Category: Linguistics

Light Warlpiri: not a new mixed language

Today the science news outlets are abuzz with the claim that a newly identified mixed language has been identified in Australia, Light Warlpiri, based on a press release from the Linguistic Society of America, which is reporting a new article by Carmel O’Shannessy entitled “The role of multiple sources in the formation of an innovative auxiliary category in Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language”.   The article in the Examiner is the best of a mixed bunch, but you need to overlook the unfortunate header describing it as the ‘newest language on earth’, which isn’t even remotely true.  But as we’ll see, even the more modest claims in the press release and news articles are misleading.

Warlpiri itself is a Pama-Nyungan language spoken in northern Australia by several thousand people, and is one of the better-known and less threatened (though still endangered) languages of Australia.    Light Warlpiri is spoken by about 300 Warlpiri people in one community, Lajamanu; it mixes English, Kriol, and Warlpiri, with an English verb structure and a Warlpiri and Kriol noun structure, and some elements all its own.   Mixed languages are not creoles (take note) – without going into a long digression, creoles emerge in situations where speakers do not have full access to one of the source languages.  Mixed languages are created in highly bilingual situations –  most speakers of Light Warlpiri also speak Warlpiri, Kriol, or English (in some combination).  Mixed languages can arise (which is what seems to have happened here) when code-switching (which happens in nearly every bilingual speech community) becomes formalized as a set of linguistic patterns.

However, beware!  Light Warlpiri has had a Wikipedia page since 2008 , and Carmel O’Shannessy first identified it in an article ‘Light Warlpiri: A New Language‘, back in 2005 in the Australian Journal of Linguistics, and identified it as a mixed language. According to Google Scholar, it’s been cited 40 times to date.  This is hardly a new discovery.  I get why O’Shannessy is still calling it a ‘new mixed language’ in the article – it’s new-ish, in the sense that it’s only been around for roughly 40 years, and its discovery is new-ish, in that it’s only been known to linguists for fewer than 10 years.  I’m trying not to be pedantic here: it’s not like this has been known for decades, so in some sense it is ‘new’.  But reading the press on this, you’d think that no one had ever heard of Light Warlpiri until today, which is totally false.

O’Shannessy’s new article, which is the one that the LSA press release is touting, is a fuller description of the grammar and history and identifies a new class of auxiliary verbs and some other features in Light Warlpiri that differ in structure from any of the source languages.  This is pretty neat, and is certainly a new discovery.  There may be some broader implications for understanding the development of certain features cross-linguistically, as the press release suggests.  But this is not a new language, nor is it newly discovered, nor newly identified as a mixed language: the article is not making these claims.  In this sense, the LSA press release is quite misleading, and the news articles that are based on it are spreading this misinformation.

Lexiculture redux: new adventures in teaching linguistic anthropology

Just about three years ago, while teaching my undergraduate Language and Culture course, I ended up poking around the etymology of the word honk and turned up some neat things, leading to the germ of an idea for a student project that I ended up calling Lexiculture.    That term, I did a test run with my students, using the word ‘chairperson’ as a really interesting in-class exercise, and then got to work putting it together as a full class assignment in the fall of 2010.   This was considerably advanced about a month later at the Language, Culture, and History conference in Wyoming, organized by Leila Monaghan, and discussions I had with many of the participants there about how to think about the linguistic anthropology of English words: moving beyond lexicography and etymology towards a real integrated approach to language and culture using words.

When I ran this in 2010, I introduced Lexiculture using an in-class exercise where we jointly researched the surprising history of the local term Michigan left.   I then put together a list of projects for them to choose from (or let them choose their own) and set them to work. I was working under a few impediments: I had never done this before, so I was sort of muddling along.  I didn’t give the students quite enough guidance to undertake research projects with good results.  At the time, I couldn’t find a good text to help the students conceptually or methodologically.  So it turned out to be OK, and we got some good results (I especially liked student papers written on the words wife-beater, bitchin’, and ketchup/catsup) but it wasn’t a complete success.    In 2011 I was on sabbatical so I didn’t teach that course, and in 2012 (my last year prior to submitting my tenure file, which is happening now), I decided to focus on some research projects (wisely, I think), and to make the course a bit more traditional.

