Cultural Change and Metaphors

Much of cultural change arises from the introduction of new metaphorical concepts and the loss of old ones. For example, the Westernization of cultures throughout the word is partly a matter of introducing the TIME IS MONEY metaphor into those cultures.

~ Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By  

  This book has provided many insights along the way; but this one is of a different sort, one that talks about cultural change. The illustration is quite apt. Think of the many areas in which English-language speech is dominated by this particular metaphor. Look at how each of the following verbs can be followed by either 'time' or 'money';  spend, invest, waste, have, make, save, take, be worth, borrow, gain, lose, be out of ______. In other words, in English (not necessarily in England or America), time tends to be conceptualized metaphorically as analogous to money in many, many ways. Time is the abstract concept; money is the more concrete daily experience. Yet, what if we had a different dominant metaphor? What if we saw time as a gift or a river or a spring of water? We'd behave differently; we'd think differently. If time is a gift, being late to a meeting because you were giving that gift to someone who needed it more implies no disrespect to the person who had to wait a bit to receive the gift you were bringing to give them. 

  Explaining more, a bit later in chapter 21, Lakoff and Johnson say, "Each culture must provide a more or less successful way of dealing with its environment, both adapting to it and changing it. Moreover, each culture must define a social reality within which people have roles that make sense to them and in terms of which they can function socially. Not surprisingly, the social reality defined by a culture affects its conception of physical reality. What is real for an individual as a member of a culture is a product both of his social reality and of the way in which that shapes his experience of the physical world. Since much of our social reality is understood in metaphorical terms, and since our conception of the physical world is partly metaphorical, metaphor plays a very significant role in determining what is real for us." (all emphasis mine)

What does this image mean?

 Even some rather basic images can communicate in some surprisingly intricate ways. You may remember this picture puzzle from childhood:

 Last night while with friends, I saw the this image on one of their hats. The friend had gotten the hat from lost and found and hadn't interpreted it yet. Together we mumbled through key words and stumbled upon the hidden meaning in a brilliant flash of illumination. I'll put our key words in light text below so you can work through it for yourself. Select the text if you want to see them though.

(source of above image)

  The interesting takeaway is that an apparently random picture can cause a group of people with shared knowledge to suddenly yell the same thing. Images are powerful.

"Is that a Bengal goat? 😀" 

"My friend had a golf hat."

"It's striped. Isn't it a tiger?"

"Oh!"

Tiger is the GOAT!!!

CoTESOL - What I still want to remember 4 months later

 Last November, I got to go to CoTESOL, Colorado's TESOL conference; it was a great experience with a healthy variety of speakers. Many of the sessions focused on a different area of language learning than I usually do, cross-cultural K-12 English users. Due to this, some of the most interesting sessions were connected to the presenters' stories of migration, emigration, and immigration (or their families'). I thoroughly enjoyed many of the speakers' sessions: Lulu Buck, Emily Francis, Don Vu, and Beth Skelton are all people to learn from and enjoy it. But I want to mention a few other sessions that I found particularly interesting. 

 But before that... For any non-teacher Americans who have gotten this far, some statistics might be the most interesting takeaway. In the USA, 10% of K-12 students have a home language other than English. 80% of those multilinguals speak Spanish. After Spanish, the next four most common additional languages in US schools are Arabic, Vietnamese, Russian, and Mandarin. Overall American schools have a rich diversity with over 300 different languages being spoken in its K-12 schools nationwide. 

 Specific to Colorado, in 2022, there were 110,000 multilingual learners with 280 different languages. Here Amharic (#4) is added to the above list of commonly spoken home languages. All of this suggests why it's possible to see monolingual people as somewhat limited. 😳😬🙊 (This data also suggests why it could be reasonable and beneficial to expand the amount of translation that is done in official spaces since only 4-6 additional languages would be needed in most states, not 300. Oops, this is beginning to sound political... 😳😬🙊, again.)

Carol Salva 

-  I don't have a long list of quotes from Dr. Carol, but she talks about teaching in the way I want to teach. She exudes love and hope for her students. If you get a chance to hear her or follow her on FB, I'd highly recommend it. Her ideas are practical and caring and focused on the students' potential. Also, she's humble enough to ask for help and then talk about it publicly...

