What is a German Accent?

   In my earlier post,  Conversion of a Spelling Reformer, I mentioned that the upper midwest was settled in the mid to late 19th century by immigrants from everywhere except England.   Today, they all speak only English,  but few of them came from England, though many came from Ireland.  My own people were Luxembourgers,  (both French speaking and German speaking,) and also Czechs, Austrians, Swedes, and Norwegians.  Two of my grandparents were born in Europe and spoke German as their first language.  But my mother,  brought up with Luxembourg German as her first language,  spoke no German as an adult, and by the time she died, had an excellent command of the English language and had no German accent that any Iowan would have noticed.   And I certainly never imagined that I had a German accent.
      When I was about thirty,  I went to Kansas City, Missouri to find work in the electrical trade.  The union hiring hall sent me out to a job site at Kansas City International Airport, which was then under construction.  The general foreman spoke to me for a few minutes, and then took me to my new foreman. He said,  "Here Jim;  I got another Iowegian  for you."   "Iowegian," I asked?.   He said, "I mean "Iowa German."    I asked, "What makes you think I'm German?   My name is has an English spelling."   He replied, "I could tell by your German accent."     I said, "Wait a minute.  I know what a German accent is.  Two of my grandparents had a German accent.  They would say diss und dat  instead of this and that. But my pronunciation of all English consonants is absolutely standard."   The general foreman replied,  "If you do not have a German accent, then how did I know that you are German?  You are of German extraction, are you not?"  "Yes,"  I confessed.   "But what did I say that you thought was so German?"   He said, "I asked you a question and you said 'ja.'   We do not say 'ja.'   We say yes or we say yeah--but we don't say 'ja.'   'Ja' is a German word."   I protested that I had said "ya,"  but not "ja."  The general forman couldn't see much difference.   I said, "But where I come from,  everyone says ya, and half of them are Irish."    The general foreman replied, "Yes, but they are Irish who were raised among Germans."
        This was not the first time I'd been away from Iowa.   I'd lived in California for four years, and had spent three years in the Army.  I had been stationed near New York City, and had served with people from all over the U.S.   And no one had ever commented on my use of the word "ya."    They say "ya" in California, New York,  and everywhere in the country I had ever been.   But they don't say it in Missouri.

Modern Agriculture

 

Last weekend I attended the "Old Time Power Show" at Antique Acres, near Waterloo, Iowa.  This is a living museum whose annual exhibition showcases the development of modern agriculture, from horse drawn equipment and steam powered threshing engines to present day diesel tractors.   I wrote a Facebook post encouraging all my local friends to attend this event and take their kids. Why?   I believe that the three most important events in human history are (1) The discovery of the use of fire,  (2)  The invention of agriculture, and (3)  The mechanization of agriculture.   If you feel that item 3 does not merit a place alongside the other two, then consider this:    In the U.S. in 1800,  90% of the population farmed to feed themselves and the other 10%.   Today in the U.S.,  less than 1% still farms, and yet we are the world's largest exporter of grain.
     The discovery of fire and the invention of agriculture did not happen within the memory of people still living and did not happen in Iowa.   But mechanization of agriculture did.   The very first tractor factory in the world opened in 1892--in Waterloo, Iowa.  When I worked at John Deere Tractor works in 1958, they made only relatively small, two cylinder tractors and a typical farm was 80-160 acres.  Today, one of my neighbors farms over 6,000 acres, and the countryside is becoming as depopulated as the moon. This is the most radical transformation in human history and it began within my own great grandfather's lifetime.  
   No matter where you live, it there is some museum near you which displays the agriculture methods of the recent past,  go there and take your children.  What they will see is the change that defines the modern world.   Because very little of what we call the modern world could exist if 90% of the population still was needed for food production.
 

Limerick of the Day, Aug 20

To learn the conventions of spelling,
(For reasons both grave and compelling)
Can drive a man daft,
With vowels fore and aft,
And reduce us to mumbling and yelling.

Conversion of a Spelling Reformer

            As a young student, I found English spelling particularly opaque.  And none of the little rules of thumb seemed to help, as they all had more exceptions than rules.  If I had tried harder to master it, I’m sure I could have.  But I deeply resented being required to invest my time learning a system that was patently absurd.  And I was half sure that, as absurd as the system was, it would surely be replaced in a decade or two anyway.  While I have less trouble with English orthography now than I did forty years ago, it still troubles me.  And without the wonderful invention of spell check software, I could not be writing this blog today.

