50books_poc | Entries tagged with language

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

37. John McWhorter, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

A popular non-fiction book about linguistics, particularly how languages change. This book doesn't try to tell the story of any particular language and its history, although it uses plenty of examples (mostly English, though McWhorter seems to speak an enormous number of languages, and knows details about even more), nor does it try to reconstruct the "original language". Instead it is about the way languages change: how words change their meanings, slang, how sounds change, how grammar changes, how creoles and pidgins arise, why people change the languages they use, and so on. This book is compulsively readable, with lots of funny pop-culture references, and the sort of facts and tid-bits that make you want to turn to anyone nearby and say, "OMG! Did you know...".

A great book. Highly recommended, and I'll be checking out McWhorter's new book, about English, soon.

I've been really interested in reading popular-style non-fiction lately. I'm particularly interested in history, but biology, linguistics, astronomy- anything easy to read and interesting would be great. Does anyone have some recs by PoC authors?

Current Mood: cheerful

whereweather.livejournal.com

21. !Ask a Mexican!, Gustavo Arellano
2007, Scribner

I actually finished this book months ago, but I couldn't figure out what to say about it. I guess I still can't, really. There are some things I really like about this book, and some things I find very disappointing, so I guess I'll just talk about that.

The book is centrally made up of a collection of columns by Arellano, who writes a kind-of-advice column for the OC [Orange County, CA] Weekly, whose putative mission is to answer questions from clueless gabachos (white people) about Mexican culture and mores. That's a part of the country where many Mexican immigrants and their Mexican-American descendants live side-by-side with white (and other) Americans, and where there seems to be a virulent ongoing culture clash, fueled in part by arguments about immigration policy and illegal immigration, and in part by the stuff that fuels any culture clash (confusion, fear, tribalism, bigotry, language barriers, racism, and all the rest of that awesome stuff). So tensions can run high there, and if one can judge by the tone of the questions The Mexican gets asked -- if even one-third of them are actual questions written in by actual white Californians -- there are lots of people who are happy to let their racism just hang out.

Given that background, I admire Arellano's "straight-talk" approach, which deals candidly with insults, epithets, stereotypes and racist language, in order to talk about them. Wab and gabacho (insulting words for "Mexican" and "white person" respectively) are frequent in the column. Questions like "Why do Mexicans have so many fucking kids?", "Why do ghetto-poor people spend money on their trucks instead of their families?," "Why do your women insist on wearing low-riding jeans with their fat bellies spilling out?," or "Why don't you illegal immigrants have enough respect for the United States to learn English?" -- these questions get serious answers. Arellano doesn't spend a lot of time berating anyone for intolerance or racism; the premise seems to be that the racism is obviously there, that's the ground-zero starting point, so let's talk about the actual questions. He maintains his dignity by addressing his interlocutors in the same tone -- which is not particularly polite -- but the answers often have a lot of actual content: Arellano talks about cultural, social, and historical issues and themes in Mexican culture, and frequently quotes sociological studies and government demographic data (Arellano has an MA in sociology). That's presumably the aspect of his approach that merited the cover blurb from the L.A. Times, "A sassy mix of Lenny Bruce rant and civil rights manual." For my part, it reminds me of the early days of Dan Savage's "Savage Love" sex-advice column, when he invited -- nay, demanded -- that his interlocutors address him as "Hey, Faggot!" The theory again being: we both know you have private opinions about me, so let's get it all out there up front so that it won't become the subtext to the rest of our conversation.

I was disappointed, though, by some aspects of Arellano's answers. For one thing, he doesn't always address the actual question asked: sometimes you can see him quickly veering the discussion around to fit in with something he apparently really wants to quote or write about that day. That's not great advice-columnist manners, I think: dude, it's not all about you. Also, some issues that questioners bring up he just kind of fails to deal with. The ones that were of most interest to me -- where I happened to notice him falling down or just evading, over and over again -- were the ones that had to do with ingrained gender inequality in Mexican culture, and the ones relating to homosexual behavior and attitudes toward it. He just kind of evades, man, over and over again -- and every now and then he says something that's just concretely insulting. "As for the Mexican women being sultry and spicy -- that's all documentary, baby." "Any man who breaks the shackles of propriety and... grabs his crotch is the kind of immigrant we want... Wolf-whistling Mexican men are our modern pioneers, and gabachas are their new frontier, their virgin soil." "As for our young men's current fascination with pansy-ass K-Swiss sneakers and the color pink... blame metrosexuality, the biggest threat to machismo since the two-income household." You know what, man, fuck you, too.

