Friday Dead Racist Blogging: This Probably Doesn't Deserve My "Language" Tag Edition

It was common for racists to take anything they could conceivably associate with race and claim that this tenuous connection was certain. Race, for instance, defined not only skin color and other physical features, but also culture, civilization, thoughts, morality (or lack thereof), religion, etc. And for any of these, they also had to demonstrate (at least to their own satisfaction) that that of whites was superior to that of blacks.

So it was with language:

Another important influence came to the blacks through their contact with the English language. The peculiar richness of this speech, the call it institutes upon the mind for contextual thoughts makes it to the savage perhaps the most educative of tongues. It cannot be compassed by any lowly people without a decidedly developing effect. The negro has mastered this language in a very remarkable manner, and without deliberate instruction by any form of schooling, and by so doing has given better proof of his natural capacity than by any other of his accomplishments in this to him very new world. . . .

The struggle of the African with the difficulties of our incompleted [sic], open-structured English speech is one of the most interesting features of his history. His inherited habits of mind framed on a very limited language, where the terms were well tied together and where the thought found in the words a bridge of easy passage, gave him much trouble when he came to employ our speech where the words are like widely separated stepping-stones which require nimble wits in those who use them. It would require a separate essay to deal with this interesting subject, so I can only note a few of the most instructive examples of the devices to which the negroes have resorted in their difficult task. . . . Our verb with its imperfect denotation of time and number gives them at first much trouble; to help themselves they have adopted some new but imperfectly defined tenses; "gwine done," "gone done," "done gone," seem to me to be natural efforts to give clearness to our indices of action, which we are able to supply from our grasp of the context,--a mental habit to which the lower races with difficulty attain. . . .

--From Nathaniel Shaler, "The Nature of the Negro," Arena, Vol. III (December, 1890). Reprinted in I. A. Newby, The Development of Segregationist Thought, pp. 58-59. Ellipses are Newby's.

I also recall reading something about how black languages were inferior because they didn't have many words in them--not enough to properly translate the Bible into. I can't recall who said it, but I think it might have been Charles Carroll.
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Tolkien probably knew this

But I didn't:

The name "Bilbo," well-loved by collectors of people's-names-that-mean-something, is an antique word for "sword."

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Spiffy

I like this passage:

Good Friday, meanwhile, like many of the other most important Christian holidays, is a set number of days before Easter. The only problem is that the date of Easter is probably the most complicated celebratory calculation this side of Hinduism, which has a number of competing religious calendars. The standard rule is "the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox." But in fact, the actual divination of the date is so involved that it has its own offical name: "computus." And so challenging that Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of history's greatest mathematicians, devoted the time to create an algorithm for it. It goes on for many lines. You can look it up. And, of course, it doesn't work for Eastern Orthodox Easter (about one month later than the Western Christian one this year, on April 27).

Unfortunately, "computus" isn't in Dictionary.com, but it is in Wikipedia.
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But what about the Australian Canadians?

This is a couple months old, but I myself just learned about it (initially via BoingBoing): in the South, "Canadian" is being used as a code word for "black":

It was a routine e-mail from the boss sent to congratulate a junior prosecutor in Houston, Tex., who had won manslaughter convictions against an intoxicated driver.

"He convicted Mr. Sosa of a double intoxication manslaughter, got a weak jury to give him 12 years in each, and then convinced Judge Wallace to stack the sentences," Harris County assistant district attorney Mike Trent wrote in an office-wide memo. Then came the odd part: "He overcame a subversively good defence by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing."

The e-mail was sent in 2003 but came to light only this month as part of an unrelated controversy with his office, forcing Mr. Trent to defend himself against accusations of bigotry -- not because he offended the people of Canada, but because "Canadian" has apparently become a code word for blacks among American racists.

...

An online directory of racial slurs defines Canadian as a "masked replacement" for black.

Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. "She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn't understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else," the blogger wrote.

"After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that 'Canadian' was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to [with the N-word.]"

A similar case in Kansas City was reported last year on a Listserv, or electronic mailing list, used by linguistics experts. A University of Kansas linguist said that a waitress friend reported that "fellow workers used to use a name for inner-city families that were known to not leave a tip: Canadians. 'Hey, we have a table of Canadians.... They're all yours.' "

The "online directory of racial slurs" is the Racial Slur Database, found here. CincyBlurg's post on the issue is here. The Language Log has a post with links to the Listserv mentioned in the final paragraph.

