#language breakdown

I've seen it several times in c-dramas, and I gather that the words mean something close to 'holy woman'. But every time I encounter it, it's in relation to a country or a people. It's always 'the saintess of - this place/tribe etc-'. So I wonder if there's something more to it.

Examples include Xiaotang from evernight, Haitang Duo Duo from Joy of life, and Sha Hualing from Scum Villain. Can you help?

hm... i just met Xiaotang tonight. I’m on ep 27 of Ever Night now! And i haven’t watched JoL(i’m actually on ep 7ish? but don’t remember because i stopped back in march and forgot to pick it back up...) or SVSSS yet. 

You’re right that the words mean holy + woman. I think that says most of what you’re trying to get at but maybe if we talk about the character 圣 a little more, it’ll be of help to you. 

圣 can mean holy or sacred on its own. It is used with the character for person (人) to mean saint or sage. A person of great skill can be known as the 圣 of something. One example is tang dynasty poet Du Fu who was called 诗圣. In some sense, it takes whatever it’s paired with and shoves that thing on a pedestal. [also note that this is the same 圣 for JC’s name 三毒圣手 with 圣手 meaning a highly skilled practitioner of some sort]

So what is a 圣女? If you look up 圣女 in pleco, it gives you the Virgin Mary or a female saint/martyr (e.g Joan of Arc). It can be a holy woman or a priestess of something (pleco PLC definition). It can be a woman of impeccable virtue, someone soon to become an empress/consort, or refer to a goddess. (the latter three are from pleco hanyu da cidian definition) 

In my experience, 圣女 in wuxia and xianxia are all females with a specific role of some sort within a cult, religion, or tribe. I think of it as a woman shoved on a pedestal who is expected to perform to those expectations and serve whatever group she is the 圣女 of (hand waves about great power and great responsibility and sprinkles in great beauty into it. like i said, pedestal). The implication, to me,  is that her group exists outside of standard Chinese virtues (think either jianghu where 义 reigns supreme or some sort of confucian 仁-based morality). 

 Somewhere on the long list of countries that most people in the West regularly forget the existence of, you will find Armenia. Which is a shame, because Armenian history is deeply interesting and complex, and the language’s development reflects that. Also, Armenian has its own alphabet, and I’m all about Indo-European languages that have their own alphabets. 

So where to begin? To the surprise of absolutely no one, there is some debate over the origins of Armenian. (If I ever find a linguistic topic about which there is no debate, I will be shocked.) It is definitely Indo-European, but beyond that, linguists are unsure. It is most closely related to the Indo-Iranian languages and Greek, and has a significant number of Greek cognates. (If you are interested in the development of cognates across the Indo-European languages, I recommend the Armenian language wikipedia page.) 

Armenian is an old language: there was an established Armenian language by the second century BC at the latest. (Yes, BC. Compared to Armenian, English is a tiny baby.) Obviously the similarities between this language and Modern Armenian were are fairly few, but this was the start. The oldest example of written Armenian dates from the 400s AD, and it is a translation of the Bible. This translation also uses the Armenian alphabet, which is credited to Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian theologian, philosopher, linguist, and statesman. (Basically, Mesrop Mashtots was the dude to be in 5th century Armenia.) 

There are differing versions of the evolution of Armenian, but the basic story is this: Classical Armenian was the spoken from the 400′s to around the 1000′s, when it began to develop into Middle Armenian, which was spoken until around the 1700′s. Classical Armenian was also used as a literary language until the 1700′s. However, that is where it gets complicated. During the next century, Armenia would be divided in half; part of it conquered by the Russian empire and part conquered by the Ottoman empire. These empires were not huge fans of each other, meaning that the Armenian communities in each had little contact with each other, and as is usual, the languages spoken in these communities began to diverge. Both communities developed distinctive dialects and literary styles, as well as modernizing the language extensively. Today, the two dialects are recognized as seperate, though they remain mutually intelligible. Both dialects purged their Turkish loanwords following the Armenian genocide, which you can find out about here. 

