A handwritten letter (written in nib and ink) arrived in my mailbox the other day. So after a couple days of absorption and conjuring, I've just mailed off a reply.
I've always found it fulfilling but never noticed the amount of risk and loss of control it would create. I had the urge to go back and rewrite into a better draft, but that would have defeated spontaneity and authenticity – especially because my sender had taken the time to use a real nib (check out an explanation of quill pen production, from the Jane Austen Society of Australia. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote 20,000 or so letters throughout his life, even bred his own geese for quills).
I wondered whether our unique writing styles (our "fists", in telegraph-speak) have evolved around our access to lossless edit and save. How different would your written communication be if everything came out as-is? How do your thoughts render in raw form? Is this format a more accurate reflection of how thoughts come out of a person's head, or am I holding back because I have one shot to get it right without using Wite-Out? Will it make me self-conscious to cross things out?
Why so obsessive? No one's going to judge me, not for long-windedness, not for illegible scrawl, not for abstraction and figuration. These are the truths we carry, and the goal is to carry them well.
One time, a former journalist in New Jersey told me a "when I was your age" story about an apartment fire. His classmates all remembered him for having climbed out the window carrying only his two most valuable possessions: his suit and his typewriter. All his life, he mailed letters to his friends all over the world.
Glyph operations would never fly in such a decade, although I always hear newsroom stories about typewriters, wet labs, and cut-and-paste page layout. We might imagine that the early translation and localization outfits would have a lot of filing cabinets.
Just for fun, here is special-effects master Michael Winslow (born in Spokane!!) doing an incredible vocal demonstration of different typewriter models.
Do you have memories of typewriters? Do you send letters? Do you keep pen pals?
In the summer and fall of 2011, my son had the opportunity to study, do volunteer work*, and travel in Vietnam, Japan and South Korea. He of course came home with many fascinating tales: drinking snake blood and bile alcohol in a restaurant in Vietnam; escaping from a hot Tokyo night club – it literally caught on fire; and in Seoul, visiting a very special kind of café, one in which there are cats on the menu… But it’s not what you think.
My son, Ian, and his Korean friends were walking across the lawn in front of the Jeongdok Library, near the heart of Seoul, when they noticed some cats lounging carefree in the shade, with library patrons. The cats were friendly and truly enjoyed being petted. Ian joked “Maybe these are library cats and we can check them out, like library books.”
From here, the conversation turned to the therapeutic value of having pets and musing about the possibility of doctors actually prescribing a healthy dose of pet-contact. A depressed patient would take the MD’s prescription to a pharmacist, who would then fill the prescription by presenting the patient with a barrel full of kittens or puppies to play with for a while. The boundless joy and cuteness of the cuddly creatures would lift the cloud of despondence off the afflicted human – at least until the next time the prescription was filled…
“Or,” Ian continued in the hypothetical and semi-absurd vein, “there could be cat cafés, where you could just go and play with cats.”
Ian laughed at his own joke, but his Korean companions weren’t laughing. Jihyun, an animal lover herself and eager host, enthusiastically proposed, “Would you like to go to one?”
“Go where?”
“To a cat café. There are several here in Seoul. There’s one I really like near Hongik University [홍익 대학교].”
Yes, in this too, Koreans prove to be far more practical than their U.S. counterparts; micro-processors, cats – it’s all about efficiencies, I suppose. I understand there are cat cafés in Japan as well.
Cat cafés are indeed popular spots for Seoulites. According to one of Korea’s largest English language newspapers, the Korea Herald, the original cat café in Seoul was started in 2003 by Yu Sang-Wook, owner of Gio Cat café (Jihyun’s favorite). Yu had been running a cat adoption service; his primary interest in opening a café was to find people willing to adopt cats, and providing these potential adoptive families the opportunity to interact with felines beforehand.
Generally speaking, unlike Westerners, Asians do not have a long history of growing up with pets living in their homes. This unfamiliarity with domestic animals means that Koreans may be leery or afraid of cats and dogs, or have canine and/or feline allergies they are unaware of. It also often means new pet owners would like to know more about how to care for the new family members before taking them home.
