All right I think I scared many readers away with my bulky post about synesthesia. So here's a shorter, sweeter post.

Somehow I managed to do well on my papers despite my really not being in the mood to write them when I had to write them.

I had a wonderful dream with a great linguistics question I had in mind, which I then forgot. If it comes back to me, I'll be sure to post it.

Hope you all have been having nice holidays.

Synesthesia and Language

Hi folks.

I finally handed in the two papers I had to do. Next semester I am thinking of signing up for Men, Women & Language, although I doubt there will be space left. I get last dibs as a visiting student, so usually full-timers take up all the spaces.

I heard that Georgetown and Gallaudet are consortium schools, along with some other schools in the area. I would love to take an ASL Phonology course or something at Gallaudet. Both of my professors were unintentionally very spoken-language-oriented, so it'd be nice to balance it out a bit. Even though one of my textbooks did use sign language examples throughout, my professor didn't mention them in the course. I think the main reason is because most people don't know that much about signed languages to begin with, and so professors don't want to teach what they don't know much about.

Anyway, I also want to learn Tactile ASL (TASL). It's a modified form of ASL used by and for DeafBlind people. It's also cool cause the situations you can use it in are even more varied than ASL. ASL can be used at school assemblies, while SCUBA diving, etc. But with TASL you can also communicate with someone under the covers or at a concert where it's too loud for speech and too dark for signing.

Another thing I wanted to discuss is language and synesthesia. Synesthesia is when the senses cross over in the brain. There are different types, such as grapheme-color (where words or letters evoke certain colors--also the most common), auditory-visual (seeing sounds), gustatory-visual (tasting colors), anthropomorphic (where objects have personalities), etc. There are all kinds of synesthesia. I was interested in wondering how it intersects with language. I know some synesthetes experience tastes from certain sounds, for example /k/ will be bitter and /s/ will be creamy. 

My color-grapheme synesthesia: A is red, E is yellow, O is a creamy white, I is a silvery white, and U is a deep blue. F and N are slightly different shades of green. H is indigo, or sometimes brown if combined with T (TH) or S (SH). Words are colored by their vowels and sometimes the first letter, if the first letter has a color. "Bike" is white bleeding into yellow. "Piano" is silvery white bleeding into red bleeding into creamy white. 

The corresponding sounds also have colors. The /a/ sound in father is tomato red. The /u/ sound in "food" is blue (even though the O's are white.) /m/ sound is blue, /n/ is green. 

And music has its own colors for me. A in writing is red but in music the note A is a fuchsia color. Middle C is white, D is blue, E flat is yolky yellow, natural E is a sunflower color. F is a yellowy green although a major 7 F chord (F, A, C, E) is jade green. F# is a deep forest green. G is red, B is a bluish gray whereas B flat is a slightly yellow-tinted slate gray. D flat is a shimmering light blue. 

So how does this relate to language? Well I was wondering if synesthesia helps to distinguish sounds.  For example, many people get confused because they think of C as a letter, e.g. come and celebrate. However, a synesthete might have different flavors or colors associated with the /k/ in come and the /s/ in celebrate, helping them realize that the C is pronounced differently. 

Also, synesthesia helps me with spelling. Common mistakes like spelling separately seperately and definitely definately makes no sense to me, because I clearly see that A as red and so I know it can't be seperately because that's yellow. And definately looks wrong because there's red in the middle that shouldn't be there--definitely is usually yellow and silvery white. 

I am familiar with lots of alphabets, and all the alphabets I know have some colors, although the strongest colors are in the Latin alphabet and also vowels across alphabets in general. In Farsi, ت (teh) is a cherry red, the Hebrew dalet is a muted yellow green, the Russian Я (ya) is pink, the Braille N is olive green, the Chinese character 覺 is a deep dark blue green. The fingerspelled alphabet in ASL is the same as the corresponding letters in English when I'm fingerspelling a word, but when the same handshape is used in a word, it has a different color. For example, the F handshape is green like in English when fingerspelling something, but the sign JUDGMENT (which is made with the double F handshape) is a shimmering yellow. 

I think my synesthesia helps me keep track of my alphabets and languages. It also helps me know the key of a song when I'm listening to it because I know that if a song is predominately blue I know it's in D. And then if I know that there are notes of green it's D minor but if the green is darker and purer then it's D major. Minor tonality has muted earthy colors, major tonality has brighter colors. And tonalities such as dorian or phrygian have a mix of muted and bright colors.

