best performance. We´re all
friends here, we can admit it. It was just okay. You could tell she
was a nervous wreck, poor baby! I do really love her performance with
Jimmy Fallon and his gang--her voice is so beautiful and in this one, she´s
clearly having fun--and I feel like this is what she sounds like when she´s
just singing around the house, playing with her kids. If she were just
singing around the house, and I were there, I´d be like, "damn, girl.
You sing real good… wow, yeah."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/17QQcK4l6Yw?rel=0" width="560"></iframe><o:p></o:p></span><br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Now, I know this Let It Go song from Frozen has been
covered and parodied 10,000 times.<sup>2</sup><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span> And there are countless things
on the internet about how kids around the world won´t stop singing this song,
thereby driving their parents mad. If you´re one of those parents, well,
then, I guess you should have stopped reading this post by now. I´m not
one of those parents and I´m not sick of this song yet. I still love
it. I think the writers intentionally made it sound like Stephen Schwartz
because they realized Wicked-style-music sounds really lovely in Idina´s tone
and register.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Here she is singing Defying Gravity from Wicked and
her voice is so beauuuuuutiful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Tonight I was catching up on The Voice with my mom and
this contestant girl sang Let It Go, and didn´t do a very good job.<sup>3</sup>
It´s understandable! It´s a hard song to sing! I started Googling
around and stumbled upon this video Disney put together of all the languages
this movie has been translated into. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I, of course, really love it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">I´ve since read that this movie was translated into 41
different languages and unlike<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://kyreles.blogspot.com/2010/08/girlfriend.html" target="_blank">Avril Lavigne (read my rant about her
here)</a>, obviously Disney has the money to actually translate this thing
properly. It´s a huge task, but of course Disney has every reason to want
their blockbuster to be perfect all around the world. Well, I´ve decided I
want to work for their team. This article<sup>4</sup><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>in the LA Times says that back in the
day, high budget translation wasn´t that big of a deal—for instance, Lion King
was only translated into 15 languages, and Tarzan only 5, and all the songs
recorded by Phil Collins himself! I´ll
have to look into these for a later post, of course. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">Here´s what I know.
There´s this man named Rick Dempsey whose title is “Senior Vice
President of Creative for Disney Character Voices International.” It´s
basically his job to “internationalize” Disney movies. He has 76 people
around the world in 19 offices who oversee movies in 55 languages, according to
this article.<sup>5</sup> Yes, I want him to hire me. They
translated Frozen into 41 languages (even though the video above only shows 25
of them—I know you were counting).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">One of my few dream jobs (along with being a singer
for Cirque du Soleil) is to be a full time translator, but I´d like to
translate novels. I´ve never been good
at rhyming or making songs in English—I´m sure I´d be no good at it in any
other language, either. I´ve done a bit
of poetry translation, and man, it´s mentally exhausting. The
translation can really make or break a work´s success. I´ve seen good translations of musicals in
Mexico, but I´ve also seen it go badly. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">As an aside: <a href="http://www.playbill.com/news/article/50162-Las-Vegas-Notre-Dame-de-Paris-w-Storm-Ruivivar-Grove-Premieres-Jan-21" target="_blank">There´s this musical I saw in Vegas along time ago called Notre Dame de Paris.</a>
Well, it was lovely. It was
translated all over the world, and seriously, according to the Guinness Book of
World records, had the most successful first year of any musical ever (it
debuted in 1998). Despite this, in the
US the critics destroyed it in the press, mostly due to its poor translation
from the original French—and soon thereafter it went under. It was translated for Canada, Belgium,
Russia, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Japan, China, South Korea, Haiti, Taiwan,
Singapore and Lebanon. Some popular
songs from the show, have also been translated into Belarusian, Catalan, Czech,
German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Dutch and English. But the English translation was so bad that
it only played in the US for less than two years. Andw has a DVD of the stage production in the
original French and, oh how we treasure it.
I still enjoy watching it, and the soundtrack is one of my favorites.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US">Khya and I used to translate pop songs from English
into other languages in high school for fun, but we… took a lot of artistic
liberties. That is, we didn´t do a very
good job, but it was fun. Andw and I
have talked about creating a new translation for Notre Dame for years, but
haven´t gotten around to it. Maybe one
day we´ll do it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US">Anyway. I can
hardly imagine how hard it is to translate a text such as an animated movie and
convert its idioms to a local understanding, keeping the essence of the story the
same, and making songs still rhyme, too, and have the lips match up! The
actors’ and animations’ lip movements, body language and what’s on screen at
the time all kind of have to match. I
know this is done all the time, but that doesn´t make the task any less
difficult. Sounds like the most exciting
of challenges.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US">But hold on, Disney even went so far as to find
singers whose voices sounded like Idina´s.<u1:p></u1:p> Part of Dempsey’s job is to find a singer
with similar qualities to the actor’s voice in each country. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US">Watching the multilingual version of ‘Let it Go’, you
can see how fantastically both the voices and the words have been matched up
with the original animation, and how the singers have been picked to match the
character and to sound as similar as possible to the English voice. They did a good job!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US">I was a little surprised to find
out what the 41 languages are, that Disney considers to be key. Among
them, 3 versions for China: Cantonese, and two different Mandarin versions
(Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China). The Mandarin dubs for Taiwan and
Mainland China are translated and dubbed by separate teams; they have different
voice actors, different accents and different dialogue. Even the lyrics for the
songs are different, <a href="http://cfensi.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/have-you-heard-the-chinese-versions-of-let-it-go-from-disneys-frozen/" target="_blank">as you can see in this post</a>. Disney takes a similar approach with French and
French Canadian, and Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. <span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><a href="http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/latin-notas/5923085/frozen-en-espanol-which-spanish-version-of-let-it-go-is-best" target="_blank"><span lang="EN-US">There are 3 Spanish versions,too</span></a><span lang="EN-US">. <span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>One is for Latin America, and Spanish
speaking Americans, another for Spain, and a third for South America. Ha!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US">In an NPR interview<sup>6</sup>, Dempsey was asked if
some languages were harder to translate to than others. He responded, “You know, certainly your
territories where they have dubbed for many years are going to be easier -
like, in France. But we have some new languages; like, Vietnamese is a fairly
new language for us to dub in. We did Malay Bahasa, and that's a new language
for us. So there's always going to be challenges when you're opening up a new
market and dubbing there for the first or second time.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-US"><br />
That´s how you know they had a big budget, hahaha. Growing up watching
cartoons dubbed in Spanish all the time, I´ve seen some really shoddy translation
jobs, and some very obviously not Mexican, even if the cartoon was being sold
in Mexico.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US">Lastly, <a href="http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/frozen/articles/227554/title/top-10-non-english-versions-go" target="_blank">I came across this list</a>—someone else´s opinion
of the top 10 best non-English versions of Let It Go. Yep, I´m still not tired of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<sup><span lang="EN-US">1<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></sup><a href="http://instagram.com/p/lDe6dxrmZH/"><span lang="EN-US">http://instagram.com/p/lDe6dxrmZH/</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US">and<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><a href="http://instagram.com/p/lD2FpgLmQI/"><span lang="EN-US">http://instagram.com/p/lD2FpgLmQI/</span></a><span lang="EN-US"> and<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><a href="http://instagram.com/p/lGgjmKLmdw/"><span lang="EN-US">http://instagram.com/p/lGgjmKLmdw/</span></a><u1:p></u1:p> <span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<sup><span lang="EN-US">2<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></sup><span lang="EN-US">This is one of my
personal favorites <a href="http://youtu.be/2bVAoVlFYf0">http://youtu.be/2bVAoVlFYf0</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<sup><span lang="EN-US">3 </span></sup><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://youtu.be/UFnT_rVVqlk"><u1:p></u1:p>http://youtu.be/UFnT_rVVqlk</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<sup><span lang="EN-US">4<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></sup><a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/24/entertainment/la-et-mn-frozen-how-disney-makes-a-musical-in-41-languages-20140124"><span lang="EN-US">http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/24/entertainment/la-et-mn-frozen-how-disney-makes-a-musical-in-41-languages-20140124</span></a><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<sup><span lang="EN-US">5</span></sup><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/frozen-composer-robert-lopez-perils-683171"><span lang="EN-US">http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/frozen-composer-robert-lopez-perils-683171</span></a><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm;">
<sup><span lang="EN-US">6</span></sup><span lang="EN-US"> <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/02/24/282081061/let-it-go-a-global-hit-in-any-language">http://www.npr.org/2014/02/24/282081061/let-it-go-a-global-hit-in-any-languag</a>e</span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-35843939603725628062014-05-04T21:56:00.004-05:002014-05-04T22:00:00.858-05:00Making Plurals with -iMichael poingnantly corrects anyone he ever hears say the word "syllabi." We were talking on the phone (I got a fancy new bluetooth radio in my car for Christmas--thanks honey!) as I was driving home and he told me the story of how he had corrected a classmate that day. Outraged, he says to me, "It´s ´syllabuses.´ Why would anyone say ´syllabi´?" I sheepishly told him maybe they say it because that´s what everyone else says. "Like who?" he asks. Everyone I´ve ever heard, I guess. <br />
<br />
The rule is simple enough. Words of Greek origin are made plural with -es and words of Latin origin are made plural with -i. For example, octopuses, cacti. But is ´syllabus´ Greek or Latin?!<br />
<br />
And so while I´m driving I look it up in the <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=Syllabus+&searchmode=none" target="_blank">Online Etymology Dictonary</a>. I found the story so funny, I´ve decided to share it here. <b>The confusion is all based on a mistake!</b><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
syllabus (n.) </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1650s, "table of contents of a series of lectures, etc.," from Late Latin syllabus "list," <b>ultimately a misreading of Greek sittybos</b> "parchment label, table of contents," of unknown origin. The <b>misprint </b>appeared in a 15c. edition of Cicero's "Ad Atticum" (see OED). <i>Had it been a real word</i>, the proper plural would be syllabi.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
But it wasn´t a real word, so the proper plural* is, in fact, syllabuses!<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
*Well, that depends on if you´re a descriptivist or prescriptivist. Language is evolving and in time, the common vernacular becomes what is correct blah blah blah. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-38588365131177112142014-05-04T21:32:00.000-05:002014-05-04T21:32:55.925-05:00Verbs Not NecessaryI don´t know if this is a New Orleans thing, or a general people thing, but I had never really heard people speak sentences without verbs until I moved back to New Orleans after college. Maybe only then did I start dealing with the general public, instead of with generally educated people. I don´t know. <a href="http://kyreles.blogspot.com/2009/09/worst-bank.html" target="_blank">I blogged about this before, here.</a> Back then, I was dumbfounded when my coworker had texted me, "We on are way." I´ll never forget that moment.<br />
<br />
I now hear people speak without verbs almost daily. I still cringe. It´s beyond bizzare, to me. Yesterday, driving home, I was at a red light. There was a gas station across the way with one of those electronic advert boards. It was scrolling through promotions, and I happened to notice:<br />
<br />
WE EXCEPT FOOD STAMP<br />
<br />
My mouth was agape too long for me to get my phone and take a picture before the light turned green.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com225tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-60502492167997325052014-02-05T10:23:00.000-06:002014-02-05T10:23:16.545-06:00A better past?<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I´m surprised I´ve never blogged
about this before. I feel like we talk about it a lot. You know, I
compare Spanish and French to each other linguistically all the time to try to
ascertain patterns. I remember learning in French about the two future
tenses: <i>je vais aller</i> and <i>je irai</i>.
