On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: Kmo had time to develop the necessary points to reasonable length.
Revision history:
All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné, a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 5 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 2 hours.
- 20180217T0135Z/version 3.2.0: Kmo corrected a bad typo (amending "1945-1958 Displaced Person" to "1945-1948 Displaced Person". - He reserved the right to make further thy, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 3.2.1, 3.2.2, 3.2.3, ... .
- 20180131T0415Z/version 3.1.0: Kmo corrected his URL for the Chaplin clip (he had inadvertently used a URL for a less satisfactory (because trimmed) upload than the one he had strictly had in mind). - He reserved the right to make further tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 3.1.1, 3.1.2, 3.1.3, ... .
- 20180131T0331Z/version 3.0.0: Kmo, running half a day late, finally finished converting his outline into full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make further tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.0.3, ... .
- 20180130T0305Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo, running about an hour late, uploaded a finished, and reasonably polished, fine-grained outline. He hoped to convert this into full-sentences prose through a sequence of incremental uploads, finishing by 20180130T1900Z
- 20180130T0001Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time to upload part of a fine-grained outline. He hoped over the next 2 hours to finish and polish this outline, and soon thereafter to start converting it into full-sentences prose.
[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]
I really must soon return to my incomplete multipart essay on the analytical philosophy of perception, action, and "subjectivity". This blog aims to help people. Some people will be helped by such philosophical writing., At the moment, however, I am preoccupied with a different topic, to a degree which I think makes it reasonable of me to defer philosophy until February.
****
My preoccupation this week is with one kind of decay - not with the decay of physical infrastructure, and not with the decay of institutions (common though those two kinds of decline are), but with the decay in acquired skills.
One occasionally hears people remarking on maths and physics deskilling. In some cases, such a decay is untroubling. Who cares when a brilliant psychiatrist confesses to not now grasping vectors? In other cases, however, the decay is either moderately or strongly worrying.
Under the heading of "moderately worrying" goes, perhaps, the case of the chemical-engineering professor who told me some years ago (he was himself then around retirement age) that he had forgotten one or another of the trig summation formulae. I am quite sure his self-confessed problem was either that he had forgotten "sin (alpha + beta) = sin alpha cos beta + cos alpha sin beta" or that he had forgotten "cos (alpha + beta) = cos alpha cos beta - sin alpha sin beta."
Under the heading of "strongly worrying" goes, perhaps, the case of the computer-science prof, then aged conceivably 35, who said in my hearing that "the first derivative of cos is sin". When I replied to this, politely enough, "Isn't that minus sin?" the prof unfortunately wriggled, saying in response, "Ah yes of course minus sin - that's why we have symbolic computation packages." - Well, perhaps I am not being quite fair. Various interpretations of our conversation are possible. One of these possible interpretations is that the prof was simply stressed and tired, and was therefore temporarily misspeaking.
Anglo Canada (where I am to be residing until, it would seem, late 2018) presents one particular kind of personal deskilling, over and over again. Practically everyone in the secondary education system out here gets much French, year upon year. Further, little practical tutorials in French are thrust before everyone's gaze with every box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, or with every bottle of Head and Shoulders Shampoo. (Here in Canada, in contrast with the UK and the USA, bilingual print seems required on commercial factory packaging.)
And yet I am fairly sure that if one took a randomly selected group of 100 middle-aged adults off the Toronto subway and offered each of them a loonie (a 1 CAD coin) for translating some such clichéd thing as "Allons enfants de la Patrie/ Le jour de Gloire est arrivé", or "Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?" one would have to pay out not 100 loonies, but just 30 or 20.
And I recall with amazement the discussion I once had in a Toronto workplace. My (young) boss-at-the-time asked me, as the Helpful Local Linguist, to translate for her or him the phrase "services bilangues". ("So this thing from Ottawa is saying, 'Services bilangues - what's it mean, 'Services bilangues'?")
Now, to my humiliation, I find that I am falling into just the same slough as everyone else is - not, indeed with French (which I have been keeping up, as I shall be remarking again below) but with German. French can be downgraded if you are soon to be resettling in Estonia. German, on the other hand, matters, since (a) it is Germany that represents for Estonia the closest source of really good libraries, really good bookstores, really authoritative subject-matter specialists, and the like; and (b) German was, from the awkward missionary events of 1208 or so right up to 1918, Estonia's main linguistic window to the West. (For all those centuries, German represented a high, if a somewhat resented, ruling culture. The Teutonic Knights secured for German in Estonia the authoritative local status which the Raj in India locally secured for English.)
I had occasion last week to correspond in English with a welcome, unexpected, German contact. Unfortunately, I added a little bit of my own supposed German, to kinda-sorta show off. In doing so, I referred to "two questions" as zwei Frage, in place of zwei Fragen. I did so without even thinking to ask myself if I was forming a correct plural.
The following warning (so one gathers) was penned by Alexander Pope: A little learning is a dangerous thing/ Drink deep, or taste not the Peirian spring. The sense in which his warning applies to that distinctively important Modern Language has already been brought out in this present blog through a long quote from humourist Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927), back on 2017-03-06 or 2017-03-07, under the heading "Practicalities of Deutsche Sprachlehre". (I might today particularly underscore Jerome's frank admission of his own deskilling: "I don't understand German myself. I learned it at a school, but forgot every word two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.")
All the same, I may as well digress a bit today, supplementing Jerome K. Jerome by recounting my own fourfold German experience.
My first efforts, when I was in a Nova Scotian high school that erred in offering no German, were feeble. From some place or other, I had happened to get two or three tiny German readers.
Mum's German had been impeccable when she was younger, and probably was still very good when I was in that high school. (Mum was celebrated in our already polyglot family for being at least septilingual. Estonian and Russian she must have learned pretty much simultaneously, as the infant of a father posted to a remote frontier county within our infant Republic. German, on the other hand, remained as a matter of academic routine the language of many textbooks, both before and during the Hitler war. The fact that Mum's Tartu degree programme was in Fenno-Ugrics meant that she had Finnish ex officio, thoroughly, at the hands of the formidable Mrs Aino Suits. Although Latin had unfortunately not been offered at Mum's gümnaasium, she did get it up, at least to some passing level or other, as a university requisite. Danish and Swedish she learned under pressure of events, after graduation, as a 1945-1948 Displaced Person. Mum's English, at least as I remember it from later years, was nearly free of accent, although in a pronunciation which I recall some friendly Canadian stranger once finding British.) So Mum would surely have been supportive of my later-1960s High-School German Project.
Still, I did not get far. All I now recall, from my First Effort, is one single sentence, quite impossible to work into normal conversation - Oh veh, mein Ei ist in den Fluss gefallen ("Aw heck, my egg has fallen into the river").
Well, I do recall from those days appreciating also Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock, in a depiction of Otto von Bismarck storming into the Chancellry, his Prussian morning starting on a Prussian note: "Acccccch...was ist dis Ding on mein Desk?"
Some historian of cinema is some day going to have to consider whether the Canadian Leacock, with his faux-Deutsch, was the ultimate inspiration for what is now acclaimed as one of the canonical screen clips, Charlie Chaplin's "Great Dictator" faux-Deutsch speech. To those readers who have not yet seen and heard Chaplin as the Dictator, or "Fooey", of "Tomania", orating to his adoring masses in that vast stadium, I say: Don't waste your time with me. You will get more vivid and lively ideas on Deutsche Sprachlehre - well, maybe not all that accurate, but vivid and lively - from "The Great Dictator". In the YouTube search interface, put in the search term charlie chaplin adenoid hynkel speech.
YouTube clips of this tour-de-force come and go. At the moment, the best is perhaps the one by YouTube uploader "Arjun Unnikrishnan", from 2011-05-26, under the title "The Great Dictator Speech- Charlie Chaplin". Whatever clip one unearths in this way should be more or less uncut, meaning that it should run to 4:30 or 5:00 or so (not just to, say, 1:00 or 1:30).
In my corner of the Web, the Chaplin material, in its "Arjun Unnikrishnan" uploading, can at the moment be reached through the URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oSN1CnXAAA. Perhaps in different parts of the world a different URL will be needed this month, and perhaps by next month "Arjun Unnikrishnan" will be gone altogether, her or his place taken by someone else's uploading.
Various readers might be helped by my adding a transcription here, which I have lifted off some now-untraceable Web source, most likely from some YouTube commenter whose posting has since vanished amid all the churning that seems to beset Charlie Chaplin. For the present blog posting, I try to add a little value, by checking the trasnscription in a superficial and hasty way against the Hollywood sound track, and consequently correcting some tiny phonetic point here and there.
I will also try to add value in the present blog posting by adding the occasional explanatory comment [in brackets, like this]:
Hee, der straf mit's Hültensekt! der Wiener Schnitzel mit der Lagerbierten und der Sauerkraut? Eh, der Flürten sagt er flärten! Ein Tomanier mit seinen Straf; und der Blitzen sagt er klütz! He, ich bleiner straf mit der Ach... Ach...Akchhh..
Balone - [this, as the film later makes clear, is a corpulent fellow dictator, blessed with a disposition more sunny than Adenoid Hynkel's, and running Italy as opposed to "Tomania"] - Balone hat einen Stritz mit Zeiten elften, sagt er, flüden? Ein, der straft mit seiner Klatsch! Ei! der straft's mit Sekadelten da?! Mit seiner Tratsch mit Skidann! Mein aller die da, wie da strafen! die strafen! sie strafen!
[Violent cheering.]
[A nice lady, translating for the benefit of Anglosaxonia - they are surely getting this speech via international shortwave radio hookup, as feeds into the BBC, the CBC, NBS-ABC-CBS, and the like - explains: Adenoid Hynkel has just said that yesterday Tomania was down, but now he has risen. The Fooey now takes a glass of water, drinking some of it, and additionally pouring some down his trousers. Although the arm-salutes of the crowd are to the modern eye explicit, and fully phallic, I guess the 1940 Hollywood censors laboured under a certain innocence. That would explain why they let this particular footage, not really acceptable even in 2018, right through. I blush at discussing such stuff here on blogspot. But however juvenile the humour, the phallic routine does make clear, as nothing else ever could, what drives the world's Great Dictators, both back in 1940 and right now, early in 2018. Such a discussion, however salacious, I think I owe to this month's diligent little bevy of Russian downloaders, especially now that Mr Alexei A. Navalny and his brother seem to be in danger of getting roughed up.]
Demokratsi schtonk. [Impressive rhetorical pause.] Liberti schtonk. [Impressive rhetorical pause.] Free SPRECHEN schtonk.
[It is at this point that the nice lady is first seen to be a bit tendentious in the translations she is offering over the shortwave links to Anglosaxonia.]
Tomania mit der grotze Army in der Welt! der grotze Navy in der Welt! mit seiner der grotze Alles! und einer to sakriface. Ei - alles! und einer strotten tighten de Belten.
[The well-decorated Minister of War, Field Marshall Herring, now rises to his feet and announces, with deep pathos, Herr Hinnkel, ICH von go försten. He tightens his belt, which pops open as soon as he again sits down.]
Ah, Herring! Puppsching Herring, Bismarck-Herring! Mit sein' Ülten sagt er plärrten. Ah, from der Harten sagt er elderbütz - ein Herring.
Und Garbitsch. [This is the Minister of the Interior - a good stand-in for the actual Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels, as Garbitsch is a good stand-in for the actual Oberbefehlshaber Hermann Wilhelm Göring.] Herr Garbitsch Wunds endt ülten sagt - Herring und Herr Garbitsch, acch! Herring schutten smelten fein from Garbitsch, und Garbitsch schutten smelten fein from Herring - Herring und Garbitsch.
[The Fooey now brushes tears from his eyes with the end of his darkly mililtary necktie. The nice lady explains in English, for the benefit of networked Anglosaxonia, that His Excellency recalls the struggles of his earlier days, shared by his two loyal comrades. People in the original 1940 screening rooms would have reflected on those early Munich days, notorious as the background to Mein Kampf.]
Wasüll! Hunde stretz: Eh die Flüten, sagt er, Klüten sind in einer Hütten nie. Ein, der stritz mit seiner Gülden, sagt er flärten. Ein Säck Stritzensekt, ein Säck Strittensucht, ein Säck Strittensekt und ein - Enough! Sie will's stretz mit sein Eltensekt.
Ah, und die Aryan. Und die aryan Maiden! Ah, die aryan Maiden ah, die Delikatessen mit die Schön; und die Flechsen mit die Stresses. [The Fooey conveys with gestures his impression of long flaxen tresses, I suppose as they might have appeared on Rapunzel when it was necessary for somebody to clamber up into her tower.] Ah, und der Rühhstein mit der Muss, ei, der Muss [the Fooey intimates with a fresh gesture how nice it is to see muscles on ladies] - für der Kinder Katzenjammer der Katzenjammer mit der Utten, sagt er, Hitten, Fighten, Hutten, Fighten, Dotten, Uttensekt! He! Soldiers for Hynkel!
[Violent cheering. Herring is seen simpering as he claps.]
Wir zenn: der Aryan und, na: der Chewton. Der Chewton! Und da strifft das Sauerkraut mit der Chewton; und der Leberwurst mit der Chewton; ei, der Flitzensekt dahinter mit der Chewton; ei! der Fluten sagt er klärten; und der Strenglichen mit der Ulten sagt er flärten; und der Blitzen sagt er, Helden: Besick! Besack! - Der Chewton, uuhh, der Chewton!
[The microphone wilts like a daffodil in late May, evidently ashamed at the garbage which it is herewith having to relay around the globe. The nice lady explains, for Anglosaxonia, that His Excellency has just referred to the Jewish people.]
[Violent cheering.]