This page has some more on that Texas case (though if you really want to know more, go here). It also includes this gem:

Canadian is the racist code word for Nigger, like Australian is the code word for gays

Isn't it fascinating what people will do in order to cling to their bigotry yet avoid societal repercussions for it? Really, this is brilliant--Canada is a majority white, so people wouldn't suspect you were using the word to refer to black people. But it's also a fact that most Americans wouldn't care if you slander someone by nationality rather than race (or even sexual orientation)--and especially not in the case of Canada, the brunt of so many American jokes. You could talk about how stupid you think "Canadians" are, or how violent they are, and you might get some weird looks ("Violent Canadians?") but wouldn't face the stigma of racism.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I am enthralled by this revelation.
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"Does the sky need a name? Does the river?"

Keen:

An ape in central Iowa is showing researchers just how smart primates can be.

Panbanisha, a bonobo at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, has given names to two trumpeter swans nesting on the center's 230-acre campus in Des Moines — an achievement researchers say shows how important collaboration is to learning.

"As we bring something into the bonobos' environment that's very different, we need to collaborate with them rather than impose changes on them," said Dr. Karyl Swartz, a scientist involved in the study of memory, problem solving and self-recognition in apes. "It has to do with our philosophy that we collaborate in every way possible — from research to everyday activities."

...

Motivating the bonobo to name the swans was complex, said researcher Liz Rubert-Pugh. Over the last few months, researchers made references to the swans while communicating with the bonobo — showing the ape they were interested in giving them names. They displayed pictures of the swans, played videos of them and took Panbanisha on a walk to find them.

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But can it compute the power of love?

I'm not entirely sure I understand this article, but it seems that there were (at least) two competing theories for how an infant learns sounds: one said that it was hard-wired in the brain, and another said that the child picks it up. Well, apparently someone made a computer program modeled off a child's learning patterns, and discovered that the computer picked up vowel sounds as well as the child did, giving some credence to the latter theory.

"The debate in language acquisition is around the question of how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain of the infant and how much of the knowledge that infants acquire about language is something that can be explained by relatively general purpose learning systems," said James McClelland, a psychology professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

McClelland says his computer program supports the theory that babies systematically sort through sounds until they understand the structure of a language.

"The problem the child confronts is how many categories are there and how should I think about it. We're trying to propose a method that solves that problem," said McClelland, whose work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Expanding on some existing ideas, he and a team of international researchers developed a computer model that resembles the brain processes a baby uses when learning about speech.

He and colleagues tested their model by exposing it to "training sessions" that consisted of analyzing recorded speech in both English and Japanese between mothers and babies in a lab.

What they found is the computer was able to learn basic vowel sounds right along with baby.

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Your linguistic tidbit of the day

I just read this, which is a summation of an interesting study done on childhood development of color recognition. I'm not going to talk about the whole thing (except to say that I, too, had the same idea for a prank as he did), just this one paragraph that really stood out at me:

A large body of research has shown that adults categorize colors into eleven basic categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey. These categories have been tested extensively, even across cultures, and found to be readily identifiable by all adults. When asked to name colors across a wide spectrum of possibilities, most people use the basic color categories to describe even the colors that fall on the border between two categories.

This brings up something interesting about Russian that I had noticed but not really considered before my Comparative Mythology professor pointed it out. He was discussing how we tend to naturally divide things into categories, especially into binary categories: left & right, up & down, black & white, male & female, dead & alive, human & not human. And when we find things that don't fit in either category, we get rather distressed. Consider how much opposition to gay rights comes from the belief that gay men aren't truly "masculine" -- they don't fit neatly into the perceived categories of "male" and "female". Or abortion -- a fetus isn't quite "human", but it's not quite "not human" either.

