Zompist Bboard Again

Raholeun wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 11:10 am Bro, are you kidding me? If I ever get called in the middle of the night by a +675 phone number, you bet I am picking up. The chance of Tok Pisin' with my new friend, twirling the telephone wire while discussing sago grub recipes till the sun comes up is not to miss.

Sago jelly, more likely. I like to quote Kulick & Terrill’s Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap for a description of this unmissable food:

Sago is the staple food of Gapun. It is eaten every single day of the year, ideally a least twice a day; once in the morning and once in the late afternoon. Its raw form is a flour that resembles compacted corn starch. This flour (muna) can be made into a kind of rubbery pancake (tamwai) by heating it on a broken pot shard (pambram) or a frying pan, it can be tossed onto the fire raw in a tennis ball- sized chunk (muna kokɨr, which literally means ‘sago head’), it can be wrapped in a leaf and cooked in on a fire (paŋgɨp), or it can be crumbled into a bamboo tube and thrown onto a fire to congeal (munakumund). Its most common and most appreciated form, though, is as what, in English, is usually misleadingly called ‘sago pudding’ or ‘sago jelly’. Both designations are misleading because they imply (a) that said food item that has the consistency of pudding or jelly, and (b) that said food item is appetizing.

Both these implications are false. In fact, the texture of sago referred to by ‘sago jelly’ is much closer to slime or phlegm than it is to jelly or pudding. Its consistency is such that some of a mouthful will be in your mouth; at the same time some of it will be hanging down into your throat, like a long thick sputum. And appetizing, alas, ‘sago jelly’ is not – unless, of course, one happens to be a Sepik villager raised on it from birth (villagers in Gapun start feeding their babies sago jelly only a few days after they are born). The color of ‘sago jelly’ varies from light pink to dark red or even black, depending on the quality and character of the water in which it was leached.

‘Sago jelly’ (mum) is served in plates or washbasins in big viscous globs. On top of such a glob, women will place a few leaves of some vegetable, or a small piece of fish or tiny chunk of meat – like a cherry on top of an ice cream sundae (although, again, that image is deceptive because it suggests something tasty). On top of that, a few spoonfuls of ‘soup’ (wawan) will be poured. ‘Soup’ consists of coconut milk (i.e. the liquid produced when a coconut is grated and squeezed in cold water) in which the vegetables or meat served on top of the mum has been boiled. If the villagers have salt, they will use copious amounts of it to flavor the soup. Aside from salt, no flavorings, spices or herbs of any kind are used in Gapun’s cuisine.

My question is why don't they make pancakes out of sago like sane people do?

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:30 pm My question is why don't they make pancakes out of sago like sane people do?

Um, what? It just said they did…?

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 12:20 amUm, what? It just said they did…?

But rubbery!


JAL

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 12:20 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:30 pm My question is why don't they make pancakes out of sago like sane people do?

Um, what? It just said they did…?

I mean instead of eating 'sago jelly'.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 8:17 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 12:20 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:30 pm My question is why don't they make pancakes out of sago like sane people do?

Um, what? It just said they did…?

I mean instead of eating 'sago jelly'.

Well, it does mention ‘sago pancakes’ also.

You'd think that "sago jelly" is the most disgusting thing they eat, but read up on the sago grubs they grow in sage tree stumps and thinned out suckers 😬.


JAL

jal wrote: ↑Tue Jan 07, 2025 3:12 am You'd think that "sago jelly" is the most disgusting thing they eat, but read up on the sago grubs they grow in sage tree stumps and thinned out suckers .

Sago grubs are where this conversation started!

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jan 07, 2025 4:01 amSago grubs are where this conversation started!

I somehow completely missed that :D


JAL

Not sure if it's really OK to talk at length here about how disgusting other people's food is.

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 5:56 pm I like to quote Kulick & Terrill’s Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap

This one is great, thanks for mentioning it. I absolutely love how the grammar is filled with ethnographical notes. As much as it is a linguistic grammar, it is an account of the life of a speaker of Tayap, which is pretty brutish. Even cooler is the author's evident interest in profanity as a language register. He does dedicate a lot of details to vulgarity, and his elicited examples contain a lot of tok nogut (Tok Pisin for "bad talk").

Raholeun wrote: ↑Tue Jan 07, 2025 6:43 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 5:56 pm I like to quote Kulick & Terrill’s Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap

This one is great, thanks for mentioning it. I absolutely love how the grammar is filled with ethnographical notes. As much as it is a linguistic grammar, it is an account of the life of a speaker of Tayap, which is pretty brutish. Even cooler is the author's evident interest in profanity as a language register. He does dedicate a lot of details to vulgarity, and his elicited examples contain a lot of tok nogut (Tok Pisin for "bad talk").

Yeah, I love it. It is, quite simply, the best-written reference grammar I’ve ever seen. I don’t think ‘pretty brutish’ is a fair summary, though — it’s simply that the authors feel no need to gloss over the ugly parts of speakers’ lives.

There's no need to get into the semantics of "brutish", but the idea of being driven into the "mosquito infested jungle" by bands of machete-wielding drunken youths is, at least to me, a grim one. This quote is from pages 14-15:

Monei’s adult children openly accused their maternal cousins of having paid a sorcerer to kill their father. Those accusations reignited long-smoldering hostilities. They led to village-wide brawls between different kin groups, and to uncontrolled drinking by young men, who a few years previously had been taught by men from the Sepik river village of Bien how to ferment and distill alcohol from coconut water or rotten bananas. The village was riven with threats of revenge sorcery, and by almost daily recurring uproar and violence that set everyone on edge. Social control collapsed and villagers’ sense of cohesion frayed.

