So, something I've been curious about is the state of modern profanity. If you think about it, the really horrible words of yesteryear seem tame nowadays. They're still "bad," but they are increasingly common in polite conversation. Coming from the hinterlands, I still remember when tame words like "damn it" and "damnation" were substituted in cursing with "dagnabbit" and "'tarnation." I'm not sure about oversees, but I know that here, the British curse "bloody" is more humorous than vile. When I was 9, my mom tried to punish me for saying "sucks". Apparently, when she was growing up, that was a pretty bad word. She gave up when she found out that that word was ubiquitous on the elementary playground.
The origin of profanity, seems to me, to be wrapped up in religion and superstition. Notice that the two words we use to describe profanity in the vernacular are "cursing" (or "cussin'") and "swearing". Some mainstream media web article off of a site like MSN, an article that I have long since lost the link to, correctly elucidated the difference between the two categories: "Cursing" is attacking something, e.g. "Damn you!", or "Fuck off and die"; "Swearing" is an exclamation showing the severity of the circumstance, e.g. "by Jove!" or "Jesus Christ". In earlier times, it was believed that words had power to make things happen, and so cursing someone was expected (or hoped to) to actually produce results - so when somebody told you to "fuck off and die", the literally wished you dead, at least in the heat of the moment. So, it's somewhat excuseable that they'd fight you right back. Likewise, when somebody said "Jesus Christ, you'd forget head if it wasn't attached!" - or the equivalent god/spirit/natural force of the era - it was expected that you were actually trying to call the attention of the power in question to attend to the matter, which is generally very unlucky, as 1)omnipotent powers are in the position to hurt you and everyone around you, and 2) omnipotent powers don't like being summoned to deal with mundane shit. Obviously, with the increasing rationality and the decreasing commonness of animistic/paganistic/anthropomorphic-monotheistic thought, these intents are no longer at the forefront of the offensive party, but I find it fascinating how these two divisions still color the way people curse and swear.
Excepting ancient religious beliefs, you can still tell a lot about a society by how it swears. You can notice that Anglo culture was obsessed by anatomy by the fact that so many of the words we are supposed to use refer to bodily functions or even body parts themselves. You can also tell how obsessed England used to be by the fact that "bastard" was a fightin' word. Nowadays, the actual meaning of bastard feels so obscure as to not be noteworthy. When I was a kid and first found out what the "bastard" actually meant, the first thing a friend and I did was bond over the fact that we were both "bastards," since our fathers both left our mothers before we were born (though, I guess technically I wasn't illegitimate, 'cause my parents were still married at the time. Just barely). We didn't see it as a mark of shame so much as a fact of life, like one being born with brown eyes instead of blue. A blasé "Oh, sucks to be a bastard, what to do..." and then move on.
French swearing, particularly Quebecois swearing, really gives me a kick. Since this is an English article, I don't have any compunctions about writing French swear words down - it's not likely that I'll be taken to task by Google for that. I asked a coworker how to swear in Quebecois, and this is what he says: "Tabernac colis hostie cris de merde. It's like a combo system [in fighting games], you just keep adding words to build power." "Tabernac" is the Holy Tabernacle in the Bible, "colis" is the Holy Chalice (Grail), "hostie" I think is the Holy Ghost (Spirit), and "cris" is Christ. "Merde" just means "shit", and that's just there to finish the combo. It's a completely Catholic swearing system, a complete perversion of everything that is deemed holy. English has some of the same religious swearing tradition, but the fomerly powerful (especially in the country) words of "Jesus Christ!" "Christ's Sake!" "Hell" "Damn it!" are now relegated to meekness.
Russians apparently had elevated swearing to an artform, at least that's what I hear. Not speaking Russian myself, I have to go by what other people say, but from what I hear those people say, I really wish I did speak Russian. Some Russian general-turned-author during the Crimean War (Tolstoy?) was recorded as saying that it was essential for a Russian officer to know how to swear properly. From asking around with Russian friends, the art of swearing has really gone down hill since the the 19th century, but it's still quite elegant and refined compared to American English:
(From the website: http://www.youswear.com/index.asp?language=Russian)
"Ne ssi v kompot, tam povor nogi moet"
Lit: "Don't piss in the bowl of punch, the cook is washing his legs in it." Meaning, "Don't chicken out."
