30 March 2009

Wordcatcher Tales: Dappokusha/Talbukja

How widespread is the economic downturn across the globe? Well, it's now affecting many North Koreans, because funds from South Korea that might help them escape their workers' paradise are not as plentiful as they once were, according to an article in Japan's Mainichi Shimbun. I'll quote just the first paragraph from White Peril's translation.
The number of dappokusha fleeing from North Korea ... has decreased substantially [to] Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, Jilin Province, China, which abuts the PRC-DPRK border. It's the biggest stronghold of the refugee business, but the activities of the brokers who maneuver behind the scenes guiding refugees through are at a standstill. This year is the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, and in addition to a heightened level of alert at the border, the effects of the financial crisis have stopped the money that gets to them from South Korea. However, the defections supported by the brokers are a "necessary evil." Beyond the border, there's a backlog of desperate people.
The term dappokusha 脫北者 (lit. ‘escape North person’) caught my attention. The same compound is read 탈북자 in Korean (talbukja in the official SK romanization), but its usage in SK is now discouraged in favor of the euphemistic 새터민 saeteomin, which I'll translate here as ‘new localites’.

The agentive sense of 脱 datsu ‘escape, desert, quit’ also shows up in the following compounds.
脱船 dassen (‘quit ship’) ‘jump/desert ship’
脱線 dassen (‘quit line’) ‘jump the (train)track’
脱サラ dassara (‘quit salary’) 'quit one's job as a salaryman'

But a similar 脱 datsu, in the agentive or instrumental sense of ‘remove’, occurs in some more common words.
脱水機 dassuiki (‘remove water machine’ =) ‘dryer, dehydrator’
脱脂乳 dasshinyuu (‘remove fat milk’ =) ‘skim milk’
靴脱ぎ kutsunugi ('shoe removal' =) ‘place to remove shoes’

Without an agent or instrument, the same kanji translates as ‘missing’.
脱文 datsubun ‘missing passage (of text)’
脱字 datsuji ‘missing word/character (in text)’

HISTORICAL/COMPARATIVE NOTE: One of the more remarkable regular sound correspondences between Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese is SK *-l and SJ *-t (the latter often -tsu in final position, or assimilated to the following voiceless consonant), as in 出発 : 출발 chulbal : しゅっぱつ shuppatsu (< shutu + hatu) ‘departure’. This sound correspondence is part of what gives Korean its characteristic abundance of rolling liquid sounds and Japanese its characteristic abundance of staccato geminate obstruents amid otherwise open syllables (like Italian).

28 March 2009

Causative Makeovers in New Guinea Oceanic Languages, 3

In contrast to Austronesian languages almost everywhere else, the Oceanic languages on the north coast of the Papua New Guinea mainland show an unusual disinclination to make use of the morphological causative inherited from Proto-Oceanic and Proto-Austronesian. Innovative causatives derived from causative serial constructions appear to have supplanted to varying degrees the inherited prefix *pa(ka)-. Part 1 summarizes the dethroning of the inherited prefix. Part 2 outlines the replacement pattern of serial causatives. Part 3 (here) suggests reasons for preferring the serial causatives.

Ambiguous syntax preferred


What accounts for the decline of the inherited morphological causative and the rise of the serial causatives in the Oceanic languages along the north coast New Guinea? From a strictly structural point of view, the path of causative serialization seems an unnecessarily complicated way to move from SVO to SOV. The most grammatically economical way would be to add one rule inverting every VO to OV. But what is grammatically economical in this case seems sociolinguistically implausible.

I assume that speakers of neighboring Austronesian and Papuan (non-Austronesian) languages were often familiar with each other’s languages, at least to the extent that each could understand when spoken to in the other language(s) and could be assured of being understood when using their own language. Even when fluent in the other language(s), speakers may have wished to speak their own language for emblematic reasons, to signal their identity as members of a particular linguistic group. Or they may have had to speak to monolinguals some of the time. In such circumstances, speakers may have tended to mitigate the differences between the various languages they used. They may increasingly have favored structures that were originally highly marked or syntactically ambiguous in their own language(s) precisely because such structures resembled the patterns of their interlocutors’ language(s). Some of these structures could have been analyzed according to the patterns of either language type.

Causative serial constructions permit just this sort of multiple analysis. They contain no clause boundary markers and thus permit speakers and hearers to parse the constructions to suit their own preconceptions about clause structure and word order. At the same time, serial causatives run little risk of being misunderstood. They describe cause-and-result events in an order matching the unfolding of those events in the real world. The first verb denotes the manner in which the Agent behaved; the second describes the effect of that behavior on the Patient.

(NOTE: Slobin [1982] presents evidence that children have a harder time learning periphrastic causatives than they do learning morphological causatives. I claim only that serial causatives, not periphrastic causatives, are semantically transparent. The periphrastic causative verb [‘do’, ‘make’, ‘cause’, etc.] carries more grammatical information than it does information about the extralinguistic world. The serial causative verb [‘chop’, ‘hit’, ‘grab’, ‘twist’, etc.], on the other hand, carries more real-world than grammatical information. The periphrastic causative indicates a causative relationship between one event or entity and another event. The entity responsible for the causing event may be described but the specific nature of the causing event must be inferred from context. The serial causative describes both causing event and resulting event. It leaves the causative relationship to be inferred from the construction—from the order in which the two events are described and from the semantic and grammatical bonds between the two descriptions. The periphrastic causative involves embedding. The result verb is grammatically subordinate to the causative verb. The serial causative involves no embedding. The cause and result verbs share one or more arguments but neither is subordinate to the other.)

Serial causatives can be parsed in various ways depending upon where the parser decides to insert a clause boundary and whether the construction involves a same subject or switch subject relationship between the verbs. A further option is not to insist on parsing the structure into two separate clauses.

If one decides the construction contains two clauses, one can insist on perceiving a clause boundary in either of two likely locations: either before or after the Patient NP. A clause boundary after the Patient NP will produce an initial SVO clause and thus make the structure compatible with SVO word order. In the switch-subject type, the second clause will be intransitive, with no overt subject NP; while in the same-subject type, the second clause will be transitive but contain neither a subject nor an object NP. As an illustration, take the serial construction, ‘I chopped the tree toppled’. If one inserts a clause boundary between ‘the tree’ and ‘toppled’, then one has an SVO clause ‘I chopped the tree’, and a second clause with just the verb ‘toppled’. A switch-subject reading would produce ‘I chopped the tree and it toppled’ while a same-subject reading would yield ‘I chopped the tree and toppled it’.

But suppose one felt that a clause boundary before the Patient was more in line with one’s preconceptions. In this case, the first clause would consist of a subject and a verb with no object NP, while the second clause would contain either a Patient NP acting as subject of an intransitive verb, or a Patient NP acting as object of a transitive verb. Again take the example ‘I chopped the tree toppled’. A switch subject version could be parsed into ‘I chopped and the tree toppled’, while a same subject version could be parsed to read ‘I chopped and toppled the tree’. Both versions with the clause boundary before the Patient are thus compatible with SOV word order. The switch subject version contains no overt object NP and the same subject version contains an object NP in front of the final verb.

