Saturday, October 18, 2008

Notes on the "habla"

For all you hispanohablantes or general Spanish language enthusiasts, this is my entry on Latin-American slang and indigenous peoples.

So last month I went to go see a showing of a low-budget film called Peces de Ciudad by Peruvian director Felipe Degregori about the indigenous people of Peru who have either been driven from their homes in the highland villages either by political violence or by lack of economic opportunity.  These Indians move to Lima, where they live in depressed slums without electricity or running water.  Houses are made of straw, cardboard, plywood, and corrugated tin.  Indians suffer a tremendous deal of racial discrimination in Lima, and are called a variety of derogatory names: charapa, cerrana (as in cerro or "hill"; literally, "hillbilly") and cholo among others.

So I went to Google these names after I saw the movie.  The first hit for charapa?  An entry on Quechua Wikipedia!  I had no idea that a Wikipedia in Quechua (a language of the indigenous peoples of the Andes and a direct descendant of the language of the Incan empire) even existed, so this was as a pretty exciting discovery for me.  I had to figure out myself, too, what language it was--that NACLO practice exercise with Quechua finally came in handy!

It turns out charapa is a Quechua word for turtle.  Apparently this is an insult directed towards Indians in Peru.  Another word used is cholo, which surprised me because it means something entirely different in Mexico and in the United States (something like "Mexican gangster," which, like "nigger" probably began as a derogatory word and eventually was reappropriated by the group to which it originally referred).  So, I went to Urban Dictionary for some clarification.  Some entries do mention its use as a derogatory term for Indians in Andean countries.  Another definition clearly only references the Mexican-American meaning, but also offered a source of its origin.

"Like many words that originated in Latin Americas--tomate, chocolate, etc.--the word cholo originated from the Nahuatl language and was eventually Hispanicized.  The original word was Xoloitzcuintli, where the X is pronounced somewhere between the English SH and CH.  The Spanish had no letter for this sound and used the X as a placeholder.  Xoloitzcuintli is the native breed of Mexican hairless dog was valued by the Mextica (Aztec) and Mayan natives.  The Spaniards used the shortened version of this word, Xolo, to mean "Mexican dog" with derogatory conotations [sic] when used by Anglos or Mexicans, as noted in previous definitions." 

This seemed to good to be true to me, so I decided to e-mail the professor of my Mesoamerican  Art & Architecture class, who is familiar with Nahuatl languages (once the tongue of the Aztecs) to ask whether or not this etymology seemed legitimate or plausible.  (As an aside, we have a ton of Nahuatl speakers here in New Haven.  You don't have to go much further than the local supermarket to hear Nahuatl spoken, since there's a large Mexican Indian immigrant population.)  Here was her reply:

"There are lots of words in Mexican Spanish from Nahuatl, almost all of them nouns (like most loan words).  My favorite is pocho--quite fascinating word origin.  I think the derivation below is correct.  Too bad the spelling of 'connotation' is wrong.  Perhaps you'll go in and fix it."  

There you have it!  I'll leave you all to look into pocho...

--Amy

Counting Your Words

Erica recently called to my attention this great article in The New York Times about the work of University of Texas psychology professor James W. Pennebaker.  He counts the number and type of words (using a computer program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count or LIWC) used by an individual to see what it can tell us.  Pennebaker's approach is unique in that it's a departure from traditional text analysis, which he says, "is really more interested in context, how sentences are put together and what a meaningful phrase," whereas his approach "is simply counting words."  He has used his software to analyze the number of first person pronouns used by Al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri to demonstrate a shift in his relationship with Osama bin Laden.

Pennebaker has also used his counting technique to analyze the speeches of the 2008 presidential candidates (the link: http://wordwatchers.wordpress.com).  He posits that the way each candidate uses language can tell us something about how he thinks (and from there we can analyze the difference between the way each approaches problems).  Here's a choice excerpt:

"Whereas McCain tends to be more categorical in his thinking, Obama is more fluid or contextual in the ways he approaches problems.  Categorical thinking involves the use of concrete nouns and their associated articles (a, an, the) and suggests that the person is approaching a problem by breaking it down into its component parts and attempting to put it in meaningful categories.  Fluid or contextual thinking involves a higher rate of verbs and associated parts of speech (such as gerunds and adverbs)."

--Amy

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Overheard: "Legitly"

Hey, guys! Since I know we're all abbreviation-happy, I thought I might report that I have heard the word "legitly" spoken on the Yale campus twice this week. It's a combination of the word "legit" (as in the abbreviation of the word "legitimate") with an "-ly" tacked on to make it an adverb. My suitemate from North Carolina used the word once at dinner, and then a couple of days later I heard it used again, interestingly enough, by a middle-aged male construction worker (a vastly different kind of speaker than a college-age female from the South).

It really piqued my interest, since it's clear neither the construction worker nor my suitemate was using "legit" consciously--as a curiosity or a novel slang word. Rather, the word had sunk at some point into their mental word banks, and when it was uttered, was treated by the brain as any other common morpheme, following the same English morphological rules (take an adjective and tack on "-ly" to make an adverb).  Now that's legitly interesting!

