by | 14 March 2006 · 12:31 pm

Reconstructing Virginia Algonquian

Language Hat notes a NY Times story about the efforts to reconstruct the dead Algonquian language spoken by Powhatan and Pocahontas in order to lend an air of authenticity to the dialogue in the movie The New World.

This family of Indian tongues, in one respect, reminded linguists of the Romance languages. Each was distinctive but as closely related as Spanish is to Italian or Italian to Romanian. Comparisons with related languages revealed the common elements of grammar and sentence structure and many similarities in vocabulary.

A translation of the Bible into the language once spoken by Massachusetts Indians offered more insights into the grammar. The Munsee Delaware version spoken by coastal Indians from Delaware to New York, including those who sold Manhattan, may be dead, but its grammar and vocabulary are fairly well known to scholars.

“We have a big fat dictionary of Munsee Delaware,” said Dr. Rudes, who adapted some of those words when needed for Virginia Algonquian. Recordings of the last Munsee Delaware speakers, a century ago, were a valuable guide to pronunciations.

Another research tool was what is called Proto-Algonquian. It is the hypothetical ancestor common to all Algonquian speech, 4,000 words that scholars have compiled from the surviving tongues and documentation of the extinct ones.

The reconstruction involves educated guesses. Strachey set down words for walnut, shoes and two kinds of beast, “paukauns,” “mawhcasuns,” “aroughcoune” and “opposum.” In Proto-Algonquian, similar words are paka-ni (meaning large nut), maxkesen (shoe), la-le-ckani (raccoon) and wa-pa’oemwi (white dog).

From this, Dr. Rudes reconstructed the Virginia Algonquian words pakán, mahkusun, árehkan and wápahshum,” or pecan, moccasin, raccoon and opossum.

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by | 13 March 2006 · 12:52 pm

Bad Call Beats Japan in World Baseball Classic

New Japundit contributor Mike Plugh gives a rundown on the World Baseball Classic‘s badly umpired game between Japan and the U.S. in a post headlined If You Can’t Beat ’em, Cheat ’em.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing Korea and Puerto Rico in the finals. Both are proven giant-killers.

UPDATE: Wow. Japan managed to defeat Korea pretty decisively in the semifinal. Canyon of Heroes has a good rundown. Now I have to root for Japan as the underdog against Cuba.

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by | 13 March 2006 · 12:21 pm

Malaya’s Role in the British Empire, 1930s

If India was the jewel in the imperial crown, Malaya was the industrial diamond. In 1940, the governor of Singapore estimated, Malaya was ‘worth’ an estimated £227.5 million to the British Empire. Its exports were £131.25 million, of which £93 million were to foreign countries, especially to the United States, to which it sold more than any other territory of the British Empire except Canada. From 1895 until the Japanese war, at no point did British Malaya need financial help from outside. Its status as a model colony was achieved from its own resources, and its accumulated budget surpluses saw it through the Great Depression. The key to the great public works and civic conceits of the Straits Settlements was opium. Duty on opium accounted for between 40 and 60 per cent of its annual revenue. Its production was monopolized by the government ‘Chandu factory’ on Pepys Road in Singapore which turned out 100 million tubes a year. Much of the revenue burden of Malaya therefore fel upon the Asian, particularly Chinese, labourers who were the greatest consumers of opium. The British crescent in Asia was supported by narco-colonialism on a colossal scale.

One of the most dramatic effects of the coming war was the way it forged the crescent into a bloodstained unity. First, the Japanese unified the peninsula from Singapore through Thailand to the borders of Assam by armed invasion. In response the British punched a land route from north India through the nearly impassable ranges of Assam and north Burma into the Irrawaddy valley. Reoccupying the Malay peninsula, they reclaimed their Southeast Asian patrimony. In fact, the designation ‘Southeast Asia’ was itself a brainchild of the military strategists who created Southeast Asia Command in 1943. Yet, as jazz-age imperialism drew to its end in 1939, there seemed little enough as yet, besides their rock solid belief in British superiority, to draw together the white settler societies of the crescent.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 33-34

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by | 12 March 2006 · 1:58 pm

