Die Urmutter von Kartoffeln

Picture by Jim Richardson taken from AMNH

Das Kartoffel wurde im 16. Jahrhundert von Spanischen Seefahrern in Süd-Amerika entdeckt. Dort wurde es schon viele Jahrhunderten kultiviert, ebenso wie Maïs, Bohnen, Zwiebeln, Tomaten und Schokolade. DNA-Forschung hat gezeigt, dass alle Kartoffeln in Europa von einem Pflanz aus Süd-Peru abstammen: nur einem Pflanz, der wirklich die Urmutter von Kartoffeln geworden ist. Seitdem entstanden viele verschiedene Rassen. Aber im Süd-Amerika gibt es dennoch viel merkwürdiger Varianten: Rot, Schwarz, geformt wie ein Halbmond oder mit Beulen überall.

Als der Kartoffel in Europa introduziert war gab es zuerst viel Misstrauen. Die Kartoffel ist nicht in der Bibel erwähnt und die Menschen waren sich nicht sicher das sie von Gott zugelassen worden. Sie waren auch zögerlich, wurzeln zu essen von einen hochgiftigen Pflanz. Für zwei Jahrhunderten wird das nur von die armsten Leuten und von Schweine gegessen. Aber weil die Kartoffel in raue Bedingungen überleben kann und auch nicht slecht schmeckt, hat es sich langsam mehr akzeptiert. Heute isst der Welt Jahrlich etwa 200 Millionen Tonnen Kartoffeln.

Das besondere von der Kartoffel ist, das es in unendlich vielfältiger Weise angewendet werden kann. Mann kan es kochen, backen, braten, oder zu Suppe oder Brei machen. In Europa kennen wir natürlich alle Pommes Frites, Bratkartoffeln und Kartoffelsalat. In Nord-Irland macht man auch Brot von Kartoffeln; man fügt einfach etwas Mehl im Kartoffelbrei zu und backt es einige Minuten in einer Pfanne. In Schweden hat ein Hotel der “Hasselback”-Kartoffel erfunden: ein Bratkartoffel, aber geschnitten wie ein Fächer, mit ein knüspriges Resultat zu gefolg. Und im eigentlichen Nährboden, Süd-Amerika, isst man gerne Kartoffel-überasschungsknödeln, aus Kartoffelbrei mit scharfen Soße in der Mitte.

Discourse dissemination across social boundaries

Picture by brooklynpix

Having embarked on the mission to find out how to do Critical Discourse Analysis, it was nice to find out that one of the staff of the School of English and a former teacher of mine, Dr Mayr, has recently brought out a book with exactly that as the title. I've borrowed it from the library (a hassly affair as it is only available as a short loan, which has me running to the library through the rain at 3:45pm to return it before I get fined at exactly 4pm) and eventually decided to purchase it as it's useful and because I feel a sense of pride at owning books from people who have taught me.

The book intends to show precisely how the "semiotic choices" authors make (authors here referring to journalists and writers as well as photographers, singers, visual editors and whoever engages in communication) are influenced by and feed into discourses, or frameworks of interpretation, which are in turn ways to obscure the ideology of the text. These ideologies form the hegemony of the higher classes, and eventually serve to convince the lower classes that the way the higher classes control and oppress them is in fact legitimate. 

Let me first say that the book does a really good job of showing how these semiotic choices work. I will be writing more on this later as I will most likely be basing a lot of the analysis I'm going to do on what's explained in the book. As of yet I am working my way through it to form a sort of plan for how to do the analysis. 

So although I really do admire the minute detail they go into when analyzing texts, some of the underlying ideology shall we call it irks me to the max. The idea that - even in a democracy - the higher/educated/managerial classes, the ABC, control the lower and working classes, the DE, through the media (such as the Daily Mail which a lot of the examples in the book are drawn from) is in fact almost belittling as it implies that the lower classes have very little agency of their own. 