Right? Now, we don´t have this in English, (it´s kind of like <i>I´m going to go</i> vs. <i>I shall go</i> with the latter being all in one word) but those same
two forms do exist in Spanish. <i>Yo
voy a ir</i> and <i>yo iré</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Okay, I know the
verb "to go" is probably irregularly conjugated in every language,
but that´s not the point here. The point is in both Spanish and French we
have I + helping verb + infinitive (the composite form) vs. I + simple future
conjugation of the verb (the simple form). In both Spanish and French,
people who speak colloquially use the composite. The simple conjugation sounds more formal in
both settings.* To the best of my knowledge these two have the same
connotation and are interchangeable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Now, what about
the past tense? This happens, too. Spanish has <i>yo he ido</i> vs. <i>yo fui</i>.
In English we do have this. It´s <i>I have gone</i> vs. <i>I went</i>.
Are these different? I think, technically, yes. They imply
different things. <i>I have gone</i>,
to me, means I have gone possibly many times in the past. <i>I went</i> means I went and it´s over now.
Now what´s funny to me about this is that in Mexico, they say <i>yo fui</i> to mean <i>I went</i> but <b>in Spain, this
simple past is nonexistant</b>. I mean, it used to exist, but it´s
antiquated and unused now. <b>I´ve
thought about this so much.</b> Is Spain-Spanish evolving (degrading?)
faster than Mexican-Spanish? Can this be? The only thing I can think of is that
since they´ve been speaking Spanish in Spain much longer than they have been in
Mexico**, I guess it got started on its decaying process much sooner than
Mexico did. I mean, it´s an interesting
question of—okay, when the Spanish settlers conquered Mexico and bestowed their
language on the natives there and left, presumably the two speaking bodies had
very little contact with each other henceforth and began to evolve separately
from each other… but then! with the dawn of quick mass communication, maybe
they started looking to each other for reference. I know Mexicans think of Spain-Spanish as…
more correct… kind of the way Americans think of British-English as more formal
or correct. Spain has their Royal
Linguistic Academy, Mexico just follows suit.
I don´t know. It´s a stretch. Maybe
in a hundred years or so Mexico will think of the simple past as obsolete, too.
Who knows. <b>Maybe the answer
is in France! </b>French used to have a simple past and a composite past
but the simple past is now <b>obsolete</b>
and only the composite remains… like in Spain! It might be interesting to
see if French colonies still use the simple past as Mexico does.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Here´s what got
this conversation started again. <b>Here´s what´s upsetting to me.</b>
Michael is taking a Spanish 202 class right now. His teacher is the
head of the Foreign Language Department, I think,*** and she is a native Cuban-Spanish
speaker. She insists that <i>yo fui</i>
and <i>yo he ido</i> are exactly the same in
connotation, but that the composite past is somehow <b>better</b>, <b>more correct</b>.
Which is bullshit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">They mean different things. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Here´s an example of a question on
his most recent test (translated into English)****.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The instructions
say, choose the most appropriate response. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">In the Emergency Room, the nurse
speaks with a patient who arrives with a stomachache. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">A. What have you eaten today?
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">B. What did you eat today?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">WTF</span></b><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">. The correct answer is A, according to her.
Michael knew this because he had been paying attention to her preferences
in class, not because it makes any logical sense. Her weak-ass argument
is that even though they have the same exact connotation, <i>What have you eaten today</i> is just <b>more correct</b>. It´s
bullshit. They do imply slightly
different things. The first one implies <i>what have you eaten so far today</i>, whereas the second implies today
is over. <i>What did you eat</i>?
But to honestly ask, which of these is a more appropriate response to “my
stomach hurts” is a bullshit question. I´d say the only way to know which
answer is more correct is to know which time of day the question was asked—I
clearly don´t have enough information. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">This class is dumb and I want to
argue with her but don´t know how.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">*You know I never
really took Spanish classes, so I´m just going on experience, here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">**Spanish was introduced to the
Americas in the 16<sup>th</sup> century.
The first written standard of Spanish was written in Spain in the 13<sup>th</sup>
century.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">***So I think there´s
really no one above her to whom it would be appropriate to complain about this.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 13.5pt;">****In Spanish,
the test read as follows:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Escoge la respuesta más apropiada. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">En la sala de emergencia, el enfermero habla con un paciente que
llega con dolo de estomago. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">A. ¿Que ha comido hoy? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">B. ¿Que comió hoy?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-88044756860158846312013-10-02T21:26:00.000-05:002014-09-04T18:30:18.941-05:00Andrew in Chinese<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTNVnJD42NLWkDzaMs5KC-wFOCyu_Y_VjOAuSI2Gkx2wRFkOzLxJ9V-2msZsR5xKHoo_02EpJkJSwjIOaVktCyMBZGHhzWINs1pd9SwVOWAKDXpXgmb6WOp-CpUYVMWtTliEEGarHy-LH3/s1600/1272745_10100273704301209_414187562_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTNVnJD42NLWkDzaMs5KC-wFOCyu_Y_VjOAuSI2Gkx2wRFkOzLxJ9V-2msZsR5xKHoo_02EpJkJSwjIOaVktCyMBZGHhzWINs1pd9SwVOWAKDXpXgmb6WOp-CpUYVMWtTliEEGarHy-LH3/s320/1272745_10100273704301209_414187562_o.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
My dear friend <a href="http://kyreles.blogspot.com/2009/05/mountains-and-ass.html" target="_blank">Khya </a>moved to Shanghai a year or two back and recently, my other dear friend Andrew went to visit him. <br />
Upon his return Andrew posted this on his fbook and I loved it: <br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="clearfix mbs pbs _1_m" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.111111640930176px; line-height: 15.555556297302246px; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px; zoom: 1;">
<div class="_3dp _29k" style="display: table-cell; vertical-align: top; width: 10000px;">
<h5 class="_1_s" data-ft="{"tn":"C"}" style="color: #333333; font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 16px; margin: 4px 15px 1px 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span class="fcg" style="color: #89919c;"><span class="fwb" data-ft="{"tn":";"}" style="font-weight: bold;"><a aria-haspopup="true" aria-owns="js_21" data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=2809982&extragetparams=%7B%22hc_location%22%3A%22timeline%22%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/andrew.farrier.35?hc_location=timeline" id="js_30" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">Andrew Farrier</a></span></span></h5>
<div class="_1_n fsm fwn fcg" style="color: #89919c; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px;">
<a class="uiLinkSubtle" href="https://www.facebook.com/andrew.farrier.35/posts/10100277884558939" style="color: #89919c; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">September 15</a> near <a class="uiLinkSubtle" href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Orleans-Louisiana/106566059380422?ref=stream" style="color: #89919c; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">New Orleans</a> via <a class="uiLinkSubtle" href="https://www.facebook.com/mobile/?v=350685531728" style="color: #89919c; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">mobile</a><a aria-label="Public" class="uiStreamPrivacy inlineBlock fbStreamPrivacy fbPrivacyAudienceIndicator _1_o" data-hover="tooltip" href="https://www.facebook.com/andrew.farrier.35?fref=ts#" role="button" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; margin-left: 6px; position: relative; text-decoration: none; top: 1px; zoom: 1;"><i class="lock img sp_2a7397 sx_75a49e" style="background-image: url(https://fbstatic-a.akamaihd.net/rsrc.php/v2/yc/r/ERwAtiRKR7Q.png); background-position: -105px -476px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: auto; bottom: -1px; display: inline-block; height: 12px; margin-bottom: -5px; position: relative; vertical-align: top; width: 12px;"></i></a></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="_1x1" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.111111640930176px; line-height: 15.555556297302246px; margin: 15px 0px; padding: 0px;">
<div class="userContentWrapper">
<div class="_wk" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}">Lots of people in Shanghai take on a western name for ease of communication with us linguistically unskilled outsiders. I met, among more pedestrian names, a Banana and a New Star. And I unexpectedly was given a Chinese way to write my name that is way better than the trisyllabic default used in translating the Bible. <a data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=1291187041&extragetparams=%7B%22directed_target_id%22%3A0%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/alex.zhang.75641?directed_target_id=0" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">ALex Zhang</a> blessed me with "Ānzhū," a friendly bisyllable meaning "peaceful pig."</span></div>
<div class="_wk" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">
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<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; line-height: normal;">And in a comment later:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #fafbfb; color: #4e5665; font-size: 11.111111640930176px; line-height: 15.555556297302246px;">Incidentally, Tyler's has switched around between meaning "Thai happy," "too happy," and "too spicy."</span></div>
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Michael and I are planning a trip to visit Khya in May and I absolutely cannot wait. I´ve never travelled to Asia before and to see a tiny bit of it with a friend, and my dear husband will be a dream come true. It will only be my second time visiting a country whose native language I do not speak. I went to Prague in 2008, and was hoping it would be like the rest of the Europe I had seen--where everyone speaks English, if only a little bit. Yeah, no. It wasn´t. No one spoke any English at all. In fact, I was lucky most of them spoke some passable German and I was able to fumble around that way. Anyway, I´m sure China with no Chinese would be completely different from the China I´ll get to see with Khya to guide us. I mean, I have no reservations about visiting the rest of Asia with no knowledge of the languages and getting by with guidebook in hand like any other tourist, but I´m just so happy about going to visit Khya there.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-31144233309594190952013-08-28T23:26:00.000-05:002013-08-28T23:27:11.107-05:00Sobremesa<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisrXyy825YRIn2eLHIoGeanBvfH2uX9vVzTzGksBY7IueJAwJulHcXLyiRl0AIV7vLz3G5XX81TVl9tNPYWlqrsYQWM7xf6spVunp4GAMCvJ4kvFzhNvF_1X053UOoywotrJyBXNalDp7j/s1600/5fd9c39d824e18dc8cb1663304de7e6c.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisrXyy825YRIn2eLHIoGeanBvfH2uX9vVzTzGksBY7IueJAwJulHcXLyiRl0AIV7vLz3G5XX81TVl9tNPYWlqrsYQWM7xf6spVunp4GAMCvJ4kvFzhNvF_1X053UOoywotrJyBXNalDp7j/s1600/5fd9c39d824e18dc8cb1663304de7e6c.jpg" /></a></div>
