"Again" - New Pronunciation, Old Habits?

The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout.

Down came the rain and washed the spider out.

Up came the sun and dried up all the rain,

And the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.

This nursery rhyme, sung all the time in schools and daycares when I was really young, was what introduced a generation of American children to language change. By first grade, everyone knew "Well, see, 'again' used to rhyme with 'rain', but it doesn't anymore..." But the thing is, I'm still seeing some poets use the word as if the second syllable had [ej]* as its vowel. For example, take these lyrics from "Would You Love A Monsterman" by Lordi, written in 2002.

(Yeah) I would slay,

(Yeah) I would maim,

(Yeah) I would vanish in thin air

And reappear again.

And the singer doesn't adjust "again" to rhyme. (Just as my daycare-mates did, which greatly annoyed me.) So, not only did the writer know that the words didn't rhyme, the singer didn't make an effort to change the pronunciation.  Lordi does have a history of using slant rhyme in their songs ("Hell's already here, and we are living tonight - beast loose in paradise..."), but this is nowhere near close enough to be considered a slant rhyme. No shared vowel sounds, no shared consonants. So, why is this not as remarkable as it should be?

See, writers know a lot about how humans hear, and think about, words. When a non-rhyme using "again" is heard/read, something happens to our immediate perception: The "It used to rhyme, the writer's not being lazy. This is just how it was back in the day," mantra is so firmly engrained into many of our minds, that we will automatically forgive the writer. Even when we know the work is modern, it's sometimes impossible to avoid thinking about it this knee-jerk way.

Now, I'm not saying that everyone should lazy and just stop trying to rhyme altogether...but we've gotta admit, we've got some privilege and wiggle room with the word "again".

*I originally wrote the completely wrong IPA symbol there. Not just wrong, but really wrong. I swear I'm not clueless, just very, very tired.

Songs In Languages I Don't Speak - Round 3: Es Izjāju Prūšu Zemi

L.I.D.S.: Latvian!

It's funny: The first time I heard this song, I hated it. Then I listened again, and I began to love that melody. It certainly doesn't help that Latvian (and Lithuanian) are gorgeous languages to my ears, probably because of the Proto-Indo-European qualities of them.

And I'm totally going to pretend that I'm not singing along to those helpful karaoke lyrics...

Songs In Languages I Don't Speak - Round 2: En Kungens Man

L.I.D.S.: Swedish!

...His voice. Damn it, that voice. Seriously, that is one of the most gorgeous voices I've heard in my life. And I love the simplicity of the guitar, voice, and drums, particularly as Falconer (being a power metal band) typically layer the shit out of everything.

Scandinavian Language Humor

...Gotta love it. Scandinavia And The World is a great comic, even if you couldn't care less about history. This is a personal favorite of mine, joking on the stereotypes that Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes have about each other's languages. (It's fun to see things written from a Danish perspective for me, too - here you're lucky to find someone who realizes that "Danish" isn't just the name of a pastry.)

Transcript:

Denmark(To America): Try saying "Rødgrød med fløde!"

America: Roedgroed meed floode.

Denmark: Heh, that sounds funny.

America: It's hard to say.

Sweden(Holding a potato): Here America, try saying it with a potato in your mouth.

America(With the potato in his mouth): Rog grog meg flaog.

Sweden & Norway: HAHAHA!!! Perfect Danish!

Denmark(Holding a beer out to America): Hmpf. Drink eight of these and say it with the potato in your mouth.

America(Drunkenly): Roga grouiga me flouiga...

Denmark(Glaring and Norway & Sweden): Perfect Swedish! Now try singing it.

America(With music notes around the words): Roga grouiga me flouiga!

Denmark(Still glaring, now Norway and Sweden are glaring at him too): Perfect Norwegian!

(Switch to a breakfast table. America is eating pancakes with a visible hangover, Canada is eating cereal.)

America: I swear Canada, I didn't visit any bars last night! I was getting language lessons!

Canada(Unbelieving): Sure, whatever.

Growing Vocabulary And The Poor, Extinct Adverbs

“I was late for the bus this morning, so I sat up and got out of bed quickly, ran down the stairs fast, and closed the door hard behind me when I went out. When I finally got on the bus, I pulled my backpack down roughly onto my lap.”

            What’s wrong with that little anecdote? Nothing, grammatically. It follows all the rules we were taught in Language Arts as kids. So why does it sound so…wrong to us English speakers?

            You probably realized it in the time it took me to start writing that paragraph, but it’s this: The verbs modified with adverbs are long-winded replacements of stronger verbs we use. The paragraph, using standard verbs, would go this way:

            “I was late for the bus this morning, so I jumped out of bed, sprinted down the stairs, and slammed the door behind me when I went out. When I finally got on the bus, I yanked my backpack down onto my lap.”

            Verbs like “yanked” and “sprinted” have negated the need to modify verbs with adverbs. This is why you rarely hear adverbs used in speech – the quicker-to-say verbs have delegated them to use only by poets and authors. Here’s just a couple:

“walk lazily” = “saunter”

“push hard” = “shove”

“sing deeply and loudly” = “belt”

            The interesting thing to me about these verbs is that some of them run on a strength continuum – each word denotes a similar action, but the force of that action is changed by the word used. (Nudge-Push-Shove, Jog-Run-Sprint). Sure, each of the words brings to mind subtle differences in the action, but they’re still relatively the same.

