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  hardie karges 7:18 am on December 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), language, MUSIC ( 8 )   

  Music is the universal language, 

  capable of enjoyment regardless of whether one knows the language in question or not. Language is secondary to music, as it is to film. Writers don’t write music, and they don’t write screenplays. People ask me what I talk about with my wife as if the eastern reality must be incomprehensible to a westerner. You don’t have to read much Chomsky to realize that life is very similar regardless of the language(s) involved; and I’m a Sapirian. I do think that language influences one’s reality in the same way that a computer program or operating system or even your search engine influences your computing output. Certainly they’re both right. The fact that the geographically contiguous and culturally similar ‘Pueblo’ Indians speak not only different languages, but languages from four different language families only two of which are remotely related says something. The fact that their reality is (or at least WAS) far different from all other language phyla says something else. To describe as ‘human’ a creature without language is almost unthinkable.

   

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  hardie karges 4:15 am on December 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Europe ( 19 ), language, rock-and-roll ( 5 )   

  I always thought rock & roll was an English language phenomenon, 

  as if all the joy and love, all the fear and angst, all the excitement and transcendence, all the sturm und drang, were somehow hard-wired into the language, directly related to the German structure/Romanticized content of the language. Let’s face it, for whatever the reason, the Continent doesn’t produce much great rock-and-roll. Sure there’s Bjork and Nina Hagen, and the occasional stray genius like Manu Chao, but mostly we’re talking the mediocrity of Abba or Ace of Base and for you really hard-rockers, we’ve got Scorpions. For those of you who refuse to get professional help, we’ve got Swedish Death Metal. This hardly compares with the hundreds of bands blasting out basements and lofts in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia. Why the Continent never developed a pop-cultural rock & roll edge to rival the English-speaking world could be speculated upon endlessly, but that’s not the point. The point is that great R & R is possible in other languages, and not just half-breed and ‘fusion’ groups, as Carabao in Thailand and Mana’ in Mexico amply prove. The reasons behind the anomaly probably lie more in the given socio-politico-economic realities than in the aptitude of the language. Europe is a museum, just too expensive and rigidified to experiment. They almost missed the Industrial revolution before; now they’re missing the Entertainment one also. Computers and Internet are but the tip of the iceberg. When it’s all over, you won’t know what’s real and what’s entertainment.
   
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  hardie karges 5:00 am on December 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language, tonality ( 2 )   

  Language can be fattening if you use too much shortening. 

  
  When w’d’ya’ want?’ becomes what you want and ‘how d’ya’ do?’ becomes how you do, then you know you’re becoming fluent in English and therefore incomprehensible to much of the world. But be careful. I might have to ask, “wha’d’you say” when you ask, “wha’ ‘tcha’ name?” but soon you’ll get it right to the nth degree and “wha ‘tsyer name?” will roll off your tongue like melted butter and you’ll never have to ask me “wha’ cha’ say?” again. It’s not a good idea to learn shortcuts in language. It’s better if they learn themselves. Otherwise it sounds unnatural and pretentious. There’s no substitute for speaking correctly, grammar-perfect and sound specific. Speed creates the shortcuts of necessity, the unaccented valleys of pitch becoming indistinct filler. For speakers of tonal languages, like here in Interzone, English by convention almost becomes a tonal language itself, changes in emotional pitch imitated as if a part of the internal structure itself. For the uninitiated, tonal languages employ changes in pitch to distinguish different words from each other, not to show emotion. We use volume for that. Got it? A rising tone does not necessarily denote a question. Though the native language will employ various tones, the borrowed tongue will invariably sound monotonal, hence the frequent borrowing of emotional pitch to compensate for the otherwise lack of sonic inflection. All this is understandable and easily predictable. Stranger is the predilection of some speakers of tonal languages to borrow what few grammatical inflections remain in the English language to use in their own, which has none otherwise. Thus the word ‘American’ is used as often as the word ‘America’, likewise ‘Spanish’ for ‘Spain’, though ‘Espanol’ is unknown. My box can’t process Arabic.

