Language

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A Scots Loss

Bobby Hogg, last speaker of Cromarty Scots

What’s lost when languages and dialects die out? It’s of course a sad loss for the local community – part of the cultural identity of the place is gone.  In the news recently (also: NPR) was the death of the last speaker of a Scottish dialect, spoken in a fishing village.  Bobby Hogg lived in Cromarty and spoke all his life the Scots dialect spoken there.  Scotland has a complicated linguistic heritage, with the many Scots dialects, Scottish English variants, and Scottish Gaelic  (a Celtic language).  Scots Gaelic has seen a revival of interest in recent years, witness the popularity of Julie Fowlis, who sings almost exclusively in her native Gaelic.  Her Gaelic version of the Beatles Blackbird was a surprise hit in England and she was chosen to contribute songs to the recent Disney/Pixar’s Brave.  Many English speakers find Scottish accents to be very pleasant, even though sometimes difficult for non-Scots to understand.  In an interview with Glaswegian singer Amy MacDonald, NPR’s Scott Simon told her that he found her English “utterly charming” but was “only understanding every third or fourth word”.  Scots dealing with non-Scots listeners, like Craig Ferguson or Sean Connery, have learned to “tone it down”.

How much would the typical English speaker understand of the Cromarty dialect?  Some would be understandable but sound archaic, such as the use of thou and thee.  One might figure out as well that beginning consonants were sometimes dropped, what becoming ‘at and where ‘ere.  But one might still have trouble understanding “At wid be scekan tiln ken?” (“What do you want to know?”).

What’s lost when language dies is more than just local color. Language is culture, and the Scottish culture, like that of Ireland, is so strong in its linguistic and literary creativity that we all lose something with the disappearance of Cromarty Scots, whether we’d understand Bobby Hogg or not.

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Translator? No

This past week, a number of world leaders spoke at the United Nations, including the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  In reporting his speech, NPR cited parts of his speech, indicating that he was “speaking though a translator”.  Actually, NPR was the one using and needing a translator.  Ahmadinejad was perfectly okay with speaking Persian.  Yet the reporting (not only at NPR) implied through the frequently used wording that his speech could only be understood as rendered “through a translator”.  Is this a picky point that doesn’t actually matter?  I don’t think so – it reinforces the unfortunate American sense that to be understood and taken seriously people need to be using English.  Couldn’t we report Ahmadinejad’s hateful speech as “translated here from the original Persian” or something else along those lines.  It would be great to show that it’s possible to use other languages to communicate.

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Obama at 86%?

A recent survey yielded the following results in terms of voter preference in the upcoming US presidential election:

Barack Obama: 86%
Mitt Romney: 7%

What?  How does this poll have such a lopsided result when all others show the race to be neck and neck?  The answer is that this was a poll in Germany.  It indicates how vastly different the views of our president are in other countries.  His popularity in Germany is common to many European countries.  There are likely a number of reasons for this phenomenon.  Policies viewed as “liberal” or even “socialist” in the US are mainstream in many other cultures.  Universal health care, for example, is something that in many other countries is a given – a fundamental right the government should guarantee.  It’s also the sense of dramatic change that the election of Obama represented, with a transition from the “don’t mess with Texas” perspective to a more internationally cooperative viewpoint.  In fact, what’s important to Europeans and others outside the US is the American president’s foreign policy, usually a matter of little concern to American voters.  For Europeans in that respect there was with Obama a welcome change form a president starting two wars to a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Of course, Obama’s popularity in Europe is unlikely to bring him any votes in the United States.  On the contrary it is likely to be seen as an indication of Obama’s left-leaning politics and kowtowing to foreigners.  The French daily Le Monde’s endorsement of John Kerry in 2004 was seen by many Americans as one more reason not to vote for him.  Even worse was the fact that Kerry was reported to speak French!  Mitt Romney is reported to speak French as well – but you won’t hear him trumpeting that fact on the campaign trail.

It’s a big plus for American politicians to be able to speak some Spanish – but other languages are suspect.  Instead of celebrating the fact that knowledge of another language expands one’s horizons and provides unique insights into one’s own culture, Americans suspect second language speakers of mixed loyalty.  In fact, many Americans would assert that they don’t want their leaders to have wider perspectives or open minds – if you have all the answers you don’t need alternative views.  This is the same kind of mentality that sees the USA as the greatest country on earth without ever having seen any other country.

