As usual the non-social scientists link gender preferences and the like to a project of evolution. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for evolution … more of it I say. The voice research reported such as this in the Belfast Telegraph links this to partner choice.  Women, they report, are evaluating genetic health of men by their voices.  So presumably the women tested were self-identifying heterosexual women. This is not stated in the media article, nor whether they were in the age-band for reproductivity.

A more fun experiment was conducted Puts Gaulin and Verdolini (2005) reported in Evolution and Human Behaviour had the experiment subjects participate in a mock dating game!!!

The developmental and anatomical causes of human voice sexual dimorphisms are known, but the evolutionary causes are not. Some evidence suggests a role of intersexual selection via female mate choice, but other evidence implicates male dominance competition. In this study, we examine the relationships among voice pitch, dominance, and male mating success. Males were audio recorded while participating in an unscripted dating-game scenario. Recordings were subsequently manipulated in voice pitch using computer software and then rated by groups of males for dominance. Results indicate that (1) a masculine, low-pitch voice increases ratings of men’s physical and social dominance, augmenting the former more than the latter; and (2) men who believe they are physically dominant to their competitor lower their voice pitch when addressing him, whereas men who believe they are less dominant raise it. We also found a nonsignificant trend for men who speak at a lower pitch to report more sexual partners in the past year. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that male intrasexual competition was a salient selection pressure on the voices of ancestral males and contributed to human voice sexual dimorphism

What is interesting about the voice studies is that they covertly acknowledge social influences – men who believed they were less dominant raised their voices. This surely is a social judgement on the part of the male subjects of the experiment. Are they not reverting to social stereotypes due to lack of more information about the males?

What is also interesting about the dimorphism of the human voice with respect to sex/gender is that the differentials between adult male and female voices are culturally conditioned. The pitch differences in Japanese gendered voices are far greater than European voice pitch differences. How would an evolutionary account explain this?

which she pronounced [ha:ke:] as if the word was in te reo Māori. In fact the fish name hake is resolutely European with recorded references back to the 14th century according to the OED. But I thought it was a lovely moment and it got me wondering what triggered her pronunciation. Of course there is the fish hoki an extremely important one in New Zealand waters (and your filet-o-fish). Not many of us would be familiar with its anglophone names, blue grenadier or NZ whiptail nice descriptive name there! or … curiously blue hake!.
In fact the two fish are distant cousins. Both belong to the merlucciidae family which includes the cod-ish fishes, though, they are in different sub-branches, or genera if you want to be fancy.
So there maybe a fishy connection, but I think there are more things about hoki/hake that conspired against our waitress than that. The wordshape is suggestive of Polynesian phoneme inventories and syllable structure.

The genre of menus itself might have had an influence on her processing of the word. The lexicon of restaurant-worthy food or cuisine is of course multingual – (cuisine, for example!) – she had already used Italian sourced terms polenta, and French, paté and if I remember there was something Spanish-ish too.
I would be interested to know what other forms in English might trigger an accidental Māori reading and vice versa!

ed’s note: oddly this is not the first entry about fishnames!

http://www.uiowa.edu/~c103112/lingprof.html

The noun gender appears in the first volume of the 1981 OED on p 1127 with four senses in the following order

1.  kind, sort or class

2. grammatical gender – i.e. the marking of nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter

3. sex

This category now has the proviso only jocular and seems to contain a few quotes from the medieval period to the late 19th century ending with a piece from the daily News, 17 July 1896 – as to the success in the work one does, surely that is not a question of gender either.

Hmmm jocular? How do you tell?

4. Product, offspring (now rare)

‘Such a gender of filth that great frog left behind him’ is the quote from Bastwick(‘s?) Letany which supports that.

The 2011 supplement begins with

1. grammatical gender

2. A class of things with related properties or characteristics

This gender of diseases is incurable wrote Matthews in The Unlearned Alchemist 1662

Sense 3 of 1981 is now 2b, the frog quote remains but Matthews’ Unlearned Alchemist makes an appearance here too…

3. Men and women viewed as a group.

This sense has a number of subsenses including

the state of being a man or a woman as cultural or social descriptions rather than biological factors

Another secondary meaning of this sense is ‘electronic gender’, by which i mean the kinds of plugs male and female that computers might have

Below is the dominant meaning of the third sense and I wonder how many are outraged by the gender = sex implication!

a. gen. Males or females viewed as a group; = sex n.¹ 1. Also: the property or fact of belonging to one of these groups.

Following the sense is a nicely illustrated list of phrases and compounds made from gneder and other parts  – including gender-bender, genderblender, and genderfuck, gender gap, gender bias.  None of these appear in the earlier edition.

