CARRY OKIE

This morning, before coffee, I did a New York Crossword by Joe Krozel, a tabula rasa to me. After doing crosswords for years and years, I still don't pay a whole lot of attention to the constructors, but I'm learning. I know the names and characteristics of a few but this guy is totally unfamiliar to me. But I thought this puzzle was really clever, its theme was punny phrases that sounded like American pronunciations of Japanese words that are familiar to Americans. The solutions were:
WASSOBY-wasabi
How thankful a Greek shipping magnate was when his car broke down: ARIGOTTOW-arigato
A really puzzling imaginary take-over: PSEUDOCOUP-Sudoku
How does one give a dust bowl migrant a ride? CARRYOKIE-Karaoke
I thought the last clue/solution was brilliant. I'll bet it's totally serendipitous though. I doubt the constructor is familiar with this usage as I wasn't when I first encountered it.

Twenty years ago, among other courses, I took a course in introductory linguistics. I don't think that qualifies me for much but I do have a little insight. The hardest lesson to accept and adapt to was that linguistics is descriptive and that the best lexicons are descriptive too. Even the best grammar texts are descriptive. Approaches to language that are prescriptive are moribund. They don't accept the facts about the evolution that has made English what it is and how it grows. Indeed, that is true of every language on our planet.

So, when I first came to Georgia, Atlanta, not Tblisi, I stayed with a family who were apparently not of urban origin. Sad fact: most likely due to television and migration, the southern accent is vanishing and this is most apparent in urban areas of the south where the "southern accent" is rarely heard. In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal declared Clarice's accent "pure West Virginia." I was in West Virginia over a year before I heard anything that approached that and I was in a town of 40,000 people. The matriarch of this Georgian family had some very odd linguistic quirks, for example, she would refer to the various pieces of matching furniture for a particular room as a bedroom suit or a living room suit rather than as a suite.

She had another quirk which sticks in my mind too. She might say something to her son something like, "I need to go shopping, will you carry me to the mall?" Or she might say, "I need to mail this letter, will you carry it to the post office?" This quirk of usage bothered me for the longest time but I eventually realized the possible source. Prior to the end of the last decade of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century, vehicles were pulled by horses, dogs, oxen, etc which were driven. Anything that was conveyed in those vehicles was carried. To someone in 1910, saying, "Drive me to the store," would probably mean something more like "Hitch me to your wagon and crack your whip behind me." So, CARRYOKIE seemed, in retrospect, very apt. Ain't it fun how language changes. It's gr8. Dunno bout U but 2 me, it sux. Still, I'm a realist and if this is the way we go, so be it. I'm not in charge and neither are U.

In the comments on the Rex Parker does the New York Ties Crossword Puzzle blog, it was pointed out that some words in Japanese were adopted from the Portuguese, to whit, arigato and tempura. I won't discuss the latter but the former bears some discussion. I looked up Japanese words that came for Portuguese in Wikipedia and found that while obirgado, and arigato, are similar, there may be written usages of that word or similar words with the same meaning ultimately that vastly predate the contact with Portuguese. Ok, big deal. But that lead to a discussion of "false cognates," words that sound similar from different languages but share a similar meaning. That lead me to a discussion of "false friends," words from different languages that sound similar but have different or even opposing meanings. All easily understood.

Somehow, my attention was attracted by a link to Nostratic Language. A notion of some kind of proto-language that predates Indo-European and a bunch of other language families. Reading in that Wiki entry lead me to an article on the Natufian culture. Those folks lived in the Fertile Crescent, the Middle East to us, 15,000 years later. They apparently had a sedentary life style, meaning they didn't move around as much as other hunter-gatherers because they had what they needed at hand all year round. All the vegetable and animal foods on which to survive. The California aborigines had that too and given no major climactic changes, they would never have developed agriculture. The Natufians, however, had major climactic changes and were the big jumpers from foraging to agriculture. They apparently utilized wild grains until droughts made that difficult, so they figured out how to cultivate the grains on which they'd become dependent.

What makes us "US"? We are still an agrarian economy more than ten thousand years later. Without farming, we won't survive. We think we've progressed to something, but have we? We still need seeds, dirt and rain to eat. Atomic bombs won't feed us. Electric power won't fed us. Astronauts to the moon still needed agricultural products to survive their journey.

But what made "US"? Somewhere in the long ago, Cro Magnon arose. Wide-spread flukes or a localized phenomenon? Whatever, they got together and produced more like them. But what did they inherit? Apparently some very important stuff. To start with, because it was imperative to survival, they inherited years and years and years of botanical knowledge. Their parents were probably hunters too and their prey was often vastly bigger than any one of them. Hunting big animals required cooperation. Cooperation required communication and conceptualization.

"Let's go get a mastodon for lunch!"

That needs a plan and an explanation. Thinking and language. Adam and Eve Sapiens and all their brothers and sisters inherited at least that. And they spread their seed and knowledge, their ability to plan and explain. I think it's cute to imagine an Adam and Eve Sapiens setting off from their old fashioned families to create the new order of humanity but I don't believe that's even possible. I don't think anyone has come up with a scenario that reasonably explains that or gives a locus for the origin.  But something occurred and "modern man" began somewhere and somehow spread his seed to create our genus and spread his ability to communicate to create what we know as language.

Sticking with the notion of Adam and Eve, it seems likely that there is a proto-language, one set of utterances that are at the very basis of human language. Not that Adam and Eve created them, they got them from their parents in some sort of basic form but they spread them to neighbors and the folks they visited on their pilgrimage to dominate the world. One set of utterances spread from mind to mind, mouth to mouth in the very beginning of human history. Ok, so maybe not just one but one dominated in the end. It seems, lately, that Homo Sapiens managed to mate with Homo Neanderthalensis and the discovery of Neanderthhal hyoid bones indicates they may have had language too. So there may have been two proto-languages but Sapiens seems to have largely blotted out Neanderthal culture.

This is all wild speculation from someone who is not a scholar on any of these subjects, possibly proving that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Still, and I doubt it could possibly be proved, it fascinates me to think that there was one original set of utterances that spread to become the first language heard on this planet.

I was once told by a linguistics professor that should a "martian" come to this planet to study our languages, that alien would conclude that we all speak variations of a single language. If that were true, it only serves to point out that we all share one thing, a common heritage.