Linguistically, Armenian has several noun cases, though like other Indo-European languages in the region, (including Modern Persian) it has no grammatical gender. Like English, Armenian uses auxiliary verbs to denote some tenses and conjugates some verbs differently in the negative. The alphabet contains 39 letters, many of which represent sounds not found in English. Interestingly, the letters of the alphabet are also used as numbers: the first 36 letters all have numerical values. The alphabet also uses ligatures; two letters combined into a single character. 

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this yet on the blog, but since two-thirds of my degree is currently devoted to languages, I’ve been taking a lot of language classes in the past few days. For those of you interested, taking Arabic and Farsi at the same time is both helpful, in that both have very similar writing systems and lots of mutual loanwords, and very confusing because sometimes you forget which is which. I’m having a great time anyway. 

Speaking of writing systems, part of the reason I chose Thai for this week’s language breakdown is because like my new frenemies Arabic and Persian, it technically does not have an alphabet. More on that in a sec, but first, some history. 

Thai is part of the Tai-Kadai language family, which is believed to have originated in Southern China. (Note that the name of this family is somewhat controversial, but I was unable to find any variants, so I’m going with it.) The Tai-Kadai languages spread throughout Southern China and into most of Southeast Asia, and include not only Thai, but also its neighbor Lao, which is mutually intelligible with spoken Thai. (They use slightly different scripts, so the written form cannot always be understood.) Thai has been heavily influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, containing several hundred loanwords from both languages. Central Thai is the official national language, but most regions have their own variants. Linguists often define these as seperate languages, but Thai speakers usually consider them dialects, as they are mutually intelligible.  

Thai has several different registers, or levels, indicating different levels of formality. Street Thai is normal spoken Thai, while Elegant Thai is used for more formal occasions. The other three registers are used for specific situations: Rhetorical Thai is for formal speeches, Religious Thai for ceremony, and Royal Thai when speaking to or about the royal family. 

Because I want to talk about the writing system, we’re going to skip over my trying to explain sounds I don’t fully understand and move onto the abugida portion of the program. An abugida is a writing system similar to an alphabet in most respects, with the exception of its treatment of vowels. (Here’s where it gets technical, because there are differing definitions of an abugida.) However, Thai fits into even the narrowest of these definitions, so it’s not really a problem. In an abugida, every consonant has an implied vowel that comes after it and is not written. If the vowel sound that needs to come after the consonant is not the implied one, it is written with marks above or below the consonants, rather than its own letter. 

(This is just an example of the Thai script, which I think looks beautiful. That being said, I have no idea what this says.)

The Thai abugida is also unique in that it has two different letters for each consonant. Rather than indicating an actual difference in sound, these letters denote tone. This is different from systems like Chinese Pinyin, which uses marks above and below letters to indicate tone. Speaking of pinyin, there is no uniform method of transliterating Thai, and transliterations can vary wildly. Like many East Asian languages, Thai does not have gendered nouns, nor does it change the endings of nouns and verbs to indicate tense or number. All of these are indicated by particles, single syllables with no meaning of their own whose job it is to mark a verb as past tense or a noun as plural. 

Whether you know about Xhosa directly or not, you may be aware of the existence of several languages that use clicking sounds as consonants as well as the usual sounds found in most languages. Xhosa has three basic clicking sounds, represented by the letters X, C, and Q, and each of these sounds has several variations, indicated by consonant clusters. Xhosa actually has very few clicking consonants when compared to languages like Jul’hoan, (Botswana and Namibia) which has 48 clicking consonants. 

The presence of the clicks is sort of odd from a historical standpoint: Xhosa is part of the Nguni family, which is in turn part of the larger Bantu language family. Most Bantu languages do not have clicks, including the language Xhosa is thought to have developed from. However, San languages (from the larger Khoisan language family) do contain clicks and therefore it is likely that Xhosa had heavy San influence during its development. Most Bantu languages completely overwhelmed earlier languages and it is interesting to note that this was not the case with Xhosa. 

Xhosa is spoken in the southeastern part of South Africa and is related to Zulu, the most widespread Nguni language in South Africa. It is an official language, one of eleven, and has the second largest speaker base, with about 16% of the population listing it as a first language. It is used in primary education in areas where it is a majority language, and it is taught in universities and secondary schools as a foreign language. Most people in South Africa know more than one language because the nation is so large and ethnically and linguistically diverse.

