Horizon

The internet becomes slightly noisier

Well, now that I eat and breathe linguistics I thought I'd start a specifically linguistics blog for myself. I know it sounds a bit silly but I've seen such blogs out there which can be interesting and useful to other lowly students like myself, and after all it's free.

You are all welcome to contribute if for some reason you have something you want to say about linguistics and would rather say it there than here.

Have a nice day!

http://emptycategory.blogspot.com/

Oh yeah, and feedback is welcome too.

They Don't Make Word Problems Like They Used To

From Charles F. Kroeh's German Science Reader (1907):

6. Zwei Kapitalisten berechnen ihr Vermögen. Es ergiebt sich, dass der eine doppelt so reich ist als der andere und dass sie zusammen $38,700 besitzen. Wie reich ist nun jeder?

My translation: 6. Two capitalists are calculating their assets. It arises that one is twice as rich as the other, and that together they possess $38,700. How wealthy is each one?

And all this time I thought I could conjugate a verb

There's a lot of interesting stuff out there about second language instruction, and on a suggestion from Alan Hogue, I've been skimming through some of it.

I love the emphasis on addressing the anxieties that prevent people from communicating in a second language, however imperfectly. Worry too much about noun genders and you'll never manage to spit out a sentence. That said, this is going too far: (emphasis mine)

According to Krashen, the study of the structure of the language can have general educational advantages and values that high schools and colleges may want to include in their language programs. It should be clear, however, that examining irregularity, formulating rules and teaching complex facts about the target language is not language teaching, but rather is "language appreciation" or linguistics.

The only instance in which the teaching of grammar can result in language acquisition (and proficiency) is when the students are interested in the subject and the target language is used as a medium of instruction. Very often, when this occurs, both teachers and students are convinced that the study of formal grammar is essential for second language acquisition, and the teacher is skillful enough to present explanations in the target language so that the students understand. In other words, the teacher talk meets the requirements for comprehensible input and perhaps with the students' participation the classroom becomes an environment suitable for acquisition. Also, the filter is low in regard to the language of explanation, as the students' conscious efforts are usually on the subject matter, on what is being talked about, and not the medium.

This is a subtle point. In effect, both teachers and students are deceiving themselves. They believe that it is the subject matter itself, the study of grammar, that is responsible for the students' progress, but in reality their progress is coming from the medium and not the message. Any subject matter that held their interest would do just as well.

Gestorben in Frankreich

Over at Demisemiblog, Martha responds to nativist paranoia by reminding us of the existence of Pennsylvania Dutch. This makes me think of my Old Icelandic professor back at Rice. Along with Ásatrú and the "Kensington Stone", English-onlyism was one of Dr. Wilson's favorite objects of scorn. His wife was Wendish/German — from the Texas heartland between Austin and Houston — and he'd done a great deal of amateur history and archaeology on the area.

He had a simple, historical response to the English-only position: Go into the old German cemeteries around Texas. Look at the tombstones dated 1918. See how many of them are U.S. military graves, with a marker saying "died in France." In German.

Changing Sides

The book that triggered my latest chresthomathy spree was An Introduction to Scientific German, by Otto Koischwitz. He does a wonderful job of introducing vocabulary and grammatical constructions slowly, in a manner that allows the reader to learn from context and deduction. I was so impressed that I ordered his Bilderlesebuch (1933), which arrived today. It's designed for the beginner, and Sara picked it up and managed to work her way through two pages without any background in German at all.

I've been flipping through it in the last few minutes, and was surprised by the emphasis Koischwitz places on minorities within Germany. The sixth page of instruction describes Plattdeutsch (Low German) favorably, mentioning the well-known author Fritz Reuter. He gives an almost apologetic, utilitarian explanation of why he's covering Schuldeutsch instead of Plattdeutch, after the only comparison between that dialect and English that I've ever seen in an introductory text. Four pages later, we're introduced to the Wends, a Slavic-speaking minority within Germany who have lived there (and in Lee County, Texas) longer than the Germans themselves.

The emphasis on this sort of diversity is an interesting thing to find in an German author in 1933. I initially assumed that with his residence in the United States and the name Koischwitz — which I assumed to be Yiddish — he was writing in reaction to events in his homeland. Is Koischwitz some sort of proto-multiculturalist? Perhaps he's a crypto-anti-Fascist, who's using his books for American students as a medium for an alternate vision of Germany?

