Gaston Dorren's Blog, page 3

A Dutch hoe and other non-hip hop words

English has hundreds of expressions containing the word Dutch or Dutchman. Some are in common use, whereas others are specialised, regional or outright archaic. This video has me mucking about with some of them as well as announcing a publication. (Dutch spoken, English subtitles available.)

 

Cape Week’s End: week 11

In which I’m dismayed to discover that even the most basic linguistic jargon may cause confusion.

Also, what was my Peak of the Working Week moment?

(Dutch spoken, English subtitles. Or Dutch subtitles, if you so prefer.)

Welcome back to Indo-Europe

[image error]It’s happened again. In spite of good resolutions, and before even making a full recovery from the previous bout, I’ve contracted a new language.

For over two years, I suffered from Vietnamese. That was for – my idea of – a good cause: the writing of a book, Babel. The experience was instructive and fascinating, but not rewarding in any practical sense. In reading, I never got beyond picture books for toddlers. My chats in Vietnamese were few, and it’s probably an overstatement to call them chats – or Vietnamese. Early last year, I beat the virus and began my recovery.

A few months later, the Polish publisher of Babel invited me to Warsaw and Cracow for some interviews. I went, I liked the places, I loved the people I met and I discovered how near they all are: if I walk out my door at 7 in the morning, I can set foot on a railway platform at Warszawa Centralna or Kraków Główny the very same evening, and still have time for a drink. How was I to resist these temptations? Once more, the language learning virus overcame my weak immune system, aka better judgement.

They say that Polish is a hard nut to crack. Or rather: we say so, the speakers of Western European languages. And it’s not a groundless claim either. Polish nouns have three genders (sexes that is, but without the organs or the fun). So does German, but German has only four cases, whereas Polish has almost twice as many: seven. And while it may not have as many verbal forms as French or Spanish, the catch is that no single verb can be said to be entirely regular – they always have something unpredictable about them. Call it a mystique. Or, if you’re more like me, call it fuckedupness obnoxiousness.

Unsurprising for a Slavic language, its vocabulary is mostly Slavic. Which is fine for Slavs, but not so much for Germans, Romans or their hybrid linguistic offspring, the speakers of English. Also, Polish has twelve different hissy sounds (the name Szczecin alone has three of them) spelt in accordance with a somewhat complex but consistent system. .

All of this explains why Poland is the only place in the world where people like to say, ‘Łatwo zrobić, trudniej mówić’ – ‘that’s easier done than said’. Because most things really are more easily done than said.

I’m kidding, of course I am. They don’t say that, nor do they have any reason to. Indeed, my own short experience points in the exact opposite direction: after less than two months of studying, I can read and even say more in Polish than I’ve ever been able to read or say in Vietnamese. Not a lot, mind you, but more all the same.

What’s going on here?!

Common ground, that’s what. No matter how intimidating Polish writing looks and Polish grammar appears, the language shares its oldest origin and many centuries of common history with all the languages I’m comfortable with. That origin is Indo-European (more about that soon). So is the common history, but without the ‘Indo’ bit: it’s European.

To begin with, a goodish amount of basic vocabulary is similar in much of the Indo-European family. The Polish word jabłko may not immediately reveal itself to mean ‘apple’, but once you know, it’s a lot easier to memorise than its Vietnamese counterpart, táo tây. The same is true for dwa ‘two’, mi ‘me’, siostra ‘sister’, mleko ‘milk’, nie ‘not’, noc ‘night’, móc ‘might, may, can’, nowy ‘new’, mysz ‘mouse’, nos ‘nose’, et cetera. Other words are closer to their Romance cousins: jest ‘is’ (French, Latin: est), są ‘(they) are’ (Portuguese: são, pronounced almost identically), dom ‘house’ (Latin domus, think domestic), morze ‘sea’ (Latin: mare, as in marine and the rather grand name Weston-super-Mare), nasza, twoja, and wasza ‘our’, singular ‘your’  and plural ‘your’ (Latin: nostra, tua and vestra), pieszo ‘by foot’ (French: à pied), sen ‘sleep, dream’ (Spanish: sueño), gospoda ‘inn’ (Latin: hospitium, think hospice).

