The virtual shark-girl streamer who took the world by storm officially graduates today. I have a whole backlog of tribute songs I'll be posting here. This "in memoriam" song is set to the tune of "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid (lyrics, music).
As I said with Mumei's memorial song, Millennials and especially Zoomers' native habitat is online, so IRL is this strange exotic territory that they're alternately fascinated and frightened by. Growing up, maturing, leaving the nest -- these all have to do with finding their place in meatspace, and navigating relations with the perplexing creatures called "other people" (as opposed to, "other accounts").
In Goob's case, she got pulled out into IRL without intending to. Fandom taboos aside, it's pretty clear that she became a mommy -- like the time she came back and while casually chatting with Ame, asked out of nowhere if she had ever lactated, totally matter of factly, as if to compare notes with her own experience.
Details like that are important, not as gossip about e-celebs, but to make it clear that she has a perfectly respectable and noble reason for having largely left behind her turboposting memelord career for the past couple years. And to emphasize that IRL still has a powerful attractive pull, yes even on terminally online, algo-poisoned Zoomer brains.
And that's what this memorial song is about -- her feeling restless after living and doing so much online, and wanting to escape out into a normie IRL existence (notwithstanding the occasional visit / reunion). For the veterans of irony-poisoned toxic content wars, IRL normie life is not "settling" or "retiring" -- it's liberating and rejuvenating! ^_^
(Atypical stress patterns: CARE-ee-oh-KEY, ee-MOTES, meat-STAN, tar-ZAN. And "nendie" is short for Nendoroid. Also, do Millennials and Zoomers realize that "cut the cord" is an allusion to cutting the umbilical cord? That's where the phrase came from relating to devices that we have become dependent on -- if it were literal, you wouldn't cut that kind of cord, but simply unplug it.)
* * *
Look at these subs, all at tier 3
Breaking the 'net during karaoke
Wouldn't you think I'm the girl
The girl who sets trendy things?
Custom emotes, membership gold
How many fan-arts can one hard drive hold?
Lurking around /here/ you'd think
"She's the trending thing"
I've got ad rev and anime nendies
Several spots 'top the meme leaderboard
A million followers? I've got twenty
But fresh air, can't be streamed -- cut the cord
I wanna be, in the greenest yard
I wanna breathe, all the flowers they're planting
Grilling their ribs with that -- what do ya call it?
Oh, mesquite
Clicking your keys, you don't bond too hard
Hands are required for shaking, planting
Climbing your way through a -- what's that word again?
Tree
Out where they talk
And call you by "hon"
Out where they're face to face, one on one
Shooting the breeze
Wish I could be
In the real world
Trade all my clips, to trade some quips
Not just spam "poggers"
Pay 'em top rate, to elongate
My attention span
Bet in Meatstan, Jane finds Tarzan
Bet they don't shadowban mom bloggers
Online women, sick of simpin'
Won't trust the plan
I'm ready to grow where the green grass grows
Ask 'em my questions and get some answers
What are tires and why do they -- what's the word?
Turn
New routes to learn
It'd be such a buff
Forevermore live outdoors, off the cuff
Off the PC
Climb out the screen
To the real world
Nice.
ReplyDeleteNeuro sama covered There Is a Light That Never Goes Out today.
https://youtu.be/v4IP4MV3wpU?si=8ozt4Wb7ngG78pDW
End of the MPDG era, have to wait another decade before the MPDGs come back.
ReplyDeleteI apologize if this is off topic but I was wondering what if languages & cultures of the pre indo European & Afroasiatic Middle East survived like say Sumerian, Hurrian etc. into present day would they be apart of a new third fault line of the MENA region like the Indo Euro vs Afro Asiatic?
ReplyDeleteOr would they be part of the same fault line to the region like the Caucasus languages people are adjacent to IE or how Sumerian & Akkadian were very interconnected together.
Could Sumeria & her diaspora in this alternative timeline create a newer cultural macro group of the Middle East?
What are your theories on Sumerian since I liked your discussion on the Caucasian languages
I haven't really looked into Sumeria that much, but it wouldn't be like the Caucasus case -- there, my theory is that Indo-Euros adopted Caucasian languages, as they tried to adapt to the mountainous geography, and had to communicate with the natives who already knew the terrain.
ReplyDeleteSame for Basque -- those people are Indo-Euros who adopted the pre-Indo-Euro Basque language, and it's also in a mountainous area (Pyrenees).
Sumeria, and nearby Elam, were in the lowlands, and neither of their language families have survived (looong dead). The people who invaded them, whether Saharo-Arabian or Indo-Euro, did not preserve their language. Other parts of their culture may have been preserved, IDK. But they didn't need the insiders' knowledge of the geography in order to survive -- they just over-ran them.
Or, the Sumerians and Elamites are the same people as the current residents, but they gave up their old languages and adopted the languages of their conquerors.
In either case, it's not analogous to the Caucasian or Basque examples.
Hurro-Urartian was spoken by a culture that mainly thrived in river valleys (Kura and Araxes), not primarily in steep mountains. And sure enough, these two died off and were replaced by Indo-Euro.
Same with Hattic -- that was in the central Anatolian plain, not really steep mountains. And it was replaced by Indo-Euro.
So either the speakers of those languages were over-run and replaced by Indo-Euros, or they survived but adopted the languages of their conquerors. Not like the Caucasian and Basque cases.
Another case like Caucasian and Basque is Burushaski from northern Pakistan, whose speakers live in the steep, treacherous, permanently snow-covered Karakoram mountain rage, which contains the 2nd-highest peak in the world -- K2 ("K" for Karakoram).
ReplyDeleteWithout looking into the genetic or other cultural details, I'm positive that these people are the descendants of Indo-Euro invaders, but who adopted the pre-existing language in order to adapt to the steep mountainous terrain.
There are over 100K speakers, which is not the size of a pre-contact hunter-gatherer tribe, a remote island-hopping tropical horticultural group, etc. And they're not a sedentary agrarian society -- very little grows up in those mountains -- so they can't have a large population due to agrarianism.
Conclusion: they're the descendants of the Indo-Aryan (agro-)pastoralists whose subsistence mode was suitable to the mountains, but who needed to adopt the language of the natives in order to learn their way around the geography.
To clarify, Burushaski is a language isolate, not belonging to Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, or any other language family in South Asia.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, some linguists propose a link among Basque, Caucasian, and Burushaski! "Pre-Indo-European mountain people" languages.
A case that is still developing is Quechuan languages in the Andes mountains, surrounded by Indo-Euro speakers. Indo-Euro invaders just showed up to Peru 500 years ago -- to see what might happen there over the next couple thousand years, just look at Basque, Caucasian, and Burushaski speakers, who were invaded by Indo-Euros several thousands of years ago.
ReplyDeleteFor now, there seems to be a pretty tight link between speaking Quechua and having pre-Columbian DNA and other pre-Columbian culture.
But give it a few thousand years -- perhaps the residents of the Andes will be genetically Indo-Euro, or a Quechua / Indo-Euro mestizo group at both the genetic and cultural level. But who will preserve the Quechua language. It's very rare for pidgins to survive -- you have to pick one or the other.
Quechuan languages are spoken by over 7 million people, and represent 10-15% of Peru's population. HUGE... for now.
In a few thousand years, it may dwindle down to "language isolate" status, even if we know it was part of a broader family in the past. Much like Basque.
But it does stand a good chance at surviving, and not even being endangered -- it's a mountain people language, so if the invaders want to adapt to the terrain, they're likely to learn their way around by adopting the pre-existing language.
Other elements of the culture may go either way. And who knows what the genepool will be. But the language itself has a very good chance of surviving, like Basque and Caucasian and Burushaski.
For the confused, the commenter is referring to an earlier series of comments in which I discovered that the speakers of non-Indo-Euro languages like Basque and the various languages of the Caucasus, are culturally and genetically Indo-European.
ReplyDeleteThe main epiphany was learning how all of them celebrate the springtime renewal holiday by jumping over fire for good luck -- one of the core Indo-Euro cultural traditions (and identical to their Indo-Euro-speaking neighbors like the Armenians and Persians and Kurds).
Conclusion: those people are all Indo-Euro, as attested by their jumping-over-fire tradition, but some of them kept their Indo-Euro language -- outside of steep treacherous mountains -- and others adopted the pre-Indo-Euro languages of a people who they either genetically replaced, or mixed in with, namely Basque and the Caucasian languages.
One has to wonder what may have happened had Georgia continued it's ascent into a Great Power before it was interrupted by the Mongols, then the Black Death, then, especially, Tamerlane:
Deletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_Golden_Age
The Burushaski speakers literally celebrate Nowruz, lol. And they wear the pakol hat -- they're the same people as the Pashtuns, except they adopted the pre-Indo-Euro language of the natives, to integrate better into the mountain environment.
ReplyDeleteLike I said, I didn't have to look any of that up, just based on their similarity to the Basques and Caucasians, I knew it had to be true -- and it is.
The pakol, as I detailed in some other comment thread, is part of the Indo-European headwear tradition -- flat, brimless, disc-type hats. From the Pashtun pakol to the Tam o'Shanter of Ireland, and going back to ancient times, not just medieval (like pronouncing the labio-dental voiced fricative consonant).
Now I'm sniffing out that a lot of the "Turkic" Central Asians are also Indo-European, but who adopted the Turkic language of their conquerors.
ReplyDeleteThis would make them analogous to the Turks, i.e. the residents of modern Turkey, who remain largely Indo-European culturally and genetically -- except for speaking a Turkic language, which was brought to them by their Seljuk / Ottoman conquerors.
And like the Azeri people of the Caucasus, who are Indo-Euro but speak a Turkic language.
I'm not sure how far the "Turkic-speaking Indo-European" belt extends into Central Asia, but basically anyone who celebrates Nowruz, which a lot of them do. When I first read that fact awhile ago, I assumed it was referring to an Iranian / Tajik / Pashtun minority enclave within an otherwise Turkic culture, and that their minority cultural rights were being protected by a Turkic cultural majority.
But Nowruz seems far more common in Central Asia than just a minority enclave of outsiders.
I'm going to call it without looking too much further -- the closer they are to the present borders of Iran and Afghanistan, the more likely they are to be "Turkic-speaking Indo-Europeans", although the ones far from that border (like northern Kazakhstan) may still be largely Turkic culturally. But I'm open to the possibility that they're somewhat Indo-Euro as well, aside from language.
Mongolia for sure is not Indo-Euro, further to the north and east of Mongolia is for sure not Indo-Euro. And we know of mixed groups (genetically and culturally) like the Uyghurs in Central Asia.
But a lot of different groups were swirling around there in Classical and Dark Age times, so there's a careful sifting that needs to be done to determine the genetic and cultural origins of the various groups there today.
A decent share of those people will turn out to be "Indo-Europeans who adopted the Turkic language of their Dark Age conquerors" -- or leaders / unifiers, depending on how you look at it.
Totally analogous to the residents of Turkey, who still jump over fire for good luck during their springtime renewal holiday (Hidirellez).
Neat!
Aka Turks are like Hungarians.
DeleteYes, I mentioned the Hungarians in the earlier wide-ranging discussion of the labio-dental voiced fricative ("v") as a shibboleth of Indo-Europeans, including those who later adopted a non-Indo-Euro language, like Hungarian.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Estonian has "v" -- they're Indo-Euros who adopted a Finnic language. Finnish has a labio-dental voiced *approximant*, but not fricative. Not quite so distinctly Indo-Euro as the Estonians and Hungarians, but still likely coming from a largely Indo-Euro background -- but being farther from the I-E heartland, they were under stronger non-I-E influence.
Confirmed that a large swath of "Turkic" cultures are actually Indo-Euros who adopted the language of their conquerors / trade route supervisors / leaders / unifiers during the Dark Ages.
ReplyDeleteWill probably put it up into a new standalone post, on the occasion of Turkey's version of Nowruz, Hidirellez, as a reminder of how Indo-European the population of Turkey still is at the cultural level, notwithstanding their adoption of a Turkic language.
But very briefly, the spelling of Nowruz in Uzbekistan is Navruz -- with a "v"! I knew I was on to something with all this "v" stuff. I have an excellent nose.
Turns out quite a few Turkic languages have "v" -- generally, the western ones, especially the southern ones among the western ones. I.e., the ones whose adopters were Indo-European speakers -- and who insisted on bringing the "v" consonant with them, as a shibboleth of their Indo-European-ness. This region does not lie on the Eurasian steppe, but clearly south of it, so it's unlikely they're the original steppe people like the old-school Turks and Mongols and Xiongnu and so on.
In the northwestern range, it's a mixed bag -- some have the approximant but not the fricative, some only use "v" in loan-words but can at least pronounce it, etc. These speakers are likely to reflect the original Turko-Mongol steppe nomads, and/or Uralic speakers, neither of whom have "v" to this day.
None of the eastern range have "v", whether northern or southern. They're the uber-Turko-Mongol people who never came under strong Indo-Euro influence.
Also, Uzbeks have their own version of the prototypical Indo-Euro headwear -- the doppa. Not just a copy of the nearby pakol, just as the French beret is not exactly the same as the nearby Tam o'Shanter in Western Europe. They're all local variations on the same underlying ancient, even prehistoric, Indo-Euro source.
Neat!
As usual, I'm ignoring the genetic evidence, which does show Uzbeks being majority West Eurasian (of the Indo-Euro sort, not Saharo-Arabian), and minority East Eurasian.
I'm talking about their cultural lineage -- and as in genetics, that requires looking at arbitrary or non-utilitarian things, like what kind of headwear you identify each other by, or what consonant you pronounce that no outsiders can pronounce, or how you celebrate springtime. Like looking at non-coding DNA, so you avoid being tricked by convergent evolution, and only detect identity by descent.
Details on "v" in various Turkic languages, which I won't be writing up into a separate post cuz I have many other things waiting for new posts.
ReplyDeleteI've already covered Hidirellez and its many Indo-Euro rituals, so to briefly recap -- it's the springtime renewal holiday, people jump over fire for good luck, they decorate eggs, they play the egg-tapping game, and other than the Muslim-influenced narrative about the prophets Khidr and Elias, it's the same as Nowruz and Easter. It's closer to Easter as far as narratives go, since Easter now also has an Abrahamic narrative, despite being carried over from our pagan Indo-Euro past.
Turks also use dairy fat as their cooking and baking fat of choice, just like Indo-Euros do. Saharo-Arabians, Sino-Tibetans, well just about everyone else uses vegetable fats of one kind or another. The Turkish variety of halwa (called helva) is made with dairy fat, not sesame oil like the Saharo-Arabian varieties.
And wouldn't you know? -- Uzbeks use butter and ghee! Don't let their Turkic language fool you -- and if you do want to look at their language, consult whether they have a "v" or not, which they do!
Within the Turkic family, "v" is absent in the proto language (just like I-E).
From the Argu branch, Khalaj has "v", and it's spoken in Iran. Very obvious case of Indo-Euros who adopted a Turkic language from a nomadic group that passed through their land as conquerors during the Dark Ages.
From the Karluk branch, Uzbek has "v", although Uyghur does not. Uzbek is Western and closer to Iran and Afghanistan, Uyghur is Eastern and closer to Han China.
From the Kipchak branch, Bulgar sub-branch, Tatar does not have "v" (only in loanwords). It's spoken by the Volga Tatars, whose largest city is Kazan. Although some Iranian nomadic groups roamed around there during ancient times, it has also been the stomping grounds of the Uralic and Turkic and Mongolic cultures.
Kipchak branch, Cuman sub-branch, Crimean Tatar does have "v", although the northern dialects do not. It's spoken in Crimea, closer to the Indo-Euro homeland than Kazan is. And again, the farther north, the less likely they are to pronounce "v".
Kipchak branch, Kyrgyz sub-branch, Kyrgyz does not have "v" (only in loanwords). Kyrgyzstan is a bit further to the east and north compared to Iran and Uzbekistan -- closer to the steppe homeland of the original Turkic and Mongolic cultures.
Kipchak branch, Nogai sub-branch, Nogai does not have "v" (only in loanwords). They're the descendants of the Nogai Horde, who were based to the south of the Kazan Khanate, and just west of the Kazakh Khanate. Not in the Caucasus, but on the northern and northeastern shores of the Caspian Sea, and therefore closer to the steppe homeland of the original Turkic cultures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nogay_Horde.svg
Oghuz branch, Western sub-branch, both Turkish and Azerbaijani have "v", from Anatolia and the southeastern Caucasus / NW Iran. Clearly Indo-Euros.
ReplyDeleteOghuz branch, Southern sub-branch, Qashqai has "v", and they're from Iran. Clearly Indo-Euro.
Oghuz branch, Eastern sub-branch, Turmken does not have "v". They border on Iran and Afghanistan, and are closer to Iran than the Uzbeks are. So they should have it, yet they don't -- I consider this one of the exceptions, which every region of Indo-Euro has.
E.g., Castilian / Spanish does not have "v" (it has a bilabial voiced fricative), although neighboring Portuguese does. Pashtun and Dari do not have "v", although other Iranian languages do.
Most Indo-Euro languages have "v", but some do not. However, all languages with "v" are spoken by cultural Indo-Europeans, whether they speak an Indo-Euro language or not.
Siberian branch, Northern sub-branch, Yakut does not have "v". It's spoken in the far northeast of Russia / Siberia -- close to the Uralic, Turkic, and Mongolic homelands, not Indo-Euro.
Siberian branch, Sayan -> Steppe sub-branch, Tuvan does not have "v" (although it does have the labiodental voiced approximant). Located just north of Mongolia. Not Indo-Euros.
Oghur branch, Chuvash does not have "v" (although it does have the labiodental voiced approximant). It's also from the Volga region, just to the west of Tatarstan, close to the Uralic and Turkic and Mongolic homelands. Not Indo-Euros.
BTW, Kazakh does not have "v". It's in the same sub-branch as Nogai, which lacks "v" as well. But in the interest of filling in the picture of nation-states in Central Asia, I should include it in the survey.
ReplyDeleteKazakhstan is well to the north of the other Central Asian stans, close to the steppe homeland of the original Turkic cultures. Not Indo-Euro.
And although Tajik is not Turkic, but Indo-Euro, just to fill out the remaining Central Asian stan, it too has "v". It's Iranian, and spoken quite a bit to the east of Iran. Most Iranian peoples have "v" in their language, whether it's Indo-Euro or not, but not the speakers of Dari and Pashto, who are the minor exception -- a la Castilian speakers within Iberia.
ReplyDeleteLastly, the Burushaski speakers of northern Pakistan discussed earlier -- who are culturally Indo-Euro, but adopted the language isolate of the pre-Indo-Euro natives -- do not have "v". So they're like the Pashtuns in yet another way, being one of the minor exceptions.
ReplyDeleteWhat does that region have against "v" anyway? Dari is just a dialect of Persian spoken in Afghanistan, but they dropped "v" unlike the Persian speakers of Iran. Pashto still clings to "w" instead of "v". And the Nowruz celebrators of northern Pakistan who speak Burushaski, also didn't insert "v" into their adopted language isolate -- unlike the cultural Indo-Euros who adopted various languages of the Caucasus.
Anyway, just thought I'd mention them, too.
As for Basque, it does not have "v" -- like Old Spanish, it has merged "b" and "v". Another nail in the coffin of Basque people being a pre-Indo-Euro native group, valiantly holding out in the Pyrenees.
ReplyDeleteNope -- not only are they clearly Indo-Euro (jumping over fire for good luck during the springtime renewal holiday), they were specifically speakers of Old Spanish, who had already merged "b" and "v" in their Indo-Euro native tongue, before adopting Basque -- at which point, they were unable to insert "v" into Basque, since they no longer had it in their own Indo-Euro native tongue.
To wrap up about Turkic-speaking Indo-European cultures, the rule of thumb is "were they part of the Achaemenid Empire" of Classical times?
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Achaemenid_Empire_500_BCE.jpg
That included the southern stans in Central Asia, where most of them (other than Turkmenistan) pronounce "v" in their adoptive Turkic language, while still celebrating Nowruz and wearing skullcaps.
But that excluded what is now Kazakhstan, the Uyghurs, and other places farther to the north and east like Mongolia and Siberia and the Volga.
The only regions not captured by "was it part of the Achaemenid Empire" is the Crimean Tatars (for Turkic speakers) and North Caucasians (who I covered earlier, for NW Caucasian and NE Caucasian speakers). Crimean Tatars do pronounce "v" in their adoptive Turkic language, but Crimea was not ruled by the Persians.
However, Crimea, especially in Classical and Medieval times, was part of the Black Sea region, not so much the Eurasian steppe. It was culturally similar to the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus, which all got taken over by Indo-Europeans (some of whom adopted pre-Indo-Euro languages when their settled in the Caucasus Mountains).
And to reiterate, it's not that Indo-Euro speakers of Classical times had "v", and that this was inherited by later speakers. Nobody anywhere on Earth had "v" back then -- it only caught on during the Dark Ages, or the very end of Classical times (Latin began the shift away from "w" and toward "v" during the 1st C. AD).
So I'm not claiming that the Indo-Euro languages throughout the Achaemenid Empire had "v", and that's why its borders are a good guide to who pronounces "v" today, whether the language is Indo-Euro or not.
Rather, the Achaemenid Empire seems to have been unable to penetrate into the proto-Mongolic or proto-Turkic homelands closer to the Eurasian steppe. So it included Indo-Europeans in its eastern range, and it would later be Indo-Europeans of all stripes who invented "v" in the 1st millennium AD, and mostly preserving it even when they later adopted a non-Indo-Euro language of their conquerors, like the Uzbeks who were conquered by nomads who were not just Turkic speakers, but culturally Turkic overall.
Uzbeks kept their Indo-Euro culture for the most part (Nowruz, skullcaps, pronouncing "v"), but adopted the Turkic language of their conquerors -- while still insisting on pronouncing "v", just to hang on to their Indo-European-ness in some crucial shibboleth way.
Why did Indo-Europeans invent "v" independently, simultaneously, nearly everywhere in their broad territory, during the 1st and maybe 2nd millennium AD?
ReplyDeleteIt's not there in Ancient times, not in the proto language, and not in any other language family, except where Indo-Europeans adopted a non-Indo-Euro language (like Turkish, Uzbek, and several languages of the Caucasus).
Set aside for now why all other languages resist "v". Why didn't Indo-Euro also resist it during the 1st millennium AD?
There must have been something about the broader phonological landscape of I-E languages that made "v" not sound so crazy or cringe-y. Ideal? No. Everyone agrees it's not ideal. But plausible, passable? Well, y'know, given the rest of our phonology, it's not the weirdest proposal in the world...
Whereas to every other language, "v" is just ridiculous on its face, no way it could pass as a normal healthy consonant.
Within Proto-Indo-European, there are two highly distinctive facts -- the rarity or perhaps absence of "b" (that is, a voiced bilabial stop), and the presence although also rarity of "g_wh" (that is, a voiced velar stop, with labial co-articulation, and aspirated).
I see the "g_wh" as an over-loaded or over-specified consonant -- too much going on. It wants to "spin off" some of those elements onto another consonant, so that two simple consonants are better than one highly complex consonant. That's a "push" factor, on the production side.
Then on the reception side, where is there an empty space for the new spin-off consonant to be slotted into? That's where the rarity / absence of "b" comes in -- that's "pulling" the spin-off consonant in the direction of "b", to fill the gap, rather than over-crowd some other place where there are already highly frequent consonants.
