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.

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!

For the BA degree in linguistics, me and my classmates are required to choose some courses from outside of the core linguistics curriculum. This is, in theory, a good thing – it gives undergraduate students a chance to see what’s going on in other departments, and particularly gets us acquainted with some fields related to our own. However, these semi-electives are simply the introductory modules that students in other programs take in their first semesters; this can cause a lot of frustration.

Over the past days, I spent several frustrating hours doing homework in such a course. I remember seeing what must have been the same frustration in students from outside of linguistics in the introductory courses I’ve taken and the one in which I tutored. I think this frustration is an indirect result of the Bologna Process, which creates a basis on which courses from different departments, universities, and countries, across Europe, are evaluated for accreditation. The problem, I think, is that it’s very hard to evaluate a course and the effort that goes into it outside of context.

Understandably, when designing courses, faculty is focussed mostly on training the next generation of scholars in their field. A certain number of students are accepted for each course from outside the field (let’s call them “outsiders”), but they are almost always evaluated in the same way as students from within the field (“insiders”) and, as a result, are supposed to do the same coursework. A part of preparing a future generation of scholars – at least as the Institute for Linguistics and some others seem to view things – is to present beginners with a large amount of hard work so that they can either quickly jump in, or figure out that they chose the wrong field and switch (or leave altogether). However, the motivations, abilities, and interests of outsiders are very different from those of insiders.

In my first semesters, I was in the process of falling in love with linguistics, and this meant I was eager to understand course material and to acquire any new skills helpful for coursework, even when this was difficult. As such, it didn’t terribly bother me that the linguistics modules were tough, or that they required a lot of homework and self-study. I was trying to enter this new world of thoughts, terminology, and ideas, so I wasn’t irked by the fact that I was required to do so. The module that’s frustrating me right now is supposedly a very small one, composed of just one course, in a field I’ve always had some familiarity with and which I find interesting, but which I’ve never been deeply into, nor have any intention of making my professional home. The homework is gruelling, even though I only have to do it every other week, and every single time I find myself kind of furious about it. Yes, I chose this module, but out of a rather narrow set of alternatives, and I have to complete it in order to earn my degree. It may be cast as a choice, but it’s really a requirement.

As I hinted above, I think the problem is a mismatch between the goals and motivations involved in creating the course and those of (some) individuals taking them. When I take an introductory module in linguistics, I am doing so as part of a bigger commitment I’ve made to the field as a whole. I know that if I find the field isn’t right for me after all, I can start an entirely different degree, but I’m willing to accept some parts along the way that I’m not crazy about, since I’m committed to the whole. It also helps that I’m surrounded by a group of people in the same situation. Now, when I’m taking an introductory module outside my field, I naturally approach it in a very different way. The little part is the whole. I’m probably interested in some aspects of the material, but I’m there basically because I need the ECTS points. I’m looking for the interesting things, but the nature of introductory courses dictates that much of what you learn is merely scaffolding for later courses, where the real fun comes. That scaffolding, which could be exciting if I planned to build on it, becomes a terrible chore when I have no reason to expect to ever use it again.¹ As a result, the whole experience becomes one of jumping through hoops, often taking shortcuts, if for no other reason then because there are so many other things I am more interested in doing with my time. And to make things worse, I have no idea who of the many people taking the module is in the same situation, and who is there for the long haul.

All of this would be okay if, say, I merely had to attend the course, with the option of doing homework and taking the exam if I want to get feedback. But module credits are awarded for completing tests, usually written exams.² And in this case, the lecturer only lets you take the exam if you got at least 50% of the points for homework assignments throughout the semester. But the course is not designed for us outsiders – it’s designed for the insiders, who have made a long-term commitment to the field, have a reason to try hard to get good at it, and have a peer group to help them out. The difficulty of assignments and exams is calibrated for them, not for us. As a result, the semi-elective often becomes the most taxing and frustrating module of the semester, even though you “merely” have to pass.

I’m not really sure what could be done about this. I don’t think it would make sense to ask lecturers to go well out of their way to accommodate the small group of outsiders. I do think it’s good that undergraduates get a peek into other disciplines, but I’m not sure that it should be a degree requirement. And as long as it’s a degree requirement, it is understandable that the university wants to make sure people actually take the courses, hence the exams etc. It’s not clear that there’s any real way out of this situation.³

If anyone has any perspective to add, please leave a comment.

Footnotes

1. This expectation may be wrong – you never know where things could come in handy – but it seems, at the very least, highly unlikely that I’ll ever need it again; I can’t help but see it as a chore, rather than a means to an end.
2. I’ve written before about why exams are bad.
3. This kind of problem is, of course, only a problem in institutions which do not fundamentally trust students to take responsibility for their own education. I believe, as with school-level education, that this is not a good design feature for an educational institution. But it would be a mistake to think that universities are mainly educational institutions. Their primary social function is rather accreditation – giving people a stamp of approval so others will allow them into some prestigious jobs and social functions. They educate only as much as they can get away with, unfortunately. And so we are left with the clash of the wish to create some inter-disciplinary cross-pollination, the need to rigorously introduce newbies into your field, and the need of the system not to give away accreditation too easily.