            But now the interest: This is not the case for some verbs. Some “stronger” verbs run along a metaphorical continuum rather than a literal one of strength. Take the above example of “jumping out of bed”. I hear this expression all the time, “jumping” being used for ‘standing quickly/energetically’, or ‘sitting up and standing quickly/energetically’. I cannot physically jump out of my bed, by the traditional definition of “jumping”, without some serious martial arts training. But the use of these metaphorical verbs is just so ingrained into our speech that it looks odd to most of us when we see literal explanations of the word.

            Metaphor. It’s a dang powerful thing.

Songs In Languages I Don't Speak - Round 1: Vérone

L.I.D.S*.: French!

I start with a rather obvious one, from one of my favorite musicals - Romeo Et Juliette.

Catchy, heavy but not too hard, and with a gorgeous chorus.

*Language I Don't Speak

Introducing: Songs In Languages I Don't Speak

I love music. I really love music. I make it, listen to it, play it, study it - it's really the biggest part of my life. (Sorry, linguistics...) But I have a habit that some people call bad, and others call awesome: Loving music that's in languages I don't speak. It can be as almost understandable to me as a Romance/Germanic song, or as foreign as the Sámi national anthem. My tastes run all across the gambit, from Finnish death metal to Romanian folk music.

And guess how I first heard Finnish? Music. Hearing those songs kick-started my interest into this beautiful language. The same story with Hungarian later on.

A couple of people have asked me: Well, why don't you show us exactly what you listen to? (This is because they want to gawk at my bizarre tastes.) But, it got me thinking - maybe its good to spread the love of languages and music around? And at the same time, get attention for some great musicians/works.

So, from now on, every Wednesay and Sunday, I'll post a video of a song in language that is not English or Latin. Genres and styles will vary, to provide a bit of a taste for everything!

Note that this is called "Languages I Don't Speak", not "Languages I Don't Understand". I understand any number of songs that aren't English or Latin, for miscellaneous reasons - the language is so similar to ones I know that I can get it, I've seen English subtitles, or just plain context clues. But still, even if I can understand them, they have a charm that those super-familiar-language-songs just don't have.

You can send suggestions in, if you want to see one of your favorite songs displayed! Long live the music!

(Of course, if I'm gone, I won't be able to post. That should be expected.)

English, Have You Gotten More Partitive-Aware?

*Note: This post deals with a dialect. I will be referring to it as simply "English", because "the English spoken in my region of the world" is way too much of a keyboard-full. I'm not saying you'll be confused, just know that there's no way I'm speaking for all the English everywhere.

Perhaps the hardest thing for me to master in Finnish is the partitive case. Speakers of English might recognize the difference between partitive form and non-partitive in the singular form as the difference between "a dog" and "the dog". We use the singular partitive all the time! But what confused me when translating was the partitive plural. In English, "the *nouns*" is used as both definite and indefinite. I can refer to three dogs as "the dogs" even though those three don't constitute every single dog in the world. So, I was at an initial loss as to how to translate words like "sanoja" - "a select number of the words in existence"?

The textbook I was using then (it wasn't very good, but do you know how hard it is to find Finnish resources in Wisconsin?) suggested I use "some". "Some words." "Some dogs." It didn't sound right to me. I was in middle school at this time, and I had never heard anyone say "I have some dogs." Not even for the division-from-a-whole-substance use of the partitive - people said "a bottle of lotion", not "some lotion".

Now, I've been in high school for a year, and I've noticed something: I'm hearing that partitive "some" being used in casual speech more and more. At least once a day, without fail, I hear someone lean across the aisle and ask "You got some gum?" Instead of "I've got time" being used in response to "It's a long story", I'm now hearing "I've got some time".

So, among my region's youth, the partitive plural form "some" is definitely coming into wider use.

I don't have much of an opinion on whether this is a great thing or not. It's definitely not bad, but what I wonder is: Does English really need this partitive?  Certainly we can already tell that "the chairs" are not the only chairs available to mankind. (Chair shortage! AAAGH! The apocalypse is coming! Sorry....) But, perhaps moving toward a more specific language, one that uses more modifiers, is a good thing. It's really up to you.

I'm seriously dwelling on the idea of a worldwide loss of chairs now...back to Roman lecti?

Yes, Another Linguist Reblogging This...

...Because it's just too perfect not to spread it around as much as possible. I am, of course, talking about this quote from a chat. Ahem:

<%kiwibonga> Je ne donne pas un merde - I don't give a shit 
<%kiwibonga> THAT MAKES NO SENSE
<%kiwibonga> you cannot give a shit to someone
<%kiwibonga> in french
<%kiwibonga> that sounds like "I'm taking a shit in my hands and I'm keeping it for myself"


Y'know, I could make a long post about cultural context and how idioms and metaphors are a huge thing that we lose through lingual assimilation and English-domination, but my mind just doesn't feel up to it, now. So, I would recommend you read the Linguistic Mystic's take on the subject.


I will write that post later, I swear.

This, This Right Here, Is Awesomeness

When people ask me why I'm so vehemently opposed to one language ( English) being forcibly spoken all around the world, I usually try my best to explain the value of dying languages, and the need to preserve ideas and concepts that can't be expressed in English, as well as the national importance of having a country's own language. Now, I just show them this video, which is most of my argument wrapped up neatly: