Fugato

Ekki er alltaf auðratað
um afkima íslenskrar málfræði.
Í völundarhúsum veit ekki á gott að … beygja vitlaust.

Mér finnst ég heyra ógnvænlegan vængjaþyt afstæðishyggjudrekans Baals sem innan skamms steypir sér yfir mig og eldvarpar út úr sér skömmum og uppnefnum: “Språkpolisen! Hreintungufasisti!” En ég bara verð.

Framan á Blaðinu í dag:

„Ævi og ástir Sylvíu Nóttar“

Í fyrirsögn á forsíðu.

Jæja, þetta blað byggir þó ekki afkomu sína á lífshörmungum hinna ógæfusömu. Við hljótum þá að fyrirgefa flest annað. Og Blaðinu til veikburða varnar beygja flestir þetta svona á vefnum. Sennilega Sylvía Nótt líka. Meirihlutinn ræður, ekki satt Baal?

Blað, mér þykir enn vænt um þig. En láttu nú einhvern prófarkarlesa a.m.k. forsíðufyrirsagnirnar.

“The Deeper Meaning of Liff” presents, like I do here, words for commonly-known but hitherto unnamed concepts. It is less concerned with Latin/Greek etymology though.

I want words to exist for two common annoyances in computer usage. First:

senex

Latin for “old” (as in senile, senator)

tessera

a small tablet of wood, bone, or ivory used by the ancient Romans as a means of identification — the modern-day equivalents are passwords, PINs, etc.

a-mnesia

inability to remember; from amnēstos, “not remembered,” from mimnēskein “to recall,” from Indo-European base men- “to think, remember.”

⇒ senectesseramnesia

inability to remember an old password or PIN (because you haven’t used it in a while)

… and then the one that’s bugging me these days:

novus

new (as in novelty, innovation)

inertia

diseased or abnormal condition (as in neurosis, psychosis, narcosis)

⇒ novotesserinertia

the reluctance of your semiautonomous nervous system to start using your new password, causing you to mindlessly type your old one everytime, for days or weeks after changing it.

Now they do!

No doubt this is a completely incorrect way to patch together Latin and Greek stems. So sue me. :-)

Ofuríslenskað heiti fyrir blindraletur. Hér hefur Háfrónskuhreyfingunni orðið á í messunni dýrdeginu; þetta er enska stafrófið!

Fyrir tilviljun rakst ég á síðu um Töluorð og mælieiningar á kjarnyrtri íslensku.

Síðan reyndist vera hluti af stærra vefsvæði, aðsetri Háfrónskuhreyfingarinnar, sem leggur stund á „ofurmálhreinsun.“ Þar getur að líta skemmtilega orðalista á við Háfrónska hreinleikarýninn, og Kenningasmiðju þar sem meðal annars kemur fram íslenska nafnið á „molotov-cocktail“ — múspellsmilska!

Ég get ekki nógsamlega lýst því hversu þessi hraðlestur kætti mig; mun skoða þetta betur í betra tómi. Og vitanlega mun ég leggja mig fram um að nota þessi orð framvegis.

Vonandi veitir þetta þér svosem eins og skreppu eða lúkuþriðjung af gleði, eða fleygir þér nokkrar ruddur eða jafnvel arðurfar (a.m.k. nokkrar dyrgilstikur!) fram á við á menntaveginum.

Fjárinn. Nú verð ég glottandi eins og bjáni í allan dag.

“Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue.”

— David Brent, Wernham Hogg

The ability to accept being the statue is called “æðruleysi” in Icelandic. What is the English word for that? I can’t recall anything that fits it exactly.

There is dignity in being the statue.

A statue is able to hold its head up high when the guano strikes.

A statue will accept almost anything.

(Much like a doormat, come to think of it.)

Let’s have some of that. Next time the pigeon swoops in … stand perfectly still. Grin and bear it. You know what to be.

Æðruleysi or bust!

Edison’s phonograph. He may have slowed the pace of linguistic change.

A door just opened on a street –
    I, lost, was passing by –
An instant’s width of warmth disclosed,
    And wealth, and company.

The door as sudden shut, and I,
    I, lost, was passing by, –
Lost doubly, but by contrast most,
    Enlightening misery.

— “Contrast,” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Note that the rhyme indicates Emily’s pronunciation of “compan-ie” and “miser-ie”.

Occasionally poetr-ie reveals how languages must have been pronounced differently in the past (at least in the dialect of the poet).

But it seems likely to me that only a small portion of such pronunciation changes would happen to be revealed by rhymes. There may be other means of discovering them, but I can imagine that there might have been plenty of such changes, even in recent centuries, that we have no way of knowing about. Right until the invention of audio recording.

And it seems likely to me that that invention made all changes in pronunciation transparent — denying them the veil of time behind which they used to hide. Tending to prevent them.

Does this mean that the pace of language change (at least phonetic change) must have decreased strongly in the last century-and-a-half? Did we technologically freeze our languages? :)

When you roll a die, do you expect it to turn up three-and-a-half?

Hell no. But that still is the expected value of a die roll, I’m afraid.

What does that mean?

