How top down spelling revision didn't work

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, writing, spelling, spelling reform, history

The cover is too good not to show: enough is enuf: our failed attempts to make English eezier to spell by Gabe Henry takes us on a rollicking journey through the stories of numerous persons, societies and clubs that have tried and tried to revise the spelling of English. Just since the founding of the USA, national figures including Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt have involved themselves in the pursuit of "logical" spelling. "Simplified spelling" organizations persist to this day.

English is the only language for which spelling bees are held. Nearly all other languages with alphabetic writing are more consistently phonetic. However, I would exempt French from that proviso. I discovered during three years of French classes that the grammar of French verbs is, to quote a Romanian linguist friend, "endless." Putting together all possibilities of conjugation, tense and mood, French has four times as many varieties of verb usage and inflected endings as English does, and then each variety is multiplied by inflections that denote number, person and gender. However, inflections ranging from -ais and -ait to -aient all have the same pronunciation, "-ay" as in "way". Other multi-sonic instances abound. Perhaps French has stalled on its way to being like Chinese, for which the written language is never spoken and the spoken languages aren't written.

But we're talking about English here. The author states several times that there are eight ways of pronouncing "-ough" in English. Long ago a friend loaned me a book, published in 1987, a collection of items from the 1920's and 1930's by Theodor S. Geisel, before he became Dr. Seuss: The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough. Geisel's essays on English spelling seen from a Romanian perspective (tongue-in-cheek, as usual; he was from Massachusetts, of German origin) dwell on the funnier aspects of our unique written language. The peculiarities of -ough occupy one of the chapters.

Being intrigued by the "8 ways" claim, I compiled this list using words extracted from an online dictionary:

1. "-ow" in Bough (an old word for branch) and Plough (usually spelled "plow" in the US)
2. "-off" in Cough and Trough
3. "-uff" in Enough and Tough and Rough
4. "-oo" in Through and Slough (but see below)
5. "-oh" in Though and Furlough
6. "-aw" in Bought and Sought
7. "-ə" (the schwa) in Thoroughly ("thu-rə-ly")

And…I could not find an eighth pronunciation for it. Maybe someone will know and leave a comment.

"Slough" is actually a pair of words. Firstly, a slough is a watery swamp. Secondly, slough refers to a large amount of something, and in modern American English it is usually spelled "slew", as, "I bought a whole slew of bedsheets at the linens sale." However, "slew" is also the past tense of the verb "slay": "The knight slew the dragon," which is the only way most folks use that word.

Numerous schemes have been proposed over time. Sum peepl hav sujestid leeving out sum letrz and dubling long vowls (e.g., "cute"→"kuut"). A dozen or more attempts at this are mentioned in the book. Others have invented new alphabets, or added letters to the 26 "usual" ones, so that the 44 phonemes could each have a unique representation. An appendix in many dictionaries introduces IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet (which includes the schwa for the unaccented "uh" sound). Public apathy and pushback have doomed every scheme.

The only top-down change to American spelling that came into general use was carried out by Noah Webster in his Dictionary. He took what we now call the English U out of many words such as color and favor; the Brits still use colour and favour. And he removed the final K from a number of words, including music and public (I think the Brits have mostly followed suit); pulled the second L from traveler and the second G from wagon; and introduced "plow" and other words that didn't quite make it to present-day usage. His later attempts at further simplification didn't "take".

I could go on and on. It's an entertaining pastime to review so many attempts. However, something has happened in the past generation, really two things. Firstly, advertising pushed the inventers of trademark names to simplify them, particularly in the face of regulations that forbade the use of many common words in product brands. Thus, we have "Top Flite" golf balls, "Shop Rite" and "Rite Aid" retailers, and new uses for numbers, such as "Food4Less" for a midwestern market chain and "2-Qt" for a stuffed toy brand. Secondly, the advent of ubiquitous cell phones motivated kids everywhere to develop "txtspk". Single-letter "words" such as R and U plus substituting W for the long O leads to "R U HWM?" Number-words abound: 2 for "to" and "too", 4 for "for", 8 in "GR8", and even 9 in "SN9" ("asinine", for kids who have that word in their working vocabulary). Acronyms multiply: LOL, ROFL (rolling on floor laughing), TTYS (talk to you soon)…a still-growing list. Even though most of us now have smart phones with a full keyboard (but it's tiny), txtspk saves time and now even X-Gen and Boomers (such as me) use it.

Social change works from the bottom up. Top-down just won't hack it. Unless, of course, you are dictator and can force it through, as Mao did when he simplified Chinese writing the year after taking power in 1949. Many of my Chinese friends cannot read traditional Chinese script. Fortunately, Google Lens can handle both, so Chinese-to-Chinese translation is possible!

We have yet to see any major literature moving to txtspk, let alone technical and scientific journals. If that were to happen, the next generation would need Google Lens or an equivalent to read what I am writing now, and all English publications prior.

It will be a while. Meantime, let this book remind us of the many times our forbears dodged the bullet and declined to shed our traditional written language. The legacy firstly of several long-term invasions (Saxon and Norman in particular), and then the rise of the British Empire, and finally in "melting-pot" America, our language is a mash-up of three giant linguistic traditions and a couple of smaller ones, plus borrowings, complete with original spelling if it existed, from dozens or hundreds of languages. Thus, one more thing found primarily in English: the idea of etymology, the knowledge of a word's origin. I haven't checked; do dictionaries for other languages include the etymologies of the words? My wife has several Japanese dictionaries of various sizes; none mentions the source of words except for noting which are non-Japanese because they have to be spelled with a special syllabary called Katakana.

