From Congressional Quarterly:

“The FBI uses a combination of Special Agents, Language Analysts, and Contract Linguists to address its foreign language translation requirements, all with tested foreign language proficiency as determined by the Interagency Language Roundtable,” FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said.

The number of FBI Special Agents who could speak at least some Arabic had increased from 29 to 46 since Sept. 11, 2001, he said. The number of Contract Linguists and Language Analysts “who meet FBI Arabic language test standards” has ballooned from 70 to 285 in the same period.

“The FBI also has access to the National Virtual Translation Center, which serves as the clearinghouse to provide timely and accurate translation of foreign intelligence for Intelligence Community agencies,” Kolko added. “Although we always look to increase the numbers through our recruiting efforts, we have the tools available to do our job.”

This would mark the first time I'd seen a spokesman talk about contract linguists (perhaps it was the first time a reporter had asked). To see in-house analysts, contractors, and the NVTC mentioned in the same rebuttal shows that the FBI is presenting its "we have the tools, stop criticizing us" message better than before.

Then there's the whole phenomena of getting yourself tattooed in a language you don't speak, a script you don't read, which often goes bad. From the BBC:

When teenager Joanne Raine had her boyfriend's nickname "Roo" tattooed on her stomach it was supposed to be a sign of her undying love.

The 19-year-old from Darlington paid £80 for the Chinese artwork in 2004 and was delighted with the results.

That was until she showed it off in a Chinese takeaway and found out it actually spelled "supermarket."

The helpful blog Hanzi Smatter disputes that the characters mean "supermarket." Commenters have fun trying to figure out what it does mean, until someone writes in to say it's the name of a Chinese supermarket chain (without corroboration).

Update: changed the typo on the hanzi blog, got the joke. Thanks to the king of closed captions.

On this blog I feel as if I'm mostly moving information around, which isn't that satisfying to write, and it's no fun to read, I admit. So I'm going to work harder to add some value to what I put here. But for right now, I wanted to pass on several Our Fathers written in some pidgin Englishes, which are collected here.

Here's the Gullah version:

We Papa een heaben,
leh ebrybody hona you nyame
cause you da holy.
We pray dat soon you gwine
rule oba all ob we.
Wasoneba ting you da want,
leh um be een dis wol,
same like e be dey een heaben.
Gee we de food wa we need dis day yah an ebry day.
Fagibe we fa de bad ting we da do.
Cause we da fagibe dem people wa do bad ta we.
Leh we don't habe haad test wen Satan try we.
Keep we from e ebil.
Amen.

Then there's this one, from Middle English. Familiar, isn't it?

Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halewid be thi name; thi kyngdoom come to; be thi wille don, in erthe as in heuene. Yyue to vs this dai oure breed ouer othir substaunce, and foryyue to vs oure dettis, as we foryyuen to oure dettouris; and lede vs not in to temptacioun, but delyuere vs fro yuel. Amen.

Pinyin News mentioned the College Board's Mandarin AP test results from 2007: 81.1 % of those taking the test got a 5, and 88.9% test takers said they "regularly speak or hear the foreign language of the examination at home."

The real story here is that the weekend Chinese school system must be doing something right. When I was talking to Gaston Caperton in 2005 for my Mandarin article, the College Board fully expected the first couple years of the test to be dominated by native speakers. Chinese parents had been pushing for an AP test in the language for a while, so their kids could get academic credit for all the work they'd put in (and so the parents could vindicate themselves in their kids' eyes, no doubt). In the early years of the AP curriculum, there just wasn't going to be enough support early enough in the public schools to give non-heritage speakers the background they'd need to do well on the exam.

The challenge will be for schools that have touted their new Mandarin AP classes to duplicate these test scores.

At a Superbowl party, I met a psychiatrist who asked me (we were talking about Um...) if I believed in the unconscious. If you mean the semiotic detritus of life that's lying around and can be borrowed, deployed, or shanghaied for acts of interpretation, sure, I replied (or something like that -- it was the Superbowl). Here's a perfect example. I sent Misty an email talking about a conversation yesterday, in which I'd been worrying about the social dynamics in various workplaces. But instead of "handwringing" I wrote "handwriting." Ah, beautiful. Dr. Freud?

