Author: Muninn

An Hour with Hardeep

So here I am in Madison, Wisconsin, walking back to my motel room after dinner and I stop at a gas station on the side of the road to get some candy. As I open my wallet to pay, the man standing behind the inch of glass in front of me notices that I have an Oklahoma driver’s license and asks what I’m doing in Wisconsin. I said that I actually go to school in Boston and was here attending a conference. He then asked me what kind of conference it was. I said it was a conference on political trauma.

He looked a bit puzzled at the term so I asked him where he was from, India was the answer. I said, “Well, if we were to talk about political trauma in India, we might discuss the experience of the partition in ’47.” The man then got very excited and said, “Partition? I can tell you all about partition. You know, the only difference between educated and uneducated are the words that you use. You can use all sorts of words that I can’t but the ideas are all the same.” He then asked me if I had a gun, and when I assured him I didn’t, he unlocked the door to his little “office” and invited me in for a chat. What followed as an hourlong discussion and debate on the Indian partition (which I was happy to admit great ignorance about), religious and political violence, the virtues of British empire, racial profiling in America, and the war in Iraq.
Continue reading An Hour with Hardeep

More on Mixing Languages

I have written here on numerous occasions about the mixing of languages. It is the most basic fact of communication between Sayaka and me, as it is between many of my friends. The newest pattern to make itself felt in my life is the fact that, increasingly, conversations with my Korean friends that I got to know during my time studying in Japan or China have become a mix of Japanese and Korean (with the most frequent pattern being them speaking in Korean, me starting an answer in Korean, giving up, and then either switching to Japanese or Chinese, depending on what secondary language we have in common, or at least throwing in words with J/C pronunciation whenever I need to).

I have also seen how fundamental language mixing of various kinds is to communication in many Chinese-American and Japanese-American households I have had occasion to interact with since I moved to the US (and in many cases there is also the interesting pattern in which a parent will speak to a child in one language, but their child will respond only or mostly in another). In fact, while I have no stats to back this up and would love to read more substantial research on this, I suspect that this mixing of various idioms in daily conversation, and not just the occasional word that might be absent or awkward to say, is and has been a basic fact of life for peoples in many communities around the world both in our times and perhaps more so in ages past.

In fact, I have often felt that in exchange for the clarity, efficiency, and stronger guarantees of accurate transmission, as well as the powerful creative forces of new national literatures that standardizing and legitimating certain idioms at the state level has we have lost an appreciation for the rich and highly varied possibilities that language allows for. I’m not lamenting some kind of pre-modern paradise of inter-lingual bliss, but I do think the way we view languages and some of the philosophies behind language learning need a good re-thinking. More on this some other time…

I have often wondered when and how this language mixing starts. My own case is too messed up to be representative. While reading in the coffee shop today I tuned into an interesting discussion between two fluent (and most likely native) Chinese speakers, one of whom had a heavy Beijing or northern accent. Since we are on campus and they were older students, I assume they were graduate students, and they may be two of the many students here who complete their undergraduate degrees in China and come here for graduate school.

They seemed to be in disagreement about a lot of things, and by the time I tuned in, the topic of the conversation had shifted, to my surprise, to the Chinese historian Simaqian. What I found interesting was the language mixing that this student, who may have only been in the United States a few years, was engaged in. I have seen this on countless of other occasions but today paid closer attention to how it worked in this case. If one can make any generalizations from the small sample of the conversation that I overheard, the mixing had these characteristics: 1) The English words in the conversation were not always chosen because the equivalents in Chinese are unusual or awkward. For example, she would say something like, “司马迁，这个life…” or “他的那个complexity…” 2) Words that bridge or transition; that connect sentences, were sometimes said in English. Thus, she might shift gears in the middle of a sentence by saying, “Well, 我知道…” 3) Sometimes I think the English words were used, as is possible in the cases mentioned in (1) above, in order to emphasize a particular point. Other times, I was left with the impression that they were used for the same reason that my mother (who is Norwegian) will throw in an English word in: because it was frequently used recently in English, the English word just happens to come to mind before the word comes to mind in one’s “mother” tongue. I would be interested in some of the more permanent and large scale examples of this: cases where, instead of specific words getting adopted and absorbed into languages (which is what most often comes to mind when we think of change in language), there is a more permanent free and flexible, if sometimes arbitrary borrowing from other “languages understood in common” among people in a community. Although I’m sure there a long list of places one could go to in order to explore this, Hong Kong pops to mind as one place where I suspect that this might happen on a large scale. Taiwan is another… In fact, perhaps we might find that any place where you have an official language at odds with the idiom of the majority would be a good place to look for these patterns…I wish I had paid more attention in that undergraduate socio-linguistics class!

