Are you a spy?
Jokingly, people ask me this question when they hear me speaking in other languages. (I speak seven languages: Russian, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Serbo Croatian.)
Shocked that I can copy accents so well and pass as a local, native speakers are dumbfounded to discover that I indeed am not one of them.
Did you live here a long time?
Are you parents from here?
Did you grow up speaking this language at home?
Did you go to a bilingual school?
Did you have a nanny that spoke our language?
I answer "no" to all the questions they ask.
They continue to look at me and can’t understand how I can speak their language so well.
How then can you sound so much like us?
Are you a spy?
This last question always gets a lot of laughs.
Spies are supposed to be smooth operators, weaving in and out of places unnoticed. Though I am told that I am good at hiding myself sometimes, I tend to fall too many times, sprain my ankle, hurt my sciatica, or have other foot or leg problems.
A Mata Hari, I am not. In addition to being a spy, she was a Polynesian dancer, right? With my feet problems, I am lucky if I can walk without falling, much less entertain a crowd with the movements of my hips and legs.
The CIA did try to recruit me after college to be a Russian language instructor. The NATO base in Naples was in need of my Italian language skills to work on a counter-mafia intelligence mission. Neither being a spy trainer or employing the luscious melodies of Italian to track the infamous Napolitano mafia attracted me. My father revolted when the CIA called me, telling me that we did not emigrate from the former USSR for me to be utilized by my government for espionage purposes.
It is not uncommon for people to seriously question who I am. Being able to be a linguistic polyglot is highly unusual. There are people who are multilingual, but they may still bear strong accents when speaking other languages or they speak using noticeably foreign sentence structures.
I realized a long time ago that I was a linguistic anomaly of sorts, able to pass as native until I made a grammatical mistake.
How so was it that I was able to pronounce a rolled Italian or Spanish “r”, Portuguese nasal vowels and French guttural “r”s?
I often responded that I just copied the sounds that I heard.
But that was not enough of a description to convince people of my abilities. There had to be something else.
Music.
Yes, music.
I learn languages just like I can copy a song. Let me say that I am no singer extraordinaire. I don’t copy sounds and songs like Pavarotti did, but somehow the cadence and musicality of languages seep into my mind.
Every language has its own music. We may not like the music, but each tongue does have its own rhythm. By listening to music, I learned to reproduce not just the verses of the songs, but also the sounds from the words.
Language learning is not just about learning grammar and vocabulary, it’s about feeling the language. Sounds resonate in our bodies and our spirit.
I encourage people to listen to music in the language they are studying to get a feel for the flow of the language. I wrote a book, Language is Music, to help people learn how to be multilingual and absorb foreign languages into their life. There are 65 tips on how to implement music, radio, TV, movies and other low-cost resources into your foreign language education.
Why haven’t teachers been using music and other media in the past to teach foreign languages?
I think that it’s because that until recently, it wasn’t so easy for people to have access to foreign music and entertainment so easily. Netflix, ITunes and You Tube enable anyone with an Internet connection to access media from other countries and languages. In the US, even someone living in rural Idaho can order a movie in Swahili to watch. I think that in the past, teachers didn’t incorporate media in the classroom or assign media related homework to students because their students simply didn’t have the access to music, radio and films from other countries.
Now there is no excuse not to put fun into language learning. As long as government censors don’t block sites like You Tube, most people with access to the Internet can watch parts of movies in other languages for free and listen to foreign music.
Check out Language is Music. You can read it online for free until April 5, 2009 at www.createyourworldbooks.com.
March 26, 2009
Dictionary of American Regional English
We should all be tickled to learn that the Dictionary of American Regional English project has come to fruition with the publication of the final volumes. According to a rumor some years back, the project died for lack of funding, but apparently that information was either false or out of date. For those interested in language, DARE is a virtual museum of American history and culture.
In connection with the publication of DARE’s final volumes, I propose that Lexiblog’s contributors launch a series of posts on regional American dialects and, in general, the history of American English. I’ll start.
If a single word had to bear the entire weight of American history and folklore, “Yankee” is perhaps the only one with the chops to do the job. One of the earliest tunes we think of as distinctly American is “Yankee Doodle.” The very title conjures images of tricornes and muskets, of fifes and rums, of Lexington, Concord, the midnight ride of Paul Revere—in short, the birth of the nation.
So when composer George M. Cohan wanted to tap reservoirs of shared American experience, all he had to do was proclaim,
I’m a Yankee Doodle dandy,
and we somehow knew just what he meant. We continue to thrill at the promise of Yankee grit enshrined in
Over there, over there,
And when the do-or-die Marines in Guadalcanal Diary huddle around the radio, eager for the baseball scores from home, do they give a Yankee shilling about the Pirates, the Reds, or the Sox (of either hue)? Nope—they want to know if the Yankees won. For only a team called the Yankees could be America’s team, a suitable emblem for American innocence and American will.
Adding to “Yankee’s” aura are its misty origins. One early legend held that it came from Indian efforts to pronounce “English.” Another was that it originated with a Cambridge, Massachusetts, farmer name Jonathan Hasting, a.k.a. “Yankee Hastings.” He was said to have often used “Yankee” in the sense of “excellent,” and so the word caught on as a suitable sobriquet for the region and its people.
In fact, “Yankee” dates to seventeenth-century Europe, and its earliest associations were none too favorable. British sailors used the name both for the Dutch and for Dutch ships—much as “Ivan” was World War II shorthand for the Russians. A plausible origin is the Dutch name Janke, a diminutive of Jan, that most Dutch sounding of Dutch names. Another is Jan Kees, or “John Cheese,” a patronizing name the British gave to the New England colonists.
By the mid-1700s, the Brits had transferred “Yankee” from the Dutch to New Englanders, and to America generally. But it was still a taunt, as one military record from the time illustrates: “By night, the British soldiers abused the watch-men on duty, and the young children of Boston by the wayside, making mouths at them, call them Yankeys, shewing their posteriors, and clapping their hands thereon.” And every generation of kids thinks that it invented mooning withal.
