Language

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Little Red Ridinghood & Evolutionary Biology

rotThrough a note in the current issue of The Smithsonian, I was alerted to an article I missed when published last fall in the open access journal Plos One. “The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood” by Jamshid Tehrani examines the origins of the well-known story, likely most familiar from the Grimm Brothers version, “Rotkäppchen”, first published in 1812 in their Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Folklore scholars have long been interested in tracing the origins of folk tales, their evolution over time, and their geographical distribution. Traditionally, this has been done through a historical-geographic methodology, best represented by the Aarne-Uther-Thompson (ATU) index, which identifies more than two thousand international types distributed across three hundred cultures worldwide. Tehrani’s approach is quite different, borrowing techniques and tools from evolutionary biology. The article details his use of phylogenetic analysis, using cladistics, Bayesian inference and NeighborNet. These methods employ a branching model of evolution that clusters characteristics on the basis of shared derived (i.e., evolutionarily novel) traits. The NeighborNet tree is shown below.

map3

Tehrani analyzed 58 written versions of the story taken from a variety of countries over 2000 years, comparing 72 different plot points and resulting in a family tree showing the most likely relationships. One of the main findings is that, contrary to some theories, the story most likely did not originate in China (it’s not at the base of the tree), despite similar versions of the story recorded there. Unfortunately, he was able to use only tales that had been translated into English.

The sophisticated data analysis used here is not surprising when dealing with scientific topics, but may seem unusual when applied to fairy tales. However, such techniques have been used recently in other areas, including languages and manuscript traditions. In linguistics, the best-known case may be its use in mapping the origins and spread of Indo-European. Tehranie wrote about his research in The Atlantic, explaining in layman’s terms his approach. He concludes by expanding the value of his work beyond insights into origins and varieties of folk tales:

Folktales, more than any other type of story, embody our shared fantasies, fears and experiences. Understanding which elements of them remain stable and which ones change as they get transmitted across generations and societies can therefore provide a unique window into universal and variable aspects of the human condition. As such, they represent a potentially rich point of contact between anthropologists, folklorists, literary scholars, biologists and cognitive scientists.

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The Other Language

Francesca Marciano, the author of the collection "The Other Language." Credit

Francesca Marciano, the author of ‘The Other Language’

Interesting piece this week-end in the NY Times about authors writing in adopted languages, such as Francesca Marciano, the author of a collection of short stories, he Other Language. It’s hard enough to be a writer in your native tongue, but imagine writing publishable stories in a second language. Creative writing is quite different from conveying information – that’s something that can be done, even if grammar is faulty and word choice seems strange. To write well necessitates having a “feel” for the language, including the use of idiomatic expressions and of valid collocations – those chunks of languages that go together. Native speakers have internalized this kind of pragmatic language use through extensive exposure to the language over time. It’s much harder for non-native speakers to capture believably the tone and nuance of a language, including hitting the right registers – for example, what level of informality or slang to use. It’s notoriously difficult, for instance, to use profanity correctly in a foreign language. The popular view of language learning is that it involves learning new words and new rules, but anyone who has tried to function in another language/culture has experienced the reality that such knowledge is necessary but insufficient. Speaking rather than writing provides some help in the form of non-verbals – facial expressions, tone, etc. – but in writing it’s just you and the blank page.

There are famous examples of writers of English who have not grown up speaking the language, Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov (although he learned English and other languages at a young age). What’s remarkable about those two writers, is the fact that they are know as great stylists, writing in a learned language. In fact, non-native speakers (like non-native language teachers) have a critical perspective on the language that may offer new insights. The Times article quotes Chinese writer Yiyun Li, who has just published her third novel in English: “If you are a native speaker, things are automatic…For me, every time I say or write something, I have to go back and ask, ‘Is this what I want to say?’ ”. Non-native writers may feel freer to play and experiment with the new language, more so than when writing in their native language.

