Category Archives: language

by | 14 March 2009 · 11:29 am

Funereal Language Revival in Northern Ghana

The occasion of the 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation seems an appropriate moment to note a recent post by Mark Dingemanse of The Ideophone about an encouraging bit of language revival in Siwu, spoken in the Volta region of Ghana: the return of traditional funeral dirges. (Note that Siwu is the language, Kawu is the place, and Mawu are the people, suggesting a noun-classification system most definitely related to those in found Bantu languages.)

Speaking of parting, it is only rarely that dirges are heard in Kawu nowadays. Two factors are contributing to their decline: firstly the fact that many churches discourage their use, preferring edifying hymns instead. The reason behind this, I am told, is that the dirges reflect a pre-Christian worldview and as such are to be eschewed by true Christians. A second factor has been the coming of electricity to the villages halfway the nineties, which has led to loud music taking the place of the dirges during the wakekeepings. Elsewhere I wrote that “culture is a moving target, always renewing and reshaping itself”, yet at the same time I can’t help but lament the imminent loss of such a rich vein of Mawu culture.

However, during my last fieldtrip there were some signs of a renewed interest in the genre. For example, one pastor told me that he had been reconsidering the rash dismissal of the dirges by his church. Realizing how important the dirges had been in containing, orienting, and canalizing the feelings of loss and pathos surrounding death, he felt that the Christian hymns did not always offer an appropriate replacement. Another hopeful event was that I was approached with the request to help record a great number of dirges in Akpafu-Todzi in August 2008. This was not just to record them for posterity (although this was part of the motivation), but also very practically so that they could be played at wakekeepings. I gladly complied with this wish of course. The result is a beautiful collection of 42 dirges, sung by eight ladies between 57 and 87 years of age. The first time the dirges were played at a funeral they sparked a wave of interest.

via Culture-Making, where Nate adds a lead-in: The cultural fall and rise of the traditional funeral dirges performed in the Volta region of northern Ghana: brought low by Christianity and recording technology, brought back by the same.

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by | 1 March 2009 · 7:14 pm

Parallel Pejoration of Terms in Korean, Japanese, Chinese

The latest volume of the journal Korean Studies (available by subscription on Project MUSE) contains an article by Minju Kim, “On the Semantic Derogation of Terms for Women in Korean, with Parallel Developments in Chinese and Japanese” (vol. 32, pp. 148-176):

This study investigates two kinds of semantic change in terms for women in Korean, along with parallel developments in Chinese and Japanese, and examines the underlying mechanisms that cause these linguistic changes. In Korean and Chinese, polite terms for young women (akassi and xiăo jiĕ, respectively) have been taking on strong sexual connotations, due to the terms’ association with professions in the sex trade. In Korean and Japanese, terms for older sister (enni and oneesan/oneechan, respectively) have been adopted by more senior speakers to address young women, especially those in service interactions, including those in sex entertainment. This study demonstrates that besides sexist attitudes, other quite different motivations can be responsible for the semantic derogation of terms for women. In an effort to be polite, speakers have adopted positive female terms to address women of lower occupational status. Subsequently, the burden of the lower-status referents has caused the positive terms to undergo semantic derogation.

(Note that, like most linguists, Kim uses Yale romanization to represent Korean, since it most closely represents the phonemic system—and for that reason most closely transliterates hangul. The more common romanization for 아가씨 is agassi.)

Kim notes similar developments in European languages, as in the pejoration of hussy from ‘housewife’ to ‘loose woman’ in English. She also notes the pejoration of the terms for the female half in pairs of terms that used to be more equivalent, such as bachelor vs. spinster or master vs. mistress in English, or in the pairs of terms that used to distinguish ‘young man’ from ‘young woman’ in several Romance languages: Portuguese rapaz vs. rapariga, Spanish hombrezuelo vs. mujerzuela, French garçon vs. garce. (Kim spells rapariga as ramariga and mujerzuela as muerzuela.)

