Camp NaNoWriMo - daily blog posts in April

Once again I'm taking part in a writing challenge. This time, Camp NaNoWriMo allows participants to set their own word count targets, and actively encourages people to write things other than novels (if they want).

I decided that during April I will use the motivation these challenges give me to write a blog post every day. I really enjoy writing my blog, and feel disappointed in months when I find I haven't written very often. Perhaps writing every day will help me make this part of my routine, so that I will continue to write every day, or at least more frequently, even when the month is over. I hope that eventually I will write my blog often, even when I am working on other writing projects (in addition to my paid translating work, which I also consider a form of writing).

The title of my blog, Reality and Fiction, gives me a lot of freedom to choose subjects. I will review some of the books I have read in the past few months, but also refer to things that happen to me and things I learn about the world. I am not worried about not being able to think of a subject to write about, or about not reaching my chosen word count target, which is, admittedly, lower than the 50,000 word target for writing a novel in the "classical" NaNoWriMo challenge.

If any readers would like to ask questions or make suggestions in the comments, I will be happy to address them during the month.

Happy writing to all Camp NaNoWriMo participants, and to bloggers everywhere!

My father, John Glucker, at eighty

My father, John (Yohanan) Glucker, celebrates his eightieth birthday today. Here are a few photos of him, marking different stages and aspects of his life.

He was born in Haifa on 23 March 1933. He is pictured here with his father, Dr. Isaac Glucker and his mother, Hannah Glucker (Bly).

After his military service, he studied Classics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and then at Oxford, before teaching Classics at Exeter University, where he met my mother, Carol Evans.

Some of their wedding photos have appeared in a previous blog post. They have two children, myself (born 1969), and my sister Ilana (born 1973).

In 1978 he was appointed Professor in the Classics Department at Tel Aviv University (featured in the photo below), where he taught until retirement, and we immigrated to Israel.

He has always had a strong connection to Greece, and is one of very few non-Greek scholars to be completely fluent in modern Greek. He was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Athens, and has also taught at the university of Crete, and visits Greece almost every year.

In his retirement he has been editing the review journal Katharsis, and is now also a grandfather to my sister's children.

I would like to wish him continued health and happiness in the coming years.

Happy Birthday!

Gender in language

This Friday is International Women's Day. There are many issues relating to gender equality that are worth discussing, but one that particularly interests me is the use of gendered language.

Most languages have not only different words for men, women, boys, and girls, but different personal pronouns for males and females, and different nouns for various professions depending on the person's gender.

Many people's first names also tend to be either male or female, though there is a trend in Israel to give girls what used to be male-only names. This might be considered as empowering to girls, but in many classrooms now people have to distinguish between two children with the same name but different genders, so they end up saying things like "Tal-the-girl" and "Tal-the-boy", rather than using full names as they would when there were two children of the same gender with the same name.

It seems that in most societies it is considered important to know whether a person is male or female, even in cases where this fact is, objectively, completely irrelevant. For example, if someone says: "I went to my doctor", a listener might ask: "What did he say?", and if the doctor is female, the reply would probably start "She said...", emphasizing that the person being discussed is a woman. This would seem to be more common when discussing non-traditional gender roles. For example, in Hebrew there are feminine forms for the professions "nurse" and "teacher", and because the vast majority of these professionals are female, the feminine plural noun is usually used. Similarly, in English people have to specify "male nurse".

The desire to use more inclusive forms in English has made people try to avoid saying "he" as the general form, and because "he or she" is inconvenient, the tendency is to use the plural wherever possible and say "they". However, many people seem to be using "they" as the gender-non-specific pronoun even in the singular, and I have heard this said even when the person's gender has been determined. For example, "My friend's sister had a job interview, but they didn't get the job". Perhaps just as "you" became both singular and plural eventually "they" will replace "he" and "she", though at the moment this seems unlikely.

Hebrew has an even more clearly gendered system, because even "I", "me", "you" (singular and plural), and "they" have masculine and feminine forms, and the verbs agreeing with these subjects are also gendered. This makes it impossible to be vague about gender, for example in a love song. "I love you" will specify whether the "I" and the "you" are male or female.

I have been wondering what it is like to have a language without genders. Apparently the following languages either have no genders or fewer ways of marking a gender: Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Persian, Basque, and Turkish. I am more confused by what I have read about Chinese and Japanese.

Would speakers of such languages still feel the need to find ways to convey whether their doctor was male or female? Do they have clearly gendered first names? Could we live in a society where language and naming conventions did not make everyone's gender such a big issue?

The Month of Letters Challenge

I have just completed the Month of Letters Challenge. The purpose is to send a letter or card or something by mail every day during February, in an attempt to revive the tradition of writing letters.

During my teens and twenties I had many penpals around the world, and also wrote to relatives every week. At first I wrote letters by hand, and later typed them on the computer. Letters took a few days to reach their destination, and so there was a delay between sending them and knowing the recipient had received them. An exchange could take two weeks or more.

