What Foreign Language(s) Should I Learn?

One of the questions people have been asking me most frequently is: what foreign language(s) should I (my kid) learn? I get that all the time. ALL THE TIME. I'm not bothered in the least bit by it; though flattered, I just feel a little under-equipped to give them any advice. After all, I'm more of a linguist/grammarian/philologist than a foreign language expert. And linguistics and the study of foreign languages are not the same.

But I have studied several foreign languages both in school and on my own. So, for what it's worth ...

First, ask yourself why you want to study a foreign language. Is it for personal edification? Is it for a specific job (Chinese because I'll be working for a Chinese company), a specific academic program (Arabic because I'll be studying Islamic literature in grad school), or a specific circumstance (I'll be marrying a Russian girl and I think I want to learn Russian)? Is it to find a job in areas that require a foreign language (I want to teach X to high school students)?

If it's for personal edification as in I want to learn X because I like it, then, by all means, learn X for no other reasons than that it pleases you and don't look back.

If it's for a specific job, academic program, or circumstance which you have planned for the foreseeable future, then you don't have much of a choice. Whatever language is required of you, you learn it.

But if you don't really have any specific short-term or long-term goal, and you want to invest your time, money, and energy learning a foreign language in preparation for whatever opportunities that may come your way in the future, here's what I think.

1. You should go for languages that are spoken by multiple ethnic groups living in multiple areas of the world. You get the most bang for your buck that way. In light of this, it's not hard to see that Japanese, Thai, or German (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_German_World.png) will not create nearly as many career opportunities for you as, say, Arabic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dispersión_lengua_árabe.png), French, or Mandarin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mandarin_and_Jin_in_China.png) plus Chinese diaspora).

2. You should go for a language that shares the same family with other widely-spoken languages. Family members behave alike. Once you know one in a family, you pretty much know how to deal with the other members of the same family even though they all have certain features and idiosyncrasies that are unique to them.

Take, for example, Romance languages. Two major, major languages in that family alone: Spanish and French. (Italian, Portuguese, etc., are great languages to learn, I know, but see point #1 for the reason I've singled out French and Spanish.) This means, once you know French, adding Spanish to your repertoire at a later time is a piece of cake, and vice versa. Knowing French will serve you well in these areas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New-Map-Francophone_World.PNG. Knowing Spanish will get you places in these areas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Castellano-Español.png. With either French or Spanish under your belt, if you have the time and the desire to study, say, Catalan, later, guess what? Easy.

This applies even to dead or ancient languages. Members of the Semitic family is well-known for behaving alike, very much alike. Pick one of them to study first, and you'll find that acquiring competency in the rest is a cake walk. Going from classical Arabic to classical Hebrew or from Latin to Attic or Koine Greek is easy, much easier than going from ancient Khmer to Sumerian.

So the whole biggest-bang-for-your-buck thing from point #1 also applies here: go for a large family with multiple influential members.

The question you may have at this point is: wouldn't studying a language that most people study make it hard for me to stand out, find a job, be considered unique and indispensable?

Yes and no. Some languages are more popular than others for a reason (which will be elaborated in point #3 below), and some languages are ignored for a reason also. True, there are a whole bunch of people who know Spanish, French, and Arabic, but how many of them know Hmong? What if I set out to become an expert in Hmong? Or modern Aramaic? Or Estonian? Or Ainu?

You can. But you're gambling. You could win big. You could also lose big. How to decide? Consider the worst case scenario, if you're okay with that, I'd say go for an obscure language or a language that may not be obscure but doesn't really have that much impact on the world compared to others (e.g. Catalan, German, modern Greek, Polish). But even with an obscure or a not-so-obscure-but-not-so-in-demand-either language, you probably also want to keep the following point in mind.

3. If a lucrative, financially-rewarding career (well, as rewarding as a career in the humanities is, anyway, which means not very rewarding) is a goal, then consider world events. Back in the Cold War era or even back in the early 90s after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, knowing Russian would definitely land you some really good jobs both in the public and private sectors. In the last decade or so, Arabic has become one of the top, if the top, choice among those seeking to learn a foreign language. Due to the war in Afghanistan, even the Pashto language (which is not nearly as widely-spoken as Arabic) has paved the way to many governmental jobs with ridiculously high salary. With the rise of China, Mandarin Chinese has also become an extremely popular choice.

Knowing a language that is in demand will naturally open up more opportunities for you than knowing an obscure language or a language spoken in areas of the world that aren't the current foci of the world's attention.

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Now, once you've chosen a language that makes the most sense to your situation to study, what do you do with it? What jobs can you get with it?

Most people who get into foreign languages often harbor the dream of traveling extensively or living overseas. From my experience, though that's a real possibility, realistically, you're not going to be making much money at all. You could spend several years living frugally overseas only to find yourself back in your home country with no retirement funds. This has happened to people, mostly those who work for nonprofit religious organizations, whom I know personally.

