Dragons in Scotland?

I just watched How to Train Your Dragon for the fourth time in total, and I still love it. Not only is it a good story, but there's something true about it; it had that faint whiff of reality that makes it really fascinating. I don't mean in the dragons or whatever, but in the people and their relationships to each other. Anyway. The dragons--well, especially Toothless--are still fantastic, and now that I finally own the movie, I can watch it over and over and over again! :D Hooray!

There's one thing about this movie that really bothers me. It starts out being narrated by Hiccup, the main character, in standard American English, which is fine up until we starting meeting the other characters, like his father and his instructor, who, inexplicably, speak a dialect of Scottish English. More baffling, all of the adolescents in the film speak American, and all of the adults Scottish, for no explicable reason.

On the one hand, this makes no sense at all. Why would an isolated society develop two completely different dialects based solely on age? Answer: it wouldn't. This is bad enough as it is, but the movie goes so far as to draw attention to it: in the opening minutes of the movie, while complaining about his father's attitude towards him, Hiccup mocks his father by briefly adopting a Scottish accent--highlighting the fact that he does not actually speak that way. Later, Stoick (Hiccup's father) tells him that Hiccup will have to learn to "speak like us [the Vikings]"--which presumably means his dialect will change? Maybe when he hits puberty and his voice breaks, he'll start speaking Scottish instead? Linguistically, it's total nonsense.

But--from a sociolinguistic perspective, taking into account the biases of the audience watching the story from the outside, this makes a good deal of sense. First of all, the book and the movie are both geared toward children--specifically, American children. Accentual and dialectal variations immediately identify the speaker as an other, an outsider, with a marked difference in expression; making Hiccup and his cohorts speakers of a neutral/standard-ish dialect of American English makes sense in order to make Hiccup appealing and relatable to the majority of the target audience.

Alright, then. Why do the adults then speak a completely different dialect? Most obvious is that the movie is playing on My Fair Lady's Higgins' Law ("An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him/The moment he talks, he makes some other Englishman despise him") to its advantage. Accent implies otherness and outsiderness; hearing someone speak with an accent immediately triggers a different reaction than if one was to hear the same words from the same person with no accent. (I make this statement from personal experience; I'd love to see some studies on it, though.) Since one of the movie's main themes is the barrier between the older and younger generations and the difficulty of communicating new and dangerous ideas, the philosophical, ideological barrier that separates old from young and Stoick from Hiccup is given measurable, perceivable form through the use of a dialectal difference. Hiccup and Stoick literally do not speak the same language.

Notably, though, they still don't speak "the same language" at the end of the movie, after all of their problems have been miraculously resolved, perhaps foreboding further troubles and misunderstandings in the future.

Now, I'm not really in a position to debate whether Scottish is really the historically accurate dialectal flavor for Vikings to have--I don't have the necessary geographical and historical knowledge, and for heaven's sake, they're computer-animated dragon-riding Vikings, so that seems to be less of an issue for me. What I'd like to know is: why Scottish? If they were going for Viking-y, why not Norse or Scandinavian? The latter is easier to answer, it seems to me. Scottish English is a dialectal variant of the great mythical ideal called English, whereas a "Norse" or "Scandinavian" accent would actually be an accent, i.e. someone speaking English as an L2 and approximating the phonemes of English using the phonemes of their Scandinavian L1. Which is a long way to say that Scottish is better-established, more consistent, and more easily recognized as "being a thing" than a Scandinavian accent. (Again, speculation!). Even the American youth have a good chance of having heard Scottish before; the chance of them having heard a Scandinavian accent, or even recognizing it as such, seems to me to be much lower.

