Gaston Dorren's Blog, page 10

How come Latin’s dead, but Greek lives?

In classical antiquity, Europe’s major written languages were Latin and Greek. Why is it that the former is long extinct, while the latter is still spoken?

In point of fact, neither has died, but both have changed. That’s normal, given that natural languages never remain constant very long. Over the centuries, Latin has acquired new names, whereas Greek hasn’t.

Modern Greek resembles its classical predecessor, but the differences are substantial. When today’s Greeks try to read Homer’s or Sophocles’ writings, they find it’s mostly Greek to them – or rather, it isn’t. Latin has also changed a great deal, but unlike Greek, it has done so in very different ways from one region to the next. You might say that each of the Romance languages, such as French, Portuguese and Italian, is the ‘Modern Latin’ of its own region. As with Greek, classical Latin is largely unintelligible to speakers of the modern varieties. A modern Roman can’t read Caesar.

The real contrast between Latin and Greek then is that while Latin has gone to pieces, Greek has by and large maintained its unity. How is that to be explained?

In the Late Middle Ages, Latin-speaking Western Europe saw the rise of separate states, each of which developed its own standard language, such as French and Portuguese. The Greek-speaking areas of South Eastern Europe, on the other hand, were almost uninterruptedly part of a single (albeit multilingual) empire, first Byzantine, then Ottoman. Moreover, the Greek Orthodox Church provided a strong unifying force. So it was both politics and religion that stopped the language going Latin’s way.

****

The above is my answer – translated and somewhat expanded – to a reader’s question in the Dutch popular-science magazine KIJK.

Heads up!

In my latest blogpost, I voiced my misgivings about being interviewed on radio and TV. A few days later, Alison Edwards, an Australian linguist, translator and writer living in the Netherlands, reported on some of her own media experiences. My conclusion: I’ve been lucky so far.

(Note: NRC is a major quality newspaper.)

ALISON EDWARDS

I was lining my pencils up in preparation for sharpening when the phone rang.

It was Pauw, from the talk show. That morning the NRC had run a small piece on my research. Would I be willing to come on the show and discuss it?

‘I could, I suppose’, I said. I’ve always been underwhelmed by Pauw’s hair, and besides, the last time I went on TV to talk about my research the segment was presented by a man in a snakeskin suit and I was made to comment on unwitting sexual innuendo in the use of English by ageing Dutch footballers.

In fact it wasn’t Pauw himself on the phone, but one of his minions. The content for that night wasn’t yet set in stone, but I was on the shortlist and they’d call back soon to confirm.

I hung up and passed the afternoon pacing up and…

View original post 189 more words

A very public rough draft

In the past few weeks, I’ve been on a couple of radio shows, and even on regional TV. I enjoy doing this: it produces a pleasant state of sharpened mental alertness, I am asked questions that I’m capable of answering and it stimulates book sales, which helps me make a living.

But hearing or seeing the recordings is something I abhor. And it’s not vanity about my voice or appearance, believe me: I’ve got used to what I sound and look like. What bugs me is the spontaneous and unedited nature of the lines I blurt out on these occasions. As a writer, I wouldn’t dream of imposing a first draft on innocent bystanders. An unfinished text is an ugly thing, full of banal statements, non sequiturs, clunky transitions, typos, needless repetitions. All these horrors somehow manage to keep under the radar while I’m writing.

On radio and TV, good interviewers will wipe the worst of the drivel away by asking for clarification, but even so, speaking off the cuff tends to result in babble. It’s not as if I feel that I make an exceptionally lousy job of it; most of us do likewise. To my mind, marginally coherent babble is what defines radio and television.

But – you may ask – isn’t it normal for conversations to be a bit chaotic? Surely I don’t dislike spontaneous and unedited talk among friends, do I? Yes, it is and no, I don’t. But in these informal situations, there’s no need to be done after exactly 3, 7 or however many minutes the script ordains. We can continue to talk as long as we like, until everything is clear.

Moreover, we have a pretty good idea of the other person’s views and knowledge, which simplifies matters a great deal. And we already like each other, which means that, even if the entertainment value of the conversation occasionally sags, we needn’t fear that our audience will change the channel. (In my world, at least, it’s still considered bad taste to go on Facebook in the midst of a conversation.)

All of which comes down to this: I am willing, indeed keen, to talk to radio and TV hosts, but I would very much like to rehearse these interviews a few times. Rethinking, revising, refining: that’s how I like to write. My own raw utterances make me cringe and writhe.

