Oh Time Thy Pyramids

Not that I’ve ever written a particularly successful contra dance, but: When I try to, it’s usually an attempt to solve the same-gender-swing problem.

I think same-gender swings are nice, and I think other people do, too, but the problem is this – starting from either improper or becket position (the only two starting positions in idiomatic modern contra), there’s almost no good way to make them happen while keeping everyone active. Typically, same-gender swings just happen in the middle, with the non-swinging partners just standing around on the edges. I dislike this for two reasons: Firstly, my own sense of aesthetics in contra say that a good dance never has anyone inactive for more than 2 or 4 counts; a swing is 8 counts minimum. Secondly, I strongly dislike contras where the caller needs to decide, each time through the dance, which couple is going to be active. Mostly this latter point applies to dances where first and second couples alternate a swing in the center (yes, this means I’m not terribly fond of contra corners – sacrilege, I’m sure), but also applies to having the caller constantly choose “gents” or “ladies”.

I’ve spent an awful lot of time trying to figure out how to get proper from the allowed starting positions, but at this point I’m fairly certain that it’s actually not possible without breaking rule 2, above (by requiring the Ones and Twos to do different things). Without the ability to get proper, there’s no way to have both roles do a same-gender swing at the same time, so my attention has mostly turned to ways to keep the non-swinging couple busy.

While in Ghana, I had the idea that the non-swinging couple might orbit, but I always find orbits kind of lame (especially in crowded halls!). But then it occurred to me to have them orbit the entire set, separating them from their partner – a common feature of modern contra. So, for instance, the gents might orbit the major set while the ladies swing in the center. How to reunite them, then? Well, what if we simply swapped the roles – have the gents swing in the center while the ladies orbit around to meet them?

The dance below is the result.

Breakfast With Rice And Fish Double Progression, Becket

A1:    (8)     Circle left 3/4

(8)     Ladies swing in the center, gents orbit clockwise

A2:   (4,4) Shadow balance RH, box the gnat

(8)  Shadow pass L, half a hey

B1:    (8) Circle left 3/4

(8) Gents swing in the center, ladies orbit clockwise

B2:    (4,12) Partner balance, swing

Notes:

• I’m not actually sure exactly how far it will feel natural to orbit in 8 counts; this could conceivably be single or triple progression (though I sincerely hope it isn’t the latter).
• Having a shadow to find at the end of the orbit will help the gents a lot, and is the only way the ladies will know which side to end their swing on; obviously it’s important to introduce everyone to their shadow before the dance begins. I believe this can be done just by double-progressing, waving at your neighbor, and they returning to place.

This is definitely a work-in-progress; contra-folk, please comment. In particular: Is this the right distance for folks to orbit? Does all the handedness make sense (in particular the hey-to-circle transition)? Is there any way to make this single progression?

I’ve always loved blackberry jam. I mean, really, I’ve always loved blackberries, for much the same reason that I’ve always loved grapefruit – I find fruit a lot more interesting when it’s tart as well as sweet. And blackberry jam has always been the go-to jam in my family – there’s always an open jar in the fridge, and we’ll go long, long stretches without any other sort of jam in the house.

One of my father‘s standard runs takes him up over the top of Twin Peaks. This being San Francisco, the sides of the road are covered in blackberry bushes – in this climate, the plant is the best kind of weed, growing tasty fruit everywhere. Every year, as the berries start coming in, my father would start coming home from runs with reports as to just how many were ripe.

So, of course, it was inevitable that I’d eventually get around to picking a bunch and making my own blackberry jam. But as I was planning this project earlier this week, I thought to myself – if the fruit is local and organic, why not make the entire jam local and organic? Since the berries were from within city limits, could I manage an entire batch of jam from within city limits?

Of course, the first issue with this plan is sugar, a decidedly non-local ingredient. A quick Google found my solution: Local honey, produced by San Francisco beekeepers, and sold by the wonderful CityBees. A quick trip to the Castro Farmers’ Market, and I was the delighted owner of two cups worth of the mildest honey they had – the Portrero Hill variety. (Admittedly, I also walked away with some West Marin blackberry honey, some of the tastiest honey I’ve ever encountered, and a belly full of samples of just about all their other varieties. Oh, and a frequent buyer card. Can’t wait until the next farmers’ market…)

The next problem was pectin. Now, I never use commercial pectin anyway: Contrary to what many websites say, every time I’ve compared recipes that use commercial pectin with recipes that don’t, the pectin recipes have used considerably more sugar, yielding sweeter, less fruity jams. But for this project especially, commercial pectin was clearly right out. Unfortunately, so was my usual solution, adding apples: I had no idea where to find apples grown inside the city. What to do?

