Category Archives: Language

Our First Languages

Our First Languages – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Last week, I listened to an essay from the New York Times Magazine about the possibility that one might lose their first language if they use another too much. Today then, I write to my own experience in this matter. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Last week, I listened to an essay from the New York Times Magazine about the possibility that one might lose their first language if they use another too much. Today then, I write to my own experience in this matter.

We choose how we sound to the extent that our physical bodies can allow. This means that our voices and body language can change as we move between environments and groups. I’ve seen this, and even noticed it in myself. My jokes change depending on the setting for one, yet also my tone and accent will deviate to the slightest degree when I move from one group to the next. This change is all the more dramatic when I’m speaking a different language to any significant degree. Last October, when I was in Brussels and Paris, I was speaking French far more than English. On two occasions when I met with friends who I normally speak with in English, I noticed something strange was happening to my voice: my accent was dulled. 

I like to compare the human voice to a pen, in the right hands and with the right training it can move with fluid precision. When at my best moments I can glide in and out of a series of registers with ease and use those different registers to accentuate the point I’m making. You’ve heard some of this here on the Wednesday Blog, those who listen to the podcast that is. The range of sounds I can make is far broader than the mere 26 letters of the English alphabet; this is thanks to my experience speaking other languages, French and Irish in conversation, and to the years of singing Latin hymns at Mass and practicing reciting Ovid and Virgil in my high school Latin classes. I can make myself understood in German, Italian, and Spanish as well if needs be, thanks to the other four I’ve spoken most frequently.

So, at those two dinners, one in Paris and the other a few days later in Brussels, I found that the usual fluidity of my speech was lacking, that I couldn’t quite make all the sounds I usually can. It occurred to me then that speaking French so much had made it harder to switch back into English after all the exercise that my vocal muscles had parler français produced different results to my usual practice speaking English. The author of the essay in the Times Magazine, Madeleine Schwartz, writes about losing recall of one language as much as the physical difficulty of making the sounds not made in the language, she uses the most. For her, the American English r sound was especially challenging after saying the French r so often. For me, my version of the French r /ʁ/ is in fact an approximation that I make based on the Irish /ɣ/ sound as in the word dhá, a variation of the number two. These two sounds are approximates of each other, the French /ʁ/ is an uvular fricative while the Irish ɣ is a velar fricative. This means that the French /ʁ/ is produced further back in the mouth than the Irish /ɣ/. Still, my American English /r/ becomes a challenging sound to make when I’ve been saying /ɣ/ or /ʁ/ all day.

On top of this, I’ve steadily worked on mastering another r sound, the trilled r sounds. I say sounds because there are a variety of these that an individual speaker can make depending on where on the tongue you produce the sound. I can make three of these sounds, one which is more of a clipped r that I picked up from Peter Cushing’s performance as Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars that I think of as more high-brow stage English, the second is a fuller trill, scientifically called a velar fricative, not quite at the tip of the tongue that I use at the beginnings and middles of Irish words, and in Latin and when I’ve spoken Italian and Spanish, and the third is a wisping of air just beyond the tip of the tongue that I use to make the r sound at the ends of Irish words. This last r is called a palatized fricative. These have all taken practice to learn and even more practice to begin doing on a regular basis. Again, I chose to speak the way that I do, and to change registers when I am speaking to a public audience, what you hear here, compared to when I’m speaking with family and friends.

I find that the letter r is important for getting down any accent, because it is so particular to each. It’s a sort of in-between sound that is a consonant yet can act like a vowel in some ways. It’s perhaps fitting then that this same Irish velar fricative ɣ is spelled dh, a digraph which is also pronounced in my Irish as the schwa vowel, /ə/. In my speech, I want to be understandable to my audience, yet also express an aspect of myself in a way that will appeal to that person. While my first language is English, my own urban Midwestern variety of it, my experiences and travels have transformed my idiolect into something that transcends regional boundaries now with bits of London and the Northeastern American English accents that I’ve been exposed to filtering in alongside the ways that my family and community here at home talk amongst ourselves.

One question I still have, one which I’ve pondered for years, is does our modern code switching reflect the abilities of our prehistoric ancestors and perhaps the early evolutionary history of language and human speech? Are other animals able to change how they communicate to reach the widest possible audience? It’s notable to me that a great deal of evidence shows that adult domesticated cats only meow to humans, a vocalization they normally only make as kittens to their mothers. So, in the cat’s meow we hear a conscious change in vocal expression intended to get whatever they’re feeling or thinking across to us. Had I not become a historian, I would have probably chosen to pursue anthropology, focusing on the evolution of human communication and human language.

What do you think about this? Do you intentionally change how you speak to be understood by specific audiences? Let me know in the comments on this blog post at wednesdayblog.org, or on the social media platforms where I share this: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter). You can also share your comments on the Wednesday Blog Patreon feed where I share these blog posts with more of an introduction from me and a bit before they go onto the social media channels.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Eclipse simulation using Stellarium

The Eclipse

The Eclipse – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This Monday, North America experienced its second total solar eclipse in the last decade. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This Monday, North America experienced its second total solar eclipse in the last decade.

I remember being over-the-moon excited when we began preparing for the Total Solar Eclipse in August 2017. Several weekends before the eclipse, my parents and I drove north from Kansas City into the path of totality to scout out possible places where we might travel on Eclipse Day to see the phenomenon for ourselves. Eclipse Day 2017 also happened to be my first day as a history graduate student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. That morning a sudden summer thunderstorm rolled through Kansas City and as the day continued the clouds persisted in our skies. When the moment of totality arrived around 12:55 pm on 21 August, we watched it through darkened clouds and heard the birds and insects around us revert to their nocturnal states and songs.

