MOUNT HOLYOKE INTERNATIONAL.

Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts (just a few miles south of where I live) has put up on its website a marvelous set of videos, called “For Parents” (presumably so that prospective students from one of the countries represented can show the appropriate clip to their parents and say “See, there are people there who speak our language and recommend the school!”), in which two or three students spend a few minutes chatting in their native language about how great Mount Holyoke is (I must say, they’re very convincing—after watching a few, I wanted to enroll myself). So far, they have videos labeled Bengali, Български (Bulgarian), 中文 (Chinese), ქართული ენა (Georgian), हिन्दी (Hindi), नेपाली (Nepali), اردو (Urdu), Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), 日本語 (Japanese), Ghana, Português, 한국어 (Korean), Español, and العربية (Arabic—one girl is from Algeria and the other from Egypt); they all have subtitles, which is what makes it such a joy for those of us who aren’t part of the target audience. It’s a great way to spend a few minutes immersing yourself in a language you half know or have an interest in; listening to Georgian made me want to pick up the language again (for the fourth, I think, time). I presume “Ghana” represents an Akan language (I wonder if using the country name is a result of some controversy about language labels?); I’m guessing Twi, but I’d be glad if someone who actually knows would chime in.

Comments

  1. There is indeed a terminological problem: the WP article you link to begins by calling Akan a language group, and then saying that all Akan languages are mutually intelligible. This implies that by the usual definition they are not separate languages at all.
    ISO 639-3 takes the sensible middle approach and classifies Akan as a macrolanguage, that intermediate category invented by Peter Constable (then of SIL, now of Microsoft) for a group of languages that is sometimes treated as a group, sometimes as a single language. Chinese and Arabic are the best-known examples, but here’s ISO’s list, which does not pretend to be complete.

  2. I thought that there might have been more difference between Hindi and Urdu by now, but if I had not read the labels I would not have known the difference. Especially since both have the characteristic heavy use of English.

  3. From Wikipedia:

    Although Mount Holyoke only considers female applicants for admission, it will award diplomas to transgendered students who become male or identify themselves as male by the time they complete their studies. To reflect this fact, in 2005 Mount Holyoke’s Student Government Association amended its constitution so that the word “she” was replaced with “student.”

    But what is Mount Holyoke’s position on the Saudi boycott of insulin?

  4. John Emerson says

    Both speciation in biology and the designation of separate languages in linguistics are pretty nominalistic, and in many cases they’re heavily politicized too.
    These are areas where the arguments against “essentialism”, which can get pretty excessive at times, actually are pretty reasonable.
    During the 19th century social-science wannabes found essences in languages, cultures, and races, right at the moment when a more powerful science, biology, was historicizinh and de-essentializing itself via evolution.
    Perhaps an intermediate category will someday be described between macro-language and language family, or a category between macrolanguage and language. One can only hope. Full scholasticism has not yet been achieved.

  5. saying that all Akan languages are mutually intelligible. This implies that by the usual definition they are not separate languages at all.
    And what ‘usual’ definition would that be? 🙂

  6. John E.,
    in edition or perhaps by extension, there seems to be some difference in the treatment of languages with written traditions and languages with zero or very little literature.

  7. Interesting how they present the Arab students. Wearing hijab (hair covering) is somewhat controversial in Jordan; although the overwhelming majority of Jordanian women wear it, sometimes women who wear hijab cannot get jobs. Of the two students speaking Arabic, one student is wearing hair covering and one not. There are several other (presumably) Arab speaking students portrayed in the background, but the camera follows the one who is wearing hijab.
    Oh, and it looks like the crescent moon has been sighted and Ramadan is over, starting tomorrow. Eid Mubarak!

  8. It’s Twi. I don’t think it’s Asante Twi, which is the only variant I have significant experience with, but it’s also been a few years since I’ve interacted with any native speakers so I could be wrong.

  9. Not to import or smuggle “full scholasticism”, but how has biology been de-essentialized by evolution? or, how does evolution disclose the non-essentiality of biology?
    I would have suspected evolution of having granulated the ‘essence’ of life more finely than the particle of a species or biological individual, but not to have eliminated ‘essence’- especially if ‘essence’ can be understood relationally (formally) as well as materially.

