Svarabhakti

As I grow older there are a lot of things from the past that I forget. Some things disappear completely. Some things hang around like very thin threads that make me almost remember them, but not quite.

For many months, perhaps years, I have wondered about one word that has been bouncing around like a rubber ball in my brain every now and then. I did not remember exactly what it sounded like, so it was impossible to search for it on the world wide thingummy.

Today, finally, the word became clear enough for me to find it: svarabhakti.

In case you also go around and wonder what it is about, here is what I found out:

A svarabhakti is a vowel that is inserted between two consonants. One example would be if you pronounce blue really slowly: be-lueue. The e between b and l is a svarabhakti. In many languages a large number of words have svarabhakti, like German, Dutch, many Celtic languages and Icelandic. It is difficult to find an Icelandic text without any words with the suffix -ur, and the u in -ur is a hundreds of years old svarabhakti. The word maður used to be maðr, but the Icelanders gave up pronouncing the tricky consonant combination ðr and added the u to make things easier.

The word svarabhakti comes from Sanskrit. Svara (स्वर) means sound, vowel. The word bhakti (भक्ति ), on the other hand, belongs to those words that can mean about anything: devotion, fidelity, order, part and division. The logic of the full word is "a vowel that divides" [two consonants from each other].

Other words for the same thing are epenthesis (ἐπένθεσις, from επι, on + εν, in + θεσις, placement) and anaptyxis (ανάπτυξής, growth).

At least that's what the internet tells me. However, it is unable to tell me where and when in the past I had seen the word before.

The clear message

Occasionally one can hear people asking for a "clear message" to this or that person or country about this or that issue. Clarity is a nice thing. A clear summer day is much nicer than an unclear summer day. Clear vision is nicer than blurry vision. A clear mind is better than a confused mind.

So let's have a look at some of the clear messages given in history:

Serbian nationalists gave Archduke Ferdinand a very clear message the 28 June 1914.

Germany gave Poland a very clear message 1 September 1939.

Japan gave the US a very clear message the 7 December 1941.

George W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein a clear message 20 March 2003.

The results of these messages may not always have been what the sender intended, but they were undoubtedly clear.

Have I made myself clear in this blog entry? No? Good!

For a good cause - or two

A friend of mine lives in Lyon. He is sick of the continuous anti-Chinese bias in Western press, so he will join the boycott of Carrefour that some Chinese bloggers plan for the 1st of May. Carrefour is the target, as it is the most visible French retailer in China. So my friend will shop at Auchan instead the 1st of May. This may be tricky, as it is not yet clear if Auchan will be open on the 1st of May, which is a public holiday in France. Carrefour may not be open either, but my friend claims this will just diminish his temptation to abort the demonstration.

Just in case, he will go twice to Carrefour in advance, the 29th and 30th of April, to pile up things he usually buys there, so he will not risk missing anything the crucial day.

Note that this is a protest against the French insensitive handling of the crisis in Tibet and a protest against the biased Western press. At the same time, my friend is a big fan of Tibetan culture, so the weekend before the 1st of May, he will participate in a manifestation for Tibet - especially for momo (མོག་མོག་).

I do not know if my Lyon friend fully understands the issue, but we live in a democracy, so even people who do not understand things are allowed to say what they think.

I also have some Chinese friends living in Shanghai. They have obviously heard a lot about the proposed boycott the 1st of May, and they are completely aware of the consequences. Therefore they will exceptionally go shopping at Carrefour 1st of May, as it hopefully will not be as crowded as usual.

Democratic action against democracy

This is perhaps a cheap observation, but at the same time as the French propagate for democracy in China, the Chinese use the democratic rights they have to demonstrate against France for that same reason.

Side effect of fighting crime

The pirates who seized a French luxury yacht a few weeks ago have now been charged by a French court.

This is of course excellent news. The innocent civilian crew on the ship, who were all taken hostages, can now feel that they are better protected on future trips outside Somalia, and so can thousands of other sailors. Pirates will now know what awaits them if they attack French ships, and probably ships from other rich countries as well.

However, they are likely to face no worse consequences than before, if they attack Somali ships - and perhaps Eritrean, Yemenite, or ships of many other Arab and African nationalities. If the innocent crew had been North Korean or Cuban, would the French have taken so swift action to liberate them?

It is difficult to demand of the French or any other country to spend as much resources on protecting and liberating foreign nationals as their own. But, surely, it is an unfortunate situation.

Pirates outside Somalia now risk concentrating on ships from countries that are too poor to protect their nationals efficiently.

Kunlangeta - mon amour

This is a conditional truth: there are few people who are so nice to be with as psychopaths. A psychopath tries to manipulate you. He lies to you. He does everything for himself, even if he has to crush you. And he is really charming, when he does this.

The psychopath is like a glass of wine - it is very pleasant if you only know when to stop. You need to be able to back out, go away, hang up and cut off at any moment. And you need to be aware, to think of this at every instance: this is not just a glass of water; this is not a decent person. Keep the distance.

If you get to depend on a psychopath, you are toast.

Kunlangeta is allegedly an Inuit Yupik word for psychopath. It is mentioned by a Jane Murphy in an article in Science from 1976 to illustrate that there are psychopaths in all cultures. It is very easy to make that kind of vocabulary claims for small languages without being contradicted. There are less than 20,000 people speaking any dialect of Yupik, and it is unlikely that many of them are aware of all the clinical symptoms of psychopaths. How many of them will read that article from 1976 and verify or deny the claim? Let's not forget that one of the most ridiculous linguistic claims ever has been made for Inuit languages: that they should have hundreds of words for snow.

The same article claims that arankan is the Yoruba word for psychopath. However, Yoruba is a big language with more than 20 million speakers, and there are actually dictionaries available. The word simply means "malice" or "evil". It is hardly surprising that there is a word for nasty in Yoruba, and that does not prove that there are psychopaths in Nigeria. It is very likely that there are some there as well as elsewhere, but the mere fact that Yoruba has a word for nasty is no proof.