The following is a very interesting documentary on how a form of Scottish Gaelic in East Sutherland has gradually declined and will probably become extinct.
Direct URL - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7647046783946085652
A common phonological rule of North American English is to change /t,d/ to a "flap" transcribed as either /D/ or /ɾ/. In other words, a /t/ in words like atom,writer sounds an awful like like a "d".
In phonology class, I present cases where a flapped /t,d/ could cause potential ambiguities (see below).
- Swe[D]ish 'from Sweden', swee[D]ish 'slightly sweet'
- ri[D]er, wri[D]er
Another ambiguity encountered in real life was Toyota vs. toy Yoda. One of the speakers in this case was British who may not have been used to decoding flaps as /t/ as North Americans are.
Still, I'm not alone because at least two organizations promised what sounded like a "Toyota" as a prize but delivered a "toy Yoda" instead. Sadly the winners, were not amused and pursued legal action.
If a phonologist had been on call, they could have provided the plaintiffs an important tip. The vowel before original (unerlying) /d/ is slightly longer phonetically than original /t/. Thus the vowel of "toy Y[o:D]a" is slightly, but perceptibly longer than "Toy[oD]a" in many dialects of American English. That's why there isn't more confusion in conversational English than there is.
The good news is that at least one waitress did win the suit enough to "pick out whatever type of Toyota she wants." I guess the Force was with her after all.
I've been involved in planning a globalization-themed for our local Penn State educational technology professionals, and a question people are asking is "How does this apply to us?" More than a few of us have struggled to make our passion for globalization understandable, but it does still seem to be a struggle. I now realize that my default answer "Because it's so COOL" isn't working, so let me try this another way.
Practically
I've always been instinctively interested in other cultures, but if that doesn't move or seems too "politically correct," you may want to consider this:
- Penn State and other universities are trying to focus on increasing "global awareness" in students. For some people, that alone could be critical.
- More importantly though, we really do live in a world where nations are connected to each other. The roots of some of our most pressing domestic U.S. issues such as the war on terror, immigration, drug trafficking, job creation and loss, the weakness of the U.S. dollar, the high price of oil, pollution, weaknesses in food distribution and the fight against killer bees (to only name a few) lie outside the U.S. as well as within in it. If you ever wonder why soda pop switched from sugar to corn syrup, it's partly because there has been a historical trend to restrict sugar imports to the U.S. to "protect" the domestic sugar industry.
- Have you wondered why some countries are so "uncooperative"? Understanding another culture and their political complexity can help answer that. Some reasons are be the result of negative interactions with the West that our students are unaware of, but almost as many deal with local issues. An issue can seem completely irrelevant to use, but can be to someone else.
- Are you interested in world peace and decreasing poverty? This also requires understanding the culture and the technology you are working with. Transplanting a system that works for us can often catastrophically fail if you don't understand WHY it works here, but may not work "over there."
- Or maybe you are interested in green technology and other important innovations. Some important ideas for improving our way of life have come from traditional cultures who understand how to flourish in different climate conditions. It's amazing how traditional building practices in the desert/tropics can really really reduce the need for air conditioning.
- Maybe the most important reason to understand globalization is to understand ourselves (or as a colleague put it, "travel far to come home"). The U.S. has always been connected to other parts of the world. World events could trigger waves of immigration, and the U.S. has always needed to negotiate its relations with neighbors and superpowers. They can provide missing pieces of the puzzle (e.g. I just found out that Mexico was a critical trigger in how the U.S. entered World War I).
The History Angle
Another theme that I push is history (sometimes Bronze Age history). I am amazed at how learning an event from "before our time" impacts us today.
For instance, have you ever noticed how many plantations were in the South vs the North? It wasn't a complete accident. Because of the English Civil War (and events from before), large landowners were fleeing for the south at one point, while in previous eras, people from different middle-class oriented religious sects (e.g. Puritan) fled to New England and the Mid Atlantic.
Well before slavery began, the roots of a cultural disconnect that led to the U.S. Civil War were beginning to form here in the U.S....all based on events in 17th-16th century Europe.
An ongoing issue in historical linguistics, particularly in terms of the dispersal of Indo-European languages, is how to model the spread of an Indo-European language. The traditional 19th century Victorian view is the "Invasion Hypothesis" which is that a group of Indo-European language speakers overcome the local population with military might and impose their language and culture.
Since then, there have been alternative hypotheses (e.g. spread via agriculture or other cultural contact), but a recent study reported in the National Geographic makes me think they the Victorians probably got it right. What the study says is that:
Most modern Indians descended from South Asians, not invading Central Asian steppe dwellers, a new genetic study reports. The Indian subcontinent may have acquired agricultural techniques and languages--but it absorbed few genes--from the west, said Vijendra Kashyap, director of India's National Institute of Biologicals in Noida.
The article goes on to say that "The finding disputes a long-held theory that a large invasion of central Asians, traveling through a northwest Indian corridor, shaped the language, culture, and gene pool of many modern Indians within the past 10,000 years."
