Learn a language in 2016, Britons are urged

The British Council has urged people to learn a new language in 2016. Fair enough, it’s a good idea in itself, and such promotion is part of what the BC does. But is it really a good idea for most people? What do they gain from it?

As pointed out in the article, it can make holidays more fun, enabling you to interact with the world around you rather than simply observe it. The advantages of this range from simply asking where the bathroom is or buying a ticket at the railway station, to the less practical but far more interesting ability to read the local newspapers and hear what people are talking about. Understanding what is going on around you and learning what matters to people are a far better way of getting to know a place than just reading the guide book and staring at churches.

A language is a route into a culture, the literature is has produced, the way it is currently moving, how it thinks and behaves, its moral values and personal assumptions. All of this can be quite fascinating and instructive.

A language is an unusual addition to a CV in England, and so can be attractive to an employer. Attractiveness to employers is a very good thing indeed.

There has long been a kind of understanding among English people that any foreigner worth talking to already speaks English. This is true up to a point, but not much of a point. English is the lingua franca of business, culture, politics, communications, and most things that matter to people around the world, but there are a lot of things going on in other languages that we miss, and might not want to miss.

Learning languages is, then, in my opinion, an excellent thing. I make my living helping people to do it, after all. But there is another side to the question.

Learning a language talks a very long time. Several months of immersion, or years of classroom study, to acquire basic competence, and basic competence is rarely enough for anything more than a tourist. As I frequently have to point out, half a language is no use to anyone, so unless you can achieve the right level of competence you are unfortunately wasting your time.

In Spain, professionals and aspiring professionals know that they must have a high level of communicative competence in English, and they work hard to achieve it, and their parents spend a lot of money to help them achieve it. The Spanish education system only aims at providing a B1 level, which is not an independent user level, and is no use to an employer. It might just do for a traveller. In any case, it usually fails to provide even that, which is great for my business, but not so great for the average Spanish student, who can’t afford private tuition over a period of years, or may not realize until it’s too late that what he’s been promised by his high school is not enough.

For a Spanish teenager with ambition, or for their parents, the effort and the investment are certainly worth making. For a young English person, possibly not, unless you have a very specific professional goal in mind, such as diplomacy.

So do listen to the British Council and learn a language this year. You really will be opening up all the possibilities that they offer, but be aware of the time and effort, and money, it will involve. Also, once you learn one language, and open up a culture you were barely aware of, you won’t want to stop.

But that, I imagine, is where the real fun lies.

On the Purpose of Dictionaries

Do not pay attention, child, to the Academics (of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language). They are theologians of language, restricting, confining, limiting, fearing change, without art or imagination. Read the great writers, listen to the great orators, learn from the great communicators, see as great artists have seen. They are the mystics of language, and they will teach you what the inbred pseudo-knowledge of the instructors cannot.

There is an article in El País about the new edition of the  DRAE, which will be published next year. It starts off rather stupidly but in fact it's quite good. It praises it for being 'less sexist', apparently thinking that a dictionary which reflects what some people think language should be and how it should be used is better than one that reflects how it really is and how it is really used. 'Gozar' is still used to mean 'have sex with a woman' and a dictionary that fails to recognize that is not a good dictionary. The editor, Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, states that the point of the new dictionary is to be better, not less sexist, which is a good start. Then the article goes on to acknowledge that language is not what the RAE decrees it to be, and that no one looks at what the Academy has said before speaking or writing. On the whole, as I say, a good article.

The Dictionary has always tried to teach people how it thinks they should speak, and has been largely ignored other than by writers of style manuals and professors of language, who tend to use it as a reference (perhaps because they have to). It does not have anything like the scope of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is a magnificent work of scholarship and, like a swimming pool in Bali with pretty young waitresses serving chilled rum as you float by; once dipped into it's hard to get out of.

There are better dictionaries of the Spanish language. María Moliner's is probably the best, and for etymology the six volumes of Corominas are unequalled. The DRAE, on the other hand, is for people who want their homework to get a good grade, or their article to be accepted by a newspaper. A fine and useful work, but with a specific purpose to define what is good and evil in language.

On 'Stringvestites'

I recently wrote- rambled would be more like it- about nonce words, because of something I heard watching ‘Are You Being Served’. Well, Mrs Hickory and I like a bit of old-fashioned British comedy, so we returned last night to Mr Humphries and co., and there was he was in a sailor costume, explaining how he had had to fight off the attentions of a number of people including a ‘*stringvestite’. My linguistic antennae twitched.

From the context it appeared to mean a working-class homosexual who doesn’t look like one. Those who remember that particular piece of ill-conceived clothing, or were forced to wore one, as was my case, are unlikely ever to forget it, but I don't remember any association with homosexuality. The Urban Dictionary's definition doesn't seem quite right, but of course it's probably a much more recent use of the term.

*Google knows almost nothing else about the word, but I have found some comment on its use in the series. There is probably no subject that someone is not prepared to make an idiot of himself over in the Guardian, and there is certainly no subject in or out of this world that doesn't have dedicated Internet forums. Here Matthew Parris is quoted at length, speaking more intelligently (scroll down to the end). Neither sheds much light on John Inman's use of the word, but their reactions to it are interesting in themselves. I don't call Stuart Jeffries an idiot, by the way, or Mathhew Parris intelligent, because I agree with one or disagree with he other. Matthew Parris gives a personal interpretation of the character of Mr Humphries, and some similar characters and performers, from his memories of being a secret homosexual in the 70's. He doesn't claim that everyone should share his experience or accept his arguments, he just explains how it was for him. The Guardian writer, on the other hand, appears simply to tell his readers what they want to hear. He might be right, and Matthew Parris wrong, but he hasn't helped us to understand anything.

When a footnote becomes longer than the entire post, some editing may be required. Stopping is also a good idea.

Language is Communication, and Communication Will Never Die

Man as a species loves to communicate. Without more or less constant communication we would literally not be human. Language is primarily, overwhelmingly, used to create and maintain social relationships, day by day, minute by minute. It is what we do. Most, the enormous majority, of what we say to each other communicates no information that would be useful or recognisable to anyone outside the conversation. It exists to oil the cogs of the social machinery, which rust very quickly indeed without it.