Well, maybe. But according to Elizabeth McLeod on the Old Time Radio mailing list, his sympathies shifted at the end of the decade:

Mister O. K. was Dr. Max Otto Koischwitz, a native German who moved to the US in the early 1920s to pursue his career as a professor of drama and literature. He taught at Hunter College for over a decade -- and at first took a decidedly anti-Nazi view of developments in his native country. But as the 1930s proceeded, Koischwitz's politics shifted -- and even though he took US citizenship in 1938, by 1939, he was openly supporting Hitler and peppering his classroom lectures with anti-Semitic harangues. Hunter put him on a "leave of absence" in the fall of 1939, and he immediately made plans to move to Germany, resigning his position at Hunter in January 1940. By the spring of that year, Koischwitz had landed at the RRG, and was broadcasting propaganda talks to the US as Mister O. K. and also as "Doctor Anders." During his career in Berlin, Koischwitz began an affair with another American, a woman by the name of Mildred Gillars -- who he took under his wing and promoted as a broadcaster, even though she was strongly disliked by superiors in the Propaganda Ministry. Koischwitz broadcast almost for the entire war -- dying of tuberculosis in a Berlin hospital in August 1944.

One of These Groups is Not Like the Others

From Fotos and Bray, page xvi:

r = [r] has no counterpart in English speech. Trilled r [r] is made by trilling the tip of the tongue against the upper gums while pronouncing r. The Scotch and Irish pronounce their r in this manner, and so do the telephone operators.

German Science Readers III

My spoken German isn't very good. In fact, the last conversation I had with a German willing to practice ended with a recommendation that I join a group that was "more my level." That said, I can hobble along in written German at an intermediate level, and spend a few weeks each year trying to refresh and improve what I still remember.

It's hard to keep current on a language if you don't have time to participate in organized classes. The best solution I've found so far is to work my way through graduated readers. You can breeze through the first bits, picking up the occasional vocabulary word along the way, then hunker down as you approach the limits of your abilities. Best of all, half an hour of reading before bed each night is enough effort to show results, despite its unstructured approach.

Graduated readers are not easy to come by: though scores were published in German or French in the first half of the 20th century, you'll have trouble finding more than a handful of titles written since 1960. I've wondered why for a long time, until this passage from Fotos and Bray's 1938 German Grammar for Chemists and Other Science Students drove home the difference in pedagogy:

The study of German in our American colleges and universities maintains its position in the curriculum for two types of students: (1) for the student who is interested primarily in acquiring the ability to read the great works of German literature and incidentally the ability to speak and write the language, and (2) for the student of science and technology who is interested primarily in acquiring the ability to read the important scientific and technical writings in German books and periodicals.

It is hard to imagine any teacher of a modern language prioritizing their students' conversational ability as "incidental". Language instruction has moved from translation drills to the "communicative approach." I'm sure this is appropriate for teaching a living language to students in a classroom, but a side effect of the conversational emphasis is to leave out the loner with a book.

31 Flavors of Monomania

Theodore Dalrymple in this Times article makes a great point about widening consumer choice for fanaticism:

When the Soviet Union de facto acknowledged that it had lost the Cold War, I thought that we had seen the end of ideological politics. Marxism being dead, I thought that we had entered an era of rational, if rather dull, compromise: instead of which we have seen the ideological impulse survive and flourish, but in the form of a hundred monomanias. Ideology was privatised along with nationalised companies.

Some people began to understand the world through the distorting lens of one issue: abortion, animal rights, globalisation, anti-racism, even various illnesses, and they formed themselves into pressure groups that in some cases were ready to resort to intimidation, violence and even murder to achieve their ends.

I take it as axiomatic first that human existence is always to some extent unsatisfactory, and second by that most, or at least many, men desire transcendence in the sense that they want their lives to have some larger purpose than the flux of day-to-day existence. Shopping and going to the pub are all very well in their way, but for people of larger spirit they are not enough.

Radical politics answers the need for transcendence and provides a plausible, though erroneous, explanation for the existential shortcomings of human existence. It kills two birds with one stone. It gives a transcendent purpose to life, by allowing participants the illusion that they are helping to bring about a life that is completely without dissatisfaction.

Via Done With Mirrors

If It's Saturday, It Must Be Weimar

Much enjoyable tosh from Majik- "I'm NOT saying that we have a fascist government in America today, but ..." - these, c/o Martha. Far too many dodgy propositions for me to get through, but I did enjoy this one:

[Portent of impending fascism number] 6. Xenophobia. Fear of outsiders is a cardinal feature of Fascism. Contemporary examples of this ugly trend include anti-immigrant rhetoric, the further militarization our borders, and Bush's proposal to create permanent second-class citizens (guest workers) who will work cheap without voting, organizing, or sharing any part of the American dream.

