Linguistic universals

 I guess I could look up linguistic universals and find out what linguists think they might be.  Maybe negation, words for spatial and temporal relations, words for things and qualities of things. Actions. Ways of ordering words. I'm thinking the beginning and ends of utterances are going to be important. That all languages will have units or phrases.  They will have questions. 

There are other ways of asking questions in Chinese.  Putting a question word at the end like 'na li' (where?). Another one that means "what."   

There are some verbal and temporal things: zai + verb for present progressive.  Le after the verb to make it past.  

It's not like you need some universal grammar at a deep knowledge. It's more that languages have things that they want to do, and then there have mechanisms for doing those things.  So suppose negation is a thing you would expect a language to want to do.  Then you would have some words that negate, or an affix, or whatever. Then a rule for where to place the negative element. 

Tedium and bewilderment

Chinese lessons I have done already seem tedious to repeat, but beginning a new lessons seems alien. I make myself drill the old material for a long time before going on. Then I realize I don't know the characters well enough and have to spend a long time drilling those too. Some I know more from gestalt than really knowing each stroke. 

Hey, ho, hey, ho

 I remember hearing that Jesse Jackson was at Stanford leading a chant of protesters saying "hey ho hey ho / Western Civ has got to go."This was in 1987.  There is something in me that broke when that happened. I don't know hoe to describe those kind of feelings, where you feel alienated from an otherwise progressive cause. 

I know it's not as catchy a chant to say "hey, ho, hey, ho / let's diversify the syllabus a little bit mo."  

A few more things

 I do know a few more things: two words of negation, mei and bu. Where to place these words. Chang chang will be frequently, so bu chang will infrequently. zai + verb will be doing that (progressive), not doing it will be mei zai + verb. 

"My daughter is not reading the newspaper."  I know how to construct that.  

There are two other tag phrases to ask question, ni ne, and bui dubui.  How about you, and is that right? 

Wo shi is I am, shi wo, it is I. 

Language learning

 I like Chinese grammar. So far, I know some basic word order, three ways of asking questions. 

Putting ma as particle at the end. Using haishi to ask about alternatives. Putting another particle at the end to ask "what."

I know how to make a progressive: the zai  before a word. 

Plural pronouns:

Wo / women

Ni / nimen 

Ta / tamen 

I know how to express possession with de. 

Putting ba at the end makes it into "let's do something" 

There's a lot of reduplication for family members, mama, baba, yeye... 

So a basic sentence:

Now / yesterday / In the summer 

Pronoun or noun 

There are demonstrative pronouns / this / these / those 

An adverb of intensity, like "very." 

Verb 

Verb can be preceded by an auxiliary, like to, is able to, etc...  

In the summer, people extremely like to go the Korean bookstore. 

There are several elements, and a particular order they have to follow. 

***

It looks like vocabulary is the big challenge. Learning thousands of anything is difficult. There are 88 notes on the piano, so we aren't learning thousands of musical notes. Dozens of ingredients will make a lot of different culinary combinations. We don't need thousands. Syntax is more conceptually abstract than vocab, but I have no problem with abstract thought. The lexicon, with each lexical item being written in a unique and unpredictable symbol, and also difficult to hear / pronounce, is difficult.  

Reviews

 I was thinking of those amazon reviews that say "the book came in bad condition." They seem to miss the point of a book review, oriented toward the content of the book, not the condition of any particular physical book. 

(There's a funny meme about people leaving reviews of on-line recipes, where the reviewer will alter the recipe in significant ways and then complain that it did not come out well.  "I had no eggs so I substituted honey. Horrible recipe; it was too sweet and didn't have the right texture."  That kind of thing. Once again, a kind of misapprehension of the function of reviewing.

Another form of recipe comment: the recipe is a "non-recipe recipe," labelled as such, with amounts deliberately omitted. Then someone will ask in the comment for exact quantities. There are hundreds of recipes with quantified ingredients. Look for one of those rather than commenting on one of few that doesn't.)  

