More non-English phobias

The Telegraph (in the UK) published a piece about how immigrants should be required to learn English before they settle in England.

I love the ironic ignorance of history, linguistics, and anthropology that leads to articles like this. And I love the totally ironic error in the sub-headline:

The inability to speak a host country’s language ... is a very reasonable requirement of any immigrant.

I guess the Normans don't belong in England. The Saxons came after the Angles, and THEY replaced the Celts, who were themselves cultural and linguistic invaders. None of them spoke the "native" languages.

But what is more ironic is that the author claims that we need to all speak one language so that we don't have "dangerous divisions". This is a totally unsubstantiated claim; lots of countries do just fine with minority populations that speak different languages; but then the author goes and cites CANADA as an example of a country that requires a language test to get in. Um... maybe someone should tell him that we don't all speak the same language in Canada? Yeesh. I guess we're dangerously unstable? Oh wait... nope, it's just a few crackpots that occasionally cause the odd ruckus about Quebec, while meanwhile separatist sentiment waxes and wanes. Oh wait, didn't England have a problem of this sort? Like, hm, Ireland? I'm pretty sure they speak English there.

I addressed some of the points about immigrants learning new languages in my previous post on this topic. To sum it up, I don't think it makes sense to force immigrants to learn the language when we don't force natives to learn the language. Research has shown (and your own intuition should also show this) that the children of immigrants assimilate quite quickly and within a couple generations they are indistinguishable from the natives. This is most true when it comes to language, as children learn languages really really easily.

What this all amounts to is that language is used as a proxy for racism and xenophobia. You can't shut the door on immigrants, you can't single out all the Muslims or Indians who want to move to England, but maybe you can raise the bar high enough that it's impractical for those people to move there.

As an aside, Joshua Gans wrote about his taking of the English test for moving to Canada. Frankly it's quite absurd that an economics professor from Australia, who has published books in English, is made to take a test to prove that he speaks the language. Surely this is something that would be immediately apparent from a simple 15-minute interview? Testing native speakers is a waste of time and money, and testing other immigrants is xenophobia and racism.

Mandatory Language Tests for Immigrants

It seems that all skilled immigrants to Canada will need to pass a language proficiency test.  Even those whose native language is English and whose careers are based on daily use of the English language.

At first glance this seems like a reasonable idea.  The truth is it is a dangerous tool which can be used to enforce racist and xenophobic policies under the guise of "integration".  However, it seems like enough of the commentors on the Star's website disagree with me. When I read the comments I was disappointed to find that most of those writing were supportive of the new policy and hostile to foreigners.  My own comment achieved a stunning 16 "disagrees", a new record for me.

The article talks about a woman who was born in New York, graduated from Harvard and has been practising law for 13 years.  Clearly there is no need to test this person on her language ability.  To suggest that anyone in the government Canada is even qualified to pass judgment on her language skills is ridiculous.  Yet she must prepare for the language test while simultaneously managing her home life and career.

Wait, what?

She has to prepare?  Many of the comments on the Star were questioning this.  Why should she need to prepare if she is so confident of her language skills?

Well, the sad truth is that language tests are notorious for being debatable about their content.  Thankfully, the test in question doesn't have any grammar questions (despite newspaper reports to the contrary), and seems to be completely about reading and writing comprehension.  But the truth is that any test which measures "language" is going to be strongly influenced by how well the test-taker understands the desired answer to a question.  A person's grasp of language is not necessarily related to their grasp of test-taking.  And since she must pay to take the test, it behoves her to prepare, so that her money isn't wasted by an over-zealous and pedantic test-grader.

Besides the dubious nature of testing a native English speaker's grasp of English, and the obvious waste of resources this entails, is the question of whether or not this exercise has any merit whatsoever.

The comments on the Star were full of sad, sad stories about going into a shop and not being able to find an employee who spoke English.  My heart nearly broke into a million pieces as these poor, poor people recounted their tales.  The ordeals of a lady who couldn't find an English speaker in a shop in Chinatown.  The escapades of a gentleman who was unable to locate the kolbasa in the grocery store and couldn't find an employee who understood his question.

All of these stories have something in common.  The speaker suffers from an absurdly inflated sense of entitlement.  They act as if they are being personally injured or insulted when they go somewhere and someone doesn't speak their language.  It never occurs to them that THEY are somehow flawed for not knowing more than one language.  They just bitch and whine that multiculturalism is a failure.  They ignore the fact that all of them are descended from people who didn't speak the local language when they arrived: none of their ancestors spoke the languages of the Natives.  The hypocrisy goes further, however, because these same people are the type that go into Quebec and complain that the people don't speak English.