So with a view to adding a little luster to the name, New Englanders invented a legend. They claimed that “Yankee” came from the “Yankos,” a tribe of Massachusetts Indians whose name meant “the Invincibles.” The New England boast was that the Yankos were so awed by the martial prowess of their conquerors that they bestowed their own name on them.
Interestingly, this tall tale was pooh-poohed not by the British but by the good citizens of Virginia. It seems the Virginians had gotten themselves into a bit of a wax when their northern neighbors failed to lend them a hand against the Cherokee. So the Virginians proposed their own Indian origin for the word: that “Yankee” came from the Cherokee eankke, meaning “coward” or “slave.” Incidentally, the so-called “Yankee and Pennamite War” of 1769, a land dispute between Connecticut and Pennsylvania, is one more reminder that our colonial forebears were not always very forbearing—and that where a storm blew up, the Yankees could usually be found nearby.
For the British, “Yankee” was a term of amused contempt, but a funny thing happened on the way to Yorktown, and Americans came to wear the name as a badge of honor. In the 1800s, even Ohio got into the act, gracefully accepting the name “Yankee State” from Kentucky bargemen struck by the number of New Englanders settling the state. Of course, during the Civil War, the Confederacy turned “Yankee” once again into a sneer, despite Rhett Butler’s view that Yankees “are pretty much like Southerners—except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents.” The South scoffed at the Union ironclad Monitor by called it a “Yankee cheese box on a raft.” A Union sympathizer from the South was a “galvanized Yankee”—coated on the outside but something different underneath.
Throughout its ups and downs, “Yankee” has remained a codeword for something unique and unmistakable in the American character. “Yankee grit” is that unflinching, persevering courage that took American troops across the Pacific to the top of Mount Suribachi. “Yankee Doodle Dandyism” suggests an enterprising, freebooting side to American life. Even the word’s darker hues are recognizably American. A “Yankee trick” suggests cunning and deception, but also a kind of unsophisticated horse sense. And while no one would volunteer to wear the latest in “Yankee jackets” (tar and feathers), the term hints at a brash, unruly quality we sometimes rank as a national virtue, for good or ill.
And so “Yankee” has become a “made in the USA” label. “Yankee peddlers” sell “Yankee notions” out of “Yankee carts” to . . . well, to Yankees. There’s Yankee clippers, jibs, clocks chowder, pot roast, run, nutmeg, nut cake. There’s just plain “Yankees” (nineteenth-century American stocks) and just plain “Yankee” (sweetened whiskey). We can “yankee” folks, and if they try to beat us at our own game, we can “out-yankee” them—with the help of a little Yankee know-how. There are western Yankees, homemade Yankees, Connecticut Yankees, Virginia Yankees.
And, the most endearing and enduring species of them all, damn Yankees.
Michael J. O'Neal's novel about Civil War espionage, Crazy Bett, is available at http://www.crazybett.com/.
In connection with the publication of DARE’s final volumes, I propose that Lexiblog’s contributors launch a series of posts on regional American dialects and, in general, the history of American English. I’ll start.
*****************
If a single word had to bear the entire weight of American history and folklore, “Yankee” is perhaps the only one with the chops to do the job. One of the earliest tunes we think of as distinctly American is “Yankee Doodle.” The very title conjures images of tricornes and muskets, of fifes and rums, of Lexington, Concord, the midnight ride of Paul Revere—in short, the birth of the nation.
So when composer George M. Cohan wanted to tap reservoirs of shared American experience, all he had to do was proclaim,
I’m a Yankee Doodle dandy,
Yankee Doodle do or die,
and we somehow knew just what he meant. We continue to thrill at the promise of Yankee grit enshrined in
Over there, over there,
Send the word, send the word, over there,
That the Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming.
Adding to “Yankee’s” aura are its misty origins. One early legend held that it came from Indian efforts to pronounce “English.” Another was that it originated with a Cambridge, Massachusetts, farmer name Jonathan Hasting, a.k.a. “Yankee Hastings.” He was said to have often used “Yankee” in the sense of “excellent,” and so the word caught on as a suitable sobriquet for the region and its people.
In fact, “Yankee” dates to seventeenth-century Europe, and its earliest associations were none too favorable. British sailors used the name both for the Dutch and for Dutch ships—much as “Ivan” was World War II shorthand for the Russians. A plausible origin is the Dutch name Janke, a diminutive of Jan, that most Dutch sounding of Dutch names. Another is Jan Kees, or “John Cheese,” a patronizing name the British gave to the New England colonists.
By the mid-1700s, the Brits had transferred “Yankee” from the Dutch to New Englanders, and to America generally. But it was still a taunt, as one military record from the time illustrates: “By night, the British soldiers abused the watch-men on duty, and the young children of Boston by the wayside, making mouths at them, call them Yankeys, shewing their posteriors, and clapping their hands thereon.” And every generation of kids thinks that it invented mooning withal.
So with a view to adding a little luster to the name, New Englanders invented a legend. They claimed that “Yankee” came from the “Yankos,” a tribe of Massachusetts Indians whose name meant “the Invincibles.” The New England boast was that the Yankos were so awed by the martial prowess of their conquerors that they bestowed their own name on them.
Interestingly, this tall tale was pooh-poohed not by the British but by the good citizens of Virginia. It seems the Virginians had gotten themselves into a bit of a wax when their northern neighbors failed to lend them a hand against the Cherokee. So the Virginians proposed their own Indian origin for the word: that “Yankee” came from the Cherokee eankke, meaning “coward” or “slave.” Incidentally, the so-called “Yankee and Pennamite War” of 1769, a land dispute between Connecticut and Pennsylvania, is one more reminder that our colonial forebears were not always very forbearing—and that where a storm blew up, the Yankees could usually be found nearby.
For the British, “Yankee” was a term of amused contempt, but a funny thing happened on the way to Yorktown, and Americans came to wear the name as a badge of honor. In the 1800s, even Ohio got into the act, gracefully accepting the name “Yankee State” from Kentucky bargemen struck by the number of New Englanders settling the state. Of course, during the Civil War, the Confederacy turned “Yankee” once again into a sneer, despite Rhett Butler’s view that Yankees “are pretty much like Southerners—except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents.” The South scoffed at the Union ironclad Monitor by called it a “Yankee cheese box on a raft.” A Union sympathizer from the South was a “galvanized Yankee”—coated on the outside but something different underneath.
