Author: Goldpanner

Borrowing, Diachronic Sound Change, and “Gentil”.

allthingslinguistic:

justlingthings:

Hey everyone! I’m going to tell y’all something that totally blew my mind the other day. So we’re doing borrowing in my historical linguistics class, and here’s one of the examples my professor gave. So background info: English was conquered by the Normans at one point (not sure of the actual year), which is why our structure and sound systems are Germanic (English is a Germanic language) but have so many French and Romance loan words in our vocabulary. So the word gentil, French for nice, kind, etc. was borrowed into English four different times:

genteel
Gentile
jaunty
gentle

That’s not even the cool part. The cool part is we can actually tell the relative order in which the borrowing happened. So the general principle of linguistic borrowing is that when you’re looking at borrowed words, the longer they’ve been in the language, the more they’ll look and sound like words native to the language they were borrowed into, and vice-versa, the later they were borrowed, the less time they’ve been in the language, the more they look like the language they were borrowed from.

So take the modern French pronunciation of ‘gentil’, it’s something like /ʒã’ti/, with stress on the second syllable, and no pronounced /l/ at the end. But, we can tell by the spelling that there was once a pronounced /l/ at the end, which was lost. Well, out of all four words above, which of them doesn’t pronounce the /l/ at the end of the word? That’s right, jaunty is the latest borrowing of the word.

#4 jaunty (was imported into English around 1600)

Next we look at the vowels. One of the most major sound changes in the English language was the great vowel shift, which happened around the 16th or 17th century. I won’t explain all the changes here, that’s what Google is for, but it’s basically the reason English ‘five’ is pronounced /faiv/ and not /fiv/. The main difference between ‘genteel’ and ‘Gentile’ is the second vowel. We can tell that ‘Gentile’ was in the English language before the vowel shift, because the /i/ in it was shifted, making it older than the next oldest word, ‘genteel’. Notice that apart from ‘jaunty’, ‘genteel’ sounds the most like the modern French pronunciation.

#3 genteel (around 1600)

#4 Gentile (around 1400)

And finally, I don’t quite remember all the justifications my professor gave for knowing ‘gentle’ was number 1, but notice that the /l/ at the end is syllabic, and very strongly pronounced. Combine this with the fact that the first vowel is very different from the modern French pronunciation, and you can tell that ‘gentle’ is not only pronounced like very old French, but also that it is super “nativized” into the English language.

#1 gentle (imported as early as 1200)

This is why I think diachronic sound change and historical linguistics are so cool, if you learn the types of changes, you can use individual words like little time machines! 

A few links, if you’re interested in more: on borrowing and on historical sound change. 

The best way to dehumanize someone while claiming you’re not is to believe you are just the same. You erase their experiences and perspective, their struggles and obstacles, their unique way of having to deal with those things in a world that also erases them. With the words, ‘but humans are humans’ or the bullshit dramatics of ‘we all bleed red’ normal people can simply pretend that if we all did things the way they did, then everything would work out okay. But, yes, we all bleed red but you don’t treat a papercut the same way you treat a gash, you don’t treat an infected wound the same way you treat one that isn’t, you don’t treat a wound to the leg the same way you treat a wound to the gut. You are not acknowledging someone’s personhood when you ignore the very things that make their lives different than yours, and when you refuse to understand that their circumstances have given them their own perspective that is just as valid as yours. More valid in fact – their perspective about their experiences that you haven’t been through is far more valid than anything you could ever think about it.

The danger of worldviews (Speaking when the world sleeps)

Hello, I saw you comment on a post about how missionaries in developing countries are ruining the cultures/societies of their people, and it really intrigued me. You see, I am about to go on a trip to Nairobi this coming June with the organization Me To We. Me To We is not religious and I’m not a religious person. But, while there I will help build a school and learn about Maasai culture. Do you feel that service trips without the intention of converting/teaching people are still alienating?

feministbatwoman:

owning-my-truth:

I am radically against service trips where people go to “build schools” (or other facilities) in a developing countries, and I find them to be incredibly disempowering and paternalistic at their core. It all boils down to stroking the (usually white) egos of the volunteers to make them feel like “good people” and does NO longterm good for the community.

I just wish people thought more critically about international development and saw through the smoke screen of “aid” that many of these “development” organizations put up as part of the white savior industrial complex. Like it just seems so obvious to me that an organization that goes through all of the logistical and human effort needed to bring “volunteers” to build schools in ~*aFriCa*~ has values that are fundamentally not aligned with those of their communities. They do not have the best interest of locals at heart, at all. 

