New Scientist is Not Amused

(Cross-posted from the other place)

You might remember the couple of days a few years ago in which the overlyhonestmethods hashtag went viral on Twitter: for those of you who don’t, it was a little joke in which academics – mainly, I think, natural scientists – made not-entirely-serious “confessions” about how they do their work and the corners they might sometimes be tempted to cut.  (Everyone knows that those of us in the humanities don’t really have methods, natch.)  Then someone wrote a blog post, since taken down, on plos blogs that complained that the hashtag was dangerous because of the damage that it might do to science in the public mind.  Similar concerns were aired elsewhere; this is an example, though much less po-faced than the former.  And it was the former that sprang to mind when I read Jessica Hamzelou’s editorial piece in last week’s New Scientist.

Her target is the seasonal edition of the BMJ and its traditionally lighter tone.  Part of her complaint is that some of the jokes aren’t… well, aren’t all that funny.  She notes the paper about man-flu, which got a fair amount of media traction, as an example, asserting that “[i]f this is meant to be a joke, it’s not a very good one”.  Now: maybe papers like this are basically fluff; and maybe that even as jeux d’esprit, they sometimes don’t hit all the high comic notes.  But so it goes: I don’t think that there’s all that much to worry about here, and I’m not going to get into a discussion about humour, beyond pointing out that there’s a difference between papers that are meant to be taken lightly and those that are meant to be funny, and that I suspect the BMJ selections tend towards the former category.  But there’s another side to her complaint:

[N]ot everyone is in on the joke – and in an era of fake news, maybe it is time for a rethink. The BMJ tells journalists reporting its papers, including these daft ones, to “please remember to credit the BMJ – this assures your audience it is from a reputable source”. And indeed, this silly science often receives straight-faced coverage from influential media outlets. What’s more, once it is archived in scientific databases, these papers get cited like any other. They are even used as the basis for future studies. After all, why wouldn’t you take the BMJ seriously? […]
And how might it be read in the future? Months or years down the line, devoid of the context of Christmas, who is to say this paper won’t be cited seriously? Could it influence the study of flu?

Well: yeah, but no.  One of the points I keep making to my students is that they shouldn’t treat rhetorical questions as if they are, or are capable of doing the work of, arguments.  After all, there’s a danger someone might answer them, and not in the way they expected.  And with that in mind…

Persian and Provincialism

It's been a while since I posted a Persian update here; it was difficult to keep much momentum when the basic alteration from one week to the next was "Learned a bit, forgot a bit, didn't make much progress".  I didn't complete any of my summer exam because I looked at the page and simply couldn't read a word of it.  It took me a while to un-freeze my brain; and by that time, the semester was over and there were no lessons.

My erstwhile teacher has said I should come along to the next level of lessons all the same; but I don't think I'd be up to it - and, anyway, they don't fit easily with my other commitments.  I may resit the beginners' course in semester 2.

In the meantime, and in addition, I've found another Persian teacher, with whom I'm having one-to-one lessons via skype.  Slowly, slowly, I'm making up ground.  But... well, you know there's going to be a but.

It turns out that what I'd been learning at the University last year was very, very formal and rather outdated; were I to turn up in Tehran and speak to people, it'd be somewhat as if Jane Austen were to materialise here.  OK: I'd be understood, but people'd be puzzled, and I might not understand them too well.  What I'm learning now is much more colloquial.  Pronunciation is slightly different, with syllables dropped or contracted into each other; some of the long alephs become vavs, too: thus, for example, "they", آنها (anhā), becomes اونا (unā).  I've also learned that a lot of people really struggle with dipthongs including the vav - many younger Iranians wish it'd just go away.  Thus "sister", خواهر (^khahar), is sometimes contracted to خاهر, on the basis that the و doesn't do anything.  If you're sending a text, those spare characters can be important!  Granted, this kind of shift isn't the sort of thing about which I have to worry a great deal, but the point stands that classroom Persian and everyday Persian sometimes come apart.

(Incidentally, I struggle to pronounce خواهر, however you want to spell it.  It's something like ^khahar; but there's something about the differentiation of the "^kh" sound of the خ, and the "h" of the ه that I struggle to make, and I keep pronouncing the first "a" more like "ar", too.  I don't know why I have a mental block about it - but, on the other hand, I don't have a sister either, so it may not matter much all things considered.)

