How much is human consciousness shaped by language? Somewhat, says theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. He’s more interested in the other things that shape it, like what he calls the “lake of sensation” — colors, lights and sounds. I guess you could argue that those sensations themselves comprise the elements of a language of consciousness.

Humphrey views this kind of raw feeling as predating language in infants. Maybe, but recent research on the bilingual brain suggests that we may begin our language development as early as in the womb. I talk with the host of the Big Show’s Science podcast Rhitu Chatterjee about this. She did her own podcast on the subject. One of the takeaway results of the research is that babies reared in a bilingual setting can distinguish between the two languages, and also between those familiar languages and unfamiliar ones.

Finally, we consider poetry. Some poems might be seen as attempts to revert to a pre-linguistic form of communication. Others try to bridge the gulf between consciousness and language. And then there’s the language of former Turkmenistan leader Saparmurat Niyazov. He liked to call himself Turkmenbashi or Leader of Turkmens (he was the self-appointed president of the Association of Turkmens of the World). His poetry was less engaged with issues of consciousness or language, and more with his own stupendously elevated place in the world. Not so much a lake of sensation as an ocean of self-regard:

I am the Turkmen spirit
And I was reborn
To bring you a golden age and happiness
I came here as a envoy of prosperity
And the music of the melody of life.

Photos: Joseph Pons, Wikimedia Commons

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The French of Gréco (pictured) is moody and melodramatic, as befits this veteran chanteuse. Her pitch swoops to low octave depths and her Rs rrrrroll, as she sings of love, betrayal and Paris. The songs sound like personal confessions, but most are not: she became famous by singing the poems and lyrics of Raymond Queneau, Jacques Prévert and others. Now in her 80s, Gréco is bringing her über-Frenchness to a London stage.

Anna Sam records the mendacious and the mundane that she overhears at the supermarket checkout.

Sam recently retired after eight years working as a hôtesse de caisse (cash till hostess) — that was her official title. Less officially, she was a beepeuse (a woman who beeps). She was doing it to bankroll her university degree in French literature — not that the customers knew, or would have cared.

Anna Sam overhead humanity at its meanest and most idiotic. Couples surreptitiously kissing in the frozen food section, or having sex next to the detergents. People so umbilically attached to their mobile phones that that they didn’t stop to say “please” or “thank you.” Mothers telling their children: “If you don’t work hard at school, you’ll end up a like that lady behind the counter.” And when she clocked off and went home, Sam couldn’t stop hearing the beep…beep…beep of the scanner. She recorded her observations in a blog, which became a book, Les Tribulations d’une Caissière (translated into several languages including English). Her fame may yet spread, with talk of a movie.

Also in the pod, the UN Security Council resolution that got lost in translation. Resolution 242. is one of the Security Council’s most famous documents, the so-called land-for-peace concept in the Middle East. The French and English versions don’t quite say the same thing. The result? Confusion and conflict, with no end in sight. Not a good advertisement for translation or multilingualism.

And to round things off, we hear from the founders of Meena, an Arabic-English bilingual poetry journal, out of the U.S. port of New Orleans and the Egyptian port of Alexandria. (Meena means port of entry). Arabic never did sound so sweet.

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I heard about this film many months ago. What really intrigued me about it was that the filmmakers — Marcia Jarmel and her husband Ken Schneider — have a big stake in this subject themselves. Ten years ago, they enrolled their older son into a Chinese immersion elementary school. A few years later, they did the same with their other son. It seemed to me that the best way to do a story about the film was to do a story about the Jarmel-Schneider family. So I interviewed them all at their house in the Richmond District of San Francisco (where many local stores are owned by Chinese speakers).

Of the four school students profiled in Speaking in Tongues, one is close in circumstance and motivation to the two Jarmel-Schneider boys. Julian Ennis is a high school sophomore, whose white middle class American parents have no obvious link to China or the Chinese language. Yet their son is taking the highest level of Chinese offered in San Francisco schools. He — and they — are in it for cultural exposure, as global citizens.

Among the the others profiled, Durell Laury is attending a Chinese immersion elementary school. He is the only kid from his housing project going to that school. He mother says learning Chinese is “a way in and a way out.” There’s also Jason Patiño, attending Spanish immersion school. His Mexican parents — who didn’t attend a day of school themselves — listen to other Spanish speaking parents at the school, as they demand more English be spoken. But without the Spanish Jason is learning in class, chances are he’d forget the language of his parents.

Finally there’s Kelly Wong, whose Chinese-American parents speak virtually no Chinese. Kelly is learning both Mandarin and Cantonese. This allows her, among other things, to have a meaningful relationship with her Cantonese-speaking grandmother. There’s one extraordinary scene at a family banquet, at which her great aunt objects to her learning Chinese, while another family member defends the decision to send her to Chinese immersion school. That scene feels like it could one day be America writ large, as migration and globalization bring the world to America, and the idea of bilingualism takes hold — and not just in polyglot places like San Francisco.

