http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/ en Copyright 2008 Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:13:25 -0600 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss here. The full original is here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/04/words_from_farflung_tribes_glo.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/04/words_from_farflung_tribes_glo.html Language Linguistics Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:13:25 -0600 This is the fourth piece I've published since 1996 about Joe, a friend I made during the summer I lived in Alpine, Texas. It begins like this: Remember Joe, my old friend from Alpine? He would be 80 years old this year, but he’s long gone. Survived cancer long enough to see the truth of God—he’d finally asked to see a priest after a lifetime of avowed atheism—and watch the twin towers fall. A month later I was driving to Midland for a burial in a place he never wanted. But Joe haunts me still. Especially when the economic news gets bad. I can hear his voice: Do you know what a derivative is, Michael? A liquidity put? Phantom envelopes mailed from Alpine arrived filled with clipped newspaper articles and forecasts of human greed highlighted with yellow marker. The words in my ears: Michael, you need a gun, and cash, small bills. The rest is here. The original is here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/04/remembering_joe_texas_observer.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/04/remembering_joe_texas_observer.html Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:21:39 -0600 It's the nouns and verbs that catch our ears first. The complex words, the sediments of Greek and Latin affixes, the long noun phrases, the passive verbs. The surnames of researchers rising and fallen. The journal titles, the acronyms. You can also hear, in that perpetual dance with certainty, the hedges that soften claims ("it was reported that") or strengthen them ("though inconclusive, the data suggests..."). The language of science, with its specialized vocabulary and clipped rhythm, has a distinctive architecture. The functional elegance of this rarefied speak is uniquely captured in one of its most inconspicuous words: "so." Read the rest here. The orginal is here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/04/so_the_anatomy_of_a_scientific.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/04/so_the_anatomy_of_a_scientific.html Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:26:20 -0600 here. The original is here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/03/lost_in_translation_chicago_tr.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/03/lost_in_translation_chicago_tr.html Sun, 30 Mar 2008 12:10:38 -0600 here. Original is here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/03/walking_the_talk_nyt_book_revi.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/03/walking_the_talk_nyt_book_revi.html Sat, 29 Mar 2008 12:05:04 -0600 If you think people in America should speak only English, maybe Texas isn’t the state for you. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of people who reported speaking a language that’s not English at home rose by 860,000 to 6.86 million. They now make up 33 percent of the state’s population. (Come to think of it, maybe the U.S. isn’t the country for you: In 2005, 52 million people reported speaking another language, up 5 million since 2000.) The Modern Language Association has just released colorful charts, based on data from the 2005 U.S. Census American Community Survey, that allow you to pull out data by state for the 30 most frequently spoken languages in the U.S. (All the data and maps are at www.mla.org/map_data.) It’s worth noting that these stats only cover speakers of languages other than English, not their fluency in English, so they capture seventh-generation, bilingual German families in New Braunfels as well as newly arrived Farsi speakers in Houston. Spanish speakers account for the larger part of the increase in the population of non-English speakers. In Texas, they added about 737,000 non-English speakers. Texas had the second-largest increase, behind California. Even with anti-immigrant sentiment a major concern for the GOP, Spanish speakers gained in 44 states in the same period; only in Mississippi, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Maine, and Vermont did their numbers drop. That’s a 4.1 million-person increase nationwide. The polyglotting of Texas and the nation seems so inevitable that true connoisseurs of xenophobia should rejoice about the boost in Spanish speakers. Spanish, after all, is a European language. It’s the only European language on the rise; the numbers for French, German, Italian, Greek, and Polish, all spoken by older generations of immigrants, are dropping. Spanish is written in the Roman alphabet, so you can sound out written words even if you don’t know what they mean. And the language has thousands of words recognizable in English because of a shared heritage. MALDEF or LULAC aren’t likely to adopt this as a slogan, but we’ll say it here: Compared with Chinese, Thai, or Urdu, Spanish is practically English. http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/01/lingua_americana_texas_observe.