On a slightly deeper level, most verbs in the simple present are indicated by the prefix mi-.  Hence "To come", آومدن (amadan), becomes man mi'am, to mi'ai, u mi'ad for I/ you/ he or she come(s); "To eat", خوردن (hourdan) becomes man mi'houram, to mi'houri, u mi'houreh.  But some aren't: for example, "To have", داشتن (dāshtan) becomes man daram, to dari, u dareh - except when it doesn't; hence one could say "man mi'daram" for "I have", and people'd think you're from Shiraz, because Shirazis do use the mi- prefix.  (Note that the ending of the third person singular is something else that shifts is colloquial Persian; I'd initially learned that verb endings were basically -m, -i, -d, -im, -id, nd; but they're often, albeit not always, -m, -i, -eh, -im, -id, -n in real life.)

"Top of the Lake" may Sink as a Procedural, but Look Beneath the Surface

A couple of weeks ago, BioNews invited me to review Top of the Lake; this is the version I submitted there, free - for better or worse - of editorial cuts.

There's a moment in the final episode of this second series of Jane Campion's Top of the Lake where Nicole Kidman's character Julia reminds Elizabeth Moss's character Robin, a policewoman and our protagonist, that she, Julia, is the 'real mother' of Mary (Alice Englert), the troubled and endangered young woman at the centre of the drama. Mary is adopted: Julia raised her, whereas Robin merely gestated her. An argument about exactly what it means to be a mother is not only important in the relationship between Robin and Julia: it is key to the main plot of the drama.

A body has been found washed up on a Sydney beach, and is discovered to be that of a Thai woman working in one of Sydney's legal brothels. The dead woman was pregnant when she died, but the baby is not genetically related to her; episode 2 ends with Robin's realisation that the dead woman was acting as a surrogate. What follows is a story that weaves together the rather murky worlds of the legalised sex trade and commercial surrogacy, which is illegal under New South Wales law.

Hands up if you shouldn't be working this case!

Now, it’s worth interjecting at this stage with the observation that, if there’s one thing we learn from Top of the Lake, it’s that Australian police have some very sloppy procedures and conflict-of-interest regulations. Gwendoline Christie plays Miranda, with whom Robin is partnered in the investigation; Miranda is not only having an affair with her boss, but is also trying to have a baby by surrogacy with him. Worried that the foetus taken from the dead woman might be her own, Miranda has a bit of a barney at the office of the clinic that she patronised (matronised?). This strikes me as the sort of thing that might see a real police officer removed from a case, at the very least; but nothing at all is mentioned about it. Police officers having affairs with each other? I’m sure that happens. Police officers engaging surrogacy services? Likewise. Police officers investigating a case that straddles the boundary between legal and illegal surrogacy, at the behest of a commanding officer with whom they are trying to start a family by means of a legally-iffy surrogacy service? Is there no oversight here? At the same time, via Puss, the none-more-sleazy pimp played by David Dencik who has something to do with the illegal surrogacy racket and with whom Mary is besotted, the story is also very personal for Robin – just as was the story in the first series of Top of the Lake. Again: should she really be working on this case?

Maybe there is method in writer/ director Jane Campion’s plotting. There is a good point to be made about how our attempts to separate the private/ personal and the public/ political can only ever be partial, and that it’s often in women’s lives that we see the intersection most clearly. But there’s also a risk here of Robin becoming a slightly rough-at-the-edges Miss Marple: someone around whom Bad Things keep happening, and with whom you probably wouldn’t want to spend too long in a country house. Whether a third series of TotL would be possible without characters becoming mere ciphers for political points is unclear.

Admittedly, it’s a bit early to worry about the plausibility of a programme that might not ever be made; and the implausibilities of this series (or what one hopes, for the sake of effective policing in Australia, are implausibilities) ought not to detain us too long. For there are deep and troubling questions that the series raises.

Brexit, Fraud, and Law - update

A little over a year ago, I posted something about someone who had set up a crowdfunder campaign to bring a prosecution over Brexit.  I was not impressed.  I concluded by saying that the person behind it, one Marcus Ball, "should think very carefully about whether to keep his campaign going".  Of course, I'm not pompous enough to think that my opinion on this stuff counts for much, or that it'd make any contribution, or that Ball would even have read the post.  But if everyone with a blog allowed that to stop them, there'd be nothing on the internet.