I can't think of anything that would have led me to write "writing" instead of "wringing," except maybe that I was thinking about the email I had just written to someone else. But since the content of my worrying was about writing, broadly construed (both as an act and as my future doing it), this is an opportunity for some interpretation, some meaning making. That's what I think a Freudian slip is -- not a bald linguistic error, but one with an opportunity for poetry. Or at least self-examination.

A short piece I did for the Texas Observer is here.

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.

Four years ago, I published a story in Technology Review about the National Virtual Translation Center, an FBI project to use technology to link contract linguists and give them tools to do translation and analysis jobs for the 16 intelligence agencies. I recently discovered that this piece (which to date is the only piece of journalism written about the NVTC) is finally available for free online here. I also looked at the FBI's 2009 budget justification, which contains more info about the NVTC than documents from previous years (even Secrecy News calls the document "remarkably detailed"), which provide a scope of how much the NVTC has grown:

--"Since 2003, the NVTC has accepted over 1,200 requirements in 60 difference languages. In FY 2007 NVTC translated over 350,000 text pages and 350 hours of audio material, a 40% increase over FY 2006. With regard to translations, in 2003 the NVTC performed 20 translation jobs for its customers. In FY 2007 performed approximately 5,500 translation jobs for its customers. A 64 percent increase is expected between FY 2007 and FY 2008 based on the volume of incoming material from active military campaigns and the expansion of incoming Asian- and African-language materials."

--"Over 73 percent of material collected by the IC and stored in the HARMONY database is untranslated. HARMONY is the IC’s centralized database for foreign military, technical
and open-source documents and their translations. Overall, the IC backlog of untranslated material is growing exponentially, with an estimated five petabytes backlogged."

--There are 54 full and part-time independent contract linguists all over the country, connected virtually to the NVTC HQ and working through backlogged material. In 2009 the FBI wants to add 8 more contractors.

--These linguists are linked through TONS (Translator Online Network Support), which is an enterprise-scale computer system that gives them access to A variety of language processing capabilities to language software (automatic optical character recognition, machine translation, named entity extraction, and transliteration) and other language tools for translators. The FBI wants $1.2 million to support TONS.

--Though the NVTC is under the FBI, the director is paid by the NSA, and four other employees are either paid by the NSA or CIA. Five others are FBI employees, which makes for a total management staff of 9, but in 2009 they want to add 2 more. These employees do "outreach, coordination, quality control and...provide agency-unique
expertise in supporting IC clients.

--The NVTC was mandated by Congress to be a "clearinghouse" for language resources for the intelligence community; the portal was built in 2006 but it has no content. the FBI wants $166,000 to support the portal.

All of which is interesting, and more detail than I was able to get four years ago (obviously, since they'd just opened their doors, they had no track record to refer to). In the budget justification, there's no reference to past successes, only to imminent gaps if funding isn't grown. (The 2008 justification is more direct: "Failure to fund this initiative could cause serious harm to national security should actionable intelligence remain un-translated.")

A Google search of TONS turned up a more detailed description of TONS and NVTC vendors from 2004:

The FBI will be acquiring an estimated total of $7,000,000 in language software products, as identified by Lockheed Martin, directly from the following companies. BBN, Basis, Stellent, BlueShoe Technologies and Abbysoft will provide ingest, prioritization and retrieval capabilities, including language identification, audio processing, and optical character recognition; Virage will provide video processing; Trados will provide translation memory, translation tools and collaboration; Global Sight will provide task tracking, quality control tools, and workflow management.

Another tidbit from the budget justification: In 2007, the FBI reported over 21,000 "positive encounters" with suspected terrorists. ""A positive encounter is one in
which an encountered individual is positively matched with an identity
in the Terrorist Screening Data Base."

Interesting comment from here about how McCain's campaign placed teleprompters so he would look more natural giving a speech:

I wish that once, just once, the cameras would show us what is really going on in these rooms. It would both legitimate and honest to show the candidate making a speech AND the teleprompters AND the cue cards/big screen TVs etc. Why does the media allow politicians to get away this fiction that they have memorized their speeches and are delivering them extemporaneously?