English is unique. Harder to learn than some languages, but not all, it is still the most-spoken language on Earth. It is probably also the most-written, in spite of all the craziness.

Give a dog a voice and she will use it

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, dogs, speech therapy

Meet Stella, subject of the book by Christina Hunger, How Stella Learned to Talk: The Groundbreaking Story of the World's First Talking Dog.

Ms Hunger, a speech therapist who works with pre-verbal toddlers and autistic children, got Stella as a puppy several years ago. She noticed that Stella's gestures and sounds were similar to the things a young child or other non-verbal person will do to communicate.

She frequently uses AAC (Alternative and Augmentative Communication) devices with her clients to enable them to begin speaking when it seems that the usual abilities aren't (yet) working. She bought four recordable "speak-back" buttons and placed them where Stella would go to request to go outside, or play, or eat. It took the dog a few weeks to first try pushing one of the buttons. During those weeks, whenever Christina would take her outside, for example, Christina would say, "Outside" and push the button that also said aloud, "Outside". Similarly for the others. Once Stella figured out what the buttons were for, she began using them.

Over time, Christina and her husband added more buttons, until they decided to attach them to a single board in one place, so Stella could use them in combination if needed (such as "outside" "play") without walking from place to place. It took Stella some time to get used to the new arrangement, but then she took off. The board shown here has 25 word buttons and one with the phrase "love you". That was a year or two ago. I think the number of words Stella can now use has grown beyond 40.

Throughout the book the author makes it clear how much repetition and patience are needed. She also discusses speech therapy issues that are common to Stella and the toddlers she works with, such as the frustration a child (or dog) experiences when she wants to communicate something more clearly. Sometimes Stella has used word combinations to express a thought not on the board, such as "water bad" when the bowl was empty; "empty" hadn't been supplied (this is my illustration, I couldn't find the place in the book where this first occurred, and the book has no index). Little children do the same thing, particularly those with an AAC that they are outgrowing. We learn that children pick up words faster than we expect, so she is always ready to add many words to a child's AAC. AAC devices for children can often use thousands of words. Time will tell how many Stella learns!

Christina's blog is here, and there are dozens of videos on YouTube about Stella's accomplishments.

The livingest languages

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, languages

My youthful conclusion has been confirmed by a linguist and the experts he cites: It is harder to learn German than most other languages. Not nearly has hard as Vietnamese, perhaps, but hard enough. I learned French rather well in three years in high school, and carried on "pen pal" relationships in French for a number of years, with great enjoyment. In my first year of college, I found I needed to learn German if I wished to be a Chemistry major. No substitutions would be allowed. I flunked German 101, twice. After my sophomore year, during which I truly enjoyed the year of Organic Chemistry, I changed majors…I also moved to another state and changed schools, but mainly for other reasons.

Reading Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren I had the fun of dabbling in his riffs on what he calls the "Babel 20". These are the languages needed to converse with at least half the people on Earth in their mother tongue, and with about 3/4 of all people in a language they know fluently.

I don't recall what I anticipated when I began to read the book. I found that each section, from chapter 20 (the first, on Vietnamese) through 2 (Mandarin), 2b (the Japanese writing system) and 1 (the last, on English) was focused on one thing or a few things that the author found interesting about the language. He speaks six languages and can read nine more, but they are all Euro-based. He spent six months, much of it in Vietnam, trying to learn Vietnamese, and failed. He got so he could sort-of read small portions of the newspaper, in a language that has the most diacritics of any. Even then, there would be at least a couple of words in every sentence he would have to look up.

A word on diacritics. They are accents, dots and other appurtenances added to our "familiar" Roman letters; it is generally considered that they make them into other letters. Written or printed English hardly has any. We have retained a very few, but they are dropping out of use. How many write "resume" when they mean "résumé" (a curriculum vitae, to use the Latin synonym), or "naive" rather than "naïve"? European languages have them, so that "Do you speak French?" becomes "Parlez-vous Français?". Notice the little squiggle below the "c"; it is called a "cedilla", pronounced "se-dee-ye". Both "résumé" and "naïve" are also from French. Scandanavian languages also have letters like "ø". Consulting Google Translate, I find that "Please show me the way to the restroom" becomes "Xin chỉ cho tôi đường đến nhà vệ sinh" in Vietnamese. Both "d" letters have a slash, some of the vowels have two "things" near them, and one "e" has a dot below plus a circumflex above. I don't know what kind of keyboard can be used to write it!

Two things seem to have conspired to make the language impenetrable to Mr. Dorren: firstly, the pronunciation is subtle, such that at the end of his half year of study, he still could not understand a simple spoken Vietnamese sentence; and secondly, the many levels of respect and politeness that affect the terms used, and they way they are written and pronounced. I learned a little of this kind of thing with Japanese (#13 of the Babel 20; my wife is Japanese), which has four levels: abrupt, ordinary (inside the home), polite (common street lingo; what you mostly learn in language classes), and super-polite. There is also a level of Japanese spoken only by the Emperor, and there are male and female ways of speaking. That's complicated enough, but Vietnamese is rather extreme by comparison.