It is not possible to say that language evolved through selective pressure on well-maintained social relations, but it was almost certainly important from the beginning.

Mr Facebook, Mr Twitter, Mr Google and others, including Mr Bell, not to mention the whole of Hollywood, have made a lot of money by betting that we would swallow anything that gave us something to talk about, however insignificant in itself, and any new means of talking.

Regular Facebook users can have hundreds of 'friends', many of whom they have never met, and with whom they do not share a common culture, country or native language. This blog and a million blogs and websites, are written for anyone who might want to read them.

The new possibilities for communicating with people of whose very existence we would not have been aware even 20 years ago is creating new problems with language... Which the great majority of us solve effortlessly. Because that is what humans are good at. To overcome barriers to communication, to successfully employ a strategic competence, as the theorists say, is as natural to us as beathing, and it is why apparent changes in the way a particular language is used are not going to stop us from talking to each other.

And in many cases it is in our economic interest to communicate well, or we have some other reason not directly related to the love of communication per se. We want to get on with someone, get to know them, impress at a job interview, keep a client, teach a class or give a speech well, calm someone down, win an argument, get permission to do something… All of this can be usefully done by using the skill we have in social communication. Yes, some are better than others, practice and experience make you better, but in general, we, as a species, are very good at this, and at learning to do it when we encounter a new situation.

Lovers of elegance, of balance, of that beauty of form and structure in language so hard to define but so easy for the discerning to recognise, lovers of specific forms of linguistic, prosodic, phonetic or cultural purity in language, lovers of a familiar idiolect, known from childhood and crafted by experience and study, will, no doubt, continue to be dissappointed by the great mass of humanity. But while we love to communicate, we live to communicate, language will only change; it will neither die nor decay.

Hólmganga

From the Language Log again

(apw palin oikwi glossees)

·  Dan Lufkin said,

April 22, 2012 @ 11:46 am

I was flummoxed when I read on my Kindle William Miller's excellent book Losing It, a meditation on getting old and the Icelandic sagas (the concept works out better than you would think), to see that Brennu-Njál was rendered as "Njdl" and Hávamál as "Hdvamdl". Not only that, every ð became a "5″.

I reported this outrage to the author, who checked and told me that (as I'd expected) the fault lay with Amazon's OCR processing. I suggested challenging the editor to a hólmganga. Alas, we have no word in English for an axe fight with both contestants standing on a islet in a stream. I haven't heard yet how that came out.

You could question the need, in modern English, for a single word to refer to this concept. Nevertheless, it tells us a great deal about Old Norse culture that they had such a specific name for the standard way of resolving dispute. I suppose you could translate it roughly as ‘binding arbitration’, but the cultural baggage would have to be explained as well, or important nuances would be lost.
Mrs Hickory is studying Old Norse, in order to read the Sagas, and although she didn't remember this word, she confirms that they are largely concerned with plotting how to smite those who get in your way and display the pile of bones where interested parties can best see them and learn from them.
Politics at its most dramatic and poetic.

Update: I cut and pasted the comment from Dan Lufkin, and then wrote the atribution to Language Log above it. For some reason it came out in Greek letters, so in brackets below it I wrote the same attribution in Greek but with Roman letters. When I posted, however, the first line came out in the Roman alphabet, making the phrase in brackets pointless. Oh well, I thought; stet). Then I happened to look at the blog in Chrome, and the first line was suddenly in Greel characters. In short, if you read this in Chrome, Safari or IE you'll see Greek, if you use Firfox you'll see Roman. Why, I have no idea. That's t'internet for you.

Translator Complains about other Translators

I have a little list, with the excuse that it's useful in teaching and translation, of words and phrases that are often poorly translated in US or UK films shown on Spanish television.
It is common to be shaken out of the little world that the action has created for you by an expression that is quite obviously not the one the character would have used at that moment. As a native English speaker I find it fairly easy to work out what the original line was and what the character should have said, but by then any narrative magic has gone.
This is especially striking because there are many good voice actors in Spain (often much better than the faces) and the distributors take pride in recording the dubbed soundtracks very well. Forget any experience you might have seen with dubbed films in English, as it is rarely done and usually very poor. In Spain the Spanish version is often better than the original, especially if the original was from the US. (The inability of American actors to speak properly will doubtless be the subject of another rant at some point.)
But the budget for translation must be tiny, and the work is rushed through; easy, standardized solutions are used, rather than trying to be creative and seek something smooth and natural. The result is that bad lines are put in the mouths of good actors, which is artistically strange, and if artistic considerations are not particularly relevant here, commercial considerations certainly are, and don’t appear to be well served.
On the other hand, these expressions become so common in the experience of people who watch a lot of American TV series, that some of them have become normal in the Spanish language, and are close to becoming standard. Life imitating art, bad art in this case.
So here is a list of the commonest problems, which won’t be of any interest to most people, but it will serve as a reference for me, at least:

‘Oh, yes’- is usually translated as ‘Ohh, sí’, which may seem obvious, but when it is used to confirm something the other speaker has expressed doubt or surprise about, what people actually say is ‘sií, si’, which has completely different phonology and euphony.

‘Ignore’- the verb ‘ignorar’ in Spanish means ‘to not know, to be ignorant of sth’. But the English meaning has become standard as well, despite the protests of many (I don’t like it much, either). And this particular Anglicism can be traced to the television.

‘You’d better (do sth)’- this is a common, natural and unobtrusive way of giving advice, or sometimes stern orders, in English. When translated as ‘será mejor que hagas…’ it is neither natural nor unobtrusive, as it virtually parks a large lorry across the entire dialogue. Exactly how you would translate it depends on the context, but a direct imperative could work, or ‘por qué no..’, or ‘deberías…’. ‘Ser(i)á mejor que hagas…’ would only work as a translation of ‘you’d be better off doing…it’d be better if you did…’

‘Drawing room’- this is a strange one, because you would have thought someone would have noticed that nobody ever draws in the drawing room, but I have often heard it translated as ‘sala de dibujo’, which is literally a room for drawing in. Very lazy.

