In a state of perpetual evening

Probably one of the weirder language things I'm having trouble adjusting to are the greetings for the time of day. This may not seem like such a big deal, but people in Côte d'Ivoire are quite gregarious. Everyone greets everyone. While in the US, a nod, or depending on the setting, just eye contact can be acceptable, if you don't verbally respond back, it's considered offensive and people will repeat their greeting to you as they assume you simply didn't hear it because everyone responds. I don't really mind this and on a great many levels, it's quite enjoyable to engage with people in a country, as opposed to just being an outsider unsure of how to interact.

The one thing that gets me though is the actual greeting. In the US, traditionally we've done away with "good morning", "good afternoon", "good evening", and "good night" to use one size fits all phrases such as, "hey". The art of linguistic articulation is not one of America's finer points…

In Spanish, I've gotten used to "buenos días", "buenas tardes", and "buenas noches" as well as the respective times of day in which they're used. Croatian took a bit more getting used to with "dobro jutro" until about 10, "dobar dan" until about 18 (depending on the time of year), "dobar večer" until about 22, and "laku noć" at the very end of the night, which also works in place of "goodbye" for the evening. The times are surprisingly punctual for these different phrases and people have some kind of very accurate clock in their head to just know when to say them.

As French would have it, there is only "bonjour" and "bonsoir"; "good day" and "good evening". This probably seems simpler overall, but when one is used to having all the shades of time through the day, it seems blunt. Obviously, you get used to it, although while writing this, I said, "bonsoir" at 10:45 in the morning to a fellow who walked in the door.

In Côte d'Ivoire, probably the hardest thing is getting used to saying these at the right time. The reason that I made such a dumb gaffe with this fellow who walked in is that "bonsoir" starts at noon. Yes, the "evening" starts in the middle of the day and while people tend to get up around 6, they go to bed at 12 (don't ask me how they do it) and so, evening is making up the vast majority of their day.

I still find it weird and I doubt that I'll really quite get it at any point, although I'll just go along with it as that's the way the day goes here.

08 02 2010      0 comments

Tags: customs, in to africa, language

Time for a re-read me thinks

In looking up the exact definition of a Prefect and realizing that, as I assumed, we really have no equivalent in the US, except those wanting to sound fancy-like, I was reminded of Ford Prefect; the character, not the car. Obviously, this joke of a name from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which the film version of sucked hard) was funny to me, but never completely ha ha funny. I was not alone:

Adams later observed that this joke was lost on U.S. audiences who assumed it was a typing error for "perfect." In the French version, Le Guide Galactique,[1] Ford's name was changed to "Ford Escort." The joke is also now largely lost on younger audiences in Britain also, since the Ford Prefect is now a rare sight on British roads. In the film adaptation, his last name was never actually stated on-screen, but it is given in the film's credits as "Prefect."

Sadly, Ford Escort would have worked in the US as well, but the French got that bit of humo(u)r. Anyways, maybe it's time to go back and read that trilogy in five parts. I had forgotten how funny it was as again, the film version that came out five years ago was crap on a stick.

24 01 2010      0 comments

Tags: england, humor, language

The different tastes of a language

It's often asked by those who just don't know if Catalan is a dialect of Spanish. It's not. They're both "dialects" of Latin, although at this point, one would go so far as to say that they're separate languages due to the fact that a Latin speaker and a Spanish or Catalan speaker wouldn't be able to understand one another. To those visiting, it probably seems that this isn't the case as there is a lot of overlap between Catalan and Spanish like they both say "hola" as well as things such as "adiós" and "bienvenido" being "adéu" and "benvingut" in Catalan. These are just a few of many, so you can see where people get this whole "dialect" idea from, although I'm guessing it has more to do with Catalonia being part of Spain than anything else. For instance, Macedonian and Bulgarian are mutually intelligible dialects of one another, but no English speaker would ever assume that as they're separate countries and no one from either of those countries wants to admit it.

But, when you actually dig down in to it and start really working with Catalan, many things are completely different. For instance while "dog" is "perro" in Spanish, it's "gos" in Catalan. But let's look at food, because it's in the language of food where you find the truth of a people.

