Adventitious Carols 6: Jing Le Belles

jing le belles
jing le belles
jing le all the way
o what fun it is to pun
bilingually today-eh!

da sheng through the snow
on a one-horse ou pen sleigh
o'er the fields we go
mandarin all the wei..

Pejorative Accuracy

I was idly sifting through the American news (well, at least the US part of it) when I realised that three terms used pejoratively in such media could certainly be applied to me in some contexts. These three terms are 'un-American', 'useful idiot' and 'fellow traveler'.

I am certainly un-American. Actually, I am completely non-American. And I am also a useful idiot when I have to be, as well as a fellow traveler to those whose causes I sympathize with. There you have it, accurate self-pejoration.

Misinterpretation

The science of analysis of language is dying. Over the last few weeks, what I write has been misinterpreted by otherwise intelligent people not a few times. That seems to be because they interpolate and extrapolate without sufficient justification.

I do try very hard to be careful with my words. However, in the past this has led to accusations of deviousness.

This is how it happens: I say or write something. Somebody else interprets it wrongly, looks stupid. Blames me for what I didn't say. Is shocked when I defend myself and then accuses me of being devious by laying a trap in my words for people to fall into...

Sigh. There is almost always a very good reason for putting my thoughts in such a form — I deliberately avoid saying things I don't mean or which I cannot verify; I use phrases like 'seems to be' or 'might imply that' when the degree of certainty is not as firm as I would prefer it to be.

Language and Truth

Reading China Miéville's latest book, Embassytown, one has the gruesome thought that Ursula Le Guin and Jack Vance have decided to play a terrible joke by sending young Miéville a bunch of the naughtiest linguistic ideas ever and letting him run wild.

What if language could only express truth as perceived by a sentient biological mind (how ever defined)? There are enormous consequences — for a start, you could use successful communication as a test for sentience of the biological sort, or for mind. And you would be able to trust any language-based communication too.

The idea is so large it boggles the mind. Wittgenstein would have risen from his grave to see this happening.

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Quote of the day: "It made sense that they would try. It would have been an elegant imperial manoeuvre. Counter-revolution through language pedagogy and bureaucracy."

Rune

From the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of the Irish Language:

Rún: a) something hidden or occult, a mystery or hidden meaning; b) a secret; c) secret thoughts or wishes, intention, purpose; d) full consciousness, knowledge; e) darling, love.

As I am fond of telling my students, the Celts were (in)famous for things starting with B — booze, bronze, bards and britches. These thoughts may or may not be related.

Oceanic

There's always been the problem of pitting American English against British English as if the two were like Hokkien Chinese and Cantonese Chinese, or French and Spanish. People are mentally fragile when it comes to arguments about dialect, basilect and acrolect.

This need not be so. Eventually, one suspects, we'll all be speaking trans-Atlantic English with trans-Pacific modifications. And it would be so much more beautiful if we adopted trans-Indianic cadences.

By this I mean that the dialect with the spectrum ranging from New England to Old England will be modified by the tendencies evinced from California to Japan and South-East Asia, hopefully with elements of the many syntaxes and accents found from Johannesburg and up and across the Old Ocean to Bombay and back down to Singapore.

Such is the beauty of English; it is so plain and yet so protean that it can easily be made beautiful in many ways — it is polymorphically crystalline when viewed in some ways. Will we end up speaking American English? Or will American English have become un-American by then? After all, look what happened to British English, that mysterious and imaginary animal.

New Words From Old

Tonight under the yellow light I read by, I am learning the old anew. I learn that the word 'ginger' comes from Greek zingiberis, a transliteration of Sanskrit srngavera (from a town on the Ganges); I learn that 'pepper' comes from Greek péperi, transliterated from Sanskrit pippali (a berry); even 'sugar' is not safe, it is from Greek sákkharon, transliterated from Sanskrit sarkara (grit).

