NaNoWriMo – Okay!

Posted on November 1, 2010 by achouston

This is National Novel Writing Month, a free-for-all invitation for all and any writers (that includes you, people!)  to write a complete novel in the thirty days of November. It must be 50,000 words in length (at least) to qualify as completing the challenge.  The idea is to get writers to sit down and write lots. Let’s face it though, writing that many words that fast is not likely to produce polished prose, and the story lines may not be so well-researched or crafted, but it hopefully blasts away writer’s block and gets the juices flowing. 🙂

I’m not officially entering this contest, mostly because I don’t want to sit in isolation for thirty days and write something at this pace, then throw it over the fence. Instead, I’ve decided to give it a go on my own in the following way: I’ll post a new, ongoing novel I’ve just started writing as of this morning, (November 1), and I’ll post an installment every day for the next 30 days. If  life intrudes on this effort and I can’t post something on some day, I’ll post two installments the next. You get the picture.

The novel is called Vamp.  First installment today.

Posted in storytelling, writing | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Stories: Up, Down and Sideways

Posted on October 29, 2010 by achouston

When seeking advice on the craft of writing a story, whether screenplay, novel or other form, most experts will tell you that you must write the back story of your characters. These back stories are pages of descriptive narrative, detailing where the character came from, what happened prior to the actual story’s beginning. It’s an exercise intended to deepen the writer’s understanding of who their characters are, what makes them tick. At some point, a back story with enough detail and plot structure becomes a prequel.

I wrote back stories for all my characters in Blind Tasting, but I found myself even more interested in what they would do next, where their actions and choices in the current story would lead them. The set of forward stories is nearly a sequel at this point.

The ease of editing an e-book, especially a self-published one, leads to the possibility that the story is never completely finished, the concept of an edition can become blurred when an author can upload hundreds of such adjusted renderings of the tale. Does such activity dampen the dramatic force of the story? Even fictional writing from decades ago experimented with versions of non-linear story-telling, offering readers different orderings of chapters and pages in which to read the story, such as Julio Cortázar’s novel Rayuela (Hopscotch).

Today, story-tellers have the full force of multimedia resources at hand; this isn’t limited to selling merchandise related to a successful movie or novel, but includes expanding the original story through additional media. Successful computer games lead to creating journals and novels about the characters in the game which provide information about the characters and world not explained elsewhere. This strategy is also used with certain popular films and novels.

Great stories create whole worlds for a reader/listener/watcher/player to explore and buy into. At some point in our past, the state of technology provided storytellers with only a spoken performance channel in which to deliver their story to an audience. That imposed a linearity to the telling, but also lent itself to a clear dramatic arc in the structure of the story. The technology of writing expanded the structural possibilities of storytellers beyond immediate performance. Today,  the structural choices available to a storyteller are enormous due to the diversity of digital technologies now in existence. It seems natural to use all of these to deepen a story, to give an appreciative audience more ways to dwell in the author’s fictional universe.

But, will the interesting and central structural pieces of stories survive this much fluidity and unboundedness? How do the notions of inciting incident, conflict and resolution work in the new settings.  Are they as relevant as before with a single channel? Will the film or the novel (or computer game) as we currently know and experience these art forms survive, or will they evolve beyond recognition to new venues of entertaining communication? Will we always want stories?

Posted in ebooks, self-publishing, storytelling, writing | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

S Spotting

Posted on October 21, 2010 by achouston

Somewhere you’ve probably read or heard the colloquial version of expect, as when cowpokes say ‘I ‘spect it’s goin’ to rain’.  I’ve been hearing and reading (tweets on Twitter) other examples of this phonological reduction:

  • I ate so much chocolate I was about to ‘splode (explode)
  • I like car crashes and ‘splosions in action films. (explosions)
  • He ‘spresses himself pretty bluntly. (expresses)
  • Can you ‘splain it to me in simple English? (explain)

But what about these?

