The Boy who Loved to Sing

A story about the Pesky 'Schwa' sound in English

By Madeleine Kando

Once upon a time, on an island in the big blue ocean, there lived a little boy who liked to sing. But singing was not allowed on his island. His daddy told him that it scared the fish away, and without fish there was no food.

So, all the little boy could do, was whisper his songs. ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star..’ he would sadly whisper-sing, sitting on the beach, trying not to scare the fish away. If you have ever tried to sing while whispering you know how hard it is. It’s like watching a black and white movie about the wonderful colors of flowers.

Not only was it forbidden to sing, but even sounds like ‘b’, as in ‘bat’, ‘d’ as in ‘dog’ and ‘g’ as in ‘good’, were considered too scary for the fish, so you had to say: ‘how to you to. Woult you like to ko for a walk? Even saying ‘I was a very good boy’ was forbidden. You had to say: ‘I wass a ferry koot poy’.

If you wonder what it was like to live on that island, try to speak English like a German. You will soon ‘realice that it iss not ass tifficult ass it sounts, putt it iss not ferry pretty’.

‘Putt tatty’ whispered the little boy, ‘why tit Kot kif us focal korts, if we are not aple to use them?’ ‘Stop asking silly questions’ replied his father. ‘Focal korts are like your appentix. A useless remnant of the past’.

One day a big storm came and all the houses ended up in the ocean, the trees lost their leaves and the birds lost their feathers. They all looked like plucked chickens, trying to take off, but flopping down on their beaks.

 
Lo and behold, when the survivors woke up, they no longer knew how to whisper and only could make the sounds that were previously verboten. All the ‘whisper sounds’ were gone!
So this is how they spoke: ‘Whad habbened? Does addywadd dow whad habbened? All the houzes are broguen! Whad zhould we do? Read more...

On Language… Yet Again

by Madeleine Kando

I have a thought which I want to convey to my Dutch husband. English is my language of choice, but then he asks me to write my thought in Dutch. I grew up in Holland, so you would think it wouldn't be such a difficult task. I find myself grappling for words, trying to construct logical sentences that mirrors what I think. I feel like an arthritic contortionist. It doesn't meet my expectations but that's the best I can do. 'I could say this a lot better in English, you know' I tell him.

But is language in general the best conduit for the multi-dimensionality of our mental world? I have to transpose something that is happening on multiple levels into one linear dimension. A thought is not just verbal, it has colors, a shape, a smell, a taste, speed and much more.

Wouldn’t it be truer to reality if we had a means of communication that includes all these dimensions in one package? I know what you are going to say: ‘that’s why we have art, music, dance, mathematics, etc.’ But aren’t those also limited by their own range? Can I do justice to quantum mechanics when I express it in music? Can I express the beauty of a sunrise using mathematics?

Couldn’t all these forms of expression be rolled into one super-language. This reminds me of ‘More than Human’, a science fiction story by Theodore Sturgeon. Even though Sturgeon’s story is about several ‘freaks’ (with telepathic, telekinetic and superhuman intelligence) that join forces to create a ‘Gestalt’, i.e. the next evolutionary step in mankind, it wouldn’t be too farfetched to artificially create a ‘language’ that would do more justice to our multi-dimensional ability to form thoughts.

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King Aleph of the Alphabet

by Madeleine Kando

Once upon a time, there was a mighty king named Aleph. He was of a strong and sturdy lineage. Just by looking at his physique, one could see how he was built to withstand adversity of any kind. Over many generations, his ancestors had developed two unusually prominent legs, which were always planted firmly wide apart. The evolutionary process had worked in mysterious ways, making his waist narrower and his shoulders narrower still, until it went to work on his head, which was the smallest part of his body. In fact, if one didn’t know that he was a king, he very much looked like the first letter of the alphabet.

But what he gained in strength, he lacked in flexibility. No matter how many yoga classes he took, he just couldn’t bend over in the slightest. Being a king, he had to spend a lot of time on his throne, which he could only manage to sit on by straddling it, his short legs dangling in the air on each side.

There were other noble families with a similar defect. His cousins from the house of Ache (pronounced H) and his uncle from the house of Arr (pronounced R), were equally afflicted by this inability to bend. Was it a result of too much royal inbreeding? ‘If it’s not good for rabbits, it cannot be good for kings’, his great grandfather from the House of Ey (pronounced A), used to say.

