If I ran a museum…

After my sons’ enthusiastic response to National Chocolate Chip Day on Tuesday, I decided to look for s0me more “days” to celebrate. But before I even got started, I opened an email from APTE (a provider of educational resources) and found out that today is International Museum Day.

I started thinking about what museum to visit this weekend. Then I realized that my son has a Boy Scout campout this weekend, so the museums will have to wait for another weekend. But in the meantime, I got thinking about the idea of museums.

The APTE email informed me that “the word museum literally means a seat or shrine to the muses. In Greek mythology the nine muses were brought to life to rid the world of evil and sorrow. Their job was to protect art and knowledge.”

Building a medieval monastery

A lot of people in today’s society long for a simpler lifestyle, with less technology, fewer consumer goods, and a less hectic pace. But how many would want to try out a 9th century way of living and working?

A German building contractor could give them that opportunity. Bert Geurten plans to build a monastery town the same way it would have been done back in the 9th century. He will use the Plan of St. Gall, which provides a blueprint for a medieval town and monastery.

Books: The Last Lingua Franca

I came across mention of this book when I was doing a post, several weeks ago, about using the computer to translate from one language to another. Since I’m interested in anything to do with languages, I immediately put in a request for the book from the library.

Naturally, all the books I had requested became available the same week. I was sure I would like this one, so I started with it. It proved a much more difficult read than I had expected, however, so it was the last one of those that I finished.

The basic premise of The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel, as indicated by the title, is that English will eventually cease to operate as a global lingua franca, but no other language will take its place. Nicholas Ostler doesn’t make this argument until the very end of the book, however. All the previous chapters are laying groundwork, showing the history behind the rise and fall of various languages that have at some point served for communication among people who do not share a mother tongue.

Computer as translator

As a lover of language and languages, I was intrigued but bothered by the opening lines of an article I read this week at The Hot Word (dictionary.com’s blog). “Back in the 1940s, mathematician Warren Weaver made an audacious suggestion: what if translation was not a feat of literary theory and linguistics, but one of cryptography?” The rest of the article indicates that Weaver was on the right track, as evidenced by both Google Translate, and the recent success of some cryptographers in decoding the Copiale Cipher.

I think computers are great tools, and it wouldn’t surprise me if eventually they could be programmed to understand and use human languages fairly well. But to do it by the tools of mathematics rather than linguistics? Besides, even humans often do a poor job of translation (Charles Berlitz gives some very amusing examples in his book Native Tongues) – how could a computer possibly do better?

I decided to check out Google Translate. I took a sentence from the article I had just been reading, and pasted it into Google Translate. It didn’t matter much which language I translated it into, since my aim was to re-translate it to English and see how this compared with the original. I chose Russian. The result was not perfect, but better than I expected.

Original sentence: By making a machine-readable version of the text, a team of computational linguistics were able to run the characters through a software program that found patterns in the text, which were otherwise inscrutable.

Russian translation: Делая машиночитаемой версии текста, команда компьютерной лингвистики смогли запустить персонажей через программное обеспечение, которое обнаружили закономерности в тексте, которые в противном случае неисповедимы.

Back to English: Making the machine-readable version of the text, Computational Linguistics team were able to run characters through software, which found a pattern in the text, which otherwise inscrutable.

By way of comparison, Babel Fish produced this when translating the same sentence to Russian and then back to English: “With way to make machine-readable the version from the text, the command of computational linguistics could break into a run natures to the program of software which it found the pictures in the text, which were otherwise inscrutable.” Yes, definitely inscrutable.

Books: Outwitting History

I had never heard of Aaron Lansky or his book, Outwitting History, when I found it at the top of a box of books my sister sent me recently. It’s the sort of book I would have read years ago if I had known about it (it was published in 2005). It has everything – history, especially regarding the Jewish people, books, a foreign language, lots of stories about interesting people and places, and a handful of idealists engaged in a seemingly impossible task.

I know no more Yiddish than a handful of those words that have made their way into English (and I had no idea that some of these were Yiddish until now). I’m sure many of my ancestors on my mother’s side spoke Yiddish, but she never considered herself Jewish despite her ancestry (her father brought her up in Christian Science), and I grew up without any idea of the rich cultural heritage that was lost to me.

From various books I have read about languages, I knew something about Yiddish, but I don’t know if I ever gave any thought as to whether there were books written in the language. As Lansky explains, it was primarily a spoken language, but for about a hundred years or so there was a remarkable outpouring of literary output in Yiddish. Then the tides of history turned, and Yiddish became a dying language.

