languagehat.com

Carina Chocano writes for the New Yorker (archived) about Luis von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo; for a longish article about a language-teaching company, there’s surprisingly little about language, but here are some relevant bits:

Von Ahn briefly considered retirement. “But only for a second,” he told me. “I get really bored.” Instead, he began a new project, Duolingo, which is now the most frequently downloaded education app in the world. Originally, he envisioned it as another Janus-faced project—a Web site that would help people learn foreign languages while simultaneously using their work to translate online texts. It evolved into something else, a smartphone app that offers language lessons as a series of bright, colorful, addictive games. But it remains, under the hood, an exercise in human computation. Like all of the work von Ahn is known for, it is an investigation into not only what we can learn from machines but also into what machines can learn from us. […]

Von Ahn grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Guatemala City with his mother and his grandmother. His mother, Norma, was the youngest of twelve children, and also one of the first women in Guatemala to earn a medical degree. […] When Luis arrived, Norma continued with her program of optimization. “I spoke to him from the time he was born,” she told me. “I think people don’t realize how important this is, but that’s how they acquire language.” By the age of two, she said, Luis spoke perfect Spanish, so she started to speak to him in English. She sent him to a Montessori school. His teachers told Norma that Luis liked to walk around the classroom explaining things to other kids. […]

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I not only enjoyed this 1915 quote from Basil Gildersleeve (courtesy of Laudator Temporis Acti) for its own sake, I learned a flamboyant and possibly useful word from it:

To come back to my Tauchnitz Aischylos. Like all men of my time, I own a number of these old Tauchnitz editions; and some of them are a joy to me, notably the Aristophanes, by reason of their faulty texts, showing as they do the advance of textual criticism just as the old Variorum editions give evidence of the progress achieved in exegesis. Both may be made to serve as adminicles to the work of the Greek Seminary. The veriest novice can be taught by these old Tauchnitz editions to restore the readings of the best MSS., to correct the false spellings, the bad forms, the abnormal syntax—an encouraging exercise in the art of handling texts.

OED (entry updated December 2011):
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Alexander Wells writes for the European Review of Books:

Whenever I leave my Berlin apartment, the first thing I see is a sign saying CHICKEN HAUS BURGER; the second is a café blackboard announcing: « You can’t buy happiness but you can buy CROIFFLE and that’s kind of the same thing. » A billboard advertises an upcoming film as « ein STATEMENT für GIRLPOWER »; one shop promises a wide range of Funsocken. Rather more disturbing — particularly here in Neukölln, a neighbourhood copiously populated by leftie Americans and families from the Middle East — is the Arabic-German barber shop called WHITE BOSS. And when I go downtown to the bookstore where I occasionally host readings, the only good coffee nearby is served by a place unbelievably named PURE ORIGINS. […]

Which is not to say that Berlin’s English-language readers — the natively anglophones plus many whose first language is Swedish, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic — do not know German at all. The Berlinglish they speak is informal English, slightly simplified, full of swears, nightlife slang and loan words — mostly adopted from German. Knowing the contours of this dialect is no small part of my editing work. Taken together, its German-to-English loans register all the points of cultural interface that an expat life simply cannot avoid — Rundfunk, Finanzamt, Anmeldung — as well as some that have made it across on account of their own attractive promises: Spätkauf, Flohmarkt, Falafelteller, Wegbier.

The English spoken by those newcomers who settle here and end up making some German friends and studying the language — it also absorbs subtler influences from German. The other day my friend S., an American Berliner, said that he had noticed his English-language social circle starting to use the word « spontaneously » wrong. When Germans say they’ll organise a social event spontan, they mean they’ll work out the details at short notice. To socialise spontaneously, in English, means something rather different. But S. and I and our Neukölln friends have started using it in the sense of spontan. « OK cool text me Sunday and we’ll choose a place spontaneously. » This error is becoming part of our little language, our ultra-local dialect, just among us.

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Medical Xpress has a report (no author named) on how “Speech rhythm and pitch are fundamental in babies’ language acquisition”:

Language acquisition is a complex process that requires different neural and cognitive skills since early childhood. One of children’s big challenges in language learning is to distinguish the words that are grammatically linked to each other, even though they hear one word after the other.

We can easily understand that in the sentence “She, who never drinks coffee, sleeps more,” “she” is the subject to the verb “sleep,” just like in the—easier—sentence “She sleeps well,” although the first sentence has many words in between the subject and the verb. However, how does a child’s brain cope with having to find regularities between the words that are separated from one another in a sentence? Since there are many words that could go together, it seems impossible to keep track of them all.