If one exercises the option of not inserting any clause boundary in a serial causative, then one has a clause that is both verb-medial and verb-final. An interpretation under which the manner verb is the main verb will be compatible with SVO prejudices, while one in which the result verb is the main verb will conform to SOV prejudices. Semantics will not easily decide. There seems no more reason to suppose that the manner-of-action is ancillary to the result-of-action than there is to presume that the result is subordinate to the manner. The manner verb describes the role of the Agent while the result verb describes the effect on the Patient. Neither the Agent nor Patient is a dispensable member of the Agent-Patient transitive clause. These parsing options are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1: Parsing Options for SVOV Serial Causatives

One clause
Parsed as SVO: S Vmain O Vsub
Parsed as SOV: S Vsub O Vmain
Two clauses
with switched subject
Parsed as SVO: S V O ## Vi
Parsed as SV: S V ## S Vi
with same subject
Parsed as SVO: S V O ## Vt
Parsed as SOV: S V ## O Vt

Reflexes of both switch-subject and same-subject serial causatives are found throughout NGO languages. Very often, reflexes of both types are found in the same languages, as in Manam. However, it appears that same-subject serial causatives are more common. In Manam, for instance, the only intransitive result verb that appears in homologs (inherited similarities) of the serial causative is -mate ‘to die, be dead’ (Lichtenberk 1983).

Table 2: Reflexes of Two Types of Serial Causatives in Manam

Switch subject: *S s-V-o O=S s-V ==> S O s-V-V-o
boro i-mate ‘the pig died/is dead’ (Vi)
pig 3s-die
(di) boro di-rau-mate-i ‘they killed the pig’ (Vt + Vi)
(3p) pig 3p-hit-die-3s
Same subject: *S s-V-o O s-V-o ==> S O s-V-V-o
(ngai) ‘ai i-sere‘-i ‘he split the wood’ (Vt)
(3s) wood 3s-split-3s
(ngai) ‘ai i-zan-sere‘-i ‘he split the stick lengthwise’ (Vt + Vt)
(3s) wood 3s-punch-split-3s

There is also evidence that speakers of Oceanic languages in New Guinea adopted the one-clause analysis of causative serial constructions. In almost every language, either the manner or the result verb has lost its verbal status. Prevailing word-order patterns seem to have been the sole determinant of which of the two verbs became grammaticalized (reduced to a smaller, more restricted grammatical class). Many of the languages that have not made the full shift to SOV (those in Morobe Province) have grammaticalized the clause-final result verbs. The reflexes of those verbs now form a class of resultative particles. In contrast, the nonfinal manner verbs have grammaticalized in the fully SOV languages. They have yielded a set of prefixes classifying the manner of action by which various results are achieved. Some of these prefixes have degenerated to the point where their meanings are indeterminable on solely language-internal evidence. These contrasting patterns of grammaticalization are summarized in Table 3.

Table 3: Different Resolutions for Two Verbs in One Clause

The VO Solution, adopted by Numbami and other VO languages:
S Vmanner O Vresult ==> S Vmain O Result
The OV Solution, adopted by Manam and other OV languages:
S Vmanner O Vresult ==> S O Manner-Vmain

One way to get the verb from one position to another within a clause, then, is to render the information of that clause in such a way that verbs fall in both positions in a construction that contains no boundary markers and thus permits multiple analyses. The evidence suggests that Oceanic languages on the north coast of New Guinea adopted this strategy in changing from SVO to SOV. The availability of this strategy suggests that serialization need not arise from either coordinate or subordinate relationships between two separate clauses. In fact, there is no evidence that I am aware of—at least in the Oceanic languages on the New Guinea mainland—that causative serial constructions were ever two fully separate clauses. The languages are adequately supplied with conjunctions, conjunctions that are often ubiquitous in other constructions. But no conjunctions show up between the constituents of serial causatives, not even as morphological remnants. Serial causatives in these languages were apparently from their very inception structures containing one clause worth of event-construction semantics and two or more clauses worth of verbs, without any intonational or morphological indication of a clause boundary.

References


Lichtenberk, Frantisek. 1983. A grammar of Manam. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication No. 18. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press.
Slobin, Dan I. 1982. Universal and particular in the acquisition of language. In: Eric Wanner and Lila R. Gleitman, eds., Language acquisition: The state of the art. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

26 March 2009

Wordcatcher Tales: Kara-e/Kōmō-e Mekiki

I came across a few interesting terms, two of them new to me, while browsing through a beautiful and fascinating book: Japan Envisions the West: 16th–19th Century Japanese Art from Kobe City Museum edited by Yukiko Shirahara (Seattle Art Museum, 2007).

唐絵目利き kara-e mekiki ‘Chinese art inspectors’ - When Japan was keeping the outside world at arm's length during the Tokugawa era, the Shogun employed inspectors to appraise, catalog, and often copy samples of all goods coming from China and the West, perhaps as much to make sure the Shogun got the best goods as to keep harmful influences out. The characters that make up mekiki are 目 me ‘eye’ and 利 ki(ki) ‘efficacy, expertise’. But the latter also occurs in other contexts: ri ‘advantage, profit’; ki(ku) ‘to take effect, operate’; ki(kasu) ‘to use (one's head), exert (influence)’; ki(keru) ‘be influential’; and ki(kaseru) ‘to season’.

唐絵 kara-e ‘Chinese painting’ - Kara is written with the character for the Tang dynasty, otherwise read (< Tang), as in 唐画 tōga ‘Chinese painting’, a synonym of kara-e. However, 唐 means not just ‘Tang’ or even ‘Chinese’, but ‘foreign’, especially when pronounced kara- in native Japanese compounds, as in 唐行き karayuki ‘going abroad’ (lit. ‘Tang-going’), 唐草 karakusa ‘arabesque’ (lit. ‘Tang grass=flowing style’), and 唐黍 karakibi/tōmorokoshi ‘maize, Indian corn’ (lit. ‘Tang millet/sorghum’).

Compare the wal- (cognate with Welsh) on English walnut (once ‘foreign nut’); or the 胡 hu (once ‘barbarian’) on Chinese 胡桃 hutao ‘walnut’ (‘foreign peach’) or 胡椒 hujiao ‘black pepper’ (‘foreign pepper’ vs. 辣椒 lajiao ‘hot pepper’), or 胡麻 huma ‘sesame’ (‘foreign hemp’).

紅毛絵 kōmō-e ‘Dutch painting’ - By Tokugawa times, the Japanese had to deal with a new kind of foreigner very different from the Asians lumped together as kara. The character abbreviation for the Dutch is 蘭 ran (lit. ‘orchid’), short for Oranda ‘Holland’, as in 蘭学 Rangaku, ‘Dutch learning’, but by extension ‘Western learning’ more generally. So Western-style paintings can be called 蘭画 ranga, just as Chinese-style paintings can be called 唐画 tōga. But this book refers to the more specifically Dutch-style paintings from Nagasaki as 紅毛絵 kōmō-eRed Hair painting’, a term I found especially engaging—as a former redhead myself (now mostly white), married to another former redhead (now more brunette with strands of gray), and the parent of a red-haired daughter.

