The value of carrots

In recent weeks my students have been learning about the concept of linguistic value (from Ferdinand de Saussure). The differences in value between terms in different languages can have very humorous effects, as I have found on numerous occasions.

I’m currently in the Netherlands on a family visit. Last night we had dinner with my husband’s old school friends, and one of them was telling me (in English) about some dental treatment he had had recently, including some ‘carrot treatment’.

Carrot treatment?

Image from here.

The English word ‘carrot’ is translated by the Dutch word ‘wortel'. But ‘wortel' also means ‘root’ more generally. I found that out a while ago when I was reading a news report or something that mentioned trees being ‘ontworteld’ in a storm. Recognising ‘wortel’ from ‘carrot’ (the first of its meanings that I learnt), I thought ‘upcarroted’? But my husband explained that ‘wortel’ means both ‘root’ generally and ‘carrot’ specifically. The trees were actually ‘uprooted’, then.

So it turned out my husband’s friend had had root canal therapy. In Dutch, as in English, the word for ‘root’ also refers to the roots of teeth, not just plants. It is also used in mathematics (square root, etc) and to refer to the background of something ('my roots are in Scotland'), as in English .

I drew a diagram representing the difference in ‘value’ between the terms in the two languages.

The large rectangle represents semantic space. In Dutch, ‘wortel’ takes up the same semantic space that in English is occupied by two terms, ‘root’ and ‘carrot’. Thus the term ‘wortel’ doesn’t have the same value in Dutch as either ‘root’ or ‘carrot’ in English, although we can say they occupy some of the same semantic space.

Carving up the world

We have now been in Italy for just over a month, having moved here for my husband to take up a research position for one year. I have slowly been picking up some Italian (hoping to pick up more, more quickly!) as I go to the local market most days and interact with the market stall holders. The market stall holders know me now and try to help me learn new words. The other day it was interesting to learn from the butcher that the word for 'thick' in Italian is the same as the word for 'tall' (alta/o). I think it's also the word for 'deep’.

It's interesting because the concepts of height and thickness are differentiated in English but not in Italian. That aspect of our experience of space is divided up differently in the two languages. This is a concept I was trying to teach my students recently - the concept of linguistic relativity and how different languages make sense of experience in different ways.

In English we want to make a distinction between the concept of height (how far something stands vertically above the ground, as with a person or a building), thickness (similar to tall-ness but it doesn't have to be vertical; perhaps better described as how far between the two opposing edges of something, as with a sponge or a coat), and depth (how far something extends down towards its lowest point, as with the ocean or a baking tin). You can see how they are all quite similar concepts. But there is a subtlety that we can discern if we think about why we use three different words to refer to them rather than one.

So now I know to ask for 'taller/deeper/thicker' pork chops rather than 'bigger' ones.

A picture's worth a thousand words?

Recently I saw the film 'The Book Thief', based on the book by Australian author Markus Zusak. Perhaps you saw it too. I enjoyed it despite the grim moments, and especially loved the wonderful characters and warm, quirky humour. But I had read the book, and there was something missing - as there often is when the book becomes a film.

When I read the book, I was struck by the many fascinating turns of phrase, the way words seemed to have been carefully chosen to stop you in your tracks as you were reading so that you would pay attention to the description and let it sit with you.

Here's an extract from the first chapter:

Of course, an introduction.

            A beginning.

Where are my manners?

I could introduce myself properly, but it’s not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away.

At that moment, you will be lying there (I rarely find people standing up). You will be caked in your own body. There might be a discovery; a scream will dribble down the air. The only sound I’ll hear after that will be my own breathing, and the sound of the smell, of my footsteps. (p.4)

The sections in bold are what I'm talking about - words put together (the technical terms is 'collocations') that are quite unusual, often because the verb typically calls for a particular kind of noun to be the 'do-er' or the 'done-to', but the noun chosen is of a different kind that would not normally be considered a good fit. It's not enough just to put a noun with a verb - under normal circumstances, you have to choose the right kind of noun with particular semantic properties in order for it to work well with the verb. But in literature, the writer can exploit and subvert these conventions in order to make very particular or vivid meanings.

'A color [excuse the American spelling] will be perched on my shoulder.' 'To perch' is a particular kind of verb that generally calls for a very tangible thing to do the perching - for example, a bird is the thing you would usually expect to find perched on someone's shoulder. Sometimes a building is said to be perched on a cliff top or other precarious position. But a 'colour' - that is certainly not a tangible thing. Colour is an abstract quality. So we can differentiate between two categories of nouns - concrete and abstract. Some verbs need a concrete noun, whereas others can take either abstract or concrete.

