Languages

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.

* * *

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?

1. A patternist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy patterns.
2. A form is a linguistic pattern.
3. A formist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy forms.
4. Formists are prone to strange and seemingly dumb language misunderstandings. A subtle error in form in a sentence can led a formist completely astray. This is often irritating to non-formists—who, as if they wore cognitive sunglasses that dull them to form, remain undazed by its glaring inconsistencies.
5. It is also common for a formist to stop people in mid-sentence only to point out a particularly beautiful (or ugly) form they just noticed in their conversation or the surrounding language. Non-formists find this offensive and obnoxious. They shouldn’t—to continue the sunglass metaphor, where they see drab colors, formists enjoy vivid hues.
6. Formists are good at spelling and care about it (even in spite of themselves). They just can’t help noticing it.
7. Formists make formidable poets, programmers, writers (of all kinds), philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, and translators.
8. Formists excel easily in school and in academia in general, both having a marked bias towards verbal talents.
9. Formists learn new languages faster and better than non-formists—to the point that their enthusiasm and natural talent can be seriously annoying and off-putting to non-formists. Even Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was overwhelmed by his extremely formist father.
   Thus it was a familiar part of our life to hear foreign languages spoken in the household. My father, indeed, could speak some forty of them. He was so proficient in linguistic matters that his insistence as a teacher on accuracy and fluency had the somewhat surprising effect of almost completely inhibiting the efforts of my mother and of us children to speak more than one language.

   I Am a Mathematician, Norbert Wiener
10. Formists have a natural bias against non-formists (and vice versa); they often think (mistakenly, of course) that theirs is the only kind of intelligence.
11. Linguistic pedantry is an occupational hazard of being a formist.
12. Eemadges is a website for and by formists. So is the lovingly kept Language Hat.
13. Homo Sapiens is the formist ape.

14. We live in the age of the triumph of form. In mathematics, physics, music, the arts, and the social sciences, human knowledge and its progress seem to have been reduced in startling and powerful ways to a matter of essential formal structures and their transformations. The magic of computers is the speedy manipulation of 1s and 0s. If they just get faster at it, we hear, they might replace us… Life in all its richness and complexity is said to be fundamentally explainable as combinations and recombinations of a finite genetic code. The axiomatic method rules, not only in mathematics but also in economics, linguistics, sometimes even music. The heroes of this age have been Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Monod, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Levi-Strauss, Herbert Simon.

    [...]

    A college student enrolled in economics, once a branch of ethics, will now spend considerable time manipulating formulas. If she studies language, once firmly the province of humanists and philologists, she will learn formal algorithms. if she hopes to become a psychologist, she must become adept at constructing computational models. The manipulation of form is so powerful and useful that school is now often seen as largely a matter of learning how to do such manipulation.

    The Way We Think, Gilles Fauconnier, and Mark Turner (both emphases are mine)
15. Much (arguably lame) humor is formist in nature. Puns are the quintessential formist joke.

    What did the Buddhist monk say to the hotdog vendor?

    “Make me one with everything.”

    * * *
    
    When the monk asked for his change, the vendor replied, “Change comes from within.”

    Formists just want to have fun.

16. A formist compliment: “I’m warm for your form.”
17. Formists enjoy proverbs, sayings, slogans, mottoes, aphorisms, and quotes in general. Have you noticed how trivial and pedestrian they sound when rephrased? Much of what we love in them is their form.
18. Esperanto is the formist language—a mixed blessing.
19. Math is the study of patterns through forms. And thus it was so disappointing to find so surprisingly few formists during the time I pursued a Math major.
20. Algebra is the most formist of math theories.
21. A classic formist comment: ”X is almost a lump of syntactic sugar^WP .”
22. It takes a formist to enjoy Toki Pona.
23. This list of figures of speech is a formist’s field day. So is this collection of aphorisms.
24. All sitcom dialogues are formist but The Simpsons is specially remarkable. Here are two noteworthy compilations of Simpsonian formist candy: Beyond embiggens and cromulent and Subtly Simpsons.

