Tag: English

Men, chocolate, and coffee: compositionality and the mapping problem

Linguists are sometimes accused of spending their time navel-gazing over sentences that are not realistic. The truth is that you don’t have to look any further than your daily life for real linguistic puzzles.

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Sign on the wall of a Village Inn. Picture source: me.

Linguists and philosophers are sometimes accused of spending their time navel-gazing over sentences that are not realistic.  However, the truth is that you don’t have to look any further than your daily life for real puzzles, and sometimes for real challenges to linguistic theory.

Right at this moment, I’m sitting in a Village Inn.  If you’re French: that’s a restaurant chain that’s known for being somewhat déclassé (déclassé and other obscure English expressions explained below in the English and French notes), and for having great pancakes.  I’m somewhat déclassé, and it’s Saturday morning, so I’m sitting here treating myself to pancakes.  (Village Inn is not so redneck as to not have wifi.)  On the wall opposite me is the poster that you see at the beginning of this post.  It says:

Men, chocolate and coffee are all better rich.

Now: that is a joke.  It plays on multiple meanings of the word rich.  Something like this:

  • rich man: A man with a lot of money.
  • rich chocolate:  Containing a large amount of choice ingredients, such as butter, sugar, or eggs, and therefore unusually heavy or sweet: a rich dessert
    (from thefreedictionary.com).
  • rich coffee: Strong in aroma or flavor: a rich coffee (from thefreedictionary.com).

A reasonable native speaker could disagree with me over whether or not rich has different meanings in rich chocolate and rich coffee, but the essential fact about the example remains: rich has more than one sense in this sentence.

Who cares?  It’s like this.  One of the fundamental assumptions in the vast majority of approaches to understanding semantics (in the sense of the meaning of language) is something called compositionality.  Compositionality is the process of meaning being produced by something that you could think of as similar to addition (technically, it’s a more general “function,” but “addition” will work for our positions–linguists, no hate mail, please): the idea is that the meaning of Khani stole the butter is the adding together of the meanings of Khani, steal, butter, and the meaning of being in the subject position versus the object position of an active, transitive sentence.

That’s compositionality.  Another bit of background that we need: the mapping problem.  The mapping problem is the question of how the semantics of a sentence–its meaning–is related to the syntax of the sentence–the structure of the phrases of which the sentence is made up.  There are all sorts of problems here.  To give you one example: take a situation where my dog stole some butter.  The semantics are: there’s a dog, it’s my dog, there’s some butter, and the butter was taken, by the dog, without permission.  (You can’t believe how horrible the poo that I had to pick up over the course of the next 24 hours was.)  The syntax, though: there are multiple possibilities.  My dog stole the butter.  The butter was stolen by my dogs.  The meaning is the same–how do you account for multiple syntactic structures being usable for communicating that meaning?  I’m giving you a very simple example of a very complex and nuanced topic–again, no hate mail from linguists, please.

So: we have the mapping problem.  Your answer to it is probably going to involve compositionality.  Imagine this sentence:

Men are better rich, kind, and patient.

How do we map the semantics to the syntax via composition?  Let’s see:

  1. Take the significance of the subject position and the adjective relative to that verb in a declarative sentence…
  2. …add the meaning of to be, and
  3. …add the meaning of men…
  4. …add the meaning of rich…
  5. …add the meaning of kind…
  6. …and add the meaning of patient.

No probs–sentence structure meaning + word meanings = the meaning of the assertion.  Now let’s go back to the sign on the wall:

Men, chocolate and coffee are all better rich.

How do we map the semantics to the syntax via composition?  Let’s see:

  1. Take the meaning of to be and the significance of the subject position and the adjective relative to that verb in a declarative sentence…
  2. …add the meanings of men, chocolate, and coffee…
  3. …and add the meaning of rich.

Ooooh–what the hell??  We have the one word rich, but we have three meanings.  We’ve been mapping one word to one meaning–how the hell can we get three meanings out of one word?  This works as a joke, versus just a simple statement, precisely–and only–because you can have that single word rich contributing three different meanings to the “utterance,” as we linguists say (énoncé in French).  Myself, though: I can’t for the life of me see how to reconcile it with linguistic theory.  That’s not a problem–it’s a good thing.  Personally, I am pretty happy with the notion that science gets pushed forward by finding problems with theories, not by showing how they work.  Something fun to think about while I listen to the hum of Berber, Spanish, and some very stigmatized dialects of English around me as I eat my redneck, Saturday-morning pancakes…

Native speakers of French: I’d love a similar example in the language of Molière–do you have one for me?

Postscript: the sentence that is the topic of this post contains the word and.  The word and is (believe it or not) actually one of the toughest problems in computational linguistics, and I have glossed over it in this discussion deliberately, despite the fact that it is crucial to the nature of the problem.  Another time, perhaps.  English and French notes below.

English notes:

  • déclassé: having inferior social status.  It can also have a similar meaning to the French meaning–“fallen or lowered in class, rank, or social position,” per Merriam-Webster–but, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it used in that sense.  How it appears in the post: That’s a restaurant chain that’s known for being somewhat déclassé, and for having great pancakes. 
  • redneck: from Merriam-Webster: a white person who lives in a small town or in the country especially in the southern U.S., who typically has a working-class job, and who is seen by others as being uneducated and having opinions and attitudes that are offensive.  It can also be an adjective, which is how I used it in the post.  How it appears in the post: Village Inn is not so redneck as to not have wifi.  Note: this can be a very offensive term if you are not yourself a redneck, and if you are not a native speaker, I recommend that you never use it.

French notes:

  • déclassé: downgraded, relegated, demoted.
  • le déclassé: dropout (societally, not from school)
  • gaulois: redneck, among other things.  See above for the definition of redneck; I don’t actually know whether or not the French word is offensive.

Tossing out lexical fields

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Leave it to a linguist to suck the joy out of pretty much anything. Picture source: http://www.cambridge.org/si/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/semantics-and-pragmatics/lexical-field-taste-semantic-study-japanese-taste-terms

One of the many things to like about France: random people will occasionally toss out words and concepts that would be quite unusual in the United States.  (To toss out explained below in the English notes.)  Case in point: the expression “lexical field.”  A lexical field, also known as a semantic field, is a set of words that share some focus of meaning.  In American English, this is a highly technical term, and you wouldn’t expect to hear it come out of the mouth of anyone who isn’t an academic of some sort.  As Wikipedia puts it: The kinds of semantic fields vary from culture to culture and anthropologists use them to study belief systems and reasoning across cultural groups.[7]  ….The term is also used in other academic disciplines, such as … computational semiotics,[4] and technical exegesis.[5]

In France: not nearly so obscure.  It came up over a glass of wine with a friend one night, and I’m talking about a music person, not a linguist friend.   Yesterday evening I ran across it on a web site for kids who are preparing for the bac, the high school exit exam.  Here is how it showed up:

Montaigne parsème ainsi son texte du champ lexical du combat: “César,” “Alexandre,” “grand besogne,” “vigueur,” “courage,” “violentes occupations,” “grands maniements,” “batailles,” “provinces,” “grand et glorieux.”

In English:

Thus, Montaigne sprinkles his text with the lexical field of combat: “Caesar,” “Alexander,” “great work,” “vigor,” “courage,” “violent activities,” [not sure how to translate maniements–can a native speaker help?], “battles,” “provinces” [Montaigne refers to conquering them–bear in mind that at the time of writing in the 1500s, it wasn’t that long since Louis XIV had finished the unification of France], “great and glorious.”

Wrap your head around that one: a concept that most of us almost certainly didn’t run into until college, and probably not even then—the lexical field—is used in test-prep materials for high school students, without explanation.   And people ask me why I like to hang out there…

French and English notes follow…

English notes:

to toss out: in this sense, it means something like “to mention casually,” similar to Definition 2 on the Merriam-Webster web site.  Note that it has many other meanings, mostly negative ones having to do with discarding something.  An example of the sense in which I’m using it here, from this story by Alexandra Rosenmann:  “Tell me,” Trump continued. “I mean, I don’t know. You tell me.”  It’s a phrase Trump tosses out a lot: Discussions on everything from Obama’s birthplace, to why gays support Clinton, to why Ghazala Khan stayed silent at the DNC all end the same. Either Trump’s stumped, or he thinks we are.  How it appeared in the post: One of the many things to like about France: random people will occasionally toss out words that would be quite unusual in the United States.

