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  • John Stokes 2:26 pm on February 7, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: 9th circuit, California, , constitutional law, gay marriage, gay rights, , prop 8, proposition 8   

    Prop 8: The importance of being ‘married’ 

    The 9th Circuit ruled today that California’s Proposition 8 was unconstitutional, saying that it violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. For a summary of the ruling and a link to the opinion itself, check out SCOTUSblog.

    Most of us probably remember that Prop 8 was the anti-gay-marriage initiative that California adopted a couple years ago. More specifically, though, Prop 8 was a public initiative that amended the California Constitution to prevent same-sex couples from obtaining the official designation of ‘married.’ It left in tact all of the rights afforded to gay and lesbian couples — the same rights that married opposite-sex couples are entitled to — but it forbade them officially to call these relationships ‘marriage.’

    One might argue–as indeed the proponents of Prop 8 did–that if none of the substantive rights of gay couples were taken away, the lack of official designation shouldn’t be a constitutional problem. Having the rights, after all, is more important than what they are called. But the 9th Circuit disagreed:

    All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation of ‘marriage,’ which symbolizes state legitimization and societal recognition of their committed relationships. Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite sex couples.

    -  Perry v. Brown. 9th Circuit 10-16696. (from Judge Reinhardt, writing for the panel that decided the case)

    In other words, what you call something does matter. And this is a powerful idea. The 9th Circuit says it doesn’t care if you leave the substantive rights in tact; it doesn’t matter if you maintain all the other entitlements that come along with the word ‘marriage.’ No– certain words have such special significance, such special power, that to deny access to their use alone is enough to violate a right.

    So indeed – the 9th Circuit’s ruling came down to the fundamental importance of being, specifically and officially, ‘married.’

     

    • John Stokes 2:40 pm on February 7, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      “Had Marilyn Monroe’s film been called ‘How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire,’ it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is no different.”

      -Judge Reinhardt putting the point slightly differently

    • johnwcowan 2:57 pm on February 7, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      Note that there is also an equivocation on married. In Romer v. Evans, gay people were denied certain rights tout court. But, as the anti-marriage-equality folks are forever pointing out, no adult in America is denied the right to marry as such — only the right to marry certain other adults.

      I hope that when the Supremes take this up, as they inevitably must either now or later, that they will look back to Loving v. Virginia, which also purported to allow everyone the right to marry, just not people of another color. The Court struck that one down, and just before Mildred Loving died in 2008, she expressed herself on the subject of gay marriage: she was for it.

      • John Stokes 3:25 pm on February 7, 2012 Permalink | Reply

        Good point. The biggest problem with relying on Loving is that it was a race case and thus triggered strict scrutiny. Sexual orientation only gets rationality review. So it’s not clear that Loving would help on the Equal Protection front.

        But there’s still some language in Loving that could buttress the Due Process claims. “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

        This is reminiscent of the language in right-to-privacy cases, e.g. Griswold, Roe, and Casey, saying the state can’t make reproductive decisions for you (the freedom to make these decisions is a fundamental right, so laws that limit that right are put under strict scrutiny). This got pushed farther in Romer and Lawrence, where the Court said the state can’t make decisions about private sexual activity/partners. So the Loving language might be employed to extend the claim to decisions about who to marry — saying that this, too, is a fundamental right and thus gets analyzed under strict scrutiny.

    • John Stokes 10:45 pm on February 7, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      Meant to post this earlier, another good point from a close friend: The whole reason that Prop 8 was passed in the first place was that its proponents thought the word “marriage” was special to them. If the point were the rights associated with the word, they would either have done nothing or passed an initiative that affected the substantive rights of same-sex couples. Instead, the focus was on whether or not same-sex couples could use the term itself — an important difference.

    • Laura Heymann 2:52 pm on February 8, 2012 Permalink | Reply

    • John Cowan 1:58 am on February 11, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      The three levels of scrutiny are judge-made law, and judges can change them.

      • John Cowan 4:31 am on February 12, 2012 Permalink | Reply

        I’ve read the whole opinion and dissent now, and it seems clear that the court remains within the bounds even of rational-basis scrutiny. There is no constitutional right to be on welfare, but a law that prevented Greek-Americans from receiving welfare would be facially unconstitutional, even though people of Greek descent don’t constitute a suspect class. By analogy, there is no constitutional right to marry, but given that people are allowed to marry, removing that right from a particular group is not the kind of law that our constitution allows our legislatures to pass.

        As for the dissent, it’s not so much about rational-basis review as about irrational-basis review. The learned judge seems to think that it’s perfectly fine for a legislature (or the sovereign people) to criminalize the making of strawberry ice cream if they believe that eating strawberry ice cream increases the likelihood of criminal behavior (which is undoubtedly a legitimate state purpose). The fact that that idea is preposterous seems to make no difference to him.