  10. John Emerson says

    Species are fuzzy sets, and they don’t stay the same, and they pass out of existence, and new species come into existence. And the whole world changes. For example, atmospheric oxygen was toxic to all living creatures up until a few billion years ago.

  11. It’s Twi.
    Thank you!

  12. How many billion years is ‘a few’?

  13. John Emerson says

    2, 3, 4. I needed to have enough slack so that no one could zing me with a billion-year error. That’s where the first aerobic life forms that could fix nitrogen evolved.

  14. “Species are fuzzy sets[.]”
    I think, enabled only by small knowledge, that that’s exactly the right logical analogy. But the fuzziness of a set doesn’t rule out ‘essence’, does it? That a set can be described accurately as more or less, or not-at-all, ‘fuzzy’ seems to argue that some ‘essence’ is ruled IN.
    Species pass into and out of existence, as do genes. I guess even the A-T/C-G base pairs of nucleic acid aren’t universally necessary for metabolism and reproduction- why NOT a living system without proteins?
    But when one says “life”, it sounds like an ‘essential’ difference from ‘non-living’ is being indicated. (Hence, allowing for form as well as matter to be ‘of essence’.)
    Perhaps I mean “essence” more ontologically and less practically than biologists mean the word when/if they refer to a species ‘inessentially’. Do biologists privilege the perspective of a biological individual so sharply that they’re interested in calling, nominalistically, each individual a separate ‘nano-species’? That WOULD be fully Full Scholasticism.

  15. John Emerson says

    There’s essentialism and then there’s essentialism. If you get scholastic enough, you have to have essentialism in order to say anything at all.
    But if you don’t have distinct essences, I don’t see how you have any essences. For example, presumably at some point there was some carnivore that was partly cat-like and partly dog-like (or perhaps weasel-like or hyena-like — I don’t know how the branching goes).
    And most forms of essentialism (people also say “Platonism”) don’t have essences coming into existence and passing from existence.

  16. What’s that script for Georgian? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it before (not that that’s saying much).
    I don’t know about “a few”, but four billions (échelle courte) is a Sagan.

  17. John Emerson says

    I believe that the earth is three Sagans old, give or take a billion or two, and aerobic life is .75 Sagans old, give or take a billion.

  18. Georgian alphabet: confusing foreigners since the fourth century!

  19. The Georgian script looks very Dravidian – like it is a cousin of Tamil or Telugu, Malayalam or Kannada.

  20. Yes, the world is supposed (by the relevant scientists) to be 13.4 billion years old the last time I heard. For some reason it stuck in my mind.

  21. the world is supposed (by the relevant scientists) to be 13.4 billion years old
    Vraiment? I was just reading a list of the HST’s achievements the other on the occasion of the release of the first photos post-refit and one of the achievements listed was fixing the approximate age of the Universe at somewhere around 13 billion. Since Sol is definitely not a 1st-gen star, doesn’t that make 13.4 unlikely for our rock?

  22. Universe. Sorry, I mean Universe. Sorry. Not world, Universe. Sorry.
    (Actually they’re pretty similar, in my experience.)

  23. John Emerson says

    Earth, universe, three Sagans, two Sagans, one Sagan, more or less.

  24. A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon your talking about a real hunk of history.

  25. John Emerson says

    We need to look at the big picture and not get bogged down in minutiae.

  26. Jörg watches a fisking says

    @A.J.P.:
    You would crown my day if you signed your next comment accurately, i.e. as the past participle that just happened to you.

  27. Since we are on the topic of the age of the universe I would like to take this opportunity to recommend the book Dangerous World: Natural disasters, manmade catastrophes, and the future of human survival (Penguin) by Canadian journalist Marq de Villiers, who grew up in South Africa but now lives in Nova Scotia. In spite of the somewhat sensational title the book is a serious look at the Earth, its place in the universe, its history, problems and possible solutions. It seems very well-documented, and it is also well-organized, well-written and very readable, mixing scientific data with relevant personal experiences of the author all over the world. I am currently rereading it: once I had finished the book I started right back at the beginning.