--Amy

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

BREAKING NEWS

So I was searching the Yale library system today out of curiosty, just to see whether we might have an original copy of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language.  It turns out we do have some incomplete sections of the first edition in Beinecke, our rare books and manuscripts library.  But more surprisingly, it turns out we have a complete of the dictionary's second edition (1755) just sitting in the stacks of our main lending library!   This is a very big deal, because this book is worth thousands of dollars.  Naturally, I went to go check it out.  It's a beautiful book printed in two folio-sized volumes--in remarkably good condition for its age.  Apparently Yale doesn't even know they just have it sitting it in the stacks, waiting to be perused by students.  Anyway, this is great news for amateur lexicographers and general lovers of old books with access to the Yale library system, because it means we can go in and commune with Johnson's tome in the deep recesses of Sterling Memorial Library stacks whenever we want.  Here are some pictures of me doing just that!



The last image is of the entry for the letter "X."  As I mentioned before, Johnson included no words in his dictionary that began with the letter.  The text reads: "X is a letter which, though found in Saxon words, begins no word in the English language."



So I've transcribed some of the Dictionary's preface that I thought was particularly interesting (Remember when McKean told us to read the frontmatter?  It turns out she was right!).  It gives us some insight into Johnson's worldview, as well as his philosophy of lexicography (prescriptivism):

"In adjusting the ORTHOGRAPHY, which has been to this time unsettled and fortuitous, I found it necessary to distinguish those irregularities that are inherent in our tongue, and perhaps coeval with it, from others which the ignorance or negligence of later writers has produced.  Every language has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in themselves at once necessary, must be tolerated among the imperfections of human things, and which require only to be registered, that they may not be increased, and ascertained, that they may not be confounded: but every language has likewise its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe.

As language was at its beginning merely oral, all words of necessary or common use were spoken before they were written; and while they were unfixed by any visible signs, must have been spoken with great diversity, as we now observe those that cannot read catch sounds imperfectly and utter them negligently.  When this wild and barbarous jargon was first reduced to an alphabet, every penman endeavored to express, as he could, the sounds which he was accustomed to pronounce or to receive, and vitiated in writing such words as were already vitiated in speech.  The powers of letters, when they were applied to a new language, must have been vague and unsettled, and therefore different hands would exhibit the same sound by different combinations."
 
Judging by the second paragraph, it seems to me Johnson is one of the first scholars to identify the phenomenon of the eggcorn!  As he says: "those that cannot read catch sounds imperfectly and utter them negligently."  He cites illiteracy as the root of this problem, since our only knowledge of a word, then, is what we hear, which can often be wrong--either we mishear or the person we hear the word from has misheard and repeated what he thought to be correct.  My third graders are familiar with this problem; it's the crux of the playground game "Telephone."  Naturally, with widespread illiteracy, Johnson's lifetime is the heyday of the eggcorn!  Anyway, even in this short passage, Johnson's description takes on a literary tone.  I just love how he calls our language before writing and standardization "wild and barbarous jargon."  If you can get your hands on a copy--even a later edition--it really is worth a look!

--Amy

Monday, September 1, 2008

End of summer musings

Hey, guys!  As we're transitioning from summer to fall and high school to college, thought I might take this opportunity to look back and forward—that is, to recap some things I've been thinking about in August and the direction those thoughts are leading me in for school, maybe.  So as I've mentioned, I took Spanish conversation classes at Berlitz this summer.  They kind of shuffled me through instructors, but I guess I didn't mind too much because it meant I got to see four or five different perspectives on the Spanish language.  

I noticed there were more or less two types of instructors—those who were concerned with the purity of the Spanish they spoke, taught, and demanded of students, and those who were content to speak somewhat Anglicized Spanish after having lived in the States for a while (“tenemos un picnic” and “es muy nice”).  To me, this Anglicized Spanish was a wonderful example of language change, and it was easy and interesting to see how and wear English had left its mark.  Yet other instructors saw this as wholly negative—a contamination of language rather than a natural change.  I almost got into a terrible argument with one instructor who was hell-bent on teaching me “lo mas puro” when she told me that despite variations from country to country, "solo hay un espanol"—there’s only one "Spanish."  Well, I would have fought her had I been able to express myself properly in not-English.

But above all, each instructor said to me that I'd know that I'd have achieved some kind of fluency if I dreamed "in Spanish."  I've heard that before about learning a language, as I'm sure you guys have.  I'm wondering to what extent there's any scientific backing to that claim, especially because there's reason to doubt that we think (or dream, in this case) in any particular language at all!  We've talked about Chapter 3 of Pinker's The Language Instinct, in which Pinker tells us that we do not think in words, or even in images.  The "language" of our minds, he says, is "mentalese"--an idea pioneered by American cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor.  (If you Google "mentalese," there are a few good links... look into it!)

