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.

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.

Multilingual texting

This evening our older son (who is home from college for three weeks) was chatting online with a friend from high school, who is currently an exchange student in France. Jokingly I asked what language they were chatting in, knowing that my son chose to study German when Spanish did not fit into his high school schedule, because he hated the sound of spoken French.

Naturally they were chatting in English, but it made me wonder what chatting in French would look like. I typically write out words in full even in online chat. (I knew a few texting abbreviations, but something in me resists using them.) But I know that people who text regularly become adept at squeezing a lot of meaning into relatively few letters. Often it is by leaving out a lot of vowels – what would that do in a language full of vowels like Spanish or Italian?

I found it somewhat difficult to find examples, though I wasn’t initially sure if that was just because it was difficult to find search terms that would not turn up too much other material. Anytime I put “foreign languages” in my search, I got references to texting as a “foreign language.” When I tried specific languages such as French or German, I got links to online translation services or dictionaries.

I did find a few, but I stopped looking after reading this very informative article on the whole texting phenomenon and whether it will “degrade” the language. Author David Crystal explains that people seem particularly reluctant to share their text messages “with an inquiring linguist.” (Are they afraid, perhaps, of having their communication analyzed by someone who will find it lacking?)

In addition to that, when it comes to finding examples in other languages, there is the fact that so many speakers of other languages incorporate elements from English into their texting. As Crystal explains, English is seen as “cool.” However, I found another article that offers numerous examples from various languages.

Here are some examples from the two articles, along with a few I had found on my own. As you can see, other languages do the same trick of using numbers that sound like parts of words.

German
HDGDL = Hab dich ganz doll lieb (I love you completely doll)
aws = auf wiedersehen (good-bye)
gn8 = gute nacht  (good night) [Note: 8 = acht]
8ung! = Achtung! (Careful!)
BS = Bis Später (see you later)

French
BAP = bon après-midi (Good afternoon)
stp = s’il te plait (please)
koi29 = quoi de neuf (What’s new?) [Note: 2 = deux, 9 = neuf]
MDR = mort de rire (the equivalent of LOL)
PDP = pas de problème (no worries)

Spanish
tq = te quiero (I love you)
sl2 = saludos (greetings – for either hello or good-bye) [Note: 2 = dos]
a2 = adios (good-bye)
nka = nunca (never)
mx = mucho (much)
qndo = cuando (when)

I did finally find a lengthy list of French texting abbreviations. My son’s friend has struggled with learning to speak French. I wonder if she knows how to text en français.

Movies: Tortilla Soup

I suppose it’s not very Irish to watch a Hispanic movie on St. Patrick’s Day, but what can I say? I’m not Irish (though I am wearing a green T-shirt with a beautiful golden dragon against a background of Celtic knotwork). Of course, I’m not Hispanic either, but having studied Spanish and lived in a Spanish-speaking country, I became particularly interested in their culture.

Tortilla Soup was recommended to me by a co-worker from Brazil. He was born in Argentina, so he speaks Spanish as well as Portuguese – and good English as well. He had watched the movie one weekend, and he loved the music in the movie. He told me he thought I would enjoy it also. (He knows I speak Spanish, and I have attempted to learn a few phrases of Portuguese also.)

Based on his comment, I was expecting music to be part of the storyline, rather than just background for the action (as it is in just about any movie). Instead, the art form that plays a lead role is cooking, as the movie is about a widowed master chef and his three grown daughters, who live with him. He is losing his sense of taste and smell – a very bad thing for a chef. And it seems that he is losing his daughters also, as they are trying to find their own way in life – an American way of life – without asking his advice and following the traditional ways.

My husband said it seemed like a Hispanic version of Fiddler on the Roof, with conflict between the traditional father and his daughters. As it is set in the present, the daughters have not only love interests but also careers. And in Tortilla Soup, there is also the question of a love interest for the father, who has been widowed for fifteen years.

I learned from imdb.com that it is actually a Hispanic version of a Taiwanese film, Yin shi nan nu (Eat, Drink, Man, Woman). The screenplay of both movies was written by Ang Lee, and one viewer review pointed out that the dialog is almost word-for-word the same in both movies – except, I’m sure, for the obvious differences in language and cuisine.

If I had been told that the movie was about four women and their romantic interests, I doubt I would have been interested. The movie is rated PG-13 for sexual content, but the suggestive content was limited mostly to one scene, one comment in a later scene, and a brief scene showing a woman in only bra and panties emerging from a bedroom. Mostly, though, the movie is about people and their relationships – not only man and woman but father and daughter, the three sisters, and the chef’s friendship with his longtime partner at the restaurant.

