Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "language"
Do Stupid People learn Languages faster?
When I was fifteen or sixteen years old, I started reading everything I could get my hands on written by William Burroughs. My father had come of age in the sixties, and had been a hippy himself, but when he saw me reading a copy of Queer during dinner one night, he shook his head and muttered, “My son is reading gay erotica.” Every time contains some palimpsest, some trace of the previous time, and Boomers were as much products of the 50s as the 60s.
Anyway, the part of Queer that always stuck with me had nothing to do with sex, and more to do with the tragic relationship between Burroughs’ alter-ego (I think his name was Lee) and a young, waifish lad who is sleeping with Lee because he wants the money the older gentleman doles out. One man wants love and the other wants money, and they compromise on sex.
I’ve never forgotten parts of the short book, though one statement that always stood out to me, above and beyond everything else, was when Lee noted his twinkish partner’s ability to pick up other languages rapidly. Since these two men (or one man and boy) are expats in Mexico, bilingualism is no negligible skill.
What always stuck with me specifically, though, is Lee’s observation that “Stupid people can learn a language quick and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out.”
Is this true? As someone who majored in language (I have an MA in Germanistik) and works to maintain his German reading and speaking ability daily (to say nothing of my mostly-doomed efforts to learn Spanish), it’s an interesting question, one I could dwell on much longer probably than Burroughs, who seemed to toss the statement out in an offhanded way before resuming his tale of tequila, anal sex, and ayahuasca.
I don’t want to beat you up with linguistic theory, so suffice it to say that most models of language acquisition don’t view the brain so much as an ice tray, with limited space, or as a bathtub filled with water, whereby new languages cause some kind of displacement by their introduction, forcing other skills or languages out of the tub (so to speak) in order to make way for the new language.
That said, I have known people whose skills with their own mother tongues sometimes languished or got rusty as they developed their English skills. My buddy Sergey was from Moscow and we spent almost every day hanging around each other after school at the boarding school where I spent one year and half a semester before being expelled for reasons that aren’t relevant to tonight’s blog entry. Sergey did ESL (English as a Second Language) and worked on the Rosetta Stone program daily, and he even had a pocket translator into which he could type something in Cyrillic, hit a key, and then a machine translation would be spit out. It wasn’t perfect, but I usually got the gist of what he wrote on his little calculator-sized black device.
Sergey confessed that he sometimes forgot the occasional Russian word. His syntax and overall grasp and command of the language was never diminished, but he would sometimes struggle for a bit of vocab here and there. My Germanistik professor in the graduate program, a PhD who was a professional translator, would sometimes struggle with an English idiom, squint, and look to one of the German students (that is, students from Germany now in America) and ask them to tell him the English equivalent of some phrase he knew in German. The irony of an American asking a German to tell him an English phrase was not lost on me, and makes me think that, as primitive as the models are, the “bathtub” or the “ice tray” concepts may have some truth to them, beyond their utility as abstractions.
But neuroscientific efforts to find literal places in the wrinkled convolutions of our brains that correspond to models usually only get so far, reaching far more dead ends than doorways. To the best of my knowledge, no one has literally located an “id” in the brain (though parallels can be drawn between mediating stratum of the brain and impulse control; i.e., you hear people talking about the reptilian brain as the id).
A lot of what we know about which areas of our brain control what comes from a horrific workplace accident in the 19th century, in which a railroad worker had a spike driven through his skull and somehow not only lived, but managed to function (although with considerable detriment to some of his social skills and probably with quite a few headaches thrown in for good measure).
Returning to the central question, which, again, I hesitate to regard as rhetorical: Do stupid people learn languages easier?
I would say that practical-minded people learn the mechanics of a language faster, that is, basics regarding prices, bargaining, locations, asking where the bathroom is, etc. I think creative, abstraction-inclined, and more probing types prefer to first master the syntactical rules and idioms of the new language, and approach the actual speaking of the language cautiously, as if it were a prized relic, albeit one heavily boobytrapped. Learning a language, and thinking one can speak it can sometimes backfire in humiliating ways the first time you try to communicate something and fail. It’s even worse if you get laughed at and the trauma can have a chilling effect on further attempts to speak to the locals in their own tongue.
I had a Dominican friend in the Army who, knowing that the Spanish word for “pregnant” was embarazado, asked a pregnant American woman if she was embarrassed, as he pointed to the bulge at her midsection. An anecdote involving an inverse form of embarrassment deals with my friend who went to a Mexican restaurant, forgot to pay for his carryout, and said (in earshot of all the Mexican staff). “Yo soy embarazado.”
He thought he was expressing embarrassment, and turned out to be confessing that he was pregnant. If he’d been embarrassed and blushing before, he was definitely humiliated and flushing crimson now.
My closing caveat to tonight’s question of language acquisition rates of the dumb versus the smart is to point out that a certain laziness or torpor (not necessarily stupidity) probably clouds the speakers in the dominant culture’s ability to acquire the language of those in the less powerful nations and cultures. You’ve no doubt heard someone commenting on the ubiquity of the English language, and how this is related to the fact that the Atlanticist bloc (America and England) conquered the world, by every method of conveyance from the ship to the hydrogen bomb. This is usually phrased as “English is a language with an army.”
Put another way, if the man who pays you to do work speaks English, and he need only pantomime to tell you what work to do, then you will probably learn his language faster than he learns yours. Conquerors are sometimes curious about those they conquered. Whites strangely began the fetishizing of Native Americans shortly after they pretty much annihilated them, though this doesn’t always extend to language acquisition.
In general, Vae victis (“Woe to the Vanquished”) may include horrors like enslavement, mass rape, and things like forcible conversion to the enemy’s religion. One of the few upsides of being defeated is learning a new language (assuming you aren’t killed outright) while still speaking your own, and thus knowing your enemy better than he knows you. It’s this kind of asymmetry between the powerful and the powerless that allows the weaker party to succeed, sometimes in literal combat (see the U.S. involvement in Vietnam).
Anyway, the part of Queer that always stuck with me had nothing to do with sex, and more to do with the tragic relationship between Burroughs’ alter-ego (I think his name was Lee) and a young, waifish lad who is sleeping with Lee because he wants the money the older gentleman doles out. One man wants love and the other wants money, and they compromise on sex.
I’ve never forgotten parts of the short book, though one statement that always stood out to me, above and beyond everything else, was when Lee noted his twinkish partner’s ability to pick up other languages rapidly. Since these two men (or one man and boy) are expats in Mexico, bilingualism is no negligible skill.
What always stuck with me specifically, though, is Lee’s observation that “Stupid people can learn a language quick and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out.”
Is this true? As someone who majored in language (I have an MA in Germanistik) and works to maintain his German reading and speaking ability daily (to say nothing of my mostly-doomed efforts to learn Spanish), it’s an interesting question, one I could dwell on much longer probably than Burroughs, who seemed to toss the statement out in an offhanded way before resuming his tale of tequila, anal sex, and ayahuasca.
I don’t want to beat you up with linguistic theory, so suffice it to say that most models of language acquisition don’t view the brain so much as an ice tray, with limited space, or as a bathtub filled with water, whereby new languages cause some kind of displacement by their introduction, forcing other skills or languages out of the tub (so to speak) in order to make way for the new language.
That said, I have known people whose skills with their own mother tongues sometimes languished or got rusty as they developed their English skills. My buddy Sergey was from Moscow and we spent almost every day hanging around each other after school at the boarding school where I spent one year and half a semester before being expelled for reasons that aren’t relevant to tonight’s blog entry. Sergey did ESL (English as a Second Language) and worked on the Rosetta Stone program daily, and he even had a pocket translator into which he could type something in Cyrillic, hit a key, and then a machine translation would be spit out. It wasn’t perfect, but I usually got the gist of what he wrote on his little calculator-sized black device.
Sergey confessed that he sometimes forgot the occasional Russian word. His syntax and overall grasp and command of the language was never diminished, but he would sometimes struggle for a bit of vocab here and there. My Germanistik professor in the graduate program, a PhD who was a professional translator, would sometimes struggle with an English idiom, squint, and look to one of the German students (that is, students from Germany now in America) and ask them to tell him the English equivalent of some phrase he knew in German. The irony of an American asking a German to tell him an English phrase was not lost on me, and makes me think that, as primitive as the models are, the “bathtub” or the “ice tray” concepts may have some truth to them, beyond their utility as abstractions.
But neuroscientific efforts to find literal places in the wrinkled convolutions of our brains that correspond to models usually only get so far, reaching far more dead ends than doorways. To the best of my knowledge, no one has literally located an “id” in the brain (though parallels can be drawn between mediating stratum of the brain and impulse control; i.e., you hear people talking about the reptilian brain as the id).
A lot of what we know about which areas of our brain control what comes from a horrific workplace accident in the 19th century, in which a railroad worker had a spike driven through his skull and somehow not only lived, but managed to function (although with considerable detriment to some of his social skills and probably with quite a few headaches thrown in for good measure).
Returning to the central question, which, again, I hesitate to regard as rhetorical: Do stupid people learn languages easier?
I would say that practical-minded people learn the mechanics of a language faster, that is, basics regarding prices, bargaining, locations, asking where the bathroom is, etc. I think creative, abstraction-inclined, and more probing types prefer to first master the syntactical rules and idioms of the new language, and approach the actual speaking of the language cautiously, as if it were a prized relic, albeit one heavily boobytrapped. Learning a language, and thinking one can speak it can sometimes backfire in humiliating ways the first time you try to communicate something and fail. It’s even worse if you get laughed at and the trauma can have a chilling effect on further attempts to speak to the locals in their own tongue.
I had a Dominican friend in the Army who, knowing that the Spanish word for “pregnant” was embarazado, asked a pregnant American woman if she was embarrassed, as he pointed to the bulge at her midsection. An anecdote involving an inverse form of embarrassment deals with my friend who went to a Mexican restaurant, forgot to pay for his carryout, and said (in earshot of all the Mexican staff). “Yo soy embarazado.”
He thought he was expressing embarrassment, and turned out to be confessing that he was pregnant. If he’d been embarrassed and blushing before, he was definitely humiliated and flushing crimson now.
My closing caveat to tonight’s question of language acquisition rates of the dumb versus the smart is to point out that a certain laziness or torpor (not necessarily stupidity) probably clouds the speakers in the dominant culture’s ability to acquire the language of those in the less powerful nations and cultures. You’ve no doubt heard someone commenting on the ubiquity of the English language, and how this is related to the fact that the Atlanticist bloc (America and England) conquered the world, by every method of conveyance from the ship to the hydrogen bomb. This is usually phrased as “English is a language with an army.”
Put another way, if the man who pays you to do work speaks English, and he need only pantomime to tell you what work to do, then you will probably learn his language faster than he learns yours. Conquerors are sometimes curious about those they conquered. Whites strangely began the fetishizing of Native Americans shortly after they pretty much annihilated them, though this doesn’t always extend to language acquisition.
In general, Vae victis (“Woe to the Vanquished”) may include horrors like enslavement, mass rape, and things like forcible conversion to the enemy’s religion. One of the few upsides of being defeated is learning a new language (assuming you aren’t killed outright) while still speaking your own, and thus knowing your enemy better than he knows you. It’s this kind of asymmetry between the powerful and the powerless that allows the weaker party to succeed, sometimes in literal combat (see the U.S. involvement in Vietnam).
If you use five Modifiers to describe Someone
When people ask me who I think the best writer of all-time was, I usually tell them the same thing. “Ivan Bunin.”
Bunin won the Nobel Prize a million years ago for Literature. I’ve never read anything novel-length by him, but his short stories are the most brilliant and strangely romantic works I’ve ever encountered. Find The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories or Sunstroke and other Stories, to see a representative sample of this guy’s beauty and talent. My personal favorite among his oeuvre is Ballad, a tale about a domestic servant describing some fable to a stolidly middle-class man who is skeptical at first, but grows at least unnerved, if not believing, by the end of the story’s telling.
It’s weird to say that I’ve never read Bunin in his original tongue (and never will; I’m not learning Russian), or to say that the best writing I’ve ever read has been based on translations from different people rather than from the man himself. That Bunin’s tone and force remains consistent regardless of who is translating him is remarkable. That these same attributes remain manifest in his writing even though Russian is drastically different from English is also a bit of a miracle.