Tangentially, this also came up when my dad and I were talking about translated texts, and lamenting their inadequacy in precisely expressing the idea communicated in the original language.  We were reading something that had been written in Spanish but translated into English by the author himself.  I said I thought this might be better than having a third party translator do the job, because the author knew best what he wanted to express with each particular word/phrase in Spanish, and could therefore carry it over into English.  But does this actually fix our “lost in translation” problem?  Or, does it still matter that the idea was originally expressed in Spanish?  How does this affect the outcome of the translation?  Is the translation true to the way the idea was conceived? What if there is no real way of translating a particular idea or concept wholly and precisely?  What if, in the language of translation, there were no good words?  One language could be better to express a particular idea than another.  This got me wondering about whether we conceive of thoughts in a particular language, and how and why some languages communicate certain concepts better than others.

Anyway, these questions are part of a larger one: Can thoughts exist outside language?  Or, what is the relationship between language and cognition?

A second fundamental question for me is the extent to which culture affects language (and perhaps vice versa?), especially if language is a pre-programmed human capacity.  In other words, do grammar and culture in fact mesh?  I understand how culture could affect language on a lexical level; however apocryphal the story that the Inuit have dozens of words for snow may be, it certainly proves the point.  Yet I wonder whether culture impacts language on other levels?  For example, what about syntax?  Is the fact that verbs come at the very end of a sentence in an SVO language like Latin just pure coincidence?  Random?  Chance?  Or is it affected by an external factor, like the culture, biology, or even geography (Jared Diamond style) of the people and place that develop a language?   These are the kinds of questions that I want to be able to answer in college—through the study of linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, etc., and through spending time abroad observing the relationship between the culture and language of a particular place.  I’m ready.

--Amy

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Hello, London!

So it turns out London is a linguist's (or lexicographer's) paradise! I've just returned from a week-long trip there with my family, and learned a whole lot about both Egyptian hieroglyphic script and the first real dictionary of the English language. I thought I'd share, and suggest, perhaps, a field trip!

The first awesome thing about London is that there are a million different people there from every corner of the world, so walking down the street you hear every language imaginable--from German to Arabic to Urdu. I guess that's not much different from New York, except the distribution of languages is different (there's a LOT of Arabic, and a LOT of Hindi or Urdu, as well as a higher concentration of non-Spanish Romance languages).

But unlike New York, London can claim possession of the original Rosetta Stone! I saw it at the British Museum, and made my sister take like a billion pictures of me in front of it. Here's one:


I've also included a picture of one of the signs posted on the exhibit, which explains the basics of how the Egyptian hieroglyphic script works. The reason the Rosetta Stone is so important is that it helped scholars (specifically, British scientist Thomas Young and French scholar Jean-François Champollion) to finally decipher hieroglyphics in 1822. The stele, created in 196 BC, records a decree of Ptolemy V in three different written languages: ancient Greek (interestingly, I believe this was the language used by the Egyptian government at the time), and the two Egyptian language scripts, hieroglyphic and Demotic. (Hope I explained that correctly... you might want to fact check because I'm not sure whether hieroglyphic and Demotic are different scripts or both different scripts and different languages. I do know Demotic comes later in Egyptian history). Anyway, scholars had difficulty deciphering hieroglyphics for many years, as the sign reads:

"...Because hieroglyphic signs look like pictures, they assumed that all hieroglyphs were images recording ideas without language. In fact hieroglyphs recorded the ancient Egyptian language with a mixture of sound and picture signs." The word cat is written by combining the signs standing for the sounds /mi/ + /i/ + /w/ as well as the picture sign for "cat" (as shown, as picture of a cat). Incidentally, the Egyptian word for cat would sound something like "miw." It's easy to tell this word was derived from the "meow" sound made by cats!

While in London, we also made a trip to the 17 Gough Square home of Dr. Samuel Johnson, where he wrote the first real dictionary of the English language over the course of nine years, from 1746 to 1755. Other English dictionaries had been published before, but never an authoritative one on the scale and scope of Johnson's. Johnson most notably included quotations from great works of English literature to illustrate his definitions of particular words. The first edition of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language contained over 110,000 quotations! This practice was considered innovative, and its influence has endured to the present day; the Oxford English Dictionary today continues to include quotations with many of its definitions.

But I found Johnson's treatment of word definitions even more interesting. Originally, Johnson believed that there were "at most seven different senses of a word." He identified the "natural and primitive signification," the "consequential meaning," the "metaphorical sense," the "poetical sense," the "familiar sense," the "burlesque sense," and "the peculiar sense, in which a word is found in any great author" (I like that one). But eventually he realized how limited his semantic philosophy was, and eventually came to permit as many definitions as he could find. Ultimately, he listed 134 definitions for the verb "to take," which took up roughly 8,000 words (and five whole pages) in his dictionary! As we know, words with multiple meanings can have their definitions listed in dictionaries in one of any number of different orders (the particular order depends on the choice of the publisher)--chronologically, in order frequency, etc. Johnson chose to list his definitions from the most tangible, literal sense of a word to the most literary, figurative, or abstract sense.

Today Johnson's dictionary is still praised for both the literary merit and thoroughness of its definitions. Just don't look for any entries under "X," since Johnson believed no real English words began with the letter! Johnson, a real character whose sense of humor always shone through in his definitions (he defined the word "oats" as "a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"), defined lexicographer in his dictionary as "a harmless drudge." The irony is hilarious; he proved lexicographers to be anything but that!