In the months following Monei’s death, there was a powder-keg atmosphere in the village, and many villagers came to grow tired of hiding inside their houses while drunken young men strode though the village brandishing machetes, screaming obscenities in Tok Pisin and challenging others to come and fight with them. People began talking of “running away” from Gapun, and some families did actually abandon their houses and leave the village to build small homesteads for themselves in the jungle.

And it seems this is not a thing of the distant past either:

A brief visit to Gapun in March 2019 determined that there is no longer any there there [sic]. The village has been all but abandoned. Fewer than fifty people (of which thirty were adults) were living in Gapun – this, out of total population of more than two hundred people five years earlier, in 2014.
Much of the village had been reclaimed by jungle. Eight houses (the entire upper third section of the village) were incinerated in 2018, during a fight, and the victims of this violence have fled into the rainforest and built new houses there.
[...]
The reason for the village’s dissolution is that the disruptive binge drinking that began in earnest in 2009 has continued, and wrought devastation. Young village men have begun murdering one another in drunken frenzies. In December 2013, a village man was shot in the stomach with an arrow during a drunken brawl. He died an agonizing death a few days later. In August 2018, again during a drunken melee, a young man was shot in the head with a cruelly barbed projectile. Relatives managed to get him to a hospital in the tiny town of Angoram (a twelve hour journey away, paddling in a canoe), and the staff there managed to remove the projectile, but the man suffered severe cognitive impairments and he died a month later.
I am at a loss to imagine how the cycle of drinking and violence might be brought to an end

I was wondering recently how the existence of the Internet might influence language change, particularly diversification. Historically, if a language like English were to "suddenly" (over a couple of centuries) expand its speaker base by an order of magnitude or so, one would expect it to diverge into separate language varieties like nobody's business. However, might the ability for continued communication between most of these people serve to slow language change, or will it just make for a stronger diglossia?

abahot wrote: ↑Fri Jan 17, 2025 9:53 pm I was wondering recently how the existence of the Internet might influence language change, particularly diversification. Historically, if a language like English were to "suddenly" (over a couple of centuries) expand its speaker base by an order of magnitude or so, one would expect it to diverge into separate language varieties like nobody's business. However, might the ability for continued communication between most of these people serve to slow language change, or will it just make for a stronger diglossia?

I think this has already been answered by the history of the mass media in the last century or more. (The Internet is hardly more powerful than the telephone, the movies, and TV.)

I'd say the effect is that English speakers understand the major dialects-- General American, standard UK-- quite well, better than they would have in 1900. But American don't speak like Brits and Brits don't speak like Americans.

What makes for linguistic homogeneity is mixing of communities. Due to modern economics (not the media), we get this at the national level: an American might end up living anywhere in the US. E.g. in California, just 40% of residents were born in the state.

I'd guess this situation will continue, unless something develops that causes widespread mixing at the global level.

One thing that should be remembered is that there is a difference between familiarity with a variety and language change. For instance many Americans today are familiar with SSBE but that does not mean they speak any closer to it. Media is very good for promoting familiarity but generally language change is driven by everyday real-world contact.

Another thing to remember about the present-day situation of English is that the vast majority of the new English-speakers outside the Anglosphere use it as a second language or a foreign language so in many cases they are likely to model their English off that of some particular Anglosphere country's national standard variety. Consequently this may reduce the divergence of English as used in these countries, as opposed to situations where English-based pidgins or creoles have developed. (There are exceptions to this such as Indian English where a country where English is largely not used as a native language has nonetheless developed its own variety of English which is not a pidgin or creole.)

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Jan 17, 2025 10:19 pm What makes for linguistic homogeneity is mixing of communities. Due to modern economics (not the media), we get this at the national level: an American might end up living anywhere in the US. E.g. in California, just 40% of residents were born in the state.

On a personal level, what I have experienced is that many of my coworkers here are from other parts of the US, which results in conversations over lunch with people I hadn't spoken much with before starting with them asking me whether I grew up in Wisconsin, presumably because they can hear my accent and how it differs from the GA or lightly dialect-colored GA spoken by many of my other coworkers. This is a function of the fact that many of my coworkers came from elsewhere to work at my company. This contrasts with outside of work, where just about everyone I interact with is from Wisconsin aside from my sister's family aside from my sister herself and the in-laws, who are from Illinois.

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Jan 17, 2025 10:19 pm I'd guess this situation will continue, unless something develops that causes widespread mixing at the global level.

As a native English speaker, I'm glad it's not 2500 AD so I don't (yet) have to learn "written English" in school which is different than the spoken English I know and love!

abahot wrote: ↑Sun Jan 19, 2025 8:52 pm

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Jan 17, 2025 10:19 pm I'd guess this situation will continue, unless something develops that causes widespread mixing at the global level.

As a native English speaker, I'm glad it's not 2500 AD so I don't (yet) have to learn "written English" in school which is different than the spoken English I know and love!

Are you sure it isn't different from the spoken English you speak? There are substantial differences between written Standard English and spoken English in practically all English dialects.