I guess what got me here was thinking that the physical properties of the book do not determine its effects on the reader, except in a comparatively minor way. Sure, we like nice paper or a readable type-face, or an undamaged book arriving in the mail. But the meaning of the book is in the symbolic system of its language, which cannot be reduced to its molecular structure.  Symbolic structures seem to have an autonomy, even though every step in the process is the result of purely physical actions. 

Determinism

What if some form of strong determinism were true?  That is to say, the course of events is determined by some primeval event, and everything after is a physical consequence of that.  the Big Bang determines what parking space I will choose at the grocery store; every word of Dante's Commedia, every word of every commentary on Dante, etc... This could be literally true but absurd at the same time, like a Borges story.  

***

Another way of putting it: free will might be an illusion, but we are incapable of seeing ourselves as not having free will, in that we will always distinguish between choices that seem free and actions that do not involve choice of any kind. The person who believes in free will can answer the determinist by saying that s/he (the free will believer) HAS to believe in free will, by the determinist's own logic.  

Archive III

 Things were really clicking for me, as I was thinking about the Lorca archive.  Only two of Lorca's plays were published in book form during his life time. Several were not even brought to the stage. There are also incomplete works. The sonnets, the suites, were not published until MUCH later. So Lorca's work is like an iceberg, only gradually appearing in its fullness. We are still awaiting Melissa Dinverno's edition of the Suites. 

Now, Lorca scholarship is really excellent, when before it tended to be mediocre or uneven (or sometimes just bad). This is a gradual evolution, and could not happen in a few years. 

To think, then, that with only two plays in print, Lorca was unknown as a playwright except for the people who happen to have been to his plays in person.  He was not unknown, but famous: what I mean is that his work was not particularly accessible. Only someone who had seen Yerma would have first hand knowledge of it. 

Archive II

 I remember a few years back  when people who had never been in an archive in their lives started to use that word as buzz word.  It was strangely disorienting.  An archive was a metaphor, not a material reality for them. 

Archive

 I have two books to review on the Lorca archive, both very interesting.  I coined the phrase "archival turn" today, but I think I will change it to the archive phase. 

update: there really is an archival turn; I didn't invent that. I guess there is a "turn" for everything. Every turn has its turn. 

Seriously though

 I notice university professors on Facebook parsing Charlie Kirk's statements to see if he is deserving of being assassinated.  The point is that this kind of assassination deeply harms society as a whole. It isn't really about him.  George Wallace was the vilest old school segregationist, but trying to shoot him just perpetuates the culture of violence.  

Some arguments

 1. Political assassination has never been good. Obviously, we can lament the killing of Lincoln, JFK, RFJ, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. Killing or attempting killing of right wing figures does no good. If you want to look at the killing of the José Antonio Primo de Rivera, it did nothing to stop Spanish fascism, which did not really depend on his charisma. Having him as a martyr was even more convenient for Franco than being alive as a rival. Of course, this was not a political assassination, but an execution by the Republic: all the more convenient for Franco. Arguably, the killing of Calvo Sotelo helped to cause the Spanish Civil War. Arguably, because the war would have occurred anyway. That was just the immediate spark.

2.  You don't want to pick and choose who gets to die and who gets to live. Then you get into arguments about the merits of the people who are assassinated, and not the general principle of the thing. Failed attacks on Reagan or George Wallace promote political violence in general. It has nothing to do with sympathy for Reagan or Wallace, or dislike for their politics. 

3. Generally, the classically liberal principles should be upheld. If we are against the death penalty, against gun violence, against vigilantism, in favor of freedom of speech, then let's stick to that rather than thinking that the sniper's veto is ok,---as long as we can dehumanize the victim enough.  