There are people who live as expats overseas who make tons of money and can afford to live in apartments and homes priced in the range affordable only among the local elite. But 99.99% of the time -- fine, based on my experience, 100% of the time -- these people's jobs have nothing to do with teaching a foreign language or serving as a translator/interpreter.

Most likely, you'll end up teaching English or doing something for non-profit organization (read: not much pay).

Work as a translator/interpreter is best done as a (hopefully) paid hobby or a side job. Translation gigs are hard to come by, and when they do come by, they come by with very little money. In fact, when it comes an event or a task wherein translation of X into english and vice versa is required, most companies or hiring entities much prefer a native speaker of X who also knows English as a second language over a non-native speaker of X whose first language is English (assuming all of this takes place in a country where X is the official language).

But there's always the Foreign Service.

Quite honestly, if the goal is to travel and live overseas, it's best to make TESOL your main study and a foreign language a secondary endeavor. TESOL will land you a job overseas (teaching English, running an international school, etc.) much more easily than a major in a foreign language. Just my two cents.

The Green Banana

I read "The Green Banana" by Donald Batchelder for the first time when I was in high school and it has stuck with me ever since. It was the first time in my life when I started questioning where the center of the world is for me, where it is for others, and what all that means; it was also the beginning of my interest in learning about other cultures beyond foreign languages.

Have you read it?

You can find this short essay from one of these sources here.

The Best Version of Polyushko Pole

I have shared with you a few versions -- from the most traditional to an instrumental version by a Turkish musician -- of my favorite Russian folk song Polyushko Pole (Полюшко Поле) in an earlier post along with some background information on the song. Last week, I stumbled across this version from 1969 which I'd like to declare my number one favorite to date. Enjoy.

To Pom Who Spent His Life Staring at the Ceiling

I'm writing this on a night when I feel inexplicably heartbroken. Nothing and no one has broken my heart, really, but somehow "heartbroken" seems the only fitting adjective. It's a haunting, hollow feeling you have after having lost something -- a feeling of being defeated without even having a chance to fight. It's the feeling of being in a situation the outcome of which seems to have been determined without you being given a chance to participate in it.

On a night like this, I think of Pom who spent his life staring at the ceiling.

I used to sit beside his bed while he stared at the ceiling and ask him what it was he was thinking about all day. Invariably, his answer would be, "Stuff." What kind of stuff, I would ask him. And he'd say,"Oh, normal stuff."

But nothing about Pom's life was normal. Pom wasn't normal and he would never be. When my nanny's eldest son contracted polio as a little child, his life stopped being normal. His limbs froze up. He could barely move his badly-deformed face. His speech was hard to understand. When he talked, he often had to gasp for air mid-sentence while beads of saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth. When he heard something funny and let out a hearty laugh, any little kids that happened to be within earshot ran away, scared.

And Pom's body ... his body. It was folded up in some places and jackknifed in others. His bony body was twisted so badly that when they laid him on his side, he was staring directly at the ceiling. And Pom was laid on his side most of the time -- I guess -- to avoid pressure wounds and bed sores.

And so he spent most of his waking hours staring at the ceiling. By the time I was born, Pom had been staring at the ceiling for almost a decade.

They put Pom on a daybed in the back of the house where my nanny lived with her family along with the other people who worked for my grandparents. Pom never went to school, didn't have any friends, and he had no idea what the world looked like beyond what he could see from his bed. The area around Pom's daybed was left alone most of the time and he would be attended to only when he had to eat or relieve himself.

And so not only did Pom spend his life staring at the ceiling, he also did it -- for the most part -- alone.

But I loved Pom. He was like a brother to me. We kids weren't supposed to hang out in that part of the house very much, as my grandparents didn't want us getting in the way of the workers while they worked. But I never listened. Every single day after school, I would run straight to Pom's bed the moment I got home. I would always save some of the snack they gave us before school was dismissed to share with Pom (his favorite was pineapple pinwheel tarts). I would tell him all the things I'd learned at school that day; he would tell me that he had been staring at the ceiling all day.

Amused and puzzled by how someone could spend that much time staring at the ceiling, I took it upon myself to educate Pom. I drew the alphabet chart and taped it to the ceiling. I drew pictures of things and taped them to the ceiling. I explained to Pom, using the most picturesque adjectives my little mind could produce, everything he'd never had a chance to see.

Pom loved hearing about the ocean, the beach, the seashells. But, looking back, I don't think I did such a good job describing to him what the ocean is like. How can you describe in 1st-grade vocabulary the foamy waves, the faintly saline smell, the wet sand that hugs your toes as you walk on it? How can you describe the enormity of the ocean? How can you describe a day at the beach to someone who has never even seen a bathtub let alone a river?

But somehow Pom never got tired of hearing about the ocean. And every time I went on a beach vacation with the family, I always remembered to pick the prettiest seashells for Pom. He'd put them in an empty Droste cocoa tin can, his prized possession -- his only possession. "She's pretty," Pom spoke of the famous "nurse" on the cocoa can that always stood next to his pillow. "She looks kind." Once in a while, Pom would ask me to shake the can so he could hear the seashells rattling inside it. And he would always smile.

