Currents: Finding the Words to Forgive Themselves

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — “Bloodshed,” declared the man on the other end of the call. He was panicked. “I don’t know whether this is the end of the road or capitulation or not, but it will be one day of bloodshed or two more — or, or, or, two more days of bloodshed, man.”

The man was not in Misurata or Dara’a or Kabul. The phone call dates to Oct. 6, 2008, a day that was going badly for David Lau. He was a trader at Galleon, the hedge fund of the fallen billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, who was convicted of insider trading this month in New York.

A striking thing about the call between Messrs. Lau and Rajaratnam — and about the latter’s other calls with subordinates, friends and tipsters in the banking-consulting universe — is a certain human need they revealed. In call after call, these characters betrayed a burning desire to give their transactions a martial, bloody quality that they naturally lacked. They were finance nerds who longed to feel like gladiators.

“I’m long 25 and I’m taking the pain, but I’m — you know, I’m a warrior. They can’t kill me,” Mr. Rajaratnam told another associate.

So many of his sentences are like this, taking a profession of virtual buys and sells and breathing an artificial physicality into them: “I wanna blow everything out.” “The only guys who are whipping stocks around are hedge funds.” “It’s very stressful, you know, every day you come in and it’s — I feel like I’m fighting Muhammad Ali.”

Mr. Rajaratnam’s interlocutors do it, too. Instead of saying that they telephoned someone, they say: “I just lobbed a call in to Ronny.” Sports and war metaphors grip them. They talk in the language of “clearing the last sort of big hurdle,” of the “falling knife” of the stock market.

Language is a beautiful thing that makes so many ugly things possible.

Only the most ruthless humans can do bad things and go on with the knowledge of their badness. Language gives the rest of us a way out — a way of rationalizing, explaining, telling ourselves a story about ourselves. We are not terrorists, but martyrs. We are not greedy, we are doing God’s work.

I read through the transcripts of Mr. Rajaratnam’s wiretapped phone calls this week, with a focus on language. I wanted to understand how this crew of rich-people-longing-to-be-richer conceived of themselves, in their own words.

Their need, above all, to inject knives and blood and boxing into their talk was telling. A common criticism of high-flying financiers is that they are increasingly removed from the reality of their deeds — from the cereal and light bulbs and apartment towers that they fund.

Their detachment makes malfeasance easier, the critics say, for they know not what they sell.

The tapes bolstered that impression. Here were men who spoke surprisingly little about the companies they were investing in, the products they made and the like. The companies were nothing but text on the tickers of a triple-screen computer. But in speaking as they did, the ethereality of their work could be grounded by a feeling that they were creators, doers; men who moved things, made things happen.

George Orwell famously worried about the corrosive effect on language of manipulative governments; in later years, adspeak and textspeak have presented themselves as threats. But financespeak is an empire unto itself, and perhaps more influential than is commonly realized.

The tapes were a reminder of how little this particular language of business is tethered to the stuff of real business: inventory and profit and revenue and the like.

That is not what the hopscotching, globe-trotting figures on the tapes speak of. They are ceaseless jumpers from one stock to another, and they have developed a standardized language of “puts” and “holds” and “long” and “short” that lets them smooth the nuances of each business into a strange new whole grasped only by them.

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Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People

The result provides support for a wider picture, controversial among linguists, that the distribution of many language families today reflects the spread of agriculture in the distant past when farming populations, carrying their languages with them, grew in numbers and expanded at the expense of hunter-gatherers. Under this theory, the Indo-European family of languages, which includes English, was spread by the first farmers who expanded into Europe from the Middle East some 8,000 years ago, largely replacing the existing population of hunter-gatherers.

In the case of Japan, archaeologists have found evidence for two waves of migrants, a hunter-gatherer people who created the Jomon culture and wet rice farmers who left remains known as the Yayoi culture.

The Jomon people arrived in Japan before the end of the last ice age, via land bridges that joined Japan to Asia’s mainland. They fended off invaders until about 2,400 years ago when the wet rice agriculture developed in southern China was adapted to Korea’s colder climate.

Several languages seem to have been spoken on the Korean Peninsula at this time, and that of the Yayoi people is unknown. The work of two researchers at the University of Tokyo, Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa, now suggests that the origin of Japonic — the language family that includes Japanese and Ryukyuan, spoken in the Ryukyu island chain south of Japan — coincides with the arrival of the Yayoi.

The finding, if confirmed, indicates that the Yayoi people took Japonic to Japan, but leaves unresolved the question of where in Asia the Yayoi culture or Japonic language originated before arriving in the Korean Peninsula.

Mr. Lee is a graduate student studying language and the mind, not a historical linguist. He has used a statistical tree-drawing method that other biologists have applied successfully to language origins, despite some linguists’ skepticism. The method, called Bayesian phylogeny, depends on having a computer draw a large number of possible trees and sampling them to find the most probable. Each language is represented by a 200-word vocabulary composed of words known to change very slowly.

If any fork in the tree can be linked to a historical event, all the other branch points can be dated. In this case, Mr. Lee knew dates for Old Japanese, Middle Japanese, and the split between the Kyoto and Tokyo dialects that began in 1603 A.D. when the capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo, the early name for Tokyo.

