C'mon, Junior, Sound It Out

Here's an interesting question for the literacy types: Given that persons raised to read the roman alphabet (as in English) have little trouble – as evidenced by the number of persons of that group able to learn the language – learning to read Russian, written in the cyrillic alphabet, can we expect persons raised to read the roman or Cyrillic alphabets to find little difficulty in learning to read a derivation of the Devanagari alphabet?
     Similarly, would persons raised to read a language in the Devanagari alphabet (as in Hindi) have any trouble learning to read a language, the alphabet for which is based on Devanagari (as in Bengali)?
     This set of questions comes from my having once been able to sound out many words in Hindi – a talent long lost or at least seriously attenuated – begging my being able to quickly learn to sound out words in the Bengali alphabet. This goes to the question of whether my ability to sound out words in the Cyrillic alphabet is based on the derivative nature of the two alphabets (Roman & Cyrillic) from a source that gives them similar graphic features. A is A in Russian and English. Same-same M & M. Even G in English has a similar grapheme in Russian (Γ, г), by way of Greek (Γ, γ) which a person nominally educated in the history of the alphabet of either language would know, providing there was a need to have this information available.
     This also proposes that a person who has a nominal literacy – at least to the point of being able to sound out words – in the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets – might have difficulty becoming literate in Bengali even if the person had at one time had experience with the Devanagari alphabet.

Within the bounds of my personal history, it works out like this: Many years ago I got a book on what was then called "Hindustani," with the story in the book going that this was a name for two languages, Hindi and Urdu. These two languages are different, but at least for me, knowing the Devanagari alphabet made life interesting, mainly because someone had removed the pages of the book – a library book – that showed me the Devanagari and the Arabic-based alphabets.
     Research on this led me to the proper alphabet by way of Sanskrit, which led me on another tangential goose chase that isn't part of this story.
     So with the Devanagari alphabet finally in my grasp I was able to learn how to spell some of the words & sound out sentences in other books that used the alphabet.
     Given as the book itself was flawed in that it did not show a difference in the pronunciation of different graphemes (the three different n sounds, for example) and made no difference graphically between /r/ and /ŗ/, I was pretty well done
     Eventually I found another book on the language which went to great pains to explain the various phonemes peculiar to Hindi & Urdu. Of course by that time I moved toward other tangential distractions and other than buying the book & putting it on the shelf next to the original book, I got the gist of things and went aimlessly down the road of a dilettant.
     Recently, however, I've been distracted by Hindi and it's sister languages that use the Devanagari alphabet or an alphabet derived from the Devanagari character set. And since one of the pushes for this distraction is having come across – once again as in many times before – the story of a Hindu mystic from the middle 19th Century, who lived in what is today West Bengal state, I'm looking at the Bengali language, among others.
     Add to this my tendency toward interesting grapheme sets, typography & the artistic nature of type, type style & composition and you can get where this is going.

It ain't the languages that attract my attention here. It's the neat little wiggles of ink on the page that I'm interested in. As in: I think the Devanagari alphabet is cool, but I think that the shape & texture of the Bengali version of that alphabet is downright pretty. And Gujarati is as well, but for a different reason.
     Bangla is neat 'cause it seems almost driven by a runic style.
     Gujarati is neat 'cause it seems driven by a quick scan cursive style.
     One is rectilinear & strong; the other is curvy and quick.
     As for the languages themselves, well, that's another point. But right now I'm trying to figure out the alphabets' ability to slip cognitively from one design to the other in the same way that a line of Kennerley Italic will have a completely different feel from, say, Cooper Italic. Both can be read by a literate person, despite the differences in the shapes of the letters across the designs of the two faces.
     Literate persons do it all the time. The type face may change from serif to sans serif and from roman to italic – or even more drastically from roman to "gothic" (the real name is fraktur) – and it's all just print on a page. Nobody has that much trouble figuring out what words are which & what the sentence or post card or whatever is printed to display.
     My wonder is simply "Do literate persons in India who read Hindi have any difficulty shifting their literacy to Gujarati or Bengali much as literate English speakers move their literacy between sans serif type & fraktur? And what about people literate in any roman alphabet language learning to read a language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet?"

