Rubrication

It has often been said that Irish is a language with little use, and no place in the new Ireland and should no longer be a cumpulsory subject taught in schools. This notion needs to be unclothed as a complicated psychological condition and not a well reasoned argument.

School is cumpulsory. Numerous subjects in school are cumpulsory. English is cumpulsory. Maths are cumpulsory. While it is clearly desirable to have students who are enthusiastically engaged with subjects such that they study them even in their spare time, it is unreasonble to assume that that state should support a public school curriculum in which no subjects are cumpulsory and a basic level of knowledge is unecessary in any subject. I’m sure that most reasonable people will agree that some cumpulsory subjects are necessary and
desirable for the education of the public.

This naturally leads as to ask which cumpulsory subjects these should
be? Bilingualism has enormous cognitive benefits as has been demonstrated by numerous studies. It is hard to overstate the pedagogic value of bilingualism. The positive effects bleed into other subjects including performance in mathematics, critical thinking and of course learning subsequent languages.

The indirect socialogical benefits are also numerous. Nothing can unmask subjectivity and perspective like the study of another language. Additional languages provide access to conversations that could never have been had otherwise. If the language has a literary tradition (as does Irish) they also give access to a body of literature that might otherwise be inaccessable.

While the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not widely believed, it would be hard to suggest that some form of the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is untrue even for universalists (I’ll have to make this a whole other post sometime).

Bilingualism should be considered a minimal basic requirement of education. What should this baseline be? I contend that Irish is the natural choice.

Irish is already fairly well known by most people in Ireland. While competency in speaking the language is low, people I have met tend to know quite a lot more than a ‘copla focal’. It would require very little effort for many Irish to gain speaking competency.

It is often claimed, half in jest, that either Polish or Mandarin should be the cumpulsory language since more people in Ireland use them daily then use the Irish language. For true bilingualism to occur it is neccessary that at least one of the additional languages taught, be taught universally. It is imperative to expect that one can use the langauge, at least at a basic level, and be understood. It is unreasonable to think that the language that will have these qualities is either Mandarin or Polish. It can’t be possible to make either of
them the single baseline cumpulsory language in school.

While the teaching (and speaking) of these two languages should be encouraged they can not be a replacement for Irish. Irish itself is the language with the greatest likelyhood of generating the socialogical consesus necessary to be a universally spoken language on the Island.

Irish, with its poetic character and its extensive and historically important literature should be seen as one of the pillars of pedagogy in public education in Ireland.

I, as an immigrant, have little comprehension of the complex emotional relationship that natives of the island have with the Irish language, besides the obvious understanding that it is indeed very complex. I have witnessed more than once, the same person in the same conversation both arguing for, and against, the importance of saving the Irish language. With such internal conflict amoung many Irish people, it is no wonder that there is a public conflict concerning the language.

There are a couple of vectors that I think that may have contributed to this complicated situation. One of which the cumpulsory teaching of the Irish language. The fact that after 12 years of study of the language in school, only a tiny percentage of people are able to speak the language with any fluency has to have had a negative effect. I’ve often heard people say that the language is impossible to learn. This is far from true, but it may indeed seem that way due to the tremendously poor methods employed in the teaching of the language.

I have heard from many sources that Irish is taught as a dead language; without a focus on conversation, and forcing memorization without teaching rules of grammar. This is a confluence of the absolute *WORST* ways to teach a language. Is it any wonder that people who take 4 years of French in the Irish school system feel far more comfortable in French? There is a large body of study on the proper methodology for teaching languages to obtain fluency. These methods need to be employed and the old techniques should be removed IMMEDIATELY before they can inflict psychological damage on yet another generation.

The Irish government is currently cash rich, and of all possible uses of money, nothing has a greater benefit for society and the long term economic health of a country than proper education. It has a nearly incalculable benefit. With this in mind my program for obtaining true bilingualism on the island would be the following.

Money should be made available to all teachers and child minders to spend signifcant periods in the Gaeltacht in the interest in assuring a high standard of fluency for those that are responsible for the education of our children.

Money should be made available to entirely subsize child care given through the Irish language. This would remove the hurdle for those who are usually at the greatest economic disadvantage in obtaining the Irish language. The money spent on child care would serve the dual perpose of education and social welfare while not increasing costs to the state significantly for either goal.

Money should be made available for adult education in the language. It is more expensive to obtain Irish language instruction in the Republic than it is in Northern Ireland. RTE should give their Irish language materials away for free (charging only for the cost of media). The BBC has better free language learning materials for Irish than does any entity in the Republic. I find this a highly embarassing situation, and I hope that others do as well.

The teaching of Irish in school should be modernised with a two pronged approach focusing both on conversational Irish, and on grammar and the study of literature.

I think that if these policies were to be put in place we could see wide spread fluency in the langnuage and most importantly a bilingual island within a generation.

I don’t intend that the Irish people be forced to give up their characteristic melange of national pride and self deprecation. I would never suggest such a thing. However, this should not keep us from implementing the most effective education system that we can.

I’ve been hacking away at my program to test a theory I have about machine translation. I wrote a bit about it in a previous post but I was fairly vague. I thought I’d describe in more detail exactly how the technique would work (I’m still in phase 1).

The idea is simple. The first phase is to take a corpus in a language. Take each sentence of the source (or some other sized chunk, currently I’m limited by computational tractability to a single sentence) and recombine each element of the sentence into every possible string of n-grams. If you play with it a bit you’ll realise that there are 2^(N-1) of these for a string of size N. One way to think about it is that there are N-1 indexes into the spaces between words in the string. You can then think of each sentence as being a collection of indexes at which we combine words. This is obviously the power set of the set of indexes {1,2,3…N-1} and hence there are 2^(N-1). It turns out however that it is nice to have a special word meaning “beggining of sentence” and another for “end of sentence”, so we end up starting with N+2 words, and getting 2^(N+1). That can be a big number!

So now that we have our n-grams for each sentence we want to look at transition probabilities between n-grams. The reason for this is that various parts of a sentence have unpredictable size. In the absense of a full NL parsing system there is no way to figure out what a syntactic unit (a noun phrase for instance) will be. This process completely obviates the need for an NL parser. This in itself is a huge win since NL parsing is at least difficult and probably impossible to do correctly because of idioms and variations in dialect. With the n-grams in hand we can now look at transition frequencies amoung the various n-grams in each of the different patterns in which they were combined. At this point we enter the information into a database which stores the transition probability between every two n-grams. Let us assume that we ignore sentences larger than 12 words. This means that we have 2¹³ or 8192 words for a large sentence. This gives us 67,000,000 entries in our transition frequency matrix. O.K. So this is looking fairly intractable. If we decided that we will only look at correlations between neighbors and next neighbors however, we are back in the realm of possibility. This limitation has a certain justification beyond making things computationally feasible in that every element of the sentence will be a next nearest neighbor with an element of one of the n-gram sentences therby relating every possible syntactic unit. It should even be possible given this information to “guess” a parse based on our frequencies given a large enough corpus.

Stage 2 revolves around extracting information from a parallel corpus. We will simply perform a nearly identical procedure between two parallel corpuses.

When stage 1 and stage 2 are completed, we can use the probabilities of co-occurance from the parallel corpus in conjunction with the intra-language transition frequencies to generate “most probable” sentences.

We’ll see how it goes.

If there is one aspect of modern society that I positively can’t stand it has to be cars.

If we could stand back and look at transportation objectively, cars would just look completely ridiculous. Let us contemplate cars as transportation for a moment.

Large steel objects are hurtled towards each other at a sum relative velocity of something like 160km/h whilst carrying only one person each. They use enormous amounts of energy. They use up huge tracts of land for their storage and for the infrastructure needed to carry them. Because they have no systematic routing, they end up with lower *average* velocities during rush-hour than bicycling. They spew enormous amounts of toxic fumes. A person is killed because of one every 240 minutes in our tiny island. Cars drive demand for energy much above what it should be resulting in increased desirability of oil which serves to create pathological political instability in the middle east. They lower quality of life as they are expensive to own and care for.

In sum total, they are not only wasteful, inefficient, toxic and deadly. They are also completely unecessary. We can affect travel in much better ways. The DART is a fabulous transportation system. If we could cover the island with a system like this, it would take up far less space, use less energy, and it would be faster for the purpose of travel than cars ever could.

I often hear the various parties (including the Greens!) saying that the trafic problem should be solved that with more and bigger roads to solve the traffic problem. One need only look at LA to see the complete futility and absurdity of trying to solve the problem by throwing roads at it. LA had faster average cross town transit speeds in 1920 when trolleys were common. It would be and environmental and aesthetic disaster if we were to turn Ireland into an LA-like twisted mass of freeways.