By the way, Katsumori Noriko, whose chapter on "The Influence of Ransho [‘Western books’] on Western-style Painting" compares Japanese paintings copied from originals in European books imported through Nagasaki, starts by correcting the conventional history that Dutch-language books were banned between 1630 (the beginning of sakoku) and 1720 (during the reign of Yoshimune). She says (p. 99):
In fact, these policies applied only to Chinese translations of Western books. Books in Dutch, presented as gifts from foreign visitors, had been preserved over the decades in the shogunal library but were largely disregarded. When the bibliophile shogun Yoshimune opened his library in 1720, Japanese scholars had the opportunity to reencounter and study ransho firsthand.

24 March 2009

Kakania or Russia as "Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs"

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 13-15:
Czechs in particular chafed at their second-class status in Bohemia, and were able to give more forthright political expression to their grievances after the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907. But schemes for some kind of Habsburg federalism never got off the ground. The alternative of Germanization was not an option for the fragile linguistic patchwork that was Austria; the most that could be achieved was to maintain German as the language of command for the army, though with results lampooned hilariously by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek in The Good Soldier Švejk. By contrast, the sustained Hungarian campaign to 'Magyarize' their kingdom's non-Hungarians, who accounted for nearly half the population, merely inflamed nationalist sentiment. If the trend of the age had been towards multi-culturalism, then Vienna would have been the envy of the world; from psychoanalysis to the Secession, its cultural scene at the turn of the century was a wonderful advertisement for the benefits of ethnic cross-fertilization. But if the trend of the age was towards the homogeneous nation state, the future prospects of the Dual Monarchy were bleak indeed. When the satirist Karl Kraus called Austria-Hungary a 'laboratory of world destruction' (Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs), he had in mind precisely the mounting tension between a multi-tiered polity – summed up by Kraus as an 'aristodemoplutobarokratischen Mischmasch' – and a multi-ethnic society. This I was what Musil was getting at when he described Austria-Hungary as 'nothing but a particularly clear-cut case of the modern world': for 'in that country ... every human being's dislike of every other human being's attempts to get on ... [had] crystallized earlier'. Reverence for the aged Emperor Francis Joseph was not enough to hold this delicate edifice together. It might even end up blowing it apart.

If Austria-Hungary was stable but weak, Russia was strong but unstable. 'There's an invisible thread, like a spider's web, and it comes right out of his Imperial Majesty Alexander the Third's heart. And there's another which goes through all the ministers, through His Exellency the Governor and down through the ranks until it reaches me and even the lowest soldier,' the policeman Nikiforych explained to the young Maxim Gorky. 'Everything is linked and bound together by this thread ... with its invisible power.' As centralized as Austria-Hungary was decentralized, Russia seemed equal to the task of maintaining military parity with the West European powers. Moreover, Russia exercised the option of 'Russification', aggressively imposing the Russian language on the other ethnic minorities in its vast imperium. This was an ambitious strategy given the numerical predominance of non-Russians, who accounted for around 56 per cent of the total population of the empire. It was Russia's economy that nevertheless seemed to pose the biggest challenge to the Tsar and his ministers. Despite the abolition of serfdom in the 1860s, the country's agricultural system remained communal in its organization – closer, it might be said, to India than to Prussia. But the bid to build up a new class of thrifty peasant proprietors – sometimes known as kulaks, after their supposedly tight fists – achieved only limited success. From a narrowly economic perspective, the strategy of financing industrialization by boosting agricultural production and exports was a success. Between 1870 and 1913 the Russian economy grew at an average annual rate of around 2.4 per cent, faster than the British, French and Italian and only a little behind the German (2.8 per cent). Between 1898 and 1913, pig iron production more than doubled, raw cotton consumption rose by 80 per cent and the railway network grew by more than 50 per cent. Militarily, too, state-led industrialization seemed to be working; Russia was more than matching the expenditures of the other European empires on their armies and navies. Small wonder the German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg worried that 'Russia's growing claims and enormous power to advance in a few years, will simply be impossible to fend off'. Nevertheless, the prioritization of grain exports (to service Russia's rapidly growing external debt) and rapid population growth limited the material benefits felt by ordinary Russians, four-fifths of whom lived in the countryside. The hope that they would gain land as well as freedom aroused among peasants by the abolition of serfdom had been disappointed. Though living standards were almost certainly rising (if the revenues from excise duties are any guide), this was no cure for a pervasive sense of grievance, as any student of the French ancien regime could have explained. A disgruntled peasantry, a sclerotic aristocracy, a radicalized but impotent intelligentsia and a capital city with a large and volatile populace: these were precisely the combustible ingredients the historian Alexis de Tocqueville had identified in 1780s France. A Russian revolution of rising expectations was in the making – a revolution Nikiforych vainly warned Gorky to keep out of.

21 March 2009

Wordcatcher Tales: Hamachi vs. Buri, Pāpio vs. Ulua

A delicious plate of hamachi kama (‘yellowtail collar’ [or ‘sickle’]), pictured below, serendipitously led me to discover that hamachi (魬) and buri (鰤) are merely different sizes of the same fish, the Japanese amberjack (Seriola quinqueradiata). Yellowtail is the usual translation in Japanese restaurants, but that name can also apply to a whole lot of other fishes (as well as other animals). You can tell you're dealing with a highly commercialized and regulated industry when the difference between the smaller and larger fish is defined so precisely: hamachi weigh less than 5 kg, buri weigh 5 kg or more. The fry are called by yet another name, mojako.

According to Japanese Wikipedia, buri has a plethora of synonyms that vary by size and region. The term hamachi seems to come from Kansai; its match in Kanto seems to be inada. The names used on Japan Sea side are even more varied. (See here for a romanized glossary of Japanese fish names.)

Hamachi kama (yellowtail collar), Hanamaru Restaurant

This put me in mind of other types of jackfish (Jp. 鯵科 ajika, Carangidae) that have different names at different sizes in Hawaiian. Ulua refers to several types of large jackfish weighing 10 lbs or more, including the white ulua, or giant trevally (Caranx ignobilis); the omilu, or bluefin trevally (Caranx melampygus); and the kagami [< Jp. ‘mirror’] ulua or African pompano (Alectis ciliaris). At smaller sizes, the same fish are called papio. (Papio papio is also the genus and species name of the Guinea baboon.) In older Hawaiian usage, the smallest ones were called pāpio(pio); the somewhat larger ones, pā‘ū‘ū; and the largest ones, ulua.

15 March 2009

Causative Makeovers in New Guinea Oceanic Languages, 2

In contrast to Austronesian languages almost everywhere else, the Oceanic languages on the north coast of the Papua New Guinea mainland show an unusual disinclination to make use of the morphological causative inherited from Proto-Oceanic and Proto-Austronesian. Innovative causatives derived from causative serial constructions appear to have supplanted to varying degrees the inherited prefix *pa(ka)-. Part 1 summarizes the dethroning of the inherited prefix. Part 2 outlines the replacement pattern of serial causatives. Part 3 suggests reasons for preferring the serial causatives.

Serial causative reflexes in New Guinea


Over 40 years ago, Milke (1965:346–347) pointed out correspondences between certain classificatory prefixes in Gedaged and certain ones in Papuan Tip languages. Such prefixes broadly classify the manner in which a result is achieved: by beating, by grabbing, by kicking, by piercing, and so forth. He proposed that the classificatory prefixes were a morphological innovation providing evidence for a New Guinea Oceanic subgroup. He was apparently unaware of the presence of identical constructions in Manam. However, Milke was hard put to find classificatory prefixes in Huon Gulf languages. If he had been looking for main verbs rather than prefixes, he would have had better luck.

