Hello fellow Linguaphiles,

I was told that the Armenian for thank you was shnorhakalutyun (transcribed), and that perhaps it was a loanword or something like that. Does anyone know its etymology and what it means literally in the language it was presumably borrowed from?

Not wishing to affront the chaste sensibilities of this community, I have confined my comments on the draft OED entry for the verb felch to this posting on my blog. Your comments and inquiries are most welcome there.

Hisae and I will board a bullet train to Osaka on Wednesday and spend three weeks at points south, mostly Kansai, so our Tokyo time is drawing to a close, alas. Most of the precious substance of the last three weeks has barely made it into these pages; the research I've been doing for the Aftergold show, the daily meetings I've had with friends, old and new.



Last night's Unreliable Tour Guide performance at NOW IDeA was shamanic fun; I turned artist Yusuke Mashiba's (very nice, outsider-ish) ink drawings into the gods of a parallel universe, and also interviewed the artist, posing questions like: "Would I find a black carton of black milk in your fridge?" and "Are you jealous of cockroaches?"



Another high point came on Saturday night, when we went to see excellent absurdist theatre group Crack Iron Albatrossoket at SuperDeluxe. Their piece, entitled Yojohan Oasis Rocket, ended with a blistering live performance from Oorutaichi, whose set with choreographer-dancer Masako Yasumoto in the Spectacle in the Farm video projected last week at Vacant was one of the most thrilling and inspiring things I've ever seen.

For me, the filament of life burns more brightly and beautifully in Tokyo than anywhere else; the question almost everybody asks me is: "Why not live here?" I've run out of reasons, so I'll just say (an Albatrossoket motto) BECAUSE WE ARE BLOK HEADS!

Hi there,

I need help please - I need to call somebody in Japan. Can you please translate the following into romanji, please? I can only read hiragana/katakana, not kanji.

Thanks so much in advance!!

Here goes:

1. Sorry that I have to call you this early.

2. Has the parcel I sent arrived?

3. Is Koji in?

4. I tried to call him, but he didn't pick up his phone.

5. I really, really need to talk to him. Please help me.

Those would be all. Thanks so much once again!

I realize that < ll > is pronounced differently in different countries where Spanish is spoken. I'm wondering whether -- within any given dialect -- it is always pronounced the same, no matter where it is in a word, or whether even within a given dialect < ll > might be pronounced differently from word to word (ie if the ll in 'calle' might be pronounced differently than the ll in 'llueve').

I'm traveling to (Buenos Aires) Argentina soon so I'm most curious about that dialect, but any information would be great.

Thanks in advance! Happy holidays!

 I've been studying Mandarin Chinese for two and a half years now through the Integrated Chinese series, but I don't feel as if I'm progressing very quickly in the language. I feel as if, after all this time, I should be able to read a newspaper article and be able to get at least the gist of it, but here my skills are stuck in recognizing only the characters every now and then and not actually understanding what's being said.

Does anyone have any tips on how to progress more quickly? Any recommendations for learning materials, perhaps?

Hello,

I would like to change my username however, when I go to Admin>Users and Groups, the username is greyed out. I believe I'll have to use the terminal for this and I'm not well-versed but I believe I can still do it.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Okay, so here's a recurring problem I've had with the audio on Karmic 64-bit Ubuntu for the past month or so:

Basically, when playing some games in Wine, but also when watching video using XBMC and such, my audio will cut out. It'll ramp up to 100% CPU and just sit there churning. The sound becomes popping and crackling, not actually giving any stable sound whatsoever. Originally I figured that I'd have to kill and restart the PulseAudio server to get it to work, but now I've discovered, strangely enough, that going to the Sound Preferences menu, selecting a different hardware output and switching back to to 4.1 surround that I use will clear it right up.

Any idea what happened to PulseAudio to cause that? I've even gone to the PulseAudio repos to ugrade to the latest version today, but nothing works.

It's causing a lot of problems for games in wine. Previously, I'd have no problem alt-tabbing out, or going to my second monitor to do what-have-you, but now doing anything that defocuses from the game will cause the audio to gam up like that. I can't figure it out.

This seems to be happening exclusively with Wine games and XBMC, the former of which are also being really stuttery with graphics. I don't know why.