I learn that it goes further back, and even further. Most of the languages I have studied come severely altered by, or have their origins in, the obsessive-compulsive disorder that was Sanskrit. Sanskrit grammar was based on super-encoded Vedic sutra-learning which only the brilliant could master; all else was dialect, with no dialectic synthesis.

And there were indeed four Chinese pilgrims who went in search of western learning. They journeyed to their west on a quest to find authentic Buddhist scriptures. They were also separated across a period roughly from 400 AD to 671 AD. The last of these returned to Sri Vijaya to transcribe what he had learnt until 695, translating from Sanskrit to Chinese.

On page 195 of this tome I am earnestly studying, Ostler tells us that Krishna's advice to Arjuna could as easily have been given to Achilles at Troy a thousand years before or Cú Chulainn at Connacht a thousand years later. What continuity of sentiment and philosophy!

Hymn to Speech

The concept of the logos is not a new one, and not even as newly ancient as most believe. Here is a hymn from the Rig Veda, originally in the Sanskrit:

When, O Lord of the Universe, the Wise established
Name-giving, the first principle of language,
That which was excellent in them, that which was pure,
Hidden deep within, through love was brought to light...

Many a man who sees does not see the Word,
And many a man who hears does not hear It.
Yet for another it reveals itself,
Like a radiant bride yielding to her husband.

Sometimes, there is an unlooked-for beauty in the earliest roots of things. Those who dig around in the Greek and Aramaic, the Latin and the Hebrew of the Book should also look elsewhere.

Language as a Way of Knowing

Lector, si argumentum requiris, circumspice. Or something like that.

Interesting

It seems that I have become a person whose words sometimes loom larger than life. It happens, and it is not always a happy event. After all, as St James said, the tongue is a naughty thing. And of course, making it more powerful leads to naughtier outcomes.

So it is, that when I say a day will be interesting, I am suddenly surrounded by clouds of people speculating on why it will be interesting and how so. It seems to be assumed that I am such a connoisseur of 'interesting' that a day I deem interesting is of the kind that would be horribly fascinating to anyone else.

No, no. When I say a day will be interesting, it mostly means that I have identified a point of certain interest to me. When I say a day looks like it will be interesting, it normally means that it seems that way, but may not turn out to be.

I would like to think that I am a normal human, with as much precognitive talent as the rest. My prognostications ('foreknowledgings'?) are to be taken with as much sense of foreshadowing and preternatural insight as anyone else's. Mostly. Normally.

All Shall Be Well

As the blessed dame Julian of Norwich said, "All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well." And she also said, "Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. Everything passes away except God." And thus did I conclude that the blessed dame had a habit (haha) of saying all manner of things in trinities.

So too it is with the most puissant Argonaut, who in days past counselled me saying, "In our island are the evils of (parental) insecurity, (student) inadequacy, and (teacher) incompetency. It is certain that someone should profit from this insanity. Let it therefore be us, for at least we are competent, conscientious, and clever."

Half a day ago, I had lunch with several very kindly and decent fellow professionals. I learnt a lot about things I had guessed were true, and of which I had heard rumours. The whole thing was painful because it forced me to remember things best forgotten; and yet, it was a good thing because sometimes we must face that which we most dislike.

But all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. And if not, one might still have recourse to the extended vocabulary of one's ancestral legacy. Whatever that might be.

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Note: The good friar tells me that 'twas not Julian of Norwich but Teresa of Avila for the second quote. Blessed, both.

Responses 007 (2011-2012)

The seventh question of this year's list is one on a theme close to my heart: " 'The vocabulary we have does more than communicate our knowledge; it shapes what we can know.' Evaluate this claim with reference to different areas of knowledge."

I have a suspicion that most people would equate 'the vocabulary we have' to 'language'. That's because 'vocabulary', strictly speaking, is a Latinate word describing a list of words and their standard acceptable meanings. However, that might be overly restrictive when managing the question given.

