Archives for May 2003

Gather round, children; it’s time once again to hurl insults at that bastion of smug insularity, the New York Times. In today’s Metro section there’s a touching story by Corey Kilgannon about a NYC doctor, Ian Zlotolow (a gold star, incidentally, to anyone who can explain to me the morphology of that name, which is clearly based somehow on Slavic zlat-/z(o)lot- ‘gold’), who first treated and then adopted a boy from Sierra Leone. So far, so good, but in an attempt to dramatize the boy’s change of surroundings, the reporter produces the following:

Early last year, Lansana spoke only his tribal dialect, Mende, and hoarded food in the house. He had never been to a city, watched television, flushed a toilet or taken a shower. He had never had a real change of clothing.
But once in New York, the boy picked up English quickly, and, with his magnetic personality, made friends just by walking down the block…. When some West African cabdrivers and a college professor engaged him in dialect, he ignored them.

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My wife asked, out of the blue, “What does ‘it stands to reason’ mean? When you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense.” I thought about it, and sure enough, it didn’t make any sense. So I did a little research and discovered that it’s a reminder of an obsolete phrase “to stand to,” meaning (in the OED’s words) ‘To submit oneself to, abide by (a trial, award); to obey, accede to, be bound by (another’s judgement, decision, opinion, etc.).’ So originally something “stood to (obeyed) reason” in the same way as a person “stood to a judgment”; when the verbal phrase was eroded by time, the cliché remained behind, a lone outcropping, as puzzling as one of the oddly shaped mesas of Coconino County.

Some examples of the earlier usage:

1584 LYLY Campaspe I. iii. 76 In kinges causes I will not stande to schollers arguments.
1616 A. CHAMPNEY A Treatise on the Vocation of Bishops 21 Such a Reformer is not bound to stand to the judgement of the Church.
1692 BENTLEY Boyle Lect. vi. 5 Will they not stand to the grand Verdict and Determination of the Universe?
1700 J. TYRRELL Hist. Eng. II. 889 The King summon’d [them] to appear.., and stand to the Law

The estimable Invisible Adjunct has an entry expressing her distaste for the word “blog.” This is a distaste that many other people seem to share, but I’m at a loss to account for it. Phonetically, it’s a perfectly standard English word, stop + liquid + vowel + stop; I fail to see how it’s any uglier than, say, “block,” “plug,” or “log.” To my mind, it’s a clear improvement over “weblog,” which is harder to use as a verb or combine with other words. It’s a nice short English monosyllable. True, it’s new, and the new always makes people nervous, but I would think the blogging community would embrace their very own novelty. At any rate, I wanted to get some feedback: any thoughts on why the word is disliked? If you dislike it, how do you feel about the comparison with the phonetically similar words I mentioned?

I have absolutely no comment on this story, for which I have Maureen to thank (thanks, Maureen!):

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A computer program can allegedly distinguish between male and female authors with 80% accuracy. If this can be independently verified, I guess you can’t argue with success, but I’m deeply suspicious of anything that runs on this kind of fuel:

“Women have a more interactive style,” said Shlomo Argamon, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago who developed the program. “They want to create a relationship between the writer and the reader.”

Men, on the other hand, use more numbers, adjectives and determiners – words such as “the,” “this” and “that” – because they apparently care more than women do about conveying specific information.

Uh huh. Anyway, read all about it in the Jewish World Review story (which I chose out of a bunch of identical ones from different newspapers because it has the URL of a site where you can examine Argamon’s research); thanks to Laputan Logic for the story (he gives a link to The Age, but it’s the same old applesauce).

Addendum. Related MetaFilter thread.

Neighbouring groups in Papua New Guinea had contact through intermarriage, trade and warfare, leading to a certain amount of bilingualism or competence in other dialects. A sizeable minority of New Guinean women have had the experience of being linguistic ‘foreigners’ in the village into which they have married.

‘We might well ask why such contacts did not lead to a lessening of linguistic differences. A partial explanation probably lies in the fact that New Guineans often make use of other-language and other-dialect knowledge in rhetoric and verbal art, highlighting the known differences between their own and neighbouring speech varieties. It appears that contacts with and awareness of other languages have led not to levelling but to heightened consciousness of and pride in difference.’

