While wondering about Wikipedia’s various and sundry language related pages (looking for support for my contention that neither Mandarin nor Hindi nor any other language is likely to supplant English as the dominant world language any time soon), I came across this page describing the Philadelphia dialect. So far, I’ve found few things more bewildering than reading about the dialect in which I operate. Some of the characteristics of the Philly dialect are so natural to me that I’m astonished to learn that there is another way to speak. Highlights:
Canadian raising occurs for /aɪ/ (as in price) but not for /aʊ/ (as in mouth) (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 2006: 114-15, 237-38). Consequently, the diphthong in like may begin with a nucleus of mid or even higher position [lʌik], which distinguishes it from the diphthong in live [laɪv].
Philadelphia is situated in the middle of the only traditionally rhotic area of the Atlantic states. This area runs from Pennsylvania and New Jersey down to Delaware and Northern Maryland, and remains r-pronouncing today.
The sibilant /s/ is palatalized to [ʃ] (as in she) before /tɹ/. Thus, the word streets might be pronounced “shtreets” [ʃtɹits].
On may be pronounced /ɔn/, so that, as in the South and Midland varieties of American English (and unlike New York) it rhymes with dawn rather than don.
The interjectionyo was popularized in the Philadelphia dialect among Italian American and African American youths. The word is commonly used as a greeting or a way to get someone’s attention.
The word “Jawn” can be used to describe a thing (”Hand me that jawn”), a person, (”That boy’s my young jawn”) or a place (”I was over at my boy’s jawn last night”) and is used in many situations to describe almost anything.
I wonder if native Minnesotans or Georgians (or elsewhere-ans) would find their own pages so innately bizarre.
Like everything else by Radiolab, I adore this video:
The movie is simple connections from word to word, an elegant demonstration of English polysemy. I’m not sure what it is about the words and examples they’ve chosen, but I really found the whole thing touching.
What is so great and powerful about this unprepossessing character bèi 被? As a noun bèi can mean “quilt” or “cover.” As a jiècí 介詞 (”preposition”), bèi is used in a passive sentence to introduce the doer of the action: tā bèi quántǐ dǎngyuán píngxǔan wéi zhǔxí 他被全體黨員評選為主席 (”He was elected by all of the party members as chairman.”) Before verbs, bèi is used to indicate passive voice: bèi yāpò 被壓迫 (”be oppressed”).
Lately, it has become fashionable to use the passive voice with verbs that don’t normally allow it and in situations that seem ludicrous. One of the most celebrated examples is bèi zìshā 被自殺 (”be suicided”), with the implication that someone was beaten to death, but the authorities made it look as though he had committed suicide. Once coined, bèi zìshā spread like wildfire, so that it wasn’t long before it merited its own entry in online dictionaries and encyclopedias.
China, of course, has long possessed some pretty stringent controls on what sorts of ideas can and cannot be expressed by its citizens (and anyone else within its borders, I suppose), and the Chinese are using constructions like be suicided to express ideas that would ordinarily die at the censors.
This, like everything else, reminds of Casablanca and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky believed that true freedom could only exist when their were rules, walls. With a wall, you have a direction, you can move with the wall, toward it, away from it, and that’s total freedom. With no wall, every place is the same, all movement is no movement, and you are utterly trapped. In the US, we have almost total freedom to speak our minds, and so very rarely do those thoughts seem to matter. In China, with so many rules so strenuously applied, language can take on rebellion while being clever, it can find freedom by exploring every brick in its walls.
As for Casablanca, the writers Julius and Phillip Epstein had originally wanted Ilsa to run off with Rick, but this plot was rejected by the censors, who wouldn’t allow such a thing what with Ilsa being married to Victor and all. They spent a good portion of the shoot rewriting the last final scenes to make Ilsa choosing Victor while still loving Rick plausible. The result? I’m saying it because it’s true. Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor. You’re a part of his work, the thing the keeps him going. If that plane leave the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.
The First Amendment is truly one of the most amazing pieces of legislation in the world, but nearly as amazing is what people elsewhere can do without it.
