The Death of Imagination

Finally finished a more involved post than I had been planning about the development of continuative aspect in Salishan on a site for language enthusiasts. (I may see what feedback I get on it before I attempt to port it over here--it is tough to write about non-European linguistic concepts for a general audience!) It was fun to do--I got to do some research on a language family I've always admired from a distance--but it wore me out.

Overall, the day could only get better after this morning's webinar. At about 80 minutes, it was almost half the length of last weeks, but twice as deadly. They took the most irritating of the three presenters we had before and paired her with a new guy who sounded like he was deliberately trying to speak with as little affect as possible. Honestly, listening to him just sucked the soul out of me; my boss asked what we should do with the ten minutes left on our room reservation and I asked, "Could we work on giving me back the will to live?" (One of my colleagues responded, "You're on your own!")

I actually made it through the previous session pretty easily simply by concentrating on the presenters' accents. The most effective of the bunch had an educated Mid-Atlantic accent--think a New Yorker trying not to sound too New Yawk--and he plowed through the material with urban efficiency. Then there was a guy with a mild Southern Midland dialect and the laid-back attitude to match. And at the bottom was a woman with a pronounced Chinese accent. But it wasn't so much her pronunciation that was the problem but her slow and laboured manner of speaking. Simply deadly. It literally made me squirm in my seat if I had to listen to it for more than a few minutes.

She did have some notable peculiarities, perhaps the most unusual of which was that she systematically distinguished for from four by pronouncing the first non-rhotically. Like most Mandarin-speakers, she could do a perfectly good r (one of my colleagues opined, "She has better r's than me") so at first I thought she was dropping it only in particular contexts. (Words like world and hardly and--let's face it--even word are ballbusters no matter how great an r you have.) But, no, she was perfectly consistent: for was always [ˈfoʊ̯] and four was always [ˈfoʊ̯ɻ], regardless of what followed. I can't think of any reason why somebody would do this.

At times, her syntax went straight to hell and you had to strain to unpack some of her sentences. I don't know if my knowledge of Chinese made this any easier for me, since I could tell at times that she was suffering syntactical interference. Particularly noticeable was her difficulty with verbs like note and point out, which she treated like straightforward ditransitives (just like their counterparts in Chinese). That is, she said, "I want to note you this example" and "I want to point you chapter 7" instead of "I want you to note this example" and "I want to point out chapter 7 to you" (or perhaps "point you to chapter 7").

When it came time to invent a drinking game to keep us awake, I steered away from naming any of her frequent errors. Not only did it seem too meanspirited, but the last think I wanted to do was make the two native Chinese-speakers in the room self-conscious. Instead I singled out her habit of asking fake questions of the other presenters, along with Mr Mid-Atlantic's use of "'kay?" as a discourse particle and the frequent awkward pauses as one or the other fumbled with their notes or missed their cue.

Seven Things I Learned Last Friday at the Workshop in Basque Linguistics

1. Basque has dative overmarking. It's far from universal and it is, in fact, stigmatised by most speakers, but Biscayan Basque dialects allow for animate direct objects to be put in the dative case (e.g. Nik zuri entzun dizut).
2. Basque Spanish has a different kind of leísmo from Standard (Peninsular) Spanish. Instead of reserving it just for male humans (e.g. Le he oído a un político), some speakers use le with all masculine animates or even all masculine objects generally. Penny even suggests that the standard system is a result of a compromise between this sort of generalised leísmo and the non-leísta varieties of eastern Castile.
3. There is a hierarchy of Basqueness and one of the criteria is mastery of a local dialect. This is what distinguishes "real" Basques (euskaldunak) from "new Basque-speakers" (euskaldunberriak) who only speak the standardised variety taught in school. After them come the vascos, who speak no Basque at all, and then the maquetos, who seem to occupy a role comparable to xarnegos in Catalonia.
4. The Basque word for "futon" is futoi and Basque-speakers will even borrow cabrón as kabroi. This is an old correspondence going back to the early days of Vulgar Latin contact, but it--and others like it--appear to have been given new impetus by the need to keep contemporary borrowings from changing the face of the language too much.
5. There are Italian dialects with umlaut plurals. I knew metaphony was widespread in Italic varieties, I just didn't know there were dialects where it combined with final vowel reduction to produce pairs like ['fjoɾə] "flower", ['fjʊɾə] "flowers".
6. Some Basque varieties show metathesis of pronominal clitics in auxiliaries. Okay, this point is so obscure and technical, I'm not even going to try to explain it here. Rest assured that it is cool, not least of all because there are lots of variations which help provide insight into how the process operates.
7. Basque prosody is different. Looks like the earlier prosodic system combined stress with pitch-accent, and topped it all with distinctive sentential stress, adding up with a system quite unlike anything seen elsewhere in Europe. Vestiges survive among older speakers, but it looks like garden-variety stress accent is on the march, at least in the Spanish Basque Country.