That said, I did learn a lot from this book. One of the most interesting parts are the longer "investigation" pieces Arellano wrote for the book, and includes at the end of each chapter. A lot of them include discussions with currently living-illegal Mexican immigrants about issues like living on a tiny budget or doing jornalero work (manual day labor). The most amazing one, for me, is undoubtedly the ten-page essay on the huge Mexican and Mexican-American fan base of Morrissey. (Yes, Morrissey, the fey, depressive Englishman, who remains sexually ambiguous decades after it's stopped being cool. THAT GUY. Morrissey and Mexicans? I would never, in a thousand years, have guessed that one.)

So anyway. As you can see, this book gave me quite a lot to think about.

Below is a short sampling from it, to give an idea of Arellano's style:

Q: "Why are Mexicans known as greasers? Is it because they spread rancid lard from their dirty kitchens all over themselves after bathing instead of baby oil or cologne the way clean, civilized Anglos do?"

Dear Gabacho: Mira, güey [Look, man], the only grease we put on ourselves is the Three Flowers brilliantine Mexican men use to lacquer up their hair to a shine so intense astronomers frequently mistake the reflection off our heads for the Andromeda Galaxy. That puts us in brotherhood with the 1950s gabacho rebels whom mainstream society also denigrated as greasers. But the reason greaser maintains such staying power as an epithet against Mexicans -- etymologists date its origins to the 1830s -- is because it refers to, as you correctly imply, our diet. Sociologist Irving Lewis Allen devotes a chapter in his 1990 compendium of linguistic essays... [Etc.]

rootedinsong.livejournal.com

5. Kanyen'keha Tewatati (Let's Speak Mohawk), by David Kanatawakhon Maracle

The first thing I noticed about this book was that it was awfully thin for a language textbook. (I bought the edition with CDs, for which Amazon misleadingly lists the dimensions as 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches. The page for the edition without CDs gives the true dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches.)

This book is linguistically quite sound - the author clearly knows his linguistics and is not bogged down in "all languages are really Latin" or prescriptivist nonsense (which is my biggest pet peeve when it comes to language materials) - but it's not really sufficient for self-study. There are a few sample dialogues at the beginning, but after that, it's pretty much a straight grammar and not a textbook, with no texts longer than a sentence (and sentences only there to illustrate grammatical points in as concise a manner as possible), and lots of verb and noun inflection charts. Enough of that and my eyes glaze over; I really can't learn a language without corpora, and I assume the same is true for most people. It seems as if the author is more used to providing sketches of Mohawk grammar so that linguists can learn facts about its typology than providing enough examples and exercises so that people can learn to apply the rule he's talking about in all/most possible contexts.

The CD was also disappointing: its content is nothing more than the examples in the book, read multiple times with their English translation. This translates to the author reading pages and pages of verb conjugation charts out loud. Hearing it did help me internalize some of the phonology, and it is essential to hear how a language you want to learn is spoken. But it was still disappointing.

I think this book would be a fine supplement to another more comprehensive book (and an actual live class). But I'm not sure said more comprehensive book actually exists.

6. One Thousand Useful Mohawk Words, by David Kanatawakhon Maracle

This book is mostly a dictionary, with a few pages of grammar at the beginning. Strangely enough, the treatment of verb conjugation in this book is more comprehensive than that of the previous book. (I spent some gleeful linguistics-nerd time figuring out the morphophonological rules to derive the different forms of the subject agreement prefixes from an underlying form.) :)

Once again: I want more information. It's extremely disappointing to me how little material there is on the Mohawk language. (And I'm relatively lucky - a lot of Native American languages are much more endangered and less documented than Mohawk.) :(

~~Edit: I can't add a tag for the author because it would exceed the 1000 tag limit!~~
Edit 2: Fixed.

waelisc.livejournal.com

Rehabilitating African Languages: Language Use, Language Policy and Literacy in Africa, Selected Case Studies, edited by Kwesi Kwah Prah (Capetown, South Africa : The Center for Advanced Studies of African Society, 2002).

A few weeks ago I posted about the book Afrikan Alphabets. I wanted to read more about African language issues and I'm fortunate to work in a university library with a strong collection in African studies.