I was excited to have experienced a total solar eclipse yet disappointed that I wasn’t able to see it. So, when the prospect of traveling for this week’s total solar eclipse appeared, I seriously considered going afield to Texas to observe it. That trip didn’t end up working out because of a series of scheduling conflicts, and so instead seeing that the cloud forecast across North America called for most places along the path of totality to be obscured, I decided to stay here in Kansas City and observe our partial solar eclipse. At its greatest extent, the April 2024 solar eclipse reached about 90.5% totality. I was able to see that extent, yet the feel of it was quite different than 100% totality from seven years ago. We were watching Everyday Astronaut and the Planetary Society’s live broadcast from the Society’s Eclipse-o-rama event in Fredericksburg, Texas while observing the eclipse here at home, and what they experienced was far more dramatic than what we observed. I do regret not travelling for this eclipse, yet at the same time in the circumstances as they fell, I’m glad I chose to stay home all the same.

This concept of an eclipse is one that speaks to me both astronomically, as a big space nerd, historically, and linguistically. Eclipses are phenomena that have made their mark on the psyche of more than just us humans, note how the birds began singing their twilight songs when the Moon passed in front of the Sun. I have never put much theological potency into eclipses because we have been able to predict their occurrences with increasing accuracy for generations now. Religion, in many ways, relies on our perceptions of things. Some see in an eclipse a threat to divine order in the Cosmos. This view reminds me of Mozart’s final opera, near to my favorite of his works, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) in which the Queen of the Night is defeated by Sarastro, the high priest of the Temple of the Sun. Sarastro proclaims victory for the good and right, singing: 

Die Strahlen der Sonne

Vertreiben die Nacht.

Zernichtet der Heuchler

Erschlichende Macht.

The rays of the sun

Drive away the night.

Destroyed  is the hypocrites’  

Surreptitious power.

(Source: Aria-Database.com, trans. Lea Frey)

Sarastro’s triumphant finale in Die Zauberflöte sung by Josef Greindl with the RIAS Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.

The divine hand is better seen in the wisdom of devising a manner to mathematically ascertain the revolutions of these celestial orbs, to borrow the title of Copernicus’s magnum opus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. In our ability to ascertain our surroundings, and to make sense of nature we see a loving design.

Still, knowledge of the movements of the Sun, planets, moons, and stars across our night skies have had their impact in our history. During his fourth voyage, on 1 March 1504, after 9 months stranded in Jamaica, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) used his knowledge of eclipses from an almanac he brought with him written by the Castilian Jewish astronomer Abraham Zacuto (1452 – c. 1515) to inspire the Taíno caique of that part of Jamaica to give Columbus’s men food and provisions. Columbus wrote in his journals that he pointed at the Moon and told the Taíno that “God caused that appearance, to signify his anger against them for not bringing the food” to Columbus and his men.[1] Several years ago then, when discussing this story with a friend and fellow Renaissance historian, I decided to use the Stellarium astronomy program to simulate this lunar eclipse as Columbus and those with him in Jamaica saw it. Our ability to track the movements of these celestial orbs is good enough that our computers can show exactly what was visible in the night sky (baring any atmospheric data) at any moment in the past or future.

My simulation of the March 1504 Lunar Eclipse as seen from St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica using Stellarium.

This ability to calculate the dates and locations of eclipses came in handy when researchers look at mentions of eclipses in ancient literature to seek to date the events of the stories. Plutarch and Heraclitus both argued that the Odyssey contains “a poetic description of a total solar eclipse,” which astronomers Carl Schoch and P.V. Neugebauer proposed matched an eclipse which occurred over the Ionian Sea on 16 April 1178 BCE, though a more recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo O. Magnasco offer doubts concerning this proposition owing to the difficulty of finding exact matches in spite of centuries of the Odyssey‘s transmission through the oral tradition before it was written.[2] Still, that eclipses are so readily discernible and measurable with our mathematics speaks to the potential that they could be used to date moments long remembered only in heroic literature like Odysseus’s return to Ithaca in Book 20 of the Odyssey (20.356-57). In this effort, where others divine gods, we make tools out of the Sun and Moon to better understand ourselves.

The way we describe an eclipse speaks to our culture’s relationship with the phenomenon. Our Modern English word derives from the same word in Old French, which developed from the Latin eclīpsis, which in turn was borrowed from the Ancient Greek ἔκλειψις (ékleipsis), which comes from the verb ἐκλείπω (ekleípō)meaning to abandon, go out, or vanish.” Eclipse eclipsed the Old English word āsprungennes, which derives from the past participle of the verb āspringan, meaning “to spring up, to spread out, to run out, to cease or fail.” As an adjective, āsprungen meant that something was defunct or deficient, so perhaps this sense of an eclipse meant that it seemed for a moment as though the Sun had run out of energy and ceased to burn? Again, this speaks to the idea that nature had limits as humanity does, to an older understanding of nature from the perspective of a limited human lifespan. 

In Irish, there is the Hellenic word éiclips, yet there’s an older Gaelic word which means the same thing, urú. Now, usually students of the Irish language will learn of urú in the context of Irish grammar, an urú or eclipsis is one way that Irish handles both consonant clusters and situations when one word ends in a vowel and the following word begins with another vowel. So, in that sense the word gets eclipsed by this urú which preserves some of the integrity of the language. Yesterday’s eclipse then was less an urú focail (word eclipse) and more a urú gréine (solar eclipse). That both the Sun and the words we speak in Irish can be eclipsed makes this astronomical phenomenon all the more ordinary and measurable. 

We use this word eclipse beyond astronomy in many cases; it seems to me today that the old guard of the Republican Party has been eclipsed by an orange political pulsar whose violent rhetoric and chaotic behavior have eaten away at their party’s support in these last 8 years, not unlike a pulsar discovered by NASA’s Swift and Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellites in 2007. An eclipse is something wonderous to behold yet ordinary in how readily we can predict when they will appear. They have given us a great deal of cultural qualifications that continue to influence how we see our world.