Values

 

"KU Wins Grant to Increase Impact of IRISE Values

KU won a nearly $700,000 grant to help raise awareness and extend the impact of KU’s IRISE Culture Charter for the Lawrence campus.  The three-year, $699,287 grant, titled “Character Development at KU: The IRISE Virtues Initiative,” from the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest University, will support KU’s efforts to bring greater awareness to the IRISE values, weave them into the fiber of the university culture and encourage KU community members to cultivate character within themselves. The grant follows a $46,040 capacity-building grant KU received last year from the Educating Character Initiative, titled “KU IRISE: Values Adoption Initiative.”   The IRISE Culture Charter was developed in 2023 to articulate five shared values — integrity, respect, innovation, stewardship and excellence — Jayhawks embody as members of the university community. A committee co-chaired by university governance and administration leaders developed the IRISE Culture Charter and values with input from KU community members.  “This latest grant will build on our initial work to develop a culture of character focused on the IRISE values as integral to the identity of being a Jayhawk,” said Nancy Snow, professor of philosophy and co-principal investigator on the grants." Somehow, I just get skeptical of this. All the values are great in and of themselves: who could be against them? But that someone is the problem.  The administration that threatens to call police on us when we are demonstrating for fair salaries is at the same time promoting these values in the abstract. It is virtue signaling with no real substance.

Language change

 Here's something: language changes because everything changes. Musical styles, clothing, beliefs, food. There is a drift in everything. I'm sure Catholics don't believe the same things as 100 years ago. There is some stability in some things, but overall human culture is not a stable system, and requires huge effort and institutional power to resist change.  

There are immense time spans, and geographical spreads. 

Language has a large number of moving parts, and hence is especially vulnerable to entropy. Phonemes, lexical items. The larger the number of variables, the more unstable the system.  Morphemics and syntax are relatively stable, in contrast to the lexicon and phonetics. I'm thinking that Shakespeare's grammar is pretty much mine, leaving out the thou conjugations. If I fail to understand Shakespeare it will be matter of lexicon, not grammar.  

If a person know 20,000 words, that person will not know 20,000 of anything else. They won't know 20,000 kinds of spices. If they do, then they will know 40,000 words. The language is more or less co-extensive with the territory.  The size of the lexicon is elastic. It can expand with more words in a particular category. There have to be more nouns than verbs, I'm thinking. 

A bad idea

 I shouldn't even have to write to explain why political assassination is a bad idea. Suppose it's the assassination of someone whose opinions are odious.  That is still a spectacularly bad idea! This is not because you have to feel sorry for the victim or the family of the victim. That has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's more of a principled thing, like: let's not do this in the first place or justify it after the fact. It's obviously easier to condemn someone who kills someone with all the right opinions, but political assassination begets more of the same. It's really not the way we want to go. Anyone who says, "but..." is quite simply wrong. 

This first part of this poem came to this morning before I got up; I don't know who "Sue" is

 I missed my moment

working in the family restaurant 

early marriage to Sue

military draft

the earthquake and the epidemic

servitude to false gods

alcoholism and worse

Maybe that's the complete poem. I know continuing it would ruin whatever it has. 

A simile

 Writing with a large language model is like sending a robot to the gym for you to lift weights. 

A sudden memory

 I remember some people in my ex-wife's department saying, oh, Lorca is not that good. It's sort of a good shock to the system. These were no brilliant people. 

Knowledge

 I'm teaching this culture course and I'm thinking about how knowledge is layered. 

On one level, there is general knowledge, what you think a well-educated person might know about, well, just basic history, geography. 

Then, if you are in the humanities, you would know what every good humanist knows. A little more about comparative religion, art history, linguistics. 

(Then there is the accidental knowledge you might have through hobbies. For example, my very limited knowledge of ornithology. My knowledge of jazz more than a Spanish professor needs.)

Then, specialized knowledge every Spanish professor knows. 

Then, say, a subspecialty within Spanish literature. A genre, a period. 

Finally, knowledge of own's own subsubspeciality, the field of one's research. 

The most relevant for the culture course is the first category, general knowledge, like knowing when the middle ages were. And then the knowledge specific to being a Hispanist. The least relevant is my specific field of research, because you want the students to remember general knowledge more than narrow questions. 

But the best thing is to put together things in a meaningful way, going back and forth between the narrow and the broad areas of knowledge. 

The other perspective

 I guess the other side would be that the names that stick with periods / movements are the ones that make some kind of sense. Mozart really does sound classical, with virtues that people associate with Neo-classical aesthetics in literature. The renaissance really does make sense to talk about a period of cultural rebirth of a particular kind. It makes sense to see baroque music and architecture  as akin to each other, and find a name for that kinship.  Reconquest makes sense in terms of later Spanish nationalism, even if Fernando and Isabel saw it as more of a "restauración." 

