Time To Fire Up The Blessing Generator
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For newcomers wishing to know more about what’s been going on here for the last decade and a half, in over 3,000 posts and over 130,000 comments, the reheated series is a pretty good place to start – in particular, the end-of-year-summaries, which convey the fullest flavour of what it is we do. A sort of blog concentrate. If you like what you find there… well, there’s lots more of that.
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Now share ye links and bicker.
@wtp
AIUI every Pidgin is different dependent on the underlying local language. So, no, Nigerian Pidgin is unlikely to be understood by, say, Solomon Islanders.
Late to the party as usual but still got here. Barkeep, a pint of best please. Ping.
Barkeep, a pint of best please. Ping.
Bless you, sir. May one of your wireless earbuds never be in danger of falling into the toilet.
AIUI every Pidgin is different dependent on the underlying local language. So, no, Nigerian Pidgin is unlikely to be understood by, say, Solomon Islanders.
Well to that degree, clear out to the Pacific islanders, I would say that’s kind of obvious. I should have properly qualified my comment in the context of the Wiki article specific to Nigerian Pidgin where the speakers are using it for simple communication. According to the Wiki article (as now presented) it is spoken betwixt the 250 or so ethnic groups throughout that country, but presumably beyond Nigerian borders into neighboring cultures. And the article itself also states that local languages even in Nigeria have their own unique words. To my example…and this is of course pure speculation from my ignorant position…I would expect that someone from the farthest western reaches of Nigerian Pidgin could, if standing in front of each other conversing, communicate sufficiently with someone from the furthest eastern reaches to get something done. But to my example, would such communication, if being written down once, be passed on to a member of the opposite community and it be sufficiently understood without much further back-and-forth?
An aside to this…I’ve always been fascinated by the complicating factors of spelling, which is influence by regional accents as well, not just in the English language but other far flung languages like French, Spanish, Mandarin, Russian, etc. Not that I know much at all about those language differences specifically, just that it’s obvious that those other languages would have the same issues. Though AIUI, the French…the ones in France…are serious tight-asses about such things. Though how far that carries I have no idea. Yet one thing that I just stumbled across….Apparently William Shakespeare didn’t even spell his own name consistently. As a student I was constantly getting dinged for my “misspelling” of his name. Yet more reason to demand a recount of my English grades from back then. Bah…likely a drop in the bucket though. On both sides.
So, no, Nigerian Pidgin is unlikely to be understood by, say, Solomon Islanders.
Having spent more than a little time in various parts of Central America, in cities I could understand and make myself understood with my mediocre Spanish, but most of the dialects in the remote areas were nigh incomprehensible often even to people in a remote area one remote area over, so it is also quite possible, particularly given Nigeria is larger than all of Central America, that Nigerian Pidgin might not be universally understood in Nigeria.
Since it appears that the Friday Ephemera is on a well-deserved holiday this week, this seems as good a place as any to post this, um, anatomically-shaped wine bottle of note:
https://tipsybrand.com/
Having spent more than a little time in various parts of Central America, in cities I could understand and make myself understood with my mediocre Spanish, but most of the dialects in the remote areas were nigh incomprehensible
IIRC, Victor Davis Hanson has remarked that many illegal immigrants in California are now coming from Oaxaca and that they and Spanish-speaking Mexicans from the north find each other to be incomprehensible.
And I seem to recall hearing that this sort of situation could be found in various parts of Europe in the days when almost nobody traveled more than a few miles from home.
that Nigerian Pidgin might not be universally understood in Nigeria.
Well, kinda to my point. But in situations such as you describe, which are not terribly different from many very rural Appalachian accents that I occasionally encounter, with patience and a good bit of back-and-forth, the information is conveyed. But this idea of a standard, written Pidgin, Nigerian or otherwise, itself seems very, very colonial. Which previous commentor implied, ironicallyI think… carrying the blessings of British civilisation to the uncultured peoples of the distant Empire is what the World Service was founded for. Good to see it’s still diligently carrying the white man’s burden in these less progressive times. I have a harder and harder time picking up on irony/sarcasm anymore though. Currently in a FB debate with some leftist friends, etc. of a cousin-in-law where I thought surely this was meant as a conservative point:
Now not knowing this guy personally, I at first gave it a “like” but then the last two sentences gave me second thoughts. I click through to his profile and see posts about how Jan. 6 was “real treason”, and a couple of similar Narrative talking-point things. This guy really believes (again apparently) that guns take more lives…or “lives”…than abortion. I doubt that even holds up in Chicago. Maybe…maybe in a world-wide context where such numbers are wild guesses if not completely made up. This guy is a “Former Graduate Program Director Landscape Architecture at Florida A&M University”. Educated. Severely.
