Languages in the Big Apple

Here’s a cool article picked up by the Christian Science Moniter
(again! I know!) that originally appeared on the writer’s blog. David
Keyes, a PhD student in Anthropology at UC San Diego, explains the
connection between soccer and linguistics through the Sapir-Whorf
theory.

Definition:
In a nutshell, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that language
doesn’t just describe reality – it shapes the way we perceive it. As
anthropologist Edward Sapir put it in 1929: “Language is a guide to
’social reality’…. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is
to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the
group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be
considered as representing the same social reality.”

In the Japanese language, for example, the word for self is jibun.
This word is made up of two parts, ji, which means part, and bun,
which means group. Put together, jibun literally means part of a
group. This has profound implications for the way the Japanese
typically conceive of the self. Unlike Western culture, which
emphasizes an individual’s autonomy, Japanese culture views people
always within the context of a group.

He goes on to define some fancy Costa Rican soccer moves, and to
explain the sociological importance of their names. La
plancha, for example, is literally defined as an iron to remove
wrinkles, but in soccer means a “straight-legged, cleats-up tackle.
Because there is a single word that describes this type of tackle,
Spanish-speakers are more likely to be aware of the offense (and thus
take offense at it being employed against them.)”

Keyes goes further in his explanation of the reality created by
language — read his blog.

Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) recently announced the introduction of a
bipartisan bill called the Plain Language in Government Communications
Act (HR 3584) that would require federal documents such as tax
returns, federal college aid applications, and Veterans Administration
forms to be written in “easy, simple-to-understand language.”

I can’t decide if this is a good thing or if it just means we’re all
getting stupider.

In any case, here’s what Rep. Braley had to say:

“Anyone who’s done their own taxes knows the headache of trying to
understand pages and pages of confusing forms and instructions,” Rep.
Braley said. “There is no reason why the federal government can’t
write these forms and other public documents in a way we can all
understand.

“Writing government documents in plain language will increase
government accountability and will save Americans time and money.
Plain, straightforward language makes it easy for taxpayers to
understand what the federal government is doing and what services it
is offering.

“I’m proud to introduce this bill to make it easier for Americans to
work with and understand their government.”

And here are the Federal Plain Language Guidelines for writing talk
that’s simple-like:

*Use short, simple words
*Use “you” and other pronouns to speak directly to readers
*Use short sentences and paragraphs
*Avoid legal, foreign, and technical jargon
*Avoid double negatives

And just in case you’re dying to see Plain Language in action, go to
plainlanguage.gov to see before-and-after examples.
Yeehaw.

In an effort to include the many Russians living in New York, the
Office of Mental Health is introducing a Russian-language Suicide
Prevention, Education and Awareness Kit (SPEAK).

The kit is already offered in English, Spanish, and, as of last year,
Chinese, and is currently developing a Creole kit for the Haitian
community in New York. These five languages apparently reflect the
ones for which the Office of Mental Health receives the most requests.

But what we really want to know, of course, is whether these languages
also reflect the highest rates of suicide. Jill Daniels, the
spokeswoman for OMH, says no:

The kits [are] not being offered because of a higher preponderance
of suicides among those ethnic groups. “We’re trying to make it
available to all communities in their languages.”

Pat Singer of the Brighton Neighborhood Association, which provides
social and quality of life services to the Russian population in
Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach area, said that in her 30 years as founder
and executive director of the association she had never been aware of
a suicide.

Alcoholism and smoking are very evident among the population, she
said, as is some depression among the middle-aged. Her clients tend
to be emotional “but not to the point of killing themselves,” Singer
added. “They’re survivors. They’re a tough group of people.”

So out of the 1,300 New Yorkers who kill themselves yearly,
none of them are Russian? Impressive. Daniels also claimed
that there was no information regarding the rates of suicide among
different ethnicities in the city, which seems like a big fat lie.
Any ideas? Which ethnic group here is throwing in the towel at the
highest rate? Comments welcome!

How much thought goes into the naming of the latest fast-food concoctions? A lot.

To come up with a name for Wendy’s newest cheeseburger, a disgustingly enormous sandwich featuring two quarter-pound beef patties, two slices of cheese, and six strips of bacon, the company sought professional help. The result? The baconator.

Ew.

A recent article went behind the scenes to look at the “linguistics” in mainstream marketing.

