Joel at Far Outliers has been posting excerpts from What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), and they are extraordinarily interesting from a linguistic point of view; I’ll quote excerpts from each.
Becoming an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist:
The Defense Language Aptitude Battery, or DLAB, is a test used by the Department of Defense to assess a candidate’s ability to learn a language. This is in direct opposition to testing knowledge of any one specific language, as the military most often aims to teach you a new language, not use whatever random one you happen to already know. To this day, this test is spoken and written of in hushed, fearful tones. When I (and all the others before me) took it, before information about it was readily available on the internet, it was even more fabled. Allegedly, the DLAB is written in Esperanto, or at least derived from Esperanto, a synthetic language invented by a Polish ophthalmologist in the late 1800s. If this sounds confusing and slightly silly, you can imagine how I felt when the recruiter told me some of these details (he mentioned the Esperanto part, but either didn’t know or care to include the eye doctor detail). There are apparently guides and resources to prepare for the test now; Wikipedia goes so far as to say that without using these materials obtaining a passing score would be well-nigh impossible. Unless the test has changed dramatically, I can assure you this isn’t true, as I, and thousands of others that attended language school alongside and before me, didn’t have such materials. We just took the test.
As far as I could tell, a strong grasp of English grammar, or, I suppose, any language’s grammar, would take you pretty far on much of it. While it is specific to language, the test evaluates a much broader skill, that is, the ability to assimilate unfamiliar, seemingly conflicting information and apply it to novel situations. I, characteristically, believed that this test, like all other (non-math) standardized tests before it, would be a cakewalk. It was not. The DLAB, like other tests based on logic, doesn’t have wholly correct answers. Instead, it relies on the test-taker’s ability to determine the most likely, or best available answer. This could be, and indeed was, immensely frustrating for someone who had undergone traditional public education (in rural North Florida no less), where tests are multiple choice and simply have one right answer, and three wrong ones.
At the time, the Air Force required a minimum passing score of 100 (out of 164) to be eligible for language school. Through some combination of luck, exposure to the sound of multiple languages, and unalloyed bookwormishness that had provided me with a decent understanding of English grammar, I received a score of 103. Not great, but good enough.
At the end of my year at DLI, I could debate the merits of divorce and its effects on children in Dari, discuss politics, and attempt to answer the question “What is love?” (This was the last question I was asked in my speaking exam. I would like to think my inability to answer was more due to my being twenty than my lack of language skill.) I could tell jokes, explain the meanings of proverbs, and generally shoot the shit with most any Dari-speaking Afghan. I thought in Dari, dreamt in Dari, and often found it easier to express myself in it. This is true for lots of recently graduated linguists; when we met a newly minted Arabic linguist at survival school and asked him what DLI and learning a language so fast was like, he said it’s cool, but it can mess with your thinking a little bit. A couple days later he was telling some story, when he stopped halfway through a sentence, with a dazed look on his face. “Wait, shit. What’s the word for that thing you eat cereal with?” “A spoon?” “Yeah, that’s it, a fucking spoon. Fucking Arabic.”
Like any skill, language can atrophy. After I left DLI, and went to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, for cryptology school, I wasn’t expected to speak Dari seven hours a day and I didn’t. While we were there, my friends and I still used our Dari, the whole secret language thing feeling like a superpower on occasion, but it wasn’t quite the same and so I forgot some words and a few complicated grammatical structures. But after Goodfellow, I wasn’t spending time with a group of other Dari linguists.
I was spitballing, as I hadn’t fully fleshed out these thoughts back then, I just felt that the Dari word made more sense. As the course progressed, this kept happening. I think, in large part, this was due to the shared words between the languages; instead of having to spend hour upon hour learning new words, I was afforded the luxury of really trying to understand how Pashto worked, and often, it was easier to do that in relation to Dari (when English is their third or fourth language, sometimes it’s easier to use Dari to ask your professor if the attempt at past progressive you just made in Pashto was correct). Because of this learning of Pashto through both English and Dari, I wasn’t only finding the hidden meanings in Dari or Pashto words anymore, I was replacing entire concepts with them. It seemed that Sapir, or Whorf, or both, had been on to something. How I was thinking was changing.
Over the next few months, I spent hours a day talking with our professors. … We did all this talking in part to prepare for the final test, but mostly because speaking a language that you’re learning is by far the hardest thing to do with it; it’s much easier to recognize words than it is to pull them whole cloth from your memory. Speaking, putting those words and ideas into (hopefully) the same order as native speakers do, is by far the best way to strengthen your language skills. Taylor and I were both “good” at Pashto, but we had a problem; we couldn’t help but speak Dari.
We figured, given the no/minimal English rules, we should just use Dari whenever we didn’t know a Pashto word. The result was strange sentences that would be 60 to 70 percent Dari nouns and adjectives, with Pashto pronouns and verbs. Or, instead of asking “to drink څنګه وایئ” (“how do you say” in Pashto plus “to drink” in English) like our classmates, we would inevitably say say “څنګه وایئ نوشیدن” (“how do you say” in Pashto and “to drink” in Dari). The first time we did this with Rahimi he just paused, looked at us both, and said “I understand what you’re doing. But I hate this.” Us being us, this of course then meant that we kept doing it.
As far as we could tell, the people requesting us had no idea that Pashto varies massively depending on where you are in Afghanistan. This was strange, or, really, plain ignorant, as anyone with a cursory knowledge of the language should know that at baseline it has two main dialects that pronounce entire letters differently. Hell, some of the people who speak it don’t even call it Pashto. They call it Pakhto. The second letter in the word پښتو, that little collection of three nubs with the one dot above it and one below it, ښ, can be pronounced as either a sh sound (though you have to curl your tongue to the top of your mouth to get the sh just right) or a kh sound (same tongue movement). There’s another letter that on one side of the country is pronounced as a g and on the other side as a zh. The “o” in Pashto isn’t always an o, sometimes it’s a u, as in Pashtu/Pakhtu.
And those are just the two major divisions, Western and Eastern Pashto/Pakhto/Pashtu/Pakhtu. Realistically there are dozens of dialects, some of which aren’t understood all that well even by native Pashto speakers. So, to expect us to be able to fly over bumfuck Khost and have any clue as to what the bad guys were saying was to have no idea of how the language worked. Which, I guess, we shouldn’t have been surprised by. Unrealistic expectations being the norm in Afghanistan.
I would never have found myself in his position, for ideological reasons, but I envy him the chance to learn such interesting languages! And if you are intrigued by the excerpts, by all means click through to the posts.
I like the semi-modesty in this:
‘When [a fellow student] would tell some other random airman, “Yeah, we know three languages—Farsi, Dari, and Tajik,” I’d supplement this—not complete untruth, but not total truth—with “Well, they’re really the same language, but with different accents.”’
I may have mentioned before that when a friend of mine working on his Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies needed to pick up some Farsi to supplement his Arabic (I think because the program just required some testable proficiency in two “area” languages, not because Farsi sources were particularly crucial to his dissertation topic), he ended up spending a summer doing immersion-learning in Tajikistan subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer, that being thought at the time a more propitious place to send American students than either Iran or the Dari-speaking parts of Afghanistan.
It’s been compared to the most dread sj of Swedish.
‘It’s been compared to the most dread sj of Swedish.’
You mean, as in “jag är inte sjuk jag är bara svensk”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8wbBJ92yyQ
But the Norwegian singer apparently can’t manage the Swedish /ɧ/. To me it sounds like they are simply saying Norwegian /ʃʉːk/ .
Which I would think sort of hurts the joke. But I‘m not Norwegian and maybe the mispronunciation is the joke?
David M.: It’s been compared to the most dread sj of Swedish.
That’s what I thought reading the description.
Vanya: But I‘m not Norwegian and maybe the mispronunciation is the joke?
Not exactly top-tier satire, but a huge hit back in the day. I remember people singing or saying the line with an over-articulated /ɧ/, so it’s a little surprising that the original doesn’t.
The joke is the mocking of the Swedish cultural institution of dansband. Either they weren’t really aware of the /ɧ/, or it didn’t matter to them, or maybe (more generously) they thought a Norwegian [ʃ] would fit the (stereotypically) Värmland/Dalarna origin of the lead singer.
Note that the DOD folks administering the aptitude battery require different minimum scores depending on what language it is proposed the test-taker learn, subdividing the range of languages that might be taught into four categories of increasing difficulty (for a learner from a presumed monolingual-Anglophone starting point). That makes perfect sense, and I’m not going to argue with the proposition that Pashto is Category IV while Dari is merely Category III. But some other classification decisions are more puzzling. Why would German be category II while Dutch and Norwegian are only Category I? Is Tagalog really trickier to learn than Indonesian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Language_Aptitude_Battery#Language_categories
I could swear we had a discussion of those categories (with similar complaints about apparently random decisions), but I can’t find it.
My understanding is that German is categorized as more difficult than Dutch and Norwegian because it has some features that make it a bit more difficult to learn for the average English-speaker, such as grammatical cases. In the case Tagalog vs Indonesian I assume it’s for similar reasons. I’ve read and heard that the grammar of Indonesian is relatively simple and regular and so is the spelling which makes it easier to learn than other languages that are just as distant from English. Compared to Indonesian, Tagalog is supposed to be more complicated and irregular (I’m happy to be corrected on that.)
My understanding is also that these categories come from the experience of many years of observation in the classroom, at least in the case of the Foreign Service Institute categories. German is deemed harder than Norwegian because it really does take the average soldier or aspiring diplomat a bit longer to learn, even in a place where your only job is to learn a language.
Well, I don’t know any Austronesian language, but IIRC Indonesian is a trade language with some creolization to it, while Tagalog is a local (once very much so) vernacular with all the gnarliness appertaining thereunto. (I was going to comment on JW Brewer’s post earlier but was having some sort of connectivity issue.)
I imagine what’s horrible about learning German is declension, because it’s largely semi-random schwa syllables bearing hardly any functional load any more. What I mean is, you’d have to invest lots of time and pain to get those right, but it wouldn’t earn you that much because in real-life conversiation you’ll hardly ever need to use those silly case endings correctly in order to get your point across. However, if you don’t master that mumbled uselessness, you will always be marked a stupid foreigner.
Also, V2 word order seems to be really hard to acquire, for whatever reason …
Yes, I confess that German defeated me (though obviously I wasn’t trying hard enough).
Pashto has phonemic stress (some of which may or may not be related, in some complex way, to PIE stress), unlike any other Iranian language. Also: “Nouns and adjectives are inflected for two genders (masculine and feminine),[83] two numbers (singular and plural), and four cases (direct, oblique, ablative, and vocative). […] Unlike most other Indo-Iranian languages, Pashto uses all three types of adpositions—prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions.”
as long as the word order behaves. When it suddenly jumps from subject-verb-object to topic-verb-comment or comment-verb-topic, they distinguish opposites pretty often (and Google Translate faceplants). Doubly so in writing where intonation can’t save you.
What must be really scary is that there are so few different endings, distributed randomly across grids that could accommodate three times as many.
Not only is Dutch more analytic than German, it also has a larger number of French loan words, which makes the vocabulary easier for English speakers to acquire. Random example – ”intimidate” in German is ”Einschüchtern” but ”intimideren” in Dutch. ”Ambassador” is ”Botschafter” in German but ”Ambassadeur” in Dutch. The biggest obstacle to learning Dutch for English speakers is simply that most Dutch speakers speak excellent English.
V2 word order seems to be really hard to acquire
My German is minimal, but the backwards-upon-backwards syntax seems easy and natural.
most Dutch speakers speak excellent English
Is that true outside the cities, too?
It has been so long (45 years last fall) since I first started on German, and I subsequently learned enough other languages with nouns inflected for case, that I was perhaps underestimating its theoretical difficulty for Anglophones, as well as too hastily assuming that other Germanic languages I have personally never really learned are by definition NOT less challenging than those I have, in fact, already learned.
Indonesian is woefully undertaught in American schools and universities, at least proportionate to how many living speakers it has. But Tagalog is probably likewise undertaught proportionate to how many living speakers in the US it has (currently 4th most common home language for U.S. residents, after English, Spanish, and lumped-together “Chinese”). A blind spot regarding Austronesian, it would seem.
