Don't Bank On Kind Robots

There are so many reasons why I hate automatic answering services. Unless I am leaving a message, I don’t like hearing machinery when I’m trying to call a person. I’m not calling to check my balance, I would use a computer for that. I’m calling because I want a person. So why is it you are doing everything possible to keep me from a human interaction?

Automatic answering services are evil. Their entire goal is to lead you around in circles and pretend to not understand everything. They often ask you to “speak your responses,” which I refuse to do because I know how successful that always is. So how does this nefarious machine react? By “pretending” to hear things that it cannot understand - that’s right, it picks up the background noises and after 2 seconds says, “I’m sorry! I could not understand you! Please try again!” (Yes, there must have been a scripting error in the programming that makes every utterance an exclamation.)

Sometimes I just try cursing at the machine, barely coherent to even myself, because my own message just gets lost in the explicit relief I get from shouting and slewing profanity after profanity, using each curse word in every grammatical form I can think of. You’d think they would have programmed these machines to notice angry voices, frustration and endless profanities and just give in and connect you. But no, the machines don’t care.

The other malicious game they play with you is the dead-end game which disguises itself as an endless circle of machinery offering you services you don’t want, need, or give a flying fuck about, so you chose whatever is the closest thing and 10 options later you notice that you are actually back to the main menu, and no matter how many times you go through all of the possible menu combinations, attempting to navigate the spiderweb of options hoping that there is a mortal voice on the other end, you realize that this labyrinth is nothing but a death spiral that only leads you further into despondency.

Luckily, there is an app for that. No, not for despondency - at least, not yet - but for getting humans on the phone. Us earthlings can’t get through to the other earthlings, but we can use our machines to get through their machines and possibly get the help we need. GetHuman offers advice for dialing, and they have their own app for droids and iPhones, which commands you what to type at each prompt in order to get a human. The alternative is Talk To A Human, but it will cost you €0.91 or $1.25, and I don’t pay for apps.

Etymological argumentation

I like it when language enthusiasts try to use etymology as an argument. Especially in the English language. Let’s face it: English is a smörgåsbord of languages, and I’m not just talking about all the borrowed words for medical terms (e.g. angina, from Latin from Greek), anatomy (e.g. pectoris, from Middle English from Latin) and animals (e.g. giraffe, from romance languages from Arabic). No, it is more than just taking various words and fitting them to our syntax. It is more than taking a word from another language and misusing it. (A ménage à toi is not what your frat guy buddy pretended to have with the two drunk girls in his room (or at least, not in French).)

English is not the tossed salad of languages. It is the melting pot. We throw things in and, pretty soon, they are no longer recognizable or distinguishable. We take bits from one language, then rules from another. For example, the word Octopus. Now, the correct plural (according to most dictionaries) is octopuses. But we all like to say octopi, don’t we? Of course we do! The Latin plural suffix –i is just irresistible to us. Plural of cactus? Cacti! Focus? Foci! Hippopotamus? Hippopotami! Jesus? Jesi! Penis? Peni!

Ok, so I am getting carried away. But it is easy to do! However, there actually is (or at least, was, at some point) a rhyme and reason to all of this. The –i plural suffix comes from Latin, and is therefore often used with latin-based words, such as cactus and focus. Hippopotamus is a bit trickier, because it comes to us from Latin from Greek. So, since Latin pluralizes –us¬ words to –i¬, we have our choice of hippopotami or hippopotamuses. But octopus comes directly from Greek, so applying the Latin –i ending is wrong; we should instead apply the Greek plural and make it octopodes. Yes, say it aloud, octopodes. It is even more fun than octopi, isn’t it?

We take Latin endings and throw them on Greek words. We are like the Iron Chef of languages. We work with what we’ve got, and we are proud of what we make with it! So what if it doesn’t make sense. Refried beans aren’t one step past fried beans. To iterate something implies to “utter something repeatedly”, yet after repeated utterings, we can still reiterate it. Though we don’t reconcile after we have conciled, nor do we repeat that which we have peated or recoup that which was previously couped. Flammable is the same thing as inflammable, though opportune is the opposite of inopportune. We sprinkle prefixes around on words like we are adding flavour and flare.