To be sure there is going to be a difference between simple literacy across type designs and literacy across completely different (but of original source) alphabets such as Hindi to Bengali or Gujarati. I say that because type design, at least as what I know of it by way of having a printing & typography background, is not the same kind of cognitive shift as would be necessary between English (roman alphabet) and Bulgarian (Cyrillic alphabet).
     Why?
     Gotta be.
      There is at least a common look to the two alphabets. Even without looking at the characters that are obviously of Greek origin, and discounting for a moment the characters that are also obviously of Semitic origin, the two alphabets have many shapes in common. (And the charts are linked, by the way. Click on 'em to see 'em in a better/fuller size.)
     This is where my question steps in: given the physical similarities between the two alphabets, is the similarity in shape conducive to learning only in this case or does this also apply to alphabets that do not, on first glance ('cause there's some contention on origins) appear related to the Roman or Cyrillic letters?
     And if so, is there an explanation for my having to fight with learning the Bengali alphabet even though I have experience with the Devanagari alphabet? Like here's the Devanagari letter set for consonants:
     Now comparing these to the Bengali consonants, at least to my sight at 61 years of age, the similarities between the Devanagari and Bengali are obvious:
     And given that, why am I having so much trouble learning to read the Bengali characters? Part of it is being an old guy & not some kid learning off a slate under a tree or a thatched roof hut. The kid's disadvantage is a lot less case-hardened than mine. Kids adapt. They learn easy. Old guys don't. We're grumpy and stuck in our ways.
     Stubborn.
     But the stubborn ain't payin' off on the learning of the Bengali script. I may be stubborn but I still wanna learn. You'd think that my being stubborn about learning this would have worked to my advantage. Eh?
     And then there are the di- and trigraphs, the connection and collocation of letter elements that represent in one character a complex collection of sounds. Like the "most common" of these runs ten lines!
     Then, of course, Sanskrit (also done up in Devanagari) has enough di- and trigraphs as it is . . .
At which point the only thing I've done is tell a story of my frustration and the questions that I ask, like anybody else in rehab, as to why this is so damn hard for me.
     Wanna bet that a Brahmin kid in Calcutta who's learned to read Bengali has no trouble at all making sense (sound-wise) of some jumble of Devanagari letters he or she might see on a window or store sign, written in Hindi?
     Betcha.
     Bet it's so easy for the kid that he or she doesn't even notice that the language has changed. Bet they do it all day long the same way Hindu students will sit around talking about how to fix chicken curry and switch back and forth between English and Hindi or Urdu and English without a word being missed or a syllable dropped.
     Betcha.

I am gonna have so much fun doing psych experiments when I retire. Hell, I might even come up with some sort of "addition to the knowledge base" thing that'll make me important for a couple minutes. You never know. Stranger things have happened.

Bush got elected to a second term.
     

Online Book Shopping Side-Effects

It is probably really too much like hoarding, but if that's what it's gonna be, that's me. I confess. I get on jags where I want to find out about something and I spend huge chunks of time chasing stuff down. Back when I was a kid it was the local library, magazines, a monstrous pile of imagination & observation of tedious detail that I never showered on homework or household chores.
     Built a sitar once, I did.
     But nowadays most of my collection (or hoarding, if you must) consists of things. Radios is one. I've got . . . seventeen. Radios. Back in the day I had records too. They went out of style when digital came in but I still have a handful. Original Sargent Pepper's, one of those. Three shelves of their CD equivalents now on the wall, comes to around 150. And yeah, I know, some kids have more than that.
     I just figured out how to rip and burn music to a thumb drive today, dammit.
     But it's the books that come in the highest count. And back before someone upgraded my library file software, I know that there were over 700 books that I had catalogued. Seven hundred that I got catalogued covered everything from The Book of Mormon to two copies of Fulcher & Long's English-Esperanto Dictionary. That and a copy of Plena Vortaro de Esperanto kun Suplemento from Sennacieca Asocio Tutmondo (World Non-nationalist Association) in Paris.

