Super-Tapping

Recently I have been noticing that in my natural speech, if there are a series of taps, I will replace them and the surrounding contexts with a trilled consonant. Things I have caught myself saying include:

ʍʌraʲɾu for "what did I do..." normally ʍʌɾɪɾaʲɾu

kʰʌraʊt for "cut it out!" normally kʰʌɾɪɾaʊt

I need to hear some more examples before I can absolutely be sure of the contexts. It's a very... not careful speech; in the second example I was exclaiming for the safety of some children. It's definitely with a rhotic quality as well, a colleague actually caught the first one in my speech when I was telling some story. I'll put any further developments as they come to me.

Lesson Plan Fixing: The Past Tense

A colleague of mine taught English in Spain some time ago, and pointed out to me and another colleague how strange it is that when we are starting out a language that we are only able to speak in the present tense. This came up while we were discussing how confident we felt about our abilities with Catalan, which the three of us are only beginning relatively. My thought was mainly that I would feel pretty confident, but only with talking about things that are pretty uninteresting.

The solution? Teach the past tense before you learn the present tense. Sure, maybe teach a few irregular verb fixed expressions, but the past tense is much more dynamic, and usually it's not particularly more complicated than the present tense. Impractical perhaps, but who wants to hear about what color the pen on top of the book is?

On a side note, my brother lived in Burgos for a time, and traveled to Barcelona. He wondered how well he would be able to get by, but figured that since everybody spoke Spanish also, he'd be able to do alright. To his surprise, he said, "everybody just spoke English."

Professional Languages

It has come to my attention that many schools of linguistics demand that their students know one or two other languages in addition to English. Not necessarily the ability to speak, but more the ability to read in the language. This is common in many fields, it's common to hear about texts that are only published or available in certain languages, German and French are the most common to my ear. A friend of mine works in art conservation (not to be confused with art restoration) and she told me that acceptance into most departments, though I can't remember if this is still necessarily the case, demands knowledge of how to read both German and French.

According to the Moscow Lomonosov University Russian Language Centre's official website:

Over a quarter of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian.

and a little further down,

It is applied as language of a science - means of dialogue, means of coding and storage of universal knowledge (60-70% of all world information is published in English and Russian languages).

So, it looks like Russian should be up there with the other two, but I have no idea how the breakdown goes. If all of the Russian scholarly works are about super-science and spacecraft and all sorts of thing that I have nothing more than a passing interest in, it might not be the best thing to invest in. I would hope that there would be lots on languages of Russia, such as Yakut, Chuvash, Ossetic, Tuvan, Chukchi, Tatar, and of course, Russian, as well as languages of Soviet states. Also Yukhagir and Votic are other languages I've had the pleasure of at least dealing with some data for, or reading about for whatever reason that could fall into this category.

Would knowledge of Russian though help with articles and the like for things unrelated to Russia and its geographic neighbors? German and French have long histories as languages of academia and Western Europe's exploration and conquest of the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and South East Asia would suggest that they might be better bets if my work dealt with those regions. In my own experiences at university as well, there are a disproportionate number of texts (on all subjects) in German and French.

I've had to read from an etymological dictionary of Latin written in French and maybe one or two other books, but I have little experience reading academically in German or Russian. Personally though, I own a number of linguistics texts and articles in Spanish. Other languages I've had to read academically include Ukrainian and Catalan, but I honestly couldn't be sure of the absolute limit of what I've read in.

Ultimately it looks like, from my experience, it probably wouldn't open up a wealth of information running the gamut to be able to access this information, but as one professor I know always liked to point out that while having more unique qualities might make certain research harder, and make your work not as widely appealing, it does have a certain "sexiness" to it.

In a related issue, it would be nice if there was a text that compiled various linguistic terminology in different languages, particularly the ones most relevant for linguistic study, presumably.

Forthcoming topics:

As soon as I get a chance, I have articles to write on the following topics. I tried to write just enough to not give away the whole bag.

1) Stop signs

2) "Alternative" familial terms

3) Keyboard frequency on my laptop

4) Lesson plan fixing - the past tense

5) Professional languages

It'd be a shame if I forgot, as I usually cannot write as soon as an idea comes to me. Too many times these ideas escape me.

