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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.)
I answered some questions for the school newspaper, since I (among others) am leaving next year for other ventures. They wanted to know if I had any words of wisdom. I thought about it, and here’s what I’ve got:
1) Never use the verb “is” in your writing.
2) Don’t fear ambiguity. Relish it.
3) When in doubt, the main character symbolizes Christ.
During yesterday’s Hebrew reading, Lee and Gail and I chatted about numbers in foreign languages–specifically, why they are so freakishly difficult to remember. I certainly find this to be the case–number words are the hardest vocabulary words to learn and the quickest to slip away when I let a language lapse. I was relieved to find two such eminent linguists, both of whom have spent their professional lives learning and teaching languages, admit to the same difficulty.
This got us onto the topic of language learning itself, and its affinities with both the “left” and “right” sides of your brain (not that I really buy that “left/right” divide, but it’s a handy shorthand). Lee has said that he finds both “English people” and “math people” doing well in Latin, though they tend to approach the material slightly differently. And I am all about the artsy-fartsy big-picture intuitive learning and am still addicted to language learning, whereas Blondie is a straight-up logician for whom Latin is a grand and beautiful puzzle.
Maybe the solution is to teach language and mathematics in conjunction in some way–to trick the students who are into math into thinking they’re in a math class, and trick the students who are into humanities into thinking that they are in a language class. By the time they realize that both language learning and mathematics require the same type of thinking, it will be too late: they’ll have all the multiplication tables memorized in French, and have learned to do the quadratic equation in the finest Attic Greek, and they’ll never mix “three hundred” and “thirty thousand” again, and they’ll never again be able to put themselves in little boxes labeled “bad at math” and “bad at writing.” That, I think, would be a good thing.
The New York Times Magazine has an interesting and quite thorough article on single-sex education, which is on a dramatic rise in public schools (apparently). It addresses both the biological and social arguments for single-sex ed, the former of which goes something like “boys and girls have inherent physiological and learning differences that make them benefit from different types of instruction” and the latter of which goes something along the lines of “boys and girls are raised with such different social expectations that single-sex ed is necessary to counter negative influences and encourage positive ones.”
I’m not sure where I stand on the matter, having both learned and taught at an all-girls school, but having found that I thrive quite well in a coed or even predominantly masculine classroom. Certainly I relish being able to do Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice in the same year without sending the class into rebellion, and I vividly remember seeing a friend (whom I knew to be intelligent, perceptive, and hard-working) dissolve into giggly helplessness for the benefit of the boys in a coed chemistry class. But when I think about the differences in learning styles within my own classrooms, I wonder whether championing single-sex education might not cause problems as well as solve them. The Language Log has a nice discussion of the perils of statistics; the line that stuck out the most to me in the article was, “gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds.” I have girls who simply salivate for competition; I have girls whom competition terrifies and shuts down. There are girls who work well within the interpersonal/conversational learning that educational psych touts as a peculiarly female strength; there are also girls who would much prefer to be working a problem out on their own. And I worry that categorizing girls as less comfortable with what we’re now calling STEM–Science, Technology, Economics, Math–is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I guess what I’m saying is that I become deeply suspicious when people implicitly take the male/female divide as prescriptive rather than descriptive, as I have seen them do. Maybe most boys will function better in a specific type of environment; it doesn’t mean that the teacher is then exempted from trying to find what environment will work best for the specific group of boys that she has. It’s one thing to try to predict what a student will be comfortable with, but it’s quite another to demand that our students match their natures to our predictions.
Final round of the Poetry Out Loud competition went down tonight–what a wonderful, grand time. Beautiful poems read and performed beautifully. I was actually very glad to be a teacher–if I were a student I think I’d have been eaten up with nerves and really wanted more than anything else to win, whereas as a teacher I got to enjoy and applaud everyone’s poems without thinking, “Is she going to sabotage my chances?” Some really beautiful and unusual poems chosen too–a nice mix of the ones that were new and the ones discovered anew.
One girl read Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116.”
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no; it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Awesome.
