The Death of Imagination

mlr asks, "What was the order of the languages you studied/picked up/etc.? And what was the impetus for the choice at that particular time?"

I've been putting off answering this because it's big and messy and I don't want the entry to turn out that way, too. But I don't want to put it off forever either, so I'll start babbling and hope for the best.

During her visit this past weekend, my sister reminded me that my very first attempts to learn any foreign language came with the aid of books bought by the pound. You see, the book depository in the small town where we spent some of our tender years had an annual sale of remainders. (My sister says she still has a few volumes on her shelves embossed with a star; I think mine have finally all cycled out and been replaced by better works.) The publisher, Harper & Row, had its own answer to Berlitz in the Cortina Method, so I picked up a stack of them.

I'm think that I had already read Mario Pei's The story of language, which includes very brief sketches of several world languages, but I'm not certain. I do know that, except for when a claque of youngsters my sister was babysitting got into them once, the textbooks languished for a period of years until I got it into my head that I wanted to learn German, probably as a result of a growing interest in family history.

Or did I not start working through Conversational German in 20 Lessons until after I'd already started high school and, thus, my first formal foreign language instruction? See, that's why I put off answering: the more I tried to chronologise things, the less sure I became of what preceded what. In any case, I know my desire to learn German preceded my opportunity to learn anything. Because when I found there was no German course at my college preparatory, I opted for Spanish by virtue of its "practicality".

I was a very naïve language learner at first. I remember distinctly one of my first big boners: I was composing sentences for class. Fortunately I had an excellent teacher who encouraged my efforts to use vocabulary we hadn't learned yet. I wanted to say "his", so I looked in the index and saw it translated as su or sus. Not understanding a thing about Spanish adjective agreement, I thought if his had a final s then its Spanish equivalent should, too, and chose sus.

On the other hand, I also remember that what really tripped me up in German--eventually forcing me to abandon self-instruction--were reflexive verbs. I can't imagine having that much trouble if we'd already covered them in Spanish class, which happened in my first year, so we're back to German first and Spanish second. Whatever the sequence, there you have my first informal effort and my first formal course.

At the same time, I also had a strong interest in the Celtic languages. This was again partly driven by heritage (since my mother's family made much of my Irish great-grandmother), but not entirely because my interest in Welsh soon eclipsed my interest in Irish. Another distinct memory from freshman year is going through the crumbling set of Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes in the dorm lounge and copying out every scrap of Celtic I could find in it, including the Lord's Prayer in Welsh. I did the same thing with the etymologies of Celtic loanwords in the Webster's Third International.

But, again, I was hampered by a lack of opportunities and materials. This was around time, however, when my father discovered David Morgan. Their catalog was an eclectic mix of Welsh flannel, Celtic jewellery, Australian hats, and books, oh the books! How I used to pore through it and dream of the books. I think Teach Yourself Living Welsh arrived on my birthday, but I know that Y Geiriadur Mawr showed up on the Christmas We Got Everything (my parents' overcompensation for their separation in 1987).

What's not in doubt is the hours I spent devouring the lessons in that flimsy paperback book. (Fortunately, by the time it was destroyed completely, I'd already learned how perniciously misleading it was.) Another memory: Walking alone through the neglected eastern edge of Forest Park reciting sentences to myself. It would be another couple of years before I'd actually hear any Welsh spoken or meet another learner of Welsh, much less learn any myself, but that didn't dim my enthusiasm.

I'll wrap up this rambling installment with the last big discovery of my high school period, Korean. I had a nodding acquaintance with it due to a peculiar feature of the Compton's Encyclopedia my parents had bought from a travelling salesman when we still lived in the country. Perhaps as a result of the Korean War, it had a much more comprehensive treatment of Korea than other countries, so this is where I got my first glimpse of Han'geul.

Then at the start of my second year in the dormitory, we got an influx of new foreign students. Four of them were Korean, the sons of engineers working the in Middle East. One of them became my friend, and my pestering questions eventually caused him to nickname me 미국놈 or "Yankee bastard". I went to the public library up the road, found a Korean-English dictionary, and eventually learned what this meant and how to take it apart. When I saw him again, I said, "If 미국 is 'America' and I'm a 미국놈, then you must be a 한국놈." Chagrinned, he said, "No, you can't use it that way."

Here's a false friend I never considered before: In my bleary-eyed state, I read Curso de derecho romano as "Curse of Roman law" instead of "Course in Roman law".

In other word maven news, I was taken aback to find that ramble has nothing to do with amble, at least etymologically speaking.

"Personal article" refers to the generalised use of definite articles before proper names--in all cases, not just when a name is being used as a generic noun, as in "He's the Cary Grant of pigs". It's something like the use of "our" in English dialects (e.g. "Our Julia") and, in some varieties, such as the Southern-tinged Standard German I use, it has a similar connotation of familiarity and informality. In other languages, notably Catalan, it's simply a standard feature, at least as far as I can tell.

