The regional languages of France

September 10, 2017

Passed on by Norma Mendoza-Denton, this beautiful map of the regional languages of France, with a tool for playing sound files for each of them:

On the Positivr site, “La France a enfin son atlas sonore des langues régionales: En un seul clic, cette carte interactive permet de faire le tour de France des langues régionales. Du bonheur pour les oreilles.” by Axel Leclercq on 7/21/17.

The posting ends with a paean to the value of regional languages in France — with a treatment of (for example) Picard and Norman in the north and Gascon and Provençal in the south as languages in their own right and not merely local deviations from correct French; and also the recognition of the Germanic languages Flemish, Alsatian, and Franconian as regional languages on a par with, say, Breton and Basque:

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Posted in Language and geography, Languages, Sociolinguistics | 1 Comment »

The fan, the spathiphyllum, and the impressionist garden

September 10, 2017

Juan came by on Friday to replace the left fan in my laptop (it had reached airplane takeoff mode) and bring me small birthday presents: some mini-cheesecakes from Whole Foods (one berry, one espresso), an excellent but hard to pronounce houseplant, and a visit to the Gamble Garden to view ranks of gauzy late summer and autumn plants in bloom.

The computer repair took only a few minutes — I am now enjoying the silence of the fans — so I’ll focus here on the vegetative side of things: the birthday plant, a spathipyllum (say that three times fast!); and those seasonal flowers, which are gauzy only to a cataractive guy like me (but the Monet impressionist-garden effect is actually quite pleasing, one of the very few positive consequences of gradual vision loss).

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Posted in Language and plants, Language and the body, Signs and symbols, Subsectivity, Tongue twisters | Leave a Comment »

Runner ducks, runner beans, rubber ducks

September 9, 2017

Back on the 6th, in “Birthday notes”:

From Benita Bendon Campbell (and Ed Campbell) a Jacquie Lawson animated card of Indian runner ducks in the rain, ending with a duck and a rainbow. In medias res: [image #1]
To come, in a separate posting, on Indian runner ducks and Indian (or scarlet) runner beans, which are not at all the same thing.

And then to add to those, India(n) rubber ducks, which aren’t ducks, though they are duck-simulacra (runner ducks are ducks, and runner beans are beans — that is, bean plants).

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Posted in Compounds, Language and animals, Language and plants, Parsing, Rainbow clothing, Subsectivity, Toys | Leave a Comment »

Dinners at Beaumont Rd., 1969-1973

September 8, 2017

Samples from a notebook kept by Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (with my help) of dinners at 63 W. Beaumont Rd., Columbus OH, for 1969 through 1973 — dinners that were notable for their food, their occasion, or their company. We moved into the house in August 1969, after Ilse Lehiste engineered my move from UIUC to OSU, so she was our first guest. On a very yellowed page:

(#1) 8/14/69

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Posted in Language and food, My life, Names | Leave a Comment »

Locked out, memorably

September 8, 2017

A little while ago my old friend J, an American, went to an international linguistics congress. From a message to me yesterday (edited to conceal identities), about an encounter J had with a European colleague, G, there:

(Note: not an accurate depiction of my Staunton Court condo, or of J or G.)

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Posted in Linguists, My life, Teaching | Leave a Comment »

Irmas

September 8, 2017

Hurricane Irma works its way through the Caribbean, now aiming at Florida. There’s nothing useful I can do at this distance, so I’ve been frittering away my time recalling the famous Irmas of my world — your list might well be different — namely Irma S. Rombauer, the Irma of Irma la Douce, and, top of the list, the Irma of My Friend Irma, the apotheosis, oh alas, of the Dumb Blonde stereotype in American popular culture.

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Language and gender, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Pop culture, Sociocultural Roles, Stereotyping | 4 Comments »

Birthday notes

September 6, 2017

As previously announced, today is my 77th birthday — my iridium, or rainbow, birthday (the element iridium, named after Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, has atomic number 77), better, as Ken Rudolph noted to me, than our 76th birthday, the trombone birthday (after the musical number “76 Trombones”, from the musical The Music Man). A hundred or so people from all parts of my life have wished me well in various ways — the electronic equivalent of companionable pats, and much appreciated. Also, some of them were funny.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Penguins | 2 Comments »

Antique technology (and its songs)

September 6, 2017

For two days in the Zits strip, Jeremy’s mother worked at getting him to submit his application to renew his automobile registration via what some have come to call, retronymically, postal mail, using the antique technology and infrastructure of cards and letters, stamps, mailboxes, and a system for transporting and delivering physical pieces of mail. Today, Jeremy admits to his buddy Pierce that he capitulated to this exotic technology, and rather enjoyed the experience —

(#1)

but Pierce treats the technology involved as not merely antique, but literally ancient.

Yesterday I refrained from playing the Swiss card: the music of the PostBus service. But now I’ll dive into the great ocean of mailmusic.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Technology | Leave a Comment »

Obsolete technologies and middle verbs

September 5, 2017

A pair of Zits strips, from yesterday and today:

(#1)
(#2)

The theme is the looming obsolescence of technologies and their supporting infrastructures and social practices, in this case the system of mail delivery (cue Thomas Pynchon’s novella The Crying of Lot 49), with all its parts and accompaniments: postage stamps, envelopes and postcards, mail boxes, mail transport and delivery systems, posthorns and their tunes, delivery personnel in uniforms, mail slots, post offices, conventions for the form of letters, and more. If you’re young and well wired these days, this all could be as mysterious and exotic as analog clocks.

Jeremy is wary of the whole business.

And yes, Pynchon is relevant.

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Posted in Argument structure, Books, Homosexuality, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Passive, Signs and symbols, Technology | 1 Comment »

Where is Gilroy?

September 5, 2017

Restrain the impulse to reply “Gilroy was here” (I’ll get to that below); the title is an echo of my 7/7/15 posting “Where is Ojai?”, which was about whether the city of Ojai, in Ventura County CA, is in California’s Central Coast region or in in the South Coast region (along with Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties).

Just so for Gilroy, a city in (far southern) Santa Clara county: is it in the Central Coast region, or in the Bay Area region on the northern California coast?

Ojai and the rest of Ventura County are in a cultural liminal zone, between central and south; and Gilroy and neighboring Santa Cruz county are in a cultural liminal zone, between central (with small cities, picturesque open spaces, and extensive rural or semi-rural areas) and Bay Area (mostly dense urban and surburban settlement).

I stumbled onto the Gilroy question through food, specifically through Original California Style Hot Pepper Sauce, made in Gilroy (but encountered on a table at the Peninsula Fountain Grill, here in Palo Alto), whose makers advertise:

Pepper Plant Pepper Sauce was developed by a lover of spicy peppers who wanted to enjoy their unique taste year round. Pepper Plant quickly became a favorite of the California Central Coast.

The Pepper Plant folks seem pretty clear that they’re on the Central Coast (along with Watsonville, Salinas, Monterey, and Carmel) — at the northern tip of the region, granted, but in it.

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Posted in Formulaic language, Language and culture, Language and food, Language and geography, Names, Pop culture | 1 Comment »

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