Gio Cat can also be written as one word, Giocat (지오캣in Hangeul, the Korean script). I initially thought the café owner had surely chosen this name because of the Italian verb “giocare”, which means “to play” in English. “La Gioconda”, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting known to most English speakers as the Mona Lisa, in Italian literally means “The Playful One”. Perhaps it is her coy smile.
“Giocate” is 2nd person plural present indicative and imperative [“you (all) play” or “Play, (you all)!” in English] of the verb, and the Italian word for “toy” is “giocattolo”, so a logical enough guess, no? It turns out to be merely a happy coincidence. For website creation considerations, Yu was told he needed to use a word having no more than 6 letters and included the word “cat”, and “gio” had a nice ring to it.
Actually, it turns out there is an Italian wholesale company in Ferrara, called “GioCAT” [http://www.giocat.it/ ] which does indeed deal in toys, “gioccatoli”. Their teddy-bear logo seems to suggest they, too, like cuddly, if inanimate, things…
The menu at Gio Cat Café does look like a real menu but is called a "profile" – your basic cat bio sheet. The profile features flattering photos and lists gender, names, breeds, ages, and occasionally personality traits. On the profile sheet, we learn that Ho-ya is “kindly”, Sung-hwa is “Kao’s dad”, Andre is a “quiet cat” and Cho-long is “hysteric”.
If you ever happen to find yourself in Seoul and feeling a little “hysteric” like Cho-long, why not try calming your nerves by heading to a neighborhood cat café? I’ve heard it’s very therapeutic.
Dog-lovers will be happy to know dog cafés exist too. Dog café aficionados, please feel free to leave any information or tips in the comments section.
* Ian did volunteer work with Peace Trees Vietnam http://www.peacetreesvietnam.org/, an organization dedicated to demining and reforestation activities in Vietnam.
Last season, while the rest of the world was telephoning, texting and interwebbing, USA won gold at the world championship of Morse code. This was in the pileup category, in which a participant listens to a mix of several ongoing messages at different volumes and speeds.
The International Amateur Radio Union (IARU) puts on the High Speed Telegraphy World Championship every odd-numbered year, this recent one having taken place in Bielefeld, Germany. Participants transmit and receive Morse code messages as quickly as humanly possible in different competitive categories, under these rules).
Morse might seem difficult, but a statistical research project shows that frequently used letters do have shorter codes. The long-term goal of an operator, according to this relatively popular telegraphy guide, is to eventually reach a point of understanding the series of long and short sounds as naturally as if they were words. Here's a quick demo:
Technically, Morse and Braille differ from language because they are not massive environments of interdependent symbols, symbols by which to understand and transmit our thoughts. These codes are simply a means to transcribe and/or transmit segments in existing languages. Because of their relationship/integration with existing language, though, even though Morse is "just a code", personal style manifests itself. For example, the personalities and communication habits of World War II radio operators would leak into their work, sometimes making it possible to tell their identities and locations merely by receiving their messages and guessing at form or cadence.
And if users of American Sign Language also develop their own slang and personal styles, is ASL a language or a code? Drawing boundaries around the definition of a language is a tricky subject because the answer really depends on whom you ask.
Recent years of telephone and Internet use have left Morse code by the wayside. The FCC eliminated Morse code in 2003 from the FCC exam requirements for amateur radio service, as "the public interest is not served by requiring facility in Morse Code when the trend in amateur communications is to use voice and digital technologies for exchanging messages."
There are few remaining modern uses –Morse code has made its way into assistive technology for people in rehabilitation settings or with special needs – for example, those who cannot use communication devices that require the voice (one such Morse device is the TandemMaster). Even in such settings, Morse code is becoming less and less useful as newer assistive technology becomes available.
When all else falls away, the telegraph remains an art piece. Telegraphy still belongs to a romantic steampunk aesthetic – one that unites time-traveling and futuristic technology with the brass, leather, and gears of the H.G. Wells and Thomas Edison era. We're far from consumer editions of a telegraph to transcribe your thoughts, but somewhere, there at least are instructions to make one that delivers your RSS feed...in Morse.