Und, na: Straf mit sein Ülten, sagt er, flärten; der Flärten mit der Ülten sagt er flärten und striff mit seiner Totztrutz eine die Fluten. Der Heer truss eine, nach Europe - Blitzkrieg, fratsch, kratz mit Sekadelten. [Now with mounting passion; the Fooey is working himself up something awful:] An feine Ulz straf mit seine und den French; und mein Ohrsein straft mit seiner Finnland; und mein Ohrsein straft mit seiner Russia - weil Strass der Welle. Ei! ei, der Flutzen Mieder hell's der Streff. Ei, der schtink deiner schtunken, der schtunken mit der Europe und schtunken mit der Höll. Ei! Ein sieht all der Grotzes - mit seine - Tomania!
[Violent cheering.]
[The nice lady in some versions I have seen - but all I can find this week is, oddly, cut off - explains to Anglosaxonia that For the rest of the world, the Fooey says he has nothing but peace in his heart.]
So much, then, for Deutsche Sprachlehre Effort Number One.
Effort Number Two came in the summer of 1974, when it became evident that my plans for fleeing Canada for the more congenial UK were headed for success, and when I had accordingly resolved upon a preliminary Continental holiday. (Conveniently, Michaelmas Term at college would not be starting until early October.) With Dalhousie University coursework finished, I had maybe half a month to spend on campus, madly cramming such German as could now be crammed. So I pored and pored over a textbook. Still better, I played and replayed reels of magnetic tape in the Dalhousie "Language Lab", into bulky headphones, like some youthful MI6 operative.
Such tape-and-headphones work proves invaluable. Things stick in the mind from robotic repetition, remaining immune from the deskilling, in other words from the decay, that besets more cerebral modes of learning.
That female voice in the headphones, making it abundantly clear that yes, the thing IS now being got ready in her kitchen (I put the rewind button to repeated good use): Jetzt wird gekocht! Jetzt wird gekocht! Jetzt wird gekocht!
Or that shocked male voice, as the full horror of an unprecedented situation at the Platform sinks in: Wass - der Zug fährt nicht pünktlich ab? ("WHAT? Is the train not leaving on time?")
And best of all, a male voice, this time oozing and dripping with condescension, as the Long Vowel is made duly vivid (I reflect on this one quite a bit now, thinking how cold life is liable to prove in my envisaged Tartu County accommodation, 18 months from now, with merely a masonry heating system in prospect): Haben Sie ZENTRALheizung? ("Do you have Central Heating?" - tsentraaaaaaaaaaal...)
Effort Number Two was, in its limited terms of reference, something of a success. I could kinda-sorta chat in German a little when hiking that July in the Austrian Alps, staying in a backpackers' hostel at altitude. And I had already been able to announce blithely, for the benefit of others in my compartment, as the night train from Ostend rolled into Vienna, Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume (or some approximation thereto).
Effort Number Three was around 1991, and did not last long, and did not produce notable results. I started a good grammar book, but seem to have abandoned it just a third or a half of the way through.
Effort Number Four was my most serious. This kicked off late in 2013, when I was preparing for surgery. Being too ill to face the normal (modest, low-level) workload in maths, physics, astronomy, and computing, I resolved on at least tackling German thoroughly, from the same book as I had used to scant good effect back in Effort Three. Here was an opportunity as good as the Great Opportunity of 1974, or better - a slab of unbroken time, with a chance to concentrate! So with blanket over knees, and catheter draining steadily, and the Knife impending, I set to work doggedly enough.
My timelog shows that things started off on 2013-12-14 with 3 hours, 13 minutes ("03h13"). Just before surgery, when going to bed on 2014-01-23, I had put in a total of 104h27. A period of increasing strength followed the Knife, with a release from hospital on 2014-01-27. On the evening of that day, my cumulative total had reached 115h52.
I passed the critical 200-hour mark in German on 2014-05-07. At this point, convalescence was over, with the normal run of duties now exerting its normal steady, distracting, pull. Enthusiasm for the "Special Subject" which was German had flagged by 2014-12-20, with a cumulative total on that date of 272h19. From that point onward, my timelogs show, again and again, mainly just WOCHE VERLOREN ("week lost"). As of 2017-08-11, I had hardly gone much beyond the already-mentioned 272h19, with now a total of just 278h11 (a day of FA oder etwas, says the log - "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, or something").
And, as I said at the outset of this week's posting, I am this month finding myself not even correctly pluralizing die Frage.
Anglo Canada (where I am to be residing until, it would seem, late 2018) presents one particular kind of personal deskilling, over and over again. Practically everyone in the secondary education system out here gets much French, year upon year. Further, little practical tutorials in French are thrust before everyone's gaze with every box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, or with every bottle of Head and Shoulders Shampoo. (Here in Canada, in contrast with the UK and the USA, bilingual print seems required on commercial factory packaging.)
