3/24/08
3/19/08
A Path to Language
A PATH TO LANGUAGE
by Christine Keneally
from Powell's.com
At a cheap pine table in a dingy dining room, we drank cask wine and showed off. H. was smart-flighty. It was a bit late in the day to be that into Kate Bush, but she was pretty enough to pull it off. R. was a medical student who gave rather surprising shoulder rubs. It was one of our first nights in a Melbourne University student house and we were getting to know each other with enormous animation.
R. dazzled us with his newly acquired catalog of human illness. Then he started talking about aphasia, and a grey hand opened inside me. "What do you mean you 'don't have language'? You mean, you can't talk?" I asked. "No," he said. "It's not that you can't talk, you don't have language at all. It's gone." They continued to chat and flirt as if nothing had happened, and I sat back in my pine chair, shocked and depressed.
Are you still you if you don't have language? Are you even human? Having spent most of my life inside a book, I doubted it. The same year I met R., I took Linguistics 101. The department was newly helmed by two brilliant field linguists, and though I dragged myself through most university courses, linguistics assignments were adventures I looked forward to. Every student felt the same way. Each week, we were presented with a fragment of language — it was an alien transmission or a mysterious document with foreign words and clauses, and sometimes translations. We had to crack the meaning, characterize the structure, and guess at missing pieces.
Linguistics taught me that language is a lens into the human mind and into human history, that language lives inside your mind, but also that it inhabits your body. I learned how to read spectrograms, which for a non-science student was an indescribable thrill. I watched vowels create bursts of energy at different bands of pitch, and I saw how consonants are always utterly silent. For my final thesis, I took an hour-long train journey from Melbourne and met with two very proud, devout, and generous Christians. They invited me into their home and prayed in front of me (and for me). When they spoke in tongues, I taped it.
Glossolalia sounds like singing, but it behaves like jazz. Groups of syllables recur again and again, and as they do, they're riffed on. A single sound or a syllable is swapped or dropped; elements from different phrases contain and mirror one another; rhyme, assonance, and alliteration are threaded throughout. It's not as complicated as language, and its nature is to be highly organized. It made me realize that the point of having language is not just to tell stories but to create pure structure, in this case by compulsively shaping and reshaping air with the tongue and mouth. Where does this all come from? I asked a lecturer how language began. "No one knows," she said. "And no one asks the question because there's no way to answer it."
The study of language evolution was formally banned by the Linguistics Society of Paris over a hundred years earlier. The ban was never lifted, and over time it mutated into an uncomfortable taboo. Yet not long after I asked about it, a growing group of men and women began to defy the informal edict against language evolution and wrestle with its many mysteries. The young field of evolutionary linguistics was pretty confused, and a few years back, having begun to write a book about it, I was, too. The biggest problem, naturally, was language.
The writing process went this like this: I read books and journal articles. I attended conferences. I traveled to Oxford, Rome, Leipzig, Boston, Atlanta, Canberra, and I spoke to researchers. Then I'd write it up. For months, sometimes years, I would sail along using an important expression or phrase, building chapters and sections around a key word, until one day, it would deliver to me one of its lesser but inevitable meanings. Suddenly, my thesis was corrupted by a casual implication or a logical connection that should never have been there. I'd have to rip tracks from the book and start all over again.
It only occurred to me towards the end that using language to investigate and explain how language began was like, well, it wasn't like anything. It was a unique and recursive nightmare. I often had the sensation, while merely thinking about this, that my brain was physically straining.
Some of the smartest people around are trying to reconstruct the trajectory of language through time, and the field abounds with wondrous and confronting ideas. A handful of researchers think language is like a virus that infects the minds of humans. It's not a parasite, it's a symbiote — and this makes a deep, personal sense to me. Your brain shapes itself around language, and language also changes to suit you.
So how did it evolve? Language grew unsteadily, but it was strung upon a smooth, unbroken line.
The platforms of language were built over thousands of millennia and we share many of these with very different animals. What we would today recognize as language gathered itself for many tens of thousands of years. Its progress was not continuous — a miniscule step would be taken, then nothing would happen, then another step, maybe a lurch, then nothing again.
As meaning and mental structure clotted together, it did so in the morphing minds of species evolving from one into another. Along our lineage, cold-blooded creatures begat warm-blooded animals, mammals generated primates, and primates tossed us up. Yet all of this tumult and stasis and creeping change has raged around an oblivious line of mothers and their babies.
Piece by piece, through a process of genetic mutation and cultural legacy, they talked and gestured language into existence. No genetic change has ever been too great to break the chain, so when the babies became mothers themselves and had babies of their own, their babies also grew up and passed the legacy on. Eventually one of those mothers had me. Not long ago, I had a baby, too.