I remember reading in the Translator’s Note to one of Bunin’s collections of short stories that if his writing were to be translated literally, without the intervening finesse of an able translator, the result would be ridiculous. The translator claimed that it’s traditional to pile modifier upon modifier in Bunin’s native tongue, and the effect is musical rather than comical, as it would be (and sometimes is) in English.
I was thinking about this in a totally different context the other day when I was reading an article in which some pundit-professor was giving his opinion of some high-level politician. Just to avoid stepping on anyone’s particular toes, we’ll call the professor The Professor, and we’ll call the politician The Politician.
The Professor was giving his opinion of The Politician and he said, “He is a stupid, insane, bigoted, dumb, reckless, uncouth ….”
It took him awhile to get to the noun modified by the mountain of adjectives. I’m not saying The Politician wasn’t all of the things The Professor claimed he was, and worse, but he could have addressed each one of those charges in their turn, or condensed some of the pejoratives that had some overlapping meaning, or, barring that, found some new and more concise words to describe this man’s execrableness.
I think, in English as opposed to Russian, more than two modifiers describing a noun may be too much, in fiction or in any other context. Too many adjectives between the definite or indefinite article and the noun have the effect of making the reader feel lost at sea, a bit adrift, as if the description may never end up linking with the thing it’s supposed to be modifying or describing.
And on a related note, more than two or three insults in tandem, daisy-chained to each other, seem to reveal as much about the person slinging the mud as the person on the receiving end.
The Gentleman From San Francisco
Sunstroke: Selected Stories
Bunin won the Nobel Prize a million years ago for Literature. I’ve never read anything novel-length by him, but his short stories are the most brilliant and strangely romantic works I’ve ever encountered. Find The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories or Sunstroke and other Stories, to see a representative sample of this guy’s beauty and talent. My personal favorite among his oeuvre is Ballad, a tale about a domestic servant describing some fable to a stolidly middle-class man who is skeptical at first, but grows at least unnerved, if not believing, by the end of the story’s telling.
It’s weird to say that I’ve never read Bunin in his original tongue (and never will; I’m not learning Russian), or to say that the best writing I’ve ever read has been based on translations from different people rather than from the man himself. That Bunin’s tone and force remains consistent regardless of who is translating him is remarkable. That these same attributes remain manifest in his writing even though Russian is drastically different from English is also a bit of a miracle.
I remember reading in the Translator’s Note to one of Bunin’s collections of short stories that if his writing were to be translated literally, without the intervening finesse of an able translator, the result would be ridiculous. The translator claimed that it’s traditional to pile modifier upon modifier in Bunin’s native tongue, and the effect is musical rather than comical, as it would be (and sometimes is) in English.
I was thinking about this in a totally different context the other day when I was reading an article in which some pundit-professor was giving his opinion of some high-level politician. Just to avoid stepping on anyone’s particular toes, we’ll call the professor The Professor, and we’ll call the politician The Politician.
The Professor was giving his opinion of The Politician and he said, “He is a stupid, insane, bigoted, dumb, reckless, uncouth ….”
It took him awhile to get to the noun modified by the mountain of adjectives. I’m not saying The Politician wasn’t all of the things The Professor claimed he was, and worse, but he could have addressed each one of those charges in their turn, or condensed some of the pejoratives that had some overlapping meaning, or, barring that, found some new and more concise words to describe this man’s execrableness.
I think, in English as opposed to Russian, more than two modifiers describing a noun may be too much, in fiction or in any other context. Too many adjectives between the definite or indefinite article and the noun have the effect of making the reader feel lost at sea, a bit adrift, as if the description may never end up linking with the thing it’s supposed to be modifying or describing.
And on a related note, more than two or three insults in tandem, daisy-chained to each other, seem to reveal as much about the person slinging the mud as the person on the receiving end.
The Gentleman From San Francisco
Sunstroke: Selected Stories
Why is Polyglotism an Aphrodisiac?
I haven’t had sex in over a year, and with the number of medications I’m on and my general intellectual obsessions, I’m good at controlling and sublimating my sex drive, or sometimes just ignoring it. I honestly don’t have too much faith in the human species, and since sex (even casual and even with a condom) is the root act that keeps this whole thing going, it also makes it hard to work up much verve for the act.
I’ll still masturbate every once and awhile, but if you told me I had a choice between sleeping with a supermodel or walking my dog in the park while listening to classical music and watching sunlight break through the trees, well, it’s me, the terrier, the chestnuts, and some Glazunov.
Pity me or despise me or whatever, but I’m just being honest.
Anyway, I am not God’s gift to women in the looks department, though I’m not exactly hideous either. This means that, without effort, I probably won’t have to deal with female attention most of the time anyway. Some women are attracted to artists, writers, etc., but I don’t go around advertising my profession, so that’s out. I also don’t look like a writer or a creative type, and look in fact more like maybe an ex-jock who’s let himself go a bit. I look like I sell cars, maybe, which is fine, because I don’t want to look like what I am. My mission, my reason for being, my salvation in writing, has helped me get through horrible times, where I was not only invisible to women but almost a nonentity to myself. If I were to catch my reflection in the mirror during these low times, I might have jumped, startled, only to realize a moment later that Hey, that’s me. I’m still here, and existing. Shit.
Despite my general reclusiveness and my indifference to sex, love, women, humanity, the whole ball of wax, occasionally I must stagger out of my hermitage and do things like buy groceries, which necessitates some nominal contact with the opposite sex.
I walk through the public with figurative blinders on, ignoring hard stares of feminists who maybe hate me for living or maybe the warm smiles of women who are at least willing to recognize me as a fellow human and something perhaps other than a potential rapist. Again, I live a pressure-free life (at least when it comes to sex), so these non-interactions are a cakewalk. If I want to ogle women I’ll go to the strip club (and tip well and not touch them or try to chat them up about their real names). But I haven’t been there in awhile either.
Sometimes, though, because I have a host of medical issues due to some injuries I picked up in the war, it can’t be helped and I have to deal with women, each, in their way, attractive to me.
Occasionally I go to the nail salon here, not because I’m vain or metrosexual or a mafioso, but because, after one extended field problem when I was stationed in Germany, I contracted this weird sort of variation on trench foot which randomly erupts on me from time to time. This massive dry crack appears down the center of my foot, and the Cambodian ladies with their warm porcelain bathes and various salves manage to make the pain go away and the dryness abate.
One of the girls in the salon is very cute, maybe in her early twenties, with a squeaky voice that might be irritating if it was an affectation, but is actually endearing because the voice is hers and part of the totality of her whole character. She has a big ass, strong thighs, flowing brownish-red hair, and warm saucer-shaped eyes.
Yes, she’s cute, and yes, I tip her well, and no I don’t flirt with her, and yes, after our sessions, I usually go home and fantasize about burying my face in her ass and pussy while she deprives me of oxygen with her squirming, bumping, and grinding, in her quest for the ultimate orgasm irrespective of my needs, those needs being sexual as well as the more prosaic need to breathe.
Anyway, one time while I was in the nail salon some months ago, I got a call from my ex-girlfriend on my cellphone while the young Cambodian-American girl was working on my foot. My girlfriend is German, and we met in graduate school, where she was working as a teacher’s assistant, and I was acquiring my MA with a little help from the GI Bill (a lot of guys who were in the Army don’t know that money is available for vets even at the graduate level).
Our relationship was accidental (as are all of my serious relationships), a sort of clash, like two particles randomly bumping into each other and fusing to create a new, more intense entity. I needed help with my German sentence construction, and she was available. She slept over one night and it happened.
The thing about me is that I have very little confidence, “game” or motivation, but once the actual preliminaries, dances, and rituals are out of the way, women get attached to me. I’m not bragging, since skill as a cocksman doesn’t really get you all that far in the real world (maybe in porn), but me and my girlfriend became very tight.
We talked, in German, over the phone, for about an hour, about who had dropped out of the language program, and their reasons for leaving school (professional differences, job offers cropping up elsewhere, pregnancies, and so on). Eventually the call ended, and I told my girl “Auf Wiederhören!”
In German, there is a distinction between how one bids a friend farewell in person, versus over the phone. To use the official, traditional goodbye over the phone would make no sense, as you would literally be saying, “See you again,” to the disembodied voice on the other end. “Auf Wiederhören” is more appropriate, because it deals with the promise of future hearing rather than seeing.
After I hung up (or turned off) my phone after talking with my girlfriend, I looked down at the pretty Cambodian girl who was dealing with my screwed up foot. I rarely looked down during these sessions, because there’s an uncomfortable implied power dynamic that borders on something like psychic fellatio when you look down on someone from a high perch (I hate shoeshine stands for the same reason).
But the sixth sense we all have told me that there was some sort of tension coming from the girl working on my feet, and the fact that she had stopped working also made me curious.
“What language is that?” She asked, smiling, beaming practically. We’d never shared more than a couple perfunctory words before that.
“German,” I said.
She proceeded to unburden herself, talk up a storm about what she was doing at the local university, what her parents thought of her career path, how they were disappointed that her own skills with the Khmer language were deteriorating …
Look. I am not one of those stupid or incredibly dense men who believes that every time a woman is personable to me that she is trying to flirt with me or sleep with me. I’m aware that a lot of women are naturally cold toward men in general, because they understand that even a modicum of kindness will be misread as practically an invitation to start dry-humping the woman’s leg, friction burns and chafing be damned.
Having said that, however, I would also have to be totally blind (rather than just totally indifferent to the corporeal world around me) not to have noticed how the girl’s treatment of me changed not just then and there, but thenceforth and thereafter.
It got to the point where her father (who co-owns the salon with her mother) started to stare daggers at me from behind the newspaper he leafed through while waiting for customers as his daughter worked on my feet, this despite the fact that I never really reciprocated her attempts to talk beyond a couple of grunts and curt answers to whatever question or story was coming my way.
Eventually, I solved the problem of the discomfort I caused for myself (and whatever irritation I caused for the girl’s father) by ceasing to go back to the nail salon. I’ve noticed that if I apply lotion rigorously and routinely to the place on my foot where the large crack usually appears first as a wrinkle in its pre-fissure stage, I can keep the problem under control.
And, if, in my solitude and hermitage, I’m occasionally hit by a wave of horniness, and in my cowardly seclusion I decide to rub one out, her image is still strong enough in my head to run some Khmer Sutra Goddess fantasy through my brain, lost in the strong, tanned, and toned sinews, muscles, and exquisite soft fatness of the sexy little Apsara (goddess of the clouds in Hindu and Buddhist religions), serving her whims in the pagoda of my feverish daydreams.
Still, I wonder why fluency in German, of all languages, would have had that effect on the girl? It’s a well-worn cliché that knowing Romantic languages (especially poetry in these languages) is a tintype Lothario’s go-to ruse (almost as lame as having a cute little dog as an excuse to start a conversation with a girl).
German can be beautiful, but in most mouths it is mostly abrasive, fricative, a floundering of consonants begrudgingly admitting the vowels that flow so freely in Spanish or French. And all the German poetry I know is expressionistic and nightmarish verse about putrescent crypts and angels who land among battlefield revetments, breastworks, and trenches in the Great War, their wings getting soaked by cloacal effluvia of blood and shit emitted by dying soldiers. It’s not first date stuff, and even if someone can’t speak the language, they can get the gist and tone just from the unfolding scansion of the recital of the poem. If you don’t believe me, listen to this reading (without looking at the images) of Georg Trakl’s poem Grodek: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2YSz...
And yes there is German Romantic poetry (see a good example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76KGU... ) but it’s not really my area of expertise.
Anyway, to return to my original question, if I had to guess why women are attracted to Polyglotism, I think it has a deep evolutionary basis, probably in proving that one can find a way to navigate among other tribes or groups without immediate recourse to violence. I don’t worship at the feet of the Mahatma (Ghandi told Indians, for instance, to enlist in the English rolls in the Great War, thinking it would hasten Indian independence), but understanding or at least the attempt toward understanding can sometimes temper or obviate violence. I saw this in Iraq and in Germany. American soldiers who spoke fluent Arabic (after studying in Monterey, California) were embraced immediately by some of the LNs (local nationals) and invited to literally break bread with them in their own midday chai tea roundtables.
