Continuing to hack my way through the 400s without resorting to reading dictionaries, I was thrilled to learn that Jhumpa Lahiri had written a book about learning Italian. Otherwise, I would have had to resort to claiming the first third of Eat, Pray, Love, on the grounds that I learned "attraverso" (let's cross over) from it. That was one of Gilbert's favorite words, and Lahiri had hers, too. As I was listening to Lahiri read her own audiobook, her beautifully pronounced Italian became a convincing soundtrack for her love story... the story of how she fell in love with the Italian language.
Lahiri didn't just fall in love with Italian-- she committed to it. She moved to Rome and made a vow to write only in Italian. The main thing that has come out of that vow so far was this memoir, which contains two very satisfying short stories and a number of more or less chronological but somewhat repetitive essays. While this is not the greatest book or even the greatest memoir I have ever read, it must have been pretty effective, since it did inspire me to action.
Lahiri's description of reading on the sofa with a pen, a notebook and a dictionary made me want to read in a foreign language again, too. I used to read a lot of French-- Andre Gide, Victor Hugo-- and I used to read the Bible in Spanish every day. Becoming more fluent in Spanish would really be useful, and reading the Bible in a modern translation might help me with that. Lahiri talks about how reading in a third language, one she was still learning, forced her to read more slowly, so this practice might help me devotionally as well. If I actually follow through!
Sunday, April 1, 2018
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Marrying the Guy Is Not Just a Stunt: When in French, by Lauren Collins
Dear reader, you know I love me a stunt memoir, from My Year of Living Biblically to My Korean Deli. But it's one thing to dedicate a whole year to, for example, reading the whole encyclopedia in hardcover (The Know-It-All), and it's another thing to marry a guy and move to Switzerland. When it comes to learning French language and culture, Lauren Collins went all in, complete with extended family, a H*Y*M*A*N*K*AP*L*A*N-style language class, and a lot of research on the history of simultaneous interpretation, Queen Victoria's efforts to learn Urdu, and prescriptive vs. descriptive linguistics.
If you have half an hour or so, you can get the drift from this excerpt in the New Yorker or the even shorter one in the New York Times. But I can summarize the story this way: Lauren grew up with no particular culture and gravitated towards men-- a "yo-boy," an "Englishman with two middle names," a "tall Tennessean" who seemed to have a stronger sense of self. When she finally met Olivier and realized he was the one she'd been waiting for, well, she couldn't even pronounce his name correctly, but his self-identity was secure enough that he apparently didn't mind. He also brought to the party not only a language and a nation but a full set of relatives, who of course had their own customs and manners, as extended families always do...
Interwoven with her own story, Lauren presents her research. She reviews the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the presumption that language shapes perception which paved the way for the discovery that people who speak different languages see colors differently. She talks about the data underlying a very common experience: it's much easier to talk about emotional situations and decisions in a second language. Turns out that's the "emancipatory detachment effect," and it's why missionaries want to learn and translate the Bible into "heart languages," so that the gospel won't be stripped of its affective weight.
And, in the end-- and maybe this is a spoiler alert, but, if so, a happy one-- she and Olivier start to build their own little bilingual family, taking advantage of two sets of vocabulary to describe that experience that is somehow both the most personal and the most universal, the most well-understood and the most difficult to explain in the world-- the experience of having a baby. A charming story and a nice introduction to linguistics... and remember, big chunks of it are available online!
If you have half an hour or so, you can get the drift from this excerpt in the New Yorker or the even shorter one in the New York Times. But I can summarize the story this way: Lauren grew up with no particular culture and gravitated towards men-- a "yo-boy," an "Englishman with two middle names," a "tall Tennessean" who seemed to have a stronger sense of self. When she finally met Olivier and realized he was the one she'd been waiting for, well, she couldn't even pronounce his name correctly, but his self-identity was secure enough that he apparently didn't mind. He also brought to the party not only a language and a nation but a full set of relatives, who of course had their own customs and manners, as extended families always do...
