Convivencia

Having recently gotten interested in the world of the Catalan medieval rabbi Nachmanides (aka Moses ben Nachman aka Ramban aka Bonastruc ça Porta), I just read the 2002 book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, by María Rosa Menocal. I was initially deterred from reading it by some disappointing reviews, but I dived in anyway and quite liked it. It is not a scholarly history nor was Menocal a historian: she was a scholar of medieval Iberian literature, and the book is at its best tracing the world of translators and connections between Arabic, Hebrew, and Romance poetry and poetic forms. There is a 2019 PBS documentary based on the book; I will watch it one of these days.

I looked at some of the reaction to this book and came across a Wikipedia entry for a book entitled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Andalusian_Paradise by Dario Fernández-Morera. But reading to the bottom of the entry led me to one of the most scathing academic reviews I have run into, entitled The Myth of the Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: The Extreme Right and the American Revision of the History and Historiography of Medieval Spain, by S.J. Pearce, who is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Thus I stumbled into a war between liberal and far-right historiography, between convivencia and reconquista. Here are some choice quotes from S.J. Pearce:

By cherry-picking evidence, relying on outdated and explicitly partisan scholarship, adopting a messianic and omniscient authorial voice, and misrepresenting his opponents in order to argue against straw men he can vanquish rather than flesh-and-blood ones he cannot, Fernández-Morera uses the case of medieval Spain to further an explicitly extreme right-wing political and conservative Christian political and cultural agenda as it bears upon debates about politics, the establishment of religion, and the very place of the academy in civic life.

and

In addition to criticizing liberal ideas and values, Fernández-Morera situates his historiographical approach on the political new right through his explicit aim of vindicating Spain’s Catholic past in a way that closely mirrors and brings to an Anglophone audience the historiographical jiu-jitsu of Francisco Franco’s nationalist dictatorship, which is articulated clearly in the preamble to the Law of November 24, 1939 Creating the Spanish National Research Council. This law, signed into effect by Franco himself, establishes the council in order to defend Spanish history against Enlightenment thought and the diversity of opinion.

I feel vindicated in reading Menocal, and will follow up with some of her suggested readings.

A Notebook Accounting

We watched today’s keynote for the Wild Wonder Conference on nature journaling that is currently taking place. The keynote presentation was given by Roland Allen who recently wrote the book The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, and was billed as an incomplete history of nature notebooks. Allen traces the history of notebooks in Europe back to the introduction of paper manufacturing in Xàtiva in Islamic Spain. This technology gave people cheap and durable surfaces upon which to write, and in Florence the paper was bound into notebooks for common use. Accountants were some of the first ones to take advantage of the technology, inventing double-entry bookkeeping via ledgers. Paper was also a much more satisfying material to draw on than parchment, and this led to the first realistic nature illustrations by individuals such as Conrad Gessner.

Allen is a great advocate of the notebook as a cognitive tool, and he shared some of the different notebooks he keeps. Both Pica and I keep many notebooks as well, and here is a perhaps incomplete list of the ones I have:

1. My bullet journal. A list of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks and events, together with notes on various projects. This is a Moleskine gridded notebook.
2. My daily journal, entitled “A Journal of The Unraveling”. I complete one page a day in this, and always end the page with a quick sketch of a cat.
3. My daily sketchbook, currently in vertical format with the subjects being plant bits.
4. A work notebook, which I mostly used for taking notes on conference calls.
5. A nature journal. Unlike most of the attendees at the conference, I rarely make entries in it.
6. A notebook of astronomy observations.
7. A notebook for my Catalan studies. I don’t seem to have a notebook for Spanish, and instead use a card file to record interesting words.
8. A notebook of Hebrew vocabulary from the Duolingo course which I got through in spring of 2022.
9. A notebook of astronomy observations.
10. Two notebooks from the days when I was actively doing radio. First, a logbook of my ham radio contacts on HF.
11. Second, a notebook of interesting shortwave radio loggings.
12. And a miscellany of other sketchbooks.

The Spanish Spoken in Chile: A Dialect or a Language?

I’ve long been a fan of La Linguriosa (Elena Herraiz), a Spanish linguist with a “superinteresante” YouTube channel. In the video released today, she’s talking about Chilean Spanish. It’s true that when spoken quickly by people whose education deprived them of learning standard Spanish, Chilean Spanish can be difficult to understand. I remember working in an office in Madrid in the early 1980s, when one of the secretaries (a refugee from Pinochet’s excesses?) introduced me to certain Chilean phonemes (especially “ch” for “tr,” as in nosochos instead of nosotros).

