20 Ideas for Social Entrepreneurs – Local language blogs

April 10, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on BlackWeb2.0. com on 10 April 2009
By Jon Gosier

In the first half of this article I shared a few ideas for social ventures in emerging economies. Some of them I’m working on, some of them I’m not but regardless I don’t think it should stop others from trying. You’ll notice that some of these ideas don’t have examples because I’m not currently aware of any but as I find them in practice I’ll revise both posts. Here’s ten more ideas for responsible fortune hunting in developing countries…

In the list of 20 ideas:

15. Local Language Bloggers

Understanding linguistics is a tricky thing, especially when the speakers of a language are few and far between. If someone were to pay a number of bloggers to write in their local language, it would give researchers a great deal of insight into these languages (things like slang, colloquialisms, implicit meaning etc.) The added benefit is that you’re preserving how those languages are spoken and written by the people who use them on a daily basis. As these languages die out (because of people adopting more widely spoken languages) their importance (and value) to future researchers will only increase.

Example – Maneno

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French and German Get Axed — Are Any Languages Thriving?

April 9, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on Finding Dulcinea.com on 9 April 2009
By Haley A. Lovett

As Winona State University looks to get rid of its French and German language programs, and as French is used less and less in international politics, some languages flourish.

Winona State Cuts French and German, More Students Nationwide Study Arabic, Chinese

As Universities and colleges across the nation look for ways to trim down budgets, Winona State University has found one way to eliminate expenses—by cutting its French and German programs.

The university, which currently has only 24 students majoring in the two areas of study combined, will still offer beginning level courses in those languages. Winona State decided to make cuts to the program to conform to a shrinking budget, and because of the decline in the popularity of French and German, according Peter Henderson, the dean of liberal arts at Winona State. Henderson told the Rochester Post-Bulletin, “The future, as I’ve said for the last 20 years, has not been in European languages other than Spanish.”

In the most recent MLA survey on foreign language study in higher education, Arabic and Chinese were the languages with the greatest increases in study. The survey showed that the study of Arabic had increased more than 125 percent, and the study of Chinese had increased more than 50 percent from 2002 to 2006. Enrollments in the less commonly taught languages, and the number of uncommon languages taught increased during this period as well. Although the raw number of students studying foreign languages has increased, the percentage of college students studying foreign languages is only about half of what it was in the 1960s. Spanish maintains its status as the most popular language, accounting for about 50 percent of language study.

Background: English pushes out French in many arenas, France tries to intervene

Winona State University’s dropping of the French major is not the first blow to the French language in recent history.

In New York, the United Nations has seen an increase in the choice of English or Spanish as the working language of diplomats, rather than French. Most of the European countries, former Soviet republics and Arab countries chose to use English as the language they are addressed with at the UN. According to The New York Times, “Factoring in China and India, with over a third of the world’s people, leads to the conclusion that 97 percent of the global population (or rather the elite of those countries) choose English as their international link language.”

The European Union has also seen a move toward English dominance. In 2004, English muscled out French as the common language among diplomats in the EU. English is used to write all financial and economic documents in the EU, reports the Telegraph, and more than 50 percent of all of the EU documents are written in English rather than in French or German (the other two main languages of the Union).

In Africa, English may take over French as the secondary language of many of the people. With much of Africa having been colonized by the French in the late 1800s, the move represents a shift in the language of the global economy, anger in parts of Africa with the history of France colonization, and in some war-torn areas a need to be able to speak with members of the UN (who mostly speak English) in order to stay safe.

France has developed organizations within its borders and beyond to try and preserve the language. The French government has a Commission de Terminologie that regulates the language and protects it from foreign word intrusion, and the Académie française, an elite group of academics in France that publishes the official dictionary of French, acts as the authority of the language.

There are also organizations designed to promote the use of French around the world, such as the Alliance Français and the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie; more than 110 million people speak French worldwide.

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African literature – Oral traditions – The nature of storytelling

April 9, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on Beibee’s blog on 9 April 2009
ByBeibee

African literature

Main

the body of traditional oral and written literatures in Afro-Asiatic and African languages together with works written by Africans in European languages. Traditional written literature, which is limited to a smaller geographic area than is oral literature, is most characteristic of those sub-Saharan cultures that have participated in the cultures of the Mediterranean. In particular, there are written literatures in both Hausa and Arabic, created by the scholars of what is now northern Nigeria, and the Somali people have produced a traditional written literature. There are also works written in Geʿez (Ethiopic) and Amharic, two of the languages of Ethiopia, which is the one part of Africa where Christianity has been practiced long enough to be considered traditional. Works written in European languages date primarily from the 20th century onward. The literature of South Africa in English and Afrikaans is also covered in a separate article, South African literature. See also African theatre.

The relationship between oral and written traditions and in particular between oral and modern written literatures is one of great complexity and not a matter of simple evolution. Modern African literatures were born in the educational systems imposed by colonialism, with models drawn from Europe rather than existing African traditions. But the African oral traditions exerted their own influence on these literatures.

