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

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