Thursday, February 27, 2020

When in Rome

Before last weekend, I had been to exactly 25 of the 50 States in the United States of America. Since then, I have been to exactly 27 of the 50 States in the United States of America. 

Last weekend, I went on a canvassing trip with about a dozen of my colleagues at AU through Virginia and North Carolina to Rock Hill, South Carolina. I was beyond excited leading up to the trip, as I have always wanted to explore the South Eastern United States but had never managed to make it much further than Southern Virginia. The night we drove down, my friends and I had a late dinner at Waffle House then went to sleep, only to wake up bright and early so we could start knocking on some doors. The culture shock was, to put it simply, rather evident when speaking with Southerners of mostly African American heritage, living in lower-middle-class neighborhoods. What was shocking to me was how differently people spoke in the South, but what was even more shocking to me still was how differently I spoke in the South.

My speech transitioned a great deal over the course of my trip. After my first couple of hours knocking on doors, I noticed myself greeting others very politely, using words like "Ma'am", "Sir", "Mr.", and "Miss" instead of addressing people by less formal nouns or pronouns. By the end of my first day knocking on doors, I noticed myself throwing the word "y'all" into my speech, and as the weekend progressed I noticed myself slurring my speech in an increasingly Southern fashion. 

This is obviously a form of code-switching, and it connects to a greater theme I have noticed myself falling into when I find myself in a foreign environment. When I was visiting Quebec for a French class trip in 2017, I stayed with a host family and noticed myself—on top of speaking more French—speaking English with a slight Quebecois accent with my host family.

When we are surrounded by people of a different background than us, we choose to try and make ourselves appear more familiar by adopting elements of speech we would not normally put on. This seemed especially apparent while I visited the South, as I feel that I (and fellow Yankees around me) embodied this idea of pronunciational mirroring to a great extent. This same concept can have more permanent implications to a persons speech when the individual is exposed to a foreign pronunciation for an extended period of time. 

My grandfather was born in England in 1945 but then immigrated to Southern California at the age of six. After living in the United States for a few years, he (and his older siblings) quickly lost their English accents. Then, when he was in his late 50s, my grandfather moved to Connecticut and now, after almost two decades, has definitely picked up the very real Connecticut accent. This demonstrates how exposure to a foreign form of a language can quickly cause someone to drop characteristics of their indigenous dialect, either for a short period of time or permanently. 


Monday, February 17, 2020

The Alphabet: An Underrated Blessing from Antiquity

       The concept of an 'Alphabet' is one that we take for granted. Considering the fact that most of the world today uses some form of an alphabet (including languages as distinct as Korean, Russian, Indian, and English), and that there are a lot of different alphabets (such as the Romance, Cyrillic, Greek, and Arabic alphabets), it is easy to ignore the reality of how rare alphabets actually are. Every single alphabet (except the Korean Alphabet) has a common origin within one original alphabet, the Phoenician Alphabet.

      The Phoenician Alphabet was invented by a civilization that occupied what is now Israel, Lebanon, and Syria but happily colonized the rest of the Mediterranean spreading trade as they went. The Phoenicians would come into contact with various other groups, including the Arabs, and Indian people-groups, who would adopt the Phoenician writing system but would adapt it for their languages (This is where we get the Arabic script and the Sanskritic script).

      The Greeks would come into contact with Phoenicians and would adopt their trade partners' writing system, but with some sizable differences. For one, the Greeks would write left to right unlike the Phoenicians, and they would modify some Phoenician characters. Later, the Romans would come into contact with the Greeks, and they would take the Greek alphabet and use it with some minor changes to its characters. This was the birth of the Roman script or the script in which we write today.

       Later, the Greek Byzantines would send missionaries to Eastern Europe and Russia. These missionaries would teach the local Slavs to write, using a modified version of the Greek alphabet suited for Slavic pronunciation, creating a new alphabet called the Cyrillic Alphabet.

       The concept of the alphabet is rare and unnatural, just as was the conception of the wheel, or the sail. The concept of the alphabet is an invention from early civilization that has defined all advancements in western society behind it, becoming a staple in how people in the west understand written language. It is a concept that I, as a college student, am fronted with on a near minutely basis on my laptop, on my phone, and on my professor's smartboard. Words are a necessity of life in the 21st century, and behind them is 5000 years of history dating back to one simple discovery that changed the world.




