robkeeney

Mucinex-D? Wonder drug! The head is almost completely cleared up and the throat has quit hurting. Now, come 2:00 a.m. when this has worn off, all bets are off, but for now, I'll take it!

I went to school just to do the "essential things". Got there at 2:30ish. Left at 5:00. And that was just essential things. I left a sub plan, just in case I awaken worse than I feel, but, I think I have a day planned wherein I'll talk as little as possible, as long as I can get Guy to download "Macavity" from CATS for me tonight.

I'm doing vocabulary again this week (instead of science or history) because the Read Aloud that introduces the words is "Macavity, the Mystery Cat" by T.S. Eliot. Seeing as how there's a song in CATS that IS the poem, why should I read it, when the kids can listen to it? As many singers as I have, they should love it.

And the nuts part? I'm making French Onion soup. From scratch. The onions are sweating now. French bread is already made to go with. I think Rob & Maggie will be jealous. :)

I also think I'll sleep well tonight.

Now it's "just" the ears are clogged, the guck is settling in the lungs and I can't talk. Yay! *wipes sarcasm off chin*

I think I better write sub plans, just in case I feel no better in the morning. There's no way I could talk long enough to teach today. I'm going to get Mucinex and more juice and run through school, then I'm going to sleep some more.

The 3 or 4 naps I had yesterday really did help. I didn't want to miss church, but nobody at church needs what I have. Couldn't have stayed awake through services, anyway.

Maybe French onion soup will cure what ails me. . .

So I have to tell you about my husband and his fabulousness.

First of all, he has been so accomodating throughout all of my big life changes of the past two years, up to and including various episodes of crying, gnashing of teeth, and wailing, "I can't do this!" Not once has he told me to suck it up and stop whining.

In addition, he proofreads all my school projects for me, brainstorms Math Lab lesson plans, and in general listens to me yammer on about how hard life is and no one understand.

This week, he has volunteered to do the grocery shopping and cook dinner every night.

That, ladies, is love.

Today in the car, we listened to the book of Ecclesiastes...and then the sermon was about Ecclesiastes as well. I've heard it referred to as a depressing book, but I've never found it to be so myself; I've loved it ever since I was a young girl reading to escape a "boring" sermon at church.

I think that one of the reasons I find it comforting is because I find that I can relate to it very easily. I have a very keen sense of responsibility and of wanting to do the right thing...it feels like everything matters so much. Sometimes I have a hard time making decisions, because every event and ever potentiality seems so fraught with importance and weight.

When the Teacher in Ecclesiastes says, "Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!" I find that I can think about it two ways. One is simply as a resigned utterance: "Nothing is worthwhile. Nothing has meaning." The other, though, is more helpful to me. "Nothing means as much as you think it does. It's not worth getting worked up over."

I get worked up about things easily--we've talked before about how I can actually start worrying that I'm not worry enough about something--but I tend to vacillate between feeling like everything is huge and important and thinking that nothing's worth anything anyway, so why even try?

Ecclesiastes reminds me that I need to be walking somewhere in the middle. How I live my life is important, but most things are probably not as all-encompassing as they become in my head. If I start with God, start with doing what I know I ought to be doing, then everything else will fall in place. Something unpleasant happening to me doesn't even mean that I did something wrong--Ecclesiastes reminds me, too, that "time and chance happen to all."

I really needed it this week, too, so I'm thankful that I got a double dose. I've been sort of up-and-down this week, now feeling on top of things, now feeling totally discouraged. I'm really craving some balance and some normalcy. Reading Ecclesiastes is like sitting down and taking a deep breath.

I bought the first full-on, store-bought, $50-and-check-your-video-card-stats PC game last week that I have in ages. I'd been jonesin' for a shiny new RPG, something where you can wander a huge map and play as a cheeky elf bard or surly dwarf paladin. Something where you spend a half hour customizing your character. Something that you could play without sleeping for a couple of days straight and not finish. Something with a good story.

Dragon Age: Origins checked all those boxes handily. So I snapped it up.

