Thoughts upon subculture and things of interest to same. Many of them appear to be regarding linguistics.
Subculture, of course, is "The arts and other manifestations of subhuman intellectual achievement regarded collectively." But I kid.
- Turns out I can make the zled language (Zbin-Ãld, to give it its proper name) ergative after all. I'd been worried about not having a passive for honorific purposes, but I can just use a reflexive causative the way Nahuatl does (that is, the honoree doesn't "do", he "causes himself to do"). Now to figure out how to make the causative work; think I'll go with "to cause" as an auxiliary and the verb that gets caused also be inflected, but be in the subjunctive. Or literally, "X caused that Y did". Hey, I'd managed to get away with no auxiliary verbs heretofore; "only has one auxiliary" is a neat, and realistic, touch.
Maybe I'll have it only be ergative in some circumstances—Hindi-Urdu, which is about as Indo-European as languages come, is ergative in some of its past tenses. I don't know why; it might be an areal feature, since Tibetan, Nepal Bhasa, and the Sherpa language, as well as Gurung and Kiranti (which is spoken in Darjeeling—yeah, it's a real place, not just a label on tea) are all ergative in those tenses. 'Course, Tibetan's pretty much always ergative. - There's a hullabaloo on, about "fake geek girls", as though geek men were some sorta eligible bachelors perpetually preyed on by gold-diggers. To every little Facebook post or Twitter-tweet about this delusion, however, there's probably two articles attempting to refute the idea. Only, most amusingly, the "refutations" involve breathless assertions that denying these people are geeks "invalidates female geeks' experiences", or similar over-the-top politicized formulae.
I'm sorry, phenomenological fail, you require other people to validate your experiences? That's pathetic. You need men's validation like a fish needs a bicycle, cupcake, maybe you should actually grasp the meaning of the one-liners your fetishized ancestor-gods spouted. Also? Maybe we'd respect you more if you didn't just regurgitate undergrad "identity studies" bromides—if you're a woman, think for yourself, instead of parroting your teachers like a third grader. - On the other hand, many of the prominent writers in geek media, regardless of their sex, are simply not geeks. It seems that disliking anime is a prerequisite of working at Anime News Network, for instance, and io9 does everything in its power to define science fiction so broadly that they get to talk about CSI and Breaking Bad.
I think it might almost be purely attributable to journalism, though. People who report on geek stuff—nowadays—are journalists, not geeks, just like science reporters are not scientists and religion reporters burst into flame on holy ground (I assume—you explain why none of them seem ever to have seen a church). And then you get a vicious-cycle dogs-to-their-own-vomit feedback loop going, where geek culture is perennially dumbed down by journalists being its defining voices. - I was thinking about the bland sameness of light novel protagonists (with some notable exceptions), especially compared to the highly memorable protagonists of a typical manga. And I realized, they're all basically Bella Swan. No, not in the "supposed to be drab everyman but lots of people fall for them anyway" sense, although there is that in the more harem-y ones. In the "utterly void non-person cypher protagonist" sense.
See, light novels appear to have fallen for the laughable nonsense that the reader wants to be the protagonist of the book. It's horse-hockey, of course; readers don't want to be Aragorn or Sherlock Holmes, let alone Humbert Humbert or Jean Valjean. But in light novels' case it's moderately more allowable than most instances of the fallacy—their creators, after all, are often the same people as make galge. In a galge, the protagonist is essentially a non-entity, usually lacking a voice or a character design. But that's because in a game, you are "being" the protagonist, in a way that you simply aren't while reading a book. - It occurs to me, the extreme significance of food and eating in anime—do you think it's because the Japanese are, culturally, partly Pacific islanders (you have to dig through about 1800 years of Chinese influence to find that aspect of them, but it's there)?
Go read about traditional Hawaiian culture. Know what most of their taboos have to do with? Food. Know what cemented their economic and political relations? Food. Hell, know what they did with their defeated enemies? Food. The same (minus the cannibalism) is true of Filipinos and Formosans (or, I dunno, what are the aboriginal Taiwanese called?—and did they practice cannibalism, along with the headhunting?).
Granted, all those peoples speak Austronesian languages, and the Japanese don't (though it's suspected both Japanese and Korean might have an Austronesian substrate); even if there isn't a substrate, though, the same material influences—the reason we call them "Pacific islander" cultures—would be in play. - Food seriously is significant in Austronesian cultures, though. They are our best guess for who the "Yue" people were ("Vietnam", and for that matter the name of Yunnan Province, both mean "the Yue South"); Yue, like Celts, show up in lots of ancient documents but it's actually kinda hazy who the hell we're really talking about.
And the Yue, of course, became Han Chinese-ified as the people of Guangdong. The way you say "How are you?" in Cantonese (Yuht Yúh—the "yuht" is "yue" in Mandarin) literally means "Did you eat yet?". - Should we maybe just content ourselves with the knowledge that when the average person says "Middle Ages", he means Renaissance? I mean, everything from social mores to hygiene to politics to science to material culture, in the typical portrayal of the medieval era, is actually something Renaissance—here's a hint, you won't find much absolute monarchy or plate armor in the 13th century.
Also? You know how Europe was backward and China was Science-land? Thomas Aquinas gives the roundness of the Earth as an example of scientific knowledge in the Summa, indeed in the very first article of the very first question of the very first part. The Jesuit missionaries in China, in 1582, were shocked to discover that Chinese scholars still thought the Earth was flat. - Related to that journalists-dumbing-geek-culture-down issue, above, is when self-hating geeks let non-geek critics define how our stuff is judged. E.g., when we evaluate film or writing according to the canons of other kinds of work, what do we get? We get braindead New Wave and magic realism, that's what.
Are you okay with there being more science fiction films based on the writing of Cormac McCarthy than are based on those of Larry Niven and C. J. Cherryh combined? 'Cause I'm not.
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