The Dialect

2010 in review

thedialect — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 23:18:50 +0000

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,400 times in 2010. That’s about 13 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 20 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 30 posts. There were 2 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb.

The busiest day of the year was May 4th with 102 views. The most popular post that day was New York’s Language Ark.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were ladypoverty.blogspot.com, mail.yahoo.com, facebook.com, search.conduit.com, and rootedincalifornia.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for danza negra translation, danza negra, kono hentai, regional expressions, and ouistiti.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

New York’s Language Ark May 2010
6 comments

Danza Negra August 2009
3 comments

How many ways to say “How YOU doin’?” ? January 2010
9 comments

Say “Ouistiti!” for the camera! March 2010
6 comments

Word of the Week: Umoja March 2010
2 comments

Dialect forced into Exile

thedialect — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 22:47:17 +0000

Dear Loyal Dialect Readers,

This note was smuggled into the country and is reprinted here at great potential risk. From information that we have gathered, the note was written clandestinely and while in custody of the authorities. It is clear that the writer did not have access to Spellcheck or a thesaurus and from this we infer that the writer was in grave danger. By a turn of fortune, we do have confirmation that the writer has been spirited to relative safety and is now being habored by local Dialect online blog followers near the beach on an undisclosed, inexpensive, semi-tropical island.

Be well and stay informed,

Dialect Support Committee

***

Friends,

Don’t be scared. Dialect still going. In prison. Will escape to internet acksess soon. Eckspect Dialect resume in July. Until then, friends, dream these books:

Hippocrene Navajo-English Dictionary by Leon Wall & William Morgan - No Eng. to Nav. tho. Damn!

Western Apache – English Dictionary: Community Generated by Dorothy Bray & White Mtn Apache Tribe – Total score.

Libera Ekflugo by Sylla Chaves – Easy Esperanto stories smuggled into hoosegow by Dialect partisan.

Spoken Chamorro by D. M. Topping with P. M. Ogo - Dangerous. Full grammar.

Candle running out. Until next time, Comrades.

The Dialect

New York’s Language Ark

thedialect — Mon, 03 May 2010 08:00:15 +0000

Below is an article from the New York Times found and suggested by Brad B., a pre-eminent language expert and a Dialect regular.

Enjoy!

***

Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages

by Sam Roberts – published April 28, 2010

Valnea Smilovic, 59, left, with her mother, 92, in Queens.

They still speak Vlashki, a language spoken by the Istrians.

photo by James Estrin

The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.

At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.

And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows, is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.

“My wife is from Java, and my children were born in Jakarta — they don’t associate with the Mamuju,” he said. “I don’t read books in Mamuju. They don’t publish any. I only speak Mamuju when I go back or when I talk to my brother on the telephone.”

Husni Husain, 67, says he doesn’t know of any other person in New York who speaks Mamuju, an Austronesian language.

Photo by James Estrin

These are not just some of the languages that make New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world. They are part of a remarkable trove of endangered tongues that have taken root in New York — languages born in every corner of the globe and now more commonly heard in various corners of New York than anywhere else.

While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages — far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 census forms.

“It is the capital of language density in the world,” said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “We’re sitting in an endangerment hot spot where we are surrounded by languages that are not going to be around even in 20 or 30 years.”

In an effort to keep those voices alive, Professor Kaufman has helped start a project, the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach them to compatriots.

“It’s hard to use a word like preserve with a language,” said Robert Holman, who teaches at Columbia and New York Universities and is working with Professor Kaufman on the alliance. “It’s not like putting jelly in a jar. A language is used. Language is consciousness. Everybody wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.”

With national languages and English encroaching on the linguistic isolation of remote islands and villages, New York has become a Babel in reverse — a magnet for immigrants and their languages.

New York is such a rich laboratory for languages on the decline that the City University Graduate Center is organizing an endangered-languages program. “The quickening pace of language endangerment and extinction is viewed by many linguists as a direct consequence of globalization,” said Juliette Blevins, a distinguished linguist hired by City University to start the program.

In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan); Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands); Irish Gaelic; Kashubian (from Poland); indigenous Mexican languages; Pennsylvania Dutch; Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland); Romany (from the Balkans); and Yiddish.

Researchers plan to canvass a tiny Afghan neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, for Ormuri, which is believed to be spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Endangered Language Alliance will apply field techniques usually employed in exotic and remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant ethnic enclaves.

“Nobody had gone from area to area looking for endangered languages in New York City spoken by immigrant populations,” Professor Kaufman said.

The United Nations keeps an atlas of languages facing extinction, and U.N. experts as well as linguists generally agree that a language will probably disappear in a generation or two when the population of native speakers is both too small and in decline. Language attrition has also been hastened by war, ethnic cleansing and compulsory schooling in a national tongue.

