Prentiss Riddle: Language

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I say Usama, you say Osama, let's call the whole thing Whorf

Here's a good rundown on the difficulty of romanizing Arabic for anyone who's been wondering about "Osama bin Ladin" vs. "Usama ben Laden".

Bush speaks Spanish much as he governs, "poorly but with great confidence" says the New York Times (registration required). (Via la Sirena Enigmática.)

The "Surinamese language Trio demands honesty" says this report on the Carib language properly spelled Trió, spoken by little over 1000 people in Suriname and Brazil. The description reminds me of my recollection of Benjamin Whorf's claims about Navajo, in that it has obligatory grammatical categories which indicate how the speaker knows of what he speaks. But I don't see how that prevents lying -- if anything, it might encourage more subtle forms of lying than in languages which commonly omit epistemological assertions. And then there's Trió's intriguing "frustrative ending". Perhaps the article is not really claiming a Whorfian tendency toward honesty in Trió, but rather that without a certain competence in the the language and its customary style of discourse, one's lies will be more apparent. Which is probably true in many languages. (Via Bellona Times.)

New theories of Black English are "neo-Anglicist" in that they reassert the importance of British dialect influences on blacks as well as whites in colonial America, while recognizing additional influences on blacks of African-derived creoles. That's according to a new book (see the previous link for a review) which swings the pendulum back from the "creolist hypothesis" I studied in college in sources like J.L. Dillard's 1973 Black English. Even the names have changed: "Black English" is now referred to by scholars as "African American Vernacular English" or AAVE. Or some scholars, anyway; given the beating it's received in the mainstream press I'm surprised to see the term "Ebonics" in serious use as well. (I didn't know until just now that Ebonics is a portmanteau of "ebony" and "phonics".) Can you tell the politics of a linguist by whether s/he says AAVE or Ebonics?

Supposedly Pat of ABWANTKC is at work on a linguablogs webring. All I see at this point is a test pattern. Stay tuned. Oh, and Pat did kick off an interesting discussion of language planning.

Silly trivia: "Oh my god I have an axe in my head" in 102 languages. (Via Reenhead.)

language 2002.07.12 link