  • John Stokes 3:34 pm on January 31, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: chad ochocinco, crazy names, inherit, magic, metta world peace, , NBA, nobility, titles   

    Who you callin’ Beezow Doo-Doo Zoppittybop-Bop-Bop? 

    Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop is the name of a man who was arrested recently in Wisconsin. Yes, that is his legal name. Considering that for much of history, a person’s name was of such weighty import as to be the key to their “power” (in one way or another), Mr. Zopittybop-Bop-Bop is a sign of just how far that history is gone.

    As Wikipedia tells us, certain cultures throughout history have thought that something’s name was so important that it was actually a “separate manifestation” of that thing. If you knew the name of a demon, you could exorcise it from a possessed person. If you invoked the name of a god or another spirit, you somehow impregnated your words with their power. If you knew the name of a person, that person was under your control.

    Most of us probably think this is silly today. But given the names of these legal figures, maybe they were on to something with the idea that a person’s name can bear influence on the course of their life.

    Learned Hand — Every law student comes to know the great Judge Learned Hand. He’s widely considered to be one of, if not the, greatest judge never to become a Supreme Court justice, and his formulation of the test for whether or not a person has been negligent dominates the tort law scene to this day.

    William Wayne Justice — Judge Justice is famous (or infamous) for his role in what’s come to be known as the Texas Prison Litigation. This was a court battle that raged for two decades about the conditions in the Texas prison system. Justice dictated that the system be improved in order to meet minimum Constitutional standards, but his role (the role of Justice, that is) was considered by many to be ‘activist’ beyond what is proper for a judge.

    Then again, maybe those names are just a happy coincidence. After all, someone, sometime was bound to have a name that coincided with their profession. Either way, in many other societies, your name had an entirely different type of influence on the course of your life. It’s not that if someone knew your name, they had power over you — it’s that if you had the right name, it meant you had power over others. I’m talking about titles of nobility – land, power, and status conferred by inheritance. No mysticism is needed to understand the importance of names in this type of society. With one type of name, you were guaranteed riches and power as a matter of right; with another, well, tough luck.

    Today, there can be no question that one’s name is less important than it was during these other periods in history. This decline is probably the subject of some very interesting historical and sociological literature, but it seems likely that the end of hereditary ruling and aristocratic classes indeed had something to do with it. If there’s no longer a hereditary aristocracy, whereby your name entitles you to certain lands and status, it’s less important to be associated with a particular genetic line. (Interestingly, the US Constitution goes so far as to prohibit the federal and state governments from granting titles of nobility.)

    Even so, one would not expect names to become entirely irrelevant (just ask a Kennedy or a Rockefeller). But, taking Mr. Zoppitybop-Bop-Bop as an example, it has become increasingly popular to forsake the name of one’s ancestors and adopt an appellation that’s slightly less traditional. Here are a couple of interesting examples from the sports world:

    Ron Artest –> Metta World Peace.  World Peace is an NBA player on the Los Angeles Lakers. His choice of names is interesting, as over the course of his career he has garnered more than his fair share of flagrant and technical fouls, and he has generally become reputed for his less-than-peaceful play.

    Chad Johnson –> Chad Ochocinco. Chad Johnson is a renowned wide receiver with great talent and a huge mouth. He is now on the roster of the New England Patriots, where he’s had a less-than-stellar season. The name that’s currently on the back of his jersey, you guessed it, is the Spanglish translation of his jersey number – 85.

    Jon Koppenhaver –> War Machine.  This guy is a mixed martial artist who liked his nickname so much that he legally took it. Haven’t seen him in the Octagon recently? Well, that’s probably because he’s been in jail for the last three years…

    Lloyd B. Free –> World B. Free.   Lloyd came into the NBA to play for the 76ers in the mid ’70s. This name change is particularly cool because his actual nickname was World. He apparently got the nickname for having a 44 inch vertical that allowed him to do a 360 dunk (back in the days before that was a common feat among NBA players). So he went ahead and made it official–how convenient his middle initial!

    Often times, these names smack of caprice and/or arrogance. But as a form of self-expression, changing one’s name can in theory be extremely meaningful. There’s literally no better way of identifying yourself with, say, World Peace than to actually make it your identity (though as I mentioned above, I’m not sure I buy that from Ron Artest).

    And dropping one’s inherited name (though most often done in favor of names less crazy than these examples) is one of the strongest forms of dissociation available to us. Today we take that to mean dissociation from one’s family for one reason or another. But this is actually something the ancients also recognized: by changing your name, you could avoid an ugly fate associated with your inherited name. An interesting idea for sure — I just hope Mr. Zoppitybob-Bop-Bop’s children get that message before it’s too late.

     

    • Laura Heymann 3:44 pm on January 31, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      Love the blog! If you don’t mind a bit of self-promotion, an article I wrote on naming and trademark law might be of interest to readers: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1761614.

      Laura Heymann

      • Sandeep Prasanna 1:49 am on February 1, 2012 Permalink | Reply

        Hi, Professor Heymann. This is awesome. Thanks for passing it along. It’ll take a while for both of us to work through the paper, but we will definitely read it soon.

