Author: geoplotsadmin

Posted on

St Jerome on Translation as Hostage-Taking

There are probably as many strategies of translation as there are well-wrought translations, but there are grosso modo two principles to choose. The first is to reflect as transparently as possible the content of the original text, expunging any trace of alterity or otherness, so as to convey with minimal interference its unadorned or naked substance. Ironically, this known as the path of « la belle infidélité » [beautiful disloyalty]. The reader is left comfortable, untroubled, firm in the belief that a window has opened into another world which might be his or her own.

Jerome, the patron Saint of translation, had a rather military view of this first strategy, one betraying the imperial Roman culture he inherited. « The translator, » he wrote, « considers thought content a prisoner [quasi captivos sensus], which he transplants into his own language with the prerogative of a conqueror [iure victoris]. » [1]

There is indeed something appropriate in Jerome’s simile to this translation of two novels (Mourir pour Haïti and Les Vèvès du créateur) by the Haitian writer Roger Dorsinville. By all evidence, Dorsinville came to think of himself and his compatriots as captive to an alien power, that of « Papa Doc » Duvalier, and was poignantly aware of how he had, for a short while, been the conqueror’s unwitting translator.

http://ile-en-ile.org/roger-dorsinville-preface/#r1

 

Posted on

Music as Earworms

I always have experience music as earworms. It follows that my playing a classical guitar is really more a neuro-physiological activity than an appropriation of pure sound.

Posted on

Readings on Black Literature

Following up on the BLM moment, I read in and around the topic, starting with  Jeffery Stewart’s The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Paul Beatty’s Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor and his novel The Sellout.

*

Likewise, Black US literature is US literature and has followed a course roughly analogous to “mainstream” US literature. From the 20th century on entire literary culture has evolved  from aspiring modernism to a state of facile identitarian subjectivism..

*

George Schuyler’s 1929 Racial Inter-Marriage in the United States, called for solving the US race problem through interracial marriage, then known by the odious term of “miscegenation”, which was illegal in many states until a 1967 SCOTUS decision

*

In The Walls of Jericho, the first novel by Rudolph Fisher, the lawyer Ralph Merritt buys a house in a white neighborhood bordering Harlem. In their reactions to Merritt and to one another, Fisher’s characters—including the prejudiced Miss Cramp, who “takes on causes the way sticky tape picks up lint.”

In 1929, Schuyler’s pamphlet Racial Inter-Marriage in the United States called for solving the country’s race problem through miscegenation, which was then illegal in most states.

He also published the highly controversial book Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia, a novel about the slave trade created by former American slaves who settled Liberia in the 1820s.

In early 2020, The New Group (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Group)

announced it was developing a musical adaptation of Black No More directed by Scott Elliott with a book by John Ridley and choreography by Bill T. Jones. Rapper Black Thought is contributing music and lyrics and will appear in the production, originally scheduled to premiere in October 2020.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/roots-black-thought-musical-black-no-more-963733/

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5129/

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137545794_8

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/19/george-schuyler-an-afrofuturist-before-his-time/

John McWhorter’s old piece on reparations: https://newrepublic.com/article/90734/against-reparations

Posted on

Notes on the Oxford Handbook of Language Contact

I have submitted a 1500 word review of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Follows a number of reading notes.

*

Pidgins: “two things stand out, namely that of suddenness and that of social barriers. In other words, two or more groups either experience a sudden need to communicate with one another” (OHLC, p 269)

Note that there is no suggestion of any difference in status, functionality, intrinsic value or quality by this use of the terms younger and elder (OHLC, p. 305)

Plain Mixed Languages (M)
Symbiotic Mixed Languages (MS)
“Neo-ethnic” Symbiotic Mixed Languages (MSN)
U-Turn” Symbiotic Mixed Languages (MSU)
“Secretive” Symbiotic Mixed Languages (MSS)
“Assimilatory” Symbiotic Mixed Languages (MSA)
        (OHLC, p 314)

Shelta, the secret language of Irish Travellers

Lagersprache, the German-lexicon pidgin used in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.