‘We’ll/let’s meet/meet (me) in your office at 6’- Again this natural and unobtrusive expression is often rendered by the clanking, unnatural phrase ‘nos reuniremos/reúnete conmigo en tu despacho a las 6’. Why? I scream at the screen. Why? Do these translators ever listen to the way real people speak? Do the actors themselves not complain that their jaws rebel against the attempt to articulate this nonsense? Does anybody care? Normal people say ‘nos vemos en tu despacho a las seis/pásate/acércate al despacho…’ and so on. It really isn’t hard.

‘How annoyed were you when the police car ran over your cat?’- Spanish has no structure equivalent to this (extremely annoying) journalistic formulation, for which we should be grateful. The great minds taxed with rendering it into Spanish are, it appears, unequal to the job of cutting out a word or two and treating it as ‘were you annoyed…’ which usually works fine. ‘Hasta qué punto se sentía molesto…?’ can work once, possibly, but only once. ‘Cuán molesto estabas…’ didn’t even work in Mexico in 1960. No real person has ever uttered that line.

‘Arrest’- the word for what the police do to suspects is ‘detener.’ ‘Arrestar’ has no legal meaning and is not normally used in Spanish, but when it is it just means ‘to stop’. See ‘ignore’.

‘Report’- the verbs meaning ‘to present information in a formal way to an interested party’ or ‘to tell the authorities about some naughtiness’ are ‘informar’ and ‘denunciar’ respectively. The nouns are ‘informe’ and ‘denuncia’. ‘Reportar’ is more or less a neologism in these senses, but is now entering normal use, because of the television. See ‘ignore’.

‘Pity she won’t live, but who does?’- elliptical verb clauses of this kind are a serious problem because they don’t exist in Spanish. Basically the auxiliary verb cannot have an emphatic function. There is no general solution to this problem, and no easy one even in specific sentences. To get the right balance of meaning, emphasis and rhythm requires careful thought and often a complete recasting of the sentence. The example sentence (a lifetime subscription to this blog to the first reader who knows where it comes from) was translated, ‘Una pena que no vivirá ¿pero quién vive?’ I think this was probably the right choice here. Other solutions involve the use of particles or changing the order of the statements, or simply stopping after a sí or no, if there is one, and if the sense allows it. It takes work to get this right.

‘do what’s right’- in Hollywood characters always seem to have the luxury of knowing what is right, and constantly exhort other characters to do it. ‘Ya godda do what’s right, ya know,’ ‘Yeah, I only want to do what’s right,’ with tortured brow muscles indicative of great sincerity. This will inevitably be translated as ‘Sólo quiero hacer lo correcto.’ ‘Hacer lo correcto’ has both a neuter pronoun and a trilled liquid, both of which reek of insinsecrity (look, they just do, OK), and more importantly, that is not what real Spanish speakers, the ones who’ve been doing it all their lives, say in that situation. You may be noticing a theme here. Your ears are regularly assaulted by the sound of people saying things which human beings do not in fact say.

We finish with some paternal advice to fresh-faced translators eager to do justice to their script: if the likely reaction of the character the line is addressed to is, ‘eh, why’d he say that?’, rather than what the director intended, then you need to try again.
And some advice to commissioning editors: sack that fresh-faced crew and hire someone who knows what they’re doing (I’m in the phonebook).

Passive Voice Day

It is reported at the Language Log that today, 27 April, has been declared The Day of the Passive Voice by Shaun’s blog, an idea considered by your humble blogging hedgehog to be finely wrought. Readers and the general public are encouraged to celebrate the versatility and creative potential of the passive voice by incorporating it into their writings on this day, especially given the way in which it is so frequently denigrated, falsely and ignorantly, by people who have been told that if it is excluded from their work, it will be enlivened and better understood by their readers.

That the passive voice is greatly misunderstood, and often misidentified, by its critics, is exemplified beautifully by the comments to the original article at Shaun’s blog in most of which a tremendous confusion about how the passive voice is constructed and what it is understood to mean can be easily observed by anyone who is not blinded by the deluge of nonsense spouted by self-appointed stylists.

The articles, and the challenge contained within them, and this post, are commended to the interest and ingenuity of such readers as might be inspired by them.

No Coffin Should be Without One

From John Hawks, quoting this paper (emphasis mine):

Only one other ancient burial site is known for Beringia: Ushki Lake 1, in Kamchatka, Russia (34–37) (Fig. 1). Ushki Lake 1, Level 7 (Ushki L7) (~13,000 cal yr B.P.) contained an adult burial associated with bone beads in a rock-lined ochre-filled pit separated from the house structures. Ushki Lake 1, Level 6 (Ushki L6) (~12,000 cal yr B.P.) is roughly contemporaneous with USRS Component 3 and contains two unburned burials of children within two separate houses (35, 36). One child burial contained ochre, a pendant, a mat of lemming incisors, and numerous microblades and wedge-shaped cores (the second burial is undescribed) (35). Thus, the USRS burial context is more like Ushki L6 than L7.

I have informed Mrs Hickory that, before she spends the insurance money, I wish her to lay me to rest on the finest mat of lemming incisors that Siberia can produce.

And talking of John Hawks, this post will be particularly interesting to fellow glossogony buffs.

The Origins of Language

To read theories of language development is to do a particular kind of anthropology. Imagine a village in some remote part of Borneo, and a total eclipse of the sun on a bright spring morning.

‘The sun is dead! The sun is dead!’ will shout the children and the more excitable women, whilst running about in panic.

‘The sun has been extinguished,’ the more earnest young men will report to the leaders, as calmly as possible, because at times you have to report to someone, even when they have just seen it for themselves.

‘It’ll be back. It always does,’ will opine someone’s grandmother with equanimity and the air of infinite sagacity that comes with knowing you’ll be dead before you can be proved wrong.

