“languages”

...que hasta yo lo tengo!”

Vicente Fernandez^WP dixit (supuestamente).

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Es increible pero el articulo de la Wikipedia en ingles sobre Vicente Fernandez esta mucho, mucho mas completo que el de la Wikipedia en español. Nuestra lengua materna esta devaluada en internet mucho mas alla de lo que nadie se atreve a decir en voz alta (o en letra grande).

Here are some interesting things to note.

Wikipedia articles of the 2006 Mexican Elections
English	Spanish	French	Dutch

Oh! In Tokyo, the New Trend Is ‘Media Immersion Pods’, a New York Times article from a while ago on Tokyo’s media youth, is important, very important. This is me, this is my generation.

And this is it. Screw Chinese, screw German or French (both of which I already studied for a year), I’m off to learn Japanese.

Today, in what I’m sure is an increasingly common occurrence to everyone, I was uncertain on a subtle language question and I googled it. The interesting thing was that I didn’t do that to get somewhere, to find any particular webpage, I only cared about the result numbers.

You see, I wasn’t sure whether you wrote “that’s a clever move of their part” or “that’s a clever move on their part.” Prepositions are one of the nastiest, most irrational things in every language. In Spanish you would use the equivalent of “of” in the equivalent expression and I’m guessing that’s what led me astray.

The worst thing is that dictionaries are no help at all in this regard, they just throw at you an impossibly long chain of usage cases. Enter Google. All it took to answer my question was a quick google for ”on their part” and one for ”of their part” (quotes included!). The first query had 2,820,000 results, the second 146,000. The winner was clear, my question was settled.

But it was unnerving. The web has swallowed our language with all its subtleties—it ought to make for one heck of a primeval soup. Don’t you get this feeling every so often that Google is this close to being able to do true translation? This close to understanding? This close to speaking? Do you think it’s not hearing us right now?

The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.

You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”

I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.

What a wonderful surprise! Reading about Google’s Marissa Mayer —I have this obsession in which I obsess for days about certain people— I found out she got a BS in Symbolic Systems in Stanford. That’s right, there is such a thing! I’m shaking with excitement. I’m reading the career description online but my eyes just keep pushing ahead. It’s a weird mixture of “artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and symbolic logic.” Even “human-computer interaction” is thrown into the mix. I mean, a degree with symbol in its title! Could you possibly ask for more?

All the more reason to visit Stanford this May 13!

Of course I’m fascinated with the Speech Accent Archive: a massive (521 samples) archive of English accents from all over the world! They put native and non-native English speakers to read the same sound-rich English paragraph, record them, and then painstakingly transcribe the reading to phonetic symbols and even point out error generalizations (it turns out Mexican poblanos speak with “final obstruent devoicing”, “interdental fricative to stop”, and so on…). It’s pure beauty  —though it’s a shame that there’s only one Mexican accent in there, I’m thinking of sending my own recording (they do accept them and even have some precise instructions).

Here’s an excellent formist intro to international auxiliary languages^WP written by Eward Sapir^WP himself (one of the most influential American linguists of the past century) in 1925:

There are many, many highlights to be made. Here’s four

1. The “difficult and subjective concept” of the richness of a language, the “richness of connotations” (that phrase alone was worth the price of admission). This was precisely what I was getting at in my badly-received post On the Language of this Blog.
2. “It is true that English is not as complex in its formal structure as is German or Latin, but this does not dispose of the matter. The fact that a beginner in English has not many paradigms to learn gives him a feeling of absence of difficulty, but he soon learns to his cost that this is only a feeling, that in sober fact the very absence of explicit guide-posts to structure leads him into all sorts of quandaries.. The simplicity of English in its formal aspect is.. really a pseudo-simplicity or a masked complexity.”
3. His dazzling insight that the problem of finding an adequate international auxiliary language is really the problem of how best to “symbolize thought.” Wow. Just wow.
4. ”A common allegiance to a form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.” ‘Nuff said.

