streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 2:15 pm on September 7, 2015 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: DNA ( 45 ), entropy, genome ( 5 ), language   

  Language Genome Project, to Order and Disorder… 

  

  DNA as word as DNA as word as DNA as word as DNA as word as DNA as word as DNA as word as DNA

  Isn’t it lovely and wonderful how language works: spinning out new words that reflect our life and times, just like ringing a bell, just like speed-dialing GMO’s? A prominent scientist once remarked that language evolution works ‘just like DNA, for no special reason; it just does.’ That includes the creation of high-tech-related words like ‘google, crowdfund, declutter, photobomb, sext, retweet,’ etc., all newly minted in the OED, and still many others, not so high-tech, and maybe not yet ready for prime-time, like ‘twerk, bitch-slap, slut-shame, shit-show, and one I just read up on about the lovely Miss Minaj: ‘tone-police’.

  What does this say about us as a people? I’m not sure that I want to know. Then there are many new words which merely reflect the evolving structure of language itself, in which grammatical inflections are deemphasized from their original purposes, and nouns are recast as verbs, adjectives, etc. and vice-versa, hence: decisioning, decidualize, Christianist, etc. Isn’t it great? They say SAT scores are at their lowest point in a decade; I wonder why. Riffing on that scientist’s previous point of language imitating life, maybe it’s time to discuss the law of entropy as it pertains to language…

   

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  hardie karges 2:05 pm on September 1, 2015 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: cliche, language   

  Cliches’ For Sale–Cheap: Comfort-food lingo that no longer counts… 

  I figure that language is our DNA, the DNA of our culture. Nothing is more exciting than a new piece of language or a well-turned phrase, BUT… nothing is staler than yesterday’s cornflakes or over-used clichés. Given our feverish climate of social media and anti-social behavior, this can happen with startling rapidity these days. By the time you’re really starting to get a kick out of saying that new phrase ‘that all the kids are saying’–it’s too late. The vacuum seal has been broken. Mold is accumulating on the outer surface and the sweet sickly smell of decay is beginning to infect, then pervade. These are prime current candidates for removal from our daily vocabulary:

  1) Anything ‘best ever’–STOPPPPP!!!!!
  2) Anything that you just ‘love love love’ in triplicate. One ‘love’ is enough. Twice loved=thrice shy…
  3) Anything that’s ‘Just wow!’… I mean: really? Is that the best you can do? Just sayin’…
  Hey, that’s another one! (yes, I’m one of the worst offenders; sometimes it seems like my whole life is one big cliché)…
  4) “Just sayin”…

  The good thing is that sometimes after a long absence, bringing old phrases back into current use can be good fun. For example: when’s the last time you used the word ‘groovy’? Try it! The basic idea is to keep it fresh and unexpected. That’s all that really matters. You gotta’ love it… WAIT!

  5) “Gotta love it”…

  Of course, to intentionally used clichés to make a point about clichés is a special use–reported speech, i.e.feedback–protected by law and copyright conventions…

  We’ll be back after a break for station identification. Stay tuned for more!
   
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  hardie karges 1:08 pm on July 30, 2015 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Chinese ( 2 ), language   

  Language Genes, Blue Jeans, and the DNA of Culture… 

  It’s easy to see how written alphabetic language becomes ideographic language, reading too fast to even notice the little spaces between vowels and consonants, much less the little gaps between verbs and nouns, so in that sense Chinese ideograms, originating from pictures, are ahead of the pack, just not conducive to the learning by increments of an alphabet imitating sound more or less. All alphabets originated from pictures, but quickly changed plans. Is there a single Chinese character to give the same meaning as ROTFLMFAO? I bet it looks like a dog…

   
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  hardie karges 3:04 pm on June 13, 2015 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Ellipses, Hash tags, language   