I'm all for breaking down the fourth wall, but does anyone actually believe this fiction anymore? And if they don't, when did they stop? "They" being American audiences, consumers of political theater? If a scholar of political communication were to take this on as a topic, I would bet they'd look at the construction of extemporaneity as a rhetorical choice -- but not at how people perceived said construction/fiction. Perhaps the fiction is not so much rhetorical as it is ritualistic: a summoning of the order of the universe through the repetition of what has been and what will always be. Which is why it would look strange if the fourth wall were broken, not because the interaction would be less persuasive but because it's a threatening departure.

The official count of the world's languages has recently increased by 96 languages. The steward of this figure, SIL International, released an annual report in January that reviewed changes in three-letter codes that are assigned to languages by the International Standards Organization; these codes are metadata used in information organization and software development.

In the 2005 edition of Ethnologue, SIL's language atlas & gazetteer, there were 6912 languages; this represented 103 languages more than Ethnologue counted in 2000.

On the surface, these increases are interesting, since it appears to contradict the notion that languages are disappearing, and the overall count of languages shrinking. But when you dig more deeply, you see it's how languages are lumped and split.

Of the new codes, 47 were assigned because previously assigned codes were rearranged. The remaining 59 were assigned to languages that apparently had never been described before. Twenty of the new codes were proposed by Jamin Pelkey, a linguistics graduate student from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, who "discovered" about half of of those languages in a 2006 language survey in southern China for his dissertation. The other half, more or less, had been previously documented by Chinese linguists or by Pelkey's supervisor at La Trobe, named David Bradley. I went through the change requests to count Pelkey's proposals. Pelkey submitted the highest number of proposals to ISO.

Two of the new language codes were given to artificial languages: Kotava, an artificial language invented in 1978 that has approximately 40 fluent speakers in France and Polynesia, and Lingua Franca Nova, spoken by an online community of 180 people. (I'm quoting from the ISO proposals.)

Three were sign languages, all in south Asia.

The remainder of new codes are "new" by virtue of being recategorized in broad "macrolanguage" families. (That is, they weren't the product of two languages merging or two dialects splitting).

A couple of things are significant about this: one, because people are mapping linguistic diversity more thoroughly, more codes are needed to describe linguistic diversity even as that diversity decreases; two, we'll never really know "how many" language there are (or were) on the planet, given varying ways to distinguish "language" from "dialect."

Would be dumb to call this ironic:

The iPhone kills conversation.

But what a boon for know-it-alls!

Actually, I know I'd use it like this, which is why I've wondered if the touch keyboard would be even more of a social annoyance. On a Blackberry keyboard I could keep eye contact while typing; not so on the touch keyboard.

Why the Times spells "creole language" as "Creole language" is beyond me, using a proper noun to refer to the generic. Will it confuse people? It's not a common spelling. Derek Bickerton (whose memoir I reviewed for the Times) spells it "Creole." Anyway, I pointed it out to the editor. Don't blame me.

I might also add: the Times doesn't allow the word "bullshit," so this charming quote, unfortunately, had to go: "As far as I was concerned, I'd gotten the bullshit out of the way so I could now get on with the serious business of life. Which is, of course, finding out stuff."

My review essay honing in on William Safire's Political Dictionary also showed up on Sunday in the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

It begins like this:

Words are the most familiar part of language, because it's words we're most conscious of learning and forgetting. Only certain words, though. Your word-of-the-day calendar will never list "the" or "but." You boast about knowing French numbers, not the pronouns. What draws our fascination is the words for things, actions, properties and the other stuff of the world, not archaic prepositions.

A spelling and grammar-obsessed guy travels across the country, searching out typos and correcting them. Here's the blog.

Geoff Nunberg talked about "um" -- and mentioned my book, Um... -- on Fresh Air yesterday; the text of his piece is here.

He invents a term that I particular like: the "umological paradox," which is that why is a word that's communicatively so useful routinely so criticized and battered? I think I provided the answer in the book: a changing technological and media landscape in the early 20th century, as well as new ideals about the presentation of self, more widespread opportunities to speak in public, and the commercializing of broadcast media changed how we judged others' speaking and regulated our own. It's true that some mention against "urs" (as by Oliver Wendell Holmes) appears earlier, but the prescription against "um" just wasn't as widespread then as it is now. Now everybody thinks that umlessness is godliness -- or, at least, the mark of eloquence (or a piece of it).

