What do you look for in a foreign language reader? If you're a solitary reader looking for an occasional refresher, your needs are different from those of a student in a classroom led by an able teacher. My memory is a bit too hazy to speak to the classroom situation, but as I find myself in the position of the former, here's what I value:
Progressivity: Readers which introduce texts in order of ease, or edit a single text so that the difficulty of the text increases (as measured by the introduction of new vocabulary words or more tenses) were often titled with the adjectives "progressive", "graduated", or "graded". The benefit of progressivity is that by only introducing a few new words at a time, the reader can concentrate on them and figure out their meaning from a context that they largely understand. This is far better — dare I say more "natural"? — than sending the reader to the glossary several times a paragraph. It has the advantage of encouraging the reader with a successful experience in the earlier passages.
Some chrestomathies introduce texts in a different systematic order: Burrow and Turville-Petre's A Book of Middle English (1992), Albert Henry's 1953 Chrestomathie de la littérature en ancien français, and Studer and Waters' Historical French Reader (1924) all present their selections in chronological order, for example. I've found myself reading the grammatical apparatus for these books alone, then reading the texts from back to front, all the while grumbling at their editors. Perhaps this would not be the case for someone familiar with Latin and Anglo-Saxon while ignorant of Modern French and English. Such people must represent a very small market indeed, however, especially since they'd have to wait to the end of the book before they could read the notes.
Random Access: It's hard to pull this off without violating progressivity, but in subject-matter specific readers, it's important to try. The student may have no interest in German medical terminology or Vulgar Latin texts, so they shouldn't be forced to work through those subjects to get to the material they're after.
Accessible Texts: Perhaps it's a lack of character on my part, but if I have to hit the glossary several times a sentence for an entire paragraph, I won't get through the first page. A graduated reader is constantly encouraging the reader by throwing them a sentence or clause that is as easily comprehensible as if it were English. Maybe the ancient Spartans had enough self-discipline to plow through Old Persian texts with their noses in a dictionary, but I certainly don't.
Interesting Subject Matter: This might contradict accessibility. For example, Arnold Werner-Spanhoofd's Erstes Lesebuch begins with the sort of thing you'd expect from a 101 instructor as they move around the class: This is a chair. This is a table. What is this? This is a chair. What is this? This is a table. I think that that only applies to beginner readers, however. Detailed discussion of interesting subjects can be accomplished without alienating the reader with glossary references. It just takes skill and effort on the part of the author.
Notes and Glossary: There's almost infinite variation here. Do grammatical difficulties get explained in footnotes or endnotes? Does each selection begin with first-language text? Is vocabulary integrated into the notes themselves, or should it be separate? What's appropriate to put into a glossary for intermediate readers? Do variant forms and compounds get separate entries, or are they located beside each other?
Teaching by Context: I've already talked about the role progressivity can play in this, but there are other tools at hand. Any additional clues given to the reader present a context for deduction. Illustrations — especially diagrams — can repeat the story through pictures, giving the reader additional information about a strange word on the same page. Any redundancy that does not give the prose an artificial character helps. Helmut Ziefele's Theological German: A Reader (1986) accomplishes this by selecting its introductory texts from well-known parts of the Bible: I may not know what a Nadelohr is, but when it occurs after the words for "rich man", "heaven", and "camel", I can make a pretty good guess.
Following the usual string of links I've come across a blog that I think Ben would like, at least. It's moderated by a professor of philosophy (and a Texan, at that) who appears to be very conservative, at least by my standards.
It's Anal Philosopher. And no, he doesn't mean that literally.
I came upon this post and since I can't comment there, thought I'd comment here.
When I was young I used to occasionally hear people, talking about over-population, conclude that more people would simply have to die, though it was (sigh) such a shame really, but what are you going to do? Of course, those people who would have to just die off "naturally" due to, say, a famine or plague, would be far away and -- it was taken for granted -- extremely poor. (What kind of people said such things? I don't know, I'm too old to remember such details. Let's just say I'm happy to be older now and able to choose who I associate with for the most part.)