Ignoring the petty 'foreign employee in a shop' syndrome, the bigger question is whether or not non-local-speakers are even useful to the society at large.  It should be pretty clear that they are.  There is no reason that a doctor can't practice medicine in Chinese or in Italian if they have Chinese or Italian patients.  This doctor may have difficulty reading the laws on what drugs are legal, or other various tasks, but isn't it the job of the medical college to regulate such things? If the college decided to offer its services in Chinese (because the Chinese population will soon be the biggest minority group in Canada) would that somehow harm the English-speaking doctors and patients?  For regulated professions we have licensing and examination boards to keep out people who can't function in those roles.  For any other task, why does it matter if the person is illiterate in English?  The electrician who comes to your house to install a new light fixture doesn't need to speak English.  He needs to know how to install wiring, and he needs to know how to communicate with YOU.  If you (hypothetically) only speak German, then that's what he needs to speak.

Furthermore, it's also pretty obvious that monolingualism is an artifact of (some) adult immigrants only.  Their children will always (always!) learn the local language.  They will be bilingual, speaking their home language at home and their local language at school and work.  And their children are (sadly) almost always monolingual in the local language.  This always happens, as long as the family stays in the country.  So any worries about Canada turning into some country where nobody can speak to anybody are just ridiculous.

Finally, Canada is supposed to be a free country.  If I decide that I want to speak nothing but Esperanto, and I teach my children only this language, and I home-school them, and throw away my TV, is this not my choice?  Sure, nobody will be able to communicate with me.  But don't I have the right? Don't I have the right to try to find work at an Esperanto-friendly business, dealing with Esperanto-speaking customers?  Don't I have the right to fail at that task?  Of course I do.  But I was BORN in Canada.  Newcomers aren't allowed to fail and aren't allowed to even try.

Chinese Numbers

One thing I've found tricky to learn in Chinese is the numbering system. Every language has their own way to name the numbers and numeric concepts, but Chinese is the strangest to me.

First of all, there are no distinct words for numbers bigger than 10 (十), until you get up to 100(百), 1000 (千), etc. This makes it easy to remember but conversely more confusing to hear for me. For example, the word for "twenty" is actually pronounced as if you were saying "two ten" (二十) in English. But this means that a word like 74 is prounced "seven ten four" (七十四). This is fairly logical and easy to understand, but because I'm still getting used to this I have to first hear the individual numbers and then recombine them in my head to form their actual values.

It gets harder as you get to larger numbers. First, there are words for 100 and 1000, but there is also a word for 10,000 (万). 100,000 is ten-tenthousands (十万). This means that you have to group numbers by 4 digits instead of 3: The number 300,223 isn't "three hundred thousand two hundred twenty three", it's 30'0223 - "thirty ten-thousands two hundreds two tens three" (三十万二百二十三). This makes it hard to convert the numbers unless you've totally internalized the different representations.

Oh, and you usually don't use er2 (二) to say "two something", you have to use liang (两). So if you want to say "Two dogs", you don't say er zhi gou (二只狗), you say liang zhi gou (两只狗).

Then there's the convention used for talking about discounts. In English we often talk about how much on sale something is: 25% off, for exmaple. In Chinese you say how much is left to pay: da qi zhe (打七折) would be "on sale for 7 tenths." That means it's 30% off. If you want to say 25% off, you'd say 7 tenths 5, or da qi zhe wu (打七折). As far as I know, you can't sell something for more than 90% off: 90% off would be da yi zhe (打一折), or 1 tenth, but you can't say da ling zhe jiu (0 tenths 9)(打零折九).

Sri Lankan Civil War

The Sri Lankan Civil War has been in the news a lot lately, especially here in Toronto where a large number of Tamil people have been protesting daily, calling on the Canadian government and the UN to intervene. It's hard to know what to make of the situation since accurate information is very scarce and both sides have their share of atrocities. Yet the situation in Sri Lanka serves as a reminder of the balancing act we have here in Canada, where there is a sizable minority of people who want to make their own country by carving their province out. The situation in Sri Lanka is roughly the same as if the FLQ had been more effective in their initial attempts to start a civil war in Quebec.

It's very interesting to note that there are linguistic aspects to both our struggle and the one in Sri Lanka. On Language Log there is a post describing this history. It's a very interesting article. To summarize it, when Sri Lanka was under the control of the British, the civil service was run in English. American missionaries had been very successful in teaching Tamil youth English, and thus the Tamil were a big part of the civil service; only about a quarter of the people are Tamil but half the civil service was Tamil. After Sri Lanka gained its independence in 1948 there was call to change the official language of the civil service to a local language. Initially it was intended to be Sinhala and Tamil, together, but Sinhalese nationalists, assisted by numerous lay Buddhists and activist Buddhist monks, organized emotive and impressive processions demanding a Sinhala-only policy. They called Tamils parasites, said that Sinhalese and Buddhism were under threat by the Tamils, and demanded a Sinhalese-only state. The result was the passage of the Sinhala-Only Act of 1956. The Tamil responded by protesting; the protesters were attacked by Sinhala protesters, and riots ensued. Over the years, the situation further deteriorated, and even attempts to elevate the Tamil language's status in the 70s and 80s didn't solve the problem.

