I’ve always liked Stack Exchange. They have beautiful websites with an excellent community-edited system for asking questions and getting answers that puts the focus on the best contributions.

So far, there’s never been a Stack Exchange site I could really participate in – until earlier today, I discovered the new Linguistics – Stack Exchange, “a free, community driven Q&A for professional linguists and others with an interest in linguistic research and theory”. Check it out!

As is the norm in popular language science, 100% of the examples are words and phrases, without a word said about actual structural changes (which in many ways are more significant.)  But I won’t peeve now.  For a ten-minute cartoon, this is both very informative and very funny, and I can only recommend you watch it.

(H/t J.W.!)

I got some odd looks today for using the local dialect’s way of phrasing the time.  But I don’t care for Standard German and don’t think I should be expected to use it.

I have to go back a few years first.  I started learning German in 2004.  Most of it I learned at the Goethe Institute in Jerusalem and on my visits to Germany.  I learned very quickly, and by the time I moved here in 2007, I spoke fluently, but with a bunch of mistakes.

Since then my accent has improved – Germans don’t immediately notice I’m a foreigner – and I’ve learned to make less obvious mistakes and to speak more naturally.  People often tell me how great my German is, but it’s my understanding that people are wrong in making language learning out to be some high intellectual achievement to be praised and awed at.

I’m pretty sure the reason I learned German so quickly is first, I grew up a bilingual (English+Hebrew,) giving me an unfair head-start on language-learning, and second, I managed to experience a lot of total immersion in a very short time by visiting Germany for weeks at a time and by hearing German-language music (yes, it was mainly Rammstein.  Excellent for learners, very clear singing!)

Anyway, I’ve tried to learn a few language since, and I’ve never been quite as successful as I was with German, although I’ve picked up useful learning habits.  (Pro-tip: just speak, even if you hardly know any words and grammar.  Speaking badly is the only way you will ever learn to speak well!)

High German, Upper Saxon

The situation with the standard language, in Germany as in most places in Europe, is this: there’s a more-or-less official standard language, and people are expected to use it in formal situations.  Every region – down to the town level – has its own variant of German, some dialects being close to Standard German (called Hochdeutsch, “high German”) and some very different from it.  There are also some new urban dialects created by contact with immigrant languages.

Schools teach Hochdeutsch as the One True German and penalize children for speaking German the way people actually speak it at home.  Adults are often judged, consciously or unconsciously, on their ability or inability to speak Standard German, with certain dialects having an especially bad reputation.

The basic reason people tend to use a standard language or language variety and consider it important is that it gives them access to a broader range of people to communicate with, because it’s not specific to one place.  This can be very important if you’re in politics, business, or academe – incidentally the areas where the standard language is most important.

The way I learned German is mainly by speaking and hearing it and trying to imitate what I heard.  I quickly forgot most of what I learned in German class and started operating on intuition.  After moving to Leipzig, I grew to really like the local dialect (a variety of Upper Saxon – the best variety, that is) and started consciously learning to speak it.

At some point, pretty early in my living here, I was already able to have complex discussions in Hochdeutsch, so long as they were about education, but for lack of practice, I was no good at casual conversation.  So I started applying myself to learning how people who live here talk in normal social situations, and this made my German even more Säcksch (that’s pronounced [zecksh] or [zeggsh], and it’s how we call Upper Saxon, which in Hochdeutsch they call Sächsisch, pronounced [zeck●sish]). ¹

Dry Furdl!

Now, Säcksch is, if not the least-liked German dialect, then one of them, and it has a very recognizable accent which anyone who lives here for a while learns to love.  What’s more, it’s strongly associated with the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), a.k.a “Communist East Germany”.

One noticable thing about Säcksch – together with many other variants of German – is the way we phrase the time.  8:15pm is fördl neun, pronounced approximately [fur●dl noyn], meaning ‘a quarter of nine’.  8:45 would be dreifördl neun, [dry●fur●dl noyn], ‘three-quarters nine’.