Aside from the clicks, Xhosa is an aggluntinative language with many prefixes and suffixes. Most people who speak Indo-European languages are familiar with the concept of noun gender or different classes of nouns with different endings. Xhosa has 15 of these classes, which seems overwhelming. (Speakers of Xhosa, if you are out there, let me know. Most people I have talked to say that their noun cases do not bother them and they do not notice, but maybe Xhosa speakers will have a different answer.) 

The only reason I know about Xhosa is because of the South African comedian Trevor Noah, who hosts the American tv staple The Daily Show. A few years ago, he sang a Xhosa song that uses all three clicking sounds on the British panel show QI, and the clip is pretty funny.

Also, if you want to hear somebody speaking, rather than singing, this video shows off all the clicks pretty well. 

Finnish is part of the Finno-Ugric/Uralic language family, just like the Linguistic Bunker’s favorite language, Hungarian. (Seriously, anyone who speaks Hungarian, hit up my inbox. Same goes for Finnish speakers. I am endlessly fascinated by the Finno-Ugric language family.) We don’t know very much about early Finnish or the transition from Proto-Finnish to the medieval form of the language because there was no written form of the language until the 1500′s. The trade language of the Baltic Sea was Low German, thanks to the Hanseatic League, a coalition of merchant cities and guilds that ruled Baltic trade in the medieval period. Similarly, the language of administration was Swedish, and the language of the Church was Latin, leaving Finnish to peasants who were almost universally illiterate. 

Fortunately for the Finnish language, in the 1500′s, a Finnish bishop called Mikael Agricola decided (perhaps influenced by Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German) to translate the Bible into Finnish. To do so, he had to develop a standard written form of the language and create a spelling system. Like so many other people throughout the ages, he struggled to wrangle the Latin alphabet into conveying the sounds of his language, leading to some inconsistencies. Additionally, he based his written form off of Western Finnish, which contains a few sounds not found in other dialects. Because of this, Finnish was modernized in the 1800′s with the rise of nationalism to make it a more functional national language. (Previously it had been used in mostly religious contexts.) Much of the credit for modernization goes to Elias Lönnrot, who introduced many words from Eastern Finnish into the written language to make it better represent spoken Finnish. He also complied the Kalevala, the famous Finnish compendium of folktales said to have inspired J.R.R. Tolkien, amoung others. Despite this modernization, spoken and written Finnish remain distinctive, as the written language contains complex grammatical forms that would be clunky in speech. 

Finnish is a synthetic language that relies heavily on suffixes and noun cases. Because of the extensive system of noun cases, pronouns are almost never used, and possessive pronouns essentially nonexistant. The suffixes also mean that Finnish has a relatively small base vocabulary, as words can be easily modified to convey extra meaning. 

This has been an unusually history-heavy Language Breakdown, mostly because I thought it was interesting. Also, I just want to note that the Finnish language Wikipedia page contains a list of basic words and phrases at the end, which I have not seen on any other language’s Wikipedia page (and I have read a lot of them) and which I think is incredibly sweet. 

The Korean language may not appear too intriguing to those unfamiliar with it. Surely, you say, it must be just like Mandarin and Japanese. After all, it uses characters, doesn’t it?

No, my friend. For Korean Hangul are not a character system like Mandarin, but an alphabet. And Korean is not part of the Sino-Tibetan or Japonic language families. Instead, it is a language isolate, a language with no apparent relationship to languages around it. There is still debate about potential links (after all, languages do not arise from nothing), some of which include relationships with Austronesian languages or Dravidian languages. Originally, Chinese characters were used to write Korean, but during the 1400′s, a Korean king ordered the development of Hangul because he felt that characters were not adequate. 

Korean is agglutinative, a type of synthetic language with many prefixes and suffixes. (More about synthetic languages here.) These suffixes don’t combine; instead they are just tacked on top of each other. Generally the language is organized SOV, subject-object-verb. 

