Being the would-be imperialist that I am, issues and titles concerning royalty and nobility are always of interest for me. But before I launch my rant, let's review the basic established terms:
King - male monarch (usually of a country), predominantly European.
Queen - female monarch, predominantly European.
Prince/ss - legal offspring of a king or queen.
Prince/ss Consort - Royal spouse, of non-royal blood. (purely honorary title, as "Princess Diana")
Emperor - male monarch of an Empire. Historically used to describe extravagant tyrants, as France, China, Japan.
Empress - female monarch of an Empire.
Tzar - Russian male monarch. (also spelt czar)
Emir - African/Arabian ruler or chieftain
So, as we can see from above, relatively contemporary examples are more accepting of foreign terms than in the past, (as seen in the appellation of Emperor for Chinese and Japanese monarchs, but the adoption of Tzar and Emir for Russian and African rulers). Or perhaps it's a regional/linguistic discrimination. It'd certainly be less communicable to English ears to use "huangdi" than "Emperor".
Why, then, is it that contemporary African rulers get the English titles instead of adopting indigenous ones? I'd also like to draw attention to the definition of Emir, which uses "ruler" and "chieftain", decidedly less regal terms than monarch. A quick look on wikipedia will show a pretty complete list of titles for sovereigns and rulers in the world.
The "Kingdom" of Jordan, for example, is one that I find somewhat odd. Clearly, their titles were created during a time before the blind adoption of foreign words had become popular. And yet, I can't help but think that emir might be a more fitting title than "king". And, more specifically, the peripheral addresses should be adjusted as well.
I was reading on a friend's blog, who mentioned Queen Noor of Jordan, later using Her Majesty, and the Queen to refer to her. When I first read those terms, my thoughts leapt immediately to the Queen of England. After all, when one speaks of the Queen in English, there really is only one. Moreover, if we are to be true to English convention, this "queen" or Jordan is really nothing more than a princess consort. Such ludicrous ballooning of one's status is near-heretical.
Royalty in our age of equal rights and dubious election strategies has little place to exist and breathe. Even though being born to a King no longer means a mandatory education in leadership and governing, the media is still fixated on you and your every action, as being representative of your culture and country.
With the French, they committed mass regicide, so no problems there (since the dead don't speak), but with England and Japan, they're trapped in glass castles. Personally, I think they should all go into witness protection programs. Go back to being normal people, and then the only people who get media attention are those who work for it -- fools, idiots, and actors.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Medieval Mediocrity
I'm not sure if I've mentioned this here before, but I guess I'll do so now in depth. In my spare time these past few weeks, I've been transcribing an 18th-century Japanese text into modern Japanese. Specifically, the Tale of Moonlight and Rain (雨月物語; Ugetsu Monogatari). I'm pretty sure it's an original, or at least, one of the original copies, given both the grammar and the calligraphy. (ie, it was entirely brush-written; not typed or printed. On traditional rice-paper, and bound by string.)
Actually, my family has a few of those kind of books too from pre-communist China, in my grandmother's collection. It would probably explain my relative aptitude for Asian calligraphy, given my virtually non-existent exposure to Asian society.
Anyway, I first chanced upon Ugetsu while browsing through the Waseda online database of classics. I was attracted by the poetic title, and therefore knew NOTHING about its contents. So, I started blindly transcribing what could have been anything from a dull diary of daily drudgeries to an erotic fantasy. Like all classical compositions, the opening was straight-forward, stating the location of the tale. "In country X, in the city of Y, lived a man named K."
Orthographically, the text was fascinating, as it gave me an accurate depiction of how Japanese looked like 300 years ago. Of course, since it was only one sample, it would be impossible for me to distinguish between characteristics of the writing system in general, and the characteristics of the author's personal penmanship. So, I went back to the database and dug up the other two big classics in Japanese literature: the Tale of Genji, and the Tale of the Heike.
Sure enough, the penmanship styles were different enough that I couldn't read them with the same ease that I had acquired to read Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu. So now I had my rough sample set. But one thing I noticed was that looking at the page as a whole had a different aesthetic value than looking at each character individually.
Which, oddly enough, is pretty similar to my own handwriting, when I write in English. I'll look at a page of my writing and think, "yah, it's neat enough," but when I actually come and edit my own text, I find that individual letters or words look off or wrong. Very strange.
Anyway, what I personally found fascinating was the lack of standard for spelling. It'd be tough to find an English example, but let's say that at one point in history, English was contesting between the older, Latin letters versus the newer reformed letters. Then some writers would appreciate the aesthetic value of certain letters in each set, and combine them in some way. That's sorta basically what I was looking at in Ugetsu; there would be two or three (sometimes more) distinct variants of the same character. In other cases, there was no evidence of the modern letter at all; only the older variant seemed to be in use.