  28. m-l, I think ‘they’ have changed the title to ‘The End: Natural disasters…’

  29. AJP, I see, I bought the book in Canada but there is a separate publisher in the US, who must have changed the title to make the book more scary. The new title uggests that the book is somehow apocalyptic, which it is not. It deserves to be read by serious readers, while the title makes it appear more directed at the “rapture” people (but who knows, such people might learn something from it).

  30. Back to the Arabic-language video… Could someone enlighten me as to the variety or varieties of Arabic being spoken by the two students, please? For example, are they each speaking their own regional dialect, MSA, or perhaps MSA with clear influences from their regional dialect etc.? Thanks.

  31. @ Stuart, re Georgian script:
    Pace our local pan-Dravidian boosters, the Georgian script is just another one of the half-dozen or so alphabets derived from Greek minuscule during the big expansion of the Eastern church in the first millenium. Others include Cyrillic and Armenian.
    The highly-divergent letterforms are the result of an extended game of visual “telephone”; scribes would copy the visual forms of the letters as they adapted the new technology to their native languages, but would use idiosyncratic stroke-order, which would ultimately affect the shapes of the letters as the scribes gained fluency. The South Asian abugidas are another example of the same phenomenon.

  32. Yes, I saw from the Wiki that Georigian was derived from Greek. Mine was just a throwaway comment on the visual similarity. I did read somewhere that Malayalam has a lot of circular letters because it was originally written on leaves and the curves reduced the risk of tearing. How much credence to give that I do not know.

  33. John Emerson says

    Greek script was derived from Tamiḻ Ariccuvaṭi, though it’s more evident with the miniscule. It has been shown that Linear A also represented an early form of Tamil. Later the Tamils were driven out and replaced by Indo-European barbarians, whose later culture shows some traces of the civilized culture of their predecessors.

  34. Thanks John Emerson, I knew I could count on you for the objective unvarnished truth.

  35. But where does that leave the Basques, my dear Emerson?
    The things I learn in this place. I had no idea about Georgian. You always make me feel so uneducated.
    There’s a new book about the end of the world, too.

  36. The book I mentioned, Dangerous World, is not quite as much a Doomsday predictor, and it is not just about astronomical events. Its US title The End may have been chosen for competition with the book mentioned by Sili, which sounds much more sensational according to the library reviews.

  37. It’s faux-sensational. Phil Plait knows how to write, and he does open each chapter with a little vignette of doom. Then he immediately dismantles it with SCIENCE.
    Okay – I’ll stop plugging him now. Mustn’t venture too close to spamdom.

  38. Parsing ‘essentialisms’ is the right call.
    But it seems to me that, when the Schoolmen got “scholastic enough”, in discovering that each existing thing (at the most granular level of particularization) is its own universal, they had discarded a ‘hard’ essence in favor of an impractically un’form’ed existence. (I’m thinking of Duns.)
    The generation and corruption of ‘essence’– that’s a useful way of phrasing the question of ‘becoming’.

  39. The time I remember as a meme of the universe’s age- the time elapsed since the Big Bang- is 13.7 billion years.
    A lot can happen in a billion years. The Cubs winning their next Series might not be one of them.

