Fascinating video of Anne Sullivan (Helen Keller’s instructor) explaining how Helen was able to learn to speak despite being blind and deaf. It was done by Helen placing he hands on Anne’s face and sensing vibrations – but note how the hands were placed.
One Sunday night after I watched the specials on Air Force One (the presidential jumbo jet) and Marine (the presidential helicopter fleet), I ended up watching a special on the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan.
While the other two specials were somewhat serious programs on what goes into protecting and transporting the president, I was struck at how humorous much of the carrier jargon was. The list of terms I remember were
We normally military jargon with arcane acronyms (e.g. “CJCS” aka Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff) and terms like “campaign, friendly fire, tactical air support” which abstract away from the fact that the goal and result of combat is usually destruction.
But terms like these show the other side of the military as a bunch of people just trying to make it through the day and aware of the irony of the military lifestyle. Other terms I have heard in my day include the immortal FUBAR (“…beyond all recognition”), BUF (the B-52 bomber called the “Big Ugly Fella” or something else) and GIB (the weapons system officer on a combat plane or “guy in back”).
Behind every warrior who has been glorified or feared lies a very large support and cleanup crew.
Since I actually did Celtic linguistics for my degree, I am always interested in good Celitc (or Norse/Old English/medieval) resources. Here’s a good list of King Arthur movies from Dr. Dev that skips to the true classics – Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Excalibur, Army of Darkness, and of course, Camelot (the musical).
Alas, the list is still a little skimpy, so while I’m on the subject, I’m asking myself to why it is so hard to film a good adaptation of medieval and ancient stories. I think we’ve all sat through some very expensive, very unwatchable movies. My personal unfavorites include Oliver Stone’s Alexander (which not even Angelina Jolie could save), a 1990s TV miniseries of Cleopatra (too bored to look this up) and well First Knight (sorry it was King Arthur by the book to me).
I suspect that the problem is finding that balance between authenticity and cheesy entertainment. Although we may now find these pre-modern interesting in terms of universal themes vs the original culture, it should be remembered that many were actually meant to popular entertainment much like Gossip Girl, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek and 24. In other words, larger than life and full of drama/comedy or both (and if social criticism comes into the mix… so be it).
For me the best adaptations include authentic touches (costumes, locations, events), but don’t forget the include the swagger of the original. In fact, I’ve been very happy with adaptations that stray from the original…as long as the original themes have been kept. For instance, Excalibur is the only King Arthur movie to include an ancient Celtic language spell (just the wrong one though). And although Excalibur is neither purely medieval or purely post-Roman, it doesn’t really matter because neither was the original. What they did keep was the theme of kingship, the mix of Christian religious purity and Druid magic and kingdom-rocking sex scandals. What else do you need?
So here’s a partial list of my favorite adaptations:
Skimpy, but oh well
It’s always fun to see how marketers attempt to add an exotic foreign language “je ne sais quoi” to their product line, and one of the better ones (IMHO) was the McDonald’s McCafé line which attempted to show how this extraordinary brew could add a touch of French elegance to your daily commute (commuté).
Aside the cheesy sociolinguistic aspect (as documented by Mark Liberman on Language Log), I do think think this does give a little bit of insight into how our grammar treats French (and pseudo French) borrowings.
When analyzing borrowings into a language, it is clear that some languages are a little more privileged than others. For some languages like French, most English speakers will actually make an attempt to pronounce the words “correctly” (the same is true for Spanish in the U.S., but not necessarily outside North America).
For instance, we “know” that French words have stress on the final syllable, drop the final consonant and have /wa/ clusters where English doesn’t (e.g. quoi /kwa/, DuBois /dubwa/ and croissant /krwasã/). If you’re really talented, you may even try to replicate the nasal vowels such as the one in en suite (/ã swit/) as something like /ã/ or maybe /ãn/, but not plain /an/
On the other hand, if the borrowing is from another language like Hindi, Japanese, Welsh or even a native American language, the same effort isn’t usually made (unless an individual speaker knows the language). The reason for the status of French and Spanish is of course due to both proximity and cultural history. There’s enough contact between the two populations that many English speakers have developed linguistic tools to categorize and pronounce these words differently.
For instance both French and Spanish introduce /pw/ and /kw/ consonant clusters, particularly consonant+w /Cw/ which are normally not allowed in English. French words are also marked as having word-final stress, even though the normal English stress pattern is NOT word-final stress. In phonological terms this could be considered a “stratum” or an area in the lexicon (mental dicitonary) where the normal rules don’t apply.
Depending on the level of contact a stratum can become very developed. English technical borrowings with Latin and Greek rules have a class of rules and even suffixes/affixes all to themselves which apply only to Latinate words (One is the alternation of “c” between /k/ and /s/ as in “electric ~ electricity”.
The French part of the grammar isn’t that robust in English, but it does have the traditional property that it’s NOT 100% accurate of real French grammar. For one thing, there are limits in how much authentic French phonology we can accommodate. Few English speakers will pronounce French “u” in the correct way – as the front vowel /y/ or /ü/ depending on your transcription system. It’s very hard for English speakers to distinguish unless they have special French class training.
Also, there are errors in implementation in our English pseudo French versus real French. A classic example is the cold potato soup vichyssoise which in French grammar is pronounced with a final /z/ or /viʃiswaz/. A lot of waiters who didn’t take all four years of high school French though routinely drop the final consonant (i.e. /viʃiswa/)…because that’s what happens in the French stratum.
The one from the McCafé ad I noticed was how the final “e” always became “é” or /e/ “eh” with a stress. Hence “cubicle” /kubikəl/ becomes cubiclé /kubikle/ and “shuttle” /ʃʌtəl/ becomes shuttle /ʃʌtəle/ . Ironically though, in actual French spelling the “e” in “cle” and “tle” would actually be dropped altogether. Hence “cubicle” would be /kubikl/ and “shuttle” might be the really exotic /ʃytl/. Try saying that early in the morning over your McCafé
I also have to applaud McDonald’s for one more thing. In the past few years French has been a neglected cultural resource (even on the Food Network). It’s nice to know there’s a marketer out there who’s willing to bring back some old-fashioned mystique français (or is that mystique française?).
P.S. Technically “French magic” is la magie française. while la mystique is mysticism. Did I mention that borrowings can undergo change in word meaning?