I thought I'd have a look at what he's up to now.  There's still a website, but the clearest updates seem to be on the crowdfunder page.   Ball reached his initial target, so one might wonder what progress he'd made in his case.  The answer would seem to be... er... not a heck of a lot.  It appears that he contacted some lawyers, who told him in January that he didn't have a case, and he then went back to them in February with a 25 000-word document and had persuaded them that he did after all by March.  He is, though, unclear about what the legal objections were, and about how he overcame them.  One wonders why, if he is that much more competent than the lawyers he's hired at the expense of 6 000 donors, he needed them in the first place; but that's for another day.  Since then, he's written for his lawyers another pair of documents; one is 22 000 words long, and the other 10 000 words.  They must love him.  He's now asking for more money (some of which will fund a salary for him).  Hilariously, after the latest update on the BrexitJustice crowdunder, he adds a note:

Charlie Gard: An Ethical Analysis of a Legal non-Problem

(This is an extended version of a post that originally appeared at EJIL: Talk!)

For those with an internet connection and an interest in current affairs, the story of Charlie Gard been hard to avoid recently. A decent précis is available here; but it’s worth rehearsing.

Shortly after his birth, Charlie’s health began to deteriorate, and he was diagnosed with a terminal and incurable mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome. By March 2017, Charlie needed artificial ventilation, and doctors at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (GOSH) applied to the High Court for confirmation that removing that ventilation would be lawful, having judged that it was not in his best interests. This was contested by his parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates; the High Court ruled in favour of GOSH. This was confirmed by the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights. During all this time, Charlie remained ventilated.

In the High Court, Mr Justice Francis said that his decision was subject to revision should new evidence emerge favouring continued treatment; in July, Charlie’s parents returned to the High Court, claiming that Charlie might benefit from an experimental treatment being offered by Professor Michio Hirano of Columbia University. However, as proceedings advanced, it became clear that Hirano’s proposed treatment had never been used on patients like Charlie, that he had neither seen Charlie nor read his notes when he offered the treatment, and that he had a financial interest in that treatment. The position statement issued by GOSH on the 24th July barely hides the hospital’s legal team’s exasperation. On the 24th July, Charlie’s parents dropped their request for continued treatment. The details of Charlie’s palliative care were still disputed; his parents wanted it to be provided at home, with ventilation maintained for a few days. The High Court ruled against this on the 27th July. Charlie was moved to a hospice; his ventilator was removed, and he died on the 28th July, a few days before his first birthday.

The way this case has played out has not been pretty. Elements of the American media (this piece is one among many) and the political right wing used it to launch attacks on single-payer healthcare systems:

Our hearts weep for #CharlieGard Our prayers are w/ him. Pls read & ask WHY govt should have power to decide who lives & dies. It's wrong. https://t.co/MsvoJBqJyO

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 24, 2017

Nigel Farage weighed in, complaining about the state taking away parental rights:

UK medical establishment closed ranks on #CharlieGard's parents & the state took away their rights. Change required. What a total disgrace. pic.twitter.com/TRBWWYTwJb

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) July 24, 2017

From the left, Giles Fraser wrote that the case was being dealt with too rationally. None of these claims is justified, and many left-leaning people have been surprised to find themselves in agreement with Melanie Phillips on this matter.

Legally, the case was very straightforward.

Dunkirk, British, and the Germans

OK. So I went to see Dunkirk, because the reviews have been almost universally excellent, and because (a) it was endorsed by Nigel Farage, and (b) everyone pointed out that Farage had missed the point.  Farage missing the point is hardly news; but I wanted to see how he'd missed it.

 

(In what follows, there may be spoilers.  But since what actually happened at Dunkirk is a matter of record, and since there're no twists, I'm not too fussed about that.  I'll say a little about a couple of characters, but nothing that'll mar the film.)

Now, I can see why Brexiteers are getting all excited about the film.  Dunkirk is part of the British national story, and anything that tells a story about plucky British fortitude in the face of a threat from Ze Hun is going automatically to have them wanking themselves square then round again.  In other words, it matters little what the content of the film actually was: it'd've been coopted into the Brexit narrative somehow.  No contortion would have been too wild, because if you've got a fixed idea about that threat and a need for the British to retreat back to the safety of Blighty in the face of a threat from the Continent... well, you get the picture.

And I know I have an idée fixe about Brexit from the other side, too.  But this is my blog, so you'll have to lump it.

Anyway: back to the point I was going to make, which is that those Brexiteers have missed the point entirely.  Dunkirk's an avowedly anti-nationalist film.  And that's apparent from the first minute - from before any character appears on the screen.

The first thing we see is a one-sentence preamble telling us about how the British and French armies have been forced into retreat by "the enemy".  Note that Christopher Nolan doesn't talk about the Allied forces being forced into retreat by "the Germans" or "the German Army" or anything like that.  "The enemy" is in a way more menacing - but it's hard to see how it's anything other than a deliberate move so as not to name the Germans.  One might go a bit further, and infer that Nolan is indicating that Nazism was not German, or at least that there's a clear distinction to be made between what might have been done in the name of Germany and what was done in the name of the Third Reich.  There might be mileage in that - lots of contemporary Germanophiles thought so - but it's not a rabbit I want to chase here.  It's enough to point out that, in the most obvious way, Nolan has deliberately avoided making this a story about Germans and Englishmen.

