Sinophilia

Random observation. I was just thinking about languages and linguistics (which isn't too hard to believe when you consider that it's I who's doing the thinking) earlier today.

And I thought about language pairs and relative difficulty: e.g. English phonetics is hard for Japanese speakers, but Japanese logographs are difficult for English speakers. So it's a bit of a trade off, I guess.

Anyways, I was thinking how most people don't flinch when a person of asian descent speaks fluent English. And yet, most people are shocked when a person of european descent speaks Chinese. Is this an example of unidirectional racism? Or is just simply because most white people who bother to learn to speak Chinese also come with some of the hugest egos known to man? It's as if they need this extra ego as some sort of overcompensation for self-confidence or something.

But I guess, anyone who does anything outside of his demographic norm would carry some pride for being able to do something outside his expected experience at all. So in that sense, it's normal. Just damned annoying.

Equality

me: blahblahblah feminism.
her: you mean equal rights and opportunities.
me: why would you want to lower yourselves to our standards?

Poetry

Long discussion about morality with friend. Hopefully still friend. Distress = no grammar.

I really ought to learn when to keep my trap shut. Or in the words of Murasaki Shikibu, "in few people is discretion stronger than the desire to tell a good story".

*burrows back into the abyss of obscurity*

Freedom

Yay! Back in school, which normally would be a bad thing, but in this case, I'll be happy to finish my degree. :)
Aaaaand, it means no work. Yay.

Believe

Short, simple thought. I was recalling a conversation with a coworker on the subject of religion, it basically got broken down to the belief in God (or some other higher all-powerful deity).

The statement "I believe in God" implies that one is religious, tries to be good, do good, etc. Or at least, that seems to be the commonly accepted understanding among [North American] society. But let's think about this a little bit deeper. In the case that one believes in [the existence of] God, one must also believe in the devil, right?

In this system, the devil is in direct opposition to God. It would therefore logically necessitate that the devil has no doubt of God's existence. And yet, for the devil to be in direct opposite to God, he would also have to oppose everything God does and wishes.

Having said that, the statement "I believe in God" says nothing about how I am as a person, or whether I'm even moral. In short, in the context of religious discussion, it's practically a meaningless statement. (Well, not really, but it's pretty close.)

Me: Are you religious?
Coworker: well, I believe in God
Me: So?

Lent

Not that I've been regularly updating this site anyways, but yah. School work, deadlines, aspirations of graduating, etc. So I'm going to disappear from the online scene. ...sorta. Mostly from dA and here. ...and xanga. Maybe LJ. Hesitating about MSN; got some very informed contacts on me list...

Anyways, wish me luck on my translations and other outstanding projects. <3

Normal and Regular

I think ppl who only read this blog of mine might start to think that I'm becoming some sort of Grammar nazi. So, here's a post on some lighter, meaningless things in life.

It's always fun to spend a weekend away with a group of friends in a chalet in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere without even going skiing on the skiing slopes on the mountain 50 metres away.
Seriously, though, it's always interesting to learn about how the differences in one's situation either help shape their character, or simply make them different without affecting anything.
For example:

Single children cannot brush their teeth while sharing a sink with someone else. I learned this when I was brushing my teeth (with the washroom door open) and my friend walked in. I motioned that he could share the sink, but he's like, "what? at the same time? but like, wouldn't it interfere...?"
I paused for a bit then asked, "are you an only child?"
"yeah..."
"Ah, that's why. Trust me, it's not too hard."
"Just the same, I think I'll wait 'til you're done."
And at the time, I knew to ask that because logically, only people without siblings [close to their age] would have any chance of having no experience with brushing their teeth with other people while sharing a sink. Not that it makes a marked difference in daily behaviour, but it just means that the maximum number of minutes that the washroom is used is raised because of those single children.

Some other minor things that I've learned is that people squeeze their toothpaste tubes differently. Guys tend to just grabble the middle (perhaps from habit of handling some other shaft-like object?) while girls tend to be more neat and push from the ends. Of course there are exceptions, and those exceptions are reflected in their personalities - the neater guys tend either to be the engineering type (maximize resources, efficiency, etc), and the 'exceptional' girls are the messy, raucous, random types.

Also, people pour their cereal differently. I haven't found any *real* difference here, but from what I've seen, most people keep the bag of cereal in the box as they pour into the bowl, but one person I've seen, at least, pulls the bag out. But another thing is that while some people cut it and then clip it (to preserve freshness?), others rip it open, then crumple it back in the box, while others fold it neatly, etc...

Some people need to wear slippers while on hardwood/tiled floors, while for others, socks are as good a barrier between the soles of their feet and the floor as any pair of slippers would be.