The game is, by all accounts, huge. Fifty hours of gameplay, easy. More, no doubt, if you're an obsessive side-quester like me ("What's that little elf boy? You lost your bouncy ball? I will go into these haunted woods and find it!").

DA:O is supposed to be a lot darker and grittier than the D&D-licensed RPGs that have come out in the last decade or so. And it is that, although it's not the darkest or grittiest thing I've ever played by a long shot.

Still, the much-touted 'morally gray' choices are agonizing, especially for a player like me who wants to see every single part of the game. The game seems to delight in tossing the player into situations where there don't seem to be any right answers, and possibly there's not even a happy outcome.

Intellectually, I really appreciate that. So many games that offer 'moral choices' come down to "Would you like to save the orphanage? Or set it on fire?" In the world of DA:O, the orphanage is already on fire and the orphans will grow up to be evil necromancers. Frequently, doing the 'obvious good' thing will lead to unintended consequences. Also frequently, there's no 'good' way to do anything and you have to do the bad thing or stand aside and watch.

Again, it's intellectually more interesting that way. In an actual game, though, it's a bit frustrating in a way. As a player, you want a clear path to reward, and DA:O stubbornly refuses to give it to you. As a story, this makes it realistic. But as a game which you are actually trying to play, it's a bit random. One comes to the point where one wants to save before every conversation.

Debating the pros and cons of such a complex moral choices in the format of a video game is definitely a conversation to be had. There's wiggle room there. But here's an area where there's not wiggle-room: I think Dragon Age: Origins fell into a rut in terms of gameplay mechanics, and that there is a design failure here on the part of the developers.

If you've ever played any of the Baldur's Gate games, the Neverwinter Night games, or there close relatives (basically, any Bioware/Black Isle/Obsidian RPG from the past fifteen years) you're going to be very familiar with the way combat and character leveling works in this game. And you know what, I'm going to say that's not a good thing.

The basic formula involves pausing the real-time combat about once a second (not an exaggeration), moving every character who isn't a mage, and using the mage to drop big area-of-effect spells on the enemy hoardes to mop them up. In a nutshell: extreme micromanagement, and magic-users are king. And this is a system that DA:O takes to the next level, by ratcheting up the difficulty and forcing you to do this kind of thing or watch your party get wiped out by low-level grunts.

The problem is, this is a game that starts out by inviting you to build any character you like. It then has a combat system that emphasizes real-time, one-on-one combat. Yet if you create a wise-cracking rogue duelist, like I did, you'll quickly find that attempting to just 'play' him is an exercise in frustration. Without being heavily optimized and understanding all the ins-and-outs of the game, the character quickly becomes quite useless in combat. And the game does little to prod you in the right direction.

Ultimately, I think these 'semi-real-time' RPGs have bad interfaces. Oh sure, they're polished and easy to navigate. But they're also extremely misleading. They make it look like the game is meant to be played one way, when really it's meant to be played in an entirely different style.

In most of the older games, that didn't matter, but DA:O demands a lot more of players (presumably because many of them have been playing this same kind of game for fifteen years) and is extremely unforgiving if you don't play it the 'right' (but secret!) way.

But here's the problem: I should fall within the cohort of 'veteran' players, since I picked up the first Neverwinter Nights nearly a decade ago. But you know what happened during that decade? I got older! I'm almost thirty, I have two jobs, and I don't want to spend my evenings pouring over the manual, the character creator, and any FAQ I can find online in order to optimize my character and make the game playable. I want something I can come home to in the evening and unwind by spending a couple hours saving the world.

I really, really like DA:O's story and characters so far. But at this point I'm starting to get torn. I want to hear more of it, but advancing through it is like pulling teeth. So I almost don't want to play it. At this point, I'm half-way inclined to start over and build a better optimized character, but I've already sunk 10+ hours into the game.

Is this the kind of game you wanted to make, Bioware? An RPG for teenagers and experts? And do you really think that recycling decades old mechanics is the best approach here anyway?

Hopefully I'll figure out a way to keep playing and enjoying this game. But I also hope that the next game in the series takes a good hard look at some of the fundamentals here. I think one of the world's foremost RPG developers owes players something better than this.