Both "g_wh" and "b" are voiced -- so the spin-off will remain voiced.
The new location is close to "b", which is bilabial, so its location will be labial -- either bilabial, labiodental, something involving the lips *alone*, not as a 2ndary co-articulation as in "g_wh".
Now what to do with that aspiration on "g_wh"? Well aspiration is kind of hissy and turbulent, although limited in duration as opposed to ongoing turbulence like a fricative or sibilant. But there's already an aspirated version of "b", namely "b_h", in the P-I-E phonemic inventory.
So, rather than create shitloads of new homophones and confuse everyone, we can't just give "b_h" double-duty after the spin-off. We'll have to settle for the turbulence of a fricative instead -- that's still very reminiscent of aspiration, but it's distinct from it as well, so we don't confuse it with existing "b_h".
Thus, after the push and pull factors, we get a voiced labial fricative -- it doesn't necessarily have to be labio-dental, could be bilabial, but this opens the door to "v" being acceptable in Indo-Euro languages.
I'm discussing the picture of the proto language, not the Classical era attested languages which formed the actual background for the sudden appearance of "v" in the 1st millennium AD. The point is, somehow or other, these distinctive facts about the proto language carried over into the attested daughter languages.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the reflexes were different in different daughters, but they would've preserved an echo of the proto stage, which makes "v" sound palatable to I-E speakers, as opposed to ludicrous or disgusting, as it sounds to everyone else in human history.
Whether or not this particular proposal is right, it has to apply to Indo-European as an entire family, and *only* to that family. It can't be narrow, it has to be about the broad context or landscape at the gestalt level. And it can't be too mechanically / physically motivated, or else it would've been attested way earlier, like the Classical era daughters or even the proto language itself.
As an aside, why might I-E speakers have favored the labio-dental rather than bilabial place? Perhaps for shibboleth reasons -- in Classical times, many Semitic languages were developing the voiced bilabial fricative, whether as a phoneme or allophonic variant (including Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew, and probably Phoenician as well). It could have existed in other non-I-E places as well, I haven't checked. But it is far more common than "v".
So, rather than sound like the outgroup, which may have had the bilabial voiced fricative, the I-E innovators chose to preserve their I-E identity as distinct from the Semitic or whoever else neighbors, and opted for labio-dental instead. No outgroup had it, so it's perfect to make a shibboleth for ourselves.
And that's how -- without needing a convocation of delegates from all branches of Indo-European, from Ireland to India -- the Indo-Euros independently, simultaneously, and ubiquitously invented the "v" during the 1st millennium AD (some maybe in the 2nd, IDK the full picture).
To clarify, I'm not proposing that "v" is a later reflex of "g_wh" from the proto stage. What I'm saying is that the presence of "g_wh" -- which as far as I know is fairly unique, or totally unique in the world's languages (labialized velars are common, but not with aspiration added on top) -- formed a key part of the gestalt or landscape of I-E phonology.
ReplyDeleteWith such a consonant in your inventory, "v" doesn't sound so crazy -- both are voiced, involve the lips, and the manner involves some degree of puffy, hissy, buzzing turbulence.
Add into the context that plenty of bilabial consonants exist, so making its primary / sole place of articulation being labial isn't so crazy either. And the fact that "b" is mostly absent, that frees up a little space for some consonantal innovation near the lips.
This phonological landscape makes it not-so-crazy to produce a voiced labial fricative.
Why labio-dental instead of bilabial like all the other labial consonants of the proto language? Maybe we've heard Semitic people or other non-I-E people using the bilabial voiced fricative, and we don't want to sound like real outgroup members.
Romans wouldn't have wanted to sound like Persians -- but imagine sounding like a Syrian. That's totally incomprehensible. Persian wasn't so incomprehensible to Romans, and vice versa.
So go for labio-dental instead.
Also during this stage, the labio-dental fricative without voicing was being adopted -- Classical Latin, although probably not Old Latin, used labio-dental "f", not the bilabial version. Avestan had "f" (and the bilabial voiced fricative, but this was not typical of I-E languages).
Greek went from having "b" from its origins to having the voiced bilabial fricative during the 1st C AD, which didn't last long, to "v" by the 4th C AD, where it has remained to the present. They didn't like that bilabial version -- too Semitic. Plus they were adopting "f" in place of the earlier "p_h", by the 4th C AD, so why not do labio-dental for both "f" and "v"?
Anyway, the point is that "v" doesn't have to descend from the same origin across all the daughter languages. There's just something about the broad landscape of all the daughters, which reflects the proto stage, that makes "v" sound plausible and palatable, whereas it's totally voted out in all other language families. Namely that presence of "g_wh" and the free space where "b" barely existed.
Off topic question but do you have any thoughts on the environmentalists / people like John Michael Greer who suggest we may wind up moving back to a pre-industrial way of life?
ReplyDeleteI think their explanations for some problem make sense but I find myself disagreeing with the overall vision of the future.
The Tocharians were not culturally Indo-Euro, they merely adopted an Indo-Euro language -- which they heavily altered to match their native non-Indo-Euro language(s) -- for a little while, before ditching it in favor of Turkic, eventually.
ReplyDeleteTheir cultural and genetic background was some mix of Uralic / Samoyedic, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Yeniseian, etc. South Siberian, esp. Samoyedic and Yeniseian.
I was looking into why some I-E languages never adopted "v", and Tocharian (both A and B) is one of these "v"-avoiders. The other big group of them are Indo-Aryan -- but my hunch there is that Indo-Aryan preserves all sorts of aspirated consonants, including on voiced stops. That's preserving part of the landscape of Proto-I-E, which had aspirated stops.
I thought the loss of aspiration meant that element of puffy / hissy / buzzy / breathiness wanted to go somewhere else, and wound up as frication instead. There was labial co-articulation on "g_wh", there was an empty slot near "b", so "v" was the right combination to play all these roles simultaneously.
Adoption of "v" came after loss of aspiration -- at the very least, loss of aspirated voiced stops. Armenian still has aspirated voiceless stops, and *does* have "v", so it seems to be more about those aspirated voiced stops. Aspiration turns into frication, voicing is preserved, there's an open spot near empty "b", there's labial co-articulation floating around trying to find somewhere to land when the labial-velars go away -- so boom, "v" it is.
Indo-Aryan languages generally have aspirated voiced stops, and that seems to be what's blocking the adoption of "v" in that big branch of Indo-European.
But Tocharian doesn't have aspiration at all -- that should've opened the door to more fricatives, including "v". But it didn't.
Come to find out, the merger of all 3 stop series in P-I-E into a single one -- voiceless, unaspirated stops -- in Tocharian is due to the bulk of their speakers learning it as L2 in adulthood, having spoken non-I-E languages before. Seemingly, Samoyedic or other Uralic languages, and/or Yeniseian.
See Peyrot (2019): "The deviant typological profile of the Tocharian branch of Indo-European may be due to Uralic substrate influence".
Well, that solves the riddle of "why no 'v' in Tocharian?" -- they didn't lose aspiration and free it up to turn into frication instead, they never had aspiration to begin with. Those various non-I-E language families in Southern Siberia / Eastern steppe don't have aspiration, so when their speakers tried to adopt an I-E language, which did have aspiration, they couldn't do it, nor could they do a voicing contrast as in I-E, so they just merged all 3 series of stops together while learning / constructing this new I-E-ish creole.
And as elsewhere, the non-I-E languages did not already have "v", so they couldn't bring it with them. And that's why, despite Tocharian seemingly having cleared the way for "v" by eliminating aspiration (esp. on voiced stops), they didn't actually adopt "v". They never had aspiration to begin with, so it was not a free-floating element that could subtly change into frication and land in the labial region to become "v".
The other I-E languages, where "v" did develop, had a history of aspiration, which they eliminated, and freed up that element to change into frication instead, encouraging the adoption of "v".
Moving beyond language, and into real culture (since language, outside of its shibboleth-y aspects, is just a utilitarian tool for communication), the Tocharians had names for both a "sun-god" and a "moon-god" -- and they were referred to that way, with the generic all-purpose word for "god" tacked onto the end, not with special unique names as though they were a person, a la the sun and moon gods from Indo-European mythology.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Seh%E2%82%82ul_and_*Meh%E2%82%81not
Also, Tocharian does not have a cognate for Dyeus or any of its derivatives, whether the longer epithet Dyeus Phter ("Sky Father"), or words amounting to "heaven," "gods," "divine", etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us
Missing the major unifying all-important sky-father? Not Indo-Euro.
Tocharian does have a cognate for the Earth Mother of Indo-Euro mythology, but she's not called by the epithet "mother" but simply "earth-god", and due to the absence of sky-father, she's not paired in a contrasting union with the sky-father.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*D%CA%B0%C3%A9%C7%B5%CA%B0%C5%8Dm
So, although using a cognate term for "earth", the earth-god's name has the generic "god" tacked onto the end, and does not refer to the same entity as in I-E mythology (one of whose defining traits is being paired with the sky-father, who is absent in Tocharian).
No sky-father, downplayed earth-god, but very keen on the moon and the sun...
Why, that's just like the Xiongnu's crucial icons, the sun and the moon!
https://e3.eurekalert.org/multimedia/980867
Both the sun and moon are included on the Mongolian flag, to reflect their affinity with the Xiongnu.
Yeah, every culture knows about the sun and moon, may even make them into deities, but making them more important than sky-father, well, that makes them Southern Siberian rather than Indo-European, culturally. Doesn't matter what language they speak.
I'm not claiming the Xiongnu specifically were the cultural ancestors of the Tocharians, just that the people who adopted / constructed the Tocharian language came from a cultural background closer to that of the Xiongnu (Eastern steppe) than that of the Yamnaya or Western steppe Indo-Euro speakers.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Indo-Europeans adopting Buddhism? Never happened -- briefly in India, where the religion originated, but it was not stable there. It quickly flowed out of India, while decaying / vanishing among Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian speakers.
ReplyDeleteIt went all sorts of directions, as long as they landed in East Asia -- Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia, and also the Tarim Basin, where the Tocharians adopted it.
If the Tocharians were culturally I-E, this is a huge surprise. If their cultural background was anywhere in East Asia, including the Ural Mountains and eastward across the steppe, then there's nothing surprising about it at all. During the Dark Ages, Buddhism was the international religion that united East Asia -- so if the Tocharians were culturally East Asian (aside from their new language), they would've been a natural fit for adopting Buddhism.
If they were I-E, then their Buddhism would've been a fleeting flirtation, as it was in South Asia where it came from. But the Tocharians seemed to have been really into Buddhism -- the vast majority of their writings are written by Buddhist monks, being supported in Buddhist monasteries, on the subject matter of Buddhism!
Not the Berkley Buddhist type at all. They must've been culturally East Asian (including the northern range of Central Asia).
It is worth noting how during China's equivalent of the Dark Ages (often called the "Period of Division") between the dissolution of the Han Dynasty in the early 3rd Century and the re-unification under the Sui Dynasty in the late 6th Century, Buddhism (along with Daoism) really spread throughout East Asia:
Delete"The upheavals of the period, and the widespread suffering that these caused, led many Chinese in all ranks of society to search for a deeper meaning beyond the life of the here and now. Confucianism focussed mainly on how to live a good life within the world of men, and offered no deep hope for the afterlife. Buddhism, with its message of eternal salvation, began to spread through all ranks of Chinese society.
The troubles of the times weakened the hold of Confucianism. It remained the official cult in all the Chinese states, and therefore the focus of the officials’ educational curriculum, thus moulding the outlook of the elite. However, in the 3rd century, some writers set out to harmonize Daoism with Confucian teaching. For example they interpreted the Daoist concept of non-action to mean taking no inappropriate action. “Clarifications” such as this made it possible for people to follow Daoism whilst pursuing an official career, and so made it much more popular with many educated people.
"
https://timemaps.com/civilizations/divided-china-2/
What do you think of the theory that it was the invasion of the Muslim Arabs that was a principal catalyst for the decline of Buddhism in South Asia?:
Deletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Buddhism_in_the_Indian_subcontinent
After all, Buddhism used to have its biggest strongholds in the mountainous areas around what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan (the Hindu Kush) and many later fled to other mountainous places like Tibet (Buddhism seems best suited to mountainous areas where can really feel "detached")
Tocharians don't appear to have celebrated Nowruz or similar Indo-Euro "jumping over fire for good luck during the springtime renewal holiday" ritual, according to the Wiki article on Nowruz's extent over time and space.
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't have conflicted with Buddhism, anymore than it conflicted with Islam, Christianity, or other new post-pagan religion. Turkic and Mongol groups didn't stamp it out when they invaded Iran.
I'll bet the Tocharians didn't decorate eggs or play the egg-tapping game for the occasion either.
I'll bet they didn't hide a good luck charm in the dessert of a New Year's holiday either.
I'll bet they didn't have a fancy footwork + rigid torso dance style, like the kathak of Northern India to the Armenian and Caucasus verions, to the Bavarian schuhplattler version, to the Irish jig!
I'll bet their wedding ritual never involved ransoming an item from the bride's side and making the groom's side pay up in order to get it / her back. And I'll bet the wedding didn't involve circumambulating.
I'll bet they never used the swastika -- before their Buddhist era, of course, when they may have imported it from India.
Until there is overt, hard confirmation of distinctly Indo-Euro cultural elements -- aside from the utilitarian tool of language, which makes it not an arbitrary marker of cultural identity (too many material reasons to give up your native language in favor of a new one belonging to wealthy, powerful, or influential people) -- I'm declaring the Tocharians to be culturally South Siberian, Eastern steppe, etc. Definitely NOT Indo-European.
I am curious as to how you view writing itself with relation to the Indo-European peoples as all writing systems seem to be imitations of non-I E civilizations. For example, it was the Semitic Phonecians who developed the alphabet, which was later imitated by the Greeks (who in turn were imitated by the Latin Romans) and possibly even Germanic runes:
Deletehttps://sjquillen.medium.com/are-germanic-languages-middle-eastern-70b5668c4cf6
The very first writing systems that we know of developed independently of each other in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilization in modern Pakistan, China, and Central America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUpJ4yVCNrI
Out of these, Egyptians and Sumerians are Afro-Asiatic, the Indus Valley Civilization are believed to be pre-I-E Dravidians and obviously East Asians and Central Americans are not Indo-Europeans.
Do you see having an oral tradition as more quintessentially Indo-European as opposed to the writing systems developed initially by despotic, stratified non-I-E states?
"V" has caught on in parts of the Niger-Congo family in Sub-Saharan Africa, including the Gbe sub-family, Swahili and Zulu among the Bantu sub-family, and maybe some others, I haven't checked them all out. Not in Yoruba or Igbo, though.
ReplyDeleteTellingly, these languages have aspiration, though not on voiced stops -- maybe they once did, and now that aspiration has been freed from voiced stops, it can be subtly changed into frication instead, and give "v", as I suspect is the case for Indo-European.
Whatever the precise mechanical reasons why, there's a telltale correlation between getting "v" and having recently / currently had aspiration.
Neither aspiration nor frication is present in the proto-languages, so they're both recent developments. But they do seem to go together, and in order to collect one of the rarest consonants into your phonemic treasury, you have to go through an aspiration phase first.
This still leaves "v" as a shibboleth for Indo-Europeans within Eurasia, Saharo-Arabian Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia (and the New World?).
But it looks like we've got a little upstart competition for global shibboleth status, if "v" catches on and becomes permanent in the Niger-Congo family. So far, not very extensive, not including some of the largest languages like Yoruba and Igbo. But once upon a time, only a few Indo-Euro languages had it -- then just about all of them did.
We'll have to wait a thousand years and check back on them. For the time being, Indo-Europeans are still the owners of "v" even at a global scale.
Dravidians have the “v” sound.
ReplyDeleteIt just occurred to me, might American cheerleaders form a properly-defined contribution of the Indo-European jump dancing tradition? Although, modern sports cheerleading can be considered a development of an all-American civilization, it also may be considered quintessentially Indo-European in its style.
ReplyDeleteDravidians do *not* have "v" -- they have the approximant, not the fricative. Many Indo-Aryan languages also have the approximant, but not the fricative.
ReplyDeleteIndian English also doesn't have the fricative /v/ either, they only have the approximant. Same goes with Norwegian and Danish.
DeleteCuius regio, eius religio. The Americanization of the Catholic Church goes back to our defeat of Italy in WWII, then scooping it up as a vassal afterward -- NATO.
ReplyDeleteThat's why there was the Vatican II Council in the '60s, albeit administered by an Italian Pope, but while Italy was now literally militarily occupied by the American Empire.
That's why Catholic Church rituals are so Protestantized by now -- among Christians in America, that's the background they came from.
There hasn't even been an Italian local administrator pope since the '70s. The first anti-Soviet / pro-NATO pope to formally wrest papal control from the Italian people was the Polak, John Paul II. Then a German, then a New Worlder (at least of Italian descent), and now another New Worlder but from America itself (of partial Italian descent).
Look through the list of popes, and you'll see which empires were powerful in a given era -- they put their people in the papacy. French popes during the unrivaled height of the French Empire in the 13th C. Byzantine popes when that empire occupied Italy. A few Spaniards during their empire's Golden Age.
Even an Englishman from just after the Norman Liberation of England from the Vikings! Adrian IV, who was pope during the 1150s, hailed from the ethnogenetic / imperiogenetic hot-bed of Southeast England, one of the few holdouts from the Viking-ruled Danelaw. He even had a cool Dark Age epithet -- before becoming pope, he was known as "Nicholas Breakspear".
One of his first actions was to further encourage the Christianization of Norway and Sweden, with the memories of England's meta-ethnic nemesis, the monk-slaying pagan Vikings, still fresh in everyone's minds. How the tables had turned...
Pope Adrian IV came to the papacy right as the British Empire had gone through its integrative civil war, and so when its ethnogenesis would kick into overdrive and construct a whole new culture for a whole new people, and their empire would expand in every direction.
ReplyDelete"The Anarchy" lasted from 1138 to 1153, and Nicholas Breakspear took office as pope the very next year, 1154, until his death in 1159.
That's like if an American were elected pope in 1877, right after our integrative Civil War & Reconstruction era had wrapped up, and we would expand like crazy and construct a whole new distinctly American identity.
More interesting is the geographical barrier *within* Italy for becoming pope -- for many centuries, a Southerner cannot become pope. The last one born in the South was Benedict XIII, 300 years ago (1724-'30). There was another Southern pope during the 1690s (Innocent XII), but going back further than that, it's still rare.
ReplyDeletePopes mainly came from Rome itself or the surrounding region -- no surprise there. But if they weren't from Lazio, they came from somewhere to the north or also in the central region -- Tuscany, Lombardy, Bologna, Venice, Genoa, etc.
The last time that Southerners were likely to be pope was when that region was part of the Byzantine Empire, and there was the Byzantine Papacy (537-752). And they were not necessarily Southern Italians, but could've been Byzantine Greeks who were born in Southern Italy. Some were even Syrian, reflecting Byzantine Christianity in the Levant.
I think that's what led to the de facto prohibition on Mezzogiorno popes -- they were a bad memory of the Italian peninsula, the city of Rome, and the papacy itself having been occupied by a foreign empire.
Venice the city was a protectorate of the Byzantines for awhile, but they eventually threw off their Greek overlords and became an expanding regional power in their own right, having developed intense asabiya on the meta-ethnic frontier with the Germanic hordes that invaded and controlled the rest of Italy during the Dark Ages.
So, a Venetian pope was not necessarily a reminder of Italy's humiliation by foreign empires.
But a Southern pope? What are we, going back to the Byzantine occupation of our wonderful land, after our once-glorious empire had collapsed? Those were the bad ol' days, and we're never going back there again.
-- Well, not until Italy became occupied by newer empires, including now under American imperial occupation.
I was wrong about the successor to Francis being the realigner pope away from America back towards traditional Catholicism. Looks like we have 1-2 more decades of American influence over the Catholic Church.
ReplyDeleteDid Tocharians had a shamanistic religion before Buddhism? Certainly Buddhism was most strongly attracted to cultures that already had shamanism in place, which is one reason why Buddhism quickly left the Indo-Aryan / Indo-Iranian sphere, and was eagerly adopted in (northern) Central and East Asia.
ReplyDeleteIf so, that would be another piece of evidence for the Tocharian speakers having descended from a culture that was not Indo-European -- no shamans there -- but from the eastern steppe, where shamanism has been abundant across various sub-cultures for a long time (Turkic, Uralic, Yeniseian, Tungusic, Korean, and others).
I mean "shaman" in the narrow sense, associated with the eastern steppe, not any ol' religious specialist who seeks an altered state of consciousness. The "medicine man" type, with a magic drum, and/or animal skins on his head, etc.
I think I've hit on several confirmations here, but will report back with more detail later. For now, just laying out the outline of how to investigate the cultural origins of the Tocharians -- or any other group, for that matter.
Language is not reliable, too utilitarian, too many material incentives to ditch your ancestral language -- but not your ancestral wedding rituals, springtime renewal rituals, dancing styles, and so on.
You can tell how much I read 4chan (/vt) by their ESL-isms creeping into my typos. "Did they had...?", lol.
ReplyDeleteApril Fools' Day is Indo-European, BTW. Nowruz has a variation of it, while in Europe it's not part of Easter, but the springtime in general.
ReplyDeleteTrick-or-treating is part of this tradition as well, and it has remained associated with the springtime holiday in the Iranian-ish region. In Europe, it got moved back to fall for Halloween, or Christmas / New Year's season, depending on the country.
Sorry, I never did get around to writing up the Indo-Euro origins of trick-or-treating, which I've known about for years now. Sometime...
Just suffice it to say for now that our April Fools' Day is a relic of the original timing and occasion of the prank-playing ritual that got moved further back toward Christmas after Indo-Europeans adopted Christianity and relegated the springtime New Year's to pre-Christian / pagan secondary relic status.
Many Sami languages have "v", suggesting either that their speakers used to be Indo-Europeans who adopted a Uralic language, much like the Estonians and Hungarians (and likely the Finnish) -- or that the Sami languages underwent a sweeping crazy series of changes which resulted in a coincidentally Indo-European array of consonants. Obviously the former is simpler and preferable.
ReplyDeleteAs with Indo-European, "v" is absent from Proto-Sami. However, it is present in both major branches of the Sami family, in several members within each branch.
Within the Eastern branch, it's in Inari, Skolt, and Kildin (maybe others, just checking those with lots of speakers, relatively speaking).
Within the Western branch, it's in Lule, Southern, and Northern Sami (which has the most speakers, currently ~25K).
Several, though not all, of these also have aspirated voiceless stops, as well as unaspirated voiced stops -- very much like the stage of Indo-European when "v" started to creep in. I don't think this is an independent development within the Uralic family, as it could be within Niger-Congo, cuz it's too easy to assume instead that this highly Indo-European array of consonants reflects the speakers being Indo-Euro speakers who later adopted a Uralic language, and brought aspirated stops and "v" with them.
Or at least, brought aspiration with them -- maybe "v" is a later development, after Indo-Euros adopted the Uralic language. But in any case, that would just recapitulate what happened among Indo-Euro speakers during the Dark Ages.
Maybe they did adopt Uralic at a stage where their Indo-Euro native language already had "v" and simply carried it over into their Uralic adoptive language. IDK about the timing.
The big picture being, Sami languages are like Estonian and Hungarian -- their speakers used to be, and in some ways still are, culturally Indo-European. They just adopted a Uralic language, for whatever reason, and brought Indo-European shibboleths with them into their adoptive language.
Maybe the harsh Arctic climate and geography is like the steep treacherous mountains that led several Indo-Euro groups to adopt the non-Indo-Euro languages of the natives? (I.e., Basque, the three Caucasus families, and Burushaski.) So difficult to navigate and eke out a living, that you need to merge into the natives, and at least be able to communicate with them? Plausible.
Unfortunately, this would be the only such place to test the theory, unlike mountains being widespread. There's only one place where Indo-Euros can be claimed to migrate into a harsh Arctic climate -- and definitely not in the parallel Antarctic climate!
We can wait 500 years and then test the descendants of Americans living in Alaska and Canadians living in Yukon to see if they still speak English or if they instead have switched over to an Inuit language.
Deletehttps://www.razibkhan.com/p/facing-facts-even-fraught-ones-the?r=u0rd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
ReplyDeleteA noteworthy point on the Indo-Europeans from a man who used to blog here:
"Despite accumulating victory upon victory, the Indo-Europeans were not, crucially, civilization-bearers. Their pastoralist world flourished atop the smoldering ruins of worlds lost, cultures that left behind hulking rough-hewn stone monuments and the faint outlines of vast villages that were once the loci of sophisticated civilizations. The early Indo-Europeans were barbarians par excellence; their arrival ushered in an age of animal competition, kill or be killed. In places like Spain, Italy and Scandinavia whole paternal lineages disappear upon their arrival, wholly replaced by patrilines which still define the peninsulas today. Though they left their legacy in flesh, archaeologically the early Indo-Europeans are ghosts, their primary material legacy being graves. They emerged out of darkness, beyond the view of history, and they brought darkness to many lands they conquered, a process only finally reversed by civilization’s creeping spread. More than 1,000 years after Neolithic Europe and its grand megaliths fell to the barbarian nomads, the two traditions would fuse to set the stage for the eventual rise of Greece, Rome and the world of the Celts."
I'm skeptical of how Indo-Euro the Scythians were, now that I'm deep into the Tocharian case. There are several cultural facets that, pretty much, only these 2 groups have among all Indo-European cultures, and that are attested -- sometimes widely and anciently -- in the non-Indo-Euro cultures of Central Asia or NE Asia.
ReplyDeleteAnd when other bona fide IE cultures observe and describe the Scythians, they can hardly believe their eyes.
Again, IDC about language, clearly Scythians spoke an IE language, but that doesn't mean their broader culture was IE.
There are, again, 3 possibilities:
1. Scythians were genetically and culturally IE, but adopted some fascinating piece of culture from a non-IE neighbor.
2. Scythians were a genetic and cultural coalition of IE and non-IE groups, and the non-IE element was only practiced by the non-IE members. So, "Scythians" as a whole coalition did not practice it, and certainly not the IE members. Akin to religious pluralism / tolerance in an empire with diverse religions among subjects (Romans, Ottomans, Russians, Chinese, etc.).
3. Scythians were only minimally IE, genetically and/or culturally, and mostly non-IE. They brought their largely non-IE culture with them, after adopting an IE language (for whatever material reason).
The same 3 cases describe the Tocharians, although from their telltale non-IE substrate in their language, it looks very much like Tocharians were #3, at most #2 with heavy representation of non-IE cultures, and definitely not #1.
Scythians could've been #2, or perhaps #1 -- they seem more IE than the Tocharians. But their IE status is still far from certain, at the culture-wide level.
No matter which big picture turns out to be true, the unusual cultural element is not of IE origin, but some other Central Asian origin, and found its way into the culture of an IE-speaking group.
Since the Scythians and the Tocharians were the only 2 major groups to have been in extensive contact with north-central Asian / eastern steppe people, that's why this odd cultural element is not attested anywhere else in the whole of IE territory, from Ireland to India.
I'll get to the specific concrete evidence in a bit, just putting the outline out there, as a reminder that language does not imply the rest of the cultural features, and does not imply a DNA cluster / lineage.
Especially on the steppe, where inter-tribal and inter-linguistic coalitions and confederations come together and break apart all the time.
Thank God there's other kinds of evidence outside of the lexicon of some culture. Looking through the Tocharian lexicon for signs of their non-IE religious practices has proven mostly pointless -- cuz they re-lexified most of their language to be IE, either at some early stage before converting to Buddhism, but especially after converting to Buddhism and adopting a whole new layer of Indo-Aryan vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteSadly, they've been an extinct culture for 1000 years, so we can't just watch contempo YouTube videos of what their weddings, dances, and holiday rituals are like.
But they did have lots of paintings of themselves made, and although the practices being depicted may have receieved a new I-E term in the language, they were still carrying on a distinctly non-I-E practice in their behavior.
You would never know it from their language, and would assume they just copy-pasted some variety of Indo-Aryan religious practice into their own.
Nope -- the traces of Shamanism are still there, but only detectable outside of the lexicon...
On Ashkenazi Jewish origins, there's another dum-dum article out in Nature, which shows that you don't need to be smart, insightful, or correct, but just institutionally well connected in order to publish in hIgH ImPaCt fAcToR journals. Won't link it, cuz I don't link dum-dums.
ReplyDeleteTheir take-home message is that Ashkenazis are mostly European, and nearly 70% Italian specifically...
I wonder how many other populations that are 70% genetically Italian have never been recorded speaking Italian, in any of its dialects and at any stage of those languages' evolution? And have never been recorded practicing any of the various Italian shibboleth cultural practices -- things that prove you're Italian rather than some other cultural / genetic group.
It's so retarded, and is another nail in the coffin of institutional scientific credibility these days.
For that matter, the other side in this ragebait-ing article are the ones claiming that Ashkenazis descend from a Judaean population from the Roman Empire that eventually left the Levant for Italy, and from there to various places in Europe -- again, despite no evidence of such a migration, cultural or linguistic or other shift, etc. Ashkenazis have never spoken a Saharo-Arabian language.
As a reminder from that study on 14th-C. Ashekanzi burials in Erfurt, Germany, the Ashkenazis are a hybrid / creole / pidgin / admixed population, from two different sources -- a European one that's Germanic or more likely Slavic, and a "Middle Eastern" one that is not Saharo-Arabian but Anatolian, Armenian, or Iranian.
The Ashkenazi genepool was BI-modal back then, with a Slavic cluster and an Indo-Euro Mid-East cluster. Any model that doesn't include this BI-modal origin is retarded and ignorant and denialist.
Dum-dum models prefer easy processes to imitate -- like uni-lineal descent indefinitely back into the past. Modern English came from Middle English, which came from Old English, which came from some Germanic language in Saxony, etc.
ReplyDeleteWhat if the language is a pidgin, creole, hybrid, etc.? Contempo Haitian Creole doesn't come from Middle Haitian, Old Haitian, Archaic Haitian, etc.
Not just cuz it's a younger language, but cuz when you go back in time to its parent langauge that is no longer mutually intelligible with the contempo descendant language, there isn't just one parent a la the uni-lineal model -- there's at least TWO! French and a West African language like Igbo, which have hybridized.
But wait, it gets worse for genetics! Unlike languages, where there is no already existing language with a deep history that resembles Haitian Creole, there *are* genepools that *do* look like a blend of, say, Slavic and Anatolian genepools -- like, say, the Italian genepool, whose people live about halfway between Slavdom and Anatolia (albeit not as the crow flies).
These ancestry-informing genes have continuous gradations across space, much like a color spectrum of paint.
But if you see green paint, did it derive from green pigment? -- or is it a blend of blue paint and yellow paint, which TWO separate and distinct pigments in its precursors, neither of which were green? You can't tell just by looking.
So, it is very easy for genetic models to be fooled by hybridization. There are already existing genepools that lie some-way between two distinct genepools, and who would resemble a hybridization of those two. The model prefers uni-lineal descent, so it assumes a mostly uni-lineal story, derived from that intermediate genepool -- even though that intermediate one had no role whatsoever in the ancestry.
Ashkenazi ancestors were some part blue and some part yellow -- none of them were green, even if the descendants today are green. That's cuz they're a blend of two notably different ancestral groups.
Dum-dums are lucky that Ashkenazis are only a blend of 2 major groups -- it could've been 3, 4, 5, or however many.
ReplyDeleteSuppose Ashkenazis hybridize with Chinese in America. Then in 1000 years, geneticists will be even more fooled. They'll assume that a single genepool has been there going back indefinitely, when in fact there was a major admixture event -- between Ashkenazis and Chinese -- and then another one still, preceding that, between Slavs and Iranians that produced the Ashkenazis.
If they insisted on being as ignorant and retarded as possible, they'd never know what a simple reading of history and culture would've told them.
The particular genetic model in this article says it can detect the danger of admixture going back 12 generations, which is only 300 years. So it could detect a recent event like Euro genes entering a previously (West) African genepool, like in America over the past couple hundred years.
But Ashkenazis began hybridizing in the early 2nd millennium AD -- way too far back for this model to see it. But if you studied actual DNA from back then (which the Erfurt study did), it would reveal the bi-modal nature of their genepool, and slam you in the face with ADMIXTURE PRESENT: THROW AWAY THE UNI-LINEAL MODEL pop-up message.
At this point, I don't think genetic studies are going to reveal much at all, compared to a cultural approach -- and especially the domains of culture outside of language (too utilitarian, too easy to drop and pick up a new one). Only the very shibboleth-y parts of language are useful for inferring history, ancestry, hybridization, etc.
ReplyDeleteI've learned nearly nothing about the Tocharians from genetic studies, but plenty from the cultural side, including a few new observations of my own! ^_^
The Tocharians... talk about admixture.
Anyway, that's what's been eating up all my time and focus for the past week, and why I haven't even left a comment. There was a lot to sift through, but it was worth it.
Had to rehash this BS about Ashkenazi origins, though, cuz of the buzz over the new article. Probably won't do so with any futher articles.
I've already proven conclusively through purely cultural analyses how Indo-European the Ashkenazis are, and always have been, including a crucial component from the region south of the Caucasus (like the set-up for a Seder plate and a Haft-Seen display, both for the springtime renewal holiday -- Passover / Easter, and Nowruz).
And I still have to write up the nuptial veil thing on that topic.
But this was good to get some comments in, before typing up something on the Tocharians. I'll likely split that up into multiple posts, so the content can be easily found by search engines (someone curious about Tocharians), which can't see inside the comment section, only main body.
Should be later today, hopefully. I just had to get enough of the picture together to make sure there *was* a picture. And how it ties into the bigger picture outside of the Tocharians, about cultural evolution in general, to keep in mind when examining other groups.
I'll try to gush about vtuber / anime related stuff sometime, too. It's just Moom and Goob leaving back-to-back, although they had de facto been gone for awhile, the formal closing of the door has made me not care as much as before. Two less people to write to.
ReplyDeleteI've continued my shift toward the JP girls, mainly clips, but I did watch all of the Koronator's stream of the Technos collection -- such a classic company! It had an arcade game based on Journey to the West (Saiyuki, in Nihongo), which is set in the Tang China (the cool, Dark Age part of Chinese history), and in the far west near Central Asia, where the Tocharians were thriving.
Korosan said she only recognized the characters' names from watching the Doraemon version of Journey to the West, so on that recommendation, I watched that anime movie -- and it was pretty cool! I just watched anothed Doraemon movie, from 2003, about the windmasters, which is also set in a composite of Dark Age Mongolia / Tibet / Tarim Basin.
Japanese people have a great sense of what parts of East Asia are cool, outside of Japan itself. And what time periods are fascinating. That's two Doraemon movies with that setting, and the landscape art alone is worth watching. I don't think any Western works have focused on that region or time period. But the Japanese love it -- and they're right to!
I wish there were a new gen within JP, that was girls of Japanese background but who grew up in an English-speaking country, still learned the Japanese language and parts of Japanese culture, and ideally who moved to Japan and live there now.
Like the nephilim princess (who would be moved out of the gen that has the most missing members, and then Bae and Kronii get folded into an "OG HoloEN" gen with Kiara, Ina, and Mori). But also reincarnating Coco, who the JP girls *still* talk about... and how could they not? She really makes an impression.
And then recruiting two more girls with that kind of life history, who are currently outside Hololive. IDK who fits the bill. Not necessarily even a current vtuber, could be a streamer who is up for the switch to an anime-girl model.
Hololive: Nippomerica! ^_^
To explain more about the weaknesses of these genetic models, and how they're like trying to tell where some green paint came from, their assumption about the world is that there were 2 stages of genepools -- a variety of input pools, and a variety of output pools. A given output is modeled as a combination of the inputs.
ReplyDeleteE.g., when they say that Ashkenazis are 70% Italian, 15% Greek, 10% Levantine, 5% Caucasian, or whatever it is. These percentages add up to 100%. And the Italian, Greek, Levantine, and Caucasian labels refer to the input populations -- from waaaay back when. They're treated like building blocks, or the basic ingredients, and the current-day populations are the outcome like a cooked meal with the various ingredients mixed together.
And so, different meals have different combinations of the inputs -- a cake has a different mix of ingredients from a hamburger, and both have different ingredients from ice cream.
What these models do not allow -- or are very bad at modeling it -- is when there is "admixture" or hybridizing. You might think these models are based on admixture and blending -- isn't that what's shown in the various labels with percentages adding up to 100%, showing that present-day groups are a blend of various source populations from waaaay back when?
No -- admixture or hybridizing is when two or more of the outcome populations intermix with each other. Like if you put a cake and a bowl of ice cream in a blender. You didn't take a bunch of raw ingredients, combine them in a blender, and them presto, the cake-y ice-cream-y meal is the result. Rather, you first baked a cake with its distinctive ingredients, then you made ice cream from scratch with its ingredients, and only after these two outcome meals were ready, did you combine them and blend them into yet another outcome meal -- a cake smoothie.
If you assume that there are no intermediary stages -- just the input stage at the source, and the outcome stage at the result -- then your model would fool you into thinking that a cake smoothie had a uni-lineal descent from its own distinctive set of ingredients, and didn't have any interactions with other meals that it may partially resemble -- like cake and ice cream.
But the blending of the separately made cake and ice cream has rendered the origins of the cake smoothie OPAQUE. You can't tell, just from looking at, or tasting, a cake smoothie, that it is a blend of two separately prepared meals.
And as far as the history of cuisine is concerned, you would be fooled into thinking that someone, at some point, came up with this single set of ingredients and created the cake smoothie from one set of ingredients -- when in reality, someone blended two already existing outcome meals that had their own separate sets of ingredients, a cake and a bowl of ice cream.
This same autistic retard focus on input-output models, with no intermediary stages and no interactions among the outputs to create a further stage of outputs, is what's wrong with phonological models like Optimality Theory -- sadly, still alive and kicking, a damning indictment of academia.
ReplyDeleteThe whole point of Optimality Theory was to erase the intermediate stages of the older, correct way to model phonological processes -- as a serial, step-by-step derivation, with intermediate forms. These models perfectly captured phenomena like OPACITY, where there are traces of an intermediate stage of a serial derivation, in the output form -- which is not motivated by a simple input-output mapping.
E.g. in Turkish, a vowel is inserted to break up some consonant clusters, like "kn". Separately, velar consonants like "k" and "g" are deleted between vowels.
So a word like "bebek-n", meaning "your baby" ("bebek" meaning baby, and "-n" being a possessive suffix), goes like this:
bebek-n (underlying form)
bebekin (inserting an "i" to break up the "kn" cluster)
bebein (deleting the "k" between vowels)
See how that "i" in the output is unmotivated from a simple input-output view? It's not in the underlying form, so it should not be added unless there's a reason. And, from the output form, there is no consonant cluster for it to be breaking up, so there's no reason. It shouldn't be there.
But this clueless input-output view obscures the serial derivation, where one step can render opaque the application of an earlier step. Only by modeling this as a step-by-step derivation with intermediate forms, can we explain why the "i" is there in the output -- it was there to break up a consonant cluster, which we can no longer see, because the application of the vowel insertion triggered the deletion of one of the consonants in the cluster.
If the solution to "no consonant clusters" was to simply delete one of the offending consonants, then this would make "beben" the output form -- with no inserted vowel, and also deleting one of the offending consonants in the cluster. But this is not what the output actually is -- it's "bebein," which a superficially unmotivated extra vowel compared to the underlying form.
So the tards in Optimality Theory conjured up an epicycle variation on their basic model, resulting in so-called Sympathy theory. In addition to constraints relating to the input-output mapping, now there were sympathy constraints relating to the mapping between one or more of the output candidates.
ReplyDeleteThis broke the theory from a simplicity point-of-view, making it intractable and ridiculously complex, compared to the earlier input-output only model, now that it also has output-output mappings.
And how does the model know which output the other outputs are supposed to be targeting? In the Turkish example, one of the outputs is "bebekin" -- the intermediate form, from the older and correct model of serial derivation. The other outputs are supposed to then be faithful to this fellow output form, namely preserving its (inserted) vowel "i". This makes "bebein" perform better than "beben," which does not have the "i" of its fellow output candidate, and the sympathy target, "bebekin".
Well, the model doesn't know that at all -- it's been stipulated by the human modeler, who is trying to simply give away the answer to the model, rather than the model come up with this answer on its own. And how does the human modeler know this? Cuz of the serial derivation models. It's such a scam.
It did result in the correct outputs -- but at the cost of intractable complexity. Talk about over-fitting the data! The older and correct family of models, serial derivations, had simplicity -- rules that apply in sequence -- and resulted in the same correct outcomes. They fit the data, and they were simpler, therefore they are better than the epicycle-esque sympathy Optimality Theory models, which are way more complex just to get the same correct outputs.
Going back to the genetic model, let's say that the geneticists admit partial defeat and say, OK, we have to make admixture a central feature of our model -- output genepools can intermix with one another, they are not simply a combination of the input genepools in a uni-lineal descent.
ReplyDeleteWell then, how would a conniving geneticist know which 2 (or more) output genepools had intermixed, to yield another one of the other output genepools? In the Ashkenazi case, how would they know it was a Slavic output and a South-of-the-Caucasus output that had intermixed to yield the Ashkenazi output?
Quite simply -- the model would not come up with that. The human modeler might know that, if they were up to speed on the cultural historical work that I and others have uncovered and pieced together, to narrow down who the source populations could have been for the Ashkenazis.
Genetics won't tell you that the Seder plate and the Haft-Seen plate are sibling rituals (not to mention all the others I've documented, like circumambulating during the wedding), pointing to one of the sources of the Ashkenazis being near Armenia and Iran.
And genetics won't tell you that Yiddish moves more than one question-word to the front of the sentence -- which is only a feature of Slavic languages, in the relevant geographical region. No other Germanic languages do this, nor do any others nearby. Despite plenty of "contacts" between Germanic and Slavic people in Eastern Europe over the centuries. This means that the "multiple question words at the front of a sentence" feature in Yiddish is a holdover from an earlier stage of that population's linguistic history. Namely, Yiddish speakers used to be Slavic speakers -- at least, enough of them were, to influence this outcome -- and later adopted a new Germanic-ish language.
This approach to history is like the serial derivation approach to phonology -- positing rules or steps or changes or processes that can happen, in a sequence, and trying to document what various stages the evolution has gone through. Not just modeling present-day populations as some combination of primeval / Bronze Age populations, erasing all the historical sequences in the meantime. That's clueless and retarded.
Specifically for the Ashkenazis, we know one of the present-day populations who they resemble and must have historically been "derived" from -- that is, Ashkenazis were derived from the ancestors of another present-day population, not that they time-traveled (again, the intractability when you only do input-output mappings while trying to relate outputs to other outputs).
Namely, Persian or Iranian Jews. People who are otherwise totally Persian or Iranian -- genetically and culturally -- who adopted a new religion. Not Second Temple-ism, which vanished with the Roman imperial destruction of the Second Temple in the early 1st millennium AD. But so-called Rabbinical or Talmudic Judaism, a construction of the Dark Ages, and a competitor to the construction of Christianity among the post-Second Temple Judaean-derived religions.
Genetics won't home in on Persian Jews as one of the sources of the Ashkenazis, except at ridiculous levels of cost, resolution power, and model complexity. A very simple model of "stages of cultural history" will immediately point you to them, as will a simple comparison of cultural rituals among present-day populations, used to reconstruct a common ancestor (much like with historical linguistics).
The less utilitarian, and the more shibboleth-y the ritual, the better -- just like using random useless genes to infer ancestry, not utilitarian ones that could easily be the targets of natural selection and result in convergent evolution, not identity by descent (e.g., dark skin evolving in sunny regions all over the world, with no shared genes among them).
I wonder if Yiddish might have become a lingua franca beyond the Ashkenazi Jews in some realities. We are after all talking about a highly affluent, well-connected, networked culture with a penchant for producing entertainment. Could there perhaps have been realities where Yiddish could have become like other lingua franca established by well-connected traders (maybe even to the extent of the original Proto-Indo-European language)?
DeleteHave Israel make Yiddish the national language instead of modern Hebrew and then the Mizrahim in Israel would have ended up speaking Yiddish as well.
DeleteWhat's Zelensky's mother's maiden name? Returning to the topic of Slavic-surnamed vs. Germanic-surnamed Ashkenazis, it's hard to find people whose mother and father both had Slavic surnames.
ReplyDeleteI just looked up Howard Lutnick, the crass brusque caricature of the "everything is for sale" Ashkenazi, who is eager to sell off American citizenship to the highest bidder. Turns out that his mother's surname is Germanic (Lieberman).
But that's still more Slavic-surnamed-ness than those with both parents having Germanic surnames. The Hebraized priestly names (Cohen, Levy, etc.) cluster with the Germanic names, BTW -- and seem to stem from the South-of-the-Caucasus source, not the Slavic source (which provided the Slavic surnames).
Eugene Levy in the '80s looked like an Armenian or Persian, not a Slav.
And the highly accomplished intellectual types are overwhelmingly Germanic-surnamed -- but also joined by the Hebraized priestly-surnamed ones. So they both come from the same source, and the Armenian / Iranian source was heavily priestly or scholarly or "elite-tested civil servant" in nature, much like Persians have been for thousands of years, whether in Persia proper or elsewhere, like in Babylon (where the standard Ashkenazi Talmud was created).
Zelensky is another crass brusque caricature willing to sell everything off for the right price -- but I can't determine his mother's maiden name. It's under heavy censorship. Her given name is Rymma, she is also Ashkenazi, and she was an engineer. That's it -- no info on her maiden name.
If she had a Slavic maiden name, then Zelensky is one of the rare super-duper crass caricatures who has *two* parents with Slavic surnames.
Typically the Slavic-surnamed ones try to marry out, or marry up, from their sub-ghetto within the Ashkenazi population, by finding a Germanic-surname
Last paragraph got cut off:
ReplyDeleteTypically the Slavic-surnamed ones try to marry out, or marry up, from their sub-ghetto within the Ashkenazi population, by finding a Germanic-surnamed or Hebraized-surnamed spouse (like Lutnick's father marrying a woman originally surnamed Lieberman).
To reiterate, I don't think the Slavic-surnamed Ashkenazis get their crass pushy brusqueness from their Slavic roots -- Slavic people in general are not like that.
ReplyDeleteRather, the Slavs who were eager to control trade routes and other mercantile projects that went through the nearby Khazar Empire, where they were joined by the more scholarly / priestly / elite civil servant Armos or Persians, were the type motivated by greed and buy-low-sell-high flipper-ism and ethnic patronage networking.
