Paging Daniel: Someone Translated My Blog Into German

To Daniel and all other German-speakers:

Someone's started copying my blog posts and translating them into German.

Here's their rendition of this post:

Sie dürften fragen, wenn Sie von einer zynischen Drehung des Gemüts sind, warum ich Bargeld auf Schönheitflüssigkeit und Haar goo fallen lasse, wenn ich deutlich für Geld und Gegenüberstehen von bevorstehenden medizinischen Rechnungen und eine potenzielle Verschiebung festgeschnallt bin.

Jene Frau sollte ihr Haar allein verlassen, dürften Sie denken. Sie sollte Mild benutzen. Oder Setzen Sie besser noch Gleich.

"Beauty fluid" becomes "schonheitflussigkeit," but "hair goo" is "haar goo." ^__^

Hooked On Delhi Phonics

Here's a quick end to the Delhi story. (I'm still in Amritsar, btw -- will write about it soon.)

On my last day in Delhi I met up with a friend whom I had originally met back in August. (He's the one who gave me palmology.)

I wish I had been able to meet up with him earlier. He had a car, and used it to take me to the nice parts of Delhi; National School of Drama, the Parliament buildings, etc.

We stopped at Bengali Market for lunch and I had a delicious chole bature (yes, Niranjana, it was everything you said it would be). Afterwards my friend left me at the National Museum because he had to get to rehearsal.

At the National Museum -- well, I didn't have enough time by half, but I managed to see several of the rooms and wished I could have spent much more time poring over the miniatures. But the most interesting discovery was the room filled with charts of Indian phonetics; that is, charts of how the various Indian alphabets have evolved over the past 2000-odd years.

And as I was staring at the Telugu alphabets, I noticed something fascinating. The original lettering appeared to be an attempt to draw the shape of the mouth while the sound was spoken. In profile. It wasn't a 1-1 correlation, but for the majority of the phonemes, it was pretty darn close.

Why didn't we leave the alphabet like that, do you think? Probably something to do with manuscripts and people adding curlicues and things, and then the flourishes taking over until the original shape of the letter was obscured. At least, that's my guess. ^__^

Indian Higher Ed: My Students

I haven't written much about my class. I've written cute anecdotes about my students, but haven't yet written about my class.

It's a good class. The students are animated, and eager to learn, and have plenty of raw talent.

Their knowledge of theatre is pretty limited; a student studying theatre in the U.S. would have had high school and possibly community theatre experience, but for many of these students, my performance will be the first one they have ever done.

We're doing an adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest. (Yes, we were going to do Alice; but it got changed, shortly before I left.)

The performance is in Telugu entirely, and is being developed improvisatorily. That is, the students and I discuss the events that take place in a particular scene, and then they create the scene onstage in the Telugu vernacular. There's no verse, no "Shakespearean poetry," nothing like that. As one of the visiting faculty commented, "even Shakespeare stole the story of Tempest from another poem; now you are stealing his story and presenting the Andhra version."

The students are very adept at "making something out of nothing," and much more capable of transforming strips of cloth, piece of wood, etc. into myriad and surprising objects than their American peers. I didn't have to teach them how to do that.

I'm not having to teach them much about improvisation, either. If I give a typical "impro-game" scenario (e.g. "a group of people waiting for a bus in the rain"), they will instantly turn it into a playable story. There's a Telugu folk game I watched them play, in which one person starts telling a story and then the narrative is passed around from person to person, which is almost identical to a game played on Whose Line is it Anyway? And they've been playing these kinds of storytelling games all their lives.

I am having to teach them about objective and tactic, about physicality and presence, about blocking and facing and all of those "technical" things. But they're very eager to learn.

What also interests me is the parts of the Tempest story to which my students are drawn. I'll explain: last week, while we were still learning the story (and learning it by rote), I divided the class into small groups and asked each group to act out the story for the rest of the class.

Every group focused their storytelling on two elements: first, that it was Prospero's addiction to magic (and neglect of his kingdom) that caused all of these problems in the first place; and second, the love story between Ferdinand and Miranda. They gave only cursory notice to the "Antonio and Sebastian try to kill Alonso" subplot, and ignored the rude mechanicals entirely. In their retranslation it is a play about a flawed father and two kids who fall in love.

The other interesting question my class put forward was "why does Prospero forgive everyone at the end?" They argued that Antonio should have been punished for attempted murder, and Stephano and Trinculo should have been punished for drunkenness and disobedience. I explained that this play was written near the end of Shakespeare's career, during his "philosophical phase," and that perhaps Shakespeare wanted to set forth a model of peace.

They didn't buy it. "Is there a book I can read that explains it better?" one asked. (I've loaned him my Critical Companion, and will be curious to hear his response to it.)

Anyway, that's where we are, and we're starting to put the play together. More news when I have news to share.

Indian Higher Ed: "Indian Writers In English"

I've started sitting in on another course. This time, I aimed towards the English department, because I figured I had good odds of the course being taught... um... in English. ^__^ (I sat in on a Bharatanatyam course for a few weeks, but the entire instruction was in Telugu and it became difficult to follow.)