There are no classificatory prefixes in Huon Gulf languages, but there are main verbs that play roles similar to those of the prefixes. And there are result verbs or resultative particles in Huon Gulf languages whose semantics resemble those of the verbs occurring with classificatory prefixes in the verb-final languages elsewhere on the northeast coast of New Guinea. Some of the morphemes involved are cognate as well.

Proto-Oceanic (POC) *taRaq ‘to hew, chop, cut into’ is virtually ubiquitous as an initial verb in serial and compound causative constructions.

Reflexes of POC *punu ‘to strike, kill, extinguish’ are universal as resultatives in the Huon Gulf languages. However, in Kairiru the reflex of *punu appears as a manner transitive. In Gedaged, it appears as either a manner or a result verb. Reflexes of *punu turn up in result position in causative compounds in Papuan Tip languages.

Capell (1943:177) reconstructs a form *tomu ‘to cut or break off’ widely reflected in Papuan Tip languages. Its reflexes appear in result position in Misima (= Panayati), Nimowa, and Sudest; and in classificatory prefix position in Suau and Iduna. In Numbami, a Huon Gulf language, tomu is a resultative meaning ‘broken off’.

POC *kabit (PAN *kampit) ‘to hold, take, snatch, carry, gather’ is widely reflected in initial position in phrasal causative and incorporated object constructions in Huon Gulf languages. Its reflexes occur in the same position in compound causative, classificatory prefix, and incorporated-object constructions in Gedaged, in Madang Province, and in Papuan Tip languages.

Reflexes of POC *mate ‘to die’ show up in Kairiru, Manam, Gedaged, and Gitua as result verbs.

Perhaps one of the most productive manner-transitive verbs is reconstructible as *rapu meaning ‘to strike, hit, beat’. It shows up as a transitive verb in Huon Gulf serial causatives and incorporated-object constructions; as the only classificatory prefix without an independent verb counterpart in Manam; and as an almost meaningless, general causative prefix in almost every Papuan Tip language. Many of the Papuan Tip languages also show a less phonologically reduced, independent verb of a similar shape with the meaning ‘to hit’.

The innovative causative constructions—no matter whether the object noun occurs before or after the verb—thus resemble each other in the semantics of the components involved, in the order in which verbal and incorporated-object components occur (VO), and, in many cases, in the shapes of the individual morphemes as well. Moreover, the two groups of innovative causatives are in complementary distribution in Papua New Guinea and both differ from the causative pattern commonly found in Oceanic languages elsewhere. These circumstances seem to invite the reconstruction of a single ancestral pattern that will account for both the VO (verb before object) and OV (object before verb) constructions.

Distributional evidence within the Austronesian language family suggests that the VO, serializing languages around the Huon Gulf are more conservative of ancestral word order than the OV languages elsewhere around the New Guinea mainland. The syntactic pattern ancestral to both the serial and compound causative constructions should thus be compatible with VO basic word order. The Huon Gulf languages already provide evidence for an SVOV pattern in which the first verb indicates a causing action and the second a result. SVOV syntax is compatible with VO basic word order and such a reconstruction will also account for the compounding pattern if we assume that the compounding languages shifted their basic word order from VO to OV after serial causative constructions were well established. (Perhaps Central Papuan languages like Motu have no classificatory prefixes because they shifted before the serial causative was well established.)

Two major changes are thus sufficient to account for the causative compounds in OV languages along the north coast of the Papua New Guinea mainland. First, SVOV serial causative constructions developed. This stage is attested in the VO languages around the Huon Gulf. The languages to the northwest and southeast then underwent a further change: they shifted from VO to OV basic word order. The SVOV causative thus became an SOVV causative. In some of the Morobe languages, which apparently never made the full shift to OV basic word order, the SVOV serial causative produced an SVOR phrasal causative when the final verbs in the construction lost their verbal status and became resultative particles. In most of the OV languages, the SOVV serial causative produced SOVV compound causative and classificatory prefix constructions. The OV languages show progressive deverbalization of the nonfinal verb in the construction. These developments are outlined below.

Reflexes of serial causatives in New Guinea Oceanic languages

* S Vt O Vi (Switch Subject) ‘they hit pig die’
* S Vt O Vt (Same Subject) ‘they hit pig kill/cause-die’

The VO languages

S V O V (Switch Subject) GITUA
ti-rap nggaya mate
3P-hit pig 3S-die

S V O Result (< Same Subject) NUMBAMI
ti-lapa bola uni
3P-hit pig dead (< ‘killed’)

The OV languages

S O V V (Switch Subject) KAIRIRU
bur rro-un-i a-myat
pig 3P-hit-3S 3S-die

S O V-V (< Same Subject) GEDAGED
boz du-punu-fun-i
pig 3P-shoot-kill-3S

S O classifier-V (< Switch Subject) MANAM
boro di-rau-mate-i
pig 3P-hit-die-3S

S O classifier-V (< Same Subject) IDUNA
bawe hi-lu-ve-‘alika-na
pig 3P-*hit-cause-die-3S

References


Capell, Arthur. 1943. The linguistic position of South-Eastern Papua. Sydney, Australasian Medical Publishing.

Milke, Wilhelm. 1965. Comparative notes on the Austronesian languages of New Guinea. Lingua 14:330–348.

Causative Makeovers in New Guinea Oceanic Languages, 1

In contrast to Austronesian languages almost everywhere else, the Oceanic languages on the north coast of the Papua New Guinea mainland show an unusual disinclination to make use of the morphological causative inherited from Proto-Oceanic and Proto-Austronesian. Innovative causatives derived from causative serial constructions appear to have supplanted to varying degrees the inherited prefix *pa(ka)-. Part 1 (here) summarizes the dethroning of the inherited prefix. Part 2 outlines the replacement pattern of serial causatives. Part 3 suggests reasons for preferring the serial causatives.

The morphological causative supplanted


Both in Oceanic languages and in Austronesian languages more generally, the causative prefix is ubiquitous. In virtually any grammatical description of a Philippine language one can find mention of a pa- causative affix. Pa- causatives also occur in all the aboriginal (Austronesian) languages of Formosa, and even in distant Malagasy. The causative prefix is also well attested in Oceanic languages. In fact, it is one of the prefixes most characteristic of Oceanic languages. In Pawley’s (1972) grammatical comparison of Eastern Oceanic languages, it is the first verbal prefix listed and also the best attested—all but one of the 31 languages compared show an appropriate reflex. The same is true of Codrington’s (1885:183–184) table of verbal prefixes in 32 Melanesian languages. (The two lists overlap by about 50 percent. Only Ambrym lacks the prefix in Codrington’s list; only Tasiko lacks it in Pawley’s.) A sample of Austronesian causative constructions follows.