On Monday then, when the sky began to darken as the Moon passed in front of the Sun, I noticed that the color spectrum that I’ve always known began to change. Before my eyes the colors seemed to take on a sort of metallic glow, as if the light which illuminated them was shifting into a spectrum that seemed unnatural to the natural world I’ve known. The Sun is fundamental to how we understand the world around us. Its light is what illuminates our senses, and without it, or even with partial changes to its glow, we would find ourselves observing a very different world.

[1] Christopher Columbus, “The Fourth Voyage,” Select Letters of Christopher Columbus: With Other Original Documents Relating to the Four Voyages to the New World, trans. and ed. R. H. Major, (London: Haklyut Society, 1847), 226.

[2] Constanino Baikouzis and Marcelo O. Magnasco, “Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 26 (2008): 8823–8828, nn. 1, 12–14.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

A Matter of Grammar

A Matter of Grammar – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, after going down the rabbit hole of the Chicago Manual of Style's monthly Q&A newsletter, I thought I'd talk a bit about grammar. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, after going down the rabbit hole of the Chicago Manual of Style‘s monthly Q&A newsletter, I thought I’d talk a bit about grammar.

One of my favorite newsletters to read is the Chicago Manual of Style‘s monthly Q&A email which tries to answer some pressing questions regarding the English language in this particularly formal academic setting that I often write in professionally. We historians in the United States use the Chicago Manual of Style as our main style guide, both for its system of extensive footnotes and for its grammatical rules. I am familiar and have used several other systems, including the AP Style Guide, and the MLA, APA, and Harvard citation systems, yet my preference remains Chicago for its clarity. Chicago is the preferred style guide for us historians as well as the basis of the style used by the American Anthropological Association.

English is an unusual language in that we don’t have a single central authoritative language academy as does French, Spanish, Irish, and German. Our best bet is to see what our two major dictionaries say: the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The former is the standard in the United Kingdom and throughout the Commonwealth, while the latter is the American standard developed first during the Early Republic when its initial author Noah Webster sought to better differentiate American English from its imperial counterpart, the better to craft a specifically republican national language fit for our young Union. I’ve had my problems with Webster’s dictionary for a while now in part because I don’t see the point of most of his spelling reforms, and for a good part of my teens and twenties I used British spellings over American ones. Today though, I’ve reverted to the American standards in what might well be a sign of my general weariness of the constant fight over so many different topics and issues; this was one that fell by the wayside.

This month then, the Chicago Manual‘s Q&A included a question about whether it was fine for an academic writer to write in the first or second person, to use the pronouns I and you. We are taught to always restrict our writing to the third person, to avoid the subjectivity that is implicit in the first person. I’ve begrudgingly accepted this, to the extent that amid the 96,276 words that comprise the ninth draft of my dissertation only three of those are the pronoun I. All three instances where I drift into the first person are in the footnotes where it is necessary to explain my decisions regarding certain translations or connections that would otherwise not be possible in the English language. By contrast, I use this pronoun a great deal here in the Wednesday Blog, where I am writing to you, dear reader, in a more personal manner that I hope is evident in this text. Of the 189,993 words that I’ve written for the Wednesday Blog before this week, 3,360 of those are the pronoun I.

The response in the Q&A about using the pronoun I spoke to that concern for subjectivity, yet also spoke of a need that our academic writing ought to be “more lively and personal.” I see both sides of this, more and more books written by my fellow academics do include more of the first person in them, yet at the same time Kate Turabian’s writer’s manual––an abridged version of the Chicago Manual––suggests that writers “avoid beginning your sentences with I believe or I think (which go without saying).” I am often frustrated to hear people use fillers like these, or like “it goes without saying,” or “to be honest,” when those are things I hope they would be adhering to in the first place. On the other hand, I’ve heard papers at conferences where the author reads out “this author finds that _____,” which sounds ludicrous. Two weeks ago, at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference I did make it clear where I was presenting my own theories based on the evidence that my primary sources provided. A spoken context is different than a written one, not only can there be more repetition of material to bring a point home, one can also use more personal elements, bring oneself into the topic and show the audience why they ought to care about it the way you do.

Academic writing is quite formal, and it follows set patterns and standards. It is in many ways an intricate dance, whether a waltz or an older minuet, which we follow in order to write to one another in the same methods and manners that we will all recognize. One may want to deconstruct some of these Elements of Style, to borrow a title, yet those standards exist to facilitate communication. Language proscription has its place along with all the innovations that happen each and every day in speech and writing. I might use this pronoun more in my academic writing in the future, especially if I choose to write a prologue which tells my reader why I am fascinated by a topic that will invite them to consider it as well.

I would like it if there were an English Language Academy in the same vein as the Académie Française, yet I would prefer to have a say in its decisions. Is that bold of me, sure. Yet that academy’s function is best served by the continued writing and publication of those of us who use the English language to express our thoughts on a daily basis. For every article or book I submit for publication about the history of animals in the Renaissance there will be countless other works published in all manner of settings which demonstrate the versatility of this language and its uses. We academics have just as much a claim to it as anyone else, and my own English is not everyone’s English. Still, we have our common grammar that keeps this language together, and that is something worthwhile.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Corrections

3 April 2024: Soon after publication, I corrected this week’s blog post for grammar, naturally.

The Essence of Being

The Essence of Being – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to begin Season 4 of the Wednesday Blog podcast, I want to talk about what it means to exist. I know, small topic for a Wednesday. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, to begin Season 4 of the Wednesday Blog podcast, I want to talk about what it means to exist. I know, small topic for a Wednesday.

