The Summer of Dork

I’m on an overload of dorky media this summer. It started innocently enough in the spring, when Battlestar Galactica was in its last season and suddenly everyone I knew was saying what a GREAT SHOW it was–deep and interesting with religious commentary etc. So I decided to order it on Netflix and see what the fuss was all about. That’s ongoing–my friend Jessie and I watch about 4 episodes a week. It IS good, though I’m getting ready for them to raise the stakes a little.

That was fine, but then I watched “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” on Hulu, as Penelope recommended, and it was so awesome that I had to find out everything else Joss Whedon has ever done. I ripped through Firefly in about a week and a half–also so awesome, though some of the characterizations are a little shaky–I want to see what Whedon would have done had he had the chance to make a second season.

Then I was telling my roommate Carmen about Firefly and she said, “Well, my sister is really into Buffy the Vampire Slayer–want me to borrow the first two seasons from her?” And I said YES YES PLEASE and, well, now Luke and I have watched the first two seasons and I may have cried on multiple occasions. (Side note: The only distressing part is that the character I identify with BY FAR the most is Giles. Which, well, is probably to be expected–he’s a big nerd who deals with ancient texts and supernatural forces; me, ditto–but, well, people call him a fuddy-duddy. Do people call me that?  Basically I am afraid I am rapidly becoming a short-sighted fussy librarian. Or maybe I am FULLY EMBRACING my destiny of becoming a short-sighted fussy librarian. You be the judge.)

THEN, because Carmen apparently loves/hates me, she brought over ALL the sequels to Ender’s Game, which is one of my favorite books ever. So now I’m reading those too. Conclusion: my summer has been a very odd melange of German readings about HIV/AIDS and workers’ strikes, Syriac fragments of the Peshitta, books about liberation theology and the martyrdom of Oscar Romero that I’m reading aloud for an MA student, and science fiction/fantasy media. Add all that up, and still my dreams are mostly about Clementine peeing on the rug. Go figure.

The problem with learning Hebrew

Okay so this is my biggest problem with Hebrew, one that’s dogged me in for the entire 7 years since I began studying it (wow, that’s a lot of time to have accomplished remarkably little), and since I can’t get any paying work done today (I am recording books for a visually impaired student, my recorder is full, and I am waiting for my boss to track down the software that allows me to transfer the files from the machine onto my computer) I am going to tell you, dear Internet, all about it. What follows is a rant masquerading as an educational post.

In order to really understand Hebrew–not just muddle your way through, but to GET it, and to know WHY weird forms do what they do, and in order to predict any forms at all, you have to understand a good bit about sound rules in Hebrew.

Linguistic background ahoy: Every language has a set of “permitted” and “forbidden” sequences of sounds–that’s why the word “blurg” sounds like it could be a real word, even though Liz Lemon made it up, but “blgur” doesn’t–English doesn’t permit the sequence “blg”. English is super unusual actually in permitting ANY sequences of three consonants–the word “strike” is a word that just wouldn’t happen in, say, Japanese, which (I think I’m right here?) only allows Consonant-Vowel syllables. So when English words get adopted into Japanese, “filler” vowels get added between any two consecutive consonants, so that the loan word will follow Japanese sound rules. Cool stuff.

Sound rules in Hebrew, at least the ones that are relevant for students, are basically vowel rules. Some vowels can’t follow each other. Some vowels don’t like being with gutterals, some vowels don’t like being too far away from the stressed syllable, some vowels don’t like being in an open unstressed syllable (CV is open, CVC is closed). So you have your basic pattern, and then the vowels shift to different vowels when they get into a situation that’s uncomfortable for them. Example: You can’t have two shewas one after the other (the shewa is the short, neutral vowel you make when you say, “uh…”). So when you would, instead the first syllable goes to an “i” and the second drops out. le-nebi’im, “to prophets,” shifts to linbi’im (I’m using e for shewa because I can’t be bothered to figure out how to insert special characters).

The problem is, these vowel shifts and syllable structures and sound rules, etc. are both incredibly basic to the language–necessary for predicting ANY forms and for recognizing most–and really difficult to understand theoretically if you don’t already know something about linguistics. I still remember poor Dr. Perkins, maybe the smartest person I will ever meet, trying to explain the difference between an open and closed syllable to me while I stared at him blankly and nodded, thinking to myself, “Well, I don’t understand it, but how important can it be?” Ahahaha. To a native speaker, not important at all. It’s all intuitive; you KNOW what sounds right and what doesn’t and you don’t need to bother to reason it out. But to someone learning an ancient language, or at least Hebrew, where you run into sound changes all the time, it’s really important.

