h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yeah, sometimes the pronunciations aren't far from the English ones.

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I had no idea until now that Swedish was the native language of Belfast!

I heard a strory about a WWII soldier from NE Scotland who was posted to Iceland. The 'Doric' dialect from his part is heavily influenced by Norse. He was billeted on a farm and found he was able to communicate with the family.

Then again...during the 'Cod Wars' of the 1970's, the Royal Navy believed that they had managed to intercept the radio chatter from the Icelandic navy. Upon investigation it turned out to be the radios of the Peterhead fishing fleet!

I listened to some Northern Scotland dialects on the BBC dialect site some time ago and they definitely sounded more like Scandic than English to me. It was quite an eye-opener - I thought that everybody in Scotland speaks like in Hamish Macbeth!

There's yer Heeland and yer Lowland Scots. My old Ma was of the Heeland variety, but I don't know which is the majority in NZ. (Apparently, two thirds of New Zealanders are of Scottish descent.)

Ah...but the Nort East of Scotland has it's own distinct dialect, too.

In the Central Belt there's a distinct difference between the West (Glasgow) and East (Edinburgh). Edinburgh has its notorious, 'douce' Morningside accent (think Miss Jean Brodie), and in Glasgow there's miles of difference between the accents of (posh) Kelvinside and (distinctly NOT posh!) Govan. There's also the notorious 'Hutchie' accent, favoured by estate agents and originating from the Hutcheson's Academy private school. A famous example of this is TV presenter Carol Smillie.

Examples of the Govan accent, as spoken by Rab C. Nesbitt, are available here: http://www.pagan.clara.net/rab.htm

A posher Glasgow accent, that of poet and saint Ivor Cutler can be heard here: http://www.ivorcutler.org/

For a Greenock accent - try this film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313670/ Director Ken Loach took the courageous decision to subtitle it for only the first fifteen minutes - to give the audience time to adjust to the accent.

>> I listened to some Northern Scotland dialects on the BBC dialect site some time ago and they definitely sounded more like Scandic than English to me

Well, that's not surprising - the Norse had colonies on Orkney, Shetlan & Faeroes islands, and eastern England (called Danelaw or something, if i'm correct), as well as a trading center in Dublin, with which they maintained connection throughout most of the Iceland occupation. Even English has borrowed words from Norse ('skirt' & 'egg'!!), so naturally the Scots & Irish languages would be more Nordic than not.

~ db

Actually...a large part of Western Scotland was part of the Kingdom of Norway until the Battle of Largs in 1263.

I'm used to (English and Welsh) castles being Norman and Plantagenet. I was surprised when I visited Locranza, on the northern tip of Arran, to discover that its castle was Norse. Arran and Largs are both to the south of Glasgow.

Also - a large part of what is now Northern England was once part of the Kingdom of Strathclyde, with its capital in Dumbarton.

I never knew any of this before emigrating to Scotland, having been taught history from an English perspective. Hell - I was even taught that the the English Roundheads beat the Royalists!

Woo. Who are the Roundheads & the Royalists?

The two sides in the English Civil War. And I think EtB was trying to say that it was the Scots who beat the Royalists.

Noggin

Indeed. The English Parliament signed a truce, but the Scottish Covenanters captured King Charles anyway.

I'd read about the Scandinavian occupation - I was just surprised that after a thousand years the effect is still so visible (or rather, hearable).

**********

In the Yimas language of New Guinea there are three past tenses and two future tenses, namely

yesterday
up to five days ago
past five days ago

tomorrow
after tomorrow

Nice and distinct, I think.

**********

A language related to Yimas, called Murik, distinguishes four numbers in its nouns (as opposed to English singular/plural):

one (eg iran = house)
two (irambo = houses)
more than two, but less than about seven (iramoara = houses)
many, more than seven (iranmot = houses)

Very succinct and quite clever! Thanks, Aïna...

Interesting peek into the cognitive processes of these people. It seems to support my hypothesis that logic is an acquired taste, so to speak, and that the basic substrate of thought is much more fluid than hard numbers.

>> ..hypothesis that logic is an acquired taste, so to speak.. <<


It certainly is cultural.
That's why Western Civilisation is generally limited. Our logic is based on our ability to reduce so many ideas to concepts of duality or opposition such as we often observe in nature.

The old Greek notions of 'two sides to every story' and concepts of natural opposition such as 'male/female', 'light/dark', 'wet/dry' and 'hot/cold' are at the heart of our very plain geometric logic.

We even apply these rules of 'parity and polarity' to culture based values and other things of our own un-natural creation into pairs like 'good/bad', 'comedy/tragedy', 'new/old', 'rich/poor', 'long/short', 'us/them', 'manual/automatic', 'temporary/permanent'.

By doing this we have created a culture of logical 'pairs and opposites' where we simply delude ourselves that by assigning an arbitrary bi-polar division, all of our constructs will follow the same order our ancestors observed in gender-based Nature and that they must therefore be as True as day and night.

Historically this ability to see 'both sides' (aka 'double-think') has allowed us to become considerate of others, to see how another mind thinks. It allows us to love our enemies or to outsmart our enemies. It chooses the sides in war and leads us to create parliamentary democracies. It allows us to both empathise or conspire and has generally proven to be a more succesful world view than any form of single mindedness, obsession or blind faith.