Indonesian, like Dutch, and Malay, like English, both accept loanwords easily, and have been creolized in many places. Verb morphology and subject/object marking are much less complex than in Tagalog (and other Philippine languages), in my experience. But Tagalog has assimilated many, many Spanish loans, and many if not most urban Tagalog speakers switch between Tagalog and English at will. Many Asians go to the Philippines to learn English, as a cheaper alternative than the major anglophone countries. On a Holland-America cruise we took to Alaska a while back, most of the customer service staff seemed to be Filipinos fluent in English, while many of the room service staff were Indonesian with much more limited English. Philippine soap operas are full of constant code-switching between Tagalog and English.
Tagalog inflections of sapatos ‘shoe(s)’: sinapatos/nakasapatos ‘shod’, sapatusin ‘hit s.o. with a shoe’ (shoe as instrument), sapatero ‘cobbler’, sapatusan ‘shoe store’ (locative), sapateriya ‘shoe business (cobbler, store, shoemaker, etc.), magsapatos ‘to wear shoes’
Also, V2 word order seems to be really hard to acquire, for whatever reason …
It is? To me seemed it the least problematic piece to learning German. After all, English swivels round constituent order fairly readily: we had “yet was I …” recently. I have bigger difficulties with French preposing object pronouns. I agree with your observations about case inflections, though I’d already learnt school Latin, so was familiar with the idea.
I’d already learnt school Latin, so was familiar with the idea.
Me too, and yet!
Is Tagalog really trickier to learn than Indonesian?
Tagalog has a lot more morphology (including flexional infixes), and an exciting form of alignment which is neither nominative-accusative nor ergative, and depends on what you’ve had for breakfast and which way the wind is blowing.
I’ve never tried to learn either language, but I’d be surprised if the answer is not “Hell, yes!”
Also, V2 word order seems to be really hard to acquire
I can’t say that it ever seemed so to me, either. But then VSO is, of course, the only really natural clause constituent order. All other orders are derived from this by laziness or natural depravity. (“Transformations”, as they are called in the linguistic literature. But we have no truck with such mealy-mouthed euphemisms here.)
Yet those little German kids manage to learn it. Amazing!
I wonder whether, somewhere on the internet, there’s a blogger called Sprachehut who has (or should that be “is having”?) threads with comments about how hard all those amazingly complicated English verb tenses are….
If so, it would, of course, actually be called Languagehat.
I recall as a schoolboy, a half-century or so ago, our German teacher recounting how German colleagues had once said of a fellow academic with a less than compelling way with words, that at board meetings wir versuchen ihn immer short zu cutten.
@Joel. Are you saying that Tagalog sapatero ‘cobbler’ and sapateriya ‘shoe business ((cobbler, store, shoemaker, etc.’are native Tagalog coinages (“Tagalog inflections”)?
Is it not likelier that sapatero ‘cobbler’ comes from Spanish zapatero 1. ‘shoemaker’. 2. ‘cobbler’ and sapateriya ‘shoe shop, shoe store’ comes from Spanish zapatería ‘shoe shop, shoe store’?
I think he’s saying they have no trouble nativizing their borrowings.
All other orders are derived from this by laziness or natural depravity.
Then by what moral turpitude have we “À quel point m’aimes-tu ?”, but “Quelle heure est-il?”. I have it from personal experience [**] the uncorrupted youth say “Quelle heure il-est?”.
[**] In the Pays-des-gîtes Dordogne.
“Quelle heure il-est?”.
Based on a former job transcribing proceedings of parliament, which requires a lot of really close listening, I have a short list of my predictions for the next century of grammatical change.
One item is: “subordinate interrogative clauses follow the same pattern as main interrogative clauses.”
So “Do you know who that man is?” becomes
“Do you know who is that man?”
most Dutch speakers speak excellent English
Is that true outside the cities, too?
It may not be totally true even in the cities, although I would agree with the statement if re-worded to “speak English well enough that it makes communication in English easier than having one side speaking Dutch badly and the other side speaking Dutch fast”.
I’ve never stopped at a Dutch farm, whether to ask for directions or a glass of milk or to talk to a farmer about anything else, but my experience in small Dutch towns or people from such places is that they usually speak German or English better than I speak Dutch. After all, they have schools in the countryside and they watch Dutch TV where lots of English-language shows and movies are shown, in the original with subtitles, and in general the Dutch countryside looks quite urbanised.