"Smekh smekhom, a pizda kverkhu mekhom."
Lit. "You may laugh until you cry, but your pussy is topped with fur", Meaning "That's not fucking funny!"
"Mne vsyo ostopeezdelo."
Lit. "I feel like I've fucked 100 Cunts", Meaning "I'm sick of it all."
"Paltsem delanniy"
Lit. "Conceived by a finger" Meaning "Moron"
---
So, with profanity being heard with increasing abandon on all of the media sources, does this mean that American Culture is become more crude and vile? Possibly. But, personally, I just think that those words are becoming less meaningful. In a modern society where sodomy (or to our more colorful British friends, "buggery") is seen less as sin against god and more of just an experimental phase in college; where a woman is encouraged to come to terms with her vagina; and where shit is as compost or manure and no longer as liquid evil (amorphous solid?), the power of anatomical terms to shock and offend seems to be waning. Nowadays, when somebody shouts "Cocksucker!", a reply of "Yeah, did it last night. What of it?" is not unconceivable. When a shock word becomes irrelevant, it becomes dead.
Plus, there is the power of "Euphemistic Drift," where words on the border of comfortability will gradually shift meaning over time, with normal words becoming dirty, and dirty words becoming tame. The word "whore" originally meant "beloved" - it is cognate (i.e. formed from the same original word) is also in English as the word "care." At somepoint in Anglo-German linguistic history, the word meaning harlot* became too racy, and people started subistuting the word for "love" instead. This came to us as "whore", which in all likelihood packs the same punch as the Germanic original that it replaced, so that now if you wish to talk about a "whore" in polite society, you use the word "prostitute" that replaced whore in the 17th century, which comes from a Latin construction meaning "to show your wares." Except in modern society, we don't use the word "prostitute" when talking to one, that's still too raw - we use the word "escort." Eventually, "escort" will become too racy, and a substitute will be invented.
(* Harlot has an interesting history itself - originally meaning vagabond, dictionary.com gives evidence that makes me think that it was originally applied to women through effeminate circus-jesters and jugglers; since then, it lost all association with men and transience, although it kept its low-born aspect)
The same principle works backwards, with swear words being overused and replaced with new words that are more powerfull. This suggests, is that if you want to find the heart of modern profanity, look for the words that still hurt, the words that pack a punch so heavy that people will fight, even kill over them. Look for the words that deal with the controversial, raw topics that modern society is obsessed about.
This was a topic that I was curious about for a couple of years - "What will be the new swear words when the current crop wears out?" - when I heard and interview of Russell Simmons by Howard Stern. That conversation opened my eyes because Russell Simmons correctly identified the "n-word" as a swear word (notice that I am actually scared to use it, as opposed to "shit" which makes its third appearance in this article). This conversation opened my eyes because the modern swear words (nigger, honkie, spic, chink, etc - wow, that gave me the chills just writing them) deal with race relations, or they deal with sexual orientation (faggot, dyke). So that tells us what modern America is currently obsessed about - Racism and Homosexuality. And in a way, this makes sense, because both of these issues are modern. It's only recently that discrimination has been deemed a bad thing, and so now the terms that are inherited that deal with denigrating and dehumaniztion other people have a special fire to them, because they are recognized as words that shouldn't be used anymore.
I postulate (and in my bid for immortality, this shall be called the "Gonzales Postulate" :Þ) that the words that a culture uses to swear, curse, or otherwise be profane, are the words that tell exactly how a recognizes and is grapples with its contemporary issues; These words show how that culture will progress and mature, given time for it process and come to terms with these issues.
J.K. Rowling really knew her shit when she made the most devasting swear word in her Harry Potter series be "Mudblood."
Saturday, September 29, 2007
How "black" was Tut Ankh Amen?
