Terminology Across the Political Divide

I want to address the way we use words to describe our political differences, in contemporary America. Specifically, I want to discuss the deep asymetry of how we use these words, depending on which side of the political spectrum is being discussed. There have always been some differences, related to the spectrum itself: words such as "liberal", "conservative", "radical", "reactionary", even "left" and "right", are obviously aimed in particular directions, and that's useful, because it's nice to have the ability to indicate political leanings. These words are generalizations, of course: not all conservatives have exactly the same political views. Not all liberals have exactly the same political views. But the terms are useful anyway.

But those are not the terminology differences I'm talking about.

One group (or part of a group) of protesters this year went beyond the original peaceful protest activity, siezed control of several blocks in the downtown area of a major city, and held it for more than a week. Another group (or, again, part of a group) of protesters elsewhere in the country, later in the year, went beyond the original peaceful protest activity, siezed control of a government building, and held it for a couple of hours. These are in many ways remarkably similar events. But we describe them with very different terminology. In the one case, we mostly call the participants "demonstrators", "protesters", and only occasionally say "rioters", perhaps because we're afraid that if we call them rioters, we'll be labeled as racists. In the other case, we rarely call the participants anything so downplayed as "rioters", instead reaching for breathless hyperbole: they are "domestic terrorists", and it's "insurrection" and possibly even "treason".

I want to be clear that I'm not excusing what was done in either case: both groups of rioters should be prosecuted for rioting, for the destruction of property that they caused, and for the disruption to public life. (In both cases here, I'm talking only about the persons who participated in the violent siezing and occupation of areas. The peaceful protest marches, in both cases, would've been fine, if things hadn't gone so much further; and of course we cannot prosecute anyone for peacefully marching down a street carrying a sign: that's a constitutionally protected freedom. Even if what's written on the sign is wrong, it's still a constitutionally protected freedom.)

In cases where people were harmed (which did happen: mostly it was the rioters themselves, and at least in the second case some of the responding police officers), the rioters should be held accountable for that as well. If there were deliberate killings, I'm not aware of it; but if there were, then murder charges would be appropriate. For accidental killings, there's another charge, manslaughter; when it happens during the commmission of another crime, such as rioting, that may be aggravated manslaughter. Criminals should be prosecuted for the crimes they committed.

But it's not right to just pick out random (or perhaps not so random) other crimes, crimes that were not in fact committed or even contemplated, and attempt to apply them arbitrarily. "Treason", to pick out one particularly egregious example, has a fairly particular definition under US law. Treason is when a person who owes allegiance to the United States (for example, by virtue of having sworn an oath to defend it, or by being a member of the US armed forces; merely being a citizen is not the standard here) gives material comfort or aid to an enemy nation, i.e., a foreign country with which we are at war. Note that acting against the government, or against current political officers of the United States, is not treason. Assasinating the President, for example, would not be treason. It'd be a very serious crime, but it wouldn't be treason. Treason is when you act not against individuals or the government, but against the entire nation, betraying your country to an enemy power, when you are supposed to be defending it. At least, that's what it is under US law. So for example if a high-ranking military or government official sells military secrets to the commies, that's treason. If some loon shoots the President, that's not treason. It's a different crime and, legally speaking, a less serious one, though still plenty serious enough to warrant the death penalty. Let me be perfectly clear: if the rioters had somehow managed to get an assault rifle into an active session of Congress and shot a bunch of Senators and Representatives, that would be on the one hand a much, much more serious crime than what they did; but on the other hand, it *still* wouldn't qualify as treason under US law. It would be mass murder among other things, and the people who did it would be in some very serious legal trouble; but it would not be treason.

The definition of terrorism is not quite so narrow, but fundamentally terrorism is about terror: mailing out envelopes of anthrax so that people are afraid to get the mail; crashing planes into buildings so that people are afraid to fly in a plane or work in a tall building; blowing up truck bombs in public places so that people are afraid to go out in public; setting fire to elementary schools so that people are afraid to send their kinds to school; these are all examples of terrorism, and they all have one thing in common: they scare not just the people who are directly involved, but people all over the country who are worried something similar might happen to them. That's what terrorism is. If you aren't at least attempting to frighten the population, then whatever you're doing isn't terrorism. Forcing your way past a police barrier and into a government building, isn't terrorism. It's tresspassing and destruction of property, and if you do it as part of an unruly mob it's rioting, and when the police try to stop you and you keep going that adds several additional charges, and if some people in the mob and/or some of the police officers involved become injured or killed, that adds yet more (increasingly serious) charges. But none of those charges are the same as terrorism.