Anyway, most people's usual advice is "remove pulseaudio," but Karmic seems to have made that a really, really sketchy process and I don't want to go mucking about and ruining the audio that DOES work.

Advice? Logs I can look at/post?

This show will be up at The Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts until January 3rd, so catch it now.

The greater Tokyo area has just under 36 million people living in it; it's still the world's most populous metropolitan area. If this monster of cities runs remarkably smoothly most of the time, and even feels like a rather relaxing place, it's because of the particular, even peculiar, habitus of presence which prevails here. Tokyo people are very good at being absent without leaving.



Tokyo's inhabitants, especially in their transitions on public transport, maintain a minimum degree of presence. Crushed against each other or spread out on seats, with lowered eyes and the virtual escape-environments of books, newspapers and electronic gadgets, they're there but not there. They're (it's Howard Devoto's phrase) absent without leaving.

A certain amount of discretion and self-minimisation exists amongst commuters all over the world, of course. But the Japanese are more discreet, and minimise themselves more politely and considerately than anyone else I know. Even their houses seem to avert their gaze; you can pass down a heavily-built Tokyo street with the sense of being completely unobserved, thanks to the frosted glass in the windows, just as you can sit in a crowded train carriage and not find a single eye meeting yours. It can feel uncanny at times, like being an invisible man. Most of the time it's very reassuring, though. You soon miss it in other cities.



Adjectives I'd use to describe this minimised public presence: discreet, considerate, polite, apologetic, cold, withdrawn, inward, socialised, repressed. And there we begin to hit on an interesting paradox: you withdraw into yourself in the interests of the collectivity. Your absence is highly social, even when it resembles a semi-autistic withdrawal. You turn inward to facilitate outward smoothness. You make yourself ghostlike out of courtesy to other people, who do the same.

When you get to your destination, of course, the sublimation and repression can stop. You can suddenly elevate your presence, like the glum silent queuer finally reaching the nightclub, checking his coat, greeting his friends, ordering a drink. What's the maximum degree of presence? Perhaps being a celebrity would represent that: a celeb is a super-individual, someone whose mere presence makes our day, our month and our year. Quick, take a photo! The celeb is being asked his view on this and that, and listened to respectfully. The celeb has engineered his life so that there's no dead time, no self-repression. Like a Romantic poet, we imagine his life filled with moments of maximal intensity. We wish our lives were like that.



The other person like that, weirdly enough, is the madman or homeless person, who lives completely in the moment because he uses the spaces of transition as his places of residence. The street or the train is the homeless person's destination; no need to sublimate, save up intensity for later. This is it; grumble, chatter, joust, laugh, be yourself, right here on the street, right here on the train! It doesn't matter! You're going nowhere! You're mad and you're homeless! The obligation to be self-effacing and considerate doesn't apply to you! Be intense! Live in the moment! Make every second count!



For the rest of us, though, self-repression is a daily fact of life. Especially in conditions of urban density; we could say that density and intensity are at odds. The more dense the urban conditions, the less intense we want people to be as they transition through public space, the more ghostlike we require each other to be. Don't talk on your cellphone! I know it makes you feel like a celebrity, feel more alive and intense, but please don't do it! What if we were all celebrities in this carriage? What if all 36 million of us in this city were super-intense individuals at every moment! What a nightmare! Let's all stay ghosts, please, at least until we reach our destination!



Japan being Japan, of course, has developed aesthetics of non-presence, turning something negative into something positive with its own etiquette and its own subtle beauty, and giving non-presence a sort of presence. Iki describes something muted, sombre, restrained, apparently-unselfconscious, half turned-away, "an aesthetics of the back, of the nape of the neck. It can't be face-to-face. It's an aesthetic of obliqueness and peripheries which avoids focus and despises intellectual analysis". A woman whose seductiveness has an iki quality would, paradoxically, turn her turning-away towards you as she dropped her gaze and revealed her back, her shoulder, the nape of her neck. An absence becomes a presence; it's something I see enacted by women on Tokyo trains every day.

A related aesthetic might be Naoto Fukusawa's idea of the super normal; self-effacing, slightly bland goods that blend comfortably with others are better than loud, flashy, unique, individualistic goods. "Super normal design means design which, instead of trying to stand out by making a statement or being "stimulating", blends into the background, becoming unobtrusive but indispensable."



