Month: April 2017

This is contentious, and ideological.

I’ll just give my answer, as a middle-aged white cis het male.

I have judgement. I have opinions. I am not disenfranchised from having opinions or judgement, simply by accident of what privilege I have inherited. I am entitled to discuss those opinions, and so long as I do so openly and receptively and respectfully, that is a good thing.

That said: I am privileged, which means that I have a hegemonic* perspective. The kinds of perspectives that I naturally align to get heard a lot, and are familiar to me and to my interlocutors. The kinds of perspectives that my less privileged interlocutors may have are not necessarily as familiar to me.

Which means that while my judgement and opinion is as valid as any other’s, I readily concede that I have more to learn from the less-privileged than they from me, about the realities they confront. And being open to learning means that, a lot of the time, I withhold judgement, and I don’t interrupt, and I just listen. And because my privilege is the kind of privilege that drowns out others’ voices, I don’t pipe up with my opinion and judgement until it’s appropriate to: it’s not all about me.

Is the reflex cry of mansplaining and whitesplaining good citizenship and good alliance-building? No, because reflex cries are not discourse, they are turf-guarding. But if the less-privileged have carved out a space to speak to their lack of privilege, then the more-privileged are in that space as guests; and it is courteous to act like it. Offer your opinion, but offer it courteously, and with a bit of deference.

If they keep shouting you down, and you are honestly speaking in good faith with them—why then, there’s no discussion to be had; shake the dust off your shoes, and move on. But do make sure you’ve been listening, and trying to learn.

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*If Sam Morningstar’s Tourette’s syndrome involves saying “neo-Marxism”, mine is saying “hegemony”.

For the past blessed week, I have not seen featured comments.

Malayalam has been written in Arabic script (Arabi Malayalam) and Syriac script (Suriyani Malayalam), with significant extensions to both to deal with the large number of phonemes. The large number of phonemes means any Romanisation is going to involve either diacritics or digraphs; but there’s no intrinsic reason why Malayalam, or any other language, cannot be romanised; and Romanization of Malayalam – Wikipedia lists two ASCII and two scholarly romanisations.

How do you remind Australians on Australia Day that they should really be a republic after all?

By getting them to sing the Australian Royal National Anthem in an ad.

You know the one.

‘God save the Queen’: Royal anthem gets republican twist in new ad campaign

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2RQ_M55Jhaw

Good work, Australian Republican Movement. You didn’t even need the people in the ad to stumble over the words (“something and glorious”). The incongruity is already plenty obvious.

(You might want to update your HTML title on your website, though, to reflect your rebranding to “Australian Republic Movement”…)

The YouTube comments, btw, indicate that the ad did not have the same resonance with monarchists that it has had with me…

David Mowbray

This fate has befallen me: e.g. Am I shallow or superficial for thinking Australia’s aboriginals are the least attractive race of humans in the world? (QUESTION DELETED) by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile. I’ve just been asked this in PM about another instance of an offensive question with answers skilfully refuting its problematic assumptions: Mike DiGirolamo’s answer to Is it right to be publicly anti-gay?

Even if the questions are offensive, good answers refuting those assumptions are useful and constructive, right? They spread knowledge and virtue, they can motivate great writing, they can challenge readers and make them more critical. So why get rid of them?

Go read Jeremy Arnold’s answer to What are common characteristics of very popular Quora users who are not Top Writers?

Read it, because he nails what it is Quora is after, and indirectly, why Quora would not give a toss about the virtuous answers deleted along with the offensive questions.

Quora is only interested in answers to questions. Specifically, answers to questions people are likely to google (and, I should add, that will not scare off advertisers).

Their primary interest is not good writing. Not virtue. Not challenging readers. It’s providing answers to Google-worthy questions.

What brings new users to Quora? High-quality answers that provide domain expertise to questions as they are asked.

Going beyond is fine. Adding personality is fine. But many writers looking to build an audience end up doing the three things that Quora views as unhelpful, effectively treating questions as writer’s prompts instead of narrow knowledge queries.

While there can be genuine value in this (e.g., exposing the hidden bias inherent in a short-sighted question), the future value of Quora as a platform is tied to the IPA market (Siri, Google Assistant, etc.) — which means that bio credibility and domain expertise are far more valuable than writing or entertainment skills.

[My italics]

In fact, look at Quora’s answer to What does a good answer on Quora look like? What does it mean to “be helpful”?, which Jeremy cites:

You should always assume that people are asking in good faith and really want help. Helpful answers don’t change the subject, obsess over faulty premises, or make fun of the question.

Quora does not want you to “obsess over faulty premises” of an offensive question. And the offensive question will attract undersirables, and repel advertisers. Quora just wants the question gone.

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Btw, I deeply enjoy writing answers that “obsess over faulty premises”, both in the question and in other answers; I love applying my critical faculties and going beyond the glib first answer that pops through people’s outrage. That enjoyment is certainly worth more to me than a jacket.

I am much more of a functionalist than Daniel Ross and Brian Collins, so I am much more sympathetic to unidirectionality, and the fact that there are counterexamples does not bother me.

It did bother Brian Joseph, who’s one of the big names against unidirectionality, and who also marked my thesis. He found it pretty good, despite the fact that it was written within the grammaticalisation framework.

