Guilt, Pt. 1: "Why don't you get out more?"

Today was a waste. I didn't want it to be, since I knew it was slated to be unbelievably gorgeous, so I planned on going shopping with monshu in the morning to give reason to rise and shine. I figured having to be up and moving before nine would put a cap on my revelling the night before at my friends' going-away party, but I still managed to close that down. (Only, however, because we're all Old People now and our revels tend to end well before midnight.)

I actually woke up an hour before I needed to and felt restless, so instead of meeting my honey at the bus stop, I walked over to his place--and found him half-clothed, brooding about what to do next. He had a backache, as I could tell from the IcyHot patch, and shopping was looking unappealing. On top of that, he had the same kind of mysterious stomach upset that put a damper on our July 4th trip to the Botanic Gardens.

I hung around, waiting to see if he'd feel better, and he ended up spending the next several hours alternating between dozes and dry heaves. Finally, the sharp pain became a dull ache and he was able to get some real sleep. I joined him in the bed for a short nap that ended up lasting almost two hours.

So here I am, with a terrible case of Good Day Guilt (thanks, Mom!) yet unwilling to go out, even though there's nothing I can do from him beyond what I've already done, namely fetched broth and crackers from the store. No doubt, there are fantastic adventures to be had out by the Lake, but just maybe I'll have another crack at them tomorrow. And at least I've acquired a crass new nickname for monshu that I can't ever tell anyone else under pain of death!

Guilt, Pt. 2: "Why don't you read more?"

So one of my Friends (and real-life friends) is trying to use the shame of her LJ peers to motivate her to read more Improving Literature. I'll be interested to see how her experiment goes. After all, it was not for nothing that owenthomas clept me "Externally-Motivated Boy" and, in twenty years' time, that aspect of my character still hasn't changed much. I've also got stacks (literally now, since I'm halfway through a reordering and reshelving project) of unread good books collecting dust and I'd love to find some way of getting me to get through them.

Right now, I'm painstakingly making my way through some Chinese short stories in Simplified Characters as a way of building my vocabulary and comfort level. The problem is I really hate Simplified Characters--and they're starting to make me hate Chinese.

I've never really liked spoken Chinese, and not just because I'm better at learning to read and write than learning to speak and understand in general. It was actually in Korean class that I began being required to memorise characters and I found that I was better at learning them than pure Korean vocabulary in Han'geul. Something about their forms has always excited me, causing me to overlook just what an ungodly, time-sucking pain in the ass it is to actually have to learn thousands of arbitrary symbols simply in order to read the most basic texts.

As a result, at first, I thought my primary objections to Simplified were merely aesthetic. Gradually, though, I'm beginning to realise a deeper problem: I've sunk a tremendous amount of energy over the years in some very narrow pattern-recognition and -recall skills tied to a very specific set of symbols. Now I'm being forced to relearn hundreds of these symbols, only I have to learn new skills in order to do that, and I resent it.

For instance, until I bought my new pocket Oxford dictionary, every character reference I owned had pretty much two things in common: It used (1) Traditional forms of characters ordered according to (2) the Kangxi radicals. Now, the case has been made that the radicals are arbitrary, that they don't really have the helpful meanings sometimes attributed to them, that it's difficult to relate their different forms to one another, and so forth.

All of those criticisms are true. But, nevertheless, over the past couple decades I've learned their quirks. But the Oxford doesn't use the Kangxi radicals. That is, it uses some but not others, and, even for the ones it does use, it indexes characters with reduced variants separately from those with full forms. So now I have to completely relearn the most annoying part of any dictionary: The character index.

Looking up unfamiliar words is becoming a huge chore. The dictionary is in alphabetical order by Pinyin romanisation, so unless I can guess the pronunciation already (and this harder now that many of the cues I've come to rely on have been trashed in the name of "Simplification"), looking up anything takes three steps: 1. Identify the radical and find it in the radical index. 2. Find the pronunciation of the character in the list of those containing said radical. 3. Find the entry for the appropriate character among those others with the same pronunciation.

Madness, isn't it? Any other language, and you could go straight to the equivalent of a phonetic index since there's actually a relationship between how the words are written and how they're pronounced. Over time, I'd learned the order of the Kangxi radicals, so I could skip step 1, and, when the entries were ordered by radical, I could often skip step 2 as well.

But unless we decide to cancel our plans at great expense and fly to Taiwan or Hong Kong instead, I just have to suck it up and get cozy with Simplified. To that end, I'm making a list of the most troublesome characters, those whose correspondence to characters I already know well keeps escaping my memory. Expect more updates as the list grows.

M is for Mobilian Jargon

Mobilian Jargon : linguistic and sociohistorical aspects of a Native American pidgin. Drechsel, Emanuel J. (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1997)

No mystery to how and when I acquired this: I recorded the event of its purchase in a LiveJournal entry. I've made some effort to avoid covering titles that I've already mentioned here, but it's by no means a hard-fast rule (as evidenced by the fact that the same entry just linked to mentions the Japanese book I covered two weeks ago). Besides, I presently have only one other "M" titles and I've got other plans for that.

I was thrilled to pieces to discover Native American pidgins. In college and before, all the emphasis was on those based on European languages, like the eponymous original, Chinese Pidgin English. It was only upon reading Holms worldwide survey that I discovered the existence of pidginised varieties of Amerind languages. The first one I read up on was Chinook Jargon, because princeofcairo had an AH project ("Reality Piebald") that required a few words of it. But, in the absence of really usable textbook, I never ended up learning much.

A central hypothesis of Drechsler's treatment was equally revelatory: Not only did use of Mobilian Jargon predate European colonisation, but it was the primary lingua franca of the Mississippian culture. Of course, absent time travel or the absolutely unprecedented discovery of writing in Mobilian Jargon from multiple Mississippian sites, we can never be sure this was true, but I think Drechsler builds a very convincing case.

Even if it's not, his discussion of the evidence provides some interesting insight into human nature. I'm quite accustomed to the idea of language being something freely shared with outsiders. Drechsler's contention that Natives of the Southeast were (and often still are) very protective of their languages and generally only shared them with outsiders who had thoroughly gained their trust was novel to me. The conventional wisdom is that pidgins only arise in situations of very limited contact which prevent more thoroughgoing language learning; these cultural traits provide an convincing explanation for why a lingua franca like Mobilian Jargon would be used even between peoples who had close and longstanding ties.

( Alert! D&D geekiness! )

If I have any disappointments with this book, it's simply that it doesn't contain a full lexicon of Mobilian Jargon. There is a grammar sketch featuring a detailed treatment of derivational processes and substantial discussion of particular loans and what they reveal about historical relationships between speakers of the pidgin, but there's not nearly enough for you to teach yourself the language from this one volume alone. But that's asking rather a lot in any case, and Drechsler has anticipated my needs and announced that he intends to publish such a lexicon in an independent volume. Well, where is it? Not gettin' any younger here, am I?