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Words and Genes

A Turkish origin for Indo-European languages

A possible solution to one of the thorny questions in historical linguistics – where was the ancestor of many European and Indian languages of the Indo-European language family spoken – has been proposed using techniques normally enlisted in battling disesases.  According to findings recently published, the parent “Proto Indo-European” originated in the Anatolia region of present-day Turkey.

The techniques used actually go back to work in 2003 by Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson at the University of Auckland in New Zealand:  ” Genes and words have several similarities, and language evolution has conventionally been mapped using a “family tree” format. Gray and Atkinson theorized that the evolution of words was similar to the evolution of species, and that the ‘cognate’ of words — how closely their sounds and meanings are related to one another — could be modelled like DNA sequences and used to measure how languages evolved.

By extension, the rate at which words changed — or mutated — could be used to determine the age at which Indo-European languages diverged from one another.” (Nature)  The new study adds to the information about when the ancestor language was spoken with the new geographical information, by using ” the type of geography-based computer modelling normally used by epidemiologists to track the spread of disease” (Nature).  Not all linguistis are convinced but as Aktinson comments in the article, it does point to a shift in acceptance of new methodologies in languistic research, indicating a “shift in attitudes towards computational-modelling approaches in historical linguistics, from being just an odd sideshow to a clear focus of attention”

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Just disappear

In a recent interview on Fresh Air, Caitlin Moran talked about what it means to have and raise a child, that “you just disappear into another person”.  I think that’s a great way to describe the experience.  Having a child means of course changing your way of life, but it’s much more – it’s giving up a part of yourself to someone else. You’re a different person as a result.

What struck me on hearing that was that something analogous happens when you become proficient in a second language.  You willingly give up part of yourself – your cultural assumptions, your linguistic certainty, your way of seeing the world – which disappear and are transformed into a new you.  The second language brings with it not just a different set of cultural values but a new perspective on everything you experience.  Of course, just learning a language in the classroom is not likely to provide this kind of experience – you need to live the language by becoming immersed in the target culture.  Having taken students for many years on study abroad programs, I have often seen this kind of transformation take place.

Having a child and learning/living a new language are life-changing. Both offer the chance to gain by losing, giving something up in order to grow and learn.  This isn’t universal in either case unfortunately, but the opportunity is there and waiting.

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“Public viewing”?

German or English?

Watching the German television news yesterday (Tagesthemen), it struck me that the use of English words stuck into the middle of German sentences is getting worse and worse.  The first was a reference in the broadcast to “der zweitgrößte airport” in Bulgaria  (second-largest), the second to a “Stasi connection“.  It’s not that there aren’t perfectly good and normal German words for airport (Flughafen) and connection (Verbindung) – it’s just that the English equivalents are used instead.  For me, the most perplexing aspect of this is that you will hear broadcasts in which an Angliscism such as “airport” will be used, then a few minutes later, the same presenter will use “Flughafen” instead – where is the vaunted German consistency?  If German TV execs like English so much, how about using subtitles rather than dubbing for the many instances in which interviewees speak English?  Or how about going further and, as is done in other European countries, subtitling all English language movies and TV programs?

It isn’t only on TV that this kind of strange and jarring code-switching goes on in Germany.  It’s particularly prevalent in advertising, where it’s maybe more understandable – use of (mostly American) English phrases gives the impression that the company or product is up-to-date.  It’s not surprising either that many Anglicisms show up in German hip-hop music.  I suppose it’s done on the news for the same reason, but I find it very annoying.  I imagine many native English speakers feel the same.

Particularly distressing are the English terms that either don’t exist in English or have a different meaning.  The German for cell phone – Handy – comes to mind as an example of the first and a term heard frequently during the recent European soccer championship – public viewing – for the second.  The phrase when used in Germany refers to an outdoor big screen set up to watch live TV (usually sports).  It’s not just nouns.  Here are some “German” verbs:  downloaden, leaken, trampen (hitchhike).  Of course, other languages import English expressions as well, especially technology terms, but I can’t imagine any others do it to the extent it’s done in German. It’s so common that there is a widely accepted word for the practice:  Denglish (Deutsch + English).  Are there reasons Germans do this more than any other culture?  Is it a sense of linguistic inferiority?

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Stereotype threat

Interesting story today on NPR about research done at the University of Arizona that used an audio recorder carried by volunteers programmed to record for 30 seconds every 12 minutes.  One of the things they investigated with the data collected was the volume of speech of men versus women.  Turns out it’s not the case that women speak dramatically more than men (as the urban myth has it):  “Both men and women speak around 17,000 words a day, give or take a few hundred.”  This is something that Deborah Cameron pointed out in her book, The Myth of Mars and Venus (2008).

