Posts by Chris Waugh
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Up Front: Let's Talk About Sex, Baby, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Not something God approves of.
"God blessed them, and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply,...'" Genesis 1:28
If that's not a divine endorsement of sex, then.... I dunno, but puritanism doesn't make much sense until seen as a means for preserving social order and the power of a certain class.
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Sacha,
Russell |is writing a post about that one, he says.
Looking forward to it, because this is a plot that thickens so steadily that I suspect somebody's cornflour silo may have sprung a leak.
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Hard News: The Music for Occasions, in reply to Islander,
erm.... well, your choice of words is more than enough to explain why I didn't google it... I'd rather just leave it in Wellington in the 80s. I may well be glad there's no equivalent for the 50s.
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Does anybody else remember that Life Begins at 40 song that Lindsay Yeo used to play on 2ZB's birthday calls for those turning 40? Is there a 50 equivalent?
ETA: I've been doing this job too long... even on a summer holiday I can't switch off the impulse to correct grammar, especially my own.
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Hard News: The Music for Occasions, in reply to Paul Williams,
Dave Dobbyn’s Welcome Home
Get's me totally teared up, but for entirely non-funereal reasons. That's just perfectly the welcome I want my wife and daughter to get when we get back.
Dunno if anybody outside China will be able to see this, but here's a favourite of the kind I would like at a funeral.
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Capture: Ice Rink Luck, in reply to Lilith __,
What are those wraith-like creatures floating along under the clouds?
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Chris Waugh,
the sub-dialect of her village in the northwest of her county*. Her mother switches between and sometimes mixes the dialects of her home county (again, specific sub-dialect) and the one she married into**.
Oops, forgot a couple of little appendices:
*A county of roughly 300,000 people, but subtle differences in accent between east and west.
**She's from the neighbouring county, but the two villages are only about 15km apart. The two counties have quite distinct accents, and it's clear when she's switched fully into her home county's dialect. Then last Spring Festival I was taking a carload of people up to her home village to visit her brother. As we were passing a village right on the border, but just inside our county, the talk turned to how this border village has an accent quite distinct from either our village (7ish km to the east) and the one we were heading to (7ish km to the west). How these two counties manage to maintain such clear differences in accent and dialect given their tiny populations, the long history of intermarriage between the two, and the now near total dominance of Putonghua/Standard Mandarin I don't know. -
Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to David Hood,
Nonetheless, in the early stages of government support for the preparation of Maori language materials (in the late 1950s and 1960s) perceptions of favouritism for writers from a particular dialect area provoked intense, if relatively short-lived, resentment elsewhere.
From Language Policies in English-dominant Countries: Six Case Studies, edited by Michael L. Herriman and Barbara Burnaby page 79, found here.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Islander,
Thanks, and thanks. It'll be a few years before we get there, but as I keep telling my increasingly impatient mother, we'll be there before the wee one needs a primary school.
I thought it was only English that had this paralysing effect. Sob.
No, and it's spreading. The Manchu language is virtually dead. I read not so long ago about Mongolians in Inner Mongolia not teaching their kids Mongolian, only Putonghua, for the same absurd reason. It makes me wonder how these kids are going to cope when they grow up. And it's especially frustrating because while Mongolia (and, I presume, related peoples in Siberia) switched to Cyrillic under Communism, China has preserved the old Mongolian script.
But the news isn't all bad. Found via Omniglot. Amazing what happens when you give people their language back.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to Islander,
quite a bit was erm ‘corrected.’
grrr.... bloody prescriptivists. They've done much damage to many languages and to many people's perceptions of 'correct language'. Witness the current sorry state of France's minority languages, for example, thanks to the revolutionary fervour for enforcing Francien on the whole country.
My wife code switches between Standard Mandarin/Putonghua and her county's dialect - specifically, the sub-dialect of her village in the northwest of her county*. Her mother switches between and sometimes mixes the dialects of her home county (again, specific sub-dialect) and the one she married into**. I have a student from the same county, but a more central area closer to the county town, who tells me he speaks the dialect with his parents, but he couldn't produce any in class - perhaps the embarrassment of being surrounded by his classmates? But otherwise, it's depressing how many of my students tell me their parents only taught them Putonghua - sometimes for good reason, like the guy who grew up in Guangdong but who's father is from Hunan and mother from.... somewhere else, but far too often because China's ever more neurotic parents are so desperate to get their kids every little bit extra opportunity to get ahead and labour under the ridiculous idea that if they speak a local dialect, they won't learn good enough Putonghua and English. Kids are great little language sponges, especially in their very early years, and raising them bilingual/bidialectal does them so much good for their later life, both cognitive function and rooting them in a particular culture, tradition and identity.
Especially frustrating one day was to hear a student from Datong say her parents never taught her Datonghua. [Insert exasperated spluttering sound here] Datong is in the Jin-speaking area, and nobody can decide if Jin is a Mandarin (Beifang Guanhua, from which Putonghua/Standard Mandarin, based on the Beijing dialect, was developed) dialect or a separate Sinitic language. What we do know about Jin is it's the only set of dialects in the north or Mandarin-speaking area (which includes the southwest) to have preserved the entering tone from Middle Chinese. Entering tones are otherwise only preserved in the southeastern languages like Cantonese, Min, Gan, Hakka.
I found this, but there's no eBook available. Guess it'll have to go on the list of books to track down when we get back.