Language How She Is Spoke

     The Power of Babel (2001) McWhorter (at U of C Berkeley) surveys a slew of languages. He establishes what should be a common-sense conclusion: Languages change without ceasing. The book explores some implications of this fundamental fact.

     Standard languages are recently standardised dialects spoken by the politically and economically most powerful groups. When the King’s power unified disparate regions into a country, the dialect of his region spread beyond its borders. The dialect of the powerful became the language of law and business. Hence, standard languages. Printing accelerated this process, and had the secondary effect of recording language changes. Before printing, people spelled as they spoke. Standardised spelling prompted the wide-spread misconception that language is unchanging, and that dialects are bastardised, defective versions of the “real” language.
     And that I think, is why language mavens make a living. They claim that they know what the language should be, and never tire of correcting other people’s mistakes. They do, eventually, accept change, but they do so reluctantly. I’ve never read a language column that welcomed some change.
     McWhorter’s central thesis is that a language is a collection of related (but not always mutually intelligible) dialects whose speakers see themselves as all using some version the common language. He shows that in pre-literate societies, languages change within a person’s lifetime, and that sometimes these changes are major reconstructions of grammar and vocabulary. Some changes are so drastic that we need a written record to recognise them.
     These drastic changes illustrate an important fact: languages change in illogical ways. There is no logical reason why English speakers should distinguish between the apple they’ve just spoken about, and an apple they haven’t referred to. Yet that’s what we do. Around the world, “articles” are unusual. Sino-Tibetan languages, even Indo-European Russian, don’t have them. In most contexts we know what we are talking about, and if we aren’t sure, we make sure with words like "this" and “that”. Thus, articles (aka “determiners”) aren’t necessary. So why do we have them?
     Look at similar oddities in every language, and there’s a clue. McWhorter focusses on gender. We think of gender as being about sex: male, female, or neither. That’s why we find German genders odd: why is a woman female, but a girl not? But in many languages, gender goes well beyond these concepts, into animate/inanimate, for example. How and why?
     McWhorter argues that “drift” accounts for these unnecessary and often illogical elaborations of language. He uses the analogy of water-cooler talk. The group develops in-jokes and allusions to their common history. Their conversation may be utterly opaque to the outsider. Linguistic drift, McWhorter claims, is like this. Speakers add information to their speech by extending word meanings, or adding in bits and pieces. I also think of tag-lines and buzzwords, and slang as sources of language drift. A deliberate in-joke mistake may become standard if it spreads fashionably enough.
     The book is rich in examples. It amounts to a survey of language as she is spoke, with a side-glance at how she is wrote. It consolidated my understanding, and gave me lots of new data and insights. McWhorter is a bit wobbly on semantic change, I think. For example, in his discussion of the English article, he fails to note that the absence of the article changes the reference of a noun from object to class. Abstract nouns normally don’t take articles in English. When someone uses the article, they signal that they see varieties of the abstract entity (eg, C S Lewis’s The Four Loves).
     McWhorter believes that pidgins and creoles show us the most basic aspects of reality that we want or need to express. I think he makes the case. Pidgins and creoles are stripped down. As such, they are a clue to the ur-language, the one that our remote ancestors must have used before they migrated out of Africa. McWhorter notes that as a creole develops and changes over time, its speakers add those wonderful curlicues and frills. We believe those add-ons are essential, simply because we use them in our own language. We’re flummoxed when we discover other languages don’t have them. And we’re even more flummoxed when we find that they have different ones. These are often so different that it’s almost impossible for us to grasp their intended meanings. I think that’s why we feel that every language expresses a different way of experiencing the world.
     An excellent introduction to linguistics in general, and especially the wonderful variety of languages. One thing this book confirms: languages differ mostly in what must be said in each of them, even if it doesn’t matter. Pinker has some interesting discussions of experiments teasing out how these differences affect the way we feel about reality. ****
     20190527: Another factor that standardises language, and also fossilises them, is religion. Sacred texts tend to be preserved verbatim by memorisation or precise copying. Thus "dead" languages like Latin and Sanskrit. Hebrew is an instructive exception: Israel made it the official language, and it has become a living language again.
     20190812: The Guardian reviews a book with the same stance. See Don’t Believe a Word by David Shariatmadari review – the truth about language.
     Thanks to CMKG for this link. 

    Update 2022-03-06: McWhorter writes a column for the New York Times. His latest discusses the effect of capitalisation on our perception of meanings. There may be a paywall, however.

