They’re dancing a bit better in heaven this morning. RIP.
Author: Josh (Page 2 of 19)
I'm currently a PhD candidate in sociolinguistics at the University of Georgia.
Je suis actuellement candidat de doctorat en sociolinguistique à l'University of Georgia.
Ya know, I’ve listened to all of Harry Connick, Jr.’s albums, but I’ve never heard him speak. He recently appeared on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and so I heard him:
At the beginning, I noticed that he was speaking Yat, meaning the variety of English spoken in New Orleans. At that moment, he was addressing Jon Batiste, who also comes from New Orleans, but as the interview went on, it seemed to me like he changed his register to something more general, seeing as I could no longer hear any Yat features very well. For someone who is still so closely linked to the area that he came from but who has worked elsewhere for so long, with great success, I’m not surprised that he seems to maintain the two varieties, and this here is a great example of how quickly they can switch in a situation where the two help express the totality of one’s character. In my opinion, that’s what on loses when one loses their native language due to the idea that it’s not worth much: one’s totality.
As always, Donald Trump finds himself in a controvery. This time, he suggested that 2nd amendment supporters will be able to stop the nomination of Supreme Court justices that aren’t supporters themselves:
Here, we have a temporal language problem. Trump speaks, usually, in an epenthetic way, that is to say he inserts small clauses in phrases that have nothing to do with the current phrase. He does this to mitigate the effect of phrases that might be offensive or to remind us that he’s the greatest man in the world (that’s clearly false, so he has to remind us), but on this occasion, he created a temporal incongruence. Here’s the full phrase:
“If she gets to pick her juges, nothing you can do, folks, although the 2nd amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
When Trump states the clause nothing you can do, he uses the present tense in an ambiguous way. It can describe either the present tense or the future tense. What determines the tense is the tense of the phrase in which the clause is found: If she gets to pick her juges. This clause can only mean the future, because she is completely incapable of picking a justice unless she wins the presidency in the future. This marks the rest of the utterance as in the future, after the election, including the clause nothing you can do. As such, there’s only one interpretation: Trump suggests that someone assassinate, with a gun, either the president or the judges, but Trump says that the clause is linked to that which would have happened before the election:
Media desperate to distract from Clinton's anti-2A stance. I said pro-2A citizens must organize and get out vote to save our Constitution!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 10 août 2016
I have no doubte that that’s what Trump meant, but the way in which he said it renders a different meaning. The problem isn’t deciding if he was really promoting the assassination of Clinton or the justices, as the media is debating, it’s deciding if he endangered these people, to which I respond: yes, he doesn’t reflect on what he says, ever, and that is very very dangerous as a president.
There’s a post at Language Log on The Jeremy Kyle Show, where the guests speak varieties of English that even the host can’t understand, and me neither, as a native speaker of English:
What I find interesting, is that I start to think about what I’m hearing as if it’s not English, as if it’s first necessary to find the boundaries of the words even before starting to parse them as something meaningful. This happens as soon as I fail to understand two or three adjacents words.
Something I’ve been thinking about for a few months is the lack of discussion on psycholinguistics in the sociolinguistics literature as well as the formal linguistics literature. Things like this seem to me like a good place to start.
I intend to start posting some small articles like this, seeing as it’s been a long time since I haven’t had the time to write some real posts.)
I updated the flashcards that I created for Louisiana French (vocabulary as well as writing/reading). The links are to the side and below:
More details are found in the previous posts:
I’m doing a project about the difference between pronunciation when one sings versus when one speaks, so I need some volunteers from Louisiana who can send me two recordings: one in which you sing a song unaccompanied and another in which you speak the same lyrics. If you would like to help me but don’t know how to record your voice, I can record it using Skype, but that requires that you know how to use Skype.
