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Speaking of t-shirts, I’d been toying with a t-shirt idea for the past year or two: a Beijing Pirate t-shirt. Let me explain…

A distinctive feature of Beijing dialect of Mandarin (and, indeed, most northern Chinese dialects) is the very frequent rhoticization (adding to or replacing the end of a word with “arr”) whose function is often glossed as a diminutive suffix. This phenomenon is called 儿化 (érhùa) in Chinese. Here are some examples, blatantly stolen from Wikipedia:

• 公园(gōngyuán)(public garden) →　公园儿(gōngyuánr), pronounced “gōngyuár”
• 小孩(xiǎohái) (small child) → 小孩儿(xiǎoháir), pronounced “xǐaohár”
• 事 (shì) (thing) → 事儿(shìr), pronounced “shèr”

The result of this variation is that it makes you sound like a pirate… and thus my t-shirt idea was born:

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I got hooked on The Office since I’ve been in Taiwan, which I watch at hulu.com via VPN. Checking for a new episode the other day, I found this clip from Steve Carell on Saturday Night Live this past weekend: The Japanese Office.

I’ve been a fan of the SNL Digital Shorts since Lazy Sunday, but this is absolutely something else. It’s a brilliant piece of cross-cultural parody. Many on the associated Hulu page had some questions, however, so I decided to write up a little explanation of what’s actually going on in this short, and why I love it so.[^2]

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From Old Man on Campus:

The Shoreland’s 13 floors, hundreds of rooms, will be a dorm for another year or so before it’s transformed into high-end condominiums. Meanwhile, plaster sifts from the ceilings, and the lobby is a mishmash of couches, stacks of student publications, a big-screen TV and handbills covering the walls. A friendly, bored staff of desk attendants watches as students — listless, sleepy, harried, running late, dressed to the nines, falling down drunk, depending on the day and hour — file past.

Accurate. I can vividly visualize the scenes he describes. Funny, I miss the Shoreland.

(via Bailey)

In my recent quest for podcasts, I just today discovered Jerry Sadock’s Automodular Grammar lectures on iTunes U, brought to you by the University of Arizona. This is essentially the first few lectures from his Automodular course I took my last year in college, which was one of my favorite and most thought-provoking and challenging (“thought-challenging”?) courses while at Chicago. While I still feel that having visuals (slides, or his handsome face, above), you can download his talks and handouts separately from their website, linked here:

1. Automodular Grammar 1. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, January 18, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)
2. Automodular Grammar 2. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, January 25, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)
3. Automodular Grammar 3: The Passive. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, February 1, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)

Possibly one of the positive results of ridiculous college entrance exams and a culture of cram schools: here’s a series of Tokyo Gas commercials. Various historical characters jump out of his armoire (the other end of a time portal) and learn about natural gas products, including John Ambrose Fleming (ad #4)! I swear, though, in the US, you couldn’t run an ad that makes fun of Fleming’s Left Hand Rule. You just couldn’t.

Now that the Taiwanese presidential election is out of the way, the already pretty boring Taiwanese news has hit a new high in boringness, today asking if closer ties to the PRC (with Ma Ying-Jeou’s promise to open up the Three Links (三通)) means we can have a panda now. No seriously. The people have been waiting.

This, together with my currently daily train commutes, have led me to further explore the world of podcasts. I’m now a proud subscriber of “The Bugle: the Audio Newspaper for a Visual World,” with John Oliver of Daily Show fame and Andy Zaltman, distributed by The Times of London. Like a weekly audio Daily Show, except more British and thus more ridiculous. It’s fabulous fun, and perfect for those of us who hate reading.

Here’s a snippet from this past episode:

USA and Britain are once again at the top!, of the western world’s teenage pregnancies – also called the two countries most committed to the war on terror. … What it also suggests is, as nations, we get overexcited in the prospect of an easy conquest without really thinking about the long term consequences.

So true.

Breaking news from the Potomac Primaries:

White Protestants and Catholics backed Mrs. Clinton, but Mr. Obama was strongly supported by voters who frequently attend religious services.

Seeing as backing Mrs. Clinton and supporting Mr. Obama are, in terms of votes, mutually exclusive, this sentence entails that white Protestants and Catholics (the majority of ) are not a part of “voters who frequently attend religious services”, as is demonstrated by the infelicity of the following sentence:

“Group A did A, and Group B did not do A — but Group A is part of Group B.”

Well, that just settles it then.

I don’t care much for the game, but always love checking out the SuperBowl ads every year… this year there was something really cool… a sign language ad by a deaf group at PepsiCo.¹ Very cool.

The crew has their own website at Pepsi too: Bob’s House.