"I Am My Brain"

   Richard Restak, M.D.. The Brain has A Mind of its Own (1991) A collection of essays originally written for Newsday and other public forums. As such, they are short, often lack nuance, and too often express far more certainty than the evidence warranted. Overall, a good refresher on neuro-biology, documentation on the state of neurology in the 1980s and ‘90s, and an interesting reminder of a time when experts weren’t afraid of saying things that these days would be heard as triggers or worse.
     Restak’s stance is that we are our brains, which implies that our Western and especially American insistence that we are somehow exempt from biology. His sometimes testy remarks about the interplay between nature and nurture should correct the widespread notion that we can be anything we want to be. Restak was also a psychiatrist, and his anecdotes about his patients and his helplessness show that there are limits to the best-intentioned attempts to help.
     I learned a few things. His comments on the limits of artificial intelligence (AI) appear at first reading to miss the point, since he wrote before neural networks so spectacularly demonstrated the power of computing. But recent equally spectacular failures of neural-net AI support his contention: human (and animal) brains are self-modifying in response to new experiences that don’t compute. AI can’t do that. Once trained, AI stubbornly resists further training. Eg, offered a mildly altered image of an orange, the AI asserts it’s a power drill. AI cannot do what biological brains do: recognise objects in a context. They can only recognise statistical patterns, so that a handful of differences in one region of the pattern prompts an incorrect recognition.
     It may be possible to build some self-modification into AI, but that won’t eliminate the fundamental limitation: it’s domain-specific. AI can deal only with the data that it’s trained on. Brains can somehow apply what’s been learned in one domain to another domain. Humans are especially good at this: mathematics is the abstraction of patterns that apply to multiple domains, which may explain the “unreasonable efficacy of mathematics”, as Wigner called it.
     Worth reading. ** to ***

Gratitude

   Oliver Sacks.  Gratitude (2015) Four essays written towards the end of Sacks’ life, lovely and loving meditations on life and death. This book was given me, and it is a gift in all senses of the word. The second essay, My Own Life, ends, “I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been and enormous privilege and pleasure.” Amen

****

Guide to gentlemanliness

     Douglas Sutherland. The English Gentleman (1978) An anatomy of the English gentleman, written with a mildly Wodehousian wit, and generally agreeing with Edmund Burke’s “A King may make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.” Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, Bart, supplies a foreword, which suggests a serious purpose beneath the mild mockery.
     Sutherland’s stereotypical English gentleman is a version of Chaucer’s very parfitt gentil knight, warts, prejudices, and all. Briefly, he minds his own business and expects you to mind yours. He strives for courtesy, decency, and kindness, as he understands these virtues; and avoids petty strife, again as he understands it. He has a strong sense of duty, is not given to self-reflection, or any reflection for that matter, and detests change for change’s sake. He spends as little as possible, but can be generous. He sees himself as upholding standards, though he may have  a vague idea that these standards may be mere shibboleths. He’s not a snob, though his shyness may give the opposite impression.
     The last chapter provides some advice on how to be a gentleman. But if you’ve understood Sutherland’s discussion up that point, you’ll realise that no gentleman strives to be one. ***

Incentives and Disincentives; Superfreakonomics (2009)

Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner.  Superfreakonomics (2009) Another excursion into the obvious but oddly unappreciated fact that humans, like other animals, respond to incentives. But it’s not aways obvious what the incentives are, in part because a policy proposer by definition doesn’t think like most people, and when most people propose or back a policy, they usually misunderstand both the problem and the solution. The former is shown in campaigns to eliminate prostitution (most prostitutes are in the business because it’s the best-paying work they can get); and the latter in the design of child safety seats for cars (for 3-year-olds an up, the adult seatbelt does as good a job as the safety seat).

     Nevertheless, the implicit thesis is worth placing front of mind: If you want to know whether a proposed policy will work, ask both what the incentives and disincentives are. Thus, Ford installed seatbelts as a safety feature, but buyers balked: they didn’t want to be reminded that driving a car is dangerous. But after several decades of ubiquitous seatbelts, buckling up has become second nature. The incentive is conformity to a social norm.
     The last chapter deals with global warming, which 10 years ago could still be considered not well enough understood for making sound policy. The doomsayers of the time have turned out to be correct: it’s real, and we should have begun mitigation and adaptation decades ago.
     A fun read, which gently teaches you to check the numbers and think hard about what people actually want. We humans rarely have simple wants: we generally want to have it all, which is impossible. So we need to compromise. Understanding the problem comes first, and that almost always requires knowing the numbers and doing the math. ***

