I should preface this by explaining that I really love Jesse Byock. His books on Medieval Iceland are excellent, treating the sagas as historical material with a commendable blend of caution and respect. Go buy one, or at least read his prefaces to Hrolf Kraki's Saga and the Volsung Saga online.
With that out of the way, may I suggest that this flash animation of feud dynamics is a bit silly?
Alan Hogue and I have been discussing how different the goals of foreign language instruction were in the twenties and thirties. Few books could exemplify that difference more than German Grammar for Chemists and Other Science Students, by John T. Fotos and John L. Bray (1938). The text is the first of a four-part collaboration between Fotos, a Professor of Modern Languages, and either of two Chemical Engineering professors at Purdue. German Grammar for Chemists is not actually a reader. It's something much, much stranger than that.
Purdue University had been a hotbed of experimentation in scientific German instruction for many years, and is the source of many of my progressive readers. According to the preface, the usual offering of Scientific German as a third-year elective had been unsatisfactory to science students with a heavy required courseload. These complained to their professors that they found themselves translating fables instead of attending lab (or drinking beer). Purdue reformulated their Scientific German class as a second-year offering, but more drastic measures were needed.
German Grammar for Chemists is a first year course. No wasting time on "weather" or "mother", "chair" or "table". Telling time is banished from the course, replaced with the participial construction. You want to talk about chalk? Wait till you read synonyms for Kalziumoxyd.
The thing is, it works. The grammar is largely the same — Lesson I still talks about the noun and articles. It's just that the exercises start with Der Wasserstoff ist ein Gas. For someone who can already muddle through some German, the readings are tremendously effective, since they're rigorously graduated as a side effect of per-lesson vocabulary lists. Those lists are compiled based on word-frequency analysis of chemistry literature, which was no mean task in 1938.
Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps because of the zeitgeist, an exceptional amount of attention is given to vocabulary acquisition. After the grammar and exercises, each lesson contains a word study section. These typically cover a single High German/Low German consonant alternation, a technical difference (e.g. "electronegative elements precede the electropositive ones in inorganic compound names"), and an exploration of a particular ending ("-shaft") or common stem. If I was ever taught this stuff in college German, I certainly don't remember it.
I'm still dubious about using Fotos & Bray for a first year course — the grammatical explanations are a bit terse, and sometimes follow the "here are the prepositions that govern the dative case" format — but as an introductory reader for chemical German, German Grammar for Chemists is spectacular.
There's a pretty good discussion of an anti-war petition over at Cliopatria today. Ralph Luker notes that the signatories include Noam Chomsky, and our own Alan Allport points out the serious flaws in the text itself.
What induces a person to sign a petition? I'm extremely picky about this,so a single sentence I disagree with is enough to prevent me from signing. I pay less attention to fellow signatories — spotting Chomsky might make me give the statement some extra scrutiny, but would not finally turn me away. I gather, however, that other people are more free &mdash even promiscuous — with their signatures.
I've just read Mark Stricherz's article "Goodbye, Catholics" in Commonweal Magazine. Stricherz is apparently working on a book detailing the movement of the Democratic party away from the New Deal constituency of white southerners, union members, and Catholics (i.e. "white ethnics") to black southerners, college graduates, and feminists, and if this article is a preview, it might be worth reading:
[Fred Dutton's] goal was nothing less than to end the New Deal coalition, the electoral alliance that had supported the party since 1932 around a broad working-class agenda. In its place, Dutton sought to build a “loose peace constituency,” a collection of groups opposed to the Vietnam War and more generally the military-industrial complex. To this end, Dutton recognized that Democrats would need to appeal to three new constituencies-young people, college-educated suburbanites, and feminists-while ceasing to woo two old ones-Catholics and working-class whites.
We're all familiar with the theories that the Nixon campaign pulled white southerners into the Republican party, that "secular" delegates pushed the religious out of the Democratic party in the 1970s, and that union members have switched from reliable Democrats to swing voters. This is the first time I've ever seen the idea expressed that Democratic party leadership intentionally traded the working-class vote for the college-graduate vote. Is anyone else familiar with this notion?
Ralph Luker has been thinking about reenactors at Cliopatria this week. I've never done reenactments of any sort, but since so much of the blackpowder community does, I've read quite a bit on the subject. You really can't avoid it, when the middle third of the Dixie Gun Works catalog is devoted to snoods and other fashion accessories.
Military reenacting isn't the safest hobby in the world. I heard that a college acquaintance was shot in the neck by French reenactors at Yorktown several years ago. Cases of heat exhaustion have been reported at Civil War reenactments for forty-five years now. I imagine it's especially a problem for these folks.
(Via Ostfront, where you can buy a fake NKVD gravy boat.)
Ben linked to an interesting, though brief, defense of "Politics and the English Language" here.
But the key to Fish's comment appears when he calls the essay "philosophically hopeless." Of course Orwell wasn't a philosopher, and the essay isn't a philosophical essay, and one isn't supposed to judge it by Kantian standards. But Fish considers himself a philosopher -- a philosopher of language -- and he takes, I'm guessing, a somewhat competitive attitude toward the piece. Why should Orwell's underformulated propositions about speech command the world's attention, while an essay like "Is there a Text in the Class" (one of Fish's) moulders in obscurity?
This gets to the bottom of the acrimonious and overheated "debates" you see between prescriptivist grammar authorities and descriptivist linguists. Linguists tend to feel, on the whole, that they aren't given enough authority by the rest of the world. Generalist journals like Science are known to reject out of hand submissions by giants in the field. No one much cared what linguists had to say during the great Ebonics debate, either. And, of course, no one gives a damn what they think about the best way to write. Though your average linguist tears his hair out every time he comes across vapid injunctions against split infinitives, all the campaigning and the skirmishes won't cut the market out from under the feet of self-appointed grammar and style experts.
This seems very odd until one realizes that the fight between "mavens" and linguists is a fight for authority over language as much as it is about particular linguistic questions. And again and again, the snobs with their arbitrary, illogical rules win.
That's because language is not just a logical, abstract system. It is also an enormous part of humans' sense of identity. When someone comes along and says, "Don't split your infinitives," they are not making a linguistic claim. They are really saying something along these lines: "If you want to be like us, rather than them, you must write/speak the way we do, not like they do." As their eternal popularity shows, people love arbitrary rules by which they can differentiate themselves and feel superior to others, and so will collect them and follow them religiously no matter how irrational they may be. I believe that this is an inevitable consequence of being a social species.
This is why linguists are constantly ignored and their technical expertise counts for so little when they confront linguistic snobbery and totemism. It is not those who dream up such magical linguistic injunctions who misunderstand the nature of language; it's the beleaguered linguist who misses the point. It is not the linguistic claim, implied or stated baldly, that people care about, but the underlying motivation for the claim.
But then there are also works like "Politics and the English Language", which superficially resemble the work of the mavens. Orwell makes a moral argument for writing in this way and not that way. The mavens also frequently invent justifications for their rules: appeals are frequently made to logic, clarity, and sometimes morality. But unlike the snobs and totemists, Orwell makes convincing and solid arguments for the moral relevance of language and for his injunctions, and moreover he does not call for the usual kind of linguistic conservatism which your average language maven takes for granted. Orwell writes:
To begin with it [the defence of the English language] has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’.
But "Politics and the English Language" inevitably encroaches upon territory which linguists claim -- the right to arbitration in all matters pertaining to language. And when one considers that PTEL perhaps overstates its case sometimes, it's not surprising that linguists might take an excessively harsh view of it.
Leaving aside the individual merit of the work, we still find that people care much more about morality than about the formal nature of language as an abstract system of rules. And so, once again, linguists who spend their professional lives studying language rigorously are left out of the great debate about the linguistic issues that really matter to the great majority of people.
I just stumbled across this nugget in another fawning interview with Noam Chomsky:
In fact up until the first World War, when people turned anti-German, Germany had been described by American political scientists as the model of democracy.