‘The Gods are angry, you must sacrifice and obey us,’ will say the priests, with slightly overtheatrical authority.

‘Listen to the priests, they know what to do,’ will proclaim the King, in the tone of one who will know what to do with the priests if anything goes wrong.

‘Gather round, children, and I’ll tell you where the sun has really gone,’ will say the only old man the young listen to, tapping the side of his nose, and mentally organizing stories about dragons and celestial fire.

And none of them in fact has the faintest idea of what is really happening.* The available information about the subject of language evolution is so limited, even by the standards of palaeoanthropology, that anything you say is as likely to be right as it is wrong, and is untestable by any normal scientific means.

Just to give a taste of how tricky this is, there are no clues in modern language as to how it developed. All known languages are equally complex, capable of expressing anything that anyone might want to say in them. There is no such thing as a primitive language, nothing that might permit us to study older, developmental stages.

Cognition doesn’t fossilize. We can measure the size of the brain by taking endocasts of skulls, but they don’t tell us much about its structure, and given that there are many animals with much larger brains than ours, size may not be as important as we tend to assume, even in the brains of our close relatives. The Neanderthals had slightly larger brains than we do, but it is not clear that they had greater cognitive ability, and the current assumption is that they didn’t. The detailed structure of the brain that allowed for levels of cognition capable of producing language might have evolved very recently.

The larynx and the hyoid can fossilize, but to say that a given hominid has a lowered larynx similar to ours, allowing greater voicing and control of sound produced, or that it has the bone that we have at the root of the tongue doesn’t mean that Homo neanderthalensis could do what we can do with it.

And the theories are mostly wild speculation, shots in the dark. A darkness the size of Wales, illuminated by half a dozen Zippos. At least we’ve got beyond the Heave Ho and the Bow Wow theories, which for some time were taken rather more seriously than their originators intended, partly, perhaps, because there wasn’t much else. Here and here are a couple of papers which summarize the state of play.

Nowadays you will hear of the attention triangle, universal grammar, the search for recursion encoded in the genome, and similar ideas. Observation of how children learn suggests the stimuli they are exposed to may be insufficient for them to identify how language works, and so it must be at least partly genetic. Others disagree, saying that the amount of information they are exposed to is far greater than is supposed, and is sufficient for the purpose.

Is language an entirely learned behaviour, a cultural artefact like art, humour or music, an accidental by-product of our high level of cognition, a spandrel? Would two babies brought up by a deaf-mute on a desert island develop a language and communicate through it? There is anecdotal evidence of children brought up in a group without any stimulus who did indeed develop communication systems. And similar anecdotal evidence suggests, on the other hand, that such a child on its own will not learn to speak, which further suggests that the mind wants to communicate with others, not with itself. But all of this is little more than speculation, and the experiments, though perfectly practicable, might meet some social resistance.

There is nothing in nature remotely comparable to human language. No other animal communicates with syntax. Chimpanzees have been taught to express their immediate desires by pointing or making signs, but they have a very limited range, no spontaneity and no ability to combine ideas or represent the abstract, nor any interest in doing so. Animal communication bears no discernible relation to ours, beyond the trivial fact that they are aware of each other’s existence. It tells us nothing about the nature or origin of speech.

Noam Chomsky’s answer to this problem was a Deus ex machine. (He does the same with politics, stating that the solution to the world’s problems is x, and ignoring reality altogether.) He decreed that there must exist a Language Acquisition Device in our brains**. However I process this idea, it refuses to become anything but a name for the problem it is supposed to solve.

So we know almost nothing about how language evolved, but it exists, and it is extraordinary, and we would very much like to know how it works and where we came from. It might take a while.

 *It’s like listening to journalists talking, or reading the comment columns in newspapers. Even now, with interesting things happening in Egypt, we get people writing about it from thousands of miles away who are simply inventing stories based on their own and their paper’s prejudices and what they can pick up from Al Jazeera and Twitter. Well, we can all do that, we don’t need them. There are one or two who claim to be in Cairo itself, but they’re talking to the protestors, and hearing only what each individual protestor thinks it’s about, which is not lacking in interest but it doesn’t tell us anything about the political and social situation and gives no clue as to where it all might lead.

**The WP article isn't very gfood but I can't link to the original paper or find a better descripotion of the concept.

Communicative Context and the New Journalism

I wonder to what extent newspaper journalists, subs and editors are aware of the way that the context of the communication they engage in with the reader has changed in the last few years.

Those who work for the media, especially the national media, have always been terribly parochial, tending to think of those media in general, and themselves in particular, as the centre of the universe, and will frequently introduce columns with phrases like ‘unless you’ve been on Mars this week you will know...’ when they really mean ‘unless you haven’t been slavishly following the popular press and the telly this week you will know...’, but now the major newspaper websites, and to a lesser extent the broadcast media, have an audience which, while it may be no larger than it was, is much more widespread, and shares the background, and especially the immediate cultural background, of the producer to a much lower degree than before. The context of communication has changed greatly, but they don’t seem to have noticed.

‘Joanna Yeates did not eat pizza’, as a headline is a little underwhelming, unless you know who she is and why her pizza is in the news. I didn’t, and neither would many readers of the Telegraph from outside Britain. I clicked on the headline only because it was so obviously not news that there had to be more to it than that.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8268205/Joanna-Yeates-did-not-eat-pizza-she-bought.html

A reader in Britain probably would know about Joanna Yeates because they would read the paper for national news and would also probably watch British television. But the reader from outside Britain does not necessarily read for information about crime stories; from my perspective that is no more than local gossip, and of little interest. And if I do not have the cultural references even to understand the headline, I am not going to be interested in the story.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan/18/dont-look-now-red-coat

‘We all remember the little red coat from Don’t Look Now’. Er, no we don’t. I haven’t a clue what that line is about, nor who Roeg is, nor why any of this should matter. And maybe it doesn’t matter, or only as much as you think it does, but though the second case is trivial, and the first is not, in both cases the writer intends for the articles to be taken seriously, and I cannot take them seriously because the writers fail to recognise the context of our communication. They assume it is as it has always been, and my point is that I am not unusual, an outlier that it isn’t worth changing your practice to accommodate; I am one of an increasingly large part of the readership, and the press will need to learn to communicate with people like me if they aren’t going to disappear into the ether.