So, at that age, I was very pleased with myself when I arrived at approximately the same counter as the Anal Philosopher. I think I got to use it a few times, too. It went like this: "Fine, if you think that, I expect you'll be killing yourself any time now, right?"
Well, I still think it's a fine retort in general, but I was taken aback when I saw the author apply this to people who believe that people should be taxed based on their wealth, and that the money appropriated thereby should be redirected to people who, just as an example, may not have access to things like healthcare. As it turns out, my failure to fund healthcare for at least one or two Americans invalidates my belief that all people deserve this and other services and that all should pay for them based on their ability.
Of course, I myself am off the hook in any case, as I don't really have any wealth. But still, the accusation stung a bit. It can't possibly be true, can it? In order to advocate for the poor and for a more egalitarian society, do I have to live in a cardboard box? No, I think there are serious problems with this argument. Well, at least one.
Let's say I believed that the US should conquer the world as soon as possible, but that for some reason a significant part of the electorate just weren't interested in doing so. In order to avoid being a hypocrite, and therefore win the right of arguing for world domination, would I have to invade Japan personally?
Why not? Because my personal attempt to take over Japan would be certain to fail.
Let's say, on the other hand, that I believed that listening to folk music was a morally reprehensible and utterly dangerous activity that should be abjured by all people (see the original post re: abortion). Would I then be a hypocrite if I listened to a Bob Dylan record here and there, on the side? Yes indeed, I would be.
And I think that's about all that needs to be said about that.
Over at Hypotyposeis, forgery-hunter extraordinaire Stephen Carson looks at The Secret Sayings of Ye Su and asks some interesting questions:
[W]hat's a Greek text doing in Tang-dynasty China? Furthermore, if it belongs to the Tang-dynasty era (618-907), why was it written in the long-extinct Koine Greek, instead of the Atticizing Byzantine Greek or, even more appropriately, in the Syriac dialect used by the Nestorian Christians who actually visited China? Why does this text seem so relevant to modern concerns (e.g. “such topics as the place of women and gays within the community”)?[. . .]
Why would a Chinese-provenanced text be written on a material that comes from Egypt instead of paper, which they invented? For that matter, why was this text written on a scroll instead of a codex, which superseded the scroll in the fourth and fifth centuries?
And that's just based on the blurb!
An obiter dictum from this article at Real Clear Politics:
85 percent of frequent Wal-Mart shoppers voted for President Bush's reelection in 2004 (and 88 percent of people who never shop there voted for Sen. John Kerry)
Last Friday night I found myself reading James McPherson's "American Victory, American Defeat", in Why the Confederacy Lost (reviewed here). The book had stumbled its way into my hands almost by accident -- I was pruning the shelves to find room for my German science readers and thought "well, I'm never likely to read this, let's just get rid of it." One thing led to another, and soon it was in bed with me.
Of course I'm reading about the Civil War: it's late June. For some reason I always read about the Civil War in June and July, just like I'm always reading about the Gulag or World War 2 in January. There's a pattern here, and I'm sure if I kept a reading journal, I'd discover that I spend late spring of every year trying to brush up on a foreign language, or that the arrival of lightning bugs is a certain predictor of another vain attempt to work my way through Malory.
I wonder: do other people's reading habits follow the seasons?
This doesn't exactly tie into anything we've been discussing below, but I thought folks here might be interested in these observations by "The Internet Monk", which have been making the rounds over the last few weeks:
We were recently discussing awards for some of our students. We were talking about some of our local students when our senior faculty member–with 40 years of service at OBI–mentioned that no local high school boy will ever take home a book from school. This seemed ridiculous, until I began thinking of the local students I knew and had known in the past. Slowly, it dawned on me that he was correct. I could not recall any male high school student from the local area ever taking home a book.Scarcely had this sunk in when he followed up with another shocker: Many of the local men who had attended our school until recently would drop out in the middle of their senior years. No matter how long they had attended, what grades they made or how important they told you it was to graduate, they would drop out their senior years. He named the fathers of some of our local students who had done exactly that: dropped out just before graduation, not because of illness or tragedy, but simply because the stigma against being educated was so strong in the mountains.