- "[Students] aren't going to believe anything more than what I believe." (for and about them and their abilities)

Monica Lara

- "When you're a second language learner, you're a second language learner for life."

-  quoting Luis Moll, "The concept of 'funds of knowledge is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge."

- She also talked about the QSSA strategy for conversations; it seems like a valuable riff on think-pair-share.

Jamal Khlifat - "Cross-linguistic Syntactic priming between Levantine Arabic and English in bilingual speakers"

- This presentation sounds incredibly complex, but it was extremely interesting. Basically, Dr. Khlifat's study shows that exposure to greater complexity moves students to express themselves with greater complexity. This is true even if the exposure occurs in the learner's native language! In other words, if you give a language learner a relatively complex text in their own language and then have them write in the target language they are learning, they will write with relatively more complexity than if you prime them with a simpler text (in their own language). The research was done between Arabic and English, but studies to explore this in other languages are ongoing.

- This study seemed to me to both support the concept of grammaring (showing grammar in real contexts instead of starting from the textbook with definitions and prescriptions), and it also "could serve as a counterargument to monolingual-immersion  teaching/instruction." This was one of three pedagogical implications given. The other two were "A learner's native language should be viewed as a resource, rather than a problem for educators to circumvent." and "Priming texts in a learner's native language serve[s] as a scaffolding tool."

Sonia Felix Naix - regarding "Ilots bonifiés" - "Collaborating to Maximize Participation in EFL Classrooms"

- This presentation was fascinating and presented a beautiful system for encouraging participation. She shared the main form needed to implement the system as well. The major challenge with learning the system was that one needed to know French as it was developed by a French teacher, Marie Rivoire in 2012. Little to nothing about it seems to have appeared in English before this presentation. Ms. Felix Naix was most interested in hearing from anyone who tried out the system.

fun with alarms and their verbs

 

 Yesterday evening in class, a dear elderly gentleman, one of the most diligent students I've had, had a new question for me. The text in the book was having the students use 'phrasal verbs', those amusing two-word, one-meaning verbs like 'get up' or 'go ahead'. The text was specifically using them in the context of alarms, like smoke alarms. He wanted an explanation for the phrasal verb used when an alarm sounds. 

Why do we use 'goes off' to say that an alarm 'turns on'?

 After asking his question, he carefully stared off into the middle distance so as not to put me on the spot as I publicly and verbally pondered the ridiculousness of this linguistic oddity for the first time. "Your alarm is going OFF; please turn it OFF, or it won't go OFF... er, ahh, I mean it won't stop going OFF."

 After a bit, I readily admitted to the class that this certainly had the potential to throw off (!) a night's sleep, at least until my alarm...

Teaching Academic Reading: a method including the Academic Word List

  It was frustration and some level of despair with teaching Academic Reading that pushed me to do an MA in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) several years ago. Now, two years after completing that degree, my academic reading classes are still the ones most likely to frustrate me, but I've learned a lot over the last 6 years. I am now completing my thirteenth one-semester, EAP class focused on Academic Reading and Writing for first-year students. (EAP stands for English for Academic Purposes.)

 When I started, I was given a variety of material and a lot of freedom to design the classes however I wanted. These classes are specific to the students' department/field of study, and that first class was with the History department. I love studying history, so it was an ideal match! 

  The problem was my lack of experience and knowledge: 

How do you teach someone who already knows how to read, how to read better? 

  I mean, I know how to read, and so do they. Also, I know how to read academic material quite well, but that's a really personal skill, or at least it feels like it. So, there was a lot of trial and error, and I began accumulating experience, often of things that didn't work well.

 Eventually, I was transferred to teaching EAP classes for Political Science and International Relations (interesting!) and Economics (not so interesting!) departments. These classes (with my MA teachers' guidance) pointed me to a central principle for teaching EAP classes: 

I'm not the expert; the students are. 

  How can I teach economics students when I don't know economics? Well, the students get to be the experts, and I tell them so! Suddenly the class becomes more collaborative because this principles suggests certain corollaries. The students answer a survey in the first week of class each semester choosing which topics we will discuss that semester and also indicating which skill areas they feel the need to learn. That's the first step in the method.