Two weeks ago, I started teaching a new class that I’m calling Bunrang Ghaeilge, Beginner Irish. The students come from my fellow members of the Fr. Bernard Donnelly Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and their relatives, and in the first two weeks we’ve progressed slower than I initially expected yet we’re still progressing through the materials. The first verb which I taught my current students in English translates as to be, yet in Irish as two forms: is for a more permanent being and tá in a more impermanent circumstance. In the moment I explained this difference by noting how I say is as Chicago mé (I am from Chicago), as in I was born in the Chicago area, but I say tá mé i mo chónaí in Kansas City (I live in Kansas City). We don’t have this distinction in English, either between the permanent and impermanent versions of the to be verb or in the clear distinction between where you’re from at birth and where you currently live; that distinction is far more subtle in English.

At the same time, I am learning Italian for a trip this summer, my own version of the Grand Tour, and on the Busuu app where I’m learning Italian they taught that I should say sono di Chicago però abito a Kansas City,as in I was born in Chicago, but I inhabit today in Kansas City. This distinction between a place that is central to our essence, the place where we were born, and the place where we now live seem important, yet it flies in the face of the American sense of reinvention that we can make ourselves into whomever we want to be. It’s struck me when I’ve met people who would rather see themselves as from the place where they currently live than the place where they were born. That is a different view from my own, born out of different lived experiences and different aspirations.

This word essence developed from the Latin word essentia, which the 1st century CE Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote was coined by the great orator Cicero as a translation of the Greek word οὐσία (ousia), a noun form of the Ancient Greek verb εἰμί (eimi), meaning “to be.” (Sen., Ep. 58.6) It refers to an innate idea that the ultimate goal of philosophy and learning in general is to better understand the self; the most famous inscription in the ancient Temple of Apollo at Delphi read γνῶθι σαυτόν (gnōthi sauton), or “know thyself.” I add to that goal the aspiration that one can improve oneself. 

This time of year, I find myself thinking more and more about what it means for me to be an Irish American. This past weekend we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, a day of great celebration for the global Irish diaspora and our cousins back in Ireland as well. I’ve written before here about how my communities’ immigrant connections to Ireland often predate the current century, if not the twentieth century as well and how we are in many respects far more American than Irish. In recent years, I began to refer to myself in this subject as an American cousin, after all as much as I have Irish roots and I come from an Irish family, I’m an American and have lived an American life to date. I’m not as far removed from Ireland as many I know, yet this year marks the 110th anniversary of my great-grandfather Thomas Kane’s arrival in America.

There’s something about being Irish American which doesn’t quite fit neatly into any of the official boxes. In Ireland, to be Irish is to be from Ireland or to be a close enough descendant that you qualify for Irish citizenship, like my father does. In America, there’s a sense that the old stereotypes of Irish immigrants are fair caricatures to still uphold, especially on our communities’ holiday in much the same way that the sombreros are donned on Cinco de Mayo. Yet there’s a lot more to it. On both sides of the Atlantic, our communities have the same deeply intertwined connections between families near and far, friends in common, and a sense of nostalgia that I see especially strong among those of us born in America.

Perhaps the Irish language can offer the best answer here. In Irish, I’ll say to Irish people, as I wrote a few paragraphs ago, “Is col ceathrair Meiriceánach mé.” Yet the official Irish name for us Irish Americans is “na Gael-Meiriceánigh”, or Gaelic Americans. I think this speaks to something far older and deeper than any geographic or political connections. We come from common ancestors, share common histories and stories that wind their way back generations and centuries even. We are who we are because of whom we’ve come from. I hope to pass this rich legacy in all its joys and struggles onto the next generation in my family; perhaps I dream of those not yet born hoping they’ll be better versions of my own generation. I hope they’ll still feel this connection to our diaspora like I do even as we continue on our way along the long winding road of time further and further from Ireland.

I am the child of my parents, the grandchild of my grandparents, and great-grandchild of my great-grandparents. In so many ways, I am who I am today because of those who’ve come before me. The geography of my life was written by them, by a choice among other immigrants from County Mayo my ancestors found their way to Chicago instead of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. My politics reflect my ancestors’ views as well, in the Irish context the legacies of the Home Rule Crisis of 1912-1916, the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence of 1919-1921, and the Civil War of 1922-1924 all have as much of a presence in my political philosophy as does their American contemporaries: the Progressive Era and its successor in the New Deal coalition. Yet I am my own person, and from these foundations I’ve built my own house in as much of an image of the past as it is a hope for the future.

What does it mean then to be ourselves? We hear a great deal today about how people identify, in a way which seems to be a radical departure from older norms and expectations both in the English language and in how we live. We constantly seek answers to all of our questions because we anticipate that all of our questions can be answered, yet the mystery of being is one of my great joys. I love that there are always things which I do not know, things with which I’m unfamiliar and uncertain. This is where belief extends my horizons beyond what my knowledge can hold, a belief born from the optimistic twins of aspiration and imagination. I know that the essence of my being, the very fundamental elements of who I am, draw far more from these twins than any other emotion. I am what my dreams make of me, I see my world with eyes colored by what my mind imagines might be possible; and in that possibility I find the courage to hope for a better tomorrow.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Personalizing Language

Personalizing Language – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, adding onto last week's release about my work as a translator, I'm discussing my view on how language ought to be personalized. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, adding onto last week’s release about my work as a translator, I’m discussing my view on how language ought to be personalized.

About this time every year I’ve been releasing a blog post about my interest in and continued study of the Irish language. In past years I’ve talked about how I came into this period of studying Irish knowing bits and pieces of it, but without the comfort of speaking or reading it regularly, and later how I appreciate the meaning of how the structure of Irish gets its ideas across. This year, I want to talk about how I feel my own personal use of the Irish language has taken on its own form, or idiolect, and why that’s the case.

A few weeks ago, I found several books on the regional variations in Irish through my university’s e-book catalog. It struck me that these linguists had found such common generalizations of Irish sounds when spoken, or rather attempted, by native English speakers who don’t have much experience with Irish itself. The frequent “ch” sound as in leathanach, or page, gets hardened from a ch to a k, while the slightly less frequent “dh” in dha, or two things, gets turned from a dh into a g. The best way I can describe this dh sound is it sounds to me like a French r that’s rolled further back in the throat.