Vietnamese also has six tones. To those who know a little about it, the four tones of Mandarin might be familiar. The way they distinguish the various meanings of words pronounced "ma" (as in "mama" for mother) is a common "fun story". Depending on tone, "ma" can mean "mother", "horse", "ride" as a horse, and it is also the "pronounced question mark". Thus, with appropriate tones, the phrase "Ma ma ma ma" means "Is Mom riding (the) horse?". Knowing that "dui" (pronounced "dway") means "yes", the answer is "Dui, ma ma ma." Tonal languages abound, particularly in Asia and Africa. Cantonese has nine tones. Luckily, you don't have to have perfect pitch to hear the languages. The tones are relative to the general pitch of the sentence and the person's voice, and some tones are moving, such as the way English speakers tend to end sentences with a rising tone or give one-word answers in a falling tone.

As I mentioned above, Japanese is #13. My nemesis, German, is #11, spoken as a first or second language by 200 million. So it isn't actually all that hard to learn. It is just hard for this Francophile English-speaker. But the author does riff for a third of the chapter on how German is indeed harder than average. Each chapter begins with a one-page summary of language characteristics. It includes such things as language family ("German belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family", while "Arabic is the most widely spoken of the Semitic languages, … of the Afro-Asiatic family"), script (German uses Roman script, but used to be written using Fraktur, which looks a lot like Old English. My grandmother's grandfather was from Germany and he wrote Fraktur), and sounds (including tones and how many vowel and consonant sounds are in common use).

A word about sounds. This is one area in which I was disappointed. Although little variations can cause the number of "distinct" sounds in any language to exceed 100, they cluster around a more limited number. "Standard" English, primarily the language as described in the large dictionaries, has either 43 or 44 sounds or "phonemes". According to my enormous second edition of Websters Unabridged (published in 1979), there are 30 vowel sounds, but to my study, several of them collapse into one another, leaving 23 or 24, depending on whether a following "l" or "r" actually changes the sounds of "a" and "o". There are 20 consonants, but the number of "nonvowel phonemes" is probably 24, which underlies the claim I have seen for 48 sounds in spoken English. Most languages have fewer than this, usually fewer than 40. But Mandarin (I have been told by several Mandarin speakers) has 88 sounds. Most of them are vowels that English speakers who didn't hear Mandarin as a small child (and keep it up) cannot distinguish, and a number of the consonant sounds are also opaque to us. Thus the common question "Are you Chinese?" becomes "Zhōngguó rén ma". That accented "e" in "rén" is a sound I can neither hear accurately nor properly pronounce (my Chinese friends giggle behind a hand). And "zhōngguó" sounds to me like "choo-go", but I am assured that the "ngg" sound is actually nasalized, though to a lesser extent than ñ in Spanish. At the other end of the spectrum, I understand that Hawaiian has 13 sounds, five vowels and eight consonants. Anyway, the sections on "sounds" for each language do not provide a satisfactory guide.

Dropping that quibble, though, the book is a delight to read, and ends on a thoughtful note. English has become the modern lingua franca, the go-to language for diplomacy and international trade (and internet communications), just as French was a few generations ago, when the term lingua franca was coined. Will Mandarin replace it any time soon? The chapter on English, posed as an interview with a native English speaker, reaches the conclusion that the Chinese writing system(s) would prohibit that. Computer-expedited communication works better when an alphabetic script is used. My Chinese friends, when texting in Mandarin, use a phonetic input method, and the software in their phones picks out possible characters for them to choose. A smaller number use software that lets them draw the character with a finger. That method is actually slower! And, as a final conclusion, automated translation software continues to get better, so we may not need a lingua franca in the future. I have no idea if the Vietnamese sentence I used above is an accurate translation. In another 10-20 years, the translations will be of greatly improved accuracy. I already have an app on my phone that lets me say something in English, and it speaks a Chinese, Spanish, Korean, or whatever translation, and it works pretty well. The person's reply is turned into English that might be a little stilted, but is clear.

Too much fun. I understand the author wrote an earlier book about 60 languages. Worth looking into.

Your English isn't your grandfather's English

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, words, linguistics, historical linguistics

I find John McWhorter fascinating: he digs out so many lovely examples of language usage, and writes about them so engagingly… In a prior book I reviewed in 2009 (Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue) he brought to our gaze the numerous chunks of other languages that were dragged together almost wholesale to produce what we today call "English". Now in Words on the Move; Why English Won't—and Can't—Sit Still (Like, Literally), he provides an antidote to the amount of energy some of us "seasoned citizens" give to decrying the trends of change in language usage (Like, you know, gag me with a spoon if I have to keep hearing that!).

That last string of phrases caused much angst in my generation when "Valley Girl" (Val Gal) talk sprawled across the nation like a lanky teen on a love seat. In particular, "like" has gone from a word meaning (as a verb) "to desire or feel affinity to" or (adjective, adverb, etc.) "similarity", into a "piece of grammar", no longer really a word, but a functional sound that has morphed from the "similarity" end of things to at least three or four uses, most particularly a kind of bullet point, such as an example on page 215:

"So we're standing there and there were like grandparents and like grandkids and aunts and uncles…"

"Like" has become more a signal than a word, and this isn't new, it started almost a century ago, some 30 years before the Beatniks began to say, "Like, wow, man!". The new "like" has gathered new uses to the extent that McWhorter touches on it in three different chapters and spends a dozen pages on it in his last chapter, "This is your brain on writing." This word is an example of several he discusses, that are grammatical markers and have become very hard to explain as words. They are "grammaticalized." Consider what "well" or "so" might mean when used to begin a sentence. Could you explain them to an inquisitive five-year-old? Thought not!

