R.B. Lemberg's Blog, page 28

Small poetry announcement

My two small poetic fragments from the Crow Epic, “The Journeymaker, Climbing” (written for Sonya Taaffe) and “The Journeymaker to Keddar,” will appear in the Winter 2013 edition of Goblin Fruit.

Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.

on neuroatypicality, and storytelling as pressure to conform

This piece by Ada Hoffmann is important. I am sharing it because it is important.
Did I say important? Important.

People with neuroatypicalities so often are told to pass, forced to pass, cajoled, shamed into passing. When people with neuroatypicalities are disproportionately represented in our genre in cure narratives written by neurotypicals, it is the ultimate act of passing-pressure: it implies that the neuroatypical difference is only important to talk about if it can be erased. Neuroatypicals are shamed and pressured into not identifying as such, and when they do speak out on how such stories harm them, they so often get rage and indignation in return.

It's as if most, if not all, stories featuring queer characters were 1) written by straight people AND ALSO 2) were about the queer people given an option to become straight.

We can extend this metaphor to other marginalized groups.

Originally posted by ada_hoffmann at Note to people thinking of writing autistic charactersYes, real autistic people have impairments and behavioural issues. I should know, since I am autistic myself. (Just making that clear for anyone who happened onto this post from somewhere else.)

No, real autistic people are not reducible to those issues.

If you write a story where your character has no character traits except for impairments and behavioural issues, and where they take no actions not related to these issues (or to someone's desire to "cure" them), you are presenting a distorted and objectified picture of autism. This goes double if you are writing from the autistic character's point of view. If you are neurotypical and have had close contact with autistic people, their impairments may seem to be their most salient trait, but that doesn't mean they are the only thing the person is actually thinking about.

Read more on Ada's blog.

Story meme

I have resisted doing this meme, but people are having so much fun! So:

Gakk'd  from tithenai and papersky and  asakiyume  and  cucumberseed and everyone!!

Tell me about a story I haven't written, and I'll give you one sentence from that story.

What is worth?

This is something I talked about with tithenai yesterday.

Those who know me know I struggle daily with the question of worth, the worth of one's work, even one's continuing presense. 

I would like to hear from you about your ideas of worth.

“The Three Immigrations” up at Strange Horizons

My magic realist poem “The Three Immigrations” about real and fantastic immigrations (and languages) is up at Strange Horizons. Many thanks to the SH team for giving it a home.

Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.

Back from hiatus.I am under the weather, however, so am n...

Back from hiatus.

I am under the weather, however, so am not fully back to regularly scheduled kvetching blogging.

How have you been?

note

Time to go on hiatus.
Short or long, I do not know yet. Hopefully short.
I'll see you on the other side.

P.S. Should still be reachable by email, etc, but might not be.


ETA: it has been brought to my attention that I need to make this entry public.

I am on hiatus.
I am not answering comments or writing new comments, here or elsewhere.
I am not posting new entries.
You are welcome to comment, but I have turned comment notification off. I will read your comments after I return from hiatus.

Thanks.

Languages in contact: Pidgins and Creoles

This started as a discussion on Requires Hate’s blog. RequiresHate questioned, among many other things, Mary Robinette Kowal’s usage of “patois” in a recent story in Apex magazine. Since this is something I happen to know a lot about, I chimed in with comments about language generation through contact, be it in colonial contexts or otherwise.

I feel this is worth reposting here, with slight modifications, to hopefully start a discussion about sociolinguistics and languages in SFF settings, and/or help people think about these issues in nuanced ways.

Note that this is an entry in specifically about pidgins and creoles. There are other models of languagage generation, language suppression, attrition, and death – if this is of interest, let me know, because this could become a series. In the interests of full disclosure, I am 1) an academic working in this area, 2) a multilingual directly affected by processes of language attrition and death.

Caveat: This is a discussion of languages in contact. This not a place to discuss Mary Robinette Kowal’s story, which I have not read. Please do not derail. Thanks.

***

If two linguistic groups are in close contact, new languages may arise. A very common scenario is the process of pidginization/creolization.