Oral traditions » The nature of storytelling

The storyteller speaks, time collapses, and the members of the audience are in the presence of history. It is a time of masks. Reality, the present, is here, but with explosive emotional images giving it a context. This is the storyteller’s art: to mask the past, making it mysterious, seemingly inaccessible. But it is inaccessible only to one’s present intellect; it is always available to one’s heart and soul, one’s emotions. The storyteller combines the audience’s present waking state and its past condition of semiconsciousness, and so the audience walks again in history, joining its forebears. And history, always more than an academic subject, becomes for the audience a collapsing of time. History becomes the audience’s memory and a means of reliving of an indeterminate and deeply obscure past.

Storytelling is a sensory union of image and idea, a process of re-creating the past in terms of the present; the storyteller uses realistic images to describe the present and fantasy images to evoke and embody the substance of a culture’s experience of the past. These ancient fantasy images are the culture’s heritage and the storyteller’s bounty: they contain the emotional history of the culture, its most deeply felt yearnings and fears, and they therefore have the capacity to elicit strong emotional responses from members of audiences. During a performance, these envelop contemporary images—the most unstable parts of the oral tradition, because they are by their nature always in a state of flux—and thereby visit the past on the present.

It is the task of the storyteller to forge the fantasy images of the past into masks of the realistic images of the present, enabling the performer to pitch the present to the past, to visualize the present within a context of—and therefore in terms of—the past. Flowing through this potent emotional grid is a variety of ideas that have the look of antiquity and ancestral sanction. Story occurs under the mesmerizing influence of performance—the body of the performer, the music of her voice, the complex relationship between her and her audience. It is a world unto itself, whole, with its own set of laws. Images that are unlike are juxtaposed, and then the storyteller reveals—to the delight and instruction of the members of the audience—the linkages between them that render them homologous. In this way the past and the present are blended; ideas are thereby generated, forming a conception of the present. Performance gives the images their context and ensures the audience a ritual experience that bridges past and present and shapes contemporary life.

Storytelling is alive, ever in transition, never hardened in time. Stories are not meant to be temporally frozen; they are always responding to contemporary realities, but in a timeless fashion. Storytelling is therefore not a memorized art. The necessity for this continual transformation of the story has to do with the regular fusing of fantasy and images of the real, contemporary world. Performers take images from the present and wed them to the past, and in that way the past regularly shapes an audience’s experience of the present. Storytellers reveal connections between humans—within the world, within a society, within a family—emphasizing an interdependence and the disaster that occurs when obligations to one’s fellows are forsaken. The artist makes the linkages, the storyteller forges the bonds, tying past and present, joining humans to their gods, to their leaders, to their families, to those they love, to their deepest fears and hopes, and to the essential core of their societies and beliefs.

The language of storytelling includes, on the one hand, image, the patterning of image, and the manipulation of the body and voice of the storyteller and, on the other, the memory and present state of the audience. A storytelling performance involves memory: the recollection of each member of the audience of his experiences with respect to the story being performed, the memory of his real-life experiences, and the similar memories of the storyteller. It is the rhythm of storytelling that welds these disparate experiences, yearnings, and thoughts into the images of the story. And the images are known, familiar to the audience. That familiarity is a crucial part of storytelling. The storyteller does not craft a story out of whole cloth: she re-creates the ancient story within the context of the real, contemporary, known world. It is the metaphorical relationship between these memories of the past and the known images of the world of the present that constitutes the essence of storytelling. The story is never history; it is built of the shards of history. Images are removed from historical contexts, then reconstituted within the demanding and authoritative frame of the story. And it is always a sensory experience, an experience of the emotions. Storytellers know that the way to the mind is by way of the heart. The interpretative effects of the storytelling experience give the members of the audience a refreshed sense of reality, a context for their experiences that has no existence in reality. It is only when images of contemporary life are woven into the ancient familiar images that metaphor is born and experience becomes meaningful.

Stories deal with change: mythic transformations of the cosmos, heroic transformations of the culture, transformations of the lives of everyman. The storytelling experience is always ritual, always a rite of passage; one relives the past and, by so doing, comes to insight about present life. Myth is both a story and a fundamental structural device used by storytellers. As a story, it reveals change at the beginning of time, with gods as the central characters. As a storytelling tool for the creation of metaphor, it is both material and method. The heroic epic unfolds within the context of myth, as does the tale. At the heart of each of these genres is metaphor, and at the core of metaphor is riddle with its associate, proverb. Each of these oral forms is characterized by a metaphorical process, the result of patterned imagery. These universal art forms are rooted in the specificities of the African experience.