Japanese in Southeast Asia before WW2

Japanese goods were at the heart of the consumer boom in Malaya in the later 1930s. The closure of American markets in the Depression led Japanese manufacturers to focus their attention on the emerging markets to the south. In 1941, Japanese investments in British Malaya totalled 85 million yen. Japanese firms attempted to corner the market in goods from matchboxes to condensed milk; they imported over half of Malaya’s everyday goods The people of Singapore marvelled at the new technology in a ‘Japanese Commercial Museum’. Children in Malaya grew up with toys from the ‘ten-cent’ stalls on Middle Road in Singapore and elsewhere; the small army of Asian clerks depended on Japanese stores such as Echigoya for the cheap white shirts and ties they were required to wear in European offices. The Japanese were responsible for what was perhaps the most revolutionary innovation within the rural economy of Southeast Asia at this time: the bicycles with which country people could get their own goods to market. In the Blitzkrieg in Malaya in 1941, this technology would be used to devastating effect by General Yamashita’s shock troops in a highly mobile form of warfare.

The Japanese had been a prominent feature of the urban landscape of Southeast Asia for many decades. Japanese ships routinely visited the ports; Japanese sailors drank in the bars and cafés, many of which catered especially to their needs. In the early period of Japanese southward enterprise, some of the earliest economic pioneers were the karayuki-san, the Japanese prostitutes. The rationale for this was, in the words of one pimp: ‘Put a whorehouse anywhere in the wilds of the South Pacific and pretty soon you’ve got a general store to go there with it.’ In the face of the 1915 boycott of Japanese businesses by the Chinese in Southeast Asia, it was largely the karayuki-san that kept Japanese commerce afloat.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 5-6

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by | 12 March 2006 · 1:13 pm

Rapa Nui Settled Later Than Thought?

New archaeological findings from Rapa Nui suggest the island may have been settled later and denuded faster than previously thought.

HONOLULU – Recent archaeological study and analysis conducted by University of Hawai‘i at Manoa anthropology professor Terry Hunt suggests that the colonization of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) took place not between 400 and 800 A.D. as previously assumed by scientists, but at least 400 to 800 years later, closer to 1200 A.D.

The finding, which challenges current beliefs about the island’s prehistoric chronology and the dramatic environmental changes that occurred on the island, is detailed in an article by Hunt and co-author Carl Lipo of California State University, Long Beach, and scheduled for publication in the journal Science. It is previewed and available online now in Science Express.

As part of a UH archaeological field school on Rapa Nui, Hunt and a team of field researchers have been excavating archaeological deposits at Anakena, Rapa Nui’s only sand dune and the landing and settlement site of the island’s first inhabitants. Archaeological materials found here with superb preservation include artifacts, charcoal, faunal remains, and the distinctive tubular root molds of the giant Jubaea palm, now extinct….

A later settlement raises some interesting implications for Rapa Nui.

“Human impacts to the environment, such as deforestation, began almost immediately, at least within a century,” explains Hunt. “This means that there was no period where people lived in some ideal harmony with their environment; there was no early period of ecological sustainability. Instead, people arrived and their population grew rapidly, even as forest resources declined. The short chronology calls much of the traditional story into question.”

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by | 12 March 2006 · 1:28 am

The Best and the Worst of the Immigrant Mentality

[My mother] and my father brought a curious blend of Jewish-European and African-American distrust and paranoia into our house. On his end, my father, Andrew McBride, a Baptist minister, had his doubts about the world accepting his mixed family. He always made sure his kids never got into trouble, was concerned about money, and trusted the providence of the Holy Father to do the rest. After he died and Mommy remarried, my stepfather, Hunter Jordan, seemed to pick up where my father left off, insistent on education and church. On her end, Mommy had no model for raising us other than the experience of her own Orthodox Jewish family, which despite the seeming flaws—an unbending nature, a stridency, a focus on money, a deep distrust of all outsiders, not to mention her father’s tyranny—represented the best and the worst of the immigrant mentality: hard work, no nonsense, quest for excellence, distrust of authority figures, and a deep belief in God and education. My parents were nonmaterialistic. They believed that money without knowledge was worthless, that education tempered with religion was the way to climb out of poverty in America, and over the years they were proven right.