You might seek maximum intensity in an affair with a lover, perhaps, but smooth, unobtrusive consideration in a longterm relationship with a spouse; the perfect spousal togetherness might approach a discreet, doubled aloneness, whereas the perfect affair intensity would be the unbearable tangle of two celebrities, two Romantic poets, or two mad homeless people.

At the tragic end of intensity is the individual who becomes intolerable when his quirks get amplified by too much attention: "everyone loves you until they know you," as John Lydon sang. At the tragic end of self-effacing consideration is the self which disappears and can't come back, even when the destination-requiring-presence is reached. So we get the otaku, unable to emerge from the pages of his manga, or the hikikomori, who can't even leave home in the first place, and who's taken consideration to its ultimate degree of absence: that barricaded room where the self both disappears from the world and becomes the world.

Momus appears tonight between 6 and 8pm as The Unreliable Tour Guide at Now Idea, Omote Sando.

I'm hoping this hasn't been asked before (this is my first post to this community, and I'm a little nervous,) but does anyone here know the difference between the German verbs 'zerbrechen' and 'brechen' (I'm not sure but I think I've seen this with zerfallen and fallen as well)?

In doing some informal rehearsing the other day, we were all saying things similar to this:

"First I say, 'In the name of our Lord, I, gordoom, promise that I will one day blah blah blah, by the faith that is in me.' And then you say, 'In the name of our Lord, I, dustthouart, in the form and manner wherein blah blah blah, by the faith that is in me.' Then the priest..."

Also found in this example from the BBC miniseries version of Pride and Prejudice:
Mrs. Bennet: "'My dear friend,' there now! 'Dine with Louisa and me today... la-di-da, la-di-da, la-di-da... as the gentlemen are to dine with the officers.' - Oh, that's unlucky! Still you must go and make what you can out of it."

Another use, commonly encountered in linguistic pursuits, is in filler for templates such as... actually I can't think of any in English right this moment, but I can think of some in Chinese, such as 以什麼什麼為主. In writing this would usually be 以......為主. Which is "take... as primary" literally, and would be said aloud as "take what what as primary." In English I would say "something something" for this kind of filler. In both languages, the "what what" and "something something" are said quickly and kind of blur together.

Another one of these "speech replacement words" in English is "yadda yadda yadda", from (I assume) Yiddish.

1. Is there an actual linguistic term for this phenomenon?
2. What words or phrases do people use in other languages for this purpose?

OK, I've been feeling kind of dumb about this, and wondering if I'm alone: until this year I had never heard that any Christians had a problem with using "X-mas" as opposed to "Christmas". Apparently it is seen as "taking Christ out of Christmas".

Am I alone in my cluelessness? Or are there places where it's not an issue? One explanation I read was that it only became a problem as fewer and fewer people were taught classical languages at school, but that's been the case for decades, so I'm not sure why it would suddenly be a big deal in the last ten years or so. Which is apparently the case, though like I said, it's news to me.

?




ETA: I should add that I do know that X-mas has been used for centuries, and that X is the symbol for the Greek letter Chi, first letter of Christ's name. What I was asking had more to do with how long it's been considered offensive and anti-Christian, presumably by people who have no idea that the X actually refers to Christ.

On Christmas morning, the local robins and mockingbirds discovered the deciduous holly I planted this summer, and feasted upon its red berries until there were none left.

I'm hoping you guys will be able to help. I'm using Karmic and decided to try my webcam again(it kept freezing the entire system back in Intrepid). Good news! It worked! System is not freezing, I seem to be getting video.

But my problem. The sound isn't working. When I switch to pulse audio it works. Kinda. In a breaking up I can barely hear anything sort of way. I'm not quite sure what I'm doing wrong. I know the webcam works(I have a dual boot in XP).

Thanks for any help guys! I'd love to be able to get my webcam working in linux.

Webcam is a logitech btw, I think its a quickcam. Is there some other package I should be grabbing from synaptic that will make the audio/mic work?
Thanks again.

Edit: Now for reasons unknown I'm not getting sound at all on skype. And whenever I change the mic's sound preference from low to medium it resets back to low.

What's the dumbest/newbest thing you've ever done to your system?