French notes:

Translations from WordReference.com:

  • la besogne: hard work, task, labor.
  • besogner: to slave away.
  • besogner quelqu’un: to have sex with someone.  WordReference.com gives pénétrer as an explanation of the phrase, so presumably this can only have a man as the logical subject (a technical term–my dog is the logical subject of both My dog stole the butter and The butter was stolen by my dog, but it is the grammatical subject only of My dog stole the butter.  She did, too–horrible shit to clean up for the next 24 hours or so…).
  • C’est aller en peu vite en besogne: to be a bit hasty or premature, to get ahead of oneself a bit.
  • la basse besogne: dirty work.  From Twitter: Honte à ceux qui utilisent les enfants pour leur basse besogne.  Another tweet: au fait ce ne sont pas des flics femmes qui auraient dû faire cette basse besogne?????????

 

 

Wikipedia is the Devil: case in point from political aspects of French feminism

One of my cousins says: “Wikipedia is the Devil. The Devil, I tell you!” Here’s a case in point.

One of my cousins says: “Wikipedia is the Devil.  The Devil, I tell you!”  Here’s a case in point.

It is sadly the case that women get mistreated in pretty much the same shitty ways all over the world.  (Shitty and other American English expressions explained below.)  Certainly there are some places where it is much worse for women than it is in other places, and in very regionally specific ways–female genital mutilation in some parts of Africa, honor killings in the Middle East, widow immolation in some parts of India, female infanticide in some parts of China–but, all in all, the same issues of violence, sexual abuse, and underpay plague women all over the planet.

Given a certain homogeneity of experience, you might expect feminism to be the same everywhere–the null hypothesis is that everything is the same as everything else, right?  However, it has often been observed that feminism in America and feminism in France have different sets of concerns and preoccupations.  Here’s a capsule description from the Wikipedia article on feminism in France:

In the English-speaking world, the term ‘French feminism’ refers to a branch of feminist theories and philosophies that emerged in the 1970s to the 1990s. French feminist theory, compared to its English-speaking, is distinguished by an approach which is more philosophical and literary. Its writings tend to be effusive and metaphorical being less concerned with political doctrine and generally focused on theories of “the body”.[13]

I’m surprised by the statement that French feminism’s “writings tend to be…less concerned with political doctrine…” …as that is completely the opposite of the impression that I have.  The renaming of an important French feminist group seems relevant as an example of this.  In the forward to their collection New French feminisms: An anthology, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron describe it like this:

Women concerned with the woman question in France use the words “feminism” and “feminist” less often do their counterparts in the United States.  …[T]here is a … profound reason.  The desire to break with a bourgeois past–with the inadequacies and fixed categories of humanistic thought, including feminism–has led to a vigorous attack against the labels by one of the most influential and radical of the women’s groups (known originally as “Psychanalyse et Politique”–“Psych et Po”–and more recently as “politique et psychanalyse)…”

My point being: French feminists are really, really into critiquing psychoanalysis.  (American feminists aren’t crazy about it, either–the amazing American sociolinguist Robin Lakoff and her colleague James Coyne wrote a book about Freud’s Dora case–but it’s not the subject of nearly as much discussion in the US.)  If the group felt so strongly that politics should have top billing over psychoanalysis that they actually changed the name of the group to reflect that, then that’s an indication that they feel that politics is really, really important.

simone smiling b2bd622faaf56ce460b21b3b0020a807
Simone de Beauvoir. Picture source: https://www.pinterest.com/source/marxists.org

The third chapter of the feminist classic Le deuxième sexe, by Simone de Beauvoir (she’s shown up in this blog before, as Nelson Algren’s lover, before she dumped him for Sartre), is devoted to Engels.  The Wikipedia page on her book describes one of its (indirect) effects like this:

European women became more involved in politics and by the 1990s held six to seven times more legislative seats than the United States, enabling them to influence the process in support of programs for women and children.[104]

The moral of the story: be as cautious of Wikipedia as you would with any other source.  It’s great, but like anything else, it’s not foolproof–citations, or no citations.

French and English notes below.

Want to know more?  Follow these links for:

  • What happens if you get caught crossing a border with a copy of New French feminisms in your backpack
  • Transcendence, immanence, existentialism, and feminism

French notes:

  • la psychanalyse: psychoanalysis.  Pronunciation: [psikanaliz]
  • bien avant: well before, well in advance.  Le féminisme en France naît au milieu du XIXe siècle mais bien avant des personnalités s’étaient préoccupés de l’égalité entre les hommes et les femmes.  (Source: Wikipédie page on French feminism.)
  • le courant: branch (of a party); trend, movement.  Either of them should work for this sentence: Plusieurs courants ont coexisté et des divergences existent encore même si le but est le plus souvent le même, à savoir l’égalité totale.  (I’m not sure how to translate si in that sentence–even if??  Can a native speaker help?)

English notes:

  • shitty: (of a person or action) contemptible; worthless.  (Definition from Google.)  How it was used in the post: It is sadly the case that women get mistreated in pretty much the same shitty ways all over the world.  
  • capsule (adjective): short and concise; brief and summarized.  (Definition from Dictionary.com.)  How it was used in the post: Here’s a capsule description from the Wikipedia article on feminism in France.
  • top billing: the first or most prominent position in a list of actors or entertainers, as on a marquee or screen.  (Definition from Dictionary.com.)  You can use it for any ordered list.  How it was used in the post: If the group felt so strongly that politics should have top billing over psychoanalysis that they actually changed the name of the group to reflect that, then that’s an indication that they feel that politics is really, really important.

 

How graduate school is like (American) football

This is an email that I wrote to a graduate student as they finished up an exceptionally heroic dissertation-writing experience. All identifying information has been changed: Robin is a gender-neutral name. Dalmatian was a Romance language spoken in Croatia. (It became extinct when the last known speaker, Antonio Udina, died in an accidental explosion in 1898.) Slivovitz is a delicious plum brandy that I recommend you drink with roasted lamb. Ilse Lehiste was a major phonetician and historical linguist of the 20th century, and the author of the classic Suprasegmentals. (I applied to Ohio State planning to study with her, not realizing that she had just retired—see my post on how not to apply to grad school.) David Sternberg is the author of the excellent How to complete and survive a doctoral dissertation. “T&K” is Sarah Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, the authors of Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics—when my undergraduate advisor made me read it, I lost all faith in distant reconstruction (in historical linguistics, at any rate) and ended up doing lexical semantics in a medical school. Banitsa is a delicious Bulgarian pastry.

Hi, Robin,

I’ve read through the most recent chapters that you sent.  Lots of progress–that’s great.

I’m going to start with what sounds like bad news, but actually isn’t: you should rethink this–a lot.  You are chasing some very specific hypotheses, and betting a lot on them.  What I recommend that you do instead is take a step back and look at the more general contributions that your dissertation can make, focus on those throughout the first chapters, and leave the theoretical implications for a later chapter.

What follows is based pretty heavily on my own approach to science in general, and other people could certainly have their own takes on the scientific enterprise, so if you decide to take my advice in this matter of the overall direction of your dissertation, you should discuss it with your advisor at the minimum, and preferably with the rest of your committee, too.  (Feel free to forward this email to the rest of your committee–I thought about copying everyone, but decided to let you stew on this yourself and then make your own decision about whether or not to do that.)

kennedy football daylight images
Picture source: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/156221

One of my fundamental ways of thinking about how to figure out what to publish in general, and how to focus a dissertation in particular, is David Sternberg’s notion of “daylight.”  “Daylight” is actually an idea from American football.  The goal there is to move a ball in a particular direction, while a bunch of big bruisers try to stop you from doing so.  [“Big bruiser” and other obscure American English expressions explained at the bottom of the post, as always.] The most basic advice for how to accomplish this is to look for an open spot between the big bruisers–one through which you can see “daylight”–and then run through it.  (Other approaches would be to try to knock the big bruisers down and run over them–if one wants to finish one’s dissertation in this lifetime, or score a goal in American football, it’s definitely easier to run through the open spot.  I think so, anyway.  ([Note to blog readers: no, I don’t play football–the real tough people play judo.]) 