If you use more than one language keyboard on your computer or iPhone, you may have encountered a sometimes humorous, sometimes annoying phenomenon: the auto-correct feature misinterpreting your intentions.
Usually the auto-correct function works to my advantage – for instance, it just added the letter ‘a’ before ‘ge’ in the word ‘advantage’ because I had neglected to hit the ‘a’ key hard enough.
However, the English auto-correct feature occasionally finds my combination of letters so odd that it decides it cannot possibly help me – and that the best solution is to shift whatever I type into Korean Hangeul.
Interestingly, it does not seem to care whether or not my Hangeul typing makes any sense. For example, if I mistype the word ‘short’ in English by omitting the ‘o’, my computer politely (i.e. without asking me or making a fuss) changes my impossible combination of letters ‘shrt’, into a possible but nonsensical combination in Hangeul, ‘녻’.
Unfortunately, this does not work vice versa on my computer. If I enter a series of impossible Hangeul letters, my computer – again, politely – lets me carry on typing nonsense and does not switch me back into English.
Those of you with iPhones, who use the English keyboard to send text messages, are familiar with the iPhone’s helpful offers to either correct or finish typing your word, based on what knows to be statistically most likely. If you happen to use keyboards of various languages, however, and neglect to change from one to the other on the iPhone, you may end up transmitting some unintended, ‘interpretative’ translations.
On my iPhone, I have 5 keyboards installed: English, French, Italian, Korean and Spanish. The iPhone will not switch my current keyboard but makes likely spelling suggestions based on that current keyboard.
Unlike on my computer, I do have the option of refusing the suggested word – assuming I catch the misguided guess soon enough – but hitting the space bar is interpreted as a sign of acceptance and the suggestion enters my text, like it or not.
This can have comical results. If I forget that I have selected the French keyboard, and I am typing the English word ‘does’, the iPhone thinks I must mean ‘dors’ – the 2nd person singular familiar form of ‘sleep’. ‘Just’ becomes ‘jus’ – ‘juice’ in French. ‘The’ is misinterpreted as another beverage, ‘thé’ for ‘tea’.
An Italian keyboard interprets the English ‘please’ to be ‘pelasse’ – the 3rd person singular imperfect subjunctive form of the verb ‘pelare’, which has many translations in English: to pluck, to shave one’s head, or to fleece (interestingly, ‘to fleece’ has the same figurative, idiomatic meaning as it does in English – to cheat someone).
If, though, I have the English keyboard selected but happen to be typing Spanish text and enter ‘lleguen’ – subjunctive form for ‘they arrive’, in English – the proposed English word is ‘lowdown’…
Accidental language gems, such as the above, are often found in translation. New technology, especially in the form of apps and other devices that support multiple languages, is a great self-generating source of unintended, cross-cultural linguistic fun. What have you ‘found in translation’ recently via some new technology that you’d like to share?
"One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things." Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
The jacket cover of Eric Weiner's 2008 work, "The Geography of Bliss", is a deep sky-blue and features a small paper airplane made out of a colorful page from an atlas.
Atlases are tools of the trade for Weiner, a National Public Radio foreign correspondent. During his 10-year stint with NPR, he covered events in excruciatingly unhappy places across the planet. Injustice, destruction and war are always newsworthy topics – he notes that stories of the misery of others can inspire compassion and often move people to good actions. But, according to Weiner in the introduction to his travelogue, The Geography of Bliss, in some ways he was drawn to these locales and stories because unhappiness was familiar terrain for him.
Despite being born in the year of the yellow happy face, 1963, Weiner is a whiner by his own account; like many people who tend to be dissatisfied with their own context. Pondering the intangible nature of happiness and seeking its quantifiable qualities, Weiner sets out to discover if his own mopey-ness might be related to geography: Where on the globe are people the happiest? Can happiness be found, as many of us believe, "somewhere else"? What makes some places "happier" than others? Are there certain areas where the grass really is greener?
