Order of Names and Titles

While working on an article about the Ottoman Empire for Popular Anthropology Magazine, I became fascinated with by the creativity of the various Sultans' titles and appellations.  There's Selim the Grim, Suleiman the Magnificent, Mehmet the Conqueror, and Beyazit the Lightning-bolt. It's either the most colorfully named royal dynasty or the greatest Wrestlemania card ever.

I wonder then, if it was boredom or megalomania that left European history full of “so-and-so the Greats.” Or if the long lines of Kings with the same name came from handing the kingdom off to the firstborn son over and over. I mean, after the 17^th or 18^th Louis, I can't keep any of them straight. I'll bet the historians have some explanation for this, but at the moment I don't know any to ask.

What is interesting to me is the orderof names and titles. Or, to be more specific, whether or not the order of a name and title matches up with the order of anything else in the language. 

Direct object Verb	Verb Direct object
Turkish Mehmet Bey Japanese Kitagawa San	English Mr. Smith Spanish Señor Lopez

I have no doubt that there are counter examples (in Turkish, for instance, political titles like "Prime minister" precede the name instead of following them), and I wouldn't expect anything other than a statistical correlation, if that.

That there should be some correspondences between these two seemingly unrelated aspects of language is not as surprising as you might think. Linguists have found correspondences between the verb-object order of a language and many other aspects of grammar. (Which, for those of you who remember our LiCTLe of the Month for Hixkaryana, explains the obsession that many linguists have developed for the Basic Word Order of sentences).

Titles, however, are more culturally conditioned than things like verb-object or noun-adjective order and probably more likely to be influenced by whatever the head honcho a few kingdoms over decided to call himself. Still, if one wanted to look into this... I would probably head over to the world atlas of linguistic features and cross index verb-object order and the name-title order for a very large number of languages, adjusting for areal effects.  Does anyone out there  know any place to find data about name-title order?

Politeness, Respect and Familiarity

In his 1987 dissertation on the grammar of Acehnese, Abdul Gani Asyik makes a very interesting point regarding that language's 'polite' pronouns that is worth reproducing here:

The term 'familiar' for Acehnese is misleading. This term is appropriate for English and many other Indo-European languages. In these languages,'familiar' has a positive sense, something preferred in a certain situation. When two persons have become close friends, they will use familiar terms towards each other, they will call each other by his first name. In a language that distinguishes between familiar and polite form of pronouns, such as French £a and vous. the familiar form is used in such a situation. It indicates closeness and friendliness.

On the other hand, the Acehnese kah and jih are words for insult that can start a fight if used to older persons or respected young persons, such as a teacher. These pronouns are only good when used by grown up persons to children, or by children among themselves. Even among children these words are used carefully. A small boy cannot use kah or lih to a big boy, unless he is a real bully. Children use these pronouns to each other if they are more or less of the same age. Some young men who have grown up together and have used these words since their childhood may continue to use them as long as they are still young and unmarried. As soon as a young man gets married, or gets a respected job or a respected position in the community, his friends cannot used [sic] kah or jih anymore to him.

So, the level of politeness in Acehnese pronouns has to do with age and respect, kah and jih are used based on age and respect. Therefore, these pronouns cannot be termed as 'familiar.'

I like the contrast he draws between the familiar T/V distinction (like, say, tu and vous in French) and the Acehnese system.  In both, a particular part of social interactions is made grammatical, but it is important not to assume that it is the same one.  So-'familiar' pronouns like Spanish "tu," or Turkish "sen" are used among family members and even between students and teachers when a sense of solidarity and friendship is meant to be conveyed.  (My Turkish hoca, Didar told us not to use the 'formal'  pronoun "siz" with her because it "make me feel old"!)

The Achenese 'respectful' pronouns, however, remind me of the situation in another Turkic language, Uzbek. Our teacher Malik aka told us that he must address colleagues even only a few days older than him with the respectful "siz" and never "sen."  If they are younger, it is the other way around, regardless of how close in age.  These two languages use the same pronouns to grammaticalize two different social values: familiarity-formality and humility-respect.

Of course both sets of social values exist in every culture, but they need not be expressed in language.  Acehnese and Uzbek chose one, Turkish and Spanish the other.  At first glance, it seems Japanese also codes humility-respect values into its grammar, but I don't know enough about the practical usage of the language to really make a educated guess here.  Any thoughts from the Japanese experts out there? (I'm looking at you, bro...)

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The above quote was taken from Asyik, Abuld Gani "A Contextual Grammar of Acehnese Sentences" which is available online.

Pejoration

A few years ago, the Hamilton County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities removed the word "retarded" from their name.  This was accompanied by a symbolic demolition of the "R" from the MRDD sign in front of their headquarters with the intention of erasing the so-called R-word from the language.

Let's face it, we can make any word an insult.  Special Education veterans will remember when "retarded" was introduced to replace such terms as "moron," "idiot," and "imbecile."  Linguists who study the way meanings evolve refer to this kind of change as perjoration.  In this process, words with a neutral or even positive connotation acquire negative meanings.  It's hardly new.  A "villain" was once merely a farm-worker and "awful" was a good thing, full of awe.

In economics there is a principal called Gresham's Law which says that bad money drives out good.  Always push overs for a turn of phrase, linguists have coined the tongue-in-cheek Gresham's Law of Semantic Change: bad meanings drive out good.  Once a word is used as an insult, that usage will eventually beat out any other meaning.

What does this mean for those well meaning attempts to fix society's ills by changing the way we speak?  I think the punk band NOFX said it best: "soap shoved in your mouth to cleanse the mind."  Until attitudes change, you can feed a dictionary worth of euphemisms, synonyms and politically correct vocabulary into the meat grinder of prejudice without so much as slowing down the gears.

