Choosing a Language

"I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat."
-- Winston Churchill

Most American children do not study a second language until high school, if then. (*) This means that they are capable of making a rational choice -- younger children are likely either to choose on a whim or to be influenced by external factors (typically parents).

Suppose you are interested in learning another language (or you are required to do so). Assuming you have a choice of languages, how should you choose which one to study? The most common argument you will hear is that you should choose a language which many other people speak, since you are more likely to have occasion to use it. This is certainly a valid factor to consider, but it is far from being the only one. Here are some others:

Literature. Spanish may be the most frequently spoken language in the US besides English, but Latin, Greek, French, German, Russian, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and many other languages have significant bodies of poetry, drama, fiction, and philosophy.

Science. English is the most commonly used language in science these days, but much important work is and has been done in other languages, especially German and Russian, in areas such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, linguistics, psychology, and medicine.

Music. Italian is the universal language of music, but French and German are also common in vocal music.

International relations. If you plan a career in government, business, or the military, it may be useful to learn the languages of major geopolitical powers or hot spots -- Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, etc.

Savoir-faire. Impress your date by taking her to a fancy restaurant and conversing with the maître d'hotel and the sommelier in French as you order hors d'oeuvres. Provide literal translations of the dishes on a Chinese menu. Discuss the finer points of Italian opera, quoting liberally from the libretto.

Heritage. Are your grandparents Irish, Ibo, Inuit? Maybe you would like to talk to them in their native language and help keep their history and oral traditions alive, or visit the ancestral country, or read the sacred texts of their religion.

Ease of learning. Rigorous statistics on this subject are hard to find. Spanish has a reputation for being easy, but that is mainly due to its phonetic spelling. French and German have more common vocabulary with English. Non-Indo-European languages such as Arabic or Swahili are much more difficult for an English speaker to learn. Non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese and Japanese are very difficult to learn to read and write.

Here are some observations by language teachers:
Which Language? French, German, Spanish, or Latin?
FAQ: Which Foreign Language?

Aesthetics. Some languages just sound nicer than others. Opinions vary, of course, but it seems to me that languages with many liquid sounds (Spanish, French, Italian, Polynesian) are more mellifluous than languages with many stops and harsh gutturals (German, Czech, Hebrew, Russian), and more musical than languages where pitch is semantically significant (Chinese). Some alphabets are visually fascinating (Georgian, Phags-pa, Kannada, Lontara, and of course Glagolitic).

Above all, unless you have an immediately practical reason to do otherwise, you should choose a language that appeals to you -- then you'll be motivated to study and practice more.

* According to a 1995 report by the Center for Applied Linguistics, only about 6% of primary-school students study any foreign language, and 39% of high-school students. A recent survey indicates that the number of public elementary schools teaching foreign languages actually declined from 1997 to 2008, to 15%.

Transparent Taxes

One of the problems with our form of representative democracy is that nearly all of the citizens are effectively disenfranchised at least some of the time.  When the Republicans control the government, Democrats feel that they are not being represented, and vice versa.  Even citizens belonging to the majority party do not necessarily agree with all of their party's platform.  As Lincoln might have said, "You can represent some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't represent all of the people all of the time."

The problem is exacerbated when citizens are forced to pay taxes to support programs to which they are opposed.  I may be a pacifist, but my taxes pay for the military.  I may oppose welfare, but my taxes pay for it anyway.  I can urge my representatives to vote against funding programs I dislike, but if I'm in the minority among constituents in my district, they may not act on my wishes, and if they're in the minority in Congress, they may not be able to eliminate programs anyway.  Even if they do, the people who support those programs are not having their wishes represented.

Is there any solution to this problem?  Ideally, since government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, I and all those who agree with me on every issue could form our own government.  In the real world, this has a tendency not to work out very well, as evidenced by the plenitude of civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and "freedom fighters".

I do have ideas about how to make government more representative, but I'll save those for another post.  For now, I have a more modest proposal.  Why not let citizens specify what their taxes should be used for?  We have a very limited form of this now, namely the Presidential Campaign fund, to which I can elect to contribute $1.  