From what I have seen, some learners are quite challenged by German word order. That never included me, of course; my love of Germanic verb morphology is well known in these parts. There are only a few situations that just require rote memorization,* to make trouble. On the other hand, learning lots of noun genders** and internalizing their inflections to the point at which they become natural seems to be a challenge for everyone learning German.
* Here are a couple of examples of the kinds of word order properties just need to be memorized. Using gegenüber with most objects, it can be proposed or postposed (rather like English opposite); however, with a dative pronoun, the pronoun has to come first. Or, you have to remember whether it is, “Er ist an der** Plage gestorben,” (correct, with a dative preposition) or, “Er ist die** Plage angestorben,” (incorrect, with a separable verb).
** Actually, per the above, it’s the gender of Plage that I would have the most trouble remembering. Moreover, there is yet another possibility, which looks like a mashup of the other two: “Er ist an die Plage gestorben,” and would be the most direct translation of English, “He died to the Plague.”
It’s actually an der Pest; Plage means “plague” only in the sense of “infestation” (like in “a plague of locusts”); otherwise it means “trouble” or “bother” (of which you probably also can die if they are sufficiently massive).
Sous les pavés, la plage
Yeah, when I saw “Er ist an der Plage gestorben” I just assumed it meant ‘He died on the beach.’
Strandplage.
@Hans: I guess just misremembered; plague and pestilence aren’t ever things I have had much reason to talk to people about in German.
Theo Vennemann did of course propose that verb-second is just VSO with the subject fronted for emphasis…
Nah, we moan through that in school. For years.
Interesting. I’m not sure I’ve encountered that one. The most common version these days is in accordance with Julian’s prophecy: il est quelle heure ?
I was going to say the Netherlands consist of densely built-up cities, bike lanes, one surprisingly big nature reserve, and that’s pretty much it. Even more seriously, age must be a much more important factor than how urban a place is.
“Quelle heure il-est?”
Should be “Quelle heure il est?”; the hyphen is only used with inversion.
Theo Vennemann did of course propose that verb-second is just VSO with the subject fronted for emphasis…
This actually happened in Brythonic. In Welsh it’s called the “abnormal order”, on account of being the normal order in pre-modern Welsh.
Gwŷr a aeth Gatraeth gan wawr …
“Men went to Catraeth at dawn”, not “It was men who went …”
It seems to have been killed off relatively recently in modern Literary Welsh by misguided prescriptivists, though they were presumably helped along by a reversion to VSO in modern spoken Welsh.
So the SVO construction has gone from being marked to unmarked and then back again to marked.
Technically, I suppose, modern Welsh is verb-second: there’s normally a particle of some kind (two of them derived from fossilised subject pronouns) before the verb.
But just to confuse matters further, these particles are now usually dropped in yer actual spoken Welsh (though any initial mutations they may have caused live on.)
Should be “Quelle heure il est?”
Hmm. I was reporting actually heard speech. I’m guessing the actual youth[**] was half-remembering the ‘il’ and ‘est’ belonged together in some ineffable way.
[**] Of an age they’d started school, but were still only half-corrupted by grammarians. If you’ve seen that heart-warming movie ‘Être et Avoir’ — comme ça.
Hmm. I was reporting actually heard speech.
Sure, but you can’t hear a hyphen. It’s a purely written phenomenon, and it’s only used with inversions, no matter how fast you talk.
Inspired by the discussion of Nahuatl syntax in the “Deciphering of Linear Elamite” thread, it has now become clear to me that, in fact, all languages are VSO. The first clause constituent (other than conjunctions) is invariably a verb, regardless of morphology; failure to see this is simply the classic analytical mistake of confusing form and function.
It’s all so simple.
Hexapodia is the key insight.
Plage is not used in German for beaches. It is in Luxembourgish, though. ?an der Plage gestuerwen? (I don’t speak Luxembourgish.)
Back to Persian: I’m trying to learn some these days, and it reminds me of learning Engish, back in the days: simple morphology, rather straightforward syntax, excessive vocabulary (really!), and hard-to-remember permutations of always the same (English: do/get/put/make/take + random preposition = unguessable meaning; Persian: random noun + کردن/زدن/گرفتن = (often) unguessable meaning). Fewer cognates in Persian, though, coming from German.
