The Death of Imagination

Over a decade ago, I wrote a post detailing my competencies in foreign languages. brian_bogue just recently asked me about them so this is a good opportunity to update the list.

It's still a bit hard to answer these questions because, as you know, active command of a language degrades rapidly with disuse, so it's hard to predict accurately whether you can still do something you haven't done in a while. I'll give it my best shot, though:

How many languages can you have a casual conversation in? Short answer: Probably about six (Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, German, Spanish.) Long answer: I might be able to manage French with a sufficiently patient interlocutor. Last time I tried chatting in Welsh, it was disastrous, but perhaps with a chance to cram ahead of time it would turn out better.

I think I was being ambitious when I said "Dutch". I did manage to have a short exchange with a Dutch-speaker at dim sum around that time but not a real conversation and I doubt I could swing that today. I suppose you could add Yiddish, since I did manage to chat with a Yiddish-learner on the shuttle once, but it was very Teutonicised Yiddish.

I haven't kept up my Chinese at all. I did some work on improving my conversational Irish but haven't really used it since. (There will be an acid test this summer when my buddy Lilis comes for a visit.)

How many languages can you read literature in? Short answer: About a dozen. Long answer: I've read short stories and/or novels in all the languages listed above plus Irish, Italian, Asturian, and Low Saxon. Portuguese and Occitan should be no problem, but Romansh is a different story; as I mentioned before, I've got a novel in Rumantsch Grischun that I've never been able to hack through more than a few pages with in the absence of a decent dictionary. I've read short Korean texts before, but nothing of tremendous literary quality. (I have short stories from Hwang Sun-wŏn and Yi Mun-yŏl that I've never been able to get through.) I also studied Old English in college, but I'm not confident in my ability to get the gist of texts I'm not already familiar with (e.g. Biblical ones). Oh, and I can probably read Yiddish--I know the orthography and some of the most vital Hebrew borrowings. (Enough to understand popular songs, at least.)

How many languages do you speak/write on a more or less native level? Only English, I would say. Most Germans figure out I'm not a native speaker after less than fifteen minutes.

How many languages have you studied for the equivalent of a year of high school language (i.e. more than picking up a bad phrasebook, but way less than any of the above)? Armenian, Cantonese, Czech, Modern Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Latin, Osage, Persian, Panjabi, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Swahili, Tibetan, Turkish. A tier below even these I would rank Alemannic, Arabic, Basque, Breton, Finnish, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Romanian, Romany, Serbo-Croatian, Swedish, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese--as you can see, it's a fairly wide penumbra. What is that, about 30 in addition to the 12-15 already tabulated?

So, as noted above, you might could move Yiddish up to "conversational" and demote Chinese to "read short stories in". And Swedish leaps all the way up from "played with" to "read novels in", though one was just a translation of a McBain novel into Swedish and I got stalled in the YA book I picked up at the Swedish-American Museum sale and never did start in on Män som hatar kvinnor.

My reading in Welsh has improved considerably; I got over a hundred pages into a fairly difficult novel (Y pla by Wiliam Owens Roberts) before abandoning it and I'm currently halfway through Caradog Prichard's Un nos ola leuad. A couple years ago I bought a volume of Portuguese short stories (Rubem Fonseca's Secreções, excreções e desatinos) but still haven't read any of it.

Besides my current fling, Hawai'ian, the only other language I can add to the longer list is Polish, which I pursued pretty doggedly for a period of several months in 2009 and then mostly forgot again. Otherwise, it's just been returning to the languages I've studied before and trying to improve bzw. not lose what little competency I already have.

The reason y'all seldom see any posts about languages here any more is that at least 90% of those end up on a site called Unilang, where I've been an active member for close to a decade. But it's down today and I'm itching to talk a bit about Amerind languages.

First, Osage. I know I've hardly done anything with it in years, but I do submit to the occasional translation challenge. Last night it was "I want someone to help me". As always, there are multiple ways to go about this but in the auxiliary I decided to use a reflexive form with benefactive meaning because it's an unusual form that I don't have a lot of experience with. This involves the prefix hkik which comes between the first point of inflexion and the stem so kǫðá "want" becomes hkihkǫðá "want for oneself". Since kǫðá is a doubly-inflected verb, the 1s form ends up being ahkíhkǫbra.

"Help" is ohką. When you add the patient prefix ą, the o undergoes assimilation, resulting in ąwąhką "helps me". That just leaves the problem of translating "someone". After some debate I went with tąąska which can me any unnamed think. Quintero says it's also used when you can't remember someone's name or want to avoid using it for some reason, so it seems suitable here. Putting it together (with a continuative auxiliary for present tense) yields tąąska ąwąhką ahkíhkǫbra mįkšé.