Hence King Aleph, as mighty as he was, could not manage to get dressed, tie his shoes or even go to the bathroom without a great deal of assistance. As everyone knows, relieving yourself without bending is well nigh impossible without creating a serious problem. We will refrain from giving a detailed description here and leave it up to the reader’s imagination.

But King Aleph knew that without the help of many of his subjects, he couldn’t maintain his ruling position. He was as shrewd as he was rigid, so he forged a strong alliance with the House of Aaow (pronounced O). What King Aleph lacked, the Aaows possessed in abundance. Which was not flexibility, as you might think. Evolution, always working its mysterious ways, had omitted to provide this side of the royal family with any legs at all. Hence, they propelled themselves by rolling. And boy, did they roll! Many a distinguished member at the Royal Court ended up flat on their face as one of these Aaows came rolling down the garden paths at high speed. Read more...

Multilingualism: Is it Good or Bad?

by Madeleine Kando



Most people agree that speaking more than one language is good for your brain. The poor mono-linguals of the world, most of whom live in English speaking countries really miss out on the benefits of knowing more than one language. In return, they can take pride in the fact that English is slowly taking over the world, pushing out other less ‘important’ languages. Some academics call this ‘Linguistic Imperialism’ and have proposed legislation to stop what they see as an attempt to take over the world through words.

You see, there is a hierarchy in the world of languages. This is a well-established theory called the ‘Global Language System’ *, developed by Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan in 2001.

Of the 7000 languages of the world, 98% of them are at the periphery, spoken by a few thousand people at a time and often with no written form. Then there are the central languages, a thin layer of about a hundred official languages of nation states, then a third layer of about 12 super-central languages which serve international and long-distance communication, and finally at the apex, is the one hyper central language, which today is English.

Since the primary job of language is to allow people to communicate with each other, this hierarchical structure makes sense. With just 2 languages, you could expect one speaker to learn the language of the other, but if there are 5 different languages, it makes more sense for everyone to learn a more central language, instead of everyone having to learn 4 other languages. Read more...

Pourquoi Doit-elle Dormir sur le Trottoir, et moi pas?

by Tom Kando

Il ya quelques jours, j’ai rencontré un personnage qui m’a bouleversé. Je rentrai chez moi du supermarché, roulant lentement dans mon quartier. Quoique nous habitons dans une banlieue assez chic, depuis quelques années il y de plus en plus de clochards, même près de chez nous. C’est un signe directe de l’accroissement rapide de l’injustice, l’inégalité et la pauvreté partout en Amérique.

Or, quand je tourne a droite a un croisement, j’aperçois une femme sur le trottoir, avec son petit chariot de supermarché, avec quelques sacs et valises là-dedans, et aussi un tas d’habits entassés pêle-mêle. J’estime que son âge n’est pas très loin du mien, au tour de soixante-dix ans. Elle est bien habillée, ses cheveux blancs sont bien peignés, et elle a l’air bien propre, donc je me demande si elle est une clocharde et une mendiante ou pas. Ce qui me frappe le plus c’est la grande beauté de son visage. Elle est entrain de ranger ses affaires, soulevant péniblement ses valises pour mieux les remettre. Read more...

Tower of Babel, Cacophony, or Multilingualism on Testosterone?

by Tom Kando

So this morning I Skyped with my family in Holland (actually, it was morning for me, evening for them).

My mother Ata lives in Holland. She will turn 104 in a few months. This week, my sister Madeleine, her daughter, her son-in-law and her grandson were all visiting Ata. They are all from America, but my sister Madeleine is an immigrant, like me.

In addition, there were a couple of Dutch ladies there, wonderful women who volunteer to provide my mother with immense assistance. Altogether, there were more than half a dozen people in my mother’s Dutch flat while I was skyping with her from Sacramento.

So this skyping event was exceptionally international, which is not unusual in my family.

We were all born in Hungary. I was seven when we left that country, and my twin sisters were six. The three of us soon forgot Hungarian, but it has always remained our mother’s primary tongue.
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It’s all about the ‘The’

by Madeleine Kando

The word ‘the’ is the most commonly used word in the English language. We don’t give it a second thought; it’s there, like the air we breathe or the water we drink. Actually, it’s not really a word like ‘butter’ or ‘table’, since it can not even stand on its own two feet. If a ‘the’ walked through the door, you wouldn’t know what you were dealing with. At least with a table or a chair, you know where you stand, but a ‘the’? You’d be waiting for the rest of the retinue to appear before you could make sense of the visitor.