Throughout its ups and downs, “Yankee” has remained a codeword for something unique and unmistakable in the American character. “Yankee grit” is that unflinching, persevering courage that took American troops across the Pacific to the top of Mount Suribachi. “Yankee Doodle Dandyism” suggests an enterprising, freebooting side to American life. Even the word’s darker hues are recognizably American. A “Yankee trick” suggests cunning and deception, but also a kind of unsophisticated horse sense. And while no one would volunteer to wear the latest in “Yankee jackets” (tar and feathers), the term hints at a brash, unruly quality we sometimes rank as a national virtue, for good or ill.
And so “Yankee” has become a “made in the USA” label. “Yankee peddlers” sell “Yankee notions” out of “Yankee carts” to . . . well, to Yankees. There’s Yankee clippers, jibs, clocks chowder, pot roast, run, nutmeg, nut cake. There’s just plain “Yankees” (nineteenth-century American stocks) and just plain “Yankee” (sweetened whiskey). We can “yankee” folks, and if they try to beat us at our own game, we can “out-yankee” them—with the help of a little Yankee know-how. There are western Yankees, homemade Yankees, Connecticut Yankees, Virginia Yankees.
And, the most endearing and enduring species of them all, damn Yankees.
Michael J. O'Neal's novel about Civil War espionage, Crazy Bett, is available at http://www.crazybett.com/.
March 23, 2009
Why Johnny Still Can't Read
In 1955, the bombshell book Why Johnny Can’t Read disturbed a few nesting hornets. A half-century later, per-student education spending in inflation-adjusted dollars has quadrupled, but Johnny (and today’s Jareds and Jessicas) still can’t read.
According to a report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than two-thirds of the nation’s fourth-graders are reading below proficiency level. And they’re not outgrowing the problem: The American College Testing Program reported that an astonishing 49 percent of the 1.2 million students who took its college admissions test in a recent year lack college-level reading skills. Minorities and the poor fare worse: Only 21 percent of blacks, 33 percent of Hispanics, and 33 percent of students from families with annual incomes below $30,000 have mastered the complex reading tasks required for college success. Not counted, of course, are the 30 percent of high-schoolers who drop out and thus don’t take the test.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Too many parents have been dot.conned into buying for their kids every piece of digital silliness Silicon Valley dishes up. Kids who used to sometimes pass the hours with a book—or being read to—now molder in front of computers, DVD players, PlayStations, and X-boxes, when they’re not engaged in narcissistic twittering. They wallow in iconography and visual imagery and “text” impoverished messages in a way not unlike life in the Dark Ages, before the printing press spread the gift of the unhurried but enriching processes of sustained written language. Shoot, we can even watch people play video games on television. What’s next? Watching people play computer solitaire?
But the blame doesn’t stop there.
The public assumes that colleges of education are preparing aspiring teachers to teach kids how to read by requiring rigorous courses in how to do so. One would think that the teaching of reading would be a college of education’s Prime Directive. To test that assumption, the Washington, D.C.–based National Council on Teacher Quality launched a sweeping examination of reading courses and textbooks at the nation’s colleges of education. The results are appalling. What masquerades as reading pedagogy is, with painfully few exceptions, a soggy confection of political correctness, collectivist social indoctrination, diversity training, and fluff courses that make basket weaving sound like advanced biophysics. An overgeneralization? To a degree, and some colleges of education actually do a bang-up job. But not enough.
Examples abound. One reading course syllabus says, “Knowledge is … constructed by individual learners through social interaction … learning occurs within a collaborative community.” Another says, “Reading and writing are acquired through social collaborative interactions and life experiences.” A popular reading textbook advocates “classrooms that allow children to design their own route to further knowledge about print; the role of the teacher is supportive assistant.”
According to the professionals, then, reading teachers don’t really have to teach reading. Like cheerleaders, they can lend sis-boom-ba support while kids magically teach themselves to read through “collaboration” and “social interaction” and “life experiences”—in much the same way they teach each other to reproduce bodily noises with their armpits.
Many of the courses are laughable in their lack of rigor. Here’s an assignment worth 20 percent of the grade in a college course in reading instruction: “After reading the book, design an original cover for it. . . .Make a commercial that convinces others to buy and read the book. Make a diorama of the book.” Here’s another: “Each person will choose a book from the book choice list to discuss and share as part of a small group.… As a group, plan a way to share what you learned about literacy learning and teaching from that book. Some book sharing ideas include poster/murals, puppet shows or plays, reader’s theater, role play, traditional book review, diorama or other 3-D method.”
These are teachers in training, captive to professors who in many instances owe their sinecures to taxpayers. They’re going to be your kids’ reading teachers, armed only with dioramas, posters, and puppet shows—and perhaps the ability to strum “Yellow Submarine” on the ukulele.
This grotesque abdication of responsibility has lifelong implications for kids. While the colleges of education spout their cant, they deny too many kids a shot at a meaningful higher education, higher earning potential, and more satisfying life work.
Worse, they deny kids the ability to connect with the timeless wisdom found in a novel by Faulkner or a poem by Frost, locking the next generation in a twilight world where the written word becomes alien and threatening rather than a source of liberation and enlightenment.
Michael J. O'Neal's novel of Civil War espionage, Crazy Bett, was recently published and is available at www.crazybett.com
According to a report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than two-thirds of the nation’s fourth-graders are reading below proficiency level. And they’re not outgrowing the problem: The American College Testing Program reported that an astonishing 49 percent of the 1.2 million students who took its college admissions test in a recent year lack college-level reading skills. Minorities and the poor fare worse: Only 21 percent of blacks, 33 percent of Hispanics, and 33 percent of students from families with annual incomes below $30,000 have mastered the complex reading tasks required for college success. Not counted, of course, are the 30 percent of high-schoolers who drop out and thus don’t take the test.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Too many parents have been dot.conned into buying for their kids every piece of digital silliness Silicon Valley dishes up. Kids who used to sometimes pass the hours with a book—or being read to—now molder in front of computers, DVD players, PlayStations, and X-boxes, when they’re not engaged in narcissistic twittering. They wallow in iconography and visual imagery and “text” impoverished messages in a way not unlike life in the Dark Ages, before the printing press spread the gift of the unhurried but enriching processes of sustained written language. Shoot, we can even watch people play video games on television. What’s next? Watching people play computer solitaire?
