Talkin' About Talk Date Archives

Should we be studying Russian?

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A colleague of mine who's a professor of Russian, tells me that whenever he's on an plane he likes to read Russian mystery novels. Typically, the person sitting next to him sees that he's reading something with unusual letters, and says something like:

You teach Russian? But that's so hard! Or maybe: But Russia is so bleak! Or: it's kind of an ugly language, isn't it? Or: What can your students can do with it! Or even: Russian? Don't they spend most of their time drinking vodka?

Let me say a few things about those myths.

First, Russian isn't as hard as you might think. It does have a different alphabet, but if you've been in a fraternity or sorority, or if you studied math in college, you might be surprised at how many of the letters you already know. They’re borrowed from Greek. There are 33 letters, and they take only about 10 hours to learn. And remember that Russian is a cousin of English in the Indo-European language family, so there are many connections. For instance, the root of the verb "to see" in Russian is "vid", related to the English words video, vision, and visual.

As to the second myth, Russia is no sense a bleak country! Yes, it has long winters, but it's a fascinating place. Its villages are a delight. Moscow and St. Petersburg are world-class, cosmopolitan cities. And consider these names as representatives of Russian culture: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pasternak, Chagall, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, to name just a few! If you're not sure of Russia's role in the arts, check out the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Even the Russian subway systems are gorgeous!

As for the third myth, about the sound of Russian, I think it's a beautiful language! But why don't you be the judge. Listen to the closing lines of a poem by the 20th century poet Anna Akhmatova:

[Russian poem excerpt]

In some ways Russian is beautiful because it's spoken by people who are passionate about friendship. People who take the time to learn Russian and travel to the country are always struck by how intense Russian friendships can be. It's a national characteristic.

The fourth myth suggests that Americans who study Russian can't use it professionally. The truth is that demand for speakers of Russian is growing and will continue to grow. The Russian economy is booming, and American companies are investing like never before. Did you know that Russia is the top oil producer in the world, with oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia's?

And Russia is huge: it spreads across 11 time zones! Roughly 150 million people consider Russian their native language, making it one of the most-spoken languages in the world. And it's also important in the U.S. The latest census reports a half a million speakers of Russian in New York City alone.

And now for the story about vodka. Well, there might be some truth to that one. Legend has it that Prince Vladimir of Kiev chose Christianity as the official religion of the Slavs partly because Islam prohibited alcohol and, as the Prince put it, "drink is the joy of the Russians." On the other hand, not every Russian drinks vodka, but almost every Russian drinks tea. It's definitely the national pastime.

So, if you're ready to start a new language, think about Russian. And the next time you hear someone speaking with a Russian accent, offer him a glass of tea. You might make a friend for life.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Benjamin Rifkin, Professor of Russian at Temple University. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about language, visit our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

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Posted by: Mari Gillogly at July 13, 2005 12:57 PM

How are language and thought related?

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A surprising number of the things people say about thinking are actually expressed as claims about language:

• "We didn't even speak the same language" really means our thoughts were totally different, and
• "I was speechless" nearly always means I was astonished, not that my voice stopped working.

Clearly, language and thought are closely related. Language permits thoughts to be represented in our minds, helping us reason, plan, remember, and communicate. It's communication that gets all the press when we talk about language, but there are also questions to be asked about whether the language we use causes us to think in a certain way.

Different languages put things differently. But does that mean some thoughts can only be expressed in one language? Is it possible to have thoughts in one language that can't be translated into another?

Well, it's pretty easy to find words in one language that don't have exact equivalents in another. The German word Schadenfreude is a famous example: it refers to the malicious pleasure some people find in other people's misfortunes. But does the lack of a one-word English equivalent mean that English speakers aren't able to experience that feeling themselves or recognize it in others? Surely not.

Another familiar example concerns color: some languages have far fewer words than English for naming primary colors. Quite a few use the same word for both "green" and "blue". Some have only four, or three, or two color-name words. Does this mean their speakers can't physically distinguish multiple colors? It seems not. An experiment in the 1960s found that members of a New Guinea tribe whose language named only two colors were just as good at matching a full spectrum of color chips as English speakers.