Lansky and his friends started looking for Yiddish books in order to help them learn Yiddish, initially for the purpose of academic study (at least in Lansky’s case). Like other young Jews, Lansky had not grown up speaking Yiddish. But unlike so many others, he wanted to save the books treasured by the older generations, rather than throwing them out as a relic of an embarrassing past.

Books: Hiroshima in the Morning

When I first heard about this book, I had no plans to read it. I was sitting in the waiting room at Meineke while getting an oil change before leaving for Michigan to take our son back to college. I had brought along a library book and I tried to focus on what I was reading instead of listening to the talk show on TV. During the first talk show I mostly succeeded, but the interview on Oprah’s show caught my attention from time to time.

There was a woman talking about how she never wanted to be a mother. She had gone to Japan to do some research, initially encouraged to do so by her husband. During the months she spent there, apart from him and her young sons, she found herself changing, or perhaps she had never been the person she and everyone had assumed she was. She didn’t divorce her husband right away, but she sees that time apart as having been when the marriage began to unravel.

I read somewhere that she came to regret the decision, but I heard no regret in that interview a couple of weeks ago. She had married young, had never been on her own before the trip to Japan, and had never had the opportunity to choose on her own what kind of person she wanted to be. Her husband wanted children, and promised to be their primary caregiver. So she had become a mother despite her own misgivings.

A fantastic writer

fan·tas·tic [fan-tas-tik]
1. conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination
2. extravagantly fanciful; marvelous
3. incredibly great or extreme

Unless you’ve studied Spanish, chances are that you haven’t read much, if anything, by Jorge Luis Borges. I’m sure his works are available in English translations, but I don’t recall seeing any when I’ve browsed in bookstores (where I do remember seeing translations of books by other Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa).

It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by Borges, but for a few years he was my favorite author. I first read something by him when I had been studying Spanish for less than a year (but at an accelerated rate, equal to at least two years of college Spanish) and I didn’t understand everything, but I was hooked. I read everything by him I could get my hands on.

Then a few years later, after my miserable experiences as a Spanish teacher, I boxed up most of my Spanish books and had little desire to read even my favorites. I thought I’d eventually get back to them, but I never did. I got married and started reading some of my husband’s favorite books, most science fiction/fantasy. I had kids and spent time reading parenting magazines and children’s books. My husband went to seminary and I was thrilled to have a large range of theology books available to me (both his textbooks and in the seminary library).

I hadn’t thought about Borges in a very long time, until I went to Google this morning and discovered their Doodle celebrating what would have been Borges’ 112th birthday. Between nostalgia for the delight I had found in reading his works, and curiosity what people know and think about him, I checked out some links regarding the man and his work.

Language without abstraction

I’ve been working on ideas for a speech I’m giving Saturday (for a Toastmasters contest), and one idea (which I’m thinking now won’t really work but I haven’t figured out what to do instead) had to do with the importance of words vs numbers. (Think of King Azaz and the Mathemagician in The Phantom Tollbooth.) I remembered having read about a language that has few if any numbers, where people manage with just words like “few” and “more.”

Looking for more information, I came across this fascinating article about the Pirahã, a tribe in northwestern Brazil. Don Everett, a linguist who first went there as a missionary with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, probably knows as much of their language as anyone else outside the tribe. Their language not only lacks numbers, Everett says, but any kind of abstractions. They have no interest in the distant past or future, or in anything that they cannot experience directly.

Imagine the challenges that presents to someone trying to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. I have read a number of accounts of the difficulties Bible translators have with languages that don’t have words that are key to understanding Bible stories and concepts. But I never heard before of a language without any abstract words.

Some linguists think that Everett is wrong. His claims fly in the face of much of what is widely accepted in academic circles regarding language and linguistics, particularly the theories advanced by Noam Chomsky. Everett himself was once an enthusiastic disciple of Chomsky, until he realized that the Pirahã language simply didn’t fit the theories.

I once thought I would spend my life doing what Don Everett and his wife Keren headed to the Amazon to do. Keren still works at learning Pirahã, with the goal of translating Scripture into their language. Don now considers himself an atheist, and his interest in Pirahã is for the language itself. The couple separated years ago, after Don concluded that he found no more spiritual meaning in the Bible than the Pirahã do. (Don did succeed in translating some passages, but the stories elicited no interest among the people of this tribe.)

I have long thought that one strong bit of evidence for a spiritual dimension to life is that people of all times and cultures have spiritual experiences and beliefs (not all people, but some people in all cultures). That the Pirahã do not (if Don Everett’s understanding is correct) does not weaken my belief in spiritual realities. But it is strange.