There are ways around it, of course–I took the route of trying to memorize every weird form instead of learning the patterns that made them all make sense, then just sticking with it long enough that it began to come intuitively. That’s fine, but here I am, seven years later, and I still feel like translating is like trying to shoot ducks in the dark. Maybe the best way would be to give everyone an introductory linguistics course before they started learning the language–but then Hebrew is a language that’s really important to a lot of non-specialists. A lot of the people who want to learn it just don’t care enough about the fundamental structure of the language to take the time, and why should they? I only learned about sound changes by accident, really–my introductory linguistics course was taken to fulfill the requirements for an English degree that would get me into a school of education in Virginia, because I thought I might want to teach English in public schools.

I guess what I’m getting at is that all the textbooks present these basic building-blocks of the language at the beginning of the textbook, usually in an introductory chapter, when it’s highly unlikely for them to sink in–students just don’t have the framework necessary. You have to understand the sound rules to read the language; but you have to have a basic sense of/experience with the language to understand the sound rules.

Good students probably go back and periodically review the sound rules throughout the time that they’re learning the grammar. I did end up doing this with Aramaic this past spring, and it paid off–I understand how Aramaic functions much better now. But I never did with Hebrew (because I’m lazy lazy lazy with languages) and only now am I beginning to realize just how big a mistake was. I may have said this before, but the main difference between what I’m doing now and what I did during high school and undergrad was that, back then, the languages were a hobby, sort of, just for fun (”fun” being a relative term, of course). They didn’t REALLY matter, because I was going to be an actor/writer/English teacher–they were just something on the side. The grades mattered, sort of, but everyone knows that you can still do pretty well without really knowing a language. Now that I have to ACTUALLY know them, inside and out, things are a little scarier.

Setting some goals

With one full year of graduate school under my belt (YAY), I am setting some goals for the summer. I thought I’d risk public shaming and put them out here on the world of the internet, so that the four people who read this can bug me about them at their leisure. Sound good? Excellent! They are roughly in order of least to most farfetched and highest priority.

1) Pass my German class.

2) Pass my Syriac class.

3) Not starve.

4) Not accrue credit card debt in order not to starve (this will be accomplished by making more money! And spending less on frivolities!)

5) Go back through my Hebrew textbook from 11th grade and relearn all the vocabulary, the paradigms, do the exercises, etc. Basically re-learn Hebrew, but for real this time.

6) Go running with the dog at least 3 times a week.

7) Eat a healthier diet (this is the point at which we enter the Land of Wishful Thinking.)

8 ) Hang out with friends a lot while still accomplishing goals 1 through 7.

9) Do some creative writing.

10) Read books that are dense and intellectually fulfilling as well as fluff.

11) Shop at the farmer’s market more often (i.e. ever).

12) Read all the school-related articles and books that I wanted to read but didn’t have time to over the school year.

13) Write my Personal Statement for graduate school applications (okay, I actually DO have to do this one).

14) Research graduate schools thoroughly, impartially, and not as haphazardly as the last time around.

15) Go to bed and wake up earlier.

16) Finish the quilt.

Whew. I feel so virtuous now. And by virtuous I mean “tired.” I’m going to go read a trashy novel instead of studying Hebrew (so much for resolutions 5 and 10…).

EDIT: Goal 17: Blog more.

FAIL.

Have you seen this? I have been laughing so hard I cried for the last half hour. Things like graffiti angrily proclaiming “All bow for SATIN,” a chewed-up puppy training book (sorry to say that Clementine’s already done that), and signs that say, “Stop disease in its tracks: Wash your hands after touching Christians.”

www.failblog.org

Also, Dinosaur Comics today is about hapax legomenon! AWESOME choice, Ryan North. My life is officially complete now.

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001434.html

Hm, it’s been a while.

Things I have done so far this spring break:

1) Not run at all or exercised in other ways.

2) Baked and eaten many cookies and bread.

3) Made the most amazing bacon cheeseburgers with Luke. (Homemade rolls! Thick-sliced bacon! Gouda cheese!)

4) Discovered hamentaschen, and eaten many of them.

5) Found out that my cholesterol is a little high (whoops).

6) Read two books (class-related) and several articles!

7) Not read the other 7 on my list. I still have, like, 4 days, right?

8 ) Made 2/3 of a hat for my dad’s birthday…which was the 9th.

9) Ripped it out because it was too small and restarted it.

10) Resolved to go to bed earlier.

11) Gone to bed, in fact, much later.

12) Found out that the dog doesn’t need another surgery! So that’s a good thing.

Well, two steps forward, one step back, I guess.