   Of course, I also bring an expertise to the classroom: 

My job is to provide shortcuts and productive pathways that students can travel for streamlined learning.  

  What does this look like? Well, one key area of learning for university-level reading is field-specific vocabulary. Every field of study has its own specialized vocabulary; every student needs to learn these, but the stakes are raised for those who have spent fewer years using English regularly. 

  Years ago, the Academic Word List was researched and published; Oxford now has a similar list. However, these are somewhat blunt tools; they merely tell the reader what words they are likely to encounter throughout the ENTIRE university campus. While useful, these tools don't tell students what words to focus on and try using this week for this topic. However, they can!

  Before assigning each reading in class each week, I take the text from whatever article we are reading, and I pass it through this text analyzer. 

   Then, I copy and paste the list of words produced by that into Excel and copy just the list of single words. 

   Then, I paste that into this List Comparison tool. On the other side, I paste the AWL words (from the PDF at the above site.)

  This tells me, which AWL words are in the assigned text. I can then prioritize the ones that are most crucial to the reading, while I can also note which ones have cognates in the students' native languages. I keep a list of all these AWL words throughout the semester; and by again using the List Comparison tool, I know what AWL words have been shared before and which ones are new this week. In this way, we can avoid excessive repetition.

  One final benefit of this process is that by scanning the original text analysis, I can note any key collocations or expressions that may be important for this text as well. These may not be on the Academic Word List, but they can be really useful for the students. This is especially true for noun-preposition combinations.

 Where do I get my articles for the readings? Well, from a variety of sources. However, two of the best sources for appropriate-length, academic-level readings are JSTOR Daily and the Council on Foreign Relations. The particular example used above came from JSTOR Daily, "The Bold Future of the Outer Space Treaty." 

  Naturally, having learned the most relevant vocabulary for their (class-chosen) topic and having read an article on it, the students are prepared to share some of their own thoughts on the topic. Thus, there's usually a follow-up writing assignment. This process can help with one final principle that Dana Ferris mentions:

“Similarly, students should be encouraged to generate key vocabulary for a specific piece of writing.” Ferris (Supporting Multilingual Writers in EAP, 154)

Responsibility-Independence & Second Languages Entrapping Thirds

Responsibility was the inevitable price one had to pay for independence; irresponsibility was something which, in the very nature of things, could not co-exist with independence.

Commodore Hornblower (p. 230). Kindle Edition. 

[While trying to speak French...] But conversation did not proceed smoothly, with Hornblower having laboriously to build up his sentences beforehand and to avoid the easy descent into Spanish which was liable to entrap him whenever he began to think in a foreign tongue.

Flying Colours (p. 98). Kindle Edition. 

 One of the three epic series that I re-read regularly, probably every three-ish years, is the Hornblower saga by C. S. Forester. (The others being Tolkien's Middle Earth works and Herbert's Dune saga.) Anyways, I recently finished reading Hornblower again and pulled out these two lovely quotes. The first is a bit of sage wisdom [is there another type?!] which seems especially applicable to parents raising children... and everyone else. 

  The second quote is a rather sympathetic insight of the ambush laid for anyone who has dabbled in third or fourth languages. Whichever non-native language is strongest is always lingering just over the horizon to ensnare the speaker in their other languages, occasionally even twisting the native language itself! 

Photo by Martin Laprise on Unsplash

short words are harder

  A hundred plus years ago, G. K. Chesterton remarked upon the dangerous laziness of long words and the difficulty and effort required to put things into short words. An extract of his thought seem worth sharing. It is worth thinking about how we think (or not), and then how we speak (or not)! 

Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment," you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out," you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

   But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially ruinous and confusing. This difficulty occurs when the same long word is used in different connections to mean quite different things. Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece of moral rhetoric. In the same way the scientific materialists have had just reason to complain of people mixing up "materialist" as a term of cosmology with "materialist" as a moral taunt. So, to take a cheaper instance, the man who hates "progressives" in London always calls himself a "progressive" in South Africa.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch. 8. (emphasis added)

a Disastrophe with Hanitizer

   My sister recently shared with me the word malaphor, which apparently is the blending of idioms or cliches; her sharing included the example, "it's not rocket surgery." It's always nice to have another word for something you already know how to do. I mean this summer I had realized that you should 

Never count your chickens before they come home to roost!