And yet I am fairly sure that if one took a randomly selected group of 100 middle-aged adults off the Toronto subway and offered each of them a loonie (a 1 CAD coin) for translating some such clichéd thing as "Allons enfants de la Patrie/ Le jour de Gloire est arrivé", or "Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?" one would have to pay out not 100 loonies, but just 30 or 20.
And I recall with amazement the discussion I once had in a Toronto workplace. My (young) boss-at-the-time asked me, as the Helpful Local Linguist, to translate for her or him the phrase "services bilangues". ("So this thing from Ottawa is saying, 'Services bilangues - what's it mean, 'Services bilangues'?")
Now, to my humiliation, I find that I am falling into just the same slough as everyone else is - not, indeed with French (which I have been keeping up, as I shall be remarking again below) but with German. French can be downgraded if you are soon to be resettling in Estonia. German, on the other hand, matters, since (a) it is Germany that represents for Estonia the closest source of really good libraries, really good bookstores, really authoritative subject-matter specialists, and the like; and (b) German was, from the awkward missionary events of 1208 or so right up to 1918, Estonia's main linguistic window to the West. (For all those centuries, German represented a high, if a somewhat resented, ruling culture. The Teutonic Knights secured for German in Estonia the authoritative local status which the Raj in India locally secured for English.)
I had occasion last week to correspond in English with a welcome, unexpected, German contact. Unfortunately, I added a little bit of my own supposed German, to kinda-sorta show off. In doing so, I referred to "two questions" as zwei Frage, in place of zwei Fragen. I did so without even thinking to ask myself if I was forming a correct plural.
****
The following warning (so one gathers) was penned by Alexander Pope: A little learning is a dangerous thing/ Drink deep, or taste not the Peirian spring. The sense in which his warning applies to that distinctively important Modern Language has already been brought out in this present blog through a long quote from humourist Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927), back on 2017-03-06 or 2017-03-07, under the heading "Practicalities of Deutsche Sprachlehre". (I might today particularly underscore Jerome's frank admission of his own deskilling: "I don't understand German myself. I learned it at a school, but forgot every word two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.")
All the same, I may as well digress a bit today, supplementing Jerome K. Jerome by recounting my own fourfold German experience.
My first efforts, when I was in a Nova Scotian high school that erred in offering no German, were feeble. From some place or other, I had happened to get two or three tiny German readers.
Mum's German had been impeccable when she was younger, and probably was still very good when I was in that high school. (Mum was celebrated in our already polyglot family for being at least septilingual. Estonian and Russian she must have learned pretty much simultaneously, as the infant of a father posted to a remote frontier county within our infant Republic. German, on the other hand, remained as a matter of academic routine the language of many textbooks, both before and during the Hitler war. The fact that Mum's Tartu degree programme was in Fenno-Ugrics meant that she had Finnish ex officio, thoroughly, at the hands of the formidable Mrs Aino Suits. Although Latin had unfortunately not been offered at Mum's gümnaasium, she did get it up, at least to some passing level or other, as a university requisite. Danish and Swedish she learned under pressure of events, after graduation, as a 1945-1948 Displaced Person. Mum's English, at least as I remember it from later years, was nearly free of accent, although in a pronunciation which I recall some friendly Canadian stranger once finding British.) So Mum would surely have been supportive of my later-1960s High-School German Project.
Still, I did not get far. All I now recall, from my First Effort, is one single sentence, quite impossible to work into normal conversation - Oh veh, mein Ei ist in den Fluss gefallen ("Aw heck, my egg has fallen into the river").
Well, I do recall from those days appreciating also Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock, in a depiction of Otto von Bismarck storming into the Chancellry, his Prussian morning starting on a Prussian note: "Acccccch...was ist dis Ding on mein Desk?"
Some historian of cinema is some day going to have to consider whether the Canadian Leacock, with his faux-Deutsch, was the ultimate inspiration for what is now acclaimed as one of the canonical screen clips, Charlie Chaplin's "Great Dictator" faux-Deutsch speech. To those readers who have not yet seen and heard Chaplin as the Dictator, or "Fooey", of "Tomania", orating to his adoring masses in that vast stadium, I say: Don't waste your time with me. You will get more vivid and lively ideas on Deutsche Sprachlehre - well, maybe not all that accurate, but vivid and lively - from "The Great Dictator". In the YouTube search interface, put in the search term charlie chaplin adenoid hynkel speech.
YouTube clips of this tour-de-force come and go. At the moment, the best is perhaps the one by YouTube uploader "Arjun Unnikrishnan", from 2011-05-26, under the title "The Great Dictator Speech- Charlie Chaplin". Whatever clip one unearths in this way should be more or less uncut, meaning that it should run to 4:30 or 5:00 or so (not just to, say, 1:00 or 1:30).