Pom continued to stare at the ceiling for another few months after I'd started second grade. I came home from school one afternoon to find Pom's daybed empty. He had a violent seizure a few hours earlier and his heart gave out, I was told. They put Pom in a makeshift casket. He was lying on his back and his face pressed against the side of the wooden box. I dropped his Droste can next to him and wished with all my might that wherever he went, he would be able to go everywhere he wanted and see things, a lot of things.

On a night like this when I feel heartbroken by something I can't even identify, when I feel sorry for myself, I think of Pom who spent his life staring at the ceiling.

The Many Versions of Polyushko Pole Полюшко-поле

Polyushko Pole, Полюшко-поле, (the speaker is speaking to and of the field -- his motherland -- with such tenderness expressed through the use of the diminutive полюшко, and "O, Field, My Little Field" is probably the closest dynamic translation that captures that sentiment) is a song about the Russian Red Army.

It must be noted, however, that this song, composed by Lev Knipper and Viktor Gusev in 1934, has nothing to do with politics or political ideology as those who are not familiar with it often assume. On the contrary, it talks about how war tears loved ones apart and how the women, though overcome with sadness, have to be brave along with their men in the army who are departing and may never return.

[The lyrics in Russian, both in Cyrillic and Roman scripts can be found here along with an (awkward) English translation.]

In order to understand how this song is often arranged for live performances, one must take into consideration the intended Sitz im Leben. At the very beginning, the singing is very, very soft -- so soft that most people think there's something wrong with their speaker. Within a few seconds, the singing becomes gradually louder and louder. Sometimes, horse's hoof beats can be heard in the background. Then the singing and the hoof beats grow soft again, going from barely audible to completely silent.

Imagine standing in an open field with a horse-borne army coming from afar, approaching you, then departing into the horizon.

Like this.



Or this.

This version by the late Ivan Rebroff has some fun man-made hoof beats: This is a modern version by the Russian singer Origa who works in Japan. Her version of Polyushko Pole is often used as background music for various anime movies. The references to the Red Army have been all but eliminated, and the result is simply a love song. This is an instrumental version by Ahmet Koç, Turkey's top Bağlama player, whom I like mostly because he's a talented musician with facial hair. But anyway ... It's a nice arrangement, and I like it a lot in spite of the pointlessness of that dancing chick. Lastly, this is a version by the man I want to marry, Michael Palin, who performs with the Pacific Fleet (Тихоокеанский флот) choir. It is the best version. You. Must. See. This.

A Mini Rant Set off by an Ancient Jewish Poem of Thanksgiving

Nostalgically, I grabbed my worn-out copy of Biblia Hebraica off my bookshelf this afternoon and started flipping through it. Then I realized that I had placed a bookmark at the location of poem #136 in the collection of ancient Jewish poetry known by its Hellenized name, the Psalms. It's a thanksgiving poem. And today is thanksgiving in the US. Uncanny. I still can't recall why I placed my bookmark there.

By the way, psalm 136 is a beautiful poem, but something about the repetition in it just doesn't appeal to me. I'm more interested in poems like Psalm 119 which is brilliantly acrostic. Now that's hard to compose. Repeating the same sentence over and over in the same poem? Not so much.

Regardless, let's get back to #136.

As any competent translator will tell you, nothing presents more difficulty than the task of rendering poetry from one language to another. The task of translation is already extremely challenging. In fact, show me a translator who finds his/her job easy and I'll show you someone who stinks at what s/he does). Subjecting one poem structure used in one culture and language group to another poem structure used in another culture and language group requires a skill which, well, I'd say, nobody has. If you want accurate translation of a poem in its entirety, the structure goes out the window. If you want to preserve the poetic appeal of the original poem, the translator almost always has to take poetic license, in which case dynamic translation becomes necessary and literal translation not only impractical but utterly impossible.

And that's perhaps why if you ask anyone well-versed in classical Hebrew, they'll tell you that the translators of the Septuagint (LXX) which is the Greek version of these Jewish sacred writings kind of messed it up.


The sentence that is repeated throughout #136 is כִּי לְעוֹלָם חַסְדּוֹ which says, for/because his (i.e. YHWH's) "hesed" is forever. We'll come back to hesed in a moment.

The LXX has rendered that Hebrew sentence thus: ὅτι εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα τὸ ἔλεος αὐτοῦ. Literally, it means, "for/because his mercy [is] forever."

The Greek word used to render חסד (hesed) is ἔλεος (elelos), the word that Hebraists will tell you is too general, too weak, too insufficient to convey the meaning of something so deep and relationship-focused as hesed. "Loyalty" or "covenantal loyalty" have been suggested as a better translation. Even so, it's still not quite accurate. Hesed is a loaded word carrying with it tons of historical and religious significance, and "mercy," it's been pointed out, is merely a tiny, tiny part of this covenantal loyalty which the main deity of the ancient Hebrews, to and about whom this poem is written, has with his people.