I read these examples of Anglicizations of Irish phonetics and could see, or rather hear, where they were coming from. Yet in my own case I’ve always tended to either make these sounds as we’re taught in class, or to soften them, with the ch becoming a h and the dh joining the other sound spelled “dh” as something along the lines of a ya. I suppose the authors of that book were using native speakers of Hiberno-English as their test subjects, something that I am not. I speak American English, more specifically a blending of the western end of Inland Northern American English (aka Great Lakes English) and Midland American English. Plus, when it comes to other languages I’m most often exposed to, French and Spanish, I’ve found a good deal of the phonetics of those languages to be rather easy to adopt. So, my own idiolect, my own way of speaking Irish would be a tad different from the norm because I don’t speak the expected standard of English.

Going forward, I wonder if it would be more helpful, should I ever get the opportunity to teach Irish here in the United States, if I adopted some of these slightly easier to pronounce sounds and taught those, alongside the traditional Irish ones, would that change the ways my students spoke the language? It’s certainly possible, yet on the other hand like how I adapted Irish to fit the comforts of my own speech perhaps they would find ways to make the language their own as well.

At the end of the day, these ch and dh sounds are two of many that make Irish its own, that give it the spirit and the character that keeps it true to its origins and history. I for one love that I’ve figured out how to make these sounds, and how to speak this language to an intermediate level now as an adult. It means a lot to me to speak the language of so many of my ancestors, to keep that vehicle for thoughts, ideas, and stories alive.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I talk about my experiences as a translator. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Over the last three years I have consistently worked in the background of my dissertation research and all the other things I’m doing, including this blog, on translating one of my dissertation’s most important primary sources from Middle French into Modern English. That book, André Thevet’s Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique was initially published in 1557 and then translated into English only 11 years later in 1568 by a man named Thomas Hacket. However, since 1568 Hacket’s translation has been the only one that English-speaking readers wanting to explore Thevet’s Singularites have had available to them. 

There are some partial translations out there, most notably Roger Schlesinger and Arthur Stabler’s 1986 book André Thevet’s North America: A Sixteenth-Century View, yet Hacket’s remains the only full translation into English. So, not only is the work I’ve been doing helpful for my own research, yet it is also groundbreaking in reopening that dusty door that leads into Thevet’s life and work for a great many English-speaking readers and scholars. It’s my hope that people find my translation of The Singularites of France Antarctique both useful and fascinating to read, as it offers a window into a worldview that in some cases makes sense while in others appears far out of place in our own world.

I have always had a fascination with and love for languages. As long as I can remember I’ve had memories, and many of those memories are of long hours engrossed in one language or another, like many of my relatives taking watches apart to see how they work I often do the same with language, learning how each grammar and mode of thinking developed in a common lineage and dialogue with its neighbors and relations. My own language studies began with Latin, which I first tried to learn 20 years ago as a 10 year old, though it wasn’t for another four years until I started high school at St. James Academy that I really began to understand what I was looking at. Around the same time, I also started studying Irish in the evenings at the Irish Center of Kansas City. Both languages are ones that I still study, and enjoy reading, speaking, and writing. 

In the years since, I’ve learned French to a level that when I’m there I can go about my life in France without using English. Translating Thevet’s Singularites has really helped with that, as three years of intense reading of his Singularites really gave me a strong impression on how French, albeit in an older form, works. One of the big differences with my translation of the Singularites is that I took a lot of time to consult page-by-page several modern Portuguese translations of his work published in 1978 by Eugenio Amado and in 2018 by Estêvão Pinto. Thanks to their common Latin heritage, and to the general use of Spanish around me for much of my life, I find reading Portuguese and Spanish to not be very difficult at all. 

There are languages out there which I can read, and to a degree write in, but cannot speak very well. Portuguese and Spanish fall into this group, as does Ancient and Modern Greek. I studied Classical and Koine Greek, two ancient variants, in high school and college at Rockhurst, yet I just don’t have the training or experience with either forms of Greek to be as comfortable or confident in Greek as I’d like. Eventually, I do want to spend the time to learn Ancient Greek as well as Biblical Hebrew, yes at some point I’d like to study the Bible in the way that I’ve studied the works of the humanists from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

I’ve also here and there studied Bulgarian, Mandarin Chinese, Māori, and Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Again, all of these came out of pure curiosity on my part, and while I’m unable to speak the first three or properly read the latter, I do know a thing or two about each. Thanks to my work with Bulgarian, I can read the Cyrillic alphabet, and I do remember a few things, though I haven’t used any of it in quite a while. During the opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics last year, I ran through what I could remember from my Mandarin Chinese class in the Spring semester of 2017, and found that I still had the pronouns, some verbs, and a handful of nouns, which was more than I expected. In past years I’ve found I can make out text in various Polynesian languages because of the time I spent in 2014 and 2015 learning about how Māori works. Egyptian Hieroglyphs are another animal. I found my curiosity with Ancient Egypt reignited in the Summer of 2019, and pursued the task of learning how to read this most ancient of script with a passion. I can make out some characters, and I remember a fair bit about how the various forms of the Ancient Egyptian language fit in with its Coptic descendants.

Last week, I found myself reading about the Coptic language and its various dialects. I was most interested in how older pharaonic Egyptian place names and terms had survived the millennia into the Coptic that persists today in Egypt and among the Coptic diaspora. It struck me how because the Coptic alphabet is modeled after Greek, I could read most Coptic words, and where there were unfamiliar letters all I needed to do was look to the Demotic script used alongside the more formal Hieroglyphs, and I’d find the source of those letters. Each of these languages are vehicles for the perspective of a particular people at a particular time and place in the long human story. They allow us to get closer to understanding how other people see their own world, and their place in it.

