A portrait in the extinction of a human language…

The last member of a 65,000-year-old tribe has died, taking one of the world’s earliest languages to the grave.

Boa Sr, who died last week aged about 85, was the last native of the Andaman Islands who was fluent in Bo.

Named after the tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to the pre-Neolithic period when the earliest humans walked out of Africa.

I passed my defense last Thursday, allowing me to use the title “doctor” with no sense of irony.  Huzzah!

I’m still working on the revisions (hence the dearth of blog posts over the last week), but I’m hoping to be finished withing a week or two.  Stay tuned, as another important announcement should be forthcoming soon…

I’m about to earn that title of FL Doctor….  This Thursday, I will face my committee for the final oral defense of my dissertation, and, if I pass, I will then get to pretentiously make my friends call me “doctor.”

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeettttttt!!!!!!

For those who don’t understand the whole PhD process, basically they tend to follow some variant of the following script (note: there are individual differences in schools and departments, but the following was my experience):

1) Lots of grad classes — this can take 2-4 years, on average

2) After one finishes coursework, one has a comprehensive exam, supposedly testing all of your knowledge acquired from graduate coursework. In my department, this took the form of a written exam (50+ pages answering 4 questions, written in the space of one week), followed by an oral exam, which mainly retrod the domain of the written exam.

3) After the comprehensive exam, one has 6 months in which to form a dissertation committee and to make a formal dissertation proposal.   The proposal is made at a public forum.

4) Once the proposal is accepted, depending upon the nature of the research project, one may have to apply for formal permission from local/state/national regulatory bodies or institutions in order to legally conduct said research.  This can take a while…

5) Conduct research.  This can take a loooooooooooong while (depending upon the type of research)…

6) Analyze data

7) Write up dissertation.  This can take a long while or a short while (depending upon focus and attitudes towards writing)…

8 ) Once one has a working dissertation, one can negotiate a defense date with one’s committee.  If, like mine, your committee is composed of some of the  busiest people on the planet, expect some wait time here…

9) Defense: essentially, this is an oral presentation of the dissertation research in a public forum, followed by a private grilling by your committee.  The severity of the interrogation can range from polite inquiry to Jack Bauer-esque activity which would fall afoul of Geneva Conventions, but is largely dependent upon the makeup of your committee.  Keep in mind: they don’t call it a “defense” for nothing…

10) Revisions: in every university’s graduate handbook, they will list at least three possible outcomes for your defense.  The first is an immediate pass, wherein the entire dissertation is taken as-is and published immediately.  This is basically a mythological beast like a hydra or a minotaur.  Everybody’s heard of it, but no one’s ever seen one, and one seriously doubts that it ever existed.  The more likely outcome of a defense is a conditional pass, wherein you pass, but have to make some revisions to the dissertation before the committee will sign off on it.  This is still a pass, and is accompanied by much revelry by the graduate student.  The other outcome is practically a “he-that-shall-not-be-named” on-campus.  This is a “fail,” and, depending on the university/department, the severity of a fail can either be immediate expulsion from the department, or simply having to spend another year or so revising the dissertation (or possibly rehashing the entire research project) before taking another go at it.

11) Graduation!  Woohoo!

Anyway, all of that to say that I will be reaching step #9 this Thursday.  Wish me luck!

p.s., I must confess that I felt a little strange when someone referred to my dissertation as “the culmination of my life’s work.”  If it were truly the culmination of my life’s work, I would suspect it would be substantially longer, wouldn’t it????  (The fact is, my Master’s Thesis was about 50% longer…)

“Google”

Seriously….

Not the normal content for this site, as this is more of a 1st language acquisition issue, but still interesting…

Children are reaching the age of 3 without being able to say a word, according to a survey that also found boys are almost twice as likely to struggle to learn to speak as girls.

The average age for a baby to speak their first word is 10 to 11 months. However, a significant minority (4 per cent) of parents reported that their child said nothing until they were 3.

While this is the extreme minority of children, and even late talkers can “catch up” and become well-adjusted average (or well-above average) children later, it still is well worth pointing out.  All to many parents I’ve seen are much too eager to advocate for their children’s language ability, interpreting grunts and gurgles as words in an attempt to deny any language development delays.  I would plead with parents to be honest in their assessments.  Don’t panic overly if the child is not talking by age 1 — that’s an average, but a child waiting a couple months to utter the first word is not of the ordinary, however if they haven’t learned quite a 50+ words and started making 2-3 word utterances by age 2, seek language development therapy for your children…

May the year be better than the movie (which totally failed to live up to 2001)…

The Mrs. and I are taking off from 12/25 until 1/1.  We would like to wish all foreignlanguageblog.com readers a very merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a prosperous New Year!!!!