The book follows Weiner's one-year journey to explore the nature of happiness in relationship to place. He examines his personal interior (and rather gloomy) landscape, while bearing in mind that the concept of "where" includes both cultural and physical environments. His experiences around the world make for delightful reading. I especially like the tales involving miscomprehension due to language usage. Here is an excerpt from the chapter on The Netherlands:
The hotel dining room is small, cozy. The Dutch do cozy well. I order the asparagus soup. It's good. The waiter clears my bowl and then says, 'Now maybe you would like some intercourse.'
'Excuse me?'
'Intercourse. You can have intercourse.'
I'm thinking, Wow the Dutch really are a permissive bunch, when it dawns on me that he is speaking of something else entirely. Inter course. As in 'between courses'.
'Yes,' I say, relieved. 'That would be nice.' (p.7)
Even the names of the chapters are funny. For example, "Chapter 2 – Switzerland, Happiness is Boredom" and "Chapter 6 – Moldova, Happiness is Somewhere Else."
Weiner includes a balanced mix of personal anecdotes, scientific data collected on happiness, literary quotes, and historical references from across the globe. It is a well-paced, entertaining and informative read. The Geography of Bliss is a travel book of sorts, but one that delves into the cultural similarities and differences of a single state of being shared by all human beings, happiness.
All the countries Weiner visits offer him a unique perspective from which to contemplate the nature of happiness, but perhaps the title of Chapter 8 best sums up the essence of the book. The chapter is ostensibly about happiness in Great Britain, but the subtitle is applicable to any nation – or any individual, for that matter: "Happiness Is a Work in Progress."
I'm happy to recommend The Geography of Bliss. Wherever you are, geographically or emotionally, this book offers an armchair tour of the globe guaranteed to make you chuckle.
Below, the author talks with internet correspondent Thomas Scrampton about Icelandic happiness.
Five years ago, as a newsroommate, I would have said that RPG stood for rocket-propelled grenade.
Glyph is getting more and more game-oriented as time goes on. It started as a group of verbivores (pretty much everybody who works here now is bilingual or more), but now the most common second languages here are technology, the mobilizing of skill, the efficient transmission of data, and smart information design. The work demands it – translation projects have gotten more media-complex.
We're making really big toasters, many of them for game developers. L10n Tamer (director of localization) describes us as taking things apart, sending the content out to be translated, then reassembling and testing everything when it's finished.
I used to take games for granted. I used to say they were a waste of time, despite previously spending hours in high school playing Super Mario. I never saw the elegance behind the machine until I stumbled upon various aspects of game design via Google – aspects such as simulating the avoidance behavior of a fake crowd, the demand for royalty-free "art assets" for homebrew game developers, or the use of artificial intelligence to create challenging gameplay environments (a bit technical, but a great discussion from International Journal of Computer Games Technology). Hello, Mr. Minsky, we haven't forgotten about you after all.
I'm learning that we play because it lets us explore, escape, solve, orchestrate, vent, experience the absurd, practice and refine... in-home gaming is part of an arc of history [some say] killed off the video arcade, while deniers reminisce and other research shows it's simply evolved to suit changing times.
Game development has changed so much over the past 3+ decades. Here's a gallery from between 1990 and 2008 alone, showing the progression of graphic design. It's astounding to me how extremely simple games such as Akalabeth (1980) were entertaining, but perhaps even the simplest games hook people for the same reason that Haruki Murakami keeps people reading....creates frustration in the reader, in addition to creating elegant backstory or neediness in the plot.
Here's a clip from 1980 of the aforementioned Akalabeth. I guess this is how gaming used to be.
Somewhere along the line, Middle-Eastern storytellers had put an identity to the jokes that go, "You ever hear about the guy who...?"
Instead of being just any random man, "the guy" is a semi-fictional character called Mullah Nasruddin who serves as a culture-wide subject of the same big joke. He blurs the line between foolishness and wisdom and probably existed in the 13th century as a Mullah – a teacher or educated man. Sufism eventually incorporated him into their teachings as a destroyer of expectations.