AUSTRONESIAN CAUSATIVES

RUKAI, Formosa
‘a-‘acay kuani taraalu‘ sa babuy
cause-die that hunter ART boar
‘that hunter killed a boar’

ILOKANO, the Philippines
im-pa-kan na diay baboy
GOAL-cause-eat 3S that pig
‘he fed the pig’

MALAGASY, Madagascar
n-amp-anasa ny lamba aho
PAST-cause-wash the clothes 1S
‘I had the clothes washed’

ROVIANA, the Solomon Islands
va-mate-a sa si keke boko pa inevana
cause-die-3S 3S PRT a pig for feast
‘he killed a pig for the feast’

BAUAN, Fiji
eratou vaka-mate-a na vuaka
3P cause-die-3S ART pig
‘they killed the pig’

HAWAIIAN, the Hawaiian Islands
ho‘o-make lākou i ka pua‘a
cause-die 3P OBJ the pig
‘they killed the pig’

The widespread occurrence of the prefix in most Eastern Oceanic languages is matched by a widespread multiplicity of function. Pawley (1972:45) notes three common functions of the prefix in the languages supporting his reconstruction of *paka- for Eastern Oceanic: causative (‘causing/allowing ...’); multiplicative (‘repeatedly/extensively ...’); and similative (‘resembling/characteristic of ...’; as in Fa‘asamoa). The prefix is so productive in Polynesian and Fijian languages that Churchward’s (1959) Tongan dictionary, for instance, has 112 pages of words beginning with faka-, the Tongan form of the prefix.

In the Papua New Guinea languages with reflexes of the serial causative, on the other hand, the prefix has markedly diminished in function and in some cases disappeared altogether.

The Manam reflex of *paka- is aka-/a‘a-. It only serves to derive transitives from a limited number of statives and psychological verbs (Lichtenberk 1983:217).

The reflex of the morphological causative in Gedaged and its congeners is variously pa-, pe-, pi-, or pu-. Mager (1952:233) defines it as “a petrified prefix” and says:
It is not always clear when this prefix (and its variants) is a prefix and when it is a reduplication or a part of the root. Some times we can discern that it is a causative prefix, at times it expresses intensification, or it gives the word an opposite meaning.

In Gitua, the reflexes of causative *pa(ka)- and reciprocal *paRi have fallen together as pa-. (Lincoln 1977:24). Pa- can indicate reciprocal or multiple action, but its causative function has been almost entirely displaced by serial causative constructions. Thus, pa-mate (lit. ‘to cause to die’) only means ‘to extinguish (fire)’. The serial causative is required to render the literal sense of ‘to kill’.

The causative prefix appears completely lost elsewhere in Morobe Province. I have been able to find no evidence of it in the Huon Gulf languages.

The Papuan Tip languages show a proliferation of causative prefixes. Reflexes of causative *pa(ka)- are well attested but are not always easy to tell—either semantically or phonologically—from the reflexes of reciprocal *paRi- (Capell 1943:113, 237–242). Other causative prefixes have arisen due to the near-total semantic bleaching of some of the classificatory prefixes (see the compilation in Ezard 1992:238-248). The prefixes, which—as transitive action verbs—used to describe the manner in which the result was achieved, now indicate little more than that the result was achieved. Capell used the vague gloss ‘assumption of state’ for such prefixes. The new causative prefixes now perform functions often identical to the functions of the inherited causative prefix. The same is true of many manner-transitive verbs in the languages that retain Verb-Object word order. A comparison of some morphologically causative verbs in Hawaiian (Pukui and Elbert 1986) with analogous new causative constructions in Papua New Guinea Oceanic languages will illustrate the way in which transitive action verbs have taken on the functions of the morphological causative inherited from Proto-Oceanic. The usual Hawaiian reflex of *paka is ho‘o-.

HAWAIIAN ho‘o-hana (‘make-work’) ‘to employ, cause to work’
WEDAU rau-karäi (*‘hit-work’) ‘to set (s.o.) to work’

HAWAIIAN ho‘o-helele‘i (‘make-falling’) ‘to scatter, sow’
WEDAU ravi-awawari (‘*hit-falling’) ‘to sow broadcast’

HAWAIIAN ho‘o-hua (‘make-fruit’) ‘to bear fruit’
NUMBAMI -ambi ano (‘hold-fruit’) ‘to bear fruit’

HAWAIIAN ho‘o-huli (‘make-turn over’) ‘to turn, change, convert’
IWAL -amb nalili (‘hold-turned around’) ‘to turn (s.t.) around’

HAWAIIAN ho‘o-loli (‘make-turn/change’) ‘to change, amend’
NUMBAMI -ambi lele (‘hold-turned’) ‘to translate’

HAWAIIAN ho‘o-luli (‘make-shake’) ‘to rock (so); to sway’
WEDAU ravi-dagudagu (‘*hit-restless’) ‘to shake, disturb’

HAWAIIAN ho‘o-make (‘make-die’) ‘to kill, let die’
MANAM rau-mate (‘hit-die’) ‘to kill’

HAWAIIAN ho‘o-piha (‘make-full’) ‘to fill’
TUBETUBE ro-karapowani (‘*hit-full’) ‘to fill’

HAWAIIAN ho‘o-pi‘i (‘make-ascend’) ‘to cause to rise’
GEDAGED bi-sa (‘hold-ascend’) ‘to lift up, raise’

HAWAIIAN ho‘o-puka (‘make-perforation’) ‘to make a hole or opening’
NUMBAMI -so bozoka (‘stab-pierced through’) ‘to make a hole or opening’

References


Capell, Arthur. 1943. The linguistic position of South-Eastern Papua. Sydney, Australasian Medical Publishing.

Churchward, C. Maxwell. 1959. Tongan dictionary. London, Oxford University Press.

Codrington, Robert. 1885/1974. The Melanesian languages. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Reprint. Amsterdam, Philo Press.

Ezard, Bryan. 1992. Tawala derivational prefixes: A semantic perspective. In: M. D. Ross, ed., Papers in Austronesian linguistics no. 2. Canberra, Pacific Linguistics.

Lichtenberk, Frantisek. 1983. A grammar of Manam. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication No. 18. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press.

Lincoln, Peter C. 1977. Gitua–English vocabulary. Photocopy.

Mager, John F. 1952. Gedaged–English dictionary. Columbus, Ohio, The American Lutheran Church Board of Foreign Missions.

Pawley, Andrew K. 1972. On the internal relationships of Eastern Oceanic languages. In: R. C. Green and M. Kelly, eds., Studies in Oceanic culture history, vol. 3, pp. 1–142. Honolulu, Department of Anthropology, Bernice P. Bishop Museum.

Pukui, Mary Kawena, and Samuel H. Elbert. 1986. Hawaiian dictionary: Hawaiian–English, English–Hawaiian, rev. and enl. ed. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press.

14 March 2009

Mosquitoes to Mars?

A few weeks ago, RIA Novosti reported on a type of mosquito that seems preadapted to the possibility of suspended animation during long space flights.
Cosmonauts who might fly to the Red Planet are learning how to survive in a forest outside Moscow. Scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medical and Biological Problems are assessing the impact of cosmic radiation on living organisms, one of which even managed to survive in outer space.

Anatoly Grigoryev, vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told RIA Novosti that a mosquito had managed to survive in outer space. First, it appeared that Grigoryev was talking about a spider running loose aboard the International Space Station. Incredibly, a mosquito slept for 18 months on the outer ISS surface. "We brought him back to Earth. He is alive, and his feet are moving," Grigoryev said.

The mosquito did not get any food and was subjected to extreme temperatures ranging from minus 150 degrees Celsius in the shade to plus 60 degrees in the sunlight.

