I need a term for....
ken
technical
language, but is really meaningless?
For example that famous paper (can't remember the citation) that made
fun of Deconstruction and was actually published as a genuine
paper in/on Deconstruction before the writer(s)
admitted it was totally phoney and meaningless.
I'm not after Deconstruction, I just read a passage from a sci-fi
novel (slipstream subgenre, 'The Raw Shark Texts' - pun on
Rorschach Tests - that purports to be some kind of
psychological linguistic well, strange - and makes no
sense at all but seems scientific.
I could swear there's a word for that. For example, there's
a rhetorical device whose name escapes me for making
up words in another language, or possibly mangling words
in your own language so they sound like they're in
another language - like adding Latin morphological
terminations to English words.
Hope this makes sense!
Peter T. Daniels
When comedians do it, it's called "doubletalk."
ken
Thanks for the reply!
Maybe that's it, and I know that word of course -it's a
good word and it fits the bill- but I had a feeling there was a more
formal term.
Something like catateleiazeugmateion:-)
Peter T. Daniels
That seems to be a few more roots than any self-repecting jargon-
inventor would incorporate!
noesy_parker
8a9e59...@v25g2000yqk.googlegroups.com:
> Is there a term for inventing phoney text that pretends to be in a
> technical
> language, but is really meaningless?
>
> For example that famous paper (can't remember the citation) that made
> fun of Deconstruction and was actually published as a genuine
> paper in/on Deconstruction before the writer(s)
> admitted it was totally phoney and meaningless.
>
Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity by Alan Sokal.
> I'm not after Deconstruction, I just read a passage from a sci-fi
> novel (slipstream subgenre, 'The Raw Shark Texts' - pun on
> Rorschach Tests - that purports to be some kind of
> psychological linguistic well, strange - and makes no
> sense at all but seems scientific.
>
> I could swear there's a word for that. For example, there's
> a rhetorical device whose name escapes me for making
> up words in another language, or possibly mangling words
> in your own language so they sound like they're in
> another language - like adding Latin morphological
> terminations to English words.
Asemic writing? Altlang?
>
> Hope this makes sense!
>
Yusuf B Gursey
wouldn't it be subsumed under the term "coinage"?
ken
Well my memory of Greek morphology is extremely limited so I
had to improvise with roots!
BTW, that raises the interesting question that altho Greek is not
agglutinative (I'm not a linguistics expert) it and probably all
languages have agglutinative aspects - joining of two or more
roots and then sticking on the endings.
BTW, are there languages that instead of endings indicate
morphology by prefixes?
ken
> ken <kquir...@yahoo.com> wrote in news:00ba223a-fa88-4940-bb43-
> 8a9e59c0c...@v25g2000yqk.googlegroups.com:
>
> > Is there a term for inventing phoney text that pretends to be in a
> > technical
> > language, but is really meaningless?
>
> > For example that famous paper (can't remember the citation) that made
> > fun of Deconstruction and was actually published as a genuine
> > paper in/on Deconstruction before the writer(s)
> > admitted it was totally phoney and meaningless.
>
> Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of
> Quantum Gravity by Alan Sokal.
>
Ah! I'm definitely going to look that up for a laugh! I hope there's
an online copy.
> > I'm not after Deconstruction, I just read a passage from a sci-fi
> > novel (slipstream subgenre, 'The Raw Shark Texts' - pun on
> > Rorschach Tests - that purports to be some kind of
> > psychological linguistic well, strange - and makes no
> > sense at all but seems scientific.
>
> > I could swear there's a word for that. For example, there's
> > a rhetorical device whose name escapes me for making
> > up words in another language, or possibly mangling words
> > in your own language so they sound like they're in
> > another language - like adding Latin morphological
> > terminations to English words.
>
> Asemic writing? Altlang?
>
Asemic - does that mean something like 'without meaning'?
Altlang - sounds German!
They both seem like good coinages.