Thus primed, I would encourage anyone who's not seen the film to count how many times the word "German" or its cognates is used.  I did: I think it's four.  In all cases (which appear over about 3 minutes in total), it's used as an accusation of untrustworthiness.  So far, so standard war-movie.  But it's always from the same character.   And that character is a terrified, paranoid, dangerous idiot, who is looking for someone to blame, and someone to shoot.

That is: the only person who makes a direct reference to Germans is someone with whom you wouldn't want to be in a confined space.  Other British characters are, by turns, doughty, brave, or - in a couple of cases - cowards.  In other words, they're exactly like most people.  They are not made saintly by dint of being British.

Now, there are atrocities committed by the enemy.  A ship that's clearly marked with a red cross is bombed.  I don't know if that happened in reality.  But even there, the bomb is from a machine.  We don't see the face of the pilot.  By and large, the enemy is unseen.  There is a brief moment when we see actual members of the Wehrmacht; but in that moment, when it would be very easy for them to kill a defenceless man, they don't.  They are not made evil by dint of being German.

In other words, the enemy can't be identified with a particular nation.  We know the origin of the enemy, but Nolan doesn't labour the point.  Nation doesn't really matter to the film he's made, which is about people in a situation behaving as people do.  He could have made appreciably the same film about any conflict, real or fictional.  Hell, he didn't even really need a conflict.  Except that, by making a film set in the second world war and not talking about nations or national character, he gives quite a clear message about nations and national character.

Quite clear, but not clear enough for some.  Farage doesn't really do nuance, and he can't really see beyond the nation.  It's little wonder he misunderstood what he saw.

MIFfed

I've got a bit of a dilemma.  It's a nice dilemma to have, and I know which way I'm leaning, but someone may tell me I'm being a fool.  They're wrong, but it's not quite as clear-cut as I thought it would be.

First things first: I love Manchester, and one of the things I love about Manchester is the Manchester International Festival.  It's two weeks of new and interesting art and culture, and even when a show doesn't work, as with Damon Albarn's Wonder.land a couple of years ago, it's still something that makes me proud to be a part of the city.

When tickets for MIF17 went on sale, I immediately went and spent an unholy amount on them.  I've crammed all the things I'm going to go to see into the second week of the Festival, because during the first week, I'll be in France.  This is at the invitation of one of my closest friends and her family; she lives in Australia now, so I only get to see her (and them) every couple of years.  So the final few days of June and the first few days of July are going to be packed, but great.  I'm really, really looking forward to them.

Except...

Law Changes and Slippery Slopes

(Cross-posted from the other place)

Apparently, there was a TV programme in Australia the other day in which a there was a discussion of assisted dying.  It got reported in The Guardian, largely on the basis that an 81-year-old audience member kept calling Margaret Somerville "darling" and then got mildly sweary.  I've only seen those clips from the programme that are linked in the Graun's report, so I'm not going to comment on the tone of the debate in particular.  Rather, I'm interested in one of the responses to the programme, from Xavier Symons, writing in The Conversation.

Symons takes the opportunity to unpick the idea of a slippery slope argument - in this case, the claim that allowing some forms of assisted dying will commit us to allowing... well, that's open-ended, but it's sufficient to say that it'd be terrible.  We'd want to avoid terrible things; therefore, the argument goes, we shouldn't allow any of it.  This is well-worn stuff in the seminar room, but it's a mode of argument that refuses to die.  Quite correctly, Symons points out that

there is a need for empirical evidence or sound inferential reasoning to support the claim that event B will necessarily (or probably) follow on from event A.  Without this evidence, the argument is invalid. I can’t just claim, for example, that the legalisation of medicinal marijuana leads to the legalisation of ice - I need to show some empirical or logical connection between the two.

So far, so standard.  (I'd say "unsound" rather than "invalid", because the validity of an argument doesn't depend on its evidence - or, at least, not in the same way; but that's a small matter.)  He then makes another move, which is a bit more interesting:

But (and it’s a big but) there is such a thing as a good and valid slippery slope argument.  A good slippery slope argument demonstrates a causal or probable relationship between event A and B, such that event B can legitimately be expected to occur if event A is allowed to occur. [...] There are, nevertheless, compelling empirical and logical slippery slope arguments available to defend more modest claims about the “normalisation” of assisted dying.