Language is a source of constant interest and joy for me. I’ve started playing Lingule daily along with Wordle, Geoguesser and bridge (massively fail on Australian indigenous and African languages, but I’m learning).

El Foraster

I have started doing a self-paced online introductory Catalan course through the folks at Easy Catalan. In the unit on personal pronouns they recommended looking at the Catalan television series El Foraster (The Outsider) because the presenter, Quim Masferrer, often uses the formal version of the second person singular pronoun, vós, when interviewing older people. Taking their hint, I’ve discovered this to be a quite engaging and enjoyable television show, even though I don’t know very much of the language.

The premise of El Foraster is that the host Quim travels around to the tiniest villages of Catalunya, spends 48 hours interviewing some of the inhabitants, and then afterwards shares his interviews in a monologue given to a group of the villagers. The show is edited so that it intercuts the interviews with video of the monologue to the group, the camera often zooming in on the reaction of the interviewee sitting in the group. Quim is warm-hearted and quite funny; he often concludes his monologue with saying to the villagers “… sou molt bona gent.” (you are very good people).

It’s a pleasure to see the countryside of Catalunya that is highlighted in the series. And it’s a good language learning experience. I watch it with subtitles in Catalan turned on, which helps considerably with comprehension and picking up on pronunciation. Because Quim is always meeting new people, the dialogue patterns will repeat, which is good for learning.

I'm Not a Spy

I had a dream last night in which I was asking a French railway ticket agent for a round-trip ticket to — where? unclear, though somewhere in France — but that I didn’t know the date of my return. I was asking this in French, which was apparently good enough for the guy to look at me, hard, then sit back and smile. Disconcerted, I assured him that I wasn’t a spy.

This dream is interesting to me because I haven’t been reading, watching, or speaking French at all, though not for want of trying. Taking advantage of VPN, I’m watching the Tour de France either in Spanish or German because the French coverage has changed and in order to watch it in French — which would be my strong preference — I’d have to disable the ad blocker on my browser, which I’m not willing to do. There are also the women’s Euros, which again, I’m watching either in German or Spanish. (I’d watch next Friday’s match in Italian only Italy are playing Spain and, well, I’m rooting for Spain as always.)

The anachronisms in my dream aside — that you’d buy a ticket from a PERSON, that the walls surrounding this person would be dingy cream and the office cluttered with filing cabinets and loose papers, and obviously that a spy might also be a person instead of AI — I think this dream means a) I need to pay more attention to my French, b) I ought to be joining the Resistance. Not a coincidence that the ICE tracker is now the most popular app in the US…

Artificial Intelligence and Language Learning Part Two

Pica a few days ago mentioned how she just took a German class on the theme of artificial intelligence. This seems to be a common theme nowadays among language learning groups, since the topic came up in my Spanish conversation group on Friday. It ended up being something of a debate about whether AI is a good tool in language learning. I am in the middle on this one. AI is very useful in providing translations on the fly: my favorite translation service is the one provided by Kagi, and I also like having a browser plugin that allows you to click on a word in a text and get a translation of it, such as TransOver for Chrome-based browsers (I use Vivaldi). I have never tried using a chatbot for foreign language chatting practice, and tend not to think it would work well. One person in our conversation group didn’t like using a foreign language chatbot because they didn’t seem to take the initiative in conversations. Another person in the group said that since the whole point of learning another language is to connect with others, it’s not very rewarding to be talking to a chatbot. There are other AI tools that seem useful for language students. Text-to-speech generators may be able to help with pronunciation of blocks of text. The Kagi translation tool I mentioned above has a proofreading feature which might help with correcting writing errors. As always with AI, one has to be careful since these are never perfect.

Artificial Intelligence

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been learning German for the past three years, initially through Duolingo and more recently through Lingoda. I’ve taken 46 classes — 46 hours of instruction in group sizes of five students or fewer (and, mostly the average class size has been three). The classes are divided up into the categories of Communication, Reading, Grammar, and Speaking. The level of instruction has been high and I’m glad to say I was today awarded a certificate: I’ve progressed through the beginner level of B2. This means I’m technically now an intermediate intermediate.

This morning’s class was talking about AI, which in German is Kunstliche Intelligenz (or KI). I’m normally the oldest student in the class which I don’t mind, especially since it allows my inner curmudgeon out to howl. I’ve been avoiding taking this particular lesson for weeks because I hate what AI is doing to people’s minds, to the planet, to the political economy, and to political life in general. There were two other students today, both in their early thirties (I’d guess). They use Chat GPT every single day both in their work and in their daily lives. There’s no point in fighting this, is there.