And be there no puddles up yonder...?

Over at the Language Log a blog I can't link to because I don't remember which it was yesterday, there was a post about a speech by Barack Obama given at the funeral of a girl from Arizon who was killed by a nut who was upset with a local politician. I'm sure you know the story. The article quoted a part of that speech, and I was struck by what, mulling it over later, I realized is probably the oddest line I have ever seen in a piece of political discourse. He said, 'If there are rain puddles in heaven, then Cristina is jumping in them today.'

It is, of course, more than likely that I am missing some context here, but it is still a very strange thing to say. The address- I didn't hear it, I only read the part quoted by the Log blogger- seems to have satisfied a number of very difficult conditions and restraints. Whoever wrote it was given a task on the following lines: it's got to be simple and elegant; it's got to reflect the age and implied attributes of the deceased; it must take as read that everyone hearing is united in feeling what it expresses, but it must make some implicit mention anyway, just in case; it must place Cristina rather than Obama at the focus of its attention, and it must at least keep the popularity index stable; oh, and it must contain something quotable that even the kids can understand.

There is broad agreement that it managed to do all this. I still find the line extraordinary, however. What if there are no puddles in heaven? Is he condemning her to an eternity stomping around in Wellington boots feeling angry and disappointed. Why puddles? Did he pull them out of nowhere. Why assume that she is in Heaven, or that she is happy to be there? Surely she would be happier to be still down here, and not cruelly summoned to paradise. Puddles are, at most, in these circumstances, a paliative of sadness, not an aid to happiness.

Anyhow, this has been your blogging hedgehog's way of not contributing to the blast of noise booming out of the empty vessels that the press and the blogosphere are so filled with. It is, is it not, so much easier to be right when you have no idea what you're talking about? For this reason I ask a question which it might in fact be possible  to answer.

So why puddles?

Apes and Wikipedians

In a previous post I said that I wouldn't be prepared to argue with a judge about the difference in semantic scope between the use in technical, legal and general contexts of the word 'murder'. The reason is that a judge is very unlikely to see that, beyond the highly charged and specific meaning that it has in his field, it might be used by other people at other times in a rather looser sense.

This is a very common problem, as can be seen from this comment thread on the Wikipedia article 'Ape'. It's very long and it all gets very confused, they start again several times and they still haven't reached any kind of conclusion after all these years. Note that nobody, at any point, is arguing about the taxonomy of Homo sapiens, the entire dispute is about the meaning of the word 'ape'. Most of the participants assume that the way they use it is the only correct one, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is a bit stupid. At different times a couple of reasonable people, who have seen the problem, try to explain it and to mediate. They are shouted down, lose their tempers themselves, and get banned.

The debate is complicated by the fact that many of the participants have a profound horror being seen to pander to creationsim, and so will not recognise that in general use people tend to mean non-human hominoidea when they speak of 'apes'. This is a simple matter of fact, but since most of the major contributors are involved in the field of hominid research they are used to using 'ape' in an inclusive sense, and do not realize that most people don't.* Add the fear of God and they come across as rather stupid, blinkered people.

As I said, the argument is not about what humans are; it is purely about the meaning of the word 'ape'. Few of the contributors appreciate that context is everything, and no attempt is made to establish what the context actually is. Such is the absurdity that the slanging match has reached that the more benighted of them have refused even to countenance a clarification in the introduction, explaining the sense in which the word is used in the body of the article, because to recognise that some people might understand it differently might be seen as pandering to fundamentalism. In other words, the inability to see beyond their own idiolect has led to an encyclopedia article refusing to define its own name.

Specialists often fall into this trap, of not appreciating that words which to them have a technical meaning are used by others in non-technical senses. This is true even of words that were coined for specialist fields and then leak into general use, and it is much truer of words that were taken from common language are applied in particular fields to clearly defined concepts.

No, I didn't get involved in the row. I saw immediately what the problem was and that no one was going to listen however carefully I explained it.

*Even this isn't true. I'm not an expert in any relevant field, but I am a very interested amateur in palaeoanthroplogy, and I read a lot of papers by experts and specialists, researchers and academics working in the field who are fully au fait with the state of our knowledge of the origin of Homo sapiens and have absolutely no religious axe to grind. On many occasions it is possible to read the phrase 'apes and humans', or to see 'ape' used when the context clearly shows that they are excluding humans. They are quite obviously not trying to suggest that woman was made from man's rib, they are just relaxed about the whole thing and only specify more precisely when there is a need to be unambiguous.

On Fait la Chasse du Porc Sauvage

Regular readers will know that one of the ways your humble blogging hedgehog keeps himself in insects is by working as a translator and interpreter. These are two rather different skills, in fact, and I more a translator than an interpreter. Interpreting at the highest level is something that needs to be practised constantly or you lose the sharpness and instant command of lexis and nuance which is absolutely essential. An interpreter who hesitates is lost, as the tide of words at a conference or business meeting waits for no man.

Proverbs aside, I don’t practise constantly and I don’t interpret at the highest level, but I can do it in other, slightly less demanding circumstances and from time to time I am contracted for that purpose.

Another thing about interpreting, which you would have thought was fairly obvious but apparently isn’t, is that interpreters specialise; you interpret from one, or sometimes two, specific languages, into your own native tongue. It is not simply a question of knowing some generalised ‘foreign’. There are people who fail to grasp this, including people who should know better. I work for the courts occasionally and the last time they rang it was to interpret for a man who spoke Hindi and Bengali, but not English.

‘So you can’t help, then?’ asked the judge, getting to the point in a sharp and practical manner. Since the accused seemed an educated chap it crossed my mind to try it in Sanskrit, if only because it would have made a great story, but I could see it ending rather badly, and I dared not.