Here’s what it means. If you roll that die often enough, you’ll get 1 one sixth of the time, and 2 one sixth of the time, etc. Add those up and you get (1+2+3+4+5+6) / 6 = 3.5 and that’s what mathematics calls the expected value, or expectation (Icelandic: “væntigildið,” or “vænta gildið”) of something random.

That makes no sense, until the mathematician explains that he really means the expected average value. If you keep rolling that die until the sound of it drives you bonkers, writing down each result you get, then you should expect your average to be pretty close to three-and-a-half.

So on any one roll of a die, whatever you expect, you shouldn’t expect to get the expected value. That would be pretty unexpected.

[Incidentally, when you roll a pair of dice, you should expect to get the expected value, which is 7. That's because for a pair of dice, the expected value is both (a) actually possible, and (b) the most probable one. 6 and 8 are a little less likely, 5 and 9 still less likely, and so forth. 2 and 12 are really unlikely. If you get to gamble on a pair of dice with even odds, bet on 7 every time. Trust me on this.]

The Tower of Babel, by a 16th-century Flemish painter named Pieter Brueghel the Elder

My point? Ok, this posting is not really about mathematics. It is about language.

The term “expected value” means a slightly different thing in mathematical English than it might mean in other dialects of English.

More generally, a mathematical background changes a person’s use of language ever-so-slightly.

Still more generally, language differs with background. Culture. Upbringing. Education. Individual temperament. The way you woke up that morning. Language differs with a lot of factors. In some sense, no two people speak quite the same language.

If you do not keep this in mind when talking to someone, you will misunderstand them. Even if you do keep it in mind, you will still misunderstand them a bit. It’s a basic human function; we breathe, eat, urinate, copulate, and misunderstand.

We do have this jolly nice invention, language, for transferring ideas and concepts and feelings from one mind to another by way of speech (and writing), and that’s pretty cool, but it’s far from perfect. We do a fair job of it for simple things (“pass me the raita please”), but for anything more complex or more important (“I like you”), the message often does not get across in quite the way it was intended.

In a restaurant today, my father called for the attention of the waitress with a chipper “Fröken!” (Miss!) and I gently explained that nowadays a lot of Icelanders in service jobs find that appellation offensive. How was he supposed to know? It was the polite way to call for attention when he was growing up. Even my brother-in-law, hardly even older than me, didn’t know. But I’ve heard several people in service jobs make it pretty clear that in their language, it is plain rude.

Ask two people to define exactly what they mean by a word, and their definitions will differ. Find several people coming out of a meeting and ask them what went on, and their responses will vary, sometimes wildly, even though they all heard the exact same words spoken in there.

When someone’s attitude or opinions or reactions completely fail to meet your, hm, expectations, you may find it useful to consider the difference between their frame of reference and yours.

You might not be speaking quite the same language.

… og fjandinn hirði rest

Kjörorð UMFÍ er „Íslandi allt.“ Skógar hafa verið ræktaðir og íþróttaafrek unnin með þessari brýningu. Ég vissi það ekki fyrr en ég fór að leita á netinu að dæmum um notkun orðasambandsins, eftir að ég hafði séð það í lokin á nafnlausum textamolum á spjallsíðum á netinu.

Téður frasi fer nefnilega í taugarnar á mér.

Gott og vel, þetta er sennilega voða fögur tjáning á ættjarðarást … en líklega fer þá bara ættjarðarást í taugarnar á mér líka. Af því að ættjarðarástinni fylgir það yfirleitt að elska skuli aðrar jarðir síður (og þá er stutt í að líta aðrar þjóðir hornauga), og „Íslandi allt“ felur í sér að önnur lönd eigi helst að hljóta ekkert meira en dreggjarnar.

Auðvitað er þetta vitleysa í mér. „Íslandi allt “ er vitanlega hugsað sem hvatningarorð til að gera sitt besta, sisvona af greiðvikni við föðurlandið, „þú skalt vinna Íslandi allt,“ þ.e. allt þitt. Það er ekki átt við að öll heimsins gæði eigi Ísland skilið fremur en aðrir. Og ég leitaði í gegnum allar vísanir sem vefréttin Google gaf mér á notkun þessa orðasambands, og hvergi sá ég það notað í þessum ljóta anda sem ég túlkaði það í. Hí á mig.

Ég er kannski bara svona viðkvæmur fyrir allri „us-and-them“ hugsun. Ég er ofsalega lítið gefinn fyrir þann tendens mannfólks að draga sig í flokka, „þessa ætla ég að láta mér annt um,“ og í skásta falli skítt með hina. Þetta kjörorð UMFÍ, sem og ættjarðarástarhjal margra, minnir mig því miður á þann hugsunarhátt. Það er kannski bara eitthvað sem ég þarf að láta rjátlast af mér.

Þekktasta vefrétt í heimi

Sko, ég var sisvona að hugsa. Um leitarvélar á netinu, þ.e. Google og allar hinar sem langar að vera eins góðar og Google.

Þær safna saman öllu mögulegu efni á netinu og flokka það. Svona hálfgert eins og að smala í réttir.

Og þær má spyrja um allan skrattann sem vita þarf, svona eins og prestarnir spurðu í Delfí til forna.

Mætti þá ekki kalla þær … vefréttir?