The 'A'

The ‘the’, together with the ‘a’ and the ‘an’ make up the articles of the English language. Even though they are useless on their own, these little function words pretty much determine what people are talking about. If my husband came in and said ‘A guy just hit a car’, it might elicit a slight shoulder shrug, but if he said: ‘A guy just hit the car’, I would drop the plate I was holding in my hands and run outside to assess the damage. Read more...

On Phobias, Philias and other Etymologies

by Tom Kando

Like most people, I have some phobias, as well as a number of philias: This means that there are things which I like, and things which I dislike. Duh.

Etymologically, the words we use for people’s (pathological) likes and dislikes (or fears), usually contain the postfixes “-phobia” and “-philia,” or the prefix “mis-.”

These are derived from Greek:
Phobos: Fear
Philia: (Brotherly) Love
Misos: Hatred

For example: Philadelphia: The City of Brotherly Love:
Philos = Friend
Adelphos = Brother
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A Brief Message to our French Friends

by Tom Kando

Here is an e-mail I sent to my friends and relatives in Paris and in France:

Ca fait une semaine que cette horreur est arrivée. Nous pensons sans cesse a vous, et a Paris, la ville d’ou jaillis toujours l’espoire et l’illumination pour le reste du monde...

Sachez donc que meme ici, de l’autre cote de la terre, la grande majorite des gens pensent a vous, du matin au soir. C’est etonnant...et bien, quand-meme: Que meme les petits provinciaux qui n’ont jamais quitte leurs petites villes et leurs campagnes si loin de chez vous, realisent que quelque-chose d’horrible et mondialement important s’est passe a Paris.

Quand on heurte Paris, la terre entiere le sent, et en souffre. Notre coeur appartient a Paris. Nous sommes tous des Parisiens.(translation next)
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The Fanboys

by Madeleine Kando

I am a fan of the Fanboys. Were it not for them, life would be short, nasty and brutish. 'Fanboys' is an acronym for what grammarians call 'conjunctions', those little things that function as superglue between parts of sentences, and consequently our thoughts.

Without the Fanboys, we couldn't 'like cats but not dogs', 'eat raisins and nuts', 'wear skirts or pants', 'work hard yet enjoy ourselves', and 'wear glasses so we could see'.

You guessed it, each letter in 'Fanboys' stands for one of those conjunctions: For, And, Neither, But, Or, Yet and So.

Can you imagine if we didn't have the Fanboys as a shield against those uppity independent clauses? So full of themselves, thinking they are always right and everybody else is wrong? The Fanboys are there to put them in their place, cut them down to size and make some room for compromise. 'My twin sister is very pretty' sounds ok, but 'My twin sister is very pretty, but I am prettier' sounds a lot better. Read more...

An Ode to the Letter A

by Madeleine Kando


It has come to my attention of late, that we, as writers, don't give enough credit to one of the most undervalued letters in the English alphabet: the letter A.

Let's face it, we misuse, abuse and overuse many letters, but the A is like the Angus of letters. For one thing, it has various pronunciations, sometimes it sounds like 'ey', sometimes like 'uh', sometimes like 'aw'. It is like a chameleon. It changes from 'mat' to 'mate', from 'glass' to 'glaze' and from 'hat' to 'hate', depending on which vowel it keeps company with. It even has to do the work of other letters when people become lazy in their pronunciation, like in 'whateva' or 'seeya'.

It is as selfless as Mother Theresa, coming to the rescue when a person is not sure what to say: 'aaah… let me see'. Or when someone has an epiphany: 'aaha', an orgasm: 'aaaah', feels sorry for someone: 'aaw', or just pretends to understand something complicated: 'ah (yes)'.

Singers use it to practice their voice, without even considering paying the A a decent living wage. Doctors diagnose throat conditions, again at no extra cost to them, knowing that the A has no collective bargaining power. Can you imagine if the A went on strike? The consequences are too horrible to contemplate. I couldn't finish this essey without committing orthogrephic mistekes. The Spanish language would particularly be in trouble, with their feminine endings and the poor Hawaiians wouldn't be able to talk at all, since most of the consonants in their language fell overboard when they came to Hawaii in their canoes. Besides, everybody would get lost on the islands, since all the streets have names like Kal'ia'iou'amaa'aaa'eiou. Read more...