Interwoven with her own story, Lauren presents her research. She reviews the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the presumption that language shapes perception which paved the way for the discovery that people who speak different languages see colors differently. She talks about the data underlying a very common experience: it's much easier to talk about emotional situations and decisions in a second language. Turns out that's the "emancipatory detachment effect," and it's why missionaries want to learn and translate the Bible into "heart languages," so that the gospel won't be stripped of its affective weight.
And, in the end-- and maybe this is a spoiler alert, but, if so, a happy one-- she and Olivier start to build their own little bilingual family, taking advantage of two sets of vocabulary to describe that experience that is somehow both the most personal and the most universal, the most well-understood and the most difficult to explain in the world-- the experience of having a baby. A charming story and a nice introduction to linguistics... and remember, big chunks of it are available online!
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
440-449: French language
No matter how eclectic the reader, everyone has something up with which she will not put, and for me, it turns out to be dictionaries. Even the adorable Leo Rosten could not hold my attention for an entire volume of Yiddish. And besides, having been a French major, and having cut my teeth (literally, I believe-- I think there were little baby-tooth bite marks on the cover of our family copy) on the Petit Larousse Illustre (follow this link! You'll thank me later!), I was considering giving myself a pass on this section of the Dewey Decimal System.
But I trudged over to the library anyway, just because I don't want to be stuck in some kind of linguistic purgatory all year, and lo and behold! Although "French language" seems to mainly consist of dictionaries and grammars and phrase books, it also includes memoirs of people's experiences learning French! Hooray! Presumably, the same will hold true for the languages still to come: Italian (Jumpa Lahiri, no less), Spanish, etcetera. It would be an interesting experiment to see how much of the Dewey Decimal System one could get through reading only books written in the first person.
But I trudged over to the library anyway, just because I don't want to be stuck in some kind of linguistic purgatory all year, and lo and behold! Although "French language" seems to mainly consist of dictionaries and grammars and phrase books, it also includes memoirs of people's experiences learning French! Hooray! Presumably, the same will hold true for the languages still to come: Italian (Jumpa Lahiri, no less), Spanish, etcetera. It would be an interesting experiment to see how much of the Dewey Decimal System one could get through reading only books written in the first person.
Sunday, December 24, 2017
430-439: German and related languages. The Joys of Yiddish, by Leo Rosten
430-499: Most. Unmotivating. Dewey. Section. Ever. Just 70 digits of language dictionaries, 60 of them allocated to various European languages. So imagine my pleasant surprise at finding that my old friend Leo Rosten wound up amongst the Germans! I knew Rosten from his wonderful character, H*Y*M*A*N*K*A*P*L*A*N, a fictional adult ESL student whose personality was as colorful as his signature. But Rosten was fluent in Yiddish as well as English and wrote a wonderfully schlocky (see what I did there?) guide to Yiddish as spoken in America by Jews and goyim alike, and that is how he ended up in 430-439.
Some people object to the jokes that were old before Rosten was even born. Others might object to outdated social attitudes. Myself, I just found out that even Leo Rosten cannot persuade me to read an entire dictionary front to back in a period of three to six weeks. But, as dictionaries go, this is a good one! And his kids have updated it, so, there's that. If you want to learn some Yiddish, this is the way to do it!
Some people object to the jokes that were old before Rosten was even born. Others might object to outdated social attitudes. Myself, I just found out that even Leo Rosten cannot persuade me to read an entire dictionary front to back in a period of three to six weeks. But, as dictionaries go, this is a good one! And his kids have updated it, so, there's that. If you want to learn some Yiddish, this is the way to do it!
Sunday, December 10, 2017
420-429: English. Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss
On the back cover of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a panda walks into a bar... and by the time he walks out, everyone has vowed to be much more careful about the placement of their commas. And their apostrophes, and even their ellipses! Truss surprised herself by writing a best seller about punctuation, and then took it to the next level by issuing a special edition equipped with a "punctuation repair kit" for the correction of any errant signage one might find in the wild: sticker commas, question marks, and, when all is lost, cute little circles that admonish, "THE PANDA SAYS NO!" (Just... no. Stop with your banana's and pretty, little, green houses already.)