In Germany, in garrison, I had a high-and-tight military haircut and was obvious a part of George W. Bush’s great imperialist war machine, but I noticed that a lot of the rough edges in various interactions (with everyone from the Polizei to the local kid working the pizza Imbiss) were tempered and smoothed after my German improved at least enough to show that I was trying to learn their language.
And why was I trying? And why am I still practicing, despite the fact that I have no desire to return to Germany, and will probably never talk to my ex again (even though I miss her so bad it hurts)?
Hell, I don’t know why I plod along with my German exercises (or with my writing for that matter), but I do know one reason I don’t do what I do: I’m not trying to get laid. I have my hands, my imagination, and I’ve also acquired a couple of other things I’m not willing to sacrifice in exchange for vagina at this relatively late stage in the game: peace and dignity.
I’ll still masturbate every once and awhile, but if you told me I had a choice between sleeping with a supermodel or walking my dog in the park while listening to classical music and watching sunlight break through the trees, well, it’s me, the terrier, the chestnuts, and some Glazunov.
Pity me or despise me or whatever, but I’m just being honest.
Anyway, I am not God’s gift to women in the looks department, though I’m not exactly hideous either. This means that, without effort, I probably won’t have to deal with female attention most of the time anyway. Some women are attracted to artists, writers, etc., but I don’t go around advertising my profession, so that’s out. I also don’t look like a writer or a creative type, and look in fact more like maybe an ex-jock who’s let himself go a bit. I look like I sell cars, maybe, which is fine, because I don’t want to look like what I am. My mission, my reason for being, my salvation in writing, has helped me get through horrible times, where I was not only invisible to women but almost a nonentity to myself. If I were to catch my reflection in the mirror during these low times, I might have jumped, startled, only to realize a moment later that Hey, that’s me. I’m still here, and existing. Shit.
Despite my general reclusiveness and my indifference to sex, love, women, humanity, the whole ball of wax, occasionally I must stagger out of my hermitage and do things like buy groceries, which necessitates some nominal contact with the opposite sex.
I walk through the public with figurative blinders on, ignoring hard stares of feminists who maybe hate me for living or maybe the warm smiles of women who are at least willing to recognize me as a fellow human and something perhaps other than a potential rapist. Again, I live a pressure-free life (at least when it comes to sex), so these non-interactions are a cakewalk. If I want to ogle women I’ll go to the strip club (and tip well and not touch them or try to chat them up about their real names). But I haven’t been there in awhile either.
Sometimes, though, because I have a host of medical issues due to some injuries I picked up in the war, it can’t be helped and I have to deal with women, each, in their way, attractive to me.
Occasionally I go to the nail salon here, not because I’m vain or metrosexual or a mafioso, but because, after one extended field problem when I was stationed in Germany, I contracted this weird sort of variation on trench foot which randomly erupts on me from time to time. This massive dry crack appears down the center of my foot, and the Cambodian ladies with their warm porcelain bathes and various salves manage to make the pain go away and the dryness abate.
One of the girls in the salon is very cute, maybe in her early twenties, with a squeaky voice that might be irritating if it was an affectation, but is actually endearing because the voice is hers and part of the totality of her whole character. She has a big ass, strong thighs, flowing brownish-red hair, and warm saucer-shaped eyes.
Yes, she’s cute, and yes, I tip her well, and no I don’t flirt with her, and yes, after our sessions, I usually go home and fantasize about burying my face in her ass and pussy while she deprives me of oxygen with her squirming, bumping, and grinding, in her quest for the ultimate orgasm irrespective of my needs, those needs being sexual as well as the more prosaic need to breathe.
Anyway, one time while I was in the nail salon some months ago, I got a call from my ex-girlfriend on my cellphone while the young Cambodian-American girl was working on my foot. My girlfriend is German, and we met in graduate school, where she was working as a teacher’s assistant, and I was acquiring my MA with a little help from the GI Bill (a lot of guys who were in the Army don’t know that money is available for vets even at the graduate level).
Our relationship was accidental (as are all of my serious relationships), a sort of clash, like two particles randomly bumping into each other and fusing to create a new, more intense entity. I needed help with my German sentence construction, and she was available. She slept over one night and it happened.
The thing about me is that I have very little confidence, “game” or motivation, but once the actual preliminaries, dances, and rituals are out of the way, women get attached to me. I’m not bragging, since skill as a cocksman doesn’t really get you all that far in the real world (maybe in porn), but me and my girlfriend became very tight.
We talked, in German, over the phone, for about an hour, about who had dropped out of the language program, and their reasons for leaving school (professional differences, job offers cropping up elsewhere, pregnancies, and so on). Eventually the call ended, and I told my girl “Auf Wiederhören!”
In German, there is a distinction between how one bids a friend farewell in person, versus over the phone. To use the official, traditional goodbye over the phone would make no sense, as you would literally be saying, “See you again,” to the disembodied voice on the other end. “Auf Wiederhören” is more appropriate, because it deals with the promise of future hearing rather than seeing.
After I hung up (or turned off) my phone after talking with my girlfriend, I looked down at the pretty Cambodian girl who was dealing with my screwed up foot. I rarely looked down during these sessions, because there’s an uncomfortable implied power dynamic that borders on something like psychic fellatio when you look down on someone from a high perch (I hate shoeshine stands for the same reason).
But the sixth sense we all have told me that there was some sort of tension coming from the girl working on my feet, and the fact that she had stopped working also made me curious.
“What language is that?” She asked, smiling, beaming practically. We’d never shared more than a couple perfunctory words before that.
“German,” I said.
She proceeded to unburden herself, talk up a storm about what she was doing at the local university, what her parents thought of her career path, how they were disappointed that her own skills with the Khmer language were deteriorating …
Look. I am not one of those stupid or incredibly dense men who believes that every time a woman is personable to me that she is trying to flirt with me or sleep with me. I’m aware that a lot of women are naturally cold toward men in general, because they understand that even a modicum of kindness will be misread as practically an invitation to start dry-humping the woman’s leg, friction burns and chafing be damned.
Having said that, however, I would also have to be totally blind (rather than just totally indifferent to the corporeal world around me) not to have noticed how the girl’s treatment of me changed not just then and there, but thenceforth and thereafter.
It got to the point where her father (who co-owns the salon with her mother) started to stare daggers at me from behind the newspaper he leafed through while waiting for customers as his daughter worked on my feet, this despite the fact that I never really reciprocated her attempts to talk beyond a couple of grunts and curt answers to whatever question or story was coming my way.
Eventually, I solved the problem of the discomfort I caused for myself (and whatever irritation I caused for the girl’s father) by ceasing to go back to the nail salon. I’ve noticed that if I apply lotion rigorously and routinely to the place on my foot where the large crack usually appears first as a wrinkle in its pre-fissure stage, I can keep the problem under control.
And, if, in my solitude and hermitage, I’m occasionally hit by a wave of horniness, and in my cowardly seclusion I decide to rub one out, her image is still strong enough in my head to run some Khmer Sutra Goddess fantasy through my brain, lost in the strong, tanned, and toned sinews, muscles, and exquisite soft fatness of the sexy little Apsara (goddess of the clouds in Hindu and Buddhist religions), serving her whims in the pagoda of my feverish daydreams.
Still, I wonder why fluency in German, of all languages, would have had that effect on the girl? It’s a well-worn cliché that knowing Romantic languages (especially poetry in these languages) is a tintype Lothario’s go-to ruse (almost as lame as having a cute little dog as an excuse to start a conversation with a girl).
German can be beautiful, but in most mouths it is mostly abrasive, fricative, a floundering of consonants begrudgingly admitting the vowels that flow so freely in Spanish or French. And all the German poetry I know is expressionistic and nightmarish verse about putrescent crypts and angels who land among battlefield revetments, breastworks, and trenches in the Great War, their wings getting soaked by cloacal effluvia of blood and shit emitted by dying soldiers. It’s not first date stuff, and even if someone can’t speak the language, they can get the gist and tone just from the unfolding scansion of the recital of the poem. If you don’t believe me, listen to this reading (without looking at the images) of Georg Trakl’s poem Grodek: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2YSz...
And yes there is German Romantic poetry (see a good example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76KGU... ) but it’s not really my area of expertise.
Anyway, to return to my original question, if I had to guess why women are attracted to Polyglotism, I think it has a deep evolutionary basis, probably in proving that one can find a way to navigate among other tribes or groups without immediate recourse to violence. I don’t worship at the feet of the Mahatma (Ghandi told Indians, for instance, to enlist in the English rolls in the Great War, thinking it would hasten Indian independence), but understanding or at least the attempt toward understanding can sometimes temper or obviate violence. I saw this in Iraq and in Germany. American soldiers who spoke fluent Arabic (after studying in Monterey, California) were embraced immediately by some of the LNs (local nationals) and invited to literally break bread with them in their own midday chai tea roundtables.
In Germany, in garrison, I had a high-and-tight military haircut and was obvious a part of George W. Bush’s great imperialist war machine, but I noticed that a lot of the rough edges in various interactions (with everyone from the Polizei to the local kid working the pizza Imbiss) were tempered and smoothed after my German improved at least enough to show that I was trying to learn their language.
And why was I trying? And why am I still practicing, despite the fact that I have no desire to return to Germany, and will probably never talk to my ex again (even though I miss her so bad it hurts)?
Hell, I don’t know why I plod along with my German exercises (or with my writing for that matter), but I do know one reason I don’t do what I do: I’m not trying to get laid. I have my hands, my imagination, and I’ve also acquired a couple of other things I’m not willing to sacrifice in exchange for vagina at this relatively late stage in the game: peace and dignity.
The Sun Still doesn’t shine on Google Translate
You don’t have to work in a language field to know that machine translation still stinks. It improved for a while, and then it bogged down, and hasn’t ever really progressed from there. You would have to ask someone who knows more about the software involved and the industry itself to cite the specific whys and wherefores behind the lack of progress. All I personally know is that machine translation has a long way to go before it puts anyone out of business, at least in the general society. I don’t doubt that great tools exist for machine translation, but so far they haven’t reached that sweet spot in terms of price, access, and ease of interface that would cause some kind of revolution, where you would see people, say, walking around with earbud-looking devices that allow everyone wearing such a headset to be understood in Esperanto or English regardless of what language they’re actually speaking. The best that’s done now for world leaders and bigwigs at various summits is to have wireless and discrete devices in their ears through which a (human) interpreter makes (imperfect) on-the-fly interpretations from the Source Language to the Target Language. And we’ve had that kind of technology in the modern world for a long, long time already, relatively speaking.
I know this kind of on-the-spot stuff pays well and is appreciated, but I also am aware of its deficiencies due to my time A) in the military B) as a boxing fan. The two go hand-in-hand since there are tons of soldiers who’ve taken the Defense Language Aptitude Battery and even gone to the Language Institute in Monterey Bay, California, and there are a ton of boxing fans in the Army (and the fights are broadcast on slight delays for free on the Armed Forces Network).
I had a Puerto Rican friend in the Army who was a trilingual and a boxing fan who absolutely hated Jerry Olaya, the guy who did post-fight translation for Hispanic boxers who didn’t speak English on HBO.
“He’s not translating the guy’s answer correctly!”
I remember during one between-round translation where a fighter (Ricardo Mayorga, maybe?) was stunned by the power of his foe, and Olaya translated his banter with his cornerman as “Man, that black guy hits hard.” My guess is that the fighter’s specific phrasing wasn’t so delicate, but where is the interpreter’s responsibility weighted in such situations? To the fidelity of the translation or toward avoiding causing offense (or hell, a riot) in a situation where he’s working on the fly with a guy who’s known to insult and degrade his opponents to the point that things might spiral out of control?
I still have quite a lot of work to do before I even get conversant in Spanish. I’m pretty good with German, though.
Obviously, as someone who works sometimes as a freelance translator and who spent a few years in earnest trying to learn the German language (no American ever really and truly learns German; see Mark Twain’s essay on the German Language) I’m relieved that we have not seen the rise of the bilingual robots with super cochlear transistors, at least not in wide use (they could be waiting in the sewers, planning their linguistic takeover of the “wet tongues” or whatever derogatory term they have for us).