I'm sick. The nose is snuffy, the throat is sore, I'm going home. It's barely 3 and I'm going home. (!)

I had another Chat with D. about his behavior and what's respectful.

Too tired to even care much. Going home. Taking drugs. G'night.

We're having a very interesting discussion on a recent blog post of mine about which modern authors will stick around to become classics. Do give us your thoughts.

Oh, and just to keep things fair, let's classify 'modern authors' as being people who have released new material within the last thirty years, and are still alive or only recently passed.

How ditzy are girls? Yesterday, A whinged on and complained because she was sitting in the back of the room, basically alone. Today, coming in to see my favorite U-shape back, she complained that she wanted to be alone, so she couldn't talk. *groooooooooooooan* GIRLS.

Very good stuff via Marginal Revolution -

In 1929, The Guardian polled its readers to find out which British authors they thought would still be popular in 100 years. Well, the century isn't quite up, but someone's unearthed this poll, and it's a cautionary tale for leading literary lights.

Here's The Guardian now:

Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky:
They are John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), H. G. Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455), J. M. Barrie (286).

What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max Beerbohm, it's pleasing to note).

Great War Fiction, where apparently somebody still reads this stuff, has some commentary:

Well, Galsworthy is still in print, and I’ve recommended the Forsyte Saga to my daughter as a good way of whiling away long cosy hours of breast-feeding. I don’t think he features on many academic reading lists, though. Wells and Bennett have their devoted followers, though there is more interest in Wells’s ideas than in his fiction, I think, and Bennett still seems to me the most under-appreciated of British novelists. Kipling is a great unignorable fact in English literature, but his name is at least as likely to produce vilification as praise. And Barrie and Walpole? Barrie is now a one-play man; Peter Pan continues to enchant, even when debased to panto. But have you tried any of his novels lately? The Little White Bird is positively creepy.

And Hugh Walpole, I fear, has quite disappeared from critical fame, and I can’t see him ever regaining it.

The list looks a little better once we get out of the Top Ten, with some more familiar names popping up:

George Moore - 165 votes
Bernard Shaw - 110 votes
Conan Doyle - 101 votes
R.H.Mottram - 79 votes
John Buchan - 63 votes
D.H.Lawrence - 61 votes
Chesterton - 60 votes
Aldous Huxley - 50 votes

Garnering only one vote is the still very popular P.G. Wodehouse. And getting absolutely no votes is a British writer who is far more widely read today than anyone else on this list: Agatha Christie.

Just yesterday I was reading a very good article by Eric D. Snider talking about the 50's John Wayne-John Ford western The Searchers, a middling hit when it was released that somehow morphed into a classic twenty-five years later. This largely unheralded film is now hailed as inspiration by two generations of filmmakers.

The fact is that books and movies that the popularity of a book or movie in it's 'moment' seems to have little bearing on its relevance to posterity. I think if you survey many of the landmark author with classic books that are a century old or older, you'll find that very few of them were immensely popular in their time. Many in fact toiled in near obscurity, only to be 'discovered' well after their deaths.

It's probable that there's a large element of chance in these things - if you're lucky some influential critic digs up one of your books thirty years after you're gone and gives it a new lease on life. There's no control over something like that.

But all the 'classic' literature tends to have a few things in common: either it deals in Big Themes or centers on some truly Memorable Characters. Stylistic choices, cultural relevance, progressive thinking - these generally don't speak to people fifty years on. They may sell books (or movies) at the time, but they also date those same works badly.

But who can really say what will stand the test of time?

How 'bout it? Anyone care to wager on what modern authors will still be read in 100 years time?

Today was the worst day I've had with my kids. I think, in part, it was the seating arrangement. I hated it. It just didn't work. So, I put them back in the U-shape (modified a little), after I went to 2 meetings, after school. ( In Which I Vent Much Frustration )

So, today was just awful. But, as Anne would say, tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it. I must go to bed, so I can face it.

So let's talk about how I've been doing homework all evening, even through dinner.