William Lozito, CEO of Strategic Name Development, understood that in coming up with a name for the burger, he needed something “that reflected the burger’s formidable qualities.”

His wife and partner, Diane Prange, who also acts as the company’s “chief linguistics officer,” offers her own in-depth analysis:

The prefix describes the burger’s key distinction and “the suffix suggests something large and compelling, as in Terminator.”

But for all the lowest-common-denominator logic of the
baconator, Strategic Name Development is raking it in — it’s
expected to pull in $2.5 million this year alone. I want to be a
product namer, too!

The company, started by Lozito in 1993, took off three years later when he hired Prange, who is fluent in four languages and “revels in arcane data and word usage.” She confesses:

“My idea of a good time is to crawl into bed with printouts from the Oxford English Dictionary.”

Or maybe watching Terminator?

Here are a few excerpts from an article from National Review creepo Deroy Murdock on the demise of American English:

As students return to America’s classrooms this month, they will focus anew on the nuances of the English language. Beyond their teachers’ lessons, it unfortunately has become increasingly difficult for them to learn from prominent Americans. Hearing her husband describe her as “the best-qualified non-incumbent I have ever had a chance to vote for in my entire life,” Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton told Iowa voters in July: “If I was as smart as Bill seems to think I am, I would say nothing.”

Wrong!

As the frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination should recognize, she should have said, “If I were as smart…” Senator Clinton (D., N.Y.) merely echoed the Democrats’ last standard-bearer.

“If I was president, this wouldn’t have happened,” John Kerry said during Hezbollah’s summer 2006 war on Israel.

“The subjunctive,” he goes on to say, “lies gravely wounded. Fewer and fewer Americans bother to discuss hypothetical or counterfactual circumstances using this verb mood.” (Hey, Murdoch! Check out this website! It’s made by an uber-liberal who works for PETA, but I think you’d dig it!

Not surprisingly, Murdock stays the hell away from Dubya’s grammar impediment, but he does include some entertaining examples of faulty usage, including the gasp! “There’s + [plural noun].” Check it out at National Review.

There have been a few articles lately about the popularity of Anglicisms among the Russian youth. English words are apparently finding their way into conversations, text messages, even politics in Russia more so than ever before.

Here’s an example of a young Russian girl’s text message to a friend:

“Hi, Katya. Ne poiti li nam drink coffee? Call asap! Cheers, Masha.”

If you don’t count the two names, that’s six English words to four Russian words.

Still, not that unusual — the language of text messaging and email is an art. Every country has its own methods of shortening and embellishing informal written language. When I was living in Italy, for example, the word per, or for, was written as x in SMS language — taken from the language of math. Sei, as in you are was written as the number 6, which in Italian is pronounced the same way.

Borrowing words from foreign languages also seems to be a habit of the text-messaging youth everywhere — the texts I get from friends often appear as a strange mélange of Spanish, English, and French, with an occasional moshi-moshi thrown in for good measure. And since Anglo-American culture is so visible all over the world, it’s not surprising that Russians are using the slang they’ve heard in movies for years in their text-messages and conversations. But what’s interesting about the way they use it, according to one of the articles, is the way that they’ve shaped it to fit their linguistic needs:

Russians increasingly do more than borrow English words. They bend them to their own grammar, combine them with native words, and generally twist them beyond recognition.

For example, an exciting football match could be described as “drivovy.”

The words stems from the English words “drive,” but has been turned into an adjective. Add to that a strong Russian accent and your average native English speaker would probably not guess that his language was being used at all.”

No explanation for why they’d pick “drive” to mean “exciting,” but you get the idea.

Links to a few articles: here and there.

Residents of Chicago’s Oak Forest and Oak Lawn are creeped out by two new billboards in their hoods. The bright yellow signs both display this message in Arabic:

“In a land full of opportunity (Fi Ard Amira bil furas), here’s one that may not have crossed your mind. A job with the U.S. Army.”

The sign at Cicero Avenue and 167th Street also contains an English line: “If you can read this, call Mohamed.” The other, at Harlem Avenue and 95th Street encourages readers to find Tarik.

Tim Turpin, the Army’s regional chief of advertising and public affairs, says the campaign is aimed at the estimated 30,000 Arab Americans living in the south western suburbs of Chicago.