The Dutch Obsession with Diminutives

by Madeleine Kando

The Dutch are statistically the tallest people on earth. Not only are they tall, but every time I travel to Holland, they seem to have grown taller. Whatever feeling of confidence and superiority my above-average height might give me in the US, it evaporates the moment I arrive at Schiphol airport, and start to navigate my way through a sea of giants. It's hard to get used to feeling 'short', even if it's just for a week or so.

You would expect this propensity for height to spill over in the way the Dutch speak, with bombastic, aggrandizing words and phrases. But it's just the opposite. The Dutch are extremely fond of diminutives. They add the suffix '-je' or '-tje' to practically any part of speech. When I visit my friend Edith in Baarn, we often go for a 'fiets tochtje', a little bike ride (even though they might take up to three hours). We'll stop on the way for a 'kopje coffee met een gebakje', a little cup of coffee with a little desert. On our way back, we'll go into town and buy a 'jurkje', a little dress or hunt for a 'koopje', a little bargain. It's all little this and little that in Holland. Read more...

Is Ambivalence Good or Bad? I am not sure...

by Madeleine Kando

"I love my man, I'm a liar if I say I don't.

But I'll quit my man, I'm a liar if I say I won't."

Billie Holiday, 'My Man,' Billie's Blues (1936) 

The official definition of ambivalence is ‘having conflicting feelings toward something or someone.’ It means "sitting on the fence", not knowing which side to choose. It usually has a negative connotation but in my opinion, ambivalence has gotten a bad rap over the course of human history. It has become the whipping boy in the arsenal of our emotions. I am not sure why, because ambivalence has a lot going for it. In a fair fight, it would win over certainty any time. After all, it has to fight on two fronts in an argument. Like an immigrant worker, it toils away; doing the dirty work that certainty feels too superior to take on.

Here comes certainty strolling down the street, briefcase in hand, stuffed with opinions whose ink is barely dry, immune to all the ugly stares from opposing views, so full of itself, so overconfident. That’s what I hate about it, it’s just too damn sure of itself.
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The Troublesome Trio: Articles in the English Language

by Madeleine Kando

The word ‘the’ is the most commonly used word in the English language. We don’t give it a second thought; it’s there, like the air we breathe or the water we drink. Actually, it’s not really a word like ‘butter’ or ‘table’, since it can not even stand on its own two feet. If a ‘the’ walked through the door, you wouldn’t know what you were dealing with. At least with a ‘table’ or a ‘chair’, you know where you stand, but a ‘the’? You’d be waiting for the rest of the retinue to appear before you could make sense of the visitor.

The ‘the’, together with the ‘a’ and the ‘an’ make up the articles of the English language. Even though they are useless on their own, these little ‘function words’ pretty much ‘determine’ what people are talking about. If my husband came in and said ‘A guy just hit a car’ it might elicit a slight shoulder shrug, but if he said: ‘A guy just hit the car’, I would drop whatever I was doing and run outside to assess the damage.
Read more...

The Evil use of Language: On ‘Animal Equality'

by Madeleine Kando

"What you speak with your tongue,

You speak with your heart.

Say not the untrue thing."

If you ever doubted the power of language, I recommend you read 'Animal Equality: Language and Liberation' by Joan Dunayer. With lucidity, courage and brute honesty, the author shows us that the way we speak about animals is inseparable from the way we treat them.

Evil, in any form, has the nasty habit of gathering euphemisms around itself, until it grows to unmanageable proportions. ‘The final solution’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and other expressions are a prime example. But the way we use our language as it relates to nonhuman animals deserves a special medal for self-deception and evil.

In her book, Dunayer opens our eyes onto the world of hunting and fishing, zoo keeping and aquariums, vivisection and animal agriculture. Each branch has its own ‘language’, which is designed to justify the immense cruelty, suffering and pain that are inflicted on nonhuman animals. Through what Dunayer calls 'speciesism', similar to sexism or racism, we lie to ourselves. Read more...

