Of Identity, Gender, And The Ever-Troubling "Is" - Part 1

            Why is it that the shortest words always seem to be the most interesting?

            Take a look at that sentence right up there. I used a form of “to be” twice, once in its original incarnation, and one in a conjugation. Even after I used the verb "to seem", it's still required that I use another copula. That little verb is one of the most essential words in the English language, and I’m just now realizing how different most people would have to speak if we were to be rid of it.

            Just as an experiment, I tried to write a simplified biography without ever using that word, or any form of it. It can work:

            “I call myself Lorre. I have two dogs, and two guinea pigs. One of those guinea pigs possesses the name Lucy. I declare my identity as an American. I possess the gender identity of a woman. I choose to follow the diet of a vegetarian. English claims the title of my native language.”

            Obviously, it’s not very convenient to write all that out. But, albeit in a roundabout way, English can work without that little verb in this case. But, let’s look at some types of sentences where it’s harder:

            “My dog is at home now.”

            My initial thought was “My dog is located at home now”, but I almost immediately realized that I’m just being more pretentious than necessary. Damn. After some thought, the best I could come up with was: “My dog currently resides at home.”

            Now, this post looks like it’s leading right into talking about E-Prime – and it is. But not in this particular part of it. I’m going to split this up into multiple posts, because I have a lot to say about this, and I’m bad about organizing my thoughts into one. Looking at this, there will probably be a total of five parts. Right now, what I want to talk about is a little more personal thought than proved linguistic forms.

            According to two of the many uses of our copula, “class” and “identity” are separate things. But what, really, do we see as the difference?

            What exactly defines us in terms of identity? Typically, we would say “I am Lore” is a case of identity – I am defining myself as the being Lore. And we would say that “I am a blonde” would be a case of class – I am a member of the class of people with blonde hair, however my blondeness does not define me as a person. But I want to look closer at the name. What if I change my name? What if I use a nickname? Names are fluid things.

            Let’s say you agree with me, and discard names from the list of what defines you as being. So what does? I would say that the only ones I can think of are “being”, “mass”, “organism”, etc. There’s one thing which I think might be a little more controversial, and which I of course want to ponder: Gender and sex.

            It’s generally understood in a society where gender is being more widely recognized as fluid that “gender” and “sex” are not the same thing. “Gender” refers to which part of the female---male continuum a person identifies themselves as. “Sex” refers to the biological arrangement of a person’s genitalia and reproductive organs. Sex does not match with gender, nor are the two terms mutually exclusive. (As the postgender community attests, a person has sex but does not need to choose a gender.)

            This leads to an interesting linguistic question: What is “woman”, and what is “man”?  One of the biggest problems transgender men and women face (remember, transgender =/= transsexual. For now I’m simply talking about gender.) is the consistent refusal of others to refer to (or even acknowledge) them  as “men” and “women”. Because, I believe, for far too long, we have only used the two terms to define sex. Rather than seeing gender as under the “identity” label, we condemn a person to whatever identity their sex belongs to. Gender, I think, we see more as a class, with members.

            I see this as a problem. Solutions, of course, are trying to be made (“biological man” vs. simply “man”). But they haven’t yet come into widespread use. Should we have separate words for “sex-oriented woman/man” and “gender-identified woman/man”?

            I’m going to break off here, but I would like to ask you to think: Next time you say “I’m a woman/man”, think – are you making your sex part of your identity?

What Exactly Is "Foreign"?

            The term “foreign language” is firmly imbedded in the world’s culture, used to refer to a language a person is learning/has learned that is not their native tongue.  But I’ve been thinking lately, musing on the problems of using these words.

            What exactly is “foreign”? I think we need to look at a couple of problems with several definitions people have used for a “foreign language”:

            1.A language from another country. – But Spanish is alive and well in America, yet it is still called a foreign language in school curriculums.

            1a.A language that originated in another country. – I’m speaking English right now, aren’t I?

            2.A language not a speaker’s native. – But how do you define “native”? What if a person was raised bilingual – in a household speaking both, let’s say, English and Russian. Now, which one of those would you define as “foreign”? Maybe it depends on the location – in America Russian would probably be considered the “outcast” of the two, but the situation wouldn’t be the same in Russia.

            2a.More on the “native” problem. How young does a person have to be when they start learning a language for that language to be considered their “native”? If a person speaks one tongue, but at seven years old starts learning another, is that too old? How about six? Five? When does it start?

            3.So, WHEN does a language stop becoming foreign? If a person attains fluency in a language, I would say that that language is no longer “foreign” to them.

            These are only a few reasons I think people need to stop using the term “foreign language”. Why can’t a language be just that – a language?

Call An [y] An [u] - The Phonetic Smeerp Effect

            The English language has a lot of sounds. Far more than the 26 letters we are taught as children, the noises we make span quite far. However, there are far more sounds that one language doesn’t have. And what I want to muse about a little today is how we try to put the sounds we don’t recognize into terms of sounds we do.

            Here’s the mandatory story that inspired this: Somehow having gotten on the topic of color names in languages other than English with a friend in a conversation, I mentioned the Hungarian word for “gray” – “szürke”, pronounced [syrke]. He looked confused, and asked for confirmation.

            “[suɻke]?” He pronounced it.

            It wasn’t simply bad hearing on his part. He heard the word, but the problem was that he also heard unfamiliar sounds. In English, we don’t have the [y] sound. The rolled [r] was also unfamiliar, but since we hear it in Spanish I don’t think it was as foreign as the vowel.

            When repeating the word back, he dealt with the unfamiliar sounds by morphing them until the resembled sounds he used every day. There is probably a name for this phenomenon, but I can’t find it and so I’m going to be lazy and not look harder. Sue me.