If only Mr. Bush, currently hemorrhaging votes across the Red belt thanks to the accursed 'amnesty', could convince his dwindling base of this!

German Science Readers II

For the historically-minded, the great joy of the pre-1940 German science reader is the vintage science. Immunization, electrification, city planning, and radio compete with hard physics and chemistry for the editor's favor. If you're lucky, you get illustrations like this:

Hey, is that Ferngeschossbahn really a propeller-driven monorail?

Why, yes it is.

Soft Countries Breed Soft Men IV

Softness has costs. Hastings is careful to point out the additional death toll incurred with each passing day the Allies failed to defeat the Germans. Holland starved, the German people and countryside were ravaged, and the camps kept operating. Nevertheless, he writes (page 510):

If Allied soldiers had possessed the energy, commitment, and will for sacrifice of either the German or Russian armies, they might have achieved a decisive breakthrough. But American and British soldiers were not panzergrenadiers. Socially and morally, we should be profoundly grateful that it was so. If this view is accepted, then it becomes no more relevant to suggest that the Allies could have won the war in 1944 than to debate how history might have turned out if the ancient Britons had learned to fight like Roman legionaries. To have achieved a swift victory, Eisenhower's soldiers would have needed to be different people. If American and British soldiers of 1944-45 had matched the military prowess and becomed imbued with the warrior ethos of Hitler's armies, it is unlikely that we should today hold the veterans of the Second World War in the just regard that we do. They fought as bravely and as well as any democracy could ask, if the values of civilization were to be retained in their ranks.

British Men Healthier than American Men for No Particular Reason Shocker

It's not lifestyle. It's not income. It's not access to healthcare. Something else is going on. Sydney Spiesel suggests our old Horizon friend happiness.

Good Riddance

Overpriced, understocked, and tiresomely affected - I give you the unlamented death of the indie bookstore.

Scare (sic)s

Maybe I'm late to the game but lately I've noticed a trend which really annoys me.

Academic writers who quote (usually significantly older) texts, and, when the original author uses "he" to generally mean "person", inserts "(sic)" after it.

I find this repulsive. sic is useful for one thing: to show that an error in your quotation belongs to the original text and is not a result of shoddy editing in your own. That is the only valid reason there has ever been and ever will be for this bit of Latin.

Do the authors who do this worry that we might think they accidentally copied out "he" where it should have been "they" or "he/she" or "s(he)" or whatever? Of course not. They are just being snarky and ridiculous.

Soft Countries Breed Soft Men III

Soft-country triumphalism from Armageddon (page 498):

General Erich von Straube, after signing the surrender of his forces in Holland to First Canadian Army, was being escorted back to the German lines by Brigadier James Roberts. After driving for some twenty minutes in silence, von Straube's aide tapped Roberts on the shoulder and said that his commander wished to know what the brigadier had done before the war: "Were you a professional soldier?" Roberts was momentarily bemused by the question. He had indeed been a solider for so long that his other life seemed impossibly remote. Then he realized that the German was seeking some crumb of solace for his defeat. He answered von Straube: "No, I wasn't a regular soldier. Very few Canadians were. In civilian life I made ice cream."

Advice on Writing to Congress

The latest diary I've been reading is The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries 1939-1955, by John Colville. October 11, 1939 records his second day on the job as Privy Secretery and includes this gem:

At No. 10 I made an effort to grasp the intricacies of the Ecclesiastical Patronage of the Crown, read the Cabinet minutes, etc., appointed one man to a Crown living, and answered a lot of irritating letters. One of the Prime Minister's correspondents said: "You may put this letter in the waste-paper basket; but remember you and I will meet face to face before the bar of judgement, and then it may be taken out of the waste-paper basket." A solemn thought if one is to spend one's time in purgatory dealing with neglected correspondence!

Bobby Digresses

...to grouse about Michael Chabon's latest column.

I think Bobby needs an explication about not picking on our fellow curmudgeons when they're ranting about kids these days.

Soft Countries Breed Soft Men II

Last winter's apocalyptic reading included Max Hastings' Armageddon : The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945. It's a fascinating subject, though I found the prose and narrative style disappointing. At any rate, one of Hastings' recurring themes is the qualitative difference between the "soft men" of the western Allied armies and the "hard men" on both sides of the Eastern Front.