    • Sandeep Prasanna 4:46 pm on January 31, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      I can’t look at Beezow Doo-Doo Zoppity-Bop-Bop Bop’s name without thinking of this: http://i.imgur.com/8AVV9.gif

    • johnwcowan 6:12 pm on January 31, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      Google for “nominative determinism” and “aptonym|aptronym” for a lot more on this subject.

    • randy 10:52 am on February 1, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      David Brooks book, The Social Animal, has any interesting chapter on how one’s name influences his life. The statistics are startling. Among a name’s many influences, if a name relates to a business orr profession, the bearer of that name is far more likely to enter it. For example, people named Lawrence are more likely to enter the legal profession than any other and enter it at a much higher rate than those with any other name. Check out the chapter for a fascinating review of the statistics on “what’s in a name.”

    • emily 11:17 am on February 1, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      Fact – also in Madison WI, there is an actual MD named Dr. Bonebrake.

    • John Cowan 5:13 am on February 12, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      Across the Pond from Judge Justice is Mr. Justice Judge, the current Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. (He’s now Baron Judge, or more formally The Right Honorable The Lord Judge.)

  • Sandeep Prasanna 12:30 pm on January 21, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: affirmation, bible, britain, christianity, court, , i swear to tell the truth, , islam, justice, , , politics, religion, sharia, swear   

    I swear (affirm?) that I will tell the truth 

    I was watching a Kannada soap opera last night (because I have apparently become an elderly Indian woman as of late) and a scene in a courtroom caught my attention. One of the characters was being questioned, and before she gave her testimony she was asked to declare her intention to speak the truth.

    ಸತ್ಯವನ್ನು ಹೇಳುತ್ತೇನೆ , ಸತ್ಯವನಲ್ಲದೆ ಬೇರೆ ಏನು ಹೇಳುವುದಿಲ್ಲ , ನಾ ಹೇಳುವುದೆಲ್ಲ ಸತ್ಯ |

    satyavannu hēḷuttēne, satyavanallade bērēnu hēḷuvudilla, nānu hēḷuvudella satya

    I will speak the truth; I will not speak anything that isn’t true; everything I say is the truth.

    That segment caught my attention for a couple of reasons.

    First, that the declaration was different from our familiar U.S. oath, “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

    But of course it wouldn’t be the same. While an objectively large number of people in India use English as a second or third language (some 125 million according to the latest census, nearly half the population of the United States), that still only comes out to about 10 or 11 percent of the country’s population.

    It would be fundamentally unjust for court proceedings to be carried out in a language with which the parties were unfamiliar — even though that probably happens regularly, since there are only (!) 22 scheduled languages of India and hundreds more unrecognized dialects and minority languages.

    So, okay, the witness’s declaration was taken in Kannada. The action takes place in the state of Karnataka, where the two official languages are Kannada and English, so a witness could plausibly use either language. That makes sense. (Plus, it was a Kannada soap.)

    Another thing that caught my attention was that there was no religious sentiment expressed in the declaration. India is a highly religious country, with upwards of three-fourths of the country declaring that religion is important to them. In the U.S., that rate is a little lower, at 65%, but the most famous form of our witness declaration here does explicitly invoke God — “… so help me God,” a line that is usually delivered, scripted, by court bailiffs, along with a Bible.

    In American law, an oath specifically references God. The OED agrees: an oath is specifically a type of declaration that “invokes God, a god, or other object of reverence.” Those who don’t want to make an oath instead provide an “affirmation,” which starts with “I affirm…” instead of “I swear…” and omits the reference to God. Affirming is referenced four times in the U.S. Constitution as an alternative to swearing, and Britain has allowed affirmations instead of swearing since 1695.

    Regardless of whether you swear or affirm, if you lie, you can be charged with perjury, a serious crime.

    President Obama

    Other declarations abroad

    In Britain, oaths are given slightly differently from the American version:

    I swear by [Almighty God/Name of God/name of the holy scripture] that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

    Affirmations in Britain require several more hedges than an oath, perhaps because of a cultural suspicion against people who affirm rather than swear: “I swear to tell the truth…” is such a well-known phrase that any deviance from that — regardless of how legal it is — can be regarded with suspicion.

    In Britain, one doesn’t simply “affirm” — one solemnly and sincerely and truly declares and affirms:

    I do solemnly and sincerely and truly declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

    In the U.S., one can simply affirm. Atheist and former Governor of California Culbert Olson, in office from 1939 to 1943, famously said to California Supreme Court Justice Waste, “God [can't] help me at all, and there isn’t any such person.” He chose to say “I will affirm,” rather than “I swear” during his oath of office.

    According to one of my friends in France (hi, Benoît!), the common declaration given by witnesses in France is:

    Je jure de parler sans haine et sans crainte, de dire toute la vérité, rien que la vérité.