So, Scottish sounds exotic in a Celtic, northern sort of way, but is not so anonymous or evanescent as a Scandinavian accent. Still, though, why not, say, Irish? Or British? Now, I'm sure there are some historical reasons that come into play here that I shall not be bothered to look into at the moment, but I submit that at least part of the answer goes back to Higgins' Law, i.e. the language one uses immediately modifies the hearer's perception and attitude toward the speaker in accordance with the hearer's previously held beliefs and stereotypes associated with that particular language/dialect. I've argued before that Americans associate British English (particularly southern) with high levels of intellect, tea and crumpets, sophistication, and villainy (see: almost every American movie ever that has a clever, ruthless villain), which are not really the connotations you want to put with your Vikings. All American varieties of English are out, for being 1) too familiar and 2) out of context; Australian and other non-British varieties for reason number 2; which leaves you with Britain. You want your adult Vikings to be fierce, brave, mighty, and noble, and Scottish fits the bill. As the article linked above mentioned, it could go back to Braveheart and the stories of the Scottish struggle for freedom against English tyranny--something that resonates and sticks with American viewers, I would guess. Stereotypes aren't always the best thing in the world, but as far as they go, Scotland could do a lot worse than "fierce, brave, mighty, and noble." Of course, I guess I'd have to add "highly traditional", "tribal", and "slightly savage" to more fully reflect the movie's depiction of its Scottish speakers. I'm not saying that is an accurate portrait of real Scottish people, just that such notions are evoked as stereotypical qualities.

Or it could be that DreamWorks just thought it would be really awesome to have Gerard Butler play an enormous red-bearded dragon-punching Viking.

Either way, I'm going to quit typing before I say something that gets me in trouble/doesn't make any sense; I suspect I'm past that point already. I just thought it was interesting that language is used in the same way that light and shadow and facial expressions are used to convey ideas, and although the inclusion of the language barrier in How to Train Your Dragon is clumsy, it also illustrates a point. How and why this kind of linguistic illustration works should be/hopefully is the topic of further study.

G'night.

A Linguistic Note And Much Squeeing

First of all, I should apologize for the long silence on this blog--though I doubt anyone's noticed. What with sorting, packing, and hauling all of my earthly possessions across the pond and then dedicating most of my mental energy to traveling, I haven't had much time to write about the more geeky side of life.

However, even though I'll have to postpone my reviews of the rest of Series 5 indefinitely, I'm certainly not giving up on this blog altogether. If you'd like to keep up with my travels, you can find that here, but this is the place for me to talk about things that I love. And so I have two things for you right now:

First, as I write, I'm listening to the Doctor Who Proms, which was a brilliant Doctor-themed concert that took place just a few days ago. As of the time of writing, you should still be able to hear it online (I'm listening to it in Austria) for three days more from this site. I highly recommend it, and not just because it's Doctor Who stuff. The DW music has always been wonderful and brilliant, and I'm buying the Series 5 soundtrack as soon as I can get my paws on it, but the concert also featured other, non-DW pieces. Unfortunately, it's not downloadable, but if the BBC has any sense at all, they'll release it for purchase someday.

So, on to point two. As you may have gathered, the DW music was the "Much Squeeing" bit of the title; we now move on to the "Linguistic Note." I direct your attention to this article from the BBC. The majority of the article will only be interesting to you if you are an economist, a politician, or an ecologist, but about halfway down, under the heading "Reputations", you will trip over a quite unexpected nugget of sociolinguistic goodness. The article is speaking about Tony Hayward's replacement by Bob Dudley as CEO of British Petroleum following the Gulf spill. Amid all the political and business-oriented maneuvering, we find the following paragraph:

Many say that, from a public relations point of view, Mr Dudley has the advantage of being American and speaking with an American accent. He grew up in Mississippi and, according to BP, has a "deep appreciation and affinity for the Gulf Coast".

Woah, hold the phone. Alright, yes, the article says they're choosing him because he's Managing Director and he's been running operations and so forth, but there's not a word about how effective he's been, what his leadership skills are like, what his plan is for BP, or how he plans to deal with the crisis from here. No, the critical bit is his accent.

I've speculated before that the British accent is often perceived negatively by Americans. In the cinemas, Brits are nearly always (a) eccentric geniuses or (b) villains. Except when the majority of the main cast has some sort of British accent, accented characters usually seem to fall into one of these two categories. I happen to believe that this is because the two dialects (Americanglish and Britainglish) are so similar that British speakers are easily understood by American audiences, but the unfamiliar accent (which Americans may associate with Europe, tea, aristocracy, and James Bond) adds a bit of foreignness and distance and, thereby, menace. I also tend to believe that (some) Americans are therefore trained to associate Britainglish with negative feelings: something of a combination of an inferiority complex from their basic education (think of the rustic guerrilla Americans in the Revolution versus the sophisticated, well-dressed British) and a sense of stupidity and vulgarity derived from the stereotypical Brit as arrogantly intellectual and posh.