During China’s Cultural Revolution, according to Kim’s sources, the use of xiăo jiĕ was discouraged because of its long history of deferential use to address young ladies of the nobility. Now its use is being discouraged for its derogatory connotations by some sociologists who suggest addressing waitresses as ‘attendant, waiter’ (服务员 fúwùyuán) rather than ‘young lady’.

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by | 24 February 2009 · 9:41 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Kanson Minpi

Kyushu-based blogger Ampontan, who reads a broader range of Japanese media much more carefully than do the habitués of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo, cites a useful Sino-Japanese four-character idiom (yojijukugo) in his lengthy analysis of former Prime Minister Koizumi’s exasperated lambasting of the backsliding by his successors on key aspects of his popular reform agenda.

The New Nelson translates glosses 官尊民卑 kanson minpi as ‘overemphasis on government at the expense of the people’, a phrase that applies all too well to the rest of the world, too.

官 kan (= tsukasa) means ‘government; officials’, as in 官僚 kanryou ‘bureaucracy, officialdom’ and 官話 kanwa ‘Mandarin language, officialese’.

尊 son (= tattoi, toutoi) means ‘respect, honor’, as in 尊敬 sonkei ‘respect, reverence’ and 尊厳死 songenshi ‘death with dignity’.

民 min (= tami) means ‘people’, as in 民衆主義 minshushugi ‘democracy’ and 民間活力 minkankatsuryoku ‘private sector vitality’.

卑 hi (= iyashii) means ‘humble, base, vulgar’, as in 卑見 hiken ‘my humble opinion (MHO)’ and 卑金属 hikinzoku ‘base metal’.

So a literal rendition of the compound might be ‘officials [get] respect, citizens [get] disdain’ or in Doc Rock‘s smoother formulation: ‘respecting officials [while] disrespecting citizens’.

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by | 15 February 2009 · 12:56 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Fukko vs. Ishin

Careful readers of my last two blogposts from a book chapter, “Cultural Change in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” by the late Marius B. Jansen, will have noticed a theme that runs through both excerpts: that Japan’s ardent reformers were inspired as much by the need to return to an imagined past as by the need to adapt to the intrusions of the modern world. The section excerpted below focuses on two terms that highlight the nuances of these dual motivations. The book in which it appears is Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art, ed. by Ellen P. Conant (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 32-35:

Some years ago Sakata Yoshio divided the Meiji Restoration epoch into periods characterized by themes of fukko [復古] or ishin [維新], “revival” or “renewal.” In modern parlance the terms are quite different in their connotations. Revival suggests nostalgia and conservatism. The 1974 Kenkyusha dictionary, for instance, gives the following examples: “ōsei fukko—the restoration of the monarchy; fukko ronsha—a reactionary.” By justifying sweeping change in the name of the past, Meiji statecraft might seem, to present-day commentators, to have injected a problematic retrogressiveness into values and culture.

In the Chinese Confucian context from which these terms derived, however, the idea of revival was entirely positive. F. W. Mote has asserted that in Chinese tradition, because neither individual nor state could claim any theoretical authority higher than men’s rational minds, there being no external creator or lawgiver, ultimate authority rested with historical experience….

In Meiji thinking, ishin and fukko could be linked. Tetsuo Najita points out that “I [維 ‘tie’] means to pull together the disparate strands in society, to regroup, as it were, and the second part of the compound, shin [新 ‘new’], means starting out in a totally new direction.” The appeal of return to an imagined moral past made it possible to utilize both “restoration” and “innovation” in government pronouncements. The official chronicle Fukkoki emphasized the theme of return, but contemporary assurances that everything would be changed (hyakuji goishin) had connotations of a “world renewal” (yonaoshi) of the sort that late Tokugawa insurrections had announced. In the event, however, the new government lost little time in suppressing advocates of such radical ideas.

Late Tokugawa nativism modified and added to the notion of the perfect past to which Japan might return. The kokugaku (National Studies) scholars argued the virtues of Japan before it had become tainted by imported values, words, and books. Their version of fukko gave rise to impressive efforts in historical philology…. Another respect in which the Japanese tradition provided helpful arguments for advocates of cultural and institutional change was to be found in tradition and historical memory that validated the practice of cultural borrowing without prescribing the category or the character of what was to be borrowed….