For my Afghan-American friend K and I, the Mullah became a shared fictional acquaintance and shared experience.
My friend and I met as first-graders shortly after her family moved to the States, into a fairly empty apartment in the hilly Martian landscape of our 'hood. We were skinny dorks at age sixish with little need for television. We were perfectly happy playing Monopoly and deep cleaning the bathroom while her big brother set fruit on fire with his magnifying glass. Otherwise, we were pestering her cool teenage sister to put on "Whoomp! (There It Is)" – mis-memorizing the lyrics to what we believed was the baddest hip hop song in the world, thinking the main chorus was, "Whoop, ehhhh?" The song was actually pretty terrible in retrospect, if you're YouTube-curious.
Then we grew up and discovered Nas, Tupac Shakur, and Wu-Tang Clan. We manifested new visions of ourselves. We became women who loved the arrangements of words, words that were never sufficient to express philosophical growth, metaphysical anthropology and our responsibilities to culture and religious life. We pushed against what we believed to be true and custom-built a social narrative that could make sense to us. We went in search and collection of witnesses, because a meaningful life is a witnessed life.
Sometime in college, she and I also bonded over stories about Mullah Nasruddin. One of the sillier ones went like this: "Mullah Nasruddin was sitting in a chair, eating eggs. When someone asked him, 'Mullah Nasruddin, why are you sitting in a chair and eating eggs?' his response was, 'Why, do you think I ought to sit on the eggs and eat the chair?!?"
One December day, the village boys decided to play a trick on Mullah Nasruddin to fool him. They hid Mullah Nasruddin's coat when he was performing ablution for Friday ritual. But Mullah Nasruddin perceived [that] trick on the way. "Mullah Nasruddin, it's a cold day, why don't you wear your coat?" asked one of them "I left my coat at home to keep the place warm!" answered Mullah Nasruddin.
Because these stories have spread by word of mouth across Turkish, Greek, Afghan, Bulgarian, and other cultures in that neighborhood, historians have a similar problem here as with baklava...There are many variations on the Mullah's name (Nasreddin, Nasr al-Din, etc...), and origin stories differ. Here for example, or here (PDF). There are hundreds if not thousands of unique Mullah stories (see here for some that have been published), many of them incorporated into the practices of Sufism, varying greatly in length and in the degree to which they are funny (See also: Evolutionary Psychology's exploration of humor as a cognitive function, PDF).
I remember calling and leaving Mullah joke voicemails. Most of these stories are fairly short and easy to remember – conveniently voicemail-sized – and much funnier to those who have "known" the Mullah for a while. We still laugh at the one about the eggs and the chair, even though on the grand scale of funny, it lands somewhere next to Mother Goose.
My friend and I don't talk about the Mullah much anymore, opting for conversations about personal purpose and asking the right questions over searching for the right answers. We also came to an understanding that loss only exists if containers exist.
I guess the Mullah isn't too far removed from our thoughts, after all – he might have told us those exact things in his cryptic ways.
"Sasupai, why do we have to go to a 'Christian' restaurant? What does that mean anyway? Isn’t it kind of weird to divide restaurants by religions?"
Welcome to Goa, the smallest of the 28 states and 7 territories that comprise India. Located on the mid-southwestern coast of the sub-continent, today it is primarily known for its gorgeous beaches, psychedelic trance music and, increasingly (especially internationally), its cuisine.
The legacies of having been a Catholic Portuguese colony for nearly 500 years - up until 1961 - linger on in obvious and subtle ways: architecture, food, names of people, names of places, and a single yet divided language – called Konkani in Roman script and कोंकणी in Devanagari script.
It turns out that restaurants are not the only things divided by religion.