But I digress. In the course of this brief discussion, he brought up an interesting fact about Russian: they have two words for what we would consider "blue". There's синий ("cee-nee") and there's голубой ("gah-loo-boy"), which translate respectively to "blue" and "light blue." As my Mythology professor drilled home to me: to us, these are fairly arbitrary distinctions, as "light blue" is just a subset of "blue"; but to Russians, these are two completely different colors. So my Russian textbook has not eleven basic colors, but twelve -- the eleven mentioned above, plus "light blue." I really do have to wonder how cross-cultural these color studies actually are. I suppose if limited to just those eleven choices a Russian could decide that something they'd normally call голубой fits more with "blue" than any of the other categories, but still.
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Fun with language

dox-y¹
-noun
1. opinion; doctrine.
2. religious views.

dox-y²
-noun
1. an immoral woman; prostitute.
2. Archaic. a mistress.
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Your Russian tidbit of the day

The Russian word for Saturday is суббота, from "Sabbath". But following European convention, it's still the sixth day of the week.

I think someone is confused.
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Some tidbits about Russian

I recently learned some interesting facts about Russian.

For one, мир ("Mir") means both "peace" and "world", which leads to the neat phrase МИРУ МИР: "Peace to the World".

Also, the word восток ("vah-stoke") is Russian for "east". A town on the east coast of Russia, Владивосток ("vlah-dee-vah-stoke") is a combination of that and the verb владеть ("vlah-dyet"), which means "to rule". So Владивосток is "ruler of the east".

If you combine these tidbits, you find that the name Владимир ("Vladimir") means "ruler of the world". At least that's according to my textbook; according to Behind the Name, it means "to rule with greatness" or "to rule with peace." But I much prefer my textbook's interpretation.

Also, our teacher gave us an interesting hand-out today--a list of pairs of English words or phrases that non-native speakers often confuse, and a similar list for Russian words and phrases. As an example, on the English side she had such words as "desert"/"dessert", "chemistry"/"cemetery", "surgeon"/"sturgeon", and my favorite, "My name is"/"mayonnaise".

On the list of Russian mistakes, she had "замок"/"замок" (the difference is in which syllable is stressed), which can be the difference between "castle" and "lock". One of the more amusing ones is "мука"/"мука". Again, the difference is in the stress of the syllables--if you stress the second syllable you get "flour", but if you stress the first you get "torment, suffering". Given how negligent most of my classmates have been of properly stressing their words (which has irked me quite a bit) I consider it highly likely that if they continue Russian they will one day ask to borrow a cup of suffering. In fact, she included a Russian poem that seems to make fun of this awkward pairing.

But the absolute best has to be the first item on her list: "Не за что" versus "Ни за что". The first one means "Don't mention it!" or "You're welcome!" The second means "I won't forgive you."

She mentioned that many students do not forgive her when she thanks them.
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Education at work

You think allowing ebonics as a language in the classroom is bad? Well, New Zealand is allowing 'text-speak' in exams:

New Zealand's Qualifications Authority said that it still strongly discourages students from using anything other than full English, but that credit will be given if the answer "clearly shows the required understanding," even if it contains text-speak.

The authority's deputy chief executive for qualifications, Bali Haque, said students should aim to make their answers as clear as possible.

Confident that those grading papers would understand answers written in text-speak, Haque stressed that in some exams, including English - where good language use is specifically required - text abbreviations would be penalized.

There are two notable responses to this development. One I loathe...

"I think text messaging is one of the most exciting things that has happened in a long time. It is another development in that wonderful thing we call the English language," [High School principal Denis Pyatt] said.

And one I love....

The minor United Future Party said in a statement: "Untd Futr is cncernd bout da xeptnce of txt spk 2 b allwd in ritn xams 4 NCEA (United Future is concerned about the acceptance of text speak to be allowed in written exams for NCEA)."

"Skoolz r ther 2 educ8 + raze litracy 2 certn standrds (Schools are there to educate and raise literacy to certain standards)," the statement quoted United Future legislator Judy Turner as saying. "NCEA shudnt let da standrd b decidd by informl pop cultr of da time."

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According to Wikipedia,

In Russia, persons of Caucasus descent are called Black.

and

The Caucasus peoples of Abidjan, and Crimea are sometimes called black because, relatively speaking, they are darker and less European in their appearance.

I find this ironic. And amusing.
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Songbirds may be able to learn grammar:

Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.

Yet what they learned may shake up the field of linguistics.

While many animals can roar, sing, grunt or otherwise make noise, linguists have contended for years that the key to distinguishing language skills goes back to our elementary school teachers and basic grammar. Sentences that contain an explanatory clause are something that humans can recognize, but not animals, researchers figured.