Culture Joke

A young girl watches her mother preparing a roast for dinner. Seeing how her mother carefully cut a few inches off both ends of the roast, she asked:

“Mamma, why do you cut the ends off the roast?”

“I don't know, it's what my mother always did,”

A few days later, the young girl visits her grandmother and asks:

“Grandma, why do you cut the ends off the roast?”

“I don't know, it's what my mother always did,”

Fortunately this was a family of long-lived women, so the next time the young girl saw her great-grandmother, she asked:

“Great-grandma, why do you cut the ends off the roast?”

The matriarch of the family furrowed her brows and replied:

“Why? My roasting pan was too damn small!”

I have to give credit to the businesswoman who sat next to me on my flight from JFK to Barcelona back in '04.  Upon hearing that I was an Anthropology student, she immediately smiled and told me this joke.

Culture, Symbols and Make-believe Fire Trucks

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

--C. S. Lewis

Imagination is more important than knowledge

--Albert Einstein

The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception...

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Imagination. Exercise. Green leafy vegetables. Flossing after every meal. Four things that everyone agrees are good things but few regularly practice. Despite the encouragement of artists, poets and scientists, many of us fail to take the imagination very seriously. The word “imagination” seems at odds with “seriousness,” as if they don't belong in the same sentence. I know I never thought much about the power of play in shaping our core beliefs. That is, until playing became part of my job description.

Youth Speech and Body Piercings

From the Schendo's Classics file, I bring you this selection from an actual assignment turned in for my Historical Linguistics class back while getting my MA.  In fact, that professor is indirectly responsible for the whole existence of Schendo's Bad Grammar, but please don't hold it against him.

So, I'm sitting across the bus from a young woman with a very unattractive nose stud.  Not that I have anything against facial piercings and she was cute enough, don't get me wrong- but it just didn't seem right.  Maybe it was her handbag with the bright pink hearts or the ugly boots, but it looked like the closest she'd ever been to a mosh pit was an American Eagle Outlet the day after Thanksgiving.

As a matter of fact, I pondered as the A-Bus lumbered around the corner, why does she have a facial piercing at all?  I'm not that old, but I can remember the piercing craze of the early to mid 90's. I can remember the moralistic outrage of more respectable members of society, who weren't having any of this new craze.  I can also remember everyone I knew getting their tongues pierced as soon as they turned eighteen.

Which brings me to the point (if belatedly): why have diamond nose studs made their way into the mainstream, but tongue rings disappeared like grunge music and flying toaster screen savers?

The question seems to be one of innovation and propagation of cultural practices. It seems to me that if we could understand why today a twenty year old sorority pledge thinks nothing of shoving a diamond studded piece of metal through her nasal folds, but my dread locked, tattooed friend needs to remove her tongue ring when she goes to work- we could apply such knowledge to why certain features of youth-speech survive and propagate, whereas others go the way of 'tubular', 'groovy' and 'righteous.'

(For the record, I would like to say that I have always placed the anatomical integrity of my speech organs above fashion, but that's just one linguist's opinion.)

Ayapan Zoque Speakers Stop... Speaking?

I read a BBC article a while back about the last two speakers of a dialect of Zoque living in a small village in Mexico.  Or, rather, they were the last two speakers. 

No one in the village knows why the two have 'drifted apart' and cannot point to any single dispute that may have triggered what appears to be a mutual decision. It seems they simply decided they don't have anything and common and are not talking to each other, as old men in small towns are wont to do occasionally. 

I'll spare everyone the familiar rant about endangered languages, however important that may be.  Personally, I'm curious as to what this anecdote can tell us about language death.

When has a language disappeared from the human dialog? Is it when the native intuitions of its last speakers are extinguished? Or when its unique cadence is no longer heard on the street?  Or in the home? Despite the volumes (nay, libraries) of written Latin,  dusty grammars of Old Turkic dialects and the waxy recordings of vanished Native American languages- most everyone agrees that these languages are indeed dead. You cannot ask a philological tome its opinion of a new word, nor will any new sentences in these languages be added to the corpus, unless some archaeologists dig them out of the ground. Perhaps most importantly, these tongues will not continue to change and mutate as they once did. 

Language, like a virus, is a thing which can only exist within living beings. Of course, the fact that all these living beings are humans doesn't make our job any easier. The case of the Ayapan Zoque speakers should be a reminder that in a social science the smallest unit of analysis is two people.

The Elevator Effect

You know the feeling.  You're stuck in a small confined space with a complete stranger and there's a moment of discomfort tinged with terror. Should you say hello?  How many floors do you think it would take to discuss the weather, local news, Monday Night Football scores?  Usually, we end up staring at the numbers above the door, waiting in suspense as 2 progresses to 3 and then on to 4....

Speech seems to be a stress reliever. When we're anxious or uncomfortable or forced into a confined space with a stranger, we want to talk. When we're stressful, we talk quickly and way too much, which explains the dreaded "first-date-foot-in-mouth syndrome." We talk when we want to relax, as we socialize and (as was probably even more the case hundreds of years ago) when we gather together with our friends, kin and coworkers.

Smokers know this phenomenon well, clustered around an ashtray in the snow of February, deftly carrying on multiple three to five minute conversations with people they've never met before.

Critic Accuses Vatican of Treating English Like an Altarboy

When I first came across this article about poor English grammar in the Vatican's newest translation of the Catholic Mass, I have to admit I was prepared to tee-off on the Grammar Police. With blasphemous puns dancing in my brain, I expected to find a typical rant about misplaced prepositions and other such nonsense.

I was a naturally a little disappointed to discover a surprisingly rational editorial. Accusing the Vatican of favoring strict faithfulness to the original Latin over a more natural English, the author has much more to say about the spirit of translation and the role of language in religious ceremonies.