When I was very new to Linux, I rm -rf'd an important directory tree. I think it was /usr.

More recently, I used usermod -G without -a. On the only account that could sudo. Fortunately, I had a recovery CD handy.

I have an 8 gig USB stick that has suddenly gone into "Read Only" mode and I can't save or copy anything to it currently. This just won't do as it holds all my every day files on it.

What in the world? How did this happen and how do I change it? Just going into properties from the desktop doesn't show anything, so is there something I can do from the command prompt?

I have a feeling it's something ridiculously simple, but I can't figure out just what that is.

ETA:
Fixed!!

     Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates them - and good wishes to all the rest!
There's something I have been thinking of recently and I wonder if you could please help me find the right answer. Over the past years, I've noticed that characters in many English/American movies (or literature) are called Mr./Mrs., which is followed by the first letter of their name, often in a humorous way, for example in the movie 1776::
    T. Jefferson: "But I burn, Mr. A!"
    J. Adams: "So do I, Mr. J!"
Also, I noticed it also appears when a one character harbours romantical feelings for another one, such as Ms. Lovett who would sometimes call Todd Sweeney "Mr.T".
    Such form of address is certainly not popular in my native language (Czech) and even seems slightly weird to me, yet I really find it interesting, so can anybody please tell me a bit more about it? Are there more situations when you use it? Does it have a history? Does its origin come from some particular book or something else? Thanks! 

a question for commuters using regularly the underground (the tube, subway) in the UK, the US, Canada and other English-speaking countries. I wonder if there is a common question you'd use when travelling on a crowded train to find out if the person/people who is/are closer to the doors is/are going to leave the train at the next station or otherwise let you through? Can you think of any? Thanks in advance!

EDIT: if you have something to say about other means of transport (buses, trams, etc.), go ahead.

The etymology of 'yule' is said to be obscure. Any interesting theories on the origins of this term?

Квебекская певица Мари-Мишель Дерозье исполняет русскую новогоднюю песенку вместе с Ансамблем песни и пляски Российской армии. Запись 2002 года. Теперь эту песню можно часто слышать в Квебеке на Рождество.



Marie-Michèle Desrosiers сhante avec le Chœur de l'Armée rouge la chanson russe.

S`il vous plaît, aidez-moi dans la transcription de cette chanson! ( Les paroles à corriger et compléter )

Hello, all! I just got into an argument about whether or not "pleaded" is a word and was ganged up on so badly that I need to find an answer!

Earlier, a few people and I were sitting around and the claim was made that "pleaded" is not a word. So, I figured I would look "plead" up in the dictionary, and sure enough "pleaded" is an accepted form of "plead." Somehow, it being in the dictionary was not good enough for these people!

I just read here that "pleaded" is the preferred form, however WikiAnswers is definitely not how I am going to resolve this argument.

What I am looking for is some sort of peer reviewed explanation for why and how "pleaded" became/is a word (because...the dictionary isn't good enough...?)

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thank you!

I needed to download some pictures that my Mom took on her digital camera today. She has a Canon Power Shot SD 780.

Did some quick googling to learn that Debian has a command-line program that can be used, and apparently supports a very large range of digital cameras: gphoto2
***
Connected my mom's camera via usb cable to my workstation.
Next did:
sudo aptitude install gphoto2

Then created a directory on my filesystem
robert@pip:~/cameraPictures/mom mkdir _2009-12-25

Then cd'd to the directory. In the directory, ran this command:
gphoto2 -P

This command downloads _all_ the photos from the camera to the directory where you executed the command.
***
Just wanted to share this quick way to get photos, in case you were like me :)
***
Happy Holidays Everyone!

Japan is a great place for a tourist to indulge in visions of alternative societies. Not only is Japan actually different in many ways from the society the tourist was brought up in, but his simple incompetence, incomprehension and sheer delirium, as he walks around Japan, will create all sorts of fertile semantic gaps which -- if no-one is on hand to explain them -- he'll fill using his imagination. His expectation of difference will make him create it.



Yesterday I was queuing for bread at a bakery on the busy plaza that leads up to Ebisu station. Perhaps the fact that it felt more like an airport than a bakery led to the vision that followed. Gazing at a sign showing the prices of different types of bread, I saw two prices. It was probably just two sizes of bread, but for a second I thought it said "WE SELL" for one price and "WE BUY" for another. I imagined, in other words, that this was a bread exchange.