Well, now it’s 2013, and my tenure file will be set in stone by September, and instead of kicking up my feet and phoning in the last 30 years of my teaching career, I figure it’s time to dust off the notes and put Lexiculture back together.    I’ve had the great fortune to have found a wonderful short, inexpensive text: How to Read a Word by Elizabeth Knowles, which has some good, not-yet-outdated methodological suggestions but more importantly is conceptually critical to get the students thinking about how the history of words intersects with sociocultural change in the English-speaking world.   So using that text, and a revised set of topics, and a stronger methodological introduction to the subject, I’m at it again this fall.

So here are a few of the words / topics on my list for this year:

Information Superhighway: I want to know how this transformed from an index of the speaker’s technological knowhow in the early 1990s, to a sign of outmodedness a decade later.

Stalemate: I want to know by what process this chess term became figuratively adopted for a situation where victory is impossible.

Uppity: What is the metalinguistic discourse surrounding the use of this word in, by, and around African Americans, both in the 19th century and today?

I have a longer list, but I need more, and here’s how you could help.  I’m looking for more English words or phrases  that students could research and that could help illuminate something of social significance.  Some basic requirements:

– The topics need to relate to the last 200-300 years, with a heavy emphasis on post-1900 material. Prior to 1800, the full-text searchable databases / corpora that the students will need are relatively few and inaccessible.
– While the papers will focus on single words or short phrases (i.e. the sort of things that can be researched readily without too much training), I’m not just interested in etymology, but rather, in words or phrases that have cultural significance or whose contextual importance has changed over time.
– The words/phrases could be primarily analyzable quantitatively (using corpora, Google Ngram Viewer, etc.), qualitatively (broader social analysis or close reading of specific textual examples) or both.
– The words/phrases can’t have been over-researched – e.g., tweet and LOL and cool have been researched in such detail that there’s too much risk of plagiarism and not much interest in it for me.

Any ideas for suitable words or phrases would be appreciated in the comments below.  So tell me: do you have a great idea for some lexiculture?

Ninilchik Russian in Alaska

There’s an interesting news reports from a couple of weeks ago on the Russian dialect spoken in Ninilchik, Alaska, a community about four hours’ drive southwest of Anchorage.  Founded in 1847 in what was then Russian America (on this map from 1860, it’s near where the X for ‘Fort Georgievsk’ is placed) in an area mostly populated by Dena’ina (Athabaskan) speakers, Ninilchik today is a community of about 900 people, mostly English speaking but with a small remnant of elderly speakers of a Russian dialect that has been developing independently from other Russian varieties for over 100 years.  The Ninilchik Russian website provides quite a bit of information, including several research papers, recordings, and other information.  My only quibble, which is a small one, is that we need to be careful in calling Ninilchik Russian ‘isolated’ – isolated from other forms of Russian, yes, but as a whole, no – obviously it has been in contact with English, with Athabaskan languages, and with Alaskan Eskimo languages over the past century, which is part of the reason it is so interesting.

Martin Bernal (1937-2013)

I heard the sad news today that Martin Bernal, the political scientist/historian/classicist and ‘humanist’ in every relevant sense of the word, passed away on Monday at the age of 76 (follow the link for his obituary in the Ithaca Journal).  At the time of his death, he was Professor Emeritus of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell.  One can only imagine that he was, and will be, the only figure to hold simultaneous professorships in these two fields.  He was also a genial, considerate scholar, and it was my honour to have worked with him.

Bernal is, of course, best known for his three-volume Black Athena (Bernal 1987, 1991, 2006), a massive attempt to show the indebtedness of classical civilization to Egyptian and Phoenician influences and that Greek civilization was only secondarily Indo-European but principally an African and Near Eastern civilization which, due to racism among European early modern scholars, was not recognized as such.  To say that it was controversial is a gross understatement – few claims in the study of the ancient world have attracted as much scorn, including an entire edited volume dedicated to its refutation.  The scholarly consensus today is that Bernal’s linguistic, archaeological and historical evidence is too rough-and-ready and that he was too willing to take coincidence as evidence when considering similarities in the languages and symbolic lives of Greeks and Egyptians.  The Greek pantheon is not simply a set of African deities with a European veneer, any more than the Greek language is some sort of bizarre mixed language full of Semitic and Afro-Asiatic roots.