  

  Having said that, I have for years been collecting words along the same line - serendipitous combinations of words that, merged together, picturesquely convey far more than the sum of their parts. Language Nerds (the main reason I've considered getting Instagram) had one this week: 

cupidity: the dumb stuff we do when we are in love 

   Here are some additional samples that I present for your use.  

hanitizer: the stuff we wash COVID off our hands with (credit: small human in Texas) 

himpered: when you feel both hampered and hindered in and from doing something

disastrophe: when a catastrophe gets disastrously worse

crimpled: the feeling of not being able to walk because you've been sitting all crumpled up

anticdote: 1. a story about one's own antics; 2. a humorous anecdote told in order to offer warning for others as an antidote to their foolishness (credit: unsuspecting theologian in a lecture)

clowsy: cloudiness that makes one feel drowsy (credit: brother-in-law)

waservoir: a place with a large accumulation of water held in reserve (credit: small human)

wuzzled: the state of a paper that has been crushed and wadded and was not supposed to be in that state Ex: Why is this all wuzzled up?!? (credit: father) 

2018 recommended reading

This year's list of top books from my 2018 reading is as eclectic as ever. A number of the books come from my masters studies in teaching English; others come from my reading to my children, and still others are from my reading for enjoyment or learning, which are often the same thing.

Theological

Family of Pi in Matthew & Reliability of Our New Testament by Russell N. Champlin - These two works were written by a distant relative whose other major publications were in Portuguese. He died this year, but I benefited from his firsthand work with the Greek manuscripts which form part of the textual legacy of the New Testament. The first work is his PhD dissertation; the second is a booklet which he wrote to present the evidence for the New Testament's reliability for non-scholars.

Historical 

John Adams by David McCullough - This book had been waiting in my reading list for quite a while, and it lived up to its reputation. It gave fascinating insights not only into America's second president, but also into the time period in which he lived. A man of the soil in ways that many of America's (famous) early nation builders were not.

Means of Escape by Philip Caputo - This was a gift to me last Christmas; and as the giver has never given me a book I did not enjoy, I gladly read it though I would not have bought it for myself and had never heard of it. It was worth it! It ranges all over the modern world and era as the author relates episodes from his work as a journalist while also managing to turn his story into a narrative.

Teaching English / Education

The Grammar Book by Diane Larsen-Freeman & Marianne Celce-Murcia - My only regret with this book is that I did not spend the money to get the most recent edition when I purchased this. In another context I commented about the book as follows, "I am beginning to associate Diane Larsen-Freeman’s name with the highest quality of materials. As I have explored chapter 33 on “Reported Speech and Writing,” the breadth and depth and level of detail in the chapter was phenomenal, and very useful. Nearly every page of my book has new markings, many with whole paragraphs of key information." The only other grammar book that I feel about like this is Murphy's English Grammar in Use, which has a completely different, and rather minimalistic, approach.

Other People's Children by Lisa Delpit - I have not yet posted about my takeaways from Delpit's book; this is because there are so many of them, not because they are in any sense lacking - and I haven't even finished it yet. It's worth any teacher's/educator's time.

Türkçe ve İngilizce Açıklamalı English Grammar by Seven and Seven - This fascinating work is written by two Turks as an English grammar with explanation in both English and Turkish. As such, it contains fascinating insights and is useful in some unexpected ways.

Second Language Acquisition by Rod Ellis - This is a solid overview on how additional (aka "second) languages are acquired. (previous post)

Fiction

Barbarossa by Iskender Pala - I have not quite finished it yet, but this book has been a fascinating and surprisingly positive journey across the Mediterranean world of the 1500s. This would be a great read for someone who wanted to venture into another nation's literature and worldview.

River of Death & The Dark Crusader by Alistair MacLean - I enjoyed these two books by MacLean; I thought I had read all his works but was pleasantly surprised to find that I had no memory of these two, though they do not rank with his great classics.

Children's

Last Stop on Market Street by Matt De La Pena - This was a book that was quietly beautiful; its message was not flashy. Rather it allowed its message to develop and be powerfully latent within the story and the illustrations without finding it necessary to verbalize it explicitly.

