Category Archives: anglosphere

by | 23 June 2008 · 10:04 pm

POW Language Use, Nagasaki, 1944-45

My sociolinguistics professor in grad school once opined that the best place to learn a foreign language was in a foreign prison. I assume he was thinking of the advantages of a complete immersion environment, total physical response methodology, and very rigorous incentive structures.

He must have been at least half serious, because he later applied for a grant to fund an audacious experiment to see what innate linguistic structures might emerge in an isolated, silently administered camp whose workers were recruited in equal numbers from communities speaking languages of a full range of word-order typologies and in minimal prior contact with typologically different languages. I believe the granting agency’s Committee on Human Experimentation nixed the proposal, for reasons one can well understand.

What makes me recall this is the abundance of fascinating bits of data about foreign language learning in prison that I’ve been finding in one of the books I’m currently reading, First into Nagasaki: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War, by George Weller (1907-2002), ed. by Anthony Weller (Three Rivers, 2006). Here are some of the insights of the reporter and the prisoners themselves, arranged under a few general headings.

Incentive Structure

Tervald Thorpson (Wadena, Iowa): “I managed to go a whole year without being beaten. Americans worked hard in the mine, but some had difficulty learning Japanese, and misunderstanding commands got them beatings.” (p. 97)

Sergeant Robert Aldrich (Capitan, New Mexico): “I was in the mine ever since it opened, but I was more fortunate than most because I learned Japanese, thus avoiding beatings due to misunderstanding.” (p. 101)

Methodology

Oscar Otero of Los Lunas, a husky New Mexican captured on Bataan, learned Japanese by being chauffeur to a colonel. By refusing to allow him to talk any Filipino [?], the Japanese furnished the coal mine prisoners with their ablest unofficial interpreter. (p. 88)

Bilingual Assistants

Dark-skinned Junius Navardos (Los Angeles): “Pressure in the mine caused me to pass out once while working. When I came around in the hospital I found myself with burned patches all over my skin. The boys told me that the burns had been made by an American-educated interpreter, Yamamuchi [prob. Yamaguchi], whom we called Riverside because he was brought up there. Asked whether he had done the burning, the interpreter told the doctor, ‘Yes, I did this, because I thought he was feigning.'”

Leland Sims (Smackover, Arkansas): “Many guards could speak English. One who we called Long Beach, because he was educated there, caught me smoking and said, ‘It’s all right with me, but don’t let the other guards catch you.'” (p. 96)

Japanese for Special Purposes

Corporal James Brock (Taft, Texas): “I was most often overworked by a boss we called Shitbird, usually with a hammer handle or a mairugi—that’s a small timber [丸木 maruki ’round wood = log’?]. He hit everybody who passed him, whether you belonged to his shift or not. I’m sorry he’s disappeared since the camp was liberated.” (p. 86)

Henry Sublett of Cisco, Texas, a Marine captured on Corregidor: “I was down with pneumonia and worked in the mine both after and before. Our first Buntai Joe [分隊長 buntaichō ‘squad leader’], or overseer, used to be drunk all the time and beat me every day for my first three months. He always used to the day start off with a few savas [サービス = sābisu ‘freebie’]—meaning ‘gifts’—of blows.” (p. 88)

Runge, captured at Singapore, was “an old Aussie,” which means he arrived at the Mitsui camp and entered the coal mine in June 1944, joining the Bataan and Corregidor Americans who had already been toiling for nearly a year underground. By February 1945 Runge was instructing “new Aussies” in the use of a jackhammer. He was showing F. R. Willis and Robert Tideswell how to chip rock, the whole party being under an overman named Katu-san [prob. Katō], when three cars carrying coal ran off the rails, causing Katu-san’s temper to do likewise. Saying “Dummy, dummy, that’s no good,” the Japanese promised that he would report Runge for haitis savis [兵隊サービス heitai sābisu ‘soldier freebie’], meaning “military gifts”—that is, a beating. (p. 104)