"bocadillo con jamón y queso"

That is basically a ham sandwich with cheese, but it's oh, oh, oh so delicious as it's with Spanish ham and manchego, drizzled with olive oil. This isn't something limited to Castillian speakers though and it is widely available and vastly consumed in Catalonia as well, but there it's:

"entrepà amb pernil i formatge"

Look at that. There is nothing that matches up, yet it means the exact same thing. If you still think that's still a dialect of Spanish, let me know how.

There is some humor from this though as it is often the case that Catalan words end with the "ll" letter like "coll" which means "neck". It also happens that there are a number of words that are quite similar to Spanish, but that they drop an ending vowel such as "cat" which is "gato" in Spanish and "gat" in Catalan. So a dorky, polyglot joke in Catalonia is to ask for a:

"bocadill amb jamó i ques"

Quite ridiculous and it's a joke that really only makes sense for Catalan speakers, who will most likely smirk if you ask for it. But don't worry, it will taste just as good as a "bocadillo con jamón y queso" except that the bread will be rubbed with tomato and garlic, making it even better actually. Why do I bring this up? Because I'm heading there again for some work on Sunday and staying for the rest of the year and getting fat on pernil in all its heavenly culinary incarnations.

05 10 2009      0 comments

Tags: food, humor, language

Let's stop using 'maybe' because it means 'no'

It seems that when people want to stop trolls on a website, they turn to only allowing a positive message to be shared. At first, I agreed with this somewhat, but then realized if you don't allow the negative in, then some aspect of the positive gets co-opted to become the negative. I mean, you can't really define the positive without the negative, so they both have to be there. But there's one other outcome of artificially skewing the positive which is the overuse of "maybe".

I've found that the US loves "maybe". It's not negative and it's not positive. It's completely noncommittal which is great for people who always want to portray an image of either being open to everything or being part of everything. Having the "maybe" allows them to do just this while fitting in a teeth whitening session around their daily activities and it allows Americans the ability to look like positive can-do people while actually being some of the flakiest people in the world.

I say end the "maybe" because really, it means "no". Let's face it, it's either "yes, I can do/come to that" or everything else. I can't count the number of times I've been part of some Evite or Meetup where there are a third "yes", a third "no" and a third "maybe". How can you plan an event other than to assume that all those "maybe" are actually "no" and if they were to show up (they never do), you just have to tell them, "Well, I didn't know you were coming."

I've actually written in to the support teams at both these groups to allow "maybe" to be taken out if you're constructing an event. They refuse to do it which is ridiculous. I think Evite even wrote back to me along the lines of, "We appreciate your feedback, but the majority of our users prefer the 'maybe' option." That's fine. Anyone who wants to use it can, but I just want to get rid of it on what I'm doing so that planning is actually possible instead of trying to generate an illusory buzz about your event.

I have to admit that the Plague of Maybe is something which is much more predominant in the bigger cities in the US. In my hometown if someone doesn't want to attend something, they'll say, "No, I'm not coming. It sounds gay and I think you're a asshole." While blunt, I appreciate this so much more than a "maybe". So come on, let's stop using "maybe".

26 08 2009      2 comments

Tags: internet, language, us america

Dennis Mccabe, can you punch yourself in the face please?

I wasn't really aware of it, but apparently a Spanish version of homedepot.com came and went while I was off doing other things that required more giving and a shit. They gave it something like four months before declaring it a failure. This goes to show that Home Depot will probably go bankrupt in the next year as they are full of monolingual MBA-ful idiots running the place. First, Spanish is incredibly important to them. There are countless migrant workers from Mexico and the rest of Central America working in construction. In fact, it seems like these are the only guys working in construction these days and for those who don't know, their first language is usually Spanish. Second, who the hell launches a website to cancel it in four months?!! I've worked on complete loser sites that stick around for years. Hell, this site has been around six years and it's just me blathering and posting pictures! Third, um, it's a recession that's hitting construction incredibly hard, so a) why launch the site now and b) again, why kill just after you do?