I came across this list* today and I really like it. It reminds me of why I like languages so much. Language is both unifying and indentifying. <br />
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It´s <i>almost </i>amazing that separately in the world, culture after culture has come up with their own way to express the emotions and understandings all humans experience. In an act of solidarity, everyone in the world came up with their own way to express gratitude, for instance. And this makes me feel like a part of such a big team. Such a big team of people who all understand and express this feeling in its most sincere form. This is us and this is what connects us as humans. (I say <i>almost </i>amazing because humans do a lot of amazing things and we need to keep our perspective straight.)<br />
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However, language identifies us--puts a unique stamp on each of our foreheads.** On a small scale, accents and colloquialisms identify our region within a language--but massively speaking, languages evolve to fit the needs of the people, culturally. And I like this list because although we are all humans, and ultimately living in the same world, we express ourselves most perfectly through language. It is the tool we continually forge to mirror our beliefs.<br />
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On a personal note, I love <b>sobremesa </b>and force Michael to observe it with each meal.<br />
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*The <a href="http://blog.maptia.com/posts/untranslatable-words-from-other-cultures" target="_blank">original post is here</a>.<br />
<br />
**An aside: I personally really wish I had the "New Orleans accent" naturally. I don´t. I do, however, try to use New Orleans-isms as much as possible, even though I know them to be gramatically incorrect. I want people to know I´m from here. I say "we´re going <i>by her house </i>later" and... any other funny things I hear--I try to repeat them often.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-63866768913611428472013-06-11T18:53:00.000-05:002014-09-04T18:31:41.596-05:00My dad´s own linguistics curiosities<div class="tr_bq">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRIr4PKuKSBkuBeOHG65OniNiB-DJBdTmEgPQo4zuewpd2L46LzgD44cL3SME235-xqDqRJxXgcXIpbFdvEPNAr1uPQVglAiOLoBkkcZzRh1gNYvsk2N7Ia4QJUjHyLl_wbILExTOqk9Up/s1600/945625_10101513824151335_99079001_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRIr4PKuKSBkuBeOHG65OniNiB-DJBdTmEgPQo4zuewpd2L46LzgD44cL3SME235-xqDqRJxXgcXIpbFdvEPNAr1uPQVglAiOLoBkkcZzRh1gNYvsk2N7Ia4QJUjHyLl_wbILExTOqk9Up/s320/945625_10101513824151335_99079001_n.jpg" height="320" width="217" /></a></div>
I have a friend, Brie (her blog is pretty great and you can <a href="http://abriegrowsinbrooklyn.com/" target="_blank">read it here</a>), who is a writer. Not a bullshit write in my free time kind of writer; she´s a legit young professional writer whose articles are published and shit. I think this is the coolest.</div>
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She recently asked me to be one of her 10 featured women in this article she was writing for MSN for Father´s Day. The theme was "things I didn´t know about my dad until adulthood." Now, since my dad passed away when I was 18, you can imagine I haven´t learned too much new information about him in my adulthood. Pretty much everything I know about my dad I learned before I turned 18.<br />
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Well, so, I really wanted to be featured in Brie´s article, so I racked my brain... and of course a linguistic story came to mind. Here is the link of where it was published <a href="http://glo.msn.com/relationships/what-i-never-knew-about-my-dad-9370.gallery">http://glo.msn.com/relationships/what-i-never-knew-about-my-dad-9370.gallery</a> (she had to shorten my peice), but here is the full text I wrote:<br />
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<blockquote>
I grew up speaking both English and Spanish at home. Even though both of my parents were Mexican immigrants to the US, when I was born my dad had been in the States far longer than my mom. When I was little, he would speak to me exclusively in English and my mom would speak to me exclusively in Spanish. Not until I was about 5 or so did they decide to switch to Spanish-only at home (knowing I´d hear and practice English everywhere else I went)—and it was about that time that it dawned on me that my parents could understand each other. All that time, in my child-mind, I assumed mom spoke one way and dad spoke another, and I had to keep the two ways of speech separate for their sake. I clearly remember the day I noticed they spoke to each other in Spanish, and suddenly I knew all along the two languages had been for my sake—not theirs.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
My dad was born in Veracruz, Mexico in 1932 and raised as the son of wealthy pineapple plantation owners. At the ripe age of 14, he was shipped off to the US to receive an American education. He taught himself English while in high school in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, and went on to further study at Loyola University here in New Orleans. Once my dad discovered New Orleans, he was in love—the city, with its palm trees and music everywhere wooed him and reminded him of home. He went on to become a successful entrepreneur and traveled the world, but he claimed New Orleans as home and lived here til the day he died.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Now, I wasn´t born until 1986—obviously my dad had been in the US a long time at this point. He had been speaking English almost exclusively for years and years. Not until he met and married my [Mexican] mom did he really start to use his native Spanish again regularly. This lead to some very curious linguistic oddities burgeoning. That is to say, he made words up sometimes. Now don´t get me wrong, I know we all do this from time to time—looking for the perfect word, and instead of finding one, inventing one to suit our needs. Except in the case of my dad, he said them so often, he´d forget they were part of his vernacular only, and to everyone else, he just sounded funny. My mom was always quick to point out which words were wrong, as if to correct him—but really, he´d just laugh it off. It was part of his charm. She was really correcting him for my sake, lest his quirky words be passed on to me. </blockquote>
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But somehow she missed one.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Apparently my mom thought it was obvious and didn’t need mentioning; my dad thought it was appropriate and continued using the word: piñaso. He used it to mean a hit or a blow or a beating. For instance, he´d watch boxing on TV “¡mira que piñaso le dio!” (“Look at how hard he hit him!”). Now let me just say, the appropriate Spanish word to use here is golpe. “mira que golpe le dio” would be acceptable. Although I was aware of this word, I thought golpe and piñaso were synonyms, and, never having formally studied Spanish, I used piñaso all the time because it was familiar to me.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
It´s almost embarrassing to say that not until very recently did I learn this was one of the words he had made up. I had somehow never noticed the similarity between piñaso (what I thought was “blow”) and piña (“pineapple”). My dad had literally made up a word to mean “beating so hard, as if with a pineapple” and I had used it all my life without the faintest clue that everyone who heard me thought it the oddest choice of words. His pineapple-plantation roots had stayed with him throughout his life, and were linguistically passed on to me.</blockquote>
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My father died of cancer in 2005, long before I made this linguistic discovery, but oh how I wish we could have shared a laugh about that one together.</blockquote>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-11947647834091835252013-05-25T17:22:00.000-05:002013-05-25T17:30:04.806-05:00How Do You Pray In Spanish?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZG4shte3_5LCjtsPulmTCKCiua32ozf4d0JPiETa6xtUniMu7zQnFcpSbEcp12Dldaafogg8-Q1ouaX5nESl_Tn8MJDeQ94Io2hW7XblKVzxeHUE33iwGafcWBnQ-x9MPLYaG4GVf6AKk/s1600/51QPTZgX%252BNL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZG4shte3_5LCjtsPulmTCKCiua32ozf4d0JPiETa6xtUniMu7zQnFcpSbEcp12Dldaafogg8-Q1ouaX5nESl_Tn8MJDeQ94Io2hW7XblKVzxeHUE33iwGafcWBnQ-x9MPLYaG4GVf6AKk/s200/51QPTZgX%252BNL.jpg" width="133" /> </a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZyHu0gDjhldOrKqe4snLiS5AA7nidWw9z6n9KmT6TNj5gwc-jvLy14iVK-NW3_Tt3tWZO3Njo7I7gN6bvv_XuNuaKIlyZY2dayH0le4hAS8OD9OO7dK5DvXqUOgKI4ePPialYcz0d79rV/s1600/livro-amar-orar-comer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZyHu0gDjhldOrKqe4snLiS5AA7nidWw9z6n9KmT6TNj5gwc-jvLy14iVK-NW3_Tt3tWZO3Njo7I7gN6bvv_XuNuaKIlyZY2dayH0le4hAS8OD9OO7dK5DvXqUOgKI4ePPialYcz0d79rV/s200/livro-amar-orar-comer.jpg" width="132" /></a></div>
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I don´t remember how this conversation got started. Somehow my mom got stuck trying to explain the difference between <b>rezar </b>and <b>orar </b>to my husband. They both mean <b>to pray</b>. Growing up as a Spanish speaker (Mexican), I never ever heard the word <b>orar </b>used outside of <b>Mass</b>. In conversation, if we were talking about praying, it was always <b>rezar</b>. In Mass, when in English they say "let us pray" (which happens really often in Mass), in Spanish they say "<b>oremos</b>" in that kind of chanty-Mass-like way. And that´s the only time I ever heard it used.<br />
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Except the noun <b>prayer </b>is <b>oración</b>. No two ways about it. I never thought about the verb <b>orar </b>and the noun <b>oración </b>as being linked. That is, I never wondered why the verb was <b>rezar </b>and the noun wasn´t something similiar, like <b>reza-cion</b> or something. That should have turned on the lightbulb in my mind. Becuase <b>reza-cion</b> sounds a lot like <b>recitation</b>...<br />
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Now, it should stand to reason that, being Mexican, my family is really Catholic. And to be honest, they´re a little snobby about their Catholicism. They don´t look down on non-Catholics explicitly, but they make it very clear that they don´t understand Protestants, or any other non-Catholics. And maybe this is just a linguistic mistake my family has made, but they would refer to the kind of free-style praying that Protestants do (as opposed to the set, recited praying that Catholics do) as <b>orar</b>. That strange, unfamiliar thing they do.<br />