Bailey just pointed me to a hilarious series of videos apparently introducing Japanese culture to foreigners, produced by the Japanese comedians Rahmens. Rahmens are incidentally the ones who play Mac and PC in the Japanese versions of the Apple ads.

Here’s one to get you started:

Via LinguistList:

‘Setting Language Research to Music’ is a Newcastle University project whose aim is to compose orchestra and choral music to demonstrate infant perception and production. The first piece of music to emerge from the project, ‘Swing Cycle’, mimics babies’ experience of discovering word boundaries, taking work by Peter Jusczyk and colleagues as a starting point.

It’s the craziest thing I’ve seen in a long while… it reminds me of the Music: Materials and Design course I took a couple years ago. My final project was an electronic composition building a rhythm with political speech samples and echos and cracking noises, representing the hollowness of political rhetoric. It was one of my academic low points at Chicago, for sure.

Maybe it’s because I’m an artist, but I’ve never understood the drive for modern art, including compositions like these. I would much rather listen to some music and read about language acquisition separately… the motivation to combine the two eludes me.

You can listen to The Swing Cycle and read the lyrics (or their approximation) on the Setting Language Research to Music website.

Every day at school they play some music over the PA after lunch and during cleaning time. Today I really enjoyed the music, which was not the usual classical or opera (our orchestra teacher normally chooses from “the classics”), and asked some teachers for the artist name. I then found a couple CD’s by the artist, 王宏恩 (Wáng Hóng’ēn), on the way to Chinese class in Yilan. The CD’s are solid overall. 王宏恩 is a Bunun aboriginal whose aboriginal name is biung tak-banuaz, and half his songs are in the Bunun language. To my pleasant surprise one CD also included a song we dance to at Nanao Elementary every week. The song is called “Buklavu,” written about his hometown and sung in Bunun. it’s beautiful, incredibly catchy, and encapsulates the aborigines’ energy. I found the song online and have embedded it here:

In addition, here’s a YouTube video of someone who’s figured out another one of my favorite songs of his: a beautiful song called “Ana tupa tu” (“moon”). I may try to learn parts of it, but simplified… it’s a little intense.

From Rands in Repose’s Nerd Handbook, probably a good guide for Bailey (though I don’t quite fit the target completely):

But in nerds’ bit-based work, progress is measured mentally and invisibly in code, algorithms, efficiency, and small mental victories that don’t exist in a world of atoms.

I feel this phenomenon exists in formal linguistics as well, where the elegance of an analysis may be measured in theory-internal terms. It’s hard to get other people excited when they don’t share that same background, precisely as there is no physical manifestation of an analysis. At least Bailey’s good about listening, trying to understand, and being happy for me. ^^

(via Daring Fireball)

From a CLV job description:

The division currently provides language and cultural-immersion programs to over 4500 children, youth, families and adults in a variety of settings, primarily near Bemidji, Minn. with a significant expansion to a location in the Twin Cities metro area anticipated in 2008. Enrollment is targeted to more than double in the next five years. [Emphasis mine.]

Wow.

From Gore Derangement Syndrome:

Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.

While I agree wholeheartedly with most of this Op-ed, I just don’t think this statement is valid. Granted, the sentiment is there. From the news, the speeches, you do get the sense that the Party is in this direction and that the conservative populus is. But would an individual Republican politician really feel this way? But then where’s the disconnect. Maybe I should ask a Republican politician. Or have someone ask for me.In addition, the idea of a smaller government and fiscal responsibility in no ways rationally leads to such a conclusion nor situation. Maybe Lakoff has the answer.

From tribe says its dialect needs official recognition for exam:

Under an affirmative action program set up by the Ministry of Education, members of Taiwan’s tribes are entitled to have their high school and college entrance exam scores raised by 25 percent. Under a policy expected to be made effective next year, those who pass a tribal language exam would have an additional 10 percent added to their scores.

The article is directly addressing the Kangke (寒溪) dialect of Atayal, which apparently received more Japanese influence during the occupation than did other dialects, making the new Atayal aboriginal language tests difficult for their students to pass.

I’ve heard Jennifer mention a couple times now how some student (often in their middle elementary years) who is half-Atayal had changed their last name from their father’s clearly-Chinese last name to that of their mother’s, precisely to be (more) eligible for such affirmative action down the line. While it struck me as strange that the student’s last name would be a real consideration in such policies, the language incentive makes more sense for me. My views on affirmative action aside (I’m not sure exactly where I stand, and of course Taiwan’s diversity is a whole other ballgame), I’m a fan of government systematically encouraging the continued use and study of aboriginal languages, especially given their rich connections to heritage and culture.