Ambilingualism – definition – Encyclo – English: Encyclo.co.uk

Code-switching as ludic. The anomaly of monolingualism

Basque, with its scantily attested relative Aquitainian, is one such example (Trask 1997).

Bloomfield’s tripartite division between cultural, intimate, and dialect borrowing is still valuable.

Pattern transfer, which led Grant (1999, 2002, 2004) to develop the complementary (not opposing) term transfer of fabric to refer to the replication of morphs (including lexicon) from one language to another (p 13)

Thurston (1987). One notes his ideas about endogenous and exogenous language creation and the relative permeability of the “endolexicon” and its outer carapace the “exolexicon,” 

It is not always easy to find reasons on a case-by-case basis why the replacement of one item in a language by a borrowed item takes place. Indeed, the solution often eludes us—but exploring such cases of intimate language contact should enable us to dig more deeply into the kinds of linguistic features that are most readily borrowed. p 16

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatypy

New dialect formation (Trudgill 2004)

Paradigmatic  templatic = canonical

Frank Jablonka (Jablonka 2017) on the rise of new mixed ethnolects as a fresh result of language contact. p 30

Procès d’intention (to shift slightly the usual meaning of the term) to presume and project ghost-in-the-machine like presumptions about why or why not a bilingual speaker might borrow a word or structure 

1 Examples from Moroccan Arabic north / south?
2 Was ist Deutsch?
3 Mandarin (sandwich)
4 Sorry-o, dry-o.
5 Wawa
6 Subvention / intervention

 *

The field has always been conceived of as a multidisciplinary area of study, built around linguistic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic approaches. Weinreich (1953) was the first to propose a systematized and integrated framework within which language contact could be investigated. In particular, he emphasizes that the components of an explanatory framework must include “purely structural considerations…psychological reasons…and socio-cultural factors” (1953: 44). These three components—the linguistic, the psycholinguistic, and the sociolinguistic—remain central to the study of language contact. Ch 2

I argue that van Coetsem’s (1988, 2000) model of language contact offers a more consistent, accurate, and princi­ pled explanation of the processes of change associated with different types of contact. Ch 2, p 52

how macro-level social factors shape the creation of creoles and indigenized varieties, is Mufwene’s (2001, 2008) Ecology of Language (EL) frame­ work. Mufwene argues that different colonization types, and the kinds of economic sys­ tems they engendered, led to differences in population structures, which directly affected the evolution of English and other European languages in their colonial settings. P 54

Andersen (1983: 7) discusses the “long and confusing history” of these terms. P 56

Matras and Sakel (2007: 829) Page 6 of 27

distinguish between “replication of linguistic matter” or MAT (i.e., morphemes and phonological shapes from a source language), and “replication of patterns” or PAT (i.e., patterns of distribution of grammatical and semantic meaning, and formal-syntactic arrangement). P 56

agentivity P 57

Weinreich’s (1953: 6) observation that “the individual is the ultimate locus of contact.” P 57

When such speakers attain greater proficiency or even domi­nance in their second language, they tend to transfer features from it to their original language. Such changes fall under the ambit of imposition via SL agentivity. P 59

deal with the fact that the speaker does not master both language systems to the same extent” (2001: 425). Hence, such a model must be able to account for the following aspects of bilingual language production (De Bot 2001: 425): P 67

In both lexical borrowing and classic insertional code-switching, speakers employ the morphosyntactic procedures of the RL as the dominant language, and selectively introduce source language (SL) lexical items, or more accurately lexemes, which are associated with lemmas belonging to RL lexical entries. p 69?

bilinguals can in fact attach the source language lexeme to the RL lemma as an alternative phonological shape that replaces the equivalent RL lexeme (de Bot 2001: 441).