September 21, 2017 On Language “Human Life Is Punishment,” and Other Pleasures of Studying Latin By James Frankie Thomas From the Cambridge Latin Course 4th Edition. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I am currently enrolled, doesn’t require you to do much of anything. Time is largely unstructured here; as long as your writing gets done, you barely have to get out of bed for two years. When I first realized this, I panicked, and then I registered for an undergraduate course in elementary Latin. I don’t even get academic credit for it. I just wanted something in my life, amidst the subjective muck of the creative process, that I could be objectively good at—the occasional dopamine rush of a check mark, an A grade, a scribbled Great job! from an authority figure—and I remembered being good at Latin. It had been almost two decades since I last looked at a Latin textbook, but I was optimistic that I’d retained a lot. My seventh-grade Latin textbook left a vivid impression on me. It followed the fictionalized adventures of a real-life Pompeian household (vocab words for the final chapter included volcano, to erupt, smoke, ashes, in despair), and to this day, I remember the whole cast of characters: Caecilius, a banker; Metella, his wife; Grumio, their cook; and Cerberus, the dog, who stays by his master’s side to the very end (RIP, little buddy). I’ll never forget the passage in which Melissa, a newly purchased slave girl, is first presented to the household: my translation was “Melissa pleases Caecilius. Melissa pleases Grumio. Uh-oh—Melissa does not please Metella!” It was pretty juicy material, by seventh-grade standards. (I just Googled these names, so I can tell you that the book was The Cambridge Latin Course: Book 1, and that it has a surprisingly robust fandom on Tumblr.) Read More
August 16, 2017 On Language Teaching Them to Speak: On Juan Pablo Bonet and the History of Oralism By Gerald Shea Children being taught to speak at a school for the deaf. Beginning in the Middle Ages and continuing well beyond the eighteenth century, “medical” treatments were devised in an effort to “cure” deafness. Many were violent, yielding illness, suffering, and at times death: Hot coals were forced into the mouths of the deaf to get them to speak “by the force of the burning.” Catheters were inserted through the nostrils, twisting them through the nasal cavity and into the Eustachian tubes and injecting burning liquids. Wide holes were drilled into the crown of a young girl’s skull so she could “hear” through the openings. Severe blistering agents were applied to the neck, scorching it from nape to chin with a hot cylinder full of magical burning leaves. Adhesive cotton was applied and set afire; vomitories and purgative agents were used; hot needles were injected into the mastoids, or the mastoids were removed altogether. One French doctor threaded the necks of deaf students with seton needles and, with a hammer, fractured the skulls of a number of deaf children just behind the ear. All of these practices were based on the idea that drilling, cutting, fracturing, scorching, or poisoning would “open up” the ear, the brain, and the body to the world of sound. Sixteenth-century Europe also saw a bloodless but equally ineffectual approach to treating the deaf, one concerned less with the intelligibility of speech and more with reproducing its sounds. The century marked the beginning of the oralist movement, which contended that the deaf should abjure their “signs” and learn to speak, a practice motivated in part by a central problem for aristocratic families in Europe with deaf children: they had to be able to speak in order to inherit. And so the influence of those who taught the deaf grew. One of the most well known among those teachers was Juan Pablo Bonet, a Spaniard. Bonet and those who followed him were either charlatans or incompetents; they mistook their students’ inability to speak for ignorance, and they not only failed to acknowledge but also prohibited their students from using their own language. In 1620, Bonet published the first known work on teaching the deaf to speak, Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a ablar los mudos (The Simplification of Letters and the Art of Teaching the Mute to Speak). In it, he writes that the deaf are “inferior beings, monsters of nature and human only in form.” He claimed he could “cure” them with his “scientific art.” But what was that art? Read More