I'm still not sure what it means for the narrator (spoiler alert: the narrator is 'Death') to say that a colour will be perched on his shoulder. Perhaps Zusak means for us to be confused there - after all, we can't yet know what it will be like when we die. Or perhaps he's trying to make 'colour' more tangible here by its association with the verb 'to perch'.

A similar thing is happening with 'a scream will dribble down the air'. With the verb 'to dribble', we expect the thing that dribbles to be concrete, and more specifically, something liquidy. You can see now how specific the requirements of the verb can be in terms of what kinds of nouns are 'allowed' to hang around with it. But 'a scream'? - it's neither liquid nor concrete.

Likewise, the phrase 'down the air' subverts our expectations. We expect that if something dribbles, it will dribble down a tangible surface, such as a wall or window. But 'the air' is not a surface and so the whole clause jars you as you read. As I ponder it, I get a very vivid image of the way the sound of the scream might make an initial impact and then gradually die away, leaving some kind of mental or emotional trace, as liquid dribbling down a surface leaves a trace.

I expect it would be very difficult, no matter how good the screenplay, to capture in film the meanings made by these unusual collocations. There are lots of these examples in the book where abstract things are collocated with verbs that usually require concrete things, and the thing about abstract things is that they are abstract. That is, they are harder to convey in the visual medium of film, without using the original wording somehow in spoken or written language as part of the film. A picture may be worth a thousand words; but where the words precede the picture, there may be no picture worthy of the words.  

References

Zusak, M. (2008) The Book Thief. Sydney: Picador/Pan Macmillan.

What's with 'God bless you'?

The other day my husband asked me why people say 'God bless you'. Isn't 'bless' the form you would use for first person ('I bless you') or second person ('you bless me') only? Why isn't it 'God blesses you'? I explained it to him and he suggested I write a blog post about it, in case others wondered the same thing.

It turns out many others have wondered the same thing, as you can see on this Wiki Answers post, this one on English Forums, or this one on English Language and Usage Stack Exchange.

Image from 'Fields of Cake' blog

'(May) God bless you' is a bit like (or belongs to the same paradigm as)

God save the Queen (not saves)

Long live the king (not lives)

Heaven help us (not helps)

God be praised (not is praised)

So be it (not is)

Truth be told (not is told)

If I were you (not was or am)

The fancy technical name for this kind of construction is 'subjunctive mood'. It's a particular form of the verb, although in English it nearly always looks exactly like the 'normal' indicative form. That's why we don't really recognise it when we see it and why it looks or sounds a bit weird if you think about it.

It's different in meaning from the indicative because it expresses a degree of doubt or wishfulness, or something of a hypothetical nature.

Here are the paradigms for indicative and subjunctive, to compare the differences:

Indicative:

I save

you save

he saves

We save

you(se) save

they save

Note that the only one that is different is 'he saves' (third person singular form)

Subjunctive:

I save

You save

He save

We save

You(se) save

They save

Now the verb form is the same across the paradigm, and it's only the third person singular form that is different from the indicative. You can of course read the Wikipedia explanation of subjunctive mood for more information on this. But that's the general gist of it.

Reflections of a language nerd

It's been a while since I formally learnt another language. In fact it was 11 years ago that I studied Latin in my third year of university. Opto, optas, optat, optamus, optatis, optant, and all that.

Now I'm studying Greek - the Greek used in the New Testament - as part of a theological degree. I wasn't sure how I'd go learning Greek, after all I'm 10 years older than I was last time I had to study language and do tests and exams. I've learnt bits of other languages since then (Dutch, Swahili, Luganda) but only piecemeal and through immersion, which is a different kind of learning.

So I've been pleasantly surprised that it's all coming back to me - learning paradigms and vocabulary, and translating sentences that don't always seem to make much sense. Thankfully, many of the grammatical concepts I learnt in Latin (such as noun declensions, noun cases and verb paradigms) carry over into Greek, so I didn't have to start cold as some of my classmates did. Of course, being a linguist doesn't hurt either! Now that we are learning more vocab and more structures, the sentences we have to translate start to be more meaningful and some are even recognisable as particular verses from the Bible.

My understanding of Greek, which is so far limited but growing, is also opening up to me new perspectives on translation of the Bible. I'm very thankful for the hundreds, if not thousands, of years of scholarship on biblical Greek and the careful translation work that has been done over past centuries to give us very good and meaningful translations of the Bible in English as well as many other languages.

The translations we have in English are really very transparent, with any uncertainties or ambiguities footnoted in most versions. So there need be no concern about the reliability of the translation. It is not to be taken for granted that we have the word of God, the Author of Life itself, in a form ordinary people can read and understand for themselves. This is especially so when there are still hundreds of languages around the world that have no translation of the Bible yet. Maybe something I can help with in the future...

Is there such thing as Ugandan English? #3: Semantics

Over the last two weeks I've been blogging some observations about the English spoken in Uganda, organised according to linguistic strata: first phonology, then lexicogrammar. This week I'm up to semantics - the systems of meaning that operate for speakers of a given language.

The main semantic difference I've noticed is really quite closely linked with wording and grammar (lexicogrammar), as it's to do with the way Ugandans perform the speech function of 'command'. For the non-linguists, I first need to briefly explain some things about this concept of 'speech functions' and how they are expressed in wording and grammar. There are basically four speech functions: statement (giving information), question (demanding information), offer (giving goods & services), and command (demanding goods & services). These are meanings which are expressed grammatically in particular ways. The prototypical matches are as follows:

• statement is typically expressed through declarative mood (Subject comes before Finite verb), e.g. The waitress brought some water for washing hands.
• question is typically expressed through interrogative mood (inversion of Subject and Finite verb), e.g. Did the waitress bring some water for washing hands?
• [offer does not have a particular match from among the three mood types]
• command is typically expressed through imperative mood (imperative form of verb, typically with no Subject or Finite), e.g. 'Bring some water for washing hands!'

But these prototypical match-ups do not always have to be used, and a different mood type can be chosen to express a speech function depending on the politeness required or other contextual factors. In Australian English, for example, it's very common to use declarative or interrogative mood to express a command, e.g. 'I need some water to wash my hands' or 'Could you please bring some water for washing hands?'. If you went into a restaurant in Sydney and said 'Bring me a menu!' (because you probably wouldn't ask for water to wash your hands), the staff member would probably take you for a very rude person and not treat you very well.

In Australian English imperative mood tends to be used to express commands in relationships of legitimate authority (e.g. owners to pets, parents to children, teacher to student, government official to citizen especially in written communication) or intimacy (family member or close friend). In the Australian context, the service relationship between a restaurant patron and a staff member is not one of 'legitimate authority'. In another context the restaurant patron might find him/herself serving the restaurant staff member.

It seems that in Ugandan English, imperative mood is used much more widely for expressing commands, without necessarily carrying the implication that the speaker is either in legitimate authority over, or in an intimate relationship with, the addressee. So you could say 'Bring a menu' or 'Bring some water for washing hands' or 'Pack these leftovers for me' or 'Bring the bill' in a restaurant and it would not be considered out of place.

On a lighter semantic note, I've enjoyed the fact that, in linguistics classes I've been to here, mangoes figure very prominently in examples constructed to illustrate a point, e.g. 'The boy bought a mango'. The mango is culturally much more salient here than in Australia - and cheaper too!

Is there such thing as Ugandan English? #2: Lexicogrammar

Last week I wrote about some of the phonological features of Ugandan English as I have observed it over the past 6 weeks or so. This week I've put together some of the lexicogrammatical features that differ from other varieties of English (particularly Australian English, of which I'm a native speaker).

What appears to be a different meaning of the expression 'relieve yourself'...

Lexicogrammatical features include words, morphemes (parts of words that have meaning of their own), and grammar. Most of what I have picked up on are either words that are used in a different sense from their use in Australian English or expressions that are not generally used in Australian English (e.g. 'we pray from such and such a church'). Some of these could probably be dealt with at the level of semantics but I thought it would be more straightforward to treat them as lexical (word) differences.

