Languages in the Big Apple

There’s been a huge controversy in New York lately over the founding of Khalil Gibran International Academy, an Arabic public charter school.

Initially the brainchild of Principal Debbie Almontaser, KGIA was intended to provide students in grades 6-12 with a multicultural environment for native Arabic speakers as well as children who wanted to learn Arabic. By graduation, students would be fluent in both Arabic and English and have a solid background of Arab culture and history. Critics are calling the plan a city-funded Islamic institution.

On August 10th, the Post reported that out of 44 registered students, only seven were enrolled, six of whom already spoke Arabic. They also reported the multicultural ambtitions of Almontaser had failed, as 75% of the student body identified themselves as “black”. What that means, exactly, is left unclear. Five black people and one quarter-black person?

Critics were all too pleased when Almontaser publicly defended “Intifada NYC” t-shirts, made by a group known as Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media, explaining that “‘intifada’ means ’shaking off’ and the shirts represented women ’shaking off’ oppression. She later condemned the T-shirt message’s connection to Palestinian terrorism.”

The t-shirt controversy eventually forced Almontaser to step down as principal; she has been replaced by Danielle Salzberg, an Orthodox Jewish woman with past ties to the Zionist movement.

The school is scheduled to open in Brooklyn in mid-September — we’ll see what happens.

In American universities, most introductory foreign language classes are taught in English, under the assumption that an explicit understanding of the language’s grammar is essential before the language itself can be picked up.

In many other countries, in fact most of Western Europe, the opposite approach is taken: classes are taught entirely in the foreign language, with the hope that as the language itself is absorbed by students, so will its grammar. The argument between teaching grammar explicitly or implicitly is an interesting one.

In this article by ESL teacher Larry M. Lynch, both methods are examined.

In the argument for explicitly-taught grammar, Lynch explains that for “Logical-Mathematical and Verbal-Linguistic intelligence learners,” understanding a foreign language in terms of its structural foundation is the basis for fluency. Once the structure is learned, students can more easily fill in vocabulary and idiomatic gaps because of their comprehension of the linguistic foundation.

On the other hand, implicitly-taught grammar calls for more “natural, communicative situations”. This view aims to teach foreign tongues in the same way that mother tongues are learned — complete immersion. This exposure often proves more effective in sharpening the ear of the student, and making him/her more comfortable in conversing. In this method, the words come first, and the structural rules fall into place later.

So, which method is better? In considering the arguments alone, there’s something to be said for both. But if you look at evidence, the implicit-teaching might well be more successful. Native English speakers can often write very well in foreign languages because we’ve had so much grammar drilled into us from the beginning of our education, but when it comes to speaking, we sort of choke. Likewise, foreigners in America (or any English-speaking country) tend to speak more fluidly and with less apprehension, perhaps because they’ve practiced the oral aspects of English much more than we do foreign languages in our classrooms.

Is it because we learned grammar first? Possibly, however, it could also be the stigma we attach to speaking French in France, or Italian in Italy, or whatever language in wherever — we worry about our accent, our feminine/masculine endings, etc., to the point where conversations become terrifying.

Lynch responds to the question rather equivocally:

“Although it is essential to teach elements of language and develop communicative abilities in our students, there is no one best way to introduce and provide practice in them.”

In the mid-19th century, experts at the helm of the somewhat new field of linguistics formally banned all research pertaining to the origin of language. They considered it pointless.

But recently the topic has come into vogue, due in part to the fact that after linguistics had its heyday in the middle of the twentieth century, the only way to keep going forward in the field was to look back. Also, with the advancements in neuroscience, psychology, and genetics, looking for the origin of language became a more palatable endeavor.

This search is relayed in Christine Kenneally’s new book, The First Word, which provides an overview of the “hardest problem in science today.”

She begins, of course, with Noam Chomsky, who saw the human brain as unique among living things in its ability to create an unlimited number of sentences through an unlimited number of word combinations. From there she brings us to today, a post-Chomsky era of linguistics with many new theories on the relationship between language and the brain, while simultaneously introducing us to the ideas of today’s prominent linguists, such as Simon Kirby, and other forms of evidence being studied by linguists, such as Koko the communicative gorilla.

A recent study found that the ‘language’ (or system of nonsensical noises) mothers use to communicate with their babies is pretty much universal. According to the “>LA Times:

“Researchers from UCLA recorded eight American, native English-speaking mothers speaking in various intonations to both adults and children, then played the recordings to 26 male and female members of a nonindustrialized culture in South America called the Shuar. The mothers were asked to react verbally to photographs of babies and adults engaged in various activities comprising four categories: prohibitive, approval, comfort and attention.”