Why, then, is the suggested translation not more prevalent among the various English versions? Given what we know about western civilization, which language has more chances of influencing/reaching the masses? Not classical Hebrew. Which version of the psalm reached far and wide into the world? Not the Hebrew version.

Hence the feeling that this is not right, that a culture or a language group is misrepresented. This may not represent one of the cases that are considered big deals—and this whole thing may seem trivial to many—but I figure it's kind of a big deal to the misunderstood.


Which brings me to something that has bothered me for nearly two weeks now.

I don't know why this bugs me so much. It happened a long time ago; and by this time people know better than to reconstruct the history of Thailand based solely, or even heavily, on the various accounts of western visitors who perceived things through their western lenses.

An outsider's view is not a bad thing. Not only is it not bad, it can also be very useful in providing a perspective you don't have as an insider. An outsider's view is bad only when the outsider is not aware of—or, worse, will not acknowledge—the limitations of his/her view or the possibility that it could be skewed due to various factors. An outsider's view is particularly bad when the outsider commits a preventable gaffe of making assertions without proper and thorough verification with respectable sources.

For example: "Having no corn, they supply its lack by cakes of rice," said François Henri Turpin of the Burmese, in Histoire naturelle et civile du royaume de Siam (1771).

The Burmese ate rice because they lacked corn? Is rice what you eat when you don't have corn? Nothing personal, but shut up, Turpin. Oh, sorry, I was being rude. Shut up, s'il vous plaît.

But the screen shot above doesn't come from Turpin; it's an excerpt from a different book, Du Royaume de Siam by Simon de la Loubère.

In this excerpt, de la Loubère asserts that the Siamese in the 1600s called their king, "Pra Maha Crassat." The word, "crassat [sic]," says he, means "living" (vivant). Since "pra" generally means "god" ("according to the Portuguese," he writes) and "maha" means "big," de la Loubère concludes that "Pra Maha Crassat," the term used to refer to the king of Siam, means, "The Great Living God" (le Grand Dieu vivant).

O. Kay.

Although ... the Thai word for "king," กษัตริย์ (ka-sat), comes from the Sanskrit Kshatriya (क्षत्रिय) which means "warrior." And since Kshatriya is one of the four varnas in Hinduism which apply only to people, its semantic range can't possibly cover "god."

[Also, I can't figure out what led the guy to such a messed-up spelling, "crassat," which suggests he couldn't hear very well (for I can't imagine the Siamese collectively pronounced the word with the consonant cluster "cr/kr" in the first syllable). But this is a minor point compared to the previous one. It can also be corrected more easily.]

Regardless, De la Loubère "facts" aren't facts. The guy was wrong. And if he was wrong about objective, verifiable things, one wonders how wrong he might have been in the less verifiable parts of his accounts. But did his readers realize this? Unlikely. Did they have the ability or the curiosity to find out? Back then, probably not. The guy went to a foreign land where most of his readers had never gone to. He comes home with tales about that place and its people. He's now the expert among his own people. If De La Loubère had written a magazine article about the food/culture/lifestyle of the Siamese, his piece would probably won a few awards from a committee of people who couldn't/didn't bother to verify his "facts" too.

Did the Siamese have any chance of correcting those pieces of misinformation? No. They didn't speak the language spoken by de la Loubère's audience; they didn't know what was being said about them in the first place. And even if they did and tried to correct it, being from a non-dominant culture, they most likely wouldn't have a voice or a platform to do so. Some of them probably even noticed that people from the dominant culture had a tendency to believe their fellow countrymen, who looked like them and whose names rolled off their tongues more easily, than some foreigners from a faraway land.

Now I know why this whole thing about De la Loubère still bugs me today. It's precisely because this kind of thing still happens in the present time.

What Different Animals Represent in Different Cultures

It happened last summer. On a Wednesday. In the afternoon.

I'd just relived my youth through an amazing lunch at Le Normandie at the Mandarin Oriental which was concluded with not just one, but two pieces of anything I wanted from the dessert cart. They were served in a pool of crème anglaise decorated with hibiscus flowers made of mango coulis. It was old-fashioned, nostalgic, delicious. And I was happy.

What does this have anything to do with anything? Why all the details?

Well, please allow me to include some gratuitous information for today isn't just any day; it marks the one-year anniversary of the day I published the first post on this site.

August 26th, 2009, which was the day I'd just been describing to you, was when I decided to write a blog about linguistics and intercultural communications. The decision was made after that glorious lunch, when I was in a car, right in the heart of Bangkok's business district, on Rama IV Road heading towards Wittayu Road.


On my way back home, the car came to a long stand-still at an intersection. See the little green dot in the satellite shot above? That's where it happened. On my left was Lumpini Park, Bangkok's equivalent of New York City's Central Park. As I was minding my own business, the driver, who had been completely quiet up to that point, blurted out, "Hia!"