There is a 10-page preface and a 34-page introduction. At least one of these, and possibly both, is disposable. But once you get into the meat of the book, the considerations of proper uses of each of the marks, you will find plenty of food for thought. The text is embellished with many examples of punctuation gone wild ("Giant Kid's Playground" is one of my favorites. Odd how the equipment all seemed normal-sized...).
The most impressive thing I learned is that there is no complete consensus on the proper use of commas!! This revelation has pretty much ruined my professional life. I used to confidently pronounce rules like, "A subordinate clause must be set off by a comma if it introduces the main clause, but not if it follows it," and, of course, "never use a comma before a coordinating conjunction unless it could be replaced with a semicolon," but it turns out those are both style choices, not natural laws along the lines of "multiplication undoes division" or "an object in motion tends to stay in motion." Snap! Now I just tell kids, "These are the rules being tested. You may have learned different rules. Your rules are not wrong, but you will lose credit if you follow them in this situation!" Welcome to reality.
And, if you still can't figure it out, apparently you can just ask the panda.
There is a 10-page preface and a 34-page introduction. At least one of these, and possibly both, is disposable. But once you get into the meat of the book, the considerations of proper uses of each of the marks, you will find plenty of food for thought. The text is embellished with many examples of punctuation gone wild ("Giant Kid's Playground" is one of my favorites. Odd how the equipment all seemed normal-sized...).
The most impressive thing I learned is that there is no complete consensus on the proper use of commas!! This revelation has pretty much ruined my professional life. I used to confidently pronounce rules like, "A subordinate clause must be set off by a comma if it introduces the main clause, but not if it follows it," and, of course, "never use a comma before a coordinating conjunction unless it could be replaced with a semicolon," but it turns out those are both style choices, not natural laws along the lines of "multiplication undoes division" or "an object in motion tends to stay in motion." Snap! Now I just tell kids, "These are the rules being tested. You may have learned different rules. Your rules are not wrong, but you will lose credit if you follow them in this situation!" Welcome to reality.
And, if you still can't figure it out, apparently you can just ask the panda.
Sunday, October 22, 2017
410-419: Linguistics. Words on the Move, by John McWhorter
Subtitled "Why English Won't-- and Can't-- Sit Still (Like, Literally)", the purpose of this book is to make the case that it is predictable, okay and actually kind of fun that "people" insist on using words incorrectly. McWhorter is all, "Language change is inevitable! Embrace it!" Then he's like, "If we didn't write it down, you wouldn't even realize it was changing!" (PS He also says that there are wrong uses-- those that are idiosyncratic and therefore unintelligible. Which brings up a chicken-and-egg question: where did these not-ready-for-prime-time yet widely accepted uses, like alternate expressions for "he said," come from? Didn't somebody have to be the first person to use them? Sadly, this question is not addressed.)
McWhorter first introduces us to the idea that besides the parts of speech we learned about in Schoolhouse Rock, English is full of words the primary purpose of which is to clarify the emotional content and grease the social wheels of the conversation. He posits that these words are doing one or more of four jobs. The first is to address issues of factuality. Here's where he addresses the dreaded "literally." His claim is that while "literally" can literally mean "literally"-- by the letter of what I am saying-- as in, "It was literally 6 below on the back porch," it has, in a completely normal process that many other words we use every day have already undergone, completed a metamorphosis to also mean "This is obviously an exaggeration that could not possibly be true but that accurately expresses my emotional state." So, for this usage, if it was +2 degrees Farenheit, you can say, "I was literally freezing my toes off," because it was indeed very ("verily") cold, but we can check-- your toes are still there. You are exaggerating the factual information to get across the experiential information. But you can't say "It was literally 6 below," because we can check, but we're not going to, and we will now be misinformed about the temperature. You also can't say, "It was literally 70 degrees" in San Diego, because it's always 70 degrees in San Diego, and whether "literally" is used literally or figuratively, it always conveys a sense that something is happening counter to expectations, which brings us to the next two functions of these kinds of words.