Euphemisms

by Madeleine Kando

The recent public lynching of Paula Deen over her one-time use of the N-word has motivated me to do some research on euphemisms. As a non-native speaker, I fully appreciate how much spice and color they add to the English language. I absolutely adore them. This is ironic, since the function of euphemisms is to avoid saying something unpleasant, offensive or taboo. So not saying something makes a language richer?

In the case of the N-word, the original word is still around, so we at least know what it means. But some other words have not been that lucky; the euphemism has completely obliterated the original word, killed it outright, knocked it off, rubbed it out, terminated it with extreme prejudice. The word 'bear', for instance is a euphemism for a taboo word denoting a large, dangerous, hairy killer. The original word has been lost forever. Read more...

Language and Colors: Now you see Them, Now you Don't

by Madeleine Kando

Not too long ago, people believed that the ability to see colors was a trait that was inherited over generations. Even as recently as 1858, the British statesman William Gladstone theorized that Homer must have been color-blind because his texts don’t mention the colors blue or green. He concluded that full-color vision had not yet developed in humans at that time. Read more...

What is my Name?

By Tom Kando

Yesterday, I went to pick up a prescription drug which my doctor had faxed to the local pharmacy. The pharmacy clerk asked me for my name, and I gave it to her - Tom Kando - adding that the prescription had been faxed in the previous day by Dr. Pollock. She couldn’t find it, so I suggested that she also look under “Cando,” with a C.

It’s happened more than once that when I give my name to someone in an office or on the phone, their brain goes on auto-pilot before I get a chance to spell my name, and I am forever entered as Cando. This can cause a lot of aggravation later, when dealing with the IRS, insurance companies, banks, airlines, etc. So I have learned, whenever asked for my name by some clerk, to reply as follows:
“My name is spelled K - A - N - D - O,” and then I say the word - “Kando.”

And sure enough: yesterday, as soon as the pharmacy clerk looked under “Cando,” she found my medication. She gave it to me and said, somewhat irritated:

“You should have given me the proper name in the first place. It would have made things a lot easier.”

I apologized for the inconvenience, but added that the proper name is, in fact “Kando.”

“I am sorry sir,” she insisted, “That is not your name. The prescription order form says that your name is ‘Cando’. ”
“My name is ‘Cando’?” I inquired, somewhat surprised...
“Yes, that is your name. Surely your doctor knows your name, doesn’t he?”
“You are absolutely right,” I said, trying to sooth her feelings, “my physician does know my correct name...”
“Then why didn’t you give me your true name to begin with? The one on the medical record. We can’t just go by all sorts of different names, you know...”
“True,” I admitted, “one can’t just go by all sorts of different names...”

Then, as an afterthought, I asked:

“By the way, can you show me the fax the doctor sent you, just to see how my name is spelled?”
“No sir, we are not allowed to do that, sir. The Federal privacy law.”
“I understand,” I replied, “privacy is important.”

I went home. It was a total defeat. I have to hand it to the clerk. She was a pro. She had me checkmated - on all fronts. leave comment here Read more...

The curse of the 'R'

by Madeleine Kando

If you want my opinion, the most difficult letter to pronounce in any language is the letter ‘R’. You can spend a life-time perfecting a language which is not your own, but the ‘R’ will always give you away.

Take me, for example. I had to learn French, Dutch, German, English and Spanish and it would have been a cynch for me to masquerade as a native had it not been for the cursed ‘R’.

That evil-doer always gave me away. It doesn’t help that we are all deaf to our own voice. Yes, deaf. If you want to hear your own voice the way others hear it, you have to record it first. Either that or travel to the Grand Canyon and shout something, to hear it echoed back. Even then, you might think: 'Wow, that person sounds weird. I am glad I don't sound like that.' Yes, if non-native English speakers knew what they really sounded like, they would stop talking altogether.

But to get back to my eternal enemy, the notorious ‘R’. I have to admit that things could have been worse. Had I been born in China or Japan my battle with the ‘R’ would have been lost the day I was born. I would have been doomed to order 'flied lice' for dinner for the rest of my life.

The thing is, the ‘R’ is a mischievous little bugger. It knows that it is a consonant, but the sneaky bastard enjoys getting a free ride on the back of the poor vowel that precedes it.

