Kono yo no subete ga hoshii.

Random thoughts post, quote from Greed the Avaricious, the Ultimate Shield—I want everything this world has. Or, well, I want to write about it, anyway. At least the bits I notice.

• People who are not linguists, or even who are linguists but not sociolinguists, often "come a smeller", to use a Bertie Woosterism, when trying to describe the relationship of alphabet, language, and society. Always remember the famous quote by the linguist Max Weinreich, "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." Only, the original version is "A sprach is a dialekt mit an armey un' flot"—because he originally said it in Yiddish, which is a dialect of Franconian German written in the Hebrew alphabet.
  
  And, of course, what we call the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets are really just two different ways of writing the Aramaic alphabet in cursive (there is an alphabet indigenous to Arabia, but the only language it's used to write nowadays is Ethiopian, which uses a cursive form of it that functions like, of all things, Devanagari).
• Apparently, people trying to advance the Niger-Congo theory of the etymology of "OK", cite the fact it is often pronounced "mkay" as evidence. Only...while it can be said that it's rare for Western European languages to use a nasal+stop onset like that, and very common in Niger-Congo languages, that statement largely only applies to the prestige/official/standard varieties. More dialect/colloquial varieties are full of that phenomenon.
  
  E.g. in Italian; Florentine (what we think of as Italian) certainly can't start words that way, but you ever hear of the Calabrian mafia? They're called the Ndrangheta; similarly "to be a brave and defiant person" is ndranghitiari, "born" is ntâ, "endowed" is ndànnu (the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", in case you wondered why I know those last two). It's also unusual for any Indo-European language to start a word with a geminated consonant, but nobody told the Calabrians that, either—their word for "cradle" is nnàca and "to buy" is ccattàri.
  
  Besides which, most of the time, "mkay" is pronounced and conceptualized as a portmanteau of "mmm" and "'kay", so the question is moot.
• It was probably predictable that, in the wake of the Connecticut massacre, people would be staking out partisan claims about which parts of a certain calf-skin with long Ss written in squid-ink, authored by slave-owning Freemasons in high heels and wigs, we should continue to regard as a divine oracle that trumps reason and morals, or cease so to regard. Only—leaving to one side that Constitutions don't have any real authority—nothing in the Constitution is remotely relevant here.
  
  Gun control cannot have been an issue, do you know what the gun laws are in Connecticut? They're among the strictest in the country; just to buy handguns, you need the personal authorization of the Public Safety Commissioner, plus a two-week waiting period. Assuming, that is, that you already have the permit to own handguns, which is issued within two months of application, if you pay a fee and complete an FBI background check. Even then you can't carry a handgun without yet a third permit. Meanwhile, dynamite, used in the still-the-biggest school killing in US history (38 children and 6 adults killed, 58 people wounded)? One permit, no waiting period.
  
  Video games cannot have been an issue either, because, uh, there are no video games where you kill kids, or can kill kids. While there are people who cannot tell reality from fantasy—and we've done studies on how media, whether video game or movie, influence attitudes—nothing remotely comparable to this massacre has ever occurred in any video game, at least not in the last ten years.
  
  No, sorry, this is an issue solely related to mental illness—namely, don't completely cut off contact with mentally unstable relatives for two whole years, then only renew it as a preliminary to having them institutionalized. This is actually how we prevent all murders—don't cheat on your spouse, don't sell drugs, don't get involved with organized crime. Avoid those behaviors, and otherwise exercise ordinary prudence, and your chance of being involved in a murder drops to roughly your chance of winning the lottery.
• If you needed further evidence of how Karen Traviss and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis don't mix, how about her saying that the grammatical simplicity of the Mandalorian language is because the Mandalorians are warriors that don't have time to bother with complex grammar?
  
  You know, like the Zulus and Apaches...whose languages have, respectively, 17 and 11 different genders, the latter of which inflect the verbs relating to motion, and the former of which inflect every word associated with the noun. Zulu verbs also inflect not only by the number and gender of their subject, but by those of their object; Apache verbs have both frequentive and iterative modes ("I do that often" vs. "I do that over and over") and 22 aspects, including continuative, momentaneous, conclusive, and semelfactive.
• Since my D&D campaign was going to be more of a Renaissance than an antediluvian setting, I decided—based on the look of the elf gear in Skyrim and the ending of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie—that I'd give my elves a slightly Spanish flavor. From there it was a simple step to decide to base the humans' cultures on Mesoamerican Indians; then I added in Puebloans, then the Navajo, then the Navajo brought the Tlingit (and Russian dwarves), and then I decided to also have Mound-builders. I usually only have three or four human nations in my stuff, so this is cool.
  
  'Course, the basis is very loose, e.g. my Mayans are independent aristocratic city-states in the midst of a decline; my Aztecs are a more centralized confederation of city-states centered on one with scary sorcerer-kings, and so on, but the tech level and most of the culture is more Standard Fantasy (i.e., Renaissance Europe). The elves are a bit better-behaved than the Spanish were (the Spanish weren't the monsters the Anglos like to make them out to be—again, compare New Spain to New England, and notice which one ain't almost all white—but they were a bit, well, brusque, in their negotiating style, and there was real bad corruption early on). But then again my humans don't eviscerate and eat people and then wear their skins to symbolize the coming of spring, or throw maidens down wells to make it rain, either, so I guess this is the Lighter and Softer version.
• The whole Mayan 2012 thing? Forget how they didn't predict their own civilization's collapse (the Long Count was used by the Classic Maya, who fell in 900 AD; the Postclassic preferred the Short Count), the people who invented the Long Count didn't predict their own collapse, either—because the Long Count was originally Olmec, and the Olmec fell around 350 BC.
  
  Of course, the Mayan calendar doesn't really make any predictions, other than the obvious ones that are the Neolithic equivalent of "order more calendar pages". Those spooky, apocalyptic-sounding things about underworld-gods getting their due, that formed the basis of all the doomsday prophesying? Yeah, uh, Mayans performed human sacrifice at the end of a Long Count, so that'd be why. People with routine institutionalized human sacrifice will talk quite calmly about certain things that only become relevant for us when stuff goes severely pear-shaped.
• Finally, you know those weirdoes who say that Olmec sculpture looks "negroid"? This is them admitting they never knew a western Native American, because seriously, I went to school from kindergarten up with people who could've posed for Olmec sculpture. Hopis and Mexicans, the latter of primarily Native ancestry.
  
  And shall we perhaps pause to ask them "Dude, do you even know any black people? Because 'thick lips, flat noses' is not all there is to what black people look like."
  
  Besides, as this picture clearly demonstrates, Olmecs were actually from Amestris. Their sculptural methods were passed down the Armstrong line for generations!