  So Just Call Me Elliptical: I Remember when a #Hashtag was… 

  I remember when a ‘hashtag’ was called… a ‘pound sign’ to be exact, or maybe ‘number sign’, and I still use it to mean ‘number’, not ‘look at this’ or #look at me# in some so-called social medium neither rare nor well-done… the rest is history…

  It’s a sad commentary when the broadcast network evening news is nothing but a re-hash of the day’s You Tube highlights long since published on Internet and social media; that’s why I watch BBC, and al-Jazeera, anything but Russia Today, RT for YT, day for night, that’s entertainment…

  I prefer three dots over hash-tags any day BTW, used to be called ellipses and have the limited function of substituting for the missing parts of discontinued narrative, with no change in meaning, until they came to represent the missing synapses of disconnected narrative, with no similarity in meaning implied whatsoever… #Twitter got nothing on Herb Caen, much less L.F. Celine, the writer and doctor not the solution…

   
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  hardie karges 11:08 am on February 25, 2015 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language, linguistics ( 13 ), schadenfraude   

  Linguistics 101: the Uncertainty Principle 

  EMPATHY: the feeling you get knowing that you’re basking in the Arizona sun at temps of 72f/22c while the rest of the country is still digging out from the latest snow…

  GUILT: the feeling you get knowing that you’re basking in the Arizona sun at temps of 72f/22c while the rest of the country is still digging out from the latest snow…

  SCHADENFRAUDE: the feeling you get knowing that you’re basking in the Arizona sun at temps of 72f/22c while the rest of the country is still digging out from the latest snow…

   
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  hardie karges 5:46 pm on February 24, 2015 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: calculus, DNA ( 45 ), Go game, kidney stones, language, math   

  Renal Calculus and Differential Equations: DNAANDDNA of Language 

  I don’t know why kidney stones make me think of math any more than I know why the word ‘calculus’ is named for pebbles, BUT: I think the two are connected.  I think all language is connected if you go back far enough, only question is whether it was assembled from the ground up or whether it came down from priests and scholars up above (on the pyramid).  I’m going to suggest that basic naming words may have been created and shared amongst the peasant populace first, but the priests and scholars likely did all the rest.

  Still, this is no mean feat.  I mean, it’s not like we make up new words every day.  We don’t.  We adapt what’s already there.  Just look what ultimately derived from that proto-word for ‘pebble’ as probably first enunciated somewhere on the Anatolian peninsula or nearby Eurasian steppes, something that probably sounded a lot like ‘cal’ (Spanish for ‘limestone’ btw) or maybe ‘kalk’: calcium, calculate, chalk, calculus, caulk, calendar (maybe) and… the list goes on.

  If my theory is correct, I wonder how many naming words existed before the priests and scholars got wise (pun) to it? It is known that ‘core vocabulary’ consisted of body parts (makes sense, just throw in some onomatopoeia) AND (drum roll here)… small numbers. Thus the act of counting (or calculating, if you will), using pebbles, no doubt, is intrinsic to language.  Cool.

  So sentences are equations, so to speak.  That means grammar. Yuk.  There is no shortcut.  There is no way to ‘Learn Any Language in Three Weeks’.  That’s BS.  That’s marketing.  Throw that book away.  Throw that program away.  Save your money.  They’re laughing at you on the way to the bank.  If you want to crack the code, then crack the book.  There are different study methods, sure, and handy ways to ‘hack’ any language.  Try them all, then crack the book.  There are no freebies in life, except life itself… now let’s play ‘Go’.  Chinese chess.  Weiqi.  Japanese, maybe?

   
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  hardie karges 3:40 am on December 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language, Lao, THAI ( 5 )   

  Thailand, the land of smiles, is no different. 