SOURCE: The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride (Riverhead Books, 1996), pp. 28-29

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by | 12 March 2006 · 1:04 am

Pamuk on the Assassination of Writers

Ka took some consolation in imagining that his poems might be translated into German and published in Akzent magazine, but it was still perfectly clear to him that should this article in the [eastern Anatolian] Border City Gazette prove to be the death of him, the published translations would mean nothing….

The many writers killed in recent years by Islamist bullets paraded before his eyes: first the old preacher-turned-atheist who had tried to point out “inconsistencies” in the Koran (they’d shot him from behind, in the head); behind him came the righteous columnist whose love of positivism had led him to refer in a number of columns to girls wearing head scarves as “cockroaches” (they’d strafed him and his chauffer one morning as he drove to work); then there was the investigative journalist who had tenaciously sought to uncover the links between the Turkish Islamist movement and Iran (when he turned on the ignition, he and his car went sailing into the sky). Even as he recalled these victims with tender sorrow, he knew they’d been naïve. As a rule the Istanbul press, like the Western press, had little interest in these fervent columnists and even less in journalists apt to get shot in the head for similar reasons on a backstreet of some remote Anatolian city. But Ka reserved his bile for a society that so easily forgot its writers and poets: For this reason he thought the smartest thing to do was retreat into a corner and try to find some happiness.

SOURCE: Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, 2004), pp. 296-297

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Filed under literature, Turkey

by | 12 March 2006 · 12:59 am

Pamuk on Two Kinds of Communists

There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only bad can come of them. But the innocents? They feel so guilty about the suffering of the poor, and are so keen to share it, that they make their lives miserable on purpose.

SOURCE: Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, 2004), p. 115

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Filed under philosophy, Turkey

by | 9 March 2006 · 6:47 pm

Pamuk on the Hectoring "Pappy State"

All over the world, men are three or four times more likely to kill themselves than women; it was a young civil servant in the National Office of Statistics in Ankara who had first noticed that in Batman [in eastern Turkey] the number of female cases was three times greater than the number for males and four times greater than the world average for females. But when a friend of his at the [secular] Republican published this analysis in “News in Brief,” no one in Turkey took any notice. A number of correspondents for French and German newspapers, however, did pick up on the item, and only after they had gone to Batman and published stories in the European press did the Turkish press begin to take an interest….

A committee of suicide experts—including psychologists, police officers, judges, and officials from the Department of Religious Affairs—was already preparing to decamp from Batman to [nearby] Kars; as a preliminary measure the Department of Religious Affairs had plastered the city with its SUICIDE IS BLASPHEMY posters, and the governor’s office was to distribute a pamphlet with the slogan as its title. Still, the deputy governor worried that these measures might produce the result opposite from the one intended—not just because girls hearing of others committing suicide might be inspired to do the same, but also because quite a few might do it out of exasperation with the constant lecturing from husbands, fathers, preachers, and the state.

“What is certain is that the girls were driven to suicide because they were extremely unhappy. We’re not in any doubt about that,” the deputy governor told Ka. “But if unhappiness were a genuine reason for suicide, half the women in Turkey would be killing themselves.” He suggested that these women might be offended if they had to listen to a chorus of male voices remonstrating, “Don’t commit suicide!” This, he told Ka proudly, was why he had written to Ankara asking that the antisuicide propaganda committee include at least one woman.

SOURCE: Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, 2004), pp. 14-15

Pamuk portrays the forces of secularism in the Turkish state as even more arrogant, brutal, and oppressive than the Islamists—and not a whit less patriarchal.

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by | 8 March 2006 · 3:00 pm

Three Views of the Purge of Singapore Chinese, 1942

A member of the Japanese Kempeitai:

The Military Police had no power to change or even protest the order for a purge of the Overseas Chinese, although they opposed it from the outset. At the Military Police Academy they had studied various national legal systems as well as international law and were, accordingly, more knowledgeable than staff officers in matters of trial and penalty. To the police it was difficult to believe that those glorious warriors, who had just gained a stupendous victory, those prominent staff officers who had received the highest military education, would talk and behave so erratically, at a time of busy operations and when Malaya was in an unsettled state immediately after the stupendous British surrender.

