Mixed Nuts

The Bad Astronomer’s at it again with a great post called Ten Things You Didn’t Know About the Milky Way Galaxy. I actually did know a few of those things, but certainly not all. I can do little more than look at stuff like this in absolute wonder. We know so much and yet everything we learn simply points to how much we have yet to find out. If there’s anything I feel any sort of reverence for, it’s that spirit of inquiry that makes us explore everything from galaxies to the tiniest, microscopic organisms that inhabit our world, just to find out what makes them tick.

I walked into the Deep Dish, a cafe at uni, the other day and had a bit of a twilight-zone moment when I hear Joe Dassin’s ‘Et si tu n’existais pas’ playing. I don’t sing very loudly, but the lady at the counter noticed and, after a chat, offered to lend me the CD - a ‘best of’ collection - if I could make her a copy too. Since then, I’ve been listening to it non-stop. I haven’t heard most of these songs in at least 20 years, but I actually remember most of them. This week’s song, then, is one of my favorites off that CD. It’s not the best of recordings and not much of a video at all, but that’s ok because the song is the point. It’s called ‘Ca m’avance a quoi?’

Ken MacLeod writes about why the use of Gaelic in signs in parts of Scotland bugs him. It’s an interesting, if brief, look at the emotional entanglement with language that, for most of us, usually remains buried.

But for what it’s worth, my guess is this: we regret not speaking Gaelic, and we resent the presumption that we should.

The comments are also worth a read.

Yes I should be working…

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This past week or so has been pretty full-on, at least for me, what with meeting what felt like at least a million new people, getting ‘orientated’, getting in touch with my supervisor, wading through readings for classes, and being generally buzzed from the whole thing. I’m glad I had a quiet, fun weekend because the coming weeks look like they’ll be a teensy bit stressful, if mostly in a good way.

My parents are leaving Tokyo tomorrow. They landed in Ankara on March 3 1974 and will arrive in Islamabad, appropriately enough, on March 3, 2008. It’s been a pretty good run. Their stuff has been sent ahead and they’re wrapping up their last-minute packing, interspersed with last-minute calls, last-minute visits, and last-minute last-minute stuff. I spoke to my father earlier today and, though Tokyo was the first posting we didn’t ‘do’ together at all, the feeling was exactly the same as it’s always been. Usually, once the place we’ve called home for one to four years is completely cleaned out, one or the other of us inevitably says, “It’s all gone.” Not in a despairing sort of way - after all, ‘it’ is now making its way to wherever we’re going next - but it’s still a feeling of emptiness. It’s the statement that allows us that little bit of time we need to say goodbye to yet another life before we head off towards the next adventure. Today, when my father said it over the phone, I knew he wasn’t just telling me but allowing himself to let go of this place that has been his home for the last few years. And, oddly, I had the same slightly choked up, slightly teary response I always do. I’m not sad - I visited them all of once and didn’t know the place so leaving it doesn’t mean much to me - but today, I’m there with my parents as they pack the last of their life in Japan up and walk onto the plane that will take them ‘home’.

Ani again.

An interesting post over at Language Log discusses how, apparently, native speakers of French, intended to serve as a control group in a second-language acquisition experiment, were remarkably inconsistent in the genders they assigned to nouns. This is important because native speakers are generally assumed to be fairly consistent and correct in their use of the language and it is this usage, alongside written grammars, that is therefore used to measure the success of non-native speakers’ language acquisition.

Ayoun was investigating second-language learning of grammatical gender in French — a major difficulty for learners from non-gender languages like English. She had constructed a couple of tasks: grammaticality judgments of sentences where there was a gender agreement mismatch, and a gender-assignment task, where subjects were given a noun and had to choose among “masculine”, “feminine”, “both”, or “I don’t know”.

In both tasks, to her great surprise, she found a great deal of disagreement among her native-speaker controls! In these tasks, there is always a normatively ‘correct’ answer — French dictionaries and textbooks all agree on what the genders of nouns are, and how gender agreement in sentences should turn out — in the same way they agree on how to form relative clauses, and how to form passives, and where to put clitic pronouns, and so on. Native speakers would be expected to perform close to ceiling on this grammatical task, as on others. But, surprisingly, they don’t.

What is interesting is that the greatest variation existed among the youngest participants.

On most grammatical tasks, for all intents and purposes, teenagers’ native-language abilities are identical to adults’ abilities. But when she broke down the gender-assignment task results by age, she found that teenagers showed considerably more variation than the adults. On the 50 feminine nouns, for example, the 14 adults all agreed on 21 of them, while the 42 teenagers agreed on only one: cible, ‘target’. Of the 93 masculine nouns, the adults agreed on 51 of them, while all adults and teenagers agreed on only 17 (of 93!!)

Apparently, no systematic study of native French speakers’ assignment of grammatical gender has been done for about 30 years, so we don’t know when or how this inconsistency developed. It’s interesting though, because it makes me wonder whether it has anything to do with the increasing amount of ‘noise’ being overlaid on language. Teachers and all manner of pedants have been bewailing the deterioration of language quite possibly since we started using language in the first place. What I find odd though is not just the change in the way people use language, but the fact that they don’t really seem to ‘have the idiom’, as it were. I hope that’s not just me turning into a stuffy old lecturer before my time and ranting about ‘kids these days’ - I’m particular about usage, certainly, but I try not to smother living language.

