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  hardie karges 8:33 am on July 11, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Hardie Karges ( 240 ), linguistics, US South   

  Southern Linguistics–on the Skids, Y’all 

  In tribute to my southern roots–potatoes, turnips, etc–I rather like saying “y’all” sometimes; it’s kinda’ fun in a kitschy sort of way. The problem arises when it’s time to get plural. You thought “y’all” was plural already? That’s a common mistake. No, the plural of “y’all”–believe it or not–is “y’all all.” You heard it here first. I have it on good authority. Chew on that, Chomsky. You’ll have to admit there’s some symmetry there. It even rhymes. At least we’re consistent.

   

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  hardie karges 8:30 pm on June 9, 2013 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Hardie Karges ( 240 ), linguistics   

  Sunday Lunch: Etymology Already, Now Onomatopoeia 

  Isn’t all war ultimately about onomatopoeia? Think about it: the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns, the hiss of spitfires overhead, and the drone of bombing in the background. I imagine the word ‘onomatopoeia’ itself came from the trenches of WWI when a Brit and a Yank with a southern accent (OK, not so Yank, maybe Johnny Reb) passed each other in the rat-maze one too may times and the rap went something like this:

  REB: I might pee right here if the Germans don’t hold their fire soon (but what the Brit heard was more like “onomatopeia rot heah,” etc…)

  BRIT: You’re pissed. I told you not to drink that rotgut swill. This is a bloody trench! There’s no latrine…

  REB: It’s bloody, all right, but I don’t need no Catholic rites yet. And I ain’t pissed, either, ain’t got no reason to be. I jus’ need to TAKE a piss, and I aim to do it right here, if I cain’t find no better place…

  BRIT: I hope you aim that thing better than you aim your gun… and better than you speak English..

  And then I woke up. It was all just a bad dream, two native English-speakers lost in translation. I must’ve ety-lotta-mology and gotten sick, had a nightmare. But that’s about how English works, isn’t it? I concede defeat on the battle fields of orthography. I’ve fought enough already, with the ploughboys in the roughest slough, and coughing up dough in the toughest boroughs, all for nought..

  It’s fun to dream up weird wacko word origins, though. After all, without a true linguistic genome project, we can just make up anything we want, right?
   
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  hardie karges 5:21 pm on November 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language ( 145 ), linguistics, thought ( 15 )   

  If Chomsky’s winning the debate over psycho- vs. socio-linguistics, 

  then I’d say it’s because the world is slowly but surely becoming a cultural, if not linguistic, unity, chocked to the gills with gadgets and thingamajigs and the materialistic culture that produces it, promotes it, and ultimately explains it away. Most languages tend to simplify over time, dropping dual number and sexual inflection and unnecessary tenses and aspects, opting for the simple analytic isolating style of Chinese, and increasingly, English. Nothing may seem more obvious than a S-V-O system in which subjects go around verbing the Hell out of objects, but that is merely convention, without any prior or inherent logic. Despite conscious efforts on the part of editors and schoolmarms to iron out the historical kinks, sentences in the passive voice, like this one, are still being written by educated speakers of the English language. Furthermore, if I have anything to do with it, they will continue to be, notwithstanding the green lines crawling through my text like geckos through my house here in Thailand. Vestiges of archaic speech remain in all languages. We like it that way. Even in the analytic no-tense no-nonsense Asian languages, the ages of speaker and person spoken to are in constant reference. I doubt that Romance languages will ever lose the gender of a noun needing modification, as if there were something intrinsically feminine about a coffeepot. Europeans are hung up on sex; Asians are hung up on age. No matter how many sentences you diagram, language and logic are not the same, and cultural magic will be lost when and if we all speak the same language, whether or not with different words. I prefer linguistic heterosis, hybrid vigor, languages mating and mutating through cultural necessity to create the cultural reality that will eventually explain it. I’m ready to get out of my rut and get into a groove. That’s the beauty of language. It allows you to do that.