The Language Lover's Blog

Why learning a language is like losing weight

2012-01-01T19:10:00.005-05:00

I've studied over ten languages in my life. Some I've been serious about, others I haven't. Some I've tried to teach myself, others I've learned with the help of others. And, some have stuck really well and others haven't stuck at all. I'm pretty satisfied with my return on investment. Of course I wish I could speak more languages and were better at the ones I do speak, but given the relatively small fraction of time I spend on it, I'm confident I'll reach my goals eventually. My progress is steady and my determination is unwavering.

I wish I could say the same about my weight, or my health in general. After college, with the stress and depression induced by a demanding doctoral program, my weight started climbing for the first time in my life and has continued to rise slowly over the last fifteen years. After the birth of my first child, I joined Weight Watchers and with a lot of effort took off twenty-five pounds, returning to a healthy weight. But I gained it back and I've had it for the last seven years. Of course I'd like to be thinner and healthier, but because it's not a high enough priority, I haven't gone about it very intelligently. And that's the ultimate problem.

I've spoken to dozens of people who tell me they'd like to learn another language, but it's just so hard. Or they learned one in high school or college, but can't speak it anymore. Or they buy self-study CDs or software with grand intentions and hopes, but they don't make enough progress and eventually give up. These lamentations parallel my own struggles with weight loss. I don't have time to cook or exercise. I did lose the weight, but couldn't keep it off. I signed up for a gym membership, but I quit going.

Yes, it's true that some people have a talent for languages, just as some people naturally have a higher metabolism. But we're only kidding ourselves when we point to some genetic capability or incapability as the reason we can or can't achieve our goals. Here are the ways in which I think learning a language is like losing weight, and how everyone can do both.

You know how to do it, really. There are billions of dollars spent every year on products that claim to make weight loss and language learning fast, easy, and painless. But they're all variations on the same theme. To lose weight, diet and exercise. To learn a language, study and practice. There aren't any shortcuts.

Doing it with other people increases your chance of success. I understand why self-study is attractive. It's flexible and you don't have to make embarrassing mistakes in front of others. But just as having an exercise buddy or regular fitness class keeps you on track, having a diet support group helps you celebrate your progress, and hiring a personal trainer lets you use your time most efficiently, language learning works better in community. Even more so than weight loss, because language is so inherently relational. So hire a tutor, take a class, or join a conversation group. You'll get farther and stay interested much longer than with a CD or software program.

Cramming doesn't work. Just like crash dieting doesn't work, you can't rush language learning. It only happens with steady discipline and focus. Intensive study can speed up the process, but the learning will stick better if it's done more slowly over an extended period of time. A former violin teacher once told me that how often I practiced was more important than how long I practiced. I find this to be true; ten minutes every day is more effective than an hour and a half once a week. But an hour and a half once a week is better than three hours twice a week. I commit to seeing my Mandarin tutor weekly even though I'm not always fully prepared, because it compels me to study hard at least one day (the day before my lesson!) every week.

Surround yourself with practitioners; maintaining your accomplishment requires a lifestyle change. Over a decade ago, my husband and I joined a gym together, figuring we'd encourage each other to work out. More often, though, one of us ended up convincing the other to skip the gym in favor of a more sedentary activity. When I first moved to Boston two years ago, I lived for a few months with friends for whom a healthy lifestyle was natural; they even hired a babysitter in the early morning so they could run together. I ate mostly vegetarian meals with them, and without a car, I walked everywhere. The weight melted off effortlessly. When I moved out, my old habits returned along with the weight.

I studied German for six years and Spanish for less than two, but my Spanish is close to fluent whereas my German is just functional. It's partly because Spanish is an easier language for native English speakers, but mostly because I create as many opportunities to practice my Spanish as possible. My work in immigrant justice is doubly fulfilling because it has become an integral part of my life in which I have to use my language skills. I don't have to find "extra" time to practice my Spanish. Likewise, my work commute by public transportation requires me to do a certain amount of walking each day, but I'm hoping to raise my activity level even more by starting to bike to work when the weather warms up.

Mastering a language is hard. So is losing weight. This year, I'm hoping to use some of the techniques and self-knowledge I've applied so well to my language studies to bring myself down to a healthier weight. Which means I'm off to do some Mandarin homework--after I get myself an orange for a snack. Happy New Year!

When a little is enough

2011-09-23T21:31:00.004-04:00

Followers of this blog--if any remain!--know that my posting frequency has been dwindling. Since moving back to Boston two years ago, I spend most of my time outside work engaged in anti-racism work and immigrant justice. I still love and use foreign languages, but they don't occupy the foreground of my thoughts very much anymore. Tonight, however, I have a story that brings it all back together.

As part of the Spiritual Care Givers program at Refugee Immigration Ministry, I provide chaplaincy services to immigrants detained at the local jail. We do not provide legal advice or facilitate contact with family; we simply listen to them, letting them know they are not forgotten. The work is important to me because it lets me maintain a connection to the people most affected by policies whose effects can easily seem impersonal and irrelevant. I hope it is also some small comfort to the detainees.

I wasn't sure how much help I'd be tonight. Still recovering from a bad cold earlier this week, exhausted and a little depressed, I made the hour-long trek to the jail to find that only one other person had showed up; our coordinator was stuck in traffic. We were escorted into the unit, the usual announcement was made, but no one came out. For twenty minutes we sat there; I wondered if we'd be talking to anyone tonight. Then, through the window to the hall containing the cells, I saw a young Latino man gesturing to a sixty-something Chinese man, who came out, looked at me, and said apprehensively, "Ni hao."

I asked, "Would you like to talk to us?" but he responded, "No English."

I was prepared to offer ministry in Spanish; I've done it before. Many of the immigrant detainees are Latino, and my Spanish is somewhere between advanced and fluent. My Mandarin, on the other hand, is abysmal. Characterizing my skills as "conversational" is generous. Nonetheless, this man needed to talk, and I was there. I explained apologetically several times that my Chinese was very bad. I had to ask him to speak slowly, and even then I only understood a fraction of what he was saying. I didn't understand the details of how he'd come to be in detention, only that he had been living in New York and that he'd been at the jail for over two months.

I can only imagine what it must be like for him in there: far from family, unable to speak to or understand a soul, herded around day after day through the routines of prison life, not knowing what the future holds. He told me that there had been a few other Chinese detainees earlier, but they were gone. I asked if he'd spoken to a lawyer, and he showed me a business card but told me it was of no use. He asked me whether there were other Chinese-speaking people at the jail; I told him I wasn't employed there. I don't know the Chinese word for volunteer, so I explained that I just came once a month, then said haltingly, "Church. Minister. But I'm not a minister. I just come so people can talk." We talked about our families; he has two sons about my age, and granddaughters the same age as my daughters. I felt his yearning for human connection, his gratitude at being able to speak to someone who could understand, even if only partially. I taught him how to say "Good morning" and "Good night" and encouraged him to practice with the people around him.

When the hour was over and we were instructed to wrap things up, I couldn't remember how to say, "I'm sorry you're in here. Good luck." I don't remember what I said instead to try and convey my feelings, but I think he understood. I clasped his hands, and he said, "Xie xie." I don't know if I'll ever see him again.

This is what it's about for me, this drive to learn and master as many languages as possible. It's about being able to be that bridge, the person who can connect to people, whether it's interpreting at the pet store or helping a tourist at the subway station or talking to an immigrant detainee. I have the motivation to keep pushing myself with my Mandarin studies now, and in time I know I'll achieve the fluency I desire. But tonight, tonight even a little was enough.

The Parabolic Jesus

2011-04-10T22:46:00.007-04:00

This past weekend, I attended a conference on the future of Unitarian Universalism in which a minister referred to Sallie McFague's Metaphorical Theology. I don't know much about theology myself, so I was paying only partial attention when I heard the phrase "the parabolic Jesus." My ears perked up.

I'm a physicist. I hear the word "parabolic" more often than the average person, and to me it means something in the shape of a parabola, which some may remember from second-year algebra. A parabola is a conic section, the locus of points equidistant from a point and a line, equivalent to an ellipse in which one of the foci is at infinity.

I thought it was far more likely that the word was supposed to refer to "parable," or a Jesus who taught by means of storytelling. But it didn't seem to me that "parabolic" could derive from the word "parable." (Where does the "o" come from?) I spoke to the presenter afterward and she confirmed that she had, indeed, said "parabolic."

It turns out that "parabolic" really is the adjectival form of "parable," and that this definition even appears first in a dictionary. From Merriam-Webster:

Definition of PARABOLIC

1: expressed by or being a parable : allegorical

2: of, having the form of, or relating to a parabola <parabolic curve>

So I guess the mystery is solved. But while the first definition is clearly the one that applies to the concept of a "parabolic Jesus," the images that immediately entered my mind using the second definition were interesting. A parabolic mirror reflects parallel waves from infinity into a single focal point (this is why satellite dishes, for example, are paraboloids) and so I was thinking of a parabolic Jesus as somehow being able to focus diverse lifestyles and philosophies into a single common goal of justice---not too far off from Unitarian Universalism, sometimes described as the religion of Jesus rather than the religion about Jesus. Metaphor, indeed!

It's not just "a thing"

2011-03-17T16:37:00.005-04:00

The word "thing" is so devoid of inherent meaning that it takes on a whole spectrum of connotations, depending on context. I have a thing for musicians (good). I have a thing about people using apostrophes incorrectly (bad). Dave Barry once pointed out that men are so scared of identifying themselves as being in a relationship that they say, "We, uh...we have this thing."

When two of my friends got into a heated argument on Facebook recently, they both expressed regret that the discussion had become A Thing (caps added by one). In this case, "thing" was used to imply that it had become larger than necessary or desired.

But "thing" can also be used to dismiss something, which is what I've been thinking about lately. In the now infamous anti-Asian rant by UCLA student Alexandra Wallace, she talks about being annoyed by all the people checking on everyone from "the tsunami thing." I think an event that has killed over ten thousand people deserves a more specific designation.

I once belonged to an organization that had some serious issues with racial and cultural inclusion. My naïve efforts to address it were met with obstacles right and left, from the conflict-fearing leader to those who wanted to maintain a white sanctuary in our diverse geographic region, to those who, like so many, didn't know how to converse effectively about an issue as charged as race. A fellow member once referred to my campaign as "the whole race thing." I felt minimized, but it was only one more disappointment among many, and I never had the courage to bring it up.

The tsunami was not a THING, it was a tragedy. My quest for racial diversity was not a THING, it became my life's work. When we fail to be specific, we show disrespect and lack of concern for that which can be highly significant to others.

Un chiste bilingüe

2011-01-26T23:30:00.000-05:00

What's a snowman's favorite color?
¿Cuál es el color favorito de un muñeco de nieve?

¡Hielo!

City names

2011-01-22T22:31:00.000-05:00

I don't know how city names get translated into different languages. For those that use the Roman alphabet, frequently the spelling is the same and only the pronunciation differs: Paris (PARE-is vs. Pa-REE), Berlin (Ber-LIN vs. Bare-LEEN). But why is Braunschweig (Germany) translated as Brunswick in English? Or Firenze (Italy) as Florence?

My Mandarin teacher and I had a lot of fun this morning reading a sample weather report and trying to identify the cities, most of which she knew only by their Chinese names. Most often the Chinese is just a phonetic representation of the city, e.g. 芝加哥 (Zhī jiā gē) for Chicago, or 巴塞羅那 (Bā sài luó nà) for Barcelona. Tokyo, however, is 東京 (Dōng jīng), literally "eastern capital" in both Japanese and Mandarin. I had a great time trying to guess the city from the Mandarin name; if I couldn't figure it out from pronunciation alone, she'd give me hints like "It's in Canada," and I could usually figure it out.

The only one I absolutely couldn't get was 德黑蘭 (Dé hēi lán), which my teacher said was a major city in Germany; she thought it was the capital. I suggested both Berlin and Bonn, neither of which was right; finally she asked me just to name a bunch of major cities in Germany because she'd know it if she heard it. "It's a very famous city!" I tried Hamburg, Frankfort, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, but to no avail. I thought "Dé hēi lán" sounded a bit like Deutschland, but that didn't make any sense; that's not a city.

Finally, we admitted defeat and looked it up online. 德黑蘭 is Tehran.

"Tehran?!" I exclaimed. "That's not in Germany! That's in Iran! Iran is in the Middle East!"

"Oh, that's why I see it in the news all the time."

Happy (Christmas and New Year)!

2010-12-29T17:24:00.000-05:00

Last weekend, a Facebook friend of mine posted "Merry Christmas" on his status in several different languages. When someone inquired, "Where's the Mandarin?" he responded that he'd hit the character limit before getting to the Mandarin and Cantonese.

Mandarin and Cantonese have the same written language, so when the commenter expressed her confusion, he replied that he'd found two different phrases for the two languages: 聖誕快樂 in Mandarin and 聖誕節同 in Cantonese. The first is easy to understand: 聖誕 (shèngdàn) means "Christmas" (literally, "holy birth"), and 快樂 (kuàilè) is the word for "merry" or "happy." Happy holy birth = Merry Christmas.