Is this correct?

Persian: Lesson 7

15th November 2016

I make no claims to be particularly academically able.  I'm not.  I've trundled along for many, many years, never setting the world on fire, never being particularly impressive, but never being utterly shit either.  I've only ever failed one thing: having wanted to go to Oxford since about the age of 4, I took the entrance exam in 1994, passed that, and then failed the interviews quite spectacularly.  There was a voice in my head during the politics and economics interview at Christ Church telling me that if I shut up, I might be able to salvage something; but I blundered on anyway.  My interview at Somerville the following day went better, but the damage was done by then.

I did not get admitted.

The letter telling me to sod off arrived on the 17th December.  I forced out a laugh for the sake of appearances - Mum was looking over my shoulder - though really I wanted to throw myself out of the nearest window.  There was then a bit of phoning to be done, to the other people who'd been interviewed at the same college for the same degree: I think there was about a dozen of us, though most of their names escape me, and most of us had shared the same train back to our various hometowns in a coach where there were the lights and heating had packed up.  Only one had been offered a place, and she'd not even been on that cold and darkling train home; everyone else - except me - was resolved to go on to Bristol or Durham or impressive places like that.  For my part: it'd never occurred to me to apply to Bristol or Durham or impressive places like that.  I think I had a 2-Cs fallback offer from an ex-Poly in Dundee to study business law, but I had no intention of taking that up.  (Odd, isn't it, that had I passed the interview, my Oxford offer would have been two Es?  My fallback for a shit course was, on paper, going to be harder to achieve than Christ Church.  As it happened, I got 5 As.  Something else that never occurred to me was to take a year out and have another pop.  Good lord, I was stupid back then.)

Anyway:  I thought it important to memorialise that failure, so framed the letter as a testament to my own fundamental rubbishness: it's on the wall just in the line of sight of my desk in the study at home, to serve as a constant reminder that I'm not all that able.  I've got a photocopy that I sometimes put on my office door at work, too, so that passers-by know that they're being taught by someone who didn't even get into university.

Why mention all that now?  Because we've a Persian exam in a couple of weeks, and I think I'm about to fail - possibly quite badly.  It'll be the second proper failure of my academic career, and it's terrifying me.

The basic problem is that the vocabulary is killing me.  Not so much that it's complicated - I wouldn't know.  The problem is that I've simply not got time to learn it.  I'm still not au fait with the stuff we were supposed to learn after week 1, and we're now in week 7.  Every week there's more, so I'm just getting further and further behind.

I'm gutted, because I'm really enjoying the language; but I'm really considering giving up.  OK, so it's £300 down the drain... except it's not down the drain, because I'd happily spend £300 to avoid the utter humiliation that's coming my way in 28 days' time.

So there we go. I don't think there'll be any more Persian updates. I've all but failed already, so there's no point taking the exam; and if I'm not going to take the exam, there's no point turning up to class.

It's been fun, but I think I'm at the end of the line.

But what about this week's lesson?  What did we learn in class?

Buggered if I know.  I can't speak for others, but I learned nothing.

Persian: Lesson 6

8th November, 2016
This is quite a short entry, I think; and it's also - in its way - an upbeat one.  There's a few take-home points from the past couple of lessons.

1. Grammar. This is beginning to worry me - less because it’s complicated than because it isn’t. Nouns and verbs have to agree, but we’ve started to pluralise things, and – so far at least – nouns don’t decline.  Nominative, genitive, ablative: all the same.  Neither is there a clear difference between the singular and the plural: one chair, two chair.

I say that there's not a clear difference - there is a difference.  You can pluralise by adding the suffix "ها"; but how that's used isn't obvious.  As things stand, it looks like it's sometimes used and sometimes not; I've not got my head around what the rule is that governs that.

Why is this worrying? Because it can’t be that simple, can it? I fear we’re about to get bitten.

2. Let’s talk about diacritics and dipthongs. There aren’t too many vowels in the Persian alphabet. Aleph (ا) does a huge amount of work – it can function as ø, æ, or ɒ:, and possibly more besides. Much depends on what accents and diacritics are used – and these don’t really have to be written. Thus ا is pronounced differently from آ, and أ, and إ, though (as far as I can make out) أ and إ are likely to be written simply as ا.

In an previous entry, I mentioned the sentence "This is Sara", pronounced something like "Een Sarā ast/ ist" - the verb "to be" can take a couple of pronunciations, because "To be" is nuts in all Indo-European languages. Anyway: here's that sentence, with the alephs highlighted:

این سارا اَست.