English is a language that went across the world with colonization and the British Navy, and we continue to invade other cultures today via our media, our movies, our books, our television, our internet. Find me someone who has never been exposed to the English-speaking world, not even through badly translated movies, and I will show you a person who is extremely isolated. We permeate, we pervade into other cultures and leave our mark. And in return? We allow other cultures to do the same on our language. We are as confident in the grammatical rules of English as Columbus was with his “shortcut” to India.

We aren’t the Germans, who must maintain order and logic to the extent that they had a Writing Reform in the 1990s, because some words just weren’t logical anymore. (daß shall henceforth be spelled dass, because the ß (sharp S, also spelled ss in websites and emails and such...) only belongs after a long vowel!) This left most people in a state of utter confusion, and people still have difficulties remembering what is the ‘new’ correct way of writing. (But I don’t know anyone who revolted and said, “No way, dass is daß, and that is it!”)

We also aren’t the French, who have their own Academie to make sure that all the words are frenchified enough to fit in. They don’t want anything sounding too much like another language, so even if they do borrow a word (such as cool, which seems to have made it to pretty much every language spoken in the world, somehow, though I am not sure what happened to the other words of that era, like far out, groovy, cat, and jive) they are under constitutional obligation to pronounce it in the heaviest accent that they can muster.

No, we are the English speakers. We might use foreign words to spice up our vocab and make us seem impressive, or we take a word like bourgeois and, because nobody really knows how to pronounce it, and even people who can spell it correctly have to think about it, we shorten it to bougie, which, incidentally, is an actual word for a surgical instrument that nobody cares about because we aren’t all doctors. Yes, we allow all words in, and English speakers are the most likely to mix in dabbles of foreign language when abroad. Our doors are open, people! Drop in a word, or make up your own, because it just might stick! Just one word on a blog or a forum can spread like wildfire and become a meme!

How do Europeans learn so many languages?

I hear it all the time from Americans. "Europeans speaks so many languages!" "The children are all fluent in three languages!""Everyone in Europe speaks English!"

Ok, compared to the United States, these statements are closer to true than to false. But they are still far from the reality.  An often stated fact is that half of Europeans are bilingual, and for starters, we know that statistics are often manipulated to convey what we want. As far as I can tell, this comes from an Associated Press article "U.S.A. Way Behind: half of Europe's Citizens Know 2 Languages" (2009), but I could not find the original article online. However, it states that the most "bilingual" country is Luxemburg, in which 99% of the population is bilingual. While this is true, we should keep in mind that it is a country 2/3rds the size of Rhode Island (less than twice the size of D.C.) with three national languages bordering three different countries. So, yes, it is pretty damn necessary for them to speak something other than just Luxembourgish, a language similar to the neighboring dialects in northern Germany.

Bilingualism or multilingualism can mean many things. It can mean speaking several of the national languages of your country, it can mean speaking the main language and a dialect, or it can mean speaking a language you learned in school. At least, these are the most common situations to which it refers.

For the sake of my argument, I am going to examine learned multilingualism. Not being an exception who had separate languages at school and at home, not someone who had multilingual parents or anything. Just someone who started studying a language in school, for example, a few times a week.  Now, in this case, let's look at some of the factor's allowing Europeans to be more succesfull at multilingualism than Americans.

First of all, it is a continent of dialects. Even though these dialects are dying out and often have a negative stigma to them (much like African American Vernacular English, i.e. Ebonics), they are still relatively prominent in Europe, as are separate languages that are often viewed as dialects. And when someone grows up speaking a dialect alongside a main language, they have a head start in the world of languages, because their brains are fairly used to the concept of having more than one languages, which is a big start.

