@isasv As an SF writer, I will say: making good neologisms is challenging even in your own language. Trying to make them in/with a foreign language you haven’t mastered is… š¤Ø Well, one should expect the attempt to fail.
It’s not a huge issue, just a pet peeve. @isasv I’ll add that even in English there are words that were newly created, or got way more popular, since I left, and on visits back, hearing them widely used by Canadians is kind of disturbing to me.
Hm, examples:
@isasv No, it’s not “an on-tact” (noun), it’s “on:tact” as an adjective for events. “on:tact festival” frex.
Which is the difference: I haven’t seen “malestream” before but it’s immediately parseable, whereas “on:tact” requires explaining b/c it’s made by someone with poor English. @isasv And of course we have neologisms in Englishāmansplain, for example. I’ve no issue with that. What annoys me is Korean media making up “fake” neologisms that will never be used outside Korea but presenting them as if they’re “English words” and convincing lots of people they are.
This is nothing new, of course: old men who don’t speak English having been coining untenable English-root-word neologisms here for decades. But what’s notable to me is that this is a second-order nonsense neologism etymologically rooted in a previous nonsense neologism. (I’m not sure I’ve seen that before. Though maybe I have and it’s just slipping my mind.)
I stressed that it’s fine to use these new baffling words in Korean, but it sounds like bewildering nonsense to English speakers and if the coinage is English-based and really outlandish, it can communicate an unintended meaning to an English speaker. They were surprised to learn these neologisms aren’t in wide use in the English-speaking world… because are always being presented in roman letters, to lend them greater credibility and “flair”.
(Which is why EFL instructors especially hate these clunky, dumb neologisms.)
Today I explained to my students that “untact” will never, ever be used by English speakers because it sounds dumb, and also sort of sounds like “tactless,” rather than what they think it means (which we have a perfectly good English term for: “socially distanced”). Then I learned that, nope, the word in question is “on:tact” which apparently is sort of the etymological demonic spawn of “untact” + “online”; meaning, “socially distanced but connected online.” Again, we have words to say this already: “online event,” or “online contact.”
The air quality is better this week, thank goodness.
Last week, I realized the phrase āinvisible lead soupā was actually pretty accurate as a descriptor for the air quality in our part of the country:
@GeekinKorea @IncheonLuke I was still stuck at, “Wait, your profs *want* you to parrot their own published academic papers back at them?”
“It’s the only way to get an A+. If you don’t, they ‘correct’ you.” Just one campus, but even so, this being the norm within any lit depatment was shocking to me.
@GeekinKorea @IncheonLuke I remember teaching Canadian (English) Literature and a Korean Lit student explain that in her major department, students were expected them to go look up and then parrot the interpretations of literary works from their prof’s published academic papers. @GeekinKorea @IncheonLuke She credited me with awakening her to the idea that students could be asked to attempt interpretation of works of literature without first checking what the prof thought/had published about them.
Like, as in, her reaction was: “I’m gonna revolutionize how we teach Korean Lit!”
@IncheonLuke @GeekinKorea The answer is inevitably, āI need more time,ā or āI didnāt knowā or I have a special situation.ā @IncheonLuke @GeekinKorea Fortunately, I also have a special situation, which is that as an instructor, I’ve done my job if Iāve explained the task both verbally as well as in writing on the class CMS, and they can go reread that and ask specific questions as needed.
Oh great, a phone app vaccine passport for South Korea?
https://t.co/QIznUy0XA6
Great.
(Itās not like Koreaās notorious for software that doesnāt work properly (or sometimes at all) for non-citizens, isā¦ oh, damn, wait.) And my best is itāll depend on having a proper account with a phone company here (which not everyone can getāit took me years) and rely on your national ID and name matching (which half the systems in this country cannot do with long foreign names).
(It doesn’t do this because there aren’t established corpuses for the speech or writing patterns of nonnative speakers. They may never be needed if machine translation advances quickly enough, but as a tool for machine-aided self-instruction, this seems like a useful tech.) FWIW my son doesn’t know about TMNT cartoons yet: he just has a few treasured early reader storybooks picked up during bulk book sales at a local used bookstore. He refers to Splinter as “The Mouse Sunsaengnim” (which is close enough to what Splinter is: a mutant Rat Sensei).