I guess I should mention at this point that these hypothesis are developed sheerly from my own observations and experiences and my conversations with other Americans of my generation. I don't have any solid evidence, but I would like to study this further.

Anyway, here's an example of these same ideas from the BBC itself. The Britainglish-speaking Mr. Hayward is, consciously or not, perceived as remote, supercilious, and cold; he isn't "one of us." But Mr. Dudley, just by the way he talks, is marked as being in our in-group. He's American; he knows, he understands, he cares, because he's one of us. I'd bet that Hayward and Dudley could do the same job with the same level of success from here on out, and Dudley would be favored by Americans because of his hometown and his dialect.

That opinion is, of course, based solely on the linguistic evidence. I'm unfamiliar with the previous circumstances, although I know that Hayward is not in favor because of his conduct over the last few months. Anyway, it remains to be seen whether Mr. Dudley actually does any better, although that may not matter as much as whether he is perceived to do better. The perception of familiarity, aided by the sociolinguistic information, is the essential PR point.

Sorry if you're asleep. Hope you enjoyed the Proms, in any case. :)

UPDATE: At about 1:10:00 in part 1 of the Proms, one of the composers goes all synesthetic and starts talking about the "colors of orchestral music." Oh, that's just delightful!

Pullum vs. Strunk and White

Geoffrey K. Pullum is continuing his crusade against the idiocy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, which celebrated its 51st anniversary on the 16th of April. More power to him, too; if I'm ever feeling sad, all I have to do is turn to the section on passives and read the "examples" for a hearty laugh at the kind of incompetence that presents "It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had" as an example of a passive sentence.

Being the sort of child who read grammar books for fun, I never had much cause to refer to Elements. I think I have a copy in one of my bookshelves somewhere, but (thank the Lord!) its grammatical inanities never found their way into my consciousness. I therefore employ adjectives and adverbs with wild abandon, adore long and complex sentences, and generally have some writing habits that would probably give S&W apoplectic fits, were they not long dead. I'm very happy with this; given that I graduated magna cum laude, I hardly think that the use of adjectives or the length of sentences are really the main issues here.

The problem that faces many college students is the need for an intuition about what makes good writing. Since I've recently re-read Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, I've been thinking about the difference between spoken and written language. Every normal human being (i.e. having not suffered serious emotional or physical trauma or mental deficiencies) learns not only the grammatical structures and vocabulary of their native language but how to utilize their linguistic knowledge in various social situations. In other words, native speakers have intuitions about how to use their language skills in various situations, with different people. They know which words are taboo and which are generally appropriate for a certain purpose with a certain person, although they may choose to ignore convention or intuition for a particular effect. This skill is just as important and intrinsic as syntactic, morphological, or phonological knowledge and intuition. Naturally, given the differing talents and intuitions regarding interpersonal relationships, some speakers are more adept and successful than others, but barring mental disability or other psychological factors, everyone can generally do it.

The key to writing well is to cultivate a similar intuition about written language. The considerations are similar, or at least parallel in many cases: Who is the audience? What are they expecting to hear? What do they want to hear? What kind of language is appropriate? As with spoken communication, the skill and success of each writer will differ, but unlike with speech, there's no guarantee that any given writer will ever be able to do this well. This is because speech is extremely natural, intrinsic to what it means to be human, whereas writing is a convention and a tool, not a natural part of human cognition. Speech comes naturally; writing has to be learned. And in the same way, the dynamics of interpersonal speech communication develops naturally, but the dynamics of written communication has to be tediously and meticulously learned. Of course, it comes easier to some than to others.

The goal of language/grammar books such as Elements is not to teach students how to compose language (usually), as, given the fact that they are usually native or near-native speakers in secondary education or above, they already know how to use their own language faculties. Instead, Elements is focused on "style", which in this case seems to mean "the proper application of spoken language faculties to a written medium." As Ong suggests, the style, form, and even cognition processes involved in writing are very different from those of speech.