Part of the reason I'm getting interested in Osage again is all the Choctaw in Shell shaker. As I said, I'm reading it with a Chickasaw dictionary in hand to puzzle out words and phrases and that naturally has me wondering what the Osage would be. The verbal systems in particular seem very similar: active-stative and polypersonal with various derived stems some of which show complicated phonological developments.

Some of the compounds are similar, too. For "cardinal", both languages use "bird-red" with unpredictable modifications of the each element. Osage, for instance, has wažįžue from wažįke "bird" and žuuce "red". Chickasaw has foshhommak (among other variants) from foshi' "bird" and homma' "red". (Yes, the same element as in "Oklahoma".)

But Chickasaw has many interesting developments of its own. One is the semantic extension of chokfi "rabbit" to mean "sheep" as well. (If disambiguation is necessary, a sheep can be called chokfi ishto' "big rabbit".) This has parallels in other North American Indian languages where, for example, "dog" is often extended to mean "horse" because horses came to supplant dogs in such functions as hauling supplies.

I don't know what's wrong with me lately but I've been refusing opportunities to speak my languages. They say twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern, right? About a month ago I was paired with a coworker from Spain. There was a quiet moment at a service point where this came out and it was a perfect chance to speak some Castilian, but I passed it up. Then of course iBAM, for which I'd been cramming Irish for weeks only to shy away from speaking it to the other Gaeilgeorí.

Yesterday, we had a prof talk about taking undergraduates to Hamburg to do original research. I ran into her at the refreshments table and in-between chatting about cheeses I mentioned studying abroad not too far from where she grew up. "Oh, so you must be fluent in German!" she said and it would've been so easy to respond with something like, "Würde gar nicht sagen, aber damals war das der Fall." But I didn't; I replied in English and that's all we spoke afterwards.

It would be easy to blame this reluctance on my worsening audio processing difficulties, which make me self-conscious even chatting in English in noisy environments. But there's more going on than just that. The observation from the Swiss woman made it clear that, at my age, I'm no longer expected to be learning languages, I'm expected to know them, and that adds a level of performance anxiety to my deep-seated needed to appear intelligent and interesting. And who needs that when I'm only really confident in my ability to charm when speaking my native tongue?

I'm feeling a conspicuous lack of language-themed posts, but I simply haven't been doing much on that front. Rather than throwing myself into the study of some exciting new language, I've simply been trying not to lose what I have. I continue to make slow progress on the Labro, gradually adding to my store of French vocabulary (Fave Word of the Now: chafouin "sly, weasly") and idiom and, very recently, there's been renewed interest for Irish on one of my fora so I feel obligated to refresh it out of season in order to provide grammatical advice.

No, this is thoroughly American weather we're having: still 29°C and 71% relative humidity. Normally, we'd expect at least a couple weeks of this. But climate weirdness continues as we look forward to a low of 17°C tonight and 15°C tomorrow. It's also been the driest week for nearly two months; Scooter actually had to plug in the sprinkler for once. But our flowers are loving it. The geraniums up front have never looked better (and will need to be seriously pruned to be brought back inside this fall). Neither have the azaleas, which a producing double and even treble blossoms. Perhaps egged on by them, the Martha Washington geranium, which did nothing all spring, has begun blossoming itself and the black-eyed susans are right on the cusp.

I only wish the garden were doing better. The dill is looking distinctly unhappy and basil risks being shaded out by the monster zucchini invading from the western edge of the plot unless I move it, trim some leaves, or both. The parsley never came up, and neither did the basil. Most disappointing of all are the nasturtiums, which have never exceeded the size they achieved in the first couple weeks and aren't showing any signs of flowering. So much for the idea of putting them in a window box rather than the full sun of the garden proper.

Despite the low participation of international bears at Bear Pride (we did meet a Belgian and a Frenchman in line at Sidetrack, a Berliner inside, and heard rumours of a Hamburger), I do have one linguistic anecdote to report. As I've complained to several people already, Sidetrack on Monday made me aware of just how uniform bear fashion has become. 90%+ of the men there had a full bear and a buzzed or shaved head and were wearing baggy shorts with a printed t-shirt of some sort or another--all in fairly muted colours. Some of the t-shirts were amusing, and at least one had katakana. The one that I stumbled into a discussion of, however, said this on the back:

кабачок одинокая
звезда
Сан Франциско

I've come across this a couple times before. It's merch from the Lone Star Saloon in San Francisco. So I knew immediately what it said. Now, normally, I'd jump right in and explain this to everyone. But as I told monshu, I'm trying hard these days not to be That Guy, so instead I just mentioned this knowledge in passing to the one guy I was actually trying to impress.