  Those smiles are for foreigners, not their own estranged brothers. Comedians will come on TV in Thailand and recite a little speech in Lao, not normal speech, but something specifically designed to be intelligible to Thais but also laughable because of their inability to speak ‘correct’ Thai. And that’s the whole joke, making their fellow Laos a laughing stock, even though the two dialects are very close, Lao being relatively ‘central’ to the entire family of languages, essentially ‘more pure’ in the sense that London English is more pure than Californian, though less popular internationally. A large percentage of modern Thais from the northeast, also, speak a Lao dialect as their local language, as do northerners and southerners their own dialects. Far more ‘bumpkin’ would be the northern dialect, though it’s never laughed at, being a good obedient son, more picturesque, and closer to the hearts of the average Thai. Laos and the northeast still carry the taint of communism, very un-Thai. Lao people, in turn, revile and insult the ‘black Tais’ resident in much of the country, the original and most traditional Tais. As Jackie Chan once said, “In China, everything face.” Someone else said, “You’re in Chinatown, Jake.”

   
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  hardie karges 3:52 pm on December 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history ( 42 ), language, politics ( 32 )   

  Burying the past with language 

  
  removes it from the usual patterns of evolution, as would deliberate gene splicing. The Dravidian languages of southern India deliberately remove Sanskrit influence while ignoring similar influences from English, which would certainly be easier to locate and remove because of their obvious foreignness. Local politics and petty jealousies weigh heavily. ‘Aryanization’ carries with it the connotation of ‘civilization’, at least in Thai, notwithstanding the fact that the same people now called ‘Dravidians’ have ancestors who created one of the world’s greatest early civilizations in the Indus River valley. They undoubtedly left much DNA in the current bloodlines of both northern and southern India. Unfortunately for them, this is the darker-skinned lower-caste bloodline that was ripe for Islam to enhance their status. It’s no accident that that same Indus River is now in Muslim Pakistan, though linguistic traces with their forbears are long gone. The lingua franca of Pakistan, Urdu, in fact is mutually intelligible with Hindi, the closest thing India has to a national language, and the local language of no one in Pakistan. Once again, efforts are continuous to separate the two for political reasons. The same has not yet happened, but could, with India’s other major language, Bengali, also known as Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh.

   
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  hardie karges 4:11 am on December 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ENGLISH ( 7 ), language, vowels ( 2 )   

  People put other people down in order to puff themselves up, 

  and so does language. The great English vowel shift in the 15^th century made sure that leaning ‘proper’ English would be a trial by fire and that only the fittest would survive. With French no longer the language of government and pretentiousness, the upper classes had no quick easy way to prove they were better than the smiths, bakers, millers, carpenters, and Joneses. So they formed their own dialect of English. Only they knew the code. Long I’s became long E’s, long E’s became long A’s, and short and long vowels separated entirely, rendering the concept largely meaningless, though still taught, at least as of my tenure. In reality, a system of dual pronunciation for each vowel was adopted, similar to the Khmer system of ‘registers’. It was complicated, but easier than learning Latin, now that French was out of favor, never to be united with England regardless of who’s the reigning monarch. Latin came in vogue at the same time, but more as a language of writing, than of speech. Spoken Latin had long since become Italian and other bastard mutations, much of the changes from classical Latin occurring even before the Empire fell.

   
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  hardie karges 4:10 pm on December 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language   

  Language is a weapon to be used sparingly; 

  stockpiled for future use in case of surprise attack, superpowers struggle to achieve parity. Language riots break out in the most unlikely places, houses of Congress and houses of servants, bedrooms and boardrooms. Shibboleths maintain purity of the race, drawing lines in the sand where no borders yet exist. Harder than metal, cutting deeper than love, words are the ultimate weapon for the complete samurai, and the balance of power for the frail of body. Nouns are the hardware of battle, pawns under the control of knights and bishops. Verbs are the software, parries and thrusts and vast sweeping movements over rolling hills designed to trap the enemy in a scissors movement without exit. Sharpen your tongue and glean ammunition from slips of the enemy’s tongue, forced confessions, and bared chests. Then when the time is right, strike with the fury of a summer storm, fire and lightning with not a drop of rain in sight to cool the fevered brow. But remember to play fair, no reason to strike below the belt. Nothing hurts more than the truth when unloaded in a properly timed depth charge.