Grigoryev said the insect had been taken outside the ISS on orders from the Institute's scientists working on the Biorisk experiment. "First, they studied bacteria and fungi till a Japanese scientist suggested studying mosquitoes," Grigoryev told RIA Novosti....

"Professor Takashi Okuda from the National Institute of Agro-Biological Science drew our attention to the unique, although short-lived, African mosquito (bloodworm), whose larvae develop only in a humid environment," Grigoryev said.

Rains are rare in Africa, where puddles dry up before one's eyes. However, this mosquito is well-adapted to adverse local conditions, existing in a state of suspended animation when vital bodily functions stop almost completely.

When suspended animation sets in, water molecules are replaced by tricallosa sugar, which leads to natural crystallization. The larvae were then sprayed with acetone, boiled and cooled down to minus 210 degrees Celsius, the temperature of liquid nitrogen. Amazingly, they survived all these hardships.

The Japanese also studied bloodworm DNA and found that it could be switched on and deactivated in 30 to 40 minutes. "This is facilitated by the crystallization of biological matter," Doctor of Biology Vladimir Sychev from the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems told RIA Novosti.
If Anopheles mosquitoes can do the same, it may not take long for the first humans settlers on Mars to melt some of its ice and turn barren landscapes into malarial swamps.

via Japundit

Funereal Language Revival in Northern Ghana

The occasion of the 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation seems an appropriate moment to note a recent post by Mark Dingemanse of The Ideophone about an encouraging bit of language revival in Siwu, spoken in the Volta region of Ghana: the return of traditional funeral dirges. (Note that Siwu is the language, Kawu is the place, and Mawu are the people, suggesting a noun-classification system most definitely related to those in found Bantu languages.)
Speaking of parting, it is only rarely that dirges are heard in Kawu nowadays. Two factors are contributing to their decline: firstly the fact that many churches discourage their use, preferring edifying hymns instead. The reason behind this, I am told, is that the dirges reflect a pre-Christian worldview and as such are to be eschewed by true Christians. A second factor has been the coming of electricity to the villages halfway the nineties, which has led to loud music taking the place of the dirges during the wakekeepings. Elsewhere I wrote that "culture is a moving target, always renewing and reshaping itself", yet at the same time I can't help but lament the imminent loss of such a rich vein of Mawu culture.

However, during my last fieldtrip there were some signs of a renewed interest in the genre. For example, one pastor told me that he had been reconsidering the rash dismissal of the dirges by his church. Realizing how important the dirges had been in containing, orienting, and canalizing the feelings of loss and pathos surrounding death, he felt that the Christian hymns did not always offer an appropriate replacement. Another hopeful event was that I was approached with the request to help record a great number of dirges in Akpafu-Todzi in August 2008. This was not just to record them for posterity (although this was part of the motivation), but also very practically so that they could be played at wakekeepings. I gladly complied with this wish of course. The result is a beautiful collection of 42 dirges, sung by eight ladies between 57 and 87 years of age. The first time the dirges were played at a funeral they sparked a wave of interest.
via Culture-Making, where Nate adds a lead-in: The cultural fall and rise of the traditional funeral dirges performed in the Volta region of northern Ghana: brought low by Christianity and recording technology, brought back by the same.

12 March 2009

The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944

From Red Storm over the Balkans: The Failed Soviet Invasion of Romania, Spring 1944, by David M. Glantz (U. Press of Kansas, 2007), pp. 372-378 (reviewed here and here):

Strategic Implications

Every officially sanctioned Soviet and, more recently, Russian history of the Soviet-German War published since war's end categorically asserts that, immediately after the Red Army completed its successful winter campaign in the Ukraine during mid-April 1944, Stalin ordered his Stavka and General Staff to begin preparations to conduct a series of successive strategic offensives through Belorussia and Poland during the summer of 1944, which, from a military and political perspective, were designed to hasten the destruction of the Wehrmacht and Hitler's Third Reich in the shortest possible time by exploiting the most direct route into the heart of Germany. Only after completing these more important offensives, these sources argue, did Stalin finally unleash the Red Army on an invasion of Romania and the Balkan region. According to this strategic paradigm, when the Red Army actually implemented the Stavka's plan, it began its offensive into Belorussia in late June, its offensive into southern Poland in mid-July, and its offensive into Romania in late August.

Furthermore, these same histories argue that, just as the Balkan region was a secondary strategic objective for Stalin during the Red Army's summer-fall campaign of 1944, it remained of secondary importance when the Red Army conducted its offensives during the winter campaign of 1945. Therefore, just as the Red Army invaded Romania in late August 1944, but only after its offensives in Belorussia and eastern Poland succeeded, likewise, during its winter campaign of 1945, the Red Army captured Budapest and western Hungary and invaded Austria in February and March 1945, but only after its offensive through Poland to the Oder River succeeded.

However, the "discovery" of the Red Army's attempt to invade Romania in mid-April and May 1944 casts serious doubts on this prevailing strategic paradigm. In short, the precise timing, immense scale, complex nature, and obvious objectives of the Red Army's offensive into Romania during April and May 1944 now clearly indicate that Stalin and his Stavka were paying considerable attention to strategic imperatives other than those described in this prevailing strategic paradigm. Simply stated, vital military, economic, and political factors prompted Stalin to order his Red Army to mount a major offensive of immense potential strategic significance into Romania between mid-April and late May 1944....

In addition to these purely military considerations, there were also strategically vital economic and political motives for Stalin and his Stavka to mount an invasion of Romania during April and May 1944. Economically, for example, as von Senger pointed out, if successful, a full-fledged Red Army invasion of Romania could deprive the Axis of its vital oilfields in Romania, thereby seriously degrading Germany's ability to continue the war. More important still from a political standpoint, a successful invasion of Romania would likely topple the pro-German Romanian government and drive Romania from the war, and perhaps even force Bulgaria to abandon its looser ties with Hitler's Germany. In fact, the loss of a significant portion of Romania to the Red Army would shake if not shatter the Axis' defenses throughout the entire Balkans, inject a sizeable Red Army presence in the region, and end all hopes by Stalin's "Big Three" counterparts, Roosevelt and Churchill, that they could halt the spread of Soviet influence into the Balkan region.

In short, since Stalin's Western Allies were already planning Operation Overlord to land their forces on the coast of France, the Red Army's entry into Romania would end, once and for all, Stalin's anxiety over his Allies establishing a "second front" in the Balkans. Ever the realist, Stalin judged that the potential political gains associated with the Red Army's advance into Romania during April and May 1944 more than outweighed any associated military risks. Nor was it coincidental that, after his spring 1944 venture failed and the Red Army's summer offensives to the north succeeded, Stalin unleashed the Red Army forces on a new invasion deeper into Romania and the Balkans during August 1944.

Furthermore, although it will be the subject of a future book, it is now quite clear that Stalin continued to pursue a similar "Balkan strategy" during the winter of 1945 after his Allies assured him at the Yalta Conference in early February that Berlin would be his for the taking. As a result, within hours after receiving these assurances, Stalin abruptly halted the Red Army's advance on Berlin along the Oder River, only 30 miles from Berlin, and instead shifted its main axis of advance—first, into western Hungary and, later, into the depths of Austria—for essentially the same political reasons that had motivated him to invade Romania during April, May, and August 1944. Just as Stalin had altered his strategy for a drive on Berlin by attempting to invade Romania in April and May 1944 only to resume his advance along the Berlin axis in June, a year later the Red Army began its final drive on Berlin on 16 April 1945, the day after Vienna fell. Therefore, the Red Anny's failed offensive into Romania during April and May 1944 is remarkably consistent with Stalin's strategic behavior during 1945.

