Developing technical terminology

[Mia Kalish]

I've been wanting to add to this for D-a-y-z-e, but have been in one with
the beginning of the semester. 
In Israel in 1947-48, people needed a very large number of words to be able
to make Hebrew the national language, with the restrictions that all
business be done in it, so they had all the Rabbis convene minions and they
literally made up words for things. Of course, Israel wasn't very big at the
time. It still isn't, population-wise, really. They wrote all the words down
- consonants only, of course - and distributed the dictionaries for people
to use. 
The differences between Rudy's reflection and the Israeli experience is both
the population density, and the ratio of people involved in the task to
total population. (The same kinds of ratio statistics are needed for
evaluation desirability of immersion programs, I might add.) Another major
factor was the ratio of Total Language at Point A, when the need for a
dictionary was determined, and Number of Words Defined at Point B, when the
dictionary was released. In Israel, the ratio was whole numbers, many orders
of magnitude greater than for the Nigerian and Spanish projects. 
But, I have what I think is an interesting and amazing experience to share. 
My friend Yolanda downloaded a Spanish-text version of a popular
recording-to-text program. Then she called me up and said, Okay, what do I
do (she was new to this particular technology.) We couldn't figure out what
to do. Her interpretation of the Spanish didn't match our joint
understandings of what the program should be offering us as options. I was
stunned. I thought that this would be transparent. Actually, it was like
running into a brick wall, and I have to admit, I kind of enjoyed it,
because I don't get to experience things this dramatic very often. Not only
could we not intuit the meaning, but not being able to do so was totally
outside my ken of what would and would not be possible. It was a fun day. 

Then we got serious, and Yolanda downloaded the English version. All was
well, and she was able to create the text for the many, many hours of her
research interviews. 

In reflection, I wondered what dialect of Spanish the program had used. This
idea arose partly because some of the children in her research had been
"subjected" to a teacher from Spain in their bilingual classes. 

I looked on the web and found this: Today, the term "Castilian" is used in
other ways too. Sometimes it is used to distinguish the north-central
standard of Spanish from regional variations such as Andalusian (used in
southern Spain). Sometimes it is used, not altogether accurately, to
distinguish the Spanish of Spain from that of Latin America. And sometimes
it is used simply as a synonym for Spanish, especially when referring to the
"pure" Spanish promulgated by the Royal Spanish Academy (which itself
preferred the term castellano in its dictionaries until the 1920s). For
those interested, there is more at:
http://spanish.about.com/od/historyofspanish/a/castilian.htm
One of the nice things about learning things is that the more you learn, the
more you have to think about, and the more sculpted the object of study
becomes. It's like the little omega we look at to measure sensitivity of our
quantitative experiences: How subtle is the effect you are trying to lure
out. 
Mia 



 
 



-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Rudy Troike
Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 12:42 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: [ILAT] Developing technical terminology

Happy New Year to Y'all! And thanks to Phil for his thoughtful reflections
and
suggestions, which I have passed along to another couple of lists.

    Re Mia's comments about the difficulty of constructing new native terms
for new technical/conceptual phenomena, the lessons from the field of so-
called 'language planning' can be instructive. Terminology evolves or is
borrowed/adapted as users make use of the language to do so -- artificial
efforts, unless institutionally enforced, are unlikely to take root or have
effect. Some years ago I heard of a dictionary project in Nigeria which was
organized by a group of academics who were trying to "modernize" some
language
for dealing with the technological culture beginning to affect them. The
anecdote I heard involved their invention of a number of terms for parts of
an automobile -- then someone subsequently visited auto repair shops in the
city and found that self-trained mechanics (my grandfather was one such) had
come up with their own terms, which they were, in the course of daily 
give-and-
take, already beginning to standardize. Sometimes this involves borrowing
and
indigenization, as has happened with English over the centuries, and
sometimes
it involves extension of native elements and linguistic resources. Borrowing
has the psycholinguistic value of facilitating processing transfer from
another linguistic code -- witness the international use of much scientific,
technical, and conceptual terminology (only in Germany was the use of
"telephone" resisted and an artificial translated form "Fernsprecher"
insisted
upon). Even in linguistics it is easy to spot borrowed correspondences for
"syntax", "phoneme", "morphology", even "linguistics". Though linguists are
loath to admit it, word-learning involves (as capturable in Object-Oriented
Programming) the acquisition of whole "packages" of information/knowledge,
and it takes some practice to transfer this packaged information to another
language, even one's native language. When one of my students from Italy,
who had studied Chomsky's Government and Binding model with me, got hold of
a new book setting forth this model in Italian, he reported to me that he
had difficulty reading it, since he was used to thinking about the topic in
English. The early culture contact between Navajo and Spanish speakers led
to the borrowing of a small number of Spanish terms, which are now simply
part
of the native vocabulary (and terms such as "caballo" for 'horse' diffused
widely between Native languages even in the absence of direct contact, while
others modified the term for 'dog' one way or another). Such "organic"
adaptation can be a productive way to import technological knowledge into
the Native discourse, and thereby helping indigenize it, rather than
treating
the conceptual information as ineffable in the Native language because there
is no certifiable Native way of referring to it. This can begin as simple
code-switching, much the way Arab or Chinese speakers on campus pepper their
conversation with English university-life related terms such as "semester",
"final examination", etc., even though ways might be found (or exist) to
label such concepts in their native languages. When people can begin to feel
comfortable discussing new concepts in their native language, even using
imported terminology (note that 80% of the vocabulary in most advanced texts
in English is borrowed), they can begin to take ownership of it, and it can
more readily become incorporated into the expanding and modernizing Native
culture. Without that, the language becomes a museum piece, and the
community
eventually abandons it as no longer signficantly functional.

    Rudy