Archive for the ‘noEE’ Category

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Bilingual writers reflect on their ‘Mother Tongues’

Thursday, September 2nd, 2004

Learning a new language means more than memorizing a new vocabulary and
mastering different rules of grammar. It also means adopting a new way of
matching words to experience and memory, as “The Genius of Language: Fifteen
Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongues” (Pantheon, $23) illustrates.

This collection of essays by bilingual authors—most of them immigrants to
the United States—chronicles not only each writer’s life’s story, but
also what editor Wendy Lesser calls “the process of being embraced or
enveloped by English.” As Czech native and contributor Josef Skvorecky puts
it, each writer struggles “to be at home in a language.”

The essays also eloquently explore the links between childhood and language.

“I dwell on all of these childhood memories because German is for me the
language of memory and loss, a linguistic Prelude [to my life],” writes
Thomas Laqueur. The echoes of his German-speaking mother’s call,
“Thomaslein,” for “little Thomas,” still have special resonance, he says.

“Tommy, which is what they called me in West Virginia, has always sounded
silly to me; Tom is just a name; Thomaslein is very sweet,” he writes.

Gary Shteyngart, whose bad dreams contain dialogue in his native Russian,
calls his essay “a child’s farewell to the language that once choreographed
his entire world.”

At times, “The Genius of Language” vividly illustrates particular features
of a certain language, giving readers a feel for its texture.

When Bharati Mukherjee, a native of Bangladesh, learned English, she “missed
the onomatopoeic phrases in Bangla that mimicked the blowing of the wind,
the drizzle of rain and gurgle of waterfalls,” she reflects. “Next to the
drawn-out vowels that made spoken Bangla a euphonic language, English
sounded harshly energetic.”

Luc Sante says something similar about his native French. When he translates
a nuanced French phrase to English, the result, he writes, “is a coarse
cluster of dentals, and it is over in a second and leaves no echo.”

Sante translates one of his favorite French poems to English, and remarks:
“It has none of the music or the magic, in part because of the tendency of
English to condensation and bluntness, away from the silken chains of
prepositional phrases that give French its incantory power.”

For other writers, individual words evoke a feeling or reminiscence that
English cannot match. M.J. Fitzgerald, who lived in Italy as a child, writes
about “a sea whose intensity of blue can only be contained in the Italian
word azzurro. The word blue, an anodyne descriptive term, does not convey
that childhood sea, but azzurro brings it all back.”

At times, the tension between two languages is so complex that a writer
cannot keep them from crowding each other out.

Ariel Dorfman says he labored for months to begin his memoir, unable to
decide whether to write it in English or Spanish. He “could not venture one
word in either language without feeling that I was betraying one or the
other,” he writes. “Whenever I wrote anything about my life, in either
language, it simply sounded . . . false, falso, fraudulent, fraudulento.”
(He ended up writing it in English, then re-writing it in Spanish.)

Dorfman suggests that different languages have unique ways of shaping how a
speaker sees the world. So does Skvorecky, who writes about “the joy, as it
were, of being an additional human being [by] writing in an additional
tongue.”

Amy Tan, a child of Chinese immigrants, takes this idea a step further,
mentioning Benjamin Lee Whorf, the mid-20th Century linguist who said
speakers of different languages have access to different thoughts because of
their different words.

Tan repeats a myth that Whorf helped spread, that Eskimos (Inuit, as we now
call them) have a variety of words for the English word “snow.” Actually,
Inuit languages have about the same number of root words for “snow” as we do
with our “sleet,” “slush,” “blizzard” and so on, as linguist Geoffrey Pullum
showed in his 1991 book, “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.”

Still the tendencies, if not the vocabularies, of different languages can
reflect different cultural norms about things such as modesty and
individualism. As Ha-yun Jung writes of his native Korean, “The simple
English sentence `I want an apple’ sounds awkward when translated, word for
word, into Korean. A Korean person is much more likely to say something that
could be translated as, `It would be nice to have an apple.’”

“I live on, not feeling whole in Korean or English,” Ha-yun Jung concludes.
“For me, one language is complementary to the other, one always lacking a
capacity that the other has. And I have a fear, constantly, of not quite
being understood in just one language.”

Besides jobs, U.S. accents also being exported to India

Thursday, July 8th, 2004

With the outsourcing of American jobs comes the exporting of American accents. In Bangalore, India—the Silicon Valley of the subcontinent—the booming customer service call center industry depends on coaching Indian workers to talk like they’re from Wisconsin. Sort of.