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They just don't stop....

I read this post at Pharyngula today, which leads me to this website:

The Geocentrism Challenge

CAI will write a check for $1,000 to the first person who can prove that the earth revolves around the sun. (If you lose, then we ask that you make a donation to the apostolate of CAI). Obviously, we at CAI don't think anyone CAN prove it, and thus we can offer such a generous reward. In fact, we may up the ante in the near future.

So let's recap. We have people who, for religious reasons, deny: evolution, the age of the earth, the Big Bang, the common-descent theory of languages, and heliocentrism.

Science is the discipline of deduction from observation--we take measurements, perform experiments, make predictions, and come up with a theory that tries to unify all the knowledge we have at the time. I cannot, for the life of me, understand the mentality that will make people believe in what some book says rather than what our own senses tell us. If the Bible told us that yellow is actually blue, would they believe that?

Oh. Never mind.
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Theological ponderings

Jesus's real name was, if I am not mistaken, Yehoshua bar Yosef.

If one were to skip the translation into Greek, then Roman, and finally English, one would usually translate this as Joshua, son of Joseph.

So the Christian messiah is Josh, son of Joe.

Armed with this, the next time somebody slurs "I was just joshing you" or some derivative thereof, I believe that I will angrily berate them for using the Lord's name in vain. I doubt I will bother explaining why.

And speaking of Christian linguistics, which I wasn't, it appears that, as an analogue to the dim-wittedness of Intelligent Design (whose SETI-analogy was dismissed by SETI researchers), fundamentalists have also tried forcing the theory of Wrathful Dispersion into schools.

Well, not really. This man was only joking.

This man, however, is not. Lord, he even bills it as "Intelligent Design in Language".

And speaking of what the Bible says about abortion (what? I don't want to make a lot of separate posts, gimme a break), I came across this today. So God only noticed people after they were a month old, eh? Hmm.
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Huh:

Two lines of an alphabet have been found inscribed in a stone in Israel, offering what some scholars say is the most solid evidence yet that the ancient Israelites were literate as early as the 10th century B.C.

"This is very rare. This stone will be written about for many years to come," archaeologist Ron E. Tappy, a professor at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary who made the discovery, said Wednesday. "This makes it very historically probable there were people in the 10th century (B.C.) who could write."

Christopher Rollston, a professor of Semitic studies at Emmanuel School of Religion in Johnson City, Tenn., who was not involved in the find, said the writing is probably Phoenician or a transitional language between Phoenician and Hebrew.

"We have little epigraphic material from the 10th century in Israel, and so this substantially augments the material we have," he said.

The stone was found in July, on the final day of a five-week dig at Tel Zayit, about 30 miles south of Tel Aviv.

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Bizarre

[Edit] Of course, this is hardly any more bizarre than U.S. laws that held you couldn't teach in any language other than English.
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I was going to write one thing, but instead I wrote this

So I decided to look up "necromancy" in the dictionary:

1. The practice of supposedly communicating with the spirits of the dead in order to predict the future.

...

Alteration of Middle English nigromancie, from Old French nigremancie, from Medieval Latin nigromantia, alteration (influenced by Latin niger, black), of Late Latin necromantia from Greek nekromanteia: nekros, corpse; see nek-¹ in
Indo-European Roots + manteia, divination; see -mancy.

Having grown up on D&D and similar genres of entertainment, this came as bit of a surprise to me. Necromancy always was more like this: a (generally reviled) branch of magic dedicated to working with death and creating undead. And from there you have people come up with "pyromancy" for fire mages, etc.

Having learned what the word actually means, I am now loathe to use it as I used to, and have been trying to come up with a suitable replacement. So I looked up a few Greek words, and I think I have settled on the word "exousia", meaning "authorities, lordship, power". So then I'd have something like "necrousy" or "necrousia" (for "power over death") as my new favorite branch of magic.

Is it weird that I insist on etymologically-correct fantasies?
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recrudescent \ree-kroo-DES-unt\, adjective:
Breaking out again after temporary abatement or suppression; as, a recrudescent epidemic.
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tocsin \TAHK-sin\, noun:
1. An alarm bell, or the ringing of a bell for the purpose of alarm.
2. A warning.
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