Jeg kan aila dig!

My three year old has already learned that she can insult us in Danish with relative impunity.  Recently, when angry, she shouts "Jeg kan aila dig!" which means "I can aila you!" only we don't know what illa is, or what Danish word she is actually using there. She was calling us "superfalig" which means, "extremely dangerous" for months before we figured out what she was saying, at which point it lost its appeal.

Having our toddler speak the local language better than we do is a comic indignity, but my failure to learn Danish has more serious consequences. While three quarters of everyone we meet here speaks decent English, the culture, administration, government, commerce, etc. are mostly conducted in Danish, and my engagement in any of these is therefore quite limited. Iris's Danish is vastly better than mine, while still far from fluent. In a fairly open and engaging society we are bound by these linguistic barriers.

Why, you may justly ask, don't I just buckle down and learn Danish? A few reasons immediately come to mind. A more-than-full-time job and two young daughters don't give me a great deal of time for down-buckling. Danish is, even the Danes often say, an unusually difficult spoken language. The correspondence between what a work looks like and sounds like is even looser than in English. Many of the consonants are silent or nearly so, and I just can't detect any differences between some of the very many vowel sounds and stops that make up most of the spoken language.

Danish teacher: The first is Å and the second is Å.
Me: You just said the same sound twice, you said O and O.
Danish teacher: No, Ååååååå vs. Ååååååå. No, you are pronouncing too hard. Oooooo is a third sound, and has long and short forms.
Me: What do the long and short forms sound like?
Danish teacher: Oooooo vs. Ooooo.
Me: Maybe we should skip to grammar.

My students say that my attempts to pronounce Danish make me sound like a drunken Norwegian. I do understand a lot more spoken Norwegian than Danish, as Norwegian is a relatively phonetic sister of Danish and I can read simple Danish. If the Danes would agree to compromise on drunken Norwegian, I would learn it.

But when my department sends me scientific reports to grade (what they call censoring), I know my Danish is not nearly good enough to know if they make sense. My course descriptions all state prominently that the entire course will be taught in English. I Google Translate every email sent out to the department to find out if it is something I need to do something about. Google Translate is less good at Danish than it is at German, for example.

Another reason for my linguistic failing is the linguistic proficiency of the Danes. One look and they can tell that I am not Danish. They start speaking English before I even open my mouth. My daughter's three-year-old friends may not speak English, but their seven-year-old siblings do.

Finally, there is the broader motivation problem. Denmark is a wonderful country in which we do not want to spend the rest of our lives. We want to be closer to family, in a more familiar and diverse culture, in a place where we speak the language (and oh what I wouldn't give for a decent bagel, or a burrito with spicy black beans and nopales). Knowing that we don't want to stay makes it easy to not learn, which makes it easy to not want to stay.

This experience has reinforced my long-standing intolerance for the intolerance toward immigrants and linguistic minorities that is very much on display in many parts of the US and Europe. I could spend the rest of my life in Denmark, and actually apply myself to learning, and would never speak the language well. Those countries that have the harshest attitudes towards immigrants tend to be the ones that need immigrants the most urgently. And being an immigrant is hard enough, even in a relatively accepting culture like Denmark's.

Administrative Danglish

A few examples:

Censorship- Grading, examining
"Will this class require external censorship?"

Confrontation Hours- The time an instructor spends actually face to face with the students, contact hours
"You are responsible for 160 confrontation hours."

Critical Situation- Emergency
"A critical situation has occurred. A critical situation has occurred. A critical situation has occurred."

Dimensioning- Downsizing, rescaling
"The department will undergo dimensioning, as the government has determined there is too much competition for the jobs our graduates seek."

Economy- Accounting, bookkeeping, purchasing, etc.
"Mads handles our economy."

Licitation- bidding (as for a construction contract) or bid
"The licitation on the new station was higher than we expected."

Referent- The person who takes minutes at a meeting, secretary
"Are you the referent for this class?"

Taxameter- I have not yet figured out what this one means.  Something to do with fees or tuition.

Hyphum

I know a bit about a lot of organisms, but don't really qualify as an expert on any species. It is great fun planning experiments with people who know a lot about a particular organism. I can say, "if a hypha that is only 300 microns breaks in half, do you get two living 150 micron individuals, or two dead hyphae?" and get the immediate response, "The singular of hyphae is hyphum," followed by, "you would get two dead halves, so we don't have to worry about it." This way I can concentrate on designing the experiment and learn good Scrabble words.

EDIT: May 2nd 2017.
 The singular of hyphae is actually hypha. I just stumbled upon my own old blog post and said, "Whoa! That's wrong." I must have misheard that six years ago.