I looked at him. Without any body gestures or anything at all to let me know what he was referring to, the guy repeated the same monosyllabic, "Hia!" -- only more loudly. My mind was scrambling to figure out to or about whom he was talking, but then there wasn't anyone else around. Me? (Gasp.) Hia? Really? Why?

Then he said it the third time while looking at me through the rear view mirror, thus confirming what I was afraid would be the case: the guy was really talking to me.

I need to explain to you first that when someone calls you a "hia" (เหี้ย), they mean you're an a--hole. This Thai word is one of the classic insults -- very vulgar ones -- which have been around for as long as I remember. The word was in vogue when my grandparents were little; it still is today.

Nobody had ever called me a hia to my face before. And I used to think that if it ever happened, I would be able to come up with a quick come-back since I'm usually pretty darn good at repartee. In this case, though, I was too busy being in shock.

"Huh?" was the result of all the wit and eloquence I could muster.


That's when my driver pointed to the left.

Through the wrought-iron gate surrounding the lush Lumpini Park, just meters away, I could see this dark green, scaly creature on a tree. Then the driver and I uttered the word in unison -- his fourth time and my first -- "hia!"

I whipped out my phone, took the picture above, and spent the remainder of the trip home concocting this blog in my mind.

Hia literally means monitor lizard. That's the primary meaning. Then, apparently, at some point in history, hia, the animal, became hia, the vile insult. How? Why? I have no clue.

My only guess is that people in the old days considered the presence of a monitor lizard in their immediate surrounding a bad thing. Bangkok, formerly dubbed "Venice of the East," used to have lots of canals and fewer roads and buildings. Sounds like a perfect place for these huge lizards who thrive in damp areas to me. Now, take into consideration that people in the old days had small animals (e.g. chickens, ducks) in the area underneath their homes to which these carnivorous creatures had easy access. When a hia is spotted around your home, it is definitely not an auspicious occasion. [Plus, not to offend lizard lovers, these things are ugly as heck. To be honest, right after I took that picture, I could feel the crème anglaise coming back up, hibiscus and all.]

An encounter with a monitor lizard, therefore, is considered by the superstitious as bad luck. Even an attempt in recent times to refer to a hia with the euphemistic, "tua nguen tua thong" (ตัวเงินตัวทอง), which roughly means "that which brings in good luck in the form of silver and gold," hasn't done much in erasing the negative connotation associated with this animal.

Re-branding fail.

Anyway, at least I came to understand that the driver was trying to get me to take a look at that huge monitor lizard -- a rare sight in the concrete jungle of Bangkok in modern times; he wasn't calling me a hia. Whew.



That got me thinking. Are there other animals that carry positive and negative connotations in the Thai culture?

Water buffaloes represent "stupidity" and sometimes "bull-headedness" in the Thai culture. The history of it is just as dubious as the history of how hia (animal) became hia (insult).

Hyperactive, unruly kids are often likened to monkeys. But this one is almost self-explanatory. Ditto with ants and bees which represent industriousness.

Do you know which one stumps me big time? Turtle.

Turtle (เต่า) -- it makes no sense to me either -- is slang for body odor. How did that happen? Don't ask me. Culture is a curious thing. Sometimes you can explain it; sometimes you just have to accept it without understanding it.

And until you come to accept that a turtle represents stinky armpits, you would never understand this most popular Thai TV commercial, which debuted almost a decade ago, about an orphaned little turtle looking for his mother or why the Thai people find this deodorant commercial so hysterically funny.

On Love

We desire the way a twice-poisoned dog eyes a third piece of meat. - Philip Milito

I Love You with All My Bowels - Splanchna (σπλάγχνα)

This post was supposed to go up on February 14th, 2010. Alas, I was too busy being anti-Valentine and making pig ear salad that I never got around to writing it. And I can't really explain the procrastination, because it's not like it's a long post that requires a lot of thought; what I had to say could be said in, like, 5 sentences tops.

Anyway, did you know that in the Graeco-Roman world, the seat of emotion is in the bowels? The organ, heart, has come to represent the seat of emotion in modern times quite universally. But there was a time when saying, "I love you with all of my bowels (splanchna* σπλάγχνα)," made perfect sense. And it wasn't even meant to be funny.

Biblical books attributed to Saul of Tarsus, better known as the Apostle Paul, as well as a few other individuals contain several occurrences of the word and its various derivatives.

Were the writers conscious of what the word literally meant when they used it? Unlikely. It's kind of like how we talk about "heart" in the context of emotion without necessarily conjuring up the image of a four-chambered, fist-sized, blood-pumping organ in your chest.

*The "ch" is pronounced like "ch" in "Bach."

Racial Slurs in the Culinary Lexicon?

In writing about food, I sometimes find myself in a quandary.

On the one hand, I want to focus on just the food. On the other hand, I can't just turn a blind eye to linguistic (political, environmental, etc.) issues that have cropped up from time to time in the course of writing about food.