Or: History Can be Really Complex
Finally Finished
I have my clock-radio set to wake me up with NPR in the morning at 7 O'Clock, which is when Morning Edition does their BBC and the US headlines. One of the mornings many weeks ago (I haven't posted recently because I've been ... distracted, yeah, that's right). There is/was a big Egyptian exhibit in Pennsylvania, and outside of it, several pillars of the African-American/Black (you choose) community were holding a demonstration complaining that the musuem was de-emphasizing the African-ness of Egypt and painting Pharoah Tut Ankh Amen with Caucasian/White (you choose) or Arab features. Well, King Tut certainly ain't White, and as Egypt pre-dates the Arabs, he ain't Arab either (though their Semite ancestors were definitely kicking it around this time period, and this may be before or not to long after they split from the group that would become the Hebrews). But the question of just how black he was is fraught with a bit more complexity than that.
(Click here for a newsclipping of that demonstration)
Unfortunately, Africa is really complicated, to the point where I can't call what polite US society would term "African-Americans" that for the rest of this article without being confusing. And when one talks about Egypt (or Khemet) being "African", one has to figure out in what sense one means that before the conversation can continue.
Image from Wikipedia, using its Common License
The image above is a break down of African continent into language groups, which are related to ethnic distributions, but of course not equivalent to them. That would make things too easy, and Africa is anything by easy. Anyway, the Red, Orange and Yellow sections roughly correspond to three families what we would consider "African" - i.e. "Black African." The Green corresponds to the distribution of what would consider "Pygmy Africans"; and the Blue corresponds to what is termed "Afro-Asiatics"; I would term them "Semitic Africans" but that is my own (and somewhat loose & incorrect) phrase. The population along the Mediterranean coast west of Egypt are better known as the Berbers. In politically un-correct terms, these people are "Non-Black Africans". The Purple guys just there to make things even harder, and are speaking something related to Indonesian - that's another long story in itself. Anyway, notice Somalia & Ethopia are in the blue zone - but we know from news-footage and whatnot that a good chunk of those people are "black", so what gives?
This further underlines the complixities of what one has to deal with when discussing Africa. What we have here, to once again put it somewhat loosely, is a population of Blacks speaking a non-Black language. Which in today's world, with all of the colonization in the recent past and the globalization going on now, isn't that uncommon - after all, Blacks in the US are speaking a Non-Black language (English), and I'm speaking a .. well, North American history is complicated as well, but a non-Amerindian* language (aka "Red" - or "the Other" - "Indian").
*I grew up thinking of my ancestors on my Dad's side of my family as "Indian", and then I started to work in the tech sector with "real live" Indians from -golly- India, and now identifying myself as "Indian" has proven to be really confusing. But I still prefer it to Native American ("Native" is meaningless) or First American (increasing evidence is pointing to the "First" being incorrect - or at least, more complicated). The way I figure it, George Carlin's skit about how extra syllables drain the life & meaning from English hits close to home here, which is why I am uncomfortable calling "blacks" "African Americans". I'll take the shortest descriptor that isn't openly perjorative.
What this means is that sometime in the past, these blacks learned a semitic-family language. This can simplitistically happen in two ways: 1) the blacks moved into a population of Semitic speakers and became linguistically assimilated, then their population outgrew the culture that they assimilated into; or 2) the Semitic speakers moved in and dominated the blacks long enough for their language to take root, and then were enthically assimilated by the population they moved into. This can get into a heavy discussion about the "status" perceived by one class about another class's or their own language; but there are readily available examples of both.
The easiest example of #2 is India, where the British moved in, taught everyone English, and then were forced out. An example of #1 is trickier, but example of that is Finland. Finland is strange in Scandinavian because though they (largely) look like the other Scandinavians, they speak an language that is wholly different. Current theory on how this happened was that Finland was previously occupied by Finnish speaking Uralic types (I have no idea what to call the previous inhabitants of Finnland beyond "the previous inhabitants of Finnland") when some Scandinavians moved across one of the waters in a small enough group to be linguistically assimilated. Then, over time, the Scandinavian Finns outbred the "Other" Finns until they dominated the gene-pool, though long after they had stopped speaking their ancestral language.