Chinese Perapera-kun

I've recently discovered a great new tool to help me learn Chinese: a firefox addon which displays pinyin and english translations for Chinese characters. It's pretty nifty: it shows the translation and Pinyin for the character next to the cursor and, if that character is the start of a common compound word or phrase, it shows the translation for that phrase.

Beijing's Olympic Inside Joke

The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing feature a set of nauseating mascots called Fuwa (福娃). The basic idea is alright (one mascot for each olympic ring) but I find the art style they used to be not to my liking. I suspect millions of Chinese children love these critters and millions of Chinese parents hate them.

But the funny thing about these mascots is their names. Beibei (贝贝) is the Fish, Jingjing (晶晶) is the Panda, Huanhuan (欢欢) is the Olympic Flame, Yingying (迎迎) is the Tibetan Antelope and Nini (妮妮) is the Swallow. (I just noticed that the official web page for the Fuwa explains the names and the joke but I'll explain it again here). If you take each name's character and put them together (贝晶欢迎妮) you get "Beijing huanying ni". Which sounds like "北京欢迎你", or "Beijing haunying ni", which translates to "Beijing welcomes you". This is a nice sentiment but only people who speak Mandarin can see the joke; if you speak Cantonese or some other dialect the words "贝晶欢迎妮" are meaningless and the pun is lost. And if you don't speak any Chinese at all you obviously won't see the hidden meaning either.

Singing in Chinese

My last post about Mandarin was related to tones. Tones convey important meaning but they are a hindrance when you want to sing, since songs have their own tones. The Chinese solution: ignore the tones.

A popular Chinese song, 月亮代表我的心 (The Moon Represents My Heart), demonstrates this. This song, originally performed by Teresa Teng, demonstrates it in action. Here is the same song, performed by Leslie Cheung. It's interesting to note that Mr. Cheung is speaking in Cantonese to the audience before singing the song in Mandarin. His pronounciation of the words is slightly different than Ms. Teng's but that's not really suprising.

The other interesting thing about singing in Chinese is that some of the words are mis-pronounced, at least in this song. The word 的 is normally pronounced 'de' but both singers pronounce it 'di'. That sounds odd to me but since I don't listen to Chinese music I can't say if it's commonplace or not.

For more information about 月亮代表我的心, check out this link.

Get Fuzzy on Chinese

This Get Fuzzy comic is, I think, a challenge for Mandarin students everywhere:

More Mandarin Lessons

Last time I discussed learning Mandarin I mentioned a few things about characters. Today I'm talking about tones.

In Mandarin there are 4 tones (or 5 if you count the 'neutral' tone). The tones are numbered 1 through 4 and represent the pitch of the word. The first tone is high pitch, the second tone is rising, the third tone is falling-rising, and the fourth tone is falling.

Tones are very important because there are lots of words that are indistinguishable except for the tone. The classic example are the words mā (媽) and mǎ (馬). The first word means mother and the second means horse. The first word is pronounced with the first tone while the second is pronounced with a 3rd tone. This musicality is the only way to distinguish between the two words when spoken in isolation. In a complete sentence, you can sometimes guess the word based on the context, but it can be unclear.

Consider the following example:

English: Please ask me.
Chinese: Qǐng wèn wǒ.

If you mispronounce the middle word, using the 3rd tone instead of the 4th tone, wèn (問) becomes wěn (吻), which changes the sentence to "Please kiss me". While this could be an extremely useful phrase, using it in the wrong situation can lead to problems.

Mandarin Lessons

I am studying Mandarin. This is an interesting language to learn because it has a long history which is all new to me. My native French and English languages I take for granted, but learning a completely foreign language, from a place like China, makes for a lot of new facts.

For example, I learned that Cantonese is older than Mandarin. This is shown by comparing classical Chinese literature to modern Cantonese and Mandarin. Poetry, for example, probably won't rhyme if read in the wrong dialect, and classical poetry usually sounds best in Cantonese because it rhymes and flows better.

What makes learning Chinese even trickier is that the written words are completely disconnected from the spoken words. In English, if you know how to pronounce "turn" and "key" you can probably figure out "turkey". In Chinese, however, the written words are just symbols, and knowing the shape of a symbol tells you little or nothing about the pronunciation.

There is one class of exceptions: Chinese characters made up of a meaning part and a sound part. A good example is the word for Mom¹:

媽

The left half of that symbol is the radical for "Woman" while the right half is the radical for "Horse". The reason for the Horse is because both mom and horse are pronounced 'ma'². Personally I find it funny that 'Horse' gets its own symbol but 'Mom' does not.

Next time: how using the wrong tone can lead to embarrassment.

Notes:
1. The word for "Mom" is actually 媽媽, as in 'mama'.
2. The words for horse and mother have different tones, which is how Chinese speakers distinguish them.