Hello everyone, hola a todos!

Well, the project has come to and end, and, as you can see from the side of this page, has been a great success. I want to take this opportunity to express my sincerest gratitude to all of you for supporting me over the last few months. Thanks to you, I can now undertake the MA at SOAS and hopefully take the first step in a new career. If successful, and I go on to work with communities and speakers of endangered languages, your contribution to this project will become a contribution to the wider global undertaking to describe, document and save the world's languages and the invaluable knowledge, culture and linguistic insight that comes with them.

I would also like to thank the Hubbub team for all their patience and support. They've been fantastic the whole time, not only in helping me but in helping many of you with various technical issues as well. 

I hope you all enjoyed the first issue of "Language Alive". I plan to write the next edition during the first term of the course, so keep an eye out for it sometime before Christmas. I'll announce the dedicated words and sentences in the newsletter. This Hubbub page is also going to remain open so I may occasionally post updates on here, either regarding any further contributions to the crowdfunding or regarding the course itself. 

Once again, thank you. Muchísimas gracias a todos. Of course, if I can ever repay the favour, I'll be more than happy to do so. In particular, as promised on Facebook, I offer:

a) translation (Japanese to English)

b) proofreading

c) English classes

d) babysitting (children of any size and description)

e) a guided tour of Madrid should you visit while I'm here

f) a guided tour of London should you visit once I'm there

g) a decent cup of tea, a good old pint, or an ear to bend about whatever

An addition to the above list suggested by one of my friends and supporters and which I'm also happy to undertake is lawn-mowing :-) Just let me know when and where.

With my very warmest regards,

Daniel


*********

皆さん、お元気ですか？

日本は厚くなっているころでしょう？マドリッドはかなり厚くなってきました。

さて、プロジェクトは終了しました。ページの右側をご覧の通り、大成功でした！皆さんの援助や寛大さのおかげ、SOASでの「言語の記録と記述」の修士課程を取り込むことができます。大変深く感謝しております。

修士課程は９月から開始しますが、その後定期的にニュース レター「Language Alive (生きている言葉)」の執筆する予定です。個人メールで配信いたします。支持者のために選ぶ絶滅の危機にある言葉の単語あるいは一文はニュース レターにて発表します。このプロジェクトページを通しても時々最新情報を発表するかもしれません。

Thank you all so much!心より御礼申しあげます。

ダニエル

Hello everyone,

As always, a big welcome and a very big thank you to everyone who has joined the project since the last update. I'm very happy to have you all onboard!

Well... this is the final weekend. I have to say, it's been incredibly touching and really exciting to see everyone's support and enthusiasm over the last three months. Not only have there been all the generous pledges themselves, many of you have also been sharing the link and the newsletter and spreading the word amongst family, friends, colleagues and beyond. I've had lots and lots of encouragement, both in person and online, all of which has helped to keep me motivated throughout the project as I've watched the clock on the Hubbub page tick steadily down and the final deadline approach, especially as I have never done anything like this before and have very much been learning as I go. It means so much to me to be able to undertake this MA at SOAS and hopefully take the first step in a new career. I'm truly grateful to all of you. I appreciate every penny of support and every word of encouragement. If I can ever repay the favour, I promise you I will!

There's still a little way to go until we hit the target minimum, however, otherwise all the pledges will count for nothing (literally, as they will automatically be cancelled). If you know anyone - family, friend, colleague, neighbour - who might be interested in the project, interested in learning more about language, interested in contributing to the documentation and revitalisation of those in danger of extinction, and therefore willing to chip in a few pounds to help bring the running total closer to the minimum, please do let them know. The deadline is Wednesday!

Thank you again! I'll keep you all posted on how things turn out.

Daniel

A splerk, a zarf, or an aglet - by any other name

"Twas brillig and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimblein the wabe

All mimsy were the borogoves

And the mome raths outgrabe."

Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky

“I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

Alan Greenspan

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

Friends, family, supporters - and all you fellow language-lovers - as the crowdfunding project draws to a (hopefully successful) close, I thought I would share with you a couple of mini-essays I once wrote about language. This is the first (I'll post the other later). I'm no expert when it comes to these things (although I hope the MA will help to change that). Indeed, to all intents and purposes, I'm a layman. But I'm a curious layman, and what follows is really one long question that I've often turned over in my head. What happens when we speak? To me it's one of those things like the arrow of time and the pull of gravity: both deeply familiar and apparently common-sensical, and yet on even the slightest investigation both remarkable and baffling. What is gravity? Why does time appear to flow in one direction? What does happen when we speak? I would really like to write more, but all I have is question after question after question, and I'm not sure that makes for good reading. Still, it's always better to ask and not find out than never to wonder in the first place.

