Language and Society

Really it's just a random thoughts post, but on those two things.

• I would dearly love to know who is responsible for translating the Sign of the Cross into Japanese, because "Chichi to Ko to Seirei no mina ni yotte" (父と子と聖霊の御名によって) is just wrong. The big problem is "seirei"; "seirei" means something more like "genius" than "spiritus". Personally I would've gone with "ki" for Holy Spirit, since "ki" comes from the Chinese word for "steam" (qí/気), and both "spiritus" and Greek "pneuma" come from "breath".
  
  I'm not sure how I feel about "no mina ni yotte" (literally "according to the honorable name of"), but I don't know what would be a better alternative.
• You know how people like to say America's position as "world's #1 economy" is a sign of our moral superiority? You get it from Gospel of Prosperity preachers, as well as various right-wing thinkers who ought to know better. I believe the concept is adequately refuted by noticing that #2 is China, #3 is Japan, and #4 is Germany. America's prosperity is due to the World Wars not happening here, and actual communism never getting control of our economy. That's really it. Also all three runners-up have experienced at least one of those two things, China and part of Germany both of them, and yet look where they are, so why are we bragging, exactly?
  
  Seriously, we are just as bad as any of the other non-totalitarians, possibly excluding England (we didn't deliberately starve 3 million people to death in Ireland and India, after all). Our 19th century treatment of natives was no different from any colonial power in Africa (Late addendum: except for Belgium, holy crap!); we had the worst slavery in the New World (yes, worse than Brazil); between the World Wars we were more eugenicist than anyone but the Nazis themselves; after World War II we exported genocidal population-control to every corner of the globe. And no, those last two are not just the Left—is Henry Kissinger a Leftist and nobody tell me? Because again, he advocated encouraging contraception in Brazil so they couldn't compete with us for oil.
  
  Nevertheless, and as many the world over cannot grasp, nations are not people; the many innocent people of a nation cannot be made to suffer for their nation's past sins. War, for instance, is only permitted to make countries stop things they're doing now. Otherwise the Turks come well before any European country, except maybe Russia, on the hit list, and England comes before France or Spain. Post-colonialism is the bastard child of Marxism and America's founding myth, and has about as much bearing on reality as you'd expect.
• I know I've mentioned it before, but Ayn Rand never, but never, actually defended capitalism. She defended an imaginary system where creative geniuses are their own masters. Oh yes, capitalism is better for them than communism, but that's not really what it's set up for; it's set up for the benefit of the investors, that's even what the name means. Of course, by the way, it's the economic system that goes with "republics", both are defined by having an elite (communism, of course, is defined by having an elite whose existence it denies—see also David Brin's worldview).
  
  The thing Rand was describing, by the bye, is essentially the High Medieval form of a guild, before the monopolistic "mastery" system came in with the Renaissance. Ironically, that is exactly the opposite of what she would say, but given she also thinks civilization, as such, is more individualistic than barbarism, her opinions can be safely discounted, snickering optional.
• Huh. If you think about it, the system considered ideal by most theorists nowadays (I wouldn't call most of these fetishists "thinkers") has, upon analysis, two classes: elite and commoner. Yes, most of them would deny that, but how many of them actually advocate total economic egalitarianism and direct democracy? Right, not many—none of the sane ones.
  
  The interesting thing is, that's the characteristic of a chiefdom, in anthropology. In states, anthropologically speaking, there are usually three classes: elite, commoner, and slave. The sole exceptions are Western European or their descendants, and thus arose from chiefdoms at the end of the Roman Empire. Thus, I reiterate, we are not living in true states, but in states heavily modified with characteristics of chiefdoms. And that's actually not a bad thing.
• Japanese is almost as bad as Chinese in the "it's not so much a language as a language family" thing (most Romance languages are more mutually intelligible with each other than Chinese "dialects"). And I don't just mean Okinawago (which is called Uchinaaguchi when it's at home—that is how they say those self-same kanji), which everyone acknowledges as a separate language. Anything other than Kansai-ben is as different from Standard Japanese as Dutch is from English (while Kansai is probably Scottish).
  
  The Hakata dialect, spoken in Fukuoka, for instance, renders "Nani shiteiru no?" ("What are (you) doing?") as "Nan ba shiyo tto?" or "Nan shitô to?". Even in the same dialect families as Kansai and Standard (Hakata is Kyûshû-ben), you have weird stuff. Some Kansai dialects have perfective aspect as well as "unmarked" and "progressive" like Standard. Tôhoku dialect, spoken on the eastern side of Honshu, pronounces "ichigo" as "uzungo" and makes the hortative with -be/-ppe. A slogan after the tsunami (Tôhoku is where it hit the hardest) was "Ganbappe!" ("Let's get to it...put in some effort...also, good luck!"—Japanese works that poor word like a plow-horse), which would be "Ganbarô" in Standard. Also? Eastern Kantô dialects go up in statements and down in questions.
• I realize most people don't look into the grammars of Tibetan, Navajo, or Zulu, but what is with people who act like Spanish and French are hard? They're SVO accusative languages that only inflect for case on pronouns and form most of their verb conjugations with auxiliary verbs. That is, they're almost exactly like English, albeit with slightly more inflections.
  
  Imagine if the Spanish or French in the New World had been like the Germanic tribesmen who founded their kingdoms, and left the native languages in place when they took over. The brats who whine about learning Spanish and French would need to know Uto-Aztecan, Mayan, and Oto-manguean to talk to Mexicans (enjoy the polysynthesis, the four or five voices, and the defaulting to future tense, respectively!), and Algonquian, Siouan, and Iroquian to talk with the Quebecois (have fun with the first one's fourth person pronouns, and the other two being Split-S and Fluid-S ergative!).
  
  Note that I am assuming that the English still took after their founders, and imposed their language on the natives. It's seriously ironic that they posture to this day like Norman French was some kind of tyranny, when they only spoke English in the first place because they were the only Germanic elite that forced a Romanized Celtic populace to use Germanic instead of a proto-Romance language.
• I do grow so tired of scanlators and fansubbers who translate the writing on biker coats (Japanese bikers wear kamikaze trenchcoats with kanji slogans on them) as "yoroshiku" ("nice to meet you")...but do not mention that it's written with kanji—夜路死苦—that, while pronounced the same (よろしく), mean "dark road death-agony". It kinda changes the connotations just a bit, don't you think?
• As I mentioned in my last post, the attitude of people toward creole languages is weird. They really are languages, Jamaican doesn't have remotely the same grammar as English. They're not really "bad" languages, now—obviously they began as pidgins, which is to say half-assed versions of other languages jury-rigged for hasty communication, but a creole is by definition a pidgin that's become someone's first language. It is not rude to acknowledge that pidgins are half-assed, because they are, but if it becomes a creole it is no longer a half-assed form of another language, but a language in its own right.
  
  You can say anything in any language, albeit it may take more or fewer words. Koine Greek is a creole, used in the Alexandrian Empire—Alexander's generals, rather than using Aramaic as he and his Persian predecessors had, preferred to use Greek—and it was good enough for the New Testament, wasn't it?
  
  On the other hand, though, people need to acknowledge that creoles all exist on dialect continua, with the language their pidgin ancestor got its words from on the other end, for a damn reason. If, say, the Jamaican Defense Force is on a joint operation with other Commonwealth forces, the officers of the other nations have a right to expect the Jamaicans to talk to them in English—just like the Jamaicans expect that New Zealanders talk to them in English, even if they're Maori. Nobody's saying they can't use creole when they call their mothers on their off-hours.