            Over the Twentieth Century, the crusade to reform spelling was not just the province of the lunatic fringe.  From 1910 to 1955, the Chicago Tribune used a modified spelling system for the benefit of its largely immigrant readership.  And George Bernard Shaw campaigned his entire adult life for a more rational orthography.   He invented the word “ghoti” which he claimed was pronounced “fish;” (GH as in laugh, O as in women, and TI as in nation.)  Before he died, he set up a grant to fund the development on a more phonetic system of spelling.

            For most of my life, I have championed the cause of spelling reform.  One day I was arguing this issue with my wife and daughter, both of whom were then teaching college level English.  My daughter, who has always dismissed spelling reform as quixotic nonsense, became exasperated.  She asked, “You say you want all words spelled as they are pronounced, but pronounced by whom--and where?   In Australia?--or Boston?--or East Texas?--or in the West of England?--or in Northern Minnesota?”  She went on to explain that while we do not have a standard dialect of spoken English, we have a reasonably standard written English.  An English speaker in Mississippi can send an Email to Minnesota, Massachusetts, Mumbai, or Manchester, and whoever receives it can read it.  She added, “If we are to require that every word is spelled as it is actually pronounced, then we would have to change spelling systems every time we crossed a county line.  Would we really want that?”

            Her final argument, the coup de grace, was to tell an anecdote about a Harvard English professor, a native Bostonian, who suggested to his astonished students that the words “Korea” and “career”  were examples of homophones.   He spake, “The young officer volunteered for service in Korea because he thought it might help his career.”

            I passed this example along to my brother, who also believes in spelling reform, and he protested, “But this isn’t “real” English.”  “Oh really,” I asked?  I reminded my brother that this Harvard Don, this Boston Brahmin, surely had ancestors that came from England.  Our family does not.  In most of the upper Midwest of the U.S., the main demographic stock that settled this area in the mid to late nineteenth century came from either Ireland or Northern Europe—but not England.  A demographic survey done about twenty years ago of the U.S. as a whole found that only 12% of Americans have an English ancestor that they know of.   But 60% have at least one ancestor who came from Germany, 40% from Ireland, 25% from Italy, and 15% from Scandinavia.  And if that survey were repeated today, it would show that the largest rise in demographic numbers would be in the Hispanic community, thus diluting the English presence even further. The modern United States is a country of English speakers--who came from nearly everywhere except England.  There really is no dialect which represents “correct English” except that any dialect may be considered correct--within its local frame of reference. 

            So as absurd as our English orthography may be, at least it’s a standard that works everywhere.   And since we have not tinkered with our spelling for over two hundred years, the two-hundred-year-old books in our university libraries are still readable.  

What Does Rhyme Do?

            Pressed for a definition of poetry, I concluded a while back that poetry was all about cadences, and about imagery. In fact, poetry might be the intersection of cadence and imagery. But what stumped me was rhyme. What does it do?  It must do something, because poets in many languages have used rhyme for millennia—perhaps from the origins of human language.  While some poets prefer not to use rhyme, or have simply found themselves unable to master it, in those cultures where rhyme is used at all, the poets who have garnered a broad public following have generally used at least some rhyme, some of the time.  People respond to rhyme.  Properly used, it delights the ear.  There is some part of our brain that loves to hear it.   But  why?  This cannot be just a cultural preference, because rhyme is found across a broad range of cultures.  What is it that rhyme does to the human brain, and why should we have evolved brain structures hard wired with the software to seek it out and enjoy it? 

            In pre-literate cultures, rhyme can serve a practical function.   It’s a mnemonic—a memory device.  When the history of a whole society had to be passed from one generation to another from memory, this would be an easier task if the lines rhymed.  But much of Western society has been literate now for 2,500 years, yet we still use rhyme.   We like it. We are hard wired to respond to it.  This post will attempt to explain why we like it.

            If there is any one thing that the human brain has evolved to do, it is to identify patterns.  We continually process the incoming stimuli to try to distil patterns from the blur of random events.  If all events were random, then there would be little point in learning or remembering anything.  If what is happening now has only a random chance of ever happening again, then there would be no advantage in remembering what is happening. But in the natural environment, not every event is random. Some things run in cycles.  There are patterns.  And there can be a useful, predictive power that comes from understanding and remembering these patterns.