But the blame doesn’t stop there.
The public assumes that colleges of education are preparing aspiring teachers to teach kids how to read by requiring rigorous courses in how to do so. One would think that the teaching of reading would be a college of education’s Prime Directive. To test that assumption, the Washington, D.C.–based National Council on Teacher Quality launched a sweeping examination of reading courses and textbooks at the nation’s colleges of education. The results are appalling. What masquerades as reading pedagogy is, with painfully few exceptions, a soggy confection of political correctness, collectivist social indoctrination, diversity training, and fluff courses that make basket weaving sound like advanced biophysics. An overgeneralization? To a degree, and some colleges of education actually do a bang-up job. But not enough.
Examples abound. One reading course syllabus says, “Knowledge is … constructed by individual learners through social interaction … learning occurs within a collaborative community.” Another says, “Reading and writing are acquired through social collaborative interactions and life experiences.” A popular reading textbook advocates “classrooms that allow children to design their own route to further knowledge about print; the role of the teacher is supportive assistant.”
According to the professionals, then, reading teachers don’t really have to teach reading. Like cheerleaders, they can lend sis-boom-ba support while kids magically teach themselves to read through “collaboration” and “social interaction” and “life experiences”—in much the same way they teach each other to reproduce bodily noises with their armpits.
Many of the courses are laughable in their lack of rigor. Here’s an assignment worth 20 percent of the grade in a college course in reading instruction: “After reading the book, design an original cover for it. . . .Make a commercial that convinces others to buy and read the book. Make a diorama of the book.” Here’s another: “Each person will choose a book from the book choice list to discuss and share as part of a small group.… As a group, plan a way to share what you learned about literacy learning and teaching from that book. Some book sharing ideas include poster/murals, puppet shows or plays, reader’s theater, role play, traditional book review, diorama or other 3-D method.”
These are teachers in training, captive to professors who in many instances owe their sinecures to taxpayers. They’re going to be your kids’ reading teachers, armed only with dioramas, posters, and puppet shows—and perhaps the ability to strum “Yellow Submarine” on the ukulele.
This grotesque abdication of responsibility has lifelong implications for kids. While the colleges of education spout their cant, they deny too many kids a shot at a meaningful higher education, higher earning potential, and more satisfying life work.
Worse, they deny kids the ability to connect with the timeless wisdom found in a novel by Faulkner or a poem by Frost, locking the next generation in a twilight world where the written word becomes alien and threatening rather than a source of liberation and enlightenment.
Michael J. O'Neal's novel of Civil War espionage, Crazy Bett, was recently published and is available at www.crazybett.com
March 17, 2009
An American back from Paris
My wife and I just returned from France.
Don’t worry. I haven’t gone native. I’m not going to lecture you on the superiority of French culture. True, they serve a cup of coffee strong enough to clean a garage floor (though in thimbles rather than mugs), and I’m still a little bound up from eating hogsheads of irresistible cheese. Paris actually has several restaurants—I know this because I checked the phone book—and some offer a glass of not undrinkable wine.
The city also has some decent museums. But the complex iconography of many paintings in the Louvre—winged lions, or the little FTD florist guy shooting arrows into the ears of an 11th-century pope—made the visit for us something of an extended trip through “Highlights for Children.” They moved the Venus de Milo, and I’m thinking someone must’ve gotten into a boatload of trouble for dropping her, because her arms were broken off. We managed to spot the Mona Lisa from the rear of a mosh pit.
I was prepared to shake my head sadly at American cultural dominance, but while we spotted one McDonald’s and one Subway (“le soob-WAY,” one presumes), I’m reasonably confident that French culture endures—though rather than Edith Piaf singing “La Vie en Rose” to the plaintive accompaniment of an accordion, we heard mostly French rap, which to my ears made about as much musical sense as, say, Hassidic hip-hop. The French really do say oo-la-la and carry baguettes under their arms.
On the other hand.
The pillows are square, so one doesn’t know which way to turn them, and with no bidet in the bathroom, we had nowhere to do laundry. My inquiries to the hotel lady about these matters met with blank stares. The toilet paper is made from recycled egg cartons. My toaster oven is bigger than some of the cars. They have a soft drink called Pschitt, which can’t be ordered with a straight face. Try it. "Garcon, I'll take a . . ."
Then there’s the matter of finding your way around. On several occasions, I asked for directions. But another Frenchman within earshot would invariably join the discussion, and the two would argue and point in opposite directions—a living tableau of French road signage, with its unnerving habit of pointing you in “All Directions” (or, if that’s not unhelpful enough, “Other Directions”). The hellish Charles De Gaulle airport is based on plans from Dante’s Inferno, where, one hopes, its designer drives for eternity in an agonized quest for car rental return signs.
Paris is slow to awaken of a morning. At 6:00, the streets are populated with jet-lagged, bleary-eyed Americans and green-clad workmen washing the sleep out of the city’s eyes. Only later do the French emerge—aging men in berets and frayed-at-the-cuffs Versace jackets, women who 30 years ago managed to look like Coco Chanel but today look like aged persimmons, younger women in scarves the size of topsails, kids with Batman book bags, teens in Twisted Sister T-shirts. On three occasions we were pretty sure we spotted Jerry Garcia.
Americans are told that these days people the world over hate us, so I steeled myself to encounter prickly rudeness, perhaps having to pose as a Canadian, though I don’t speak Canadian, not even when I'm oot and aboot. I was disappointed, for we met with nothing but kindness and goodwill (except for one hotel owner, a woman with all the charm of a rectal probe). My wife and I have a smattering of copybook French—all nouns, it turns out—so we got by in a kind of French haiku that seemed to be appreciated. Of course, we weren’t frequenting murky bistros with disaffected French intellectuals chain-smoking unfiltered Gauloises, drinking hearty peasant wine, and denouncing American imperialism. We were tempted to take a plunge into the Salon des Artistes, a disreputable-looking hookah bar two doors down from the hotel, where we likely would have stood out like hookers at High Mass.