All of this is business idiocy at its best, but what really got me was the comment you see below. I can't believe that one comment can have so many offensive parts to it, but this Dennis Mccabe is obviously in a league of morons that has yet to be charted. Beyond the fact that he misspells "kowtowing" and is so belligerent towards anyone who doesn't speak his idea of Americanian, he just had to go and say that we're trying to, "Balkanize the US with different languages" I'm sure he felt really, really smart tossing in that word; almost BBC smart I'm assuming. He probably also didn't read this article either. My blogging reach is small I see, but this article talks about the whole issue of localization for companies in a much more professional manner. For starters, it doesn't tell a commenter to punch himself and only goes up from there.

15 06 2009      0 comments

Tags: language, morons, us america

Have your lard and drive it too

Take a good hard look at this temporary license plate paper on a new car of my cousin's. For anyone from the Central Valley of California, this means nothing. It's a big fat place to go buy cars in the town of Manteca. For anyone who knows Spanish, the ugly truth comes out though and that 'fat' aspect becomes especially true. Yes, in Spanish this means, "Lard Auto Square". That's maybe not the foulest thing out there, but it's near the top and let's not even talk about what happens in the summer.

15 05 2009      0 comments

Tags: california, central valley, language

Misworded Mondays: What is your Attractor?

Haven't touched on the Mondays in awhile and I wanted to change up the format a bit as I wanted to talk about the 'attractor' for a website. Quite literally, an attractor is '...a set to which a dynamical system evolves after a long enough time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed.' I'm playing with the definition a bit to apply it to websites (blogs and non-blog alike) because beyond our initial intents, it seems that all of us end up with an prominent attractor as the life of the site continues. There is one word or phrase that brings people to your website more than anything else except maybe the literal name of your site. Let me provide a few examples culled from site statistics.

This site, Hudin enjoys the most searches for, "caucasian dreadlocks" followed in a close second by "ass". The most logical choice, "hudin" is actually #7.

#1 Fan enjoys actually having "elia" as her first and foremost attractor, but has the distinction of being the center of all things, "comida hawaiana" for the most common non-site related term.

Maneno is quite new, so these things are harder to trace, but after "maneno" and "maneno.org", "ben affleck" gets a good number of hits for my endless rants about the guy.

Other sites I run get a bit more tame, such as Belden Place which people find by many different forms of "belden" in their term which leads creates the attractor.

But others dip in to strange waters when it comes to what formations attract people to those sites. For instance, my friend Oso has a great claim to fame in that people appear to find his site through searches about "anal bleaching". Yum. Read up if you're really curious. Then of course, a past employer, Zoetrope All-Story had, for the longest time, "midget amputee sex" as its attractor.

This can at times seem random, although it almost always correlates in to a few things. One is that you have some really bizarre term or page on your site that just doesn't really exist anywhere else and so the search engines have grabbed ahold of your site as a relevant result. Two is that you have purposely decided to work on SEO to grab these terms in which case, good for you. Third is that Google is purposely doing this to you in an attempt to categorize the net.

In talking to some folks who work at Google last year, it appears that Google made a really big push to have businesses be listed as businesses among other things. This is most likely the reason why Belden Place gets the vast, massive majority of its searches for "belden place" while I'm sitting here fielding hate comments and mail from people pissed that I think their "caucasian dreadlocks" are repulsive. Haven't changed my stance on that by the way and I beat my chest with a good degree of pride knowing that it comes up as the #3 result on Google.

But is there really anything you can do about this? Should you even care? I know a number of people with blogs who write up posts from time to time wondering who these weirdos are searching for this crap on their site. Otherwise, there isn't much to do except exclude the pages altogether or maybe monetize them if you want to take advantage of the fact. The important thing is that at least somewhere near the top of the list, the attractor that you actually want people to use to come to your site is working. While "hudin" is a #7 term for being an attractor, it happens that it's #1 on Google search results and "tea reviews" brings up hudin.com in the top ten, which is good stuff.

But, I pose the question to those of you with sites out there, what is your attractor?

By the way, I was going to call the attractor, "blognate", but thought better of it after seeing this. Obviously, "blognate" is one of their attractors.