A final element conducive to cultural borrowing was the nature of Japanese cultural nationalism. Acutely aware of other civilizations, especially the Chinese colossus to the west, Japanese thought in comparative and competitive terms. The country and its deities were divine, and the question was how to serve them best….

In sum, revivalism differed in Japan from its counterpart in China, partly because of the shadowy nature of the Japanese past that the nativists exhumed, and partly because of the historical precedents for change and for borrowing. To paraphrase Maraini’s argument and apply it here, Europe might be constrained by absolutes of theology, and China by its commitment to a transmitted body of ancient learning that was relatively constant, but in Japan fukko permitted the greatest flexibility in appropriating or devising stratagems for protection of the cultural polity. It could blend with change and even slide into renewal.

Terms like “Meiji culture” and “Tokugawa tradition” suggest rapid change in a previously stable setting, but it is important to remember that late Tokugawa culture was profoundly eclectic and that the Meiji changes represented acceleration of many trends that were already in progress. What was new was the explicit acknowledgment and the clear assessment of problems and the unity of determination to remedy them.

Nowadays, 明治維新 (Meiji Ishin) is the usual Japanese term for what English speakers often call the “Meiji Restoration.” I was not familiar with the alternate term 復古 (fukko) (‘return-past’) but it seems to be a better translation for ‘restoration’. The core meaning of 復 fuku seems to be ‘return, revert’, as in the everyday term 往復 ōfuku (lit. ‘go-return’) ’round trip’ or in 復活 fukkatsu (lit. ‘return-life’) ‘rebirth, revival, resurrection’ (as in 復活祭 fukkatsusai [lit. ‘return-life-festival’] ‘Easter’).

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by | 26 January 2009 · 10:04 pm

Navigating America by Area Code

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles blogger Jennifer 8. Lee notes the key role of telephone area codes in helping Chinese immigrants who can barely read English find their way to smaller cities served by the Chinatown bus services.

That is because many Fujianese restaurant workers are not educated and thus don’t really read and write English. Given that. How do you divide the United States? Not through towns and states. You do it through numbers — hence the area codes. As I wrote in a piece in 2005, job listings in Chinatown employment agencies are often done by area code.

Here’s a snippet from that earlier article, which is well worth reading.

For workers who cannot read the names of their destinations in English, area codes serve as the restaurants’ main geographical identifiers. The workers do not see America as a series of cities or even states, but as a collection of area codes, almost all with dozens upon dozens of Chinese restaurants looking for help. Maps in every Chinese agency break down the country by area code, with recently introduced area codes scribbled in by hand.

For many restaurant workers, the number of hours by bus is a critical measure of how far they are from the American center of their universe, East Broadway in Chinatown. Almost all travel by bus, because many do not speak English or have identification, so they cannot travel by plane. A network of Chinese bus companies has sprung up to shuttle the restaurant workers from Chinatown to the rest of the country. Some have started to draw non-Chinese riders, specifically the “Chinatown buses” that run between New York and Boston or Washington. One bus-company sign advertises the destination and the fare: “Minnesota (612, 551, 952, 763) $150; Wisconsin (920, 715, 608, 414) $120.”

via Culture-making

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by | 19 January 2009 · 5:06 pm

Japan’s Women vs. Children Left Behind in China

From Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, Mariko Asanoi Tamanoi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 91-92 (Japanese kanji added):

Today the Japanese state and media woman call [women abandoned in Manchuria at war’s end] chūgoku zanryū fujin [中国残留婦人](Japanese women left behind in China) and distinguish them from chūgoku zanryū koji [中国残留孤児] (Japanese orphans left behind in China) in terms of age and gender. The latter were born of Japanese parents, mostly agrarian colonists, in either Japan or Manchuria, and were younger than thirteen at the time of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. In the wake of Japan’s capitulation, their parents entrusted them to Chinese families, either because they were too sick to take care of their children or because the latter had little hope of survival. Children who were orphaned or accidentally separated from their families were also adopted by Chinese families. Today, owing to the tender age of these children at the time they were separated from their relatives, they are unsure of their mimoto, their “roots” [身元]. Since the mid-1970s, such children have been urged by the Japanese state to prove their identities as Japanese in the system of nation-states. Only those who have successfully proved their Japanese nationality have been officially allowed to return to Japan permanently.