However, no one seemed able to decipher the second phrase. Its third character, 節 (jié), means "holiday" and can be added to the first two without any substantial change in meaning (perhaps "Christmastime"). But the final character in the Cantonese phrase, 同 (tóng), usually means "same" or "equal." How did a phrase literally translated as "holy birth festival together" become "Merry Christmas"? Was it some sort of Cantonese idiom?

As a Mandarin student and linguaphile, this puzzle was driving me nuts. I did hours of web research, asked my Mandarin tutor, my mother, and a Hong Kong born friend, all of whom confirmed that 聖誕節同 made no sense.

Finally, late into the evening, I figured it out. My friend, who does not speak or read Chinese, had taken the translations from the Omniglot site, which reads:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in many languages

Chinese (Cantonese)	聖誕節同新年快樂 (singdaanjit tùhng sànnìhn faailohk) 恭喜發財 (gùng héi faat chōi) - used at Chinese New Year

Chinese (Mandarin)	聖誕快樂新年快樂 [圣诞快乐新年快乐] (shèngdàn kuàilè xīnnián kuàilè)

In the "Mandarin" translation, the first four characters form the phrase "holy birth happy" while the last four form the phrase "new year happy" (新年 xīnnián = new year). In the "Cantonese" translation, my friend inferred that the first four characters again 聖誕節同 represented "Merry Christmas."

In fact, 聖誕節同新年快樂 is not two phrases but one. The character 同, in this case, means "and" and connects 聖誕節 ("Christmas") and 新年 ("new year"), so that 快樂 ("happy") actually modifies both nouns. Literally, it is "holy birth time and new year happy."

It's a good reminder that even the shortest of translations are subject to interpretation.

Typo vigilantes

2010-08-26T23:34:00.000-04:00

This is fantastic!

Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson, both 30, "took it upon themselves to correct public typos during a three-month road trip across the country...[they] drove across the country in the spring of 2008 armed with sharpies, pens and whiteout, correcting spelling, removing surplus apostrophes and untangling subject-verb disagreement on signs outside stores, gas stations, parks and public buildings."

No physical abuse here

2010-08-08T23:45:00.000-04:00

Kyla, my five-year-old daughter: "Mommy, your Mandarin teacher hits you, right?"

Me: "What???"

Kyla: "You said she hits you."

Me: "No, she doesn't! What are you talking about?"

Kyla: "Or pushes you, or something?"

Me: "Oh yeah, she pushes me!" The explanation followed.

When I was in college, I was speaking with a Bulgarian friend who had never heard the expression, "Beats me." He had a shocked reaction too, before I explained it.

I wonder if English has more metaphors of violence than other languages?

Turkish Facebook prank

2010-08-07T23:59:00.001-04:00

I do intend to get back to some substantial posts soon, but this was too good not to post immediately:

http://countermeasures.trendmicro.eu/facebook-prank-lost-in-translation/

I am highly against the practice of crowdsourcing translation work. Contrary to popular belief, skilled translation requires far more than native-level fluency in multiple languages---and many don't even have that. I'm unimpressed by the quality of the Facebook translations even in Spanish, a language for which there are many qualified professionals.

You get what you pay for. Or worse.

I guess I'm supposed to be impressed?

2010-06-30T22:25:00.000-04:00

The Tower Of Babble

Supermarket | New Zealand

(Note: I am of Asian descent.)

Me: “Good morning!” *starts scanning groceries*

Customer: “Ni hao!”

Me: “Oh, I’m not Chinese.”

Customer: “Konnichiwa!”

Me: “I’m not–”

Customer: “Shalom!”

Me: “Sir, that’s not even–”

Customer: “Namaste!”

*silence*

Customer: “I know so many languages! So many!”

(Courtesy http://notalwaysright.com)

Dead giveaway

2010-06-10T23:00:00.001-04:00

I was brought up short yesterday at work during our weekly team meeting, in which we were all asked to introduce ourselves to the new interns. After I went, I was asked by the woman next to me, a tech writer I don't know well, "Where are you from?"

It always takes me a second to answer this question, because as an Asian-American I'm subject to the "perpetual foreigner" stereotype. And, at an institution where people are obsessively focused on academic pedigree, I thought for one wild instant that she was asking for my alma mater. Then I wondered if she, knowing I was fairly new to the group, wanted to know where I'd moved from. I couldn't decide what to say. MIT? Taiwan? California?

Finally, she clarified, "Are you from the Midwest?" I answered that I was; I grew up in Kansas, though I haven't lived there in almost twenty years. I asked her how she knew, and she replied, "It's how you say your name." I immediately knew what she meant. A Midwestern dialect is characterized by the Mary-marry-merry merger, which means that I pronounce the first syllable of my first name like "care", or the New England "Mary." In New England, the vowel is closer to a short a (IPA /æ/), just as it is with "marry." I know I'm still a Kansas girl.

Incidentally, I don't care that much about the pronunciation of my name. Just spell it right, please!

Qui-sauce

2010-05-19T20:06:00.000-04:00

As a highly visual person, I rarely notice when words sound similar if they're spelled quite differently. During dinner this evening I was playing the wonderful Cuban song "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás", which I rediscovered at a recent concert of the fantastic Sol y Canto and have been singing around the house since. My daughters wanted to learn it, and joined in on the final "¡Quizás, Quizás, Quizás!" after which my five-year-old pointed to her ketchup and said, "Sauce!"

Rules and corpora

2010-05-09T20:56:00.000-04:00

Over the years, I've watched the ways in which my two daughters acquire language and have come to the conclusion that they do so very differently. Kiera, the seven-year-old, has an unbelievable vocabulary; once she hears a word, it's incorporated into her speech. She's like a sponge, absorbing everything she hears. Kyla, the five-year-old, appears to learn in a more rule-based way, with a deeper understanding of grammar. I believe this because she often makes errors in applying a rule of English language to a case when it doesn't apply, e.g. "I beated* Kiera in the race." She seems to have internalized regular patterns like "add '-ed' to put a verb in the past tense."

Kiera, on the other hand, has never made such errors that I can remember. As a toddler, though, she did frequently confuse the first and second persons, apparently deciding that "you" always referred to her, and "I" to the speaker. She also often refers to herself in the third person, and to me in the third person even when she's addressing me. I suspect it's because she has accumulated sort of a corpus of valid English words and phrases that she draws from. Since she's never heard incorrect forms like "beated", she's never inclined to use them---but she has heard both "you" and "Kiera" to refer to herself, which is why it took her a while to understand that she should use "I" rather than either of those.

I think my own acquisition of language is much more like Kyla's. I have a deep understanding of grammar, which facilitates learning new languages in a structured environment, but makes it harder to pick them up based on immersion alone. While boarding a plane to Mexico after studying Spanish for a year, the flight attendant asked me which row I was in and I absentmindedly answered, "Diez y cinco", invoking a rule that applies only to numbers sixteen and above; I felt a little sheepish when she corrected me, "¿Quince?" And last weekend, at my Mandarin lesson, I was asked to translate the time "eleven-thirty pm" and I said, "yi shi yi dian ban", even though I know that "eleven" is just "shi yi". Subconsciously, I'd misapplied the rule that applies to numbers twenty and over, where the tens digit is explicitly named.

In the public square

2010-05-02T19:25:00.001-04:00

Despite all the contexts in which I've used my Spanish, and despite my characterization of myself as (mostly) fluent in the language, I'm well aware that I don't have the eloquence and command that a native speaker would possess. That's why I decided some time ago that the goal I once had of being a professional interpreter wasn't realistic. But I've found numerous other ways to fulfill my deep love of practicing foreign languages, particularly as I become more involved in spirituality and justice. The demographic landscape of the United States is changing before our eyes, and we must start becoming not only multicultural but multilingual if we are to keep up.

The golden rule of translation is that one always has one's native language as the target language. I can translate Spanish into English, and German into English, but I really don't have any business translating from English into other languages for anything important. For interpreting (interpreters speak, translators write) in informal contexts, when the goal is to make oneself understood as quickly as possible and nuance is less critical, it's okay for me to go in both directions. But for translation, I simply don't have the intimate knowledge of all the subtle connotations and idiomatic phrases in any other language to do justice to an original text.

Nonetheless, because of the linguistically isolated circles in which I move, I'm occasionally starting to find myself in a position where I'm the go-to person for a Spanish translation. Last Friday evening, I received a call from my minister, who was preparing remarks for an immigrant rights rally we were attending the next day; he wanted to be able to deliver them in both English and Spanish (which he can pronounce but not speak). I warned him that I wouldn't be able to render as elegant a translation as he'd get from a native speaker, but relented when I realized that I was the only person he felt comfortable asking for help on such short notice.

I must have labored for an hour on less than a hundred words of text, trying to capture his tone and spirit and making sure everything was absolutely free of grammatical errors. The next day, right before the rally, my minister showed the translation to a Latino clergyman, who said it had been well done. I felt proud; my minister has given me so much in the way of pastoral care and spiritual nourishment that I was happy to be able to give something back to him in return. And it occurred to me later that it was the first time I've written something in Spanish that was delivered to 3000 people for inspiration. Like all writing, translation is an art, and I think I just had my first major showing.

Bits and pieces

2010-04-28T23:29:00.001-04:00

My life's been rather hectic lately, but fortunately my language activities are in far better shape than my blogging frequency would suggest. I've finally committed to improving my Mandarin and learning to read and write it, and have hired a wonderful tutor who's pushing me through the very excellent Integrated Chinese text. I was surprised to discover how much aesthetics matter while writing characters (especially traditional characters, which I insist on learning); it's like drawing, and definitely teases the right half of my brain.

My Spanish is getting a good amount of practice with all the work I've been doing lately in immigrant justice, and my church recently hired its first Latina minister to begin in the fall. I'd been steadily losing my conversation skills since moving out of California, but I feel them returning rapidly.

Here are a few interesting language tidbits I've found recently:

I went to a fabulous restaurant called Pangea last weekend in New York City. Pangea (or Pangaea) is the name of the supercontinent that existed before it split into the seven continents we know today. I'd never thought much about the name, but while staring at it I suddenly realized it's from Greek παν-, meaning "all", and γαια, meaning earth. Makes sense!
A translation/interpretation professor I had many years ago once said in class that in Spanish there's a verb meaning "make the sign of the cross", but I never knew what it was. Finally, I had the chance to ask my future Latina minister, and she told me it was "persignarse". I think that's one of the few cases in which the Spanish uses fewer syllables than the English.
I learned the four tones of Mandarin Chinese as a child from my parents, but never made the distinctions well and was always confusing the second and third tones. Studying the language more formally in adulthood, I saw a rendition in music notation, and I've found them much easier to keep straight ever since.

Like mother, like daughter

2010-03-31T22:25:00.000-04:00

My older daughter, now seven, showed early signs of taking after me in her insistence on accurate and correct English. Now that she can read quite well, she's becoming ever more vigilant. Yesterday my husband took her into a gas station to go to the bathroom, and she pointed to the sign that said "Womens" and said, "I can't go in there, they spelled it wrong!"

That's my girl.

Happy National Grammar Day!

2010-03-04T21:31:00.000-05:00

There's some fun stuff here.

I was about to ask, "Why today?" not expecting a very good answer, but in fact there is one, and it's charming.

Language is something to be celebrated, and March 4 is the perfect day to do it. It's not only a date, it's an imperative: March forth on March 4 to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!

Osculating orbits

2010-02-14T17:26:00.001-05:00

Here's a good one for today. A few weeks ago I went to a talk, and on one of the speaker's slides there appeared the phrase "osculating Cartesian covariance". I had no idea what that was, but since "osculate" means "to kiss", I was pretty sure that he'd meant "oscillating" instead.

So, feeling fairly smug, I was mentioning the error to my coworker afterwards when a bystander said, "Actually, 'osculating' is the correct term there." I was embarrassed and rather puzzled as to what it could possibly mean, so I looked it up. Indeed, there is such a thing as an osculating orbit, which is the orbit a celestial body would travel around its primary gravitational influence in the absence of perturbing forces like other planets or satellites. The term comes from the fact that at any point in time and space, a body's osculating orbit is tangent to (i.e. touches or "kisses") its actual orbit.

¡Hablando español, otra vez!

2010-02-05T22:43:00.000-05:00

One aspect of my job that I dislike is the lack of diversity in my work environment. Because we do work for the Department of Defense, everyone has to be a U.S. citizen. Whereas working in the semiconductor industry I had plenty of coworkers from Asia and Europe, here it's pure American.

Yesterday I met a couple of guys from Puerto Rico who work in the Speech and Language Processing group. I'd love to work for this group, but I couldn't even get an interview because I had no relevant experience. I told these men about my love for languages, to which they responded that they didn't actually do much with language, but it was mostly signal processing and pattern recognition. I said I knew that, but I just needed to be around different languages, and I'd heard nothing but English for the last four months. One of them said, "Oh, we can help you with that, if you want to learn a bit of Spanish." When I said I already knew Spanish, they told me about a Spanish conversation group that meets for lunch every Thursday and invited me on the spot.