Gliding back to the first chapter, "The FACEs of English", we find a long discussion of the acronym FACE, used to describe the uses of grammaticalized words such as "well" or "so", which a linguist would call "Modal Pragmatic Markers" or MPM's. Here "pragmatic" most closely means "personal". Our author states that a multitude of such words are needed so that we don't just speak English, we can talk.

This brings us to a major theme of the book, the difference between written and spoken (or "talked") English. Firstly, of course, we use fewer grammaticalizations when writing. I tend to write at full speed as though I were having a conversation with you, so I almost began this paragraph with, "Now, …". Were you and I really talking together, that's how I would have said it. But even writing full speed at 50wpm or so, I edit as I go and make the written form a little more compact, and, I hope, readable. (Those who find me long-winded are saying, "Oh, really!")

He dwells much more on spelling. For example, written English has a pronunciation rule of "silent, terminal e", that it makes the vowel before the prior consonant into a long vowel. Thus we have "mad", meaning crazy or angry, in which the "a" is pronounced as flatly as possible and is often called "short A"; and we have "made", meaning constructed or produced, in which the "a" is pronounced almost like "eh-ee" and is called "long A". The author tells us that nobody would design such a system from scratch, and that it had to arise from some process. Indeed it did. He discusses the "Great Vowel Shift" on pages 152-159, using a map of the placement of vowels in our mouth to show how the "short A" of 5 to 9 centuries ago morphed into a longer "E" sound then to the "long A", and that a final "eh" sound at the end of many words was gradually dropped. Thus, "made" was once pronounced "mah-deh", as the spelling suggests, shifted through "meh-də' ", which a much shorter final syllable, shown by the schwa (ə), which is more of a tiny grunt than a vowel, and then into the one-syllable word of today. The Great Vowel shift moved all the vowels about, leading certain words that once rhymed to have different sounds now than then, and they no longer rhyme. "Water" and "after", in "Jack and Jill", used to rhyme perfectly. No longer.

Dictionaries began to be written for English very early in the Great Vowel Shift. While this didn't exactly entomb all the spellings in stone, they did tend to hold things back, and today, dictionaries of "modern English" have to trot to keep up, having been rendered out of date by our movable language just in the time needed to research, typeset, and publish them. By the way, usage of the words "typeset" and "typesetting" is dropping, having peaked in the 1980's; they are being overtaken by "key in" and "keying in". As computers get better at speech recognition, those will drop off also.

Here is side point that I enjoyed. Do you ever hear the expression "willy-nilly"? I figured out long ago that it came from "will I, or nill I", but I wasn't sure just what "nill" meant. Dr. McWhorter has the answer. A millennium or so ago, negating words was done by adding the prefix "ne-", so to "not will", or not desire, something was to "ne-will" it. To say you don't have something, you would say, "I ne-have it", but by Chaucer's time it would have been "I nave it", with "nave" pronounced "nah-veh" or even "nah-və". And Chaucer spelled it næbbe. It seems the consonants have shifted as well, but the author has left that for a future book, I reckon.

I'll forbear further nerdifying. It is a delightful book, and an incredibly informative one. I am thinking of giving a copy to a friend who is a linguist, but primarily of Chinese, not English, to see what similar trends might have occurred in Mandarin, which the Chinese acknowledge is not a written language at all: the "written Chinese" language is one that nobody speaks, but they all know how to interpret it into whatever dialect they grew up speaking.

I knew Time was left wing, but...

kw: politics, language

How you say something reveals how you think about it. In the most recent issue of Time, dated Sept 17, 2012, the cover article is titled "One Nation on Welfare: Living Your Life on the Dole", by Michael Grunwald. His attitude is simple: the Government owns you, and any "benefit" you receive is a subsidy. The article is illustrated with four large photos, littered with yellow squares. Some of them state:

• At least $15 billion goes each year to farm supports.
• The IRS allows a $3,800 tax exemption per child and more for child care.
• Deductions for health care expenses cost the Treasury $184 billion a year.
• Charitable tax deductions cost the government about $40 billion a year.
• Depreciation of business property like computers and other capital goods cost the feds $5.7 billion in 2011.
• The home-mortgage-interest deduction costs the Treasury $84 billion a year.

Let's look at one word used in four out of these six items (the number of yellow boxes totals 17). That word is "cost". Folks, let's be clear, the deductions and depreciations mentioned do not cost "the government" anything! The author's language implies that we, the taxpayers, are reaching into the pocket of "the Feds" and taking money out.

Wrong! Taxes are when "the Treasury" reaches into your pocket. A deduction is a statutary provision that "allows" you to reduce what "they" take, because you are behaving in a way "they" think is worthwhile and want to encourage, or because you have incurred an unusual expense, and "they" are in part giving you recompense. Two examples will suffice.