Instead, we made the pilgrimage to the American cemetery at Normandy, where, remarkably, every voice we heard was French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, or Japanese. So maybe they don’t hate us after all.
They’ve tricked us into thinking andouille sausage is fancy French cuisine. It’s chitlins. That’s OK, though.
They still think the Big Mac is made with beef.
Michael J. O'Neal is the author of Crazy Bett, a novel about (or aboot) Civil War espionage. The book is available at www.crazybett.com, or from Amazon.
Don’t worry. I haven’t gone native. I’m not going to lecture you on the superiority of French culture. True, they serve a cup of coffee strong enough to clean a garage floor (though in thimbles rather than mugs), and I’m still a little bound up from eating hogsheads of irresistible cheese. Paris actually has several restaurants—I know this because I checked the phone book—and some offer a glass of not undrinkable wine.
The city also has some decent museums. But the complex iconography of many paintings in the Louvre—winged lions, or the little FTD florist guy shooting arrows into the ears of an 11th-century pope—made the visit for us something of an extended trip through “Highlights for Children.” They moved the Venus de Milo, and I’m thinking someone must’ve gotten into a boatload of trouble for dropping her, because her arms were broken off. We managed to spot the Mona Lisa from the rear of a mosh pit.
I was prepared to shake my head sadly at American cultural dominance, but while we spotted one McDonald’s and one Subway (“le soob-WAY,” one presumes), I’m reasonably confident that French culture endures—though rather than Edith Piaf singing “La Vie en Rose” to the plaintive accompaniment of an accordion, we heard mostly French rap, which to my ears made about as much musical sense as, say, Hassidic hip-hop. The French really do say oo-la-la and carry baguettes under their arms.
On the other hand.
The pillows are square, so one doesn’t know which way to turn them, and with no bidet in the bathroom, we had nowhere to do laundry. My inquiries to the hotel lady about these matters met with blank stares. The toilet paper is made from recycled egg cartons. My toaster oven is bigger than some of the cars. They have a soft drink called Pschitt, which can’t be ordered with a straight face. Try it. "Garcon, I'll take a . . ."
Then there’s the matter of finding your way around. On several occasions, I asked for directions. But another Frenchman within earshot would invariably join the discussion, and the two would argue and point in opposite directions—a living tableau of French road signage, with its unnerving habit of pointing you in “All Directions” (or, if that’s not unhelpful enough, “Other Directions”). The hellish Charles De Gaulle airport is based on plans from Dante’s Inferno, where, one hopes, its designer drives for eternity in an agonized quest for car rental return signs.
Paris is slow to awaken of a morning. At 6:00, the streets are populated with jet-lagged, bleary-eyed Americans and green-clad workmen washing the sleep out of the city’s eyes. Only later do the French emerge—aging men in berets and frayed-at-the-cuffs Versace jackets, women who 30 years ago managed to look like Coco Chanel but today look like aged persimmons, younger women in scarves the size of topsails, kids with Batman book bags, teens in Twisted Sister T-shirts. On three occasions we were pretty sure we spotted Jerry Garcia.
Americans are told that these days people the world over hate us, so I steeled myself to encounter prickly rudeness, perhaps having to pose as a Canadian, though I don’t speak Canadian, not even when I'm oot and aboot. I was disappointed, for we met with nothing but kindness and goodwill (except for one hotel owner, a woman with all the charm of a rectal probe). My wife and I have a smattering of copybook French—all nouns, it turns out—so we got by in a kind of French haiku that seemed to be appreciated. Of course, we weren’t frequenting murky bistros with disaffected French intellectuals chain-smoking unfiltered Gauloises, drinking hearty peasant wine, and denouncing American imperialism. We were tempted to take a plunge into the Salon des Artistes, a disreputable-looking hookah bar two doors down from the hotel, where we likely would have stood out like hookers at High Mass.
Instead, we made the pilgrimage to the American cemetery at Normandy, where, remarkably, every voice we heard was French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, or Japanese. So maybe they don’t hate us after all.
They’ve tricked us into thinking andouille sausage is fancy French cuisine. It’s chitlins. That’s OK, though.
They still think the Big Mac is made with beef.
Michael J. O'Neal is the author of Crazy Bett, a novel about (or aboot) Civil War espionage. The book is available at www.crazybett.com, or from Amazon.
Verbing Weirds Language
A colleague recently made a startling announcement.
He reported that on a short-hop flight, an attendant had apologized to her parched passengers because time had not allowed them to be “beveraged,” but not to worry, for they would be “beveraged” on their connecting flights.
Bemused, he announced, “I got verbed.”
Now he didn’t know it, but he was echoing Calvin, who once informed Hobbes, “I like to verb words,” referring to an unaccountable tendency among speakers of contemporary English to convert nouns into verbs. [Sidebar: Having been an English teacher, I know from sad experience that any mention of anything having to do with grammar immediately induces either extreme narcolepsy or feelings of total inadequacy, for when I would reluctantly ’fess up to people at cocktail parties that I taught English—and oh, how I’d try to avoid doing so—I’d get a vacant nod, then the person would drift away, leaving me to find another victim who would likewise be convinced he’d commit some unspeakable grammatical faux pax and I’d immediately crack his knuckles with the ruler I undoubtedly carried at all times in my pocket for that very purpose, ready to pounce censoriously on any molestation of the mother tongue. But this ain’t rocket science, folks. A noun is a thing—like “tree.” A verb is an action, as when my dog “trees” a cat. And he’s a smart dog, so even he knows the difference.]
Calvin concluded that “Verbing weirds language,” but does it?
