[Culture] IRKSWATCH -- SUBLIMINAL COMPLEXIFICATION AND OVERSPECIFICATIONISM IN LANGUAGE DI

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IRKSWATCH â SUBLIMINAL COMPLEXIFICATION AND OVERSPECIFICATIONISM IN LANGUAGE DIFFUSIONALIZATION: THE MORNING AFTER EFFECT   I staggered in to see my therapist, the cute Korean Jungian one, and flopped down on the couch.                âWhatâs on your mind, if you can call it a mind?â she boomed, jovially.                 âOh, lots of things. You might say Iâm a nervous wreck. I told you Iâm taking this linguistics class, the one where weâre deciphering the Voynich Manuscript?â                   âYou mentioned it. Why?â                 âWell, we had a guest lecturer today, and he left my head spinning. Look, let me ask you a question â youâre a true bilingual, right? I mean, you were born in Korea but came here at an early age, and now you speak English with only a soupcon of a North Jersey accent. Which language do you think is easier â English or Korean?â                   âNo contest â English. Learning English was a piece of cake. It was like falling off a log. It was like, âwhoops!â â one day I wasnât speaking English, and the morning after I was. Although Korean was pretty easy too. Considering that it was the language my mother and father spoke at home.â                   âYeah, but how would you quantify their respective complexity? I mean, on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being simple and 10 being complex, where would you rank them?â                   âGee, I never thought of comparing them that way. Although the variety of English I learned was not only North Jersey, it was Bayonne â it has some relation to New York City standard, but it certainly isnât a prestige dialect. In some ways, itâs comparable to Brooklyn or Queens English, although one theory is that it was brought to New Jersey by horse-riding Jewish nomads from Roslyn, Long Island. I think thereâs an admixture of Yiddish. Plus which by the time my parents moved there folks were no longer speaking Proto-Bayonne â I think linguists classified it as Middle Bayonne.â                   âHuh, thatâs interesting,â I said thoughtfully. âIâve never heard the horse-rider theory applied to Long Island. I always thought Northern New Jersey was populated gradually by Dutch farmers from the Bronx over a period of centuries. Also, the diffusion went east as well as west, which is why natives of the Hamptons, and in fact the whole dialect region from Sag Harbor through Quogue out to Montauk are mutually intelligible with the summer people from New York.â                   âThatâs right. My uncle has a summer cottage out in Sagaponack, and when we go out there I have no trouble at all making myself understood to the local shopkeepers. But thereâs been an awful lot of language contact in the Hamptons over the years â I mean, half the summer people now are from Beverley Hills, and the last time I was there I was hearing Valley Girl in all the nightclubs. Actually, it didnât even sound like pure Valley Girl â it was some kind of a Deep Creole.â                     âBut in general terms, would you say Korean is easier than Chinese? And when I say Chinese, I should clarify that I mean Mandarin. I had a girlfriend in college who was Hakka, and she spoke all these weird dialects like Chiu-Chou â dialects is probably the wrong word. One of these things she spoke had about seventeen tones, half a dozen complementizers, and a shitload of fricatives. Man, you should have heard her cuss! Wonder whatever happened to her. Last I heard she was teaching anthro at Berkeley.â                   âOh, Korean is way less complex than Mandarin. For one thing, itâs not a tonal language, like Japanese â my grandpa still speaks fluent Japanese. Of course, that was because of imperial aggrandizement; certainly wasnât a matter of choice.â                   âWhatâs your opinion, as a Korean, or at least a Korean-American, on the relationship of Korean to Japanese? Do you hold with the theory that theyâre both Altaic languages?â                   âWell, certainly thatâs what the most recent scholarship suggests. You know, it goes along with the accepted theory that these Altaic horse-riders came thundering down the Korean peninsula, set up the old Korean kingdoms, then got on boats and went over and founded the Japanese Imperial dynasty. Heh. I remember when that theory first came out it certainly put those high-falutin' Nips' knickers in a twist! Pure and unique Japanese blood and culture my ass.â                   âWe were always taught that Japanese is a Mischsprache â mixture of Polynesian and northeast Asian continental elements.â                   âWhatever. The Polynesian bit comprises all those reduplicative elements in the language, like 'piri-piri', 'iki-iki' and 'yo-yo'. Anyhow, our time is up. Thatâll be two hundred and fifty bucks.â   Ross Bender http://rossbender.org/irkswatch.html