This is extremely confusing if you’re used to saying viertel nach acht and viertel vor neun, i.e.  ‘a quarter after eight’ and ‘a quarter before nine’, respectively, as in Hochdeutsch.  But it’s the way I’ve come to speak, without having to think about it, and I speak this way because it’s the most effective way for me to communicate with the people around me.  It signals my familiarity with the language and my control of its subtleties in a way that’s literally impossible in pure Standard German, simply because every native speaker has a bit of their own dialect.

But most of all, it’s the way I speak, and I’m not about to learn some sterile, artificial version of German on top of the one I already speak just to accommodate people who aren’t familiar with Säcksch.  Due to the dominance of Hochdeutsch, it’s not even really Säcksch anymore, just Hochdeutsch with bit of an accent and some occasional regional word.  Students who move to Leipzig for the low cost of living and nearly-free education should learn to speak the language here, and as for foreigners like me, learning to speak the way locals do is the most natural and reasonable thing we could do – even if native speakers think it’s funny.

Footnotes

1. The pronunciation keys in the [skwer bra●kits] are supposed to be read as though they were American English.  This gives roughly the right pronunciation.  The ● thing means “syllable boundary”, and the stressed syllable is bolded.  If that last sentence is “all Greek to you”, don’t worry, it doesn’t really matter.

Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun: Hen

[…]
Earlier this month, the movement for gender neutrality reached a milestone: Just days after International Women’s Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia. The entry defines hen as a “proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon].” The National Encyclopedia announcement came amid a heated debate about gender neutrality that has been raging in Swedish newspaper columns and TV studios and on parenting blogs and feminist websites.[…]

This again connects to how everything’s political. Yes, trying to change a natural language might be taking it a bit too far. But this piece points out quite a few things that can conceivably be seen as fostering inequality; it’s really interesting to see how maintaining a supposedly neutral/natural status quo becomes explicitly political in this situation.

Ultimately, for all the liberating ideals behind these attempts, as soon as they become part of an oppressive mechanism, there’s nothing liberating about them. As the piece says:

Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers.

(Full piece here. H/t to whoever shared this on Facebook!)

See also the post where I try to make my thesis comprehensible to non-theorists using Wikipedia links.

My blog is called the “because” charade because what follows the word because (in a lot of discussion of science, ethics, politics, religion, …) is rarely a reason, or reasonable, or rational. And I believe that we’d all be better off if reason(ableness) played a bigger part in public life.

Recent topics have included the Pirahã controversy – an important linguistic debate, which he explains in terms a layman can understand – and the theory of evolution. A pleasure to read!

The film was “Translating,” by the Israeli filmmaker Nurith Aviv, a series of in-depth monologues by translators from Hebrew into other languages, and the occasion the annual conference of the Israel Translators Association in Jerusalem. The audience, whose linguistic gaps were filled by Hebrew subtitles, could identify with the speakers’ singular strain of obsession, their solitude, and their implicit surprise at being for once in the spotlight instead of the shadows wherein they normally lurk. The symphony of the dozen or so languages in which these unsung laborers told their stories, all referring to the one language they shared and revered, was mesmerizing.

In Barcelona, Manuel Forcano, a lapsed Catholic, told in Catalan how translating poet Yehuda Amichai, a once-orthodox Jew, helped him come to terms with his faithlessness. The Lithuanian-born Sivan Beskin, in Tel Aviv, recalled in Russian how she began translating children’s stories by Lithuanian-born Israeli poet Leah Goldberg from Hebrew back into the poet’s native Russian, so that her immigrant parents could read those stories to her children. Near Paris, Itshok Niborski spoke in a Spanish-accented Yiddish of compiling a Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary of idioms.

At minute 1:03:00 of the film appeared the Israeli author Ala Hlehel, of Acre, introduced himself and explained that his native tongue, which he was speaking, was colloquial Arabic. He learned literary Arabic in school, and then Hebrew, which was “not a neutral language for me, it was charged.” He had only just begun to elaborate – “it is the language of occupation, but also of culture” – when the system crashed, those last words frozen on the screen, and a technician rushed over.

Hlehel must not have been on screen for more than 30 seconds when the film stopped, and one had barely begun to take in this new character and absorb his words. But no sooner had the audience realized there was a problem, when a young female voice in my row said out loud: “I’m glad it got stuck. I don’t like what he’s saying.” Then she added: “I don’t like his terminology. It’s not like he’s from the occupied territories, he’s from Israel.”