When you call ordinary rioters "terrorists" or "insurrectionists" or call their actions "treason", you are ignoring the actual meanings of words and making up random claptrap; and you are accusing people of various serious capital offenses (markedly more serious than mere first degree murder), who are in fact guilty only of various non-capital offenses, with maximum sentences involving prison time. Maybe you're doing it to be dramatic, or maybe you're doing it to be persuasive, but whatever the reason is, what you're doing is wrong. You're slandering (or in print committing libel against) the criminals, by accusing them of much more serious crimes than they've actually committed. Whatever political point you're trying to make does not give you the right to just accuse people of things you know perfectly well they did not actually do. It's deceptive, dishonest, disingenuous, wrong, and illegal (or at least legally actionable in civil court, i.e., you can be sued for a lot of money for doing it). It also turns the criminals into victims, which is really unfortunate; I don't like to be in the position of defending criminals. I know there are people whose whole job is defending criminals, but I didn't sign up for that. Please stop making me do it.

Preposition Chart

I found myself in a situation (in an online venue) wherein I wanted to refer to this chart, but the site in question didn't provide an easy way for me to attach an image to my message. So I'm posting it up here. This is a visual chart depicting several common English prepositions.

The chart is inspired by a similar one that William D. Mounce used to explain Greek prepositions in his excellent grammar (which I highly recommend to anyone who has even a slight interest in Greek in particular, dead languages in general, or the etymologies of English words; it is hands down the best textbook I have ever encountered, on any subject).

Notes to Myself

Sometimes I write notes to myself. I do this because my short-term memory is imperfect. Call it a compensatory mechanism. Anyway, I've been doing this most of my life.

When I write notes to myself, I don't always necessarily want just anyone to be able to read them. Often the intended audience consists of exactly one person, me.

At some point I realized that, having studied a couple of foreign alphabets, I could write notes to myself in them, and most people wouldn't be able to easily read it, even if the actual words were entirely in English. Since English contains some phonemes that the foreign languages in question do not, I developed special conventions for representing those sounds, either by modifying existing letters with diacritical marks, or simply by taking a letter that normally represents a sound English doesn't use, and pressing it into service to represent an entirely different sound.

Of course, being the person that I am, I couldn't just leave it at that. After all, somebody might know the Greek alphabet. Somebody might know the Hebrew alphabet, for that matter. (This isn't as far-fetched as some might think. I know a handful of people who know both of those alphabets. In fact, I live in the same house with another such person.)

So naturally at some point I started mixing things up a bit. Being a bit of a glossophile, it was natural to learn several more writing systems and adopt some of the symbols from those. Some of the letters were too complex and took too long to write, so I simplified them by leaving off parts I deemed unimportant. At some point I changed my writing direction... and so it goes.

The note in the picture is a good example of the kind of thing I do now. (This particular note doesn't contain anything private, so if you're thinking of trying to decipher it, feel free, although you run the risk of being labeled a linguistics geek.)

Why am I sharing this? I have no idea. Maybe it's a feeler: am I really the only person who does this sort of thing?

Targetted Web Searching on the Client Side: A Little Programming Knowledge Can Save a Lot of Time

Okay, here's the background: there's a website that I use, which in general is quite good and very useful. It's called Lang-8. The basic idea is, you write journal entries in the language you're studying, and native speakers post comments and corrections. In turn, you post comments and corrections to entries they've written in your native language. The idea is good, and the site has a lot of really useful features.

One feature it doesn't have, unfortunately, is a really good search capability...

In particular, I wanted to be able to search through the comments and corrections I've made in the past. When you're working with people coming to English from the same liguistic background, they tend to make some of the same mistakes (e.g., Japanese people seem to have trouble learning the correct use of the English phrase "after all", which, admittedly, is somewhat idiomatic), so several times I've run into situations where I remembered having explained a particular thing in some detail before, with examples. Being the lazy person that I am, I wanted to have a look at that previous explanation and possibly copy and paste some or all of it in response to someone else who was asking about the same thing, or who made the same mistake.

