Chased and Cornered

I know there’s a field of psychology for analyzing dreams. Not aspirations but images and sounds you somehow perceive while being asleep. But has anyone studied how the dreamer, who is defenseless, can control images and sounds in dreams?

These days, I have trouble sleeping. I need the aid of alcohol to push myself into sleep. And alcohol doesn’t help me as though it can usher me to sleep quickly, it doesn’t seem to give me quality of sleep.  Possibly, partly because I’ve been rather busy with work and also partly because I’ve reading much (who am I if I stop reading?), I, while asleep, see mostly nonsensical strings of English words in black against a white background as if looking at the computer screen. Similar things have happened before when I was busy. I may be just following the strings or I may be trying to translate them into Japanese. (More than half, or maybe much, of my work consists of Japanese-to-English translation.)

And the past several days, while following them and dreaming, I, supposedly unconscious, am also thinking. Thinking hard. Often, I hear real, clear noises coming from outside.

Being asleep and looking at nonsense word strings, I sometimes see, or I think I see, phrases like “chased and cornered,” definitely in English, probably a reflection of the situation wherein I find myself now.

Another Translation Job Is Over, and the Vise Is Still Vice

 This afternoon, I delivered another job of translation after overnight work. Overnight after I had been in a half-awake-half-asleep state in bed and then on the sofa for more than half a day, or maybe close to a whole day. This time, it was a set of documents about legal registrations for land and transactions of it in Osaka. I found only a few sentences and many tables. Therefore, it involved not much of sentence construction but much of table making. I have dirtied the tables, moving cells to places where they should not be, and cleaned them up by adjusting font sizes, space between the lines, etc. These documents may be used evetually for a court case as evidence. I cannot be sure because this job came from an agency with which I have been working since I started my own mini company in 2008 and which in many senses, has been functioning as my company’s de facto sales division. My appreciation to the agency.

I should write about my inner self especially when my mind is being squeezed by a heavy, large vise. Or that is what at least some people say, especially when they are related to the psychological and psychiatric fields. This has never worked for me. No doubt, I helps me reflect on the situation I find myself in and try to think about constructive ways to get out of it. Writing only crystalizes my situation and kicks me down deeper into the hole. The clever vise is so incredibly vice.

奇怪な英語との出会い（２）

 東南アジア全域に広がっているような種類の英語は一般に、ピジン・イングリッシュ（pidgin English）と呼ばれる簡略型英語であるだと呼ばれるかもしれないが、この呼称は正しくない。

　"There is much confusion about the term pidgin. The word itself comes from the Chinese pronunciation of the English word business. (It was a form of English used between the English and Chinese in seaports in China and the Straits settlements in the nineteenth century.) Technically, a "pidgin" is an auxiliary language, one that has no native speakers. In other words, it is a speech-system that has been formed to provide a means of communication between people who have no common language. When a 'pidgin' (English, French or Portuguese) becomes the principle language of a speech community – as on the slave ships – it evolves into a creole..."

  "It is a misconception to imagine that a pidgin is a debased form of speech without rules. A pidgin will always have its own way of constructing a sentence. What is different about a pidgin is that usually it dispenses with the difficult or unusual parts of the language, the parts that speakers from a great variety of language backgrounds would find strange or hard to learn...¹"

　また、心理言語学者のスティーブン・ピンカー（Steven Pinker）は、

"When speakers of different languages have to communicate to carry out practical tasks but do  not have the opportunity to learn one another's language, they develop a makeshift jargon called a pidgin. Pidgins are choppy strings of words borrowed from the language of the colonizers or plantation owners, highly variable in order and with little in the way of grammar. Sometimes a pidgin can become a linga franca and gradually increase in complexty over decades, as in the 'Pidgin English' of the modern South Pacific."

と同様に説明し、また、ピンカーは言語学者のデレク・ビッカートン（Derek Bickerton）が行った研究を引用して次のように説明している。

　"... [I]n many cases a pidgin can be transmuted into a full complex language in one fell swoop: all it tackes is for a group of children to be exposed to the pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue. That happened, Bickerton has argued, when children were isolated from their parents and were tended collectively by a worker who spoke to them in the pidgin. Not content to reproduce the fragmentary word strings, the children injected grammartical complexty where none existed before, resulting in a brand-new, richly expressive language. The language that results when children make a pidgin their native tongue is called a creole.²"

　しかし、現代シンガポール人はピジンで話していたと思われる祖先から何世代も経ているのである。

    ちなみに、石原慎太郎はこの種の英語について、「ピジョン・イングリッシュ、つまりハトの英語だな」と言ったことがある。それを聞いた瞬間に、この人の持つ博識に対する信頼度が急降下した。後に、この文法破壊と発音破壊はシンガポール独自のものではなく、程度と種類に差はあるが、東南アジアとにおいて、現地の言語にも影響されて一般的であることを実体験として知るようになる。だからと言って、そのまま受け入れることはできない。

　世界中で使われていると言ってもいいほどの英語には、それなりにしっかり定義された話し方、すなわち国際的な標準があると固く信じている人が、東南アジアの「庶民」「一般人」の通訳をするとすれば、おそらく必ず認められるであろうそんな氷人との言語運用の腰を抜かすほどの隔たりが原因で、通訳も翻訳もできないかもしれない。それほどズレているのである。北京語、福建語、広東語、マレー語、タミル語に影響されてきたということで、シンガポール式英語に関する学術書まであるのだが、そんな解説はどうでもいいのである。多言語社会にはどの言語も中途半端だという欠点がある。文法破壊はとりわけ華人に目立つ。彼ら独自の効率性重視の言語構成なのかもしれないが、国際的と呼べる代物ではない。無視できないのは、ここが国際的な都市国家としての評判を得てしまっているからである。

¹ The Story of English, 1986

² The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, 1994