So I wrote a new piece at someone’s request. It’s probably a good thing, too, since I hadn’t written anything in quite some time and this gave me impetus to start up again. Anyway, it’s No 5 under Doodles for Chambers in the music section.
Month: December 29, 2013
This video, created by a music critic, was posted recently over at Gawker:
The creator, Grady Smith, explains that the video highlights how generic modern mainstream country music is.
I’m inclined to believe that all he’s really doing is highlighting how strong these themes are, symbolically, in country music. Complaining about country singers always talking about dirt roads and river bends is like complaining that hip-hop artists mention “the ‘hood” so often. The argument he could be making instead is that these symbols have become the content of the songs instead of being tools used to anchor the music in the genre while making more personal idiosyncratic statements, which is quite possibly what’s happening. Of course, even then you’d have to decide whether the narrative is even the point of the song or whether the song is just meant to be fun. That’s the case in a lot of Cajun music, for instance, where a song might consist almost completely of just the phrase, “Les haricots sont pas salés,” [The beans aren’t salty] because the point is to dance and the vocals are being utilized purely for their rhythmic potential.
I don’t know if I’ve talked about the flash card program Anki on here before but I know I’ve professed my love for it to practically all of my friends who are students. I started using it just for language classes but soon realized I could use it for basically every class in some way which was perfect for studying on the move because you can pull up cards on your phone and it will sync them with your computer.
It’s not like traditional flash cards in that it doesn’t show you every card every day. You can limit how many new cards you see each day as well as how many old cards. Even better, each time you get a card correct, it takes pops up less and less often in your old card pile. Eventually, you won’t see a card that you know really well for maybe a year but those cards that you get wrong every day keep showing up every day. All of this can be adjusted as well.
I had been making a deck for my Cajun French class and ended up with a pretty significant number of cards. I thought about sharing the deck with classmates but then I realized I could share it with the whole interwebs. Anki allows users to share their decks with other users through its website. I couldn’t find a Cajun French deck already posted so I cleaned mine up a bit and posted it at https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1735265721.
The description on the Anki site has all the details. If anyone is interested in using it but can’t quite figure out the program, feel free to contact me.
Last night I was talking to a stranger about sign language, because of the story above, and discovered that he was under the false impression that there’s only one sign language. He was pretty surprised to find out that there are many, that American Sign Language “speakers” can’t even understand British Sign Language “speakers” because they’re literally completely unrelated languages.
This all goes to highlight the problems inherent in little known languages. For instance, if the imposter in the story was an Afrikaans interpreter, it’s unlikely he would’ve made it on stage because there would have presumably been many instances along the way when he could have been caught. For sign language, probably not so many.
This is a problem not just for catching imposters, but even for actual speakers of languages that don’t get used often. For instance, this stranger I met was from New Zealand where some people are trying to revive the Māori language. Problems arise because there’s no reinforcement of language norms there. Teachers are often not native speakers and make lots of mistakes, sometimes large mistakes, but students simply assume that the teachers are correct. Later, when these students attempt to talk to grandparents that are native speakers, they have no ability to communicate whatsoever.
Languages are not tangible things, they’re abstract entities that are socially constructed. Without regularly sharing and reinforcing norms with other speakers, it’s impossible to know if you’re using the language or simply saying gibberish, as the imposter signer was.
So I’m sure everyone has seen Van Damme’s epic split by now:
Mainly, I walked away from this thinking, “Ya know, I actually really like that Enya song.”
It turns out Enya’s first language is Irish:
I spent quite some time trying to find and example of her speaking Irish that was at least of a slightly better quality than the video above but it doesn’t seem to exist. What’s more, her music is only occasionally sung in Irish. This is strange to me as New Age music places a premium on exotic otherworldly aesthetics which the use of a little known language would support. In fact, Enya once had an entirely new language created just for three songs off her album Amarantine.
So why not employ a language that she knows so well? Maybe she doesn’t like writing her own lyrics (as all of her songs in Irish seem to be written by her)? Maybe she doesn’t want the language to associate her too closely with Ireland? It’s hard to imagine that she’s not proud of her heritage, though, and if she cares at all about the survival of Irish she could help it out a ton by being known as a world-famous singer who uses Irish exclusively.
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