Over the decades in the secluded northeastern Istrian Peninsula along the Adriatic Sea, Croatian began to replace Vlashki, spoken by the Istrians, what is described as Europe’s smallest surviving ethnic group. But after Istrians began immigrating to Queens, many to escape grinding poverty, they largely abandoned Croatian and returned to speaking Vlashki.

“Whole villages were emptied,” said Valnea Smilovic, 59, who came to the United States in the 1960s with her parents and her brother and sister. “Most of us are here now in this country.”

Mrs. Smilovic still speaks in Vlashki with her mother, 92, who knows little English, as well as her siblings. “Not too much, though,” Mrs. Smilovic said, because her husband speaks only Croatian and her son, who was born in the United States, speaks English and a smattering of Croatian.

“Do I worry that our culture is getting lost?” Mrs. Smilovic asked. “As I get older, I’m thinking more about stuff like that. Most of the older people die away and the language dies with them.”

Several years ago, one of her cousins, Zvjezdana Vrzic, an Istrian-born adjunct professor of linguistics at New York University, organized a meeting in Queens about preserving Vlashki. She was stunned by the turnout of about 100 people.

“A language reflects a singular nature of a people speaking it,” said Professor Vrzic, who recently published an audio Vlashki phrasebook and is working on an online Vlashki-Croatian-English dictionary.

Istro-Romanian is classified by Unesco as severely endangered, and Professor Vrzic said she believed that the several hundred native speakers who live in Queens outnumbered those in Istria. “Nobody tried to teach it to me,” she said. “It was not thought of as something valuable, something you wanted to carry on to another generation.”

A few fading foreign languages have also found niches in New York and the country. In northern New Jersey, Neo-Aramaic, rooted in the language of Jesus and the Talmud, is still spoken by Syrian immigrants and is taught at Syriac Orthodox churches in Paramus and Teaneck.

The Rev. Eli Shabo speaks Neo-Aramaic at home, and his children do, too, but only “because I’m their teacher,” he said.

Will their children carry on the language? “If they marry another person of Syriac background, they may,” Father Shabo said. “If they marry an American, I’d say no.”

And on Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few hundred people around the world. One of them, Dakhil Shooshtary, 76, a retired jeweler who settled on Long Island from Iran 45 years ago, is compiling a Mandaic dictionary.

For Professor Kaufman, the quest for speakers of disappearing languages has sometimes involved serendipity. After making a fruitless trip in 2006 to Indonesia to find speakers of Mamuju, he attended a family wedding two years ago in Queens. Mr. Husain happened to be sitting next to him. Wasting no time, he has videotaped Mr. Husain speaking in his native tongue.

“This is maybe the first time that anyone has recorded a video of the language being spoken,” said Professor Kaufman, who founded a Manhattan research center, the Urban Field Station for Linguistic Research, two years ago.

He has also recruited Daowd I. Salih, 45, a refugee from Darfur who lives in New Jersey and is a personal care assistant at a home for the elderly, to teach Massalit, a tribal language, to a linguistic class at New York University. They are meticulously creating a Massalit lexicography to codify grammar, definitions and pronunciations.

“Language is identity,” said Mr. Salih, who has been in the United States for a decade. “So many African tribes in Darfur lost their languages. This is the land of opportunity, so these students can help us write this language instead of losing it.”

Speakers of Garifuna, which is being displaced in Central America by Spanish and English, are striving to keep it alive in their New York neighborhoods. Regular classes have sprouted at the Yurumein House Cultural Center in the Bronx, and also in Brooklyn, where James Lovell, a public school music teacher, leads a small Garifuna class at the Biko Transformation Center in East Bushwick.

Mr. Lovell, who came to New York from Belize in 1990, said his oldest children, 21-year-old twin boys, do not speak Garifuna. “They can get along speaking Spanish or English, so there’s no need to as far as they’re concerned,” he said, adding that many compatriots feel “they will get nowhere with their Garifuna culture, so they decide to assimilate.”

But as he witnessed his language fading among his friends and his family, Mr. Lovell decided to expose his younger children to their native culture. Mostly through simple bilingual songs that he accompanies with gusto on his guitar, he is teaching his two younger daughters, Jamie, 11, and Jazelle, 7, and their friends.

“Whenever they leave the house or go to school, they’re speaking English,” Mr. Lovell said. “Here, I teach them their history, Garifuna history. I teach them the songs, and through the songs, I explain to them what it’s saying. It’s going to give them a sense of self, to know themselves. The fact that they’re speaking the language is empowerment in itself.”