Word of the day: onomastic

As always, my reading provides me lots of opportunities to learn new words. In a discussion of the French royal cosmographer Thevet’s fantastical lists of creatures, places, and monuments:

In this exercise in Rabelaisian nomenclature, Colossus generates Column by, it seems, the repetition of a common radical; Ypodrome proceeds from pyramid by inverting the first two letters; and the Obelisk consummates, with its terminal erection, the alignment of Colossi with Columns by borrowing from them a pivotal vowel o. The onomastic play that represented, along with a vogue for anagrams and for the equivocal, one of the bases of the poetic science of the Renaissance.” Frank Lestringant Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery U of C Press, 1994, 34.

Onomastic apparently means, “of or relating to the study of the history and origin of proper names.”

Early Modern Food Delivery?

Though it is an unhealthy attitude, I admit, I find that meals and eating really are the most annoying interruptions to my daily schedule. The options are many (making food, eating out, pizza delivery, etc.) but everything, including the eating takes time and money.

I wonder when home delivery of food (in the US, pizza seems to dominate, but in places like Japan and Korea, I get the feeling no single thing really completely dominates the very diverse food delivery market in the same way) started? It looks like the German philosopher Leibniz was doing something of this sort:

“At home, he was monarch of all he surveyed; he always took his meals alone. He had not stated times for them, and no domestic staff. He sent out to a cook-shop for something to eat and took whatever was going. Very often he slept the night in his chair, and woke up none the less refreshed at seven or eight in the morning…” quoted in Hazard, Paul The European Mind 1680-1715 (1952), p234″

Footnotes for Weblogs Revisited

Early last year I tried to work out a convenient and simple way to incorporate footnotes into blog entries. The solution I settled on didn’t work well and I quite using it. I looked into it again today and found an excellent piece of coding over at Brandspankingnew for Footnotes with CSS which I think works well. The code there shows you how to get some embedded footnote information in a “Span” tag to get put together with all other footnotes at the bottom of your article, complete with anchor links back and forth.

All I had to do to make this work with a weblog is incorporate this code into the WordPress theme. For my own reference and for anyone else who wants to try here is how I did this with my WordPress installation:

1) Upload this Javascript file (on my server here if the link dies) to your server and remember where you put it.

2) Add this css code to your WordPress theme’s styles.css file. Modify it to your liking, this will change the appearance of the footnotes themselves.

3) In your theme’s post.php file, change <div class=”post-content”> to <div id=”post<?php the_ID(); ?>” class=”post-content”>

4) In the same post.php file, add the code <div id=”post<?php the_ID(); ?>notes” class=”footnoteholder”></div> after the div tag labelled class=”post-content” which we changed in (3).

5) In your theme’s index.php file, just before the body tag is closed at the bottom of the file (before the ), add:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
//< ![CDATA[
<?php rewind_posts(); ?>
< ?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
formatFootnotes(“post< ?php the_ID(); ?>”,”post< ?php the_ID(); ?>notes”);
< ?php endwhile; ?>

//]]>
</script>

6) Also the same index.php file, add the line

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://the-address-to-the-javascript-file/formatFootnotes.js”></script>

just before the closing of the head tag (). (remember to change the address to point to wherever you uploaded the javascript)

7) Now we have to steps (5) and (6) for the single.php file and the category.php as well, which controls how your blog entries look like when they are viewed as a single posting or when a series of postings are viewed from the same category. Add the script just above the closing of the body tag () and add the call to the javascript from step (6) just above the closing of the header tag in both the single.php and category.php theme files.

That should be all there is to it. To create a footnote, simply embed it into a span tag with the class “footnote” like this: <span class=”footnote”>Lawson, Konrad Mitchell<em>My great book</em></span> and then it should come out looking like this.Lawson, Konrad Mitchell My great book

I figured this out by basically studying the great example provided by Brandspankingnew.net here and then going to the WordPress website and learning about template tags and template loops, with the most important information on this page under the category of multiple loops. Good luck to anyone else who tries! Here are a fewMy second footnote footnotesMy third footnote. to show how it works.My fourth footnote!