Why? Because in modern usage, a vocabulary can be taken to be the complete set of tools, techniques, processes, symbols and actions used to express oneself. That is why we can speak of a vocabulary of dance, of visual imagery, or of non-verbal communication.

This has to be borne in mind when one parses the second part of the claim. A vocabulary certainly communicates knowledge. But the claim is that one's range of knowledge is confined, restricted, or otherwise shaped by the constraints of one's vocabulary — not just language, but all the contents of one's 'communications toolbox'.

That claim is not a new one. It is found in constructs like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and other ideas about linguistic relativity. These range between two extremes.

At the 'weak' end, theories of linguistic relativity merely assert that different people have different languages, and since language also encodes nuances of thought and culture, some things can only be communicated if the language to do so is available. At the 'strong' end, the hypothesis suggests that language capability controls what a person thinks and how a person can think.

This is one key to understanding how the question should be approached. If a thought cannot be expressed or communicated using available components in one's toolbox, then doesn't one's vocabulary control what one can understand, and hence have knowledge about?

Once this is assumed, then the second part of the question comes into play. To what extent do different areas of knowledge rely on vocabulary?

Certain areas of knowledge have some capacity to bypass communication (as in religion or the aesthetics). In such areas, it may be true that you cannot express something completely in words and yet can have knowledge of it (think of the Biblical phrase 'the peace that passes all understanding', for example). If this is the case, then the original claim may be less significant or less true — or the definition of knowledge in the area may be less sharply defined than in other areas.

Well, that's a possible position to look at. There are lots more, and if you attempt this question, take the opportunity to extend your vocabulary.

Hamartia

I had a very funny conversation just yesterday on that ubiquitous vehicle of social communication, FacePalm (well, that's what it might be called when books are dead). A certain fellow made the statement, "Apparently fatness is a worse sin than embezzlement." I replied, "...fatness is normally judged to be a minor flaw... ."

And then, the unhappy fellow decided to have an argument. He does that a lot, this young man. He told me, "Fatness is not a flaw. Of any kind."

For those of you who don't quite see the contradiction, it is one Aristotle would have spotted at once. For that old Greek used the word hamartia (ἁμαρτία) to denote a flaw. That same word was translated 'sin' in the New Testament.

Someone who says that fatness is apparently a sin of any sort must a) hold that opinion, b) believe that someone else holds that opinion, c) imagine that such an opinion exists, or d) be putting words together without reason and coming up with a line that implies one of the first three without him knowing it.

I was therefore very amused when this fellow then told me that I was equivocating or dodging his point when I justified my use of 'flaw'. He hadn't actually advanced any point except that he seemed to be upset with my use of 'flaw' with regard to his own use of 'sin'.

Sometimes, because of the way FacePalm hides earlier comments, it is genuinely possible to lose self-awareness and talk rubbish. This is a serious flaw, and I blame FacePalm and its ilk for making people like me and that poor fellow vulnerable to it.

A Brief Taxonomy of Ill-Speaking

When people say they are cursing, swearing, or otherwise indulging in whatever we tend to acknowledge as 'bad speech' or 'verbal insults', what possible kinds of activity are they discussing? There are actually academic tomes and histories of such maledictory arts, and having read a few, I know that a mere blog post cannot adequately describe the range. Yet, I will now attempt to give a brief account of how to classify such activities, while supplying mild and non-lethal examples.

1. Verbal insults can be classified firstly by parts of speech. Generally, a noun is applied with the intention of giving an unflattering image of the target (e.g. 'Pig!') Similarly, an adjective attributes an unflattering characteristic to the target (e.g. 'Ugly!') A verb is normally an action that you hope will result in negative outcome (e.g. 'Die!'). These are the main ones. However, note that centuries of bad grammar and misuse have made some words take on the properties of several different parts of speech — one such word, now taken to connote the act of defaecation, is discussed here.