Unsurprisingly, a huge proportion of the published works on African languages are by North American / European academics, but I found this one, in which all but two chapters are by black African academics. The editor addresses that in the introduction, in fact, noting that for one language group, Khoisan, there are no native speakers with linguistics training at present (or there weren't in 2002.)

I'm actually not a linguist, so I more or less floated through some of the technical issues discussed here. But the rest was very thought-provoking. Virtually everywhere in Africa, the colonial languages (mostly English and French) are used in higher education and government. (I did know that.) That means a student must learn a new language to go beyond secondary school, or in most cases, beyond primary school, because the the colonial languages are widely (not universally) used at the secondary level.

And in fact, what I did not realise at all is that students at the elementary level often don't get schooling in their own language. In Tanzania, the official languages are English and Kiswahili, but only 5% of families speak Kiswahili at home. The other 95% speak other African languages; those children have to learn Kiswahili just for elementary school. Similarly, there are more than 200 languages & dialects spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

So there are several very challenging issues involved in reclaiming, or as the title puts it, rehabilitating African languages. One is that there's a lot of prestige associated with colonial languages because of their use in higher education and government; the people who've spent years learning those languages naturally don't want to give up that status. Another is that most African languages don't contain scientific and technical vocabulary; one of the chapters here was on the various ways of doing that (compounding, loan words, "calquing" - lots o' technical linguistic stuff here.)

And a third issue is the incredible number of languages & dialects involved. Printing 200 versions of every textbook? What a logistical nightmare. So the linguists see their main job as "standardisation and harmonisation" of dialects within a given language, and within language families. This involves things like choosing a single writing system (whether it's the Roman alphabet or one developed specifically for African languages) and standardizing the spelling of words that actually are pronounced similarly in different dialects. (I think the parallel to this might be if English words in the U.S. were spelled differently depending on whether they were being used by someone with a Southern accent, someone from the Midwest, someone from Boston...)

The research center that published this book has a whole series, some of which appear highly technical (Ibibio Phonetics and Phonology) and others more on cultural issues (Knowledge in Black and White: The Impact of Apartheid on the Production and Reproduction of Knowledge.) I'm interested to keep reading on this topic.

(Cross-posted to my journal.)

kate_nepveu

My first two books for the challenge. Unlike some, I am going to count books I "was going to read anyway," partly because the challenge might prompt me to pick books up sooner—and given my to-be-read bookcase, that's no small thing—and partly because I want to see what the overall distribution looks like at the end of the calendar year. All of these are crossposted from my booklog, with links to the original posts at the end of the review.

First, John McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, a non-fiction popular-level linguistics work:

( review )

Second, Tobias S. Buckell, Sly Mongoose, an SF novel:

( review )

waelisc.livejournal.com

This is nonfiction; the full title is Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika.

Saki Mafundikwa is a Zimbabwean graphic designer and started ZIVA, the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts. About 20 years ago he became interested in the diverse writing systems developed in various African cultures, and started collecting info on them during his travels.

The topic is really broader than alphabets per se. The author explains in the beginning that he's going to use "alphabet" as an umbrella term to include alphabets, syllabaries, pictographs, ideographs, and written symbols in general. A linguist would probably cringe at lumping those all together, but honestly, African Writing Systems sounds dry and academic compared to Afrikan Alphabets and he does want people who aren't linguists to get interested in the topic.

There's lots of beautiful artwork, and the section on Bantu symbol writing was probably the most interesting of all because the meaning of each symbol was explained. Unfortunately, many of the other writing systems were just pages and pages of symbols without any explanation of how they were developed.

For some of the pictographic and ideographic systems this was baffling, because over time the symbols become very stylized and you can't tell if the symbol now identified as 'dou' started as a tree or a warrior with a shield or a field of maize or what. It's just pretty. Since the author is a visual artist, I guess he was more focused on appreciating the symbols for their aesthetic qualities more than I was.

So I found this book both moving and frustrating. Mafundikwa is passionate and eloquent about African people reclaiming traditional cultures and his desire to see a revitalization of writing systems developed in Africa, for African languages, by native speakers of those languages.

But I was frustrated that the book wasn't so much "the story of writing in Afrika" as "a scrapbook about Afrikan writing," and there were so many points where I wanted to know more. So, now I'm interested to find a book about African language & writing by someone with more of a linguistics background. And hopefully also a PoC.