In the context of a dissertation (and, to some extent, scientific publishing in general), “daylight” is whatever you can contribute to science that hasn’t been contributed to science before.  There are a lot of forms that “daylight” can take:

1) No one has ever written about X before.

2) Someone has written about X before, and/but you looked at it again, and found different facts.

3) Some theory makes a prediction about X, but no one has ever actually tested it.

4) Even better: some theory makes a prediction about X, but no one has ever actually tested it, and you have data that suggests that the prediction is wrong.

5) There are contradictions in the literature.

There are others, but these seem like the most salient ones, at least for a linguist.

So, what do you want to see in a linguistics dissertation, in particular?  Personally, I want to see two things.  In particular, I’d like to see the two main things in (American) linguistics:

1) Description

2) Theoretical implications

football run to daylight 58106302-19ef-4fab-8b03-e665e1731df5_red_rtd_itunes_3000
Picture source: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/156221

Back to the generalities: in general, you want (or I want, at any rate), in science in general, to work on questions such that whatever the answer turns out to be, it’s interesting.  For example, (3) and (4) on my partial list of kinds of “daylight” are both versions of the same method: let’s test theory X.  Theory X works in the case of your question?  Great, if no one has ever published that before.  Theory X doesn’t work in the case of your question?  Even better.  Either way: you win.  You win because you’re not invested in any particular outcome–this is the time to be that most dispassionate of dispassionate scientists, only interested in knowing what the truth is.

 

vince lombardi run-to-daylight-9781476767178_lg
Picture source: http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Run-to-Daylight!/Vince-Lombardi/9781476767178

If you buy all of that: let’s think about your dissertation in terms of where the daylight is.  Let’s also think about it as linguistics, per se–that is, in terms of description and theory.  When I write the following, I’m writing it on the basis of my knowledge of what the literature already covers, and you certainly know the relevant literature better than I do, so if you disagree, I’m going with your judgement, not mine.  I went through the current chapters and highlighted every place where you mention that no one has ever done something before, and you have:

1) Dalmatian is phonetically understudied.  This is the first acoustic phonetics study of Dalmatian.

2) “To my knowledge, there has never been any study performed to compare the acoustic variations in different dialect groups of Dalmatian speakers.”

3) From p. 16: “My data provides examples of phonological processes that have not been previously mentioned or evaluated.”

4) Does the acoustic observation of sound variation in Dalmatian show consistency in all Dalmatian dialects?  No one else has looked.

5) No one has ever studied code-switching in Dalmatian speakers before–you have.

Now the disagreements (see 5 on my partial list of kinds of daylight):

1) There is disagreement on the number of vowels and consonants in Dalmatian.  You have an answer.  (I didn’t say “the” answer–you don’t have to have “the” answer–just an answer that is well-supported by data and by argument.)

2) Lehiste gives an excellent account of Dalmatian contrasts, but doesn’t capture the variation between dialects.  You do.

3) P. 29: “…there is a disagreement among scholars, whether or not this sound belongs to the vowel inventory of Dalmatian.”

Predictions:

1) Slivovitz says that U and o are allophones–you show that it’s more complicated.

2) Banitsa predicts palatalization–your data shows otherwise.  (Your effort to elicit the palatalized consonants was not “unsuccessful,” as you described it–it was a *successful* effort to find out whether or not they’re there.  Turns out they aren’t, for your speakers.)

3) From p. 20: “According to Mongo (2011), words typically have a single primary stress, which falls on the final syllable….My data shows that stress can also appear on the first syllable, as well as the penultimate syllable.”

4) Slivovitz claims all three insertion processes for all three dialects; you show that it doesn’t happen in Central.

5) P. 25: “The results of my examination demonstrate whether or not Thomason and Kaufman’s assertion applies to Dalmatian.”

Would any single one of these get you a PhD?  Unlikely.  Should all of them get you a PhD?  With some examination of the theoretical implications: yes.  I just gave you THIRTEEN contributions that your dissertation makes, and we haven’t even gotten to the stuff that you’ve mainly been focussing on, which is the whole language contact thing.

So: you’ve got the descriptive part of this covered.  Now you need some theory.  The theories: (a) language contact, (b) the internal, community-identity model (T&K) versus the structure model.  You know what you think Croatian contact might throw into the mix.  You know what you think Slovenian contact might throw into the mix.  You know what you think education, urban versus rural, and age might throw into the mix.  You didn’t just make those predictions up–they’re based on what we know about how language contact usually works, as well as what education does, urbanity does, age does.  Now: is what you would expect to be true based on all of that, true?  Do the predictions all hold?  If so: that’s nice.  Not very interesting, but nice–validation that you got the facts right.  Do the predictions not all hold?  That’s GREAT.  In science, we LOVE data that doesn’t fit theories!  That’s, like, the best thing in the world.  The key: don’t have an investment in the outcome.  Think about all of this such that whatever the answer is, you know what its significance is.  You know that it fits the theories?  Great–you know the theories, and you have a bunch of new data, and that would fit the minimally accepted requirements for giving Robin a PhD, so let’s do so.  You know that it doesn’t fit the theories?  GREAT–Robin realizes that she’s found a problem with the theory, and that’s how science advances, so let’s give her a PhD.

If you buy all of this: you need to do some rewriting.  You don’t need to change the content, really–you just need to move some of it.  Start with facts–just facts. Description.  Tell your reader what the previous literature says, and what’s missing from it.  Tell the reader what your data says.  Point out where the previous literature was right, and where you’ve contributed the new knowledge that it was wrong, and where you’ve filled the empty holes. Then theory, later. Later.  Take all of your speculations, predictions, explanations, etc. about language contact, age, education, etc., out of those earlier chapters.  Put them in a later chapter or chapters.  That’s where you’re going to test the theories–theories about language contact, about the effects of education, age, etc.  When you get there, you’re already going to have half of your PhD in hand, because you’ll already have contributed 13 things (see above) to our incomplete descriptions of Dalmatian.  Now you’re going to be a good linguist and talk about theory, and then you’re going to tell your committee that it’s time to award you your PhD, and you’re going to go on with your life.

On my paper copy, I wrote tons of comments about specific points in the dissertation–things that I don’t agree with, areas where I don’t think that you present the data convincingly, but mostly, place after place after place where you get caught up in the specifics of your predictions about the effects of language contact, etc. and should pull that material out and move it later.  I’m not talking about rewriting five chapters–I’m talking about moving material out of four chapters and putting it later.  You can absolutely do this between now and when your dissertation is due.  If you want the paper copy, come by my office.

Let me know if you have questions about this.  If you agree with the approach that I’m suggesting, I suggest that you forward this email, or some condensed version of it, to your advisor and to the rest of the committee.  If they agree with the approach, too, then you’re on very safe ground.

Postscript: Robin finished their dissertation, and defended it to wide acclaim.  English notes follow–back to French next time.

  •  bruiser: Definition from Merriam-Webster: a large, strong man. (If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that the combination of large plus a physical object is not typical–see this post on large and big as things that seem like synonyms, but aren’t, exactly.)  How it appeared in the post: The goal there is to move a ball in a particular direction, while a bunch of big bruisers try to stop you from doing so.
  •  tons of: a large quantity of, a lot of. How it appeared in the post: On my paper copy, I wrote tons of comments about specific points in the dissertation–things that I don’t agree with, areas where I don’t think that you present the data convincingly, but mostly, place after place after place where you get caught up in the specifics of your predictions about the effects of language contact, etc. and should pull that material out and move it later. 
  •  judgement: the British spelling of judgment. The American spelling always rubbed me wrong, somehow—sue me.
  •  investment: this has many meanings.  I meant it in this sense, from The Free Dictionary: “a devoting, using, or giving of time, talent, emotional energy, etc., as to achieve something.”  How it appeared in the post: The key: don’t have an investment in the outcome.  Think about all of this such that whatever the answer is, you know what its significance is.  That is: the advice is to be able to not care (to not devote emotional energy) to what the specific answer happens to be.
  • allophone: a technical term in linguistics. We’ll save it for another time.

What happens when you spend less than 24 hours in Peru: the English perfect tenses

Trigger warning: lots of grammar, occasional obscenities, and photo of deceased Cavia porcellus.

