Shifty Semantics

Usually, people don't question whether the words they know have changed in meaning or usage. This is a good thing, because it would be a tremendous deterrent otherwise -- spending an extraordinary amount of resources, daily verifying whether your vernacular is similar to the world vernacular. But sometimes a generation of individuals are raised with a certain set of words with a certain set of meanings, and are confronted with a different generation of individuals who use the old words in new ways. Thus, it was a great surprise to me when I chanced upon a different usage of the popular Latin phrase, carpe diem.

The traditional translation is "seize the day," with an attached meaning of "don't do tomorrow what you can't do today". Or more basically, "don't waste time". But it appears that the youth have seized this phrase, and turned it into something else: "enjoy the pleasures of now," in a sort of hedonistic philosophy.

While it's unsettling that a phrase that the literati have been using as a motto to get things done now, I suppose it's inevitable that the rambunctious youth would turn that phrase around and pervert it to their own silly pleasures. Then again, the phrase "social intercourse", as used by Jane Austen, would have trouble standing on its own today (unless explicitly contrasted by "sexual intercourse").

No argument for language purity here, just a mere observation on the curiosities of English.

A Quest for Sex

...and by my title I mean the noun, not the verb. Ravi Zacharias once poignantly noted that sex has never been discussed more openly before, but people have never been more confused about it before either. Actually, I'm sure what his verbatim quote was more poignant than what I have in my memory, but it gets the point across. With the rise in sex and gender distinction, individuals don't feel they can all be pigeon-holed into one of two characters anymore.

And science fiction tends to share that view. Large iconic shows like the Star Trek franchise and the UK analogue, Doctor Who, all theorize about sentient alien life that may not as easily be categorized into human terms of "male" and "female". Thus, the age-old address of "ladies and gentlemen" is no longer sufficient. And here we get into the language-related portion of this blog.

In one of the more recent episodes of Doctor Who, the hostess of the ship addresses the passengers as:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, and variations thereupon"

which I think is rather clever. It plays on the idea that similarly sentient life-forms also reproduce sexually, and therefore would in fact be some sort of similar variation between the males and females of human physiology. Still, given the hypothetical number of different aliens out there, it seems a bit biased to lump all those different sexes into a simple two words that basically relate back to the human template. But maybe the alien translation of such a phrase would be equally biased for that species' sexes.

Incidentally, Star Trek: Nemesis also had a go at updating the old address. Near the beginning of the movie, Data asks for attention from the party guests by addressing them as:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, and invited transgendered species"

Sounds a bit harsh, especially compared to the Doctor Who version. Although the Doctor Who version was set much farther in the future, does it really take humanity three millenia to coin a better phrase? Apparently, in the Star Trek universe, the male/female split is pretty universal, and across all species, it's considered different or rare to have one that is "other". So I suppose in their case, the address is kinda excused in a way. If I live long enough to see it, I'd like to know what we actually end up with if we get to that stage in society where "others" are just as normal and plentiful as the traditional males and females.

Reparse and Rephrase

--General Notice from the Author of this Blog-----
Not that I have too many dedicated readers, but those who do read this blog might notice a slight change in the past and future posts over the next year. Apparently, it can raise the general brownie points I earn with the admissions office for studying linguistics at grad school. Which means I'll have to censor some of my past posts to make them less offensive. I mean, I'm pretty confident that my posts are mostly benign, but I know when I can get emotional, decrying silly things like the prototypical grammar nazi.
--End General Notice-----

Some of you may already know, or otherwise infer from my general [inter-related] interests, that I'm an avid crossword puzzler. In fact, I spent about 5 hours in HS designing my own for submission to the school newspaper. It was ultimately rejected though, because they felt the calibre was too high. And that hurt. Somewhat. I suppose I could post it online sometime, if I ever figure out how to work in interface elements in Adobe-Macromedia Flash.

So, now that I'm in university, enjoying and suffering the life with my fellow students, I grabbed the newest release of our university newsletter, and flipped to the crossword [and sudoku] section. Given that my university's commercial strength is in its engineering and science-related fields (being one of two universities in Canada to have Math as a separate faculty), it's also natural that a number of them would also be avid watchers of science-fiction shows, such as the Star Trek series, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, etc. But what's also interesting (which would explain bookstores' shelving logic), is that those who invest a lot in watching science-fiction also enjoy a lot of fantasy. And that seems to teem more into this rising "genre" of anime. (Although strictly speaking, it's more a medium than a genre, given that the common elements are reliant on their drawing style, as opposed to general plot elements.)