   
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  hardie karges 5:48 am on December 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), history ( 42 ), language   

  Written language pulls together what spoken language splits apart. 

  For probably the first time in history languages are no longer dividing and multiplying and declaring independence at the same time that more and more nations are. Go figure. Dialects are disappearing under the onslaught of mass media and standardized education, in favor of a national standard language. A language is a dialect with a book and a sword. National languages are themselves in danger of disappearing in favor of international standards, once the national languages become deviant or pidginized to the point of incomprehensibility. Already French and Chinese movies offer subtitles in their own language. IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE! This is understandable with mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects that share the same written language, but French has no convenient excuse. It’s just hard to understand in the vernacular, like subtitles for senile mumblers in documentaries.

   
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  hardie karges 7:43 am on December 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history ( 42 ), language   

  I consider Slavs to be the broad mass of Indo-European stock, 

  the population pool from which the others spun off and never came back. They are to the European race what chimpanzees are to the great apes, the most direct descendant of that common ancestor who was father to them all. The other large pool was the Aryan/Iranians, who occupied Central Asia before the Turks. To me, the descendants of the Aryans who invaded India in 1500 BC look more European than the Aryans who stayed behind and became Iranians, in the process of mixing with Arabs and Turks. But for the darker skin, the average northern Indian could be mistaken for someone hailing from Hackensack or Peoria. Interestingly, descendants of Portuguese who settled Malacca in the modern state of Malaysia, now mostly fishermen, look darker than the predominant Malays. They can trace their descent and know a smattering of the language, but more closely resemble Indians or Australian aborigines than modern-day Portuguese. Their first language now is English.

   
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  hardie karges 7:26 am on December 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), FRENCH ( 2 ), history ( 42 ), language   

  The French get so righteous about the spread of English 

  at the expense of French (maybe French is just more expensive), but they do the same with Dutch/Flemish and others. All of Belgium, and especially Brussels, used to be a political and linguistic entity with Holland to the north and its Germanic language. That all changed with Napoleon and the Flemish had to wait long and fight hard just to regain parity. Of course, long before that, all Franks were part of that same entity before they became ‘Romanized’ and proceeded to butcher Latin. Apparently not all of Charlemagne’s progeny were in agreement on that issue, as the domain became divided, and the French/Latin-speakers became a centralized nation long before the rump Holy Roman Empire of independent principalities became Germany. Whether the centralization of ancient Rome was somehow transmitted through the vestiges of its language while the Germans were stuck in the proud but ultimately feudal heritage of its own tribal past would be an interesting thesis. Whether the individualism and de-centralization of ancient nomadic Germany was the basis of capitalism and industry is another. Throughout the entire Germanic Europe to this day the dialects spoken are mutually intelligible from one village to the next, though the national standard dialects have become mutually unintelligible.

   
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  hardie karges 6:57 am on December 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ENGLISH ( 7 ), language, Thailand ( 75 )   

  I think there’s a direct relationship between the amount of English 

  a foreign language absorbs, and the ability of that foreign culture to speak correct English. No country wants to speak English more than Thailand, no country absorbs and ‘localizes’ English more than Thailand, and ultimately no country speaks it worse. There’s got to be some causal connection, right? Certainly Thailand’s ‘fun, fun, fun’ attitude toward life creates obstacles for the serious study of any subject, including English. How can you learn anything if everything’s a joke? The average street vendor in Tijuana speaks better than the average Ph.D. in Thailand. Of course, they are at opposite ends of the linguistic spectrum, with only vague connections via the ancient Sanskrit-Greek relationship, yet still they rank lower (by their own measure) than ‘neighbor countries’, which include such basket cases as Burma, Laos, and Cambodia. They speak almost with envy of their neighbors who got lucky enough to be colonized by England or America, in the case of Philippines. They judge one another by how well that person speaks English, as if anyone were qualified to judge, and to fill a Thai sentence with English ‘buzz words’ is the ultimate in ‘cool’, whether by a politician, rock star, or TV personality, no matter whether anyone understands or not. It’s mind-boggling.