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Rwanda: Country’s Unofficial Second Language – Luganda

April 2, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on AllAfrica.com on 2 April 2009
By Sam Ruburika

You no longer hear so much Kirundi or Congolese Lingala or even Swahili spoken on the streets of the country’s major towns. A decade and a half after the end of mass exile for many Rwandans, Kinyarwanda is the preferred mode of communication – with Luganda a close second! And with every passing year it seems as if speakers of the language in this country only increase.

We could find no sociologist to explain the reason behind the language’s growing popularity, so we sent our reporter Sam Ruburika into the streets of Kigali to try to come up with some anecdotal answers to the question.

No question about it, Luganda is a very popular language in and around Kigali, if not in Nyagatare where I was only the other day! Walk into any bar or restaurant and you are likely to hear a conversation like this: “owange, emirimu munnaku zinno si mingi oba tuyiiye kki? That is some Rwandan telling another of the hard economic times he is experiencing. Or, “enkya nkera kwatta baasi ya kumi neemu.” This is another Rwandan informing his girlfriend he will be on a very early bus to some destination.

The interesting thing is that these people are likely to be fluent in their own language, Kinyarwanda, but prefer to communicate in Luganda. Also, this is likely not to be just a case of people who were born in Uganda growing up with the language. The speakers could as well be Rwandans who never lived anywhere near Uganda but for some reason decided to learn that country’s lingua franca.

There are certain areas of Kigali such as Gatsata, Nyabugogo and Giporoso that are well-known as Luganda speaking enclaves.

Immediately after the Genocide these places had an influx of Luganda speakers, Rwandans who either went to Uganda fleeing earlier pogroms and ethnic cleansing campaigns in the early sixties or those born in exile. But Ugandans looking for opportunity in the shell shocked country came in many numbers as well, contributing to disseminating Luganda in the country.

In the invading army, the RPF, the situation was even more pronounced. Almost all the fighting men and women, from the topmost commanders to the lowliest private, they all spoke Luganda. President Kagame himself knows the language. So naturally those fighting men and women who joined the armed struggle from Burundi, the then Zaire, Tanzania and other countries soon became fluent Luganda speakers themselves.

Sounding sexy

Why have so many Rwandans decided to learn Luganda? The first obvious reason is the perception that the most influential people in the government speak the language, so if you want opportunity you better be able to have a serviceable knowledge of it. It doesn’t matter whether or not there is substance to this perception, it still is there.

But many others have no such considerations. Jean Paul Gashugi for instance is a lowly worker in a car repair workshop (garage). But he has a command of Luganda, having learnt it in the workshop. “Understanding the language helped me to learn mechanics because my instructors at the garage spoke Luganda,” Gashugi says.

Others say they learnt Luganda just for the pleasure of it. “My neighbors spoke it and I just liked the language because to me it sounded sexy so as time went on I began speaking the language fluently,” one Alphonse Kayitare remarks.

Commerce also has a role in gaining the language ever newer speakers in Rwanda. Right after the war, almost 90 percent of the imported goods Rwandans consumed either were from Uganda or imported through the country. For businessmen to be able to communicate in Uganda they were forced to learn Luganda.

“When I moved into business after the war, I always took a translator to Uganda to help me purchase goods,” Yves Muvunyi, a Kigali trader says.

Currently many Rwandan traders are involved in cross border trade between the two countries. The continuous movement has necessitated learning of Luganda by Rwandans as it is the trader’s language in Uganda.

A taste for the language

But Luganda’s growth in the country has more reasons. Food for instance. There are numerous restaurants in Kigali that are well known for their Ugandan dishes such as umunyigi, (steamed mashed bananas), Katogo (banana fingers cooked with beef or beans) and many other dishes.

When these restaurants began opening shop Ugandans living in Rwanda and Rwandans with a Ugandan origin were their main clients. However the trend has changed as other Rwandans develop a taste for Ugandan food. And with that a taste for Luganda.

“Whoever enters this restaurant, they are influenced by their friends to try the language and after a few months they can speak a few words well,” Grace Nantongo a restaurant proprietor in Kigali says.

Entertainment has also contributed to Luganda’s popularity among Rwandans. For example, Ugandan music appeals to many Rwandans. This is especially evident with the song requests on popular radio shows such as Ekikesa and Muna U. Ugandan artists like Jose Chameleon and Juliana Kanyomozi are household names.

“I was tired of nagging people to translate Chameleon’s lyrics for me and so I decided to learn Luganda with the help of my friends,” says Solange Iribagiza a teenager of Gikondo.

Luganda is spoken in some offices as one of the languages between employees or while they are chatting on their mobile phones. “Luganda is the easiest language that I feel comfortable discussing in, and talking with friends. In fact I really enjoy speaking the language with my workmates,” says Joyce Mutamba, an employee with Rwanda Motors.

‘Native’ speakers

Some Rwandan party goers prefer to spend their weekends in Kampala due to the night life which they deem a better choice compared to Kigali. Once there they communicate in Luganda, or try to learn it.