Back when the UK still had national service in the 50s, my grandfather rocked up to the RAF to do the assessment which turned out to be an (even more?) primitive DLAB equivalent – an IQ test of sorts, basically. He was really quite keen to be a pilot and so was understandably somewhat taken aback when he was told he had, without knowing what he was doing, done too well on the test and was therefore going to spend the next two years in a Cornish air force base being taught Russian by an array of very strange Tsarist emigres. Which tbf did then get him a lifelong career as a Russian translator so he couldn’t complain too much.
@JW Brewster:
he ended up spending a summer doing immersion-learning in Tajikistan subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer, that being thought at the time a more propitious place to send American students than either Iran or the Dari-speaking parts of Afghanistan.
Still true for Farsi undergrads in the UK, at least when I was at university (2017-20). I think I knew one person who went to Iran for their year abroad as a sort of experiment in around 2019 but it was pretty hard to take (the constant low-level harassment / aggro / curiosity) and they came back after a few weeks.
Plage is not used in German for beaches.
Yes, I realize that now, but I don’t actually know German, I can just sort-of-read it.
@ DE
… in fact, all languages are VSO…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_notation
just as all cats are grey in the dark?
just as all cats are grey in the dark?
No, no, no! We’re talking fundamental truth here, not the specious world of mere appearances!
my apologies, I stand corrected.
Which tbf did then get him a lifelong career as a Russian translator so he couldn’t complain too much.
In 1968, pressed by the impending draft, I signed up for DLI, first choice Russian, second Spanish. I got Spanish, so they sent me to Panama instead of Germany. At the moment I was a bit sore about this, but it gave me a grad-school career as a Hispanist and a real-world career as a colonial-discourse scholar.
my apologies, I stand corrected.
Might as well sit down, jack. It may take a while until you are fully forgiven.
Indeed. Impugning the ontological status of my deep structures. That’s pretty hurtful.
You have to be careful to not mix up your ontological structures and your ophthalmological structures, or you could out your eye put.
I have been plagued by ontological insecurity regarding ophthalmology ever since I discovered that most people have more than the average number of eyes.
This is something humanity was never meant to know. Iä! Iä!
It is obviously naive to think that the dangers of prior ages cannot return and that the fearsome monsters who historically lurked in the shadows just outside the light cast by our puny campfires have been vanquished forever, but when I see items like Rodger C.’s “pressed by the impending draft” story, I am struck by much time has passed and how the American men I know with stories like that are now quite getting on in years and are e.g. example A (my youngest uncle) just turned 77; or example B (boss I had in an early-career job more than 30 years ago) about to turn 75. My own freedom from such pressing (and the accompanying need to negotiate with The Man) when I was of relevant ages during the 1980’s seemed at the time like it might be a transient thing, what with the Cold War being perhaps temporarily cooler-than-average for a while. But that transient respite has stretched out for a while, at least in the U.S.
My own freedom from such pressing …
There’s plenty of countries have never dropped the draft/have only for brief periods been free from the threat of war and invasion. Those in the NATO-aligned lands should regard themselves as the historical exception.
I’m only a little younger than your two cites, but at risk of going all Monty Python, I’m keenly aware how fragile is World Peace (which has never in fact held), and how it can’t be expected to last.
It’s been interesting watching All Creatures Great and Small and realizing that there was very good reason veterinarians were exempted from the draft in World War II.
Yet the original television series ends* with both James and Siegfried joining up. The real senior partner, Donald Sinclair, did spend a few months as a volunteer in R. A. F. training, but in the end the actual veterinarians all spent most of the war practicing in North Yorkshire—although Brian Sinclair (the model for Tristan) joined the Royal Army Veterinary Corps in 1944.
* Or rather, was intended to end, until they brought it back (with the original cast, not the more recent remake).
Most NATO-aligned lands only ended the draft (in theoretically temporary ways) less than 20 years ago. Sweden just brought it back.
Austria (not a NATO member; neutrality in the constitution) never abolished it in the first place. It’s really a draft of comically underpaid labor into the civilian service – turning occupations like, say, ambulance driver into actual paying jobs seems unthinkable.
I believe South Korea and Taiwan require all young men to register for the draft and undergo a period of military training. There are still deferments for education and boy-band stardom, but you have to report for training before you age out of eligibility.