Trying to understand what there was not to like – the speaker had barely opened his mouth, what “terminology”? – I looked back at the screen, and there it was, the “O” word, hanging in the air, stuck right in front of our faces, with nothing to do about it and nowhere to go. I felt stung by my colleague’s rudeness. Whereas my engrossment in the film had transported me to that perfect place where we all listen to each other with full attention and respect, the women’s outburst reminded me I was still in Israel. The mixture of sheer discourtesy, intolerance and even incuriosity made me cringe.

How dare she hope Hlehel shut up before he even had the chance to say anything? I, for one, was extremely eager to hear what Hlehel had to say. I had first heard of the 38-year-old author two years ago, when he won a literary award in Beirut but was forbidden by Israel to travel to the ceremony – an administrative injunction he challenged in the Supreme Court and succeeded to overturn. Then, some months ago, a Facebook friend had shared a witty column Hlehel had written about the Arabs “wanting back” all the words Hebrew had “stolen” from them, often mispronouncing and distorting their meanings in the process.

Now here he was, about to share some of his thoughts on the profession that had brought us here today, our shared self-appointed mission of ferrying our insular cultural treasures safely into the bigger world. And after hearing how this was being done by an assortment of people who ranged from strangers to friends, we were now about to hear it from a more challenging perspective, that of our estranged cousins, our intimate nemeses, the Arab minority of Israel. For me it was a peak moment in the film. Yet, my colleague over there in the darkness had already heard enough.

While I waited for the organizers to fix the problem, I fumed. I felt the speaker was in the middle of a very personal confession about who he was and how he had become that person, and this heckler was denying him nothing less than his right of self-determination. I tried to analyze what he had said: Hlehel had referred to Hebrew as “the language of the occupation” and the disembodied voice had said that was not acceptable coming from him as he was not occupied. It took me a moment to locate the problem, but when I did, I was actually impressed at how instantly my colleague had processed the whole situation: in her reasoning, I realized, Hlehel was declaring that his native Galilee, part of Israel since it was founded in 1948, was occupied, which meant he did not recognize Israel, and therefore she, an Israeli, did not recognize him. The linguist in me kicked in: but that’s not what he said, I thought. He said Hebrew was the language of occupation, but didn’t specifically count himself as one of the people under it. He may or may not consider himself occupied but still call it the language of occupation. But even if he was implying he did not recognize Israel, do we Israelis have to be so terrified that we would rather end the conversation right there? I would like to think we have enough confidence to hear dissenting voices, not just ones that make us feel good, and contend with them.

Unfortunately, in today’s Israel, any voice that falls outside of the political mainstream is silenced with outrageous ease. How naïve of me to be surprised that happened here, at an international translators’ conference. It must have also been naïve of me to think anyone with a complicated enough identity to qualify for this line of work was as curious as I was about other people’s complicated identities. Here was one of our esteemed colleagues laying himself bare, exposing the clashes of his battling loyalties, ultimately leading to his amazing choice to dedicate much of his human capital to bringing his people the culture of their adversaries. It was surely the most painful of all the stories we had heard. But apparently it left some people cold.

Thankfully, our competent technician got the film running again and we got to hear Hlehel’s account of pillaging Israeli literature and making it available to the Palestinian people, perhaps getting even with us for all those stolen words. He overcame his initial resistance when he discovered the iconoclastic Hebrew playwright Hanoch Levin and couldn’t resist translating his work, beginning with “The Suitcase Packers,” about a group of people who all want to leave the country, but, instead, die.

The camera panned Acre’s jumble of cinderblock tenements with solar water heaters on their rooftops, with a glimpse of a strip of blue sea on the horizon, as seen from the window of the translator’s study. The translator reverted to his shadows and his silence.

I can understand this sentiment quite well. Some five years ago, Y. gave me a ride in his car; his self-definition as a male was new to me at the time, and indeed I had never had to deal with this situation before. I knew that Y. wished to be seen and treated as a man, and wanted to respect that, but it took me a lot of effort to start using the male gender for him.¹ I remember sitting in the passenger seat, struggling with awkward silences, and trying to figure out how to speak to him, until I finally got a male “you” out of my mouth.