At least with restaurants, a person can have a bit of variety. You can go to a Hindu restaurant one night and order vegetarian dishes, like dahl (lentils) or aloo gobi (cauliflower and potatoes). Another night why not try mutton biryani (biryani comes from Persian word beryā(n) (بریان) which means "fried" or "roasted" and is a saffron rice dish to which many different ingredients can be added) at a Muslim restaurant? Though admittedly there are few Muslims in the area. But if you're looking for the spicy and unapologetically pork-laden sorpotel/sarapatel, the eating establishment will have to be Christian.
When it comes to the local language, Konkani, things get more complicated. Native Konkani speakers primarily use one of two different scripts to write the language: Roman and Devanagari.
And a person's script use, like the food, is generally a question of religious culture. If you write the language in Roman script, you are probably Christian; if you write the language in Devanagari, you’re most likely Hindu or Muslim. The school you go to, the books you will be able to read, and the people with whom you can have a written correspondence – all will be inadvertently determined by, and limited to, your cultural-religious background.
In Christian and Muslim restaurants, if I want to, I can just order vegetarian dishes; if I don’t want to drink alcohol, I can order an alternative no matter which restaurant I’m in.
But in their learning institutions, there are no menus to provide choice. Although there are people who can read and write both scripts, most Konkani speakers cannot easily choose to read, write and study in Devanagari script one day and in Roman script the next…
Sasupai is the Konkani word for "father-in-law" in Roman script. The same word, same pronunciation exists in Devanagari as सासुपै.
My Konkani, Portuguese- and English-speaking sasupai passed away in 2008 and is sorely missed. Upon a visit to Goa without my father-in-law in 2009, my husband and I struck up a friendship with a Hindu Goan family we had met and ended up visiting their home. The grandmother of the house was in her early 80s, approximately the same age of my father-in-law, who had lived in the area as a boy.
The family was delighted to learn that I’d called my father-in-law "sasupai" and insisted I call the grandmother, "sasumai" [ सासुमै in Devanagari ]– you guessed it, mother-in-law.
Gradually, it came to light that the grandmother had known my father-in-law’s family. However, although the two families had known each other intimately, and were native speakers of the same language, they would not have been able to attend the same schools or write letters to each other.
Although English was the language of the British colonists, this script phenomenon partway explains why English remains an official language in India today. Internationally and even within post-colonial India, for better or worse, English is hard to beat as a lingua franca.
My sasupai, a devout Catholic, was able to enjoy his sorpotel, Kingfisher beer and fenny (or feni, a Goan cashew liqueur)... all of which we found at various Christian restaurants between the lovely, if touristy, Goan beaches of Baga and Calangute.
Regardless of what language, religion, or restaurants you prefer, the rich diversity of landscape and of cultures that a trip to Goa provides is well worth any confusion such diversity might occasionally create. Bon voyage!
As our translation and localization needs evolve, our CATs evolve too. The creators of Computer-Assisted Translation tools (CAT tools) keep releasing cool new updates, and we're exploring one such update in recent weeks. It's always a nice turbocharge to learn and experiment with new ways to better organize terminology and content, if it means better ways to prevent avoidable detail errors or inconsistent use of words.
Lately, we've been experimenting with a new feature that slices up and analyzes large quantities of text (English text, in this case). Based on its findings, it guesses which words and phrases might be appropriate as glossary terms.
This would sound like an approximate use of semantic analysis, a process that allows users to discover trends or prioritize issues within text – the machine looks for structural patterns and relationships among words and phrases in a large document. Our software uses mathematical algorithms to produce a sortable list of words and phrases that the machine believes are important. The list also includes number of occurrences, a number to describe the term's likely relevance, and sentences that contain each term (to show context). Then, a human can go in and evaluate the system's suggestions, weeding out the silly ideas. For more details about how this works, here's a piece published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
This tool will help tremendously when we build glossaries for clients with specialized terminology... collections of terms we'd like to keep consistent into future projects. It's possible to build a list manually while working on a project, picking out phrases that are specialized industry terms, but for long-term clients with multiple projects, it helps to prepare a trove of glossary terms ahead of time. A computer can slice up and sort the document into phrases before we even approach it.