    I swear to speak without anger and without fear, to say the entire truth, nothing but the truth.

    My friend writes, “Because France is a non-religious country, there isn’t any trace of God in any institutions.” I’m sure truth is more nuanced than that, but the French people are certainly less religious than the United States. But the word – jurer – used in the oath is similar to “swear.” Jurer usually carries the same valence as the English “swear” (in that it has religious undertones) and it also has the same secondary meaning of “to curse.” But jurer can also translate to “certify” or “pledge,” words that carry no religious undertones in English.

    Another one of my friends, a walking encyclopedia of Islam (hi, Ahmad!), gave me an overview of Muslim declarations of truthfulness. In many majority-Muslim countries, cases that are tried under Shari’ah law (today, usually family law disputes) require an oath to be given by witnesses. However, unlike Western civil courts, the oath is traditionally given after testimony is given. Once the judge collects all the testimony, he asks the parties to swear on the Qur’an or by God that what they have said is true, or else bringing upon them divine wrath. (Incidentally, this traditional oath appeared in the recent Golden Globe-winning Iranian film A Separation, which I highly recommend.)

    Back home

    The U.S. government is explicitly areligious, but a profession of faith is built directly into the common understanding of court procedure. Of course, there’s no law requiring nonbelievers to swear. But it’s undeniably unfair when free deviance from a set religious phrase, scripted and delivered by a court’s bailiff, could color a jury or judge’s perception of a witness. We shouldn’t be suspicious of someone who affirms more than someone who swears, but many of us are.

    Eliminating “I swear…” probably won’t help, but maybe raising the profile of “I affirm…” as an option for nonbelievers (and even believers who object to swearing in a civil setting) will help make the process fairer.

     

    • Dani 9:45 am on January 22, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      As a nonbeliever, I feel it is far more meaningful to affirm than to swear to an entity in which I do not believe.

      And how is our oath not a violation of separation of church and state?

      • Sandeep Prasanna 1:59 am on February 1, 2012 Permalink | Reply

        The text of the oath isn’t statutory, as far as I know. It’s only customary. There’s only a requirement that one swears or affirms.

    • Benoit 8:06 pm on January 26, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Sandeeep!

      Actually, I was not really clear in my quick translation and explanation of the French sence of Justice. So I’ve taken few minutes to think about this topic.
      I do think there is a huge separation between Justice and Religion in France. I guess the Revolution and, maybe deeper with the secular laws under the 3rd republic (1870-1940), the religion was put out of the State and the Justice.

      The French Justice oath are :

      the witness’s one: ” as I said « Je jure de parler sans haine et sans crainte, de dire toute la vérité, rien que la vérité. » which means “I swear to speak without fear and anger and to say all the truth, just the truth”
      the jurys’s one: uses as well the « je le jure. », so “I do swear”.

      But it’s pretty hard to say there is a religious connotations in those two French words. I’ve look around and I’ve realised the word “jurer”, came from the latin “juro, jurare” which means “to take oath” in the law and political sphere, this verb was mostly used toward the emperor/leader more than a religious reference.
      The French Dictionnary I have say “Jurer” (to swear) is actually the verb describing the action of taking an oath, using something or someone as a witness. The dictionnary underlines the fact this person/thing could be a god, a friend, a princip, etc. I guess in the case of the Law Court; witnesses take oath in front of this principle.
      The Dictionnary mentions many other sence of this verb: a religious one “jurer le nom de Dieu” as a blasphemy. ; “jurer” as “saying insults” ; wiktionnary gives nine different interpretation of this verb.

      This topic made me eager to look a little bit deeper in the way France has dvp a very strict seperation between religious principles and Justice.
      http://www.conseil-etat.fr/fr/discours-et-interventions/justice-et-religion-regards-croises-sur-les-systemes-juridiques-francais.html
      in the Cours d’Etat website (the Higher Administrative French Court), I’ve found this résumé of a common UK-Irlande and French conference about links between Religion and Justice. It is said that we could not compare “secularism” (which is, according to Errera an absence of religious reference in the public activities) and “the separation between the State and the Religion” (no organic links between the State and the religious authorities)
      It’s said the US are in the situation where there is a clear separation but no “secularism” in the French sence of “laïcité”, because of the presence of those references in the US State.
      The author said France in the only county (among those 3) using the notion of “laïcité” , placing it in the core of the French Constitution, and applying it in Justice.