‘Afraid not, Your Honour,’ I declared. ‘Maybe we’ll have better luck next time.’ And I was sent on my way. They paid me anyway, since it’s someone else’s money.

On another occasion I was asked to interpret for the judges at a dog show. It wasn’t for the show itself, where communication seems to be done by a form of sign language, but beforehand, to keep them busy and stop them getting in the way while everything was organised. A simple enough task, it should have been. Except that they were French, and spoke no English. Again we had hit the problem of generalised foreign.

Now I read French well enough, and I speak it after a fashion, but that fashion can be seen in the title of this post, which is a verbatim answer I gave when asked what the men loading rifles into their cars were doing. Experts in the Gallic tongue well notice there is room for improvement. Had I had time to think, I would have made a better attempt, I would at least have remembered the word ‘sanglier’, but that’s the thing about interpreting- you don’t have time to think.

So there I was, through no fault of my own, taking a professional fee for doing the job of a rank amateur. To point out that I wasn’t really up to the task would have been useless, as the organisers were far too busy to look for a replacement, so I just got on with it. It went remarkably well, in the end. Everything that needed to be communicated was communicated, they were kept away from the preparations for the show, and they went off quite happy.

Due to another little mix-up of that kind I suspect there is a farmer somewhere outside Dublin trying to raise pigs on hazel nuts, and wondering why they are so expensive to feed and the meat doesn’t taste anything like what he tasted in the south of Spain, when I told him that’s what they fed on.

It all serves to make life a bit more interesting.

The Indus Script- Is It Or Isn't It?

Brawling scientists, Hindu nationalism, Markov chains, mysterious ancient symbols that one man believes he can interpret... there’s a Dan Brown novel in there, I think. There’s certainly a fascinating story, which I shall attempt to explain.

The Indus Valley scripts are associated with a people about whom little is known except that they lived in that area around 4,000 years ago. Where they came from, where they went, whether they sliced their tomatoes along the equator or through the poles... these are things which may never be known. And the language they spoke is also unknown.

A lot of people, for many different reasons, would like to think they know the answers, and to this end a lot of work has been done to analyse the symbols that have survived on a number of clay artefacts, a few thousand symbols in a few hundred inscriptions, most no more than three or four symbols long.

The script is unknown, as is the language that it encodes, and, given the scarcity of information that can be extracted from such a small amount of data, that is not going to change unless a bi-lingual tablet turns up identifying is as an already known language.

It is far from certain that the symbols represent language at all. That is a point which might, at some time, be determined, but so far it is still in doubt. It matters (to the people who care about these things) because writing was probably developed independently in only three or four places in history. If the Indus script encodes a language, it would be another one, and it would mean that the Indus Valley civilization was literate. This matters not only to linguisticians and historians, but also to various flavours of Indian nationalist.

Back in 2000 Michael Witzel and Steven Farmer wrote a paper demolishing the pet theory of N. S. Rajaram, who claimed to have translated these inscriptions, in the course of proving that the Harappan civilization used domesticated horses. It is generally believed that horses were introduced to that area much later. You wonder why Witzel and Farmer even bothered with the witterings of someone who clearly doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, but it served as a warm-up for their 2003 paper, with Richard Sproat, which attempted to show that the Indus script could not be a language, and more generally that the Harappan people could not have been literate.

Last year, Rajesh Rao and others used a technique involving Markov chains to try to detect the sort of structure they thought the inscriptions would have if they really were language. They measured the conditional entropy (a term pinched from physics but the concept is well defined in information theory and computational linguistics) of the script, in a way that they describe in the notes to the paper.

The entropy measured for the script was in the same narrow range as the (very few) real language scripts that they analysed in the same way, and far from the values of the control scripts they tested, which were artificially produced, one to have very rigid structure and the other to be almost completely random. They thus announced that this was evidence that the Indus script was a written language.

But is it? They have no way of knowing how significant the presence in that narrow range of the entropy values is. Without analysing a far larger number of natural scripts that do and do not encode language, it is not clear that any script that is used to encode information in a real situation can fall outside that range. It is easy to construct, and indeed to find, scripts which that do not represent language, but which fall in that same range. It may well be that any script that contains sufficient structure to contain information, whether or not it is given linguistically, and is employed by a real person, will tend to be in that range. The paper does not consider what the result actually means, or if it means anything at all.

Richard Sproat answered with a paper of his own, which was answered by Rao, and reanswered by Sproat. They was also a bit of vigorous debate hosted by Rahul Siddharthan at this (excellent) blog, and Mark Liberman at the Language Log got involved as well. Rob Lee et al have tried to apply the same analysis to the Pictish inscriptions, with similar results.

Sproat descended into anti-nationalist ranting, more it would seem from exasperation than from lack of arguments or from axe-grinding. Though he has made a heavy professional investment in the illiteracy of the Harappan civilization he is clearly a serious scientific researcher (and so is Rao).

Rao et al have now expanded on their previous work, fleshing out the background and context of their results in order to give their method much greater interpretative power. The matter is far from decided, and when the scientists finally agree, one way or the other, is when the nationalists will take over the fight. It promises to be fun.

The Queen's English

Real life, in the form of a lot of work and the computer sliding down the curtain have meant no blogging for a while. And even now all I can offer is the worst kind of post, a collection of links and quotes from myself. But anyway, here we are. One of the things I had intended to write about was this, from the Times. (Another, of course, was the football.*)

The Queen's English Society, as you will discover if you take the trouble to peruse their website, are an ignorant, barely literate bunch who think the function of language is to show how clever they are at learning rules, and to express a stupid and sinister kind of nationalism. They have no idea how communication works, or of what English really is, as opposed to how it's spoken down their street and what their old teacher used to upbraid them on years ago. Even if an English Academy were a good idea these would be the very worst people to run it. I even wondered if it might be a send-up of the Plain English Campaign (who seem to have got a lot better recently, by the way, although for some reason they've lost the article), but it isn't. It is actually intended to be taken seriously.