The greediest pushiest brusque-est Slavs left the Slavic population and formed one-half of the eventual Ashkenazi population.
Oddly enough, they were paired with a highly moralistic group -- obsessed with prophets, not profits -- derived from Persian elites, who have always looked down in shame on the amoral crass merchant-ism of their fellow Ashkenazis who used to be illiterate Slavic strivers and hucksters.
Here's a good article that notes the Persian connection:
Deletehttps://theconversation.com/ashkenazic-jews-mysterious-origins-unravelled-by-scientists-thanks-to-ancient-dna-97962
Kson made rainbow takoyaki today, speaking of mixing up colors and blending foods together. And no, it's not gay-related -- all that cringe woketardism from the 2010s was never adopted in Glorious Nippon. In fact there was an idol group named Tacoyaki Rainbow -- a typical idol group, nothing gay-related. The rainbow remains an uncorrupted symbol in Japan, like it used to be in America before the 2010s (e.g., the original Apple logo).
ReplyDeleteSome of the colors started swirling together on the grilling pad, and I think it made for a cool marbling effect! ^_^ Like the blue-green contrasting with the yellow-orange. It looked like it was made from some exotic expensive stone. What Bob Ross would've called a happy little accident, that turns out cool without planning it.
Also, she pronounces "orange" the way that Noo Yawkahs do, and she was raised in the Southeast (Atlanta area). So maybe it's an East Coast thing in general, not just from the Mid-Atlantic.
They say it with the first syllable being "are" rather than "ore". And that's the reason why that knock-knock joke must have come from the East Coast.
"Knock knock." Who's there? "Banana." Banana who? "Banana." On and on, then finally, "Orange." Orange who? "Orange you glad I didn't say 'banana'?"
This only works if "orange you" sounds like "aren't you". In the standard American dialect, it doesn't, and "ore-ange you glad I didn't say 'banana'?" has always sounded try-hard and cringe since it's not a good rhyme.
But in the East Coast dialects where the joke originated from, it's actually funny! They say the punchline as "are-ange you glad I didn't say 'banana'?"
the joke works in the UK as well.
DeleteI remember in the past you telling us to learn dynamical systems. What books and other resources do you recommend for anybody learning the subject?
ReplyDeleteThe purple food dye didn't take too well in the yellow dough, and it turned out on the gray side.
ReplyDeleteWhat she needs is a handy Doraemon gadget...
Da da-da da!
Murasaki ni suru megane!
(Make It Purple Glasses!)
Glasses with eye trackers that send out special waves to make whatever you're looking at turn purple, hehe.
Hijinx ensue as the wearer accidentally looks at various other things that they *don't* want to turn purple. After trying and failing at various fixes, Doraemon realizes, oh yeah, maybe I should just take out the Color Restoring Glasses! ^_^
The dum-dums don't have a *dynamic* model, that's what I was going to say. Thanks for asking about dynamical systems and reminding me.
ReplyDeleteThe simplistic input-output model that treats the endpoint as a combination of some long-ago inputs, is waving away the dynamics of how things changed in between. You need to know step-by-step how things changed, to understand how one thing led to the next, where things stabilized, or got de-stabilized, and so on.
Those serial derivation models for phonology are dynamic, in a way, albeit not involving differential equations. Whereas the Optimality Theory types are not dynamic -- you consider a whole shitload of inputs / candidates, subject them to a whole shitload of constraints / criteria, and whoever passes the inspection best is the winner / output form. No intermediate forms, no partial derivations, no stages, no context, no history, no path-dependence.
Archaeology has dynamic models, whether modeling how one culture succeeded another, or detailing how one layer changes compared to the layer above it in the excavation, and so on.
So does historical linguistics -- Pre-Proto-Indo-European, Early Proto-Indo-European, Late Proto-Indo-European, Early Italic, Late Italic, Old Latin, Classical Latin, Late Antique Latin, Vulgar Latin, Old Spanish, Middle Spanish, Modern Spanish, Mexican Spanish, etc....
In fact, historical investigations are precisely what motivated the serial derivation model to begin with -- back to Chomsky & Halle's classic, The Sound Pattern of English, which was a serial derivation model on steroids. Earlier sound laws like Grimm's Law were also a "stages in a derivation" model, but Sound Pattern of English really ran with that kind of model.
And given its success in historical investigation, other phonologists applied it to the here-and-now derivation of a surface form from an underlying form, where the steps / processes / etc. were akin to the historical "laws" from historical linguistics -- e.g., "insert a vowel to break up a consonant cluster," "delete a consonant between vowels," etc.
Anti-dynamic models only started cropping up in the '90s and really the 2000s -- another case of the 21st century marking the irrevocable decline and collapse of intellectual culture, scholarship, and academia as an entire institution.
They're not merely "non-dynamic" -- they were adopted within a background of there being nothing but dynamic models, like differential equations or serial derivations. They were consicously against that whole entire approach, erasing the sequence of steps along a path from origin to destination, and only focusing on the origin and destination themselves, waving away the path-traveling as a black-box mystery.
So they are decisively ANTI-dynamic, and that damns them to irrelevance (for the smart, insightful, correct people, very few of whom control what the hell is going on in academia anymore).
As for suggestions about where to begin for dynamical systems, there's no substitute for having someone who knows the material teach it to you, with some kind of tailoring to your interests -- even if broad, like are you into physics or biology.
ReplyDeleteSo where I really picked up my knowledge, and then created all sorts of models of my own, was in grad school. In a year-long course on "mathematical models in biology," from applied math profs. First half was ordinary differential equations, second half threw in partial d-e's.
We covered all sorts of things that are not in a single textbook, but from the prof's own work, comparing notes with other specialists, etc., over the course of their career. I still have those notes in a couple notebooks.
As for the textbook, though, it was "Mathematical Models in Biology" by Edelstein-Keshet. A classic and standard. You can also try Murray's two-volume "Mathematical Biology".
A somewhat popular-audience book is Martin Nowak's Evolutionary Dynamics, which I read after it came out. IDK how it stands up to others of its kind.
Before grad school, I followed along to MIT's OpenCourseWare videos on YouTube, a new thing at the time. Here's the first lecture from the differential equations class by Mattuck, which probably has a link to what textbook they used (I forget).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDhJ8lVGbl8
It's from the math dept, so it isn't specifically for biology, although it does have a lecture on predator-prey models, another on logistic population growth, etc. It also has physics applications.
I also followed along to the course on linear algebra by Strang, which begins here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7DzL2_Na80
You won't need nearly as much linear algebra, though, and you will probably pick what you need up from the d-e course itself. And again it's from the math dept, so with various applications, not just bio.
But if you have the time, might as well at least watch those lectures so you're comfortable when the d-e course talks about analyzing the eigenvalues of a matrix to study the tendency of the system to blow up, stabilize, and so on.
Once you've done those 2 courses, you can follow along to Peter Turchin's book "Historical Dynamics," if you're specifically interested in applying it to history. I read that during my grad school course, so as long as you know the basics, you can pick up what he's saying. It's not an advanced math text, it's about applying d-e models to a new subject matter -- like the dynamics of asabiya on a meta-ethnic frontier.
And of course you need to practice, practice, practice, to get a better feel for how these things work. I have notebooks full of models I fooled around with while bored and curious -- some illuminating, some not so much, just to get practice and put my curiosity to a productive use.
Also, Theoretical Ecology by May, which is also biological, but mostly large-scale processes like predator-prey, not microbio like metabolizing lactose.
ReplyDeleteHowever, you need the micro-level models that are included in the Edelstein-Keshet and Murray books, cuz macro phenomena can often be modeled with a micro-level model, as long as you find a good insightful analogy or similar pattern.
The main place where hysteresis shows up in the models is at the micro-level, like metabolizing an energy source. But macro processes show hysteresis as well, if you look. Then you can take a model originally made for the micro-level and apply it to a macro process. That's the best way -- don't proliferate models, but find new applications of existing ones, which strengthens their status as Good Models (ones with lots of applications) rather than Bad Models (ad hoc, single application, over-fitting the data).
The new application will probably lead to a variation on the model that appears in some other existing context, but it will share the same Platonic Essence model.
As for what pre-reqs there are for d-e's and linear algebra, if you have high school algebra, that's the most important. One semester of single-variable calculus should be fine. Really, just taking the derivative of an expression.
ReplyDeleteActually existing d-e's do not have exact solutions, so you won't be solving equations, so much as studying their behavior qualitatively. And that does not involve much calculus above taking a derivative.
It's more about setting up the various possible phase planes, finding fixed points, analyzing their stability (with the eigenvalues of the Jacobian matrix), drawing a vector field to see how things flow in various regions of the plane, plotting some trajectories typical of each region, and summing things up with some algebraic expressions -- like the disease will become epidemic if the ratio of this parameter to that parameter is greater than some third parameter.
D-e's are their own kind of thing, it's not just "the next step in calculus," or "the next step in matrix algebra". So the pre-reqs are scattered around, but they aren't very advanced. D-e's that can be solved exactly are rare and not useful. The toolkit for getting around that is what you pick up in the course, and it's its own thing.
Come for the vtuber recs, stay for the dynamical systems recs.
ReplyDeleteAnd both on YouTube! ^_^
While we're at it, "AI" is another textbook example of ANTI-dynamic models. So are all their predecessors, like "connectionism" in cognitive science and linguistics, which again only started cropping up in the '90s, and really blew up in the 2000s. Same anti-intellectual crowd was/is into both, and are into AI slop in the present.
ReplyDeleteNo rules, no steps, no sequence, no path-dependence, no abstract symbols whatsoever.
Just statistical correlations between inputs and outputs, and then applying those correlations in a novel context to produce a novel output. But as always, falling victim to the flaw of extrapolation -- and therefore, needing a ridiculously complex, expensive, time-sucking training set in order to cover all bases and avoid the flaw of extrapolation.
Rather than just tell the truth simply and let the steps flow in the right sequence.
Statistics is not dynamic, it's just an input-output mapping, trying to discern a signal from noise. If the phenomenon you're studying is not dynamic, then no big deal. What's the difference in grip strength between men and women? Not an evolving, dynamic path-dependent process -- so just a simple statistical test is fine.
But "where did various populations come from?" That's nothing BUT dynamic, and statistics won't tell you the answer.
Honorable mention to "chaos theory" as the last widespread appreciation and excitement for dynamic systems models. It definitely verged way to far into the clever-silly direction, but it's not retarded or boring or fake -- which is more than you can say for everything that came after it.
ReplyDeleteIt was still popular in the '80s and early '90s, when it made an appearance in the Jurassic Park movie, in some way (I forget, possibly not a real example of a math model, but more the general phrase about "the butterfly effect").
Chaos theory used to be something you had to know about and be at least somewhat into, if you were intellectually inclined.
But by the collapsing 21st century, that whole era of dynamical insight was over, and the Great Retardation of Big Dayta had arrived, to eclipse the earlier long-standing, wide-winding wisdom.
The biggest problem for statistics is model selection -- choosing among various competing models that are describing the data set.
ReplyDeleteWell, the big insight there came all the way back in the good ol' '70s -- the Akaike Information Criterion, from '74. That's still mostly all you need, at the Platonic Essence level, into the 21st century.
Sadly, Akaike died in 2009. But look at the "Asian don't raisin" effect in his profile pic at Wikipedia -- pretty damn good skin for someone in his 60s (or whenever, as usual Wikipedia is a black hole of information and doesn't say when the pic was taken):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Akaike.jpg
Just one of many illustrious figures from Glorious Nippon in the world-changing 20th century.
Lack of intermediate stages may also explain why AI slop doesn't look like manmade art (or stories or music or whatever else).
ReplyDeleteIt is fed a training set that has a simplistic input-output mapping -- with no intermediate forms. It links verbal category tags with visual-spatial features of an image. It finds a correlation.
Then when you enter your verbal prompt, it predicts what you want based on that correlation, and spits out an image -- also without intermediate forms.
Actual art is dynamic in its execution, and has intermediate forms. You make a rough sketch, then draw some line art over top of that, and then fill in colors within the boundaries formed by the lines, and then maybe play around with lighting / shading / texture last.
At each step in the sequence, you can be led down an alternate path from what you conceived of in your head before putting pencil to paper (or stylus to tablet). You assess how things are going on step at a time, like hiking up a mountain that doesn't have a pre-made trail.
That's why two artists -- or even the same artist in a different mood -- can begin with the same initial conditions (a rough sketch), and wind up with different, perhaps strikingly different, outcomes when the line art, color, lighting, and texture have been fleshed out.
The sketch does not determine what the line art looks like, it's just a guide. You could use smooth thin fluid curvilinear line art, or angular thick rectilinear line art, while tracing over the sketch -- depending on what effect you're going for.
Will you fill in the color flush against the line boundaries, or maybe leave a little gap? Even if you push the color to the line, will it be a striking contrast between the two, or will you try to to soften the boundary by sfumato or whatever?
Chiaroscuro lighting, or even lighting? Evenly bright, or evenly dim?
Highly textured, or smooth textured?
You may go back and revise previous choices after making later choices. You decide on pastel colors, but then choose even lighting -- and now there's no contrast, and it's too boring, so you go back and make the colors more saturated after all.
Some steps may erase the context / motivation for earlier steps, like opacity in phonology, leaving vestiges or traces in the final work that don't appear motivated -- but were motivated, when they were put there, at a certain step in the sequence, which now has been obscured by later steps.
At a trivial level, the rough sketch gets obscured first by the line art, and totally by the filling in color.
Maybe you made a certain choice in the line art, about which parts of the sketch to really emphasize, and which to play down, based on the sketch.
But then when you fill in the color, the sketch is no longer visible, and the reasons why you chose the line art that you did, are no longer clearly interpretable from the final surface outcome. But those line art choices *did* make perfect sense, if you could see it at the early stage of "putting line art over the rough sketch".
This is another reason why AI slop prefers photography rather than illustration when imitating manmade art.
ReplyDeletePhotography doesn't have as many intermediate forms, revising of choices, alternate paths that you can be led down, and so on. It has some forks in the road -- dodging and burning, cropping, over or underdeveloping the negative, and so on. But far fewer than in illustration and painting and sculpture and architecture.
Speaking of the sequence of steps mattering, let's see AI try to 3D print a sculpture! Talk about the intermediate stages mattering -- if it just tries to print from bottom up, it could throw the sculpture off-balance before getting to the middle or top regions, and then there goes the whole project!
Retarded, blind, clueless, necessarily poorly trained AI cannot walk around the block of material, look at it from different viewpoints, walk away and then close up again, chisel at it from different angles with different degrees of intensity, and so on.
Especially when we're talking the large or monumental scale of sculpture, which is where we really call it art -- not just a figurine that fits in your hand (no offense to figurine makers).
Let alone if it requires fabricating various pieces, and then assembling them together into a whole!
Stupid fucking AI!
Well, it's not the computer's fault that it's so dumb and inept -- it's just a computer, that's their nature. It's the fault of the dum-dum techtards who think computer programs are gods that will follow mortal instructions, rather than treating them for what they are -- clumsy tools.
To clarify, I mean AI would have to do both the conception and execution of the sculpture, not just 3D print a replica of a sculpture that a person has already conceived and executed.
ReplyDeleteIt'd be a miracle if it could create something that didn't fall off-balance, in a non-trivial way -- like high-up pieces stretching out over the footprint, rather than an obelisk.
And remember, techtards -- programming in a set of laws of physics, to guide it away from creating off-balance culptures, is cheating! The AI is supposed to "learn" those laws by induction, based on its training set, not having them hardwired in.
Making a sculpture that doesn't fall off-balance, and that also has non-trivial expansion through space above ground-level, is not easy. Those decisions and executions can get pretty sensitive.
Do tones / pitch accents in East Asia stem from adopting Buddhism? I keep coming back to this topic directly or indirectly, and the latest pattern I notice is the timing and location of tones and pitch accents in East Asia -- it sure looks like the countries that adopted Buddhism, and within the timeframe that they adopted Buddhism (the Eurasian Dark Ages, roughly 300 - 1300 AD).
ReplyDeleteThe ones that adopted Buddhism earlier and were Buddhist centers, like Tang China, developed tones earlier than those who adopted Buddhism somewhat later, like Vietnam or other parts of Southeast Asia.
In some regions, it was a pitch accent rather than full tonal system -- pitch accent in Tibet, Korea, and Japan, tones elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia.
The exception on the side of "adopted Buddhism, but did not develop pitch accent or tone" is Mongolia -- however, they were Tengrist for most of the Dark Ages, adopted Buddhism only fleetingly during their control over China during the Yuan Empire (circa 1300), and they ditched Buddhism after the Yuan Empire collapsed (in 1368). There was a Buddhist resurgence in Mongolia during the Early Modern era, but they were not as thoroughly Buddhist as their East Asian neighbors, throughout the crucial period of the Dark AGes.
There are many more apparent exceptions in the Austronesian languages, like the islands of Southeast Asia, modern-day Indonesia. They have never had tones or pitch accents. Two of their kingdoms during the Dark Ages were PARTLY Buddhist -- Mataram and Srivijaya -- but they were also partly Hindu. They're described as Hindu-Buddhist, or Indianized.
What really proves the point here is the Khmer Empire -- they were Hindu, unlike the surrounding Buddhist regions. And as I detailed earlier, they began the process of tonogenesis, and then halted it dead in its tracks, and adopted a non-tonal path.
ReplyDeleteThey began deleting consonants at the end of syllables, just like Chinese and other languages nearby. And they decided to re-encode the info from those lost consonants onto the preceding vowels. They even started to "phonate" some of those vowels, the first step on the path toward developing tones on the vowels. But they ditched that idea, and switched to making those vowels into various diphthongs instead. So the lost consonant info was re-encoded by diphthongization of the vowels, not altering their pitch.
I already noted that they did this during imperial-level ethonogenesis, as they became a whole new people during the Khmer Empire, and as usual developed a new language to mark their ethnogenesis. Not developed out of whole cloth, but made it unintelligible with their earlier language of their ancestors -- since their ancestors were on the other side of a cultural identity dividing line.
And I noted that they wanted to stand out from their neighbors, who were not bona fide empires, but mere kingdoms. So the last thing they would've wanted was to sound like a tonal language -- go with diphthongization instead.
But now I see the link to the Khmer Empire being Hindu rather than Buddhist. The presence of Hinduism prevented tonogenesis -- in the Khmer Empire, the Mataram kingdom, the Srivijaya Empire, and other such Hindu or Hindu-Buddhist societies in Southeast / Island Southeast Asia.
This raises the possible confounding variable of Sinosphere influence vs. Indosphere influence. Perhaps the Buddhist tone/pitch cultures are merely reflecting Sinosphere influence, and since Tang China was an early adopter and promoter of Buddhism -- and NOT Hinduism as well -- those in the Sinosphere mimicked their linguistic change in developing tone/pitch.
ReplyDeleteWhereas the Indosphere cultures in Southeast Asia and especially the Pacific Islands, where Hinduism was present (alongside Buddhism), reflected the spread of those religions from South Asia directly rather than via Tang China. Or, they were primarily influenced by India, and only secondarily via China. And since Indian cultures of that time were not speaking tonal languages, the Indosphere cultures in SEA did not adopt tone/pitch -- they were imitating India, not China.
However, I don't think it's Sinosphere vs. Indosphere. Most of mainland SEA is not part of the Sinosphere (only the coastal regions like Vietnam), and yet they adopted Buddhism, and most of them speak tone/pitch languages.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that most SEA Buddhists are Theravada rather than Mahayana also reflects their Indosphere roots -- Theravada coming directly from India, and Mahayana coming from Tang Chinese influence (ultimately from India, but via China).
It seems to be about Buddhism vs. not-Buddhism per se, not what influential cultures were spreading these religions.
To emphasize for those who don't remember the last time I wrote on tone in East Asia, it arose across entirely unrelated language families during the same broad time-frame.
ReplyDeleteSino-Tibetan, Kra-Dai, Austroasiatic, Koreanic, and Japonic (allowing for tone or pitch accent). And it arose throughout each family, not just one prominent member. It spread *everywhere* during the Dark Ages.
...Everywhere, that is, that adopted Buddhism (and not also Hinduism).
This means it is not motivated by some physical, mechanical, phonetic reason. The proximate trigger in some / most languages may have been the deletion of consonants in the final position (coda) of a syllable -- but that just pushes back the question of what motivated every language across various families to start deleting those consonants, and open the can of worms called homonyms, which they'd have to solve by yet another massive change (which ended up being tone/pitch, or diphthongization in Hindu Khmer).
To make it clear -- there was no phonological motivation for these sweeping changes whatsoever. Not across all members of a family, and across entirely unrelated families, which didn't even have contact with each other.
It must have been ethnogenetic in origin -- they were becoming a new people, with a new culture, and they wanted to mark that new cultural identity by radically altering their language. It would become unintelligible with the language of their ancestors -- but their ancestors were not Buddhist, and may have been considered loathsome heathens / pagans by the new Buddhist zealotry of the Dark Ages.
So, it's only fitting that they not understand us, and we not understand them -- we're on opposite sides of a massive cultural dividing line, between the conversion to a global-missionizing Axial Age Big God super-moralizing religion.
Now, why was it tone/pitch that they all chose to mark their conversion to Buddhism? As we see with Khmer, it is not determined that tone/pitch will be the solution of re-encoding lost consonant info onto the remaining vowel -- you can generate diphthongs from earlier pure vowels, and have that diphthong info re-encode the lost consonant info.
ReplyDeleteThe most plausible connection I see, albeit with a wrinkle due to the absence of tone/pitch in the Hindu or partly Hindu regions, is the fact that Buddhism was being spread alongside its liturgical language, Pali, ultimately from Sanskrit. There would still be Sanskrit influence, even if it was in the later Pali language.
And in particular, these Indo-Aryan languages were not being used as everyday spoken vernacular languages -- the converts kept speaking a Sino-Tibetan, Kra-Dai, Austroasiatic, Koreanic, or Japonic language. Rather, they were liturgical, and especially used in chanting -- which is musical, and involves pitch or tone.
But it's not just "we're hearing this new language in a musical context, so let's borrow the property of tone/pitch from music". Their old religions must've had songs and music associated with them, for example in shamanic chanting.
It's that the liturgical language itself was tonal or pitch-accented, whereas their earlier native languages were not.
Sanskrit and Pali were not tonal, but they *were* pitch-accented, and that stems from Proto-Indo-European itself being pitch-accented. Vedic Sanskrit heavily preserved this in Vedic chanting, where pitch is a much more salient property to preserve, rather than everyday chatter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_accent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_chant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_accent
None of the language families of the East Asian adopters of Buddhism, were tonal or pitch-accented. This property only arose among them when they converted to Buddhism.
This would've made tone/pitch much more identifiable to East Asians as a feature of their new liturgical language, that distinguished it from all of their native language families. It's very exotic, and special, and totally unlike our everyday vernacular languages from when we were heathens and pagans.
Therefore, fixate on tone/pitch as what we're going to borrow from our new Buddhist liturgical language, into our everyday vernacular languages -- and make them pitch-accented or full-on tonal as well!
You see the wrinkle, then -- the Hindu or partly Hindu converts in SEA / Pacific Islands did not adopt tone/pitch, even though their new religion came ultimately from an Indo-Aryan-speaking source, just like Buddhism did.
ReplyDeleteWhy didn't Sanskrit / Indo-Aryan pitch-accent spread into the Hindu converts, if it spread into the Buddhist converts?