South Korean military deferment policy became a big talking point for Tottenham Hotspur fans a few years back since their talismanic forward Son Heung-min was always at risk of being snatched away for two years by the powers that be. He wound up winning the Asian Games football title, which (along with an Olympic podium) gets you an automatic exemption for being a sufficiently Good Citizen. As a non-spurs fan this was one of their more interesting complaints in recent times.
There was of course a difference of historical practice and cultural attitudes within the NATO-member countries. Conscription in peacetime had since the 19th century been a common feature of life in many countries located on the European continent whereas conscription outside time of actual major war was contrary to non-Continental baseline understandings of individual liberty in both the U.K. and the U.S.* The Cold War continuation of conscription in both the U.K. (until circa 1960) and U.S. (until 1973**) was a serious deviation from that.
*There was also some post-1945 conscription in Australia, but not Canada. New Zealand apparently had something until 1972 but never actually deployed its conscripts overseas in either Korea or Vietnam (or the Malayan Emergency etc.) The U.S. had of course started with a reasonably strong tradition of local quasi-mandatory local militia service but that fell into desuetude mostly before the Civil War and even in wartime the militia generally did not venture too far from home unless we were trying to invade Canada.
**It is now a full 45 years since the late Pres. Carter, looking feckless after inter alia having been caught unawares by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and thus casting about for symbolic gestures of toughness, reinstituted the requirement for young American men turning 18 to register with the bureaucracy for a hypothetical resumption of conscription. I was 14 when that happened and registered when I turned 18. I didn’t get conscripted and neither did anyone else, either then or since.
As military conscription in South Korea is for all able-bodied men, even those that grew up overseas, there is huge competition to become a “linguist” (military interpreter) with several times more applicants than available positions for in-demand languages such as English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, French, German, and Spanish. For more niche languages such as Turkish and Vietnamese, I hear they don’t have an application process and just recruit you based on your background from the training centre for new conscripts.
I wasn’t a linguist during my time in the army, but I was once called in to help out at the ROK/US Combined Forces Command when they had a document that urgently needed to be translated into English. Most of the enlisted soldiers there seemed to be linguists, and some were speaking to each other in English without a foreign accent, presumably having grown up in English-speaking countries.
It’s really a draft of comically underpaid labor into the civilian service – turning occupations like, say, ambulance driver into actual paying jobs seems unthinkable.
I assume you are talking about Zivildienst, which is what I gather the majority of young men sign up for. The Austrians who actually do military service sometimes learn useful skills like driving large trucks in the mud from what I hear. They also occasionally have to fire weapons.
But in any case Rettungsfahrer*in is also an actual paying job. Dramatized memorably in Wolf Haas’ novel Komm, süßer Tod and the excellent movie of the same name.
Yes and yes – though the movie (excellent indeed) does feature a number of Zivildiener. I should have worded it as “creating enough actually paid positions as ambulance driver etc.”.
One of the arguments against the abolition of the draft in Germany was actually that it would exacerbate the shortage of people in care professions, because the Zivildienst would be abolished together with the draft. Basically nobody back then argued that we might need an army big enough to defend ourselves against any serious attacker… it’s hard to believe that those innocent times were only 14 years ago.
Austria has long pretended to think so (as Switzerland actually does), but never did in living memory. Joke from the Cold War:
How long do the Russians need to overcome the Alps?
A quarter of an hour. Ten minutes for laughing, five minutes for climbing.
I heard about this test and the classification (categories I to IV).
“Which language is the hardest (easiest) to learn” etc. is one of questions bored people ask on langauge learning forums all the time, and this classification is the only reference known to the people who answer these questions. A bit weird that the classification is intended for someone who would circle around her target language speaker in a gunship, listening to her communications on radio and directing the gun:/
Are not there any better classifications?
A pleasure to have you back, drasvi! And I agree that there are much better classifications.
Perhaps making threats was the original function of language …
Or telling jokes.
Making rude comments.
Surely farting sufficed for that.
Few people have that much control over their farts.
(Some do, and it works wonderfully.)
Some become big stars.
Those are the pow-pow, ha-ha, and [r̼̊.r̼̊] theories?
It didn’t really get traction before the three were combined to make rudely funny threats.