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.
Author: Josh (Page 7 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.
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.
C’est la même affaire
It’s the same thing
C’est la même chose
D’être assis icitte en silence
Après guetter les mains de la pendule
De demander pour le temps
“What time is it?”
Ça fait beau.
C’est la même affaire
It’s the same thing
C’est la même chose
De se frotter les doigts en silence
Après guetter les ronds de tes yeux
De parler pour la fin de semaine
“And the one before that?”
Ça s’a passé pareillement
C’est la même affaire
It’s the same thing
C’est la même chose
De s’en aller en silence
Après sourire avec les lèvres prudentes
De demander quoi faire
“Didn’t you have work to do?”
Je suppose je vas jamais connaître
Mais allons parler en code
Allons prétendre
Ça c’est la même chose
This was for another assignment in my Cajun French class. It’s meant to take advantage of diglossia, contrasting semantic extension, and dialectal variation as a sort of follow up to my point from a previous post about what’s lost when a language dies.
(Take it easy on me, by the way. This is my first attempt at poetry in French.)
A recent assignment for my Cajun French class was to make a meme using the language. La Prairie des Femmes shared the memes with the interwebs (here and here). This seems like a great way to create an output for the language that can spread, particularly in writing where Cajun French and Louisiana Creole could both use some love.
A lot of these make use of puns that require the reader to understand English, Cajun French, and sometimes even Louisiana Creole. (Some familiarity with Cajun music doesn’t hurt either.) These cross-linguistic word games help build the case that you lose more than just the language itself when a language dies: you also lose comedic productivity.
So La Prairie des Femmes blog has started up a forum, appropriately titled The Prairie des Femmes Forum. The blog itself is essentially about all things Cajun, which fairly regular includes French related topics. The forum sounds equally broad.
I wouldn’t be surprised if people started posting in French which would be great, not only for the practice, but also for connecting people from various regions of Louisiana so that they can share regional words and grammatical constructions with each other. I have a hunch that part of the lack of standardization in the local varieties of French stems from lots of isolated usage. For instance, it’s difficult to maintain vocabulary when the only two people you know that can speak the language also forget the word you’re looking for. This sort of thing could lead to isolated neologisms, English borrowings, or just the abandonment of the language all together even though there might be ten people in the next town over who remember the word(s) you need. Widely accessible public spaces for communication would probably go a long way to ruling out such a problem.
(I once joked with a friend of mine, who speaks imperfect Spanish, that we could just end creating our own special code if we practiced often together since we’d have to make up words and constructions without knowing if they make sense to the rest of the Spanish speaking world.)
Anyway, check it out, whether you’re interested in language or just Louisiana in general:
Because he/they keep putting out things like this:
I normally listen to music while studying but I always skip Why? because I constantly become distracted by the poetry of the lyrics. So deadpan that it’s easy to overlook the depth of what he’s saying. I might have to do some lengthy posts about what’s going on here linguistically someday, maybe when time expands to allow for extracurricular activities.
… as long as you speak French or Haitian Creole.
So I went to an actual voodoo ceremony for the first time the other night for Fête Guédé, probably more commonly known as either All Saints’ Day or Day of the Dead. It was held in New Orleans in a small home converted into a sort of temple down a dirt alley with all sorts of decorations:
It was a really nice ceremony. There were probably 30-35 people plus more passers-by who I think just wanted to watch a little out of curiosity. For nearly two hours they walked around an altar (I think it was to Papa Guédé himself), writing things on the ground with dust of some sort, lighting candles, and saying prayers. This was interspersed with chanting in a call-and-response style as well as drums which reminded me a lot of Cuban rumba. The aura of the whole thing was definitely otherworldly and it worked purely based on the fact that so many people were involved. I mean, they were singing in a language I couldn’t really understand–which may have been somewhat poorly pronounced Haitian Creole–and I find it hard to believe that they all actually spoke this language so here we have some 15 or so people who bothered to memorize chants in a language they don’t even know. It made the whole thing feel real and for all intents and purposes it was. It served a symbolic purpose that could be appreciated even if it didn’t actually do anything. The ceremony was meant to communicate with the dead and as long as the atmosphere was right and no one cared to question whether it really worked, it might as well have been working.
I did feel a little confused about the authenticity of the ceremony, though. The woman leading it had long ago been ordained in Haiti, where the religion is still prominent, but it still felt somewhat like appropriation. As I mentioned, the chanting was all done in what may have been Haitian Creole and the woman leading the ceremony was definitely speaking Standard French. The people of Haiti use these languages because those are their native languages but it’s unlikely to be the same for the faithful here. The use of a language that’s not understood does help serve the purpose of creating an experience that clearly feels demarcated from everyday life but it’s also questionable whether it’s a sign of pure exoticism as well. I mean, it’s unlikely that any of these people grew up practicing voodoo–even the woman in charge grew up Jewish–but, really, there’s no rule against converting. I suppose the part that makes it seem somewhat like appropriation is that the people leading it aren’t people who grew up in it necessarily.
Ultimately though, it’s a bit sad that voodoo has been almost completely reduced to horror stories and sales gimmicks as it seems like a quite beautiful religion. I plan on checking it out more and maybe talking to the different priestesses in the city about it as well as the way that language fits in.
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