Where I grew up, in Anchorage Alaska, there really was nothing for it but to own a car. The city center was 12 km from my home, and winter temperatures could reach as low as -40C. There was no public transportation that could be used reliably. The most frequent bus routes were served once every 45 minutes. The buses were frequently late, or even worse early, and they sometimes didn’t come at all. The transit center where all bus transfers took place was at the *edge* of town. The poor were at a terrible disadvantage. A car was necessary to hold a job. The poor also spent a disproportionate amount of income on their cars since the weather causes more repairs to be necessary than in a more moderate climate and cheap cars would break down frequently.

Things are certainly never going to be that terrible in Ireland. The public transit system is great relative to the US, even if it is terrible relative to most of Europe. I am however frightened by the lack of support for a comprehensive public transportation plan and the talk of increased roads. If anything, all public roads should be toll roads. Using cars should be discouraged, and the money could be used to provide real alternatives. Poor decisions should not be rewarded with subsidies from the state. Building roads and road maintainance are a subsidy of a poor tranportation choice.

I was perusing Wikipedia today at lunch since I left the book, “An Taistealaí”, which I’m currently reading, at home. I recently finished my first Irish book “Bagairt Ón Spás”. The latter is *much* easier reading than the former, since it was written for the instruction of teens between the ages of 12 and 15.

In any case I was roaming around the sections on syntax and morphology and I stumbled onto an article concerning Ubykh. This extremely strange Northerwestern Caucasian language is sometimes classified as polysynthetic due to the capacity of verbs to incorporate large parts of the sentence. The following sentence is, to me, quite facinating:

“aχʲazbatʂʾaʁawdətʷaajlafaqʾajtʾmadaχ!”

which translates to:

“If only you had not been able to make him take it all out from under me again for them!”

If you can’t read that because of the strange characters that you need to have present in your font, or because you don’t understand how to read IPA then don’t worry too much. You probably couldn’t pronounce it even if you could read it, since Ubykh has one of the largest consonant sets outside of South Africa. In order to compensate however it has an almost ridiculous paucity of vowels, totaling to only two.

I first learned about the Ubykh language while reading a facinating book Nart Sagas from the Caucasus. This book has one of the most incredible collections of folk tales that I have ever read. At the same time strange and familiar, the Narts hold many values that are incredibly modern and egalitarian (for instance the recognition of the sexual rights of women), whilst at the same time holding traditions that are incredibly alien (the ability to avoid blood feud by suckling at the nipple of your adversaries wife). I HIGHLY recommend this book. Really, these stories should be up there with the greek myths and the story of Cúchulainn.

Unfortunately as I was reading, I also learned of something else about the Ubykh language. “The Ubykh language died out on October 7, 1992, when its last fluent speaker (Tevfik Esenç) died in his sleep.” (wikipedia)

A tragedy to be sure. I remember the excitement I felt in reading the Nart Sagas and in the possiblity of reading the sagas in their native language, and I even contemplated the possibity of going to Caucasia and speaking with the Ubykh people in their native tongue. Alas, there are none to speak to.

For those of you who missed out on it, Richard Waghorne wrote an extremely amusing post on the Irish language. Apparently a few people were incensed. I myself thought it was quite funny and I sent it to my wife straight away. She, not being as familiar with Waghorne’s antics, was quite convinced that it was a parody.

I didn’t have time to prepare a response due to other constraints. Soon after the post appeared I found a post which covered nearly every argument that occured to me to put forward over at Talideon.com. Even the post title which had arisen in my mind was stolen by some clever soul working at Údarás na Gaeltachta before I could use it.

I’m quite convinced that Ireland is in the midst of a cultural revolution. The economy is booming in Ireland and the McCulture that can be offered by the global entertainment industry and the appeal of excessive drinking can only hold the attention spans of an affluent population for a limited time. The popularity of the Gaelscoileanna are growing rapidly and visits to Irish classes in the Gaeltacht are booming. TG4 offers reasonable entertainment value which is at least as good as most of the programming on the english language stations. And now, we find that even youtube.com has modern Irish music in its repertoire.

As evidenced by the juggernaught that is the Welsh language, or the meteoric rise of Finnish, It doesn’t take long for people to take back their native tongue. All it takes is the will to see it used.

I look forward to the day when dinosaurs like Richard Waghorne will have to make a choice of whether to move into the modern era or hide under the swiftly fading shadow of Englands hegemony.