Oh, also–on a more personal note, I got an interview at Cornell for their Near Eastern Studies program! Woohoo! That is, naturally, the one school that Blondie did not get into for chemistry…but it’s still good to be that much closer to an acceptance.
It’s funny–some days I feel as though I’m really getting the hang of this job, and other days I realize just how much of a noob I still am. And the days aren’t predictable. Something like, say, explaining what a “motif” is and getting the students to become aware of the recurrence of language having to do with blood, masculinity, owls, darkness, vision, Christ-figures, and what have you, in Macbeth? I turned out to be a pro at that. Something as seemingly simple as showing a movie version of Macbeth on the last two days of class before Christmas Break? Completely threw me for a loop. First I check out all of the VHS versions in the school library (4, in case you were wondering), then I realize I don’t have a VHS player and that none of those versions are very watchable anyway. I borrow an extra one from the school, take it home, and completely fail to put it up successfully. I decide to shelve that dilemma, rent a movie from the Fan Video, settle down to watch it, and realize that it completely sucks. So then I spend two to three hours driving around Chesterfield (I get lost) in complete desperation in search of a DVD version that another teacher recommended. I rent what I think is it, then realize within five minutes of playing it that it’s laughably bad. Finally I suck it up and watch the Roman Polanski one (which is actually fairly good, if dated) and just tell the students to close their eyes for the violent parts. Oh, and I’m leaving out the part where I had to beg the librarian (who is very sweet, luckily) for help finding a stand with a TV and VCR, then lug it around to all of my classrooms.
Go me.
The middle school chaplain, who gave our chapel talk today, discussed balance. She advised the students to figure out what was important and focus on that, and to leave the unessential strewn by the wayside. Now, when I listen to sermons (of whatever kind), I generally find myself conducting a discussion with the speaker in my head, and today was no exception.
Yes, I think we can all agree that Britney Spears’ underwear is an instance of the “unessential” things which deserve to be left behind. On the other hand, I find it considerably more difficult to discern what is unessential in my life than one might think would be the case.
Which is most essential: a bed to sleep in; clothes to wear to work; a paid-off credit card; tea from Starbucks in the morning?
Which is most essential: quality time with my parents and siblings; quality time with my boyfriend; quality time with my friends; quality time with my students?
Which is most essential: sufficient sleep; sufficient preparation for class; sufficient time spent alone; sufficient time spent with others?
I don’t mean to whine. I have more control over my life than I ever have before, so in some sense I have it easier than most of my students probably do. But how do I go about making those choices? How do I choose between what is necessary and what is necessary? How do I build enough of the “unnecessary” things–tea, knitting, reading, relaxation–into my life that I don’t feel as though I’m constantly living on the hard and bitter edge of necessity? And if I can’t seem to figure these things out, how will my students?
I’ve been spending a good deal of time recently talking with my students about fluency. Write often, I tell them, and eventually you will learn to write well. To the students whose prose is sparse or clotted on the page, I say, think about keeping a journal. Get the words out. Learn to express your ideas and emotions with clarity and precision and, above all, fluency. Clear the clutter and fog from your mind and from your sentences.
I am working on this myself. I am always working on this. The trouble these days comes from finding the time: somewhere in between the class prep and the grading and the teaching and the resting so that I can continue doing this lovely, satisfying, immensely challenging work, I lose the time to write. And so when I do write (which is not often), I lack fluency. I lack precision. The fog rolls over my brain.
Reading helps. I am rereading Laurie R. King, and though her prose seems more mannered than it did when I was fourteen, it retains the occasional blinding clarity of phrasing that I admire so much. I am two-thirds of the way through Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, and am finding his writing as subtle and expressive as I’ve ever read. Most of the time. One of the things I like about Gaiman’s work is that his best pieces–which are so damn good–are balanced with stories and novels that, frankly, aren’t so good.
Fluency.
I don’t know when I will have time to write again. I almost don’t care–as I said, this is immensely satisfying work. But I want, somehow, to be able to set aside that time, to uncramp my intellect and stretch it and let it send out loose and fluent tendrils out into the night air.