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Writing Chinese made easy?

fire

Word group from Chineasy

There has been a lot of media buzz lately about Chineasy, a book and Chinese character learning method by ShaoLan Hsueh.  Her method was first publicized in a TED talk she gave in 2013 and recently published in Chineasy: The New Way to Read Chinese. As someone who has struggled for years to learn Chinese characters, I was intrigued.  It turns out that her method is not quite as revolutionary as she claims.  It boils down to associating an image with the character which both represents the meaning of the character and illustrates it graphically, so for 火 (huo, meaning fire) she shows the character engulfed in fire, or for 山 (shan, meaning mountain), a picture of a mountain superimposed on the character. In most cases, she uses the historical origin of the character for her mnemonic.  She then shows how characters combine to make new words, as in volcano, “fire mountain”  (火山). She is by no means the first to advocate using such a method.  Many learners of Chinese are familiar with Rick Harbaugh’s Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary, either the book or the web site, which presents a series of zipu or “character genealogies” which show graphically the close interconnections between over 4000 characters according to the  2000 year-old Shuowen Jiezi by Xu Shen and subsequent research by traditional etymologists. Another resource that explores graphically the origins of characters and associates them with images or little stories is the very well done Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters by Alison and Laurence Mathews.

What distinguishes Chineasy is above all the very nice color illustrations by Noma Bar.  Characters are grouped together based on the principal character used (such as a variety of combinations using the fire character).  The characters, however, are chosen not based on their use frequency, but based on whether they combine with other characters for which Noma Bar has found an appropriate illustration.  This makes for entertaining browsing through the book, but maybe not for practical vocabulary learning. Another caveat is that the characters used are the traditional character set, used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but not in mainland China, which uses the simplified character set. This in fact makes it much easier to find appropriate illustrations, as the traditional characters reflect more accurately the origins of the characters.

Chineasy is not the first method to advocate learning characters first, before learning how to speak.  This was most notably championed by James Heisig in his series of books on Japanese and Chinese, starting with Remembering the Kanji.   This is not an approach widely used today.  In fact the all-oral approach of the popular ChinesePod podcasts assumes learners will probably not be interested in learning characters, or will do so later, after learning to speak.  At any rate, I would agree with the comments by Victor Mair on the LanguageLog blog, that the statement by ShaoLan Hsueh in her TED talk that learning to write Chinese is much easier than learning to speak to be very different from my experience and, I would venture to say, from that of the majority of Chinese learners.  However, given the difficulty of learning Chinese characters, I welcome any new thinking about approaches to keeping those pesky characters to stick in my brain. And the illustrations by Noma Bar are indeed very nice.

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Code-switching Arabic in song

Yasmine Hamdan

Yasmine Hamdan

Interesting review today on NPR of the latest album from Lebanese singer, Yasmine Hamdan, Ya Nass. She is well-known in the Middle East, going back to her days in Soapkills, the duo she founded with Zeid Hamdan. Hamdan now lives in Paris and is fluent in English, French, and Arabic. However, she sings exclusively in Arabic. This is a decision that is culturally understandable, but which tends to limit her popularity. According to the BBC, Hamdan was offered a lucrative contract by music executives, if she were willing to sing in English, but she refused. She’s forgoing catering to the larger English-speaking public, at least in part, because her songs are culturally and linguistically tied to the Middle East. As she has traveled and lived in a variety of Middle-Eastern countries, Hamden speaks a variety of dialects of Arabic, which, according to Wikipedia, has enabled her “to playfully use various dialects of Arabic in her lyrics, which alternate between Lebanese, Kuwaiti, Palestinian, Egyptian and Bedouin, as well as some of the code-switching which is so typical of Middle-Eastern humour”. Clearly, English or French would have a whole different dynamic in her songs, losing much in the translation.

Code-switching among Arabic speakers is common, but that occurs principally between speakers’ own dialect of Arabic and Standard Arabic. Typically, Standard Arabic is used in formal, religious, and literary contexts, while dialectal versions are used in everyday situations. Code-switching can be used for paralanguage purposes, i.e. to convey irony, disdain, or special emphasis. It also has social functions, such as its use for identity negotiation, social-group membership, or to signal social solidarity (or superiority). Less common than the back and forth between Standard Arabic and dialect, at least in normal everyday situations, is the kind of dialectal code-switching done by Hamdan. However, it is used for effect in the entertainment industry. Such code-switching occurs in the U.S. entertainment as well, for example, by having a character speak with a strong hillbilly-like accent, a clear signal of unsophistication and a source of humor.