In contrast, chūgoku zanryū fujin is a gendered category, referring to women who were over the age of thirteen when separated from their families. By 1945, most Japanese men older than thirteen had already been mobilized into the Youth Brigade or military. Hence, whether they were married or not, the women in this category had been left to take care of themselves and all the children. In the turmoil after Japan’s capitulation, some of these women chose to marry Chinese citizens for their own survival, and they stayed in China. These women are different from the children who were left behind in one important way: because they were older, they firmly remember their roots as well as the Japanese language. Precisely for this reason, the Japanese state deemed these women old enough to make choices when they were left on their own. Thus until 1993, the state did not permit them to return permanently to Japan; they were regarded as belonging to China as the spouses of Chinese citizens.

The set of terminology is confusing largely because the difference between the women and the children was artificially created by the Japanese state and media. In addition, the categories excluded Japanese men older than thirteen who left in China as of 1945. In 1994, the Japanese state admitted this confusion. Through the Repatriation Support Law (Kikoku shienhō [帰国支援法]), the state eliminated the differences between the two categories and combined them under the umbrella term of chūgoku zanryū hōjin [中国残留邦人] (Japanese left behind in China). Nevertheless, this term too has generated confusion; as a result, the state and media continue to use the two earlier terms today.

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by | 17 January 2009 · 12:39 pm

Possessive vs. Attributive Genitives in Numbami

Genitival modifiers in Numbami, an Austronesian language of Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea, may either precede or follow their head nouns. This word order difference has consistent semantic correlates. For convenience, I will refer to the Modifier + Head genitive order as the “possessive” genitive. This contrasts with the “attributive” genitive, which has Head + Modifier order.

MODIFIER + HEAD ORDER

There are two types of genitives with Modifier + Head order. One is simply a noun-noun compound without any intervening markers of a genitive relationship. Such compounds express whole-part relationships. The modifier indicates the type of larger entity of which the principal entity (that denoted by the head noun) is a part. This modifier is descriptive rather than referential. There are no restrictions on the referentiality of the compound as a whole. It can be nonspecific—that is, it can denote some not-yet-uniquely-identifiable member(s) or quantity of the set it describes. It can be generic—that is, it can refer to any and all members (or the entire quantity) of the set it describes. Or it can be specific—that is, it can refer to some individually identifiable subset of the set it names. Because the term “generic” is sometimes used in both the nonspecific and the generic sense (as just defined), it will be convenient to use different terminology in the discussion that follows. The term “attributive” (or “nonreferential”) will substitute for “nonspecific” and the term “referential” will take the place of both “generic” and “specific”. Examples of whole-part genitives in Numbami follow.

Whole-part Genitives

    wuwu lau ‘betel pepper leaf’
    wuwu ano ‘betel pepper fruit (catkin)’
    nima kuku ‘finger’ (lit. ‘hand digit’)
    nima daba ‘thumb’ (lit. ‘hand head’)
    nima duga ‘elbow’ (lit. ‘arm joint’)
    nima gidu ‘wrist’ (lit. ‘arm nape’)
    tina daba ‘headwater’
    tina gidu ‘river mouth’
    kapala lalo ‘inside of house, indoors’
    kapala zamoka ‘veranda of house’
    Awayagi dume ‘back (windward) side of Awayagi Island’
    Buzina bubusu ‘Buzina (Salamaua) point’

In contrast to the modifiers in whole-part genitives, those in possessive genitives must be referential. The reference of the head noun is also restricted. It must be referential.