***

Awesome New York Times video from this article:

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/04/28/nyregion/1247467719180/city-of-endangered-languages.html

Word of the Week: MAKIBAKA!

thedialect — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:10:24 +0000

Kumusta, mga kaibigan!

[Laban hand gesture]

I’ve been interested in Tagalog/Filipino for a while and I wanted to find a rousing political slogan in the language. A guy came into my line at work and he mentioned that he was a professor in the Philipines. Frank was his name. I asked him, “So does that mean you speak Tagalog (or Filipino)?” to which he answered in the affirmative. I then asked him for some good political phrases for “Let’s go!” or “Let’s do it!” using raised-fist gestures to convey the sentiment.

He thought for a while and wandered the store and came back with these offerings:

BONGGA KA DAY – You’re hot babe!

TARA NA – Let’s go!

ANG GALING MO’PRE – You’re good, pal.

He must have missed the key word ‘political’ and, so it seems, brought me back a few pick up lines or some such. I said, “Oh no, not like that. Political slogans like ‘Unite!’ or something.” He thought for a little while longer and came back with:

MAKI BAKA – Let’s fight

I was thrilled to be given these phrases and thanked him profusely. I brought them home and looked them up. To my disappointment, I couldn’t find any of these words or phrases. Furthermore, when plugging his Filipino words into Google Translate, here’s what came back in English:

(You prententious day); [no translation]; (The coming mo’pre); (Maybe inter, inter cow, contend in battle)

My Lonely Planet Pilipino Phrasebook (1988) has táyo na for ‘Let’s go’ and ‘contend in battle’ seems like a good start for MAKI BAKA. My National Book Store Diksiyunaryong Ingles-Pilipino (1968) has some constructions around ‘fight’ and ‘battle’ that get close to Makibaka but not close enough. Google Translate says Laban ng! means ‘Fight!’, Laban na! means ‘Against that!’, and Laban! means ‘Against!’ and any of these phrases could be the phrase I’m searching for.

As for Frank’s pick up lines, however, I have to start from the beginning. Are these Tagalog, Pilipino, Filipino, or possibly some other language entirely?

Reading a bit of history on the origins of Filipino, I see that these terms are not interchangeble. It’s also possible that he speaks a separate language that is not based on Tagalog which would sabotage the whole inquiry from the get go.

Here’s a bit of history on Filipino from Wikipedia:

In 1937, Tagalog was selected as the basis of the national language of the Philippines by the National Language Institute. In 1939, Manuel L. Quezon named the national language “Wikang Pambansâ” (“National Language”). Twenty years later, in 1959, it was renamed by then Secretary of Education, José Romero, as Pilipino to give it a national rather than ethnic label and connotation. The changing of the name did not, however, result in acceptance among non-Tagalogs, especially Cebuanos who had not accepted the selection.

In 1971, the language issue was revived once more, and a compromise solution was worked out—a “universalist” approach to the national language, to be called Filipino rather than Pilipino. When a new constitution was drawn up in 1987, it named Filipino as the national language.The constitution specified that as the Filipino language evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages.

I’m going to try and get some friends to look my phrases to see what’s what. In the mean time, any clues that you all can bring to the mystery would be great!

Salámat!

Ble mae’r Gymraeg?

thedialect — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 08:00:39 +0000

Just a little follow up on the previous post regarding Welsh language activist Osian Jones. The campaign to achieve a New Welsh Language Act and make Wales officially bi-lingual is on-going and remains strong.

A friend and fellow activist of Osian sent me a package of materials from Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg as well as propaganda from the radical union that the two of them are members of – Gweithwyr Diwydiannol y Byd – the Industrial Workers of the World.

Amongst the stickers and ‘badges’ was a nice glossy brochure entitled Gair I Gell… Llythyrau carchar Osian Jones, a’r ymgyrch dros Ddeddf Iaith (Word to Cell … Prison Letters of Osian Jones and the Campaign for the Language Act.) There were bits of English in the publication that were satisying but because I don’t speak Cymraeg, I was forced to simply admire its exotic spelling and imagine its other-worldly pronunciation.

The Welsh language struggle is a very compelling cause but I can’t help but think of the sobering comments from Arika Okrent in In the Land of Invented Languages where she talks about how difficult it is to start, revive, or maintain a language if it is falling into disuse. She describes how Irish (Gaeilge), Navajo (Diné bizaad), and others have a difficult time maintaining even with official status and institutional sponsorship. The best counter example of this being Modern Hebrew (עִבְרִית) in Israel. Okrent and other linguists I’ve read discuss how people have to want to speak it instead of… well, English. With so many forces, both malicious as well as benign, compelling people to speak and create and live in English, its a gargantuan task to fend it off and attempt to create a new interest in living and creating in Welsh or another national or regional language. But since language is crucial to cultural vitality, the struggle must be waged, no matter how difficult, so that English does not swallow up yet another unique piece of the world’s heritage.