The process is called “accent neutralization.” But in reality, trainers are out to transform, not just tweak, the speech of trainees facing the tricky task of dealing with often grouchy people demanding customer assistance.

The challenge is to slow the clipped Indian speech cadence and tackle the pronunciation of what seem like unnatural sounds to the trainees in order to be understood by North American and British customers. Although the Indian trainees typically speak English as either a native or a second language, English has a markedly different sound on different continents. Trainers in Bangalore say some Western pronunciation doesn’t come naturally to the people in their classes.

“Some Indian trainees take a little more time to grasp the sounds `v,’ `w,’ `ei,’ `th’ and `aw,’” Nina Nair, general manager of learning and development for the call center service 24/7 Customer, wrote by e-mail from Bangalore.

“[We] practice with words containing these sounds: wine, vine, vet, wet, vale, wail. We also have the students make up paragraphs using words with these sounds.”

Nair has trained more than 1,000 Indian call center workers. She teaches 20 people at a time in classes that last about two weeks, working on the phonetics, intonation and rhythm of American and British accents (other trainers handle the Canadian accent).

For examples of American speech, Nair says she shows her classes clips of TV shows such as “Friends” and movies such as “Pretty Woman,” “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” and “Men In Black.”

“Intonation is taught [by] speaking out sentences with stress on different parts of speech,” Nair wrote. “`She likes them’ is spoken as `She laiks’em,’ with the stress on the verb `likes.’ `Can’t you?’ is spoken as `Canchyu’?”

These and other vocal exercises can become tongue-twisters in the mouths of Indians unfamiliar with Western speech. In “The Other Side of Outsourcing,” a documentary hosted by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on the Discovery Channel last month, call center trainees were shown struggling with the R’s and T’s in a reading exercise that began, “Thirty little turtles in a bottle of bottled water.”

“Remember the first day I told you that the Americans flat the `ta’ sound?” the instructor asked the class. “It sounds like an almost `da’ sound. They do not keep it crisp and clear like the British. … They would say, `Insert a quarder in the meder,’ or `Beddy bought a bit of bedder budder.’”

“When we talk to an American over the phone, that’s when we open our mouths a little wider, like the Americans do,” one call center supervisor told Friedman.

The training may not be enough, however, to fool Americans into thinking their customer service calls are being picked up in Indiana instead of India. Internet message boards are beginning to register complaints from customers frustrated with overseas call centers.

“While the reps were polite, they simply would not speak clear enough English to be understood and could not seem to understand my simple questions!” wrote one computer customer at Silicon.com. “Sure, there are bad employees in the U.S. also, but they can at least be understood when they speak and can understand what you’re saying.”

In response, 24/7 spokesman Shimonti Sikdar said, “If you look at the percentage of such complaints, it is less than 1 percent of the total calls. Rather than taking extra time to train the agents at the onset, it makes sense to give them continued education in accent and communication to maintain the call quality at all times.”

Endings

  • Nearly three years after moving to Italy, Rebecca Helm-Ropelato isn’t
    just learning Italian; she’s learning Italian idioms.”Where we say, `you’re pulling my leg,’ the Italians say, `you’re pulling my nose,’” Helm-Ropelato wrote recently in the Christian Science Monitor.
    “Instead of `we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ the Italians admonish `not
    to bandage one’s head before breaking it.’ Italians don’t say `it’s raining
    cats and dogs’; they say, `it’s raining as if God sent it.’Helm-Ropelato says her linguistic progress is “piano, piano”—an Italian
    expression for “slowly, step by step.”
  • Roger Kimball nipped ambiguity in the bud in an essay earlier this
    year in The National Interest: “By `intellectual,’ I do not mean `bookish’; I do
    not mean `intelligent,’” Kimball wrote. “I mean characterized by a certain lofty
    moralism—smug, progressive, abstract, activist.”
  • Receptionists—make that customer service representatives—keep
    getting promoted, if their titles are any indication. Callers seeking news
    of people admitted to Northwestern Memorial Hospital are asked to hold for “the
    next patient access representative.”

Rico the dog’s vocabulary restarts linguists’ debate

Thursday, July 1st, 2004

One thing everyone agrees on: Rico is one special dog.

Researchers in Germany spotted Rico on a TV game show and brought him in for tests. What they found, the journal Science reported last month, was that the brilliant border collie seemed to recognize more than 200 German words. That kind of vocabulary was previously thought to be attainable only by children and specially trained animals such as apes and dolphins.

