Month 14.3. Math = God.

Has anyone ever noticed the uncanny similarity between God and mathematics?

As physicist David Deutsch puts it, humans explain the seen with the unseen. We posit unobservable explanations for things that we observe but do not understand. The logic is simple: if something happens, but we cannot see why, then the reason it happens must be something unseen.

Two comments. First, the logic depends on the assumption that events have explanations. There is no proof of such an assumption. Why should there be a reason for the change of seasons? Why did people ever even ask themselves why things fall down instead of up? The fact that humans have always assumed a reason for things shows our fundamental attachment to determinism. We demand explanations. (My next blog will give the scoop on our hunger for knowledge).

Second, it’s amazing how much power we assign to the unseen causes of things. God is huge. He doesn’t just explain why there is day and night. He explains why we wear clothes, why we speak different languages and why we have a sense of morality. God is an efficient concoction/entity (depending on your beliefs) – we get the answers to everything all in one. Bada-bing, bada-boom.

For non-believers, it’s easy to laugh and say, “God’s ability to explain everything is just further proof that he can’t possibly exist.” But hold on a sec. Non-believers have their own powerful, unseen explanations for things. Nowadays the most popular replacement for God is mathematics.

Mathematics is huge, maybe as huge as God. Mathematics is used everywhere to account for everything. Math is taken as the reason why one theory is right and another is wrong. And yet no one “observes” math. We observe only what we interpret as outcomes of the math – just like religious people interpret phenomena as being the works of God.

Math is a powerful authority despite its mysteriousness. Much of our scientific knowledge was accepted only because the math works. Einstein’s relativity is like that. Relativity has observable effects, but nobody’s ever observed it in action. Relativity is accepted because the numbers crunch correctly. If the math works, then of course relativity has to be true. Voila! A few equations explain a whole slew of phenomena, from GPS technology to electromagnetism.

Even psychology is bending knee to mathematics. Human behaviour is explained away by statistics and probability. Psychologists don’t discuss what thought processes are like. They conduct experiments, trace neural connections, plot correlations, and measure doses. As in physics, math has the final say. If the numbers show it, the theory is true.

Mathematics is becoming the modern God. It’s creeping in everywhere. It’s used blindly as a justification for why things are the way they are. If two theories are batting heads, we turn to math to determine which is right. You argue, “Well yeah, but that’s because mathematics is true, it’s universal. Math is never wrong – if there’s a problem, it’s because people are following the wrong steps or applying a principle incorrectly.” And the response? That’s exactly what people have been saying for millennia, if you just replace the word “math” with “God.”

_____________________

P.S. For other nerds of logic and language: ever notice how when you say “A is B” you’re not really asserting equality? When we say ‘A is B,’ we usually mean “A doesn’t really exist on its own, it’s just another way of saying B.” Like when I say, “Math is God,” I’m making an assertion about math, not God. If I’d said, “God is math” then I’d be making an assertion about God – namely, that he isn’t really anything other than math. Our language thus fails to replicate mathematics. The verb “is” is not equivalent to equality, as the semanticists will tell us. That’s why logic is cool – it’s the smooth union of language and math. So from now on, all my blog entries will be written in the format of logic.

QED

Month 14.2. Through Thick and Through Thin: An Ode to Yogurt.

This blog entry is written for you. Yes, you. It dawned on me that people really like to read about food. (I know I'm basically the last person on earth to realize this. Personally, when I read about food it makes me want to eat, so I stop reading to go eat. Therefore I concluded that writing about food is self-defeating if you want people to actually read what you're writing.) To keep my readers interested, I'll write about food today. I guess that makes this blog entry ultimately for me, since it's in my interest to keep you interested. Oh well, Kant sue me.

But this entry is not just about any old kind of food! Heavens no! It's about practically the best food ever invented. I say "invented" because there are arguably better non-man-made foods, like mangoes. I say "practically" because there are close runners-up, like muffins. When I was in high school I joked that if I ever wrote an autobiography, I'd call it "Mangoes and Muffins." Now that I'm older, I'm wiser by exactly one word: yogurt.

During my travels, I've come across all kinds of yogurt. But to this day, the most exquisite yogurt I've tasted was right at home in Montreal. I worked in a little café run by a Romanian couple. They bought this enormous tub of 10% yogurt to make parfaits with. I made the parfaits and decided to try one for myself. I nearly fainted. My boss was looking at me, and he asked, "…Are you ok?" And now I have secret altars throughout the house where I can worship yogurt whenever a burst of faith graces me.

Yogurt has been around for about 2000 years. One of the earliest documentations is from the middle ages. The author reports it as a popular food amongst Turkish nomads. Yogurt gradually made its way from the Middle East into Europe. In the 1800's, it was used as a cleaning agent (and is still used today as a hair conditioner in India). But it was only well into the 20^th-century that yogurt entered the diets of westerners. The typical yogurt cups now found in North American grocery stores go back 60 years to a Czech guy who combined yogurt with jam.

True to the history, I ate lots of yogurt in Turkey. In Istanbul, they like their yogurt really thick. I spread it like butter over my toast. With Nutella or hazelnut butter, yogurt toast is heaven. But the Turks do all kinds of things with yogurt. They blob it over their salads or eat it as a side-order with a sprinkle of dried parsley and chili. The most popular yogurt concoction is ayran. Fill a cup half-way with yogurt, top it off with water, add a generous sprinkle of salt, shake or stir, and enjoy. Best to drink it with kebab; goes well with burgers too.