***

A word of welcome to all new readers of this blog! Since Lingo came out in the US, last December, the number of subscribers has nearly doubled. I try to write a new post every month, but bear with me if I don’t. I hope you’ll agree that I should give priority to my new book.

A perfect Babelfish in 2026? No way

Under the headline ‘The language barrier is about to fall’, Alec Ross in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal makes a strong claim: ‘In 10 years, a small earpiece will whisper what is being said to you in your native language nearly simultaneously as a foreign language is being spoken.’ So the Babelfish will finally spread from the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy to the real world.

But I think Ross is wrong, for four reasons.

1. The prediction has been around for over half a century without coming true. Machine translation is one of the holy grails of technological development, up there with nuclear fusion (with electricity ‘to cheap to meter’, a promise from 1954) and autonomous cars – I remember how I first heard about those in my 1970s primary school, and the idea wasn’t new even then. Of course, none of this disproves Ross’s claim, but it does justify a certain scepticism.

2. Computers have a hard time interpreting the human voice, and speech recognition software always needs a training period to get familiarised with any specific user. Under suboptimal conditions – noisy surroundings, sloppy or emotional deliverance – it has even more trouble converting our sounds into words. On the other hand, this technology has advanced considerably in recent years, so perhaps – I’m not a good judge of that – it only takes increasingly smart algorithms and more brute computing force to perfect this particular skill required from a Babelfish.

3. The quality of current machine translation is mostly horrible, in spite of frequent claims to the contrary. I am an almost daily user of Google Translate, and though my expectations are low, even so I find the results underwhelming 8 times out of 10. One particularly exasperating example is what it does to names, such as cities: instead of just leaving them as they are, it tends to replace them, turning ‘Olomouc’ into ‘Birmingham’ and ‘Esperanto’ into ‘English’. Sometimes I can understand why, but more often I’m just flummoxed.

Only yesterday, I had GT translate a Dutch-language blogpost into Spanish. With Spanish being the third largest language online and Dutch the 12th, this can hardly be considered an exotic pair of languages. Nevertheless, the result was grade A gobbledygook. The English translation, I should add, was reasonable, though probably not as good as any Dutch student taking their O levels could produce. GT has the word ‘Translation’ in its name for a reason: it is currently little more than a (rather poor) device for translating into and out of English.

Translating, mind you – not interpreting. We feed it strictly written language. The verbal jazz that we call ‘ordinary speech’, full of unfinished sentences, repetitions and filler words, would send GT into a fit. This suggests that Google Interpreter, the device predicted by Ross, is very far off indeed.

4. The main reason for my disbelief is a fundamental flaw in translating software: it processes language statistically, and statistically only. It compares all input with its database, looks for the best and most frequent matches, and thus chooses the output most likely to be correct. It works – but only so far.

And nor can it get farther, because it fails to do two crucial things: parsing and comprehending. Computers don’t understand grammar and they are clueless about human experience of reality. As long as that doesn’t change, they will get nowhere near the capabilities of translators and interpreters of flesh and blood and brain. A machine that translates the Dutch word for ‘a bet’ (weddenschap) into a Spanish verb meaning ‘he bet’, is a grammatical idiot. A machine that can’t pick the right meaning of prijs (‘price’ or ‘prize’) is a moron – in a context, any reader can do it in a split second.

In my experience, GT has for several years now been more or less stagnant at its current level, which I would describe as ‘helpful hallucination’. I am convinced that it will not substantially improve without a grasp of grammar and some worldly wisdom. And as for the article in the Wall Street Journal: barring a scientific breakthrough, the same prediction can and probably will be made again in ten years’ time.

Bowing to the inevitable

Geography may not be fate, but Fate certainly knows her geography. And when she wanted to inculcate me with a keen interest in languages, she took great geographical pains to achieve it, starting as far back as the 1930s.

In that decade, my father was born in the Dutch city of Enschede (the red dot marked 1 on the map – click to enlarge), a mere five kilometres from the German border. He grew up speaking not only the national language but also the region’s Low Saxon dialect of the Low German language. He went on to become a French teacher, dabbling in Spanish on the side. Having moved to the south of the country, he then learnt another regional language, Limburgish, about which more in a minute. Finally, he also became fluent, though not grammatically perfect, in German, so much so that later in life, when his other languages were temporarily wiped out by a stroke, he would only speak German. From a linguistic perspective, Fate did an excellent job with him.

What about my mother? She grew up in red dot number 2, speaking Limburgish and Dutch. Her village was within waving distance of Flanders – where the Dutch is markedly different from her own – and a short cycle ride away from Germany. She also spent four years under German occupation. After liberation, English was all the rage. But my mother’s true linguistic love has always been Dutch. For her, no conversation is completely satisfactory without occasional recourse to the dictionary.

