Michael Erard - Home

Book

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:29:59 -0600

Hi, if you're coming here from YouTube. Yes, I am writing a book about hyperpolyglots, which will be titled Babel No More and published in the spring of 2011 by Henry Holt & Co. in the US; it will be published in South Korea by Minumsa. The manuscript is shaping up nicely, if I can say so -- I sent off another revision to my editor today. There's a website, www.babelnomore.com, which I set up for research purposes, mainly to explain and link to an online survey for people who speak six or more languages. I'll be rolling out some other content for that blog in the meantime. The survey, which was up for a year, is now closed so that I can do some data analysis, but here's one small result: 172 people replied; of that number, 66 reported having 6 languages, and 37 reported having 7 languages. The highest number someone reported is 537. One other respondent listed 40, and another 26. Also, nearly 70% of the respondents were men. One of the people I feature in the book is Alexander Arguelles, whom I videotaped describing his incredible daily routine; you might have seen that video somewhere. If you have any questions about the book or the topic and you want to get in touch, there's an email address at the bottom of www.umthebook.com.

two new

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:02:40 -0600

This piece, which was published in the July/August issue of Search Magazine, is about the relationship between academic linguists and SIL International, a language research organization with a Christian mission. I've encountered SIL as an organization and individuals with SIL affiliations quite a bit, and written about SIL linguists' work (the Science piece I did in April is partly about SIL work in China), and always was intrigued by the theological underpinnings for their work -- not in its connections to evangelism, necessarily, but a view of creation and history and the role of science -- and how those underpinnings provided a more robust model for doing work with minority languages than anything that academic departments and universities had so far been able to come up. Some have complained that religion and science are incompatible, and for most sciences I would agree. On the other hand, no science is ideologically pure in its motivations or ramifications, so any criticism of SIL as a Christian evangelical organization that doesn't also critique other aspects of the endangered language agenda is showing its ideological bias. This piece just appeared in Design Observer and was something I'd been thinking about for a couple of years, following some of the epiphanies that occurred after I was introduced to the notion of a gift economy in Lewis Hyde's amazing book, The Gift. Basically, I came to understand that if I wanted to sell my book (then just a proposal), I should buy books, and if I wanted people to read my book, I should read books. That's been my position since. I did sell the proposal and publish the book (that was Um...); there's probably no connection, but that hasn't kept me from believing that's the case. When Um... was about to come out, I also came across advice for self-publishers about marketing that was annoyingly confident in its assumption that consumers and potential readers won't be doing anything good with their time until you come along with your book. You just have to assault their fortresses of ignorance higher and louder until they come around. The reality is that they're living perfectly good lives without your stuff, so by what right do you impinge on their attention? So my thinking started with a modest proposal: don't allow anyone to sell a proposal or a book unless they buy and read a certain number of books, especially ones in the genre they want to write/sell. Immediately I got bogged down by potential counterarguments: what if you buy books but don't read them? What if you're too poor to buy the books but want to read? This leads to the thinking that it's not about the commodity economy, by and large, it's about attention: who we spend our attention on, and whose attention we gather. (I still like the notion of an attention tax for aspirants and newbies, which is also in the essay).

Linguists Discover New Tongues in China, Science, April 17, 2009

Thu, 21 May 2009 21:03:30 -0600

CORRECTION: The number of countries that Ethnologue tracks is 226, not 156. The full text of my recent Science piece can be found here. It begins like this:

After a long day in the field, deep in the mountains of southwestern China near the border with Vietnam, retired environmental health professor Gary Shook was surprised to meet another American, Jamin Pelkey, staying in the same government guesthouse. The two exchanged pleasantries. "I'm collecting tiger beetles," explained Shook, who had found four new species in the region. "What about you?" "I'm collecting new species of languages," replied Pelkey, then a graduate student at La Trobe University in Australia doing fieldwork for his dissertation...

Cedars, Design Observer, May 12, 2009

Wed, 13 May 2009 07:12:35 -0600

The second paragraph of my new essay, an homage to my time at the Dobie Paisano ranch, up at Design Observer:

Cutting cedars is a lot like writing, but it doesn't replace writing, and I've never gone out until I've done my daily. Standing, searching, bending, cutting, standing: it's repetitive work but has its art, too. You have to jam the clipper mouth around the tree stem below the dirt so the stump can't find the light and send up sprouts, but not so low that you grab a rock and chip the blade. Always in the back of your mind you have to know the line you're walking and working, more to guard yourself than for cedar-cutting efficiency, because the bigger trees would rather beckon you into the thick stands, where they grow fourteen, twenty feet high, and deep in their midst, where no sun ever reaches, the dry branches will first blind then skewer you, and there you'll wither and twist out of sight of the sky. Jerky gifts for coyotes.

And with that I'm also a contributing writer at Design Observer, where I've been happily writing sporadically for a few years. (An archive is here.)

Language legislation redux

Tue, 12 May 2009 06:39:50 -0600

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 work. As I wrote for the New Republic (the original TNR link is dead),

Akaka's bill gives the czar a budget for p.r. but no oversight over anyone else's budget, so the czar wouldn't set goals and steer a national language strategy to meet them as much as hope for the cooperation of the agencies represented on the council. Akaka's bill doesn't specify to whom the czar would report, either, which leaves no one responsible when the goals aren't met.