A pidgin is usually defined as variant which arises when two or more linguistic groups come in contact. A pidgin usually has simplified vocabulary and syntax; it usually has no native speakers. “Usually” is important, because there are exceptions, such as extended pidgin languages, which have complex vocabulary and syntax. A creole is a pidgin that has acquired native speakers (i.e. second-generation pidgin); a creole as a rule develops extended vocabulary and syntax in opposition to a pidgin, though a creole that has developed from an extended pidgin (which already has complex vocabulary and syntax) may not change that much. Pidgins are not by definition “temporary languages” that always give way to creoles. Some are long-lived; trade pidgins especially may have a long lifespan.

While pidginization/creolization is a common scenario to language birth through contact, there are other scenarios, such as fusion languages, and other language contact scenarios which do not, strictly speaking, lead to the creation of lasting new variants, such as language attrition and death. All of those processes tend to be of great emotional significance to speakers and cultures, as they directly touch upon issues of identity, belonging, displacement, and access to one’s cultural heritage, which is very often encoded through a specific language or languages. These processes are also very often tied to issues of power, prestige, and hegemony.

Languages do not randomly come in such a close contact as to generate new variants. There are a few common scenarios, most centrally trade, multi-ethnic work environments, slavery, and colonialism. Note that there are more than two sides to this equation, which may be balanced or unbalanced in terms of power, so let us consider each of these scenarios separately.

Trade: a pidgin arises between two or more language groups who engage in trade, e.g.the Yimas-Alamblak pidgin (Tanim Tok) in New Guinea. While pidgins are said to often arise from trade, I personally believe that this is no longer the main scenario for pidginization due to the prominence of colonial processes to language generation. Note that there is no obvious power imbalance in the creation of a trade pidgin – multiple sides participate as equals. Yet power can certainly be a factor even here, when one trade group is for some reason stronger than others.

Multi-ethnic work environments: pidgins can develop in multiethnic crews, e.g. Melanesian Pidgin English was first used by multiethnic whaling ship crews in the Pacific; Fanagalo is a language used by miners and is one of the rare example of Pidgins and Creoles based on an indigenous language (in this case, Zulu) rather than on a colonizing language.

Slavery: not that different from multiethnic work environments except the power balance is completely different. Here, multiple linguistic groups are forced together in a context alien to them, say on a plantation. This scenario is so common that some scholars speak of “plantation creoles.” There has been some recent literature that suggests that many of these creoles started forming already in Africa, in interactions between slave traders and the colonized. Both theories show creolization as a process in which the enslaved form or continue to develop a new language using the colonizing power’s language as its base. An example of this process is Haitian Creole, with French at its base; though the exact processes that gave rise to Haitian Creole are not documented, it is a language that arose as a result of colonialism and slavery, even if trade has been a component at its earliest stages. The process is similar for Gullah Creole, which has English at its base. Some scholars claim that AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) is a Creole, since it shares certain grammatical features with other Creoles and is likely have arisen through similar processes; others dispute this. Note again the power imbalance: such languages tend to draw heavily on the hegemonic language, but the speakers of hegemonic languages look down upon the speakers of such languages (more on this below).

Colonialism: Please consult this list of English Creoles, most of which arose as a result of colonialisms. An English Creole can compete with indigenous languages and may endanger or marginalize the indigenous languages, in a process not dissimilar to that of World Englishes. Again, the power imbalance is present, since this process is a direct result of colonization.

There are additional scenarios, but those are the common ones.

Attitudes.

Native speakers of creoles and of other languages that arose from power-unbalanced contact tend to be denigrated by speakers of hegemonic languages. Such words as “jargon,” “slang,” “patois,” “broken language,” “broken speech,” and such adjectives as “low-brow,” “uneducated,” “substandard,” “bastardized,” “backwards,” and others are used to indicate that the native speakers of creoles and other languages that arose through contact phenomena are somehow lesser than native speakers of hegemonic, often colonizing languages. This is so pervasive that even Wikipedia, which is supposed to be unbiased, says this about Haitian creole: “Yet another theory is that in attempt to learn the informal French of the White colonists and the Free black Creoles, African imports butchered the French patois spoken to and around them.”

WTF, Wikipedia?!