In my corner of the Web, the Chaplin material, in its "Arjun Unnikrishnan" uploading, can at the moment be reached through the URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oSN1CnXAAA. Perhaps in different parts of the world a different URL will be needed this month, and perhaps by next month "Arjun Unnikrishnan" will be gone altogether, her or his place taken by someone else's uploading.
Various readers might be helped by my adding a transcription here, which I have lifted off some now-untraceable Web source, most likely from some YouTube commenter whose posting has since vanished amid all the churning that seems to beset Charlie Chaplin. For the present blog posting, I try to add a little value, by checking the trasnscription in a superficial and hasty way against the Hollywood sound track, and consequently correcting some tiny phonetic point here and there.
I will also try to add value in the present blog posting by adding the occasional explanatory comment [in brackets, like this]:
Hee, der straf mit's Hültensekt! der Wiener Schnitzel mit der Lagerbierten und der Sauerkraut? Eh, der Flürten sagt er flärten! Ein Tomanier mit seinen Straf; und der Blitzen sagt er klütz! He, ich bleiner straf mit der Ach... Ach...Akchhh..
Balone - [this, as the film later makes clear, is a corpulent fellow dictator, blessed with a disposition more sunny than Adenoid Hynkel's, and running Italy as opposed to "Tomania"] - Balone hat einen Stritz mit Zeiten elften, sagt er, flüden? Ein, der straft mit seiner Klatsch! Ei! der straft's mit Sekadelten da?! Mit seiner Tratsch mit Skidann! Mein aller die da, wie da strafen! die strafen! sie strafen!
[Violent cheering.]
[A nice lady, translating for the benefit of Anglosaxonia - they are surely getting this speech via international shortwave radio hookup, as feeds into the BBC, the CBC, NBS-ABC-CBS, and the like - explains: Adenoid Hynkel has just said that yesterday Tomania was down, but now he has risen. The Fooey now takes a glass of water, drinking some of it, and additionally pouring some down his trousers. Although the arm-salutes of the crowd are to the modern eye explicit, and fully phallic, I guess the 1940 Hollywood censors laboured under a certain innocence. That would explain why they let this particular footage, not really acceptable even in 2018, right through. I blush at discussing such stuff here on blogspot. But however juvenile the humour, the phallic routine does make clear, as nothing else ever could, what drives the world's Great Dictators, both back in 1940 and right now, early in 2018. Such a discussion, however salacious, I think I owe to this month's diligent little bevy of Russian downloaders, especially now that Mr Alexei A. Navalny and his brother seem to be in danger of getting roughed up.]
Demokratsi schtonk. [Impressive rhetorical pause.] Liberti schtonk. [Impressive rhetorical pause.] Free SPRECHEN schtonk.
[It is at this point that the nice lady is first seen to be a bit tendentious in the translations she is offering over the shortwave links to Anglosaxonia.]
Tomania mit der grotze Army in der Welt! der grotze Navy in der Welt! mit seiner der grotze Alles! und einer to sakriface. Ei - alles! und einer strotten tighten de Belten.
[The well-decorated Minister of War, Field Marshall Herring, now rises to his feet and announces, with deep pathos, Herr Hinnkel, ICH von go försten. He tightens his belt, which pops open as soon as he again sits down.]
Ah, Herring! Puppsching Herring, Bismarck-Herring! Mit sein' Ülten sagt er plärrten. Ah, from der Harten sagt er elderbütz - ein Herring.
Und Garbitsch. [This is the Minister of the Interior - a good stand-in for the actual Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels, as Garbitsch is a good stand-in for the actual Oberbefehlshaber Hermann Wilhelm Göring.] Herr Garbitsch Wunds endt ülten sagt - Herring und Herr Garbitsch, acch! Herring schutten smelten fein from Garbitsch, und Garbitsch schutten smelten fein from Herring - Herring und Garbitsch.
[The Fooey now brushes tears from his eyes with the end of his darkly mililtary necktie. The nice lady explains in English, for the benefit of networked Anglosaxonia, that His Excellency recalls the struggles of his earlier days, shared by his two loyal comrades. People in the original 1940 screening rooms would have reflected on those early Munich days, notorious as the background to Mein Kampf.]
Wasüll! Hunde stretz: Eh die Flüten, sagt er, Klüten sind in einer Hütten nie. Ein, der stritz mit seiner Gülden, sagt er flärten. Ein Säck Stritzensekt, ein Säck Strittensucht, ein Säck Strittensekt und ein - Enough! Sie will's stretz mit sein Eltensekt.