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

What happens when we speak? Patterns of neural activity representing the concepts we wish to express are converted into the linguistic forms that represent them; that is, abstract ideas are turned into semantics and grammar, which in turn are converted into the sounds necessary for their vocalisation via the coordinated articulation of the larynx, glottis, tongue, lips and jaw. On a purely physical level, breath is converted into vowels and consonants and the atmosphere vibrates. Taking the entire process more figuratively, thought becomes air. But if I think of a cat in a hat on a mat, and tell my friend to do the same, there is nothing inherently feline in the voiceless velar plosive, the front unrounded vowel or the alveolar stop which together signify the animal in English (and in that order alone – after all, a cat is a very different thing to an act or a tack, just as blogs are not globs, and chicken flesh is not a kitchen shelf). Nor is there anything especially catty about the two syllables ne and ko in Japanese, or anything four-pawed, furry and whiskered in the Wolof equivalent muus. Hindi calls them billi, Turkish goes with kedi, popoki’s the name in Hawaiian, they’re goyang-i in Korean, while the Polish word is kot. The phonemes themselves are mere referents. Of course, not all words are made up of arbitrary sounds. Etymologically there is a likelihood that all language can trace its origin back, at least to some degree, to an early kind of onomatopoeia. Indeed, onomatopoeia is a rich source of word formation, with dogs going woof, bombs going bang and rappers going bling. Sometimes it contributes to whole families of words. The consonant cluster at the beginning of the words sneeze, snort, snigger, snooze, snot, snuffle, snore and snivel clearly suggests something sniffly going on, and there’s something about bringing the lips together that sounds just right when we whistle, whisper and whine. Nevertheless, onomatopoeic words still only approximate the sounds they represent, as evidenced by the fact that they often differ between languages. English speakers don’t really hear knock knock when someone’s knuckles rap a door, any more than a Danish speaker hears bank bank. Spanish klaxons don’t really go pi pi. Indonesian pigs don’t really go grok grok. 

What happens when we listen? The air turns back into thought. The vibrations created by my vocalisations disturb the tiny bundled hair cells of my friend’s attentive ear, the movements of which trigger electrical signals to be sent along the auditory nerve to specialised regions of the brain, where the grammar and semantics are decoded, reconfiguring the incoming signal into a pattern of neural activity that matches the original. The headgear-wearing kitty I envisaged reappears inside the mind of my friend, and thus the elaborate system of symbols and processes that we call language has managed, rather wonderfully, to transmit from my mind to my friend’s mind an entire idea. Unless of course she understands no English, in which case all she will hear are meaningless vowels and consonants.

Nevertheless, we must ask ourselves this; even if we do share a language, how much of the idea has really been conveyed? What if I picture a black cat wearing a blue beanie, lounging on some tattered old damp grey bathmat, none of which detail is conveyed in the original sentence? My friend, for her part, on being told to picture a cat in a hat on a mat, might visualise instead a tabby cat in a dainty lace bonnet sitting upright on a welcome mat of rough brown jute. Or I might say the phrase to a Kenyan in Kiswahili, using paka, which may then, for all I know, conjure up a tiger or a lion. What if my friend is congenitally blind? Does she instead feel the animal’s fur, the hat’s brim, the weft and the weave of the mat that it’s sitting on? What if (though unlikely) she’s never seen a cat before, and only knows it from description as a four-legged furry mammal good at hunting vermin and popular in internet memes? What then does she see? I could instead tell her to visualise a member of the felis catus species of the Felidae family, wearing a covering for the crown of the head, resting its body with the torso upright and the hind limbs bent upon a rectangular piece of thick woven fabric used to cover a section of floor. Such a dry, lengthy sentence might be more exact, but those aren’t the words I used. Indeed, they hardly succeed in conveying an image at all, and they certainly add no detail. Nevertheless, as far as the original phrase is concerned, my friend and I both understand it perfectly; the core idea is fully conveyed. Very often such a degree of generality is all we need; we communicate largely in categories. If I tell my friend I’m thinking of buying a new bike, I might have in mind the nifty road bike with the silver frame that I saw in the shop by the station, but she doesn’t need any of that detail to understand new bike. All she needs to know is what a bike is and what it means for an object to be new. Likewise, she might tell me she went to the cinema last night, but I don’t need to know what the building looked like, what colour the seats were or how big the screen was before I can ask what film she saw. Generality is necessary in jokes as well – the man who walks into a bar, the chicken that crosses the road. Nobody needs to know what kind of bar or what kind of road to get the respective punchlines. And if I tell my friend I have an allergy to cats, I don’t even need to visualise any in order to be able to utter the sentence, or she to see me red-eyed and sneezing to understand what I mean.