Hypothesis is likely too strong a word, since it’s opened up to refutation through the counterexamples. But the tendency towards more grammatical, more reduced, more bounded, more obligatorified, is a thing, and it’s both quite useful in reconstruction (as Daniel concedes), and something to be explained.

Formalists in an online discussion on unidirectionality I read once dismissed unidirectionality in grammaticalisation as an epiphenomenon. The retort was: aren’t most interesting phenomena?

There are underlying similarities between Turkish and Greek music at a deeper level, and there are clear similarities between Greek pop and Turkish pop at a more proximate level.

At a deeper level, the scales and instruments used by Turks and Greeks are related, through close to a millennium of coexistence. The tunings and modes of Byzantine chant have undergone microtonal influence from Turkish classical music. (The Greek chant preserved in Corsica does not have the same microtones.) Both the wind and the stringed instruments of the region have travelled in both directions. And of course the folk music of Christians and Muslims living in the same region was usually indistinguishable, whether it was Greece or Turkey. (Crete appears to have been an exception, but Christians took up the Muslim repertoire anyway after the Muslims left.)

At a more proximate level, the pop tradition of Greek music started with Rebetiko, and Rebetiko itself is clearly rooted in Smyrneika (Ottoman café music associated with Smyrna/İzmir). The scales and style were clearly Ottoman in the 1920s, although they evolved in more Western directions in Greece, from the 1930s (the Piraeus style) on.

Even before Rebetiko, there was a parallel outright Western pop tradition in Greek music, and the two traditions have mostly remained distinct; rebetiko has turned into Laïko (which in other answers I’ve termed “bouzouki pop”), and Western operettas of the 1910s have given way to rock, R&B stylings, and Euro disco.

Greeks are well aware that their Laiko tradition, and the revered Rebetiko that it comes from, has Turkish roots. Occasionally a nationalist might grouse about, but for the most part they’re happy that they’ve nativised it. It is worth noting that the Rebetiko that there is the most reverence for is not the Smyrneika of the 1920s, but the more nativised Peiraeus style of the 1930s.

With the thaw in Greek–Turkish relations since the 1990s, there has been a lot of traffic of “serious” musicians between the two countries; the Wikipedia article I linked to points out that contemporary performers of Rebetiko, if anything, overemphasise the Turkish style of the music. There has been some traffic of pop songs between the two countries, although that in itself is not remarkable; Arabic and Indian pop songs have also been covered in Greek.

In discussion with Turks on Quora, I’ve found that we understand each others’ music, it is familiar to us—but also that we would not mistake one’s music for the other. One user (and I’m annoyed I don’t remember who: it was in a comment, so good luck searching it) offered to me that there was something more impassioned about Turkish music, and more fatalistic about Greek music (“What can you do? Let’s have an ouzo”). That threw me, but then I realised that what came across to them as fatalistic comes across to me as stern and restrained: that was the contribution of the Piraeus style.

Possibly off for a week.

Hiatus by Jordan Yates on Jordan Yates’s Blog

They all do. And let me elaborate on that.

For starters, there’s the element of formal craft in poetry, and there’s the allusive use of language in poetry. Both of them are essential.

For allusiveness, what you need is a culture expressed through that language. All natural languages that people live their lives in are vehicles for culture. Yes, some literature cultures will have a huge backlog of canon to allude to; but oral cultures are no slouches there either. The subtle allusions to layers of Roman mythology make Latin literature very dense, and difficult to get through for an outsider. But Roman mythology is not that far removed from the religion of any given preliterate tribe, and their oral literature will not be any less powerfully allusive for it.

The languages that are in a disadvantage there are constructed languages. Esperanto is not at a severe disadvantage, since much of its literature for the most part is still squarely in the European tradition, and there are both internal and external allusions it still makes. But compared to ethnic languages, it’s fair to say, Esperanto is a bit more of a blunt instrument.

Klingon’s even blunter, though at least Klingon has a mythos. I still have a soft spot for the Klingon terza rima I came up with though…

Then there’s the formal element of poetry. I have to say, talk of which languages it’s easier to rhyme in is cheap. The forms adjust to accomodate the possibilities of the language. If rhymes are easy, you have rhyme-rich forms like the Petrarchan sonnet. If rhymes are less thickly strewn on the ground, you dial that back to the Spenserian or the Shakespearean sonnet. If rhymes are hard, you’ll allow all sorts of off-rhymes; if rhymes are facile, you’ll frown on suffix rhymes, and put hurdles in the way like Rime riche. The resources of the language are so harnessed in the language, that the exercise of craft is enough of a challenge to be appreciated, and not so much of a challenge as to be impossible.

Not all poetic traditions use rhyme, but many poetic traditions do something like that. (I’d like to think all do.) In Latin poetry, having the ictus coincide with the metre (stress coinciding with the feet of quantitative metre) was gauche, tolerable only in the very first poets in the language like Ennius.

So, I could say that Italian is a rhyme-rich, clear-sounding, culturally fertile language, well suited for Petrarch. And English is rhyme-poor, muffled, and came into the 17th century blinking and deracinated. So Early Modern Italian must be better suited for poetry than Early Modern English, right?

Yet, Shakespeare.