Every one of the relationships seems strained nearly to breaking at times. I usually hate seeing people make fools of themselves on the screen, as I feel so embarrassed for them. But the struggles in these relationships are so typical of real life, and they are believable also in the way they are resolved. There’s not a happy ending to every relationship, but there is a happy ending to the movie.

I wonder if next I want to see Yin shi nan nu with English subtitles.

Bible for the Future

Unless you are quite young, or avoided using computers until recently, you know how much the technology has changed in just a few decades. I never used a computer until the mid-80′s, and when I took my first computer classes we kept our files on 5¼” floppy diskettes. You’d be hard pressed to find a computer today that could read one of those. Even the smaller 3½” diskettes (still called “floppy” to distinguish them from hard drives, although their plastic cases were rigid) that replaced them are obsolete now.

We still have some old 3½” diskettes, but only one of the computers on our home network has the floppy drive to read them. (An even older computer has the drive, but no way to transfer the data to our newer computers.) Any of them can read the dozens (hundreds?) of CDs, even the newest computer with its DVD drive. But it’s not hard to imagine a time not so far in the future that today’s CDs would be as hard to read as the old floppy diskettes are today. (I’ve seen the even older 8″ floppies, but never worked on a computer that could read one.)

In the business world, where data has generally been backed up on magnetic tape, a similar process has taken place. I worked with at least three different tape cartridge formats during the seventeen years I was responsible for system backup, and I have seen others. Data that was expected to be needed into the future was kept online, or converted to a newer format, but much archived data was left on the older, now unreadable cartridges.

Corporate IT departments have long been aware of this issue and make arrangements accordingly. A product liability suit may require being able to produce details on some long-ago transaction. Good customer service requires having good records on even very old products, for the purpose of repair and parts replacement. Keeping the needed data available is not cheap, but it needs to be done. And like all their other expenses, they plan for it in their budget, and pass the cost along to their customers.

I never thought about it until today, but non-profits probably are less likely to be so thorough. Chronically faced with needs greater than the donations coming in, the highest priority will generally be meeting current needs, rather than allowing for some hypothetical need to retrieve data from long-completed projects.

When the product itself is information, I would have thought that the situation would be different. But today I interviewed a woman from church about the volunteer work she is learning to do for Wycliffe Associates, so I can write an article for the church newsletter. (It’s not the typical newsletter, giving news of coming events – that is now distributed via email. This one is produced quarterly, and highlights various people and ministries in the church.)

She will be transcribing passages of Scripture using format markers that identify each element of a printed page – book, chapter, and verse divisions, section headings, cross references, paragraph starts, indented text (such as poetry), and more. I was initially puzzled by the need for this, since the source material she receives will already be formatted. But a printed page can be produced in many ways – a word processor (which may be any one of several competing software brands), a graphic image of the page, or a pdf file. It may even have been typed on a typewriter, in which case it exists only on that piece of paper.

If you want to print the Bible, you don’t want to have Genesis in WordPerfect (we’ll assume it was done a while ago), Exodus in Microsoft Word, Numbers in an old unsupported version of Microsoft Word, Leviticus in plain text, Deuteronomy in a pdf, and so on. Unlike a big corporation, missions agencies can’t make sure their people in the field all have the latest version of one approved brand of software (assuming they do have computers). And it’s hardly the best use of their time to have to concern themselves with page layout, when their primary objective is translating the text of Scripture.

In addition, there are apparently many Bible translations that are now out of print, and whatever source was using to make the print run is now gone. I guess I would have thought that some kind of digital copy would have been maintained, but that has not always been the case. Perhaps some have been saved on media that are now obsolete, or rendered unreadable due to degradation of the physical media.

I’ve no idea whether my friend is likely to be transcribing Scripture newly translated by linguists in the field, or making some of those old translations ready for re-printing. Perhaps some of each. But I am glad that Wycliffe Associates is working on preserving the Bible in a format that will be available to future generations. I’ve long thought that if I didn’t need to work for a living, I would like to do some kind of behind-the-scenes work for a non-profit, preferably some kind of computer work. I’ve no idea how many years it will be before I can take an active part in this effort, but I’m happy to be able to write about my friend who can do it now.

Getting ready for Christmas (part 2)

Today my son and I talked about another aspect of getting ready for Christmas. Last week I had mentioned that one way we get ready is by studying for tests. Christmas isn’t a test, of course, but there’s lots of stuff to know about Christmas. Some of it is very interesting, but not necessarily important.