Hopefully Linguistics Can Save Me Now

So, last night I was driving around a campus that I am not very familiar with, especially where I am allowed to park as I have no affiliation with the university. I was told that there was a main road that I would probably be space on. The signs along this road all read something more or less:

Student/Staff Parking 6AM-1AM NO PARKING 1AM-6AM

All of the signs along the road were very clear. So I figured it was best to keep looking around. Apparently there is a visitor lot that I managed to miss because it was late and the sign was not well lit, and was a distance from the road. I arrived at a lot that had the following information on the sign:

Staff Parking 6AM-1PM Student Parking 1PM-4PM

There was no mention of what is going on between the hours of 4PM-6AM. I am familiar with another university that has similar signs, and anyone can park during the unlisted hours, since there is no longer a premium on parking. Apparently, to my dismay, the implication of this sign is that there is not to be any parking in this lot during the unmentioned hours. Of course, now I need to pay the university because they didn't explain to me where I am allowed to park. I probably won't contest it, it's not very much money, but does anybody think I have a case?

Political Super Language Groupings

Currently I am taking a course that deals with Catalan sociolinguistics, and we regularly refer to Spanish as Castilian, and Catalan, of course, as Catalan. There is not a lot of data in either direction, but the professor frequently refers to "my language," or will refer to both as "varieties." Varieties, yes, can be used to hedge between language and dialect, but I think in this case it is something else. It's odd to call French and Spanish different varieties for example.

So, Despite Catalans general distaste for being associated with Spain, I started getting the impression that there was almost an interpretation of an abstract "Spanish Language" which includes Castilian and Catalan. Very important to say, I am not suggesting that Catalan is a dialect of Spanish or any such thing, but something more akin to the situation in China, where many unrelated languages and "varieties" are united under the moniker of "Chinese" despite lacking mutual intelligibility. Often these share a writing system, but I believe the organization is often more nationalistic. Since the Catalans feel quite the opposite of this, I found it quite strange to see what seemed to be the same general idea.

At this point, I would probably guess that "Spanish language" has a meaning similar to "language of Spain," that perhaps Basque is also a "Spanish language," under the umbrella of that which is Spain if this analysis is accurate. Since, politically speaking (and we all know to what extent this is an accurate statement) Spain has four official languages, Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, Gallego (Galician), and Basque, why couldn't we discuss them as such? To me, I can almost imagine some kind of more or less abstract or arbitrary designation of languages. Personally, I've written several pieces on "Iberian Languages," where my only real concern is there geographic location. There are probably many historical precedents as well of languages being grouped together for less than genetic reasons, why-ever that might be. Though, strange to hear this specific case.

Why Computers Aren't As Helpful As I'd Like Them To Be

Diacritics have always been a problem on computers, because some fonts just don't want to render them in the right spot. I was trying to add breathy voice marks to some data I was typing up. Most of the time it put the diacritic half under the letter it is supposed to be under, and half under the following. A couple of times it was in its own space (or as one of those mystery boxes).

m̤

It looks pretty good in the window for typing (it's slightly offset), but I think my default font for this site doesn't do it so well. It shouldn't be so hard to generate m̤ when I need it.

My other related problem is not so much with rendering the symbols properly, but with typing them. IPA-fonts aren't really that helpful because even if you could match every symbol to it's own key, or simple key command (say, shift+k), I'd never be able to able to remember which one went with which key command. Also, there's probably thirty thousand different characters if you include diacritics and all that other fun stuff I need to type out regularly. It's inconvenient when I need to type out something like xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰʦʼ and I need to search through several sections of several tables on the character map. I wrote up an Input Method file for key commands to generate all of the necessary characters, by having a combination of basic characters, plus ways to modify them. So, simply put, h, ʜ, ɦ, ħ, ʰ, ɧ, and ʱ, would all be generated by pressing "h" and then another key that normally doesn't generate a letter. I was very content with my setup, but my computer froze when I installed it (and I followed the instructions to a t, and double checked and retested), and wouldn't work until I managed to delete the file. Apparently, it's a common problem, but the solution I cannot find. If there are any ways that people know of to generate Input Methods, I certainly am in need of one.

Etymologies And Phonologies

Doing phonology problems can actually be quite a bit of fun (especially since Phonology is not something I normally have to deal too much with). Since we always want to see the furthest potential in language and the most complex notions, textbooks will have lots of interesting examples from all sorts of languages, and sometimes I can pull out interesting finds. The other days I noticed the Greek word for money is xrima (χριμα, I would guess), which probably (is, or) has the same root as the Ukrainian грівна.

Wikipedia sez:

The word hryvnia is thought to derive from the Slavic griva; c.f. Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian грива / griva, "mane". Hryvnia may have indicated something valuable worn around the neck, usually made of silver or gold; c.f. Russian grif (гриф , "neck") or c.f. Bulgarian and Serbian grivna (гривна , "bracelet").