The idea of the camp administrator, Captain Yuri, was that a prisoner’s main and only job was to dig coal for the Japanese, and his only reward for twelve hours’ daily labor should be his salary of three-quarters of a cent daily, plus a yassamai [休み yasumi ‘rest’] or rest day every ten days or so. (p. 108)

With the arrival by train from Nagasaki of the first Army-Navy team for the evacuation of Kyushu’s largest prisoner of war camp, the final sinkes [出欠 shukketsu ‘attendance, (take) roll’] (Japanese for roll calls [otherwise 点呼 tenko lit. ‘point call’]) were sounding today over the grimy buildings and meagerly-clad G.I.s. This camp, 1,700 strong—700 being Americans from Bataan and Corregidor—has been thinned already to 1,300 by impatient ex-prisoners, mostly Americans, who have hit the high road for the American airbase at Kanoya in southernmost Kyushu. (p. 92)

So profound is the prisoners’ hatred of Baron Mitsui’s coal mine, the Japanese military police, and the aeso [営倉 eisō] or guardhouse where five Americans have found a violent death, that the entire camp would probably have been deserted had not the Army-Navy team arrived today. Hospitals filled with cases of malnutrition, diarrhea, beriberi, and mutilated men offer special problems. (p. 92)

Graduate Assistants

Pharmacist William Derrick (Leesville, Louisiana): “The Korean straw bosses were decent to us except when the Japs were around, who frightened them.” (p. 96)

Sergeant Wiley Smith (Coushatta, Louisiana): “We looked across the bay toward Nagasaki after emerging from the mine and saw black smoke starting up. The atomic bomb, falling ninety minutes before, had kindled Nagasaki. Our Japanese bosses kept pointing that way and chattering. It was better than Germany’s surrender, which we only heard about from Korean miners.” (p. 91)

Thoughts on Graduation

Navy Cook Laurel Whitworth (Bourne, Texas): “Leaving Japan for me means not having to cook any more dogs to eat. One day I had to cook sixty-nine, another seventy-three, another fifty-five. I hate cooking dogs.” (p. 94)

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Filed under anglosphere, Japan, language, U.S., war

by | 20 November 2007 · 6:45 am

First English Usages of ‘Barbecue’

The latest issue of Southern Culture (vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 138-146; Project Muse subscription required) contains an article by John Shelton Reed entitled There’s a Word for It—The Origins of “Barbecue” that contains this little gem.

The earliest use of the English word that I’ve encountered comes from 1661, when Edmund Hickeringill’s Jamaica Viewed reported that animals “are slain, And their flesh forthwith Barbacu’d and eat,” but by 1689 in a play called THE Widdow Ranter OR, The HISTORY of Bacon in Virginia, “the rabble” fixing to lynch one Colonel Wellman cry, “Let’s barbicu this fat rogue.” That the word could be used casually on the stage shows that by then it must have been familiar to London audiences. (The play was written by the remarkable Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to be a professional writer, and “Bacon” in the title refers to the leader of Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, not to side meat.) About the same time, the Boston Puritan Cotton Mather used the word in the same gruesome sense when he reported that several hundred Narragansetts slaughtered by New England troops in 1675 (among them women, children, and elders burned in their lodges) had been “terribly Barbikew’d.”

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by | 31 October 2007 · 8:17 pm

China Diary, 1988: The Inscrutable West

In 1987–88, the Far Outliers, with their two-year-old daughter in tow, spent a year teaching English at a new community college in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China. The following is one of a series of articles I wrote in 1988. I sent them to a Honolulu newspaper, but they were not interested. So now I offer them as a retrospective on coastal China twenty years before hosting its first Olympics. At the same time, I am scanning in a lot of our old China photos and uploading them to my Flickr account or to my WordPress blog to illustrate this series.

One of my Chinese students wrote:

“Play baseball must have two group and each one have nine person. They stand in the place and play the ball. One group is throw the ball to the other group. The other group must approach the ball and fielding the ball. Before the ball coming you must watch the ball because you must keep it.”