So, in Ethiopia, which was it? Since it's Africa, and most of the Arab world is to the northeast, one my think that it was it was populated by black Ethiopians first and then conquered by Arabs. Historically, this is pretty accurate to what happened in the Sahara, which is why Arabic is the current popular language of Egypt. But there are some other facts that point to the fact Ethiopia was first inhabited by (possibly proto-) Semitics, who then expanded out into the Arabian Peninsula, the Maghreb (Mediterranean Coast of Africa) and the Levant; and then came back, a'conquering to establish the Muslim Caliphate Empire of the first millenium AD/CE.
There is a constant truth in linguistics that whenever you have time or distance, languages will tend to fragment into many dialects. Notice I say "or", and not "time and distance" - this is important. If you look at England, there are many, many dialects for a small island half the size of California. There is not a lot of distance here, and yet we have two dialects as different from each other as Scotch and Surrey. To further ram home the importance of time, a city the size of London, which is big as cities go but not as large as the entire island itself, is fragmented into many, many dialects spoken by a variety of economic classes and neighborhoods (which, if one remembers, is the basis of the plot of My Fair Lady (^_^)).
What this means is that the place where a language family is resident the longest will have the greatest number of dialects & sub-languages; and, conversely, if you want to find a "homeland" for a language group, look for where there is the most variety of a language family found in a small area. A modern analogy is that European languages are spoken all over the world, and just based on size territory, one would expect that the the Europeans would've originated in the Americas - two whole continents that speak French, English, Spanish & Portuguese. But if one looks for the area of the most variety of dialects, one one find that the English homeland is in Northern Europe (many kinds of German, Danish, Norwegian, many kids of Dutch, Norweigian, Swedish) and that the French, Spanish and Portuguese homeland is in Southwest Europe (with Italian, Catalan, Corsican, Provencal, etc). This leads us to reason that Europe is the homeland of the major political languages spoken in the New World (I say political because many Amerindian languages are still extent in the Americas, particular South America, but these most of these countries don't share their Amerindian languages - another example of high language diversity in a small space - and so they have to use Spanish to communicate amongst themselves).
So, in the area Ethiopia, there is much higher density of (Coptic, Amharic )Semitic languages than elsewhere, which points to Ethiopia being the homeland of the Semitic languages. In that link, look at the diversity of Afro-Asiatic languages ("Arab") versus the Nilo-Saharan languages ("Black").
Now where was I.. I got on this linguistic rant for a reason. That's right, the reason was to establish that once upon a time, there was a large population of "non-blacks" in Africa as far south as Ethiopia, in order to combat the claim that, just because Egypt was in Africa, the Egyptian pharoah Tut Ankh Amen "had to be" black. I'm not saying the Egypt didn't have black people in, or that Egypt was never black. I'm just saying that the actual situation is really complicated, much more complicated that the protestors would have one to think. Now to give credit, they claim that Tut Ankh Amen is Nubian (Nilo-Saharan), which would definitely make him black if he were. But I obviously haven't been reading the same sources as they have, 'cause I haven't seen that claim myself. To be honest, though, I have seen other cases where Nubians would control the Pharaonic Throne for some number of dynasties - which plays into my whole over-arching point: it's really complicated. But the Egyptians spoke a Semitic language, as demostrated by surviving offshoot, Coptic, and they spoke the language when the Semites were still based in Africa. This points to fact that even if Tut was genetically black, culturally, Egypt was something much more murky than a simple "black or not" question.
And so what really goads me about the protestors - and why I wrote this in the first place - is that their demand is for the museum to "Document and display the research and accomplishments of the renowned African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop in scientifically proving that Kemet [Egypt] was an African civilization" [My emphasis]. This is complete balderdash - there is no way that history as field can be "scientific", much less "scientifically proven". Science is based on the cycle of hypothesis, test, observe, repeat, until you have theory that is water-tight enough that it can deal with all of the evidence so far. All that hub-bub I wrote above was to offer evidence in contradiction to the theory that Egypt was was a (Black) African civilization; but there is no way that we can ever know for certain or scientifically, one way or the other or more likely shade of grey inbetween, because we can't go there ourselves to find out. All we can do is speculate, and that is not "scientific". All we have is second-hand or third-hand accounts passed down the generations by people who had a vested interest in doctoring the documents for their own needs, or maybe if we are lucky, some first-hand accounts by somebody on the ground who was limited by the biases and prejudices of his time, location, class, and station in life, and whose writings were similarly doctored. DNA might give evidence that Tut the individual was black or not (most likely mixed race, in my own opinion), but it can't show whether or not the larger society was African or not.