Today I have only minimal difficulty respecting the self-definition of the transgenders. I also expect other people to respect their self-definition, as I expect people to respect self-definition in other aspects of identity. How is the case of Y. different from my self-definition as an Israeli? After all, just as Y’s biological gender contradicts his self-definition as male, so does my American citizenship (from birth, via my mother) contradict my self-definition as Israeli.

There’s something incredibly arrogant, even obnoxious, about refusing to respect another person’s self-definition. People seem to recognize this more easily when it’s an entire group’s self-definition that is in question – Israelis take offense at someone denying our view of Israel, or Jews, as a community with a distinct identity; Palestinians take offense at someone denying their self-definition as a nation. The examples of groups getting furious about others denying their group identity are endless (Basques, Afrikaner, and French Muslims come to mind). Yet the same is also true in reverse – it is awful to be persecuted for belonging to a group you do not identify with, as some Europeans with Jewish ancestors discovered under the yoke of Nazi fascism.

As anyone who has ever had a crisis of identity will know, changing your self-definition is not an easy thing, and few people are able to do it on a whim. If a person whose genetic heritage says “female” or “Jew” decides they are “male” or “Muslim”, you can bet on it being important to them, and you can count on them having come, in some way, to the conclusion that the new label is more appropriate to them as a person. Ultimately, as an outsider, you cannot know better than them which label fits, and presuming to do so – even with excellent evidence – is insulting and degrading. It is to say that their self-knowledge and self-determination is of less importance than your knowledge of their background.

Again, I understand that it’s difficult to adjust to changes in the self-definition of others, even when you don’t know them (as in the case of my acquaintences’ comments about Y.) It is especially difficult regarding transgendered individuals, probably because being openly transgendered is a relatively new thing in Western societies, and because the conventional, ancient view of gender is as a completely inborn, unchangeable property. The idea that gender labels are entirely a social construct – albeit one influenced by a basic biological fact – is a very difficult idea to swallow. I find it counter-intuitive. But I also consider it intellectually undeniable – though I lack the ability to explain it properly and convince you it is so.

Be that as it may, gender labels are just one example, and my main point remains: hard as it is, respecting an individual’s self-definition is just basic decency, and refusing to respect it is indecent and offensive. I have to stress that I am not writing this to condemn or attack anybody. I acknowledge the difficulty involved, and only want to argue for the importance of making the effort to observe this basic, though unconventional, decency. Comments are open if you wish to dissuade me from or berate me for my deviant view of decency – discussion is welcome, as always.

Footnotes

1. It’s important to note that in Hebrew, there are two different forms of singular “you” – one for males, another for females. The same applies to other pronouns, like “your”, as well as to verbs, like “like” – so I can inflect the sentence “Do you like hamburgers” one way for addressing a male (ata ohev hamburgerim?) and another for addressing a female (at ohevet hamburgerim?), but I have no way of leaving the sentence neutral as it would be in English.

PEACE: Harry Potter and the Politics and Terror

Dan Nexon over at The Duck of Minerva took two stabs at analyzing the last installments of the Harry Potter series. Both are an amusing and interesting read:

• “Harry Potter and Foreign Policy, or Voldemort is not Osama Bin Laden” 
• “Terror, Counter-Terror, and Insurgency in Harry Potter, or Why Harry Won” 

The Duck also points to a piece on Foreign Policy about the post-conflict reconstruction that must be done after the fall of Voldemort.

LANGUAGE: Pullum on apes and (possible) racists

Over at Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum has two excellent and characteristically sharp posts:

• “Caesar and the power of No” (on the peculiar theory of language evolution in that new Planet of the Apes movie)
• “David Starkey on rioting and Jamaican language” (attacking some racism and misconceptions around non-standard Englishes)

Other fine links

I’m very busy lately, and will be over the next few weeks, because I’m organizing a student conference on linguistics (called StuTS, pronounced “shtuts”) here in Leipzig, June 1-5.

Posts will probably be few and far between until after that. Or not, if I badly need to write stuff.

If you’re a student of linguistics in reasonable range of Leipzig, please come, it’s gonna be awesome!