Pedantry - Moved to http://pedantry.fistfulofeuros.net

2003-12-23T15:30:00.000+01:00

Déménagement - Verhuizing - Moved Address

Yes, it's been too long, but between the move, the job, my dysfunctional computer and the transition from a furnished apartment in a cozy college town to an unfurnished apartment across the street from the Georgian embassy in Brussels has taken quite a toll.

But now it's Christmas. I'm finished moving, and so is my blog. We are now at:

http://pedantry.fistfulofeuros.net

Update your bookmarks appropriately.

2003-11-14T10:12:00.000+01:00

Blame Canada - still

This was too good not to blog, and it doesn't really fit A Fistful of Euros. It's in today's LA Times.

Canada Doesn't Deserve These Vial Accusations
Peter McKnight of the Vancouver Sun

Blame Canada? I always thought that was just a satirical song from a postmodern TV cartoon.

Sure, I always figured we probably foisted a few too many comedians and journalists on to the U.S., but of late, the days of being pilloried because of Jim Carrey and Peter Jennings appear positively halcyon.

Seems Canada's now being blamed for exporting everything from terrorism to gay marriage, from lax laws on illegal drugs to "B.C. bud" — the best marijuana the American dollar isn't supposed to buy.

So it's not surprising U.S. drug czar John Walters described the Great White North as "the one place in the hemisphere where things are going the wrong [way] rapidly." And it's also not surprising that the vitriol aimed at Canada isn't limited to illegal drugs. Prescription drugs, too, are going the wrong way — from Canada to the U.S. — as American consumers now spend about $1 billion a year at Canadian pharmacies.

That's not Canada's fault, of course. It's simply because drug prices in the U.S. are so exorbitant — the highest in the world — that those who need them most, such as seniors on fixed incomes, have to truck up to the land of igloos several times a year to get their fixes.

This is a problem of American apathy, not Canadian kindness, toward the underprivileged. But you'd never gather that from the rhetoric of some American politicians, who say the problem stems from the fact that Canada isn't paying "its fair share."

Let's consider that criticism. Sure, Canadians pay anywhere from 30% to 80% less than Americans for the same drugs, but only because the Canadian pharmaceutical industry agreed to price controls in exchange for increased patent protection. Specifically, the government agreed to extend the length of time before generic versions of patented drugs could come on the market, and the industry agreed to invest more money in research and development. So Canadians are getting what we bargained for and are, therefore, paying our fair share.

Those opposed to the export of Canadian drugs also suggest that they really have the best interests of Americans at heart. After all, they're not concerned about the profits of drug companies, they insist, but rather about safety, because, you know, those beer-swilling Canadians just can't be trusted to produce good stuff.

That position, which is held by the Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical firms and some senators and House members, was concisely articulated by National Assn. of Chain Drug Stores President Craig Fuller, who said, "Importation of prescription drugs is illegal because it's unsafe."

That one statement represents a masterful example of backward logic. There's no evidence that Canadian drug manufacturing and labeling standards are any less rigorous than those of the U.S. — in fact, Canada tends to be the more cautious of the two countries in approving and marketing drugs. Several American studies, including one by the state of Illinois, confirm that Americans face no increased health risks in consuming Canadian pharmaceuticals.

Nevertheless, by making importation illegal, agencies like the FDA are prevented from ensuring such things as proper handling during personal importation. So importation may be unsafe, but only because it's illegal, which turns Fuller's statement on its head.

All of this is not to suggest that selling drugs to Americans is good for Canada. On the contrary, the Canadian health-care system is beginning to suffer from the mass exports.

Some pharmaceutical companies, including Bayer and Eli Lilly, are taking advantage of loopholes in their price control agreements and are beginning to raise the prices of drugs like Cipro and Zantac. In the last few months, some drug prices have risen almost 10%. And some companies are threatening to limit Canada's supply of drugs, which isn't good for anyone.

The present state of affairs can't continue. And it's up to the U.S. to find a solution because this is an American problem, even though it's causing problems in Canada. Canadian pharmaceutical manufacturers could stop providing drugs to Americans, of course, but that would violate the spirit of free trade, something Americans have championed for years.

So maybe the United States is the place where things are rapidly going wrong.

Blame America? No, that will never catch on.

2003-11-10T18:53:00.000+01:00

Hi, Pietro!

An old friend from an earlier incarnation of the web has tracked me down to here, saying "hi" by sending me something from my Amazon wish list. I don't know when he sent it - my address at Amazon.com goes to my wife's APO box, which hasn't been checked in a month. So, Pietro, if you've been wondering why I haven't said anything, it's because I only got it today. I apologise for not having much to blog for the moment - I'm moving in the next three weeks and I'm desparately trying to actually get everything together for the move. In December I go back to daily blogging. Anyway, it's good to hear from you. Drop me a line - if you're still in Europe it'd be nice to actually meet you.

2003-11-07T17:33:00.000+01:00

Relocating myself and my blog

Busy, busy, busy...

I'm almost at the end - I think - of the writing work that's been so instrumental in giving me writer's block, and I'm moving to Woluwe-Saint-Pierre/Sint-Pieters-Woluwe at the end of the month - a part of greater Brussels. Back to terre francophone.

At the same time, I will be moving Pedantry to a new format, a new URL and relaunching it. For those of you have have sat patiently waiting for the last two months as I haven't written squat, I apologise. I should be back to writing code for a living forthwith, a trade that lends itself far better to blogging.

Blog moving news will be posted here as it becomes available.

2003-10-18T12:34:00.000+02:00

Going to America on Tuesday

I'm off to Idaho until the 30th. I have a huge writing load for work that I'm taking with me, but I intend to blog, either here on on A Fistful of Euros something about going back to the States after two years in Europe. Then, when I get back, I'm going to resume regular blogging both here and at A Fistful of Euros. I've breached the simplest rule of all writing, and especially of blogging, by not doing it frequently. It's been a tough couple of months, but I'm still planning to move to Moveable Type and resume regular blogging.

The last few weeks, I haven't even been reading the blogs much. I hope no one is feeling neglected or slighted through my failure to keep up with the blogosphere or link to their blogs lately. I've had a request to syndicate one of my posts in print, so that provides some motivation to work.

Edward's comment in the post below makes me think a little presentation of computer assisted translation might be in order, since that's what has been on my mind lately anyway. Anyway, I hope everybody is having a good fall.

2003-10-10T15:46:00.000+02:00

Yet another fascinating extract from my current masterpiece

II. Measuring Generated Text Quality

Quality assessment is a recurring problem in the translation industry, predating the arrival of computers by many centuries. The Koine Greek translation of the Torah, prepared in the second and third centuries B.C.E., is reputed to have used to have used either divine inspiration or peer review to guarantee quality, depending on which apocryphal account you prefer. Despite these efforts, it is regarded as a quite poor translation overall and Hebrew scholars brought at least six centuries of correction to it. (Catholic Encyclopaedia 1911) Peer review, being somewhat easier to arrange than divine inspiration, is now widely accepted as the best general approach to insuring translation quality. However, it is no less labour intensive than translation itself and consequently tends to be reserved for literary and scholarly works. It is generally minimal or non-existent in common commericial practice except in areas of unusually high liability like medical documentation and legal materials.

Evaluting translation quality has not, on the whole, changed in quite a long time. The SAE J2450 translation quality standard, which was only finalised in 2001, is little more than a way for a human reviewer to assign a number to their evalation of the translated text. Efforts to evaluate MT quality have largely followed traditional practice by using a human evaluator to assess the quality of the output. These methods, however, have very serious limitations. They are quite labour intensive, so they are difficult to provide on a large enough basis to establish overall quality. The subjective nature of these evaluations makes uniformity a serious problem. Lastly, in an enviroment where the machine translation product is not expected to stand alone but is used as an aid to the human translator, it is very difficult to ensure that these quality evaluations genuinely reflect translator labour.

However, using generated texts to write final translations offers us an obvious way to evaluate their quality: We can compare the generated output to the final, human produced translation. It is by comparison of the two that we can tell how much and how little we are actually assisting the translator. Evaluating machine translation quality cheaply and comprehensively means deploying an algorithm to evalute the difference between the generated text segment and the final translation.

Fortunately, this problem has been addressed by a group of algorithms usually refered to as edit distance metrics by mathematicians and fuzzy string matching by computer scientists. These kinds of algorithms are already deployed in most translation memory systems under the label fuzzy matches. However, fuzzy matching has such a poor reputation among translators that we would prefer to use the more concise technical term edit distance to describe it.

Hey, I managed to get a reference to the Septuagint into a computer science grant proposal. I think I deserve some credit for that. :^)

2003-10-08T14:43:00.000+02:00

Using the lazy web as a proofreader

I've been off-line for a week. Things have been a bit messy lately in real life. Along with a number of other compilications to my life, my wife has gone back to the States for a month, and I expect to join her for a week at the end of the month. I also managed to get my old cellphone number back, so that's at least one good thing.

And, I have a new post up on A Fistful of Euros for anyone suffering from withdrawl due to my lack of blogging. :^)

Anyway, I have to make up some new, more technical materials for my company's grant proposal, and since some of my readers are also translators, I though I might put up the first part - the section which offers no real clue how to clone our work. I'm open to reactions.

The research programme that we are advancing is motivated by a number of practical considerations as well as a particular theoretical model of the translation process.

Of the novel tools that the 90's introduced to the translation industry, it is apparent that only one has enjoyed genuine success and acceptance by translators: translation memory. We believe that the failure of machine translation to gain acceptance, despite being an older and far more ambitious technology that has absorbed far more time and funding, is substantially the failure of the cognitive models that have driven it.

The promoters of machine translation have traditionally viewed MT not as a labour saving device for translators but as a partial replacement of them. This sort of thinking continues to permeate discussions of MT within the translation industry, where the term "post-editing" is still used to describe the task of human translation in conjunction with MT systems. In this model, translation is a process driven by the MT system, and the translator is understood as a post-editor who adds value to a machine translated text. Translation memory, in contrast, is a translator driven system. It is nothing but a database of existing translations and its contents are entirely determined by translators. It is a genuine labour-saving device, since it minimises the translator's workload by making sure that for any particular segment of text the translator need only translate it once. The translator is neither replaced nor reduced to a lesser role, because every sentence in the translated text is still the work of a translator.

We believe that translation should remain a process driven by translators, who remain the focus of all translation activity. The mechanical aids placed at translators' disposal should not be imagined as doing translation, but as devices designed to enhance the productive power of individuals. We contend that the task of these systems is to offer the translator a packet of information which is easily absorbed and which minimises the cognitive load of composing new translations. In this way, the computational apparatus which surrounds the translator acts as an extension of his or her own cognitive apparatus. Successful automation in the translation industry will be built on gains in machine aided translation, not automated translation, for the foreseeable future.

This distinction between machine-driven and translator-driven work lends itself to a family of models of activity and cognition generally known as distributed cognition. We are using a particular framework called Sociocultural Activity Theory to give our efforts a theoretical basis. (Vygotsky 1932/1986, Cole & Engeström 1993) This theory is increasingly important in the software design industry, which has long confronted difficulties in building software that enhances productivity. (Nardi, et al 1995, and Walenstein 2002) It advances a number of theoretical constructs that are useful in analysing the translation process, but we will only look at two of them here. The first of these is the idea that artefacts of some sort always stand between people and the objects of their activity. Second, artefacts in conjunction with human knowledge and abilities can form a single system, termed a "functional organ", in which the tool is adapted to the person and the person to the tool, enabling the whole to function better than the parts.

This sort of analysis suits the translation process quite well. Translating is a very information intensive process which, even in the pre-computer era, made heavy use of tools external to the translator. In the classical context, these were usually printed reference materials, such as dictionaries and glossaries as well as translations of related materials, and mechanical text production devices like typewriters. The typewriter in conjunction with the manual skills of the translator is a functional organ for the production of written texts. In the same sense, reference materials in conjunction with the linguistic capabilities of the translator are a functional organ for transforming information from one language into another. It is primarily this latter functional organ which is the object of our research, and we are largely concerned with the functioning and enhancement of those cognitive supports which are external to the translator.

Translators are human. They have limited memories, limited attention spans and suffer from fatigue and other performance-limiting phenomena. We cannot realistically change this property of human bodies, and some linguists believe that even if we could, our ability to learn and manipulate language might well be damaged rather than enhanced. (See Newport 1990, for example.) Yet, the qualities that we would most like to see in a translation are the very ones that the human translator is least naturally suited to give us: completeness, accuracy and consistency. Thus, the translator is compelled to use cognitive supports like dictionaries and term lists during translation.

This human frailty was a major motivation behind early MT. (Although admittedly the labour-intensive nature of translation was a more important motivator.) Machines are well suited to ensuring completeness, accuracy and consistency. However, despite over fifty years of effort, the core process of uncontrolled natural language translation still cannot be genuinely automated. The form and complexity of the information involved requires an authentically human knowledge of the world. (Bar Hillel 1960 is the classical source of this claim.) Even if we could construct computers potentially capable of storing and manipulating this encyclopaedic information about the world, it is not clear that there is any way to acquire this data except by embedding the computer in a slowly maturing human body.

Computers are, therefore, not well suited to the very human problem of constructing good translations. Consequently, enhancing the productivity of translators through automation means using computers to create better functional organs for translation. We must pay a great deal more attention to the interface between human translators and the machines that support their activity, and, although the translator must adapt to the machine, it is far more important for us to adapt the machine to the translator.

Machine translation, while it may not offer us much hope of substantially replacing the translator, does offer us the prospect of a very convenient interface between automated systems and the translator. We want, ideally, to generate a text that encapsulates the information that the translator would ordinarily be forced to search out in reference books and previous translations. This sort of comprehensive search and consistent result is the domain in which the computer excels, but where the human translator often fails. By putting the result in the form of a readable text, we minimise the additional cognitive load of interpreting this information. Where the text diverges only slightly from being a correct translation, the work of fixing it is quite simple. Where it diverges sharply, if it remains a readily comprehensible text which has, to the degree possible, used the terminology and usages which we would expect to find in a good translation, we believe that we have still made translators' work much easier by reducing the need to laboriously look up terms and check with previous translations.

Update: They move quickly over at Taccuino di Traduzione, where not only is this post linked to, but there is also a link to an article on machine translation in Italian. Alas, my Italian is not too good, so I used Babelfish as an aid in reading it. However, the stripped-down Systran code that powers Babelfish translated the title as "The bacon of the translator automatic rifle", which, I think, neatly demonstrates the point that the article is trying to make.

2003-10-01T22:19:00.000+02:00

Practical Chinese Reader: The Next Generation

This is just something I had to blog...

Past students of Chinese as a second language will of course all know Gubo, Palanka and Ding Yun. For a generation now, nearly all Chinese foreign language textbooks have come from the same place: the Beijing Culture and Language University. The Practical Chinese Reader series is essentially the same textbook in every classroom in the world, translated from Chinese into into whatever the local language might be so that all Chinese students everywhere have the same preparation and the same curriculum. Then, if they come to China to study, they can all have the same textbook, whatever their native languages might be.

These textbooks contained readings that primarily centred on the lives of two foriegn students at the Beijing Culture and Language University: Gubo and Palanka. The two names are just generic, western sounding names. For years, I assumed Gubo was intended to be African and Palanka possibly Russian, but there is never any discussion of exactly where they came from. In the first couple of lessons, they befriend a young Chinese univeristy student, a women named Ding Yun. The entire BCLU curriculum was built around these three recurring characters, whose names must be recognisable to many thousands of Chinese language students around the world. I'm sure I'm not the only student to put his minimal Chinese to use wondering how Gubo would approach Palanka and Ding Yun about a menage à trois or similar extracurricular activities. I've even come across Palanka/Ding Yun slash fiction on the net - the occidental ingenue and the naive Chinese university student, discovering their sexuality in the dorms of Beijing...

Chinese classes are usually three hours a session. It gets boring. You learn to entertain yourself.

Well, today in my Chinese class, I finally acquired the New Practical Chinese Reader, the lastest edition from the BCLU Press. To my shock and amazement, there was no sign of Gubo and Palanka!!! Well, I was just blown away.

So, at the end of class, I went up to the prof and asked "?"

The prof replies "? ? " Then, he opens up the textbook to the second page, where all the characters in our text are profiled, and the first person introduced is:

Ding Libo
A Canadian Student,
aged 21, male
Gubo is his father
Ding Yun is his mother

Well, now the mystery is solved. Gubo is Canadian, and he never managed to hit it off with Palanka, but seems to have gotten somewhere with the xenophilic Ms Ding.

I suppose I'm a bit of a sentimentalist, but I'm going to miss (Gubo), (Palanka) and (Ding Yun). I've taken first semster Chinese at least four times, three times in English, once in French, and once in California with traditional characters, where I also passed the second semster. Wherever I studied, Gubo, Palanka and Ding Yun were there. This is the first time I've taken Chinese and their difficulties in surviving day-to-day life in Beijing were absent.

Still, life goes on, and after twenty-odd years stuck in BCLU's foreign student dorms, I suppose it's time for them to move on to grown up life.

2003-09-30T23:10:00.000+02:00

Caption the Photo

From Microsoft sued for alleged theft at CNN.com

Update: The wife has a knack for finding these things:

From CNN Inside Politics

2003-09-27T20:26:00.000+02:00

For everyone who knows me in real life

My cellphone got stolen today in Brussels, so if you're one of the people with my GSM number, it won't work anymore. Just use my landline number, and if you don't have it, e-mail me to get it.

2003-09-26T18:57:00.000+02:00

The Scar

I finished reading China Miéville's last book The Scar the other day. I'm really beginning to like Miéville's books. But, ever since the dialogue in Perdido Street Station about the Torque bomb, I've wondered if we're going to find out that Bas-Lag is some kind of post-weird-holocaust Earth. Now that I've finished The Scar, it seems almost obvious. Anybody else had these thoughts?

2003-09-26T15:43:00.000+02:00

The 80's are finally over

For those of you who count yourselves among the first MTV generation (hint: Who was Martha Quinn? If you don't know the answer, you don't count), the following is tragic news indeed:

Robert Palmer dies in Paris

PARIS (Reuters) - British rock singer Robert Palmer has died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 54, French media say.

Palmer was best known for his 1985 hit "Addicted to Love" and its accompanying video, which featured laconic models with slicked-back hair and electric guitars.

The singer was on holiday in Paris with his companion Mary Ambrose when he suffered the heart attack, the reports said on Friday.

No further details were immediately available.

Robert Palmer - inventor of the now obscure reference "Robert Palmer girls" - was something of an icon of the 80's, right up there with Don Johnson. Always looking good in formalwear that a mere few years earlier might have been eschewed as "square", Palmer was always at the forefront of men's fashion. In a stark reflection of the Reagan-era rejection of social progress, women in the Palmerverse were empty, near identical, interchangeable vessels, who served as little more than backdrop scenery. Easy to look at and impossible to tell apart, they were mere simulcra of women, there only to play guitars and shimmy on stage.

Palmer's music career reached its peak in the mid 80's, with his 1985 and '86 hit singles "Addicted to Love" and "Simply Irresistable", both far more widely known for the sterility with which the simultaneously released music videos portray the female form than for their artistic value as music. He was also the front man for the Robert Palmer-Duran Duran hybrid "Power Station", the one-hit-wonder responsible for the lyrically unimpressive hit "Get it on (Bang a gong)" in 1985.

With Palmer's death, my dear readers, the 1980's are finally over. Unstructured blazers and pink shirts will never be fashionable again. Can I also presume that the end of the 1980's means we can now stop fighting the war on drugs, political correctness, welfare queens and Middle-Eastern extremism?

2003-09-25T23:22:00.000+02:00

For the World's A B C's, He Makes 1's and 0's

Good article on Michael Everson and Unicode at the NY Times. Also, the front page has an obit for Edward Saïd, who passed away today.

Oh, and the archives are functional again. Blogger blew up for a few days and a lot of the archives were missing or incomplete. But it should be okay again.

I've been busy with Chinese and Russian the last couple of days. My language classes are all in Dutch, so this is sort of Dutch immersion Russian and Chinese. It's a new experience, but it is doing my Dutch a fair amount of good.

2003-09-23T18:49:00.000+02:00

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

Cosma's asked me not to post anything too "insightful" about methodological individualism until he's had a chance to respond. Since I have the same kinds of problems getting the time for more in-depth arguments, I sympathise.

I just want to say one thing before we go too much further, and I'm hoping that it isn't too insightful: It was a something of a mistake for me to go into arguments against methodological individualism in general rather than going straight to the Barbie example, because the second is much important to the case I'm trying to make. In order to really take advantage of arguments that attribute phenomena to populations that don't fit my criteria for a collective - like the speakers of a language - I have to develop a whole different area of theory. Doing this would be helpful for other purposes as well, like developing a theory of class. I've got some notions about where to go to do that, but it won't happen today.

Besides, I am trying to offer a normative theory. I want to show just how, and under just what conditions, we can assert a collective responsibility. My answer is that we can only do so when we can assert that a collective possesses both a capacity for collective action and collective cognition. Something else - for example, women in Heath's example - may have a capacity for collective action. They individually buy cosmetics and collectively support the cosmetics industry, but they possess no capacity for collective cognition. Women do not all get together and decide, as a group, to buy cosmetics. Their collective action is attached to no collective cognition. Therefore, we can't blame women for the cosmetics industry. We can't assert that whatever damage cosmetics do to the lives of women, that it is their own fault.

Now, on to other stuff. The comments to the third post have some good stuff that I never did respond to. Zizka thinks I should write a book - which, along with the other positive responses I've gotten to this series have expanded my ego to the point where it is becoming a health hazard.

Tom T., however, makes some good counterpoints:

Your post is thought-provoking and very smoothly written. Also, the critique of capitalism would indeed be very interesting, and I hope you get around to writing it. I find myself running up against a fundamental issue, however, but it may be that I am either reading too much or too little into your post.

I have a hard time seeing how the principle of self-development, as you've described it thus far, differs the U.S. Constitution's principle of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." It seems to me that both are open-ended aspirational goals that are hard to argue against in principle but provide little guidance in themselves for day-to-day policy-making.

You say that education is important to the freedom of self-development. That may be true, but the principle of self-development, in an of itself, doesn't seem to help us decide how much money to spend on public schools, or what tuition (if any) to charge for college or grad school, or whether to permit vouchers. Does self-development alone provide a means for getting past the doctrine of "separate-but-equal"?

The same holds true in other areas as well, I think. Self-development may embrace a right to transportation, and again that may be so. At what level, though, should bus and subway fares be set; what percent of costs should be covered by fares and what percent by taxes? Is Amtrak service justifiable? Should the government offer low-interest loans on cars to the needy?

Affirmative action also strikes me as a more difficult issue than you present. Certainly, American history can be seen as giving rise to racial and other systemic injustices that persist to this day. Nonetheless, under your own theory (in my opinion, of course), using affirmative action to further the self-development of a member of a protected group necessarily impinges upon the self-development of the member of the unprotected group who would otherwise have gotten that spot in the college class, or that job, etc. There may be just and worthy reasons for favoring one person (or class of persons) over another, but I think that self-development in this context is a wash.

It seems to me that it is impossible for a policymaker to maximize every person's self-development. Every dollar that you or I pay in taxes is a dollar that could otherwise have gone to our personal self-development. Again, there may be excellent reasons for imposing such taxes, but I think one has to look beyond simply the principle of self-development in order to reach those reasons. And if that's true, then what does the principle of self-development add to the process?

First, I would say that what I am putting forward is certainly compatible with Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. It is true that it is an aspiational goal, but so are almost all normative political principles. I don't forsee the development of a detailed calculus which enables us to say that action A leads to X units of self-development and action B leads to Y units, so if X > Y, we do action A. However, I think it is at least as reasonable a principle to advance as the utilitarian goal of the greatest good to the greatest number.

This is not a decision procedure, but rather a set of terms in which to make an argument. People might well legitimately disagree what specific action will do the most to advance self-development, and no ready mechanism exists for measuring it. There is still a need to balance interests against each other. The idea, instead, is that using these categories to make these judgements is useful because it explicitly rejects certain kinds of arguments that I find damaging.

For example, my system lends itself well to arguments for a progressive income tax - the very rich loose very little capacity for self-development by paying high taxes, while the poor lose a great deal. It does not, however, tell you what level of taxation will optimise the capacity for individual self-development. Indeed, you can still make a case against high progressive income taxes on the grounds that self-development is more enhanced by the investment activities of wealthy people than by taxing their money and using it for more specifically targetted activities. I don't happen to think that is a very good argument, but it is a possible one in this framework. What I am rejecting is the idea that progressive income taxes are wrong because they are unequal or because of some moral notion of what's mine is mine.

In the case of affirmative action, I made a different argument, one based on historical injustice rather than one based on optimisation of self-development in the present. In Canada, we tend to recognise a sense of "collective rights" which we attribute based on very ad hoc notions of identity - "francophone", "aboriginal", "visible minority", etc - and we do this especially when we recognise historical injustices. I have always been bothered by this sort of thing, and this is my alternative.

2003-09-22T14:56:00.000+02:00

An example for Cosma

In the comments to the post below Marc-Antoine Parent points me towards Joseph Heath, who has an interesting paper up on his website called Ideology, Irrationality and Collectively Self-Destructive Behaviour. It is an expansion of the "prisoner's dilemma" type problem so frequently found in choice theory to explain a wider variety of phenomena that are frequently - and particularly within Marxist discourse - attributed to ideology. It lends itself well to a methodologically individualist analysis. He points out that American women spend some $20 billion a year on cosmetics, even though many of them realise quite acutely how collectively damaging that spending is to women as a whole, and offers a good reason why.

I don't have any particular problem with his explanation. Women are not, to my way of thinking, a collective. However, while it may be a good explanation of why the opinions of women seem to have virtually no impact at all on the cosmetics industry, it is not a complete explanation. It explains why women buy cosmetics, but it doesn't explain why they make and sell them. Women also work at cosmetics firms and they work at banks that make loans to cosmetics firms. They, the ones who would have the power to do something about the cosmetics industry, are also doing nothing about it.

Many years ago, I worked for a small firm that did some contract work for Mattel, back in the old days before they merged with Tyco. I had enough exposure to middle level management at Mattel to realise that the women who make and sell Barbie - and they were mostly middle-aged women - largely hated "the little plastic slut" and everything that she stood for, and sold her anyway. Why? Heath's reasoning applies quite well to them - no Barbie means no job. They hated Barbie, but they hated unemployment even more. How can it be that a whole firm - or something fairly close to it - can promote and sell a product that most of the individual employees, including the top managers, individually hated?

I claim that it is because the firm does not hate Barbie. It has motivations quite different from those of its individual members. For the firm, Barbie is life or death. Mattel makes a number of products besides Barbie, but none is nearly as big, as profitable or as emblematic of the firm as Barbie. The risks and choices available to individual Mattel employees may very well explain why Mattel continues to function and why the parts of the firm continue to work in their context, but all that shows is that a theory of individual choice can be compatible with a theory of collective cognition and behaviour. The behaviour of the firm itself is better explained in terms of the firm as a single entity making choices as a whole, choices that are only rational in terms of the firm's position in a market for which the firm acts as a single player.

We can't actually attribute full responsibility for Barbie - and all that she entials - to any real person at Mattel. I am inclined to be sympathetic to someone who works in a job that entails doing things they don't personally like, since, like most people, I've been in those kinds of jobs. Whatever ills we believe Barbie to cause, we can only honestly attribute them to the whole firm and to its - possibly - rational choices in a context even larger than itself.

2003-09-22T11:23:00.000+02:00

Confessions of a negligent blogger

I realise I've not been blogging as much as I used to. For example, it's been two months since I last put up a post from Grandpa's memoirs, and I haven't looked terribly hard at the comments on the posts on language rights that have now dropped off the main page into the archives.

I have been a little busy.

However, I am especially embarassed since last night, when I got a call from my mother wondering how it could be that she had commented on one of my posts a week ago and I had said nothing about it.

So, hi Mom!

Anyway, since I know that my Mom (and my ego-surfing little brother who found this blog) will be reading this page, I cleaned up the broken images in the archives, which have been down for a while now because Quasitown.com went from being a free site to a pay site. And now, I'm going to put up a set of links to some of the key posts that I think she's going to want to read (and, of course, any other readers I still have after such a long period of slow blogging who haven't read them are welcome to click through too):

Grandpa's autobiography:

Nestor Makhno and me
Das Alter Buch
Out of Friesia
One third of the way around the world in 30 days
Down and out in Siberia
Winnipeg emm Kjalla
Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows
Beastly Murder
Tina Rennt...
Liebesbriefen von Rußland
Apanlee
The Apanlee Park
Faith put to the test

Then, there are the posts on language rights that are the current focus of discussion here at Pedantry:

Language Rights and Political Theory - Chapter Summaries and Specific Criticisms
A different kind of language policy
Mediation, Collectivism, Self-Development and Political Theory
Language, Culture and Reality

And:

French Immersion
A Link from An Unenviable Situation
Another latecomer to the debate on language rights
Methodological Individualism and Actor-Network Theory

I'm going to respond to some of the comments on the language rights posts as soon as possible. I just have a little code to fix up first.

Update: At Ikram Saeed's request, I'm also adding a link to the post on Israel and the Palestinians that first invoked some of these notions:

Why Israel and Palestine are not morally equivalent

Further Update: Fixed the links again. @$%^ Blogger keeps changing where my posts are in the archive. Still hunting for the post on education that I think must be the one Donald Jobson is looking for.

Still Further Update:

I think the post Donald is looking for is this one:

We don't need no education

And the follow-up:

Smokin' In The Boys' Room

2003-09-18T22:49:00.000+02:00

It's good to be poor

I see, having a few minutes to surf the blogs before bed, that there is an interesting multiblog argument going on over Jacob Levy's recent New Republic column. Levy promises to respond to several of his critics, and I'm hoping that it's not too late to join in the fun. The article is about the Wall Street Journal's recent complaints that poor people don't pay enough taxes.

Here is the core of Levy's argument:

The general form of these arguments ("lucky duckies" as well as the arguments from the left) is: If we subject everyone to the same rules, institutions, or conditions, then there will be political demand to make them fair or otherwise tolerable. If we only subject some people to them, then some may be unfairly singled out or burdened; there will be opportunities to divide the citizenry, play the interests of some against those of others, and to undermine the overall desirable outcome. The only detail that changes from argument to argument is the class to which one tries to yoke people--the class of taxpayers, the class of potential soldiers, the class of recipients of government checks, etc.

Now, Levy has a point, but he has skipped an essential element of nearly all discussions of political equality: what exactly is a political system supposed to equalise? Equalising net tax rates are, I think, a fairly pathetic goal for a political theory. The simplest justification for progressive taxation is to raise the time-honoured - and nowadays nearly cliché - difference between formal and substantial equality.

I've already claimed that political systems should not be about equality, they should be about optimality, but that's just me. I would make the argument that many social institutions should treat people differently, that their goal should be the best possible outcome (by whatever standard is appropriate) for each person, rather than identical outcomes. To me, that means a guy with a billion dollars can live with a much higher tax rate than a guy with a minimum wage job. The self-development based case would go something this: a guy with a billion dollars can buy just about as much self-development as money will buy. His opportunities are less diminished by taxing his money away than the guy on minimum wage. Alternatively, I can make the case on the grounds that there is no way a guy with a billion dollars works 100,000 times more than someone with ten grand. All wealth is socially created (screw you, Ayn Rand!), and the only way a person can have that kind of wealth is when they owe the rest of the world for it. That would be a bit more conventionally Marxist, but I don't want to make the usual labour-value-based argument about exploitation. I don't think the guy on minimum wage is any less tied to the rest of society for his earnings than Bill Gates, but I'm quite okay with saying that he deserves his money more.

But actually, I mostly agree with Levy. Binding people to institutions is sometimes necessary precisely because of its effect on social cohesion. Frankly, participation in social institutions is rarely voluntary at all and usually can't be genuinely voluntary under any realistic circumstances.

I just think that that's a crappy argument for taxing the poor, but then I'm not very sympathetic to the Wall Street Journal's incessant complaining about taxes anyway. I don't think there is any good reason for state policy to assist in creating pressure for tax cuts in the US. I pay 50% income taxes and 21% VAT on a lot less than a top 1% income, and I don't complain about it. I suspect the conservative rich in America are just whiners.

Nota Bene: This should have been pulbished last night, but Blogger was on the blink.

2003-09-18T22:18:00.000+02:00

Methodological Individualism and Actor-Network Theory

Cosma Shalizi brings up two points in reference to my third post on language rights that I'd like to address: First, that I haven't made a case against methodological individualism, and second, that I haven't made a case for Actor-Network Theory.

First, methodological individualism. Methodological individualism, at least as it applies to the social sciences, usually means that our theories about human activity should only make reference to the actions, and often reasons, that individuals do things and to the side-effects, expected and unexpected, of those actions. I have indeed put forward a theory that is not methodologically individualist. So, let me make a case against methodological individualism. Credit where credit is due, I stole part of this argument from Dan Sperber.

I can't for the life of me figure out how anyone could do historical linguistics in a methodologically individualistic way. Historical linguistics is the study of how languages change in time. Naturally, languages are spoken by individual people, but when we talk about language change, we are almost exclusively talking about a group phenomenon. If some individual somewhere changes the way they speak, without any reference to other people, it's of no interest to historical linguistics. It is only when the languages of whole communities of people change, and change in a largely uniform way, that it becomes interesting. Historical linguistics depends on this tendency for the whole community to change together. It simply makes no sense to say that linguistic change is something that happens to individuals or as something that follows from individual actions.

An individualist theory of historical linguistics would have to explain language change in terms of psycholinguistics. I don't see how that is reasonable, and I see even less reason to reject presently collectivist theories of historical linguistics just because they aren't grounded in psycholinguistics.

I subscribe to what is, depending on how you want to look at it, either a very weak form of reductionism or a moderately reductionist form of holism. I think that it's a good thing when theories with different objects are compatible and I think that there is often knowledge to be gained in working out that they are compatible, but I see no special reason to order our theories on the basis of some sense of fundamentalness and then use that scale to privilege some theories over others. It would be nice if our theories of psycholinguistics were compatible with historical linguistics, and since almost all of the theories of psycholinguistics and language acquisition that I know of allow for people's language to change over time and over generations in response to all sorts of things, I don't think that this compatibility is essentially a problem. But, no theory of psycholinguistics that I know of actually explains any theories of historical linguistics. Historical linguistics has functioned for centuries without privileging individualist explanations and I don't see any likelihood of change soon.

