The Hardest Language

Great article on language from a recent Economist.

TONGUE TWISTERS
Dec 17th 2009

In search of the world’s hardest language

A CERTAIN genre of books about English extols the language’s supposed
difficulty and idiosyncrasy. “Crazy English”, by an American
folk-linguist, Richard Lederer, asks “how is it that your nose can run
and your feet can smell?”. Bill Bryson’s “Mother Tongue: English and
How It Got That Way” says that “English is full of booby traps for the
unwary foreigner…Imagine being a foreigner and having to learn that
in English one tells A lie but THE truth.”

Such books are usually harmless, if slightly fact-challenged. You tell
“a” lie but “the” truth in many languages, partly because many lies
exist but truth is rather more definite. It may be natural to think
that your own tongue is complex and mysterious. But English is pretty
simple: verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add “s”,
mostly) and there are no genders to remember.

English-speakers appreciate this when they try to learn other
languages. A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in
the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive and two
different past subjunctives, for a total of 48 forms. German has three
genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady
has no sex, but a turnip has”. (MaDCHEN is neuter, whereas STECKRuBE is
feminine.)

English spelling may be the most idiosyncratic, although French gives
it a run for the money with 13 ways to spell the sound “o”: o, ot, ots,
os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and o. “Ghoti,” as
wordsmiths have noted, could be pronounced “fish”: gh as in “cough”, o
as in “women” and ti as in “motion”. But spelling is ancillary to a
language’s real complexity; English is a relatively simple language,
absurdly spelled.

Perhaps the “hardest” language studied by many Anglophones is Latin. In
it, all nouns are marked for case, an ending that tells what function
the word has in a sentence (subject, direct object, possessive and so
on). There are six cases, and five different patterns for declining
verbs into them. This system, and its many exceptions, made for years
of classroom torture for many children. But it also gives Latin a
flexibility of word order. If the subject is marked as a subject with
an ending, it need not come at the beginning of a sentence. This
ability made many scholars of bygone days admire Latin’s majesty–and
admire themselves for mastering it. Knowing Latin (and Greek, which
presents similar problems) was long the sign of an educated person.

Yet are Latin and Greek truly hard? These two genetic cousins of
English, in the Indo-European language family, are child’s play
compared with some. Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one
moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are
tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages
differ overall.

Even before learning a word, the foreigner is struck by how differently
languages can sound. The uvular r’s of French and the fricative,
glottal ch’s of German (and Scots) are essential to one’s imagination
of these languages and their speakers. But sound systems get a lot more
difficult than that. Vowels, for example, go far beyond a, e, i, o and
u, and sometimes y. Those represent more than five or six sounds in
English (consider the a’s in father, fate and fat.) And vowels of
European languages vary more widely; think of the umlauted ones of
German, or the nasal ones of French, Portuguese and Polish.

Yet much more exotic vowels exist, for example that carry tones: pitch
that rises, falls, dips, stays low or high, and so on. Mandarin, the
biggest language in the Chinese family, has four tones, so that what
sounds just like “ma” in English has four distinct sounds, and
meanings. That is relatively simple compared with other Chinese
varieties. Cantonese has six tones, and Min Chinese dialects seven or
eight. One tone can also affect neighbouring tones’ pronunciation
through a series of complex rules.

Consonants are more complex. Some (p, t, k, m and n are common) appear
in most languages, but consonants can come in a blizzard of varieties
known as egressive (air coming from the nose or mouth), ingressive (air
coming back in the nose and mouth), ejective (air expelled from the
mouth while the breath is blocked by the glottis), pharyngealised (the
pharynx constricted), palatised (the tongue raised toward the palate)
and more. And languages with hard-to-pronounce consonants cluster in
families. Languages in East Asia tend to have tonal vowels, those of
the north-eastern Caucasus are known for consonantal complexity: Ubykh
has 78 consonant sounds. Austronesian languages, by contrast, may have
the simplest sounds of any language family.

Perhaps the most exotic sounds are clicks–technically “non-pulmonic”
consonants that do not use the airstream from the lungs for their
articulation. The best-known click languages are in southern Africa.
Xhosa, widely spoken in South Africa, is known for its clicks. The
first sound of the language’s name is similar to the click that
English-speakers use to urge on a horse.