Asked by his German owners to retrieve a certain toy from the next room—such as a stuffed panda bear or banana—Rico scrounged around in a bin of toys and returned with the correct item 37 out of 40 times. When his owner asked for a toy Rico had never heard of, the 9-year-old border collie knew enough to retrieve the one item in the bin whose name he didn’t know.

This apparent ability to learn words, which scientists call “fast mapping,” was “comparable to toddlers,” the study said.

Rico’s owner stayed in an adjacent room during the tests, to ensure the dog was no Clever Hans—the horse who gained attention at the turn of the 20th Century for supposedly answering math questions. It was later learned the horse was just responding to subtle gestures from his owner.

Since Rico was on his own when retrieving the toys, his feat was heralded by scientists as a breakthrough for animal recognition of language. “The study suggests to scientists that the ability to understand sounds is not necessarily related to the ability to speak, and that some aspects of speech comprehension evolved earlier than, and independent from, of human speech,” wrote Daniel Kane at the Web site of The American Association for the Advancement of Science.

But while there was no question that Rico’s skills were remarkable, the study did reignite a contentious debate among linguists about whether animals can actually understand language. Rico can fetch different toys, but does he understand what his owner is saying?

No way, fumed Geoffrey Pullum, author and professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “Nobody doubts that mammals are capable of associating large numbers of aural stimuli with particular behavioral responses,” Pullum wrote at www.languagelog.org. “It’s the confusion of that with `understanding language’ that drives me nuts.”

Pullum was especially displeased with the Associated Press headline, “Research Shows Dogs Understand Language.”

“It is my belief that no dog ever actually understands anything, in the special sense of recognizing that it has been told something that might be either true or false, or understanding the meaning of something . . . or even dimly appreciating that there is such as thing as meaning,” Pullum wrote in an e-mail interview. “With dogs, despite the high degree of sensitivity to humans’ social cues, it’s all tied to immediate behavior, like Rico’s fetching behavior.”

In a 1987 study of Kanzi the bonobo, another gifted animal with a vast vocabulary, researchers wrote, “Our view is that Kanzi’s behaviors are more like the use of tools than the human use of language. Tools are the instruments by which we attain certain outcomes. They are not symbols.”

Kanzi, they said, “does not know that lexigrams [words and pictures] represent, symbolize, or name objects and events; rather, he knows how to use them in order to effect desired outcomes.”

In a commentary in Science on the Rico study, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom voiced the same cautions. Although the study “seems to vindicate” dog owners who “boast about the communicative and social abilities of their pets,” Bloom wrote, Rico “learns only through a specific fetching game.” Unlike children, who understand that words “refer to categories and individuals,” Bloom said, in Rico’s brain, there may be no difference between “sock” and “fetch the sock.”

For now, Bloom concluded, “It is too early to give up on the view that babies learn words and dogs do not.”

Endings

Scandals not only reveal politicians’ bad behavior; they lead to leaders’ lamest language. When Connecticut Gov. John Rowland announced his resignation last month in the face of an impeachment inquiry and a federal corruption investigation, he stated, “I acknowledge that my poor judgment has brought us here.” Meanwhile, asked why he told Illinois Republican leaders that he didn’t think his divorce file would be damaging, U.S. Senate candidate Jack Ryan told reporters, “I don’t think the phrase `I don’t think so’ is misleading.”

Business school emphasizes a ‘values-based’ curriculum

Thursday, April 22nd, 2004

The Loyola University Graduate School of Business has new billboards around town that read, “We educate values-based leaders.”

As timely as the tagline is in this era of Enron/Tyco corporate scandal, it raises one question: What exactly is a values-based leader?

“Most business schools do an effective job educating students about the technical aspects of business—debits, credits, accounting, supply and demand curves, and so on,” said Robert Parkinson Jr., dean of Loyola’s Graduate School of Business and former president of Abbott Laboratories.

“I’m not sure if business schools do as effective a job of training leaders in the broader context of ethical and socially responsible behavior.”

To describe this goal, Loyola, a Jesuit university, chose “values-based leaders” over “responsible leaders”—which was considered too broad—and “ethical leaders”—too narrow—Parkinson said. The school is counting on common interpretations of the word “values” to get the message across.

“There’s a moral undertone to `values-based leadership,’” says word watcher Paul McFedries, author of “Word Spy” and editor of WordSpy.com. “We’re seeing ‘values’ morphing into the general idea of moral values, probably because people see it as a short form of `family values.’”