Even though we have a president with a basic proficiency in Indonesian, the country's language needs are no less dire now than they are then, which means that Akaka's bill has the same limitations -- though as the post-9/11 political will fades, establishing even a symbolic role would be a victory. (One name that came up a lot as a language czar candidate is Leon Panetta, now head of the CIA--who else could fill the role?)

Michael Langell, Spanish learner

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:59:48 -0600

I'm taking some time to write about a language learner I admire: Michael Langell, my uncle, who died on Wednesday at the age of 70. He was a Glenmary missionary -- Glenmary is a Catholic group that builds Catholic communities mainly in the Protestant-dominated American South. He worked in Tennessee and North Carolina, and in the 1990s his congregations swelled with Spanish speakers from Mexico and Central America. Rather than throw up his hands, he started learning Spanish. He was well into his 50s by that point, but went to immersion programs in Cuernevaca, Mexico and continued taking college-level classes in the US. In his parish, he worked on the homily with a native Spanish speaker, who delivered the homily. A lifelong priest (though as a young man he was a great ball player recruited by the Detroit Tigers), he was a humble guy, so never made great claims for his Spanish, and probably traded homily duties because he wanted a native speaker to give important messages. But he was more effective in the language than he let on, and that was the point: he wanted to be effective, and he did what he had to do to care for people the right way, which was to speak their language. Resto en paz, señor, tio mio.

"Linguists discover new tongues," Science Magazine, April 17, 2009

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:38:34 -0600

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 speech variety") is an ethnobureaucratic artifact more than a reflection of reality -- though in the Chinese case you see the clash between ethnobureaucracies, with the Chinese government on one side and a global international standard on the other. What makes this case intriguing is that the global regime, along with a definition of "language" that Chinese scholars don't support, is aided by SIL International, not the sort of organization that could have done work in China not long ago. I'll put up a PDF of the article in 30 days.

At Real Art Ways

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:00:16 -0600

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 would do, it's a delightful book about the experience of reading a book that's a list of words (and he's working on another book about reading books that we don't think of as books: phone books, catalogs, etc.). Anyway, I had a blast, and here are two photos:

Start to Finish

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:37:53 -0600

Until my time at the Dobie Paisano ranch, I'd never worked on such a large surface. This table, built by Texas author & journalist A.C. Greene, not only inspired order, it enabled memory. Files in drawers and books on shelves I tend to forget about, so it's as elemental as having my materials in front of my eyes. Not as distracting as I thought they'd be were windows opening onto the porch and front yard through which I saw deer, turkey, armadillo, cardinals, hummingbirds, and roadrunners. And I'll never write there again. The fellowship is over, and we moved out yesterday. The rest of the book I'll be writing on a 4-foot long table in a windowless laundry room in Portland, Maine -- where I am productive, and which I do like. But I leave this with this book, Babel No More, about half drafted, so it's hard not to see some connection.

God of Hyperpolyglots

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 10:48:54 -0600

Fellowship Pics

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:39:22 -0600

My New Workspace

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:38:09 -0600

Through two locked gates, two miles down a gravel road, over the creek (dry, dry, dry) and up a little hill is a house with a room where I work. It looks like this:

Pages

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:36:22 -0600

I once accidentally left the manuscript of Um... on the porch overnight. In the morning it looked like this:

Adventures in Intellectual Property

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:35:31 -0600

Because I believe in open source, public domain, commons-based peer production, and gift economies, I posted an entry back in May sounding off about a book I'd bought that treated intellectual property (including mine) badly.

Well, the author got in touch, because he thought I had overstated my case, and asked me to change my original posting. So I examined his materials again, and found even more instances where he was putting his own copyright on and selling material that was neither his to copyright or sell. After some back and forth, he saw the error of his ways, and he agreed to remove all this stuff. I've updated my original post my original post.

In general, I think it's a wise book. Learning languages can't really be made easier, but learners can benefit from social support -- coaching, advice, kicks in the pants -- along the lines that Ultimate Language Secrets provides.

But why did it have to be so slickly marketed, buried in cheesy typography, and presented in that Dance of the Seven Veils way? Just sell me the product without Free Offers! and Additional Value! and whatever. I also felt it was sleazy to be automatically signed up by some email marketer when I made my final purchase online. Yes, I could unsubscribe. And yes, educational materials are marketed. But this website miscalculates the audience for this product.

Um in paperback

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:34:24 -0600

What is Um...? It's a natural history of verbal blunders. It's a history of verbal fluency and the people who pursue it. It tells the story of famous types of slips like the spoonerism, the Freudian slip, the malapropism, and the Bushism. As a hardcover, it went into three printings, and it was reviewed by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

As of today, Um... is also available as a paperback! But what's new isn't just a softer cover. Inside is a new afterword with up-to-date reporting on brand new scientific research that seeks to unlock the mysteries of slips and the brain. This research (including a report on errors by Kanzi, the bonobo -- yes, that's right, a bonobo) was all published after the hardcover was already in press.

Also in the new afterword, I analyze some of the slips and stumbles in recent American politics, focusing on the Obama/Osama malapropism that media commentators and politicians -- on all sides -- have been making. As long as we have public speakers, we'll have public blunders, and Um... is the only book that will tell you why they happen.

The website www.umthebook.com has reviews, news, and information about readings, interviews, and appearances.