It was one of the best times I've had in a while. I've been worried that I'll lose my Spanish without opportunities to practice, and spending an hour every week chatting with native speakers puts those fears to rest. Sorry, officemates...you'll have to do without me every Thursday from now on!

Save the words

2010-01-24T19:04:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine on Facebook pointed out this cute application. I don't think it's very necessary, nor is it likely to work, but I like their spirit. Maybe if I find an especially good one, I'll adopt it.

A+ for creativity

2010-01-10T07:57:00.000-05:00

I absolutely loved this.

(courtesy Epic Win)

At your service

2009-12-18T23:13:00.000-05:00

It happened again today! As I was exiting the Harvard Square T station, a woman approached me with "Ni hao" and asked if I spoke Mandarin. I answered "a little" and confirmed that she was on the right platform to head downtown.

I used to get irritated when people spoke Mandarin to me based on their assumptions from my physical appearance, but now that my language skills are enough to hold very basic conversations, it doesn't anymore. I do, however, cringe a little when I'm expected to speak Japanese or Korean. It makes me wonder how much of my previous ire about Mandarin was really about my own insecurities about not speaking a language I thought I should. And while most people don't like having assumptions made about them, the assumptions that are false are far more annoying than the ones that happen to be true. We tend not to decry the latter, which may be why stereotypes persist and always will.

What English sounds like to foreigners

2009-12-18T23:10:00.000-05:00

I thought this was really impressive and a good antidote to linguacentrism. For all the times we English speakers mimic other languages with nonsense syllables, it's both humbling and amusing to be reminded that we, too, have our characteristic sounds.

Spanish language podcasts?

2009-12-12T21:53:00.001-05:00

I knew this was going to happen when I moved out of California, but I'm losing my Spanish. Boston doesn't have quite the concentration of Latinos that the San Francisco Bay Area does, and the only time I ever speak Spanish these days is with my roommate's Colombian nanny, and then it's only quick conversations about the weather or what the kids are doing. I'm hoping to join a visitation program for detained immigrants within a few months, but in the meantime I've decided to stop trying to make progress on any new languages and just try to hold on to what I have.

Does anyone know of a good advanced-level podcast in Latin American (preferably Central American) Spanish? I still listen to my old Puerta del Sol audiomagazines, but they're mostly in Castilian Spanish, as is the only advanced-level free podcast I've found on iTunes, Notes in Spanish. I'd love a news-oriented, NPR-type podcast that features native speakers at normal speed and vocabulary, rather than something oriented for language learners. If anyone out there has recommendations, please pass them on!

Misspelled variable names

2009-11-24T22:41:00.000-05:00

As a computer programmer, I face a conundrum whenever I see a variable name that is misspelled. For those of you who aren't programmers, variable names are words that exist in the source code (written in C or C++ or Java or whatever) of a program. Source code gets compiled into a binary executable, which is the thing you actually run.

For anything that's actually seen by users---prompts, error messages, configuration files---I, of course, insist on proper spelling and grammar. That's just part of putting out a quality product. But variable names aren't seen by anyone other than fellow programmers, and when a variable is used many times throughout a program consisting of thousands or millions of lines of code in perhaps hundreds of files, changing it is time-consuming and risky. The benefit is questionable, too; it might be easier for future programmers using that variable to remember it, but compilers will catch inconsistencies in spelling anyway.

My general practice is to leave the misspelling but grumble about it as often as possible to anyone who will listen. The latest one I encountered today was DELIMITER (something like a comma or space or tab to separate fields) misspelled as DELIMETER. People really don't think before they spell. The word "delimiter" comes from "limit", which this programmer presumably knows how to spell. "Delimeter" looks like "Deli-meter" to me, which looks like something a sandwich shop might use to keep track of sales or ingredients.

WHAT people?

2009-11-13T22:07:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I was listening to news coverage about Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida when I heard what is for me a dreaded phrase: "These people." Variations on "These people are unsalvageable. These people are recidivists. These people have nothing to offer society."

Although I hadn't heard of either of these cases previously, I immediately suspected that both Graham and Sullivan were black males. And I was right. Why? Because the vague designation of "these people" can only be used when the reference is obvious. And all too often, it is marginalized groups of society who are collectively characterized in this manner. I have heard "these people" used to refer to blacks, Asians, Muslims, homosexuals, and transgender individuals. Yes, individuals. The privilege to be considered individuals and not representations of an entire population is only granted to those in the majority. Try Googling "nidal malik hasan 'these people'" and nearly all of hits will use that phrase to designate...what? Islamic fundamentalists? All practioners of Islam? People with dark skin? By contrast, Googling "timothy mcveigh 'these people'" produces results in which the phrase refers as often to the victims or Washington politicians as to domestic terrorists.

Though not as blatantly derogatory as "you people" (think John McCain speaking to Latinos), I think we'd all be better off avoiding the use of "these people" or "those people". Let's say what we mean. At the very least, we avoid ambiguity. And perhaps, even, by asking ourselves the question, "WHAT people?" we might begin to notice our prejudices and assumptions and examine them.

¿No habla inglés? ¡No se permite manejar!

2009-10-25T22:23:00.000-04:00

Apparently some officers on the Dallas police force have been ticketing drivers for not being able to speak English.

As a former software engineer who has spent a lot of time fixing poor user interfaces, I do think it's entirely plausible that rookie cops might select an option from a pull-down menu called "non-English speaking driver", thinking it was an informative note rather than an instruction to issue a ticket. At least, I prefer that possibility over the idea that police officers might actually believe this to be a real law and seek to enforce it. The police chief seems extremely cool about it all, which is a refreshing change from how these types of challenges usually go down.

Another chance to do good

2009-10-08T20:23:00.000-04:00

My commute for my new job in Boston is entirely via public transportation. As I got off at the subway station earlier this week, I was approached by an Asian gentleman holding a coffee cup and a dollar bill. I thought he was a panhandler at first, but then he asked me (in Mandarin) whether I spoke Mandarin. My grasp of this particular language is "conversational" at best, and even that is a generous characterization. I answered "a little", and got enough of his response to realize that he was asking me how to buy a weekly pass. I navigated the menus on the ticket machine and managed to confirm, "七天? (seven days)" and tell him that it was "十五 (15)"...I didn't know the Mandarin for "dollar", but he figured it out.

While I have assisted strangers with my Spanish skills several times before, this is the first time I've been able to use my Mandarin. Many times throughout my life, I've been approached by people who either assume or ask whether I speak Mandarin, and I've hated saying no. There is no greater joy to me than being able to build bridges between people, especially of different cultures, to forge connections that would otherwise not exist. I miss interpreting.

After this incident I found renewed energy for listening to my Mandarin lesson podcasts, but realized I'd left my earphones at home. There's nothing like real-world application to motivate one to learn.

Employed!

2009-09-27T20:54:00.000-04:00

Language Lover is happy to report that after ten long months, she has finally found gainful employment.

It took much longer than I had expected, and was accompanied by far greater changes than I had envisioned, but all is well now. Yesterday, I got on a one-way flight to Boston, and on October 1, I'm beginning my new job on the technical staff of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a research and development center that mostly does government defense work. My husband and two girls will be joining me in a few months.

Some highlights along the way...

I'd hoped, as previously mentioned, to make a career change to a language-intensive field, or at least a technical field where knowledge of language would be useful. It seemed like a possibility when I was recruited for a software internationalization position at The Mathworks, but I didn't get the job. However, during the interview trip I realized that I really wanted to move back to Boston, so after discussion with my family, I refocused my job search to the East Coast. I had high hopes of working at multilingual software company Basis Technology after initial enthusiasm from the CEO and recruiting manager, but in the end they decided that they wanted local candidates with direct experience.

I decided that in this economy it's too hard to make a career change (without a huge pay cut, anyway...I did get considered for an administrative position at Berlitz, but decided that was way too impractical), especially one that involves a cross-country move. Although doing language and linguistics work full-time remains my ultimate goal, I'm content to stay in the scientific and high-tech fields while I make progress in other non-professional areas of my life. And the Laboratory does have a Speech and Language Processing division; they wouldn't consider me without a Ph.D. in computational linguistics or something, but perhaps once I prove myself there I'll have a chance to explore it further. For now, I'm just grateful to be back on my feet and looking forward to all the new changes in my life.

It's National Punctuation Day!

2009-09-24T18:57:00.000-04:00

It's National Punctuation Day! If only that meant a reprieve from the egregious misuse of ~~apostrophe's~~ apostrophes.

Sync or synch?

2009-09-22T00:51:00.001-04:00

I usually abbreviate various forms of the word "synchronization" with the spelling "sync". It just looks right to me, perhaps because it seems to be the more common spelling---the iTunes command, the band 'N Sync, etc. I've also seen it spelled "synch", but that looks a little weird and less aesthetically pleasing to me.

The linguist in me, however, realizes that the root is χρόνος ("time"), and the Greek letter chi (χ) is always transliterated into the Roman alphabet as ch. So it seems that one should preserve the final "h" in the abbreviation. "Synch" is more correct...but I still don't like the way it looks.

I feel torn between aesthetics and linguistic purity.

Dye it!

2009-09-22T00:42:00.000-04:00

This evening I was at Starbucks and overheard a woman saying to her friend, "I'm going to diet tomorrow." This struck me as a little strange, both because she was fairly slim and because one doesn't usually decide to diet for one day---she hadn't said she would start dieting tomorrow, she just said she was going to diet tomorrow. I do live in California, home to weird ideas, so I figured maybe she was just hoping to make up for one pastry or one Frappucino too many with a one-day fast or something.

After surreptitiously eavesdropping a bit longer, I realized she was talking about her hair, and that she was going to dye it!

Mistaken identity

2009-09-13T02:53:00.000-04:00

Today I called my friend Jocelyn, a sociologist who specializes in Latin America and speaks fluent Spanish. We'd been playing phone tag, and I was a little surprised when she answered her cell phone "Hola". But she has caller ID and she knows I speak Spanish as well, so I figured she was just being silly. I returned the greeting, "Hola, Jocelyn, ¿cómo estás?" and after a pause I heard her say in English, "I'm sorry...who am I speaking with?" Apparently her caller ID hadn't been functioning and she'd assumed I was her Colombian nanny.

It reminded me of a similarly funny incident that happened to me as a teenager once when my father was out of town. He'd usually call home every night, so one evening I answered the phone to hear a familiar voice ask in Mandarin whether my father was there. I thought, "Ha ha, very funny" and responded in a little girl's voice, "我不知道" ("I don't know"). He kept playing along, asking why I didn't know, to which I responded, "我聽不懂!" ("I don't understand!") Suddenly, I heard him speaking to a woman in the background who then got on the line to talk to me, and I realized in horror: This is not my father. By then I was mortified, and beyond the limits of my Mandarin, so there was only one possible course of action.

"MOM!!!!!"

FreeRice.com is back and even better!

2009-09-04T01:37:00.000-04:00

Almost two years ago, I blogged about this wonderful site where you can test your English vocabulary. I stopped playing it after a while, and I think the site even disappeared for a time, but it's back and even better. The English vocabulary section is pretty much the same as it was before, just with the words distributed among more levels. And now there are other subjects, including art, chemistry, geography, English grammar, and foreign language vocabulary.

The English grammar quiz is pretty easy and there are only five levels; I got bored with it fairly quickly. The foreign language vocabulary quizzes have ten levels. For Spanish, in which I consider myself fluent, I hit level 10 quickly, as I'd expected. For German, which I took all through high school and have sort of kept up over the years, I could make it to level 10 but mostly centered around 9. I had much more fun with Italian and French, though, neither of which I've studied formally. With Italian, I found that my knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and music got me to level 8 fairly consistently. French is a bit farther from Latin, but combined with my Spanish and all the food-related terms I've picked up over the years, I managed to achieve level 7.

I don't think the database is that large for these languages, so I'll probably play them until I learn all the words. It's more fun than flashcards.

No conjugating!

2009-08-13T01:35:00.000-04:00

I was on a cross-country flight today, only half-paying attention to the passenger instructions, when I heard the flight attendant say, "..and please do not conjugate in front of the restrooms!" I'm sure she meant congregate, and it's quite possible that I heard her incorrectly. Perhaps I have a dirty mind, or perhaps it was just the association with airplane bathrooms and what's said to go on there, but I found myself chuckling at the idea of two people doing the deed in front of the bathrooms.

It occurred to me later, though, that I don't think I've ever actually heard the word conjugate used in reference to sex, though the phrase "conjugal relations" is certainly well known and often used. From Latin, con + iugare means simply "to join together". The more commonly used word is copulate, from copula, link. I tried Googling conjugate to see if I could find an instance in which it has the meaning I ascribed to it, but the word has too many uses in biology and mathematics for that to be a useful exercise.

Anyway, I don't think they'd want people standing in the aisles reciting Spanish verb forms either.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

2009-07-29T13:24:00.000-04:00

I promise I'll get back to writing substantive posts soon. But for now, I thought I'd share this cute video, aptly titled.