I corrected the grammar but didn’t worry about the ideas. It’s hard to explain baseball in ten minutes, even when you have a blackboard to work with.

You don’t have to understand baseball—or cricket or rugby or Aussie rules or American football—to master basic English. But when you teach English abroad, someone is bound to ask you what it means to strike out, throw someone a curve, or be out in left field.

I don’t feel too confident myself explaining cricket phrases like “sticky wicket,” and I’m even foggier about what the Hong Kong newscaster means when he says “Pakistan are 396 for seven in the third day of play” in a Commonwealth cricket tournament.

To our students in Zhongshan, the eating habits of English-speaking peoples are at least as peculiar as their sports—and more essential to understand, especially when many will go to work in the local visitor industry.

A few examples from our role-play in class illustrate:

Teacher: “I’ll take your chicken and pineapple salad.”
Student: “What kind of dressing would you like on it? We have oil, vinegar, French, Italian, Russian, and British.”

Eating raw vegetables tossed with dressing is a foreign notion in China. Lettuce, called “raw vegetable” (sheng cai), is abundant in the markets. But our students asked, “Have you ever eaten it raw?” We never did there.

Teacher: “I’ll take the French onion soup, the roast beef medium rare, and apple pie for dessert.”
Student: “And what kind of sandwich would you like?”

Our students figure a complete meal should include at least one item under each major section of the menu, just as a complete Cantonese meal might include a soup, a poultry dish, a seafood dish, a meat dish, and a vegetable dish. And they don’t usually measure the size of a meal by the number of helpings eaten. They count the number of dishes served.

Teacher: “I’d like a beverage with my meal. What do you have?”
Student: “Tea, Coke, Sprite, cognac, and brandy.”

A common sight in restaurants in Zhongshan, even at breakfast, is a bottle of liquor in the middle of the table. Having “wine” (usually translated jiu, meaning any kind of alcohol) with a meal is not a foreign idea, but the fine distinctions among the types of alcohol usually drunk before, during, or after a meal in the West require some explanation.

Typical American classroom culture is also hard for students in China to understand.

After hearing in a listening comprehension talk that young Alfred Hitchcock went to strict schools, one student asked, “What other kind is there?”

Chinese students are usually highly motivated and don’t expect the kind of song-and-dance routines that American teachers employ to try to keep their barely interested students from being disruptive or falling asleep. But Chinese students do doze off during long lectures, and most of their classes are long lectures.

In addition to passively listening, the students memorize and recite, read and translate. It takes a lot of work to get most of them to absorb and present information without memorizing it, to answer questions in their own words, or to participate in a seminar-type class.

As one Chinese essayist in China Daily observed, “stuffing students’ heads full of knowledge is by no means the best way” to educate them. The writer, obviously a radical revisionist, advocated less reliance on lectures and more reliance on seminars and directed research.

Still, the examination system in China has for centuries tested memorized knowledge, and classroom initiative has for centuries come from one source—the teacher—even if heads do nod from time to time.

UPDATE: Basketball has certainly become more scrutable in China in over the past two decades (via Language Hat).

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by | 8 October 2007 · 9:33 pm

Multilingual Name Changes in the Bonin Islands

From English on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, by Daniel Long (Duke U. Press, 2007; Publication of the American Dialect Society, no. 91; Supplement to American Speech, vol. 81), pp. 125-128

There is something of a misconception among Japanese—or at least among that minute percentage of the population that has any knowledge of the subject—that the Westerners of Ogasawara acquired Japanese family names when they were naturalized as Japanese citizens back in the early Meiji era. This is not true….

