Talking in your sleep

A little over a year ago, I decided to do something I've always wanted to do -- learn Japanese.

I've had a fascination with Japan since I was a kid.  My dad lived there for a while during the 1950s, and while he was there collected Japanese art and old vinyl records of Japanese folk and pop music, so I grew up surrounded by reminders of the culture.  As a result, I've always wanted to learn more about the country and its people and history, and -- one day, perhaps -- visit.

So in September of 2023 I signed up for Duolingo, and began to inch my way through learning the language.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's a challenge, to say the least.  Japanese usually shows up on lists of "the five most difficult languages to learn."  Not only are there the three different scripts you have to master in order to be literate, the grammatical structure is really different from English.  The trickiest part, at least thus far, is managing particles -- little words that follow nouns and indicate how they're being used in the sentence.  They're a bit like English prepositions, but there's a subtlety to them that is hard to grok.  Here's a simple example:

Watashi wa gozen juuji ni tokoshan de ane aimasu.

(I) (particle indicating the subject of the sentence) (A.M.) (ten o'clock) (particle indicating movement or time) (library) (particle indicating where something is happening) (my sister) (am meeting with) = "I am meeting my sister at ten A.M. at the library."

Get the particles wrong, and the sentence ends up somewhere between grammatically incorrect and completely incomprehensible.

So I'm coming along.  Slowly.  I have a reasonably good affinity for languages -- I grew up bilingual (English/French) and have a master's degree in linguistics -- but the hardest part for me is simply remembering the vocabulary.  The grammar patterns take some getting used to, but once I see how they work, they tend to stick.  The vocabulary, though?  Over and over again I'll run into a word, and I'm certain I've seen it before and at one point knew what it meant, and it will not come back to mind.  So I look it up...

... and then go, "Oh, of course.  Duh.  I knew that."

But according to a study this week out of the University of South Australia, apparently what I'm doing wrong is simple: I need more sleep.

Researchers in the Department of Neuroscience took 35 native English speakers and taught them "Mini-Pinyin" -- an invented pseudolanguage that has Mandarin Chinese vocabulary but English sentence structure.  (None of them had prior experience with Mandarin.)  They were sorted into two groups; the first learned the language in the morning and returned twelve hours later to be tested, and the second learned it in the evening, slept overnight in the lab, and were tested the following morning.

The second group did dramatically better than the first.  Significantly, during sleep their brains showed a higher-than-average level of brain wave patterns called slow oscillations and sleep spindles, that are thought to be connected with memory consolidation -- uploading short-term memories from the hippocampus into long-term storage in the cerebral cortex.  Your brain, in effect, talks in its sleep, routing information from one location to another.

"This coupling likely reflects the transfer of learned information from the hippocampus to the cortex, enhancing long-term memory storage," said Zachariah Cross, who co-authored the study.  "Post-sleep neural activity showed unique patterns of theta oscillations associated with cognitive control and memory consolidation, suggesting a strong link between sleep-induced brainwave co-ordination and learning outcomes."

So if you're taking a language class, or if -- like me -- you're just learning another language for your own entertainment, you're likely to have more success in retention if you study in the evening, and get a good night's sleep before you're called upon to use what you've learned.

Of course, many of us could use more sleep for a variety of other reasons.  Insomnia is a bear, and poor sleep is linked with a whole host of health-related woes.  But a nice benefit of dedicating yourself to getting better sleep duration and quality is an improvement in memory.

And hopefully for me, better scores on my Duolingo lessons.

****************************************

Beginner's mind

Last September, I started learning Japanese through Duolingo.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Grantuking from Cerrione, Italy, Flag of Japan (1), CC BY 2.0]

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, so I'm at least a little better than the average bear when it comes to languages, but still -- my graduate research focused entirely on Indo-European languages.  (More specifically, the effects of the Viking invasions on Old English and the Celtic languages.)  Besides the Scandinavian languages and the ones found in the British Isles, I have a decent, if rudimentary, grounding in Greek and Latin, but still -- until last September, anything off of the Indo-European family tree was pretty well outside my wheelhouse.