Some lexicographers might argue that everyone is “values-based.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines “value” as “a principle, standard or quality considered worthwhile or desirable.” But what people consider desirable can be good or bad.

“What’s important to one person could be many things, not necessarily positive things,” McFedries said. “A business might value the bottom line. If that’s what you value, then the means to get to that end are not necessarily important as long as you reach the thing you value: maximum profit for the shareholder.”

Parkinson said he considered the ambiguity of the word “values,” citing a commencement address by columnist George Will at Lafayette College in 2000. In that speech, Will contended that when people say “values,” they often mean “virtues.” Webster defines “virtue” as “conformity to a standard of right . . . a particular moral excellence.”

But Parkinson didn’t wish to split lexical hairs on his school’s billboards and said using “virtuous” would be “a little self-righteous.”

“I didn’t want the tagline to be `virtuous leaders,’” he said. “The word ‘values’ is more in line with business terminology. . . . Implicit in ‘values’ is good values, not bad. If we were to do market research on this, I would be shocked if less than 99 percent of respondents didn’t associate something positive with that.”

Talk of “values” is hardly restricted to the world of business. With the election season under way, “`moral values’ is going to be on everyone’s lips,” McFedries said.

So will the phrase “family values”—it’s hard to locate a candidate who says he or she doesn’t value family life.

“Values” is also unavoidable in sports, though it can serve as a source of irony. This month’s telecast of The Masters golf championship included a public service spot for First Tee, a non-profit organization that introduces golf to youth. In the spot, a mother reported that golf is “teaching my daughter important values.”

But at Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts The Masters, those values do not include welcoming female golfers as members. To fend off protests aimed at advertisers over that policy, CBS and Augusta National made this the second year in a row the tournament was commercial—free save for that First Tee spot and its message about “values.”

Endings

  • Activists succeeded earlier this month in blocking Wal-Mart’s
    expansion into Inglewood, Calif., despite some ambiguous campaign buttons.
    The
    buttons bore the words “Stop Wal-Mart!” underneath a red circle with a
    slash
    through it, literally urging readers to oppose efforts to stop Wal-Mart .
    . .
  • Monthly visitation to Congaree Swamp National Monument near Columbia,S.C.,
    has
    more than doubled since the site dropped “Swamp,” The New York Times
    reports.Last November, President Bush authorized changing the park’s name to
    Congaree
    National Park. . . .
  • “Wardrobe malfunction” was the top “HollyWord” in
    terms
    of its impact on the English language over the last 12 months, according
    to
    the word-tracking Web site Global Language Monitor (languagemonitor.com).

Linguists hunt and study words in their natural habitat

Thursday, March 25th, 2004

Sometimes language lovers sound as if they’re on a safari. They talk about observing words in their natural habitat and studying their behavior in herds.

With the first release of the American National Corpus, an annotated body of over 10 million words, linguists can hunt like never before.

“Up until now, linguists were kind of like Victorian bug hunters,” says Erin McKean, the Chicago-based senior editor of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press and board member of the American National Corpus. “We’d go out with our nets and we’d catch some butterflies and we’d chloroform them and pin them to cards and put them in a drawer.”

“But now, when people are really studying an ecosystem—and English is like an ecosystem—what they do is, they take a representative square area and report everything that’s there: every bug, every plant, every leaf,” she said.
“And now with the corpus, we can do that for English.”

If the dictionary is like the drawer with bugs on cards, the corpus is the jungle. The ANC collects blocks of text from newspapers, books and conversations so words and phrases can be viewed in their natural habitat—that is, in an American English context.

Readers can search the collection by word, phrase, part of speech or type of source and find their quarry used in a sentence or paragraph.

For students learning English as a second language, a corpus—from the Latin word for “body”—can help teach idioms and tendencies in a way dictionaries cannot, as ANC users around the world have already discovered.

“I hear from language teacher trainers in Egypt, Germany, Japan and Sweden who are really excited to have these data available to them, so they can go in and look at aspects of conversation,” said Randi Reppen, English professor at Northern Arizona University and Project Manager for the ANC.

The ANC could also be used by advertising copywriters in search of resonant slogans, or by computer programmers to make automated customer service hotlines sound more natural, McKean said.

The ANC’s initial release last October, available on CD-ROM for $75 at www.americannationalcorpus.org, contains 11.5 million words. About one-fourth of the collection is made up of spoken English, including transcribed phone conversations from volunteers who were given phone cards in exchange for being recorded.

The rest of the corpus is written text contributed by The New York Times, the online magazine Slate, Langenscheidt travel guides and books from Oxford University Press on architecture and Abraham Lincoln.