And boy, when you live with a group of post-teenagers, you REALLY learn who's a morning person, and who isn't.

Yah, no deep thoughts here, just some causual observations.

Know Knots!

It's always interesting to learn about historical examples of change in language, but to actually *witness* it? Some very exciting stuff. Either that or I haven't been around laymen enough. But in any case...

Around mid-december, 2005, was the first time I heard this curious linguistic phenomenon. "Will you be coming in my car, or no?"
Some very exciting stuff. It struck me as being unusual because the natural sentence would be, "Will you be coming in my car, or not?"

And since then, I've been encountering it more and more often, from my co-workers, from my churchmates, from random snippets of conversation that manage to waft into my ears on the public transit system, ... .

It's so queer, it's almost addictive! ...except that it's wrong. Nevermind this curious shift in conversational grammar, another thing I've learned is that "younger" adults (in their mid-thirties) are also extremely susceptible to these changes in colloquial speech.

And here's why it's wrong:
When one asks a yes/no question with a choice, the pivotal point, the ellipted part, is the verb. And one does not negate a verb with "no"; one negates it with "not".
e.g. "I did not go to the store today" instead of "I did no go ..."
Hence, it is illogical (and ungrammatical) to ask, "will you be coming or no?" because in full, the sentence would be, "will you be coming, or will you not be coming?"

Some have argued (pitifully and rather unsuccessfully) that the "... or no" is legitimate as an alternative ellipsis. They postulate that the "no" is the implied expletive in the expectent statement, "no, I will not be coming". But there are two main problems with this:
1. Lack of parallel structure. In the same way that it's wrong to say, "I hate fishing, going to school, and to take things out of trash cans", it is wrong to ask, "are you leaving or no?"
2. The converse is never expressed. If one is to advocate the legitimacy of this odious bastard "no", then one must also legitimise his sister "yes". And yet, consider the following sentence: "Are you not leaving or yes?"
Strange, isn't it.

But like the malicious tapeworm that's slowly devouring the flesh of your cute little kitten, the "no" bastard is devouring proper English speech. Will we ever find a cure? Unfortunately, there is no cure for idiocy.

...and here I feel the need to make some disclaimers. I am not saying that I equate speech with intelligence, although I do find that to be a very popular attitude within society (the reason why "smart people" always talk "smart", and the same reason why "dumb people" always think "big words" are the answer to remedy their speech). What I am saying is that I find it rather bothersome (and maybe on some level hilarious) that people with the pretense to pretend to be princely would make such howling errors as the one above. Also, I have known some very bright and intelligent people to have exceedingly poor speech. But seriously, what's the point? Yes, perhaps the attitute that one's speech reflects one station in life is outdated and wrong, but if you can't fight that current, why fail to it? Why would anybody want to be wrong? (whether morally, or grammatically)

...in short, use "not"!

Elipsed Era

Nobody uses the period properly anymore. As to my last post, I will concede that there is a necessary difference in style between a research paper and a blog. However, what I meant by it, is that the blog shouldn't be used as an excuse to propogate bad english. Since one's [public] blog is presumably written for oneself, and for one's friends, it is logical to assume that one would want one's friends to be able to understand one's blogs. I'm not expecting blogs to be of newspaper calibre (although I personally abhore newspapers and their alleged linguistic standard). However, I do feel that if everybody at least wrote in natural english and employed basic punctuation, the reader would have a significantly easier time understanding the author.

And now, to the period.

It's extraordinary to see more and more decadence in the world as I venture further and further in to the "real" world. All e-mails internal and external to my company employ equally bad grammar. For a business, this is particularly concerning to me, as I would expect those who have 15 years' experience to know a little better than writing unintelligible e-mails, and expect them to be used as a basis for a new project. Especially since we deal primarily with schools. Am I supposed to now believe that our contemporary educators are about as capable as their students? In which case, school truely is a waste of time.

Anyway, by bad grammar I don't even mean nit-picky things like "too" instead of "to", or "twenty" instead of "20" for quantifiers. I mean entire sentence fragments.

e.g. "...a few corrections. The proper spelling for S. Abraham, D. Dunlope, J. Sinclair, and L. Ming not I. Ming."

Good luck finding the verb in that sentence...

I especially like it when they don't bother with periods at all, and don't bother making new lines either to make up for it. Just a large "paragraph" of text. It gets particularly confusing when they choose to use the period to note a short form, but not the end of a sentence.

e.g. "[product name] was not done plz. fix soon"

It helps me go crazy at work, when I already have oodles to do. I suppose part of my pickiness stems from my STFU-personality. (Or, as my [psych-major] sister would say, my INTP-personality. Read more about me here.)