Apparently, the reason for the discussion was that someone had come by earlier and told the wearer of the shirt (the boyfriend of the guy I was talking to--rats!) that it meant "zucchini". "Sounds like he was pulling his leg," I joked. But he wasn't. The first word, кабачок, corresponds to "saloon" in the English and is, in origin, a diminutive of кабак "tavern, pub". (A bit ironic if you've ever seen the size of the Lone Star.) But there's another кабачок which translates as "marrow/squash" or "courgette/zucchini".

Near as I can tell, this is also a diminutive from another кабак, a borrowing of the Turkic kapak which in modern Anatolian Turkish means "bald" or "baldy" as well as "courgette/zucchini". Kap has many meanings in Turkic, among them "pot" or "vessel". So it's possible that the two meanings are ultimately related. The metonymic use of "drinking vessel" or "pouring vessel" for "wineshop" or "tavern" can also be found in dialectal German Krug (cf. Dutch kroeg "pub"). And the resemblance between certain marrows/squashes and pots or other vessels is motive enough to explain that semantic extension. Sadly, though, all the good etymological dictionaries here are inaccessible at the moment, so for now this remains a hunch.

In any case, it was a good reminder that, when it comes to most things, I really only know enough to know how little I really know.

monshu drew my attention to an article in the most recent Economist about the adoption of English by foreign companies (a process it terms "Englishnisation"). He was particularly struck by this bit:

Still, Englishnisation is not easy, even if handled well: the most proficient speakers can still struggle to express nuance and emotion in a foreign tongue. For this reason, native English speakers often assume that the spread of their language in global corporate life confers an automatic advantage on them. In fact it can easily encourage them to rest on their laurels. Too many of them (especially Englishmen, your columnist keeps being told) risk mistaking their fluency in meetings for actual accomplishments.

Naturally, this got me thinking about the issue of linguistic privilege more generally. (That last line in particular is an almost perfect summation of the whole phenomenon of privilege.) I went looking for examinations of the concept online and found this excellent essay (with links to research findings! Those of you who aren't new to the privilege discussion--which should be everyone reading this--can safely skip the first half-dozen paragraphs.)

Of course, since the author has bigger fish to fry than I do, he leaves off mentioning some manifestations of native English-speaking privilege that are more salient to me because I encountre them on a daily basis. For instance, he talks about English as capital and how mere possession of a fluent command of it secures speakers good-paying jobs at home and abroad. In the language fora I frequent, one of the ways this plays out is that even the most unsophisticated speakers can present themselves as experts and receive a certain amount of deference. Time and again I've seen natives capture the benefit of the doubt in a disagreement with a much better-educated non-native speaker. American youngsters in particular are prone to consider their opinions authoritative when really they're hardly in a position to generalise about their own dialect of American English, much less the totality of varieties going under the name of "English". I've made this mistake many times myself and now am far more cautious about branding something "incorrect" as opposed to simply unidiomatic in the varieties most familiar to me.

Related to this is a certain lack of humility about the extent of one's own ignorance of anything not in English. Before it became fashionable to say "Everything's online nowadays" it was common to hear "If it's important, it'll be translated". Of course, anyone who's tried to do serious research in any field that isn't very limited in both time-depth and geographic scope knows this isn't true. But still an English-speaker can be dismissive about works which aren't available in his native language and receive a more sympathetic hearing than, say, a Finn or a Bengali would.

Another area of particular interest to me is that of borrowing. An English-speaker takes for granted that words from his native language have permeated every significant vernacular on the planet--often in large number. Moreover, if the usage in the foreign language doesn't match the usage in his own, it is somehow wrong. I've witnessed the embarrassment of Germans over the use of such words as Handy and Bodybag, which sound ludicrous to a German-speaker. Meanwhile, English-speakers freely and unapologetically create mock Germanicisms like "Freudenschade" and "Blinkenlights". (A similar double-standard involving Spanish has been criticised by Ana Celia Zentella in the book José, can you see?, who laments that English-speakers' disregard of all grammatical norms of Spanish "passes as multicultural 'with-it-ness.'")

Of course there's much more to be said in this vein, but it all adds up to "The English-speaker is right even when they're wrong". And that's on top of English-speakers hogging the space for discourse purely on account of not having to put as much thought into how to structure what they're saying. It will be interesting to see how this dynamic shifts if there comes a time when "native-speakers" become a minority and cease to wield such disproportionate economic power. (Not in my lifetime, I don't think, but the world is full of surprises.)

