Foblish

Thanks to work I have the dubious pleasure of interacting with fobs of both the curry and asian varieties these days (yeh yeh I'm so racist etc, get over it already). And today I noticed something somewhat odd/interesting. With both varieties I change my normal speech patterns to something closer to theirs so that I'll be more easily understood by the person I'm talking to. Now, with the Indians I find myself carefully enunciating every syllable, using a long string of simple words to convey every concept. But with Asians I find myself shortening my sentences. "Why are you starting so early?" Becomes "Why you start so early?". And in both cases these techniques work, but not vice versa.
Maybe it has something to do with their native languages? Because I know that Chinese grammar is an exercise in minimalism and that's consistent with the Foblish I use with them. I don't know much about Hindi/Urdu grammar but in the future it seems like research will be required into this.

In other news, I just spent 8 hours trying to do 3 people's worth of work by myself. And now I'm tossing up whether to sleep for a few hours or start writing my linguistics essay

Words of wisdom

From one of the mailing lists I frequent:

It's hard to get too dogmatic about whether you
use a shovel with a pointy tip or a flat tip; one works better
for one type of dirt, the other for another... but set two cars
side by side, both just about equally capable, and people will
get pretty passionate. Put two computers, each of which enable
the users to do just about everything that the other can do, and
the passions run even hotter. Two cameras, each capable of taking
a picture that only an expert could differentiate... and maybe
not even then... stand back! The only way to get people more
wound up is to set them arguing about something wholly (ehem)
imaginary like "god".