As I wrote this book, I watched as my toddler son learned English as a foreign language, or rather, learned language as a foreign language. I knew what language evolution was supposed to look like from the outside, but what does it feel like? At least in this case, as my two-year-old said when I asked what he was doing with a stray toy in a café, "I am making pleasure."
by Christine Keneally
from Powell's.com
At a cheap pine table in a dingy dining room, we drank cask wine and showed off. H. was smart-flighty. It was a bit late in the day to be that into Kate Bush, but she was pretty enough to pull it off. R. was a medical student who gave rather surprising shoulder rubs. It was one of our first nights in a Melbourne University student house and we were getting to know each other with enormous animation.
R. dazzled us with his newly acquired catalog of human illness. Then he started talking about aphasia, and a grey hand opened inside me. "What do you mean you 'don't have language'? You mean, you can't talk?" I asked. "No," he said. "It's not that you can't talk, you don't have language at all. It's gone." They continued to chat and flirt as if nothing had happened, and I sat back in my pine chair, shocked and depressed.
Are you still you if you don't have language? Are you even human? Having spent most of my life inside a book, I doubted it. The same year I met R., I took Linguistics 101. The department was newly helmed by two brilliant field linguists, and though I dragged myself through most university courses, linguistics assignments were adventures I looked forward to. Every student felt the same way. Each week, we were presented with a fragment of language — it was an alien transmission or a mysterious document with foreign words and clauses, and sometimes translations. We had to crack the meaning, characterize the structure, and guess at missing pieces.
Linguistics taught me that language is a lens into the human mind and into human history, that language lives inside your mind, but also that it inhabits your body. I learned how to read spectrograms, which for a non-science student was an indescribable thrill. I watched vowels create bursts of energy at different bands of pitch, and I saw how consonants are always utterly silent. For my final thesis, I took an hour-long train journey from Melbourne and met with two very proud, devout, and generous Christians. They invited me into their home and prayed in front of me (and for me). When they spoke in tongues, I taped it.
Glossolalia sounds like singing, but it behaves like jazz. Groups of syllables recur again and again, and as they do, they're riffed on. A single sound or a syllable is swapped or dropped; elements from different phrases contain and mirror one another; rhyme, assonance, and alliteration are threaded throughout. It's not as complicated as language, and its nature is to be highly organized. It made me realize that the point of having language is not just to tell stories but to create pure structure, in this case by compulsively shaping and reshaping air with the tongue and mouth. Where does this all come from? I asked a lecturer how language began. "No one knows," she said. "And no one asks the question because there's no way to answer it."
The study of language evolution was formally banned by the Linguistics Society of Paris over a hundred years earlier. The ban was never lifted, and over time it mutated into an uncomfortable taboo. Yet not long after I asked about it, a growing group of men and women began to defy the informal edict against language evolution and wrestle with its many mysteries. The young field of evolutionary linguistics was pretty confused, and a few years back, having begun to write a book about it, I was, too. The biggest problem, naturally, was language.
The writing process went this like this: I read books and journal articles. I attended conferences. I traveled to Oxford, Rome, Leipzig, Boston, Atlanta, Canberra, and I spoke to researchers. Then I'd write it up. For months, sometimes years, I would sail along using an important expression or phrase, building chapters and sections around a key word, until one day, it would deliver to me one of its lesser but inevitable meanings. Suddenly, my thesis was corrupted by a casual implication or a logical connection that should never have been there. I'd have to rip tracks from the book and start all over again.
It only occurred to me towards the end that using language to investigate and explain how language began was like, well, it wasn't like anything. It was a unique and recursive nightmare. I often had the sensation, while merely thinking about this, that my brain was physically straining.
Some of the smartest people around are trying to reconstruct the trajectory of language through time, and the field abounds with wondrous and confronting ideas. A handful of researchers think language is like a virus that infects the minds of humans. It's not a parasite, it's a symbiote — and this makes a deep, personal sense to me. Your brain shapes itself around language, and language also changes to suit you.
So how did it evolve? Language grew unsteadily, but it was strung upon a smooth, unbroken line.
The platforms of language were built over thousands of millennia and we share many of these with very different animals. What we would today recognize as language gathered itself for many tens of thousands of years. Its progress was not continuous — a miniscule step would be taken, then nothing would happen, then another step, maybe a lurch, then nothing again.
As meaning and mental structure clotted together, it did so in the morphing minds of species evolving from one into another. Along our lineage, cold-blooded creatures begat warm-blooded animals, mammals generated primates, and primates tossed us up. Yet all of this tumult and stasis and creeping change has raged around an oblivious line of mothers and their babies.