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So in my mind--not due to etymological analysis, but due to pure exposure--I thought <b>rezar </b>was recited (Catholic) prayer and <b>orar </b>was (Protestant) free-style prayer. Turns out, I was right--basically.<br />
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According to the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy* (it´s so convenient that they have this), <b>oración </b>means prayer (no dispute there); <b>orar </b>means pray to God vocally or mentally; <b>rezar </b>means pray to God or holy people, or recite prayers. Not too much difference after all.<br />
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Does this mean they can be used interchangably?? No!! I mean, only if you want to sound like a n00b. They might be used differently in different Spanish-speaking cultures, but they are not interchagable ever, to the best of my understanding. I happened to read that in Spain and Argentina, <b>rezar </b>is used colloquially, and <b>orar </b>formally. Having only ever heard <b>orar </b>in Mass, I too, thought it was more formal. This would make sense if they are all Catholics--and I thought surely no country is as Catholic as Mexico--but I was wrong! In <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sp.html" target="_blank">Spain, about 94% of the population is Catholic</a>; <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ar.html" target="_blank">92% in Argentina</a>, and by comparsion, <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mx.html" target="_blank">Mexico is only about 83% Catholic</a>, according to a quick CIA World Factbook search. So this could be, that the more Catholic the country, the more commonly is the word <b>rezar </b>used over <b>orar</b>.<br />
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I also dug into the Bible a little bit. On www.bible.com I searched all the Spanish translations they had for the verb <b>rezar </b>and <a href="https://www.bible.com/es/search?q=rezar&category=bible&version_id=" target="_blank">came up with 17 hits</a>. When I searched for <b>orar</b>, <a href="https://www.bible.com/es/search?q=orar&category=bible&version_id=" target="_blank">910 hits</a>.<br />
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Draw your own conclusions.<br />
I think it´s not so much a Catholic versus Protestant thing as much as it´s a recited prayer versus free-style prayer thing.<br />
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I will make one final note. When I was googling around here, the book/movie Eat Pray Love kept coming up. In Spanish, the work was translated as Come <b>Reza </b>Ama; in Portuguese it was translated to Comer <b>Orar </b>Amar. Spanish and Portuguese are so similar, of course <b>rezar </b>and <b>orar </b>exist in the same way in Portuguese. I wonder why they chose the latter for the title in Portuguese but the former in Spanish. <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/po.html" target="_blank">Portugal is about 85% Catholic</a>.<br />
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*Really. <a href="http://www.rae.es/rae.html">http://www.rae.es/rae.html</a><br />
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rezar.<br />
(Del lat. recitāre, recitar).<br />
1. tr. Dirigir a Dios o a personas santas oraciones de contenido religioso.<br />
2. tr. Dicho del clérigo obligado a ello: Recitar el oficio divino vocal u oralmente.<br />
3. tr. Rel. Recitar la misa, una oración, etc., en contraposición a cantarla.<br />
4. tr. coloq. En un escrito, decir o decirse algo. El calendario reza agua. El libro lo reza.<br />
5. intr. coloq. Dicho de una cosa: Tocar o pertenecer a alguien, ser de su obligación o conocimiento. Eso no reza CON tus alumnos.<br />
6. intr. coloq. Gruñir, refunfuñar.<br />
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orar.<br />
(Del lat. orāre).<br />
1. intr. Hacer oración a Dios, vocal o mentalmente.<br />
2. intr. Hablar en público para persuadir y convencer a los oyentes o mover su ánimo.<br />
3. tr. Rogar, pedir, suplicar.<br />
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oración.<br />
(Del lat. oratĭo, -ōnis).<br />
1. f. Obra de elocuencia, razonamiento pronunciado en público a fin de persuadir a los oyentes o mover su ánimo. Oración deprecatoria, fúnebre, inaugural.<br />
2. f. Súplica, deprecación, ruego que se hace a Dios o a los santos.<br />
3. f. Elevación de la mente a Dios para alabarlo o pedirle mercedes.<br />
4. f. Hora de las oraciones.<br />
5. f. Gram. Palabra o conjunto de palabras con que se expresa un sentido gramatical completo.<br />
6. f. Rel. En la misa, en el rezo eclesiástico y rogaciones públicas, deprecación particular que incluye la conmemoración del santo o de la festividad del día.<br />
7. f. pl. Primera parte de la doctrina cristiana que se enseña a los niños, donde se incluye el padrenuestro, el avemaría, etc.<br />
8. (Porque en ese momento se tocaba en las iglesias la campana para que los fieles rezaran el avemaría). f. pl. Punto del día en que está anocheciendo.<br />
9. f. pl. El mismo toque de la campana, que en algunas partes se repetía al amanecer y al mediodía.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-1637908919073865612013-05-24T13:57:00.000-05:002013-05-24T13:57:06.533-05:00Heavy Nightmares<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnsE6YoAtnqyKAxdVTM5KiH2Np3Q222AKLpos5e3XXwRLUSSTlP_GnND-DRc__YRhaiCr89AjwnIi_REd1kr8A2YAJRdE17SK0L5wU_HOMTw7mjC-WJTWHYAd-K4G2LvFiaLBYKvvbdReM/s1600/ht_house_of_cards_nt_130211_wg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnsE6YoAtnqyKAxdVTM5KiH2Np3Q222AKLpos5e3XXwRLUSSTlP_GnND-DRc__YRhaiCr89AjwnIi_REd1kr8A2YAJRdE17SK0L5wU_HOMTw7mjC-WJTWHYAd-K4G2LvFiaLBYKvvbdReM/s320/ht_house_of_cards_nt_130211_wg.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
We were recently watching House of Cards on Netflix again, this time in Spanish, in order for Michael to continue practicing Spanish (other than with me). We had a little problem with the setup, because when we watched it dubbed and subtitled, the Spanish dubbing and Spanish subtitling didn´t match up. So we ended up watching it dubbed in Spanish, with English subtitles.<br />
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Suddenly, he pauses the show and asks me about the word "pesadilla" (nightmare). It sounds weird in Spanish, doesn´t it? Well, it´s a common word, so it doesn´t sound weird to me. What are the origins of the word, do you know? he asks.<br />
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We look it up. I found a book that explains this perfectly. Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection By Shelley Adle:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The identifying features of the night-mare are evident in the terms used to refer to it. The etymology of the English word nightmare, for example, reveals a great deal about the experience itself. "Mare" comes from the same root as the German mahr and Old Norse mara, a supernatural being - usually <b>female - who lay on people´s chests at night, suffocating them.</b> The specific terms for night-mare that are used in many contemporary cultures are etymologically related to words for "weight" and "pressing". Mare appears to be of Indo European origins, although its initial meaning is not clear. Linguists purpose three possible roots of the word: noros (death), mer (drive out), and, perhaps the most likely source, <b>mar (to pound, bruise, crush)</b>. Because the sense of pressure or weight is prominent in the night-mare experience, it is not surprising that it is also a key element in the historical development of its linguistic forms. The idea of pressure is also present in other terms for the night-mare experience that do not share the mare linguistic root. The medieval French appesart and the Spanish pesadilla, for example, are both derived from the verb <b>peser, meaning "to press down upon".</b></blockquote>
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It turns out people have always thought nightmares were heavy, and their languages have indicated as much.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-28350063880603419702012-11-07T15:37:00.001-06:002012-11-07T15:59:15.276-06:00Let Me Google That For You<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwhtw5flSHDd3O0PGNPGKiStJyVEUAUidNNTdEeQPy_DE4bxS3ldFycGzk9MHE8jzz8ny-TL1wazCj3ok5gKbmGHawXMTC17u06MvnI7ThA6LIv7oJ3Qxtz_gfngoW4EF9cgDzzEXP2ago/s1600/Phantom_of_the_Opera_Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" rea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwhtw5flSHDd3O0PGNPGKiStJyVEUAUidNNTdEeQPy_DE4bxS3ldFycGzk9MHE8jzz8ny-TL1wazCj3ok5gKbmGHawXMTC17u06MvnI7ThA6LIv7oJ3Qxtz_gfngoW4EF9cgDzzEXP2ago/s320/Phantom_of_the_Opera_Cover.jpg" width="200" /></a>Michael recently shared this great website with me called Let Me Google That For you. <a href="http://www.lmgtfy.com/">www.lmgtfy.com</a></div>
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">
What it does is, it creates a link that shows a little clip of how to Google something. <a href="http://bit.ly/YzAxwI" target="_blank">Like this</a>. </div>
<br />
Obviously I think it´s meant to be used sarcastically. Michael´s example was when he posted somewhere that one of his favorite books is Phantom of the Opera, and someone corrected him saying: that´s a musical, not a book. His response: Oh, really? <a href="http://bit.ly/YzAEs0">http://bit.ly/YzAEs0</a><br />
<br />
Then he went on to tell me about how he read Phantom in its original French, despite having the movie Amelie as his only other prior French experience. He said he had to look up every few words, but really enjoyed making linguistic discoveries (we're obviously compatible). His most interesting discovery: <strong>villain and vilify are not etymologically related</strong>. ! Who knew? In my mind I thought for sure vilify was to make a villain of someone (when in fact it means "to make vile"), but as I typed it just now, I realized<strong> the lack of double-l in vilify should've been the dead giveaway.</strong><br />
<br />
Here are the the OED entries:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<em>villain</em><br />
c.1300, "base or low-born rustic," from Anglo-Fr. and O.Fr. villain, from M.L. villanus "farmhand," <strong>from L. villa "country house"</strong> (see villa).<br />
"The most important phases of the sense development of this word may be summed up as follows: 'inhabitant of a farm; peasant; churl, boor; clown; miser; knave, scoundrel.' Today both Fr. vilain and Eng. villain are used only in a pejorative sense." [Klein]<br />
Meaning "character in a novel, play, etc. whose evil motives or actions help drive the plot" is from 1822.<br />
<br />
<em>vilify</em> <br />
mid-15c., "to lower in worth or value," from L.L. vilificare "to make cheap or base," from L. <strong>vilis "cheap, base"</strong> (see vile) + root of facere "to make" (see factitious). Meaning "to slander, speak evil of" is first recorded 1590s</blockquote>
<br />
What I'm still unsure of is why this discovery happened while reading French. Villain in French is <em>méchant</em> and vilify is <em>diffamer</em> or <em>calomnier</em>. I'm guessing he happened across some other words--don't know which ones.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-25638651736111789692011-08-01T17:10:00.001-05:002014-09-04T18:35:16.898-05:00Wait, what is a vowel?!So here we are; I've finished my first semester as a linguistics major (ok I only took one course), but I still couldn't come up with a succinct answer when Michael Bell asked me: what's the deal with vowels? Is y a vowel or not? You know, when you're a kid, they tell you "a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y." Why?<br />