Even more helpful is the fact that many Polish words are structured in recognisable ways. Prefixes are a case in point: w(e)-, wy- prze- and others have functions similar to our in or en-, out or ex- and through, across or per-. I’m not suggesting that Polish and English consistently use them in identical ways. But once you know that a wejście is the way into a building, odds are that a wyjście is the way out and a przejście a way through or across. And indeed, the three words simply mean ‘entrance’, ‘exit’ and either ‘aisle’ or ‘crossing’. Close enough, isn’t it?

Polish grammar too is Indo-European down to the bone. (A lot more so than English, as a matter of fact.) Take those notorious seven cases: Polish has five of them in common with Latin. Only the Latin ablative is represented by two different Polish cases, the instrumental and locative (which have much more intuitive names, if not endings). There are even formal similarities between Latin and Polish: you can count on neuter words always having the same endings in the nominative and accusative cases, and in the plural, these consist in -a.

The verbs have quite evidently been baked in the same oven as well, only for various lengths of time. Just look at the conjugation for the present tense, which takes the following endings (I’ve omitted the repetitive vowel):

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Further fun is to be had in the past tense, which shows yet another family trait: here, the form of the verb depends on the gender as well as the number of the subject. Germanic languages don’t have it, but part of the Romance family does. The French passé compose is a good example: il est venu (he has come) is masculine and singular, whereas elles sont venues is feminine (whence -e-) and plural (whence -s). Okay, so perhaps we would prefer to smother this feature in an unlit tunnel and flush it down a rest area toilet, but we can’t claim never having met it before: remember how it tried to trip us up in French tests at school?

Finally, there are all these things that we believe to be normal and universal, but which, in point of fact, merely happen to run in the family – our very own Indo-European language family, that is. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that the subject determines the form of the verb; that nouns have a singular and a plural and that we use the plural whenever there’s more than one of something; that the degrees of comparison are three in number and are formed by adding more and most or -er and -est, et cetera.

However, none of this is even remotely universal. Verbs do not universally get conjugated at all, and where they do, the object or some other thing besides the subject may poke its nose in. In many other families, plurals are used more sparingly, or they are differentiated into duals (for pairs) and real plurals (for triplets and beyond). Elsewhere yet, degrees of comparison use a verb or some other trick that is nothing like more and most. Not only that, but what we call the superlative may just be a special case of the comparative – something like ‘more than all’ or ‘the more’. (Exotic? As exotic as French.)

Not so Polish. On all these counts, Polish is exactly what we like our languages to be like. Indeed, its degrees of comparison are the spitting images of ours: syllables tagged on for simple adjectives, similar to English -er and -est, and words for ‘more’ and ‘most’ when things get more complicated. (The Polish idea of ‘complexity’ may leave us a bit shame-faced though.) Granted, Polish pronouns are more complex than ours, but they’re complex in a grammatical, Germanicky sort of way, not subject to all sorts of interpersonal nuances that East Asians have a penchant for. Polish even shares in the widespread (especially continental) obsession with the reflexive pronoun: enjoy oneself is bawić się, similar to s’amuser and divertirse.

In spite of everything, there are numerous troublesome differences between Polish and the languages  of Western Europe. Unpleasant surprises, unwelcome obstacles of the ‘why on Earth?’ type. That’s what makes Polish a foreign language – or język obcy as the Polish say, literally ‘a strange language’. But the really amazing fact, the wondrous gift, the unexpected boon is that studying Polish feels, to me anyway, like a home-coming. A return to the fold. As if I’m welcomed back by my long-lost Indo-European next of kin.

It’s also like a return to my hometown. To Europe, that is, where over the centuries we have deeply influenced each other’s manners of speech and writing. And boy, does it show. But that’s for next time.

