Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

I intended to stay at the Marriot Library until 01:00.

I decided to take a break from work at 22:00, so I ventured to the Middle East collection.

I picked up a grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew.

I got really depressed.

I walked away. Pouting.

Good Lord, I’m pitiful.

Sorry, I’ve been busy. This semester is looking tough so far. However, I am learning some pretty nifty things. I look forward to relaying accquired knowledge to you in the near future. For now, let me discuss what I have been reading for structure of Arabic.

Triconsonantal verb morphemes in Semitic languages (in the pattern of C₁C₂C₃) C₁ and C₂ are not typically identical. In Arabic, for example, such roots don’t exist at all. An identical C₂ and C₃ is permissible, however, and occur regularly. So, we see roots like ∫kk ‘to doubt’ in Arabic, but not *∫∫k. The existence and non-existence of certain root patterns led Jospeh Greenberg (1950) to investigate all possible combinations. Here is a summary of what he found:

· In addition to prohibitions of geminates in C₁C₂ positions, homorganic consonants are prohibited. No Semitic language would have *bm- or *gk- (where both are velars) in addition to *kk-.

· In C₂C₃ positions, homorganic consonants are marked, though attested, but geminates are allowed. In Arabic, we find the root ∫kk, though not ∫gk.

· There is an exclusion, though not as rigorous as the preceding constraints, of C₁___C₃ homorganic consonants, including identical consonants. We do see a few instances of such roots. For example, qlq ‘to be confused’ in Arabic and prm ‘to tear’ in Syriac (where the first and third radical are labials).

Let’s see how well that stands up to the numbers Greenberg crunched (I am using the examples of labials) from a collection of 3775 Arabic roots [root (occurence)]:

C₁C₂

· bf- (0).

· bb- (0).

· bm- (0).

· ff- (0).

· fb- (0).

· fm- (0).

· mf- (0).

· mb- (0).

· mm- (0).

C₂C₃

· -bf (0).

· -bb (22) (geminates are allowed here).

· -bm (1).

· -ff (19).

· -fb (0).

· -fm (0).

· -mf (0).

· -mb (0).

· -mm (0).

C₁C₃

· b-f (0).

· b-b (1).

· b-m (5).

· f-f (1).

· f-b (0).

· f-m (11).

· m-f (0).

· m-b (0).

· m-m (0).

So…as al-Ghawalki said, “As regards Arabic formation, he most excellent are formed by letters which are distant in their points of formation.” Pretty nifty I think. Oh, and if this is hard to parse, keep in mind that I haven’t been sleeping much lately.

Greenberg, Joseph H. 1950. Patterning of Root Morphemes in Semitic. Word 3: 162-180.

Note: I had a substantial linguistic update to post, but hated the way it was formatted. Maybe later. I was also going to post some juicy gossip, but I am above that. How about some political commentary instead?

The following conversation took place between 17:00 and 18:00 on January 17, 2007.

Me: So, what’s this ‘I’ve got a secret’ thing.

Mom: We get up in front of the kids and ask them to guess our secret.

Me: What was your secret.

Mom: I was a Nixonette.

Me: ….No…no you weren’t.

Mom: Yes, I was.

Me: No, mom, you’re a Democrat.

Mom: Yeah, but the other option was George McGovern.

Me: …

Mom: I mean, party loyalty can only go so far.

/chuckle

I started Monday unable to find my class, only to learn that I had arrived two hours too early. Phonology was interesting today. The professor asked everybody’s name, except me. He asked me what I go by. I don’t know what to think of that. I am also praising my deity of choice that my structure of Arabic course isn’t filled with theoretical elitists and ignorant fools thinking they are getting an Arabic course.

Anyway, I am taking the following from Lyle Campbell’s book Historical Linguistics. Perhaps I find the change of Enlgish interesting, or perhaps I find the specific Biblical passage he chose to cite fitting, as it deals with language. Really, language change is inevitable.

Matthew 27:23

Modern English The New English Bible (1961)

Shortly afterwards the bystanders came up and said to Peter, “Surely, you are another of them; your accent gives you away.

Early Modern English King James Bible (1611)

And after a while came vnto him they that stood by, and saide to Peter, Surely thou also art of them, for thy speech bewrayeth thee.

Middle English Wycliff Bible (14^th Century)

And a litil after, thei that stooden camen, and seiden to Peter, treuli thou art of hem; for thi speche makith thee known.

Old English The West Saxon Gospels c. 1050

θa æfter lytlum fyrste genealæton θa ðe θær stodon, cwædon to petre. Soðlice θu eart of hym, θyn spræc θe gesweotolað

Note, the theta represents the what would be in Old English orthography ‘thorn.’ I can’t find that HTML entity. I would comment on changes, but I think the data speak for themselves.