And that was before the InterWeb.

Somewhere around 1990 I bought something online for the first time. Some kind of radio doodad, if memory serves. Shortly after that I bought some books. Then CDs. Then a milspec camera bag, followed ever since by tons of stuff.
     So far I ain't bought any cats online. Good thing too. I already have four inside and something like six or seven outside.
     Books, however, are still another problem.
     Just today I got a copy of W. S. Milne's A Practical Bengali Grammar. It's a reprint of the original 1913 edition, the source of which is not noted. This adds to the copy of Wickremasinghe's Tamil Self-Taught, also a reprint of a 1911 book. Both of these reprints came from Asian Educational Services of New Delhi & Madras, which books are available – along with a bunch of other interesting items from the Indian subcontinent – from Khazana, a store "located in the heart of downtown Minneapolis on Marquette Avenue, between 10th and 11th streets, across the Minneapolis Hilton Hotel."
     Now the problem with this knowledge is its being more dangerous than Amazon.com. Like this is the list of books that I've picked up on in Khazana's present inventory:

• Tisdall's Simplified Grammar of the Gujarati Language of 1930-something, 190pp, $23.00 hardcover.
  
• Greaves' Hindi Grammar, 566pp, $43 hardcover.
  
• Brown's The Grammar of the Telugu Language, 392pp, $37, hardcover.
  
• Fronhmeyer's Progressive Grammar of the Malayalam Language, 322pp, hardcover.
  
• Gundert's A Grammar of the Malayalam Language, 448pp, $30, hardcover.

And then there's these 'ns:

• Peck's Eskimo Grammar, 100pp, $23, hardcover.
  
• Schmidt's Grammatik der Mongolischen Sprache, 180pp, $47, hardcover.

Which wouldn't be so bad 'cept Khazana also carries musical instruments, various statues of Hindu deities, devotional items &c.
     As if I ain't got enough stuff the way it is.
     Now I'd bring this up only for a couple reasons. One of which is what the hell is gonna happen to this stuff when I snuff it.
     I'd like to think it would go on to some better purpose, being as how I will have by then gone on to reintegrate my molecular self with the rest of what's left of this planet by the time I do snuff it.
     All the language books, well, them I give to the university where I work. Special collection: languages & other crap. Politics of experience & all that, religion books, them I ain't too worried about. It's the language books that I worry for. After all, it ain't every university library will be able to claim the ownership of Schmidt's Grammatik der Mongolischen Sprache or Iversen's Norrøn grammatikk. Or a pristine copy the nearly useful but plainly over-simplified Hugo's Hindustani Simplified.
     Not to mention the complete series of Hugo's language manuals themselves, a couple of 'em in duplicates. Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and the very nearly rare Hugo's Dutch Simplified.
     All of that, dictionaries and grammars and the history of various languages, language families &c, all of that is, at least to me, pretty important. Some of it is the only source for knowledge on languages that may some day be as snuffed as I'll be by the time the books end up in the special collections shelves.
     I mean, when's the last time you saw a copy of Schmidt's book on Mongolian?
     In German?
     That's what I mean.