For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xoo, spoken by just a
few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual
sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy,
and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying
ones. The leading expert on the !Xoo, Tony Traill, developed a lump on
his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed
that adult !Xoo-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed
it yet).

Beyond sound comes the problem of grammar. On this score, some European
languages are far harder than are, say, Latin or Greek. Latin’s six
cases cower in comparison with Estonian’s 14, which include inessive,
elative, adessive, abessive, and the system is riddled with
irregularities and exceptions. Estonian’s cousins in the Finno-Ugric
language group do much the same. Slavic languages force speakers, when
talking about the past, to say whether an action was completed or not.
Linguists call this “aspect”, and English has it too, for example in
the distinction between “I go” and “I am going.” And to say “go”
requires different Slavic verbs for going by foot, car, plane, boat or
other conveyance. For Russians or Poles, the journey does matter more
than the destination.

Beyond Europe things grow more complicated. Take gender. Twain’s joke
about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to
do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely
a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists
talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or
size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see.
George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal
(spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and
dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they
are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.

Agglutinating languages–that pack many bits of meaning into single
words–are a source of fascination for those who do not speak them.
Linguists call a single unit of meaning, whether “tree” or “un-”, a
morpheme, and some languages bind them together obligatorily. The
English curiosity “antidisestablishmentarianism” has seven morphemes
(“anti”, “dis”, “establish”, “-ment”, “-ari”"-an” and “-ism”). This is
unusual in English, whereas it is common in languages such as Turkish.
Turks coin fanciful phrases such as
“

CEKOSLOVAKYALILASTIRAMADIKLARIMIZDANMISSINIZ?”, meaning “Were you one
of those people whom we could not make into a Czechoslovakian?” But
Ilker Ayturk, a linguist, offers a real-life example:
“EVLERINDEMIScESINE RAHATTILAR”. Assuming you have just had guests who
made a mess, these two words mean “They were as carefree as if they
were in their own house.”

YES WE (BUT NOT YOU) CAN
This proliferation of cases, genders and agglutination, however,
represents a multiplication of phenomena that are known in European
languages. A truly boggling language is one that requires English
speakers to think about things they otherwise ignore entirely. Take
“we”. In Kwaio, spoken in the Solomon Islands, “we” has two forms: “me
and you” and “me and someone else (but not you)”. And Kwaio has not
just singular and plural, but dual and paucal too. While English gets
by with just “we”, Kwaio has “we two”, “we few” and “we many”. Each of
these has two forms, one inclusive (“we including you”) and one
exclusive. It is not hard to imagine social situations that would be
more awkward if you were forced to make this distinction explicit.

Berik, a language of New Guinea, also requires words to encode
information that no English speaker considers. Verbs have endings,
often obligatory, that tell what time of day something happened;
TELBENER means “[he] drinks in the evening”. Where verbs take objects,
an ending will tell their size: KITOBANA means “gives three large
objects to a man in the sunlight.” Some verb-endings even say where the
action of the verb takes place relative to the speaker: GWERANTENA
means “to place a large object in a low place nearby”. Chindali, a
Bantu language, has a similar feature. One cannot say simply that
something happened; the verb ending shows whether it happened just now,
earlier today, yesterday or before yesterday. The future tense works in
the same way.

A fierce debate exists in linguistics between those, such as Noam
Chomsky, who think that all languages function roughly the same way in
the brain and those who do not. The latter view was propounded by
Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist of the early 20th century, who
argued that different languages condition or constrain the mind’s
habits of thought.

Whorfianism has been criticised for years, but it has been making a
comeback. Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University, for example, points
to the Kuuk Thaayorre, aboriginals of northern Australia who have no
words for “left” or “right”, using instead absolute directions such as
“north” and “south-east” (as in “You have an ant on your south-west
leg”). Ms Boroditsky says that any Kuuk Thaayorre child knows which way
is south-east at any given time, whereas a roomful of Stanford
professors, if asked to point south-east quickly, do little better than
chance. The standard Kuuk Thayoorre greeting is “where are you going?”,
with an answer being something like “north-north-east, in the middle
distance.” Not knowing which direction is which, Ms Boroditsky notes, a
Westerner could not get past “hello”. Universalists retort that such
neo-Whorfians are finding trivial surface features of language: the
claim that language truly constricts thinking is still not proven.