Hats off to the Cymdeithas movement! Keep inspiring and keep working to show the world the value of the Welsh language. Mewn Undeb mae nerth!

Dialect Empire Announces New Acquisitions

thedialect — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 08:00:34 +0000

After months of behind-the-scenes arm twisting and agonizing negotiation, a series of decisive moves made on the part of The Dialect has brought nearly a dozen new acquisitions under their sole proprietorship. Nervous insiders describe the transferred materials as “a frightening arsenal of linguistic technology.” While official statements from the now-infamous online language website blog dismiss these moves as ‘utilitarian’ and ‘inconsequential’, there is reason to believe that unilateral domination of the language world remains the covert objective.

Below is a summary of the materials named in official Dialect press releases. That there are only eight named-technologies out of the “dozen” anounced by The Dialect is no cause for concern, says a spokesperson for the blog. Attached to each item below are relevant data indicating the threat posed.

Bemba - English Hippocrene Concise Dictionary, Rev. E. Hoch, 1960 – Zambian language in Roman script. 1.5 million adherents. Awesome. Acquired for <3USD.

Contemporary Czech, Michael Heim, 1982 – Full grammatical course with sample dialogues. Rules. Acquired for ~2USD

(Teach Yourself) Esperanto: A Complete Course for Beginners, Cresswell, Hartley, & Sullivan ,1992 – Precisely what was needed for operations in Invented Langauge Territory. Full course. Kicks ass. Acquired for ~4USD.

(The Everything) Speaking Mandarin Chinese Book, John-Francis Grasso, 2007 – Total find. Audio CD included. Acquired new for <3USD!

Hawaiian Names, English Names, Eileen M. Root, 1987 - Gives origins and meaning of names and their equivalent in the other language. A little silly. Not integral to operations. Still neat. Acquired for ~1USD.

Papago & Pima – English (O’othham – Mil-gahn) Dictionary, Dean & Lucille Saxton, 1969 – O’odham was requisite. Never seen before or since. Full grammar, charts, profusely illustrated but a little out-dated. Rules nevertheless. Acquired for ~9USD.

(Lonely Planet) Quechua Phrasebook: The Language of the Andes, Serafin M. Coronel-Molina, 2002 – Modern day pocket guide to the family of ancient languages adopted by the Incas. Spoken in six countries. Very cool find. Acquired for <5USD.

Yoeme – English Standard Dictionary: A Language of the Yaqui Tribe in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, Shaul, Valenzuela, & Molina, 1999 – Another WMD. Seems very current and ‘with it.’ Acquired for ~9USD.

4.5.10 Dialect Crimethink Doubleplus Dangerful

thedialect — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 08:00:52 +0000

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

I just got finished re-reading one of my most formative books, George Orwell’s 1984. I wanted to go back and re-read it after having started The Dialect in order to discuss ‘Newspeak.’ In this classic dystopian novel, Orwell invents ‘Newspeak’, a regressive language introduced by the Party to prevent resistance by restricting thought.

1984′s social vision and historical prediction resonates with those who distrust government and fear a future of repression. Sadly, though, its easy to find 1984 fans upon whom Orwell’s powerful message is utterly lost.

In talking to right-wingers, on occaisions that I must, I hear that people like Glann Beck or some such radio nazis are telling their listeners to go out and read 1984! [Here's a great example: http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/23479/ : Tell me this isn't the most confused political 'analysis' you've seen, ever? "The Government's telling you who you can hire and much you can pay them!"]

The Right posits your Barack Obamas as would-be Big Brothers and thus staples “fascism” onto the Left. Read the slogans of Oceania and tell me that these are not, indeed, the axioms of Freedomland:

WAR IS PEACE – - Endless war, 800 foreign military bases, and permanent military domination of the domestic langscape. This is our patriotism at its finest.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY – - The first and primary “Freedom” in the US is the freedom to own property - if you can manage to do so. This freedom, for most Americans, is in a way, slavery because we are someone’s property. We are their wage slaves; we are their debtors; we fill their prisons.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH – - Does this even need to be elucidated? Take A Patriot’s History of the United States (the right wing ‘spoof’ of Howard Zinn’s work) as an example. Lies told to us as kids get debunked by a people’s historian and then re-bunked again by the right wing press. Is this not the age of the Lie masquerading as Truth? Is not Prolefeed the bedrock of our modern culture?