These students didn’t want to appear that they were trying to be “better than” their parents or grandparents. They did not want to appear to be “putting forward” their “book learnin’” over their parents or grandparents. No matter what they heard from us–us being teachers and adults–they were able to go no farther than their culture said was permissible.
He continues to analyze this in the context of culture and personal identity. Very much worth reading.
I wonder if The Guardian will retract this one?
Also worth reading is Beaumont's preemptive response to the Medialens folks and perhaps the reaction.
Just in the last day or two I'd noticed some of the linguistics mailing lists in a flurry of activity over the idea that, in a language called Aymara, time metaphors are reversed from what has generally been considered the universal "future in front" and "past behind" orientation.
This could be a big deal in cognitive linguistics, which appears to hinge so much on the concept of metaphor, and perhaps many other slants of linguistics, which tend to hinge so much on the concept of language universals. It's reminiscent of the revelation that Pirahã has no number words above two, for instance, which has caused a similar stir.
So I was very interested to find this Language Log post, itself a synthesis of the surely enormous barrage of email they've received on the subject lately, which makes some surprising obervations about many other languages, including English, which use this "reversed" metaphor for time.
I may be cyncical, but I wouldn't be surprised if we continue to see such flashes in the pan now that the example of Pirahã has ignited this search for counterexamples to apparent or presumed linguistic universals. Many of the linguists who wrote to Language Log appear to have known for some time, and apparently considered it unremarkable, that certain languages do not follow this expected metaphorical orientation. But now the hunt is on. That's not a bad thing necessarily, but it is likely to produce many more underwhelming discoveries in the near future.
He isn't well known here, but I gather that in Japan Yoshitoshi ABe is quite famous. He's responsible for the stories or character designs of a good few of the best anime that's been released in America over the past five or ten years, such as the surprisingly excellent Haibane Renmei, full of suspicious religious symbolism but, as it turns out, quite a beautiful and insightful story with not a speck of the cliched piety I expected, Serial Experiments Lain, not at all bad though somewhat dated and willfully ambiguous, and the epic, dark, almost horrific dystopia of Texhnolyze. (I don't include any links for these because there are no good ones out there that I know of. The fan sites are mostly embarrassing.)
If you want an example of his work at its finest, I don't think you can do better than to see this painting (drawing?) at the top of his homepage. I was delighted to find, after sifting through the rest of the site (I don't understand Japanese, unfortunately), that he has links to several galleries which are well worth looking through here and here.
Is the number of times you must repeat a falsehood before people start to believe it, according to this Grail Code entry. Christopher Bailey — an Arthurian scholar justifiably torqued at Dan Brown — even gives step-by-step instructions:
First I make a ridiculously false statement, like the one about Constantine striking three days out of February. Then, under a different name, I make the same statement in another book, citing the first book as my source in a footnote.Now I’ve made the statement true, because it’s based on research. (“His research is impeccable,” one reviewer said of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.) Other books can cite my second book, and still other books can cite the other books, and so on. Will any of them ever try to figure out where the original statement came from? Of course not. It’s in a book, and the book has a footnote. What more do you need?
For some reason I never can wrap my head around the idea of the European Union as the child of the Second World War. I'm not sure why, since I've read Orwell calling for a "Socialist United States of Europe" in the last years of the war, as well as Robert Kagan in "Power and Weakness" citing the "taming of Germany" as "the greatest accomplishment of Europe."
Colville finally makes it real for me in his entry for December 13, 1940, below.