2. Verbal insults can be classified by conversational function. An expletive is an exclamation that serves to fill a lacuna or void in conversation, when the speaker cannot think of anything else that will serve. For example, 'My pet snail died yesterday...' is a sad observation to which the expletive reply might be, 'Damn!' — a word that has no meaning but expresses the negative (possibly sympathetic) response of the respondent. On the other hand, an ejaculation is more forceful, and occurs when the respondent is taken by surprise. You can hear such ejaculative responses, for example, when a person using a hammer misses and hits a finger instead. A third kind of conversational function is insulting banter, in which friends trade random insults as a means of re-establishing old ties; for example, 'Hey, you old cow, I haven't seen you in ages!'

3. Verbal insults can also have rhetorical function. However, these are more elaborate cases, such as satire, sarcasm, and other forms of witty assault. I shall not attempt to cover this.

4. Verbal insults can be classified by their material content. If an insult has to do with bodily functions that are normally executed in private (I'm sure you need no elaboration), then technically, it is obscenity. If an insult has to do with irreligious (or secular) matters or behaviours (e.g. 'Dammit!') then it is profanity. If an insult involves taking the Divine name (or any other revered spiritual being's name) in vain, then it is blasphemy. If the insult contains aspersions intended to defame the target, then it is denigration: often, the denigration is indirect and has to do with the target's ancestry (which is why so many insults begin with 'your mother'). Lastly, if the insult contains material that is intended to invoke ill-fortune or other negative consequences upon someone, then it is malediction. [Note: technically, all 'bad speech' is malediction, but from an historical point of view, the word 'malediction' has slowly come to mean 'cursing' in the sense of inviting bad things to happen to someone.]

5. Finally, there are legal classifications of verbal insults. The most well-known is 'slander', which is interpreted differently in different jurisdictions. I won't go there, since I am not a legal scholar.

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In conclusion, I have to say that this is not intended as a manual for the would-be maledictor. Rather, it's a list of personal observations about the creative use of language when the human animal is feeling negative about something and needs to vent. I don't recommend any of this, but being human, I have occasionally fallen prey to such verbal behaviours. It's probably best to try to control the tongue; perhaps reciting this post before saying anything will engage the brain enough to prevent anything else from emerging. And may you indulge in better speech, 'with God to guide the way', as a certain school's anthem says.

Old Thoughts

Donne's famous Meditation XVII tends to eclipse his other works in the mind of modern man, perhaps because the phrase 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' was etched by Hemingway on the modern literary consciousness. But Donne wrote profusely and entertainingly, and what he wrote is good basis material for people professing to know anything about 'Knowledge and Inquiry', as some in Atlantis do these days.

For example, in Meditation XX, he writes:

The arts and sciences are most properly referred to the head; that is their proper element and sphere; but yet the art of proving, Logic, and the art of persuading, Rhetoric, are deduced to the hand, and that expressed by a hand contracted into a fist, and this by a hand enlarged, and expanded; and evermore the power of man, and the power of God himself is expressed so, 'All things are in his hand'. Neither is God so often presented to us, by names that carry our consideration upon counsel, as upon execution of counsel; he is oftener called the Lord of Hosts, than by all other names, that may be referred to the other signification.

Such thoughts are interesting. They dig deep into the heart of language and the hidden assumptions we make in the use of metaphor and image. It would be valuable even for those who care nothing for Christianity and its range of cultures and cultural history, to undertake the equivalent exercise into their own ideas, models, tropes and schemata.

Contextualising Heteroglossic Discourses

Amazing title for a post, for which I have to thank Potash, that most caustic and clever of commentators. I nicked it off the first chapter of his dissertation.

What it really means, of course, is that we take all the wonderfully varied things that different people say about a particular topic and we put them all into some kind of context. It is a rewarding activity; you synthesize stuff, and if you are good, the stuff speaks to you.

By analysing Potash's work, I've come to realise that I am incapable of using that level of discourse in which five-syllable words are routinely bandied about and used in artful ambush of the innocent intellect. He is just too good at it, and I think I need a few more years to catch up — years that I don't have.