• 'airtime' - phone credit, which you can buy in various denominations from numerous small stands around the streets, or from machines in supermarkets, or even from people wandering around selling it through taxi-bus windows in the taxi park!
• 'balance' - meaning 'change', e.g. when buying something at a restaurant or market stall and you don't have the exact money, the staff member will say something like 'I'll get you balance'.
• 'benching' [see earlier post]
• 'bouncing' - opposite of 'benching', in which you go to visit someone and they are not home so you have to leave immediately.
• 'born-agains' [see earlier post]
• 'bury' - to attend the funeral of someone, e.g. 'I'm going back to the village to bury my father'. It doesn't mean they will literally carry out the burial, but will attend the burial/funeral ceremony.
• 'by the way' - doesn't seem to be used in the same way as in AusE, but possibly closer to 'in fact' or 'actually'. I don't have a clear example I can remember, but something like the following. Person A: I learnt yesterday that in Luganda you say 'osiibyo tyeno nyabo/sebo' to mean 'hello'. Person B: By the way, we say 'osiibyo tyeno nyabo/sebo' but if it's in the morning, like before 12 noon, you say 'wasuzo tyeno nyabo/sebo' and then after noon you can say 'osiibyo tyeno nyabo/sebo'. In AusE you usually use 'by the way' to talk about something not related to what was previously said.
• 'dear' [see earlier post]
• 'done' [see earlier post]
• 'eh' - high-pitched vocal noise expressing surprise or indignance, especially when recounting some situation that brought this response about. It can also be used with a lower pitch as a checking move when explaining something to someone, e.g. when applying for a bank account, 'You fill in this one, eh?, and then he fills in, eh?' (a bit like some uses of 'ok', 'right', 'yeah' in Australian English)
• etc [see earlier post]
• 'for me' - common at the beginning of an utterance in which someone will either express their opinion or share something about what they have done or decided
• 'ka' is a diminutive prefix in Luganda (& other Bantu lx?) and has been imported into Ugandan English with the same function, e.g. ka-bag (small bag), ka-man (small/insignificant man). Instance in conversation: (a local commenting on a picture of a kangaroo and the fact that it has a pouch) 'Isn't God wonderful, how he made the kangaroo with small legs at the top and bigger legs at the bottom and a little ka-bag here for the baby'. I recently heard it in very high frequency when we went out for a walk and dinner with some friends. For example, our friend was on the phone giving directions to another friend for how to find us: 'We're in the ka-place as you come in the drive way, near the Checkers Supermarket'.
• 'pick' [see earlier post]
• 'picking up' is used, but seems to be only used to mean 'increasing' e.g. 'community radio is picking up in East Africa'
• 'pray from…' [see earlier post]. One local I spoke to about this suggested that it's because in the local languages they don't have an equivalent for 'we go to [such and such a place habitually]'
• rolex - cooked egg rolled up in a chapati (also an item and name that originated at Makerere, apparently)
• 'sorry' [see earlier post] - also has different intonation from Australian English - a long fall from high tone, a bit like when someone says 'sorry' and they don't want to say it but they know they have to (reluctant apology).
• 'thank you too' [see earlier post]. Lately I have realised that it probably comes as a translation of the Luganda 'kale' which is used in response to the word for thank you, 'webalenyo', as well as many other greetings and fixed expressions, and seems to mean something like 'you too' or 'likewise'.
• 'what' [see earlier post]. I have also noticed it more recently in everyday conversation; it's very pervasive, and seems to be used also to mean 'whatever', 'blah blah blah', 'this and that', and 'and so on'. For example, you might hear something like this: "I had to go to the market and then the pharmacy and what and what'.
• 'where do you stay/sleep?' [see earlier post]
• 'You are welcome' [see earlier post]
• 'you people' meaning 'you plural', e.g. when arranging to open a bank account, the bank staff member said something like 'you people wanted to be able to convert into US dollars…'. And when some kids were trying to sell us stuff when we were in a parked car waiting for our friend to come and drive, she came back and said 'do you people want to buy something?' Definitely more acceptable than the hotly contested 'youse' in some varieties of Australian English!

Is there such thing as Ugandan English?

Recently I spoke to a postgrad student here who is interested in the question of whether the English spoken in Uganda should be called 'Ugandan English' or not. Is it a dialect of English? My observation so far, after 6 weeks in Kampala, is that the English spoken here has some systematic differences from other Englishes at pretty much every linguistic level - phonology, wording and grammar, and semantics. So I'd say it's a specific dialect (although I'd be interested to see how it differs from the English spoken in neighbouring Kenya and Tanzania). I have been posting some of my observations of local expressions over the past few weeks (here and here) and thought I'd start to organise them a bit more. I'll start with phonology this time (using as much common-sense language as possible, and no phonetic symbols, for the benefit of non-linguists reading this).

Vowels: The phonological (sound) systems of the Bantu languages spoken in Uganda have only 5 vowels, and a couple of diphthongs, which means that the 20+ vowels in English are usually reduced to these five when speaking English. Vowels such as the 'a' in 'hat' and the 'ur' in 'hurt' do not occur in Luganda (for example) and so they are both approximated to the vowel 'a' as in 'hut'. So the words 'hat', 'hut', 'hurt' and 'heart' all sound much the same (as 'hut'), although sometimes there is a longer vowel in 'heart' and 'hurt' than 'hat' and 'hut'. Likewise the vowels in 'sin' and 'seen' are pronounced the same, as in 'sin'. Also, the 'schwa' vowel that is used in unstressed syllables in English (like the 'a' in 'again' or the 'e' in 'written') is not used, so all vowels are given their full value (again as 'egen', written as 'writ-ehn'). This also affects the rhythm of speech, as there are not as many unstressed syllables.