Acknowledgement recognizes that not only the speaker but also the hearer has knowledge and feelings about the information being shared. This is the obvious task of "you know." It is also the important task of such underrated words and phenomena as changing the subject with the word "So..." which, in that context, does not mean "therefore," but rather serves as a sort of "new paragraph" marker in speech. The much-maligned habit of uptalk: "So I was coming home from work yesterday? And I saw a squirrel?" is doing the same thing, inviting the listener to confirm that he is with you, much as you might sing, "I met him at the candy store-- he turned around and smiled at me, you get the picture?" Beginning a sentence with "well" can also be part of this way of speaking, but I think the author underrates its function as a marker that a condescending explanation is on the way. The explainer is hoping that the "well" will soften the blow of the disagreeing factuality marker "actually" that immediately follows, but the gambit is transparent, and now we all know where a mansplainer gets his water.
"Totally" often also expresses some counterexpectation: "Do you think I'll get the job?" "They'll totally hire you. They'd be idiots not to." Mild vulgarity will now ensue as I use my favorite example of a counterexpectational marker: the suffix "-ass." I first started paying attention to this marker after I heard it used in a staff meeting. The usage was something like this: "What are we going to tell students about problem 24? It looks fairly straightforward, but it turns into this big-ass problem that most of them don't have time for." For some reason, I found it hilarious to describe a math problem as "big-ass." But I began to realize, to my continued amusement, that just about anything can be described this way as long as it is bigger than anyone could have reasonably expected. So, you can't have a big-ass whale, because all whales are big. But you can have a big-ass rodent. Note that this word seems to be doing a different job from either of the uses of "literally," because the thing of unusual size must be, as far as I have ever heard, an actual noun that can take the adjective "big." That said, this versatile little marker of surprising largeness can be appended to all kinds of words: you can have a "grown-ass man" and a "long-ass book" and maybe even a "cold-ass day," although I still think most people would prefer to say they are "literally freezing my ass off."
The final need in our language is for easing, that is, making the listener feel more comfortable. IRL we laugh, chuckle, nod, and smile to take the edge off what we are saying, but in writing we "LOL" or "haha" or maybe just 😀. Much has been written about the rapid evolution of these easing words, and I follow it with interest so that my texts and emails won't alarm people haha or make them roll their eyes at my out-of-it-ness 😆, but I wouldn't dream of trying to summarize it here.
Instead, I will talk about the beautiful word "like," which seems to do all four of these jobs, sometimes more than one at a time.
"Like" is one hard-working word. It can mean "in the same way as" ("like a boss") or "resembling a,"and, of course, on Facebook it is primarily an indicator of acknowledgement, but it does lots of other good things. It can gradiate factuality, signal counterexpectation, and ease dialog-- and it has become a dialogue marker. Consider this conversation:
"The jury I was on had to decide on, like, 17 separate charges!"
"Actually, it was 20."
"Yeah, so, like twenty charges! So I was like, 'You guys, we can't get through all these before lunch! We have to, like, order in!"
In three sentences "like" has 1) signaled that the speaker is giving you an approximation 2) let you know that the word following is both true and unexpected 3)introduced a direct quote and 4) moderated a command to become a suggestion so the listeners could accept it more easily. Noice!
So as the language changes all around you, while writing and the SAT struggle -- or don't even try-- to keep up, don't get mad-- have fun with it! Join in, experiment and rejoice in all the ways we can express ourself with our beautiful language!
