After my previous guest post Beware: Adult Content generated a high volume of traffic to Michael’s blog, he invited me back, and I will be contributing occasionally (even though we both know what really drove the traffic surge were the key words “adult content”). As I end my visit to Leipzig I offer you a piece I wrote during a previous visit two years ago. It is long.

My German Manicure

By Shoshana London Sappir

I am ushered to a downstairs room in the beauty salon. The manicurist, walking a step behind me, says something in German about “links.” My mind flashes straight to Dr. Mengele on the platform. Links – left –means life. Rechts – right – means death. She wants me to take the seat on the left, I realize. I sit down.

“English?” I ask. She struggles with the words “only a little,” giggles and shrugs. I answer with a big smile, trying to convey: “Don’t worry, we’ll be just fine.”

The woman, in her mid-forties with dark-framed glasses, brown hair tied back in a pony tail and a white smock, places a folded white towel on each of my knees.  Then she places a deep bowl of soapy water in front of me, signaling me to dip my fingers in the holes. While we wait, she asks me in German where I live. I figure it out from the word “haus.”

“Israel!” I answer, gleeful with comprehension. “Mein kind lives hier,” I explain, mixing English with scraps of Yiddish that float up from my childhood. She understands and asks me if he is a student at the “uni.” I don’t know how to say “sort of,” or that he is starting next fall, so I say “ja,” and add proudly, albeit half in Russian, that he speaks German.

Our conversation is going very well. She asks me to take off my rings and tells me that she has a daughter who is living in London and speaks English. We laugh at the symmetry. We are both mothers of grown-up children who live away from home and speak each other’s respective languages. I ask if her daughter is a student and she says no, “arbeit.” “Arbeit macht frei!” a bell rings in my mind. I know that word!

I am treating myself to some pampering while I wait for my son to get off work at his new job in Leipzig, Germany. He is 19 years old and has lived here for nine months.

I never really saw Michael as an adult before this visit. Last time I saw him, I reminded him to take a sweater and asked him if he had enough money. Now I am his guest, and it is he who is taking care of me: he made me my hotel reservation; he speaks for me when we order from a menu and he even coaches me in manners. He claims I talk too loud when we walk in the street or sit at a restaurant. Funny, in Israel I always thought of myself as the quiet one.

The manicurist takes my right hand in her left and starts on it with an oversized glass nail file. All evidence to the contrary, she makes another attempt to find out if we have any language in common: “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” she tries. “English,” I start counting off on my fingers, “Hebraisch,” she shakes her head apologetically, “Russische” – here I lilt my voice hopefully – it is the former East Germany after all, and if she had paid any attention in school we would have something to work with – but no, she is sorry to indicate; “Spanische,” I continue, and she is by now feeling pretty bad about herself. I sum it up with a shrug and then I remember what I majored in at university. “Arabische!” This just makes her file a little harder.

And it makes me think about the irony of speaking so many languages but being so utterly unequipped to deal with the present moment. I love studying languages and until now I thought I had mastered more than enough of them to serve the needs of one lifetime. Yet here I am, literally speechless. I have definitely been studying the wrong languages. I could just as soon have known German by now. But how could I have known my son would end up in Germany? Conversation has come to a halt; I am staring into space while the manicurist focuses on my hands.

But the dialogue goes on in my head. How did you come to be from Israel and have a son living here? I imagine her asking me. Well, it’s a long story, I say. Actually, his grandmother on his father’s side was a German Jew, but she had to leave because of the war. Oh, that’s too bad, her imaginary voice in my head says, and her glib tone of voice surprises me. She does not sound sufficiently embarrassed, horrified or guilty and I get the feeling she does not know that much about the war. I remember that I read somewhere that the generation of this woman’s parents didn’t speak much about the war, and the post-war generation grew up with a kind of void regarding the past; some of the more eloquent members of that generation – my generation, in fact – tell of a feeling of sitting on a huge secret, knowing there are things you don’t ask about and don’t talk about, and if you are sensitive and conscientious you might find that eerie, creepy and crazy-making; moreover, from what I have heard, the Soviet-satellite East of Germany, of which Leipzig once was a part, did not commit to the same process of self-examination as the West. And as I have already figured out, if she had been a good student she would know some Russian and we would be having this conversation out loud and I could ask her.