<br />
So I read up on it. He's right. English is one of the languages that isn't really clear about vowels. Big surprise, right?<br />
<br />
<u>Phonetically speaking</u>, vowels are sounds that are made with no constriction in the vocal tract. Basically, by pushing air from your lungs out your mouth and only shaping the sound by the way you move your tongue and lips without ever interrupting the air flow.<br />
<u>Phonologically speaking</u>, vowels are the peak of a syllable. <br />
Now here's the issue with English. We have words like little and castle, where that sound is the peak.<br />
<br />
The issue with y and w in English, is that they meet the criteria of non-constricted sound, but they happen at the non-peak of words, too, like in yet and wet.<br />
<br />
So we can have non-constricted sounds at the non-peak of the word. Not vowels. <br />
Similarly, we have sounds at the peak of a word that are constricted sounds--also not vowels.<br />
<br />
<strong>Technically speaking, a sound must match both criteria to be officially designated a vowel sound.</strong><br />
---<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVfKeO0N49NM6vcG1zLWuL0gv71KoUnve8erQJsCN_9AGLQZO5bGTKH4mCc0FHrsnT8IrvpX1xeLYJ-rrAEAWNtecpZBr26ErcHubxvB5mncshQn1vGBuMy0-yCZPiP8g1VllwI7CNvIt0/s1600/400px-Cardinal_vowel_tongue_position-front_svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVfKeO0N49NM6vcG1zLWuL0gv71KoUnve8erQJsCN_9AGLQZO5bGTKH4mCc0FHrsnT8IrvpX1xeLYJ-rrAEAWNtecpZBr26ErcHubxvB5mncshQn1vGBuMy0-yCZPiP8g1VllwI7CNvIt0/s200/400px-Cardinal_vowel_tongue_position-front_svg.png" height="200px" j8="true" width="200px" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This picture shows where each sound is produced. <br />
<br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowels_chart_with_audio">Here is a link</a> to a chart with audio clips of each vowel sound. It's in the International Phonetic Alphabet, so these sounds could go for any language in the world, not just English. The x-axis shows front, central and back--referring to where the sound is produced. The y-axis shows close, mid and open--referring to how close to the roof of the mouth the tongue is when the sound is made.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-48691614424917117562011-08-01T16:50:00.000-05:002014-09-04T18:36:11.789-05:00Doctor or Not?!Let's play the game of "Doctor or Not!?" yayyy<br />
<br />
Psych<u>iatrist</u>. Psych<u>ologist</u>. I can never remember which is which. One's a medical doctor, the other is a therapist. <br />
Hmm. I try to remember by thinking, pod<u>iatrist</u>, dermat<u>ologist</u>--those are both doctors. That didn't help. Gynec<u>ologist</u>. Ger<u>iatrist</u>. Neur<u>ologist</u>. Still no help.<br />
The truth is, there are a lot more -ologist words in the world than -iatrists, but what's the difference??<br />
<br />
Dictionary says...<br />
<strong>-ology refers to the science or study of something</strong><br />
<strong>-iatry indicates healing or medical treatment</strong><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Ok. So etymologically, they could both be doctors, but in this case the psychiatrist is the doctor and the psychologist is not.</span><br />
<br />
What about <strong>optometrist and opthalmologist and optician</strong>? <em>Opto- obviously means sight from Ancient Greek.</em><br />
<br />
<strong>Optometrist</strong> - someone licensed to practice optometry (which is the practice of examining the eyes). -metrist is obviously someone who measures, so optometrist literally= <strong>someone who measures sight</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Opthalmologist</strong> - a doctor who practices opthalmology (which is the branch of medical science dealing with the anatomy, functions, and diseases of the eye), so opthalmologist literally= <strong>scientist who studies sight</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Optician</strong> - a maker or seller of optical glass, so optician literally= <strong>someone who specializes in sight</strong><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">So in this case the opthalmologist is the doctor and the optometrist and the optician are not.</span><br />
<br />
Thanks for playing.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-8582622577599201662011-05-22T17:25:00.000-05:002014-09-04T18:37:59.268-05:00Snickers doesn't get it either.Remember <strong><a href="http://kyreles.blogspot.com/2010/08/i-dont-think-they-get-it.html">this post</a></strong> about bad malamanteaus??<br />
<br />
Michael Bell found an example of another pretty bad one just the other day, this time in a Snickers wrapper.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2gVUXQ6oaT4p3yBke4V5XwjrC0rw9zU693-1ZmU-7prykuu2qbjF3hau_pyrIm6UoZiVYszEEu_OpeNEEcWf9gnW8S0kl1DMMSgKZTANcAwLNr1jgu-8LrG0c-rJe123AJkoVSMs6KsMC/s1600/New+Image.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2gVUXQ6oaT4p3yBke4V5XwjrC0rw9zU693-1ZmU-7prykuu2qbjF3hau_pyrIm6UoZiVYszEEu_OpeNEEcWf9gnW8S0kl1DMMSgKZTANcAwLNr1jgu-8LrG0c-rJe123AJkoVSMs6KsMC/s640/New+Image.JPG" height="240" j8="true" width="400" /></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-43431700878410759682011-03-09T03:57:00.001-06:002014-09-04T18:41:13.325-05:00V is for Saturday<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTnyFaE1lDKfqHOi1pmB6aoKeSdXjjR6KtMu70xA8oj3ch21ye-wWJe16I9L5N8hZftD1JCAcni5ZmABdFUjb6epPE_lMBxaIvkST6UTWGRxYFV80bbC35OVK58IgZoDVDJf8uucjNAk_8/s1600/cypriot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="361" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTnyFaE1lDKfqHOi1pmB6aoKeSdXjjR6KtMu70xA8oj3ch21ye-wWJe16I9L5N8hZftD1JCAcni5ZmABdFUjb6epPE_lMBxaIvkST6UTWGRxYFV80bbC35OVK58IgZoDVDJf8uucjNAk_8/s400/cypriot.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
The other day <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=625572244">Magee</a> and I were talking via text message and he said something along the lines of "but they are closed on V", and I did not understand what he meant. I, personally use the standard university abbreviations for days of the week: MTWRF and I guess I used Sa and Su in my notes for weekend days.<br />
<br />
He explained he uses <b>MTWθFVS</b>. θ makes sense for Thursday, S for Sunday. I had no guesses about the V. He explained he looked for a syllabary that had a simple solution, and found the Cypriot syllabary, in which a symbol that looks like a V represents the syllable "sa."<br />
<br />
Fair enough.<br />
<br />
I came across this <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/definition.htm">wonderfully comprehensive wobsite about writing systems</a>, and started reading. This stuff is endless.*<br />
<br />
<b>A syllabary is like an alphabet, except instead of each symbol representing a sound, each symbol represents a syllable.</b><br />
<br />
In terms of syllabaries, Maggs said his decision had come down to using the Cherokee "sa" which is a U with a horizontal line through the middle, or the Cree, which looks like a little chair. I´m assuming he went with the Cypriot V because of it´s accessibility on a standard keyboard. I think he made a good choice, considering the alternatives. (<a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/syllabaries.htm">Look here</a> for a compilation of syllabaries.)<br />
<br />
They say the Cypriot syllabary descended from Linear A and Linear B and was actually used for the Cypriot dialect of Greek between 800 and 200 BC. In Linear A, "sa" was Y and in Linear B, "sa" was like Y but with two little tear drops on each side. I was surprised he hadn´t chosen the Y from Linear A--seeing as how it´s equally easy to use as the Cypriot V, but it seems <i>the origins of Linear A are too ambiguous for his note-taking standards</i>. Ok.<br />
<br />
What he means is that even scholars today are unsure about Linear A and whether its decipherment is correct. I mean, he´s right. Linear A was used between 1800 and 1450 BC, and really, all they can do is start with what they know and go backward. <b>They think Linear B probably evolved from Linear A, but they don´t know how they´re related.</b> Furthermore, these linguists just assigned the same pronunciation that Linear B uses to characters that look similar in Linear A--but that was just guessing, too. There´s no real consensus on Linear A.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiie0ZBk45bR8jHsf3p-cTrtQnixJrFw4F_tZDqr1FOryYhENxQiSX7UXuB8BpqvS9C5pGgeEFQV4WHRlQ2kyDkCfXZctetNOdR5pnaKaIuSQCiE68jI3RbJoPKXivm28jOjtGKiQTBNc0-/s1600/phaistosdisk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="195" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiie0ZBk45bR8jHsf3p-cTrtQnixJrFw4F_tZDqr1FOryYhENxQiSX7UXuB8BpqvS9C5pGgeEFQV4WHRlQ2kyDkCfXZctetNOdR5pnaKaIuSQCiE68jI3RbJoPKXivm28jOjtGKiQTBNc0-/s400/phaistosdisk.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phaistos Disc</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Speaking of undecipherables, Linear A isn´t alone. I mean, there are other really old things that are yet undeciphered (like Crete´s Phaistos Disc from 17th century BC seen on the left, and Proto- and Old Elamite used around 3000BC in Persia/modern Iran), but I feel like that makes sense, and is excusable. They´re really old texts.<br />
<br />
What is really weird to me is that there are a handful of relatively modern texts that are also undecipherable, namely:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><b>Voynich Manuscript </b>(<b>1404-1438AD</b>, Europe?) - at least carbon dating confirms the dates on this one. The vague general consensus seems to be that it´s a medical or pharmacopeal document. Some think the manuscript is gibberish, and was probably a joke played on Rudolph II, probably made by Roger Bacon. There are lots and lots of theories on this one.***</li>
<li><b>Rohonc Codex</b> (<b>1530?AD</b>, Hungary) - people have tried and tried to decipher this sucker, and have failed. Most Hungarian scholars seem to have given up, and assume it´s a hoax created by Sámuel Literáti Nemes, who was infamous for his historical forgeries from around that same time period. Some cryptographers think it´s a religious text. The writing might be some variant of paleo- or old- Hungarian.</li>
<li><b>Rongo Rongo</b> (<b>until 1860sAD</b>, Easter Island) - the language is Rapa Nui, the Polynesian language spoken on Easter Island. There´s debate over whether or not this is actual writing, or if it´s just some notes jotted down for the sake of decorating, or maybe remembering things.</li>
</ul>
<div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF_aEAKtoXxasPZxBYisTS5JHU43uAXgYCUUl4U98DqiCN_ReViwSHYrKPkYtc7Yic07cCHn4XkflJlsGSx6Smsk0XFhu-lkyRvRQgGHuQ1pa8Mv766gEk7j996vcAqpK0HjXhnLrgmvvT/s1600/voynich-manuscript1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="338" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF_aEAKtoXxasPZxBYisTS5JHU43uAXgYCUUl4U98DqiCN_ReViwSHYrKPkYtc7Yic07cCHn4XkflJlsGSx6Smsk0XFhu-lkyRvRQgGHuQ1pa8Mv766gEk7j996vcAqpK0HjXhnLrgmvvT/s400/voynich-manuscript1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Voynich Manuscript***</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOLIFvOqkuIjjo5IYJckYZ91avLOXDYUbw4jT2PRjY5Wyif_Z4YYYsRs8mSZ6MzSnVUtRoad0Pm2Vby42tfUQGR8qBm9-zS4ONkJ8ZoWlmTxa4366efMxs5ZiWxXQiI_I1Q7qdKo0UQsSs/s1600/rohonc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOLIFvOqkuIjjo5IYJckYZ91avLOXDYUbw4jT2PRjY5Wyif_Z4YYYsRs8mSZ6MzSnVUtRoad0Pm2Vby42tfUQGR8qBm9-zS4ONkJ8ZoWlmTxa4366efMxs5ZiWxXQiI_I1Q7qdKo0UQsSs/s400/rohonc.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rohonc Codex</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding-bottom: 6px; padding-left: 6px; padding-right: 6px; padding-top: 6px; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirN4gQgkNHYvuDXK02U8E547OUM2-RCnVXMMC8kMl6b_Hmrkqyf4I0hKyI6Xu77t-63QtnObMT4xZeUaO7UJhfiazvaw8rv-sVNcTq42KsmTX0_Rtq1QaY_h9LZ7T8_5gMjqOQy5PP9i8n/s1600/Rongo-Rongo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirN4gQgkNHYvuDXK02U8E547OUM2-RCnVXMMC8kMl6b_Hmrkqyf4I0hKyI6Xu77t-63QtnObMT4xZeUaO7UJhfiazvaw8rv-sVNcTq42KsmTX0_Rtq1QaY_h9LZ7T8_5gMjqOQy5PP9i8n/s400/Rongo-Rongo.jpg" style="cursor: move;" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; padding-top: 4px; text-align: center;"> Rongo Rongo<br />