I think this same logic applies to anything that smacks of cultural anthropology, and a theory of socially mediated tools definitely fits the bill. People are born into a world that already exists, and the tools available to them are already chosen by others. The cultural machinery that supports them is largely hidden from view. Just as language can only persist as a social phenomena, collectives like states and companies and cultural phenomena like the division of labour only persist when they are supported by groups.

The grand contradiction of language rights is that they are inherently collective in nature, while the traditional liberal rights are usually understood as inherently personal. Nations and corporations are no different.

And that leads me to Actor-Network Theory. I could have made the same point somewhat differently. I might, for instance, have invoked more traditionally socialist characters like Stafford Beer, who discusses a similar sort of collective thinking in The Brain of the Firm. However, Bruno Latour draws attention to something that I think is important to the kind of collectivism I'm advancing. Collectives - as I've described them - are never just groups of people. Collectives always have non-human elements which are essential to its ability to think and act as a whole. A collective always includes at the very least mediating tools like codes for communication and structures that divide and order labour and enable the transformation of cognition into action. They can include other essential elements as well, and Latour makes a particular point of the importance of texts as cognitive elements. I think this is quite illuminating in areas like legal theory, where a document like a national constitution can be a genuine actor within the collective.

I should also point out that the kind of collectivism that I'm advocating is quite different from folk collectivism. I agree with Margaret Thatcher that there is no such thing as society, but there is such a thing as General Motors. That distinction between things that are just a bunch of people and things that are collectives is very important to the case I'm trying to make.

Next: I think I'm going to delve into the comments here for my next post, then Seth Edenbaum, for why I prefer not to use intrinsic value in normative political theory.

Update: Cosma responds, first citing Elster, then Sperber, Boudon and a book I haven't read. The book appears, according to the reviews I've found, advance some kind of psycholinguistic explanation for language change. I'll have to see it to evaluate it. The rest - reevaluating what it means for languages to be in contact, and rethinking the notion that there is a motivated distinction between internal and external causes for language change is something I'm pretty sympathetic towards. Sperber's article - which I'm pretty sure is the one I stole the example from historical linguistics from - seems to largely support my case, offering up a very weak kind of individualism and an epidemology of representations in place of strong methodological individualism. I am not as keen on the idea of an epidemology of representations, prefering instead an anthropology of tools. However, there is a fair amount of overlap between the two, something I think somebody with more time on his hands ought to explore in conjunction with a contrast of Dennett and Vygotsky. The Boudon paper is quite interesting, but not so convincing as all that. To identify all social explanation exclusively with individualist theories is, I think, really pushing the envelope beyond reasonable limits. I think it is not only perfectly reasonable, but absolutely necessary, to have theories of institutions which evoke the actions of institutions and explanations which make sense from an institutional point of view. I don't really see how an economics which includes the division of labour or a political science which deals with modern states, can genuinely do without it.

I have my differences with Elster, and most of them revolve around the key issue of methodological individualism and my rejection of public choice theory as a firm foundation for the social sciences. I see even less how public choice theory can explain lingusitic change than psycholoinguistics. However, I agree with Elster that a Marxist theory of institutions is not in terribly good shape, and I think he has identified the kind of thinking that has helped put it there. Once you start seeing the capitalist class, or the proletariat, as a kind of collective actor, you are asking for trouble. Many of his complaints about an objective teleology are spot-on. "Because it benefits the capitalists" is not an explanation, and does not substitute for a social theory. But that is not the kind of explanation I'm putting forward. I am trying to explain how a CEO who considers himself socially conscious, in charge of a company whose stock holders might be predominantly liberal, can find his firm exploiting people and polluting the environment; or a better example, how a nation of people who are largely socially liberal and when presented with the basic principles of social democracy agree with them, can have and continue to have over many years a state which goes repeatedly against those same principles. I think a theory of collective identity, collective action and collective cognition is necessary to this. I claim that collective outcomes can arise from structural conditions which are just as cognitive as human choices, and I think these outcomes should be compatible with a set of microfoundations for institutions, but they do not require them in order to be useful.

I also want to reject ad hoc classes of collective. Only those entities structurally capable of cognition and action can be classed as collective in my ontology. I have not advanced a theory of classes in this framework because this kind of thinking lends itself poorly to a theory of classes. This really is a key point which distinguishes what I am saying - which really is not that ambitious as social science - from the type of sociological explanation that methodological individualism came into being to oppose.

2003-09-17T11:24:00.000+02:00

I'm back

I've finally managed to return to normalcy after having the flu all weekend and then taking a Chinese placement test on Monday. I've been unable to find a Dutch class that's more than one night a week, except for classes that run during the day and one class that starts at 5pm three nights a week. I can't fit that into my work schedule, so I'm going to do an intensive taalbad towards the end of the year instead of taking Dutch this semester.

I feel a little guilty about not studying Dutch until December. I guess there's some bit of me that is trying to be a good immigrant. So, this term I'm studying Chinese and Russian at KU Leuven. I have taken both simultaneously once before back in Montreal - it didn't go well. But this time, I don't have any other classes, so I'm hoping it will work out okay. I've managed to test into second year Chinese - which was all that I aspired to do. Since I haven't used Chinese at all in two years and I only know fan2ti3zi4, I'm taking it as a victory. I've taken first year Chinese several times, and I really, really, really, don't want to have to start all over again.

Anyway, I'm going to write a post for A Fistful of Euros, and then I'm going to start responding to comments and posts on my series on language rights, starting with Cosma Shalizi, because he brings up a pair of important points.

I have a chunk of code to debug first - I'm using minimum description length theory to identify terminology from corpora. It's working a good deal better than I could reasonably have hoped for. I'm pretty sure I'm on to something here, and I need to spend a couple hours teasing a good formula out of it. After lunch though, I expect to be writing.

2003-09-09T20:40:00.000+02:00

Going offline for a week

Most of my readers will have noticed that I haven't posted since the weekend, and that it's been awfully slow lately. I had hopes that things would turn around this week, that I would be able to answer the comments on my own blog, write some responses, maybe get up the next bit of Grandpa's memoirs... but instead, I need to do another revision of my grant application by the end of tomorrow, I have to spend a full day running around Brussels on Thursday, I have to pass a Dutch proficiency test next week, and a Chinese one right after that, plus a few other bits of non-blog writing that I have to do. On top of that, I have to do a glossary for a British windshield manufacturer by early next week and I have some dinner guests coming over on the weekend. I've written a piece of code that does a good job of building glossaries automatically, so at least that isn't too much work. Oh yeah, and on top of that, season seven of Buffy has finally started on Kanaal Twee.

Besides, as much as I hate to say this, I've been suffering from the most incredible writer's block lately. I started this blog so that I would at least be writing something, and now - very suddenly - I have writing work coming out of my ears. So, I'm taking a week off this blog. I'm going to keep up a little posting on A Fistful of Euros, but Pedantry will be closed until Tuesday next.

Until then, Seth Edenbaum has put up a few points about my language rights postings that are well worth reading. According to the Daily Trudge, one of my past posts about evolutionary psychology has made an EP mailing list. (I was a bit harsh on EP, but you see, I think it's bollocks.) Jonathan over at the Final Analysis thinks lexicography is cool. It's good to know that I'm not the only nut out there. :^) Lastly, I should note that I have been blogged in Welsh.

I appreciate the responses I've gotten, here in the comments and on other blogs, and I do intend to explore this a bit further - just not this week. As one of this blog's commenters told me in the comments to an early post here: you can't have a dialectic if the other side won't keep up their end.

Anyway - think of this as my summer vacation, except I'm not going on vacation.

2003-09-06T02:40:00.000+02:00

Another latecomer to the debate on language rights

Cosma Shalizi has also commented on my recent series of posts on language rights. Writing the follow-up post just keeps getting harder and harder, and I fear I'm going to have to turn it into a another multi-part post. Also, my hit counter leads me to suspect that several authors of the book I started by reviewing - Language Rights and Political Theory - have hit my blog. If you're one of them, hi!

Cosma pulls out the heavy guns. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's Popper time. I will get to that soon in a follow-up post. I just got back from a birthday party - hi, Peter! - and am a bit too tipsy to try it now.

But there is one thing I want to draw attention to. Cosma is "a little disappointed that [I] didn't at least mention a certain recently-influential tradition, which still has adherents, that anticipated [me] in certain aspects."

Cosma is speaking of the big man himself - Karl Marx. Now, lemme see. I talked at length about Lev Vygotsky - famous Marxist psychologist - and quoted Marx himself, not once, but twice without attribution. I linked to a Norman Geras article which does nothing but talk about Marxism. "Self-development" itself is also something of a Marxist tagline.

In short folks, it's time I confessed. Cosma has smoked me out. I was advancing a theory which is Marxist through and through, drawing heavily on Marxist literature and the Marxist tradition. I was being snarky by carefully and intentionally not using his name. I expected someone to point this out, but Cosma is the first to call me on it. The prize in this unannounced competion is 1,000 Laotian Kip in cash - acquired during my vacation two years ago - collectable by personally coming to Belgium to pick it up.

2003-09-05T18:58:00.000+02:00

Things Technorati misses

I have missed linking to one of the better philosophy blogs out there - Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg. Worse, it's written by a regular commentor here and has a post on my mammoth posting on language rights.

I can only apologise. I rely to much on link services to tell me who is linking to me. Folks, if you want me to read your comment or link to you, you have but to drop me a line.

2003-09-05T17:38:00.000+02:00

Stupid things people say about language

This article has me shaking my head:

Brand names create global language

Brand names have become so abundant that in France they account for two out of every five words an average person knows, according to a study being carried out by French branding company Nomen.

Shocking as that may sound, Nomen Chief Executive Marcel Botton says the trend is creating a new international language that helps people communicate in foreign countries.

" You hear people abroad asking for well-known brands of food or drink when they don't know the word in the foreign language. It's irritating for Coca-Cola when rival products are treated as the same thing but it makes people's lives easier. "-Nomen Chief Executive Marcel Botton

"The distinction between brand names and ordinary words is becoming quite blurred," Botton told Reuters.

"This is bad news for companies that have invested a lot of money in branding a product, but for the general public I see advantages. Brand names are more international than words and they are creating a new Esperanto, which I rather like."

Esperanto, an artificial international language invented in 1887 as a second language everyone could learn, never took off.

Learning brand names, on the other hand, is subconscious, as names seep into our brains through advertisements and shopping.

English speakers use trademarks like Frisbee, Hoover and Walkman as ordinary words, causing some to spread abroad. France uses "Kleenex" for tissue and "Scotch" for adhesive tape.

"You hear people abroad asking for well-known brands of food or drink when they don't know the word in the foreign language. It's irritating for Coca-Cola when rival products are treated as the same thing but it makes people's lives easier," Botton said.

Botton, who created such company names as Vivendi, Wanadoo, Arcelor and Vinci, began testing people in August to see how many brands they recognised and how many dictionary words they knew.

"It crossed my mind this would be an interesting study, as it seemed people knew more and more brands and fewer words."

Botton's team chopped up the French dictionary -- which lists around 100,000 words -- into bitesize chunks which were read out to different people within a test group. A list of 20,000 brand names was also split into chunks and read out.

While the study is not complete, the results so far suggest the average French person knows some 3,000 words and is familiar with around 2,000 brand names on top of that -- suggesting that 40 percent of total vocabulary consists of brand names.

Botton said there were enough possible permutations of pronounceable one-, two- and three-syllable words to cover several billion new brand names.

I presume that what Botton has discovered is that average French people can tell you what roughly 3% of the words in the Petit Robert mean. That seems a little low to me - I would have expected a figure closer to 10% - but it's probably the right order of magnitude. That part is not too surprising. The thing is, that doesn't mean you only need 3000 words of French to get by in life. Explaining this will require a bit of basic lexicology.

First, dictionaries don't list words, they list lexemes. These are not the same things. To be is a lexeme. Be, am, 'm, is, are, was and were are words. In most languages, fluent speakers have to understand the meaning of several words for each lexeme. Second, a surprising percentage of the words in everyday texts are proper nouns of various kinds that don't appear in dictionaries. But most importantly, a count of lexemes is not a real measure of the amount of linguistic information a fluent speaker has to possess.

Consider the sentence "It was raining hard." In French, you could translate that as "Il pleuvait fort", which literally means "It rained strongly." One of the pieces of information you have to have in your head about the words rain and hard in English is that when there is an intense rain, it rains hard and not *"It rains strong." ("*" is a symbol used in linguistics to designate an intentionally incorrect example.) So, there are only two words rain and hard, but not only do you have to know what rain and hard mean, you have to know what hard means when it refers to rain.

This phenomena is called either collocation or lexical functions. Since I started out in the Meaning<->Text school of linguistics, I tend to prefer the term lexical functions, reserving collocation for any pair of lexemes that frequently occur together, for whatever reason. Since I mostly do statistical language processing, the distinction is important. By taking lexical functions into account, the number of meaningful units a native speaker has to know explodes by a factor of anywhere from 10 to 50.

To this, we have to also add a certain amount of phrasal information. Consider the sentence "He does what he wants." To do has its most common meaning in that sentence. Now, consider the differences in meaning to do takes in these three sentences:

     What can I do for you?
     What did you do to my car?
     I want to do her.

To do for X, to do to X and to do X all have completely different meanings, and competent native speakers have to distinguish between them. This same phenomena occurs in French. Faire à X doesn't mean the same thing as faire pour X. These are sometimes called phrasal verbs, but phrasal verbs covers another class of phenomena in English - the Germanic separable verbs. These often don't appear in dictionaries, although most dictionaries make an effort to cover them nowadays. An example of a separable verb in English is to take off, which means something that can't be deduced from the meaning of to take and off. Standard French has phrasal verbs but doesn't have separable verbs, although Canadian French sometimes does:

- T'as-tu vu mes clés?
- Oui, quand je suis allé au bureau, je les ai pris avec.

Lastly, words have very different meanings depending on the register of the language. The word to book means something very different when you're watching Hawaii 5-0 - "Book'em Dano, murder one." - than when you're an accountant for a manufacturing firm - "Book the new orders before the end of the month so they show up as revenue." High frequency words tend of have multiple distinguishable meanings. Although these meanings may (or may not) be related in some way, they can not simply be deduced from a single definition. To know the word to book, you have to know that in means something different in the law enforcement register than in the accounting register - there is no single meaning of to book which by itself tells you what each one means.

Proper nouns - like brand names - are not like common class words or even technical terms. They rarely have any irregular morphology, so they only have the most standard inflected forms. They usually don't have any non-trivial lexical functions. They usually don't change meaning based on the prepositions or phrasal context that you find them in. And, they usually don't vary across registers.

So, it seems very silly to suggest that brand names represent 40% of the words people know. I doubt very strongly that more than the tiniest part of people's lexical knowledge is bound up in brand names. Even sillier is the idea that brand names are forming the core of a new Esperanto. I mean, come on! How many brand names are verbs? Or adjectives? Or adverbs? I mitsubishily kleenex the nike coke?

It is true, however that brand names sometimes become common nouns, much to the annoyance of their trademark holders. Kleenex, for instance, is not happy having their brand name in use as a common word. And, it's true that in much of the world, when you order a coca, you may well get Pepsi. As a linguist, this strikes me as remarkably normal behaviour for people. Besides, I rather like knowing that the more successful a brand is, the more likely people will take the brand and use it as a generic term, destroying its value. It's something I like to encourage.

2003-09-04T21:01:00.000+02:00

If you read H. P. Lovecraft...

...just follow the link. Via Three-Toed Sloth.

2003-09-03T23:52:00.000+02:00

Enetation, once again, fails to earn the money I don't pay them

Comments are on the blink again. Yet another reason to move to MT.

2003-09-03T17:26:00.000+02:00

A Link from An Unenviable Situation

I wanted to mention that D. Ghirlandaio at An Unenviable Situation has also linked to my series of posts on language rights. I bring this up now, because there are no permalinks on his blog and the post may drop off the page before I get to responding. He makes an important point that I would like to clarify. I intend to get into a little more depth in the follow-up post.

I can make a point here that applies also to the question of language politics: Languages can only die a natural death. Invasion and conquest are as natural as the search for food, but we are at the point in our history that in the cause of our morality we defend an ethos of artifcial preservation and museification. My civil morality makes me defend this process, but not without regret. The author of "Pedantry" is too willing for my taste, to replace living culture with its simulacrum, but he is trying to come to terms with just what that culture is.

He's got me dead to rights on the last point: This is about trying to come to terms with what culture is. However, the cultural-historical activity school in education is particular in the kind of distinctions it makes between "natural" and "artificial" in measuring a person's abilities. It explicitly and emphatically makes no such distinction. I deny, for example, that a child's arithmetic skills with pencil and paper are "natural" and arithmetic skills with a calculator are "artificial."

Since I'm extending cultural-historical activity theory to political philosophy, I am also extending the unwillingness to deride one process as artificial and another as natural. Just as it would be wrong for me to label the death of Occitan as "artificial", I won't label using legal mechanisms to preserve French in Canada as "artificial" either. Nor do I class the mechanisms that preserve English in the US and French in France as "natural."

He's right that invasion and conquest are very natural behaviours, just like the search for food. However, we still develop theories of right and wrong that make it wrong to steal food. There is nothing unnatural about slavery or genocide either, but I don't think many people would want to subscribe to a normative political theory that labelled them as "right."

The point is not that one kind of language death is natural and the other artificial. I don't think I ever made any such distinction. I've proposed that language death is always unjust, but that injustice is not always avoidable or remediable.

Update: Seth Edenbaum does have permalinks. The relevant post is here. He also explains that I've missed the point in the comments (which are hopefully still available) and here if not.

2003-09-03T10:20:00.000+02:00

New venue

I am now blogging part-time at A Fistful of Euros - a group blog on European affaris, events and, well, stuff in general. Go, take a look. There are a number of excellent Eurobloggers who have joined the FFOE collective: David Weman, Matthew Turner, Jurjen Smies, Tobias Schwarz, Iain J Coleman, and Nick Barlow. Add it to your bookmarks.

I will continue this blog, but I expect to post fairly little on the news here and stick to more involved posts on Pedantry. In fact, I'm preparing to move this whole operation to MT this month. My posts from my grandfather's memoirs will continue, and I intend to do a follow-up on my language policy posts (see below) this week. Things have been a bit slow here on the blog the last few days, primarily because work has picked up a lot and I'm hunting for an apartment in Brussels, but I'm expecting things to start picking up very soon.

2003-08-31T20:21:00.000+02:00

Aaron McGruder says what I've been thinking

2003-08-29T23:57:00.000+02:00

Why I need an editor

Rereading my last post hours later, now that I'm back from Brussels, I hate it a lot. It flows badly and there are a lot of anaphora problems. Folks, I do usually write better than this, but I got a bit rushed to get this out this week. It's been, to some degree, pasted together out of bits written in different drafts, but without that stage where you reread the whole with a fresh brain and make them all fit together. If I had the time, I would just rewrite it now. Maybe Monday.

I have difficulty managing two big writing projects at the same time, and unfortunately IWT-Vlaanderen got my best work this week.

Oh, and David Weman over at Europundit is promising to "to demolish all [my] arguments." He doesn't know that I didn't originally start exploring this set of ideas for language policy, I developed them as a critique of representative democracy and private property for a science fiction novel that I was, once upon a time, planning to write. He hasn't even seen the really radical parts yet. If he's really interested, I'll explain why we ought to abolish elections and what I think we ought to replace them with.

2003-08-28T10:01:00.000+02:00

Language, Culture and Reality

Finally, my long-delayed fourth post on language rights. Click appropriately for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

I'm not entirely happy with it, and may make some changes later on. It seems a bit diffuse to me. Well, I hope y'all aren't reading the blogs for polished scholarship. But, I decided that since I'm so delayed putting this out, I didn't want to wait until Monday to publish it. I have a rather busy weekend ahead, so there will probably not be much new here until next week.

I didn't quite cover everything I intended to say, but this post was already growing quite long.

Let me also say thanks to Kerim at Keywords for linking in. He also has some good points about this series. I am hoping to get together a post collecting and responding to the response I've gotten in the blogosphere.

But anyway, on with the show...

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

-- Philip K. Dick

Our language is dying because reality no longer takes place in Occitan. And what purpose do our words serve, when there is no longer any meaning with which to fill them?

-- Péire Pessamessa, quoted in Langue et Société by Jacques Leclerc ¹

There is a notion, widespread enough outside of linguistics but almost extinct within it, that claims that language has a determining influence on how we think. Lev Vygotsky, who I discussed in my last post, was one of the people who believed this. It's a really tempting notion and in its own way, it could explain quite a lot. Why do those pesky Arabs, Mexicans, Indians, English, whoever, do whatever it is they do that seems so incomprehensible? Blame their language.

This theory is often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but I've always preferred to call it "vulgar Whorfism." I am not a Whorf scholar, but I have known a couple who quite earnestly claim that what most people take to be the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn't what Whorf said at all. It's just a contagious idea that people have read into Whorf. This may be true - it's happened to other people - so I stick to "vulgar Whorfism" just in case.

Vulgar Whorfism is a really very tempting notion, and it's always reinforced by the same example: The 20 [30, 50, 100 or more] words the Eskimos have for snow.

First of all, let me be politically incorrect for a moment. The word "eskimo" does not derive from the Abenaki word for "bad breath", something even many Eskimos believe. No one's quite sure where the word comes from. It came into English via the French esquimaux, but where the French got it from is a bit of a mystery. The two major theories are that they got it from the Spanish esquimal or from the Montagnais word for snowshoes. Still, folks like to be called what they like to be called, and Eastern Canadian Eskimos like to be called Inuit. In an etymological sense, this word is even more disturbing than "eskimo." It is the Inuktitut plural noun for "human", so all us non-Inuk are what?

I actually spent four years of my childhood in the city of Iqaluit (back then still called Frobisher Bay). My father was the shop teacher at the high school, and my mother taught first grade. Paul Okalik, the Premier of Nunavut, was one of my father's students.

I've travelled a lot in life, but Iqaluit is easily the most exotic and out of the way place I ever lived, and I have a residual attachment to Inuit issues. Back when I was a student in Montreal, and I still entertained the idea of becoming Canada's first NDP prime minister, I decided that having an aboriginal Canadian language in addition to English, French and Chinese (which I was studying at the time) couldn't hurt me at the polls. So, I took up Inuktitut.

It's an interesting language in a lot of ways. It has a lot of really interesting linguistic features. The one that I always found the most interesting is the "fourth person." Inuktitut has split the third person - he, she, it, them - into two different pronouns and morphological categories (actually, the pronouns are the morphological elements in Inuktitut), one for the main person in a narrative, and one for any other person who intervenes in the narrative. This notion has always brought to my mind Samuel Delaney's science fiction novels, where he takes many languages issues far more seriously than most other SF authors. I've long thought there might be an interesting bit of science fiction in a story about the ways language can have syntactic and morphological elements that specifically serve narrative functions.

For those of you who have never seen or heard Inuktitut, here's a little snippet of printed text lifted from the Nunavut government website:

The above reads Nunavut Guvamangit - I'm surprised that I only had to look up two characters - "Government of Nunavut." It looks like something you'd expect to see on an alien starship. Back when I was kid, I thought that was way cool. You would hardly think that this syllabary derives from Pitman shorthand. This same syllabic writing system, modified to some degree, is used for a dozen or so Canadian aboriginal languages. Most dialects of Cree are written using it, as is Ojibwa, Chippewyan, both Slavey dialects, Athapascan, Carrier and a number of smaller languages. It is the only writing system unique to Canada.

I've forgotten a lot, but there is one thing I haven't forgotten: There is only one good word for snow in Inuktitut. It is "aput" in its canonical form - or at least it is in semi-standard Eastern Arctic Canadian Inuktitut. If you live in Greenland or anywhere west of Coppermine, your mileage may vary.

The thing is, even if Inuktitut had a zillion words for snow, it wouldn't have proven anything per se. You see, vulgar Whorfism is almost true. The difference is so small, and yet so important. It is an idea turned upside-down and I want to set it right-side up. The structure of our language doesn't fixes the content of our thoughts, our thoughts fix the structure of our language.

Language is not merely a protocol of communication. It isn't simply a code. It is the reflection of our mental life. Vygotsky explains how our interactions with others is a way in which we use the structures around us to expand our powers in every way, taking them into ourselves. And, language is the foremost way in which we interact with the things that most empower us: other people. In order to make the most of the people around us, we must express our thoughts because it is almost exclusively through language that we are able to use other people's heads to think. Language can only work when it is able to express whatever we might wish to say.

Jerry Fodor is most associated these days with the idea of a "language of thought." However, he imagines it to be a symbolic repertoire and a set of combinatory rules hard-wired in some sense into the human nervous system. What I am advocating is quite different. I don't think it's useful to envision the activity of the nervous system in that way at all. I think it is useful to envision social cognition as something mediated by language, but unlike Whorf or Fodor, I don't think that linguistic mediation creates any meaningful restraint on cognition at all - in or out of the body.

Inuktitut has a single general word for "snow" because sometimes people have thoughts that concern snow in general and have a need to express them. They also have structures - sometimes independent lexemes, sometimes not - for more specific varieties of snow and specific contexts that snow might find itself in, but then so do we in English. If you live in Canada, these words have quite specific meanings, while I once had to explain to a life-long Californian what "sleet" means. People in southern California usually have little need to discuss the finer points of snow, unless they are skiers.

Inuktitut also has a single word for "snowmobile." They have no trouble manipulating this concept - nor gasoline or engine mechanics - even though it was utterly alien to them less than 50 years ago. As soon as it became necessary to talk about snowmobiles, gas and carburetors, a way of expressing those things developed, using a combination of terms borrowed from Bombardier technical manuals and invented or repurposed Inuktitut words.

The idea that language reflects the thoughts of speakers is very important. Speakers' categories of thought reflect the way they interact with the world and how you interact with the world may vary a lot depending on who you are and what context you live in. Language is not an arbitrary protocol, it is the concrete manifestation of the worldview of the culture that supports it. It is an expression of the reality of its speakers' lives.

This notion that language reflects culture without restraining it is important, because on it rests a lot of baggage. It is the principal justification for associating language with culture at all. It is also what distinguishes an advocacy of linguistic diversity from a reinvention of "separate but equal."

Culture is one of those notions that is widely used - so widely that we probably should conclude that it actually refers to something even if only in the minds of the word's users - yet so hard to pin down as to be undefinable. A variety of definitions of "culture" have been proposed over the years, but each revolves around a small set of core notions: meaning, behaviour, tradition, convention and continuity.

I want to - in a sense - abolish the noun "culture" and replace it with an adjective: "cultural." The ambiguity in the way people use the word "culture" suggests that while it probably represents some real thing for speakers - some category of phenomena that they can productively manipulate and talk about - it hides some more analytically useful idea. I suggest that what it hides is Vygotskyan tools and their cultural nature.

I want to define a culture as the set of tools - cognitive and otherwise - that people find at their disposal. I want to get rid of this notion of culture as a monolithic thing. "Cultural", instead, is an adjective used to highlight the contextually situated nature of something, particularly how it is situated within a social and historical context. That separates it from something that is merely a natural phenomena whose existence is independent of human action. Pine trees in a wild forest are not cultural, they are merely natural. A house built out of pine lumber is cultural.

When we speak of a culture as if it was a single entity, we are not designating it that way because its members form a collective. We are merely asserting that there exists some set of people who have many common tools at their disposal. That set of people will not have all the same tools at their disposal. They may share few if any common values. They may and often do live very different kinds of lives and have very different sorts of priorities. By identifying a "culture" we are at most asserting that everyone in this group of people will use some culturally constructed tools that most of the other members of the group also use. They need not all have any common element at all.

Why then, do people place such heavy and personal importance on culture, if it is really a very fuzzy-edged, flexible, changeable thing?

I think it's because culture determines so much of our reality. Although language doesn't restrain thought or action, culture can. You can't build a good, solid house without the necessary tools. Although we could imagine a culture that doesn't need hammers or lumber to build a solid house - the science fiction readers among you can imagine using nanotechnology to just grow a house without any carpentry or masonry at all - we can't imagine building one without any tools at all, or at least we couldn't build one that would be very solid. Without the culturally constructed tools of home-building, the kind of solid, reliable housing that forms a part of our real lives just isn't real.

This same sort of logic applies to more symbolic tools as well. Consider a cultural artefact like property. Property forms a very important part of our reality. The cultural limitations we place on what is mine and what is somebody else's touch almost every element of our lives. It is such a potent symbol that we actually send people to prison for decades for refusing to acknowledge it as a real thing.

To completely lose your culture is to be plunged into an incomprehensible and unreal world. The things that enable you to develop freely disappear. Furthermore, much of what you are is only accessible through the tools that your culture makes available to you. For your culture to die means that a part of you - a large part of you - is also dead.

That is the main injustice done in the death of a culture. It deprives people of the tools of their free self-development. This injustice is particularly acute when it is done quickly, and when it happens quickly, it is always done incompletely.

Most of the world's minority aboriginal communities offer good examples of exactly this problem. People in these communities often have access to a set of cultural tools which are no longer well adapted to the world they live in and only limited access to better suited tools. Then, the ill-adapted tools can disappear without ever being replaced by better ones. The cultural tools that they have taken as their own are missing in the dominant community, but they don't serve them very well within their own community.

Language plays an important role in all this. Language is a sort of meta-tool. Not only does it have instrumental value as a tool of cognition, its structure and categories also reflect the other tools accessible to its speakers. Culture is reflected and supported in the way people communicate. When the cultural artefacts that support life and development change, the language must change with it, just as Inuit developed vocabulary and structures for discussing snowmobiles when they became a part of their lives.

The problem for language activists arises when the cultural artefacts change, but the language doesn't reflect the changes.

In a strictly monolingual community, this can't happen. New artefacts may come into the lives of the language's speakers, but they will necessarily create ways to express them. They may well borrow those words from another language - sometimes borrowing vast numbers of words and structures - but once they have done so, those words are their own. The language will change with the culture, but it will persist. Its traditions and texts, and its way of categorising the world, will not be totally lost. Instead, it will fade over time as the lives of the languages speakers are transformed.

In a largely bilingual community, the risk that a language will no longer reflect the changes in the lives of speakers is much larger. My mother's native language, Mennonite Plautdietsch, is dying in part because so much of day to day life can only be discussed in that language by relying on the English knowledge of the speakers. There is no vocabulary in Plautdietsch for describing computers, traffic jams, government bureaucracy or even discussing the news beyond the farm report. Were there still any large number of monolingual speakers in Canada, who had adopted those words themselves and could keep up their end of the conversation in Plautdietsch, this would not be a problem. Plautdietsch would still be a productive language, adapting to the transformation of its speakers lives. Instead, the reality of the few remaining Plautdietsch speakers' lives largely no longer takes place in Plautdietsch, even when they still speak the language.

It is this fear that motivates a very diverse array of policies both for cultural and linguistic preservation and should inform language preservation efforts.

In my second post, I outlined an economic argument why large, well-established, sustainable language communities ought not to be suppressed. This argument translates well into a self-development driven framework. It is really not much more than a kind of enlightened self-interest translated into the language of free development instead of economics. My capacity for self-development is highly contingent on the world around me, and particularly on the ability of others to develop themselves. This is one of the key lessons of the notion of distributed identity I developed in the last post.

Simply recognising that language has instrumental value to people - that it is a very important tool of self-development - suffices, in my opinion, to justify linguistic tolerance for any community large enough and established enough to sustain itself and offer a reasonably complete set of options to people. This means more than not punishing people for speaking their language, it means giving them the opportunity to construct their own institutions and to remain attached to them.

Let me offer a more concrete example of how this works: Consider the effect of scientific work on individual self-development. It should be fairly self-evident that scientific work can, and generally does, empowers people quite remote from the work itself. I suppose there might be some real Luddites out there who disagree, and one might find specific instances where scientific work had the opposite effect, but otherwise I would think that most people would agree that science is, on the whole, a good thing even for those with little interest or awareness of science.

Now, imagine a child growing up in Tijuana who has a real gift for math and science - an Einstein or a Newton who can radically change the world for the better. Unfortunately, he has very little gift for languages. But, he grows up in Tijuana speaking Spanish and attending Mexican schools. There, his teachers recognise his abilities and encourage him. He never does well in English classes, but his overall intellectual abilities are enough to get him a scholarship to a major Mexican university and eventually to a PhD at an elite American university. He develops some knowledge of English by then, but he has a hard time communicating clearly. Still, he's obviously brilliant, his work is well-received, and if his English isn't so good... Well, so his papers get ghost-written. It wouldn't be the first time in the history of science. He is still a productive person, and in the end he does work that changes the world for the better.

Now imagine this same child growing up over the border in the barrios of San Diego. He masters a bit more English when he's young than he would have in Mexico, but he still has no gift for languages. Like many Latin American children in the US, his English is never fully fluent, and his limited ability to fully express himself restricts his success in school and in other areas of life. As a result, he has difficulty in all his classes, not just English, and his teachers assume that he just has no intellectual gifts at all. He drops out of high school instead of flunking and ends up flipping burgers at McDonald's.

We can easily see how the main character of this little dual narrative has lost out by being in an English-only society, but what I think people really need to understand is that everyone loses out in this case. My capacity for self-development is contingent on his. His ability to access the tools he needs enhances my access to the cultural tools I need, even when we don't need the same tools. When he loses, I lose.

This bears a more than coincidental resemblance to "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Unlike the original author of those words, I assert that this is not something the world must become, but that it is how it already is and always has been. This same little narrative applies equally to the man who might be a plumber but is instead a day labourer, or to the man who could run a shop but instead sweeps the floors. Whenever a person might have more freedom of development than they have, I have less freedom of self-development than I could have. If someone can be more productive and isn't, I lose from his lack of productivity. Whenever someone has less education than they would like, I suffer from ignorance, because there is a cognitive resource that might be available to me than I can not use.

Although this kind of argument is not novel, I have never seen anyone apply it to multiculturalism or multilingualism. It is, to me, a sounder argument than assigning an intrinsic value to diversity.

This same argument limits language rights claims where we can't so easily decide whether a community is large enough to be sustainable on its own. Instead of first looking to see if there is a historical injustice to remedy, we should ask if there are individuals who are presently suffering from a lack of freedom of self-development that we can link, at least in part, to language endangerment.