Before I could get round to posting, a lot of other people had already done it: Stan Carey of Sentence First does it here, John Macintyre of the Baltimore Sun does it here (both added to blogroll), and Mark Liberman does it at the Language Log.

Self-quotation time: this is the comment I left at Stan's place:

"‘You can’t make a record if you ain’t got nothing to say,’ as Willy Nelson done sung.

Mr Estinel clearly has nothing to say, and so, having little use for the language as a vehicle of communication, he treats it as an exercise in the application of rules, which he doesn’t seem to understand in any case. Contrast his comments with those of Mr Gorman, who does have something to say and expresses it well (though he might express it better if he ignored the advice of the QES- note the self-conscious avoidance of contracted forms).

Another underlying, and quite wrong, assumption, is that children learn to communicate by being told rules in the classroom. They don’t, they learn by observing how others communicate, trying, failing, trying again, and discovering how different listeners interpret their words.

Another little clue for Mr Estinel: context is everything; and I do mean everthing. When (young) people text, tweet, Messenger, Tuenti, scribble postcards or just talk to each other, much of the language they use is not only non-standard and largely incomprehensible to anyone outside the group, but is in fact mostly meaningless. This is because it’s not intended to convey factual information, but simply to express their pleaure at being together."

and this is what I said at You Don't Say:

"I don't think it's worth taking them remotely seriously. Their website is terrible; it's very poorly written, full of errors and clunking style, it's parochial, predictable and ignorant.

Peevology is a lower-middle class obsession. These are poorly.educated people striving for something to feel snobbish about. By all means laugh at them, but don't worry about them.

Or it could just be about money, a modern form of tele-evangelsim."

They sum up what I don't have time to develop in full.

The main reason there is no point in having an Acandemy of the English Language is that no one would listen to it. Where such Academies exist they provide a rich source of discussion for the sort of people who like to argue about these things, and they make life a lot easier for lazy writers of style manuals, but for the vast majority of speakers, including professional writers and communicators, they are a useless irrelevance. Spain has one, now linked to all the other Spanish-speaking countries that have created similar Academies, and I don't think I have ever used its dictionary or its grammar to determine how I express something (even its spelling is prescriptive). I do use usage manuals and historical dictionaries (and I tend to have Mrs Hickory vet anything that's for publication) and I check terms and expressions and stylistic choices against those used in similar kinds of writing, but the Academy can't help because it doesn't tell you how people communicate in a particular context, it just tells you very broadly how it thinks they should.

As I said before somewhere, language is not in danger because we will always find ways to achieve communication when we want to. In communiction theory (a dry field of linguistics that consists mainly of stating the obvious) a number of sub-competences of the global communicative competence are identified, one of which is the strategic competence, whose role is to identify and solve problems in communication. It varies from person to person, naturally, but we all have it, and anyone whose intellectual and social skills are superior to Robert Green's goalkeeping instinctively knows how to do it.

*I haven't watched either of England's games at the World Cup (or Spain's, for that matter) and I can't get too depressed that we haven't been able to beat a couple of teams that don't know one end of a ball from the other. Footie in the summer doesn't seem to matter, even if the cricket is a bit weak this year.

But one thing that strikes me is that someone has clearly made a fortune by convincing South Africans not only that football has always been an inseparable part of their culture, but also that they have always watched it while blowing loudly on an overpriced plastic trumpet. I bet they didn't use them five years ago. A triumph of marketing, but then, there's one born every minute. (And also, football is fun. That's the point of it. It's why we watch it. It doesn't have to make sense or be historically accurate.)

On The Reliability of Oral Tradition*

For a couple of weeks I’ve been trying to put together some thoughts on the role of oral tradition in human society, with no success. This failure has been caused by the need to do a great deal of research before pretending I know what I’m talking about, and then to sift through the data, theories and speculations of others to try to make sense of it all.

It occurs to me that I don’t have the time to do this, nor, given the amount of rubbish written on the subject, do I have the interest to work my way through it all, so I offer a kind of stream of consciousness piece, a random, swirling collection of thoughts that come into my mind when I think about the question, and which are just as likely to be nonsense as much of what I have read.

A friend of mine, who does know a lot about narrative tradition, and has done the research, happens to be preparing a lecture/paper on this very subject, including cognitive and neurological aspects, but I shan’t pinch his ideas, so you’ll have to make do with mine.

We like to hear stories, to be told stories and to a lesser extent to create stories. Stories entertain us, they help to pass the time. Stories help us to escape from life, to believe that somewhere, better, more fun lives are being led, and to imagine that one day we might be part of them. Those who create stories can have a great deal of power. Those who control the creators of stories can have a great deal more. But stories were not invented to be used as a tool by those who sought power; that would, I think, be too great a conceptual leap for human intelligence to make, dangerous as it is to rule out such possibilities. No, the desire for stories, for ornamental falsehood, is instinctive to the human mind, and I want to consider why this is so, and how this instinct serves us, and serves to control us.

As I have said many times before here and in other places (the pub mostly, and also in my unpublished collected works) we need to believe things to be true, but we are not very good at seeking it out, and we are often afraid of what it might turn out to be. So we invent things we would like to be true, and we call them truths. Often we do not invent them ourselves, but rather we take them from others, who may not be telling us their real beliefs, but giving us stories that it is useful to them to have us accept as true. Most people cannot distinguish truth from belief, or understand that there are categories of truth, each applicable to a different type of understanding.

Anyhow, oral tradition. One of the original uses of story-telling, as shown by primitive tribes even today, is to provide a sense of identity, to describe the origins of a people and establish a foundation for its behaviour and customs, including its concept of right and wrong. In the absence of recorded history- a very recent phenomenon and still limited in geographical range- the imagination of some of the tribe provides a past, a sense of superiority and justification, of possession, both of the tribe with respect to other tribes, and of each individual within the tribe. The hierarchies quickly learn that these stories are a way of creating truth and reinforcing their authority, of instilling courage in the warriors and fear in the underclass, and they are used as such.