Acronymic Challenge

As a grad student, I operated independently enough, and had a large enough group of undergraduate assistants, that I decided to pretend I had my own institute. I named it the Dissertational Institute for Evolutionary Demography, and believe me, I worked for that acronym.

Some colleagues and I are now discussing starting an actual scientific society for evolutionary demography, and it needs a good acronym. I suggested Society for Ecological and Evolutionary Demography (SEED) but was shot down on the grounds that I had added Ecology to the society just for the acronym. So I'm still thinking here, and wonder if you have any good ideas.

It has to have the words "Evolutionary Demography" in it and some word that means society or association. It can have the word "International" if the I helps. Keep in mind that this is going to be an actual scientific society, so nothing ridiculous, scatological or overtly jocular will do.

Now, I should clarify I'm not actually in charge here, so I don't necessarily get to pick the name, but if you propose something sufficiently clever, appropriate and memorable, I'll propose it, and you may have the honor of naming a scientific society.

Linguistic injustice; it's good to be a native Anglophone

The English language is good to me. Much of my success in science to date can be attributed to my English skills. The quality of my writing and my speaking attract the praise of my peers at least as frequently as the originality or soundness of my ideas. (I am not such a good speller, but at this point that has very little effect on me.) Further, my wife’s work is very much based on her English skills; she teaches English as a second language and edits scientific articles to improve their English.

All this came to mind when I saw this letter
“Awkward wording. Rephrase”: linguistic injustice in ecological journals

and this response
‘Linguistic injustice’ is not black and white

in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution (TREE).

TREE is a high profile journal, publishing mostly excellent review articles, but unfortunately most of its content is not free to the public.

I will quote; the letter’s author, Miguel Clavero, begins,

International scientific communication is monolithically dominated by English, particularly within natural sciences. The professional career of individual scientists relies on their ability to publish in internationally relevant journals, and writing in English is the only way to achieve this. Non-native English speakers (NoNES) seem to be clearly disadvantaged with respect to native English speakers (NES) when trying to get their work published. In fact, English language proficiency has been shown to be a strong predictor of scientific output...

This argument makes sense to me. I have colleagues who are both smarter and harder working than I, who are quite fluent in conversational English, who take much longer to write a paper than I do. Writing crisp, clear, precise, flowing science while staying within word limits is hard, and frankly I’ll never learn a second language well enough to pull it off in anything but English. If Greek, Latin, French, Chinese, Arabic or German were the dominant language of science, I would be in deep trouble.

The response published in TREE points out that other disadvantages (e.g., being from a developing country) are vastly harder to overcome than being NoNES. A Swede has a much better chance to succeed in international science than an Anglophone African. A Swede may even come to speak and write English which is better than that of some Anglophones. It also points out that most English language journals won’t reject a paper because of language problems, so long as the science is sound and the writing is comprehensible and reparable. Both of these things are surely true, but don’t negate Clavero’s point. Bad English may not be a huge disadvantage, but skilled beautiful English is, it seems to me, a big advantage, and native speakers are much more likely to speak a language beautifully. This is particularly true, I think, when it comes to job applications. When one is being evaluated not only on the quality of one’s work, but also on one’s presentation skills, ability to answer complex questions clearly and leadership potential, language skills are important. I have seen application talks at the Institute given in such poor English that I had trouble following them; these people were not hired. The graduate students and post-docs I work with are mostly NoNES; a larger portion of the Research Scientist and lab heads are NES or have lived for extended periods in English speaking countries. This is not because of hiring decisions beeing made inappropriately. Rather, those fluent in English tend to be more successful in those tasks on which hiring decisions are legitimately based.

I doubt that English will cease to be the dominant language of science in my lifetime, and for this I am glad. That said, I take Clavero’s point, and I suppose we should add NoNES to the list of groups disadvantaged in scientific careers (females, underrepresented minorities, the disabled, citizens of developing nations, etc.). I am not sure what is to be done about it. Clavero argues that journals should cover the costs of language editing by charging a fee to all authors, whether they need language editing or not, spreading the costs. They would have to waive this fee for those without sufficient funding to cover them. Some journals in fact already do this, paying in-house language editors from author fees. This has not obviated the linguistic injustice. I am not sure what will, short of sci-fi quality automatic simultanious translation technology. I would love to have this technology, if for no other reason than because then I could stop struggling to learn German.