  • I’ve lowered my ‘spectations. (expectations)
  • We ‘splored the shops downtown. (explored)
  • The rules aren’t ‘splicit about it. (explicit)
  • The coupon already ‘spired. (expired)

Does the reduction work for the other voiceless stops, t, k, in the environment of ex-?

  • We had termites and had to ‘sterminate them. (exterminate)
  • “What a cute puppy!” she ‘sclaimed.  (exclaimed)
  • They have ‘stended the deadline another week. (extended)
  • No more ‘scuses.  (excuses)

The generalization to t and k doesn’t work too well for my intuitions, but maybe it’s just from a lack of  ‘sposure to such examples? 🙂

Posted in language change, language variation, pronunciation | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

What’s in a Name’s Ending?

Posted on October 15, 2010 by achouston

Have you ever wondered why we say Californian and Bostonian, but then say New Yorker, Londoner and Midwesterner? A friend recently used the term Kendallites to refer to habitues of Kendall Square, Cambridge MA. I understood perfectly what he meant and it sounded just right, certainly better than Kendallers or Kendellians. But why? After all, we use a derivation of the medieval Latin word cantabrigia to refer to the people of Cambridge — Cantabrigians!  (Note: would the purists among us prefer Grontabriccians? 🙂 The Cam River in England had a Celtic name ‘Granta’ which was changed to Latin ‘Canta’ and then through Norman influence became ‘Cam’.)

Well, there are certainly other -ites: socialite, suburbanite, ruralite. Ruralite? Probably not, just thought I’d sneak it in. 🙂  There is also townie for a class of urban dweller, not townite or townian. What’s right, is it Nob Hillers or Nob Hillians or Nob Hillites? I kind of like Nob Hillies, actually.  What are the odds you could persuade (consciously or unconsciously) people around you to say northernites and southernites, instead of northerners and southerners?  Language has its own momentum, like that of a fourteen-ton sea vessel. One person pushing against its side may not have much effect. And yet, slowly, inevitably, it does change course.

Posted in names, Word Formation | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Social Network: Some Thoughts

Posted on October 7, 2010 by achouston

I finally saw the new film, The Social Network, last night. It’s not a film predominately about language, but there are a few points to make about language in regard to the movie. First, I was deeply impressed, as were so many others apparently, by Jessie Eisenberg’s performance as Mark Zuckerberg.  I don’t know whether Eisenberg’s performance portrayed Zuckerberg’s personality accurately or not (I know very little about Zuckerberg as an individual), but Eisenberg brilliantly portrayed the traits of a highly intelligent, emotionally fragile, obsessively-driven, socially-inept person. I think he was able to achieve this to a large extent by how he used his voice: his rapid-fire prosody and his quick, contemptuous intonations, coupled with a confident command and articulation of multi-syllable words. It’s not the sort of linguistic tour de force we see frequently in American films. One of my personal peeves in the acting of many American actors (there are shining exceptions) is their lack of using their voice as a tool to shape their character. I would have to say that even if you find actors such as Tom Cruise, Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts and Leonardo DiCaprio engaging in films, their voices, their intonation and pronunciation are pretty much exactly how these people sound in real life. And they sound and talk essentially the same way in all films. Meryl Streep is a striking counterexample to this trend, but there aren’t many others. Given how much voice and language convey about an individual, it’s surprising more attention isn’t paid to it. But, I think the linguistic craft exhibited by Jessie Eisenberg payed off — big time.

If there was a geek message in this film, I didn’t really get it. The obsessive passion driving the protagonist seemed to be personal power, not discovery of how the world works — a hallmark of real geeks. He had enough technical talent to build a web application, but it was just a technical means to a social end, he came across as sort of an Internet impresario, not a wizard, a guy who never wanted the party to end, only to get bigger. His curiosity was too circumscribed, too power-centric, to convey the joyful intellectual play that geeks are usually associated with. That’s my two cents on the film’s theme.

