Grammar, lesson 1

This is a memory from my university years, studying linguistics in French and English. My teachers then had a talent for giving examples – examples that I still remember 15 years later.

So there was this campaign promoting lamb’s lettuce (!) at the time when I was supposed to learn about theme vs rheme. And time has proved the catch line was just what I needed to remember it forever!

What you want to talk about = theme.

What you want to say about it = rheme.

It’s that simple: La mâche, ça change de la salade. (Lamb’s lettuce, it’s a change from lettuce)

And even though…

Not sure about this one…

Excuse me, do you speak Earthian?

Although not a big fan of sci-fi, I’m always fascinated by the way we imagine other forms of life and other types of civilization. Fascinated, as well as disappointed: what our imagination creates never seems to reach the infinite possibilities of what could exist. And then I come across this article gently making fun of Star Trek writers for imagining a planet with 18 billion people and only 3 languages. Ha ha, so simplistic! So, I read the article and Chomsky is quoted, together with the universal features of the languages we know on Earth. And apparently “Chomsky has even argued that if a Martian linguist were to come to Earth, they’d conclude that all 6 billion of us speak just one language“. I mean, it’s Chomsky, right ? What can I say… Just that linguists inventing languages for sci-fi movies will have to puzzle over different forms now. Not “same, but different”, because that’s still earthian dialects, but DIFFERENT different. Bon courage !

Pay attention: it may not be as foreign as you think.

What do linguists do? They probably don’t agree on this (either). Well, some of them are historians, or archaeologists, of words. Check out what their job is about in this super-simple, gorgeous TED-Ed animation that also reminds us that languages are far more than a linguistics matter. They ask questions – and sometimes give answers – about our histories, our societies, our politics.

Do you know a good language school there?

That’s a question I often get from students or friends travelling to France. They trust me for having taught there for several years, which was, I have to say, a fruitful experience. The thing is that there isn’t one school that is good for everyone, nor one teacher, so I get a little embarrassed to give a strait answer.

However, there is a relevant clue that can help assessing the quality of a school: their use of education technologies. They’re equiped with smartboards? Fine. They have a computer room? A bit old-fashioned, but why not. They provide a tablet with each registration? Good. All those tools are cool, they are fun and often a way for a language institution to show how modern and professionnal it is. Many teachers are trained to use those technologies efficiently, adding dynamics to their lessons. “Dynamics”. Not “interactions”. Interactions in the language being our goal.

Now if the website claims that the school offers an interactive learning BECAUSE they use technology, then you know the marketing guy doesn’t know a thing about language learning. Digital white boards are not interactive, neither are tablets. Interaction in language is based on communication, and communication only exists if there are at least two conscious persons trying to address each other. No such thing when you’re studying on a software. Communication and interaction involve people. Some institutions offer special classes based on the technology tool: you’ll have computer classes, tablet classes, and so on. Just run away: you want to learn a language, right? So the point should be the skills that you will build, and the people you’re going to use these skills with, not the type of screen involved.

It’s a money-saving method for big, international language institutes to develop softwares and to get rid of skilled and experimented teachers. That’s why the emphasis is put on convincing the customers that they will learn better with a machine. But you want better than that. You deserve better. You deserve to have a real person with real skills, real empathy and real interaction capacity to help you achieve your goal of learning a foreign language.

You picked the right language to learn

 

That is, IF you’re currently learning French, IF you’re planning to use it by 2050 and IF the study led by Natixis is somehow right. Mainly due to French speakers presence on all continents and its widespread use in several growing African countries, this language’s “rayonnement” isn’t over. This article on Forbes summarizes the results of the study, and may give you motivation and confidence to keep brushing up your French.

Education is…

Education is what people do to you. Learning is what you do to yourself.”

Joi Ito

Lost in the universals

Language universals are an old memory from university: merely mentionned as a field for lunatic linguists, they were an outdated utopia, to which our teachers would always oppose the infinite diversity of languages. I was then surprised when I came across this article (by Jacques François, in French), quoting the collection gathered by the university of Konstanz, The Universals Archive.

2029 linguistic laws are listed, coming from recent or older sources, with their counter-examples and comments by Frans Plank, the project’s leader. You can browse by number: from 1 to 2029!… or search by domain (phonology, syntax, semantics…) or keyword. Every article is about a very specific point that is common to many, most, or all languages in the world. And they contain a LOT of jargon. Ready? “IF alignment is ergative for some rule(s), THEN alignment tends to be accusative for other rules, or also for the same rule(s) in other contexts”. So? 

I got lost in that archive, trying to find a few things I could understand, a few for which I could find an example in one of the 3 or 4 languages I know. Oh, I forgot to mention there are no examples given, or just a few that were kindly added by Frans Plank for the geeky non-specialist who, he thought, might be interested. But getting lost is surely part of the process in this massive yet incomplete collection.

The quest for language universals used to be ideologically linked to the search for the original divine language, the one humans used before Babel — humanity’s mother tongue. Even if most scientists now agree that the origins of language are multiple, that there were in fact several outbreaks of human language on different point of the planet, immerging in those researches still looks like a quest for meaning. While some statements are rather obvious (“A grammatical element is less likely to be omitted the greater the ambiguity which would result from its omission”), others are more surprising (“If a language has adjectives for shape, it has adjectives for colour and size”).

I always invite my students to compare what they learn in French with the languages they know. In Singapore, multilinguism is a great enrichment in this respect. Finding differences is frequent and allows to separate linguistic systems; finding common points is always a good surprise. “Adjectives are usually on the right of the noun in French?! Just like in Bahasa!!” This is precious. Not because it’s good to be the same or to think alike. Because it points out the very purpose of language: creating links.

Unreplaceable teachers

Researchers from Oxford University have tried to estimate the jobs that could be computerised within 10 to 20 years. They’ve come out with a list of 700 occupations, with the percentage of their probability to become automated. Teachers are in good place, since their probability to be replaced by computers is only of  0,44 % (for elementary school). Literacy teachers for adults, however, are likely to have automated substitutes at 19 %.

This visual data by Bloomberg shows a selection of jobs with their percentage. More insteresting are the 3 main skills that make it impossible for a computer – so far – to do our jobs: manipulation, creativity and social perception. That’s how we know we’re Homo Sapiens, after all.

If you can read…

 

 

 

 

 

 

And thank YOURSELF, for being so smart!