This is a quote from the book:

Power comes from privileged access to social resources such as education, knowledge and wealth, which provides authority, status and influence to those who gain this access and enables them to dominate, coerce and control subordinate groups. (...)

Power can be more than simple domination from above; it can also be jointly produced when people are led to believe that dominance is legitimate in some way or other. (...)

Power, at least in democratic societies, needs to be seen as legitimate by people in order to be accepted, and this process of legitimation is generally expressed through language and other communicative systems. (Machin and Mayr, 2012: 25)

To do a little analysis here; in the second part of the quote "people" are an object of a passive verb: they are led to believe that the dominance is legitimate rather than that they just believe it, which would imply more agency on their part. Who is the implied actor here? Who leads them to believe it? With reference to the first part of the quotation, it is suggested that "those who gain this access" are the ones who lead the "people" on and who are apparently not "people" themselves. Also, "dominance" could have been phrased in a more neutral manner, as "reign", "regime" or "government". Dominance is a very charged word which implies that the one group is controlling the other. The rather explicit suggestion throughout is that those who have money and who are educated are controlling and coercing the poor and the uneducated.

However if we are talking about how the higher classes control the lower through ideology, then it makes no sense that most of the examples in the analysis are from a paper (the Daily Mail) that espouses views almost exclusively held by the lower classes, as opposed to the Guardian or the Times, which communicate ideas more popular with the higher and middle classes. Clearly there is a question here about who actually writes the articles; who communicates these ideologies and why is it in their interest to do so. Also, one needs to know what the actual readership of the articles is like.

I am under the impression that the Daily Mail is written for and by people from working class environments and communicates ideas held by some people in this group, though certainly not all. The ideology of the educated classes is more so represented by papers like the Guardian, which is also written by people who come from ABC environments. (I should warrant that I am working on impressions, but I would be surprised if I were proven wrong.A research project to back up this hypothesis could take the form of a survey for journalists of the various papers, to ask about their and their parents' education, type of work and income and their political leanings.)

Now, if both groups actually read papers written by their own group, then where does the transfer of ideology happen?

Another source of material analysed in the book is the Cosmopolitan. Machin and Mayr show how its imagery and articles paint a streamlined, idealised and kind of vapid picture of what women's lives are or should be like, and then promote the accesoires that belong with such a lifestyle. It is very entertaining to read their minute analysis of the high-pitched lighting and absolute absence of any clue as to what type of work the stylishly dressed women are doing.

A question that they leave open, which is fair enough to them I suppose, is "who actually buys this crap?" Who are these women spending actual money to read the magazine? Who takes the barely obscured sales pitches and laughable advice serious? Now beside all the people who read the magazine for a laugh, although that may very well be a majority of the readership, I believe that the intended audience of the newspaper is a group of girls and women who do in fact have an image of what their own lives are or should be like that matches the image sketched in the Cosmopolitan. They buy the magazine because they would actually like some advice on what make-up products are available and how they could go about wooing a man, in the same way that I bought the How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis book because I wanted to know precisely that.

If this is true it means that the group who reads the magazine does so because they already share its ideology. The same may be true for the newspaper choice; the Daily Mail readership shares its fairly explicit racism, its sense of humour and its obsession with "crazy murder beasts" who batter little children. The Guardian readership would indeed like to be informed about the latest developments in the NSA debacle or what's on show in the country's modern art museums. That's why they buy the paper.


In conclusion, ideological hegemony via newspapers may not work in the way the authors seem to suggest - ideas "produced" by a powerful group that serve to prolong their domination over the less powerful group. In a democracy, this theory belittles the wit and agency of those supposedly subordinate groups. Rather, each group communicates their ideology to other members of the same group, who are not "led to believe" new discourses but who in fact already agree, which is the premise that their voluntary consummation of the information is based on. Within the groups discourses develop organically, but they will be slower to filter down from the one group to the other.

Rather than media, education may be a key to how some discourses are communicated across social boundaries. Again it should be asked who decides on the content, who communicates it to the children, and how much of it the children actually believe and internalise.

I'm collecting opinion articles on SA language policy

The unfounded fears of a Zulu hegemony by T.O. Molefe

Quote:

Mabuza’s comment underlines what has perhaps been the most surprising aspect of the reaction, which is that some of the backlash has, for various reasons, come from black South Africans against what is perceived as an act of Zulu domination.

I'm thinking articles like these would be useful for critical discourse analysis, though of course the first article I come across has to be one of which I share the outlook.

So is this one: KZN University: A Storm in a (Zulu) Teacup by Pierre de Vos (whose blog happens to be my home page), although I don't fully support his stance on Stellenbosch as an Afrikaans-medium university seeing as how Afrikaans is itself threatened by English dominance as well. It should make space for black students, probably through steering away from Afrikaans only, but it wouldn't be unfair to ask the students to take a class in Afrikaans along the side. Vice-versa the university can offer isiXhosa classes to the Afrikaans-speaking students. The ideal, I believe, would be to have a number of multilingual universities throughout the country, each of which has a main emphasis on the language that is dominant in the particular region but also offers courses in the second and third language of the region. I haven't yet figured out how to make this workable.

Link to a page on the actual language policy considerations of the University of Stellenbosch (in Afrikaans).


UL multilingualism

The new KwaZulu-Natal University policy is not unlike the policy of the University of Luxembourg, which I will be visiting next week for a conference. In their founding text (from 2003) it stipulates that multilingualism is one of the main founding principles:

 « le fonctionnement de l’université se fonde sur (…) le caractère multilingue de son enseignement ». Les langues de l’Université sont : le français, l’anglais et l’allemand.

Le multilinguisme est un point essentiel du développement stratégique de l’UL car il peut apporter l’atout unique d’un diplôme bilingue, ce qui est un créneau indéniable et abordable du fait du contexte multilingue dont bénéficie l’UL : Luxembourg pays aux trois frontières, au cœur de l’Europe, abritant de nombreuses institutions européennes. Le multilinguisme apparaît comme un élément incontournable, voire même central de la renommée internationale de l’UL.

What they're saying is that because of Luxembourg being geographically wedged in between France, Germany and Belgium and its central position in Europe (again, mostly geographical), multilingualism is "inescapable".

In fact, the UL goes much further. All courses are in fact taught in German, French and English and by the time you graduate, fluency in all three is expected. Moreover the staff need to be able to converse in Lëtzebuergesch as well in order to facilitate interaction with students.


Conversational languages

The difference is of course that there is a plethora of universities teaching in any of the UL's three languages already, whereas isiZulu and isiXhosa are more like Lëtzebuergesch: the native language of the majority of the population of the region where the university is situated, but seen as a language of conversation rather than writing, or god forbid, universitary teaching.(I'm not sure whether UKZN staff are required to be able to hold a conversation in isiZulu; I believe that that is in fact one of the purposes of their new policy.)

Stock photo

A small token of corporate language policy

The Swedish Språkråd (language board) have decided not to include the word "ogooglebar" (ungoogleable) in their list of new Swedish words due to a feud about it with Google. The Råd wanted to define it as "cannot be found through a search engine" but Google has apparently been hunting after usage of its name to signify search engines in general rather than Google in specific. They put their lawyers on the case to make the definition say "cannot be found through Google". The språkråd have expressed their disappoinment that Google tries to control the language in this way. 

Source: Onze taal magazine mei 2013 (free translation)

I thought this was interesting in line of the previous post on the way McDonalds and Apple control language use with regard to their products. I'm not entirely clear on why Google doesn't want its name to be used as a word for search engines in general though - surely it would be beneficial to them if people directly associate searching online with using Google. Opinions welcome.

Dissertation methodology

Picture by Frank Bohbot taken from ignant.de


I've started the work for the dissertation I'm going to be doing all year. I'm still in the blissful first stages: swimming around a bit and reading very broadly, all I can get my hands on. In the past two weeks I made good acquaintance with an introduction to sociolinguistics by Mesthrie et al. and now I have moved on to a stack of books on the methods and assumptions of critical discourse analysis (less fun to read, not as many cartoons).