Yasmine Hamdan – Ya Nass ياسمين حمدان – يا ناس‬

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U.S. Diplomat speaks Pidgin

U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria James Entwhistle

U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria James Entwhistle being interviewed

It’s not what you expect from the U.S. Diplomatic Corps, an ambassador who gives an interview in which he speaks what sometimes is described as “broken English”.  This was Ambassador to Nigeria James F. Entwistle speaking in an interview on Nigerian radio.  What he spoke (only in short segments) was pidgin English, a broadly spoken version of the language used across West Africa.  Entwhistle was interviewed on Nigeria’s Wazobia FM, the first radio station in Nigeria to broadcast in pidgin English.  When asked about Nigeria’s controversial anti-gay legislation, he responded:

“The U.S. government no say sanction go dey for Nigeria, because of same-sex palava-o.”

In other words, the U.S. is not going to impose sanctions on Nigeria for passing the  law.  When Entwhistle was asked about the U.S. position on the upcoming election in Nigeria, he asserted U.S. neutrality in these terms:

“Make I tell you say U.S. no get any candidate for mind. The only ting wey go sweet us be say make the election dey transparent, credible and concluded. Make Nigerians pick candidates wey go sweet their belle, wey go do well well for them.”

The Ambassador’s use of pidgin was much appreciated at the radio station and presumably by everyday Nigerians as well.  Even if they may not have agreed with his positions, they certainly liked to hear the ambassador of a major power speak their language.  As can be seen from the examples above, Nigerian Pidgin is quite distinct from standard English, in vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. The Pidgin English School offers video lessons in the language. It is certainly to the Ambassador’s credit that he has made the effort to be able to understand Nigerian Pidgin and speak it somewhat as well.

YouTube video of interview:

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Becoming “Clark Rockefeller”

Christian Gerhartsresiter, aka Clark Rockefeller

Christian Gerhartsresiter, aka Clark Rockefeller

An interview this week on NPR’s Fresh Air brought back to light the case of “Clark Rockefeller”, the con man who was in reality Christian Gerharstreiter from Germany, not, as he claimed, a member of the Rockefeller clan.  That claim came after previous identities adopted over the years including being a British baronet, a cardiologist in Las Vegas, a Hollywood producer, and a bond broker in New York. The interview was with author Walter Kirn, who was a friend of “Rockefeller” for years.  Listening to the interview, it seems hardly credible that Kirn would accept the wild stories he was being told: that his friend was a “freelance central banker”, that he had never eaten in a restaurant, that he had attended Yale when he was 14, that he had a master key to the Rockefeller Center, that on successive week-ends he had as house guests Brittany Spears and then Angelika Merkel. It turns out that Gerhartsreiter was not only a con man, but he had brutally murdered a man in California in the 1980’s, a crime for which he was convicted last year and resentenced to prison for 27 years to life.

How was the massive deception possible?  Gerhartsreiter was skilled in reading his conversation partner and accurately gauging what stories would be believable.  His verbal skills were impressive, given the fact that he was not a native speaker of English.  The family with whom he originally stayed on coming to the U.S. as an exchange student (which he fraudulently arranged himself) when he was 18 reported that he experimented with different accents.  Eventually, he settled, according to Kirn, on an accent that sounded like Katharine Hepburn’s cousin. But, probably even more important than his language ability, were Gerhartreiter’s non-verbal skills.  His bearing, dress, and general appearance seemed to confirm his identity.  He acted out his roles with confidence and great self-assurance.  His success calls to mind the TED talk by Amy Cuddy in which she discusses the importance of body language and the possibility of adjusting your posture and appearance to convince yourself and others of the identity you want to convey.

Gerhartsreiter’s case also for me brings to mind a concept in modern linguistics:  performativity, originally conceived by J.L Austin. The idea of “performance” is that communicative competence is not, as often conceived, a matter of mastering the whole grammar system of a language, but rather of being able to strategically choose what is needed in particular contexts.  In this way, according to Suresh Canagarajah, performance “gives primacy to acts of creative and strategic communication motivated by the enigmatic purposes of complex individuals.  It draws attention to playfulness, fabrication, strategic negotiations, situationally motivated shifts, multiple identities” (from the forward to Clemente/Higgins, Performing English with a post-colonial accent:  Ethnographic narratives from Mexico). Christian Gerhartsreiter was clearly a master of performance in a number of senses.

