Josh McNeill

Tag: orthography

Hide and then party.

June 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Or the party is hidden? Or the cache is done?

There are several lexical differences between Standard French and Louisiana French. One says cache-cache [hide hide] in France, and sometimes cache-est-faite [cache is done] in Louisiana to mean hide-n-seek, but that is not the focus of this post. We’re going to talk about orthography.

This compound noun is written as above, cache-et-faite [cache and done], cache-fette, cachez-fête [hide the party], and caché-fête [hidden party]. Each of these spellings is pronounced the same and can also mean something different if one considers their components.

The writing of Louisiana French, or rather of any unwritten language, is perfect for studying the way that speakers separate words in their heads. It’s very much possible that the standard French writing system influences speakers to think that, for example, je sais [I know; ʃɛ] is truly two words, whereas je [I] is a clitic that can’t be separated from the verb. So, one could just as well write chais without creating much trouble. In fact, these things often come about in informal domains; one can find the spelling chu for je suis [I am; ʃy] in texts as well as online, for example.

In Louisiana, agglutination is the example of this that appears the most often. Liaisons, when they are very regular, become real parts of the words. As such, one says le n-oncle [the uncle; l’oncle in Standard French] and un z-haricot [a bean; un haricot in Standard French] because the standard writing fails to influence illiterate speakers. These forms are still variable, however. As one approches Creole, one see them become rules. Ultimately, this requires a new orthography. The trouble that one finds, trying to write Creole with the writing system it is based on, makes this new orthography more or less necessary, but on loses something with this choice.

So, that brings us back to the subject of cache-est-faite. I guess I didn’t talk about this word much, I kind of got lost, but another angle that I’d like to talk about in another post, is etymology.

Reading, the Cajun way.

September 21, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I use flash cards for everything, like this. So, I created a deck to help you all learn to read and write in French, Louisiana French to be exact.

The details are in the link. You will need the program Anki, available for Windows, Mac, Android, and iPhone, and the deck itself: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1725941306.

It’s easy to start. Install Anki, create an account, download the deck, then open the deck in the program. If you have any questions, let me know.

When you QQ, I confuse morphograms with pictograms.

July 15, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I am a nerd. As such, I have an huge inventory of acronyms which are basically useless in the real world. Still, the following threw me off today (as I was wasting time I don’t have indulging said nerdiness):

One female human thief in LLK of TC in EB of WvW, from Guild [PinK] of SOS servers.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/wuv/wuv/A-Thief-in-TC-LLK-in-WvW

In normal person speak, this says: “Someone was in the Tarnished Coast game server’s Lowland Keep in the Eternal Battlegrounds Player versus Player game zone. They were in a guild named Pink that plays on the Sea of Sorrows game server.”

In fact, that’s not really normal person speak as I’m sure almost nobody who doesn’t play the game understands the translation. It would have to be parsed even further to make sense to people who don’t play video games, let alone Guild Wars 2. Maybe it would be something like this: “Someone playing an online video game against other players was in an enemy player’s base in an area where players fight eachother. They were a member of a group of players that often play together and call their group Pink.”

Of course, this loses all specificity (and makes awkwardly heavy use of the play morpheme). I’m not sure there’s actually a way to translate the original sentence to someone who has no familiarity with the subject at all without going into enormous amounts of explanation, which probably fits well into Language Log’s concept of nerdview.

But what really caught me was the orthography here, not the semantics. The original sentence was difficult to parse on the first reading even for myself. There are six acronyms (PinK, as all guild tags in the game are, is actually an acronym) which all require significant familiarity with the game. MMOs thrive on this sort of thing because so much conversation is typed while performing various other actions. Shorthand becomes essential for efficiency so that your character doesn’t die. Hell, even MMO is sort of for efficiency. It stands for massively multiplayer online… game. It used to be, more commonly, MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), then it got shortened because even the acronym was too much. Sometimes you’ll still see MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) but I’ve only really come across this being used by people who don’t play these games. This reminds me once again of the debate over Japanese orthography. Kanji are essentially serving the same function as acronyms in MMOs and the difficulty in understanding them for the uninitiated is often outweighed by the benefits they offer for the initiated.

This also reminds me of one of my favorite MMO shorthands: QQ. This isn’t actually an acronym–it’s not even a morphogram like kanji–it’s a pictogram. It’s literally supposed to look like two eyes with tears coming out. It means cry. I was confused by this for the longest time while playing Dark Age of Camelot, where (if you can call a game a place) it was invented because I kept wanting to read it as an acronym. Actually, I guess this wasn’t done for efficiency since there’s literally a one character difference. Maybe it’s for the semantic effect: I don’t believe you can use QQ to show sympathy for someone; it’s always used to mock. Hence one of the advantages, inherent in languages written in multiple ways like Japanese: intonation in writing.

And if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, QQ more newb.

Smudged pencil.

May 18, 2013 / / 0 Comments

image

Sometimes my notebook is metaphorical. I write down a bunch of words that are barely understandable, hoping to build up a meaningful list, but I forget some things and others simply vanish as the adjacent pages rub together, filtering down to a few leftover segments.

I like that 歌 (uta or /ɯtɐ/) stuck around. It means song.

Or maybe I just need to buy better notebooks.

Mothers’ mother’s Mothers Day.

May 3, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I’m pretty sure the title of this post could be paraphrased as the Mother’s Day of all the mothers that belong to all the mothers out there.

A friend of mine just mentioned Mother’s Day to me through text and I had to pause when writing back because it seemed that any version of mothers/mother’s/mothers’ would make sense when talking about the holiday. This is a topic that John Wells has blogged about at least a few times. He likes to go on tirades against apostrophes, and I think for good reason. They’re often unnecessary when context will due and the phonetic realization of each version is the same. If we can handle this in speech, why not in writing?

Maybe because no one is likely to understand a title like Mothers’ mother’s Mothers Day in speech. If someone actually uttered this phrase, I’m sure their listeners would need to ask for some clarification. In this case, the orthography actually has the option to disambiguate without any clarifying questions. So what if we end up writing things “wrong” because of confusion over apostrophes and polysemy: a purpose is still served.

This reminds me of the debates over Japanese writing that I’ve blogged about before.

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