Actually, a good example would be the letters I and J in English, as well as U, V, and W. (I and J came from the same letter, as did U, V and W.) So in older English texts, sometimes it's more useful to substitute the J with an I, or vice versa (eg. the word "jmagery" would really be "imagery". Or "wniuersity" for "university".) The difference here, is that all these letters exist in English now, whereas the hiragana variants simply disappeared in Japanese.
Imagine how much fun we could have if English had two or three alternatives to the already existent 26 standard letters?? (Come to think of it, I suppose technically we could treat minuscule and majuscule letters as being variants of the same letter, and it's only by convention that write majuscules larger... hrmm...)
But so far, I haven't been able to discern any pattern concerning the choice of one hiragana varient over another. Maybe it's purely random/aesthetic, but maybe not...
It's no small wonder that people were slower on the uptake to literacy back then, with their uneven and standardless writing system...
Actually, my family has a few of those kind of books too from pre-communist China, in my grandmother's collection. It would probably explain my relative aptitude for Asian calligraphy, given my virtually non-existent exposure to Asian society.
Anyway, I first chanced upon Ugetsu while browsing through the Waseda online database of classics. I was attracted by the poetic title, and therefore knew NOTHING about its contents. So, I started blindly transcribing what could have been anything from a dull diary of daily drudgeries to an erotic fantasy. Like all classical compositions, the opening was straight-forward, stating the location of the tale. "In country X, in the city of Y, lived a man named K."
Orthographically, the text was fascinating, as it gave me an accurate depiction of how Japanese looked like 300 years ago. Of course, since it was only one sample, it would be impossible for me to distinguish between characteristics of the writing system in general, and the characteristics of the author's personal penmanship. So, I went back to the database and dug up the other two big classics in Japanese literature: the Tale of Genji, and the Tale of the Heike.
Sure enough, the penmanship styles were different enough that I couldn't read them with the same ease that I had acquired to read Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu. So now I had my rough sample set. But one thing I noticed was that looking at the page as a whole had a different aesthetic value than looking at each character individually.
Which, oddly enough, is pretty similar to my own handwriting, when I write in English. I'll look at a page of my writing and think, "yah, it's neat enough," but when I actually come and edit my own text, I find that individual letters or words look off or wrong. Very strange.
Anyway, what I personally found fascinating was the lack of standard for spelling. It'd be tough to find an English example, but let's say that at one point in history, English was contesting between the older, Latin letters versus the newer reformed letters. Then some writers would appreciate the aesthetic value of certain letters in each set, and combine them in some way. That's sorta basically what I was looking at in Ugetsu; there would be two or three (sometimes more) distinct variants of the same character. In other cases, there was no evidence of the modern letter at all; only the older variant seemed to be in use.
Actually, a good example would be the letters I and J in English, as well as U, V, and W. (I and J came from the same letter, as did U, V and W.) So in older English texts, sometimes it's more useful to substitute the J with an I, or vice versa (eg. the word "jmagery" would really be "imagery". Or "wniuersity" for "university".) The difference here, is that all these letters exist in English now, whereas the hiragana variants simply disappeared in Japanese.
Imagine how much fun we could have if English had two or three alternatives to the already existent 26 standard letters?? (Come to think of it, I suppose technically we could treat minuscule and majuscule letters as being variants of the same letter, and it's only by convention that write majuscules larger... hrmm...)
But so far, I haven't been able to discern any pattern concerning the choice of one hiragana varient over another. Maybe it's purely random/aesthetic, but maybe not...
It's no small wonder that people were slower on the uptake to literacy back then, with their uneven and standardless writing system...
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Lyrical Language
A while back I went through a sort of Children's Classics marathon, which included an entire set of Disney films, from Sleepy Beauty to Aladdin. I also saw the original animated film, Charlotte's Web, in which Wilbur sings a song, celebrating his new-found ability to talk. The best was in this verse:
C: "Who dares disturb my slumber?"
A: "It is I, Aladdin."
Notice that it isn't "it is me, Aladdin". Here, the copular principle is preserved; both sides of the verb are in nominative form.
Also, consider the traditional opening and closing forms:
Another interesting point is the significance of rhyme. When I was seven, and still imperfect in English, I misunderstood (or misremembered) my teacher, giving me the impression that poets were a rare, foreign race of people, whose language always rhymed. I thought it'd be cool if I could become one of these "poets", which obviously didn't happen. For the first few days after I heard my teacher, I would consciously try to speak in rhyme. It was really hard work.
But my personal linguistic struggles aside, rhyme is an extremely strong literary device used in children's literature, and indeed, a lot of older literature. I'm sure a lot of it was appended to the mysticism of symmetry and evenness of lines, but in any case, the intentional pattern of random sounds would draw attention to the listener. For this reason, dialogue in German Märchen was always in rhyme, even if the rest of the narrative was blank prose. (I think this tradition was preserved to some degree in English literature, but I lack the resources to verify the claim.)