The solution was closer to home than anything so far: Lemons! The peels, membranes, and seeds of all citrus fruit are fairly high in pectin, and luckily, my family has a lemon tree growing in our yard. Blackberries themselves, particularly when slightly under-ripe, contain a fair amount of pectin as well, so I didn’t anticipate any real problem.

At first I was dreadfully worried that two cups of honey wouldn’t be anywhere near enough for the 9 cups of blackberries that I’d already picked, so (despite having previously sworn to myself never to make jelly again) I initially started straining the blackberries to make jelly. I quickly discovered that they had cooked down to about 4 cups, which I believed would give me the right proportion of honey to fruit, and so I ended up using almost all of the pulp anyway, with only a small amount strained out. But, as it turned out, this honey was rather more potent than I had believed, and I needed only 1.5 cups for all that fruit. (More for eating!) Furthermore, blackberries have quite a bit more pectin than I was anticipating, and jelled up quite nicely; I suspect that I could have gotten away with considerably less lemon, and still had a lovely jam.

And so:

San Francisco City Limits Blackberry Jam.

• 9 cups wild blackberries from Twin Peaks (cooked down to about 4 cups; see above)
• 1.5 cups Portrero Hill honey
• peel from 1 lemon, from my own back yard (or less: see above)

Cook blackberries down, possibly straining a bit of the seeds and pulp if you like a less pulpy jam. Add honey and lemon peel, and boil until set. Process in hot water bath, as usual.

Tasty! Can’t wait to make a second batch in August, once the rest of the berries ripen…

A totally unorganized list of impressions, now that I’ve been back here a week and a half.

• I was expecting my reverse culture shock to take the form, “Whoa! White people!” Or at least, “Whoa! Running water!” Instead, it mostly just took the form, “Whoa! Green money!”  Ghanaian money still looks way more natural that American money, so far.
• I rather miss banku, now… I didn’t even say goodbye to the proprietor of Tina’s. (I’ll be making at attempt at cooking banku and groundnut soup soon, though.)
• For future reference: Be way, way more careful about selecting speakers for dialect. All of my informants had differing opinions on a rather important question, right at the very end…
• I’ve been playing a little seprewa every day, and rather miss Kyerematen, all frustrations aside. (My seprewa hates San Francisco, though.)
• Don’t really miss gyil, though.
• Sort of wish I’d bought three times as much cloth as I did – it seems a lot prettier when you’re not overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of it.
• Getting out of Ghana is about 15 times more difficult than getting into America. Seriously. Embarking is about a 10 step process, in which each of your bags is opened and checked through in front of you at least twice, and occasionally is completely emptied and repacked; the exit interview was also significantly more suspicious than the US entry one. Total nightmare.
• On the second to last day, I had a delightful encounter, on a tro-tro, with a young deaf man signing Ghanaian Sign Language.
• My Twi is almost good enough to read the Twi Bible I brought (with the aid of a dictionary). Almost.
• The vast majority of my dreams since returning home have involved being on a tro-tro or trying to catch a taxi.

On the whole, I’d rate the trip a success, though I’m not dying to go back to Ghana in the near future. Still have a lot of data analysis to do, and may post about some of that as it happens.

(Back in San Francisco! Safe and sound! More on that eventually.)

Last night I noticed for the first time that my parents both say “an historical” rather than “a historical”, a usage that I associate primarily with British English and that I was fairly certain I’d only ever seen in print. Not entirely certain how I’ve gone 21 years without noticing this before, but there it was. So I became curious: Just what is the distribution of this?

The usual rule is, of course, that “a” is used before consonant sounds, and “an” before vowel sounds (one of the ways that we know that the articles in English are actually proclitics, actually), suggesting that folks such as my parents drop the initial [h] in “historical”.

There’s a reasonable summary of the issue here, including some nice, well, historical background on the English language. The split, then, is over whether to drop initial [h] in unstressed syllables (explaining why my parents both say “a history” but “an historical”). It still doesn’t give any demographics for the split, however.