Chomsky's characterization of American opinion rings entirely false to me. Is there any evidence at all that Americans admired the Kaiserreich's democracy, as opposed to other characteristics?
Ben approvingly posted a link to a review of a book called Conservatives Without Conscience recently.
Well, the review is full of typical conservative pretense and doublespeak, such as:
The RWA survey teems with other such statements, many of almost irredeemable silliness. Take, for example, “God’s laws about abortion, pornography and marriage must be strictly followed.” Well, who could disagree with that? If God’s laws are by definition perfectly good, then by modus ponens one should follow them whether God exists or not. The statement is as self-evidently true as “All unicorns are horses.” Curiously, however, Altemeyer finds that left-wingers tend to disagree with the statement. One may conclude, therefore, that leftist ideology tends to incapacitate logic—an important result, perhaps worthy of further research, but not the one Altemeyer was going for.
Does the author really think he's made a point, or is he just scoring with his expected audience, just as he accuses Dean of doing? Well, of course, the answer could not be more obvious to anyone who isn't blinded by rabid conservative ideology.
Geoffrey Pullum, in his usual style, takes a sledgehammer to "Politics and the English Language".
Looks like both the Alans are wasting their time.
Bouncing around some parts of the net today is Austin Bramwell's review of Conservatives Without Conscience, by John Dean. We at Horizon love to mock the pseudo-psychological analyses churned out by partisans nowadays to prove that their opponents are not merely wrong, but sick, sick, sick, so the Bramwell's demolition of the "authoritarian personality" meme makes for fun reading. (And if that's not enough, there's an elaboration at Classical Values.)
One thing nobody in the conservative blogosphere is talking about is the final couple of paragraphs, which I think are worth quoting below.
Second, those at the top of the conservative movement have wide discretion to set its movement’s official positions. Bedrock or founding principles, whatever they may be, play very little role in determining what policies the conservative movement will embrace. Whatever may be said of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, for example, they were surely not deduced from immutable conservative principles. Nevertheless, the signature achievement of the conservative movement in the past decade has been to rally—or, perhaps more accurately, manufacture—public support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With just one or two changes in personnel, however, one could easily imagine events turning out very differently. Reckless or prudent, thoughtful or ignorant, the opinion-mongers at the top set the movement line; the other constituents—the donors, the directors, and the other writers and the consumers of opinion—then accept and promulgate whatever positions the movement tells them to.This is, of course, precisely how ideology works. In one of the better passages in Conservatives Without Conscience, Dean rejects the view—upon reflection, almost patently false—that “conservatism” as now understood is not an ideology. He rightly senses that conservatism, in the philosophic sense, does not define the conservative movement; rather, the conservative movement now defines conservatism, at least as far as the media and the public understand the term. In Dean’s model, however, conservative elites respond to the (dangerous) psychological demands of the conservative masses. It is much more likely that, on the contrary, the conservative masses respond to the demands of a handful of movement elites. An open question remains as to who, exactly, constitutes the elite, especially as movement institutions that once sought to change minds now passively disseminate opinions devised by newer, more vigorous outlets.
I have no idea if Geoff Nunberg is right that conservatives spend more time ranting about agent verb-ing liberals than liberals do about agent verb-ing conservatives. I was struck by the dichotomy in this passage, however: "On the Web, Volvo-driving liberal outnumbers pickup- or truck-driving conservative"
We are a two-car household. I drive the pickup, Sara drives the Volvo. And she's more conservative than I am on any issue you could name.
A fascinating summary of a documentary about China's "petition system". According to the author, Chinese sites serving the video have been shut down.
The film itself looks harrowing but no doubt it is in Mandarin.
For all the hype about China becoming westernized and more capitalistic, this seems like an exceptionally good counter example. A breathtaking display of hot air (mixed metaphor, or not mixed enough?) that should be appreciated by all Orwell fans.