When I first began doing my own taxes in 1967, all consumer interest was deductible from income taxes: home mortgages, car loans, and credit card interest, for example. Two things were changed about ten years later. First, all consumer interest other than mortgage interest was removed from the list of allowed deductions. In particular, that part of the deduction was thought to be driving a rapid increase in people getting deeply into debt via credit cards, revolving-charge accounts at retailers, and unsecured loans. The change in the law did make a dent in unwise borrowing, but consumer credit has continued to increase anyway. It was also considered "unfair" that rich people with a dozen homes scattered about the country (or the world) were deducting huge amounts of interest from their income taxes, so the law was changed to allow the deduction only for a primary residence and a secondary one (such as a vacation home). The deduction for house 1 and house 2 was retained, because it is desirable to encourage home ownership. People who own their own home usually take better care of it than renters (as every one of my friends who is a landlord will attest). Occupant-owned houses simply last longer and cost less in the lifetime of the structure, than rented properties.

Secondly, in 1967 nearly all medical expenses were deductible. At the time, there were no HMO's or other vestiges of socialized medicine. "Traditional" health insurance was "Major Medical", which paid for hospitalization or visits to the emergency room. When you went to see your family doctor, or bought pills or had an injection, you simply paid for it. If you were a sickly sort (or hypochondriac), you might spend a lot more than the average. The medical deduction partly offset this. Though an increasing set of limiting thresholds has been imposed, now about 7%, before you can deduct anything, the principle is the same.

Let us recall that a deduction is not a tax write-off. If you had "extra" medical expenses of $10,000 last year, over and above the threshold, and you are in the 20% bracket, taking the deduction will yield a $2,000 reduction of your taxes owed. I don't call that very generous, but it is what it is. Also, if you had mortgage interest of 4% on a $150,000 loan, or $6,000, in the same tax bracket, that deduction will reduce your taxes by $1,200.

For people who take the time to think it through, the mortgage interest deduction can allow them to buy a slightly better home. If you can afford a payment of $6,000 per year (ignoring escrowed taxes and insurance), working the math backward means you could afford an up-front payment of $7,500, and at 4% the loaned amount would then be $187,500. That's enough for an extra bedroom or a nicer neighborhood. Now your deduction is $1,500 instead of $1,200. Is this money "taken" from the government? No. On average, you are among those who are increasing in prosperity, earning more, spending more, and particularly in this case, supporting home builders at a higher level than you might have done without the deduction. The extra $37,500 (at least; we've ignored down payment) in the cost of the home went into someone's pocket, who had it to spend and make their own contribution to the flow of cash in the economy.

This is not to say that all tax offsets and genuine subsidies (many of which are in the form of direct payments) are good. Some are "special interest" items that benefit a few who really don't need it. But let's consider one more, farm subsidies. In the author's yellow box, these are pegged at $15 billion. In a $3.8 trillion federal spending spree (there is no budget, for three years running), that is a rounding error-sized amount. It comes to about 2.4% of the total amount we spend on food in America. While not all of this little nest of subsidies is well spent, the main effect has been to allow larger numbers of small farmers to stay in business. This, again, is a case of encouraging behavior that is better for the country. So not all subsidies are "bad things".

But to state that we are all "on the dole"? Ridiculous! Consider the Interstate Highway System and Air Traffic Control. These are examples of what President Obama was actually talking about when he said, "You didn't build that". While the way he said it was a monumental gaffe, just think what life here would be like without them. Prior to President Eisenhower's initiative in the 1950s, the best road from where I live to my cousin's home in Bucks County, PA was the road now called Route 202. You can still go that way, if you want to spend an extra hour on the road. But it's better to take the Interstate and the feeders attached to it, also built with federal funds. And if air traffic were strictly a state-by-state system, probably with conflicting standards, could we support 3 million daily flights around the country? Are you on the dole when you take a road trip, or fly somewhere? No.

"The Dole" properly refers to support for those who cannot support themselves. As a society we have the Welfare system, administered at the state level. Of course, because no law is perfect, there are abuses, which various "workfare" bills have attempted to address. But there is no question that some folks simply can't make it without help, and as a civilized people, we have decided to help. "The Dole" is not properly applied to publicly supported infrastructure that enable more efficient economic activity. If federal money was used to improve the local sewage disposal system, or the township's water supply (true in both cases), are all of us living here "on the dole"? Hardly! We paid the taxes that were used to pay for those projects. In such cases, yes, dammit We Did That! It was just indirect.

And so, finally, even in the case of Interstate highways and air traffic control, every dollar used to create those systems was taken from the American people. We Did That. Or, more properly, Our Parents Did That. To keep those systems running well, we continue to pay taxes to "the Feds", which uses them to pay for infrastructure maintenance. It is not "the dole" if you pay for it.

To avoid going on and on, and so I can have my lunch before the end of the day, I'll stop here.

Unwinding Babel

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, english language, globalism

About half the members of the church I attend are Chinese, both "mainlanders" and Taiwanese. Though they all speak Mandarin, it is not everyone's first language. At a church lunch I might hear four or five Chinese dialects in use. The rest of the congregation consists of those, like me, whose first language is English. Church meetings and business sessions are conducted in English. However, when speaking to the group, I unconsciously speak a simpler English, adjusted to more closely match the vocabulary of them all.