Still, just to assuage my fears, I’ll still occasionally check out the software. Not the cutting edge stuff, mind you, but the kind of stuff in wide use, like Google Translate.
There’s a pretty good test I use based on one of the first little bits of wordplay our professor taught us in a 101 course. Die Sonne scheint zu scheinen . The word Scheinen is a homonym that means both “to shine” or “to seem” in German. Sonne means “sun.” Thus anyone with a brain (which still excludes machine translation software) sees the German sentence as “The sun seems to shine.” The software still sees this as something like “The sun shines” or “The sun seems,” depending, I guess, on what kind of mood it’s in that day.
I’ll keep checking with Google Translate to see if they ever fix this problem.
Until then, your jobs are still safe for the time being, you filthy meat bags.
I know this kind of on-the-spot stuff pays well and is appreciated, but I also am aware of its deficiencies due to my time A) in the military B) as a boxing fan. The two go hand-in-hand since there are tons of soldiers who’ve taken the Defense Language Aptitude Battery and even gone to the Language Institute in Monterey Bay, California, and there are a ton of boxing fans in the Army (and the fights are broadcast on slight delays for free on the Armed Forces Network).
I had a Puerto Rican friend in the Army who was a trilingual and a boxing fan who absolutely hated Jerry Olaya, the guy who did post-fight translation for Hispanic boxers who didn’t speak English on HBO.
“He’s not translating the guy’s answer correctly!”
I remember during one between-round translation where a fighter (Ricardo Mayorga, maybe?) was stunned by the power of his foe, and Olaya translated his banter with his cornerman as “Man, that black guy hits hard.” My guess is that the fighter’s specific phrasing wasn’t so delicate, but where is the interpreter’s responsibility weighted in such situations? To the fidelity of the translation or toward avoiding causing offense (or hell, a riot) in a situation where he’s working on the fly with a guy who’s known to insult and degrade his opponents to the point that things might spiral out of control?
I still have quite a lot of work to do before I even get conversant in Spanish. I’m pretty good with German, though.
Obviously, as someone who works sometimes as a freelance translator and who spent a few years in earnest trying to learn the German language (no American ever really and truly learns German; see Mark Twain’s essay on the German Language) I’m relieved that we have not seen the rise of the bilingual robots with super cochlear transistors, at least not in wide use (they could be waiting in the sewers, planning their linguistic takeover of the “wet tongues” or whatever derogatory term they have for us).
Still, just to assuage my fears, I’ll still occasionally check out the software. Not the cutting edge stuff, mind you, but the kind of stuff in wide use, like Google Translate.
There’s a pretty good test I use based on one of the first little bits of wordplay our professor taught us in a 101 course. Die Sonne scheint zu scheinen . The word Scheinen is a homonym that means both “to shine” or “to seem” in German. Sonne means “sun.” Thus anyone with a brain (which still excludes machine translation software) sees the German sentence as “The sun seems to shine.” The software still sees this as something like “The sun shines” or “The sun seems,” depending, I guess, on what kind of mood it’s in that day.
I’ll keep checking with Google Translate to see if they ever fix this problem.
Until then, your jobs are still safe for the time being, you filthy meat bags.
Assault in Translation
When someone asks how long it takes to learn a language, it’s hard to give a satisfying answer. It’s hard, firstly because I’m not some sort of polyglot wizard, secondly because I know nothing of this individual’s aptitude (they could be some kind of savant), and thirdly: What exactly do they mean by “learn” a language?
If by “learn a language,” they mean to get the rudiments that will allow one to tell waiters what they want from the menu, or where they want a cabdriver to take them, I’d say between three and six months (for most languages). If you want to be able to read a philosophic tome in your second language, and debate its merits in that language with a professor without making a bunch of grammatic errors, maybe you need ten years. Or maybe never.
I know, for instance, people who’ve been in their adopted countries for decades and continue to use idiomatic sentence constructions from their native language, in their second language. When you hear someone saying something awkward (or even wrong) in your language, it’s because they’re phrasing things according to the structure of their own language rather than yours, even though they know your language. You’ve no doubt heard someone (usually French) casting about for a word in English, who stumbles and says, “How you say…?”
“How you say?” is actually how one says, “How does one say?” in other languages. In German “Wie sagt man” literally means “How says one?”
Of all the impediments to fluency, I’m convinced that the main one is the fear of humiliation that comes with any interaction with a native speaker. Sometimes the person might not be malicious, or reveling in your mistakes (although if you’re an American abroad who looks like a tourist, they might view your ineptitude with the language as some sort of innate American characteristic that also makes us prone to getting fat and starting wars).
The industrialist Armand Hammer related in his autobiography that he desperately wanted to learn Russian (he was selling imported American grain to Lenin during the NEP years). Hammer was a morally unscrupulous man (to put it charitably) but he was quite savvy, brilliant in fact, and nothing if not tenacious.
Thus he committed himself to learning one-hundred new Russian words per day for one year. Finally, when it came time to speak in a factory before an assembled throng of Russian workers, he gave an impassioned speech, in Russian. There was much cheering when he was done. And the titan beamed, grinning from ear-to-ear. He then added sheepishly, “I apologize for any mistakes I made. My Russian is not good.”
One of the Russian functionaries furrowed his brow, stroked his Van Dyke beard, and said, “We thought you were speaking in English.”
Such incidents have to be dispiriting.
Sometimes they’re funny, though. Like with my German professor in college, who invited one of the exchange students to stand up for a moment from her desk. The teacher addressed us, while Sonja (that was the girl’s name) looked at the floor, her bangs in her eyes. She was obviously a bit shy. “Sonja speaks perfect German and English. So if you need help, stop her in the hall and take advantage of her.”
There was an awkward silence in the room. My professor, who was a feminist, no doubt wouldn’t have enjoyed the fact that she’d unintentionally told us to perhaps sexually harass one of her female students between classes.
You can also really piss people off without meaning to do so when trying to speak another language. While I was in the Army, deployed to Iraq for a year, I was on a small base, a joint operation where a lot of MPRI guys were working. MPRI were a less friendly Blackwater, a rough outfit of contractors who wore black umpire hats and khaki outfits, and spent most of their days training the Jundi (Iraqi soldiers) with various weapons.
One day I was walking the rocky grounds of that sunbaked complex, when I saw an MPRI guy sitting in a semicircle with several Jundi in their chocolate chip desert fatigues and red berets. They were going through some block of instruction on a new weapon system. There was also a terp there (as they called the interpreters) wearing a red and white checkered keffiyeh and a pair of Oakley sunglasses. The trainer looked up at the terp and said, “Tell them not to worry about putting the belt in the feeding tray. It’s so easy my dog could do it.”
The interpreter hesitated, shifted from foot to foot in his suede desert boots. “I don’t know.”
“Go ahead.”
I could feel the terp’s reticence, even though the layers of his scarf and sunglasses concealed his face. But he finally spoke to the men in Arabic, translating what the MPRI guy had said. A low rumble passed through their ranks and they stood up from the semicircle as one, fast enough to kick up clouds of dust in the MPRI man’s face.
“Where are they going?” The contractor was red-faced, confused.
The terp himself was near-livid, his hatchet nose looking now even sharper, as if pointed in accusatory fashion toward the man he addressed. “You cannot call men dogs in Iraq.”
Here in the West we see dogs as our companions, “Man’s best friend,” as the old saying goes. We not only like them, but love them, aside from some feral and stray canines. In Iraq (and possibly through large swaths of the Middle East) a dog is the lowest animal, something without dignity and lacking in all the qualities the people of the Levant codified, at least at the cultural level (it’s been awhile since I’ve read the Koran).
I hear you saying that the pig is a lower animal to these people, but that’s not quite true, as it’s so low that it’s regarded almost as a supernatural sort of demon, uneatable for the same reason that those who regard the Snake in the Garden of Eden as the literal manifestation of evil might not be keen to try rattlesnake even at their most adventurous. They would no doubt regard the eating of dogs (as done in some parts of Asia) as revolting, but more as a gustatory violation than a spiritual one. They also find our attachment to our dogs (especially allowing them in the houses and even sometimes in beds) unseemly, sort of like most Westerners might tolerate their friend playing with their iguana or boa constrictor but still look askance at it.
Ultimately my point (if I have one) is that you need to not only put in the time necessary to learn a language, but you must also be willing and able to have that moment that Armand Hammer experienced, or the one that the MPRI contractor had there in the desert when the Jundi left in a huff, kicking up dust as they went. You have to be prepared for that moment when you realize that the theory and drilling didn’t properly prepare you for the practice, and the pain that comes with it.
“Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the nose,” as Iron Mike Tyson used to say. Or until they open their mouth, try to speak a new language they’ve been practicing, and see the man across from them squinting in confusion. Or even worse, smiling.
If by “learn a language,” they mean to get the rudiments that will allow one to tell waiters what they want from the menu, or where they want a cabdriver to take them, I’d say between three and six months (for most languages). If you want to be able to read a philosophic tome in your second language, and debate its merits in that language with a professor without making a bunch of grammatic errors, maybe you need ten years. Or maybe never.
I know, for instance, people who’ve been in their adopted countries for decades and continue to use idiomatic sentence constructions from their native language, in their second language. When you hear someone saying something awkward (or even wrong) in your language, it’s because they’re phrasing things according to the structure of their own language rather than yours, even though they know your language. You’ve no doubt heard someone (usually French) casting about for a word in English, who stumbles and says, “How you say…?”
“How you say?” is actually how one says, “How does one say?” in other languages. In German “Wie sagt man” literally means “How says one?”
Of all the impediments to fluency, I’m convinced that the main one is the fear of humiliation that comes with any interaction with a native speaker. Sometimes the person might not be malicious, or reveling in your mistakes (although if you’re an American abroad who looks like a tourist, they might view your ineptitude with the language as some sort of innate American characteristic that also makes us prone to getting fat and starting wars).
The industrialist Armand Hammer related in his autobiography that he desperately wanted to learn Russian (he was selling imported American grain to Lenin during the NEP years). Hammer was a morally unscrupulous man (to put it charitably) but he was quite savvy, brilliant in fact, and nothing if not tenacious.
Thus he committed himself to learning one-hundred new Russian words per day for one year. Finally, when it came time to speak in a factory before an assembled throng of Russian workers, he gave an impassioned speech, in Russian. There was much cheering when he was done. And the titan beamed, grinning from ear-to-ear. He then added sheepishly, “I apologize for any mistakes I made. My Russian is not good.”
One of the Russian functionaries furrowed his brow, stroked his Van Dyke beard, and said, “We thought you were speaking in English.”
Such incidents have to be dispiriting.
Sometimes they’re funny, though. Like with my German professor in college, who invited one of the exchange students to stand up for a moment from her desk. The teacher addressed us, while Sonja (that was the girl’s name) looked at the floor, her bangs in her eyes. She was obviously a bit shy. “Sonja speaks perfect German and English. So if you need help, stop her in the hall and take advantage of her.”
There was an awkward silence in the room. My professor, who was a feminist, no doubt wouldn’t have enjoyed the fact that she’d unintentionally told us to perhaps sexually harass one of her female students between classes.
You can also really piss people off without meaning to do so when trying to speak another language. While I was in the Army, deployed to Iraq for a year, I was on a small base, a joint operation where a lot of MPRI guys were working. MPRI were a less friendly Blackwater, a rough outfit of contractors who wore black umpire hats and khaki outfits, and spent most of their days training the Jundi (Iraqi soldiers) with various weapons.
One day I was walking the rocky grounds of that sunbaked complex, when I saw an MPRI guy sitting in a semicircle with several Jundi in their chocolate chip desert fatigues and red berets. They were going through some block of instruction on a new weapon system. There was also a terp there (as they called the interpreters) wearing a red and white checkered keffiyeh and a pair of Oakley sunglasses. The trainer looked up at the terp and said, “Tell them not to worry about putting the belt in the feeding tray. It’s so easy my dog could do it.”
The interpreter hesitated, shifted from foot to foot in his suede desert boots. “I don’t know.”
“Go ahead.”
I could feel the terp’s reticence, even though the layers of his scarf and sunglasses concealed his face. But he finally spoke to the men in Arabic, translating what the MPRI guy had said. A low rumble passed through their ranks and they stood up from the semicircle as one, fast enough to kick up clouds of dust in the MPRI man’s face.