And yet the predictable fact that readers are even now preparing to judge my conclusions as 'right or wrong' is proof perhaps that we are too much in love with our essentially primitive two phase logic.

Yes, it has taken us into space with principles of action/reaction and we have created cyberspace from the duality of Input and 0utput. But our thinking has become so 'two-sided' we may never be able to embrace the bulk of reality which lies outside the simplistics of ying and yang.

Know ye that reality is more like a gyroscope than a pair of repulsive magnets.


~jwf~ (passive/aggressive)

All languages make a male/female distinction in some way though. So that one would seem to be a cultural universal.

While I may be very interested in linguistics (especially psycholinguistics) I'm not terribly knowledgeable. I've heard similar comments, as you mention Aïna, and assume they must have some weigh.

However, the distinction between 2 genders is not a universal one in terms of societies. The two sexes (male and female) is present in many cultures, and biologically, is hard to refute (although Eunuchs have their place in cultural history). But gender can be conceptualised as separate (to some extent) from biology, and the two gender concept is not universally held. I think Margaret Mead (might be wrong here, need to google or check my own notes later!) did some interesting work exploring gender roles on isolated pacific islands. Some of this work has been quite criticised over there years (a tendency for Ms. Mead to only report findings she personally wanted to find, and ignore evidence to the contrary). Anyway - there was definitely one culture which has three divisions of gender. A 'typical' male role, a more 'typical' female role, and a third gender, reserved for biological males, but lacking aggressive traits, and emphasising community and co-operation. I think they usually abstained from taking partners and often had important roles in the 'running/management' for the society.

Terribly sorry for the lack of details there. The culture had a name, as did each of the distinct genders identified. I will try to search them out, I was just eager to contribute!

L.I.

Welcome to the thread, LI. Most of us aren't too knowledgeable, ahem, at least I am not. We've all got patches of knowledge we try to build a mosaic with.

I think you're right about the gender multiplicity, though. I do recall Mead writing about a similar term phenomenon: the Dobu of Samoa (?) use a term for younger sibling - although both sexes use it to refer to younger siblings of both sexes, it is used more by girls than boys and men. Most languages I know of have specific sister/brother terms.

Hia all,
I'm a newbie from the recently closed Get Writing group and hope this thread is a good omen of good discussion in this community.
Being a keen reader, though no expert, of Derrida's writings I was drawn in by the opening posts and interested to see the subsequent tracks covering terrain I think Derrida provides some interesting maps or at least sign posts for.

I take issue with the claim about
>>the largely discredited idea that our language governs our thoughts
and think there are dangers drawing such a conclusion from arguments from the anthropology of perception and numeracy mentioned by Edward and the Guardian article he refers to.

For starters, doesn't the above dispute about Inuit being the prefered term over the colonial "Eskimo", illustrate the modern awareness that the very words we use have real effects in the world, that they shape both what we think and do.

In the earlier discussion of differance I think Edward was misleading in saying Derrida's point was about 'the primacy of the written word over the spoken'. I think Derrida's "deconstruciton" of the opposition between orality and literacy was not concerned with replacing the primary terms. Rather he is revealing hierarchical structure of Western language and thinking and the way it priveleges one chain of concepts over their opposites; speech over writing, man over woman, sex over masturbation, the serious over the funny, straight talking over metaphor, white over black. So these aren't opposites of equals, but oppositions involving the forceful limiting of powers associated with the weaker term. He stressed the overturning of these hierarchies he pursued throughout his career was no quick trick, but involved the painstaking analysis of the structures of concepts keeping these hieararchies in place.

So he showed how from Socrates through to American speech act proponents, Western thinking has assumed a model of language based on communicating ideas from one mind to another. Writing is thus a bastard, inferior, secondary imitation of speech as it involves, among other inferiorities, the absence of the speaker's and even the listener’s mind. The deconstructive operation unleashes the negative attributes never completely constrained to writing, and finds that a present mind is not essential to speech, in other words speech is just another kind of writing in this new general sense.

In deconstructions like this Derrida often introduces ‘a third term’ to suggest the significance, the meanings, the power that was excluded by traditional oppositions our language and thinking. Difference is pointing that way, out away from old ways of thinking. He created it from the verb to differ, suggesting the difference that is the very fabric of language, and the way meaning is never simply present with a word but is deferred by references to other words, the temporal aspect ignored by traditional faith in transcendental meaning . His novel spelling with an ‘a‘ exposes the written nature of the word: you can’t hear any difference from the usual ’difference’. He wrote ‘Difference is neither a word nor a concept’.

I wonder how many will bother getting through that and how many will only feel confirmed in their prejudice against Derrida as obscurantist twaddle. I honestly didn’t intend such a wordy rave but I felt it worth a try to share a richer understanding of his work as almost every reference to it is ignorantly dismissive. That most certainly does not apply to Edward’s.

I suppose it’s hard stuff to get your head around and I don’t claim to, but I find reading Derrida increasingly rewarding. I strongly recommend giving a shorter text like ‘Signature, Event Context’, to anyone interested in the biggest questions about Language and Linguistics. It has certainly given me the most exhilarating experience of reading, of getting to the limits of language and the overwhelming thrilling terror of its beyond.

Anax

ps. I'm not usually like this!