--Amy

Georgia

This article in the Times discusses the sociolinguistic issues at hand in the Caucuses, as it relates to the present situation in Georgia. Apparently Georgians will choose not to learn or even pretend they do not understand Russian as a form of cultural defiance. 

Some interesting commentary: "A language is the prime indication of the existence of a people," said George Hewitt, a University of London scholar of Abkhaz, the language spoken in Abkhazia, another separatist region of Georgia. "If a language dies, the culture dies as well. The people will become assimilated."

This is obviously a case where linguistics is directly tied into the politics of a region in the world. I'll be learning about this in my "Languages of the World" survey course that I just started today (!); I'll post more if I learn anything new.

-Alison

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Laurence Urdang Dies at 81

Here's the link to the Times obit of Laurence Urdang, who was big in the dictionary world. He was the managing editor of the first edition of the Random House dictionary and a word enthusiast in general. Also did some fun wordplay stuff...check it out.  

-Alison

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Ammon Shea reads the O.E.D.

From the 8/3 Sunday Times Book Review, a review of a new memoir by Ammon Shea chronicling his experience reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary in one year: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Baker-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The review is peppered with examples of a few of Shea's encounters with exotic verba--from "obmutescence" to "petrichor" to "glove"--and is well worth a read just for that. For those interested, Shea's Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages also garnered praise from likes of William Safire and Erin McKean.

--Amy

Monday, July 28, 2008

Reading Reexamined

For anyone interested in literacy who missed this article—there was a piece in The New York Times yesterday about internet literacy (“Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?”).

“Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.”

Here we encounter again the question of how and to what extent literacy and the written word (something altogether separate from spoken language, a more innate ability) changes the wiring of the brain. Now the question has become whether and how reading on the internet—since it uses different skills than reading in print—affects our brain’s circuitry in a different way. As a child of the web generation, this really hits home for me. Worth a look.

--Amy

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Tales From the Third Grade

So as most of you guys know, I am responsible for a crop of adorable (“devilish though they may be”) second and third graders as a counselor at Recky’s Day Camp. And as you can imagine, I’ve been covertly using them to conduct informal field studies of language acquisition, literacy, and bilingualism (in essence, I am being paid to do amateur linguistic “research” with unsuspecting, unpaid subjects… I love my job). So, I thought I would share some cute and surprisingly enlightening anecdotes.

First, I have a seven-year-old boy named Jason, who is of Chinese descent, but was born in the United States. His parents speak Cantonese (most of his family is from Hong Kong), some Mandarin, and English. His mother has also lived in Paris and speaks fluent French, and is teaching him a little bit. He has two-year-old twin siblings, who only speak Cantonese. One day a couple of weeks ago, Jason was telling me about how he goes to Chinese school to learn how to write in Chinese, and how even though Cantonese and Mandarin are different, they have the same writing system. He told me how he found learning to write Chinese very hard, because you have to memorize lots of characters—one for each word. I said, “It’s not like English, is it? Because in English we have letters that stand for sounds instead of words. The sounds all put together make up the word.” At this point, another boy piped up: “Yeah, that’s why English is the easiest to read! Because the letters stand for sounds! But it’s also the hardest to pronounce, because we have letters like ‘ph’ that make the wrong sound.”

So these kids not only have phonemic awareness, but also an idea of how writing systems vary in different cultures for different languages—which is more than can be said for many adults today. In short, these kids are AMAZING!

Jason tells me that he is “A little bit Chinese, a little bit English, and a little bit French,” because these are the languages that he speaks. He speaks English best, followed by Chinese, since as a baby his parents spoke both languages to him, but he has spent more time immersed in English because he goes to public school in the United States. He speaks only a little bit of French because of his mother, yet still counts this as part of his linguistic, and therefore ethnic identity. On the subject of language and identity, this is kind of a revolutionary idea. Jason looks Asian, and clearly grew up in a home with some Chinese customs—to any person on the street, he would just be an “Asian kid.” But to Jason, his ethnic identity is much more complex. He feels that because he speaks English and French also, he therefore partakes of the cultures that speak these languages, and therefore they make up part of his ethnic identity.

Jason may learn later that most of the world does not see ethnic identity in this way. Or, Jason may simply be part of a post-racial generation—where our definitions of “identity” are based on culture (I include language in this, even if some linguists might disagree) rather than biology (in race or in ethnic group).

Pamella is eight-years-old and grew up in a bilingual household, speaking both Spanish and English. Her father is Colombian and her mother is Peruvian. Like Jason, she makes fine distinctions between different dialects. She knows that her family speaks Spanish, but sees a distinction between the way her mother’s family and her father’s speak Spanish. “It’s the same language but it’s different. Sometimes they have different words for the same thing.” I tried to explain to her that it’s the same with British and American English. Pamella also says that speaks “more Peruvian than Colombian,” because her mother and grandmother speak Peruvian Spanish. For me, this just reaffirms the mother’s critical role in teaching language to her children (from “baby talk” in infancy and beyond). Sometimes I wonder if it had been my mother who spoke Spanish in my family, if I might have picked it up as a child. Quién sabe?

