Evenings like this make everything else worthwhile. Welcome June.
Browsing the archives for the Observations category.
Memorial Day comes up on Monday, which means that we have a four day weekend, and time for Pirate of the Caribbean 4, Hangover II and some good old home theatre with leg stretched on the leather sofa. In an alternate world, there will also be some tone project transcribing, short writings, bibliography gathering for forthcoming MA project, and some hours of being serious reading abandoned books and babysitting cats. Four days is not so long when one thinks about it. Have a good one, readers.
There was a huge tornado in this area four weeks ago, and I was in it. It was a most frightening experience. I was returning home from campus, and it ended with my car being spun 360 degrees and tossed off the road along with the meal of fries I had just bought at McDonald’s. (It gives a new meaning to “taking the car for a spin”, doesn’t it?) Luckily I wasn’t hurt, and neither was the car. But by the time I read the news and saw what it had done to the airport in St. Louis that same night, I knew how much luckier I had been. It moved planes and cars, broke glasses and knocked down electric systems. Since then I’d sworn never to ignore tornado alerts.
The biggest storms I’ve ever experienced in Nigeria usually happened at night. There have been tornadoes but they are rare and spaced out so I’d never actually been in one. They’re deadly nevertheless. Imagine walking in the rain at night and have the wind throw an aluminum roof straight at your jugular or at your car while you drove. Just a few years ago, father went to bed in a large house of two storeys and woke up with an open roof. The whole roofing frame had been moved a few miles down the street. My grandfather’s house once suffered the same fate many years later.
The houses in America are built differently, it seems, and thus suffer a seemingly greater damage. Then there is the powerful wind running at such speed that can wreck anything in its way. Two days ago, another big stormed roamed this parts and killed about 117 people from Missouri to Minnesota. Pictures from Joplin MO looked like a war zone. When people say “be thankful for little blessings”, I guess they mean that one should be grateful for not being in a place like this when the storm comes. It is a frightening, and often devastating experience.
UPDATE: President Obama has promised to visit the town on Sunday.
What can be observable in the process of acquisition of tones by L1 speakers of English? Chinese (and a host of other languages in South East Asia) already gives us an enormous database of observable patterns. African languages (in this case Yoruba) occupy another level of the problematic realm for those merely accustomed to a language based on intonation, stress and inflections. Why is it funny when my friends call me in a way that rhymes my name with Cola or “caller” rather than with the uptalk mode of pronouncing the “sugar” in “sugar daddy” or the “brother” in “brotherly love”. Tone is music, rising and falling as needed. What makes it imperative that speakers of English relate to it only in one direction, viz (usually) as a high-low in a two syllable word? Why will “Bolaji” sound like “allergy” rather than the “beautiful” in “beautiful girl”?
What other nuggets are observable? How much proficiency can an L1 English speaker really acquire in a tonal language like Yoruba? With the many years of study by people like Karin Barber and (perhaps) Susanne Wenger, could they/did they pass the native-like proficiency test? What is the bar for native-like proficiency anyway?; and besides the general list of impediments across second language learning processes, what are the specifics in L2 tonal language learning that presents the greatest obstacles? And how does it happen? It is after all equally easy, equally difficult to learn any language either at L1 or L2 level given an equal and sustained level of interest and low affective filter. Jargons, jargons.
A linguist might know, or at least be neck deep in the long process of finding out.
The Lewis and Clark interpretive centre is built to commemorate the spot where the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark departed on the orders of President Jefferson to discover what lay in the piece of land by then just recently purchased from France. It was called the Louisiana Purchase and it contained what is now must of the Midwest United States reaching to Arkansas, Minnesota and North Dakota. (A most fascinating look-back to those times would wonder what kind of country we would be living in now if the land hadn’t been sold and the land – as it was then – consisted of English speaking people on the east, Native Americans and some French speaking people in the middle and Spanish speaking people on the West.)
Here are some of the pictures I took on a visit to the state historic site a few miles away from here. The old houses there are replicas of the camps that must have been built by the expedition party before they set off on the Mississippi river trying to discover the flora and fauna of the wild west. The models, according to information, were rebuilt from the notes and diaries of Lewis and Clark.