Category Archives: language

by Joel | 8 January 2009 · 10:56 am

Uighur Bilingual Education Debate

From Under the Heel of the Dragon: Islam, Racism, Crime, and the Uighur in China, by Blaine Kaltman (Ohio U. Press, 2007), pp. 18-19:

The use of Mandarin as a vehicle for instruction and the benefits of learning Mandarin versus the Chinese government policies designed to maintain Uighur culture and language were issues that frequently came up during interviews. According to one Uighur businessman who was in his midforties, “This [the Uighur need to learn Mandarin] is a tricky problem because, while more and more schools [in Xinjiang] are teaching in Mandarin, there are still far too many that don’t. Many Uighur teachers don’t speak Mandarin. This is especially true outside Urumqi. Furthermore, the Han government wants Uighur to maintain their local language, so they encourage Uighur schools to teach in Uighur.” He thought for a moment and then added, “But this should be a Uighur responsibility. The Han know little of our culture. It’s up to Uighur parents to teach their children our language and about our Uighur culture. But it’s up to the schools to teach our children Mandarin and Han culture.”

Although many Uighur parents want their children to have a proper education and to learn Mandarin—which almost always means attending a predominantly Han school—they feel that being a Uighur student in a school where Han teachers and students make up the majority population is difficult because of racist attitudes and language difficulties. Some Uighur believe that Chinese government policies encouraging instruction in Uighur, not Mandarin, are designed to limit Uighur development in Chinese society.

Speakers of minority languages the world over face similar choices.

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Filed under Central Asia, China, education, language

by Joel | 3 December 2008 · 6:06 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: The Hazelnut Coast Shibboleth

My history-professor brother, who digs up many sources containing observations about the varied roles of mercenaries and conscripts in militaries ancient and modern, sent me the following excerpt from Michael E. Meeker’s (1971) “The Black Sea Turks: Some Aspects of Their Ethnic and Cultural Background,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 2:318-345.

It is said that the Laz when conscripted [by the Turkish state] are automatically placed in the navy … because Anatolians associate Black Sea men with the sea, even though many of them have little or no experience as sailors or fishermen. The eastern Black Sea men, realizing that the period of service for the navy is three years, while that for the army is only two, naturally try to hide their origins, but the recruiting officer simply asks each man to pronounce the word ‘hazlenut.’ The vowel sounds of this word are inevitably distorted by the eastern Black Sea men, and the recruiting officer places each man in the army or navy according to his pronunciation. The accents of the Black Sea Turks are by no means uniform even in one given local, but most accents east of Samsun feature a distortion of the vowel harmony typical of Anatolian Turks. As one proceeds eastward along the coast the accents tend to become more unlike the Anatolian accents, until in the province of Rize even some Anatolian consonants are distorted or changed [different]. For example geldim becomes jeldum, and balik become paluk. These consonantal changes are more localized than [the vowel harmony changes], therefore the latter remains the best test for detecting eastern Black Sea origins.

There are two intriguing terms in this passage, one an ethnic label of miragelike reference, the other a shibboleth of chameleonlike pronunciation.

The Laz language is not at all related to Turkish. It is a South Caucasian language (related to Georgian and Mingrelian) with a lot more complex system of consonants than Turkish, but a much simpler vowel system, just (a, i, u, e, o). Laz is spoken in the far southeast corner of the Black Sea coast, where Turkey meets Georgia. (See Dumneazu‘s post this past summer about Laz ethnorock music.)

Nowadays, most Turks seem to consider the Laz people to be any inhabitants of the northeastern coast of Anatolia (old Pontus), whose Trabzon dialect of Turkish is called Lazca. This usage may go back many centuries, to an era when the ancestors of the current speakers of the “Lazca” dialect of Turkish actually spoke a “Lazca” language related to Georgian. (The Pontic Empire of the Trebizond was the last remnant of the Byzantine Empire to fall to the Ottomans—in 1461.) The Turkish-speaking “Laz” now prefer to call themselves Karadenizli (‘from the Black Sea’), and the men would rather spend two years in the army than three years in the navy (according to Meeker 1971). Even though they eat a lot of anchovies, they are rarely fisherfolk; instead, they are mostly farmers growing tea and maize.

And hazelnuts (Corylus avellana). Turkey produces about 75% of the world’s hazelnuts, and half of those come from Ordu Province, smack in the middle of old Pontus, the Hazelnut Coast.

The Turkish word for ‘hazelnut’ is fındık, with a dotless ı that sounds like an unrounded u (like Tokyo-standard Japanese u). The word fındık (or funduk or finduk or whatever other variants fail the shibboleth) appears to have entered Turkish via Arabic bunduq/funduq, which derives in turn from Greek φουντούκι (funduki), from Ancient Greek ποντικόν κάρυον ‘Pontic nut’ (at least according to this thread in Projet Babel, Des mots turcs d’origine grecque). Etymologically then, Turkish fındık = Pontic (i.e., Black Sea) [nut].

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Filed under Caucasus, Greece, language, military, Turkey

by Joel | 26 November 2008 · 6:48 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Begum, Jhampan

I never read much Kipling as a kid, and some of the vocabulary of British India that I have encountered in Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008) is new to me. Here are two such novelties.

The royal tour ground on, zigzagging up through the belly of India and stopping in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad and Indore. By 4 February [1922], it had reached Bhopal, where Dickie [Mountbatten] and David [Windsor] were the guests of the only woman ruler in Asia, the Nawab Sultan Jaban Begum. The Begum was an ardent Muslim and usually ruled from behind a purdah screen. The rare sight of her tiny figure, swathed in a blue burka, next to the white-uniformed Prince of Wales gave the tour’s photographers some of their best opportunities. But it was an image more connected to the past than to the future. [p. 70]

Bhopal seems to have had a number of enlightened female nawabs. Begum is the feminine of Turkic Beg (or Bey) which turns up in many names from former parts of the Ottoman and Mughal empires—Izetbegovic, for example.

The British continued to come to Simla, sometimes for eight months of each year, with the European ladies and gentlemen carried up in the local jhampan sedan chairs. They were followed by hundreds of coolies, who had been press-ganged from their surrounding farms into the service of Her Majesty’s government, lugging dispatch boxes, carefully packed crockery, musical instruments, trunks full of theatrical costumes for amateur dramatics at the Gaiety Theatre, crates of tea and dried provisions, faithful spaniels in traveling boxes, rolled-up rugs, aspidistras, card tables, favorite armchairs, baskets of linen and tons upon tons of files; all the paraphernalia of the raj literally borne on the shoulders of one long caravan of miserable, sweating Indian peasants. Eventually, in 1891, a narrow-gauge railway was opened, weaving in and out of 103 tunnels up from the plains at Kalka—a journey which still took at least six hours. The British never questioned whether all this was worth it. Gandhi may have criticized the administration’s annual repair to Simla for being “government working from the 500th floor,” but that was exactly the point. [pp. 193-194]

This word turns up under jompon in Hobson-Jobson (via Google books), which cites a 1716 source that defines a jampan as a “palankin”; an 1849 source that defines a jhappan as a “kind of arm chair with a canopy and curtains”; and an 1879 source that specifically mentions its use in Simla:

The gondola of Simla is the jampan or jampot аs it is sometimes called on the same linguistic principle … as that which converts asparagus into sparrow grass … Every lady on the hills keeps her jampan and jampanees just as in the plains she keeps her carriage and footmen — Letter in Time Aug. 17

That’s the wonderful Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive by Henry Yule, Arthur Coke Burnell, William Crooke (J. Murray, 1903), digitized from a printed original at the University of California.