The 1984 excerpt I’ve pasted below was borrowed from a pretty neat site called newspeakdictionary.com. They’ve got a lot of fun stuff on their site and I really like the overall gist, but there’s just one problem: their political analysis is dangerously incorrect. This website, evidently, has shifted to being a platform for Ron Paul’s Counter-Revolution. I think Ron Paul has a great schtick but it cannot be denied that his movement is inextricably linked to the white-populist upsurge that fears a Black-Latino-Asian (and hopefully socialistic) future. This movement believes wholeheartedly that they are fighting against fascism. However, they are precisely the missing piece that the Right needs to install fascism: a racist, working class base of support for employer-lead domination.

George Orwell was a socialist that fought with the POUM in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938) details this account as well as his sympathy with the anarchists. Later in his life, 1984 served as a warning of the coming amalgamation of Anglo-American capitalism with Stalinist Communism [think modern-day China]. These two supposed adversaries jointly sought the destruction of freedom and the domination of humanity, each under their own set of slogans. One can only guess that right wingers think Orwell is talking to them because Ingsoc is English Socialism. Getting a right-wing message out of Orwell is the same incisive analysis that gets “God Hates Fags” out of the teachings of a propertyless, carpenter-pacifist who wandered the country side with his vagabond commune peopled by the dregs of respectable society.

But let’s return to ‘language’, shall we?

The right equates Newspeak with so-called ‘politically correctness’ and has struck gold. It is a symbol of everything communist, liberal, brown, female, and gay yet it can all be condensed into an interpersonal moment when some white guy blurts outs a familiar utterance and is told he’s not supposed to say that. [Hence the genius of the Politically Incorrect Guide(s) to Chattel Slavery, Augusto Pinochet, Achievements of the Third Reich, etc.]

It is not the left-liberals and their so-called ‘politically correct’ demands upon language that mimic the Party’s Newspeak. At their best, liberal so-called ‘politically correct’ phrases are demands made by a group of people that desire respect from others and at their worst are rather silly and cumbersome, but harmless. Attaching the Newspeak label to the Left is false because it is the neo-Right’s “War on Terror” vernacular that is the actual inheritor of Orwell’s vision.

Read the following excerpt and decide for yourself.

Below is the Appendix to 1984:

***

THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles of the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist, It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile, it gained ground steadily, all party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of Newspeak dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary, that we are concerned here.

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

To give a single example – The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as “The dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free,” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary, and the C vocabulary. It would be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.

The A vocabulary. The A vocabulary consisted of words needed for the business of everyday life — For such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one’s clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess — words like hit, run, dog, tree, sugar, house, field — but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary, their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.

The grammar of Newspeak has two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and noun form, when of the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word thought, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was involved here; in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and a verb of kindred meanings were not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for example, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb knife. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix -ful to the noun verb, and adverbs by adding -wise. Thus, for example, speedful meant “rapid” and speedwise meant “quickly.” Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as good, strong, big, black, soft, were retained, but their total number was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived at by adding -ful to a noun-verb. None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a few already ending in -wise; the -wise termination was invariable. the word well, for example, was replaced by goodwise.

In addition, any word — this again applied in principle to every word in the language — could be negative by adding the affix un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant “warm” while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, “very cold” and “superlatively cold”. It was also possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ante-, post-, up-, down-, etc. By such methods it was possible to bring about an enormous diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well –indeed better– expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by Unlight, or light by undark, according to preference.

The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned below, all inflections followed the same rules. Thus in all verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in -ed. The preterite of steal was stealed, the preterite of think was thinked, and so on throughout the language, all such forms as swam, gave, brought, spoke, taken, etc., being abolished. All plurals were made by adding -s or -es as the case might be. The plurals of man, ox, life, were mans, oxes, lifes. Comparison of adjectives was invariably made by adding -er, -est (good, gooder, goodest), irregular forms and the more, most formation being suppressed.

The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that whom had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the shall, should tenses had been dropped, all their uses being covered by will and would. There were also certain irregularities in word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech. A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad word: occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained. But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary. Why so great an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in this essay.

The B vocabulary. The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases they could be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.

The B words were in all cases compound words.* They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To take a single example: the word goodthink, meaning, very roughly, ‘orthodoxy’, or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, ‘to think in an orthodox manner’. This inflected as follows: noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle, goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.

* Compound words such as speakwrite, were of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but these were merely convenient abbreviations and had no special ideological colour.]

The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words of which they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation. In the word crimethink (thoughtcrime), for instance, the think came second, whereas in thinkpol (Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word police had lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficulty in securing euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of Minitrue, Minipax, and Miniluv were, respectively, Minitruthful, Minipeaceful, and Minilovely, simply because -trueful,-paxful, and -loveful were slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.

Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a Times leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: “Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.“ But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by Ingsoc. And in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word oldthink, which was inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped ‘false gods’. He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity). Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by goodsex — that is to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was sexcrime. In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.

No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as joycamp (forced-labour camp) or Minipax (Ministry of Peace, i. e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation ‘good’ when applied to the Party and ‘bad’ when applied to its enemies. But in addition there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not from their meaning, but from their structure.

So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdep, the Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes Department was called Teledep, and so on. This was not done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it. The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable.

In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike. Almost invariably these words — goodthink, Minipax, prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel, thinkpol, and countless others — were words of two or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.

For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a political or ethical judgment should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain willful ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.

So did the fact of having very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘ to quack like a duck’. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when The Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

The C vocabulary. The C vocabulary was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no word for ‘Science’, any meaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.

From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy.

It would have been possible, for example, to say Big Brother is ungood. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For example, All mans are equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which All men are red-haired is a possible Oldspeak sentence.

It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth-i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or strength. The concept of political equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged out of the word equal. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in doublethink to avoid doing this, but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have vanished. A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of ‘politically equal’, or that free had once meant ‘intellectually free’, than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced — its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox(goodthinkful would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation — that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government. . .

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.

A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature — indispensable technical manuals, and the like — that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.

George Orwell

The Benevolent & Protective Brotherhood of Them What Has Been Shot At

thedialect — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:00:32 +0000

“Ya don’t git combat pay ’cause ya don’t fight.”

My dad and I went to a military vehicle and gear ‘swapmeet’ one weekend and I came across a book that I just fell in love with. I really like politically-oriented cartoons and art and this book struck many beautiful chords with me. It’s called Up Front and its written and illustrated by WWII’s famous rank ‘n’ file cartoon genius, Bill Mauldin. It was written in 1944 while Mauldin was in Italy and France. It’s essentially a long political and social diatribe to accompany 161 of his cartoon drawings, all of which give voice to the sardonic vignettes of ‘dogface’ infantry soldiers.

Some of the words and phrases he uses in Up Front are from the era of the Greatest Generation and have since dropped out of usage. Some of these word uses, however, are still used in British English. For example, in the title of this post, The Benevolent & Protective Brotherhood of Them What Has Been Shot At, ”what” functions as “that” or “whom” does in our current vernacular but you will find speakers in Britain that use “what” in the same way as Mauldin did. This Brotherhood, by the way, was what Mauldin imagines is the unspoken understanding and mutual respect amongst those who were ’in the shit,’ to use a more comtemporary phrase.

Mauldin also uses a lot of military jargon that is often a bit esoteric. Here’s a sample:

“The infantry in combat doesn’t worry much about rank. One company I know of had two sets of noncoms for a while. One set led squads and patrols when the outfit was committed. After the company was pulled back to a rest area, this first set lined up to be busted, and an entirely different set – those who had more of an eye for regulations and discipline – took over while the others went out and got tight.”

For those that didn’t catch it (as I didn’t at first) ‘noncom’ is non-commissioned officer such as a corporal or sergeant (or possibly also ‘non-combatant’? (a double entendre?)); committed is on patrol, engaged in battle, or ‘in the shit’; busted means demoted in rank; got tight means got drunk, etc. In the book, Mauldin also uses the term souse for drunkard and being sick on the floor for puking.

If Jerry, the Germans, are shooting at them, a buck sergeant, a newly-promoted SGT, and a buck private, an ambitious PVT, might leave their shelter half and run and take cover behind a revetment of sandbags. If they got hit, they’d be carried in a litter, a stretcher (possibly from the term for a carrier of royalty).

Officers were derided as the old man, brass hats, martinets (if they are sticklers for rules and discipline), and Rear echelon gold bricks. Gold bricks are people who dress themselves up as better than they are (ie: phonies or frauds) and goldbrickers are shirkers or do-nothings. Both of these are from the idea that if you paint a brick of worthless metal in gold paint and then try to sell it as gold, it is a fake and you are a lying, do-nothing bum.

Other fun words include: the Anzio Express, a huge German gun that pounded the Allied forces at this Italian beachhead; round robin, a petition-style letter; pop corn man, a German bomber dropping butterfly bombs at night; and exploding ack ack, anti-aircraft guns a-firing.

Below is another of my favorite vignettes from Up Front:

I made a drawing of Joe and Willie slouched in a ruined doorway and looking wearily at an admonishing rear echelon corporal.

Says Willie, “He’s right, Joe. When we ain’t fightin’ we should ack like sojers.”