No, on second thought, let's not, because that's depressing. Instead, we'll just point out that I have five weeks of school remaining, and four major projects to complete by December 13th, as well as some other large projects on my plate. *shudder*

On the other hand, there was free food at school today, thanks to our amazing PTO President. There was even--deliciousness of deliciousness--pineapple upside down cake!

AND when I got to school today, my first assignment was to go to Target and buy storage boxes. Now our Math Lab supplies are all organized and ready for Thursday's new unit. Hopefully it will help in the long-run, but even just for now it feels good to have things sorted. I always feel like I have a better grasp on what I have when I run my hands over it, look at it, feel it, put it away. It's soothing, like Scrooge McDuck letting his rows and piles of coins slip through his fingers, feathers.

I wish I could touch things like love, or respect, or golden sunshine.

I have to tell you this: I have a favorite place in the school. There are huge windows in the hallways, and in one specific hallway there is a bench beneath one window, in a little alcove. When the sun is just right, golden rays pour through the window and across the floor and up the other wall, and the whole hallway feels effervescent, as though the light was made up of infinitescimal bubbles. Sometimes, after lunch, I sit on the bench and let the quiet light settle around me. So peaceful.

So, the new arrangement isn't working, for a variety of reasons. I hate it. I loathe and despise it. It's going back to the U-shape this afternoon. Dunno how I'm going to put the kids in it - maybe boy, girl, boy, girl - but it's going back. I hate not having the open floor space. I was heard muttering, "I hate this," during morning math time, so you know it's bad. I even heard one kid say that the horseshoe was better.

The feng-shui is just not flowing in here right now. Back it goes.

One of the things I was never taught in college is that getting the right seating chart can be one of the great struggles of a room. And that's just the first of MANY things I was never taught in college.

My devotional reading for the day is about predictability, being stuck in a rut. According to the author--who himself attributed it to John Gardner, a Cabinet minister under President Johnson--most people stop learning by their mid-'30s. Now, I have to assume that this implies intentional learning rather than the kind of learning you do, say, when you discover that adding cocoa powder to the coffemaker's brew basket is not a Good Thing.

The author's point is predictability, too much routine. I worry about this in my own life, because in some ways it's very predictable. We all get up at the same time each day. We get up at the same hours, go the same places, say the same things...

But I would have to say that I am learning so much all the time that--no, honest--I wouldn't mind a bit of a rut now and then. When the reading closed with the challenge to do something unpredictable, I honestly couldn't think of anything unpredictable I could do!

What's it like for you? Does your mileage vary? It certainly doesn't seem that I am so far out of the ordinary, so I'd love to know what this is like for other people.

http://blag.xkcd.com/2009/11/02/notes/

http://blag.xkcd.com/?p=306

I had a lot of fun putting together today’s comic. Anyone who likes strange charts like this should check out Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It’s long been one of my favorite books. Thank you to my friend Tina for color advice, and to my brother Ricky for some Lord of the Rings detail corrections.

Also thank you to Olga and Noam for the lovely animated version of comic #442.

In Power of Babel John McWhorter has a beautiful term for the moment in acquiring a new language when you realize that this is going to be much harder than you thought: dammit! moments.

In learning any language on earth, we come to a point, often right at the outset, when we encounter something that from the perspective of our own language makes us think, "Dammit! How can anybody speak this every day?"

McWhorter argues that almost every language on earth is 'unnecessarily' complicated (there are a handful of exceptions, but I'll get to them in a moment). The truth is, a lot of the trappings we take for granted in European languages are unnecessary.

Anyone who has studied French or German has wondered why it's necessary to keep track of whether a table or an onion is a he or a she. Many languages have gendered nouns, although this appears to serve no functional purpose. But even where the features of a language have some functional use, they may not be strictly necessary. Tenses, for example. Many languages have them, but not all. And in fact you can get by without them based on context.

In English, we might say, "Yesterday, I was in my boat." 'Was' indicates that this occurred in the past. But wait, doesn't 'yesterday' also do that? In many languages, you would say "Yesterday, I am in my boat" with no loss of clarity.

There's an argument to be made for tenses, though, in that they can at least speed up the process of indicating when an event or action occurred. At least English avoids those grammatical constructions of really marginal utility, like reflexive verbs. Right?

