SLOW Movement

ST: Seared by Mandarin

I never did have the problem of learning Mandarin. In fact, Chinese was one of my pet subjects when I was a student, thanks to my mom. An avid reader, I actually make a conscious effort to read a Chinese book at least once every 2-3 months so I am in touch with the language.

As for dialects, I am very fluent in Cantonese although I am a Hainanese. My knowledge of Hainanese is only limited to 3 words:

1) Stupid (Bong Gang)

2) Naughty (Hiap)

3) Eat (Jiat Bui).

My dad never spoke to us in Hainanese and the fact that he spent more than 6 months in a year working overseas (he's in petroleum industry), I spent a lot more time with my late maternal grandparents - hence the environment to learn and speak Cantonese, not to mention a regular dosage of Hong Kong dramas. 

I am not sure if I will ever pick up Hainanese but at least I am glad that I am proficient in my mother tongue - that is Chinese.

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Lifestyle

Home > Lifestyle > Reflect > Story

Nov 29, 2009

Seared by Mandarin

If Chinese had been taught in a fun and creative way back when I was in school, I wouldn't have hated it so

By Sumiko Tan

-- ST ILLUSTRATIONS: ADAM LEE

I've long come to the conclusion that you either have it or you don't and clearly I don't.

I've no flair for languages. I can speak, read and write only English. I can't for the life of me get the hang of another language.

My knowledge of Chinese - my 'mother tongue' via my father - is pathetic.

Despite studying it in school for 12 years and suffering through 12 years of tuition classes, my Mandarin today is so poor I can't even conduct a proper conversation with a hawker (how do you say 'deep fried' or 'steamed' in Mandarin?)

My written Chinese is worse. I was having dinner with a friend from South Korea recently when he asked me to write a word in the Chinese script. I shrugged. He shook his head in mock censure.

I have forgotten how to read Chinese and can barely make out the meaning of the simplest words.

My understanding of Teochew - my 'mother tongue' via my paternal grandparents whom I grew up with - is better than my Mandarin, but it is bazaar Teochew. I doubt I'd understand proper Teochew if it was spoken to me.

My knowledge of Japanese - my 'mother tongue' via my mother - is dismal too. In fact, it's non-existent beyond common greetings, which I still often mix up.

My mother never spoke Japanese to my siblings and me although she and my father communicated in it when they wanted to keep things private. He could speak conversational Japanese.

Instead, my mother learnt Teochew and some English which was what we spoke at home.

Whenever I visit Japan now, I feel as if I'm mute. People will talk to me in Japanese and I'll have to gesticulate that, sorry, I may look like you and in fact I'm halfJapanese, but I don't speak the language.

At home my mother has her TV tuned to the Japanese cable channel NHK the whole day. I can sit in front of the TV and watch a programme with her yet not understand a word that's being said.

I suppose I would have been proficient in Mandarin and Japanese had they been spoken at home. But they weren't, and the reason I've not been able to pick them up later in life is simply this: lack of interest.

I have no interest in the Japanese language. Of course, I wouldn't mind being able to speak it. How nice it would be if I woke up one morning and found myself able to chatter away in it. But take lessons in it? No thanks. It'll be too difficult and I've no inclination to put myself through such a strenuous exercise.

Even the thought of being able to understand my heritage better if I spoke the language is not big enough an incentive for me to want to study it.

Chinese was a different ball game. Growing up, I needed to understand Chinese for a very practical reason: so that I could get into university.

The incentive was there, certainly. Unfortunately, the interest wasn't.

I belong to that group of English-educated Singaporeans whose lives were seared by Mandarin.

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew recently acknowledged that Chinese lessons in the old days were pitched at too difficult a level because he believed that it was possible to master two languages equally well.

The result was that 'successive generations of students paid a heavy price because of my ignorance'. He urged Chinese language teachers to make learning the mother tongue fun for children.

My reaction upon reading his speech was: 'Oh, MM, why couldn't you have said all this 40 years ago?'

A more relaxed approach to Chinese as a second language might have saved at least three generations of English-educated Singaporeans with no flair for languages a lot of heartache.

We might have become better speakers of English (instead of the Singlish that has become the lingua franca) had we poured that energy into perfecting English, which we were already comfortable with.

We might have had more time to spend on other subjects such as mathematics or history or economics.

We might, ironically, have been even better speakers of Mandarin. If we hadn't been forced to pass the subject and to attend all those horrible tuition classes, we might not have been so resistant to the subject and might have even liked it.

A more relaxed policy might have also saved countless families from having to take up mortgages so they could afford to send their children abroad to university. It might have even prevented some families from emigrating.

Mandarin was the bane of my childhood. My parents couldn't speak it, my grandparents didn't speak it and clearly I was a dunce at it.

But I had to pass it, and like thousands of others, I struggled to do so.

I memorised whole essays (xia yu tian, or a rainy day, was one of them) in the hope I could regurgitate it in the exam. I'd throw in a few evergreen phrases (ren shan ren hai, literally mountains and seas of people) to hopefully impress the person marking the paper.

My textbooks were pockmarked with English words to aid in pronunciation. I went through at least five tutors in 12 years. It was a subject that filled me with hate and dread yet I had to spend the most time on it.

I got a B3 for my O levels and I think a D7 for my AO levels. It was enough to get into university. Thereafter I promptly forgot everything related to Mandarin.

The irony was that when I was in my 20s, I lost my antipathy for the language. I became interested in Mandarin music and Chinese pop culture and got myself a tutor.

Instead of textbooks, we studied the song sheets of singers I liked and articles in Lianhe Zaobao which were related to my work. I enjoyed those lessons.

I gave them up after a few months because of lack of time. I soon forgot all that I had re-learnt through lack of practice.

Today, I have positive feelings about Mandarin and wish I could speak it well, but there is no great incentive to learn it.

To be fair to the Singapore system, it would have been hard to have made the teaching of Chinese 'fun' back in the days I was in school.

China was a closed, communist country associated with farmers, Mao suits and poverty-stricken relatives who were always writing letters appealing for help.

Taiwan was associated with big-haired songstresses who had no appeal to young people. Mandarin pop culture wasn't as big a draw as Hong Kong Cantonese pop.

It's a different world today and there are so many ways a Chinese language teacher can make the teaching of the language interesting. He can use Mandarin movies, music, comics and blogs.

What's past is past and there's no point regretting the harsh Mandarin policy of the old days.

There are hardcore Chinese advocates who think MM's move to make the teaching of Chinese more fun might lead to a dilution of the language and a drop in standards.

To them I say, good for you if you are so blessed with the ability to speak and write another language, and there are plenty of opportunities for your children to learn higher Chinese.

But spare a thought for linguistic dunces like me. The Chinese policy in schools hasn't changed and you still need a pass grade to enter university. If there are ways to help us get the hang of the language better, why begrudge us that?

sumiko@sph.com.sg

Sumiko Tan's column will resume in January.

Do you think that the move to make the learning of Chinese fun will lead to a drop in standards? Write to suntimes@sph.com.sg

NY Times: A Translator Tool With a Human Touch

 

 

 

 

November 23, 2009

Link by Link

A Translator Tool With a Human Touch

By NOAM COHEN

HOW hard can it be, as the joke goes, to speak Chinese? (Six-year-olds do it all the time.)

Yes, it turns out that learning languages is one of those skills that humans, even relatively young ones, master seemingly magically. It is all enough to make a mainframe computer jealous.

At I.B.M., a team of nearly 100, including mathematicians and software developers, is working on a project to create an automatic translation tool, so-called machine translation, that has the speed and accuracy to be used in instant-messaging between speakers of two different languages.

The project, called n.Fluent, is intended to teach the computer terminology that is specific to I.B.M.’s businesses, and, more significantly, allow the computer to learn what it has been doing wrong. To that end, the company is extracting and organizing contributions from I.B.M.’s 400,000-member work force spread across more than 170 countries, adding a human touch to the project.

Over a two-week period last month, the company issued a “worldwide translation challenge” to its employees, using a points-based system to award the biggest contributors prizes that were converted to charitable donations. About 6,000 I.B.M. employees made improvements in 11 languages to more than two million words of text translated by n.Fluent.

So, when a machine translation from French produces, “MTTP is the time of 30 minutes and it is steadily declining since January 2006,” a human correction comes up with this improved English version: “The MTTP delay is 30 minutes and it has been steadily declining since January 2006.”

“From this parallel data, we update the models,” said Salim Roukos, an I.B.M. researcher in language-related technology at its T.J. Watson Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., home of the n.Fluent project. “You want to learn the idiomatic expressions — when you say someone has kicked the bucket, you don’t want that translated word for word.”

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So far, n.Fluent is used only by I.B.M. employees, but the intention is to create a product that can be sold to other businesses.

Efforts like this at I.B.M., as well as social networking tools behind the company’s firewalls, amount to a new twist on “crowdsourcing,” the term I.B.M. officials use to describe them. In addition to the n.Fluent project, I.B.M. has its own companywide version of Wikipedia (Bluepedia), with contributions from 1,300 employees.

Perhaps the most innovative social networking experiment at I.B.M., according to Irene Greif of the I.B.M. Center for Social Software in Cambridge, Mass., is Dogear, a tool similar to Delicious that allows employees to share links and tagging on the Internet as well as on the I.B.M.-only intranet. The project itself was a bit of an experiment, and I.B.M. developers tweaked further, she said.

This led to Dogear, a system of tags and descriptions contributed by 10 percent of users. It has become more popular than I.B.M.’s own internal search engine.

“A small crowd, a self-selected crowd can often be useful,” Ms. Greif said.

This highlights the differences between what is occurring at I.B.M. and other large companies and what traditionally constitutes crowdsourcing.

I.B.M. employees are not just any “crowd”; they have expertise and a loyalty to their employer that any old posse wrangled up on the Internet may not. In fact, crowdsourcing may be the wrong way of thinking of such internal corporate projects. Employee-sourcing?

Maybe that catch-all term “collaboration” is the best way to think of what social networking technology can bring to the workplace.

After all, collaboration is an old goal for employees and employers.

In the case of the n.Fluent project, programmers are not trying to have a computer master the “rules” of a language, but rather are looking for statistical patterns between two sets of translated texts and among the words themselves. For example, Mr. Roukos said, the text of a Canadian parliamentary debate in French and English can help programmers to “build statistical models based on the parallel corpus.”

•

It is language’s fluidity and unpredictability that thus far make translation resist simple computer-based solutions. Which means that for the foreseeable future, translation experts will also need to become experts on collaboration.

“One of the reasons we’ve got senior-level executives behind this is that it is kind of a Harvard Business School case study of how the crowds inside the company help you develop a better product,” said David Lubensky, another researcher on the n.Fluent project. “We should be able to replicate this over various domains.”

For example, initially, all rewards to contributors were in the form of donations to one of seven worldwide charities. Over time, the team heard that some contributors “would personally want some trinket,” he said. And now small gifts are awarded as well.

Something any 6-year-old could have told you.

Check out Financial Times Lexicon

I have been reading FT for so many years and I didn't realise that they have this. Cool! :)

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http://lexicon.ft.com/

Browse thousands of words and phrases selected by Financial Times editors and suggest new terms for the glossary.

Fast Company: When Great Design Becomes Its Own Language

October 14, 2009

Tags: Design, Duffy Point of View, Joe Duffy, Duffy & Partners

When Great Design Becomes Its Own Language

By Joe Duffy

I've never been very good at learning a language. I was terrible in high school Spanish and couldn't grasp it at all until I started traveling to Mexico and had to learn at least enough to get by or starve. I tried to take up French some years back when I was working on a project in Paris and could barely retain enough to order in a restaurant or ask for directions on the street. I've been going to China every year for the past ten and I can hardly get beyond "hi", "how are you", "goodbye" and "thanks." Learning languages and how to play the piano are my biggest failings in life. Oh well, there's still time, some day...

On the other hand, I am quite good when it comes to making up new languages--if I do say so myself. Every new brand design project we take on requires that our entire team master the art of visual and verbal linguistics. If you think of any successful brand, you will no doubt know what I mean. The brands that have been designed in the best possible ways have their own proprietary language that tells their story, sets them apart from all the brands they compete with, and connects them in a very meaningful way to their audience.

The basic elements of a brand's visual language--type, color, photographic/illustration style and layout also establish a filter for making decisions on how to best "speak" from the heart. If all the basics are in sync, it will make choices like story, set design, talent, wardrobe, physical space, dialog and tone of voice easy to make.

It's really no different than being true to yourself when you speak to others about how you really feel or most importantly, who you really are. It's also the key to creating the world that surrounds you in a one-off, true to you kind of way. You already know the real you, from where you came, what got you here and what you stand for. These basics are the filter for designing your own language that sets you apart from everyone else. We all know the people who are most successful at this, as well as the brands that have been designed in a unique and meaningful way.

I can think of no better example of combining these two examples of originality--brand/person--in one piece of brand communication than this now somewhat old positioning spot from Apple that coincided with Steve Jobs retaking the helm and Chiat\Day's brilliant new phase of work with him. For my money, there has never been any brand that has so beautifully mastered the art of creating its own distinct language in everything they do.

Article location:http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/joe-duffy/duffy-point-view/when-great-design-becomes-its-own-language

ST: Rajaratnam, keeper of the faith

Sep 20, 2009

Rajaratnam, keeper of the faith

The Pledge is the enduring legacy of the late minister, to whom Singapore was worth fighting and dying for

By Irene Ng

Mr Rajaratnam understood the power of language and of ideas. And the idea he loved most was: A Singaporean Singapore where its citizens transcend their boundaries of race, religion and language, and unite to become one people. -- ST FILE PHOTO As any writer knows, first drafts are subject to revision. Good writers hone, sculpt and polish their drafts to make sure that their final versions sparkle. Mr S. Rajaratnam, who drafted Singapore's national Pledge, was a very good writer. Before he joined politics in 1959, he had distinguished himself as an influential newspaper columnist and a short-story writer. He understood the power of language and of ideas. And the idea he loved most was: A Singaporean Singapore where its citizens transcend their boundaries of race, religion and language, and unite to become one people. The Pledge and its origins have been much discussed recently. The subject is of particular interest to me as I am writing Mr Rajaratnam's biography for the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. In the course of my research over the last five years, I have gained a deeper appreciation of how the Pledge came about and why it stands as Mr Rajaratnam's enduring legacy to Singapore. Before the then Foreign Minister put his mind to the wording of the Pledge in 1966, the initial idea, as envisaged by the then Education Minister Ong Pang Boon, was that the Pledge would be recited by students in classrooms and during flag-raising ceremonies. The original idea arose, in fact, as a sort of administrative compromise, given the constraints of schools. It can be traced back to October 1965, shortly after Singapore's separation from Malaysia. The Education Ministry wanted to inculcate national consciousness and patriotism among students in schools by assembling them for a flag-raising ceremony to the strains of the National Anthem. However, the mass singing of the anthem, to be accompanied by a brass band, required a large field or assembly hall. Many schools lacked such facilities. Even those with the facilities could not carry out the flag-raising ceremony daily because of the tight curriculum. In a letter dated Oct 20, 1965, Mr Willie Cheng, the Ministry of Education's principal assistant secretary (administration), proposed that the flag-raising ceremonies be carried out in the classroom instead, where students would salute the flag. In a response dated Oct 22, 1965, Mr Kwan Sai Kheong, acting permanent secretary and director of education, wrote that Mr Ong had suggested, as a compromise, a pledge of two to three lines to be recited in the classroom, in place of singing the national anthem. On that basis, two earlier versions of the Pledge were produced. The first, dated Dec 17, 1965, was by Mr Philip Liau, adviser on textbooks and syllabuses. He used the American Students' Pledge as a reference: 'I pledge (reaffirm) my allegiance (loyalty) to the Flag of Singapore, and to the country for which it stands; one sovereign nation of many freedom-loving people of one heart, one mind and one spirit, dedicated to a just and equal society.' The second version, dated Dec 30, 1965, by Mr George Thomson, director of the Political Study Centre, read: 'I proudly and wholeheartedly pledge my loyalty to our flag of Singapore and to the honour and independence of our Republic whose banner it is. We come from different races, religions and cultures, but we are now united in mind and heart as one nation, and one people, dedicated to build by democratic means a more just and equal society.' Both versions were submitted to Mr Ong on Jan 26, 1966. His senior staff preferred the first version, considering it shorter and less abstract. It was no surprise that Mr Ong then turned to Mr Rajaratnam, a master stylist known for his strong convictions on building a common national identity. In a letter to Mr Rajaratnam dated Feb 2, 1966, Mr Ong asked him for comments on the two versions and for 'whatever amendments you wish to suggest'. By the time Mr Rajaratnam reverted with his earliest draft dated Feb 18, 1966, the Pledge was completely transformed. While the first two versions were all about pledging loyalty to the flag and country, Mr Rajaratnam's was about pledging to shared ideals, to a vision of Singapore that was, to his mind, worth fighting and dying for. And while the first two versions used the personal pronoun 'I', Mr Rajaratnam opted for the collective 'We, as citizens of Singapore'. Defying the evidence before his eyes, he imagined a nation pulsating as one people. Only he would have the boldness to envision a people giving voice to such ideals in unison, declaring their identity as 'citizens of Singapore', as opposed to 'the Malays', 'the Chinese', 'the Indians' and so on. More profoundly, he changed the entire premise for the Pledge as originally conceived by the Education Ministry. It was not just a few lines to be recited to the flag. It was a promise made to oneself, to each other and to future generations. Mr Rajaratnam's earliest draft which we have on record went: 'We, as citizens of Singapore, pledge to forget differences of race, language and religion and become one united people; to build a democratic society where justice and equality will prevail, and where we will seek happiness and progress by helping one another.' When he wrote 'to forget differences of race, language and religion', it was not a call for collective amnesia. He was not enjoining the people to deny their differences. He was calling on them to disregard these differences in their quest for a Singaporean Singapore. As his speeches during that period show, he was not blind to the fact that these differences were deeply rooted. On the contrary, he was all too conscious of their potency after the trauma of the racial riots in 1964 and the Separation in 1965. He was subjected to repeated reminders of the emotive power of appeals to these differences. During the years of merger, he was the strongest advocate for a Malaysian Malaysia, as opposed to a Malay Malaysia. Indeed, it was he who coined the slogan 'Malaysian Malaysia'. What he did not foresee was that Singapore would be expelled. The Separation in 1965 was, as he put it, 'the crushing of my dreams'. 'I believed in one nation, regardless of race and religion. My dreams were shattered,' he said. In the wake of that agonising moment came another test. Shortly after the Separation, a group of Chinese chauvinists, aware that their community now constituted 75 per cent, wanted Chinese language and culture to be the dominant consideration in government policy. Mr Rajaratnam recounted: 'They charged the PAP government with betraying Chinese language and culture. They believed that, in a predominantly Chinese Singapore, where the Chinese had overwhelming strength, the Government could be panicked into opting for Chinese chauvinism.' The minorities, particularly the Malays, were fearful of what Singapore would be like. When Mr Rajaratnam wrote his first draft of the Pledge, asking people to 'forget their differences', it was in the context of such anxious times. Disregard these differences of race, language and religion; do not let them stand in the way of becoming a united people, to the dream of creating a Singaporean Singapore, where justice and equality will prevail. Help one another to seek happiness and progress. Do this regardless of race, language or religion, we are implicitly urged. This ideal permeates many of his speeches on the topic at the time. Indeed, he was the first minister to use the phrase 'unity in diversity' in the 1960s, enjoining people to come together while celebrating the diversity among them. From available records, we can ascertain that the Pledge - as is used today - was finalised in July 1966. There is unfortunately a gap in the historical records on the revisions between Mr Rajaratnam's first draft, dated Feb 18, 1966, and the final one. But knowing how he worked and liked to work, in his days as a journalist as well as a politician, he would have refined it along the way, taking into account various views. As part of this process, he consulted the then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. According to Mr Lee's recollection, as related in an interview with me, he had pointed out to Mr Rajaratnam that some words sounded too idealistic. Mr Lee also tightened the draft. Unlike the Singapore flag which was discussed in the Cabinet in 1959, there is no record of any discussion in Cabinet on the Pledge. A search of the Cabinet minutes of meetings and papers in 1965 and 1966 revealed nothing on it. From this and available records, one can conclude that the final version was firmed up between individual ministers with input from Ministry of Education officials. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that the final words, spirit and sentiments of the Pledge owed much to Mr Rajaratnam. Mr Lee rightly described him as 'a great idealist'. He was also a great visionary. Without such qualities, the Pledge would not have been the imaginative leap that it was. He had great faith in the power of the human will to overcome the differences of race, language, and religion, and to transform the separate communities into a nation. After Mr Rajaratnam left the Cabinet in 1988, he became concerned with policies which appeared to encourage Singaporeans to assert their communal identities. In 1990, he spoke up against what he perceived as a dangerous form of Chinese self-assertion in the Speak Mandarin campaign. While making clear that he supported the campaign just as he would for others encouraging people to speak 'Malay, Tamil, French, Japanese, or even better English', he took issue with the campaign's slogan 'if you are Chinese, make a statement - in Mandarin'. This, for the nervous minorities, would carry the subliminal message that the Chinese are different, he warned. Had he been asked, he would have suggested this slogan instead: 'Make a Singaporean statement in Mandarin.' Such episodes underscored the importance of Mr Rajaratnam's role as the keeper of the faith, a role which few others could play with equal conviction. He became an institution as a protector of the vision in the national Pledge - his enduring legacy to Singapore. The writer is a Member of Parliament and writer-in-residence at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Iseas). The first volume of Mr S. Rajaratnam's two-part biography will be published by Iseas by early next year.

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

TIME: Twitter and Gourmet Sex - They're in the Dictionary Now

Excerpt:

To qualify for inclusion in the esteemed lexicon, a word had to have, over the past two years, six quality citations in Collins' digital corpus, a computerized database that scans 2.5 billion words across a number of print and online resources.

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Thursday, Sep. 03, 2009

Twitter and Gourmet Sex: They're in the Dictionary Now

By William Lee Adams / London

If language acts as a barometer of society's changing mores and preoccupations, then in the past two years scores of people have developed an interest in gourmet sex (lovemaking that is particularly passionate and enjoyable), the mankini (a man's swimming costume consisting of a narrow V-shaped piece of material extending from the crotch to the shoulders) and Fannie Mae (the informal name for the Federal National Mortgage Association that buys and sells mortgage debt).

Editors at Britain's Collins English Dictionary have added these and 264 other entries to the 30th Anniversary Edition, published Sept. 3. To qualify for inclusion in the esteemed lexicon, a word had to have, over the past two years, six quality citations in Collins' digital corpus, a computerized database that scans 2.5 billion words across a number of print and online resources. (See the best social-networking applications.)

The rise of social-networking sites led to the addition of Twitter (the noun) and twitter (the verb), while the kind of dashed-off writing that appears in posts on that site has given new permanence to words such as hmm, heh, and mwah (the sound of an exaggerated kiss) that were previously considered mere sounds. "Had Twitter and Facebook not become so popular, there's no doubt these terms would not have been included," says Duncan Black, editor of the dictionary. "They're part of the language of microblogging." (See 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

He also credits Twitter for the resurgence of terms like heigh-ho and hey-ho — exclamations of happiness, disappointment or surprise — that had fallen into disuse. Words popular in e-mail shorthand and text-messaging such as OMG (oh my god) and WTF (what the f___) also made the cut.

Beyond digital culture, environmental concerns have helped color the dictionary green. Craggers (members of carbon reduction action groups) now have terms to describe their colleagues in the environmental movement. They probably know more than one ecotarian (a person who only eats food that has been produced in an environmentally friendly manner) and plenty of carborexics (those obsessed with reducing their carbon footprint). (Read "Hangman, Spare That Word: The English Purge Their Language.")

Lastly, the ongoing global financial crisis has moved once highly niche words into the mainstream. People that bandy about complex terms like quantitative easing (increasing the supply of money in order to stimulate economic activity) can now check that they are actually using them correctly. The recession's effect on our behavior has impacted language too. Holidaymakers trying to rein in spending have popularized the term staycation (taking a holiday without going abroad). Glamping (glamorous camping) is less popular at the moment, for obvious reasons.

Expand your vocabulary with these other additions to the dictionary:

Avid fart: a flashy and intrusive visual-effects editing style (in film)

beer o'clock: the time of day when it is acceptable or customary to start drinking alcohol

boomburb: a large suburb experiencing rapid population growth

cage fighting: a form of extreme fighting taking place in an enclosed space

frugalista: a person who tries to stay fashionably dressed on a budget

gak: slang for cocaine

goon bag: the plastic bladder inside a box of (usually cheap) wine

homo economicus: a theoretical human being who rationally calculates the costs and benefits of every action before making a decision, used as the basis for a number of economic theories and models

Ponzimonium: financial turmoil in the wake of uncovering Ponzi schemes

space junk: objects such as artificial satellites and material discarded from space stations that remain in space after use

supernanny: an expert who advises parents on how to deal with badly behaved children

Twitterverse: the social-networking site Twitter and its users

Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1920277,00.html

Copyright © 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

Boing Boing: Machine translation fun

Machine translation fun

Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, August 17, 2009 2:10 PM | permalink

Enter a phrase intro Translation Party and it will translate it into Japanese and back into English as many times as it takes to reach steady state. (Via Zoomdoggle)

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Enter a phrase intro Translation Party and it will translate it into Japanese and back into English as many times as it takes to reach steady state. (Via Zoomdoggle)

Machine translation fun

Enter a phrase intro Translation Party and it will translate it into Japanese and back into English as many times as it takes to reach steady state. (Via Zoomdoggle)

FT: You say 'you was' and I say 'you were'

You say ‘you was’ and I say ‘you were’

By Michael Skapinker

Published: June 15 2009 19:21 | Last updated: June 15 2009 22:30

Not everyone has taken Sir Alan Sugar’s appointment as Gordon Brown’s “enterprise champion” seriously. “What do we think of him coming in? Not much,” one business group told the Financial Times.

Most of the antipathy stems from a perception that the appointment is a stunt, an attempt by the prime minister to appropriate the stardom that attaches to the veteran entrepreneur’s hosting of the British version of The Apprentice.

But there is a fair bit of snobbery, too, about Sir Alan (soon to become Lord Sugar). This is not because he has refused to soften his east London accent. Even Tony Blair used to drop the odd ‘t’. It is because he has not adjusted his grammar.

“It seems you was a prophet,” he told one contestant during the final of this year’s The Apprentice. Critics have asked why the BBC, as a supposed guardian of the language, allows this sort of thing.

People say “you was” elsewhere too. The New Yorker, reporting on the death of a school assistant principal in the borough of Queens, quoted a written tribute from a student: “You was the Person That woke everybody up in the morning. You was a really nice man.”

To some, this merely proves that poor education knows no boundaries. But in their study “Was/were variation: A perspective from London”, Jenny Cheshire and Sue Fox of Queen Mary, University of London, write that those who say “you was” have history on their side. “You was” is hundreds of years old.

It has been used in many parts of the English-speaking world. “You was” appeared in Tristan da Cunha and in New Zealand in the 19th century. It is common in parts of the eastern US today, as well as in England. Older people use the construction as much as teenagers do. Sometimes older people use it more. In Birmingham, researchers found that older people were more likely than adolescents to say “you was”.

“You was” appears, too, in the south-west of England, East Anglia and in Sir Alan’s native east London. The academics’ study of east London threw up interesting patterns.

They looked at an outer London suburb and an inner city district. The outer London suburb was 95 per cent white. The inner London area was 44 per cent white. Children at the local schools spoke 26 languages.

In the inner London area, most of the elderly residents said “you was”. The elderly outer London speakers, many with roots in the inner city, said “you were”. Among the young, it was the other way around. Adolescents in outer London were more likely to say “you was” than those in the inner city.

And here is the twist. The inner city youth most likely to opt for “you were” were young Bangladeshis. Why? The Queen Mary researchers thought it might be because many arrived at school unable to speak English. They also went to schools that were almost entirely Bangladeshi, where their Anglophone teachers taught them “you were” rather than “you was”.

Good, you may think. At least this generation of immigrants’ children is learning to speak correctly. But there is no single standard of correct grammar. “You were” would be as much of a howler in some (non-Bangladeshi) parts of east London as “you was” would be in this newspaper.

When I have written along these lines in the past, I have received outraged e-mails saying: “You are wrong.” (The same people would say that the business group quoted at the start of this column should have asked “what do we think of his coming in?”) But notions of grammatical correctness change. If they did not, the outraged e-mails would say: “Thou art wrong.”

In his book, The Fight for English, David Crystal says: “The only languages that do not change are dead ones.” Sometimes everyone picks up on a change. On other occasions, the take-up is uneven and some of us end up saying “you were” and some “you was”.

It is true that if you want to get ahead, it pays to adopt the grammar of those in charge. If you grow up saying “you was”, it helps if someone teaches you that “you were” is going to take you further in a university or job interview.

Some people become adept at what linguists call “code-switching”, changing grammatical constructions depending on the context. I noticed one Sugar quirk. He told the winner of The Apprentice, “you were on the money”, not “you was”. Sue Fox, one of the Queen Mary researchers, told me that mixing constructions during the same interaction was not uncommon. What was unusual about Sir Alan was that he had held on to his childhood grammar while rising so high.

But then Sir Alan has always thrived on being an anti-establishment outsider. Will he continue to be? His speeches in the Lords will make a fascinating linguistic study.

michael.skapinker@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/skapinker

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

ST: I vowed not to be vexed

Aug 9, 2009

I vow not to be vexed

By Fiona Chan

By the time you open this newspaper, dear reader, I shall be a happily married woman - if all has gone well. If, that is to say, I have managed to finish writing my wedding vows in time for the solemnisation yesterday. You see, in the spirit of making our wedding personalised and unique - just like every other couple out there - my new husband and I decided to come up with our own version of 'I do'. It seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, we'd already custom-made our bridal outfits (four for me), wedding invitations (that look like concert tickets), table favours (bookmarks with our favourite quotes) and photo album (created from scratch in a single night). In other words, we'd already thrown tantrums at each other, screamed at inept wedding vendors and threatened to call the whole thing off several times. Compared to that, how difficult could it be to write a couple of sappy lines? It's not like we didn't consider just using the traditional texts provided by our Justice of the Peace and the thousands of wedding websites out there. But it's difficult to take your soon-to-be spouse seriously when his vows rhyme like a boyband song: 'In sickness and in health, in poverty and in wealth, no matter what you do, I will always love you'. So given that both my husband and I make a living using words - he's a lawyer, I'm a journalist - we figured it would be a piece of cake to create our own lovey-dovey oaths. What we failed to realise was that it would be nearly impossible to agree on what to say because, well, I'm a journalist and he's a lawyer. Whenever I tried to be sensational and stirring, there he was being pedantic and practical. Me: 'I will love you always and forever!' Him: 'Define 'forever'.' It soon became obvious that our vow vexations simply reflected the fundamental problem of any relationship: trying to balance romance with responsibility. It is undeniably poetic - and very easy - to promise someone that you will be truly, madly, deeply in love with him or her forever and ever, no matter what happens, even if you both get struck by lightning and are paralysed for life. But can you really deliver on a promise like that? Being struck by lightning is all well and good, but what if, for instance, your husband starts to take on the personality of Homer Simpson? Or if your wife - horrors - turns into her naggy mother? Then again, if you play it too safe, your wedding vows could well end up thus: 'Okay, I really love you today, but I'm not so sure about tomorrow. We'll see.' It doesn't help that my generation is more likely to SMS 'hi i luv u' than to write a real love letter. I can't remember the last time I put pen to scented paper, although my husband did surprise me last week with a handwritten card. It didn't mention forever, but it came pretty close. Even if you've found the perfect sentiment to express, you have to be careful about what words you choose. Saying your vows in front of a few hundred guests is a bit like performing stand-up comedy, without the comedy (hopefully). What's the point of beautifully written vows if, struck by performance anxiety on the day itself, you end up taking your partner to be your 'awfully wedded' spouse, through 'bitcher and through poorer', 'till debt do us part'? With so many things to worry about, it's little wonder I had serious writer's block the whole of last week. Up until Friday, I was in real danger of saying: 'Dear husband, I, like, promise to, you know, love you... and stuff.' Increasingly desperate, I turned to my most constant and reliable source of wisdom: TV shows. There I found that even the most articulate TV characters run into trouble with their fake wedding vows. On the sitcom Friends, Chandler spends an entire episode coming up with this: 'Dear Monica,' he practises. 'There are no words... ' (pause in which he tries to think of what to say next, and fails) There are no words.' Fortunately, while I also had no words, I have many DVD box-sets. And so, after a long but entertaining search, I decided the best thing to do was to keep it simple. Professions of unconditional and endless love are meaningless, but I can at least promise to do the right thing. Which is to stay by my husband's side, for better or for worse, and to treat him with all the affection and loyalty he rightly deserves. It won't be easy, but what fun would it be if it was? Marriage, is, after all, nothing but a set of promises - and I'm looking forward to keeping every single one of them. fiochan@sph.com.sg

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.  Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

WSJ: Quick! Tell Us What KUTGW Means

AUGUST 5, 2009, 10:50 A.M. ET

Quick! Tell Us What KUTGW Means

By STEPHANIE RAPOSO

Kate Washburn didn’t know what to make of the email a friend sent to her office with the abbreviation “NSFW” written at the bottom. Then she clicked through the attached sideshow, titled “Awkward Family Photos.” It included shots of a family in furry “nude” suits and of another family alongside a male walrus in a revealing pose.

After looking up NSFW on NetLingo.com—a Web site that provides definitions of Internet and texting terms—she discovered what it stood for: “Not safe for work.”

Ellen Weinstein

Say What?

A sampling of some popular shorthand texting terms.

• UG2BK . . . . . . . You got to be kidding
• GBTW. . . . . . . . Get back to work
• NMP . . . . . . . . . Not my problem
• PIR . . . . . . . . . . Parent in room
• GFTD. . . . . . . . . Gone for the day
• FYEO. . . . . . . . . For your eyes only
• BI5 . . . . . . . . . . Back in five minutes
• DEGT . . . . . . . . Don’t even go there
• BIL . . . . . Boss is listening
• PAW. . . . Parents are watching
• 99 . . . . . . Parents are no longer watching
• PCM . . . . Please call me
• IMS. . . . . I am sorry
• TOY. . . . . Thinking of you
• KUTGW. . Keep up the good work
• CID . . . . . Consider it done
• FWIW. . . For what it’s worth
• HAND . . . Have a nice day
• IAT . . . . . I am tired
• NRN . . . . No response necessary
• 4COL. . . . For crying out loud
• WRUD. . . What are you doing
• LMIRL. . . Let’s meet in real life
• ^5 . . . . . . High five

“If I would have known it wasn’t safe for work, I wouldn’t have taken the chance of being inappropriate,” says Ms. Washburn, 37 years old, a media consultant in Grand Rapids, Mich.

As text-messaging shorthand becomes increasingly widespread in emails, text messages and Tweets, people like Ms. Washburn are scrambling to decode it. In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with—and sometimes police—their children.

One reason for the surge in texting abbreviations—more than 2,000 and counting, according to NetLingo—is the boom in social-media sites like Twitter, where messages are limited to 140 characters. Text messages, too, are limited in length, so users have developed an alphabet soup of shorthand abbreviations to save time, and their thumbs.

Taking time to learn the jargon may seem like a WOMBAT (“Waste of money, brains and time”). But with over one trillion text messages sent and received in the U.S. last year, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group, you run the risk of feeling out of it if you don’t.

“If a CEO does not appear to be tech-savvy, people may start to wonder, ‘Is the company not plugged into today’s technologies also?’” says Stephanie Grayson, a corporate speech and media trainer based in New York.

Translation Sites

The confusion has given rise to a number of resources that provide English translations for terms like WRUD (“What are you doing?”) and TTYL (“Talk to you later”)—among them independent Web sites like NetLingo.com and UrbanDictionary.com and corporate ones like LG Mobile Phones’ DTXTR.com. Textapedia, a pocket guide to texting terms released last year, is sold in over 4,000 stores nationwide. NetLingo reports a 391% increase in the number of unique visitors over the past five years, while UrbanDictionary says it saw a 40% jump in its unique visitors last June from June 2008.

Both the AP Stylebook and Merriam-Webster Dictionary recognized texting shorthand for the first time in their 2009 editions, which were released in June. The AP Stylebook now includes IMO (“In my opinion”), ROFL (“Rolling on the floor laughing”) and BFF (“Best friends forever”), among others. Merriam-Webster defines LOL (“Laugh out loud”) and OMG (“Oh my God”).

“These abbreviations have shown they are very likely to be a part of our language for a long time,” says Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster.

Branding strategist Elizabeth Kanna, 50, maintains a “Mom’s Text Talk Sheet,” a cheat sheet of over 30 textisms created and updated constantly by her three teenage daughters, on her desk at work. Ms. Kanna, who lives in Sacramento, Calif., says she refers to it daily as many of her clients prefer communicating through text shorthand like SWDYT (“So what do you think?”) and WDYM (“What do you mean?”).

Bert Martinez Communications LLC, a Houston-based consulting firm, hired a 20-year-old and two teenagers last fall to help teach texting vernacular to its staff of six. “It gave us the confidence that we could use the lingo and connect with the younger clientele on their level,” says Bert Martinez, president of the firm, which now conducts about 20% of its communication with clients via texting.

Teenagers, for their part, text in code for a reason, says Anne Mitchell, president of the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy, based in Boulder, Colo. “It is usually because they are involved in activities which they don’t want their parents to discover, such as casual sex, drugs and alcohol,” she says. Indeed, parents may be startled by such popular terms as GNOC (“Get naked on camera”), POS (“Parent over shoulder”), LMIRL (“Let’s meet in real life”) and IWSN (“I want sex now”).

Susan Avery, senior editor at ParentDish.com, AOL’s parenting Web site, says she has observed parents becoming more concerned about not knowing what their kids are talking about. “The best thing is to embrace it and use it as a bonding experience with your child,” she says.

Shannon Snyder, a writer in Vancouver, B.C., uses DTXTR.com to monitor her children. “I don’t want my kid to be the racist or the rude kid because he’s repeating a random composition of letters he heard someone else say in school and thought it was cool,” says Ms. Snyder, 34.

The fact that 15-year-old Jack Beisel’s mother uses texting shortcuts like HBU (“How about you?”) and CIL (“Check in later”) strengthens their relationship, he says. “It makes her seem like she’s a little more understanding about modern culture,” says Mr. Beisel, who lives in Bayport, N.Y.

The consequences of misunderstanding the lingo can be mortifying. Cassandra McSparin, 23, of Jim Thorpe, Pa., knew a woman whose friend’s mother had died. The woman texted her friend: “I’m so sorry to hear about your mother passing away. LOL. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

It turns out she thought LOL meant “Lots of love.”

Write to Stephanie Raposo at stephanie.raposo@wsj.com

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

==

See also: Non Sequitur - Twitter

Washington Post: 'Best' for Last?

'Best' for Last?
Or Should You Sign That E-Mail With Sincerely? Regards? Cheers? or L-, L-, Love?

By Ruth McCann
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 3, 2009

It feels like the 18th century all over again. All that daily correspondence, all those long hours spent hunched over a desk, composing some thoughtful missive about one's dowry or the Jacobite rebellions. Signed, "Yr humble servant."

Same deal now, basically, except (obviously) we're not clutching quills; we're writing a passel of e-mails and clicking send on ye olde BlackBerry until our fingers bleed. And something else isn't quite the same: Unlike the heroes and heroines of epistolary novels, we aren't blessed with time-tested formal guidance on the correct way to sign off.

"Best"?

"Cheers"?

"Sincerely"?

For Daniel Morrison, CEO of the D.C.-based international relief nonprofit 1Well, the wrong sign-off posed an impediment to deeper romance. "I sent an e-mail to a girlfriend, and she was very put off by me signing off with 'Regards,' saying that I sounded very 'emotionally detached,' " Morrison says via e-mail. "We did break up shortly thereafter, so maybe she was right."

Will Schwalbe, co-author with David Shipley of "Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better," warns, "You can really do a lot of damage, even with a careless closing. And one of the terrifying things about e-mail is: You may never know."

But you may well feel the chill.

"If you have been writing to someone 'Best' this and 'Best' that, and you get an e-mail that is a little colder, a little hostile, and they sign 'Sincerely,' that does mean things aren't so good," Schwalbe says. " 'Sincerely' is the one that says, 'There's a problem here.' "

And, one may well wonder, does "Cordially" ever mean anything other than "My hostility is only thinly veiled"?

And when, e-mail-wise, is it too early for "Love"? Does "Fondly" ever belong in business? Is "Cheers" too mock-Brit? Too alcoholic?

Will something that seems totally clever turn out to be totally obnoxious? Such as: "Off like a prom dress"?

So many questions, so few answers.

Craig Brownstein, vice president of media relations at the PR firm Edelman, is a devotee of "Best" and its variants. He says he started seeing "Best" in e-mails a few years ago and has since picked it up. But that professional close can quickly escalate into greater e-intimacies.

"Likely, if it's someone I know, they get a whole mess of 'Kisses' and 'Hugs,' " Brownstein sighs. "I'm the sweet flack on K Street."

Brownstein asked his research team, StrategyOne, to catalogue the most common e-mail closing lines with an online poll. (The sample of about a thousand Internet users came from a nonrandom pool of respondents, so these numbers are rather more food for thought than hard data.)

Although "Best" seems ubiquitous in certain e-mail circles (Brownstein's and Schwalbe's, for instance), for some reason it was barely a blip on this survey's radar.

Twenty-five percent of participants said they close their professional e-mails with "Sincerely," while 20 percent use some variant of "Thank you," and 17 percent use no closing at all. "Love" is the most common personal e-mail closing, followed by no closing.

This all might come as no great surprise to Peter Post, author of "Essential Manners for Men," and one of manner maven Emily Post's great-grandchildren. Post swears by "Sincerely," which he describes as an all-purpose, "safe" e-mail close -- the little black dress of sign-offs, if you will. "Yours truly" and "Regards" can also work, Post says, but "Best" is more dangerous territory.

"I think it's more important with 'Best' that you know the person," Post says. "I think it would be very awkward to do that to a person that you only knew very slightly or hadn't yet met."

But in their book, Schwalbe and Shipley recommend "Best" and "Best wishes" as "among the most common in e-mail -- safe, all-purpose ways of bringing a note to an end." Schwalbe himself often ratchets "Best" up to "Best!" -- with the exclamation point added to warm up a medium in which everything can unfortunately sound a wee bit frigid and humorless.

Huffington Post editor in chief Arianna Huffington, likewise, says that one can do better than "Sincerely."

"The problem," Huffington says, "with traditional sign-offs like 'Sincerely' is not so much that they're too cold as that they're like vestiges of another medium: letters. . . . I've always used 'Best' or 'All the best,' because that's always been standard for me, even for letters. And I never liked 'Sincerely' -- I always found it very cold."

Huffington -- who signs off with "Fondly" when she's writing to older correspondents and closes e-mails to her daughters with kisses and hugs -- says that she drops the closing with the writers, editors and friends with whom she's in near-constant communication, describing these sorts of e-mails as part of an ongoing conversation that encompasses everything from face-time to instant-message exchanges.

Musing on the ever-mutating art of the sign-off, Huffington says, "One thing that is kind of interesting is how more and more people are actually signing off by telling you where they are. . . . Like, 'Sent while being yelled at by a flight attendant to turn off all electronic devices,' or 'Sent while killing time in traffic,' which we should not be doing."

Murky waters, these, unless you're fortunate enough to be, say, in the military, where specific closings are standard fare. Matthew Cox, a senior staff writer at the Army Times, says that members of the Navy and the Air Force often close their e-mails with "V/R" ("Very respectfully"). For the Marines, it's "S/F" (Semper Fi), while Army Rangers sign off with "RLTW" ("Rangers Lead the Way").

Emily Gould, a New York writer, blogger, former Gawker staffer and not a member of the military, avoids both "Best" and "Sincerely." She finds "Best" unsavory, as it frequently appears at the end of the rejection letters. And "Sincerely," she says, "sounds grade school." So she uses "Thanks" whenever possible.

"But the sad truth," she says, "is that if I am on speaking terms with someone, or if I feel at all warmly towards them -- basically if I have met them and don't actively dislike them -- I will often close with 'XOXO.' Like Gossip Girl. I'm ashamed to admit this."

The easy-to-type-ness and communicating-of-warmth-ness of "XOXO" have proved handy, too, for MSNBC's chief D.C. correspondent Norah O'Donnell. She writes in an e-mail that she started closing notes to friends with "XOXO" after she realized she'd been neglecting to sign off at all. (Her e-mail response, even to yours truly, ended with "XOXO.")

Or, O'Donnell says, she'll close with "Warmly," since " 'Sincerely' seems so formal and outdated." Her husband, local restaurateur Geoff Tracy, invariably uses "Cheers!"

Gould and O'Donnell are not alone in their proclivity for "XOXO," which also has a much-truncated alter ego, "x." Schwalbe says that "x" began as a text-message closer (useful for its brevity) and has since migrated to e-mail.

Freelance writer Alyssa Shelasky says she usually signs off with "xxAlyssa" (the "x" isn't necessarily indicative of blue material anymore).

Spike Mendelsohn, Shelasky's boyfriend and owner of Good Stuff Eatery in Southeast Washington, says, "I used to sign e-mails totally erratically. Like, I'd write, 'From Spike,' and intentionally put a comma after my name just to rebel against grammar." Perhaps TV fame has mellowed him (yes, he's that Spike, the one who wore a series of hats throughout "Top Chef"), as he now simply signs off with "Love and Bacon."

Whether you love bacon or puppies or flowers, a person can choose particular-to-me closings, the likes of which we've spotted since the familiar blue triangle of AOL began its cyber rule at the dawn of the '90s. Post, for one, fondly recalls that his sister used to sign to letters (and now signs e-mails) with "WLAFR"--"With love and fondest regards." The Rev. James Schall, a professor of government at Georgetown University, says he closes all his informal correspondence with "Pray for me." ("One does," he says, "get funny reactions.") Peter Baker, a "Best wishes" sort and an English professor at the University of Virginia, reports having spotted an Old English sign-off at the end of a colleague's e-mail -- "swa a," which apparently means "as ever."

Participants in the StrategyOne survey reported all manner of strange e-mail closings that tumble forth from correspondents reveling in the intoxicating mania of near-instantaneous communication. Among them: "In brotherhood," "That's me yo," "Hope you live through the night," "Safety first," "Make love not war, that's what Army cots are for,"' "Wonka wonka" and "Seacrest out."

Until e-mail etiquette starts being taught in elementary school (is it?), perhaps we've little choice left but to hit send first and ask forgiveness later. Cheers & Ciao, Yr Obdt Srvt.

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

WSJ: What's Chinese for .limitedgovernment?

OPINION: INFORMATION AGE
JULY 26, 2009, 7:51 P.M. ET

What’s Chinese for .limitedgovernment?

Authoritarian governments make a bid to control the Internet.

By L. GORDON CROVITZ

One of the marvels of the Internet is that it is self-governing, with private groups of engineers and technology companies doing their best to keep it up and running without political interference. Many countries around the world censor how their citizens access the Web, but governance of the Internet itself has been left to technologists and their largely libertarian instincts.

This happy state of affairs could be close to an end. There are now more Internet users in China than in any other country, and the fastest growing group of new users online is from non-English- speaking developing countries. This has led to a well-meaning plan to reorient the Web toward these users. But it could result in authoritarian governments insisting on more influence.

At issue is a key shift in the approach of Icann, the California-based nonprofit that maintains the directory of Internet addresses. Icann, which stands for Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, ultimately reports to the U.S. Commerce Department, though it has numerous advisory groups from other countries and from free-speech and other advocacy groups. It plans to open the door to many new Web addresses and to give better access to non-English-language users.

Next spring, Icann is set to expand Web addresses beyond the familiar .com, .org and .edu to domains that would include the names of industries, companies and political movements. Under its proposed rules, anyone who could afford the almost $200,000 registration fee should be able to start a domain. Icann would also permit top-level domains in non-Latin alphabets. This means Internet addresses in languages such as Chinese, Arabic and Farsi.

This will make the Web more accessible to non-English-speakers but also will lead to tricky issues, such as whether dissidents in China or Iran will be permitted to have their own dot-addresses. How would Beijing respond to a Chinese-language domain that translates into .democracy or .limitedgovernment, perhaps hosted by computers in Taipei or Vancouver?

This prospect could explain why Beijing recently had a top bureaucrat engage with Icann for the first time since 2001. Governments tend to be less concerned when only their better-educated, more English-fluent citizens have access to information. When I ran the English-language Far Eastern Economic Review magazine in the 1990s, it was rarely blacklisted in China for its reporting, but issues were routinely banned when they included political cartoons featuring Chinese government officials.

The combination of more domains in more languages could put unprecedented pressures on a system under which Web addresses are interoperable only because all governments agree that Icann controls the directory.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a Web researcher writing a book about lessons from China on Internet freedom, praises Icann for being influenced by nongovernmental groups, not just governments. “The U.N. model of Internet governance is highly unsatisfactory from a human-rights and free-expression point of view for obvious reasons,” she told me. “The Chinese and the Iranians and various other authoritarian countries will insist on standards and rules that make dissent more difficult, destroy the possibility of anonymity, and facilitate surveillance.”

Up to now, governments have been largely hands-off. An amusing example is the dispute over the domain www.newzealand.com. The queen of England, “in right of her Government in New Zealand, as Trustee for the Citizens, Organizations and State of New Zealand,” brought an action in 2002 against a Seattle-based company called Virtual Countries Inc. that had registered the Web address. The queen argued that her antipodean country should have control over its own .com name. This may sound reasonable, but she lost. New Zealand had to buy the .com address for $500,000.

Will governments like China’s be as philosophical about Internet domain decisions they don’t like?

Countries such as China, Russia and Iran have long argued that it’s wrong for Icann to report to the U.S. government. Any alternative to the light control exerted by the U.S. government could put the Web on a slippery course toward more control. This is one reason efforts by these countries to politicize Icann have failed in the past.

“I think the question here is not about which governments have the moral right to lead Internet governance over others,” Ms. MacKinnon argues, “but about whether it’s appropriate that Internet governance should be the sole province of governments, many of which do not arguably represent the interests of Internet users in their countries because they were not democratically elected.”

It’s tempting to dismiss Internet idealists, but the Web has been a powerful force for individual expression, especially in parts of the world where free speech had been limited to those who could afford it. Groups like Icann will have their hands full trying to keep controlling governments from restricting freedom of the Internet.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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London Telegraph: Twitter gains entry in dictionary

Twitter gains entry in dictionary

Twitter has gained academic respectability with inclusion in the Collins English Dictionary.

 

By Ben Leach
Published: 7:00AM BST 06 Jul 2009

More than 220,000 Iran tweets were sent through Twitter every hour at the peak of the unrest

The social networking tool, which has 1.8 million users, will be listed in the 30th anniversary edition to be published later this year.

The website, which allows users to send brief online updates to their friends and family, will appears as both a noun and a verb.

The entry under noun will read: "a website where people can post short messages about their current activities" and under verb it will read: "to write short messages on the Twitter website".

The word Twitterati, referring to users of the website, will also be entered, as will Twitterverse, which defines the website and its users.

Elaine Higgleton, Collins editorial director, told the Daily Mail: "Hardly a day goes by when you don't see some Twitter-related article. Hence I find it entirely unsurprising that this year we have not one Twitter-related entry in the dictionary, but three."

Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Stephen Fry and Lily Allen are all regular users of the website. During Wimbledon Andy Murray posted updates, including one which revealed the Queen had wished him luck.

Other regular users include Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, and Boris Johnson, the London mayor.

Washington Post: Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project

Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project
Making Freerice vocabulary learning more portable

Phil Shapiro
PC World
Sunday, May 17, 2009 4:19 AM

At my public library job I've been talking up the Freerice.com Web site to many elementary school and middle school students who visit the computer center where I work. The site donates rice to a United Nations food program when students click on the correct answers to multiple-choice vocabulary questions. I've been fascinated to see the different reactions students have to using this Web site. One second-grade girl loves Freerice.com, even though many of the vocabulary words are beyond a second-grade reading level. Some fourth-grade boys cannot get any questions correct at the easiest level of Freerice.com.

It occurred to me that without too much effort I could build some free multimedia learning materials that could help those fourth-grade boys have a positive experience with Freerice.com. I was sitting there at my job pondering this question when I received a phone call from a friend of mine, the mother of a twelfth-grade student here in Maryland. Maryland requires all graduating students to perform 75 hours of community service. This is a fabulous law that was put into effect in the early 1990s.

My friend's daughter, Sarah Behnia, was in need of 30 hours of volunteer work by the end of March, 2009, or she would not graduate high school. My friend asked me if I could help her daughter acquire those volunteer hours. As it happens, the Takoma Park Maryland Library, where I work, is qualified to give volunteer work hours for students who perform community service work at the library. So I told my friend, ?Send your daughter down to the library. I'm going to put her to work on a free educational learning materials project. I can guarantee you that your daughter will have some fun working on this project, will learn new skills and will create something very useful for our community.?

Sarah showed up at my place of work at 6 p.m., at the end of my shift. I sat her down at my MacBook and showed her how to use Screenflow, an excellent screencasting program for Macs. She quickly learned how to use Screenflow and was creating narrated screencasts of the correct answers for the easiest vocabulary levels of Freerice.com. We laughed a lot in the process of creating these screencasts. I was particularly focused on this community work not feeling too burdensome.

I then showed her how to export the screencasts using video and audio codecs that would let these screenplays play on older Macs and Windows that I like to place with families in the neighborhood.

At the end of the project, I decided to use iSquint, a free program, to compress these screencasts for viewing on iPods, Sony PSPs, and other portable media devices. I uploaded all these screencasts to the Internet Archive, which provides free Web hosting for such materials. You can view these screencasts online or download them all for offline viewing on computers or portable media players. (The download is a 151 MB zip file.)

Now members of my community--and other communities--can learn some Freerice.com vocabulary using this freely distributable, public-domain learning material. Using an iPod, they could even learn vocabulary while waiting for a bus in the morning, or riding the bus, or waiting at a doctor's office. The people who benefit from this project may never meet me or Sarah Behnia, and that's just fine with me. Creating something of value for others to use is what the Internet is all about. I am immensely grateful to John Breen, the inventor of Freerice.com, and this is my small way of saying thanks.

A couple of next steps in this Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project remain, and I could use the help of about 10 to 20 more people to work on those steps. These steps include: creating a spreadsheet with all of the synonyms in the Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project and then populating that spreadsheet with sample sentences illustrating use of the words. I'd also like to create a pure audio version of the Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project using Audacity. I'm thinking of using Zoho Projects to manage the next steps of this project. Does anyone know of a better Web management tool?

If you know how to use computers and would be interested in participating in those next steps, then send me an e-mail with the subject: Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project--and thanks in advance. You don't need to make any specific time commitment, but I'm looking for people who could volunteer about 4 hours per month (or more) for the next stages of this project.

Phil Shapiro

(The blogger works as the public geek at the Takoma Park Maryland Library and is an adjunct professor of education at American University. He can be reached at philshapiroblogger@gmail.com)

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Starbucks' shift reflected in words

http://www.seattlepi.com/business/405911_starbucks06.html

Starbucks' shift reflected in words

What a difference a recession makes for the coffee giant

Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Last updated 12:36 a.m. PT

By ANDREA JAMES
SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

Can you remember 2007?

Seattle's economy was booming. Housing prices seemed liked they'd never fall. And Starbucks looked to be a growth company without end.

Last year marked several significant transitions for Seattle-based Starbucks. Howard Schultz returned to the role of chief executive officer, the company shuffled its leadership team, closed stores, introduced new products and shifted its focus from opening new stores to maintaining quality and customer loyalty.

Though Starbucks was already in transition before the economic slump worsened, the recession intensified the need for corporate changes.

Starbucks is an image company, one in which words matter. In 2009, executives described the coffee giant using a different set of terms than they used in 2007.

The word clouds below show us how different.

The first image represents all of the words spoken during Starbucks' 2007 second quarter earnings call. Larger words mean that the term appeared more times during the call.

Notice that the words, "growth," "international," "markets," and "China" are prominent.

The second image represents all of the words spoken during Starbucks' 2009 second quarter earnings call. Notice that the words "customers," "coffee," "value" and "Howard" are more prominent.

(Click the images below to see larger versions.)

Starbucks executive language, mid-2007

Starbucks executive language, mid-2009

In 2007, executives spoke the word "coffee" just 16 times. In 2009, the company's signature product bore mention 35 times.

The words "customer" and "customers" were uttered 31 times in 2007, but 46 times in 2009.

The word "growth" was spoken 62 times during the 2007 conference call. In 2009? Just 13 times.

Starbucks' has said that its research shows that customers are increasingly looking for value. In 2007, the word "value" was mentioned five times. In 2009, it spiked to 37 times.

What about lattes? When it comes to talking to Wall Street analysts, it appears they don't matter much at all. Latte and its plural were mentioned twice in 2007 and three times in 2009.

The 2007 conference call included a total of 9,978 words, including numbers and questions from analysts. The 2009 call included 10,083 words. Because the total number of words was relatively similar each year, it's accurate to make comparisons of individual words. (In contrast, if the transcript were much longer one year, it would not be fair to compare the number of times a word appeared in one year over another. Rather, the number of times words appeared would need to be given in percentages.)

How were these word clouds made?

Seeking Alpha provides free transcripts of corporate earnings calls going back several years. First, I looked up the second-quarter earnings transcripts from 2007 and 2009.

Then, I pasted the transcripts into a free word cloud program provided on Wordle.net. Wordle lets you change the color and font scheme. It also provides word counts for the pasted text.

---

Andrea James can be reached at 206-448-8124 or andreajames@seattlepi.com.

© 1998-2009 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Economist: Chinese characters - Not as easy as it looks

See also: NY Times: The Chinese language, Ever Evolving

===

Chinese script

Not as easy as it looks

Apr 23rd 2009 | BEIJING
From The Economist print edition

A character-forming development

FOR better or worse, Mao Zedong usually came out on top, whether facing Japanese invaders, nationalist warlords or Communist Party rivals. But for all his success in overturning traditional values and institutions, the founder of modern China came up short in his desire to convert written Chinese from its character-based system to an alphabet. Intellectuals resisted fiercely, some out of the belief that China’s writing system was superior to any other, and unified a land of many dialects far better than a phonetic system, others on simple sentimental grounds.

Many claimed it could not be done, despite the examples of Korea, which managed the trick in the 15th century, and Vietnam which, like China, has a tonal language with many homonyms but switched successfully to an alphabetic system. In the end Mao settled on a halfway step: cutting the number of strokes in some Chinese characters (from 18 to four in the case of feng, which means “abundant”, and is shown above). This set China apart from Hong Kong, Taiwan and most overseas communities. Many purists thought simplifying characters as appalling as eliminating them.

That fierce debate is now being rekindled with the government’s announcement of plans to issue later this year a new list of character modifications, aimed mainly at correcting certain “oversimplifications” undertaken in the past. Some characters will have more strokes added and thus be brought closer to their earlier, more complicated forms. But officials insist the move does not mark the start of a campaign to scrap simplified characters. China, they say, need not move back toward the traditional forms, nor further along the path of simplification. It simply needs to “standardise” things.

This will disappoint Pan Qinglin, a member of the consultative committee that advises China’s government. In March he submitted a proposal to the government calling for a return within ten years to the greater expressiveness and “artistic quality” of the traditional script. Others, however, will be pleased, including the internet commentator who recently compared reviving traditional characters to “asking women to revive the practice of foot-binding”.

Other arguments focus less on deep issues of cultural identity than on practical concerns, such as how hard the new forms will be to learn, how much it will cost to convert signs, replace textbooks and adapt software, and whether the government will pay for the changes. Mao famously argued that “revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture”. It might, however, be reforming orthography.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

NY Times: The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving

May 2, 2009, 5:00 pm

The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving

By The Editors

(Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art) Detail of a Ming Dynasty scroll by Zhu Yunming in the cursive script.

The Times recently published an article about China’s effort to manage the vast number of characters in the Chinese language. A government computer database, designed to recognize people’s names on identity cards, is programmed to read about 32,000 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, cutting out the more “obscure” characters.

This is not the first attempt to modernize a sprawling and ancient language. The most ambitious effort was the introduction to a simplified system of writing in the 1950s. As part of the Communist Party’s campaign to reduce illiteracy, simplified characters were promoted as the common written language, replacing many traditional characters.

More than five decades later, simplified characters remain the standard writing system of China, while Chinese elsewhere — especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong — continue to use traditional characters.

We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.

• Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, professor of Chinese literary studies
• Eugene Wang, professor of Asian art
• Hsuan Meng, writer, World Journal
• Norman Matloff, computer scientist

The Utopian Ideal in Writing

Eileen Cheng-yin Chow is an associate professor of Chinese literary and cultural studies at Harvard University.

The utopian impulses behind standardization and simplification of a living language are always understandable. Increased literacy, administrative efficiency, and ease of communication are laudable goals. But those impulses can also strip a language of its wit, whimsy, and play, not to mention its capacity to accommodate new concepts and usages.

The inability to read traditional characters is to close oneself off to Chinese history and arts before the 1950s.

Traditional characters and simplified characters never were two separate and autonomous language systems — they have always existed on a continuum. Many simplified characters are adaptations from common usage in Chinese cursive script; on the other hand, the inability to read traditional characters is to close oneself off to much of the Chinese cultural legacy — its history and arts — before the 1950s.

Since I grew up in Taiwan, where reading and writing in traditional characters is the norm, simplified characters were a novelty and a bit of a challenge, and perhaps, something to be sniffed at. But when my first job after college led me to Beijing to work as a literary translator, I spent the first week furtively consulting a little manual of “Simplified/Traditional Character Conversion” before I became fully comfortable with the new system, including learning to write my name in a way that was comprehensible to desk clerks. The experience taught me the follies of being a cultural purist.

Given the increasing flow of published and online materials among the mainland China, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese diasporas, a literate reader must have the ability to code-switch. Thus, the answer is not either/or, but — annoyingly for policy makers — both.

Elitism vs. Populism

Eugene Wang is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller professor of Asian art at Harvard University.

Simplifying traditional Chinese characters was a linguistic democratization and one of China’s most successful progressive programs in the 1950s. The majority of the population was lifted out of illiteracy.

Literacy had long remained a privilege and a source of power wielded by the elitist few. With the characters made easier to learn, the key to knowledge embedded in written texts was handed to a wide population.

The running- and cursive-hand in traditional Chinese calligraphy is a radically simplified form.

A clash between traditional and simplified characters comes down to elitism vs. populism. A recent poll conducted by Sohu.com on whether to reinstate the traditional characters shows that more netizens oppose it. Behind the elitism/populism divide is the opposition between an archaistic nostalgia toward the illusory “purer” traditional Chinese literacy and a pragmatic and forward-looking modern drive. (Both Singapore and Malaysia, with sizable Chinese populations, also adopted simplified characters decades ago.)

Advocates for reinstating traditional characters exaggerate the break of the simplified system from the traditional orthography. Simplified characters still retain the basic structure of traditional ideographs. The structural continuity makes the switch between them easy and smooth, a skill any educated person can quickly acquire. Many of the simplified characters had been in existence for more than a millennium. Manuscripts unearthed from ancient tombs and medieval caves suggest that some simplified characters now used were already in currency then. The reform in the 1950s only officially legitimated these underground “outlaw” vernacular characters.

Aesthetic appeal is another argument made for reinstating traditional characters. Calligraphy, the quintessential aesthetic form of Chinese writing, in fact favors simplification. The running- and cursive-hand in Chinese calligraphy has always been the most radical form of simplifying characters. The six-stroke character xing (running), for instance, was reduced to a mere two vertical strokes in medieval calligraphic practice.

It’s true that computer keyboarding has now made the dreaded writing of multi-stroke-characters mostly moot. But why require schoolchildren to spend time and cognitive energy learning overly complicated ideographs in this age of information explosion, so vastly different from traditional society? Why not let them acquire the simplified form first, and if they desire, move on to master traditional characters? The first step is for efficiency; the second is for cultural refinement. That is why every society has the division of labor between bankers and poets.

The Chinese Canon, Diminished

Hsuan Meng writes a column for World Journal Weekly.

Language is about cultural identity. This is especially true in the case of the written Chinese language, which has evolved for at least three millenniums and is now used by one and a half billion people worldwide. Given the language’s long history, future Chinese readers and writers may have to live with the consequences of current decisions long after today’s powers and regimes have ceased to exist.

The advantage of traditional characters is that they offer a stronger and richer connection with the history of the Chinese language. The simplified writing system has reduced the variety and changed the nature of many character shapes, making it more difficult for people to access classical texts in their full richness.

The writings of Confucius, Lao Tzu and countless others exploited the full range and expression of the traditional Chinese characters.

This is more than an academic concern. Just as Shakespeare’s plays and the language he used serve as a foundation for the English language, so are the canonical writings of Confucius, Lao Tzu and countless others who had exploited the full range and expression of the traditional characters.

Proponents of simplified characters say that simplified characters are easier to learn. But I have found no rigorous study that fully proves this. Moreover, some studies have shown that because the simplification process, by warping the shapes of characters, can cause confusion in the meaning of characters.

In Taiwan and Hong Kong, schoolchildren have no trouble learning traditional characters, and those regions demonstrate some of the highest literacy rates in the world. Meanwhile, in recent decades, the People’s Republic has implemented policies that implicitly acknowledge the practical, cultural and aesthetic values of traditional Chinese: some traditional characters have been restored to use, and the government permits traditional characters in the practice of calligraphy.

The push to simplify Chinese reflects contemporary political agendas more than a desire for a good solution. We should find ways to promote coexistence of both systems of writing.

This essay was translated from the Chinese by Victoria Meng.

How a Computer Might Respond

Norman Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, and is the author of KuaiXue, a software tool for learning Chinese.

The original rationale for simplification was to accelerate the learning process. But is this necessary today, given China’s much improved economic and social conditions? There may be no easy answer.

What’s certain is that converting from the simplified characters, or jiantizi, to the traditional characters, fantizi, would be a huge task, affecting everything from school textbooks to government documents to online systems. Automation of that process would present serious technical challenges.

The trouble stems from fundamental differences in the two character sets. The simplification process of the 1950s sometimes resulted in two different traditional characters becoming identical in simplified form. For instance, the traditional characters 發 (”develop”) and 髮 (”hair”) are both written as the simplified character, 发. When the software sees the latter, it must guess which of 發 and 髮 is intended. Typically the guess is made by analyzing context. Sometimes, the software can produce the occasional howler. A passage describing “loss of face” might be translated by the computer as loss of 麵 (”noodles”) rather than loss of 面 (”face”)!

So while most of the process could be automated, especially with more fine tuning in the software, much work would need to be done by hand as well.

===

April 21, 2009

Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — “Ma,” a Chinese character for horse, is the 13th most common family name in China, shared by nearly 17 million people. That can cause no end of confusion when Mas get together, especially if those Mas also share the same given name, as many Chinese do.

Ma Cheng’s book-loving grandfather came up with an elegant solution to this common problem. Twenty-six years ago, when his granddaughter was born, he combed through his library of Chinese dictionaries and lighted upon a character pronounced “cheng.” Cheng, which means galloping steeds, looks just like the character for horse, except that it is condensed and written three times in a row.

The character is so rare that once people see it, Miss Ma said, they tend to remember both her and her name. That is one reason she likes it so much.

That is also why the government wants her to change it.

For Ma Cheng and millions of others, Chinese parents’ desire to give their children a spark of individuality is colliding head-on with the Chinese bureaucracy’s desire for order. Seeking to modernize its vast database on China’s 1.3 billion citizens, the government’s Public Security Bureau has been replacing the handwritten identity card that every Chinese must carry with a computer-readable one, complete with color photos and embedded microchips. The new cards are harder to forge and can be scanned at places like airports where security is a priority.

The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that Miss Ma and at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common.

Moreover, the situation is about to get worse or, in the government’s view, better. Since at least 2003, China has been working on a standardized list of characters for people to use in everyday life, including when naming children.

One newspaper reported last week that the list would be issued later this year and would curb the use of obscure names. A government linguistics official told Xinhua, the state-run news agency, that the list would include more than 8,000 characters. Although that is far fewer than the database now supposedly includes, the official said it was more than enough “to convey any concept in any field.” About 3,500 characters are in everyday use.

Government officials suggest that names have gotten out of hand, with too many parents picking the most obscure characters they can find or even making up characters, like linguistic fashion accessories. But many Chinese couples take pride in searching the rich archives of classical Chinese to find a distinctive, pleasing name, partly to help their children stand out in a society with strikingly few surnames.

By some estimates, 100 surnames cover 85 percent of China’s citizens. Laobaixing, or “old hundred names,” is a colloquial term for the masses. By contrast, 70,000 surnames cover 90 percent of Americans.

The number of Chinese family names in use has tended to shrink as China’s population has grown, a winnowing of surnames that has occurred in many cultures over time.

At last count, China’s Wangs were leading with more than 92 million, followed by 91 million Lis and 86 million Zhangs. To refer to an unidentified person — the equivalent of “just anybody” in English — one Chinese saying can be loosely translated this way: “some Zhang, some Li.”

The potential for mix-ups is vast. There are nearly enough Chinese named Zhang Wei to populate the city of Pittsburgh. Nicknames are liberally bestowed in classrooms and workplaces to tell people apart. Confronting three students named Liu Fang, for example, one middle-school teacher nicknamed them Big, Little and Middle.

Wang Daliang, a linguistics scholar with the China Youth University for Political Science, said picking rare characters for given names only compounded the problem and inconvenienced everyone. “Using obscure names to avoid duplication of names or to be unique is not good,” he wrote in an e-mail response to questions.

“Now a lot of people are perplexed by their names,” he said. “The computer cannot even recognize them and people cannot read them. This has become an obstacle in communication.”

But Professor Zhou Youyong, dean of Southeast University’s law school, said the government should tread carefully in issuing any new regulation. “The right to name children is a basic right of citizens,” he said.

Miss Ma said that while her given name was unusual, bank employees, passport control clerks and ticket agents had always managed to deal with it, usually by writing it by hand. But when she tried to renew her identity card last August, she said, Beijing public security officials turned her down flat.

“Your name is so troublesome and problematic,” she recalled an official telling her. “Just change it.”

Miss Ma argues that the government’s technology should adapt, not her.

“There were no such regulations when I was born, so I should be entitled to keep my name for my whole life,” she said. If she changes her name to get an identity card, she noted, it will be wrong on all of her other documents, like her passport and university diploma.

Besides, she said, “I can’t think of another, better name.”

Using the time-honored Chinese method of backdoor connections, Miss Ma was able to get a temporary card in January. She must renew it every three months but considers that a small sacrifice for keeping her name.

Zhao C., a 23-year-old college student, gave up the fight for his. His father, a lawyer, chose the letter C from the English alphabet, saying it was simple, memorable and stood for China.

When he could not get a new identity card in 2006, Zhao C. sued. But security officials convinced him that it would cost millions of dollars to alter the database, his father said, so he dropped the suit in February.

His case might suggest that resistance against China’s powerful bureaucracy was futile. Still, the government’s plan to limit the use of characters has not gone all that smoothly.

The new rules were originally supposed to be issued by 2005. Now, 70 revisions later, they have yet to be put in place.

An official this week batted away questions, saying publicity might delay the rules even longer.

Huang Yuanxi contributed research.

NY Times: Of Loos and Language

 

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April 30, 2009

Op-Ed Columnist

Of Loos and Language

By ROGER COHEN

A poet friend, Vincent Katz, was over for dinner the other night and asked me with a twinkle in his eye if I was “knackered.” Katz came to poetry via rock ’n roll, and to Oxford via the University of Chicago, and along the way he picked up some English vernacular.

“Knackered?”

The word — meaning more than tired, beat — transported me to the England of my youth, a place of hissing gas fires, metered hot water, contempt for “the Continent,” schoolboys in corduroy shorts, crows over the rubbish dumps, skinheads on the tube, Pink Floyd in Hyde Park, soggy leaves and solid fog.

Aging is like that. The memories pile up. More things are done for the last time than the first. It doesn’t take much to be transported.

Yes, I was knackered — and suddenly nostalgic for the churning clouds of London, the damp mustiness of pre-prosperous England, and the mist hovering in an Oxford dawn.

I dug out a diary I kept at university in the early ’70s and found this: “Sunday morning: the allotments dotted with stooping figures. Steaming water poured over gleaming cars. The papers. This England.”

And this:

Loose summer dresses catching in the crotch
The leather boys stick together
With coffee on the benches.
Tulips dying gape open-mouthed
At the fruit rotting after lunch.

That England’s gone, of course, it’s had its glossy makeover like everywhere else. Gastropubs shun bangers and lumpy mash and even Leeds is trendy.

But language is another story. Katz told me how uncomfortable he felt saying “loo” for the first time. The unthinkable alternative was to ask some bloke for the “bathroom.”

What for, mate?

Katz read classics at St. John’s College (viewed as a too-beautiful refuge of sporty underachievers by my own Balliol) and he summed up the experience this way: “I began to realize (what I should have known all along) that I was living in a completely different culture. It was just as alien to me as France would have been, or Spain, or Italy, or Germany. There is the illusion that we speak the same language, but we really don’t.”

Yes, the illusion is there. The United States freed itself from Britain in a revolution but had to opt for subtler forms of sedition when it came to the language.

I remember getting in a row with an editor and friend, Richard Berry, after writing “car park.” No such thing in American, Berry said. Come on! It’s where you put your car, Richard. Nope, he insisted, parking lot.

I was miffed. I was gutted. (Look that up, Richard.)

“Well done, love,” I told my 14-year-old son the other day. “Well done, love!” he parroted in that scorn-dripping tone teenagers reserve for their Paleolithic parents, weaving an English patter into his Brooklynese. “You mean: Good job!”

Quite.

Jobs, the work ethic — no escape from them in the United States, where finishing a meal in a restaurant prompts the death-penalty-meriting: “Are you still working on that?” When I took an English test to become a U.S. citizen a few years back, one of the three sentences in my dictation was: “I plan to work very hard every day.”

Quite.

America works, every day, its youthful ambition still boundless. England, having seen everything go pear-shaped, relieved of the burden of running a ropey world, boozes and says it’s sorry and prefers a lie-in.

“Oxford was the only place I’ve heard someone use ‘mayn’t’ completely casually,” Katz wrote. “I began to long for those usages — grammatically unimpeachable and stylistically extravagant — and be on the lookout for them. I had a friend who used ‘Crumbs!’ as an exclamation, something I’d only ever read in books or seen in movies.”

Crumbs! It’s been yonks since I heard that or peered through the windscreen over the bonnet at lorries on the motorway. I thought I’d left England behind — its rucksacks and trousers and chemists and fortnights — you know, the full Anglo monty — until I got too knackered to resist.

Katz continued: “After a year or so of tuning into the subtleties of the English language, something quite remarkable occurred — I began to perceive many different layers of expression in ways the British communicate. Where they are often criticized by Americans for being cold, I began to see endless expressions of warmth. Where they might be considered narrow-minded, I found instead some of the most open, progressive minds I have encountered.”

English tolerance can be as uplifting as American idealism, that many-faceted and quizzical “quite” seeing U.S. “hope.”

Since my student walks to the Isis past the wet autumn leaves smoking rather than burning, English has gone global. In fact, the world’s lingua franca is now bad English. It’s strange then that a U.S. president who speaks good English, far better than his predecessor, seems able to communicate with that world. This may even be Barack Obama’s biggest achievement in his first 100 days.

Brilliant!

ST: Brush up Mandarin to tap China Opportunities: MM

Home > Asia > South-east Asia > Story

April 18, 2009

MM LEE'S VISIT TO VIETNAM

Brush up Mandarin to tap China opportunities: MM

He says Chinese firms will need S'poreans who speak language to expand into S-E Asia

By Sim Chi Yin

HANOI: Singaporeans should get their Mandarin up to scratch because Chinese companies will increasingly use Singapore as a base to expand into South-east Asia, much like multinational corporations (MNCs) have done in the past, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said yesterday.

Taking questions from the Singapore media at the end of a five-day official visit to Vietnam, Mr Lee said Singaporeans who speak good Mandarin will find opportunities opening up for them as China's economic prowess grows.

WHY SINGAPOREANS SHOULD IMPROVE THEIR MANDARIN '(China) is going to be the world's biggest economy in 30 years' time. In other words, they will be everywhere. They already are...They'll need the Singaporeans who can speak Mandarin and who can also speak Malay and take them around the region.' WHY IT'S HARD TO DRAW MORE YOUNG S'POREANS INTO POLITICS 'Everybody thinks that Singapore is doing well, please leave me out and I can follow my career...I can stay in America after graduation for a few years to get experience before I come back. 'I've got a grandson like that...He's got a place in MIT...He doesn't want to take a scholarship although he could have got one because he said if he takes a scholarship, he's got to come back after graduation and he does not intend to come back. He intends to stay there, get experience, maybe get a further degree and then come back. 'So new generation, new circumstances...so different choices. My two sons and my daughter took government scholarships, bonded themselves eight years and served the Government. And then they carried on, but that was in the late 60s, early 70s. This is 2009.'

They will be valued as middlemen to help Chinese firms extend their reach in South-east Asia, with their headquarters in Singapore - replicating the way MNCs have operated and spread their wings across Asia, he said.

'(China) is going to be the world's biggest economy in 30 years' time. In other words, they will be everywhere. They already are. But they will be everywhere in strength. In Africa, Latin America, you name it, they're there,' noted Mr Lee.

More and more Chinese companies will also set up shop in investor-friendly Singapore. 'They'll need the Singaporeans who can speak Mandarin and who can also speak Malay and take them around the region,' he said.

'Malaysia, Indonesia...will recover and the Chinese will want to do business there but they would base themselves in Singapore like the MNCs did and have always done, and then scout the region, and then expand into the region and bring the Singapore team to help them start,' said Mr Lee.

He added: 'We perform a hub role where we help multiply activities into the region.'

Even US firms are now recruiting Singaporeans and dispatching them to their China offices because of their Mandarin-speaking edge, he noted.

'That's why I advise Singaporeans to make sure that their Chinese is up to scratch, because now it's a valuable extra opportunity.'

Speaking at the 30th anniversary of the Speak Mandarin Campaign last month, Mr Lee urged Chinese Singaporean parents to speak to their children in Mandarin instead of English to help them build a foundation in their mother tongue early on.

Slipping into Mandarin, he told reporters yesterday that at the end of this year, the Singapore Press Holdings will publish a book documenting his experience of learning Mandarin and English, and on 40 years of bilingual education in Singapore.

The opportunities that bilingual, globe-trotting young Singaporeans have overseas also mean they are less inclined to return to Singapore in a hurry - or go into politics, making it ever more difficult to recruit younger politicians.

'Everybody thinks that Singapore is doing well, please leave me out and I can follow my career...I can stay in America after graduation for a few years to get experience before I come back.'

One of his grandsons, who has won a place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, refuses to take a scholarship because he wants to remain there for some years before coming home, he said.

'So new generation, new circumstances...so different choices.

'Singapore is a different place and the world is a different place. We have to reassess our position in a different world environment.'

simcy@sph.com.sg

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.
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ST: Speak Mandarin ads criticised

April 18, 2009

Speak Mandarin ads criticised

Singaporeans say they do not connect with foreign kids in the campaign

By frankie chee

The kids are cute, their Mandarin perfect. But the same cannot be said of the commercial, going by some of the comments on local online forums. Netizens on AsiaOne, Stomp's Talk Back and Sam's Alfresco Heaven have been criticising the use of foreign children in this year's Speak Mandarin Campaign since its launch a month ago. Aired on Channels 5 and 8 at under a minute each, the commercials feature six children from France, Norway, Russia and Congo reciting Chinese nursery rhymes and talking about their hobbies in pitch-perfect, Beijing-accented Mandarin. Another clip showed an American baby girl responding to her five-year-old sister's Mandarin instructions to clap her hands and point to the lamp. JohnTT commented in Sam's Alfresco Heaven: 'Why use foreigners in such a campaign? Is it to put locals in a shameful and embarrassing spot or to emphasise the talents of foreigners in S'pore? 'With such strong pro-foreigner signals sent to the locals, it's no wonder many Singaporeans feel inferior and that they are second-tier citizens. Very sad.'  Off the Internet, other Singaporeans have similar sentiments. Global account manager Lee Siew Yian, 35, told Life!: 'The videos don't connect with the locals it's supposed to reach out to. There's no local context and it doesn't tell us the advantages of speaking Mandarin'. Even some non-Chinese object to the clips. National serviceman Firdhaus Kasim, 23, said: 'It's belittling Singaporeans who can't speak Mandarin. My Chinese friends have complained that they feel like they're being looked down upon.' Ms Lim Sau Hoong, chairman of the Promote Mandarin Council, said the original idea was to feature a mix of races and local kids were also filmed for the clips. Filming took place in Singapore, Beijing and Shanghai. 'But it so happened that the Chinese didn't do as well,' she said. 'They weren't as good on camera or couldn't speak as fluently, so they were cut out.' She stressed: 'We don't have any intention to belittle or shame anyone. We just want to show the bigger view that everyone worldwide is learning Mandarin.' Professor Lee Guan Kin, director of Nanyang Technological University's (NTU) Centre for Chinese Language and Culture, said the mixed reactions are to be expected. She noted: 'There's nothing wrong with using Westerners. The purpose is to tell the Chinese that it's not hard to learn Mandarin well. We should look at it from a positive angle.' Ms Grace Chew, research associate from NTU's Chinese Heritage Centre, added that the clips appeared to be attempts at breaking the association between race and linguistic performance. 'An ethnic Chinese who cannot speak Mandarin might see the clips as subtly mocking him. But another viewer might be encouraged to practise more because he sees these fluent Chinese-speaking foreigners as role models,' she said. Love it or hate it, the campaign is set to unveil its second phase on YouTube and in cinemas soon. Unhappy netizens will be pleased to know that this time, the clips will feature children from a mix of races. frankiec@sph.com.sg What do you think of the commercials? E-mail stlife@sph.com.sg

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