Geoff Nunberg, probably the most prominent politically active linguist after Chomsky, McWhorter and Lakoff (in approximately that order), has a new book about politics and language out. As expected it talks about the right's success in defining liberals and leftists, turning various labels perjorative, inventing scathing stereotypes, and so on.
But on Language Log Nunberg talks a bit about syntax, particularly constructions like "Volvo-driving" and "Latte-drinking", etc.:
The fact is that the right owns those object+present participle compounds, as surely as it owns values, media bias, the lapel-pin flag, and sentences that begin with "See...."
Lexical differences are a dime a dozen. They are easy to make and their use is obvious, but it's always interesting to see syntactic constructions falling along political lines.
Incidentally, I like Nunberg, but I have yet to see him respond publicly to this embarrassing snafu which transpired on Language Log a long time ago. (Be sure to see the response here.) It's probably coincidence, but after this altercation he didn't post on LL for a long time. Until he does respond in some way (maybe he has and I haven't seen it), I must say I can't take him as seriously as I used to.
"A new study by University of Alaska Fairbanks Professor Judith Kleinfeld indicates that boys, regardless of their socioeconomic status, lag behind their female peers in language arts."
Saturday night, a friend told me that her job has gotten so boring that she checks Horizon several times a day to see if we've posted anything new.
I think there's an entire Barbara Ehrenreich book in that comment.
I have no idea how to cite Charles F. Kroeh's 1907 book. The spine and cover call their contents by the familiar Scientific German, but the title page proclaims the book as German Science Reader: An Introduction to Scientific German for Students of Physics, Chemistry and Engineering. You can almost hear the butler at the top of the stairs sigh as he draws his breath to announce such a pompous guest.
Charles F. Kroeh, A. M. was Professor of Modern Languages at the Stevens Institue of Technology, and his reader was self-published. Stevens is still in Hoboken today, and unlike many other schools, hasn't renamed itself as a University despite offering doctoral instruction. Apparently they didn't have a press in 1907, as Kreoh's other eleven books on French, German, and Spanish were all either self-published or released by Macmillan. The very titles speak to the changes in language pedagogy over the last century: nowadays you'd never find a fifty-nine page octavo on pronouncing French sold separately from The Living Method For Learning How To Think In French.
Scientific German is an odd little book. Kroeh announces that the reader will "attack the subject systematically." But his notion of a graduated reader is very different from the idea that would prevail later in the century: "[The selections] are arranged progressively and consist of fundamental definitions, descriptions, processes, and problems of Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Physic[sic] and Chemistry." That is to say, the science is progressively introduced, not the language. In other words, any actual progressivity is a by-product of shared vocabulary. The introductory sentence on electricity uses the words for "square" and "square root", which were covered thirty chapters earlier in the chapters on arithmetic, so I guess this does work. Sort of.
The 112 page book is broken into 55 chapters, but each chapter averages only fifteen endnotes. This might seem like a lot, but those notes provide the only explanation of the language — there is no glossary, nor introduction. The result is very difficult to work through, but the subject matter is not without its charms. Part of this is nostalgia — the section on electiricty describes jute insulators — but much of the pleasure of reading Kroeh is trying to remember bits of math and science you learned as a teenager. Sara and I spent part of a drive back from Houston trying to figure out what a Wechselwinkel was from context in the geometry section and were stymied more by the limits of our geometetrical recall than by the German. Also, you learn some nifty arithmetical rules skipped over by my education:
Eine Zahl enthält den Fektor 11 und ist also durch 11 teilbar, wenn die Quersumme der ersten, dritten, fünften, siebenten etc. (d. h. der ungeradstelligen) gleich der Quersumme der 2., 4., 6., 8., etc. (d. h. der geradstelligen Ziffern, von der Rechten gegen die Linke gezählt, ist, oder die Differenz dieser beiden Quersummen 11 oder ein Mehrfaches von 11 beträgt.(My translation):A number has a factor of 11 (and thus is divisble by 11) if the cross-sum of the first, third, fifth, seventh, etc. (i.e. the odd digits) is equal to the cross-sum of the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, etc. (i.e. the even digits), as measured from the right to the left, or the difference between these two cross-sums is 11 or a multiple of 11
About half of the people I talk to — all of whom are engineers — have never heard of that rule. I certainly hadn't until Charles Kroeh came along. Had you?