Possessive Genitives

    wuwu na lau ‘the leaves of the betel pepper plant; particular betel pepper plant’s leaf’
    kapala na lalo ‘the insides of house: particular house’s inside’
    kakawa na kapala ‘the houses made for chickens; particular chicken’s house’
    kaila ndi kapala ‘the houses built by inlanders; house(s) belonging to a specific group of inlanders’
    Siasi ndi gutu ‘the Siassi Islands; islands belonging to a particular group of Siassi people’
    bumewe ndi nomba ‘the things or concerns peculiar to whites; thing(s) belonging to a particular group of whites’
    bumewe ndi bani ‘the food typically eaten by whites; food belonging to a particular group of whites’

The possessive genitive is the only type in which the modifiers may be pronominal. The internal structure of the majority of genitive pronouns parallels that of the genitive nominals. The independent pronoun appears in the same position as other nominals.

Pronouns Pronominal genitives
woya na-ŋgi kapala ‘my house’
aiya a-na-mi kapala ‘your (sg) house’
e e-na kapala ‘his/her/its house’
i i-na-mi kapala ‘our (excl) house’
aita aita-ndi kapala ‘our (incl) house’
amu amu-ndi kapala ‘your (pl) house’
ai ai-ndi kapala ‘their house’

The preposed genitive is also the only way to express a possessive relationship between personal possessors and inalienable possessions. Remnants of former suffixed possessives show up in the middle of a few body-part and kin-term compounds, however. Only the kin-term infixes show agreement with the preposed pronouns, and then only with the singular pronouns.

Inalienable Possession

    ena taŋa-n-owa (lau) ‘his/her/its (outer) ear’
    anami nisi-n-owa (awa) ‘your nose (nostril)’
    naŋgi tai-n-owa (bibi) ‘my buttocks (rectum)’
    ena gode(-n-ewe) ‘his/her (female) cross-cousin’
    anami gode(-m-ewe) ‘your (female) cross-cousin’
    naŋgi gode(-ŋg-ewe) ‘my (female) cross-cousin’

Noun-noun possessive constructions are distinguished from noun-noun (whole-part) compounds by morphology as well as by semantics. Singular possessors are indicated by na and plural possessors by ndi. One of these two morphemes intervenes between the preposed referential genitive modifier and the head noun.

HEAD + MODIFIER ORDER

There are two types of simple attributive constructions with Head + Modifier order. Noun-adjective constructions are one type. In Numbami they contain no markers of a genitive relationship. The adjectives themselves are attributive rather than referential, and the construction as a whole may be either attributive or referential.

Noun-Adjective Attributives

    wuwu wiya ‘good betel pepper’
    wuwu maya ‘bad betel pepper’
    tina wawana ‘hot water; tea’
    tina luluwila ‘cold water, ice water’
    niwila masoso ‘dry coconut, copra’
    niwila teliŋa ‘liquid coconut, drinking coconut’
    kole goiya ‘big man, prominent man’
    kole bodama ‘ordinary man, worthless man’
    usana pisipisi ‘drizzling rain’
    usana wami ‘downpour’
    kapala kae ‘little house; toilet’
    kapala kaikaila ‘poor quality house’ (kaila ‘inlander’)

While adjectives carry no morphological indication of an attributive or genitive relationship, attributive nominals are marked as genitive. They are followed by either na or ndi. Singular na is far more frequent. Plural ndi is only used when the attributive nominal denotes a type of people with whom the referent of the head noun is characteristically associated. Attributive nominals never refer to a particular subset within the set they name. Instead, they only restrict reference to a subset of the prototype set denoted by the head noun. The construction as a whole may be referential or attributive, but the modifying nominal is nonreferential.