Case in point, Mr. @GarySoup recently tweeted: "Amazed that foodies still don't know (or don't want to know) that "kaffir" is a racial slur."

I recalled mulling over that issue a few years back.

It has been suggested that the kaffir in kaffir lime comes from the term كافر (kāfir), along with its plural form كفّار (kuffār) which features the reduplication of the second radical of the tri-literal root (hence the doubling of the f in kaffir, perhaps). Wiki has some information on this word.

Looking at a close relative of Arabic, while the cognate tri-literal root in Hebrew, כפר, primarily points to the idea of "to cover (one's sin)" or the propitiation of sin, it's been suggested that, at some point, the related form כופר has also come to be used to refer to those who have left the religion (source).



More lexical investigation is needed to establish firmly that the bumpy citrus fruit, heavily used in Thai cuisine, indeed comes from the derogatory kāfir. For now, let's assume that this is the case.

What am I supposed to do every time I write about dishes that contain that fruit? I certainly can't avoid it, especially when I write about Thai food. Do I always include a footnote? An apology? Do I, as has been suggested, refer to the fruit with its Thai name, makrut, and let folks figure out on their own what the heck I am talking about?

Do we go on calling the fruit "kaffir lime" as long as we use the term innocently?

Kaffir is far from being the only potentially racial slur in the culinary lexicon, though. Dig deeply enough and I'm sure you'll find a few -- if not a lot -- more. If we collectively change the way we refer to kaffir lime -- and I'm not saying we shouldn't -- we perhaps should also consider changing the names of many other things. Those who are offended by and campaigning against the use of the word "kaffir" in the context of "kaffir lime," -- and there's nothing wrong with that -- could be surprised that they, too, have been innocently using racial slurs to refer to other things.

As I'm composing this post, I have in the draft folder of my other blog a post on Thai fried bananas. This much-loved street food is commonly called in Thai, "kluai khaek" (กล้วยแขก). "Khaek"(แขก) is an old-fashioned catch-all Thai word for South Asian or Middle Eastern people. Sometimes, it even applies to fellow Southeast Asians of the Islamic faith. The term, "khaek dam" (แขกดำ), literally "black khaek," makes it more specific that the speaker is referring to certain sub-groups with darker skin color. Similarly, "khaek khao" (แขกขาว), literally "white khaek," refers to some sub-groups with fairer skin color. However you slice and dice it, we're tiptoeing in a very sensitive territory.

Personally, I have never sensed that it's being used by anyone I know as a racial slur, though. But that doesn't necessarily mean there will be people who find it derogatory or offensive.

Also, as any linguist/semanticist will tell you, meanings of words change over time. What wasn't derogatory (or used in an intentionally derogatory way) decades ago can become so in the current usage (based on this, it's not unfathomable that some words that are used derogatorily in the present were once completely benign (or even had positive meanings!).

So I am in a dilemma. Should I bring up the Thai name at all? Or do I pretend it doesn't exist?

The answer to my dilemma could be the use of the alternate term for these banana fritters, kluai tod (literally: fried bananas) which is more generic and politically correct. But it's not a common way to refer to this particular dish in Thailand and is quite inadequate as it fails to specify which of the various types of fried bananas is being referred to. Yet, even though I could manage to dodge the banana issue, more similar issues will soon crop up. For example, one of these days, I'm going to have to mention the Thai version of the Indonesian salad, gado-gado, salat khaek (literally: salad khaek-style) or a dish that has the Thai word for green beans, thua khaek (khaek's beans), to cite just a few examples.

And don't get me started on the term farang, used by the Thai to refer to Caucasian foreigners, (which could be derogatory or neutral, depending on whom you ask -- and, oh, this debate could go forever) and how often it is used in the culinary context.

Chewing gum (mak farang) = farang betel
Dill (phak chi farang) = farang coriander
Potato (man farang) = farang yam
Guava (farang) = just ... farang.
Etc.

Back to the "kaffir" issue: if we stop using "kaffir lime," must we also stop using other derogatory (or potentially derogatory) words currently in use? Maybe we should. Maybe we must. This, however, will involve analyzing a lot of things, linguistically, religiously, ethnically, historically, socially, politically, etc. It's no small task.

Why Study Ancient Greek?

Whenever a budget cut rumor starts flying, people in the humanities division walk around with their hearts thumping nervously.

No need to get into details or the politics of it all, as that's not exactly the point, but if your world involves -- even indirectly -- this kind of thing, you know what I'm talking about.

Have the studies of ancient languages become irrelevant?

Just a few moments ago, a link to the Telegraph story on ancient Greek being taught in state primary schools in England was being circulated on Twitter (Thanks, RayBeckerman!). And I can't tell you how much joy that little piece of good news has brought to my weary, cynical heart. In fact, if I wasn't busy licking a melting ice cream cone to keep it from dripping on the computer keyboard, I -- no kidding -- might have even been moved to tears.

Why ancient Greek?