For anyone wanting to hit the Amazon link…
For the penurious…
The innarwebz are truly both wondrous and frightening.
Nigerian Pidgin might not be universally understood in Nigeria.
Ah. Divided by a common language, as it were…
For the penurious…
From the Dedication page: “Faught in the war against the Fascists 1043-1945”
Faught. Yes, he faught. Fraught with thought he faught, I’m sure. But hey, his son got the doctorate. Who is this BS dummy to question it?
But hey, his son got the doctorate.
Berkeley, none the less. One of the Elite.
Oh Lord…this gets richer…Relating all this to my wife who asks, “Well maybe ‘faught’ is a real word”. To which I haughtily reply…gimme a break. If it was a real word, the spell checker on this blog would not have underlined it…but the subject matter being what it is I had to check Google. So I types “define faught”…Now if you observed the title page on that doctoral thesis, the author got his BA from the University of New Orleans…so clicking through on the first link…”Faught was a cajun term in south Louisiana for fart. Common Misspelling of the word fart.”
Faught was a cajun term in south Louisiana for fart.
Credit where credit is due, farting against the Fascists for 902 years is no mean feat.
Heh. 902 years. Well my having fought fonts appears to have left me fraught with faults. I’m my defense though, I don’t have the doctoral committee from one of the greatest universities to ever exist on the planet (so presumed) reviewing my posts.
In my defense…stoooopid phone spell checks.
IIRC, we’re in the 3,048th wave of “eating insects is de future”
Don’t forget the algae!
farting against the Fascists for 902 years is no mean feat
Yeah, but did he actually fart against them, or just in their general direction?
I’ve been struggling along with “The Boat of a Million Years” on and off over the last six months. I find Anderson… grueling.
That seems like a very surprising statement to me. Have you read anything he wrote earlier in his career? I find most of his work pretty snappy, prose-wise, and the stories move along at a brisk pace. TBoaMY was one of the last things he wrote, and a bit like Leiber, I think his abilities may have declined late in life. I haven’t read it myself since I was a teenager and remember only the premise and a couple of scenes that made an impact on me.
I do still enjoy Fritz Leiber
I hadn’t read anything by him until last year, when I picked up the first of the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser collections. About halfway through I purchased all the others. Great fun, and very inventive.
I love Howard, but if he’s a bit too pulpy for your tastes you might want to try a collection of Clark Ashton Smith stories. He was part of the circle of literary friends that included Howard and Lovecraft, and his tales have their own distinct flavor. I’m particularly fond of his dying-Earth “Zothique” stories.
the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser collection
Painting a Mauser grey: only a barbarian would do that. I’ll let myself out now.
Blind Lemon Jefferson invented Texas blues
Hope y’all got a diligent sexton on stand-by.
IIRC, Victor Davis Hanson has remarked that many illegal immigrants in California are now coming from Oaxaca and that they and Spanish-speaking Mexicans from the north find each other to be incomprehensible.
My dad ran his own ad agency in SoCal for about 25 years. When he was running ads in metro Los Angeles print outlets (e.g. weekly local papers) and needed it in Spanish as well as English, he had at least two good friends to help out on the translation. Unfortunately, one was born and raised in Mexico City and the other was from East Los Angeles … and they’d occasionally get into arguments over what was a “correct” translation.
I miss the interesting links.
The Anti-Woke circle-jerk not so much… y’all remind me of the old farts sitting a mall food court.
Faughts. We’re calling them faughts now. Young punk-asses. Always pissing and moaning about something. Please try to pay attention.
@pst314, Mr. Pournelle was granted a specific license by Mr. Piper to write stories in his universe.
You don’t want to know of which you remind me.
Thanks for the blogging, David. Have ‘pinged’ you some British pounds.
Have ‘pinged’ you some British pounds.
Bless you, madam. Whatever your age, may the thrill of unplanned ice cream never entirely fade.