When the original inhabitants of the islands began to be naturalized in 1877, only a few took Japanified names. Among these was the almost legendary German figure Frederick Rohlfs (1823–98), who settled on Hahajima and aided subsequent Japanese arrivals when they were on the verge of starvation. He was commonly called “Rose,” probably because this is how his name sounded to Japanese listeners when pronounced by English speakers. His legal Japanese name was composed of five kanji (Sino-Japanese) characters chosen strictly for their pronunciation. Although they convey no coherent meaning, when combined the characters (pronounced as Rōsu Rarufu) sounded something like the two pronunciations of his family name. Rohlfs was in the minority, however; most of the Westerners (referred to as kikajin ‘naturalized people’ in those days) used katakana renderings of their own Western family names as the official names in their koseki, or Official Lineage Registries. These were not Japanese family names, nor Japanified versions of their Western names, but simply adaptations of them to the Japanese phonology and representations of them in the Japanese script (e.g., Gilley became Gērē, Savory became Sēborē, Webb became Uebu, Washington became Washinton, Gonzales became Gonzaresu).

The usage of kata[ka]na names continued for a couple of generations. It was not until the Sōshi Kaimei (創氏改名‘Establishment of Family Names and Alteration in Given Names’) law that people with non-Japanese surnames were forced to change them. This 1940 law is mainly known for its effect on the millions of colonized people in Korea, but it also affected the Bonin Islanders. Elderly islanders today recall choosing their own last names, often hurriedly and quite randomly….

Some of the islanders chose kanji characters that either sounded like their original names or expressed some significant meaning. The Savorys became Sebori (瀬堀[‘rapids-ditch’]), and the Ackermans, the Akaman (赤満 [‘red-full’) family. The Webbs chose characters that could be read as Uebu (上部 [‘upper-part’]) (though the name is pronounced Uwabe today). Other families decided on a name with some symbolic value. The Gilleys, proud of the “South Sea Islander” part of their roots, chose the name Minami (南 ‘lit. south’). Other families abandoned the idea of names in which either the sound or the meaning of the kanji held significance. In most cases, different family names were chosen by distant branches of the family tree, so that the Gonzales family descendants became either Ogasawara (小笠原 [‘little-hatshade-field’]) or Kishi (岸 ‘shore’).

During the war years, Westerners gave their children Japanese names. Children born after World War II (during the U.S. Navy period) were given only English names, and they use these today—written in katakana—as their official Japanese names.

Following the reversion to Japan, Westerners adopted the practice of giving Japanese names—written in kanji—to their children, but even here, we find cases of islanders identifying with their cultural roots. One case of this is Nasa Sēborē (セーボレー那沙), born in the 1980s, whose name, although written in kanji, is an homage to his ancestor Nathaniel (pronounced “Nasanieru” in Japanese).

Some of the Westerners legally changed their surnames back (from Japanese ones forced upon them in 1941) to their older katakana names following the changes in the Japanese law in the 1980s.

In many cases, a single individual has possessed four legal names in the span of his or her life. A case in point is Able Savory. He was born Sēborē Ēburu (in katakana, セーボレーエーブル), was forced to changed his name to Sebori Eiichi (in kanji, 瀬堀栄一) at the start of the war, and used Able Savory (in the Roman alphabet) during the Navy Era. After the 1968 reversion, he reverted to his wartime kanji family name, but used the katakana “first name” given to him at birth, resulting in the name Sebori Ēburu. In the 1980s, when some of the Savory clan changed their surname back to the katakana Sēborē, he decided four names in one lifetime were enough and retained the kanji surname.

In Ogasawara today, one finds many interesting name-related phenomena. Nicknames—in both Japanese and English—are the norm. Then, most of the Westerners have two names; many have both Japanese and English surnames and given names, which means there often are at least five or six ways to refer to most Westerners.

This reminds me my favorite comment thread ever on Language Hat, in reaction to a post about a poem entitled Peaches in Cluj.