Not so fast, dude. Remember our previous discussion about a, an and the? Yep, articles. Talk about marginal utility. Anyone who has ever spoken with a foreigner who hails from one of the (many) languages without articles will know that there's no piece of our language more likely to trip people up. Does it really matter whether it's "I took a bus to school" or "I took the bus to school"?

Every language has words to indicate specificity, and in fact our articles descended from the words for 'one' and 'that'. "I took that bus to school," "I took one bus to school." Linguistically, this is a much more common way of handling the problem of specificity, when it's actually needed. Why English feels the need to mark the specificity of almost every noun is almost as confusing as the whole gender fixation.

Of course, I suspect the real dammit! moment for foreign learners is realizing that English has no rhyme or reason when it comes to spelling and pronunciation. Poor bastards.

So, European languages are pretty complex beasts. Do you think that, on average, it would be safe to say that they tend to be MORE complex then, say, the languages of tribal bushmen? After all, our languages have had to evolve to suit the hurly-burly complexity of modern life. Surely people living in the forest participating in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle have no need for advanced linguistic complexes?

Maybe not, but McWhorter says that they have them anyway, and in spades. In fact, he claims that generally speaking the language of an isolated tribal group is likely to be much more complex then one of the 'Big Ten' languages. Often, the only word to describe the grammars that these groups deploy is 'baroque'. These small languages may employ a multitude of tones, nouns with dozens of genders, an array of verbs that are all entirely irregular, or 'word soup' word orders that make it difficult to figure out what's being said even when you have a word-for-word translation in front of you!

This seems counter intuitive at first. But the reason for it might come to you if you think about English as it's spoken in the ghettos of America. This dialect of English is famous for evolving very quickly and in very strange ways ("Fo shizzle my nizzle," anyone?). It's clear that the people who speak it enjoy this strange form of word invention, and this is often true of close-knit communities.

So, imagine a South American tribe that has been living in the mountain rain-forests for hundreds of years, with little or no contact with any other people. They have no reason to teach their language to anyone from the outside world. And being in constant contact with each other allows them to participate in the kind of word-play and invention that human beings seem to have an endless taste for. Over time their language will take on so many layers and odd branches that it may well remain virtually unintelligible to any intrepid translator who might find his way into their jungle.

McWhorter refers to this as "language as an inside joke," which I think communicates the idea here pretty succinctly.

Meanwhile, back in the wider world, the "Big 10" languages are continually undergoing a process of simplification. Their requirement that they be teachable to non-native speakers means that they are constantly being 'sanded down', made simpler and more consistent. Not enough, alas, to get rid of articles and noun genders, but at least enough to keep the irregular verbs to a minimum and the word order relatively straightforward.

So, strangely the large, widely-spoken languages are usually simpler than small, obscure ones.

But they've still got plenty of dammit! moments in store for the unwary learner.

The only exceptions to the dammit! rule are new languages. McWhorter spends a chapter on pidgins and creoles, because these unique products of colonization and globalization give us a lot of insight into the fundamentals of language.

Very briefly, when two groups of people who don't speak the same language meet, they often develop a 'pidgin' to communicate in. Pidgins are extremely basic, invented on the spur of the moment to facilitate simple communication. They tend to involve the simplest parts of both languages. Any shades of complexity are thrown to the wayside.

But a pidgin is not a complete language. It lacks a real grammar and doesn't have a wide-enough vocabulary to encapsulate all concepts. But sometimes, if contact between the two groups is sustained, like it was when the Europeans started colonizing Southeast Asia, the pidgin grows into a full language. We call these languages creoles.

When a creole is born, it's like a brand new language. It tends to be very, very simple grammatically and have few linguistic 'curlicues'. Creoles usually have a word order of subject-verb-noun. Verbs have no tense. Short words known as 'particles' usually proceed the verbs to modify them and give them a tense.

While of course creoles carry some features of the languages that spawned them, these features are often very simple, and they rapidly evolve beyond the recognition of speakers of the original languages. For instance, in Tok Pisin, "em bai go long maket" translates as, "she will go to market." Were you able to get that from that sentence? Tok Pisin is an English creole!