Consonants: I have only noticed a couple of things so far. One is the 'k' sound, when in combination with 'i' or 'y' sounds, is pronounced as 'ch', e.g. 'particular' is often pronounced as 'particular' (rather than 'partikyular'). I think this is because in some of the local languages, e.g. Luganda and Runyakitara, 'k' is always pronounced 'ch' before 'i' or 'y'. The name 'Runyakitara', for example, is pronounced 'Runyachitara'. It seems that not all varieties of the languages do this, as I've also heard 'Runyakitara'. Another is the sounds 'l' and 'r'. I haven't quite worked out the status of these sounds in the local languages, but I think it's a bit like in Japanese, where the two sounds are not recognised as different sounds but the same 'sound unit' (phoneme) that is pronounced a bit differently depending on the other sounds around it. As with many other world languages, Luganda and other Bantu languages do not have the 'th' sounds as in English 'thin' and 'this', so I think they are usually replaced with 's' for the sound in 'thin' and 'd' for the sound in 'this'.

Intonation: I'm no expert on intonation so it's hard to describe the difference, but I know it's different!

Rhythm: As mentioned above, because the 'schwa' vowel is not used, the rhythm of English spoken here is a bit different. It's not quite the even syllabic rhythm of French (as heard in this cute video), but it's also not quite the 'dum-di-dum' rhythm of British, American (as heard in this amusing video), or Australian (etc) English.

Of thunderstorms and instantiation

The wet season has arrived in Kampala, and we can expect to have a thunderstorm at least once during most days. The other morning there was an almighty one that woke us up around 6.30am and, as you do when half asleep, we started talking about meteorology and climatic expectations in the different places where we have lived.

Image from typicalugandan.tumblr.com

When thunderstorms happen daily and the rain lasts maybe half an hour and then the weather is clear again for most of the day, thunderstorms are not very newsworthy. You hardly hear anyone talking about 'the thunderstorm early this morning' because that's no different from the day before when there was one in the afternoon, and the day before that, and the day before that... When they occur only every so often, as in Sydney, it's much more noteworthy and may even make the news, and much of the conversation of casual encounters refers to the event - 'did you hear the thunderstorm this morning?', 'well, the rain was so heavy at our place that our guttering was overflowing!', etc.

It reminded me of Halliday's illustration of the difference between a language system and an instance (the 'cline of instantiation'), using the analogy of climate and weather (Halliday 1992: see also Halliday & Matthiessen 2004:26-27). Describing language from an instance perspective is like describing the day's weather: well, it was clear in the morning, then it clouded over and there was a thunderstorm and it rained for about half an hour, and then it cleared up again. This would be a fair description of the weather in Kampala on most of the days this past week. It's a specific description of a particular instance that you experience.

Describing language from a system perspective, on the other hand, is like describing the climate of a geographical area: it's a view of what the tendencies are over a much longer period, when you take each instance into account. For Kampala, there is not a great deal of difference in practice between what you experience on a given day, and what the probabilities are across a given year. The average maximum throughout the year is between 24 and 27 degrees C, with reasonably high humidity, and high annual rainfall (mainly concentrated in March, April and May, and then October and November). This climatic 'system' can also be described even more generally as a 'tropical wet and dry climate'.
The relationship between the instance and the system gives an instance its 'value' for those observing it. Hence, the 'value' of a storm in Kampala is different from the value of a storm in Sydney, and therefore the 'newsworthiness' of a thunderstorm is different for people in each place.

It's not as if thunderstorms here have no impact on everyday life, though. The main 'life impact' is that rain causes even greater havoc on the roads, worsens potholes, and makes it very unadvisable to try walking along any roads or going by boda-boda. So class might be cancelled if the teacher can't get to uni, all because of a systemically predictable thunderstorm!

Halliday, M. A. K. (1992). The notion of context in language education. In Le, T. & McCausland, M. (eds), Interaction and development: Proceedings of the international conference, Vietnam, 30 March - 1 April 1992. University of Tasmania: Language Education.
Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.

The origins of language (1)

Oops! Another unintended hiatus! Now that I have changed to Monday as my thinking/blogging day it is under peril of long weekends and other distractions. For the last two weeks I’ve been playing tour guide to my parents-in-law-to-be who were visiting from The Netherlands. The weather was less than spectacular but thankfully they still had a wonderful time seeing the mountains, the coast, some native birds and plants (including lots of flowers, which are all out at this time of year), and most of all being part of engagement celebrations.