But, in the imaginary ignorance I silently attribute to her, she apparently does not share my outrage at her people – maybe even her father, grandfather, uncles, the grownups who raised her, the people who came to her childhood birthday parties – who went all the way to Kaunas, Lithuania, to round up and kill my great grandparents, and my mother’s 11 uncles and aunts, including little Dvosha – my grandmother’s baby sister born in the old country long after she herself left for America – Dvosha, who a surviving cousin told me read Hebrew at four, recited entire Psalms by heart at five and died sometime between the ages of six and nine.

Because the woman filing my nails has only vaguely ever heard of any of these atrocities, I imagine, my resentment growing, they do not weigh down on her conscience, and therefore being a German cosmetician who is doing the nails of a Jew from Israel whose son is a would-be student in Leipzig is not a terribly charged experience for her, and the story I find myself telling her in response to her imaginary question about how my son ended up here comes out different from the one I usually tell myself or people who ask me about it in Israel.

In this simplified version of the story, Michael’s paternal grandmother had to leave Germany “because of the war” – more specifically, directly from Bergen Belsen, but that’s just another place she never heard of, so I won’t complicate things by mentioning it – and he decided, well, to come back. And I think for today we can leave out the part about how in the interval his grandmother was part of founding the State of Israel, how my family moved there from America to be part of the miracle of the return to our Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile, and that at one time we believed that now that we had our own state we and our children would never want to live anywhere else. All of that may be implied when another Jew asks me what Michael is doing here, here in the land of the killers, of all places outside of our Holy Land, but in this little room in a beauty salon populated by a work-weary woman who is massaging my hands with cream, I will keep it simple, one mother to another, proud of our young-adult children venturing out into the world to seek their futures. Why ruin a perfectly sunny day in May with all those dark memories, unfathomable ironies and unanswerable questions when we just came here to have a little fun?

“Everything okay?” she asks, looking up from my left hand, which she is holding in both of hers and rubbing.

“Everything’s fine,” I smile back at her.

My husband’s Uncle Meir, who unlike his parents and siblings fled Germany before the war, is emphatic about not visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons: “This generation had nothing to do with that,” he told me. So I look at this kind lady and tell myself: “It is not her fault she was born to a bunch of murderers.” Nor was Michael responsible for the dreams of his fathers. He rebelled against the idea that just because he was born a Jew in Israel he had to be religious or Zionist. He is neither.

It pained me when Michael announced that in Germany he felt at home. This is not something I expected to hear from my Israeli-born son. But I suspect the grandmother he never met passed on certain subtle aspects of German culture to his father, who passed them on to him, giving things in this country a familiar, comfortable feel. Before Michael I had almost never heard a Jew say anything positive about Germany: I heard a lot of people say they would not set foot there – including my husband, until he changed his mind – and that they “couldn’t stand the sound of the German language.” Even though Israel has maintained relations with Germany for more than 40 years now, most of the people I know can not resist making a snide comment at the mention of that country. Few met the news of Michael’s moving there with equanimity. For a long time I couldn’t say the name of the country out loud. I would say “my son went to Europe.” One day I took the bus home from my Russian class with a classmate, and she told me she had a daughter who was living “in Europe.” To which I said “I have a son in Germany too!”

Yet, Michael states plainly that Germany’s public civility and cleanliness make him feel comfortable and welcome here, just as much as Israel’s noise and chaos always bothered him.

So you see, I wrap up my closing argument in my imaginary answer to the cosmetician’s question about how my son ended up here, I thought my son would stay in Israel, with us, but he decided to move away and live here, just like young people do all the time, just like your daughter in London, I tell my new friend, although still silently, in my head, as she massages some cream into the backs of my hands.

I am so engrossed in thought that it takes me a while to notice something is amiss. I don’t see any bottles of nail polish in the room. This is not like any of the manicures I have ever had, surrounded by hundreds of colorful little bottles forcing me to make a deliciously agonizing choice. For half an hour my hands have been massaged, peeled and rubbed with cream, my cuticles have been poked and my nails have been filed, but where is this going? When I try to broach the issue, I am so anxious I can’t think of any pseudo-German word for “color” or even “red,” so I try faking it with an accent, coming out with something like “ruhd,” gesturing and lapsing into English: “Where are the colors?”