Piece by piece, through a process of genetic mutation and cultural legacy, they talked and gestured language into existence. No genetic change has ever been too great to break the chain, so when the babies became mothers themselves and had babies of their own, their babies also grew up and passed the legacy on. Eventually one of those mothers had me. Not long ago, I had a baby, too.
As I wrote this book, I watched as my toddler son learned English as a foreign language, or rather, learned language as a foreign language. I knew what language evolution was supposed to look like from the outside, but what does it feel like? At least in this case, as my two-year-old said when I asked what he was doing with a stray toy in a café, "I am making pleasure."
Audio of Josh Prager's Book - The Echoing Green
Click HERE to listen to an excerpt from Joshua Prager's book.
And Excerpt from Stacy Sullivan's Book
AN ARMY MADE OF SCRATCH  |  | |||
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It was not the most efficient way to build an army — hand delivering walkie-talkies, flying halfway around the world with a few thousand dollars in cash to buy some AK-47s, while at the same time running a roofing business and battling Bajram Curri’s thugs — but somehow it worked. With Florin’s efforts, and those of the Homeland Calling Fund’s European fund-raisers, the Kosovo Liberation Army continued to function. In spite of the increased Serb border patrols, a communication network bought at Radio Shack, and a limited arms supply interrupted by fellow Albanians in both official and unofficial capacities, the weapons smuggling convoys continued to penetrate into Kosovo. Night after night, the KLA grew bigger as Albanians across Kosovo took up arms and declared themselves loyal to the rebel force.
Before long, uniformed KLA soldiers were visible in the outskirts of most towns and across the province, building bunkers and setting up roadblocks. They didn’t look very elegant. The men were dressed in a mishmash of camouflage that reflected the countries that had significant Albanian communities. Their guns were mostly AK-47s and hunting rifles. Their bunkers were made out of tree branches, rocks, tablecloths and whatever else they could find rummaging through their houses. They made roadblocks out of old tractors, trucks, farm tools, tires, bales of hay and bulldozers. But they were the most welcome presence on the ground that Kosovo Albanians had ever seen.
Suddenly what had always seemed impossible now seemed possible. The Albanians outnumbered the Serbs nine to one and virtually every one them was supporting the KLA. Their fear of the police seemed to diminish by the day. The guerrillas seemed to grow bolder and bolder in challenging the police. Soon, they were moving to within a few hundred yards of sandbagged police checkpoints and firing regularly on police convoys. They dug trenches on ridge tops and manned them with machine guns overlooking Serb positions. In one village, they even sent a note to the police station daring the officers to come and get them. By the end of April, the attacks and counterattacks had grown so frequent that the rap-rap-rap of automatic weapons was constant in the countryside. Kosovo was at war.
---
As the KLA and the Serb police and military faced off against one another, the international press corps descended on Kosovo to cover the conflict. At first view, the vagabond KLA, with its motley uniforms, silly roadblocks, pathetic hunting rifles and sheer determination, seemed to be engaged in a heroic struggle. Against all odds, it had risen up from nowhere to battle a far better-armed force.
The KLA did its dirty work at night, in small groups, out of view of the media. For many weeks, the guerrillas picked off a policeman here and there. Soon however, the emboldened guerrillas started intimidating and threatening local Serbs. Rumors also spread that they were kidnapping Serbs and holding them prisoner. But the press didn’t see any of this.
The Serb troops, by contrast, did their dirty work in plain view. With their faces painted black, police and military convoys began driving through Albanian villages with their assault weapons pointed out of their windows, spreading terror among the population. When they went in to attack a village, they set up checkpoints to keep the press out, but inevitably, when they were finished with their operation they left behind traces of their crimes. Once it was the mutilated corpses of two Albanian cattle herders in the Bistrica River. Another time it was the headless corpse of an old man who was probably too weak to flee with the rest of his family. Such horrors ensured that the KLA stayed well ahead on the public relations front.
As the rebels staged their nighttime guerrilla raids and Serb forces retaliated by attacking the villages that harbored them, the death toll slowly crept up, and each death was commemorated with much ceremony. Thousands upon thousands of Albanians attended the funeral of each slain civilian and fighter, and inevitably the funerals turned into KLA rallies. After each one, the Albanians left with more resolve to fight. The populace seemed undeterred by death. Each Albanian who died became a martyr for Kosovo, and scores of willing new fighters were born. Families talked about the need to sacrifice their sons to the cause. They knew that the Serbs had overwhelming military power, but over and over they repeated that they were on the side of right and had more motivated fighters. They might have to fight a war of attrition, but they had tens of thousands of willing fighters at home and in the diaspora, and eventually they would triumph.