The problem is that, just how what is accepted and standard in spoken language fluctuates frequently, what is acceptable and standard in written language changes as well. Even if Elements was accurate at the time it was written, there's no reason to assume that the same protocols apply; written conventions fluctuate just like spoken conventions do, although certainly much more slowly and reluctantly.

So how to teachers teach students to write clearly and beautifully, especially in an age of txt msgs, truncated RSS feeds, and Twitter? I don't have a catch-all answer, but I'd start by doing the same thing students have been doing for millennia: observing the masters at work and emulating them. These students know how English works, but just like they need to learn some conventions when meeting the President or their in-laws, they also need to learn what is appropriate and encouraged in writing as well. And really, outlawing passives and adverbs is not going to help.

Oh dear...

So, uh, I was intending to post after the airing of The Time of Angels and somehow seem to have messed up the TARDIS controls and overshot by a month or so. Sorry!

No, really, I haven't given up on updating this blog. It's just that Angels threw me for a bit of a loop; I still don't really know what I want to say about it. Don't fret, I'll figure it out eventually. Also, the delay gives me the advantage of appearing to follow the BBCA broadcast schedule, thereby not spoiling episodes as yet unreleased in America and avoiding the whole you-can't-use-iPlayer-so-how-do-you-watch-Doctor-Who-on-the-British-schedule kerfuffle. It's magic, I tell you.

In the meantime, have an adorable Britishism: faff. According to UrbanDictionary, it means to "muck about" (aw, that's delightfully British as well, innit!) or "waste time doing nothing/something unnecessary." Hmm, sounds like what I did today. Anyway, I like this word not only because it has a handy meaning neatly condensed into a single word, but it's also oddly entertaining to say and makes you feel a complete loony when you say it. Go on, try it: "faff." For some reason that I can't begin to fathom, this word reminds me of ducks. Specifically, duck feathers. Maybe because the mental image I associate with this particular sequence of phonemes is someone fluttering their hands uselessly with a vaguely distraught and bemused look shining in their eyes, rather like a duckling halfway across a motorway. "Faff." It also sounds to me (although I'm sure it's unrelated) like a twee replacement for the f-word.


Maybe because that rhymes with "duck"? Now I'm just confused.

Anyway, I highly recommend this word. Another one I quite like (although don't think I've ever encountered it in the wild, i.e. spontaneously elicited in speech, so I'm a bit vague on its usage) is "twee", which I've employed above. Again thanks to UrbanDictionary, we have "to be obnoxiously sweet, or quaint...disingenuous, corny, or effeminate." It seems to me that the best that Americanglish can offer in response is "saccharine" ("cloyingly agreeable or ingratiating; exaggeratedly sweet or sentimental"), which both lacks the sense of falseness and has the disadvantage of being distractingly pompous-sounding. "Twee" has the distinct advantage, like "faff", of fitting its phonemic form to its sense and meaning. I therefore recommend that both "faff" (and "faff about"; if we're going to do this, we might as well do it properly) and "twee" be adopted by all English speakers forthwith.

As I've written the above (in what has become an unexpectedly long post with a disproportionate number of brackets), I've noticed that my language is changing. Did you note the increased frequency of the present perfect instead of the simple past, the use of lexical items like "quite" and "proper", and the elevated register? I blame this, solely and entirely, on the BBC, especially Top Gear and Life on Mars. Britainglish is getting into my head.

Anyway: More Doctor Who reviews and other nonsense coming soon!

Dalek Psycholinguistics

This picture/poster was linked to from Hello, I'm the Doctor. I especially like the note on the "ears"/light bulbs: that they let off extra energy so the Dalek doesn't just spontaneously explode. I suppose that's a reasonable cover, given that the original rationale behind those flashing lights was probably something like, "Hey, wouldn't it be awesome if it had lights on its head? That flashed when it spoke?!"

Relevant in this particular instance is point (4), which reads as follows:

Inside the dome is the voice machine and translator unit, which connects to the control chamber (18). A Dalek has no vocal chords [sic], so this unit amplifies thought into speech and is sensitive to whatever language is necessary. For instance, an Englishman would hear a Dalek's "thought-noises" as though the Dalek were speaking English. This is best described as "Noise Telepathy." When anyone speaks to a Dalek, the process is reversed--it has no ears, but understands instantly.