Thus, you can’t fuck someone in the ass with a dildo, according to the current edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, and Webster’s New World Dictionary. The whore in Portnoy’s Complaint “who fucks the curtain with her bare twat” can’t do that, according to American Heritage, Webster’s New World, Random House, or Encarta. Lesbians can’t fuck each other at all, according to Webster’s New World and Encarta (though if they use a strap-on, Encarta becomes OK with it). Fucking a woman’s breasts is only possible according to Merriam-Webster. Finger-fucking and fist-fucking are impossible according to Webster’s New World, Random House, and American Heritage; Merriam allows it, but only if it’s vaginal and not anal. Only the OED, whose entry for the word I edited, defines fuck to encompass sexual acts beyond “sexual intercourse.”
Sheidlower’s book, The F-Word, has a new edition out and is apparently fucking amazing.
In high school, I was a budding grammar Nazi. I blame this on an ex-girlfriend’s grandmother, who, despite her advanced years and Alzheimer’s, had an ear for the same violations that once gave Strunk&White the howling fantods: ungrammaticality. Dottie’s favorite game–one I adopted, to the chagrin of virtually everyone I knew–was to count incorrect usages of the word “like” in speaking. She would say nothing while doing this. Dottie would simply listen serenely to whatever you said to say, raising her fingers, one at a time, until the speaker realized the correlation. “They’re decorating it with, like, this like jungle theme with palm trees and like tigers everywhere.” Three silent digits extend.
This game generated one of two effects on speakers: either you slimmed your sentences and removed a great deal of your chaff (as the ex- and I both did, quicksharp), or the stress of avoiding “like” became so enormous that smooth sentence completion be impossible: pausing, backtracking, violent re-words and stuttering were the new modus operandi.
Of course, I went to public school, and in public school, they don’t teach you things like the nominative/accusative/dative/genitive/locative cases, what a preposition is, how polarity words work, and so forth. Thankfully, SOMEBODY learned all these things, and are willing and able to share them all with us. Without further delay, a few more language-oriented blogs to recommend you to:
Perhaps the biggest and brightest and best of the language blogs, this site is run by Mark Liberman, a professor in UPenn’s well-esteemed linguistics department. He get’s plenty of help from a number of other linguistic luminaries, and the blog covers plenty of ground from Dan Brown’s prose and Van Morrison’s swearing to Beatles gibberish and Google books critiques.
This charming piece of webspace is occupied by Gabe Doyle, a UCSD linguistics grad student. His sub-header and motto apparent is “Prescriptivism Must Die!”, which is funny in such an inside-baseball, grammar-nerds-only sense that the time it would take to explain the joke would render it unfunny. Timing, as they say, is everything. Perhaps his hallmark post thus far (for me, at any rate) is his thorough argument, with ample evidence, of why the singular “they” is perfectly grammatical.
Ben Zimmer spends a lot of time moonlighting at Language Log or filling in for William Safire. When he’s doing neither, he keeps his own site, tracing words and their usages back through history. Most notable in his recent work, perhaps, is his debunking of “Cronkiters”.
For a long time in America, atheism has been long associated, rather unfortunately, with hedonism and anarchy. To be atheistic is to be evil, to hold no values, to be young and crass and cruel. The word itself is negative; it is merely the word theist with a privative a attached indicates an absence or a negation of the root word. Atheists believe in the absence of a god, but this reality is taken to an extreme: they believe against a god.
The response by the atheists has been to look for a new word to describe themselves. Some have declared agnosticism, a word which connotes either a lack of thought on the matter, or the belief that, even if there IS a god, that god cannot be known, for certain. Some prefer non-believer, but that carries the same baggage as atheism. Many have taken humanism (especially secular humanism), and that term received a shout-out from the President at the National Prayer Breakfast this year.
It would seem the newest term to gain the minds and preferences of the un-religious is “Nones”. Or maybe that’s just “nones”. This usage seems to stem from survey question that goes something like:
Religion?
A. Christian
B. Jewish
C. Muslim
D. Hindi
E. Other
F. None
Today, the proportion of Independents who are Nones has leaped from 12 percent to 21 percent; and the percentage of Democratic Nones has doubled from 6 percent to 16 percent. In stark contrast, the GOP share has fallen from 8 percent to 6 percent. I’d say that’s a function of the GOP becoming an essentially Christianist fundamentalist party; and the Democrats having lots of Irish, Jewish and Asian supporters, who are the strongest groups in the None cohort.