(Click here for a newsclipping of that demonstration)
Unfortunately, Africa is really complicated, to the point where I can't call what polite US society would term "African-Americans" that for the rest of this article without being confusing. And when one talks about Egypt (or Khemet) being "African", one has to figure out in what sense one means that before the conversation can continue.
Image from Wikipedia, using its Common License
The image above is a break down of African continent into language groups, which are related to ethnic distributions, but of course not equivalent to them. That would make things too easy, and Africa is anything by easy. Anyway, the Red, Orange and Yellow sections roughly correspond to three families what we would consider "African" - i.e. "Black African." The Green corresponds to the distribution of what would consider "Pygmy Africans"; and the Blue corresponds to what is termed "Afro-Asiatics"; I would term them "Semitic Africans" but that is my own (and somewhat loose & incorrect) phrase. The population along the Mediterranean coast west of Egypt are better known as the Berbers. In politically un-correct terms, these people are "Non-Black Africans". The Purple guys just there to make things even harder, and are speaking something related to Indonesian - that's another long story in itself. Anyway, notice Somalia & Ethopia are in the blue zone - but we know from news-footage and whatnot that a good chunk of those people are "black", so what gives?
This further underlines the complixities of what one has to deal with when discussing Africa. What we have here, to once again put it somewhat loosely, is a population of Blacks speaking a non-Black language. Which in today's world, with all of the colonization in the recent past and the globalization going on now, isn't that uncommon - after all, Blacks in the US are speaking a Non-Black language (English), and I'm speaking a .. well, North American history is complicated as well, but a non-Amerindian* language (aka "Red" - or "the Other" - "Indian").
*I grew up thinking of my ancestors on my Dad's side of my family as "Indian", and then I started to work in the tech sector with "real live" Indians from -golly- India, and now identifying myself as "Indian" has proven to be really confusing. But I still prefer it to Native American ("Native" is meaningless) or First American (increasing evidence is pointing to the "First" being incorrect - or at least, more complicated). The way I figure it, George Carlin's skit about how extra syllables drain the life & meaning from English hits close to home here, which is why I am uncomfortable calling "blacks" "African Americans". I'll take the shortest descriptor that isn't openly perjorative.
What this means is that sometime in the past, these blacks learned a semitic-family language. This can simplitistically happen in two ways: 1) the blacks moved into a population of Semitic speakers and became linguistically assimilated, then their population outgrew the culture that they assimilated into; or 2) the Semitic speakers moved in and dominated the blacks long enough for their language to take root, and then were enthically assimilated by the population they moved into. This can get into a heavy discussion about the "status" perceived by one class about another class's or their own language; but there are readily available examples of both.
The easiest example of #2 is India, where the British moved in, taught everyone English, and then were forced out. An example of #1 is trickier, but example of that is Finland. Finland is strange in Scandinavian because though they (largely) look like the other Scandinavians, they speak an language that is wholly different. Current theory on how this happened was that Finland was previously occupied by Finnish speaking Uralic types (I have no idea what to call the previous inhabitants of Finnland beyond "the previous inhabitants of Finnland") when some Scandinavians moved across one of the waters in a small enough group to be linguistically assimilated. Then, over time, the Scandinavian Finns outbred the "Other" Finns until they dominated the gene-pool, though long after they had stopped speaking their ancestral language.
So, in Ethiopia, which was it? Since it's Africa, and most of the Arab world is to the northeast, one my think that it was it was populated by black Ethiopians first and then conquered by Arabs. Historically, this is pretty accurate to what happened in the Sahara, which is why Arabic is the current popular language of Egypt. But there are some other facts that point to the fact Ethiopia was first inhabited by (possibly proto-) Semitics, who then expanded out into the Arabian Peninsula, the Maghreb (Mediterranean Coast of Africa) and the Levant; and then came back, a'conquering to establish the Muslim Caliphate Empire of the first millenium AD/CE.
