UNDERSTANDING CULTURES THROUGH KEYWORDS

Started reading Anna Wierzbicka's Understanding Cultures Through Their Keywords.

I'm considering this one 95% brain candy until further notice. Actually, I pretty much agree with the overall sweep of the argument (the particular structures and characters of languages influence the development of cultures), but I don't think it's really provable on an evidential, scholarly level (she herself (over)-frequently falls back on appeals to personal cross-linguistic experience in her intro. I'm reading this more to pick up the odd linguistic anecdote and the fun culutral factoid than for her argument.

She takes a few fun potshots at Pinker's The Language Instinct in her introduction, basically accusing him of wanton monolinguism (the word "ethnocentrism" is fired).

Also argues that Russian as a language tends to make stronger absolute value statements vs. more circumspect English. Compares use frequency of pravda/istina vs. "truth." Not being much of a Russian scholar, I don't know how broad a semantic field pravda/istina cover, but I could certainly see it overlapping with contemporary English usage of "really" (which she doesn't mention). After lambasting one-to-one translation correspondences, she's oddly happy to use them in frequency lists.

See also:

The reason to study frequency lists.

A HISTORY OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE THROUGH TEXTS

Finished up A History of the German Language Through Texts today. Somehow the book itself is so awesome it almost overshadows what it actually says: it's got diplomatic reprints of texts ranging from the oldest OHG fragments ("fater unseer/fater unser/fadar is usa/fadar ist usa"...) all the way to the Jugendsprache in internet chatrooms (book was published in 2003). Each excerpt is accompanied by a fairly thorough philological analysis -- in English? -- that contextualizes it and compares it with the preceding examples. Darn tootin'. Can't say that it's terribly well-written, but that's not really the point anyhoo.

Both the authors are interesting. Gloning is apparently a specialist in "German language cookery texts 1350-1896" or, if you prefer, Monumenta Culinaria et Diaetetica Historic. Going by his faculty page this book seems to be his sole foray into English, which perhaps explains the involvement of Christopher Young, who I'm guessing is currently buried in work on the new edition of the Kaiserchronik.

Squillatong

A language w/ an extremely high-density of the "skwee" phoneme. I will call it Squillatong.*

Ei-yuh! Squigee squibbing squimjimsquaw. Squack a squillo, sqoofloops.

I think this is hilarious, and I am clearly suffering from severe cabin-fever. Way back when in highschool (in the old Walrus-and-the-Carpenter-performed-by-Donovan-days), I invented a language with the sole purpose of collating all the most amusing-sounding phonemes I could think of it. Been racking my memory trying to remember what I called it, but can't quite fetch it.

*W/ a tip of the hat to the Italian squillare.