Without being a specialist in the history of religion in SEA, I can offer several possibilities for others to follow up on:
1. Hinduism was mainly an elite religion where it took root, whereas in solely-Buddhist countries, Buddhism was adopted by the masses as well. Because vernaculars are spoken by the masses, the masses in Hindu SEA societies were not so heavily exposed to Indo-Aryan liturgical languages, didn't value those religions very highly anyway (elite, not popular), and therefore didn't bother imitating how they sounded.
2. Hinduism did enjoy more popular support in the Hindu SEA societies, but it did not employ as much musical chanting as did Buddhist rituals in the Buddhist East Asian / SEA societies. Perhaps the Hindu rituals didn't even employ very much plainspoken Indo-Aryan litugical language, compared to their Buddhist counterparts. Sculpture, architecture, myths and narratives, names of gods, non-linguistic rituals, sure -- but not so heavy of a presence of the Indo-Aryan language in their frequent rituals. Maybe Hindus chanted less than Buddhists.
3. Hinduism did employ Indo-Aryan languages as liturgical languages in SEA, and the masses heard them regularly. However, they were from a dialect that was originally not very pitch-accented, compared to the dialect used among Buddhist missionaries. Or if used by local priests, maybe the lack of pitch/tone in the native languages made them erase pitch-accent from the liturgical language at the outset -- whereas Buddhist missionaries were either Indian, or locals who were heavily invested in maintaining the pitch-accent despite not speaking a pitch-accent language themselves. Buddhists being more zealous, perhaps. But for whatever reason, the Hindu liturgical language not being very pitch-accented, compared to the Buddhist liturgical language, in these non-Indian cultures.
And so on.
I admit this is a wrinkle in the theory, which is otherwise as smooth as a baby's butt. Still, there are several plausible explanations, which I probably won't follow up on to narrow down, since this isn't an obsessive focus of mine. Specialists can take up that leg of the journey.
It may be worth noting that it was largely Dravidian language speakers from South India that spread the faith to Southeast Asia during the Global Dark Ages. For example, the Chola Empire.
DeleteAnother factor in Indonesia is the arrival of Islam, which did not come with a pitch-accented liturgical language. Arabic is not pitch-accented, nor is the Semitic family as a whole -- unlike Indo-Aryan and Indo-European.
ReplyDeleteThat would also go toward explaining why some Central Asian cultures that used to be Buddhist for a moment, but later adopted Islam, like the Uyghurs, didn't develop pitch/tone in their Turkic languages.
Circling back to the Tocharians, they adopted Buddhism, but did not have a pitch-accented or tonal language. And they adopted Buddhism during the Dark Ages, with missionaries or contacts from India, just like in SEA. They translated Indo-Aryan Buddhist literature into Tocharian, so at least some of them were aware of / knowledgeable of Sanskrit, Pali, Gandhari, etc. Maybe they even used Indo-Aryan in frequent rituals, IDK much about their practices (I don't think the specialists do either, there's a lot unknown about the Tocharians).
However, the Tocharians didn't last long as a linguistic community, and were absorbed into the Uyghur culture, which soon adopted Islam and a Turkic language. Maybe if that major change had not happened, and Tocharians still spoke Tocharian into the early 2nd millennium, and kept practicing Buddhism, they would've underwent pitch-accenting or tonogenesis as well. Their cultural identity was cut short, unfortch, so we'll never know.
I don't think Islam in Indonesia is the major factor why they didn't develop tone/pitch in their languages -- Islam arrived circa 1300, long after the Hindu-Buddhist stages of their history, and at the end of the Dark Ages when the other Asian cultures underwent tonogenesis.
ReplyDeleteJust adding it in as another factor that would've dampened any halfway attempts at tonogenesis among them.
Islamization of Central Asia was more important, since that took place during the Dark Ages (before 1300).
I'll put this together, with some links / formatting, into a new standalone post, so search engines can find it better, and to get another comment section ball rolling. Just fleshing out some intuitions for now.
ReplyDeleteBut I haven't seen this discussed in what I've read on tone and pitch evolving in East / Southeast Asia, let alone at a granular level (like how Khmer is both lacking tone/pitch and converted to Hinduism rather than Buddhism during the critical time period).
The cliff-dwelling sage of the ruins of the blogosphere has to prepare the next crockpot meal first, though. I may live a humble lifestyle, but I'm not ascetic -- just like the Buddha himself taught, starvation is not a virtue (contra the Millennial credo, where they are mean girls to even themselves).
Hamburger meat, ground sausage, various spices, and fresh mushrooms, brussel sprouts, and collard greens -- an eclectic mix, but it was what was on clearance price! Good ol' crockpot meals, making use of all that at once, so you don't have to worry about it going bad. Then just eating it for lunch and dinner for several days in a row.
Mmmm, now that's how you get variety in the Dark Age diet -- whatever's cheap du jour! ^_^
Speaking of Nihongo and pitch accent, in a recent Holo JP stream, 4 of them were playing a game where you imitate sounds, and see who matches it the closest. Pitch, duration, etc. An elephant roar, a door slamming, whatever.
ReplyDeleteThe best sound-imitators were the Kansai girls, Fubuki and Korone, who are also very good at imitating specific individuals. Fubuki can imitate almost anyone -- Marine, Subaru, anyone.
The Eastern and Northern girls, like Mio and Okayu, can do pretty well, but not as well as the Kansai girls.
I discussed this before, using this same game as an example. But it's nice to see it confirmed again.
Non-standard dialect regions, far from the meta-ethnic frontier, are more theatrical in personality, and more musical in their tone/pitch (a more theatrical intonation pattern). Part of the theatrical personality is being able to assume different roles, like an actor or actress. And that means being able to do different accents, one of the most important skills for an actor / actress.
The same pattern holds in America, where the back-East people have more rollercoaster intonation, and are better at imitations. East Coasters like Goob can imitate people better than Midwesterners like Fauna or Moom. And her basic voice is more roller-coaster in intonation. Midwestern / Western intonation is more level, much like Eastern / Northern Nihongo.
Also, pronunciation of foreign languages -- non-standard dialect speakers are better at accurate foreign accents. Goob can do a pretty good Swedish, Portuguese, Nihongo, and other pronunciation, if she applies herself.
There was a recent 20-some minute clip showing the English skills of various Holo JP girls, and again the Kansai girls are better at pronunciation than the Eastern / Northern girls. The Eastern / Northern ones may be good at word-formation and syntax and vocabulary, but pronunciation is much better among the Kansai girls like the Koronator.
This is just one of many ways in which people far from the meta-ethnic frontier are more unhinged, unconstrained, and "do whatever you feel like" / "no barriers". Whereas people close to the frontier have to be more guarded, level-headed, and conformist. Imitating a foreign language, another individual, or a strange sound like elephant roaring and door slamming, is not conformist and free-wheeling.
In the presence of an existential Us vs. Them conflict, you have to stay on the rails. Far from that existential threat, yeah sure, fly off the rails, what's the worst that could happen? Is the boogeyman gonna get me? Pfft!
But where there is a meta-ethnic nemesis, that's worse than the Boogeyman. It's a sprawling, collective, very real enemy. And you can't be acting unhinged, anti-conformist, and flying-off-the-rails with such a constant threat nearby.
I predict Biboo will develop a very good pronunciation in Nihongo, since she's an East Coaster.
ReplyDeleteAnd so will Bae, since all of Australia is a non-standard dialect region -- cuz there *is no* single standard dialect, and no meta-ethnic nemesis or frontier. They can't even decide between Sydney and Melbourne for the standard!
Yes, Australia is an entire country full of theatrical, free-wheeling, non-standard dialect speakers. ^_^
Kronii and Fuwamoco have good Nihongo pronunciation, despite being West Coasters -- cuz they're *Canadian* West Coasters. Not the same as American West Coasters.
ReplyDeleteAll of Canada is a non-standard dialect region, somewhat like Australia. East Coast Canada, AKA Quebec, is even more non-standard -- French-speaking -- similar to the situation in America.
But Canada lacks a meta-ethnic frontier or nemesis, and they're the cast-offs from America, so they aren't part of our standard culture, although they can mimic it and pass to some extent.
Notwithstanding their obsessions with politeness, Canadians are a very theatrical people -- which is why they're so over-represented in music, acting, and even streaming, including vtubing. It's the easiest thing in the world for them to put on a stage performance before an audience.
Why, there's even CRYPTO-Canadians in the vtuber medium... ones who go out of their way to pass as red-white-and-blue 'Muricans... and yet, all it takes is a nanosecond slip-up, and they accidentally say "zed" instead of "zee" for the last letter of the alphabet, or spell a word with "-our" instead of "-or". All that tireless and otherwise impeccable effort at passing -- undone in a single moment, over the most trivial thing!
But that's the nature of a shibboleth, it only takes one single slip-up, and your cover is blown.
I still don't get why crypto-leafs are so ashamed and paranoid about being discovered. We're not going to disown you, if we already love you, silly.
Part of maturing fully is loving who you are, and that means not having a hang-up about your nationality. We can't force you into loving yourself, but just keep that in mind as you mature... nothing to be ashamed of, being Canadian is not abnormal or deviant or weird, unlike the things that someone actually *should* be ashamed of and keep to themselves.
"How can you say that, when you just called us all a bunch of cast-off Americans???!?!?! We're just an entire nation of misfits and rejects, or something??!?!?!?!?!!"
Just a little friendly joshing for our North American kouhais. All in good fun, not need to get all emo about it. ^_^
You know that the very reason why Canada and the United States are separate nations is that the former is where the Loyalists fled from the American Revolution. Canada was basically to the American Revolution what Taiwan is to the Chinese Revolution of 1949! The French of Quebec remained in British North America because they had a "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know attitude" towards (vocally anti-Papist) republicans.
DeleteIt may be worth noting that the West-East divide in Canada is far more pronounced than in the United States. You have described how various under-the-radar cultural components (especially those related to the meta-ethnic frontier) may result in a future splitting of America into Western and Eastern halves with the West being the less decadent equivalent of the Byzantines to the Romans or the German Empire to the Franks.
The Western part of Canada has had an independent streak since at least the Red River Rebellion not long after Confederation. Western discontent in the 1980s lead to the rise of the populist Reform Party decades before populism became fashionable elsewhere. It latter took over the old Progressive Conservative Party
Britain's Nigel Farage even described the Canadian Reform Party as "the inspiration for us".
It's not the vernacular language of the missionaries that matters, since all sorts of missionaries carried Buddhism around East Asia. It's the liturgical language that matters.
ReplyDeleteThere was no Protestant-esque movement to re-code Buddhist chants into the local languages by Dravidian speakers of the Chola Empire. When they landed in SEA, they brought an Indo-Aryan liturgical language.
Same with SE Asians taking up Indianized names, e.g. the Srivijaya Empire, rulers named Jayavarman, etc. -- that's derived from Sanskrit, not Tamil.
What Dravidians *did* spread to SEA is their alphabet, the Pallava script, whose descendant is still used today for Thai, Khmer, and others.
Japanese, Korean, and Altaic connections. Languages spreading to absorb large #s of L2 learners may shed light on this age-old question.
ReplyDeleteIt's obvious that at some point in the past, there was a common culture and likely common language, possibly a homogeneous / unimodal genepool, for the ancestors of Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese speakers.
However, when you try to reconstruct that language using the standard tools of historical linguistics, you can't do it. You can't find the "most recent common ancestor" between two families, so they appear to be separate families or language isolates, like Koreanic and Japonic.
Looking outside of language is better to reconstruct that ancestral culture, cuz language is too utilitarian and people can easily drop their native language and adopt a new one. But they don't drop and switch their dances, superstitions, myths, food taboos, wedding rituals, and various other key aspects of their culture.
Sticking just to language, though, I think it makes the most sense to say that Koreanic and Japonic *are* isolated families. 3000, 5000 years ago, maybe their ancestors spoke the same language or members of a single family. But a lot happened in the meantime, and they're no longer so closely related to each other.
Concretely, close languages can diverge radically due to a huge influx of L2 learners -- into just one of the pair, let alone if both languages have this influx. And the wider the variety of L2 learners -- not just one non-native speaker group, but 2, 3, 4, etc. -- the more radically it will alter the target language.
Whatever the L2 learners can't pronounce, is gone. Whatever inflectional system they can't handle, is gone, or heavily simplified. Things that are opaque, gone -- things that are transparent, stay.
And these changes don't just last for one stage -- when whole series of consonants are eliminated, that creates homonym problems, so now there's going to be a vowel shift, or re-encoding the lost consonant info as tones or diphthongs, or new distinguishing features will emerge among the consonants. These ripples last for awhile.
At the same time, there are random mutations that accumulate, but every language has that. And any pair of related languages will have random mutations distinguishing them -- and will be the basis for sound correspondences between them, and signaling their relatedness / common descent from a most recent common ancestor.
It's really those initial radical changes, and the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-order knock-on effects that they set into motion, that makes two formerly related languages diverge wildly away from each other.
And these changes are not similar between the two formerly related languages -- they're incorporating different populations of L2 learners, so their initial changes will be different, and then the knock-on effects several centuries down the line will be different as well.
E.g., former sister languages A and B, both with similar levels of voiced and voiceless consonants. A incorporates people whose L1 lacks voiced consonants -- so the new form of A, with the influx of newbies, has only voiceless consonants. Whereas B incorporates people whose L1 prefers voiced consonants, so its new form is going to have tons of voiced consonants.
ReplyDeleteAt this initial stage, you could still look at both and say "they're clearly sister languages, but one dropped it voiced consonants, and the other amped them up".
But as these initial changes trigger round after round of further adaptation, spawning new series of consonants, vowel shifts, or whatever else -- then it's not so clear that the two are sisters. They look only distantly related, and you can't use historical reconstruction to find their most recent common ancestor. Cuz they were subjected to two entirely different influxes of L2 learners, and subsequent radical re-organization of their phonology and morphology.
Getting back to opacity and serial derivations, evidently these kinds of massive disruptions at the initial stage, and all the further changes they trigger, and not easily identifiable and invertible. If they were, you could just invert each one of them, in backwards order, and wind up at the original stages of both sister languages -- and show, conclusively, they were sisters!
ReplyDeleteYou can do that for things like the Great Vowel Shift in English, or Grimm's Law, or whatever other laws that were not simply triggered by a massive influx of L2 learners. So you can relate the Germanic languages together into a Proto-Germanic parent. And likewise with changes in the Hellenic branch, Italic branch, Indo-Aryan branch, etc., and wind up with a Proto-Indo-European parent.
Certainly each of those languages took in L2 learners throughout its history -- but to what degree, what percentage of speakers were L2 at any given time? And how many different languages did these L2 learners account for?
Something qualitatively different happened within Koreanic and Japonic, that did not occur in Indo-European -- well, aside from perhaps Tocharian (Uralic L2 learners).
The chain of changes within Koreanic and Japonic jumbled things up so much, that you can't invert them and wind up with the parent of Koreanic and Japonic. Cuz they're not merely descendants of that common ancestor, with only random mutations accumulating since then -- rather, they were shaped by the massive influx of L2 learners, and these newbies were not shared between the two families, so they sent them down very different paths.
Specifically, which L2 learners flooded into Japonic and Koreanic, which at some distant point that we can't reconstruct, must've been sister languages?
ReplyDeleteWell, Japonic used to be spoken in the southern Korean peninsula and was brought into the Japanese archipelago -- where they encountered speakers of Ainu and related languages, who they labeled the Emishi.
The Emishi were not genocided, they were genetically and culturally absorbed into the invading population that spoke Japonic. But the non-Japonic indigenous people couldn't speak Japonic -- they spoke an entirely unrelated language, whatever it was. And you can't hold a spear to someone's throat and order them to pronounce sounds that aren't in their native language.
Therefore, the stage where pre-Japonic language was a sister to a pre-Koreanic language, the one that spread within the Japanese islands was heavily altered by the influx of Ainu-type speakers. IDK exactly what those phonological and morphological changes were, but they undoubtedly happened -- cuz they were L2 learners, and every time that happens, the target language gets simplified and altered to accomodate the L2 learners.
Still, that was only 1 major group of L2 learners, perhaps the only one.
On the Korean side, their polity and culture used to extend waaaay outside of the Korean peninsula, and into Northeast Asia. E.g., during the Goguryeo and Balhae periods, which lasted throughout the 1st millennium AD. Koreanic speakers did not genocide any of those people, they absorbed them (and killed off a group here or there).
They would've incorporated speakers who originally spoke Mongolic, Tungusic, Amuric, perhaps Paleo-Siberian, and maybe some Turkic languages. And some Sinitic speakers from the Chinese frontier? IDK exactly who joined their confederation, but there were shitloads of non-native Koreanic speakers, and any of them who joined the Korean polity and influenced its common language would've brought massive changes to what used to be a language close to pre-Japonic.
So I think Korean is the more divergent one from the original state, compared to Japanese. Japanese speakers only incorporated one group of non-native speakers, whereas Korean speakers incorporated many more -- who were not from the same families themselves (Mongolic, Tungusic, Amuric, etc.).
It's hard enough to compromise on a single lingua franca when there are just 2 parties, the L1 speakers and the sole group of L2 speakers. But when there are 2, 3, 4 groups of L2 speakers from different families, think of how much more difficult it is to find a single compromise among them as well! Much more radical simplification, and much more radical innovation as a consequence -- to re-encode the lost information from the initial stage, but in a form that all parties can understand and produce. Yikes!
Korean went through a huge vowel shift, unlike Japanese. And Korean has a bewildering and highly unstable series of consonants, called plain, tense, and aspirated. Imagine a "p", "t", "ch", and "k" all coming in 3 subtle variations apiece.
ReplyDeleteThis 3-way distinction is not in the earlier stage of Korean, not even a 2-way distinction, just the plain old "p", "t", "ch", and "k". This must be one of those knock-on effects several steps down the initial radical changes brought about by L2 learners flooding into the speech community.
Korean doesn't have voiced stops -- that will change. These subtle distinctions want to be more salient, and they will become that way. Or they'll simplify this consonant distinction and re-encode the info onto the vowel, with tone, diphthongs, or whatever.
It's not stable to have so many highly similar consonants, when the basic and more salient ones (like voiced stops -- b, d, j, and g) are absent.
Just like with those 3-way distinctions among velar consonants in Proto-Indo-European, they got simplified one way or another in the daughter languages. Proto-Indo-European, i.e. what can be reconstructed, was obviously just a snapshot in time -- and an unstable one at that. No way that 3-way distinction went back to time immemorial. They emerged from a single velar that used to exist at a time back when we can't reconstruct it.
And Korean doesn't make much use of fricatives -- only plain vs. tense "s", and "h". That will change, too, just like in Indo-European, which used to only have "s" and "h" as fricatives, right up through Ancient Greek.
Japanese at least uses a kind of "f", and "z", in addition to "s" and "h". And Japanese doesn't have 3 subtle variations on all of their stops and affricates, like Korean does. It's much more stable, and doesn't indicate a history of massive L2 influx disrupting the original language. There was such an influx, it just doesn't show up so tellingly, cuz it was only 1 group, not several different groups.
To clarify, Japanese does the sensible thing that a language-designer would choose, by making its consonant distinctions more salient -- they have voiceless vs. voiced stops (like "p" vs. "b", "t" vs. "d", etc.). Korean has 3 types of voiceless stops -- plain, tense, and aspirated, but not making use of voicing as a distinction.
ReplyDeleteThat's not how you would design a language, so it must be a temporary disruption / sub-optimal stage, triggered by some larger natural disaster that could not be helped -- influx of L2 learners from multiple separate families.
Eventually Korean will iron out these wrinkles, and have voiced stops, or a new system of vowels after simplifying their consonants, or whatever it becomes. Their language is highly unstable.
The point is, a high level of instability indicates that there was a far more disruptive change in their history, compared to the history of Japanese. Japanese had L2 learners, but only from 1 family, whereas Korean had to try to accomodate 2, 3, or 4 entirely different *families* of L2 speakers -- it's going to be chaotic for awhile, whereas the chaos in Japanese settled down into an equilibrium much sooner.
These "influx of L2 learner" effects are similar to admixture effects in genetics. Initially, you can discern where the various sides came from. But after awhile, it really is an entirely new and distinctive genepool.
ReplyDeleteSo, to sum up, Koreanic and Japonic are no longer sister families, due to all the changes triggered by influx of L2 learners -- who were not shared between Koreanic and Japonic (no Ainu speakers adopted Korean, and no Tungusic speakers adopted Japanese).
At some distant stage in the past, the ancestors who spoke pre-Koreanic and pre-Japonic spoke sister languages. They had sister cultures, and probably a similar genetic haplogroup.
But after incorporating so many new peoples outside of that old original stage, Koreanic and Japonic have diverged so much that it makes no sense to classify them as sisters anymore.
Nor should they be lumped in with Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, or whatever else -- those languages were not identical to pre-Koreanic or pre-Japonic, and they took in their own distinctive groups of L2 learners -- not the Ainu as in Japanese.
This makes Koreanic and Japonic effectively isolated language families now.
Final note on terminology, we shouldn't call these isolated families "primary" or "fundamental" or anything like that. "Primary" suggests it goes back indefinitely in time, as one of many "unmoved mover" languages. One of the original building blocks.
ReplyDeleteBut in reality, Koreanic is a very recent, shallow-rooted family. There's nothing primary or primeval about it -- it developed only in historical times, during the 1st millennium AD and later, crucially as a consequence of absorbing all those L2 learners from Northeast Asia throughout the Dark Ages.
Same with Japonic -- it doesn't go back to a linguistic Garden of Eden either. It's the result of pre-Japonic speakers incorporating Ainu-type L2 learners in the Japanese archipelago.
I propose the term "sisterless" family instead. You could use "isolated", but that's misleading cuz it sounds like it's geographically remote and small in size. But Indo-European is a sisterless family -- despite being vast in size and spread all over the world. Hard to call that an "isolated" family.
And yet, Koreanic is a sisterless family as well, despite being (relatively) small in size and confined to the Korean peninsula.
"Sisterless" is better cuz it doesn't suggest anything about size or scope. And it says what it's about -- it's about the lack or absence of something, namely any other language family that it shares a linguistic parent with. There has to be something in the term that says "lack" or "absence".
The female kin term is standard in linguistics -- mother tongue, daughter languages, sisters, etc.
The same-age term is right cuz you're talking about the lack of anyone who you share a parent with, i.e. your would-be siblings.
It has a few too many sibilants, it's a bit polysyllabic, but it's the best there is.
"Cousinless" sounds a little better, not so many identical sounds. But just cuz you're cousinless doesn't mean you're sibling-less. It's a stronger claim to say you don't have siblings, you're an only child.
There's another term -- "only child" language family. Sounds too emo to me, though. Oh boo-hoo, poor only child language family, that has to speak to itself and can't find anyone else to play with.
"Sisterless" is less emo and more neutral / clinical.
One last remark about Glorious Nippon, not related to language. Earlier this month, for the May the 4th celebrations -- "May the force be with you" turning into the pun, "May the 4th" be with you -- several of the Hololive JP girls did streams about Star Wars.
ReplyDeleteThey're not alone -- Star Wars was an instant hit in Japan, and has remained popular there ever since. It's *the* American epic -- the original trilogy, anyway. Japanese people recognize quality when they see it, and they love their "twin separated at birth," America, so naturally they love our definitive national epic.
