When geeks attack!

I'm really enjoying all the font geekery in the comments to this entry. (If you can't read it,it's because bitterlawngnome doesn't want you to. Sorry. Of course, if you were any kind of photography fan, you'd Friend him in half a heartbeat if only to see his pics and then he just might Friend you back.) Reminds me of some of the conversations I had with TV's owenthomas back in his innocent layout snob days. Also, there's something sweet about geeks talking knowledgeable and earnestly yet snarkily about their passions. (As long as it isn't computer programming. I think I've overheard enough conversations about the joy and sorrows of coding to keep me set for life.)

I can only hope that some people have a similar reaction when I go all language geek in my journal. Speaking of that, despite my Great Big Amazing Brain, I still managed to flub the alienable/inalienable distinction in Hawai'ian. Some of my contrastive examples are exactly backwards! That's what I get for not having my reference material handy at posting time. I'm going to fix the errors, but I still feel the need to confess them in a spirit of humility, since otherwise I'd never be caught and would go to my grave remembering guiltily how I'd misrepresented the Hawai'ian language to over a hundred people.

At least I'm getting a better idea why Nichols characterises the Polynesian system as being different and more complicated than the typical inalienable/alienable system. It seems to be overlaid with an active/passive system (though I'm still not clear why a wife should be considered more "passive" and "alienable" than a hired maidservant). There's a post in that: How languages are designed by bricoleurs, not engineers, so few morphemes are used straightforwardly to express one and only one relation. The Osage grammar has a beautiful example in its subject marking.

( Cut for those who don't care for quite so much geekery )

Two particles, a whole panoply of meanings. Each time a new distinction is introduced, the older ones don't go away. They hang around and still find contexts where they can come to the forefront. It all seems horribly complex and first glance and you wonder how Osage speakers can make sense of it all. But then you think of all the ambiguities of English and realise how little trouble we have interpreting them properly in context most of the time. Walking around the lagoon the other day, I tried to view things the way an Osage speaker might--wondering what it's like to live in a world where the woman jogging by is lumped together with my office mates rather than with the man standing a few feet from her and smoking a cigarette. It was useless, of course--how can I hope to comprehend one tiny part of an interdependent system?