The plain fact is, I don’t know. Fads and fashions come and go in English usage, just as they do with clothing; yesterday’s paisley shirt evolves into today’s Patagonia vest. I’m not an English teacher anymore, partly because I’m not sure I speak English anymore, at least not the English spoken by others, like the flight attendant. I feel a sense of disequilibrium when I watch TV cooking shows and food gets “plated”—not electroplated (like covered in chrome), but meaning, I think, that “a minuscule portion of food gets arranged artfully on a plate by a tony sous-chef.” Then, I know I speak a different tongue.
Lots of words that started out as nouns—as things—have gotten verbed. Take knife, spear, lance, gun, club, torpedo, and torch, all nice martial words. We raise nary an eyebrow when we read that a person has been knifed, speared, lanced, gunned (down), or clubbed, or when a ship is torpedoed and a building torched. But can someone please explain why the nouns “arrow” and “blunt object” can’t similarly be verbed so that an elk is “arrowed” or a crime victim “blunt-objected”? If a building can be bombed with a bomb, why can’t one be missiled with a missile? I have no explanation.
English purists, and I guess I’m one, like to skewer those who commit what they see as outrages on the language, like “beveraged.” [Brief sidebar: Notice that the noun “skewer” has gotten verbed into “to skewer.”] There’s something business-jargony and big-city new-fangled about a lot of contemporary verbing, as in “to task” or “to impact” or “to access.” Some of it just seems lazy, like “to garage” a car. But if we can “sheathe” a sword, or “holster” a weapon, or “bottle” wine, or “can” peaches, or “box” Christmas presents, why can’t we “garage” a car? If we “fish” for fish, why don’t we “deer” for deer? If our toddlers are “teething,” why aren’t they ever, say, “hairing”? Can’t help you there.
And this raises a whole swarm of other questions that make English ultimately unknowable. We “breakfast” and “lunch,” but we don’t “dinner.” We do things “nightly,” like snack on snacks (though we don’t chip on chips, but we do chip golfballs but try not to chip china). So why don’t we ever do anything “morningly,” or “afternoonly,” or “eveningly”? Can’t help you on that either.
Hobbes thought he had the final word: “Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.” Yet somehow the mother tongue will endure, growing and adapting with each new generation. True, she’s a fickle mistress, a creature of crotchets and quiddities. But that’s what makes her enormous good fun.
Michael J. O'Neal is the author of Crazy Bett, a novel about Civil War espionage. The book is available at www.crazybett.com, or on Amazon.
He reported that on a short-hop flight, an attendant had apologized to her parched passengers because time had not allowed them to be “beveraged,” but not to worry, for they would be “beveraged” on their connecting flights.
Bemused, he announced, “I got verbed.”
Now he didn’t know it, but he was echoing Calvin, who once informed Hobbes, “I like to verb words,” referring to an unaccountable tendency among speakers of contemporary English to convert nouns into verbs. [Sidebar: Having been an English teacher, I know from sad experience that any mention of anything having to do with grammar immediately induces either extreme narcolepsy or feelings of total inadequacy, for when I would reluctantly ’fess up to people at cocktail parties that I taught English—and oh, how I’d try to avoid doing so—I’d get a vacant nod, then the person would drift away, leaving me to find another victim who would likewise be convinced he’d commit some unspeakable grammatical faux pax and I’d immediately crack his knuckles with the ruler I undoubtedly carried at all times in my pocket for that very purpose, ready to pounce censoriously on any molestation of the mother tongue. But this ain’t rocket science, folks. A noun is a thing—like “tree.” A verb is an action, as when my dog “trees” a cat. And he’s a smart dog, so even he knows the difference.]
Calvin concluded that “Verbing weirds language,” but does it?
The plain fact is, I don’t know. Fads and fashions come and go in English usage, just as they do with clothing; yesterday’s paisley shirt evolves into today’s Patagonia vest. I’m not an English teacher anymore, partly because I’m not sure I speak English anymore, at least not the English spoken by others, like the flight attendant. I feel a sense of disequilibrium when I watch TV cooking shows and food gets “plated”—not electroplated (like covered in chrome), but meaning, I think, that “a minuscule portion of food gets arranged artfully on a plate by a tony sous-chef.” Then, I know I speak a different tongue.
Lots of words that started out as nouns—as things—have gotten verbed. Take knife, spear, lance, gun, club, torpedo, and torch, all nice martial words. We raise nary an eyebrow when we read that a person has been knifed, speared, lanced, gunned (down), or clubbed, or when a ship is torpedoed and a building torched. But can someone please explain why the nouns “arrow” and “blunt object” can’t similarly be verbed so that an elk is “arrowed” or a crime victim “blunt-objected”? If a building can be bombed with a bomb, why can’t one be missiled with a missile? I have no explanation.
English purists, and I guess I’m one, like to skewer those who commit what they see as outrages on the language, like “beveraged.” [Brief sidebar: Notice that the noun “skewer” has gotten verbed into “to skewer.”] There’s something business-jargony and big-city new-fangled about a lot of contemporary verbing, as in “to task” or “to impact” or “to access.” Some of it just seems lazy, like “to garage” a car. But if we can “sheathe” a sword, or “holster” a weapon, or “bottle” wine, or “can” peaches, or “box” Christmas presents, why can’t we “garage” a car? If we “fish” for fish, why don’t we “deer” for deer? If our toddlers are “teething,” why aren’t they ever, say, “hairing”? Can’t help you there.
And this raises a whole swarm of other questions that make English ultimately unknowable. We “breakfast” and “lunch,” but we don’t “dinner.” We do things “nightly,” like snack on snacks (though we don’t chip on chips, but we do chip golfballs but try not to chip china). So why don’t we ever do anything “morningly,” or “afternoonly,” or “eveningly”? Can’t help you on that either.
Hobbes thought he had the final word: “Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.” Yet somehow the mother tongue will endure, growing and adapting with each new generation. True, she’s a fickle mistress, a creature of crotchets and quiddities. But that’s what makes her enormous good fun.
Michael J. O'Neal is the author of Crazy Bett, a novel about Civil War espionage. The book is available at www.crazybett.com, or on Amazon.
March 12, 2009
Karaoke your way to a good accent
Yesterday, I was recording an interview for the New America Now radio show and the interviewer asked me a question about my book, Language is Music, that really surprised me.
