7 March 2003 (3 Adar II 5763)
With my fortieth birthday around the corner, I inevitably ponder upon what I have done and have not done in the past four decades of my life. I would characterize of each of these four decades as follows: 1) the first decade - period of existential struggle and input; 2) the second decade - period of sociocultural and intellectual struggle and input; 3) the third decade - period of intellectual struggle and input; 4) the fourth decade - period of sociocultural and spiritual struggle and input.
What characterizes all the four decades is that I have been engaged mainly in the input, whatever it is. Intellectually, the third decade, my twenties, was the most fruitful period in terms of quantity and quality, especially in its latter half, when I studied in Jerusalem. With the end of this period, however, my life became quite turbulent internally. Socioculturally, what I learned (or forced to learn in tabula rasa without questioning) in the second decade had to be seriously questioned and reexamined with my return from Israel, when the fourth decade, my thirties, started, and something new must be learned out of constant internal (and sometimes overtly external) struggles with myself and the Japanese society which was supposed to be familiar to me but in reality seemed foreign to me after five years of absence.
I wonder what the coming decade, my forties, will be. Learning is a life-long process, so there will be no end to the input I will be required to make, whether intellectually, spiritually or socioculturally. I feel, however, that time has come to pay more attention to the output for the society in whatever form I can. If I should be able to say at the time of my departing this world that I could do something to make it a little better or more enlightened than at my birth, it would be enough to convince myself that it was not for nothing that I lived.
14 March 2003 (10 Adar II 5763)
As there are people who have irreversibly affected me for better or for worse in the past forty (almost) years of my life, so there are books that have had a decisive influence upon my life. If I am to single out only one of them, it is probably a textbook of English with cassette tapes I received from an older niece of mine one year before I formally started learning English in the seventh grade. It seemed rather unique, at least at that time, in that it had no explanations in Japanese though it was published in Japan by a Japanese publisher, and it had accompanying cassette tapes when a tape recorder was still a luxury.
I was born and brought up in a poor, rural area in the north of Japan, and at that time the intellectual stimuli children could expose themselves to were quite limited (and still are). TV had not become an integral part of average households there back then, and of course, I had not met anyone speaking a foreign language; actually, even hearing someone speak standard Japanese was a rare, surprising thing.
For the first time in my life I was exposed to the sounds of a foreign language, and when I look back now, this seems to have affected my life in most significant ways. First and foremost, this has kindled my interest in foreign cultures in general and foreign languages in particular, and I have ended up a linguist (or at least an apprentice) though I still have no tenure. In theory every language interests me, but in practice I can continue to learn only those languages whose actually sounds I can listen to. Although I could not make head or tail of this textbook with no explanations in Japanese, it has definitely induced me to learn a number of foreign languages by myself but, of course, with cassette tapes or CDs in my later life.
21 March 2003 (17 Adar II 5763)
Now I am supposed to concentrate on something I have to investigate and finish by the end of this month. Unfortunately, however, I cannot say that I am very successful in this, which does not surprise me in particular. If my memory does not deceive me, and/or if I am not idealizing my younger days consciously or unconsciously, it seems to me that I could concentrate more when I was younger, especially until my early twenties.
Although this may be partly explained by the fact that I am less self-disciplined now than before, it is well compensated with greater curiosity about more things and stronger desire to learn them. It seems to me that ironically, this very curiosity which is greater now than before is what often prevents me from concentrating. When I was younger, many areas of knowledge I encountered were totally new, so I could study and absorb them without thinking about anything else. As one gets older and has gone through more learning experiences, one is generally left with less areas which are totally virgin soils. Everything new one starts learning turns out to be connected directly or indirectly with something else one has studied. Of course, this alone does not make me concentrate less on one specific thing I have to investigate.
Although invented and implemented only a little more than a decade ago, the World Wide Web, which I consider one of the greatest inventions of the past century, is revolutionizing the traditional reading and/or learning habits of many of us, including myself. One of the ingenious ideas that constitute the very foundation of the World Wide Web is hypertext. We are not required to read text linearly. So when we start reading or investigating about some subject, we follow links embedded in hypertext and end up finding ourselves in a place which has little or nothing to do with the original subject. Along the way we encounter various subjects that are liable to make us, including myself, lose concentration on the original subject.
28 March 2003 (24 Adar II 5763)
Computers can be both clever and stupid in that they do not allow fuzziness characterizing human brains and many areas of human activities. Although they are meant to serve us and not vice versa, we, at least those of us in the humanities who use them as tools to get our tasks done more efficiently, find ourselves in a frustrating situation in which we are forced to outsmart them by disambiguating fuzziness. This is of course easier said than done as anyone who has had to rack his or her brain to do so knows too well.
I find myself in such a frustrating situation now. The truth is that I am forced to define with XML Schema the structure of an annotated corpus and a lexical database of Modern Hebrew I have been planning to build in XML. The latter was relatively easy to define as it is data-centric, thus more or less rigidly structured. On the other hand, the former, which is document-centric, thus not so well structured, has turned out to be much more difficult to define than I imagined.
Having made a list of parts of speech (or word classes) at the word level for Modern Hebrew, which was also a problem in itself, I have been unable to define unequivocally the internal structure of phrasal and clausal constituents, i.e., which word-level constituents can be the "children" of nominal, adjectival and adverbial phrases and clauses, and/or how they can be nested inside themselves like Russian dolls. I see clearly that the structure of human language is too complicated for a single person to define instantaneously without leaving any fuzzy area for the comsumption of computers, and it becomes fuzzier and fuzzier as one goes from phonology (structure of sounds) through morphology (structure of words) to syntax (structure of phrases, clauses and sentences).