“Where are they going?” The contractor was red-faced, confused.
The terp himself was near-livid, his hatchet nose looking now even sharper, as if pointed in accusatory fashion toward the man he addressed. “You cannot call men dogs in Iraq.”
Here in the West we see dogs as our companions, “Man’s best friend,” as the old saying goes. We not only like them, but love them, aside from some feral and stray canines. In Iraq (and possibly through large swaths of the Middle East) a dog is the lowest animal, something without dignity and lacking in all the qualities the people of the Levant codified, at least at the cultural level (it’s been awhile since I’ve read the Koran).
I hear you saying that the pig is a lower animal to these people, but that’s not quite true, as it’s so low that it’s regarded almost as a supernatural sort of demon, uneatable for the same reason that those who regard the Snake in the Garden of Eden as the literal manifestation of evil might not be keen to try rattlesnake even at their most adventurous. They would no doubt regard the eating of dogs (as done in some parts of Asia) as revolting, but more as a gustatory violation than a spiritual one. They also find our attachment to our dogs (especially allowing them in the houses and even sometimes in beds) unseemly, sort of like most Westerners might tolerate their friend playing with their iguana or boa constrictor but still look askance at it.
Ultimately my point (if I have one) is that you need to not only put in the time necessary to learn a language, but you must also be willing and able to have that moment that Armand Hammer experienced, or the one that the MPRI contractor had there in the desert when the Jundi left in a huff, kicking up dust as they went. You have to be prepared for that moment when you realize that the theory and drilling didn’t properly prepare you for the practice, and the pain that comes with it.
“Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the nose,” as Iron Mike Tyson used to say. Or until they open their mouth, try to speak a new language they’ve been practicing, and see the man across from them squinting in confusion. Or even worse, smiling.
The Danger of Learning a New Language
I speak two languages, German and English, which I suppose is not bad for an Anglo-American. I am learning Spanish now, which, if I succeed, will make me a trilingual. Someone once told me American trilinguals are a rare species. The old gag by comedian Eddie Izzard is that the Dutch speak five languages while being stoned out of their gourds on hashish, which should shame a sober Ami (as the Germans call us).
Bilingualism is hard enough on this poor noggin, but now that I’ve added (some) Spanish to the memory bank, I can feel my brain reaching not for a binary bin of index cards separated into two files, but cycling through a system of options. I’ll translate something from English to German in my brain, and then to Spanish, and then reverse the process, and invariably at some point, like a novice juggler, it will all come tumbling down and I’ll say “Shit” (or “Scheiße,” which is German for “shit.”).
I remember when I was stationed in Germany in the Army, and my friend’s Dominican girlfriend asked me, “Hablas Español?”
“Ja,” I said, which made her laugh. She’d asked me if I spoke Spanish and I’d answered “Yes,” except in German.
Why is it so hard for Americans to learn other languages? We know the standard reason, which is not without merit. Here it is in Hebrew:
אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט
Or, in English:
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
The English conquered the seas, and thereby most of the world, and then this order of things was reshuffled after a couple of World Wars in a way that gave another English-speaking nation unrivaled global power (America this time). Throw in a massive technological upheaval on a scale with the Industrial Revolution that took place in California (also located in the United States) and English wins by default. I’ve heard, but don’t know that when a Japanese pilot is speaking with the tower at a Korean airport, both parties speak English. I’ve also heard that English is practical and spare compared to other languages, less concerned with granular differences in various concepts (we don’t have twenty-five words for snow) and our words are ungendered except in a literal sense.
If someone has no choice but to do something, they will get better at it than someone who has the option of either doing something or not doing it. And learning anything but English is, in a lot of international commerce, an option.
To cite one example of this principle, many years ago trained soldiers could load and discharge a musket at a rate that is very hard to replicate under real-time conditions today, even by small arms experts. And this is because even if you’ve never handled a machinegun, your senses somehow know that your life does not and will not depend on loading and firing a musket quickly to stop an advance of gray-backs or butternut Johnny Rebs on the charge, and so your mind is not compelled to learn.
Someone whose land has been colonized by fat white people, whose daily income depends on being able to steer business his or her way and ingratiate customers (say, for a cabdriver or a prostitute), will pick up the language pretty fast. The (usually-white) American, used to being deferred to, catered to and given a patronizing deference, probably doesn’t even suspect that when the cabbie gets on the horn with his dispatcher or the prostitute shouts something to another prostitute across the hall that they may be talking about the fat American in the fanny pack and Hawaiian shirt, and that what they’re saying might not be a compliment.
And the American is not much troubled by this. The thinking is, Let them hate so long as they fear, expressed also by William Burroughs in his book Queer about living the expat life in Mexico thusly: “I don’t mind people hating me. It’s what they’re in a position to do about it.”
Or expressed even more simply: Talk all the shit about me you want. I can’t understand you.
And yet the willful ignorance (or at least resistance) does not always flow from some collective font of geopolitical power. A stubborn refusal to learn the language of the conqueror, or at least the powerful foe, can also manifest itself among peoples who haven’t conquered the seas and the skies.
Roberto Duran, for instance, one of my favorite boxers of all-time, made it a point not to learn or speak English, except for a few words, which he delivered to the wife of “Sugar” Ray Leonard before their first fight. Duran, known as “Manos de Piedras” (Hands of Stone, or Stone Hands, depending on how you translate genitive constructs), once described as looking like a cross between Che Guevara and Charles Manson, fixed Madame Leonard with his black eyes and reportedly said, “Tell your husband I kill him.”
One of the happiest days in Duran’s life according to multiple accounts was when the Torrijos–Carter Treaties went through and the Panama Canal was once again in the hands of the people of the Isthmus and no longer a possession of the imperial Yankee swine.
Senator Manny Pacquiao, another great boxer and probably the most famous and beloved Filipino in his nation’s history, has spent many years in America, training and fighting, and working alongside master coach Freddie Roach, and yet he still struggles to string a sentence together in English. A tweet from Manny’s account a million years ago addresses the topic: “Tyong lhat pinoy ang slita ntin ay tgalog we should use our language we’re nt american, jpan,chna,atbp. They’re using there own language…We should proud in our language that’s the real pinoy yan ang tama thank you God Bless everyone.”
I don’t have a twitter account so someone else will have to go back and either authenticate or disprove the origin of the tweet, if they care that much.
But for our purposes, the relevant question emerges: Is there an inverse correlation between one’s pride or chauvinism in their own culture & language and their resistance to learning another language?
Returning to William Burroughs, can his assertion that there is a force within each of us not working to our advantage be applied to the learning of languages? Might we fear the entrance into our minds of another language, as if it were a form of conquest or some sort of diluting of the psychic stock or purity of the mind that comes with being a monoglot? No one wants to admit to being bigoted, or even acknowledge unconscious biases, but putting aside moral evaluations, is anything lost or altered when we become bi- or trilingual?
We’ve all been marinated in a culture that tells us knowledge is power and education is key (and I’m starting to think a lot of this has been done just to justify the out-of-control student loan ecosystem, which has turned education into one big hustle-cum-bubble), but I think at some level we fear what education may strip away from us, what vital élan will be dissolved or diluted when poisoned by total acceptance of the Other. We attempt to assimilate the Other, and the Other devours us, or at least that’s the fear.
You encounter this quandary a lot in black thought from W.E.B DuBois to James Baldwin all the way forward in time to a pale manqué of such men, like a Ta-Nehisi Coates. This charge of “acting white” was for the most part an “in-house” running conversation between various black intellectuals until comedian Bill Cosby started grumbling and set off a firestorm that brought even the first black president into the conflagration (with perennial candidate and seatbelt advocate Ralph Nader accusing Obama at one point of “talking white”).
Sticking with the subject of race and power vis-à-vis language, even if you hated someone, and actually especially if you hated them, you could do much worse than to learn their language. The asymmetry that comes from being forced to learn the mores, customs, and habits of those who are more powerful than you (people, to whom, you, incidentally, are invisible) is what has made asymmetrical, Fabian-like victories possible since the time of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus himself.
How many American GIs in Indochina, some probably high-ranking, blathered about sensitive information while receiving a shave from a barber who, while invisible to them, happened to have a pair of functioning ears and also moonlighted as a Vietcong irregular by night? Similar-themed narratives from servants feigning docility and ignorance while secretly observing the foibles, hypocrisy, and degeneracy of their masters are staples of slave stories.
Note, that I am not honing my German or learning Spanish on a daily basis in order to conquer swaths of Western Europe or Latin America as a guerilla fighter under the guise of a domestic servant or barber. I’m doing it because I find it intellectually stimulating, fun, and challenging. Plus with all the resources available to us today, one really doesn’t have an excuse not to at least learn another language. One could easily become bilingual via YouTube alone, devoting probably half as much time to the effort as most people spend on searching for porn or keeping up with baseball box scores.
That said, if I were in public and perceived as an American (ugly, quiet, or otherwise), and were a conversation to start up within earshot in a language which the speakers assumed I didn’t understand, yeah I might play dumb, keep my mouth closed and my ears open and maybe get a chance to hear something I might not have otherwise heard. Maybe even something I wish I hadn’t heard.
Bilingualism is hard enough on this poor noggin, but now that I’ve added (some) Spanish to the memory bank, I can feel my brain reaching not for a binary bin of index cards separated into two files, but cycling through a system of options. I’ll translate something from English to German in my brain, and then to Spanish, and then reverse the process, and invariably at some point, like a novice juggler, it will all come tumbling down and I’ll say “Shit” (or “Scheiße,” which is German for “shit.”).
I remember when I was stationed in Germany in the Army, and my friend’s Dominican girlfriend asked me, “Hablas Español?”
“Ja,” I said, which made her laugh. She’d asked me if I spoke Spanish and I’d answered “Yes,” except in German.
Why is it so hard for Americans to learn other languages? We know the standard reason, which is not without merit. Here it is in Hebrew:
אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמיי און פֿלאָט
Or, in English:
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
The English conquered the seas, and thereby most of the world, and then this order of things was reshuffled after a couple of World Wars in a way that gave another English-speaking nation unrivaled global power (America this time). Throw in a massive technological upheaval on a scale with the Industrial Revolution that took place in California (also located in the United States) and English wins by default. I’ve heard, but don’t know that when a Japanese pilot is speaking with the tower at a Korean airport, both parties speak English. I’ve also heard that English is practical and spare compared to other languages, less concerned with granular differences in various concepts (we don’t have twenty-five words for snow) and our words are ungendered except in a literal sense.
If someone has no choice but to do something, they will get better at it than someone who has the option of either doing something or not doing it. And learning anything but English is, in a lot of international commerce, an option.
To cite one example of this principle, many years ago trained soldiers could load and discharge a musket at a rate that is very hard to replicate under real-time conditions today, even by small arms experts. And this is because even if you’ve never handled a machinegun, your senses somehow know that your life does not and will not depend on loading and firing a musket quickly to stop an advance of gray-backs or butternut Johnny Rebs on the charge, and so your mind is not compelled to learn.
Someone whose land has been colonized by fat white people, whose daily income depends on being able to steer business his or her way and ingratiate customers (say, for a cabdriver or a prostitute), will pick up the language pretty fast. The (usually-white) American, used to being deferred to, catered to and given a patronizing deference, probably doesn’t even suspect that when the cabbie gets on the horn with his dispatcher or the prostitute shouts something to another prostitute across the hall that they may be talking about the fat American in the fanny pack and Hawaiian shirt, and that what they’re saying might not be a compliment.
And the American is not much troubled by this. The thinking is, Let them hate so long as they fear, expressed also by William Burroughs in his book Queer about living the expat life in Mexico thusly: “I don’t mind people hating me. It’s what they’re in a position to do about it.”
Or expressed even more simply: Talk all the shit about me you want. I can’t understand you.
And yet the willful ignorance (or at least resistance) does not always flow from some collective font of geopolitical power. A stubborn refusal to learn the language of the conqueror, or at least the powerful foe, can also manifest itself among peoples who haven’t conquered the seas and the skies.