            Once I noticed that, I’m seeing myself do it all the time. Hearing [n] instead of [ŋ] when listening to a song, as we aren’t really ever taught about the velar nasal sound in school. Accidentally slipping up and aspirated my “t”s when practicing speaking in Finnish, because I always spoke aspirated before. Accidentally saying “ö” instead of “ő”, as I had learned French sounds before I learned Hungarian sounds.

            This got me thinking, and I scrambled back to that fun site I mentioned earlier: tvtropes.org. There’s an article there titled “Call A Smeerp A Rabbit”. The trope in question refers to when either an author or a character in fiction refers to an magical animal (for which we don’t have a name), by the name of a (different) animal we do have a name for. For example, there’s an animal with four legs, purple scales, antennae, and a vaguely lizard-like shape standing in front of you. And it can talk. You would probably call it a lizard, right? Because we don’t have a name for this animal, we find the familiar animal that’s closest to it to us (in this case, a lizard) and refer to this unfamiliar animal by that name. After all, otherwise you have no name for it. (Well, without making one up, but that’s another discussion.)

            That’s exactly what my friend did when repeating back “szürke”. He took the unfamiliar sounds and, so he could understand them, called the phonetic Smeerps some Rabbits. So, until I can find the actual name for this habit, I’m shall call it the Phonetic Smeerp Effect.

            Note: I apologize for the need to use a different font for the IPA. My computer doesn’t have most of the characters, so some copying-and-pasting was needed.

The Familiarity Trap

Let’s face it: We humans like things better if they’re familiar. If something is completely alien to us, we’re hesitant toward it – even afraid of it. This affects language learning more than it affects anything else, I believe.

            Let’s say you’ve attained fluency in Latin. Congratulations! Well, now you want to learn another language. If you’re like most people I know, the obvious next step would be to learn French, Spanish, Italian, or German. After all, they’re related. (Yes, yes, I know German is not a romance language. That’s not what I’m saying here.) They have almost identical words, and similar grammar conventions. Easy!

            But, is it worth it? Learning Spanish, you’re just learning Latin with alternate vocabulary, and different endings for the same grammar conventions. French might be a little further off, but it’s still a gendered, inflecting language with familiar-sounding words to an English speaker. I’m not saying it’s not difficult to learn these languages (I’m a Latin learner who always had trouble with Spanish), but what I am saying is that it seems a lot less rewarding to.

            I bring this up because – and I’ll come back to this topic a lot in my writing – when I ask my fellow currently-monolingual English speakers, “If you could learn any language in the world, what would it be?” the answer is always in the Indo-European language family. And the only reason I say “Indo-European family” instead of “Romance and Germanic family” is that I’ve had – as a pleasant surprise – one person say “Greek”. I get “Spanish” at least seventy percent of the time, and “Italian”, “French”, or “German” all the others.

            I believe this taps into the theory that we think along these lines: What is familiar to us is easier than that which isn’t, even if the familiar is more complicated. We are much more likely to want to learn a language is the word for  “night” is “nuit”, “noche”, or “nacht”, than if it is “ejszaka”.

            Now, in response to that, most people would say “Well, that’s because the last word looks harder to say.” I’ll give that yes, maybe it does to us. But, here’s what I want to muse about for a minute: What about when the familiar isn’t really easier?

            Let me try to explain. The two most frequent complaints I hear in Latin class are: “Why does everything have to have a gender? THIS IS TOO HARD!” and “Why does there have to be so many endings? THIS IS TOO MUCH!” Now, these are the same people that declare that whey want to learn Spanish, and that it would be “Soooo much easier than this stupid dead language!” When I hear these complaints, I try to explain to them that not only does Spanish use gendered words, it’s even more difficult to form a sentence, as you have to worry about what gender form of “the” you use. (As opposed to gendered but article-free Latin.) I also try to explain that Spanish has just as many endings as Latin. What happens when I do this? I get completely ignored. The standard  response is “Yeah, right. Spanish is WAYYY easier than this.”

            My desk in that class has many marks from banging my forehead against it in frustration.

            The reason for this false (and lamentably common) conception is that, well, we see Spanish every day here. We walk around seeing wet floor signs that say “CUIDADO!”, but not “CAVE!” We constantly hear people saying “Hola!”, but I’ve never seen someone go up to a friend and say “Salve!” And so, since we’re so exposed to Spanish, we automatically think it’s easier.

            Now, how about the really foreign. I think the reason most people don’t believe me when I say I’m learning Hungarian and Finnish (that is, if they’re not one of the people asking “What’s that?” Yes, it’s happened.) is that they aren’t exposed to them. Ever. And if they know that they’re really not related to our “familiar” languages at all, then the question I usually get is “Why?”.

            I think all these reactions are understandable. But what I don’t understand is why people who learn a little about the languages (they ask me, I try my best to explain) then think that learning them would be more difficult than learning a familiar language. To demonstrate what I mean, let’s compare the structure of a sentence in both Spanish and Hungarian.

            Spanish: “Ella es una mujer.” First, there is a specific form of the third-person singular subject based on gender. This sentence requires a verb, conjugated to the third person. The indefinite article “a” also must be gendered.

            Hungarian: “Ő nő.” The third-person singular subject doesn’t need to be changed according to gender, it’s exactly the same as “he” and “it”. Since this sentence is a copula, it does not require a verb. There is no need for an indefinite article. Handy, huh?

            Linguistically, the second sentence is much easier to make. Yet, if asked, the people I know would all say that the Spanish was simpler.

            So please, if you’re anything like these people I know, don’t fall victim to the familiarity trap! Branch out, and I guarantee you’ll feel more accomplished once you conquer something.

            Bonsoir! Víszlat!

            (Quick! Which one is “easier”?)