Douglas Todd: Richmond toughens stance on Chinese-language signs

2015/12/18 Leave a comment

Finding the balance:

After years of dismissing residents’ worries about the expansion of Chinese-language signs in Richmond, the city is hiring a new staff person to press for more signs to include English.

Richmond last week quietly posted a full-time job for a sign inspector. The inspector’s duties will include educating business owners about the city’s policy, which says signs should contain 50-per-cent English lettering.

“I think the issue is being taken more seriously than it once was,” Councillor Alexa Loo said this week.

Loo, who was elected to council in the fall of 2014, had previously said it was “ridiculous” that Chinese-only signs were on the rise in Richmond, despite ethnic Chinese now making up one out of two residents.

Richmond’s current council, Loo said, is slowly becoming convinced that community “harmony” is threatened by a proliferation of signs that cannot be read by those who do not read Chinese.

The city’s decision to hire someone to educate businesses about English on signs is a significant change.

Only a few years ago former Richmond city bylaw manager Wayne Mercer said every month he would tell yet another “anxious and insecure” Richmond resident that the city correctly intended to do “nothing” about Chinese-only and Chinese-dominant signs.

Joe Greenholtz, a member of Richmond’s intercultural advisory committee, also brushed aside the concerns of people who felt alienated by Chinese-only signs.

Longtime Richmond residents who complain about signs, Greenholtz wrote in 2012, are simply “feeling the pain of being irrelevant in their own backyards for the first time.” At the time, Greenholtz, an immigration consultant, argued the sign issue was solely a matter of commerce, but more recently he acknowledged community cohesiveness is also at stake.

The city’s records show Richmond residents were going to council to express concerns about Chinese-only signs as far back as 1997.

In was only in recent years that some residents became more vocal, launched petitions and eventually brought international attention to Richmond, whose population is 62-per-cent foreign born.

The tide began turning late last year when retiring Richmond councillor Evelina Halsey-Brandt admitted she had been mistaken in believing the sign controversy would “solve itself.”

Halsey-Brandt urged the new council to find a way to ensure that a large portion of the 200,000 residents of Richmond don’t end up “feeling that they don’t belong in their own city.”

Between 1981 and 2011, Statistics Canada figures show the ethnic Chinese population of Richmond expanded by 80,000. In the same period, the white population had a net loss of 28,000 people.

In response to increasing debate, a group of prominent Metro Vancouver Chinese business leaders gathered in Richmond in May and urged all immigrants to “follow Canadian customs” and include English in their signs.

For his part, Richmond Councillor Chak Au says he has been waiting for years for other council members to come around to his viewpoint.

“I was the only one four years ago who was saying we should go to bilingual signs,” Au said.

“In the beginning, the others didn’t want to do anything.”

Many Richmond residents remain disappointed the city’s new inspector is being asked only to “encourage” business owners to make signs 50-per-cent English.

Richmond activist Kerry Starchuk, who has been interviewed by media outlets across Europe and Asia, said this week the city and province aren’t being nearly proactive enough.

“This is just as minimal as what can be done,” she said. Without enforceable municipal and provincial legislation, Starchuk believes, almost nothing will change in regards to the proliferation of Chinese-only or Chinese-dominant signs.

For their part, Au and Loo want to avoid formal sign bylaws. They believe it’s more “harmonious” to have a staff member try to persuade businesses to include English, to improve cross-cultural communication.

Au and Loo also worry Richmond could open itself up to a charter challenge if it requires English. Even though the province of Quebec has laws preserving the French language in signs, Loo said Quebec has more constitutional authority than B.C.

The executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which has threatened to take Richmond to court over the sign issue, told The Vancouver Sun in July that individual rights trump community concerns. Some BCCLA board members, however, have since questioned Josh Paterson’s position.

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/douglas+todd+richmond+toughens+stance+chinese+language+signs/11597065/story.html#ixzz3uff8Oi1uSource: Douglas Todd: Richmond toughens stance on Chinese-language signs

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Linguist documents dying languages still spoken in Toronto

2015/10/01 Leave a comment

Interesting. Another aspect of Toronto’s diversity and the diversity within communities:

Paolo Frascà’s rare Italian dialect “fossilized” in Toronto and found its own community here.

“That is why I speak the dialect probably better than the people in my generation back home in Italy,” said Frascà, 24. “It’s because I moved here when I was 13 years old.”