Roberto Duran, for instance, one of my favorite boxers of all-time, made it a point not to learn or speak English, except for a few words, which he delivered to the wife of “Sugar” Ray Leonard before their first fight. Duran, known as “Manos de Piedras” (Hands of Stone, or Stone Hands, depending on how you translate genitive constructs), once described as looking like a cross between Che Guevara and Charles Manson, fixed Madame Leonard with his black eyes and reportedly said, “Tell your husband I kill him.”
One of the happiest days in Duran’s life according to multiple accounts was when the Torrijos–Carter Treaties went through and the Panama Canal was once again in the hands of the people of the Isthmus and no longer a possession of the imperial Yankee swine.
Senator Manny Pacquiao, another great boxer and probably the most famous and beloved Filipino in his nation’s history, has spent many years in America, training and fighting, and working alongside master coach Freddie Roach, and yet he still struggles to string a sentence together in English. A tweet from Manny’s account a million years ago addresses the topic: “Tyong lhat pinoy ang slita ntin ay tgalog we should use our language we’re nt american, jpan,chna,atbp. They’re using there own language…We should proud in our language that’s the real pinoy yan ang tama thank you God Bless everyone.”
I don’t have a twitter account so someone else will have to go back and either authenticate or disprove the origin of the tweet, if they care that much.
But for our purposes, the relevant question emerges: Is there an inverse correlation between one’s pride or chauvinism in their own culture & language and their resistance to learning another language?
Returning to William Burroughs, can his assertion that there is a force within each of us not working to our advantage be applied to the learning of languages? Might we fear the entrance into our minds of another language, as if it were a form of conquest or some sort of diluting of the psychic stock or purity of the mind that comes with being a monoglot? No one wants to admit to being bigoted, or even acknowledge unconscious biases, but putting aside moral evaluations, is anything lost or altered when we become bi- or trilingual?
We’ve all been marinated in a culture that tells us knowledge is power and education is key (and I’m starting to think a lot of this has been done just to justify the out-of-control student loan ecosystem, which has turned education into one big hustle-cum-bubble), but I think at some level we fear what education may strip away from us, what vital élan will be dissolved or diluted when poisoned by total acceptance of the Other. We attempt to assimilate the Other, and the Other devours us, or at least that’s the fear.
You encounter this quandary a lot in black thought from W.E.B DuBois to James Baldwin all the way forward in time to a pale manqué of such men, like a Ta-Nehisi Coates. This charge of “acting white” was for the most part an “in-house” running conversation between various black intellectuals until comedian Bill Cosby started grumbling and set off a firestorm that brought even the first black president into the conflagration (with perennial candidate and seatbelt advocate Ralph Nader accusing Obama at one point of “talking white”).
Sticking with the subject of race and power vis-à-vis language, even if you hated someone, and actually especially if you hated them, you could do much worse than to learn their language. The asymmetry that comes from being forced to learn the mores, customs, and habits of those who are more powerful than you (people, to whom, you, incidentally, are invisible) is what has made asymmetrical, Fabian-like victories possible since the time of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus himself.
How many American GIs in Indochina, some probably high-ranking, blathered about sensitive information while receiving a shave from a barber who, while invisible to them, happened to have a pair of functioning ears and also moonlighted as a Vietcong irregular by night? Similar-themed narratives from servants feigning docility and ignorance while secretly observing the foibles, hypocrisy, and degeneracy of their masters are staples of slave stories.
Note, that I am not honing my German or learning Spanish on a daily basis in order to conquer swaths of Western Europe or Latin America as a guerilla fighter under the guise of a domestic servant or barber. I’m doing it because I find it intellectually stimulating, fun, and challenging. Plus with all the resources available to us today, one really doesn’t have an excuse not to at least learn another language. One could easily become bilingual via YouTube alone, devoting probably half as much time to the effort as most people spend on searching for porn or keeping up with baseball box scores.
That said, if I were in public and perceived as an American (ugly, quiet, or otherwise), and were a conversation to start up within earshot in a language which the speakers assumed I didn’t understand, yeah I might play dumb, keep my mouth closed and my ears open and maybe get a chance to hear something I might not have otherwise heard. Maybe even something I wish I hadn’t heard.
Euphony, Cacophony, and the Crying Baby
Euphony is the opposite of cacophony, and it’s a word you hear a lot less often. Why is that? The reason, I think, is simple. When something sounds bad, or at least discordant (not quite the same thing), you notice it; it sticks out. When something sounds good, when it works aesthetically, yes it can draw your ear, but in most cases, because it works you don’t really notice it. We notice a lot more cacophonous than euphonious sounds.
I read something awhile back (I can’t remember where) about an experiment in which both Polish and English babies were placed side-by-side, and each group was played sentences from the other’s language. The Polish babies were exposed to people speaking English sentences that were correctly spoken and those which were in some way wrong (grammatically, syntactically), and vice versa.
The researchers found that when the babies of English-speaking parents heard an incorrect Polish sentence, they would cry or otherwise register displeasure or confusion. The Polish babies would also whine and cry when they heard incorrectly spoken English sentences.
Babies, of course, cry quite a lot for reasons that have nothing to do with their quest for bilingual perfectionism; they are still working on mastering monolingualism, after all. But I think the point of the exercise was to show that babies had an instinctive capacity to know which sentences sounded right and which ones didn’t; that this was innate, and that in some ways learning a language was the process of selecting which sounds to listen to and which ones to filter out.
My guess is if you were to play the same sentences for the parents of these children (or for these same children as adults), they would not register disgust or frustration at hearing incorrectly spoken sentences in the foreign tongue. Not only would they not cry or whine (being adults) but they would barely listen to the sentences in the foreign tongue. They wouldn’t be able to listen at first; it would not so much have no scansion, as it would reach their ears the way the voices of adults struck the children in the Peanuts cartoons of Charles Schulz, like someone blowing into a trombone with a mute in a bell.
Part of language acquisition (whether you think it’s instinctive or social or some combination of the two) is learning not just which sounds to pay attention to, but which to ignore. Those factory-direct babies not only lacked the capacity to listen only or especially to those speaking their own language; they were still listening to everything as well as learning to navigate their four other senses, working their way through an unfiltered and intense miasma of light and sound and smells that only synesthetics experience as adults.
But still, even for the adults in body and mind, there is a time and a place to recall that childhood sensory array; not in logjam traffic on the highway, but maybe lakeside on a Sunday afternoon.
Returning to language, Charles Baudelaire once said that “genius is childhood recaptured at will.” Foreign language acquisition is, I think, the mind (and ears) of a newborn recaptured through hard work and a lot of listening.
Let me give you an example.
A few years back I was at a convenience store here in America with my girlfriend who was from Germany. We were speaking in German (she spoke it better than English) and the cashier, an older woman, said, “It just sounds like ‘choka choka choka’ to me” (I can’t remember the exact “bar-bar”/”blah-blah” onomatopoeia she used).
German definitely sounded like that to me when I first tried to learn it, just a bunch of fricatives punctuated by plosive pops and a lot of guttural, umlaut-laden low troughs (more Bavarian alphorn than trombone with a mute in the bell), as well as throat clearing sounds to rival the perorations of a Klingon rabbi.
But now, after years of much reading and writing in German, after speaking it and listening to it for so long, German does not sound like anything to me. I just pick up the information being conveyed by the speaker. Varying degrees of effort are required of course, some difference in listening to a meteorologist versus listening to someone recite an expressionist poem.
I have not learned anything so much as I have become able to hear things I previously tuned out because I had no need to learn about them, or curiosity about them.
You can apply this idea of the crying baby to aesthetics as much as to linguistics, attuning the ear and the eye better to what works and what doesn’t, what sentences or words or colors or sounds would piss off the ward full of babies and which ones are sonorous and would thus leave them cooing.
Some science fiction writer (I think Ray Bradbury) had a story about some adults who wish to be children again, thinking that, once granted their wish, they would once more step back into a world of innocence and encharmed magic.
They get their wish be kids again, but end up doubled over in fear, overwhelmed in the swell of emotions washing over them. I imagine that if this wish were actually granted to someone, they would not just experience emotional turmoil, but true sensory overload, a kind of perverse instantiation that could give a genus malus a chance to really roll up his sleeves and go to town when a credulous and greedy human rubbed his lamp and asked to “be a kid again”.
I don’t know about you, but the emotions that I have, especially the deeply imbedded ones that go back to childhood, feel dulled these days, like echoes of what they once were. And I don’t exactly bemoan this state all the time, since I cannot afford to feel anything now as deeply as I did back then. And I mean “afford” literally. If I enjoyed playing in a pile of leaves or watching ants crawl today as much as I did thirty years ago, I might find it fun for a while but I would also probably end my days homeless in a park, prodding ant colonies with twigs and stuffing dead leaves into my pants (I may still end up doing that, actually).
Returning to the subject of this meandering blog entry, the goal should not just be to seek out euphonia and eschew cacophony.
An overflow of euphony can become treacly, the harmonious sounds somehow eventually becoming grating, simply because writing must be varied, modulated, and some contrast must be displayed to heighten the sonorous, leavening it with the dissonant. Call it linguistic chiaroscuro, if you like painting metaphors. Call it the “changeup,” if you like baseball.
“The slick polish grates,” as I think the writer Charles Bukowski once said (though I think some of his detractors might argue that Buk could have stood with some polish, assuming he didn’t try to drink it).
My ultimate point here is that there is some paradox involved in the effort of learning what sounds good, what works, since what works by its very nature doesn’t draw attention to itself, and is therefore harder to notice (let alone study) than what doesn’t work.
But it’s still there, waiting to be heard and learned, spoken and wri
I read something awhile back (I can’t remember where) about an experiment in which both Polish and English babies were placed side-by-side, and each group was played sentences from the other’s language. The Polish babies were exposed to people speaking English sentences that were correctly spoken and those which were in some way wrong (grammatically, syntactically), and vice versa.
The researchers found that when the babies of English-speaking parents heard an incorrect Polish sentence, they would cry or otherwise register displeasure or confusion. The Polish babies would also whine and cry when they heard incorrectly spoken English sentences.
Babies, of course, cry quite a lot for reasons that have nothing to do with their quest for bilingual perfectionism; they are still working on mastering monolingualism, after all. But I think the point of the exercise was to show that babies had an instinctive capacity to know which sentences sounded right and which ones didn’t; that this was innate, and that in some ways learning a language was the process of selecting which sounds to listen to and which ones to filter out.
My guess is if you were to play the same sentences for the parents of these children (or for these same children as adults), they would not register disgust or frustration at hearing incorrectly spoken sentences in the foreign tongue. Not only would they not cry or whine (being adults) but they would barely listen to the sentences in the foreign tongue. They wouldn’t be able to listen at first; it would not so much have no scansion, as it would reach their ears the way the voices of adults struck the children in the Peanuts cartoons of Charles Schulz, like someone blowing into a trombone with a mute in a bell.
Part of language acquisition (whether you think it’s instinctive or social or some combination of the two) is learning not just which sounds to pay attention to, but which to ignore. Those factory-direct babies not only lacked the capacity to listen only or especially to those speaking their own language; they were still listening to everything as well as learning to navigate their four other senses, working their way through an unfiltered and intense miasma of light and sound and smells that only synesthetics experience as adults.
But still, even for the adults in body and mind, there is a time and a place to recall that childhood sensory array; not in logjam traffic on the highway, but maybe lakeside on a Sunday afternoon.
Returning to language, Charles Baudelaire once said that “genius is childhood recaptured at will.” Foreign language acquisition is, I think, the mind (and ears) of a newborn recaptured through hard work and a lot of listening.
Let me give you an example.
A few years back I was at a convenience store here in America with my girlfriend who was from Germany. We were speaking in German (she spoke it better than English) and the cashier, an older woman, said, “It just sounds like ‘choka choka choka’ to me” (I can’t remember the exact “bar-bar”/”blah-blah” onomatopoeia she used).
German definitely sounded like that to me when I first tried to learn it, just a bunch of fricatives punctuated by plosive pops and a lot of guttural, umlaut-laden low troughs (more Bavarian alphorn than trombone with a mute in the bell), as well as throat clearing sounds to rival the perorations of a Klingon rabbi.
But now, after years of much reading and writing in German, after speaking it and listening to it for so long, German does not sound like anything to me. I just pick up the information being conveyed by the speaker. Varying degrees of effort are required of course, some difference in listening to a meteorologist versus listening to someone recite an expressionist poem.