Weasel words

I always thought the term "weasel words" derived from the idea that some words are inserted into speech or writing to allow the speaker to weasel out of saying something directly. It turns out it comes from the false belief that weasels suck the insides out of eggs, but leave the shell almost intact, so they appear to have more substance than they do. So in the statement, "I've heard it said that maybe half of your ancestors were kangaroos, just sayin'," the weasel words "I've heard it said," "maybe half," and "just sayin'" suck the hard meaning out of the actual statement "Your ancestors were kangaroos." The speaker, if challenged, can disavow responsibility for the statement, but has still said it.
After reading the Wikipedia article on this, I happened to sit down to edit an application essay by a brilliant, but very shy, student of mine. I found it full of phrases like, "I wanted to," "Although I was," "I believe," "I began to," "I had the opportunity to," and "I helped to." These aren't weasel words mostly, but they serve a similar function. They allow her to say what she accomplished without it seeming like she is saying that she accomplished things. "I designed and carried out the research" reads a lot better than, "I was offered the chance to gain experience in designing research and gathering data," and takes up a lot less space.
The really successful scientists I know not only can say a great deal in very little space, they can squeeze in praise of their own work. I have several times seen, in scientific publications, people describe their own work as startling, revolutionary or subtle. For purely professional reasons, I aspire to this level of unabashidness. For the truly shy, classes in hubris might be in order.

Lunchhour at the Institute

A table full of scientists. Biologists, applied mathematicians, sociologists and demographers. Graduate students and post-docs working for the Institute. Maybe 20 of us, each eating a lunch brought from home. The several conversations are mostly in English, with some German and Italian thrown in for emphasis or clarification. The concert she went to where there were five bands but only four audience members. The hallucinogenic properties of toads and banana peels. The upcoming Kristmasmarkt. The worm in my pear. It takes me several minutes to realize I am the only native English speaker at the table. These several scientists, about half from Germany, have no common language but the language of international science, English. I'm sure glad it isn't German, or I'd be in a different line of work.

Language Learning

Today Iris and I are each trying to learn a language. Iris is out, walking around Rostock, investigating the various schools in town that offer German classes to auslanders. I am focusing on learning a much more broadly used language, R. Now Germany is certainly used by more people than is R, and R isn't really anybody's first language, but R is used all around the world, and by a surprising range of people. Yesterday a colleague who has been in Germany for a year and not yet learned German said to me, "I'm not staying in Germany forever, and German isn't going to do me a whole lot of good outside of a few countries, but R I will need for every job I might ever have."

R is a simple programming language intended for statistics and data analysis. It is rapidly becoming the standard for advanced data analysis, in the natural and social sciences, from advanced college students to statistics professors, and in every country where people with internet connections need to analyze data.

Back in the 1970s, Bell Labs developed a programming language called S (for "statistical") and somehow, in the mid '90s had the wisdom to release an open source version of it, called R. R had the wonderful property of being easy to extend. Any user can, invent new words for this language and tell the computer exactly what to do when users used those words. This is equivalent to English's allowance of the sentence, " From now on, let's use the word reflop to mean 'to flip something over, and then flip it back to its original position.'" Users can also find something they don't think works well, look at the underlying language, and tell the computer, "from now on, I want this word to mean X, not Y as it did before." Users have added and modified Graphical User Interfaces, make implementations that work inside other programs, and compiled packages for every major operating system.

These extensions and modifications can be uploaded to the R website, and other users can decide which bits and pieces they want. Every once in a while a pre-fab version is released, with all the most recommended bits and pieces, and with someone having checked that they all work well together. So every user is necessarily a programmer, and every programmer can fairly straightforwardly improve on the model. It is as though every user of an open source browser such as Firefox in learning how to use the browser also necessarily learned how to make improvements to the browser. By this model R quickly and clearly outstripped S and S+. I am sure there is someone out there who still uses S, but not many. R is more versatile, more widely used, has elegant add-ons in fields from architecture to phylogenetics, and is entirely free. It's the feel good statistics package of the decade, and a serious threat to the business model of anyone who makes money selling data analysis software (which can often cost hundreds of dollars for a single user).

At the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, where I've recently started working, everybody uses R. The simulations are in R, the data queries are in R, statistics are in R and the figures and graphs are created in R. R is more necessary than German for anyone at the Institute. Which is why I am dedicating the next couple of weeks to learning it. As with any language, the largest part of learning R is trying to using it, failing to be understood, and trying again. So I've given myself a task, outlining in English a simple simulation I need to perform for a paper I'm revising. Programming this requires about 50 steps. So far I've figured out the first three, and I'm stumped on the fourth. Even so, I think my R is already better than my German.