Local listings for Speaking in Tongues are here.

Also, I talk with linguist Deborah Fallows on living in China and learning Chinese. In Chinese, she says, rude is polite, and brusque is intimate. This comes out in all kinds of disorienting (no pun intended) ways, but the bottom line is, if people feel close to you in China, they will use a language of intimacy. That’s another way of saying they will dispense with please, thank you and other niceties. Their language is likely to seem harsh and abrupt. Just remember: it’s a compliment! Check out other interviews Fallows did with Time and NPR. Better yet, listen to my interview with her, which is longer, weirder and funnier: we do Chinese names for foreigners, English names for Chinese people, and what happened to the language during the Sichuan earthquake. Here’s her book in the United States and the UK.

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Gauldin has a good record of improving ELL students’ English skills, in marked contrast to many of the schools in neighboring Los Angeles. The situation there is so dire that the the U.S. Department of Education has launched a investigation to determine if if the Los Angeles Unified School District is violating the civil rights of English Language Learners. The feds are also taking a look at Boston schools. (A few months ago, Carol Hills and I discussed Arizona’s decision to penalize ELL teachers whose accents are deemed too foreign. Arizona is still defending its policy, which itself has come under federal scrutiny.)

Also in the podcast, a Creole-speaking Haitian girl newly arrived in New York City enrols in a high school, with help from a community group in Brooklyn. The girl fled Haiti after the earthquake there earlier this year. Like most Haitians, she wants to master the language and stay here permanently. But she only has a U.S. visitor visa. Then it’s back to California as an Arabic immersion program gets underway at FAME a public charter school in Fremont, CA.

Reporter Hana Baba provided us with this nice slideshow of scenes from the school, including the photo (left) of school founder Maram Alaiwat. Not surprisingly, many of the students at this K-10th grade school are of Arab and/or Muslim descent. More surprising is that the school has opened its doors to the FBI. The bureau offers FAME 5th graders the chance to become “junior special agents” .

Finally, the first Zulu-English dictionary in 40 years has just been published in South Africa. Some English speakers already know a few words of Zulu (also known as isiZulu) — words like ubuntu. Zulu has also borrowed from other South African languages such as Afrikaans, and many Zulu words offer their own linguistic takes on apartheid and AIDS. We talk with the publishing manager of Oxford University Press South Africa. Download MP3

5. An Israeli-British study shows bilinguals may respond differently depending on the language of the questions. According to the study, Arab Israelis are more likely to respond warmly to certain Jewish names if they are asked about them in Hewbrew, as compared to Arabic. Does this mean we think differently in different languages? No, but it might help explain why someone who is bilingual (or trilingual in Rhitu’s case) is “more polite” in one language.

4. New research points to a possible breakthrough in deciphering ancient scripts.

3. Sarah Palin compares her coinage of new English words to Shakespeare’s. Her most recent coinage, of course, was refudiate, which she said on Fox News and then tweeted a few days later. (She somewhat refudiated her own invention by zapping the tweet, before acknowledging it and making the Shakespeare comparison in a subsequent post.) For his part, Shakespeare came up with gnarled, premediated, fitful, and hundreds more, none of them via Twitter. Maybe in time we’ll prize refudiate as highly. My guess though, is that like wee-wee’d up, an Obamaism, refudiate ain’t gonna make it. Let’s face it: most of Shakespeare’s coinages appear to have been based not on ignorance but inventiveness.

2. A science writer argues in a Discover magazine blog post that language diversity condemns a society to poverty. I don’t fully understand the argument, but it made for a lively conversation.

1. Clark’s adventures in linguistically confused Belgium. Yes, The World’s tech man about town has just moved to the land of beer, waffles and linguistic discontent. So which of the country’s two main languages should Clark learn, Dutch or French? And in choosing one, has he upset speakers of the other? Mr Boyd reveals all, including the surprising nationality of the podcaster/language teacher he’s following.

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Next in the pod is an interview with Seattle-area rabbi Mark Glickman (pictured, looking at the camera). He recently visited the Cairo Genizah, which once boasted one of Judaism’s largest repositories of documents. Many of these documents dated back hundreds of years, but at the Cairo Genizah, they were, in Rabbi Glickman’s words, “a messy, jumbled dump.” They are now stored, in somewhat better shape, in archives around the world — in the UK, the US and Israel. Glickman explains why so many sacred Jewish texts were written in Arabic.

Next, a report from Syria on book-publishing and reading in Arabic-speaking world. Books in Arabic have a long history (pictured is an Arabic version of One Thousand and One Nights from the 14th Century). But not many people these days read books in Arabic: a recent UN survey reported that less than 2% of native Arabic speakers reads even one book a year. That means that fewer books are being published. However, you can still find bookstores in cities like Damascus and Beirut; they’re trying mightily to revive the practice of reading in Arabic.

