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  hardie karges 7:55 am on March 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), Europe ( 19 ), language, mathematics ( 3 )   

  Cultural Relativity 

  Europeans are internalized, Americans external.  Multi-lingualism leads to useless complexity and introversion.  Uni-lingualism allows mental space to be devoted to other things, like science and technology, without devoting so much effort to translation and bad grammar.  There are two broad fields of knowledge in the world from which all others derive: mathematics and linguistics, on the surface at polar extremes from each other, mathematics revealing knowledge of the other, linguistics revealing knowledge of each other.  In reality the two are not so different from each other, linguistics with a strong logico-mathematical basis, math also capable of a distinct relativity of perspective.  They both thrive on the little stick-men of culture that live in the pages of books, on the pages of experiment.  Numbers and letters are not so different, really.  Everything else is derivative knowledge, recipes for fulfillment and short histories of nearly everything.  The thing is in the name, a convenient substitute for the thing itself, virtual reality in graphic symbols.  It’s like my movie scripts.  Nobody wants them; they just want the titles: “Good Day to Die”, “Virus”, “Reality Check”, and “Lost in Time”, my names just hung on any old shit piece of work. 

   

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  hardie karges 12:17 am on February 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), language, lingua franca, Thailand ( 79 )   

  Lingua Franca 

  Cheerleading is an art form in Thailand; no football, no marching bands, no white lines or referees, just cheerleaders, like acrobats in a Chinese circus, forming human pyramids and human waterfalls, flipping and tumbling like human jumping beans.  I’m not sure if they cop the language or not, though I’m sure they emulate the actual cheering aspect.  Something is always lost in translation whenever one culture apelike imitates another, as if some benefit might accrue by sympathetic magic.  The English word ‘cheer’ has long been adopted into the Thai language, coming to mean much more than the original, though in the American, not the British, sense.  Loanwords don’t follow land borders.  Logic would make you think that words would filter across borders selectively finding additional cross-cultural use among its border crossers.  Thailand is not logical.  Thailand follows the hand that holds the money.  Nowadays Thailand borrows words from English, and English only, also known as ‘pahsah Farang’, literally ‘lingua franca’.  It’s as if the only thing that had changed internationally over the last eight hundred years was that Pig Latin had somehow morphed into Pidgin English and the people were still essentially the same, Crusaders of the Lost Ark.  Maybe they’re right. 
   
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  hardie karges 2:02 am on January 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language, Vietnam ( 9 )   

  Tieng Viet 

  Vietnamese language is another of those languages with mixed origins.  It seems like the languages of the most successful countries are so, the hybrid vigor thing and all that.  Vietnam may not be so successful, but it is strong, as America found out.  The Vietnamese greeting equivalent to “How are you?” is literally “Are you strong?”  The language sounds like somebody playing banjo with a loose string.  Try to get a handle on it and it slips through your fingers like sand through the hourglass.  That’s a bad cliché, like ‘Days of Our Lives.’  Sounds and syllables fall from your hands like chopped vegetables spilling over the edge of a hot wok, dancing lightly over a surface of super-heated oil, an experiment in theoretical physics gone terribly wrong.  The words spoken are themselves chopped karate landing on the bearded surface of your white skin, little slaps in the face each of them, just begging for a response.  Give it to them.  When you prove you can be as big an asshole as they are, then you’re part of the club, a full member with honors.  There’s no age requirement.  Even little kids are in on it.  You sit reading the paper on a park bench in Hanoi and some kid just comes up and pokes you like you’re some animal in a cage that he wants to hear squawk.  Throw him to the ground and now there’s a bond between us.  Go figure again. 

   
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  hardie karges 10:53 am on January 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: hill tribes ( 3 ), language, Vietnam ( 9 )   

  Vietnam Hill Tribes 

  The Viets can’t believe that tourists go to Sapa to view the incredible hill-tribes, insisting it’s the French alpine atmosphere that draws them.  Maybe it’s a poor man’s Switzerland, but certainly no more than that.  The hill tribes are another story.  The little Hmong girls have been photographed and appeared on book-covers many times and could speak better English than a Thai bar girl by the age of six just by being copycats and hungry, Pidgin by parrot-chat.  The Dzao women are from outer space, heads half shaved and wearing outfits resembling the British Redcoats of three centuries back.  Rumor has it they’d get frisky with their male counterparts during the long weekend market.  It’s true.  They’d sing songs antiphonally, and then just wander off, I guess.  I was propositioned at least three times by various members of the group of varying ages, all wanting nothing more than my temporary membership in their apparently frequent openings.  I think their guys smoke too much opium.  Of course the young girl I fantasized about wasn’t available.  Photographers followed us on our only date, to eat Vietnamese noodle soup.  I wonder what it’s like now.  They’d started to refurbish the French colonial atmosphere that got badly smudged by the Chinese invasion of 1979.  China intended to teach Vietnam a lesson for invading Cambodia and putting an end to the Pol Pot terror.  They lost almost 20,000 troops in two weeks before withdrawing.  A Chinese friend insists Vietnam begged China to leave.  Right.  Countries do that all the time.  Just ask Slobodan.