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Filed under anglosphere, Britain, India, Islam, labor, language, Pakistan, South Asia, Turkey

by Joel | 12 November 2008 · 8:33 pm

Early Research on New Guinea-area Preposed Genitives

In my dissertation on word-order change in the Austronesian languages of New Guinea, I reviewed some of the earliest published typological research in the area. Here is a glimpse of what obsessed some of the earliest European researchers.

Over most of the territory occupied by Austronesian (AN) languages, genitive (or “possessor”) nominals (= GEN) follow head (or “possessed”) nominals (= N) in noun–noun genitive constructions. However, the reverse order (GEN + N) prevails in the neighborhood of New Guinea and nearby islands of Indonesia (from Sulawesi and Flores east). The distinctive “preposition of the genitive” in the AN languages of the latter area engendered much discussion by European scientists during the earliest era of their work in the area, when hardly any other syntactic information was available.

Various explanations were offered. Kanski and Kasprusch (1931) reviewed some of these explanations and concluded that the preposed genitive most likely resulted from the influence of Papuan languages, which also have preposed genitives and which share a very similar geographical range. This still seems the most likely explanation, although it remains a mystery why the preposed genitive has a wider distribution than any of the other grammatical features attributed to Papuan influence.

Even leaving Papuan influence aside, however, the narrower and contiguous geographical distribution of the preposed genitive, when compared with the unrestricted distribution of the postposed genitive, suggests that the former is innovative and originated somewhere in “extreme eastern Indonesia” (Blust 1974:12). (Genitives may have been optionally preposed in Proto-Austronesian, as they are in many Philippine languages. This would have made it easier for preposed genitives to become the dominant pattern in New Guinea-area Austronesian languages.)

The boundary between languages with preposed genitives and those with postposed genitives forms a wide arc running to the west, north, and east of the island of New Guinea. The southwest-to-northwest portion of this arc is frequently referred to as the “Brandes line” (after Brandes 1884), and the northwest-to-southeast portion has been called the “line of Friederici” (after Friederici 1913). (See, for example, Kanski and Kasprusch 1931, Cowan 1952).

The Brandes line was first assumed to be a genetic boundary (a linguistic analog of the Wallace Line perhaps). However, there was some disagreement about which genetic units it separated. Brandes (1884) himself thought it set off two groups of Indonesian languages. Jonker (1914) argued that two such Indonesian subgroups could not be distinguished. Schmidt (1926) thought the Brandes line marked the border between Indonesian and Melanesian languages.

(Brandes and Jonker were more familiar with the languages of Indonesia and were impressed with how similar in other respects the languages with preposed genitives were to Indonesian languages in general. Schmidt was more familiar with Melanesian languages and was impressed with how similar the genitive-preposing languages were to Melanesian languages in general. See Kanski and Kasprusch 1931:884.)

Kanski and Kasprusch (1931) offered a compromise. They identified four groups of languages:

Like Kanski and Kasprusch (and Jonker), most scholars today would not consider genitive word order to be a valid criterion for subgrouping. Another feature of genitive constructions was put forth as a better basis for distinguishing Indonesian from Melanesian languages. In western Austronesian (“Indonesian”) languages, genitive pronouns can be suffixed (or encliticized) to all nouns. In eastern Austronesian (“Melanesian”) languages, genitive pronouns can be suffixed directly to nouns only in case the possessed entity is an inalienable relationship to the possessor. In practice, this means that most body-part and kin terms are directly suffixed. Most other nouns are not. Instead, head nouns (denoting possessed entities) in constructions expressing an alienable relationship are preceded by genitive pronouns.

Schmidt (1926:424) and Kanski and Kasprusch (1931:889) regarded the influence of Papuan languages as responsible for the origin of the grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable possession in eastern Austronesian languages as a whole. Under Papuan influence, they argued, the AN languages in transition from Indonesia to Melanesia began to lose their original postposed genitives and to acquire preposed ones. Nouns denoting alienables formed the vanguard of this change. Nouns denoting inalienables, such as body parts and kin terms (which involve animate—usually human—possessors, one could add), were slower to lose the original genitive pronouns because reference to an inalienable almost always requires reference to a possessor as well. The inalienables retained their postposed pronouns long enough for the latter to become an integral part of the noun itself. The general change was thus arrested, with inalienables forming a relic category.