I know this shift occurred because for the book I looked through as many 18th and 19th books as I thought would contain such finger-shaking. They didn't. That's not to say that people were more lax then. They had plenty of rules about how language should be used, but it was mainly about dialect and pronunciation, not about making uninterrupted utterances.

Somebody once asked me, "How will Um... make me play poker?" Here's one answer: if "um" can be used deliberately (as Geoff points out) as well as unintentionally, then the simple presence of "um" (or some other pause filler) isn't as telling as you might like. Here a tell isn't always a tell.

I am obliged to quote from today's NYT report from the Harry Potter lexicon trial:

It was an emotional culmination to three hours of testimony in which Mr. Vander Ark gushed over Ms. Rowling and her work like the devoted fan that he claimed to be, and disarmingly preceded almost every answer to a question with an “Um.”

Thanks for plugging my book, Steven! The check's in the mail.

“If I was a fish and there was bisphenol-a in the water, I’d be concerned,” he said. “If I was a fetus and my mother was using a plastic water bottle, I wouldn’t be bothered.”

Don't panic.

My essay on "so" for April's Seed just came online. But do see the print version if you can: the graphics, a spill of 70's style loop-de-loops in black and white, is gorgeous.

Misty, meaning to say "rural or urban," instead saying "url and -- " and stopping short of "url and burban."

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:

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.

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.

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 can remember two dozen signs. More. Eat. Drink. Cat. Dog. Thank you. Please. Outside.

This decision is pretty representative of the decisions we've made overall. In an interesting scholarly paper analyzing some hearing families who use baby sign, the authors (Pizer, Walters, Meier) write that "baby signing fits neatly into the parenting ideologies prevalent in the professional class in the United States. These ideologies value early communication with infants and promote the adaptation of the physical, social, and linguistic environment to their perceived needs." Yes, that's us. Professional class; adapt the environment to the infant's needs; promote early communication.

One of my favorite books to read in preparation for parenthood was David Lancy's The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings">, a vast (and very readable) cross-cultural and historical account of the cultural meanings of various stages of parenthood and childhood. There (and on his website, here) he lays out two broad models for when cultures decide that children should be socialized. One model he calls "pick when ripe," which is used in societies where babies and toddlers are largely ignored, may not be named until they're weaned, and undertake what he calls a "village curriculum" -- that is, not a formal education, but running errands, running messages, and doing small-scale versions of adult tasks. The other model, indicative of industrialized societies (Europe, Japan, the US), he calls "pick when green." In that model, it's never too early to socialize babies. Teaching signs to babies for use is pure "pick when ripe."

To be clear, we're not just teaching him how to say what he wants, which will supposedly make our lives easier, we're socializing him.
--We're socializing him into the notion that children's self-expressions are significant in some fashion -- too significant to be merely guessed at or ignored
--We're teaching him that children can have opportunities to display knowledge as soon as possible (and in fact, one of his roles already is to put on display what he can do; his "tricks")
--We're promoting socially appropriate behavior
--and we're promoting how to make one topic of communication the communication itself, which is what you get in a family with two highly verbal people.
--We're socializing him in how people interact with each other, at a more basic level (like how we take one-at-a-time turns when talking), as well as what are the platforms for further interaction.

It is not, I'll admit, about promoting an awareness of Deaf culture, or even building the start of basic fluency in American Sign Language, and I see that websites on baby signing promote this as a plus, including this dubious claim: "Should your baby continue to learn American Sign Language past his or her 3rd year, s/he will have acquired a 2nd or even 3rd language!" I mean, let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we.

There's a lot more to say on this topic, so I'll be posting more on this, including a summary of the research that evaluates the claims that teaching babies sign makes them smarter and verbally more precocious, and maybe I'll dig into some work from Australia about the predictors of verbal precocity.

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 with other knowledge. And that's never been done before, not on this topic, of people who can speak a lot of languages and who have an easier time than others learning them.

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.