Second of all, there are small countries with their own languages, such as the scandanavian countries. Being in the north, there are often cheap flights in the winter, and it is green and beautiful in the summer. Europeans flock to these countries in droves, and yet few people bother to learn their languages, because they often opt for languages that are more widely spoken, such as English, German and French. The people in these countries therefor not only need to learn to communicate in the languages of the tourists, but they also (perhaps more importantly) have ample opportunity, because they are constantly practicing with those droves of tourists.

Which brings us to a third factor: Europeans get to practice. They get to fly over to other countries and practice a new language. Weekend trips are often quite common, and round-trip tickets usually range from €20 to €200 ($28-$280), which can make a 3 or 4 day weekend well worth it. You get to immerse yourself in a new culture, albeit shortly, and put all that language learning to use. And when you are not doing that, they might run into these tourists in thier cities in towns, or in their nearby mutual destinations.

And my final factor? Social networking, communication and making friends. Now this is where English comes in quite handy. It is often a lingua franca for backpackers; just look at Couchsurfing. Though you can clearly state your languages (I think 6 is the max, though) as well as the level, the majority of the reviews, profiles and information is in English. This means that if you want to try to stay with someone in another country, chances are, you are going to try to speak English with them. And if you try, you practice. And if you practice, you improve. Same thing goes for those tourists you met and befriended on Facebook in the hopes that when you visited them in their own countries you will be able to crash on their sofas.

I know that I did not mention the educational system as a reason, and it is true that most Europeans start at a younger age. Often it is in middle-school or even grade school that people learn a first foreign language, and then they start a second in high school. However, I have met plenty of people who studied English or German or whatever for 6 years or more, and yet have forgotten everything. Now, if they ever chose to re-learn it, it will be much easier, because we can resurrect that forgotten language  fairly easily when we return to study it. But it takes a lot if work and motivation to study a language on our own after college or even beyond high school, and these languages often remain forgotten in our pasts.

Anyway, this is all speculation and opinion from an American living in Europe, who finds herself speaking other languages far more often than she finds people speaking her own. But I do know that I was disappointed in America by the lack of opportunity to practice a foreign language. Mexico and Quebec were both quite far, and they were accomodating to tourists and so used to accomodating non-spanish or non-french speakers that they would usually simply respond in English.

We can't learn all the languages in the world, but we can learn languages, and the more we learn, the more likely we are to be able to communicate with people who are also multilingual. Though the lack of practice makes it hard, we are on the edge of an internet-era that is going to make it much easier to find new ways to practice and make friends across the world via video chatting. One of these days, America, you, too, will be multilingual.

The New Worldians Amongst the Natives

A language/linguistics blogger recently posted an article on CNN about word play in 2010. According to him, the biggest misuse was that of the term “tea party”. He explains the putative derivation:

[T]he Tea Party claims to take its name from the Boston Tea Party, when a few colonialist men, disguised as Indians, threw British tea into Boston Harbor to protest British taxation without representation in the British Parliament.

No, we are not going to discuss how ridiculous the Tea Party is (from a purely linguistic stance, of course). Here, we are looking at the Indians. Yes, he said "Indians" and not "Native Americans." And does this matter? Yes. At least, it should. It certainly matters if you are Indian (from India), in which case you are wondering, what the hell does that even have to do with my country? Nothing. It was a mixup. We misused a word a few centuries back and it stuck. But to go back to Robert Beard's article, he ends it with the following comment,referring mostly to the Tea Party:

Playing with new words in any year does no damage to the English language. It is often another way humor is created with and from language -- and it goes away soon enough.

Misusing the words we have, however, does cause problems, because it leads to confusion in communication, if not offense to those who try to use language clearly, precisely and appealingly. And that's not a fun word game at all.

Despite his "misuse" of the word Indian, which now only seems to cause confusion in America when you are actually trying to refer to someone from India, because the term is so widespread, he responded to criticism with the following: 

I am not concerned since I have mentioned before the futility of hoping that by changing the name of something, we will cure all problems associated with it.