“Predominately, we’re looking for linguists to assist us in Iraq,” Turpin said.

The government’s latest attempts to recruit speakers of Arabic isn’t new — similar billboards have popped up in New York, Los Angeles, New Jersey, an Florida, but it’s got some speakers of Amer’can pissed.

“For Edgar Castro, who works in the area and lives in Richton Park, the first thought that crossed his mind when he saw the sign was that he couldn’t read it.

‘It’s offensive,’ Castro said.”

Good thing this guy doesn’t live in California; all those billboards, street signs, and names of cities! in Mexican — muy offensivo.

William Safire, who writes the New York Times Magazine’s weekly column, On Language, recently provided us with a brief history of the word “schlep” and its incorporation into colloquial and written English.

After being surprised at spotting the word in three different “quality” newspapers (The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post), Safire embarks on a bit of research and finds that while “schlep” is used by all three as both a verb and a noun, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary only recognizes it was a verb.

He writes:

The recent embrace of schlep by The Times, Post and Journal shows that the dictionary’s incorporation of the word was a wise decision. The verb comes from the German sleppen, adopted with that meaning in the Yiddish schlepn or schlep, meaning “to drag, haul, lug.” “In Yiddish, the verb shlep is standard,” the lexicographer Sol Steinmetz, who spells the verb without the c, informs me, “with the literal meaning of ‘a pull, drag or jerk.’ Our slang meaning — ‘He’s such a shlep!’ — is an English innovation, either a figurative use of the Yiddish word or an adaption of the Yiddish shleper, meaning ‘a bum, tramp, beggar.’ The phrase ‘an ordinary shlep,’ as used in The Times, can be rendered in plain English as ‘an ordinary jerk,’ and the use of the slang phrase in the editorial seems to be an attempt to soften the serious message with a touch of New York humor.”

That Safire has a soft spot for schlep is sort of amusing, considering its Yiddish origin and the authors relation to his own Jewish heritage: born William Safir, he added an “e” and subtracted an ethnicity by adopting the more WASPy “Safire.”

Whether his approval marks a return to his roots or not, good for him for not applying his conservatism to language. Over all, an interesting, informative article. Read it here

In a remote corner of Israel, a Bedouin community is the subject of Margalit Fox’s new book, Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind (Simon & Schuster).
Fox, a linguist and New York Times journalist, was accompanied by four other linguists to investigate the peculiar story of a place where a relatively new sign language is spoken by deaf and hearing residents alike.

In Al-Sayyid, the number of deaf people is more than 40 times that of the general population — 150 out of 3,500 — and because of this prevalence, the community makes for an interesting study of both language and culture, especially due to the fact that so many hearing residents learn and speak the language of their deaf neighbors. Fox writes,
“It is quite unremarkable to be deaf here….In Al-Sayyid there is neither deaf culture nor deaf identity politics, because there is little hegemony of the hearing.”

After an anthropological ’study’ of the community, Fox gets into the beginnings of an ongoing study of the town’s sign language. She also gives us a brief history of Western sign languages, explaining why speakers of British Sign Language and American Sign Language can’t understand each other (ASL is based on French Sign Language.)

“If the linguists can isolate the formal elements that make Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language a language, they will have helped illuminate one of the most

Perhaps because their US ratings are failing so miserably, MTV has turned its attention to the Middle East; MTV Arabia, which will feature such television gems as “Pimp My Ride” and “Cribs,” was launched Monday.

Here’s what Bill Roedy, vice chairman of MTV Networks, has to say about it:

“Through MTV’s global platform that reaches nearly 2 billion people, Arabic music and culture can be exported to new audiences — giving Arabs a bigger voice and greatly enriching the diversity of our MTV creative culture. MTV Arabia is only the beginning of our ambitious plans for growth in the Middle East, and we’re excited to launch further Arabic services, including Nickelodeon next year.”

The network says it will feature a 60%-40% mix of international and Arabic music videos aimed toward a potential audience of 190 million.

And are the fine people of the Middle East just sooooooooo excited to have their own version of “Super Sweet 16?” Bhavneet Singh, managing director at MTV Networks International, says YES!

“MTV is the first global brand to launch a fully localized, Arabic-language entertainment service in the Middle East that truly represents Arab youth while being respectful of their rich and diverse culture.”