(Language is Music is about how to learn foreign languages using music, TV, radio, movies and other low-cost resources. Since all of the aforementioned media helped me to successfully learn seven languages, I wrote this book so that other people could use media and entertainment to improve their vocabulary, accent and comprehension when learning foreign languages.)
“So, if music can help people learn the melody and rhythm of a language, why is it that my Japanese friends can sing music in English with no accent, but speak English with heavy Japanese accents?” asked the journalist.
I came up with this answer, “It’s because those who learn English songs for karaoke may not necessarily make the connection between the music of the English language and the actual process of speaking English. They have to first recognize the links between music and language for them to be able to transfer what they are learning from singing into their spoken abilities.”
Afterwards, I talked to a friend who is also in the language learning business about this and he conferred. When someone is speaking in another language and their brain is translating their thoughts from their native tongue to their target language, they are using the methods that they learned in their language learning classroom that most likely involved memorization and not musical association. They are not using the parts of the brain that they use to copy sounds for a song.
I realize that the more outreach I do about my book, the more questions such as this one will come to me. Our educational system has made language learning into something systematic and almost math-like. While, language, math and music do have their common roots, a great deal of language acquisition is not linear. We have to listen to the sounds of a language before we are able to pronounce the words correctly and reproduce them well. Some people may remember song lyrics better than others and some words may be more memorable to some people than others.
Language learning is a process and it can be fun if you tell yourself that it will be enjoyable.
Make sure to put music into your curriculum and daily life and you will see that languages will come much easier to you!
----
Susanna Zaraysky is the author of the Create Your World Book Series.
Read Language is Music for free at www.createyourworldbooks.com until April 5, 2009. You can contribute tips to the book and enter to be published in the book and win prizes from contest co-sponsors.
(Language is Music is about how to learn foreign languages using music, TV, radio, movies and other low-cost resources. Since all of the aforementioned media helped me to successfully learn seven languages, I wrote this book so that other people could use media and entertainment to improve their vocabulary, accent and comprehension when learning foreign languages.)
“So, if music can help people learn the melody and rhythm of a language, why is it that my Japanese friends can sing music in English with no accent, but speak English with heavy Japanese accents?” asked the journalist.
I came up with this answer, “It’s because those who learn English songs for karaoke may not necessarily make the connection between the music of the English language and the actual process of speaking English. They have to first recognize the links between music and language for them to be able to transfer what they are learning from singing into their spoken abilities.”
Afterwards, I talked to a friend who is also in the language learning business about this and he conferred. When someone is speaking in another language and their brain is translating their thoughts from their native tongue to their target language, they are using the methods that they learned in their language learning classroom that most likely involved memorization and not musical association. They are not using the parts of the brain that they use to copy sounds for a song.
I realize that the more outreach I do about my book, the more questions such as this one will come to me. Our educational system has made language learning into something systematic and almost math-like. While, language, math and music do have their common roots, a great deal of language acquisition is not linear. We have to listen to the sounds of a language before we are able to pronounce the words correctly and reproduce them well. Some people may remember song lyrics better than others and some words may be more memorable to some people than others.
Language learning is a process and it can be fun if you tell yourself that it will be enjoyable.
Make sure to put music into your curriculum and daily life and you will see that languages will come much easier to you!
----
Susanna Zaraysky is the author of the Create Your World Book Series.
Read Language is Music for free at www.createyourworldbooks.com until April 5, 2009. You can contribute tips to the book and enter to be published in the book and win prizes from contest co-sponsors.
March 9, 2009
Foreign Pet Names
Not only am I a language lover but I'm an animal lover as well.
So thinking about languages and pets triggered a memory in me. About three years ago I was on the subway when a charming young lady sat down beside me, a cat bed in her arms. We got to talking about pets and she brought up her cat, a Persian named "Saman," which she said came from a Farsi name meaning Jasmin (it also means Precious in Arabic).
Not surprisingly I felt highly provincial when I told her the name my parents bestowed upon their Persian cat, the ubiquitous "Fluffy."
Now, my parents' pet names weren't always so obvious. Growing up our Norwegian Elkhound carried the Scandinavian/Teutonic moniker, "Ingrid."
And of course, thousands of chihuahuas carry names such as "Pedro", "Tita", "Taco", "Madre", "Rica", "Pepita", etc.
But it pays to be careful if your love of languages is inspiring your pet names. For example, you may want to re-consider naming your Japanese Chin puppy "Tama" as the breed's history suggests these little dogs originated in China. Ditto for naming your French Bulldog "Mon Cherie" as this breed has its origins among English laceworkers.
(By the way most dog breeds as we know them originated in Victorian Europe and America. Most breeds are ancient by only 100 years.)
Perhaps in the end it doesn't matter if your pet's name comes from your native language or a foreign language, as long as your dog continues to come when she's called and your cat simply stares at you blankly!
And, in case you're wondering, that's Fluffy in the picture.
March 7, 2009
Top 10 Endangered Languages in the World
Over at The Guardian, Peter K. Austin, a linguistics professor and author shares a personal selection of languages on the brink of disappearing from the face of the earth.
According to The Guardian:
Peter K Austin has published 11 books on minority and endangered languages, including 12 Australian Aboriginal languages, and holds the Märit Rausing Chair in field linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies where he is also director of the Endangered Languages Academic Programme. His most recent book is 1000 Languages: The Worldwide History of Living and Lost Tongues, which explores the state of languages around the world.
Austin's top 10 endangered languages are:
Here's the full article, Top 10 Endangered Languages.
Let us know what you think and if you know of any other languages on the verge of being endangered in the comments.
March 1, 2009
World's Hardest Languages to Learn
Have you ever wondered what the world's hardest languages to learn are?
Well Leximo has been wondering so we decided to ask other language enthusiasts and here are their responses.
"I’d say the hardest language to learn is Hindi. While I love the writing, the script is even less distinct and more difficult to read than Chinese characters (which I can read). Also, the fact that there are different words whether you’re speaking to a male or female or whether you as the speaker are male or female makes it even more complicated".