Attributive Genitives

    wuwu weni na ‘forest (wild) betel pepper’
    wuwu dadaŋa na ‘outside (domesticated) betel pepper’
    wuwu Buzina ndi ‘type of betel pepper associated with the Buzina people at Salamaua’
    wuwu Zena ndi ‘type of betel pepper associated with the Zena people at the mouth of the Waria river’
    kulakula kundu na ‘sago work’
    kulakula uma na ‘garden work’
    lawa teteu na ‘village people’
    lawa da na ‘people of the spear (= police)’
    walabeŋa tamtamoŋa na ‘fish poison, native means of stunning fish’
    walabeŋa bumewe na ‘dynamite, explosives, European means of stunning fish’

The attributive genitive seems very close in meaning to the possessive genitive when the reference of the construction as a whole is generic (as earlier defined). Both bani bumewe ndi ‘European food’ and bumewe ndi bani ‘the Europeans’ food (the food of Europeans as a “genus”), can refer to the same set of food. But the difference is this: The attributive nominal helps identify the referent by subtyping the head noun according to its association with another type of entity. The possessive nominal helps identify the referent by associating the head noun with another referent. Possessive genitives, in fact, are as much a means of referring to possessors as they are of referring to possessions. The following example illustrates.

Kundu, ena lau wa kapole, ena wambala tiyamama
sago its leaf and leafstalk its cargo all
nomba sesemi. Sese ena bolo luwa.
thing one&same but its skin two
‘Sago, its leaf and stalk, all its content is the same. But its husk is of two kinds.’

The semantics of the attributive genitive, on the other hand, make it suitable for other functions. Since it identifies entities by subclassifying them, it is useful in distinguishing homophonous or polysemous words and in creating new classes of entities.

    awila buwa na ‘betel lime (betel awila)’
    awila iya na ‘fishhook (fish awila)’
    waŋga aidudu na ‘airplane (treetop canoe)’
    waŋga tailalo na ‘submarine (undersea canoe)

Neologisms and periphrastic translations of foreign terms are frequently attributive genitives. The head noun denotes a familiar general prototype and the genitive identifies some familiar domain with which the new entity is associated. The attributive genitive construction thus characterizes the novel entity by creating a novel association between familiar entities. This is the point at which genitive constructions shade into relative constructions.

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by | 10 January 2009 · 8:29 am

Japan’s Genre of Uprooted Colonist Memoirs

From Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan, Mariko Asanoi Tamanoi (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 53, 59-60 (inline reference citations omitted):

In Japanese, the verb “to repatriate” (hikiage-ru) has multiple meanings; among these are to pull up, raise, refloat, pullout (of a place), and (close a business and) return home. [‘Pull up stakes’ seems the best English equivalent to me—J.] As a noun, “repatriate/s” (hikiage-sha) becomes not only historically but also morally charged in postwar Japan. Repatriates are those who emigrated to Japan’s overseas territories in the age of empire but were forced to (close their businesses and) return home after Japan’s capitulation in the Asia-Pacific War. Once in Japan, however, they were often seen as social misfits, largely because the dominant perception of them dramatically changed over the divide of August 15, 1945. Before then, they were imin (emigrants) who were hailed as the vanguards of imperialism in official discourses. After Japan’s defeat, they were hikiage-sha, who were greeted with pity, suspicion, and callousness by their compatriots who had never left Japan proper. Here, the oral narrative of Aki … is helpful: “When we returned home [to Fujimi in 1946], our neighbors were very cold to us Manchurian daughters. I truly worried that I might become an old mistress.” An arranged marriage for Aki would fail largely because she was “a returnee from Manchuria” who might carry “foreign sexual diseases.” In the end, she married a “Manchurian boy” whom I could not meet since he died a few years before the beginning of my fieldwork. After all, kaitaku imin (agrarian emigrants) were not supposed to return, for they had left Japan to rehabilitate the rural economy at home. With Japan’s capitulation, they lost land and houses in Manchuria that the state had taken away from Chinese farmers. Hence they had no recourse but to return to Japan, the only country on earth that was obliged to take them. Yet in the immediate postwar period, when resources were so meager, the people of their mother villages, who had sent them off enthusiastically, were reluctant to welcome the repatriates back to their home….

Although the first memoir written by a returnee from Manchuria appeared as early as 1949 (and was reprinted in 1976), the upsurge in this genre came decades later, from the late 1960s to the 1990s, with several published in the early years of the twenty-first century. This means that the majority of authors waited for more than two decades before publishing their memoirs—in order, possibly, to keep a certain distance from the past. What characterizes the memoirs is that most authors rely only on their personal memories, as well as the memories of their fellow settlers that they (over)heard while fleeing from Manchuria. In addition, they cite each other’s memoirs, rather than primary or secondary sources on Japanese imperial history. After all, hikiage-mono are the authors’ eyewitness reports and they force the reader to believe in the authenticity of their personal memories.