And to Japan's credit, their people like Star Wars no matter what generation they belong to. The Holo JP girls are Millennials and Zoomers, who are too young to have seen the original trilogy when it was release in the late '70s through the early '80s.
In Japan, Star Wars is like other space Westerns or space operas -- something that every Japanese resident must learn about and appreciate while they're growing up, or else the government will revoke their citizenship.
That's why Holo JP girls also uphold the traditions of their own space Westerns and space epics, like Space Battleship Yamato, whose theme song was performed by 4 JP girls during one of Luna's live concerts, as the finale. That anime originally came out in the '70s, before the girls were even born. But they have to learn about it, and appreciate it, or the Japanese government will revoke their citizenship!
Indeed. I have often speculated that in an alternate reality where George Lucas and Steven Spielberg never existed, Japan might have actually taken over much of America's pop culture monopoly. After all, before then American cinema was increasingly dreary, "artsy", and proto-woke as some hipsters pine for:
Deletehttps://washingtonspectator.org/juvenilia-strikes-back/
Even Disney had entered its so-called "Dark Age" before the Disney Renaissance.
https://movieweb.com/disneys-dark-era-exploring-70s-and-80s/
Subsequently, I believe Japan may have had a real possibility of taking over much of the market for wholesome entertainment in particular. If the idea sounds far fetched, keep in mind that that is what happened to video games.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MediaNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983
In America, for the time being, Star Wars is unfortunately a central part of the collective identity for the generation that was its target audience at its original theatrical release -- Gen X, and some late Boomers perhaps. It's a memory from their own lived experience.
ReplyDeleteAnd Millennials weren't alive when the real Star Wars came out -- the national epic of America -- only the shitty, not-epic prequels from the late '90s and 2000s. So Millennials have never had any affinity for Star Wars, and Zoomers even less so -- they only remember the shitty woketard slop from the late 2010s, as their lived experience.
Instead, Millennials' lived experience has led them to claim Harry Potter as their generation's shared guiding narrative cycle. No Gen X-er has ever been a part of that.
Nor has any Zoomer -- and since American imperial culture collapsed over the course of the 2010s, IDK if Zoomers even have their own shared guiding narrative cycle. Stranger Things? (A derivative of Gen X culture anyway.) Hunger Games? The 2010s iteration of Marvel capeshit -- but not the 2000s iteration of it?
I don't really see them using that as a common reference or allusion that they all instantly understand and identify with. It seems like American Zoomers are the first generation *not* to have that shared cultural framework.
Before Star Wars among Gen X and late Boomers, Boomers had Superman -- which Ben from Ben & Jerry's recently referred to in protesting Zionism, about upholding the values of "Truth, justice, and the American way".
America being a shallow-rooted nation, culture, and people, means we're not big on stressing our traditions. Our traditions only go back to the 1890s at the earliest -- after our integrative civil war wrapped up. But even our Euro-LARP-y culture only goes back a couple hundred years before then, and we inherited it all. It's not "ours" to preserve.
ReplyDeleteSo, unfortunately, the American government will not revoke your citizenship if you've never seen the original and true / epic Star Wars trilogy. It's mind-boggling how many Holo EN girls have never seen a single one of them. I think Goob only saw the first one a couple years ago, also for the May the 4th occasion, at the prodding of her fandom.
Zoomers' brains are filled with nothing other than pop culture awareness -- but they aren't aware of America's national / imperial epic, the original Star Wars trilogy. Or the Westerns and space / sci-fi / fantasy genres it comes from.
Millennials may be semi-aware of it, but they don't value or identify with it -- cuz it wasn't their lived experience, which was the shitty not-epic prequels, so they chose something that wasn't a trainwreck to make their collective framework, namely Harry Potter (British and Euro-LARP-y, but part of the American Empire by that point).
Not only will the American government not revoke their citizenship, the compulsory school system will not fail them and withhold their diplomas until they've enculturated themselves in the American classics. And it's hardly the students' fault -- the school system should fire the teachers for not enculturating their powerless charges into American culture, by making sure they all see the Star Wars trilogy at some point.
To make it clear, the original Star Wars trilogy is aesthetically superior to any series of John Steinbeck novels, and is more central to the American collective identity and moral framework than those novels. So if one of them must be required parts of the curriculum, it's the Star Wars trilogy, not Steinbeck. You could accomodate both, but you can't have kids read those novels while remaining ignorant of space Westerns made during the peak of Hollywood.
Hopefully this gets rectified as the successor rump states to the collapsing American Empire do things somewhat differently. I can easily imagine the California-led cohesive out-West rump state making Star Wars part of the curriculum, whereas I hold no hope for the culture-less and heritage-hating East Coast to do so.
Over in Glorious Nippon, affinity for Star Wars is not a matter of lived experience. The Millennials and Zoomers in Holo JP have exposed themselves to Star Wars, and enjoy it, even though they were born too late to be in the target audience for the original release.
ReplyDeleteAnd the movies that they did see in the theater, the not-epic prequels, they like those too. I don't understand that at all -- all 3 movies are garbaggio. But from what rumors I've heard, the Japanese voice actors who dubbed the dialog gave superior performances to the very second-rate performances by the American original cast.
Jar-Jar Binks is not a hated cringe-fest in Japan, but then he's not voiced by the same actor and not saying the same words. Korone loves Jar-Jar Binks... that only makes sense if she's thinking of the Japanese dub actor, who isn't as ridiculous as the American original.
Anyway, the point is that Japanese people all know Space Battleship Yamato, Galaxy Express 999, *and* Star Wars, Alien, The Terminator, and all the other American classics -- no matter what generation they belong to. Classics are meant for every person to appreciate, and Japanese society sees to it that every generation appreciates the classics.
They are a more deeply rooted society than America -- not a high bar to clear. So they know better how to enculturate their population, and uphold traditions -- old ones or new ones, like space Westerns.
Given the incredibly fragile hold that America has on its own culture, I wouldn't be surprised if it's all gone by the end of the century within America and its rump states -- with the possible exception of a California-led rump state -- and is only preserved in cultures like Japan where they have always appreciated the classic things we have created.
Help us, Glorious Nippon-i, you're our only hope...
Japan definitely succeeded America in one domain of cool-ness -- space-themed culture, and futurism in general. Robots, computers, video games, outer space, and so on.
ReplyDeleteThe original Star Wars trilogy was actually the very end of America's futuristic space culture, and the final movie, Return of the Jedi, showed heavy "primitive fantasy" elements in the scenes set on the Ewok planet Endor.
Throughout the '80s, there was a tidal shift away from sci-fi, futurism, and outer space, and toward fantasy, primevalism / Medievalism, and settings on Earth (in the past). There may have been a tenuous connection to the futuristic culture of before, like how the cartoon Thundarr the Barbarian is set in a post-apocalyptic future, where all the razzle-dazzle futuristic tech of before lies in ruins, and magic and fantasy have returned.
The only major futuristic space culture from the late '80s and early '90s was Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's one of the best TV shows of all time, but it wasn't enough to sustain the futuristic space themes throughout the decade.
Demolition Man is another noble effort from the early '90s, but also not enough to carry the themes through the decade (and no outer-space theme). The original Stargate movie from '94 is the last, not to say the greatest, entry in the genre of "futuristic space adventure" even if it ties into present-day or ancient Earth.
By the 2000s and especially the collapsing 2010s, futurism and outer-space simply meant the same ol' ordinary bullshit stories from contempo Earth / America, but with all-white interior design and flying cars in the background, taken for granted rather than a fascinating and imaginative part of the sense of place or narrative, sparking our desire for adventure and exploration.
And what really dominated the 2000s and 2010s was more Medieval / primitivist fantasy -- Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings / The Hobbit, Pirates of the Caribbean (Early Modern, but in a Medieval level of technology and economy and government), Chronicles of Narnia, and so on. The minority of movies, video games, etc. that have a space theme don't involve imagination, adventure, exploration, glory, etc.
Demolition Man was prophetic though in a lot of ways around what happened in the transition from rising crime/outgoing to falling crime/cocooning. The buzzers that go off when someone swears, the 50s-esque "mini-tunes" that have whole radio stations devoted to them, the effeminate gay leadership and the fact that all the cool people have gone underground, and sex between young people becoming increasingly virtual and through machines.
DeleteJapan never really stopped with the space-age futurism -- after Astro Boy in the '60s, in the '70s and early '80s there was Space Battleship Yamato, Galaxy Express 999, Space Pirate Captain Harlock, the sci-fi adaptation of Journey to the West (Starzinger), and the original Gundam (which Irys is watching right now -- and fulfilling the requirements for keeping her Japanese citizenship! ^_^).
ReplyDeleteBut they kept going throughout the '80s and '90s, with Macross, Legend of Galactic Heroes, Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and too many Doraemon movies to list (including up to the present), not to mention revivals or side-branches of older franchises like Astro Boy and Gundam.
Even some of the exceptions in American space culture from the '80s had a major Japanese role in their creation -- the entire visual side being conceived and executed by Japanese artists. Transformers, Thundercats, SilverHawks, BraveStarr, and so on. Jem had a slightly futuristic / hi-tech angle to it, and that was also animated in Japan.
Even a purely primitivist fantasy series from America, Dungeons & Dragons, was animated in Japan! (Toei, as usual.)
In video games, right from the start Glorious Nippon dominated the futuristic space genre -- Space Invaders, Galaga, and then the space shooters that allowed you to move around the screen, Darius, Gradius / Salamander, Star Soldier, and just about every game for the PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16.
Although America had a few decent entries early on (Defender, Sinistar, Asteroids), by the late '80s the genre was entirely Japanese -- and they kept the genre going throughout the 2000s and 2010s and 2020s, first with the bullet hell style, piloting mechs in outer space (perhaps tying into anime series of the same style, like Gundam), and so on.
There were a few space shooter-ish American games from the '90s, like Doom, TIE Fighter and Rebel Assault, parts of Perfect Dark, and Halo from the early 2000s. These have largely faded away, though, and the FPS genre that America pioneered has always been not very futuristic or space-y.
American RPGs and MMORPGs have always been primitivist / Medieval, not futuristic or space-age (Elder Scrolls, Warcraft, etc.). Sandbox games are not futuristic either -- GTA.
The three most original and not-photorealistic games from the 21st century, made outside of Japan, are all primitivist or Medieval -- Minecraft, Terraria, and Stardew Valley.
Hololive girls also keep alive the futuristic / space tradition. Roboco, Suisei, and Luna from JP, Moona from ID, and Sana from EN (whose original song was fittingly called "Astro Girl").
ReplyDeleteAlthough her persona is not space or futuristic-themed, Kson regularly does streams of her assembling gunpla models. With each stream, her Japanese citizenship is renewed for another year! ^_^
These themes just don't resonate with non-Japanese streamers, whether they're face-tubers or vtubers.
The reason why space-age futurism collapsed as a cultural trope in America, while it remained healthy in Japanese culture, is that our empire began stagnating and then collapsing, whereas Japan never became an empire, so it is not undergoing the collapse / hangover stage like we are.
ReplyDeleteStagnation and collapse has the opposite effect on our national imagination -- no more optimism, adventure, exploration, conquest, mastery of technology, and so on. Back to pessimism or apathy, bedrot-maxxing rather than ever step foot outside, shaming anyone with curiosity, defeat on the battlefield / sea, no new tech invented (AI is fake) and loss of the ability to even manufacture and maintain the tech that we invented not so long ago.
We haven't put a man on the moon since the '70s -- if we tried, the whole thing would blow up in our faces, like the Challenger, the Columbia space shuttle, those astronauts stranded in low orbit forever, and so on and so forth.
Japan never soared as high as we did as an empire, so the fact that they're not putting men on the moon these days is not a humiliation or sign of stagnation, decline, or collapse. It doesn't get to them like it gets to us. So they still have nothing but good vibes about space-age futurism.
The only narrative we can still pay attention to is "ancient aliens" -- like Stargate -- which is an Earthbound narrative, where they visit us rather than us explore the galaxy, and where all the major action happened in the primeval past, not the future.
Nothing wrong with that, as part of a broader interest in outer space -- but for it to be the sole surviving member of that family of culture, shows how demoralized we have become. Best to not even think about those themes, and never watch the original Star Wars trilogy, to spare our fragile egos about what we have become so quickly.
But it's no humiliation for the Japanese, so they can continue being fascinated by these themes -- lucky them!
Ending for now with a viewing rec -- Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, from 1985, originally a TV movie, which aired on ABC like the other Star Wars spin-offs (an earlier, not-so-great Ewoks movie, Caravan of Courage, and the cartoons Droids and Ewoks).
ReplyDeleteSidebar: for someone who experienced the '90s heyday of NBC, with their yuppie sit-com domination (Seinfeld, Friends, Will Ferrell-era SNL and after), it's really shocking to see how little they mattered throughout the history of TV. Especially for anything involving sci-fi, fantasy, supernatural, or mystery -- there it was ABC (Twin Peaks) and especially CBS at the top (Twilight Zone, The Incredible Hulk, Beauty and the Beast, etc.).
In any case, The Battle for Endor has even less of a futuristic space theme than Return of the Jedi, and delves even further into the Medieval magical fantasy genre. It belongs to the "dark fantasy children's movies" of the '80s, along with The NeverEnding Story, Labyrinth, Return to Oz, Willow, and the rest of them. Orphaned small children, having to rely on adorably unusual fantastical creatures for friends, evil sorceresses, it's all there.
Although made for TV, its production values are silver-screen-worthy -- it was Star Wars, after all, they couldn't make it look crappy just cuz it was on the small screen.
One thing that stands out in the cinematography is the relative brightness and outdoors setting. It isn't set in a dim cavern in order to hit on the "dark" theme. It looks like the Ewok planet from Return of the Jedi -- somewhat light, somewhat dark, but just like a natural forest. Similar to the sets for outdoors-y fairy tales, like the Hansel and Gretel episode of Faerie Tale Theatre, from the same time period.
There's something a little more creepy or disturbing about that naturalistic setting and light level, like any time you venture into the woods near your house, strange creatures could attack your parents, chase you in a hunt, and force you to befriend whatever is there. Not the dim cavern or dark gritty urban streets that are obviously filled with bad omens.
More like the "it could happen here in tree-lined suburbia" atmosphere of Blue Velvet, Alice in Wonderland (another TV movie from the mid-'80s), A Nightmare on Elm Street, and so on.
I haven't seen the Droids or Ewoks cartoons that immediately followed this movie, but the reviews of them are not very glowing. Every kid who saw The Battle for Endor back in the '80s remembers it well. So as far as the gatekeepers of Star Wars -- Gen X -- is concerned, The Battle for Endor is the last real Star Wars work, and the only part of the eXtEnDeD UnIvErSe that you need to experience, after the original trilogy.
"Extended" not just in the sense of it only involving one minor character from the original trilogy (Wicket, the Ewok), but in the sense of it being more of a primitivist dark fantasy movie than a futuristic sci-fi space Western.
These various spin-offs from the '80s are all available on Disney+ (under "Star Wars Vintage"), and probably for free elsewhere, I haven't checked since the late 2010s when I watched the two Ewoks movies for the first time since the '80s.
Japanese culture also preserves the primitivist / fantasy / mythological / Dark Age / animal side of American culture. American culture is primitivist futurism, or futurist primitivism -- a yin-yang combination, not just either one alone.
ReplyDeleteAgain, just look at the Doraemon movies -- they have primitivist / fantasy / chivalrous knights / magic / sorcery / pre-Big God religion / etc., from their start right up through the present day.
I just watched the 1987 Doraemon movie (Nobita and the Knights on Dinosaurs), and was really blown away by how many sci-fi and fantasy staples of the 20th C they managed to fit into a single movie for kids.
Knights and dinosaurs -- OK, that's in the title, no surprise there.
But there's time travel, futuristic all-metal ships that can phase through solid matter, and other sci-fi tropes.
And the core, so to speak, of the narrative is Hollow Earth and Lost World -- themes that America gave up after the '60s or '70s. The landscape art is amazing. Even in the American versions of these themes, they were usually not very big-budget sets, they have that typical B-movie look, aside from the places where they shot on location in a tropical climate or something.
Doraemon is a central anime franchise, so they invested a lot of money into the production values, and it shows. "So *that* is what Hollow Earth / Lost World looks like, when you give the creative team enough money to realize their imagination!"
The architecture of the Underground world is fantastical, too -- primitivist in being highly curvilinear and organic, but also futuristic in looking Mid-Century Modern. It looks a lot like the "New Formalism" of Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki (best known for the World Trade Center, but image search his name and New Formalism to see what his typical work looked like -- much more Mid-Century Modern and Brutalist).
Lush colors, striking lighting effects, not to mention the futurist primitivism of monorails zipping around the pastoral Eden of Hollow Earth.
Also, the Underground "people" evolved from dinosaurs rather than primates, and they've got a huge chip on their shoulder about mammals taking over the Aboveground world, and are preparing a grand battle to take back control over the surface world.
In fact, they're planning to time-travel back to the point, tens of millions of years ago, when the dinosaurs went extinct, to try to wage a holy crusade against whatever army wiped them out back then. They don't know it was a natural disaster, and are preparing for a major existential battle, to prevent their own extinction in the Cretaceous period.
The human children and Doraemon get swept up in this fantastical land and the plot to retake the Aboveground from the mammals.
And it's all played perfectly straight by the voice actors, there's nothing campy or self-aware or winking or ironic or parodying about its tone. America hasn't done sincere high-concept sci-fi and fantasy since those handful of late examples from the '90s, like Star Trek: TNG and the Stargate movie.
Japanese video games have mastered the primitive / Medieval fantasy genre since Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest, right up through recent franchises like Monster Hunter and Elden Ring.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just futuristic robots that dominate Japanese culture.
And the Holo JP vtubers reflect this primitivist / Medieval fantasy / myth / folklore genre as well -- Marine (pirate), Korone (Inugami, dog-god from JP folklore), Okayu (Nekomata, cat-creature from JP folklore), Noel (knight), Shion (witch / magician / sorceress), and so on.
There are others that are animal-human hybrids -- Koyori (coyote), Fubuki (fox), Mio (wolf), Botan (lion), Lui (hawk), and so on. Also within the fantasy theme.
Japanese culture is part of the wolf cult, as shown by the far more numerous number of canine vtubers in Holo JP compared to any other species (feline, bird, whatever else).
ReplyDeleteJapanese folklore values the wolf as a helper or guide through dangerous territory, they help to raise future gods or leaders, and there are numerous shrines to wolves throughout Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_wolf
One of the most popular anime movies outside (and inside) Japan is Princess Mononoke -- where wolves help to raise and protect a future important figure in Japanese history.
There was a highly popular game for the Wii, Okami, where you play as a wolf -- a beneficial, important, "the weight of the whole of Japan is carried on your shoulders" kind of wolf. Not an evil predator kind of wolf.
The name "okami" is in fact a taboo label, meaning "great god". They don't want to use the ordinary direct word for "wolf," which has passed out of common usage by now.
This links the Japanese to the Turkic cultures to their west in mainland Asia, not to mention parts of Indo-European cultures even further west on the steppe (the branches of Indo-European that subtly altered the word for "wolf" in taboo-labeling style, such as Hellenic, Italic, and Germanic -- whose cultures pride themselves on having been founded by humans nursed and protected by wolves, and who dress up as wolves and go berserk on the battlefield).
Nowadays, Japan is famous for being cat-lovers when it comes to domesticated pets. But as far as their totem animals are concerned, felines play almost no role -- maybe the lion borrowed from Chinese culture, but that's it. Their spirit-animals are more likely to be canine, including the wolf.
It's a shame that wolves of both species are now extinct in Japan, as of 100 years ago. It's like if bald eagles, or all eagles, went extinct in America.
But they live on in Japanese culture as totem animals nevertheless -- even in new-fangled hi-tech domains such as vtuber models. ^_^
Japan is not very much into the bear cult, despite lying next to other Northeast Asian cultures where the bear cult is central, including the Ainu themselves, whose ancestors were absorbed into the Japanese.
ReplyDeleteNot many shrines to bears, not many legendary or mythological or folkloric creatures related to bears, and no bear models for Holo JP vtubers (although Marine has a secondary cutesy teddy-bear model, "Kumarine", a portmanteau of "kuma", meaning bear, and "Marine").
The Japanese word for bear doesn't appear to be a taboo label:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%86%8A
Possibly it was borrowed from Korean, where it may or may not be taboo in Korean -- but the Japanese wouldn't know that. Korea is most definitely part of the bear cult, their founding myth involves a bear transforming into a woman (Ungnyeo) who gives birth to the founding king of Korea, Dangun.
It seems like the Japanese wanted to distinguish themselves from the Emishi / Ainu-speakers who they were absorbing, by promoting their own totem animal -- the wolf -- and downplaying the totem animal of the people they were conquering and absorbing -- the bear.
So by now, the bear is still present in the background of Japanese culture, and the culturally distinct Ainu are allowed to keep participating in their bear cult. But standard Japanese culture decided on the wolf rather than the bear, to preserve their older religion and folklore, which is akin to Turkic and some Indo-European cultures from the steppe of Eurasia, and not so much Northeast Siberia or the Arctic in general, where the bear is revered and loved.
If Japanese culture is related to / originated from the cultures of the Eurasian steppes that would explain why Japan is all into animal fats and dairy rather than plant fats.
DeleteThe bear cult shows up in Indo-Europeans who are northern -- Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic. They love bears, own them or train them as pets, and use taboo words to refer to them. Hellenic, Italic, Anatolian, etc., do not use taboo words for "bear", since they're southern.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, and I'll get to it later -- the Tocharians have no word for "bear", although I expect them to have been part of the bear cult, since most of their speakers were L2 learners from a Uralic language, from Siberia.
I think the absence of a word at all for "bear" shows they held a taboo about it. There is only a related word, which no one in Tocharian studies has noticed, or maybe I'm not a specialist enough -- "artkiye," which means something about "in abundance" or to a high degree.
If I'm right that this is ultimately derived from the Indo-Euro word for bear (h2rtkos, with the original order of the "t" and "k" being preserved in Tocharian as in Anatolian, since both are very old I-E languages, vs. being metathesized in somewhat later languages like Italic and Hellenic), then the Tocharians only allowed the straightforward word for "bear" to survive in an abstract derived form, not about the animal species itself.
Balto-Slavic did something similar, allowing a word for the den of a bear to preserve the original root, while taboo-labeling the animal species itself as "honey eater" or "hairy / bristly one":
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Balto-Slavic/ir%C5%9Btw%C4%81%CC%81%CB%80
But I'll get into that in more detail when I write up my findings about the Tocharians.
Maybe Mumei can prod the Holo JP girls into playing WolfQuest (a 3D immersive wolf sim), one of her idiosyncratic obsessions, which she roped several EN girls into playing over the years.
ReplyDeleteBut given how much more wolf-worshiping the Japanese are than Americans, maybe the JP girls would enjoy it more. ^_^
I'm sure she's still in contact with them.
She shouldn't let her legacy being promoting Overwatch -- too normie. It should be promoting WolfQuest -- more unique to herself, hehe.
The Japanese included Africa in their genre of "sublime, unexplored cultures of today, with hidden ancient civilizations from the past".
ReplyDeleteThe Doraemon movie from 1982, Nobita and the Haunts of Evil, sees the Tokyo kids venturing off to sub-Saharan Africa, discovering a hidden ancient civilization on the Congo River, whose chief god was a dog (named after the JP sound-symbolic words for barking and woofing -- Bauwanko).