I should’ve expected trouble from the moment that the stewardess on the Lima-to-Houston flight recognized me. ¿No venimos de hacer este viaje anoche? “Didn’t we just do this trip last night?” I smiled a “yes” at her. She switched to English: Couldn’t wait to see me again, huh?  I’m sure I blushed.

The English word before belongs to a couple of parts of speech. Rarely, it can be a preposition indicating location:

  • Sufficiently stoned but not unreasonably so, we stand before the bathroom mirror, marvelling at the crisp clean surfaces of ourselves and one another.
  • How can you stand before her and offer her the nothing, the nothing, that you are?
  •  When the last trump sounds and I stand before the Lord our God and am judged I will be found wanting and know not what to do.

(All examples from the British National Corpus, a collection of 100 million words of British English that is commonly used in linguistic research, courtesy of the Sketch Engine web site.)

More commonly, before is adverbial, indicating a point in a temporal (time) sequence:

  • It should be hard enough to secure the tesserae, but it must not harden before the local pattern has been completed.
  • Admittedly, there is a larger number of fourth century pavements (differential preservation may be an important factor here): before the 1960’s, but for those from Wheeler’s excavation at Verulamium, few pre-fourth century pavements were datable at all.
  • That means that the court has to consider the position immediately before an emergency protection order, if there was one, or an interim care order, if that was the initiation of protection, or, as in this case, when the child went into voluntary care.

In constructions with the perfect tenses, it has a special meaning. The perfect tenses in English are the ones with have used in what’s called a modal sense, followed by a past participle:

  • I have never been able to understand why anyone would want to wake up at the dead of night (5 a.m.) to go and paddle a canoe, but I am assured that the challenge is worth it.
  • I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard it sung in Latin, I certainly haven’t.
  •  She has written various articles on medieval theatre.
  • I saw everything had been tidied up.
  • He was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace when Whittaker Chambers, a renegade and self-confessed Communist ‘spy’ then on the staff of Time magazine, accused him of having passed him documents from the State Department during the late 1930s.

When you combine before with a perfect tense, it has a very specific interpretation: it refers to something that has happened at an earlier point in time, and is happening again now, or is about to happen, or will certainly happen at some point in the future:

  • But, as I‘ve said before , you do have such interesting friends.

Here the speaker is both asserting right now that you have such interesting friends, and asserting that they have said that on some previous occasion.

  • You‘ve heard before that Leeds works within the rules of the framework set down by regional planning guidance…

The speaker is asserting right now that Leeds works within some framework or other, and also asserting that such has been asserted on some previous occasion.

  • I’ve never been to Venice before, I can prove it, nor have I met your father.

 The speaker is in Venice now, but is asserting that they have not been to Venice on a previous occasion.

What you should take away from these examples: in English, the perfect tense plus before refers to something that is happening now, or is about to happen. So, when a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer said to me yesterday morning at 7 AM after a long night spent in an unusually uncomfortable aircraft: Have you ever been arrested before? …I thought: This morning is not going to go quite as I had planned.

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Peru. Picture source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peru_(orthographic_projection).svg

A friend who was scheduled to give a keynote speech at a conference on Big Data in Cuzco, Peru had taken ill, and I was asked to fill in for her at the last minute.  I had a commitment right before the conference and a commitment right after it, so giving the talk required that I land in Cuzco at 5 AM, give my talk at 2 PM, and then get on a flight back to the U.S. at 7 PM–a passage éclair, “lighting visit,” as we say in French.

The most salient fact about Peru is this: it’s wonderful. A beautiful place that has a lovely Southern Hemisphere ambience without the constant in-your-face grinding poverty of, say, Guatemala. The people that I met were delightful, and the grilled meats that I had for all three of my meals in-country were probably the best I’ve ever had in my life (and I say that as someone who knows a few good restaurants in Paris). It’s also one of the world’s biggest producers of cocaine.

Cocaine entered the European context when an Italian doctor ran across it in South America. As Wikipedia tells it:

In 1859, an Italian doctor, Paolo Mantegazza, returned from Peru, where he had witnessed first-hand the use of coca by the local indigenous peoples. He proceeded to experiment on himself and upon his return to Milan he wrote a paper in which he described the effects. In this paper he declared coca and cocaine (at the time they were assumed to be the same) as being useful medicinally, in the treatment of “a furred tongue in the morning, flatulence, and whitening of the teeth.”

As he put it in his work Sulle Virtù Igieniche e Medicinali della Coca e sugli Alimenti Nervosi in Generale (“On the hygienic and medicinal properties of coca and on nervous nourishment in general”, translation and quote from Wikipedia):

“… I sneered at the poor mortals condemned to live in this valley of tears while I, carried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went flying through the spaces of 77,438 words, each more splendid than the one before…An hour later, I was sufficiently calm to write these words in a steady hand: God is unjust because he made man incapable of sustaining the effect of coca all life long. I would rather have a life span of ten years with coca than one of 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 centuries without coca.”

I don’t actually know how many countries I’ve been to. Between 9 ½ years in the military and a subsequent career that involves a lot of international collaborations, it’s got to be somewhere north of twenty (north of and other obscure American English expressions explained below, as usual). I cross many national borders, and I have never had any problems, either in foreign countries, or when returning to the United States. (I was really worried the time that I passed through French customs with a little bottle of American-made kosher wine in my luggage—I was going to be in Germany for Passover—but, they didn’t catch my nervousness, and I made it into the country without being searched.) Normally, when I return to the United States, I stick my passport into a Global Entry machine, it spits out a piece of paper with my photograph and various bits of information on it, I show that piece of paper to an Immigration officer, he waves me on, and I go about my business. This time, the paper was different: it had a big, black X on it. I showed it to the immigration officer. He asked for my passport, stuck it in an electric reader, and pushed buttons on his computer. Then more buttons, more buttons, and more buttons. Finally: how long have you been out of the country? “Less than 24 hours,” I said.

He pointed me towards an area off to the side of the Customs area that I’d never been to before. (Note the perfect tense had (never) been to and before—that means that I’m going there now.)

I took my suitcase and stood waiting while several Customs agents let me stand there and think for a while. Finally, a couple of them waved me over. Put your suitcase, backpack, and jacket on this table. I did. Then one of them asked me two questions: Is there anything you’d like to tell me before I open this? No. Have you ever been arrested before?

Uh-oh. As it turns out: no, I have never been arrested. (This might come as a surprise to those of you who know just how many tattoos I have, but: no, I haven’t.) Then they started going through my stuff, and when I say “going through,” I mean: searching, and searching very thoroughly. Throughout this, two Customs agents asked me the same questions, over and over, in a variety of ways: Why did you go to Peru? How long were you in Peru? How much cash are you carrying?

The answers didn’t change: For work. Under 24 hours. Under $100. Occasionally they threw in something different: do you have any narcotics? I carry a couple pills containing butalbital for migraines. Your employer paid for your plane ticket? Yes. (Actually, the organizers of the conference at which I gave a keynote paid for it, but my employer actually purchased the ticket—it didn’t seem like a good idea to introduce that level of complication into the conversation, though.) Their question about why I have so many pills in my luggage was easily dealt with—I’m old, I have shit wrong with me, although I didn’t put it in quite those terms—just said that I have prescriptions for everything, which is true. What really raised their eyebrows surprised me—the copy of New French feminisms in my backpack (edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courivron—it’s quite good), and the laminated photocopy of my passport that I carry in my suitcase in case of emergency.

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Roasted guinea pig, a specialty of Peru and some other Andean countries. Picture source: http://toro-peru.over-blog.org/article-25467945.html

It’s a good thing that I had a decently long layover, because this went on for quite a while. They pulled back the lining on the bottom of my suitcase. The nature of the bags of salted dried corn (corn is a Peruvian specialty, raised in many species and prepared in many ways) that I had purchased as gifts for friends back home were questioned. Inquiries were made as to my profession, what exactly informatics is, and in which countries my relatives reside. (For me, the most nervous-making part of an American border crossing is when the Immigration officer asks me to explain what I do for living—that used to happen a lot before I got my Global Entry card, and it’s hard enough for me to explain my profession in one sentence even when I haven’t just spent six to twelve hours sleeping only very fitfully during an airborne traversal of a very large ocean.) Finally they harrumphed, told me to take my stuff, and I was off to my next flight. Many years ago, I read a novel about a customs inspector, and marveled at/was skeptical about how easy it was for him to spot the lady with a fortune in undeclared currency sewn into the lining of her overcoat, or the man with a king’s ransom of diamonds encased in a salami. I didn’t bother asking why they had flagged me for a thorough search, though—it’s easy enough to guess that some algorithm noted my frequent international travel and my under-24-hours visit to a cocaine-producing country. No big mystery there–that’s what happens when you spend less than 24 hours in Peru, I guess. So: if you ever have the opportunity to visit that beautiful country, plan to stay a while—I plan to visit again, and next time, I’m going to eat some guinea pig.