For whatever reason, it's a usage that really appeals to me. So much so that I find myself extending it to other languages where it doesn't belong, like Spanish and French. I mean, perhaps there is a variety of French where "C'est d'un ami du Jean" is a perfectly normal utterance, but if so I haven't found it yet. So it is that I find myself stumbling sometimes, inserting the article in my mind and then deleting it as the words comes out: "¿Qué has oído de...Martín?"

Let's is an odd word. I know that any dictionary or grammar book will describe it as "a contraction of let us" but that doesn't begin to capture how it's used in my speech. For starters, the so-called "uncontracted" form belongs to a completely different speech register than regular let's. Try saying "Let us get out of here" and see just how stilted that sounds.

When I was a young Catholic, "Let us pray" was the formula with which we ended our petitions in church. (I remember one of the nuns admonishing us not to run the first two words together so they sounded like "lettuce".) "Let's pray", on the other hand, is a preface to a casual wish for someone's safety, as in "Let's pray he's alright." No one in my milieu would've taken that as an earnest suggestion to clasp hands and address the Almighty.

That's not to say that let us doesn't appear in my informal speech, but only with a completely different meaning--one directly parallel to let me or let him. Compare "Let's go!" to "Let us go!" You can't "expand" the first expression to the latter or "contract" the latter expression to the former. In some cases, the result would be beyond ludicrous and into ungrammaticality. Consider the ordinary dual form "Let's the two of us" as in "Let's the two of us go to the cashier and explain." What fluent speaker would ever say *"Let us the two of us go"? I've even heard the contrastive usage "Let's us go".

Speaking of emphatic usages, I also have "Do let's!" in my speech, but only as a conscious affectation. (Although I know I've spoken before about affectations which become so routine they're more-or-less indistinguishable from one's natural usage.) That's something else about let's: It can be used on its own as an interjection, something else that doesn't really work with the ostensible "full form".

It's such a curious word--I'm not really sure what word class to file it away in--that I'm sure it must be extensively studied by syntacticians. If I weren't such a lazy bastard, I go look in McCawley or someplace to see what's been said about it.

Recently I wrote a post in another forum listing all the languages which I had personal overheard spoken in Chicago. I thought I'd reproduce that here, but with the added value of trying to rank the languages roughly according to frequency.

Daily

English (American, AAVE)
Russian
Spanish (Latin American)


Over the Course of a Week

Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
Chinese (Putonghua)
French
German
Hebrew
Korean


Over the Course of a Month

Amharic
ASL
Chinese (Cantonese)
Hindi/Urdu
Japanese
Polish
Thai
Vietnamese


Over the Course of a Year

Arabic
Aramaic
Bengali
Dutch
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Igbo
Italian
Khmer
Lao
Latvian
Panjabi
Persian
Portuguese
Rumanian
Somali
Tagalog
Turkish
Ukrainian
Wolof


A Least Once in a Decade

Belizean Kriol
Catalan
Hungarian
Irish
Malayalam
Mayan
Swedish
Schwyzertüütsch
Teochiu
Welsh

NetLoon: I read something from a guy who says cheese is made from corn. Does anyone know anything about this?
Me: As far as we can tell, there is no way to make cheese out of corn.
NetLoon: It makes sense what he's saying since corn is yellow and so is cheese.
Me: A lot of foods are yellow. That doesn't mean they're all related.
NetLoon: Look here where he says that polenta is "creamy" and so is Gouda!
Me: Take any two foods and you can find resemblances in texture between them. This still doesn't prove anything since they could be due to chance.
NetLoon: What do you know anyway? He's got a lot of comparisons on his website.
Me: I have a degree in food science. Near as I can tell, your man's credentials are that he used to be a fry monkey at KFC.
NetLoon: KFC has a bowl that mixes CORN and CHEESE!!!
Me: ...

A day after cracking the cover of Ostler and he's already succeeded in annoying me. In one of his introductory chapters, he tells us, "Bizarrely, linguists almost universally assume that the basic properties of languages which they study...are irrelevant to the language's prospects of survival." He trumpets as one of the "innovations of this book" that he dissents from this orthodoxy.

So what's his counterargument? He directs the reader to the section of Chapter 14 titled "What makes a language learnable". His first grand example is the spread of Arabic, which "settled permanently only in areas that had previously spoken an Afro-Asiatic language", e.g. the Aramaic-speaking Middle East, but not Iran or Anatolia; Berber- and Egyptian-speaking North Africa, but not Romance-speaking al-Andalus, etc.