Potentially, we're looking at four different pronunciations from just one letter.

On top of that, there’s the semi-vowel ye, which is written as ﯾ, or ـﯿ, or ی, depending on whether it’s an initial, medial, or final letter.  (Did I mention that letters have three written forms, depending on where they appear in a word and which letters appear to their left?)   It can also modify the aleph; hence the word "Iran" is pronounced "Ee-rōn", though it contains two alephs - you spell it "ایران". (That does explain the American pronunciation: "Aye-ran" does make a kind of sense.)  Correspondingly, my name would be written as "ایان"; I'm not sure how a Persian speaker would cope with the "ya" sound in my name: my hunch is that they'd want to extend it into a longer "ō".

There’s another semivowel, vav (written as و as an initial, or ـو as a medial or final letter), which is sometimes pronounced as “u”, and sometimes as “v”. That depends on whether it’s next to a vowel or a consonant. (Come to think of it, that's fairly straightforward: the Latin v usually has a “u” or “w” sound, except when it doesn’t.  And there's something in the back of my mind telling me that Hebrew does something similar - which'd make sense, on the basis that there's a close relationship between Hebrew and Arabic, and Persian took the Arabic alphabet.)  But what I’ve not worked out yet is whether the invisible vowels count to modify it. We shall see…

Oh, and writing the letter s - س - is difficult, and "st" (ست) and "sp" (سپ) more so: it's like writing a w from right to left, which is bad enough; but once you've started, it's hard to know when to stop. I have no idea how I'll cope if I ever need to use a double s. "سس" might be an orthographic black hole, from which one never escapes.

Actually, there is the number 6.  Pronounced "shesh", it looks on the page like this:

 شش

Yipes.

Persian: Lesson 5

25th October, 2016
So... it's Tuesday, which means a Persian lesson, which means a Persian update.

By what I'm coming to take to be the standard of this thing, I can say that I'm feeling a bit more chipper about some aspects of this than I have been.  This doesn't mean that it's not frustrating, because it really is.  But - on pain of jinxing the thing - the reading and writing, unexpectedly, are fairly straightforward so far.  Granted that I'm still only at beginner level, I think I'm on top of them. The grammar and syntax, too, seem fairly simple - at least so far; maybe that'll all change soon.

What's killing me is the vocabulary. I don't have the time to sit and learn it. I need to find some way to force industrial quantities of new words into my head. They're percolating slowly, but that's not enough.

If I could set aside half an hour a day, I think I'd be laughing. But with things as they are, I'm spending a lot of time sitting in class with my mouth open in horror. After all, there's no point understanding the sentence structure if you've no words; no point in mastering the alphabet if you've literally nothing to write.

Eeeeep.

Persian: Lesson 4

18th October, 2016
Let's focus on the writing for a bit.  Being able to read the Arabic alphabet is something that I've wanted for years and years, because I like being able to read stuff.  (Not necessarily to understand what's been written, but to be able to sound it out.)

To begin with the basics.  Persian adopted the Arabic alphabet.  I think that there's a couple of minor differences, like those between, say, the English and Welsh or Icelandic versions of the Latin alphabet; nothing significant.  However, it means that there's a degree of duplication, because Arabic makes use of some sounds and conventions that Persian doesn't.  Our teacher mentioned that there's one letter - I forget which at the moment - that gets used, but that Persian "doesn't like", whatever that means.  Damnit, they're repudiating their own alphabet!

Anyway: to illustrate what I mean.  There're 5 different versions of the letter "Z".  Officially, they have different sounds; in practice, not so much.  Your bog-standard "z" looks like "ز".  But on top of that, there's zal, pronounded (on Wikipedia's telling) ẕ, and it looks like this: ذ.  Zhe - pronounced ž - is written as "ژ"; za, pronounced ẓ, is written as "ظ".  And then there's zad, pronounced as z̤, and written as "ض".  The transliteration available via Wikipedia is different from some of the suggested pronunciations I've seen on other sites, but I've no reason to suppose that it's wildly out of the way.  And there might be a subtle difference between them all (though the Wiki suggestion that we differentiate between ẕ, ž, ẓ, and z̤ is mystifying in its own right.

So far so good; and though I know there's no relationship between the shape of a letter and its sound, it's reassuring that there's a family resemblance between three of the letters, and another one between the other two.  On the other hand, the equivalent of "R" - ر - looks painfully like "ز", so that'll only take us so far.

The number and location of the dots can make a big difference, too.  Here are the equivalents of "B", "P", "T", and "S": ت ,پ ,ب, and ث.  Well, I say "S"; it turns out that there's multiple versions of that as well, with, س, and ص standing for sounds in that kind of are too.