>
>
>
>
> > Hope this makes sense!
ken
except that I would think a coinage is a word
that is intended to be accepted into the language -
for example Shakespeare coined hundreds of
words (as I recollect) and many of them (I seem
to remember) became accepted and
reused. And his intent was not satire or parody but
expressiveness - expanding the language
he could use.
technically tho you may be right.
Yusuf B Gursey
one could qualify it by saying "etymologically false coinage"
Peter T. Daniels
Certainly -- Bantu languages are the ones you'll most likely encounter
in your Morphology workbook (such as the one co-written by the late
Benjamin Elson, which we used at Cornell in 1970), but even in IE,
things happen at the fronts of words in Celtic.
Peter T. Daniels
Or schottisch? "Fuer alt lang sein, mein Tier, fuer alt lang sein!"
Marco Pagliero
> like adding Latin morphological
> terminations to English words.
>
text to be meaningless, only that it sounds like Latin while being
English.
Marco P
Marco Pagliero
Yes, and there is also the comedian's art of talking rambling nonsense
while sounding like meaningful speech called grammelot.
ken
I had forgotten macaronic! But it does have the qualification you
mention.
ken
It sounds like what I'm looking for is a variant of grammelot. Wasn't
there a 'Dr. Irwin Corwin' who did this form of humor quite a number
of years ago, like on Johnny Carson?
alan
ken
That was hilarious. I haven't laughed that hard since the porn
movie with wind breaking from a startling place. Which was about
30 minutes ago. So thanks for the double whammy.
Peter T. Daniels
"Macaronic" refers to a (usually song) text written with different
languages in (usually) alternate lines.
John Atkinson
prefixes "instead of endings", if by that you mean that they don't use
suffixes at all to indicate morphology. Certainly this isn't the case
for any Bantu language.
AIUI, there are quite a few languages that use only suffixes (e.g., the
Eskimo languages), and, probably, purely isolating languages that use no
affixes at all, but no languages that use only prefixes.
John.
PaulJK
Here is an example of macaroni poetry mixing words from, I guess,
at least six languages. It's actually meaningful, for people, who
speak those languages the poem can actually make sense.
(Hold on, I just noticed some Spanish and Italian?, so it's at least
eight languages, if not more.)
I LOVE YOU MADCHEN KRASNE
By Frantisek Ringo Cech
Me heart is velmi happy
kagda ja smatrju na girls
When ony ladne walking
po Strasse meho little town.
Kagda ony der Fuss kladou
cestou do Arbeit nadvorim
Ich stopping jejich kroky
o amour s nimi hovorim.
I love you Madchen krasne
vot eto je ten richtig cit!
Achtung na la jolie chvilky
o etoile expose mit.
Was delat mam pro amour mou
Ich habe bolsoj svetobol
This Woche vsjo on rozhodne
neb jinak zizn Wiedersehn!
Excuse me, bitte, promluvim
ja zvu vas gratis do Gasthaus
manana sobas vystrojim
o je t'aime hot ji vypravim
Mamma mia kak scastlivyj
is Fachmann love jako ja
Cornuto nikdy nebudu
wir budem happy na vsegda!
pjk
Peter T. Daniels
Well ... that's not macaronic poetry in the traditional sense (for
which see e.g. the English Christmas carol "Good Christian Men,
Rejoice," a version of "In dulci jubilo" that alternates Latin lines
with English).
ken
The Shorter Oxford Dictionary:
1. Of the nature of a jumble or medley
2. (of verse) of a burlesque form in which vernacular words are
introduced into the context of another language, especially
Latin, with appropriate inflections, etc.
I found a number of versions of the lyrics to "Good Christian Men,
Rejoice" none of which contain Latin lines. Could you supply a link
or cut&paste the lyrics you're referring to?
In any event, alternating lines of one language with those in
another seems to defeat the 'jumble' or 'burlesque' nature of
macaronic at least as the Shorter Oxford defines the term.