All in all, it was an afternoon very well spent. I'm glad Nuphy convinced me to come down and join him and I'm a bit surprised he made it through all four presentations with me, given that theoretical linguistics is a stretch for him even in German, much less crazy moon man languages.

I wish I were writing today's entry in rather than simply about Welsh, but I just don't have the stamina. I'm so out of practice that every time I try to compose a sentence, it gets hijacked by Irish. I have to keep reminding myself that Welsh is a language you "speak", not one that is "at you" and that I'm not failing to recall the distinctive form of the Welsh copula because there isn't one. I am, however, regularly forgetting that be takes a special form in the present tense when it represents a verb of existence. And on and on.

Sometimes I feel like I'm losing ground in all my languages at once. Even my German isn't as fluent as it was a few years back. It's not that I lack opportunities to exercise it, it's that I lack the discipline. For a while there I was at least keeping my passive facilities alive but then I chose to put one kind of accomplishment above another and where formerly I made an effort to ensure that at least one of the books I was reading at any given moment was in a foreign language, now I'm content to surround myself with English.

Theoretically, I guess, I'm still reading Dúil, but in practice I've only finished one of the shortest stories in the book and part of another. I keep it by my bedside since I really can't make it through a paragraph without resorting to the dictionary but I find myself too tired of an evening to pick it up. Instead, it's more (Hiberno-)English: Mary Lavin, Seán Ó Faoláin--nothing so taxing as Annie Proulx or even George Washington Cable.

On that note--and because it is St David's Day today--it occurred to me that I've presently got almost a dozen collections of stories by modern Irish writers (Joyce, Ó Faoláin, O'Connor, O'Brien², Ó Flaithbheartaigh, Kiely, Lavin, McGahern, two anthologies) and only one by a modern Welsh writer: Dylan Thomas' Collected stories. I suppose it's no wonder given that the modern Welsh genius seems to lie in poetry rather than in prose, but still I find it telling and a little depressing that if you ask me to name a living contemporary Welsh author and my mind simply draws a blank.

I finished Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy today, only about a week later than I thought I would. Starting Edith Wharton's The custom of the country had something to do with that. All this week, I've been reading of the misadventures of Louisiana low-lives on my way to work and of Gilded Age socialites as I drift off to sleep. If I were like clever and stuff, I'd be able to write an interesting post about the commonalities between John X Shade's quest for a life of pleasure unencumbered by entanglements and Undine Spragg Marvell's and what this says about the American Dream and whatnot. But, bad luck, I'm dull as a tush hog and about as sharp as an invisible toothpick.

After many misalignments, I've got a tutoring session with the Rabbi again this Sunday, which has got me wanting to read some German again. To this end, I went digging in some boxes the other night and pulled out a book of Arthur Schnitzler's short stories. Such a natural choice of reading materials, how is it that I hadn't read it before? Well, judging from the position of the bookmark, I already had, at least up until I hit a 100+ page story and decided to take a breather. Or that's what I think happened; my memories of the stories earlier in the book are so vague, it's difficult to tell whether I've read them all before or not.

