So here are some of today's little snippets
of discovery:
I. Gullah
While I was attempting to do my homework
this afternoon and not get distracted by Facebook, I remembered this TV show from when I was a
little kid called "Gullah Gullah Island." I have no idea why it popped into
my head. Probably because one of the characters was a giant yellow tadpole and
I was looking for some color to cheer me up in this dreary gray weather.
A scene from the TV show "Gullah Gullah Island"
Anyway, "Gullah" made made me
remember that it's also a language and the name of a people, and I wandered over to YouTube (that other
great distractifier) to find this cool video explaining a short history of the
Gullah language and culture.
If your attention span is even shorter than
mine – which would be amazing, because I've timed my average Internet attention
span, and it's a little shorter than a minute and 30 seconds for watching a
video – and you don't want to click on the YouTube link above, here's a blurb
from our friend Wikipedia:
Gullah (also called Sea Island Creole
English and Geechee) is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also
called "Geechees" within the community), an African-American
population living on the Sea Islands and in the coastal region of the US states
of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and northeast Florida. Dialects of
essentially the same language are spoken in the Bahamas.
A cool word form the Gullah language is binyah which means a member of the Gullah community, in addition to "been here" as in "I've been here a long time" (and also the name of the giant yellow tadpole in the TV show; his name is Binyah Binyah).
I wish I could compile an
ethnography of all the different English dialects. Can anyone suggest a good book?
II. Carnal
Courtesy of a classmate who explained this interesting slang word, I learned that carnal in Mexican Spanish (and maybe other Spanishes?) means "brother," but also like "bro" and perhaps "homie" as well.
It's interesting because carne
means "meat" so in a sense you are saying "meat brother" or
"brother of the flesh."
For the feminine, it's carnala.
I came across this bit of slang in this El
País article about speed racers in Mexico City.
III. Sumab****
Today in my class "Fundamentals of Translation," one of my classmates, this adorable elderly Korean lady whom I wish was my grandma, was giving a presentation. She mentioned how in Korean, there are maybe 5 or 6 ways to address someone (and I thought Spanish and Arabic were hard!), depending on the age and status of the person you are talking to.
I asked her if, because it seemed there is this element of "politeness" in Korean, if there were not many curse words. She said there definitely are a lot of curse words in Korean, but that often, people will just use English curse words, except that they're pronounced with a Korean accent so you might not understand what someone is saying anyway! For example, "son of a b****" would become "summabi..." or "summabuh..." (with the last syllable trailing off into a fade; at least, that's how it sounded to me when she gave the example).
So take that! English purists. English is changing whether you like it or not. That's "languolution" for ya.