Do you have synesthesia? Does it help you memorize things? Maybe it helps you in math because various symbols are colored or have flavors? Do your senses get overloaded when your exposed to a lot of stimuli, e.g. at a concert?

I also want to note that synesthesia is often painted as just a benefit, but it's not necessarily. Sometimes my senses are overwhelmed. Sometimes if I see something and the color and letter don't match, I get an unpleasant feeling. Sometimes I'll be listening to music and I see these beautiful colors and then a track comes in with an ugly color and messes it up. When people are too loud or there is too much noise going on, I get overloaded. So just keep in mind that being synesthetic is just another way of being, and it's not a plus or a minus. It just is what it is.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving, folks. :) 

On Tuesday I went with a classmate of mine to my middle school to get some surveys from middle schoolers. We also interviewed one teacher, and she is going to do an Internet interview with another teacher.

The survey was about how often middle schoolers use text messaging and IM shortcuts in everyday conversation and writing, and whether they use it in papers and so on. Does it affect their language? Does it affect their writing?

The teacher we interviewed was convinced that the use of texting/IM shortcuts was leading to the disintegration of students' grammar. This is a very common view--almost every teacher we mentioned the project to mentioned something about how "kids these days don't know grammar."

The main assumption is that if you are not exposed to "proper" grammar only then you will internalize improper grammar. But let's look at where we first learn language. The first people we learn language from is our parents. But how do parents talk to their kids? In full-blown adult language with correct grammar usage?

Mother: Johnny, look at my eyes disappearing behind my hands and reappearing again!

Baby: (cooing noises)

Mother: Look! My hands are disappearing and reappearing!

Now how about this conversation.

Mother: Peek-a-boo!!

Baby: Cooing noises.

Mother: (gasp) Peek-a-boo!!

Somehow we internalize full-blown correct grammar from "peek-a-boo" and "gaga gugu." So do you really think "JK" and "LOL" will lead to the disintegration of grammar?

Another thing to think about is that there are many languages that uniformly use shortcuts. Arabic and Hebrew routinely omit vowels. Grade 2 Braille has 198 shortcuts, some of which are single letters for entire words (H for have and K for knowledge and ,F for Father). And Deaf people have been using shortcuts such as "mtg" (meeting) and "ga to sk" (go ahead to stop keying) for TTY communication for years. And yet their grammar isn't deteriorating. 

Something to think about.

African American Vernacular English

The most over-discussed topic in Linguistics in my opinion is African American Vernacular English (AAVE). So you might be wondering why I'm discussing it now? Because I want to call all you non-linguists* on something.

All this talk about how AAVE is a different language from Standard American English (SAE)? That right there folks, is racist. Okay before you attack me let's back up some.

Different languages are defined by the mutual unintelligibility of two speakers. So the reason Tagalog and Quechua are considered different languages is cause if you put two speakers of Tagalog and Quechua in the same room, they won't know what the other one is saying. Sometimes the difference in languages vs. dialects is political, e.g. Chinese "dialects" versus Romance "languages." They are about as similar and different from each other, but China is one country, and Western Europe is made of all different countries, so all the sudden Cantonese and Mandarin are dialects, yet Spanish and Italian are languages.

Indian English and British English are considered two different dialects of English because they are mutually intelligible and a speaker of IE and BE in the same room would be able to understand each other no problem. Well guess what, two speakers in the same room, one of SAE and the other of AAVE will have no problem communicating. So they're dialects. And plus I have issues with the name AAVE because I know plenty of African American folks that speak SAE and I know plenty of white folks that speak AAVE (I use it myself and I'm white). So why do we have to use race to define dialects?

So since AAVE and SAE obviously meet the criteria for being dialects (mutually intelligible), the reasons they are claimed to be different languages is political. I don't know if others see this but I think trying to claim "that language associated with black people" is different from "that language associated with white people" is racist. To me it sounds like trying to widen the gap between two races.  We really aren't all that different in the end, folks. I have plenty of AAVE-speaking friends (not all of them black or of color) and I have no issues understanding them. And they have no issues understanding me when I speak SAE.

Another thing I would like to mention is that it's not fair to talk about all these different white dialects, and then to make this one group of AAVE, that covers dialects from Dallas, TX to Chicago, IL. There is just as much variety within AAVE dialects as there is within SAE dialects. 

So my end point folks, is that talking about SAE vs. AAVE as different languages is just racism disguised in language.

*As pointed out by my linguistics professor

Language and Gender

So I'm doing a research project with three other classmates on how language affects perceived gender. We've been thinking about linguistic features that come across as more masculine, more feminine, or neutral, etc.