The day after the cartoon was printed a pleasant old colonel came into the Stars and Stripes office. He was quite evidently a new arrival, for he didn’t know I was seditious. He hadn’t bothered to study the drawing, which had taken a crack at the rigid regulations with regard to soldierly conduct behind the lines.

All the colonel knew was that when you weren’t fighting you were supposed to have a military bearing. So he had a brilliant and highly original idea which he thought certain to win him a promotion or the Legion of Merit. He wanted, so help me, to take the original drawing and have thousands of huge poster copies printed. He planned to plaster them on every wall and telephone pole in Italy, as an admonition to GIs to “ack like sojers.”

I was in a hell of a spot. He really looked like a nice guy, and I didn’t want him slaughtered like a lamb, when he would probably start drawing retirement pay in a couple of years. But surely I couldn’t say, “Sir, that’s a treacherous cartoon, made to cause riots and rebellion among soldiers, and it would be a mistake to make posters of it and aid and abet my cause.”

Instead, I gave him the drawing and, with brigadier’s stars in his eyes, he headed for the door.

“The general will love this,” he said.

I’m sure the general did.

***

***

Here’s the NY Times article on Bill Mauldin’s death in 2003:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/arts/bill-mauldin-cartoonist-who-showed-world-war-ii-through-gi-eyes-dies-at-81.html?pagewanted=2

Here’s an interesting article on military jargon using English, French, and German examples:

http://www.answers.com/topic/military-slang-1

Word of the Week: Umoja

thedialect — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:00:33 +0000

Swahili (or Kiswahili) functioned in the 1960s & 1970s as a symbol of ’Pan-Africanism’ and was employed by Ron Karenga* in the creation of the Kwanzaa holiday rituals.

In addition, Swahili now functions in US pop culture as a catch-all African language. The words below reflect both of these tendencies.

Swahili might have been chosen both as a political unifier as well as a palatable commercial tool because it has always been a very trans-national language. It was based on regional economics in East Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean, with its first script being the Arabic script and then shifting to latin or roman characters with the arrival of European colonizers. 35% of the words in Swahili are said to be of Arabic origin. Another feature of international languages is their ability to assimilate foreign words, which, in addition to Arabic, Swahili has done with words from Persian, German, Portuguese, English, and French. Swahili functions as a wide-spread second language for East Africa and because of this, German and English colonizers used the teaching and implementation of Swahili to establish their influence over many different groups all speaking separate languages.

The standardization of Swahili’s written language occured in June of 1928 at an interterritorial conference held in Mombasa, Kenya. The Zanzibar dialect, Kiunguja, was then selected to be the basis for standardizing Swahili and modern Swahili, taught as a second language, is essentially Zanzibar Swahili despite some divergences.

Here’s a few (unverified) words you might recognize.

umoja – unity. This is a very popular word for cultural and social movement groups especially in regards to ’African Unity.’ Hence: “Umoja – The Spirit of Togetherness” dance troupe from South Africa.

uhuru – freedom Thus: Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles in Oakland and Philly!

Jenga! – Build! From kujenga – to build

Simba – a lion [See where I'm going with the commercialization tip?]

kwanza – first; at first The name “Kwanzaa” is said to be from matunda ya kwanza - ”first fruits of the harvest.” The “Nguzo Saba – The Seven Principles” (nguzo – pillar or strong pole; saba – seven) of Kwanzaa are below, taken directly from Organization Us’s website. My (suppositional) notes from a 1965 Teach Yourself Swahili dictionary are in parentheses:

Umoja – Unity; Kujichagulia – Self-determination (chaguliwa – be chosen; -ji- – self; kukaza nia – determine; kua – to grow (?)); Ujima – Collective Work and Responsibility (ujima – cooperation; -ote pamoja – collectively); Ujamaa – Cooperative Economics (ujamaa – family; elimu ya mapato na matumizi ya fedha – economics (!)); Nia - Purpose (nia – intention; to resolve; kusudi – purpose); Kuumba – Creativity (kuumba – creation; umba – to create); Imani – Faith

Several of the above words, excluding the Kwanzaa principles, are borrowed from a strange yet poignant article on buzzle.com called “Swahili and its Popularity.” Below is a fascinating excerpt.

Still in Lion King, there is this very beautiful and happy song, called “Baba Yetu”, which means “Our Father”, and is, in fact, the Lord’s Prayer translated in Swahili. And here are the words: “Baba yetu yetu uliye (Our Father, Jesus, who art)/mbinguni yetu, Amina! (in the heavens, amin!)/baba yetu yetu uliye/Jina lako milele litukuzwe (Hallowed be thy name)/Utupe leo chakula chetu tunachohitaji (Give us our daily bread)/Utusuhamele (forgive us of)/makosa yetu, hey! (our trespasses)/kana nasi tunavy owasamele (as we forgive others)/waliotukoseo (who trespass us)/Usitutie katika majaribu lakini (Lead us not into temptation)/ Utuokoe (But)/ na yule (deliver us from evil)/milele na yule (and you are forever and ever)”.