The song is Les Barres de la prison, the version by Canray Fontenot below:
Here are the lyrics:
Goodbye chère vieille mom
Goodbye pauvre vieux pop
Goodbye à mes frères et mes chères petites sœurs
Moi j’ai été condamné pour la balance de ma vie
Dans les barres de la prisonMoi j’ai roulé
Je m’ai mis à malfaire
J’avais la tête dure
J’ai rentré dans le tracas
Asteur je suis condamné pour la balance de ma vie
Dans les barres de la prisonMa pauvre vieille maman
Elle s’a mis dessus ses genoux
Ses deux mains sur la tête, en pleurant pour moi
Elle dit, «Mmm, mmm»
Cher petit garçon
Moi je vais jamais te revoir
Toi tu as été condamné pour la balance de ta vie
Dans les barres de la prisonJ’ai dit chère vieille maman
Pleure pas pour moi
Faut tu pries pour ton enfant, pour essayer de sauver son âme
De les flammes de l’Enfer
If you send me these recordings (to my e-mail address: josh8211@gmail.com or look under Contact above), please indicate the details below, all of which will remain anonymous:
Age:
Hometown:
Current City:
First Language:
If your first language is not French,
When you learned French:
How you learned French:
Please spread the word.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a post due to my studies, but I had the chance to write one for Astheure.com recently, on the elections in Louisiana:
None of them.
None of the candidates for governor of Louisiana speak French, that is. Well, Scott Angelle admits that he speaks it a bit (or maybe he’s just ashamed?), but the rest are absolutely anglophone, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t also support French in the state. So, I tried to figure out their histories and positions concerning French.
Scott Angelle has put out an ad in which he speaks French:
He acknowledges that he isn’t fluent, but he tries nevertheless, and he strongly supported efforts to allow drivers to add the title “I’m a Cajun” on their licenses. The funds generated by this program are passed on to the Fondation Louisiane for the program Escadrille Louisiane, even if they don’t add up to much.
I sent Mr. Angelle, as well as others, an e-mail asking some question about his position, but I only received a response from John Bel Edwards, or rather, from his aide:
This is MP Wray with the JBE campaign. John Bel is the only candidate with a record of supporting riding for programs like CODIFIL and French immersion programs in public schools when their funding was threatened. John Bel went toe to toe with Governor Jindal to support his French speaking colleagues in the legislature. As you are well aware, we have a sordid past that includes the suppression of the French language. We must preserve and grow this unique cultural heritage and never take it for granted. JBE has taken the votes that show he doesn’t just give this issue lip service.
And again another response after more questions about what he will do specifically:
Reinvesting in CODOFIL and our public schools will allow for the investment needed to promote the teaching of French. JBE is responsible for negotiating a quarter of a billion in funding increases for k-12 over the objections of Bobby Jindal and working with Acadiana legislators to restore CODOFIL funding.
We also have to reinvest in our museums in the Secretary of State’s office to ensure that preservation of the history of French in Louisiana remains a top priority. JBE has set out how he will deal with structural budget problems in order to be able to make these investments and find the revenue.
As for David Vitter, there’s nothing to say. Likewise for Jay Dardenne, who is mentioned in in an article on NOLA Française where the links are broken. Lets hope that the links to French won’t be broken by the next governor.
UPDATE:
There are other elections, too. Here’s what the candidates for Lieutenant Governor say about CODOFIL, and French in general. It seems to me that, while two of these candidates respond in French, they aren’t too fluent. In any case:
Thanks to Brad Nation, administrator of the Facebook Group Cajun French Vitrual Table Française, I have other information to share about Scott Angelle, candidate for governor. Mr. Nation contacted him to find out Mr. Angelle’s position in relation to French in Louisiana. Here is what he received as a response:
Scott is an avid supporter of our French culture and heritage here in Louisiana. He strongly believes in protecting and preserving the French language. Scott even speaks some Cajun French himself. He often uses the phrase pour moi c’est la Louisiane chaque fois tout le temps [for me it’s Louisiana each time all the time] as he encourages the people of Louisiana that he is solely focused on them and that our state has its greatest days ahead of us. Scott will always preserve our history and our diversity here in Louisiana. -Jessica Ragusa, Communications Director
If nothing else, Kirby Jambon’s most recent book of poetry has provided me with a number of topics to write about on this blog (like here, here, and here). Today, I’d like to expand more on the idea of the usefulness of providing glossaries to readers who may speak different varieties of the language a work is written in.
Language variety is generally a difficult concept to begin with for those who don’t study linguistics. Usually, we think in terms of languages and dialects, where a language would be something like English or Swahili and a dialect would be something like American English or British English. Relationships between various languages and various dialects of a language are a lot more fluid than that, though.