In other news I’ve been doing some reading about the development of language. A few years ago some colleagues in linguistics put together a very thought-provoking book about the development of language (in both humans generally and in individuals) from a functional perspective (i.e. a perspective in which language is used to make meanings in particular functions). So far I’ve read the first two chapters – an introduction by the editors, Annabelle Lukin (one of my PhD supervisors) and Geoff Williams, and a chapter by Michael Halliday, who is considered the father (grandfather?) of functional linguistics.

On the first page, the editors put forward the claim that “language has evolved under the pressure to ‘mean’” (Lukin & Williams, 2004:1). I’d like to explore this idea of ‘pressure’ a little. ‘Pressure’ in other contexts is used to refer to a demanding situation or burdensome condition that means the person or phenomenon in that situation or condition must change or act in a particular way or under particular constraints. We can usually recognise where the pressure comes from – our boss, a client, our parents, a heavy backpack, too much bodyweight, water building up behind a blockage in the plumbing, etc.

In this case, the use of the noun ‘pressure’ obscures the fact that something must cause or create the pressure, and also doesn’t make clear what the pressure is actually exerted on (humans? Or language? Or the process of development?). According to the authors, the nature of the pressure seems to be that it requires language/humans to make meaning, but the origin of the pressure is not identified. Who or what puts this pressure on the development of humans/language? Why must humans ‘mean’? To be able to answer these questions without discomfort, one must hold the belief that humans (at the very least) are here by design, not by accident, and that there is a purpose to our existence. From what I have learned by talking and listening to colleagues and reading around, these beliefs are not widely held among linguists.

Being a follower of Jesus and a believer in a Creator God, Yahweh, allows me to answer the questions about where the pressure ‘to mean’ comes from, and why it is necessary for humans to mean. As I wrote a few months ago in this blog, I think humans’ capacity for, and use of, language reflects God’s character as a creative, communicative, personal God. The pressure ‘to mean’ comes from God, who made us in his image and designed us for relationship with himself and with other humans. The reason humans need language, need to be ‘meaners’, is for relationships, and in particular the relationship with God who communicates with us through meaning. As the apostle Paul says to the Romans, ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved' (Romans 10:13). Reconciliation with God requires repentance and faith. But repentance requires a conscience (the recognition of having done wrong), and ‘faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ’ (Romans 10:17). In order to be reconciled to God we must be able to hear and understand his Word, and then respond to it by turning away from sin and seeking forgiveness which is granted because of Jesus.

For me, this also explains why animals are not ‘meaners’ with language in the same way as humans. Sure, animals can make some meanings, and have even been shown to be able to communicate with humans using human language (e.g. the bonobo apes at the GreatApe Trust of Iowa; see Susan Savage-Rumbaugh’s TED presentation). But they were not created in God’s image, and they do not need to be saved the way humans do because animals do not (as far as we know) have a moral conscience. We learn from God’s word in the book of Hebrews (2:17) that it was because humans needed reconciliation with God that he sent His Son as a human being, Jesus, to die on a cross and be raised again from the dead. There wasn’t also another sacrifice, fully God and fully bonobo (or bull, or beetle) that had to be offered up at the same time to reconcile all the animals to God. It is only humans, who have a moral conscience, and who have the ability to mean for relationship with others and with God, who need to be reconciled to God.

References:

Williams, G. & Lukin, A. (Eds). (2004). The Development of Language: Functional Perspectives on Species and Individuals. London & New York: Continuum.

How does this sound?

Tomorrow I’m giving a guest lecture as part of a subject I’m teaching in a Masters of Interpreting and Translation program. Normally I just teach tutorials but this week I get to do part of a lecture. I’ll be teaching a bit of phonetics and phonology in the hope that it will give the students a tool for improving their pronunciation in their B language. For most of the students, English is their B language, but there is a small handful of native English speakers whose B language is Spanish or Japanese. The idea of the subject as a whole is for students to learn how to keep developing their proficiency in both working languages, beyond the period they spend studying.

 (image from http://introling.ynada.com/category/phonetics-phonology)

I like the following quote from Daniel Jones, who was a British Phonetician who became Professor of phonetics at the Sorbonne University in Paris. He is thought to be the person upon whom George Bernard Shaw based the character of Professor Henry Higgins in his play ‘Pygmalion’ (see also My Fair Lady). Obviously we want our students to master grammar and vocabulary as well, as most of them are looking to be professional translators or interpreters, but since pronunciation can be such a barrier, not just to understanding but to interpersonal relations, I think equipping them with some phonetic training is important too.