Mr. Lee reasoned that Japanese would have originated with the Jomon if the root of the tree turned out to be very ancient, but with the Yayoi culture if recent. The computer’s date of 2,182 years ago for the origin of the tree fits reasonably well with the archaeological dates for the Yayoi culture, he reported Tuesday in The Proceedings of the Royal Society.

John B. Whitman, an expert on Japanese linguistics who works at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, in Tokyo, and at Cornell University, called the new finding “solid and reasonable,” although the date of the Yayoi culture, he said, has now been pushed back to around 3,000 years after a recalibration of radiocarbon dates. That would open an 800-year gap with Mr. Lee’s date but not necessarily change his conclusion.

The question of Japanese origins has had political consequences, with the link to the Yayoi culture having been invoked to justify the annexation of Korea and Manchuria before World War II. After the war, the link with the Jomon culture was emphasized.

Quentin Atkinson, an expert on language phylogeny at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, said that Mr. Lee’s time scale was plausible but that if Japonic had spread through an agriculturally driven population expansion, his language tree should be much bushier at its root. Mr. Lee said that such earlier versions of Japanese might have disappeared when the island was politically unified about 1,000 years ago.

Genetic studies have suggested interbreeding between the Yayoi and Jomon people, with the Jomon contribution to modern Japanese being as much as 40 percent. Apparently the Yayoi language prevailed, along with the agricultural technology.

 

Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People

Researchers studying the various dialects of Japanese have concluded that all are descended from a founding language taken to the Japanese islands about 2,200 years ago. The finding sheds new light on the origin of the Japanese people, suggesting that their language is descended from that of the rice-growing farmers who arrived in Japan from the Korean Peninsula, and not from the hunter-gatherers who first inhabited the islands some 30,000 years ago.

The result provides support for a wider picture, controversial among linguists, that the distribution of many language families today reflects the spread of agriculture in the distant past when farming populations, carrying their languages with them, grew in numbers and expanded at the expense of hunter-gatherers. Under this theory, the Indo-European family of languages, which includes English, was spread by the first farmers who expanded into Europe from the Middle East some 8,000 years ago, largely replacing the existing population of hunter-gatherers.

In the case of Japan, archaeologists have found evidence for two waves of migrants, a hunter-gatherer people who created the Jomon culture and wet rice farmers who left remains known as the Yayoi culture.

The Jomon people arrived in Japan before the end of the last ice age, via land bridges that joined Japan to Asia’s mainland. They fended off invaders until about 2,400 years ago when the wet rice agriculture developed in southern China was adapted to Korea’s colder climate.

Several languages seem to have been spoken on the Korean Peninsula at this time, and that of the Yayoi people is unknown. The work of two researchers at the University of Tokyo, Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa, now suggests that the origin of Japonic — the language family that includes Japanese and Ryukyuan, spoken in the Ryukyu island chain south of Japan — coincides with the arrival of the Yayoi.

The finding, if confirmed, indicates that the Yayoi people took Japonic to Japan, but leaves unresolved the question of where in Asia the Yayoi culture or Japonic language originated before arriving in the Korean Peninsula.

Mr. Lee is a graduate student studying language and the mind, not a historical linguist. He has used a statistical tree-drawing method that other biologists have applied successfully to language origins, despite some linguists’ skepticism. The method, called Bayesian phylogeny, depends on having a computer draw a large number of possible trees and sampling them to find the most probable. Each language is represented by a 200-word vocabulary composed of words known to change very slowly.

If any fork in the tree can be linked to a historical event, all the other branch points can be dated. In this case, Mr. Lee knew dates for Old Japanese, Middle Japanese, and the split between the Kyoto and Tokyo dialects that began in 1603 A.D. when the capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo, the early name for Tokyo.

Mr. Lee reasoned that Japanese would have originated with the Jomon if the root of the tree turned out to be very ancient, but with the Yayoi culture if recent. The computer’s date of 2,182 years ago for the origin of the tree fits reasonably well with the archaeological dates for the Yayoi culture, he reported Tuesday in The Proceedings of the Royal Society.

John B. Whitman, an expert on Japanese linguistics who works at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, in Tokyo, and at Cornell University, called the new finding “solid and reasonable,” although the date of the Yayoi culture, he said, has now been pushed back to around 3,000 years after a recalibration of radiocarbon dates. That would open an 800-year gap with Mr. Lee’s date but not necessarily change his conclusion.

The question of Japanese origins has had political consequences, with the link to the Yayoi culture having been invoked to justify the annexation of Korea and Manchuria before World War II. After the war, the link with the Jomon culture was emphasized.

Quentin Atkinson, an expert on language phylogeny at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, said that Mr. Lee’s time scale was plausible but that if Japonic had spread through an agriculturally driven population expansion, his language tree should be much bushier at its root. Mr. Lee said that such earlier versions of Japanese might have disappeared when the island was politically unified about 1,000 years ago.

Genetic studies have suggested interbreeding between the Yayoi and Jomon people, with the Jomon contribution to modern Japanese being as much as 40 percent. Apparently the Yayoi language prevailed, along with the agricultural technology.