I think I finally remember all the verses of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” I usually have trouble keeping them straight once we get past the seven swans a-swimming. But this year I made Al a game, based on Candyland, that includes some cards that let you go forward some number of spaces. I left blanks for the numbers, so you have to remember how many reindeer there are, how many days of Christmas, how many geese a-laying, etc. And after playing it several times, I think I finally have the lords, pipers, and drummers in order.

But Al agreed that knowing those numbers wasn’t all that important – unless you want to sing the carol. (As it happens, his fourth grade class will be singing it for their Christmas concert, and he will be one of the lords a-leaping.) So I asked, what about knowing who brings Christmas presents in different countries? He knew that Santa Claus has different names in other places, but he was surprised to hear that in some countries it’s someone completely different who brings the presents.

For instance, in some countries it is Baby Jesus who brings presents to children. In others, it is the Three Kings. (This seemed very wrong to Al. Baby Jesus and the three kings belong to the Christmas story, not the fun-and-games-and-presents part.) One characters I hadn’t heard of before looking at wikipedia is Olentzero. He is a traditional figure among the Basque people of northern Spain and southern France. According to tradition, he “was a pagan coal worker who went to adore Jesus in Bethlehem. Nowadays, it is said that he brings presents to all good people at Christmas Eve.”

I was interested in learning about what traditional meals are on Christmas. We usually think of turkey or ham, or maybe goose (think of A Christmas Carol). I always liked it when my father served duckling. But if I lived in Estonia, I would probably eat pork with sauerkraut, baked potatoes, white and blood sausage, potato salad with red beet, and pāté. In the Czech Republic, I’d be eating fried carp and potato salad.

And of course there are all sorts of side dishes and desserts – casseroles with liver and raisins in Finland, pickled herring and Janssons frestelse (potato casserole with anchovy) in Sweden. When I lived in Spain, I enjoyed sampling turrón, a nougat candy made of honey, sugar, egg whites, and toasted almonds. (When I think nougat I think Snickers, but traditional turrón is very hard and crunchy.)

Al agreed that was interesting – but not all that important. What’s important, he stated, is knowing that Jesus was born, and why. He eagerly explained that this is what the Christmas play he’s going to be in next week (at Winfield Presbyterian Church, where my husband preached today) is all about. So I’d have to say that, if there were a test for Christmas, I think Al would pass it with flying colors.

A better alphabet?

I’ve driven many times past church signs written in a language I didn’t understand but knew to be Korean. Actually, I’m not sure I knew they were Korean until I married a Presbyterian, and learned about the strength of the Presbyterian church in Korea. Mostly, I still thought of the unreadable symbols as another of those Asian languages that don’t use the kind of letters we do.

Beyond that, I never gave it much thought. I like learning languages, but never had any inclination to learn a language that required learning a new alphabet, except for New Testament Greek (which wasn’t too difficult because I knew much of the alphabet from math and science classes, and many of the letters are similar to those in our own alphabet). I tried learning the Hebrew alphabet once, but quickly lost interest.

I do find the whole subject of linguistics fascinating, however, and for several years, as a teenager, planned on becoming a Bible translator. I knew that it meant having to learn a tribal language unknown to outsiders, and then develop a system for writing it down, before I could even begin translating the Bible, or teach its speakers to read and write their own language. The idea was daunting, yet also an appealing challenge, all the more so because it would bring the Word of God to people who had never heard it.

I never imagined using a completely different alphabet, however. There are languages with sounds that our alphabet cannot represent, but the International Phonetic Alphabet can account for virtually all of them. In college, I took a course in which we studied how different sounds are formed by the mouth, and how to represent them all using the IPA. (I also learned that I don’t pronounce “s” the normal way, and that I have a “lazy jaw” which results in a tendency to mispronounce certain vowel sounds.)

It’s been a long time since I did much reading on linguistics, but I was fascinated to read recently, in the Wall Street Journal, about the effort of some Korean linguists to export their alphabet to other countries. The Cia-Cia language, spoken by less than a hundred thousand people on the island of Buton in Indonesia, has never had a written form. Efforts to use our Roman alphabet to write Cia-Cia produced confusion. The Korean linguists are convinced that their Hangeul script is the answer.

Why, I wondered, would the Korean alphabet be better than the IPA? It turns out that Hangeul was designed specifically to make it easy to learn. Most alphabets evolved over time, but Hangeul was created to replace the difficult Chinese and Japanese characters that had previously been the only way to write the Korean language. Not only do the symbols represent the sounds of the Korean language, their shapes even indicate the shape of the mouth for forming those sounds.