We must, we absolutely must think about what it means to perpetuate these linguistic stereotypes.

Every time you hear things like “they are butchering the language”, or “they cannot even speak English properly” said about a native speaker, the processes of power, prestige (often associated with class and race divides), and/or forces of colonialism and oppression are at play through linguistic judgments.

Creoles and similar languages often struggle with recognition and literacy. E.g. Haitian Creole was recognized as a state language only in 1961. French served as literary language, which is to say the language of prestige and literacy was the language of colonizing power. Since literary languages are gateways to status and power through education and advancement, such situations (by no means unique to Haitian Creole) are often stratified by race and class, where the disempowered have less access to a hegemonic language and thus advance less.

I think this is enough theoretical discussion for now.

I grapple with those issues as both an academic and a writer. In my recently finished novel Bridgers, one of the protagonists is a linguist from a marginalized culture who travels to study another marginalized culture. Ulín is not a sociolinguist (sociolinguistics does not exist yet in Birdverse), but when she, for the first time in her life, interviews a lower-status speaker, she discovers that speech can be significantly stratified by class, and that this realization can affect every aspect of our understanding. While Ulín has this realization and is trying to follow where it leads her, the privileged people around her are trying to convince her that only the hegemonic dialect should be studied as the most “pure” and “representative” of what language is.

The book is about more than just linguistics, but I am curious to see what people will think about it.

Questions and thoughts most welcome.

Originally published at RoseLemberg.net. You can comment here or there.

Goats! Old Norse! Mead!

Last night I was cheered up by answering sovay 's meme with personages from North mythology.

sovay herself and people in the comments were working on Shakespeare, and their answers are awesome and worth checking out if you haven't yet. 

My answers are here, but I thought they would be worth reposting because I think some of you would be interested.

Name a fandom and I'll tell you which character I most likely:

1. bake cupcakes for:
2. lend my books to:
3. put thumbtacks on the chair thereof:
4. have a crush on:
5. pack up and leave if they moved next door:
6. vote for President:
7. pick as my partner in a buddy movie:
8. pair up:
9. vote off the island and into the volcano:
10. wheedle into fixing my [whatever is currently broken around the house]:

1. Bake cupcakes for: Heiðrún, the mead-making goat. I have not yet met a goat I did not like, and Heiðrún has been on my Top 5 Goats of the Year List forever. A self-respecting mythical goat should enjoy cupcakes, but if not, I am also handy with cabbage.

Heiðrún heitir geit,     er stendr hǫllo á Heriafǫðrs

                Oc bítr af Læraðs limom,

Scapker fylla    hon scal ins skíra miaðar

                Knáat sú veig vanaz. (Grm. 25)

‘Heithrun is called the goat            who stands by the Hosts-father’s hall

                       And bites on Lærað’s branches.

 A vat* she** shall              fill with the bright*** mead ,

       that intoxicating beverage that can never run out!’

*skap-ker: skap- here means fitting, right, correct.

** she, the text says, and obviously Heiðrún is a girl’s name, yet Thorpe translates “he” – what’s up with the goat-mysogyny?

***skírr is bright, or clear; I like ‘bright’

2. lend my books to: Huginn and Muninn; I do so anyway. Such books as are not being lent to either of those worthy ravens are very sad books indeed.

Huginn oc Muninn fliúga hverian dag

                    Iormungrund yfir;

Óomc ec of Hugin, at hann aptr né komið,

          Þó siámc meirr um Munin. (Grm. 15)

‘Thought and Memory fly each day

          over the immense ground (=earth),

Fear I for Thought, that he shall not come back,

       though even more for Memory.’

And I would borrow books from Alvíss, the incredible dwarf linguist!

Segðu mér þát, Alvíss,    -ǫll of rǫc fira

            voromc, dvergr, at vitir-

Hvé sá eldr heitir, er brenn fyr alda sonom

            heimi hveriom í.

Eldr heitir með mǫnnom, enn með ásom funi,

            kalla vag vanir,

Frecan iotnar, enn forbrenni dvergar,

            kalla í helio hrǫðuð. (Alv. 25-26)

‘Tell me that, Alviss – all people’s fates

It seems to me, dwarf, that you know –

How is fire called, that burns for people’s sons

In each of the worlds.