For those who aren't familiar with the significance of the above sentence, here is an explanation.

That's the thing

2009-06-10T01:50:00.001-04:00

This evening, my six-year-old daughter remarked of her sister, "Mommy, Kyla's four and she still can't say 'th'. She can't say the word 'thing' right."

As we tried unsuccessfully to get her to say it correctly, I had some interesting insights about the way people mispronounce the "th" sound. There are actually two versions of it, the voiced (as in that, this, the) and the unvoiced (thing, theory). Kyla mispronounces both of them, but she preserves the voiced/unvoiced character when she does: "Dat's de fing." The voiced "th" is replaced by "d", which is also voiced; the unvoiced "th" is replaced by "f", which is unvoiced.

My Taiwanese parents also have difficulty with the "th" sound, but they have different voiced/unvoiced substitutions: "Tzahs tze sing." My Russian violin teacher substitutes a voiced "z" and an unvoiced "t": "Zat's ze ting." Although I haven't yet done an exhaustive study, I suspect that all foreign accents that replace the "th" sounds do so in a way that preserve the voiced or unvoiced aspects as appropriate.

It seems to me that this kind of voice-aspect-preserving substitution makes up a huge fraction of the consonant differences we perceive in foreign accents. A native English speaker trying to speak Spanish will frequently confuse the voiced "b" and "v", (haber and a ver are actually homonyms) or the "d" and voiced "th" (todo is generally pronounced more like to-tho).

I wonder if I could predict how a native speaker of a given language would pronounce English without ever meeting one, simply by studying the voiced and unvoiced sounds that exist in that language.

Congratulations, Kavya Shivashankar!

2009-06-07T00:47:00.000-04:00

I'm a little late on the coverage here, but I'd like to extend a hearty congratulations to Kavya Shivashankar, the winner of the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee, and a fellow Kansan and violinist!

In my comments on the 2006 nationals, I noted that foreign language study is an excellent tool for increasing one's understanding of English orthography. According to this article, 117 of the 293 spellers in this year's bee---nearly 40%---speak a language other than English. Even more interesting is that 33 of those---over 10%---do not speak English as a first language. I wonder what the officials at the Storm Lake School District in Iowa would think of that?

Stars and sequins

2009-05-25T14:51:00.000-04:00

My six-year-old daughter is really interested in astronomy and knows that a star begins to shine when it enters the main sequence stage. Today she confessed to me that she thought the name was "main sequins", which would explain the shininess.

I followed it with a quick explanation of the Latin word sequor, "follow", and how the word "sequence" comes from this, as well as the expression "non sequitur" (which my husband uses to describe her conversation much of the time). I don't know how much she followed---no pun intended---but hey, that's life when you're the child of a language lover.

Closer than I thought

2009-05-09T02:22:00.001-04:00

I got a compliment today, of sorts.

I speak to my daughters' Mandarin/Taiwanese teacher in Taiwanese, though it's the second language for both of us. She speaks fluent Mandarin but my Mandarin is lousy; I speak fluent English but her English is lousy (or so she claims). We both are proficient---though less than fluent---in Taiwanese. It's enough to communicate about homework, the class schedule, my girls' progress, and the fact that I have to make a wooden horse for the end-of-year performance.

Anyway, afterwards I was sitting outside the classroom chatting in English with another mother, who suddenly asked, "Where are you from?" I was baffled by this question; it's a Taiwanese-American center, so presumably everyone's from Taiwan, and I believe the country is small enough that there are not significant regional differences in speech from, say, the north and south parts of the island. Nor did she want the location of my residence in California, so I said, "Um, well, my parents are from Taiwan---Changhua---and I was born in the United States..."

Her response was, "Oh! The way you speak Fukien [another word for the Taiwanese language] I thought you were from Malaysia or something. I never would have guessed that you were born in the U.S., your accent's too good for that!" One of the languages spoken in Malaysia is essentially a different dialect of Taiwanese---they are mutually intelligible, unlike Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese---so a Malaysian accent is a "valid accent", so to speak.

It's somewhat like being told I speak German with an Austrian accent, rather than that I speak German with an American accent. The former is just a different "flavor" of pronunciation, whereas the latter is just mispronunciation.

Excuse my French

2009-05-08T03:30:00.000-04:00

This is really funny. I find it quite charming that the customer was so embarrassed.

It reminds me of the year I played Secret Snowflake with a group of online friends. As we were sharing what we'd all received from each other, my recipient noted that I'd given her "autocollant stickers." No one ever pointed out the redundancy.

Cultural sensitivity

2009-05-06T14:35:00.000-04:00

"White Power" is a term that has a unique and very charged meaning in American culture and history. This fact was apparently unknown to German car company Audi's press agency, which recently released its new RS6 with that unfortunate name. The error was caught very quickly, but the apology wasn't necessarily much better:

"Furthermore we distance ourselves from anything that has to do with that group synonym and we would also like to say sorry if anyone got personally touched."

Advice to Audi: PLEASE get yourself a native English speaker on your PR team.

Supernova?

2009-04-21T21:14:00.000-04:00

As my friends and regular readers know, I'm a huge fan of violinist Joshua Bell. After years of following his career, I've read just about every superlative a reviewer could possibly come up with: "world-class", "wunderkind", "superstar", and so on. Recently I saw a new descriptor, courtesy of the Seattle Times, referring to him as a "supernova violinist". This was disturbing to me. Call me excessively literal, but a supernova is the DEATH---albeit spectacular---of a star!

I actually wasn't even sure whether the author was referring to Bell's playing or his professional success. Joshua Bell can certainly execute fiery performances (watch him play the third movement of the Bruch violin concerto if you ever get a chance...wow!), but he's more often described as saccharine or "pretty". I Googled the expression "go supernova" and found references to Depeche Mode, Nokia fashion phones, and microblogging, from which I conclude that it's intended to mean something like "wild, unpredicted success." Bell's career has certainly been amazing, so I guess it's an apt description. I just can't shake the image of a "supernova violinist" as someone who explodes into pieces all over the stage.

Learning to read

2009-03-30T03:57:00.000-04:00

I am learning to read, and it is really hard.

I'm referring to reading Mandarin Chinese, something I find increasingly necessary as my six-year-old daughter progresses in her classes at the Fremont Taiwan School. Although I speak conversational Mandarin, and am proficient in the Taiwanese dialect (which has very similar grammar), my reading vocabulary is probably only a few hundred characters. Increasing this has been a slow and arduous process that has given me tremendous insight into the way that people learn and helped me appreciate the privileges I had during my childhood education.

Learning Mandarin within the Taiwanese culture is significantly different from learning it within the mainland Chinese culture, or within the American culture. For one thing, in Taiwan only traditional characters are used. There is a long-standing debate on the use of traditional versus simplified characters, but there does seem to be a general consensus that traditional characters are more difficult to learn. Furthermore, while pinyin is the phonetic system of choice in China (and most other places), Taiwan uses the bopomofo (zhuyin) system. (This caused me tremendous confusion about pinyin for a long time, because until a few years ago I had thought that pinyin was a crutch used only by Westerners, since I had never been exposed to it myself.) Unlike pinyin, which uses familar Roman letters, the bopomofo phonemes (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) are completely unrelated to anything an English reader might recognize.

So the process of learning Mandarin characters that I used, and that my daughter is using in her class, involves first mastering the bopomofo letters. There are 37 of them, and while I knew them all as a child, I've long forgotten most of them and have had to relearn them along with my daughter. The difficulty of remembering the particular sounds associated with the letters makes me appreciate what my girls must have been going through as they were learning to read with phonics. It's hard to keep b and d straight, just as it's hard to keep ㄉ and ㄌ straight. Moreover, even if one knows all the sounds of the letters that make up a word, it's not obvious how one blends them all together correctly. "Er - uh - guh" can be concatenated into "eruhguh" rather than "rug". Similar challenges arise when using bopomofo to pronounce a Chinese character.

I also believe that having my daughter enrolled in this class, which is intended for the children of Taiwanese immigrants who are fluent in Mandarin and speak it at home, has helped me understand the huge role that parents must play in successful education, even with a highly competent teacher. My daughter gets little to no reinforcement at home of the letters and characters she learns, because neither I nor my husband find it natural to use them. When she doesn't understand the instructions to her homework, I can't easily help her because I can't read them either (this site has been an absolute godsend). Strategies like using an object to remember an initial sound, like "A is for apple", don't work for us unless we happen to know the Mandarin word for "apple". So there's a lot that we struggle with. Fortunately, I have the time and resources to mostly overcome my lack of knowledge in this area, but what of those who do not? I can finally understand the helplessness a parent must feel when she sees her child struggling in calculus and doesn't have the experience to assist her. Yes, you can get where you need to go with hard work, but there's a lot more hard work required for some than for others.

I have a fuller appreciation now of the privileges I grew up with in having parents who highly valued education and were highly educated themselves. Getting a Ph.D. in physics wasn't a walk in the park, but it was definitely easier for me than it is for some; I had parents who could coach me in advanced math, a physics professor father with a multitude of contacts in the academic world, and---perhaps most importantly---the expectation that this was something I should and could achieve. With my daughter's Mandarin class, we lack many of those advantages, so we are highly dependent upon and grateful for the assistance of her excellent teacher and her classmates' parents. So yet again, language study has broadened my view of the world and, I hope, made me a better person.

The best music joke ever

2009-03-24T04:37:00.000-04:00

Because I'm a sucker for puns, and because I realized how depressing and negative my blog has been lately...here's a joke I just read on a violinist site I frequent.

A C, an E-flat, and a G go into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve minors." So the E-flat leaves, and the C and the G have an open fifth between them. After a few drinks, the fifth is diminished and the G is out flat.

An F comes in and tries to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough. A D comes into the bar and heads straight for the bathroom saying, "Excuse me. I'll just be a second."

Then an A comes into the bar, but the bartender is not convinced that this relative of C is not a minor.

Then the bartender notices a B-flat hiding at the end of the bar and exclaims, "Get out now. You're the seventh minor I've found in this bar tonight."

The E-flat, not easily deflated, comes back to the bar the next night in a 3-piece suit with nicely shined shoes. The bartender (who used to have a nice corporate job until his company downsized) says, "You're looking sharp tonight, come on in! This could be a major development."

This proves to be the case, as the E-flat takes off the suit, and everything else, and stands there au natural.

Eventually, the C sobers up, and realizes in horror that he's under a rest. The C is brought to trial, is found guilty of contributing to the diminution of a minor, and is sentenced to 10 years of DS without Coda at an upscale correctional facility. On appeal, however, the C is found innocent of any wrongdoing, even accidental, and that all accusations to the contrary are bassless.

The bartender decides, however, that since he's only had tenor so patrons, and the sopranout in the bathroom, everything has become altoo much treble; he needs a rest, and closes the bar.

Even more school administrator idiocy

2009-03-21T01:16:00.001-04:00

I thought the xenophobia displayed by a Louisiana high school's reaction to a valedictorian giving part of her commencement speech in Vietnamese last year was pretty outrageous, but here's another case that I find even more nefarious. A high school student in Iowa with a 3.9 GPA has been suspended for refusing to take an English proficiency test required by the school because she speaks Lao at home. As if she could have managed those academic accomplishments with anything other than proficiency in English?

Look, I can see how the policy, part of No Child Left Behind, might have been conceived with good intentions. But what gets me is that even when presented with convincing evidence that there are some very wrong assumptions behind this policy, the school officials didn't take the student's side and advocate for an exemption or at least acknowledge the idiocy of the requirement. No, they've instead directed all their energies into putting this young woman "in her place"; the assistant principal even went so far as to tell her she was "no Rosa Parks" and should give up her protest. Though some of the comments on the news stories are nothing short of appallingly racist, I'm glad that she is being supported by classmates and administrators in nearby districts.

And I'm sure all of my readers realize this, but there are many, many people who managed to become fully proficient in English---including yours truly---despite having immigrant parents who speak another language at home. In fact, doesn't the school district effectively admit its own failures if it assumes it can't teach its own students English without the help of the parents? These assumptions about bilingualism remind me of something told to me by a Caucasian friend who recently adopted a girl from China. As she was discussing with her friends and relatives how she was going to facilitate her daughter learning Mandarin, some of them asked her, "But don't you just want her to be a 'normal' American girl?"

There's a common joke that goes, "What do you call someone who speaks two languages?"

"Bilingual."

"What do you call someone who speaks three languages?"

"Trilingual."

"What do you call someone who speaks one language?"

"American."

Or, at least, a "normal American."

(Once again, thanks to Angry Asian Man for calling attention to this incident.)

Still searching

2009-03-09T17:22:00.001-04:00

In case you hadn't heard, the job market is terrible. Especially in Silicon Valley. Whereas at my last job it took me only two days from interview to offer, I've been searching for over two months now with barely a nibble. My family is fortunate enough not to be experiencing financial hardship, thanks to my husband's contract work and help from my parents, but it's pretty demoralizing.

