Making Sense of Sentences I

In Rhetoric, Aristotle defines the sentence as a complete thought. Princeton professor and literary critic Jeff Dolven notes one objective shared by all sentences: "The purpose of a sentence is to end."

Dolven is offering his thoughts on a "beloved or bedeviling sentence" each week in his current 8-part series "Life Sentences," appearing in the Paris Review. The first to be dissected comes from the pen of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:"The world is everything that is the case."

Why not bookmark Verbum Sapienti and catch the rest of the series?   

Effects of EFL Proficiency on Students

As language plays a key role in the transmission of information and the regulation of cognitive processes, proficiency may have profound effects on learning and development, particularly when it involves mastering a foreign language. A recent Australian study examines the experiences of five international students from Brazil, China, Colombia, Mongolia, and Saudi Arabia, and finds that the higher the level of English language proficiency, the lower the levels of cultural stress, academic difficulties, and negative emotions. For details, see "The Influence of Language Difficulties on the Wellbeing of International Students: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis."

Simple Truths Mask Complex Losses

The days that English shares our planet with thousands of other languages are numbered. A century from now, a time traveler from our age would be apt to notice two things about the 22nd-century language landscape, predicts Columbia University's Dr. John McWhorter. There are vastly fewer languages, and they are far simpler, in particular, as they are spoken. While some may lament the reduction of 6,000 different languages to just 600, the process is already underway, as the world witnesses the birth of optimized versions of old languages, McWhorter concludes in "What the World Will Speak in 2115." 

Organizing the Humanities

Many literary historians concede that the traditional pedagogical organization of the humanities according to national language and literature has exceeded its expiration date, yet there is little consensus on alternatives. Mobile demography, immigration, and dispersed media networks defy such categorization, but post- nationalism can blind us to the economic and national power struggles that underlie literary politics and to conflict among monocultural states and multilingual communities. Cf. Emily Apter's Untranslatables: A World System

Birth of a Language

The story of the English language is an extraordinary one. It has the characteristics of a bold and successful adventure: tenacity, luck, near extinction on more than one occasion, dazzling flexibility, and an extraordinary power to absorb. And it's still going on. New dialects, new Englishes, are evolving all the time all over the world. But every story needs a beginning and, in the case at hand, who better than Lord Melvyn Bragg and the BBC to recount the tale of the birth of this remarkable language?

What Happens in Literature

Uniqueness is mediated by language, the Irish author Kevin Stevens reminds us in his retrospective review of Saul Bellow's Herzog.  Not simply as style, but as the medium through which ideas, images, and narrative are captured and conveyed, language is what happens in literature, as Richard Ford, an American writer, aptly puts it. It is the field of battle for literary genius and the canvas of the author's vision. "Without the brilliance of their language," Stevens observes,  it. It is the field of battle for literary genius and the canvas of the author's vision. "Without the brilliance of their language," Stevens observes, "Moby Dick's symbolism would be heavy handed, Henry V's speechmaking jingoistic, The Waste Land's imagery hollow."   

Stirring Saxon Words

Every single one of the 100 most frequently used words in the English language is of Anglo-Saxon origin. So are all the following words from Prime Minister Winston Churchill´s 4 June 1940 address to the House of Commons ― save one. Care to hazard a guess which is the sole exception? “We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” To unearth the Norman invader, see English Comes From Holland and Germany.

Practically Abandoned by One’s Friends

Whence, where, and why the English major? Adam Gopnik asks in the New Yorker, noting its impending demise like the Latin prerequisite before it ― “a dying choice bound to a dead subject.” Despite his sympathies, Gopnik finds the apologias of the discipline's defenders unpersuasive, mocking “The Economic Case for Saving the Humanities” proffered by Brown University’s Christina Paxson as “the kind of Letter to a Crazy Republican Congressman that university presidents get to write.” Like most pragmatic parries, it surrenders the tradition’s essence in the vain hope its accidents might carry the day or, at least, prolong the inevitable. Hardly surprising, given the bottom line for Paxson’s fellow economists: “Is it worth it?” ― not the best way to defend the intrinsic worth of the humanities, even in an age that abhors such “useless knowledge.”

Buzzwords Drone On

Veteran readers may recall our calling attention to the problem of word inflation. Buzzwords are a prime culprit, and when they become so pervasive they’re virtually inaudible, we should start listening, as Judith Shulevitz, science editor of  the New Republic, reminds us. Take disruptive, which permeates cliché-ridden venues like the platforms at TED talks and the pages of Forbes. "Disruptive doesn’t mean what it used to," she notes. "It’s no longer the adjective you hope not to hear in parent-teacher conferences. It’s what you want investors to say about your new social-media app" ― ah, there's the rub. For additional examples of insufferable argot, read her essay.

Building Blocks of English: Affixes

Affixes are building blocks of language. The four types are prefixes, suffixes, combining forms, and infixes. We are familiar with prefixes, which placed at the beginning of words qualify their meaning (inappropriate) and suffixes, which convert the stem into another part of speech (celebrate to celebration). Combining forms, which can be either prefixes or suffixes, add another layer of meaning to words (biochemistry; pesticide). The least common affixes are infixes, which are placed within a word (in this case, to form the plural cupsful).

A Curtain Call for Culture?

If loss can be pregnant with meaning, the recent death of historian Jacques Barzun assuredly was. It portended, as Ben Zimmer, Boston Globe language columnist, noted, "the passing of a classically informed view of language as a barometer of human nature" and of one of the English language's most committed defenders. And that barely scratches our presentiment of loss. The departure of one who so brilliantly embodied the "richest and best in the much abused word 'culture' seemed to mark the end of an era," Wilfred McCay writes in the University Bookman, "a curtain-lowering that left us without the promise of any encore." Hope or Despair? Roger Kimball and the Future of Culture