We came up with features such as using the word "like" in many different ways, using the conditional tense, and pronouncing "ing" with a final velar nasal more often than with an alveolar nasal, apologetic vs. empathetic sorry.

So this would play out as something along these lines. The first would be marked as more feminine and the second one as more masculine.
Like
I was like (1), "I don't know, like (2), five bucks?"
(1) Quotative Like (used to introduce a quotation)
(2) Approximant Like (used to mean "approximately")
vs.
I said, "I don't know, maybe five bucks?"

Conditional Tense
Would you like something to eat?
vs.
Do you want something to eat?

"Ing"
We were dancing and singing all night long
vs.
We were dancin' and singin' all night long.


Empathetic vs. Apologetic Sorry
F1: I got into a car accident today so I don't have my car with me.
F2: I'm sorry.
F1: Yeah.
F2: Do you need a ride somewhere?
F1: That'd be great.

vs.

M: I got into a car accident today so I don't have my car with me.
F: I'm sorry.
M: Why are you sorry? It's not your fault.
F: I know I'm just saying.

Are there any other differences you've noticed as trends? Not necessarily what each sex uses but that is associated with masculinity/femininity? So a linguistic feature that when a man uses it sounds normal, when a woman uses it sounds masculine, or a feature that when a woman uses it sounds normal, but when a man uses it sounds feminine.

Can I go to the bathroom?

Did you ever have that annoying teacher that would reply to your question "Can I go to the bathroom?" with "I sure hope so!"?

Enter Pragmatics. That teacher was not taking into account the law of Conversational Implicature (Grice). That's basically a fancy way of saying that there is often an extra meaning to something someone says beyond its semantic (literal) meaning. The semantic meaning of "Can I go to the bathroom?" is "Do I have the ability to go to the bathroom?" But the speaker's meaning is "Permission to go to the bathroom?" The extra part is that the student is asking for permission. People figure out the extra meaning behind an utterance by using the Cooperative Principle, which basically says that you can figure out the speaker's meaning from the semantic meaning by assuming that the speaker is behaving rationally and cooperatively. So when your teacher interprets your asking permission as your asking about your ability to form bodily functions, s/he's not taking into account that you are behaving rationally and cooperatively. You wouldn't randomly ask your teacher if you have the ability to take a shit in the middle of class because you're behaving rationally and cooperatively. So obviously there's an extra meaning behind "Can I go to the bathroom?" and that extra meaning is you're asking permission.

The speaker's meaning depends on the context of use. For example, if you just woke up from a major surgery on your vertebral column, when you ask your surgeon if you can go to the bathroom, you probably mean "Do I still have control over my bowel movements?" But in the classroom context, it's obvious to all your classmates (and should be obvious to your teacher) that you're asking permission to go to the bathroom.

So next time your teacher replies, "I sure hope so!" you can tell them "It's not like I just risked becoming paralyzed, so you just misinterpreted the meaning of that question given the context of use! Not to mention you completely violated the Cooperative Principle!"

Computational Linguistics

My professor wore cat ears today. And she dressed in black and orange and passed out candy.

And the class featured my VoiceOver on my Mac, to show how text-to-speech works (computational linguistics). Little awkward cause she definitely gave me a five-minute introduction.

VoiceOver is a screen reader that comes with Apple that is designed for blind and visually impaired people. I told it to read the following things:

I do not have the cot/caught merger.

I do not have the pen/pin merger.

I read the newspaper every day.

I haven't read the newspaper today.

I read the newspaper yesterday. (which it read as "I reed the...")

Happy Halloween, folks.

Meeting Deborah Tannen

I got to talk to one of my all-time favorite linguists today, Deborah Tannen. I've read her books, watched her movies, and today we went to the same lecture. And she came up to me afterwards and told me she was impressed with my follow-up question. Then we talked for about ten minutes.

The lecture was about the use of Spanish and Nahuatl (Mexicano) and how it establishes Indian identity. One of my questions was how they added the Nahuatl infinitive verb suffix onto Spanish verbs. The examples the lecturer, Jacqueline Messing, gave were:

vivir-oah
Sp. "to live" + Na. verb infinitive suffix

and

ti-sufrir-oah
Na. "we" prefix + Sp. "to suffer" + Na. verb infinitive suffix.