To date, it was thought that babies could not recognize these distant regularities in speech signal until their first year of life. Now, a study published in the journal Science Advances reveals that 9-month-old babies are sensitive to non-adjacent grammatical regularities contained in language components. The conclusions of the study highlight the importance of prosody—rhythm, melodic stress, pitch, pauses, etc.—that eases the babies’ language learning process.

The study is led by Ruth de Diego Balaguer and Ferran Pons, lecturers at the Faculty of Psychology and the Institute of Neurosciences of the UB (UBneuro). Researchers Anna Martínez Álvarez and Judit Gervain, from the University of Padova (Italy), participated in the study as well.

The study itself is here; I find this stuff fascinating, and I look forward to follow-ups. Thanks, Bonnie!

Miranda Wollen writes for the Yale Daily News about a welcome new course offering:

Yale has informally offered Indigenous languages as part of the University’s curriculum for over seven years through the Native American Cultural Center and the Directed Independent Language Study program, but this fall marks the first time that studying one will fulfill the language distributional requirement. Patrick DelPercio, a Cherokee language instructor at the University of Oklahoma, will join the University’s faculty to teach a lecture course focusing on Cherokee language and culture.

“Other home speakers can take heritage language classes at Yale, but not Indigenous students,” Director of Undergraduate Studies of Linguistics Claire Bowern told the News. “Particularly for Indigenous students, it seemed very out of place that one can do one’s language requirement by studying languages from all around the world… except the Indigenous languages of the Americas.” […]

Bowern noted that the limited documentation and archival material which exists on Native peoples is often held within the walls of the very institutions which have historically excluded those communities. She pointed to the Belonging at Yale Initiative’s emphasis on curricular reform. “We don’t want to lock things up in archives and make it difficult for the communities whose cultural heritage they are to have access to those materials,” she explained.

I once wanted to learn Cherokee; it’s probably too late for me, but I’m glad Yale is now offering it (and I’m pleased to feature Claire Bowern, once a fellow linguablogger, at LH again).

Unrelated, but this is driving me crazy and I’m hoping some learned Hatter can help: I’m trying to find the Greek original of the Chrysostom prayer that includes this passage in the Church Slavic version: “и да не на мнозе удаляяйся общения Твоего, от мысленнаго волка звероуловлен буду.” I’m citing it from Последование к Святому Причащению, under “Молитва иная, иже во святых отца нашего Иоанна Златоустаго, 2.” It’s translated here as “lest I stray far away from Thy flock, O Master, and become caught by the wolf of souls” and here as “that I may not by long abstaining from Thy communion become a prey to the spiritual wolf.” But even though his Opera Omnia from Migne’s Patrologia Graeca are online, I have failed to locate anything that corresponds to ‘second prayer for communion/Eucharist’ (I tried googling [Χρυσόστομος προσευχές για τη θεία κοινωνία]). Any assistance gratefully received!

Update. Xerîb has found the Greek original, which can be seen (with parallel English translation) here under ΕΥΧΗ Γʹ (Ἰωάννου τοῦ Χρυσοστόμου) [THIRD PRAYER of Saint John Chrysostom]: καὶ ἵνα μή, ἐπὶ πολὺ ἀφιστάμενος τῆς κοινωνίας σου, θηριάλωτος ὑπὸ τοῦ νοητοῦ λύκου γένωμαι. Excellent detective work!

Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti posts this inspiring quote from Toynbee’s A Study of History, Vol. X:

Professor H.W. Bailey (natus A.D. 1899), a philologist of world-wide renown who in A.D. 1952 was the Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Cambridge, had awoken to consciousness as a child on a farm in Western Australia; and it would be hard to think of a more unpromising environment than this for producing a savant in the field of Oriental languages. The virgin soil of a recently colonized terra nullius exhaled no folk-lore to play the part of those local legends that had put Heinrich Schliemann, in his Varangian village, on the track of buried treasure; but the local human environment in Western Australia in the first decade of the twentieth century of the Christian Era did provide Harold Walter Bailey with the equivalent of the Universal History that had given the decisive turn to Heinrich Schliemann’s life when it had come into Schliemann’s hands on Christmas Day, 1829. The books that descended from Heaven upon the boy on the West Australian farm were ‘a set of seven volumes of an encyclopaedia (eagerly devoured) and four other volumes with lessons in French, Latin, German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. Later came Arabic and Persian, out of which Persian took the lead (joined later to Sanskrit)’.