Lesson Learned

Regardless of Stalin's motives for authorizing the offensive into Romania, for a variety of reasons, the Red Army's first Iasi-Kishinev offensive ended as a spectacular failure. After failing to overcome Axis defenses from the march during mid-April, Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front was equally unsuccessful in its better-prepared offensive aginst Axis forces defending in the Tirgu-Frumos and Iasi regions in May. During the same period, although Malinovsky's 3rd Ukrainian Front was able to seize some bridgeheads across the Dnestr River in early April, its twin efforts to expand those bridgeheads later in the month achieved little more. Complicating the Stavka's strategic plans, while Konev and Malinovsky were organizing a third effort to capture Iasi and Kishinev during mid-May, for the first time since late 1942, counterattacking German forces actually managed to inflict serious defeats on major Red Army forces defending bridgeheads across a major river....

The defending German forces had also been fighting for as prolonged a period as their Red Army counterparts and had suffered many serious and costly defeats and heavy losses in men and equipment. Furthermore, when Konev's and Malinovsky's forces invaded Romania, in many sectors they faced green and poorly motivated and equipped Romanian troops. Despite this fact, fighting with a determination born of desperation, the Axis forces were able to hold firmly to most of their defenses in April and early May and, thereafter, mount successful counterstrokes of their own during early May and early June.

Difficult spring weather conditions and the adverse effect of the heavy rains and flooding on the terrain also certainly exacerbated the already significant logistical problems the two fronts were experiencing as they operated at the end of their overextended lines of communications characterized by a rickety patchwork logistical network that was just being constructed. First, the two Ukrainian fronts were conducting offensive operations in a region whose hilly, broken, and often lightly wooded terrain differed substantially from the rolling grass-covered flatlands of the Ukraine to which their troops were long accustomed.

Second, for the first time in the war, the two fronts were attempting to conduct offensive operations after warmer weather melted the icy surface they had exploited to conduct mobile military operations in previous winters. Predictably, the rasputitsa proved as formidable an obstacle to the two fronts' advancing forces as the Germans' resistance and, in some cases, even more formidable.

Third, compounding the problems cited above, pursuant to orders, as they conducted their fighting withdrawal, the Germans systematically destroyed everything of value both for destruction's sake and to create obstacles to the Red Army's forward movement. They blew up railroads, beds, tracks, and culverts alike; they cratered roads and demolished dams; and they destroyed every building or installation regardless of military value. In short, they left a vast wasteland for the Red Army to traverse in their wake.

As a result, whether attacking or defending, in addition to experiencing customary shortages of food, which made soldierly foraging an essential art, and the normal effects of prolonged combat attrition, virtually every formation and unit within the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts suffered significant losses in weaponry and heavy equipment and experienced severe ammunition and fuel shortages. For example, archival documents indicate that, prior to its offensive along the Tirgu Frumos axis on 2 May, the 2nd Ukrainian Front's 2nd Tank Army was supplied with between two and five combat loads of ammunition and two to two and one-half refills of gasoline and diesel fuel, which was not excessively low to conduct such an operation. However, it would be disingenuous to offer these realities as excuses for Konev's and Malinovsky' offensive failures, since, as was always the case, the two front commanders, as well as their subordinate officers and soldiers alike, frequently relied on sheer ingenuity or "native wit" to resolve their logistical dilemmas.

11 March 2009

From Tight Ethnotowns to Dispersed Ethnoburbs

The latest issue of Southeastern Geographer (on Project MUSE) has an article by Paul N. McDaniel and Anita I. Drever that examines Immigrant Businesses in a New South City (Birmingham, Alabama), asking: Do they form an Ethnic Enclave or International Corridor?

Here's the abstract and a bit of the introduction that I found interesting. I have eliminated most of the in-text citations and cross-references in the extracts that follow.
Abstract: Immigration is changing the U.S. South in unprecedented ways. First and later generations of Latinos and Asians comprise increasing portions of the population in towns and cities across the region. Some of these newcomers have started entrepreneurial business ventures rather than going to work for someone else. This research examines the forces driving the spatial patterns of and civic leader response to immigrant-owned entrepreneurial establishments in Birmingham, Alabama, a middle-tier metropolitan area. The paper answers the following questions: (1) Why did immigrant businesses begin moving into Birmingham during the last decade and a half? (2) Where are ethnic entrepreneurs opening up retail shops and why? (3) What are the attitudes of city officials towards these multi-ethnic business enclaves? These questions are addressed using a mixed-method approach that includes census data analysis, archival research, personal observations and semi-structured open-ended interviews....

Historically, ethnic businesses have been spatially concentrated.... Ethnic neighborhoods in gateway cities developed at a time when city inhabitants traveled on foot or by streetcar. Ethnic businesses and residences therefore had to be located in close proximity. The ethnic businesses that have opened up in the U.S. South during the past ten to fifteen years largely cater to a clientele within driving rather than walking distance. Many of the recent arrivals to the South have also lived in other parts of the U.S. and are therefore less dependent on ethnic intermediaries to find employment or housing. Research on the residential settlement of new arrivals to the South reveals minimal spatial clustering.... Walcott (2002) did find that ethnic businesses were spatially concentrated along the Buford Highway international corridor between the northeast Atlanta suburbs of Chamblee and Doraville; however she saw minimal evidence of spatial clustering by nationality within this area.

Contrary to the findings in studies of several other southern cities (see Mohl 2003), Asians and Hispanics appear to be settling largely in white neighborhoods .... Dissimilarity index calculations by the authors based on data from the 2000 U.S. Census indicate that one-and-a-half times as many Asians and Hispanics would have to move to evenly distribute their population among blacks as among non-Hispanic whites.
What attracted these immigrants to Birmingham?
The shift in the locus of U.S. economic growth from the Rustbelt in the Northeast to the Sunbelt in the South brought biotechnology firms, large banks, and multinational corporation headquarters to the Birmingham metropolitan area. These global companies—along with Birmingham's universities—recruited talent from around the United States and the rest of the world.... Like in other locales, Birmingham's expanding well-paid, highly educated workforce has demanded better housing and more services. This has helped to fuel job growth in construction and basic services and the foreign-born have arrived to fill these jobs (Mohl 2003). And as a result, like in many parts of the country Birmingham has attracted a foreign-born population that is both more and less educated than the metropolitan area as a whole: 19 percent of immigrants have a graduate degree as compared to 9 percent of the total metro population and 27 percent of immigrants have less than a high school education compared to 16 percent of metro Birmingham's population as a whole....
Where are they living and working?
First, although the residences of the foreign-born are fairly dispersed ..., new immigrant businesses in Birmingham are clustered.... A second important characteristic of Birmingham's ethnic business concentrations are that they are multiethnic in contrast to the Chinatowns, Little Tokyos, and Latino barrios that evolved before the automobile era in gateway cities.... Third, ethnic businesses in Birmingham are located along suburban corridors rather than in neighborhoods per se. In the walking cities of the past, ethnic businesses were located on contiguous neighborhood blocks to accommodate customers traveling on foot or by streetcar to do their shopping. In addition, immigrants often lived in the dwellings above the street level shops. By contrast, Birmingham's ethnic businesses are moving into a suburban, automobile dominated landscape where zoning ordinances have purposely separated residential and commercial landscapes....
And what kinds of attitudes do they encounter?
The interviews with Hoover and Homewood city officials suggest immigrant business owners receive more verbal support from city officials in Homewood. The fact that the international corridor in Homewood is larger and more complex than in Hoover may in part be the result of the warmer welcome it received from the local government. It is also likely that city officials' positive attitudes toward ethnic businesses make it easier for immigrant businesses to acquire permits and influence local ordinances.
The author of a key work cited in this article recently published a book titled Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America, by Wei Li (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

