just to keep from being thrown to the wolves

[walkingshadow]

Another reason Geoffrey Pullum is my hero:

The story about Irish lacking particles meaning "yes" and "no" is true, by the way. But it has nothing to do with the Irish mind or spirit or way of looking at the world or the notion of neither agreeing nor disagreeing. In Irish you repeat the verb of someone's clause to agree with it (as if someone said "Got milk?" and the way you gave an affirmative response was to say "Got"), and you repeat their verb with the negation particle in front to deny it ("Not got"). But the same is true of Chinese. Anyone want to suggest that the Chinese have exactly the same cultural propensities and outlook on life as the Irish? More bullshit about language and thought.

Here's some advice. Whenever you hear someone starting to say something that begins with "The X have no word for Y", or "The X have N different words for Y", never listen to them, and always check your wallet to make sure it's still there.

Pullum is the author of The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language, a book that has been on my reading list for something like three years.

Last night on our Entertainment Weekly scavenger hunt, Jules and I ran into A., a high school friend we bump into every year or so. We caught up and exchanged stories and she invited us to today's meeting of the Russian Club, where there would be, she promised, lots of free Russian food. I rolled out of bed at about 1:30 and Jules stuck her head in my doorway an hour later asking if I wanted to go; it's a good thing she did, as I had forgotten completely. I threw on some clothes and we took ourselves off to the lovely ballroom in Dauer Hall, where we'd missed the dancing and the singing, but the buffet (however picked-over) was delicious and indeed free. There was someone fooling around on the piano, and somebody broke out an accordion in the forty-five minutes or so that we were there, lounging on a sofa and talking with A. about ESOL and high school reunions.

It's something like 78 degrees out and sunny—very, very sunny. Jules drove off to work and I called silentfire on the walk home. She actually answered the phone, and we were actually on the phone with each other at the same time, so be alert for falling pieces of the sky.

Right now there is no rain at Indian Wells and there's tennis on the teevee. Pre-match analysis:

Cliff Drysdale: And Federer, is he vulnerable in any way that you can see?
Patrick McEnroe: Uh, no.

Comments

[casirafics.livejournal.com]

The X have no word for Y", or "The X have N different words for Y", never listen to them, and always check your wallet to make sure it's still there.

Oh, totally true.

I do get fascinated by words in certain languages that have no direct equivalent in English -- something like schadenfreude, for instance. I don't necessarily take them as any kind of deep-seated cultural comparison, but they do interest me, partially because they're often so useful. ;)

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

I do get fascinated by words in certain languages that have no direct equivalent in English -- something like schadenfreude, for instance. I don't necessarily take them as any kind of deep-seated cultural comparison, but they do interest me, partially because they're often so useful. ;)

They so often are! You can tell because English has absolutely no shame about yoinking cool words from other languages and adopting them for its own purposes. ;) I don't think anyone will try to argue that you can't make cultural comparisons based on cultures' respective languages, but the big problem is when those comparisons are made by people who haven't done any actual research into the language or the culture—and boom, unfounded myths are perpetuated and the baby Geoffrey Pullum cries.