Michael Erard
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"Language"
Researching my previous post on the web, I came across an Austrian-born, NY-based conceptual artist, Rainer Ganahl, who works in and around languages — not in the way artists usually do (contrasting text with image) but getting at the political and cultural conditions for learning and speaking certain languages. This is very exciting for me, [...]
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So plagiarism is in the air; the NY Times caught the bug (with a reasonably nuanced nondemonization of the perpetrators) the other day, with an article that’s, at this writing, the most emailed. Or maybe they stole the idea from me — my essay for The Morning News, “Cheater, Cheater,” burned up the [...]
Continue Reading →Last week, The Morning News published an essay I was first assigned to write by Rolling Stone back in 2002, in which I found the first student I caught plagiarizing and interviewed her about how it impacted her life. The piece got killed (because I didn’t know what I wanted to write) but I remained [...]
Continue Reading →Needless to say, we’ve talked more about signing than we’ve actually signed. DOG and CAT get into regular rotation, as does MORE. Other than that, we’re using spoken English. All throughout the last couple months, the baby’s said phantom words a couple of times. For instance, you ask him some question, and he responds with [...]
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Last weekend we went to NYC so I could meet up with my new agent, David Patterson, of Foundry Media, where this was waiting for me at the door:
It was good to talk, talk shop, talk books, talk writing, the whole thing. But first, we had to ogle my son, who loved the [...]
Continue Reading →Managed to remember to teach the sign for “dog” today. Also invented a sign for “outside,” which I know is going to come back and haunt me — the boy poking one finger through the other hand’s closed fingers, over and over and over. But what the hell. And sometimes, we’ll want to be outside.
Continue Reading →Babel No More is a scientific book — not in the sense that it’s laden with charts and figures, and not because the action takes place in laboratories, but because it attempts to provide reliable information about language superlearners, that is, information that’s not self-reported or anecdotal, but that can be verified, compared, and synthesized [...]
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So our baby is 6 months old, and we’re about to start using baby sign language, which I view with some trepidation — oh, great, another language to stumble around in. On the other hand, kids don’t seem to develop very big repertoires of signs, so even though I’m sleep-deprived and distracted, I think I [...]
Continue Reading →Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii announced that he’s sponsoring the National Language Coordination Act of 2009, which he also sponsored in 2005. The bill would create a cabinet-level language czar to “oversee, coordinate, and implement continuing national security and language education initiatives.” Sounds great, but if the czar has no budget control, it probably won’t [...]
Continue Reading →It hasn’t been a year for much journalism by me, but I do have a piece in the April 17th Science about efforts to identify and survey languages in China (in Yunnan province, specifically), and about the politics involved. In China, as elsewhere, what gets called “a language” (as opposed to “a dialect” or “a [...]
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Last week I appeared with Ammon Shea at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, reading and talking about books. (He talked about his, me mine. Maybe next time we can swap.) His is a word book: he spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary. But it’s not a word book like a lexicographer [...]
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