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!

There’s an excellent essay by Geoffrey K. Pullum over at Language Log, in which he explains — in a way that anyone can understand if they try — what a passive construction in English is.

Our grumbling about how these people don’t know their passive from a hole in the ground, we have received mail from many people who want a clear and simple explanation of what a passive clause is. In this post I respond to those many requests. I’ll make it as clear and simple as I can, but it will be a 2500-word essay. I can’t make it simpler than it is.

Pullum and others at the Log rightly ridicule overzealous application of the “grammar rule” that the passive should be avoided at all times. I actually find the “rule” useful, and this is not incompatible with my agreeing with Pullum’s post. The passive is often used for blurring agentivity (even as it can be used for the exact opposite) or for sounding official/smart. As long as common sense (i.e. a native speaker’s intuition) comes first, I find I can actually make my writing simpler, more direct, and a better read by eliminating passives that only snuck in because part of me thought they sound smarter or something.

Also, when writing for EUDEC, I often find myself tempted to say something like “the wug¹ was selected because…”, in order to glaze over the fact that the ones doing the choosing were, in fact, the Council I’m writing for. (I happen to always be a bit uncomfortable with our role as elected representatives, and I wish EUDEC were more of a direct democracy.) But having written something like, and being aware of the tempting perils of the passive, I often correct it to “we chose the wug because…”, which is both more honest and, I think, easier to read.

Anyway, Pullum’s essay will surely be a long-lasting contribution to the Internet war between descriptivists and prescriptivists, and is an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to find out, in just 2500 words and without needing a linguistic background, what the passive is. It’s also a neat example of the kind of thing linguists look into. So check it out.

Footnotes

1. “wug” doesn’t mean anything, but you probably know two or more of them would be “wugs”.

For a very long time I’ve wanted to be an academic, but when I decided to start studying it was important for me not to think too far ahead and take things one at a time. I wanted to stay open to other options, some of which, I knew, could not have even occurred to me at the time. As the degree gets closer and closer I know I have to at least decide what the next step will be. There have been times when it was clear to me that a BA was not enough, that I’d need at least an MA to satisfy my curiosity. At other times (in particular when I get annoyed at the university’s structure) I’ve wished to just be done with it as soon as possible and go do something else.

What makes the whole thing more difficult is that I find both fields absolutely fascinating, and both engage me in a way that makes use of my skills. Activism stands out to me as a particularly worthy way of spending one’s time, because activism means working for the greater good (or one’s vision thereof) and would have a clear goal. The goal in linguistics is less clear to me, and I know that the best one can do is create, or help improve, a model that is useful for understanding the phenomena of language — hoping to achieve total understanding would only be a recipe for disappointment. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking and speaking about democratic education since I was thirteen, and I don’t think it’s much good to advocate it as a graduate who hasn’t spent much of their adult life outside the movement.

In the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about one way of seeing things, a way that had occurred to me when I started to study but I somehow forgot about in the meantime. The idea is essentially to make a hobby into a career, and work on something you believe in in your free time. In my case, the hobby-career would be linguistics — a pursuit that is valuable to me simply because it’s fascinating and fun. I could be an activist on my free time, as time allows.

I’m far from done figuring this out, but this approach seems like a good one. Going into a career without any lofty expectations would allow me to spend time on something challenging and enjoyable, while pursuing more lofty goals on my free time would let me continue being part of something I consider really important, something that seems to make a real difference in people’s lives (which, outside of academia, linguistics rarely does).

I’m writing this just because it is on my mind and I feel like writing. I should actually be doing my computer science homework. I’d appreciate thoughts on all this, especially if they come quickly enough to distract me from my homework!

Unfortunately, none of my classmates are taking the same classes that I am, so I also end up sitting in classes where I know nobody, feeling disoriented and isolated like in the first weeks of my first semester. We’re all still more-or-less in touch… But everyone’s very busy, and although I still regularly see some of my classmates, it’s not nearly as often as it used to be.

I think this might be more than just a bit of a discomfort for us third-years. It seems like a deeper design flaw in the program. It just so happens I saw a TED talk last night where Steven Johnson talks about where good ideas come from. A big point is that they tend to come from informal interaction in which different people’s thoughts meet and mix. Thinking back on the most excited ideas me and my friends have come upon during our studies, most of them truly seem to have come up either at bars or in living rooms. And this semester? We’re not all working on the same things anymore and we don’t see each other all that often. Studying isn’t only less fun this way, it’s also less creative and produces less interesting thoughts and insights.

I also saw another TED talk last night which seems vaguely relevant to all this, and I felt was very worth watching: Dr. Brené Brown on Connection. (Hat tip to Don Berg.) It’s a curious talk in that Dr. Brown starts by talking about how “if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist” and ends with advice that could have almost come from a New Age mystic. But coming from a serious researcher who has been examining the issue for years, it makes quite a different impression.

I can only recommend watching it. I’ll leave you with that for the time being.