The Quiltmaker's Gift  - This book is another example of exquisite illustrations complementing a deeply-told story. The 'moral' in this story is somewhat more explicit, but it is not preachy. While there is no suggestion that it is "Christian" in the book itself, I feel the story harmonizes at a quite deep level with the message of Jesus.

Songs & Artists

Song: "Awesome" (artist: Charles Jenkins)

Group: The Gray Havens (song - "The Train Station")


Recommendations from years past: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011

A Collection of Quotes on Learning and Teaching

We are so attuned to errors and so involved in ferreting them out that we tend to neglect to praise our students when they take a risk and get it wrong. Students are more likely to take risks if they see that risk-taking is noted and encouraged. So we should be on the lookout not only for what is correct but also for good attempts.

- Ann Raimes, "Errors: Windows into the Mind." College ESL, 1991.

We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. "The king died and then the queen died" is a story. "The king died, and then the queen died of grief" is a plot.

- E. M. Forster, The Aspects of a Novel. (1956).

As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another's voices, in recognizing one another's presence. 

- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress

Each writer has its own audience (intended readers) that might be part of a discourse community in which there is a degree of shared understandings and knowledge. Your class (the actual readers) may not be part of that discourse community and so they will make very different meaning and will need scaffolding if they want to read it as part of a particular community of readers. This is something to consider as you teach—what is your role as a teacher in this dilemma?

 - Leslie Turpin

This activity from Scott Thornbury's post, "V is for Vocabulary teaching" seemed useful and enjoyable:

I picked out 8 words from the text that I wanted my pupils to learn. Then I had my pupils identifying the words in the text. Task 2 was a selecting task where the pupils had to underline the words that were typical for India. They shared their work with a partner, explaining their choices. As task 3 they were matching the words with an English description from a dictionary. They also found antonyms and synonyms. Task 4 was a sorting activity where the pupils had to decide whether the words were nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs. Finally, as a ranking and sequencing activity I had my pupils rank the words according to preference, to decide how important they thought knowing each word was. They discussed their ranking with a partner. (Mette B.)

Language Learners & Having a Voice

 From my grad reading for this week, I want to submit the following quotation for your consideration. 

Norton saw social identity as multiple, contradictory, and dynamic. To obtain the ‘right to speak’ learners need to be able to see themselves as legitimate speakers of the L2, not as defective communicators. They have to be prepared to challenge the subservient social identity that native speakers often thrust upon them and assert the right to communicate. 

(Emphasis mine)

Ellis, Rod. Understanding Second Language Acquisition 2nd Edition (Kindle Locations 707-709). OUP. 

  As a language learner and a language teacher, I find that challenge to be always significant. The non-native speaker of a language can easily have a sense of inferiority and illegitimacy in their speaking, especially if their audience does not demonstrate empathetic, active listening. However, this does not actually mean that their thoughts are less valid or less important to hear. Listen attentively to your non-native friends; speak your L2 with assurance to your native friends.

excerpts on "Language" from Lost in Translation

No, I’m no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love. It lives within me despite my knowledge of our marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions. Is it blind and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory? I think it would be blind and self-deceptive not to. All it has given me is the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me the colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves.

***

The very places where language is at its most conventional, where it should be most taken for granted, are the places where I feel the prick of artifice.

***

Telling a joke is like doing a linguistic pirouette. If you fall flat, it means not only that you don’t have the wherewithal to do it well but also that you have misjudged your own skill, that you are fool enough to undertake something you can’t finish – and that lack of self-control or self-knowledge is a lack of grace.

***

So each language has its own distinctive music, and even if one doesn’t know its separate components, one can pretty quickly recognize the propriety of the patterns in which the components are put together, their harmonies and discords.

***

When I speak Polish now, it is infiltrated, permeated, and inflected by the English in my head. Each language modifies the other, crossbreeds with it, fertilizes it. Each language makes the other relative. Like everybody, I am the sum of my languages – the language of my family and childhood, and education and friendship, and love, and the larger, changing world – though perhaps I tend to be more aware than most of the fractures between them, and of the building blocks.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (p. 74, 106, 118, 123, 273). 

And, a thought from this immigrant child, concerning writing "home"...