Thanks to Sketch Engine, purveyor of fine linguistic search tools and corpora, for the examples. Check out their web site to see what sorts of things you can learn by exploring huge collections of naturally occurring language. No, they didn’t pay me to mention them–the opposite.  I pay them a few hundred dollars a year for access to their fine offerings.

English notes:

“North of 40” means “more than 40 years old.”  Note: “You’re” should be the possessive pronoun “your.”  Picture source: https://memegenerator.net/instance/65847931

North of/south of: these expressions mean more than and less than, respectively. See the picture for a good example. How it showed up in the post: Between 9 ½ years in the military and a subsequent career that involves a lot of international collaborations, it’s got to be somewhere north of twenty [countries].

To catch: lots of idiomatic meanings. I used it in the post in this sense, taken from The Free Dictionary: To become cognizant or aware of suddenly: caught her gazing out the window. How it showed up in the post: …they didn’t catch my nervousness, and I made it into the country without being searched.

How we’re sounding stupid today: deadjectival nouns

transcendence and immanece
Transcendence and immanence as descriptions of the relationship between God and reality. Picture source: https://missniven11sor.wikispaces.com/Term+01+Lesson+04

I was feeling good the other day.  Chatting up a pretty French girl, showing off my (lack of) familiarity with 20th-century French philosophers, and using lots of great abstract nouns–transcendence, immanence, agency, objectivity.  Feeling smart, feeling charming, feeling sparkling.  Pride comes before a fall, and my fall came hard: Oh, Kevin–your neologisms are so cute.  The way that you make up new words! 

Shit–Not what I was going for.  My mistake: throwing around deadjectival nouns too freely.  Overgeneralizing from limited data.  The Fallacy of Small N.  Bref, as we say in French: I was making nouns from adjectives–transcendence from transcendent, objectivity from objective–but I was using the wrong word endings to do it, trying to generalize from too few examples (overgeneralizing from limited data), extracting a pattern that seemed to have held a few times (the Fallacy of Small N).

You can see from my very small set of examples that English has pretty good facilities for making nouns from adjectives.  We call these deadjectival nouns.  Start with the adjective objective, add -ity, and you’ve got a noun.  Start with the adjective transcendent, add -ce, and you’ve got transcendence.  You can see something else from my example, too: you don’t get to add just any ol’ word ending to the adjective.  Transcendity?  Not OK.  Objectiveness?  It’s OK, but it means something different from objectivity.  French also has pretty good facilities for making nouns from adjectives.  And, in French, as in English, you don’t get to add just any ol’ word ending to the adjective–you have to know, for any given adjective-noun pair, what the right word ending is.  Let’s look at some examples, including of course some that are more or less randomly chosen from recent things I’ve said that have made people snicker, plus an encounter with the always-hilarious old lady who owns a bookstore near my apartment, and then some more thrown in just to show the diversity of possibilities.  I’ve relied heavily on WordReference.com to make this table; if I indicate an English word as NFE, I mean to communicate that there is No French Equivalent, at least according to WordReference.

Adjective Possible noun Impossible or other nouns
radin stingy la radinerie stinginess
câlin cuddly, affectionate les câlineries cuddles (plural only, as far as I can tell) affection affection

NFE affectionateness
malin smart, clever intelligence, astuce cleverness (intelligence); ingéniosité, habilité cleverness (ingenuity) malinerie doesn’t exist (thought we had a pattern going there, didn’t you?  I sure did!)
complice complicit (involved in) la complicité complicity (which I’ve only ever heard in a positive sense, meaning something like closeness, bondedness) NFE complicitness
banal common, banal, mundane
 la banalité banality
abrasif abrasive
 abrasivité abrasiveness (I think–can a native speaker help?)
impécunieux impécuniosité
sûr sûreté
las weary la lassitude weariness
ingrat ungrateful; unattractive; unrewarding l’ingratitude ingratitude, ungracefulness
transcendent, transcendental transcendent la transcendance transcendence
immanent immanent immanence immanence
obéissant obedient obéissance obedience

Things to note:

  • There is a pretty tight requirement for specific endings to be added to specific adjectives.
  • There is quite a bit of phonology (technically, morphophonology) going on with some of these endings–for example, abrasif   (with an f) versus abrasivité (with a v); impécunieux (with no consonant pronounced at the end of the adjective) versus impécuniosité (with an s, which of course is pronounced as a z).   
  • As far as I can tell, there’s no simple mapping between the ending in English and the ending in French (or vice versa).  English -ity might match to French -ité (e.g. English banality, French banalité), but then again, so might -ness (e.g. English impecuniousness, French impécuniosité).  Of course, English -ness might map to something else, too (e.g. English stinginess, French radinerie). And, forget remembering how to spell any of this–I can’t spell either language anymore…  Make me read and write in Spanish for a week, and I won’t be able to do any of the three…
  • Is there an easy way to predict, or at least to group together for memorization, any of this?  I haven’t found one yet–suggestions appreciated…
man is nothing else but 7644721
Transcendence versus immanence becomes a major issue in the philosophy of feminism via Simone de Beauvoir: existentialism, to which she adhered, posits that we are not born what we are, but rather become it.  This becomes a problem if you live in a cultural framework that posits that men transcend–go beyond what they are, change–but women remain immanent.  She works through this in “The second sex.”  Picture source: http://www.thinkphilosophy.org/thinkphilosophy-blog/on-the-provocations-of-existentialism-a-commentary

To put all of this in a bigger picture: what we’re looking at here–things that can change the part of speech of other words–are what is known as derivational morphemes.  The whole phenomenon of derivational morphology has some pretty interesting implications for the nature of human language.  You can read more about derivational morphology, and those implications, at this blog post.  In fact, we’ve recently been talking about a very particular kind of morphological derivation–zero derivation, or changing part of speech without adding an affix, as in this recent post that discusses why that particular phenomenon is interesting, and then this recent post that explores at some depth the range of zero-derived verbs that come from nouns that refer to parts of the mouth and that refer to some form of communication.

English notes:

Not everyone would agree that some of the English nouns that I have in the third column are OK–particularly, affectionateness and complicitness. 

Mouthing off: English denominal verbs that come from mouth parts

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

— Winston Churchill, at the White House in 1954.  Source: http://www.bartleby.com/73/1914.html

I’ve always been more into depth than breadth.  It’s more like me to explore every restaurant on a single street than to try to cover the top ten eateries of a city; to try everything on the menu of one restaurant, going back week after week, than to go from restaurant to restaurant; to spend years with one woman, rather than flitting from flower to flower, as the girls say in the Philippines.  (This hasn’t stopped me from being married three times, or perhaps that’s why I’ve been married three times.)

Want to know more about denominal verbs?  See this blog post, and Carolyn Gottfurcht’s fascinating doctoral dissertation on the subject of the kinds of relationships that can exist between the original noun and the derived verb.

So, when learning vocabulary, I like to pick one subject, and dive deep.  Lately I’ve been struck by my crappy command of words for common things–in particular, parts of the face.  In the way that things always seem to spin out of control, or to become more complicated, or to just be connected to everything else, that soon branches out into questions of pronunciation, questions of how words are put together, and who knows where else I’ll end up–which is to say, what I’ll be distracted by–but, let’s be polite–by the time I finish writing this.  For today, let’s talk about English verbs that come from parts of the face.  We recently talked about the phenomenon of denominal verbs–that is, verbs that are made from what were originally nouns.  English has a bunch of these verbs that are related to body parts.  We’ll focus today on denominal verbs that come from parts of the mouth.  They tend to be related to three ideas: producing language, chewing, and making contact with a physical object.  As we go along, we’ll see others, too.