Here’s the long answer. I’m not sure I’m right.

Looking at the Oxford dictionary online

Gruntled is listed as a playful backformation of disgruntled.
This implies that the sense of gruntled is younger than that of disgruntled. This may mean that the creators of this backformation, which could be many individuals in different times and contexts, removed the dis-.

Now since disgruntled means ‘To put into sulky dissatisfaction or ill-humour; to chagrin, disgust. Chiefly in pa. pple’, according to the OED (see site above) the meaning of the backformation is dependent on the meaning the coiners of gruntled apply to the prefix dis-.
The OED lists a number of meanings for this term many of which are related. The OED sets out two distinct sets – the first, they suggest apply to English and Latin – so we should expect to see them on Latinate words and in fact the entire set of terms that are used to illustrate the meaning of dis- in group 1 are latinate. This group’s meaning is about splitting up, treating separately. However, sense 1.d and 1.e are of the most interest to us here.

1.d . With privative sense, implying removal, aversion, negation, reversal of action (cf. de- prefix 1f), as discalceātus unshod, diffibulāre to unclasp, disjungĕre disjoin, displicēre displease, dissociāre dissociate, dissuādēre, dissuade.(OED See link above)

Here the strongest sense is a removal or reversal of an action. I think the most interesting one here for us is displease, as this is the closest we get to a verb of an emotional state , similar to disgruntle.

Sense. 1.e however seems to have dis- as an intensifier. This only works according to the OED if the verb it is attaching to is already about splitting up or negating an action.

With verbs having already a sense of division, solution, separation, or undoing, the addition of dis- was naturally intensive, ‘away, out and out, utterly, exceedingly’, as in disperīre to perish utterly, dispudēre to be utterly ashamed (OED, see link above)

Note too that these appear to be Latin forms, many of which do not have high frequency contemporary English descendent! The OED asserts that meaning of dis- in disgruntled (though see final note) however is of this type.

Even though assigning the meaning to 1.e intensifier meaning, making the backformation gruntled meaning a less intense form of being sulky, we cannot be so sure.

Backformations rely on speakers realanalysing (playfully or seriously) the structure of words they plan to operate on. So for example in recent times marathon a how many miles long running race? Has been reanalysed so that –athon has become a new meaning bearing unit in English, so that danceathon, readathon, hopathon, telethon are readable as events of extreme duration entailing the activity of the first part of the new word. The original Greek marathon was simply a place name that seems to have its origin in a flower name.

Likewise, taking disgruntled which was originally dis+grunt+el, modern speakers of Engish can recognise dis- as a meaning bearing unit. BUT, and here is the big but, are probably not able to assign the original sense from the set of meanings it may contain. One reason for that is some of the senses are now less frequent than others, and I daresay that 1.e intensifier is the least productive of all. That is, few new words are coined with dis- having this sense. Instead, the current dominant meaning of dis- is derived from sense 1.d – the privative, negating meaning. (in fact the OED, gives this the dominant sense in the second group of senses.) Thus many speakers creating a backformation from disgruntle are going to apply this sense, whereby stripping the prefix from the form should restore a positive meaning, undoing the reversal. To put it schematically, if DIS+ X= – X then Dis+X –Dis = X. If disgruntled means sulky and sullen or put into a sulky mood, by this logic, gruntled should mean to be in a good mood, pleased, etc.

A problem with the analysis presented though is the nature of gruntle an archaic verb meaning ‘to grumble’. According to the OED, the the Dis- intensifier reading, in fact, all the group of senses, 1a-e all apply most readily to latinate forms in English. Though they suggest a 1.e meaning being attached to gruntle this is resolutely Germanic in origin, not latinate. The OED does suggest that the group 2 senses, including the one that produces, to be pleased as the meaning of the backformation, can be attached to any kind of verbal base – something that separates it from the first group of senses.