There is no way, I know, that I can convey the nature of my new life to her, and besides, she is one of the many affections that are only causing me the pain of nostalgia, and that I therefore try to numb or extract from myself like some gnawing scruple, or splinter lodged in a thumb.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (p. 23). 

Understanding, Listening to each other, and Knowing

 I will be posting tidbits from my grad school reading here. Much of the recent stuff doesn't relate directly to teaching; it relates to humanity and learning. The chapter mentioned below by Curran was particularly good.

The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become - and such lucidity is a form of joy. 

Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation

The preservation of the self-image is the first law of psychological survival. Therefore, in any social encounter each person exposes for public scrutiny and public testing - and possibly for intolerable undermining - the one thing he needs most, which is the self-perception that he has so laboriously fashioned. This mean that the stakes in any social encounter are incredibly high. No such encounter, therefore, can be merely routine.

- Earl Stevick, "A View of the Learner" (emphasis added)

This is a common major or minor tragedy of the human condition: two people meet each other, both seeking to be understood, and neither of them are able or willing to make the effort to understand. This could be like two performers in a circus trapeze act - both expecting to be caught and no one catching. One can almost feel the pain as they crash into one another after both have leaped off the trapeze. 

(...)

Consequently understanding between people cannot be presumed, even though it is a basic need of us all. That is why it is necessarily an acquired skill. To assume it, as many do, is to mislead oneself. In the assumption, one can be in the narcissistic bind of presuming one is a very "understanding" person when one has, in reality, never left oneself and one's own world. Others seldom tell us this even when everyone around us knows it. We can therefore remain in a self-deception trap. 

- Charles Curran, Understanding: An Essential Ingredient in Human Belonging (emphasis added)

Dreaming in English - a Turkish author's ponderings on writing in English

 At the end of print copies of her novels, Turkish author Elif Shafak has a short piece on why she writes novels in English; it's called "Dreaming in English." She has a slightly adjusted version of this piece posted on the English Pen. It is beautiful and well worth the read, especially if you are interested in the lives of global nomads and TCKs. Shafak expresses that sense which children of multiple cultures may have of being able to be true to each of their cultures in various ways, without betraying or abandoning any of them. She expresses the sense of belonging and connecting and loving, indeed, the sense of identity, which is felt deeply and yet somehow at a distance. I'd love to have posted the whole thing, but I'll leave these tidbits, with the hope that you will go read the whole thing for yourself (here, emphases mine).

I never thought I had to make a choice between my two loved ones: English and Turkish. In truth, perhaps even more than writing in English or writing in Turkish, it is the very commute back and forth that fascinates me to this day. I pay extra attention to those words that cannot be ferried from one continent to the other. I become more aware of not only meanings and nuances but also of gaps and silences. And I observe myself and others. Our voices change, even our body language alters as we move from one language to another. At the end of the day, languages shape us while we are busy thinking we control them.

Sometimes, the presence of absence strengthens a bond and distance brings you closer.

Rather than a pre-given, fixed, monolithic identity, we can have multiple and fluid belongings. We can even love more than one person. Our hearts are wide and deep enough to do so. And yes, we can also dream in more than one language.

 Incidentally, for reasons she hints at in the article, Shafak is often not well regarded here in Turkey. Unfortunately, the reasons for that here (as with other authors in their own homelands) are political rather than literary. I am interested, however, in the experience she is expressing - not in either the literature itself or the politics thereof.

'A world of languages' - VISUALIZED

  As a student of language, I'm not sure which statistics in the graphic below are the most amazing... (See all 4 charts.)

1.  Chinese as a larger language group than the next three largest ones combined.
2.  English having nearly 20 times the number of language LEARNERS as any other language.
3. India for having 5.5 of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
4.  America for having the fourth highest number of living languages in the world - still a nation whose strength is her immigrants.

Source: https://cdn3.scmp.com/sites/default/files/2015/05/27/languages.png (click to enlarge)

  I also didn't realize that Spanish was the second largest natively spoken languge in the world.

Apologetics for Lucy Pevensie of Narnia

  I recently started reading C. S. Lewis' Aslan, Cadı ve Dolap (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, obviously in Turkish).