But, an important question to ponder in this age of Facebook and Twitter, and the burgeoning world of social media apps, is whether and how these abilities to maintain communications among individuals and groups will impact future linguistic change. In past millennia humans did not travel and communicate to the extent which they now are; the conditions for communities to become physically and linguistically isolated from each other, of having only limited contact for prolonged periods, was much greater than nowadays. The lack of roads used to be a barrier to communication, but there are now cell towers even without roads, and people are communicating. Furthermore, unlike the 20th-century broadcast models (which passively provide standard linguistic forms to wide audiences), modern social media is interactive, more in line with speaking and writing than with passive listening (as in broadcast). Will all this interaction mean that, in three or four hundred years, we will not have branching separate dialects to compare from an earlier root form, but instead the data will show fairly constant waves of borrowings back and forth among speech communities.? Will it be possible to construct a branching tree of related languages/dialects or will it look more like a network?

Posted in Internet, language and social media, language change | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

New Language Discovered in Himalayan Foothills

Posted on October 5, 2010 by achouston

The Wall Street Journal reported today on the findings of a 2008 linguistic expedition to Arunachal Pradesh, the most northeastern state of India. In a mountainous region already populated with a plethora of other spoken tongues, researches claim to have linguistic evidence of yet a wholly new language called Koro. If true, it’s an astonishing discovery — and bittersweet. Like so many other languages of the world, Koro is likely endangered; the younger members of this speech community are learning more standard languages in school (Hindi and English) and are not speaking Koro in their villages. The Journal article states there are about 800 living speakers of Koro.

Koro has been identified as a member of the Tibeto-Burman subgroup of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It does not exist in a written form, but presumably the linguists who have made the recordings of Koro speakers have transcribed these. The linguistic details of Koro are to appear in an upcoming volume of the journal Indian Linguistics. There will also be an online dictionary of the language available at some point.  If you go to the WSJ article (the link above) there are several audio recordings of basic sentences in Koro — it’s interesting to hear them. The recordings and research were conducted as part of National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project.

It has been estimated that within this century as many as half the 6,909 known human languages will become extinct; many of them exist in isolated, small speech communities. The topics of language birth and language death will be the subject of a future post.

Posted in language typology, speech communities | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Word Jumbles #9

Posted on October 5, 2010 by achouston

  • BLARSMEB
  • SHOOTLEST
  • YESVUR
  • LUCERALL
  • AFECIDE

Correction: Fifth jumble should be:  IFECIDE

Solutions posted tomorrow on Answers page.

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Sweet as Sugar

Posted on September 30, 2010 by achouston

My sister Alexandra reports that her linguist friend once told her that, of the two dozen languages he knew, the word for sugar appears to have the same root in all of them. Here are the terms for sugar in a number of languages, not all of them in direct lineage with each other.

  • sharkara (Sanskrit)
  • shakar (Persian)
  • sukkar (Arabic)
  • succarum (Middle Latin)
  • zucre (Old French)
  • zucherro (Italian)
  • azucar (Spanish)
  • zucura (Old High German)
  • Zucker (German)
  • sakhar (Russian)
  • cukier (Polish)
  • cukar (Serbian)

Interestingly, the Sanskrit word’s original meaning (grit, gravel) is a cognate with the  Greek word kroke (pebble).  Varieties of sugarcane grew in both India and New Guinea in antiquity, but it was not in widespread use as a sweetener — honey was far more prevalent. In India a method of drying the sugarcane into crystallized form was developed and the technique spread to China. Apparently sugar was enjoyed by Alexander the Great and his entourage in India as ‘honey without bees’. The Arabs adopted the technique of crystallization, expanding its production significantly and the ‘sweet salt’ spread throughout the Arab Empire, to east Africa and the Iberian peninsula of Spain. The Crusades resulted in widespread use of sugar throughout Europe. Sugar probably reached England through Italian merchants; the city-state of Venice set up production of sugar in Tyre villages. One account of how sugarcane first reached the New World is that Christopher Columbus, stopping to provision his ships in the Canary Islands, had a romantic liaison with the governor there, Beatriz de Bobadilla y Ossorio, and she gave him cane cuttings which he then transported across the Atlantic to the Caribbean islands. The introduction of sugar to the New World led to the famous (or infamous) ‘Triangle Trade’ of transporting sugar from the West Indies to the distilleries of New England which then exported rum to the west coast of Africa and, in turn, transported slaves back to the West Indies to cultivate the sugarcane.