The result is that there are features of Japanese that I'm struggling with, because they're so different from any other language I've studied.  Languages like Old English, Old Norse, Gaelic, Greek, and Latin are all inflected languages -- nouns change form depending on how they're being used in a sentence.  A simple example from Latin: in the two sentences "Canis felem momordit" ("The dog bit the cat") and "Felis canem momordit" ("The cat bit the dog"), you know who bit whom not by the order of the words, but by the endings.  The biter ends in -s, the bitee ends in -m.  The sentence would still be intelligible (albeit a little strange-sounding) if you rearranged the words.

Not so in Japanese.  In Japanese, not only does everything have to be in exactly the right order, just about every noun has to be followed by the correct particle, a short, more-or-less untranslatable word that tells you what the function of the previous word is.  They act a little like case endings do in inflected languages, and a little like prepositions in English, but with some subtleties that are different from either.  For example, here's a sentence in Japanese:

Tanaka san wa, sono sushiya de hirugohan o tabemashou ka?

Mr. Tanaka [particle indicating respect, always used when addressing another person] [particle indicating who you're talking to or the subject of the sentence], that sushi shop [particle indicating going to a place] lunch [particle indicating the object of the sentence] should we eat [particle indicating that what you just said was a question]? = "Mr. Tanaka, would you like to eat lunch at that sushi shop?"

Woe betide if you forget the particle or use the wrong one, or put things out of order.  Damn near every time I miss something on Duolingo and get that awful "clunk" noise that tells you that you screwed up, it's because I made a particle-related mistake.

And don't even get me started about the three different writing systems you have to learn.

This is the first time in a while I've been in the position of starting from absolute ground zero with something.  I guess I do have a bit of a leg up from having a background in other languages, but it's not really that much.  Being a rank beginner is humbling -- if you're going to get anywhere, you have to be willing to let yourself make stupid mistakes (sometimes over and over and over), laugh about it, and keep going.  I'm not really so good at that -- not only do I take myself way too damn seriously most of the time, I have that unpleasant combination of being (1) ridiculously self-critical and (2) highly competitive.  If you're familiar with Duolingo, you undoubtedly know about the whole XP (experience points) and "leagues" thing -- when you complete a lesson you earn XP (as long as you don't lose points in the lesson because you fucked up the particles again), and at the end of the week, you are ranked in XP against other learners, and depending on your score, you can move up into a new "league."

Or get "demoted."  Heaven forbid.  Given my personality, my attitude is "death before demotion."  As my wife pointed out, nothing happens if I get demoted -- it's not like the app reaches into my cerebrum and deletes what I've learned, or anything.  

She's right of course, but still.

I'll be damned if I'm gonna let myself get demoted.

So last week I reached "Diamond League," which is the top-tier.  Yay me, right?  Only now, there's nowhere left to go.  But I have to keep hammering at it, because if I don't I'll get dropped back into Obsidian League, and screw that sideways.

On the other hand, I keep at it because I also want to learn Japanese, right?  Of course right.

In Zen Buddhism, there's a concept called shoshin (初心), usually translated as "beginner's mind."  It means approaching every endeavor as if you were just seeing it for the first time, with excitement, anticipation -- and no preconceived notions of how it should go.  This is a hard lesson for me, harder even than remembering kanji.  I've had to get used to taking it slowly, realizing that I'm not going to learn a difficult and unfamiliar language overnight, and to come at it from a standpoint of curiosity and enjoyment.

It's not a competition, however determined I am to stay in the "Diamond League."  The process and the knowledge and the achievement should be the point, not a focus on some arbitrary standard of where I think I should be.

And some day, I'd like to visit the lovely country of Japan, and (maybe?) be able to converse a little in their language.  

[Image licensed under the Creative CommonsKeihin Nike, Bunkyou Koishikawa Botanical Japanese Garden 1 (1), CC BY-SA 3.0]

When that day comes, I suspect if I can approach the whole thing with beginner's mind, I'll get a lot more out of the experience.  Until that time -- I could probably think of a few other aspects of my life that this principle could be applied to, as well.

****************************************

Reconnecting the isolates

Determining which languages are related to which is significantly more difficult than you might expect.

English, for example.  Most people know that it's a Germanic language, related not only to German but to Dutch, Flemish, and (more distantly), to the Scandinavian languages.  This shows most strongly in the basic vocabulary; the majority of our common verbs and nouns, as well as pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions, have Anglo-Saxon -- i.e., Germanic -- origin.