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Back in 2011, I posted The Bilingual Advantage, featuring a NY Times interview about “how bilingualism sharpens the mind”; now it seems that was hooey. Emily S. Nichols, Conor J. Wild, Bobby Stojanoski, Michael E. Battista, and Adrian M. Owen have a new article in Psychological Science (Volume 31, Issue 5; https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976209031) titled “Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages: A Population Study of Executive Function in 11,000 People”) whose abstract says “We assessed 11,041 participants on a broad battery of 12 executive tasks whose functional and neural properties have been well described. Bilinguals showed an advantage over monolinguals on only one test (whereas monolinguals performed better on four tests), and these effects all disappeared when the groups were matched to remove potentially confounding factors.” Here are some salient passages from the article:

In this study of 11,041 participants, no reliable differences in executive function were observed between monolinguals and people who reported speaking more than one language. First, when we created matched groups to eliminate confounds that may be masking an executive function advantage in bilinguals, and to ensure that our groups met the criteria for being either monolingual or bilingual, we found no significant group differences. Second, when utilizing the entire (large, though unbalanced) data set, we found that only one task, Digit Span, showed an advantage in performance in bilinguals. Although this result is statistically significant, it is important to put it in perspective: The regression coefficient was 0.05. In real terms, this means that, statistically, speaking a second language is associated with better memory for digits, but that difference is one twentieth of 1 standard deviation. […]

These results demonstrate that, across a broad battery of cognitive tasks of executive function, no systematic differences exist between monolinguals and bilinguals. […]

We conclude by emphasizing, however, that despite the fact that no meaningful relationship was found between bilingualism and executive function, the broader social, employment, and lifestyle benefits that are available to speakers of a second language are clearly numerous.

I’m glad they added that last paragraph to ward off despair!

I won’t say “the tooter the sweeter” is the oddest entry I’ve ever encountered in the OED, since I’ve seen some doozies, but it certainly took me aback:

‘The sooner the better’: used as a comparative of toot sweet adv., typically to intensify a preceding use of the positive form.

1917 Punch 5 Dec. 389 (caption) Tommy (to inquisitive French children): ‘Nah, then, alley toot sweet, an’ the tooter the sweeter.’
1919 H. M. Kramer With Seeing Eyes viii. 143 So when one heard the whistle of a bomb he ‘hit the ground’, to use a soldier expression, ‘toot sweet—and the tooter the sweeter’.
1960 N. E. Jacob Search for Background iv. 54 There’s a message from your dad, to go to Mr Oswald’s office as soon as you get here. As we used to say in the first war—the tooter the sweeter.
2000 Scotsman (Nexis) 2 June 16 Greetings, mine honest tapster..furnish me toot sweet—and the tooter the sweeter—with a pint of your finest industrial-strength sheep dip.

I mean, it’s a jolly phrase, but since when has the OED been including jolly phrases in its lexicon? Why isn’t it s.v. sweet? But I’m glad to know about it, and I thought I’d pass it on.

Ryszard Szopa writes about a fascinating use of the annoyingly ubiquitous ChatGPT:

When I was a kid, I used to invent languages. […] My 9 years old son, Rysio, has inherited the predilection for language creation. However, he has the good fortune of living in a different era. Thanks to YouTube channels like NativLang and LangFocus, he has access to a wealth of linguistic knowledge, which he uses to create more elaborate and creative languages. His latest creation is Kłeti (pronounced “kwety”). His design goal is to create a language whose grammar would not mimic any languages he knows well, like English or Polish. He also strived to use as many sounds as possible. […]

I absolutely love engaging with my son’s creations. Part of me feels like I should become fluent in Kłeti as quickly as possible. However, the language is very different from the Indo-European languages that I am familiar with. For example, Kłeti has a sentence structure that is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb), while all the languages I know have a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentence structure. Additionally, Kłeti uses specific connectors to link nouns, verbs, and adjectives together, again: not a feature an Indo-European speaker would be familiar with. Furthermore, Kłeti has a different approach to forming questions, showing possession, and indicating plurality. All of these differences can make it surprising and challenging for someone with an Indo-European language background to learn and use Kłeti. […]

Despite my son’s age-inappropriate impressive linguistic knowledge, properly documenting Kłeti seemed to be beyond his current abilities. As a result, it seemed like the language might only exist in his imagination, along with the glossary and some example sentences he put in a Google Doc.