With all that in mind, which is the hardest language? On balance THE
ECONOMIST would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound
system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard
to speak as Ubykh or !Xoo. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating,
so that one word, HoABaSIRIGA means “I do not know how to write.” Like
Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun
classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close
relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare,
such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be
extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has
begun to peel apart.

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble.
Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker
knows something. DIGA APE-WI means that “the boy played soccer (I know
because I saw him)”, while DIGA APE-HIYI means “the boy played soccer
(I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that
is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force
speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

Linguists ask precisely how language works in the brain, and examples
such as Tuyuca’s evidentiality are their raw material. More may be
found, as only a few hundred of the world’s 6,000 languages have been
extensively mapped, and new ways will appear for them to be difficult.
Yet many are spoken by mere hundreds of people. Fewer than 1,000 people
speak Tuyuca. Ubykh died in 1992. Half of today’s languages may be gone
in a century. Linguists are racing to learn what they can before the
forces of modernisation and globalisation quieten the strangest
tongues.

Best Medicine

Just rediscovered this Woody Allen classic, “The Moose.”

“Ya gotta be kiddin’ me. Paypah Towels”

Ali G and Pat Buchanan. “Izit eva werf…fightin’ a war…ova sanwiches?”

For myself I am an optimist…

For myself I am an optimist; I don’t see much use in being any other way. –Winston Churchill

Just came across this article. Nothing extraordinary, but a good reminder.

Optimistic women ‘live longer’

Women who are optimistic have a lower risk of heart disease and death, an American study shows.

The latest study by US investigators mirrors the findings of earlier work by a Dutch team showing optimism reduces heart risk in men.

The research on nearly 100,000 women, published in the journal Circulation, found pessimists had higher blood pressure and cholesterol.

Even taking these risk factors into account, attitude alone altered risks.

Optimistic women had a 9% lower risk of developing heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause after more than eight years of follow-up.

In comparison, cynical women who harboured hostile thoughts about others or were generally mistrusting of others were 16% more likely to die over the same time-scale.

One possibility is that optimists are better at coping with adversity, and might, for example take better care of themselves when they do fall ill.

In the study, the optimistic women exercised more and were leaner than pessimistic peers.

Lead researcher Dr Hilary Tindle, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, said: “The majority of evidence suggests that sustained, high degrees of negativity are hazardous to health.”

A spokeswoman for the British Heart Foundation said: “We know that hostile emotions can release certain chemicals in the body which may increase the risk of heart disease, but we don’t fully understand how and why.

“Optimistic or hostile attitudes can be linked to health behaviours such as smoking or poor diet, which may also influence heart health.

“A good thing for all women is that regardless of your outlook, making healthy choices such as not smoking and eating well, will have much more of an impact on your heart health than your outlook.

“More research is needed to explore how and why these psychological attitudes may affect health.”

From BBC.org

The Varieties of Scientific Experience

When I mentioned to my parents that I was reading a book by Carl Sagan, they both immediately launched into their best “beel-yins and beel-yins of stars” impression.

“That guy?” they asked.

Yep, that guy. Sagan is remembered in the mainstream conciousness for pronouncing “billions” funny and for popularizing scientific thought about extra-terrestrials and the origins of the universe. He wrote Cosmos and Contact. A friend recently let me borrow The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, which is not actually a book written by Sagan, but more accurately a collection of a series of his lectures, edited later by his widow Ann Druyan.

I read the book faster than I’ve ever read any non-fiction. I thought about it when I wasn’t reading it. I read it instead of watching TV, instead of checking my e-mail, instead of showering. It is the best summary of the God-Science question that I have ever encountered. Sagan clearly and unpretentiously outlines the way that science has been able to shed light on answers to questions historically reserved for the realm of religion.