I do, however, have a second volunteer job now that is extremely fulfilling. I'm working at the CET Immigration and Employment Program in San Jose, which provides citizenship and immigration services and strengthens civic involvement among immigrants. I administer ESL placement tests and give mock citizenship interviews, along with some basic administrative work. While I don't use my Spanish as frequently as I do at clinic, the conversations are less predictable and exercise more of my vocabulary than the medical terms I already have down pat.

In widening my job search beyond the electronic design automation industry, I've discovered two fields that interest me greatly: software localization/internationalization and computational linguistics. The former refers to adapting software for global users; the latter deals with modeling language concepts from a computational perspective (e.g. machine translation, natural language processing). Both seem like ideal ways to combine my extensive software experience with my passion and talent for foreign languages. Do any of my readers have knowledge and/or contacts in either of these fields?

Made-up words

2009-02-19T03:23:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, my parents were in town and we got to talking about all the cute ways my girls used to say certain words: "lellow" for "yellow", "mazageen" for "magazine", etc. My father then added, "And remember, when you were little, you used to say 'ku' for 'kiss'!"

I responded that it wasn't the same, because I was just using a different language. Sure, it's cute to mix up languages, but it's not the same as mispronouncing a word in a particular language. My father responded, "Well, it's hard to say, because, you know, it's like a made-up language."

I kept insisting that it wasn't "making up" a language just to slip in a foreign word now and then, until something occurred to me. I asked my parents directly, "Isn't 'ku' the Taiwanese word for 'kiss'?"

It is NOT. As I learned only that afternoon, the Taiwanese word for "kiss" is, roughly transliterated, something like "jim". "Ku" is not a Taiwanese word, or a Mandarin word. It's something I made up as a young child because I apparently couldn't pronounce "kiss", and my parents kept using it because they thought it was cute. When speaking Taiwanese, we'd stick it in sentences like "Come on, ku me", with all the particles and such that are used instead of inflection. And because I rarely spoke Taiwanese with anyone except my parents, and the word "kiss" didn't typically enter into casual conversation with others, I never figured it out. I have been using a made-up word for thirty years! It kind of blew my mind, which wasn't a good thing since I was driving at the time.

I know it's common to have "inside" words and sayings among family and friends, but typically you know they're inside terms and use them only with the proper audience. I've been racking my brain trying to figure out whether I ever used "ku" with anyone other than my parents and what they must have thought I was trying to say.

The only inside word I can think of that I use with my daughters is "dab", which we use to denote the use of a towel to wipe one's face while bathing or showering. It started when I'd say "dab dab dab" while bathing my daughter when she was a baby. She eventually learned to ask for it, "Need a dab!" and now both my kids are known to call for "dab towels" from the tub. I'm beginning to think that sometime I should tell them explicitly that this isn't exactly what "dab" means. Otherwise, I can imagine one of them yelling to her spouse someday, "Honey, I need a dab!" and having the same shocked reaction I did when I realized my word wasn't real.

The Queens English? Ha!

2009-02-03T01:37:00.000-05:00

I used to believe that poor grammar and punctuation (along with lame justifications thereof) was chiefly the domain of us Americans, but this article is making me rethink that assumption. There might be some valid reasons to remove apostrophes from signs, but "confusing and old-fashioned" aren't among them. And one shouldn't need an A-level in English to understand a simple street sign!

In the town of Manhattan, Kansas, where I grew up, there's a street that had three different names among at least seven signs: Seth Child Road, Seth Childs Road, Seth Child's Road. This was the case fifteen years ago, anyway; I don't know if they've settled on something since. The inconsistency was a little annoying, but I wouldn't have taken it as an argument to remove all apostrophes from every sign. If anything, "Seth Childs Road" makes the least amount of sense among the three.

I'm with Lynne Truss on this one. It's a weak attempt to hide ignorance by claiming some higher purpose.

Heavy metal band names

2009-01-15T03:40:00.001-05:00

I'm not at all a heavy metal fan, but I thought this chart classifying band names was just awesome.

I was surprised to find out that "Def Leppard" was a deliberate misspelling of "Deaf Leopard." I'm such a visual person that I never would have made a connection between the words. There's a similar story for Led Zeppelin, which dropped the "a" from "Lead" in order to prevent "thick Americans" from pronouncing it "leed"; it refers to the metal, not a position (as in "lead singer").

For Latin (language) lovers

2009-01-07T05:52:00.000-05:00

Latin Crosswords, by Peter Jones and David Dare-Plumpton

My husband picked this up for me a few days ago and it has consumed every minute of my leisure time since. I'm somewhat of a puzzle buff, appreciating brain twisters of all kinds, and nothing has ever tickled all parts of my cerebrum so delightfully. The cleverness of the authors is astounding. The clues are packed with puns, anagrams, and jokes ("Down from a bottomless goddess" = "de", from "dea") that will gratify any cruciverbalist. Puzzles increase in difficulty; the first section (Facillimum) is accessible to anyone with knowledge of the most common Latin words, but I suspect my abilities---the equivalent of about three years of college Latin, much of it forgotten---will not carry me through the final Difficillimum.

The one imperfection, alas, is that many of the clues make use of incorrect Roman numerals. Rules governing the formation of Roman numerals state that only powers of ten may be subtracted (VL is invalid), and that a letter may not be subtracted from another letter representing a quantity more than ten times greater (IC cannot be written for 99; it's XCIX). It bugs me a bit that the authors don't seem to know this, but I'm willing to ignore it given the absolute genius of the rest of the book.

Note to hubby: do not give your wife a book this entertaining on the first day of her job search. I promise I'll send out some more résumés tomorrow. But it's 3 a.m. and I have some crosswords to do.

Order of adjectives

2009-01-03T01:37:00.000-05:00

By the time I started learning Spanish, I'd already studied three languages formally. Two of them, Latin and ancient Greek, have extremely complicated grammar. So I was well-versed in all terms grammatical---all the parts of speech, noun and adjective declensions, verb tenses and aspects and voices and persons. I consider myself somewhat of an expert on the structure of the languages I know.

I was shocked, therefore, when a fellow student in Mexico brought up something I'd never even considered before: order of adjectives. You can't say "a black small cat"; it has to be "a small black cat". I don't remember learning this in my English grammar classes, but as a native English speaker I can tell you what sounds right and what doesn't.

There is, in fact, an accepted order of adjectives in English, depending on the quality described. Size comes before color. Other languages have their own orders (see here for a description in Spanish), which seem more or less similar, with accommodations for non-English constructions like postpositive adjectives.

What I find curious is the fact that I never learned order of adjectives explicitly, not in English or any of my foreign language classes. Is it because it's more of a custom than a rule (though making the distinction is always a little dicey)? Or because there's some inherent hierarchy based on how humans perceive material qualities (I find this a little hard to believe)? I do see the subject mentioned occasionally in ESL classes. I'd love to know from my readers who learned English formally in other countries whether this topic was ever discussed.

Language study and anti-racist parenting

2008-12-31T20:46:00.000-05:00

And to cap off this year, a subject that combines two of my greatest passions.

Anti-Racist Parent, a blog I frequent, recently posed the question, "How important is language study to anti-racist parenting?" My answer should surprise no one. As I have written here many times, I consider language study one of the best ways to expand one's horizons and perspectives.

I know that language study is neither required nor easy (like fighting racism, for many white people). But I believe both are essential for the development and survival of a global, peaceful society. In the next year, I resolve to either become functional in a new language or significantly increase my fluency in one of my existing languages. And, of course, encourage and help my children to do the same.

Welsh FAIL

2008-12-10T18:33:00.000-05:00

I saw this on failblog.org and absolutely loved it:

When will people learn that blindly trusting translations is not a good idea?

Another one bites the dust

2008-11-25T00:52:00.001-05:00

Language Lover was laid off last week and is now a lady of leisure.

It wasn't a huge surprise, given the state of our nation's economy in general and the funding situation at my former company in specific. I'm going to miss my great coworkers, but on the whole I'm not particularly depressed or worried. This could be an opportunity for me to start pursuing a translation/interpretation career in earnest. However, I've still got two little kids and a husband who loves being a stay-at-home dad and teacher (and is really good at it), so the flexibility and financial security of another high-tech job is tempting.

I think I'm going to try to do volunteer work for a few months that combines my passions of racial justice, immigrant advocacy, and foreign languages. I'd like to get a better idea of the kinds of jobs out there and how realistic a career switch might be for me, while hubby and I go through our finances and long-term plans in detail to determine our options. Stay tuned.

Last night at the pet store

2008-11-11T15:44:00.000-05:00

Last night after work, I decided to pop into PetCo to pick up some much-needed flea shampoo for my cats. It was supposed to be a five-minute stop, but then I saw a clerk wandering around the store asking people, "Do you speak Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?" No one ever asks me, an Asian woman, whether I speak Spanish, so I called out, "I speak Spanish, do you need an interpreter?" He accepted my services with relief and I spent the next fifteen minutes helping him help a young Hispanic woman buy some fish for her little boy. Apparently the fish she was eyeing were rather difficult to take care of, requiring that she put other fish in the tank for six weeks first to "balance it" (excrete some bacteria or something), but there was no way he was going to be able to explain that with hand gestures. Eventually she settled on some red cap goldfish, which are much easier to raise, and all parties were happy.

I never get to be the one who saves the day. I can't stand up when a flight attendant asks, "Is there a doctor on board?", and I'm never the one who happens to have a Swiss Army knife in her purse with just the right tool. Even when I was on my former company's emergency response team, the only thing I ever had to do was give someone an ice pack. And so okay, while helping someone buy fish isn't exactly a lifesaving gesture, I was happy to be able to help when no one else around could.

The clerk told me that he was so glad I'd been there, because the woman had been in several times before but no one could ever speak to her, and he wanted to make sure she got the right fish for her little boy. I was touched. In my daily life I see so many instances where people who don't speak English---usually Hispanics, in my part of the country---are simply dismissed, or even yelled at, and here was a young white guy doing everything he could to help her. He could have just sold her the original fish, which would have died without proper care, or decided she wasn't worth it as a customer and just tried to get rid of her, but he didn't. He recognized her humanity despite their lack of a common language. Once again, I say that it is not language that creates barriers; it is people and their attitudes, and this little incident restored my faith in the innate goodness of many.

I learned the Spanish word for fresh water, agua dulce (literally "sweet water"). And the clerk gave me a ten percent discount on my flea shampoo for helping them out. We were winners all around.

Obama headlines around the world

2008-11-06T22:21:00.001-05:00

I wanted to put together a compendium of what foreign papers are saying about our election results, but it seems several others have beat me to it, so I'll happily link to them instead:

Webweaver
The Daily Beast
Menegay.org
Zain's Diary at The Daily Kos

Of the headlines I can read, I like the Hamburger Morgenpost the best. Trust the Germans to be blunt!

Adding to the wish list

2008-11-02T03:07:00.001-05:00

I really, really want this shirt.

Dora the Explorer around the world

2008-10-28T02:06:00.000-04:00

When we were in Taiwan, we happened to catch Dora the Explorer on TV. In the original show produced in the United States, Dora and her friends speak mostly English, with occasional Spanish words like "¡Vámonos!" or "¡Delicioso!" sprinkled into conversation. The Taiwanese version, however, had Dora speaking mostly Mandarin with a little English. Apparently this is what most other countries do, replace English with the dominant language of the country and Spanish with English. I guess the implication is that English is the most important second language for kids to learn.

There are a couple of exceptions to this rule. In Ireland the bilingualism is Irish-Spanish, which makes sense since English is a second official language anyway. And in Serbia, the show is in Serbian and Spanish as well.

Whatever works

2008-10-24T05:49:00.000-04:00

I just returned from a week-long trip to Taiwan and now have lots of great fodder for this blog, which I will share in the next several posts. Trying to get around in my far-from-perfect Taiwanese and my very-far-from-perfect Mandarin reminded me of two things: 1) one is frequently not as fluent in a language as one thinks one is, when tested in a variety of real-life situations, and 2) one can get very far with minimal fluency if one has enough patience and creativity.

I've written before about my need to resort to slightly embarrassing measures when interpreting for Spanish-speaking patients at the clinic where I volunteer. And recently, my boss related an incident where he was presented with whale meat at a restaurant in Japan and asked his hosts what it was. They couldn't come up with the English word for "whale", so they instead explained "Moby Dick!" He got it.

While buying some last-minute gifts on my last day in Taiwan, I went to a music store to try and find a book of folk songs for my daughter's piano teacher. But I'm pretty much illiterate in Mandarin, and I wasn't having any luck looking through the shelves randomly. The only clerk present didn't speak English. I don't know the Taiwanese word for "traditional" or "folk", so I asked her, "Piano book. Taiwan songs. Really old." It worked---in seconds she'd pulled three books, all of which I bought.

My parents and cousins found this story hilarious, but I say...whatever works. As a professional interpreter once told me, when you use a foreign language, you just need to hang your ego by the door and do whatever you need to do to get the job done.