The research question as of yet is: which linguistic analysis methods are useful in the study of language policy and planning?

This is different from what I had thought of initially. At first I wanted to research the impact of language policy and planning (LPP) on internal language change. This was my abstract:

Language planning and policy are a well-researched area of study, but the focus is strongly on the political side of things; how can we ascertain that people have the right to use their language for administrative purposes? In which language should education be provided in multilingual countries? The purely linguistic aspect of language policy has been given less attention. The question this dissertation will attempt to answer is what influence language policy has on internal change of the affected languages, thereby tying in to a bigger question of what factors trigger language change.  

In this dissertation I will first make a classification of types of language policies based on actual policy decisions with regards to language planning and regulation. For each type of policy I will investigate how this might affect internal language development and provide examples from languages affected by these policies. The conclusion will reflect on how these findings relate to the bigger debate on language change in general.

The feedback I got for my first proposal suggested that the chapter "Linguistic Analyses in Language Policies" by Ruth Wodak was a good start for such a dissertation. That chapter didn't mention my proposed idea at all though, but instead seemed to suggest that the only feasible method of linguistic analysis in LPP is critical analysis of texts proposing language policies. Hence I now feel that I ought to try this method also.

To criticise my own idea that you can evaluate language policies by analysing the way they impact on the languages they police; it goes against the principle of sign arbitrariness of De Saussure. The language is not better or worse at signifying meaning before or after a change, no matter whether that change be onset by a policy of some kind. However there are some social aspects - e.g. language attitudes and economic benefit - that do get better or worse as language policy changes.

Another assumption underlying my original proposal that I now don't agree with is that you can draw a clear line between linguistics and sociology or politics. There are more and less "social" approaches to studying language and LPP but they blur into each other and overlap very much. Moreover I implicitly made the assumption that this distinction is meaningful and important. It serves to delineate the number of topics that need to be discussed in a degree on any of the subject fields, but that does not mean that it is a good reflection of reality.

What I feel I have to do now is try out a set of different methods and approaches, preferably on and to the same case study. The choice will focus on the more "linguistic" type of investigation as that would be what I can get the most assistance with within the School of English. The purpose to my mind is to get an idea of the relative benefits and helpfulness of each of the methods and the type of information that can be acquired via them. I still want to look at language change and variation, but I also want to critically analyse texts surrounding my case study, and perhaps I can investigate language attitudes as well.

The book I've started reading at the minute is "Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis" by Titscher et al. I found it hard to read at first but then I employed the tried and trusted "line per paragraph" summarising strategy. Then I got into the flow and stopped summarising as it was a bit tedious, but by now (a few hours later) I have forgotten what the bit that I didn't take notes for said. The main point they have made so far is that all research methods are, implicitly or explicitly, related to particular theoretical assumptions. They then went on to set out a four-step research design decision procedure. The first step is to decide what the research is for; finding explanations, testing hypotheses or describing. The researcher then needs to decide how involved they have to be with the source of research data, how critical they want to be of predetermined categories, and whether they want to do a snapshot or track changes. More on this later.

iMc: Persuasion and word elements

Did anyone else notice that two of the most established brands, McDonalds and Apple, both use a recognizable element in their product names? Mc/Mac for the former i.e. McChicken, Big Mac, and a lowercase i for the latter i.e. iPhone. What I'm most impressed about is that they get people to actually call these products by the name they've given them; they're not having breakfast out, they're eating a McMuffin. You don't just have an MP3-player, you have an iPod. (I've even heard people call Samsung mp3-players "iPods" but those people were all old.)