Also, yesterday I found a very small (size 0-1) double pointed knitting needle in my bag. It was also somewhat shorter than a typical knitting needle. I stared at it for about 15 seconds, trying to reconstruct the circumstances in which I’d acquired this needle and wondering where I had put the rest of the set. Then I realized that it was a toothpick.

Re: last post

Flannery O’Conner on the Eucharist: “If it’s a symbol, then to hell with it.”

Concerning matters of religion

So, in case you didn’t know, today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. This is the 40-day period that mirrors Jesus’ sojourn of fasting in the wilderness; in the early Christian church this would be the time, leading up to the celebration of Easter, when new members learned the matters of faith that they needed to in order to be baptised, and those who were estranged from the church could re-enter it through public penitence and reconciliation. Today, we go to church on Ash Wednesday and the priest makes a cross of ashes on our forehead; we might fast–apparently it’s mandatory for Catholics? and optional/encouraged for Episcopalians–and we “give up” something for Lent, usually chocolate or desserts.

What this has me thinking about today is the intersection of ritual and rationality. Ironically enough, the single concept I have the most “faith” in is rationality. I think Aristotle was totally right (not that I’ve actually read Aristotle): reason is what makes people people. And I think that the free exercise of reason is both the essence of freedom and our bounden duty. And one thing that I absolutely believe about God is that God wants us to use our reason without fear or limitations, even and especially when it comes to matters of faith. These are my premises.

So you might naturally think that I would not see the value in doing something that doesn’t have a reasonable basis behind it; that rituals without a firm rationale would not fly in Mary’s world. You would, however, be wrong.

I have, as a teenager/adult, always loved the Eucharist, even at times when I don’t actually believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in the crucifixion as atonement for my specific sins, or even in the afterlife. I just like doing it: saying the words, the call-and-response prayers, the formality and cadence of the language, the sharing the bread and wine, all of it. Luke has, from time to time, asked me about this, and I don’t really have a good response. In fact, there’s a real cognitive dissonance at play: why do I place so much value on a rite that is, apparently, predicated on a complex of ideas that I can only accept partially, at best? That, even if it makes sense to other people, doesn’t make sense to me?

This time around I decided to do Lent right. (We’ll see how it plays out.) I am in sore need of the kind of self-discipline and self-reflection that the season encourages–mostly just to get my head out of my own ass. I don’t give up food products because that just makes Lent a diet, and I diet anyway, and it has nothing to do with penitence and everything to do with the kind of narcissism I’m trying to avoid. (For me, not necessarily for anyone else.)  So I give up unnecessary spending–something that imposes self-discipline and makes my budget happier.  (If I really want to avoid narcissism, I should give up blog posts and facebook status updates. But let’s not go TOO crazy.) So far, pretty reasonable–I can explain the reasons why this self-denial is a good thing, the virtues I hope to inculcate thereby, etc.

I also, however, decided to fast today, and I can’t really tell you why I did that. Okay, the diet might have contributed–but apparently fasting shuts down your metabolism like woah and doesn’t actually help you lose weight unless you do it all the time, and then we call it an eating disorder. So it’s not reasonable on those grounds. I didn’t really expect it to remind me of God and my own mortality but so much. My friend Scottie once memorably noted that after a day of fasting, all she thought about was (surprise) food. I guess peer pressure had something to do with it? Like I said, apparently it’s mandatory for Catholics. Mostly I think I did it because it’s something the bible tells us to do that doesn’t make sense to me, that doesn’t seem like it would work for me in the way the biblical authors seem to picture it working, and I wanted to find out if it made sense when I did it. I wanted to see what meaning I could find in the practice done for its own sake.

Well, it worked and it didn’t work. It didn’t work in that I was basically either hungry and thinking about food, or not hungry and thinking about other things. I didn’t think, “my stomach is rumbling…and that reminds me of GOD.” But I did come to this hypothesis in the car on my way home (wow, that was a long lead-up to one mediocre idea):

