Gasolina o Quesadilla?

I've been thinking about how great it would be if there were a version of this song "Gasolina" by Daddy Yankee where instead of "gasolina" they said something like, "quesadilla." Here's the video:



The chorus goes like this:
Daddy Yankee: A ella le gusta la gasolina (She likes that gasoline)
Girls: Dáme más gasolina (Give me more gasoline)
Daddy Yankee: Como le encanta la gasolina (Oh how she loves that gasoline)
Repeat

I think it would be a lot funnier if every "gasolina" were replaced with "quesadilla." But then I realized that there is actually a really long list of femenine nouns that would also work pretty well:

• sopapilla: a delicious fried doughy dessert item.
• hamburguesa: hamburger.
• carne asada: roast beef.
• papas fritas: french fries.
• papas frias: cold potatos.
• cocaína: cocaine.
• frutas y verduras: fruits and vegetables.
• casa blanca: white house.
• aceituna: stuffed olive.
• librería: bookstore.
• salsa verde: green sauce.
• mini-falda: mini-skirt.
• zanahoria: carrot.
• calabaza: pumpkin
• and the list goes on and on and on...

What would be your preferred replacement?

In other news, I converted my bike to a fixed gear about two weeks ago and I LOVE IT! Not only does my bike look cooler/cleaner/sleeker, but it also weighs less and is in some ways actually easier to ride than before. In most situations you really don't need to use the brakes because pedal-braking is sufficient. You can really only brake as fast as you would normally be able to accelerate though (which is not very fast), so sometimes regular brakes are still necessary; so I think that anyone who has a fixie without a front brake is plain crazy. I think my favorite thing about the fixie coversion, however, is that the thing is practically silent going down the road. With no derailers to thread the chain through, it is just so quiet! It is a really neat sensation. Hopefully someday soon I'll get a picture of it post-conversion. I suppose the only downside to it is that it makes me feel more smug and superior to other cyclists when I pass them on my superior bicycle. That and steep hills are hard to get up.

What else? Well, classes are going well, work is okay... yeah, I guess that's it.

Some Fun New Words

A couple weeks ago in my Study of Words class we learned about blending, a linguistic term for when people take parts of separate words and blend them together to form a new word. In class we looked at this list of new humorous blendings sent in by readers of the Washington Post.

The Washington Post asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are the winners:

1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realise it was your money to start with.

2. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

3. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

4. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

5. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

6. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

7. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

8. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

9. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido: All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.

And the pick of the literature

18. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an a**hole.

Here's the link where I got them from: http://www.psychicsahar.com/artman/publish/article_121.shtml

No one ain't never done did it

Looking at stories on NPR today, I came across this lovely sentence in a summary of a story about two guys who are trekking to the North Pole solo:

No one has done reached the North Pole during the brutal months of eternal night with no airdrops of food and no pre-arranged rest stops.

I'm no grammarian or anything, but to see the NPR intellectuals write, "No one has done reached," I thought was humorous indeed.

Chinese Tidbits

Engrish.com is a website that catalogs and collects funny English usage from around the world, either on signs, or on clothing, or wherever. As English has grown in importance over the decades, so has its cool-factor, and now in many parts of the world people like wearing clothing with English written on it just because it looks cool. It is similar to how in this country people often get tattoos or wear shirts with Chinese characters, just because they look cool. I agree, they do look cool, but we mess up the Chinese just as much as they mess up the English. There was a story on NPR today about a Chinese American guy who has started a blog about botched Chinese tattoos he has seen in the United States. So for anyone who has ever wondered if Chinese and Japanese people laugh at the Chinese characters they come across here, the answer is yes.

Whorish English

I'm at school studying for my Language in US Society final exam and came across this humorous mental image in my notes about the history of English:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words, on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
- James Nicoll

Yeah, funny image. Well, back to studying. Last final! yay!

Chinese in Public Schools

ABC News Article - "As China Grows, More U.S. Schools Teach Mandarin"

My first reaction to this article was, "that's awesome!" Foreign language education in this country is woefully undervalued and as a result Americans are some of the most chronically monolingual people in the world, so ANY news about more foreign language education in public schools should be good news. But the fact that Chinese is making it into more pubic schools and that some would even REQUIRE it is pretty cool.

But then my second thought was, "damn, that means more competition." Not very many Americans learn Chinese which means that I am in kind of an exclusive group (and a smaller hiring pool!). But if kids in Massachusets are learning Chinese from kindergarten, how will I be able to compete?! Luckily I am more or less ahead of the curve, so by the time those little snotheads finish college and move out into the big bad world, I will already be a veteran and hopefully will have learned another language or two by then. Mwahahah!

So I say, Let them learn Chinese if they must.