Nerd humor

2008-10-03T19:00:00.001-04:00

I just had a disagreement with my coworker on whether the C/C++ programming keyword "enum" should be pronounced "e-noom" or "e-numm." I think he's actually right that the former makes more sense, since it's short for "enumerated". But the incident reminded me of one of my favorite jokes ever, on the pronunciation of the names of a well-known operating system and a text editor:

We were discussing how to pronounce certain computer names. Is "Linux" pronounced "Lin-ucks" or "Lie-nucks"? And is the editor "vi" called "veye" or "Vee-Eye"?

So we tapped them into our friendly Mac, and asked its verdict on pronunciation: "Linux" is pronounced "Lin-uks". "vi" is pronounced "Six".

Say again?

2008-09-29T00:21:00.000-04:00

I was recently emailed an article in Mandarin from my daughters' Taiwanese school. I've written before about how online translators should never be used if one wants quality output, but they can be useful in some cases to get a rough (if ungrammatical) sense of what is being said.

Very rough, in this case (courtesy Altavista's Babelfish)...

The earth flow destroys the homeland “to teach them to move” Reporter Liang Yufang, Lai Suling Writer Huang Chun stated clearly some time ago occurred on his body's small story: “once me to ride the train from Yilan to return to Taibei, Swiss fragrant that station group of high-school students, pushes chats outside the restroom creates a disturbance. I come out from the restroom, a vehicle curve, I hit to a student. 'how do you do?'He is not very happy. “I said: 'sorry, the vehicle sways very much fiercely.'He has a look at me, said: 'you soon have died in any case.'My good pain, went home saying that at heart listened to wife, how did Taiwan's child change this? I quickly die do not need you to say like this.” Just retired when Jinan University Professor Li Jiatong at the beginning of this year to cyanine UK high-school student lecture, talks about the Indian poor person hunger to probably want food with the monkey the situation, under the stage the student to laugh. Li Jiatong has been angry, reprimanding young student: “I am not the comedian clown, comes joyful everybody; This country must some people tell the young people the serious matter, lets them see the world the truth.”

Bumbling along with joy

2008-09-22T02:31:00.001-04:00

My two daughters, ages five and three, have been taking Mandarin and Taiwanese lessons at the Fremont Taiwan School for a few weeks now. It's been an interesting experience for our family. The teachers, staff, and most of the parents are first-generation Taiwanese, which means that their primary language of communication is Taiwanese or Mandarin. Since classes are held during the day, it's my stay-at-home husband---who speaks neither language---who's responsible for ferrying them to and from class. I've come home to comments like, "Um, she has homework for next week, but I'm not sure what it is."

Nor can I completely save the day, since my Mandarin is abysmal and my Taiwanese is functional but by no means fluent. When I emailed the teacher last week in English to inquire about the homework, she phoned me at work speaking Mandarin; I inquired (in Mandarin) whether we could switch to Taiwanese and we managed to have a reasonable conversation about my daughter's homework in a language neither of us felt totally comfortable in. We stumbled around for a while on what I think was the word "trace", which neither of us knew in Taiwanese. I was eventually able to convey to my husband what I thought the homework was, even though I couldn't read the characters on the worksheets. (I have got to learn how to use a Chinese dictionary.)

In the midst of all this parental confusion, my girls have been real troupers. My older daughter was at first upset that she couldn't understand the teacher, who also spoke too loudly, but after I armed her with the Taiwanese phrases for "What does that mean?" and "Could you please not speak so loudly?" she was fine. I think it helps, too, that she attended a German immersion preschool for two years and can deal with being in an environment where she doesn't understand the language. Now that a few weeks have passed, they're happy and enthusiastic and the teacher raves about their participation and progress.

I relate these experiences because I've so often, in my anti-racism work and elsewhere, encountered people who describe feelings of unease, frustration, or hostility when they are in the company of people who don't speak English. Yes, I do understand the discomfort. I wasn't born speaking five languages, nor do I speak most of those languages fluently. Yes, language is a barrier, but frequently not as huge of one as people think it is. When there is a willingness on both sides to bridge the gap and to be in community, many wonderful things can happen. With the school, I was upfront from the beginning about my and my husband's lack of fluency in Chinese and our desire to change that for ourselves and our daughters. The staff got me an interpreter for the parents' meeting, and they've set up a camera and a monitor so my husband can observe the classes and (hopefully) pick up a bit of the lessons themselves. When the kids had a Moon Festival party a few weeks ago, an older child sat between my girls explaining what was going on, and a fellow parent performed a similar service for my husband.

It is not language that creates barriers; it is people and their attitudes. In my volunteer work as a Spanish interpreter for the Rotacare Free Clinic, I seek to bridge the language gap for others; in my position as a parent at the Fremont Taiwan school, I gratefully accept the willingness of others to bridge the corresponding language gaps for me. Through it all, I am humbled and proud to be in the presence of those who recognize that in this world we need all the bridges we can create, that humanity transcends the borders of a country, and that we are ultimately far more alike than we are different.

Hidden prepositions

2008-09-10T01:36:00.000-04:00

I've often told my five-year-old daughter that she used to hiccup a lot while she was in my tummy. I don't remember how we got on the subject again tonight, but my three-year-old reminded us, "And she kept hicc-ing up!"

I find it fascinating when my kids use language in a way that provides a window into their young minds.

The king's not the thing

2008-08-18T00:25:00.000-04:00

When the word "reify" popped up recently on a "Word of the Day" application I have, I was sure I could guess the definition. I knew what "deify" (from Latin deus, god) meant, and I thought for certain that "reify" must be from Latin rex, king---and thus probably meant "to crown as king" or "to treat as a king".

Actually, the root is not rex but res, a delightful word whose brevity belies its multitude of meanings. I learned its translation in first-year Latin as "thing, matter, or affair" but never really understood it until I encountered it in contexts like res publica or in medias res. And so, in fact, "reify" has nothing to do with kings but means "to convert into or regard as a concrete thing, e.g. to reify a concept".

Incidentally, the above-mentioned application from Merriam-Webster is pretty cool. It not only gives you a word's definition, but also a sample sentence and an interesting fact. Even when I'm already familiar with the word of the day, I usually end up learning something.

A personal update

2008-07-25T17:06:00.000-04:00

I always advise those who ask that self-study is by far the least effective way to learn a new language, and that goes for me too. Though I'm still determined to go through with my plan for learning Arabic, which was to be language #8, I can't seem to make any meaningful progress without the aid of a teacher and conversation partners. So, that goal will be deferred until next summer or fall, when my schedule becomes more flexible and I'm able to enroll in at the Esteban Language Center.

A few months ago my husband and I were contemplating a trip to Italy at the end of the summer, so the new language #8 was Italian for a short time. Learning Italian when one is already fluent in Spanish and competent in Latin is like a violinist learning to play the viola or the mandolin; a few tweaks are necessary but it's pretty close to what you're used to. (Learning Arabic, however, was more like learning the French horn for me!) But those travel plans have been delayed in favor of a family trip to Taiwan in the fall...

...so I'm backtracking and working on improving my competence in Mandarin (which was either language #7 or language #3, depending on whether you count my childhood "baby" Mandarin). After getting most of the way through the full Pimsleur course last year I've got basic conversational abilities, but I can't read more than about fifty characters or discuss anything remotely substantial. It's time to get better.

Most schools these days will teach simplified rather than traditional Chinese characters. I, being from Taiwan, am primarily interested in learning the traditional characters. (To quote my mother, "Simplified character has no character!") I've found an online course which will teach them, but the Taiwanese-run school near my home only teaches children. I hope that between the former and enrolling my daughter in the latter, I'll be able to learn what I want.

My Chinese coworker gave me some interesting insights this morning when we were discussing the effect of technology on the traditional vs. simplified character debate. Back in the days of low-resolution VGA monitors, it was actually quite difficult to display traditional characters on a computer screen ("they just look like a black blob"). However, one argument in favor of simplified characters is that they're faster to write by hand, though that's moot in the age of computers where input is performed by pinyin or Bopomofo. I recommend reading the debate linked above; it's quite fascinating.

School board idiocy

2008-07-02T15:03:00.000-04:00

I am absolutely horrified by this story. Following a commencement speech at a Lousiana high school in which the co-valedictorians thanked their parents briefly in their native Vietnamese, the school board is considering a formal policy that all commencement speeches must be delivered in English. (Reports here and here.)

How ignorant and xenophobic do you have to be to feel threatened by a high school valedictorian wanting to express gratitude to her parents in a few sentences of another language? I am sick and tired of people believing that living in the United States entitles them never to hear any other language spoken besides English. It's simply incomprehensible to me how the school board can claim that this policy is aimed toward inclusivity.

Hue Vo, one of the co-valedictorians, also said in her speech, "Ellender is very diverse. We have many cultures there. They encourage us to be an individual. That’s why I love Ellender. It helped me be an Asian American and not be ashamed of it because no one judged me." Ironic, isn't it?

(Thanks to Angry Asian Man, who expressed his outrage far more eloquently than I can.)

V.S. = Very Stupid

2008-06-25T17:45:00.000-04:00

String sections in an orchestra commonly have their parts marked so that all players switch bows at the same time. This job is usually performed by the principal player in that section. In my former community orchestra, however, the conductor decided to have a professional violinist---who happened to be my private violin teacher---bow the parts instead. I noticed that she wrote her initials, "V.S." at the bottom of one of the pages, which I thought was a little strange; it's hardly a difficult or creative enough task that it justifies a personal signature.

Years later, I've discovered that V.S. in fact did not stand for her name, but is an abbreviation for volti subito, or "turn page quickly".

Here we go again

2008-06-13T18:38:00.000-04:00

I almost don't want to waste blog space writing about a subject that I think has already received far too much attention as it is, but this latest development seems too ridiculous to ignore:

The International Astronomical Union has decided on the term "plutoid" as a name for dwarf planets like Pluto.

Sidestepping concerns of many astronomers worldwide, the IAU's decision, at a meeting of its Executive Committee in Oslo, comes almost two years after it stripped Pluto of its planethood and introduced the term "dwarf planets" for Pluto and other small round objects that often travel highly elliptical paths around the sun in the far reaches of the solar system.

(Full article here) So now Pluto is not a planet or a dwarf planet, but a plutoid. Pluto is a plutoid. How tautological is that?

I doubt we'll see the end of this. My impression is that the original controversy arose because people were emotionally connected to the idea of nine planets. I can understand this; I picked up the children's book 11 Planets recently and it just felt...wrong. Blasphemous. Weird. So I don't think those people who desperately want Pluto to be a planet again will settle for anything less than Pluto, and only Pluto, restored to full-planet status. They think Pluto was unfairly demoted (which I disagree with) and they want justice.

As a scientist, I'm quite familiar with the phenomenon of words having different scientific and colloquial meanings, and I think it's okay. We know koala bears aren't bears and peanuts aren't nuts in the botanical sense. And while I still think it's more consistent to have either eight or eleven planets rather than nine, there are many precedents in our language for "wrong" words and concepts being retained for historical reasons.

That said, I'm still a proud member of the Facebook group "I'm Glad Pluto's No Longer a Planet; It Makes Gustav Holst's Suite Complete".

Color naming

2008-05-28T18:34:00.001-04:00

While trying to explain the color of fuchsia to my five-year-old daughter recently, I was reminded of something I learned in a linguistics class at Harvard many years ago about how color terms in a given language are predictable based on the number of color terms that exist. Though I don't remember the source, it's likely that the work presented was that of Berlin and Kay, in Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. According to the authors, languages that have only two color terms specify only black and white. If a third color exists, it is red, followed by green, yellow, blue, and brown.

The idea is plausible, though I haven't read the book itself, and the study does have its critics. I've known since I was a child that Taiwanese and Mandarin make no distinction between the colors of green and blue. And according to the Wikipedia article on color naming, dark and light blue are considered separate "basic colors" in Russian and Italian, much the same way that red and pink are in English.

The engineer in me finds the precision of the RGB color model quite appealing, but I can also spend hours paging through Avon catalogs looking at all the different names given to subtly varying shades of pink, purple, and brown. I can't say that "Sinful Passion" is terribly descriptive, though.

Plural logic

2008-05-26T04:44:00.000-04:00

I was clowning around with my kids recently and addressed them in a drawl, "Hiya, childrens."

"Mommy, that's like FOUR kids! 'Children' means two, and 'kids' means two, so if you say 'childrens' it means you have four!"

Auch nicht übersetzbar

2008-04-24T13:57:00.000-04:00

After dropping my daughter off at her German-American preschool this morning, I noticed a "Quotes of the Week" posted on the door of one of the older kids' classrooms.

"Wenn ein Mann ein Buch schreibt, dann heißt er 'Autor'. Wie heißt es, wenn eine Frau ein Buch schreibt?"

"Frautor!"

Disappointment at the opera

2008-04-22T03:09:00.000-04:00

I don't consider myself a huge opera buff, but I've loved Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) since I was a teenager. When I found out that Opera San José---a group whose musicians I've worked with from time to time---was performing it this month, I leaped at the opportunity to see it. I'm a big proponent of enjoying art (vocal works, poetry, movies) in its original language whenever possible, and the website promised "Sung in German, with English supertitles."