I like to practice my Spanish with Pamella sometimes, but I’ve noticed that whenever I speak to her, she’ll answer me in English. I used to think she did that because my Spanish was so poor. Then my Spanish instructor at Berlitz told me that the same was true of her kids, who are bilingual. I realized that the same is true of many other bilingual families I’ve known. (And now think about all the kids our age who have told you that they can understand a language that their family speaks… but can’t speak it.) Is it because the non-English language becomes secondary for the child after living and going to school in the English-speaking United States? I wonder.

Sometimes the counselors also have to speak to parents who speak little English. One day, I got this fabulous note from an ELL parent—a juicy ELL writing sample:

“To. Recky

This is Seoyoung’s mom.
She is gonna be absent tomorrow.
We are going to go to North Carolina to visit my aunt.
Thanks for your understand.”

Of course, I read this and absolutely loved it! Look at Seoyoung’s mother’s brilliant use of “gonna” as an English idiom. She’s a bit ahead of the curve, since “gonna” isn’t really accepted as legitimate in written English yet (though it should be and probably will be soon enough). She also chooses “thanks” as the informal, abbreviated form of “thank you.” She has mastered the present progressive-plus-infinitive construction, demonstrated in “we are going to go.” She also recognizes and makes use of two different meanings of the verb “to go” (she knows “going to” expresses an event in the future, as opposed to the general meaning of the verb, which expresses movement). She only misses by using “understand” instead of the gerund form “understanding,” where she means for the word to function as a noun—the object. Not sure what’s going on with her use of the period instead of the colon in “To. Recky”—though I do know some Koreans who use it instead of a comma in writing letters (ex. “Dear Amy.”), or for some reason include it at the end of titles (ex. “An Introduction to Hungarian Folklore.”). Otherwise, this note is completely clear, coherent, and understandable. Seoyoung’s mom showcases ELL at its finest.

--Amy

Monday, July 21, 2008

On "romance languages," "litmus tests" and other matters of grave import

Hi Guys -- This is Amy's dad, trying to get into the 21 st century by posting my first blog comment ever. Some random thoughts:

1) Amy's comment to Kim about the stereotype of Spanish as a "passionate" language got me thinking about similar biases and misconceptions regarding other languages. The question is, are these stereotypes ever based on real characteristics of a given language, or do they simply reflect cultural biases? To wit: Is French really the most "beautiful" or the most "musical" language? Anyone have any other examples?

2) In response to Kim's call to compile a list of superlatives, I have a nomination for the most unnnecessary word: "litmus." Why is it that no one puts anything simply to the test anymore? Nowadays, one must apply a "litmus test." It brings me back painfully to my high school Chem Lab days (which resulted in a C grade), and which I would rather repress. Please: Let's bring back plain old tests.

3) Vocabulary Word of the Day: aphasia It's a goody, describing a rare and weird condition in which one loses the power to use language. Look it up if you don't believe me. Duh-h-h-h-....

4) Recommended reading: Virginia Heffernan's column in the NY Times Magazine yesterday. She wrestles with the problem of how to transcribe and report online language faithfully. It's amusing.

Waxing aphasic daily,

-Richrod

Thursday, July 17, 2008

FIELD TRIP!

Hey guys,
Thought this might be of interest to all of you:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/theater/17bway.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin

The above is a link to an article in the Arts section of today's NYT: "Jets? Yes! Sharks? ¡Sí! in Bilingual ‘West Side’"

“They will speak Spanish where they would naturally,” Mr. Laurents said in a telephone interview from his home in Quogue, N.Y., adding that supertitles would be used to aid the audience. “The scenes with the Spanish are wildly exciting because they are much less inhibited. I don’t think many eyes are going to stray to the translation.”

Who needs supertitles? We certainly don't. A bilingual performance=language at its finest. So come February, we're all going. This would be an unforgettable TFS experience.

-Kim K.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

David Foster Wallace

I recently picked up a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace at Strand, not expecting to find a lengthy essay about language use and the dictionary inside! His essay "Authority and American Usage" is a humorous piece, but still has real substance.

I'm going to try to find a copy of the essay on the internet so that everyone can read it properly, but in the meantime, something interesting that Wallace brings up is the role of the dictionary in language. He explains that when Webster's Third endorsed the words "OK" and "ain't," there was uproar among many linguists, and the response of Webster editor Philip Gove was this: "A dictionary should be have no truck with artifical notions of correctness or superiority. It should be DESCRIPTIVE and not PRESCRIPTIVE" (caps added for emphasis). Then, Wallace explains that this led to linguistic conservatives being labeled as Prescriptivists and linguistic liberals as Descriptivists.

It's interesting to consider what camp you fall into. Should a dictionary should dictate the way people SHOULD speak, or do you think a dictionary should chronicle how people DO speak?