The Shuar mamas scored highly. In fact, they were able to surmise with 73% accuracy whether the American women were speaking to adults or to babies by listening to the pitch, loudness, and rate of speech.

This makes sense — it’s probably just as instinctual to use a high-pitched coo for a baby as it is for a newborn puppy. But Greg Bryant, the professor at UCLA who led the study, was also concerned with why these noises appeal to wee babes:

“Babies have immature perceptual systems, and they need extra enhanced input. So you’re spoon feeding them, essentially, which helps them understand… With exaggerated sound effects, you get enhanced perception. When people talk to adults, they rely more on words.”

Now let’s look at David Crystal’s How Language Works to find out more about ‘dude discourse’.

If girls are all about cooing, sing-songy, questioning conversation peppered with we and you, guys are more like, Let’s Talk About Me.

According to Crystal:

“Men are much more likely to interrupt (more than three times as much, in some studies), to dispute what has been said, to ignore or respond poorly to what has been said, to introduce more new topics into the conversation, and to make more declarations of fact or opinion.”

Sounds like a good time, right? But just as the lady-talk rules are simply products of the unspoken rules of social conduct, this description of men’s speech habits strikes me as somewhat oversimplified. Granted, Crystal does admit that none of these patterns are inherent to gender:

“Men are seen to reflect in their conversational dominance the power they have traditionally received from society; women, likewise, exercise the supporting role that they have been taught to adopt — in this case, helping the conversation along and providing men with opportunities to express this dominance.”

Even with this concession, the explanation feels outdated for a book published in 2005. I mean, thinking about it, I just really feel like my womanly-emotive adjectives are going to explode. Doesn’t it make you, like, soooo sad to hear the girls and guys stereotyped like this? Mmmhhm? Don’t you think, maybe, that we could all benefit from a little Judith Butler-style performative gender in our everyday conversations?

At least for the sake of a balanced discussion.

The most obvious way to tell whether a speaker is a man or a woman is to rely on pitch — a low-pitched speaker is usually a man, and a high-pitched speaker a woman.

But there are other, more subtle linguistic differences. In certain languages, such as Japanese and Thai, there are structural choices built into their systems of speaking that allow phonology, grammar, and vocabulary to be used differently by men and women to denote the sex of the speaker.

While English has no such system, linguists have concluded that there are singularities in the way each sex expresses itself. David Crystal, author of How Language Works, writes:

“Among the words and phrases that women are supposed to use more often are such emotive adjectives as super and lovely, exclamations such as Goodness me and Oh dear, and intensifiers such as so or such. This use of intensifiers has been noted in several languages, including German, French, and Russian.”

Isn’t that too precious? While it sounds at first like a loaded stereotype, it actually might be true. How often do you hear a guy call something lovely? Not very often. Crystal also says that women are more likely to ask questions during conversations and to “make more use of positive and encouraging ‘noises’ (such as mhm), use a wider intonational range and a more marked rhythmical stress, and make greater use of the pronouns you and we“.

Again, from experience, I guess I’d agree. But it’s still a little annoying, and isn’t that just a construct of the role of women in society? More to follow…

If you were to guess the etymology of the word malapropism, it would make sense to believe that it’s a scientific term taken from “mal,” (bad, wrong, evil) and “apropos” — that is, an inappropriate term, or “the mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one.”

In fact, the word comes from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play, The Rivals. While Sheridan was playing off the French term, mal à propos, his slippery-tongued character ultimately gave birth to a high-profile linguistic topic of study.

There’s a specific type of malapropism, appropriately known as an eggcorn, that Michael Erart’s Um… explains beautifully:

An eggcorn is “a word is mispronounced or misheard once. Then an individual continues to use the wrong form, insisting it’s correct and often inventing little stories — what linguists call ‘folk etymologies’ — to justify them. One reason classical malapropisms persist in a person’s vocabulary is that one can conceive how, even in the incorrect form, the badly-chosen words make sense”.

“Eggcorn” does, after all, sound like acorn, and an acorn is, after all, kind of shaped like an egg. “Exercise regiment” sounds a lot more disciplined and hard-core than “exercise regimen,” and “for all intensive purposes” technically makes just as much sense as “for all intents and purposes.”

Erarts gathers eggcorns from a few different places, including linguist Arnold Zwicky’s languagelog.com (the site that coined the term) and the official eggcorn archive. Check them out for more examples of Mrs. Malaprop’s progeny.

David Crystal’s book, How Language Works, includes an illuminating chapter on what exactly our eyes are doing when we read. Here’s a summary:

Both eyes work together as they search for an object, in quick jerky movements known as saccades. Between saccades are fixations, or periods of relative stability.