So I wanted to search my past corrections and comments, but the site doesn't seem to have a way to do that. I can search my own journal entries, but that doesn't solve my problem. I thought about Google's site-specific search, but privacy features prevent most of the journal entries, and the comments on them, from being visible to the world; Google, from the site's perspective, is the world.

So I used my virtue of laziness to create a way to quickly search through my past comments and corrections. You can see the actual code on Perlmonks. (It's easier to post it there, because of the automatic handling it has for source code.) One screenfull of easy code, and my computer is pointing me right to my previous explanation. The first time I used it, it saved me more time than it took to write it, and I know I'll be using this one again and again and again.

Ugly Words for Beautiful

Have you ever noticed that a lot of languages have some fairly nasty-sounding words for the concept of beauty? The Hebrew word, יָפֶה (ya-FEH), for instance, sounds kind of like you're coughing up a hairball. The Japanese word, 美しい (oots-koo-SHE-ee) is a little better, but it doesn't exactly roll melodiously off the tongue. In Greek, καλός (cah-LOSS, good or beautiful) is only one letter different from κακός (cah-KOSS, evil, bad, ugly).

I think the worst of all may be the Latin word pulcher, source of the English spelling-bee word "pulchritude", which ostensibly means "beauty", although I cannot possibly imagine ever using such a hideous-sounding word non-sarcastically to refer to genuine beauty. Perhaps we could coin the word "malpulchrated" to refer to unnecessary or gaudy decoration (making something "beautiful" in a bad way, like stringing excessive amounts of five clashing colors of tinsel all over an otherwise attractive building, or make-up a la Tammy Faye Bakker).

Reading kanji more important than writing them by hand with a brush? No kidding?

It looks like the Japanese government has decided (see also: Slashdot discussion) that it's more important to be able to read the Chinese characters that appear in Japanese writing than to be able to reproduce them by hand. Yeah, I could have told them that.

As a consequence, they are updating their list (of characters you really ought to know if you want to read Japanese), adding almost 200 characters that weren't on the list before. As someone who is trying to learn their language, I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, 200 *more* characters, yikes. It's not like there weren't too many (many *times* too many) already. On the other hand, they presumably wouldn't have added them to the list if they didn't think they were already being used quite a bit, so I probably would have needed to learn them anyway sooner or later, whether they're on the list or not.

Remind me why I picked this language to study? I must be some kind of idiot, or a masochist.

Beginning to Understand

I think I may be beginning to understand the Japanese writing system. This worries me, because it's not the sort of thing you really expect to understand. Ever.

There's a bit of necessary background information: I have a Spaced Repetition System, that I use for memorizing vocabulary and stuff. I've had it for, oh, about a year now I guess.

The SRS is cool because it makes review automatic. How it works is, for every active card it tracks two things: when is it due to be looked at next (due date/time), and how long is that since the previous time (repetition interval). When you get a card right without any trouble and click the "Correct" button (after showing the answer to check yourself), it increases the interval geometrically and requeues the card based on the new interval. If you have trouble remembering but do get it, you can click "Difficult", and the interval stays about the same. If you don't quite get it, but almost, "Close" will shorten the interval a bit, and if you just plum forgot or missed outright, there's a button that will cut the interval down to a fraction of its former value. There's also an "Easy" button that increases the interval by a couple orders of magnitude. Anyway, the normal state of affairs, once you get your multipliers tweaked to match your personal learning rate, is that *most* of the time you remember the card and click the "Correct" button, with the result that the interval climbs from minutes to hours within the first couple of days, then from days to weeks, and it just keeps climbing from there. The better you know a card, the longer you can go and still know it.

New cards are introduced as necessary based on how far apart your active cards are spaced. You can also dequeue a new active card any time you want, if you just feel you're ready for a new one, and there's a review-only mode that never gives you any new ones. But usually I just let it give me new ones when it thinks I'm ready. Cards that aren't active yet have a "cue number" that controls the order in which they are introduced.

I've got a number of different kinds of things in the SRS: English words, Hebrew words, Japanese characters and words, Bible verses, geography, US Constitutional amendments, whatever I want to memorize that breaks up into bite-sized pieces. I spend roughly half an hour a day using it, broken up into 5-10 minute segments here and there.

So here's the story: months and months ago, I put the word 七曜表 into my SRS. Since I didn't yet know two of the three characters used to write it, I gave it a cue number higher than either of them. At the time I was putting in a bunch of words just so there'd be something there to dequeue whenever I needed it. I then promptly forgot about the word until it came up.