Hilarious list of unfortunate domain names bought by companies who need to clean out their publicity departments (or get ones).
If not for the wonder of the web human civilization might never have been alerted to the dread results of concatenating innocent-looking words like "Experts Exchange". Not to mention my recent spam-related discovery that "socialist" contains the name "cialis". And progress marches on...
(Found on del.icio.us, a trendy "2.0" site which should be avoided by anyone who already spends too much time trawling the web. Like myself.)
I've been thinking about libarary catalog software ever since last year's hurricanes reminded us of the ephemerality of material things — especially when they're soggy. Amy Welborn's got a nifty mosaic of book covers on the left side of her blog, which turn out to be a link to her catalog on LibraryThing. LibraryThing is a shared online cataloging system -- like a wishlist, but for books you already own.
I'm not entirely comfortable sharing the contents of my library with the entire world, but there's a really compelling upside to LibraryThing. The sofware will provide the same kind of recommendations that sites like Amazon do. You can browse the catalogs for everyone else who owns Kaspar Riemschneider's Akkadian Grammar and see what else they have on the subject. There are comment boxes on user entries, so you can ask Languagehat about his collection.
I'm not sure that that's a good thing, though. I don't have time to commiserate about Riemschneider's choice of Old Babylonian augury texts for all his exercises with someone just working through the book. It seems like the social networking aspect I don't want — or at least assume I wouldn't gain much from — is the cost of using group recommendation algorithms nowadays. Are there other downsides to sharing your book holdings with the world?
An interesting article debunking the meme "that the Chinese word for 'crisis' is composed of elements that signify 'danger' and 'opportunity.'" Some insight into the Chinese writing system for those interested in such things and, needless to say, useful for those given to spouting eastern "pseudo-profundities" as the author so eloquently puts it.
Politics shows up in the strangest places. Like carved into tree trunks across the American West, for example:
Political statements are abundant and indicate that the herders followed major world events, albeit in delayed form. Most references are pro-Basque and anti-Spanish, particularly against the dictator Franco. Numerous comments and diatribes on the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War in the Central California mountains appear to be made by one or two individuals. Northern Basques carved many “Biba Frantzia” (“Vive La France”) slogans with various spellings, especially during World War II.The messages that refer to the United States are overwhelmingly favorable, but some Mexican herders made some harsh statements about the “Gringos.” One Basque didn’t agree with President Nixon’s policy of overture toward China, and several times he carved that Mao had fooled him (the actual word used is more graphic). There are hails to Fidel Castro, hurrahs to the Russian sputniks, and pedestrian details recorded, such as the reaction of one herder who watched television for the first time.
Am I the only one who finds it strange that the only segment of our population trained in conflict avoidance are CHL applicants?
Worth reading purely for the image of a man in a lab coat looking up at an experimental subject and saying "I wish I looked more like Britney Spears," but more importantly something which all kinds of generative grammarians, among others, might have to wrestle with some day. Interesting stuff.
This year's results have been announced. Two entrants from Austin received dishonorable mentions.
My personal favorite was the winner for the Romance category: Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced; and for the entirety of the Labor Day weekend they had sex like monkeys on espresso, not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, but more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and access to an espresso machine.
I've been cleaning up the comments on old blog posts, and ended up stumbling across a lot of articles I'd never gotten around to publishing. Most of them were just URLs I thought might would interest Horizonistas, so without throwing any more double modals to Alan Hogue, here is the list of things I once thought worth posting.
Sandra Tsing Loh takes on Leslie Morgan Steiner's Mommy Wars in "Rhymes With Rich".
Nobel Prize winner takes direct action on women in science by funding daycare and housekeeping grants for doctoral students.
A history minded Catholic dines at the Culinary Institute of America campus and muses on its Jesuit past. (Sara thinks his prose annoying and adds, "Aioli does not spring. It glops.")