The enemies change, the sense of self changes, what the present requires of the past changes, the leaders change, the fashion for entertainment changes- even around the tribal camp-fire- new traditions need new stories. New story-tellers give new stories or new twists to the old stories, either because they want to make them their own or because they are genuinely interested in the creative process. In this light, when you look to the politics of modern industrialized nations, the uneasy conspiracy between journalists and politicians to create an apparently coherent narrative that they can call the truth is not at all surprising. It's not even much more sophisticated. Sadly, we don't require them to try very hard to fool us.

Stories that are not written down will change very quickly, from generation to generation or more quickly still as events require, and no reliance whatsoever can be placed on the factual accuracy of stories that are told even about the supposedly very recent past. Although they purport to represent truth, they exist for quite different reasons than the transmission of any objective truth, and mean nothing whatever from the perspective of academic history.

Once they’re written down, or put into verse, with metre and broader structure, they are more likely to be preserved in something closer to the form they had when first written or versified, but they can still change, and of course, we can know nothing of their pre-literate history.

The essential elements of an oral narrative are, of course, the characters, not as names but as symbols, of qualities or institutions, mainly, and the events, which are also symbolic. Once it is in writing or in verse, the structure becomes as important as, or more important than, the symbolism of the story, and much harder to change. If the original context is lost, which will always happen eventually when they are put into writing or verse, and can happen even with oral transmission in some circumstances (for example, when the story is held to be beautiful in itself, and is deliberately preserved without change for long enough for the reason for its having that form to be forgotten) it is then no longer its transparent narrative symbols which are open to manipulation through direct change, but the interpretation of events and symbols whose originally meaning is no longer clear.

This, broadly speaking, is why oral tradition matters, how it is used and abused, and why it is not history.

*The title of this post has been changed on the advice of someone with taste.

Miguel Delibes, Man

Miguel Delibes died on Friday. He has been the grand old man of Spanish letters for as long as I've lived here, which is over twenty years. His first novels, recognised as good, were written in the 1940's and he continued to publish until a few years before his death.

He had competition as the great Spanish writer, particularly from Camilo José Cela, but Cela, though undoubtedly a writer of genius, was also an irrascible old s***e, whereas Delibes wrote, then went off for a pint, or to the football, or to pot a few rabbits in the woods.

His place in the hearts and minds of Spain as a whole, and particularly Valladolid, which is in a genuine and unaffected state of mourning, was won largely by being an agreeable, intelligent man who liked people, was aware of those around him, placed enormous value on his family and friends, and told very good stories very well. He wrote because he enjoyed it and was good at it, not to publicise his sense of his own importance or to express simplistic political opinion. He rarely gave interviews, and he never got involved in the great self-appreciation movement that for many seems to be the main purpose of literature and the arts in general. His great loves were hunting and Real Valladolid football club. I should imagine the former gave him more unmixed pleasure than the latter.

A great man, has left us. And part of his greatness was that he himself would never have imagined that he was more than a normal chap.

Broadly on the same subject, Óscar Pujol is a Sanskrit scholar who spent 13 years preparing a Sanskrit-Catalán dictionary, said to be the first in a Peninsular language. This may well be true, I certainly know no other, not even in Spanish. I use Monier-Williams in theory, though in practice, Theodore Benfey's dictionary is easier to handle. (There's an on-line Monier-Williams, by the way, which is fiddly and often unhelpful, but can be a lot quicker. This one's useful, too.)

Pujol is now at the Casa Asia, and collaborates with the University of Valladolid, and I mention him here because he seems to have a deep love and knowledge of Sanskrit literature and the culture that created it, and to some extent still does. Also, a man who can spend 13 years of his life writing a dictionary to help speakers of one small minority language (nearly all of whom are bilingual in Spanish, so it reduces his possible readership very dramatically and quite unnecessarity) understand another language which, despite its beauty, and its historical, cultural and literary richness, is of interest to very few people indeed outside of India, has my respect and regard. (The only Sanskrit department I know of in Spain is at Salamanca.)

And so I raise my glass this evening to these two men. Without pretending to compare anything about them, I merely recognise that they have both made the world, as I understand it, a better place by being in it.

The Decay of Language Part 2

There are two main threads to the ‘language is decaying’ argument. One laments the fact that some people do not use the terms, meanings, pronunciations or structures that we learnt when we were young. The other suggests that the effectiveness of the language for communication will be impaired if a certain change or changes is ‘allowed’ to happen. Neither is a serious problem. Language use changes more or less randomly over time, and is widely different across regions, ages, classes and professions. This doesn't stop people understanding each other when they wish to. Differences in education, knowledge, cultural reference and interests are more likely to cause difficulties than differences in the way words and structures they have in common are used.

Meaning is constantly being negotiated, even during the course of a single conversation, and much more so across wider linguistic communities. But the young and the old, the British and the Nigerians, the Metropolitan professional and the rural worker, those with backgrounds in the sciences and those from the humanities, even left-wingers and right-wingers, may not belong to one linguistic community in any meaningful way, despite sharing a mother tongue and perhaps even a hometown. When they speak to each other, neither uses the language they would naturally use when speaking to those they instinctively feel are 'like them.' Each seeks a form of accommodation, a way of making the communication work, with greater or lesser effort depending on how much interest they have in it. Most of us are capable of speaking with a range of styles, registers, semantic fields and even accents, according to the communicative context, and we think nothing of it.

While there are enough people in constant communication with each other in sufficiently varying groups a language will not decay; it will only change. Those changes will leave some people mildly confused while others assimilate them completely without even realizing it. But language will decay if it ceases to be used for literary or academic purposes, or if it ceases to be written at all, or if those who use it do so for a very limited range of purposes, or or if it becomes solely a literary or academic language, no longer used for real communication at all, or if the groups who use it are too small or too isolated. Then it can lose plasticity, expressive power, or comprehensibilty between groups.

The problem with trying to impose standards in language is that nobody really listens to you. For most of human history it hasn't mattered and, except in certain specific forms of communication, they don't matter very much now. Communication in everyday life is as much about seeking ways of understanding each other as it is about exchanging information. We create standards as we go,for the times when we need them.