“I gradually came to see that Phonetics had an important bearing on human relations – that when people of different nations pronounce each other’s languages really well (even if grammar and vocabulary are not perfect), it has an astonishing effect of bringing them together, it puts people on terms of equality, a good understanding between them immediately springs up.”

Daniel Jones (1881-1967, phonetician)

I quite like teaching phonetics. It’s not my main area of expertise in that it wasn’t the field of my doctoral research, but I remember how much I enjoyed as a student learning how to classify sounds and produce strange sounds and gaining a more technical knowledge of the sounds of speech and how they are used (or not used) in different languages. I have a reasonably good ear for differentiating sounds so I enjoyed being able to put that to use.

One reason I like teaching phonetics is that it requires you to get rid of your inhibitions and be willing to be laughed at. My past phonetics lecturers have involved me singing and making all kinds of strange sounds in order to illustrate a point, e.g. to illustrate the point that vowels are sonorant (i.e. singable), I demonstrate that you can’t sing ‘Happy Birthday’ (apart from the rhythm) on the consonant [k]. I also love it when the students can’t help themselves and start trying out the sounds as you explain them. You get some very interesting facial expressions and sounds coming from the lecture theatre – somehow the students seem to forget that they are in a lecture and don’t even realise they are making the sounds!

There are also lots of interesting videos about how the human vocal tract works, which liven up the lecture quite well. If you’re interested (and not too squeamish), here’s a video of a laryngeoscopy showing the vocal chords (larynx) of a female singer while she makes sounds with varying loudness and pitch. A slightly less graphic one is this x-ray video (no sound) showing how the shape of the vocal tract changes for producing different vowel sounds.

What people are saying about language

There are some big questions that I'm thinking about at the moment and want to start writing about soon, but need to do a bit more reading. So today I was thinking I should find out what other language blogs are out there and what kinds of things they’re on about. Language is a broad topic, after all, so blogs about language could (and do) include funny ones about Chinglish as well as more serious ones about language teaching/learning resources.

There is even a ‘World Top 100’ competition of language blogs run by bab.la – you can see the 2011 top 100 list here. The list is mainly populated by blogs about language learning and teaching, translation, and language humour. Two that caught my attention were The Yearlyglot, by a guy who has made it his aim to learn a new language every year, and A Walk in the Words, with amusing language tricks, puns and observations.

So far I haven’t seen any doing anything similar to my blog – that is, thinking about issues of language and faith. I’m sure there are some out there, including many focusing on Bible translation (like God Didn’t Say That), and there are probably contributions to more generic blogs that do it occasionally (e.g. this one about what language God speaks, or this one about Bible Translation). I’ll keep looking… I’d be interested to hear of any interesting language blogs you know of, too.

Work is a verb (and a noun)

Teaching started in earnest at the three universities where I am teaching this semester. When my temporary full time contract finished last year I didn’t really know what work I would have this year, and I just hoped I could pick up enough tutoring to pay the bills. But in fact I have an abundance of classes to teach and in the end I had to turn some down. It’s just as Jesus said when he was speaking to the crowds and disciples on the mountain one day (Matthew 6:25-34; ESV):

²⁵ "Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? ²⁸And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ³⁰But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? ³¹Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' ³²For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. ³³But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

³⁴ "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

And he was right about each day having enough trouble for itself! First year students and new casual tutors will know how difficult it can be to negotiate admin, IT access and online learning systems at your new institution, and in my case I'm trying to negotiate them at 3 unis all with different systems! But I think I've got it all sorted now.

Yesterday I witnessed one of the greatest student epiphanies I've ever seen in one of my classes. This being the first lesson in a first year grammar course, I was trying to lay the foundations by introducing nouns, verbs and the like. I asked them to give me some examples from the text we were looking at, and then asked them to tell me how they were able to identify that is was a verb just from looking at the text. Was it a wild guess, or a feeling about the word, purely intuition, or some other way?

One student, who had earlier indicated that she was at a loss to understand the subject so far, said 'I think it was just that the rest of the sentence seemed to be about that word and so I thought it might be the verb'. Wow! I got really excited at that point and gave lots of encouragement.

And then I tried to build on her observation by make a transition to a more technical version of it, i.e. that each clause needs a verb and the verb is like a nucleus that all the other elements in the clause revolve around. But the other students wanted her to repeat her version because that was a bit more accessible! So I think I misjudged their readiness for technicality at that point.