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2008/01/lingua_americana_texas_observe.html Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:43:43 -0600 In an excerpt from her new book published in The Forward last month, Harvard literature professor Ruth Wisse notes that Jews have received 12 of the 105 Nobel Prizes in Literature, writing in seven languages (German, French, Russian, English, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Yiddish). "Beyond the disproportionate number of Jewish recipients," Wisse wrote,"there are three unusual aspects of this statistic: The multiple languages in which Jews wrote; that there were winners in two Jewish languages; and that one of those languages was Hebrew, which no modern Jewish community had spoken before 1900." Observers seem to track the nations, not the languages, of the 105 Nobel-winning writers. Yet parsing the list of 25 languages that they wrote in turns up many other gems of disproportion. For instance, more Scandinavians (13) than Jews (12) have received a Nobel, representing four of six Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic). More dramatically, more writers of English (27) have received awards than writers of other languages; French is second, with 13 awards, then German (12), and Spanish (10). This may reflect the global status (and the colonial legacy) of English and Spanish; French once had such status, too, though all the French winners so far have been French citizens, Belgian citizens, or Samuel Beckett. Only two winners wrote in languages that aren't attached to a nation, Yiddish and Occitan (which is a regional language spoke in the Provence region of France). It's worth noting that a large number of recipients (31) wrote in Romance languages, the linguistic descendants of Latin, more than you'd expect from the relatively small number of these languages and the global population of people who speak them. Of the top 20 languages spoken in the world, ranked by the number of native speakers, only four — Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian — are Romance languages. The Nobels are even more skewed toward Germanic languages. Fifty-one winners wrote in Germanic languages, only two of which (English and German) are in the world's top 20. If you look at the writing systems the Nobel winners used, that's also out of balance. Ninety-two winners wrote in the Roman alphabet, which is used to represent fewer native languages in the world than other writing systems like Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, and Devanagari. Fourteen Nobel winners used other writing systems were used by Nobel winners, the most in Cyrillic (by five Russians and the Serbo-Croat Ivo Andrić). Given the Internet, other technology, and the global status of English, it's probably true, though, that most people in the world who can read know the Roman alphabet. To find a breakdown that begins to seem fair, you have to go so broadly as to break down the winners by language families. More recipients of Nobel prizes wrote in Indo-European languages (97) than in non-Indo-European languages (eight), which were Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Hebrew. Yet even though Indo-European languages make up a major group of languages, they dominate the awards to an extreme. Parsing this list of languages so assiduously reveals one thing: there's nothing proportionate about any of it. The winners have overwhelmingly been Europeans who use the Roman alphabet to write their Romance or Germanic languages. To the degree that such writers were also Jewish, they rode the coattails of this larger trend. In a similar way, it's not conceivable that the Scandinavians are overwhelmingly more verbally transcendent, or that Germanic languages inherently produce better literature, or that the history of Indo-European languages makes them essentially more Nobel-worthy. Using the Nobel prize list to show the literary or linguistic prowess of any particular group (as Ruth Wisse does for Jews in her essay) is akin to judging human appetites from the menu at a sushi restaurant. The Nobel is to world literature what the World Series is to world baseball: a slice of literature that's very, very good, from writers who are very, very good, but that is, in the end, unrepresentative. Of course, nothing says they have to be representative. When an Asian country starts handing out prestigious prizes in literature to world writers, no one will be especially surprised if the prizes favor Asian writers, or those who don't write with the Roman alphabet. It's too soon to tell, but maybe things are changing in Stockholm: In the last ten years, a third of the recipients have written in non-Indo-European languages, almost one-half of those since the awards were first presented in 1901. If that change is real, it might become harder and harder for some of us to share something with the languages of the writers who win. Even if it's not, it shows how wrapping a Nobel around Babel — the world in all its linguistic diversity — has always been a monumental task. http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/10/babels_nobel_design_observer_o.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/10/babels_nobel_design_observer_o.html Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:05:42 -0600 here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/09/read_my_slips_science_magazine.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/09/read_my_slips_science_magazine.html Fri, 21 Sep 2007 07:35:00 -0600 here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/08/in_the_beginning_was_the_word.