Again, thanks to all who’ve chipped in, including all those much too shy to say hello, or who’ve subscribed, or done shopping via the Amazon links. It’s what keeps this place here and is much appreciated.
Did you read the comments on that article, Farnsworth? Many agreed with the piece but seem to have not learned from it.
@WTP – I was wearing my best Muldoon disguise at the time of posting which no doubt was the cause of the confusion.
I hadn’t read the comments, but I can believe it.
Just to be clear, I do not have shares in UnHerd or anything like that, but just came across this which makes for dismal reading:
Of the many horrible things you might witness as a junior doctor in the capital, among the worst must be watching a teenage gang trying to break into the ward you work on, hoping to finish off a victim, punching your colleagues out the way to get to him.
Where I work, there’s a “code red” every day. That’s what we call the arrival of a stabbing victim [ … ] Just a few weeks ago, a boy came in with knife wounds and was taken to have a CT scan to assess the damage. But his attackers were not satisfied with wounding him — they wanted him dead. After turning up at the hospital, the whole gang rushed to the CT scanners. [ … ] Gangs come up with all sorts of ways to try and access victims who have survived. Sometimes, they pretend to be family members [ … ]
[ … ] The Major Trauma team often includes ex-military doctors. There will be up to five different surgeons working to save one victim simultaneously. This, of course, places a great strain on the health service, but the upside is that London surgeons have become experts — the best in the world — at treating stab wounds [ … ]
Although through personal experience I tend to groan inwardly when I hear the phrase “raise awareness”, this is the pseudonymous author’s stated intention for the piece – to let it be more widely known how often armed gangs invade hospitals, bringing their disputes or, whatever it’s for, with them.
But in this case it seems fair enough.
to let it be more widely known how often armed gangs invade hospitals,
The secret, I suspect, is to have fewer knife-wielding degenerates.
WTP, apparently the interesting thing about William Shakespeare is that he spelled his name in various ways, with around 15-20 versions known including “Shakestaffe”, but the one way that is NOT recorded is the now accepted spelling “Shakespeare”. I always suspected that some long ago Don at Oxford (or wherever) was having a sort of private joke and managed to get that spelling accepted as “correct”.
On SF, there was, some 50 or so years ago (so 1970 or so) the idea that there were three “great” contemporary SF books; Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Stand on Zanzibar (by John Brunner if you have not heard of it). Of those, just IMHO, only Dune really remains a classic. Heinlein can be OK – again for me The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is his best and most readable, but he suffers quite badly from the syndrome I once saw described as “I tells them, then I tells them what I told them, then I tells them again in case they missed it…” didactism writ large, and very present in his late works like Methuselah’s Children. If you want a lighter “adventurous” read from an absolute craftsman of exotic worlds, Jack Vance is always worth exploring. James Tipree Jnr is another quirky and pseudonymous writer.
Mr. Pournelle was granted a specific license by Mr. Piper to write stories in his universe.
Yes. I’d forgotten about that!
The secret, I suspect, is to have fewer knife-wielding degenerates.
By any means necessary™, as the left has been saying for generations. That means far more severe penalties for criminal behavior and far more stringent immigration laws.
I grant Fred Foo a specific license to fuck right off back to whatever swamp he came from.
The secret, I suspect, is to have fewer knife-wielding degenerates.
“The security guards we have are pretty impressive and fearless, but theirs is a massive job — do we really want to ask Joseph and his buddy Emmanuel to stand up, unarmed, just the two of them, against 12 teenagers with 12″ kitchen knives who have stabbed before and are here to do it again, all for £18,000 a year?”
I would arm them and tell them to shoot such vermin without warning. “Two to the chest, face gets the rest.”
Heinlein can be OK…but he suffers quite badly from the syndrome [of] didactism writ large
Sadly true. And I do wonder how some of his fans can not see it. (Maybe because they always agree with his messages?*) But he was such a talented storyteller that even many of his later stories had their merits if the didacticism did not bother you excessively. Starship Troopers works well in spite of its very strong streak of this. Likewise Glory Road. And it is amusing to notice how readers tend to separate out regarding those two books: I recall one leftist critic who deplored Starship Troopers for its “fascism” and didacticism, while praising Glory Road for its well crafted storytelling. The critic’s penchant for extremely promiscuous polymorphous sex couldn’t have had anything to do with his opinion, no siree.
