[Repost] Social Media Has Ruined Grammar (And Other Elementary School Skills You No Longer Need) (by Andrea Greb)

Social Media Has Ruined Grammar (And Other Elementary School Skills You No Longer Need)

So in news that makes me embarrassed to be both an English speaker and a Twitter user, adorable Brazilian schoolchildren are correcting the grammar in celebrity tweets as a way of improving their own English skills. Also, they’re ridiculously polite when they do this. Celebrities, please take note and learn both grammar and manners.

While this is an awesome exercise in both learning about punctuation and proofreading for these students, it also raises some questions – if you can be a multimillionaire with no demonstrated command of the English language, are there other skills we’re being taught in elementary school that have been rendered obsolete by the digital age?

Spelling

So I’m going to date myself by saying this (I’m old, guys), but in my youth, word processing software didn’t have spellcheck. If you didn’t know how to spell a word, you had to look it up in the dictionary, which is this giant book (a predecessor to dictionary.com) that listed all of the words. I have gleaned from my friends who are teachers that spelling tests are still a thing, and I know spelling bees are alive and well, but there’s something about the fact that kids can just spellcheck their papers now instead of having to proofread for actual typos. How long before they’re just dictating their essays to Siri?

Cursive

On the subject of writing, how relevant is penmanship anymore? I have fond memories of that paper that had lines like a traffic light so you knew where to start and end your letters, and less fond memories of the hand cramps that followed writing an entire essay test in cursive. I was relieved to learn that apparently most students are still learning cursive, presumably mostly so that they can establish a signature that will devolve into an illegible scrawl. When more and more of our communication is just taking place on a screen and not even on paper, should we be learning cursive at all, or would time spent learning that be better used catching our math and science skills up to the rest of the world?

Arithmetic

Then again, who needs math skills when we’re all carrying around phones that function perfectly well as calculators? I recently learned that a friend who’s my age (an age I promise isn’t 50) used to take an actual abacus to school. I was actually impressed, and a little jealous that he knows how to use an abacus. I can barely remember where my calculator is, and heaven help me if I ever have to actually use it. 97% of the math I do is done in Excel, and the other 3% is calculating tips, which I do in my head, but I’m pretty sure there’s an app for that.

Telling time

I have a friend who actually cannot tell time using a regular clock – she had the chicken pox when it was covered in school, cheated on the test, and subsequently never learned. It seems like most clocks are digital these days; is there really value anymore in learning all this hour hand and minute hand nonsense? Do people even wear watches to tell time anymore, or do kids just think they’re fun fashion accessories with numbers on them?

Making friends

One of the most important lessons of elementary school was learning how to interact with other kids – not fighting over toys, forming friendships based on your shared love of Anastasia Krupnik books, realizing that boys have cooties. Here’s the thing, though. Talking to other kids is hard, and scary. So we can just skip that bit and be friends with people on the internet, based on some selfies and perceived shared interests.

Basically, what I’m suggesting is that we overhaul our whole elementary education system and focus on the skills these kids are going to need to be successful: Instagram, Tumblr, and a willingness to humiliate themselves on reality television in exchange for money. (Relax, Millenial-fearers, I’m kidding). The point of technology isn’t to avoid using our brains, it’s just a shortcut to be used after we’ve learned the real skills behind it, so we can spend our time doing really important things like protesting t-shirts that are maybe mean to Taylor Swift. That said, I do remember when things like “computers” and “typing” were elective classes, and not essential skills required to succeed, so I am curious to see what elementary school will look like by the time I have kids.

Featured image via

Cf. original: http://hellogiggles.com/social-media-has-ruined-grammar-and-other-elementary-school-skills-you-no-longer-need

ANDREA GREB view all posts by Andrea

Andrea Greb has spent nearly a decade trying to figure out if she’s a Carrie or a Miranda. She daylights as a rocket scientist and pursues her secret passion of writing in her spare time. She enjoys running, baking and hanging out with Blair (her cat, not the Gossip Girl character, though she thinks she would enjoy the latter were she not fictional).