I think that maybe ritual acts are supposed to be unexplainable on some level. Was it Edward Albee who, when asked what he meant to say with “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, replied, “If I could have said it in any other way I wouldn’t have had to write the play”? Maybe these are things that we do, actions we take, that fail to intersect with human reason on some fundamental level. And in performing the ritual, whatever it is, we experience or come to know or intersect with the great mystery of God, who is fundamentally inaccessible to human reason.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to figure out what the ritual “means.” I mean, I don’t think it’s possible anyway–trying to keep myself from investigating a problem usually just makes me grumpy. We are rational beings, and we need to reason in order to understand. So we should talk about soteriology and soma/pneuma and the second Temple communal meals and the Body of Christ and atonement and whatnot. But it’s like a good story, or a good book–you can write as many essays on the book as you want, or you can talk about the symbolism of the story, and that’s important and valuable, but the best part about a really good story is that it’s bigger than any of the essays written about it. It is irreducible. You have to, on some level, swallow it in a big gulp and let it haunt your memories for the rest of your life, and you’ll be closer to what the value of the story is. Maybe rituals are like that: you need to let your reason wrestle with it, but you also have to recognize that its chief value is its irreducibility, its refusal to make total sense. You do it for its own sake, because it reminds you (and I think there’s a stronger bond than that even) that God is both totally inexplicable and very, very near.

Thoughts? I suspect that this will be a problematic stance in several ways.

Briefly

This  article from “America: The National Catholic Weekly” is a much better defense of what I do (from a faith perspective) than I could ever come up with. Thanks for posting it on FB, Sonja!

A List

I don’t have anything specific I want to write about, so I’m just going to start typing and see where I get. I can’t promise not to edit, though.

1) I got home this evening to find that Clementine, whom I had left in the kitchen instead of in her crate because I felt sorry for her (oh, the irony), had escaped the baby gate, gotten into my bedroom, and TORN THE PLACE APART. I seriously cannot see my floor for all of the clothes, yarn, scraps of toilet paper, fabric, bobbins, socks, beads…wow, I have too many crafting materials.

2) Two things encouraged me not to kill her: she didn’t actually destroy anything–she’s not a shredder, she just likes to carry my clothes around for a while–and she didn’t pee anywhere. Hooray for that.

3) I am coming to realize that I know Hebrew significantly less well than is acceptable. I am discovering this when it comes to using the Biblical Hebrew to build other languages/dialects (Aramaic, Rabbinic Hebrew, and Modern Hebrew are what I’m working on now) and I FAIL because I don’t actually understand the rules for vowel shifts or have the paradigms for anything other than the very basic verb forms memorized. You’d think if I could recognize forms I could reproduce them, but oh you would be wrong.

4) This means that I am going to have to spend the summer going back over the introductory grammar and learn it for reals this time. I swear I am going to do this.

4a) A troubling thought: I am becoming so used to the warm fuzzy feeling of being surrounded by people who care about the same fiddly things that I do, such as the relative merits of the Lambdin and Seow grammars for embarking on said reconstructive project, that I am in danger of becoming really super boring to the 99.9% of people who are not specializing in this field because they have better things to do with their time. I shall try to avoid this. I cannot promise anything about the contents of the blog, though. Consider yourselves warned.

5) I am making a quilt! With the wonderful sewing machine I got for Christmas! It is going to be fabulous!

6) My most recent project on the sewing machine was a stuffed bird ornament from a book on quilting that I bought because I wanted to make everything in it (Last Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts, in case you’re wondering). It looks…handmade. In the bad way.

7) Most of the time this semester I have been feeling terrific–cheerful, happy to be here, busy but not TOO busy, challenged but not stupid, feeling like I’m in exactly the right place, basically.

8 ) Today is not one of those days. I feel slow and stupid and man, is there a lot of stuff out there to learn. So much so that four years (8 semesters, 30 classes, not counting summer languages) of graduate school (assuming I get into Notre Dame for the Ph.D) feels like too short of a time to learn anywhere close to enough to actually TEACH this stuff or contribute to this field.  And the assumption is not a safe one to make by any means. My goodness are there a lot of people who want fellowships. And knowing that, and knowing that my professors will judge whether they want to let me in here for the Ph.D based on whether they like what I’ve done in the MTS, is kind of freaking me out. Not most days…just the days where I feel slow and stupid and wonder why I want to work with languages when I can’t remember vocabulary words for longer than 30 seconds at a time.

9) I will stop feeling sorry for myself now. I swear.

10) Annnnnd, to end on an entirely unimportant note, Mary Frances, I stole your nail polish color and I am NOT GIVING IT BACK.

Okay, off to read about virtue ethics. Good times!