              When the tides are at their very lowest level, one can obtain shellfish in some areas just by walking on the beach and picking them up.  And tides are not random.  A band of migrant hunter-gatherers might increase its food supply if they learned to synchronize their wanderings to the tides, so that they were always near the beach when tides were lowest.  Annual human migrations would be affected too.  The salmon run next year will be at exactly the same time and place as it was this year, etc.  Observing and understanding even more complex patterns would also be useful.   If our ancestors noticed that when a leopard stashes a kill in a tree, he eats on it for a while, and then leaves—and is always gone for several hours—this would be an opportunity.  It would mean that if, after the leopard leaves, a man were to climb the tree and steal some of the kill, he could get away with it.  He would be long gone before the cat returned. 

            We humans are not the only pattern seeking animals.  Any mammal will do this.  Once we had a mouse problem, so I set some traps-- and I caught one.  When holding the trap with a dead mouse in it, I was at a loss for what to do with it.  So I just threw it out the window, into the flower bed below.  There was a feral cat about, and she found the mouse and ate it. And it happened that the next day, I caught another one and disposed of it the same way. I’m sure the cat was delighted.  Then we found the hole where the mice had been getting in and plugged it. There were no more free mice, but the cat kept coming anyway.  Every morning, she would carefully check the area beneath my window.   Then about two weeks later, we caught one last mouse and the cat found it.  That was it.  Intermittent re-enforcement is the strongest kind.  The cat was hooked forever.  For the rest of her life, she stopped by every morning, looking plaintively toward the flower bed.

            But though many animals seek patterns, we humans do it maniacally, often trying to impose patterns on random events.  In any culture where people do a rain dance in hopes of bringing rain, what surely happened is that somewhere in the dim, distant past, some ancestor noticed that it happened to rain the day after a dance festival.  If this occurred twice in a row, that would clinch it. The rain gods like dance music. An entire religion could spring from the over-interpretation of a few random events.

            So what does all this have to do with rhyming poetry?   When two written or spoken lines end in the same vowel sound, this creates a pattern.  And if the lines are written in the same meter, this creates a very definite pattern.  The little “pattern recognition module” in our brain perks up, and we experience a tiny amount of stimulation and pleasure, as neuro-transmitters are released in response to our switching into the “pattern recognition mode.”  The amygdala, which decides which experiences to remember, also perks up and probably receives a small shot of dopamine and this also excites us.  And why would the amygdala crank up in response to poetry? Random events are generally not worth remembering—but patterns might be. True, the first six lines of a nonsense poem contain no life saving information--but it’s still a pattern.  And our mode of operation is to record all patterns first, and then decide at our leisure whether they are important.

            If one writes lines with statements that evoke some kind of imagery while also using both a repetitive cadence and rhyme, the images will trigger a stronger emotional response. They will be experienced more deeply, due to the mild state of arousal which occurs as a result of pattern recognition activity.   And that’s what makes poetry poetry, though the cadence and imagery alone can trigger the same effect, with no rhyme at all, if used skillfully.  

            I’m sure some of you will damn me for de-mystifying this, but I assure you: The effect of a poem is in no way diminished by comprehension.  A retired earth-science instructor once explained to me, “When I look at a sunset, I know enough about meteorology and physics to know precisely what makes it beautiful. But that doesn’t mean I enjoy it any less." 

Swallows

The swallows have not fledged nor flown.
They stay within their comfort zone,
Perched in a row atop the nest,
With pale orange banners on their chest,
Awaiting pre-digested food.
(My God! That still seems awfully crude,
But it's the only food they've ever known.)

But come tomorrow they'll be gone,
No more to grace my twilight lawn.
Without a star, nor GPS
To guide them, they will go, I guess.
Itinerant insectivore,
Continuing in nature's plan
For catching flies in Yucatan;
Since its ancestral species dawn;
A feathered dart above some distant shore.

P.S.  Not 30 minutes after I wrote this poem,  the swallows nesting beneath my portico roof had indeed fledged.  By tomorrow, they will leave the area for the season.
P.P.S.   Generally, we cats do not write about small birds--we simply eat them.  But on this occasion, Runcible Cat makes an exception.

About Thiamin--Vitamins: Be One!

Thimple Thiamin met a piamin, going to the fair.
Thaid Thimple Thiamin to the piamin, let me taste your ware.
(wholesome grains to grow good brains, and long and thilky hair.)