absurdistan

A random assortment of language-related news from Slovakia.

1. Our present government (may its reign be shortened) is a bunch of MAGA* assholes whose main ideology is the same as that of their counterparts in the US: get as much money as possible, remain in power for as long as possible laws be fucked, and - most importantly - be anti-woke and nationalist. They are also, like their US counterparts, a bunch of incompetent idiots, so any implementation of said ideology inevitably ends up being incredibly stupid. A case in point, a gentl... a per... an entity by the name of Lukáš Machala, a Flat-Eath-curious former journalist with legal education who currently holds a high position (and, according to the grapevine, all the strings) in the Ministry of Culture. Said ministry is among other things tasked with the preservation and protection of the Slovak language. And so couple of weeks ago, Mr. Machala took time from his busy day of funneling taxpayer's money to his MAGA friends to comment on the state of Slovak used in public broadcasting:

"Nie je to USA, ale SŠA, Spojené štáty americké. Začnime používať tie skratky tak, ako sú v slovenčine..."

"There is no USA, there's SŠA, Spojené štáty americké. Let's use initialisms the way they are in Slovak..."

Spojené štáty americké is of course the Slovak name for the federation of 50 states that include North Carolina (where I am writing this) known as United States of America. The generaly used initialism for this political entity, however, is USA (pronounced [ʔuːʔesʔaː] or [ʔuːesaː]) and this is prescribed by the normative Pravidlá slovenského pravopisu (pdf, section 2.1). Mr. Machala now insists this should be replaced with an initialism corresponding to the Slovak translation of the country's name, i.e. SŠA.

People were quick to point out that this is how USA is referred to in Russia, making a covert reference to how far up Putin's ass the entirety of the current Slovak government is. People were equally quick to ridicule the idea and so I have been fielding questions of the "how is life in SŠA?" for the last few weeks.

2. The government is currently trying to fill a giant hole in the budget and so naturally the first priority is to harass small businesses about bureaucratic bullcrap. One such bureaucratic bullcrap is the legal obligation of printing receipts and handing them to the customer. One such small business is a langoš stand in the small town of Kvetoslavov whose owner was issued a 1500 Euro fine. Did they fail to print and hand the customer the receipt? No, far from it. Their crime was much more serious and insidious: the printed out receipt did not contain any diacritics. This is in fact a violation of section 5 subsection 5 of the respective act, but the punishment surely does not match the crime which was, in any case, remedied immediately via a push update. The Slovak people, God bless them, once again responded with ridicule. Leading the pack is as usual the bunch of masked shitposters known as Zomri with my favorite meme below.

3. The shitty paper I keep reading (despite my better judgment) occasionally does something right. Most recently, they have published a book by Daša Bombjaková, a Slovak anthropologist. The book titled "Hovor ústami Yaka" ("Speak with a Yaka mouth") recounts her experiences conducting fieldwork among the Bayaka Pygmies in the Republic of Congo while working on her dissertation. The dissertation is of course fascinating with much of the discussion focused on the concept of mòsámbò, a public speaking event where members of the community air their grievances or just express their emotions.

Now I am of course mostly interested in language, so I was wondering a) what language do the Yaka speak and b) whether Dr. Bombjaková** pulled a Margaret Mead.*** Turns out she did not; in fact she has acquired full command of the language. On her website, she even offers a course in Mbendjee Yaka. Sadly, the Memrise link is now dead.

Kudos to her, certainly, but I guess the spirit of Margaret Mead is still alive and well, since we can also find comments like these in Dr. Bombjaková's dissertation (p. 72): 

"While in the field, I reached fluency in Mbendjee Yaka. However, I grasped the grammatical rules rather 'intuitively'. Studying the languge in detail after returning from the field has shed considerable light on many of the issues that I did not understand fully in the field. Through micro-analysis of people’s speech by making careful transcriptions and transliterations, and learning about the semantics of Bantu prefixes helped in understanding literal meanings of people’s expressions as well as understanding the metaphors of ripening."

Huh, who would have thought that understanding a community's language would provide insight into said community...

And speaking Dr. Bombjaková and the shittiness of Denník N, let us consider the scientific reporting by the latter. It is often handled by a gentleman named Otakar Horák who seems to have a certain obsession with ... size. At one point, the paper was churning out articles in praise of Slovak scientists with high h-index numbers, especially one. Then it turned out that one of those scientists may have been fudging the numbers by publishing in predatory journals. Horák never names them, just refers to them as a "top scientist", and then ends the article with a weasely "if there is any interest, we will look into it further". Narrator voice: he did not. Even where he rightly criticizes scientific misconduct and mismanagement of science, he unquestioningly accepts the narrative about "top journals" or "highly cited papers". And so when he conducted an interview with Dr. Bombjaková about her work, he could not help but insert the following:

"Miestny jazyk ovláda Bombjaková najlepšie na svete."

"Bombjaková's command of the local language is the best in the world." 

I can't even with this guy.

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* Or rather MSGA, obviously; there is an interesting word in Slovak for this, on which perhaps later 

** I'm getting all formal on yo asses up in here because just giving her last name sounds ... weird, like we're both in elementary school. 

*** Just an example: "But twenty or thirty locutions at the most, with allowance for inflection, of course, is usually enough to permit the investigator to ask the who, how, when, where, for what reason, what relationship, by virtue of what status, as a result of what previous event, etc. something is happening or has happened." (Mead 1939: 197). Read the whole thing and also Kulick's take.