We get 10,400k Google hits for {“an historical” -grammar}, but 17,000k for {“a historical” -grammar”}, confirming that “a historical” is much more common on the Internet, perhaps pointing at a generational split. (Similarly, we get 465k for {“a hysterical” -grammar} and only 170k for {“an hysterical” -grammar”}. This is a much higher ratio, which possibly suggests that a certain number of the “an historical” people are just following a rule that they memorized, which doesn’t extend to other areas of their language.)

This seems somewhat contradicted, however, by the progression indicated in the reference above – [h]-dropping is a newer linguistic innovation, so “an historical” ought to be the newer form. This indicates that the “an historical” usage is BBC standard English, so this is definitely (though not only) a Britishism. There’s a well-known dictum in historical linguistics, supported by a lot of empirical data, that whenever you have a language diaspora, the people who move the farthest are the most linguistically conservative; American English, by this account, is likely to be more conservative than British English. This would seem to go nicely with the fact that “a historical” is actually the older usage, and that a few dialects (meaning, several British dialects at least, and apparently a few American ones) have begun to drop that initial [h].

So, in summary: American Standard English uses “a historical”; some American dialects have begun to drop the initial [h], either independently or somehow under the influence of British English. I’m still unclear on which dialects have done this, and the extent to which they’ve changed. (As noted above, the ratios of the Google hits seem to indicate that this happens much more for some words than for others; there can’t be a phonological explanation for this, though, as the sound environments are totally the same. So I rather suspect that in some cases it’s just a memorized rule, possibly an affectation of a Britishism.)

My own idiolect is, apparently, slightly unstable: While I’m totally consistent with “a historical”, I’m inconsistent as to whether the article “the historical” is pronounced as [D@] or [Di], but in both cases drop the [h] – so either [DI'storIk@l] or [Di I'storIk@l].

Anybody have more information on the demographics of this split?

…that I’m in a totally foreign musical culture:

(This post could use some sound examples, but I’m not going to try to do that from an internet cafe; perhaps I’ll edit them in later.)

There’s this one piece on gyil in particular that’s been giving me fits.

Most gyil pieces give me fits, to some degree: I’m not good at articulating two independent lines, so my hands get tangled fairly often. But this piece is different: I can play the notes fine. Individually, I can play each of the pieces fine. What’s tripping me up is this: The beat is not where I expect it to be.

The trouble started when I was learning what Bernard calls the “melody” of the piece, which is what I would call the “rhythm” (in the Ghanaian sense), or the bass-line: A rhythmic ostinato in the lower part of the instrument that structures the rest of the piece. It’s a fairly simple ostinato — just single notes in straight “eighths” (in 2/4), but with every fourth note doubled in octaves (the same note, ever time). This doubling creates a very strong emphasis on that note, understandably — in addition to being the only doubling, it’s also both the highest and lowest note in the melody. So all my musical instincts say that that note must fall on the beat. Makes sense, right? But no: I’m told that that strongly emphasized note falls just before the downbeat of the pattern. (So, we’re more-or-less in 2/4, with the emphasis on the final eighth of the measure.

I cannot for the life of me hear it this way. I try, every time, to keep the beat where it’s meant to be, and every time my internal meter shifts back that last eighth note after at most half a repetition of the pattern.

Of course, that’s just the ostinato: The same thing occurs in the “song” (an actual melody in the upper register), and what Bernard calls the “solo” (a semi-fixed ostinato in the upper register). The solo, in particular, is just a disaster for me, because once again the beat is not where I expect it to be, but this time its just a sixteenth off! This effect is created the same way: an octave doubling on the lowest and highest note of the pattern that happens just before the beat, followed by a syncopated in-between rhythm. This in-between rhythm is considerably less syncopated if you understand the “measure” as beginning on the octave doubling. But, of course, when you do that, there’s just no way you can ever start the solo on time — it’s usually played coming out of the song, and (carrying over the beat from the song) if you try to put that doubled octave on the beat… Well, you’ll get really confused looks from all the Ghanaians near-by, is what.

Of course, this means that in order to correctly put the solo over the melody/ostinato thing, I have to do the following mental contortions: Somehow manage to hear the beat for the solo correctly, so as to start it on time, and then hold onto that beat when all my musical instincts are telling me that I’m exactly one sixteenth note off from the underlying ostinato. (Even though I’m not, for some values of not…)

It took me perhaps half an hour to manage this particular feat, yesterday, and then I was only able to hold onto it for a brief while. (It’s made more tricky by the fact that both the ostinato and the solo change in the usual Ghanaian pattern of AABA-BBAB; when I’m concentrating so hard on holding down the solo, I tend to forget where in the cycle I am, but if I try to listen to the supporting ostinato to recover I just switch back to my instinctive meter…) I was working with Jerome, and he was spectacularly confused. I play the ostinato while tapping my foot on what I perceived to be the beats, and he actually couldn’t mirror that back to me; but, of course, neither could I mirror back to him tapping my foot in the correct place.