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</tbody></table>
<br />
--<br />
<br />
It´s funny to me how vocabulary and grammar can change in a language so quickly, relatively speaking, and how it seems writing systems change so much more slowly. If you think about the Latin alphabet for instance, the letter W was added to accommodate some German sounds in the Middle Ages, but that´s about it. We don´t really see a lot of changes. I guess since the printing press, and now keyboards worldwide, it would be much more difficult to create or destroy a letter than it is to create or destroy a word.<br />
<br />
But it does happen sometimes! I remember when I first started learning German, the teacher made some rules very clear about when to use ß and when to use ss. --although we learned that ß = ss, the rule is:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>ß is used after diphthongs (beißen [baɪ̯sən] ‘to bite’))</li>
<li>ß is used after long vowels (grüßen [ɡʁyːsən] ‘to greet’)</li>
<li>ss is used after short vowels (küssen [kʏsən] ‘to kiss’)</li>
</ul>
<br />
Thus it helps to distinguish words like Buße (long vowel) 'penance, fine' and Busse (short vowel) 'buses'. <b>However, the teacher reluctantly informed us that ß is pretty much going out of style, not because of computer keyboards, but because of text messaging. </b>While computers made for Germany do have the ß key, cell phones do not, and kids are basically forgetting all about ß.<br />
<br />
Huh.<br />
<br />
I also recently heard <a href="http://www.theworld.org/2010/12/english-sources-italian-renaissance-spanish-rebellion/">an article on PRI´s The World</a> that Spanish has decided to get rid of two of their official letters.** WHAT. To the best of my knowledge, in addition to the 26 letters we see in English, Spanish claims/claimed 3 more: ch, ll, and ñ. Now I´m hearing that the Royal Spanish Academy is getting rid of ch and ll as single letters, and my name will now be spelled C-H-E-L-A as opposed to the CH-E-L-A that I loved. <br />
<br />
This is crazy. My first initial is no longer Ch and now I must rethink my whole sense of self identity! No, I´m just kidding, but Venezuela´s <b>Hugo Chavez</b> actually seems pretty upset about it. I mean, he´s losing the first initial of his last name--I totally get it. <a href="http://mexico.cnn.com/mundo/2010/11/11/hugo-chavez-hara-caso-a-las-nuevas-reglas-de-la-rae-se-llamara-avez">CNN reports</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
If the academy no longer considers “ch” a separate letter, Mr. Chávez chortled to his cabinet, then he would henceforth be known simply as “Ávez.”</blockquote>
<br />
smh.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
Now, of course people have suggested and created countless alternate writing systems throughout the years. For instance, Benjamin Franklin took great interest in the promotion of spelling reform. <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm">See here</a> and <a href="http://www.childrenofthecode.org/code-history/franklin.htm">here.</a> He proposed a more phonetic way of writing English, <a href="http://kyreles.blogspot.com/2011/03/english-is-hard-to-pronounce.html">which actually makes a lot of sense</a>, but no one seemed to listen. The only person who really cared for this idea was Noah Webster. Lol.<br />
<br />
There are lots of other pretty writing systems, but my two favorites are:<br />
<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/baduk.htm">Baduk</a> - based on the Korean board game by the same name, which is based on Go--the Japanese name for an ancient Chinese board game. The alphabet has only 2 characters and one marker to indicate the start of words. Like in Baduk the game, the meaning of one letter is determined by its relative rather than its absolute position.</li>
</ul>
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<li><a href="http://www.astrolingua.spb.ru/ENGLISH/colorbet.htm">Colorbet</a> - developed by Vitaly Vetash, a Russian painter and linguist. Basically, he took the idea that the whole variety of colors is based on fusion of 3 main rays (red, yellow and blue), and translated it into sounds, saying the variety of vowel comes from the combination of the triangle of the main sounds (A, I, U). Colors of vowels are: A is red, I - blue, U - green. He then expanded this to consonants, too, saying: vowels, being the most resonant between phonemes, represent clear colors, and consonants have more complicated formant structure, representing complex tints of colors. (This also makes me think of synesthesia? I didn´t even know what that was until... <a href="http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=181753301868045&id=765307188">see here.</a>)</li>
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(For a good list of constructed scripts, <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/conscripts.htm">see here.</a>) My cousin actually came up with a writing system, too, years ago. It´s called something like AlienCode 2 Specific or something like that. It´s by no means more efficient than the Latin Alphabet, and only a handful of people know about it. I wonder if thousands of years from now someone will find a sample of it and wonder. But then again, it´s probably very easy for cryptologists to decipher, seeing as how (with a few exceptions) there is one character per Latin letter. It was fun when we were kids anyway, and is still convenient to know... hahaha.<br />
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*(<a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/yi.htm">Click here</a> to check out the Yi syllabary. It´s the largest standardized syllabary on record, and geez... things like this give me a lot of hope for humanity, to be honest, and man´s mental capacity. If common, normal, run of the mill people can grow up using this writing system and mastering it, surely we are capable of great things.)<br />
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**Here´s the article with all the changes announced (but it´s in Spanish): <a href="http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/i/griega/llamara/ye/elpepucul/20101105elpepucul_9/Tes">El Pais</a><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-33962155646321217212011-03-01T03:06:00.002-06:002014-09-04T19:31:15.625-05:00English is hard to pronounce.You know, English is a pretty hard language to read and pronounce. <br />
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My mom always said you pretty much have to memorize all the words and the sounds that correspond with them, because while there is a pattern for figuring out sounds, there are almost more exceptions than rules. This has obviously got to be frustrating for a non-native English speaker. I get it. She would always then go on to exclaim how great Spanish is in that every single letter makes exactly one sound, and that any word can be sounded out. Yes, yes, yes.<br />
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In my mind, then, every time she would say that, I would always construct a piano keyboard which played, instead of a note, a sound for each key pressed corresponding to a letter in Spanish. I thought that if I were ever a Spanish teacher, I would take this keyboard to class and let the students learn how to pronounce correctly using the keyboard. They could press the keys on the keyboard spelling out a word and listen to the right way to say the word. They could experiment and even create hypothetical Spanish words and be assured the pronunciation the keyboard was assigning was correct.</div>
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I always wondered why no one had ever done that.</div>
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My mom repeatedly ranting about this triggers a very vivid childhood memory of an <i>I Love Lucy</i> episode I saw in which Ricky is reading a book and explores the many different ways "ough" is pronounced in English. </div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">en<b>ough</b>. thr<b>ough</b>. c<b>ough</b>. b<b>ough</b>. th<b>ough</b>.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">/ənəf. θru. kɑf. baw. ðo./</span></div>
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I think this is one of my earliest childhood memories of being interested in linguistic curiosities and oddities.* I was very young when I saw this episode, and the realization that "ough" could be pronounced in so many ways... just... blew my mind. </div>
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I was outraged. I must have been about 5 years old, because I hadn´t yet come across letter combinations with so many possibilities before. I specifically remember after the episode was over, I got a notebook and a pen and wrote down the example words Ricky had used.</div>
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I found the clip online just now! --and was surprised to hear Ricky--after the book reading part--exclaim almost word for word what my mom always said about Spanish.</div>
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(The noteworthy part starts at minute 2:45.)</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/g10jFL423ho?rel=0" width="420"></iframe></div>
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Which brings me to this really great thing <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=765307188">Nitzkin</a> showed us in class the other day. It´s this project called <a href="http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/anguish.html#Furry Tells">Anguish Languish</a>--which retells stories, using real English words--but the wrong words--to convey an accents or dialects. Try reading some! It works best if you read it out loud.** Here´s a snippet:</div>
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<u>Ladle Rat Rotten Hut</u><br />
Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.<br />
Wan moaning Ladle Rat Rotten Hut's murder colder inset.<br />
"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainers!"</blockquote>
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<b>Funny, something like that could never, ever exist in Spanish. In Spanish, there is no other way to spell any sound than the correct way, and there is no word that could have two different pronunciations. One sound per letter, that´s it. Yes, I know, mama.</b></div>
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Which brings me to the YouTubes´ sensation Kim Dong Won. This video here kind of does the reverse of Anguish Languish. </div>
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So I don´t know if he´s reading these Mariah Carey lyrics, or if he´s just replicating the sounds from memory, but it´s really the subtitles that make this video so funny***.</div>