Another finding (the main one reported on in the story) is that female scientists talk differently to male and female colleagues: they had “male and female scientists at a research university wear the audio recorders and go about their work. When the scientists analyzed the audio samples, they found there was a pattern in the way the male and female professors talked to one another.”  They found that the women scientists talked about their work in a quite different, and less confident, way to men than to other women.  However, “when the male and female scientists weren’t talking about work, the women reported feeling more engaged.”  The investigators concluded that the women were (likely unconsciously) responding (through hesitation, unassertiveness, self-doubts) to the wide-spread belief that women aren’t as competent as men in science.

This is a phenomenon known as “stereotype threat”, well-known in social psychology.  Experiments have shown that stereotype threat affects performance in a wide variety of domains.  The lead scientist, a German, reported that he experienced it himself when going dancing with his wife (a Mexican) and other Latinos:  everyone knows German can’t hold a candle to Mexicans in salsa dancing and registering that thought in the act of dancing likely negatively affected his performance.

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Vanishing Voices

“ak byzaa”

Wonderful article in the current issue of National Geographic Magazine (how can the magazine be so good and the TV channel so bad?) on endangered languages.  Great examples of vocabulary from sample languages showing the connection between culture and language.  In Tuvan (famous for its throat singers, spoken in Tuva, Russia), for example, the word for future (songgaar) is literally to go back, while the word for the past (burungaar) is to go forward, pointing to the Tuvan belief that the past is ahead and the future behind.  Demonstrating the importance of herded animals in Tuvan culture, there is a word, ak byzaa for a “white calf, less than one year old”, while the term of endearment for a baby is anayim = my little goat. Segments as well on the Aka lanugage of India and the Seri language of Mexico.  Great pictures (as one would expect) and portraits of last speakers of a variety of languages – very sad.

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Bilinguals smarter?

There has been quite a bit of controversy about bilingual education in recent years.  As schools have faced reduced budgets in the wake of the economic downturn, one program looked at critically – along with arts and foreign languages – is bilingual education.  A recent article in the NY Times suggests that we should instead do all we can to encourage bilingualism: “Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age.”  This adds to the recent research that indicates that learning a second language late in life can help fend off the onset of Alzheimer’s.

The new research points in the opposite direction from the common view of bilingualism in recent years, namely that a second language hindered a child’s development, interfering cognitively. The new research, interestingly does not really contradict this view:  “They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.”  In the experiments carried out on bilingualism, bilinguals did better than monolinguals at solving a variety of mental puzzles.  The improvement in cognition points to a heightened ability to monitor the environment. Having to switch back and forth between languages requires speakers to keep track of who and what’s around them – so they can speak English to Mom and Spanish to Dad, for example.  The good news for language learners: “The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age and there is reason to believe that it may also apply to those who learn a second language later in life.”

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Chinese beer: getting the name right matters

Today I ate at J.W. Chen’s in South Bend, Indiana.  After being seated, the waitress asked if she could bring me something to drink.  I ordered the standard Chinese beer imported to the US, “Tsingtao” but used the standard Mandarin pronunciation for 青岛 which is Qīngdǎo.  A little later, the owner/chef came out of the kitchen, sat down at my table, asked me what kinds of Chinese food I liked, and suggested a couple of dishes not on the menu.  Something similar happened to me a while back at an Asian restaurant in Richmond, where I was eating lunch with my then boss.  I again ordered Qīngdǎo.  Shortly thereafter, the waiter broght out eating utensils for us, a fork for my boss, and chopsticks for me.  Chinese people are so surprised (and delighted) when Westerners try to speak their language and even occassionally get the tones right (a rare occurrence for me), that their perception of you and attitude may change significantly.

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Product names: IKEA in Thailand

A local language team transliterates product names into Thai.

Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal on problems Ikea has with using its normal product naming process in other countries. The Swedish names sometimes don’t go over well. In Thai some of the Swedish product names had sexual overtones. Reminiscent of Chevy trying to sell “Nova” (Spanish: no go) cars in Latin America. They would like to keep the Swedish names (often from place names in Sweden) not out of nationalism but to reinforce the Scandinavian origins, with the hope that the association is with quality products.  Product names for American products in China is an interesting challenge.  The products should sound similar to the name in English but the characters used for the sounds should also have an appropriate and positive meaning.  Coca-cola’s name in Mandarin is 可口可乐 (kě kǒu kě lè), with the sound being close and the meaning something like delicious happiness.