Conference blogging 3

We're back home now, but I have to share this. In one of the panels I met a Cuban musicologist who had been part of a team recording folk music on Carriacou back in the 1980s, just before the Grenada Revolution imploded and the US did their "intervasion," as some Grenadians called it.

So, here Rolando Pérez Fernández presents me with a copy of the record he produced from that fieldwork. I promised to reciprocate by transcribing what I could of the French and English Creole that might be heard on the record. But first, I have to find someone to convert the analog LP to digital. Wow!

Conference blogging 2

Well, it's surprisingly hard to keep up with blogging when you're at a conference of linguists and what you mostly want to do is talk. This is probably more true of me than most, since I'm the only linguist at my university.  It's rare that I'm surrounded by people who totally understand concepts like allophone and absence of copula.  Too much fun.

Also, it's hard to be cranky when the view from your hotel balcony is of the Caribbean Sea. The waves are rolling gently over a line of reefs a few yards off the beach, and a humongous hummingbird flits around in the tree just outside. I am playing hooky from a session going on now to write a bit here before we meet downstairs for lunch.

Today is the third day of the conference, and my two duties are scheduled for tomorrow. I chair a session on varieties of French Creole in the morning, then in the afternoon I do a presentation on a tentative method I've worked out for reducing linguistic prejudice among my students against African-American and other "non-standard" forms of English.

One of the really cool and satisfying things about these conferences is that I get to meet and interact with people whose names were in my dissertation bibliography these many years ago: in particular this time folks like Mervyn Alleyne, John Rickford, and Bernadette Farquhar. It was Farquhar's 1974 dissertation on Antiguan Creole, discovered by me at the University of Florida Library's Latin American Collection in 1978, that as I told her yesterday "ruined my life, but in a good way."  Her description of Antiguan Creole led me to conceive of doing similar work in Carriacou, where I had been a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1971-74.

The conference, incidentally, is celebrating the late Richard Allsopp, a scholar of Caribbean languages who has very unfortunately passed away but who I had met some years back. His magnum opus I suppose is the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, published by Oxford in 1996, with a 2003 paperback edition from the University of the West Indies Press.  However, it was earlier article* on Africanisms in Caribbean creoles that contributed most to my own research by documenting how idioms in African languages had been carried to the New World by slaves and relexified to produce expressions such as "cut-eye" and "hard-ears." 

More later...

*Allsopp, R.  1977.  Africanisms  in the Idiom of Caribbean English.  In Language and Linguistic Problems in Africa, ed by P. Kotey and H. Der-Houssikian.  Columbia SC: Hornbeam Press.  Pages 429-41.

Interesting...

From a friend:

Did you know that the words "race car" spelled backwards still spells
"race car"?

That "eat" is the only word that, if you take the 1st letter and move
it to the last, spells its past tense, "ate"?

And if you rearrange the letters in "so-called tea party Republicans,"
and add just a few more letters, it spells: "Shut the hell up you
free-loading, progress-blocking, benefit-grabbing, resource-sucking,
violent, hypocritical assholes, and face the fact that you nearly
wrecked the country under Bush."

Conference blogging

This week we're at the meetings of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics, in Barbados. Life is pretty good!  We arrived yesterday late afternoon, after being delayed for two hours in Miami. The two hours were spent sitting on the plane, first waiting for the arrival of a replacement copilot, and then waiting for a pretty vigorous thunderstorm to calm down.

Amazingly, although we're deep in the Tropics, it's cooler and more comfortable here than Jacksonville has been this summer.  We've been consistently in the high 90s or at 100, with heat indexes in 105-110 range. Here, today, it's in the mid-80s and there's a wonderful breeze coming in off the water, which is maybe at most 100 yards from our hotel room.

While waiting to board in Miami several conference attendees joined us, including the Society President John Rickford and his wife Angela, who have researched extensively on African-American English and its uses. More attendees appeared at breakfast this morning. It's always fun to meet someone you've known, and who has known you, from publications, but whom you've never encountered in person until a conference.

It should be a good time...

The most destructive use ever of weapons of mass destruction

This is the 65th anniversary of the US's bombing of Hiroshima, followed shortly after by a repeat on Nagasaki. As I wrote last year:

I was just under a month old on August 6, 1945. On that day, a US bomber dropped the bizarrely named nuclear bomb "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan, killing up to 140,000 people, 80,000 of them instantly. Three days later, US forces dropped a second bomb, "Fat Man," on Nagasaki, killing another 80,000. Besides those who died, many survivors lived with terrible injuries, and for many years babies were born deformed by the lingering effects of the radiation.

So, in less than a week 64 [now 65] years ago, the United States of America committed the two most destructive uses of weapons of mass destruction in the history of humankind. The usual defense is that it was necessary to end the war, but this is subject to debate. There is also evidence that the real purpose was to show the Soviet Union that we had the Bomb and we were crazy enough to use it, needed or not. I don't know which is true, perhaps both are. What I do know is that possession of nuclear weapons by the US makes me just as nervous as their possession by any other nation. And why shouldn't it, given that we are the only ones who, so far, who have actually used them?

This year, Life.com has posted a gallery of unpublished images.

New Blog Link

There's a new link over on the left to the blog Anthro Jack, written by a friend from the Anthro-L list. Anthro Jack is now participating and observing in the predominantly Cree speaking community of Chisasibi, a town near the  eastern shore of James Bay in northern Québec. AJ is investigating the role of alcohol in the culture and society of Chisasibi.  Fascinating stuff, check it out!

For me, one interesting thing going on in Chisasibi is that they use the Cree syllabary to write the language.  The word Chisasibi looks like this:

ᒋᓴᓱᐱ

Too cool!

The Primate Diaries is now in exile

Eric Michael Johnson has taken his excellent blog, The Primate Diaries, off of Scienceblogs, but he's still writing. He calls his new blog The Primate Diaries in Exile. Check it out.