Some highlights:

p. 35 So the history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe’s noncompliance with this human tendency.

p. 64 But what clearly has been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that’s no longer God’s realm.

p.151 So, considering this range of alternatives, one thing that comes to my mind is how striking it is that when someone has a religious-conversion experience, it is almost always to the religion or one of the religions that are mainly believed in his or her community.

p.164 It is argued that some pain is necessary for a greater good. But why, exactly? If God is omnipotent, why can’t He arrange it so there is no pain? It seems to me a very telling point.

p.188 By no means does it follow that religions thereby have no function, or no benign function. They can provide in a very significant way, and without many mystical trappings, ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in time of bereavement, continuity with the past, and faith in the future. But there are many other things that they do not provide.

p.214 Because surely we are not faster than all other species, or better camouflaged, or better diggers or swimmers or fliers. We are only smarter. And, at least until the invention of weapons of mass destruction, this intelligence has led to the steady—in fact exponential—increase in our numbers.

p.216 What we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another’s belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies and inadequacies of our own.

p. 224 The answer depends very much on what we mean by God. The word “god” is used to cover a vast multitude of mutually exclusive ideas…. Let me give a sense of two poles of the definition of God. One is the view of say, Spinoza or Einstein, which is more or less God as the sum total of the laws of physics. Now it would be foolish to deny that there are laws of physics. If that’s what we mean by God, then surely God exists…. But now take the opposite pole: the concept of God as an out-size male with a long white beard, sitting in a throne in the sky and tallying the fall of every sparrow. Now, for that kind of god I maintain there is no evidence. And while I’m open to suggestions of evidence for that kind of god, I personally am dubious that there will be powerful evidence for such a god not only in the near future but even in the distant future. And the two examples I’ve given you are hardly the full range of ideas that people mean when they use the word “god.”

Sagan’s greatest legacy may be that he was among the first to warn the public about environmental dangers and the threat of nuclear war. One of his last achievements was a campaign to unite religion and science in the battle against these problems.

Sleep is wild.

Wish Fulfillment? No. But Dreams Do Have Meaning

By Tiffany Sharples Monday, Jun. 15, 2009 (from Time.com)

According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. “Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass,” says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest — specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep — influences our ability to read emotions in other people’s faces. In the small analysis of 36 adults, volunteers were asked to interpret the facial expressions of people in photographs, following either a 60- or 90-minute nap during the day or with no nap. Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions like happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.

Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe — a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion — was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. “If you’re walking through the jungle and you’re tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things,” he says. The idea is that with little mental energy to spare, you’re emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you’re well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival, he suggests: “If it’s getting food, if it’s getting some kind of reward, finding a wife — those things are pretty good to pick up on.”

Full article here.

Slavoj Žižek

The last time I saw my older brother he gave me a book by Slavoj Žižek.

“Happy Birthday,” he said.  My birthday was two months earlier.  “I saw this in London and it seems like some of the stuff you’re into.” I wasn’t sure how to interpret that seeing as how the book was entitled Violence.

I had no idea who Žižek was, but I started getting pretty into the book. Reading Žižek is like getting really messed up on drugs and experiencing total chaos for a few hours before finally having a beautiful moment of clarity and then doing it all over again. Or maybe I’m just not well-read enough to really soak in his endless allusions.

Žižek is a Slovenian-born sociologist and psychoanalyst, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that he was also an atheist and a Marxist. (Though that’s not to say that he aligns himself with leftist political movements.) I wavered between adoring and loathing this book, and as I’ve learned more about Žižek, I’ve started to project the same ambivalence onto him. I greatly admire his analytical ability and his talent for analogy, but I could do without the extremism and the unchecked pretension and judgments. I like that he calls into question things that are normally automatically given the stamp of “goodness,” such as love, tolerance, political correctness, and human rights. But I’m annoyed that he never insinuates that, in the same breath, his opinions could and should also be called into question. I appreciate his desire to show that things are never as simple as the categories and labels that we create for them, but his aversion to these methods of organization make it seem like he rarely draws meaningful conclusions or offers solutions.

I love this, for example:

Habits are the very stuff our identities are made of. In them, we enact and thus define what we effectively are as social beings, often in contrast with our perception of what we are.

And this:

[If] a jewel is stolen from a locked container, the solution is not telekinesis but the use of a strong magnet or some other sleight of hand; if a person vanishes unexpectedly, there must be a secret tunnel. Naturalistic explanations are more magic than a resort to supernatural intervention.

But sentences like this made me want to throw the book across the room:

The standard Marxist hermeneutics of unearthing the particular bias of abstract universality should thus be supplemented by its opposite: by the properly Hegelian procedure which uncovers the universality of what presents itself as a particular position.

Although I’m probably just angry because I have know idea what he’s talking about.

Here, Žižek describes his “spontaneous attitude towards the universe” and concludes that love is evil:

Then, he describes true love as seeing “perfection as imperfection itself”:

Žižek on ABC explaining why the world’s toilets show ideology and why being a philosopher means living with a “personal trauma”:

Žižek on vegetarians

Get learned.