The manicurist points to a shelf behind me, on which there are six bottles of polish, all nearly indistinguishable shades of bright pink. I ask, in English, if that’s all. Yes, it is. I choose the darkest one, hoping it is redder than it looks, but when she paints my pinky nail it comes out electric pink, and I scream: “No, no, no, forget about it!” This cuts right through the language barrier.

She wipes it off and continues her program of cream, peeling, mask and massage as I try to get over my shock. I try to put a positive spin on my disappointment. I have been having hand pains for some time because I type so much, and maybe, I comfort myself, I am getting just the treatment I need even though I didn’t ask for it. But still, it said “manicure” on their sign and that is what I asked for. Is it possible that the only word in German I had no doubt about, that I thought I really knew, that I didn’t try to cobble together out of fragments of two thousand years of globe-spanning Jewish linguistic history, could the word “manicure” have more than one meaning? Could they take it literally to mean “hand treatment,” without nail polish? Apparently they could and they did and they charged me 25 euros.

I go out into the street staring at my boring, colorless nails in disbelief. I could have filed my nails and put cream on my hands myself. What did I just pay 25 euros for? What is wrong with this country?  When I meet Michael at my hotel I am indignant.

“I can’t believe what just happened,” I begin my rant.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“I went for a manicure, at that place we saw the other day, and look, look!” I shove the backs of my hands into his face.

“Yeah, what?”

Boys, I sigh. My daughter would have gasped. “No color! No nail polish!” I spell it out to him. “What’s the point of getting a manicure if you don’t get your nails polished?”

“What a bummer.”

“And it cost me twice as much as it does in Israel!”

“No kidding.”

“What is wrong with these people?” I scream. “You tell me. What kind of people are they?”

“Mom?”

“What?!”

“Come with me,” he says.

And I look at my son, mein kind, this six-foot man with a blond pony tail who makes waitresses blush, this citizen of the world who knows his way around town and speaks the language, and I feel safe and cared for and I follow.

He leads me across the street, holding a hand to my elbow, gently reminding me to watch out for the trams. He takes me to the drug store and for another 10 euros I get my favorite shade of braun.

by Shoshana London Sappir

A few years ago my husband and I attended a lecture by linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann, presenting a provocative theory: the Hebrew we speak today is closer to the European languages of the early Zionists than it is to classical Hebrew, even though most of its vocabulary is Hebrew; therefore, Zuckermann proposed, it would be more accurate to call it “Israeli” than “Hebrew,” letting go of the romantic notion that Israelis today speak the language of the Bible. Our conversation about this idea went on for days after we came home, sweeping up the whole family; later, Michael even wrote a term paper about it.

So it was only natural that when I saw the translators’ association to which I belong had scheduled another lecture about the genealogy of Modern Hebrew, I asked if anybody would like to go with me. Perry said he would and we both looked forward to a pleasant evening in Tel Aviv. I dutifully registered in advance. Next to Perry’s name I added: “14 years old.”

On the hour-plus drive we discussed the upcoming lecture. The speaker was a researcher who was studying the structures of spoken Hebrew and was going to present us with her findings as to whether they had more in common with European languages or with Hebrew, and whether, indeed, this language was Hebrew. Perry was already inclined to believe it was not, because he cannot understand the Bible without an intense explanation or translation: he welcomed the new translation of the Bible into Modern Hebrew and has begun reading it.

At the registration desk a colleague of mine searched for my name on the list, crossed it out and started writing me an invoice. I noticed the total she had entered, and started to protest, “what about him?” – but thought the better of it mid-sentence and shut my mouth; if minors got free admission, who was I to argue?

During the lecture we tried not to disturb anyone with our excited whispering and exchanges of meaningful looks of agreement, surprise or exasperation over certain points in the presentation or behaviors by members of the audience: one woman stormed out not ten minutes into the lecture, shouting at the speaker: “Shame on you!” for doubting the unbroken chain between ancient and modern Hebrew. Another translator prefaced a question about the effectiveness of correcting linguistic “mistakes,” by saying: “If my 15-year-old son had his way, he would spend his whole life lazing in front of the computer and television,” which elicited a room full of nods and sighs of agreement. Perry and I rolled our eyes at each other and clenched our teeth, as if to say: “Just look how people talk about children.”