A short plug here for Ed Park’s novel, Personal Days. The book is replete with inventive wordplay (unwanted backrub given by a character named Jack = jackrub; character called Graham with whiny British accent is renamed Grime). Plus, there’s a nice un-Eating Sideways moment. It’s when the narrator suggests that there should be a French expression, along the lines of l’esprit d’escalier, for the sensation of being initially amused but later unnerved by something that’s said to you.

Finally, we visit the New York Public Library for a smell test. What does a book’s particular odor convey to an educated nose, such as that of Shelley Smith (pictured) of the library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division?
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Meza: “I like the hustle and the bustle of the place. And people coming in and out all of the time. Thank you. Hasta Luego. Thank you man. Appreciate it guys.”

Porzucki: This would be your standard Tex-Mex joint — there’s Tejano music in the background and Mexican pralines for sale — except Juan, has a taste for wordplay. When he opened the restaurant 29 years ago he needed a catchy name. Something that would stand out in Austin, a town with a glut of Mexican restaurants. It needed to be one in a million. No, make that…

Meza: “Juan in a Million. It’s a name that sticks.”

Porzucki: That’s right, Juan, J-U-A-N, in a Million It’s a bilingual pun. By definition, a pun is a form of wordplay that exploits the similar sounds of two words. A bilingual pun plays upon the sounds of two words in two languages. In this case, Juan and One. It’s not just between English and Spanish that restaurant owners are punning.

Hallock: “The Asian restaurants are the ones that are really thick with puns especially thai and wok.”

Porzucki: Gary Hallock is the local authority on all things punny. He organizes the annual O. Henry Pun-off World Championship here in Austin. It’s a verbal battle in which punsters compete for the title of Word Champion. Gary’s a Word Champion himself. I ask him about restaurants that pun bilingually. He pulls out a long handwritten list that he has compiled from around the country.

Porzucki: “Wow, you have quite a list here…”
Hallock: “I printed out a copy…My favorite was Thai Me Up (laugh) and Wok Around the Clock, En-Thai-Sing and Pho Shizzle, that’s P-H-O Shizzle
Porzucki: “That’s a play on sort of rap culture and…”
Hallock: “Right, right, right, that’s trilingual sort of. And I like Hard Wok Café and Thai Tanic.”

Porzucki: It’s true, ethnic cuisine is becoming more and more a part of the mainstream American diet. But according to Gary, some people may need a little more encouragement to try something new.

Hallock: “If you see a weird name that you can’t pronounce or doesn’t mean anything to you, you’ll think that’s a restaurant that’s probably this ethnic or that but if you see one where the owner of the restaurant is playing with the words and seeming to be having a little fun, you might feel a little more comfortable going in.”

Porzucki: Thai Tanic, Hard Wok Café, these names may be fun to say and perhaps, provoke a chuckle or two, but can a clever name really be a successful marketing strategy? For Kristen Studer and Cody Fields, wordplay is integral to marketing their product, empanadas. That is, mmmpanadas. The couple owns Mmmpanada! a food truck selling empanadas to late night Austiners. I caught up with the couple in their kitchen as they mixed up a batch of dough.

Kristen Studer and Cody Fields

Studer: “We decided on a different name that we weren’t all that excited about. It was Papa’s Empanadas Which is fine, you know…but…at our house we have those refrigerator magnets and Cody had spelled out empanada on the refrigerator but we didn’t have an ‘e.’ And then one day … I had just walked by the refrigerator and was like ‘mmmpanada,’ ‘mmmpanana,’ ‘MMMPANADA!’”

Porzucki: The name seems to be working. Kristin and Cody now bake more than 100 dozen empanadas each week..

Porzucki: Back at Juan in a Million, Juan is still at his post near the register greeting guests, smiling and shaking hands. The restaurant is packed. I speak with several customers who seem to agree. While the name is clever, the key to the restaurant’s decades of success according to one longtime patron Alberto Garcia…

Garcia: “It’s Juan, his personality runs this place. Without Juan there wouldn’t be this restaurant.”

Porzucki: He’s right. Without Juan, this would just be one among a million other Tex-Mex joints. A punny name may get you in the door, but as to bringing you back again – well that’s a whole other enchilada.

For The World, I’m Nina Porzucki in Austin.

• Pho Shizzle
• Thai Tanic
• Thai Me Up

This week, a look back at the career of the late Sergei Mikhalkov, who has died aged 96. During World War Two, Mikhalkov wrote the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem. After Stalin died, he rewrote the lyrics, expunging all mention of Stalin. Decades later, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian government adopted a new national anthem, but no-one particularly liked it: it just didn’t sound grand and powerful enough. So in 2000, Vladimir Putin re-installed the old tune by Alexander Alexandrov and had Mikhalkov re-write the lyrics yet again. This time round, instead of praising Stalin or Lenin, the anthem gave a nod to God. As someone who so readily held his finger to the political winds, it’s no surprise that Mikhalkov took part in smear campaigns against the likes Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Of course that was during Stalin’s rule, which means that not participating in such campaigns could have dire consequences.

