Saving Endangered Languages…. With Math!

There’s a really interesting article over on Discover Magazine discussing how a mathematician named Anne Kandler used a formula to calculate how many people learning Scottish Gaelic were needed per year in order to keep the language alive (860) in association with the Gaelic Development Agency, so that they could increase their chances of saving the language from extinction, and how we can use her techniques to come up with formulas for other languages in order to save them. Knowing how many new speakers per year are needed to save a language can help programs and governments better target their efforts and budget funds for teaching initiatives. And I think it might also be a good idea to begin international campaigns using these numbers. And it’s nice to know that at least one of the endangered languages on the list stands a really good chance of being saved. So, if you’re thinking about learning a language, I’d encourage you to pick Scottish Gaelic. I may not be much help over here in America, but at least I can help promote the efforts to keep the language going and know that, if you include me, they only need 859 more people this year.

And now the fun part

Where you get to judge my progress and laugh at my mistakes! Woot!! TYG Lesson 2 in three parts:

A Note on Methodology and Tools for Language Learning

When learning a new language, choosing the right textbook or program is really important. The wrong book can lead to frustration, confusion, or cause you to give up entirely. If you’re taking a formal class, a really good teacher might be able to make any book work, but when you’re learning on your own that book might be the difference between success and failure.

So today I thought I would explain the reasons why I chose the book I initially planned to use, why I switched, and why I like the new one better. My reasons for preferring one source over another may not work for you, you may go about learning in a different way, but you might still be able to take something from the way I considered my options. And, the whole discussion can relate back to some observations I made about lesson 2, so you get some videos too. Bonus!

Now, if you’ve been paying attention up to this point, you know that when I began this crazy adventure in blogging I was using a book called Colloquial Scottish Gaelic, and you know that after only a week of working with it, I suddenly switched to something called Teach Yourself Gaelic. If you hadn’t been paying attention… well, now you know. You should try to keep up though.

The reasons I decided to drop CSG are many, but it mainly comes down to the fact that the book was obviously intended to be used in a classroom setting, and I was learning on my own. I was doing a great job of memorizing phrases, and I knew what the meant, but I couldn’t tell you what I was saying. I had no idea which word meant what or how to formulate a sentence. I couldn’t plug new vocabulary into basic structures. I was just learning a semantics without the structure that underlies it. And without tests and grades, I wasn’t retaining anything. I needed a book that would teach me how to make sentences, not recite them.

so I went looking, and I came across a simple little book called Teach Yourself Gaelic. Now, this is actually an entire course, with two textbooks and audio files corresponding to units in the main book. (You can find the whole course on Amazon), but I’m not bothering with all that. I’m just using the little grammar book by Boyd Robertson that goes along with it. This little textbook has a very simple structure; each lessons begins by introducing a new grammatical rule or two (word order, inflectional morphology, etc), then gives you a list of vocabulary words that will be used in this lesson, and finally asks you to complete two exercises and read a few paragraphs. Exercise one gives you a number of sentences using the grammatical rule for the lesson in Gaelic and asks you to translate them into English. Exercise 2 gives you some very very similar sentences in English and has you translate them into Gaelic. and that’s where the genius is. Nowhere is there a direct translation of any of the sentences. But by working translation from one direction to the other and back you can start to identify patterns and understand more than just the particular rule your presented with, but corresponding rules the book does not address. And, because you are often expected to figure it out for yourself, rather than be presented with some lesson and dialogue and translation, your investing more brain power and retaining more information. Using the same basic sentences and building them in new and complex ways also causes you to review the old information as you practice the new. It’s a system perfect for someone doing exactly what the title says, teaching themselves Gaelic.

For an example, you can look at Lesson 2, which teaches you to use various forms of the verb ‘to be’ to form statements, questiions, negative statements, and negative questions. In the list of vocabulary words, you’re given ‘seo’ and ‘sin,’ which mean ‘this/these/this is’ and ‘that/those/that is’ respectively. You are, however, never given any instructions on how to use them, so the natural assumption is that they work the same way the equivalent words do in English. To say this cat, you assume you should say ‘seo cat.’ So when presented with the sentence ‘A bheil an seomar seo blath’ you translate it to ‘is the room this warm’. seems right. But later on you’re given the English sentence ‘isn’t this room warm’ and asked to translate it to Gaelic. You realize that the two sentences should be almost the same, that the demonstrative functions as an adjective in Gaelic, and can be used in conjunction with a definite article, unlike in English. You’ve figured out how a part of speech functions without being told. Rather than rote memorization, we have active analysis, which leads to greater comprehension and flexibility.