Persian: Lessons 2-3

Once again failing to realise my intention of writing these things up in real time, I've got to admit that there's actually nothing to report for either of these lessons, because it'd never occurred to me to record what was happening at the time.

I had a meeting in London on the 4th October, so missed lesson two.  That wasn't ideal at all - but, on the other hand, the British Medical Association provides quite good biscuits during meetings, so it's swings and roundabouts.

Looking back at the handouts from that week, there were a few reading exercises, to translate simple sentences along the lines of

این سارا اَست. سارا َزن اَست
This is Sara; Sara is a woman

and

آن آماندا اَست، سارا نیست

That is Amanda, not Sara.

Quite obviously, things were centred around "This is x; x is y" or "x is not z". These exercises would have been based on what we did in class in week 1. I can't remember if these were things we were expected to have translated in time for lesson 2, or in time for lesson 3. To be honest, I can't imagine that it would have made a heck of a lot of sense to expect us to do that after only one lesson.

Still, there're some important points. First, word-order is straightforwardly subject-object-verb. Negations are also straightforward: you just bung an "n" prefix on to the verb. Hence

اَست

ist

becomes

نیست
nist.

If the verb begins with a consonant, the prefix is "na"; whether that's adding a phoneme to the negation in some cases, or swallowing it in others, is neither here nor there.

Another thing to notice is the omnipresence of the aleph: ا.*  The role and pronunciation of the aleph is slightly complicated, we're warned; but we can tell already that it's sometimes pronounced as "Ah", as in the first syllable of "Sara", sometimes as "A", as in "Amanda", and sometimes as "ee" when we're saying "ist".  Sometimes there're diacritics to indicate pronunciation.  Sometimes there aren't. Oh, and the negative prefix, for some reason, turns the ا into an ی, except that the ی appears as ﯾ when it's neither the final letter of a word nor connected to any preceding letters, and ـﯿ when it's in the middle of a word and is connected to preceding letters.  Pay attention.

There's also the first chunk of vocabulary to learn. Fortunately, there's a Latin transliteration alongside the Persian; but it's a fairly strange collection of words. Some are explicable enough at this stage in proceedings: pen (خودکار; xodkār**), chair (صندلی; sandali), table (میز; miz), school (مدرسه; madresē), university (دانِشگاه; daneshgah), student (دانشجو; daneshju) and so on. Others are less expected so early in the course: driver (را َننده; ranandeh); lucky/ prosperous (خوشبخت; xoshbaht), ugly (زشت; zest). Some would say that the selection of vocabulary is scattergun. Still, I do like how "home" and "family" are, respectively, خانه (xanē) and خانواده (xanevadeh).

Persian: Lesson 1

Having said that I was going to repost and elaborate on the Tuesday Persian Updates I've been posting on Facebook without hindsighted commentary, I find myself having to break my own rule already.

Why?  Simply because it never occurred to me in the first few weeks to record what was happening, so there's going to have to be quite a lot of invention.  Here's the first mention of it, from the 22nd September:

I've decided to sign up for a language course. But which?
(a) Russian - I've not done it since GCSE, and was never much good at it even then. (The A grade came more from knowing how to game the exam rubric than for understanding the language.) Requires the linguistic equivalent of intensive care.
(b) French - Did it to old-style A/S level; I was reasonably good, but am rusty now. Linguistic physiotherapy.
(c) Persian - Never spoken a word, but love the country, and have wanted to learn it for years. Linguistic IVF.
Help me decide, o internet!

The internet leaned towards Persian, with the odd suggestion of things like Tocharian, because that actually counts as trolling among some of my friends.  My heart was also leaning towards Persian anyway, though, so that was reassuring.  Indeed, I'd found someone in January who was working as a private tutor in Persian, and had fully intended to chase that up except that real life had got in the way and made it impractical.

Merely learning to read the alphabet counted for a lot in my decision: that was one of the reasons I did Russian at school.  We used to have French lessons in B4, which was the room in which Russian was taught.  I'd see the Cyrillic script on the blackboard, and want to be able to read it.  A few years later, being able to make out the shapes of the letters was the most satisfying part of my abortive attempt to teach myself Greek.  The Arabic alphabet is a bigger hill to climb, but I like being able to read stuff.

Here's what I wrote on the 27th September, just before lesson 1:

In which I Learn Persian

Back at the start of the academic year, I signed up for a course of beginners' Persian.  I've been a bit of a Persephile for as long as I can remember, and meaning to take lessons in the language for ages.  Then I learned that the University offers language classes to the public, and that Persian is on the menu.