Ah, und die Aryan. Und die aryan Maiden! Ah, die aryan Maiden ah, die Delikatessen mit die Schön; und die Flechsen mit die Stresses. [The Fooey conveys with gestures his impression of long flaxen tresses, I suppose as they might have appeared on Rapunzel when it was necessary for somebody to clamber up into her tower.] Ah, und der Rühhstein mit der Muss, ei, der Muss [the Fooey intimates with a fresh gesture how nice it is to see muscles on ladies] - für der Kinder Katzenjammer der Katzenjammer mit der Utten, sagt er, Hitten, Fighten, Hutten, Fighten, Dotten, Uttensekt! He! Soldiers for Hynkel!
[Violent cheering. Herring is seen simpering as he claps.]
Wir zenn: der Aryan und, na: der Chewton. Der Chewton! Und da strifft das Sauerkraut mit der Chewton; und der Leberwurst mit der Chewton; ei, der Flitzensekt dahinter mit der Chewton; ei! der Fluten sagt er klärten; und der Strenglichen mit der Ulten sagt er flärten; und der Blitzen sagt er, Helden: Besick! Besack! - Der Chewton, uuhh, der Chewton!
[The microphone wilts like a daffodil in late May, evidently ashamed at the garbage which it is herewith having to relay around the globe. The nice lady explains, for Anglosaxonia, that His Excellency has just referred to the Jewish people.]
[Violent cheering.]
Und, na: Straf mit sein Ülten, sagt er, flärten; der Flärten mit der Ülten sagt er flärten und striff mit seiner Totztrutz eine die Fluten. Der Heer truss eine, nach Europe - Blitzkrieg, fratsch, kratz mit Sekadelten. [Now with mounting passion; the Fooey is working himself up something awful:] An feine Ulz straf mit seine und den French; und mein Ohrsein straft mit seiner Finnland; und mein Ohrsein straft mit seiner Russia - weil Strass der Welle. Ei! ei, der Flutzen Mieder hell's der Streff. Ei, der schtink deiner schtunken, der schtunken mit der Europe und schtunken mit der Höll. Ei! Ein sieht all der Grotzes - mit seine - Tomania!
[Violent cheering.]
[The nice lady in some versions I have seen - but all I can find this week is, oddly, cut off - explains to Anglosaxonia that For the rest of the world, the Fooey says he has nothing but peace in his heart.]
So much, then, for Deutsche Sprachlehre Effort Number One.
Effort Number Two came in the summer of 1974, when it became evident that my plans for fleeing Canada for the more congenial UK were headed for success, and when I had accordingly resolved upon a preliminary Continental holiday. (Conveniently, Michaelmas Term at college would not be starting until early October.) With Dalhousie University coursework finished, I had maybe half a month to spend on campus, madly cramming such German as could now be crammed. So I pored and pored over a textbook. Still better, I played and replayed reels of magnetic tape in the Dalhousie "Language Lab", into bulky headphones, like some youthful MI6 operative.
Such tape-and-headphones work proves invaluable. Things stick in the mind from robotic repetition, remaining immune from the deskilling, in other words from the decay, that besets more cerebral modes of learning.
That female voice in the headphones, making it abundantly clear that yes, the thing IS now being got ready in her kitchen (I put the rewind button to repeated good use): Jetzt wird gekocht! Jetzt wird gekocht! Jetzt wird gekocht!
Or that shocked male voice, as the full horror of an unprecedented situation at the Platform sinks in: Wass - der Zug fährt nicht pünktlich ab? ("WHAT? Is the train not leaving on time?")
And best of all, a male voice, this time oozing and dripping with condescension, as the Long Vowel is made duly vivid (I reflect on this one quite a bit now, thinking how cold life is liable to prove in my envisaged Tartu County accommodation, 18 months from now, with merely a masonry heating system in prospect): Haben Sie ZENTRALheizung? ("Do you have Central Heating?" - tsentraaaaaaaaaaal...)
Effort Number Two was, in its limited terms of reference, something of a success. I could kinda-sorta chat in German a little when hiking that July in the Austrian Alps, staying in a backpackers' hostel at altitude. And I had already been able to announce blithely, for the benefit of others in my compartment, as the night train from Ostend rolled into Vienna, Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume (or some approximation thereto).
Effort Number Three was around 1991, and did not last long, and did not produce notable results. I started a good grammar book, but seem to have abandoned it just a third or a half of the way through.
Effort Number Four was my most serious. This kicked off late in 2013, when I was preparing for surgery. Being too ill to face the normal (modest, low-level) workload in maths, physics, astronomy, and computing, I resolved on at least tackling German thoroughly, from the same book as I had used to scant good effect back in Effort Three. Here was an opportunity as good as the Great Opportunity of 1974, or better - a slab of unbroken time, with a chance to concentrate! So with blanket over knees, and catheter draining steadily, and the Knife impending, I set to work doggedly enough.
