3 June 2005 (25 Iyar 5765)
I have to confess that I wanted to keep a dog in my childhood and often implored my parents to make my wish come true; I may have wanted to have one as a kind of sophisticated toy. But since my adolescence such a thought has never occurred to me. Although I do not hate dogs, at least as long as they do not torture me with their barking in my neighborhood, I consider it a waste of time to keep them (or any other pet in this respect) at home. Dogs may need human beings in order to survive, but not vice versa. I simply cannot imagine spiritual and/or intellectual persons spending (for me wasting) time caring their dogs, at least in the Jewish tradition; for example, an Orthodox rabbi walking with his dog is the last thing I can imagine.
There are an increasing number of people who keep dogs and/or other animals even in Israel. Many of them seem to consider their four-legged companions as their true family members. Give me a break; I cannot buy this though I can imagine all kinds of their self-justifications-shmustifications. It is true that dogs may sometimes be even more faithful and trustworthy than our fellow human beings, but in my opinion they are nothing but surrogates of human beings after all. Dogs cannot replace human beings. If there are people who really believe they can, I am really sorry for them. Something fundamental must be wrong with them.
The question is whether these people would nevertheless prefer dogs to human beings if they had a choice. I do not think they would. Of course, I cannot force them to live without dogs, but I would like them to control them instead of our being controlled by them. Although I think dogs are nothing but surrogates of human beings as I said above, they have at least one thing in common with human babies: we have to educate them. If one is to keep a dog in a residential area, he or she has the responsibility not to allow it to behave as if it were the boss in the neighborhood. In a sense the owner of the barking dog in our neighborhood is lucky in that I do not know who and where he/she is. I could "bark" at him/her, and my "barking" could be really nasty. ;-)
10 June 2005 (3 Sivan 5765)
That all the languages are equal, which some descriptive linguists love to repeat, is a plausible lie. They may be right in what they mean, that is, structurally, but being a social institution, no language exists in social vacuum. We all know that sociolinguistically some languages are "more equal" than others, and English is "the most equal" of all the languages in the world, to put it in Orwellian terms. In this respect average non-linguists know much better than naive descriptive linguists with no sociolinguistic orientation.
Unlike these linguists, I am not ready to spend my precious time learning and studying languages that do not have cultural values for me. These cultural values are of course subjective and essentially have nothing to do with the number of speakers. Modern Chinese and Modern Korean may have many speakers, but I am not ready to waste my precious time studying the languages of the countries that contribute little to the world culturally and are only good at blackmailing Japan with such chutzpah. Many, if not all, of the so-called endangered languages may be in such a situation with reasons that are probably ascribed to themselves and not only to external factors.
The safest criterion for measuring the sociolinguistic strength of a language must be whether and how much it can serve as a language of science and technology, that is, the degree of the so-called Ausbau, to use the famous term coined by Heinz Kloss. Some languages with more speakers may be lower in the degree of Ausbau that those with less speakers. There is nothing less rewarding than studying languages that are supposed to be numerically major languages in the world but are not developed enough as Ausbau languages, including Modern Arabic, Hindi and Urdu. On the other hand, it gives me intellectual pleasure and even pride to study languages that are numerically insignificant but are fully elaborated as languages of science and technology.
Modern Hebrew is one of these honorable languages. This becomes more amazing if its history is considered; until about a century or so it had no native speakers! It must be among the few non-European languages, together with Japanese, that have been elaborated to meet the demands of modern science and technology. I am very proud that I am a researcher and a native speaker of these two languages respectively. On the other hand, I am really sorry for those miserable people who may be good at English as a means of scientific communication not because it is their native/national language but because they have had to be educated in it as their respective native/national languages cannot serve this purpose.
17 June 2005 (10 Sivan 5765)
Since I am familiar with differences between Israeli and Japanese modes of daily communication and can switch between the two more or less seamlessly without losing my identity, it seldom occurs these days that some crosscultural difference in my day-to-day interaction with speakers of Hebrew surprises me. Scientific communication among specialists in a certain field, on the other hand, is supposed to show far less cultural differences, hence can seldom be a cause of surprise. But recently I realized that there is at least one fundamental difference between Israeli and Japanese modes of academic communication: purpose and preparation of handouts for oral presentations.
In Japan, at least in the graduate school and the discipline where I was educated, a handout is something that can help the audience not only follow your presentation but also reconstruct it afterwards, so it generally takes the form of a detailed schematic summary of arguments with a lot of examples including glosses. In Israel, on the other hand, a typical handout is a simple collection of examples with no glosses and no explanations, and quite a few people do not even prepare any handout (nor use presentation software). In oral presentations per se (and in writing papers) Israeli scholars may generally be much better than their Japanese counterparts, but as far as handouts are concerned, I think the Japanese way is far superior and of course prefer it.
Nevertheless, I have recently realized that the preparation of handouts à la japonaise can be an obstacle, at least for me, in preparing articles based on oral presentations afterwards. Since a handout is a kind of detailed summary of a paper-to-be, I have an illusionary sense of accomplishment after preparing it as if I had written a paper itself. Then when I have to write it, I often do not have enough patience or inspiration. I have to get over this since "the scientific process can only be said to have occurred when research is published or made 'public knowledge'" as one paper I happened to read this week on scientific communication wrote.
24 June 2005 (17 Sivan 5765)
This week I attended the annual conference of ISCOL (Israeli Seminar on Computational Linguistics). Unlike the former conferences this one was coorganized for the first time by the Israeli Association for Theoretical Linguistics. The joint panel session entitled "Cooperation between Theoretical and Computational Linguists in Research and Technology" was especially stimulating and inspiring. Being a descriptive linguist myself, I would have enjoyed the session even more if it had been about cooperation not (only) between theoretical and computational linguists but between descriptive and computational linguists.
The very fact that there is an academic discipline called computational linguistics but not, let us say, computational historiography, says a lot about the special importance of computing in linguistics among various disciplines in the humanities. Personally, I believe that no descriptive linguist can manage any more without sufficient knowledge of computational linguistics, but unfortunately, I do not see many descriptive linguists here who share my view not only in theory but also in practice.
Since computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary area, the background or the home base of researchers working in the field can be either computer science or linguistics. But at least in Israel, most of the computational linguists are those who are trained in computer science (or to be more precise, natural language processing) and not in linguistics. They know more about linguistics than what average linguists know about computing. Computational linguistics should not remain one-sided love, as it were. But on the other hand, I cannot be so optimistic about the possibility that computational linguistics and/or advanced computing will become part of the common knowledge shared by the majority of linguists in the near future. The gap between NLP people and descriptive linguists is still quite big, if not unbridgeable.