I think we can identify such a community in many other cases, particularly aboriginal communities. Although the problems most such communities face can not all be traced to language per se, we can trace a great many of them to the lack of a society which which offers them a full set of cultural tools for their self-development. Helping them to construct such a society, at least where such efforts are possible, is a better solution than integration, and their language can be an important tool in attaining that goal.

Canada has made some moves in this direction, as has New Zealand. The US and Australia are also moving somewhat tentatively towards reconstructing aboriginal societies instead of imagining that integration will solve the problem. The record of these kinds of efforts is mixed, and I think a Vygotskyan treatment can help explain some of the reasons why.

I think the grand mistake of many cultural and linguistic policies is that they focus on preserving the past culture of a community instead of trying to build a future one. I don't want to say that the past is without value and should be unceremoniously abandoned, but I see a lot of community cultural projects that revolve around things like collecting oral narratives or teaching children the history and some elements of the traditional religion of their own communities. These things are valuable, but they are not programmes which serve to keep a culture or a language alive.

Instead, I think these sorts of efforts should focus on avoiding Péire Pessamessa's complaint about Occitan. We cannot prevent cultures from changing and adapting to the circumstances of life and we should not want to. Sometimes, cultural and linguistic preservation projects have to start with people reclaiming their past, but it is a doomed effort if they can't adapt what they find to the present. It is crucially important to develop cultural tools which people can identify as their own and which serve them now.

This is why a language preservation project should place a great deal of emphasis on ensuring that the elements of daily life are available in the language we seek to preserve. There needs to be a basic vocabulary for computers and for government services in that language, and it needs to be a consistent vocabulary that speakers know and understand. It must be possible to communicate without relying on speakers' knowledge of another language.

Inuktitut is one case where these kinds of efforts are presently taking place. With the establishment of Nunavut as a government and the creation of fairly important community-controlled institutions, more and more kinds of materials are available in Inuktitut. This web page, for instance, has a glossary of statistical and demographic terms in Inuktitut for use in government publications. Some are borrowed words, many are created terms, but they are all Inuktitut. By doing this - working to provide a consistent, usable, known vocabulary for concepts which were not present in traditional Inuit culture - they are ensuring that reality continues to happen in Inuktitut. This sort of planned linguistic innovation is utterly essential to the survival of endangered languages.

It is this same thinking which motivates French language policy. French is not endangered in the way that Inuktitut is. There is no need to rely on people's knowledge of a foreign language to conduct your day-to-day life in French. However, it is growing harder to conduct scientific research or high-tech engineering in French without relying on people's knowledge of English.

French language policy is motivated by this fear that many essential cultural elements can no longer take place in French. It is not an effort to shelter French society or the French language from change. In fact, it is most often exactly the opposite. French language policy institutions actively create and promulgate new terms and new expressions in an unending effort to keep up with cultural change. The motivation for these kinds of policies is the desire to ensure that the cluster of tools supported by the French language can continue to serve people, so that French-speaking people can develop themselves as freely as possible.

That is what has been denied to languages like Occitan and other endangered languages. The irony that France on the one hand defends the national language while having a long history of repressing regional languages is not lost on me.

I have already proposed that the freedom of self-development be the metre with which we judge our institutions, and I believe that it should be the uniform goal of all language policy. Language policy should enhance development rather than restrict it.

That means that we must not gain linguistic security by denying people access to other languages that can still further enhance their freedom of self-development. It will probably never be possible to conduct high-energy physics in Inuktitut. If there is some young Einstein growing up in Iqaluit right now, he will need English. Inuktitut-speakers are too small a group to make it possible to do everything without access to a second language, and to make that a goal is unreasonable. However, the ability to conduct as much of one's life as is feasible in the language of one's choice is not an unreasonable goal and where it is present, even universal bilingualism does not necessarily threaten the language's future.

What I reject is the argument that the liability for a historical injustice done to the speakers of a language is owed in any sense to that language. It is only owed to people, and preserving a language is only merited when it serves to restore a capacity for self-development unjustly denied to real, living people. This replaces the idea that some time limit or immigration status should separate justified language rights claims from unjustified ones. When we can't identify a real, existing community that is suffering because a language is threatened, we have less justification in taking radical measures to save it, regardless of the injustice done.

This does not eliminate the hard cases. There are communities where cultural identity persists, but the language is already extinct. Israel has managed to bring a language back from the dead and turn it into a vehicle well suited to communication in the modern world, but Israel had resources that are not available to most communities. Besides, in terms of language preservation, Hebrew has done as much harm as good. Hebrew thrives, but Ladino will not survive another generation and Yiddish - a language with a rich history and literature which only three generations ago had millions of speakers - will probably not reach the end of this century.

Instead, activists on behalf of those languages might entertain a number of options to empower their communities. One option is to opt for a related but less endangered languages. I have hopes that the various Cree/Montaignais/Innu speakers, perhaps in conjunction with smaller communities whose languages are more endangered or extinct like the Abenaki, the Micmac and the Ojibwa, might adopt a single common language as a superior vehicle for their cultural self-preservation than adopting English or French. Another is to give up on language and attempt to develop unique cultural tools using English as a medium.

As appealing as the personality principle is, realistically there will always need to be a territorial element in language policy. Inuktitut is gaining ground because Nunavut is an institution with the power to enforce language policy on a fixed territory. French has in large part recovered in Quebec, and may be gaining ground in New Brunswick. Except in the Ottawa Valley - which is both near Quebec and the seat of the bilingual federal government - it is clearly endangered in the rest of Canada.

Territorial solutions require a fairly high level of political will. This is the problem that has plagued Ireland and the UK. Only 18% of Welsh residents genuinely speak Welsh, and somewhere between a seventh and a quarter of Irish residents speak Irish, depending on the standard of Irish you apply. One can justify measures to restore those languages on the grounds that they are necessary to ensure the freedom of self-development of those communities, but as time goes by it gets harder and harder to make that case. Precisely who is discriminating against the Welsh or Scottish Gaelic speakers, or for that matter the Irish in the Republic?

In Ireland and Scotland, much of the blame for this decline rests with the very state that was supposed to be preserving their ethnic and cultural identity. Scotland has been effectively bilingual for a very long time, and it was the Scots English speakers - particularly the Scottish lords - who were most instrumental in pushing Scots Gaelic out of the highlands and into the outer islands. In Ireland, at the time of independence there were some half-million regular Irish speakers. Now, the figure may be as low as a 50,000. The Irish Free State did not press for an aggressive language policy at a time when it was more likely to have been publicly accepted, and now suffers the consequences.

Ireland and the UK have begun to move towards a more narrowly tailored territorial solution. In Ireland, language law recognises one area - the Gaeltacht - as more Irish than others. It is the part of western Ireland where the majority of the population still speaks and regularly uses Irish. Unfortunately, this area includes a great many English speakers, and the Irish state has not been willing to make Irish mandatory for business and government in that area in the way that, for example, Quebec and Catalonia have. In the UK, the Outer Islands in Scotland have had official bilingualism for a little over 30 years. They still do not have fully Scots Gaelic schools. Bilingualism is expanding to areas like the Isle of Skye as well. Wales is now actively promoting the Welsh language, and the percentage of the population that speaks Welsh is now roughly stable. However, like in Scotland and Ireland, the area where the language is genuinely used in day to day life is relatively isolated.

I think the kinds of language policies that can serve these cases have to be somewhat narrowly tailored. I think all three cases could be well served by identifying those areas where reasonable majorities of the population still speak Celtic languages and enact the kind of language charter that has served well in Quebec. This should happen in conjunction with a tax break for business investment in those areas and the preservation of weaker language protections elsewhere. In all three places - Scotland, Ireland and Wales - there is at least significant political support for language promotion. By identifying the areas where the language is still strong and using moderately coercive measures to keep them that way, it is still possible to keep them from extinction.

Many English monolingual Canadians now identify French as part of their own national identity, so much so that they will gladly pay for quite costly language support programmes in areas with very small French-speaking minorities. Anglophones who do speak French often take pride in it, as a way of showing how loyally Canadian they are. I see no reason why the same thing could not happen in Wales, Ireland or Scotland in conjunction with a narrow and territorial language policy affecting those areas where the language is still fairly strong. A language can constitute an element of identity even to people who don't speak it.

In short, I am recognising that there are times and places where a genuinely coercive official languages policy, instead of a merely pragmatic one, is at least reasonable. There are several factors that I think have to come into play in this sort of instance. First, it must enhance the freedom of self-development for some real group of people without unduly restraining it for others. The language that this policy is trying to save must have the political support of some population willing to pay a price for it. If the Irish want to preserve Irish and are willing to subsidise the Gaeltacht in order to make that happen, that is acceptable to me. Second, the policy should not undermine a language that isn't secure in some other area of the world. An English speaker living in an all-Welsh village still has access to hundreds of millions of English speakers elsewhere in the world. An Abenaki speaker in Quebec should not be forced to use French over Abenaki. This sort of policy must also not restrict the freedom of movement either of those inside or outside of the designated territory and it should be able to offer the most basic kinds of services to speakers of the areas most important minority languages. People who wish to live in a language protected area should recognise that they ought to learn their neighbours language not out of altruism but for their own sake, and the people who already live in them should recognise that isolating newcomers from basic services until they learn the language harms them as much as it harms the immigrants.

It is especially important that racial and ethnic criteria not play a part in language policy. New Zealand is now trying to encourage non-Maori to learn the Maori language precisely because their language and culture will survive better by integrating willing outsiders than by demanding a set of rights predicated on ancestry and ethnicity. If Ireland's Gaeltacht is to be Irish language-only country, that should not prevent a Gujarati immigrant from moving in, learning Irish, and being an equal member of the community. Mixing language, race, ethnicity, nationality and religion is almost always a bad thing.

That is much of what makes a defence of language rights different from "separate but equal." First, it isn't really equal. By identifying that different circumstances call for different measures, a good set of language policies is never truly equal. It shouldn't be equal, it should be optimal. It should offer the most freedom to the most people.

Second, it isn't separate. I expect and I want people to move around freely across language lines, and to learn the languages of the people they are most likely to need to communicate with. I don't want one group of people living in their community and another group in a different one. Good fences may make good neighbours, but actually interacting with other people is a lot more fun and a lot more stimulating.

I want to end this post with that vision of a multilingual world, where people have both language security and the resources to keep language from becoming a barrier to development. That is what language policy should be for.

1 Quote translated by Scott Reid, Alliance MP for Lanark-Carleton. I came across it in his book Lament for a Notion. I do not endorse Scott Reid's politics, but I don't have a copy of Leclerc's book on hand.

2003-08-27T16:58:00.000+02:00

Yet another reason to move to MT

For whatever reason, comments are still dysfunctional today. You can see them by turning off Javascript. If the problem hasn't gone away by evening, I'll... I dunno... do something, I guess.

Update: I've identified the problem - it's Enetation's fault. They've got a syntax error in their Javascript.

Further Update: Trying to fix the problem. I'm thinking maybe it's time I invested in a domain and just went over to MT.

Temporary Fix: You can't see how many comments a post has, but at least you can get to the comments.

2003-08-26T21:27:00.000+02:00

Short delays

Well, it looks like I am once again behind schedule. There is still a fourth post on language rights coming but it's still in bit and pieces. With some hope, it will go up Wednesday evening my time - Wednesday during the day for my North American readers and Thursday morning for my Pacific Rim readers.

The problem is that my boss is suffering under the delusion that just because he pays me, I'm expected to do what he asks. :^)

In the meantime, I strongly recommend reading the comments to the language rights posts so far (if you happen to be lucky enough to actually see them when you load the page) and the posts of the folks who have linked in. Besides Jacob Levy, Matthew Yglesias and Language Hat, I see that Ampersand at Alas, a Blog, Prometheus 6 and Debitage have all linked in. All have some good points that I need to get to.

Also, I have recently had some research on ICAO English and air traffic control come across my desk. There's some interesting stuff going on there. The air travel industry is more or less the only place where global, mandatory functional monolingualism has genuinely been tried, and the results are awfully mixed. I think the linguistic troubles of the air industry can inform language policy issues in general, and I have in my head the outline of a post on it, which I will get to as soon as I can.

2003-08-24T21:43:00.000+02:00

Proof positive that I'm a hypocritical bastard

This is an extract from what I've been working on all weekend:

Quality control and measurement has long been considered a hard problem in translation and there is no well-established body of theory or practice treating this problem. The principle barrier to addressing quality issues in translation is the difficulty quantifying quality. There have been efforts in the past to use human readers and revisers to score translations, but the subjectivity and inconsistency of these measures, as well as the added expense of a human reader, has rendered these methods impractical on any large scale. This project takes on the challenge of developing effective and consistent quailty metrics for translation that can be cheaply deployed, and building processes to enhance quality and productivity using those metrics.

At present, the state-of-the-art in translator productivity software includes a toolkit of terminology management, translation memory and machine translation software. These tools are most frequently owned and controlled by the translators themselves, who must spend time maintaining them. Translators judge for themselves how much time and effort to put into their tools in order to optimise their own productivity, and because translators are most frequently paid by the word rather than the hour, they alone benefit from whatever productivity gains their tools offer them. In recent years, many translation firms have moved to centralise their productivity tools in order to further enhance their value and translation tool vendors have started offering more centralised software suites.

However, in order to realise gains from these efforts, translation firms have had to modify their payment schedules. Translators see their pay per word reduced on the basis of an estimate of how useful these centralised resources are in translating an element of text. Generally, a firm may adjust translator pay in one or more of a small number of ways. They may ask translators to pay for the terminology they receive from the translation agency. They may lower translator pay when they receive perfect or high quality matches from a translation memory. And, they may treat machine translations in the same way as translation memory matches, usually offering a single reduced rate for some or all of the text segments that have been automatically translated.

We are unaware of any research justifying adjusted translator pay scales on the basis of actually measured productivity enhancement. These schemes tend to be a matter of hit and miss, based on anecdotal evidence and negotiations between translators and translation agencies. Furthermore, in the past when translators managed their own productivity tools, they could presumably best judge how much gain they were actually getting out of each tool and divide the time they spent maintaining them appropriately. By centralising these productivity tools, this feedback loop has been broken. It is impossible to estimate how much productivity translators gain from particular tools, nor how much labour savings is derived from a given amount of maintenance effort. Without this knowledge, it is possible to actually reduce productivity by misdirecting labour. There is anecdotal evidence that companies may well be spending the most labour maintaining the tools that least increase translator productivity. The hit-and-miss nature of these tools almost ensures inefficient central management.

The knowledge that we hope to acquire through this project is a way to restore the feedback from the translator to the productivity tools. We are not aware of any other effort oriented specifically towards this goal. By measuring translation quality consistently and cheaply, we are able to determine how much impact our central resource management policies have on translator's work, and by more accurately estimating the value of our central resources to translators, we can adjust their pay scales in a manner that genuinely reflects their productivity gains.

That's right. I'm working specifically on ways to lower someone's pay. I know there are a number of translators reading my blog who will be appalled, but not any more than I am. At least, if I get my way, we'll only be paying you less when we actually do something useful for you.

2003-08-23T16:49:00.000+02:00

Mediation, Collectivism, Self-Development and Political Theory

Because of the extra workload my boss has dropped on me along with the length of this essay, I have decided to break this third post on language rights into two posts. I expected to put this up yesterday, but better late than never. The next post will go up sometime early next week.

You can view part 1 and part 2 by scrolling down the page or following the links. I'd also like to thank Language Hat for linking to this discussion.

This post outlines an alternative to normative liberal political theory, something I have promised to do since this surprisingly controversial post on the Middle-East. I've actually started writing it a half dozen times in the last couple of months, and then scrapped it. I guess I need a certain amount of pressure to actually get some kinds of work done, but language rights are a good example application so I'm taking this opportunity to do it.

This post only outlines the theory and offers an example of its application that has nothing to do with language policy. I use it to analyse arguments justifying affirmative action in the United States as a form of slavery reparations. In the next post, I will apply it specifically to language issues.

I'm not a philosopher or a political scientist by training. I grew up immersed in child development and education theory because of my parents and later studied a lot of linguistics and translation theory, ending up - somehow - with a degree in physics and becoming a computer programmer by trade. In a lot of the social sciences, and particularly in philosophy, I'm more or less self-educated, and I realise the limitations that entails. Sometimes it means rediscovering something that's been hashed over decades ago without knowing it. But sometimes, it has advantages in terms of thinking outside of the box. Bits and pieces of my outlook have been advanced by other people, but I don't know anyone else saying quite the same thing. On the other hand, this may all be old news and I just don't know about it.

I want to start by giving you a brief and quite skewed summary of a theory in psychology and child development. It was originally promoted by Lev Vygotsky, a Russian who worked in the era of the revolution. He was a contemporary of Jean Piaget, and for a long time people tended to group them together as if they were largely saying the same things. They weren't, but Vygotskyan thinking is certainly informed by the experiences of Piaget's disciples.

Vygotsky advanced, among other things, a notion he called mediation. He believed that people always interact with the world through culturally constructed artefacts. Mostly, he just called them tools. The most trivial examples of this sort of thing are, in fact, physical tools. Hammers, for instance, are culturally constructed. They require a metalworking industry, mass produced nails and access to lumber, each of which involves a complicated cultural framework of divided labour, market relations, transportation networks and the like. When we want to build something, we don't just construct it with our bare hands, we use carpentry tools, and how we build is determined in large part by the tools and materials we have.

Part of what was unique about Vygotsky was that, first, he claimed that symbolic tools were just as important, and just as much culturally constructed artefacts, as physical tools. Second, he claimed that tools not only affect how we interact with the world, they also affect how we think about it. Mathematical algorithms, categories, philosophies and beliefs constitute, in Vygotsky's thinking, tools in the same sense as a hammer or a car. They have histories, they are instrumental in mediating how we interact with the world, they are supported by a cultural and institutional framework and, just like a hammer, we come into possession of them as is, without direct knowledge of the history and cultural supports all tools have. Furthermore, not only are our tools culturally adapted to us and our needs, we adapt ourselves to them as we use them. Vygotsky considered this the core principle of psychology. He called it cultural-historical activity theory, now often abbreviated as "CHAT."

This school of thought has been very influential in education theory and is beginning to have influence in cognitive science, thanks in large part to work at UC San Diego's Communications department and in the Education department at the University of Helsinki. It has found an especially productive home in the computer industry in recent years, where CHAT has become an important school of thought in the theory of Human-Computer Interface design. Bonnie Nardi, former chief interface wonk at Apple, is one of its better known proponents.

But I want to highlight some of the more philosophical consequences of this kind of thinking. To do that, I'm going to use a semi-famous quote from Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and I think Margaret Mead's husband:

Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do "I" start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick?

Bateson goes on to argue that cognition - at least, if cognition is understood as information processing - is something that takes place both inside and outside of our bodies. Tools, like the blind man's stick, are as much a part of the human information processing system as a chunk of our brains. But if the stick is part of the blind man's mental processes, isn't the curb he taps it against just as much a part? How about the man who made the curb, or the city planner who put it there in the first place?

Cognition isn't the only place where this sort of "out of body" thinking applies. No one can run a mile in a minute, but I can sure drive a mile in a minute if I have a car. If my legs are a part of my locomotive apparatus, surely so is any vehicle I'm using? But then, so is the road, the road signs, the gas stations and the crews who repave the road every few years. Digestion is the process of turning food into stored energy for my body, so where does my digestive system start? I have to cut food up on the plate before I can eat it, so my hands and my fork and knife must also be part of my digestive system. But then, the cook also has to be a part of my digestive system, since he too plays a role in converting food into metabolic energy.

This more philosophical way of looking at Vygotskyan mediation says that our selves expand out from our bodies to the whole world, permeating the machines, the social structures and even the people all around us. We are not merely our bodies, or our memories, or even some sort of software running in our nervous system. My mind is not just my brain, it's also my Ultra 10 workstation, my books, my job and the whole cultural and intellectual milieu I inhabit, as well as the larger global sphere that it exists in. Each of us encompasses the entire universe.

This "oneness with everything" begins to sound like New Age mysticism, but I want to convince you that there is nothing mystical about it. People chop the world up into categories and things and what I am describing may not be the way that you're used to chopping the world up, but all I'm doing is chopping it up differently. I have no intention of evoking gods, essences or mystical forces. I am not proposing any sort of strange theory of physics, although I might be guilty of proposing a theory of metaphysics. I am saying that the stars affect our destinies, but only in the same sense as I might claim that if the sun went out you'd freeze to death.

Vygotsky was a materialist - both historical and dialectical - and had little use for mysticism. Mediation was, for him, the tool that let him get at the human mind.

As an aside, I've always thought there would be an interesting paper in comparing Vygotskyan mediation to Dennettite memes. At times it seems like they're almost talking about the same thing and at others they seem like they're on different planets. Vygotsky felt that consciousness is constructed by the use of cultural artefacts, while Dennett feels that it is constructed by the action of memes. The big difference is that Dennett says that consciousness is a socially constructed illusion, while Vygotsky claims that it is a socially constructed fact. Therein lies a world of difference.

Now, there are several other alternative ways of looking at cognition and identity, but one frequently discussed alongside CHAT is Actor-Network Theory (ANT), a school of thought most associated with Bruno Latour. Bruno Latour is fairly famous, especially in Europen intellectual culture, primarily because of his work in science studies. He's been pretty heavily attacked for his work, and I think he's done a reasonably good job of defending himself, except that unfortunately some of his books - Pandora's Box in particular - are far too dense and stylistically difficult to explain some of his ideas very well.

Latour devised ANT in large part to explain the semantic capacity of non-humans, particularly the objects of scientific study and the experiments used to study them. He deploys Greimas' notion of the actant to describe a wide variety of phenomena as actors, and then suggests that a more appropriate way to look at scientific work is to see scientists as people who interpret the acts of their objects of study, doing so within a cultural framework just like all other kinds of acts of interpretation. This view is opposed to a vision of scientific work as the generation of theories and testing of hypotheses. A full discussion is too far from my main topic and a bit too complicated to get into here.

What Latour claims, at some length, is that cognition should be understood not as the actions of individual agents like people, but as a process which takes place over heterogeneous networks of actors held together by different kinds of relations. Thought, for him, is always and everywhere a collective process. It is reasonable and useful to say that a network capable of cognition and action constitutes an agent in the same sense that a person does.

There is quite a lot I find appealing in Latour's approach, although I think Latour would be disinterested and possibly horrified to see ANT used to develop a normative political theory. This notion of collective cognition and action allows me to identify a wide variety of things in the world - companies, countries, institutions of various kinds - as things with the capacity for thought and action in their own right.

People already do this all the time. Every time someone says that "Microsoft is out to destroy Linux" or that "America made a mistake invading Iraq", they are ascribing the capacity for thought and action to an entity which is not a human being. Most people, when pressed on this issue, will say that it's a sort of verbal shorthand for saying that "some of the people who run Microsoft want to use the human and material resources at their disposal as Microsoft's bosses to destroy Linux" and that "George W. Bush and other executive office decision makers made a mistake in ordering individual American soldiers to invade Iraq." I don't think it makes any sense to see the one as a shorthand for the other.

Most of us have had the experience of dealing with some kind of customer support person, or some kind of government agent, only to be told that whatever perfectly reasonable thing we want them to do is "against policy." It is possible to have an outlook which claims that when this happens we are dealing with an individual person who has just told us "no." But, that strikes me as counter-intuitive. We don't usually blame the actual person we're dealing with for failing to do what we requested, no matter how desperate we are to have them do it. Think about it, who precisely is to blame when your local library is closed due to budget cuts? The librarian has the keys, she (it's usually a she) could keep it open if she wanted to. Of course, there would be consequences for her, but do we genuinely attribute the underlying fault to the individuals making those choices? No, we blame the government and usually we blame them in a quite amorphous and indistinct manner, since bureaucrats and elected officials also work in a context of limited choice.

I am not claiming that anything except individual people are making decisions and taking actions, just that we can attribute outcomes to the whole that we can not necessarily attribute to individuals alone. All I am saying is that "[m]en make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances..." The circumstances in which people act are not static and sometimes we do act as a part of something else. To attribute only to individuals the causes of their actions is utterly contrary to the way we usually conceptualise the world and the way we behave towards each other.

Instead, I propose to step back as say that it is perfectly reasonable to identify an action with a country, a firm or another kind of institution. This is very much in line with modern thinking about institutions. The division of labour, for instance, is a perfect example of this sort of collectivist thinking. A firm is not an individual. Its cognition is not the cognition of a single person because it is impossible that a single person could do all the planning, much less execute all the actions, of a large firm. Yet, we are presented with and usually interact with a firm as a whole which singly produces whatever goods and services it sells and is singly compensated. In the same way, a government is never merely one man, even in the most absolute dictatorship. There is always an apparatus of state which cannot be micromanaged from the top. Yet, the whole point in having a state is that it should act with a single mind in those matters that fall within its sphere of activity.

I harp on this point because it is the hardest one to get people to accept. The world does not have to be analysed as if only individuals counted and there are many times when such an analysis is counter-intuitive and misleading. I should also make clear what I am not saying. People are never merely elements of a collective. Nor am I claiming that no one is ever to blame if they are "following orders." Humans have individual powers of agency and I do not seek to deny this.

Furthermore, it is extremely important to recognise that not just any group of people can be called a collective by my definition. That was what got me into so much trouble the last time I brought this topic up. A collective exists where a heterogeneous group of humans and non-human actors exist in a network of relations that creates a capacity for cognition and action as a single thing. This pretty much always means an institution of some kind. America is a collective. The Americans are just a bunch of people. America is not just the 280 million odd US citizens and residents; it is also a mass of land, an industrial plant, an armoury of weapons, a body of law and traditions that have developed over history and a set of social relations, some of which extend outside of US soil and encompass people who have never set foot in the USA. It is reasonable to say that America has invaded Iraq; it is not reasonable to say that the Americans have done so.

The last time I brought this up it was to make a point about Israel's relations with the Palestinians - that it is a category error to claim that the Palestinians are to blame for something or that the Palestinians have to do something in order for there to be peace, while to make the same assertions about Israel is not a category error. The reason is because Israel is a collective in the sense that I have described, and the Palestinians are not. Naturally, it is not a category error to say that the Palestinian Authority or Hamas is to blame for something or must do something. They are collectives and, should there someday be a Palestinian state, it too will qualify as a collective. But, "the Palestinians" will never qualify as a collective, nor will "the Israelis", "the Jews", "the Americans", "the Muslims" nor anything else that is just a bunch of people.

Now, I want you to consider my definition of a collective in light of CHAT and mediation. The term collective in the sense I am using it here describes individual people as well as institutions. Cognition is something that happens both inside and outside the brain, through networks of cultural artefacts which may include other people. This approach to cognition, action and identity has the advantage of scaling well. It treats people as just one class of collective.

Here is the first principle I want to put forward: responsibility and intent can only be attributed to collectives. Remember, individuals are collectives by my definition and can be held responsible for their acts, but it is also possible to attribute to collectives responsibility for acts without necessarily attributing them to any specific individual people. This notion is very productive in the discussion of historical injustices, as I will show later.

There is one other element that I need to bring into this discussion. It's a concept that comes down to us from Hegel via several other thinkers (attn: Brad): self-development. I want to advance self-development as the core idea of a sort of humanism. I assert that people have the right to develop themselves as they wish and that enhancing people's ability to do so should be identified as the good thing on which utilitarian discussions of policy should focus. That means that people should be able to become what they want to be; that their thoughts, desires and choices should be able to evolve in as unrestricted a manner as possible. This idea subsumes the notion of "opportunities" in liberal discourse but it is larger than that. It, too, has a sort of new-agey feel to it that I want to dispel.

Norman Geras is one of the few writers I know of pursuing this line of thought. Those interested in self-development as a normative principle tend to eschew any discussion of justice as if sefl-development renders it superfluous. Geras argues here that it does not, and I am inclined to agree with him. What I am hoping to do is build up a right to free self-development as a normative theory to compete with liberalism.

Naturally, self-development is not an absolute standard which exists independently of time, place and social context; nor can all developmental efforts be treated equally. If someone wants to develop into a serial murder, they can't assert the freedom to go around killing people in the name of self-development. Furthermore, what policies specifically enhance or block self-development are always conditioned by the historical circumstances people find themselves in. To someone who is starving, food insecurity is an enormous barrier to self-development even when they have nominal political liberties like freedom of speech. It is possible, under this scheme, to come to the conclusion that a dictatorial regime which grants none of those political rights but which is able to keep people fed may actually be the juster regime. Of course, this is not to say that a regime that offers food security and political rights isn't juster still.

This is a sort of relativism, but it is quite different from the kind of vulgar relativism that serves as a strawman in a lot of arguments. What enhances the freedom of self-development in one time and place may harm it in another. Even the mostly widely adopted and agreed upon liberal principles are not necessarily universally applicable. I claim that the freedom of self-development is a universally applicable principle, but that what that means is highly relative.

Asserting a freedom of self-development enables us to get rid of the taxonomy of freedoms that have proliferated under liberalism. Both negative rights (freedoms from something) and positive rights (freedoms that enable people to do things) can be evaluated within the same framework: do they enhance or hinder self-development? A standard of self-development enables us to more rationally judge the classical liberal freedoms, since in practice each is to a significant degree restricted.

We can claim, for example, that freedom of speech is a necessary condition to self-development because it enhances the cognitive abilities of individuals. The principle of mediation means that when we communicate with others, we are in effect taking advantage of cognitive abilities outside of our own brains and enhancing our cognitive powers because of it. But, to do this, we need to be free to communicate with other people. Freedom of speech is, in my analysis, a freedom to think outside of your own head. At the same time, we can identify communicative acts which hinder self-development. The classical instance, of course, is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, but more realistic examples are acts of fraud and conspiracy.

Also, the freedom of self-development allows us to treat empowerment in the same framework as liberty. Access to an automobile and good roads, or to an efficient public transportation network, empowers people to develop more freely by giving them access to more of the world. Income security and social esteem enhance free self-development. And, access to good education and the freedom to learn what you want are key liberties in a self-development-based notion of rights. This last point in particular makes my philosophy appealing to someone coming from a background in child development and education.

So, let me summarise. I have advanced three principles:

Individual identity is not a property of bodies. It is a property of a set of relations between people and things which are centred on the body. We can identify the structures that we live in as parts of ourselves.
A collective is any assemblage of things, physical, symbolic or otherwise, which we can identify with a single centre of cognition and action. That definition includes people, according to the first principle. We can, to some degree treat collectives the same way we treat people, even though not all collectives are people. We can assert responsibility and lay blame on collectives. Assemblages that can not be identified with a centre of cognition and action can not be identified as collectives and can not be treated at all like people.
The right to free self-development is the standard for establishing, defending, justifying and limiting all other rights and freedoms. It is the final tool by which policies are to be judged. It is also a context-sensitive right which may mean very different kinds of policies and priorities in different times and places.

The first two are really ontological principles; only the third is genuinely normative. To this, I want to add one more normative principle:

Our judgements of collectives that aren't individual human beings must be according to their instrumental value in enhancing the freedom of self-development of individual human beings. These non-human collectives are not people and do not enjoy equal rights with people. They have no intrinsic value. We are free to construct them and terminate them as we see fit, guided only by the needs of free self-development.

I am privileging one kind of collective - the kind we identify as individual human beings - above all others. I have no argument to deploy in favour of this principle, although I doubt that most people will be terribly bothered by it. I don't intend to deduce it from something else. I don't think the universe privileges people in any special way, but I do.

However, not everyone acts as if they agree. Consider carefully what I am saying. I am saying that there is never any need to "give one's life for one's country." It is reasonable to be willing to risk your life to defend your state for its instrumental value in enhancing the freedom of self-development. But, to die for King and Country, for honour, for glory, for the mother or fatherland, for your race, ethnic group, religion, whatever - I am saying that all of that is plain stupid. People possess intrinsic value and institutions only have instrumental value.

This principle is intended in part to undermine the charge of collectivism. This is a collectivist theory in that it recognises the real existence of collectives and assigns value to them. But, I am specifically saying that the worth of the individual is not their worth to the collective; instead, the worth of the collective is only its value to the individual.

I actually have a critique of capitalism based on this principle, but that is for another post.

There is a specific example from outside of language policy that this line of thought works well with: affirmative action as a form of slavery reparations. Most of the people opposed to affirmative action will point out that there is no living slave owner in America and many Americans don't even have ancestors who lived in America when there was slavery. However, even though individual slave owners are all dead, we can still attribute liabilities for slavery to various collectives: the US government, the various state governments, political parties, church organisations, even to America as a collective entity. These collectives are still alive today.

Furthermore, I don't have a problem with the logical consequence: Making a collective responsible, and compelling it to make amends, means that individuals who participate in the collective must bear the costs. I considered writing much of this post a few weeks ago, when Brad Delong had a post on more or less the same subject and justified affirmative action on almost identical grounds to the ones I am using. America is a collective, but it is also a culturally constructed tool - one that is both symbolic and more substantial - through which Americans as individuals interact with the world. To accept the benefits of this tool - to make it a part of yourself - means accepting the costs associated with it. That means paying taxes, but it also means accepting the liability for its past injustices. Cultural artefacts have histories, they do not come into the world as they are, and the artefact and its history are not readily separable things. No individual is liable for slavery because of their ancestors, even those whose ancestors did own slaves. Everyone is liable for America's past because of their acceptance of America's present instrumental value, even those with no history in America until recently.

The problem I have with the idea of slavery reparations - even in as distended a form as affirmative action - is determining just who is owed. I can't identify black people, or people descended from slaves, as a collective by my definition. Were there any individuals who had been slaves still alive today, they would be personally eligible for compensation. But there are no such individuals.

Instead, let me offer an alternative to hereditarian theories about who should be the beneficiary of a collective liability for past policies. People alive today who suffer diminished freedom of self-development due to historical slavery are the ones who ought to be the beneficiaries of whatever America owes.

This has a number of advantages. For example, one of the notions that I've seen in circulation is that contemporary racial inequalities in America have as much to do with a shift in the way labour is employed as it has to do with continuing racism. The idea is that at some point in the fairly recent past - the 1970's in most analyses - the American economy shifted from one that offered a lot of opportunities to unskilled labourers to one that was heavily tilted against them, and that the mechanisms by which children from families of labourers gained skills in the past have disappeared. Black people, having entered this period with poor skills due to past racism, have since tended to stay unskilled and poor even as racism diminishes.