Gillian Sankoff, The social life of language (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980) pp. 9-10, abridged

Quoted in Andrew Dalby, Dictionary of Languages (Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 491

Dalby points out that PNG “is linguistically the most complex region of the world. In mountainous, forested and swampy country, full of obstacles to travel, the languages of New Guinea have been developing and interacting for 40,000 years… It is a massive challenge to historical linguistics to trace language relationships that may date back 40,000 years or more. Genealogical trees have been drawn that link all the languages of New Guinea into a very few ‘phyla’, but for the present these all-embracing families are little more than blueprints for future research.”

Turns out there’s a 150-year-old German community in Texas that is in the final stages of assimilation; the Texas German Dialect Project is trying to record as much as possible of the dialect before it disappears for good. From a Daily Texan article by Lori Slaughenhoupt:

It all began when he was eating at a restaurant in Fredericksburg, Texas.

During lunch, Hans Boas, an assistant professor of Germanic Studies at the University, overheard a conversation that he quickly found would impact his life. “People were sitting next to me speaking German, and I thought, ‘Hey, what’s going on?'” said Boas, who is from Gottingen, Germany. “When I got back to Austin, I went to the library, and there was all this stuff on Texas-German [dialect] from research done in the ’50s and ’60s.”

After reading the research, Boas found that English, Spanish and German were once the primary languages spoken in Texas. He decided to research the dying Texas-German dialect before it was gone forever. “What struck me about Texas-German was that after reading descriptions from the ’50s and ’60s, I realized that all of the sudden, it’s different,” Boas said. “In just 40 years, the sounds, grammar and word use has changed.”

Although he knew funding for language-revival programs is often hard to obtain, Boas applied for a grant from the University. In September 2001, after receiving one from the dean of liberal arts, Boas founded the Texas German Dialect Project….

Germans settled in much of Central Texas after the 1840s. It was then that the Adelsverein, the Society of Noblemen — was organized in what is now Germany and encouraged thousands to go to Texas….

The American culture, which especially began to become incorporated after World War I in the 1920s and 1930s, is the reason Texas-German has not been passed to future generations, Boas said. The introduction of English-only laws after the world wars made it even more difficult for the German culture — especially the language — to be passed on….

“Texas has this rich history of culture in terms of language and, up until World War I, Texas was trilingual,” Boas said. “What makes Texas so unique is that it is much more open toward cultures that are different. You don’t see that in other states.”

Thanks to Andrew Krug for the links!

A wide-ranging 1996 interview in which Kai Kresse, editor of polylog, talks with Kwasi Wiredu, a Ghanaian philosopher, contains a section in which issues relevant to both the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the possibility of translation are discussed in terms of Wiredu’s native language, Akan (map):

Kresse: Here, of course, the crucial point is language; so it is the language, the words, the concepts of philosophy which you describe as having to be cleansed of colonial burden. Using a phrase of Ngugi, one could say that colonising the mind is what has happened, and the objective must now be the project of decolonizing the mind at all different levels. Ngugi has worked on doing that in literature, and your programme is to work on decolonizing philosophical thought. In both cases we can speak of a decolonization, a liberation of the language in which Africans think or express themselves.

This now raises several difficult issues, above all maybe the relativity of languages, which gravely affect philosophical concepts. For example, you have sketched out that in your language Akan the famous phrase of Descartes, »I think, therefore I am« (cogito ergo sum), would be unintelligible. My question now is: is this an unsolvable problem – because the start of philosophy is inevitably within the language which one speaks, in which one perceives the world and with which one constructs meaning in the world? Taking you as an example, an Akan who has studied in English and has thus learned to philosophize in English: doesn’t there always remain a dilemma of the two options in which to philosophize? You could either philosophize in Akan or in English, but even upon the same issue that might be two different ways of philosophizing within yourself.
The question is, does not the language problem have to be linked to the project of an intercultural dialogue, which, if it wants to be fair and open to all (i.e. on a level of real equality), it has, above all, to grant equality on the level of language? Could you sketch out possibilities of how the language problem in the project of such an intercultural dialogue could be surmounted?

