Jun. 8th, 2013

muckefuck: (zhongkui)
On one of my most frequently visited fora, someone is trying yet again to come up with an "objective" definition of "a language". I've seen this discussion so many times at this point I've got my canned arguments all ready to go: "languages" are just high-order abstractions; judgments of "similarity" are hopelessly subjective; lexical comparisons depend on a series of increasingly arbitrary definitions (e.g. which terms you choose to compare, how you measure vocabulary size, what definition of "word" you're using). But it never seems to matter: people seem to feel very strongly that "languages" are concrete things rather than convenient social fictions and, therefore, can be defined scientifically.

Of course, the real problem is that most people don't understand what that word means. Someone linked to this laundry list of intelligibility studies and asked if we thought it was "accurate". How could anybody tell? There's no methodology given at all, so we haven't the faintest idea what the researchers actually measured. It's like asking, "Is it true that when you're embarrassed you're also 27% angry?" Yeah, sure: choose the appropriate criteria for defining "embarrassment" and "anger" and the appropriate method for quantifying the data and you can get that percentage. Does that make it "scientific"? No.

But present your results in numerical form and most people will simply accept them. The first response to that blogpost begins, "I don’t dispute the scientific validity of those findings, but..." Well, then, you're a fool. Worse, you're a cargo cultist who believes the mere presence of numerical data is evidence of "science". For all you know, someone just banged out those percentages on a pub table over a beer or two. Or maybe they abstracted them from a single reading comprehension test. Who cares? One way or another, they don't tell you what you think they're telling you.
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muckefuck: (zhongkui)
The book I feel into reading last weekend, even while I hadn't yet finished up Parrot and Olivier, was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Petals of blood. As mentioned before, his Devil on the cross (Caitaani mutharaba-ini) is--like Sōseki's Kokoro--one of those books I read as an undergraduate which I retain positive feelings towards despite not being able to recall much of anything about the style or plot. Petals treats the same subject matter, i.e. what's wrong with Kenya, and has much the same trick to pull off, i.e. keeping us interested in the trajectory of its central characters when we know that the chances of a happy resolution are nonexistent.

Somewhat predictably, I suppose, it's gotten me interested in the author's native tongue, Gikuyu. Practically the first thing I discovered about it is that I've been mispronouncing "Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o" all these years. You'd think the tildes were there to indicate nasality (cf. Portuguese) or, barring that, pitch/tone (cf. Ancient Greek, bzw. Vietnamese). But you'd be wrong: they indicate vowel quality. Gikuyu isn't unusual in having a seven-vowel system, but more common methods for differentiating the two mid middle levels are representing the open vowels with the corresponding IPA symbols (i.e. ɛ, ɔ) or distinguishing the closed vowels with a dot below (i.e. , ). I'm not sure what the motivation is for having ĩ represent /e/ and ũ /o/ unless it's the fact that, in related languages with a five-vowel system (notably Swahili), they've been merged with /i/ and /u/, respectively.

Given the relatively rarity of dental fricatives, you'd also likely assume that th represents an aspirate. But, no, it's /ð/. Gikuyu actually has a full fricative series, but it's not obvious from the orthography where /β/ is written b and /ɣ/ g. So "Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o" has the pronunciation [ˈŋɡoɣe wa ðiˈɔŋɔ]. The only remaining curve ball is c which can represent [s] or [ʃ] depending on the speaker--unless, that is, you count the fact that prenasalised voiced stops often simplify to simple ones. That is, the [ŋɡ] or [ᵑɡ] at the beginning of Ngũgĩ often ends up as [g]. In general, though, the phonology is more conservative than that of Swahili, and this extends to morphology as well, with Gikuyu keeping distinct more of the noun classes inherited from Proto-Bantu.

Ngũgĩ seems to enjoy tossing in snatches of both Gikuyu and Swahili into the text, and I can't find much of a pattern to it, let alone to why he glosses some words and not others. He tells us, for instance that ugali is porridge but neglects to mention that mnazi is palm wine. And I can understand leaving words like mbari, ahoi, and ndugata in because these are roles in Kikuyu society without exact counterparts in English. But why words for "kettle" or "insects"? Not that I mind--you know I love looking this sort of thing up. Googling "shifta" led me to an article on a war I never knew had happened, giving me some valuable cultural background for understanding the larger context.

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