Sarapen

Via Language Log: No Dogs or Canadians? 

This is rather bizarre, but apparently in the US, the term "Canadian" is apparently increasingly being used as a replacement derogatory term for "black people".  It's ideal for cryptoracists because it doesn't sound racist.  "Damn Canadians" doesn't sound like a racial slur, after all.

Posted by sarapen at 09:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What exactly does Bakhtin mean when he refers to "style," and how is style different from genre in his thinking?  I'm not entirely clear on it and it's bugging me more and more.  I'm going to have to do some more digging on the topic and maybe read the other essays in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays.  Still, Bakhtin's got such an interesting-sounding name: Mikhail Mikhailovich BAAHK-TEEEHN.  Or M.M. Bakhtin for short, also great-sounding.

And speaking of linguistics, I've discovered an unexpected benefit from having to ride the bus all the time -- namely, that I get to eavesdrop on the conversations of the other riders, and consequently I get to listen to a lot more French-English codeswitching than I usually do.  I just heard some intrasentential codeswitching, so I I guess I have to reject my original contention that such codeswitching doesn't happen around here.  I wish I could read on a moving vehicle without feeling like I need to vomit, otherwise I'd do more on the bus than daydreaming and surreptitiously scoping out the other people there.

Posted by sarapen at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The twelve days of Christmas officially end tomorrow, so take down those holiday decorations, people.  I didn't get what I really wanted for Christmas, but hardly anyone ever does.

Anyway, during Christmastide I watched the latest round of the Ultimate Fighting tournament at some dude's house.  I'm back in northern Ontario now and it's interesting seeing how stuff is different here than in Halifax, especially the casual codeswitching.  There are quite a few francophones here and even a dialect of French peculiar to the region, so bilingualism in French and English is common among locals.  Many people from here switch back and forth between English and French quite easily, although I noticed that they do it intersententially instead of intrasententially (meaning that they switch the language of their sentences, but not within the sentence itself, i.e., no "Do you wanna coucher avec moi?").  Still, this intersentential codeswitching happened at a gathering where the speakers couldn't be sure that everyone spoke French, although they knew everyone spoke English, so the codeswitching would probably be different if the audience was entirely bilingual.

Still, one of the more peculiar parts of the evening (I guess besides the part where people gathered to watch savage beatings on tv) was in the waiting period before the fighting started, when one of the guys there invited everyone to watch Saddam Hussein's hanging on his laptop.  From the excitement in the way he talked about it, the video sounded rather graphic.  I declined to see it, but most everyone else saw the recording.  Apparently the video quality was rather poor, especially with the shakiness of the cellphone camera.  "That was it?" seemed to be the prevailing sentiment among the viewers.  Still, I wonder what exactly they expected.  Perhaps an execution like on film, with a dramatic speech and bloody climax?  Maybe with the prisoner shouting "Freedom!" until his voice fades away?

The banal nature of the execution seems to be the kicker, added to by the very method used to capture the proceedings.  Surely the execution of the greatest monster of contemporary times (or so we have been told), surely that execution couldn't have been so ordinary?  Shouldn't there have been more of a spectacle befitting this most extraordinary death?  Shouldn't a tumbril have at least been involved, or maybe a bulletproof Popemobile?  But a secret hanging recorded on a cameraphone?  Where's the drama, the blood?  I can imagine it was a disappointing video to see.  I suppose the videos of various beheadings floating around will have to do until the next important execution.

Posted by sarapen at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's pretty much all languages besides English.  By order of my level of fluency:

1. Tagalog (a.k.a. Filipino).  This one I have native fluency in, but my vocabulary is for crap.  Even in the Philippines, I mostly spoke in the dialect known as Taglish (Tagalog-English), and I''ve been losing little-used words.  Don't get me wrong, I am perfectly comfortable in it, but it can be hard for me to avoid codeswitching in my speech (codeswitching is the technical term in linguistics for switching between languages inter- or intrasententially).
2. Spanish.  This one I almost achieved fluency in after five weeks in Peru for an ethnographic field school.  I was so close I could feel it, and had I stayed just a bit longer in South America I think I could have gotten it.  Funny story,  I actually only took a year of Spanish back in undergrad (I think I got a B) and that was three years before the field school.  I'd half-assedly been reviewing my Spanish in preparation, but I was hoping to be able to get the help of other people in my group who were better speakers.  When I arrived at the airport, though, I couldn't find the person I was supposed to meet and couldn't remember the name or number of the hotel I was supposed to be staying in.  There was a taxi driver talking to me in Spanish trying to get me to take his cab, and out of desperation I managed to start producing sentences in Spanish.  I got the guy to take me to a decent hotel, then I managed to get a room and make a long-distance call back home to sort out the whole mess.  I hooked up with the rest of the field school the next day.  After that I was fine talking in Spanish for the rest of my time in Peru.
3. French.  Canada is officially bilingual in French and English, and what that means for English-speaking children is that they must study French.  I resisted learning French, partly because I thought it was unfair to expect me to study it at the same level as my classmates when I'd never encountered it before (the educational system made no concessions to immigrant children in this regard), and partly because I'd begun taking up the attitudes of my Anglophone classmates regarding French (mainly, that it was stupid).  By the time I got to high school I started making an effort and actually got an A in French, despite me not knowing how to count past ten (by that level, you're assumed to have already learned the basics, so you don't get tested on them).  However, that was only for one year, the last year of mandatory French study, and after that I dropped French like a hot potato.  In retrospect, I wish I hadn't, since there are all kinds of direct advantages to be enjoyed from French fluency, such as the greater number of scholarships one becomes eligible for and the greater number of job opportunities.  And I wouldn't mind living in Montreal sometime, despite it being the dirties Canadian city I've ever seen (which is still rather clean compared to the Philippines).  I can still kind of get the gist of written French, though, and sometimes in Chinese restaurants I read the French side of the fortunes in my fortune cookies first just to see how much I still understand.
4. Bahasa Indonesian.  I had this idea for doing ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia and Indonesia for my Masters and I bought myself a Teach Yourself Indonesian book in preparation (the proposed project turned out to be too big for a one year Masters program like mine).  I only got a quarter of the way in and I haven't cracked the book in over a year, so all I can remember is yes, no, and counting to ten.  Still, I'm hoping to do fieldwork in Southeast Asia for my proposed PhD project, so the book could still be useful in the future.  I'll have to start doing the exercises again sometime.
5. German.  This one I've never studied at all, but I could have.  After reading Heidegger in my high school philosophy class, I suddenly got the hankering to study German and signed up for it.  However, I was the only one interested in a school of (I think) 5 000 students.  My school offered to have me bussed to another school for my German lessons, but I decided I didn't like Heidegger enough to put up with this inconvenience.  Again, in retrospect I wish I'd stuck with it, since it's never a bad thing to have more languages under one's belt.

Posted by sarapen at 01:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)