Wiredu: You have put the problem very nicely, and it is an extremely important one…. What I try to show is that, even though human beings are different, for example, they have different languages, and they have different ways of conceptualizing some very important matters, still they are all simply featherless bipeds, and as featherless bipeds they are also subject to certain fundamental rules of reaction with the environment. And it is because of this that they can exchange ideas over everything, in philosophy, in (practical) ethics or whatever.
As we start, we must be aware of the differences: we must investigate the differences. But when we have brought the differences to attention, we can then work on cross-cultural evaluation…. And, indeed, in the programme of decolonization, I envisage two stages: first, to elicit the differences, but second, to use what I call the independent considerations, i.e. considerations that are independent of the peculiarities of a particular language or culture, to make cross-cultural evaluations.

So if you take the Cartesian example, “I think, therefore I am” (which is a very good one for these purposes), the reason why he is able to say sum, “I am”, in the given context, is that in the language he is using there is something like the existential verb “to be” which can be used independently. In the Akan language there is no corresponding term representing this form of the word “to be”. Now, there is no special problem about this. Because I am an Akan who understands English, I can see the correspondences nevertheless. So that in itself is not a problem at all.

But I understand why an Akan, thinking and speaking in her own language, will not say something like that. He or she does not have the words for that in Akan. You see, “I think” in my language is medwen or mesusu asem, meaning, etymologically “I measure”, “I measure a matter”. Now, if I try to construct something like Descartes’ existential sum, it will be something like mewo, which is meaningless. (The apparent Akan equivalent would have to be something like mewo ho, which says “I am there”, whose locative significance would be suicidal from the point of view of both the epistemology and the metaphysics of the cogito.) Thus here we have a difference of structure, but the run of thought itself can be understood by the Akan who bothers to learn Latin, English, French, German or related languages. If he bothers to learn those languages, he can also see what is going on in Descartes’ sentence.

The way your language functions can predispose you to several ways of talking and, indeed, to several ways of reasoning. But we can, if we learn each other’s language, see what is happening, and we will be able to sweep a lot of those translational things aside and argue on the main points. Now, if I want to take on Descartes, it is not going to be enough for me just to say that the concept of sum is not in my language, therefore the statement is nonsense. No! I would have to go further, to develop my argument in English (or the relevant language). I maintain that I can develop a critique in English which is aided by the tendencies that I start with in my Akan language. But that is just the beginning, it can never be the ending: it is, in fact, only the beginning of a never-ending procedure.

The next section, Going intercultural, going multilingual?, is also interesting:

Time is short in the world, so some people, some philosophers will probably remain in the same language. Those who are specially interested in intercultural philosophy, however, would probably want to be able to use other languages in philosophical thought, in particular, languages which are very different from their own. And then they could see what can be done in and through cross-cultural evaluations.

(Via wood s lot [05.26.2003].)

The LA Times has a nice story by Louise Roug about the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (a joint project of UCLA and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), connecting it with the recent destruction in Iraq:

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Renee is doing a series of entries on the Old Norse heroic poem Völundarkvíða (Völundarkvitha, if you can’t see the long i and edh; it means ‘lay of Völundr’). She gives what she calls a multimedia presentation:

There will be 16 parts. Each part will include a cutout panel illustration, a portion of text and my translation. It will also have an mp3 file with my reading in Old Norse – it is not really dramatic, I am afraid… I have tried to keep close to what I perceive as Old Norse pronunciation; my interpretation may be quite off the mark, so I’d be happy to discuss this.

Here are Part One (Intro and stanzas 1-3) and Part Two (4-5); enjoy, and keep following the series!

Update (Jan. 2021). I thought I’d check and see if there were further installments; on June 19 she published Stanzas 6-10, but on July 28 she said “I am taking time off” and on October 12 she quit blogging for the time being (“It’s time to step aside. I have disabled the comments section in all entries, but you still will be able to read the old discussions”). She resumed blogging the following March, but apparently never returned to the Völundarkvitha.