I’ve been struggling to connect my disparate thoughts on this week’s readings into a semi-coherent post. Yet I’m realizing that at the crux of my various reflections are the notions of borders, ruptures, and thresholds: aspects of our environment that exist in natural and man-made capacities, and that can simultaneously serve welcoming and exclusionary purposes. So far in class we’ve emphasized the locally-specific duality of linguistic practices: for instance, the way that pronouncing “Greenwich” as “GREN-itch” in Philadelphia reveals you’re not from South Philly, while pronouncing it the “Philadelphia-proper” way of “GREEN-witch” in NYC shows you’re not from the village. Both pronunciations of “Greenwich” are right, and both are wrong; and the practice of “citizen sociolinguistics” exists at the border of these separate/connected worlds. I want to situate the practice of “citizen sociolinguistics” in this way, because I think the “Greenwich” example illustrates the complexity ...
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I would like to invite you to take a look at several French examples to illustrate some of the key claims made by this week’s authors about the role of language in society. All of these could use lengthier developments (and probably will in the course of the semester 😉), but I would like to use them here to paint a sort of introductory big picture of the situation in France. In retrochronological order: 1) The first one comes from our Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer. In April 2018, in the heat of new reforms of primary and secondary education, he mentioned in several speeches and op-eds the importance of teaching the “passé-simple” (a rather difficult past tense used mainly in literature). In November of the same year, he was invited to a TV show called “Au tableau!” in which famous guests standing at the black board have to answer questions from school children. And of course… he made two mistakes attempting to conjugate the verb “to run” in ...
In 1993, when the German punk band Die Ärzte published the song “Stummer Schrei nach Liebe” 1 (Silent cry for love), East and West Germany had just recently reunited politically but social and cultural fissure were deep and raw. At that time, the song was written in response to xenophobic attacks in Hoyerswerda, one of many cities in the Eastern part of the country with a growing Neo-Nazi scene. More recently, in 2015, amid growing anti-immigrant sentiments in reaction to the arrival of than 1.000.000 refugees that year, the song was resurrected: A homespun rendition by the senior choir, The Goldies , went viral on Youtube, a social media campaign, #Aktionarschloch, was founded to bring the song back into and to the top of the music charts, and flashmobs organized across German cities to sing the song in public squares. Just last week, the song was referenced once again. This time, its lyrics were recycled in a post by the Heute Show 2 , a German version of The Daily Show . T...
Thanks for posting this (Sarah?). In general, I like the attitude about the creative-writing AI: It's a tool that writers can work with--sometimes it has insights, sometimes its lame. In a way, it seems like Google translate: Useful in some ways, but often, you really already need to know both languages you are "translating" to know if it is being helpful.
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