That is the words should be vernacular in one language
malformed with the inflections of the other language; I don't
alternating words of two languages or clumps of words
meets the intent here.
Peter T. Daniels
Then which is the well-known Christmas carol that _does_ alternate
English and Latin lines? One rhyming pair is "In principio" and "Alpha
est et O."
alan
It *is* "In Dulci Jubilo". Probably couldn't find it because he was looking
for the English title. (The phrase, btw, is "in praesipio") :
http://liberax.netfirms.com/lyrics.htm#3.3
I believe it's a translation from what was originally a mixture of German
and Latin:
http://www.metrolyrics.com/in-dulci-jubilo-lyrics-die-toten-hosen.html
Trond Engen
But part of that is the tendency to keep (or interpret) preceding
elements as separate words while elements at the end are likely to be
treated as affixes. The classic example would be the French pass� simple
and pass� compos�. The banal explanation is that fronted elements are
more distinctly pronounced because they get more air.
--
Trond Engen
Yusuf B Gursey
in Arabic poetry (originating in Muslim Spain but then spreading) one
has the muwa*sh**sh*aH , the mainbody being in classical Arabic but
the last two lines being in colloquial Arabic or a foreign language or
mixed. here is some information about it from Enc.of Islam II
"Muwashshsah". note the use of the term "macaronic" in the article.
to modern linguists they are a source of Andalusian Arabic and early
Iberian Romance.
<<
MUWASHSHAH. (A.) (muwashshah. or muwashshah.a, pl. muwashshah.āt),
name of a certain genre of stanzaic poetry, which according to
indigenous tradition developed in al-Andalus towards the end of the
3rd/9th century. It is reckoned among the seven post-classical genres
of poetry in Arabic [see KĀN WA-KĀN].
Structure.
The muwashshah. has a particular rhyme scheme and a special final part
(khardja). The main body of the poem is always composed in Classical
Arabic, while the language of the final part is mostly non-Classical
(vernacular Arabic or Romance mixed with vernacular Arabic to a larger
or lesser extent [macaronic]; very rarely pure Romance). ...
...
Name and terminology.
Different explanations have been proposed for the name muwashshah..
The ancient indigenous philologists, followed by J. Ribera and S.M.
Stern, derive it from wishāh., "an ornament worn by women (consisting
of) two series of pearls and jewels strung or put together in regular
order, which two series are disposed contrariwise, one of them being
turned over the other" (cf. Lane, s.v.). A muwashshah. would thus be a
poem in which the rhymes alternate in the manner of a wishāh. .
According to I. `Abbās, however, the basic meaning of al-muwashshah.
would be "that which is characterised by a colour different from its
normal colour (or by striped pattern), or an embroidered or ornamented
garment"; the transposition would thus find its explanation in the
comparability of the ornamentation of the material consisting of
regularly recurring stripes and the lines of the poems (cf. Ta'rīkh al-
adab al-andalusī, 220 f.).
(G. Schoeler)
Extract from the Encyclopaedia of Islam CD-ROM Edition v. 1.0 © 1999
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
>>
ken
The mixture of Latin and English in "In Dulci Jubilo" is actually
quite beautiful
and moving. Even tho I can't quite make out ALL the Latin:-)
But Peter, would you still say it's macaronic? My own feeling is that
i) it is not burlesque or comic (far from it)
ii) I think macaronic would require English words with Latin
inflection. Damned
if I can come up with fitting examples.
The pie eatabitur?
Let's eatamus the pie?
Please somebody come up with something cleverer!
Odysseus
<3f53436c-6181-4386...@f16g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
ken <kqui...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Dec 3, 11:38�pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > On Dec 3, 6:14�pm, ken <kquir...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Is there a term for inventing phoney text that pretends to be in
> > > a technical language, but is really meaningless?
<snip>
> > > Hope this makes sense!
> >
> > When comedians do it, it's called "doubletalk."
>
> Thanks for the reply!