I'm still looking for a language to begin studying, however. This time last year I was hip-deep in Swedish, but I tried getting into that again last month and failed. Irish has been hovering at the edge of my consciousness for a while--November weather sometimes does that--but to no great effect so far, and discussions about Slavic prompted me to pull out a Russian grammar, the Ukrainian textbook I never made much progress in, and to think about reviewing my Polish. I just wish something would seize my imagination; this kind of linguistic drift just feels unnatural.

If you're wondering why you have seen more posts from me here on the subject of language, it's mostly because I'm a lazy git. But it's also because I'm plowing some of those urges into an irregular series of post on Irish grammar in the community gaeilge. Here's the most recent of three so far. The series title is "Sentence of the Day" which--if you've noted my usage in this journal--is by no means a promise that there will be one every day.

Some of what's left is going into preparing for my weekly tutoring sessions. Not a lot because we're still in the introductory stages and, moreover, the Rabbi is the kind of enthusiastic student who drives the lessons. So it's far less about coming up with ways to keep him engaged and far more about making sure I've got the tools to answer his barrage of questions. You'd think some good fodder for posts would've come out of this already, but nothing really comes to mind except for one pronunciation quirk:

The Rabbi is the second person I've tutored from Long Guyland and I'm having the same problem I had years ago with that friend of my stepmom's, namely getting him to pronounce ng as [ŋ] rather than [ŋg]. For most English speakers, this is the difference between singer and finger. German doesn't have this contrast; singen and Finger both lack [g]. And of course it's hard to explain this to the linguistically unsophisticated, since "drop the g" to them would mean saying *Finner. Moreover--as is often the case with speakers who lack a certain phonological distinction--neither of them can even hear the contrast in pronunciation. I say "gegangen", they repeat "geganggen".

Obviously it's only a small flaw, but it's irksome. If I can learn to hear the difference between pen and pin so that I say "Englisch" when I speak German and not *"Inglisch", then they should be able to simplify this one cluster, right? Time will tell, I guess. In the meantime, it's back to reordering all the elements of a simple sentence so I'll be able to come up with explanations on the fly for why some possibilities are ungrammatical, unidiomatic, or simply odd.

I may or may not get around to writing a proper review of La fanciulla del West at Lyric last night, so let me say up front that it was an utter delight. Not that it was perfect by any means, but what flaws there were were inconsequential to a good evening's entertainment.

Now if you've ever watched anything with subtitles, you've noticed that they never translate all of the dialogue. I imagine the ratio is better for opera than it is for a lot of things because it simply takes longer to say the same words when they're set to music. (Unless, of course, a piece has a particularly high proportion of recitatives and/or patter songs.)

Unusually for an Italian work, Fanciulla has no recitatives at all. So I was all the more struck by how much was left untranslated. In Act II, for instance, there's an exchange of three or four short utterances none of which appear in the subtitles. Very odd, considering that every occurrence of "Hello!" in the text seemed to be translated for our benefit (to the amusement of many patrons).

My Italian is piss poor, so I didn't pick up much that wasn't translated. There was one pretty amusing exception, though. In Act I, a group of miners are playing faro (which at the time was more popular in the West than poker). One of them loses a hand a lets loose a mild blasphemy (one suitable for the sensitive ears of 19th century Italian operagoers): "Sacramento!"

Among the games played last night was one I didn't mention, Scrabble Flash. This is a set of five small boxes each with an LCD display. At the start of each round, a letter appears in each box and you have something like ten seconds to arrange the letters to spell an English word. If you fail, the boxes flash the message "OUT" before revealing the answer; if you succeed, the message is "NEXT" and you can either pass the the boxes along to the next player or play another round yourself. (I don't know if there's any internal mechanism for keeping score or whether or not there is only one acceptable answer in each round.)

Plurals seemed common in the score or so rounds we played. This led to some odd results, such as when JB got "BILES". Sure, that's a legitimate word form but we questioned whether it would ever appear in English outside of specialist literature. Everyone seemed willing to validate my claim of being handicapped by my multilingualism, which more than once caused me to see words which were perfectly acceptable in something other than English. But my real trouble was not this tendency per se but rather not being able to shake an invalid word once it was lodged in my brain, and that was something we all suffered from. For instance, one of my first sequences was something like B R A O T. Of course, I immediately saw "BORAT" and, try as I might, could not unsee it. Then there was the problem of "reverse dislexia", where your mind would fool you into thinking you had the letters in a different order than you did, as when Bear Cookbook spelled "SIWPE" and couldn't understand why the programme wouldn't accept it.