This style of teaching language has taken a lot of hard hits recently. There are complaints that the simple ‘see Spot run’ style sentences feel useless, that students get frustrated because they aren’t being taught to say anything that might actually be used in conversation, and that the method is too far removed from the way we learned our first language. And I don’t disagree. My video lessons are full of snarky asides about the strange conversations we’re presented with with. But that’s a problem with the writers, not the system. We simply need to change the vocabulary we pick to be more relevant to our students and try writing conversations that people might actually have, with an obvious connection between thoughts. Which is easy to do. We simply put new words which are the apppropriate parts of speech and plug them into the grammatical structure you’ve been taught. Which is precisely why this system is so good. Once you understand how to formulate a sentence of a certain type, you can take new words you learn later and use them in meaningful ways. The conversational method does not share this feature. By presenting dialogues without any explanation of the underlying structure, you are limited in what you might say. You aren’t able to apply your knowledge to new situations. You won’t talk, you’ll recite.

And as for the movement to make second-language acquisition as similar to first language acquisition as possible; I think that’s just plain silly. Yes, immersion will cerainly help you learn a language faster and more effectively, it requires that you actually be immersed. This cannot happen in a classroom. Immersion works because it increases your motivation; it puts you in a position where your survival, or at least immediate feeling of safety and security, entirely depends on you learning to communicate. The language is necessary, so you put your brain in overtime to learn it. This is, indeed, the way we learn our first language. But no matter how much your teacher stresses that grades are important, they do not produce that level of motivation. Instead, we should embrace the fact that we already have a language under our belts. We have metalinguistic knowledge that allows us to better focus our efforts and grasp rules and morphological changes far faster than any child. We can arrange the order we teach various concepts so that they build on each other logically. We can change the system if it isn’t working. Children simply do not have this option. We have control and the ability to improve. Shifting to this conversational format because students want to learn just the part of the language that’ll help them be a tourist for a week is doing a disservice to those students. Instead, we should be encouraging them to learn the structures that will give them the freedom respond appropriately in any situation. Teach them to search for the rules that allow the world to work instead of just using the results.

Wow, that was quite a rant. But now that the serious stuff is out of the way, you can has videos! Namely, me working my way through Lesson 2 in three parts (which I am now going to put in a new entry since this one’s so awfully long.)

Addressing that Atrocious Accent

I’ve been thinking about the troubles I’ve been having with pronunciation, and I think I’ve managed to identify my two main problems. First, my ‘ch’ sound, that fricative sound down in the back of your throat, sounds far too much like the German version. In German the ‘ch’ in, for instance, ich, is a low drawn out sound. Sort of like a cat hissing. The Scottish ‘ch’ is, on the other hand, a harder, stronger, higher sound. It’s like a k with a bad throat cold. Loch sounds like lock for a reason. Ich is closer to ish.

And then there’s the rhythm of my sentences. Gaelic has a kind of sing-song, melodic flow to it which comes from the stress pattern of words. The accent is always on the first syllable. English, however, uses stress to mark case or importance, since we don’t have endings to do that for us. So our stress patterns are variable. When I read Gaelic sentences, I have a tendency to place the stresses where they would be in English, which makes me sound wrong. Especially because I’m also infecting improperly. Tonal inflection in many sentences is a reflection of the semantics. We change the pitch of our voices to indicate what type of statement we’re making, and we adjust our pitch at various points in the statement to identify important information. So, in a language with a subject-verb-object structure, pitch often starts high and lowers throughout the sentence, jumping up again at the end if it’s a question. This is because we’re marking the subject, the important thing. However, Gaelic doesn’t use that structure. So when my vocal intonation reflects that structure, the tones don’t match up with the proper words. I sound like a bad actor who doesn’t know what they’re supposed to be feeling. I have to start thinking in a verb-subject-object format. And the same order discrepancy has me putting pauses in the wrong places. You pause between constituent parts of a sentence to mark the words as part of a group. I keep pausing after nouns (because English puts nouns at the end of noun phrases), which makes the adjectives sound like they aren’t modifying anything. It sounds odd.