But I don't think I need to use five-syllable words. I've come to realise that just as in the stories of primitive societies, great complexity can be found in simple ideas, couched in simple words.

For example, these lines from the great bard of modern Wales:

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true 

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon 

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. 

O may my heart’s truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year’s turning.

Too beautiful for words, almost. The miracle is that he was able to put all that blood and fire into the water of his voice.

Plurality

ARGH. The plural of 'talisman' is NOT 'talismen'. Just because a noun ends in 'man' doesn't mean the plural ends in 'men', unless the word originally indicates some sort of 'man'. I mean, the plural of 'Roman' isn't 'Romen', is it? And neither is the plural of 'shaman' 'shamen'.

The plurals of 'talisman' and 'shaman' are 'talismans' and 'shamans' respectively, just as the plural of 'Roman' is 'Romans'. I am incredibly irritated by people who get the obvious plurals wrong. I don't mind if people think the plural of 'octopus' is 'octopi' or 'octopuses' (it ought to be 'octopodes') because nobody ever uses the real plural; the same goes for 'cyclops' (singular) and 'cyclopes' (plural).

The plural of 'cow' ought to be 'kine', just as the plural of 'sow' is 'swine'. But 'cows' and 'sows' do fine. Modern English is forgiving of those who just tack on an 's' to the end of a noun to make a plural. You only come a cropper when you get too clever and experiment with the irregular forms.

It's like the old problem of finding a plural for 'Lexus'. 'Lexuses' should be OK. If you want forms that are irregular to English, you'd have to worry about using 'Lexi', since the -us ending is normally pluralised by changing it to -i (as in 'radius' and 'radii'). However, if you want to be pedantic about it, you might want to refer to this relatively complicated section which will show you the mysteries of Latin and Greek plurals, and may initiate you into the study of supposedly more logical languages than English.

If you looked carefully at the page linked to in the previous paragraph, you may have realised (if you don't already know) that the plural of 'datum' is 'data', just as the plural of 'stratum' is 'strata'. This means that you ought to say, 'The data are bad,' and not 'The data is bad.' You would also come to the conclusion that the plural of 'Mercedes' (itself irregular in that context) should be 'Mercedei' (which sounds better than 'Mercedeses' anyway).

And, oh yes, to my friends who have just left school, an alumnus is a male ex-student; 'alumna' is the female form. The plurals of 'alumnus' and 'alumna' are respectively 'alumni' and 'alumnae'. Clear? *grin*

Disincentivization

I amused myself this morning, to the detriment of productivity, by looking at ugly words while anticipating even uglier ones. Although there are many ugly words in circulation, and people have taken to banning what they think are the more egregious ones (like 'czar' when used to denote a multidisciplinary bureaucrat, or the equivalent), there are few that actually hurt the brain and the eyes which are the windows thereto.

One such word is the title of this post. It is aesthetically ugly. It has hidden connotations which are etymologically unsound. It has nothing to do with innocents, incense, cents, or the like. It has to be considered cautiously in order to be parsed correctly. Yes, indeed, it does refer to the practice, process or state of having incentive(s) removed.

Surely the disciples of Gowers et al can mount an effective response? If not, we are all doomed. Or at the very least, disincentivized.

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Note: Technically, it should be 'disincentivised', since the core word (incentivus, 'to strike up a tune') is Latin and shouldn't have a suffix equivalent to Greek -izein, which does have a 'z'.

Responses 009 (2010-2011)

Question 9 in the recent list was a shocker in its blandness — or at least, its perceived simplicity. "Discuss the roles of language and reason in history." That was all, and of course, to students who think that history is just another discipline, this would look easy.

The problem is that history, like art, is one of the BIG core disciplines of knowledge. History is one of the two parents of science; as late as the 19th century, science was either called 'natural history' or 'natural philosophy'. As I've mentioned before, in the posts of the 'Drawing Lines' series back in May 2009 in this blog, there is a very very thin line between history and science, and they are much more alike than people seem to think.