One creator of semantic analysis software, Janya, Inc., described semantic analysis as the extraction of "critical information from unstructured and semi-structured data to create actionable intelligence." (read more here) A company called Expert System has a similar development called Cogito, used to analyze news about terrorism (Lower on the page is an explanation of the data visualization).
You may have heard of SA's cousin, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) – same concept but different purpose, because LSI is designed to improve data retrieval. The system analyzes a large collection of data to produce more intelligent search results or to group documents according to "conceptual similarity".
Both semantic analysis and semantic indexing have dozens of uses related to search engines, programming languages, plagiarism, Biblical texts, and even customer service (Intesa Sanpaolo, a financial services organization in Europe, is using this technology to look for different sentiments in customer satisfaction. Some places transcribe customer calls and identify keywords) Such technology might make our jobs disappear someday, but for the while, smart information design is giving us new uses and applications for the same knowledge. We're applying it to translation and software localization and it's doing us pretty good service.
Part 3 in the 3-part series “Chimps, Fingertips and Polyglottery: 3 Takes on Language Acquisition. Read part one here and part two here.
The following article is based on a conversation I had with polyglot and scholar, Alexander Arguelles, in the fall of 2011. I am indebted to Mr. Arguelles for his willingness to share with me his personal and professional perspective on language learning. Many thanks, Alexander!
Laura Nelson: “So, Mr. Arguelles, please tell me a few things about you that I won’t be able to find doing an Internet search.”
Alexander Arguelles: [chuckles] “Well, I don’t just live and breathe languages; I have a life outside of language study.”
You may, however, doubt his claim of having a life outside of language study if you take a look at the YouTube video, “A polyglot’s daily linguistic workout,” featuring Mr. Arguelles. How could he possibly dedicate time to any other activities given the rigorous, daily – if self-imposed – requirements of the scholarly pursuit of polyglottery? Not to mention holding down a full-time job as a language specialist at SEAMEO [Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization] – a teachers’ training institute in Singapore.
But neither his sincerity nor his accomplishments can be doubted. With a B.A. from Columbia and a PhD. from the University of Chicago, Prof. Arguelles has published 9 texts on language topics ranging from Old Norse sagas to Korean Zen legends to a French/German/English dictionary. His accessibility to both students and like-minded language aficionados is downright infectious, his unconventional and innovative language-learning techniques stimulating.
AA: “I’m married and have 2 sons. I swim and/or run every day. I play the flute. And the didgeridoo.”
As our conversation was happening on Skype, Mr. Arguelles was generous enough to agree to play the didgeridoo for me. The sound quality was excellent and the music hauntingly beautiful. He adds, “And I’m a vegetarian.”
If polyglottery were a religious institution, Alexander Arguelles would surely be canonized in his own lifetime. I’m not sure if there is a saint of language study, but I am pretty sure that Hermes (the Greek god of languages) would have loved to have Arguelles as an assistant!
But what IS polyglottery anyway?
Polyglottery is considered a misspelled word by my version of Microsoft Word, but Word has “no spelling suggestions”. Yahoo’s spell checker also considers the word a misspelling, but at least offers me what it thinks are useful suggestions: polygraphs, polygamous, polygonal, polymerization, or polynucleotide, perhaps? On the iPhone, English, Italian and Spanish language spell-checkers may be at a loss (“no replacements found”), but the French version proposes two: polyglotte and polyglottes. Now we’re getting somewhere!
I asked Arguelles, the polyglot who after all coined the term, to define it in relation to three other terms: multilingualism, polyglotism and polyliteracy.
AA: “Polyglottery is the passionate study of languages, for the love of language study; polyliteracy is scholarly language knowledge one develops through conscious study, especially through reading. Multilingualism can be defined as the state of acquiring multiple languages as a natural condition, of exposure in childhood. Polyglotism would be perhaps the broadest term, and can be defined as knowing multiple languages, no matter the means by which they were acquired.”
Merriam-Webster defines polyglotism as “the use of many languages: the ability to speak many languages” and cites 1882 as the year of its first known use.
