i love cutthroat kitchen but bingewatching makes it really stand out how often alton brown refers to himself as ‘daddy’ and makes contestants wear spreader bars
Intern Takeover, Part Deux! The Arts Desk’s excellent intern Milton Guevara conducted this interview with linguist Gaston Dorren about his new book, Babel. Enjoy!
– Petra
Like a plane ticket, Gaston Dorren’s Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages can take readers across the globe. A fun exploration of the most widely spoken languages, Babel travels to places as far afield as Cameroon and Vietnam to uncover interesting linguistic quirks. Each chapter focuses on a single language, such as Turkish or Tamil, and gives us a glimpse into its unique and curious characteristics – for example, the way Japanese women and men speak different “dialects.” Or France’s resistance to linguistic diversity.
Dorren himself speaks six languages and reads nine more, but when I asked him to give some advice for would-be language learners, he told me there’s no clear recipe. “I’m afraid it really depends on both what kind of person you are. In my own case, for instance, I find it very important to be able to read stuff. There are many more languages that I can read than I can speak. In order to learn to read, I basically take a very old fashioned approach: learning vocabulary, learning grammar, and applying it. But if you are one of those people who want to speak the language, which of course makes a lot of sense, then I think from the very start you should give a lot of attention to the correct pronunciation of words. And also start conversations right away … It depends on the person, but I would say most people are best off practicing what little they’ve learned right away.”
What are some of your favorite language-specific expressions?
We have this expression [in Dutch]. “It stands like a pole above water” (Als een paal boven water staan). The meaning is “it is absolutely sure, it is absolutely certain. There is no doubt about it.” The image being that while the water surf is always waves, the poles that the ships will be attached to are always very firm in place. Those poles are a point of certainty within an otherwise very insecure water surface. The Dutch language has a lot of water-related expressions because the Dutch used to be a seafaring nation.
For some languages you talk more about the quirks, for others you emphasize the history. How did you narrow down how you would approach each language?
Basically what I do in Babel – and what I also did in my previous book Lingo – is really follow my own curiosity on the assumption that what I find curious and interesting, many readers will probably also find curious and interesting. So if I discover that the Turkish language, say, was deliberately changed over the 20th century in order to purify it and make the language more purely Turkish, that is something that strikes me as unusual. So I look into that. Then I discover that there is this pretty interesting and well-written book about it, which I read, and of course I find additional information … On the other hand, with Spanish for instance, which is much more familiar for many of us, that is a good place to tell something about the grammar of that language. It’s easier to relate to Spanish grammar than to, say, Turkish grammar.
Were there any anecdotes you wish you could’ve included in the book?
Actually yes. I wrote too many chapters about Japanese, because at that point we hadn’t decided yet that every language would get just one chapter. I wrote a chapter about Japanese haikus. They’re short five-seven-five syllable poems that are very present in Japanese culture and that we also know about in European and American culture. Whether or not you like that particular poem, the interesting thing is that in Japanese, they don’t have five-seven-five syllables, they have five-seven-five moras. Moras are not a concept that we’re familiar with in English. Moras are like syllables, but they’re different. And that difference is very important for the Japanese language, and haikus are an excellent way of illustrating that. But in the end I had to choose. I could only have one chapter about Japanese … or, actually, I cheated a bit and had two chapters about Japanese.
For Tamil, there is this great story about how they have two rather different forms of Tamil. One for the written language and one for the spoken language, which are way different than spoken English and written English. So how did they do that? And why is that? I didn’t write that chapter, but I would have loved to write it.
What language was the most challenging to write about?
In the case of English, it was tricky because English is not my first language … that would be Dutch. So here was I, thinking what to write about a language that the reader probably knows as much about, if not more, than I. I wrote two versions. In one version, I tried to explain what English as a world language is like for second language speakers, such as myself. What do we go through to learn it? How do we experience it? I love the language, I can’t get enough of it. In other ways I feel a bit intimidated because the native speaker will always out-discuss me. Some English speaking people, and I really want to underline some, are not very kind to second language speakers. Being monolingual speakers themselves, they don’t realize how hard it is to speak a second language.
What are some other thoughts you have about the book?
It’s important to note that while the book is about all these languages, it is basically a book for people who may very well be monolinguals themselves. I present the languages as if they were friends of mine. I want to be a sort of tour guide who shows the beauty and the special things of these language while trying to entertain the reader. So if I manage to make the reader feel that this is worth reading about, then I feel I’ve achieved my aim.
what do you like most about lake superior? i love the sunsets across the water. i love the beaches where the water is so clear you can see through to the sand/rocks (though not always easy to find).
love it! i love how big it is, how different it’s shores are, grew up on the south shore with it’s sandstone cliffs and caves, then you get to the north shore and there’s lovely agates to find on the rocky beaches
I that at their core kids toys have been the same forever. Animals with wheels and a string to pull, dolls, little animal figures, balls etc. it’s so cute and interesting