One major weakness of this hypothesis is that it ignores the distinction between pronominal and nominal genitives. In eastern AN languages generally, it may be more common for independent genitive pronouns to precede head nominals in cases of alienable possession. (There is considerable variation.) In all but the more narrowly defined “Papuan-influenced” languages, however, genitive nominals follow head nominals (N + GEN), whether or not alienable possession is involved. This hypothesis, then, leads one to the false expectation that genitive nominals precede head nominals in all languages in which the alienable–inalienable distinction exists.

The alienable–inalienable distinction is reconstructible for Proto-Oceanic (Pawley 1973:153–169), the ancestor of most of the languages of eastern Austronesia. However, it is not unique to that group. It also occurs in many languages of eastern Indonesia that are not daughters of Proto-Oceanic (Collins 1980:39 ff., Stresemann 1927:6). So even the presence or absence of the alienable–inalienable distinction does not adequately indicate genetic affiliation.

The traditional recognition of differences between “Indonesian” and “Melanesian” languages is now generally phrased in terms of “Oceanic” and “non-Oceanic” languages. The former term denotes what is generally recognized as a genetic unit (primarily on the basis of phonological criteria). The negative term “non-Oceanic” lumps together all other AN languages without implying that they form a single genetic unit. The boundary between the two groups of languages distinguished by the new phraseology has also shifted somewhat farther to the east since the time of Brandes, Schmidt, and Friederici. The new boundary, which in an earlier era would have been called “Grace’s line” (after Grace 1955:338, 1971:31), is assumed to have a firmer genetic basis than the two earlier boundaries. Grace’s line, separating Oceanic from non-Oceanic languages, runs north-northeast to south-southwest, intersecting 140° E longitude between New Guinea and Micronesia. The scope of this thesis is restricted to the AN languages west of Friederici’s line and east of Grace’s line. These languages can be characterized as “Papuan-influenced Oceanic.” However, before restricting discussion to these languages, it will be helpful to review the various boundaries and the nature of the groups of languages they set apart.

The Brandes line marks the western boundary of a group of languages with innovative genitive word order. This group of typologically similar, but genetically not so closely related, languages is bounded on the east by Friederici’s line. Somewhere east of the Brandes line is the western boundary of a group of languages showing an innovative grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable genitives. Most of these languages are members of the Oceanic subgroup, a genetic unit, but the westernmost languages are not. East of this boundary lies Grace’s line, the western boundary of the Oceanic subgroup. The eastern boundary of the Oceanic subgroup, and of all AN languages showing the alienable–inalienable distinction, is the eastern border of Austronesian as a whole (east of Easter Island). (I am assuming that the distinction between a and o genitives in Polynesian can be considered somewhat akin, semantically but not structurally, to the alienable–inalienable distinction in the rest of Oceanic.)

References

Blust, Robert A. 1974. Proto-Austronesian syntax: The first step. Oceanic Linguistics 13:1–15.

Brandes, Jan Lourens Andries. 1884. Bijdrage tot de vergelijkende Klankleer der westersche Afdeeling van de Maleisch-Polynesische Taalfamilie. Utrecht, P.W. van der Weijer. 184 pp.

Collins, James. 1980. The historical relationships of the languages of Central Maluku, Indonesia. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago.

Cowan, H. K. J. 1951–1952. Genitief-constructie en Melanesische talen. Indonesië 5:307–313.

Friederici, Georg. 1912. Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse einer amtlichen Forschungsreise nach dem Bismarck-Archipel im Jahre 1908, vol. 2, Beiträge zur Völker und Sprachenkunde von Deutsch-Neuguinea. Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten, Ergänzungsheft 5. Berlin, Mittler und Sohn.