The P.M. reverted, in some detail, to his ideas for the future. We had got to admit that Germany was going to remain in the European family. "Germany existed before the Gestapo." When we had won he visualised five great European nations: England, France, Italy, Spain and Prussia. In addition there would be four confederations: the Northern, with its capital at The Hague; the Mitteleuropa, with its capital at Warsaw or Prague; the Danubian, consisting of Bavaria, Würtemberg[sic], Austria, Hungary, etc. with its capital at Vienna; and the Balkan with Turkey at its head and Constantinople as its capital. These nine powers would meet in a Council of Europe, which would have a supreme judiciary and a Supreme Economic Council to settle currency questions, etc. Each power would contribute an air cohort — Prussia included — and boys of sixteen would be selected for it. Once enrolled they would be under no national jurisdiction, but they would never be obliged to co-operate in an attack on their own country. All air forces, military and civil, would be internationalised. As regards armies, every power would be allowed its own militia, because Democracy must be based on a people's army and not left ot oligarchs or Secret Police. Prussia alone would, for a hundred years, be denied all armaments beyond her air contingent. The Council would be unrestricted in its methods of dealing with a Power condemned by the remainder in the Council.The English speaking world would be apart from this, but closely connected with it, and it alone would control the seas, as the reward of victory. It would be bound by covenant to respect the trading and colonial rights of all peoples, and England and American would have exactly equal navies. Russia would fit into an Eastern re-organization, and the whole problem of Asia would have to be faced. But as far as Europe was concerned, only by such a system of Confederations could the small powers continue to exist and we must at all costs avoid the old mistake of "Balkanising" Europe.
There would be no war debts, no reparations and no demands on Prussia. Certain territories might have to be ceded and certain exchanges of population, on the lines of that so successfully effected by Greece and Turkey, would have to take place. But there should be no pariahs and Prussia, though unarmed, would be secured by the guarantee of the Council of Europe. Only the Nazis, the murderers of June 30th, 1934, and the Gestapo would be made to suffer for their misdeeds.
But all this was a thing of the still distant future: we might have to give it one hundred years to work. At present he could utter no such ideals when every cottage in Europe was calling for German blood and when the English themselves were demanding that all Germans should be massacred or castrated.
Back in February, Alan Allport and I argued about tolerance versus respect within a society. At the time, I promised to quote from Eugene Genovese's deeply strange The Southern Tradition to him, then gamely withdrew when I remembered I'd loaned it to an old college roommate. I stumbled across the book today while culling the shelves, and so can finally type up Genovese's observation, with the caveat that — like the Nashville Agrarians — Genovese is probably equating "northern" with "American".
There nevertheless remains a fundamental difference between northern and southern versions of religious tolerance. In the North, people are wont to say, "You worship God in your way, and we'll worship Him in ours." This delightful formulation says, in effect, that since religion is of little consequence anyway, why argue? In contrast, the southern version, well expressed in an old joke, says: "You worship God in your way, and we'll worship Him in His." From the early days of the Republic, when Baptists led the fight for religious freedom and the separation of church and state, white southerners have done rather well in living together with mutual respect and tolerance for each other's religious views. Always reminding themselves of human frailty, they are perfectly tolerant of some damned fool's right to choose eternal damnation. But they are not about to pretend that they regard another's religion as intrinsically equal to their own.
John Colville's The Fringers of Power is great for bizarre suggestions about the British Constitution. First he got all excited about the last-minute suggestion that France merge with Great Britain to avoid total defeat by the Germans. Now he's suggesting that the South African Jan Smuts be made Prime Minister (p. 271):
As I was sitting at the C. W. R, drinking lager with Tony Bevir, I said what a remarkable man Smuts was and how shrewd in the comments he sends from thousands of miles away. Tony suggested he might be Prime Minister if anything happened to Winston (which God forbid). This seemed to me a great Imperial idea: to have a Dominion politician as Prime Minister of England would be a living proof of the solidarity of the Commonwealth; and Smuts, a member of the Imperial War Cabinet in the last war, the man whose tact broke the Welsh coal strike at a critical moment, has the experience, the wisdom, the drive and the reputation to prove himself a worthy successor to Winston. There would, of course, be difficulties: the jealousy of the other Dominions, the strength of opposition and division of opinion in South Africa; but the idea seems to me so grandiose that I wrote to Mother and proposed that she should put it to Queen Mary with the idea of its filtering through to the King. The King chooses the Prime Minister and can send for whomsoever he wishes.
Perhaps someone who knows more about British history can enlighten me: would this have been constitutional? Would it be now?