When we read, our eyes are alternating between saccades and fixations, taking in words not as linear lines of print but as larger visual units.

This “visual pattern of graphic features” is then transmitted to the retina; after that an optic nerves sends the pattern along to our brain for interpretation.

But the process of understanding what we read is a little more complicated, and there are a few different theories as to how we translate text into complete words with meanings. One of these theories is that we read by ear, or phonic mediation. This view argues that the process of reading individual words is indeed linear: letter-by-letter, our brain gathers the phonological sounds one at a time until a whole word, recognized by sound, is understood.

The other method claims that the “phonological bridge” is not necessary in any situation where the text is not read aloud. Instead, it emphasizes the partnership between graphology and semantics — that words are taken in by the brain as whole units, or read by eye. This process involves our peripheral vision to steer us towards the most important part of the page, leaving us to “guess” the significance of the leftover words to form a comprehensive understanding of the text as a whole.

Ever wonder where bad words come from? According to the Daily Utah Chronicle, the school paper of the University of Utah, a class called Bad Words and Taboo Terms teaches just that.

Described as “an introduction to linguistics as a whole”, the course examines expletives from around the world to chart the linguistics behind obscenities. It sounds pretty cool: Randall Eggert, a linguistics professor at the University, covers the whole spectrum of dirty words, from profanity to blasphemy, racial, ethnic and social slurs, and the significance of curse words all over the globe.

What’s really interesting about this course is the fact that it’s offered in Utah, the Mormon capital of the world. For the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, swearing is right up there with drinking, drugging, and pre-marital heavy petting — i.e. not kosher. Perhaps you remember the 2005 story of Tyler Poulson, a Mormon teen who jumped from a moving truck to avoid hearing his buds talk nasty about some bitches.

But Eggert, while eager to appease the worries of critics (who’d most likely come in the form of devout parents), also seems ready to defend his cause: “I will never use any word that I wouldn’t use in a lecture,” he said. “I will mention (taboo terms) in quotation or example sentences, but this class is not censored.”

He goes on to assure the paper that he is not looking to offend students and urges those sensitive to potty-talk to consider not enrolling. While the class would obviously provide some titillation to profanity-deprived college kids, the topic is also a great look at the cross-pollination of anthropology of language studies.

For example, the Australian Guugu Yimidhirr tribe forbids any man to address his mother-in-law directly. Instead, he must use a set of inanimate objects — whatever’s lying around — as intermediaries.

Sounds pretty interesting. It’s also probably a pretty big step towards a more liberal academic discourse for the University of Utah.

You don’t buy the New York Post expecting the New York Times. Obviously. You slap down a few quarters, get on the subway, and breeze through the paper within about fifteen minutes. On a good day, you’ll come away feeling entertained and (somewhat) informed.

The people at the Post aren’t about hoity-toity language and opinions — they’re about jamming as much breaking news and gossip down your throat as you can handle. And they’re good at it. So good, in fact, that you’re willing to overlook their blatantly right-wing op-eds in exchange for a juicy Page Six.

And then there are the headlines.

After a close reading, you’ll notice that the Post seems to apply three unspoken rules to the art of headline writing:

1. Use incorrect spelling wherever possible
Through is thru, Brooklyn is B’klyn, says is sez, etc. Okay, so they’ve got their reasons — their headlines are invariably enormous, and there just isn’t enough space to spell out every word in 64 point font. But this habit of shortening words can make the entire paper feel like an AIM chat, to the point where you start asking yourself, “omg! r u 4 real?”

2. Awful Alliteration Always Appeals
It’s almost as if they think their average reader is still hooked on nursery rhymes. Or maybe there’s a daily contest for the writers, with a point system for each word in a headline that begins with the same letter. More than three Ps per headline, you get a raise? Today’s paper included five stories with Mother Goose-style repetition: “Spitzer Story Slammed”, “Post Panelists Pick Hillary”, “Tornado Twisted for 9 Miles”, “Mafia’s Mister Clean”, and “Asian Bigot Busted!” Say that three times fast.

3. Shameless Word Play is Fun!
The last headline rule of Post headline writing is that all puns are created equal; use them whenever possible. From today’s paper: “What a Welcome Matt!”, “TV Chef Out of Frying Pan”, “Moore ‘Bad News’”, “Kitty Litter: 63 Cats Left at Shelter”, “Vroom for Two at Top”, “Jetsue: Arab’s T-Shirt ‘Bias’ Rap”, and, finally, “Chime-Out for Big Ben — Big Ben is losing its bongs — temporarily”.

After pinpointing these trends, it makes a little more sense why sometimes after finishing the Post, you just feel a little…. cheesy. In a good way.