But now that I recognize where I’m going wrong, I can be more aware of my vocal patterns. And thanks to Simon over at Omniglot, who sent me a bunch of really helpful resources, I have some pronunciation guides and audio files to listen to. I should be sounding more Scottish in no time!

I think language teachers should pay more attention to this kind of thing. If my Japanese teacher had explained to me that I was inflecting improperly because I was using the rhythm of a language with a different structure, I might have stopped sounding like I was practicing my racist generic Asian accent. It also helps the structure of the language become more natural to you when your vocal patterns reflect it. It gets easier and faster to translate things when you say them with the right pattern. A little linguistic knowledge of the language you’re learning can really help sometimes.

Later on today I’ll put up the videos for Lesson 2 from TYG and we’ll see if my speaking has improved. Fingers crossed.

The Adjectival Inflection Question

There is a strange inflectional morphology in Scottish Gaelic called lenition, where word initial consonants are made weaker through the addition of h just behind them when in certain environments. Teach Yourself Gaelic introduces this initially in lesson 1A, and expands on it later. All it has to say in 1A, which is mostly about adjectives, is that adjectives modifying feminine nouns are lenited. So, for instance, take the word beag [BAY uck]. When used with a masculine noun, it appears in its standard form (eg. ‘an cat beag’ or ‘the small cat’) But when used with a feminine noun, the initial sound changes (eg. ‘an iolair bheag’ [VAY uck]). The stop becomes a fricative. Since not all sounds are capable of lenition (vowels aren’t, and in some cases S’s aren’t) there are instances where the sound change doesn’t occur in this environment, but for the most part it’s there. And feminine noun phrases aren’t the only environments that cause it. Direct address of a person leads to lenition, but only if it’s a woman, and the adjective gle [glay] (which means very) causes lenition when it modifies another adjective. Words can be lenited when they are in specific cases or when proceeded by by possessive determiners in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd masculine persons. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern by which I can determine what causes the sound change though. It’s grammatical, not phonological, but the instances don’t seem to have anything in common. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t, kind of randomly. Why should masculine nouns lenite in genitive and feminine in nominative? Why not the other way around? I’m really curious as to why the change happens.

You’ll also note that in Scottish Gaelic the adjective follows the noun it’s modifying. I was surprised to learn that that is actually the case in most languages. Twice as many languages use a noun-adjective formation than use the adjective-noun structure found in English. I guess we just like being the underdogs.

That’s really all the linguistically interesting stuff you can pull out of Lesson 1A, which I really think could easily have just been included in Lesson 1, rather than given it’s own super-special section. It was only two pages. But, despite my complaints about formatting and lack of creativity in the text, I’m really glad I switched to this book. While it would be nice to have audio to improve my speaking, I find my ability to read Gaelic has dramatically improved in the past couple of days. I’m retaining the information well and I’m picking it up fast. CSG had you memorize phrases and then told you what they meant, but you still didn’t know what you were saying. The individual words were just as foreign as before you started. By explaining how to formulate any and all sentences, TYG allows me to expand beyond just recitation. I can figure out new words in context and use old words in new places. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I really think that’s a better system.

You can see for yourself the considerable improvement in translation as I stumble through this sections exercises.

I’m Back Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

I can’t bring myself to leave a lesson only half finished when I’ve been so lax lately already, so here’s part two of Teach Yourself Gaelic Lesson 1, in which I tackle exercise two, which is pretty much the same thing as exercise one, except in reverse. Which I’m afraid doesn’t make it terribly interesting as far as linguistic analysis is concerned. N o new information. I did however have a lot of snarky things to say about the semantic choices made by the textbook’s authors, so that’s fun. The people who write these things really do come up with the strangest sentences to have you translate. If I ever write a language textbook, I cross my heart anything I ask the students to translate will be stolen directly from Garfield or Calvin and Hobbes or something. Quirky stuff, so once they figure out what it means you’ll get a room full of startled laughter. Anyways, enough of my rambling. Just see it for yourself.