English notes

Screenshot 2016-08-22 07.23.47
Example of the verb “to lip.” Picture source: screen shot of https://goo.gl/c38BRF

to lip: to speak in a disrespectful way to someone, perhaps especially if answering something said to you by an authority figure.  You can’t lip just anyone–it has to be someone to whom you’re supposed to show respect.

 

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Example of the verb “to jaw.” Picture source: screen shot of https://goo.gl/v0eD2e

to jaw: to talk, particularly at length and about nothing very important.

 

 

 

 

 

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Example of the verb “to lip.” Picture source: screen shot of https://goo.gl/c38BRF

to mouth (first definition): From Google: say (something dull or unoriginal), especially in a pompous or affected way.  From The Free Dictionary: To utter without conviction or understanding; To declare in a pompous manner; declaim.

 

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Example of “to mouth” in the sense of saying something without making any sound. Picture source: screen shot of https://goo.gl/61Y0V5

to mouth (second definition): to say or sing without making a sound.  From The Free Dictionary: To form soundlessly. 

 

 

 

 

Screenshot 2016-08-22 08.16.55
Example of “to mouth” in the sense of saying something that you don’t really mean. Picture source: screen shot of https://goo.gl/BIF7Kp

to mouth off to someone: to speak disrespectfully to someone.  Again, this needs to be someone in a position of authority, someone to whom you owe respect.

 

 

Native speakers of French: are there French verbs that come from the nouns referring to parts of the mouth, whether they denote acts of speaking, or anything else?  I’d love to hear about them.

 

 

 

I can’t tortilla: denominal verbs and hand surgery

When we talk about hand surgery being all about function: it’s about the function of the hand, sure. But: it’s also about the function of the person. 

I’m in Guatemala at the moment. I come here once a year with a group called Surgicorps. We’re volunteer surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, technicians, therapists, and interpreters (that’s me) who provide surgical services to people who are so poor that for them, even the almost-free Guatemalan health care system is too expensive. There are a lot of groups like us, actually–you can find them all over the world. What makes Surgicorps special is the set of surgical specialties that we bring with us. One of those is hand surgery. Hand surgery is a very specialized occupation—in the course of learning his trade, our hand surgeon did fellowships in both plastic surgery and orthopedics. A fellowship is about five years, and that’s on top of four years of college, four years of medical school, and a three-year residency—so, these guys are hard to come by.

Every medical and surgical specialty has its central concept, its central concern. In hand surgery, that’s function. When our hand surgeon told me about this, he was talking about the function of the hand–the goal is to take something that isn’t working, and make it able to do things again. Hand surgery is about function in a larger sense, too, though. The thing is: in a country like Guatemala, most people work either in agriculture or in manufacturing, and opportunities for education are few. (In 2010, 31% of the female population was illiterate.)  In that kind of economy, for most people it’s the case that either you work with your hands, or you don’t feed your children.  Functioning here means doing manual labor, which for men is likely to be farming and for women is likely to include weaving and doing housework.  You’ve got a hand that doesn’t function?  Then you don’t function.

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Guatemalan handmade tortillas from the hospital cafeteria. Picture source: me.

For women here, part of functioning is making tortillas.  Guatemalans might not get much in the way of nutrition, but getting enough calories per se is usually not a problem: when there’s no drought, corn is plentiful and cheap.  If a Guatemalan is poor enough, he might be living on tortillas and salt–but, he’s living, not dying.  Not from hunger, at any rate.  (The top five causes of death in Guatemala: respiratory/pulmonary diseases (influenza and pneumonia), violence, coronary artery disease, diabetes, and stroke.)

 

 

dupuytren's contracture ArticleImageHandler.ashx
A contracture.  I’m showing you one called a Dupuytren’s contracture because after a week of looking at poorly healed burns, skin grafts gone bad, and the like, I just can’t take any more. Call me a wimp, but it’s difficult. Picture source: https://www.thebmc.co.uk/dupuytrens-contracture-research-survey

You make tortillas with your hands.  They’re actually made somewhat differently here in Guatemala, as compared to elsewhere: not so much with the palms, as patted out with the fingers.  So, when women show up on screening day with a contracture in one of their hands from a burn, or a cut, or whatever horrid thing has happened to them and won’t let them open their hand all the way, and our hand surgeon asks them what the matter is, they say: No puedo tortillar–I can’t make tortillas–while making a characteristic slapping-your-fingers-together-while-turning-your-hands-over motion.

Here’s a short video that shows you how a Guatemalan woman makes tortillas.  Like 70% of the country, she’s Mayan.  There are a bunch of things to notice in the clip:

  • When the video starts, the language that you’re hearing is one of the 20-22 different Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala.  (There are some more spoken in Mexico.)
  • The women are wearing the traditional clothing of their village.  Mayan women most definitely do still wear the traditional clothing, every single day.  Choosing not to wear it makes a huge statement about your personal identity and affiliation, and the waiting rooms of the hospital where we do our thing are jammed with people in this kind of clothing.  I’ll point out that every village has its pattern of dress, apron, and huipil (the shirt that the ladies are wearing), and leave it at that.
  • The lady is cooking over an open fire.  Super-common here, and I haven’t yet been here without a few people showing up on screening day to show us their burn-scar-contracted hands.
  • The American speaking crappy Spanish.  One of the main industries of the town that we’re in is intensive Spanish lessons.
  • The lady’s hands are wide open, and fingers are flat–with a contraction like the one that you see above, she couldn’t do it.
  • At about 1:05, the verb tortillar. 

Tortillar is an interesting little verb (at least if you’re the kind of person who gets excited about verbs).  As far as I can tell, it doesn’t exist anywhere else.  Here’s where I looked:

  • WordReference.com, which has an amazingly complete on-line dictionary.  No luck.
  • The Bantam New College Spanish and English Dictionary, which is by no means huge, but has excellent coverage of Central American Spanish.  (If you’re an American, and therefore don’t know where Guatemala is: it’s in Central America.)  Also no luck.
  • Google, through which I found a number of blog posts written by people who ran across the word while travelling this part of the world, but no evidence that the word exists anywhere else.
  • (I did find a French dictionary of the natural sciences from 1845 that lists the word as the common name of some species of Orme with a tall trunk and small leaves.  I have no clue what an Orme is.)

What the verb tortillar means: to make tortillas.  It’s a nice example of a verb that comes from a noun–what’s called in linguistics a denominal verb.  We have lots of these in English–“bare” or “zero-derived” ones like to tango, to cash, to water; ones made with prefixes, like to defrost and to encage; and ones made with suffixes, like to victimize, to vaccinate, and to classify.  (Language geeks: yes, I am leaving out back-formation.  No hate mail, please.)

One of the interesting things about the process of making nouns of out verbs is that there is some systematicity to it–there are particular types of relationships that tend to exist between the original noun and the derived verb.  You might remember a post in which we talked about the particular kinds of relationships that exist between the nouns in compound nouns, like kitchen knife (knife that is used in a kitchen), bread knife (knife that is used to cut butter), and pocket knife (knife that is carried in a pocket).  In that post we talked about how the set of relationships between those nouns is limited, and about how trying to explain that set of relationships is a good example of the issue of falsifiability in scientific theories–if you can posit any old relationship on the basis of any particular compound noun that you happen to run across, then you have a theory that cannot, even in theory, ever be shown to be wrong (“falsified”).  That’s a theory that can’t actually be tested, and a theory that can’t be tested is a crappy theory.

How about verbs?  Carolyn Gottfurcht wrote a fascinating doctoral dissertation on the subject of denominal verbs and the kinds of relationships that can exist between the original noun and the derived verb.  (All of the English verb examples in this post are from her dissertation.) She looked at 8,900 English verbs and found that in that language, one of the most common relationships is what is called the resultative. 

The resultative relationship is especially relevant to us today, because that’s what the Guatemalan verb tortillar is based on.  The resultative relationship holds between a noun and a verb that is derived from that noun when doing the verb brings the noun into being.  For example:

  • to granulate: to cause something to exist as granules
  • to enslave: to cause someone to be a slave
  • to mummify: to cause someone to be a mummy
  • to summarize: to cause a summary to exist
  • to cripple: to cause someone to be a cripple

This is the kind of verb that tortillar is: to tortillar is to cause tortillas to exist.