For the Serbs, it was different. Thousands of them turned out to commemorate the death of their slain policemen as well, but while those gatherings no doubt cemented the Serbs’ bitterness and hatred of the Albanians, they did not breed a resolve to fight. Most of the army and police fighting in Kosovo were not from there; they had been sent there to fight from elsewhere in Serbia and they resented it. They felt for the two hundred thousand Serbs who lived in Kosovo, but that didn’t mean they were willing to risk their lives for them. When Serb troops moved in and attacked a village, they did not dare try to hold it, because that made them too vulnerable to Albanian attacks. Spooked by how quickly the KLA grew, they were increasingly confining themselves to the cities or hiding behind sandbagged bunkers on the province’s main roads.
Soon, counterinsurgency experts were saying that Milosevic had vastly miscalculated in Kosovo. In order for the Serbs to squash the guerrilla movement, they would need to outnumber the KLA by a ratio of ten to one. The Serbs had nowhere near those numbers and they probably never would. Even if Milosevic increased the number of troops in the province, the rebels could still call on tens of thousands of potential fighters living in the diaspora. Indeed, many were already coming. On any given day the rusted hulk of a ferry from Koman was packed full of Kosovo Albanians returning to their homeland from abroad, many of whom spoke better German or French than they did Albanian.
Although the Albanian government continued to insist that it was doing everything it could to crack down on the gunrunning, many government and army officials began aiding the KLA. They began providing them army vehicles and armed escorts to move their weapons north. They also opened up several military facilities to the KLA and allowed several Albanian army officers to provide training and assistance.
At long last, all of the ingredients for a successful guerrilla insurgency were now in place. The KLA had overwhelming popular support; a steady supply of money, arms and fighters; and a safe haven across the border in Albania, where the guerrillas could receive training.
3/18/08
LAST CHANCE: RCWS
RIVER CITY WRITERS SERIES CONCLUDES ITS SPRING LINEUP WITH:
Christine Kenneally, Joshua Prager and Stacy Sullivan. These three are journalists and authors of nonfiction books.
Christine Kenneally is a freelance journalist and author who has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Discover, Slate and Salon, as well as other publications. Her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, was published by Viking in 2007. The paperback is due in May 2008. Before freelancing, she received a Ph.D. in linguistics from Cambridge University and a B.A. (Hons) in English and Linguistics from Melbourne University. She was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, and she now lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Joshua Prager grew up in New Jersey and studied music theory at Columbia College. He is a senior special writer at the Wall Street Journal and lives in New York City. The New York Times Book Review had this to say about Prager's book The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World (Vintage, 2008):
The title of Joshua Prager's winning new book comes from Blake, its theme of suspicion and guilt from Hawthorne, its method from Woodward and Bernstein. A baseball whodunit on an epic scale, it offers a heretofore secret view of the game's most memorable moment, a view that challenges verities about fair play, right conduct and lasting fame.... 'The Echoing Green' is a revelation and a page turner, a group character study unequaled in baseball writing since Roger Kahn's 'Boys of Summer' some three decades ago.
Stacy Sullivan is the author of Be Not Afraid, For You Have Sons in America: How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure the US into the Kosovo War, which tells the story of how a Kosovar émigré spearheaded a multi-millions dollar fundraising effort from his Brooklyn roofing company and launched a guerrilla army in the Balkans. She covered the war in Bosnia for Newsweek magazine, and her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, New York Magazine, Men’s Journal as well as the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. She is now an advisor on counter-terrorism for Human Rights Watch, the largest US-based human rights organization.
Reception and Reading: March 27 @ 6 PM and 7 PM, respectively, Galloway Mansion, 1822 Overton Park Avenue (Click HERE for directions from The UofM)
Interview: March 28 @ 10:30 AM, 456 Patterson
Christine Kenneally, Joshua Prager and Stacy Sullivan. These three are journalists and authors of nonfiction books.
Christine Kenneally is a freelance journalist and author who has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Discover, Slate and Salon, as well as other publications. Her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, was published by Viking in 2007. The paperback is due in May 2008. Before freelancing, she received a Ph.D. in linguistics from Cambridge University and a B.A. (Hons) in English and Linguistics from Melbourne University. She was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, and she now lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Joshua Prager grew up in New Jersey and studied music theory at Columbia College. He is a senior special writer at the Wall Street Journal and lives in New York City. The New York Times Book Review had this to say about Prager's book The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World (Vintage, 2008):
The title of Joshua Prager's winning new book comes from Blake, its theme of suspicion and guilt from Hawthorne, its method from Woodward and Bernstein. A baseball whodunit on an epic scale, it offers a heretofore secret view of the game's most memorable moment, a view that challenges verities about fair play, right conduct and lasting fame.... 'The Echoing Green' is a revelation and a page turner, a group character study unequaled in baseball writing since Roger Kahn's 'Boys of Summer' some three decades ago.