For some reason (probably that I'm not really actively studying one or reading any untranslated lit at the moment) it's been a while since I posted anything linguisticky. But my eyes perked up at the sign language controversy swirling around Madiba's memorial service. Partly it's just such a bizarre story: The sign language interpreter hired for the event was apparently a complete incompetent. Seeking to deflect blame, the government announced an investigation of the agency they used--only to find that it apparently doesn't exist. For his part, the soi-disant interpreter has tried to explain away his flailing as the results of a schizophrenic episode (revealing in the process that he's had violent episodes in the past and was due to be evaluated for re-hospitalisation on the day he was tapped to stand on a podium within swinging distance of a sitting US President).

From a language geek point-of-view, probably the most interesting aspect is how quick other sign-language speakers were to spot the fraud despite the fact that many of them did not speak SASL or another language belonging to the same family. This is one of the more constructive explanations, who major points I think are worth reproducing in full:

1. [H]e signed with relatively little facial expression. Brow raises and furrows, for example, are important visual correlates of rising and falling intonation in spoken languages, and such features are regularly used in sign languages to distinguish questions from statements, as well as group particular elements of a sentence together.
2. [T]here was a lack of mouth actions. Many sign languages use mouthing of spoken language words alongside some signs and/or mouth gestures (such as a slightly protruding tongue or pouting lips) with other signs.
3. [T]here were noticeably long pauses between his signed utterances, jerky transitions between signs, and too few signs to actually translate the full content of the memorial service speeches.
4. [T]here appeared to be random repetition of certain gestures, and no detectable regularities or matches to recurring spoken language words that could be their equivalents.
5. [T]he patterns of body and head movement as well as shifts in eye gaze did not appear to align, as would be expected, with elements of the sign language production.
6. [T]here was no use of fingerspelling at all in his signed production, even though South African Sign Language has such as a system of manual letters for spelling out the names of people and places mentioned in the service.
7. South African Sign Language has been influenced by a number of sign languages that I am familiar with, such as British Sign Language and Irish Sign Language (from which Auslan is derived), and yet I did not see any vocabulary items that I recognise from these languages.

It makes me wonder how easy it would be for the typical oral language-user to spot a similar fraud. Some of the points would seem to have clear analogues--for instance, the use of fingerspelling for proper names would correspond to the appearance of those names as phonetic loans in the translation. But names can undergo extensive deformation to fit the phonology of an unrelated language, making them indistinguishable from common words. ("George Bush", for instance, becomes in Mandarin "Qiáozhì Bùxī".)

At least having done some preliminary reading on SASL, I'm now better able to understand the Deputy Disability Minister's claim "There are as many as a hundred sign language dialects." Apparently, it's very much an emerging koiné at this stage. That is to say, schools for the Deaf there variously taught Irish Sign Language, American Sign Language (both ultimately derived from French Sign Language), or British Sign Language (which is not) depending on who founded them and when. So though SASL is now reckoned to the BSL family (which has itself come under increasing influence from ASL in recent years) it's not as closely tied to it as Auslan or NZSLm which are collectively referred to as "BANZSL". It's still a dismissive claim (implying as it does that the interpreter was using some legit dialect of sign language even if it wasn't one familiar to particular critics), but at least she wasn't characterising all signed languages as "dialects" in contrast to "real languages".

Unlike, say, the Rob Ford story, which I've been following just for the yuks, this is one that represents a confluence of several important issues: official promotion of sign languages (where South African policy is actually quite progressive); perceptions of mental health and its relationship to security considerations; vetting of foreign-language interpreters; the ongoing lack of formal certification in South African employment; and so forth. The level of reporting could be better. (Why, when reporters spoke to the interpreter on film, didn't they bring along someone with a sound knowledge of SASL who could put the man's expertise to the test?) But it doesn't seem to have yielded all of its secrets yet.

So I had some fun last night playing with this map. It's basically just another way to view the data collected here, the chief advantage being that counties where more than 10% of the population speaks a language other than English at home are colour-coded, so it's easier to spot some intriguing islands of multilingualism in a sea of English.

Take, for example, Jefferson County, Iowa. In the map it's coded blue for "Other" and mousing over will tell you that the most-spoken LOTE (Language Other Than English) there is Hindi. So far I can't find any explanation for this. I had better luck with a couple of anomalies from my home state. When I saw that Sullivan County, in North Central Missouri had the highest proportion of Spanish-speakers in the state, I reasoned, "Must be a meatpacking plant." Yup--Premium Standard in the county seat of Milan[*]. I was more confused by the prominence of an "Other West Germanic language" in nearby Scotland County until I saw a population breakdown by religion: 20% Old Order Mennonite.