I picked "Indian Writers in English" because I thought I might get lucky and find the class discussing a text I had read (or, at least, read about).

I'm going to continue to watch this course for a while. It was very interesting. The discussion, when I sat in, was about whether Indian writers who chose to write in English were being "authentic." Was their choice of English, for example, a strategic move to break into an international market? Or was it a betrayal of their roots and an indication of continued slavishness towards their former colonial masters? Could an Indian writer communicate effectively about the Indian experience in a "non-native" language?

The professor didn't reach a "conclusion" to his line of questioning; instead he left it open-ended for the class to ponder, with the intention of discussing the issue further as the semester progresses.

But he did leave out one argument which puzzled me by its absence.

That is, he left out the fact that for many Indian writers (esp. the "big name" ones), English is in fact their mother tongue; or, perhaps, a shared mother tongue along with Hindi or Bengali or another Indian language. Gurcharan Das and Mahesh Dattani both write about this in the preface to their plays. I can't quote them directly because I don't have the texts with me, but the arguments are thus: "How can we be accused of using a non-native language when we have been speaking English from birth?" Das in particular argues that he writes in both English and Hindi, and that some of his essays and plays can only be written in Hindi, and others only in English.

Anyway. I'll be interested to follow this class.

Lost in Translation

I was with a few of my future students this afternoon when a young man rode by on a bicycle and wolf-whistled at me.

"That man is making noises at you," said one of the students.

"I know," I said. "But I don't like to pay attention to silly people."

My choice of words perplexed the students. "What is silly?" they asked.

For a moment I didn't know what to say. I still don't, really. How does one define "silly?"

I ended up telling them that it was the same thing as stupid, which served the purpose but left me feeling a little bit unsatisfied. Ridiculous might have been closer, but still isn't right. Nor is frivolous, which my students probably wouldn't have understood anyway.

So... I propose a game of Balderdash. No cheating. Leave your definitions of silly in the comments. Tomorrow I'll post a few dictionary definitions, and we'll see who was closest!

On the Limitations of American Accents

(Editor's Note: She's posted this one, then pulled it, then posted it, then pulled it again. She's not sure. She never is, on issues like these, because she knows she can't ever truly understand anything from "the other point of view."

But she's posting it again, anyway, because she thinks her point about American accents not being considered accents is valid, and she'll trust her readers and commenters to straighten her out on the rest of it.)


Hmmm. I read this editorial in the NYT today and thought it was about time I weighed in on the... um... "name thing."

The editorial tells the story of a Hispanic author's experiences with his own name, Manuel Munoz, and his observations that there are two ways of pronouncing it -- the Mexican way and the English way. He notes that he and many of his Hispanic friends and relatives allow their names to be pronounced in the English way for "convenience" and to allow them to "blend in:"

Ours, then, were names that stood as barriers to a complete embrace of an American identity, simply because their pronunciations required a slip into Spanish, the otherness that assimilation was supposed to erase.

I won't argue his experience. Munoz goes on to write about how having an easily-pronounced name increases "access" (in the lit theory sense as well as the literal one) in America. It's overwhelmingly present; there is still discrimination against people whose names sound too "foreign."

(As I've noted before, people today are extra-aware that names are everything.)

But there is another side to this story.

It has to do with Munoz' failure to identify the native-born American accent as an accent, with all the quirks and limitations thereof.

He writes as if it were merely a matter of choice that American speakers (read: white) pronounce his name "Man-WELL" without the elisions that a Spanish speaker would use.

This troubles me, because it speaks to a generality: that the "American accent" is, in this country and increasingly worldwide, viewed as a "default." Think of the dialect coaches in India, working to give call center employees default/blank/all-purpose-American accents.

If this "American accent" (never mind the varieties of speech patterns among Americans) is viewed as default, a few other assumptions begin to tag alongside.

The first is the assumption that people with American accents have the ability to say any phoneme they like, or to slip into any other accent unhindered. (After all, the American accent isn't an accent; it's the opposite of an accent: a blank slate.)

The second is that people with American accents have the ability to hear the difference between the way they pronounce a particular name and the way it is pronounced by the original speaker. (Trust me: when we refer to "Dr. Gooooopta," we really think we're getting it right.)

The third, of course, is that all non-American accents are viewed as variant, deviant, of less value, etc.

I'm not sure what the solutions will be to any of these problems. It will be interesting to see how accents change in the next hundred years; whether the "American" accent is allowed to dominate, or whether it becomes tucked alongside a multiplicity of accents and is no longer a "default." Globalism could take us either way.

But -- at the current moment -- to Mr. Muniz and to everyone who's had a name butchered: Some of us, including me, can't always say the words we'd like to say. Forgive us our flat vowels.

Junie B. Jones Will Fail Freshman Comp (actually, given grade inflation, she'll probably get a B, but that's another topic for another time)

I haven't done a post on education in a long time. I suppose I've been away from the classroom.