Friederici, Georg. 1913. Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse einer amtlichen Forschungsreise nach dem Bismarck-Archipel im Jahre 1908, vol. 3, Untersuchungen über eine melanesische Wanderstrasse. Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten, Ergänzungsheft 7. Berlin, Mittler und Sohn.

Grace, George W. 1955. Subgrouping Malayo-Polynesian: A report of tentative findings. American Anthropologist 57:337–339.

Grace, George W. 1971. Notes on the phonological history of the Austronesian languages of the Sarmi coast. Oceanic Linguistics 10:11–37.

Jonker, J. C. G. 1914. Kan men bij de talen van den Indischen Archipel eene westelijke en eene oostlijke afdeeling onderscheiden? Mededeelingen der Koninklijk Akademie van Wetenschappen, afdeeling Letterkunde, 4e Reeks, deel 12, pp. 314–417.

Kanski, P., and P. Kasprusch. 1931. Die indonesisch melanesischen Übergangssprachen auf den Kleinen Molukken. Anthropos 26:883–890.

Klaffl, Johanne, and Friederich Vormann. 1905. Die Sprachen des Berlinhafen-Bezirks in Deutsch-Neuguinea. Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen 8:1–138. (With additions by Wilhelm Schmidt.)

Pawley, Andrew K. 1973. Some problems in Proto-Oceanic grammar. Oceanic Linguistics 12:103–188.

Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1900, 1902. Die sprachlichen Verhältnisse von Deutsch Neuguinea. Zeitschrift für afrikanische und oceanische Sprachen 5(1900):354–384; 6(1902):1–99.

Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1926. Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erde. Heidelberg, C. Winter. 595 pp.

Stresemann, Erwin. 1927. Die lauterscheinungen in den ambonischen Sprachen. Zeitschrift für Eingeborenensprachen, Beiheft 10. Berlin, Reimer. 224 pp.

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Filed under Germany, Indonesia, language, Netherlands, Papua New Guinea, scholarship

by Joel | 5 November 2008 · 9:10 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Hodohodo, Czechia, Kanakysaurus

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal about a “shocking” new slacker attitude among Japanese workers referred to such workers as the hodohodo-zoku ‘so-so folks’. By itself, the word hodo (程) translates into ‘degree, limit, distance, status, amount’, and its reduplication, 程程, suggests ‘moderation’ or ‘judiciousness’. Grammatically, hodohodo behaves like an ideophone, but then ideophones in Japanese generally behave like nouns. To make it into a verb, you have to add -suru ‘do, be’, to make it into an adverbial you add the postposition ni, and so on. But I suspect hodohodo fails one test for onomatopoeic ideophones in Japanese: the ability to occur before -to ‘with’, in the equivalent of English ‘with a [plop-plop, fizz-fizz, etc.]’. I await correction from Matt of No-sword.

Last weekend, I also had the opportunity to meet a scholar visiting from the Czech Republic, who repeatedly referred to her nation as Czechia—a most sensible formulation which I subsequently found to have had official sanction since 1993 (along with Česko, the Czech equivalent), but which seems to be very slow to spread among English speakers, who perhaps still feel guilty about agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia in 1938 and want to compensate by resisting any attempt to shorten the fuller form of its current name. However, feeling no guilt on that score despite my English heritage, I henceforth resolve to refer to that glorious center of historic dissidence as Czechia, plain and simple. In fact, I’ve just added Czechia to my list of country categories for this blog. I had already added Bohemia before, but that does no justice to Moravia, which has, if anything, an even greater tradition of religious dissidence.

Finally, I see that the latest issue of Pacific Science (vol. 63, no. 1, 2009, but already online at BioOne) reports the discovery of a new species of a lizard genus indigenous to New Caledonia, a viviparous skink genus with the wonderfully appropriate name, Kanakysaurus.