McWhorter first introduces us to the idea that besides the parts of speech we learned about in Schoolhouse Rock, English is full of words the primary purpose of which is to clarify the emotional content and grease the social wheels of the conversation. He posits that these words are doing one or more of four jobs. The first is to address issues of factuality. Here's where he addresses the dreaded "literally." His claim is that while "literally" can literally mean "literally"-- by the letter of what I am saying-- as in, "It was literally 6 below on the back porch," it has, in a completely normal process that many other words we use every day have already undergone, completed a metamorphosis to also mean "This is obviously an exaggeration that could not possibly be true but that accurately expresses my emotional state." So, for this usage, if it was +2 degrees Farenheit, you can say, "I was literally freezing my toes off," because it was indeed very ("verily") cold, but we can check-- your toes are still there. You are exaggerating the factual information to get across the experiential information. But you can't say "It was literally 6 below," because we can check, but we're not going to, and we will now be misinformed about the temperature. You also can't say, "It was literally 70 degrees" in San Diego, because it's always 70 degrees in San Diego, and whether "literally" is used literally or figuratively, it always conveys a sense that something is happening counter to expectations, which brings us to the next two functions of these kinds of words.
Acknowledgement recognizes that not only the speaker but also the hearer has knowledge and feelings about the information being shared. This is the obvious task of "you know." It is also the important task of such underrated words and phenomena as changing the subject with the word "So..." which, in that context, does not mean "therefore," but rather serves as a sort of "new paragraph" marker in speech. The much-maligned habit of uptalk: "So I was coming home from work yesterday? And I saw a squirrel?" is doing the same thing, inviting the listener to confirm that he is with you, much as you might sing, "I met him at the candy store-- he turned around and smiled at me, you get the picture?" Beginning a sentence with "well" can also be part of this way of speaking, but I think the author underrates its function as a marker that a condescending explanation is on the way. The explainer is hoping that the "well" will soften the blow of the disagreeing factuality marker "actually" that immediately follows, but the gambit is transparent, and now we all know where a mansplainer gets his water.
"Totally" often also expresses some counterexpectation: "Do you think I'll get the job?" "They'll totally hire you. They'd be idiots not to." Mild vulgarity will now ensue as I use my favorite example of a counterexpectational marker: the suffix "-ass." I first started paying attention to this marker after I heard it used in a staff meeting. The usage was something like this: "What are we going to tell students about problem 24? It looks fairly straightforward, but it turns into this big-ass problem that most of them don't have time for." For some reason, I found it hilarious to describe a math problem as "big-ass." But I began to realize, to my continued amusement, that just about anything can be described this way as long as it is bigger than anyone could have reasonably expected. So, you can't have a big-ass whale, because all whales are big. But you can have a big-ass rodent. Note that this word seems to be doing a different job from either of the uses of "literally," because the thing of unusual size must be, as far as I have ever heard, an actual noun that can take the adjective "big." That said, this versatile little marker of surprising largeness can be appended to all kinds of words: you can have a "grown-ass man" and a "long-ass book" and maybe even a "cold-ass day," although I still think most people would prefer to say they are "literally freezing my ass off."
The final need in our language is for easing, that is, making the listener feel more comfortable. IRL we laugh, chuckle, nod, and smile to take the edge off what we are saying, but in writing we "LOL" or "haha" or maybe just 😀. Much has been written about the rapid evolution of these easing words, and I follow it with interest so that my texts and emails won't alarm people haha or make them roll their eyes at my out-of-it-ness 😆, but I wouldn't dream of trying to summarize it here.
Instead, I will talk about the beautiful word "like," which seems to do all four of these jobs, sometimes more than one at a time.
"Like" is one hard-working word. It can mean "in the same way as" ("like a boss") or "resembling a,"and, of course, on Facebook it is primarily an indicator of acknowledgement, but it does lots of other good things. It can gradiate factuality, signal counterexpectation, and ease dialog-- and it has become a dialogue marker. Consider this conversation:
"The jury I was on had to decide on, like, 17 separate charges!"
"Actually, it was 20."
"Yeah, so, like twenty charges! So I was like, 'You guys, we can't get through all these before lunch! We have to, like, order in!"
In three sentences "like" has 1) signaled that the speaker is giving you an approximation 2) let you know that the word following is both true and unexpected 3)introduced a direct quote and 4) moderated a command to become a suggestion so the listeners could accept it more easily. Noice!