“Those reviewers on Amazon are ____________ [fill in the blank]”

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Blogger and teacher Larry Davidson from Weston, MA had a close look at the reviews of Babel at amazon.com. And like myself, he didn’t like what he saw. And he went on to do what I could never do: review the reviewers, and without mincing his words either.

I’ll reproduce his first few paragraphs here before sending you off to the man himself – who I’ve never met or spoken to in my life, I should add. But is he a friend? You bet.

So here’s Larry Davidson’s blogpost:

As Tom Lehrer famously said, “the reason most reviews on Amazon are so atrocious is that they were written by the people.”

Actually, that’s not quite what he said. He actually said “the reason most folk songs are so atrocious is that they were written by the people.” But it’s exactly the same idea; there’s no editorial eye on members of the general public who write reviews on Amazon, Google, and Yelp. So it’s not just Amazon, but I’ll use that as my example.

Yesterday I reviewed Babel by Gaston Dorren. My review was positive — enthusiastic, in fact. Now of course opinions differ, and de gustibus non est disputandum, so it doesn’t bother me if you dislike a book I like, or if you like a book I dislike. You can even think Dan Brown is a good writer for all I care. But some things about non-professional reviews do bother me. Let’s use the Amazon reviews of Babel as an instructive example. Half of the reviewers gave 4 or 5 stars, so obviously those people are discerning and thoughtful.

A prize for Babel!

On Saturday 5 October, I was honoured to win the Onze Taal/ANV Language Book Prize 2019. The prize-giving ceremony took place during the biennial conference of Onze Taal, an NGO dedicated to the Dutch language. The award is endowed with 3,000 euros and comes with a certificate and a caricature by well-known cartoon artist Tom Janssen.

The same video with subtitles in Dutch can be seen here.

Ten reasons to study Vietnamese (and 5 to regret it)

Last year, my friend Huyền and I gave a presentation at the Polyglot Conference in Ljubljana titled ’10 Reasons to Study Vietnamese (And 5 to Regret it)’. Since she couldn’t come to Europe at the time, her contribution was pre-recorded.

The whole talk, including the Q&A, has now been published. The response of the audience can’t be heard, making the thing a bit eerie, like a movie without its soundtrack. Anyway, here it is:

Babel: global languages in a provincial town

The world’s most widely spoken languages – the subject of Babel – are also widespread outside their countries of origin. In my city, for instance. And probably in yours as well.

A professor at boiling point

[image error]My invitation to the readers of Babel and Lingua to let me know what they think has produced a steady stream of emails, most of them interesting and many heart-warming. Occasionally, however, the effect is chilling, and here’s an example.

The Babel chapter about Tamil is mostly about India, but it also touches on Sri Lanka, which has a sizeable Tamil-speaking minority. Since independence in 1948, relations between the two major ethnic and linguistic groups, the Sinhalese and the Tamils, have been tense at best and frequently violent. While tension and violence can never be exclusively blamed on one side, Sinhalese nationalism and suppression of Tamil rights did much to ignite the powder keg into civil war – a powder keg created by the British colonial administration, I should add.

This is how most of the outside world sees the issue. Not so the conflicting parties, of course. And when you publish a book in English, some of the people involved may read it and take exception

Some time ago, I received a message from a Sri Lankan-American medical professor who believed he had found a mistake in Babel. Let me quote him in at full length, capitals and all:

Subject: SRI LANKA IS NOT TAMIL!!

Comment: You made a complete false undertaking in this venture when you knew that in S Asia there are so many languages spoken that it is insane to show a country & paint it with ONE LANGUAGE!! Sri Lanka majority language is SINHALA & NOT TAMIL!!! period! Same with INDIA, so many damn lang. Tamil is spoken in the South of India & N of Sri Lamka!!

I am sorry to give you the TRUTH! Pl. ask when you NOT SURE,SIR!! Prof. [name], [company name], [city and state], USA

What had aroused his wrath was a map, let’s call it map A, in which Sri Lanka seemed to be depicted as a Tamil-speaking country. But it didn’t; it merely said that Tamil, one of the 20 languages of Babel, has official status at the national level. Another map, B, made it clear that Sri Lankan Tamil speakers mostly live in the North and East of the island. Sinhalese wasn’t depicted on the map for the simple reason that Babel doesn’t deal with it. By the same token, the whole of Belgium is depicted as a French-language country in map A, while only the South (and Brussels) are colour-coded for French in map B.