On any given weekend in Kampala’s popular night spots, it is not surprising to find throngs of Rwandans who have crossed over. This has also contributed to more Luganda speakers in the country as they share their experiences with friends and relatives. “I learnt Luganda through hanging out with Luganda-speaking friends,” one Rose Kabatesi told this writer.

Some Rwandans cross over to Uganda for visiting purposes and to prove stories that they were told by their counterparts who have been there before. “I have been to Uganda twice but before I went I had got some Luganda lessons from my friends who lived there.”

But one of the biggest reasons Luganda is likely to be around for a long time is that many Rwandan parents take their children to Ugandan schools. They feel these schools will give the offspring a better grounding in English which has rapidly replaced French as the language of the offices and official business.

The children obviously will mix with Ugandan children, and they will learn to speak Luganda like natives-as many already do.

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English language and its rivals in British Parliament

March 29, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on Monitor Online on 28 March 2009
By Prof. Ali A. Mazrui

The English language has rivals within the two British Houses of Parliament. But the rivalry goes beyond the confines of the House of Lords and House of Commons to include global rivals, transnational regional rivals, and rivals within countries.

A world language is defined as one that has at least 300 million speakers, has been adopted by at least 10 countries as the main language of national business, and has spread meaningfully to more than one continent.

Against this definition, distinct rivals to English at the global level are French and Spanish which clearly meet the criteria of recognition as global languages.

Arabic is a global language because of its intimate association with the rituals of Islam. The Muslim population of the world now numbers 1.2 billion people.

In most of the Middle East English is also a regional rival to the existing national languages of Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Turkish. In the Maghreb the English language is a regional rival to both Arabic and French in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt.

English now has a rival in parts of the United States. In Florida, Texas, California and even parts of New York City, Spanish is now widely spoken.

As Presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore found it necessary to display their competence in the Spanish language. The 2000 contest was first US presidential election in over 100 years when the campaign was seriously conducted in more languages than one. In the US, Spanish is a national rival to English.

In Quebec English is regarded as more than a rival. It is deemed an outright adversary to the French language. Many French Canadians regard the linguistic combat as a duel unto death.

Hindi may be a rival to English in India, but this makes Gujerati and Punjabi allies of English, for they fear Hindi more than English. Urdu is a rival to English in Pakistan, but this makes the Sindhi language an ally of English to protect itself.

English does have national rivals in Africa, but emotions about English do not run as high in Africa as they do in Quebec. Afrikaners in South Africa are a little bitter at seeing their language, Afrikaans, treated increasingly more like Zulu than like the English language. Is Afrikaans “just another African language”?

Afrikaners feel bitterer now about their language being treated as being less than English than about its being treated as “another African language.” Being lower than English is a bitterer pill than being the equal of the Zulu language.

In East Africa a major regional rival to English is Kiswahili. In Tanzania English has definitely lost some ground to Kiswahili.

In Kenya both English and Kiswahili have gained at the expense of ethnic languages. In Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo both English and Kiswahili are gaining at the expense of the French language in this new millennium, though the gains are still fragile and could be reversed.

In Sudan Arabic is being successfully pushed at the expense of the English language. In Ethiopia ethnic rivalries between the speakers of Amharic and Tigrinia are giving new opportunities to the English language.

In Somalia the Latin alphabet has gained at the expense of the Arabic alphabet, but because of the chaos in the country it is not clear whether the English language is gaining at the expense of the Arabic language. The Somali language is certainly supreme over them all.

The English language is the most successful language in human history. It has brought more people together than any other tongue. However, in language as in democracy, we need checks and balances.

The same English language which is bringing nations together may be tearing social classes apart. The same English language which is building bridges between ethnic groups may be destroying bridges between generations. Whole languages and cultures are imperiled by the success of the English language.

English is of course today the language which most of the world respects. But in 1912 George Bernard Shaw could make the following observation about the language and the English class structure: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman despise him.”

Prof. Mazrui teaches political science and African studies at State University New York
amazrui@binghamton.edu

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Google in Your Language Project: Afaan Oromoo Goes Global

March 27, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on Gadaa.com on 27 March 2009

By Qeerransoo Biyyaa

Gadaa.comThe Google in Your Language Program is a program launched by Google to help translate Google services (products) into world languages.

The Google language products include Main Search Site, Google Map Maker, Group UI, Knol, Main Site Help Pages, Orkut Frontend Templates, Orkut Mobile, and Picasa3. Each of the products have thousands of technology terms to be translated. Don’t let the jargon confuse you. The pleasure of seeing one’s language go global has been what, I think, made the voluntary translation a huge success for Google. Often, poor people have devoted hours and years of translation for Google, without compensation. Imagine marathon human translators in Africa, making sacrifices for Google and themselves. Within each country, I have witnessed groups competing to make their own languages go global and technological on Google.