I don't think the American focus on hidden ancient civilizations ever treated sub-Saharan Africa. Mostly the New World and Pacific Rim, or the Eurasian Old World, and only Mediterranean Africa / Egypt.
There's some connection to African-Americans coming from sub-Saharan Africa, as the reason why the trope was never done by Americans about s-S Africa. Maybe they didn't want to portray Af-Ams as atavistic relics of that primeval dog-god-worshiping cult.
But the Japanese have no political connection to African-Americans, or to Africa at all, so they were comfortable applying the trope to s-S Africa, unlike American artists and writers.
They also included Africa in Terranigma, an action RPG that involves resurrecting all life and civilization across the planet. I'm not sure of s-S Africa playing such a key role in American / Western-made games.
The closest that American culture ever got to the topic was The Lion King from the Disney renaissance (1994). But unlike their previous movie, Aladdin, which was set in a civilization based on history and featuring human characters -- and likewise for Pocahontas, released the year after -- Lion King featured entirely animal characters, and was not set in a civilization. More of an ecosystem, which had some level of social complexity and politicking -- but no more than the animal species who make up the cast.
It's not cuz s-S Africa didn't reach the civilizational heights that the Middle East did (Aladdin), since the Native Americans in Pocahontas were fairly primitive in their social complexity and civilization.
It's simply that s-S Africa touches a third rail in American culture -- the descendants of slaves -- and therefore American artists are self-censored from even thinking about how to treat the place and the people in an awe-inspiring way. At most, lazy, risible We Wuz Kangs / Wakanda stuff like Black Panther, just woketard political slopaganda.
So leave it to good ol' Glorious Nippon to fill this sorely missing void in American culture!
Only in music did American / American-empire culture borrow from s-S African culture, make it cool, and in fact sublime -- that whole African music trend of mostly the '80s, but into the early '90s as well ("Send Me on My Way" by Rusted Root). Maybe starting in the late '70s, IDK exactly when.
ReplyDeleteThe whole Graceland album by Paul Simon with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the African chants in songs that were not otherwise African ("In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel), of course "Africa" by Toto (and later, "Storms in Africa" by Enya), the originally Swahili song "Aie a Mwana" that was Bananarama's debut single, and the most sublime one whose total theme is African -- "Liberian Girl" by Michael Jackson (from the Bad album).
All part of the World Music and New Wage zeitgeist, which was gradually dismantled and deconstructed during the late '90s through the woketard 2010s and early 2020s. You still can't resurrect that multicultural zeitgeist, but give it some time, and we'll see then.
Ending with two relative hits from the mid-'90s finale of this whole s-S African-infused World Music zeitgeist, "Show Me the Way" and "Yolele" by Congolese musician Papa Wemba. They just don't write 'em like that anymore...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wYLK6ek4Y0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YE1edR_1hs
American culture allowed s-S African music to enter the mainstream cuz music isn't so clearly about civilizational complexity. You can come from a society that's just a confederation of tribal chiefdoms, and still make sublime music.
ReplyDeleteAnd music is not verbal or narrative necessarily -- it's mainly corporeal and about the music and dance itself. So there's no need to weave a story about human characters in African societies, and having to specify how complex or not-so-complex they are -- and whether they're atavistic relics of a long-lost dog-god-worshiping civilization or not.
I watched the Doraemon movie from 1992 last night, Nobita and the Kingdom of Clouds, and it was another wonderful weaving of futuristic sci-fi and primitivist fantasy.
ReplyDeleteThe Tokyo kids build their own Medieval castle in a cloud -- with its own waterfall-in-the-sky! -- only to discover that there's a whole federation of cloud-covered societies, who are not only advanced technological civilizations, but hell-bent on a crusade of stewardship toward life on the surface of Earth.
Their plan is to cause another Great Flood to wipe out the industrial economies that are polluting their sky-world, and whose hunters are driving rare species to extinction. They have already begun shepherding species long since extinct on the surface, like the Glyptodon. Fittingly, they name their crusade Plan Noah.
It's up to the gang of kids from Tokyo to settle this dispute and restore harmony between the surface and cloud societies.
Again, the landscape art and architecture is amazing. It's not Hollow Earth or primitive jungle, but there is plenty of pastoral Edenic grassland in the cloud-world. And the buildings are all Mid-Century Modern, looking just like an American corporate campus from the 1960s. Being set high up in the clouds also makes it look like The Jetsons (the American cartoon from the '60s).
The verdant grass, rich blue sky -- it made me wonder whether the American cartoons of that time also had this color palette.
Well, the Jetsons did use a rich blue sky, and was set high up in the sky, not on the ground. So it was lacking in the verdant grassland.
And its yin-yang partner, the Flintstones, doesn't have a blue sky at all. I was really shocked by that -- scroll through the picture gallery at the IMDb entry for it. The sky was either sand, beige, or slate gray (the "blue"-est it ever got). Only at night was the sky blue, to suggest darkness. During the daytime, though, the Flintstones' vision of our primeval origins had a pretty bleak and dusty-looking sky. And the ground was also lacking in verdant grass, more of an earth-tone sand, bone, brown soil, etc. Perhaps taking the "cave" part of "caveman" too far.
As of the '80s and '90s, and certainly afterward, Glorious Nippon was the only culture upholding the aesthetic of "verdant grass, rich blue sky, warm orange-y browns on the ground". And especially if it also had modern / futuristic architecture in the same landscape -- that peaked in American culture in the '60s and '70s, before our empire went into stagnation and then collapse. Related to the changing look of dystopia, too, not just utopia, in American culture:
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2017/10/is-dystopia-bright-lush-harmonious-or.html
One of the futuristic houses had RED carpeting, too, I couldn't believe it. Nothing in American culture from the '90s had red carpeting, which peaked in the '60s and '70s along with Mid-Century Modern styles in general.
ReplyDeleteNothing more American-utopian than red carpeting.
But American culture treated that as a mere fashion-cycle fad, rather than a preserved-in-amber icon of American utopia. The Japanese kept that look-and-feel in their vision of utopia, long after Americans had abandoned it as "omg, that's like soooo last decade..."
Glorious Nippon.
Wouldn't you know? Japanese portrayals of noble-savage cavemen and their Edenic environment always had clear pure blue skies (and rich deep blue water), and verdant grassland / plant foliage. Not like the Flintstones, which looked too much like a cave, even outdoors.
ReplyDeleteThere was a Flintstones-esque franchise, Giatrus, which began as a manga in the mid-'60s (right after The Flintstones), and spawned an anime TV series in the mid-'70s.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1653967/
This look-and-feel remained through the late '80s and early '90s video games featuring cavemen and their world, such as Bonk's Adventure and Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/12481/bonks-adventure/screenshots/turbo-grafx/
https://www.mobygames.com/game/888/joe-mac-caveman-ninja/screenshots/snes/
Glorious Nippon upholding the Edenic environmental aesthetic, no matter how late, and even in the few parts of American culture that strangely missed it (like The Flintstones).
This clear pure blue sky and verdant grassland combination goes far back in Japanese art, at least through the Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. It's not just an imitation of 20th-century American landscape art.
ReplyDeleteIt makes me wonder if it ties into their East Eurasian steppe cultural roots -- where the people worshiped Tengri, the god-like incarnation of the clear pure blue sky. IDK if their earth god was associated with verdant grass, but the nomadic horse-herders would have enjoyed such sights, as pasture for their livestock.
Japanese culture has been obsessed with those rich blue skies and verdant grasslands for centuries, unlike other Asian cultural traditions, especially Chinese, who Japan and Korea borrowed some artistic traditions from. But not the color palette, which was always more muted, beige / brown / sepia with black watercolor, in high Chinese art.
Japanese landscape art looks like what a Mongol or Turkic khan would commission.
The reason I think the Japanese wolf cult is related to, not merely convergently / coincidentally similar to, the East Eurasian steppe wolf cult (and even the West Eurasian strain, a la Romulus & Remus), is that the Japanese don't just worship the wolf in a vague way. The wolf is specifically a guide for people on-the-move, specifically through difficult mountain terrain.
ReplyDeleteVery reminiscent of the gray wolf of Turkic and other Eastern steppe mythology. Nursing, fostering, raising future human leaders -- but also guiding them through labyrinthine mountain passes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_wolf_(mythology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asena
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiele_people
Just like in Japanese, many Turkic languages, including the big one, Turkish, use taboo re-labeling words for wolf. The original, direct species word is b%C8%ABr%C3%BC, while the re-labeling word is k%C5%ABrt and comes from "insect" (meaning, something negative, harmful, etc.).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/b%C8%ABr%C3%BC
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/k%C5%ABrt
Everyone else views the wolf as an evil predator -- something that threatens human beings directly as a pack predator, or threatens their livestock as predators.
The Japanese, Eastern steppe, and some Western steppe cultures view it positively, as a helpful guide and guardian, and a foster-parent for the most noble lineages of human beings (not an orphanage for low-status cast-offs).
Perhaps cuz they weren't raising livestock that wolves prey on, but relied more on horses. Wolves may occasionally prey on horses, but not usually -- they're far more likely to prey on sheep and goats and other smaller / weaker / less intimidating livestock species.
That may be why the northern Siberian people don't worship wolves -- they threaten their reindeer herds. Reindeer are closer to sheep / goats than to horses, in terms of being preyed upon by wolves.
Well those words for wolf didn't go through well, but click on the wiktionary links. Something like boru and kurt.
ReplyDeleteMore on the bear and hawk as pre-existing totem animals in Japan, before the Wa / Yamato people absorbed them after invading the islands, and establishing their own totem animal from the Eastern steppe as the standard Japanese totem animal -- the wolf.
ReplyDeleteThe Ainu in the north (and they used to live in Northern Honshu, not just Hokkaido) are known practitioners of the bear cult. But there was another pre-Yamato group in Kyushu, in the Southwest, right where the Yamato landed from Korea, who were possible bear worshipers. Their name, Kumaso, has the word for "bear" in it (Kuma). The Wiki entry lists "bear worship" at the end, but doesn't go into further detail if they were known to be bear worshipers. But perhaps they were, given what the Yamato named them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumaso
Likewise, the Hayato people, named after the hawk, also from Kyushu rather than the North. They had a very distinctive form of music and dance, and their own distinctive backwards-S visual icon, for which they were known in the imperial court in Nara / Kyoto / the Kinai region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayato_people
The pre-rice farmer people who lived in Japan, the Jomon, have left more of their DNA in two separate places -- the North of Honshu / Hokkaido, and Kyushu (in the SW). The rice farmer people, the Yayoi, left a higher percentage of their DNA in the Kinai region, in the center, where the early imperial court was located (Nara, then Kyoto).
That suggests that the Kumaso and Hayato people were in fact pre-Yamato and pre-Yayoi groups, more like the Jomon, and had a different religion from the invaders from the mainland of Asia. But as the invaders conquered and absorbed these earlier groups, they dampened the role of the pre-Yamato totem animals -- the bear and hawk -- and elevated their own as the standard -- the wolf.
There's some speculation that these pre-Yamato groups from Kyushu were Austronesian culturally, either their language or their culture as a whole. IDK about that. The bear cult is distinctive of Northern Siberian and Northeastern Asia, not the tropical Pacific Islands.
As for their language, there are only two words known from the Hayato language, and both of them could be Japonic. This would reflect the early stage of the Hayato people giving up their non-Japonic language, and adopting the Japonic language of the invading Yamato.
The Kumaso people have titles that resemble words in Austronesian, so perhaps their official titles hint at their earlier Austronesian linguistic roots -- and/or broader Austronesian cultural roots, who knows? But again, they probably abandoned their non-Japonic language early, and adopted the Japonic language of the invaders, leaving only their distinctive ruler's titles as the relics of their pre-Japonic language.
Noel from Hololive JP is from Kyushu -- I wonder if she feels an affinity with the girls from Tohoku / Hokkaido like Okayu, Flare, and Hajime? They're from opposite ends of the archipelago, but both are far from the old imperial court and core of Yamato culture. Both have a higher percentage of Jomon DNA, and probably Jomon-derived culture.
ReplyDeleteIt's probably too abstract for a person to notice IRL, but maybe they do.
Later I'll get to the ubiquity and distinctiveness of reduplication in Japanese, to uncover the role that a massive influx of L2 learners played in the evolution of Nihongo.
ReplyDeleteEven if you don't know what the words mean, you can't help but notice the presence of reduplication while watching Japanese streamers. Guru guru, giri giri, iro iro, doki doki, Lui teaching one of the Holo EN girls the word for humid / sweaty (jime jime), and so on...
I first experienced this without realizing it, while playing Metroid as a kid. The "morph ball" of later games was left untranslated, as "maru mari," reflecting the verb "maru maru" -- to roll around in a ball-like shape.
A relatively new Razib Khan article on how Buddhism flourished in Tibet after being chased out of India by a number of factors:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.razibkhan.com/p/soft-power-from-the-rooftop-of-the?r=u0rd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
What makes someone an American, vs. a diaspora member living in America (or Canada, Britain, Australia, France, Japan, wherever)?
ReplyDeleteIf they can easily unplug themselves from America and plug themselves into some other culture.
Americans can't do that -- notwithstanding our native language being English, and ability to understand British people if we moved there. Language is only part of the whole cultural integration toolkit. And we would always stand out as foreigners in every part of Britain, and would be treated accordingly -- based on our accent alone -- so we cannot in fact *easily* decamp to Britain.
We have no experience with all the things that make British people British, what living the British way is like, so it would all be culture shock for us if we moved there. Yes, even the Olde Worlde LARP-ers from the East Coast who drink tea, play golf, and have plaid wool blankets from the Scotch House.
We could move to Canada, but Canada is not its own culture, it's the cast-offs of the American Empire.
And that's symmetric -- Canadians can move here and integrate easily, but British immigrants here will always be in a state of culture shock, and will always be treated as outsiders, due to their accent alone. That's how shibboleths work.
What else is in the cultural toolkit, aside from language? Anything and everything that goes under "the customs" of that country. Religion, rituals, folklore, superstitions, sayings, passtimes / hobbies / leisure / sports, clothing and grooming styles, subsistence mode, and so on.
Americans only have the toolkit that allows them to take part in American society and culture, not that of another culture.
Then there are kinship connections. Americans don't have kinship connections in other cultures that would allow them to plug into a kinship network over there, get help in general, get protection, get a matchmaker to find a husband or wife, get favor in hiring for a job, get a place to live, and so on.
We only have those kinship connections here in America.
Once upon a time, all Americans had somewhere to plug back into -- the first colonists could've turned around and gone back to Britain and continued being members of British society and culture. But most of them didn't.
ReplyDeleteDitto for the Ellis Islanders -- at some point, they severed their cultural and kinship connections to their former motherland. When the cast of the Jersey Shore went on a vacation in Italy, they stuck out like a sore thumb, despite several of them being Italian-Americans. Yeah, cuz they're Americans, not Italians anymore.
They don't speak a word of Italian, their Italian-American cuisine was heavily created in America, not carried over from Italy. Although they may speak with their hands, they don't know the distinctive gestures that Italians use every day, like the one for "perfetto". At most, they still use the "pinch all fingers together and hold them upward" for general emphasis. They don't practice the various regional holidays and celebrations -- they practice Santa rituals, not Befana rituals, for Christmas. Their hairstyles and clothing styles are not Italian, but their own Mid-Atlantic American style.
And no, just being Catholic, even a regularly-attending Catholic, doesn't allow you to integrate into Italian culture. Hardly anyone in Italy goes to church regularly anyway. They wouldn't understand the liturgy, since it's in Italian (or Latin), not English like they're used to. And the Catholic Church in Italy has not been as heavily Americanized and Protestantized as it has been in America, so they would be confused by a lot of the other aspects of church life over there.
Nor do they have any remaining kinship connections. Oh sure, they could do a family tree project and notify their relatives in Italy that, "Hey, we share an ancestor!" But that Italian person is not going to acknowledge them as a kin member, beyond sharing blood. They won't invite them into their home, find them a job, match them with a husband or wife, and so on. It's just an interesting factoid, "Hey, whaddaya know, we're related... well, have a nice life in America!"
In the early 20th century, these cultural and kinship connections to Italy were still present for Italian-Americans. But no longer. They cast their lot with America, so they have nowhere else to go back to and integrate into. They're Americans of Italian descent, not Italians living in America.
The same goes even more for African-Americans, i.e. the descendants of slaves in America. African immigrants who are still bilingual are not American. If they have relatives who they know about in Africa, and those relatives would acknowledge them as kin and help them out accordingly, they are not American. Let alone if they regularly visit Africa!
ReplyDeleteThey could go back to whatever country their recent ancestors came from, and integrate successfully -- and easily, without training or preparing.
The descendants of slaves have no such option. They speak no other language than (American) English, they invented and adopted new music and dance styles here, they adopted a new religion / syncretized it into their own African-American religion, they don't re-tell the folktales of their ancestral country, or follow its superstitions, or anything else in the cultural toolkit.
Vague abstract generalities like, "African-Americans are more likely to believe in magic, just like their cousins back in Africa" may be true, in terms of racial, ethnic, or whatever "character" or "personality". But just being a character and having a personality doesn't let you integrate into a specific culture.
African-Americans would have to follow the specific set of magical thinking and practices in whatever African culture they were trying to integrate into -- and they don't mirror any of those specifics, so they wouldn't be able to. To the extent that they share an inclination toward magic, mojo, and so on, they've adapted it or spun off a new variation on it here in America. That only allows them to integrate into African-American culture, not any ol' culture back in Africa.
It's like saying that they enjoy dancing -- OK, but they don't perform any of the specific dances of any African culture. They dropped those long ago, and invented or spun off new variations on old ones, once they integrated into American culture. Dancing the Charleston, the mashed potato, the running man, or the twerk, won't get them waved into any African culture. Those are American dances, not African ones.
They not only don't have any kinship connections in Africa, most of them don't even know which country in Africa their ancestors came from. Where would they even begin to look? If nobody over there will take them in as protected kin members, then they're American.
Who's *not* American, then? Well, it's easier to talk at the level of groups rather than individuals. Some particular member of a group that has lots of ties to foreign countries, might not have them -- that one individual may be stuck in America. But that doesn't contradict the assessment of their group as a whole.
ReplyDeleteAnd let's keep it topical and relevant, not autistically go through every single possible sub-group within the hundreds of millions of American residents.
First up -- South Asians. Not American. Afghan, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, wherever they're from, they're not American. Again, on the whole. They tend to be at least passingly bilingual in a South Asian language (perhaps not totally fluent), familiar with / still practicing a South Asian religion, and follow South Asian customs for weddings, funerals, births, and other milestones, rites of passage, and celebrations.
They also have kinship connections in South Asia, and may even have visited there / regularly visit there. They could get help with housing, work, matchmaking, and the rest of integration. Most South Asians in America / Canada are recent arrivals, so they probably have numerous kinship connections back in their motherland, not just a vague awareness of what region of the subcontinent their ancestors came from.
We already covered African immigrants (separate from descendants of slaves in America).
Increasingly, the "Asian" population is just Asians living in America, not Americans of Asian descent. They're bilingual, continue a broad range of customs distinctive of their motherland, have kinship connections back there, have visited / regularly visit there.
ReplyDeletePretty much all Asians in North America -- except for those of Japanese descent.
Nothwithstanding some individuals whose ancestors came over recently -- like Irys from Hololive EN -- most Japanese-Americans severed their links to Glorious Nippon, and cannot integrate there. Japanese-Hawaiians like Irys may be different from Japanese on the American mainland, since they kept their language and other customs alive in Hawaii.
But typically, Japanese-Americans can't understand or speak Nihongo, they're totally unfamiliar with Buddhism, they don't practice Japanese wedding rites, funerary rites, or birth rites, or other major holidays and celebrations. They don't continue Japanese folktales, folk dances, or folk music. They don't follow Japanese superstitions. They may be aware of anime -- but then, what American isn't aware of anime? That doesn't make you capable of integrating into Japanese culture.
They don't have kinship connections back in Nippon, and since they're the Asian group that's most likely to marry outside of their ancestral group and into the general American group, they have very few relatives even theoretically. They're not an ethno-cultural enclave like other Asian groups, so they're likely to only be part-Japanese.
Like moi -- 1/4 (father's mother), and as with other mainland Americans of partial Japanese descent, I have never spoken Nihongo and couldn't integrate into Japanese society to save my life. Not even my dad spoke the language or carried over the other traditions of his born-and-raised Japanese mother, who cast her lot with America and married an American of 17th-century Euro colonial descent.
I actually do have an uncle who moved to Japan, but he only learned the language and culture by intensive study in college and afterward, and then by absorption when he moved there. I could technically count on one person in Japan to support or help me -- but that's not enough to integrate. I'd need a full family over there, or extended family, not just one guy. I've never met him either, he moved there before I was born, IIRC.
But even full-blooded Japanese-Americans have mostly cast their lot with America, and don't have kinship connections back in their motherland. They have no choice but to remain here, on the whole.
My interest in Glorious Nippon is only minimally due to having a small blood connection to that country. Americans of all backgrounds have been fascinated by Japan for as long as American culture has been its own thing (turn of the 20th century). I'm not even a weeb -- they have no blood connections to Japan, but are more obsessed with it than I am.
I do appreciate the extra layer of exotic-ness that it gives my individual identity, which most people wouldn't even know if I didn't tell them. But it doesn't scale up to the group level -- I'm not part of a "Japanese-American" or "partilly Japanese-American" cultural community. There's no such thing, like there is for Chinese-American or Filipino-American. I still experience Japanese culture as a foreigner, like every American does when they encounter it.
Hispanics who are bilingual and have kinship connections to the motherland, are not American, they're Colombians / Mexicans / Etc. living in America.
ReplyDeleteBut there are Americans of Hispanic descent, who don't speak Spanish, and don't practice the other distinctive cultural rituals of their motherland. A decent chunk of Mexican-Americans in the Southwest are like that, from Texas through New Mexico and into Southern California.
And on the East Coast, Puerto Ricans from New York are largely like that. AOC is a perfect example -- she doesn't speak a word of Spanish, doesn't blast Puerto Rican music or do Puerto Rican dances, doesn't practice folk superstitions or tell folk tales from Puerto Rico. She does have some family in Puerto Rico, though, and her mother was born there, so she's not super-American. But again, at the general level, Puerto Ricans from the NYC area tend to be Americans of Puerto Rican descent (who came here after we won Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War in 1898).
Obviously none of the Hispanics you see standing in the customer service line at the supermarket, so they can send money to their family back in the motherland, are American. Or anyone else sending money to family outside of America, whether they're Somali or Filipino or Guatemalan. Talk about having kinship connections outside of this country!
At some point, maybe some of today's Hispanics living in America will sever their ties, cast their lot with America, and become American, similar to Italian-Americans.
But Italian-Americans had a bright future in America to look forward to -- they didn't have to predict the future, they could tell from their present day that it was an expanding empire, growing wealthier.
Today's Hispanics living in America have nothing but imperial collapse, disintegration, and austerity / impoverishment / DOWNWARD mobility to look forward to. They won't assimilate like the Ellis Islanders. Neither will the other recently arrived immigrant groups -- there's no material reason to anymore.
So, like the various non-Italian groups that flooded into Italy while the Roman Empire was at its expansionist peak in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, but who GTFO back to their motherland once it began collapsing in the 3rd C -- the immigrant groups who arrived in America after, say, the neoliberal stagnation that began circa 1980, will mostly be going back to where they came from as the American Empire collapses further and further. What's the point in staying here? It's not the '50s anymore, and it never will be.