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Filed under Czechia, Japan, language, nationalism, Pacific, scholarship, science

by Joel | 1 November 2008 · 8:22 am

Hindustani for British Royalty, 1921

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 58-59:

On 26 October 1921, Dickie [Mountbatten] and David [Windsor] left Portsmouth on the battle cruiser HMS Renown. On 12 November, they came ashore at Aden on the south coast of Arabia, the westernmost British colony ruled from Delhi. The pair of them drove past large gatherings of black spectators hemmed in by the occasional white man in a pith helmet. Union Jacks fluttered in the sky, and a huge banner was unfurled. It addressed the Prince of Wales with a loyal exhortation: “Tell Daddy we are all happy under British rule.” And it was from this acceptably loyal outpost of his future empire that David embarked finally for the Jewel itself….

The prince’s itinerary had been planned according to long-established royal tradition. He was to progress around India attending interminable parties, opening buildings, killing as much wildlife as possible and only interacting with the common people by waving at them from a parade. The sentiments of the royal party were made plain in the booklet of Hindustani phrases produced by Dickie and Sir Geoffrey de Montmorency and circulated on board HMS Renown. It comprised a list of basic numbers and verbs, plus a few everyday expressions. These included:

Ghoosul teeyar kurro—Make ready the bath
Yeh boot sarf kurro—Make clean these boots
Peg do—Give me a whisky and soda
Ghora lao—Bring round the horse
Yeh miler hai; leyjao—This is dirty; take it away
Tum Kootch Angrezi bolte hai?—Do you speak any English?
Mai neigh sumujhta—I don’t understand

The words for please and thank you are nowhere to be found.

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Filed under Britain, India, language

by Joel | 1 November 2008 · 7:26 am

Rebranding British Royalty, 1914-1917

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 43-45:

ON 28 JUNE 1914, AN AUSTRIAN ARCHDUKE AND HIS WIFE were shot in Sarajevo by a nineteen-year-old terrorist. Assassinations were not unusual at the time. Victims in recent years had included the presidents of Mexico, France and the United States, the empresses of Korea and Austria, a Persian shah and the kings of Italy, Greece and Serbia. Portugal had two kings assassinated on the same day in 1908. But the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would swiftly assume its legendary status as the trigger for the Great War. Swift to feel its tremors was the fourteen-year-old great-grandson of Queen Victoria, His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg….

Four months to the day after Franz Ferdinand’s death, the elder Prince Louis of Battenberg was removed from his position as First Sea Lord. Prince Louis had been British since 1868 and had served in the Royal Navy since he was fourteen years old. But by October 1914 Britain was at war with Germany, and there were far too many Germans visible in high places. For King George V, of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the public tide of anti-German feeling was alarming. He was largely German; his wife, the former Princess May of Teck, was wholly German; his recently deceased father, King Edward VII, had even spoken English with a strong German accent. It was uncomfortably obvious where all this might lead, and a high-profile sacrifice was required to satisfy the public. Prince Louis was at the top of the list.

And so the king and his First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, agreed to throw one of their most senior military experts onto the pyre at the beginning of the war, because his name was foreign….

But the humiliation of the Battenbergs was not complete. On 17 July 1917, a mass rebranding of royalty was ordered by George V. The king led by example this time, dropping Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (which was, in any case, a title — nobody knew what his surname was, though they suspected without enthusiasm that it might be Wettin or Wipper), and adopting the British-sounding Windsor. Much against their will, the rest of the in-laws were de-Germanized. Prince Alexander of Battenberg became the Marquess of Carisbrooke; Prince Alexander of Teck became the Earl of Athlone; Adolphus, Duke of Teck, became the Marquess of Cambridge. The unfortunate princesses of Schleswig-Holstein were demoted, in the king’s words, to “Helena Victoria and Marie Louise of Nothing.” And the unemployed Prince Louis of Battenberg would be Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven…. Henceforth, Prince Louis would be a marquess, and Battenberg a cake.