As an educated middle class white guy, this theory strikes a chord with me. I don't claim that there is no racism in America, but members of the class with the most power in America are the people least likely to think that skin colour is a good factor in making decisions about people. I think quite a few Americans are bothered by persistent racial inequality in America even though neither they nor the people they associate with are bothered by having black neighbours, co-workers or friends; and, I think people are hard pressed to understand how this can be. This theory explains how even if no one in America was racist, there could still be racial inequalities.

The logic I'm advancing still justifies assistance specifically for black Americans, as compensation for the present consequences of past injustices. It enables us to compensate black people who may not even be descended from former slaves - immigrants and their offspring - who have diminished present day opportunities for self-development, while at the same time identifying black people who appear to enjoy as much freedom of self-development as everyone else - say, Condoleezza Rice - as people who should not benefit from compensation but who bear the same liability for past injustices as other Americans.

This, I think, takes away the most pernicious problems people see in compensatory policies that make racial distinctions. My logic does not lead to the conclusion that "white people" owe "black people." It justifies targeting compensation in the same way that the injustice we are compensating for is targeted. It also makes liability conditional on benefiting from a collective rather than hereditary criteria or racial classification. It suggests that affirmative action should not merely target people by their race, but also by their social status.

So far, I have not discussed language in this framework. My analysis of affirmative action is emblematic of how I intend to bolster language rights claims on the basis of historical injustice and specify who should benefit from them and what kinds of policies may legitimately serve those ends. But that will have to wait for my next post.

2003-08-21T19:13:00.000+02:00

French Immersion

I know I need to respond to the comments on the post below and I said I would get the important and somewhat complicated third post in my discussion of language policy up today. It may still happen, maybe. My boss - who really is a nice guy in most respects - has only today found me a copy of the outline for our research grant application, and informed me at the same time that I only have until Tuesday to write the whole thing up because he promised weeks ago we were going to submit it by the end of the month. No pressure.

Folks, if you have people working for you, and you work in a business with deadlines, I implore you to keep your people abreast of their work schedules and not inform them at the last minute when work must be ready.

It looks like part 3 will be up, in all likelihood, Friday instead of today. In the meantime, I want to discuss just one of the comments to part 2 because it has some bearing on language policy in general. Sylvia Li asks if I have "statistics, as well as anecdotal evidence, for saying that French immersion schools are a failure? If so, you'd think there'd be a bunch of very annoyed Anglophone parents in Western Canada."

For lack of university access, I can't claim to have numbers or citations at the tip of my fingers. There are a number of people in Canadian education research who are critical of French immersion. Gilles Bibeau is the most notorious, but I can't recommend him because he believes several things that I think are not merely wrong but also stupid and harmful. Roy Lyster is much more sympathetic to the goals of French immersion and is also cited as someone quite critical of the programme.

One thing you will not find any well-informed advocate of French immersion saying is that children graduate from school with the level of French necessary to genuinely live in the language. They usually graduate with better French than children coming from Core French programmes (manditory French classes taught in ordinary English-language schools), but they are not at all comparable to native speakers. One paper I remember reading on the subject claimed that a minority of Ontario French immersion graduates who went on to study French at bilingual universities (Laurentian, U of Ottawa, and York) did ultimately develop real fluency. Most did not. Other studies show that children in immersion can develop fairly good passive comprehension skills in French, but that fluent speech and writing rarely develop.

This, to me, constitutes a failure. Now, I should make clear what I am not saying. Children in French immersion - including early immersion and 100% French programmes - do not appear to measurably suffer from the experience. The overwhelming majority feel that it was a positive experience and intend to send their children to French immersion. There is no apparent failure to meet other educational goals. English abilities are as high - and according to some higher - in children graduating from French immersion as in children coming from ordinary English schools. Putting your child in French immersion does not harm them in any way that regular schools won't.

Furthermore, immersion programmes were quite successful in Quebec before they started disappearing in the aftermath of Bill 101. Nowadays, English-language children often graduate from Quebec's ordinary English schools with excellent French, and demand for French immersion in Quebec has dropped because parents identify more and more with their schools as symbols of their Anglo-Quebecois identity. I would not be surprised to discover that French immersion remains quite successful in the Ottawa Valley, northern Ontario and New Brunswick because it is in those areas that a child is most likely to be exposed to French in their daily life.

French immersion is a failure because the majority of 18 year olds can acquire genuinely fluent French by getting average grades in Honours French in high school and then spending a year in Chicoutimi. To send children to schools where 75% to 100% of the time is spent in French classes for as much as 12 years and still not produce fully functional French speakers does not incline me to think highly of the efficacity of French immersion programmes in Western Canada.

Now, you may be asking yourselves, how can it be that a child spends all that time in French languages classes, pass, still not be able to communicate in French and have learned just as much as ordinary students? Since I already have a reputation as something of a radical on education policy, let me suggest that it is because most kids don't learn very much in school anyway. But that is a different issue.

However, these problems in Canadian French immersion highlight the practical difficulties that follow from Canada's choice of the personality principle - as Denise Réaume and Alan Patten call it - instead of more territorial principles as the basis for language policy. It is nearly impossible for a Canadian who did not learn French at home to acquire real fluency without living - at least for a while - in a community where French is widely spoken. This, not the government of Quebec and not anti-French sentiment in the west, is the major barrier to Trudeau's vision of coast-to-coast bilingualism.

The problem can, to some degree, be remedied by placing English-speaking children not in French immersion schools filled with other English-speaking children but in native French schools. Unfortunately, this very solution is categorically forbidden by the constitution of Canada in every province except Quebec. Only children with a largely hereditary right to study in French may do so in regular French schools outside of Quebec. The alternative is to promote physical mobility and try to construct large francophone communities with limited English skills across Canada which can serve as real-life immersion environments for children. That option seems unlikely.

Why, then, isn't French immersion a scandal instead of being incredibly popular? Well, first, neither the parents nor the students are usually readily able to judge the French skills taught in immersion. They may think they have quite good French, but they are comparing themselves to their friends from English schools. Since children's overall educational outomes are not harmed, immersion schools are not producing swarms of English-illiiterate graduates who are flunking out of university.

Second, it is a scandal, but only among language education scholars.

But, I think the most important factor is that many people in Canada so strongly identify their nation with a policy of state bilingualism, that patriotism keeps the immersion programmes popular. Parents believe that they are doing the right thing, not only for their children but for their country, by sending them to French immersion schools. Attitudes towards francophones and towards official bilingualism are very positive among French immersion students and their parents.

The programme serves an important political purpose. In a nation with very little militarism, French immersion substitutes for sending your young ones off into military service as a demonstration of nationalist pride.

2003-08-20T01:31:00.000+02:00

A different kind of language policy

First, let me thank Jacob Levy and Matthew Yglesias for linking to Part 1 of this discussion of language policy. If hits are any measure, you've drawn a fair amount of attention to it, and I appreciate it.

This post tries first to make an argument for linguistic diversity without assigning any intrinsic value to languages, and second introduces an additional element into the debate that I think has been sharply neglected: the economic value of second-language education for speakers of dominant languages. Then, I talk about some policy options that I think are worth considering.

It is after 1am as I post this. I had expected to put on a few finishing touches this afternoon and found instead that I didn't like where it was going to much, so I took a nap and then rewrote it from scratch. I tend to do that a lot. Long format blogging is a kind of seat-of-the-pants exercise for me. If I didn't work this way, every post would take a month to write. The downside is that I always find myself rereading these posts and cringing at things I would have said differently if I could edit it a week later.

My boss is back from Sweden, which means I have a paying writing gig tomorrow, extracting research funding from the Flemish Council for Industrial Research. So, although it's more than half done, I expect the third post to go up Thursday rather than tomorrow. It will cover a different normative political theory, one derived in large part from child development theory rather than traditional political or economic principles.

There are really two somewhat separate arguments that have to be resolved in debates over language policy. First, is linguistic diversity something worth supporting? Second, what goals should a language policy try to meet?

Most of the people who write about language politics either place value on linguistic diversity or at least don't think that there's a good reason to be opposed to it. Like most linguists, I certainly tend to place value on it. But there are, of course, people opposed to linguistic diversity. They tend to be anglophones nowadays and far too many seem to regard the existence of multiple languages as the "curse of Babel." Arguments about the inherent superiority of one language over another are, thankfully, no longer very fashionable, but in their place English-speakers will tend to say that theirs is the only viable candidate for universal common tongue, shrug their shoulders and say that there's nothing to be done and it would be better to not resist the inevitable Anglicisation of the world.

It is hard enough to get past this barrier, much less actually advocate support for multiple languages in a single community. It is hard to convince people of arguments in favour of linguistic diversity when they do not feel that their languages are threatened. But, such arguments practically go without saying for those whose languages are threatened.

The authors in Language Rights and Political Theory who do see intrinsic value in language diversity appear to be bothered by the weakness of their arguments, and rightly so. I think some of their arguments can be presented more strongly. Linking different languages with different cultures is helpful, since people are generally more at ease with the case for cultural diversity. It is difficult to deny the aesthetic and economic value of cultural diversity when the dominant popular artistic forms in America derive overwhelmingly from its minority cultures.

Arguments from justice are stronger when integration into a dominant language community is viewed as an expense born by the minority rather than a privilege granted by the majority. We can, in fact, make an extended version of this case on purely economic grounds. Although people usually invoke the vocabulary of "greater opportunities" in the abstract, this term is in almost every case a synonym for "more money." Employment opportunities are generally greater for speakers of more dominant languages, but this is not something that has happened in isolation from language policy. The American state, through the public education system, subsidises companies by providing them with English-speaking employees at no additional cost. If the state did not undertake this form of subsidy, businesses would have to offer more opportunities to non-English speakers and would sometimes have to operate through bilingual intermediaries in order to most productively deploy labour. We can even view the lost opportunities to minority language speakers as a cost to the economy as a whole rather then simply a burden on individuals. Multilingualism can be justified on the grounds that it results in more productive use of labour.

This highlights the impossibility of language neutral policies but it also points to a serious problem in policies towards cultural minorities on the whole: Policies designed to help minorities, often policies designed with only the highest of ideals in mind and with a very genuine intent to improve the lives of real people, can have the opposite effect. I suspect that if there was less concern in the US about how well Latin American immigrants were integrating, their socio-economic status would actually be good deal better.

I think Canadian and Belgian histories support the validity of my case, although the order of events is somewhat reversed. Before WWII, French Canadians were, in the words of one Québecois activist, les nègres blancs d'Amérique - the white negros of the Americas. They suffered from all the same patterns of poverty and discrimination that have to some degree characterised Spanish-speaking Americans and at one time the Flemish. During the war, the British needed labour to build weapons, and since conscription did not apply to Québec, the province had a large available labour pool far out of range of German bombers. Hundreds of thousands of young French Canadians were enticed off their farms and into the cities, primarily to Montreal, to work in the factories. The needs of war meant that if factories had to operate in French to get things done, they operated in French. It is this economic shift, and its continuation in the post-war period, that led to the Quiet Revolution and the rise of francophone activism and Québec nationalism.

Belgian history is in some respects similar. In the late 19th century, Wallonia - the southern, French-speaking half of Belgium - was what Silicon Valley was in the 1990's: a global high-tech centre, where standards of wealth were higher than virtually everywhere else. Belgium was a major global player in the coal and steel industry - an industry as central to growth in the 19th century as electronics is today. After WWII, during the years of the German "economic miracle", there was an enormous demand for labour in manufacturing, and Flanders was conveniently located near large German industrial centres. Germans had no particular preference for French over Dutch, so Flemish industries operated in the language of Flemish workers. At the same time, Wallonia's engines of wealth were failing. The steel industry was moving to Japan, and coal didn't fetch the price it used to. Wallonia became poor while Flanders grew rich. It is this economic shift which made Flemish nationalism and linguistic equality feasible.

Alan Patten makes a distinction that I think is genuinely useful in this sort of instance. He labels certain language groups as ones able to support a "societal culture." I think his terminology is atrocious, but that the idea is sound. This enables us to distinguish between the minority language rights we might extend to a relatively small immigrant community from those we extend to a much larger and better established community. Where a language community exists in sufficient numbers and concentration that it is only policy and prejudice which prevents people from having as full and complete a life within their own community as the majority has within its community, I don't see any good reason why that language shouldn't enjoy full legal and social status wherever numbers merit. Insisting on linguistic integration into the majority community serves neither their best interests nor a more general economic interest.

This does not mean restricting anyone's access to education in the majority language, and need not deny anyone whatever limited choice they may realistically have over what language they want to live in or raise their children with. It need not even mean failing to learn the majority language well enough to participate in public life.

Would you believe me if I told you that in Canada there are schools that are entirely in French, where enrolment is, in effect, conditioned on being a member of a specific ethno-linguistic minority and the schools themselves are completely segregated from English language students, yet where graduates on the average score higher in English than the graduates of neighbouring English-only schools? This is routinely the case in French schools across Western Canada. It is not because the French schools are superior. The more likely explanation is, in fact, their exclusivity. Having no immigrants in the school means having no children who don't already have fair English knowledge. It also means that more students come from socially secure middle class homes.

There are other informative examples. In Scandinavia, the level of fluency in English is extraordinary, often better than among second-generation Latin American immigrants in the US, although many Scandinavians in my experience - especially engineers - believe their English to be better than it actually is.

If these things are happening elsewhere, why is it so hard to improve English knowledge among Spanish-speaking Americans? It is traditional to claim that American schools are terrible, that they are failures, that they can't teach anything, etc. This is not exactly true, or rather it is true but not in the way or for the reasons most people think it is. As is regularly pointed out by anti-bilingualism activists, some immigrants have fewer problems with the schools than others. I'll give long odds that second generation Swedish-American children do quite well in America's schools.

So, let me beat on a traditional leftist drum: social inequality is the reason why Spanish-speaking children do poorly both in immersion and bilingual programmes. It's all about class. For many Spanish-speaking Americans, there is a vicious cycle where poor English and a certain amount of old-fashioned prejudice leads to poverty, poverty leads to poor outcomes from public education, and poor response to schools leads to poor English. Someone who immigrates from Sweden to the US, in contrast, is probably white, probably comfortable in English, and probably a professional with a decent income.

The single most important justice-motivated argument for better language policies ought to be the breaking just this sort of vicious cycle. By creating a viable, respectable, Spanish-speaking culture in the US, one which is equal to anglophone culture in esteem if not in numbers, not only is the inequity that arises from ignorance of the majority language reduced but actual knowledge of English may improve. This is more or less what happened in Canada and might have happened in Belgium in an alternate universe where early proposals for personality principle based bilingualism had been accepted.

This line of argument has some limitations. It really only applies to the kinds of language conflicts in generally well-developed countries where there is a clear dominant language, and even then only for those minority languages that are relatively well-established. At the limit, it might serve Inuktitut language activists and perhaps Cree/Montagnais speakers, but it is of little use to those seeking to promote Navajo, Welsh, Basque, Breton or other languages where there are few if any monolingual speakers left and fluency in the dominant language is at least as great as in the minority language. These are the hard cases, where one must rely on weaker arguments for diversity per se, or else on what I consider the weak grounds of historical injustice.

However, I think there are a few principles that can help, and a few fallacies that need to be swept away.

I would offer the language activist the following advice: If there is insufficient local political will to support a minority language, radical efforts to support it will fail. This principle is particularly important to the indigenous minority languages of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Although the Irish public has repeatedly expressed its support for the Irish language, the political will to make it thrive simply does not exist. There is no longer anyone who fears that the Irish will cease to be Irish if they just speak English, and few people in Ireland are willing to accept the costs of making knowledge of Irish economically necessary. The same, to greater and lesser degrees, applies to Welsh and Scots Gaelic. This is what distinguishes them from the Basques, for example. The Basques have shown a good deal more political will because they much more strongly identify their language as a core element of their identity. Many Spanish monolingual ethnic Basques send their children off to Basque language schools, while few Welsh are willing to do the same for their children.

If communities with diminished status have the political will to rehabilitate their languages, they should have the right to try. They should even have the right to moderately coercive territorial measures, like mandatory bilingualism for certain classes of work, restrictions on the use of particular languages on outdoor signs, and mandatory education in their language for children who come under their jurisdiction. However, I don't think this entails a right to prevent children from learning the more dominant language, or even throwing up excessive barriers to acquiring that knowledge. It is not even incompatible with mandating bilingualism. Certainly, people should be free to choose to leave the community for any reason they like. No language is worth saving at the cost of diminished opportunities, but unlike many, I do not think saving endangered or minority languages needs to entail any such risk.

This brings me to the thing that I feel is most lacking in discussions of language policy, not just in Language Rights and Political Theory but in the field in general: The failure to consider minority language rights in the same context as second-language education for dominant language speakers. People in these debates tend not to assign much value to multilingualism for speakers of secure, more dominant languages. Countries spend billions of dollars trying to eradicate immigrant languages in the name of integration, and then spend billions more teaching many of those same languages to speakers of the majority language. Surely, I am not the only person to wonder why this should be?

Jacob Levy is the only person I can think of who even mentions this issue in passing: "A native French-speaker who learns Breton instead of German as a second language trades more options (people to talk with, books to read, job opportunities, and so on) for fewer..." Although on the surface this appears to be a reasonable assumption, it is frequently untrue in practise, especially in the case of large, hegemonic languages like French and English.

I have been through high school and college language studies in America, and very few people emerge from those programs fluent in a second language unless they take more intensive immersion studies in addition to their classwork. The same is true to a very significant degree in France and Germany and much less true of English studies in Scandinavia and the Low Countries. I am convinced, after living in Belgium, that this is primarily because people living in Scandinavia and in Dutch speaking countries have far greater access to English-language media and English speakers than people in France and Germany.

By comparison, look at Canada's French immersion schools. These are special schools where English-speaking children are enrolled in a fully French-language programme. Their investment of time in learning French is as large as it could possibly be. French immersion education started as an option in the Quebec anglophone school system in the 1960's, where it was phenomenally successful. Yet, transplanting this programme to other parts of Canada has been a failure. Children rarely emerge from these schools fluent in French. When I was a student at the University of Montreal, my programme had several anglophone students from other parts of Canada, students who had mastered French well enough to attend a French university. Not one of them came from an immersion school.

We can conclude that an investment of time in second language studies does not produce fluency in proportion to the time spent. Local language access is a significant if not determining factor in actual probability of acquisition.

This uncomfortable fact is uniquely annoying for me. In one year in France, I went from almost useless French to good enough to gain access to the university. In one year in Quebec, I went from good enough to study at the university to good enough to pass as a native. (And in nine years outside the French-speaking world, I have gone from near perfect French to awkward, but still functional French.) In contrast, in two years in Flanders, I have gone from no Dutch to awful Dutch. These situations are, of course, not identical. My year in France was spent almost entirely in language courses, and my first year in Quebec I almost never spoke English except on the phone to my mother. In Flanders, I have a spent one year in an exclusively English-language university programme and one year in a full time job in a firm where French and English actually reach more of the employees than Dutch. As Phillipe van Parijs puts it, stubbornness counts. The legendary intransigence of francophones (which has causes quite different than mere personal cussedness) actually makes French easier to acquire.

Still, this suggests to me that a child living in Brittany will likely acquire more real fluency in Breton than they would acquire in German while living in most parts of France, given the same investment of time and effort. Investment in the larger language (whether larger is interpreted in terms of population or gross economic importance) does not always offer a higher rate of return. It is better, in my opinion, to spend a few years learning Breton and actually be able to use the language than to spend the same time studying German and have little to show for it.

This argument is important to debates over Spanish in the USA. A child in school in New Mexico is far more likely to successfully acquire Spanish than French. Furthermore, if this child continues to live in New Mexico as an adult, his or her economic opportunities are almost certainly substantially more advanced by Spanish bilingualism than by French bilingualism. This is not only because of the demographic weight of Spanish-speaking New Mexicans but also the proximity and economic importance of Mexico to the local economy. I fail to see how a state that claims that studying algebra is in the best interest of children, even though very few of them will remember or ever use it, is making an unreasonable imposition by requiring them to study the native language of roughly one in ten of their fellow Americans and the official language of several of America's nearest neighbours, especially for those children those living near Mexico and Cuba and in areas where the demographic weight of Spanish-speakers is greatest.

I think this claim is important because it opens the way to a more symmetric notion of language rights and duties. There may be some obligation on the part of minorities to learn the majority language, and certainly if the state is to set curricula and requirements on the basis of what most promotes economic opportunities for children, then teaching everyone the dominant language (although not necessarily to the exclusion of their own languages) is perhaps reasonable. But, I should think this same obligation ought to be equally imposed on speakers of dominant languages. If a substantial portion of your community speaks a language other than your own, you ought to feel as much obligation to be able to communicate with your neighbours as they do. Your economic opportunities are certainly enhanced by a knowledge of the languages in use in your community. And, if the state is to decide what is best for children to learn, it is certainly reasonable for them to require the study of their own area's major languages.

This sort of language education is not a pipe dream. It can be accomplished, and the proof comes from the very same bilingual educators so derided in the US in recent years. The first big bilingual education programme in the United States was founded in Texas in the 1960's. It took Spanish and English-speaking children and put them together in roughly equal numbers, in bilingual classrooms with bilingual teachers. The intent was not merely that Spanish-language children should learn English, but that the English-language children should learn Spanish. This programme was very successful at achieving both goals and had no apparent negative consequences on other educational goals. It is this kind of education which is feasible in genuinely multilingual communities, and which at once sweeps away most of the arguments against multilingualism.

This leads to some radical ideas. As someone who has previously advocated some genuinely counter-intuitive education proposals on this blog, let me advance a very different language education policy: All schools should be bilingual schools. Local linguistic dominance and arguments from economic opportunities may be enough to fix one of the two languages, but the other language ought to be any language where there is sufficient community interest. For large minority languages, the economic advantages associated with knowing the them ought to be enough to get dominant-language parents to enrol their children in those schools instead of distant, but perhaps more globally important languages. Failing that, a quota system - where seats in schools for some languages are numerically limited - ought to be enough inducement. If it proves difficult to find majority language speakers willing to enrol their children to learn smaller community languages, then perhaps minority-language parents should be encouraged to pay a small tuition fee used to bribe majority-language parents to send their children to those schools. For small languages that enjoy political support within some community - cases like Scots Gaelic or Navajo - simply offering majority language parents money to enrol their children in bilingual schools with these smaller languages is probably the least coercive way to sustain them.

The very smallest languages in a community will probably be unable to get their own schools, or will have to pay the majority some significant amount to ensure that their school remains bilingual. Otherwise, I don't see how such a school system is linguistically unequal. All students are subject to the same requirements: you must master your own language and another in order to graduate. No one needs to feel more linguistically repressed - at least at school - than the speakers of the dominant language. Freedom of choice would certainly be more secure than under monolingual regimes, and there is no reason to think that any child is being deprived of the opportunity to learn something more profitable to them. There is no reason why such schools have to perform worse on any other educational measure.

This sort of system rests, however, on a different social foundation than the one most frequently found in English-speaking countries. Local access is essential in second language education and the success of Spanish-English bilingual programmes is likely to be conditional on placing the two languages on a closer to equal footing in the community. The same logic applies to language like Welsh or Breton. In order for this to work, people have to be exposed to far more culture in other languages.

Making a case for promoting minority language cultures is unusually hard to make in the English-speaking world because however much minority culture may be the engine of popular arts in America and the UK, anglophones are only barely exposed to foreign language culture. This may sound like liberal elite carping about American provincialism - which is pretty much what it is - but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

As I write this paragraph I am listening to my (fully legally acquired) MP3 collection. Looking over the music I've listened to over the last couple hours, it includes one song in Irish (Chicane - Saltwater), two in French (Mylène Farmer - Desenchantée, one of my all-time favourite pieces of French pop; and Un Jour en France - Noir Désir, the French band whose lead singer murdered his actress girlfriend in Latvia a few weeks ago), one in Icelandic (Björk - Hriti Bjorn), one in Japanese (the ending theme to my all-time favourite piece of animation, Key the Metal Idol), one in German (Rammstein - Du hast!) and right now I'm listening to a song in Punjabi (Panjabi MC - Mundian To Bach Ke). Now, most of my music is in English, and I'm the first to admit that I'm not an especially typical person, but none of this music is very obscure here in Belgium or abroad. Except for Mylène Farmer and Noir Désir, I doubt I would have very much difficulty getting music by these artists in the US. But, I think Saltwater is the only thing on that list that I've ever heard on the radio in America. Du hast! was on the soundtrack to The Matrix. Mundian To Bach Ke is fairly recent stuff, so it may be better known in the States than I think it is and it surely gets airplay in the UK, but somehow I suspect that Punjabi rap music is not a growth market in North America. I saw Key the Metal Idol on PBS in California, but it was fully dubbed - even the music was translated. I don't think any of Björk's music in Icelandic is ever sold in the US. People miss out.

That is, to my way of thinking, the all too often neglected element of language policy. Monolingualism has costs for dominant language speakers too. It makes it harder for them to learn languages which clearly expand their own opportunities, and it cuts them off from the currents of culture elsewhere. This is not a uniquely anglophone problem. It applies to a significant if lesser degree to French and German as well, and applied even more to them in the past.

I am convinced that the most effective way to attack this sort of cultural isolationism is through local multilingualism. I want to see countries using the native languages of immigrant and minority cultures as resources. Imagine the impact on America's so-called "war on terrorism" if New York and Detroit were dotted with Arabic language schools full of Anglo kids. The military, the CIA, the FBI and other wings of the American state are constantly complaining about the language barriers they face in the Middle-East. To have on hand a community - not just of immigrants but of fully integrated Americans - who are not only fluent in Middle-Eastern languages but for whom the people and cultures of the Middle-East just aren't terribly foreign or scary - it seems to me that has some real value. The same logic applies to doing business in China, or for that matter in France.

But to do this means rethinking not just schools. It means rethinking the whole way we identify and deal with things that are foreign. As someone with a long history of regularly changing countries, freedom of movement is a more important principle to me than it is to most people. This gives me a somewhat unusual perspective on multiculturalism and multilingualism. I want everyone to be free to go where they want, and I don't want them to have to be afraid either that they will be rejected as foreign or forced to adopt arbitrary cultural norms in order to avoid the charge of being a bad immigrant. I want people not to have to live in fear of foreign languages, either in their own community or elsewhere.

At the same time, I don't want people who speak and live in smaller languages to be afraid every time an outsider moves into their community or a young person moves out. In my perfect world, people in Wales would be encouraging immigrants from India and teaching them to speak Welsh rather than living in fear that summer people from London are going to buy up their homes and make them all speak English. It's true that not all the world's small languages can be saved. Too many aboriginal American and Australian languages are already dead. But many can still be saved if there is both the will to do it in those communities that identify with them, and a reduction in fear and arrogance from others who live with them.

It is a radical vision, but I don't think it's a utopian one. I do think it would be a better world, and that is what is hardest to demonstrate to most people. I think my policy prescriptions for larger languages make sense even if you place no intrinsic value on language diversity, so long as you think that a monolingual world is simply not feasible. In order to justify defending the smaller and politically weaker languages, I have to actually articulate reasons why a multilingual world is a better place than a monolingual one. That means finding a different answer the first question I posed, at the beginning of this post. To do that, I have to delve a little deeper into philosophy and language, and that will be the subject of my next post.

2003-08-18T19:47:00.000+02:00

The fit hits the shan

Via Mac-a-ro-nies, I see the first real attempt to put the story of the Great Blackout of 2003 into a single narrative. I have been behind on the nes, and this article is already a couple days old.

Blackout probe eyes failure near Cleveland

US electric industry officials said last night they had strong indications that the massive power outage that shut down New York City and much of the Northeast began with the failure of a high-voltage line near Cleveland.

That failure was the first in a 60-minute series of breakdowns that spread blackouts across eight states and Ontario, affecting about 50 million people. The North American Electric Reliability Council, a group originally formed to prevent a recurrence of the massive 1965 Northeastern blackout, said the crisis began at 3:06 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday on a line in the "Lake Erie loop."

Michehl R. Gent, president of the electric council, said it could take days or even months to come up with a detailed explanation of what went wrong. But Gent said the Erie loop and a gaggle of power plants that feed into it -- 22 nuclear reactors and 80 conventional plants -- are "the center of the focus" of council investigations.

Over the space of 9 to 10 seconds at about 4:10 p.m. Thursday, Gent said, at least 12 high-voltage power lines in the loop failed, and 100 power plants almost simultaneously shut down under standard emergency precautions intended to prevent generators from swamping the crippled grid.

As they shut down, 800 megawatts of electricity -- an amount comparable to the power used by 600,000 homes -- that had been flowing from west to east suddenly surged in the other direction, sucked into the growing vacuum in Ohio and Michigan. [...]

It does read a bit like Bruce Sterling in The Hacker Crackdown, doesn't it? The ass-covering and suspicion-casting is already underway according to Newsday:

Ohio Company Defends Itself

The Ohio-based company whose failed power lines have been targeted preliminarily as the starting point of Thursday's massive blackout defended itself Sunday, insisting that the wider electric grid was faltering hours before its lines went out of service.

Kristen Baird, a spokeswoman for Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy, said that as early as noon Thursday operators noted fluctuations in the frequency and voltage of electricity traveling on lines in the Eastern Interconnection, a grid that includes all the United States west of the Rocky Mountains and north of Texas. She declined to specify where the anomalies occurred. [...]

"Our position is that what happened Thursday is much more complex than a few tripped transmission lines in our system," Baird said.

On Saturday, the North American Electric Reliability Council said that five high-voltage lines in northern Ohio failed during a period of an hour, beginning at 3:06 p.m. Moments later, Canada and the Northeast United States experienced huge power swings that quickly cut electricity to an estimated 50 million people.

FirstEnergy owns or co-owns four of the five lines that failed, the company said.

This, to the best of my knowledge, the first time I have heard a company deploy the "it's more complex than that" defense. But wait, there's more:

Sunday, Michael Gent, president and chief operating officer of the [Midwest Independent System Operator, a nonprofit cooperative of utilities in 15 midwestern states and Canada], said Thursday's blackout "is exactly what we are supposed to prevent."

"We have a problem here where we either have a bad design, or we have bad following [of] the rules," Gent said in an interview on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

Long before last week's blackout, Gent's organization was lobbying Congress to put teeth into the voluntary reliability rules. The changes are needed, the council says, because electric utilities that generated their own power and were regulated by the government have given way to a free-market energy system in which kilowatts are bought and sold by hundreds of disparate players.

"The users and operators of the transmission system, who used to cooperate voluntarily on reliability matters, are now competitors without the same incentives to cooperate with each other or to comply with voluntary reliability rules," the council said in a statement on its Web site, which was posted before the blackout. "As a result, there has been a marked increase in the number and seriousness of violations of these rules."

Long-delayed energy legislation pending in Congress would give the council the authority to enforce compliance with reliability standards among all market participants.

So, it is all going to turn out to be deregulation's fault, isn't it?

Speaking of power failures...

GOP Candidates Under Pressure to Support Arnold

Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon, under considerable pressure by the party to withdraw from the recall election and endorse front-runner Arnold Schwarzenegger, wouldn't rule out that option on Sunday.

"I'm running hard," Simon told NBC's "Meet the Press" when asked a second time if he would stay in the governor's race to the bitter end. "Where's Mr. Schwarzenegger stand on the issues? This has to be about the future."

When asked if there was a situation where he could imagine endorsing Schwarzenegger, Simon told interviewer Brian Williams: "I need to hear people's vision."

Simon wouldn't say if he planned to talk with White House political director Karl Rove about his future in the race or if any appeals from the Bush administration might sway his decision.

Tea-leaf reading on the status of Simon's campaign and that of Republican challenger state Sen. Tom McClintock has become a daily obsession throughout GOP political circles. [...]

In the latest Field Poll, Simon registered 8 percent and McClintock 9 percent. Schwarzenegger led the GOP field with 22 percent, trailing only Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante's 25 percent. GOP strategists, however, said the biggest number in the poll was the cumulative support for the best-known Republican candidate. [...]

The Schwarzenegger campaign has also encouraged the other party candidates to consider dropping out. "Without a doubt, with one Democratic candidate and multiple Republican candidates it's obvious that there is a factor that could diminish Republican votes for the front-runner but there's not a factor diminishing the Democratic votes," Schwarzenegger spokesman Rob Stutzman told Fox News.

It's nice to see Democrats united for once and Republicans divided.

2003-08-18T19:20:00.000+02:00

More stuff missed while I've been busy

I suppose I should put more smilies in my text. Jurgen over at No Cameras has posted a response to some earlier posts of mine. As for my post containing a few less than methodologically sound ways of comparing the US military budget to the rest of the world, I am quite guilty. I did note some of this in the original post.

However, I think my point still holds. It costs relatively little to force your enemy to pay a lot to invade you and the expense of good equipment and a relatively high level of casualty aversion does make it far more expensive for America to go on the offensive than for others to defend themselves. I did not put military spending statistics in terms of percentage of GDP, but I suspect that it would be more politically intolerable for the US to spend 3% of its GDP on military action than for a moderately industrialised dictatorship to spend 10% on its defense.

2003-08-18T16:41:00.000+02:00

Language Rights and Political Theory - Chapter Summaries and Specific Criticisms

Welcome to part 1 of what I'm planning as a three or four part discussion of language policy, starting with my long awaited review of Kymlicka, Patten, et al's Language Rights and Political Theory. Part 2 is almost finished, and I'm part of the way through part 3. It's long, folks. Pull up a pew an' set a spell.

If you're Jim over at Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufrey, you can follow along with your own copy. I have included spoilers, so be warned. For everybody else, let me reveal the surprise ending in invisible text: The British did it, the French helped them and the Americans covered it up.

Okay, now on to the serious stuff.

Language Rights and Political Theory brings together a number of authors, primarily working within a mostly Rawlsian liberal framework, to investigate issues in language policy. There are a number of things that strike me about this work in contrast to other efforts to flesh out a theory of language policy.

First, it is abundantly clear that the authors have only a handful of instances of language contact in mind as they write. The arguments and principles advanced in this volume derive overwhelmingly from just four regimes: Canada, the United States, Belgium and Spain. There is mention of other places and cases - it is not the work of 12 authors with blinders to the rest of the world and Jacob Levy is one of the few to give anything close to equal time to language issues outside the west - but there is almost nothing here of value to people interested in post-colonial language policy and there is little sense in this volume of the diversity of linguistic contact situations.

Still, these four flagship cases - each involving linguistic conflicts that have come to boil in the last 50 years in well connected, reasonably wealthy, occidental liberal democratic states - are informative. A focus on the most powerful states is not, per se, a criticism. The powerful are, obviously, powerful, and their conflicts tend to colour everyone's politics, even those quite culturally and politically remote.