More recently I have kept in touch with my remaining penpals and relatives by email, and also through Facebook. This is a rather different experience to writing letters. With email you know it will arrive almost at once, so there is a tendency to write more frequently, but shorter messages. And on Facebook it is possible to communicate privately, but people tend to comment on each others' status updates and photos, so everything is said in public (or at least in view of other friends, depending on your settings). My tendency on Facebook is to be less controversial and less personal than I can in private correspondence.

The challenge was fun, and in some ways more difficult than NaNoWriMo. While my daily word count did not have to be as high (though three of my letters reached the average daily word count I would do for NaNoWriMo), each letter was a complete piece of work rather than a work in progress, and it had to be sent out that day rather than left for later revision. I was aware that my recipient would be reading it within days, while the novels I have written during NaNoWriMo have yet to be read by anyone else!

I didn't want to use this challenge to make new friends, but I did use it to reconnect with two of my past penpals. One of them recently found me on Facebook (which has happened with several others over the years), and I sent another an email recently, which turned out to be good as she had lost all her email contacts. I also managed to send a parcel, a birthday card, and some newspaper clippings. I wrote a couple of letters by hand, but my writing has deteriorated and my hand now gets very tired, so I really prefer typing.

I consider myself as part of an intermediate generation. I grew up knowing I would be a writer and expecting to own a manual typewriter. I started owning and using a computer around age 20, and now use it for many hours a day, for work, communication, education, and entertainment. However, I still love physical books so I don't yet have an ereader, and I still enjoy physical letters, though it makes more sense now to use email. I hope the analog, such as physical letters and books, can continue alongside the digital.

Avoiding arguments online

The Internet is notorious for arguments. It is obviously easier for people to argue online than face to face, because of anonymity and the reduced risk of physical violence. It is also easier for people to misunderstand each other without the useful cues of body language and tone of voice. Our culture seems to have trained us to stand up for ourselves and defend our opinions, instead of seeking to coexist harmoniously with others in a diversity of opinions and attitudes.

Here are some useful tips for avoiding getting into arguments online:

First, be honest with yourself about your own motivations for the discussion. Are you trying to prove to yourself and others that you are "right"? This sort of attitude often leads to conflict. Are you determined to defend yourself against being misunderstood? Accept that not everyone will understand you or agree with you, and it won't matter so much.

Be aware that you might have misunderstood what the other person said or meant. People express themselves in different ways, and some may not be using their native language.

It is always possible to ask for clarification before jumping to conclusions. You can ask what someone meant, politely. Try saying "Excuse me, did you mean...?". This will give the other person an opportunity to rephrase and perhaps reconsider the statement.

When you are certain you know what the other person meant to say, you should still wonder about motivations. Was it said seriously or as a joke? Was it intended to inform, express a personal opinion, or even insult?

Realize that regardless of what someone else does, the decision on how to react is completely yours. Nobody obliges you to feel offended, or to want to correct someone. Ask yourself whether and why it is important for you to be seen as being "right" by this person (and perhaps others who read the exchange).

If someone is spreading false information, you can find a reliable online link to the correct information and post that. This shows it's not just your opinion, and that you are correcting the information, not the person who made a mistake (for whatever reason). In general it is preferable to address the statements rather than make the attack personal.

If someone is trying to be offensive, you can choose not to be offended. This makes you the stronger person. You can leave the conversation, since it is unlikely to be productive in any way, or you could say something like "I understand you think those words should offend me. This shows that your motivation here is negative, and I choose not to take offence from you".

If something you say upsets someone else for whatever reason, don't get defensive. If they choose to disagree with your opinion, you can just say "I see that we don't agree, and that's OK". If they attribute to you negative motivations, you can say "I'm sorry that you were hurt by my words, that was not my intention".

It seems to me that our culture has made it less acceptable to apologize and to forgive, and I find this very sad. Apologizing is a benevolent gesture that shows you care more about having good relations with others than about "winning" or being "right". Forgiving and accepting someone's apology also show strength and compassion. 

Some useful ways to phrase things in order to avoid conflict:
"In my opinion..." (rather than implying that whatever you say is the absolute truth)
"I have heard that..." (perhaps finding a source for this claim)
"Do you know if...?" (engaging someone with a question rather than a challenge)

Finally, you can always leave a discussion before it gets ugly. You are not a parent or teacher of everyone you meet online, and you have no duty to educate or correct everyone. If the discussion is taking place on your site (blog, Facebook), you can delete it.

Of course, I am assuming here that if you are reading this you are not the sort of person who sets out deliberately to create conflict and offend people! If you are such a person, I think it would be worth finding out why you enjoy doing this and changing yourself.

Why your vote matters

Tomorrow Israel holds general elections for the Knesset (parliament). Like many democracies, Israel has seen a decline in voter turnout, and voters who care are trying to encourage others to vote.

There has even been some discussion of countries where voting is compulsory. I'm not sure whether this would be a good idea, or how it would be enforced. I think it is better to convince voters of the importance of casting their votes voluntarily.

I think people would be more likely to vote if they saw it as a duty rather than a right. While it is often perceived as a right, and therefore not compulsory, voting in a democracy is intended to ensure that the ruling body reflects the wishes of the people. The more people vote, the more closely the composition of the parties in the Knesset reflects the opinions of the citizens.