As the post points out, the experiment was not set up to provide answers to questions regarding the variation between native language speakers so we’ll have to wait for another study before we can do more than wonder out loud. But in the mean time, I shall happily speculate to my heart’s content.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you hear of something awful/upsetting/annoying/stupid happening in a foreign country or a community that’s been in the news a lot. You, in your wonderfully informed and astute way, watched an ABC special or read an article about this culture/community in the Economist, both of which are respected institutions. You might even have worked with this girl who was dating someone from there once - you know because she brought him/her round for drinks once and you had a lovely 15-minute chat. So, armed with your indignation about said event and your vast body of knowledge on said culture, you a) declare your indignation and/or b) proceed to locate the nearest person belonging to that culture and demand an explanation.

Yes?

Well I’m tired of being that chai-colored person you immediately go to for that explanation. I have yet to meet an Australian who can give me a thorough, nuanced historical explanation of the political and symbolic importance of last week’s Apology to the Aboriginal peoples. I have yet to meet an American who can, at the drop of a hat, explain why Americans don’t want to vote for a woman or a black man and how the fuck a bible-bashing lunatic who wants to destroy the Constitution is even being considered as a potential presidential candidate or what the fuck Scientology is. But then I wouldn’t ask them why their societies are so fucking racist and sexist and homophobic and downright illiterate. Oh and xenophobic too. Gotta love that xenophobia.

Why? Because as it happens, the individuals I know from these countries are not any of those things. Or, if they are, they’re open-minded enough to challenge themselves a bit and get the fuck over it. See, I’ve lived there. Sure there’s some bad stuff, but mostly, I’ve seen good stuff. Decent people, good friends, intelligent conversation, that sort of thing. If I did have a question though, you know what I would do? I’d go look it up. I’d go read. Gosh, I might even watch the news for more than five minutes. And once I’d figured out what impact, if any, it might have on my life, I’d go do something else.

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you believe, who you fuck, or what you eat. I would appreciate it, though, if you would extend me the same courtesy. I am not the spokesperson for all things Pakistani, Muslim, Islamic, South Asian, female, queer, Pakistani + female/queer, Muslim + female/queer, Islamic + female/queer or South Asian + female/queer. I don’t care how fucking concerned you are about those poor benighted savages whose plight you feel so deeply for that you must make asinine statements about their ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ while ignoring completely that there are people on the ground from those societies working the asses off to actually make a difference. You have the gall, instead, to feel sorry that you can’t do more, because obviously, nothing will ever get fixed until you get your big fat pink ass over there to really turn them into beggars. Fuck. The angst must be unbearable.

And don’t for a minute think that this isn’t also addressed to the fucking desi morons who make equally stupid assumptions about people cultures that they know nothing about. They pity you folks too, and in much the same nauseating way. Tsk tsk. All these women having babies by themselves, without even a maid to help. Poor old man dying alone after raising five children. You know, they put him in a nursing home! Oh you know them, no families or religion or values or anything. Wonder how they survive, poor things. Oye stay away from them - you know they’ll fuck anything that moves. It wouldn’t happen if they’d just get married when their parents told them to.

The only difference is whose words get heard more. I have the enviable good fortune of traveling between these two poles of stupidity. In Pakistan, I’m trying to explain the big, bad, warmongering, female-exploiting West, outside it, I’m trying to explain the evil, fundamentalist, female-oppressing Islamist world.

Fuck that.

No I don’t think America-the-Asshole is right. No I don’t think bloody goat-raping Al-qaida is right. No, Pakistan is not part of the goddamned Middle East. No I don’t think there is a Zionist conspiracy. No I don’t fucking cover my head and I never will. No I am not oppressed. No I’m not gay. No I’m not straight either you fucking moron. No I wasn’t taught any Islamic creation myths. No I wasn’t taught that men are better than women. No I do not speak Arabic. No Urdu is not my first language. No I don’t defer to my little brother, to my father, to my husband, or to any random idiot male on anything relating to my personal freedom. No I’m not Indian. No I don’t fucking want your approval for speaking my first language so well or for being so ‘progressive’. No I’m not ‘exotic’ or ‘fascinating’ (you’re fucking ignorant). No I fucking do not need to apologize for being from wherever it is you think I’m from or whatever it is you think I am.

I do not owe you a fucking explanation.

Tracy Chapman singing about a revolution. This is live - just her and her guitar and what looks like hundreds of people.

Scientific American interviews Alice Gaby, a linguist working at UC Berkeley (and a University of Melbourne alumna), about her research on how language affects our perception of the world. She explains, however, that language isn’t some sort of “straitjacket” that limits us to thinking in only one way, but rather a “habit” of mind that we fall into and that can and does change. Culture both reinforces and results from these habits.

The discussion ranges over other interesting topics, including Gaby’s project regarding the concept of time in language, which sounds fascinating.

SciAm promised a transcript of the interview a week from the post, but nothing’s been posted yet. I’ll link to it as soon as it’s up.