Second, with the exception of Stephen May, I don't think any of the authors are particularly trained in or aware of linguistics. I can't blame them - the most visible school of linguistics in the English speaking world is almost completely without value to a discussion of language policy. Still, there are places where this lacuna is especially unfortunate.

However, the book does offes some valuable points for debate and clues in the search for a more productive theory of language policy. I will review each chapter in turn, and then put forward a more general critique in the second post. In the third part, I'm going to fulfill my long running promise to put up a post sketching an alternative to liberalism as a normative political theory.

Chapter Summaries and Individual Critiques

I. Language Rights and Political Theory: Contexts, Issues and Approaches

This introductory chapter, from the Canadian co-editors Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten, outlines some of the challenges language policy poses for liberalism and some of the specific issues a liberal theory of language policy has to face.

Language simply can not be handled by analogy with those areas where liberals are more at home: race, class, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other traditional concerns. We have no difficulty envisioning collective institutions which are indifferent to those things, but we are hard pressed to imagine institutions which do not, either de jure or de facto, favour some small set of languages over others. Language rights are essentially collective rights - to conceive of them as rights individuals can exercise independently of their community is to seriously misunderstand the nature of language.

Kymlicka and Patten go on to describe the various fields of policy that are most frequently subject to linguistic prescription. This list includes access to government services, participation in public discourse, employment rights, access to education, the situation of indigenous minorities, historical oppression, the problems posed by immigration, and state language polices as a tool of constructive nationalism. They also takes an initial stab at classifying language policies by their scope and nature, but this sort of policy distinction is, regrettably, strictly limited to European and North American states.

II. Language Rights: Exploring the competing rationales

Ruth Rubio-Marín places a great deal of emphasis on the distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental language rights. This seems - if I am reading her correctly - to represent the distinction between language rights granted to individuals in order to enable them to enjoy political liberties and rights designed to offer security to language communities, ensuring that their language is able to continue to exist. An example of instrumental rights is the requirement - fixed by precedent in the US and codified under the European Charter of Rights - that people brought before a court be able to understand the charges against them and be able to defend themselves, even if that means employing the services of interpreters and translators. In contrast, an example of a non-instrumental language right is the right to schools in your language of choice, even if it is not the dominant language in your community.

Rubio-Marín goes on to investigate the different kinds of measures this distinction entails, and advances the idea that language policies should properly be placed in a framework of legal rights rather than mere regulation.

III. A Liberal Democratic approach to Language Justice

David Laitin and Rob Reich offer a contrast to Rubio-Marín's advocacy of a rights-based framework for understanding language policy. They first attack this rights-based conception by dividing liberal normative approaches to language policy into three categories: compensatory justice, nationalism and liberal culturalism. They argue against each one in turn.

Compensatory justice is identified with the idea that linguistic minority communities are or have been the victims of unjust policies and that language rights are justified on the basis of compensation. The example they use is Catalonia, where the rhetoric of historical injustice has been used to gain the help of the state in re-establishing the linguistic security of their language. This is problematic for Laitin and Reich because few minority language speakers are willing to accept compensation in order to integrate into the majority community. Therefore, they must envision their language as something of intrinsic value. This undermines claims for compensatory justice in their view.

The archetypical instances of nationalist language policies are in Eastern Europe, where most of the current states are less than a century old ad their the national language came into being in conjunction with the demand for a nation-state. The language served as proof of the existence of a unified nation and the desire for a nation served to promote the language. Liberal nationalism therefore envisions language policy as a mechanism for reclaiming cultural sovereignty or national territorial rights. Laitin and Reich regard this position as foundationally incompatible with liberalism, since it entails a state authority over people's freedom to live in the language they choose.

Liberal culturalism is the position Laitin and Reich associate with Will Kymlicka, but it is one I would associate with an uncritical sort of multi-culturalism. It is a position which tends to regard groups which share an identity - be it ethnic, religious, racial or linguistic, as a single entity possessed of rights that merit protection. Laitin and Reich point out the difficulties this presents for the individualistic focus of liberal theory. These groups do not speak with one mouth, nor do they have a common view of what they want or need.

They offer an alternative: the prospect of politically negotiated language rights. Where a language community is able to mobilise within a system of essentially democratic decision-making to secure its language rights, they should be secured. Like all but the least liberal monolingualism advocates, they deplore the beatings children once received for using their own languages in school, but otherwise do not see any particular liberal interdiction against monolingualist policies. They explicitly advocate the politicisation of language issues, limited only by general liberal principles of just and unjust behaviour towards individuals. I think they are rightly critical of liberal theorists for distrusting democratic processes to decide on what rights are appropriate for which communities. We are, after all, able to advance more sophisticated notions of the democratic process nowadays than mere majority rule.

It is, at times, hard to get a bead on where Laitin and Reich are coming from. On the one hand, they are critical of the efficacy of bilingual education and on the other seem to deplore the way in which the wealthy in Catalonia are able to purchase private Spanish language educations while the poor are stuck in Catalan-language schools. They are deeply hostile to Stephen May's promotion of minority political rights in terms of power relationships, but I do not see how they expect any linguistic minority to promote its rights in a politicised framework without such advocacy.

I am inclined to attribute to Laitin and Reich a sin worse than the distrust of politics that they attribute to other liberal thinkers: the development of a political theory that serves no purpose but to justify the status quo. They point to Quebec and Spain as places where political negotiation ultimately secured significant language rights, but it does not seem to occur to them that bilingual regimes in schooling and government in the US are also the product of the same kind of political mobilisation.

IV. Accommodation Rights for Hispanics in the United States

Thomas Pogge offers the least universalist perspective on language policy, restricting his arguments to the Spanish language in the United States. He is particularly critical of Will Kymlicka advocacy of minority language rights, and defends a quite resolutely monolingual nationalist policy.

Pogge argues that historical injustices are irrelevant to Spanish language policy, since it is impossible to segregate from the descendants of recent immigrants that part of the Hispanic community descended from those present in the United States at the time that its borders were extended. Second, he makes the baffling claim that linguistic inequality does not entail any sort of injustice as understood by liberals. He supports this claim, as far as I can tell, only with the idea that if Hispanics choose to live among their own, it is by choice and therefore of value to them.

Pogge goes on to offer us a red herring: He raises a strawman argument against teaching English to Spanish-speaking Americans - an unlikely position that he attributes to Kymlicka, but which Kumlicka does not claim in Pogge's quotes. As far as I know, forbidding English education for children in American schools, or even failing to mandate it, is a not position advocated by any mainstream political force. Thus, Pogge's attack on it is quite irrelevant to the actual context of the United States. Had he attempted to generalise his position to Belgium, Switzerland or even Canada, where it has far more bearing on matters, he would have been compelled to generalise his case to a far more complicated context.

To justify monolingual English education, Pogge advances the notion that the best education for children is the education which is best for each child. That's fine, as far as it goes, but there is an enormous gap between this postulate and a policy of English-only education which Pogge makes no effort to bridge. He neither makes empirical claims about what form of education is best for children, nor does he defend himself from the charge that he wants the government to decide in lieu of parents. Given what I presume to be a liberal preference for freedom of choice, this deserves some explanation.

This "English for the children" sort of rhetoric is uncompelling to me. Consider an alternative form of the same argument. In post-9/11 America, it is likely that Muslim children, especially those of more visible and conservative sects, face significant disadvantages in education and employment. They are taunted at school and almost certainly have a harder time getting a job, especially in the sorts of unskilled trades that many immigrants need to survive in a new country. Are we, therefore, for the sake of the children, justified in Christianising them or at least pressing them to adopt a more secular and less visible form of Islam? I should think the liberal answer to be no. Pogge proposes nothing to explain why this is less true of language than of religion.

V. Misconceiving Minority Language Rights: Implications for Liberalism

Stephen May is a sociolinguist who I associate primarily with Maori language issues. In some ways, I am more comfortable with May than the other authors here, because he does not speak the language of Rawlsian liberalism, opting instead of the language of cultural criticism. He is particularly hostile to the explicit monolingual nationalism of Thomas Pogge, and the more hidden form he sees in Laitin and Reich.

First, he is critical of the magic link between the nation-state and the identification of a single official language. There is a reason for that link and May makes no mention of it: the belief that a common citizenship and a common political space is difficult to sustain without a common language. However, May is still on fairly firm ground pointing out that this is a post-facto justification of national monolingualism. The historical foundation of states, especially America, is far less simple.

May also highlights the asymmetry of claims about the importance of reinforcing the dominant language over minority ones. He points to the either/or nature of many language claims as representative of this problem. I, too, noticed how the authors of many of the chapters in this book seem to think that bilingualism is simply impossible, or assume that any bilingualism is simply a step towards assimilation into the dominant language and culture. There is no inherent reason why this should be true. Although May does not make this case, in the era before the modern nation state, whole multilingual communities persisted for generations, and in many place they were the norm, not the exception. Even today, large parts of the Balkans have communities where universal or near-universal bilingualism is the norm, and in the most Anglophilic nations of Europe - the Low Countries and Scandinavia - near universal bilingualism has become a stable situation.

May goes on to criticise the notion that language must define identity as an essentialist and reductionist view - fighting words for the cultural critic. One can be American while still speaking English, Spanish while speaking Catalan and British while still speaking Welsh. He is in my opinion on the right track here. It was once considered unthinkable that one could be Irish without being Catholic, and to claim that to be American requires being Anglophone is just as pernicious a position unless it can be supported by some stronger claim than the presumption that one nation must have just one language.

VI. Linguistic Justice

Philippe van Parijs is, I assume, largely kidding with his contribution to this volume. Deploying the notion of distributive justice, he proposes to use cash to compensate minority language speakers for the effort they must expend in learning the majority language, since he deems this an effort which benefits the majority at a cost to the minority. This resembles Swift's famous proposal for resolving Ireland's overpopulation problems in the 19th century.

However, let us for a moment take van Parijs seriously. This makes some sense in light of the history of van Parijs' native country: Belgium. The history of language politics in Belgium was, until 1989, a history of Dutch speakers learning French, while French speakers saw no particular need to reciprocate since Flemings were largely able to understand and express themselves in French. This persisted even after Dutch-speakers became a majority of the population. Flemish bilingualism was largely beneficial to French-speakers, who were therefore able to expend less effort learning and using a non-native language.

Consider, however, the effect of guaranteeing every Spanish speaker in the US a regular payment from the government. What would this do for Spanish retention rates among Latin American immigrants? It has the distorting effect of making it profitable to retain a native knowledge of Spanish, undermining the very effect so earnestly sought after by integrationist policies. Money has secondary effects, and offering money to Spanish speakers creates a moral hazard for the whole community, discouraging their langauge from behaving as it should by dying off.

VII. Diversity as a paradigm, analytical device and policy goal

François Grin takes a long hard look at the logic and consequences behind support for social diversity and finds them lacking.

One paradox that Grin identifies is the distinction most countries make between "indigenous" minorities and "immigrant" ones. The United Kingdom has more Gujarati speakers than Scots Gaelic speakers, yet Scots Gaelic enjoys some legal status in the UK, while Gujarati has none. The goal of fostering diversity would presumably be just as well served by support for the Gujarati community as for Scots Gaelic.

Grin recognises that our natural sense of justice leads us to grant more support to these "indigenous" communities than to other communities, but asks whether making time the deciding factor in language rights isn't problematic. Where does one draw the line? Spanish, French and German have been spoken in the United States for as long or longer than English. Each predates the founding of the United States by a considerable time. Should support for language rights in the US only include languages spoken before 1492? If so, how does one transplant this decision to the rest of the world? Europe's ethnic distribution is the product of millennia of migration, assimilation and remigration where no magic date separates some previously just distribution from the present. Grin does not have an answer.

VIII. Global Linguistic Diversity, Public Goods, and the Principle of Fairness

Idil Boran is, to me anyway, the most sympathetic author in this volume. She considers arguments in favour of biodiversity to see if they can inform arguments for linguistic diversity. As Boran points out, she is not the first to consider this train of thought. There are a number of similarities between language diversity and biodiversity. The most diverse ecosystems tend to be fairly small, and advocating biodiversity means protecting relatively small territories. In the same way, the world's hundred most common languages are spoken by some 90% of the world's population, while thousands of other languages are spoken by small communities.

Furthermore, the very places with the richest biodiversity also tend to be the places with the richest linguistic diversity. This is not a coincidence. Biodiversity and linguistic diversity are generally greatest in areas that have not been fully colonised by agricultural civilisations. Just as farmers bring with them their own organisms to the detriment of local flora and fauna, they bring with them their languages and tend to liquidate or assimilate less efficient users of fertile land. Biodiversity and linguistic diversity also tend to be greatest in areas that are heavily partitioned by geographical barriers. The same mechanisms that limit the movement of species limit the movement of cultures.

Discourse on biodiversity tends to be centred on the notion of a public good. A public good, in liberal discourse, usually means something which is identified as beneficial to at least most people, but where it is difficult to exclude anyone from enjoying the good if it exists. This undermines voluntarist and market-driven solutions to distributing the good and theorists most often treat the identification of a public good as something which justifies an exception to the liberal predisposition towards freedom of choice.

Boran rehearses many of the arguments in favour of viewing linguistic diversity as a public good. First is the argument from aesthetic value so often favoured by classical humanists. Language is not exclusively an instrument of communication. It is also a medium for artistic works. To lose a language means to lose all the arts which are only accessible in that language - its poetry, its literature, its songs, etc. However, she finds this argument weak. There are ample disputes over the recognition of artistic ventures as public goods, and what policy implications this entails. Look, for example, at the constant griping in the US over state funding for controversial artists, like the display of Robert Maplethorpe photos in public museums. Adding language issues to this conflicting mess seems ill-considered.

She is also confronts arguments from scientific value. Although local cultures do contain a variety of useful information about the world - information which is often far less self-evident to occidental scientists - we should not overestimate the value of this knowledge. In my estimate, Boran is right to think this is also a weak argument.

She also identifies an individual's freedom of choice as grounds for supporting language diversity. However, this is difficult to accept at face value. An individual's freedom to live in a particular language is conditioned on access to a substantial community of speakers. This can not be guaranteed in the same manner as an individual freedom to hold particular political views or religious beliefs. The essentially collective nature of language rights makes this entire line of thinking problematic.

Instead, she offers us a principle of fairness which can be interpreted as a more serious effort to apply the logic of just compensation advanced by Philippe van Parijs. If we identify linguistic diversity as a public good, it is appropriate to accept its maintenance as a public cost born by linguistic majorities.

IX. Language Death and Liberal Politics

Michael Blake claims that language rights can only be understood by embracing what he feels is a paradox. He contrasts two hypothetical situations: In the first, a language charges over time until its speakers no longer understand the earlier form of the language; in the second, a language changes over time until it becomes indistinguishable from some other language which was earlier clearly distinct. Is it not appropriate, in both cases, to claim that a language has died? Why then do we object so forcefully to the second case but are unbothered by the first?

Blake's example is a case where a more complete knowledge of linguistics would have been very useful, because while Blake wants us to understand the second to correspond to what happens in unjust language death, what he describes in fact virtually never occurs.

I say "virtually never" because whether it really occurs at all remains the subject of some controversy. In linguistics, this process is called decreolisation, and it is exceedingly rare if it ever actually happens. The study of language contact is complex and somewhat disorganised. There are still vast gaps in our knowledge and plenty of controversy over what happens when languages come into contact. One of the things that can happen is creolisation. This corresponds, in some respects at least, to what Blake is describing.

There is no controversy over the idea that sometimes elements from one language are adopted into another. The current thinking is that this process is pervasive and forms a part of the past and present of nearly every language in the world. The elements that are most frequently and obviously adopted are lexical. Languages borrow words from each other. However, there are ample well-documented instances of morphological and syntactic borrowing as well. The school of linguistics that I more or less adhere to does not even make very sharp distinctions between lexical items, morphological rules and syntactic structures, so for me this poses no difficulties at all.

The problem is the other half of what Blake is claiming: borrowing foreign elements can turn two languages into one. This idea is one of the theories about the origin of Black English. (Also known as African American Vernacular English, but when I call it AAVE, I'm saying that this is a matter for linguists, and if you aren't a linguist you shouldn't be talking about it. When I say "Black English" people are quite clear on what I am talking about. So I stick to "Black English.") The decreolisation hypothesis says that non-standard speech patterns among African Americans came into being because African language patterns persisted among early American slaves, who spoke a creole instead of standard English. In this view, the language of African American communities has been converging with the standard language ever since.

This hypothesis is not highly regarded among linguists. Historical records of slave language in the US do not support this account. Furthermore, arguments from historical reconstruction - claiming that copula dropping in Black English is evidence of African origin because of pervasive copula dropping in Bantu languages - are not convincing. Russian is also a copula dropping language, yet we would not call this fact evidence of the African origin of Russian. Black English appears to have originated as a dialect of colloquial American English which grew away from the standard due to low levels of literacy and segregation.

There are a few other borderline cases. Hawaiian Creole English speakers clearly manipulate a variety of intermediate levels of language between a completely basolectal (= incomprehensible to outsiders) creole and standard English. The same is true to some degree among the Caribbean creoles. However, in each of those cases, the people who speak mesolectal (= may be more comprehensible to outsiders) forms enjoy some mastery of the standard language. It is not clear whether the underlying creole languages are being progressively transformed into the standard language, or if growing bilingualism with the standard language isn't simply creating mesolectal forms among the already bilingual.

Unfortunately, the whole of Blake's argument is built on this base. He demands that before a linguistic right can be established, we must show that the second situation has occurred due to a historical injustice rather than happenstance. He believes that progressive assimilation can occur in an entirely just, voluntary manner. But this process describes no real situation. In every case that might in some way resemble Blake's description, we have a community which has been compelled, by more or less coercive means, to become bilingual in some more dominant language. Without extensive bilingualism in the minority community and unequal access to power, there is never assimilation, and even in cases where there is widespread bilingualism, social inequality and extensive borrowing, there is not always linguistic assimilation.

Blake's core argument - that language death is not always the consequence of coercion so we must look to historical factors in assigning language rights - collapses entirely on this matter of historical record. He might have made the case that either extensive bilingualism or unequal access to power occurs for reasons that are, if not just then at least difficult to remedy without creating more injustice. That is that case Jacob Levy makes in the next chapter, and I am far more sympathetic to that kind of claim.

X. Language Rights, Literacy and the Modern State

Jacob Levy, like Blake in the previous chapter, claims that the death of a language can not necessarily be identified with an injustice. Levy, however, uses a somewhat novel approach in making this claim - the costs associated with acquiring literacy. He is correct to say that literacy does not play an important part in discussions of multilingualism. Modern linguistics, which has since the era of de Saussure eschewed literacy as a subject of study, is unfortunately the main culprit. It is part of a general trend in theoretical linguistics - a particularly pronounced one in the era of the structuralists - to ignore any area of language study that might actually prove useful to someone.

Levy recognises, unlike many other commentators on language issues, that multilingualism is a feature of many language communities and claims that a major engine of linguistic assimilation is the cost of becoming literate in multiple languages rather than the cost of becoming conversant in a foreign tongue. I found this claim surprising, because it is quite contrary to most people's experience in learning languages. Developing true verbal fluency - the ability to follow conversations in diverse local accents under noisy conditions using local idioms - is quite a bit more difficult than developing basic literacy in the more standard form of a language.

Then the logic of it came to me. This claim is true for a set of languages. Chinese, Japanese, English and French are the prototype examples of languages where even native speakers have a great deal of difficulty acquiring literacy and second language speakers are still more disadvantaged. Otherwise, this claim is simply false for the overwhelming majority of the world's languages, particularly its smaller and more threatened ones.

Literacy in Inuktitut, which is written using an unusual and moderately complicated writing scheme unique to Canada, spread spontaneously after its introduction by a Methodist missionary in the 19th century. Inuit children, who are hard-pressed to develop fluency and literacy in English, often enter school already literate in their native language. This situation is also common in Africa. Among my father's four native languages was Kituba, a trade language spoken in Bandundu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He developed fluency through exposure as a young child, but became literate in a matter of minutes after he was introduced to its largely phonetic writing scheme.

I do not find arguments from the added burden of literacy terribly convincing. The creation of written forms for languages is not, in fact, usually the realm of "linguistic activists and outside preservationists" as Levy claims. It is in most cases the work of either the state in some guise or of missionaries. Missionary linguistic work nowadays is carried out primarily by an organisation called the Wycliffe Bible Society and its more secular wing, the Summer Institute of Linguistics. One of the most common features of missionary linguists' stories is the speed and ease with which literacy spreads once it has been introduced. It is unheard of for linguistic assimilation to outpace the spread of literacy when a reasonably phonetic writing system is introduced to a community. In many instances, its spread is faster than the missionaries themselves. In the case of Inuktitut, missionaries would sometimes arrive in new villages prepared to teach people how to read only to find that the written language had preceded them, and this in a culture that could only write in the snow because they had no paper.

Levy is on firmer ground when he points out that one of the key advantages of literacy is access to a wider society. Many modern languages were constructed, some more explicitly than others, as unions of diverse dialects. Building a competitive linguistic community is a form of cultural self-defence. However, it is better understood as a sort of compromise measure for linguistic communities. Consider the case of Inuktitut. Although partitioned into a number of partially intercomprehensible dialects, there is a growing degree of standardisation on the phonologically conservative dialect of Iglulik. Although this means that some Inuktitut communities' unique language forms may be lost, this standard Inuktitut is a far better vehicle for their culture and traditions than English. By choosing this strategy, Inuit are accepting the loss of smaller group identities in return for preserving some of what is valuable to them.

Personally, I wish this strategy was more widespread. I know of no comparable movement among Canada's Cree and Montagnais communities, who are numerically superior to the Inuit and who could even more effectively take advantage of a common linguistic strategy. Unfortunately, the political barriers to doing so are much larger for them, since they are divided by two scripts, several churches, two different prefered European languages, and spread across six provinces and one of the territories. However, regardless of its necessity or justice, this phenomenon of language construction by merging dialects is rarely if ever spontaneous. It is, almost without exception, a result of a policy designed to sacrifice some linguistic diversity in return for some good. It is true that it is not in all cases the result of brutally unjust policies imposed from the outside, but it is unlikely to occur unless there is some perceived threat to a language community. Levy's claim that language death through this kind of process is spontaneous is difficult to support.

Levy finally returns to what is the best argument against linguistic diversity and the only one I think actually has enough merit to be worth discussing. Living one's entire life in a language of limited scope is an expensive proposition. It cuts its speakers off from opportunities for personal advancement. Language should not be a prison, and I am largely in agreement with Levy's statement that children should not be tools in the maintenance of unsustainable sociological divisions. However, they have no choice but to be tools in the maintenance of sustainable ones, and distinguishing the lost causes from the viable languages is not an easy task, nor one that the designers of language policies can so easily avoid.

XI. The Antinomy of Language Policy

Daniel Weinstock rehearses many of the same issues in language policy described at length by previous authors, but goes on to describe a vision of a more just kind of language policy. It is composed of three principles:

Minimalism. The only language dependent goal states should be allowed to pursue is effective communication. Language policies which serve other goals - nation-building, cultural preservation, political unity - are to be rejected.
Anti-symbolism. The selection a particular language by the state should not have a symbolic significance. It would, under Weinstock's principles, be wrong for the United States to declare its official language to be English so that non-English speakers can be identified as Unamerican.
Revisability. The state should be prepared to change its language choices in the face of demographic change. It should be committed to effective communication, and if a change in language policy serves this goal it should be adopted.

Weinstock concedes that this set of policy prescriptions will generally favour the dominant language, but at least it will do so for pragmatic reasons, and without any sudden deprivation of reasonable linguistic rights to communities of any size. I find myself in substantial agreement with Weinstock, although I think there are many cases where these principles do not form an adequate decision procedure for language policy.

I fear that Weinstock's prescriptions, as good as they are, are too little, too late. Had these principles been in place in Canada and the United States since their respective foundings, it is unlikely that either state would have English-speaking majorities today. In the era before mass media and rapid transportation, they would in fact have constituted a relatively just and economically efficient basis for language policy. However, the instrumental value of mass languages today is so great that to imagine that any sort of minimalist language policy can be economically efficient may be an unreasonable assumption.

XII. Beyond Personality: The Territorial and Personality Principles of Language Policy Reconsidered

Denise Réaume contrasts two general classes of language policy and the justifications behind them. The "territorial principle" attaches language rights to particular geographic territories, constructing for each language a place where it can be dominant. Your right to use your language in all parts of your life may be restricted if you are not resident in a territory where your own language is legally established. The "personality principle", in contrast, guarantees language rights without respect to location.

Réaume is right to consider the territorial principle suspect. It is little more than a weak extension of territorial ethno-linguistic nationalism, a principle responsible for more than its fair share of the world's ills. There is nothing special about an existing set of national borders or administrative divisions that makes them worth entrenching as linguistic frontiers. Furthermore, creating these territorial divisions always creates new linguistic minorities by stranding minorities of both languages on the wrong side of the line.

However, she goes a step further, pointing out that a personality principle may justify no more protection for language than any other kind of social division, like religion. Clearly, this is inadequate. Religions can generally be practised individually and privately without losing their value to those who adopt them. Languages can not.

Territorial solutions do have this vexing property of actually working and alternatives often do not, and that is where Réaume finds herself in a pickle. She wants to use the personality principle to advocate radical policies designed to promote minority languages and is hard pressed to do it. Even Canada, champion of the personality principle, has a very different situation on the ground than the Trudeauist vision of coast-to-coast bilingualism. Québec and New Brunswick are the only places in Canada where French is genuinely thriving and they are the only places where the legal code genuinely favours French.

Réaume takes a very Canadian approach to justifying radical minority language support. Language rights are, to her, justified on the basis of collective, rather than individual rights. The constitution of Québec is one of the few in the West to recognise any notion of collective rights by that name and collective rights form the basis of the native claims that are so vexing for Canadian politics right now. However, her argument is subject to the criticisms advanced by Laitin and Reich against collective rights. Réaume will convince no one outside of Canada because her position is so utterly remote from the traditional liberal embrace of individual rights.

XIII. What kind of bilingualism?

Alan Patten picks up many of the same themes as Réaume in the final chapter of the book. He distinguishes a number of arguments for multilingualism and attempts to discern what sort of language regime - territorial or personality based - each tends to favour.

Patten argues that a concern for language rights based on access to public institutions favours the personality principle rather than regionalist language policies. This is not inherently true, because the resources to support bilingualism are not unlimited, and the group which most needs support in accessing public institutions may vary from place to place.

Patten goes on to visit arguments from social mobility, which he deems more likely to favour a territorial principle. Where there are millions of speakers of some language living in close proximity, it is possible to have a reasonably complete set of social institutions in that language, ensuring that members of that language community do not face diminished opportunities. Where a language community has insufficient numbers, there is no prospect of equal opportunity except by acquiring a more dominant language. Therefore, it makes the most sense to promote minority languages where they are viable, and to promote integration elsewhere.

Patten also treats arguments from social cohesion, although he does so under the name "democratic participation." He views this argument as supportive of territoriality, but curiously I am inclined to come to the opposite conclusion. If people do not share a common language, it is even more damaging to their cohesion to segregate them geographically. The difference, I suppose, follows from a different set of assumptions. If you presume linguistic disunity to be the norm no matter how you cut a territory up, you will not support a principle of one state - one language. If you make the opposite assumption, you might well conclude that it is better to have two monolingual states than one bilingual one.

Patten's last argument is from intrinsic identity. To whatever extent language is constitutive of identity, people ought to have the right to the identity they like no matter where they are. This tends to favour a personality-based language policy.

Unlike Réaume, Patten does not come out in favour of unalloyed personality principles in language policy. He finds that arguments from social mobility and social solidarity are good arguments, even if they do not trump the case for personality principle.

Tomorrow: A more general critique

2003-08-17T01:02:00.000+02:00

Tied up

I see how thin the blogging's been this week. Sorry, I've been tied up between work, renewal of my Belgian resident's permit (BTW, does anybody know a Belgian immigration lawyer?) and some things that have eo be arranged in my real life. I am, however, most of the way through writing my review of Language Rights and Political Theory. Tomorrow the first part will go up if all goes well.

I note that the fundamental cause of the blackout seems to still be in dispute. Let me be the thousandth person to go out and blame deregulation.

British trains don't run because of deregulation, California is broke in part because of power deregulation, airlines are going broke because of deregualtion (and the effect is that airfare actually costs more than it used to), and now power goes out on a business day for 50 million people because of deregulation. Instead of talking about botched deregulation as if it was an exception to the rule, I'm just going to assume that any industrial or public utility deregulation is just a cock-up waiting to happen until proven otherwise.

Update: BBC World tells me that a trunk line failure in Ohio is the likely cause of the problem. So, the Americans did do it.

2003-08-14T23:40:00.000+02:00

And darkness covered the land...

About an hour ago, the power went out all over central Canada and the northeastern US. It's out from Chicago to New York and north to Timmins in Ontario. I caught it on the Beeb not too long after it started up. Now, I'm listening to CBC Radio One from Ottawa and it's kinna funny listening to the People's Radio get themselves together. First, there's afternoon guy, basically looking out his window and saying "Yup, the power's still out. How 'bout you, Bob?" Cell phones are down because the relays have only got thirty minutes of battery time. Then, they get some guy from Hydro on the phone to say, "Power's out, eh? 'Mericans did it." Now, CBC seems to be organised. Lester Pearson's closed, but Dorval is open. NavCan has air traffic in hand. They've got - I swear to god this is his name - Sgt. Muscat from the Toronto fuzz on the phone, saying the buses are running, the cops'll be doing traffic control, it's all cool, go home and smoke a constitutionally protected spliff.

For some reason, the whole thing makes me think of Bruce Sterling. Especially this:

On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system crashed.

This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted.

Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn to the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for no apparent physical reason.

The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single switching-station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely physical damage, it spread and spread. Station after station across America collapsed in a chain reaction, until fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire and the remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.

Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less understood what had caused the crash. Replicating the problem exactly, poring over software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. But because it was hard to understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained. The root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and fear. The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software - not the sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially in the face of increasing competition. Still, the truth was told, in the baffling technical terms necessary to explain it.

Somehow the explanation failed to persuade American law enforcement officials and even telephone corporate security personnel. These people were not technical experts or software wizards, and they had their own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.

I was in France in early '90, so I missed the whole thing, but Sterling's account has always struck me as quite compelling. Naturally, there seems to be a blanket denial that this problem is terrorism related, so perhaps the surreal response to the 1990 Mother's Day phone system crash wil not be repeated this time. I think since '90 people have gotten used to the idea that technology fails.

Anyway, time for me to see if I can find an American station.

2003-08-13T19:21:00.000+02:00

Speaking English is hazardous to your health

My wife picked this up off a forum somewhere.

Japanese people eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Japanese people drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.
Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than Americans.

CONCLUSION: Eat and drink what you like. Apparently, it's speaking English that'll kill you.

2003-08-13T17:43:00.000+02:00

Coming soon

Language Rights and Political Theory, which I promised to review here after having earlier promised Jacob Levy that I would read it when it came out in paperback, came in yesterday at the wife's US mission box. Thanks again, Aidan.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through it - in the middle of Idil Boran's chapter on linguistic diversity as a public good. Some meta-review notes: Are political science collections usually this acrimonious? David Laitin and Rob Reich trash Stephen May, Thomas Pogge trashes May, Reich, Laitin and Kymlicka, May trashes all the above, and everybody seems to hate Brian Barry.

In linguistics, it never works that way. A collection will almost always unite people who largely agree; not, as is clearly the case with Pogge and May, people from different planets. Stephen May, Will Kymlicka, Phillippe van Parijs and Jacob Levy are the only contributors that I recognise from other publications, so the conflicts of the first few chapters are new enough to me that I can laugh at them.

Chapter 6 offers incontrovertable proof that Phillippe van Parijs has a strong - if oblique - sense of humour. I have to wonder if he is being intentionally Swiftean with his proposal for resolving all linguistic justice problems. It took me several pages before I asked myself, "Is Phillippe shitting me?", and until the last paragraph I wasn't sure that the answer was "yes."

It's a little odd to see language politics discussed in the language of Rawlsian liberalism - a language which seems uniquely ill-suited to the challenge for exactly the reasons Kymlicka points to in his introduction: the impossibilty of language-neutral policy. Though, I suppose it's an improvement over discussing language policy in terms of nationalism, segregationism, historical grievances and Lebensraum. I'm not a liberal of the Rawlsian type myself, but I can more or less follow the lingo.

I'm thinking the format will go as follows: Three posts in short succession (I won't publish the first one until I've actually written the lot). First, a couple paragraphs to review each chapter, after which I'll pontificate on more general issues of linguistic policy and then present an alternative approach to language policy and some model policy ideas. Sound good?

2003-08-11T21:16:00.000+02:00

Mennonites lose their last enclaves of separatism

I think there will be light blogging for a few days, but I have a knack for saying that when all of a sudden I'm about to blog a lot, so keep checking in. I've been off for the weekend because it was my birthday Sunday, and I spent the weekend moping about being old.

Anyway, Language Hat sent me this from Sunday's NY Times:

Paraguay Mennonites Find Success a Mixed Blessing

FILADELFIA, Paraguay — On Avenida Hindenburg, the dusty main street running through this farming town founded over 70 years ago by zealous, hard-toiling German Mennonites, the traffic signs are also signs of the times.

Where a few years ago "Vorsicht Schüler" would have been enough to warn drivers passing the Benjamin Unruh elementary school to watch out for children, the town needs bilingual signs now. The Spanish "Cruce de Alumnos" has been added. [...]

On one hand, the Mennonites need the labor to keep their successful farming cooperative growing. On the other, the outsiders inevitably dilute the colonizers' German-language culture and religious traditions that have been unaltered for decades.

The forefathers of Filadelfia's Mennonites fled Russia in two waves. The first went to Canada in the 19th century, when they lost their exemption from military service, and then to Paraguay, while a second wave fled Stalin's collectivization program via Germany and China. The Mennonites now make up less than half the town's population of 8,000.

"We are victims of our own success," said Gundolf Niebuhr, curator of the town's tiny museum, which is filled with Mennonite memorabilia and stuffed wild animals. "The Mennonites' highly successful work ethic and commitment to build a functioning society attracts others and ends up fragmenting our own social structure." [...]