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 conference room and wasn't fazed by the business talk:

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 something that sounds like "yes." Dad double takes, Mom double takes, and we ask each other: Did you hear that? Who's talking in the baby's mouth? (Babies, of course, precipitated the birth of ventriloquism: up to about three months ago, I could give voice to stuffed animals and he'd look at the stuffed animal, but now he looks at me. It's not enough motivation to learn how to throw my voice, but I do see where the impulse comes from.)

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 fond of the work and recently decided to resuscitate it. The essay is here.

It sparked some conversation around the interwebs when it was reposted at The Awl, Huffington Post , and D Magazine. You can read how and where it was tweeted around here.

It also provoked a letter to the editors at The Morning News, which was posted today here. The letter came from Elliot Hartwell, a graduate student at UC Davis. Here's my response to Elliot:

Dear Elliott,

Your note is puzzling. You start out agreeing with me, and by the end you're in full-blown ad hominem mode. I won't venture to diagnose what this suggests your experiences as a graduate student or as an instructor might be. I will say that nowhere in my piece do I say that I removed a statement of plagiarism policy from my syllabi. Nowhere do I claim to have stopped hunting plagiarists. And nowhere do I say that I stopped dealing with people I caught. You have felt free to read that into my essay. I wrote an essay that pursued nuance of morality and biography, yet it seems to have provoked you (and a few other readers, judging by the comments that were left on websites where this essay was linked) to accuse me of some sin against civilization itself. I invite you to quote for me from my essay where I said that moral standards do not matter. I'll make that offer even broader: I invite you to quote for me from anything I've ever written that glorifies or sanctions cheating in any form. But the essay is imperfect, because I didn't describe what I did when I discovered plagiarism in the semesters following. I responded by doing my primary job, which was to teach writing. Of course, I had to uphold institutional policy, but when policy conflicted with teaching, I let the pedagogical guide my hand. I should have assigned more writing to Haley, not less--as it stood, she only wrote six papers that semester (three drafts, three revised drafts), not the eight papers that her classmates did. I should have made her write me an apology. I should have made her write an apology to the website's author. I should have made her accountable, and I should have made her articulate her accountability in writing. I happen to think that school at any level should endeavor to make better people, not merely better students. In that, the punishment failed. I failed. As for the integrity of the academy you believe in, well, let's just say that scholars and researchers are part of the culture, not apart from it, despite their insistences to the contrary. I don't know you, but allow me the presumption of hoping that you learn this gently when the time comes.

Michael

Clearly, the conundrum that is student authorship in higher education hasn't gone away, and neither has the tendency to moralize simplistically about what instructors' proper responses should be.

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 tweetosphere (for a summary, go here) in June. The Times did an earlier story about the technology being employed to catch plagiarists. (Just kidding about them stealing the idea.)

The focus of both of those articles is on student writing -- but not student computer programming, where the plagiarism of code is also a rampant problem. That's a tougher situation to think about, I think, because if you're talking about literary (loosely construed) authorship, you have recourse to a couple thousand years of authorial traditions, with all its various threads and permutations. You also have recourse to reconsiderations of the postmodern sort, like mine, one result of which is to alter the moral valence of plagiarism as an activity, but also introduce new themes for pedagogy. Instructors of programming have no such recourse.

Another complicating difference is that writers actually do have to come up with their own language and ideas a great portion of the time, depending on appropriation, pastiche, riffing, paraphrasing, etc. as legitimate tools but one that, from a craft perspective, you don't want to use too often. And if you do use them, you may not want to admit to it. (Naturally, there are some writers who embrace the pastiche as a practice; see David Shields' Reality Hunger: A Manifesto as the most recent example.) My point is that the gap between what the classroom ideal is (you do your own work) and the actual practice (you come up with your own language) are very close.

I don't know much about the coding world, but what I do know suggests that the gap between the pedagogical ideal (you do your own work -- some of which means facing the blank screen and making the first steps) and the actual practice is much, much bigger than in the literary/compositional world. the coding world, And yet, in the actual work of writing code, copying/borrowing/appropriating is the only way to get the job done, so the gap between classroom practice (and academic values) and actual practice is much wider than it is in composition. I got an email recently from someone in response to The Morning News essay; the writer (who disagreed with my take) then admitted, "In my line of work, copying code from others is essential to getting my job done and an important skill, but also the worst kind of cheating if done in class to avoid completing an assignment."