I was part of a Google Translation Group known as the Gumii-Dagaagina Afaan Oromoo, established in the US to translate Google products into Afaan Oromoo or Oromo, the language spoken by nearly 50% the Ethiopian population. It struck me to see how the political competition among nationalities in Ethiopia also translated itself into competition to be the first to make one’s language part of the giant search engine on earth. This feels like technological nationalism.

The Afaan Oromoo group started translating Google products in the year 2005. The team was composed of about 40 people. High-profile college and high school students, linguists, and technology geeks were involved. Nevertheless, the high dropout rate of volunteers was a major problem down the line. Qeerransoo Biyyaa persevered to complete two important products 100%, Google Main Search Site and Main Search Help Pages — both important for accessing Google Interface. I congratulate members of the Gumii-Dagaagina Afaan Oromoo for the wonderful work they have done as a team and as individuals. The translation was a huge struggle as a person needs to integrate concepts from technology, language and culture simultaneously. It was sometimes hard to find equivalent technological terms in Oromo or other language from Ethiopia. This is simply because technological terms are as foreign as the technologies themselves to Ethiopia.

So far, Google users from the Horn of Africa have the options of accessing the Google Search Interface in Afaan Oromoo, Amharic, Tigrigna and Somali languages. Healthy competition is okay, folks. We must realize we are using Google’s innovations, not our own. It is okay that every language gets represented so that linguistic plurality will be achieved.

To access Google Interface in your language, all you need to do is go to www.Google.com and click on the link ‘Language Tools’. Then, select and save your preferred language setting. It is fun for multi-lingual people to switch between the original and the translation versions of searches.

For example, Oromo users may want to access Google in their language at the following link:

http://www.google.com/intl/om/

Gadaa.comNote that the typos and inaccuracies across many of the Horn of African languages I mentioned are still annoying, but working options.

Among the Horn of African languages, the competition among languages is as fierce as the competition for power-sharing and representation in a national government.

One hopes that the availability of Google in African languages will play a certain role in improving the unfair New World Information Order, where information flows predominantly from the global NORTH to SOUTH. When Google fully develops support for languages like Afaan Oromoo, Amharic, Tigrigna and Somali etc., information may gradually start to flow in both directions, from South to North and vice versa. If that happens, it can be dubbed ‘the Grand Information Justice’. Naively speaking, information justice can lead to better understanding among world’s nations, peoples, cultures and languages. It can foster more co-operation and friendship among peoples, nations, and ethnic groups.

– California Chronicle

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Israel: The Language of Taxis

March 25, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on Global Voices Online.org on 25 March 2009
By Ayesha Saldanha

This post is also available in Nederlands: Israël: De taal van taxi’s…

Rasha Helwa, who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel living in Acre (and describes herself as living in Palestine), has written a series of short posts at her blog Zaghroda about her thoughts when taking shared taxis, and on the significance of the language – Arabic or Hebrew – that the driver chooses to use.

In her first post, Rasha wonders:

ليش شوفير التاكسي دايمًا متعصبن؟
وليش شوفير التاكسي العربي بحكي مع زميله كمان شوفير تاكسي عربي باللغة العبرية؟
وليش شوفير التاكسي العربي بحط دايمًا موسيقى أو نشرة أخبار بالعبري؟
وليش أنا لما أفوت عَ التاكسي دايمًا بحكي مع الشوفير باللغة العربية؟
وطيب ليش هو بردّ عليّ بالعبري؟وليش شوفير التاكسي اليهودي بحسه دايمًا رايق؟
//
طيب ليش أنا متوقعة إشي تاني يعني؟…
Why are taxi drivers always irritable?
And why does an Arab taxi driver speak to his colleague, also an Arab taxi driver, in Hebrew?
And why do Arab taxi drivers always put on Hebrew music and news?
And why, when I get into a taxi, do I always speak to the driver in Arabic?
And then, why does he answer me in Hebrew?
And why do I feel Jewish taxi drivers are always at ease?
//
And then, why do I ever expect anything else?

In a second post she recounts a specific incident:

مبارح، وأنا بالطريق من حيفا لعكا، بالتاكسي طبعًا..
ومع شوفير تاكسي عربي.
//
طلعت صبية سمرا بالطريق معنا بالتاكسي، الصبية عكاوية، هيك لاحظت من لهجتها.
أول ما ركبت بالتاكسي، مقدرتش تسكت (شكلها اللي بقلبها عَ راس لسانها!) وسألته بنبرة قوية:”إنتِ ليش حاطط أخبار بالعبراني؟ ومرة بتحطوا أغاني بالعبراني؟ شو قصتكو؟”
//
الشوفير العربي، ضلت أعصابه هادي، وردّ عليها بالردّ المتوقع:”لو إحنا مسافرين من عكا لقرية المكر كُنت بحط أغاني عربي..بس من حيفا لعكا بزبطش!”
الصبية السمرا جاوبته بسرعة:”هاد إسمه ضعف شخصية!”
//
كل واحد بقدر يحط مليون جملة غير اللي قالتها الصبية السمرا، وبتزبط.
وأنا ضحكت بقلبي وقتها
Yesterday, I was on the way from Haifa to Acre, by taxi of course…and with an Arab taxi driver.
//
A dark-skinned girl got into the taxi with us on the way, a girl from Acre, from what I noticed of her dialect.
When she first got into the taxi, she couldn’t keep quiet (it seemed like what was in her heart was on the tip of her tongue!). And she asked him [the driver] in a strong accent, “Why have you put on the news in Hebrew? And another time you put on Hebrew songs – what’s the deal?”
//
The Arab driver stayed calm, and answered her in the expected manner: “If we were going from Acre to Al Maker village [east of Acre] I would have put on Arabic songs…But that’s no good from Haifa to Acre!”
The dark-skinned girl quickly answered him, “That’s what’s known as weakness of character.”
//
Every person can think of a million lines apart from the one the dark-skinned girl said which would have been good.
As for me, at the time I laughed in my heart.

In her third post Rasha is left wondering:

اليوم، كان شوي رمادي
سافرت من حيفا لعكا، بالتاكسي أكيد.
مقدرتش أعرف بالزبط شو هوية الشوفير.
يمكن لأنه ما حكى مع الرُكاب
يمكن لأنه مصرخش على ولا أي شوفير
ويمكن لأنه كان حاطط موسيقي بدون كلمات.
//
ويمكن لأنه الموسيقى شغلتلي بالي أكتر من أي إشي تاني
Today it was a little dusty.
I went from Haifa to Acre, by taxi of course.
I couldn’t quite make out the identity of the driver.
Perhaps because he didn’t talk to the passengers.
Perhaps he didn’t shout at me or at any driver.
Perhaps because he put on music that had no words.
//
And perhaps because the music preoccupied my thoughts more than anything else.
You can find more on Rasha’s blog at http://zaghroda.blogspot.com/
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I can’t speak Hokkien, so I’m learning Swahili

March 22, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on Asia One Electric News on 22 March 2009

By Ng Tze Yong

HABARI za asubuhi, babu, wariye?

Before you hit ‘send’ on a complaint e-mail, be assured that’s not a keyboard error.

It’s Swahili for: ‘Good morning, ah kong, eat already or not?’

If you’re still in school, picture the day you become an ‘ah kong’ (grandfather in Chinese).

When your grandkids come bouncing along to visit you as you lounge in your wheelchair, what language will they use?

It may be English or Mandarin or, who knows, perhaps Swahili.

That’s right. Swahili – one of Africa’s mother tongues.

Economies can rise and fall in a single generation. For all we know, business or cultural opportunities might spring up in Africa.

It’s got people (almost a billion of them). It’s got resources (it’s where those blood diamonds came from). So, despite its current woes, let’s not rule out Africa in the 22nd century.

If this comes to pass, we’ll probably embrace Swahili because Singaporeans know very well that for a small country to survive and thrive in an ever-changing world, we must go with the linguistic flow.

So say ‘jambo’ (hello in Swahili).

(It’s actually easier than Mandarin!)

Appreciating language as culture

Together with the pragmatic learners of language (those who embrace its utilitarian value), hopefully there will also be those who seek out new languages out of a broad appreciation of different cultures.

All languages have stories to tell. And many are going extinct.

As a French academic noted, ‘half of the 6,000 or so languages in the world today are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people and a quarter by less than 1,000. Only a score are spoken by hundreds of millions of people.’

So, many cultures will disappear without leaving any trace as languages die. At least 30,000 have already vanished.

‘Languages usually have a relatively short life span as well as a very high death rate. Only a few, including Basque, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit and Tamil, have lasted more than 2,000 years,’ says Mr Ranka Bjeljac-Babic, from the University of Poitiers.

So, how would I feel if my grandkids come up to me spouting a new language?

I’d feel what my own ah kong feels now – resignation, that his own grandson can’t speak Hokkien to save his life.

But just as he tries to keep up with the times – the one and only English word he knows is ‘good’ – I’ll try too.

‘Nzuri,’ I’ll say.

Good that the young are reaching out to other languages and cultures.

Good that the stories embedded in languages are being kept alive.

But not so good if our own stories wither away due to the neglect of the languages we grew up with.

If only we could all learn three or more languages. But unfortunately for most people, the human brain is not wired to learn so many.

Now, what’s the word for ‘pity’ in Swahili?

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In what language do deaf people think?

March 19, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on StraightDope.com on 19 March 2009

By Cecil Adams, December 26, 2003

Dear Cecil:

In what language do deaf people think? I think in English, because that’s what I speak. But since deaf people cannot hear, they can’t learn how to speak a language. Nevertheless, they must think in some language. Would they think in English if they use sign language and read English? How would they do that if they’ve never heard the words they are signing or reading pronounced? Or maybe they just see words in their head, instead of hearing themselves?