The always-readable Paul Graham comes up with ten reasons why high-tech startups condense in the United States. Based on conversations I've had with people who've worked elsewhere, 7, 5, and 9 are especially important. Graham also lists some suggestions for ways to do the US one better, including a high-skill immigration policy less stupid and counterproductive than the 6-year H1-B. (via Slashdot)
Jaron Lanier (who is not a film director) writes on "Digital Maoism", his term for the utopian collectivism promoted by Wikipedia zealots. His analysis of when collective, algorithmic processes work and when they fail matches my own experience. (via Ralph Luker)
Finally, for those feeling nostalgic for a good rant about the British intelligentsia à la early-40's Orwell, I recommend Scott Burgess's Flaying the Flag. (via Harry's Place)
Alan Hogue writes that his acute sense of a misplaced apostrophe has preserved him from all sorts of schemes to defraud him of his checking account. I'm sure that still applies to 419 scams, but you can find perfectly grammatical English in the image-based spam which compiles sentences from literature in its text section to trick filters. At its best, the results can be as fun as a game of Exquisite Corpse:
Everybody in town said so. Whatever you called the stuff, however, there were enough torches in there to get the whole village afire — it would burn like a Guy Fawkes dummy, Geoffrey thought. God, what if she's moved the dope?Paul understood that Annie had been driven to cull only the most hostile ones — those which reinforced her jaundiced view of mankind as Homo brattus — but they were vituperative by any standards. It looked like an octopus. "I did it in the night," she said. The challenges were constant. He had managed about four feet before realizing he was going to do nothing more useful than roll the wheelchair past the door and into the far corner unless he could turn it. On those occasions he would take Maugham along, but rarely read him &mdash being outside again was too great an experience to allow much concentration on other things.
Stumbling around Amazon in search of more foreign language readers, I came across a couple of really clever reviews written by the same person. I know nothing about Sean Burke, except that he claims to be from Alaska. Thus I have no proof that he's not actually Alan Hogue. If you combine the wit with the willingness to review books on computers and linguistics, I think we've got an A.K.A.
Alan, it's time to 'fess up.
Well, as some folks here know, we've managed another live meeting of long-term Net friends. Last Saturday Joel and I got together for lunch with Ben and Sara Brumfield. We'd hoped to meet Alan Hogue too but our thrice-dratted municipal bus system didn't cooperate, so we'll have to do this again some time, maybe at a more accessible meeting place.
We had a great time waiting in the local public library benefit bookstore, every so often asking likely-looking people "Are you Sara?... Are you Ben?... You're not Alan, are you?"
Finally met up with the Brumfields (not Alan, unfortunately). Had a good vegetarian lunch. We were spared the expected Texan ribbing over an adjacent convention for believers in the mystical power of crystals -- they said they get that kind of thing in Austin all the time.
Found much in common, including an interest in the Ruby programming language and fondness for a Douglas Adams invention, the Somebody Else's Problem (SEP) Field. No arguments, much jawboning about Western history by yrs truly, much discussion of programming languages by others present.
Brumfield daughter distinctly adorable, Brumfield grownups distinctly good company. Gotta do this again.
Here's an interesting article about some nut-job who is campaigning to get "concept", used as a verb, into the dictionaries. This by way of Language Log.
Both articles make some good points about language snobbery (something LL always stands ready to combat).
While trawling around Slate I also found this article, on a topic we debated ages ago -- or was that The Scottish Newsgroup?
And while looking for that thread I found this old post of mine which makes an interesting point about how the lore of copy editors is employed to distinguish the legitimate from the illegitimate.
In the March issue of First Things, David Westbrook takes Bernard Henri Lévy to task for American Vertigo. The book is a disconnected series of vignettes, suitable for light reading, but unworthy of Tocqueville. Journalism, but not a book, one might say.
I can't disagree, although I enjoyed it for precisely that reason. Then again, I enjoyed reading de Tocqueville's journals better than I did Democracy in America, so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask. Certainly BHL's run-ons and sentence fragments work better when he's paraphrasing a conversation or describing what he sees than, say, when he's philosophizing on memory.