Israelis often talk about the civic duty to serve in the military, which is compulsory here, and complain about those who manage to avoid this duty. I would say that voting in the elections is another civic duty that people should take more seriously. It requires less time and effort than military service, and has an impact on more aspects of daily life.

Many people say they are not going to vote because none of the parties reflects their views. To this I would say that you don't have to agree with 100% of the positions of a party in order to vote for it. It's sufficient that you think this party is closer to your position than any other party, or that it's the least bad of the parties available.

Some people are frustrated because they think their vote is not going to have any impact among the 5,656,705 eligible voters. This is like saying that nothing you ever do matters because there are so many other people in the world. If everyone thought like this, nobody would vote. You can't leave this responsibility to others. I argue that everything you do matters in the total sum of human actions.

All of our actions matter and have some influence, large or small, on others around us and ultimately on the whole of humanity and the world. This is why I think everyone should be considerate and cooperative at all times. If you believe smiling at a stranger can somehow make the world a better place, even if only to a small extent, then you should believe that every vote matters.

Apathy and a feeling of disempowerment are attitudes that people inflict on themselves. Here you are given an opportunity to express the power that you are able to have within a democracy, and turning away from it can be harmful to your sense of controlling your destiny and belonging to a community.

Other people say they don't understand politics. I find this strange, since it is quite easy to grasp the positions of the different parties and what their policies would mean for different individuals and groups. Part of our civic duty is to learn about things happening in our country and community, and form opinions about these things.

I have voted in every Knesset and municipal election since I reached voting age (18). I think it matters in two ways. First, this is how I can influence, even in a small way, what happens in my country and community. Second, it matters to me to know that I consider myself a person who cares enough to express her views and make this contribution to her community.

I will vote tomorrow, and urge all eligible voters to do their civic duty and vote, both for the sake of our democracy being more representative, and for their own sense of who they are.

ITA Lectures: Zuckermann and Sela-Shapiro

Last week I attended a lecture event organized by the Israel Translators Association in Haifa, at the Mount Carmel Hotel.

The first lecture was by linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann. I had previously heard him speak about his somewhat controversial assertion that what we speak in Israel is in fact Israeli, not Hebrew, since the revived language includes influences from Yiddish and other modern Indo-European languages, and has not remained strictly a Semitic language like its ancestor. Thus far, his theory was quite convincing, but it turned out he also advocates a very "descriptive" rather than "prescriptive" ideology, which went a bit too far, in my opinion, in accepting the spoken language and rejecting the idea that there are rules people can learn and use.

This time, his lecture was on a rather different subject, Revival Linguistics. Zuckermann now teaches linguistics in Australia, and has been involved in reviving some of the Aboriginal languages. Some figures quoted: There are 250 Aboriginal languages in Australia, of which only 18 (17%) are still living. Of 7,000 world languages, we will lose 90% within the next century (unless action is taken). 96% of the world's population speak 4% of the world's languages, which means only 4% of the population speak the remaining 96% of languages, probably only a small population per language.

Much of the lecture was devoted to the reasons for reviving "sleeping" languages, which was the aspect I found most interesting. The Aboriginal languages became extinct through a deliberate policy of linguicide imposed by the colonialists. Loss of a language entails loss of cultural autonomy. These languages contained traditional stories and symbols and contributed to cultural diversity. Some languages contain unique concepts that do not exist in other languages. Learning a native language empowers individuals and groups and being bilingual improves other skills.

I found myself becoming convinced of the importance of reviving minority languages. While it would be easy to argue that in today's world it is most important to speak one of the major world languages, I now understand the ideology and idealism that wishes to teach people the traditional languages of their ancestors, even if these are spoken by relatively small groups. I find this particularly worthwhile if the children are brought up bilingual, as I was, and learn to move between two linguistic and cultural worlds from an early age.

After dinner, the second lecture was by translator Yael Sela-Shapiro. She discussed the problems of translating scientific and technical material into Hebrew, where there are vocabulary voids. After explaining the problem, the suggested solutions were as follows: where there is a familiar and accepted translation, it can be used, taking the target audience into account. Where there is an accepted but perhaps less familiar translation, the word can be used with the foreign word in parentheses the first time. Where there is a translation that is unfamiliar, or there are two translations, it is worth consulting the customer and also placing the foreign word in parentheses. Where there is no Hebrew equivalent, consult the customer, and discuss inventing a new word, with explanation, or transliterating the foreign word, or leaving the foreign word in the original, according to the target audience's preferences.

This lecture led to a lively discussion about word formation in Hebrew, and about how to estimate the expectations of the target audience. Towards the end she presented some words she and other translators had invented to translate into Hebrew words that were invented in English in SF books.

Both lecturers were knowledgeable, charismatic, and experienced speakers who engaged with the audience. I was pleased that about 50 people attended this lecture, a similar attendance to the ITA events held in Tel Aviv, and hope many more such events will be held in Haifa.