He speaks a language particular to a small town of about 3,000 people in the region of Calabria in southern Italy. This tongue is closer to Latin than typical Italian because of the region’s late Romanization. Back home, younger generations like his don’t speak Santonofrese — named after the town of Sant’Onofrio —because it is seen as “lowbrow.” He says that thanks to Toronto’s large Italian community, there may be several endangered languages and dialects like his preserved in the city as people continue to speak them with their family.

That’s not always the case, though. Anastasia Riehl, who started the Endangered Languages Alliance Toronto, has been documenting which of the world’s dying languages are spoken in Toronto, including Frascà’s. Some are spoken by just one or two people in the city, or even in the world. Without a community to share it, those people stop speaking their language and absorb the regional language instead.

Riehl began the Alliance in Toronto after her Cornell University grad school colleague, David Kaufman, launched one in New York. After years of documenting languages overseas, she discovered the last fluent speaker of a dying Latvian language, Livonian, lived outside Toronto. The woman, Grizelda Kristina, was 101 and ailing.

“That’s when I was like, ‘OK, let’s just say we’re going to do this,’” she said of the day in 2011 when she hopped on a flight to Toronto from Argentina, where she was vacationing, to interview the woman, who died two years later.

Since then, she’s interviewed more than a dozen speakers of eight endangered languages from around the world. She’s working on a short documentary detailing the stories of three speakers. Riehl has taken time off from her role running the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University to devote more time to the project.

Toronto’s position as one of the most diverse cities in the world — more than 30 per cent of its residents speak a language other than English or French — makes it an “as good if not better” place to document endangered languages.

The city’s website pegs the number of languages and dialects spoken in the city at more than 140, but Riehl estimates there are “dozens” that don’t appear in census figures. Any language becomes endangered, according to the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO), when its speakers cease to use it and when it is no longer passed on to the next generation.

“The global context we’re in has definitely impacted [language loss] because people have all these pressures to speak a more dominant language,” Riehl said, explaining that the phenomenon doesn’t only appear in English-speaking countries. “It’s a sad way to think about it, but it’s one of the few things [immigrants] bring with them.”

She says the best way to preserve a language is for children to speak it and use it.

“I’m thinking of these refugees, especially the kids who end up in these new places — it just seems like it’s so much better for them if there can be a way to support them in their native language.”

But the shyness younger immigrant generations, like Frascà’s, experience in speaking their language contrasts with the shame indigenous peoples of North America were forced to bear for years under colonization, said David Kaufman, founder of the Endangered Languages Alliance in New York and Riehl’s former Cornell colleague.

“The tragedy in New York, I would say, is that you can find almost every language under the sun except the indigenous language of New York itself, which is Lenape,” an Algonquin language, he said, adding that the only place the language is now spoken and taught is in Ontario.

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Don’t LOL, the kids can still spell: Renzetti

2015/08/25 Leave a comment

Elizabeth Renzetti on the state of kids spelling and the evolution of language:

“Healthy languages change,” Mr. Shea said. “Dead languages are static.”

The linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker also delivers a liberating smack on the nose to pedants and doomsayers in his recent book, The Sense of Style. “The problem with the Internet-is-making-us-illiterate theory, of course, is that bad prose has burdened readers in every era,” he writes. Television and radio were once blamed for a decline in writing skills; now, it’s texts and Twitter. But, as he argues, college students are actually writing more these days than ever before, and they do not make more mistakes than their predecessors or “sprinkle their papers with smileys.”

Instead of seeing a degradation brought about by technology, Mr. Pinker identifies a long-existing division between bad prose, which is bloated, rule-obsessed and obscure, and good prose, which is vibrant, direct and clear. And he banishes treasured notions, such as the idea you can’t start a sentence with a conjunction, to grammar’s slagheap. To deftly split an infinitive is accepted. Prepositions can be placed anywhere they want to cling to. (The rules around prepositions and other parts of speech, Mr. Pinker demonstrates, have more to do with centuries-old fashion than clarity or common sense.)

In other words, language is its own thing, shifting and transforming before our eyes, as much the possession of teenagers as the people who grew up on Strunk and White. “When it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge,” Mr. Pinker writes. “The lunatics are running the asylum.” And that’s how it should be.

Don’t LOL, the kids can still spell – The Globe and Mail.

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Adopting a Chinese Name Helps Win at the Polls – NCM

2015/02/11 Leave a comment

For those interested in language and branding, Tung Chan’s column on choosing a Chinese name, whether for politicians or companies, is well worth reading:

The third method, beautified phonetic translation, is the most commonly used method. This is a modified approach of the pure phonetic translation method. The starting point of this method is the phonetic pronunciation of the name followed by choosing culturally meaningful homonyms. The official Chinese name for the aforementioned LaPointe, 賴普德, was arrived at by such a method. The three Chinese characters are pronounced in Cantonese as Lai Po Dug and approximate LaPointe.