Well I asked why they added the Nahuatl infinitive verb suffix if there was already the Spanish infinitive verb suffix -ir. The Spanish verb roots are viv- and sufr-, and I asked if anyone ever said viv-oah or sufr-oah. No, she said, they always attach the Nahuatl infinitive suffix to the already Spanish infinitive verb.

I guess that's the "the hoi poloi" of Nahuatl.

Today I spent about half an hour after class talking to my Linguistics professor. We were going over syntax in class. The two major syntax categories are head-first languages and head-last languages. Head-first languages put adjectives in front of nouns, prepositions in front of nouns, etc. So a simplified way of thinking about it is whatever is modifying the thing is put in front of the thing.

A red car (and not a car red)
At home (and not home at).

Some languages are head-last in that they use postpositions and modify nouns with an adjective afterwards, etc.

So I asked her if American Sign Language is a head-first or head-last language.
English grammar in general goes Subject + Verb + Object. (shorted to SVO.)
I like candy. subject: I + verb: like + object: candy.
ASL grammar has a topic-comment syntax, which can sort of be analyzed as Object + Verb + Subject (OVS.)

CANDY, LIKE, ME. Topic (Candy: object), comment (verb: LIKE, me: subject). But does that make it a head-first or head-last language? It's hard to say.

In ASL, adjectives tend to come after languages, which makes one think it is a head-last language, but it isn't that clear-cut because adjectives follow nouns in Spanish too, which otherwise has very head-first syntax.

(Just for reference there are other languages that have SOV, for example Farsi.
من پلو دوست دارم man polo dust daram (subject: I object: rice verb: like)
I like rice. )

My linguistics professor didn't know the answer to my question but hopefully someone reading this (Shockwave) will know. Is ASL a head-first or head-last language, generally speaking?

Sociolinguistics Research Project

I am taking a Sociolinguistics course at Georgetown University. We are doing a research project and I handed in my research topic today. I couldn't decide between three topics and this is the topic that won the most votes among my friends (and that my professor admitted to finding the most interesting today):

How does perceived blindness affect language of customer service in a restaurant setting?
1) How does an employee use language get the attention of a blind customer?
a) when the blind customer is alone
b) in a group setting (with sighted people)
2) Does the employee use direct pronouns (you) or indirect pronouns (he, she)?
a) when the blind customer is alone
b) in a group setting (with sighted people).

I will be going around as a blind person. (Having been legally blind for years this will be easy--me being in my element.) Then I will observe how people talk to me.

What do you all think?

Prescriptive vs. Descriptrive

Morning, all! Thanks for the comments!

Some of you mentioned prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, which was the blog post I planned for today. Linguists often talk about descriptive vs. prescriptive grammar. Prescriptive grammar is what most people think of when they hear the word grammar--the grammar your English teacher taught you in grade school. Don't split an infinitive! Don't end a sentence with a preposition! Don't use object pronouns in a compound subject! Descriptive grammar is the grammar people actually use, what we hear on the streets. That is the refreshing part of language, where "right" and "wrong" is defined by what people do instead of what people "should" do. Descriptive grammar doesn't reflect the way people talk. This is proved in the fact that we have to learn it at all. For example:

Which of these sentences sounds wrong to you?

a) I am in love with.
b) I am in love with you.

Most people will say a). Did anyone ever have to teach you that? Did your English teacher have to say, "the expression 'in love' takes an object, in other words you have to be 'in love with someone.'" No. People just say "I am in love with [someone/something]." No one has to be told that.

How about these two sentences? Which sounds wrong to you?
a) It's me.
b) It's I.

Most people will say b). In second grade when someone in class knew the answer and wanted the teacher to call on them, did they say "I! I!" Probably not. Most people would say "Me! Me!" But descriptive grammar tells us that the verb "to be" takes the object pronoun, giving us "It's I." The fact that rules have to be memorized shows how unnatural prescriptive grammar is.

Why is it so unnatural?
A bunch of elitists men in the 1800's had nothing better to do than to come up with rules based on Latin. The problem is that their rules were based on properties of Latin that don't translate to English.

1) Don't split infinitives. Well, in Latin, infinitives are one word, so they can't be split. So applying that to English, which has two-part infinitive makes no sense.
2) Don't end sentences with prepositions. Latin uses cases to convey the same relationships we use prepositions for. So they change the endings of words, making it impossible to end a sentence with a preposition. Other Germanic languages, like German, end sentences with prepositions all the time.
Etc.

In short all those prescriptive grammar rules you learned in English class are based on an attitude from centuries ago where Latin was thought to somehow be an inherently better language than English, and so a bunch of these educated men (who usually studied classic Latin and Greek) made up rules to have English imitate Latin.