>
> Maybe that's it, and I know that word of course -it's a good word and
> it fits the bill- but I had a feeling there was a more formal term.
They're not formal, but there are also "gobbledygook", most often
applied to bureaucratic obfuscation -- not always intentional -- and
"technobabble", more specifically quasi-scientific.
A meaningless pseudo-Latin text used as filler by graphic designers is
called "Lorem ipsum".
--
Odysseus
Yusuf B Gursey
would the spoken equivalent be termed "code switching"?
Peter T. Daniels
No one ever associated it with "burlesque and comic" in my day.
> ii) I think macaronic would require English words with Latin
> inflection. Damned
> if I can come up with fitting examples.
Why do you think that?
> The pie eatabitur?
> Let's eatamus the pie?
>
> Please somebody come up with something cleverer!-
Or just stick with the extant examples.
Peter T. Daniels
praesepio
A few hours later, I wondered whether I had typed "principio" instead
of "praesepio."
> http://liberax.netfirms.com/lyrics.htm#3.3
> I believe it's a translation from what was originally a mixture of German
> and Latin:http://www.metrolyrics.com/in-dulci-jubilo-lyrics-die-toten-hosen.html-
Peter T. Daniels
> In article
> <3f53436c-6181-4386-a5ba-99988b60f...@f16g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
It;'s not "called" Lorem ipsum, it _is_ Lorem ipsum (thank you, White
Knight)
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:5283bc84-7eab-49e1...@f20g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> On Dec 5, 10:03�pm, Odysseus <odysseus1479...@yahoo-dot.ca> wrote:
[...]
>> A meaningless pseudo-Latin text used as filler by graphic
>> designers is called "Lorem ipsum".
> It;'s not "called" Lorem ipsum, it _is_ Lorem ipsum (thank
> you, White Knight)
It's a good deal more than just 'Lorem ipsum'! And while
you might not care for the practice, I have seen it called
'Lorem ipsum'. Also 'lipsum', whence Lipsum, a random text
generator. Come to think of it, I've also seen 'Lorem
ipsum' described as the name of the text, so all we need to
know now is what that name is called.
Brian
PaulJK
Okay. If there is no accepted term describing poetry verses
chopped into fine pieces smaller than macaroni, I shell call it...
...ehmmm... let's say.... Cous Cous love poetry. :-)
pjk
Richard Herring
<ad0ca4f1-1ca2-4d46...@h10g2000vbm.googlegroups.com>, ken
<kqui...@yahoo.com> writes
>ii) I think macaronic would require English words with Latin
>inflection. Damned
>if I can come up with fitting examples.
>
>The pie eatabitur?
>Let's eatamus the pie?
>
>Please somebody come up with something cleverer!
What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
Implet in the Corn and High
Terror me Motoris Bi:
Bo Motori clamitabo
Ne Motore caedar a Bo--
Dative be or Ablative
So thou only let us live:
Whither shall thy victims flee?
Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!
Thus I sang; and still and still anigh
Came in hordes Motores Bi,
Et complebat omne forum
Copia Motorum Borum.
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!
by A.D. Godley, evidently an Oxford man ("in the Corn and High" - the
Cambridge variant substitutes "wheresoe'er they ply").
--
Richard Herring
Peter T. Daniels
> In message
> <ad0ca4f1-1ca2-4d46-8fd2-5e7089a54...@h10g2000vbm.googlegroups.com>, ken
> <kquir...@yahoo.com> writes
That reminds me of a lengthy poem printed by I. M. Pei that can be
read in either Latin or Italian.
And a group of Assyriology students in Paris in the late 1940s created
a cuneiform poem that could be read as either Akkadian or Elamite --
and translated into perfect alexandrines. (Erica Reiner kept a copy
but never let anyone see it.)
ken
> In message
> <ad0ca4f1-1ca2-4d46-8fd2-5e7089a54...@h10g2000vbm.googlegroups.com>, ken
That is definitely cleverer, almost quam cleverrimum (hastily
referring to my
school Latin books). Well maybe not - the stuff Peter T. Daniels
refers to
in the next post might fit that bill in spades, which is probably
about 3
metaphors in flagrante abusio.