So as the language changes all around you, while writing and the SAT struggle -- or don't even try-- to keep up, don't get mad-- have fun with it! Join in, experiment and rejoice in all the ways we can express ourself with our beautiful language!
Friday, September 15, 2017
400-409: Introduction to All the Languages in the World. Chitchat by Isabella and Boake
Fun fact: I was a graduate linguistics student for one year. When I got married and moved away from my university, I thought I would just finish up somewhere else, but it turns out graduate linguistics programs are not thick on the ground, and then life happened, and what with one thing and another, I mainly used my training to study my children's language acquisition. But you would think that with this history, I would be superstoked about the 400s, especially since my undergrad was in French, I sort of speak Spanish, and I currently make a living teaching English, among other things.
You would think.
But I've been having a hard time getting into this chunk of the library. I mean...
400: Overview of language
410: Linguistics (which is different from the overview of language how?)
420: English
430: German
440: French
450: Italian
460: Spanish
470: Latin
480: Greek (ancient and modern, in case you were wondering)
490: Other languages (you know, Swahili, Hindi, Mandarin, Russian, Arabic, etc. 10 numbers should be plenty for them, apparently?)
And all I can think is, "Oh, glory, I have to read an entire book about German? And then another one about Italian? Ugh." The good news is that in the 420s I get to read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which I have never read before, which is just plain ridiculous given that, as previously mentioned, I teach people where to put commas for a living.
Anyway, even my little local library agrees about the superfluity of 400-409. There were literally no books numbered as such in the adult section, which is how I ended up reading a kids' book called Chitchat, by Jude Isabella and Kathy Boake.
More fun facts I learned from the brightly illustrated pages of this book for middle grade readers, and then verified for you through minutes of painstaking research:
- Ancient languages had no name for blue, and neither do a few living languages. People speaking such languages perceive blues as shades of green or black. Thus, perhaps, Homer's "wine-dark sea." (Or maybe he just figured you already knew what color the sea was. We don't actually have a clue.) People who grow up with a different set of color words think of the whole color spectrum differently. I don't think I can ever unsee ROYGBIV, but I love that some cultures use the same word for "black"and for all dark colors. When I went back to school for Art, I learned in Painting 1 that there's no such thing as pure black (or white, for that matter), and we were made to mix all our "blacks" from colors. So we could learn to "unsee" something our language had taught us. Maybe with a few more years of training, I could unsee the distinction between green and blue?
- There is a group called "The Long Now Foundation" that has etched 1500 human languages on one palm-sized disk. This Rosetta Project is named after the famous Rosetta Stone that, by carving the same text in three languages, unlocked Egyptian heiroglyphics to the modern world. So, that's pretty cool. Only you need a microscope to read the carvings, so I hope the people 2000 years from now who find this thing will have one. Also, I hope they can find it, since it's so small. The foundation seems to have considered some of these issues, and they are certainly right that digital records are quite undependable in the long run.
- Hildegard Bingen, that turn of the (12th) century polymath, invented an alphabet and language, possibly as a result of divine revelation. (She also wrote music and medical texts.) In the present day, making up languages is a whole thing, whether to lend verisimilitude to a fictional narrative like The Lord of the Rings or Star Trek, or to bring about world peace, as Esperanto was meant to do.
- Akbar the Great once conducted an experiment wherein a large group of children were brought up in one building with nurses who could not speak. The idea may have been to see whether they developed any kind of speech, and, if so, what known language it resembled, but the actual result was that they only made noises-- and may or may not have used sign language, which they may or may not have learned from the nurses. There's much uncertainty about the nature and outcome of this experiment, since it took place so long ago, but what is known is that communities with large numbers of deaf inhabitants typically work out sign languages that are adopted by even the hearing members of the community. Chitchat references the Al Sayyid Bedouin community, which is particularly exciting to linguists because the whole process of language development has taken place within recent history and is continuing as we speak. Similar processes produced a local sign language on Martha's Vineyard which has since died out, and in Nicaragua, where the language is still developing.
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