  40. Yes, that’s it, god. 13.7. I was only 0.3 billion years out.

  41. Jörg (who renounces signature criticism in favour of numerology) says

    At which point I’d like to ask: is the definition of “world” as the universe the common way of understanding the term? Without context, I’d have taken it to mean “earth” (whose future, by the way, recently brightened, since researchers found – according to an article on Science Daily – that it will probably last a billion years longer than had been assumed prior to the newest calculations). And that would have meant that A.J.P. would have been several – or, taking the new results as the point of departure – several minus one billion years off. I hope I may be excused for having thought that A.J.P. wanted to squirrel away a major piece of eternity. Here’s a snippet from the police – ahem, ScienceDaily – report: “Increasing the lifespan of our biosphere — from roughly 1 billion to 2.3 billion years — has intriguing implications for the search for life elsewhere in the universe. The length of the existence of advanced life is a variable in the Drake equation, astronomer Frank Drake’s famous formula for estimating the number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy. Doubling the duration of Earth’s biosphere effectively doubles the odds that intelligent life will be found elsewhere in the galaxy. “It didn’t take very long to produce life on the planet, but it takes a very long time to develop advanced life,” says Yung. On Earth, this process took four billion years. “Adding an additional billion years gives us more time to develop, and more time to encounter advanced civilizations, whose own existence might be prolonged by this mechanism. It gives us a chance to meet.”
    Wikipedia, though, doesn’t seem to be in favour of giving us a chance to meet – me and A.J.P., that is – as it unequivocally claims that he must be arguing “In a metaphysical context,” where “World may refer to the Universe”. That would appear to be a frame of reference that does not encompass my habitat. Indeed, Wikipedia goes on to tell us that “world” is just the name she chose to go by – this planet of ours, mother earth, she with those life-extending tricks up her sleeve that put transhumanists’ weirdest visions to shattering shame.
    And for the rest of the etymology I will just hand the mike to Trond Engen, who – on being asked: “English “world” is explained from Germanic *wer-ald literally meaing age of man. Is this etymology reliable?” -, replied: “Yes. The Icelandic word for “world” is “veröld”, of which the second part is the same as öld “long time, century, aeon”, genitive aldar (even the genitive of veröld is veraldar). The ver- part is less obvious, but even modern Icelandic knows “ver” as a poetic word for a man.”At which point I’d like to ask: is the definition of “world” as the universe the common way of understanding the term? Without context, I’d have taken it to mean “earth” (whose future, by the way, recently brightened, since researchers found – according to an article on Science Daily – that it will probably last a billion years longer than had been assumed prior to the newest calculations). And that would have meant that A.J.P. would have been several – or, taking the new results as the point of departure – several minus one billion years off. I hope I may be excused for having thought that A.J.P. wanted to squirrel away a major piece of eternity. Here’s a snippet from the police – ahem, ScienceDaily – report: “Increasing the lifespan of our biosphere — from roughly 1 billion to 2.3 billion years — has intriguing implications for the search for life elsewhere in the universe. The length of the existence of advanced life is a variable in the Drake equation, astronomer Frank Drake’s famous formula for estimating the number of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy. Doubling the duration of Earth’s biosphere effectively doubles the odds that intelligent life will be found elsewhere in the galaxy. “It didn’t take very long to produce life on the planet, but it takes a very long time to develop advanced life,” says Yung. On Earth, this process took four billion years. “Adding an additional billion years gives us more time to develop, and more time to encounter advanced civilizations, whose own existence might be prolonged by this mechanism. It gives us a chance to meet.”
    Wikipedia, though, doesn’t seem to be in favour of giving us a chance to meet – me and A.J.P., that is – as it unequivocally claims that he must be arguing “In a metaphysical context,” where “World may refer to the Universe”. That would appear to be a frame of reference that does not encompass my habitat. Indeed, Wikipedia goes on to tell us that “world” is just the name she chose to go by – this planet of ours, mother earth, she with those life-extending tricks up her sleeve that put transhumanists’ weirdest visions to shattering shame.
    And for the rest of the etymology I will just hand the mike to Trond Engen, who – on being asked: “English “world” is explained from Germanic *wer-ald literally meaing age of man. Is this etymology reliable?” -, replied: “Yes. The Icelandic word for “world” is “veröld”, of which the second part is the same as öld “long time, century, aeon”, genitive aldar (even the genitive of veröld is veraldar). The ver- part is less obvious, but even modern Icelandic knows “ver” as a poetic word for a man.”

  42. Please delete: the text got completely garbled, I will repost.

  43. John Emerson says

    Duns of couse was the very definition of an idiot.
    The word “secular” means both “worldly” and “temporal” and in old literature “segle” seems confused between “this world” and “this era”. “Secular” in economics means “long-term trend”.

  44. @Stuart:
    “I thought that there might have been more difference between Hindi and Urdu by now, but if I had not read the labels I would not have known the difference.”
    It’s quite possible to make sentences that no Indian can say it’s clearly either Hindi or Urdu. OTHOH, I have seen H/U translations of the Lord’s prayer that only coincide in some two words. It’s all a matter of how intensely you look for words that can be assigned an origin sufficiently close to, for Hindi either Sanskrit and relatives, or for Urdu Arabic (or Turkic), often via Persian, or directly from Persian.
    King: “One Language, Two Scripts” is interesting on how and why the (two?) language(s) did(n’t) diverge.