Anyway, the Oxford and Cambridge giveaways - a little research found a
Cornmarket St. off the Oxford High St. (I'm across the pond) - is that
it?
and Cambridge - is that some sort of linguistic tic common to
Cantabrigians (again, this word is applied to Cambridge, MA
inhabitants or characteristics and may not to Cambridge, England) or
did
some famous Cambridge person write that phrase in
some famous work of literature - or maybe not so famous?
Or did you just have to be there, so to speak? That's ok too.
Peter T. Daniels
Surely it's just that they couldn't find a local feature that both
rhymed and scanned.
A school song at Cornell in my day (1968-72) went:
Give my regards to Davy,
Remember me to Tee Fee Crane.
Tell all the guys up on the Hill
That I'll be back again--
We'll all have drinks
At Theodore Zinck's
When I come back again.
(I might have lost some lines over the decades.)
Obviously dating from the time of the song it parodies (1910s?), it
refers to two administrators and a tavern all long gone by the 1960s.
Richard Herring
<85bf64d4-7c23-4677...@9g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>, ken
<kqui...@yahoo.com> writes
>referring to my
>school Latin books). Well maybe not - the stuff Peter T. Daniels
>refers to
>in the next post might fit that bill in spades, which is probably
>about 3
>metaphors in flagrante abusio.
>
>Anyway, the Oxford and Cambridge giveaways - a little research found a
>Cornmarket St. off the Oxford High St. (I'm across the pond) - is that
>it?
I believe so, but my knowledge of Oxford is pretty much confined, with
one significant exception, to the works of Michael Innes, Dorothy L
Sayers and the like.
>and Cambridge - is that some sort of linguistic tic common to
>Cantabrigians (again, this word is applied to Cambridge, MA
>inhabitants or characteristics and may not to Cambridge, England)
It works for Cambridge UK too.
>or
>did
>some famous Cambridge person write that phrase in
>some famous work of literature - or maybe not so famous?
I don't think so. It's just not-Oxford, rhymes with "Bi" and is in the
right register to fit the rest of the poem.
>Or did you just have to be there, so to speak? That's ok too.
--
Richard Herring
Joachim Pense
>
> Altlang - sounds German!
>
It would mean "oldlong". Hmm.
Joachim
Prai Jei
> Is there a term for inventing phoney text that pretends to be in a
> technical
> language, but is really meaningless?
>
> For example that famous paper (can't remember the citation) that made
> fun of Deconstruction and was actually published as a genuine
> paper in/on Deconstruction before the writer(s)
> admitted it was totally phoney and meaningless.
>
> I'm not after Deconstruction, I just read a passage from a sci-fi
> novel (slipstream subgenre, 'The Raw Shark Texts' - pun on
> Rorschach Tests - that purports to be some kind of
> psychological linguistic well, strange - and makes no
> sense at all but seems scientific.
Jabberwocky, after the Lewis Carroll original?
Brian Aldiss' short story "Shards" adopts this style while nevertheless
remaining a readable, understandable, visualisable story.
Douglas Hofstadter's books make numerous references to a journal called "Art
Language" which appears to be full of such outpourings.
As an example of the genre, try the technical spec for the Turboencabulator:
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~ids/dotdot/misc/jokes/turboencabulator.txt
--
ξ:) Proud to be curly
Interchange the alphabetic letter groups to reply
Tony
<snip>
> Anyway, the Oxford and Cambridge giveaways - a little research found a
> Cornmarket St. off the Oxford High St. (I'm across the pond) - is that
> it?
Yes it is. Cornmarket St. is the main shopping street in central
Oxford. Ironically, it is now closed to all traffic except buses and
taxis.