So I signed up.

It was either that, or blowing the cobwebs of French, or grinding the rust off Russian, or starting German from scratch.  All had their advantages.  But I chose Persian.

Lessons are for three hours on a Tuesday evening; I've been providing a potted précis on Facebook week-by-week since.  But it might be interesting to repost those updates here, with a little elaboration as I deem fit.  I'm going to try to ensure that they appear in "real time" - to the greatest extent possible, the posts will not alter according to what I would come to know or think later.  Having said that, it might be impossible to add to what I was thinking at the time without that kind of distortion.  We shall see.

So, over the next few days, that's what I'll do.  Spoiler alert: I'm not very good at it.

In the meantime, here's a couple of photos from my trip to Iran in 2004.  (Some people go on package tours to the Algarve.  I went to a totalitarian theocracy - albeit one where the totalitarian theocracy seemed only to be skin-deep.)

This was taken in Yazd, where I ended up with sunstroke.  Annoyingly, I can't remember the names of most of the other people who were in the group.  I think the guy with the moustache that you can half-see was Paul.  But I do remember the name of the guy in the foregroud.  He was a German teacher from Aberdeen called Kenny.  Kenny had a very low tolerance for bullshit - in Esfahan, for example, he noticed that there was someone who was following us around during a bit of free time when he, I, and one or two others went for a wander around the city.  He was suspicious that our shadow might have been a policeman of some sort, so went to engage him in conversation.

In the course of that conversation, our shadow claimed that he'd worked in Germany for 20 years.  Naturally, Kenny responded by talking in German.  The shadow had no clue what he was on about.
"But I thought you lived in Germany for two decades?"
"Yes, but we never left our compound."
"For twenty years?"
"..."

Iranian police informers need to be a bit less obvious, I think.

Kenny also had a habit of joking that he was the Hidden Imam.  While the jokes were in English, they were also in public.  I'm not sure of the wisdom of that.

Anyway.

Here's another photo, this time taken under the Khaju bridge in Esfahan.  There's no story that attaches to it in any way; I don't know who the man is.  However, I do like the photo for a couple of reasons.  First, it's one of the rare pictures that I've managed to centre more or less correctly, so the perspective is good.  Second - I can take no credit for this at all - I like the way that the guy's outline follows the lines of perspective: his right arm following the vertical axis, and the line from his head to his left shoulder following the diagonal from the centre to the bottom right.  There's another reason on top of those that I like it, which is that there's a very similar photo that's on the cover of a fairly popular book - though I can't remember for the life of me what it is.  Anyway: that version of the photo on the book doesn't have anyone in it.  I think my picture is better.

So there we are.  The drip-feed record of my adventures in the language will begin anon; in a couple of weeks, we'll be up to the present.  Maybe one or two people will be interested.

"Denial" and Disinterest

Having taken myself off to see Denial the other night, I've been thinking about its portrayal of law - specifically, how it's done in the English courtroom.

The film that tells the story of Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian David Irving's libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt.  His complaint was, basically, that she shouldn't have called him a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian, and that in doing so she was a big meanie, and booooo!  And, of course, as everyone knows, he lost.  This is why I can call him a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian here with impunity.  (Well, under the terms of the 2013 Defamation Act, I probably could anyway: the requirement for serious harm would mean that a blog with a readership as low as this would slip through the net.  But the point stands.  English law was satisfied that David Irving is a Holocaust-denying Nazi third-rate historian.)

One of the plot points - can one talk about a plot when one is aiming to represent reality?  I suppose you can: you can't distill a dispute that lasted years into a couple of hours without (a) deciding that there's a story worth telling there, (b) where the main parts of that story are to be found, and (c) weaving them into a plot - Anyway: one of the plot points concerns the way that English libel laws worked at the time.  These laws famously made it very hard to defend a libel action; the burden of proof would be on Lipstadt to show that she was correct, rather than on Irving to show her incorrect.  In a reversal of the normal order of legal proceedings, she'd have to prove her innocence; in effect, she'd have to show that the Holocaust happened.  Rachel Weisz' Lipstadt is clearly flummoxed by all this; and the film is plainly sympathetic to her confusion.  The English defamation laws were a mess.  (Whether they still are is for another post.)  Lipstadt is also baffled by the distinction between solicitors and barristers, meaning that it's a surprise to her that the lawyer she'd hired to take her case, and who'd be doing the donkey-work to put it together, would not be the lawyer who presented it in court.

I mean, you can see why someone not brought up on the system would think it weird.