I suspect that Hastings would agree with the first half of the statement Herodotus attributes to Cyrus. The second half was proven wrong, however — I mean, the soft countries won, right? Well, sort of. Here's Hastings on the subject (page 91):

American and British historians have expended immense energy in recent years arguing the issue of whether the German soldier was superior to his Allied counterpart. To all save the most dogged nationalists, it must be plain that Hitler's armies performed far more professionally and fought with much greater determination than Eisenhower's men. Allied generals were constantly hampered by the fact that, even when they advanced bold and imaginative plans, these were often incapable of execution by conscientious but never fanatical civilian soldiers, opposed by the most professionally skilful army of modern times. Yet it seems wrong to leave the matter there. There is a vital corollary. If American and British soldiers had been imbued with the ethos which enabled Hitler's soldiers to do what they did, the purpose for which the war was being fought would have been set at naught. All soldiers are in some measure brutalized by the experience of conflict. Some lapses and breaches of humanity on the part of Allied soliders are recorded in these pages. To an impressive degree, however, the American and British armies preserved in battle the values and decencies, the civilized inhibitions of thier societies. It seems appropriate for an historian to offer military judgements upon the failures and shortcomings of the Allies in 1944-1945, which were many and various. But there is every reason to cherish and to respect the values that pervaded Eisenhower's armies.

Many indiviudal German soldiers were likewise unwilling warriors, men born and raised with the same instinctive humanity as their Allied counterparts. But they fought within the framework of an army which was institutionally brutalized. Hitler and his generals demanded of Germany's soldiers, on pain of savage punishment, far more than the Western allies expected from their men. American and British officers knew that their citizen soldiers were attempting to fulful tasks which ran profoundly against the grain of their societies' culture. The Germans and the Russians in the Second World War showed themselves better warriors, but worse human beings. This is not a cultural conceit, but a moral truth of the utmost importance to understanding what took place on the battlefield.

Such obersvations lead in turn, however, to a consideration which might dissuade the democracies from celebrating their own humanity too extravagantly. Western allied scruples made the Americans and British dependent upon the ferocity of thier Soviet allies to do the main business of destroying Hitler's armies. If the Russians had not accepted the casualties necessary to inflcit a war-winning level of attrition on the Wermacht, the Western allies would have had to pay a far higher price, and the struggle would have continued for much longer.

Soft Countries Breed Soft Men I

If you skip to the end of Herodotus, you'll see this anecdote:

This Artaÿctes who suffered death by crucifixion had an ancestor named Artembares; and he it was who made the Persians a proposal which they readily accepted and passed on to Cyrus. "Since," they said, "God has given empire to the Persians, and among individuals to you, Cyrus, by your conquest of Astyages, let us leave this small and barren country of ours and take possession of a better. There are plenty to choose from — some near, some further off; if we take one of them, we shall be admired more than ever. It is the natural thing for a sovereign people to do; and when will there be a better opportunigy than now, when we are masters of many nations and all Asia?"

Cyrus did not think much of this suggestion; he replied that they might act upon it if they pleased, but added the warning that, if they did so, they must prepare themselves to rule no longer, but to be ruled by others. "Soft countries,' he said, "breed soft men. It is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too." The Persians had to admit that this was true and that Cyrus was wiser than they; so they left him, and chose rather to live in a rugged land and rule than to culitvate rich plains and be subject to others.

It's a lovely story — the sort of origin myth you'd imagine Victor David Hanson quoting in the middle of one of his editorials about how American students shouldn't be awarded a high school diploma until they've killed a Helot. But is it true?

Flanagan in Time

It's been months since we at Horizon indulged ourselves in a tiresome brawl about the Democratic Party and its messaging to moderates. Those nostalgic for those happier days should check out Caitlyn Flanagan's latest article in Time, "We're Here, We're Square, Get Used to It".

The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the great work of the '60s--civil rights, women's liberation, gay inclusion--we decided to stigmatize the white male. The union dues--paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us. So he dumped us. And he took the wife and kids with him.

Laura at 11D has written about Flanagan before and the discussion at her site has already gotten interesting. Rebel Dad and Echidne each give her article a good ranting-at. Joan Walsh — one of Flanagan's targets — responds in the Huffington Post, reminding readers that "having a full-time nanny until her children went to preschool makes her privileged; it doesn't make her an at-home mom who's given up her career for her family".