For instance, Norwegian and Swedish are considered different languages, yet mutual intelligibility between speakers is very high. What’s really happening here is that these two could be considered “dialects” of one Scandinavian language, but, because they’re separated by political borders, they both aim at different standards: “Norwegian” in the former case, “Swedish” in the latter. This phenomenon of dependency is known as heteronomy.
In the case of Louisiana French, not providing a glossary for a literary work that is expected to be read by other francophones implies that one believes their variety to be a part of a larger umbrella language. In general, this sort of heteronomy helps maintain cohesion and mutual intelligibility itself over time, though it also places more value on one variety than the other. If Louisiana French is a dialect of some standard version of the language that speakers aim for, under the assumption that the latter is the “true” language, then it devalues the former.
On the other hand, the inclusion of a glossary suggests that the work in question is written in a variety that is so different that it can be seen as its own separate language, even though others might understand it. This is a position more akin to the reality of the difference between Norwegian and Swedish. The variety certainly maintains its prestige in this scenario, played out in Petites communions, as there’s no way to label it as a sub-par version of a more idealized variety, but one ironically loses any assurance that the two will remain mutually intelligible over time if this idea propagates.
And the idea that Louisiana French is not mutually intelligible with other varieties of French, or that it’s not even French, is quite alive. Many speakers don’t even refer to the language as French at all, but simply as “Cajun,” as in, “I speak Cajun.” Ethnologue, one of the most thorough and popular catalogs of languages of the world, even states that “reportedly, Cajun speakers can partially understand standard French” [my italics], as if to say it’s questionable. As a non-native speaker of Louisiana French myself, I’ve often had experiences where I’ve spoken in French with someone at length, and then, when the subject of French in Louisiana comes up later in the discussion, they claim that they can’t understand a word of it. My usage may not be completely native-like, but it certainly approximates the variety well enough that being able to understand me should equate to being able to understand native speakers, yet it’s as if, in their minds, they imagine Louisiana French as so different that it must not be the language they’re hearing if they’re able to comprehend it.
Ultimately, the choice of a adding a glossary to literary works in Louisiana French has much more political or symbolic meaning than anything else. When Mr. Jambon adds one to his book of poetry, that doesn’t automatically change the fact that the majority of the work is clearly in Louisiana French, it simply lends a little bit more support, inadvertently or not, to the idea that these varieties of French differ from eachother enough that they can be viewed as separate languages. The implications for such a view becoming consensus may need to wait until a later post.
Continuing on the topic of how to create a makeshift language immersion environment (here and here), I’d like to talk today about getting lost.
Unfortunately, I used to work at an AT&T store. However, this led many interactions with Louisianians that I may have never had otherwise, such as the older Vietnamese woman I helped one day with her bluetooth speakerphone device. The situation was a bit difficult because I don’t speak Vietnamese and she didn’t speak English very well, but we worked through it. Near the end, I accidentally hit a button that caused the device to start speaking and what I heard was French. It just so happened that this woman could speak French perfectly fine, so we finished up as such.
The combination of being a seemingly insular group and being from a country which was once ruled by the French means that many Vietnamese people are probably in a similar linguistic situation. What’s important here is that this woman’s device was speaking French, though.
GPSs also speak French. These little boxes that allow us to mindlessly drive from location to location without a thought could actually be doing so in French, if that’s the language one wishes to learn. This may seem like a frightening prospect, particularly if listening comprehension is one’s weak point, but that’s exactly why it’s such a good idea.
In real life situations, one doesn’t always have the time or ability to pull out a dictionary or ask their interlocutor to repeat what they said five times; real linguistic interactions are fast-paced and full of all types of pressures to perform. That is also what happens when attempting to use an important tool in a language that’s not particularly familiar.
The advantage of using GPSs in this way is also that their vocabularies are necessarily limited. They essentially have to say things like “turn right” and “continue straight for 40 miles,” and that’s about it. This means that a user doesn’t have to have a particularly large vocabulary themselves. A learner can have a really basic inventory of words at their disposal and still be at a sufficient level to either understand every word being used by the device or to only need to learn to recognize a few extra words.
The fact that the information communicated by GPSs is also very important in a practical sense further enhances their usefulness. What could be worse than getting lost in a foreign language environment, asking someone for directions, then not being able to comprehend them? Learning to rely on getting directions in one’s target language before ever becoming lost could turn a tense situation into nothing more than a minor irritation and an opportunity to find new satisfaction in one’s language faculties when the situation is resolved.
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