For all these reasons, the genre is called hikiage-mono rather than hikiage-bungaku, “repatriate literature.” Though a generic term for “genre,” mono is primarily used for classifying popular cultural productions such as movies, comedy shows, and songs. In other words, the term indicates the genre’s lower position in the hierarchy of cultural production: it is neither “literature” (bungaku) nor “history.” Indeed, most repatriate memoirs have small readerships, as the authors, being amateurs, submitted their works to small, local publishing houses. Many of the works are not even for sale. Others are not books at all but short essays printed in magazines published by organizations of former colonists and soldiers, as well as alumni organizations of the Japanese schools built in Manchuria. In fact, I bought most of the works that I examined in secondhand bookstores in Japan since the collections at university libraries are rather limited. It is for this reason, I believe, that Japanese as well as Anglophone scholars have hardly paid attention to them.

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by | 9 January 2009 · 6:13 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Brown brown, Poda poda, Upline

Among the more interesting words of Sierra Leone Krio that I learned from reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), were the following.

I took turns at the guarding posts around the village, smoking marijuana and sniffing brown brown, cocaine mixed with gunpowder, which was always spread out on the table, and of course taking more of the white capsules, as I had become addicted to them. [p. 121]

Where was I from? What was it like growing up upline? Upline is a Krio word mostly used in Freetown to refer to the backwardness of the inner country, its inhabitants, and their mannerisms. [p. 184]

The call for prayer from the central mosque echoed throughout the city, poda podas crowded the streets, their apprentices hanging on the open passenger doors and calling out the names of their destinations: “Lumley, Lumley” or “Congo Town …”. [p. 190]

Most reviewers gush over the book, as a story that needs to be told, no matter how embellished it may have been.

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by | 8 January 2009 · 11:14 am

What It Means to Be ‘Chinese Uighur’

From Under the Heel of the Dragon: Islam, Racism, Crime, and the Uighur in China, by Blaine Kaltman (Ohio U. Press, 2007), p. 17:

While discussing the importance of learning Mandarin with a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried Uighur man originally from Kashgar, I was introduced to the expression “Chinese Uighur.” It is a derisive term referring to Uighur who have learned to speak Mandarin properly and are making every effort to assimilate into Han society. While usually relatively well off economically, these Uighur are generally looked down on by other Uighur who feel they have sold out or betrayed their identity to advance in Han society.

As the man from Kashgar explained, “I think it’s harder for Uighur than for Han, because we do have to learn a second language. And, although the Chinese government encourages businesses to hire Uighur in Xinjiang, no one will hire a Uighur who can’t speak good Mandarin. But now, as Xinjiang becomes more developed, it is getting easier. Uighur children learn Mandarin at such a young age that it’s not so hard for them.”

He laughed and said, “you know, now there are many Uighur in Urumqi whose Mandarin is better than their Uighur because they go to Han schools, where all their classes and interactions are in Mandarin. Especially those rich Uighur children who have parents who send them to live at Han schools. They spend more time speaking Mandarin than Uighur, and when they come home they forget how to speak Uighur. In fact, now more and more Urumqi Uighur, middle-class Uighur children, can’t read Uighur. They can still speak it, because it’s their first language, but they never learn to read. And some speak it so poorly.”

He laughed again and said, “We call them ‘Chinese Uighur’ because they aren’t real Uighur.”

I asked, “What do you mean by ‘real Uighur’?” “My meaning is Chinese Uighur don’t read Uighur. They might not eat pork, but they don’t know why. They don’t keep Uighur traditions and culture alive. Many of them date Han or Hui girls. Many don’t go to pray.”

I wonder if there’s an epithet applied to Chinese Uighur that is the equivalent of oreo, banana, coconut, or apple.

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