The word 賴 is a common Chinese surname; 普 means general, universal or popular, while 德 means virtue or moral. Thus, 賴普德 is far better than the pure phonetic name 拉波特 used by one of the local Chinese language newspapers. Another such example is the Chinese name for the Toronto Dominion Bank. It dropped the pure phonetic name of 道美寅 in favour of the beautified phonetic name of 道明. Both of the Chinese names were based on the word “dominion”. 道美寅 has no consequential meaning while 道明 means a “bright pathway”.

The Chinese name for Coca-Cola, 可口可樂, is another wonderful example. The four Chinese characters are pronounced in Mandarin as Kē Kou Kē Lè and can roughly be translated as, “pleases your mouth, makes you happy.”

The fourth method, trans-creation, is by far the most powerful, but less used one. This method is used almost exclusively for commercial entities and rarely used by individuals. The starting point of this method of name generation is to crystallize the essence of the resulting image one wants to project onto the consumer. The second step is to pick a name that best reflects that essence, but doesn’t necessarily bear any relationship to the actual English name. Thus the HK and Shanghai Bank becomes 匯豐銀行 (plentiful remittance bank), the Bank of Nova Scotia becomes 豐業銀行 (plentiful business bank) and Manulife Financial becomes 宏利財務 (grand profit financial). The Chinese names of all three examples cited above resonate with people who understand Chinese and is by far the most effective way to brand a product unless you are working with a pan cultural name like “Apple” 萍果.

Good luck in picking a powerful Chinese name this election.

Adopting a Chinese Name Helps Win at the Polls – New Canadian Media – NCM.

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Robert Cushman: No, the feminists didn’t ruin English

2014/10/01 Leave a comment

For those interested in language, writing and debates over feminism, good piece, if a bit meandering, by Robert Cushman, taking down the arguments of David Gelernter on the use of he or she and equivalents, starting with yet another good Orwell quote:

George Orwell, another model author, once compiled his own list of rules for good clear writing; it culminated in the admonition to break any of his preceding instructions “rather than write something outright barbarous.” Which means that these things have to be approached case by case, to be judged by the eye and especially the ear.

I can’t understand, for example, why Gelernter should object to “firefighter” replacing “fireman”; it may have an extra syllable, but it’s still a more active and descriptive word.

Well, no, I can understand; he thinks that the change is the result of caving in to those New Feminists. For him, as for others, feminism is a word applied to anything that its employer dislikes or feels threatened by, a sort of all-purpose Bogeyman. (Or should that be Bogeywoman? The professor certainly wouldn’t countenance Bogeyperson; and neither, for the record, would I.) I can’t see why a female member of a fire brigade should put up with being referred to as a fire man. And neither side would welcome ”firewoman,” which just sounds silly (though “policewoman,” for whatever reason, doesn’t).

…. It’s likely true that students today enter university less equipped to write well than were their predecessors. But that isn’t the fault of feminism. It’s because both English language and English literature are taught less, and possibly less well, than they used to be; and because of the pervasive sloppiness of communication that underlies the abuses I noted in my opening paragraphs, none of which have anything to do with gender.

Gelernter puts it all down to “ideology,” another of those words that merely means something that its user disagrees with. It’s like “elite,” a term that the Left used to hurl at the Right, that the Right now throws at the Left, and that is equally meaningless either way. He begins his article by inveighing against the words “chairperson” and “humankind.” I think that the first is an abomination and the second quite unobjectionable, and my reasons in both cases are aesthetic, not ideological.

It’s true, as Gelernter says, that what any writer agonizes over while actually writing is where the next word is coming from. But those words aren’t chosen in a vacuum; they’re the expression of whatever idea the writer is trying to convey: of, if you insist, his ideology.

Yes, I said his ideology. Because, judging from this article, Professor Gelernter is quite the ideologue himself.

Robert Cushman: No, the feminists didn’t ruin English

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Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking – NYTimes.com

2014/06/24 1 Comment

Interesting psychological experiment on language. Believe there have been similar experiments with managers working in a second-language which both slows down their thinking (Kahneman’s System 2) and removes some of the emotion:

But we’ve got some surprising news. In a study recently published in the journal PloS One, our two research teams, working independently, discovered that when people are presented with the trolley problem in a foreign language, they are more willing to sacrifice one person to save five than when they are presented with the dilemma in their native tongue.