Majorly Linguistic

I have been interested in languages for almost as long as I can remember and have thought about studying Linguistics since I began my college search way back as a senior in high school (wow, I'm starting to feel old already). Despite my interest in linguistics, I decided to make International Affairs my second major instead of linguistics. At the time I thought international affairs seemed more practical.

Then while I was in China I started thinking that I don't really even like international affairs and that I should switch it to linguistics when I got back. Well once I got back, low and behold I had already earned too many credits toward international affairs to really be able to justify dropping that major, and so I resigned myself to not studying linguistics.

But then I started looking at the requirements for linguistics and realized that by delaying my graduation only one semester (graduate in December 2006 instead of May 2006), I should theoretically be able to finish my international affairs AND add a linguistics major (and of course there is Chinese which is already finished). So I made an appointment with my advisor to see if she thought it was feasible, and she thinks it is. So today I added my third major, linguistics!

In order to finish both the international affairs and linguistics majors by December, I am going to have to take full course-loads both semesters and maybe even an online course or too, but I am really excited about getting a third major in something that I think will be really interesting to me. And to do it all in only 9 semesters when plenty of people take more than that to do just one or two majors will be cool.

Other good news, it snowed the other day and it is snowing pretty hard out right now too. I love it!

Beijing 2008 Olympic Mascots

http://en.beijing2008.com/37/03/column211990337.shtml

Who's your favorite of the five Beijing 2008 Olympic Mascots? I think I like Yingying (the orange one). REally, I don't like any of them though. It seems like kind of a dumb choice of mascot. They seem kind of like Power Ranger Pikachus or something which seems more Japanese to me than Chinese, and the Chinese hate the Japanese, so I don't know why they would want to invoke such images. It is also pretty cheesy. When you add all five of the mascots names together and divde by two (look at just the first syllable in their two-syllable names), you get "Beijing Welcomes You" in Chinese (as if they were named Beibei Jingjing Welwel Comescomes Youyou). Kinda really stupid if you ask me. I personally think they should've chosen a killer panda ninja with bloody teeth that uses chopsticks as its weapon as the mascot. Yeah, that would be WAY cooler!! Although, I guess that would still be pretty Japanese-y with the ninja stuff and all... but at least it wouldn't be so lame

European English

First of all, you should still read my previous entry and vote for a language if you haven't already.

I found this on the online discussion board for my World Language Policy linguistics class and I thought it was pretty funny. I don't know how true it is though.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Euro-English, don't drop your German just yet!

The European Commission has just announced an
agreement whereby English will be the official
language of the European Union rather than German,
which was the other possibility. As part of the
negotiations, the British Government conceded that
English spelling had some room for improvement and has
accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become
known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c".
Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with
joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k".
This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have
one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond
year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with
"f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling
kan be expekted to reach the stage where more
komplikated changes are possible. Governments will
enkourage the removal of double letters which have
always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil
agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the
languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as
replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from
vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil
hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl
or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu
understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil
finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be
speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.


- Author unknown

Poll

I was at Barnes & Noble yesterday killing time before going to see a free Spanish movie on campus. As always, I gravitated directly to the foreign language section. With 3+ years of Chinese under my belt and because I am not taking any language classes next semester (for the first time in SEVEN years!), I am thinking it's about time to start a new language. I was looking through all the books they had there and since I think all languages are pretty much equally awesome, I was unable to decide which one I want to start next. Here are the primary candidates:

• Arabic (165 - 206 million speakers) - It sounds awesome. People would likely be as impressed that I spoke Arabic as they often are when they learn I speak Chinese. Arabic would open up a very large portion of the globe and new culture to me. It would be pretty difficult to learn on my own though. Also, there is a lot of variation between different kinds of Arabic, so that would be difficult.
  
• Japanese (120 million speakers) - Also sounds pretty cool. I've already done half the work by learning Chinese (Japanese uses a combination of Chinese characters and its own syllabaries which are kind of like alphabets). Learning Japanese, I would be moving more towards a 'Mr. Asia' sort of identity, which I guess isn't really a good or a bad thing. I could go to Japan or to sushi restaurants and order sushi, but I can't afford sushi anyway. Japan is one of the major players in Asia, although it is becoming less important with the rise of China, although Sino-Japanese relations are a major point of tension, so knowing both of these languages could be an asset. Japanese would probably be easier to teach myself than Arabic.
  
• Korean (65 million speakers) - Going along with the 'Mr. Asia' idea, learning Korean would also move me more towards Asian specialization. There is a lot going on between China and the Koreas as well. China is North Korea's best friend. Also, I would venture to say that South Korea is almost as important as Japan these days in East Asia. Korean also sounds pretty cool, a little less delicate than Japanese I think. And with just a syllabary, it is considerably easier to learn/read/write than Chinese or Japanese. I don't really like Korean food though. Also, I kind of want to learn the bigger languages (those spoken by more than 100 million people) first, and this doesn't meet that criteria.
  