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfwzpHeKTtk">Here is a link to another video of him</a>, but without subtitles, and it is much less funny, because the listener´s mind automatically and instantly atunes to the accent and,--especially because the lyrics to this song are already relatively familiar in the background of Americans´ pop culture minds--it is therefore pretty easy to understand what he is saying. </div>
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What´s difficult about reading Anguish Languish is that we have set meanings in our minds associated with these symbols on the page, which are pretty much unrelated to the sounds we hear. Just listening to Anguish Languish (if read correctly) is very easy to understand. But the mind auto-disconnects the sound from the letters on the page when discerning meaning, making reading it silently and understanding practically impossible.</div>
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*I think one of my favorite parts of kindergarden was learning to read, and the rules for when vowels were supposed to be long or short. We learned the short and long sounds for each vowel, and then wrote some words with a little scoop over the vowel if it was short and a dash over the vowel if it was long. </div>
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The simple rule was that if a vowel was followed by a consonant, and then another vowel, the first vowel was long and the second, silent. Conversely, if the vowel was followed by only one consonant, or more than one consecutive consonant, the vowel would be short.</div>
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ie. "bĭt" and "bīke" or "măp" and "māde". I loved drawing the dashes and scoops. <u>I wanted to draw them everywhere. </u> (I think later that week we learned about different vowel combinations, and the sounds they made, but those were tedious and less fun, with no symbols to draw involved.)</div>
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On this same day, I distinctly remember we also learned when to pronounce /ði/ or /ðə/. We were walking to recess, and some kid just randomly asked it, and the explanation ensued.</div>
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The rule was that if the next word started with a vowel, say /ði/, if it started with a consonant, say /ðə/. Hard, fast rule. I liked this, too. </div>
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Of course, immediately someone asked about /eɪ/ and /ə/. The teacher said this was more easily alleviated, not by changing pronunciation, but by changing "a" to "an" if the next word started with a vowel. This annoyed me, because we already knew that.</div>
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I really liked my kindergarden teacher, Ms. McMyne, but one other thing that really annoyed me**** was the way they taught us how to put verbs in the past tense. We had already learned how to drop the -e and add -ing for present indicative or whatever the hell tense that is. So I think they were trying to simplify by teaching us to make past tense by <b>dropping the -e and adding -ed</b>. </div>
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This DROVE ME NUTS. Why couldn´t they just say "add -d"?!?!? I asked. The teacher placated me, said, "yes, could think of it that way, too", and moved on. My classmates of course <i>took her side</i> when I tried to bring the point up again at recess. </div>
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They were really extremely fond of dropping that -e before adding any ending at all, apparently gahdammit, and I just thought it was <i>terribly inefficient</i> to drop an -e and then re-add THAT SAME GAHDAMM -e along with the new -d. </div>
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Oh well. </div>
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**Here is an excellent video clip of Anguish Languish being spoken aloud.</div>
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***among many other factors, of course.</div>
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****Kind of like that time in third or fourth grade when we were learning our multiplication tables (maybe this doesn´t belong in a language blog?) and we were reviewing before a test or something, and the teacher asked if we wanted to share any helpful hints with the class. </div>
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I guess she was hoping someone would point out the gahdamm obvious like "add a 0 behind the number you´re multiplying by 10, like 5 x 10 = 50" but instead I tried to explain my trick for multiplying by 5s: </div>
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When multiplying by 5s, you could take half of the number you were multiplying, and just add a 0 behind it if the number was even (like half of 6 is 3, therefore 5 x 6 must= 30), or if the number was odd, use the next even number up, apply the rule I just said, and subtract 5 from the answer (like 7 is odd so half of 8 is 4 so instead of the answer being 40 it must be 40-5. 5 x 7 must= 35). </div>
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I tried to explain it was like half of multiplying the number by 10. The teacher was furious. She wasn´t having it.</div>
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This was a super FAST and EASY way to multiply, but the teacher looked <i>horrified </i>when I explained it, and tried to get everyone to forget I even spoke so as to avoid confusion and questions about my method. I briefly hated her. Then I felt superior because I had this trick up my sleeve and no one else did because the teacher was too lazy or too stupid to explain my method to the class.</div>
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Oh well. I guess this all stems from me not being very good at memorizing. If you know me at all, you know my memory is terrible. I´d much rather calculate quickly than memorize... <b>WHICH IS WHY I LIKE LANGUAGES SO MUCH, I think. They´re just like math, really. Formulaic, generally neat, and calculate-able. Figure-out-able. I guess there were signs of my forthcoming love of linguistics all along.</b></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-72910571790541117802011-03-01T00:02:00.002-06:002014-09-04T20:39:40.595-05:00Dwarves and Elves and AngelsOk, when I was growing up, I learned that in Spanish<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">duende = dwarf</span> and <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">enano* = elf = midget</span>.<br />
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I guess I never wondered why Santa's elves and Snow White's dwarves were both enanos*.<br />
Just the other day I happened across this article claiming<b> DUENDE is the single most difficult word to translate from Spanish to English</b>. <a href="http://hotword.dictionary.com/duende/?t">Read here.</a><br />
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It says,<br />
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In 1933 Spanish poet and theater director Federico Garcia Lorca gave a lecture in Buenos Aires titled “Play and Theory of the Duende” in which he addressed the fiery spirit behind what makes great performance stir the emotions:</blockquote>
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“The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ”The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation … everything that has black sounds in it, has duende.” </blockquote>
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Of course a lot of people who commented on the article said the same as me, that they understood duende to be a dwarf or elf, etc. but there were a few interesting responses as well:<br />
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César on February 22, 2011 at 6:13 am<br />
In fact, this use of the word “duende” is more typical of the region of Andalusia, mostly used for “flamenco” dance and music, and is not very extended to other parts of Spain. From what I gather, it means something similar to being posessed by the spirit of the artwork, so that the artist expresses its fiery feelings, like a flame revealing the hotness and lawlessness of the fire.</blockquote>
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Mikhail on February 22, 2011 at 5:05 am<br />
In Trinidad and Tobago. A douen (which I presume comes from the same word duende due to our past Spanish Influence) is actually a small childlike creature that wears straw hats and runs around in the bushes on back-to-front feet. They were thought to be the souls of unbaptized children.</blockquote>
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Blueberry on February 22, 2011 at 2:49 pm<br />
<b>In <u>Buenos Aires</u> generally people say that someone has “angel”, not duende, when talking about talent.</b></blockquote>
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Which brings me to this phrase I´ve been wanting to mention, just because I like it a lot. In Mexico, <b>tener angel</b> means to be really charismatic. Someone who has a lot of angel is someone who is really likeable. Now I always attributed this phrase to Mexico being super-Catholic, but <i>maybe </i>it´s related to this dwarf-elf spirit.<br />
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This is another example someone gave on wordreference.com:<br />
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In <u>Andalucia</u> you say someone "tiene AGE" that really refers to "tiene ANGEL" when someone is very artistic. For example when a dancer dances very well you say "tiene age (angel)." Hope this helps.</blockquote>
which sounds like what the aforementioned article said about DUENDE. <b>Maybe angels and dwarves are all descended from the same creature, which just evolved into having various names, depending on what part of the Spanish speaking world they finds themselves in.</b><br />
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*Or in this case, enanitos, the diminuitive form.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-24752488816156719222011-01-24T23:15:00.001-06:002014-09-07T18:42:50.563-05:00FaceMy linguistics teacher seems to have studied Yucatec Maya extensively, and he shared this tidbit:<br />
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In Mayan, "uts" means "good" and "uts so wich" means "how are you?" but literally means <b>"how´s your face?" </b> This made me laugh. Although I can´t find any evidence of this being true (<a href="http://users.elite.net/runner/jennifers/Greetings%20M.htm#Maya">the webweb shows</a> lots of different ways to say it, not surprisingly), I believe him.</div>
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It´s funny that the Mayans identified themselves as their faces, literally,</div>
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which made me think of this:</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe2BgFKKeK6CZGwxg9YdqhVp4qkg3rasPDsIvctE6Wis0o3wKZgzAZ1Rsf3gKDHcebogqdX2m7aolbqWG4MwtWZN_cSrVOKcO6dGrxpVxtriNc0rTUhiGqk3ZAYblwONT1-Oj8pn1W0XF8/s1600/IMAG0013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="color: black;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe2BgFKKeK6CZGwxg9YdqhVp4qkg3rasPDsIvctE6Wis0o3wKZgzAZ1Rsf3gKDHcebogqdX2m7aolbqWG4MwtWZN_cSrVOKcO6dGrxpVxtriNc0rTUhiGqk3ZAYblwONT1-Oj8pn1W0XF8/s320/IMAG0013.jpg" height="189" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I see this at work all the time and it also makes me chuckle. It´s our copier.</span></td></tr>