Yup. Definitely foreign.

Hard to believe, but I’ve only got five days left in this country. In the last twenty-four hours I’ve flipped over from being totally ready to get home to absolutely panicking about so little time yet. I’m still stumbling across something new in every elicitation session, and god knows I could use another few years of seprewa tuition…

Most recent excitement:

• New favorite Twi word: “bumpy” (like the roads around here) can be either monka-monka (for a few large bumps) or monkye-monkye (for many bumps; pronounced ['mOncC)i ,mOncC)i]*). I’ve even gotten monkye-monka once or twice.
• The local English sometimes makes elicitation… interesting. For instance, as a by-product of the cot/caught merger in my dialect and the lack of rhoticization in Ghanaian English, every time I ask for the word “hot” [hOt], I get the word for “heart” [ha:t], as opposed to Ghanaian “hot” [hot]. Similarly, “bend” and “burnt” actually form a minimal pair for vowel length in Ghanaian English ([b@\nd]/[b@\:nd]), so I’m always saying the wrong one.
• I finally! have! proof! that the de-construction (which originally got me interested in Twi SVCs) involves object raising. (M3 de atar no gaw su, lit. “I held the shirt dropped on.”, for “I dropped the shirt.” The only way to get this is to have atar no raise out of the prepositional phrase headed by su, the complement of gaw. Without the de and the raising, but still with the su, the meaning is entirely different.) I’m excited. Um, no. Never mind. That’s really just a particle, on the end, and no movement ever occurs de sentences. Whoops.
• My seprewa is underway, but still not done. I sat with Kyerematen today as he finished sanding down the neck/sound-post and the frame of the resonator. He says the hardest part is getting the pegs to fit right, and that’s still to come.
• I think I’ve forgotten how to shake hands the American way.

*I’ll be using Conlang X-SAMPA for all IPA transcriptions from here on out. CXS is very nearly the same as X-SAMPA; Wikipedia has the basic differences here. Eventually I’ll try to get actual IPA working, but we’ll see.

(For non-linguists: “Theta-roles” is the technical term for semantic roles assigned to various participants in an event/sentence, such as Agent, Patient, Benefactor, etc. These are separate from grammatical relations such as Subject, Object, etc.: in both “The dog bit the man” and “The man was bitten”, “the man” takes a Patient theta-role.)

Got a nice reminder today (along with a good laugh) that theta-assignment by verb is language-specific.

Akan doesn’t really have a true passive voice, but many verbs do have alternative intransitive forms in which they assign Patient theta-role to their subject. So we get, for instance, Kofi hy33 dua no “Kofi burned the wood” alternating with Dua no hy33 “The wood burned.” Simple enough. But this is not a productive feature: Not all verbs have this ability.

I was working with variations on the sentence “Kofi ruined the surface the table” (i.e. by scratching it, or whatever), Kofi s3e epon no da. (A more literal gloss might be, “Kofi ruined on the table.”) The particular variation that I wanted was “Kofi let (allowed) the table top to get destroyed”, which comes out Kofi gyaa ma epon no da s3e. This is a standard, nice serial verb construction (lit. “Kofi let give on the table destroyed”) except for the (for me) fascinating bit that the shared object of the two verbs, here is a postpositional phrase (PP — equivalent to prepositional phrases in English), even though only the second verb allows a PP as object. So I set out to look for other sentences like it.

I thought that a fairly good chance would be “Kofi let the table be painted”, as the verb “to paint” in Akan (which is just painti, an English loan) always takes a PP object. So, we have Kofi paintii epon no ho, lit. “Kofi painted on the table.” So I tried the other sentence type: *Kofi gyaa ma epon no ho paintii.

Which elicited nothing more than laughter from my informant, J. “A table can’t paint itself!” she said.

Apparently, the difference is that s3 “destroy, ruin” is one of those verbs, mentioned above, which assigns Patient theta-role to its subject if used intransitively, while painti always assigns Agent theta-role to its subject. This is a bit as though we could say, in English, “The table destroyed!” to mean “The table was ruined!”

