languagehat.com

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.

Joan Smith discusses the decline of spoken Arabic in the Turkish province of Hatay (formerly the Sanjak of Alexandretta, a part of Greater Syria in Ottoman times).

Although there are no official statistics on language use or on ethnic groups in Turkey, it is clear that in the province of Hatay (in the south, bordering Syria), most people are descended from Arabic speakers. Arabic entered the area as a result of the Arab conquests in the seventh century. Prior to this, the cities were Greek-speaking; people in surrounding areas spoke Aramaic. (Trimingham, 1979) The area first came under Turkish rule for a brief time at the end of the eleventh century, when Seljuks and Turkmen began eroding Byzantine control. Crusader rule followed…. The area subsequently came under Mameluke rule (from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries), then under Ottoman rule (from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries)…. As part of Greater Syria, Hatay was still largely Arabic-speaking when it was annexed by the Turkish Republic in 1938.

Until annexation, Turkish and Arabic co-existed for centuries; under republican policies, however, the use of Arabic began to decline.

Smith’s is one of a number of interesting articles on endangered languages (for example, Language Shift on the Kamchatka Peninsula [by Jonathan David Bobaljik], about the situation of Itelmen, and Gumbaynggirr [by Michael Walsh — not archived anywhere in 2021], about the comeback of an Aboriginal language of New South Wales in Australia) in a special issue of Cultural Survival. (Via wood s lot.)

Update (May 2021). Even though Cultural Survival is still in existence and I have been able to provide new and functioning URLs for the first two articles, they appear to have dumped the Walsh one down the memory hole, and Internet Archive also has no record of it (beyond the title liested in the archived “special issue” contents). And the current page for that issue silently omits that and other articles (and doesn’t put the authors’ names on the page — you have to click through to find out). I know they’re trying to support cultural survival, but that’s doubleplus ungood.

The latest New Yorker has a brilliant review by James Wood of God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson that not only makes me want to read the book but introduces me to a fine word and a fine poem. The word comes about halfway through, as Wood is discussing King James’s desire to “elide doctrinal differences”; he quotes Nicolson as follows: “This is the heart of the new Bible as an irenicon… an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace. It is the central mechanism of the translation, one of immense lexical subtlety, a deliberate carrying of multiple meanings beneath the surface of a single text.” The OED defines “irenicon” (or, in the older spelling, “eirenicon”) as “a proposal designed to promote peace, esp. in a church or between churches; a message of peace”; I like the word, and the way Nicolson defines it in context, very much.

The poem comes earlier in the review, as Wood is tracing the line of influence of the King James Bible in some surprising places, like Philip Larkin, “an English poet of decidedly secular leanings.” I’ve never been a big fan of Larkin’s (apart from everybody’s pitch-black favorite, “This Be The Verse“), but the poem Wood quotes to illustrate Biblical echoes, “Cut Grass,” is a gorgeous little lyric:

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.

Aside from these incidental pleasures, the review provides one of the best concise summaries I’ve seen of exactly why the KJB is so great and will never be replaced:

The Hebrew texts in particular feature what have been called “key-words,” words or phrases repeated and subtly modified in a passage, as a kind of threaded meaning. The English translators were sensitive watchers of these words, and the King James Bible is considered superlative for the pursuit of such threads. The scholars Robert Alter and Gerald Hammond have discussed the technique as it appears in II Samuel 3, in which the phrase “and he went in peace” undergoes a series of variations analogous to those of the original Hebrew:

And David sent Abner away; and he went in peace. And behold, the servants of David and Joab came from pursuing a troop, and brought in a great spoil with them: but Abner was not with David in Hebron; for he had sent him away, and he was gone in peace. When Joab and all the host that was with him were come, they told Joab, saying, Abner the son of Ner came to the king and he hath sent him away, and he is gone in peace. Then Joab came to the king, and said, What hast thou done? Behold, Abner came unto thee; why is it that thou hast sent him away, and he is quite gone?

Hammond notes that later versions of this passage, like the Jerusalem Bible and the New English Bible, smother the effect by varying their translations of the key-phrase too drastically.

Wood discusses the use of repetition further, then sums up: “So there is a one-word answer to the question of what the translators got right. It is music.” Amen.

(You can read the first few paragraphs of the book here.)

A glorious rant by Paul Ford on Ftrain, all about printed books and colophons and monkey grunts and McSweeney’s abuse of ligatures. Many thanks to wood s lot for the link.
A brief excerpt:

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