But here’s the thing: we’re living in a time when things that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago are now at our fingertips. In April 2023, we decided to take advantage of this fact by giving ChatGPT a run for its money. As an afternoon project, we decided to teach it Kłeti. […]

ChatGPT didn’t quite learn to translate from Kłeti to English (it kept making mistakes). In our rather non-scientific test, it scored a hair above 50% (6.5/12). Are we disappointed? Let’s put this into perspective. We gave the model a completely new invented language and no explicit description. The language itself was designed with the goal of being complex, and GPT needed to extract most of the description of the language from a super tiny parallel corpus (a handful of sentences, literally). It got to the point where it was able to do ok translations in one directions, and almost passable translation in the other. All this in a lazy afternoon’s time work (assuming you have a child who has already invented a language for you, of course). That is mindbogglingly amazing (regardless of whether we are talking about a human being or a model).

The details of the attempt are well worth reading. Thanks, Michael! (For an LH discussion of conlangs, see this 2009 post.)

I’m reading Eugene Vodolazkin’s 2012 novel Лавр in Lisa Hayden’s superb translation as Laurus, and I’ve come across a passage that seemed eminently Hatworthy. Our hero Arseny, a 15th-century village healer, has gotten enough renown for his success that his patients in Belozersk are giving him plenty of money (Christofer is the grandfather who raised him and taught him about healing herbs):

Arseny used the money to buy several small books that he chanced upon: they described the healing properties of herbs and stones. One of them was a doctor book from abroad, and Arseny paid the merchant Afanasy Flea, who had visited German lands, for a translation. Flea’s translation was extremely approximate, which limited opportunities for using the book. Arseny employed the book’s prescriptions only when they coincided with what he knew from Christofer.

By following along as the merchant read the unfamiliar symbols and translated the words they composed, Arseny grew interested in the correlations between languages. Thanks to the story of the confusion of tongues, Arseny knew of the existence of seventy-two world languages, but he had yet, in his whole life, to hear a single one of them beyond Russian. His lips moving, he repeated the unaccustomed combinations of sounds and words to himself, after Flea. When he learned their meanings, it surprised him that familiar things could be expressed in such an unusual and—this was the main thing—awkward way. At the same time, the multitude of opportunities for expression entranced and attracted Arseny. He tried to memorize correlations between Russian and German words, along with Flea’s pronunciation, which probably did not correspond to authentic German pronunciation.

The enterprising Flea quickly noticed Arseny’s interest and offered to give him German lessons. Arseny readily agreed. Essentially, these new lessons were nothing like the usual notions of teaching, because Afanasy Flea was unable to say anything intelligible about language in general. He had never thought about its structure and certainly did not know its rules. At first the lessons consisted of nothing more than the merchant reading more of the doctor book aloud and translating it. These language lessons differed from their previous translation sessions only because at the end of each section, Flea asked Arseny:

Got that?

This allowed the merchant to charge Arseny a double fee: for translation and for lessons. Arseny did not begrudge the money so he did not grumble. He valued Afanasy Flea as the only person in Belozersk familiar to any degree with speech from abroad. Understanding that he would achieve little by merely reading the doctor book, Arseny decided to make use of one of his instructor’s undeniable merits: Flea possessed a good ear and a tenacious memory.

During his time spent on lengthy trips in the land of Germany, Flea had mastered phrases to be uttered in various situations and could repeat those words when asked probing questions. Arseny described these situations for Flea and asked what to say in those cases. The merchant (this is so easy!) waved his hands around, surprised, and reported all the versions he had heard. Arseny wrote down what Flea said. When he was alone, he put his notes in order. He extracted the unfamiliar words from the expressions he heard from Flea and registered them in a special little dictionary.

I presume he will make use of this knowledge later in his travels. The novel is delightfully cavalier about historical accuracy (the author calls it «неисторический роман» — “an unhistorical novel”); there are occasional dips into the future (at one point someone quotes the Little Prince: “For what you have tamed, you become responsible forever”), and the language mingles Ye Olde Church Slavic with modern colloquialisms in a pleasing way which Hayden renders with perfect pitch (her equivalents for “бля” are a master class in themselves). She even comes up with a spectacular equivalent of the pun in “Корова (что в вымени тебе моем?)” (an allusion to the Pushkin poem “Что в имени тебе моём” ‘What is in my name for you,’ with в вымени ‘in udder’ substituted for в имени ‘in name’): “The cow (how shall I udder your name?).” Highly recommended!

The Russian original is below the cut:
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