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by | 25 December 2006 · 8:54 am

Anglosphere Navies vs. Cuban Pirates, 1820s

The United States sent out a second pirate-hunting squadron in 1823, this time under the command of Commodore David Porter, a naval hero who had captured the first British warship taken in the War of 1812. There had been a debate during the winter as to the best method of combating the pirates and it was decided that, to be fully effective, the squadron ‘will require a particular kind of force, capable of pursuing them into the shallow waters to which they retire’, as President Monroe informed the Senate. And so, in addition to the ships which had sailed with Biddle in 1822, Commodore Porter was supplied with a fleet of vessels specifically tailored to the task in hand, the first time that such a sensible policy had been adopted in pirate-hunting history. These included ten fast schooners, with a draught of less than seven feet and fitted with twenty or twenty-four sweeps, and five light double-bank cutters or barges, each to row twenty oars and adapted to carry forty men, well armed with muskets, pistols, boarding pikes and cutlasses. The squadron was also graced by the presence of the US steam brig Sea Gull the first naval steamer of any country to serve in action. She was originally built as a New Jersey ferry and ‘the croakers predicted that she would founder at sea in the first blow’, as Porter told his son who later wrote his biography. But in fact the Sea Gull did good service, mainly as a mother ship to the rowing vessels, though she had a chance to use her powerful guns on occasion and in May 1825 was reported to have sunk a pirate ship after a two-hour gun battle off Matanzas.

Porter chose as his base Key West, American since 1819 and only a hundred miles from the coast of Cuba. The United States was now at last getting cooperation from the Spanish authorities in Cuba and his orders permitted him to pursue pirates ashore, having first given notice of his intentions, orders which shared the ambiguity of those given to the British commanders. American relations with these British counterparts were excellent, the British going so far as to replace the normal admiral commanding the Jamaica station by a commodore so that Porter would not be outranked and ‘we might meet on equal terms’, as the American commodore recorded with gratitude. There was a certain amount of division of labour, the British concentrating their searches on the south coast of Cuba and the Americans on the north, but men of the two navies also hunted together, as in March 1825 when the boats from the British frigate Dartmouth and the schooners Union and Lion joined up with boat crews from the Sea Gull in a successful pursuit of the pirate schooner Socorro. ‘I am happy to say,’ reported the British commodore Sir Lawrence Halsted, ‘the greatest harmony prevailed throughout the service, the men of either nation receiving orders from the officers of the other and obeying each with equal alacrity.’ This harmony was echoed by Lt. Com. McKeever of the Sea Gull who praised ‘the handsome manner in which we were seconded by the officers and crews of the boats of HMS Dartmouth. There had been a certain amount of cooperation between the British and French in previous anti-pirate campaigns, in both the Leeward Islands and West Africa, but nothing on the scale of this Anglo-American camaraderie, this being nicely epitomised by the kind and friendly treatment given to sick British sailors at Key West which included taking convalescent men for a trip round the Florida Keys in the steam brig.

Such cooperation, along with Spanish assistance and the choice of the right sort of vessels for the job, was to prove the doom of the Cuban pirates, but the service was quite incredibly arduous for the British and American sailors and marines involved. Nearly all the close-up work was done by men rowing in open boats who pursued the elusive pirates from cay to cay, through shoals and reefs and into hidden passages through the mangrove swamps, such close pursuit often being done under fire from the retreating pirates. Captain Godfrey of HMS Tyne reported a successful cruise by his men who had chased pirates ‘in open boats without any kind of shelter for thirty days and thirty nights’, a record beaten by Lieutenant Platt of the United States Navy who was employed for sixty-eight successive days in an open boat on the north-west coast of Cuba, ‘in the examination of the inlets, bays, keys, and other places of piratical resort’. A report to the House of Representatives in January 1825 stressed the perilous service being imposed on Americans engaged in anti-pirate duty, who faced disease as well as danger in vessels too small to maintain health on long cruises. But such sacrifice was justified by the result. ‘They enabled the commanders to scour the coast, to penetrate into the shoal waters of the creeks and inlets, to the very margin of the land.’ No pirate hunters in the past had ever shown such zeal, determination and courage as these truly professional British and American sailors and marines.

SOURCE: The Pirate Wars, by Peter Earle (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), pp. 242-244

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by | 9 September 2006 · 8:09 am

Impressions of an Albertan in Florida

Albertan Colby Cosh reports from Florida:

I have to admit I had some subconscious trouble dealing with Americanness when I went to Florida last year for the Western Standard Cruise. It was really my first time anywhere on the east coast proper, and my first time in the South, and as it turned out I hadn’t psychologically prepared myself….