I half expected this explanation would take him off the boil. In fact, it seemed to fire him up even more.

NO NO!! you mixed FALSE PROPAGANDA BY THE TAMILS AG. OTHER RACES LIVING IN THAT MULTI-CULTURAL COUNTRY!  IN YOUR BOOK!  ITS NONSENSICAL POLITICS BECAUSE I AM A SRI LANKAN FIRST & THEN WHATEVER RACE YOU WANT TO PAINT ON ME !! RACE IS A FALSE HOOD PROPAGATED BY IGNORANT PEOPLE WHO DONT UNDERSTAND HUMAN GENETICS!! ALL SO CALLED RACES HAVE 99.9% OF THE GENOME SAME & IDENTICAL!! THAT 0.1% IS CULTURAL &

A BIG DEAL!!

TAMILS GET AROUND YOU AMERICANS & CRY !! TO GET YOUR SYMPATHY & SPREAD FALSE PROPAGANDA AG THE BUDDHISTS & THE SINHALA RACE WHO ARE ONLY IN SRI LANKA, WHEREAS TAMILS ARE ALL OVER THE WORLD!!

Take care!!

Prof. […]

He’s absolutely and evidently right in claiming there’s only one human race. I wouldn’t dream of calling Sinhalese, Tamils or Sri Lankans ‘races’; they’re two ethnic and linguistic groups and one nationality. What bemused me was his hatred of Tamils, being ‘all over the world’, spreading ‘false propaganda’ to get the sympathy of ‘you Americans’ (I’m actually European, which I don’t keep dark from my readers). To me, this is strongly reminiscent of bad old anti-Semitism or modern-day anti-Muslim sentiments in the West. The professor’s outburst did perhaps more than any sober and factual article to bring the intensity of the Sri Lankan conflict home to me. Here was a highly educated person, living thousands of kilometres away from his native country, who started foaming at the mouth and lost all reason because to his mind, a despised minority was placed in too favourable a light.

Let me end on a more hopeful note. The Sinhalese filmmaker Asoka Handagama takes a more conciliatory perspective on the country’s diversity and future. Not only did he make a Tamil-language film about the aftermath of the civil war, he also took a map of the 2015 election results, which partly reflected the ethnic divide, and added some black lines to depict a very different Sri Lanka:

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John McWhorter: ‘When I learn something I want to share it’

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During the interview

Why is it important for a linguist to engage with a general audience? If languages go extinct, why is that a loss people should care about?

These are two of the questions that I asked Professor John McWhorter on Skype. We had this conversation right after John interviewed me for his Lexicon Valley podcast, which you can find here.

https://languagewriterdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/john-mcwhorter-af.mp3

Living Yiddish: an insider’s observations

I recently had a fascinating correspondence with a reader who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking environment. She has allowed me to publish her emails, but prefers to remain anonymous. As per her request, I have given the text a – very light – edit.

[image error]Much as I enjoyed your book Lingo, I was surprised to read your description of Yiddish today. In your book you describe Yiddish speakers as mostly older survivors while the next generation speak it at best as a second language. It is not surprising therefore that you are pessimistic as to its future.

But this situation could not be further from the truth. Yiddish in places like Brooklyn, London, Montreal, Antwerp and Israel is not just spoken, but it is often as a primary mother tongue. In villages like Kiryat Joel and New Square in upstate New York Yiddish is the official language of everything from commerce, education, press etc.

I grew up in Brooklyn, moved to upstate New York, and today live in Israel. My husband is British and his mother is Antwerpian. I have thus been to major centers of the Orthodox Jews where it is common for Yiddish to be a mother tongue. Most Hassidic families I know have somewhere between six to twelve children and they are the fastest growing group of Jews in the USA.