]]> http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/im-not-usually-the-kind-of-linguist-who/feed/ 0 masseylinguists http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/haere-atu-take-manu/ http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/haere-atu-take-manu/#comments Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:33:46 +0000 masseylinguists http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/?p=1000 ]]> A quick ka kite anō to te wiki o te rēo Māori, which at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa (Massey University) grew into te marama o te rēo Māori. I hope you opened up the Massey home page and found it was presented in te rēo over that time. While the recent report on the state of the Māori language (http://www.tpk.govt.nz/_documents/te-reo-mauriora.pdf) doesn’t give too rosy a picture for the future, what I have noticed over the years that we had had Māori Language Week is how succeeding wiki over the years seem to have left traces in our general discourse, a greater presence of te rēo as a normal part of New Zealand English discourses. About 30 years ago, Naida Glavish of Ngati Whatua was temporarily demoted from her job as a telephone toll operator for greeting callers with Kia ora (http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/maori-language-week/history-of-the-maori-language). That caused a reaction, and nowadays that is a normal opening for notices, e-mails, telephone calls in many contexts. A few years ago, National Radio’s morning news programme, Morning Report, responded to te wiki by using a few brief greetings and formulaic introductions in their programme … but decided to keep them on after the end of the week, so that nowadays many people wake to phrases such as ata marie or Nau mai, haere mai. For Massey, this year’s contribution to te wiki (or te marama) has included our own waiata (http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/maori/maori-language-month/uni-waiata/uni-waiata_home.cfm) so let’s hope that is a lasting legacy.
However, we should not become too blindly optimistic. The wide presence of te rēo does not necessarily penetrate far enough for everybody necessarily to celebrate our linguistic riches. For example, recently when doing a five-minute quiz with a group of people, I found everyone could chorus how John Campbell finishes his show every night (see the first line of this message) but I was a little shocked when one person asked, apparently for the first time, “But what does it mean?” Let’s hope that by the time of next year’s te wiki o te rēo Māori all New Zealanders would at least be able to answer that quiz question.

]]> http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/haere-atu-take-manu/feed/ 0 masseylinguists http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/brids-the-wrod/ http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/brids-the-wrod/#comments Tue, 21 Jun 2011 21:34:26 +0000 masseylinguists http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/?p=975 ]]>
Well perhaps this is a really old pot. A much older form of bird in English was brid sometimes brydd.
From the OED

Etymology: Middle English byrd, bryd< Old English brid(masculine) (plural briddas), in Northumbrian bird, birdas ‘offspring, young,’ but used only of the young of birds. There is no corresponding form in any other Germanic language, and the etymology is unknown.

The vowel and the liquid have undergone a process known as metathesis – the swapping of places of sounds within a word (though note speakers of NZE subsequently do not pronounce the postvocalic liquid). Most often seen as a phonological process which results in change over time, a few languages use metathesis for grammatical purposes. Sierra Miwok a language a severely endangered language of California uses this process to derive nouns:

Base	Derived form
kalaŋ ‘to dance’	kalŋa ‘a dance’
ʔumuʧ ‘to approach winter’	ʔumʧu ‘winter’
tuyaŋ ‘to jump’	tuyŋa ‘a jump’
ʔawin ‘to play’	ʔawni ‘a game’

(data from Stonham, J. 2006, p.93).

]]> http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/brids-the-wrod/feed/ 0 masseylinguists brid http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/attitudes-and-tataiako/ http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/attitudes-and-tataiako/#comments Sun, 12 Jun 2011 00:16:40 +0000 masseylinguists http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/?p=966 ]]> Opportunities to collect data about language attitudes in New Zealand are never in short supply. However how they represent the range of views in New Zealand is hard to gauge.

Recently Dr Pita Sharples, Minister for Māori announced a project Tataiako to develop the cultural competency of secondary school teachers in te ao Māori – the Māori world, including elements of te reo, language, and tikanga – protocol. Elements necessary to engage with the Māori community in the school and in which the school is embedded.  There was the inevitable and for some teachers reasonable response regarding heavy workloads. However many of the responses did not come from teachers or school principals.

Here’s what readers of the website of the National Business Review had to say:

If you make a minority language compulsory in this way,instead of engendering support for the language, the result will be the opposite – resistance and negative attitudes. Sometimes, I think we have a government of absolute idiots with no knowledge of the wider world and what has happened elsewhere.
Anonymous | Saturday, June 11, 2011 – 1:23pm

I was thinking of doing a diploma in education next year but if I have to waste my time learning something that is totally irrelevant I’ll seriously reconsider. Trainee teachers get the treaty of Waitangi rammed down their throats enough as it is. Unless the teacher’s subject is maori it is totally irrelevant and a waste of time & money. What will it achieve? Nothing. Maori will still at the bottom of the heap because their attitudes remain the same. They’ll still beat their children to death, fail school, go to jail, go on a benefit, live in poverty – but their teachers will speak basic maori, even if the students themselves can’t. The real issue is why the govt forces them to go to the crappiest schools because they live in low decile areas.

http://www.rogerdouglas.org.nz/?page_id=901

Anonymous | Saturday, June 11, 2011 – 4:04pm

We all love the Haka ….. whats wrong with embracing a little more Maori rather than assisting the John Hadfield’s of this world
Chopper says…. | Saturday, June 11, 2011 – 4:39pm