But when someone starts using language less than fluently, it starts to fumble. The funny thing is: there are typical error sets within one or another second/foreign language learner population: common errors to speakers with this or that first language. Language teachers abroad learn to parse the common (and less common but still semi-standard) errors for the group among whom they’re immersed, when one dominant group exists. It strikes me this is something people do, but software probably doesn’t do… yet.
It took a few repetitions for me to get this, though: I had to unhear “pee” and realize there was some other verb he was using, and I couldn’t hear “be” till I unheard the more logical (if bizarre) “pee.” This idea of listening templatesāmy termāis funny and striking. We have whole matrices in our heads that sort for expected usages, and are especially tight for typical usages. The net is loose enough for creativity & innovation, but tight enough to allow on-the-fly listening.
Half the problems faced by a nonnative speaker of a language are about how hard the native speaker listening to them leans on their internalized expectations.
The fun part of this is that little kids are, effectively, nonnative speakers until a certain age. Example: My son said something about Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I’d have sworn he said they “can pee in a pipe.”
Turned out he was saying, “be in a pipe”āmeaning, travel comfortably in sewer pipes. This use of “be” clashed with me normal English-listening templates.
Huh, I was just talked about the story of mine thatās in this the other dayā¦ new anthology, neat stories! twitter.com/BigEchoSF/statā¦
I missed those articles last summer, so this is all news to me and man am I disgusted. The RCMP knows that this coming out would be bad for their image, though, so I expect the public inquiry will be a shit-show and we’ll have to wait decades to learn the facts. (If ever.) And personally, the time difference in how long it took them to extract traumatized children of known victims from their basement (~3 hours!) compared to how long it took to evac an ex-con buddy of the shooter (<2 hours) is really disconcerting and fishy.
So, remind me, why did the RCMP so badly botch their handling of the Nova Scotia shooter last year? We still don’t know? They still aren’t saying? If you’re curious, this is worth a listen.
#canadaland #commons
https://t.co/VL4CpxItbK And while it’s a speculation based on circumstantial evidence, it seems maybe that the shooter was an agent/informant, and that everything was botched to because of that, and they’re covering it up.
Protip for the Doug Fordies: over here at the grownup table, saying “you don’t sex, har har” generally discredits the asshole saying it more than the person it’s said about.
(It’s a pure middle school bully , and a shameful one for a provincial government to bust out.) twitter.com/goldsbie/statuā¦
š¹ Seen this twice my son and both times he called the songĀ āsadāāand I get the vibe too, even though none of the lyrics are sad (itās more fo a nursery rhyme). Itās a bit about the music, a bit about how tentative Robin the Frog is voiced,… tmblr.co/ZwA1ltZwKWqzyaā¦
š¹ Tuneful and gorgeous. Was lucky enough to see a live set of J.J. Johnson in Saskatoon at The Bassment jazz club, I think as a teenager or maybe an undergrad. It was incredible. There were maybe 20 of us there, but every one of us was… tmblr.co/ZwA1ltZvV3dPOiā¦
@CreepyFables @BorjimusP @nevanizhu @Fian_Imperator @Gourethys @LotFP @Rol_NL Thanks, glad you had a good time. It should only get crazier as you go on! š
I’ve been busy with work lately, but I’m actually working on something for Knight Owl Games at the moment, and considering other projects as well!
Thanks for the encouragement!
This sums up a lot of what people are willfully ignoring when they keep insisting that “it wasn’t racially motivated.”
š¹ This whole album blew my mind years ago. When I first heard it, everyone playing on it except the drummer was still alive. Now, only the bassist is. But the song is true to its title, and so is the whole album.Ā Ā tmblr.co/ZwA1ltZujSxAuuā¦
Well, or, I guess I canāt say whether it is or isnāt racist; itās uncomfortable because of the overlapping otherings of āElfā and āNative Americanā with differing and weirdly clashing valences. But I think itās intended to be inclusive and positive. The thing that leaves me uncomfortable is that it also sorta ends up being an erasure of Native people from the setting. Not intentional, but hard not to notice. Not that you couldnāt jhave a Navajo Gadgeteer, of course, butā¦ thereās still a kind of erasure. (I think?)
@jeremiahtolbert As a WordPress.org user, I kinda hate Jetpack. (But installed it for reeaaaaasons.)
What did the unhappy Ankylosaurus offer the T.Rex?
(“A tail of woe!”) What do the other dinosaurs hum when the Spinosaurus leaves?
(“Sail away, Sail away, Sail away…”)