At work, some of my colleagues are Indian, American citizens born in India. Several other colleagues with whom I sometimes interact are in India, at the other end of a video conference link or Skype call. I don't need to adjust my language much with any of them, but I have noticed signs of some of them digging out English terms to express concepts that, among themselves, they have a local word for. At least four Indian language groups are represented among them, so even though they also all speak Hindi as a second or third language, their English facility is better, and that is how business is carried out, in Indian-accented English.

Nearly none of my wife's family can speak English, but some of her childhood friends do. With them, we can speak ordinary American English; they learned from American servicemen and their spouses. But their children and grandchildren all speak "Japanglish" (more recently termed Janglish) among themselves, and can effortlessly switch to a lightly-accented English if they need to talk to me (not that they much care to).

Robert McCrum would tell me these are varieties of Globish, the new world language. The title of his new book (just a year out) is Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language. His thesis is simple, that a few accidents of history, and the recent immense spread of the World Wide Web starting as an English language phenomenon, catapulted this word-gobbling, culture-flattening German/French hybrid tongue into global hegemony. Though twice as many earthlings speak Mandarin as a first language, more than half of all of us, four billion, speak English as a second or first language.

Simple though the thesis may be, the process was sinuous as a burnt python. Starting with the confluence of invader languages and native Celtic in the 5^th Century, Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, quickly developed as the primary tongue of Britain. The breakup of the Roman Empire had resulted in the rapid eclipse of Latin as anything but a scholar's language. A few generations of Norman rule starting in 1066 AD nearly doubled the vocabulary as the British subjects of Norman overlords were required to learn new words for everything, but kept their old language for converse among themselves. A similar phenomenon continues wherever there is a servant class; just go to the Jamaican section of Baltimore, where you'll hear little English but plenty of Patois being spoken, though they speak English clearly enough when at work. In Norman England, the Anglo-Saxon of the servant class was sufficiently robust to survive and become Middle English, even though a nearly total overlay of "upper class" French words had been added to the mix.

King Henry V was the first to use (Middle) English instead of Latin or Norman in all his documents. Not for nothing did Shakespeare put a rousing English rallying cry in his mouth as he prepared his troops for battle on St. Crispin's Day (what King Harry actually said is, of course, not known, except that it was in English). In this, Henry was, perhaps consciously, recapitulating Alfred the Great, who used the vernacular hundreds of years earlier to rally his people, including his commissioning of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. As Alfred's influence catapulted Anglo-Saxon back into a national tongue, so Henry did for Middle English at a crucial time.

We still retain memorials of the transition of Middle English into Early Modern English—Chaucer, Shakespeare and the Geneva Bible—and then Modern English, with the Authorized Version (King James Bible) on the cusp of the transition. Though spelling conventions have changed, making KJV English hard to read in a first or second edition, the spoken word has changed less (barring 400 years of neologisms), so that you'd be able to understand William Shakespeare well enough, were he to pay us a visit to discuss his life and work.

What is it that makes English such a robust language? In a word, flexibility. English is the great borrower. It exemplifies the entrepreneur's ethic: Why create what you can freely appropriate? While the French are struggling to find "honest" French expressions for the one-quarter of modern Franglish that was borrowed from English and other languages, English has grown to have a vocabulary of more than a million words, as collected by the Oxford English Dictionary. It requires only 10,000 words or so to become a fluent speaker of most modern languages. Any English-speaking fourth grader has a vocabulary exceeding 30,000 words, and the college-educated population knows 50,000 to 80,000 words. About a fifth of these make up the Anglo-Saxon/Norman core that fills our daily conversation, and many of the rest are borrowings of various vintages.

A most fortunate circumstance for the spread of English worldwide was England's loss of the American colonies in the 1776-1814 period. England turned to worldwide Empire building, and within a century, Great Britain and her empire girdled the globe and acculturated more than a billion people to her language and customs. Then two world wars came along, in which the Anglophone powers, the U.S. and England, became the closest of collaborators. One result was the breakup of the British Empire into the British Commonwealth plus a number of English-speaking former colonies. Another was the Marshall Plan, which has morphed into half the world's nations hosting clusters of American troops, whose English language spreads from every American base outward throughout those nations (this last sentence is my addition to McCrum's otherwise comprehensive historical review).

Just at such a juncture, technology intervened to produce a class of perfect electronic servants. When I first obtained a desktop computer in 1981, I knew that 90% of all keystrokes on PC's were word processing. PC's replaced typesetting equipment almost overnight; they replaced typewriters shortly thereafter, once printers got cheap (though my IBM ProPrinter, at $600, doesn't seem cheap now, it was quite a bit less than $7,000 laser printers of the time). The early 1990s saw the World Wide Web sweep over the Internet/DARPAnet and turn it into a global library. Now it is becoming "the Cloud", and if you don't read or write English, you can get free translation to and from the language you prefer at Babelfish or Google Translate or several other venues. They are getting less clumsy all the time (BTW, when I correspond in French, I use GT to check my word choices and grammar).

The two largest nations on Earth are promoting English even more than the U.S. and England. The Indians of course are becoming the go-to-folks for technical service no matter where you happen to be. And their accents are getting better. India has a greater accent-reduction industry than Hollywood. The Chinese are teaching English almost universally, so even though Mandarin is spoken by a billion and a half people, you can now add half of them to those who can use fluent English, or actually Globish, for commerce.