Another 1950s picture book about Austria

    Langewiescher Verlag, compiler not named. Österreich (1957) Franz Nabl, a prizewinning author, supplies a text summarising the landscape of the country. He writes a dense and convoluted prose, intended to be archly amusing. The pictures cover the same ground as Breidenstein’s book, but with more emphasis on architecture.
     The book is one in the series of Blaue Bücher, picture books that originated in 1902, and were intended to provide a concentrated summary of some topic, via a short but authoritative text and masses of pictures. The printing was excellent, since the books began as advertising for Langewiesche’s printing and publishing business. Their dark blue wrapper became their trademark. But the format was much imitated, and evolved into the standard tourist souvenir book that we love to bring home with us.
     A good overview of Austrian landscape and architectural monuments. Nabl laments the reduction of the empire into the small (but still world-class!) country illustrated in the photos. He’s a believer in the mystical connection between landscape and psyche. **

Words, words, words Wanted Words, Jane Farrow 2000)

 

   Jane Farrow, ed. Wanted Words (2000) The CBC ran a delightful short program about words for those things, events, and (usually) annoyances that we labour to describe. It was almost entirely listener-driven. Listeners supplied the wants and the words, and many anecdotes, some even about the event that caused the coinages.This eponymous book collects some of the best, along with short lists of alternative suggestions. None of the listed words has entered the general lexicon.
     For example, Motorola-mouth for those annoying people who not only answer their cellphones in public, but ensure that we hear their side of the conversation. An alternative suggestion: Cell-droids, which would do very well for people incapable of surviving more than a couple of minutes without checking their screens. Now that texting has superseded voice, we may be entertained by demonstrations of the perils of texting while walking, and terrified of becoming a participant in a demonstration of the perils of texting while driving.
     Aneurythm was proposed for “a song that sticks in your head”, but earworm appeared later and became the fairly common term for this annoying brain-glitch.
     A pleasant read. **½

Austria: A Nice Place to Visit (1952 photo album)

     H. Breidenstein et al, eds. Österreich: Landschaft, Menschen, Kultur (1952) (Austria: Landscape, People, Culture) A photo album, with an introduction by K. H. Waggerl and a preface by Dr. Eduard Widmoser, an academic. Heavy on landscape (especially mountains covered in snow), light on people and culture. I suspect that many of the photos are prewar, since the city and town images show no war damage, which in 1952 was still extensive. It took Austria a long time to rebuild. The selection creates the impression that Austria is a country of wilderness and farmland. In fact it’s one of the most urbanised nations on the planet.
     Which raises the question, who is the intended audience? The photo captions, in German, English, and French, suggest the book was aimed at tourists. The hard cover, and the excellent printing on very good paper imply a high price, higher than most Austrians could afford at the time. The book aims to make Austria out to be a very nice place inhabited by very nice people creating very nice cultural artifacts.
     An interesting socio-political document, I think it’s part of the campaign to deny Austria’s complicity in the rise of Naziism. **

A corpse disguised: Dressed for Death by Donna Leon.

     Donna Leon. Dressed For Death (1994) The dead man seems to be a transvestite whore. But he’s really a bank manager, very respectable. Brunetti and his team uncover subtle inconsistencies which show that the dead man was not what he dressed up to be. But corruption at the highest levels of Venetian society prevent a simple arrest. Additional murders almost obscure the trail completely, until a random accidental witness undoes the protective charade the criminals have devised.
Well plotted, nicely done ambience, and a believable because flawed cop make for a good entertainment. I like the Brunetti books and am happy whenever I find one in a 2nd-hand book store. There are fewer and fewer of those, unfortunately. Recommended. ***

Alberta and Oil, or Subsidies Forever!

On April 9th of this year [2019], the Toronto Star reported on the estimated future costs of cleaning up decommissioned and abandoned oil and gas wells in Alberta. The Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project estimated between $40 and $70 billion, based on data supplied by the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). The AER’s official public estimate is about $30 billion. But internal (leaked) documents suggest including the oils sands cleanup costs could boost the bill to $260 billion.

There is very little incentive or pressure on the oil industry to clean up after themselves, In fact, a couple of loopholes encourage well-owners to abandon them. So far, the Alberta government has collected about $1.6 billion from the oil and gas industry to be applied to the clean-up.

Big Question #1: How much is that in real money? In other words, how much will it cost me, the average Canadian?

Let’s start with the $40 billion figure. There are about 33,000,000 of us. So that comes to about $1,200 per person in Canada. There are about 140,000 direct jobs in oil and natural gas extraction in Alberta. That means the clean-up cost per job is about $285,000. If the $260 billion is more realistic as a total clean-up cost figure, the cost per person is about $7,150, and the cost per job is $1,850,000. [1]

Big Question #2: Who will pay this cost?
The Alberta NDP and Liberals want to put timelines in place to force timely clean-up by the industry. The United Conservatives want Ottawa to provide tax incentives and financial support.

