Posts Tagged ‘linguists’

|

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.”

The Jesuit Scholar Who Translated ‘The Passion’

Thursday, March 4th, 2004

Obscured by the furor surrounding Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” is one relatively mundane bit of trivia: Last week’s debut marked the widest release ever of a subtitled film in North America. The subtitles were actually Plan B. Gibson originally intended to show the movie without them, letting the sound of the Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin—not to mention the spattering blood—speak for itself.

“He was real hard-set against them,” said Alan Nierob, Gibson’s publicist. “He initially thought they would be a distraction. . . . It’s a very visual movie.”

Gibson also wanted to avoid the phony air of British English that has plagued so many film renditions of the life of Jesus Christ, Nierob said.

But after early screenings of the film without subtitles, Gibson decided to insert them for the sake of clarity.

“I’m glad he did,” Nierob said. “It is a better movie with them. I’ve seen it both ways, and it’s great [either way], but it’s much better with subtitles, I felt.”

The task of achieving linguistic authenticity fell to Rev. William Fulco, a Jesuit priest and professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Gibson got Fulco’s name from Yale University, where Fulco received a doctorate and taught Aramaic.

“I got a call while I was in Jerusalem: ‘Hey, Padre, It’s Mel, I got a job for you,’” Fulco said. “I said, `Mel who?’ We talked for about an hour. He told me about the project, and I couldn’t pass it up.”

In 2002, Gibson gave Fulco the script written by Benedict Fitzgerald, mostly derived from the Gospels, and asked Fulco to translate it into Aramaic , Hebrew and Latin. Fulco later translated the script back into English subtitles.

The use of multiple languages in the film reflects the linguistic diversity of Palestine during Jesus’ life. Most people spoke Aramaic, which the Jews adopted while exiled in Babylon in the 6th Century before Jesus’ birth. Hebrew, their language before the exile, was retained in religious writings and liturgy (and is spoken by Jesus in prayer in “The Passion”). Latin was spoken by the Roman soldiers occupying the region. Greek was spoken throughout the Roman Empire, thanks to Alexander the Great, but was seen as a sign of secularization and thus resisted by many Jews.

Fulco left Greek out of “The Passion,” substituting Latin in occasional cases where Greek might have been used. He also made mostly imperceptible distinctions between the elegant Latin of Pilate and the crude Latin of soldiers, thanks to an X-rated source he found on his shelf.

“I tracked down some obscene graffiti from Roman army camps,” Fulco said. “Somebody who knows Latin really well, their ears will fall off. We didn’t subtitle those words.”

Fulco even confessed to some linguistic mischief.

“Here and there I put in playful things which nobody will know. There’s one scene where Caiaphas turns to his cohorts and says something in Aramaic. The subtitle says, `You take care of it.’ He’s actually saying, `Take care of my laundry.’”

Other linguistic tricks of Fulco’s serve a function in the script.

For example, he incorporated deliberate dialogue errors in the scenes where the Roman soldiers, speaking Aramaic, are shouting to Jewish crowds, who respond in Latin. To illustrate the groups’ inability to communicate with each other, each side speaks with incorrect pronunciations and word endings.

Later, “there’s an exchange where Pilate addresses Jesus in Aramaic, and Jesus answers in Latin. It’s kind of a nifty little symbolic thing: Jesus is going to beat him at his own game,” Fulco said. “One line [in that exchange] I kind of enjoyed is when Jesus says, `My power is given from above, otherwise my followers would not have allowed this.’ That’s [spoken in] the pluperfect subjunctive.”

It takes a linguist to appreciate that grammatical nicety as remarkable for being uttered by a Palestinian Jew who mostly spoke Aramaic and Greek.

For the relatively few Middle Eastern Christians who still speak Aramaic, “The Passion” may sound riddled with mistakes—spurring Fulco to point out, “modern Aramaic dialects are as different [from ancient ones] as Chaucer and modern English.”

Still, now that the movie is in general release, Fulco fully expects to get an earful about his use of languages.

“We linguists are a crazy bunch,” he said. “The more obscure the language, the more people try to prove their territory worthwhile and say, by God, we’re going to sniff out errors.”

|