Without influence and lacking assertiveness, Lt. Onishi returned to his Headquarters and conveyed the liquidation order to the captain of his auxiliary Military Police. The cruel task would fall on his company of auxiliary police. Neither the auxiliary forces nor the military police were eager to massacre the Chinese. A company at that time consisted of around 60 soldiers equipped with rifles or light machine guns. They hauled the victims away in lorries and slaughtered them down by the beaches. One of his auxiliary Military Policemen, Yamaguchi, carried out the executions with the help of the others, near Changi Road. The number of victims is not known. The figure given by the Japanese was 6,000. The highest Chinese figure was 50,000.

A Chinese survivor:

Yap Yan Hong was one of those who went to Onishi’s Jalan Besar checkpoint for screening. On the morning of the radio announcement, he put on a pair of new shoes and his best shirt. They were told to bring food and drink for three days. At the packed Jalan Besar Stadium he had a harrowing time, suffering from heat during the day, from exposure to cold at night, never knowing what to expect from one moment to the next. On the third day the women and children were told to go home. But the men were lined up and paraded before a high-ranking officer. As they passed him he flicked one index finger. If it was his left it meant the person must be detained; a flick of the right finger was a sign to go home. The fate of many thousands of people hung on the whim of a single person, on the wagging of a finger.

When asked by the military policeman at the third interrogation point where he had worked since the outbreak of war, young and naive Yap Yan Hong thought of the most innocent occupation. “In the map drawing business,” he replied. This could be a spy, the policeman thought. So Yap was detained for two days. Then he was tied with a rope as part of a group of six and made to mount a truck with two other groups. They were taken past Changi prison to the end of the island. It was already evening when his group was made to wade into the sea and was shot by the Japanese auxiliary military police forces. Yap was lucky. When his rope made contact with the sea water, it loosened and Yap, miraculously, was able to swim away, and survived to tell his story.

An Indian Independence League member:

On the afternoon of 21 February, Mr. Royal Goho, leader of the Singapore branch of the Indian Independence League, visited Maj. Fujiwara Iwaichi, who at his liaison agency (the Fujiwara-kikan) was successfully recruiting Indians to join the Indian National Army.

“Major, do you know that the Japanese soldiers are indiscriminately detaining Overseas Chinese and massacring them? One can barely face such cruelty. Has the Japanese Army lost its mind? The British had already surrendered and the war was supposed to be over!”

Busy overseeing the surrender of the 55,000 Indian POWs, Fujiwara was unaware of the incident.

Goho pleaded:

The residents of Singapore and Malaya respected the Japanese soldiers’ bravery and their fine policy to liberate and protect the natives. It is true that Indians and Malays were deeply hostile towards those Chinese who had been exploiting them to their hearts’ content under the British. And it is true that some even rejoiced in the massacre of Overseas Chinese. However, upon witnessing horrifying scenes, their regard for the Japanese Army has turned into fear. This is a sad thing for the Japanese Army. Can’t you do anything to stop it?

Fujiwara dispatched some members of his agency to investigate the situation. The result of the investigation was even worse than what Mr. Goho had recounted. Shocked by the seriousness of the matter, Fujiwara immediately went to see Chief-of-Staff Sugita at Army Headquarters, and inquired if this really was an order from the Army.

With a pensive expression, Sugita lamented that his moderate position had been overruled by staff officers holding extreme opinions, and an order to carry out the massacres had been issued much against his wishes. Fujiwara countered that the result of this purge was a disgrace for the Japanese Army ….

SOURCE: Guns of February: Ordinary Japanese Soldiers’ Views of the Malayan Campaign & the Fall of Singapore 1941-42, by Henry Frei (Singapore U. Press, 2004), pp. 153-154

See also British accounts of the fall of Malaya and Singapore (via Wikipedia).

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Filed under China, Japan, Malaysia