      The Law History said the influence of God in Justice ceased with the French Revolution, then with the Napoleanian Code, (which gave us the “Code Civil” we used today -we did renewed it, hum-, and the 3rd repulic as I said which affirmed the “laïcité” principles with differents laws 1901-1905. (But it’s still hard to say precisly when this influence really starts and stopped)

      To conclude about your soap ;) , I’ve read the part of India which was under the French Influence at the Napoleonian Time : the “French India” , which was mostly composed of portuary towns. So, these town were under the influence of the “Code Civil” of Napoleon since a law of the end of the19th century (this code was secular, and we still use it today), it can explain why the French oath could be closed to the one you’ve seen in your soap.
      By the way Wikipedia says Pondichéry still have a very distinct justice code, close to the French Napoleonian one.
      http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_en_Inde#La_sp.C3.A9cificit.C3.A9_fran.C3.A7aise

      • Sandeep Prasanna 2:15 am on January 30, 2012 Permalink | Reply

        Wow Benoit, thanks so much for taking the time to write such a detailed response. And thanks for clarifying the French use of “jurer” — it’s interesting to compare how both countries incorporate religion (or don’t) into the law.

    • Martijn Coppoolse 3:18 pm on February 8, 2012 Permalink | Reply

      I think Benoît means “Because France is has a very strict separation of state and religion”. That doesn’t mean there are no religious people in France, just that there’s no reference to God or church in legal documents or official events and procedures.
      (Last year, when watching a remembrance service in the UK, it suddenly struck me that there were both military and clerical officers present. In France, you’ll never see a priest officing at a military event, nor a military in official function in a church).

  • Sandeep Prasanna 12:34 pm on January 17, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: academy, , , precision   

    The English literature academy’s glorification of “elegant variation” in which one attempts to vary one’s nouns and adjectives when referring repeatedly to the same thing is anathema to the law. Kuney and Lloyd. Contracts: Transactions and Litigation. 2011: 40.
     

  • John Stokes 9:15 pm on January 8, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: E.B. White, , , , quote, , taxes, White   

    Advice from E.B. White (especially good for aspiring lawyers…) 

    “Some day I mean to have a fireside chat with my government, that we may come to know each other a little better, for it is by a better understanding of the other’s traits that a government and its citizens must fulfill their mutual destinies. In my chat I want particularly to take up the first sentence under Section G of Form 1040, which is called ‘Items exempt from tax’ and which starts this way:

     ’The following items are partially exempt from tax: (a) Amounts received (other than amounts paid by reason of the death of the insured and interest payments on such amounts and other than amounts received as annuities) under a life insurance or endowment contract, but if such amounts (when added to amounts received before the taxable year under such contract) exceed the aggregate premiums or consideration paid (whether or not paid during the taxable year) then the excess shall be included in gross income. . . .’

    I want to ask my government what it thinks would become of me and my family if I were to write like that. Three sets of parentheses in one sentence! I’d be on relief inside of a month.

    That sentence, above, was obviously written by a lawyer in one of his flights of rhetorical secrecy. There isn’t any thought or idea that can’t be expressed in a fairly simple declarative sentence, or in a series of fairly simple declarative sentences. The contents of Section G of Form 1040, I am perfectly sure, could be stated so that the average person could grasp it without suffering dizzy spells. I could state it plainly myself if I could get some lawyer to disentangle it for me first. I’ll make my government a proposition: for a five-dollar bill (and costs), I will state it plainly.”

    -E.B. White. “Fro-Joy.” One Man’s Meat.

     

  • The Diacritics 7:32 pm on January 7, 2012 Permalink | Reply  

    thediacritics.com 

    Ladies and Gentlemen, we’ve reached a milestone. Our domain is now officially http://www.thediacritics.com!

    Subscribers, don’t worry–you don’t need to change anything. Also, our WordPress domain will redirect you to the new site automatically.

    Oh, and new posts to come soon!

    -John and Sandeep

     

  • The Diacritics 4:19 pm on January 3, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , cyrillic, dear leader, dprk, hangul, hanja, hanzi, kim il-sung, kim jong-il, kim jong-il looking at things, korean, , naming conventions, north korea, russia   

    What’s in a Kim? 

    (Posted by Sandeep)

    I’ve been fascinated by North Korea’s late Dear Leader Kim Jong-il for a while now — not just because he liked to look at things or because he died, although many people agree that those were two of his more positive qualities.

    Kim Jong-il looking at a leaflet.

    The reclusive state that he, and his father before him, maintained affected the development of the Korean language in the North by setting forth new standards (via official pronouncements in 1964, 1966, and 1987), which solidified differences between the Seoul and Pyongyang dialects. And while general daily vocabulary is based on a pre-partition standard, South Korean uses a lot of foreign borrowings from languages like English, whose influence is all but absent in the North.

    I was also surprised to learn that Kim Jong-il was born in Siberia with the name Yuri Irsenovich Kim. I couldn’t find any information about that discrepancy, so I did a little sleuthing.

    –

    Kim Jong-il looking at names

    Korean naming conventions place the family name (here, Kim) at the beginning of the name. The name 김, Kim (pronounced /kim/, often mistakenly heard as “gim” because the /k/ is unaspirated) is the most common surname in Korea, with nearly 22% of Koreans named Kim. The name is derived from the Chinese hanzi (called hanja in Korean) 金, jīn, which means gold. In fact, nearly all popular Korean names derive their meaning from Chinese, and are often written in hanzi as well.