The Balkans are also yogurt-friendly, owing to centuries of Ottoman rule. The first researcher of the chemistry of yogurt was indeed Bulgarian. But thick yogurt isn't easy to find in Eastern Europe. To Croatians, yogurt is something like milk. They share the same thinness and are served in the same plastic bottles. You can pour it over your cereal. In Serbia yogurt is a drink too – usually paired with burek, a stuffed pastry also originating in Turkey.

The default yogurt in Turkey and the Balkans is plain. In Turkey, the selection of sweetened yogurts is very limited. The whole notion of sugary, dessert-like yogurt seems to be North American. I got some strange looks in Macedonia when I combined yogurt and jam (I mean, right? If a Czech guy can do it, so can I. That's all fruit-on-the-bottom is, anyway). I remember seeing coffee and chocolate yogurt in Montreal, with about 6% fat, under the label "Mediterranean tradition." Well I may not have seen the whole Mediterranean, but I have yet to see 6% yogurt, and yet to see yogurt combined with anything more exotic than peaches. It turns out that high-fat yogurt was developed in North America. (It also turns out that the jelliness of North American yogurt comes from the addition of pectin, which explains why Balkan yogurt is so much thinner.)

The whole idea that yogurt is a "perfect" food also seems restricted to North America. Nobody tries to sell you on probiotics or bacteria over here. It's true that yogurt was supposedly used to cure the French King Francis I of diarrhea, way back in the day. The Bulgarian researcher mentioned above speculated that yogurt was responsible for the longevity of Bulgarians. Europeans accept the healthiness of yogurt, but without dwelling on it or advertising it. So it's ironic that the regions that most promote yogurt as a health food are the ones that add the most sugar and fat to it.

I miss being able to spread yogurt over toast, but it's also nice to pour yogurt over my cereal like milk. Yogurt is versatile, delicious, healthy, cheap, cultural, and attractive. Whatever its form and wherever its origins, yogurt is yo-great.

Month 14.1. Cheesy dreams of Africa.

Cheesy's new year's resolution was to try something different: hibernation. In January, she vanished from the waking world. With every slow breath, she lulled the sun back a little closer. By February she had entered an REM phase. Cheesy slept…

…and dreamed of Africa. She dreamed of a village near Kampala, the capital of Uganda. She dreamed she was her friend Dew, who in real life had visited Uganda during the holidays. In the dream, Dew/Cheesy went to Uganda to visit her European friend Birth. Birth was living with a family in the village. Dew stayed with them for one month.

Dew's experiences nearly shook Cheesy out of hibernation back into the real world. But sometimes we need dreams to crystallize our experiences. So Cheesy dreamed, and Dew lived.

Dew first arrived in Kampala, a chaotic city in which cars drove on whatever side of the street they fancied. Birth was waiting for her there. Together they went to the village where Birth was living. Dew was greeted by flocks of children screaming, "Musunu how are you!" "Musunu" was the Lugandan word for "white person," and "How are you" was the only English phrase the kids knew. They reached out at her, yelling and trying to grab her blue eyes. This greeting would happen to Dew every day for an entire month.

Dew explained she was from Portugal. But to the villagers, anything outside of Africa was America. They showed a tremendous amount of concern for Dew the American. They were always asking about her about her family, always wanting to know that everyone was healthy and happy. Dew was struck by how much the villagers smiled.

The villagers had almost nothing. Each person had one shirt and one skirt. No shoes. They ate one meal per day: boiled water mixed with flavouring. The water was boiled over a bonfire outside. The water had to be carried to the village from a well a fifty-minute walk away. The well was also the only spot villagers could clean themselves. Cleaning consisted of splashing some water over one's body.

A full eighty percent of the population had AIDS. Children would use knives to carve out parasites living under their nails, then hand the knife over for the next child to use. Dew was horrified. She tried to explain that sharing blood this way could spread disease. But the villagers were not afraid of AIDS. To them, it was a part of life, just some thing that most people had, some basic and unchangeable condition. The concept of prevention was not in their minds.

One child had a birthday during Dew's stay. Dew and Birth went to Kampala to buy the child a birthday cake. When they returned to the village and presented the cake, the child panicked. She had never seen a cake. None of the children had ever eaten any kind of sweet. The child trembled and stuttered. When the other children tried the sweets, they simply erupted with excitement. But they never fought over the sweets, never got greedy for more. They just screamed, laughed, and shook.

The villagers lived fully in the present. The future was not on their minds. They worshipped God and family. Dew believed it was faith keeping them alive – flavoured water and shared knives certainly weren't doing it. Maybe more concern for the future would lead to a reduction of AIDS in Uganda. But it might also lead to the disintegration of the family and of the perfect happiness they shared. The future was full of personal ambition, greener grass, and greed.

Not to say the Africans knew no greed. While the villagers lived and shared, like a massive creature more than a group of individuals, others took everything they could get. Such greed might also have been a symptom of living in the present: if one believed that one's community could grow stronger and better in the future, one would try to help. If everyone was dying under 50, one would take the cake and eat it too.

The case in point was Birth's supervisor. He was receiving money from the EU. The money was intended to support Birth during her volunteer stay. Birth never saw the money. She was living off her own savings. The supervisor kept the money for himself. He lived in his own apartment in Kampala. He dressed in pants like a white person. When he came to the village to visit his family, everyone would eat on the floor with their hands while he sat in a chair eating with a fork. Instead of asking him for money, his family treated him with reverence.

By western standards, Uganda was dirt cheap. For Christmas, Birth and Dew made food baskets for each family in the village. The baskets contained basics like rice and sugar. The baskets were worth a small fortune to each family, but they cost Birth and Dew only 5€. One girl had a tumour near her collarbone that had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe. When Dew asked her why she didn't go see a doctor, the girl answered that she didn't have the one euro necessary to take a taxi to the city. Dew gave her the euro, and later the 30€ necessary to have the tumour removed.

Dew's month was fantastic and, well, dream-like. Africa was like a giant canvas full of bright colours splashed randomly about. But eventually the dream faded. The black and white seeped back in, the splotches and streaks reorganized themselves into recognizable shapes. Dew returned to the airport and Cheesy shifted in her bed. They cried and cried. It had been the happiest, most beautiful month of their lives.

Month 13.6. Support our existence.

It turns out that the boy who killed those people in Arizona was having some existential troubles before the shoot-out. He had been reading some nihilist writings. Apparently he told his friends that life has no meaning and we could do whatever we wanted, because nothing really matters. As someone who's uttered her fair share of existentialist propaganda, I feel I should comment on this.

No, I'm not going to say that existentialism is a bad thing that turns people into homicidal maniacs. I'm also not going to say that existentialism is a grand old thing. Whether existentialism is "good" or "bad" is a matter of opinion. The point isn't to evaluate existentialism, anyway. It exists – that's the point. People have various beliefs about the meaning of life. For some, God is the answer. For others, nothing is. Whatever your beliefs, you can't help but believe them. To argue that someone's beliefs are "bad" is sort of futile. People get existentialist thoughts whether you want them to or not, whether they want to or not, so we might as well address the issue constructively.

Let me be clear before I write further that I do not think the shooter is excused because he couldn't help having existential beliefs. We remain responsible for our actions, even if our actions follow from beliefs that we didn't "choose." One of the cornerstones of a functional society is self-restraint. Spontaneous thoughts and beliefs should not have free reign over our actions. I may browse through stores thinking, "Oh that watch is pretty, and that necklace. If I took them no one would ever know." But because I have a sense of morality and social order, I prevent my thoughts from being put to action.

Right away the problem with the Arizona boy falls under our noses. The chain between his existentialist thoughts and his homicidal actions remained unbroken. It's easy to say, "Oh he's just crazy, he couldn't control himself." "Crazy" is not an explanation. We must really ask ourselves why he chose not to engage his capacity for self-restraint.

Right away the answer falls under our noses. Self-restraint is valuable only within a system of morality or social order. If neither morality nor social order is valuable – as a nihilist will tell you – then self-restraint is futile. So we can just go ahead and do what we want. The boy went ahead and killed people. (Note: Nihilism and existentialism are different. In important ways. Which I'll ignore here because I already talk too much. Don't tempt me. Well, I can explain… just kidding. Well ok, maybe later. Is it wrong to make jokes in a blog about nihilism and murder?)

I really, really want to get a message across here. The solution cannot be to go to a nihilist and try to teach him that morality and social order are good things. This is like trying to teach a rabbi that Vishnu is a good thing. It's called conversion, and it's hard to do. Especially with nihilists. Nihilists have their own belief systems, just like religious adherents do. It's easy to criticize a belief system, much harder to change it. The solution for how to deal with nihilists is neither to convert them nor to write them off as crazies.

What nihilists need, on the contrary, is support. This Arizona boy needed someone to listen to his thoughts, and to brainstorm with him an appropriate behavioural system to match his beliefs. If he'd had someone to talk to (maybe someone with a secretly non-nihilist bias, hehehe, seeing as we don't need any more suicide bombers), then maybe he would have chosen other actions to express his beliefs. If nihilists don't value self-restraint, maybe we could make them value something else that would not lead to murder. Like chocolate chip cookies. Cookies don't usually lead to murder. Cookie make yum.

We cannot treat nihilists as outcasts, even though that's exactly what they seem to want to be. Existentialists have very little outlet for their thoughts in modern society, because society rejects them as anti-social. Bit of a paradox. Existentialists need to feel comfortable to come out of the closet in order for their thoughts not to rot into violent actions. This is why I think Camus is so important. His Myth of Sisyphus could be re-titled, "So You're An Existentialist. Now What?" And Camus gives a whole bunch of really positive possibilities. Travel. Paint. Make love. Perform. (Eat cookies.) The Arizona boy could have kept his beliefs, but re-channeled them into actions that actually benefit society rather than destroy it.

We need more books like Camus', in order to reduce the destructiveness and sense of shame of people like the Arizona boy. There's no shame in having existential thoughts any more than there's shame in believing in God. You just do. Actually, heehee, I have an idea of creating a new profession. The job: existential therapist. And you know what? It's been done! In I Heart Huckabee's, one of the best movies ever. (Ever.) They call them "existentialist detectives," but it's almost the same. Someone to guide you when you're having an "existential crisis," as a friend of a friend once put it.

I don't want to be an existential therapist. I do think it would be useful for a sub-section of therapists to be educated in existential philosophy, so that they can deal with people like the Arizona boy. And not even just extremes like him – I know smart, normal people who struggle trying to find meaning in a life where they believe there is no meaning to be found. They struggle also because they feel that they need to put up a "front," since nihilists are stigmatized. (Actually I've noticed this "front" emerging in Christians. Nowadays everyone's afraid to profess their beliefs openly. I'll take partial responsibility for that. Sorry, Christians.) Existential therapists could help build confidence in people whose beliefs constantly lead to self-doubt. There is no advice out there for making existentialism compatible with a happy, healthy life, and the Arizona case shows that such advice is badly needed.

(P.S. For goodness sake don't take this blog entry the wrong way! I am not sending subliminal messages to or about myself or anyone else. Ok maybe I'm sending subliminal messages to myself about everyone else. Oh really, Steffi? No, Steffi, it was a joke. Geez.)

(P.P.S. I took some liberties with this blog – of course I don't know what the Arizona boy was thinking before the shoot-out, or whether he was even a nihilist. Actually I just wanted an excuse to write another blog about existentialism.)

(P.P.P.S. Okay that joke was inappropriate. Sorry, God.)

(P.P.P.P.S. Sorry again. Dammit I need to stop. Inappropriate jokes are just so easy.)

Month 13.5. Importation of foreigners.

I have a lot to say this month, and this week in particular. Here's a short one.

I've long been a supporter of the "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" advice. My Spanish roommates know I roll my eyes when they insist on ordering ice cubes with their espressos, or when they'd rather starve than have dinner before 9 p.m. I still urge travelers to take the "When in Rome" advice. If you go to a foreign country for a few days or weeks, then you won't really experience the culture unless you embrace it. Locals may also take it as an offense if you resist their habits.

But I take back the advice if you're moving to a foreign country. (And so, my roommates can take this as an official apology.) "When in Rome" will work for the first few weeks, maybe even months. But beyond that, it actually becomes a bad idea rather than a good one. As a foreigner, you have something unique to offer the community. You have the ability to teach people about other ways of life, and other parts of the world. You will help no one if you stifle your upbringing. If you are constantly wishing that you were doing something else, behaving in some other way, then you will feel like an outsider. So you will be treated like an outsider. Then, no one will be able to learn from each other. Moreover, you'd actually be dishonouring your own traditions, even if you'd thereby be honouring someone else's. In the end, "When in Rome" gives way to "Be true to yourself." The "Be true" advice works for everyone: you, your peeps back at home, and your new crowd abroad.

And so I dedicate this blog entry:

To the No Damn Good crew, including those who have left (such as the Cow-Town people who all want to come back anyway), and all of your associates who may not be No Damn Good but who are damn great anyway: c'tte ville-ci, là, y'est ben full hot, but me I miss you en estie, v's'autes!

Month 13.4. Volunteering in the Balkans.

I was in Macedonia this week for a training seminar. The participants were volunteers and employees at different NGO's across Europe. The theme was "social inclusion." The seminar was meant to teach participants how to involve disadvantaged youth in the projects offered by the NGO's. I wish I could give you some answers how, but in fact I didn't get any.

I got plenty of answers about other things, though. For example, what it entails (realistically) to get any kind of volunteer project going in the Balkans. I realize that most of my lovely blog readers will never become volunteers in this region, nor perhaps anywhere else. But volunteers are around to spread things to people who don't have them. Those things can be anything – love, medical attention, food, knowledge. So far, as a volunteer, I haven't saved the whales or performed CPR. But I can share with you a bit of practical wisdom about volunteering itself. It may be a weak start to a successful volunteering term (a meta-start to be precise), but it's a start.

I would like to begin with one main observation about volunteering in the Balkans. I'll be perfectly blunt about it, because everyone beats around the bush and someone needs to tell it like it is. My observation is that the volunteers here are totally lost. I don't mean they're brainless. I mean that they come to the Balkans ready to pump some life into the community, but within a few months nothing is pumping but a few lazy breaths. We have become a troop of hot air balloons, wheezing and floating around aimlessly.

Not all volunteers are that way. I'm talking only about volunteers from EVS, a European program that allows young people to volunteer abroad. (I'm an EVS volunteer.) There are some really effective volunteers in the Balkans – they just tend not to be EVS. So what's wrong with us? And what can we do about it? These questions are important since thousands of young Europeans are now turning to EVS, given that it's free and available whereas good jobs are not.

My basic question is this: what is limiting the effectiveness of EVS volunteers in the Balkans? EVS stands for "European Voluntary Service," not "Unemployed Europeans Living Abroad." And yet we're all acting more like the latter. Going to the seminar in Macedonia made me realize a few reasons why EVS volunteers in the Balkans are more like free-fallers than ground-breakers.

1. Expectations. The expectations of young people beginning an EVS voluntary service in the Balkans are grotesquely off-mark. In my opinion, the most basic flaw with EVS is that the volunteers arrive expecting to be assigned tasks. When I arrived in Split with the other volunteers, my boss ("boss") literally said, "There's work here for you to do. But if you want to sleep all day and party on the beach all night, you're free to make that choice."

    The truth is that organization in the Balkans is slack. Take the seminar I went to – we barely even discussed the theme that was supposed to underlie the whole training. People go with the flow around here, and the flow changes. EVS volunteers in the Balkans have to be go-getters in order to achieve anything. Nobody tells them that before-hand. Nobody teaches them how to be a go-getter once they arrive. I think Balkan NGO's expect EVS volunteers to arrive as go-getters, but this comes as a shock to many volunteers who come expecting to be lead around by hand. This is partly the fault of EVS info sessions, where potential volunteers are told they will have mentors, language lessons, contracts, and assignments. On paper, this is all true. The reality is another story.

So EVS candidates are given unrealistic expectations about what it's like to volunteer in the Balkans. It follows that the wrong kinds of people wind up here as volunteers. There are EVS volunteers who are only 18 or 19 years old. They've just finished high school. They're used to teachers checking their homework and parents telling them to clean their rooms. And now, without any forewarning or instruction, they're expected to create a community newspaper or recruit language students in Montenegro. Maybe it would be possible if they were under closer supervision by a boss-like figure telling them what to do. But in the Balkans, EVS volunteers are not told what to do. We're volunteers, ain't nobody gonna waste their precious time holding our hands.

2. Funding. Continuing from the previous sentence: in the eyes of Balkan NGO's, we're just volunteers. Many organizations take on EVS volunteers because the EU gives them money for it. All the EVS-promotion-police will hunt me down for publishing this. But Balkan NGO's enroll in EVS because volunteers bring in money. The employees have neither the time nor the interest to really train us. We're money-makers. And when we're treated like young kids trying to find some "direction" in life by having fun in another country for a few months, then that's exactly how we'll act.

3. Duration. Okay, maybe I have an over-ambitious interpretation of what EVS volunteers should be able to achieve. EVS voluntary terms are relatively short – sometimes as little as three months. As pointed out to me by a participant at the seminar, three months is by no means long enough to impact a foreign community. It's not even enough for the volunteer to get to know the community.

Volunteers with Peace Corps (a program for Americans) have two-year terms. When I first hear this, it sounded impossibly long. Two years in Croatia? Holy Split. And that's the second-biggest city in the country. Imagine being stuck for two years in a village in Mongolia. Let's say it takes four to six months to really get a feel for the community you've moved to. It takes about the same amount of time to get a feel for what kind of projects would benefit your community (and would be feasible to implement. A project for teaching people how to use Adobe Acrobat in a village that has no computers will not be too successful).

So a volunteer needs time to get to know the community before developing projects that will benefit the locals. Then the volunteer has to plan the project. This is not easy. You have to learn how and where to find partners, how and where to find funds. You have to learn how to write an application for a project. You have to find out what organizations to submit your application to, and by what deadlines. You might wait several months before you find out whether the project has been approved. In summary it's a joke to expect an EVS volunteer to achieve in 6 months what a Peace Corps volunteer, or a local organization, takes years to do. Especially when EVS volunteers are not even told that they can develop their own projects, let alone instructed in how to develop them.

4. Language. You're from Poland. You've been accepted to be an EVS volunteer in Serbia. You will help give art lessons to children at a local elementary school. You get to Serbia. You live in an apartment with one volunteer from Germany and another from Italy. You go to your first day on the job. You still haven't a clue about Serbian culture and haven't learned a word of the language. You meet the kids. You say in your broken English, "Hi! I'm Magda. I Polski." Blank stares.

    It takes a really long time to learn a language. In six or even twelve months, you can't expect to have learned perfect Bosnian. The lingua franca ends up being English. So both the volunteer and the community members are struggling to understand each other in a language that is not their own. The language barrier varies from person to person, place to place. And yes, it's up to the volunteer to learn the local language if he or she wants to make a real impact. But quality language courses usually aren't offered to volunteers in the Balkans, despite all the EVS promises. Many EVS volunteers continue to feel like outsiders and to feel unable to help locals because of the difficulty they have in expressing their ideas to each other. Volunteers from within the region have a lot more potential because they already speak the language and have an idea of the community's needs.

    I want to add something here. People don't like to take me seriously when I talk about language barriers because I can get by in a handful of languages. People get upset because they use the language barrier as an excuse for their struggles abroad, and my (relative) ease with language is a threat to their excuse. I really don't people taking out their frustration on me, because (a) it's absurd to get angry at someone for speaking foreign languages, since learning a language is a way of showing curiosity and respect for a culture; (b) I did a degree in linguistics, so of course it's easier for me to pick stuff up; (c) I actually study the languages I learn during my own free time, and if you studied hard you could learn German too; and most importantly (d) since I have some language experience, you should trust me when I agree that you have to know a language really, really well to be able to communicate effectively in it. I've learned some Croatian, and you can all say I speak it great, but even "great" in six months hasn't been enough to establish solid communication skills with the locals. So keep your excuse. It's a good one. EVS volunteers need either a lot more time or a lot more language training to influence more than a few people in their community.

    There are many reasons why EVS volunteers in particular tend to sit at home thinking, Geez what to do with myself today. Part of the problem is that the EVS program in the Balkans doesn't sufficiently empower us. I've listed some explanations above. But part of the problem is that we're not empowering ourselves. Okay I may be a high-expectations kind of person, but I'm not saying anyone has to change the world. I'm simply saying that if no one will lead us, then we should lead ourselves. If volunteering in the Balkans teaches us anything, then let it be self-empowerment.

    These blogs are getting really long and specific.

Month 13.3. Shapes in sounds.

This is the second of two blog entries about the English language. In this entry, I propose a way in which the sounds of English may be changing.

I begin by offering you a crash course in phonetics, the study of speech sounds. Linguists, who are not particularly known for their visual art skills, will teach you that the human mouth looks like this:

Let me see if I can illustrate this cryptic diagram a bit better.

So the trapezoid-thing represents the space in your mouth. Your tongue moves around to produce different vowel sounds. There are sounds like “oh” and “ah” that are pronounced with your tongue in the back of the mouth. Sounds like “ee” are pronounced with the tongue forward and raised. If you say out loud right now, “Ah-eh-ee” without pausing between the sounds, you can feel your tongue raise. Linguists illustrate the “position” of certain sounds in the mouth using the trapezoid.

There is a special alphabet of symbols used to represent sounds. Sometimes, the sound-symbol is the same as the letter. For example, the symbol [o] designates the sound “oh.” Shocking. The square brackets indicate that o is being used not as a letter, but as a symbol representing the sound “oh.” The symbols for other vowel sounds in English are easy enough to grasp. [i] designates “ee,” as in tree. The symbol [e] demonstrates wait, and [ε] is for wet. [ɑ] is for rod, [o] is for rode, and [u] is for rude. Finally [æ] is for bat.

To illustrate the location of the tongue for different sounds, we chart the vowel-symbols into our trapezoid-mouth:

So [i] is pronounced with the tongue high and fronted, [u] with the tongue high and back, and so on. (Sorry but the blog changed the [ɑ] to ?)

The grand proposal of this humble blogger is that the pronunciation of American English vowels is changing – in a way that looks pretty in the trapezoid-mouth! It goes like this:

Actually there’s a term for the above diagram. Students learn it in historical linguistics (the study of how language changes). It’s called a push-pull phenomenon, and it’s already happened once in the history of English. What happens is that the sound [u] becomes more like [o], then [o] becomes like [ɑ], which becomes like [æ], which becomes like [ε], which becomes like [i]. There is circular rotation amongst the vowels.

Let’s explain. Say we start pronouncing the word rude more like rode. Then we have two words pronounced the same, but meaning different things: rode meaning “impolite,” and rode meaning “moved in a vehicle.” We want to maintain the distinction, so we start pronouncing the original word rode like rod. In other words, the [u] sound in rude “pushed out” the [o] from its space in the trapezoid. Words that were once pronounced with a [u] sound become pronounced with [o] instead (thus rude > rode). Words pronounced with [o] become pronounced with [ɑ]: rode > rod.

The process continues. We’ve begun pronouncing the original word rode “moved in a vehicle” like rod. But rod is already a word. So to get rid of the ambiguity, we start pronouncing the original rod like rad. But that’s also a word (as in, “That’s rad, dude”). So we start pronouncing rad like red. That’s already a word, so we pronounce red like rid. That’s a word, so rid becomes reed. Then reed becomes something like rude. This is called a “vowel shift.” The example I gave is hypothetical. But vowel shifts really have happened. They are the reason we have the following word pairs which have the vowel [a] in English but [u] in German: round-rund, hound-hund, mouth-Mund, pound-Pfund. The original sound was [u], which is still present in German but which has shifted to an [a] sound in English.

The amazing thing is not that vowels change. What’s amazing is that they change in an ordered way, even though speakers are unconscious of the change. My proposal is that a vowel change is happening in American English. Specifically, the vowels are undergoing a circular rotation around the trapezoid-mouth.

For now, we can only hear the vowel shift in a few words. The gay guy on Glee says “colture,” not “culture.” The u has become [o]. Americans say, “I gat so angry…” not “I got….” The [ɑ] has become [æ]. The name “Sarah” has become “Serah.” The [æ] is turning into [ε]. Americans say “mint” rather than “meant.” The [ε] is becoming [i]. So we have u > o > ɑ > æ > ε > i. Plot this transformation in the trapezoid-mouth, and you’ll see. The circle is being put together.

According to the literature in historical linguistics, vowel shifts begin with a few words being pronounced differently. Like Sarah > Serah and the other examples above. Eventually these changes spread to all words, so yeah > yeh, bad > bed, etc. Once all words have undergone the change, the vowel shift is complete. This can take a few decades or a few centuries. But one day, rode really will mean “impolite.”

If you’ve actually gotten this far in my blog entry, here’s a final geographical note. Canada has not fully caught on to the rotational vowel change I’ve argued for. Quebec English has resisted it. I spoke to some British Columbians recently, and they didn’t have it. On the other hand, people from Southern Ontario do talk like Americans. Draw what conclusions you like. But I hope you now see that there are more interesting differences to be discussed than that blasted about vs aboot.

Month 13.2. Words count.

This is the first of two blog entries about the English language. This entry concerns a lexical characteristic of English. The second entry – which I'm particularly excited about – concerns a phonetic characteristic of English.

One of my trusty blog-followers was pleased to tell me an interesting assertion he read about English: it has by far the most words of any language (with something like 600 000 words, compared to German in second place with 250 000. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong on the exact numbers). I'm equally pleased to give a more detailed response at this time.

The first reason to cast doubt on the assertion is methodological. It's possible that the author of the assertion derived his facts by counting the entries in various dictionaries. One problem immediately arises that many languages simply don't have dictionaries. Another problem is that standard English dictionaries are the result of centuries of compilation, whereas the dictionaries of other languages may be relatively new. Therefore, much more research has been done on "finding" words in English than in other languages, and consequently many more words have been found. It also follows that many archaic words are listed alongside modern variants in English dictionaries. More recent language dictionaries stick to words currently in use.

(Aside: Yes, people actually had to do research finding words in order to compile the first English dictionary. A great read about the creation of the English dictionary is "The Professor and the Madman.")

But suppose our friendly asserter got his data online. There are plenty of sites that track "new words" in English. Add these up and bingo! Tons of words to add to the English dictionary. Like "Belieber" and "screenager." The question any shrewd reader should now ask is, "Well so how does something become a 'new word'?" The answer is totally arbitrary: if it has been used at least x number of times by separate writers. That's it. (I can't remember what the number is, 25 or 82 or 103. The point is that it's arbitrary, and actually pretty low).

I can think of three problems with this arbitrary criterion for online word-counting. Each problem may lead to the inclusion of more words in the English lexicon than there ought to be. First, many coinages vanish as soon as their referents do. (At least I hope that Justin Bieber will vanish soon.) So it's not clear whether a word that was used x times last year, but x – 1 times this year, should still be counted as a word. Second, many coinages are technical jargon. So if cyclomethicone, the second ingredient in my facial cream, is not a legitimate word in English, than neither should "xenozoonosis" be just because x many people used it on the internet. Third, many of these coinages result from incorrect usage of a "real" English word. So just because a bunch of people have mistakenly used "irregardless" to mean "regardless," does "irregardless" become a legitimate word? Whether we count words online or in dictionaries, there is no uncontroversial methodology for summing up the English lexicon.

This brings me to the second reason for doubting that English has more words than any other language: there is no clear way to define the word "word." The problem is morphological. Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies how meaning is built up from units of speech. A morpheme is a chunk of speech that bears meaning. Take the word "count." It consists of a single morpheme meaning "add up." Now we can add the morpheme –able which says, "It is possible to execute the action denoted by verb I attach to." We get "countable." Now we can add the morpheme un- which negates the adjective it precedes. We get "uncountable." And so on.

English isn't particularly agglutinative. That means that one word usually corresponds to one morpheme (e.g. all the words in "He is happy to be here" are monomorphemic). But some languages can create huge words just by attaching lots of morphemes together. Famous is the German Donaudampfschifffärtsgesellschaftskapitän which breaks down to the noun "Captain-of-the-society-for-the-passage-of-cargo-ships-on-the-Danube." And that's just a noun. In other languages, whole sentences are piled into a single word. So we can make really long words by adding a lot of morphemes together.

It turns out that infinitely many sentences can be constructed in any sufficiently rich language (I actually had to prove this in my intermediate logic class – there are orders of infinity, and the number of possible sentences corresponds to one of the orders of infinity). For our purposes, all human languages are "sufficiently rich." So there are infinitely many possible sentences in each language. Here's the key deduction: if there are languages in which words can be sentences, and all languages have infinitely many possible sentences, then there are languages with infinitely many possible words. So there, English.

I know what you're going to say. If we wrote English in such a way as to make words out of sentences, then English would have infinitely many words too. E.g. Asentencewouldlooklikethis – just one word. Now write every sentence as just one word, and suddenly we have a bazillion more words in English. It's not so easy. There are reasons why "word" and "sentence" are separate notions. Linguists have identified many criteria that distinguish them.

One of the main criteria for distinguishing words from sentences is their prosody. Individual words have particular stress patterns. Each language has a different way of assigning stress to words. For example in French, stress falls on the last syllable of a word. Within any particular language, the rules governing the intonation of whole sentences are different from the rules governing the intonation of a single word. For example, the same sentence can be a question or a statement in English ("You're coming home" vs. "You're coming home?"). But that doesn't mean that every word within a question has the same rising pitch as the overall question. So, words and sentences have different prosodies. If, in a language, a particular sentence has all the same prosody patterns as a word, we can say that the sentence is actually a single word.

There are additional criteria for distinguishing sentences from words. Sentences can be broken up into morphemes that can stand on their own (e.g. The word "go" of the sentence "Go home!" could stand alone). Words cannot be broken up into morphemes (meaningful parts) that stand alone. That's why un- isn't a word, even if it bears some kind of meaning. So, words and sentences contain different types of morphemes. If, in a language, a sentence cannot be broken up into smaller parts that can stand on their own, then that sentence is a word.

What I've hoped to demonstrate is that the definition of a "word" is a complex issue. Whether something is a word depends not just on its usage, but on a variety of linguistic "tests" (such as prosody and ability to be broken up into free-standing morphemes). Given these linguistic tests, there are plenty of "words" that cannot simply be looked up in the dictionary. There are languages that form new words every time a sentence is spoken. The grand conclusion is that we should be skeptical when anyone tries to "count" the number of words in a language, which misleadingly suggests that some languages are richer than others.

(An addendum might help to clarify the intuition that English does have a huge vocabulary. The reason is that English is a Germanic language, but received many loans from French after the Norman invasion in 1066. The result is that for most words with Germanic origins, there is a word having the same meaning but with Latin origins. E.g. dumb (G) – stupid (L), wonderful (G) – excellent (L), hunger (G) – famine (L), speech (G) – language (L).)

Month 13. Revisions.

We were sitting in the smoke-room of a hotel in Serbia when an Estonian guy sitting across from me launched into an elaborate tirade about the despicability of Americans. Well, at least he thought he was being elaborate. He had two points, both clearly deduced by a lengthy and ingenious reasoning process surely not replicated by anyone else in Europe: Americans are stupid and they consume too much.

I sat there listening to him go on and on. Just when my brain was about to self-destruct, I asked the guy, "Have you ever been to the States?" Silence. "Well, uh, I had this friend who went…." "And have you ever met an American?" "Well, you know, I watch movies…."

After my visit to North America this summer, I admit I was also cynical. It seemed to me that everyone was absurdly spoiled. I couldn't imagine anyone ever being satisfied when there was always something bigger, better, newer, prettier to be had. I saw things going to waste everywhere, things being thrown out that would be a luxury over here (e.g. broccoli).

But after living six months in an apartment where half the electricity is out most of the time and all the electricity is out some of the time, my opinion has changed. We by no means suffer in Split. We're happy and we live pretty well; in summer we live excellently. But when you live in a long-term lack of something, it's human nature to get as much of that something as you can once it becomes available. There's no morality involved – it's a question of human nature. That's what people get wrong when judging NAm. (I'm blending the States and Canada together in this, although Europeans are curiously insistent that Canadians are different.) (Another aside: My words imply that human nature is "above" moral judgment. Intellectually, I do kind of think so. Practically, instinctively, there are plenty of things I see people do out of "human nature" that I judge to be morally wrong. It's a huge issue that I'll leave to the philosophers.) And so the people who judge NAm are the ones who forget to consider how they themselves would act, given the same circumstances as a North American.

In the States, wifi internet is available on buses and trains (!). Fancy phones (I don't even know what's what anymore, iPads or whatever) are cheap. Gizmos and gadgets are there and easy to acquire. You can keep in touch people and take care of business instantly from anywhere. For God's sake you can look up a word online while you're riding the metro to work. That's amazing. Would you refuse that, given the chance? What good would it serve you to refuse?

In NAm, you can get strawberries in the middle of winter. If someone offered you fresh blueberries in March after you've spent months eating wrinkly apples, would you really say no? Who cares where that mango came from - it's delicious, nutritious, and available. Why not?

In NAm, you can sample cuisine from all over the world at a modest price. I sound like an advertisement, I know. And yeah, the cuisine is not always "authentic." But the fact is that NAm has ties to everywhere. Walking down a single street, you can hear people speaking Vietnamese, Portuguese, and Creole. Go to an Irish pub and a real, live Irish person will serve you. There are shops that sell Korean goods, there are bookstores that carry literature from all around the world. This sounds ridiculous, but in a way the world is in North America. You can learn about any place and meet anyone from anywhere right at home. (Don't get me wrong – I still think there's nothing compared to living it first-hand.) And so if an Argentinean tried to strike up a friendship with you in NAm, would you politely decline because it's not Argentina?

The point: NAm really is the land of opportunities. To not take advantage of the opportunities is actually more wasteful than to "consume" them. This blog is not an incitement to go out and spend thousands of dollars on useless trinkets. It is an encouragement for people in NAm to realize how truly lucky they are, and to make the best use they can of all the wonderful things available to them.

_____________

Your homework for this lesson is to go about your daily routine as always, but to look around you for all the small items and choices that you wouldn't have if you weren't in NAm. Those are the things that count. Do you have special whitening toothpaste? Eggs, toast, or cereal for breakfast? Did your shower stay hot to the end? Do you wear round-toe or pointy-toe shoes? Can you schedule a doctor's appointment? Do you drink water from your tap? With ice? Do you have a cell phone? Do you buy organic? Bonus points go to the student who finds the smallest thing to be grateful for.

Month 12: Layers

Layer 1.

The best things in life are layered.

What comes to your mind when I say the word "layered"? Indeed, it's a very layered word. Here are the things I think of:

The Opera cake that I once helped Sarah make in Calgary.

Onions.

People. You can learn so much more from layered people. There's something unnerving about people who lay all their cards out right away. At first you feel special. Then you realize you're more like a microphone, an object that people whisper their deepest feelings to, then walk away from. I feel better around people that I know are hiding something from me. It commands respect and patience.

Bed sheets and clothes. I used to have dark blue bed sheets, and going to bed was like diving underwater. Deep layers are dark and safe.

Erosion. See picture.

Pretty cool eh? (But maybe not quite the greatest thing in the world, um…)

Art. Any masterpiece was once nothing but a few blobs of colour. The colour you choose for the background of a painting can make or break it even before it's made. And certain media are impossible to master if you don't learn to layer, e.g. watercolours.

Flavours. You wine connoisseurs know what I'm talking about. And enough has been said about the importance of aftertastes – "the scent lingers on the palate," "he left a bad taste in my mouth," etc.

Layer 2.

Expecting me to say something a little deeper?

I'm finding that the experiences gained from living abroad come in waves.

At first there is that giddy nervousness that comes with facing the unknown. Then there is empowerment and a sense of ownership. Nobody can tell you where to go or what to do. You know better than everyone else because you've been there and done that.

Then there is the sheepish humility that surfaces when you realize you don't know anything about anything. You're just another foreigner trying to feel special in someone else's space. Once you've absorbed that wave, you feel motivated to adapt. You want to fit in, so you try to learn the language and the lifestyle in order to re-integrate yourself into society. Empowerment comes from belonging.

You ride that wave for a little while. You're doing good. Then all of a sudden you realize you're miles from the shore. People back home are either straining to see where you've washed up, or have given up on following your course altogether. Serves you right – you forgot to look back when you drifted off, and you have no idea how you got to where you are. You want to grip onto something familiar, but you're lost at sea and ain't nobody coming to find you.

At this point any big impetus is useless. It's also useless to give up. You have to take it slowly, pick a direction you think is at least roughly right, and aim for it. Maybe this is the hardest time – you need more confidence and optimism than ever, and yet you have every reason to believe that even if you make it back, everyone will have packed up and left. On the bright side, no matter which way you go there's something new to learn. You also begin to appreciate home in a way you never have before.

Layer 3.

Down here it's warm and cozy, like I promised. It might seem that reality is pretty far from here. That's ok. Here is the place where you tell stupid jokes and boogie to really loud music in your room (hey tikitakirikiraka macarena, hey lakalikarikiraka macarena. Hey rakarikalakataka macarena, heyyyyyyyyy macarena!). Here is the place you stick your tongue out to falling snow and goose your friends. You probably pick your nose when you think no one's looking. Here is where you laugh so hard that you snort, and then laugh harder because you're snorting. Things are simple. Everyone loves everyone. You know where this is. Yes, you do. And it's not that hard to get there.