If they cared about the community, they would be building out local capabilities and talents rather than trying to make a quick buck from western volunteers. They wouldn’t be bringing in untrained (usually) white people from the West without any language skills or understanding of local cultural intricacies to a community that is most at need. Rather than siphoning resources toward making white people “feel good” about themselves and aligning their values with white supremacy and white savior-dom, instead they would be working to give that exact same business to local carpenters and construction workers. Or, worst case, they would bring in people using those same dollars to train community members so that they develop these critical skillsets for themselves and their community at large. Why not actually work in solidarity with a community and build together to improve and develop local capabilities in the longterm? Why must we instead center the white gaze and destructive paternalism, which is disempowering and harmful and only has one longterm impact: making the Western volunteers “feel good” about themselves for “saving the Africans”

It makes me sick.

I also think it’s just so indicative of the deepset narcissism that lies in white supremacy and Western global hegemony that somehow we think that we can “build a school” better than people who are actually from that community. You know the ones who intimately know their needs and those of their communities, far better than the volunteers swooping in for 2 weeks to “save” them. How sick is it that we presume that “expanding our global horizons” can come at any cost, including undermining the fabric of a community, breeding dependency, and pulling resources away from actually building out the longterm capabilities of the people in these communities? I discussed these topics at length with someone who worked in international NGOs for 7 years in Africa and who left incredibly jaded because she saw how the values of so many of these organization was focused on “more NGO, now” rather than doing the more important work of creating communities where the presence of NGOs fades progressively with time as these communities are empowered. 

The structure of the white savior industrial complex is one of disempowerment, damage and harm. Participating in it furthers this destruction and hurts these communities in the long run.

The vast majority of these international aid and development NGOs do not have our best interests at heart, and are simply there to make white people (and other Westerners) feel better for the “good deed” they did once in ~the third world~

It’s horrible.

Absolutely. Think about how much money it takes to send a “volunteer” to a volunteer location. A couple thousand dollars, right? 
They could *hire* dozens of local EXPERTS for the cost of ONE volunteer’s plane ticket. And then they could *actually* put money back into the place’s economy. 

From a former volunteer: “Our mission while at the orphanage was to build a library. Turns out that we, a group of highly educated private boarding school students were so bad at the most basic construction work that each night the men had to take down the structurally unsound bricks we had laid and rebuild the structure so that, when we woke up in the morning, we would be unaware of our failure. It is likely that this was a daily ritual. Us mixing cement and laying bricks for 6+ hours, them undoing our work after the sun set, re-laying the bricks, and then acting as if nothing had happened so that the cycle could continue.

Basically, we failed at the sole purpose of our being there. It would have been more cost effective, stimulative of the local economy, and efficient for the orphanage to take our money and hire locals to do the work, but there we were trying to build straight walls without a level.” 

(http://pippabiddle.com/2014/02/18/the-problem-with-little-white-girls-and-boys/) 

I had a friend on Facebook for a while who would make a lot of statuses on the importance the LGBTQ community being welcoming and kind to allies and I generally tried to ignore but respect her statuses because she is a member of that community and I don’t know that much anyway so I figured she knew better than me but today I unfriended her for other reasons and was thinking about how that sort of irked me anyway and now I am just wondering how you feel about LGBTQ who push welcoming allies?

scenicroutes:

lol ok i’m gonna be controversial here

obviously, allies should never be prioritized over lgbtq people. but there is an important difference between the trevor project giving a statue to katy perry and a group of high school students in a rural town holding an ally week. and /nobody/ on this piece of shit website seems to want to acknowledge this difference.

another important reality no one wants to acknowledge: “ally” is very frequently a category used by young kids who are just learning about lgbtq issues and are questioning their sexuality or aren’t ready to come out of the closet yet

i first came to lgbtq rights activism at the age of seventeen under the label “ally.” i knew, even in my first gay-straight alliance meeting, that the label wasn’t completely honest but, god, given my abusive home life? given the fact that my friends at church were shunning me just for attending GSA meetings? “ally” was the easiest and simplest and safest identifier for me to use. 

when my high school GSA held an ally week, it wasn’t about patting straight people on the back for being decent human beings. it was about educating the 99.9% of the student body that didn’t come to GSA meetings and didn’t give a shit. it was about encouraging them to help us create a safer space for the handful of openly gay kids at our school. and it profoundly, deeply helped me to see that so many of my classmates and peers were receptive to this messaging and openly, actively supportive of the GSA’s purpose.

another thing? at my school, the GSA and ally week were both founded by one of the guidance counselors, who has two gay daughters. it did not originate with a straight person disconnected from the movement who wanted to score some feel-good brownie points. it started with a mother who wanted to improve her childrens’ lives by increasing the level of support around them.

like, there’s this weird presumption that “ally week” and the concept of a “straight ally” started with straight people. ally week is an initiative of GLSEN. “straight ally” is a term created and promoted by LGBT rights organized to increase public support and solidarity.

of course no one should get a medal for merely being an ally, and of course queer spaces shouldn’t be dominated by allies, and of course an LGBTQ person’s voice is always going to be more important in queer space than an ally’s, but this weird senseless ganging up on high school gay-straight alliances and ally weeks has g o t to stop.