Now, the problem here is not an inane attempt to 'fix' all things wrong with the nomenclature of the present-day minority of people who were once the only human inhabitants of this continent. It is the fact that Indian usually responds to a native of that country across the globe. You know, the one called India? Oh, wait, I said native. Mr. Misuse has already tackled that word:

The word native is based on the Latin past participle natus “born” and refers to where someone is born. A native American is someone who was born in America, nothing more.

However, I used it as a noun with a preposition, since it was a country. I would not hesistate to say a native New Yorker, referring to the city, but I do not say that I am a native American or that my friend’s are native Germans, Indians usually to not say that they are native Indians. They are just Indians. Let’s look at the etymology of this: Oh, wait, it comes from India, the country they were born in.

Now, I try my best to be relaxed and descriptive about the English language, focusing on what the kids actually are saying these days, as opposed to prescriptive and telling people what they should say. But do we really need to refer to the descendents of the indigenous tribes of the Americas as Indians? He argues against the word native based on etymology, but where is his etymological defence for the use of the word Indian? I mean, this is a word that came up when colonists thought they were in India, but then they figured out that they weren't. Yet we carried a word born from this misconception on throughout the generations and continue to use it today, even though we know that they were indeed not in India, they were in the New World. So, I don’t care if it is Native Americans or Aboriginals or New Worldians, I really think we could do without two groups of people on opposite ends of the planet with different cultures, continents, languages and customs, both being called Indians because one group comes from the country and we briefly thought for a couple weeks +500 years ago that the other did, too. And I am willing to give them the title as 'native', because it doesn't mean much to me. They can have it. I will swear off ever describing myself as a Native American, though I will not deny I am a native to America. 

And if a boat full of confused German travelers crashes on the shore of New Zealand and they think they are in America, I should hope that 500 years from now, they are not referring to New Zealanders as Americans in Germany.

Because that is more than misuse. That is taking a word hostage and forcing it to do another word's job against it's will. That is word expropriation. And we already saw how terrible a misuse of the word can be:

Misusing the words we have, however, does cause problems, because it leads to confusion in communication, if not offense to those who try to use language clearly, precisely and appealingly. And that's not a fun word game at all.

Funny how he can say that but not see how the word Indian could lead to confusion and define himself as a Native American because he was born in North Carolina.

German Gender Problems and Solutions

It is well known that German is a language that seems to enjoy being difficult for the sake of being difficult. (We are all familiar with Mark Twain's famous ranting on "The Awful German Language".) Even the germanic neophyte knows that German has three genders for nouns: masculine (der), feminine (die) and neutral (das). A german spoon is masculine (der Löffel), a german fork is feminine (die Gabel), and a german knife is neutral (das Messer). However, as we have the distinction between I and me, she and her, he and him (not to mention the much neglected who and whom), German applies this declination to its nouns, creating 4 variations for the 3 genders, plus another for the plural. That means that there are 16 possible variations for the word "the", though there are only 6 words that are used for these 16 variations. "Der" can be masculine nominative, feminine dative or genitive, or plural dative or genitive, meaning it is much overworked as an article, but effectively upping one's chances of getting it right. (The full list of possibilities would be der, die, das, den, dem, and des).

So when one is learning German, how do you get around such complications? The answer is simple: Denglish. Denglish is the mixture of German and English, much like spanglish is the mixture of Spanish and English. These language combinations exist in many languages, and it makes it easier to sprinkle words of one language into the syntax of another. I love Denglish. If I am looking for my I.D., I can exclaim, "Where is my damn Ausweis?" It doesn't matter if it is mein verdammter Ausweis, meine verdammte Ausweis, or mein verdammtes Ausweis, because it is just a fucking Ausweis. No gender. No declination.

God bless English and its lack of gender.

(Bonus: For those of you learning German, it is actually "mein verdammter Ausweis", but only when it is existing in its nominative form, like when I am wondering where mein verdammter Ausweis is. When I am looking for it, it becomes accusative and is thus "meinen verdammten Ausweis",  but if I am seeking it, it becomes dative, and is thus "meinem verdammten Ausweis".)