You also need to know that in the Japanese writing system, each character has multiple possible "readings" (pronunciations). There are also a couple of different major *kinds* of readings, "on" readings and "kun" readings being the important ones for most purposes. In my SRS, I always list on readings before kun readings, and they show up in a different color, so *hopefully* I'm getting at least a general sense of which is which. In my SRS I list the readings in kana (the portion of the Japanese writing system that's strictly phonetic in nature, which makes it perfect for pronunciation guides). Here, however, I shall attempt to render these pronunciations in a manner that will make sense for English speakers, on the theory that some of the people reading this might not know kana.

So anyway, as of a couple of days ago I've now reached the point where I've studied all three of the characters used to write this word. 七 can be pronounced either "she-chee" or "na-na" and means seven. 曜 is "yo" (with the o held for two beats; a rare character with only one major reading) and its basic meaning is day, as in day of the week. The third character, 表, is one that I only started studying a couple of days ago and am still reviewing multiple times per day. It has three major readings. The first one is unspellable in English; the traditional transliteration would be "hyo", but you're going to want to make that two syllables, and it's only one: the "hy" is a blend. (The y sound is pretty much the *only* blend-forming phoneme in the Japanese language. They don't really have l or r, and they don't form blends with s or z or w.) Oh, and the "o" is held for two beats. The character can also be read "oh-moe-tay" or "ah-dah-wah-sue". (That "d" is not exactly a normal d. It's a lateral alveolar flap consonant, often transliterated as "r". It sounds sort of like "l", only different. It's closer to d than r. If you know Spanish, it's said to be more like a Spanish r than it is like an English r.) This character carries the idea of displaying or showing or expressing something or making an annotation the concept of a surface or table. (Oops, got it mixed up with another character I'm still learning.)

So the card comes up, and I look at it, and I guess based on its structure that I should be using the on readings, so I come up with "she-chee-yo-hyo" (with each o held for two beats) as my best-guess pronunciation. Then I think about the meaning. Seven-day display? Showing seven days? What, a calendar or something?

And then I clicked the "show answer" button, and... wow. Both my pronunciation guess and my meaning guess were dead-on. That's... weird. Normally when a new card is first dequeued, I expect to get it at least partly wrong the first three or four times I see it, until I finally start getting it pounded into my thick skull. But this one... well, it just sort of made sense.

And that's a major milestone. Because when I first started studying the Japanese writing system, I did not think any part of it (well, other than the kana) would ever make any sense.

Screenshot

Okay, I'm just going to post this screenshot here to demonstrate something.

Hepburn Must Stop

People who know me generally are aware of the fact that I am interested in language. The topic has always fascinated me, even since I got my dad to explain parts of speech to me when I was three or four years old. (Actually, come to think of it, I already was familiar with three writing systems at that point, as well.) So it should come as no surprise that I've been looking at assorted language-related stuff in my spare time ever since I left college.

Most recently, I've been looking at Japanese. Yeah, I know, it's a weird one to pick (especially since it seems almost all of the English-speaking people with any interest in it are obsessed with anime and manga, which don't interest me at all), but hey, I've seldom been accused of being excessively typical.

Anyway, in the course of reading (mostly on the internet) about Japanese, one of the things I've run into is the Hepburn Romanization. This is a system whereby Japanese text is transliterated into Latin characters. Transliteration is seldom without problems, and studying a foreign language from a text that transliterates everything is generally inadvisable (unless all you want to learn is how to say "Does anyone speak English? Does this airplane go back to the United States? How much is a ticket?"), but it seems to me that Hepburn is particularly obnoxious, especially for English speakers.

In the first place, learning to correctly pronounce the Romanized Japanese is at least as hard as learning Hiragana, maybe worse, because of the need to unlearn long-ingrained habits associated with English use of the same characters (e.g., it's difficult to learn to pronounce "ou" as a held long o rather than as it would be pronounced in English). This is compounded by the fact that Hepburn uses Latin vowel pronunciations, so e is a and i is e and u is oo and so forth, like in Spanish. The Latin vowel mappings by themselves, if they were the only major issue, would be no big deal at all, but in Spanish you don't have combinations that would be dipthongs in English showing up every other syllable to screw with your mind.