A Small Invading Group?
But not so fast. You can still have an "invasion" (i.e. a group imposing their cultural supremacy over another) without a large genetic contribution to the original population. A very extreme model of this is post-colonial Africa where governments and education tend to be in English or French, yet the percentage of Europeans is relatively small. The vast majority of people in Africa are still descended from Africans.
The general discouragement of intermarriage between groups means that what European genes are present are concentrated in a smaller group, but that this group is often in the elite (more on that later). The same could be true in India as well, although intermixing does gradually happen in the long run.
How Language Change Happens
The unasked question is how did English and French come to be dominant in Africa? Colonization of course! It may be that English/French were convenient to learn over large polyglot territories, but the fact is that it was European military might which backed up the ability of a language with a small group of native speakers to become dominant. Before the colonial era, it was clear that groups in Africa were able to co-exist in a multilingual environment. Political domination was a necessary ingredient for English and French to become official languages of Africa.
If the speakers of pre Sanskrit were truly a small population, I would expect that adoption among other speakers would happen via political or cultural domination of some sort. I would also expect that if the Indo-European speakers had become dominant, they would also be in the elite...and that is what happens in India, particularly Northern India. I don't think it's a coincidence that the group preserving the Sanskrit texts we do have are in the highest caste, and I don't think the Victorians did either.
The process of changing language in a family or group is complicated, but it's rarely an easy decision. Economics plays a factor in many cases (i.e. switching to the politically dominant language), but many groups are so reluctant to switch that governments often implement horribly coercive methods to "make it happen" (more political domination).
This history of documented language change is why I am skeptical that an indigenous population would switch to a "foreign" Indo-European language WITHOUT that language exerting being in some sort of dominant position, usually augmented by military force. The fact that most Indians have indigenous DNA confirms that Indo-European spread via some sort of "invasion" process where a relatively small group imposed some of their culture, including the language, on a local population.
BTW - If being a large group of speakers were enough to to enact language change without political dominance, white South Africans would be speaking Zulu, white Hawaiians would be learning Japanese and my Pennsylvania ancestors would have probably adopted German at some point. But that's not what happens...
Considering Class and Language Dispersal
Believe it or not, I want to be as egalitarian as the next linguist, but unfortunately, I do think we do have to consider social class when doing genetic assessments of a population. I am an English speaker, but genetically speaking, my ancestry is NOT English, and even those ancestors who did come from the U.K. came not from East Anglia but Scotland, Cornwall and Wales. You would never want to tap my DNA to figure out where the original English speakers came from.
I also don't want to discount the complexity of the relationships among language and cultural groups in India. Almost all modern national histories include one outsider group imposing its political domination over another. But a strange miracle does happen where the two groups can merge to create a new culture (even if the blending retains many rough patches). The fact that a group of speakers emigrated to India many millennia ago does not make their descendants less Indian or the contributions less worthwhile.
What's important to me is that we understand our history honestly, both the positive and the negative, or else we will truly never be able to heal any wounds inflicted in the past.
P.S. Mixing Genes Along the Way
A second model can also be also be considered - any Indo-European population reaching India may have been intermixing with people along the way. It is very possible that people speaking the Indo-European Indic languages did not have the same genetic makeup as those in the Indo-European "homeland" (wherever that was). However, the language can still be said to have been Indo-European, even if the culture and DNA had already been changing. It's actually rare for language/DNA/culture to spread in one package.
I was just checking out some language preservation efforts out there in YouTube land and I ran into these two Xhosa videos from South African video blogger Khayav. I admit that I wouldn't show every video in the classroom, but these two videos on Xhosa are lighthearted and full of Xhosa clicks in the wild - enjoy!
YouTube in Xhosa (Translated and Ad Free)
A Xhosa Tongue Twister (with sociolinguistic digression)
There's an excellent clip from the new Bravo show Pregnant in Heels in which soon-to-be-parents from New York request professional help to give their baby a good "brand" name. The maternity consultant Rosie Pope obliges by creating a naming panel who are "very academic" (which of course a linguist must be included).
No one has asked, but I thought I would I would offer my expert advice. The parameters the parents gave are as follows:
- Name for a boy
- Upper class, but ethnicity not important
- Not "decorative"
- Easy to spell
- Not too popular
- No J,E,R and no final S
To these parameters, I would add the following - "will not get you beaten up on a playground." In other words, even if the name is not common, it should have some positive resonance in multiple social settings outside of Upper East Side. Since we're talking brand, this criteria should be factored in.
In addition, since the parents are Anglo, I would also tend towards an Anglo name. I have nothing against non-Anglo names, but most "high class" names actually have some sort of family or ethnic connection, so I feel this is an important consideration.
My Choices
The trickiest part was avoiding the "E" because it is the most common vowel in English, but it can be done. These are some recognizable names I believe fit the criteria:
Donald, Nathan, Colin, Dylan, Gavin, Ian, David, Hugh, William, Karl (with a K),
There may be others that fit the criteria, but which I feel are not playground-friendly (some things are personal judgement calls).