In response to Chopper says…. | Saturday, June 11, 2011 – 4:39pm
The element of compulsion is what’s wong. Even Labour wasn’t foolish enough to do that.
Anonymous | Saturday, June 11, 2011 – 4:43pm

many of our teachers struggle with literacy and numeracy let alone Maori.
Anonymous | Saturday, June 11, 2011 – 4:55pm

Maori Youth Council should learn from some SE ASIAN countries, where local languages made compulsory had actually failed. Most local graduates had problem understanding most communications predominantly in English, written or verbal..
No Time | Sunday, June 12, 2011 – 8:04am

Its actually very similar to how hitler altered Germany’s education system.
Anonymous | Sunday, June 12, 2011 – 11:50am

]]> http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/attitudes-and-tataiako/feed/ 2 masseylinguists http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/an-anthem-without-a-nation/ http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/an-anthem-without-a-nation/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 20:44:47 +0000 masseylinguists http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/?p=959 ]]> As some of you may know I am interested in anthems as examples of language ideology and planning.  New Zealand’s own anthem underwent cosmetic surgery in the late nineties by becoming more beautiful and bilingual, now beginning with a sequence in te reo Maaori.

An anthem as a national symbol might be understood as a narrative of nation’s character – it’s aspirations towards unity and perhaps even uniqueness – though nations have shared anthems in the past – God Save the Queen, anyone? Other nations reflect the natural landscapes for example Australia’s beauties, rich and rare. Ours doesn’t mention our beautiful islands (nor our inclement weather for that matter), and perhaps strike a note of humility, perhaps an idealised trait of the people, by beseeching God’s protection.

The Saami, known by the exonym, ‘name from the outside’ as the Lapps or Lapplanders, though some Saami react strongly to such nomenclature live across a region of northern Scandanavia and adjacent Russia.  While associated in the popular mind with reindeer herding the Saami  engage in quite varied lifeways.  The recognition of political rights for the Saami is quite developed in the Scandanavian countries, with linguistic and educational rights in some areas, as well as the provision of separate Saami Parliaments in all regions but Russia.

However, this cross-border regionalism of the Saami people is from an outsider’s perspective. To the Saami, those borders are less relevant despite the fact that they crossover and carve up the region they have long referred to as Sápmi.  It is a paean to this ‘land’ that the Saami sing in the firs three verses of the Saami anthem, ‘Song of the Sami people’ and it is this region that the song calls on the sons of the sun to defend.

The Sami language family, a subgroup of Uralic is comprised of ten languages.  The anthem lyrics seem available in many of them. You can read them here  and note the orthogrpahic differences across the varieties and the influence of those national borders on representing the languages.

]]> http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/an-anthem-without-a-nation/feed/ 3 masseylinguists http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/a-king-among-linguists/ http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/a-king-among-linguists/#comments Thu, 26 May 2011 20:35:31 +0000 masseylinguists http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/?p=945 ]]> In the history of language and linguistics, perhaps two kings are widely credited. These are King Sejong who was responsible for Hangul, the elegant and descriptive writing system designed for Korean, and King James, who got a Bible named after himself. However a forgotten King, Ibrahim Njoya, ruler of the Bamum of West Africa, made a contribution to the language and culture of his subjects in a way that reflects the goals of contemporary linguists in the documentation field.

Coming to power in 1889 as the 17th King of the Bamum he set about modernising his people. This included conversion to Islam and allowing the Christian missionaries to influence the court, resulting in a ban of polygamy. After experimenting with a pictographic system, Njoya and a coterie of intellectuals opted to develop a syllabary for Bamum. According to the great site affrocentriccultrebydesign, in a supremely democratic move, the king demanded his subjects contribute graphemes to the project. Eventually, the system stabilised as a 73-symbol set known as Aka Uku after the first four symbols.

In written Bamum he designed calendars, created volumes on ethnopharmacology and dynastic histories that promoted his line and his people’s customs and law. Moreover, to spread literacy among his subjects he built schools, and printing presses which could have been the seeds of a flourishing autochthonous literate culture had colonial intervention not arrived in the form of the Germans and French. When the French seized control of Western Cameroon, the visionary King was exiled, much of his written work destroyed or carted off to Europe into British and French collections. The suppression of written Bamum was clearly the goal of the French who destroyed the printing press, and this goal was achieved. Only now, are the descendents of this visionary monarch making attempts to revive the script for use in education, in according to affrocentricbyydesign, the Palace Ibriham Noya built.

As far as I can tell this photographs were taken by Bryan White, but sourced from Blackethics.

]]> http://linguisticsmassey.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/a-king-among-linguists/feed/ 0 masseylinguists King-Njoya-Ibrahim-of-bamum-300x225 Bamum-script2-300x225