New Year Radio Appearance on FM Ishigaki

 Language, Life, Music, Ryukyuan  No Responses »
Jan 102012
 

I had the pleasure of appearing on the FM Ishigaki radio program 島唄への誘い (Invitation to Ryukyuan Island Music) hosted by Aragaki Shigeo [新垣重雄], who also runs the excellent 島そば一番地 [shima-soba ichiban-chi] restaurant. Listen here:

Play

The radio program, which can be heard live here every Friday from 2 to 3 pm [Japan time], focuses on traditional Yaeyaman music. In this program, Aragaki-san introduces a number of  celebratory songs appropriate for the New Years season. The oldest forms of these songs were called yunta and zïraba, and were sung a capella, often with a kind of call-and-response pattern between male and female parts.

The first yunta introduced in this episode is called basï yunta [鷲ユンタ]. This is followed by the more well-known basï nu turï busi [鷲の鳥節], which evolved from the yunta and incorporates the sanshin. The titles include the central vowel [ï] (中舌母音) characteristic of the languages of Yaeyama. The word basï is cognate with the Japanese word wasi 鷲, and refers to the kanmuri hawk, which is indigenous to the Yaeyama islands. The basic pattern is that the vowel /e/ in Japanese maps to /i/ in Yaeyama, while /i/ maps to /ï/. Listening to myself on the radio, I seem to have adopted the [e] –> [i] mapping in my own phonology of Japanese. I blame it on my enthusiasm for the local languages of Yaeyama.

Update: The vowel that I described above as a centralized vowel /ï/ may not be centralized after all. It is traditionally described as 中舌母音 [naka-jita boin "central-tongue vowel"] in the Japanese literature, but Yukio Uemura describes it in his book The Ryukyuan Language as an apical vowel that has been pushed farther forward than the high front vowel [i], making it similar to what is found in the Miyakoan languages, although phonetically this vowel seems to retain more of its vocality in Yaeyaman than in Miyakoan, where it often seems to become an [s] or [z]. There is actually a place in the radio broadcast where Aragaki-san points out an occurrence of this phoneme which sounds much more like a [z] than any kind of vowel, which may suggest that a loss of vocality (or transition to a consonant) also occurs in certain environments in certain dialects of Yaeyama as well.

 Posted by chris at 9:47 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Human exceptionalism

 Language  No Responses »
Dec 142011
 

In preparing to take an online ethics training course to do experiments with human subjects, I was asked the following:

Do you conduct or supervise studies that use vertebrate animals?

True Answer: Yes.

Pragmatically Correct Answer: No.

Somehow, in a question that clearly targets people working in the biological sciences, we’re supposed to interpret “vertebrate animals” as “the set of all vertebrate animals except homo sapiens“. Sort of like we’re supposed to interpret “apes” as “the set of all apes except homo sapiens“.  What feature of the context is supposed to help us decide when to exclude ourselves from the domains to which we properly belong? [+anthroexceptional], maybe.

 Posted by chris at 12:14 am  Tagged with: ,

The Lexicalization of Everyday Life?

 Language  1 Response »
Dec 072011
 

Near the beginning of Ben Goldacre‘s (quite excellent) book Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks is a puzzling use of a familiar (to linguists) word. Telling us what all we can expect from the book, Goldacre writes (emphasis added):

[B]y the end of this book you’ll have the tools to win — or at least understand — any argument you choose to initiate, whether it’s on miracle cures, MMR, the evils of big pharma, the likelihood of a given vegetable preventing cancer, the dumbing down of science reporting, dubious health scares, the merits of anecdotal evidence, the relationship between body and mind, the science of irrationality, the lexicalization of everyday life, and more.

This really threw me. In linguistics, lexicalization means, essentially, the process whereby some concept is encoded as a word (i.e. as part of the lexicon). I’m not aware of any other meanings for this word, and the two entries in the online Merriam Webster are variations on the use described above. What could the “lexicalization of everyday life” possibly mean?

Earlier in the same introductory chapter, Goldacre tells us that he will be taking down nutritionists, who he argues paste a veneer of science on their crank advice to give it an air of objectivity and unassailable authority:

[T]his new industry acts as a distraction from the genuine lifestyle factors for ill health, as well as its more subtle but equally alarming impact on the way we see ourselves and our bodies, specifically in the widespread move to medicalize social and political problems, to conceive of them in a reductionist, biomedical framework, and peddle commodifiable solutions, particularly in the form of pills and faddish diets. [emphasis added]

So nutritionists are guilty of medicalizing problems that should not be medicalized, all with an aim to commodifying the solutions to these medicalized problems (which now, of course, require expert solutions). I suspect that the mysterious use of lexicalization stem from the fact that along with the medicalization and commodification come new words. But the usage is still awkward. Surely the problem lies not in the “lexicalization of everyday life”, which is presumably lexicalized to exactly the extent that speakers of the language find necessary, but to the commodification and medicalization of everyday problems and their solutions.