Mostly, the distributions are what you'd expect (provided you know about, for instance, the Acadians in Maine or the Hmong in Minnesota), but there are some surprises. I wasn't surprised to find a high proportion of non-English-speakers in the eastern Aleutians, but I wasn't expecting to find that the most-spoken LOTE was not Aleut but Tagalog. And though I knew there were a lot of LOTE-speakers in Miami, I wouldn't've put the proportion above 72%.


[*] First syllable as in "mile", i.e. /ˈmaɪlən/.

The book I feel into reading last weekend, even while I hadn't yet finished up Parrot and Olivier, was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Petals of blood. As mentioned before, his Devil on the cross (Caitaani mutharaba-ini) is--like Sōseki's Kokoro--one of those books I read as an undergraduate which I retain positive feelings towards despite not being able to recall much of anything about the style or plot. Petals treats the same subject matter, i.e. what's wrong with Kenya, and has much the same trick to pull off, i.e. keeping us interested in the trajectory of its central characters when we know that the chances of a happy resolution are nonexistent.

Somewhat predictably, I suppose, it's gotten me interested in the author's native tongue, Gikuyu. Practically the first thing I discovered about it is that I've been mispronouncing "Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o" all these years. You'd think the tildes were there to indicate nasality (cf. Portuguese) or, barring that, pitch/tone (cf. Ancient Greek, bzw. Vietnamese). But you'd be wrong: they indicate vowel quality. Gikuyu isn't unusual in having a seven-vowel system, but more common methods for differentiating the two mid middle levels are representing the open vowels with the corresponding IPA symbols (i.e. ɛ, ɔ) or distinguishing the closed vowels with a dot below (i.e. ẹ, ọ). I'm not sure what the motivation is for having ĩ represent /e/ and ũ /o/ unless it's the fact that, in related languages with a five-vowel system (notably Swahili), they've been merged with /i/ and /u/, respectively.

Given the relatively rarity of dental fricatives, you'd also likely assume that th represents an aspirate. But, no, it's /ð/. Gikuyu actually has a full fricative series, but it's not obvious from the orthography where /β/ is written b and /ɣ/ g. So "Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o" has the pronunciation [ˈŋɡoɣe wa ðiˈɔŋɔ]. The only remaining curve ball is c which can represent [s] or [ʃ] depending on the speaker--unless, that is, you count the fact that prenasalised voiced stops often simplify to simple ones. That is, the [ŋɡ] or [ᵑɡ] at the beginning of Ngũgĩ often ends up as [g]. In general, though, the phonology is more conservative than that of Swahili, and this extends to morphology as well, with Gikuyu keeping distinct more of the noun classes inherited from Proto-Bantu.

Ngũgĩ seems to enjoy tossing in snatches of both Gikuyu and Swahili into the text, and I can't find much of a pattern to it, let alone to why he glosses some words and not others. He tells us, for instance that ugali is porridge but neglects to mention that mnazi is palm wine. And I can understand leaving words like mbari, ahoi, and ndugata in because these are roles in Kikuyu society without exact counterparts in English. But why words for "kettle" or "insects"? Not that I mind--you know I love looking this sort of thing up. Googling "shifta" led me to an article on a war I never knew had happened, giving me some valuable cultural background for understanding the larger context.

I was hardly back from breakfast with Scruffy and Graysong this morning before I set out for lunch with Nuphy and Blondie. We let Nuphy pick the place, so it was the Gage, of course, but the plus side was that he paid. ("I don't cook, so this is like having people over for me.") He had a concert to attend at 3 p.m., so I accompanied Blondie to the Art Institute and Millennium Park until he was free again. We timed it well, emerging right about the hour when the afternoon warm-up really kicked in and made it comfortable to go coatless.

Once again, Blondie was full of stories about his niblings. At this point, all three of his siblings have reproduced at least twice, so it's quite a gaggle. He makes a point of always speaking to them in Arabic because he doesn't want them to end up like his brother-in-law, who's barely conversational in it despite having grown up in Bahrain. That led to this exchange with his elders niece:

"Uncle Blondie, you should learn English!"

"I know English."

"The why don't you use it?"

"I do use it in America. But we're in Bahrain. What are the official languages here?"

"Arabic and English."

"And in America?"

[pause] "Arabic and American?"