Can You Lose Your Native Tongue?

When you speak one language, you think and feel differently than when you speak a different language.

Lian Greenfeld wrote in her 2016 Advanced Introduction to Nationalism: “Language, above everything else, is the medium of thinking, thinking representing the explicitly symbolic component of our consciousness, the explicitly symbolic mental process… To capture symbolic experiences (experiences produced by the specifically human, cultural environment) language is necessary; only it can incorporate them into reality. A stable sphere of new experiences presupposes the annexation to human existence of a new sphere of meaning which only language can create, the emergence of a new semantic space. Therefore, while one can imagine a social current without the participation of language, institutionalization without language is impossible. Any social order starts with the creation of a new vocabulary, and this is demonstrated by every case of nationalism…”

As you add languages, you don’t only add to your identity, you simultaneously replace, reduce and erase other identities.

Our languages master us as much as we master them.

Madeleine Schwartz writes in the New York Times:

Compared with English, French is slower, more formal, less direct. The language requires a kind of politeness that, translated literally, sounds subservient, even passive-aggressive. I started collecting the stock phrases that I needed to indicate polite interaction. “I would entreat you, dear Madam …” “Please accept, dear sir, the assurances of my highest esteem.” It had always seemed that French made my face more drawn and serious, as if all my energy were concentrated into the precision of certain vowels. English forced my lips to widen into a smile.

…Back in New York on a trip, I thanked the cashier at Duane Reade by calling him “dear sir.” My thoughts themselves seemed twisted in a series of interlocking clauses, as though I was afraid that being direct might make me seem rude. It wasn’t just that my French was getting better: My English was getting worse.

…Rather than seeing the process of becoming multilingual as cumulative, with each language complementing the next, some linguists see languages as siblings vying for attention. Add a new one to the mix, and competition emerges. “There is no age at which a language, even a native tongue, is so firmly cemented into the brain that it can’t be dislodged or altered by a new one,” Sedivy writes. “Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there.”

…Even languages that seem firmly rooted in the mind can be subject to attrition. “When you have two languages that live in your brain,” says Monika S. Schmid, a leader in the field of language attrition at the University of York, “every time you say something, every time you take a word, every time you put together a sentence, you have to make a choice. Sometimes one language wins out. And sometimes the other wins.”

…A change in language use, whether deliberate or unconscious, often affects our sense of self. Language is inextricably tied up with our emotions; it’s how we express ourselves — our pain, our love, our fear.

… “It appears that what is at the heart of language attrition is not so much the opportunity to use the language, nor the age at the time of emigration. What matters is the speaker’s identity and self-perception. … Someone who wants to belong to a speech community and wants to be recognized as a member is capable of behaving accordingly over an extremely long stretch of time. On the other hand, someone who rejects that language community — or has been rejected and persecuted by it — may adapt his or her linguistic behavior so as not to appear to be a member any longer.”

…Regarding a first language as having special value is itself the product of a worldview that places national belonging at the heart of individual life.

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Report: ‘A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA

Washington Free Beacon:

Up to half of UCLA medical students now fail basic tests of medical competence. Whistleblowers say affirmative action, illegal in California since 1996, is to blame.

Long considered one of the best medical schools in the world, the University of California, Los Angeles’s David Geffen School of Medicine receives as many as 14,000 applications a year. Of those, it accepted just 173 students in the 2023 admissions cycle, a record-low acceptance rate of 1.3 percent. The median matriculant took difficult science courses in college, earned a 3.8 GPA, and scored in the 88th percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT).

Without those stellar stats, some doctors at the school say, students can struggle to keep pace with the demanding curriculum.

So when it came time for the admissions committee to consider one such student in November 2021—a black applicant with grades and test scores far below the UCLA average—some members of the committee felt that this particular candidate, based on the available evidence, was not the best fit for the top-tier medical school, according to two people present for the committee’s meeting.

Their reservations were not well-received.

When an admissions officer voiced concern about the candidate, the two people said, the dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, exploded in anger.

“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” Lucero asked the admissions officer, these people said. The candidate’s scores shouldn’t matter, she continued, because “we need people like this in the medical school.”

Even before the Supreme Court’s landmark affirmative action ban last year, public schools in California were barred by state law from considering race in admissions. The outburst from Lucero, who discussed race explicitly despite that ban, unsettled some admissions officers, one of whom reached out to other committee members in the wake of the incident. “We are not consistent in the way we apply the metrics to these applicants,” the official wrote in an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “This is troubling.”

