Sorya Genjitsu Ssu-ka?

Japanese. "Is that real?". Reality check de arimasu.

• Today's Penny Arcade features Karen Traviss' Mandalorian conlang. It was a mistake to draw my attention to it.
  
  Sit down before you hurt yourself, little girl, it embarrasses the grownups to watch you. That Y vowel? Yeah, that's not a separate, different sound. It's an I. Those apostrophes? Yeah, go read the Wookieepedia article on all the work that language gets out of its apostrophes, and then laugh yourself sick. Apostrophes—which are called "sighs", even though a sigh is the glottal fricative (H), not the stop—stand for, get this, a pause before final vowels, an "indication of breath" (whatever the hell that means), to indicate emphasis, and to indicate the letters dropped by contractions. Remember what Vonda N. McIntyre said about languages made up by English speakers sounding like they were made up by English speakers? Each of those functions would be done by a separate character, Ms. Traviss, unless the Mandalorians were inexplicably basing their orthography on English.
  
  The verbs' infinitives (because they have infinitives, unlike Japanese or Navajo but, by an astounding coincidence, just like the European languages Ms. Traviss is likely to have studied in high school) end in R—again, just like Romance languages. Indeed, just like western European Romance languages, considering Romanian's end in A and Italian's (like Latin's) in -re. I guess Mandalore had contact with France and Spain at some point in the past. Amazingly, the negative is with "N", and adjectives add "-la" (which is "-al" spelled backwards) and "-yc" (which is just a stripper spelling of "-ic").
  
  Worst is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as understood by a special-needs eighth-grader, stuff, like not having a word for hero (in which Traviss demonstrates she doesn't know what the word means—"being prepared to die for your family and friends, or what you hold dear" was "basic citizenship" in ancient societies, ma'am, "hero" means something else), or not having passive verbs. Now, there are sociological aspects of verb voice—in Japan and Korea a major part of honorific speech is making the honoree the agent, and never the patient, of passive verbs—but any language that lacks them is going to find itself in serious trouble, since sometimes the patient of an act has to be the subject of a sentence about it.
  
  Oh yeah, and by the way, apparently being primarily spoken, rather than written, makes a language easy to learn. You know, because Navajo and Hopi and Nahuatl and Irish and Basque are so much easier than Japanese, French, Korean, Spanish, and Danish. Right?
  
  Traviss Asdzaan bizaad shił doo yá'át'ééh da, yá?
• Ever read the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell? It's a kick in the pants to the idea of meritocracy, because it shows how much of anyone's success is opportunity, and, basically, luck.
  
  It has, however, two factual errors and one bad argument, all in the section about rice paddies. It says that landowners let their rice-farmers keep all their surplus, over a fixed sum, in South China and Japan and Korea. I don't know about farming in South China, but I do know about Japan and Korea, and quite frequently in both those countries, farmers got to keep exactly none of their rice—they lived on millet, AKA birdseed, and the rice all went to the daimyo or the yangban. Also, the description of European peasantry is a strawman caricature that's pretty much been debunked to hell and back, certainly for all eras before the late Reformation (the system of tenant farming did break down a bit, some places, when the Renaissance and Reformation ruined the world—but certainly nothing described applied to medieval farmers, I'll tell you that for free).
  
  More importantly, though, the argument about Chinese being advantageous for math is simply bogus. It's true Chinese numbers are short, and their arrangements may be easier for mathematical analysis. But that doesn't explain why monolingual English-speaking Chinese-Americans are good at math, nor why Indian kids, whose numbers are in Hindi (which is as convoluted as any other Indo-European language, number-wise), are just as good. Of course, the whole argument is essentially another dumbed-down Sapir-Whorf: "Oh, isolating languages, with their highly analytic grammar, are better for math than inflecting ones!" Yeah, tell it to Euclid and Brahmagupta. All the greatest Chinese mathematicians were building on Indian math, sorry.
  
  Still, all told, definitely a great book, at least when it sticks to sociology and statistics—the second it steps into linguistics or history, it starts to founder.
• I suddenly realized, you know how people have called Whedon a Geek God, and even said he's a geek himself? Seriously, take film/TV geeks out of that equation, and, no, no he isn't. That's like saying Fellini or Godard was a geek. No, film geeks are into his stuff, but he wasn't one himself.
  
  Similarly, there's a list of ways to provoke geek arguments floating around on the web, and #2 is to say "Joss Whedon is a hack". Now, I've called Whedon a hack myself, but that's really like calling Anna Nicole Smith a bitch: by all accounts bitchiness was not her character flaw, ideally we would be more precise in our denunciations. The specific type of bad writer Whedon is is not, in fact, precisely the same thing as a hack.
  
  Every single thing you can dislike about Whedon, from his faux-philosophical noodling to his preachy plots and one-dimensional characters to his catastrophically implausible settings, is due, on examination, to one factor. He's shallow. He cannot be bothered to learn what existence and reality are (nor what the word "God" means), or how and why societies set up their sex-relations the way they do, or how actual people behave (the Operative, for instance, makes a Metal Gear villain look believable), or how much energy is involved in terraforming. That's boring. Or at least tiring. And Whedon, being a fat, self-satisfied Anglo who's too rich to walk, has never been in a situation where not knowing your stuff can have immediate bad results, therefore he's never had an incentive to bother.
  
  Whedon is not a hack. He is a fat stupid shallow rich Anglo hack who was very deeply affected by repentence and reeducation camp Women's Studies at Wesleyan. Also he has a forehead like a hydrocephalic.