Great new post on Lifehacker, the website that comes frighteningly close to fixing all of your problems…

Top 10 Tools for a Free Online Education

10. Teach yourself programming

9. Get a personal MBA

8. Learn to actually use Ubuntu

7. Get started on a new language

6. Trade your skills, find an instructor

5. Academic Earth and YouTubeEDU

4. Teach yourself all kinds of photography

3. Get an unofficial liberal arts major

2. Learn an instrument

1. Learn from an actual college course online

Thanks to Adam for the heads-up.

The Search for Hidden Dimensions

Any other Science Friday fans out there???? No? Or maybe you’re just not comfortable admitting it because it gives you automatic status as citizen of “Dorkdom.”  (Let’s be honest, how cool can a radio station really be when it features two different guys named “Ira”?) But for me there’s no holding back. Letting your nerdosity all hang out is liberating.

Every Friday on NPR, Ira Flatow hosts two hours of talk radio about the latest newsworthy tidbits from the realms of Science and Technology. You may know that this is not exactly my field of expertise (don’t ask what is), but I like “SciFri” because Ira and his guests generally don’t talk over my head, nor do they talk to me like I’m on a class field trip to COSI.

Last week Ira did an interview with Harvard physicist Lisa Randall who studies the possibilities of hidden dimensions in the universe. She’s a little bitchy abrupt at times, but the interview kept my attention for a whole twenty-six minutes. Particle physics and cosmology both offer hidden dimensions as a possible explanation for nagging questions in the fields. She explains that one of the things she researches is the puzzle of why gravity is such a weak force:  a tiny magnet can hold a note on the fridge while the whole mass of the earth is pulling on it. One explanation is that we only experience a part of gravity, because the rest of the force takes place in a fifth dimension. Wild.

Can I get that band to go?

Pre-recorded music videos are for your grandpa. Unless your grandpa knows how to use the internet, in which case maybe he noticed that music-on-the-go videos are the new web trend. It all started when one hipster Parisien with a camera and a pseudonym  teamed up with another hipster Parisien with an indie music weblog…et voilà! You have Vincent Moon posting Take Away Shows on La Blogothèque. Moon seems to ascribe to a no-bells-or-whistles philosophy of filmmaking. Actually, scratch that, bells and whistles are a go. Just no lighting, editing, or tripod. The novelty is the simplicity.

Moon filmed the first Take Away Show (Concert  À  Emporter in French) with The Spinto Band in 2006. Since then there have been over 90 shows which include the biggest indie rock stars of the last couple years. Chill, indie rockosphere, you know you have “stars.” And you know they all hang out in Paris.

If not Paris, then London. London is the home to a second successful music-on-the-go budget video innovation called Black Cab Sessions.  BCS was started as a partnership project between brother/sister duo Gen and Jono Stevens to create some buzz for their other (sweet) jobs: director of a music promo company and co-director of a film production company, respectively. It worked. They started with Johnny Flynn over 50 sessions ago and now all the cool kids are doing it. Literally—The Cool Kids have a Black Cab Session. (They also have an interview about cereal. Amazing dudes.)

Call me misanthropic, but part of what I like about these videos is seeing how much some of them suck. And when they don’t suck it really blows you away because it’s one take, no electricity, shitty sound quality and they’re in a friggin’ taxi…or elevator… or subway train…or boat…

Some highlights…

Sunset Rubdown Black Cab Session

Black Cab Sessions:

Daniel Johnston – Grievances

The New Pornographers – All the Old Showstoppers

The Walkmen – The Red Moon

Take Away Shows:

Grizzly Bear – The Knife (a capella)

Tapes and Tapes – Insistor

The National – Gospel

Beirut – Nantes (they did the entire The Flying Cub Cup album “à emporter”)

SXSW

If you’re reading this you’re probably not there. But worry not, here are some links to help you pretend you are.

Here you can find NPR.org’s extensive coverage of the concert including a 100-song stream  called the “Austin 100″ as well as a 10-song sampler for download which features some decent tracks from The Avett Brothers, Heartless Bastards, and The Decemberists.

Here’s another sampler put together by IODA. Thanks to Scott for the heads-up.

Here’s the official SXSW site.

Dig.