Rhyming, as a literary device, obviously fails in SOV languages, since every sentence would rhyme, given the same tense, as all sentences would end with verbs. Japanese poetry, for example, has no appreciable notion of rhyming. But all PIE languages have some rhyming tradition in their literature, as does Chinese, being more-or-less SVO languages. as far as "structured" poetry goes, I'm only aware of the haiku and the tanka. as for Chinese, they basically had a ABXB rhyming scheme, where A could rhyme with B, but wasn't necessary (and X was anything else).
Some more interesting facts about rhyme: the phrase rhyme or reason dates back from the mid-late 1600's. Maybe because at the time, people would often spread easy rhymes to help spread royal rumor, or rile revolution, but there wasn't one foreshadowing Charles II reclaimation of the throne from Cromwell's cold, clammy claws. (Historical example: "When Adam delved and Eve span/ Who was then a gentleman?" which eventually led to the Peasant revolt in 1381.) In any case, that phrase is really, really old, and generally avoided. Whenever I hear a person use it more than once in the same day, I wonder if they've been reading a vocab-building book.
Frank H. Vizetelly, in his book Essentials of English Speech and Literature, consistently spells "rhyme" as "rime", explaining it thusly:
I pop with perspicacityApparently, Wilbur isn't alone in teaching young children difficult words. Consider this classic from Merlin's aquatic lesson in 1963:
I'm loaded with loquacity
My vocalized veracity is tops
Semantically each bit of me's
The verbalized epitome
My plethory of patter never stops!
You must set your sights upon the heightsBut as far as linguists and Children's literature buffs are concerned, this is nothing new. For some strange reason, there is a strong tendency for children's literature to preserve more antiquated aspects of language than contemporary novels. Thus:
Don't be a mediocrity
Don't just wait and trust to fate
And say, "That's how it's meant to be."
It's up to you how far you go
If you don't try you'll never know
And so my lad as I've explained
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
C: "Who dares disturb my slumber?"
A: "It is I, Aladdin."
Notice that it isn't "it is me, Aladdin". Here, the copular principle is preserved; both sides of the verb are in nominative form.
Also, consider the traditional opening and closing forms:
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived ...instead of
... . And they lived happily ever after.
... lived in a foreign country, a long time ago.Supposedly, there's some principle somewhere that states that languages whose objects follow their verbs, would also have a stronger tendency for their adjectives to follow their nouns, which makes English a glaring exception. And yet, we can see "a land far away" somehow sounds more classical than "a far away land". Also consider: "The Brothers Grimm" versus "the Grimm Brothers"; "the extraordinary man" v. "the man extraodinaire". Perhaps this is history and grammatical regularity preserved in the innocent tomes of fiction for children. Too bad they forget it all as soon as they enter formal education.
... And they were happy for the rest of their lives.
Another interesting point is the significance of rhyme. When I was seven, and still imperfect in English, I misunderstood (or misremembered) my teacher, giving me the impression that poets were a rare, foreign race of people, whose language always rhymed. I thought it'd be cool if I could become one of these "poets", which obviously didn't happen. For the first few days after I heard my teacher, I would consciously try to speak in rhyme. It was really hard work.
But my personal linguistic struggles aside, rhyme is an extremely strong literary device used in children's literature, and indeed, a lot of older literature. I'm sure a lot of it was appended to the mysticism of symmetry and evenness of lines, but in any case, the intentional pattern of random sounds would draw attention to the listener. For this reason, dialogue in German Märchen was always in rhyme, even if the rest of the narrative was blank prose. (I think this tradition was preserved to some degree in English literature, but I lack the resources to verify the claim.)
Rhyming, as a literary device, obviously fails in SOV languages, since every sentence would rhyme, given the same tense, as all sentences would end with verbs. Japanese poetry, for example, has no appreciable notion of rhyming. But all PIE languages have some rhyming tradition in their literature, as does Chinese, being more-or-less SVO languages. as far as "structured" poetry goes, I'm only aware of the haiku and the tanka. as for Chinese, they basically had a ABXB rhyming scheme, where A could rhyme with B, but wasn't necessary (and X was anything else).
Some more interesting facts about rhyme: the phrase rhyme or reason dates back from the mid-late 1600's. Maybe because at the time, people would often spread easy rhymes to help spread royal rumor, or rile revolution, but there wasn't one foreshadowing Charles II reclaimation of the throne from Cromwell's cold, clammy claws. (Historical example: "When Adam delved and Eve span/ Who was then a gentleman?" which eventually led to the Peasant revolt in 1381.) In any case, that phrase is really, really old, and generally avoided. Whenever I hear a person use it more than once in the same day, I wonder if they've been reading a vocab-building book.
Frank H. Vizetelly, in his book Essentials of English Speech and Literature, consistently spells "rhyme" as "rime", explaining it thusly:
The spelling rhyme, although commoner in literature than the older rime, is etymologically incorrect, having been introduced in the sixteenth century through a mistaken connection with rhythm. The use of the older spelling has now been revived by many writers.This was published in 1915. Sorry, Franko, nobody listened; Rhyme is here to stay.
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