  45. Jørg, I’m sorry i didn’t respond to your previous request, i thought you were a spammer. i don’t make metaphysical points. I can’t write a proper reply now because there are two men chopping down trees in my garden.

  46. @Lugubert – your post was preaching to the choir. The point I was trying to make, already being very familiar with the ways in which the differences can be emphasised by selective choices in vocabulary, is that the young girls’ ordinary, everyday conversational language was still, for want of a better word, “Hindustani”, despite 60 years of effort on both sides of the border to drive them apart. I am sure that if I listen to them again I will find word choices that would act as markers of the difference, but the overall impression from a simple listen through was one of delight. I found the resilience of the commonality refreshing given the way nationalists have promoted campaigns for shuddh Hindi and its equivalent in Urdu.

  47. John Emerson says

    Relating to the Hindi-Urdu question: in Taiwan I met an Anglo-Dutch woman fluent in both languages plus Malay, and she said that when she traveled in Indonesia she could understand almost everything, because she could understand the Dutch loan words that were Indonesian’s main difference from Malay. Or so she said.

  48. The Cubs winning their next Series might not be one of them.
    The Cubs are not supposed to win. They are supposed to play like gentlemen which they do very well, and hopefully will continue to do for several Sagans more, as the friendly confines of their ballpark falls down around their ears.
    the Arabic-language video
    Two things I noticed about the regional accent was the Egyptian student saying for أجنبي “foreign” egg-na-bee instead of edge-na-bee, which is unique to Egypt. Also the pronunciation of the plural of bint بنت girl/virgin was pronounced bin-net and not bin-naht as they do in Jordan, at least the northern part, not sure of the significance of that. They also use “yani”, meaning something like “maybe” as a vocalized pause, which I think of as a slang usage, although you hear government officials using it.

  49. saying for أجنبي “foreign” egg-na-bee instead of edge-na-bee, which is unique to Egypt
    Not unique; it’s also in Yemeni Arabic. There’s a nice summary here:

    jiim (CA /d͡ʒ/) too varies widely. In some Arabian Bedouin dialects, and parts of the Sudan, it is still realized as the medieval Persian linguist Sibawayh described it, as a palatalized /ɡʲ/. In Egypt and Yemen, it is a plain /ɡ/. In most of North Africa and the Levant, it is /ʒ/, apart from Algeria. In the Gulf and Iraq, it often becomes /j/. Elsewhere, it is usually /d͡ʒ/.

    (Here /d͡ʒ/ is English j, /ʒ/ is French j (“zh”), and /j/ is English y.)

  50. Today’s unexpected gain in my linguistic knowledge (courtesy nijma + wiktionary): Dennis’ rant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail against the ability of the Lady in the Lake to confer political legitimacy (“if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me . . .”) includes an Arabic loanword.

  51. Well, AJPC, in this century, the “age of the universe” will probably ‘change’, thanks to the pressure of empirical compulsion, as well as theoretical ingenuity, by at least a factor of 10 x 0.3 billion years, right?

  52. Lugubert, I would have guessed that the Sanskrit ancestry ‘visible’ in modern Hindi words would have been more like the Persian in Urdu than either are like Arabic and Turkic words in Urdu. Or do I misunderstand your point?

  53. Duns was never the “definition of an idiot”.
    I mischaracterized Duns’s moderate realism; he’s not on the All-Time OJ Jury, where the mediaeval seat for nominalism should probably be split (in reality, not in idear) and given to Roscelin and William of Occam, for arguing that categories are only abstractions and that perceived similarities are similar in the mind as a reflection of will and not reality, respectively.
    But that the centuries-later followers of Duns- the Dunsmen- should have been devoted enough to sophistical refutation in opposition to ‘humanistic’ learning to give the world “duncery”: why blame the Subtle Doctor?

  54. Nijma, according to your Cub-theory, the ‘gentlemanliness’ of Piniella and Bradley should secure the Cubs a Series triumph this very October.