This site seems to agree, stating that

Daleks have no vocal cords so this unit amplifies the Dal mutant's thoughts into speech patterns acceptable to the listener's brain. This process is reversed when the Dalek is spoken to.

These descriptions are, to me, a bit unclear. Take the first quote's description of the speech/translation process. It says that, given that the Daleks do not have an organic speech apparatus, this "translation unit" transforms their thoughts into speech. Okay, assuming a highly advanced alien race, I can suspend my disbelief long enough to let this slide past. But the description goes on to say that this translation unit is "sensitive to whatever language is necessary," and "an Englishman would hear a Dalek's 'thought noises' as though the Dalek were speaking English."

What does this mean? Does the unit, clearly already having telepathic capabilities, read the mind of the hearer in order to generate the proper language? Does it broadcast some sort of telepathic wave or other such nonsense that the hearer hears/receives and understands as being their own language? Anyway, the phrase "as though the Dalek were speaking English" seems to imply that the Daleks aren't actually speaking English, they're just perceived to be speaking English (or German, or French, or whatever). This brings to mind the passage in Acts where the disciples of Jesus preach to the masses and each man hears their words in his native tongue, and makes me wonder what the Daleks actually are saying (if anything). In reverse, the process is just as convoluted: apparently, the unit receives the audible input from a speaker, translates the entire thing into pure thought (including, apparently, highly culture- and context-dependent variables such as pitch, tone, stress, speed, emotional inflection, etc.--or not, given how obnoxiously literal and immune to humor and sarcasm the Daleks are!) and transmits it into the Dalek's mind as thought.

I cannot even begin to imagine what this would be like for the Dalek. First, it would require very precise cognitive control--how does the Dalek prevent the unit from translating every thought into speech? How does a Dalek lie? And how does it distinguish its own thoughts from those fed to it by the translation unit? Since humans are not generally telepathic, psychic communication is generally represented as audible speech in the media, usually with an echo effect; but that is still audible speech, represented so for humans, for whom audible language is the default mode. The Dalek would have no such echoing voices to distinguish each thought from another; from this description, they would have no concept of "word" or "language" at all, since they apparently deal directly with pure thought.

How does a creature with no voice and no ears conceive of speech as distinct from thought at all? With no way of producing or receiving language (no vocal organs or ears, as noted above), how can the Daleks understand this process at all? What sort of language could an alien have that has no way of creating or receiving language? The other options are telepathic communication and some sort of sign language/visual communication. The translation unit clearly has telepathic capabilities (it adapts to "whatever language necessary" and can clearly manage psychic input) but the Daleks specifically developed aparati to enable them to speak audibly--why, if they can communicate telepathically? Even when there are no other non-Daleks around, they still insist on shrieking obnoxiously at each other. As for sign language, the robotic shell they are encased in barely has enough mobility to function, let alone produce an entire language based on visual signs.

As a side note, the Daleks do seem to have one word of their own that is consistently left untranslated: "rel", which seems to correspond to the English "second" (as a unit of time). Why a high-tech telepathic translator would choose to leave this word untranslated when it has a simple counterpart in the target language (and, furthermore, is inflected as an English word; the Daleks often initiate a countdown from "thirty rels" or whatever) must mean either that (1) the Daleks, either intentionally or not, choose to preserve this word and distinguish it from their rest of their translated speech or (2) the word "rel" isn't actually a direct translation of the word "second." Given that the Daleks, like the Time Lords, have time-traveling capabilities and therefore would need specialized vocabulary (or thought-noises?) to deal with the mechanics of time travel, it's very possible that the word "rel" has additional senses or shades of meaning that are not captured by the English "second." It could also be a holdover from the language of the Kaleds, although certainly not for sentimental reasons. Being unfamiliar with Old Who, I have no idea if this word came up in Old Who episodes; even if it did, though, the TARDIS translation circuit should have translated it anyway, so the problem remains unresolved.