Well, it doesn't have to be Greek. It could be Latin. It could even be ancient Chinese. But starting off with the basics of the Classical languages is especially beneficial to those who seek to master the English language, the lingua franca of our time. And as we know, fluency in English is not the same as mastery of the English grammar.

I've said this over and over and over to people who are learning a foreign language for the first time. Your first foreign language, be it ancient or contemporary, is going to be the most difficult. This is because when you learn a new language for the first time, you're learning two things simultaneously: the language itself (vocabulary, orthography, pronunciation, etc.) and the method of learning languages (conjugation, parts of speech, verbs, verbal patterns, declensions, etc.).

The good news is that while the former will always be new or somewhat new to you every time you study a new language, the latter remains largely the same. Once you've acquired that knowledge, it will stay with you and see you through for the rest of your life. It helps build a solid foundation which supports all future linguistic endeavors. It works across the different language families.

A separate, more detailed blog post may be needed for me to explain more fully why I support the inclusion of classical studies in primary education. For now let me rejoice on behalf of those in England and express my condolences to those who aren't that unfortunate.

Supersized Last Supper - Interesting But So What?

I wrote this in 10 minutes when I was very hungry. Excuse the convolution. The web version of The Daily Telegraph reports today of a finding by a group of Cornell University researchers indicating that, based on the sizes of the bread and plates shown in The Last Supper, food portion sizes have "progressively grown by up to two-thirds" in the last millennium. The group has cited the portion sizes shown in da Vinci's famous painting as one piece of evidence leading to the finding. "Using a computer, they compared the size of the food to the size of the heads in the depictions of Jesus Christ and his disciples at their final meal before his death," reports the Telegraph. The study concludes, based on what's shown in the painting, "... the size of the main dish grew 69 per cent, the plate by 66 per cent and the bread by 23 per cent, between the years 1000 and 2000." [Source] Although the study has indeed shown what we all already know that today's portion sizes are bigger than what our forefathers were used to, the main point of the study, from what I have deduced from the article, is that the supersize phenomenon is actually a long and gradual process that has taken place over the past millennium and not something recently introduced by greedy fast food companies as many have suggested; it's just more noticeable these days. I don't have a problem with that conclusion. It's kind of interesting, actually. Not earth-shatteringly enlightening, but interesting nonetheless. What kind of bugs me is how people's attention is wrongly focused on the theme of the paintings (the Last Supper) and the characters found therein (Jesus and his disciples) instead of the real objects of the study, i.e. the perceptions of the painters. I'm not writing this in response to the Cornell group or the Telegraph; I'm writing this in response to all the "Jesus got supersized" tweets. People should not automatically assume that the oldest of the 52 paintings -- the one that portrays the smallest amount of food -- is the most historically accurate (or, worse, more moral) than the newest of the 52 painting that portrays the biggest amount of food. More importantly, nobody should ever think that the smallest amount of food shown in the oldest of the 52 paintings more accurately represents the amount of food divinely prescribed to mankind. These things may be true, but they are not what this particular study intends to show. The Last Supper itself is irrelevant. Jesus and his disciples are irrelevant. What is being studied is how much food the painters of these 52 paintings, painted in the course of a millennium, imagined to be present at the Last Supper and how the amounts changed over time.* This study does not say that the portion sizes of the oldest painting more accurately represents the amount of food served at the Last Supper, and that the degree of accuracy gradually decreases over time with the newest painting being the least accurate. This study is about a group of different (European?) painters and how the amounts of food they imagined being served at the same event vary according to the time in which they (the painters) lived. Who really knows what and how much was served at the famous supper? Painting #20, painted at the mid-point between 1000 CE and 2000 CE may actually portrays more historically accurate amounts. Nobody knows. It's all imagined. The smallest portion sizes are imagined. The largest portion sizes are also imagined. Everything else in between is also imagined. Who is Leonardo da Vinci but an Italian artist who tried to imagine what a group of Palestinian Semites ate at a Passover meal circa 30 CE? At risk of sounding like a broken record, the focus of the study is on 1. the painters, whose works were produced between 1000 and 2000 CE, 2. how their perceptions of portion sizes influence the amounts of food they imagined to be served at that event, and 3. how those perceptions might have been influenced by what their contemporaries considered to be the norm. By the way, am I seeing things or does the bread in da Vinci's The Last Supper look more like dinner rolls than the flat, unleavened bread one would expect at a, uh, you know, Passover meal? *Why the Last Supper? Because the study is about food and portion size and what food-centric historical scene is as consistently portrayed as the Last Supper? If the biblical scene of, say, how Esau traded his birthright for a bowl of lentil stew, were portrayed in a painting as often as the Last Supper, I'm sure those paintings would have been studied to see how the size of the bowl shown in the earliest painting has grown over time.

From Mourir to Mourez - How a New York Times Op-Ed Was Edited Overnight

On March 14, 2010, the Twitterverse went nuts over a New York Times Op-Ed piece titled, "It's My Party and You Have to Answer," by Rand Richards Cooper. Links to the article were tweeted and retweeted ad nauseum. The article must have struck a chord with people as it seemed everybody was talking about it.

