Languages in the Big Apple

I think it speaks for itself…

New research at the University of Toronto has recently discovered that contrary to popular belief, the dumbed-down, abbreviated language we use for communicating over the internet in doesn’t actually affect our ability to write in formal English.

This is great news! It means you can sound as stooopid as you’d like when emailing, instant-messaging, or facebook-wall-posting with your friends, and still get an A on that Critical Theory paper.

In fact, the linguists at the University view this new lingo as proof of young people’s creativity!

After performing a study of 71 technologically-adept teenagers, the researchers concluded that
When chatting with friends, the teens cleverly fused different features of the language: written and spoken, formal and informal.
“It’s showing a real creativity and a firm grasp of the linguistic resources available to them,” said Derek Denis, a co-author of the study that is to be presented today at the Linguistics Society of Canada and the United States annual meeting in Toronto.
He said the unique study refutes fears that instant messaging is “the bastardization of the English language and the linguistic ruin of a generation.” It’s about time they chillaxed. (That was for you, Safire.)

Source

The San Francisco Chronicle recently featured an excerpt from Ilan Stavans’ new book, “Love and Language” (Yale University Press; 261 pages; $25). Stavans, an essayist, critic, and fiction writer, conducted a series of six dialogues with Veronica Albin, a senior lecturer of Spanish and translation at Rice University, to track the evolution of the concept of love.

Here’s a tiny peek:

Verónica Albin: How should the word love be defined?
Ilan Stavans: As a most amorphous human feeling, capable of extremes: attraction and repulsion, exultation and misery, life and death, Eros and Thanatos.
The definition is imperfect, however, perhaps more so than for any other feeling. How does one define hatred? And envy? In fact, think about the way Western civilization conceptualizes feeling, as the condition of being emotionally affected. But at what point aren’t we emotionally affected? And how many feelings are there? Five, like the senses? Seven, like the days of the week, or better yet, like the deadly sins? Try cataloging them and you’ll fall prey to confusion.
VA: Are feelings and emotions the same?
IS: They have become synonymous, yes, although this is something of a cliche. A feeling, the dictionary states, is an emotional state, a disposition. Conversely, an emotion is the part of the consciousness that involves feeling. In any case, I prefer the word emotion.
VA: Why?
IS: Maybe it’s a reaction. In the Mexico of my salad days, the word sentimiento, feeling, had a New Age quality. I remember the expression “estar en contacto con los sentimientos,” to be in touch with one’s feelings.
VA: What is the nature of an emotion?
IS: Emotions aren’t quantifiable; they aren’t even verifiable. Yet they rule our life from beginning to end. They are messy, rowdy and turbulent. While they might be predictable, their patterns depend on circumstance and temperament. We don’t fall in love because we want to, nor do we befriend a person by simply pressing a button. These actions are directed by an internal force. Reason might seek to control them, set limits to them, but emotions are autonomous; they exist beyond reason.
VA: How many distinct emotions are there?
IS: Let me offer an alphabetical, albeit partial, list of these nebulous experiences: angst, anguish, attraction, bereavement, betrayal, compassion, disappointment, ecstasy, elation, envy, exultation, failure, glee, gratefulness, guilt, happiness, hatred, helplessness, inferiority, insecurity, ire, jealousy, keenness, kinkiness, kinship, loss, love, meanness, misery, nostalgia, obligation, obsession, outrage, panic, pride, qualm, queasiness, regret, remorse, repulsion, revulsion, sadness, shame, trust, unhappiness, vulnerability, withdrawal, xenophobia, yearning and zealousness.
VA: What makes love different?
IS: The fact that its contradictions make each of us feel unique.
VA: Contradictions or not, we know when we are in love …

Read the entire article here !

New research suggests that Neanderthals, our closest extinct relatives, may have spoken just like we do. Best known for making tools similar to those our ancestors used, these cavemen were previously believed to have been grunters and groaners, but new data suggests that they possessed the same gene that we credit with our language and speech skills today.

The FOXP2 gene, which scientists assumed had developed into the modern human variant that it is today less than 200,000 years ago, was found in a bunch of Neanderthal bones collected in a cave in northern Spain.

This means, according to paleogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, that “It is possible that Neanderthals spoke just like we do.”

The most interesting (or creepiest to imagine, maybe) part of the study is Krause’s theory on how the FOXP2 gene ended up in our biological make-up: he “noted that some might suggest that interbreeding or ‘gene flow’ (aka sex) between modern humans and Neanderthals led us to having FOXP2 in common.”

So if you’ve ever secretly thought those Geiko cavemen were hot, don’t feel bad. Your great-great-great-great-grandma did, too.

Source

Harvard mathematicians have come up with a formula that will help predict the future of language evolution. It is, in short:

“Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language.”

Got that? What it boils down to is thinking of linguistic development in terms of evolution: ” Just as genes and organisms undergo natural selection, words — specifically, irregular verbs that do not take an “-ed” ending in the past tense — are subject to powerful pressure to “regularize” as the language develops.”

Their research is based on seven of the verb conjugation rules of Old English – only one of which is still used today.