It’s called fire among men, and among the Aesir – flame,

Vanir call it conflagration,*

Giants call it ravenous, and the dwarves - burner,

In Hell they call it hurrier.’

*vag is a hapax legomenon. Do we need more evidence that the Vanir spoke a separate language? Methinks not!

3. put thumbtacks on the chair thereof: Bragi! Because I am with Loki here:

Sniallr ertu í sessi, scalattu svá gora,

Bragi, beccscrautuðr! (Ls. 15)

‘Bold are you on the seat, you shall do no such thing (=cut Loki’s head off),

Bragi, you are a bench-ornament!’

4. have a crush on: Kostbera. It’s the magical literacy thing.

Kend var Kostbera,  kunni hon scil rúna,

inti orðstafi at eldi liósom ;

gæta varð hon tungo    í góma báða:

váro svá viltar,         at var vant at ráða.  (Am. 9)

‘Kostbera was learned, she knew how to interpret runes,

          read out the letters by the firelight;

she became attentive to her tongue and both gums,

        they (=the runes) were so tangled, it was hard to interpret them.’

I was sorely tempted to say “Thor in drag,” but see 5. Nevertheless:

Bundo þeir þór þá brúðar líni

Oc ino micla meni Brísinga,

Léto und hánom hrynia lucla

Oc qvennváðir um kné falla,

Enn á briósti breiða steina

Oc hagliga   um hǫfuð typþo. (þrm 19)

‘Bound they Thor then in the bridal veil,*

and in the great necklace of Brisings.

Let the keys rattle around him,**

And women’s garments fall to the knee,

And on the breast the broad gems

And pleasingly arranged his hair up.***’

*the bridal veil here is, of course, the bridal linen.
** the mistress of the house wears the keys on her belt as a symbol of her authority.
*** It could also mean a headdress, but I like this possibility better.

5. pack up and leave if they moved next door: Thor. I mean, he kills Alvíss, I will never forgive him this.

6. vote for President: Útgarða-Loki. He wins the nomination due to smarts, size, administrative experience, and the fact that he has a mitten. His vice-president is Kvasir (yes I know he gets killed and made into the mead of poetry, but I don't see why the Mead of Poetry cannot be vice-president?)

7. Pick as my partner in a buddy movie: Bǫlverkr. Though it’s the other way around and already well established.

Inn aldna iǫtun ec sótta, nú em ec aptr um kominn,

             fát gat ec þegiandi þar;

mǫrgom orðom mælta et í minn frama     

             í Suttungs sǫlom. (Hav. 104)

‘I sought an old giant, now am I come back,

Little got I there by keeping silent;

With many words    I talked myself forward

In the halls of Suttungr.’

8. Pair up: Skírnir and Loki. One curse-talked a giantess into sleeping with his master Freyr (who strangely enough, in another Eddic lay, is said never to have made a woman weep); another curse-talked a whole assembly of gods into kicking his salmon-shaped behind. I am curious as to what they will do to each other, though I can venture an educated guess.

Til holtz ec gecc oc til hrás viðar,

    gambantein at geta,

    gambantein ec gat. (Skm. 32)

‘To the wood I went and to the green-sap forest,

    To get a stick of power,

    a stick of power I got.’

9. Vote off the island and into the volcano: Guðrún. She is heroic and everything, but I believe the bit about killing one's own children to feed to her husband as a method of revenge is something of an overkill.

10. Wheedle into fixing my [whatever is currently broken around the house]: Vǫlundr! I like him a lot even though he commits rather horrible crimes.

Sat á berfialli, bauga talði,

Álfa lióði, eins sacnaði. (Vkv. 10)

‘Sat on the bear-pelt, counted rings,

Prince of the elves, he saw one was missing.’

It must be his obsessive making and then counting of rings that endears him to me.

Note that I am in spoon bankruptcy, so  comment responses will be slow and/or unreliable.

Hi guys, what do you use to export LJ entries with commen...

Hi guys, what do you use to export LJ entries with comments? I just want to have a backup. Thanks.