Thevet often referred to his own people as “Christians” and less frequently as “our Europe.” He lived at a time when the older idea of Christendom––comprising of Syriac, Greek, and Latin churches that traced their roots back to classical antiquity––began to fade away with the triple influences of the collapse of the last vestiges of the Roman Empire in Constantinople, the Protestant Reformations, and the beginning of the First Age of Exploration. This Christendom steadily became known in the sixteenth century as Europe, and eventually with the establishment and flourishing of transoceanic European settler colonies as the West. Reading Thevet’s works, looking through his eyes, I now understand how he saw his own world at least a little better.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Terminologies

Terminologies – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Today, I'm going to talk for a bit about how the meanings of words change. Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Normally, I’ll have something written for the Wednesday Blog by Monday and recorded at the latest by Tuesday morning. Yet this week I’m sitting here on Tuesday at 2:30 pm with nothing written, and thus nothing recorded. Some weeks I’m abuzz with ideas and others, like this week, the hive remains silent. So, while I was talking this morning with my friend Rebecca Legill, I was in the background searching for something to write about this week.

Our conversation turned, as many conversations in Kansas City do these days, to the new terminal at Kansas City International Airport. The big shiny new building opened to the public a month ago on February 28th and has seen around 300,000 travelers pass through its doors in the weeks since. What struck me while I was talking about the new terminal with Rebecca was that the word terminal itself is a bit of an odd word. Terminal comes from the Latin terminus, a word for a boundary or a limit. The modern context of a terminal as a transportation hub came from the railways whose end stations are called terminals. Think of Grand Central Terminal in New York or the London Terminals that you used to see on old British Rail tickets. Here in Kansas City, it’s a bit of a weird idea because our Union Station was built as a through station. Sure, trains once terminated and still terminate here, the Missouri River Runner’s western end is in K.C., but elsewhere the idea of a terminal station makes sense.

So, when the languages of railways and ocean liners were being adopted for airports a century ago the idea of the airport terminal as one building among others where people board and disembark from planes was born. In many cases a terminal isn’t necessarily where a trip ends, especially on a point-to-point carrier like Southwest Airlines here in the United States, yet for hub airlines like our big three––American, Delta, and United––to say that the new building at KCI is the terminal works pretty well. In a similar way, saying that O’Hare Airport in Chicago has Terminals 1, 2, 3, and 5 or that London Heathrow has Terminals 2, 3, 4, and 5 also makes sense in this logic of aviation naming considering that a flight is most often the equivalent of an express train, they rarely make stops along the way anymore to unload some passengers and bring aboard others.Language evolves with its speakers; my English today is different from my English twenty years ago when I was a spry 10 year old. The complexity of any language becomes more noticeable with time and experience speaking that language. Language is the vehicle that carries us from one terminal in our lives to the next, it’s how we interpret the experiences that our senses describe to us. Language is our mechanism for crafting new worlds and ideas, whether fantastical or ordinary. Language is how we think, so it strikes me as curious to consider which philosophers speak to which people. Some appreciate the Stoics for their straightforwardness, others like me the Existentialists who see patterns and subtext in every interpretation. In the study of history perhaps the most influential thinker is Karl Marx, whose economic philosophy has defined a great deal of historians especially in Europe following the Second World War. All of us have read Marx to varying degrees. I get his ideas though I don’t entirely buy them. Of all the Marxist philosophers the one who speaks the most to me has to be Harpo Marx for all the life and joy that can be found in his chaotic wisdom. Language can be more than just words, and Harpo lived and breathed that kind of expression.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

In Praise of my Favorite Latin Verb

In Praise of my Favorite Latin Verb – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Today, I'm talking about a particularly versatile Latin verb that I'll admit I'm rather fond of: mittō. Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

I first started studying Latin when I was fourteen, a high school freshman at St. James Academy. Over the next four years I studied Latin with Bob Weinstein, then the St. James Latin teacher, and even took a year of Ancient Greek with him as well. In those years I got a good foundation in Latin, though I’ll admit I didn’t learn as much as I wanted, in part thanks to my own immaturity at the time. In the years since I’ve been able to connect more of these concepts in my thinking about the language, now on my third round of studying it. I often like to say that there are certain languages which I feel I can inhabit, that are so familiar and comfortable to me that I feel empowered to read, speak, write, and even think in them on a regular basis. These four are English, my native language, Irish my ancestral language, French, the language I fell in love with in college, and Latin, my original language of study in school.

Honestly, it took me until my third round studying Latin to really get the hang of today’s verb of note: mittō. Its full dictionary entry, laying out its principal parts are mittō, mittere, mīsī, missum. Looking at these four we can see the utility of this verb, which in its most basic meaning I’d translate mittō as “I send.” It means to send, but it also includes other types of sending like dispatching, releasing, or extending a hand, yielding, bringing out, attending, and dedicating a book, among many others. To say that one verb has so many meanings, so many actions it represents seems a bit of a stretch to me, but if you only think of a language by taking its parts out of place and analyzing them individually of the rest of the language, you’ll find you’re getting a different picture than you would if you considered the whole thing in one go.

Mittō has a great many descendants in English. Just looking at that 1st person present active form (mittō) we can see emit, intermittent, omit, permit, remit, submit, transmit, and everyone’s favorite cat name mittens. Frommīsī and missum we get all of the mission words, words like intermission, missile, omission, permission, promise, remission, and transmission. 

Even the word Mass as in the Catholic liturgy comes from mittō. It originated in the phrase Īte, missa est, which I’ve always heard as “Go, the assembly is dismissed” though I think of it more in line with the phrase “the Mass has ended” that you hear at the end of every liturgy. Missa in that phrase comes from missiō, a 3rd declension Latin noun meaning sending or dismissal, which itself has roots in our old friend mittō. One thing of interest regarding the name of the Mass is that the Latin word Missa is the origin of a great many names for the liturgy in the Romance and Germanic languages as well as the Polish msza. Yet in Irish the Mass is called Aifreann, which comes instead from the Latin verb participle offerendus, essentially translating as offering. The same Latin word is the origin of the name for the Mass in all of the other Celtic languages, though Welsh and Breton today call it an offeren and an oferenn respectively.

