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.)

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New Jersey, the neighbor-state we love to hate, may be the latest place to incorporate changes into its constitution in an effort to sound less asshole-ish and more PC. The State Constitution currently states that “No idiot or insane person shall enjoy the right of suffrage.”

Other states that categorize their mentally disables as idiots: Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Ohio.

On November 6th, New Jersey voters will decide whether or not to eliminate the offensive terms, which, according to the bill’s advocates, “perpetuate myths” about the disabled.

“The perception is still out there that if you have a disability that you can’t fully function, that you can’t be a participating member of the community,” said Colleen O’Dell-Multer, a Brick resident who has multiple sclerosis and is legally blind. “That perception is totally inaccurate.”

As a 1976 court opinion stated, “A mentally retarded person need not be an `idiot’ and a mentally ill person need not be `insane.’”

But don’t hold your breath — in 2002, voters in New Mexico rejected a bill that would remove the same terms from its constitution.

Still, when you think about it, even if they change the language of the constitution, the rule stays the same. So while mentally disabled people will continue to be excluded from the voting process, idiots will be granted ballots! Quite the conundrum.

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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 !

William Safire’s latest contribution to the Sunday Times tries in vain to prove that the old man ain’t a square. “Language: translating the lingo of adultalescence” is a brief summary of the colloquialisms of today’s young-but-not-that-young. Let’s take a look at what he came up with:

Sketchy about the lingo being spoken by today’s adultalescents? As those in their late teens and early adulthood like to say, Ah-ite!
The sound of that last word is hard to convey on the printed page. The famous cry in comic books of a man being thrown out a window - Aiee-ee - comes closer to the first semi-syllable of the slurred word, but there is a hint of a at the end. When you ask a young person conversant in this campuspeak (a word created on the analogy of George Orwell’s newspeak) a question like “Would you do this for me?” you are likely to hear the answer “Ah-ite“.
The meaning is “O.K.” The sound is an amalgam of all and right, which used to sound like “aw-rite” but now is compressed into a sliding “a’ight”, as the teen-slanguist Fred Lynch transcribes it.

A few other brilliant translations:

Adorkable = endearing though socially inept
Fauxhawk = hairstyle achieved by combing all of the hair to the center to give the appearance of a Mohawk without shaving the head.”
Ginormous = gigantic + enormous
Chillax = chill + relax

… and a few other words you already know and use, plus several you’ve probably never heard of and were probably the result of some kid pulling old Safire’s leg.

Take a look 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.

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The language police descended upon a Pennsylvania woman last week for swearing at her toilet.

Dawn Herb, a resident of Scranton, PA, let her john know who was boss after it overflowed onto the bathroom floor. Luckily, her rant was overheard by a next-door neighbor, who also happened to be a policeman. His virgin ears were so distraught that he called up some fellow coppers, who raced to the scene of the crime and stuck Herb with a disorderly conduct charge before things got out of hand. Ms. Herb, who reportedly doesn’t remember exactly what she said to the poor toilet but admits using profanity, now faces up to $300 in fines and 90 days in jail.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she told The Times-Tribune, “I was in my house. It’s not like I was outside or drunk. The toilet was overflowing and leaking down into the kitchen and I was yelling for my daughter to get the mop.”

Sure, lady. In her defense, she was potty-talking to her potty.

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Here’s some good news: British researchers recently released a study claiming that profanity in the workplace can “boost morale and esprit de corps.”

“The study observed workers at a mail-order warehouse in England, which employed 14 people, and six focus groups of 10 to 20 people, two in England and six in the USA,” according to the Eastern Daily Press. “They included full-time and part-time workers in a variety of organisations, ranging from restaurants and retail, to a bank, nursing home and hospital.”

Yehuda Baruch, professor of management at the University of East Anglia, adds, “For some people, the use of profanity is a way to create collegiality. For others, it’s a way to relieve stress.”

The study’s other shocking revelations include the fact that young people tend to swear more often than older folks, and that some people find swearing offensive – Baruch himself, actually. He’s quoted as saying: “Personally, I detest the use of profanity. I don’t use it myself and I think it’s something terrible to do.”

Hmm. If he finds it so appalling, why did he conduct a study on it? In any case, journalists got a little giddy in their coverage of the report; here are a few headlines, courtesy of USA Today:

F-Yeah! Swearing At Work Is OK, Study Finds

Office Expletives: H— Yeah!

That’s for $@#! Sure

What the …? Workplace profanity boosts morale: study

Hey-ho.. It’s eff to work we go

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.

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Warning: this is a long one!

Living in a multicultural urban environment like New York can really skew your perception of racism in America. Sure, we get regular reminders of xenophobia in many forms – the uproar over Brooklyn’s Arabic school, for example – but more often than not, blatant racism is blurred by the diverse make-up of the city. If you’re a white person who hates brown people, you probably shouldn’t live here.

So it’s both surprising and sobering to come across letters such as this one, from KansasCity.com, in which a woman rants against people who live in America and can’t speak English.

This is in regard to Zdenko Bergl’s letter “Coming to America” (10/5). I agree with Mr. Bergl, who has no sympathy for immigrants who do not learn English. They are just as capable as the immigrants from long ago.

My family came to America from Sicily. They also attended English classes and became U.S. citizens. They were true Americans who loved our country. They and the other immigrants from long ago learned to speak English and adopted the ways of the American people. Why can’t the new immigrants?

I get very upset when I go shopping to hear the salespeople speaking in their language instead of English. I get upset when products we buy today are printed in Spanish. Why Spanish? Why not in Italian, Russian, German, Arabic, etc.? Why has Spanish become our second language? Why can’t the new immigrants use English in America because that is our language?

If the immigrants want to use their own language in their home or with their own people, that’s great. But they should learn English if they want to live in our great country.

Virginia G. - Kansas City

Why Spanish? Well, Virginia, maybe because the Latino population makes up the largest minority group in the country? The question should be, Why not Spanish? The fact is, she and so many other racists continue to misuse the immigrant argument. Yes, the United States is a country of immigrants, many of whom were treated at some point or another with prejudice and contempt. But what these people fail to realize is how everything is arbitrary. Like Saussure’s declaration about the link between signifier and signified, so, too, is the fact that our country chose English as our national language instead of German. (It was a close call.) But what good is there in sanctifying English? Trust me, Virginia, it ain’t going anywhere. The treatment of the most prominent language in the world as a precious, disappearing commodity reminds me of an interview I once saw on a college campus about the importance of Women’s Studies. One boy, when asked what he thought about the department, replied proudly:

“I don’t see any buildings dedicated to Men’s Studies, do you?”

Take a look around, buddy. The whole bloody campus is dedicated to Men’s Studies. And giving Virginia Woolf a room of her own won’t wipe you or your manhood off the map. Nor will the Spanish on your cereal box.