But what then is communicated when I tell my friend to visualise the cat? What exactly is it that is stored in our brains as the concept of ‘cat’ that enables the language to work in the first place, that gives it something to symbolise? The concept must precede the language. After all, if I see a cat on the street I recognise it as a cat without language even entering into it. I don’t make my way to work every morning identifying everything I see or hear or feel, even inwardly to myself, even though I register the church on the corner, the rumble of traffic along the main road, the breeze against my face. There are plenty of things that we come across in life that we don’t know the names of (at least not until learning them), but we have a mental representation of them all the same. We may easily be able to work out their function, or guess at their provenance, even use them, without ever knowing what they are called. That little plastic tube at the end of your shoelace, for example, the thingummy that stops them becoming frayed… Or the cardboard holder for a takeaway beverage that has no handle, the whatjermacallit that keeps your fingers from getting burnt… We don’t need to know that the first is called an aglet in order to make our own out of sellotape, or that the latter is called a zarf in order to wish we had one when we hold an unprotected cup of boiling coffee. 

In conceptualising cat, do we extract all the similarities from all the cats we’ve ever known and codify them into some mental rendering of a kind of model or prototype, which in English we label cat, in Japanese neko and in Wolof muus, and against which we cross-reference every sighting or mention of a particular cat that we come across (the one on the street, the one on the mat)? Features of this general cat might include: being smaller than most dogs but bigger than rats and mice, being furry and four-legged, having whiskers, purring when content, meowing when hungry, not really known for donning headwear (beanie or bonnet or otherwise) and with a tendency, whenever the mood might take it, to be decidedly aloof. Colour-wise, the brain might generalise by settling on a common colour for a cat, say black, or else blending all the possible colours into a kind of muddy brown. For such a rendering to work, however, surely the brain needs to cross-reference everything mentioned with all the other concepts involved; with the concept of fur, for example: a coating on the skin of soft, thick hairs; or with legs: a limb that supports and moves the body; or with black: the colour of coal and the sky at night; and then those in turn with their respective features, some of which lead back the way we came, so that the whole thing ends up circular; coal: a black material used for burning; soft: not hard, stiff or rough, but yielding readily to pressure, like a pillow, a ripe banana, or the fur of a cat.

Is this really what happens? It would indeed seem to be the case if I invent an animal and describe it to my friend, requiring her to do a similar mapping to the conceptual cross-referencing above. Let’s say I tell her that zoologists have just discovered a hitherto unknown animal in the depths of the African hinterlands which they’ve named the African splerk. This four-legged creature is bigger than a dog but smaller than a horse, has a thick hard skin like a rhino, but with yellow and white stripes, has a mane like a lion, a trunk like an elephant and dinosaur-like plates along its back. Assuming my friend is reasonably good at drawing, she should then be able to produce a picture of this bizarre creature without ever having seen it before – indeed, without it even existing. Would this image of a splerk be a kind of equivalent, at least as far as the visual aspects go, of our conceptual general cat? Can it really be so cartoonish? Surely, given that we see real cats from all angles, it can’t be two-dimensional? Or is there a kind of holographic generalisation going on? And if indeed this is the way abstraction works, why does my friend, when I tell her to visualise the cat in the hat, not visualise the generalisation? Why does she instead picture a particular example (even though it may well be imaginary and little more than a vague image in her mind’s eye)? And how can it be that if I ask her if she knows the word for cat in Wolof, and she replies that funnily enough she does, it sounds a bit like moose, how can it be that neither of us need to visualise either of the creatures involved, or even really think about them, for the communication to take place? Clearly, we can store the purely phonological aspect of words without knowing their meaning. Let’s say I’m in Senegal myself, and keep hearing the word xarit. I don’t have a clue what it means, but there it is, bantered back and forth by the Wolof speakers around me, a string of disembodied phonemes drifting around my mind in search of a concept to cling on to. Xarit. Xarit. Xarit. Maybe it means market (after all, that’s where I hear it first). Maybe it means customer (the man in the restaurant uses it when speaking to me). Xarit. Xarit. Xarit. Maybe it’s a kind of greeting; people seem to smile a lot when they say it. Who knows? It’s only later that I learn the word means ‘friend’. But how can we possibly divorce the sounds of words from the concepts they represent, such as cat and mouse, when we do know what they mean? If I say to my xarit, “Does the word splerk sound hard to you?”, do I really expect that she will hear nothing but the sounds alone, and not have any notion whatsoever in mind, visual or otherwise, of the creature she earlier drew? 