  55. Jörg, your message is not completely garbled, it is just doubled in size. The second paragraph should be cut in half, starting with “At which point”, and the rest of the text deleted from that point.

  56. John Emerson says

    If it makes you feel better, Scotus can now be called The Blessed Dunce. Please also note that Bede is now sainted and no longer venerable. Please update your address books.
    Regarding Bedes, Minnesota had a Congressman named Adam Bede. He was reputed to be very funny, but research has so far failed to find any real zingers. (For obvious reasons, Google research on Rep. Bede is not easy.

  57. Bede is no no longer venerable.
    Never say never again. Sometimes these things can flair up years later.

  58. Saint Bede: he may still be venerable, even though he is no longer Venerable. Does it mean that his works should know longer be attributed to the Venerable Bede, by which he has been known for centuries?

  59. John Emerson says

    Up-to-date editions will presumably call him Saint. I don’t no about reprints of older works.
    As a Protestant, I call him Mr. Bede, of course.

  60. John Emerson says

    Incidentally, my mirror-image typo was not intentional. And I’m a native speaker.

  61. Thanks for the notification.
    I see that the Franciscans say that Duns was “called” blessed soon after he died, but that he wasn’t beatified officially until 1992. Does anyone know what “miracle” he’s credited with having effected? I know he’s the “minstrel of the Word Incarnate”, and the chief theologian-apologist of the immaculate conception; does either of these cerebral feats constitute a miracle?

    Going by a descriptivist nomenclature, are we now to call Bede “St. Venerable Bede”?

  62. John Emerson says

    There’s solid evidence that Duns was responsible for Roger Staubach’s 1975 Hail Mary pass, but the hierarchy has covered up and denied this up until now in order to avoid the desecration of churches and pillage of convents in the Wobegon area.

  63. ‘Flair’ was intentional. i was testing something.

  64. John Emerson says

    The Immaculate Conception is the very opposite of birth control. Now I understand why that’s such an important issue for Catholics.

  65. Fortunately, the event does not appear to have been repeated.

  66. Because there’s no evidence, I believe it was Dan Brown who heaved the Daniel’s bottle after that “defensive pass interference” call.

  67. “The Immaculate Conception is the very opposite of birth control.”
    You may be confusing the Immaculate Conception [of the Blessed Virgin* on December 8, nine months before Lady Day on August 8] with the conception of Jesus [simultaneous with the Annunciation on March 25, nine months before the Virgin Birth on December 25]. While Mary was conceived without sin, the process did involve Saint Joachim boning Saint Anne.
    *Or Mrs. Virgin, if you prefer.

  68. Thank you for that contramisconception, Molly. But shouldn’t “December” be “November”?

  69. I got confused too, or did not think long enough, even though I recently explained that very difference to a person unfamiliar with Catholic teaching. But either way there is no birth control. It is interesting that the privilege of sinless conception was not extended retroactively to all of the Blessed Virgin*’s ancestors, but that would have created all kinds of problems.
    *(She can’t be “Mrs. Virgin” since she did not have a husband named Virgin).
    December vs November: perhaps the 8-month period reflects a counting process which mentions both the initial and the final unit? eg in French “8 jours” traditionally meaning one week, “15 jours” two weeks? The two gestational periods seem to have been calculated by different people, probably at different times.
    “Lady Day”: according to Wikipedia this name refers to the day of the Annunciation.

  70. September 8 (rather than October) is in both Eastern and Western traditions the nominal birthday, a/k/a the Feast of the Nativity of Our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary. That gets you nine months from early December.

  71. ‘either way there is no birth control’
    Indeed. But I inferred that, for Mr Emerson*, ‘the very opposite of birth control’ would be pregnancy without sex.
    *Or the Blessed John, if you prefer

  72. ” … the boning of Saint Anne?”

  73. The boning of Saint Anne.

  74. John Emerson says

    I confess that I thought that The Immaculate Conception meant not having to do laundry afterward (no macula on the sheets).

  75. “I confess that I thought that The Immaculate Conception meant not having to do laundry afterward (no macula on the sheets).”
    That is compatible with birth control, other than the withdrawal method.

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