Not really sure where to go with this. Historically, griva seems to be a very reasonable root, the h-g change in Ukrainian is standard, but the H-R-I-N-A patter was quite striking to me, that I was all but positive right off of the bat. Now, I'm no slavicist (yet), but it is commonly known that roots of words are cryptic at best in many cases. I'd love to see some evidence of a transitionary form between any of the forms (maybe even for the Greek to have borrowed it from the Ukrainians! Anybody have a good Ancient Greek dictionary?)

One other catch I got was when looking at some Votic data, which is Finno-Ugric and is spoken in Russia by a scant few Votes. One of the words in the data was bočka, meaning "barrel." We have the same word in Ukrainian, and I bet probably in some other slavic languages. I couldn't find any similar words in Finnish or Hungarian, so I bet the Votic just used the local word. It's weird to see one word in a set of data like that. The same thing happened to me when I was going through a passage in Yakut and I believe the only recognizable word to me was the word for "Saturday." It's pretty clear that these are just borrowings from Slavic, but with the Greek example before, maybe it's just a coincidence, but I don't know for sure.

Language Lessons From Music Class

So, last week I was teaching a music class, and one of the things I had with me was my guitar. We had a few percussion pieces I had to look up the names of, "sand blocks," "cluster bells," and possibly the best named piece, the "clatterpillar," which also might be the most unpleasant of the bunch, at least in its plastic form.

In Japan this instrument is called the 小切子 kokiriko, which I just think is a regular word, but I can't seem to find my dictionary right now to check it out, if anything interesting pans out, I'll be sure to update. (There are also a couple of other ways of writing this name, it seems)

The other thing interesting that came up during the lesson was a girl who speaks Spanish in the house, and English most elsewhere. A couple of times she told me that she wanted to "touch the guitar." As it turns out, she actually wanted to play the guitar, or at least bang on it a bit. By the second time I decided that it probably wasn't the quick-changing nature of children to suddenly want to start playing after fulfilling her desire just to hold the guitar.

Those hispanophones among us might be aware that the Spanish word tocar can be translated as both "to touch" and also "to play (a musical instrument, for instance)."

If I had to guess, it almost looks like she is mapping right off of Spanish and doing more or less a one to one translation and doesn't really sort out some of these finer points. For the most part this doesn't seem to affect her English, and most of her quirks are quite unrelated (she'll say miss instead of mister, and once in a while the other way around) but I'll have to pay more careful attention and see if any other examples show up.

Pop Vs. Soda, A Theory

It's a long story, and I really can't (nor want to) get into the details, but basically, it goes like this: This guy I met had apparently just moved to the area. I found out from a mutual acquaintance that they apparently offhand remark implying that referring to soda as pop, which is by far the norm for the area, was a "Jewish thing." I'm not really sure what the basis of this claim is, and it'd certainly be an interesting one to hear.

How serious he was, I really don't know. Not that I really thought it would go anywhere, but I decided to compare size and percentage of Jewish populations to usage of pop versus soda, and actually, it looks more the other way, that states with both high raw number and percentages of Jews are overwhelmingly soda-saying. New York is the notable exception, being split down the middle for pop and soda. Another interesting point is that his home state has the 2nd highest percentage of Jews, and the fourth in pure number (that's New Jersey, by the way).

Of course, I doubt that this could possibly be related, and in all likelihood he was trying to get a rise out of somebody or had some other kind of motivation for saying this. Or maybe he just lumped all of the "different" things together. I'm actually a little bit more aware of the circumstances that brought this about, but as I said before, I'm not going to really get into them. It's a curious remark though, isn't it?

Spanish Language(s)

Today I was talking to a puerto-rican girl, and we were talking in Spanish. She didn't quite believe me at first when I told her that I could speak Spanish. We chatted a little bit, and then she said something that I couldn't recognize at all (I couldn't even remember it, sadly). I told her that I did not understand, and her response was something along the lines of "that's because I'm speaking Puerto Rican."

Polyglot Curricula

I'm glad to hear that not only are local schools offering Chinese, but at different schools, students can elect to take Arabic, or ASL as their foreign language. Apparently the school offering Arabic as an elective feels that this better reflects the community, but I've only heard this through rumor. Certainly Arabic is a language on par with Chinese and Spanish in terms of their importance in world affairs. ASL seems to be a more academic choice. More and more I hear about how ASL assists with learning, and I also know that education programs at colleges are encouraging taking ASL and many schools highly value ASL (as well as Spanish).

My boss told me today that her son's teacher knows ASL and signs everything during class, and how he asks her to say things to her in "the language." On top of all of the benefits I referred to before, apparently the teacher will only sign certain things, and has the children do the same, keeping them quiet, making sure they are paying attention, as well as making it so they have to wait their turns. Find another language that does that!