Here’s the thing about causing tortillas to exist: if you’re a functioning Mayan woman, that’s one of the things that you do.  That’s not the only thing that you do–but, if you can’t do it, you can’t take care of your family.  So, when we talk about hand surgery being all about function: it’s about the function of the hand, sure.  But: it’s also about the function of the person. 

Like the rest of us Surgicorps volunteers, our hand surgeon donates his services, buys his own plane ticket, pays for his food and lodging, and contributes a week of hard-earned vacation.  The costs of the surgeries themselves–instruments, medications, dressing materials, anesthetic agents, pain medications, etc.–are covered by Surgicorps.  Surgicorps lives or dies on the basis of donations from nice folks like you.  Want to make a donation?  Click here.  $250 will pay for all of the costs of surgery for one patient.  $100 will pay for four surgical packs.  $25 will pay for a nice lunch for you–or one surgical pack for us.  $10 will pay for all of the Tylenol that we’ll send our patients home with all week–and, yes, we send our patients home with nothing stronger than Tylenol, in the vast majority of cases–or, it’ll buy you a latte and a scone.  I have nothing against lattes and scones–I’m a big fan of both–but, when you think about it from that perspective, how can you not click on this link and make a donation?

No French stuff today–back to the language of Molière on Monday.  Now, donate some money!  I’ll stop hitting you up for donations next week.

 

The next splint is here: metonymy and hand surgery in the Guatemalan highlands

The most important part of a surgical mission: it’s not actually the surgeons. Plus, here’s how you can be a hamburger in the corner.

Yesterday I was interpreting for our hand therapist. She was putting bilateral (this and other obscure English words discussed below) splints on a young man. (Some patient details changed to protect privacy.) “The next splint is here,” she said. Great, I thought, looking around—where? I’ll grab it for her. I didn’t see a splint, though. “Where is it?”, I asked her, somewhat puzzled. She watched me look around. “No—there’s someone else coming in to get a splint, and he’s here.” Ahah—metonymy. More on this later, but first, let’s talk about those splints—and that hand therapist.

I’m in Guatemala at the moment, with a group called Surgicorps. We’re a team of all-volunteer surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, technicians, therapists, and assorted non-medical personnel, such as myself—I’m an interpreter. There are lots of groups like ours that come here to Guatemala—there’s an enormous need for surgical care, and not a lot of options for getting it for the very poor population that we serve.

What makes us special: among other things, it’s the fact that we have a hand surgeon. Hand surgery is a very specialized occupation—in the course of learning his trade, our hand surgeon did fellowships in both plastic surgery and orthopedics. A fellowship is about five years, and that’s on top of four years of college, four years of medical school, and a three-year residency—so, these guys are hard to come by.

As specialized and as in short supply as the hand surgeons of the world are, there’s another profession that’s even harder to find an expert in: hand therapists. Hand therapy is a subfield of occupational therapy, which is the art and science of teaching people how to function normally after things like strokes, heart attacks, and amputations. The other day, one of the physicians said to me: The first time I went on one of these missions, I heard that we had a hand therapist with us, and I thought: why the hell do we need one of those? What could she possibly do on a surgical trip? Then I saw her working, and I realized: she’s more important than the physicians.

Almost every kind of hand surgery requires some kind of splinting afterwards, and it’s to the extent that the splinting is or isn’t successful that the surgery is or isn’t successful. For example: an operation that our hand surgeon does here quite frequently is repairing something called syndactyly. Syndactyly is a condition in which fingers don’t separate from each other during development in the womb. It’s ruinous here in Guatemala, where most people’s educational opportunities are nil, and the only option for earning a living for most people is manual labor.

syndactyly 7232340_orig
Syndactyly. Picture source; http://thehurds.weebly.com/aidens-syndactyly-surgeries.html

Our hand surgeon can undo the syndactyly. Typically what happens in syndactyly is that the genes that should cause the tissue between the fingers in the fetal hand to reabsorb don’t work right, and what the surgeon does is to cut that tissue away, and then graft some skin between the fingers. (I’m simplifying the description of the surgery!) Once that surgery is done, though, those fingers have to be kept apart for several months. Otherwise, the fingers will re-fuse. How you keep that from happening: a hand therapist builds you a special kind of splint. These have to be made to order after the surgery, as they have to fit the individual child very well, and they have to fit that child when he has bandages on his fingers after the surgery. (That’s why you can’t do it before the surgery.)

Splint-1
A custom-made splint. Imagine trying to mold that on a toddler who is scared, nauseous, doesn’t speak the same language as you, and thrashing around while screaming for mama at the top of his lungs. Picture source: https://plasticandhandsurgery.com.au/hand-surgery/hand-therapy/

The surgery to repair syndactyly is usually done when a child is small. So, here’s what it’s like to fit one of those custom-made splints after surgery: you’ve got a little kid. The kid is coming out from under anesthesia and is disoriented, nauseous, surrounded by funny-looking people speaking a language that he can’t understand—and he’s scared shitless. So, you’re trying to build a very precisely-sized splint for a kid whose hand you need to fit it to—while he cries, and screams, and tries to pull his arm away from you, and tries to make a little fist while you’re trying to get things between his fingers. Add to the mix the fact that the splint is made from a kind of epoxy that is rigid when cool, and flexible when heated. You heat it up, then take it over to the kid and try to mold it to the right size while he cries, and screams, and tries to pull his arm away from you, and tries to make a little fist while you’re trying to fit it between his fingers. The resin cools down while you’re trying to do your thing, and then it won’t bend any more? Tough shit—go back to your heat source, heat it up again, and then try again.

So: the surgery doesn’t work without a good hand therapist. Being a hand therapist is a difficult job to do, and it’s hard to find places to learn to do it, and in addition to having considerable technical skills in order to make the splints correctly, you need to be able to do it under very adverse conditions, and to keep your cool while you’re doing it. Indeed, it’s the hand therapist that is the key to our mission.  We can replace a surgeon, or an anesthesiologist, or a nurse—or an interpreter—but a good hand therapist is hard to come by.

cerebral palsy index
Kids with cerebral palsy. Picture source: torc2.com.

So, back to the young man and “the next splint:” he has cerebral palsy. This means that he has essentially no control over his muscles whatsoever. They twitch, and cramp, and they make his hands clench into useless fists that can’t be opened. He can’t speak.  He can’t nod his head “yes,” or shake it “no.”  Our hand therapist was making splints for the young man that would keep his hands open for half of the day. If they can stay open, he will be able to grasp things. This is a smart teenager who can’t hold so much as a pencil—having hands that function even a little bit would be life-changing for him. Can the hand surgeon make this happen? No—it’s only the hand therapist who can give him that new capacity, one that you and I probably never even think about.

So, “the next splint is here:” this is an example of a phenomenon called metonymy. Metonymy is the process of referring to something by one of its attributes. For example:

  • The hamburger in the corner is a slob and needs more napkins. Meaning: the person who is eating a hamburger and is in the corner is a slob, etc.
  • Would you ask if the right front flat in bay two is also supposed to get an oil change? Meaning: there’s a car that has a right front flat in bay two, and I need to know if it’s also supposed to get an oil change.

This is a different phenomenon from metaphor, in which we refer to something as something else entirely—love is a river, life is a journey, for example—as opposed to referring to it by some attribute that it has—the hamburger that the sloppy customer has, or the flat tire that the car has, or whatever. Metonymy is a super-common phenomenon in language that lets us take advantage of context in the course of communication—and not just linguistic context, but what you could think of as “world” context, and from a theoretical point of view, that’s pretty interesting, for the following reason.  Most linguistic theories are entirely about language and its structure (I’m simplifying here—if you’re a sociolinguist, please don’t send me hate mail), and if you need to incorporate the world into your theory about how language works, that’s quite a challenge. Being context-dependent, it also requires that both the speaker and the hearer know what that context is—I didn’t know that the therapist had another patient scheduled, so I totally misunderstood her statement, thinking that she was referring to an actual splint, not to a person who was going to receive a splint.

a-abbott-3-353x239
Hand contracture in cerebral palsy. Picture source: http://www.cerebralpalsy.org/inspiration/artists/anne-abbott

Back to the kid again: he went home happy, him and his mother hopeful that next year his hands will be more functional. We’re talking about a kid who is super-happy to be spending his days in a wheelchair, because it means that he’s not spending his days in bed. (How’s your day going, dear reader?)  If he gets some improvement over the course of this year, then when we come back with a hand therapist again next year, he can improve even more with another splint. Someday he might be able to hold a pencil and use writing to get all of the stuff that’s in his head out of it, like I do—he sure as hell isn’t ever going to be able to speak.