— Cathy, Malvern, Pennsylvania

You’re on the right track, kid. But first a little detour. Your speculations raise a larger question: Can you think without language? Answer: Nope, at least not at the level humans are accustomed to. That’s why deafness can have far more serious consequences than blindness, developmentally speaking. The blind suffer many hardships, not the least of which is the inability to read in the usual manner. But even those sightless from birth acquire language by ear without difficulty in infancy, and having done so lead relatively ordinary lives. A congenitally deaf child isn’t so lucky: unless someone realizes very early that he’s not talking because he can’t hear, his grasp of communication may never progress beyond the rudiments.

The language of the deaf is a vast topic that has filled lots of books–one of the best is Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf by Oliver Sacks (1989). All I can do in this venue is sketch out a few basic propositions:

The folks at issue here are both (a) profoundly and (b) prelingually deaf. If you don’t become totally deaf until after you’ve acquired language, your problems are . . . well, not minor, but manageable. You think in whatever spoken language you’ve learned. Given some commonsense accommodation during schooling, you’ll progress normally intellectually. Depending on circumstances you may be able to speak and lip-read.

About one child in a thousand, however, is born with no ability to hear whatsoever. Years ago such people were called deaf-mutes. Often they were considered retarded, and in a sense they were: they’d never learned language, a process that primes the pump for much later development. The critical age range seems to be 21 to 36 months. During this period children pick up the basics of language easily, and in so doing establish essential cognitive infrastructure. Later on it’s far more difficult. If the congenitally deaf aren’t diagnosed before they start school, they may face severe learning problems for the rest of their lives, even if in other respects their intelligence is normal.

The profoundly, prelingually deaf can and do acquire language; it’s just gestural rather than verbal. The sign language most commonly used in the U.S. is American Sign Language, sometimes called Ameslan or just Sign. Those not conversant in Sign may suppose that it’s an invented form of communication like Esperanto or Morse code. It’s not. It’s an independent natural language, evolved by ordinary people and transmitted culturally from one generation to the next. It bears no relationship to English and in some ways is more similar to Chinese–a single highly inflected gesture can convey an entire word or phrase. (Signed English, in which you’ll sometimes see words spelled out one letter at a time, is a completely different animal.) Sign can be acquired effortlessly in early childhood–and by anyone, not just the deaf (e.g., hearing children of deaf parents). Those who do so use it as fluently as most Americans speak English. Sign equips native users with the ability to manipulate symbols, grasp abstractions, and actively acquire and process knowledge–in short, to think, in the full human sense of the term. Nonetheless, “oralists” have long insisted that the best way to educate the deaf is to teach them spoken language, sometimes going so far as to suppress signing. Sacks and many deaf folk think this has been a disaster for deaf people.

The answer to your question is now obvious. In what language do the profoundly deaf think? Why, in Sign (or the local equivalent), assuming they were fortunate enough to have learned it in infancy. The hearing can have only a general idea what this is like–the gulf between spoken and visual language is far greater than that between, say, English and Russian. Research suggests that the brain of a native deaf signer is organized differently from that of a hearing person. Still, sometimes we can get a glimpse. Sacks writes of a visit to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where hereditary deafness was endemic for more than 250 years and a community of signers, most of whom hear normally, still flourishes. He met a woman in her 90s who would sometimes slip into a reverie, her hands moving constantly. According to her daughter, she was thinking in Sign. “Even in sleep, I was further informed, the old lady might sketch fragmentary signs on the counterpane,” Sacks writes. “She was dreaming in Sign.”

— Cecil Adams

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How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour

March 19, 2009 — lingoproz

Found on FourHourWorkWeek.com on 19 March 2009

By Tim Ferriss

arabic-script.jpg
Deconstructing Arabic in 45 Minutes

deconstructing-russian.jpg
Conversational Russian in 60 minutes?

This post is by request. How long does it take to learn Chinese or Japanese vs. Spanish or Irish Gaelic? I would argue less than an hour.

Here’s the reasoning…

Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it. During my thesis research at Princeton, which focused on neuroscience and unorthodox acquisition of Japanese by native English speakers, as well as when redesigning curricula for Berlitz, this neglected deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners…

So far, I’ve deconstructed Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Norwegian, Irish Gaelic, Korean, and perhaps a dozen others. I’m far from perfect in these languages, and I’m terrible at some, but I can converse in quite a few with no problems whatsoever—just ask the MIT students who came up to me last night and spoke in multiple languages.

How is it possible to become conversationally fluent in one of these languages in 2-12 months? It starts with deconstructing them, choosing wisely, and abandoning all but a few of them.

Consider a new language like a new sport.

There are certain physical prerequisites (height is an advantage in basketball), rules (a runner must touch the bases in baseball), and so on that determine if you can become proficient at all, and—if so—how long it will take.

Languages are no different. What are your tools, and how do they fit with the rules of your target?