On lexical poverty and other things

Being interested in linguistics is a funny thing. The more I learn about it, the more I get the sense that most people’s conceptions of how languages work and what they do is totally different from linguists’ conceptions of these things. Take the split infinitive, for example (or indeed any other finicky grammatical rule that either bugs you when people get uptight about getting it right or bugs you when people get it wrong). The “rule” is that one shouldn’t separate the “to” from the verb itself (”to go boldly”, not “to boldly go”). The reasoning behind it is that, in Latin and Greek (the languages of knowledge, culture and status for centuries), the infinitive is  expressed in a single word (dicere, currere, amare). In other words, because it’s impossible to split an infinitive in Latin, 18th-and 19th-century grammarians (my history is a little fuzzy) decided that it wasn’t “correct” to split it in English, even though separating the “to” from the “go” creates absolutely no conflict in terms of meaning. And yet, most people still assume that keeping the parts of the infinitive together is the right way to use English. Whether they get irritated at people who don’t follow the rule (I have to count myself in this group) or whether they get irritated at people correcting them, there’s still, I feel, a general cultural sense that the rule itself is a valid one.

(If any of my former students read this, they are going to call me a hypocrite; I was pretty hardcore about using standard English grammar in papers. I tried to justify it by arguing that, whether or not the rules have a valid basis, they are still the standard set by the people who hold power in this country; and one of the best ways to get some of that power and make a success of yourself is to write according to the standards by which they’ll judge you. Really, though, it’s just that it BOTHERS me when people make grammatical mistakes. Cognitive dissonance or straightforward hypocrisy? You decide.)

Another linguistic question comes up a lot when Hebrew is discussed. I imagine it’s mostly because Hebrew’s a non-Indo-European language, so its structure is totally different from either English or most of the languages people take in high school; also, it’s a sacred language, so a whole lot of people are pretty invested in texts translated from Hebrew, while relatively few can actually read the original. Well, as close to the original as we can get, which isn’t actually all that close. But that’s another story. The point is that, several times over the past few months, I’ve been in conversations with people who asked me whether and to what extent the structure and vocabulary of Hebrew influences the types and patterns of thought that we find in the Hebrew Bible. That is, does the way that Hebrew grammar works have to do with the way that the “Old Testament mind” works? Let me make one thing very very clear: this is not a dumb question. When I first started learning Hebrew, I was struck with, and enchanted by, its utter alienness of structure and idiom. In the case of poetry especially, it became clear to me that even the best English poetry is a poor substitute for the original; the form of Hebrew Bible poetry (based on parallelism of meaning rather than rhyme or meter) seemed to me ideally suited to the patterns and rhythms of the language. I’m told that this question was a matter of scholarly debate for some time, and like I said, it’s not a dumb hypothesis.

(Also? Before I go any farther, I’d like to point out that I don’t have much of a linguistics background and I can’t really be said to know what I’m talking about by people who actually know about these things. So, grain of salt. Right. Onward.)

Now, though, I get the sense that it’s not really the case, that every “natural” language has the capacity to express whatever thoughts its thinkers damn well please. We can see this in modern Hebrew, which has essentially the same grammatical structure (somewhat simplified) as Biblical Hebrew, and much of the same vocabulary. Admittedly, my exposure to modern Hebrew is limited to six weeks of floundering over “where are the toilets?” and one long-drawn-out struggle with a great article by Mordechai Cogan.  But in the latter instance, especially having the English translation of the article to work from as well, it became abundantly clear that Hebrew is just as well suited to expressing ideas drawn from a firmly Western European scholarly tradition as it is to discussing the God of the Hebrew Bible.

Maybe we think that there’s this connection between Hebrew language and “Hebraic” thought because the Bible is essentially our entire corpus of ancient Hebrew. True, we’ve had the Dead Sea Scrolls for the past 60 years or so, but that’s a blip in theological terms. And the mindsets of the writers of the Bible–even such vastly different writers as, say, the Deuteronomist and the author of Ecclesiastes–are still much more similar to each other than they are to ours. So I guess it makes sense to posit that the weltanschauung and the linguistic structure are inherently related, even though I’m increasingly thinking that this isn’t actually the case.

A related-but-different phenomenon is the old saying of “Eskimos have 300 different words for snow but no word for __.” The idea behind this, I think, is that, without the lexical category for a thing or concept, recognition or understanding of the thing or concept is impossible. If you’ve read 1984, Orwell uses the same idea for Newspeak–the government systematically erases the language necessary to express rebellious ideas, and so the capacity to have rebellious ideas disappears from the people’s minds. Only I’m pretty sure language doesn’t work that way. This post from the Language Log several years ago is both deliciously snarky and expresses why, exactly, it doesn’t. It’s also the reason I wrote this behemoth of an entry in the first case. Lastly, I wish to have it on record that I thought Orwell was wrong about the way language and thought are related when I read this my senior year of high school–I distinctly remember having a heated discussion with Mr. Wood and the entire rest of the class about it–and now science proves that I’m right. (Okay, Luke, fine, not science. Science-ish. Science-y things. We need a word for fields that aren’t science but are closer to it than, say, art history.)