In the article, Cooper bemoans the fact that people, including some of his friends, have failed to RSVP to his E-vites, thereby causing the host unnecessary inconvenience and anxiety. This, he opines, clearly shows not only "how hard the R.S.V.P. rubs against the grain of contemporary life," but also that in requesting commitment from people, "you are demanding a kind of navigation that Americans increasingly do not practice."

While the point of the article was taken and appreciated, my focus here has nothing to do with etiquette. Cooper suggests in the article that the standard R.S.V.P, which stands for "Répondez s'il vous plaît" ("Please respond") in French, is no longer effective. He proposes R.V.O.M as a more suitable and potentially more effective replacement. R.V.O.M., according to the article as it appeared online (and perhaps in the hard copy as well, though I can't verify) on March 14, 2010, stands for "Répondez Vite -- Ou Mourir!"

"For those friends of mine who plead a lack of high school French, allow me to translate. Respond Quickly, or Die!" says Cooper. Immediately, my mind went to the post I had recently written about how to use free online translators without making it so obvious that you do.

You see, 'répondez vite — ou mourir' is grammatically-incorrect French. The first verb, 'répondez,' is correctly in the 2nd person, plural/formal, imperative form. The second verb, 'mourir,' is supposed to be conjugated in the exact same manner. Unfortunately, it wasn't, and the infinitive, 'mourir,' appeared in the article. Instead of getting "respond quickly or die" as he intended, Cooper inadvertently wrote, while his friends "who plead a lack of high school French" looked on, "respond quickly or to die."

To say that it's an embarrassing mistake is a bit of an understatement, especially when you take into consideration that the article appeared in the newspaper of record and that the author clearly wanted to show his clever side.

This morning (March 16, 2010), as I was rereading the article online, I discovered, to my amusement, that the mistake was mysteriously corrected. What used to be "mourir" now reads "mourez," as it should have been all along. Somebody must have alerted the author's attention to such an obvious blooper -- the kind any high school French student could spot easily.

Even though the original text no longer exists and I have no proof that the mistake was really there at one point, luckily the phenomenon which happened to lost ancient texts is at work here. The original incorrect version of Cooper's French has been preserved in the form of a tweet here, a tweet there, a retweet here, a retweet there, a quote here, and a quote there. I'm not making this up, you see?

How could someone who knows enough to come up with 'répondez' have unwittingly written 'mourir' instead of 'mourez'? Call me crazy, but I have a hard time believing that it was simply a typographical error. Besides, I'm sure that article was read and proofread tons of times before it went to print. It seems deliberate. In other words, the mistake did not appear to be due to an oversight, but -- not to be harsh -- a lack of high school French -- precisely what the author says his friends plead.

The textual critic in me suspects the use of an online translator. The test on Babel Fish didn't confirm my theory as Babel Fish is smart enough to create the parallelism between the two imperatives and spits out "mourez" instead of "mourir."

The gotcha moment came when I entered the same text into Google Translate. When given the English, "respond quickly or die," Google Translate gives you, "répondre rapidement ou mourir" -- two infinitives. Google Translate does not recognize that "respond" and "die" in this context are used as imperatives and, therefore, treats both words as infinitives. The expression R.S.V.P is formulaic enough for anyone to know that the Google Translate result needs to be slightly altered from "répondre" to "répondez." The 2nd person, plural/formal, imperative form of "mourir" which is "mourez," on the other hand, isn't so common. (How many times do people say, "You/Y'all, die!"?)

The failure to see 'mourir' as wrong, to me, shows the inability to verify results derived from an online translator. I could be wrong, but I think I have a pretty good case here.

******************************************

Addendum

(Added March 17, 2010)

Well, what do you know? Words got out and Mr. Rand Richards Cooper, the author of the op-ed piece in the New York Times, wrote me an email message today (March 17, 2010) telling me that my online translator theory was not based on truth. Mr. Cooper's message was, as you will see, gracious and even a bit self-deprecating. What can I say? Rand Richards Cooper comes across as humble and very likable.

Printed with permission:

"Hi Leela:

I’m the guy who wrote the op-ed piece on RSVPing in the New York Times… Your nice theory notwithstanding, there was no online translation machine involved – just my own faulty, three-decades-old high school French, which (alas) used to be serviceable, and would not have committed that gaffe twenty years ago. But as the saying goes, tout lasse, tout passe, tout casse… (Or at least that’s how I remember it.)

Rand Richards Cooper"

To which I replied:

"Hello Mr. Cooper,

Thank you so very much for taking the time to write me. The gracious tone of your email made me regret my being presumptuous regarding my theory on how the gaffe came to be. Please do pardon an overzealous linguist.

Can I please have your permission to reprint the content of your email as an addendum to my post? That way, the five people who read that blog will have a more balanced view of the story.

Leela

P.S. I always RSVP. :)"

"Mais bien sûr!" was what he said. And all of us live happily ever after.