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Philly sound: Dying out?

philly

Philly cheesesteak: More popular than the accent?

Interesting article in the NY Times about what the author describes as “the most distinctive, and least imitable, accent in North America,” namely the “Philadelphia, or Filelfia, accent [which] may sound like mumbled Mandarin without the tonal shifts”.  What has been unique about the Philly sound was that it represented a mash-up of Northern and Southern accents: “Nowhere but in the Delaware Valley can you hear those rounded vowels — soda is sewda, house is hay-ouse — a clear influence from Baltimore and points south.”

Some examples of Philly talk from the article:

Jeet? D’jou wanna get a sawff pressle?  [Did you eat? Do you want to get a soft pretzel?]
Dry da wooder awf wit a tail.   [Dry the water off with a towel.]
’Lannic City’s too torsty anymore.  [Atlantic City is too touristy these days.]

To hear the accent, check out the series of YouTube videos by Sean Monahan. Unfortunately, according to a recent study by linguists at the University of Pennsylvania, the accent is changing and moving towards greater similarity to other Northern accents.

Speaking of regional accents, a survey was conducted by cupid.com to determine the “sexist” North American accent.  The winner?  Southern.  The least sexy? “Mid-Atlantic” – does that mean Philly? On the other hand, the Philly Cheesesteak continues to find lots of admirers.

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Not in Putin’s plans: Crimean Tatars

tatar

Crimean Tatars in traditional dress

Part of the tense, complicated crisis currently in Crimea is the role of an ethnic group indigenous to the Black Sea peninsula, the Crimean Tatars.  Their history has made them side much more with Ukraine than with Russia in the current stand-off.  They were forcibly removed by Stalin from Crimea, which they consider their ancestral homeland, and in the waning days of the Soviet Union, under Gorbachev, gradually began returning to Crimea.  Today they represent some 12% of the population of Crimea. Having suffered persecution under both Czarist and communist Russia, the Crimean Tatars are understandably nervous about Crimea coming back under Russian control. In fact, until the recent arrival of Russian military units in Crimea, the Tatars were among the few groups outside Western Ukraine actively proclaiming their allegiance to the new Ukrainian government. According to a recent article in the New Republic, the Crimean Tatars are not likely to go along with an increasing Russification of the peninsula and may  cause trouble for Putin’s possible plans to annex Crimea.

The Crimean Tatars differ from both Russians and Ukrainians in religion (Muslim) and language (Crimean Tatar).  Their language belongs to the Turkic language family and is one of the treasured cultural traditions the Tatars maintained in exile.  Today, however, living alongside other Crimeans speaking Russian and Ukrainian, there are fears that the language is endangered.  Should the language die out, so would a crucial element of the group’s cultural identity and cohesion.  In an interesting reflection of socio-political realities, the written language has gone through myriad transformations, from using Arabic script, to Turkic, to Cyrillian, to a Latin-based alphabet. 

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Periods? No.

dotInteresting piece in the New Republic about the use of periods in text messages and online chats.  It’s not something I’ve thought about or even noticed.  In text messages I rarely see any punctuation. The period in short-form electronic communication plays a quite different role than it does normally in writing. According to the article, “people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce ‘I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.’”

According to Ben Crair, the author of the article,

This is an unlikely heel turn in linguistics. In most written language, the period is a neutral way to mark a pause or complete a thought; but digital communications are turning it into something more aggressive. “Not long ago, my 17-year-old son noted that many of my texts to him seemed excessively assertive or even harsh, because I routinely used a period at the end,” Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me by email.

It’s not just the period that’s being used differently today.  A recent piece in Slate examined “Why everyone and your mother started using ellipses … everywhere”.  The article speculates that ellipses are being used to simulate spoken language, namely in place of pause words like um and uh.  He cites writer Clay Schirky on that idea: “People are communicating like they are talking, but encoding that talk in writing.” This is the same trend seen in the use of the period, namely an attempt to put into written texts the features of spoken language, to make up for the lack of paralanguage (tones, intonation, expressive gestures, non-word utterances).  A recent thread on the Language Log explores the “new semiotics of punctuation.”