As seems to be my annual tradition, here’s how to say “Merry Christmas” in a bunch of different ways.  Try practicing with random friends and neighbors and see how many strange looks you can collect over the holidays!

The FL doctor is trying to become gainfully employed.  Scarily enough, my time as a PhD candidate is rapidly drawing to a close (with expectations of defending the dissertation sometime in Jan. or Feb.), and I’ve been on the job hunt since last summer.  As such, I’ve recently started to move from the “fill out and send applications” phase to the “job interview” stage.  I’ve done a couple of phone interviews, but this last week I had my first live campus interview, and it was a biggie…  It was in Japan.  Yes, they flew me out to Japan…  Note to self: international travel is always best done on someone else’s dime…

I’m not going to talk about the school or the interview yet, to protect the whole application and candidacy process, and to give my wife and myself sufficient “space” to discuss our options as they arise, however, while I was in Japan I took some notes as to some of the differences that had developed during my nearly 10 years of absence from the country.  The following are observations from a 3-day whirlwind tour, in no particular order:

·         Japanese fashion now apparently dictates heavy eyeshadow, making the majority of the under 40 Tokyo girls look somewhat raccoon-ish…  This is still hands-down better than the “guranguro” look of 10 years ago, wherein they would tan themselves a deep bronze, bleach their hair to a ghastly blond/white, and use white eye makeup.  There was no better word to describe that trend than “stupid.”

·         Ten years ago, phones were all about smallness, daintiness, and cuteness…  Now, they are considerably larger, but considering that is to accommodate as large a screen as possible for all sorts of digital applications such as email, websurfing, and even watching TV, that is both understandable, and quite exciting.

·         I apparently could afford to have an I-Phone in Japan!  The price quoted by a sales rep for a basic phone/data plan was slightly better than the min. price in the US.  A single company, like in the U.S., has a monopoly on I-phone service plans.  What does this tell us about Apple?

·         Tokyo still freaks me out.  In the interceding 10 years, I’ve lived in “real” cities, but the megapolis mindset is still foreign to me in a way that the rest of Japan is not.  Walks down main thoroughfares in Shinjuku (新宿) are, to me, visually more similar to scenes of salmon swimming upstream than to those of people walking down streets.  One literally fights the current of a tidal wave of humanity, no matter what direction one is trying to go in.  Also, the “freak factor” is high, although my time there being mid-week, the number of night-time revelers in the area was nowhere near its weekend peak.  Still, one sees people dressed as if for Halloween randomly interspersed with businessmen and students coming home from cram schools.  Mind you, these people are not street performers – rather, just out for a fun (if unusual) time.

·         The current exchange rate is rather eye-popping, especially from the perspective of having been there a few years ago.  On the subject of exchanging money, never do so in airports.  The rates suck.  It’s much more efficient to withdraw money from ATMs, thereby getting the actual exchange rate of the moment.  I was forcefully reminded of this when I lost around $30 changing a mere $100 to yen and back.  It was a necessary move given my travel plans, but it still hurt…

·         Sushi is ALWAYS better in Japan (as one would expect)…

·         I previously believed that you simply could not get a bad bowl of ramen in Japan.  I was tragically proven wrong at a lunch counter near Shinjuku….

Please note the flag currently featured on the Google banner at the present moment:     http://www.google.com.   That’s the Esperanto flag!  It’s there in celebration of L. L. Zamenhof’s 150th birthday.

Just in case you were curious.

 I seriously get asked from time to time why chimps can’t be trained to talk, and “blah, blah, blah…  Koko the gorilla.”  From now on, I’ll just refer them to this article…

From the UCLA Newsroom:

 If humans are genetically related to chimps, why did our brains develop the innate ability for language and speech while theirs did not? 

 

Scientists suspect that part of the answer to the mystery lies in a gene called FOXP2. When mutated, FOXP2 can disrupt speech and language in humans. Now, a UCLA–Emory University study reveals major differences between how the human and chimp versions of FOXP2 work, perhaps explaining why language is unique to humans….

 

“Earlier research suggests that the amino-acid composition of human FOXP2 changed rapidly around the same time that language emerged in modern humans,” said Dr. Daniel Geschwind, Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. ”Ours is the first study to examine the effect of these amino-acid substitutions in FOXP2 in human cells.