After writing this up, I found via a quick search that someone else has been working on footnotes for wordpress at Elvery.net. It looks very similar, may use the same footnote code, but comes in the form of a wordpress plugin which may be much easier. Also, Alex King has something which also looks really wonderful for this, called JS QuickTags but I haven’t tried it on my own server (if it ain’t broke…).

NOTES & UPDATES: I need to work more on this, for example, there is the question of what to do with RSS/atom feeds, in which the spans don’t get converted to footnotes…

1708 Nicolas de Fer on the Scandinavians

Nicolas de Fer, geographer to the French royal court had this to say about Scandinavians in 1708:

“The Swedes are an honest and courageous folk and fond of the arts and sciences. The air of their country is clear, keen and salubrious; their forests are the haunt of numerous wild and ferocious animals. The Danes are more or less the same in their manners and customs as the Swedes. The Norwegians appear to be of a simpler type, and are very frank and ingenuous.” Paul Hazard The European Mind 1680-1715 Yale U Press 1952

I had to look up ingenuous: “(of a person or action) innocent and unsuspecting. See note at GULLIBLE.” at the note under gullible it says, “implies the simplicity of a child without the negative overtones.”

Word of the day: lampadophory

Again, studying in the library together, my friend Brendan pointed out an unusual word in one of our readings for our Early Modern European Intellectual History Class. Here is a sentence from Trever-Roper’s “The Religious Origins of the Englightenment”:

It is interesting to observe the continuity…between the political radicals of yesterday and today: to see the torch, so nearly dropped from the failing hands of the last Whigs, skillfully caught and carried on by their successors, the first Marxists. This transfer of the same formula to different hands, this neat theoretical lampadophory, occurred at the close of the last century.”Trever-Roper’s The European Witch-Craze p194

The word, lampadophory, comes, according the Oxford English Dictionary, from lampadedromy, an old greek word meaning:

A torch-race; a race (on foot or horseback) in which a lighted torch was passed from hand to hand.

Why do we bless those who sneeze?

As we were studying together in the library one afternoon my friend and fellow historian Brendan pointed out a wonderful little passage from the Essays of Montaigne that he was reading at the time:

Do you ask me whence comes the custom of blessing those who sneeze? We produce three sorts of wind: that which comes from below is too foul; that which comes through the mouth implies some reproach of gluttony; the third is sneezing, and, because it comes from the head and is blameless, we give it this honourable greeting.Essays of Montaigne Harvard University Press, 1925. p74

I see that it has received mention elsewhere on the net, including the excellent Language Log. You can read a different translation of the whole essay, “Of Coaches” here.

Korean Websites

As most foreigners who have been to Korea know, it is infuriatingly difficult to use a lot of Korean websites or order products online unless you have a Korean citizen’s registration number. The fact that unless you are using Internet Explorer and Windows many useful websites hardly function doesn’t help either, but the registration number is far more disruptive. Even the most simple tasks can been damn near impossible. This is a shame – it is a big fat slap in the face to all foreigners who want to do anything in the Korean online world, even if they master the Korean language.

I am told that even if you have an official Alien registration number, which has the same number of digits as the Korean citizen’s number, you still have problems. Read more at this article over at Korea Focus, written by a professor at Hanyang University and Hanoemo (The Korean-Speaking Foreigners Club). As it says:

Each year, the thousands of foreigners who come to Korea to learn the Korean language receive an ARN. In addition, tens of thousands of other people, including foreign company employees, teachers, and workers, come to Korea each year – all of whom receive an ARN. The number assigned to them remains theirs even after they return home from Korea. Most foreigners who have lived in Korea for an extended period of time will probably continue to maintain an interest in or seek to do some work that is related to Korea. It is my firm belief that these people can play a crucial role in helping to further invigorate the Korean economy and improve Korea’s image abroad. It is like sending out thousands of supporting Korean ambassadors around the world every year.

However, this golden opportunity to promote Korea will be lost to some extent if these individuals are not provided with the chance to participate in Korean media and culture. With hallyu (the Korean wave) sweeping across Asia, Korea should take advantage of every opportunity to assure the continuation of this phenomenon. Attention needs to be focused on the sheer disregard with which Korean corporations and the Korean media treat those motivated to come here to work and to learn about this country. (For those who would like to express their support for a law forcing organizations to accept the ARN, please sign the online petition found at: http://www.petitiononline.com/korea/petition.html.

I signed the petition and I hope you will to. Until this situation changes (and perhaps it has since this article was published or since I was in Korea), foreigners in Korea or interested in Korea will be left in an online ghetto.