Courtney IMG_1910
Courtney Retzer Vargo, PhD, checking a splint.

Here’s the thing: if there’s no Surgicorps, then there’s no hand therapist, and there’s no hope for functional hands for that kid—a teenager with a fully functional mind and not a lot of physical abilities.  (OK: no physical abilities.)  One of our hand therapists is Courtney Retzer Vargo.  Courtney has a PhD in occupational therapy, two kids, a hot husband, and a busy job in the United States.  But, every so often she burns up a week of her hard-earned vacation time and flies to Guatemala or Zambia to volunteer a week of her time doing exactly this.  Like all of us in Surgicorps, she buys her own plane ticket, pays for her own food and lodging–contributes a week of hard-earned vacation time. Surgicorps pays for all of the costs of the patients’ treatments, and Surgicorps lives or dies on the basis of donations from nice people like you. Click on this link, and making a donation will take you less than 5 minutes. $250 will pay all surgical costs for one patient, or the expenses for transportation and lodging for a patient and their parent during the period of the surgery. (See this post for what that trip is like, and why they need us to put them up.) $100 will pay for four surgical packs. $10 will pay for all of the Tylenol that we’ll send our patients home with this week—and, yes, our patients go home with nothing stronger than that. Do it—if you don’t feel better about life immediately, I’ll give you your money back—and you know where I live!

English notes:

  • Bilateral: on both sides. Bilateral symmetry is one of the most common features of multi-celled animals. How it was used in the post: She was putting bilateral splints on a young man.
  • To be hard to come by: to be difficult to obtain. During a famine, there actually is usually food, but it’s very expensive and hard to come by. How it was used in the post: Indeed, it’s the hand therapist that is the key to our mission—we can replace a surgeon, or an anesthesiologist, or a nurse—or an interpreter—but a good hand therapist is hard to come by.
  • Physician: a somewhat technical or formal term for doctor, and specifically, a medical doctor. Non-health-care people don’t use it very often, but health care professionals use it frequently—especially doctors. 🙂  How it was used in the post: The other day, one of the physicians said to me: The first time I went on one of these missions, I heard that we had a hand therapist with us, and I thought: why the hell do we need one of those?  What could she possibly do on a surgical trip?  Then I saw her working, and I realized: she’s more important than the doctors.

Spanish notes:

  • Férula or tablilla: a splint. I’ve noticed over the course of the past four years that some people know one word, some people know the other, and many, many of them don’t know either. In that case, I ask the therapist if I can tell the patient that a férula is a piece of hard plastic that will keep their fingers apart/fist from closing/wrist from moving/whatever.

French notes:

  • une attelle: a splint. I think there’s also a word une éclisse, but I haven’t been able to verify that one.

 

 

Life isn’t cheap here, but sometimes things go to sh…: consecutive and simultaneous interpretation

Writing from Guatemala in the 1980s, Jonathan Maslow said that it is not true, as is often said, that life is cheap in Central America, but it is true that life is briefer there, and so takes place faster. I thought about this yesterday when a conversation went completely to shit. (I was talking about this with one of the anesthesiologists today. “It went completely to pieces,” I said. “Kevin, you can say it went to shit,” she said. This and other obscure English expressions discussed at the end of the post.)

There are two basic kinds of interpretation, known as consecutive interpretation and simultaneous interpretation. In consecutive interpretation, the person for whom you are interpreting says something, and when they stop, you repeat it.   In simultaneous interpretation, the person for whom you are interpreting speaks without any pause other than their normal ones, and you repeat what they said immediately, essentially phrase by phrase.

Each form of interpretation has its advantages and disadvantages. I’ll summarize them:

  Consecutive interpretation Simultaneous interpretation
Plusses ·      Much easier with some language pairs

·      Easier for bilinguals to listen to

·      Obligatory in “double interpretation” situations (see below)

·      Greater accuracy

·      Required in legal situations, where both languages are recorded

 ·      Faster—as little as half the time of consecutive

·      Better provider/patient contact

·      Obligatory in certain situations: multilingual (more than two languages), speeches, conferences, and live media
Minusses ·      Slower (see below for how you can make it less slow) ·      Sometimes harder for bilinguals

·      More difficult—special training required

·      Interpreter can’t clarify without interrupting

·      In many situations, requires two interpreters

A number of these are relevant to interpreting for Surgicorps, the group with which I’ve come to Guatemala. Here are some specifics:

  • “Double interpretation” refers to a situation where the interpreter and the person who speaks the “target language” don’t share a language. This happens on occasion here, and the solution is “double interpretation:” the health care provider speaks in English, the interpreter speaks in Spanish to a second person who speaks Spanish and one of the many indigenous languages, and then that person speaks to the patient in the language that they share—then it goes back in the other direction. This kind of situation has to be handled with consecutive interpretation. (I had a double interpretation situation on screening day. The gentleman who was doing the Spanish <-> indigenous language interpretation had no teeth, and it was a challenge to understand him, even for me.)
  • How you can help with the relative slowness of consecutive interpretation if you’re a health care provider: use shorter sentences. If you use long sentences, professional interpreters will often write down notes while you speak. The shorter your sentences, the less need there is for note-taking on the part of the interpreter.

How this all became relevant yesterday: I was interpreting between one of the Surgicorps people and one of the Guatemalan staff. The Surgicorps person was anticipating the end of the local nurse’s sentences while I was still repeating them, and responding in English. So, now I’m speaking a sentence that I’m having to remember in Spanish so that I can interpret it in the Spanish -> English direction, while someone is speaking to me in English. This is the kind of context in which you need two interpreters because you’re basically doing simultaneous interpretation instead of consecutive interpretation: this is the kind of situation where everything immediately goes to shit.

…and that’s when I thought about Maslow on Central America: life is briefer there, and so takes place faster. No problem: the other thing about Central America is that people here know how to make things work in suboptimal conditions. Ask everyone to stop, tell them that you’re having trouble and why, and people will do their best to accommodate—the Americans, as well as the Guatemalans. As is almost always the case: communicate what you need, because the only way to guarantee that you won’t get it is to not tell people what it is.

How about helping our work in Guatemala?  Surgicorps provides free surgical care to people who cannot afford it.  We pay for all of our patients’ costs through the generous donations of the kind of person who would read a blog like this.  Click here to donate–I’m the funny-looking bald guy. 

English notes here—French and Spanish vocabulary below:

  • Life is cheap: a delightfully ambiguous expression. The most common interpretation: it’s a way of saying that life is not valued. That’s not to say that people don’t value their own lives, but more that the society doesn’t, in general, value people’s lives. That’s the sense in which it is used in the Maslow quote: it is not true, as is often said, that life is cheap in Central America, but it is true that life is briefer there, and so takes place faster. The other possible interpretation is the more obvious, but the much less common one: it is inexpensive to live. For example: life is cheap in Benin—I think a nice apartment is maybe $50 a month. From the context, it will probably be clear which is which; in case of doubt, the default interpretation is the “life is not valued” one.
  • to go to pieces or to go to shit: for a situation to suddenly start going very badly, for things to stop working. To go to pieces is acceptable in pretty much any social context, but to go to shit is very casual and mildly obscene, and you should only use it with peers with whom you are very comfortable. Now: if you’re talking about a person, then to go to pieces (but not to go to shit) has a different meaning. It means something like to stop functioning, perhaps to start crying if you’re talking about an incident; or, if you’re talking about a chronic situation, not to cry, but to stop functioning normally in life. An example of the isolated incident version: I dropped her cell phone and the screen broke, and she completely went to pieces—locked herself in the bathroom and cried for maybe 15 minutes. The chronic one: After his wife died, he completely went to pieces—stopped showering, then stopped showing up for work, got fired, and ended up living with his daughter.

French notes:

  • merder: to go to shit, to get complicated.

Spanish notes:

  • embolismo: this word does not mean what it looks like—a false cognate. In Spanish it is basically a situation that has gone to shit. The word for “embolism” is embolia, e.g. una embolia cerebral, a cerebral embolism (a kind of stroke).  (The other kind of stroke is a derrame.)
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