It's kinda extraordinary, really, to see the sort of errors that alleged native speakers of English would make when they've spent all their time in English-speaking nations, with fellow native English-speakers. I can understand that not everyone has an aptitude for language, and that I shouldn't expect all ESL'ers to eventually speak fluent English in five years' time, but how does one manage to muck up one's mother tongue? General idiocy, I'd like to believe.

So really, people, how hard is it? Simply write what you mean, and mean what you write! That's it! Unless, of course, you're maintaining a secret cryptic society in which you write in code, but if that were the case, why would you so openly make it known that you were writing in code?

"He who would keep a secret must keep it secret that he has a secret to keep."

To Write or to Rant?

I recently got "promoted" to Editor-in-Chief of my church's Uni/College Fellowship magazine. A magazine that I've yet to see published in the six months I've been in attendance. So this ought to be interesting. What have I done so far? Nothing. What am I do to? Possibly everything. Thankfully not, since we're a team, and most of the other people are survivors from the past publication (which should be coming out soon). And they'll take care of me... ...riiiight?

At work, due to my grammatical prowess, editing anything my company publishes has become yet another duty [not in my original job description] of mine. As a result, I've also been dubbed the Comma Splice King.

In school, I'm now editing and revising old drafts of papers that I desperately need to finish and submit in order to proceed to thesis phase of my degree. I'm also taking a course on English Grammar right now, which is extremely interesting and enlightening. Especially when I disagree with the TA's and have better reason to think what I do than the reasons they provide to think contrariwise.

So with all this theme and thought in English and editing, it should be no surprise that I would mentally edit anything that I read. Even my friends' blogs.

There is one particular friend who's known to write a lot. And since most people shy away from large bodies of text (an unfortunate side-effect of formal education) they tend to miss the fact that most of the text is superfluous and needlessly wordy.

Writing well involves many things. It includes a strong sense of grammar, a conscious awareness of lexical nuances, a general theme, coherent and cohesive thought and structure from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, audience awareness, etc.

My aforementioned friend possesses none of them. So late in his life has he taken an interest in reading and writing that he has unfortunately equated the colloquial with the natural. And I don't even mean 'tricky' things like knowing that "between him and me" is more correct than "between he and I". He doesn't recognise the error in replacing a past participle with a past tense as being incorrect in a perfective contruct. (e.g. "you have came" instead of "you have come", or "he had drank" instead of "he had drunk".) His sense of pronouns and prepositions are equally weak, which I suppose is to be expected when one's communication skills are entirely dependent on the extreme colloquialisms of what high-society would deign to call "low-society". One cannot produce a Shakespeare from a street urchin; a grammarian from a guttersnipe.

But my point here is not to harp about all my friend's linguistic failings. Rather, he serves as a convenient example of all that fails in our contemporary society. His failings in language are so numerous, he is practically an archtype for all that is wrong. And one of the most grevious ones is that of concision.

It is easy for most of us to spew pages and pages on a subject we feel passionately about. If we were to write about a person very dear to us, we could easily write twenty pages inside an hour. But most of it would probably be meaningless drivel. Because unless most of us are in that 0.00001% of the population who naturally and quickly organise their thoughts as to be able to write a coherent and cohesive twenty-page article on a dear friend, most of us would instead, be ranting.

My English professor related to us a story of Winston Churchill, who had written a ten-page letter to a friend. Upon receipt, the friend wrote back, saying, "your letter was extremely informative, but I don't know what to make of it," to which Churchill replied, "I'm sorry, but I didn't have the time to write a shorter letter".

The truth and the fact of the matter is, most of us cannot write. That most of us also hide behind the fact that our writings are in blogs and therefore shouldn't be subjected to the same scrutiny as published novels, only provokes me to say two things:

1. It is Published. If you've written it online, listed, and linked for anyone to find, it is published. That means the general public has access to them. It is only because of the foolish freedom afforded by the internet that the standard of language has been lowered to unintelligible proportions. We've managed to undo all the beauty and linguistic complexity that our ancestors have striven to refine and perfect. In short, we've managed to do in a century what China managed to do in a decade.

2. Excellence is acquired, not affected. Those who consistently write properly find it easier to write properly and only progress to become even more precise and articulate authors. Those who write whichever way they will, and only bother to write formally when the occassion rises, will find that their formal writing will be as impressive as a pianist who hadn't practised for his recital.

So you can hide behind your blogs and fears, begetting yet another generation of illiterate ignoramuses, or you could try to learn all that you can, and become a generation of adventurous authors. If you were given the choice, which would you choose: to rant or to write well?


Latin phrase of the day: pari passu
Means "at the same pace (or rate)". E.g.: "Despite the fact that he was my junior by many years, we progressed pari passu in our instruction of the violin".