The words for sugar seem to follow the pattern of dissemination of sugarcane and its cultivation, from Sanskrit to Arabic and Persian, then to western European languages, the linguistics reflecting the economic importance of the substance. It would be interesting to know when the term for sugar was first attested in each of the languages cited above.

As a final note, the striped fabric known as seersucker, a textile from India, came into English via Hindi’s sirsakar, which itself was a borrowing from Persian shirashakar (literal meaning — milk and sugar). The textile adopted the Persian name figuratively, but of course, the Persian name for the fabric utilized a word that came originally from the Sanskrit word for sugar, sharkara.

Posted in etymology, social context of language, word borrowing | 2 Comments

Word Relics

Posted on September 29, 2010 by achouston

Today’s word of the day is fortnight. When I first heard this word as a kid, I immediately concluded it had something to do with forts and battlements, some length of time during which soldiers of kings did something or other. Then, too, when I was about four, I thought the word nightmare referred to white female horses running in the dark. Not such a bad image, is it? 🙂

A while ago, I walked through my town center taking my dog for his morning walk. We met up with a casual acquaintance, an octogenarian whom we regularly encountered on our walks, and who enjoyed petting my dog. That morning, this gentleman stopped in front of a stone structure filled with flowers (it was summertime) and pointed it out to me. I had noticed it many times on my walks over the years, an attractive bit of masonry to pretty up the town with flowers planted and maintained by local gardening groups. All true. But, my older friend said it was originally a water trough for horses, and when he was a kid, he remembered the milk wagons and coal wagons — still horse-drawn then — stopping there to let the animals have a drink. I suddenly saw the ‘stone flower planter’ in a new light — I could now perceive the original function of the stonework quite easily, and how it handily formed a deep container in which to plant flowers, now that horses no longer needed to stop there on hot days for water.

It’s often a similar experience to seeing the horse trough, when you look at the etymology, the earlier senses and constructions of words in common use today. We take their structures for granted, taking the current meaning at face value. When you stop and wonder, however, why a word contains the combined parts it has, e.g., fortnight, there is often an interesting story there. Words carry their histories with them through the passage of time, not unlike artifacts around us that at one time served one purpose, then a different one. Understanding the word’s story can often make its form seem less arbitrary, one can appreciate how it conformed to patterns and principles now buried beneath new paradigms and rules.

Posted in etymology, history of language, word meaning | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Folk Numbers

Posted on September 28, 2010 by achouston

Mathematics is the most rigorous branch of knowledge. But leave it to people — and language — to make even maths folksy. (Maths is the British informal term for mathematics. Isn’t it nice? It preserves the final ‘s’, unlike the American short form, math.) Certainly languages provide names for rigorous, card-carrying numbers like the cardinals, e.g., million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, and so on. But look who snuck in there as well: zillion, gazillion, bazillion and probably a few others. Why a zillion? Why not a pillion? And is there a rough ordering of size going on, or not? Is a bazillion bucks more than a gazillion? They’re probably both bigger than a zillion, but is that just “prefix prejudice” entering the picture here? 🙂

We also have the precise quantities for groups: pair, sextet, dozen, score. And even when things get vaguer, some of the terms still maintain an air of numeral dignity: multitude, numerous, plenitude, abundance, profusion. Then it gets casual fast: lots, bunches, scads and oodles. So, can oodles of dollars be more than a bazillion dollars?

Bazillion and its ilk are phony cardinal numbers (they also have their fake ordinal cousins, as in bazillionth, gazillionth, etc. “I’ve told you for the gazillionth time to save your files!”), whereas oodles and scads are slangy quantifiers, which most languages possess, well, scads of.

Posted in word meaning, word play | Tagged , , | 1 Comment