In his epilogue, McWhorter discusses the possibility of reconstructing the 'ur language', Adam and Eve's tongue from which all others are presumably descended. Alas, given thousands of years of history and the random, haphazard fashion in which languages change he concludes that this endeavor is extremely unlikely to succeed. We can't know what the first language sounded like.

But the interesting thing is that new creoles give us a pretty good idea of how that first language's grammar probably worked. The language features listed above are common to creoles across a wide swath of peoples, cultures and geographies. There does seem to be some consistency in the way that new languages are created. They start simple with a basic word order and particle-modified verbs, and then over time they evolve (often spectacularly!) in complexity and nuance.

So Adam and Eve probably spoke a relatively simple language, but they're not around today to tell us how it sounded. It's probably just as well, though.

I imagine that if they had to learn English, they'd pretty quickly find themselves slapping their foreheads and saying "Dammit! How can anyone speak this way?!"

It was, all in all, a good week. It started out iffy, but I got past most of the challenges and it ended really well. There are two things I was thinking about yesterday and today, though, that give me a little pause.

One is that I would feel better if I could figure out whether my job is hard, or whether it's just hard for me. I can never tell whether the challenge is the work or myself. Perhaps it seems like only semantics, but I constantly wonder whether I just need to find a way to work harder, or whether it's just the nature of the job and I can relax a bit. Wonder whether I'll ever know.

The second is connected to it. Every time I do something new (got my first job, got my second job, had kids, got my third job, went back to school, got a full-time job), I think, "Okay, this is it, I'm really a grown-up now...this is what grown-ups do." But I still don't feel like a grown-up. I still feel a bit like a little girl taking a field trip to some "foreign" place--I'm participating, but not really sure that I'm doing it right.

Anyone else ever feel this way?

Remember this?

http://singersdd.livejournal.com/734422.html

Guess what happened while I was at school. Yes, that's right! Another large hunk of the same tree kee-rashed across the driveway. Thank goodness, the cars aren't stuck on the wrong side of the tree this time. Guy was so confused when I walked in the door, but the car wasn't at the top of the hill. . .

It looks like robkeeney will get some free firewood soon.

My room had to be re-arranged. The girls were getting on my last nerve, whining and whinging about every little thing - and each other. So. I had to dismantle my awesome U shape and go for something a bit more the standard: modified rows.

I've paired the boys' desks in the middle of the room, then arranged the girls around them, individually. Each of the girls is her own little island now. I can hear the whining, "It's not fair!" already. These complaints will fall on deaf ears.

I think this arrangement will put an end to the chatter and drama. *evil grin* Well, at least for a day or two.

Fall always makes me feel sentimental--not for anything specific, just in general. This year, as I've watched the leaves of the trees turn from green to flame, I was struck by the comparison between the cycle of the trees and what my life as a Christian is supposed to look like.

The process of conversion is that--a process. Although the "old man" is symbolically put to death at baptism, in reality we'll be working our whole lives to kill off that "old person" and grow as a new creation. It's instantaneous, yet gradual, immediate, yet lifelong.

It occurred to me that as the tree leaves are dying, they glow more and more brilliantly. In the same way, as the "old Katherine" is put aside, I should glow more brightly, shining more greatly for the glory of God.

Today was fantastic.

It really started last night, when I attended the official induction ceremony for Phi Theta Kappa, which is an honor society for two-year colleges. Membership is predicated on a 3.5 or higher GPA for at least 2 semesters running, and the emphasis is on scholarship and service. I was so glad that I attended the ceremony; it really did make me feel like I am doing something, like I am getting somewhere.

This morning, then, I was already on a bit of a high and feeling rather smug and annoyingly happy--wore my PTK pin to work, had a white rose to put on my desk, and had even exercised (yay, happy endorphins!). My librarian was there, so I was able to deal with some "invisible" tasks that had been building up, like replacing some labels on books, taking care of some paperwork, and just odds and ends that needed some focused effort. We had some good conversations, too, about some different things going on in the library, and it was just a positive day all around.