    The second part of Kim Jong-il’s name is derived from 正, zhèng (hanja), written 정 jeong (hangul), which means “straight” or “correct.” The third part is derived from 日, rì (hanja), written 일 il (hangul), which means “day.”

    Kim Jong-il named his sons using a generational name, keeping the character 정 jeong in all of them — Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-chul, and finally Kim Jong-un (the current Supreme Leader), although he didn’t do the same for his eldest child, a daughter, Kim Sul-song. Kim Jong-il’s father, Kim Il-sung, kept the character 일 il in his son’s name.

    That all does little, of course, to illuminate Kim Jong-il’s Russian name, Yuri Irsenovich Kim. For that we turn to the Slavs, whose naming conventions differ widely from the Koreans.

    –

    Who is Kim Ir Sen?

    Russians place the family name (Kim) at the end. For males, the second name is a patronym, which means that it’s derived from the father’s name. If Yuri’s father’s name was Ivan, then his second name would be Ivanovich, like cosmonaut Yuri Ivanovich Malechenko. If Vladimir’s father’s name was Vladimir, then his second name would be Vladimirovich, like Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

    So this means that Kim Jong-il’s father’s name was Irsen, right? Right.

    Wait, what? Sort of.

    Kim Jong-il’s father, as we all know, was Kim Il-sung, the Eternal President of North Korea. In Russian, his name was transliterated Ким Ир Сен, Kim Ir Sen. That form is the most commonly used Cyrillic transliteration of Kim Il-sung’s name. However, under the standardized Kontsevich system of transliterating Korean hangul into Cyrillic, his name would be spelled Ким Ильсо́н, Kim Il’són. The Kontsevich system is the main system for Korean transliteration in Russia, but proper nouns such as names are still often treated differently. (Indians can relate to this discrepancy — for example, while my name would be transliterated saṃdīp, it’s most commonly written in English as Sandeep.)

    What a happy brutal autocrat!

    The border between the liquids /l/ and /ɾ/ is frail in Korean, and a word spelled using /l/ can be pronounced as /ɾ/ depending on its position between vowels or at the end of words. However, the “l” in Il-sung is not located in one of those places. Instead, the Russian transliteration of Il-sung as Ир Сен Ir Sen seems to be a sound change that occurred in Russian, not Korean. I’m not familiar with Russian phonology, so maybe somebody can explain in the comments why his name is spelled with “р” r, not “л” l.

    But… Yuri?

    The name “Yuri” is derived from the Greek word γεωργός geōrgos, which roughly means farmer. It’s unlikely that naming Kim Jong-il “Yuri” was an attempt to translate “Jong-il” into Russian, because the component parts of Jong-il translate into “straight” and “day.” Maybe Kim Il-sung just really liked the name Yuri for his son.

    Yuri is a nice name, although if Kim Jong-il had kept it, he probably would have been teased on the playground — Yuri (유리, transliterated yuli but pronounced /ju:ɾi/) is a girl’s name in Korea.

    And nobody — nobody – teases the Dear Leader.

    So there you have it — a “look” at Korean and Russian names. Kim Jong-il — sorry, I mean Yuri Irsenovich Kim — would have been proud:

    Yuri Kim looking at jam.

     

  • The Diacritics 9:00 am on December 30, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ape, cormac mccarthy, , evolutionary anthropology, , monkey,   

    Aping McCarthy 

    [This is a guest post from my friend and former research colleague Joel Bray, a junior at Duke studying evolutionary anthropology. He is recently back from projects and adventures in Uganda and Madagascar and writes about his experiences and all things primate here. -S.]

    I just finished Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian, an epic tale about the depravity and brutality of the American Old West, revolving around a teenage boy who joins a band of Native American scalp hunters. An unpleasant read, to say the least.

    I was struck, however, as any good primatologist should be, by McCarthy’s obsession with the word “ape.” He uses it not once, not twice, but nine times throughout the story to describe the primitiveness and wretchedness of humanity. For example:

    • “Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes.”
    • “He turned to the men and smiled and they once again began to hoot and to pummel one another like apes.”
    • “They were half naked and they sucked their teeth and snuffled and stirred and picked at themselves like apes.”
    • “…where the company sat among the rocks without fire or bread or camaraderie any more than banded apes.”

    The frequent use of “ape” got me thinking about the word’s etymology and current popular usage. I did some browsing on the web, and it appears that the word can be traced to pre-12th century and has its roots in Middle English, from the Old English apa. Its origin is uncertain, possibly alluding to animal chatter, but it seems to have first referred to all primates and was a synonym for “monkey.” Since medieval times, it was believed that apes were prone to imitative human behavior, and the word was used to describe a “fool,” leading to the modern, secondary definitions of “ape” as a mimic, or large uncouth person. Recent cognitive studies suggest, however, that humans are in fact the expert imitators, which explains why you see children mimicking ape behavior at the zoo more often than the reverse.