They found that the one surviving rule, which adds an “-ed” suffix to simple past and past participle forms, contributes to the evolutionary decay of irregular English verbs according to a specific mathematical function: It regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.

In other words, a verb used 100 times less frequently will evolve 10 times as fast.

To develop this formula, the researchers tracked the status of 177 irregular verbs in Old English through linguistic changes in Middle English and then modern English. Of these 177 verbs that were irregular 1,200 years ago, 145 stayed irregular in Middle English and just 98 remain irregular today, following the regularization over the centuries of such verbs as help, laugh, reach, walk, and work.

Don’t ask me. I almost failed Calculus.

Source

My personal exposure to the Icelandic language is pretty limited; except for the occasional Bjork song, it’s not something I hear often, but I’ve often wondered about the history behind the language.

An article I found answered a lot of my questions. Here it is, the history of Icelandic, in a nutshell:

The most used language of Iceland is “the Icelandic” and it is one of the very famous Nordic languages group. This group is the sub-group of the Germanic languages. Normally, Germanic language is divided into two groups i.e. North Germanic or Nordic languages and West Germanic. Iceland was first inhabited in around 870 A.D and most of the first visitors were from Norway [west Norway], Sweden and Ireland. Some Celtics were also in the earliest arrivals to Iceland. The language that became the most popular in Iceland was that of the people of Norway. Some traces of Celtic language are also visible in Icelandic language. The only words borrowed from Celtic language are some personal names and some names of places. Till 14th century Icelandic and Norwegian language was almost same. It was after 14th century that they became totally different from each other. This change occurred due to significant changes in the language of Norway. Icelandic language didn’t change and this was due to rich Icelandic literature that was written in read in the same language in 12th and 13th centuries. Now it is said that not even a single word has changed in Icelandic language that’s why the texts written in twelfth century can be read by a ten year boy even now. Another quality of Icelandic language is its uniformity i.e. the absence of dialects.

A new article in Science Daily reveals that toddlers are grasping language skills much earlier than expected, and “by the age of 18 months understand enough of the lexicon of their own language to recognize how speakers use sounds to convey meaning.”

Apparently the wee tykes are also able to discern which sounds to ignore – those, for example, that don’t play a significant role in speaking their native tongue. If you’ve ever wondered why you have so much trouble rolling your ‘r’s, this is why – the most important period for acquiring the speech patterns and sounds of one’s native language is during a child’s first year. Sounds that don’t factor largely into the language a child is hearing – in our case, the rolled ‘r’ – are categorically ignored, causing our tongue and brain to develop accordingly.

This is why Japanese toddlers, like Japanese adults, cannot tell apart the English “r” and “l” sounds and why English speakers have trouble with certain French vowels because they all sound the same to non-native speakers due to language learning in infancy. The Penn study shows that even when two words sound very different, toddlers know whether to take this difference seriously or to chalk it up to random variation depending on how their language works.

So while linguists are finding that learning a new language as an adult isn’t as impossible as previously believed, your accent could be there forever.

Read the complete article: here

After a summer of heated debate, the Khalil Gibran International Academy, New York’s first Arabic public charter school, opened its doors for the first time on September 4th.

Over at City Hall, those opposed to the academy united to protest. Here’s a quote from Irene Alter, one of the objectors:

“The mayor and chancellor owe the citizens and taxpayers an explanation for the necessity of a school like this. And, additionally, [an explanation of] how they plan to monitor it, since it’s well known that many of the texts emanating from countries such as Saudi Arabia are filled with anti-American, anti-Zionist rhetoric.”

Oh, Irene, let me count the ways your logic falters: First of all, “countries such as Saudi Arabia”? The academy, one of 70 dual-language schools in the city, has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia in particular, but rather will provide a secular focus on Arabic language and culture. Secondly, “anti-Zionist” rhetoric? Since when must America’s public schools adhere to a Zionist regime? True, the separation of church and state has suffered some serious blows in the past few years (prayers in schools, anyone?), but to base your opposition to the Khalil Gibran International Academy on the fact that there are texts in the Middle East that aren’t down with Israel is the fast track to making yourself look like a xenophobic fool.

Hopefully, the school will succeed in teaching its 55 enrolled students to use language with a bit more precision.

Quote source here.

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has a new book out entitled The Stuff of Thought, in which he argues that language is a display of our inner nature. Douglass Hofstadter wrote a thorough, if somewhat unfavorable, review for the LA Times.

That language reveals our inner nature is not a terribly revolutionary premise — language is, after all, our primary means of expression — but the book also tries to take the academic notion of semantics down from the ivory tower to show that the meanings of words matter more than we suspect.

Coining the term verbivores (a species that lives on words), Pinker argues that “our verbivorous, highly biased perception of reality differs radically from the findings of science yet allows us to thrive in a complex universe.”

Translation: there are many classes and “microclasses” of verbs, some of which incorporate alterations into their usage based on the objects which they describe, and some of which don’t.

These classifications are used to support “the idea that we sometimes frame events in terms of motion in physical space and sometimes in terms of motion in state-space”, a notion that makes it seem as though Pinker may have failed in plebeian-izing the theoretical study of semantics; still, it sounds like a good read.

Get the complete Los Angeles Times review here.

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.