The Prodigal Linguist Returns

Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s kinda been a bit. I promise I haven’t forgotten about this blog or given up on learning Scottish Gaelic. i just got super busy there for a minute. I work in a restaurant, and my employer took a good 70% of the crew off to Vegas on vacation. I was not part of that 70%. Instead, I stayed behind and covered everyone else. So yeah, busy busy busy.

It doesn’t help that I got really frustrated with CSG. I was putting a ton of work in, but I didn’t feel like I was learning the language at all. I could sputter off some basic phrases when prompted, sure, but I barely knew what I was saying. I wasn’t getting anywhere.

So I’ve switched to Teach Yourself Gaelic. It doesn’t have an audio file with it, which makes me sad, but the written pronunciations are included with each word, and I can supplement it with the thousand audio files and flashcard programs I have. And I like the format sooooo much better. By the end of the first lesson I’m already translating some pretty complicated sentences, and I really feel like I understand how they’re formulated. I know what I’m saying, and I’ve already memorized the vocabulary list for this section. I feel like I’m getting somewhere.

I think that is hugely important in second language learning, that sense of accomplishment as you begin to grasp the words or sounds or grammars you’re trying to learn. I know a lot of people are down on the old-fashioned style of teaching language, where you memorized lists of words and then had someone teach you grammar. Contemporary teachers are adopting more conversational models. But I find that there’s a sense of comprehension the old system has that I miss in the new one, a feeling similar to that of putting puzzle pieces together and beginning to see the underlying picture. While the conversational method might, in the long run, increase fluency and shorten learning time, it can only do that if people stick with it. And the lack of immediate and obvious improvement can be really frustrating.

I think maybe we would be better combining the two, so that students can feel like they’re getting somewhere and learning something while still being taught to converse and think in the right way.

Anyway- here’s the video of the first half of Teach Yourself Gaelic Lesson 1.

This lesson focuses mainly on grammar and introducing some vocabulary, and there are some really interesting things about the Scottish language to learn here. For one thing, most of the world’s languages use a word order that is subject-initial, but SG is one of only 120 languages using a verb-initial structure. (You can look at the charts of which languages use which orders over here. Additionally, SG is one of only 98 languages to have a definite article but no indefinite (thanks to WALS again, you can see the list here). I’m really curious if there’s any sort of connection between those features. I didn’t see anything that stood out immediately, but a closer look might show some correlation. There’s a few other things I noticed just about the structure of the language and possible patterns, but I’ll save those for Lesson 1 Pt 2, which I plan on having up by the end of the day.

Language change is weird, man

My SG book is teaching me the paradigm for the verb ‘to be’ today, and I was noticing the personal pronouns, which are as follows:
I- mi
you- thu
he/she- e/si
we- sinn
y’all- sibh
they- iad
you(f)- sibh
I though it was funny that the singular pronouns are so very similar to their English equivalents, but the plurals are way off base, and I was curious if English plural pronouns somehow got changed from Germanic roots to Romance roots. So I compared other Indo-European pronouns. And this is where it gets really strange. Observe:
German French Italian Spanish Danish
Ich je io yo jeg
du tu tu tu du
er/sie il/elle egli/elle el/ella han/hur
wir nous noi nosotras vi
sie ils essi ellos de
ihr vous voi vosotras I
Sie illes lei ellos de

You might notice that you singular is very similar all the way across the board. Makes sense, they’re all from the same family. But everything else goes crazy.

English and German use similar first person singular pronouns (ich and I), while SG randomly uses what sounds like the English and German first person accusative. French, Italian, and Spanish are quite similar, as you’d expect. But Danish (a Germanic language) uses something very close to theirs. Where did that come from?

And third person all seems totally normal; with Eng, Ger, and SG all very similar while Fr, It, and Sp are grouping up with a totally different set of sounds. And then Danish plays the wild card, pulling out the third person accusative for it’s nominative case.

