This is the final installment in the series of posts inspired by comments I left in the archives of Lynne Murphy’s blog (previous installments here and here). I won’t mention everything that I mentioned there, and I’ll mention some things that I didn’t mention there too.
Words that mean different things in different dialects can be fun.
When I wrote about food and drink in Australian English, I promised a sequel incorporating more of the comments I left last month on Lynne Murphy’s blog. I think the time for that sequel has come.
Once again, I’ll cover only some of those comments today - those that pertain to a particular theme. I’ll save the rest for later. Today’s theme is not about Australian English per se, but some of my personal preferences regarding the use of various words. None of these are a matter of right or wrong; they are simply preferences or habits.
I’ve always thought that our way of telling time doesn’t fit our culture very well, particularly the way that a day officially begins at midnight. What sense does that make in a culture where people so often stay up beyond that time? Below is my idea for a better system.
Let the day be divided into four sections: morning (6:00am to midday), afternoon (midday to 6:00pm), evening (6:00pm to midnight) and night (midnight to 6:00am). It seems to me that these definitions are very similar to the way people already use these terms, but under my proposal it would be official.
Let night be known as post-evening and also as pre-morning, so that “post-evening Saturday” is synonymous with “pre-morning Sunday“. This should be thought of as analagous to the fact that in music, “C Sharp” is synonymous with “D Flat“. Thus the six hours from midnight to 6am would belong equally to both the day before and the day after, and during that period you could please yourself how to use the terms “yesterday” and “tomorrow” (just as people do now after midnight, but without the uneasy feeling of being technically incorrect).
In Lynne Murphy’s blog Seperated by a Common Language, she routinely discusses dialectal differences between British and American English. I recently left comments on a number of her posts from 2006 and 2007, in most cases adding an Australian point of view.
I’d like to take up some of the points I raised in those comments about Australian vocabulary, but for the time being I’ll only list the ones pertaining to food and drink. I’ll save some of the others for a sequel.
I like to speak gibberish, and also sing it. It is the act of spontaneously creating sounds, with no forethought, aiming for the cadence of natural language (basically it’s just improvisation using the mouth instead of a musical instrument). Speaking gibberish, I can pretend to be fluent in a foreign language, although the practical advantages of that are admittedly few and far between (at least I don’t have to actually think of any real lyrics when singing lullabies to young children).
In my fantasies, my gibberish is considered by experts to be the highest of improvisational arts. In real life, it sometimes mildly impresses people for about two minutes as a minor party piece. Tonight I have uploaded two samples of gibberish, in the hope that readers will tell me that it is, in fact, the highest of improvisational arts.
I am now “General Australian speaker 2” at the AUE Audio Archive. You can go there hear what I sound like as I read aloud read several standard texts. (The story of Arthur the Rat is morally objectionable, but that doesn’t matter when it’s used merely as a tool to demonstrate the sound of the spoken word.)
I recently bought myself a microphone stand, in order to make recordings like this easier and eliminate various sources of interference.
Do you have a favourite spelling error? One that made you cry with sheer delight when you noticed it in print? That you’ve vowed never to tell the perpetrator about lest they fix it and thereby deprive the world of abundant pleasure? That you would like to nominate for a prestigious award? I do, and I’m going to share it. I’m also going to recommend a nice place to eat.
Today I have chosen to write about the songs in my CD collection that are sung in languages other than English.
I have a collection of Irish Gaelic music by Kíla, and a little by Altan. Examples of songs by Kíla: On Taobh Tuathail Amach (excerpt) and Béilín meala (excerpt).
I have some Hebrew music, including the album In Between by Meir Banai and a few songs by other artists, including Yehuda Poliker and Rafi Ginat.
I have a copy of the Swedish-language album Ranarop by Gjallarhorn. Like many of the albums listed here, I obtained this one year at Womadelaide. There is one Finnish track.
I have a copy of the Spanish album Ritmo del Corazon (”Rhythm of the Heart”) by the Bolivian band Surkuy. Unlike most of the foreign language songs in my collection, I do not have English translations for these.
Finally, I have a song from the album Serious Tam by Telek (I purchased the whole album as a gift, but kept a copy of one track). The songs are sung in a native language of Papua New Guinea.
The hobby of conscripting is related to the hobby of conlanging (in fact conscripting is very often a part of conlanging). A conscript is the writing system (e.g. an alphabet) used by the inhabitants of a fictional reality. The inscription on the ring in The Lord of the Rings was written in a conscript.
It’s not something I’ve ever got into. However, one aspect of conscripting that I have played with a bit is that of simulating the way that scripts evolve over hundreds of years. In the real world, it is well known that different scripts are related to each other, as the shapes of letters were gradually modified by generations of writers. I recommend this website for the animated illustrations of the process, including the evolution of the latin alphabet (you may need to do a forced refresh (Ctrl-F5) in order to see it more than once).
So let’s play a game in which we take an existing script, and speculate on how it might have evolved in an alternative reality.
Following on from what I’ve said before, I’d like to say more about vowel allophones in my idiolect, as relative to other Australian speakers.