The English language escaped England two hundred years ago, and now it is escaping America also. That is a good thing. The flow of language is two ways, and Globish is now the language with the greatest ability to gain new words for new concepts. As a result, English/Globish is the only language that really needs a Thesaurus. It will never be a concordant language. Today's situation was summarized by McCrum's colleague Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian thus:

1. There is no such thing as Abroad.
2. Most of our readers are 'foreign'.
3. They expect us to inform them about their own countries.
4. Their decisions will affect us.
5. No economy is an island.
6. 'They' will want to come here.
7. It matters in London what they teach in Lahore.
8. The environment is global.
9. Technology is global.
10. Their own media won't do this: but we will!

(Note on p 290). This is a journalist's view, but with minor tweaking it represents the environment in which all commerce finds itself. For the coming decade or two, native English speakers will have it a bit easier than most, but the spread of Globish continues to flatten the playing field. After all, it matters most if you have something to say, and the world is full of people with plenty to say, and they are getting better at saying it to everyone, everywhere.

Manner or Manor

kw: language, usage, homonyms

I have occasionally commented on misuse of homonyms. For many years the most frequent misspelling in print was the use of hoard when horde was meant. In a plug for a new store, a news article might mention that it was visited by "hoards of shoppers".

Lately a new one has cropped up. Shakespeare's Hamlet is probably the origin of the phrase "to the manner born", which means that Hamlet understands a local custom because he was born and raised there. "The manner" in this case can refer to any locality or ethnicity. Much later, "to the manor born" appeared, and has more recently become the title of a popular British TV series. This refers specifically to being born rich.

Consider: "She well knew the ravages of poverty, being to the manor born." This is clearly an error, for the other phrase is meant, and it counts as a misspelling. But this: "The games they played, the powers they wielded, were second nature to him. He was to the manner born." This could go either way. The writer may really mean manor in this instance, but the phrase is not used improperly. The one encompasses the other.

A "search-poll" turns up some interesting statistics. I Googled both phrases, then repeated the searches in the Google Books page (the quotes were part of the search strings):

• "to the manner born" in Google – 430,000
• "to the manor born" in Google – 98,000 (all top hits refer to the TV show)
• "to the manner born" in Google Books – 50,000 (many advice books)
• "to the manor born" in Google Books – 16,000 (many relate to the TV show)

[Searches were performed late 10/20/2010; the figures will likely change daily but stay in these relative proportions.]

For a list of hundreds of sets of homonyms (AKA homophones), see Alan Cooper's Homonym List, to which I contributed a few hundred examples some years ago.

A chimp Newton?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, chimpanzees, language

Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would be Human, by Elizabeth Hess, chronicles the life of the most remarkable of the "signing chimps", the ones who were taught to communicate using American Sign Language, or ASL. I was quite excited to see this book. I've read for years about the experiences of Washoe, the first chimp taught a lot of ASL by Roger Fouts and his family and friends. And I've read about Koko the signing gorilla, taught mainly by Penny Patterson, whose repertory (vocabulary?) totals more than 1,000 signs.

Nim was raised as nearly like a human as possible, by two families. He was, as his name indicates, intended to disprove the language theories of Noam Chomsky, who considers humans unique bearers of "true language." Eight years since Nim's death, the question is not settled, but I see it as a matter of definition…just how "true" do you mean?

Chimps grow up about five times as fast as human infants, at first, reaching adolescence about age six, then slowing down so that the females give birth beginning about age 12. The trouble is, a two-year-old chimp is not that much like a four-year-old human. A male in particular is, at 30-40 pounds, already stronger than almost any human male, and chimps are always much, much more excitable than humans. A childish tantrum in the home can result in the need to replace all the furniture.

In his first three years, the stresses of raising Nim broke up two marriages. Chimpanzee mothers remain in constant, 24/7 contact with their young for four years. Human mothers can't meet the expectations of chimp babies. Nim's fourth year was spent in a cage. He was already too strong, too aggressive, and too dangerous to be fully integrated into any human family. "You can take the ape out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the ape."

All together, about 25 people taught ASL to Nim. This chart shows his progress up to the age of four (Click for a larger, more readable chart, scanned from p166). His final repertory was about 150 signs, but he was much more fluent than other signing chimps, and much more at ease communicating with humans. Most signing chimps will sign back if someone makes ASL signs to them. Only Nim typically initiated communication.

This may have something to do with the more intensely "family" atmosphere that his first sponsor, Herbert Terrace, set up with the families that raised Nim. But I think it is also that Nim was an extraordinary chimpanzee. One of his nicknames was Houdini, for his persistent facility in breaking out of any kind of enclosure. All chimps try to figure out any kind of lock on their cage; Nim excelled above all in his success at escaping. Nim may not be an apish Newton, but he might be compared with David Copperfield! Yet, in the end, Dr. Terrace was not sure his communication could be called language.

This is worth a bit of philosophical thought: human tools, including language, suit human needs, and evolved with the species, beginning at least 100,000 years ago, and perhaps much, much earlier. In the past six million years or so, hominids evolved into humans, and pongids evolved into chimpanzees. The kinds of communication chimps employ suit their needs in their environment. The onus is on us to understand chimp "language", and so far we aren't doing that very well. The most complex animal "language" yet decoded is the dances of bees, used to tell other bees where to find food or the next nesting hole.