There have been of course for some time conventions in online writing to compensate for the this absence such as emoticons (sad face), netspeak (lol) or typing in all caps (I’M SHOUTING). These efforts go some ways towards adding more expressivity to written texts, but miss the ability to identify one of the modes of speaking that isn’t conveyed easily by these traditional techniques: sarcasm.  But never fear, a company called Sarcasm, Inc., is marketing a “Sarcasm punctuation mark” called SacrMark.  But maybe that’s not really needed, as John Gruber commented:  “What a great idea. I’m sure it’ll be a huge hit.”  Sometimes all you need are words.

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Selfie Society?

Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt takes a selfie

Helle Thorning-Schmidt takes a selfie

The word of the year for 2013:  selfie, according to Oxford Dictionaries, as well as linguist Geoff Nunberg, speaking today on NPR. Selfie (i.e., self-portrait) describes a picture taken of oneself with a phone camera. The word has been in the news recently in connection with the picture Danish prime minister took of herself together with President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron.  The picture excited comment due to the fact that it was taken during the memorial ceremony for Nelson Mandela, maybe also for the disapproving expression from Michele Obama. The term — and the practice it describes — have been seen as symptomatic of what ails modern society, from the cutesification of English to an obsession with sharing everything one does. It does seem to point to something that a wildly popular mobile app such as Snapchat can exist principally to enable sharing of selfies. A columnist in the New York Post pointed to the narcissism inherent in the practice and commented that the picture taken by the Danish prime minister “symbolizes the global calamity of Western decline.”  It’s not just in the U.S. that such concerns have been raised, as evident in the Telegraph’s (U.K.) article, Family albums fade as the young put only themselves in picture.

On NPR today there was another story that struck me in terms of language use.  It was in a story describing the high cost of housing in the San Francisco Bay area.  The reporter struggled to find a way to describe the housing arrangement of a group of unrelated young people living together in a large house.  He suggested the term “commune” but it was rejected as too heavily burdened with free love associations from the 1960’s.  The inhabitants of the house use the term “co-living” to describe their arrangement.  I found the difficulty finding a term interesting because of how easily and conventionally such arrangements are described in German-speaking countries: Wohngemeinschaft (living community), often shortened to WG.  This is not only a word widely used, but so too is the practice of doing what NPR thought was newsworthy in the Bay area, unrelated young people living together. Americans tend to think of houses as single family dwellings, which is far from how they are viewed in most of the rest of the world.

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Untranslatable?

waldInteresting story on NPR today on words that are difficult to translate into English because they express concepts for which we do not have an equivalent single word.  The list comes from a request at the Web site Maptia for readers to submit such examples.  The full list is presented nicely at 11 Untranslatable Words From Other Cultures.  The first example, from German, Waldeinsamkeit, meaning being alone in the woods is one familiar to me, as it was created by Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck in his story Der blonde Eckbert (1797).  German is likely to be one of the languages with the most such words as it’s characteristic of the langauge for speakers to create new compound nouns, which can be amazingly long.  One of the longest was in the news this summer, as it was officially “retired”, due to the fact that the law which referenced it was removed by the EU: Rindfleischetikettierungsuberwachungsaufgabenubertragungsgesetz (law delegating beef label monitoring).

Other nice words in the list:

  • Culaccino: The mark left on a table by a cold glass (Italian)
  • Iktsuarpok: The feeling of anticipation that leads you to go outside and check if anyone is coming (Inuit)
  • Pana PoʻO:  The act of scratching your head to try to remember something (Hawaiian)
  • Dépaysement:: The feeling that comes from not being in one’s home country (French)
  • Sobremesa: The time spent after lunch or dinner, talking to the people you shared the meal with (Spanish)
  • Pochemuchka: Someone who asks a lot of questions (Russian)

 

 