Herstart

Het nieuwe semester is begonnen. Ik had gepland om allerlei vakken waar ik eigenlijk niet voor ingeschreven sta te auditeren en dat plichtmatig ingeroosterd, maar desondanks heb ik me gisteren achter de computer verschanst en hoegenaamd niets volbracht. Vandaag werd ik doodmoe wakker, te moe om lang genoeg rechtop te staan om me aan te kleden, zodat ik besloot om op een ander matras nog wat verder te slapen. Zo heb ik al drie lessen gemist. De scriptiebegeleider heeft (eindelijk) gemaild en laten weten mij volgende week te willen spreken, wat wil zeggen dat ik deze twee weken één officiëel ingeroosterd lesuur heb. Vandaag heb ik me in de regen gewaagd om wat boeken in te leveren - te laat volgens het systeem, omdat mijn betaling voor dit studiejaar nog niet is verwerkt geloof ik. Op de natte trappen en rondom de poorten van het hoofdgebouw zaten groepen nieuwe eerstejaars, duidelijk nog te bevangen door alle nieuwe ervaringen om te merken wat een grauwe dag het was. Ik interpreteerde hun drukke praten als nervositeit: de stiltes vullen in een eerste gesprek met potentiële nieuwe vrienden. In het gebouw waar ik de afgelopen maand gewerkt heb stond een lange rij buitenlandse studenten die de receptie wilden spreken, ordentelijk gehouden door een van mijn voorheen-collega's. Door mijn inactiviteit gisteren kon mijn a4-tje met gewerkte uren, dat ik toen had moeten inleveren, pas volgende maand verwerkt worden. In de bieb ben ik naar de kasten met taalkundeboeken gelopen, op de tweede verdieping, en heb min of meer lukraak interessant ogende boeken uit de kast getrokken. Taalkundeartikelen vind ik meestal makkelijk om te lezen, volgens mij omdat taalkunde nabij mijn normale modus van denken is, maar misschien is dat onzin - misschien zijn ze gemiddeld beter geschreven omdat men in die sector zelfgeselecteerd is op taalgevoel. Ik las een artikel over een praktisch onderzoek in Strassbourg - naar taalkeuze van klanten en verkopers in warenhuizen - en de intro van een artikel over de filosofie achter critical discourse analysis. Iets wat daarin werd gezegd maakte grote indruk, namelijk dat taal niet op zich beschouwd kan worden los van sociale status, maar dat het de sociale realiteit juist bouwt of helpt te bouwen. Daarna was ik echter te moe om door te lezen. Thuis stond ik een tijdje met mijn hoofd tegen de waslijn, maar toen vond John dat ik gek deed en maakte hij citroen-tijmchips en thee voor me.

Omdat ik volgend jaar wellicht in een Duitssprekend land verder wil studeren heb ik me samen met een vriendin ingeschreven voor een Duitse taalclub, waarvan deze avond de eerste les. Tot mijn geruststelling was het precies wat ik had gehoopt, namelijk een soort excuus om zoveel mogelijk Duits te spreken, met een lerares wiens functie niet was om ons oefeningen te laten doen of over grammatica te drammen, maar om met onderwerpen voor gesprekken te komen en desgevraagd een woord te vertalen. Op de vraag waarom ik daar was heb ik enigszins trots laten weten dat ik overwoog om in Luxemburg een Master te gaan doen. Gisteravond zag ik namelijk dat daar een drietalige studie over meertaligheid wordt aangeboden en het lijkt me een bijzonder goede optie. Claire hakkelde meer dan ik maar ik was erg blij dat ze zich ook had ingeschreven, het voelt een stuk minder dreigend tussen de andere deelnemers, die allemaal in "Ruhestand" waren - met pensioen dus. Na het eten heb ik een begin gemaakt in Frisch' Homo Faber, dat mama voor me mee heeft genomen. Het leest het beste met Google Translate ernaast om snel alle onbekende woorden op te kunnen zoeken, hoewel ik had verwacht dat de computer te afleidend zou zijn. Nu ben ik nog wakker met de bedoeling een post te schrijven over dat taalkunde niet aan zijn prescriptiviteit kan ontsnappen, maar het is meer een soort dagboekentree geworden. Wat dan ook.