• Hindi (180 million speakers, plus 40 million Urdu speakers) - In its spoken form, Hindi is virtually identicaly to Urdu which uses an Arabic-based script instead of Sanskrit like Hindi does. I don't know how hard Hindi is to learn, but it would open up another large part of the world with over 200 million speakers. And I love Indian food.
  
• Portuguese (155 - 177 million speakers) - Since Spanish and Portuguese are so close, learning Portuguese would almost be like a vacation. I'm not sure how useful Portuguese really is, although I think Brazil is growing more and more important these days, I don't really know that much about it though.
  
• Romanian (24 million speakers) - This would be virtually useless to me, but it sounds cool and how many people do you know who speak Romanian? I would guess not many.
  
• Russian (about 155 million speakers) - I've heard Russian has some difficult grammar structures, but for the most part this shouldn't be all that difficult to learn and it represents a signficant population. Also, Vodka is good, but borscht is not so good.
  

So please vote for which one you think I should learn next. Thanks!

Bathroom Grafitti

I found something cool in a bathroom stall in Norlin today. Right next to a fairly detailed and graphic drawing was this poll:

What has GWB done well in his time in office?
1. Given the Daily Show lots of good material
2. (an inappropriate comment about his daughter's preferred forms of entertainment)
3. (my favorite) Defended our country against dinosaurs.
4. and then the rest were stupid. I mostly just like the dinosaurs comment.

Ding Guppy

Here is a snippet of a conversation I was having with my friend Justin, or "Ding" as he is better known (part of his Chinese name). Ding just got a job working at PetCo and today was his first day selling fish. So I asked him what kind of fish he would recommend for me if I were looking for a friendly fish.

Me: now that you are basically a professional fish salesman, if I were hypothetically in the market for, say... a playful, yet smart fish that's, um, good with children, what kind of a fish would you recommend me?
Ding: buy a beta
Ding: they require the least effort on my part
Me: lol
Me: but what if I have a terrible fear of beta fish, so it must be anything but that
Ding: get a guppy
Ding: it rhymes with puppy, so you know it's friendly

And then I began laughing kind of uncontrollably, which is fine usually, but I was in the library and I think the people next to me thought I was crazy.

Funny Story

Ok, this story isn't mine and it happened a long time ago, but I was reminded of it today and thought I would share it with everyone.

One of my classmates on study abroad in China got a job at a bar in Nanjing for awhile. One night she was working and a Chinese couple walked in. They looked a little lost or confused or something so this friend, who we will call N, walked up to them and asked them if they needed any help or anything. They responded and N thought that they were asking, "Where can we sit?" She told them, "随便 (sui bian)", which means basically, "wherever you want."

They looked at her with a rather confused look and N, realizing that maybe she hadn't understood their question asked them for clarification. "Wait, what did you say?" They said again, "Where's the bathroom?"

Embarassed, N then pointed them to the back and made it clear that no, you cannot urinate or deficate wherever you wish, but in fact there is a designated room for that.

What I Learned in School Today

Rock 'n Roll music in Chinese is 摇滚音乐 (yao gun yin yue), which literally means to rock and to roll music or rocking rolling music or something to that effect. How 'bout that! Of course when the teacher was trying to explain rocking and rolling, I thought she meant a cartwheel because she was like, "so yao means to rock, like side to side, and gun means to roll," so I thought, "what happens when you roll after rocking side to side? Sounds like a cartwheel to me." I don't think the teacher thought it was funny, but I wasn't trying to be funny anyway, I really thought it meant a cartwheel!

I learned that Hindi and English are in the same large language family, hence the name Indo-Europoean. We watched a movie in my Language in US Society class that talked all about the history of English. It was very fascinating to see how similar it was to German way back in the day before the French took over part of England and Frenchified it. The film made me want to hopo on a plane to England and go study all the different accents there. One thing I didn't understand is how the linguists know what English actually sounded like hundreds of years ago. I guess they can conjecture to a point based on regional dialects of English, but it still seems kind of fishy to me.

What I Learned in School Today (ok, so it was yesterday...)

I learned that when the Korean alphabet was designed (in the 1950's I beleive?), they designed the "letters" to be graphical representations of the mouthshapes of the sounds that they represented.


Click here to see the website I got this from.
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I learned that there are 509 languages spoken in Nigeria. The education system is set up so that the first language of instruction is the local mother tounge, then they begin to learn English in primary school, in secondary school they learn their mother tounge, English, and one of the three larger national languages (Hausa, Yoruba, Adamawa). Some also learn French or Arabic. But there is no real unifying language. English is the official language of government, and it is taught in school through high school, but because only about 50% of the population even goes to school, not even English is spoken widely enough to make it a common language. So how to Nigerians in the south talk to those in the north? Who knows...
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Old Chinese movies from the 1930's suck. Our Chinese teacher sucks. CU's Chinese department as a whole pretty much sucks.