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They all say <i>face up, face up, face up</i>--until we get to the Spanish, literally "<b>mouth up</b>" (well, the German says <i>picture up</i>, but that makes sense because it´s a copier). Curious that the Spanish define the front half of the body by the mouth and not the face.</div>
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[I don´t know what the Japanese say or WHY there would be 2 in Japanese, and Khya´s not home. I´ll have to ask him once he gets here.]<br />
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<u>Edit</u>: Ok, Khya came home and woke me up to answer my question. The top one says "copy side placed up" more or less, and the bottom one says "transmission [fax] side placed up"--so neither of these are really metaphorical at all, just more descriptive of what to do with the sheet of paper you have in your hands before you turn it over to the machine. <br />
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As to WHY there would be two in Japanese and only one in every other language, we can only safely guess, either A) it´s a Japanese machine so Japanese language takes precedence or B) Japanese users of this machine must be so dumb they can´t figure out what to do with their fax even if they know what to do with their copy. <br />
jk.<br />
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<u>Edit part 2</u>: I emailed Nitzkin about the Mayan phrase above. He responded:<br />
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Remember, I said there are 22 mayan languages! You were probably looking at qiche or yucatec. I was talking about <b>kaqchikel</b>; the phrase is "la, utz a wach" with unlauts over the "u" and the second "a", pronounced "la, ootz a wuch" (wuch pron. Like "butch"). Literally, It means "hey, how's your face?"</blockquote>
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Many of those 22 languages are actually as different as french from italian or more. Kaqchikel is the 3rd largest, and is spoken in the mountains of guatemala. Most people when they say mayan, mean yucatec, which is spoken all over yucatan (where most tourists go).</blockquote>
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And then he said:<br />
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Excuse me, actually, most literally it means <b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">"hey, good your face?"</span></b></blockquote>
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And then he said:<br />
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Oops, excuse me again--that's <b>22 in guatemala alone</b>. Don't want to mislead you!</blockquote>
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:)</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-34755318896275410072011-01-24T17:22:00.000-06:002011-01-24T17:22:58.045-06:00Translating Animals<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyp56NZHjYprxBFRf9PityLsboAeTDDjwnT64B0dqW-ftc1NXden5GeaMvpbFt40N3RbgeSs2uzihqgtmbvYT00YrnEI3CznYknJQ4RMdDCjRPJ-cKSyO7HcNw3jhhipvah5_K5LSELB3j/s1600/nim.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" s5="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyp56NZHjYprxBFRf9PityLsboAeTDDjwnT64B0dqW-ftc1NXden5GeaMvpbFt40N3RbgeSs2uzihqgtmbvYT00YrnEI3CznYknJQ4RMdDCjRPJ-cKSyO7HcNw3jhhipvah5_K5LSELB3j/s1600/nim.jpg" /></a></div>Ok, so you know I'm <a href="http://catalog.tulane.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=37&poid=727&returnto=822">studying linguistics officially</a>, right, and I'm in this Languages of the World (really like an intro to linguistics) course. There are really interesting tidbits all the time--like on day 1, Nitzkin told us how humans are different from other animals in our ability to speak, and communicate about not only the concrete, but the abstract as well.<br />
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While other animals communicate to each other, this is generally done through instinctual sounds being made in response to some threat or stimulus. Then perhaps other animals respond to that sound, instinctually. There´s obviously no chatting involved. <br />
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But I was thinking about <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093793/">that awesome movie from my childhood, Project X</a> (starring a very young Helen Hunt and an even younger Matthew Broderick), and about all those chimps that supposedly learned sign language. What about them??<br />
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Well, I read <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130104043">this article on NPR</a> about how humans are linguistically different from monkeys, and it says, first of all, monkeys´ vocal chords are shaped differently from those of humans, so they´ll never really be able to make the sounds we do--obviously--which is why scientists went on and gave sign language a go. To summarize about the sign language obsession researchers had in the 60s and 70s, monkeys are smart enough to make certain shapes with their hands in response to certain stimuli (like twisting a fist by the corner of the mouth when shown an apple), but still, the number of words they learn seems to peak at about 300.<br />
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<blockquote>But by the end of high school, we have about 60,000 words, the average human. And every chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, they all sort of hit the wall at two to 300 words, which is also where a dog hits the wall, or a parrot. So there's something really different about us. And it's not to say they don't communicate - of course they communicate. And of course they have communication that can say very specific, surprising things, but it's not language. [...] And what became clear to the researchers doing this was that the human infant had a language, a vocabulary explosion at a very young age that never occurs with chimps.</blockquote><br />
So Nitzkin was right in saying no monkey has ever spoken better than a 2 year old child.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjemZxI1E80z1tty4R6HxJqiS2cKk_YSm1LRY0NX_AiOxle4_0GLHPwLa2XYcPm_pAY6x8xf2Zf7b_A8C6aELzdMQr9dgvDB3WN8Q4dXyRHTwX8zXEy5J81DgrERi9AElbodqhIFcpVAAnh/s1600/brains.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjemZxI1E80z1tty4R6HxJqiS2cKk_YSm1LRY0NX_AiOxle4_0GLHPwLa2XYcPm_pAY6x8xf2Zf7b_A8C6aELzdMQr9dgvDB3WN8Q4dXyRHTwX8zXEy5J81DgrERi9AElbodqhIFcpVAAnh/s320/brains.jpg" width="302" /></a></div>WHAT I DIDN´T KNOW is that although monkeys´ DNA matches like 97% of ours, cognitively, dolphins might be more similar to humans. Studies show that dolphins are the only animals that can communicate about things not in their immediate surrounding, such as past and future events.*<br />
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I read on dolphin-world.com (that´s right) that <b>dolphins have a greater brain-to-body-weight ratio than any other mammal</b> besides homo sapiens and that because dolphins tend to stay within their own pods, <b>they have trouble understanding “foreign” dolphins</b>. This might be an indicator that they have different dolphin "languages" in different parts of the world, even though they are the same species--if in fact they use language at all.<br />
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Well, anyway, it´s probably for the best animals don´t seem to really use language the way we do. LEST THIS HAPPEN:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="youtube-player" frameborder="0" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/G3ek0hTdlPA?rel=0" title="YouTube video player" type="text/html" width="480"></iframe><br />
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lolol<br />
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*Ok, I found this wobsite, and I can´t decide if it´s for real or not. It´s called <a href="http://www.speakdolphin.com/">SpeakDolphin.com</a>, and well... they have a running list for if they ever do get to talk to dolphins, what are the questions they would ask. <a href="http://www.speakdolphin.com/20questions.cfm">Look. You can submit yours here.</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-5268004802798331742011-01-15T15:35:00.000-06:002014-09-04T20:45:25.256-05:00World's First "Promercial"So a few months back <a href="http://kyreles.blogspot.com/2010/07/productivity-for-prosumers.html">I blogged</a> about this new word I heard, "prosumer." In that post I learned, in the context that I heard the word, prosumer = professional + consumer.<br />
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So what about "<strong>promercial</strong>"? A commercial for prosumers? <a href="http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/promotion-plus-commercial-equals-promercial/">The New York Times</a> claims it's actually <strong>promotion + commercial</strong>. Now, maybe I'm mistaken here but aren't commericals ALL promotions? Come on, now.<br />
What they actually mean is that not only will there continue to be product placement in tv shows we watch, but now there will be a commercial before said tv episode, promoting both the product that will be placed and the episode itself.<br />
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Obviously, this is happening because of the prevalence of TiVo-type devices that very easily allow viewers to fast foward through commercials. ABC did it first. A triple punch. 1) The upcoming episode of Cougar Town was going to have Diet Dr. Pepper all up in it. 2) Throughout the day, leading up to that episode, they aired promercials--previews for that night's episode--particularly the part of the episode that includes the product pitch. 3) On their wobsite, they featured extended footage from said episode--but of course before you can watch the clip you have to watch a Diet Dr. Pepper commercial.<br />
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You can <a href="http://abc.go.com/shows/cougar-town/andys-dreams?cid=11_CougarTownWebi_ABChomepage_bnb">watch this historic event here</a>.<br />
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Lol I agree with <a href="http://techland.time.com/2011/01/13/abc-dr-pepper-create-worlds-first-promercial/">Time's Graeme McMillan</a>, "If this kind of thing continues, how long before we get a <strong>prepromercial</strong> to let us know that there might be an advertisement to tell us about the advertisement hidden in real content somewhere in our future?"Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-416803281117127007.post-61195246983051433582011-01-13T00:14:00.000-06:002011-01-13T00:14:14.146-06:00New classes!So I´m taking some classes for fun this semester! Woooooooooo<br />
Remember <a href="http://kyreles.blogspot.com/2010/05/linguistics.html">this post</a>?<br />
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They each meet once a week, so the sessions are long--perfect for discussion. I definitely plan to update my blag much more regularly now, seeing as how I´ll want to jot down here interesting tidbits I pick up along the way--for my own sake. You know.<br />
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These are the classes I´m taking.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.tulane.edu/"><img border="0" height="587" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUOWLYVDZDzVdS4l9H3xcTQdZEYztoY2Zhwoo7yo4CH6f1xt63DrrLDk3hovj7l-jT4yRU0wDfsuxF4qnW4fGaR0paPm1qJkruhfCkX8pRj-wH591vCDamYXP9ATFPVdnKDwlUY2mrXiVo/s640/classes.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0