Classical music

"Classical" music to mean Haydn through Beethoven gets its name from the 19th Century, when there had to be a name for that to contrast with romanticism. They still probably didn't call Bach "baroque."  

Renaissance

 It's kind of interesting that people didn't know that they were living in a time called the "renaissance." The term used to refer to the period of time is 19th Century!  It was first an artistic movement, then a period of time when that artistic movement occurred, and then applied to science and other cultural things that are not artistic per se. It's historiography, the retrospective view of things, that allows us to make up these categories. I guess ren. intellectuals thought of themselves as humanists?

I think it does matter how people conceived of history while they were actually experiencing it.  We did think of ourselves as in "the space age" when we were children (we = my generation.). 

I was looking things up today

 I was wondering when the idea of a middle age occurred. It wasn't during the Middle Ages, because those people thought they were modern.  Also, when did there renaissance think of itself as a renaissance?  It turns out that the concept of medieval could only arise with the renaissance itself. But the term renaissance  wasn't even used in English until the 19th Century.  It arose in Italy first (no surprise).  Other terms like baroque are not contemporaneous with the periods in question.  Mozart didn't know he was "classical."

I still don't know when the concept of renaissance was introduced in Spain itself. We tend to use other categories, like "Golden Age." 

Modernity arose when we could conceive of a tripartite division of history.  Antiquity / Middle Ages / and Modern. Renaissance and baroque are early modern. Then we have Neo-classicism and Enlightenment, then romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism.  

More foreignizing

I guess, too, it isn't clear how much "foreignizing" is enough.  It would seem like you would introduce some elements that make a translation sound a bit unnatural.  But wouldn't a little of it go a long way? In other words, it cannot be a consistent technique, only a sort of compromise between naturalness and unnaturalness.   

Now you've got me talking in clichés

 Life is hard 

so you need a little sentimentality

smoothing out the hard edges

Now you've got me talking in clichés!

So you need a little sentimentality?

I've got some in the back room

Now you've got me talking in clichés

there is no "you" here, though

I've got some in the back room

but I don't think you want me to go back there

there is no "you" here, though 

Once you realize that, the jig is up 

But I don't think you want me to go back there 

Life is hard

Once you realize that, the jig is up

smoothing out the hard edges

Yikes

 We have a water cooler and a coffee machine in our lounge. We need to bring the reservoir of the coffee machine over to the water cooler to fill it. It's about 7 feet between the two. I was about to make some coffee, and a grad student was at the water cooler. It turned out that she was getting exactly the right amount of water, in a paper cup, to make herself one cup of coffee, instead of filling the entire reservoir, which holds enough water for a day or so. So I took the whole reservoir over and filled it, and let her make her cup of coffee first. It struck me as kind of weird that one would not fill the whole thing, and get just enough coffee water for one person. I'm sure I've done things as silly myself. Perhaps she did not realize that the reservoir was removable?  

Philosophy of language

 I'm thinking that the foreignizing fallacy comes from a kind of misapprehension about the differences between language. I remember a student, Oscar, who was really into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and he would argue by using examples from various languages, rather than using principled arguments. There are cool examples, but we can't really say that, because Spanish uses reflexive constructions for many uses, that Spanish people think more of people doing things to themselves. Studying Chinese is helpful here, because I'm seeing the principle that languages choose what to do and not do, and it creates differences, but then that does not mean that the speaker of the language has a different mental structure. There are just different ways of doing things, and most of those won't come through in a translation, and they shouldn't either. It creates a sort of Whorfian illusion. And foreignizing can only be partial, anyway. You have to choose which parts of the source language / text are relevant or meaningful, and which parts can just be glossed over. 

***

Well, I think of a year as going around a circle, counter-clockwise. January is at the top of the wheel, and July at the bottom. I have no idea why, but that is how I think of it, starting when I was a child. I have no idea why it is counter-clockwise, since my conception of a day is, in fact, clockwise. I'm told that Mandarin speakers think of time as vertical rather than horizontal.