At the same time I bring this up because I'm a firm believer that there must be other idiots like myself out here, hoarding cats and books and radios and CDs full of Puerto Rican salsa. Believing such makes my mentioning of this information and the sources part of a program that makes sense all the way around.
     If there are indeed others like me, I'm leaving a trail of bread crumbs by which others will be able to get their own damn copy of Schmidt's Grammatik der Mongolischen Sprache. In the original German. Printed in Madras or New Delhi.
     Among other afflictions.
     At the same time, if you're wondering how much space this takes up in my vast estate on the pampas of the American Midwest, you may be shocked to know that I have all this crap stuffed into a room 12 ft long and 8 ft wide. With a window.
     There are three book cases on the back and side walls. The other wall, covered it with ugly green striped wallpaper, carries the load of heavy-duty bookshelves that also hold half of the radios (the ones that work) and all the books and other accretia that I have yet to find places for.
     Which explains my concern of what happens after I snuff it.
     The average person would think this was a junk room, one of those places you let the kids loose in so they can screw up and screw around without, one might hope, setting the house on fire or otherwise destroying the furniture, carpets, curtains &c. That is, after all, pretty much what it looks like.
     But that ain't what it is, see?
     It's the place I hide out in – not including the garage print shop & the former radio room/radio shack – and dream stuff up or read stuff or come up with weird ideas or – which is probably the whole starting point for this rant – buy stuff online. And see what it is that I can buy later online when I have saved up enough money. Or after I've come down from whatever is the present jag.
     How this fits with language and linguistics is anybody's guess. To be sure, if you came here to read about language & linguistics, the worst case scenario is you've discovered a source for a book in German on the Mongolian language. That or you've discovered that for what you spent on radios you could have bought a real, made-in-India surbahar. Even if you lost the four volume set of Sambamoorthy's South Indian Music you picked up back in the 60s.

Not that I could afford a Sarasvati Vīna anyway.

Of course the other half of this dreamscape is the question of what will become of libraries themselves by the time I do slip free these corporeal bonds. Today you can go to any library and spend more time getting what you want off the screen from which you are likely reading this.
     Books on shelves take up space and resources. Libraries spend tons of loot on keeping the air in the place sufficiently dry or moist or whatever so the paper doesn't dry out and the books go to dust. (Saying that I'm reminded of the scene in the 1950s version of H. G. Wells' Time Machine where the main character runs his hand through a shelf full of books, each book of which collapses into a cloud of dust.) Any more many academic libraries don't even have half their collection in the building. The university where I work has a set-up with other libraries in the area for storage of books in a giant warehouse, from which any library patron can borrow a book from any library in the system.
     If you want it today, you're out of luck.
     "No glot! Come fly-day!"
     I don't expect that situation to change. In fact, I expect warehousing books to become a standard set-up. From that I expect that books will be turned into PDFs or some other easy to manipulate file system so the book can be read off the screen.
     In many ways the printed books that Khazana gets from Asian Educational Services are only one step away from the digital. AES produces books from offset repros of what was originally a book set in type and printed the old-fashioned way: paper against type & ink. Huge copy machines are available in the "First World" that produce books on demand, one at a time or in multi-copy press runs that look all the world like books from "serious" book printers. Most college textbooks are puked out that way, which doesn't explain the exorbitant cost of the books to the students.
     Digitalized books, once thought strange and unmanageable, are getting more common. Some books are presently available that way from Amazon.com. Others show up in Google searches. It's becoming an every-day deal.
     In the end my collection of paper and paste board is going to be worthless anyway. But the thought that somewhere there will be a character left over from an episode of Twilight Zone who enjoys sitting down with a book to quietly read off the page from reflected light, apart from the hum of cooling fans and the flicker of the screen filling the room.

Some people have imaginary friends; I have these books. Best part is: they don't need batteries. Even if I do write about 'em on this screen.
 