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Y’know, just between you and me, when the time is ripe—that is, in around 10 years—I would love to plunge myself in language: I would love to speak (and think in) Esperanto, Japanese, German, French, Mandarin, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Russian, Hebrew, Sweddish, Arab, Hindi… —Oh! Were languages not the harsh mistresses that they are! I’d love to work (and solve!) the problem of automatic machine translation (which, according to Kurzweil, will be the last task left for AI to emulate, the crucial last stepping stone to consciousness). I’d love to read both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. I’d love to construct all sorts of constructed and auxiliary languages. I’d love to write in Esperanto and join la movado. I’d love to become a Wiktionary super-freak. I’d love to write language textbooks. I’d love to create a compiler and write programming languages. I’d love (in a most masochistic kind of way) to be a professional translator and translate a novel. I’d love to study some serious linguistics. I’d love to do advanced algebra. I’d love to become a Lisp super-freak or, quite oppositely, think in assembly code. I’d love to understand Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. I’d love to work in the semantic web. I’d love to create software to help one read and absorb written information (we have software to write, word processors, so why don’t we have software to read?).

Oh well, please excuse the future lapse.

I must confess that I love Spanglish in a kitschy, campy, and yet honest kind of way.

It all started with Molotov and their ¿Dónde jugarán las niñas? album of my early adolescence. I loved their mongrel insults (”fuck you puto baboso!”) and their Voto Latino song:

More recently, a song by Yolanda Perez (featuring “Don Cheto”), Estoy Enamorada, has brought it all back to me:

Akwid, a recently famous group from Los Angeles, is a slightly different matter. Their music itself, for one thing, is something both truly different —mixing Mexican Pacific brass band with hip-hop— and truly good —the tuba “burping along like a nimble elephant.” But they don’t really speak Spanglish. It’s mostly just Spanish, but a different one from mine. One even more imbued with American influence.

They have a song called Pobre Compa in which the singer tells about a romantic triangle between him, his best friend and a girl. There’s a voice-over at the middle of the song in which the singer addresses the girl. One hears knocking, a door opening, and the following brief dialogue:

You can’t tell by the text, but the girl speaks her 5 words with a distinct accent that I love: crisp Spanish with an English cadence —which, btw, is completely different to gringo Spanish: broken Spanish with no cadence at all; an English tongue trying to mimic, unsuccessfully, Spanish sounds. And there was something else, beyond the accent, that I found interesting and appealing but couldn’t precisely pinpoint. I know now: it’s that “pienso que si”; a perfectly valid Spanish sentence, of course, but it feels somewhat unnatural to my Spanish sensibilities. “Pienso que si” mimics the English “I think so” where I would have more naturally said “creo que si” (“I believe so”).

It’s similar to the phrase “dulce para mi ojo” in their Taquito de Ojo song. That’s a quintessentially English phrase, “eye candy”, translated to Spanish inside a song with a quintessentially Spanish phrase as its title: “taquito de ojo” (“eye taco”). I like that.

Truth is, I love this blending whatever the language involved, I “delight in mélange.” Just to give an example, yesterday, via Diana, I found about a French Canadian group called K’maro and I was thrilled. They have true talent for Franglais, just look at this gem:

Or think about how “weekend” is now a French word. It’s much more natural to French cadence that the clunky “fin de semaine”.

En ficcion, el primer paso para crear destruccion digna de ese nombre es describir algo tan bello que duela destruirlo. Si quieres un divorcio realmente tragico y amargo, muestra primero lo feliz e idilico que fue el noviazgo. Para que que duela la caida, vuela alto. No duele el vacio, duele el recuerdo de lo que alguna vez hubo, la superposicion.

Es por eso que creo que el prefijo “des” (y su equivalente en otros diomas) es la forma suprema del lenguaje para expresar destruccion. Sad no lastima, no puede, lo mismo que unhappy, que insinua felicidad solo para arrebatarla. Existe algo mas triste que el desamor, la desesperanza, el desencanto, la desilusion, el desamparo?