Listening to the Irish

by Sheila Connolly

Long before my County Cork series saw the light of day, I started taking Irish language classes at a local Irish cultural center.  The classes were offered by an organization called Cumann na Gaeilge, which translates to Friends of the Irish.  I spent five years of Thursday nights trekking to the center, and emerged with a rather rudimentary knowledge of contemporary Irish, plus a few memorized poems and songs.  No fault of the instructors—it's a notoriously difficult language to learn.  In truth, mostly I went to listen, since both my primary instructor and more than half the people in the class were Irish-born (which does not necessarily mean that they learned the language in Ireland in their early years), and I wanted to absorb the speech patterns and inflection.

Due to internal conflicts, Cumann na Gaeilge split apart in the past year, and my former instructor founded a new group, Ar dTeanga Dhuchais, which means Our Native Language, to offer language classes.  Somehow I found myself agreeing to be treasurer of the new group, mainly to keep some contact with the language.  Recently we held a meeting at an Irish pub in Boston.

I was the only American-born person at the table of five.  I knew two of the people there, and the other two were strangers to me.  I mostly listened, and after a while I wished I'd had a recorder with me, because what I saw unfolding was exactly what I've tried to include in my irish-based series.

First a stranger (Irish) walked up and started a conversation with Seamus, one of the men at the table, asking if they'd met before.  They hadn't, but it turned out that Seamus's brother had worked in the same union as the newcomer (all but one of the men are now retired from one or another of the building trades).  Then there ensued a long conversation amongst them men about what other contacts they shared, covering a few decades.  There was a strange aside when the newcomer was somehow reluctant to reveal his surname, at least until everyone (or at least the men) had established his bona fides.  (It turned out to be Keneally.)  And then this segued into where each had come from and when (but not why) and who and what they knew back in Ireland.

And I'm sitting there still as a mouse, gobsmacked (another good Irish phrase—"gob" means mouth in Irish) by what I'm hearing, because it's exactly what I wanted in my book, and here I am hearing it like it was a script, or something I wish I'd written.  These men are decades removed from "home," and yet they're still talking about where they came from.  Not on a grand level, but about details—about waiting for the tides, and curraghs (a kind of small boat I'd only read about), and harvesting kelp not for food or fertilizer but to dry and use in weaving. About neighbors helping neighbors when the seas were too rough to travel to the mainland from the little islands off the west coast. About families maybe none of them knew, but they knew about from others.

All the elements I've seen in Ireland—as an American outsider—were there:  the attachment to the land, the connection to a network of people, the way of establishing not "if" but "how" they connect with an Irish stranger. All rolling out in front of me, unasked. 

I'll be in Dublin again on Sunday. I can't wait.

Listening to Language

by Sheila Connolly

Earlier this week I activated (for the first time ever) the "speech-to-text" function on my computer. I've known it existed for a long time. In fact, I considered setting up something like that for my late father, whose handwriting started out illegible and grew worse with age. He had long been aware of that shortcoming and resorted to typing for most communication (this was in the distant pre-computer days), using a pen only to sign cards and letters. But he's been gone for a decade, and I never saw any use for the function myself.

Then my husband decided to try it out. He needed to put together a talk for someone else to present at a conference, and he was concerned about timing, since the conference assigned a fixed slot. There is a learning curve, for both the user and the computer—you have to accustom the computer to your voice, or conversely, manage your voice so that the computer will recognize what you're saying. (Forgive me if you've been writing this way for years—I'm a little behind the curve.) I'm not sure it did my husband much good, because he had to speak more slowly than usual, not to mention give the computer a few commands along the way. It would have been quicker for him to just sit down and type it out.

But once he'd demonstrated how easy the process was, and shown me where to find the program (very well hidden in Windows), I had to give it a try. I played by the rules and read slowly and clearly, and chose texts that were fairly basic. The computer performed as well if not better than I expected. Then, since it and I were both warmed up, I decided to give it a real test and read a list of Irish place names. I was impressed at how well it handled what I said. While it managed to identify few of the names precisely, its interpretation of the phonetics of the words was more than adequate.

I can see that it could work. However, for personal use, I think I'd find the need to insert command for punctuation and formatting would interrupt the creative flow, so for now I'm going to stick to typing or keyboarding or whatever it's called this week. (Note: I have not tried text-to-speech yet. Will I like it?)

Yesteryear's Richard Pickering

But at the other end of the spectrum, this past weekend I attended an event where the speaker was Richard Pickering, one of the reenactors at Plimoth Plantation. He's been representing various Pilgrims for over twenty years now (since the time frame of the place is set at 1627 in perpetuity, as he has aged he has moved on to age-appropriate colonists). He is well-informed about his task, and strives for authenticity in all things, from clothing to accent. It was the accent that I found intriguing, because he makes an effort to speak English as it would have been spoken in the early seventeenth century. (I didn't have time to ask him for all the details of his sources—how do you recreate vocal sounds that you have never heard?—but he assured me that there is a scholarly basis.)

Today's Richard Pickering

In his colonial English persona he can be easily understood. Yet it doesn't sound like stage English either (you know, what you hear on all those lovely PBS series). What I found most interesting is that almost all of the letters in a word were pronounced then. For example, "known" was said with a hard K at the front. In any word ending with "ion" you would say both the I and the O. So in effect, we speakers of English have misplaced a lot of letters over the past four centuries, not just in this country, but in England as well. Where did they go? And why? It makes me wish I'd taken a Linguistics course.

This doesn't take into account many local dialects, even within England, which is far smaller than our country (and don't get me started on the variety of dialects in Ireland, which is the size of New Jersey). There are still places in both countries that adhere more closely to earlier pronunciations and speech patterns. Yet we all manage to understand each other somehow, and even the computer is able to interpret our words from spoken English. (I wonder what it would make of Richard Pickering?)

Capturing the differences in writing is a more complicated process: if we write what we hear, it looks wrong on a page—and becomes the bane of copyeditors. But what came home to me quite vividly this week is that language is a living thing—familiar yet constantly changing and evolving.

SAVING A LANGUAGE

by Sheila Connolly

I’m one of those dinosaurs who still reads a daily newspaper—yes, one of those paper ones. I know it’s possible to read it on line, but the process of skimming on-screen is entirely different. I like to pick and choose what I skip and what I read in detail.


I find such interesting articles (which now and then actually lead to story ideas). I’m still mulling this one over: an article that appeared a week ago in the Boston Globe about a MacArthur Foundation grant made to a local Massachusetts woman. You’ve probably all heard of the MacArthur grants—they’re the so-called “genius” grants of $500,000 each. How nice it is that somewhere a committee thinks that someone who has a good idea should be rewarded.

This grant was made by the Foundation to preserve a dying language. I have a soft spot for languages: I’ve been studying Irish for the past five years, and while I’m still terrible at speaking it, at least I understand more than I used to. My father’s parents were both born in Ireland, but for various reasons I never knew them, and I have always hoped that by learning the language I could understand them and their culture a bit better. And as a writer, I think it never hurts to listen to how a language is spoken—the inflections, the sentence patterns, the vocabulary choices. Plus the Irish have traditionally been a race of bards and poets, and I’d like to hope that a little of that has come down to me.

The newspaper article was about a language even more obscure than Irish: Wampanoag. It’s a language used by the Indians who were living in my neighborhood (literally) when the first colonists arrived, who fought those settlers in King Phillip’s War, and who can still be found in parts of Massachusetts (in fact, they toyed with opening a casino in my town, and still hold an option on over 500 acres of land). The director of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, Jessie Little Doe Baird, is the grant recipient.

Even though the language is not in current use, and hasn’t been since late in the nineteenth century, it lives on in a lot of New England place names. The Wampanoag tribe, now much reduced in numbers, does make consistent efforts to sustain and pass on their cultural traditions. Baird will use the grant to record surviving records in Wampanoag, and will try to establish a school where children can learn the language. She has been teaching her own daughter to speak Wampanoag since birth—possibly the only child to do so for more than a century.

In a peculiar twist, I knew something about the Wampanoags before I ever moved to Massachusetts. When I worked at The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I was asked to write a brief pamphlet about the dramatic actor Edwin Forrest (1806-1872), whose collections were housed there. One of Forrest’s efforts to support his craft was to sponsor a play-writing competition beginning in 1828. The first winner was John Augustus Stone, whose submission was Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags, which Forrest produced and starred in for many years. (Sad to say, despite this success Stone committed suicide by jumping into the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia a few years later.) The play was based on the life story of the Wampanoag chief Metamora.

I think we all are impoverished when a language vanishes forever. Any language reflects the values and character of its speakers, and I salute Jessie Little Doe Baird for fighting for her heritage, and the MacArthur Foundation for supporting her.

We Are What We Say?

Sandra Parshall

When you look at a bridge, do you see it as male or female?

If your native language is English, you probably think that’s an absurd question. A bridge is a an object without gender. If you’re a German speaker, though, you’re likely to see a bridge as slender and elegant – feminine. A Spanish speaker may see it as possessing physical strength and other masculine qualities. German and Spanish, like French, assign genders to inanimate objects, and psychologists have found in studies that this aspect of language literally affects the way the speakers see the world.

To me, language is the most fascinating and baffling aspect of human life. All animals communicate in one way or another, and many mammals and birds have vocabularies of spoken sounds with specific meanings, but no other creature has carried communication to the extreme that humans have. On a recent TV documentary about the brain, a neurosurgeon observed that most people feel they would have no reason to live if their ability to use and understand language were taken away.

Wouldn’t you love to know what the first human word was – the first sound that had a specific, widely accepted meaning? (An easy guess: it probably had something to do with either danger or food.) Look how far we’ve come since then. Why did so many different languages develop? Does the language we speak train us to see the world in a particular way?

I hadn't thought much about that last question until I read Guy Deutscher’s article on the subject in the August 29 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Deutscher rounds up recent research that indicates the answer is yes. (The article is adapted from his new book, Through the Language Glass.)

English is unusual among European languages, because it doesn’t assign gender to inanimate objects. English speakers don’t go through our days viewing cups, brooms, clocks, violins, rain and garbage as male or female. To us, almost everything is just an impersonal it. Does this mean we truly see the world in a different way? Apparently so.

Deutscher writes about an experiment in which French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign gendered human voices to objects in a cartoon. Most French speakers wanted to give a fork (la fourchette) a woman’s voice, while Spanish speakers said the fork (el tenedor) should have a gravelly male voice. What would English speakers say, after they stopped laughing at the very idea? My own reaction would probably be to study the shape of the fork and assign a gender voice based on its appearance.

As Deutscher notes, the research hasn’t yet been done that will demonstrate whether the “emotional maps” imposed by a language’s gender system have broad societal effects on tastes and behavior (not to mention the design of bridges). As we learn more about the human brain, we will discover just how strongly the languages we speak shape our everyday perceptions and actions.

Another intriguing aspect of language is the way we describe space and give directions. Studies have shown that women and men see the landscape around them in different ways. Men are better able to create maps of an area in their heads and use them to navigate, and they give directions accordingly. Women tend to rely on landmarks – pass the church on the corner to your left, look for the school on your right – to find their way, and most languages allow them to give directions in those terms. The majority of us use the words behind, front, left, and right routinely.

But what if your language didn’t include such terms? Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian aboriginal tongue spoken only in far northern Queensland, doesn’t. Everybody, male and female, uses north, south, east, and west exclusively, even when talking about body movements. A left arm is never a left arm; depending on the person’s position, it’s a south arm or a west arm, etc. Children in the society learn this way of perceiving the world at a very early age, and they always know exactly where they are, and which direction they’re facing, on the compass. They have to develop this ability quickly, to be able to communicate when they speak – and they aren’t unique. Researchers have discovered a number of other languages scattered around the world that rely on geographical coordinates. All of these people think and live, to some extent, in ways forced on them by their languages.

It's more than a little amazing that we’re only now beginning to wonder whether language helps to shape our habits of thought, our perceptions and attitudes. We still don't always recognize the tremendous cultural weight some words carry. Considering how vital clear communication is in our dangerous world, we should all hope this field of research receives much more attention.

The Everyday Miracle of Language

Sandra Parshall

If you’re reading a writer’s blog, reading is probably an important part of your life. Maybe you’re like me – you’re compelled to fill idle moments with words, and your eyes seek out print wherever you are. If you forget to take a book to the doctor’s office, you’ll read six-month-old issues of People and Sports Illustrated in the waiting room. Anything will do, as long as you can read.

Writing and reading are uniquely human activities, unlike language itself. Most animals have some sort of language, a way of communicating with others of their species. Dogs bark, cats meow, monkeys screech to alert others to danger, birds sing or call to attract mates, claim territory, sound alarms. Honey bees “talk” to each other with dance-like movements that identify the locations of good foraging spots. One way or another, animals communicate with other animals.

Humans, however, are the only animals that can write and read our languages. How did our species develop the ability to preserve and pass on information by using marks on a page? What goes on inside our brains when we read those little marks? And what do tree branches have to do with reading?

You won’t be surprised to learn that this subject has been studied in depth – we’re also the only animals who examine their own behavior to find out what makes themselves tick.

French cognitive psychologist Stanislas Dahaene, author of Reading in the Brain, is one of the most prominent researchers into the neuroscience of reading. He talks about his discoveries and observations in an interview in the March/April issue of Scientific American Mind. When we read, regardless of the language, we all use a region of the brain in the left hemisphere that Dahaene has nicknamed “the letterbox” – the visual word-form area. The “letterbox” is part of a larger brain area that helps us recognize objects, faces, and scenes and is especially attuned to natural shapes in the world around us. When humans began writing their languages, they created symbols – letters – using shapes the brain already knew.

Every written language on earth uses the same basic shapes drawn from nature. For example, if you look up at a tree, you’ll see the “Y” shape over and over. Keep looking and you’ll see all the angles, curves, and circles that people have woven into their written languages.

The marks we call letters have no inherent meaning, either alone or combined with other marks to form what we call words. They mean whatever we say they do. When children learn to read, they’re actually learning to decipher a form of code – grasping the idea that each “word” represents an object or an abstract concept – and learning to do it so rapidly that it becomes automatic. That’s a monumental achievement for a little kid, don’t you think? And yet the vast majority of children are able to do it early in life.

The next time you see a kid reading something, whether it’s a novel or a comic book or a web page, take a minute to appreciate this everyday miracle and to remember, if you can, the excitement you felt when learning to read opened up the whole world of written language for you.

We Are What We Write

by Sandra Parshall


How much do you think you might reveal about yourself in describing a simple plastic water bottle?

You would be amazed.

Social psychologist James W. Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin has devoted his career to the study of human speech habits, and his web site, The World of Words, is crammed with fascinating information about the way we reveal ourselves in our choice of words. For a fiction writer striving to create realistic characters who spout realistic dialogue, this site is a treasure trove – if you’re willing to make your way through lengthy and intricate scientific articles. For fun, you can tackle one or all of three short writing assignments, including the bottle description, and get a quick assessment of what your words say about you. Pennebaker’s site also offers some capsulized conclusions based on decades of speech and writing studies.

A few examples:

Women in general use more pronouns and references to other people, while men are more likely to use articles, prepositions, and big words.

Despite the common perception of old people as being a little cranky and anchored in the past, studies show that as most people age they talk about themselves less and use more positive than negative words. They also use more future tense verbs and fewer past tense.

Those who enjoy high status tend to be the most loquacious, but they talk more about others than themselves and use fewer emotionally-charged words. People of low status talk about themselves more.

When people tell the truth, they tend to use first person singular pronouns and don’t hesitate to use words like except, but, without, and excluding, which convey complex situations and concepts. A liar is more likely to keep it simple.

In two studies, a high testosterone level correlated with fewer references to other people.

The way people speak and write can provide a reasonably good indication of what kind of music, cars, and other consumer goods they prefer.

In the time following a cultural upheaval or a disaster, people use the word “I” less and the word “we” more often.

Perhaps the most intriguing conclusion researchers have reached is that it’s not the content words – nouns, regular verbs, most adjectives and adverbs – that give away a person’s mental and emotional state and attitudes toward others; it’s the “style” words -- pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs and articles. A person’s choice of pronouns, for example, may not only alter the factual meaning of a statement but can convey the speaker’s perception and attitude. To use a simple example, a reference to the house becomes something quite different when it changes to my house or her house. Pennebaker cites numerous studies that assessed both physical and psychological health based on the word choices people made in essays.

Pennebaker and his colleagues used decades of research to create a computer program called Linguistics Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC – nicknamed “Luke”) that can analyze speech and text quickly, saving humans many hours of laboriously counting words in various categories and assessing their use. LIWC was used last fall to analyze the speech of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates, and the results were posted at www.wordwatchers.wordpress.com, where you may still read them.

The three brief writing analyses offered to The World of Words visitors will give you an idea of how LIWC works in analyzing verbal thinking, visual sensitivity, functional thinking, tactile sensitivity, and contextual thinking. I was surprised at first that most of my scores were far above average. After thinking about it, though, I realized that I’m neither a genius nor the most sensitive and perceptive person on the planet. I’m just a writer, and I notice everything around me to a greater degree than the average person does because noticing things and translating them to the page is my business. According to LIWC, my description of the water bottle demonstrated extremely high sensitivity to color, texture, depth and shape, but I also appreciated the practical functions of the object (not that there's much to appreciate about a water bottle). I suspect that most fiction writers would score high on this exercise. The other two exercises are more challenging and personal, and I’ll let you discover them for yourself. You’ll find the links to them at the top of the site’s opening page.

The LIWC software is now available to the public in two versions, full and lite, at fairly low prices, and I can imagine writers running dialogue through the program to make certain it will create the desired impression of their fictional characters. If you don’t want to go that far, you can do the free exercises on Pennebaker’s site – not in your own voice but in that of your protagonist or another character whose dialogue is giving you trouble. Let me know if you try it. I’d love to hear what you learn!

Using Our Words

Elizabeth Zelvin

A feature of contemporary parenting as practiced by generations younger than mine that always tickles me is the way parents deal with temper tantrums by telling a screaming toddler, “Use your words.” It’s a pithy definition of what writers do.

This piece occurred to me as I sat around the breakfast table at a country inn in Oakmont, PA with two writer friends, Rosemary Harris and Barbara D’Amato, with whom I appeared at the Mystery Lovers Bookshop Festival of Mystery. It’s always great fun to schmooze with other writers, and we got to talking about what different kinds of writers do and how it’s not as easy as it looks to the people who perennially tell writers, “I’ve got a great idea, why don’t you write it and we’ll split the profits.”

I’ve done a significant amount of writing in four distinct genres, or five if you count short stories separately for novels: fiction, poetry, songwriting, and academic or professional writing—six if you count blogging, which I consider a form of journalism, though for some bloggers it’s rather a form of journaling, not at all the same thing.

As someone said at breakfast, it’s marvelous that there are so many words in the English language that each writer comes up with something unique on any given theme. Aspiring fiction writers don’t always realize this. Newcomers sometimes worry that if they send their manuscripts out to agents and editors, these professionals may steal their uncopyrighted material. I’m told this sometimes happens with movie pitches in Hollywood, but it makes veteran novelists laugh.

One, there are proverbially only seven original plots.

Two, the ideas are the easy part: imagination, craft, organization, and perseverance in putting the words on paper (or on screen) are what distinguishes the writer from the wannabe. (Note that this pejorative term becomes less ugly when defined by the writer’s ability to follow through and complete a work, not by publication status.)

Three, I've met at least one writer who expressed concern that his manuscript, also about a recovering substance abuser in lower Manhattan, might coincidentally be too similar to Death Will Get You Sober. I assured him it didn't worry me. I believe someone else has about the same chance of coming up with my characters, my dialogue, and my voice as those monkeys who are supposed to type Shakespeare’s plays if they keyboard long enough.

Poetry, a craft I’ve been practicing for more than thirty years, allows the individual writer to create a unique work by using fewer rather than more words. The challenge is to tell a story (or paint a word picture, depending on what kind of poem one writes) in 100 to 200 words if it’s a typical free verse one-page lyric poem, in seventeen syllables (three lines divided five-seven-five) if it’s a haiku.

Song lyrics are often equated with poems, but in my experience, the crafts of songwriting and writing poetry are distinct. Without demonstrating it here, I can assert with confidence that I can pair songs and poems I’ve written on a single theme—alcoholism, love lost or found, and death, for example—in which I address the theme in two entirely different voices and ways of using words. The power of good songwriting is not only that, like poetry, it’s condensed, but that it expresses what the writer wants to say not in the most original words but in the simplest and most basic words of one and two syllables, while managing to give this simplicity a fresh twist and depth of emotion that can move listeners in much the same way as a poem moves hearers or readers.

In contrast to all of these storytelling genres, professional writing requires the writer to use specialized language—a jargon or, more kindly, idiom—with a precision that will make it perfectly comprehensible to any colleague in the same profession—and do so without telling any stories at all that aren’t true.