Monday, February 10, 2020

Romanian: A Linguistic Mish-Mash Like English

My cousin flew into Washington DC this week for a business trip. He brought his wonderful girlfriend with him, and the three of us met up for dinner on Sunday. My Cousin's girlfriend, Diana, is of Romanian heritage; both of her parents left Romania after the overthrow of Romania's Communist Dictator in 1989. She is a heritage speaker of Romanian and I enjoy asking her about Romanian vocabulary. But at dinner on Sunday I got a little bit carried away in my questioning and went a little bit too into detail for her to follow: "How much Slavic influence do you notice in Romanian." She, not having much knowledge of linguistics or a Slavic language responded to me by saying, "None, its a romance language."

What Diana didn't realize is that yes, Romanian is, without doubt, a Romance Language, closely related to Italian, French, and Spanish, but unlike the other three languages which have developed away from Vulgar Latin in contact with one another, Romanian was isolated from the Romance Language Family and has adopted a flair all in its own both by adopting characteristics of the languages it is surrounded by and also by maintaining features of Latin which disappeared in Western Romance Languages. 

For example, Romanian has maintained three noun cases from the Latin grammatical case system. Modern Romanian maintains a dative, vocative, and nominative case whereas all other modern Romance Languages have lost this feature that was present in Latin. Additionally, Romanian maintains three grammatical cases (Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter) just like Latin. Romanian also maintains a large amount of Latin based vocabulary, and here are some examples I was able to find through Google Translate: 

English:       Romanian:      Spanish:      Latin:
Red              Rosu               Roja             Rubrum
House          Casa               Casa             Casa (or Domum)
Hand           Mana              Mano            Manibus
Language    Limba            Lengua          Lingua

Although Romanian maintains a lot of features from its Romance roots, there is also a great deal of borrowed vocabulary from the Slavic Languages which nearly surround Romania with Romanian. The word for 'yes' in Romanian is 'da' as it is in Russian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, and Polish. The Romanian word for 'car' is 'mashina' just as it is in Russian and the Romanian word for 'coat' is 'palt' which is rather similar to the Russian word 'Palto.' A lot of Romanians most sophisticated vocabulary stems from a Slavic source, insinuating the elevated status that speakers of Slavic languages must have had over Romanian speakers. In fact, the cross between Slavic and Romance features in Romanian is very reminiscent of English, a Germanic language that has adopted a lot of its sophisticated vocabulary from a Latin (French) source. It also reminds me of Russian, a language that has plenty of French and German influences on its sophisticated vocabulary. 

Evidently, Romania has borrowed a lot from its Slavic neighbors, making Romanian a very interesting cross between two the Europes most prominent language families. It is a perfect example of how languages can change over time based on contact with other groups of people.


Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Dialects, Dialects, Dialects

The United States is a nation of immigrants. Although some people in the United States have heritage in the US for generations, others have much newer ancestry from recent immigration. My family heritage falls somewhere in between. My father was the first generation of his family born in the United States. His parents were from Drummondville, Quebec, and his two sisters were also born in Quebec Province.

My grandparents and my two aunts all speak French as their first language. In fact, when they all immigrated to Southern California in the early 1960s they spoke no English, but slowly my family learned to speak English, and then my father was born. Unlike his sisters, my father didn't grow up speaking French by itself but instead learned to speak both French and English, together, in a form of Frenglish. My dad is, of course, fluent in English, and he is perfectly proficient in Canadian French as well, but sadly he never taught me any of the French he knows.

That being said, I still learned a deal of French while studying it in Highschool. I might not have perfect French, but I never had any difficulty understanding the French my teacher spoke or the French spoken in the French language audio recordings we used in class. That being said, when my father or my grandparents try to speak with me in French I often struggle to understand even simple phrases. But how could this be? I was taught French, and my family can speak French.

The difference stems from a difference in dialect. I was schooled in Metropolitan (or Parisian) French, whereas my family, obviously, doesn't speak this variety of French. Dialectical differences make communication difficult amongst speakers of most languages: A Bavarian German speaker will likely struggle to understand a German speaker from Cologne; an Italian speaker from Sicily won't be able to understand someone from Milan; and a speaker of perfect Oxford English will likely struggle to understand a Scots speaker from Glasgow.

Dialects are tricky. Dialects are probably one of the features of languages that make communication the most difficult, which is why so many different nations have put in the effort to issue 'standard' varieties of their languages. We have a 'Standard' form of German, of French, and even of English (Oxford English is generally considered to be Standard English).

But language standardization is also dangerous. When languages are standardized, it can often result in local dialects being lost as the standard variety slowly takes on more popularity. Additionally, standardization is often associated with the supremacy of one part of a country over the other parts, as standard varieties are often structured around a prestigious dialect of the language (i.e. Metropolitan French or Standard German which is built around Berlin German). For those of us interested in preserving linguistic diversity, standardization is not a good thing. That being said, standardization makes learning languages easier for a foreigner and allows for easier communication amongst the people of a country.