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Trapped by language

Rachel Jeantel620x408In the past month there have been several big media stories in the U.S. dealing with language. One was the use of racist language (and behavior) by Paula Deen, the celebrity Southern cook, which has resulted in her losing most if not all of her business contracts. The other was the use of English by a witness in the Travon Martin case, 19-year old Rachel Jeantel, a friend of Martin’s who had been on the phone with him just before he was shot by George Zimmerman. As detailed in a post on Language Log, her use of vernacular Black English was widely reported with a number of negative and offensive comments. There was a view expressed that Jeantel was just being lazy or contrary in not speaking standard American English and that she was using English incorrectly with random grammatical mistakes. As linguists pointed out (including John McWhorter on the Time web site in a segment on the NPR series “Here and Now“), she was not willfully distorting standard American English, she was speaking a version of English well known in linguistics and usually called African American Vernacular English (AAVE) or Ebonics. As John Rickford points out in his post, AAVE has rules and patterns that are fixed, giving the following examples from her testimony:

  • Stressed BIN, as in I was BIN paying attention, sir, meaning, “I’ve been paying attention for a long time, and am still paying attention.”
  • Preterit HAD, ax, and inverted did in embedded sentences, as in He had ax me did I go to the hospital “He asked me whether I had gone to the hospital.” [The use of the pluperfect form where other varieties use a simple past or preterit was first discussed by Stanford undergrad Christine Theberge.]
  • Absence of auxiliary IS: He ø trying to get home, sir.
  • Absence of possessive and third present s, as in “He a momma ø boy” and “He love ø his family.”

The defense attorney expressed at times difficulty in understanding Jeantel’s testimony, although it is unclear whether that was indeed the case, or whether this was being used as a strategy to discredit the witness. If the latter was the case, it seems to have worked, as one juror afterwards commented:

Juror B37 said Jeantel was not a good witness because the phrases used during her testimony were terms she had never heard before. The juror thought the witness, “felt inadequate toward everyone because of her education and her communication skills. I just felt sadness for her.” [from the cnn blog post]

Ironically, it turns out that Jeantel’s mother is a native speaker of Haitian Creole and that Jeantel speaks Creole and Spanish and thus in terms of speaking skills, has more language skills than most Americans.

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Do Koreans make bad pilots?

asiana2In the wake of the Asiana Airlines crash at the San Francisco International Airport, there has been puzzlement over how the accident happened, particularly as there were four pilots on board, one or more of whom surely would have pointed out that the plane was coming in way too slowly for a safe landing.  The main pilot was not experienced with the Boeing 777 but the other pilots were.  This has raised questions about how the pilots interacted with one another and led to speculation that there must have been some communication failure that contributed to the crash.  Because the pilots were all Korean, several commentators (including a piece in the National Geographic Daily News) have brought up the analysis by Malcolm Gladwell of Korean pilots in his 2008 book, Outliers.  Gladwell also talked about Korean pilots in a CNN interview (video embedded below).  Gladwell points to the poor safety record of Korean airlines in the 1990’s, which he relates to the Korean respect for authority and hierarchy.  In a culture like Korea, with a large power distance, it is less likely that a subordinate (such as a co-pilot) will point out possible errors or problems, as that would be disrespectful.

There is no doubt that respect for superiors and elders is a traditional aspect of Korean life, still in evidence today.  I recently spent time at a Seoul National University and was struck by the deferential attitude of the Korean students, which was markedly different from my experiences with Chinese students in Shanghai and Beijing.  However, does this mean that all Koreans in all contexts will behave in a way consistent with this trait of their national culture?  Are there no other forces at work that can affect individual behavior? In fact, we all have identities that are complex combinations of influences that come from a variety of sources, including individual experiences, family life, social media, group membership.  In the case of pilots, it would seem to me that the work environment and the extensive training involved would necessarily influence cockpit behavior in significant ways.

In the CNN interview, Gladwell mentions that respect for authority is built into the Korean language, with its rich use of politeness forms, and that having the pilots speak English (which Gladwell characterizes as a “non-hierarchical” language) has led to a behavioral change.  That’s an interesting socio-linguistic theory but I’m not sold on its validity.