My response to the above question: If a dictionary does not document the way people DO speak, the language will not be able to evolve cohesively. That is, a divide between the way people do speak and the way they are supposed to speak would grow, and possibly lead to high and low forms of the language (Amy, remember the tapes we listened to about "H" and "L"?). If a dictionary does document the way people do speak, the language may evolve cohesively, but is that necessarily superior or inferior to the above option? I think it is superior, because if it ends up with the educated elite speaking the high version of the language and the rest speaking the low--and it typically would end this way, I believe--then the language difference is going to reinforce differences in social class and make for a stratified society that, eventually, won't even be able to communicate across classes.

I think this came up in Fluent once, but we never discussed it fully...so here's an opportunity now!

--Erica

Friday, July 11, 2008

Age and Language

I know we talked about a critical period about learning language, and I just found this very interesting abstract about the way a child learns a second language vs. an adult. I can't find the actual article online, but the gist is very interesting. The article says that a child learns the specific words of a new language before picking up on the verb conjugations and whatnot. They also pick up on patterns within the language much picker. For example, most children intuitively say gooses instead of geese in English because they know to make most noun plural, you add on an s. The adult learns the grammar aspects of language and the rules of structure, then filling in the vocabulary. That's basically how I learn Spanish, in fact. First I learned all the ways to conjugate some simple verbs in different tenses, and then I gradually learn the vocab to go along with the grammar. On the other hand, someone who grew up speaking Spanish learned rudimentary vocab words, and then picked up on sentence construction later. Which makes sense, considering that we all grew up saying single words first, and then form coherent sentences.

-Angela
Yes, I know I ramble a lot.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Update: different languages, different mindsets?

Hey, guys... just wanted to follow up on the whole bilingualism issue. Check out Alison and Erica's comments under the post "Different Languages, Different Mindsets?". Alison links us to a couple of particularly relevant studies of that confirm our sense that different parts of the brain are used for L1 and L2 (which apparently is always true, no matter how fluent you become in L2?)--and that seems to explain the difficulty we have in switching back from one language to another, particularly after a long period of time (when we immerse ourselves in one language for a long time, it's hard to get back out!).

Anyway, on the subject of language immersion, I guess I wanted to throw out a related question... I'm wondering what role cultural immersion plays neurologically when using and "getting into" an L2. (Current language pedagogy insists on cultural fluency as a vital part of foreign language learning; we tell ourselves that the best way to learn a language is to go abroad and immerse ourselves in the culture of the place; and even Senor Damken imparts the mantra to us: "Grammar and culture mesh.") I could be wrong, but I think the Chomsky types would say that culture actually plays a minimal role (seeking to erase that perception of language as being an outgrowth of culture) in achieving fluency. I'm not sure if the linguistics benefits of being abroad go beyond simply having a steady stream of authentic, varied input in L2. If we could recreate that situation in the United States, and just surround a test subject with native speakers of the subject's second language (so that the L2 only was spoken around the test subject for an extended period of time)... I wonder if having that experience in the United States vs. in the foreign country would make any difference in how involved the test subject became in the language (cognitively speaking) and whether or not the test subject acquired the same kind of fluency he would abroad (i.e. immersed in the culture). Desperately seeking research...

Also check out this video on TED. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh works with bonobo apes that have acquired written language! The whole thing is really interesting (the apes also seem to understand human language--English in this case), but things start getting really crazy around 10:55, where she shows us clips of the apes using lexical symbols to communicate with humans! The conclusion she draws from this is somewhat spottier, I think. My sense is that maybe bonobo apes tell us that humans aren't the only species with a language gene--or the capacity to acquire language, however it is built-in. By contrast, Savage-Rumbaugh seems to believe that, in light of the bonobos' abilities, we must reconsider whether our talents (language, writing, etc.) are biologically-programmed and unique to us, or whether they're a function of exposure to culture. She's right in that writing is, in fact, a cultural invention rather than a hard-wired ability. But I'm still not willing to attribute the bonobos' ability to acquire language to culture/socialization.

--Amy

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Hooked on phonics?

I do like Kim’s idea for some word superlatives, though idioms could be fun to list too, as Zinna’s Slate article does.

But I wanted to post on ELL (English Language Learning, formerly known as ESL or English as a Second Language) and phonics because I’ve gotten really into phonology and language acquisition over the past month (through tutoring as well as chatting with some of my ELL second grade campers at Recky’s). I actually got some old phonics textbooks out of my second grader teacher (you never know where you can find excellent resources… ask around).

So I guess what triggered this was thinking about the different pronunciation of “woman” versus “women” in English. The only semantic difference is that one word is singular and the other is plural. Woman is made plural by changing the –an to –en (as in “man” to “men”), and making plurals this way in a language is kind of strange to begin with (if I were a second grader, I’d be asking, “Wait, aren’t you supposed to just add –s to a word to make it plural?”). Even stranger is the accompanying change in the pronunciation of the first syllable (from WUH-man to WIH-men… or something like that; “Wait, the letter ‘o’ doesn’t make that sound!”). I was wondering how an English Language Learner comes to master such bizarre changes of pronunciation like that in English, since there are so many bizarre cases like that out there. (It’s like the Stanley Fish thing we talked about… “ghoti” could realistically be another spelling of the word “fish,” if we use the way “gh” is said in “cough” (/f/), the way “o” is said in “women” (/I/ or a short “i” sound), and the way “ti” is said in the word “intuition” (/š/ or “sh”).)