For first person plural there’s we/wir/wi for Eng/Ger/Dan and nous/noi/nosotras for Fr/It/Sp. The Spanish is a little strange, but not too bad, all in all it’s about what you’s expect. But SG has sinn, which comes out of nowhere. That’s not even similar to another case, it’s just completely new.

Second person plural has everybody just about back to normal (English doesn’t count, since we don’t really have one, and Danish is a bit strange, but I can see where it might have come from). But English gets to be the odd one out in he third person, they doesn’t sound anything like the others.

And then you plural happens, and everyone across the board just borrows their plural you except Italian, which seems to be using some variant of second person singular.

I’m really curious why it is that every single pronoun group has one member of the language family that just does something seemingly completely random, except second person singular. What is it about that particular pronoun that keeps it so regular? And why a different oddball in every case? Why isn’t it Danish that’s just always a little weird? I imagine my sample size is just too small, but it makes for a very strange pattern. Anybody know what’s going on?

A Video, Oh Noes

So, I know it’s been a bit, but I promise I haven’t forgotten about this blog.  Finals week slowed my progress down a bit, but I’m still working.  I’ll be posting something about the last half of Chapter 1 tomorrow.  Tonight, however, I have a special treat.  Here’s a video of me mangling the pronunciation of some “useful phrases” I found on the interwebs.  If any Scottish Gaelic speakers out there want to tell me how I’m doing on actually saying this stuff aloud, I’d really appreciate it.  I know my accent’s atrocious, but there just aren’t a lot of examples out there to base it on.  The people in the learn Gaelic videos all sound so stilted.  So I’d really love some tips from native speakers, or just people who’ve been learning longer than me.  Anyway, here’s the video, laugh away.

 

Scottish Gaelic Day One: Basic training

I think the first few days of learning any language are the hardest.  The words all look so very very foreign.  Even if the language is in the same family as your native one all similarities hide when you look at a page of words in a completely unfamiliar language. It becomes a bunch of gibberish.  I have a feeling a lot of people who try to learn a language on their own give up in the first week.  And I can’t say I blame them.  Flipping through a page or two of a language book and finding you can’t make heads or tails of any of it is kinda scary.  It looks so esoteric you are just not smart enough to learn it.  I think language books should make a point not to put large blocks text in the language you’re learning anywhere on the first five pages, so as not to freak people out.  Because I’m good at languages; I pick them up pretty quick, I find the patterns on which they’re built with relative ease, and my knowledge of language families helps me find similarities between languages.  I went into this with a level head, knowing I’m perfectly capable of learning this language. I almost gave up after looking at a page of Gaelic text.

It’s the orthography of Gaelic that’s scary.  Their spelling system is almost as complicated as English’s.  Lot’s of single sounds are represented by two letters together, or could be represented in two different ways, or is represented by a letter which also represents an entirely different sound, or aren’t pronounced at all. And sometimes there are letters in a word whose primary function is to tell you how to pronounce some other letter. And there are h’s everywhere.  It looks completely impossible.

So I decided I needed a plan of attack, a way of breaking the language up into manageable chunks.  I downloaded the Colloquial Scottish Gaelic e-book and associated audio files, and I’m going to work through it carefully, repeating and rewriting all dialogues and completing all exercises, half a chapter a day.  In addition, I found a website that has lots of videos in Scottish Gaelic with good English subtitles.  I’ll watch one of those a day too, in order to get a semi-immersive aspect going.  And for later, once I have a pretty good grasp of the language, I found a bunch of Gaelic fairytales I can try translating, to improve my fluency.    And every fifth day will be review of everything I’ve learned thus.  Oh, and as a bonus I wrote down a pretty long list of useful or entertaining Gaelic phrases so I could familiarize myself with the spelling system in a less overwhelming way, one sentence at a time.  I may also post video or audio files of me reading the dialogues and stuff so that, on the off chance this gets any actual followers and one or more happen to speak Gaelic, I can get some feedback on pronunciation

I think it’s a pretty good plan, actually. I have no idea how long it’ll take to get to a reasonable level of ability (enough to be able to carry on short conversations an read with average skill) but I hope to be ready to pick a new language in no more than six months.  Then I’ll continue to improve my Gaelic with reading and videos while I start learning the basics of something else.