We spent this weekend in Manhattan visiting old friends and pretending that the aches from our ankles gave us license to eat more than we should. I've enjoyed enough of James Lileks' ruminations on ghost ads that I spent a lot of time looking at the sides of old buildings for traces of the past. No luck with the ads, but I did spot quite a few ghost buildings, and one phenomenon that puzzled me.
Say you spot a twenty-story masonry building next to a three-story one. The top two floors of the masonry building have windows exposed on the side, but the windows are bricked up from floors four through eighteen. Obviously a seventeen-storey building once stood where the three-storey photo lab stands now, and that ghost building was constructed after its taller, longer-lived neighbor. Nobody would build bricked-in windows from scratch, so they must have been a reaction to the construction of the ghost building.
There's just one thing I don't understand: why wouldn't you re-open the windows after the neighbor had been torn down?
Science may soon have a cure for those who think their fake Irish accent is really funny.
As Ben's recent obsession with graded readers for language teaching has indirectly shown, the day of the graded reader and the pedagogical approach implied by this outdated beast is over. Over, that is, except in the world of dead language instruction, in which an approach ridiculed today by SLA people as the "grammar-translation" method is still the only game in town. People like Ben and I, who like syntax and think telling time is boring, are left in the lurch if we want to learn any languages still spoken by a significant number of people, though.
So Ben is absolutely right about the difference in approach to dead and living languages. What I find interesting is that this difference in approach is driven largely by assumptions about the needs of the typical student.
But is it appropriate that living languages are taught uniformly with the assumption that students will need, any day now, to ask questions about chairs or buy groceries? I don't think so. Any college level language class is at least theoretically aimed at developing heavy reading skills. While a German major certainly might spend a summer in Berlin and ought to learn to communicate practically in a reasonable time, there is no reason to grind through all the mundane stuff (telling time, buying things) right away as there would be if your students were, say, new arrivals who need to get jobs and navigate the train system as soon as possible. And all this goes for learning explicit syntax and such like as well, of course.
I think the reason practically every beginning college language course starts with yellow chairs is because of the research community which ultimately shapes the textbooks and pedagogical norms that are available. And this community, commendably and understandably, are more interested in solving pressing problems for people who are in dire situations, such as refugees etc. From my limited exposure to SLA research and the sorts of conversations going on in professional literature (and again, note I said it's limited), I do not think the plight of the syntax-loving college student gets a lot of play. Hence the sorts of materials available and the sorts of methods promulgated.
So, interestingly, the fact that I have to order away for a book written in the sixties if I want a graded Chinese reader to work through might have everything to do with the population SLA researchers and practitioners are focused on serving -- at least as much as real, substantive theoretical changes.
The problem, though, is that this change in emphasis, which is essentially contingent on a change of audience, if you will, eventually becomes a dogma, a bias, against any bookish or technical approach to language study.
I would like to see that change, but it might be inevitable, especially if you also consider that current pedagogical techniques largely rely on and cater to people who are talkative and social rather than bookish and -- let's face it -- geeky. Recently I was only one of two linguistics students in a graduate course in a highly respected SLA department. This course was designed for people headed for careers as ESL teachers (today the ackronym is TESOL, for some reason), and no one there had any time at all for anything remotely technical. They were really nice, friendly, sociable people who wanted to work with people and help them learn how to interact with other people, and that was that. The bias against anything technical was enormous.
And then again, even the college-going population has changed dramatically since the heyday of the graded reader. There is no longer as much of an ideological emphasis on the superiority of the written word, or really of literature in general. Academics seem increasingly to see themselves as solving non-academic problems (sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results). And the demographics of the student population has changed enormously in terms of class since the GI bill and, later, the collapse of the US secondary education system which forced huge numbers of people into college who once would have been fine venturing out into the job market with a high school diploma.
Again, the problem, if it can be called that, does not in the end come down to theoretical changes so much as demographics.
I don't think graded readers are coming back any time soon.