Hepburn doesn't even have the good graces to be easy to type on a US-English keyboard, because it uses a diacritical mark (which for added bonus points is not even a mark that's particularly common in European character sets) on vowels when they are held for an extra mora. Since this is untypeable on most keyboards, most of the time in practice you usually either simply don't see any indication that the vowel is held (which is extremely bad, because it makes non-identical words identical, and the absolutely *last* thing Japanese needs is twice as many homonyms) or else a second vowel character is used, which aggravates the aforementioned vowel pronunciation issue for English speakers. Using a punctuation mark to indicate a held vowel should have been an extremely obvious approach, since after all that is what katakana does, but no.

The letter y is even worse than the vowels, because you have to unlearn the notion that it could ever under any circumstances be a vowel, even when it directly follows a stop consonant. Did you know that "Tokyo" is two syllables? Also "Kyoto". This shows up in approximately seven out of every ten Japanese words and is *hard* for an English speaker to get used to reading correctly. When you see the corresponding hiragana, you don't have this problem, because each symbol stands for exactly one syllable (or "mora" or whatever they call them), so it's very obvious where the syllable divisions go. This is fairly important in Japanese, and the Romanization obscures it.

Just in case the y issue didn't do enough to obscure the syllable boundaries (which, it bears repeating, are important in Japanese), Romanization also obscures the syllable divisions in other areas, though I think a certain amount of that would be fundamentally unavoidable in any system that transliterates a syllabary into a true alphabet. (Alphabets are inherently suited for writing languages with a more freeform syllable structure allowing for closed syllables and arbitrary blends; the only closed syllables you have in Japanese are with the sokuon, and the only blends you have are the aforementioned yoon.) The only thing worse than transliterating a syllabary into a true alphabet is trying to go the other direction and write a language like English in something like katakana, which is just wholly altogether unworkable (not that that stops the Japanese from doing it, of course).

The most egregious offense I want to talk about, though, is the letter r. Hepburn uses the r to represent an alveolar flap, a sound we don't have in English at all. Now, the idea of using a letter that wouldn't otherwise be used to represent a sound that wouldn't otherwise be represented makes a certain amount of sense, but r is a particularly unfortunate choice here, at least for English speakers, because of the various bizarre properties of the r sound that English speakers take for granted and do without thinking. (For native speakers of Romance languages, I suppose Hepburn is maybe not so bad, but in practice how many people are there who speak Spanish and Japanese but not English?) There are other letters that could have been used, not least l, which is somewhat closer to the sound anyhow, but no, Hepburn uses the r. Problem is, if you pronounce it as r, or anything even vaguely like r, you're in for all manner of trouble, because r has all sorts of phonemic consequences. It colors every letter it sits next to, either before or after, especially vowels. It's also completely impossible to form certain very-common Japanese blends (most notably ryo and ryu, which it should be noted are one syllable each, see the previous paragraph about y) if you pronounce this r as the English r.

Aside from the blends, and the weird and unfortunate mess it makes out of adjascent vowels, r isn't even a stop ("plosive") consonant. It's a liquid. Japanese doesn't have liquids, unless you count the syllabic nasal (which is altogether another topic, and believe it or not Hepburn Romanization manages to make that one harder to read easily as well).

So anyway, all of that is to say, every time I run into Japanese language-learning materials that make extensive use of Romanization (which is *annoyingly* common), I cringe and go looking for something else. I suppose the writers of these materials believe that transliterating everything will make it "easier" for English speakers by removing the need to learn kana, but honestly, anybody who is even *slightly* serious about learning a language can certainly handle picking up at least hiragana, and everything thereafter will be *much* easier than with the Romanization.

It's not like hiragana is anywhere close to being even the tip of the iceberg for what characters you've got to learn if you actually ever want to be able to read any actual Japanese. I mean, you can't even look up words you don't know in a dictionary without learning two or three hundred radicals (and their lexical order) just to get started, so 46 hiragana characters is really no big deal.

The Value of Dead Languages

Sometimes people question the utility of studying a dead language, but honestly, I think dead languages have just as much utility as living ones, albeit for different reasons. The value of knowing dead languages was kind of hammered home for me tonight.

My dad was on a discussion forum, and he turned to me and said, "How do you spell sarcophagus? p-h-a?" I didn't even have to think about this question; the answer was blindingly obvious. I just looked at him and said, "Dad, it's from σαρξ and φαγομαι." So, yeah, p-h-a then.

Obviously, I didn't study Greek just so I could spell English better. But having studied it I do know English better, and not just spelling either.