The best reaction, however, is from Phil Kitchel at PuddingTime. He's also been reading Flanagan long enough to know that someone who can afford nannies and housekeepers is not exactly a stay-at-home Everymom. However, he goes a bit beyond the initial "poor little rich girl" reaction to her article and takes a look at the whole discussion. In a too-brief aside, he points out that the energy of the Mommy Wars spent on patriarchy conspiracy theories really isn't helping anyone: "[T]his isn't just about you, you fancy contemporary-lit majors! This is about reality and choices and trade-offs that, assuming no actual domestic upheaval, are being made by responsible mothers and fathers--together."

Figuring out what to do about work, family, careers, and childcare is a real problem, faced by real people. For reasons I'm not entirely clear on, it seems to be covered in the press by disproportionately silly people. Sometimes making fun of them is great fun — see Sandra Tsing Loh's review of Leslie Morgan Steiner's Mommy Wars for a delicious example. I have no reason to believe that Flanagan doesn't deserve the sound drubbing she's gotten, either.

But at least some of the time, class-based criticism of the people trying to figure out these problems is really an attempt to shut down the discussion. I've seen it in action over at Laura's. So feel free to laugh at Flanagan — who so richly deserves it with her opportunism and hypocricy — but remember that the next person who comes along writing about work and family might not be such a clown.

2006 Horizon Awards II: Most Surreal Programming Language Tutorial

Back in college, I used to read programming manuals to go to sleep at night. This worked so long as the language was thoroughly obsolete and had no relevance to my coursework. A particular COBOL manual was perfect — good for perhaps 20 minutes of pre-slumber reading. After I finished it, I tried others. A System/370 Assembler was too dry so I'd get bored and start worrying about life, while my copy of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures kept me up for a full hour each time.

It's a very good thing I never stumbled across Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. I'd have never slept, and my sophomore grades would have been even worse than they actually were, if that's possible. Why (who blogs at why the lucky stiff and played the banjo at SXSW this year) is brilliant. He manages to integrate cartoon foxes, surreal prose, and morbid anecdotes about his family life into a decent Ruby tutorial.

Could you learn Ruby more quickly elsewhere? Sure. But I'll bet you wouldn't stay up all night reading.

I’ll be straight with you. I want you to cry. To weep. To whimper sweetly. This book is a poignant guide to Ruby. That means code so beautiful that tears are shed. That means gallant tales and somber truths that have you waking up the next morning in the arms of this book. Hugging it tightly to you all the day long. If necessary, fashion a makeshift hip holster for Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, so you can always have this book’s tender companionship.

Analysis from the Past

I suspect that most Americans shared with me a complete unfamiliarity with the label "neo-conservative" before 2001. Today it seems like it's used as "fascist" once was — a term of opprobrium divorced from any actual semantic content. For some reason, the debate between Caleb McDaniel and Horizon's own Alan Allport (see here and here ) over the morality and pragmatics of nuclear deterrance reminded me of an article I read a few years ago.

"The Irony of American Power" appeared in the March, 1998 issue of First Things a mostly-conservative, mostly-Catholic monthly, and addresses the limitations of neo-conservatism and the then-currnent Clintonian neo-liberalism from a refreshingly distanced perspective. It proposes "realism" as an alternative — which may seem obvious to many of us here in 2006, but is especially useful reading right now. Separating ourselves from current affairs is perhaps the only way to evaluate political philosophies, otherwise we are tempted to forget the banality of neo-liberalist globalism or conflate neo-conservative theory with the application thereof we see in evidence.

BHL's Prose

I think that Bernard Henri-Lévi's prose is giving me vertigo. I'm not sure if it's French idiom — he also uses French punctuation when he's quoting — or a result of too many debates with post-structuralists, but sentences like this make me long for the simplicity of scientific German:

This form of absurd, pathological memory, this memory that is both anxious and lazy, febrile and idle, this memory that is, at bottom, "un-American" since, by a singular reversal of roles, it is in the process of turning that great America of the Enlightenment, the America about which Goethe wrote that it had freed itself both from its European past and from the European obsession with the past, into a country even more enslaved to the past than the most past-obsessed European countries: this memory, then, is a memory that, if the world resembled what philosophers say of it, if we followed Nietzsche to the conclusion of his most somber premonitions, would turn into not the stimulus but the grave digger of the present time, and would be, for the American nation of today, a harbinger of identity crises at least as formidable as those actualy symmetrical crises that stem from absolute nonmemory and from a settling into that "vegetative present" that Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations also speaks of, and which hypnotize peoples just as powerfully.

Whew!