“We want writers to want to be part of the American National Corpus,” McKean said. “We’re hoping to have an ANC logo that authors can have their publishers put on their books, as a way of saying, `My work is influencing the study of the English language.’”

By the end of 2005, the ANC, which last year received a grant from the National Science Foundation, hopes to release 100 million words — 90 million written, 10 million spoken — evenly balanced among sources as diverse as town meetings, medical journals and novels.

“It’s hard to take one area and say, `This is English,’” Reppen said. “By having different types of writing and speaking situations, the corpus gives a better picture for language researchers, teachers and learners.”

Until now, such seekers of untamed English have relied on other corpora such as the British National Corpus, a collection of 100 million words of British English released 10 years ago. But in the last 10 years, new technology has made formatting samples of text faster and cheaper.

“We’re lucky that we’re doing it today,” McKean said. “This is something that would have been insane to do in the 1950s and was barely possible in the 1980s when the British National Corpus [started].”

Meanwhile, demand for corpora has grown in the field of computational linguistics, which uses computer programs to analyze the structure of language.

“The motivation for the ANC came from the fact that many computational linguists were using the BNC to gather statistics about
syntactic patterns, [when in fact] British English and American English are not alike in several ways,” said Nancy Ide, professor of computer science at Vassar College and Technical Director of the ANC.

Another new wrinkle in corpus linguistics is the Internet. The ANC plans to add e-mails, message boards and Web sites to its collection. McKean has already gotten permission from her message board of fellow “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” fans to use their posts for the ANC.

’60s American culture altered communication

Thursday, March 11th, 2004

When did the term “rhetoric” become an insult? When did the word cease to mean artfully crafted speech and start to convey scorn, as it does when we hear a campaign speech and mutter, “That’s just rhetoric”?

The answer is 1965, says John McWhorter in his recent book, “Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care” (Gotham Books, 279 pages, $26).

That happened to be the year McWhorter was born and the year color television began to elevate the visual over the written in American culture.

What’s more, 1965—the year the first American combat troops were sent to Vietnam—also marked the era when trust in government began a plunge that would last the rest of the century and ruin the reputation of oratory.

But the ’60s also marked a more subtle and profound shift in American culture that altered the way we communicate, says McWhorter, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Not only did we come to regard political speech as manipulative, but we started to see formality in general as old-fashioned and insincere. The culture that bred casual Fridays and microwave dinners came to value “doing your own thing” over older standards of propriety, and this attitude has shaped our language, McWhorter says.

McWhorter is not your typical prophet of doom for formal English. In an earlier book, “Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a `Pure’ Standard English,” (Perseus Publishing, 300 pages, $17.50) he argued that harrumphing about proper grammar is an ill-conceived effort to enforce the arbitrary rules imposed by long-dead scholars.

In its purest form, he maintains, human communication is oral and always changing—a point he revisits in his new book. He is interested in graceful and artful English, not `proper’ English, he says.

Certainly, Americans, in what McWhorter calls `post-oratorical America,’ do not speak and write as formally and decoratively as they did in the most ordinary conversations a century ago.

At the time of the Civil War, even the least educated, teenage soldiers writing letters or diaries were penning beautiful prose. McWhorter quotes the love letter of a 19-year-old store clerk in the 1830s who wishes to seize the day since “At best we live but one little hour, strut at our own conceit, and die.”

Try sending that kind of prose out in an e-mail today, and your sweetheart will quickly hit the delete button. “What gave us Americans a tacit sense that to wield the full resources of our native language is tacky?” McWhorter wonders in his book.

The result of our culture of informality is not only more ordinary English, but also muddier public discourse, McWhorter says in an interview by telephone.

“It can impede the development of precise thinking,” he says. “The most worrisome thing about this development is that it eliminates the space in the culture for speeches and addresses that make a careful, logical case for a point of view.”

Not that the change has been entirely harmful, McWhorter points out.

The ornate English that has fallen out of regular use, he says, “could be the vehicle of sophisticated argument, or it could be a wonderful way to say nothing at all.”

“Change is heartening in as many ways as it is sad,” McWhorter says. “I’m not a nostalgic person to any great extent.” He calls his book “an anthropological description.”

McWhorter says the triumph of the casual in American life was inevitable, but he suggests that artful English could have gone the way of good cooking—which we continue to appreciate, if not always practice.

Instead, McWhorter says, “We do not see English as worthy of that kind of loving, artful attention.”

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