Korean has both honorifics and speech levels. Honorifics indicate a the level of respect for the person spoken of, while speech levels are for the person being spoken to. Traditionally, these were needed for the strictly regulated social structure of Korean society. Today, however, they are not used as frequently, and it is not infrequent to hear young people speaking to grandparents in a low speech level to show affection. Interestingly, Korean also lacks grammatical gender. While it does have a “he” and “she” variant of the third person singular pronoun, these only developed in the last century from contact with other languages and aren’t used in colloquial speech. 

“The British Linguist David Dalby traces the likely origins of hip to the Wolof Verb hepi ( “to see”) or hipi ( “to open one’s eyes”) So from the linguist point of view hip is a term of enlightenment, cultivated by slaves from the West African nations of Senegal and Coastal Gambia.”

All my life I’ve had a large vocabulary. Yet, I never considered my word bank to be any larger than anyone else’s until someone pointed it out. And they didn’t just comment on its existence, they pointing out came with a healthy side of ridicule and general bad-feelingness and, what took me years to figure out, a large fountain drink of envy and low self-esteem. 

Now, people still take energy out of their day to point out when I use big words, like its my fault or I’m trying to be something I’m not (which is the worst accusation in the history of the world, in my opinion). Like it’s wrong that I should know something they don’t, like complex, multi-syllabic word formulations don’t belong in their personal word-cloud, and I should keep mine hidden away from them. Like at some point in their lives they decided they learned all the words they’ll need for the rest of their life and I shouldn’t remind them of that false, false assumption.

So what do we (my generation) do instead of vocabulary-expansion - for I’m just as guilty as everyone else in attempts to match my word cloud with important people in my life. We instead learn and incorporate “new” words like sick, clutch, YOLO, plur, FOMO…The constantly changing, never used for more than a couple months, and full of “meaning” that once you scratch the surface betrays the complete lack of meaning. These words are necessary for everyday communication, but to me, are eroding what’s left of linguistic richness and complexity.

For that’s what “big words” actually are - complex. Try defining epistemology in two words. You can’t. Five words maybe? Nope. You need at least a sentence, maybe two to shallowly describe the meaning of an entire school of thought to someone who’s never run a skepticism critique or sat through a logic lecture. These people don’t understand the beautiful concept that one would can capture and represent and symbolize so much context and so much thought. That it’s definition is nuanced and subtle, and when used correctly, so effective. Which raises an interesting point. In America, where I would posit this sort of language degradation is happening the fastest and on the largest scale, a small population of my contemporaries continue to enrich their vocabulary and immerse themselves in literature everyone should be reading - but they can’t escape the reductionistic trap either. 

I would say policy debate had the largest and most lasting impact on me than any other activity I’ve ever done so far in my life. Yet my largest stumbling block in the format was learning its language. Arguments have labels like “DA,” “K,” “case,” and large philosophical schools of thought are reduced to “cap,” “dehum,” “skep,” or “fem IR.” To win a debate, you must posses working knowledge of not only the ideas themselves, but the correct phraseology to express them that correlates with the current trends. Any deviation from the script earns you a loss, even if you debated the concept better than the other team.

So obviously this is a problem that plagues every generation and most likely comes about as a means to demarcate the younger from the older, but I believe the language degradation happening today is the most insidious, threatening, and perhaps non-reversible process ever to occur. Because those not subscribing to it fully are ridiculed, ostracized, and thrown out of the pack. Because the simple act of trying is no longer valued and respected. Because insecurity spurts intellectual rejection, which is worse than any other rejection in the long run for social growth.

Because to me, when someone makes fun of me for glibly saying “rectify your situation” instead of “gurl, go fix yo-self,” they’re giving up on just that. The pursuit of knowledge and the continuous expansion of something like your vocabulary is a form of self-betterment. It’s a commitment to strive for something higher, better. It’s an attempt to add layers to communication, not strip them away.

But I see daily the degradation of communication. I see that my friends can’t muster anything more than “bowls?” “kk” and “lighter, batch, bong.” How when expressing something exhilarating, titillating, earth-shatteringly awesome, all we say is “that was cool” or “dope.” How people’s personalities are reduced to how “chill” you are, which is nothing but apathetic. This scares me, honestly. It scares me because I fundamentally disagree with it. It resonates as “wrong” in my in a way not many other things do.