Besides, how far can this kind of mental modelling be applied to less concrete entities such as groups, meals, days, dreams, noise or even friends? Or to actions? Sitting, buying, cooking, deciding, falling or investigating, for example. How are they represented in the brain? What about relative concepts such as big and small, or purely abstract concepts such as beauty or wrongdoing? What about grammatical concepts, such as tense and aspect, modality or negation? After all, if I suddenly blurt out, apropos of nothing, “I would if I could but I can’t so I won’t”, my friend will not have the foggiest idea what I’m referring to, but she’ll know that it’s neither possible nor going to happen. Likewise, if I suddenly announce “It isn’t!”, she may not know what ‘it’ is, or even what it isn’t, but she’ll certainly know that it’s ‘not’. We can even understand a sentence grammatically when there’s gobbledygook involved. If my friend tells me that “The floober plengled a quirp last night”, I won’t have a clue what a floober or a quirp are, or what it means to plengle, but I’ll be in no doubt whatsoever as to which of them did what to which. How does the brain do that?

One day, it seems likely, neuroscience will map the wiring of the brain as comprehensively as the geneticists have sequenced the coiled double-helix of our precious DNA, at which point we will be able to describe exactly what goes on inside those lumpy folds when I utter the sentence “the cat, getting bored of being talked about, took off its hat and left”. But even then, tracing circuitous routes around the rich resulting cartography of abstraction, surely we will still be left confronting an unbridgeable gap between our knowledge of the biological mechanisms that produce the image, and our experience of the image itself. No amount of data about the genes, the synapses, the signals and the networks, no matter how detailed or voluminous, no matter how complete, can ever amount to that experience. My friend, for all the accrued knowledge and understanding, will still find herself looking at a discarded bonnet on a welcome mat, while all that remains in my mind’s eye will be a bathmat and the beanie left behind. The splerk by then will have joined a herd of other fantasies and figments, while the cat, having crawled off down some neural back alley, will be nowhere to be seen. And when that time comes, we may yet be none the wiser. 

**Important Update**

Hello everyone,

I have decided, in consultation with the people at Hubbub, to lower the project minimum to £6,000. This is for the following reasons:

1. I’ve spoken to SOAS about payment of the course fees, and they have agreed that I can pay in two instalments, one immediately before the course begins and one during the second term (although doing so does incur a £150 admin fee!). This means that I should be able to start the course with the amount raised already (should the project succeed), and will then have a window of time in which to secure the shortfall.

2. I have been in touch with the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, who oversee the Master’s degree I’ll be doing. They have been impressed with the commitment I have shown via this crowdfunding project to undertaking the course and also by my plan to do some awareness-raising via the newsletter I hope to continue writing. They have asked me to meet them when I get to London, as there is a possibility (I emphasise the word ‘possibility’) of some work with them during the year. This might help offset some of the costs of studying and living in London. I have no idea if this will come to anything, or what the work might entail, but I’m happy to do whatever is available if it means the opportunity to work with people involved in the field I’m trying to get into and if it brings in some income.

All this gives me a little more flexibility going into the course as regards both the amount of money I need to get started and the possibilities I have to fund myself through the remainder of the year. Once I know my timetable and workload, I can also look for English teaching work in London which should help me out. My family are kindly going to feed me, and (at least initially) shelter me (if crashing on a floor doesn’t work out, then pitching a tent in a garden is one current suggestion!).