There is a constant truth in linguistics that whenever you have time or distance, languages will tend to fragment into many dialects. Notice I say "or", and not "time and distance" - this is important. If you look at England, there are many, many dialects for a small island half the size of California. There is not a lot of distance here, and yet we have two dialects as different from each other as Scotch and Surrey. To further ram home the importance of time, a city the size of London, which is big as cities go but not as large as the entire island itself, is fragmented into many, many dialects spoken by a variety of economic classes and neighborhoods (which, if one remembers, is the basis of the plot of My Fair Lady (^_^)).
What this means is that the place where a language family is resident the longest will have the greatest number of dialects & sub-languages; and, conversely, if you want to find a "homeland" for a language group, look for where there is the most variety of a language family found in a small area. A modern analogy is that European languages are spoken all over the world, and just based on size territory, one would expect that the the Europeans would've originated in the Americas - two whole continents that speak French, English, Spanish & Portuguese. But if one looks for the area of the most variety of dialects, one one find that the English homeland is in Northern Europe (many kinds of German, Danish, Norwegian, many kids of Dutch, Norweigian, Swedish) and that the French, Spanish and Portuguese homeland is in Southwest Europe (with Italian, Catalan, Corsican, Provencal, etc). This leads us to reason that Europe is the homeland of the major political languages spoken in the New World (I say political because many Amerindian languages are still extent in the Americas, particular South America, but these most of these countries don't share their Amerindian languages - another example of high language diversity in a small space - and so they have to use Spanish to communicate amongst themselves).
So, in the area Ethiopia, there is much higher density of (Coptic, Amharic )Semitic languages than elsewhere, which points to Ethiopia being the homeland of the Semitic languages. In that link, look at the diversity of Afro-Asiatic languages ("Arab") versus the Nilo-Saharan languages ("Black").
Now where was I.. I got on this linguistic rant for a reason. That's right, the reason was to establish that once upon a time, there was a large population of "non-blacks" in Africa as far south as Ethiopia, in order to combat the claim that, just because Egypt was in Africa, the Egyptian pharoah Tut Ankh Amen "had to be" black. I'm not saying the Egypt didn't have black people in, or that Egypt was never black. I'm just saying that the actual situation is really complicated, much more complicated that the protestors would have one to think. Now to give credit, they claim that Tut Ankh Amen is Nubian (Nilo-Saharan), which would definitely make him black if he were. But I obviously haven't been reading the same sources as they have, 'cause I haven't seen that claim myself. To be honest, though, I have seen other cases where Nubians would control the Pharaonic Throne for some number of dynasties - which plays into my whole over-arching point: it's really complicated. But the Egyptians spoke a Semitic language, as demostrated by surviving offshoot, Coptic, and they spoke the language when the Semites were still based in Africa. This points to fact that even if Tut was genetically black, culturally, Egypt was something much more murky than a simple "black or not" question.
And so what really goads me about the protestors - and why I wrote this in the first place - is that their demand is for the museum to "Document and display the research and accomplishments of the renowned African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop in scientifically proving that Kemet [Egypt] was an African civilization" [My emphasis]. This is complete balderdash - there is no way that history as field can be "scientific", much less "scientifically proven". Science is based on the cycle of hypothesis, test, observe, repeat, until you have theory that is water-tight enough that it can deal with all of the evidence so far. All that hub-bub I wrote above was to offer evidence in contradiction to the theory that Egypt was was a (Black) African civilization; but there is no way that we can ever know for certain or scientifically, one way or the other or more likely shade of grey inbetween, because we can't go there ourselves to find out. All we can do is speculate, and that is not "scientific". All we have is second-hand or third-hand accounts passed down the generations by people who had a vested interest in doctoring the documents for their own needs, or maybe if we are lucky, some first-hand accounts by somebody on the ground who was limited by the biases and prejudices of his time, location, class, and station in life, and whose writings were similarly doctored. DNA might give evidence that Tut the individual was black or not (most likely mixed race, in my own opinion), but it can't show whether or not the larger society was African or not.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
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