On our way out of the room for the break, one of my friends turned to Perry, and asked in a kind but patronizing tone: “So, did you fall asleep?” More awake than ever, Perry replied with a startled: “Huh?”

Suddenly I started seeing a pattern: my friend was assuming Perry wasn’t there of his own will but was forced to suffer in boredom while he waited for his mother. As if a child couldn’t possibly come to a lecture out of interest, just like we did. Could that be why they hadn’t charged him admission? Just by looking at him and noting he is of school age, did everyone take it for granted I made him come because I didn’t have a babysitter? Did the organizers let him in for free as a favor to me, allowing me to use an extra seat because they thought I had nowhere else to park  him?

It reminded me of the story about the guy who comes to a movie theater box office carrying a crocodile under his arm, and says: “Two, please.” The teller says: “Sir, don’t you think you should take that crocodile to the zoo?” “Thanks,” he answers, “but we already went this morning.”

Sitting down in the lounge with our refreshments, we analyzed the evening. We agreed that people were so upset by their preconceptions’ being challenged that they hardly let the lecturer speak, interrupting her with questions and comments from the beginning.

The next day I sent an e-mail to a colleague whom I had seen at the lecture, with some information she had asked for. On a personal note, I added: “My son really enjoyed the lecture and would like to come to future events.” To which she replied: “That is SO funny! What an adorable geek!” I answered: “What is funny is that everybody thinks he came with me because I didn’t have a babysitter. He really came because he was interested.” She replied, by way of apology: “My son’s a geek too.”

But Perry does not consider himself a “geek,” nor is he considered one by others. The idea, I gathered, is that it is unusual, and what’s more, uncool, for a teenager to pursue intellectual interests, especially at an “adult level.” The geek label implies that such a child is probably uninterested in sports, music and girls, socially awkward and unpopular, living the lonely life of the misunderstood, his best friend being his computer.

Perry knows what a geek is; he just played one in a teen musical about geeks and jocks, the American high school stereotypes. But such categories have never meant much to him. From the first grade Perry has been attending Sudbury Jerusalem, where students are not divided by age and mix freely with each other and with the staff. They are free to pursue whatever interests they have at a given time with whatever means available: play, books, the Internet, but primarily conversation with other children or adults.
Maybe it is because of this upbringing that Perry has never internalized a hierarchy of subjects of interest and activities, rating them as childish/adult, work/play, serious/frivolous, cool/geeky. He has always flowed with his interests, at times devoting intense attention to one thing and then moving on to another. In the early years of school he was very interested in climbing on door frames and walls and leaping from high perches; we nicknamed him Spiderman. He went through an Ancient Egypt period and still likes to go to the museum and decipher hieroglyphics. He spends a lot of time playing the piano. He has a rock band with some school friends. In the last couple of years he has become politically aware and sometimes comes to demonstrations with me.

Perry is still a child and we treat him like one: we support and protect him, attempt to know where he is at all times and keep him safe. But the status of child should not be a barrier that keeps him out of the adult world insofar as the environment in question poses no danger to him. He is just as mentally capable as any adult of hearing a lecture about the Hebrew language, and a lot more open-minded than some language professionals.

Sometimes we are startled to be reminded we live in a world where adults have such a skewed view of children: if they spend a lot of time on their computers, like us, they are presumably brain-dead. If they show signs of interest in their culture, they are freaks. I suppose the ideal, non-threatening child, in this view, would be penned up in his classroom with other members of his ilk, dutifully performing age-approved tasks dictated by adults – but not too enthusiastically.

Language is all around us. It is everywhere, everyone uses it, and people are interested in languages wherever you go — people like languages. I get into spontaneous conversations about language with non-linguists several times a week. But when I tell people that I study linguistics, and moreover, that I’m into grammar theory, many are nearly shocked. “Grammar theory?! Why? Grammar is so boring!”. This post is an attempt to explain why, of all things, I love grammar.