Take the word ‘part’, for example. In many languages the ‘R’ has the decency of standing on its own, so that a Frenchman will correctly say: ‘parrr’, pronouncing the ‘R’ as a third, distinct, sound in that word. The ‘R’ in English, (especially British English) however, often will ride piggyback on the vowel in front of it.

If you live in Boston, the 'R' becomes particularly lazy and the word is pronounced ‘paht’. But it isn't satisfied by just riding piggyback; it also changes the sound of the 'a' in front of it, and the way the word is pronounced by native Bostonians brings shivers down the spine of any 'normal-English' speaking person. It is pronounced: 'paaaht'. See what I mean?

So what’s a foreigner to do? Well, it depends on which language you speak originally. The expression ‘you cannot teach an old dog new tricks’ surely applies here. If you are from Spain or France, there is no way you will loose the habit of pronouncing ‘R’s like rolling marbles in your mouth. That's what 'R's are meant to do, or they wouldn't be called 'R', don't you agree?

You are supposed to say: 'Bears are usually barred from bringing beer to bars before breakfast.' You don't say: 'beahs are usually bahed from bringing beeh to bahs befoh breakfast.' (Unless you have the misfortune of being Bostonian or a New Yawker.)

So, if Americans cannot agree on how to pronounce their own 'R', how do they expect foreigners to learn the correct pronunciation?

My advice to you is to not even try. Just lay it on thick with your foreign accent. Usually it will charm at least a certain percentage of the people around you and the rest? Well, you can please some people some of the time but you cannot please all the people all the time. So there!  leave comment here Read more...

I Speak Therefore I Am

by Madeleine Kando

I am fascinated with language. When I was little girl, I liked to play language games in my head. If I heard a new word, which was quite often since I had to learn three languages consecutively, I immediately deconstructed it. In Holland this tendency of mine was very useful. The Dutch like to string words together to make up new ones (arbeidsongeschiktheidsverzekering, which means disability insurance) and trying to find the roots of a word helped me learn Dutch.

So here I am, reading yet another book by Steven Pinker, the all-time expert on language. This one is called ‘The Stuff of Thought’. This has stimulated me to play another game in my head.

It is generally assumed that, other than ‘onomatopoeia’, the sounds of words are arbitrary: a train might as well be called a ‘tsorp’, it would not make any difference in its meaning.

But Pinker points out that some phonemes carry meaning in and of themselves. Take the sound ‘sn’ for instance. Many words with that sound in it have to do with the nose. Snout, snooze, snot, sneeze… you get the idea?

So, if I throw out another sound, let’s say ‘gl’? what does that conjure up in your mind? Glance? Gloat? Glean? Obviously the ‘gl’ sound has to do with vision. What about the sound ‘cl’? clan, clot, club, cluster? This sound probably has to do with people banding together…

Boy, language is funny. It makes you think about thinking, doesn’t it? It can keep you busy for days, speculating on the endless intricacies of this incredible tool we have developed to communicate with each other.

Pinker is a proponent of the ‘language as instinct’ theory, which means that humans are born with an ability for language, as instinctive as walking or breathing. Others say that people are born a blank slate and that everything has to be learnt, including language. I’ll leave it up to the the experts to fight it out. For me, it’s enough of a miracle that we are able to enjoy language, enjoy it almost as much as a sunset on a beautiful Hawaiian beach.

Words are being created all the time. But who are these Einsteins of language? I’d like to know. I suspect that language is so dynamic that it is being invented by people like you and me. Not by anyone ‘special’. New words come into a language mostly by necessity (texting, emailing, browsing etc). Other words enter our language because of major historical events, like ‘Ground zero’ or ‘wmd’s’.

Some words can be made up very easily. I just read the word: ‘preheritance’, (that is when parents give money to their children during their lifetime.) So why cannot we talk about going ‘pre-shopping’ for a wedding gown? (I guess that would mean going window-shopping), or say ‘I went on a pre-vacation to Hawaii?’ (I didn’t like it so I went to Bali instead.) It might generate an entire new industry or virtual experiences.

Language in itself is so mysterious. We take it totally for granted because we can all speak, but if you really think about it, it is one of the most incredible feats of the human mind. I would like to go on record by correcting what Descartes said so long ago (‘I think, therefore I am’) and change it to: ‘I SPEAK, THEREFORE I AM’. leave comment here Read more...