Language Learning with tv.garden

A while ago I found the wonderful app Radio Garden. The interface to this application is a globe you can rotate and zoom in on any city or town of interest. Across the globe are thousands of green dots, each a city or town containing a number of streaming radio stations. Click on the green dot, select a radio station, and listen to the stream. It’s a great way to explore the diversity of radio all across the world.

Radio Garden isn’t often ideal for language study; for one thing most of the world’s radio stations are playing music most of the time. Yesterday I remembered that the application now has a spin-off, tv.garden. This has a similar interface with a globe, but instead providing access to streaming radio, the application lets you click on a country and see live TV programs from stations that have a free-to-view internet stream. One shouldn’t expect to find streams of major sporting events this way, but news programs are pretty common. As an example, the listing for Spain is on the right in this view. At the furthest right is the language code: in this example most of the stations are in Spanish, but some are in Catalan, with a scattering of other languages such as Basque. Catalan seems particularly well-served by free TV streams, I think because the Generalitat de Catalunya (the regional government) has invested a lot in making Catalan language resources freely available to its population.

The tv.garden application is built upon an open project to catalog the publicly available internet TV streams around the world. On this page there is a section labeled Grouped by language with a tab that expands to the scores of languages that are available for streaming. In addition to tv.garden, there are dozens of applications for viewing these streams on every platform.

Othering Oneself

Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, was published in 1961. It chronicles the journey of a white man who had his skin darkened to pass as black in the American deep South. I’ve known two people personally who have done a “passing” experiment and written a book about the experience: Ted Conover had already published his account of riding trains with hoboes, Rolling Nowhere, when he attended Cambridge University’s Centre of Latin American Studies to study for an M.Phil while I was the secretary there in the early 80s. The second was Norah Vincent who was a work colleague at Harvard University Press in the early 90s and who subsequently spent a year as a man, as told in Self-Made Man.

I have been reminded of this by a sentence in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia about needing to look like a revolutionary militiaman in order to blend in in Barcelona in the early months of the civil war, and then needing to look bourgeois once he was on his way home through France after being wounded. From what I’ve read of Orwell, he could move comfortably through these different spheres, always being a little on the outside of them. When Orwell was on his way to Spain he dropped in on Henry Miller in Paris, who thought he was absolutely nuts to go and fight fascism in a country where he didn’t even speak the language—that he must be propelled by guilt or obligation. (Orwell wasn’t alone: thousands from all over the world volunteered to fight in Spain.)

And this is my big question: why do I feel the need to join the fight for those outside my group? For African Americans who have faced centuries of enslavement, discrimination, and police violence, for Mexican Americans who right now fear for their livelihoods and indeed lives? For those with less privilege than I have? A friend raised a possible answer this morning: this is what constitutes civilization. Most, if not all, animals are propelled by instinct to ensure the survival of their offspring even if it means endangering others in their own species. We have evolved as humans to become altruistic when it is in our interest to protect the group beyond our own family. But when we expand this outside the group, expand our definition of community to include everyone, this gets us labelled lunatic fringe lefties.

In a sense I’m continuing a political fight I had with my father while growing up, and he dead for more than 25 years now. The decades have taken a toll on my enthusiasm but they have never stopped my feeling that this is where, as a moral person, I ought to stand. What action to take is always the question, but it doesn’t stop the need for it. It is a comfort to know I’m not alone in feeling this way.

Bread and Roses

As Pica discussed yesterday, we have both recently read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and I have just finished a good follow-up book, Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses. This is a beautiful account of how despite his fierce political activism and writing, Orwell had a side to him that was rooted in the countryside, tending his vegetable garden, planting his beloved roses. For instance in 1946 Orwell wrote an essay praising the common toad. From its second paragraph:

At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature.

The phrase “Bread and Roses” is the title of the third section of Solnit’s book. The phrase originates in 1910 in a conversation among several woman suffragists. One of the activists, Helen Todd, later declared that women’s votes would “go towards helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter, and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, the government of which she has a voice.” The phrase soon got incorporated in the labor movement, and lives on today in the name of a socialist feminist movement in Latin America, Pan y Rosas. Orwell has similar sentiments. In January 1944 he writes:

A correspondent reproaches me with being ‘negative’ and ‘always attacking things.’ The fact is that we live in a time when causes for rejoicing are not numerous. But I like praising things, when there is anything to praise, and I would like here to write a few lines — they have to be retrospective, unfortunately — in praise of the Woolworth’s Rose.