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/08/in_the_beginning_was_the_word.html Thu, 09 Aug 2007 07:27:51 -0600 Jan Freeman, the regular language columnist for the Boston Globe, handed me her space when she went on vacation. This was my piece... Wildness. We go outdoors, to the mountains or the ocean, to encounter the untamed and untameable. But this quality can be found closer to home, too -- our spoken sentences are full of wildness, right under the threshold of our attention. I'm talking, of course, about verbal blunders. To read the rest of this piece, go here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/08/the_beast_within_boston_globe.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/08/the_beast_within_boston_globe.html Sun, 05 Aug 2007 07:21:29 -0600 Babdists. Cole points out the dean of a Baptist seminary, then a man in a dark suit who Cole says is the armed bodyguard of a prominent seminary president. We’ve crowded into chairs with another pastor, Wade Burleson from Oklahoma, his wife Rachelle, and a pastor from Alabama, C.B. Scott, who knows hired muscle when he sees it. That used to be Scott’s line of work. It’s Sunday afternoon, June 10, and talk turns to what to watch on television tonight: the first game of the NBA finals or the last episode of “The Sopranos.” “Actually, I’ve learned a lot about how to be a Southern Baptist from ‘The Sopranos,’” Cole says. “Hold your friends close but your enemies closer. The person who sets up the meeting between you and your enemy is working for your enemy. You know, the whole ‘Godfather’ thing.” To read the rest of the article, go here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/07/dont_stop_believing_texas_obse.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/07/dont_stop_believing_texas_obse.html Fri, 13 Jul 2007 11:33:43 -0600 Linguists have, in general, done a poor job of articulating why people should care that half of the approximately 6,900 languages spoken on the planet will be extinct in a century. And despite heaping scoops of truism and sentimentality atop exoticism, journalists haven't done much better. As for me, afraid of having to dip into the sentimentality and the fetishizing of Last Things, I've kind of been repulsed by the topic and have never written about it. Until now, that is. To read the rest of the piece, go here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/05/languages_as_design_objects_de.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/05/languages_as_design_objects_de.html Tue, 08 May 2007 11:36:02 -0600 In the dim, humid basement of his Maryland home, Michael Scherer, a tall 38-year-old with the long, square beard of a mandolin player or a monk, leans toward a rebuilt Russian tube microphone, desperate for silence so he can begin recording a 200-year-old essay by an American founding father. Even in the makeshift studio he has constructed, with thick blankets hanging from nails in the joists and the basement windows plugged with fiberglass, the sounds of lawnmowers, car alarms, birds, air conditioners, and children kicking balls in the street still intrude. “I have to hold on a minute here—there’s a, there’s a truck,” he says. A few seconds later, the truck passes, and he reads in his deep, resonant voice, “The Federalist.” He stops, clears his throat, and begins again. “The Federalist, No. 19.” Read the rest here. And please note this correction.]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/04/the_wealth_of_librivox_reason.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/04/the_wealth_of_librivox_reason.html Sat, 28 Apr 2007 11:49:46 -0600 Languagelab.com will offer English and Spanish classes. The cost of the classes will be comparable to those in the real world, which can cost several hundred U.S. dollars for a semester-long course. "You won't be taking classes in LanguageLab because it's a lot cheaper," says LanguageLab founder David Kaskel, an entrepreneur and PhD candidate at the Center for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. "We think it's a lot better than in a physical space because there's more you can offer than in a classroom." To read the rest of the piece, go here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/04/a_boon_to_second_life_language.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/04/a_boon_to_second_life_language.html Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:44:34 -0600 Apocalypto opened in the United States, and my wife and I are following a young Mayan man, Agosto, through the Yucatán jungle. A tour guide and biologist, he’s showing us a group of spider monkeys that live on the Punta Laguna preserve run by his village. It’s late afternoon, and while rain clouds gather, Agosto offers to show us around so the other guides can go home. As we walk down the slippery paths, he tells us about the place in a Spanish that’s remarkably easy to understand, probably because, as for us, it’s his second language; his first language is Yucatec Maya, the language that’s notoriously used for what little dialogue there is in Gibson’s bloody confection. To read the rest, go here. ]]> http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/01/guarded_language_texas_observe.html http://www.michaelerard.com/archives/2007/01/guarded_language_texas_observe.html Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:27:24 -0600