30 03 2009      0 comments

Tags: attractor, google, language, misworded mondays, seo

When the Grandg Openin is a Problem

It's not often that I feel as if one of my random photos needs an article of its own, but here we are, with the photo below. I saw this along Taraval down in the Sunset where apparently the G crosses O. I mean, what happened here? This isn't some simple misspelling (nor me screwing around with PhotoShop), but a completely abortive attempt at sign making. And it's not like they couldn't send it back once receiving such a lump of sign from whatever little brother it is that is making signs around there. The 'Grandg Openin' was a separate piece and I even thing you can buy that bit at just about any hardware store around. I'm mystified as I'm sure many a resident in the area is as well.

24 02 2009      1 comment

Tags: language, san francisco

Barcelona: Spelling not Perfectness

I have bad news for all of you trying to learn a new language to broaden yourself beyond hanging out with Australians at Irish Pubs around the world: languages other than English aren't cool. Well, at least in the case of places like Spain English is 'tan cool'. The 'hip' thing to do in titles and other promotions is to toss in an English word or two, just to sound cool. You know how we like to say 'savoir faire' instead of 'know how' (among other fancy Frenchery)? Well, you can see such lovely things around a place like Barcelona. For instance, there is a chain restaurant called, 'Pans and Company'. There is also the airline, Vueling can't sleep unless at least one of their ads says something like, 'Las Rebajas Llegan Flying!'

In another instance, there is this new ad campaign that the city of Barcelona has decided to run to promote their fashion side. While there are a number of good designers in Barcelona, I think that they're still under the delusion that they're some sort of Milan after America's Next Top Model was based there for a season.

Something else they're under the delusion of is the fact that they can write proper English. Spread far and wide around the city are all these signs that were created in a Communist propaganda style which read, "I'm Citizen of Barcelona Nation - The Nation of Fashion". No, that's not a typo on my part. They happened to leave out the 'a' between 'I'm' and 'Citizen'. An honest mistake as in Spanish this reads, 'Soy ciudadano de Barcelona' or in Catalan, 'Sóc ciutadà de Barcelona'. I know I'm prone to the typo from time to time that #1 Fan dutifully catches, but you would think that given the stoned, dreadlocked slurry of expats living in Barcelona that someone might have thought to run this phrase by a native English speaker before pasting it around the city for said expats to stare at and wonder if they're "Really that stoned..." which of course they are, but that's a different issue. I'm sure if pressed for an answer, the Ministry of Defense & Super Cool Language Spellings would state that this was done on purpose, although the translation hiccup proves otherwise so, neener neener neener Barcelona. (My thumb was on my nose while I was doing that by the way...)

13 01 2009      2 comments

Tags: barcelona, language

Misworded Mondays: Peacekeeping Force

Definition: defined by the United Nations, is "a way to help countries torn by conflict create conditions for sustainable peace." It is distinguished from both peacebuilding and peacemaking.

Usage: "The US and Britain deployed a peacekeeping force to the war torn region of It-Hellsabadere on Friday."

Reality: A bigger oxymoron there hasn't been when it comes to Third World issues. It's like this term is something that the US came up with to sound badass while at the same time doin' some good out there. It's a joke. We're deploying soliders (ie fighters that do shoot, shoot, kill, kill, normally) in to a region to act as a non-war entity. These regions happen to be places that already have a great deal of soldiers running around in them, thus the reason the "peacekeeping force" was though to be needed in the first place.

I gotta tell you that this system doesn't really work so well. I've seen UN peacekeepers in "action" in the Congo, which mainly consists of them sitting around not doing much. Oh, except for the prostitution rings that they start with local, underage girls that they never get tried for because you know, "boys will be boys". Thanks Yasushi Akashi...

One could say that they forces are doing something just by being there, but then again one could say (me) that they do nothing. They can't engage rebel troops and they mainly act as a human shield, but they don't even do that so well as shown by the disarming and rapid slaughter in Srebrenica. Is there really a point to these deployments? On a long term, protracted basis, I say no. I say that an entity deployed for the purpose of peace is either a fighting war force or a development force. There is no in between ground. Of course, Americans would think that someone working in an NGO should get $400,000 because that's what they'd get in a typical private sector job probably think that these forces are good. Of course, they're just applying their social systems to a place where such systems simply do not apply.

05 01 2009      0 comments

Tags: language, misworded mondays