I have not learned anything so much as I have become able to hear things I previously tuned out because I had no need to learn about them, or curiosity about them.
You can apply this idea of the crying baby to aesthetics as much as to linguistics, attuning the ear and the eye better to what works and what doesn’t, what sentences or words or colors or sounds would piss off the ward full of babies and which ones are sonorous and would thus leave them cooing.
Some science fiction writer (I think Ray Bradbury) had a story about some adults who wish to be children again, thinking that, once granted their wish, they would once more step back into a world of innocence and encharmed magic.
They get their wish be kids again, but end up doubled over in fear, overwhelmed in the swell of emotions washing over them. I imagine that if this wish were actually granted to someone, they would not just experience emotional turmoil, but true sensory overload, a kind of perverse instantiation that could give a genus malus a chance to really roll up his sleeves and go to town when a credulous and greedy human rubbed his lamp and asked to “be a kid again”.
I don’t know about you, but the emotions that I have, especially the deeply imbedded ones that go back to childhood, feel dulled these days, like echoes of what they once were. And I don’t exactly bemoan this state all the time, since I cannot afford to feel anything now as deeply as I did back then. And I mean “afford” literally. If I enjoyed playing in a pile of leaves or watching ants crawl today as much as I did thirty years ago, I might find it fun for a while but I would also probably end my days homeless in a park, prodding ant colonies with twigs and stuffing dead leaves into my pants (I may still end up doing that, actually).
Returning to the subject of this meandering blog entry, the goal should not just be to seek out euphonia and eschew cacophony.
An overflow of euphony can become treacly, the harmonious sounds somehow eventually becoming grating, simply because writing must be varied, modulated, and some contrast must be displayed to heighten the sonorous, leavening it with the dissonant. Call it linguistic chiaroscuro, if you like painting metaphors. Call it the “changeup,” if you like baseball.
“The slick polish grates,” as I think the writer Charles Bukowski once said (though I think some of his detractors might argue that Buk could have stood with some polish, assuming he didn’t try to drink it).
My ultimate point here is that there is some paradox involved in the effort of learning what sounds good, what works, since what works by its very nature doesn’t draw attention to itself, and is therefore harder to notice (let alone study) than what doesn’t work.
But it’s still there, waiting to be heard and learned, spoken and wri
The Blind Ride the Light Beam; Or, Needing Words to See?
Lately I’ve been reading an old, but-still-relevant book on cognitive science, Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. To give a brutally brief summation here, his argument is that language (the thing I’m using to write) does not give the mind its structure. The mind has its own language and rules for that language—syntax—and all the languages we see in the world are products of this thing in the brain. The linguist Noam Chomsky called this thing the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Contained within the LAD is the Language of Thought (LOT), a term coined by cognitive scientist and philosopher Jeremy Fodor. Think of the LAD as the hardware and the LOT as the software program, and you’re in the neighborhood.
Pinker doesn’t really have a beef with either Chomsky or Fodor. He simply thinks that evolutionary theory can explain more of the workings of this hardware and software than Chomsky seems to think. There’s a smidgen of lese-majesté directed at Chomsky in the book, but that’s mostly Pinker taking umbrage at how inaccessible Chomsky’s work on grammar is to the layman.
Pinker, like, Malcolm Gladwell or Ben Bova, shrinks down big concepts so that you can get a reasonable grasp on them during a single plane ride. You also won’t annoy fellow passengers by spreading out a bunch of notebooks and bulky texts on your tray table trying to grasp the concepts.
In the book, Pinker is careful to qualify his assertions, and to admit that the mind is not only an incredibly complex organ but a dynamic one. New pathways can be lain down and old connections can grow weaker. Functions supposedly handled by one hemisphere of the brain can involve other regions inexplicably—contra not only received wisdom, but hard neuroscientific data. Such inexplicable “teamwork” and sharing of function has been observed in everything from PET scans to MRIs to experiments involving those head electrode stickeys attached to skullcaps that look like colanders. The brain has over one-hundred million neurons and over one-hundred trillion potential synaptic connections, which is greater than the number of stars in the Milky Way.
This means that we don’t just have a long way to go in understanding the human brain. It means, rather, that we will probably never understand it completely, because it continues to change. It lacks unlimited space to expand and is not flatly Euclidean like our universe (probably), but it still an infinity unto itself. Everything from air pollution to digital pollution has an effect on it as well; there is some evidence, in fact, that constant cellphone and internet use has thinned the myelin sheaths of our brains, especially those of young people.
Pick up a book written by someone in the 19th century and one by someone in the 21st century. More than likely you will observe massive differences in the lengths of sentences and sizes of paragraphs. It is a long fall from Marcel Proust to Chuck Palahniuk (no offense to the author of Fight Club.)
That the brain and the world interact makes it hard to say which exerts the greater effect on the other, at least where language is concerned. The baby’s brain begins to form around the third week of fetal gestation—which gives the brain a head start. But it’s only a matter of months until that baby is delivered and is immediately bombarded with words from its mother, the doctor, and nurses.
Another issue with trying to unriddle this chicken-egg relationship between the brain’s language and literal language is the variability in how human brains work. Think of any time your doctor or someone else gives you some new information they want you to assimilate. Remember that form they give you, which asks for your preferred learning style. Would you learn better with visual aids or with a written description?
For those of us who are word-obsessed, the picture is best seen in the words. Yes, as paradoxical as it sounds, I see pictures in words better than I see them in pictures.
I don’t think I’m the only one with such a predilection. It’s a fine line between bibliophilia and bibliomania. In an early poem Charles Bukowski cautioned, “Beware those always reading books,” and maybe he had a point. Maybe there is something wrong with people like me who need words to see.
I imagine there are also people with the inverse problem, too. I’d hazard there’s more than one autodidactic auto mechanic (say that phrase three times fast) who’s illiterate but can fix your car, no trouble. Let him look under your hood and you’re going to get much further than you would with me reading a troubleshooting manual to you. Even if that manual is comprehensive and written by a master. The map is not the territory and a 2D diagram is not a three-dimensional engine.
The director Tim Burton says that when he was first offered the Batman film, he balked, claiming that he hated comics as a kid. He didn’t know the order in which to read the narrative boxes and thought bubbles. I, being the weirdo I was (and am) would usually only read the words, getting the images from them. I’d be halfway through turning the page when a little voice in the back of my head would scream Go back and look at the pictures! Someone spent a lot of time on drawing them, inking, and coloring them.
We’re all maybe slightly synesthetic, tasting colors or seeing music. The part that is strongest with us—the cognitive in me, the visual and conceptual in Burton—probably compensates for weaknesses elsewhere. How exactly this affects the software in our brain—the LOT—is beyond me.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that this overdeveloped “word” or “picture” muscle has no effect on the hardware—LAD, the box in which the mind’s internal language sits.
That cake is baked before we hear anyone speaking, as the baby doesn’t even have fully-formed, functioning ears until the sixteenth week, at the earliest. The brain is ready for language and pictures well before the eyes are ready to read comic book panels or stare at Batman throwing a Baterang.
For those like me, though, I think words and language are necessary not just for thought, but for true sight. And because we begin speaking very early—especially if you count a baby’s echolalic babbling—we see from pretty much the beginning. Even if we only see with words. Lack the words and perhaps you will lack the sight.
Many of the stories that support this idea are apocryphal, but that doesn’t mean they don’t contain some truth.
Recall what that man aboard Captain James Cook’s ship said in his diary about the natives ignoring the approach of the English fleet.
The myth has also been imputed to the Conquistadores who arrived on the shores of the Americas. The cuirassed men carrying their blunderbusses expected to present a shocking sight to the locals. But the people of the Americas supposedly ignored them until their ships pulled ashore. It was only after the Spaniards descended the gangplanks that the natives grew animated and curious, and the bolder of their number approached the invaders for a better look.
It wasn’t the lack of a word for ship that kept the natives from supposedly seeing the ship. It was the lack of a concept. A word doesn’t stop a people from grasping a concept, and when a language needs two or more words to describe something described in one word in the source language (SL), it’s an easily enough solved problem. The target language (TL) uses something called “kenning.” When the Vikings called the ocean “whale road,” they were kenning. When the natives made their first mistake of imbibing alcohol and dubbed it “firewater,” that was also kenning. And a tragedy.
Remember also the story of the German foundling Kaspar Hauser, who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, having supposedly been kept in cruel isolation by a sadistic warder up until then. He knew only a few phrases, like Weiß nicht (“Don’t Know”), though he could sign his name beautifully. Because there was such great cultural ferment at that time regarding human nature—the Enlightenment got to Germany later than France—Hauser became a cause célèbre.
By studying Hauser and other foundlings and feral children, it was thought key issues about culture versus inborn nature could be solved. No one in Enlightenment Europe would have been allowed to conduct the kinds of “language deprivation” experiments previous kings had tried, but opportunities like Hauser’s would provide the Stoff for similar experiments. Did humans contain deeply embedded platonic ideals—ding an sich in German—a priori of seeing such things? And would one’s senses—critiqued so critically by both Goethe and then Kant—be even further atrophied by such isolation?
Hauser’s custodians kept careful notes of his progress and setbacks—the Germans call these fastidious records Protokolle—which give us some clues about inborn versus socialized nature. What they learned about language was especially important, assuming, that is, you accept Der Protokoll at face value. There are those, for instance, who maintain the entirety of Hauser’s story was a hoax, and others who claim it was something much graver, part of a royal conspiracy to disinherit a potential usurper to the throne.
Let’s put all that aside, though, and give what’s recorded and relevant a closer, hermeneutic reading:
Early in Hauser’s stay among the Nürnberger, he was given a room with a beautiful view, as an act of kindness. But much to the dismay of his benefactors, when he looked outside, at the leafy lindens and flowing creek, he howled as if in pain. And because he had not yet learned to talk, he couldn’t even explain what had disturbed him so. Why had he reacted with such horror to such simple and natural beauty? Even Friedrich Hölderlin, the Romantic poet—plagued with schizophrenia and confined to a garret—enjoyed looking out his window when not composing.
Had it been a simple matter of sensory overload for Hauser, after the many years of deprivation?
Someone got the chance to ask him about this harrowing incident after he learned to speak, and it appeared in eine der Protokolle. Sadly, I can’t find the book in which I first read it, but will try to recreate a paraphrased approximation.
Why did you shout so at the beauty? they asked.
To which Hauser responded, I did not have the words yet, so I could not see the trees or the water or the birds. It was all a whir of vertiginous color.
This being unable to “see the trees” sounds quite a bit like our old proverbial saw about “not seeing the forest for the trees.” This idiom even has its own neurological corollary. It’s rare as hell and an ungainly word to boot, but here it is: Simultanagnosia. It’s literally defined as the inability to see more than one object at a time.
Incidentally, the German idiom for “forest for the trees,” is “den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht sehen...” Adding the modal infinitive “zu können” (just to give us a healthier fragment) would make the Redewendung (turn of phrase): “den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht sehen zu können.” In English, this would translate as “to be unable to see the forest before the loud trees.”
The dative preposition vor could also be translated as “from.” Likewise could “laut” be translated in a more figurative sense (like we would describe a shirt patterned with palm trees and flamingos as “loud”.)
I personally prefer to see those trees as literally screaming, though. Wasn’t there an old rock band called The Screaming Trees?
If all this sounds like incredibly weak sauce to you, barely science (even social science) consider that we have proof of our own blindness to reality before us.
We needn’t feel the anthropologist’s cultural relativist guilt over patronizing the aboriginals before James Cook or the Mesoamericans before Cortez. Neither should we feel too much pity for Kasper Hauser’s predicament of the lysergic color wheel that was the world before he had words to separate its elements, and thus see.
How many people were even aware of the realm we literally inhabit, spacetime, before Einstein had his epiphanous vision of running alongside a beam of light? It’s literally all around us and is announcing itself each time we take a step, Zeno-like, in any direction. There’s probably less shame in not seeing a ship (or ignoring it) or shrieking insensately before a bucolic view of the landscape outside your window, a la Kasper Hauser.
