Tag: linguistics

What I Read: ‘You Are What You Speak’ by Robert Lane Greene

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One of the reviews of this book faults Greene for writing about linguistics without being a linguist. I don’t find the same fault in the pages here. Certainly, this has the density one would expect from an Economist writer, but don’t let that fool you.
As an English major and English teacher who has been thinking about these things for some time, the initial introduction to prescriptivism and descriptivism did much to act as a refresher for the topics and lay the foundation of the different global perspectives of the book.
From a historical understanding of the resurrection of Hebrew to the formation of modern Turkish (an subsequent distance from pre-1930 Turkish texts), I’m walking away from this book with much richer and deeper understanding of language and it’s formation around the world.
Perhaps most helpful for me was Greene’s clear love of language. If there were any impediment created by his lack of training as a linguist, his love of language makes up for it handily.
Reading about language from the perspective of one who is so clearly curious and in love with language shapes the book as a tool for infectious love of language.
If you’re curious about language, read this. If you’re passionate about language, read this. If you are hungry for a appropriately-dense text acting as a primer to understanding linguistics, read this. It’s not a book for everyone, but it’s definitely a book for those who love and are fascinated by language.

cross-posted at http://goodreads.com/mrchase

Things I Know 124 of 365: Literacy brings democracy

I read this piece aloud to one of my G11 classes this afternoon.

We all sat in a sort of oval on the floor and I read it from start to finish. The students had only one direction: Mark anything you have a question about.

In case you didn’t click the link, some things you should know: the article was about Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Russian literature, Russia’s role in the Russo-Turkish War and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s disagreement over whether or not Russia should have stepped in. Oh, also, it is about Libya and the possible negative economic consequences of American participation in the military humanitarian aid mission in Libya.

A little light reading.

My interest in examining the article wasn’t that my students have a deep understanding of the Russo-Turkish War, nor was I particularly worried they did or did not see its relevance to contemporary history.

I wanted my students to see the text because it was dense and difficult. In two sentences, we saw three words that had appeared on our vocabulary quizzes during the year.

In a moment of frustration, one student commented she thought the article was “the stupidest thing ever.”

I replied she should research Crystal Clear Pepsi before she made that statement, and asked her why she thought what she thought.

“He just writes it so it’s too hard and boring to understand.”

James Warner does some interesting and slippery things in his writing of the piece. These are techniques of linguistic subterfuge that disguise some of his deeper points and play off of the psychology of his readers.

In a text inspired by and commenting on US intervention in Libya, Warner mentions the country only once and never brings up President Obama. Warner does reference the Iraq War twice and directly refers to President Bush once.

“What kind of connections is he drawing by bringing up Libya, Iraq and President Bush, but leaving out President Obama?” I asked.

A few students’ faces flashed with the “hmmmmmm” moment.

I asked how many students had seen any James Bond movies. Several hands went up. “Where are Bond villains often from?” I asked.

“Russia!” they answered.

“So what’s the implication of saying the United States is acting like Russia?”

More “hmmmmmm” moments.

They might not know about the Cold War, but 007 has taught them Russia’s not to be trusted.

For those of my students who struggle the most with reading, my job is to help them read the lines on the page and to find more pages with more lines they might be interested in reading when they believe the world doesn’t have any of those.

For all of my students, my job is to help them detect semantic snake oil salesmen and read between the lines on the page. They are growing up in a world of The Magic Bullet, FOX News, challenges to collective bargaining, and Michael Moore. They need to read smarter.

One student commented the article sounded intelligent because of all the expensive vocabulary.

Exactly.

I want to help each of them build the linguistic haggling skills to determine if the price of understanding is equal to the value of what is being said.

Each time they step up to a piece of writing unprepared to read it, they’re left out of the democratic process a little more.

Things I Know 98 of 365: The way we talk about the way we talk matters

Language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about.

– Benjamin Lee Whorf

My sister Rachel is working toward her degree in English education and her minor in linguistics. She asked me tonight to take a look at a paper due in one of her classes later this week. It’s one of those moments that keeps me feeling useful as a big brother.

Rachel’s considering Zora Neal Hurston’s adherence to dialectical English when she was working as an anthropologist documenting early African American folktales.

I’ve not thought so much and so academically about the topic since I wrote my own term paper on African American Vernacular English (called Ebonics at the time).

This got me thinking.

Every once in a while, I’ll hear a student correct or chastise another student for saying “toof” instead of “tooth” or some other dialectically attributable difference.

Whenever I witness these moments, I take them as opportunities for discussion – the chance to show how understanding language and its connection to culture matters. They’ve been some of the richest culture-based conversations I’ve had in the classroom.

I wonder if waiting for the odd teachable moment might not be underserving in my role as an English teacher.

Colleagues in the Spanish department help their students understand dialectical variations across multiple Spanish-speaking countries and even regionally within those countries.

English teachers, though, remains tremendously staid in our approach to helping our students explore language. We not only ignore the international variations across English-speaking countries, we teach as though intense variations do not exist across America as well.

There is what is right and there is everything else.

Much of the time, the everything else is what our students are speaking in their homes, and intentionally or not, we make it seem wrong or less than.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of formal academic language or the prestige dialect as many of my undergraduate professors referred to it.

Instead, I’m suggesting room exists at the linguistic table to help our students understand the variation and complexity inherent in language.

To do so would be a radically complicated shift in approach. For one, classroom teachers would need to better show the cultural sensitivity we so often pride ourselves on when selecting texts.

Teaching Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for its authentic dialectical style is far from building lessons and discussions around the dialects students walk into our classrooms practicing and then building bridges from those dialects to the academic English we’ve been preaching for generations.

If we want our students to interact with the world – to be global citizens – we might need to help them become better national citizens first. To do that, we might need to help ourselves do the same.

Language is complex and intensely tied to culture. America is complex and intensely cultural. Perhaps we could be better diplomats.