It’s not going to be easy. As you all know, London is incredibly expensive and I will still have to fund travel and basic living expenses. Therefore I still hope to secure enough money via this project to at least be in with a fighting chance of making it through the year. I think £6,000 would be a reasonable springboard from which to begin. The all-or-nothing basis of the crowdfunding remains the same; if I haven't secured the minimum by Wednesday June 10th, the project simply closes. Of course, ideally the project will exceed even the original minimum!

I know you all signed up to the project on the initial basis that the minimum was £7,260. I hope none of you disagree with this change of plan. However, please do let me know if anyone has any objections.

In the meantime, there are now only 13 days to go to secure the remainder. If you know anyone else who might be interested in helping out, please do either let them or me know.

Many, many thanks,

Daniel

Hello everyone, and bienvenidos, bruchim ha-baim, youkoso, yá’át’ééh, fáilte, karibu and welcome to new supporters (top marks for anyone who can say what languages those are). Thank you for joining and for all your ongoing support!

Here's an interesting TED lecture about a project that's giving a technological and commercial boost to endangered languages. I hope you enjoy it.

Bye for now,

Daniel

Hello everyone! A warm welcome to any followers who have joined since the last update. Thank you all for your support.

Well, I've finished putting together the sample issue of "Language Alive", the newsletter I plan to write to accompany the course should this campaign be successful. Please accept this as a heartfelt thank-you for your support. I hope you enjoy it.

It's a month from today until the funding deadline (June 10th), and there's a long way still to go. The Hubbub model is all-or-nothing funding, which means that unless the minimum is reached by the deadline then no pledges are collected at all. In the spirit of crowdfunding, it needs lots and lots of people helping out a little in order to make something big happen; therefore, if you know of anyone you think might enjoy the newsletter or who might like to chip in to the crowdfunding itself, please do let them know!

Also, a big thank you to everyone at Hubbub itself for all their help and support. 

That's all for now. Hope you're all enjoying the weekend!

Daniel

Hello everyone!

First of all, a very big thank you to all those friends and family who have joined the project since my last update, and another big gracias, merci, arigatou, obrigado and kamsahamnida to everyone so far on board. There's a long way to go yet, and the days are counting down (only 49 to go), but I've still got my fingers crossed that others will get involved and that we can make it to the minimum. If you know anyone else who might be interested in supporting me, please do let them know! 

Some good news. This project now has the support of none other than that bastion of wit and erudition, Stephen Fry, who has kindly agreed to lend his name to it. If you're interested in an educational and entertaining introduction to the wonders of language, I highly recommend his 5-part BBC documentary series "Planet Word".

You might also get a kick out of this short video of "audio illusions", which has something to say about language and how we perceive sound. 

Bye for now,

Daniel

Hello everyone!

I just wanted to share with you a trailer for a PBS documentary series that my good friend Jerry, who's supporting this project, shared with me. I think it illustrates very well the issues that my MA will deal with and the area of work that I want to become involved in.

PBS. What does the world lose when a language dies?

Thanks! Daniel

Hello everyone!

I just wanted to share with you a trailer for a PBS documentary series that my good friend Jerry, who's supporting this project, shared with me. I think it illustrates very well the issues that my MA will deal with and the area of work that I want to become involved in.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/what-does-the-world-lose-when-a-language-dies/

Thanks! Daniel

A very big thank you to everyone who has pledged so far. Your help is truly appreciated! There's a long way to go yet, but I've been really moved by the support I've had so far and am very excited about how things are looking.

Please help me spread the word by sharing the link below and by letting your friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances know that they can support me not only by pledging but also simply by clicking on the "Become a helper" tab at the top right of the page. The more "helpers" I have the better. You too can do it!

Thanks! Gracias! Arigatou! Obrigado! Hvala! Xie xie! Merci! Paxmet! Grazie! Kamsamnida! Kia ora! Nuhun! Merci! And "ta muchly" in all the languages I'm yet to learn about. x

Thank you to everyone who's pledged so far. Two days in a already at the two percent mark! Feeling very grateful and very excited. :-)

First pledge received!  A big thank you to Francesca!