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.

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

0

Noam Sheizaf at +972 Magazine brought to my attention a Jerusalem Post editoral which made a few red lights in my head go off (bolding mine):

ISRAEL IS the only country in the world where Jews are the majority. Only here can they enjoy the advantages of living in a state whose language, holidays and national symbols are their own.

Let’s leave aside the truly objectionable stuff in this editorial and focus on the linguistic part. I love Hebrew, in fact, it’s my favorite of Israel’s national symbols. I would like to point out how ludicrous it is for the Post to claim Jewish “ownership” over this, or any, language.

I

Before anything else, reflect for a moment on the fact that the majority of Jews worldwide do not speak Modern Israeli Hebrew and would probably call another language (usually American English) their own.

II

The nation is a relatively new construct, dating back just to the end of the 18th century. Naming official national languages was part of the rise of nationalism in Europe. It was part of the creation of a national identity — not artificial, but put together of existing pieces.

To the linguistically uninitiated, it might seem natural that every nation-state has a language “of their own”. German for the Germans, Swedish for the Swedes, Chinese for the Chinese. But languages are actually really bad at sticking to international borders. The Swiss speak Swiss German, which is no more similar to Germany’s Standard German than is Dutch. Standard Swedish is so similar to Norwegian and Danish that the three might be considered dialects of one language, and can be understood mutually with a bit of effort. “Chinese” is not even one language; usually “Chinese” means Standard Mandarin, the official language used by the People’s Republic, but the term includes the many many languages spoken in mainland China, even though many of them only have a writing system in common, remaining unintelligible to one another.

In the case of Modern Israeli Hebrew it should be especially clear that there is not a 1:1 relationship between (Jewish) nation and (Hebrew) language. Modern Hebrew has taken on European structure in almost all areas of grammar (with some very notable exceptions), since those who revitalized it were speakers of European languages. The bulk of Israeli slang is comprised of Arabic loanwords such as ahla and sababa. And the language is spoken by non-Jews as well; the Arabic of Israeli Arabs is so full of Hebrew that efforts are underway to refresh the community’s Arabic vocabulary.

III

Nonetheless, Modern Hebrew is the result of a conscious effort of will, and one might insist that it is an exceptionally national language. After all, the Zionist made a real, and apparently successful, effort to revive the language of Jewish scripture.

But in fact, even those parts of Modern Hebrew considered “pure Hebrew” — the parts attested in the Bible and other ancient texts — are unlikely to be in any way pure or belong entirely to any ethnic group. Quite simply, no language ever does. The ancient Israelites did not live in isolation, and were surrounded by different peoples with different cultures and different languages. Inevitably, the language they spoke was affected by it, and likely eagerly assimilated elements of the gentiles’ languages, just as all languages have always done everywhere. (but see NOTE below)

IV

The suggestion that the Arabs have no place within our state, that they are a foreign entity that does not belong, is ludicrous and incredibly offensive. It is even ludicrous if you think there’s a god-given right for Jews to be in what was once Cana’an. Modern Israel (and its language) have always had non-Jewish residents (and speakers), most of them Arabs. At no point was the pre-state Yishuv isolated from Arabic culture. Israel has co-existed with Arabs, sometimes more peacefully than at other times, from the very start. Perhaps oddly, I find myself startled to see Israelis railing against Arabic culture as though it were a scary foreign influence. To me, hummus is the national dish, and even those who mistakenly think it’s falafel can’t deny there’s a bit of Arab in us.

Incidentally, sababa shel hummus, roughly “nice hummus”, is a phrase with an [arguably] European structure (cf. English “quite a day” and “hell of a guy” ), made up of two Arabic-loaned content words connected by one Hebrew function word [shel, “of”]. And what phrase could possibly be more Israeli?

I feel there is a general point here about Jewish culture – before, during, and after Diaspora. Before Diaspora, the Israelites were a part of the fabric of the Ancient Near East, going about the typical Ancient Near East national pass-times of worshiping, building, farming and conquering, maintaining a distinct culture and very distinct religion but not without influence from the languages, cultures and religions of their neighbors (who were all influenced in return, and by one another as well). In Diaspora, the Jews of every area developed their own cultural and linguistic remix. The most well-known resulting languages are Yiddish and Ladino, but they are not nearly the only ones. I recently learned that a small Jewish community in northwestern India developed a dialect of Marathi: Judæo-Marathi, still spoken in India and Israel.

And indeed, after Diaspora, the state of Israel has been a cultural patchwork quilt, taking patterns and colors from the many places its residents came from, while remaining firmly grounded in the political and cultural reality of the Middle East, which we are now undoubtedly part of.

V

One could argue, and perhaps one should, that in all of these cases the borrowing group made the borrowings its own, both by choosing them and by integrating them in a unique way (i.e. fitting loanwords to native phonology and morphology, which Modern Hebrew excels at). But there is nothing particularly Jewish about living in cultural isolation, nor is it a particularly sensible proposition that Modern Hebrew belongs exclusively to Israeli Jews. The Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have been there since before Hebrew was revitalized, Hebrew has been in contact with them ever since, and whether the Jerusalem Post likes it or not, the Arabic language and Palestinian culture are part of the fabric of the Israeli quilt.

Note

Unfortunately I am unfamiliar with Ancient Hebrew and neighboring languages of the same period, such as Philistine, Phoenician, Moabite, Hittite, and Ancient Egyptian, and can’t give examples for loanwords off the top of my head like I can with English and Modern Hebrew. I also don’t know any good source to check (though I’d be eager to get one). But I’ve certainly seen mention on Wikipedia and on Israeli linguistics blogs of loanwords from neighboring languages into Ancient Hebrew, and this is not surprising in the slightest. It would be surprising if it were the other way around.

Related reading tip

Jerry Haber of the Magnes Zionist is writing a fascinating series of articles about “Israel’s ‘Arab Problem'”. Part one, part two. I read them cross-posted on +972 Magazine, which is becoming a more and more central source for my reading…