This massive perspectival shift—from three to four dimensions—is at least as great a leap as that from two dimensions to three. Assuming String Theory isn’t dead, we’ve all got at least another six dimensions to go—conquistadores, foundlings, physicists, and aboriginals all.
That’s a lot more forest, a hell of a lot more trees.
Incidentally, these massive shifts in thinking that occur in brilliant individuals then spread out to the wider culture, are described as Wendungen in German. Eine Wendung is literally a turn. Wendungen as used in philosophy refers not just to turns-of-mind, but explosions in consciousness. The jump from the tortured and flat two-dimensional paintings to those that gave a vivid sense of true perspective represent a giant Wendung / turning in arts. The leap from the unicameral, animist-integrated consciousness of primitive man to the bicameralism proposed by Julian Jaynes is also such a Wendung.
If you’re thinking that you saw that word, Wendung, previously in this blog entry when we were talking about language, you’re right. The German word for turn-of-phrase or idiom is “Redewendung,” literally “speech turning.”
Isn’t that something?
And if you’re wondering, by the way, if playing with words—Redewendungen—can accidentally lead to one of those bigger Wendungen in consciousness, wonder no more.
Read The Discovery of Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature by Bruno Snell. The poets of Attic antiquity were struggling to find ways to describe the greatness of the gods and accidentally deified themselves, discovering that writing itself was an act of creation, a panegyric to human consciousness as much as to the gods on Mount Olympus.
This led many to view the gods as figurative rather than real.
It’s a short leap from there to Nietzsche, and potentially the nihilistic end of the human project.
Whoops.
Pinker doesn’t really have a beef with either Chomsky or Fodor. He simply thinks that evolutionary theory can explain more of the workings of this hardware and software than Chomsky seems to think. There’s a smidgen of lese-majesté directed at Chomsky in the book, but that’s mostly Pinker taking umbrage at how inaccessible Chomsky’s work on grammar is to the layman.
Pinker, like, Malcolm Gladwell or Ben Bova, shrinks down big concepts so that you can get a reasonable grasp on them during a single plane ride. You also won’t annoy fellow passengers by spreading out a bunch of notebooks and bulky texts on your tray table trying to grasp the concepts.
In the book, Pinker is careful to qualify his assertions, and to admit that the mind is not only an incredibly complex organ but a dynamic one. New pathways can be lain down and old connections can grow weaker. Functions supposedly handled by one hemisphere of the brain can involve other regions inexplicably—contra not only received wisdom, but hard neuroscientific data. Such inexplicable “teamwork” and sharing of function has been observed in everything from PET scans to MRIs to experiments involving those head electrode stickeys attached to skullcaps that look like colanders. The brain has over one-hundred million neurons and over one-hundred trillion potential synaptic connections, which is greater than the number of stars in the Milky Way.
This means that we don’t just have a long way to go in understanding the human brain. It means, rather, that we will probably never understand it completely, because it continues to change. It lacks unlimited space to expand and is not flatly Euclidean like our universe (probably), but it still an infinity unto itself. Everything from air pollution to digital pollution has an effect on it as well; there is some evidence, in fact, that constant cellphone and internet use has thinned the myelin sheaths of our brains, especially those of young people.
Pick up a book written by someone in the 19th century and one by someone in the 21st century. More than likely you will observe massive differences in the lengths of sentences and sizes of paragraphs. It is a long fall from Marcel Proust to Chuck Palahniuk (no offense to the author of Fight Club.)
That the brain and the world interact makes it hard to say which exerts the greater effect on the other, at least where language is concerned. The baby’s brain begins to form around the third week of fetal gestation—which gives the brain a head start. But it’s only a matter of months until that baby is delivered and is immediately bombarded with words from its mother, the doctor, and nurses.
Another issue with trying to unriddle this chicken-egg relationship between the brain’s language and literal language is the variability in how human brains work. Think of any time your doctor or someone else gives you some new information they want you to assimilate. Remember that form they give you, which asks for your preferred learning style. Would you learn better with visual aids or with a written description?
For those of us who are word-obsessed, the picture is best seen in the words. Yes, as paradoxical as it sounds, I see pictures in words better than I see them in pictures.
I don’t think I’m the only one with such a predilection. It’s a fine line between bibliophilia and bibliomania. In an early poem Charles Bukowski cautioned, “Beware those always reading books,” and maybe he had a point. Maybe there is something wrong with people like me who need words to see.
I imagine there are also people with the inverse problem, too. I’d hazard there’s more than one autodidactic auto mechanic (say that phrase three times fast) who’s illiterate but can fix your car, no trouble. Let him look under your hood and you’re going to get much further than you would with me reading a troubleshooting manual to you. Even if that manual is comprehensive and written by a master. The map is not the territory and a 2D diagram is not a three-dimensional engine.
The director Tim Burton says that when he was first offered the Batman film, he balked, claiming that he hated comics as a kid. He didn’t know the order in which to read the narrative boxes and thought bubbles. I, being the weirdo I was (and am) would usually only read the words, getting the images from them. I’d be halfway through turning the page when a little voice in the back of my head would scream Go back and look at the pictures! Someone spent a lot of time on drawing them, inking, and coloring them.
We’re all maybe slightly synesthetic, tasting colors or seeing music. The part that is strongest with us—the cognitive in me, the visual and conceptual in Burton—probably compensates for weaknesses elsewhere. How exactly this affects the software in our brain—the LOT—is beyond me.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that this overdeveloped “word” or “picture” muscle has no effect on the hardware—LAD, the box in which the mind’s internal language sits.
That cake is baked before we hear anyone speaking, as the baby doesn’t even have fully-formed, functioning ears until the sixteenth week, at the earliest. The brain is ready for language and pictures well before the eyes are ready to read comic book panels or stare at Batman throwing a Baterang.
For those like me, though, I think words and language are necessary not just for thought, but for true sight. And because we begin speaking very early—especially if you count a baby’s echolalic babbling—we see from pretty much the beginning. Even if we only see with words. Lack the words and perhaps you will lack the sight.
Many of the stories that support this idea are apocryphal, but that doesn’t mean they don’t contain some truth.
Recall what that man aboard Captain James Cook’s ship said in his diary about the natives ignoring the approach of the English fleet.
The myth has also been imputed to the Conquistadores who arrived on the shores of the Americas. The cuirassed men carrying their blunderbusses expected to present a shocking sight to the locals. But the people of the Americas supposedly ignored them until their ships pulled ashore. It was only after the Spaniards descended the gangplanks that the natives grew animated and curious, and the bolder of their number approached the invaders for a better look.
It wasn’t the lack of a word for ship that kept the natives from supposedly seeing the ship. It was the lack of a concept. A word doesn’t stop a people from grasping a concept, and when a language needs two or more words to describe something described in one word in the source language (SL), it’s an easily enough solved problem. The target language (TL) uses something called “kenning.” When the Vikings called the ocean “whale road,” they were kenning. When the natives made their first mistake of imbibing alcohol and dubbed it “firewater,” that was also kenning. And a tragedy.
Remember also the story of the German foundling Kaspar Hauser, who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, having supposedly been kept in cruel isolation by a sadistic warder up until then. He knew only a few phrases, like Weiß nicht (“Don’t Know”), though he could sign his name beautifully. Because there was such great cultural ferment at that time regarding human nature—the Enlightenment got to Germany later than France—Hauser became a cause célèbre.
By studying Hauser and other foundlings and feral children, it was thought key issues about culture versus inborn nature could be solved. No one in Enlightenment Europe would have been allowed to conduct the kinds of “language deprivation” experiments previous kings had tried, but opportunities like Hauser’s would provide the Stoff for similar experiments. Did humans contain deeply embedded platonic ideals—ding an sich in German—a priori of seeing such things? And would one’s senses—critiqued so critically by both Goethe and then Kant—be even further atrophied by such isolation?
Hauser’s custodians kept careful notes of his progress and setbacks—the Germans call these fastidious records Protokolle—which give us some clues about inborn versus socialized nature. What they learned about language was especially important, assuming, that is, you accept Der Protokoll at face value. There are those, for instance, who maintain the entirety of Hauser’s story was a hoax, and others who claim it was something much graver, part of a royal conspiracy to disinherit a potential usurper to the throne.
Let’s put all that aside, though, and give what’s recorded and relevant a closer, hermeneutic reading:
Early in Hauser’s stay among the Nürnberger, he was given a room with a beautiful view, as an act of kindness. But much to the dismay of his benefactors, when he looked outside, at the leafy lindens and flowing creek, he howled as if in pain. And because he had not yet learned to talk, he couldn’t even explain what had disturbed him so. Why had he reacted with such horror to such simple and natural beauty? Even Friedrich Hölderlin, the Romantic poet—plagued with schizophrenia and confined to a garret—enjoyed looking out his window when not composing.
Had it been a simple matter of sensory overload for Hauser, after the many years of deprivation?
Someone got the chance to ask him about this harrowing incident after he learned to speak, and it appeared in eine der Protokolle. Sadly, I can’t find the book in which I first read it, but will try to recreate a paraphrased approximation.
Why did you shout so at the beauty? they asked.
To which Hauser responded, I did not have the words yet, so I could not see the trees or the water or the birds. It was all a whir of vertiginous color.
This being unable to “see the trees” sounds quite a bit like our old proverbial saw about “not seeing the forest for the trees.” This idiom even has its own neurological corollary. It’s rare as hell and an ungainly word to boot, but here it is: Simultanagnosia. It’s literally defined as the inability to see more than one object at a time.
Incidentally, the German idiom for “forest for the trees,” is “den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht sehen...” Adding the modal infinitive “zu können” (just to give us a healthier fragment) would make the Redewendung (turn of phrase): “den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht sehen zu können.” In English, this would translate as “to be unable to see the forest before the loud trees.”
The dative preposition vor could also be translated as “from.” Likewise could “laut” be translated in a more figurative sense (like we would describe a shirt patterned with palm trees and flamingos as “loud”.)
I personally prefer to see those trees as literally screaming, though. Wasn’t there an old rock band called The Screaming Trees?
If all this sounds like incredibly weak sauce to you, barely science (even social science) consider that we have proof of our own blindness to reality before us.
We needn’t feel the anthropologist’s cultural relativist guilt over patronizing the aboriginals before James Cook or the Mesoamericans before Cortez. Neither should we feel too much pity for Kasper Hauser’s predicament of the lysergic color wheel that was the world before he had words to separate its elements, and thus see.
How many people were even aware of the realm we literally inhabit, spacetime, before Einstein had his epiphanous vision of running alongside a beam of light? It’s literally all around us and is announcing itself each time we take a step, Zeno-like, in any direction. There’s probably less shame in not seeing a ship (or ignoring it) or shrieking insensately before a bucolic view of the landscape outside your window, a la Kasper Hauser.
This massive perspectival shift—from three to four dimensions—is at least as great a leap as that from two dimensions to three. Assuming String Theory isn’t dead, we’ve all got at least another six dimensions to go—conquistadores, foundlings, physicists, and aboriginals all.
That’s a lot more forest, a hell of a lot more trees.
Incidentally, these massive shifts in thinking that occur in brilliant individuals then spread out to the wider culture, are described as Wendungen in German. Eine Wendung is literally a turn. Wendungen as used in philosophy refers not just to turns-of-mind, but explosions in consciousness. The jump from the tortured and flat two-dimensional paintings to those that gave a vivid sense of true perspective represent a giant Wendung / turning in arts. The leap from the unicameral, animist-integrated consciousness of primitive man to the bicameralism proposed by Julian Jaynes is also such a Wendung.
If you’re thinking that you saw that word, Wendung, previously in this blog entry when we were talking about language, you’re right. The German word for turn-of-phrase or idiom is “Redewendung,” literally “speech turning.”
Isn’t that something?
And if you’re wondering, by the way, if playing with words—Redewendungen—can accidentally lead to one of those bigger Wendungen in consciousness, wonder no more.
Read The Discovery of Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature by Bruno Snell. The poets of Attic antiquity were struggling to find ways to describe the greatness of the gods and accidentally deified themselves, discovering that writing itself was an act of creation, a panegyric to human consciousness as much as to the gods on Mount Olympus.
This led many to view the gods as figurative rather than real.
It’s a short leap from there to Nietzsche, and potentially the nihilistic end of the human project.
Whoops.