And let's not forget the tired old claim that Eskimos see the world differently because they have some huge number of words for different varieties of snow. You may be disappointed to learn that there's hardly any truth to it. The eight languages of the Eskimo family have only a modest number of snow terms. Four were mentioned in a 1911 description of a Canadian Eskimo language by the great anthropologist Franz Boas: a general word for snow lying on the ground; a word for 'snowflake'; one for 'blizzard'; one for 'drift'; and that was it. His point had to do not with numbers of words or their influence on thinking, but just with the way different languages draw different distinctions when naming things.

But after years of exaggeration and embellishment of his remarks, a seductive myth has arisen. People with no knowledge of Eskimo languages repeat it over and over in magazines, newspapers and lectures, with the number of alleged "Eskimo words for snow" varying wildly from the dozens to the thousands. They offer no evidence, and they ignore the fact that English, too, has plenty of words for snow – words like "slush", "sleet", "avalanche", "blizzard", and "flurry", but they insist that these arctic nomads see a whole different world.

So, do the vocabularies of Eskimo languages really give Inuit and Yup'ik people a unique way of perceiving, unshared by English speakers? It's extremely unlikely.

People tend to make overstatements about language shaping thought. Some go as far as claiming that your language creates your world. But the idea that our language determines how we think is pure speculation. And it's hard to imagine what could possibly support it. In order to know there was a thought that was understandable for a speaker of, let's say, Hindi, but not for us English speakers, we'd need to have that Hindi thought explained to us. But that would mean we could understand it after all.

Our worldview may be influenced in some ways by our native language; but that doesn't mean there are untranslatable thoughts that only a speaker of some other language can have.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Geoffrey Pullum, Professor of Linguistics and Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

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Posted by: John Barbuto at February 14, 2006 09:28 AM

Posted by: John Barbuto at February 14, 2006 09:48 AM

How are Dictionaries Made?

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Language is forever morphing. It's hard to know the exact shape of a language because it has so many faces -- and it's a moving target. But for a few fleeting moments, it can be captured in a dictionary. Those of us who love language owe a lot to lexicographers, the unsung researchers who make dictionaries, and know that within months their product will in some respect... be out of date.

As recently as a few centuries ago, just one very learned person could create a dictionary single-handedly. But these days virtually all of them are built by teams of talented people. For each new dictionary, and each new edition of an existing dictionary, they collect huge amounts of written and spoken language -- from newspapers, magazines, books, plays, movies, speeches, TV and radio shows, interviews and internet -- and sift them for evidence of how language is being used: What words haven't we seen before? What words are changing their meanings? What words are used only in particular ways? What are their histories, pronunciations, grammatical quirks and foibles?

If you think this makes lexicographers sound like scientists, you're exactly right. Most of them see their primary job as data collecting. They try to capture as accurate a picture as possible of how people actually use a language at a given point in time.

But a lot of people in the dictionary-buying public are uncomfortable with scientific neutrality when it comes to language. They don't want their dictionaries to describe how people actually write and speak. They believe that some language is right and some is wrong, period. And they think the lexicographers' job is to tell us which is which. They want prescriptive dictionaries that omit vulgar language and condemn other words they disapprove of, like 'irregardless' or 'muchly'.

If you're one of those people, you'll be disappointed to learn that most modern dictionaries are basically descriptive. They don't prescribe what we ought to say or write; they tell us what people actually do. Like umpires, lexicographers call 'em the way they see 'em.

That doesn't mean that prescriptive views are completely left out. People's attitudes toward words are also a legitimate part of the dictionary. For example, the New Oxford American Dictionary doesn't forbid its readers to use the unlovely word 'irregardless', but it clearly notes that the word is, (quote), "avoided by careful users of English."(unquote) Because you no longer use words like "fletcherize" (meaning to chew each bite at least 50 times before you swallow), and because you don't talk like people did in 18th century Williamsburg -- you know that language is always in flux. So if research finds a lot of good and careful writers using "irregardless," or creating sentences like "Anybody could look it up if they wanted to" -- using "they" where you might expect "he or she" -- the dictionary can say with authority that it's becoming standard English --even if prescriptionists disapprove.