The Nones are not wealthier than average, but they are more male. Almost 20 percent of American men are Nones, compared with 12 percent of women.
61 percent of Nones find evolution convincing, compared with 38 percent of all Americans. And yet they do not dismiss the possibility of a God they do not understand; and refuse to call themselves atheists.
But that’s “none”, as in “Religion: none”. If “a-theists” don’t like being defined as against a God they don’t believe in, “None” is worse still. An atheist is, truly, someone without belief in God. Though the Trinity study says most “Nones” are not actively hostile to religion, the name makes it sound like “Nones” believe in nothing at all. I’m sure most “Nones” wouldn’t appreciate that. Or perhaps, consistent with the name, they just don’t care.
Personally, though I am not one, I’ve often been more comfortable with people who self-identify as atheists (or one of its many synonyms) than I have with the religious.
Via Language Hat comes this piece of irresistible fun:
Translation Party translates any English phrase into Japanese using Google’s translator. It then translates that new, slightly altered translation into English, and the new English phrase into Japanese, on and on, until Google’s Japanese phrase and English phrase stop changing. The phrase has now reached equilibrium.
Because of the difficulty of translation, some odd things happen. For your enjoyment, I T-partied the first section of my favorite poem. Here is the original:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive toward such things
(Why should the aged eagle spread its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgment not be too heavy upon us
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
And here is the same words, in Japanese-English equilbrium:
To enable it again, I do not expect
Because, I think
To do this, I do not expect
Range of men, the gift of hope this man
Work effort
(Eagle, or if you need me?)
Why should mourn
, Disappeared in the normal control
Not again
Weakly positive hours of glory
Because, I think
I know I know
1:00, 2 single power supply
Because I can not drink
Here, roads and trees and flowers in spring and
Because, I know time is always
Location is always the only place
Also, only one, in fact, real-time
Only a single location
I am me and I will love them
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
To enable it again, I cannot be expected to
Bon appetite, to build something
According to this happy
We are praying for the mercy of God
I can remember a prayer To discuss their problems, many
Description excessive
To enable it again, I do not expect
Let’s answer these words
However, this does not – The Company will be determined by the size of the
In the calculation, under the wings of a bird
However, the fans beat the air A small flow of dry air
The following is a hair
We pay particular attention
If you have questions, please sit down
Our time of death, pray for sinners
This is our time to pray for the death of us.
The italicized lines were unable to reach equilibrium. Generally, when that happens, the line in question flips between two results. See here for an example in which “The air which is now thoroughly small and dry” flops from “A small flow of dry air” and “Small flow of dry air”. Google has some trouble with punctuation. Including a full-stop in a phrase will change the end result significantly, and sometimes punctuation appears where there was none before. I threw it a few sentences of Finnegans Wake and my computer started to smoke, so I’d recommend more casual language for other users.
When my fiance, Katie, was in college, and I had a numbing office job, she would send me her papers which I would happily edit because her efforts to gain a Bachelor’s in political science out-gained my interest in the mortgage industry. Katie was a rigorous researcher, and her distended papers reflected the growth of her education within the confines of page or word limits. Her sentences, especially in the opening paragraphs, wound long and twisted through multiple clauses and ideas. My primary job was to edit for clarity and consistency, because I did not possess the education to edit for facts. The first five pages of a 15 page essay bled red, and the 10 pages to follow displayed somewhat more monochromatically.
The editors at Vanity Fair chose to have some fun with Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, and took their red, blue, and green pens to the black&white transcript. The color nearly equals the text upon which it comments. Some of their edits are so thorough that it seems amazing they found the ball amidst such thick rough.
Behold this line from the speech:
Seward withstood such disdain as he chose the uncomfortable, unconventional but right path to secure Alaska so that Alaska could help secure the United States.
And now the same sentence after Vanity Fair gets through with it:
Seward, however, secured Alaska realizing that Alaska could secure the United States.
The whole speech is edited harshly enough to render its eight pages a tough slog. It’s clear the editors took a heavy hand to the speech, altering lines that did not require such slashing. The research editor took things even further, arguing against the speech within the comments. The gimmick is fun to look at from a distance–look at all that red!–but up close, the edits are taxing and overly severe.