    Carl [To the MENSA members]: Let’s make litter of the literati!

    Lenny: That was too clever! You’re one of them! [punches him]

    Episode: AABF18, They Saved Lisa’s Brain
25. Touch, a language of making languages, is a formist wet dream.

That’s the chilling intro to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Honestly, when I first read it I thought it was mere Engrish, but now that I’ve come to terms with its form (I’m even starting to like it), I can’t get its content out of my head. It’s just so powerful.

It makes you think of civilization as one long gradient towards ever larger complexes. A very interesting lens with which to revisit many important events and inventions: family, clans, money, speaking, writing, printing, law, contracts, corporations, science, the net, IP, blogs, wiki, mailing lists, email, IM, whatnot.

And it reminds me a lot of a favorite essay of mine—one I stumbled across a few years ago in wonderful serendipity: Erosion of the Essential Self. In it, it is argued that our sense of self is being made increasingly obsolete by technology, and that this may not necessarily be a bad thing. One of the interesting points it makes is that our sense of self itself is probably a byproduct of written culture: “In ongoing, face-to-face conversation, we are little concerned with the mind behind the words; meaning is shaped before us in the course of the interchange. However, with the emergence of printed text, important questions were created about the ‘author’s meaning.’” It’s one of those essays that simply becomes a part of you afterwards, something like this:

Claro que es posible, pero, al menos para mi, es mas dificil. Tu afirmas tacitamente que lo que importa es el talento, no el idioma, y eso es muy cierto. Estoy seguro de que toda la jerga gringa que nos invade—jerga tecnologica, cientifica, social, y artistica—podria haberse desarrollado perfectamente en Español, en Japones, en Hebreo, o, quizas, en toki pona. Pero se desarrollo en Ingles! Y es precisamente  por que el idioma no es lo que importa, sino sus hablantes y la suma de sus talentos y creatividad linguistica¹, que el Ingles es actualmente la lengua. A principios de nuestro siglo no hay esfera mas importante, mas efervescente, ni mas creativa que la angloesfera^WP (que para mi abarca todos los hablantes del Ingles, sin importar si lo aprendieron, quizas a regañadientes, como segunda lengua). No es malinchismo, es la verdad.

Precisamente, un buen ejemplo en Español de a que me refiero con jerga es “malinchismo”. Es una palabra curiosa, llena de significado y matices para cualquier mexicano (quizas tambien para cualquier latinoamericano), pero es muy dificil de traducir a otros idiomas por ser un fenomeno cultural (tristemente) muy nuestro. La tecnologia, la ciencia, y el arte son hoy en dia, en enorme medida, fenomenos de la angloesfera (como lo fueron en su tiempo del Aleman, del Frances, del Latin, del Griego, del Sumerio, del…).

O aqui va otro ejemplo, mas alentador: como dices “trova” en ingles? No puedes. Te ves forzado a escribir trova entre comillas y explicar atropelladamente que es la trova dentro de la hispanoesfera (o simplemente confiar que tu escucha este familiarizado con ella).

Por supuesto, este tipo de palabras y conceptos no son propiedad exclusiva de la esfera que las creo. Eventualmente, otras esferas las asimilan y llegan a su vez a derivar nuevas palabras y conceptos—rocanrol es ya una palabra hispana, y mas aun rocanrolero (como dices “rocanrolero yo soy” en ingles?). La pega aqui es ese “eventualmente”. (In the long run we’re all dead, remember?)

Es por eso que me faltan palabras en Español para hablar sobre lo que yo quiero hablar—mi idioma no las sabe todavia. Me faltan palabras y me faltan interlocutores—la gente con la que quiero hablar, abrumaduramente habla ingles (muchas veces como segundo idioma, claro, pero aun asi). Le he dado pues varias vueltas al asunto y, en este momento, la conversacion que me interesa, en la que quiero participar directamente, es la de la angloesfera². Que cada quien elija, libremente, la suya.