So don't think of dictionaries as rulebooks. They're much more like maps. They show where things are in relation to each other and point out where the terrain is rough. And, like maps, dictionaries are constantly updated to show the changing topography of the language -- not just with shiny new words (like 'podcasting' or 'lo-carb') but new uses for old words (like 'burn' meaning "record data on a CD") and even new parts of words (the suffix age as in "signage" or "mopeage" -- just a funnier way of saying "moping"). Dictionary-makers put as good a map as possible into your hands, but devising a route is up to you.

Just because a word is in the dictionary doesn't mean you have to use it. And just because it isn't in the dictionary doesn't mean you can't. If it did mean that, there'd never be any new words. And lexicographers might be out of a job.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Erin McKean, Editor in Chief of US Dictionaries for Oxford University Press. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And in the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

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Posted by: mulatto at September 16, 2005 11:15 AM

Posted by: Ted Edwards at May 16, 2006 03:45 PM

Where did Cajun come from?

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Did you know that French was once the language of everyday life in Louisiana? Remember that it was French territory until we bought it from Napoleon in 1803, and Louisiana is still the place in the U.S. where French is spoken the most. According to the 2000 census, over a million people claim French ancestry there, with around 200,000 saying they speak some type of French at home.

So how did all those French speakers get there? In some cases their ancestors came from France as early colonists or fled from Europe during the French revolution. In other cases they came from Africa, often by way of the Caribbean, and the French they spoke was a creole, similar to the French creole of Haiti.

But the most widely-spoken variety, and the one we hear the most about -- probably because of the food and music that made it famous -- is Cajun. Oddly enough, it came from Canada.

Here's the story: Around 1600, emigrants from France settled along the coast of present day Nova Scotia, in a colony they called Acadia. After struggles between France and England over the territory, it finally came under British control. But when the Acadiens refused to swear allegiance to the king of England, they were deported in 1755, forcibly loaded onto boats and driven out. Many of them landed in Louisiana. You probably know all this from Longfellow's poem Evangeline, the story of an Acadian girl who was separated from her fiancé during deportation and spent the rest of her life trying to find him.

The refugees from Nova Scotia who went to Louisiana came to be known as "Cajuns," a local approximation of the word "Acadiens." The language the Cajuns spoke -- and what they still speak -- is French.

But is it real French? Yes, real French. The Cajuns may not always speak according to French rules, but Cajun French doesn’t differ from "standard" French any more than other varieties do -- like the French of Morocco, Quebec, or the West Indies. Cajun adds its own spice to the rich stew we call the French language.

Here's a little sample of it: (insert audio sample)

The majority of words and structures in Cajun are certainly recognizable to French speakers from other countries. The differences are like those between British and American English. Cajun has kept some words that French abandoned, and produced new words to describe new situations. And it borrowed words from other languages. For instance, Cajun kept the original word chevrette to refer to shrimp, while the French use crevette, from the Norman dialect. The term chaoui came from Choctaw, to name an animal that didn’t exist in Europe, the raccoon. African languages contributed the word gombo to refer to okra.

Acadian French was different from the French spoken by the people who came to Louisiana directly from France, because it was separated for up to 150 years. But most linguists no longer distinguish between the colonial French and Acadian French. Over time, the two strains blended together into what we now just call "Cajun."

Like many non-English languages in the U.S., Cajun faces an uncertain future. Members of the younger generation don't hear and use French as much as their parents did; and many Cajuns speak little or no French. Groups are at work to preserve the Cajun language and culture, and I hope they succeed. French has been a part of U.S. culture for as long as there has been a United States -- even longer. It's an important part of our linguistic heritage.

And by the way, the use of French in the U.S. isn't limited just to folks in Louisiana. After Spanish, it's still one of the most widely spoken foreign languages in the country. Have you noticed? Your American passport is bilingual -- both English... and French.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from my colleague Dr. Robyn Holman, Professor French at the College of Charleston. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And in the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.