I was shocked, therefore, when Tamino uttered his desperate plea, "Ach, schützet mich!" and fell over in a faint, only to emerge from this state speaking English. HUH? Apparently, only the songs were to be presented in German; all dialogue had been translated and was spoken in English. The effect to me was jarring, and I felt a mental grinding, as of changing gears in a car without a fully depressed clutch, every time there was a transition between music and dialogue. It didn't ruin my experience, but my enthusiasm for the performance was undoubtedly dampened.

During the intermission, I asked a staff member why this was done and she told me that it was pretty standard. "If you see this opera in France, they'll do the dialogue in French." I've since confirmed with my friends across the Atlantic that this is indeed common. But my question is, why? The Wikipedia entry for "Libretto" provides a clue:

Just as with literature and song, the libretto has its share of problems and challenges with translation. In the past (and even today), foreign musical stage works with spoken dialogue, especially comedies, were sometimes performed with the sung portions in the original language and the spoken dialogue in the vernacular. However, this reinforces the idea that the words to the songs do not matter, a common misconception in those who do not really understand musicals or operettas.

(Yes, there's some editorializing on the part of the author here, with which I happen to agree.) I understand that opera arias are fiendishly difficult to translate well; this is a subject I've expounded on before. And in the days before projector technology enabled the common practice of supertitles, perhaps opera companies feared that audiences wouldn't want to sit through three hours of an incomprehensible story, so they made the choice to translate the dialogue (a much easier task, since there are far fewer constraints) and leave the music intact, thus giving listeners some clue of the plot. But nowadays, why not just supertitle the entire thing? We don't watch foreign movies with some sections dubbed and some sections subtitled, which is really the equivalent of what happened here.

I'm willing to consider the possibility that my disappointment has partially to do with my love for and competency in the German language. It's not particularly tiring to me to listen to three hours of German, and far worth any increased effort to experience the opera in the beauty of the original language. But would I feel similarly for a Russian or French opera? Maybe I'll appreciate the English next year, when they perform Carmen.

Wishful thinking

2008-03-25T14:05:00.000-04:00

My five-year-old daughter put up a sign on the door of our guest room: THE KIDS LEAVE ME ALONE AREA. I thought that sounded like a wonderful place to spend the evening, until she informed me it was THE KIDS' "LEAVE ME ALONE" AREA, not---as I'd hoped---THE "KIDS LEAVE ME ALONE" AREA.

Once again, it's all in the punctuation.

Maestro Has a Request

2008-03-21T17:47:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite violinists, Hilary Hahn, recounted this event on her website some time ago. I was recently reminded of it again and thought my readers would enjoy it.

Some moments are the stuff of comedy routines. This is a scene from a recent rehearsal, exactly as it happened. The conductor was European, the orchestra of British descent.

"Does anyone have a rubber?" the maestro asked the orchestra, pencil in hand.

A titter passed among the musicians. Realizing his double-entendre, the conductor turned crimson, ruffling his hair in an embarrassed gesture.

The principal violist located a large white eraser and handed it over. The conductor rubbed out an old pencil marking, then returned the eraser. A quip was made about sharing a rubber, getting it back used.

A minute later, the eraser was borrowed again, and again returned.

The next time an eraser was needed, the principal violist gave the conductor a small, flat, white packet with serrated edges and a distinct shape inside. A surprised chuckle escaped the orchestra. The maestro shook his head, laughed, and held it up for all to see. He hesitated – and then, in one decisive motion, pocketed the package.

The joke was complete. Rehearsal continued as usual.

What's in a name----sight or sound?

2008-03-12T01:42:00.000-04:00

My violin teacher is Russian, as is the young woman whose lesson immediately follows mine. I recently asked her to remind me again of her name, and she answered "Alena", pronouncing it "Ah-LAY-na". My teacher chimed in with his pronunciation, "Al-YO-na", and gave me a somewhat garbled explanation of how the Russian vowel was pronounced differently in English. I later did a bit of research on the Russian alphabet and discovered that the original name is actually spelled "Alёna"; the "ё" is pronounced like the English "yo".

Given the vast difference in sound between the Russian and English versions of the vowels, I was surprised Alena (or her parents) didn't choose to spell her name "Alyona" or "Aliona" or something else that would reflect the native pronunciation when they moved to this country. But then I realized that it comes down to whether one cares more about the appearance or the sound of one's name. I spell my name the German/Scandinavian way, "Karin", and I pronounce it basically the same way as the more common American spelling "Karen". Although I try not to be unreasonable about it, I care about having my name spelled correctly. There was a time when I also cared about having it pronounced the way I pronounce it, but now I consider all different pronunciations of my name (KAHR-in, kuh-RIN, kuh-REEN) to be more or less valid and don't correct people unless explicitly requested. Maybe it's because it's the spelling, rather than the sound, that makes my name unique, or maybe it's because I'm a much more visual than auditory person.

On the other hand, I have a friend whose given name is Maura, but she recently changed it to Mara. I've only ever interacted with her online, and until the change I'd always thought of her as "MORE-uh", rather than the pronunciation she prefers, which is "MARR-uh". For her, making a spelling change in her name was a minor price to pay to get people to say it the way she wanted. I personally would consider it mildly traumatic!

So what's the essence of your name to you...appearance or sound?

Benny Lava

2008-03-01T00:41:00.000-05:00

I have not laughed this hard in months.

Caveat stultus

2008-02-07T00:24:00.000-05:00

Regular readers of my blog know that one of my many language pet peeves is the misuse of Latin. One example I haven't previously mentioned is attempted variations on "caveat emptor" which show a complete misunderstanding of grammar and word order.

A Google search on "emptor -caveat" yields such gems as

Caviar Emptor
Calorie Emptor
Cannabis Emptor
Investor Emptor

(as well as a zillion different misspellings of "caveat")

For the unenlightened: Caveat is the VERB. Third person singular, present active subjunctive, meaning "let him/her/it beware". Emptor, meaning "buyer", specifies the subject. Thus, if you wish to issue a warning to any other type of individual, it is emptor that should be replaced, not caveat.

Southern-fried grammar and California freeways

2008-01-30T02:47:00.000-05:00

When I composed this post about the grammatical errors that characterize certain accents, I was mostly referring to foreign accents. After spending several days down South, however, I realize that the same holds true of regional accents. To me, the most noticeable feature of an American Southern accent is the replacement of adverbs with their adjective counterparts, e.g. "That works real good" instead of "That works really well."

The Wikipedia entry on Southern American English has a more extensive list. The use of "me" and "him" rather than "myself" and "himself" in examples such as "I bought me a new coat" is another that always sticks out to me.

I checked the other entries on North American dialects to see whether my own English---shaped mostly from living in Kansas and California---has any grammatical idiosyncrasies that I've failed to notice. I didn't find any, although I plead guilty to overuse of "like" and "totally". There is, however, a delightful section on the differences in freeway nomenclature between Northern and Southern Californians. It's one of the first things I teach my friends who move here from Los Angeles, and my biggest gripe about the movie "Sneakers", which is set in San Francisco but whose script was clearly penned by Hollywood natives. "The 101", indeed!

Up too late

2008-01-17T02:30:00.000-05:00

During my days as a physics student, I wrote h-bar so frequently that I often found myself putting horizontal slashes through all my h's, even when composing prose. Now, as I sit here simultaneously debugging some code for work and writing a column for my church's newsletter, I realize I'm inserting "\n", the newline escape sequence in C programming, at the end of my sentences.

I guess this is the written, scientific/technological equivalent of accidentally speaking the wrong language.

Love's confusion

2008-01-06T01:21:00.000-05:00

There are two violin pieces by composer Fritz Kreisler, "Liebesfreud" (Love's Joy) and "Liebesleid" (Love's Sorrow), that are often performed as a pair. I've written before about how non-German speakers tend to confuse ie and ei, sometimes writing "Liebesleid" as "Liebeslied" (Love's Song).

Following the New Year's Eve "Live From Lincoln Center" gala concert in which both pieces were performed, I saw yet more variation in the reviews posted on the websites I frequent. One person flipped the first but not the second pair of vowels, referring to "Leibesleid"...Leib means body. But my favorite has to be that of my friend who typed "Liebesfraud", which I described as something a jilted lover would talk about.

Christmas 2007

2007-12-26T14:53:00.000-05:00

I made out pretty well this year. My ever-thoughtful husband took the hint from my constant sotto voce muttering about the difficulty of the Arabic alphabet, and presented me with the excellent Pocket Guide to Arabic Script as well as a set of vocabulary flashcards.

The best memory of this Christmas, however, has to be the book that my husband received from a certain family member. We didn't understand why this person had bought him a random volume from the Sgt. Frog manga series, until we considered the teaser that had been written on the gift tag: "A book every 'lefty' should have!" Apparently the gift giver thought the book was appropriate for my southpaw husband simply because it read right to left...not understanding that ALL Japanese books read right to left.

No more "is" on Facebook!

2007-12-14T18:27:00.000-05:00

As of yesterday, the much-maligned "is" restriction on Facebook status updates---which I wrote about recently---is gone. Coverage can be found here, as well as many other places.

An X-rated gaffe

2007-12-06T03:50:00.000-05:00

I've made my share of language blunders, but fortunately never said anything quite as embarrassing as Tony Henry did a few weeks ago while singing the Croat anthem. Eighty thousand people...ouch!

Language #8

2007-11-30T04:52:00.000-05:00

I have varying degrees of competence and experience in seven languages, and I've purposely avoided starting any new ones for quite some time as I struggle to maintain and improve the ones I have amidst all my other obligations and hobbies. From time to time I've thought about what the next one might be: French or Italian, which I love and which would be easiest given my history of Latin and Spanish studies? Japanese or Korean, which would be most valuable in my current high-tech career? Russian, which I'm attracted to for its history, literature, and culture? Actually, I've decided (and already begun) language number eight, and it is none of the above.

It's Arabic.

Early this month I carpooled to a concert in Fresno with a very casual friend, someone I met online and have encountered from time to time but with whom I've never had a deep conversation. She is Iranian, a devout Muslim, and over a decade younger than I am. It is not often that one gets an opportunity to make a profound connection with someone so different, and even less often that one takes advantage of that opportunity. I feel immensely privileged that during our five-hour round trip we talked, and talked, and talked, and I came away with a glimmer of true understanding of her values, beliefs, and upbringing. Genuine understanding, not the simplistic picture of Islam and the Middle East that we are fed by politicians and media in an effort to gain popularity by feeding on people's natural fear for the unknown.

Different people have different ways of acquiring knowledge of a culture, different paths to making it accessible. Some are attracted to food, or literature, or art; some do it when they begin dating someone of that culture. For me, the link is language. I could write a book on the secondary effects that my studies of Spanish have had on me, from my appreciation of Latin pop music to my views on immigration. I've mentioned before that the study of foreign languages has opened my mind and broadened my horizons far more than anything else I've done, including travel. Thus, it is through the study of Arabic that I shall seek to fill this huge gap in my understanding of the world.

Some of my friends and acquaintances have already expressed surprise at my decision, convinced that Arabic is a far less "useful" language than, say, French. A few months ago, I would have agreed with them. In fact, Arabic is the fourth to sixth (depending on exact criteria) most commonly spoken native language in the world, far ahead of all the languages I listed above. I believe that my previous notions of what languages qualify as "useful" were heavily influenced by growing up in an educational system that highly overemphasizes Western culture and history, and a economic system that equates importance with wealth. I consider my ignorance of Middle Eastern language, culture, and religion an embarrassment, and I will delay no longer in trying to remedy it.

Good intentions are only that, however, and it's proving to be quite a challenge. Although I consider myself an experienced language learner with a natural gift, for the first time I'm tackling one that is substantially different from English, without the benefit of ethnic heritage and connections (Taiwanese and Mandarin) or previous familiarity with the alphabet (Greek). After a month, I'm still trying to master the abjad---the term for a consonantal alphabet---connecting all the letters (which can take up to four forms!) to their sounds. It's a slow process, but as with all new language acquisition, a deeply rewarding one for me.

My only hope is that I maintain my energy and motivation for this work, for passion and a lofty purpose can often be defeated by a healthy dose of reality; I remember several classmates in my Ancient Greek class who took it with the worthy goal of reading the New Testament in its original language, only to drop out when faced with the devilishly difficult grammar. My friends and fellow language lovers, I'm counting on you to hold me to my word.

FreeRice.com

2007-11-07T01:31:00.000-05:00

This site is one of the best I've ever seen for combining education with entertainment. It's a simple concept, elegantly executed. You're given a series of vocabulary words with multiple-choice definitions, and your level goes up or down depending on which words you answer correctly. There's even a charity aspect to it; for each word you get right, ten grains of rice are donated by the advertisers to the United Nations World Food Program.

The adaptive nature of the game means it's suitable and instructive for people with all levels of English ability; my four-year-old daughter plays at levels 1 (puppy, ship) and 2 (concentrate, employee) while my husband and I compete in the upper 40s (ratiocinative, adumbrate). I have made to 50, the highest level, only once.