August 31, 2016 On Language Truly Trending: An Interview on Intensifiers By Peter Nowogrodzki William Blake, Geoffrey Chaucer. Sali Tagliamonte is a linguist at the University of Toronto, where she studies language variation and change. Her latest book, Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents, was published in June. I called Tagliamonte because I’d noticed more and more people using the word truly. All of a sudden it seemed to be everywhere: in work e-mails and movie reviews, in headlines, on Twitter, on Twitter, and on Twitter. “It truly is up to us,” Hilary Clinton said this summer in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. A week prior, in Cleveland, Trump had remembered his “truly great mother.” Is truly trending? I couldn’t tell—Liane Moriarty’s book, Truly Madly Guilty, had just published. There had been that Savage Garden song in the nineties, and the Lionel Richie one in the eighties. I wanted to find out more, so I did what anyone with a linguistics question would do: I e-mailed Noam Chomsky. To my surprise, he wrote back within half an hour, suggesting I ask “an outstanding sociolinguist like William Labov.” So I did. Labov told me, “The person who has done the most work on intensifiers like truly is Prof. Sali Tagliamonte.” Read More
March 30, 2016 On Language Language Leakage: An Interview with Sarah Thomason By Ryan Bradley The linguist discusses how technology shapes culture and culture shapes words. A uniform for the Spokane Indians in Salish. The first time Sarah “Sally” Thomason and I spoke, she’d just completed her annual two-day, eighteen-hundred-mile drive from her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she teaches, to rural northwestern Montana, where she spends her summers studying Montana Salish. For thirty-four years, Thomason has been assembling a dictionary of this Native American language, which is spoken fluently by fewer than forty people. Thomason, a linguist, is fascinated by what happens when one language meets another, and how those languages change, or don’t. I had contacted her because I was interested in how certain words—say, e-mail, or google, or tweet—had been exported worldwide by American-born technology. I’d already called several linguists, and they all said I had to speak to Sally. No one, they said, had more insight into how linguistic traits travel, how pidgins and creoles are born, and how languages interact and change over time. The French government tried very hard to resist American loanwords like e-mail, promoting in its place messagerie électronique or courriel. They’d formed a whole agency for this purpose. Laws were passed and enforced. And yet e-mail prevailed—it was simply more efficient. But Sally was especially excited about languages that resist such borrowing, even in the face of extraordinary cultural influence and dominance. Montana Salish was one such language. Our conversations followed a pattern: I arrived expecting one thing and ended up somewhere entirely distinct, thinking differently about language and human culture. Is it fair to say that you study what happens when languages meet? Is meet too friendly a word? I suppose there’s a whole range of things that happen, and sometimes it’s friendly and sometimes it’s not. Right, but having a language disappear because all the speakers got massacred is actually really rare. There are a couple of examples where all the speakers of some language got wiped out by a volcanic eruption on an island. And there are a couple of examples, at least one in this country, where almost everybody was wiped out by smallpox and then the remainder was lynched by a mob. What languages are those? Read More
March 10, 2016 On Language The Delinquents By M. G. Zimeta The language of debt and ethics. Illustration: Thomas Hosmer Shepherd When E. E. Cummings wrote “i am never without it (anywhere / i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done / by only me is your doing, my darling),” he was talking about a lover, but he may as well have been talking about a debt. For we are wracked with debt, especially with student debt, which last month the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported to be the second largest household debt category after mortgages. It’s also the debt category with the highest delinquency rate—perhaps because its balances are unpayable, given the way the global economy is stacked against the young. But still creditors wonder: How can they make their debtors pay up? The key may be in asking with the right words, and for the right reasons. Read More
January 21, 2016 On Language Striking Similes By Dan Piepenbring There’s an abysmal simile making the rounds online right now, drawn from a certain splashy literary debut: “Breasts like bronzed mangoes.” Yes, it comes courtesy of a male writer, of course; and yes, Google suggests it’s the only use of the phrase “bronzed mangoes” in recorded history. Even so: as an object of ridicule, this is what you’d have to call low-hanging fruit. Read More