And that's the reason why "ability to integrate somewhere else" is the fundamental trait of being a cultural insider rather than outsider.
ReplyDeleteIndians living in America can easily integrate back in India. And since they have only diminishing prospects to look forward to as the American Empire collapses, most of them will do exactly that. They were only here to get while the getting was good, and those days are never coming back.
Will a small handful remain, as stubborn hold-outs, or just cuz they really love suburban sprawl and car culture, or marrying into the American norm? Sure, but on the whole, they're going to make use of their ability to integrate somewhere else, as the material prospects for Americans continue to fall off a cliff.
Americans don't have that option -- we're stuck here, whether we like it or not, through thick and through thin, in sickness and in health, till death do us part (knock on wood).
That's true for all cultures in their homeland, BTW. Indians can't just go integrate into whatever society they feel like -- they don't speak those languages, follow those customs, and so on. They were waved into North America to undercut American wages, both blue-collar and white-collar, but they have never really integrated and remain Indians living in America, on the whole.
Aside from these fleeting opportunities to be waved into another country as cheap foreign labor, most people in most places are stuck with their own culture, for better or worse.
That's why shibboleths are so pervasive, that's why enculturation is one of those "sensitive developmental window" phenomena, and so on. This process ensures that you're stuck with your own culture, and that you can't just opportunistically leave and flit around wherever you please for the rest of your life.
That rootlessness would unglue the cohesion of the cultural group and deprive it of all its public goods and services. And the costs as well -- but you gotta take the benefits with the costs. Without involuntarily commitment to a specific culture, those benefits never materialize in the first place.
As usual with 100% cultural analyses, I expect that the typical educated American reader will interpret what I wrote as a 100% DNA-genetic-skull-measuring analysis instead, which is contradicted by what I wrote -- but that's just the genetic determinist dum-dums projecting, whether leftoid or rightoid.
ReplyDelete"So you're saying Muslims aren't American???!?!?!?! What's the matter, you think brown people can't be American, it's not in their DNA or something?!?!??!!"
And then followed up with either "BASED!" or "literally shaking rn" depending on whether the genetic determinist dum-dum projector is a rightoid or leftoid.
Americans happen to not be Muslim, based on historical contingencies. We were settled and founded by non-Muslims, and none of the later groups who severed their cultural and kinship connections to their motherland during the Ellis Island era, were Muslim.
Islam is merely correlated with the actually important thing -- being a recent arrival, maintaining cultural traditions and kinship connections to the motherland, and so on.
And that's true for a lot of Christians in America who are recent arrivals, including white European ones. There are some Americans of Ukrainian descent. But any Ukrainian who came over here after 1980 is not American, despite having white skin, European DNA, practicing Christianity, and so on.
Jews who came over in the Ellis Island era are Americans of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. But if they came over recently, they likely speak a second language, carry over the cultural traditions of wherever they came from, and have kinship connections outside of America -- whether in the former Soviet Union, or Israel, or wherever.
And no, "being American" is not in anyone's DNA -- it's in the unbroken chain of cultural transmission that you are a part of, or not a part of.
I know this genetic determinist retardation will not go away from American dIsCoUrsE for a very long time, perhaps never. But just to make it clear for the alien scientists in the far-distant future who are uncovering this blog...
Elon Musk is another example. He's not American, he's a South African immigrant to America.
DeleteTo end on something more uplifting and cool, an interesting example from the multicultural fusion in American music that lasted up through the mid-'90s or so.
ReplyDeleteAs I said, Americans of all backgrounds have been fascinated by Japanese culture for over a century. That includes African-Americans. AFAIK, the first time that people of African descent have ever taken such a liking and inspiration from East Asian culture -- but that's America for you.
The first major step along this path, certainly in music, was Carl Douglas' early disco hit "Kung Fu Fighting". As far as Americans knew, he was simply black or African-American, but he's actually Jamaican and grew up in Britain. The producer of the song was of Indian descent and living in Britain. But it made Oriental culture cool to African-Americans.
Wesley Snipes popularized Japanese and other East Asian martial arts for an African-American audience, and helped to build up the sublime / dangerous-yet-cool image of Japan in the buddy cop movie Rising Sun from 1993 (with Sean Connery).
Also from the early '90s World Music / New Age zeitgeist, topping the R&B chart in 1991, is "How Can I Ease the Pain?" by African-American singer Lisa Fischer, which includes two spoken phrases in Japanese during the intro ("gomenasai" and "aishitemasu", meaning "I apologize" and "I love you"), and has sublime Asian/Oriental-coded bass-tuned pipes (synthesized) throughout, to give it that dangerously yet tantalizingly larger-than-life feeling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_r79eenvS4
Not since Quincy Jones' "Ai no Corrida" has Japanese-inspired African-American music been so over-the-top! Well, her album was titled "So Intense," can't say she didn't warn you... ^_^
Thing is with foreign immigrants they aren’t nethier of their own origin nor the adopted country ethier.
ReplyDeleteIt’s sort of like what is explained in this…. Twitter thread. Yeah I’m calling it twitter https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1914376773581553937
TLDR- Indian, Middle Eastern & African immigrants don’t mesh with majority English & can’t relate to host countries so a new ethnogenisis is emerging of these groups.
Canada is worse god help us. Complete nothing country now. Thanks Trudeau you massive faggot
The right wing is to blame for immigration, in Canada as in America. Their neoliberal open-border cheap foreign labor era began in 1984 with Mulroney as PM, and like Reagan and Thatcher he was a right-winger. Immigration was declining or flat during the same period as the American New Deal, right up through Pierre Trudeau, a leftie. Reagan flung the borders open in America, ditto Thatcher in Britain. Britain was entirely British when the commie-nists were in power, through the '70s.
ReplyDeleteFrom the Wiki article on immigration to Canada:
"During the Mulroney administration, immigration levels were increased. From the late 1980s, the 'fifth wave' of immigration has since maintained, with slight fluctuations (225,000–275,000 annually). Today, political parties remain cautious in criticizing high levels of immigration, because in the early 1990s, as noted by The Globe and Mail, Canada's Reform Party "was branded 'racist' for suggesting that immigration levels be lowered from 250,000 to 150,000"."
Justin Trudeau is just the latest iteration of neoliberal scum in Canada, much like Obama is the inheritor of Reagan in America, albeit from the opposition party of the era (lefties).
Any big-picture problem after 1980, in America, Canada, Britain, and others whose neoliberal realigners were right-wing -- blame the right wing, right-wing voters, the sectors of the elites who use the right wing as their political vehicle, and right-wing media.
If the neolib realigners were left-wing, as in Australia and New Zealand, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece -- then blame the left-wing, left-wing voters, elite sectors who use the left wing as their vehicle, and left-wing media.
Wokeness can certainly be blamed on the New Right as the diversity industry really began to grow tremendously since the late 1980s.
DeleteIt has been a trope right-of-centre since that time that universities and the "tenured radicals" within them constitute the main threat to "freedom" in a post-Cold War world. While universities are important due to their role in accreditation, in many ways they have only been the smokescreen for the real place where PC had its greatest triumph: corporations (and particularly those associated with the knowledge economy).
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn detailed in a book from 2001 how the diversity training industry was born in the late 1960s and really expanded after 1987. A key impetus was the Reagan administration's "Workforce 2000" initiative launched by the Hudson Institute. It stated that due to the threat of an "aging population" (a phrase that first spread in the 1980s), workplaces had to take measures to become more "sensitive" to an ever-more diverse workforce.
https://www.amazon.ca/Race-Experts-Etiquette-Sensitivity-Revolution/dp/074252759X
And because, after all, the fundamental freedoms of the constitution (like freedoms of expression and conscience) don't apply in corporations, it was here where PC/woke actually had its biggest triumph not universities.
It's not correct to say that recent immigrants belong to neither culture, their ancestral one or their adoptive one. They have many many more kinship connections in their motherland than they do in their adoptive country. And they have the basic toolkit for integrating into the motherland's culture -- language, food taboos / preferences, music & dance, religion, stories / myths / tales, habits or superstitions, and so on.
ReplyDeleteSure, they're more deracinated than the ones who never left the motherland, but they can still plug right back into the motherland. They don't plug into the adoptive culture just cuz they watched the common sit-coms on TV while growing up -- if they remain bilingual, outsider religion, outsider music & dance, no extended kin networks in the adoptive country, regularly keep in touch with / visit the motherland, and so on.
So if they go back to the motherland, they don't fit in 100% like the ones who never left -- but they still fit in 85%, and that's good enough. The people of the motherland will accept them, more or less, as one of their own, far more so than the people of the adoptive culture will accept them as one of their own.
The point about "involuntary commitment" to a single culture is that it shifts the focus from the past and one's ancestors -- to the future, and the rest of their own life, and any progeny they might have.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just squabbling about someone's ancestors, do they pass some test or whatever. It's about the future, too -- are you compelled against your will to remain connected to the chain of cultural transmission in this country? If so, you're one of us. If not, you're not one of us. Simple.
Why is the future important? Cuz we want to know who we can rely on and trust going forward, as we try to keep the chain of transmission going. Both in the immaterial domains -- knowledge of certain tales, distinctly insider slang, and so on -- and the stewardship over material domains, our material culture (buildings and architecture, parks, productive land, recreation / leisure places, and so on).
Me and some random descendant of slaves from the not-so-glamorous part of town can agree that we ought to preserve awareness of American English over all other languages, Christianity favored over most other religions (aside from an off-shoot of it in America, like Mormonism), '80s buddy cop / buddy action movies, New Jack Swing music and the running man dance, roller rinks and malls and video game arcades and mini-golf courses, public schools being a major provider of public goods and services to the community, etc. That's just how American culture and society is defined.
I know that they're committed to that kind of culture cuz they have no alternative -- they can't just move back to somewhere in Africa, where society and culture is defined very differently from the specifics listed above.
And they know that I'm committed to that kind of culture -- cuz where else am I supposed to go back to?
The Somali, Filipino, or Guatemalan -- or the post-Soviet Ukrainian, Israeli Jew, or other recent white immigrant -- who me and the descendant-of-slaves girl see standing in line at customer services in the supermarket, as they're sending money back to their kin in the motherland, cannot be counted on to uphold those specifics listed above.
Those tribes have other options that they are deliberately choosing to keep open and available into the indefinite future, just in case. They're not trying to wean themselves off of the motherland and gradually sever ties and become involuntarily American.
It's not purity-testing their ancestors -- it's forecasting their commitment to this culture, alone, into the murky risky future.
Don't ever forget the insanely anti-American rant that Ramaswamy went on during Christmas, about how "we" need to kill off sleepover parties and malls, and degrade public schools from community centers and into non-Japanese Asian-style cram schools, to destroy jocks and praise nerds, etc etc etc.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that's the ideal structure for the sub-slice of Indian society and culture that he comes from, but let him move back there if he wants to preside over that kind of society. He still speaks their language, follows their religion and other cultural customs, and regularly visits the motherland.
Quit trying to destroy American culture, and just move back already.
That's why we don't trust Indians or other South Asians, or white Euros who migrated here recently -- they have other options they're keeping open, and their motherland culture is not a carbon-copy of our own, so they are not involuntarily committed to preserving the American way of life. Period.
Voting Democrat in the upcoming Ohio governor's race is the easiest thing in the world. Jesus, I'd even consider volunteering for whichever Democrat it is, as long as they weren't also a rootless anti-American like Ramaswamy of course.
Hopefully MAGA-tard turnout will be low due to Trump not being on the ballot in a midterm election, and hopefully the legions of normie libtards will turn out like crazy just to vote against the guy who the Cheeto Menace endorsed.
The orange retard did not have to heavily endorse Ramaswamy, that's all Trump's personal fault. Ramaswamy had no leverage or power or influence.
Now Trump puts Ohio in the position of praying for the MSNBC normie libtard brigades to deliver us from a mall-hating, cram-school, biotech-scamming foreigner who isn't committed to this country, for better or worse, thick and thin, in sickness and in health.
Indies might be pissed, too, about the spiraling inflation and dedication to wasting shitloads more money on losing wars. We can only hope MSNBC turns up the volume ahead of the midterms...
I just hope there's some anti-woke Dems around here who will fight dirty and refer to Ramaswamy's background. Not by calling him a dirty foreigner, obviously they'd never say it like that. But just bringing it up as a dogwhistle, perhaps through surrogates or the candidate themselves, to the indies and right-wingers, to sour them on someone who is just a mini wannabe Obama jumping on the Trump-era GOP bandwagon.
Otherwise, Ohio's days as a decent purple place to live are numbered, and we'll just turn into another global landfill for dumping cheap foreign labor, following the other big red states like Texas, Florida, and Georgia.
I don't think people realize how little remains of Japanese culture among Japanese-Americans in mainland America.
ReplyDeleteIn Hawaii, it's the opposite -- they're Japanese living in Hawaii. They still encourage learning Nihongo (spoken and written) through the ordinary schools (not a special school you have to go to after the ordinary school), they maintain more of the cuisine, they hold annual celebrations like the Obon festival, they're likely to own and occasionally wear traditional Japanese clothing, to visit hot springs just like they're Japanese onsen, they're more aware of their kin connections back in Nippon, they're less likely to marry outside of their original cultural group compared to mainland Japanese-Americans, and so on and so forth.
So, there truly is an ethnic enclave of Japanese in Hawaii.
But in mainland America, there haven't been Japantowns or Little Tokyos since WWII. Some still bear the original name, like Little Tokyo in L.A., but it stopped being Japanese over half a century ago.
Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Manila or whatever it's called, those are still ethnic enclaves. Every Asian group other than Japanese still maintain their cultural and kin connections to their motherland.
Just consider the Chinese, who are the best example since they've been here as long as the Japanese have, but are still an ethnic enclave. They're likely to know some Sinitic language (usually Cantonese), they grew up with Chinese food and will continue making Chinese food as they mature, they still have their own Chinese restaurants and markets where the clientele is mostly Chinese, they listen to Chinese music and do Chinese dances for festive occasions, they celebrate Chinese New Year, which is not January 1 -- with all the distinctly Chinese features that go along with it (people forming a dragon, Chinese fireworks, etc.) -- they're likely to still be given a Chinese first name (although perhaps being called by an American-friendly alias in daily life among Americans), they're familiar with Hong Kong cinema (in the original language), they've had some experience with Chinese martial arts or exercise programs or hobbies and pastimes and games (diabolo AKA Chinese yo-yo, mahjong, etc.), they prefer to marry and form families with each other, and they have extensive ethnic patronage networks like a "Chinese Students Association" on college campuses or "Chinese-American Political Action Committee" for national govt lobbying.
None of those things is true for Japanese-Americans on the mainland! It's not just 1/4 cases like me, my 100% Hokkaido-blooded born-and-raised-in-Nippon grandmother gave up most of those things herself when she settled over here. She didn't teach her children Nihongo, except for that one uncle of mine who was really fascinated by it and begged her to help him, she barely spoke it herself -- after all, she didn't live in an ethnic enclave, she was surrounded by Americans in suburbia, so there were almost no fellow Nihongo-speakers around for her to talk to. And in fact, there *was* one old Japanese woman like herself -- but my grandmother never welcomed her, and kept her out of her life! She was that intent on severing ties with Japan.
ReplyDeleteShe rarely made Japanese food for us, although I think she still made it for herself. My dad only picked up one Japanese dish from her, which he still makes -- sukiyaki. Otherwise, we've only ever eaten the same Japanese food that Americans as a whole have adopted -- sushi, instant ramen, and so on. And dessert at my grandmother's home was always American -- Viennetta ice cream, not mochi or dorayaki or anything like that.
She probably played some Japanese music like enka for herself when she was alone, but she didn't play it for us or for her children. The only Japanese music my dad knows is what all Americans know -- "Sukiyaki". The only Japanese he heard in music was the Nihongo portions of the MC during the Ventures Live in Japan '65 concert.
He did inherit some of her Japanese dolls, who wear traditional Japanese clothes, but that's it as far as Japanese crafts and clothing that he owns. We have never owned kimonos, and wouldn't know how to put one on if our life depended on it. My grandmother herself never dressed up in Japanese style, not for any occasion. We only wear flip-flops, an adaptation of Japanese zori sandals, like every other American.
We don't even know when Japanese New Year is, or what they do for it. We don't celebrate what we don't know about. Everything about Japanese New Year I learned by watching the Koronator, who always dresses up as the Celestial Maiden, adorned with a kadomatsu, extinguishing the worldly desires of the past year in order to enter the new year free of them (although she doesn't ring a bell 108 times, like the Buddhist temples do in Japan), and so on. No Japanese-American from the mainland is aware of any of those features.
We also don't know what the Obon festival is, have never celebrated it, and if some of us *are* aware of it -- it's only from watching Japanese vtubers, who hold their own virtual Obon festival with traditional singing, dancing, and stage-building and decorating (with the rising sun flag rays).
We don't know what Sanzu no Kawa is, and we don't include 6 coins with the deceased so they can safely cross the Japanese River Styx.
We don't know how to perform the Japanese tea ceremony, and probably have never even had it performed for us, for example at a Japanese restaurant. American weebs or Japanophiles are more likely to have experienced the tea ceremony than we are! Hehe.
We don't marry and raise families preferentially with each other, we don't live in ethnic enclaves, we've never visited the motherland, we don't know our relatives back there, we've never sent any money to them, none of them have ever visited us in America... we just don't even know who they are in the first place.
I said I have an uncle who moved there, but we don't know who my grandmother's relatives are, in Hokkaido. They're still there, we just don't know who they are, and have never been in contact with them. And that's not ancient history. It's just Japanese-Americans wanting to immerse themselves into American culture and sever ties with their roots, to prove they aren't keeping non-American options open for the future. They're committed involuntarily to America by this point -- on the mainland.
ReplyDeleteWe don't have Japanese schools where they teach all these various parts of Japanese culture. We don't have Japanese-American Students Associations, don't have a national political lobby like Japanese-American Political Action Committee.
We're only aware of Japanese live-action cinema, anime, kaiju (monster suit movies & TV), video games, and vtubers, to the extent that Americans as a whole are aware of them.
We don't have our own restaurants, markets, etc., where the clientele is primarily Japanese-descended.
For every item on the list, Japanese-Americans (outside of Hawaii) are the polar opposite of every other Asian-American group.
That preserves a certain level of exoticism between the Japanese and Americans (whether of Japanese descent or otherwise). There are no cultural bridges of halfway homes between the two, as there are for Chinese, Korean, and other Asian cultures in America.
ReplyDeleteJapanese culture -- as a whole -- can only be experienced in Japan (and Hawaii), whereas other Asian cultures can be experienced here. Yeah, you can buy instant ramen and sushi in the supermarket, but that's not the whole of Japanese culture. You can't hear Nihongo spoken anywhere in mainland America, there are no Nihongo-only video stores or movie theaters or whatever (and if there are, they're for turbo-weebs), and you'll never know what Japanese New Year or Obon or other celebrations are like.
And due to their intermarriage, you can't even really see the Japanese phenotype in America anymore. By now, those of Japanese descent are mostly 1/2 or 1/4 or less. And they stopped immigrating here many decades ago. Whereas you can see full-blooded Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, etc., some of whom have lived here for decades in an ethnic enclave, some of whom are fresh off the boat.
If you want to see the Japanese phenotype IRL, you have to book a ticket to Narita International Airport. (Or take that vacation in Hawaii that you've always been thinking about...)
And that works in the opposite direction -- when Japanese people visit here, there is nowhere for them to plug into as a familiar Japanese cultural enclave. When the Hololive JP girls visit L.A. or Las Vegas or New York, they're getting the 100% American experience -- there are no Japanese people, stores, markets, or neighborhoods, where they can preserve a Japanese cultural cocoon.
Whereas Chinese, Korean, and Filipino people visiting America can very easily find their culture-mates and settle into a familiar cocoon if they want to. They don't have to -- but they can, and it's easy to do.
By now, there is effectively no Japanese diaspora, other than Hawaii. All Japanese people live in Japan, and everyone in Japan is Japanese.
Glorious Nippon!
I think that's why Americans (or others) who still have a sense of curiosity, adventure, exploration, and a taste for the exotic, overwhelmingly flock to Japanese culture and Japanese people, instead of other Asians.
ReplyDeleteThe non-Japanese Asians are too familiar -- they live here in large numbers, they've preserved their culture so that we have had some contact with it IRL in our everyday lives, and they speak English. Japanese people still do not speak English -- passion English, perhaps, but they are not bilingual like the Koreans, Indonesians, even Chinese in Asia, let alone the Korean-Americans, Chinese-Americans, etc.
If you want to converse with a Japanese person, you're going to get the 100% passion-language experience, which preserves the exotic differences between the two sides. If you want to talk to an Indian, Korean, or Chinese, you can just use the global lingua franca, English, which they all know fairly well, even if they live outside of America.
That's why Japanese babes will always reign at the top of the "yellow fever" totem pole. Partly it's due to their phenotype, having somewhat Caucasoid features compared to other Asians (especially their more pronounced noses, large eyes, and furry eyebrows -- and elsewhere). They have way more hourglass waist-to-hip ratios too, compared to the somewhat hip-less Asians outside of Japan (although Mongolian women also have very hourglass curves).
But I think it's more due to their exotic appeal per se -- people outside of Japan have rarely interacted with a Japanese person IRL, and they would have difficulty even if they did meet, due to the language barrier.
On the one hand, Japanese pop culture and entertainment has been a global export for the better part of a century. But on the other hand, Japanese people and their everyday common / folk culture, including their language, remains confined to Japan itself. So they are still quite the exotic, unexplored, shrouded-in-mystery secret island that curious adventurous dreamers fantasize about discovering.
The lost civilization of Mu was sitting right under our noses the whole time -- it was Glorious Nippon! ^_^
>Bomb Pearl Harbor
ReplyDelete>Get nuked, navy destroyed, occupied
>End up controlling Hawaii anyway
heh
That's my sense of fascination with the Japanese side of my ancestry -- it's very exotic, despite JP pop culture being so ubiquitous. It's like a hero discovering that one of his ancestors was actually a member of a secret shrouded-in-mystery civilization.
ReplyDeleteIf I was told that my grandmother was Korean, Chinese, Filipino, etc. -- my reaction would just be, "Oh, so I'm like one of those people from Koreatown, Chinatown, Little Manila, etc., or the English-speaking Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, etc., who are all over the internet". Too familiar, not exotic.
But learning I'm part Japanese? No way! I thought all of them lived in Japan (or Hawaii)! I have no familiarity with Japantowns or Little Tokyos, since they don't exist. I can imagine anything I want! Well, to some degree... if my imagination goes too far, then I'm not really connecting to the real-but-secret culture. But still, it can spark my imagination and wonder, in a way that Chinese, Korean, and Filipino could never.
Do Japanese people realize how exotic and cool we still find them? In a way that we don't find the other Asians?
I think they can sense that, and they welcome it. They would never scold us for exotifying them, or whatever woketard tone-policing the non-Japanese Asians use.
Remember that whenever you hear an Asian whining about Japanese culture, or lecturing Americans / Westerners who are interested in Japan -- it's never a Japanese person, or a Western resident with a wa-go surname. It's always a Gwak or a Phuong or a Tranavvattsihatsoiphat.
Keep your grubby non-Japanese paws off of the people and culture of Glorious Nippon, for whom the Trans and Chans and Chois will never speak.