Consider this scenario. A community of professionals obtains and accumulates data. Then they select the most reliable data points by a mixture of methodologies such as critical comparison, cross-referencing, and context. Then they collate these data points and synthesize a body of data which is converted by analysis into a body of information and then knowledge. A critical appraisal follows, and then a conclusion is reached. While all this is going on, elements of the same community keep testing the analysis and conclusions by obtaining new data. Regular publishing and peer review keep the discussion alive and healthy.

Question: is this community composed of historians or scientists? Answer: you can't tell.

But wait, some will say, where is the hypothesis, where is the experiment, where is the inductive or deductive process? They must be historians!

Ha, I would have to say that if your idea of science is purely Baconian (i.e. stolen from Arab and Indian science) or Aristotelian (i.e. stolen from misinterpreted Greek texts) or Popperian (i.e. a negative definition of reality), then Newton and Hawking and Feynman would have harsh words with you. The fact is that there are many areas of science not susceptible to conventional hypothesis or experiment; and all areas of historical research use induction or deduction in various phases.

The thing about history is that its final output, the historical narrative, is a synthesis of historical data points. The most important data points are accounts (oral or written) and artifacts. With Aristotle (who claimed that all things consist of substance given structure), one can argue that these are the substance of history; the process which forms the narrative is the structural principle of history.

By direct comparison, a large part of the substance of history is therefore language, and it is the form in which the narrative is delivered as well. Since language is subject to the classical communication model (i.e. something is put into code, the code is transmitted, the transmission is received, the receipt is decoded, the decoding should give the original something) it is subject to the usual errors (bad coding, bad transmission and/or bad decoding), made worse by time and cultural bias. This is most true of cultural history and least true of scientific history, although there may be localised exceptions. Because historical narratives are in danger of being seen as narratives first and history second, extra pains must be taken to evaluate whether the style and presentation of content are being manipulated (consciously or not) so as to bias the receiver's perception of what the narrative means.

By the same comparison, the structural principle of history is a kind of reason that is mainly to do with chronological sequencing, cause-and-effect, evidence for conjectures about social phenomena, and deduction from empirical findings. Since historical reason may suffer from the problems (in this case) of incomplete data and error from data sources (i.e. the data are there but may be compromised in some way), there may be gaps filled in by plausible conjecture. This kind of reasoning is found in evaluations, for example, of the King Arthur legend — we know somebody (or some bodies) balked the Saxon colonization of Britain for a time, and we can deduce a lot from the accounts and artifacts, but we'll never know the real Arthur. When examining historical narratives, pains must be taken to identify the gaps and evaluate how much is conjecture and how well supported such conjectures may be.

It's interesting to evaluate Samuel Huntington's 1993 book The Clash of Civilisations along these lines. It's not a good historical narrative, although it's a brilliant conceptual trick. He's wrong about some key things, because his historical underpinnings are very shaky. It's an example of how linguistic manipulation can lead to false reasoning and be used to create an iffy narrative. (That book was published 16 years ago, so any IB student who wants to clobber Huntington in a History extended essay can do it now.)

So... what are the roles of language and reason in History? Ha, I think there's enough here to act as a starting-point.

'Inspiration' (Part II): Psychobabbleon (And On, And On...)

As Trivandrum pointed out, the bowels of that ancient city and one-time Babylon of the West have vomited forth a great edict concerning what they used to do and now swear never to do again... indulging in bureaucratese. The reason that this particular piece was so inspirational to so many is that this great city was once the headquarters of the largest corporate dominion ever created by humans.

Oh, do not blame the Americans; they are but a young and benighted nation compared to that great Lion of the Sea!

Unfortunately, I have yet to think of a version for the education sector that won't be immediately recognizable as proceeding from the mouth of... urgh. Let us not think about it, but pray. I shall leave this as a stub for now.