Books: In the Company of Others

When I started reading the book that first introduced Father Tim, At Home in Mitford, I was entranced from the first page. This second book in the Father Tim series (which follows the Mitford series) took several chapters to draw me into the story. But I’m glad I kept reading, because In the Company of Others is as full of mixed-up people finding the difficult but wonderful way back to God as the Mitford books were.

In fact, it’s even more full of mixed-up people, and part of the difficulty in reading it is keeping track of them. There are the other visitors at the fishing lodge, the family and staff who run the place, as well as related family at the big manor house nearby. The fact that there is a mystery about just how some of the people are related just makes it that much more confusing to sort them out. And there are not just the people in the present whom Father Tim and Cynthia interact with, but also those whose lives are recounted in a dusty old journal that Father Tim and Cynthia are reading during their vacation in Ireland.

This journal is probably the biggest complaint readers have about the book. No one but Father Tim and Cynthia wants to read it, because “‘t is long-winded as any politician…” But the retired priest and his wife are fascinated by this special window into the life of a nineteenth century American-trained Irish country doctor. (They became so caught up in the lives of these long-dead people that they found themselves praying for them.) I found many of the journal passages boring myself, but forced myself to read them because Karon obviously considered them an integral part of the story.

For people with an interest in Ireland and its history (which no doubt includes Jan Karon, who did a great deal of research for this book), the novel may be a special treat. (The flyleaf indicates that Karon considers it her favorite.) I didn’t have too much trouble with the written Irish brogue, which some readers find more difficult. I enjoy historical fiction, particularly of the British Isles, so I took some interest in the history recounted in the journal. But I think I would rather have read a book entirely devoted to that story, rather than just the diary excerpts mixed into another book.

The peculiarities of human character and their interactions with one another are always central to Karon’s books, with Father Tim usually being the one to also point people the way to interact with God as well. Here on vacation, with his wife largely confined to her room due to an injured ankle, he becomes the confidant people turn to in their distress – even though they are Catholic and he is a Protestant. As he did in Mitford, and everywhere he goes, he listens, he counsels (including hard advice, like forgiveness instead of bitterness, and listening instead of making promises), and he reminds people of God’s gracious love.

People in pain do not easily take his advice. Reconciliation with people who have hurt each other many times over the years is not easy, nor is reconciliation with a God who has not made life easy either for those who follow him or those who do not. But those who are willing to accept His help to reconcile with each other and with Him find the blessing of doing so, and hope for the future even though their troubles do not go away (especially as many of their troubles are of their own making).

Just to make us think

I don’t know exactly what the Wall Street Journal’s reason was to publish this controversial essay about Chinese mothers (other than the obvious, to sell newspapers), but I think it’s good food for thought, no matter what you think of the opinions expressed in the essay.

Hearing a view very different from your own (and I would guess that most readers of my blog would have views much closer to the typical Western parent than the Chinese mother who wrote this essay) can make you see your own views a little differently. Maybe you don’t change your views, but having to think why you hold them is good – better than having those same views without thinking them through.

And maybe thinking about those different views helps you consider that there might be some good points in the opposite view also. After all, why is it that some people do hold such views so tenaciously?

My own inclination is always to guess that the best answer lies somewhere between two extremes. In the context of the article, I would say that typical Western parents can learn from the Chinese about having high expectations, and being willing to do the difficult work of insisting on high standards being met – despite strong resistance from children.

Based on some of the comments (though I read only a few of the 2500+ comments), it’s not at all clear how typical the views of the essay’s author are, among Chinese parents. But however many do hold those views, and see them as superior to the typical Western view (and I don’t know just how typical that view is either, though I would guess pretty widespread), they can learn something from the Western point of view. Not every child can be the best – obviously. There are valuable traits and skills that may not manifest themselves in high grades and awards.

I can’t help but lean more towards the Western view, but it’s worth stopping to ask myself why.

How much of our views comes from the culture we live in? How much from our individual experience (including direct observation of others we know personally)?

Is there one best way to parent? What are the unintended consequences of both parenting styles described?

Must stability in society always be at odds with innovation? If one has to err on one side or the other, which has the better long-term consequences?

Is it possible for everyone to be special? If so, what does it mean to be special?

What do you do with the low achievers in society?

I almost didn’t read the article, because the headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” didn’t sound like it could be intended to do anything but grab attention and provoke strong reactions. But I’m glad I did read it. Because it made me think, and that’s always a good thing.