How many languages does Prof. Arguelles know? This is a question he “dreads” according to his website (2), which is dedicated to helping others in their pursuit of polyglottery. A native English speaker, he studied French, German, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit at Columbia University. At the University of Chicago, he studied Old Norse.
But a look at the list of languages Arguelles is able to read gives us a partial answer: a vast array of European languages, modern and ancient, and I’m including Esperanto and Afrikaans; Arabic; Korean; Persian; Hindi; Sanskrit.
Inspiring or depressing? I haven’t decided yet...
I asked Arguelles if he felt help from new technological resources would herald a new age of accomplished polyglots. Can internet-based language-learning programs like Livemocha.com or language apps like Lexicon improve language learning?
AA: “We’ll need to wait and see.”
I gleaned from Arguelles that the tools themselves are important, but not as important as true desire and “serious, concentrated, focused study”. And resourcefulness. When he was studying Russian in St. Petersburg in 2001, listening materials for language learners were limited, so he came up with the idea of going to the library for the blind where they had just what he needed: books on tape.
Though new technologies may not change the number of polyliterates in the world, easier access to new technology resources should – hopefully! – make it easier for a larger percentage of citizens across the globe to acquire a working knowledge of multiple languages. And having some ability to understand, converse, read and write in several languages is itself a worthy pursuit. U.S. citizens need to be particularly pro-active in the pursuit of language study; we have been the butt of a linguistic joke for decades:
Q: What’s someone who knows 3 languages called?
A: Trilingual.
Q: What’s someone who knows 2 languages called?
A: Bilingual.
Q: What’s someone who knows 1 language called?
A: American.
This is a well-earned stereotype, I am sorry to confirm, but the combination of increasing global interdependence and decreasing U.S. world dominance may provide the impetus needed to make the above joke obsolete. Monolingual Americans will simply have to learn other languages to remain competitive.
Mr. Arguelles’ children (9 and 7) are half American, half Korean, and have obviously had early exposure to foreign languages that most Americans have not.
LN: “You are American and your wife is Korean, so I assume your children are at least bilingual. Are they learning other languages as well?”
AA: “Actually, yes, they are bilingual but not in the languages you would logically assume. I was working in Lebanon when my youngest was born and my oldest was 2, so their early schooling was in French and Arabic. I only speak French with them and their schooling here in Singapore is in English and Chinese. So, their English is slightly better than their French and they have a passive understanding of Korean as my wife mostly speaks English with them. They speak French between themselves, and have done Spanish immersion programs…”
Get all that?
LN: “And what do you and your wife speak to each other?”
AA: “Mostly English in the home these days, but still Korean when we are out alone, and we also revert to Korean when we don’t want the children to understand exactly what we’re talking about.”
Arguelles’ children may or may not follow in his footsteps and pursue polyglottery with the enthusiasm and determination of their father. Regardless, they will be well versed in multiple languages thanks to the framework he has provided, a particularly healthy position to be in early in the 21st century.
Inspiring or depressing? I’ve decided now: definitely inspiring, the way another’s passion, drive and success often are. With a little diligence, the right tools, and guidance from experts in the field like Prof. Arguelles, the rest of us aspiring polyliterates or polyglots should be able to attain our own personal linguistic goals as well – however modest these may be…
Glyph is getting more and more game-oriented as time goes on. It started as a group of verbivores (pretty much everybody who works here now is bilingual or more), but now the most common second languages here are technology, the mobilizing of skill, the efficient transmission of data, and smart information design. The work demands it – translation projects have gotten more media-complex.
Instead of being just any random man, "the guy" is a semi-fictional character called 
This would sound like an approximate use of semantic analysis, a process that allows users to discover trends or prioritize issues within text – the machine looks for structural patterns and relationships among words and phrases in a large document. Our software uses mathematical algorithms to produce a sortable list of words and phrases that the machine believes are important. The list also includes number of occurrences, a number to describe the term's likely relevance, and sentences that contain each term (to show context). Then, a human can go in and evaluate the system's suggestions, weeding out the silly ideas. For more details about how this works, here's a piece 