  When I came to the part where Lucy's older siblings go the Professor to find out what they should do about her Narnian imaginings.  I noticed that the Professor used the same argument that Lewis popularized regarding the deity of Jesus in order to convince Peter and Susan of Lucy's truthfulness.  In other words, Lucy was describing something true because they had never known her to be a liar and she had not seemed to be trying to lie convincingly.  Furthermore, she wasn't crazy.  So, therefore, the Professor concluded that she must be speaking the truth (which he obviously could have guessed much more easily with his extra information from Büyücünun Yeğeni.)

 As I confirmed on Google, this is not a new observation, but it was still a fun discovery.

Language Learning

If you are going to learn a language...

This should help with the practical: Language Learning in the Real World for Non-Beginners as well as other resources by Greg Thompson

Your long-term possibilities are better, because... language learning stalls dementia and Alzheimers.

Prepare for smiles...

Aşkı Bulacaksın - an oldies Turkish love song

  I heard this catchy song in a friend's car a couple weeks ago, so once I figured out how to find it, I wanted to figure out the words.  So, here's my translation of "Aşkı Bulacaksın" which I only completed so I could give it to my wife.  Hopefully, I can improve the translation as my understanding of Turkish idioms improves!  A version of the song performed by Tanju Okan is embedded between my English translation and the Turkish words. 

You will find the prettiest love

Some twilight when you meet her

You’ll find true love, with her

As you come face to face and blush.

Instantly your heart will be ablaze;

Your hand, your foot will dance around.

You will find the prettiest of loves

When the sun sets right as you meet her

You’ll find true love  

You’ll be so tongue-tied

  that you can’t say a word

Everywhere will be brilliant

And those eyes of yours will be dazzled

Don’t ask me what sort

  of issue this is

If you’re in such a state, look at yourself

Don’t whine or complain

  about this sort of love

In the world you've no other joy.

Look! I’ll tell you something.

  Don’t lose your senses.

This is the most beautiful thing in life.

Take care not to forget

  to give ear to your friend,

In the world you've no other joy.

You will find the prettiest of loves…

Instantly your heart will be ablaze;

Your hand, your foot will dance around.

You will find the prettiest love

When the sun sets right as you meet her

You’ll find true love…

 (This song apparently has a completely different meaning than when directly translated from the French original by Dalida “Gigi L'amoroso.”)

En güzel aşkı bulacaksın 

Bir akşamüstü onunla karşılınca 

Aşkı bulacaksın onunla
Göz göze gelip yüzün kızarınca 

Bir anda kalbin tutuşacak 

Elin ayağın dolaşacak 

En güzel aşkı bulacaksın 

Güneş batarken onunla karşılanca 

Aşkı bulacaksın 

Birşeyler söylemek için
  dilin tutulunca
Her taraf aydınlık olacak 

Ve o gözlerin kamaşacak

Bu ne biçim iştir

  diye bana sorma 

Her ne halin varsa kendin gör 

Bu ne biçim aşktır
sızlanıp yakınma 

Dünyada senden mutlusu yok

Bak haberin olsun

aklını kaçırma 

En güzel şey bu hayatında 

Ve sakın unutma
kulak ver dostuna 

Dünyada senden mutlusu yok.

En güzel aşkı bulacaksın... 
Bir anda kalbin tutuşacak 

Elin ayağın dolaşacak 

En güzel aşkı bulacaksın 

Güneş batarken onunla karşılanca 

Aşkı bulacaksın...

*Söz (lyrics): Mehmet Teoman

The Obscured Origin of English Grammar

English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

― James Nicoll

I can't say that I haven't felt the sentiment which inspired this quote as I've taught, or tried to teach, over the last weeks or months. The area which this quote, or its more colorful cousin which concerns English vocabulary and is found in other places online, does not cover is spelling. English orthography (spelling) seems to me and to my Turkish friends and students to be a most unnecessary hinderance to learning the English language.

See, Turkish has nearly perfect orthography.  Certainly, there are some aspects of pronunciation which are not demonstrated in the letters; and while native speakers often don't recognize it, there are some pronunciation differences in practice; but at least the letters all stay in their own region of the ballpark.

Having said all that, thanks to the various English teachers who invested in my learning the boulevards and alleyways of the English language. Your insights are still useful to me.