[T]oday the Mennonites' large cooperative farms are successful, providing dairy products consumed across the country. While Paraguayans' income slumped to $950 a year from an average of $1,750 in the decade after the last military ruler, Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, went into exile in 1989, Filadelfians' average yearly income is about $10,000.

On a recent visit, Luiz Augusto de Castro Neves, Brazil's ambassador to Paraguay, told the people at the cooperative, "I'm fascinated by what I have seen — a Paraguay that works!" [...]

The town is also split over whether Mennonites should get involved in politics beyond electing a community leader. Generally, the older generation clings to the centuries-old tradition of steering clear of statecraft.

In general elections in April, however, Orlando Penner, 40, formerly a rally driver and governor of Boquerón, Filadelfia's province, became Paraguay's first Mennonite senator. Elected on the slate of Beloved Homeland, an anticorruption, grass-roots movement that became a political party, Mr. Penner says that Filadelfia's Mennonites should integrate more and that their success could serve as an example to the rest of the country.

"If we want to keep ourselves caged inside orthodoxy, we will be chasing around the world forever looking for new, empty, isolated lands," he said. "I'm sure that if we can't preserve our identity as Mennonites while still opening up to and living alongside others in this country, then it doesn't make any sense to be a Mennonite."

As weird as it is for me to think about there being an "Orlando Penner" (Penner is one of the most common names among Manitoba Mennonites), this pattern in Paraguay parallels what happened in Canada. One of the things that I'm eventually going to cover in my Grandfather's autobiography is the complex and sometimes painful integration of the Mennonites into Canadian society. Unwillingness to integrate was the key reason Mennonites went to Mexico and Paraguay in the first place, and in Canada, two generations after they left, no one under 40 still spoke German on any regular basis and even church services were in English.

Mennonite communities and businesses proved quite successful. Steinbach Credit Union is the largest non-union credit union in Manitoba. Penner Foods is a rapidly growing supermarket chain. Businesses with names like "Reimer", "Friesen" and "Unger" are pretty commonplace. Steinbach is still a majority Mennonite city, but now it has a Catholic church, a mall and a McDonald's that's open on Sunday.

There was a decision in the 1960's - a semi-conscious decision - to try to preserve the Mennonite faith, even at the cost of losing any sort of distinct Mennonite culture. Now, Canadian Mennonites speak English. In my own extended family we have no other common language. With my grandfather's death, my grandmother and I are the only remaining Martenses who are literate in German, and my mother is one of the youngest in Manitoba to still be able to speak Plautdietsch - and she almost never uses it. Mennonite churches nowadays usually contain a mixture of "hereditary" Mennonites and first, second, in some cases even third generation converts, while the culturally Mennonite may belong to any of several Evangelical churches or often none at all.

It looks like this is what is happening in Paraguay now too. There are almost certainly people in Paraguay who are afraid of losing their cultural distinctness, but there are no more countries with free land and tax bargains to run off to anymore. The 21st century almost certainly means the end of a separate Mennonite way of life, for better and for worse.

2003-08-08T19:52:00.000+02:00

Language Quizzes and Chi-Squared Tables

Via Language Hat, I found this collection of language proficiency tests at Transparent Language, a seller of language self-study software. Having nothing better to do today, I took several of their quizzes. Here are the scores I got:

Language	Score	Percent	Level
English	150/150	100%	"Advanced"
French	131/150	87%	"Advanced"
German	113/150	75%	"Advanced"
Dutch	87/150	58%	"Advanced Beginner"
Spanish	79/150	52%	"Advanced Beginner"
Chinese	63/150	42%	"Beginner"
Irish	51/150	34%	"Beginner"
Japanese	28/150	18%	"just starting out"

These are pretty mixed results. My French was once better than that, but I hardly ever use it here. But I was shocked at my German and Dutch scores. You see, I haven't spoken German at all since the mid-90's, and it was never my most fluent second language. I did grow up hearing various kinds of German around me, so it never seemed completely foreign, but I only spent two semesters in German classes in my life. My Dutch score, though, was really disappointing. A lot of the questions revolve around the order of verbs at the ends of sentences, which is a big problem for me because I always want to put the words in German order, and that is wrong 90% of the time in Dutch. Also, I have to admit to not having a good enough vocabulary in Dutch.

I was also surprised by my strong Spanish score, since my Spanish consists of four credit hours in 1990 and nothing since. I would have been mortified if I had scored better in Spanish than in Dutch after taking the equivalent of 14 semester-hours and living in a Dutch-speaking country for two years. Still, as the website itself points out, one should not place too much stock in these little quizzes.

I was gratified to have any sort of score at all in Chinese. I haven't spoken a word of the language in two years, and I have to take the placement test here in Leuven in just under a month. However, the relatively low score forced me to ask myself how many of my right answers could be attriuted to chance. The tests are structured as 50 multiple choice questions with four answers in each. Therefore, randomly choosing your answers should give you an average 25% right, or 37.5 out of 150 points. I only had 63 points on the Chinese test, so I asked myself, what are the odds of getting a score like that randomly? How much do my results actually reflect any linguistic knowledge and how confident can I be that chance isn't reason for my scores?

So I consulted a Chi-squared table I found on the web. Now, you would expect random selection of answers to give you 37.5 correct. (1/4 * 150) So, my Chinese score of 63 leads to a p value of 23.12. There is only one degree of freedom in this test, so we look up 23.12 in the top row of the chi-squared table and we get less than 0.0005.

So, we can conclude with fair confidence that I actually do know some Chinese, and all those Chinese classes haven't been completely for nothing.

In order to test this hypothesis, I decided to take the Irish test. I told myself, how much Irish have I studied? There was a lesson on Celtic languages in my historical linguistics class in '92, and there was that day in '95 that I spent in suburban Dublin, drinking cider in a pub and learning Irish from a "Teach yourself..." book with the help of a bunch of drunks. But hell, I barely even remember that day. I wasn't even conscious for most of it. I have absolutely no memory of any Irish I might have learned, and I haven't looked at it since. I have no Irish skills whatsoever.

So, I took the Irish test, figuring I would get a random result. Instead, I scored 51 points - 12 less than I got in Chinese, which I studied on and off for years. The p value for a score of 51 out of 150 is 6.48. meaning there is a less than 2% chance of getting that many answers right by chance.

I was so shocked that I tried Japanese, which I only studied for five lessons in 1996 before dropping it. I only got 18 points. That gives me a p score of 13.52, and a probability of 0.0025. In short, I am so bad at Japanese that there is a less than one in four hundred chance of getting so few right by accident. I realised, after completing the test, that I had consistently chosen the answers that contained a Japanese word that I thought I had heard before, and perhaps by doing so I had actually managed to do worse than random chance.

Of course, it's very possible that I've screwed up the calculations. I haven't done a Chi-squared look-up by hand in a long time. Still, I am forced to contend with the notion that I might actually have some knowledge of Irish without any conscious access to it - enough knowledge to be measurable. That's scary.

Update: The scoring isn't structured the way I thought it was. That may contribute to my odd score distribution.

Further Update: Yeah, I managed to confirm that I did screw up the math. There are 50 questions, not 150. That's a lot fewer independent variables. There is a 15% chance that my Irish score is pure luck if the points are distributed evenly over the questions and all my probability estimates are way, way off. So, there's an 85% chance that I actually know some Irish.

2003-08-07T19:32:00.000+02:00

Total Recall

Well, it looks like yet another actor will be running for office. I'm sure everyone in the English speaking world and many who aren't now knows that Arnold Schwarzenegger is running for governor of California. Unfortunately, Gray Davis is not really responsible for California's running disasters. He didn't create the energy crisis, the dot-bomb crash, or Prop. 13. Whoever wins inherits this mess, and won't have anymore power to fix it than Davis does.

You know, I remember my undergrad PoliSci prof complaining that liberals think there's some kind of button on the President's desk that just makes everything better, and for some evil reason he's just refusing to push it. Well, what goes around comes around. Does anyone really think that there's a button on Gray Davis' desk that just fixes things? Does anyone really believe this election changes anything? The legislature remains Democrat, and California is too big and too powerful for the state reps to just roll over and play dead for an actor in the Governor's Mansion.

2003-08-06T22:57:00.000+02:00

And in weather, it's hot and dry...

...and by all evidence likely to stay that way.

Since European penis stories seem to garner more hits than anything else I write, I thought I might continue in the same vein with this from the BBC.

Skirting around Sweden's heat

Mats Lundgren, from the northern Swedish town of Umea, got fed up of sitting in the drivers' seat for hours at a time in dark uniform trousers.

He asked his boss whether he could wear shorts for comfort as temperatures hit 25C (77F).

But when his boss said "no", Mr Lundgren decided to find an alternative. And he began showing up to work in a skirt. [...]

Mr Lundgren is exploiting a loophole in the firm's dress code, which allows skirts to be worn but does not specify which sex should be wearing them.

As Mr Lundgren settles into the driver's seat, the navy blue skirt slides up his thighs just above his bony knees, revealing a pair of hairy white legs.

"It's even better than shorts. It's unbearable driving a bus in long trousers when the sun is blazing through the windscreen, but with the skirt it feels just great," he says. [...]

Rolf Persson, managing director of Umea's transport authority said he was surprised to see Mr Lundgren dressed this way.

But his hands were tied, he said, as careful perusal of regulations produced no mention of rules about men in skirts.

Now folks, Umeå is just south of the 64th parallel north. That's just a bit further south than Fairbanks, Alaska or about as far north as my childhood home in Iqaluit. If it's hot enough that far north to make a bus driver wear a skirt, think of what it's like in semi-tropical climes like London and Amsterdam, or what I have to put up with. It seems that Belgium has a law that anyone whose workplace is over 30C can go home with pay. Unfortunately, my office is air conditioned.

2003-08-04T22:06:00.000+02:00

In search of the standard Euroschlong

Ananova is carrying this rather juicy bit of news from the annals of European standardisation:

German penises 'too small for EU condoms'

Germany has demanded a rethink on EU guidelines on condom size after finding its average penis did not measure up. Doctors around Essen were ordered by the government's health department to check out the average size suggested by Brussels. They reported the EU has overestimated the size of the average penis by almost 20% and insist other countries will discover the same.

Urologist Gunther Hagler, head of the team compiling the research, said: "By checking hundreds of patients we found German penises were too small for standard EU condoms.

"On average they were 14.48 cms long and 3.95 cms wide. That makes them much smaller than the EU standard condom size of 17 cms in length and 5.6 cms in width."

He denied the German man was any smaller than the rest of Europe, adding: "We think the EU has got its sums wrong, and if other countries [*cough Italy cough*] were to check out their men's assets they would find the EU has made a mistake in its calculations.

"There should be a rethink and the EU statisticians should check their figures again. After all, they have also ruled EU standard condoms should be able to hold 18 litres of fluid without breaking, which also seems a bit excessive."

That certain European states might, umm, select measurement methodologies with higher than industry standard margins of error is understandable. I mean, it's hard to get honest information about anything related to sex - a well known problem in the social sciences. Besides, I have to ask myself how the measurements were taken. I mean, if I had to get it up for some German urologist with a caliper, I imagine I might well be a bit subpar in the fully aroused department. If one wanted to get answers for the fully erect size of the German wiener, I suppose getting busty young nurses to take the measurements might raise the numbers a mite.

But what I want to know is where in hell this 18 litres number comes from? I mean, Jeebus! How big do Euronads have to be before you get anywhere close to that safety margin?

2003-08-04T16:17:00.000+02:00

Kjenn Jie Noch Plautdietsch?

For those who have an interest in languages and who have been reading my posts from my Grandfather's papers, a guy in my office with a passion for Lower Saxon passed me a link to the online version of the only Mennonite Plautdietsch dictionary I know of. I have a copy of the paper version of Kjenn Jie Noch Plautdietsch? and the author/editor Hermann Rempel is, I believe, one of my many, many second cousins on my mother's side.

People have spelled Plautdietsch very differently over the years and there is still no fully agreed upon standard spelling scheme. Like most Mennonites - who in the old days used German as a liturgical language - the writing scheme is based on standard German, although the sounds are much more Dutch-like.

Looking through the word lists gives me warm fuzzies. When I was a child, my mother used to say Schlop scheen! to me and my brother every night before we went to bed. I still have a taste for wreninkje, but I doubt I'll find any in Belgium.

2003-08-04T15:49:00.000+02:00

Islamic Finance in America

I have something of an amateur interest in Islamic finance. The main reason is an eclectic interest in social orders that differ sharply from Anglo-American liberal capitalism. This isn't because I think there's anything uniquely evil about "Anglo-American liberal capitalism" - quite the contrary - I just don't think it's the final, natural, perfect form of human society.

An AP article on Islamic mortgages in the US just came over the wires, and I thought it might be interesting to my readers:

Muslims Embrace New Finance Alternatives

For more than a decade, Daoud Othman and his family have rented a small apartment and dreamed of owning a home with a yard for the children to play in.

Othman thought about applying for a mortgage from a bank, but as a devout Palestinian Muslim he couldn't, bound by a prohibition in the Quran against paying interest.

But now, Othman and many others like him are joining the ranks of homeowners using special Islam-approved financing, a fast-growing phenomenon that has been common in Muslim nations for years, but is only now catching on in this country.

The way an Islamic mortgage works is that the bank buys your house and sells you a share of it equal to your downpayment. You pay rent on the house at a rate fixed in your lease as well as a little bit extra that goes towards purchasing the house itself. If you have kept up your payments, at the end of the term you own the house outright. In principle, this is little different from a fixed rate mortgage. The main virtue that it has to offer, I think, is that it is a little more honest. People with mortgages fool themselves into believing that they are homeowners, and an Islamic mortgage eliminates that illusion.

The main principle of Islamic finance is the interdiction on interest. This means, as I understand it, that banks can charge for whatever services they do for you, but they can not make those fees proportionate to the amount of money involved in the transaction. They can, however, take business risks and reap proportional rewards.

This means that taking out a business loan from an Islamic bank makes the bank a limited partner in your business and therefore able to collect a portion of your profits, although it also means it has to swallow your loses. This actually makes a good deal of sense to me and it has some resonance with the way I understand commerical finance to work in Japan. One of the factors in the establishment of the Japanese keiretsu structure was the lack of reliable credit rating institutions. Becoming part of a keiretsu means that you have a special relationship with a bank and often a "trading company" - which is a sort of middle man who acts to ensure contracts to supply goods and services. This relationship can act as a sort of guarantee of your creditworthiness. The structure of Islamic commercial banking actually seems to fit this model pretty well, and it has worked very well for Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Japan's recent troubles seem to have more to do with the implicit guarantee that no company will ever be liquidated - no matter what the cost - rather than the actual structure of the Japanese firm.

Business loans for capital purchases work on the same sort of principle as Islamic mortgages. The bank buys the equipment you want and rents it out to you on a rent-to-own sort of plan. This too makes matters a little more honest. I do wonder if Enron would have been able to so easily hide its true financial situation had it been compelled to declare all the things it borrowed money to buy as leased assets and to give each of its creditors a share of the company's profits and full access to their books.

Now, I am not by any means claiming that interest is inherently evil. I am not a Muslim and I have little interest in whether something is forbidden by the Quran. There is a wonderful post on D² Digest on the importance and usefulness of interest. I am, however, very interested in how alternative finance mechanisms work and how well they serve economic needs. One of the points D² raises is the importance of interest-bearing loans in personal finance, and especially how important it is when you don't have assets:

Loan sharks seek out poor neighbourhoods; they don't create them, and the fact that extremely poor people are nevertheless prepared to pay extortionate prices for the ability to move consumption around in time just confirms what a great thing it is to have access to debt.

Islamic finance seems to be able to build homes and businesses. It looks to me like it is no more inherently inefficient or problematic than traditional finance for these purposes, and may have the virtue of keeping businesses more honest. However, personal finance - the most oppressive aspect of banking in terms of its potential negative impact on people's quality of life - still seems to be a real problem for Islamic banks.

The Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank is something of a trend-setter in the Islamic bankng world, and does offer some personal finance products. (They also offer some strangely anachronistic services, like Ladies' Banking, whatever that is.) Their credit card offerings look a lot like American Express: at the end of the month, you must make full payment. However, take a look at their "Al Khair Financing" product. I'm not an Islamic theologian, but I can spot when a loophole violates the spirit of the law as well as the next guy. Unless there is a clause here that I'm not seeing, this looks a whole lot like a fixed-rate loan to me, except that the bank has transfered a portfolio of commodities to the borrower instead of cash money and calls the interest payments a "fixed profit rate." There appears to be no real risk sharing at all, just avoidance of "interest" by the narrowest possible definition.

Anyway, whatever virtues Islamic finance may have in commercial banking and loans for the purchase of secured assets, I haven't seen any way for individuals to get unsecured credit in a genuinely interest free fashion. The only mechanism I can think of that would fit the bill is for the bank to give you a loan in return for a percentage of your personal income for a fixed length of time - something like the PAYE system for student loans in Australia and New Zealand. That way, the bank's loan to you is essentially an investment secured by your earning potential, and the bank bears the risk that your earnings will not be adequate to make the payments.

The thing is, I can't really imagine people agreeing to it. It's too invasive. One advantage of interest is how impersonal it is. The bank cares very little how you lead your life, as long as they get paid. On the other hand, if the bank has a vested interest in your employment situation and you become unemployed, you have a very powerful advocate with every interest in following up on wrongful dismissal charges. Furthermore, the bank's bottom line is quite directly linked to the general employment situation in your industry and area, and they have a vested interest in making preferential loans to any business that might improve the local employment situation. Perhaps the personal security that follows from such a relationship has advantages to outweight its intimacy.

Anyway, just some thoughts while I work through my writer's block on the stuff I'm being paid to do.

2003-08-04T13:37:00.000+02:00

Paranoia

Sorry to have been out all weekend. I ought to write a response in the comments to the post below and I have an e-mail about Activity Theory from a correspondent in Rochester that I need to write back to. In addition, I promised a part two to the post below.

None of these things happened this weekend and they aren't going to happen today. I have had a relapse of my Belgian summer allergy problem, in addition to acute Belgian bureaucracy issues, compounded by a writing assignment at work for which I am feeling absolutely zero inspiration. So instead, let me point to an ugly trend that is making me hesitant to travel in the US again.

Tightening of Visa Rules to Disrupt Travel for Some

Marc Guzman, fresh from Lima, Peru, and reuniting with his brother in the international-arrivals section of this city's frenetic airport this afternoon, rolled his eyes at the mention of the new antiterrorism measure that will bar citizens of Peru and many other countries from passing through the United States without visas. [...]

Travelers from all but 27 nations, most of them in Europe, will be subject to the new rules, which will require United States visas even for the briefest of layovers. The Department of Homeland Security announced this weekend that it was suspending two programs that waived visa requirements for foreign travelers making connections at American airports — one known as Transit Without Visa, the other as International to International — because of intelligence reports suggesting terrorists might take advantage of the programs.

Not every country in the world allows visa-free transit, however a great many do. Such a policy is a real boon to a country's airlines, and US companies have profitted heavily from free transit policies in New York, Miami and Los Angles, primarily for travel to and from Latin America. If this is going to be a "pro-business" administration, it would nice if they were at least consistently pro-business.

Via Electrolite:

US anti-war activists hit by secret airport ban

After more than a year of complaints by some US anti-war activists that they were being unfairly targeted by airport security, Washington has admitted the existence of a list, possibly hundreds or even thousands of names long, of people it deems worthy of special scrutiny at airports.

The list had been kept secret until its disclosure last week by the new US agency in charge of aviation safety, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). And it is entirely separate from the relatively well-publicised "no-fly" list, which covers about 1,000 people believed to have criminal or terrorist ties that could endanger the safety of their fellow passengers. [...]

It is not just left-wingers who feel unfairly targeted. Right-wing civil libertarians have spoken out against the secret list, and at least one conservative organisation, the Eagle Forum, says its members have been interrogated by security staff.

This is a bit worrysome for me. Although I have no particular associations with any political groups at the present time, I have noticed a lot of bots with *.gov and *.mil addresses hitting this blog. I have no evidence that opinions voiced on the 'Net are being used to build up dossiers, but I worry that they might. It makes me somewhat scared to travel the US.

What I'm most scared of, since I'm not a US citizen but I do have a resident's permit, is this:

Jailing Immigrants

On Nov. 30, 2002, Mr. Nikpreljevic was pulled over for speeding on the Connecticut Turnpike. A computer check revealed that his immigration papers were not in order. A nightmare scenario ensued. He was handcuffed and arrested, and has not been out of custody since. The government has ordered him deported. And under current law he would be barred from any realistic chance of returning.

"He hasn't done anything wrong," said Ms. Markvukaj. Tears streamed down her face during an interview on a large, covered patio behind the restaurant. She described how she took the baby, Nina, to visit Vaso in prison ("She recognized him!"), how business has fallen off in the restaurant and how the family is fighting with everything it has to block Vaso's deportation.

Mr. Nikpreljevic's immigration history is complicated. His lawyers, Theodore Cox and Joshua Bardavid, said that back in the early-90's when he first came to the U.S., Mr. Nikpreljevic's mother submitted a petition on his behalf requesting authorization to apply for a green card. That petition was approved. But Mr. Nikpreljevic submitted a request for asylum. That was denied and he was deported.

He returned to the U.S. illegally, through Canada. But, according to the lawyers, he paid a $1,000 penalty and was permitted to apply for a green card and remain in the U.S. pending a decision on his application.

As he had never been in trouble, and his relatives and fiancée had all been able to secure citizenship or permanent residency status, he did not anticipate a problem.

But times (and the treatment of immigrants) have changed since Sept. 11. After his arrest in Connecticut, Mr. Nikpreljevic was told that his application had been "terminated." No reason was given, his lawyers said. Mr. Nikpreljevic has been held in a number of prisons in Connecticut and Massachusetts since then, the latest being the Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers, Conn.

When he is being moved from one prison to another, his family said, officials just show up in the middle of the night and take him away — a very frightening procedure. Thousands of men and women, many of them completely innocent, are ensnared in this system, which is fundamentally uncaring and frequently cruel. Many of the immigrants never even see an attorney.

In Mr. Nikpreljevic's case, the lawyers have challenged the decision by immigration authorities to "terminate" his application for permanent residency status. If their effort is unsuccessful he will be deported, and there is little doubt his family will be devastated.

Considering how little the Canadian government has managed to do for its citizens in the past when the INS gets ahold of them, I have to question whether my nationality will do me much good in the US anymore. At least I can't be sent for interrogation in Jordan and then deported to Syria, at least, I don't think so.

2003-08-01T14:56:00.000+02:00

It couldn't happen here

The editor of The Shamrockshire Eagle makes a point in the comments to my previous post about the secondary role of military build-up in the management of late capitalist economies. Military spending can serve as a mechanism of economic regulation, and while on the surface this role is portrayed as a secondary - even incidental - matter, it may in fact become the primary role of the military.

This sort of thinking has a lengthy tradition. It is, for example, the classic explanation of the social function of magic and religion. The secondary effects of a cultural belief in magic or in other sorts of supernatural authority may be its primary reason for existing. The fear that the economic effects of military spending may become the principal reason for the military was expressed at least as early as 1961, in Eisenhower's parting speech as president.

It is a kind of distorted reflection of Hayek's concerns about economic planning in The Road to Serfdom. As soon as the state begins to take a role in the economy, according to Hayek, it can only take a greater and greater role in all aspects of life, trying to bring it under control so that the state's plans will work. In the same way, once the military starts having a social function beyond making war, that role can only grow as it further distorts the functioning of social institutions, forcing more and more of them to come under direct and indirect military control because they are "vital to national security."

Although the "military-industrial complex" has become a byword of X-Files type conspiracist thinking, it is not a notion without merit. There are quite a few people who think America's technological dominance is primarily a consequence of vast networks of military spending, and they make a pretty good case. Aeronautics and computing are both areas that enjoy huge research subsidies from the Defence Department. Boeing would never have built the 707 jet if it had not received a large order from the DOD. Many early semiconductor firms sold most of their production to the government or to government contractors making missiles.

There is other confirming evidence that state subsidy rather than unique "American know-how" is a major factor in high-tech growth. European and specifically French spending on aeronautics, while vastly less than total US spending, has still managed to produce commercial aircraft of comparable or better quality, showing that the same state support works for other people too. Biotech, which has not enjoyed a similar level of subsidy in the US, but has in many other countries, is the one high tech area where it seems that the US is lagging significantly behind. Profitable biotech comes primarily from European, Australian and Canadian labs.

Of course, a key aspect of 21st century capitalism is its global character. A Swedish biotech lab may be owned by a Swiss company that trades on the New York stock exchange. A European drug company may campaign against the sale of Brazilian-made generic AIDS drugs in Africa by lobbying the US government. It's a lot more difficult nowadays to say just what country can claim credit for what technology .

One of the things I think is worth worrying about is the idea that America's military adventures may serve less desirable social goals than mere industrial subsidy. The Vietnam war served as a focal point for opposition to the government, but now that there is no conscription, the dynamic has changed. It is simpler to just say that you "support the troops" because unless you are one of the troops, when America goes to war no one is actually asking very much of you. War becomes a way of rallying the masses behind the regime and of bullying the opposition into submission.

The first time I encountered this idea from an American, in reference to their own government, was after Clinton's bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998. Many conservatives, and a few liberals, suggested that it was a consequence of the Lewinsky affair. If so, it didn't work, and I see some sign that perhaps Iraq won't help Bush either.

However, when I proposed that the military's greatest value may have little to do with defence, back in '98 on a forum I used to hang around on, I was referred to an interesting short story from 1992. The story was the work of a Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dunlap, at the time attached to the US National War College. It's called The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012, and at one time it was moderately famous.

The story is set in the aftermath of a coup d'état that has replaced constitutional government in the US with a junta. The story itself takes the form of a letter written by an unnamed US Army officer, outlining how the government came to be overthrown by a cabal of officers. This near science fiction story, a work of advocacy rather than an attempt at entertainment, is quite enlightening. Dunlap lays the blame for America's dictatorship on the acceptance of the military's secondary effects as its principal justification. In his imagined future, this process has continued to the point where the American military is useless at war, but has replaced nearly the whole of the government.

It wasn't any single cause that led us to this point. Instead, it was a combination of several different developments, the beginnings of which were evident in 1992. Here's what I think happened:

Americans became exasperated with democracy. We were disillusioned with the apparent inability of elected government to solve the nation's dilemmas. We were looking for someone or something that could produce workable answers. The one institution of government in which the people retained faith was the military. Buoyed by the military's obvious competence in the First Gulf War, the public increasingly turned to it for solutions to the country's problems. Americans called for an acceleration of trends begun in the 1980s: tasking the military with a variety of new, nontraditional missions, and vastly escalating its commitment to formerly ancillary duties.

I am more sanguine about the "military's obvious competence in the First Gulf War", but as a statement of the mood in America after the First Gulf War (note that way back in '92, he was already calling it the "First" Gulf War) it is clearly true. In Dunlap's story, the elements that destroy American democracy are the combination of a loss of faith in democratic institutions in conjunction with a sharp and sudden rise of faith in the military, at the same time that the collapse of the Soviet Union reduced the actual need for such a large defensive force.

Commentator James Fallows expressed the new thinking in an August 1991 article in Atlantic magazine. Musing on the contributions of the military to American society, Fallows wrote: "I am beginning to think that the only way the national government can do anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn the job over to the military." [...]

About a decade before Fallows' article appeared, Congress initiated the use of "national defense" as a rationale to boost military participation in an activity historically the exclusive domain of civilian government: law enforcement. Congress concluded that the "rising tide of drugs being smuggled into the United States . . . present[ed] a grave threat to all Americans." Finding the performance of civilian law enforcement agencies in counteracting that threat unsatisfactory, Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act of 1981. In doing so Congress specifically intended to force reluctant military commanders to actively collaborate in police work.

Dunlap goes on to apply one of the classic creative devices of science fiction: Pick a trend and take it to its extreme.

It wasn't too long before 21st-century legislators were calling for more military involvement in police work. Crime seemed out of control. Most disturbing, the incidence of violent crime continued to climb. Americans were horrified and desperate: a third even believed vigilantism could be justified. Rising lawlessness was seen as but another example of the civilian political leadership's inability to fulfill government's most basic duty to ensure public safety. People once again wanted the military to help. [...]

The military's constituency was larger than just the aged. Poor Americans of all ages became dependent upon the military not only for protection against crime, but also for medical care. Again we saw the roots of this back in 1992. First it was the barely defeated proposal to use veterans' hospitals to provide care for the non-veteran poor. Next were calls to deploy military medical assets to relieve hard-pressed urban hospitals. As the number of uninsured and underinsured grew, the pressure to provide care became inexorable. Now military hospitals serve millions of new, non-military patients. Similarly, a proposal to use so-called "underutilized" military bases as drug rehabilitation centers was implemented on a massive scale.

Even the youngest citizens were co-opted. During the 1990s the public became aware that military officers had the math and science backgrounds desperately needed to revitalize US education. In fact, programs involving military personnel were already underway while we were at the War College. We now have an entire generation of young people who have grown up comfortable with the sight of military personnel patrolling their streets and teaching in their classrooms. [...]

The military was also called upon to manage the cleanup of the nation's environmental hazards. By 1992 the armed services were deeply involved in this arena, and that involvement mushroomed. Once the military demonstrated its expertise, it wasn't long before environmental problems were declared "national security threats" and full responsibility devolved to the armed forces.

Other problems were transformed into "national security" issues. As more commercial airlines went bankrupt and unprofitable air routes dropped, the military was called upon to provide "essential" air transport to the affected regions. In the name of national defense, the military next found itself in the sealift business. Ships purchased by the military for contingencies were leased, complete with military crews, at low rates to US exporters to help solve the trade deficit. The nation's crumbling infrastructure was also declared a "national security threat." As was proposed back in 1991, troops rehabilitated public housing, rebuilt bridges and roads, and constructed new government buildings. By late 1992, voices in both Congress and the military had reached a crescendo calling for military involvement across a broad spectrum of heretofore purely civilian activities. Soon, it became common in practically every community to see crews of soldiers working on local projects. Military attire drew no stares.

There are many aspects of Dunlap's nightmare that I don't consider likely. One of my fears about the occupation of Iraq was, and is, that America's troops make poor policemen. Dunlap believes that the pressures of duty will transform them into policemen, but good policemen are professionals who spend years training for their work. Nor do military officers have "the math and science backgrounds desperately needed to revitalize US education." Dunlap has what seems to me to be a traditionally military conception of education, not as a profession requiring specific skills but as the knowledgeable simply passing on what they know. America's trade deficit has nothing to do with the shipping industry. Military hospitals are widely reputed to be worse than civilian ones, and operate at a greater cost. Furthermore, it's hard enough to get the government to recognise that there are any environmental problems, much less assign military resources to resolving them. Crime has not exploded as Dunlap predicts and there seems to be no pressure to put troops on the streets in support of the local police, at least not in response to ordinary crime. Fear of terrorism, though, just might produce such a result.

Dunlap seems to forget, or not really think about, the number of services he attributes to the military where it already depends on private contractors. Shipping and air transport in particular are areas where the military budget supports well connected private concerns, and there simply aren't any independent military resources to draw on.

Dunlap points to a few other factors in the establishment of an American junta that I think are overblown. He opposes a unified military command, which he claims is the inevitable outcome of joint activities between the various American military services. According to the narrator, "no one seemed to recognize the checks-and-balances function that service separatism provided a democracy obliged to maintain a large, professional military establishment." I, frankly, am not impressed by this argument. Chile's multiple military services did not prevent its 1971 coup d'état and I see no evidence that America is any different. Dunlap, in his story, leads us from a joint military command to the appointment of a single, unelected high commander of the military. Yet here in 2003, America already has a single, unelected high military commander.

Still, Dunlap's point about the politicisation of the military in response to declining budgets seems sound to me. However, he isn't done yet. He points to another trend which worries me as much as it does Dunlap:

Still, that doesn't completely explain why in 2012 the military leadership would succumb to a coup. To answer that question fully requires examination of what was happening to the officer corps as the military drew down in the 1980s and 1990s. Ever since large peacetime military establishments became permanent features after World War II, the great leveler of the officer corps was the constant influx of officers from the Reserve Officers Training Corps program. The product of diverse colleges and universities throughout the United States, these officers were a vital source of liberalism in the military services.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, that was changing. Force reductions decreased the number of ROTC graduates the services accepted. Although General Powell called ROTC "vital to democracy," 62 ROTC programs were closed in 1991 and another 350 were considered for closure. The numbers of officers produced by the service academies also fell, but at a significantly slower pace. Consequently, the proportion of academy graduates in the officer corps climbed. Academy graduates, along with graduates of such military schools as the Citadel, Virginia Military Institute, and Norwich University, tended to feel a greater homogeneity of outlook than, say, the pool of ROTC graduates at large, with the result that as the proportion of such graduates grew, diversity of outlook overall diminished to some degree.

Moreover, the ROTC officers that did remain increasingly came from a narrower range of schools. Focusing on the military's policy to exclude homosexuals from service, advocates of "political correctness" succeeded in driving ROTC from the campuses of some of our best universities. In many instances they also prevailed in barring military recruiters from campus. Little thought was given the long-term consequences of limiting the pool from which our military leadership was drawn. The result was a much more uniformly oriented military elite whose outlook was progressively conservative.

Furthermore, well-meaning attempts at improving service life led to the unintended insularity of military society, representing a return to the cloistered life of the pre-World War II armed forces. Military bases, complete with schools, churches, stores, child care centers, and recreational areas, became never-to-be-left islands of tranquillity removed from the chaotic, crime-ridden environment outside the gates. As one reporter put it in 1991: "Increasingly isolated from mainstream America, today's troops tend to view the civilian world with suspicion and sometimes hostility." Thus, a physically isolated and intellectually alienated officer corps was paired with an enlisted force likewise distanced from the society it was supposed to serve. In short, the military evolved into a force susceptible to manipulation by an authoritarian leader from its own select ranks.

I think Dunlap is onto something. Many people have noticed how much more conservative the American military has become over the years. I know I'm not the only person who has also noticed how much of its officer corps is from the American South. A recent article in London's conservative Spectator newspaper, which I found via Silt, highlights this very point in understanding American foreign policy:

Sword of honour

If you are looking for some fun, and have a research grant to spend, try this. Visit an American university, bump into random students in the corridor and loudly call each one 'asshole'. Then measure their reactions. This is what a team of psychologists did in a controlled experiment at the University of Michigan. The results were most interesting. Students from the southern part of the United States reacted far more violently and aggressively than those from the North, were shown to have much higher levels of cortisone and testosterone, and in tests regularly suggested more belligerent solutions to problems. America, it seems, remains culturally divided along the Mason-Dixon line, and the crucial difference now, as at the time of the American Civil War, is honour. [...]