Stacy Sullivan is the author of Be Not Afraid, For You Have Sons in America: How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure the US into the Kosovo War, which tells the story of how a Kosovar émigré spearheaded a multi-millions dollar fundraising effort from his Brooklyn roofing company and launched a guerrilla army in the Balkans. She covered the war in Bosnia for Newsweek magazine, and her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, New York Magazine, Men’s Journal as well as the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. She is now an advisor on counter-terrorism for Human Rights Watch, the largest US-based human rights organization.
Reception and Reading: March 27 @ 6 PM and 7 PM, respectively, Galloway Mansion, 1822 Overton Park Avenue (Click HERE for directions from The UofM)
Interview: March 28 @ 10:30 AM, 456 Patterson
3/17/08
Floyd Skloot - River City Writers Series Tonight!
Floyd Skloot, father of UofM faculty member Rebecca Skloot, will read from his work and speak as part of the River City Writers Series this evening at The Jay Etkin Gallery. The reading will be a wonderful event — a mix of poetry, nonfiction and fiction, with discussions of how the three genres overlap and relate in his work, and what it’s like to be a family of writers who often write about each other.
Floyd Skloot is a nonfiction writer, poet and novelist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Poetry, American Scholar, Georgia Review, Sewanee Review and many others. He contributes book reviews regularly to the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, New York Times Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle and others. He has written 15 books, including the memoirs "In the Shadow of Memory" and "A World of Light"; the poetry collections "The Evening Light," "Approximately Paradise" and "The End of Dreams," and most recently the novel "Patient 002." His awards include the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction; the Independent Publishers Book Award in Creative Nonfiction; Oregon Book Awards in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry; two Pushcart Prizes, and others. He's twice appeared in "The Best American Essays" and "The Best American Science Writing," and once in "The Best Spiritual Writing," "The Best Food Writing" and "The Art of the Essay." He has three books forthcoming in 2008 -- "Selected Poems: 1970-2005" from Tupelo Press, "The Snow's Music" from Louisiana State University Press and "The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life" from University of Nebraska Press. In May, 2006 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Franklin and Marshall College, his alma mater. For more information: www.floydskloot.com
Reception and Reading: March 17 @ 6 PM and 7 PM, respectively, Jay Etkin Gallery, 409 South Main Street. Click HERE for directions from UofM.
(Complimentary snacks and beverages)
Floyd Skloot is a nonfiction writer, poet and novelist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Poetry, American Scholar, Georgia Review, Sewanee Review and many others. He contributes book reviews regularly to the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, New York Times Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle and others. He has written 15 books, including the memoirs "In the Shadow of Memory" and "A World of Light"; the poetry collections "The Evening Light," "Approximately Paradise" and "The End of Dreams," and most recently the novel "Patient 002." His awards include the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction; the Independent Publishers Book Award in Creative Nonfiction; Oregon Book Awards in both Creative Nonfiction and Poetry; two Pushcart Prizes, and others. He's twice appeared in "The Best American Essays" and "The Best American Science Writing," and once in "The Best Spiritual Writing," "The Best Food Writing" and "The Art of the Essay." He has three books forthcoming in 2008 -- "Selected Poems: 1970-2005" from Tupelo Press, "The Snow's Music" from Louisiana State University Press and "The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life" from University of Nebraska Press. In May, 2006 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Franklin and Marshall College, his alma mater. For more information: www.floydskloot.com
Reception and Reading: March 17 @ 6 PM and 7 PM, respectively, Jay Etkin Gallery, 409 South Main Street. Click HERE for directions from UofM.
(Complimentary snacks and beverages)
3/11/08
Think Globally - ACT Locally Speaker Series
The 1020 Project is producing a speaker series which will focus on the topic "Think Globally, Act Locally." To this end we will bring in local activists and educators to speak about issues that we normally think of only in a global context, but that have impact and import in our local community. Please join us for this exciting opportunity to engage with these civic leaders to learn about how we can change the world, by changing our community.
Our first speaker will be Andrew Couch of the MidSouth Clean Water Coalition. He will discuss the value of renewable energy and the effectiveness of energy efficiency by taking the class through the history of modern energy consumption through today.
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