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Heavymetal fans: Go learn Finnish

made-in-finland-2008I’ve been working for a number of years to get to the point in Russian that I can read one of my favorite authors, Leo Tolstoy, in the original. For stylistic masters like Tolstoy or Proust, a lot gets lost in translation.  Apparently for some fans of Finnish heavy metal band Hevisaurus, it’s just as important to learn the language to appreciate the subtle nuances in their lyrics. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the popularity of Nordic heavy metal bands has led a number of young people to learn Finnish or Norwegian, the native tongues of many heavy metal bands.  According to one U.S. fan cited in the article, Michael Brown,

Finnish bands perform with a “dark woodsy resonance” that he has come to love, he says, and “the poetic and obscure nature of the Finnish tongue really gave it a unique wave.”

It’s not that Finnish is an easy language to learn.  It’s not part of the Indo-European family of languages but rather belongs to the Uralic group, along with Hungarian and Estonian. As a consequence there are fewer recognizable cognates for English native speakers and the grammar has a notoriously steep learning curve, being heavily inflected, with its 15 (!) cases. Norwegian (an Indo-European language), in comparison, is a piece of cake, with a very simple grammar, similar to its Scandinavian cousins, Danish and Swedish. Heavy metal fans would be well advised to keep that difference in mind and try to find Norwegian bands to like.

The article speculates that there is a connection between the often apocalyptic nature of heavy metal lyrics and Nordic culture:

Olivia Lucas, a Harvard doctoral candidate who is working on a dissertation about Nordic metal, said people “simply want to understand what the culture is like that has produced this music.” It doesn’t take long, she said, to draw a parallel between the melancholy and gloom that underpins Finnish metal and the wider Finnish psyche. “Finns are comfortable with this feeling, and don’t feel pressure to be cheerful all the time,” Ms. Lucas, 25, said. Their music “embraces this view of the world.”

According to the article, Norwegian “black metal” is even darker in tone and was long tainted by an association with violence.  Nowadays, however, it has gone mainstream, with the Foreign Ministry of Norway giving its trainees seminars on black metal because there are so frequently questions about it raised at Norwegian embassies throughout the world.

The article brought to mind for me an interview earlier this year on NPR with a black woman, Laina Dawes, a fervent heavy metal fan, who wrote a book on her struggle to find acceptance as an African-American woman in the mostly male and white heavy metal scene.

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Texas German & Nietzsche’s Sister

TexGer0120Logo2Interesting examples of code-switching (German mixed with English, like the combination of German was and English whatever) in a NPR story today about Texas German, a variety of the language still spoken by several thousand Texans living around the town of New Braunfels, between Austin and San Antonio. It’s one of only a few areas in the U.S. where there are still German-speaking communities.  Best known are the Amish communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania.  As mentioned in the story, one of the unusual aspects of Texas German is the fact that it is based not just on one or several dialects but on a relatively large number.  Also of interest are the words from the “new world” that were invented and imported into Texas German.  Skunks are not known in Germany, so the Texas German came up with Stinkkatze (smelly cat, in standard German Stinktier).

The story calls to mind a recent NY Times article also about German in the Americas, in this case about a German colony in Paraguay, Nueva Germania, founded in 1887 by German anti-Semites, including the sister of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  This is the same sister, Elisabeth, responsible for distorting her brother’s ideas to make them much more anti-Semitic.  According to the article, the town of Nueva Germania today is a model of multilingualism, far removed from Elisabeth’s vision of an Aryan stronghold:

While there are still a few blond-haired children running around, after generations of intermarriage, many of the town’s 4,300 residents have German surnames but are indiscernible from other Paraguayans. Nueva Germania’s dominant language is Guaraní, the indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay; even those families who still hew to old ways, speaking German at home, mix it with high-pitched, nasal Guaraní and some Spanish.

Describing a towering tree in the yard of her farm with few branches around its trunk, making it daunting to climb, Ms. Fischer, the descendant of Nueva Germania’s pioneers, called it simply “ka’i kyhyjeha,” an indigenous term roughly translating as “monkey’s fear.” “Guaraní and German are so different from each other,” she said, “but they mix well for us.”

What a horror for Elisabeth Nietzsche, German mixing well with an indigenous language!