From that simple "mistake" I suddenly extrapolated an alternative society, one which I find rather intriguing: a WE BUY / WE SELL, convenience/exchange, most-consumerist/post-consumerist society in which the ratio between those two prices approaches 1:1.

Clearly, elements of this society are already falling into place, and not just in Japan. Money exchanges at airports buy and sell currency. More and more cash machines will allow you to deposit as well as withdraw cash. People with solar panels on their roofs can increasingly feed excess power they generate back into the grid, and get paid for it by power companies. The technology will soon be cheap enough to make this "total power" profitable to generate at home. Who knows, people's roofs could one day displace power stations the way distributed computing and the web have displaced mainframes.



There are other examples of this eco-efficient "exchange society" taking shape. There are many secondhand clothes shops now (I think of Beacon's Closet in Brooklyn, for instance) where you have a check in counter that receives, appraises and buys clothes customers bring in, and a check out counter where customers buy clothes they didn't bring. And there's the revolution wrought by eBay, of course, and other online buying and selling mechanisms.

It gets particularly interesting when this exchange culture is blended with convenience culture, and we get a 24/7 exchange-convenience culture. For instance, say I wake up in the middle of the night thirsty. I have no cash, but I have some aluminium drinks cans I've been collecting in a bag. I take them to the can recycling machine, which gives me enough cash to buy a new drink from the drinks machine nearby. Obviously it's going to take ten or more empty cans to get the price of one full one, but it's nice to imagine ways to get that ratio lower (government subsidy to encourage the IN/OUT society, perhaps?). Achieving 1:1 would be a utopian goal, the eco-economic equivalent of building a perpetual motion machine.



Japan's convenience culture does make it a good place to entertain such visions; one of the premises of the Aftergold show I'm putting together is that the most advanced consumer society is where we're likely to see "the thing after consumerism" taking shape. The combini below my apartment here is open 24/7, 365 days a year. Most shops in Japan seem to be open at incredible times; as a European I don't at all take it for granted that I can get parts for a broken bike late on a Sunday evening, but that's exactly what we did last Sunday at about 8pm, heading to a blazing, crowded bike shop in Nishi-Shinjuku.



Japan is a country with limited natural resources, so it uses materials carefully and recycles conscientiously. Trash is graded and separated very strictly in the home. There's also a flourishing secondhand market. Shimokita has a strong Dorama-based secondhand culture, and the whole of Koenji seems to be selling used goods (including, of course, our good friends the Shiroto No Ran or "amateur revolution" crew). Bigger concerns like Book Off sell secondhand goods too. Even out in the slick Italianate shopping mall Venus Fort in Odaiba, Hisae and I found a huge and excellent secondhand clothes store (Furugi Hypermarket) selling immaculately clean clothes; the Japanese obsession with cleanliness makes secondhand here a much more pleasant -- and much less smelly -- experience than it can be in the West. And something of the same spirit infuses a place like Utrecht, which sells handmade books brought in by the artists themselves.



The unique structure of Japanese business also encourages this "amateur revolution" angle (and the exchange society I'm outlining is clearly one in which the distinction between amateur and professional gets dissolved). Even big companies like Toyota tend to employ hundreds of small household suppliers, who produce components to very high standards in little workshops on the ground floor, often, of family houses. So even companies that look vast and monolithic tend to be comprised, on closer inspection -- like a gigantic halftoned photograph -- of big numbers of small, almost amateur, suppliers.



Obviously, quality control would be a big issue in this convenience/exchange culture, especially when it comes to food (or, you know, piloting jet planes; could you get a cheaper ticket if you flew the plane for a while?). There are overlaps with my idea (most recently referenced in decade's-end music retrospectives in The Guardian by Simon Reynolds and Alexis Petridis) about everyone being famous, in the future, for fifteen people; this is very much a long-tail system of production, one which breaks down not just the distinction between amateur and professional, but also the distinctions between producer and consumer, between new and secondhand, between consuming and recycling, and between big and small-scale production.

Are any economists heralding this sort of production system at the moment? Are any political parties taking steps towards it, or putting it into their manifestos? They should be.