I knew I'd be able to guess many definitions based on my knowledge of foreign languages, but I was surprised when I noticed that my Spanish was helping me far more than my Latin: arruga for rugose, nido for nidus, ala for alate. Then I realized it's simply because my Spanish is much better than my Latin; I just didn't know the Latin words for wrinkle, nest, or wing! In fact, they are identical or similar to their Spanish counterparts.

Enjoy! But be warned, the site is addictive!

Language Lover is... blogging about Facebook

2007-10-24T00:39:00.000-04:00

I spend far more time on Facebook than a person of my age and lifestyle can really justify, and one of my favorite five-second diversions is changing my "status" to whatever I feel describes me accurately in the moment. A sign of self-absorption, to be sure, but fun nonetheless.

One challenging feature is that Facebook automatically inserts the word "is" after your name, which creates a limitation that users deal with in various ways. Some of my friends ignore the word entirely, creating statuses like, "Jane is can't wait for the weekend!" which I find mildly annoying. Still others try to change the system from within; there is a group called "Petition to Get Rid of 'is' from Facebook Status Update" to which I do not currently belong, but have thought of joining.

In most cases I see the mandatory inclusion of "is" as an opportunity to develop flexibility in my writing. For example, "Jane can't wait for the weekend!" could easily be recast as "Jane is eagerly anticipating the weekend!" I would, however, like to see the removal of "is" simply to facilitate status updates in foreign languages. With the number of Facebook users in non-English-speaking countries, this seems like a good step toward global user-friendliness. I did have a buddy living in Austria who once wrote "Dan is t ...", which I suppose worked to a degree, but any language other than German and you're out of luck.

Foreign accents and more than you ever wanted to know about verbs

2007-10-09T05:38:00.000-04:00

When someone is perceived to speak English with a foreign accent, there are at least two different elements involved. The first is what the American Heritage Dictionary explains as

A characteristic pronunciation, especially:
1. One determined by the regional or social background ofthe speaker.
2. One determined by the phonetic habits of the speaker'snative language carried over to his or her use of another language.

This is what most accent reduction programs seem to focus on: individual vowel and consonant sounds, syllabic stress, etc. Another element, however, is the set of characteristic grammatical errors made by speakers whose native language is not English. It is this aspect that allows me to detect when something I'm reading has been written by a native Chinese speaker, for instance. Because Chinese has no articles and no inflected forms for plural nouns or verb tenses, native Chinese speakers frequently omit these constructions when speaking or writing English. "Yesterday I went to the store and bought an apple for fifty cents" would become, "Yesterday I go to store and buy apple for fifty cent".

Examining these characteristic errors can also provide insight into the grammar of a particular language. I've never studied Russian, but I've noticed that many Russian speakers make excessive use of the present progressive. My violin teacher, who grew up in Moscow, says things like, "When I am practicing this passage, I am thinking about relaxing this finger" whereas a native English speaker would use the simple present, i.e. "When I practice this passage, I think about relaxing this finger". I finally began to wonder whether there's something about the Russian language that emphasizes the progressive aspect of verbs, and sure enough, there is.

In elementary school grammar we usually learn only about a verb's tense, which is simply where the action occurs in time, i.e. past, present, or future. But verbs have another quality called aspect, which describes the state of completion of the action. It can be incomplete (imperfect), as in "I was going to the store, or complete (perfect), as in "I went to the store". This is the difference between the Spanish imperfect ("iba a la tienda") and preterite ("fui a la tienda"), or the imperfect and aorist in Ancient Greek. Based on the superficial knowledge of Russian verbs I've managed to gain by perusing sites like this one and this one, in Russian the aspect of a verb is more important than its tense, and most verbs come in imperfective-perfective pairs. I'm guessing that when Russian speakers learn English, they're somehow taught that the equivalent for their imperfective verb is formed by the English present progressive (to be + present participle), whereas the simple present tense is much more idiomatic and often conveys that progressive aspect implicitly.

By the way, the term "perfect" when used to describe a verb has nothing to do with the connotation of "flawless", as I wondered when I first encountered the term many years ago. They do have related etymology, however, from the Latin "perficio" meaning "to complete". The word seems to have evolved to its more common meaning in that something completed, or brought to full development, is presumed to be of high quality.

To my husband, once again

2007-10-04T03:16:00.000-04:00

Felices ter et amplius
quos irrupta tenet copula nec malis
divulsus querimoniis
suprema citius solvet amor die.
- Horace, Odes 1.13

Thrice happy and more are they
who are held by an unbroken bond
and whom love, untorn by bitter complaints,
shall not separate before their final day.

Happy Anniversary, and thank you for ten wonderful years!

Bon Appetité?

2007-10-01T18:49:00.000-04:00

The break room at my company has recently been decorated with some new art, including this print.

What is "Bon Appetité"? I asked our human resources manager, who speaks French and actually ordered the art, and she had no answers other than, "Maybe it's Italian?" (to which I responded that the Italian word is buon) followed by an unsatisfying, "Huh, maybe it's just wrong."

I tried Googling the phrase and came up with nothing other than the link to the print itself and a few sites where it looks like a typographical error. Is it legitimate French? Or some other language? Or is it, in fact, "just wrong"? It seems like an odd mistake to make, with the accent and all.

The Taxonomy Song

2007-09-12T23:52:00.000-04:00

My husband has come up with a song for Kyla, our 2-year-old daughter; the subject is, of all things, taxonomy. Sung to the tune of "The Flintstones" theme, it goes:

Kyla, has a phyla
And a family and an order too.
She's a lass who's got class
And a genus just like me and you.

The only problem is that "phyla" is a plural noun, and as such, cannot grammatically be preceded with "a". I've struggled with that first line and simply cannot come up with a replacement that scans well. There is some precedent for treating Latin plurals as singular nouns in English: data, the plural of the second-declension neuter noun datum, is probably the most well-known example. But "phyla", to the best of my knowledge, is not one of them, and I'm stuck contemplating this one flaw to a song that I find otherwise perfect. Anyone got a solution?

A new musical term?

2007-08-24T19:41:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I returned home from work and was greeted at the door by my two young daughters, each clutching a piece of sheet music. The older one informed me, "Mommy, we're singing aqua-pella!"

Perhaps if they were doing it in the bathtub...

The Girl's Like Spaghetti

2007-08-04T00:54:00.000-04:00

I am a proud member of the Spelling and Grammar Police, and I find it especially unforgivable when errors are made in materials targeted for children. So last night at Borders, when my daughter handed me a book with the above title, my first reaction was indignance followed by dismay that such a blatant error could make it through all the editors to the title of a hardcover publication.

Upon further examination, however, I discovered to my delight that the book was written by none other than Lynne Truss, author of the best-selling Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. In fact, its full title is The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can't Manage without Apostrophes! and the cover illustration features a girl with noodle-like hair. The book is filled with wonderful drawing illustrating the difference between the phrases "The boys bat"/"The boy's bat"/"The boys' bat" and sentences like "Those smelly ones are my brother's"/"Those smelly ones are my brothers".

I didn't buy the book, because my girls are still too young to read, but it's a neat concept and probably valuable reading for the many adults out there who still haven't mastered the correct usage of "its" and "it's".

Harry Potter in translation

2007-08-01T00:39:00.000-04:00

(MINOR SPOILER ALERT)
Having just finished the final book of the Harry Potter series, I find myself once again pondering the difficulty of translating works so rich with puns and British culture to languages highly unrelated to the original. I've read a few of the early books in their Spanish (distinctly Castilian) translations, and was impressed with how deftly the anagram of Tom Marvolo Riddle's name was handled, as I described in this earlier post.

For those interested in exploring the particular challenges of the Harry Potter books---the task made yet more daunting by their notoriety---I recommend this Wikipedia article, which has a number of excellent references at the bottom. As someone who was also confused by the meaning of "Deathly Hallows" before I actually read the book, I was fascinated that the Swedish publisher asked for, and received from Rowling, an alternate title that removed the ambiguity of "hallows": Harry Potter and the Relics of Death.

I love how so many of the spell names in the wizarding world derive from Latin, and am particularly interested to know how they are handled in translations to languages that don't use the Roman alphabet; unfortunately, I don't read any of those languages myself, so I welcome comments from any readers who do. Are they simply rendered phonetically, or done in a clever way that retains the semantic connection to an linguistic ancestor? And I'd love to get my hands on the Latin version itself, as I wonder if it's confusing to have spells in the same language as dialogue and narration.

And at the risk of inviting another flame war, I find it worth noting that there is no official translation into Esperanto, which to me makes a statement about the success and future of this language.

Spelunk!

2007-07-16T02:14:00.001-04:00

I went caving with some friends this past weekend, and as we pondered a sign entitled "Speleology", one of them commented, "Don't you find it hard to believe that a word like 'spelunk' actually comes from, like, a Latin root?"

I did, so much so that I had to look it up (though the presence of the -ology suffix was a pretty good indication):

ETYMOLOGY:From obsolete spelunk, cave, from Middle English, from Old French spelunque, from Latin splunca, from Greek splunx.

But I also like the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip with the following dialogue:
Calvin: Want to go spelunking with me?
Hobbes: Spelunking? There aren't any caves around here!
Calvin: You don't need a cave. All you need is a rock. Spelunk!

The most hated Internet words

2007-06-22T00:45:00.000-04:00

I found this article rather amusing, though I wonder exactly why those particular words were deemed so irritating since they don't bother me personally. Is it their sound, their ubiquity, or the fact that several of them are amalgams of other words? (Note that it was a British poll; I somehow think of Brits as more protective of the English language's "purity".) The words that I find most annoying are those that I consider inelegant and/or overused, such as "proactive" and "concertize". As for Internet-created vocabulary, by far the most irritating word in my book---if it can even be considered a word---is "lol", when it's not treated as the interjection and acronym that it is. A simple "LOL!" in response to a joke is fine, but "...and then I walked into a wall lol!" drives me crazy. How do you even say that out loud?

Mad Libs as grammar tutor

2007-06-21T00:40:00.000-04:00

I keep a book of Mad Libs in our minivan to entertain my young daughters on car rides, and it's proven to be a somewhat useful grammar tool. I can now prompt my four-year-old for various parts of speech, and she knows that a noun is a "thing", a verb is "something you do", and an adjective "describes something". It's a shame that the resultant stories don't work perfectly, often because their creators aren't specific enough in asking for certain parts of speech. The most frequent example is when the blank calls only for a "verb", not a "transitive verb" or "intransitive verb"; most verbs are only one or the other. I'm guessing, unfortunately, that such a specification would be futile, given the general population's ignorance of grammatical terms.

My daughter's creativity makes for much more interesting choices than I'd make myself. The last time she was prompted for a noun, she gave me "A colorful butterfly with really big wings!" I guess I won't harp on the fact that that's actually a modified noun with a prepositional phrase.

Think before you spell

2007-06-19T01:16:00.001-04:00

I didn't follow (or blog about) the Scripps National Spelling Bee this year as I did in 2006, but I was prompted to think about it when I found out that a friend's daughter had been eliminated in one of the early rounds. I was still happy for her, as I never made it to the nationals myself. The farthest I ever got was the state bee of Kansas back in 1988, when I stumbled on the word "jaundiced", spelling it "jaundist".

There are many instances in which I think people would spell better if they actually understood what they were spelling. I had never heard the word "jaundiced" before, and when I asked for a sentence I was given the context, "He held a jaundiced view of...", using the meaning of "prejudiced". I spelled it incorrectly because I associated the word with other world views like "socialist" and "capitalist", and to this day I'm satisfied that I went through that reasoning process even though it ultimately failed me. If I'd been given instead the sentence, "The baby's face was jaundiced", perhaps I'd have guessed the correct spelling.

I'm still puzzled by the number of people who misspell "deodorant" as "deoderant", though they surely can spell the word "odor". Do they not realize that the words are related? One can tell a lot about how a person is thinking (or not) about the meaning of an expression when he substitutes a nonsensical homonym; I recall a tae kwon do classmate asking if anyone was planning to participate in the "Beta Breakers" race. It's actually "Bay to Breakers", a course that begins at the edge of the San Francisco Bay!

I noted in one of my very first blog entries that the letters V and B are pronounced identically in Spanish. A common Spanish expression is "A ver", frequently written incorrectly as the infinitive verb "Haber". But the expression means "Let's see", which should serve as an easy reminder for the word "ver", which means "to see". Again, I don't see how anyone who is aware of what he's writing can make this mistake.

Ice cream, the panacea

2007-05-22T20:39:00.000-04:00

I love my work as a volunteer interpreter at the Rotacare Free Clinic, but I find it difficult to fit it in with all my other activities. I try to schedule myself twice a month, because any less than that and I start losing my language skills in between sessions. But May was particularly busy and last night was the first time I'd managed to go in four weeks. Despite this, I was surprised at how easily the Spanish was coming out of my mouth...until I suggested to a patient that she put ice cream (helado) on her chest instead of ice (hielo) to ease her pain.

Well, I have long been of the opinion that sufficient ice cream can cure anything. That, plus the patient's laughter---the best medicine---leads me to believe that maybe I didn't screw up so badly after all.