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Filed under Britain, Europe, Germany, language, nationalism, war

by Joel | 26 October 2008 · 8:09 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Hokahoka, Hougan, Hiiki

A seasonal Japanese matsutake (松茸 ‘pine ear’ mushroom) tasting menu at a restaurant named Yoshitsune (義経) turned up a couple of new vocabulary items that caught my fancy.

ほかほか hokahoka ‘warmth, heat’ – The menu for the fall seasonal special announced 目の前で松茸釜飯がほかほかで炊き上がります me no mae de matsutake kamameshi ga hokahoka de takiagarimasu ‘the matsutake (flavored) rice-pot cooks up warmly before your eyes’. And indeed it did. The fragrantly flavored rice finished cooking in each individual-sized cauldron perched above a can of sterno as we oohed and aahed our way through the courses leading up to the pièce de résistance.

The ideophone hokahoka does not behave grammatically like an adjective, despite its normal English translation into an adjective. It seems better to think of it as a noun, as in the postpositional phrase hokahoka de ‘from the heat’. As a noun modifier, hokahoka needs a genitive (or nominalizing) no after it—not the na that follows “adjectival nominals” like the hen of hen na gaijin ‘strange foreigner’. So a piping-hot sweet potato can be described as hokahoka no satsuma imo. And you can convey that you feel a hokahoka sense of warmth by adding the “light verb” to the ‘heat’: hokahoka suru ‘do/be hokahoka’. Let the mnemonic be ‘do the hokahoka’!

Another ideophone with a very similar form and a very similar meaning is pokapoka ‘pleasant warmth, toasty warmth, warming (weather)’.

判官贔屓 hougan/hangan biiki ‘favoring the underdog’ – Our restaurant was named after Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a famous warrior of the Minamoto (= Genji) clan whose martial feats played a key role in defeating the Taira (= Heike) clan in the Genpei War. The Genpei War (1180–85) has often been compared to the equally treachery-ridden English War of the Roses (1455–85) between the noble houses of Lancaster and York, but the latter led to a gradual centralization of authority in England, while the former led to a dispersal of power in Japan that eventually culminated in a long period of civil war before Oda Nobunaga unified the country and paved the way for the centralizing Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1868).

Despite his many heroic feats, Yoshitsune eventually sided with the Emperor Go-Shirakawa (After-Shirakawa, i.e., Shirakawa II) against his own elder brother Yoritomo, who went on to found the Kamakura Shogunate. When Yoshitsune’s forces lost, he was forced to commit suicide—a pattern that went on to become all too familiar in Japanese history. But his fame lives on, as does his Imperial Court name 判官 hougan/hangan in the expression 判官贔屓 hougan/hangan biiki ‘favoring Hougan (= Yoshitsune)’, a phrase Hatena Keyword defines as 弱いものに、弱いからと言う理由で、えこひいきしてしまうこと yowai mono ni, yowai kara to yuu riyuu de, ekohiiki shiteshimau koto ‘the act of favoring the weaker party just because it is weaker’.

The kanji for the compound ekohiiki, written in hiragana above, are 依怙贔屓, etymologically ‘relying-strength’. An impartial or fair person is an ekohiiki no nai hito ‘favoritism-lacking person’. The tendency to favor one who loses, like Yoshitsune/Hougan, with dignity and honor intact has long been deeply embedded in Japanese culture. Witness the undying popularity of stories about the 47 ronin and Saigo Takamori.

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Filed under Japan, language

by Joel | 23 October 2008 · 8:56 pm

Lamarckian Identities in PNG

From James B. Watson’s chapter “Other people do other things: Lamarckian identities in Kainantu Subdistrict, Papua New Guinea” in Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, edited by Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin Poyer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1990), pp. 17, 26:

The aboriginal peoples of Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands are organized in autonomous polities, some with as few as one or two hundred members. Many if not most of these local peoples experience episodes of radical revision in their membership. Most groups are formed in a highly fluid sociopolitical field, intermittently marked by relocations, realignments, and the patriation of alien immigrants who have been expelled by hostile neighbors from their own lands elsewhere. Restless or disgruntled insiders split off to form new groups; refugee outsiders are recruited from time to time to reinforce the ranks of those remaining. To the literal-minded genealogist, the long-term kinship and continuity of each such group seem confused, even compromised.