But an article in today's NYT caught my eye, and I may be inspired to write my first ever letter back to them.

The article is about parents who wish to ban the Junie B. Jones books, or -- at the least -- prevent them from ever falling into their own children's hands.

Junie B. is a spunky little seven-year-old who has thus far narrated 27 short books about her life and adventures. I've actually read one of her books, because I was curious to know what the fuss was all about.

Parents want to protect their children from Junie B. for three reasons: 1. she disobeys authority, 2. she answers back to people, and 3. she uses nonstandard (or "incorrect") spelling and grammar.

Most of the focus is on #3. This actually delights me, because I am so impressed that parents are concerned that a book might cause their children to absorb poor English.

The NYT and Sample English Doctoral Student Jill Ratzan -- were they really only able to find a grad student to give the expert testimony??? -- deflect the argument as follows:

Just because they read "funnest" doesn't mean they'll learn to say that. I've never heard a kid speak in a Yorkshire accent because they read The Secret Garden or say "Have you any wool?"

(Obviously Ratzan never knew a kid like me, or my sister, or my best friend from elementary school. We used to play Secret Garden and Little Women and all of that and would imitate the dialogue incessantly.)

But Ratzan seems to be missing the mark here. She's only making the connection between reading and speech.

Most people, when put to it, can speak. Speech, and its associated grammatical patterns, are easily absorbed. They're absorbed because we are surrounded by speech.

But there is another, equally important connection: that between reading and writing. I've taught my fair share of undergrads who can speak without any lapses in grammar or syntax, but cannot write a coherent paragraph.

And, strangely enough, there seems to be a missed connection between the two. When undergrads visit my office hours to ask about ways to improve their papers, I often have them read the first several sentences aloud. Or I pick a particularly mangled sentence and ask them to read it.

"Do you hear what is wrong?"

A few get it, but many say "no." Then I ask them to tell me what they are trying to say with the sentence. The spoken result is nearly always clearer than the written one.

My point is that speaking well seems to be a separate activity from writing well; that many people grow into adulthood learning how to speak coherently, but far fewer seem to grow up learning how to write eloquently and understandably.

And this, I think, has a direct correlation with what is read in childhood. We learn about semicolons, for example, by experiencing them; by reading them, becoming immersed in them, and finally understanding (on an intuitive level rather than a punctuation-test one) how they are used.

(Learning about grammar in ninth grade is about as useful as learning about French; it will rarely be mastered that late.)

And Junie B. does not use semicolons, or parallel structure, or subject-verb agreement. But Ramona does, as do Anne and Alice and Tom Sawyer. Even the Babysitters' Club provides readers with clearly presented ideas, even if the ideas themselves are a little dim.

(BTW -- the NYT poses the argument that Tom and Huck used slang and incorrect English and somehow generations of kids turned out all right. But Tom, at least, had Twain as omniscient narrator, telling about his adventures in slightly more standardized prose so that his comical errors might become even more prominent and pointed. Huck, as the sequel, lets Mr. Finn promenade his English-butchering exploits but assumes, perhaps, that the reader is already familiar with the regularities of the language and thus can enjoy the fun.)

I'm not at all advocating banned books. I would be the last person to suggest banning a book. I might suggest, instead, that publishers stop publishing the equivalent of literary junk food, but I can't even justify doing that because I am such a fan of the biggest junk food of all (comics).

So I suppose I can only suggest that perhaps the parents have it right -- that they should limit their children's exposure to Junie B. Give them Ramona instead; they're essentially the same stories (young girl gets into silly mishaps) but much better written. And any kid who can read at a Junie B. level can read Ramona the Pest.

What do you all think? And for the members of Team Parent: what have you done with your children to encourage reading, and what books have you promoted?

Pretty Blue's Voice

Thanks to the additional technology I've... um... imported into my laptop, I can record audio files and share them with whomever I want.

Which means you.

Anyway, it's interesting for me to listen to people's voices for the first time, or to match voices to images or voices to text. It always surprises me, a little. I never expected Garrison Keillor, for example, to look like Garrison Keillor -- his voice seemed to suggest someone soft and pillowy and rounded, but Mr. Keillor is so angular and craggy and off-putting.

So, if you're interested, you may hear my voice below. If you'd rather not have the way my writing voice sounds "in your mind" distorted by the way I actually sound, then obviously don't click it. But I bet you will. It's less than a minute long, and you're curious. ^__^

Click here to hear!

A Message for SepiaMutiny

I know you deal in much larger issues, and that I should really be busying myself thinking about one of them instead, but the one thing that stuck with me after reading your feed today was the discovery that the people on NPR aren't pronouncing "Lakshmi" correctly.

Is it really true? Really?

How is it actually pronounced?

And can you suggest a nice drug to combat the depression that comes alongside learning that even Public Radio can't get their phonemes right, and thus I (a small person with no governmental funding or pledge drives) have no hope?

Blargh.