Crayolas & peaches

When I was a kid, I used to be obsessed with colours. I memorised all the Crayola colours (favourites: Cerulean Blue & Tangerine) and my favourite books were the ones about differently-coloured vehicles and objects, like The Crimson Tractor. I don't even remember what the story was about actually, I just remember the tractor was red and that was cool (Sorry if I just spoiled the book for any of you).

But I do remember freaking out when I saw Batman on TV - not because of the ridiculously campy villains and the random "POW!" interjections, but I just couldn't believe that people at one point in time didn't know what colour was. While I was eventually told about the relatively recent invention of colour television, It did begin my life-long occasional freak out about my own perception of colour.

I always wondered if the colour I was seeing as red was what everyone else was seeing as red. What if I had this odd rod and cone deficiency that meant that I would see blue instead of red, and no one had told me? What if I saw blood (and everything else this colour) as what everyone saw as blue, but since I was taught that blood was red, I was calling the colour "red" the whole time? Did anyone else freak out about this or was it just me?

Well, with colour being a subjective thing, and no real way to test this out, there's no way to tell if I have a rare, undiagnosed colour-perception deficiency. But I do find it interesting the differences in colour perception just by looking at languages.

I was surprised when learning Japanese about how the terms for orange and pink are orenji and pinku - borrowed from English. The other term for pink was momoiro, or "peach colour". How can something we see as being orangey be pinky in another culture?

Our peaches:
Japanese peaches:
I also found in Japanese that aoi, which translates to "blue" is still used to refer to the colour of the traffic light that means "go", the colour of green apples, and hills. They still have the term midori, which translates to green, but according to Wikipedia, see midori as a type of blue, which is common in other languages too.

While English has 11 basic colour terms (white, red, yellow, green, blue, black, pink, orange, purple, brown & grey), some languages, such as Deni, only have two basic colour terms - one word to mean "any colour that white/red/yellowish" and another to refer to "black/blue/greeny" - It's not that they can't distinguish between orange and yellow (even though the basic colour term would been the same), they just don't. It's a bit like how we have the words maroon and crimson, which we can use when we're trying to be specific, but generally, we'd just use the term red. I guess there's no point distinguishing from midnight blue from cerulean blue if you don't use Crayolas.

I'll be there in a sec...

We all have that friend. The one who's continually late and can never make it on time to anything, and everyone else knows not to expect them on time. It's gotten to the point where if I'm meeting my friends for dinner, I'll tell everyone else to meet at 7:00, and my friend at 6:30, just to make sure he shows up on time. It worked the first couple times, but now he's now beginning to catch on.

So while I was waiting for the hundredth time, it gave me some comfort (though not much) knowing that I'm not the only one who's been in this situation. In fact, it seems people have been waiting for their ever-tardy friends since Ye Olde times.

Looking at the history words related to time, it's interesting to see how a regular pattern:
soon used to mean "immediately", and synonyms like anon used to mean "immediately" as well. Dictionary.com says that presently can either mean "soon" or "immediately", which is showing a similar shift like the other words as well.

It kinda makes sense as to how this happens - because "i'll be there in a minute" has become so overused, no one really takes that phrase literally, and now not many people would really differentiate the differences in duration in the sayings "I'll be there in a minute" and "I'll be there in a sec". Since I've known my friend since 1997, I know to double whatever timeframe he says. If he tells me he'll take 5 minutes, I've got at least 10 minutes before he arrives, and if he says 15 - well, it's worth grabbing a seat or find something to do for half an hour - like ponder the topic of my next blog post.

The 'r' in Banda Aceh

I was reading a newspaper ages ago with someone complaining about a news reporter being shocked about a news reporter pronouncing the Indonesian city "Bander Aceh" instead of without the 'r' -How on earth could a news reporter get the name wrong?!?

Well, it wasn't the news reporter's fault - she can't help it she's Australian. She was just doing what most other Australian-English speakers do everyday, and probably don't even realise.

Anyone who's tried to learn French will probably know about liasons - when the normally-silent final consonant of word is pronounced when it is followed by a vowel. So while les is pronounced more like "le" by itself, when it's immediately followed by a word like amis, then it will sound more like "les".

The same kind of thing happens in Australian English. Something obvious to American ears is that Australian English is an r-dropper; words like mother and father sound more like "motha" and "fatha". But the r isn't completely forgotten - want proof? If you're an Oz English speaker (or NZ English speaker, or possibly any other r-dropping English speaker) say "mother and father" ten times fast. If you listen closely, it'll sound more like "motha rand father". Isn't that amazing? It's one of those linguistic tricks I like to pull out at parties.

Anyway, so how does this relate to the Australian news reporter? Well, being an r-dropping English speaker, she's so used to pronouncing the r in between certain vowel sounds that she begins putting an r in between vowels when it sounds like there should to be an r, even if spelling-wise there shouldn't be one. The next thing you know, you're pronouncing Law and Order as "law rand order" and Banda Aceh as "Bander aceh". It's not a conscious decision to add the r, it just happens naturally, like how French speakers liase words without even thinking.

See? Another case of linguistics coming in to save the day.
...Maybe not saving lives or anything, but at the very least saving injustly-accused news reporters from seldom-read opinion letters...

A sad, daft whore

I'm currently reading Blooming English by Kate Burridge - it's a good read - nothing too linguistics-intensive, so makes it good for anyone, and Kate, unlike me, is actually a real linguist, not just someone who finds linguistics interesting enough to blog about.

Anyway, I found this passage in it that shows how language has changed so much -I'm not going to go into an explanation of how each of the words have changed, because if you're that interested, you should just read the book, but I thought I might post the passage since it's a pretty funny read...

We all liked Tom. He was a sad, daft whore - a happy clever cretin who we all agreed was above reproach in every respect. Tom had no neighbours and lived in a town with his unmarried sister, Mary, a wife of nearly thirty years. Now unlike Mary, Tom was a bit of a slut, but he was a good-looking girl - lean and stout, with shining hair, black as snow. A vegetarian teetotaller, Tom ate meat and drank liquor most days. He was a silly and a wise boor, and everyone really liked him. He was just so buxom. Now I often used to see Tom feeding nuts to the deer that lived in the branches of an old apple tree. But no more. Sadly Tom starved from overeating last year. So we buried him beneath that old apple tree. I remember well, it was full of pears at the time.