I am no demographer or linguist, but I think I understand what is happening here. You see, the millions of non-Orthodox Jews who spoke Yiddish before the war, did not pass it on to their children after moving to places like the USA and Israel. At the time the Yiddish speaking population – so decimated by the war – was but a tiny minority. As the older, less religious generation died, so did Yiddish. Yet the Hassidic and Orthodox Jewish community – due to their high birthrate – boomed and with them came a boom in Yiddish speaking homes. This holds true from the USA, UK and Israel (see here and here).

So though from the 2000 census we see an aging Yiddish population, the situation twenty years later is very different. I have seen the shelves of supermarkets and book stores in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods fill with an ever rising pile of Yiddish newspapers, magazine, adult and children books and even comics. This phenomenon was not just noted by me.

I therefore have no fears for Yiddish. Though it’s quickly absorbing so much English (or Hebrew in Israel) as to make old timers like my father gnash his teeth, I see the reverse happening as well. So many of us in the Orthodox Jewish community pepper our speech with Yiddish and Hebrew words and grammatical features as to make it possible (given enough time and isolation–something more difficult in our current age) for us to develop our own Jewish dialect of English! Try to watch this video making fun of how Orthodox Jews speak English and see how much is comprehensible to an outsider.

It would be difficult for most people to have a real grasp on where Yiddish is holding today. Yiddish went from a language tied to Eastern European Jewry in general to one mostly tied to specifically Orthodox (usually Hassidic) Jews hailing from Eastern Europe. As the language became increasingly the sole domain of the most religious Jews, it became increasingly tied up with their religiosity. Speaking Yiddish plays the same function as dressing in traditional Hassidic garb. It is a way to keep the community together, to keep if from assimilation and to tie it to the past. It is a badge of pride and a desire to remain a people apart – living in the heart of places like New York City or London yet more closely connecting to eons of Jewish history. This is not a community that invites outsiders to peek in or answers questions to demographers, anthropologists or linguists. In a way, the isolating force that allowed German to become Yiddish is now being used in reverse to keep those desiring Jewish distinctiveness going.

And so, from academia it would be easy to see Yiddish disappearing from the Jewish stage, but harder to see into the isolationist Hassidic communities. Yet more and more has been written about this living Yiddish in the last decade, such as this and this.

Besides, most writers on the subject of Yiddish tended to study a different Yiddish than the one I speak. Their Yiddish was that of Yiddish theater, socialist Yiddish papers and secular Yiddish writers. It was the Yiddish preserved by institutions like YIVO and mostly spoken by Jews hailing from Russia, Lithuania and Poland.

I know very few speakers of this brand of Yiddish today. The Yiddish that is spoken by Hassidim today is mostly the Hungarian/Galician Yiddish which had a different accent and vocabulary. The Yiddish on the street is likewise different from that preserved by academia in that it has starting to show its English setting. I don’t just mean in vocabulary – that is easy enough to see – but in subtler grammatical ways. Whenever I listen to old Yiddish speakers or recordings I notice how the word order I tend to choose would usually match English, not something older speakers do. Yiddish, like German, has many gendered words that require different articles but I and many other modern American Yiddish speakers sometimes ignore gender altogether.

You inquired about the use of the Latin alphabet. This is something I have never seen done at all in Yiddish. Yiddish books written in Israel are sent straight to the USA, UK or Belgium since all Yiddish is written with the Hebrew alphabet and no adjustments are required.

But transliteration of Yiddish into Latin alphabet is common in another from: When Orthodox Jews write books, magazines etc., they often transliterate Yiddish words, as well as Hebrew and even Aramaic ones, that are part of our everyday speech. Standard practice of copy editors is to mark these words by italicizing them and many an editor will require a rewrite if there are too many words being italic (after all this is usually meant to be English!). This is the case unless these words gain acceptance in the broader English speaking world, such as ‘kvetch’, ‘spiel’, ‘schnook and the like. To see a typical Yiddish newspaper today check out Der Yid.