Along the way, Westbrook points out American Vertigo's omissions by suggesting alternative subject matter for the book. This is worth quoting; especially the bit about the flags:
Lévy could write a book on America that would be far more challenging for his French and American audiences than these articles. He could, for example, write much more deeply about how multiple political identities work in America. American identity happens on another plane from cultural identity—hence the conflicts that Lévy expects between American and Mexican, or even American and Arab, identity are rare. One is Mexican or Jewish or Arab, or something non-national like gay or Asian, as well as American. Thus it is subtly wrong to understand flags, or the military, in the sense of competition among nations in a European sense. Most Americans have little serious cognizance of other nations; there is no competition. This is, of course, beyond arrogant. It is an echo of the revolutionary presumptions of the United States (and one of the things Tocqueville was trying to capture); an analogy might be drawn to the French tendency to speak for civilization itself.Then, too, in paying attention to traditional cities, Lévy misses one of the largest migrations in human history. Millions upon millions of people have been moving to lower density living and working environments. Not merely to suburbia, but moving to places where there is no city, or the city is functionally irrelevant. Much of America is booming, and has been for decades. Very small towns are undergoing a renaissance of sorts, but as pleasant places to live while working in the new economy, rather than as autonomous economic units. Suppose cities, instead of being the site of civilized life, are just an arrangement dictated by the needs of commerce at the level of transportation technology? Suppose Atlanta, hundreds of kilometers of trees and traffic with no discernible center, a highly populated forest, represents the future of cities? What would this mean for the United States? For France?
Michael Covington asks if chemistry will be banned in the United States. As someone who owns his own pH meter, I share his concern. I just hadn't realized that my paranoia about law enforcement thinking my homebrew equipment was a still should have actually been rational worries about them thinking it was a meth lab. Along the way, he posits the following:
We must beware of what I call the anti-freedom principle, best articulated as, "If I don't want to do X then nobody has any business doing X." This is an attitude held by fashionable people who don't realize they're inadequately educated, people who assume that the only worthwhile human activities are those of their own in-crowd. Yuppies, in other words.
I've thought about this pretty often, myself. I've got enough obscure and unhealthy hobbies that it's not rare for me to stumble across someone advocating a ban on one or another of my pastimes. But Covington's point is more broadly applicable, and if you were to ask me about golf or long-distance running, I'm sure I'd be equally uncharitable. Scratch an American and you'll find a Puritan.
Why did they put a picture of Jackson on money, since he hated the central bank?
Wednesday morning I woke up from a dream about Ward Churchill. If I were the sort of person who looked for signs and portents, then no doubt the vision would transform my opinion of academic scandals, and I'd pitch in to comment boxes far and wide. As it is, I just think I've probably been spending too much time online.
Chris Bowers at MyDD discusses a different Red/Blue map. (via Laura)
Adam Gopnik's discussion of Robespierre touches on our perrenial Communism vs. Fascism discussions. (via Callimachus) Gopnik has also written what may be the only, but is certainly the finest literary review of the Gospel of Judas.
When is bad linguistics at its worst? When it's in the service of bad history. Over at Language Log, Bill Poser updates his criticism of 1421: The Year China Discovered America — see the earlier entry, too.
For the dilletante medievalists among us — and you know who you are — Mike Aquilina and Christopher Bailey have a series of posts on "the historical Arthur" over at their Grail Code blog. They haven't categorized their posts very effectively, so here are the entries to date: I II III IV V VI
My usual reading at Language Log, an august institution featuring actual famous linguist contributors, is usually worthwhile, but just today I found an especially interesting entry (by someone I once took a class from) about "the n-word".
I don't really feel qualified to comment on this subject either linguistically or, well, politically, but I personally avoid using the word and I do think it is very offensive in most contexts. But I also find McWhorter's dismissal of the Defense's claims about the changing use of the "n-word" a little hard to swallow, whatever the linguistic precedence.
The issue, it seems to me, is not whether it is right, proper and common for some words to be appropriate when uttered by some people in some situations and inappropriate in others. Leaving aside competing claims in the case, what seems important is that the use of this particular word is changing fast now and that it is no longer safe to assume that its use by a person of whatever race is intended either as a racial insult or a replacement for "dude". To the extent that the Defense is trying to suggest this, I think they have a point.