FYI - Another option are family names as first names. A nice feature of family names is that they are both aristocratic, but authentic to the family.
Despite my earlier branding parameters, I do believe that any name can work if the parent really believes in the history of it passes it along to their children. As a child, I never really appreciated Alfred as a name, until I learned more about the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great.
Just found a link to a humorous piece on how the AP Style Manual recently removed mandated hyphens from their stylebook - Thanks MJ! Of course, I plan to continue to randomly hyphenate/join together compounds until a kindly spell checker tells me to knock it off.
Just ran into an article describing how future queen Kate Middleton learned the Welsh anthem enough to sing along at her recent Welsh visit. According to palace news sources, she chose to do this on her own, partly because she has been living in Anglesey, Wales
I'm sure there's more than one point of view about how integrated Wales should be with the rest of the United Kingdom (technically, this would be irrelevant in an independent Wales)...but my heart was warmed by this. First, I have to applaud anyone deciding to learn the local language. She really could get away being monolingual, even in a location as Cymrophonic (Welsh speaking) as North Wales, but she is choosing to learn more about the area she is living in.
But it's also an important symbol that members of the Royal Family are living in Wales and learning Welsh. Whether you're a Royalist or want a completely independent Wales, I think it's better for all of Britain if the former enemy nations can understand each other more. And I do believe that one role of the British Royal family can fill is to be cultural ambassadors. I'll be curious to see how the monarchy and the Welsh evolve together.
Having visited relatives and friends in New York (not to mention the Met), I confess that I do get a kick watching some insider NYC references on the night time soap Gossip Girl. I confess though to being curious if any of the more manipulative characters had actually learned anything of academic interest from their expensive private school and Ivy League educations.
To my delight though, one of the fashionistas realized that she might want to think about a career depending on skills and talent rather than influence and dirty tricks. Her choice? To be an editrix of a major fashion magazine. Using her Latin, she realized that she didn't have to settle for being just an editor (originally the masculine form), but could actually rise to the feminine editrix.Sadly the feminine -rix suffix has been mostly consigned to ladies in leather (the "dominatrix"), but Latinists also know it from aviatrix (i.e. woman aviators such as Amelia Earhart) and executrix (women who are estate executors). But sometimes an educated woman remembers that -rix and -or were once more co-equal and will reclaim the -rix suffix for her own (sometimes when I have the map in the car, I am the navigatrix.
I like the choice of "editrix" because there is nothing wrong with a talented woman wielding power in her own right in the open.
A few days ago, Google introduced a site they called Culturomics in which users could enter two or more terms and get a graph representing their frequency of occurrence with the Google Books archives. Depending on your word selection, you can get some interesting results. For instance, the verb form ain't has been attested since 1840 with the now "correct" not appearing widely until 1840.
I can tell this service has successfully grabbed the attention of the popular imagination, since some sci-fi fans put in some genre-themed word pairs. Apparently Darth Vader IS more popular than Luke Skywalker. However there are some issues to consider.
One critique comes from Mark Davies, a member of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). One feature that the COHA interface has that the n-gram doesn't have is that it lists frequently found co-occuring words (or "collocates"). For instance, in 1900, the word gay may frequently occur along side words such as "happiness, light, carefree". Today it is much more likely to co-occur along words such as "rights" or "marriage" (especially in news articles).
Davies also notes that the Google tool doesn't yet distinguish between parts of speech or differences in usage/meaning, and this can be very important. For instance, a chart of twitter shows a peak circa 1900, but at that time it referred to sounds a bird might make (or perhaps the sound of gossipy chit chat). Today it generally refers to the Twitter service - but there is no way to distinguish this use.
Similarly, the tool doesn't also allow you to view the types of passage in which a word occurs. For instance, the word ain't continues to be found in written text, but it may be that after 1840, the context for a lot of the uses is in writing guides saying to AVOID "ain't". That makes a difference in how to analyze usage of "ain't" over time.
That's not to say that there is no use to the Culturomics tool, especially if the terms are very specific and unambiguous (e.g. Darth Vader), but I do have to agree with Davies that it doesn't let you track the subtleties very well. But fortunately, there are other tools out there that linguists can use. But I will have to admit that the interface will be more complex.
Postscript: Jan 4, 2011
There have been several experiments online, especially on Language Log (e.g. northeaster vs nor'easter) working to see how the Google engine works, and Google is responding. One feature I initially missed is that you can narrow your corpus a bit. For instance, I ran the isn't/ain't pair again but restricted it the the "English fiction" corpus - this should rule out pesky grammar books (although it would be distinguish quote in "dialect"). It's still interesting to note that "isn't" is not a clear winner until sometime after 1900.
Postscript 2: Jan 7, 2011
One issue that could also be problematic is synonyms/heteronyms as well as multiple usage. For instance, a report of dove may not distinguish the irregular past from the bird of peace.