If you’re a native Japanese speaker, respectively handicapped with a bit more than 20 phonemes in your language, some languages will seem near impossible. Picking a compatible language with similar sounds and word construction (like Spanish) instead of one with a buffet of new sounds you cannot distinguish (like Chinese) could make the difference between having meaningful conversations in 3 months instead of 3 years.

Let’s look at few of the methods I recently used to deconstructed Russian and Arabic to determine if I could reach fluency within a 3-month target time period. Both were done in an hour or less of conversation with native speakers sitting next to me on airplanes.

Six Lines of Gold

Here are a few questions that I apply from the outset. The simple versions come afterwards:

1. Are there new grammatical structures that will postpone fluency? (look at SOV vs. SVO, as well as noun cases)

2. Are there new sounds that will double or quadruple time to fluency? (especially vowels)

3. How similar is it to languages I already understand? What will help and what will interfere? (Will acquisition erase a previous language? Can I borrow structures without fatal interference like Portuguese after Spanish?)

4. All of which answer: How difficult will it be, and how long would it take to become functionally fluent?

It doesn’t take much to answer these questions. All you need are a few sentences translated from English into your target language.

Some of my favorites, with reasons, are below:

The apple is red.
It is John’s apple.
I give John the apple.
We give him the apple.
He gives it to John.
She gives it to him.

These six sentences alone expose much of the language, and quite a few potential deal killers.

First, they help me to see if and how verbs are conjugated based on speaker (both according to gender and number). I’m also able to immediately identify an uber-pain in some languages: placement of indirect objects (John), direct objects (the apple), and their respective pronouns (him, it). I would follow these sentences with a few negations (“I don’t give…”) and different tenses to see if these are expressed as separate words (“bu” in Chinese as negation, for example) or verb changes (“-nai” or “-masen” in Japanese), the latter making a language much harder to crack.

Second, I’m looking at the fundamental sentence structure: is it subject-verb-object (SVO) like English and Chinese (“I eat the apple”), is it subject-object-verb (SOV) like Japanese (“I the apple eat”), or something else? If you’re a native English speaker, SOV will be harder than the familiar SVO, but once you pick one up (Korean grammar is almost identical to Japanese, and German has a lot of verb-at-the-end construction), your brain will be formatted for new SOV languages.

Third, the first three sentences expose if the language has much-dreaded noun cases. What are noun cases? In German, for example, “the” isn’t so simple. It might be der, das, die, dem, den and more depending on whether “the apple” is an object, indirect object, possessed by someone else, etc. Headaches galore. Russian is even worse. This is one of the reasons I continue to put it off.

All the above from just 6-10 sentences! Here are two more:

I must give it to him.
I want to give it to her.

These two are to see if auxiliary verbs exist, or if the end of the each verb changes. A good short-cut to independent learner status, when you no longer need a teacher to improve, is to learn conjugations for “helping” verbs like “to want,” “to need,” “to have to,” “should,” etc. In Spanish and many others, this allows you to express yourself with “I need/want/must/should” + the infinite of any verb. Learning the variations of a half dozen verbs gives you access to all verbs. This doesn’t help when someone else is speaking, but it does help get the training wheels off self-expression as quickly as possible.

If these auxiliaries are expressed as changes in the verb (often the case with Japanese) instead of separate words (Chinese, for example), you are in for a rough time in the beginning.

Sounds and Scripts

I ask my impromptu teacher to write down the translations twice: once in the proper native writing system (also called “script” or “orthography”), and again in English phonetics, or I’ll write down approximations or use IPA.

If possible, I will have them take me through their alphabet, giving me one example word for each consonant and vowel. Look hard for difficult vowels, which will take, in my experience, at least 10 times longer to master than any unfamiliar consonant or combination thereof (”tsu” in Japanese poses few problems, for example). Think Portuguese is just slower Spanish with a few different words? Think again. Spend an hour practicing the “open” vowels of Brazilian Portuguese. I recommend you get some ice for your mouth and throat first.

russian-alphabet.jpg
The Russian Phonetic Menu, and…

reading-real-russian.jpg
Reading Real Cyrillic 20 Minutes Later

Going through the characters of a language’s writing system is really only practical for languages that have at least one phonetic writing system of 50 or fewer sounds—Spanish, Russian, and Japanese would all be fine. Chinese fails since tones multiply variations of otherwise simple sounds, and it also fails miserably on phonetic systems. If you go after Mandarin, choose the somewhat uncommon GR over pinyin romanization if at all possible. It’s harder to learn at first, but I’ve never met a pinyin learner with tones even half as accurate as a decent GR user. Long story short, this is because tones are indicated by spelling in GR, not by diacritical marks above the syllables.

In all cases, treat language as sport.

Learn the rules first, determine if it’s worth the investment of time (will you, at best, become mediocre?), then focus on the training. Picking your target is often more important than your method.

[To be continued?]

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