A truncated local sense of history nevertheless contains the frequent events of fission and fusion. In spite of ongoing exchanges of personnel, a common and ostensibly continuous local identity immerses not only long-established elements of the community but, in time, the descendants of recent immigrants….

Over half a dozen languages are spoken in the immediate vicinity of Kainantu, and all the communities I resided in have close social ties to at least one community of alien speech. Often two or three other languages are represented in these linkages. Many communities of the vicinity have incorporated refugees who arrived speaking a language other than that of their hosts. With time, if the refugees remain, their original language may be lost, but probably not without a distinct residue of the sounds, words, attitudes, and cultural practices they brought with them. In some communities in the 1960s there were refugees or their descendants still speaking their original language, … resulting in their designation by the community (from Pidgin) as “hapkas” [half-caste].

What does this mean for language documentation and conservation efforts in the area? To whom does any particular language belong, and for how long?

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Filed under language, migration, Papua New Guinea

by Joel | 21 October 2008 · 6:25 am

India’s Vibrant Vernacular Press

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 223-224:

The rise of the vernacular press would have pleased Mahatma Gandhi. He disapproved of advertising and printed no ads in his papers. But perhaps he would have relented if he had realized that advertising revenue is the lifeblood of the vernacular press. When Gandhi reorganized the Provincial Congress Committees along linguistic lines in 1920, he did so because he was convinced that people must conduct their political debates in their mother tongue. The thriving vernacular press proves this point. Gandhi would also have been pleased by the national orientation of the vernacular press: none of the papers mentioned back any kind of secessionism. This is also due to the fact that the ‘print capitalists’ who control the papers are very much aware of the benefits of an integrated national market. Another encouraging feature is that none of these papers are ‘party papers’ to the extent of being owned and operated by a political party. The private owners of the papers may sometimes back a particular party, as Ramoji Rao backed the TDP, but such alliances are temporary with the party depending on the ‘print capitalist’, not the other way round. In earlier times parties controlling the government could exercise considerable influence on newspapers by placing advertisements or withholding them. Nowadays revenue from commercial ads is far more important than that derived from government advertising and this has greatly enhanced the freedom of the press.

India’s lively and free press is of great importance to the country’s democracy. It is significant that the first big spurt in growth of the vernacular press was witnessed after Indira Gandhi’s ‘Emergency’ had been terminated in 1977; her attempt at gagging the press by means of her emergency powers led to a pent-up demand for information. Many people became avid readers when they had access to a free press once more. There is, of course, the more subtle method of influencing the press by co-opting journalists: giving them official importance or letting them know that their careers may depend on adopting certain political views fits in with this method. By now journalists earn good salaries and enjoy many perks, so the threat of forfeiting them might influence their views. But the large number of journalists would make it difficult to co-opt all of them: in 1950 there were only about 2,000 in India but by 1993 there were 13,000 officially registered journalists and there may have been many unregistered ones. At present there are probably more than 26,000. As there are no powerful unions for journalists in India Indian journalism has no collective voice; but the large number and the great variety of journalists are in themselves guarantees of the freedom of the press.

Most Indian journalists are urban people who only occasionally show up in the countryside. But they have rural counterparts who are really behind the newspaper revolution which has swept India in recent years. These rural stringers are often graduates engaged in various activities in their locality. They may own some land or a repair shop and also serve as distributors of newspapers, as advertising agents and as part-time correspondents. They usually are not paid by the editors but send in their news items free of charge. If their contributions are printed, this enhances their reputation in the village and helps to increase the circulation of the paper which they distribute. In their own way, these people support the freedom of the press and it is mainly down to them that huge numbers of newspapers are sold in India every day.

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