    As the use of “ape” among the public changed over the centuries, so did the biological definition evolve over time with advances in our scientific understanding of primates. For a long period, and even among some holdouts today, it was used to describe all members of Hominoidea except humans. Homo sapiens remained exceptional until recently, when they were finally placed within the other apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons — a victory for monophyly (grouping all descendants of a common ancestor together).

    Colloquially, “ape” and “monkey” continue to be used interchangeably to the constant vexation of primatologists (shortcut: monkeys have tails, apes do not). From personal experience, if and when people do differentiate, “monkey” simply refers to all primates while “ape” retains some specificity. To be fair, even “monkey” refers to a paraphyletic group (a group descended from a common ancestor, but not including all descendants) and thus is not reflective of true evolutionary history, but that’s a discussion for another day.

    An amateur investigation at Google Translator suggests that most languages (Spanish, Dutch, French, Korean, Portuguese, Arabic, German – exceptions include Japanese and Chinese) do not even distinguish between the two and use the same word or character for both. For example, in Spanish “mono” means both “monkey” and “ape,” although due to English influence there seems to be a movement for the less-used “simio” to signify “ape,” though traditionally it too refers to both. Complementing this usage is the phrase “grandes simios,” or great apes, which parallels the English in referring to all apes except gibbons.

    Other languages likely have similar etymological histories. However, since English is the modern language of science, it may have been the prime mover in officially separating the two words and their meanings. That being said, I’d be curious to know if languages from regions of the world that are home to both apes and monkeys (e.g. equatorial Africa, Indonesia) have historically had more subtle terminology to describe them. [The English word "orangutan" comes from the Indonesian/Malay words orang hutan, forest man, suggesting that Indonesians viewed orangutans as more similar to humans. The word kera is translated as both "monkey" and "ape," but in a scientific context monyet is "monkey" and kera is "ape." --ed.]

    Ultimately, with such a complicated and dynamic etymological and evolutionary history, it’s no surprise that the public can hardly keep up with the wishes of primatologists on what to call the primates. I won’t give up the good fight, but I realize that it’s pretty much a big deal to fewer than a hundred people on the entire planet.

    Thinking back to the connotations in Blood Meridian though, I would like to know how other people perceive the word “ape” and what it suggests to them. So I ask you: does ape make you think smart, thoughtful, creative? Or primitive, nonhuman, backwards? Do you imagine monkeys? Savages? King Kong? Yourself?

     

  • The Diacritics 1:11 pm on December 19, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , english teachers, , , , ,   

    Speaking with precision 

    (posted by John)

    My first semester of law school is drawing to a close, so I thought I would write about something I heard on my very first day. I’ve been mulling it over since then, partially because at first blush it runs so against my beliefs about prescriptivism and the ‘rightness’ of one person’s language over another’s. Professor John Langbein finished his riveting orientation talk on the history of law schools in America with a lament about the debasement of the English language my generation is committing. My immediate reaction, as you might guess, was a bit of haughty “This old fogey just doesn’t get it. Prescriptivism is dumb!”

    But on at least some level, he was right. Professor Langbein’s point was not that language shouldn’t change because change is bad. His point was that it’s easy to lose some of the aspects of language most valuable—especially to someone trying to become a lawyer. To me his most potent example was the loss of precision in language, which he blamed on the overlarge number of outlets for spewing our thoughts to others. Cell phone, text, facebook, twitter—you catch the drift I’m sure. It seems every major newspaper has a bi-monthly requirement for an editorial talking about the over-share phenomenon of Facebook status and twitter updates.

    Langbein wasn’t quite talking about this, though. Think about a recent conversation you’ve had, in which you related the contents of an interaction with another person. Did it run something along the lines of “I was like . . .Then he was like . . . Then I was just like whatever and left.” It may not have, but if you do some good ol’ eavesdropping on the street you’re sure to hear something like it. (Or if you’re lucky you might get “And I was all . . . Then she was all . . . Then I was all . . . .” ). This is one of the things (<– there’s another one of them) that dismayed Professor Langbein. “Is that really what you were like?” He asked us. He gave other examples, too. Overusing “thing” was one of them. Another was prefacing a point we haven’t fully thought out and can’t very well express with “You know, uh, . . . ,” and then proceeding on our muddled way. Another was compensating for a poorly-thought-out sentence by ending it with an “. . . or whatever.”

    We can all get our point across using imprecise language, and the linguist in me recoils at the thought of saying it’s actually ‘wrong’ to do so. But you can be sure that being imprecise is the one of the quickest routes to becoming an inept law student (not to mention a bad lawyer).

    So I’ll cede the point: it is worthwhile to attempt to be precise in language. If we don’t use linguistic vagaries like “or whatever” and if we avoid saying “thing” whenever the right word doesn’t immediately come to mind, it forces us to organize our thoughts more clearly. Using precise language makes us think more precisely. I tried spending a day saying precisely what I meant every time I spoke. It was exceedingly difficult, but it seemed helpful in terms of my mental organization.