05 March 2009

Rushdie on Slumdog Tourism

In a dyspeptic disquisition on screen adaptations from books in last Saturday's Guardian, Salman Rushdie coughs up some colorful bile in the general direction of the recent Oscar favorite.
It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes; or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah; or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect. Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it's still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead. In an interview conducted at the Telluride film festival last autumn, Boyle, when asked why he had chosen a project so different from his usual material, answered that he had never been to India and knew nothing about it, so he thought this project was a great opportunity. Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away.
via LaurenceJarvikOnline

Like most Oscar winners, Slumdog had not yet enticed the Outliers to make an effort to go see it in a movie theater. Nor is it likely now to find a place in our never-very-long Netflix queue. We've already seen, courtesy of Netflix, Thom Fitzgerald's award-winning, disgusting, poverty-porn movie, The Wild Dogs (2002), which views Romanians as nothing but beggars, con-men, sex workers, or dog catchers—and compares them with heavy-handed symbolism to the wild dogs of Bucharest, which the government is determined to euthanize. All foreigners there (or at least all Canadians!), on the other hand, are either corrupt exploiters or naive do-gooders. And the path from exploiter to do-gooder requires finding your own personal beggar to support: the Canadian ambassador's wife takes on a legless beggar boy, who follows her around like a puppy; the Canadian pornographer tries to redeem himself by repeatedly giving stuff to a reverse-kneed, hand-walking beggar, whose companions promptly steal it from him; and the Romanian dog-catcher tries to redeem himself by creating a refuge for dogs he was supposed to have euthanized, only to be arrested and have his dogs taken away. I fully agree with the reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes, whose review (no longer available online) includes the quote, "No one in this sterile film is redeemed, condemned or even particularly humanized.... Ultimately, Fitzgerald's gutless film is a muddled, grotesque travelogue."

Sorry. Next time I'll tell you how I really feel.

04 March 2009

Kaiten Sushi Plate View of Its World

なにこれ? Did you ever wonder what the world looks like from a kaiten sushi plate?

via Culture Making

How Doth Lotte Love Baseball?

In the Los Angeles Times, John M. Glionna profiles the unlikely manager of a once hapless Korean baseball team, the Lotte Giants of Busan: former LA Dodgers infielder Jerry Royster.
Reporting from Busan, South Korea -- Jerry Royster isn't sure whether to laugh or cry: The umps just don't speak his language. Every time he races out of the dugout to argue a play, he has to bring along an interpreter.

Last year, the former Dodgers infielder took the helm of this city's wildly popular Lotte Giants, becoming Korea's first foreign manager....

In his first year, he took the cellar-dwelling Giants to the playoffs for the first time in nine years. Even with a shorter 126-game schedule, the Giants attracted more fans than many major league teams and doubled attendance from the year before.

Long-suffering loyalists dubbed their new manager "Hurricane Royster" and composed a rally song in his honor.

But Royster, now in his second season, said it's not just fans who excite him: Koreans play good baseball.

Korean players' ability is well-known -- except in the U.S., where only a few, such as former Dodgers pitcher Chan Ho Park, are household names.

But that is changing. Korea won the gold medal in the 2008 Olympics without losing a game, and in the 2006 WBC lost only once -- to archrival Japan in the final. Only Cuba was ranked ahead of Korea in the International Baseball Federation's world rankings.

"We're not a secret to most countries," Royster said. "It's only the Americans who are now starting to realize there's good baseball being played here." Royster didn't know what to expect in late 2007 when old friend Bobby Valentine, manager of Japan's Chiba Lotte Marines, called him.

Shin Dong-bin, owner of the Lotte teams in Japan and Korea, wanted to shake things up by putting a foreign manager in the southern city of Busan. Valentine recommended Royster, who'd just been fired as manager of the Las Vegas 51s, then the Dodgers' triple-A team.

"I told him he was going to take over the Cubs of Asia," said Valentine, a former Dodger who once managed the New York Mets. "They were a blue-collar team that never won but everybody loved anyway. The fans were dying for a competitive team and a leader."
I doff my authentic Chiba Lotte Marines baseball cap to Mr. Shin—and also to Bobby Valentine, who showed the way. Now, if only Marty Brown can lead my old NPB Central League favorites, the Hiroshima Toyo (= Mazda) Carp, to win the Japan Series this year. And in Korea, Go Busan!

01 March 2009

Parallel Pejoration of Terms in Korean, Japanese, Chinese

The latest volume of the journal Korean Studies (available by subscription on Project MUSE) contains an article by Minju Kim, "On the Semantic Derogation of Terms for Women in Korean, with Parallel Developments in Chinese and Japanese" (vol. 32, pp. 148-176):
This study investigates two kinds of semantic change in terms for women in Korean, along with parallel developments in Chinese and Japanese, and examines the underlying mechanisms that cause these linguistic changes. In Korean and Chinese, polite terms for young women (akassi and xiăo jiĕ, respectively) have been taking on strong sexual connotations, due to the terms’ association with professions in the sex trade. In Korean and Japanese, terms for older sister (enni and oneesan/oneechan, respectively) have been adopted by more senior speakers to address young women, especially those in service interactions, including those in sex entertainment. This study demonstrates that besides sexist attitudes, other quite different motivations can be responsible for the semantic derogation of terms for women. In an effort to be polite, speakers have adopted positive female terms to address women of lower occupational status. Subsequently, the burden of the lower-status referents has caused the positive terms to undergo semantic derogation.
(Note that, like most linguists, Kim uses Yale romanization to represent Korean, since it most closely represents the phonemic system—and for that reason most closely transliterates hangul. The more common romanization for 아가씨 is agassi.)

Kim notes similar developments in European languages, as in the pejoration of hussy from 'housewife' to 'loose woman' in English. She also notes the pejoration of the terms for the female half in pairs of terms that used to be more equivalent, such as bachelor vs. spinster or master vs. mistress in English, or in the pairs of terms that used to distinguish 'young man' from 'young woman' in several Romance languages: Portuguese rapaz vs. rapariga, Spanish hombrezuelo vs. mujerzuela, French garçon vs. garce. (Kim spells rapariga as ramariga and mujerzuela as muerzuela.)

During China's Cultural Revolution, according to Kim's sources, the use of xiăo jiĕ was discouraged because of its long history of deferential use to address young ladies of the nobility. Now its use is being discouraged for its derogatory connotations by some sociologists who suggest addressing waitresses as 'attendant, waiter' (服务员 fúwùyuán) rather than 'young lady'.