So, a university strong in maths and science results in a lot of students who are interested in anime. This in turn means good business for the East Asian Studies department over at one of the affiliated colleges of the university. But it also means that when speaking to a student from my university, you cannot assume total ignorance about East Asia, especially since a sizable proportion of the students are also of East Asian descent.

So, back to the crossword. From all the above, it would therefore be less strange to see a higher number of clues and answers to be related to East Asia. And that, although not strange in and of itself for crosswords, does stand out as something that one would expect only at this university.

The crossword at hand had no less than 5 Japanese-related hints, out of a total of about 100 clues. One that was particularly curious (and again, relating back to the fact that the audience is expected to be anime-watching engineers instead of culturally acclimatised linguists), read as follows: "Japanese opposite of 'seme'".

The answer they were looking for, of course, was "uke". But why might I contest that answer? First, let us look at the semantics and morphology of these words. "Seme" is the gerund form from the verb "semeru", meaning "to thrust; to attack". The connotation is therefore "aggressive". "Uke", on the other hand, is the gerund from the verb "ukeru", meaning "to receive, to accept", and connoting passivity. And from this explanation, it might seem clear why these two form an opposing pair: one does the stabbing, the other suffers the stabbing. But typically, and especially in the context of an anime-watching audience, the most salient associations that surface for "uke" and "seme" are not verbal gerunds, but rather the meanings they represent as Japanese slang.

As it turns out, a male can be described as "seme", if he "wears the pants in the relationship" (to phrase it in an excruciatingly polite way. A quick review of the preceding paragraph should give a better glimpse of what it really entails.) An "uke", therefore, is the partner to the "seme", and does the ahh... other half of the work in a relationship.

So, that's all fine and dandy. It's a set pair of words used in a certain sub-genre of anime, and that's fine. But the problem is, "uke" isn't exactly the Japanese opposite of "seme". Because, you see, to the culturally normalised Japanese national, the opposite of "attack" is "defend".

Aha! But then, perhaps the crossword writer merely meant that the answer was supposed to be in Japanese when she wrote the clue. That is perhaps true, but how many people honestly interpret the opposite of a verb to be the passive form of that verb? Is the opposite of killing "being killed", or "reviving"? But then, the opposite of eating is to be eaten, right? Or is it to starve?

And here, the solution dawns that although the word "opposite" is a linear, one-dimensional transformation (to borrow some terminology from my math days), the actual range of opposites for any given word is in fact, closer to being two-dimensional. The semiotic square is actually a nice way of summarising and articulating this conclusion.

[illustration to be added later].

So, as we can see, oppositions can come in one of two forms: laterally, horizontally, or diagonally. Yay. Applying knowledge to everyday situations.

Hisuterikku

I was reading some scanlations online (which I'm quite prone to do, apparently), when I came across this mysterious word: "hisuterikku". From what I could gather, the scans were from an [official] Chinese translation of the original Japanese comic. But whether the translation was from the Japanese dialogue or not is something else. Anyway. Character A starts describing character B as being "hisuterikku", which for a moment looks a bit foreign. Until I realised that the idiot "translator" (extremely generous use of word there) was phonetically transcribing the Japanese assimilated English word: "hysteric". Doesn't it take about 20 seconds to flip through a physical dictionary to confirm the spelling? And even if the translator was terrible at English, that translator must at least have English-competent collegues. Or maybe not, the translator's idiocy probably alienated herself from linguistically competent beings. Garr.

Rant #2: Scheschuan
Fine, it's a foreign word, and therefore has a spelling that's strange for English-speakers/readers. But still. You KNOW it's Chinese, so why the frell would you think that it'd adopt a germanic spelling of "sch-"!? For the record, there are three official/accepted spellings: Sichuan (Mandarin Pinyin), Szechwan (Cantonese phonetic), and Szechuan (hybrid). Also, German Wikipedia recognises Sichuan, Sechuan, and Sezuan. So none of that sch- business.
Which reminds me: why the heck do English ppl think that a phonetically transcribed Chinese name /ch/ would be pronounced as a /sh/?? Eejits. Sichuan ends up sounding like "shesshuan" in the mouths of foreigners. Yes, it sounds foreign enough from English words, but it sounds equally foreign to Chinese ears. Encountering it almost makes me go hisuterikku!