The kind of honour I am referring to here is not the gentility of men such as Robert E. Lee. It is the rougher sort embodied in the code duello, which encouraged men to engage in vainglorious bouts of one-upmanship and to respond to insults with violence. Among the poor, the violence took the form of no-holds-barred gouging and scratching contests, the aim of which was to tear out an opponent's eye or otherwise permanently disfigure him. Among the rich, it took the more formal shape of the duel. But the essential point was the same -- an honourable man never accepted insults; he responded to them with force.

In 1861 this led to war. An interesting point is that the South had no need to leave the Union. Lincoln was not proposing the abolition of slavery, and even if he had been, he could not have enacted it. Pro-slavery elements continued to control both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court. The 'peculiar institution' was not under threat. But to southerners, Lincoln's election was a provocation too far. [...]

If all this seems remote from the current era, consider that the American Civil War was, according to James McPherson, one of its foremost historians, America's first pre-emptive war. As he describes it, the South's way of life was not immediately under threat, but southerners chose to pre-empt what they saw as a potential future threat by seceding. The honour code dictates that one loses face if one does not respond to an insult, but one does not always know whether something is an insult. So it is always best to treat it as if it were. Similarly, it is better to get one's strike in before an opponent has a chance to hit first, even if perhaps he never intended to attack anyway. Thus, one secessionist commented in 1860 that if one sees a sleeping, curled-up rattlesnake, one doesn't wait until it wakes and unwraps itself before killing it: precisely the logic of the 2002 US national security strategy.

Other parallels between the old South and the present are not hard to find. The years before the Civil War saw a rapid expansion in the number of military institutes and academies in the South. After years of decline, these schools and colleges are now once again enjoying a revival. Confederate armies were famous for their religiosity. The modern United States army is remarkably similar. It is not uncommon to find American generals beginning meetings with prayers, just as they might have under Stonewall Jackson. The ante-bellum South was famous for its militarism. Contemporary southerners continue to be disproportionately represented in the US military, and opinion polls consistently show far greater support for all forms of military action among the states of the South than in those of the North.

I don't know how prevalent this kind of thinking is in the South, but it seems pretty widespread among American troops. This suggests to me that the military is not only susceptible to corruption from within, but that it can be corrupted from without by a leader able to speak a language of honour and force that is clearly inappropriate in the affairs of state.

Furthermore, the isolation of the military from the rest of society is very apparent at US bases in Europe. A few weeks ago, I was at the headquarters of the US Army 254th Base Support Battalion at Schinnen, Netherlands. My reasons were simple enough: I needed to buy some things that are either very hard to find or very expensive in Europe. My wife's office is primarily composed of American military officers, so she has a number of friends who have base access and who buy things at American PX's to save money.

The facilities at Schinnen aren't so much a military base as a shopping centre. The men assigned there all live off-base in rented apartments. It isn't an active forces base, but rather some sort of supply centre. On base, only US dollars are accepted. Even the soda machines take only US currency. Euros were nowhere to be seen. There is a Burger King, a franchise pizza restaurant of some sort, a bowling alley, a movie theatre, a small Waldenbooks-style bookstore, a barbershop, a department store that was, by European standards, very large, a Home Depot-type store, and a base commissary with hard-to-find American foods like peanut butter. It was as if someone had tried to boil the essence of middle America down to a few familiar elements and decided to make them into a mall.

The prices were all lower than comparable prices in the US, but without American - much less European - sales taxes. For the price of a good pair of shoes and a pair of jeans in Leuven, I bought four pairs of shoes and a year's worth of jeans, from sales staff with Georgia accents and Walmart smiles, who pronounced Schinnen "Shin-un." I heard no Dutch, saw no Euros, and encountered nothing that wouldn't have seemed completely familiar in the Midwest. It seemed like the entire base staff was hanging out at the mall with their families, just as they might have on a Saturday in the States.

Since technically I wasn't supposed to be shopping at the base, I didn't ask people too many questions, but I had a distinct sense of being cut off there, The place has a very shut-in sort of vibe to it. The base itself is almost invisible from the highway that runs alongside it, and on the inside there is no indication that you are in Europe instead of suburban Kansas. The thing is, a lot of military communities in the US feel that way too. Military towns in the US tend to be small, somewhat out-of-the-way cities. The local business community tends to lean towards large national franchises and lowest-common-denominator services, and driving through them you often get a sense of déjà vu.

The other matter is more worrying. American colleges have been the traditional home of American liberalism - not just the sort of liberalism that leads to liberal politics but also to the sense that tolerance and diversity are valuable things. Even politically conservative university graduates tend to have those sorts of values, at least to some degree. Small town America, especially in the South, has more or less the opposite reputation.

Before reading Dunlap, it simply had never occurred to me that the growing social and political conservatism of the American military might have nothing at all to do with military culture as such. As others have pointed out, the actual structure of the military and the nature of military life bear a much closer resemblance to Soviet-style socialism.

Dunlap places the blame on the disappearance of college ROTC programmes, many of which were under fire in the early 90's because of the exclusionary anti-gay policy of the US military. Dunlap attributes this to "political correctness", carefully avoiding telling us what he thinks about gays in the military. I think Dunlap is right to think that the decline of ROTC programmes and other sources of more liberal officers, as well as the social isolation of the military, are the cause of the growing conservatism of the armed forces. I think, however, he has not correctly identified the cause of the decline of ROTC programmes. A military career is simply not very lucrative for university graduates, and 20-something men and women are a lot less willing to sign up when it probably means spending their careers in places like Iraq and Liberia and risking actually getting shot at. Furthermore, even the most jingoist of America's university graduates are still probably wary of placing their careers - not to mention their lives - so completely in the hands of the US government. These days, fighting wars is what other people do.

Dunlap offers some advice for avoiding his dictatorial nightmare. In particular, he suggests that the American military get used to living on a smaller budget:

We are not the DEA, EPA, Peace Corps, Department of Education, or Red Cross - nor should we be. It has never been easy to give up resources, but in the long term we - and the nation - will be better served by a smaller but appropriately focused military.

Where I feel most uncomfortable with Dunlap is his suggestion that campus ROTC programmes should be kept open by litigation. I think the better approach would be to simply change policy and stop throwing out gay soldiers.

Despite Dunlap's interesting and stimulating short story, I don't actually think a military coup is a likely scenario for the US, nor do I think the growth of military participation in public life, which seemed so plausible in 1992 in the face of Cold War budget cuts, is very likely now. I do fear that many of the elements of Dunlap's story could play out in a quite different sort of death of democracy. In the comments to a previous post, I told David Weman that I had actually come up with an alternative to liberal democracy in the context of a science fiction novel that I, at one time in my life, was trying to write. Although I strongly doubt that the novel will ever come to pass, some of the issues I wanted to raise in it are ones that I think are still important.

Dunlap's story is how he fears that it - Sinclair Lewis' pronoun referring to fascism - could happen in America. So, next post (or soon anyway), I will answer David's request for my alternative to liberal democracy and show you how I would have written Dunlap's cautionary tale.

Update: Geez, I misspell the guy's name like 300 times (Dunlap, not Dunlop) and spell "serfdom" as "surfdom." I'd blame booze, except I haven't had any.

2003-07-30T22:20:00.000+02:00

America: the stillborn empire?

An article in today's NY Times got me thinking about something.

New Top General Tells Legislators U.S. Will Probably Need a Larger Army

The former Special Operations commander called from retirement to be Army chief of staff said today that the Army is likely to need more troops to meet its worldwide commitments.

General Schoomaker's use of the phrase, "chain of command," was a reference to Constitutional provisions for civilian control of the military.

Mr. Rumsfeld has repeatedly stated that he wants the entire military, and especially the Army, to be speedier and deadlier, the hallmark of the Special Operations forces. It was General Schoomaker's credentials in that area, especially his time as chief of the United States Special Operations Command from 1997 to 2000, that brought him to Mr. Rumsfeld's attention.

General Schoomaker gained insight into the terrorist threat long before the Sept. 11 attacks, serving on the team that investigated the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. He also has served with conventional forces, including infantry and armored cavalry units, before moving to Special Operations. [...]

Now, contrast with this:

Last of the Big Time Spenders: U.S. Military Budget Still the World's Largest, and Growing

Selected Countries Military Budget
($Billions)
United States 399.1
Russia* 65.0
China* 47.0
Japan 42.6
United Kingdom 38.4
France 29.5
Germany 24.9
Saudi Arabia 21.3
Italy 19.4
India 15.6
South Korea 14.1
Brazil* 10.7
Taiwan* 10.7
Israel 10.6
Spain 8.4
Australia 7.6
Canada 7.6
Netherlands 6.6
Turkey 5.8
Mexico 5.9
Kuwait* 3.9
Ukraine 5.0
Iran* 4.8
Singapore 4.8
Sweden 4.5
Egypt* 4.4
Norway 3.8
Greece 3.5
Poland 3.5
Argentina* 3.3
United Arab Emirates* 3.1
Colombia* 2.9
Belgium 2.7
Pakistan* 2.6
Denmark 2.4
Vietnam 2.4
North Korea* 2.1
Czech Republic 1.6
Iraq* 1.4
Philippines 1.4
Portugal 1.3
Libya* 1.2
Hungary 1.1
Syria 1.0
Cuba* 0.8
Sudan* 0.6
Yugoslavia 0.7
Luxembourg 0.2

Figures are for latest year available, usually 2002. Expenditures are used in a few cases where official budgets are significantly lower than actual spending. The figure for the United States is from the annual budget request for Fiscal Year 2004.
* 2001 Funding

Selected Countries	Military Budget ($Billions)
United States	399.1
Russia*	65.0
China*	47.0
Japan	42.6
United Kingdom	38.4
France	29.5
Germany	24.9
Saudi Arabia	21.3
Italy	19.4
India	15.6
South Korea	14.1
Brazil*	10.7
Taiwan*	10.7
Israel	10.6
Spain	8.4
Australia	7.6
Canada	7.6
Netherlands	6.6
Turkey	5.8
Mexico	5.9
Kuwait*	3.9
Ukraine	5.0
Iran*	4.8
Singapore	4.8
Sweden	4.5
Egypt*	4.4
Norway	3.8
Greece	3.5
Poland	3.5
Argentina*	3.3
United Arab Emirates*	3.1
Colombia*	2.9
Belgium	2.7
Pakistan*	2.6
Denmark	2.4
Vietnam	2.4
North Korea*	2.1
Czech Republic	1.6
Iraq*	1.4
Philippines	1.4
Portugal	1.3
Libya*	1.2
Hungary	1.1
Syria	1.0
Cuba*	0.8
Sudan*	0.6
Yugoslavia	0.7
Luxembourg	0.2

As I understand it, The US is now outspending the entire rest of the world on national defense. The US is the third largest nation in the world, and has the highest GDP by a factor of at least three. And yet, it needs a larger military.

Paul Kennedy is best known for advancing the idea that empires are destroyed by overreach, but the numbers in this case are so incredible that I can't imagine why it isn't a public scandal. According to the CDI, Iraq spent all of $1.4 billion on its defence, and yet it has cost the US some $70 billion to invade Iraq and roughly $4 billion a month to occupy it. Imagine attacking an enemy that spent $3 billion a year on defence!

At 50-to-1, the ratio of US invasion costs to Iraqi annual defence spending, it takes only $20 billion dollars to defend against an annual US defence budget of $1 trillion a year - twice what Bush is budgeting for fiscal 2009. Federal receipts are approximately $2 trillion and total US GDP is roughly $10 trillion, so it doesn't take too many billions in spending to ensure that the US simply can't afford to attack you. At $200 billion, half of what the US spends now, it would take the entire US GDP to invade your country.

Logically, I suppose the cost of defeating an enemy doesn't rise linearly with their defence spending, but it is worth asking just how much money it takes to defend against a single dollar of the US military budget. It doesn't look to me like the US can afford to be a superpower.

The Romans took centuries to reach the point where they could no longer afford their empire. For the major European colonial empires, it took a couple centuries at least to reach that point, and in France and Britain's cases, two devastating wars against industrialised enemies. For America, it seems like the empire can't even afford its start-up costs.

2003-07-30T20:06:00.000+02:00

Neck deep in Liberia

Via The Head Heeb, an interesting piece on US legal obligations towards Liberia. It's primarily about the legal case that the US has some responsibility towards the country, but I am sceptical. What court could you make the case in? However, the moral obligation comes through quite clearly in the following section:

Understanding America's Obligations in Africa's Newest Trouble Zone

The "Special Relationship" Between Liberia and the U.S.: Lengthy and Deep

As a review of Liberian-U.S. ties will show, America's special relationship is based on its using Liberia's resources to advance its security interests, and for economic gain.

In the early 19th century, Paul Cuffe, a wealthy African-American merchant from Massachusetts, became convinced that the only way that American blacks could become self-governing was to emigrate to Africa. To this end, he created a transportation company called the American Colonization Society. With the U.S. government's approval, the Society began to resettle free American blacks in Liberia.

Those pioneers were the original Americo-Liberians. In the small tropical nation, they quickly became the ruling group, assuming all positions of power and influence. Soon they constituted a U.S.-friendly elite. (It was also an elite whose skin color was typically lighter than that of the original Liberians. Sadly, then, the Americo-Liberians created a hierarchy that, in this respect, mirrored the racial hierarchy they had endured in the U.S..)

In the 1920's - in large part because of the presence of this friendly elite, and that of a considerable U.S. naval fleet just offshore - the U.S.-based Firestone Tire and Rubber Company founded the largest rubber plantation in the world in Liberia. The company installed Americo-Liberians in positions of power, and the small elite rose to economic prominence.

Subsequently, Liberia's president, William Tubman - who ruled from 1944 to 1971 - allowed the CIA to build the largest spy station in all of Africa within his borders. During the Cold War, the U.S. sank billions of dollars into developing surveillance equipment in Liberia. Liberia also functioned as a U.S. outpost from which the U.S. sought to undermine national liberation movements throughout the continent.

After Tubman's death, his successor, President William Tolbert, angered the U.S. by courting favor with China and Cuba. Tolbert also angered most Liberians by showering privileges on his fellow Americo-Liberians. The ethnic and class conflicts between the Americo-Liberians and the darker Liberians grew.

In 1980, Tolbert was murdered by Samuel Doe - an illiterate warlord trained by the U.S. Green Berets. Doe became the first "true" Liberian to rule the country. Doe assassinated most of the former cabinet members as well as his fellow insurgents, and unleashed a wave of ethnic-based terror.

Doe also exploited America's Cold War fears concerning Africa. Famously, President Reagan - who handed Liberia more than $5 billion during the early 1980s - invited Doe to the White House, addressing him as "Chairman Moe."

Just as the victims of abuse so easily seem to become the next generation of abusers, ex-slaves from the US move to Africa and restore all of the injustices they had left behind with the assistance of the old country's own elite. To me that makes a much better case for some US responsibility than the legal issues the article discusses.

2003-07-29T22:42:00.000+02:00

Okay, I don't read the Volokhs that often

By the far the best of the Volokhs and the main reason I visit the site at all - Jacob Levy - is back and blogging. His post on Liberia's historical ties to the US is worth a gander. Also, he reminds me (last Sunday, to my shame) that I said I would buy Language Rights and Political Theory when it came out. It's out.

Unfortuately, one of the conditions of my parole (and since my wife is my parole officer, I can't get out of it) is that I can only make a few big Amazon orders a year, and I've spent my quota until September. However, if someone wants to buy me the book, you can do so by clicking here or on the "Buy me books" link on the left. Because it gets shipped to my wife's APO box, there is no overseas shipping to pay.

If I receive the book, I promise to do a full review here on the blog. Since it's about language policy, I expect it ought to be an interesting review.

Update: Aidan Kehoe has come to the rescue and bought me the book. I have to admit, I didn't actually think anyone was going to do it. Now maybe I'll have to add some other books to my wish list. Thanks loads, Aidan!

2003-07-29T21:44:00.000+02:00

If French is the language of love, then what is German?

Via Universal Language, which is just a veritable plethora of useful pointers for language politics junkies, comes this article from the Deutsche Welle website:

Teachers Plan to "Sex up" German

An international conference of German language teachers concluded with plans to make the language more attractive and to adopt a more aggressive approach to its promotion.

German is sexy, apparently, and should therefore be used more as an international language. That’s the conclusion of the International Association of German Teachers which just concluded its annual conference at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena on Monday. [...]

So, what can be done to make German more attractive? Well, to start with, the conference concluded that the language must first be spread by those speakers already confident and proud of their German skills. To do this, the teachers have expressed a desire to follow the Lingua Franca model where the French language is aggressively promoted among native speakers around the world. The French are renowned for their pride in their language and their mostly unshakeable use of it at home in France and in former colonies. [...]

German is taught but is it promoted? Dr. Hermann Funk, one of the 80 professors attending the conference in Jena, went a step further when he criticized the Germans themselves. “There is no German language policy. In France, language is a political issue. In Germany, it is something more or less dealt with.” [...]

This has been building up for a while. Domestically, there is very little that could really be called an aggressive language policy in the Bundesrepublik. However, Germany is growing a lot more aggressive in its external promotion of the language, particularly at the European level.

For instance, back in the summer of '99, Germany started boycotting all informal EU ministerial meetings that don't place German on an equal footing with French and English. English and French are the semi-official languages of the EU bureaucracy, but since reunification in 1990 and especially since the addition of Austria to the EU in 1995, Germany has been pressing hard for their language to be given genuinely equal footing. They have been fairly successful too. Many EU committees now operate in English, French and German, although some are still just English/French and a few are English-only.

The semi-official policy of the French government is to promote multi-lingualism in all the international institutions it participates in. This no longer means just French and English, increasingly it means French politicians enlisting the help of other nations who want to promote the use fo their languages. Germany is increasingly France's major ally in this. The recent creation of the European Patent Office is an excellent example. The UK, Scandinavia and some of the smaller EU states wanted the EPO to only accept patent applications in English. The French government found this unacceptable and enrolled the German government to support a trilingual patent bureau, which Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal considered unacceptable. However, France and Germany together were able to put up enough pressure against an English-only solution that in the end they got their trilingual patent office. France alone could not have managed it.

I expect to see more French-style efforts from Germany to promote its own language abroad and quite possibly more effort to promote it at home. I think the European Patent fight is a sign of a nascent Franco-German axis to stem anglicisation in Europe. Language promotion is increasingly the trend everywhere in Europe, not just France. Even in Flanders, there is perceptible pressure to place more value on Dutch. But of the European nations, Germany has the most people and money and therefore the best chance of making a dent in international institutions. In combination with France, I don't see any coallition of other states likely to inhibit them.

2003-07-29T20:15:00.000+02:00

À bas le mél!

Jeremy Osner sends e-mail noting some letters to the editor in today's NY Times.

To the Editor:

Re "You've Got Courriel" (editorial, July 28):

As an American computer technologist living in France, I have followed the coverage of the rejection of the word "e-mail" by the Académie Française with some amusement.

One need not speak fluent French to pick up a French-English dictionary and discover that the word "émail" already exists in French. It is pronounced (roughly) "eh-MY" and means "enamel." So it is perfectly logical that the Académie wants to avoid using it again.

What is surprising is that the Académie prefers the Québécois formulation of "courriel" (a contraction of "courrier électronique") to the more recent, popular and home-grown formulation "mél."

"Mél" is a contraction of "message électronique," but is pronounced, by a curious coincidence, almost exactly like the English word "mail."
KEVIN D. KISSELL
Le Bar sur Loup, France
July 28, 2003

I can actually answer this question. "Mél" was not exactly "home-grown." It was part of an unsuccessful effort by the Académie Française to get the public to accept the formulation "messagerie électronique." This is a common story in the history of French computer terminology. Have any of my francophone readers ever heard the word "programmerie"? I didn't think so. Back in the early 70's, that was what the Académie wanted to call "software." The people at the Académie Française are creative proposers of new words. They think up stuff that's logical, coherent, reasonable and - as is the case with "mél" - even cute. And the first term they try to get to work always fails. For computer terms, it's been like this for over 30 years. I don't think I've ever seen the word "mél" outside of term lists and dictionaries. Later, someone else - an ISO committee, the OLF, or the Canadian Secretary of State, sometimes even IBM or Microsoft - will start using some other term and make it work.

To the Editor:

Re "You've Got Courriel" (editorial, July 28):

There have been any number of unsuccessful anti-Franglais forays. But there have also been some very successful ones, notably in information technology.

The French word "informatique" is in fact more useful than the multitude of equivalent English terms like I.T. and data services. From "informatique" has come "burotique," for office applications and matériel.

Courriel is actually fairly elegant, a fusion of "courrier" (mail) and "électronique." It is intuitive, and sounds good — which is very important to French purists.
BOB NELSON
Calais, France, July 28, 2003

Actually, I think French computer terminology makes more sense than English computer terminology, but there have been some failed campaigns in the computer terminology business. "Toile" never caught on for "web", and at this point "web" has become the accepted word pretty much everywhere. But otherwise, French has been very successful in creating and propagating new, consistent, native terminology in computing. Only Chinese has a comparable record of success.

One of the reasons it has worked so well is that they got to the translators fairly early on. In the early 90's in Quebec, you could tell the old-timers from the newbies by the French computing vocabulary they used. The old-timers used a lot of anglicisms: rebooter, se loguer, directoire and the like. The newbies used official OLF-approved terms. Why? Because the newbies learned their computer terminology from their translated manuals. They didn't know that the words they were using were inventions and most of them had little or no contact with the older generation of computer people. By '94, when I left Quebec for California, the newbies outnumbered the old-timers 10-to-1 and we were the ones being forced to use the new terms because no one would understand us otherwise.

Anyway, that's how official neologisms get to be common words without anybody having a gun held to their heads.

2003-07-29T18:20:00.000+02:00

Faith put to the test

It's been a while since I put up a post about my great-grandfather David Jakob Dick (who will mostly be referred to as "Grandpa Dick" from here on out) - more than a month from the look of it. The last post, written by his younger sister Helene, ended with:

When the greatest misfortune took us, I can well remember sitting right there under the fruit trees and hearing the shots.

To read up on how we got to this point, you can start here, with the beginning of the story of the Dick family in Russia before proceeding to the last post; or, you can start with the index to all the posts that I've put up from my grandfather's family and personal history.

I found the scanner at my office. Man, technology is great. It took a fifth of the time to do this with the scanner than when I had to retype everything. Since I had access and some time on my hands, I thought I might include some other material in today's post. For the fans of Tsarist bureaucratic forms, I have a scan of Grandpa Dick's birth certificate, which I rather amateurishly translated ten years ago when I was studying Russian. Unfortunately, most of the material I have from Grandpa is photocopied, so it's not photo quality.

For those of you who read the last instalment and were wondering about the dollhouse great-aunt Helene was talking about, it looked like this:

The Dollhouse at Apanlee - Beats the hell outta Malibu Barbie, dunnit?

Preparing this post put me in mind of something Richard Dawkins wrote in mid-September 2001 for the Guardian:

Religion's misguided missiles

A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane's exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston.

That is precisely what a modern "smart missile" can do. Computer miniaturisation has advanced to the point where one of today's smart missiles could be programmed with an image of the Manhattan skyline together with instructions to home in on the north tower of the World Trade Centre. Smart missiles of this sophistication are possessed by the United States, as we learned in the Gulf war, but they are economically beyond ordinary terrorists and scientifically beyond theocratic governments. Might there be a cheaper and easier alternative? [...]

How about using humans as on-board guidance systems, instead of pigeons? Humans are at least as numerous as pigeons, their brains are not significantly costlier than pigeon brains, and for many tasks they are actually superior. Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers. [...]

Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? If only! Nobody is that stupid, but how about this - it's a long shot, but it just might work. Given that they are certainly going to die, couldn't we sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life again afterwards? Don't be daft! No, listen, it might work. Offer them a fast track to a Great Oasis in the Sky, cooled by everlasting fountains. Harps and wings wouldn't appeal to the sort of young men we need, so tell them there's a special martyr's reward of 72 virgin brides, guaranteed eager and exclusive.

Dawkins has a point, albeit a limited one. If we are going to hold 9/11 against religion - all religions - we have to hold WWI against all nations. The things that convince people to die for their faith aren't much different from the ones that convince people to die for their country. At least with God, you're getting offered heaven in the end. If you die for your country, you might get a nice funeral on the taxpayers.

What I want to draw attention to is the flip side of Dawkins' rather pessimistic view of religion. There are people who will not kill, people who won't even fight to save their own lives because of their religion. The promise of heaven means that they won't resist any sort of aggression at all, for fear of the damage it might do to their souls. Better to die than to kill. The same power that makes holy wars also makes martyrs and like most powerful forces, religion is a two sided thing.

For my Mennonite ancestors, committing an act like the WTC attack would have been inconceivable. WWI seemed to them at the time like the act of pure, stupid folly it seems like to most of us now. These people didn't even have murders in their communities. During my lifetime, some of them still refused to lock the doors to their homes or cars. There was some strife and the ordinary sorts of conflict that all people suffer, but for them, there was no war, no murder, no theft worthy of mention and very little fear.

Seems too good to be real? I promise you, these people and places really existed. Unfortunately, in an act that proves that if God exists then she must have a sense of irony, they built this utopia in the middle of what was about to become the Soviet Union.

Grandpa Dick, my Russian-born great-grandfather, described the events that preceded his departure for Canada in the April 15, 1977 edition of the MB Herald, the bi-monthly magazine of the Canadian Mennonite Brethren Church. He was quite at ease in English, and the words are wholly his own. One missing piece of context that you ought to have: from 1919 to 1923, Canada forbade all immigration of Doukhbours, Hutterites and Mennonites from Russia. The Canadian Mennonites lobbied Parliament - the first time they had ever been so deeply involved in politics anywhere - and eventually had the order overturned.

The Dick Family, circa 1909
From left to right: Jessie, Jacob, Elsie, Lydia, Louise, mother Katharina with Helene on her lap, Anna and her husband David Sudermann, father David, son David [my great-grandfather David Jakob Dick], Tina, Johann [John], and Maria [Mary].

Faith put to the test

My parents were devoted Christians. They lived what they believed and they believed strongly in the "very peculiar teaching" of non-resistance. Our family lived on the beautiful plains of the Ukraine on an estate called Apanlee. We lived in peace and harmony with our Russian neighbours, who lived in large villages nearby. Whenever my father could he helped needy people, and we had many friends. In the revolution of 1905 many of the large estates, especially Russian ones, were demolished by roving mobs, and many of the owners were killed. Our farm was also threatened. A letter written by my father to his mother on December 22, 1905 describes how he handled the situation:

On Wednesday, late in the afternoon, a carriage with four men drove onto the yard. One, more educated than the rest, was the leader. The Lord gave me grace to remain calm, and I asked this man what he wanted. He replied, "Support for the poor." I asked if he had a government permit giving him the right to collect the money. He replied that he did not need one. When they saw they could not frighten me, they left. In the backyard they met some of our workers and advised them to quit their jobs and ask for their wages, because in two days they would return to smash everything.

Of course, anxious days followed. But we can still praise and thank God for those days; prayers and the Word of God became more meaningful to us. Our faith was especially strengthened through the promises in Ezra 8:21-23 and Nehemiah 6. As he did in Nehemiah's time, God built a wall around us. Unfortunately, through our unbelief we often breach the wall. Yes, mother, there have been days of blessing. The Lord showed us our shortcomings, he showed us that we have not done our duty toward our Russian neighbours.

The next week was hectic. The yard was always filled with people, but nobody was rude or indecent. They all asked for help, though some actually did not need it... Most of the time I stood on the porch and talked with them, distributing New Testaments and tracts. I realised the hunger of the common people for the Word of God... Most of them told me they had not come to smash and destroy my property, but because they wanted to protect us...

Now it is quiet and we trust our Lord for the coming days. The moment we put our trust in his promises he strengthens our faith and we are confident that nothing will happen against his will; whatever may come will be for our good.

The people wanted to protect us with clubs and pitchforks, but father, who wanted no fighting or bloodshed on his place, thanked them for their good intentions and asked them to return home. Not long after, the leader who had demanded money was saved and became a good friend of ours.

The second revolution, in February, 1917, was more successful in toppling the government. The Communist party came to power in October. Two of our neighbours left their estates. One, a Mr. Sudermann, moved to the Mennonite town of Halbstadt and was one of the first to be murdered in the Molotschna colony, where I was attending school at the time. Our family decided not to move.

One day a communist named Alexander came to our place with the intention of organising the poorest Russian villagers into a commune. As my father predicted, he was not successful. But, since Alexander was a good-natured man, he soon became our friend. Father could even witness to him about Jesus Christ.

Our peaceful way of life was interrupted abruptly on the afternoon of February 13, 1918 when two communists appeared at our doorstep. One of them I recognised as the bloodthirsty man who had murdered Mr. Sudermann and others. They searched our house for silverware, dry goods, and sugar. Then the "black Vidka", as he was called, ordered my father to come along to the headquarters of the commune on the neighbouring estate. We all knew what. that meant: he intended to kill father on the way. My youngest sister cried, "Dear, dear Jesus, you have to save our dear father."

God answered in an unexpected way. Our friend Alexander stepped between the mad man and my father, so he could not shoot him on the way out. Then he arranged that he and this man would go on one sleigh, while the other soldier and my father followed in a second sleigh. By the providence of God the Russian peasants were assembled for a meeting at the place. As they were being told what was going on, they put up a petition asking that my father not be killed. By 11 p.m. Father was home, and we had an evening of thanksgiving unlike any we had ever had before.

The next morning brought an unusual surprise. The man entered our house again, with two revolvers and grenades on his belt, and confronted us. We were all shocked and wondered what was coming. But the man took off his belt and weapons, sat down comfortably in an armchair, and said: "Now I want to see that man for whom several hundred have signed that petition." After a while he received a phone call and left. Through God's grace another chapter had ended peacefully.

In the spring of 1918 the German army occupied the Ukraine and restored law and order. However small bands of terrorists frequently attacked isolated places and murdered whole families. A German officer, Lieutenant Reinhard, the commander of our district, visited and offered us as many army rifles as we wanted for our protection. Father thanked him for the offer but refused it, explaining that it was contrary to his non-resistant convictions as a Christian. Mr. Reinhard, a polite man, said to him, "If you can't kill, take the rifles anyway. If the people know you have rifles they will stay away." Dad's reply was: "Mr. Reinhard, if they come in spite of the rifles, I'm not sure what I would do. I am only a human being. Would I be strong enough to overcome the temptation to kill if the rifles were standing in the corner?" Father did not accept the offer and as long as the Germans occupied the Ukraine we lived in peace.

That fall the Germans had to leave, and the civil war began with all its horror. In the fall of 1919 the most dreaded terrorist group, the Machno group, overran our district.

October 30 of that year was another gloomy day for us. Brother Bernard Dick, a teacher on a neighbouring estate (who now lives in Coaldale, Alberta) came over to tell us he had heard that a gang was planning to murder our family.

Father called the family and all the servants together to pray and ask the Lord for his guidance. After they rose from their knees, father had the conviction that the Lord wanted him to stay. His eldest son Jake also decided to stay with his wife and baby boy.

All day small groups of bandits came and went, taking everything they could get hold of. All the horses were taken, except one very old nag.

At about 11 p.m. in the evening a carriage with five men pulled up before the house. As had been arranged beforehand, my sisters and the servant girls left the house and hid in the bushes. Only my widowed sister, whose husband had been murdered a few months earlier, remained in the house with three of her children, my mother, my sister-in-law and her baby, and the men.

The gang burst in and lined up my father and mother, my two brothers, Jake and John, and Mr. Schellenberg, an employee, against the wall. The leader demanded fifty thousand roubles. Dad told him that the money had all been taken. He asked for permission to go to the other employees on the farm; he was sure he could borrow that amount from them.

The request was refused. A shot rang out, and my father fell wounded, pretending to be dead. The light had gone out after the gun blast, and in the dim light from the other room Schellenberg leaped out the window and John threw himself on the bed, waiting for the bullet. Father whispered to him, "Save yourself." John then leaped out the window. Jake escaped through a door, but was wounded as he ran. Mother tried to escape also, but two shots were fired and she died instantly.

Before the murderers left, they fired twice more at my father, but missed. Once they were gone Dad shouted for help and one by one the family members emerged from their hiding places. They found a horrible picture. Mother lay dead, her head shattered by explosive bullets, and father lay in a pool of his own blood, suffering great pain.

During the last 28 hours of his life father received the most severe test. of his faith. The pain and agony he experienced can only be understood in part by those who shared that time with him. He had obeyed God; he had trusted God completely; and now this had happened. Why? What was the answer? The family realised that the "very peculiar teaching" did not lead along an easy road.

With no medical help, no pills or needles, the pain was severe. A doctor from 10 miles away arrived that evening under cover of darkness, but it was too late. A choir from Aleksanderkrone came to sing comforting songs. Despite the pain, father never complained.

Dad's last hours were a great blessing to his family. He was the first one to find his way through. My sister wrote down some of his final words: "Children, love one another. Be good soldiers of Christ... Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness." He was concerned about his people: "Do not forget Bethany (a home for the retarded) and the other institutions... Send greetings to our teachers." He had no bitter words or feelings against his murderers. By the grace of God he could pray, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do."

When the pains overwhelmed him, he prayed, "Lord help me to be patient... Lord, forgive my impatience. You have suffered so much for me." Satan was not idle either, and did not allow my father to die in peace. When he became very weak, father whispered to one of the ministers, "Only not to go astray in the end" (Nun nicht am Schlusz nosh irren). Early in the second morning the struggle ended and he was reunited with his wife after a separation of only 28 hours.

Our father lived the Jesus way and died the Jesus way in the power of the Holy Spirit. Praise be to God now and in all eternity. For the family it was not easy to understand the leading of the Lord. But he did not let us down, and gave us the victory over all inner struggles.

My personal reaction has not been mentioned. At the time of the murders I was serving in a military hospital. Communication with home had been interrupted, and it was not until I returned home three weeks later that I learned, like a bolt out of the blue sky, that my father and mother were dead. My first thoughts were not very Christian. One was to give up the non-resistance stance, take the gun and fight the terrorists. I thought of revenge. I would not judge anyone who does not have any other strength but his own and does take revenge. But praise the Lord, I knew Jesus Christ as my personal Saviour, and in his power I could overcome the temptation. Today I thank God that I have not sent a single soul into a Christless eternity.

I am so glad we can claim Psalm 73:23-25: "But even so, You love me! You are holding my right hand. You will keep on guiding me all my life with Your wisdom and counsel; and afterwards receive me into the glories of heaven. Whom have I in heaven but You? And I desire no one on earth as much as You."

I don't have much else from Russia after that. I have two very brief letters from Grandpa Dick to his sisters who went to Canada immediately after the ban on Mennonite immigrants was lifted. They are very banal stuff, mostly about where he is on the emigration lists. Grandpa Dick himself got out in the spring of 1924. His sister Elsa summarises the years from 1919 to 1927 in two sentences:

Until 1923, all the children kind of drifted around in South Russia. Then, from 1923 to 1926 when the way was opened, most of them immigrated to Canada except Anna, Lydia and Johann who are still there. [These three were married before 1923.]

This brings us just about up to 1929, where Grandpa Dick enters my grandfather's life for the first time.

Next: We return to Canada in the 1940's, where Grandpa faces culture shock for the first - but not last - time in his life.

Update: Fixed the images problem, I hope. The free web storage site I was using is going non-free, so I tried to use Geocites. No dice. But is should all be okay now - I found an alternate storage area.

2003-07-29T13:52:00.000+02:00

American war crimes

Quite a few bloggers have picked up on this Washington Post article. Technorati lists 56, and this post on Eschaton has pointers to the highlights. The relevant chunk of text is quite small:

Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in." Such tactics are justified, he said, because, "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info." They would have been released in due course, he added later.

The tactic worked. On Friday, Hogg said, the lieutenant general appeared at the front gate of the U.S. base and surrendered.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is bad. It is a breach of the first Geneva Convention, the fourth Geneva Convention and both Protocol I (which applies to international conflicts) and Protocol II (which applies to non-international conflicts) of the Convention. Although the US has not signed the two 1977 protocols, it signed and ratified the first convention in 1882 and the second in 1949.

The fourth Geneva Convention goes on to define this action as a grave breach of international law. The term grave breach is used for very serious matters. The things defined as grave breaches are:

Attacking a person who is hors de combat. (Protocol I, Art. 85, Sec. 3)
Practices of apartheid and other inhuman and degrading practices involving outrages upon personal dignity, based on racial discrimination. (Protocol I, Art. 85, Sec. 4)
Biological experiments on the wounded and sick. (Convention I, Art. 12; Convention I, Art. 50)
Biological experiments against shipwrecked combatants. (Convention II, Art. 12; Convention II, Art. 51)
Biological experiments against prisoners of war. (Convention III, Art. 130)
Biological experiments against civilians. (Convention IV, Art. 147)
Compelling a prisoner of war to serve in the military forces of the hostile power. (Convention III, Art. 130)
Any unlawful act which causes death or seriously endangers the health of a prisoner of war. (Convention III, Art. 13)
Unlawful transfer, deportation or confinement of civilians, willful killing, hostage taking and torture . (Protocol IV, Art. 147)
Attacking cultural objects when they’re not located near a military target or used for the war effort. (Protocol I, Art. 85, Sec. 4D)
Depriving civilians who are under the control of an enemy power of the right to a fair trial (Convention IV, Art. 147)
Depriving combatants, prisoners of war, refugees, or medical or religious personnel of a fair trial. (Protocol I, Art. 85, Sec. 4e)

Folks, this is a pretty serious list. The US has neither signed the two 1977 protocols to the Geneva Convention and has not only declined to join the Internation Criminal Court, but has also refused to sanction any external legal authority to prosecute exactly the acts listed above. One of the provisions of the fourth Geneva convention is that no nation can negotiate immunity for itself or its troops if they commit grave breaches. The agreements the US has signed to avoid ICC prosecutions offer no protection in any state that has signed the fourth convention. Col. David Hogg can no longer safely travel anywhere without risking indefinite detention.

If we are to believe that America is not trying to grant itself arbitrary authority, then an act of hostage taking of the type described in yesterday's Post needs to result in a court martial and a serious prison term. I realise that this isn't the first breach of the Geneva Convention in US history - it doesn't even compare to the bombing of Cambodia or My Lai - but this article is bragging about it publicly as if there was nothing wrong with taking hostages at all. I expect to either see a denial of the Washington Post's coverage or a public prosecution, and I expect anyone else who imagines the US to be something better than the Taliban to demand the same.

2003-07-28T22:45:00.000+02:00

L'aménagement linguistique dans le monde

I just came across this site while looking for some information on the exact role of the Duden publishing company in German standardisation. The story, as I recall it, is that in the late 19th century, the German, Swiss and Austrian governments got together to try to establish a German language academy like the Académie Française. They couldn't agree on how the institution should be structured, so the responsibility was given "temporarily" to the private company Duden. I wasn't able to confirm the story, primarily because I found this French language site at the Univeristy of Laval in Quebec.

The site is an effort to maintain a comprehensive database of language laws and policies around the world. There are too many things missing for me to give it a perfect score. For example, I didn't find any reference to Duden on the German page, and I know for certain that Duden enjoys a unique status among German dictionaries, I just don't remember the relevant history. There are also some outright errors. The population statistics they have for Singapore don't add up the way the author claims - he has confused the percentage of Mandarin speakers with the percentage that speak all forms of Chinese, and the entry on Mennonites claims that Plautdietsch and Pennsylvania Dutch are the same language. They are not mutually comprehensible at all - the latter is a middle German dialect close to the Rhine valley dialects and the former is a dialect of Lower Saxon.

Still, it is quite detailed. The page on the USA is particularly interesting to those who think that America's current linguistic situation came about without any coercion. It mentions, for example, how the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hildago requires Spanish to enjoy a priviledged legal status in some parts of the US. It seems to skip, however, the diverse linguistic situation in the US during much of the 19th century. Untill WWI, there were public schools in German and Spanish in many parts of the US, and until the Civil War, French was the primary language of the state of Lousisiana.

Dans les faits, les États-Unis ont appliqué, depuis le début, une politique linguistique jacobine. Avec le résultat qu'aujourd'hui l'unilinguisme anglais règne de façon quasi incontestée dans l'administration fédérale. Selon un rapport du General Accounting Office, de 1990 à 1994 moins de 1 % des documents du gouvernement fédéral ont été produits dans des langues autres que l'anglais. C'est ce qui entraîne le jugement suivant en 1995 de la part de Edward Chen, membre de l'American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, qui affirmait que les langues des minorités étaient immensément sous-employées: «If anything [...] language minorities are vastly under-served.»

"Une politique linguistique jacobine" - that's perhaps a bit harsh. Although American language policy is not quite as awful as all that - or at least not at all times or in all places - the page is a useful corrective to movements like English Only and US English. It even points out that some of the language laws in the US are stronger than even French language law.

Anyway, the site is all in French, so I imagine it will only be of interest to those with decent French skills. For those who want to read something in German, try this from the Duden website instead:

Fremdwörter: Bedrohung oder Bereicherung?

[...] Fragwürdig kann der Gebrauch von Fremdwörtern dort werden, wo die Gefahr besteht, dass sie Verständigung und Verstehen erschweren, wo sie der Überredung oder Manipulation (z. B. in der Sprache der Politik oder der Werbung) dienen oder wo sie lediglich als intellektueller Schmuck oder sogar aus purer Nachlässigkeit und Gedankenlosigkeit (weil ein deutsches Wort »gerade nicht zur Hand« ist) verwendet werden. Freilich sind dies Funktionen der Sprache, die sie durchaus auch mithilfe von einheimischen Wörtern erfüllen kann, sodass es sich hier nicht um ein spezifisches Fremdwortproblem handelt.

Ein solches spezifisches Problem ist die Tatsache, dass Fremdwörter sich kaum auf Wörter des deutschstämmigen Wortschatzes beziehen lassen, da sie nicht zu einer vertrauten Wortfamilie gehören, aus der heraus sie erklärt werden können (z. B. Läufer von laufen). Aus diesem Grunde ist mit der Verwendung von Fremdwörtern auch ganz allgemein die Gefahr des falschen Gebrauchs verbunden. Nicht umsonst heißt es im Volksmund: »Fremdwörter sind Glückssache.« Fehlgriffe sind leicht möglich: Restaurator kann mit Restaurateur, Katheder mit Katheter, kodieren mit kodifizieren, konkav mit konvex, desolat mit desperat oder effektiv mit effizient verwechselt werden. Oft kann dabei unfreiwillig Komik entstehen, beispielsweise wenn statt von einer Sisyphosarbeit von einer Syphilisarbeit die Rede ist. [...]

I suppose it could be embarassing to mix up the "labour of Sisyphus" with "work on syphilis." One of the justifications for language management is to try to reduce this sort of confusion - although this example is a bit farfetched - but it's not the only reason.

Update: I want to give a shout-out to Brian Lennon at Universal Language, who links to my post on French language laws below. I actually support language laws of certain kinds and in certain cases, and I've added a more thorough explanation of why to my running list of as yet unwritten essays. But, the example from Duden is one reason why. In the end, the goal must always be clear communication and the methods should be primarily structural rather than legal. But, that's for another post.

2003-07-28T16:05:00.000+02:00

\/0+3 133+, \/0+3 630r6y!

To add to the list of people running for governor of California: a 26-year old UC Berkeley computer programming grad.

Hard-at-work-Georgy [Russell] demonstrates her great posture from her (current) station in life.

Well, she's probably smarter than Ahnuld, and almost certainly smarter than Simon, and much better looking than either one. She's in favour of a balanced budget, in favour of gay marriage, against the death penalty and thinks the recall is a farce. So far, I'm with her 100%. My only gripe about her take on the issues is my suspicion that she really does think the analytical skills you learn by writing code are useful in getting out of a recession.

2003-07-28T14:13:00.000+02:00

Trying to think of something useful to say about California's recall election...

...but all I can think of is how much cheaper it is to buy a democracy with a free press than to buy a dictatorship. This, it seems to me, is one of the few places where Chomsky and I are largely in agreement.

Anyway, what can you say for a governor's race with Governor Moonbeam's straight man, a car thief, a certifiable Republican wingnut who has already lost to Davis once, the mayor of LA, not one but two Huffingtons - a straight ex-conservative liberal and her conservative gay ex-husband - and, in the words of Bill Maher, "a Viennese weight lifter [...] who can explain the [Bush] administration's social policies in the original German"? I'm speechless. The whole thing is getting intermittent coverage on the Beeb and CNN International, but I think I'm going to be missing out on some of the funniest political TV in a generation by living in Europe.

I think Fox ought to turn it into a reality TV show:

Survivor: The Governor's Mansion - Who will be voted out of Sacramento next?

Or better still, get Jerry Springer to moderate the debates. I might actually pay to see that.

Anyway that's all I've got until the mudslinging really starts.

2003-07-28T13:48:00.000+02:00

Philosophy as an interdisciplinary pursuit

Decent article (not terribly enlightening but worth reading anyway) in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the differences between British and American philosophy departments. The author admits it's a bit of a charicature, but since I've never studied philosophy in the UK, I can't really judge. I'm actually on the North American side of this debate (or at least on the side described as North American by this article's author), despite my strongly continental tendencies. The following quote, however, highlights the risks of interdisciplinary thinking as it is often practiced and is utterly, horribly true:

In Britain, there is more skepticism about the value of interdisciplinary work, notes Tim Crane, the country's leading philosopher of mind. "A lot of what counts as interdisciplinary work in philosophy of mind," he says, "is actually philosophical speculation backed up with certain, probably out-of-date, Scientific American-style summaries of research in psychology or neuroscience, which tend to support the philosophical preconceptions of the authors."

Update: Eeep! Since I've been linked to on Crooked Timber, let me make myself clear: I am agreeing with Tim Crane about the philosophy of the mind. I don't know that much about most other interdisciplinary fields in philosophy, except for the philosophy of artificial intelligence (which is mostly the same stuff as the philosophy of the mind) and the philosophy of language, to which this judgement doesn't apply quite so much.

2003-07-28T13:23:00.000+02:00

Barney goes North

Why is this polar bear purple? Alas, a Blog has the answer.

2003-07-26T23:43:00.000+02:00

More time wasting from Quizilla

You are Neo, from "The Matrix." You
display a perfect fusion of heroism and
compassion.

What Matrix Persona Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

God, it's Saturday night, I'm sick, I'm at home, I'm watching Have I Got News for You on BBC2 and I must be bored out of my mind.

2003-07-26T22:34:00.000+02:00

Is this the end for Christiania?

Via Beatnik Salad, it seems Denmark's centre-right wing government wants to close Copenhagen's 30-year old experiment in hippie ideals.

Pusher Street dealers face up to the shove

Walking through the totem pole-style gateway into Christiania, a familiar smell hangs in the air. The pungent, earthy, unmistakable scent of marijuana thickens along the leafy path to Pusher Street, where everyone, including the local dog flat out in the middle of the road, seems to be affected by the fumes.

Pusher Street, in the heart of this Copenhagen suburb, is Scandinavia's largest open soft-drug market, a cobbled lane lined with about 15 stands where dealers display lumps of top quality Moroccan hashish, bags of skunk and masterfully rolled "super joints", all neatly labelled with handwritten price tags like cakes at a summer fair. [...]

But all is not quite as chilled out as it seems. By a fence near the entrance a young Christianite stands guard, walkie-talkie in one hand, spliff in the other, watching for approaching police. The sale of drugs, however soft, is illegal in Denmark and the new centre-right government has a mission to shut down the hash market and clean up the area.

Narcotics police, backed by riot forces, have raided Pusher Street several times in recent months, arresting any of the dealers who do not pack up and run fast enough when the walkie-talkie alert goes out. They say they are afraid there would be riots if they tried to close down the whole street.

But the hash market - thought to turn over at least £100,000 a day - is not the government's only gripe. [...]

[T]he new government says Christiania is an eyesore, a security hazard and an unruly community which must be made to step into line with the rest of the country. That has become one of its priorities.

It plans to close down the hash market, destroy 98 illegal buildings and build or upgrade hundreds of others, to "give the area a lift".

"Christiania's days as a hotbed for hashish are numbered," the Conservative party law and order spokesman, Helge Adam Moeller, said.

Ulrik Kragh, a deputy in the centre-right party Venstre, said: "Graffiti is destroying everything there. We cannot turn a blind eye any more to this dirty and dangerous area. It's like hanging out your dirty laundry for all to see."

Half Christiania's economy was supported by the hashish trade, without which it would collapse, he said. And illegal building in recent years was ruining a national heritage area. [...]

"They hate us because we like to be different," said Peter Post, a former postman and the community's elected representative. "They say we are naughty. But we have a right to live this way. Our houses are not illegal, they are like flowers: where one grows, others sprout.

"They want to put state-of-the-art flats here, like in neighbouring bourgeois areas. But they know we won't be able to afford that. How can we old hippies afford to buy our own houses?

"I am afraid this is going to end in a confrontation. I'm not looking forward to it. There are people here who are ready to barricade themselves in and fight like the Red Indians in America to defend their homes."

Other residents say the new government does not know what it is taking on in threatening to force Christiania to change.

"They are out of touch with reality," said Consolata Blanco, an Italian who has been selling handmade leather shoes, at £600 a pair, in Christiania for the past 28 years.

"They are likely to end up with 800 court cases. We are going to have fun."

Gitte Christensen, a blacksmith who makes metal ornaments and tools for clients all over Denmark, said: "What this is all really about is the price of land. This area has become too valuable - they cannot bear to let us poor people live here any more."

Oscar Meldgaard of Nybolig Erhverv, one of Denmark's biggest estate agents, said: "Christiania is on one of the most attractive areas of Copenhagen. It is three kilometres from the centre of town, it's a green area on the waterfront. Land there has more than doubled in value in the past five years." [...]

"The Danish people like us being here," said an ex-pusher and tour guide calling himself "Joker".

"Everybody has a hippy inside them somewhere. We have never asked the politicians to go barefoot, smoke hash and grow beards. But we have a right to be different. We will not let them change us."

2003-07-26T15:26:00.000+02:00

In America, weapons of mass destruction get you the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Via, this week's What's New:

Weapons of mass destruction are hard to find in Iraq, but in this country, contributions to methods of mass fatality are recognized with the Medal of Freedom. Recipients this week included: Edward Teller for the H-bomb, Charlton Heston for the Saturday-night special, and Dave Thomas for Wendy’s square hamburger with fries.

Confirmed by Voice of America.

2003-07-25T23:33:00.000+02:00

My carefully considered and well earned aversion to Noam Chomsky

Several people have written posts critical of Chomsky lately. I don't think I've ever posted anything about Noam Chomsky here. It is likely that a few of my readers know that I hold him in a fair amount of disdain. Of the principles he advanced in linguistics, nothing remains. Even among Chomsky's advocates, universal grammar has been replaced by an amorphous "language instinct." The separation of syntax from semantics is now viewed as a deeply foolish, if not outright contradictory position to hold. Phrase structure grammar is a meaningless formalism if you add headedness to it, and modern theories of grammar are almost without exception lexicalist theories. Virtually nothing remains of the competence/performance distinction. And, that isn't even the worst of it. Chomsky's rise actively discouraged work in empirical linguistics, valence theory, and any sort of lexical semantics - all the fields I work in now.

His principles ultimately produced nothing, and may well have set linguistics back decades. The day will come when his legacy is compared to Skinner's, and when historians of the social sciences will debate which one ultimately caused the most damage.

The thing is, I earned the right to say that. I took ten semester-hours of Government & Binding coursework, and God-only knows how much pablum about the formal properties of natural language in other classes. NP, VP, X-bar, move-alpha and the hierarchy of grammars were a sizeable chunk of my existence for about a year and a half. I believed in it all, for a while, until I got to my first dependency grammar class, and watched an unfortunate young woman go completely ape-shit when the prof said that there was no such thing as an NP. That was the day when it first occurred to me that there might be problems with Chomskyan linguistics, that it might have decended into a political position divorced from any actual linguistic phenomena. I spent roughly five years unlearning Chomsky, bit by bit.

This is why I swear I will go postal the next time somebody tells me how revolutionary his linguistics has been just before going on to slag his political writings. The great irony of Chomsky is that among linguists - who tend to be fairly leftish sorts of people like so many other social scientists - his reputation is exactly the opposite.

The flaws in Chomsky's linguistics are equally apparent in his political work. Notably, a failure to cite his oppenents honestly, to entertain alternative arguments, to provide adequate context to the events he describes, or to develop or even think it necessary to develop a theory to explain how his interpretation of events could come to pass. These things are all quite serious flaws, and yet, they just aren't compelling reasons for blanket condemnation.

Had Chomsky destroyed active, functional schools of political science or media theory, as he did in linguistics, I would be more inclined to condemn his poitical works. But that is simply not the case. As far as I can tell, he has had very little impact on either of those fields. He is an advocate of a political stance, and like most advocates he is not the most trustworthy person to evaluate the accuracy or completeness of his work. Chomsky is inclined to jump to conclusions about past events, and sometimes those conclusions border on the insane. He should not be read in isolation from other accounts, nor is it safe to draw conclusions from his work alone.

And yet, in the general dishonesty department, I am ill-inclined to view him unfavourably when compared to a great many folks. I find Pinker's work - both public and academic - easily worse than Chomsky's in terms of dishonesty, pretentiousness and poor basis in fact. I find it far more dishonest to advance any opinion that can be summarised with the words "the problem with Arab society is..." than anything I've ever read from Chomsky. Chomsky at least restrains himself to jumping to conclusions about government officials, not whole peoples. To Chomsky's knee-jerk revulsion to US foreign policy, one must balance the simple truth that US foreign policy has been quite repulsive quite frequently, and that the promoters of US foreign policy are not themselves on the whole any more honest than Chomsky, and often far less careful about their facts.

So, I no longer read Chomsky, on language or on politcs. And yet, I have no desire to waste my breath bothering to condemn his politics. It seems pretty pointless.

In most any argument over Chomsky, one eventually finds his opponents and his supporters sound identical, each claiming the other has dishonestly read them. The argument quickly decends into a pickiness over small quotes and textual context that leaves you uncertain what has actually been said at all. The first one to turn to name calling loses, and in 99% of cases, it will not be anyone personally close to Chomsky.

That is part of Chomsky's gift and power, and it is why his most vocal detractors are complete suckers for him. In almost every instance, Chomsky's defenders actually have the case with more merit because Chomsky is always very careful with words.

The trick is to pay attention to his use of hedge words. (Yes, Professor Delong, I mean you.) For example. Chomsky is frequently charged with claiming that presumed anti-Semite Robert Faurisson is a “relatively apolitical liberal." Chomsky, of course, said no such thing. He said "As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort." Note the words as far as I can determine. This shifts the burden of proof onto his opponents, who must not only show that Faurisson is, in fact, an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathiser, but must also show that Chomsky's conclusions were impossible given the materials he chose to read and the standards he might reasonably apply to them. This is more or less impossible.

However, taking that route misses the whole point. It is not Chomsky's words that damn him but his actions. Chomsky agreed to write a preface for a book that by his own admission he had not read, by an author about whom he claims to know next to nothing. Chomsky's name added credibility to the work, even if Chomsky denies that that was his intent. That is pretty irresponsible.

It is the same argument against Chomsky in linguistics. Chomsky denied no one a grant, refused no one a teaching position and said virtually nothing directly about empirical linguistics (offering instead his "introspective" methods), valency (which goes away if you believe in an independent syntactic competence anyway) or lexical semantics (which he locates outside linguistics altogether). But the result of his rise to popularity was the near disappearance in the United States of those fields of study for a period of some 20 years.

Chomsky's primary tool in doing this was to shift the burden of proof onto his opponents, just like the use of a hedge in his statement about Faurisson shifts the burden of proof. Consider, for exmaple, the "poverty of stimulus" argument. Chomsky offered nothing in support of this notion - not one observation or empirical study. He simply said that it seemed quite obvious that language was too complicated for a child to learn. Since then, it has been very difficult to fight back against this shift in the burden of proof, even after it could be shown that there exist huge statistical redundancies in language even when extracted from a meaningful context, and that neural networks are readily able to pick up on those redundancies.

By focusing on Chomsky's words, you will almost always lose or end in a draw, because once you have taken out the carefully hedged claims, you will find little left of Chomsky except innuendo. This is what makes standard methods of criticism so frustrating in his case. You are better served by concentrating on actions - Chomsky's wherever possible - and his conclusions when they are far fetched. The weak point in a Chomskyan argument will usually be the shift in the burden of proof. At some point, you will be asked to accept an account of events deemed "plausible", even when it lacks any evidence from primary sources, and then the burden of proof will fall on those who disagree with that account.

The other approach is to simply ignore him. His methods are more worrysome than any of the opinions he actually advances.

There was some more stuff I was going to say about Cambodia. There's something about that country that seems to drive its students mad. I mean, I've seen academic fights in regional studies, but I've never seen the level of bile Cambodian studies seems to generate. I have read exactly two serious books on Cambodia, far too few for me to make any real judgements of the positions various people have taken on the country's history. One of those books, Michael Vickery's Cambodia: 1975-1982, is both the more thorough and to me the more plausible account. It is, however, sympathetic to Chomsky and nonetheless appears to be well respected among scholars of Cambodia. Even Sophal Ear, who is hardly a defender of Chomsky and even less sympathetic to efforts to downplay the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, seems to take Vickery seriously enough. The biggest serious criticism I could find was the claim that Vickery is biased by his sympathies for Cambodia's peasants over their urban cousins. That doesn't bother me in the slightest since Vickery more or less admits it in his book.

Yet, Vickery considers Chomsky's contribution valuable. Vickery's point is fairly clear: It was wrong to come to the conclusion that the Khmer Rouge was undertaking mass murder on a scale of hundreds of thousands of lives at the time when most people came to that conclusion, and Chomskly was right to call the conclusion into question when he did. I don't know if this is an accurate assessment of Chomsky's writings on Cambodia and I have only Vickery's arguments that it accurately reflects the information that was available at the time, however, it is exactly the kind of carefully hedged conclusion I can imagine Chomsky coming to.

Even today, it is impossible to find a number of dead untainted by someone's politics. My tour guide in Cambodia claimed that three million had died and that the Khmer Rouge executed everyone with an education. I decided that I couldn't take her figures too seriously since she had not five minutes earlier told me that her mother had been a school teacher in Phnom Penh, that she herself was in the lycée in 1975, and how neither one of them had been killed nor threatened with death, nor knew anyone who had been.

It appears that there are mass graves in Cambodia, yet I have not been able to find any source (admittedly, I could look harder) able to say what percentage of those found in the graves died violent deaths. I doubt that the figure is 100%. Is it 50%? 20%? That a lot of people died in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge is undoubtedly true, but it seems unlikely that they were all, or even mostly, executed, even if they were buried in mass graves. That a regime executed tens to hundreds of thousands and saw a million or more die of starvation, disease and overwork is not an endorsement of a regime, but it legitimately debateable whether it constitutes genocide, or merely incompetence and brutality on the part of a thoroughly nasty regime.

The difference it makes now is purely rhetorical, but Chomsky is a rhetorical figure. I'm afraid trying to nail Chomsky for his words on Cambodia is no more likely to work than it does with the Faurisson affair.

2003-07-23T19:36:00.000+02:00

Europe's unions go left?

Between Bill Hayes editorial in yesterday's Guardian, and the appointment of Juergen Peters to Germany's IG Metall a few hours ago, I'm beginning to wonder of it isn't possible that there is still some life in Europe's unions? Yesterday's post mentioning the value of coordinated wage rounds has sensitised me a bit to the notion.

Is it possible that we are on the brink of a new model of European syndicalism, one built more on the Dutch and Irish model than the British or German ones?

2003-07-23T19:27:00.000+02:00

To whoever found my site by searching for "asian smelly pussy"

It's pedantry, not pederasty.

2003-07-23T19:00:00.000+02:00

A draft for polyglots?

Via Silt, I see that the Pentagon is considering expanding the draft to a few new categories. I was dimly aware of the Health Care Personnel Delivery System, but, as so many conservatives allege, give the government a little power and all they want is more. According to the Charlotte Observer, "At the Pentagon's direction, the [Selective Service] also is examining whether that plan for a "special skills" draft could be adapted to address critical shortages that might arise for military linguists, computer experts or engineers."

And remember folks, if you are in an affected category (as health care workers already are), you are not exempt just because you're older than 26. You are eligible until you're 45 and you can't get out of it by being a woman either.

2003-07-23T18:47:00.000+02:00

English without anglophones

Via Universal Language (which, in turn, comes via Language hat but is now on the blog roll), an article on the state of English today.

English Is Language of Business, but Americans Aren't Fluent

Mac Watson saw the future of the English language aboard a jet about two years ago.

On a flight from Tokyo to Bangkok, an Indonesian woman speaking fractured English couldn't make herself understood to an American flight attendant.

But a Japanese passenger could tell what the Indonesian woman was saying.

She relayed the request in a form of English that the flight attendant could understand, Watson recalled.

The two non-Americans then joined with a Thai woman seated nearby to discuss -- in English -- what had just happened.

More evidence, he thought, that English as a second language has gained the upper hand. While English is the international language of business, it's no longer the U.S. version that everybody strives to speak. [...]

When Americans do business overseas, the burden to conform is now more on them, Watson said. If not, one non-native English speaker will find solace, and perhaps a business deal, with another non-native speaker.

Watson recalled when a Japanese bond trader came to Baldwin-Wallace so he could learn better English and thus better communicate with his American supervisor in Tokyo. But the bond trader and his Japanese associates had no problem doing business over the phone in English with Koreans, Thais and other Asians at their trading desks.

"The person that needed the training was the American," Watson told a small class on intercultural communication earlier this month at the college. "Not the Japanese." [...]

I have seen exactly the phenomena described here. English speakers don't generally realise that the power they derive from being native speakers of the world's most politically and economically important language is not a power they can necessarily keep. It is quite easy to imagine a world full of creole Englishes that bear more power and prestige than more standard dialects.

I have some issues with this article, for example, the following:

Watson also cautions against using absurd assumptions, such as "suppose you were me" as a preface to a statement, because it's difficult for ESL speakers to form a mental picture of something contrary to fact.

That is not true, ESL speakers are no less capable than anyone else of manipulating contrafactual notions. Instead, it is important to understand that contrafactuals are one of the most idiosyncratic aspects of language. Even within a single language community, there are often quite sharp distinctions in the way a contrafactual situation is described and the kinds of things it's used to express. Contrafactuals are hard to communicate clearly across a language barrier.

Otherwise, the advice offered seems sound enough. It also offers a reason for anglophones to learn a second language - it enables you to both understand the limitations of second language speakers and to get a leg up on people who need to use "Business English" wherever they go.

2003-07-23T18:30:00.000+02:00

It's Krugman's fault

Via, well, the man himself's website, the Internet Weekly Report:

Greenspan Blames Krugman For Sluggish Economy

Washington (IWR Satire) - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan today put the blame for the U.S. recession squarely on the shoulders of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

"The blame for the current recession that began in 2001 should not be placed on the failed policies of the Bush Administration. Instead, that dubious honor should go to that liberal economist Paul Krugman and his bad attitude.

2003-07-22T18:56:00.000+02:00

More juicy rumours for the rumour mill

I haven't seen anyone else blog this except Shadow of the Hegemon, but then, I haven't been paying full attention.

It seems that Judicial Watch did manage to spring a few documents from Dick Cheney's now forgotten March 2001 "Energy Task Force." The documents released contain "a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.'"

Although this is hardly enough to prove that the entire war in Iraq was concocted on behalf of the oil industry, it is enough to make a nice juicy rumour to spread around.

2003-07-22T17:49:00.000+02:00

Santa is from Greenland -- not!

According to the Father Christmas World Congress, Santa Claus is a Greeenlander. The deciding argument, according to Reuter's: "We have lots and lots of reindeer in Greenland. Didn't you know that?"

I have difficulty believing all this, since everyone knows that Santa has a Canadian address. The annual Christmas-themed convention seems to have ignored what every Canadian has known since childhood and remains the subject of Canada Post commercials all through December. You really can send your Christmas lists to Santa at:

Santa Claus
North Pole, Northwest Territories, Canada
H0H 0H0

2003-07-22T17:22:00.000+02:00

Notes from a distant timezone

Now that it's getting to be circa 11am on the East Coast, the American bloggers are starting to wake up with a few interesting posts.

Ikram Saeed on how the American Democratic Party's problems bear a distinct resemblance to problems every Canadian is familiar with.
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Juan Cole's Monday update reports on an editorial in London's al-Hayet newspaper concerning the future administration of Iraq:

Ibrahim Khayyat writes in al-Hayat that Wolfowitz's visit to Baghdad was in part for the purpose of "closing the file" on the Defense Department's involvement in the civil administration of Iraq. He says that Wolfowitz told his loyalists, seeded in the civil administration earlier, that the State Department is now taking over, and that things may be hard for those who remain behind (many, Khayyat says, are leaving). Also imperilled are some members of the Governing Council who were picks of the Pentagon, like Ahmad Chalabi.

Khayyat speculates, however, that Bush may not leave Bremer himself in place. Bremer is talking about Iraqi elections in late 2004 or early 2005, and Bush is said to want them out of the way before the US presidential election, so it can be portrayed to the American people that the US has handed off Iraqi sovereignty to an elected government. If Bremer looks like he can't get the job done that fast, Khayyat thinks, the Bremer himself may be dismissed in favor of someone more agile.
Dr. Andrea Boltho in this month's New Left Review discusses What's wrong with Europe. I got this link from someone, only now I've closed the window and no longer remember who it was. I can't claim to agree with all of Boltho's analysis, although I think he has, in the main, gotten right the idea that GDP's failure to take into account value destroying economic activity undermines claims of vast economic superiority over Europe in the English-speaking world. This in particular doesn't jive with my experience:

Finally, and in this author’s view most importantly, ageing has a longer-run, indirect negative effect on the growth of both output and productivity of a non-economic nature. Old people are, on the whole, opposed to change and dislike new ventures. Old people are surely less innovative and less entrepreneurial than the young. Thus, America’s advance in the new technologies may also have been helped by the relative youth of its population (both native and immigrant). Europe, in other words, may be slowly turning into a conservative continent, in which a growing share of the population shuns change and frowns on new initiatives.

As a veteran of the dot-com boom, I didn't see the creativity of youth nearly so much as the orgueil and general cluelessness of youth. The firms I worked for were not run by young people, nor were the new technologies they produced much the labour of youth. Although there were kids dropping out of college to found billion dollar firms, these companies did not add a lot of value to anything. The real gains seemed to be driven by access to easy capital, which I see is a big problem in Europe although not quite as big as I expected it to be; a lot of hype about computing and the Internet driving spending, hype which seems to have not been so strong in Europe; and incremental improvements in software and hardware manufacturing produced largely by late 30 and 40-something engineers.

What I find really interesting, and ought to take a better look at, are some of his claims about the Netherlands' recent economic success.

Indeed, two of the most successful Eurozone economies over the last decade, Ireland and the Netherlands—neither of which, and especially not the latter, are models of unfettered liberalism—owe much of their spectacular results in reducing unemployment from erstwhile very high levels to precisely this factor: coordinated wage rounds. Both countries, by engaging in that ultimate corporatist sin, incomes policies, agreed upon by the various social partners, achieved rapid output growth, a strong profit and competitive performance, and also rapid rises in employment levels and in real wages. (Dutch unemployment, recently the lowest in the OECD area, was also reduced by a very successful drive to encourage part-time employment. This now accounts for as much as one-third of the country’s workforce.) Conversely, New Zealand, a country that, far from sinning, fulfilled with almost religious fervour all the orthodox prescriptions of labour market deregulation, had a macroeconomic and employment performance that can, at best, only be described as mediocre.

I knew that the Netherlands had encouraged part-time work, but its reliance on income policies is new to me. Can anyone explain to me exactly what "coordinated wage rounds" means? It's a new term for me and the web isn't very illuminating. Must write a post on the Netherlands and cyberpunk sometime soon.

Lastly, comments system from enetation.co.uk is not working very well. It's been flacky for a while. It seems that there is a reason:

There have been a couple of failures of the comment counter in the last week caused by what appears to be a suspect chunk of code on the user forum which has caused the database sync to stop. We will upgrade the forum software this week.