This brings us to the issue of phonics as an area of an instruction, for native speakers as well as learners—which is a huge debacle in education now. Phonics involves teaching children to associate English letters with certain sounds, as well as to put letters together making sound blends (like “ch” and “tr”). So in essence, it seeks to teach which letters produce each phoneme, which in turn helps children to understand the composition of words, so that they can eventually begin to decode unknown words (based on letter/sound correlation). There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that this is a very effective way of teaching young children to read (almost counterintuitively, because we know English has SO MANY exceptions where the resulting pronunciation of a word seems completely nonsensical given the way it’s spelled). Regardless, it seems most every major study has come to the conclusion that phonics IS in fact very effective (Wikipedia gives a nice summary under the “phonics” entry… the information seems correct since I’ve also read it from journals The Reading Teacher and American Educator). Yet for some reason a strong opposition remains (not sure what their argument is…considered too juvenile for students, maybe? Or perhaps for the same reasons we don’t teach grammar (an equally un-sexy subject) anymore… wait, I can’t think of any good reasons for not teaching grammar). Apparently it’s even bitterly opposed within our school district (I get the sense Mrs. McDonough is running the “Underground Railroad” of phonics programs with Mrs. Fox at Stillman. The other three schools do not teach phonics). Maybe this isn’t a problem if our schools ultimately produce competent readers… but oftentimes they don’t—and as a nation we lag behind many other industrialized countries in reading level of students. Why don’t we use the time-tested, research-backed tools we have available to help our kids to become better readers?

With regard to phonics and ELL, apparently there is also a place in the classroom for phonics instruction in the student’s native language, because if a student develops phonemic awareness in one language (Spanish for example, given 80% of ELLs in the U.S. use Spanish as their primary language), she can transfer phonemic awareness from one language to another, according to an article in The Reading Teacher (“Conciencia Fonémica en Español (Phonemic Awareness in Spanish)” by Hallie Kay Yopp & Lilia Stapleton, February 2008). “Encouraging English-language learners to build phonemic awareness in their native language leads to gains in their English reading skills.” The abstract can be found here. If you want an actual copy, let me know. ELL is actually the most interesting thing in the world. I wish I had paid more attention to it while we were still in school (CSI internship?).

And then there’s the most elusive aspect of ELL and second language acquisition in general—the question of the accent! For those of us who went to the Swarthmore conference on sign language acquisition, we’ll remember how Deborah Chen-Pichler talked about having an “accent” (in the form of hand shape) as an M2 (mode 2) learner of ASL. As with any other language, it seems as though if one learns it after a certain point in her childhood, one is forever doomed to speak it with a foreign accent (with rare Alon Harish-type exceptions). This seems to correspond with the whole critical period idea… at some point we stop absorbing language like little sponges, and acquisition becomes a difficult, draining, conscious process (as most of us know through our high school studies)… though apparently there have been all sorts of recent challenges to the critical period hypothesis (según Maestra Giblin). I should really look into that and post for y’all (also, an unrelated thought—but can we please revive the second person plural pronoun? It’s so necessary!).

In any case, se supone que most every ELL student who learns after a certain age will have some accent, even if he speaks perfect English otherwise. Yet I’ve noticed that some of my kids who are still within the “critical period” and often speak English at home still have accents. In particular, I have an Israeli girl who speaks to her parents in a mix of English and Hebrew, and she speaks normal English, but with a very think Hebrew accent! Meanwhile, I have two twins brothers who speak almost exclusively Hebrew at home, and they have no accent at all. Why? I think the problem is that the girl learned English from her parents, who speak it well but likely with a very heavy accent. Meanwhile, since the twin brothers learned English exclusively outside the home, they didn’t retain an accent (since they’re still young enough to completely learn a another language without an accent). I was talking to my second grade teacher about this, who was telling me how her Korean kids who come in with no knowledge of English end up speaking better sometimes than Israeli kids who learned English at home. Of course that doesn’t always happen, since I know plenty of people who grew up in bilingual households speak without an accent. But I thought this was worth reporting since more than one person has noticed this among Tenafly kids.

In conclusion, let's storm the Board of Education and demand changes in the reading curriculum. Then we can teach phonics to ELLs in underprivileged school districts. I'm down!

--Amy

just an idea...

A quick proposal:

You guys know know how the American Dialect Society has that convention where it comes up with Words of the Year awards under the categories of, "Most Creative," "Most Unnecessary," "Most Outrageous," etc.? Pues, I was thinking, the Fluent (Dialect) Society could hold its own type of convention sometime later in the year, obv. via the Internet. And, we can come up with our own list. It would be a cute way of staying in touch. (This was another one of my many sponatenous ideas at work today. I hate archiving).

-Kim Kirschenbaum

Monday, July 7, 2008

A highly-recommended website!