   
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  hardie karges 6:14 am on December 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), DNA ( 45 ), language   

  Language is one thing and races are another. 

  Races are historically geographic in nature, a genetic isolate in breeding, while language is a function of culture. The two phenomena parallel and overlap each other, but seldom form crisp clean lines equating a language/race on one side of the line to another on the other side. Sometimes it seems as though languages themselves are the conquering invaders, crossing borders and conquering new territory even when the number of people involved is almost insignificant. Latin America is probably the best example of this, where a mere handful of Spaniards subjugated millions of Native Americans with fear, cunning, superior weaponry, and germ warfare. Though decimated, the natives’ numbers rebounded with the help of an admixture of disease-resistant Spanish blood. Nevertheless, much of the culture was forever lost, and Spanish and Portuguese are by far the language of the majority. Interestingly, one of the surviving native languages, Guarani’, is a national language spoken mostly by non-Indians. Though shrouded in the mists of prehistory, something similar must have happened in India, where ethnic Iranians (Aryans) spread far more language than bloodlines over the sub-continent and over time, still expanding into the future, having left vestiges all over Southeast Asia. On the contrary, people very similar racially might speak totally unrelated languages, as in the Caucasus and Africa. There Hamitic-speaking Hausas reside far from their Semitic linguistic cousins and tend to be ruled by Hausa-speaking Fulanis, traditional herders who have their own language but use that of their subjects when acting as rulers. A similar situation exists in Ethiopia, where very dark-skinned people speak languages related to the very light-skinned people across the Red Sea. Sometimes it seems a people adopt a foreign language simply because it’s an improvement over their own. This, the Celts seem to have done repeatedly in the history of Europe. It could certainly be argued that they’ve sacrificed their culture in the process.

   
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  hardie karges 4:56 pm on December 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), history ( 42 ), language   

  By my linguistic and culinary comparisons, 

  I’d estimate that Thais and Viets diverged from a common source probably about three thousand years ago, coincidentally about the time that Han Chinese began emigrating southward in heavy numbers. Austronesian Proto-Malays probably diverged from that same common source about four to five thousand years ago before sailing the seas and settling islands as far away as Madagascar and Hawaii and New Zealand. Very few traces remain of that distant association, if indeed the theory is correct, but as they say, “What goes around comes around,” and Malays and Thais were destined to meet once again in the Isthmus of Kra along their current national borders. Thai curries probably come from this association. Most words in common between Thai and Malay result from the common pre-Muslim flirtation with India and Sanskrit. After their conversion to Islam, Malays even became re-established in Southeast Asia as an inter-bred race with their long-lost Cham brethren in Cambodia, also Austronesian and supposedly the original link between the Tai and Malay languages. This happened after their once-proud culture was nearly annihilated by the land-hungry Vietnamese at about the same time that Columbus was discovering America. Whether they remained on the mainland or came back is uncertain, but their aboriginal cousins are heavily intermixed with aboriginal Khmers in the central Vietnamese highlands, they also presumably a product of that original southern Chinese proto-race.

   
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  hardie karges 3:46 pm on November 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), DNA ( 45 ), language   

  The DNA of language can also go awry 

  when ‘smoking’ (pronounced ‘esmoquin’) becomes Spanish for ‘tuxedo’. Even more bizarre is the meaning it takes under the watchful eyes of Bangkok courtesans, probably because the word pronounced ‘soop’ also means ‘to suck’ as well as ‘to smoke’, and the rest is history. I heard white punks use the same term the same way a few days ago in a movie. Don’t think about this while eating your morning gruel. To talk about the DNA of culture is to acknowledge possibly more than just the similarities between the evolutions of Nature and culture, but also the unity, the interlocking connection between the two, culture presumably a plethora of Nature’s little experiments, little whirling eddies, off the main flow. As such, might there not be a common uniting factor, such as memory, which propels both?