I decided to write about mittō this week because it keeps coming up in stuff as I find myself going about my work. I like versatility, the idea that we can look to something as particular as a verb like mittō to find the source for so many concepts and ideas. Language is the way we understand the world around us. It’s one of the first things in most creation myths that the humans do, they look about and start naming things. Those names transmit information about the object to people whether in earshot or in other worlds through writing. In our own day we are pushing the limits of mittō and its descendants by sending data back and forth to our furthest out exploratory spacecraft, from the Voyagers on the edge of the Solar System to the Perseverance Rover on Mars to the International Space Station in orbit. All of that data gets submitted back to each craft’s mission control here on Earth for further analysis.So, here’s to mittō, one of my favorite Latin verbs.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Summer School in Irish

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Summer School in Irish – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I finally returned to Irish school this summer after a decade away. You can find out more about Gaelchultúr's online North American Irish classes here: https://www.gaelchultur.com/en/courses/irish-language-online-cursai-usa-2022

Bhí mé ag staidéar Gaeilge an Samhradh seo le Gaelchultúr ar Zoom. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a formal Irish class, but when I saw the opportunity from Gaelchultúr to take classes scheduled for the North American evening hours on Zoom I jumped at the chance. Irish has a special place in my heart, it’s the language that many of my ancestors spoke only a century ago. I’ve always wanted to be able to speak Irish as well as read and write in it, but never to much avail. So, now as an adult I wanted to give it a second try.

I first started studying Irish when the Irish Center in Kansas City began offering classes back in 2007. I was one in their first class of students, and at 14 found myself studying two languages at once: Latin in school and Irish in the evenings. They’re different enough that I didn’t often mix things up, but I still don’t think I was quite ready to really understand either language. I’ve now taken Latin three times and Irish twice formally, and only now am actually properly beginning to understand the nuances and structures of both.

So, what have I learned this time around? Well, I learned how to form past tense verbs, something I’d bumbled my way into half-learning on my own in the past, and I learned about this nifty habitual aspect that can be useful to describe actions that are regular and frequent in happening. I’ve become more confident in my speaking abilities and my recall of words, phrases, and grammar. So far then, I’d say this time around of studying Irish has been a success.

My biggest piece of advice if you want to study any language, whether you already speak it or not, is figure out how you personally learn languages best. What’s your best method? If you figure that out, then you can really begin to make progress. I like doing all the week’s exercises before class so when class starts, I already have notes and am more prepared. I find I need the confidence boost of knowing the answers ahead of time to really let myself make progress in a task. In the same way that I always had a harder time ice skating when I started to think about it in my usual depth and excess than if I just did it and didn’t worry too much. 

The same, as it turns out, goes with Irish. When I’m not overthinking about what it is I’m trying to say I do pretty well; when I do overthink things, I’ll mess up either the pronunciation or chose a different word altogether that just doesn’t work as well. I’ve really learned how to learn languages through learning Latin and French. Using the methods, I’ve found helpful for those languages, particularly writing out sentences and reading text aloud, I’ve been able to really pick up on my Irish far better than I ever did as a teenager.

Irish for me has a particular potency, it’s the language that my name comes from, it’s the language that is best used to express the origins of my identity. It’s a foundational language for me that I was aware of for most of my life but hardly ever fully understood. I wrote last year about my struggles learning and retaining my Irish, that rather fittingly for a language spoken by past generations of my family I knew how to conjugate in the past and present tense only but not the future tense. Now having studied the past tense and muddled a bit with the present tense I know that looking at the future tense I could probably write future tense verbs if I had to though I don’t know any of the intricacies of the Irish future tense yet. So, from last year to now I’ve made some progress yes, albeit at a slow pace.

Where does that leave me today? Well, I’ve enrolled in the next class up. Even though I’ve taken Irish before I decided to start at the very beginning (a very good place to start) seeing as it’s been a decade since I last studied it. Thus, as I now finish up the A1 class, I’m looking forward to starting A2 in September. Maybe then by this time next year I’ll be strong enough near the end of the B2 to write some of these blog posts and podcasts in Irish. (Don’t worry!) To quote Florida’s own former Governor Jeb Bush, “Please clap.”

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Understanding Others and Communicating Well

This may not necessarily be a post that will be on a topic that’s familiar to most of you, the 30 or so people who occasionally read these posts, but it’s something that’s important to me. The ability to communicate well, and efficiently, is paramount. It’s ultimately going to be key to solving all of our problems, to making life better for everyone. I truly believe if we could, or rather would, actually sit down and talk with someone we have a disagreement with, chances are we’d find enough common ground to begin sorting our problems out.

But this post isn’t about solving humanity’s big problems, and I’m going to try to refrain from my usual upbeat optimistic conclusions that I’ve noticed I tend to write. Because this evening I want to write about a topic I’ve been interested in for nearly 20 years, one that I’ve struggled with and studied, and am only now really feeling like I’ve confidently mastered: Latin.

Latin is a language that I’ve been fascinated by for a very long time. In part, I’ll admit it’s an attraction to the prestige it embodies: the language of the Romans, and of my Church. It’s been a constant piece of the intellectual and cultural fabric of European and now Atlantic civilization (that’s another idea I’m working on) for millennia. It’s also a highly logical language, a systematic language governed by a set of rules that, once explained, make pretty good sense. Moreover, it’s the ancestor of a number of humanity’s most widely spoken languages, and has directly influenced many, many others, including English. It’s taken three tries now, but I’ve made sense of the language well enough now to feel confident not just repeating the declensions and conjugations that I’ve memorized, but understanding the intricacies of their meaning, and in so doing, to have a better idea at understanding how Latin works.