Hey, guys!
While soldiering at work today, I somehow landed on the following website:
http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/guide/

It's called "Double-Tongued Dictionary." It’s basically a compilation of undocumented and underappreciated words. The site focuses on slang, jargon and new words. The blog posts under “Lexicographer’s Rules” are great. One post, from April 1st, 2008, entitled, “Saying it Wrong on Purpose,” really hit close to home. Although the post specifically focuses on words we intentionally pronounce incorrectly in our day to-day conversations (the post mentions “liberry,” “cowinkidink, etc.), I think the same can truly be applied to the way we approach the written word, too. Amy and I, and I’m sure plenty of others who are reading this post (if anyone is even reading it), have recently made a pastime out of deliberately spelling words wrong. “High” instead of “hi,” “chrue” instead of “true,” “kollege” instead of “college…” the list goes on. We do this, the post suggests, because it’s ironic, we enjoy making fun of ourselves (or rather, other people), and it’s just plain fun! The post is definitely interesting and informative. After reading it, I spent the rest of my idle time at work trying to come up with spoonerisms. Check out the post if: 1. you want to learn what a spoonerism is 2. you want to enrich your already-fab. understanding of linguistics 3. you want to make the world a better place
Hope everyone is having a fab. Summer! I miss you all!!!

-Kim Kirchenbaum (yes, I purposely spelled my last name wrong. Some people never seem to get it right…even after you pay them $130)

Friday, July 4, 2008

Different languages, different mindsets?

Looks like Fluent members are on the same wavelength, as usual. Kim and I were talking the other day about friends who are fluent in two languages, but find it hard to switch back from one to the other after extended periods of time. (I have a friend who grew up speaking both English and Spanish, but considers herself to be more fluent in English. She goes to Colombia once or twice a year and speaks only Spanish for about three weeks. When she comes back to the U.S., she finds it very difficult to switch back into English.) Then I got this e-mail a few days ago from Angela, who said something really similar:

"...Anyway, I was thinking about how different languages sometimes utilize different parts of the brain. I realized that whenever I think in English, I have to go with the English pronounciation and whatnot. Even when I'm reading about something Chinese and I know the Chinese equivalent for the English word, I have to use the English version. It's most noticeable with city names and proper nouns, but if I start using in one language, it takes a conscious effort to switch. I guess this is a part of why I don't really understand people who can combine languages, like Spanglish. For me, when I took at one language, I can't translate it word for word. I can get the gist of it, but that's about it. If you want me to translate Chinese to English, it's going to sound terrible. On the other hand, if you give me both translations, I can tell you if the translator did a good job or not. It's almost as if I need to be in a different mindset in order to speak a different language."

So I guess I have a bunch of questions to throw out there:

1. Has anyone had or does anyone know of a similar experience (having trouble "switching" languages)?
2. Why does it happen? Do different languages actually utilize different parts of the brain (in the way Chinese and English reading do, according to the dyslexia studies we looked at last month)? How and why does the brain "get used to" operating in a specific language?

I want to find some research to make sure what we seem to be sensing isn't just folk psychology... but please feel free to weigh in (especially if you find info on the web or otherwise) so we can get to the bottom of this!

--Amy

Happy Fourth of July, Everyone!

For an interesting discussion on the common American usage of "the Fourth of July" vs. "July Fourth" vs. "Independence Day", see this Language Log post and this perhaps less reputable random blog posting. This references both cultural issues and the linguistic concept of ordinal numbers. Enjoy!

On an unrelated note, I found this article on Slate.com that deals with catchphrases - like "Make it work," "My bad," and "Not so much" - and how they cycle through the modern lexicon. It considers pop culture influences and developing technology as different factors that affect the longevity of phrases in English, and also contains some lighthearted commentary on what phrases have overstayed their welcome. Not really scientific or technical, but still worth the read.

--Alison

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Links for the summer

Hey, guys! I remember some people asked for links to the Erin McKean video on lexicography and the changing "shape" of the dictionary. Here's the link: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/erin_mckean_redefines_the_dictionary.html.

If you found Ms. McKean to be particularly charming, you also can watch her speak at Google:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1588634025806636713&q=erin+mckean+video&ei=yElsSKn9JYTErwLP2pyiDw&hl=en
She talks about the top 10 things she wishes people knew about dictionaries. (Who knew we were supposed to read the "front matter" of our dictionaries before using them? McKean also talks about it in an interview here: http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/archive/2005-11/2005-11-30-voa1.cfm.)

More pertinent videos can be found here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/themes/words_about_words.html

I especially recommend the Pinker one, but Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, Zeresenay Alemseged, and Murray Gell-Mann are all on my to-do list.

Also, some of you guys wanted the link for the eggcorn database. Alison helpfully included it on the sidebar. Now there's no way any of us can possibly get bored this summer. These links should, as Senora might say, "keep us cooking."

--Amy

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

The Official Fluent Society Blog!

Now The Fluent Society officially has its place on the internet, so we can continue our discussions outside 119 and into the "Real Word" now that we've graduated! Anyone can post about any language or linguistics-related topic (I've sent the log-in information via e-mail to all members). We'll see whether this catches on or not... it could become a really nice way of staying in touch! ;-)

We also have an e-mail address, if you feel so inclined to use it. the.fluent.society@gmail.com

More to follow!

--Amy