Anyway, the thing that thrilled me was that I had an opportunity to show this student, who had said she was anxious about grammar and ‘couldn’t do it’, that actually she was able to ‘do it’. She seems to have even been able to ‘feel it’, and not only that but to articulate how she came to her conclusion. Exactly the kind of outcome I’m hoping for in my grammar classes!

Speaking with confidence

I'm currently teaching a course in spoken English for academic purposes. It has been really interesting and rewarding to watch how the students (who are all from non-English speaking backgrounds) develop in confidence, even just in the last 5 weeks since semester began. Every 2 weeks they have to record themselves reflecting on some feature of spoken discourse they've heard around them (or sometimes it might be on a set topic) and then upload it to the online class discussion forum.

In one of the tutorials recently, after getting a bit frustrated with their lack of verbal participation in class, I asked them if they felt more comfortable uploading their recording to the class forum than speaking in class, and they all said yes! It seems that speaking to a faceless, anonymous audience (from within the comfort of their own home) is less confronting for them than speaking in front of classmates in class.

As well as the recorded 'discourse diary', on the in-between weeks they also have to comment on two of their classmates' recordings from the previous week. This is also interesting, as they seem to be very happy to both encourage and critique their classmates in this mode, which I never see them doing in class.

I have been greatly encouraged to see the way they interact with each other online, and actually there is quite a good friendly atmosphere in class when I give them interaction activities to do in groups. It's only when I ask a general question of the whole class that most of the students feel uncomfortable being the one to speak. I hope they will be less reticent as the semester progresses. I realise it is a cultural difference as many of them are from China, where the teacher talks and the students listen, and if the teacher wants you to say something they will ask you directly. Hopefully we can come to an understanding by the end of semester.

Notes on a haircut

I always enjoy it when I'm in a situation where specialized and everyday discourse come into contact, seeing how the people involved negotiate the interaction so that they can make themselves understood.
For example, a few weeks ago I had a hairdresser appointment (Ed: I actually started writing a blog on it that week but my iPhone went cactus shortly after so I lost all the notes I had made). It was interesting because it was late on a Friday afternoon, just before closing time, and I was the only customer so all 3 staff members were talking to me and discussing my haircut.
In order to explain what I wanted or didn't want done to my hair, I used my own non-technical terms such as 'foof it up' and 'not like a curtain on my head'. They found my attempts to explain hairstyles amusing, but were able to understand what I meant and then used my terms for the rest of the procedure.
In service encounters like hairdressing appointments the domain of experience is quite everyday as far as the customer is concerned - their hair and its appearance. So modifying your use of technical terms when operating at the interface between experts and laypeople is a really useful thing to do.

A linguistic approach to history

To the historian equipped with the proper tools, it is suggested, any text or artefact can figure forth the thought-world and possibly even the world of emotional investment and praxis of its time and place of production. Not that any given text can alone call up the whole world of its origin or that any given set of texts can reveal its world completely. But in principle, it seems to hold that we today possess the tools to probe texts in ways only dimly perceived or, if perceived, not fully utilized by earlier intellectual or other historians. And these tools, it is suggested, are generally linguistic in nature. (White, 1987:187)

The above quotation is taken from the work of a scholar not of linguistics, but of historiography and intellectual history. It is from Hayden White's The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History. The potential of a text or artefact to 'figure forth the thought-world... of its time and place of production' (White, 1987:187) is a point of departure that is common to both historians and linguists. White is sympathetic to the ideas of linguistics and discourse analysis, advocating a 'semiological' approach to text as the most productive approach to questions concerned with meaning production and the meaning systems by which the meanings in a text are produced.

'Semiological', in White's sense, means 'the tradition of cultural analysis that builds upon the theory of language as a sign (rather than a word) system, after the manner of Saussure, Jakobsson, and Benveniste' (White, 1987:191). One of the schools of linguistics that has developed out of the theories of Saussure and Jakobson, among others, is systemic functional linguistics (SFL). It provides considerable explanatory power for the whole range of linguistic phenomena, from intonation in speech (at the level of phonology) to syndromes of meaning (at the level of semantics) and beyond to the patterns of cultural tendencies. What I have argued in my recent work from my PhD research is that indeed we do have 'the tools to probe texts' to reveal how they 'figure forth the thought-world' of their time and place of production, and that the tools and concepts offered by SFL are ideal for this kind of job.

I'm hoping to post here, over the next little while, some of my thoughts on how linguistic tools can be used in historical enquiry, and particularly the study of media history.

References:

White, H. (1987). The Context in the Text: Method and Ideology in Intellectual History. In The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 185--213. Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press.