[Repost] Of Cabbages and Kings: five ways to talk about translation (on Oxford Dictionaries)

Of Cabbages and Kings: five ways to talk about translation

King Alfred

Translation has been a crucial part of Anglophone culture from its very beginnings. The earliest English writers knew that the state of learning in England, with knowledge of Latin far from universal, meant a need for translations. Everything necessary for a rounded education was written in Latin, and so King Alfred the Great introduced a programme of translating “certain books, which are most needful for all men to know, into that language that we all can understand”. Alfred’s list of necessary books was very specific, and encompassed classics of theology and philosophy, rather than the Greek and Roman classics which were to torture school boys nearly a millennium later. These poor beleaguered boys, struggling with their Homer and Virgil, would often use a crib, a translation that provided them with illegitimate help in their studies. This might also be called a cabbage in the school slang of the nineteenth century; nobody’s sure where the term comes from, though it might be that the strips of paper looked like strips of cloth which tailors rolled up into shapes resembling cabbages (etymologies can be a bit labyrinthine at times!).

Like most linguistic concepts, translation has been described using a wide range of words. Here are some notes on five of my favourites.

Translate

Let’s start with the basics! The verb translate goes back to at least the early thirteen hundreds, when the author of the religious poem Cursor Mundi tells his readers that:

Þis ilk bok es translate into Inglis tong

to rede for the love of Inglis lede,

(This book is translated into the English language as advice, for the love of the English people.)

Translation was an important art in the medieval period, perhaps even more so than in King Alfred’s day, since the people of England now had to deal with both Latin and Norman French as commonly-used languages as well as the English vernacular. The verb comes from the Latin translatus, the past participle of transferre, meaning “to transfer”, hence the use of translate to refer to physical transferral. It‘s often used to describe the moving of a saint’s remains to a new resting place.

Paraphrase

The mythic first poem in English, Caedmon’s Hymn, was a paraphrase. Legend has it that Caedmon, a simple cowherd in the monastery at Whitby, was visited by an angel who inspired him to compose poems on scriptural themes. The Latin scripture would be read to him, and he would produce beautiful paraphrases in the intricate Old English verse form. The verbparaphrase, however, comes a long time after Caedmon: the Oxford English Dictionary’s first evidence is from 1593 (the noun is attested a little earlier). It comes, via French and Latin, from a Greek root: para (“alongside”) and phrasis (“diction, speech”). So, whereas to translate is to transfer from one language to the other, to paraphrase is to speak in the new language alongside the original.

Englify

The delightful verb Englify was first used, according to the OED’s evidence, in 1688, when the writer Randle Holme referred to “a Welsh name Englified”. It is one of a set of words describing translation into English. Englishizeappears around a hundred years later, not long after anglicize was first used in this sense (in 1711 according to current research), whereas the simple verb English is the earliest of the trio, first appearing in the Wycliffite translation of the Bible in the 1400s: “I Englishe it thus”, the translator tells us. Other language names have been used in the same way: in 1868, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that “We clothe the nude word by Frenching it”, andFrenchize has also been used for translation into French.

Traduce

Coming from the Latin traducere, meaning “to bring across” or “to transfer”,traduce was used to mean “translate” from at least the fifteen hundreds, and was still in use when Charles Kingsley wrote his novel Alton Locke in 1850: the title character will be allowed no more books to read “If ye canna traduce to me a page o’ Virgil”, so the Scotsman Sandy Mackaye threatens him. The verb is related to words for “translation” in a number of Romance languages: French traduction and Italian traduzzione, for example. The more common sense of traduce now is to slander or disgrace a person. It seems a bit of a leap from “transfer” to “slander”, but the classical Latin traducere could also mean “to lead along (as a spectacle)”, as one might do to a criminal, and in later Latin it carried the sense “to lead astray”, “to corrupt”, and “to blame”. It’s a verb of many talents, and it seems quite fitting that a word for translation should itself have such a variety of possible translations.

Wend

This is my favourite translation verb, and the oldest of our five. Indeed, this meaning of the word seems to have died out in the twelve hundreds, remembered now only by students of Old English who read King Alfred’s accounts of his efforts at translation: “Ða ongan ic..ða boc wendan on Englisc”; “Then I began to translate that book into English”. The range of meanings that wend had even in those days tells us something about how the Anglo-Saxons thought about translation. It could mean altering your course, changing your mind, travelling, or taking the final journey of death. Translation was a slippery thing, and it could fatally change the meaning of the original text unless great care was taken by a skilful translator.