Next, a conversation with Keith Spicer on Canada’s 40-year-old language laws. Spicer was the country’s first enforcer of bilingualism. Being Canadian, there wasn’t much enforcing– more like pusuading, cajoling and endless, endless debating. The way Spicer tells it, Canadians eventually embraced the law, with millions of English Canadians clamoring to learn French. He says that Quebec’s provincial language rules that outlawed signs in English and discouraged English-language expressions in French were silly but understandable, given the historical hostility to French in Anglophone Canada.

Finally, this month the British government finally apologized for its treatment of Alan Turing, who helped break the Nazis’ war codes. When Turing’s homosexuality was exposed, the British government stripped him of his security clearance and prosecuted him for gross indecency. Faced with a prison term, Turing agreed as an alternative to hormone treatment. The treatment drove him to suicide in 1954.

Also in this week’s podcast, I speak with author Katherine Russell Rich on learning Hindi at a language school in Rajasthan. Her book “Dreaming in Hindi“ is also an investigation into what happens to our brains when we learn a learn a language. Rich quizzed several neurolinguists, so she could get a handle on the challenges and all-round weird linguistic moments she encountered in her pursuit of Hindi mastery. So there are answers (not THE answers perhaps) to the following: what’s the difference between learning a language “intuitively” as a child and in a classroom setting later on? Why is it so difficult to have a perfect accent in your second or third language? Why do so many people verbally shut down for weeks or months when learning a language? How does language effect personality and vice versa? And is there blowback from your learned language that changes how you speak your native tongue?

On the subject of the last question, check out this fascinating conversation on The World’s science podcast on the latest research into what happens to your native tongue when you learn a second one. According to this study, you’ll never read your first language in the same way. Also, that cognates can trip you up.

Finally, we cast a somewhat shameful eye over a tough-to-translate expression in Spanish.

For this month’s language news podcast, I roped in The World’s Online Editor Clark Boyd. In a former life, Clark taught English in Hungary — yes that’s a barely younger version of him by the signpost. He has some choice stories about that time. (I wish I could offer up a hyperlink here…) Clark and I chose the following stories:

5. Slovakia passes a law banning Hungarian in official communications in some of its Hungarian-speaking regions. The is just the latest in a long-running series of bureaucratic battles between this small country’s Slovak-speaking majority and its Hungarian minority. Hungarians are getting used to this. Because they found themselves on the losing side in World War One, their country contracted. That left millions of Hungarian speakers living in surrounding nations, primarily Slovakia, Romania and Serbia. And aside from –in some cases — sharing the same script, the Hungarian language bears no similiarities to the languages spoken in these countries. Cue suspicion, fear and loathing.

4. New research out of Italy seeks to show why babies and young children are so adept at learning two languages simultaneously. It’s more evidence of the possible advantages — social and neurological — that bilingual speakers have over monolinguals. Above is a picture I took inside a Phoenix-area elementary school that has had to change its curriculum because it was deemed to be teaching “too bilingually.”

3. Stereotyped Japanese toy story alert: toy maker Takara Tomy has come up with a device that claims to translate dog noises into human language. . That language, for the time being, is Japanese, so it might not work for you. This may or may not be entirely a gimmick. But even if there is something to the translation “algorithm,” do you ready want to know what pooch is saying? $220 will buy you a Bowlingual.

2. Six years ago, the Malaysian government ordered its public schools to start teaching math and science in English. After several protests, mainly from ethnic Malays, the government has lifted the requirement, so that schools can choose which language to use. The main languages of instruction there are Bahasa Malay, Chinese and Tamil. This will please rural schools where finding a English-speaking math or science teacher was vitually impossible. But the fear now is that Malaysia may fall further behind the the likes of Singapore and Hong Kong in producing a tech-smart, English-speaking younger generation.

1. Good news for people who occasionally swear: results from a new study show that the trangressive nature of cursing helps when it comes to tolerating pain. You can keep your hand submerged in a jar of ice for longer if you put filthy words to your feelings. Try it at home! However, this methodology won’t work if you are a over-sweary person, you swear constantly even in your most painless moments: the curses will have lost their meaning.

A bonus this week: our favorite hated words. This is inspired by the Ledbury Poetry Festival in England which asked poets to come up with their least favorite words. The winner: pulchritude — not a bad word till you know what it means: beauty. Clearly, it needs a meaning reset. How about the lingering smell of garbage? Other words Clark and I discuss: benign, dadrock, homeland and alien.

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