First I will say a little about the traditional, or naive, view of grammar. The way I used to think of grammar, the way most people are probably used to thinking of grammar, is that grammar is something like religious dogma. There are do’s and don’ts, and their goal is to make your language usage correct and beautiful. It is commonly held that there is a right way to speak English (or German, or Hebrew, or Dutch, or Russian, etc.) and that there is a wrong way. Many are even convinced that without instruction in the correct rules of the grammar for their native language, speakers will talk and write the wrong way.

Another commonly held strange belief that confuses the matter is that every word has a certain meaning. So traditional grammars label, for example, the verb form write as “present tense”, and another form of that verb, wrote, gets the label “past tense.” Each correctly describes a typical way to use the form, but that description can’t explain all usage in any clear way. The naive language afficionado may then, as is Bill Bryson in his Mother Tongue (which I just read), be shocked to find that the innocent present-tense write is being used in such a patently past-tense sentence as “I used to write on my blog” (to use my own example). But grammar is a little bit more complicated than that.

Symbols, a system of symbols.

The way we look at language and grammar changed forever in the later part of the 19th century, when Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist (who incidentally got his PhD at the University of Leipzig, where I study), came upon an important realization. He realized that any symbol is made up of meaning on the one hand, and of form on the other hand; he realized that the connection between the two is purely arbitrary; he realized that language is a system of such arbitrary symbols.

This means that it is an arbitrary choice of English speakers to say “I used to write” and of Hebrew speakers to say ‘nahagti likhtov’, which means the same. It means we assign different sounds to express this thought simply because we are speaking different languages – there is no logical reason to say “to write” rather than Hebrew ‘likhtov’ or Spanish “escribir” or Russian ‘pisat’’. This is a little bit obvious on the one hand, especially if you speak more than one language. But it is startling, because we are used to thinking that words simply mean something. In truth, there is no connection between “tree” and the physical object that we refer to with the word; the word is just a short burst of sounds that we agree to use to communicate about our bark-covered, leafy friends.

These insights had impact in many fields of philosophy and social science in the decades that followed. A particularly big step was taken in the mid-1950’s by a young American linguist named Noam Chomsky. Chomsky argued – and still argues –

• that language is a system,
• that it is a system unique to human beings (other animals can’t produce language of the kind humans use, even with help),
• that it is a system universal to all human beings (even the most isolated human cultures use language),
• and that this system is an inborn feature of the human brain.

Chomsky has argued much more than just this, and has identified recursion as the key feature of human language that makes it so useful and fundamentally separates it from other animals’ communication – but I will spare you the details. The logic is solid, trust me. There has been an ongoing debate about some of the points above ever since Chomsky first began to publish, but I will spare you those details as well for now.

Generativist grammar theory.

Modern grammar theory is a direct result of Chomsky’s Generativistic approach, an approach which Chomsky has developed over the past half-century, publishing a new version of his theory every decade or so. Chomsky’s works have transformed all of linguistic theory, even amongst those who disagree with his hypotheses or his approach.

Chomsky and other generativists have demonstrated that every native speaker of a language has an internal grammar that allows them to instinctively know what is a possible sentence in their language and what is not, and to only speak or write in a way that fits this grammar. This means that a native speaker cannot use their language in a wrong way. To demonstrate, here is a grammatical English sentence:

(1) “I used to write on my blog, but now I rarely do”.

This is not a grammatical sentence of English:

(2) “I wroted on-blog-a-mine, now-but I not-much does“,

nor is this:

(3) “I on my blog to write used, but now do I rarely“,

and of course not this:

(4) “Kcha plip plip blugu, muppu muppu fla gen“.

There are, of course, different ways in English to express the thought behind sentence (1), such as this:

(5) “I don’t write on my blog as much as I used to”.

But for some reason, (2), (3) and (4) are not utterances that an English speaker would produce in place of (1) or (5). These example sentences would look very different in another language, but there would always be sentences that are part of the language and possible sentences that are not. Generative grammar theory tries to figure out how this works, how native speakers structure language.

Intention, meaning, form.

Another important realization that Chomsky has given us is that a grammatical form is not necessarily a meaningful form; not every grammatical sentence makes sense. Chomsky’s classic example is (6) “colorless green dreams sleep furiously.” There is no way to rule out the form of sentence (6), but there is also no reasonable way to interpret its meaning, except perhaps in the context of a highly surreal post-modern poem. A form can be permitted by the grammar without carrying coherent meaning; form and meaning are very separate things – continuing de Saussure’s line of thought.