* I have made fun of author-specific clubs for a tendency towards blind fanaticism, such as the Robert Burns clubs which demand that one like haggis, and similarly for Sherlock Holmes fans, Trek fans, etc.
Agreed re. Heinlein. Very few of his books have no didacticism (though his short stories are mostly free of it), but he’s such a compelling writer than I can mostly ignore it until I will Fear no Evil; that and all its successors I just ignore, as his obsession with various types of sexual congress has become utterly tedious.
Oh, by the way, Ping!
Oh, by the way, Ping!
Bless you, madam. When emptying the washing machine, may you be spared the grim realisation that your long-sleeved undershirts and assorted nethergarments have somehow been combined into one bewildering and inseparable item.
I grant Fred Foo a specific license to fuck right off back to whatever swamp he came from.
Seeing as how Gospodin Foo (if that is his real name) appears to have spilkes in his genectegezoints over one of the main themes here, I offer another exciting chapter of Today In Wokness™…
Join us now as we explore “Cultural Appropriation: Babywearing”.
To be honest I didn’t know what in the hell “babywearing” is, but apparently it is toting your sprog around in a rucksack”.
Because wypipo never invented anything but stole everything from PoCs, it is true that ancient wypio never carried their kids. The only three options were levitation – this was only allowed by kings and queens and the power to levitate was, of course, magic performed my court magicians who were PoCs. The middle aristocracy used prams made of gold, silver, and ermine, made and pushed by PoC servants. The average peasant just tied a rope to the kid and dragged it like a sack of potatoes.
Medieval depictions of wypipo using babywearing techniques are just the earliest examples of cultural appropriation. Below we see a young European peasant with a papoose clearly stolen form American Indians, and St. Christopher is using a device invented by early Arabs.
Speaking on knife wielding degenerates…well not really…here’s something I haven’t seen discussed in regard to this supposed story of Gen. Milley calling the Chinese to say he would warn them “if”…
Discussing this with The Wife, thing I find amazing about this, if true, is HTF did they expect China to react? Imagine your next door neighbor knocks on your door to tell you that if their son tries to kill you that they will stop him, so don’t worry. Would you feel safer? Imagine cops aren’t an option. Are you more or less likely to keep your weapons loaded at the ready? Are you now more or less likely to shoot him first if you witness or suspect odd behavior? What happened to all those game theory “geniuses” the Pentagon employed back in the 1980’s?
That means far more severe penalties for criminal behavior and far more stringent immigration laws.
And a lot less of this wormy posturing.
And a lot less of this wormy posturing.
“But you got to remember that a worm, with very few exceptions, is not a human being.”
–Young Frankenstein
Speaking on knife wielding degenerates…
I have to call BS on the whole story. A quick search shows a Code Red in the UK is just massive h(a)emorrhage for any reason, not just a stabbing. If you are calling a Code Red (which is a fire in the US) fr a stabbing, you are not going to waste time with a CT, it would go straight to OR, stab wounds being pretty obvious. Gun shot wounds you might (or more likely plain films which can be done in the OR) because bullets can bounce around.
Aside from the impracticality of deliberately stabbing someone in the rectum absent the victim being tied down spread eagle, a rectum can be repaired (might require a temporary colostomy), and even in the event a rectum must be removed, an ileo-anal pouch can be made. There is other sketchy medical wisdom besides that.
Gangs are running amok through London hospitals, but no one reports it, and the article is the only thing that shows up.
Right.
Farnsworth: I have read a few news items about incidents of gangs invading American hospitals. I am not as sure, but seem to recall, seeing a news item about such an incident in the UK.
David and all commenters British: Knife crime is clearly a serious problem in the UK, but I never see any reports breaking down the identify of the perpetrators by nationality, race, religion, etc. I get the impression that most of such crime is the work of immigrant gangs and individuals, but am willing to acknowledge that impressions can be imprecise.
Join us now as we explore “Cultural Appropriation: Babywearing”
Uh oh.
Babywearing.
In the cause of equality (or is it equity these days) I propose that wypipo cease appropriating black culture by wearing their offspring in this way. In turn I would expect that a corresponding respect be shown to white culture by not using any form of wheeled transportation, including but not restricted to, perambulators, buggies and motorised vehicles of any size or description.
“Bold, gender neutral lazer show could spell trouble for the Trump presidency while raising awareness for their community”. Because what could do more for “awareness” than inserting lasers in their anuses?