The tax return could instead list a variety of programs, with a box next to each into which I can write the amount of my taxes I wish to contribute to that program.  Thus, if I am concerned about the environment and food safety, I can split my taxes among the EPA, FDA, and USDA.  If I dislike farm subsidies or foreign aid, I can allocate my taxes elsewhere.  If I don't care, I can leave all the items blank and let Congress decide how to spend my taxes.

Corporations likewise could allocate their corporate taxes to programs of concern to them.  If companies are having a hard time finding skilled workers, they can allocate their taxes to education or job training.  If they're concerned about intellectual property protection, they can support the patent office.

What about unglamorous but essential government functions such as dredging shipping channels, running prisons, servicing the national debt, monitoring television broadcasts to make sure no children are traumatized by the sight of a female breast, and paying congressional salaries?  Well, perhaps we find some of them are not so essential after all.  In other cases, perhaps the agencies concerned need to do a better job of educating the public -- in essence, advertising their services.  And Congress would still set tax rates.  If absolutely necessary, they could limit you to only being able to allocate, say, 90% of your taxes, the rest to be spent at Congress's discretion.

Besides making us feel a little better about paying our taxes, this would also serve as a much more accurate gauge of what citizens think our government should be doing.  Which is what government is supposed to be all about, right?

Magic and Language

Arthur Clarke once wrote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."  So, for example, if you could travel in time and show a computer to a man from the Middle Ages, it would surely seem magical to him.

In fact, though we don't like to call it magic these days, to most of us a computer is essentially magic, in the sense that it operates by mysterious principles which we don't understand.*  You could extend the analogy farther by remarking how often the computer must be placated, pleaded with, even prayed to, so as to avoid as far as possible its unpredictable and sometimes malicious quirks.

But information technology, to use the current lifeless cognomen, has been around for much longer than computers, longer than adding machines and abaci.  I would argue that it began with the invention of writing, some 6000 years ago, which made it possible to transfer information across arbitrary distances in space and time.

To the illiterate, this was obviously magic.  How could a person learn of an ancient or faraway event from mere marks on stone, clay, wood, or papyrus?  There must be some supernatural power at work, either in the scribe or in the marks, or both.  Perhaps something of this feeling animates those who inscribe their names and doings on convenient walls, from ancient dynasts to modern graffiti artists.

Words, whether written or spoken, are at the heart of magic -- think of a wizard casting a spell, which derives from a Germanic word meaning "talk".  Glamour originally meant "a magic spell" and derives from grammar, which comes from the Greek grapho, "write".  If we stretch the definition of technology to include language itself (after all, language is certainly an acquired skill, or techne in Greek), this follows directly from Clarke's observation.

And it seems to me that there is something magical in language.  Think how radically words can alter human behavior -- a shout of "Fire!" in a crowded theater, a verdict of "Guilty", a declaration of love or war.  How can marks on a page, or pixels on a screen, or vibrations in the air, influence human actions?  Through the human mind, of course, and since no one understands how the mind works, it must be magic!

* Partly this is the result of abstraction. When I am writing a blog post, I am not concerned with the tiny voltage differences across billions of minuscule transistors which form the most basic level of the computer I am using, nor the CPU registers and microcode at a higher level, nor the event handlers and bitmap display software at a still higher level. All of that may as well be magic to me. If there were tiny imps and homunculi inside the computer case interpreting my keystrokes and painting pixels on the screen, it would work just the same as far as I am concerned.

"Glagolitsa"

"Glagolitsa" is the name of an old Slavic alphabet used from the 9th century onwards in the Balkans, said to have been invented by Saints Cyril and Methodius.  The name comes from the Old Slavic glagolati "to speak", hence poetically "the marks that speak".  

I thought that was a very appropriate name for a blog intended to discuss words, etymology, and language, among other subjects.  Also, it looks really cool!  The image to the left (from this fascinating article) is from the Missal of Hrvoje, written in 1404.

I encountered the alphabet in a roundabout way, thanks to Janáček's Glagolitic Mass -- of course, the music doesn't directly involve the alphabet, though it is sung in Old Church Slavonic.