Update — Dr. Ben Goldacre has kindly responded, saying that the peculiar use of lexicalization described in this post is attributable not to an idiolectal idiosyncracy, but to an inexplicable editorial substitution that occurred in the American edition of the book. The original contained “medicalisation”, which was somehow mapped to “lexicalization” in the American version. So now we’re left with a new puzzle: What would lead an editor (or his software, or a typesetter) to make this substitution? I would suspect that “medicali(s|z)ation” is more frequent than “lexicali(s|z)ation”, a hunch that is supported by the fact that Google returns about 50% more hit counts for the former than the latter. Strange. In any case, Dr. Goldacre is innocent. So, go read the book, substituting “medicalization” as appropriate.

 Posted by chris at 12:50 pm

ほんやら洞: The Coolest Cafe in Kyoto

 Life  No Responses »
Nov 292011
 

If you are ever in the Kyoto area, you really should stop by ほんやら洞 (Honyaradou), a cafe run by the photographer Kai Fusayoshi. Kai is an excellent photographer, who has been photographing the local area for some 40 years or more. The cafe is a showcase for his photos, and has also been a meeting place for artists, political activists, and various intellectual types. It also has free Wi-Fi, not at all common in Japan.

The photo to the left is a view of the entrance to Honyarado from inside the cafe. This photo and more of Kai’s work can be seen here. Check it out. And if you are in the Imadegawa area, do check out the cafe as well.

 

 Posted by chris at 6:25 pm  Tagged with: , , ,

Major and Minor Pentatonic Scales?

 Music, Ryukyuan  No Responses »
Nov 292011
 

I was recently reading an interesting book on the science of scales and temperament, and there was passing mention of several pentatonic scales used in Japan. The so-called 民謡音階 (min’you onkai, “folk scale”), typical of folk music in mainland Japan, has the following structure (assuming a root sound of C):

Notice the E-flat and B-flat. If we look at this scale from the angle of a Western seven-step scale, we can see that we’re missing the second and sixth steps. We can easily substitute in a D and A-flat to get a C-minor scale:

Maybe it was cheating to put an A-flat in at the sixth step If we stick in an A instead, we get the Dorian mode on C.

Now compare the so-called 琉球音階 (ryuukyuu onkai, Ryukyuan scale), representative of (some) traditional music of the Ryukyus:

Just like the Japanese folk scale, we can view this as a seven-step scale from which the second and sixth steps have been eliminated. But unlike the Japanese folk scale, the notes remaining are all consistent with a major scale; if we stick a D and B into the “missing” slots, we get a C-major scale:

The question of course is whether the “flavor” of a scale can survive the elimination of two steps.

One thing I noticed about the Japanese folk scale is that it eliminates all steps consisting only of a half-tone interval. In the minor scale, we have half-tone intervals between the second and third steps, and between the fifth and sixth steps. But since the second and sixth steps are not found in the Japanese folk scale, there are no half-tone intervals. Instead we get a mix of full-tone and 1.5 tone intervals.

The Ryukyuan scale by contrast retains the two half-tone intervals found in the associated major scale, but lengthens the interval just before. So we go from C to E, an interval of four half-tones (or two full tones). We then go from E to F, which is only a half-tone interval. We then have a single full-tone interval before hitting another four half-tone interval between G and B. The scale culminates with another half-tone interval between B and C. The Ryukuan scale thus has at once both larger (two full-tone) and smaller (single half-tone) intervals than the Japanese folk scale. But it doesn’t have any 1.5 tone intervals at all.

Some caveats: There are a lot more scales used in both Japanese and Ryukyuan music than the (canonical) ones described above. And in the Ryukyus, there are many cases where a hexatonic scale is used (or a pentatonic scale is “augmented” with a sixth step, maybe). And finally, we can by no means assume that the intervals used in the traditional music in question correspond to the temperament used on your handy 21st century piano; in fact we can be almost certain that they don’t, except when performers are forced to adapt their playing/singing to the accompaniment of a western instrument.

 Posted by chris at 2:31 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,
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