My timelog shows that things started off on 2013-12-14 with 3 hours, 13 minutes ("03h13"). Just before surgery, when going to bed on 2014-01-23, I had put in a total of 104h27. A period of increasing strength followed the Knife, with a release from hospital on 2014-01-27. On the evening of that day, my cumulative total had reached 115h52.
I passed the critical 200-hour mark in German on 2014-05-07. At this point, convalescence was over, with the normal run of duties now exerting its normal steady, distracting, pull. Enthusiasm for the "Special Subject" which was German had flagged by 2014-12-20, with a cumulative total on that date of 272h19. From that point onward, my timelogs show, again and again, mainly just WOCHE VERLOREN ("week lost"). As of 2017-08-11, I had hardly gone much beyond the already-mentioned 272h19, with now a total of just 278h11 (a day of FA oder etwas, says the log - "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, or something").
And, as I said at the outset of this week's posting, I am this month finding myself not even correctly pluralizing die Frage.
****
How can decay in skill, whether in maths or in German or any other important thing, be avoided?
(1) Continuity of effort is encouraged by detailed time-logging, in a style at which I have hinted by citing the pertinent statistics from my Effort Number Four.
(2) Skills seem to bear up surprisingly well through surprisingly small refreshers, provided the refreshers are sufficiently frequent. Humiliated though I am by my current German fiasco, I do note that French stays up rather well when spoken casually just once a week, for around ten minutes per conversational session. I note in the same way that Latin stays up rather well when used five or so days per week, in the unstressful setting of the Liturgia horarum.
So now it is clear what I have to do with German. After reviewing and recovering lost ground, it will be enough to read Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, or Deutsche Welle, or similar online material, just briefly each week, keeping a duly sharp eye on such things as genders of nouns, or again on irregular verb forms. Google Translate is a rather false friend in the undertaking, since it can instill inaccurate impressions of mastery. But two true friends are not far to find. One the one hand is the traditional printed dictionary. (As I have already marked on some previous blogspot occasion, my own is a fat old Brockhaus.) On the other hand is that quick untier-of-knots, the Listen-Di Donato-Franklin Big Yellow Book of German Verbs. (The front-cover blurb is helpful: "555 FULLY CONJUGATED VERBS. The Most Comprehensive Reference and Practice for German Verbs! Conjugations Illustrated with 5,000 Usage Examples /.../").
So now it is clear what I have to do with German. After reviewing and recovering lost ground, it will be enough to read Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, or Deutsche Welle, or similar online material, just briefly each week, keeping a duly sharp eye on such things as genders of nouns, or again on irregular verb forms. Google Translate is a rather false friend in the undertaking, since it can instill inaccurate impressions of mastery. But two true friends are not far to find. One the one hand is the traditional printed dictionary. (As I have already marked on some previous blogspot occasion, my own is a fat old Brockhaus.) On the other hand is that quick untier-of-knots, the Listen-Di Donato-Franklin Big Yellow Book of German Verbs. (The front-cover blurb is helpful: "555 FULLY CONJUGATED VERBS. The Most Comprehensive Reference and Practice for German Verbs! Conjugations Illustrated with 5,000 Usage Examples /.../").
****
As for the individual, so too for the community. Even whole nations may lose skills. I finish by giving three examples.
(A) Upon looking at old YouTube clips of locomotive manufacture, or of shipbuilding, we may well ask ourselves: how much has British industrial expertise declined since the 1930s?
(B) Russia used to be a worthy colleague of the West in mathematical physics. (As young Russians could get the Feynman physics lectures in their local bookstores, duly translated, so could we, here in the West, get an English translation of Landau-and-Lifschitz for our classical mechanics. I don't know how many people in Toronto read very much in that scary book. But even having it on the shelf generated a certain good cheer, a certain quiet professional pride. Prof. Garrison of course urged me to work from it. I would suspect our particular little chat gets played out between prof and research assistant over and over and over here in Toronto, year upon year upon year, and that such chats are even more common in the big USA and UK universities.) Now, however, Russian academia is said to be hollowing out. The recent introduction of "patriotic subjects" at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology might be one bad sign, among others. The more time is invested in studying "Russian greatness", and other silly such things, the less remains for the real work of div-grad-curl, or again of differentuial topology.
(C) It is alarming that aspects of chip design are said to have migrated from the USA to Asia. Intel is not looking good in the current Meltdown-cum-Spectre CPU-design crisis. Will future historians, in their schematizing way, perhaps be taking this pair of security exploits as a milestone in America's cyber deskilling?
[This is the end of the current blog posting.]
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