Latin has also come to reflect the people who have written in it and spoken it over the generations, particularly in their preferences in word order and writing. I’ve often thought, considering that word order isn’t as important in Latin, after all the word endings provide the meaning, couldn’t a native Irish speaker go ahead and speak Latin using a verb, subject, object order and be decently-well understood just as much as a speaker using the classical Ciceronian order of subject, object, verb? Yet there’s one thing that does survive from the ancient world in faint traces that was revived later than other customs in written Latin, something that is still not universally adopted: the macron.

Macrons: the flat line over a vowel sometimes seen in Latin writing, as well as the first family of France, is something that I believe to be fundamental in properly understanding Latin. Sure, my medievalist friends will say, it wasn’t used in Medieval Latin, so we (Medieval and Renaissance historians & scholars, myself included) don’t need to memorize the macrons. But for me, it’s the macrons that have been one of the best tools to help me make sense of Latin. It’s answered the question for me of how a Latin speaker might differentiate between līber, “a child” (lī pronounced like Lee) and liber, “a book” (li pronounced like literature). It helps me make sense of the difference between a 1st declension nominative singular noun (the subject form) and a 1st declension ablative singular noun (a slightly more complicated form).1 The macron makes everything clear.

This is a good explanation from a far better Latin scholar than me about the use of macrons (the apex).

Without the macron, the meaning of a sentence can be understood, but with much more difficulty. This particular idea makes perfect sense to me because of my work with my primary ancestral language, Irish. In Irish, there are two types of vowels, long and short. The long vowels are represented by a fada over the vowel, essentially an acute accent (accent aigu en français). This is how an Irish speaker knows when reading my name that they’re in fact reading about a guy named Seán and not something that’s old (sean). The presence of the fada isn’t just to make the language look cool (which it also does), but it has a very real impact on the pronunciation and meaning of the word as a whole.

I think it’s best not to think of Irish vowels with fada or Latin vowels with macrons as just variant forms of those vowels but instead as entirely different vowels all together. The á in Seán is an entirely different sound, and thus ought to be seen as an entirely different letter to the a in sean. In the same way, that ī in līber is a different character, and a different sound from the i in liber.

We don’t have these same written variations of our vowels in English. We just have the 5 vowels, occasionally 6, which are supposed to represent all of the vowel sounds that English uses, in all national and regional Englishes around the globe, and in all of their local varieties. In my own accent, I can count at least 3 different sounds that each of the vowels represent. Granted, English wasn’t always like this, macrons were also used in Old English, and through generations of linguistic change, immigration, and English’s constant adoption of foreign words the language has become the exceedingly complicated, often irregular form of communication it is today. Not only is my English influenced by the most basic form of the language studied and spoken here in North America, but there’s also hints of Irish in there as well as the strong British, German, and Nordic influences in my English from all those immigrants who settled in my home region, the American Midwest, in the 19th and 20th centuries, including some of my other ancestors from England, Finland, Flanders, Sweden, and Wales.2

In English, we’ve chosen complexity in spelling as it relates to the spoken language over a 1-to-1 matching of the written language with the spoken language. Why? My best guess is it’s to preserve the unity of English. This keeps it so that all English speakers are generally spelling their words in the same way, between the two main written forms of English (UK & Commonwealth, and US English). For the most part, it’s worked for English, and I wouldn’t recommend moving away from the current model for the exact reasons why it exists; more on that at a later date.

But returning to Latin, if students trying to learn this language, famous for its now generally unspoken nature, really want to give themselves a good chance of succeeding in learning it, then those of us familiar with Latin, whether as students or as teachers, should embrace the macron even more than it already is, and use it throughout all our written Latin. Up until recently, it was challenging especially on computers with English keyboards to type any sort of accented vowels or consonants, but the technology has advanced enough that it’s readily possible today for most keyboards to make things work. On my Mac, I can hold down any of the vowel keys until a box pops up on the screen indicating each accent that can be put on that vowel. I then just have to choose them by number. So, for līber, when it comes to the ī, all I have to do is hold down the i key and press 4, et voilà, I’ve got myself an ī. We should do ourselves, and Latin itself, a favor, after all the easier we make learning this language, the more likely people are going to want to keep learning it.

I like Latin, it’s orderly, and when it’s explained well it can make a lot of sense. All of my Latin teachers to date have done a wonderful job explaining it, sometimes though it takes a bit more maturity to make sense of things. In general, I think we tend to have trouble in the English-speaking world understanding grammar. Let’s face it, our own language has so many contradictions that often English speakers don’t even really understand the rules of English grammar all that well. One of these days, I want to write a little book, a libellus in Latin, that can provide at least what I see as some of the more important rules in English, that’ll allow English to make more sense for the average speaker.

Today though, in my Latin studies (Wheelock, Ch. 20), I learned to my delight that the word frūctus means both fruit and profit. Frankly, those two make sense together, after all what are profits but the fruits of our labors. For the rare admirer of Star Trek out there who might be reading this, it came to mind that if I ever get the chance to write for them on a future Trek TV show involving the Ferengi of DS9 fame, I’d want to have a particularly smart-ass human academic offer a Ferengi a bowl of fruit (frūctus), after all the sole goal in the life of a Ferengi is the acquisition of profit (frūctus). A Latin pun set in an imagined version of the 24th or 25th century CE somewhere out in Space. I wonder what Cicero would make of it?

1 For the sake of the narrative flow, the ablative basically is the form that distinguishes a myriad of ways a noun relates to the rest of the sentence not covered by the nominative (subject), genitive (possessive), dative (indirect object), and accusative (direct object). I’m going to let the Latin teacher who runs the Latin Tutorial channel on YouTube explain it in this playlist:

2 What can I say, I’m an American.

CORRECTION: 18 March 2021, added pronunciations of līber and liber.