(no subject)
LINGUA: FRANK, UHH..
1. Word to the new enlightenment: reliable sources have informed me via the e-mail that there is now a minor league soccer team in the spartan prairie city-state of Calgary that have made The Core a part of their training ritual. One love, jah provideth, eee tee cee...
2. Add to my list of hanyu conversations the one wherein I ask around about why a certain double-A battery was much more expensive than another certain double-A battery (the answer is apparently because "it's better"), and a dozen or so exegeses on the how and wherefor of Canada's being a colder place than China ("I lived in the north! In the woods! In a tent! It was much colder! Snow! This is nothing!" speak-shouted telegraphically, my neck snapping in exaggerated grotesqueries of the fourth tone); yes, up in Manchuria we're also talking about the weather.
A flock of geese propels itself across the globe in annual migration and picks up nothing but idle chatter: "gehen sie um die ecke....man, there was this girl..... quelle age as-tu?... wo ke-bu-keyi gei ni da dianhua...." - linguists the world over throw down their mortarboards in frustrated humiliation, their accumulated degrees and commendations withdrawn due to public indifference; "Were you just fooling us with that 'science' stuff all along?".
Right, linguistics:
Even the most obstinate, xenophobic monolingual cannot help but pick up certain tiny fluorishes of the language spoken in the place where they have ended up residing; of all of these tiny bilingual grace notes, the use of contextually appropriate proper nouns is the simplest barrier to break. I live on 'zhong jie' (look the place up on ewetube), it is easy to think of it as 'zhong jie' because that is what it is named - hence the awkwardness when someone addressing me in English chooses to overcorrect their speech to such a degree that they replace that perfectly sensible street name with the pathetic one-two punch of 'middle street'. Wouldn't this kind of code-switching just further confuse someone whose zhongguohua is so sorrowfully inadequate that they need that kind of help (such as taciturn old lourdzwaa is sometimes assumed to be)? If you are convinced you can't remember a few simple syllable-clusters corresponding to a few simple phrases, you may very well run into some cognitive roadblock when it comes to referring to a place by -two- names; western nomenclature's preference of "centre" is just that much more static on the screen...
DEUS EX LINGUA
...but what is that 'anecdote' meant to address? I am in a strange position viz. speech, subject to that arcane foolishness of one who has a decent syntactic and theoretical grasp on a language but can barely use it to communicate. Chinese language classes, Chinese linguistics classes, a linguistics degree; these three factors conspire to leave me with a fairly reasonable notion of some abstract 'Chinese grammar', but the skeleton stands fleshless in my brain like a middle-school science class prop; I know how thngs work, but I can't spar word-to-word for shit. I stare dumbly at my conversant until I can form some notion of what they want out of me, pause to process for a moment, and fire back a series of stuffy conditionals and relative clauses nestled together as factory-misprint babushka dolls... the grammar so immaculate and dated that it is at worst inscrutable, at best "polite"...
But with a flash, enter our old friend the pomo linguist. He appears in a cloud of blacklight and steam, clad head-to-toe in black leather, wrap-around sunglasses hiding bloodshot eyes, hair greased back to reveal a forehead tattooed with the word "logos" in Hellenic script. Throwing back his trenchcoat he uncovers four arms; two hold perpetually burning copies of Chomsky and Samuel Johnson, the third holds a wand, the fourth a conch shell. On opening his mouth he reveals two tongues; moving independent of one another, they begin to proclaim simultaneously in English and Phrygian:
"But you don't need to learn any words! Every generation, in every inevitable Oedipal kill-the-father-fuck-the-mother pageant, seeks to completely wipe clean the lexicon they have inherited and replace it with the novel and the recontextualized. A group's success and dominance is measured by the degree to which it can spontaneously raze their inherited vocabulary to the ground and grow fecund neologisms from its ashes. The language is a scratching post scarred by linguistic alphas of the past, wounds inflicted by today's tough and precocious running their ragged perpendiculars. Yet this territory is marked mostly through the recasting of vocabulary items, the old syntax retained (because syntax is, like, hard) except where the newly recast words necessitate change. So worry not... you know no less than today's frazzled parents in their struggle to understand their children, you are in a position to ride the crest of any linguistic innovators you so choose, or pick up the torch and become one yourself! So whenever you find yourself lost, just repeat silently to yourself this prayer: 'language has no words... language has no words...' and all will be well in good time. But ere I depart consider this: if there are no words, how can there be word class?"
And with that he's gone, fading back into omniglottal void - the smoke clears revealing lourdzwaa sitting in the back room of a Manchurian wangba off what is most resolutely and clearly zhongjie. Why? Because, for now, that's what people seem to agree to call it...