One of the secret joys of linguistics is getting to spend time on this kind of absurd sentence, but it also illustrates a fascinating and important point: every speaker of a language has a formal grammar for that language – a system for producing grammatical utterances, forms that are permissible in the language – and this component is responsible for form alone. There is then another component of grammar that is in charge of making sense of things, which is different in every language as well.

For example, some say we must never use a double negative in English. Others say there ain’t nothing wrong with double negatives. In Russian, everyone agrees that they are mandatory – the sentence “I didn’t see anybody” is, if my Russian is to be trusted, ‘nikavo ne videl’, literally ‘[I] didn’t see nobody’. In fact, Russian has not only double but even triple negatives – the question ‘kto kavo videl?’, “who saw whom?”, can be answered ‘nikto ne videl nikavo‘, literally “nobody didn’t see nobody”, meaning “nobody saw anybody”. In standard varieties of English the Russian pattern would have no meaning. Some would say Russian is just illogical, or perhaps that English is, but really they just have a different way of presenting the same meaning. In Russian you just negate everything in the sentence, whereas standard English uses one negative element (“nobody”) and then only uses “any“-items, which aren’t actually negative, but are mandatorily used together with negatives. These are simply different ways to give form to a particular meaning.

Coming back to our little verb write, let’s see how a grammar theorist would label these forms. write would be, for example, the bare verb form. In English this is usually used for the present tense (I write, you write, they write) but it is also used in the infinitive to write. There is a particular meaning of the verb use which lets us make a particular kind of past tense, which I would call past habituative: “I used to write”. It is created by taking the preterite (“simple past”) of use – used – and putting it together with an infinitive. Used to write, used to run, used to think – etc. A linguist would note that this is a perfectly normal way of using the bare form of an English verb.

It doesn’t make sense in a literal way – the sentence doesn’t mean I “used” anything – but it’s a form that English uses to express a certain meaning. The Modern Hebrew equivalent is created using the verb ‘linhog’, the most common meaning of which today is “to drive”, but which also means to “to be of the habit”. write is present-tense in some situations but not so much in other situations, just like use or ‘linhog’ have different uses. Forms cannot be so simply labeled by meaning; the link between form and function is not as simple as we may have liked it to be.

To complicate things, logicians and semanticists, who study the meaning of words and sentences, have also made the distinction between meaning and intention, both of which are involved in the semantic content of language. “You will give me back my book” and “give back my book!” have the same basic meaning, but they express a different intention, and get a different grammatical form. In spoken Modern Hebrew the only difference between the two would be the intonation — in both cases the sentence is ‘takhzir li et hasefer sheli’.

Strange languages. Remarkable things.

It is remarkable that form is sometimes so independent from meaning and intention, and that meaning and intention sometimes have such an effect on form. But what is truly fascinating to me is that the way these levels of meaning and form are related to each other is in each language systematic. The way form and meaning are constructed, and the way they are related, are systematic, and it seems they are all fundamentally based on the same principles. Even the differences between languages appear to be systematic, although the system is not clear yet. Still, without being entirely sure exactly what the “building blocks of grammar” are, we are able to easily compare between languages as different as English and Dyirbal. (The former is a very strange language originating on an island off the northwest of Europe but spoken by over 1½ billion people spread around the world. The latter is a very strange language of aboriginal Australia spoken by only a handful of people.)

Modern linguistics, or more particularly language typology, has managed to refine the way we look at languages and compare them, such that from just a few words describing the features of a language, a linguist can get an idea of how that language works without ever having heard a word of it. We can compare and summarize how languages deal with different things, such as marking tense on verbs or negating a proposition, even though they choose very different forms to express them.

Grammar theory is about figuring out how this works, what the underlying system is which gives rise to languages that are so different yet so similar. We are figuring out not only what differences there are, but also why and how they arise. We are working towards a theory of grammar that hopefully will one day be able to capture how any given language in the world separates the grammatical forms from the ungrammatical. On the way, we get to see how people say things in all kinds of different languages (there are over 6,000 languages spoken worldwide!), we get to argue and hypothesize, we get to play around with funny example sentences, and we get to write about it. I can’t imagine anything much better than that.