After my parents got married and my sister and I were born, we settled in a tiny village whose name is pronounceable exclusively – and then only just – for native Dutch speakers (Scheulder, [sxøːldər] – red dot 3). German, French and Flemish-Dutch were spoken just 15 kilometres to the east, south and west, respectively. And that’s without mentioning the variety within the region: the dialects of towns just 30 kilometres apart were so different that people would switch to Dutch rather than be baffled by each other’s Limburgish. I myself was teased by class-mates because my dialect – roughly my Mom’s – sounded weird to them.

In a word, I was fated to be a language buff. Lingo and my other books have been eighty years in the making.

I notice that I’d rather you didn’t

Alison Edwards, the Amsterdam-based translator of Lingo and one of the world’s funniest writers with a PhD in linguistics, recently read a Dutch book about language that was a run-away best-seller a few years ago: ‘Taal is zeg maar echt mijn ding’, by well-known comedian Paulien Cornelisse. Here’s what she couldn’t help noticing.

ALISON EDWARDS

Observant, Maastricht

I was watching TV with my husband when he turned to me and said, ‘Actually, it wouldn’t be all that easy to kill you.’

‘Pardon?’

It was the word actually that struck me. As though it was a rejoinder to a conversation about the difficulty or otherwise of doing me in that had been going on for some time. In his head, perhaps.

This is the kind of thing you pick up on when you’ve just finished reading Taal is zeg maar echt mijn ding (Language is like totally my thing) by Paulien Cornelisse.

It was a very instructive book. I learnt a lot about Dutch, and the language attitudes of the Dutch; for instance: ‘the word fucking is an enrichment and we should be thankful for that’. But also things that hold for language in general. Bound to come in handy is the revelation that you…

View original post 224 more words

Getting high on status

Words changing their meanings are like plants growing: we never catch them at it, and afterwards we’re not even sure what they used to be like.

Take ‘High German’, or Hochdeutsch as the language calls itself. Centuries ago, the name simply meant ‘the German language as spoken in some of the more elevated regions’, roughly in the centre and south of what’s now Germany. Low German or Niederdeutsch, in contrast, was spoken in the plains near the North and Baltic Seas.

From the sixteenth century on, High German increasingly came to be seen as the standard language of the whole empire, while Low German’s status dropped to that of a mere dialect. Instead of Niederdeutsch, it’s now often called Plattdeutsch: literally ‘flat German’, but with overtones of ‘dialect’ and undertones of ‘not-all-that-bright’. (The westernmost dialects of Low German broke away from the rest and are now known as Dutch.)

As a result, the term ‘high’ is nowadays no longer interpreted geographically, as the German of the higher areas, but sociolinguistically, as the high-status or standard variety of the language. Even well-educated Germans, indeed linguists, believe that this is what it has always meant. (Remember what I said about ‘not being sure what things used to be like’?) But etymology, schmetymology – what matters is current usage, and there can be no doubt that the word hoch in this context has come to mean ‘standard’.

This has had the remarkable effect that the same epithet is now also applied to other standard languages, to distinguish them from competing varieties. Among the language guides for travellers that I have on my shelves, there is one for Hochchinesisch and another for Hocharabisch – ‘High Chinese’ or Mandarin and ‘High Arabic’ or Modern Standard Arabic.

Sounds sort of highfalutin, doesn’t it?

***

The two guides mentioned above are from the superb Kauderwelsch series, which covers well over a hundred languages. It includes one publication in English, which is about German – High German, of course.

‘We’ve went aw Scots’

On page 90 of Lingo, I predict that ‘(s)hould Scotland become independent (…) then Scots may well set course for full and undisputed languagehood.’

To some, that sounded far-fetched. But see what Scotland’s National newspaper has done today (as reported by the Independent):

Ptime in ptranslation

Both minute and second owe their existence as words to one famous book from Classical Antiquity. Yet their etymologies are a surprising mix, with not only Greek and Latin but also Arabic ingredients. How come?

A 16th-century engraving of Ptolemy

Let’s start with the book: it’s called the Almagest and was written in the second century CE by the mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek in Roman Egypt. In it, he did what scholars had been doing for ages: divide the circle into 360 degrees, each degree into sixty minutes and each minute into sixty seconds.* But ‘minute’ and ‘second’ were not the words he used, for they did not yet exist. What he wrote was ‘first sixtieth’ (prota heksēkosta) and ‘second sixtieth’ (deutera heksēkosta), which in a freer translation might come out as ‘one sixtieth of the first order’ and ‘one sixtieth of the second order’.