(Of slightly more interest for my continuing research is that this actually makes the sentence given above, Kofi gyaa ma epon no da s3e, even stranger, because here it appears that we have a prepositional phrase as the subject of s3 “destroy”, being assigned Patient theta-role. So that we’ve got “On the table destroyed” to mean “The top of the table was destroyed.” Definitely odd. I’ll need to try a more normal, non-causative SVC type with the sentences above, to be sure.)

Dear Ghana,

Your food is tasty! Really, I’ve come around on this — I was dubious at first, but I’ve gotten to really like it! But seriously — folks? This is the most impractical method of food consumption I’ve seen yet.

Soup is great! There are many wonderful ways to eat soup — with a spoon, drinking straight from the bowl, dipping with bread, pouring over rice… Many, many perfectly reasonable ways to consume soup. But with your fingers, using only a wad of totally non-absorbent paste? This is not one of them.

Along similar lines: I like goat meat, I really do! It’s very tasty, especially when sopping in a good spicy groundnut soup. But prying off pieces of scalding hot meat with ones fingers, one-handed, without dumping the whole bowl of food in your lap — this would not be an easy task, even if the meat in question weren’t naturally rather tough, full of slippery blubber, and covered in (ferociously hot) slimy okra stew.

It’s good food! I like banku a lot, really, I do! But there’s got to be a better way to get it from bowl to stomach.

Sincerely,

Leland

Seprewa lessons continue to be simultaneously delightful and really frustrating. The upside is that I really like the instrument, and the music I’m working on is very pretty. (In particularly, I’ll be starting a lamentation song today that hovers in this bizarre Phrygian-Lydian modal world that is lovely, lovely, lovely.)

The frustrating bit is, of course, the usual clash of ways of learning and teaching. It took me several lessons of arguing to convince Kyerematen that there was absolutely no way that I was going to learn to improvise convincingly on this instrument just by sitting there playing the basic rhythms over and over again: Up until yesterday, his usual pedagogical method was to say, “play this!”, and then walk out of the room for ten minutes. Don’t get me wrong: I like Kyerematen quite a bit, and we’ve been getting along very well. But I’m just not going to learn that way — way too much Western musician in me, and also a lack of listening background in the seprewa tradition.

It’s proven impossible to separate out traditional seprewa music from highlife. Highlife is a popular music genre that originated in the early 20th century in Ghana, basically when seprewa tunes were displaced to guitar and combined with a larger ensemble. It sounds quite a bit like Latin jazz at first, given that they share the same roots (rhythmically speaking, at least). Anyhow, Kyerematen hasn’t really seemed to understand me whenever I’ve asked whether a song is “traditional” (or “old” or “folk”) or not: He happily confirmed that a certain song was completely traditional, an old folk song, and then I later found out that he wrote it in 1995. Either highlife really is just an outgrowth of older music, with no real discontinuity, or this is some effect of the extreme endangerment of the seprewa now.

Or it could just be the nature of seprewa music: The seprewa, as I’ve noted, was mainly the instrument of “troubadours”, travelling musicians whose social role mostly involved singing the praises of local chieftains while offering social critique and commentary through other songs. As such, the style mostly involves a repertoire of “rhythms” over which to write new songs anyway, so perhaps the idea of a separation between older tunes and newer ones just doesn’t make any sense, in this context.

I like being laughed at during elicitation.

My favorite new test-sentence paradigm is based off of the sentence “Kofi’s dancing made me happy.” It’s a nice test-bed for nominalization stuff, and you usually get a bonus SVC in the made clause (“made me happy” comes out, more or less, “gave me getting happy”.)

Of course, part of the point was to see if you can get serial verb nominalizations in the first bit. So, for instance, since “Kofi chopped down the tree.” comes out as an SVC (more literally “Kofi cut the tree it fell down.”), I’ve been trying for “Kofi’s chopping down the tree made me sad.”* This generally earns me a pause and then laughter, as the most obvious “nominalized-SVC” version comes out as, more or less:  “Kofi’s tree’s ground-falling chopping gave me getting happy.” Which sounds even worse in Twi than it does in English, I promise, because (as it turns out) you can’t nominalize SVCs. (The best grammatical alternative is “Kofi’s tree-cutting and it-falling…”, with overt coordination.) Unsurprising, but fun.

Really: My favorite moments in elicitations are those moments when I try to say something so grammatical that my informant laughs at me. Then I know I’m doing something right. (A close second, though, is when informants start arguing over some grammatical point with passers-by.)

*Yes, Waldenites: I thought of that, too.