Posts by linger
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OnPoint: Budget 2011: Now with 70% less wordiness!, in reply to Greville Whittle,
Yep, that was exactly Ana's point (=there is something good that we will NO LONGER get as a result of the budget; hence it is not neutral)
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Perhaps John Key’s wristband works after all.
OMG. That would totally explain his popularity in the polls.
Some parallels from science fiction:
Damon Knight’s 1992 novel “Why Do Birds…” featured a ring (or bracelet?) with the power of persuading others to agree with the protagonist.
(It ended with the End of the World, too. … Which in this case isn’t as much of a spoiler as it might seem.)Slightly less parallel would be the “Luck Machine” of E.C. Tubbs’ novel.
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Hard News: Budget 2011: While you wait, in reply to BenWilson,
- or their gums, anyway.
Even that would make a change from simply tonguing Nat policy. -
And in some cases, drug courts seem to be horrifyingly misapplied.
Listen to this ( This American Life episode 430, “Very Tough Love") and weep. -
Hmm. You might possibly count yourself lucky…
(The link was to Rod Derrett’s 1960s song “Puha and Pakeha”.)
Let’s see… yeah, it’s also on YouTube here with video from Heartland .) : -
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There is one language usage issue upthread that does trouble me, and that's the misuse of the term "prescriptive" as if that were an excuse for being judgemental. (Which is not unrelated to the comment about bigotry above.)
For a prescription to have any value, it has to come after an accurate diagnosis. You have an obligation to first ascertain that there actually is a problem, and then identify what it is, before trying to impose a solution.
Jumping straight to "I think you're sick; so I say you need to do this" is simply irresponsible.In language issues, corpus evidence is a starting point for making a diagnosis: basically it tells the linguist what is normal, under what circumstances.
In this case, the corpus tells me that many people writing in New Zealand English seem to consistently apply a principle to spelling "Maori" and "Pakeha" (observed to occur without macrons) that they don't apply to other words more consciously taken from te reo māori.
Hence my starting assumption has to be that there may be good reasons for doing this. The corpus doesn't immediately tell me what those reasons are; but it does tell me to be very cautious about assuming there actually is a problem.What might be some possible reasons for choosing "Maori" and "Pakeha" as being, not merely possible, but acceptable standard forms?
(i) at the time that these words were borrowed into English, te reo had no writing system, and so the spelling adopted had to be filtered through what was possible in English. Changing those words now would be like demanding that other historical borrowings such as "taboo" should be respelled. To some degree, that waka sailed with the Endeavour, and it went to places from which it cannot be easily called back. (But that is not by itself a reason not to discuss the issue.)
(ii) the uses of these words to name and express identity were co-created among the indigenous people and the settlers; there was never a time when these particular uses belonged only to te reo. It is therefore possible to argue that both languages and both groups have some ownership of both terms: which is an argument for taking both variants (with and without macrons) as standard.
Note that this is a prescription (it's not supported by the corpus), but it's not a judgemental one.(iii) given both possibilities, each person can make their own decision. For example, I may choose deliberately to use the English spellings, if I am forced to talk about Maori language or culture, to signal that I am not speaking as an insider or an expert. To label such a choice as being "stupid and wrong" is to do a severe disservice to the personal choice, to the language, and to the whole idea of prescription.
My prescription is: tolerance.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to James Butler,
Police could piggy-back ...
(i) Heh.
... on the Air Force's helicopter
(ii) I'd so like to see that.
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it’s also possible that “Maori” is a word in te reo which is spelt incorrectly by people with English 1st language intuitions.
This position is untenable given the data.
Corpus frequencies for use of “Maori” across 500 texts:
without macron: 1026;
with macron: zero.
Note that this includes some texts by fluent speakers of te reo.
Note also that several texts in the sample do correctly use macrons on words such as whaikōrero or pā; but even these texts avoid the macron with Maori.
As to prescriptive vs descriptive, you might want to actually read what I wrote. I’m not against being prescriptive, and I'm not even against the objective of this particular prescription; but if you’re going to start telling every user of a language they’re wrong, you’re better not to start from the frankly delusional position that there is no such thing as word borrowing. -
what New Zealand English speakers think about the spelling of te reo words is not relevant in this instance.
You’re missing a step in the argument. Edited published writing, by definition, is subject to editorial influence (it’s not just a product of what the writers “think” about language). Any relevant prescriptions have been brought to bear. The one under discussion generally is not – and so it is, as an observed fact, not currently a prescription applied to English, and no-one can just order it to be so. (“This word ‘Maori’” as you put it clearly is a word of English, not of te reo, because it does not follow the rules of te reo. That is the reality that we have to work with.) Whether that is the best outcome and whether it can be changed is then open to question.
Now, if you want to say that words from te reo used in English should ideally be spelled as they are in te reo (macrons and all), I’m actually with you. But I disagree considerably about the method to use in bringing about change. I don’t think it should be phrased as a bald prescription about spelling (which is valid within te reo, but becomes invalid when extended into English: you open yourself up to the same sort of ridicule reserved for those who make pronouncements about “the only proper plural of octopus ”); rather, the focus of debate (and of any resulting prescription) more properly concerns what it means to borrow a word; how far such words are typically assimilated into English rules (which isn’t just a matter of what speakers “think” about English, but also of how English works when we don’t think about it!); and, then, crucially, the extent to which the level of assimilation should change when the audience for the English text includes speakers of the source language; and even more so in a country where the source language is also an official language. (Which brings us to a sound basis for your second point about respect, too.)
Thing is, we need to be clear this is a prescription about society more than language.