Not something I could imagine playing for hours on end, but it made for a nice break between games of strategy. I speculated on the possibility of foreign language editions. Differences in average word length would, I think, be an obstacle. Give the typical length of English words, five characters seems a reasonable trade-off between portability on the one hand and playability on the other; I don't know that the same would be true even for such closely-related languages as German and French.

Someone asked me at the release party Thursday night if it's true that "it gets harder to learn a language as you get older". And I gave her my usual weasel answer: It depends. I don't really buy the "critical period" hypothesis. I haven't known too many people in my life who could pass for native in a language they only learned in adulthood, but you only need to meet one, right? It really comes down to how much damn effort are you going to put into "perfect" rather than "more than good enough for government work" and--with few exceptions--the answer is going to be "not much".

The hardest part is that language learning chiefly consists of rote memorisation, and as we all know the memory is the second thing to go. It annoys the hell out of me to find myself looking up a word that I know I've looked up a half dozen times before--maybe even earlier the same day! Perhaps I'm fooling myself when I muse that it would've taken me at most two glances to cement it back when I was twenty. Actually, I know I am, but it sure seems that was the case.

On the plus side, as I explained that evening, languages show more similarities than differences, and the more you see the firmer your sense of what the range of variation really is. Sure, you can find some crazy features out there, but unless you're studying Pirahã or Guugu Yimithirr, most everything will work the way it does in some language you already know. It's just a question of figuring out which of the handful of common alternatives is the one that counts.

Take, for instance, demonstratives (e.g. "this", "that"). The Eskimo-Aleut languages are notorious for making a plethora of distinctions--how close the item is, how much space it occupies, whether or not it is visible--over twenty combinations in all. But that's an outlier; most languages have only two degrees of what is called deixis. Some add a third, either distinguishing "by me", "by you", "by neither of us" (e.g. Spanish) or "by me", "away from me", and "way far away from me". When it comes to expressing deixis with nouns, some languages use distinct determiners while others use only one (usually identical to the definite article, if there is one) in combination with an adverb, cf. dialectal English "this here". Many languages allow demonstratives to double as pronouns third-person pronouns.

So when I took up Swedish, learning the grammar was chiefly a matter of going through a mostly-unconscious mental checklist: Okay, demonstratives. Two degrees or three? Two. Distinct stems? No. Double as pronouns? Yes. If anything it was even easier than that. Because if you know German, you'll readily recognise that those answers are all the same[*]. So more often than not, the question I was really asking was, "Same as German here, or different?"

Which is, in the end, why I decided to tackle Swedish in the first place. It's always bugged me that I can read most West Germanic languages easily, but put a North Germanic one in front of me and I just stare dumbly at the page. I knew it was mostly a question of knowing a relatively small stock of non-cognate (or at least not recognisably cognate) function words. Once you can map, say, någon to einig and ingen to kein, vast swathes of incomprehensible verbiage suddenly open up. (And, of course, studying one Scandinavian language is basically getting the others for free.)



[*] With minor qualifications. E.g. a distal demonstrative--jener--does exist in German, but it's literally, use of demonstratives as pronouns is colloquial, etc.

There's a very accessible and reasonably well-written article by Guy Deutscher in the New York Times Magazine on the current state of knowledge vis-à-vis the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I haven't read much from Deutscher, but he is a bona-fide linguist, so for once my issues with an article in the popular press relate more to spin and emphasis than to glaring errors of fact. (In particular, I think he's harsher on old Ben Whorf than strictly necessary, but he's hardly alone in that.) Nothing in the article will comes as news to a well-informed layman, let alone someone actually in the field, but the rest of you may it interesting to read what he has to say about languages where directions are expressed purely geographically instead of primarily egocentrically and about recent findings on expressive dimensions of grammatical gender.