However, consider the first sentence in this post.  The words which, are, to, is, more, than, you, and might are Germanic; but the more complicated words (determining, languages, related, significantly, difficult, and expect)  -- the ones that carry most of the meaning -- are all Latin in origin.  So is English actually a Romance language?

It isn't, of course, but a superficial look at the language might well push you to reach the wrong conclusion.  Most of our words of Greek and Latin origin were either via the Norman French spoken by the conquerors and ruling class in England who came in during the eleventh century, or later borrow-words that slipped into common parlance from their use in legal, scientific, and religious contexts.  English, in fact, has borrowed words from just about every language it's contacted.  A few interesting ones:

• algorithm (Arabic)
• loot (Hindi)
• torso (Italian)
• ketchup (Malay, by way of Chinese)
• easel (Dutch)
• sauna (Finnish)
• amen (Hebrew)
• chess and checkmate (Farsi)
• coffee (Turkish)
• icon (Greek, possibly via Russian)
• chocolate (Nahuatl)
• hurricane (Taino)
• tattoo (Samoan)

Despite all this, it remains a Germanic language in basic structure, something that is borne out by our knowledge of the history of English-speaking people.

We English-speaking linguists are lucky, because the written records for English and its antecedents are generally excellent.  We have a highly-detailed map of how the language evolved, and even in the case of borrow-words, we can often pinpoint not only where they came from, but when they entered the English language.  Things are far murkier with languages that have a poorer -- or completely nonexistent -- written history.  In that case, we're left with the immense task of using similarities in word roots and syntactic structure as the basis for inferring where a language fits in the overall family tree.

And sometimes even that isn't enough.  There are a good number of languages for which we have been unable to establish a clear relationship to any other; these are called language isolates, and include Basque, Sandawe (a language spoken in Tanzania), Zuni, Huave (an indigenous language in Mexico), Burushaski (spoken by about 100,000 people in Pakistan), and -- amazingly -- Japanese and Korean.

In fact, it's the latter two that are why this topic comes up today.  Both Japanese and Korean are of unclear relationship to each other and to the other languages in the region.  The Japanese writing system is largely borrowed from Chinese; the Japanese kanji is an ideographic script that uses many identical characters to those in Chinese (although the pronunciations, and some of the meanings/connotations, are completely different).  Korean writing, on the other hand, is of known provenance; the script (hangul) is a phonetic alphabet that was invented by the fifteenth-century King Sejong to give the speakers of Korean a standard, easily-learned way of writing the language.

So despite having complex and well-studied writing systems, the historical records of Japanese and Korean don't help us a lot with establishing how they fit in with other Asian language families.  But some research published last week in Nature, which I found out from loyal reader of Skeptophilia Gil Miller, has proposed a solution to the mystery.  Using computational analysis to map out not only the related features between the languages but their degree of separation -- analogous to the genetic bootstrap analysis used by evolutionary biologists to determine when the common ancestor between two species existed -- they figured out that not only are Japanese and Korean distantly related to each other, they're also related to Mongolian, to the Tungusic languages of eastern Siberia and Manchuria, and to... Turkish!

"We have languages, archaeology and genetics which all have dates.  So we just looked to see if they correlated," said study co-author Martine Robbeets, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in an interview with New Scientist.  "We all identify ourselves with language.  It’s our identity.  We often picture ourselves as one culture, one language, one genetic profile.  Our study shows that like all populations, those in Asia are mixed."

Her use of the phrase "we just looked" makes it sound simple, but that's undue modesty and a significant understatement.  In practice, determining these kind of relationships is anything but easy, and the Robeets et al. study -- if it bears up under further analysis -- is positioned to solve a linguistic conundrum of very long standing.  The work by Robbeets and her colleagues traces these curious language isolates and their relatives to a common origin in the Liao River Valley of northeastern China, on the order of nine thousand years ago, which is pretty stunning.

It also shows that despite the dearth of records and distance in time, we can still gain new insights into the origins of languages long thought to be a mystery -- and potentially reconnect spoken languages that once were considered oddball isolates, related to no other speech system.

*********************************************

If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]