These are serious problems, and to his credit, Bernal did attempt to address them, not always successfully. I do not, however, agree with the assessment of some that he was credulous.  Rather, I view his work as a conscious attempt to provide a counterpoint to mainstream views, even when – or especially because – the ideas he was proposing were so challenging. He was unafraid to be wrong if the alternative was to be silent.  Unlike, say, Erich von Daniken, to whom he has been most unjustly compared, Bernal’s work was meticulously thorough in its citation, and rather than simply postulating massive conspiracies, asking ridiculous rhetorical questions, and dishonestly ignoring all contrary evidence, he was a very serious scholar, sometimes out of his depth, but never out of his mind.

I corresponded with Martin over the past five years (we never met in person) during the preparation of Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger.  His chapter in that volume, ‘The Impact of Blackness on the Formation of Classics’ (Bernal 2013) will surely prove to be one of his final published works.  I do not know if he had an opportunity to read the entire volume prior to his death, but I want to echo the remarks I made in the introduction: there is enormous value in Bernal’s demonstration of the role of implicit and explicit Eurocentric biases in shaping the course of classical scholarship from the 17th century to the present day.  His chapter expands on his earlier work by addressing the role of some key scholars, such as James Bruce, in shaping views of Greece and of Africa, and their interrelations.   He insists that postulating links between societies does not stigmatize borrowing: “I do not accept that hybridity leads to sterility; a culture is not a mule!” (Bernal 2013: 14).  Throughout the process of editing and revision and production, Martin was cheerful, thoughtful, and open, responsive to editorial comment and a true professional.

I wrote Bernal to invite him to participate in the volume, knowing full well that Trigger had been publicly quite critical of Black Athena and its revisionist assertions.  Indeed, that was part of the point.  Bernal exemplified an unflinching willingness to spend decades on an extreme version of a position that, over time and with much refinement and revision, has come to limited acceptance in some scholarly communities, at the cost of great scorn from others.  You might count this in the ‘loss’ column, if scholarship were measured in wins and losses.  But this was never the point.  The point is the process, and both Bernal and Trigger exemplified the principled willingness to present a point of view regardless of its conformity to some present orthodoxy.  In my view, too much anthropology and archaeology, and quite a lot of linguistics, lack this principled willingness to challenge, to doubt even when doubting has costs, to publish the unpublishable – a luxury his position afforded him, but alas, too few of us today enjoy such freedom.

In 2002, when I was just finishing my PhD and writing my first published article, ‘The Egyptian origin of the Greek alphabetic numerals’, I un-courageously felt the need to distance myself from Bernal in writing, “This theory is a further contribution towards delineating the economic and intellectual transfers between Egypt and Greece in antiquity, though of course at a later date and with a more secure contextual foundation than that found in Bernal’s (1987) analysis of the subject.” (Chrisomalis 2003: 58).  It’s a true statement, but at the time, what I failed to recognize is that I could not have had my hypothesis considered fairly without the sort of framing that Bernal’s body of scholarship afforded me.  I am grateful, a decade later, to have had a chance to know the man and return the favour.

Bibliography

Bernal, Martin. 1987. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bernal, Martin. 1991. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 2: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bernal, Martin. 2006. Black Athena : the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 3: The Linguistic Evidence. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bernal, Martin. 2013. The impact of blackness on the formation of classics.  In S. Chrisomalis and A. Costopoulos (eds.), Human Expeditions: Inspired by Bruce Trigger, pp. 12-30.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Chrisomalis, Stephen. 2003. The Egyptian origin of the Greek alphabetic numerals. Antiquity 77 (297): 485-496.

Visualization of American English dialect data

Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at NC State, has put together a great set of visualizations based on data from Bert Vaux’s Harvard Dialect Survey, and using an algorithm that weights responses by location to produce multicoloured visualizations of variability in individual linguistic features in American English.  If you’ve ever wondered at the diversity of American lexical and phonological variation – for instance, crawfish vs. crayfish vs. crawdad, or whether mayonnaise is pronounced with two syllables or three – you’ll want to check it out.  The full set of maps seems not to be loading right now (possibly due to server / bandwidth issues, if its popularity on my Facebook and Twitter feeds is any guide) but the smaller set is still visible on the Business Insider site.