These are just a few of the many verbs that are or have been used for translation; there was no space to talk about convert, render, interpret, orthrow, to name just a few. Dub also lost out in my list of five, though it has the neatest etymology, being a simple shortening of the word double. So there is still plenty to explore in the world of translation; but, for now, I shall wend my way.

Cf. original: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/10/five-ways-to-talk-about-translation/#.U117FOTRzCU.twitter (previously shared by TransGALAtor)

[Repost] Multilinguals Have Multiple Personalities (by Alice Robb)

LANGUAGE – APRIL 23, 2014

Multilinguals Have Multiple Personalities

by ALICE ROBB @AliceLRobb

Cf. original: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117485/multilinguals-have-multiple-personalities

In an essay published on Monday, New Republic Senior Editor Noam Scheiber—who grew up speaking both Hebrew and English—explains why he stopped speaking only Hebrew to his three-year-old daughter. “My Hebrew self turns out to be much colder, more earnest, and, let’s face it, less articulate,” he writes. “In English, my natural sensibility is patient and understated. My style in Hebrew was hectoring and prosecutorial.”

I understand the feeling. My not-so-fluent French “self” is most comfortable talking about classroom supplies. It’s surprising, though, that people who are actually fluent in two languages also feel their personality shifting as they switch between languages. Yet researchers have confirmed this: Between 2001 and 2003, linguists Jean-Marc Dewaele and Aneta Pavlenko asked over a thousand bilinguals whether they “feel like a different person” when they speak different langauges. Nearly two-thirds said they did.

How does that play out in day-to-day speech? In 1964, Susan Ervin, a sociolinguist at the University of California, Berkeley, set out to explore the differences in how bilinguals represent the same stories in different languages. She recruited 64 French adults who lived in the U.S. and were fluent in both French and English. On average, they had spent 12 years living in the U.S.; 40 were married to an American. On two separate occasions, six weeks apart, Ervin gave them the “Thematic Apperception Test”: She showed her subjects a series of illustrations and asked them to make up a three-minute story to accompany each scene. In one session, the volunteer and experimenter spoke only French, while the other session was conducted entirely in English.

Image from the Thematic Apperception Test

Ervin then analyzed the stories, looking at the different themes incorporated into the narratives. When she compared the two sets of stories, she identified some significant topical differences. The English stories more often featured female achievement, physical aggression, verbal aggression toward parents, and attempts to escape blame, while the French stories were more likely to include domination by elders, guilt, and verbal aggression toward peers.

In 1968, Ervin—by this point, “Ervin-Tripp”—designed another experiment to further explore her hypothesis that the content of bilinguals’ speech would change along with the language. This time, Ervin-Tripp looked at Japanese women living in the San Francisco area, most of whom were married to American men and many of whom had American children. Most of the women were largely isolated from other Japanese in America, and spoke Japanese only while visiting Japan or talking to their bilingual friends. Ervin-Tripp had a bilingual interviewer give the women various verbal tasks in both Japanese and in English, and found—as she expected—important differences.

For instance, when the women were asked to complete the following sentences, their answers differed depending on the language in which the questions was asked:

Scholars have also used more qualitative methods to try to understand language’s impact on personality. In 1998, Michele Koven, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spent a year and a half carrying out ethnographic research with bilingual Parisian adults whose parents had immigrated from Portugal. All of her subjects were fluent in both French and Portuguese, and most maintained close ties to Portugal while living in France; many planned on returning eventually, though most also had monolingual French friends. Koven focused specifically on how her subjects represented themselves in narratives of personal experience, which she elicited by asking them to recount various life events in both languages. When Koven transcribed and analyzed the content of their accounts, she saw that her subjects emphasized different traits in their characters, depending on which language they were speaking. For instance, the women in the French stories were more likely to stand up for themselves, whereas the female characters in the Portuguese narratives tended to cede to others’ demands. And their own personas changed, too. One girl, Koven writes, sounded like “an angry, hip suburbanite” when she spoke French, and a “frustrated, but patient, well-mannered bank customer who does not want attention drawn to the fact that she is an émigré” when she spoke Portuguese. Whether that’s due to the different context in which she learned French and Portuguese, an inherent difference between the two languages, or some combination, researchers have yet to figure out.

Image via Shutterstock

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