Of course in  the end we will all pay the total cost, one way or another. It will be paid in direct and indirect subsidies, and in the cost of everything we buy. [2] [3]

So should we pay up front, in the price of gas and oil? Or should it be back-end expense, after the oil and gas are consumed?

If we pay up front, the price of oil and gas will increase. That will make Alberta oil and gas more expensive and harder to sell. If we pay after the wells are dry, we will either pay higher taxes, or spend less on government services, or both. The bill would likely be financed by borrowing, so debt servicing would increase, too. Any pressure on the industry to pay a higher share will lead to more abandoned wells.

And some combination of these things will happen, along with the inevitable unintended consequences.

[1] The job numbers count people directly employed by the oil and gas industry. The median pay for Alberta oil industry workers is about $80,000/year. The average length of time worked in the oil patch is about 7 years. Thus, the average total earnings of an oil-patch worker is about $560,000. So the possible clean-up cost per job could be higher than 3 times the total average earnings per worker. So we could end up subsidising the average oil patch job at three times what the average worker actually earns.


[2] We pay directly at the pump, of course, but any tax rebate or government financial incentive for clean-up is a subsidy. We also pay in other ways, because all prices include the energy costs of the goods or services we buy. A large part of those costs are for gas and oil.

[3] Canada exports a large chunk of the oil and gas it produces. If the prices charged include the clean-up costs, one could argue that foreigners will be paying a large chunk of the total bill. This is unlikely to happen, since the higher prices would reduce exports. Besides, foreigners pay for our exports by selling us goods and services in return. Their prices would have to include the cost of the oil we sell them, else they couldn’t afford to buy the oil from us. So one way or another, we pay.

Update 1 May 2019: Jason Kenney, leader of the United Conservative Party of Alberta and its new Premier since yesterday, has already indicated where his heart lies: as promised, he loves the oil and gas industry. He's threatened to cut oil and gas shipments to B.C, since that Province has opposed the extension of the Transmountain Pipeline. IOW, he's already shown that he wants the Rest of Canada to subsidise Alberta's lifestyle. This will not end well.

Trade: As old as humankind

       Lewis Lapham, ed. Lapham’s Quarterly XII:2, TRADE (2019) The usual nicely done collection of unconsidered trifles adding up to an overview of the theme topic, with a perhaps surprisingly coherent insight made up of many bits and pieces.
     Humankind is a trading animal. Other creatures share food and prey, and some demonstrate a well-developed sense of fairness. But only humans have built systems to exchange goods and services within and between groups. Money, understood as tokens of value functioning like IOUs, appears very early, along with the confusion between ascribed and intrinsic value. The earliest examples of money are all precious objects and materials, desirable on their own account. Thus the confusion between wealth and a positive cash balance, which has skewed economic systems ever since.
     The connection and conflict between trading and politics is also very old. The earliest law-codes include rules regulating trade and (usually brutal) punishment for cheats. The desire for profit is tied up with the desire for power. Merchants, with their focus on cash instead of goods, have suffered suspicion from the earliest times. Kings have used merchants to amass wealth, all the while despising the people who did the mundane work of trading.
     Trade is of course the essence of modern economies. From about Renaissance times on, the accumulation of profit, the techniques of accurate bookkeeping, and the customs and laws of enforceable contracts have accelerated the development of technologies hard and soft, and have brought us to the present impasse: An economy built on the twin pillars of ever-increasing consumption and ever-increasing profit. Profit has ceased to be the well-earned income of the trader and has become an end in itself. As such, it’s become a tax on the economy as a whole, which can be paid only by expanding production and consumption. This will not end well. ***

Grain ships and murder: Sara Paretsky's Deadlock.

     Sara Paretsky. Deadlock (1984) Warshawski’s cousin “Boom Boom” Warshawski, erstwhile star Blackhawks player, is found dead and floating in the Chicago grain loading port. Vic doesn’t believe he slipped on wet wharf wood. Her search for the truth leads her through the Great Lakes shipping industry, dysfunctional families, and a close encounter with death. All’s well that ends well, of course.
     A nicely plotted yarn, with the now obligatory touches of real life, carefully researched and built into the story. Paretsky’s talent is a nice mix of characterisation, plotting, and ambience. I’ve enjoyed her books, and am happy when I find a new-to-me title in the used book section of the foodbank yardsale. **½