There was a related but very different effect once I got onto the boat, where the WS passengers were immediately immersed in a sea of overtanned gravel-voiced northeasterners between the ages of 50 and 80. For some reason all the Seinfeld accents (Oh my gawd, Lenny, you have to troy the smoked SAAA-m’n) just made me giggly instead of resentful. Whenever possible I’d just hang out in one of the restaurants after breakfast, listening to old Italians and Poles, folks from Philly and Boston. Everything these people say sounds like movie dialogue to me–they could be talking about shaving their corns and I’d be inhaling it like it was Chekhov. Again, it’s not strictly a matter of accent but also of how outlandishly oral these people are because of the different cultural influences–it’s like absolutely everything that’s ever in their minds has to be communicated at once or they’ll physically explode. Going to the States always makes me despair of ever writing a novel, because I discover I was born with a great disadvantage–namely, that I live in a place where people’s inner lives are actually interior. It’s not even fair, really: in the U.S. it just seems like you could create excellent literature with a tape recorder.

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by | 8 February 2006 · 9:22 pm

Hear Four Sets of Anglospheric Accents

The University of Otago has mounted online samples of male and female speakers of four sample accents of English: New Zealand female and male, Australian female and male, North American female and male, and English female and male.

Part of their experiment involved asking people from other nations to evaluate the personality traits of the speakers along several dimensions based solely on their accents. The results are often surprising.

UPDATE: It’s interesting that, in virtually every country, the North American accents rank most highly in the categories of solidarity (especially the female) and often competence, but much lower in the categories of status and power. The North American accents are American, not Canadian, but very few of the evaluators are likely to have been able to tell the difference. If you want to sharpen your ear for American-Canadian differences, just listen to the Winter Olympics coverage on NBC. There seem to be several Canadian-American pairs of announcers.

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by | 18 October 2004 · 8:28 pm

English Accent Recordings

The British Library has deposited online a selection of recordings of English Accents and Dialects collected during the 1950s. Turn up your speaker volume and try out this one, by Miss Dibnah, b. 1890, from Welwick, Yorkshire, recorded in 1955, about ‘how to make white bread, brown bread and spice bread’. Here are the grammar notes for this one.

grammar

adjective as adverb (I kneaded it real well; if you don’t knead it real well; I kneads it real well; then it’s real brown)

zero definite article (if you don’t put it in front of _ fire; I puts it in front of _ fire again; I puts it into _ oven; I leaves it in _ oven; I pokes _ fire up; I shoves _ damper in; put it into _ oven)

past participle gotten (when it had gotten risen; we’d gotten egg in)

verbal inflection with I (I takes; I kneads; I puts; I leaves; I pokes; I shoves; (I) stands it); verbal inflection with plural noun (some folks puts whole brown flour in)

non-standard plural marker (if they are big loafs; today they were big loafs)

first person singular has (then I has a look at it)

second person be + negative particle (if you ain’t)

zero for + time phrase (I leaves it _ another twenty minutes; it has to bake _ two hours)

use of thou (thou means spice bread)

word order with infinitive phrase (you have it to weigh = you have to weigh it)

past participle baken (when you get that baken)

note use and phonetic quality of utterance initial discourse marker why [wa:I]

via Foreign Dispatches

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by | 30 July 2004 · 6:03 pm

Reports from the Land of Oz

Language Hat has another post on Aussie slang, which I think should be officially declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage of at least the anglosphere. Fortunately, this particular cultural asset doesn’t seem to be in any danger of dying out.

Meanwhile, the Head Heeb has a long and interesting post, Terra Nullius Revisited, on settler-aboriginal relations in Australia, as a follow-up to his earlier post, Terra Australis Cognita, after returning from a trip Down Under.

Australia seemed less foreign than any other country I’ve visited. There are certain things about Australia that can mislead an American tourist, however, and the aborigines are one of them.

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