In the year 827, the Almagest was translated into Arabic, and then in 1175 the result was translated again, now into Latin. It is in this Latin version that somewhat familiar words pop up for the first time, namely pars minuta (or sometimes pars minuta prima), that is the ‘(first) small part’, and pars minuta secunda, the ‘second small part’. (If you prefer to translate minuta as ‘minute’, pronounced as ‘my newt’, go ahead.)  As you can see, any concept of ‘sixtieth’ had got lost in translation. And for reasons of efficiency, the two terms were commonly abbreviated to minuta and secunda – I mean, it’s practically impossible to even say ‘pars minuta secunda’ within a pars minuta secunda.

Provisional conclusion: our words minute (the one rhyming with in it) and second come from Latin, and the Latin words were inspired by the Greek – they were calques or loan translations, as linguists call this particular type of borrowing. So why did I mention Arabic influence at all? Well, the Arabic words for these two units of time are (and seem to have been for many centuries) daqīqa, which is literally ‘something small’, for ‘minute’, and thāniya, which is not only ‘second’ as a noun but also as a numeral. Comparing all these words closely, we see that the meaning of the Latin minuta is particularly similar to the Arabic word: in these two languages, but not in Greek, it refers to something ‘small’. It stands to reason therefore that minuta is not so much a calque from Greek as from Arabic. There you have it: elements from three major languages in these two seemingly unremarkable words.

One last thing. In Modern Greek, a ‘minute’ is called lepto and a ‘second’ deuterolepto (or strictly speaking defterolepto). Literally, these words mean ‘something small’ and ‘a second something small’ (sorry for the bad grammar). Obviously, these are yet again calques, undoubtedly from Latin. But calque upon calque upon calque has made Ptolemy’s original practically unrecognisable. The concept has come full circle, from Greek to Greek, but the words have taken a serious pummelling.

* For Ptolemy, minutes (and also seconds) were essentially minutes of arc, that is parts of a degree, not of an hour – I’m not sure if he ever used the word in a temporal sense. However, both types of minutes are more closely related than they may seem at first sight: in sundials, it’s the angle between the visible shadow of the so-called gnomon and its shadow at noon that indicates the current time. A 15 degree angle is equivalent to one hour, so there’s 15 minutes of arc to the clock minute. Why is that? I have no idea.

 

The Small Dictator

It had to happen sometime, and it’s happened now: a journalist has told the world they don’t like Lingo all that much. Ever since the publication of the book, just over a year ago, I’ve been spoiled with good reviews, in Britain, the US and elsewhere. Some have been generously appreciative, others nothing short of jubilant. I felt almost embarrassed at times: surely the book wasn’t as good as all that? But I was greatly pleased too, if only because good reviews help me survive on Lingo while I’m working at my new book. And that’s without mentioning the psychological gratification of strangers saying friendly things about the fruit of my linguistic obsession.

But now, one review is different. Though far from scathing, it will send no-one hustling to a bookshop. Also, while it’s not exactly the first review that contains inaccuracies – it’s incredible how frequently that occurs – it is the first one to make a false accusation. It claims that I use grammatical jargon such as ‘augmentative’ and ‘ergative’ without explaining it. Simply not true.

Hard on the heels of this review, there was another one that had a slightly more critical tone than I’ve grown accustomed to. But this one had a peculiarity that much amused me: it consistently referred to my person as ‘Mr Dorren’. This habit, undoubtedly dictated by house style, strongly reminded me of press reports about not only ‘Mr Clinton’, ‘Ms Houston’ and ‘Mr Cosby’, but also ‘Mr Hussein’, ‘Mr Milosevic’ and, in old radio recordings, ‘Mr Hitler’. Once a mass medium has decided to refer to people as Mr or one of its female equivalents, it will extend this politeness even to those clearly undeserving of it, including cruel dictators. There’s just no way of drawing a line.

As a result, this use of ‘Mr’ to my ears sounds hypocritical, even sinister, rather than respectful. And as this review contained a lot of words like ‘French’, ‘Russian’ and ‘English’, this ‘Mr Dorren’ might well be one of those unsavoury characters attempting to redraw the map regardless of human suffering. He couldn’t be one of the great dictators, of course, or his name would be more familiar. Surely some local upstart, this Mr Dorren. A small dictator.

****

Fortunately, I’m getting encouraging information from my American publisher. Good reviews far outnumber the more critical ones (here’s one), and sales are exceeding expectations. Hurray, I can go on working at my new book!