Now I am not the extremist type that doesn't recognize these rules are useful for writing or speaking when you need to impress somebody. Most people do have hang ups about phrases such as "where's he at?" so sometimes it is beneficial to say "where is he?". If you're interviewing for a job or writing an article for The New York Times it's probably best not to write/say "Me and him love kayaking." But that is just what those rules are. They are there to please a certain audience and no more! They do not speak to how language really truly should be. Hopefully with time more people will put those rules in their place instead of equating them with some superior form of language.

Now if you're still not convinced, take a look at the blog title. The title refers to the fact that most prescriptivists will tell you that when forming a question that requires an object as an answer, the form "whom" should be used.
Subject
Q: Who is that person in the blue shirt? A: That's my boss.
Object
Q: With whom are you going to the concert? A: I'm going with him.
Most people in natural conversation say: "Who are you going to the concert with?" which implies the answer should be "I'm going with he."
But let's take this for example:
Subject
Q: What is your name? A: My name is Horatio.
Object
Q: With what do you chop wood? A: I chop wood with an ax.
Here, "what" doesn't change form! It stays as "what." And yet prescriptivists say we should change "who" to "whom" in the case of a question that requires an answer in object form. Did there used to be an object form for "what?" There sure did. That is what that weird word in the title is--"hwam." (The wh- words used to be written hw-, so "who" was "hwo" and "whom" was "hwom" and "what" was "hwaet"--and the object form was "hwam.") Now it is easier to see just how arbitrary the prescriptivist rule requiring us to use "whom" is. Does anyone go around saying "with hwam do you chop wood?" So why should we say "with whom did you go to the concert?" Sure you can say it, but is it really all that important in the end?

Only if you're trying to impress a potential employer or your professor.

Language Deterioration Cont.

Well folks, I had originally planned on coming home yesterday and continuing on yesterday's post. But some great news!

I was propositioned to join a professional Latin Jazz band! I was doing a gig on the Mall, a one-time thing with a band I used to play in, and then right afterwards three guys come up to talk to me. One starts talking to me in Portuguese because I sang Samba de uma nota só (One Note Samba) in Portuguese, and then these two guys come up to me to ask me if I want to join their band! And then it turns out they speak Spanish and I speak Spanish so we really hit it off! I spent the day with these two other musicians talking about jazz. One of the guys--I'll call him Renaldo--writes songs too. His brother (I'll call him Ignacio) and him are very tight and so I will be looking forward to being part of the group! We have already started trading song ideas.

Next thing I know it's dinner time and I went with my piano teacher to see some Jazz crooning, Grady Tate. It was great but man was I sleepy with his smooth voice. My piano teacher said he's like a glass of cognac. I've never had cognac (or any alcohol for that matter) but hey, it's pretty cool that I can experience drunkenness without drinking through music. When we drove home she said, "I feel like I'm DUI, driving under the influence!" It was great and it was perfect timing 'cause that was the kind of singing I was thinking for this song I'm writing and needed to hear some good crooning so that I could really feel out the style for my song.

So that is why I didn't come back to finish my post.

You can really start to see how ridiculous the claim of language deterioration is when you read complaints from a long time ago. My linguistics professor once told me she came across an essay about how teachers had started to use "you" instead of "thou" with their students, and if even teachers couldn't choose the correct pronoun, what about the students, and if teachers were making such a huge linguistic blunder, what was education coming to? But nowadays we don't even think of using "you" as being incorrect, in fact that is the pronoun we use. So really, all that language deterioration those of you among the older generations are cringing at--that is the language of the future. Just like your grandparents probably cringed at the fact that you used "access" as a verb, and yet now no one even thinks about it, one day no one will even think about if it is more correct to say "between you and me" or "between you and I."

Language Deterioration

For all of you out there that insist that today's youth is completely massacring (does that word have four syllables for you too?) the English Language (or whatever other language), this blog will probably either annoy you to no end or will be just the place for you!

Language deterioration. How many of us haven't heard our parents or grandparents saying that language is deteriorating, and oh boy, if we let it keep going down this path, what will education come to? How will our children learn? Well I'm here to say their parents said the same exact thing about their language. "The word 'access' is not a verb! It is a noun!" Clearly if I let you access something instead of granting you access, my IQ has just dropped ten points and my ability to learn and the ability of all my progeny to learn has been cursed for all eternity.

I have to go but I will be sure to elaborate on why language deterioration is really just language change when I get back.