Anyone see any problems with this? Let's start in the Maghreb. You know, the part of the world with around 25 million Berber-speakers, including one-third the population of Morocco? If linguistic affiliations are so important, why are there any of them left at all? As for Spain, who knows what the prospects of Arabic would've been there if not for that little bout of mediaeval ethnic cleansing known as the Reconquista? And what about Malta? From what I can tell, this island was thoroughly Latinised before the Arabic conquest, yet the Arabic implanted there has survived nearly a millennium of Frankish rule.

But there's a much bigger fly in the ointment, and its name is Persia. On page 554, it's proof of his thesis: Thirteen-and-a-half centuries of Islamic rule have not made Afro-Asiatic-speakers out of Aryans. But on page 555, where he contrasts the successful implantation of Greek in (Phrygian-speaking) Asia Minor to its failure to catch on in Asia Major, we find this frank admission:

It is most surprising structurally that Greek did not take root in Persia, since Persian is a fairly similar Indo-European language (and was famously learnt in a year by the aging Greek Themistocles...); but perhaps there are non-linguistic reasons why an alien language should be particularly resented and resisted in the heartland of what had been an independent and mighty empire for over two centuries.

Ya think? Doesn't this also make a more compelling explanation for the Persians failure to adopt Arabic than simply a distaste for nonconcatenative morphology? Greek's failure to implant is only "surprising" if you start from a dubious assumption of its prospects.

That's my problem with his thesis: It doesn't seem to account for anything for which an equally good or better explanation cannot be found. Worse, it seems to have no predictive power at all. So, for instance, he concludes his paragraph on the spread of Arabic by bringing in the Turks, who "did not pick up Arabic, although they did accept, and even spread into Europe, the religion of Islam. The Turks' language is even less similar structurally to Arabic than Indo-European is." Ostler seems to have missed that, according to the transitive property, this also makes Turkic less similar structurally to Indo-European than Arabic is yet it was implanted in Indo-European-speaking areas with resounding success. Whatever the number of nomadic Seljuqs who came to Asia Minor in the eleventh century, they were vastly outnumbered by urbanised Greeks. Yet by 1914, Greeks and Armenians combined were less than twenty percent of the population.

Perhaps I'm being unfair to Ostler. After all, I've only tasted excerpts, not read his carefully constructed arguments from cover to cover. Maybe I'll revisit this entry several weeks from now my opinion entirely changed. But don't count on it.

Ever since reading Lakoff, I've been sensitivised to conceptual categories. It's always fun to realise that your brain has classified something in a way that's non-obvious to other speakers, but is so natural to you that you're not even aware of it until there's a miscommunication.

For instance, last night at dinner monshu talked about serving something "with the beans". I had to think about it for a moment, because I was sure he'd said that our starch was going to be potatoes (a.k.a. "the Great Satan"). Turned out he was referring to the green beans, which I never in hundred years would've classified as "beans". They're a green vegetable; they require no soaking or boiling in order to eat. Canned is not an acceptable substitute. I wouldn't put them in a soup or a stew. And so on and so forth.

Other revelations which employ the same type of interaction-based logic:

1. "Chickpeas" are not "peas". Neither are "pigeon peas". Only "green peas" are "peas" (to the point that "green peas" sounds pleonastic to me). And for those of you who call them "garbanzo beans", they aren't "beans" either.
2. "Hot dogs" are not "sausages". And this holds whether you call them "franks", "frankfurters", "red hots", or god-know-what. It doesn't matter that they are encased meats or that bratwursts and their ilk also show up regularly on buns.
3. "Cream cheese" is not "cheese". Neither is anything that looks and tastes similar, like Quark/Topfen or Neufchâtel. I'm not sure what to do with mascarpone, but ricotta is also "cheese" and "cottage cheese" isn't. (As far as I'm concerned, cottage cheese isn't even edible, but that's neither here nor there.)
4. "Soda water" is not "soda". "Soda" is artificially coloured and flavoured and sweetened.

I don't expect all of you to agree on these, and I don't think that difference is necessary dialectal; it wouldn't shock me if my own brother, raised with the same (godawful) food traditions differed with me on one or more of these. (After all, he's wrong about so many, many things.)

Okay, unlike the last fill-in-the-blank, this is just a straightforward elicitation to gain insight into a grammatical question which popped up on linquaphiles. (Obviously I can't tell you what the question was before you answer without prejudicing the results, so be patient.) All I want is the first thing that pops into your head.

"He was squatting down on his _____ cutting out paper hearts with _____."

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later: I finally had to create a record written in a language for which there is no established ALA-LC Romanisation standard. I asked one of my co-workers what to do and he told me, "I had this problem a few years ago, so I wrote to LC and asked and they said, 'Do what you can.'" So I did what I could--but before I go further, I wonder, does anyone else want to have a crack? Here's the title as it appears on the cover:

بوقاتان

I know that's not much to go on, but the spelling of the place of publication is so exotic, I don't even have the proper Arabic character set to handle it. So ignore the second hamza in this attempt:

ءۇرئمجى

Any guesses? ( Read more... )