Also, I am working on a new layout. How does white sound?

I start the Spring semester tomorrow morning at 08:30 with a class that, for all intents and purposes, I have taken four times previously under a variety titles. The course, Shi’ism, is taught by Prof. Michel Mazzaoui. At this point in his career, his courses, whether on modern Middle Eastern history or the ancient Near East, start in 570 AD with the birth of the prophet Mohammed and proceed along similar lines. In fact, I once took two of his courses simultaneously with identical midterms and finals. This will be fun. I will also start posting more linguistic updates as soon as the semester starts. I would have done so over the break, but nobody would be interested in my reading of Arabic grammars.

Previously on this blog, I have written about the carry-over of real-world prejudices and constraints into virtual worlds, particularly MMORPGs. I had intended to continue on that topic, but I decided to address another (related) issue: gender-bending. As a boy, I always wondered why my peers were so fascinated by the Tomb Raider game franchise. I never found it very enthralling. I was able to understand why female players loved it, with the protagonist being a strong, smart woman, but it took me much longer to realize that male players loved it because the same character had enormous breasts.

Nick Yee of the Daedalus Project reports that male players of MMOs are far more likely to play female characters than female players are to play male characters. In fact, some 50 % of female player characters are likely to be played by males on a standard World of Warcraft server (68 % on a PVP server). Yee cites several possible reasons why males are more likely to gender bend:

-Social gender boundaries more stringent in real-life for men, and in an anonymous space, men are more likely to explore gender roles.
-Female avatars receive more “freebies” and are treated “better” than male avatars.
-Male gender-bending is another form of dominating the female body.
-In PvP games, female avatars are perceived to be weaker and this might give the player a psychological edge against unsuspecting chauvinistic players.

To this I offer two other hypotheses. First, some players, particularly those with more vivid imaginations, live vicariously through their virtual avatars, affording them the opportunity to pretend there is a more awesome world than the real world. I would guess that these players are less likely to gender bend, and I imagine that most women would fall into this category, with a history of being below the so-called glass ceiling, which has a virtual representation as well. The second is along the line of Yee’s second point: some players want to look at something more appealing, so they gender bend. I would say that men are more likely fall into this category.

In my experience, I have generally assumed female player characters to be played by females, and males to be played by males. Gender bending in a game seems weird to me. In fact, I am more comfortable reading novels where the protagonist is an honorable male character, as I like to identify with the character. I can think of few books I’ve read where I identify with female characters. The same goes for games. When speaking to The Reverend about gender bending in games, he told me that his female character in Guild Wars was often given free uberleet gear and such. In fact, he thinks that may have been the initial reason why he was approached by our guild leader. His little brother said he played as a female because he would rather stare at the ass of a female avatar than a male one. He also played a troll, so… Anyway, I thought I would close with the two accounts from Daedalus:

The funniest experiment about ‘not being me’ was to play a female character. Strange how players were nice with me. They start conversations without reasons, gave me items, money or time. Some even died to save me. I guess a lot of MMORPG players are single men, that’s why. [M, Anarchy Online, 34]

I never realized how irritating it can be to have to put up with unwanted advances. [EverQuest, M, 38]

Note: A good summary of all of this, along with a discussion of possible confounds, can be found in this article.

I’m beginning to think English speakers think in terms of punctuation and try to apply punctuation to every situation and written language. I recall from an Arabic class some students having trouble with a text because of the lack of periods. One student remarked, ‘This sentence is nearly a page long.’ Mind you, modern written Arabic doesn’t utilize punctuation to nearly the same extent as English. In reality, that really long sentence was about 24 sentences, separated by rhetorical markers, conjunctions, etc. A period may be necessary to mark the end of a sentence, or at least an idea, in written English, which I think is important, but it isn’t a true linguistic device.

I have five more days left of my Winter break, and I am as bored as can be. I need something more productive to do to keep me sane. As a result of my lack of intellectual stimulation, I have had little to write about on this blog. Maybe I should become one of those local new analysis blogs when I’m not in school. Anyway, until I think of something more interesting, here is the run down of my New Year’s celebration:

My celebration for the new year consisted of tanking for the http://dan.thecentralnode.com”>Reverend as we went to visited an old associate, an associate neither of us care for, to meet the Reverend’s ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, who frankly looks a lot like the Reverend himself. We also got to watch them taste wine. After all, you can’t have fun without alcohol. Afterwards, we played Apples to Apples with friends of the Reverend’s younger brother. Such party animals are we.