The Opening Volley

The concept of language operating in a four dimensional matrix may not be new. It certainly isn't a new way of explaining how language works or how it comes to be what it is in the minds of human speakers. It is very true that modern technology and general wide-spread literacy makes us think that language is what's in the newspapers and magazines and books. However, that is wrong.
     Language is and always has been the noises that come out of our mouths. Even back when the Sumerians first started recording their language on clay tablets, some ten thousand years ago, language was sound. Fortunately modern humans have been able to decipher the codes of the Sumerian writing system and through that and the continued Sumerian writings over time have come to see how the Sumerian language developed & became more powerful.
     But language is and always has been the noises that come out of our mouths.
     Language is also the sound that goes in our ears and it is at that point that the true mystery of language begins.
     While it is true that millions of neurons and millions of muscle fibers are involved in making any language sound come out of our mouths, it is the way that language as sound becomes thought in the mind of the listener that is most mysterious.
     We know that there are four sections in the brain that seem to be tied to language comprehension. These sections of the brain are part of the production of speech and in understanding what we hear. The process by which noises in the environment become thoughts is really unknown. It involves neurons, yes, and it involves neurons that are not common property to other animals, particularly animals outside of the primate group. In this we are lucky to have living examples of our evolutionary forebears available to humans to see how this all works. And it's obvious from the research that human language and the vocalizations of primates are connected and connectable.
     But the so-called "lower primates" that end up in research institutes and testing cages are proof of the singular audio nature of language. We have in the recent past taught chimps to use keyboards with symbols to communicate their desires or to answer our questions, but once away from those keyboards, chimps vocalize. We humans built the keyboards; the chimps have just learned the trick of using them and they have learned that trick only recently.
     Chimps & other primates show us that language is simply a bunch of noises, controlled food barks, warning calls and other auditory markers that have been part of the evolution of life on this planet since the first audio receptors showed up in the dawn of life on this planet over 650 million years ago.
     Humans have been barking, grunting, making political speeches and preaching from the pulpit for barely a tenth of that time. Since those early barks, we have developed a wide variety of language skills and learned the power of language as a tool to direct social and intellectual growth, change and decay. We have figured out how to sell each other and how to sell each other things we may not really need. We have figured out how to make people kill, how to make people sit down and talk and how to make people think that they have imaginary friends who will protect them from imaginary evils. We are so sure of ourselves because of language that some even think that there are others like us – gibbering away – across the galaxy and throughout the universe.
     We have confused language for literacy and have decided through language that we are the pinnacles of creation. We have learned a lot about using language.

The facts are contrary.

We are highly intelligent animals with reflective consciousness and a huge capacity for inferred knowledge and memory. At the same time we are monstrously powerful animals with a mean streak that runs so deep that we have forgotten that we are just animals.
     Within that construct exists the language artifact. It is an artifact because it is a symbolic tool that clearly defines our species. We know of no other animal with our communications skills and we know that because our communications skills have isolated us from the rest of the animals.
     Language as an artifact exists as a matrix of four dimensions. The three most easily visible are sound as individual phonemes, sound as units of meaning or morphemes and the collection of morphemes into structures that communicate meaning & action. The fourth dimension is time.
     Languages change over time by changing the operation of the three physical dimensions. The sound systems of languages change and with those changes come changes in morphology, which leads to changes in syntax – in the way sentences are formed and words are collected into meaningful utterances – which change the languages themselves.
     Thinking of language as an artifact similar to a stone tool or a straight razor or a laser surgical instrument recognizes the simple fact that language has become our most fluid and most easily mistaken tool. Recognizing that the passing of time changes language just as it changed the stone blade on its way to becoming a surgical instrument requires that we recognize the way that language extends through time in the same way that DNA extends through time in the record of life and the evolution of life on this planet.
     Such a cognitive leap is necessary in order to understand just what we have been doing for the past six million years as animals traveling through time while language developed within us and changed the world around us. Once we take that cognitive leap we will recognize that this is our last evolutionary step.
     Genetics and natural selection have brought us to this point in time as animals on a small planet in the middle of nowhere special. Language has brought us to this point as conscious, thinking animals who are just now coming to grips with the simple truth of existence. That truth demands that we face the ultimate challenge: we are here because, at some point in the dim past, someone avoided being lunch. Being able to think that and to recognize that demands that we see an overarching, ultimate fact.
     We are here because the goal of life is to keep the DNA around. Now the DNA has a voice and we are it. We can go no further. We have out-evolved our place in the physical world and it is only language that keeps us around.
     If tomorrow we were to suddenly fall mute, all of our grand ideas and thoughts, our music and literature and science and philosophy and our superstitious belief in divine beings would disappear like dust in the wind. We would return to being the animals we always have been. But without language, we would never again understand how the stone tool became the surgical instrument.

Then even the stone tool would be useless.