    Based on our knowledge of how language allows us to think complex thoughts in the first place, it makes sense that being more precise in our speech would make us more precise in our thinking. I wrote a post a while back looking at some of Liz Spelke’s experiments that suggest language lets otherwise distinct, insulated modules of intelligence interact, thereby making us ‘smart’ compared to other species. One experiment I didn’t discuss there shows that language allows us to grasp the concept of “sets of individuals.” Babies and monkeys can distinguish “individuals” and they can distinguish “sets,” and when the set is less than four items large, they recognize that adding or subtracting an individual changes the size of the set. But when the set is larger than four, they cannot combine the representations of ‘set’ and ‘individual’ to understand that it is a “set of individuals” such that adding or subtracting one changes the quantity. Only once we have language is this possible.

    There are also sad but interesting cases of so-called ‘feral children‘ who have been deprived of exposure to language from a very young age.  These people never fully learn a language. They also are unable to perform tasks indicative of ‘higher’ human intelligence—for example distinguishing which of two massed quantities is larger.  According to still more research by Spelke and others, children without language and other animals like monkeys can distinguish between larger and smaller quantities at a ratio of about 2:1. If the quantitates get much closer in number, it becomes difficult for them to guess correctly. Humans with language can do this at a considerably better rate.

    Finally, the emergence of language, some have argued, is associated with a cultural explosion of sorts; more complex tools, recursive patterns on bits of pottery, even materials that look like they could be used to go fishing. The idea is that language allowed us to do the ‘higher thought’ necessary to develop culture.

    All of this evidence suggests that we are able to think complex, highly structured thoughts in large part because we have language. It also suggests I should take Professor Langbein’s advice: you know, try not to be like, “Let’s speak more clearly or whatever.”

     

    • John Cowan 3:47 pm on December 19, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      Your first judgement on Langbein was right. I was all/like is a perfectly sensible quotative form, and not the least bit vague or ambiguous. Taking it literally is a ludicrous rhetorical strategy suitable only for bonking a captive audience on the head, like complaining about It was colder than hell because Hell is traditionally a place of fire. Does he criticize people for using the vague word said when so many other “more precise” terms such as shouted, hissed, shrieked, muttered, babbled, grunted, ejaculated, or bloviated are available? I suspect not.

      And I doubt he would have a word to say to anyone who used such older hedges as as it were, in a sense, in a manner of speaking, if you will and so on, though they too are used to mark “a point we haven’t fully thought out and can’t very well express”. Human beings are not expected to formulate all their thoughts in advance and spew them out in perfectly formed standard prose — unless they are giving speeches, and even then, the speech will not sound natural if they do.

      No, let Langbein stick to law or learn the facts about what he’s talking about.

    • Phil 12:29 am on December 23, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      What your professor is really bemoaning is the demise of a world where the uneducated working classes were denied access to the means with which to publish their thoughts.

      Once upon a time, the only way your ideas were ever permitted to be put on paper is if they were first rigidly screened by arch-conservative editors, and if you’d spent years at a private school, being caned for ending sentences with prepositions, and having all originality beat out of you.

      Today, the uneducated masses have Twitter, blogs, tabloids, Facebook, Tumblr, and god knows what else. The foremost triumph of democracy is the expansion of access to ‘voice’, as political scientists would term it.

      They may not be able to express themselves as clearly as we’d like, but the question arises whether that is due to their lack of ability, or our lack of flexibility. We are accustomed to seeing information presented in a certain manner, but this does not harm intelligibility, this is merely a reflection of systemic elitism.

      For instance, we undeniably understand that “she was like, no way, i wasn’t there!!1lol” equates perfectly well to “She vehemently denied her involvement”, and yet we can’t help form certain preconceptions about the authors of the two statements which make it far easier to dismiss the former out of hand. Perhaps that is what we ought to work on, not on trying to make the masses conform to our narrow class-based preconception of how intelligence correlates with register.

  • The Diacritics 4:18 pm on December 13, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: bad lip reading, dubs, fake english, funny, history of english, , , mcgurk effect, , videos   

    Lots of language videos 

    Stephen Fry rails against pedantic prescriptivists: “Sod them to Hades!”

    –

    Bad Lip Reading, whose hilarious dubs bring to mind the McGurk Effect, reimagines the words of disgraced Republican candidate Herman Cain: “Mexican people don’t eat sugar, especially when it’s a mixture of lice and tiger DNA!”

    –

    The Open University describes the history of English in a charming cartoon video.

    –

    Finally, short film capturing the cadences and sounds of normal spoken English, but utterly nonsensical. Apparently intended to show how American English sounds to others. (Family Guy trades it back, making fun of how British English sounds to Americans.)

     

    • krish 1:05 am on December 20, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I MADE IT ON THE BLOG!!

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