Anyway, these descriptions of the Dalek's mode and method of speech leave much to be desired. One would think that if a thoroughly malevolent alien race had not only impenetrable armor, unstoppable death rays, and time-traveling capabilities, but also a highly functional telepathic translation unit theoretically capable of reading the thoughts of their victims and transmitting their own thoughts into the minds of others, there would be nothing (short of an inability to climb stairs) that could stop them from very swiftly taking over the universe, not even a mysterious and overconfident bloke with modern hair and a screwdriver. And furthermore, with such a sophisticated thought-speech-thought translation system, they could come up with a more refined auditory output than grating, repetitive, robotic shrieking. Then again--maybe such speech is rather a painfully accurate rendering of what a Dalek's thought patterns are really like.

I hope to return to this topic someday, perhaps when I get around to analyzing the nature of the TARDIS's translation circuit, which shows similar features. For now, more research needs to be done.

Batman and the TARDIS

Despite the fact that that would be a kickass fanfiction title (and story, for that matter...although I bet someone's already done it), this is mostly to celebrate the simple fact that Matt Smith likes Batman.

The full story can be found here.

Eleven commented about Batman, "I’ve always loved him, you know? I guess it’s the darkness in him that I like." The article also draws a parallel between Batman and the Doctor, quoting Smith: "There’s something about the darkness and the loneliness of the man that I guess I’m sort of in tune with I think." That quote was apparently about the Doctor, though it could be about Batman as well.

The similarities and differences between Batman and the Doctor--two very different role models and, really, superheroes from two different cultures--would certainly be worth exploring in greater depth. I'm a huge fan of both characters, and find their darkness and loneliness fascinating as well. Those qualities bring both characters out of the two-dimensional, primary-colored world of pure children's entertainment and makes them into believable, relatable people brushed in the duskier hues of life's sorrows, griefs, and disappointments.

But in the meantime, extra points for Matt Smith for choosing Batman! And a few points off for Karen Gillan for picking Spiderman. That guy's a loser.

Have you reached your daily excitement quota today?

"Doctor Who has a tradition of thrilling title sequences but the new version exceeds all previous excitement quotas!"

The entire, sickeningly cheerful article is here, complete with a video of the aforementioned title sequence that I can't watch thanks to what I affectionately call the BBC's You Shall Not Has policy. (Read that out in your best impression of Gandalf facing down the Balrog.)

Okay, first of all, this means that the BBC's definition of "thrilling" is some combination of the following:
(1) floating heads in a kaleidoscope vortex;
(2) taxi signs in a tube vortex, or
(3) lightning and fire in a colon.

Iconic? Yes, at the risk of using a word so much that it simply falls apart at the seams (like "swansong" around the end of last year...argh!) and all of its meanings escape and hop away. Epic? Yes. In a very Who-ish sort of way. But thrilling? Um...not really. Especially not the new sequence, which, although thankfully without the taxi-sign logo, was not what I would call thrilling. The fire improved it significantly, but still...just no.

Second: "previous excitement quotas"? Really? Was this blurb automatically generated by a bizarrely enthusiastic yet incompetent computer? Or did the BBC just unwittingly create a new Serenity House in-joke?

From the Latin of the same form, English "quota" is apparently a shorter version of the phrase quota pars, meaning "how large a part," from quotus meaning "which." So, not exactly the right wh-word.
Dictionary.com has two relevant definitions for "quota":

1. the share or proportional part of a total that is required from, or is due or belongs to, a particular district, state, person, group, etc.
2. a proportional part or share of a fixed total amount or quantity.

My personal intuition goes with (1) here, a phrase like "daily quota" meaning "the recommended/expected/required amount per day." So that means that a "previous excitement quota" would be something like the amount of excitement that you are required to have based on previous experience. So, what, does that mean that since I find the new theme mostly unimpressive, that I should go top off my excitement quota by dodging cars on the freeway or something?

My feeling is that the writer meant something like "expectations" or "levels" and it just came out all wibbly-wonky. Admittedly, though, "previous excitement quota" is a lovely nugget of linguistic absurdity, one that I'm going to stuff away in this blog to bring out and giggle over again in the future.

Of course, it could just be that we Americans simply don't speak "Propah English." ;)

P.S. Shout-out to my good friend, the Online Etymology Dictionary. If I were you, I'd seriously consider spending an hour or so just wandering around there. Your life will be better.