While Anglo-Saxon cultures tend to avoid unnecessary travel and watch their backs on Friday the 13th, in Spain, Latin America and Greece Tuesday is the day to look out for. As Martes (Tuesday) in Spanish is linguistically linked with Mars, the god of war and violence, its combination with number 13, long a bad luck número, is almost too much for some to take. According to wikipedia, there’s actually a condition called Trezidavomartifobia, a paralyzing phobia of Tuesday the 13th.

Now, I say dubiously scientific here because I’ve always been suspicious of this whole “expatriate” idea. Not to mention its cutesy shortened form, “expat”. What makes an expat an expat, rather than an immigrant (or shall we say, to make it equallly cute, an “immy”)? HSBC did not set out to define, among the 2,155 persons they surveyed, what an “expatriate” was other than “an individual who relocates to another country”.

In the meanwhile, it seems that anxiety about “relocating” types in Germany has begun to simmer a bit. There have been rumblings of adding an article to the constitution simply stating that the language of Germany is German.

According to the Independent, this is due to worries about the encroachment of “Denglish” – the English peppered mishmash that has brought Handy, downloaden and babysitten into the language. On the other hand, another motivation for the legal move may be to buffer the inferiority complex that comes with the disparagement of the language by the rest of the world, starting with – to be rather scientific about it – comedienne Tina Fey, who in a recent Vanity Fair article called German “so uncool”.

(via Omniglot)

]]> http://blog.babbel.com/liebe-deutsche-liebes-denglish-germany-named-love-destination-for-expats/feed/ 0 http://blog.babbel.com/sex-drugs-and-gobbledigook-sigur-ros-and-rjdj-emote-in-musilanguage/ http://blog.babbel.com/sex-drugs-and-gobbledigook-sigur-ros-and-rjdj-emote-in-musilanguage/#comments Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:01:26 +0000 Mara http://blog.babbel.com/?p=260

According to evolutionary musicology, “Musilanguage” is a proto-linguistic form of communication somewhere in between, on the one hand, emotive grunting/cooing/moaning/what-have-you, and then on the other, semantically/ symbolically appropriate but sonically arbitrary sounds that convey meaning (i.e. words). As most things are when it comes down to it, this particular concept is about gettin’ busy.

In “Descent of Man,” Darwin describes “true musical cadences” used by “some early progenitor of man” to woo the opposite sex (or to get totally whack with the same one). This “musilanguage” – a term coined by neurologist Steven Brown – would ostensibly evolve into language and music, respectively.

The Icelandic post-rock four-piece Sigur Rós is well-known for switching up the emotive and the referential. A made-up language Vonlenska (“Hopelandic” in English), which emulates the cadences of Icelandic without actually meaning anything, peppers their songs up to the current album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (“With a Buzz in Our Ears we Play Endlessly”). Now on tour in Europe, Japan, Canada and the US, the band’s bassist confessed in an interview with Pitchfork media, however, that all the hullaballoo about the nature of their lyrics and linguistic hijinks was, and is, rather hype. For example the title of a track on the last album, “Gobbledigook”, was not so much a comment on how they express themselves, but rather a misspelling of the Icelandic “Gobbldigob”, a word for the clippity-clop of horses’ hooves.

For those seeking to devolve employing the latest technology, a new iPhone app RJDJ is on the case with a lot of seriously funky features. One is converting normal speech into something more, let’s say, emotive, according to the music you’re listening to — a digitally generated “musilanguage”, as it were. Birthed over the weekend, RJDJ is explained in the below video, where an enthusiast describes it as “connecting the outside world to your acoustic perception.” This is, in his esteem, sort of like drugs: