Plenty of languages, as usual

Benny the Irish polyglot, whose blog I've been following with amusement since my daughter recommended it to me, feels there's no excuse for not learning a foreign language or several, because we have so many opportunities to practise. Living in Ottawa, that's true; I hear different languages spoken every day without even seeking them out, and I love it. Several of our immediate neighbours are francophone. The gentlemen fitting my stair carpet last week were speaking in Arabic. The ones working on our basement talk to one another in an interesting mix of French and English. Chris introduced a Bulgarian gentleman to the Rockcliffe Flying Club last weekend and conversed with him in German. Last week I met Maria from Spain, of whom more below, and every Thursday I introduce my German speaking group (usually around 15 of us these days) to our theme of the week––16th century German painters, for instance: I showed them my Dürer book and we read about Cranach der ältere and Hans Baldung Grien.

Last Sunday we had a 1-year-old child in our house, who pointed out the birds and squirrels in Cantonese. She had already mastered a few words of English too. At the Algonquin College tour mentioned in my blog last week I met a little girl, 3 years old, who could already speak Slovak, Czech and English.

It isn't only Ottawa. On Facebook I read people's updates in Italian, German, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Filipino, Mandarin, Japanese (some of those, admittedly, with the help of Google's translation tool!). And the other day a Belgian friend had posted a short video in Flemish that I could more or less follow because of the Dutch I remember learning in the 70s.

Last night I watched a DVD in Spanish, Todo Sobre Mi Madre (una historia de mujeres ... estrenada en 1999 y ganadora del Oscar a mejor película extranjera.) The complicated plot revolves around a transvestite in Barcelona who has fathered two sons; I think it is an absolute work of art, directed by a genius. Because I've learned a bit more of the language since the first time I saw it, I got more out of it this second time, an experience so intense that although Chris came into the room in his running shorts telling me he was going out for a run (with a thunderstorm imminent), I only realised he'd been gone when he came back. Waking up in the middle of the night (during the heavy rain) I found myself trying to explain the film to myself––in Spanish! ––after which it took me a while to go back to sleep again.

Maria, mentioned in the first paragraph above, lived in Spain, Turkey, Argentina, France, Honduras and Columbia before coming here. She told our Spanish speaking group about Buenas Aires, how it is more than half Italian, and about Colombia, a country which she feels does not deserve its bad reputation, the capital, Bogotá, being a civilised city with a wonderful university. Education, she said, was the only way for the people to escape poverty, "...and they know that." From her experience of Latin American culture, she had come to realise that a family consists of a mother and her children, helped by her neighbours, the mother being the pillar (el pilar) of society. The husband / father, relatively speaking, is just a passer-by (el hombre pasa).

Maria was also an apologist for bullfighting in Spain. After all, bulls are born to fight, she said: la corrida de toros is an art form.

Words, words, words

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.

My grandson's first word was "Boo!" (and he said it to me). Then he began naming things, such as birds (which he classifies either as "duck" or "owl"), road vehicles ("car") and spherical objects — from peas to oranges to the moon, he names them all "ball". Recently he's been acquiring far more vocabulary and has started to string words together into phrases, if not quite sentences. Having begun with nouns, he's now incorporating other parts of speech into his vocabulary: verbs, a few adjectives and prepositions. He can't yet manage personal pronouns or adverbs (other than "where?" -- e.g."where teddy?"), but he can already convey a good deal of information:

Dig, dig, uh-oh! (Alexander's commentary on the demolition of a building that he and his father observed.)
"Man-on-moon rock" [= rocket / lunar module]. (He was taken to the Science Museum last month.)
"Mummy wash ball." (Watching his mother pick a tomato and wash it under the tap, he picked another and held it up to her.)
"Big red bus." (He lives in London.)
"Dig, dig, dig! Yellow digger." (Playing in the sand pit.)
"Light on, light off."
"Bye-bye!"

To my daughter's delight, he even came out with "Love Mummy!" the other day.

I didn't think Alexander could manage anything other than the infinitive or present tense form of verbs, until the other day he surprised me after a hiatus on our Skype link: "A'nder did hit keys, gran'a gone." (i.e. I accidentally touched a critical spot on the computer keyboard that caused my grandmother's picture on the screen to disappear).

Interestingly enough, it's not only human babies who venture, nouns first, into language. It seems that computers take this route as well. My husband has been pointing my attention to the development of OpenCyc, "the world's largest and most complete general knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine" that purports to contain "hundreds of thousands of terms, along with millions of assertions relating the terms to each other, forming an upper ontology whose domain is all of human consensus reality" rather like the links in the language processing part of our own brains, it seems. Apparently, the boffins involved with this project have for the last 24 years been trying to teach computers what we call "common sense", but in order to do that they have to give them an adequate word classification system from which to make the sensible sort of connections we humans make without much obvious effort. To give the example Chris showed me, "if you look at 'CEO' you'll see it has a subject type (organisation) and object type (person)." Therefore the computer understands that "an organisation's CEO is a person."

This web page gives you the opportunity to check the system for yourselves. I decide to give it a go and type in a few words. It knows what an "echidna" is, but it knows neither the word "mankind" nor the modern, politically correct alternative, "humankind". It doesn't know "me", either. All it shows for those nouns and that pronoun are "nothing available". Ditto, "quintessence".

For "romance", it gives: "romance [love] Has something to do with romantic love, like sending flowers to a significant other, or a couple embracing." Which leaves out an awful lot else.

I'll try it with a verb, I decide, and type "pitch", but it can only identify this word as a noun, the first example given being "baseball pitch".

How about adjectives? I try "nice" and "city of France" comes up! That's a good one.

It also adds a reference to something technical: "Nice, The-Program". This is one biassed ontological knowledge base.

Other parts of speech leave it floundering:

"whatever": nothing available
"unless": nothing available
"also": nothing available. It doesn't even know the word "then"!

My husband, reading this over my shoulder, says that my comments are inappropriate, because what I'm trying to describe is an "upper ontology," not a dictionary. I'm still dismayed though, for I find that the Reasoning Engine's understanding of "us" is limited to "United States" and if I look at the entries listed under the word "forward", I find that they're either computer related or applicable to a military context. The potential for a misunderstanding in that context is no longer funny. It worries me considerably.