So there you are! Now whenever you see some anonymous ‘African’ language in a Disney movie or in an activist context, you might want to bust out your Kiswahili dictionary to see if its not in fact Swahili!

***

*Ron Karenga is now Dr. Maulana Karenga of the Organization Us which is still around - formerly US Organization. This was eye-opening to finally put the pieces togther that Ron Karenga from US started Kwanzaa. I had always heard of Karenga in connection to the antagonism fostered by the FBI between the Black Panther Party and US. I had also heard of Dr. Prof. such-and-such started Kwanzaa in 1966 etc. etc. Now its great to know the connection! PS: Maulana means “Lord” in Swahili

Say “Ouistiti!” for the camera!

thedialect — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:00:24 +0000

Charles Timoney gives the would-be traveller in France some sage advice in his, Pardon my French: Unleash your Inner Gaul published in 2008. Excerpted below is one of his finds:

Should you ever be asked by a French person to take their photo in front of some famous monument somewhere, there is no point in pointing their camera at them and saying brightly, “Say cheese!” For a start, if you stand in front of a mirror and say cheese with a silly French accent, it will not produce the photogenic rictus that you were hoping for. The main problem, however, is that a French tourist will not be expecting to be asked to say “cheese” because in France,when being photographed, people say “ouistiti!” Like “cheese,” the success of the photograph depends on the accent used when saying the word. If you sayouitsiti – it means “marmoset,” by the way [a very small monkey from Central & S. America - The D.] – in a flat English accent reminiscent of the cartoon dog Droopy [?], you will look thoroughly miserable in the photo. If, on the other hand, you say it enthusiastically in a strong French accent, the two last syllables force your mouth sideways into a broad grin. Just in case you are planning on asking a French person to take your photo one day, there is a slight chance that in place of ouistiti he may let his fondness for things culinary win through and ask you to say “omelette!”

Well, now, with this suggestion before me, I set to work attempting to find confirmation for “Ouistiti!” as an authentic and viable French expression.

I chanced upon a father and son from Nice, France, who came into my line at work. I asked them if anyone ever says “Ouistiti!” when they take a picture and they both laughed and said, “Non.” They told me that Ouistiti is a big yellow monkey cartoon character (which others confirmed but of whom I could never find a good photo). When I inquired as to the for-realz picture taking exclamation they told me that, “Smell the little birds coming out!” was in fact the more acurate phrase. When pressed, they assured me that this phrase makes you smile wide when you say it.

Later, another woman from Nice indicated that she had heard of neither ”Ouistiti!” nor “Smell the little birds coming out!” She did however give me a translation for the phrase and rendered it, “Sont le petite oiseau!” which I can’t for the life of me figure out. (They are? Smell or feel? It’s?) A gut feeling told me not to trust her so I grilled her for her substitute exclamation. But she claimed to have none. “I just take ze piture,” she insisted. Fine.

A third encounter confronted me with a French family from Paris. I duly inquired as to their preferred photo-snapping phrase and the mother couldn’t think of one until I suggested “Ouistiti!” She said that yes, yes, of course, she had heard that one. ”But,” she admitted, “I just say ‘cheese’.” So much for Dr. Prof. Timoney’s thinly-veiled Anti-American assertions. She had also never heard of “smell the little birds coming out,” but, to be fair, I didn’t have the French translation in front of me so you can’t expect the crude English version to jog her memory. Cute family though. Makes me wanna be French again.

Finally, though, a fourth encouter with the rare species of European put many things into place. Bruno from the South of France, whom I met at a pajama party claimed that “Non” - ’Ouistiti’ is in fact a load of merde and that he had never heard it said. (But yes he had heard of the cartoon monkey by the same name.) He gave me no substantive subsitutes that I can recall (it was a party remember) but, fortuitously, our Bruno from the South of France did provide The Dialect with the etymological tip about the birds - le petite oiseau – that we had been in need of. Bruno described the old cameras with the dude that hunkered down underneath the cloth as he fixed the camera just right. The photographer then climbed out from beneath the contraption, all the while admonishing the children to keep their eyes fixed on the camera lens. He told them to keep watching the camera – so you don’t miss the little birds coming out.

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Who of our faithful Dialect readers can help us with this simple French quandary? Since we cannot figure out this rudimentary French expression, we are hoping that you can. What’s the French photo-phrase for the little birds? Who uses it, how do you say it, and what does it mean?