One research team, working in Barcelona, recruited native Spanish speakers studying English and vice versa and randomly assigned them to read this dilemma in either English or Spanish. In their native tongue, only 18 percent said they would push the man, but in a foreign language, almost half 44 percent would do so. The other research team, working in Chicago, found similar results with languages as diverse as Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, English and Spanish. For more than 1,000 participants, moral choice was influenced by whether the language was native or foreign. In practice, our moral code might be much more pliable than we think.

Extreme moral dilemmas are supposed to touch the very core of our moral being. So why the inconsistency? The answer, we believe, is reminiscent of Nelson Mandela’s advice about negotiation: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” As psychology researchers such as Catherine Caldwell-Harris have shown, in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language.

An aversion to pushing the large man onto the tracks seems to engage a deeply emotional part of us, whereas privileging five lives over one appears to result from a less emotional, more utilitarian calculus. Accordingly, when our participants faced this dilemma in their native tongue, they reacted more emotionally and spared the man. Whereas a foreign language seemed to provide participants with an emotional distance that resulted in the less visceral choice to save the five people.

If this explanation is correct, then you would expect that a less emotionally vivid version of the same dilemma would minimize the difference between being presented with it in a foreign versus a native language. And this indeed is what we found. We conducted the same experiment using a dilemma almost identical to the footbridge — but with one crucial difference. In this version, you can save the five people by diverting the trolley to a track where the large man is, rather than by actively shoving him off the bridge.

Moral Judgments Depend on What Language We’re Speaking – NYTimes.com.

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Language and morality: Gained in translation

2014/05/21 Leave a comment

Interesting finding but not surprising that slowing down thinking, through the language barrier, can lead to more rational outcomes:

Several psychologists, including Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for his work on how people make decisions, think that the mind uses two separate cognitive systems—one for quick, intuitive decisions and another that makes slower, more reasoned choices. These can conflict, which is what the trolley dilemma is designed to provoke: normal people have a moral aversion to killing (the intuitive system), but can nonetheless recognise that one death is, mathematically speaking, better than five (the reasoning system).

This latest study fits with other research which suggests that speaking a foreign language boosts the second system—provided, that is, you don’t speak it as well as a native. Earlier work, by some of the same scholars who performed this new study, found that people tend to fare better on tests of pure logic in a foreign language—and particularly on questions with an obvious-but-wrong answer and a correct answer that takes time to work out.

Dr Costa and his colleagues hypothesise that, while fluent speakers can form sentences effortlessly, the merely competent must spend more brainpower, and reason much more carefully, when operating in their less-familiar tongue. And that kind of thinking helps to provide psychological and emotional distance, in much the same way that replacing the fat man with a switch does. As further support for that idea, the researchers note that the effect of speaking the foreign language became smaller as the speaker’s familiarity with it increased.

Language and morality: Gained in translation | The Economist.

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Learning a Second Language

2014/03/15 Leave a comment

Nice piece by Victoria Ferauge on the challenges on becoming really fluent in a second language. Most of us who are bilingual (and not brought up that way) likely have a similar experience:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/mjljN/~3/G2YxpTwiZoo/the-trials-of-learning-and-maintaining.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

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The Multiple Personalities Of Multilinguals « The Dish

2013/11/11 Leave a comment

Some interesting observations how language affects one’s personality, no matter how bilingual or multilingual one is. The key point is that most of us are not symmetrically bilingual, but have different levels of competency and emotional affiliations.

The Multiple Personalities Of Multilinguals « The Dish.

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Bilingualism isn’t a sign of community decay

2013/10/09 Leave a comment

Bilingualism from a BC perspective by Henry Yu – English and Asian languages. Resentment by English speakers with other languages remains an issue; being able to recognize that people live in both and the opportunities for exchanges and getting to know each other remain:

One of those legacies is the odd belief that it is better that we all speak only English for the benefit of those who can only speak English, rather than allowing those who can speak both English and other languages to be respected and even rewarded for being able to speak many languages. English is extremely useful as a lingua franca, a language used in common by many people who can also speak other languages. That is fundamentally different than saying we should all speak only English all the time.

In this city, almost all those under the age of 25 who can speak Chinese can also speak English. They have the wonderful ability to speak multiple languages.

Those Cantonese-speaking youngsters on the bus likely use English most of the time at school and work. Why be angry at them for being able to also carry on a conversation in another language?

Guest column: Bilingualism isn’t a sign of community decay.

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