But the highlight was yet to come! Today was Post-Assessment day for the kids in the math lab that happens in the library during the last period of most days. Kids are sent to the lab for more focused, individualized help in areas where they're struggling. Sometimes, it feels like we're trying to round up squirrels, and I think, "Is ANY of this getting through?"

Today was gratifying. I graded their tests and compared the scores to their first assessment (the grade for which determines who needs some additional help). All the students but one had improved, many significantly--some doubled their score. Two aced the test, and a few missed only one question.

I was SO pleased, I could have just burst! I actually ran down the hallway (no worries, school was out and no one saw me) to let the other math lab helper know how well the kids had done. I don't think I stopped smiling for an hour and a half, and then it was only because...

...I was eating the fantastic prime rib dinner that Chris treated us to, in order to celebrate my entry into the Phi Theta Kappa society.

I am SO thankful for a day that was so full of good things.

When I first moved The Netherlands, the language experience was somewhat disorienting. As I listened to everyone around me rattle on in Dutch, I felt as though I was on the verge of comprehension. If I could just listen a little harder, just pay attention a little more, the language would suddenly 'come into focus' and I would understand it.

Alas, that elusive comprehension remained over the horizon for many months of hard study.

But it's perhaps not surprising I felt this way. John McWhorter states in The Power of Babel that Dutch is probably the closest language to English, especially Old English.

Unfortunately, English isn't close to Old English. In fact true English words make up only about 1% of the modern English language! All the rest are imports from Old Norse, Norman French, Greek and of course Latin, not to mention bits and pieces from virtually every other culture we've ever come into contact with.

Grammatically, English remains in the Germanic family. But alas for us English speakers, it is really all alone in a class by itself. McWhorter says that that's what makes life hard for English-speaking natives when they decide to acquire a second language.

My experience in Amsterdam was that a native German speaker could be conversant in Dutch within about two months of arriving. McWhorter says that Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are so similar that they are really different dialects rather than languages. And a Dutch or German speaker would find many familiar things in them and acquire them rapidly.

Likewise, Spanish speakers are well on their way to speaking Italian and Portuguese. Even French, the odd-ball of the Romance languages, will come quickly, because for all its strange sounds it uses the same fundamental grammar and word-order.

Meanwhile, the English speaker who wants to learn a Germanic language finds that the core of the language is somewhat familiar. Those few Old English words that we have left are almost all important ones: a, an and the, and itself, the pronouns, words like water and old, and our irregular verbs, esp. the many odd forms of to be all have their roots in Old English.

Learning Dutch I was gratified to find that it had articles in common with English. Having articles of speech is actually a bit odd for languages in general, but Germanic languages tend to have them: an and the correspond nicely to een and het* in Dutch, for example. Also nice: if a verb is irregular in English, it's also probably irregular in Dutch, although probably in a different way. But at least you know what to look for.

So picking up the core of a Germanic language isn't too bad, but after that it gets hard. They treat complex verbs rather differently and the 'high level' language is completely alien. We use virtually no OE words for complex, multi-syllabic words, so unless one is lucky to find that the Germanic language in question also cribbed from Latin (occasionally the case in Dutch) then one is going to be doing a lot of rote memorization for several years just to read the newspaper.

Try and learn a Romance language, and the situation is reversed. The 'core words' are completely alien, as we don't use the Latin-descended words for 'is', 'love' or 'fish' in Modern English. Once you get into the higher-level language, though, the Latin-based suffixes and prefixes should be familiar. But conjugating those verbs and keeping track of noun gender is probably never going to come easily.

It's strange that English has taken such a separate path from other European languages. And while it's certainly not unusual for a language to take on outside words, for a language to be overwhelmed by them to the degree that English has been has certainly set it apart.

There is good news, at least for our great-great-grandchildren. Given English's momentum as the global lingua franca, it's likely that it will be with us and heard around the world for a long time. And when it does evolve into one or more different languages, well, hopefully our descendants will have a leg up on them from having spoken our unique mother tongue.

* I know it looks like a misspelled the, but it actually is closer kin to it.