So there you have it, according to the people Leximo interviewed, those are the hardest languages to learn. Looks like there's a clear consensus that Chinese, whether Cantonese or Mandarin is one of the hardest languages to learn. If you think we missed a language, or would like to suggest another, let us know by leaving a comment.
Well Leximo has been wondering so we decided to ask other language enthusiasts and here are their responses.
Icelandic
"Icelandic is the hardest language to learn because of its archaic vocabulary and complex grammar. Learning it is additionally difficult for English speakers to learn because most native speakers under a certain age also speak English wel"l - Peter A. Gudmundsson
Russian or Mandarin
"I've studied Spanish, French, German, Swahili, Russian and Mandarin Chinese. (I'm only fluent in English and Spanish, though.) The hardest would be either Russian (the awful grammar!) or Mandarin (the tones, the writing). Foreigners have told me that English is pretty easy, then they qualify that to mean the written, not the spoken. Reason: simple grammar". - Miles Abernathy
Arabic
"Arabic, because it is a language which requires you to learn how to write and read opposite than you are accustomed to (right to left rather than left to right), the sounds are guttural and you have to learn new annunciation for the language.
I studied the language for a little over a year, 5 days a week, eight hours a day at the Defense Language Institute until I was "proficient." I then lived in Cairo for three years, where I became much more proficient in conversational Arabic (Egyptian Dialect) "- Michelle M. Friedman
Mandarin
"I have heard that Icelandic is the hardest language to learn, however, I can't imagine anything more difficult than learning Mandarin Chinese.
I speak am a American English speaker from the south, I speak spanish well, and can converse and carry on business in Polish, Hindi, and Russian.
I have taken up Chinese as a part of expanding my ministry and though I have a strong proclivity towards language, the tones in Chinese have posed a particular threat to my success in learning it.
Amazingly enough my young children have mastered the tones and can even be understood by native speakers- who just look at me and smile. I have no experience with Icelandic but it is my heartfelt conviction that Mandarin is the toughest language to master". - Andrea R. Frayser
Hungarian
"Check out “How to learn any language” by Harry Farber. The guy speaks abut 35 languages and claims Hungarian is one of the hardest as it has masculine, feminine and neuter genders as well as about 7 different verb conjugations. It is also one of a handful of “independent” languages, meaning no one really knows their origins and they are not linked to any base language set like Latin (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) One of the easiest is supposedly Polynesian. To make a word plural, you just say it twice". – Jim Taylor
English
"The reason is because there are a million words in English and new words show up all the time. Also, the rules for sentence structure in English don't follow the rules for most of the languages in the world.
Most languages have the verb come first before the subject where in English the first follows the subject. English also has articles like a, an & the, which other languages, like Chinese, don't have.
The average language has about 50,000 words in its vocabulary compared to English at a million. French is second with a quarter million words". - Lloyd Lofthouse
Hindi
"I’d say the hardest language to learn is Hindi. While I love the writing, the script is even less distinct and more difficult to read than Chinese characters (which I can read). Also, the fact that there are different words whether you’re speaking to a male or female or whether you as the speaker are male or female makes it even more complicated".
"Also, their words are soo long. Either before or during brief trips to these countries, I’ve picked up some Greek, Italian, French, Arabic, German, and Swahili; I’ve also studied Chinese and Spanish. However none compares in difficulty to learn, pronounce, read, and understand than Hindi. Another reason why Hindi is hard, even in country, compared to these other languages is because people are more likely to speak to you in English in India, whereas in the other countries you can hear more of the native language. These are my reason for arguing Hindi is the hardest".
Some recommendations I’d have for others learning languages are– Toffler Niemuth
- Do an immersion in the language (go to the country) if you truly want to learn it.
- If that option is not available, start with comprehensive input (ie listen to as much as possible), then find a language partner to practice speaking.
- If you want more structure in learning a language (or someone to start you with the basics) but can’t find or afford a course locally, you can search a site like italki.com to find teachers who teach any variety of languages online.
Cantonese
"I'd go with Cantonese. There are several reasons for this:- Gary Arndt
- It is not only a tonal language (which is hard for people who grew up speaking a non-tonal language) but it has 8 tones, as opposed to the 4 for Mandrin. This makes it difficult even for speakers of other
- Chinese dialects.
- Chinese has a pictograph writing system. As opposed to western characters, Korean, Thai, Arabic or Cyrillic, there are thousands of characters to learn as opposed to tens. I have been told that literacy in Chinese writing consists of knowing 4700 characters".
Chinese
"While I'm sure there are harder languages (Cantonese comes to mind), Mandarin Chinese stands out as an incredibly tough language to learn. I also speak Spanish, which felt hard when I was learning it, but in retrospect and in comparison to Chinese, it's a piece of cake. Here's what makes Chinese hard:
- The Written Language - with a total of 20,000+ characters, just learning the 4-5000 necessary for reading a newspaper is quite a hurdle. There's no real secret to it; it must just be learned by practice.
- The Tones - Chinese is a tonal language, which means if you accidentally use the wrong inflection, you'll say something completely different. Pronounce "ma" with a downward, followed by upward inflection instead of a high even one, and you'll accidentally call your "mother" a "horse".
- Combinations - Chinese, being monosyllabic relies on combinations of simpler words to form bigger ones. The bad news is that when you combine compound words to form other compound words, you often split the original words before combining. For example, take "super", which is "chao ji" and "market" which is "ji shi" (by the way, those "ji" are different written characters with different meanings that just happen to be pronounced with the same tone). To create the word "supermarket", you drop the two "ji" words and say "chao shi". (sorry, I don't have a link for this one yet!)
Once you can get over these three hurdles, the learning curve flattens and adding vocabulary does become much easier, but that takes a while. I'm not there yet, having studied the language for nearly two years". - Theron Welch
Tamil
"Tamil – They are a total of 247 characters, more than script, pronunciation is tough. For example, it is actually Tamizh (zh doesn’t have an exact English spelling)". – LTGenPanda
So there you have it, according to the people Leximo interviewed, those are the hardest languages to learn. Looks like there's a clear consensus that Chinese, whether Cantonese or Mandarin is one of the hardest languages to learn. If you think we missed a language, or would like to suggest another, let us know by leaving a comment.
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