Could someone get back to me and fill this in?

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, even though it's late in the game, book-wise. One project has been to learn foreign languages and document the time he spends doing it, mainly on video. As of 1997 (I think), he'd worked with 10 languages, which he describes in a quite brilliant essay, "Traveling Linguistics." Another project is a legislative movement to get the European Union to declare Chinese a European language and get it taught as a second or third language in schools. His motivation for doing this he articulates in his essay this way:

I have become increasingly aware of the psychoanalytical and identity-shaping consequences of my interest in studying foreign languages that can probably be best expressed in the "special note" of my file, basic linguistic services: "keep moving away from your mother tongue". However, I felt the need to question my own interest in the languages, their significance (romantic, powerful, marginal aspects, etc.) and the implications of the studies as well as the specific, privileged context within which I was able to free the energy to engage in these studies.

Hence the "traveling linguistics." Learning foreign languages, he claims, is informed by tourism and migration as a paradigm -- even if actual tourism or migration do not occur -- a paradigm that emerges in the 19th century in Europe, closely allied with Western imperialism and Orientalism (in Edward Said's sense). What existed before the tourism/migration paradigm? Before that was the nationalist paradigm, where one embarked on expertise in a language to shore up one's own claim to belonging to that nation and to no others. Before that was the scriptural paradigm, where the power of the church had to be engaged in its own language(s), but also in terms of the vernaculars. All this feeds the cultural fascination with polyglots and hyperpolyglots, and helps explain why the polyglot may be a distinctly Western cultural icon.

One of the best (and, sadly, only) stories I've read in a while about interpreters in Iraq and Afghanistan is this piece by Neil Shea on NPR/Foreign Policy. What's so great about it is the way he shows how progress (if that's the word to use) on the ground depends not on the number of interpreters, the amount of money that the Pentagon pays to defense contractors to supply those interpreters, or the quality of the interpreters themselves. What matters is the interaction from all sides of the language barriers that occurs in the traffic of words. Both sides fail; they can't help themselves.

Shea writes:

U.S. troops rely on translators. There is no alternative. On the battlefield and in the shuras, young officers like Kearney, raised in the get-down-to-business culture of America and its military, often express themselves to their translators directly and with heaps of slang, roughly the way they might talk to a college buddy. The terp is then expected to decide not only how to translate the words but also how to bridge the gulf of propriety and custom. But although this colloquial language is informal, it is still complex. And unfortunately, it assumes even more common background and idiomatic understanding than a more formal diction would: Think of phrases like "man up," "freedom isn't free," or even "shoulder responsibility" and "build your nation." In the best circumstances, the most successful shuras, it would be unrealistic to expect all this meaning to pass intact to a group of old men from another world. Try filtering it through a translator who didn't attend college, was never your buddy, and didn't grow up surrounded by phrases Americans take for granted, and the chances for error or insult multiply rapidly.

This resonates in interesting ways with David Mitchell's new masterwork novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: A Novel, which I just finished reading. The novel takes place on a small trading island where the Japanese keep their Dutch trading partners contained, like dangerous viruses. They're managed by a guild of Japanese translators and interpreters (interestingly, whole families get into the language business, and fathers pass positions to sons) who not only communicate messages but also act as censors and procurers, and who even engage in corruption themselves. The Dutch don't learn Japanese -- except for de Zoet, who begins the novel as a wet-eared but canny lower clerk pining for a girl at home and ends up, many years later, as someone so inside the culture and language but who still couldn't be with the Japanese woman he loves. Over and over Mitchell shows how the real trade isn't in copper or porcelain; neither is it in ideas (an early scene has de Zoet fearful that his Psalter will be confiscated; Christianity is prohibited in Japan) and knowledge (the Japanese clamor for Western medical expertise). The real traffic is in words and what they mean.

As a depiction of the economy of language in a pre-colonial context, Mitchell's novel is excellent. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, translation and the economies of meaning determine outcomes -- not only in terms of geopolitical resolution but in terms of what has to happen in order for US soldiers to be able to leave those places and come home, alive.