“I wondered,” the official added, “if this applicant had been [a] white male, or [an] Asian female for that matter, [whether] we would have had that much discussion.”

Since Lucero took over medical school admissions in June 2020, several of her colleagues have asked the same question. In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.

Race-based admissions have turned UCLA into a “failed medical school,” said one former member of the admissions staff. “We want racial diversity so badly, we’re willing to cut corners to get it.”

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UCLA Pro-Palestine Protests (5-23-24)

I report, you decide!

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The Nostramus Kid

I loved this 1993 movie about growing up Adventist in Australia.

John Gowlett posts to my YT comments:

Although I was brought up in The Salvation Army, which makes an appearance in the finals scenes of The Nostradamus Kid, as a Ken Elkins play, and is only a slightly changed play from The Salvation Army musical “The Blood of the Lamb” – I can identify with everything in this movie.
The Salvation Army was not quite as obsessed with the end of the world as they were to send their officers as missionaries to the ends of the earth in order proclaim the Gospel and save lives by God-bothering the locals.
I could identify with chasing all the pretty girls, and even had my own Jennie O’Brien, not so much the daughter of a newspaper publisher, but the daughter of a well-to-do city engineer for Perth, Western Australia. Similarly her father disapproved of my relationship with his daughter and she had to rush down the stairs and out the door when I came to pick her up and take he out. Luckily, he never called the cops on me.
Equally, I asked the type of questions Ken asks at camp, all in vain, in an effort to understand those who interpreted the Bible for us; this was more to control the likes of me, and retain the young members in the Army of the Lord, than to really save more souls to the cause.
We went on camps too, but by the mid 1970s the camps were well established properties with comfortable buildings, where the youth of the different corps gathered to further our indoctrination. Instead, when a film was put on late on a Saturday night to tire the youth, the dark room became the place where the cool boys and the pretty girls cuddled and kissed until the floor was writhing with French kissing and heavy petting that we had been strongly warned against as a sin that was clearly within our scope.
The next day, the Captain in charge of the camp served up his sermon, a sermon we’d never forget, about having never seen such a display of debauchery and if this is what we got up to in public, what would we be doing in private? I guess only a witness to the back seats of our cars could answer that question, but we smirked knowingly.
As Salvationist youth, most of us did not bother to drink alcohol, because that could be detected by parents too easily and cause too much unnecessary grief for us; all the while we practiced other sins, like rooting the church girls. Some of us, like Ken, got quite good at it too. The girls were quite willing too, as much like other primitive cultures, the girls were keen to snag the best husbands by well rehearsed methods such as decorating themselves in the uniform and bonnet, along with the accompanying hair and make up to match, and making themselves as accommodation to the boys wishes on a Saturday night, just hours before they’d both be singing the praises to God in the Sunday meetings and looked upon by the Corps hierarchy as the fine youth who would make up the future of The Salvation Army.
Many of my peers did indeed make themselves available for full time ministry by attending the Training College in Melbourne, but eventually most came to the same conclusion as me, that perhaps they had been persuaded against their true will and that although many life values had been learned from attending the community of this church, their happiness lay elsewhere and many, just like Wayland and Sarai, started to experience the things of life that they denied themselves while striving to be as good as they could, for a God they are now not sure even exists.
5 STARS (but mostly because it tells much of my own story)

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Decoding Israel’s Growing Isolation (5-22-24)

01:00 NYT: What to know about Karim Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/world/europe/icc-warrants-israel-hamas-khan.html
07:00 Which first world nations have become more Muslim and more free?
14:20 Prof. John Mearsheimer: How Will the War in Gaza End?
36:00 WSJ: The Israelis Prove Biden Wrong on Rafah, https://www.wsj.com/articles/rafah-evacuation-israel-biden-administration-antony-blinken-jake-sullivan-hamas-3e3c85f7
43:30 Dennis Prager and Julie Hartman on humor, intelligence, Israel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_AOXzJl8as
56:00 BLM has more blood on its hands in the past decade than any other American organization
1:00:00 The Joy of Sex, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n04/florence-sutcliffe-braithwaite/indoor-sport
1:03:45 NYT: On Campus, a New Social Litmus Test: Zionist or Not?, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/style/jewish-college-students-zionism-israel.html
1:06:45 Betrayals: The Unpredictability of Human Relations by Gabriella Turnaturi, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=9079
1:17:00 Settler violence in the West Bank, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/magazine/israel-west-bank-settler-violence-impunity.html

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