It is not a matter of brain size. African gray parrots can learn human spoken language, and they seem to understand what they are saying, to the point of making basic conversation. All this with a brain a tenth the size of a chimp brain. Koko, supposedly a smaller-brained ape (relative to body size), has seven times the repertory and even more fluency than Nim. Yet the experts continue to claim the matter is not settled.

I find it a bit arrogant for Chomsky to claim that human grammar is the only grammar there is. Deaf people who communicated with Nim might report a long sentence he made, when the others present who knew ASL would have seen only two or three signs. Prior to 20-30 years ago, ASL was uninflected. A movement to make ASL an "institutional" or "correct" language added signs to distinguish "have gone", "going", and "went" from "go", for example. So during the 1970s—Nim's heyday—a deaf person might intend to say, "I am going to the store to get eggs and milk", and use the signs GO STORE EGGS MILK. Sign language interpreters (including a couple we know well) routinely expanded such an utterance into a complete English sentence. Nim's signing YOGURT NIM EAT was perfectly grammatical to a "native" ASL signing deaf person of the time. Thus, the statement of one deaf woman upon meeting Koko: "I just spoke with a nonhuman in my native language."

Nim lived in a primarily caged environment from age four to age 24, when he died of a heart attack. The book doesn't say, but I suspect a combination of human foods and extreme stress weakened his heart. Nim never saw another chimpanzee until he was four. As one of his handlers noted, he was probably expecting to lose his hair and grow up into a human some day. He also spent periods of a year or two at a time in isolation, which is very, very hard on any chimp, but was doubly hard on Nim.

The author unblinkingly chronicles the casual cruelties of some of the keepers. Not those who cared for Nim directly, but the head of the Norman, OK facility where he was born and spent part of his adolescence, the owners of the medical facility he got briefly sent to, and two early farm managers at Black Beauty Ranch, where he spent the last 18 years of his life. Fortunately, a third manager brought in made things much better for Nim as an adult.

This is the dark side of all these studies. You have to distort the animal to learn anything about such things. I continue to support the work of those like Jane Goodall, those who study the chimps in their own place and on their own terms. I suspect Ms Goodall speaks Chimp better than even she realizes. We'll never get these animals to discuss the daily news with us; it is pretty much irrelevant to them. But I suspect they'd have a lot to say about the 150 different kinds of food they eat, the many kinds of trees that are better or worse for making their nests, and the sundry attractions of the opposite sex. We just have to learn their words.

Chimp language?

kw: musings, animals, language, chimpanzees

I am halfway through a biography of Nim Chimpsky, the chimp whose language facility was supposed to disprove Noam Chomsky's theories of the human "grammar engine". On the surface, his theory seems nonsensical to me, because it posits the sudden development of a major mental ability that seems to have no precursor in the evolutionary past. It is the intellectual equivalent of a brief mutation sequence producing a new kind of limb upon the body, making us perhaps pentapods or hexapods (we are tetrapods).

The animal named Nim was the subject of H.S. Terrace's work. Two families raised him from an infant and they and others laboriously taught him ASL signs. Nim did learn to communicate using ASL, but there is little evidence that he said things using ASL that an unschooled Chimp could not communicate via other means. In 1979 H.S. Terrace wrote, "I could find no evidence of an ape’s grammatical competence, either in my data or those of others." (H. S. Terrace, “How Nim Chimpsky Changed My Mind,” Psychology Today, November 1979, Vol. 13, No. 6, p. 67)

Looked at in a larger context, researchers into whale and dolphin communication recognize that there must be some kind of grammar involved, but it is too different from our own and we can't figure it out. In the same way, all primates use a combination of sounds, postures and gestures to communicate according to their own social needs. What we find in the case of the numerous Chimps and a Gorilla or two that have been taught ASL signs, is that they seem to learn a vocabulary of signs equivalent to their "natural" vocabulary. It would be instructive to compare lists made by researchers in the animals' native habitats, of their "natural vocabulary" (as well as a human could figure it out), with the repertory of signs of these trained animals.

The last common ancestor between Human and Chimp lines was six or seven million years ago. Not only has the genus Homo developed and finally become "sapiens" since then, a similar level of change has occurred in the Chimp lineage, to produce Pan troglodytes and the Bonobo. They are as different from that common ancestor as we are. There is some kind of "grammar engine" in the brains of many mammals and birds. Our relatively gigantic brain simply has the extra power to support a much more intricate grammar, so I conclude that Dr. Terrace is only partially right. He sees no evidence of Grammar...at the Human level. But I see evidence of a Chimp-level grammar.

None of these primates has been trained much beyond the age of about four. By that age, they are, at 40 to 50 pounds, too large, aggressive and dangerous for intimate human contact. Did you know that nearly all the "media Chimps" are female? It is because they are less likely to suddenly kill their handlers, than are males. In Chimp society, all males are in a constant battle for status, and their "skirmishes" are at a level humans find lethal. The rare human who has achieved Alpha status with adult male chimps has to maintain it with the use of cattle prods and 2x4's. What is seen by some as cruelty and abuse is probably considered "barely adequate" social control by the Chimps.

It is sad that Nim and other "ASL-speaking" chimps had to spend all their life after the age of four in caged or zoo conditions. But there's no other way to keep the rest of the human world around them safe from them, or them safe from gun-toting vigilantes should they attempt free life "outside". All the better reason to leave them in the jungle where they know how to live, and to keep people (other than a tiny handful of researchers) strictly OUT.