TheJakerblog

Parlez-sie Proto, signor?

    The Voice of America is heard around the world in 45 languages. The Finnish public broadcaster YLE broadcasts the news in classical Latin. Across the USA radio stations’ search for a faithful “niche audience” means that languages from Korean to Navajo can sound from our speakers.

     But a few weeks ago, WSKG may have had them all beat. We were broadcasting (albeit briefly) in Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It was spoken about 6,000 years ago and is the root of many other languages across much of today's world, from Sanskrit to Icelandic. The “announcer” was Dr. David Anthony, professor of anthropology at Hartwick College, who was a guest on OFF THE PAGE along with his wife and fellow researcher Dorcas Brown. They came to tell about Dr. Anthony’s new book, “The Horse, the Wheel and Language”, which reveals how people in what is now the steppes of southern Russia gained power through their domestication of the horse, perfection of the wheel and of agriculture, and left their mark on today’s world and its languages.  The dominance of their husbandry, technology and poetic speech displaced many other tribal tongues.

     Linguists were able to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European by applying known rules of language change and tracing back common words in known ancient languages. No one will deliberately let a tongue-twister become everyday speech. Every language has gone through modification (some would call it corruption) over the centuries, but a surprising number of words appear to have changed little since those Proto days: the wheel rotates on an axl. Nime is name, wete became water. Another PIE word that has been preserved in English is ghos-ti-. It is the root of both “guest” and “ghost”.

    Ghos-ti-, however, is not necessarily related to the English word for the finny creatures that swim in the wete. Ghosti: gh, as in enough; o as in women; s as in corps; ti as in action. Fish. After 6,000 years you’d think we’d had enuf.

Go n-éirí do thuras leat!*

*May your trip succeed with you = Have a successful trip!
   (or as we say in English, “bon voyage”)

I spotted a misspelled word the other day, one I’d expected sooner or later to see. Writing about individuals who leave their own country to live abroad, somebody turned an expatriate into an “ex-patriot”. In fact, and in fairness, a person living abroad may continue to harbor warm and loyal feelings about the old homeland, but chooses to do so from a distant harbor.

This came to mind during the April 1st OFF THE PAGE visit from Mary Pat Hyland, who dropped by to speak about her new novel “The Cyber Miracles”, but also to speak (partly in fluent Gaelic) about Irish culture and her family’s ancestral homeland. At several times in its history conditions in Ireland had become intolerable and emigration was the most reasonable choice. But there was also a sense that Irish men and women really couldn’t be free to develop their talents while remaining on the auld sod.

On a visit to Ireland a few years ago I discovered a delightful nation going through an economic and cultural transformation. New industries were starting up, high-tech companies were running help wanted spots on the radio, Dublin’s fair city surpassed half a million in population and, for the first time in a long while, people were coming back to Ireland to stay. There were still stone castles and thatched cottages, but Ireland is now integrated into the European Community. The fiber-optic cables that connect Europe and North America all pass through Ireland and that country has become one of the most wired in the world. At the same time the road network remains largely two lanes squeezed between hedgerows. “We’ll never widen our roads,” one Irish woman proudly told me. “It’s part of our heritage.”

Often it is the ex-expatriates expecting their country to be unchanged who strive the hardest to preserve the heritage, though they are also at the forefront of the changes taking place. Mary Pat Hyland is working on a sequel to “The Cyber Miracles” in which her protagonist Maeve Kenny may make her first journey to Ireland. We look forward to sharing her impressions.

winter memory

The end of summer can be a melancholy time.  But winter's passing also takes sweet days with it.  I wrote this poem, then forgot that I'd written it and began it again, then rediscovered the original.  That may be the best way to write and rewrite.

Winter is washing away.  March backwards.
There are outcroppings of ice on the north side
    of cold rocks that will melt slowly,
    the very last trickle of winter’s heavy water – snow and ice working away.

All season long we bundled against the cold
   when we had to be outside
And stepped carefully onto and into the piles and drifts
   settling deeper, then covered over
   revising but not erasing every step of the way.
Escorting the dog, deliveries to the bird feeder,
   just walking somewhere to spend a moment in the cold looking into the woods, sensing a smooth world.
Each step pressed down toward the frozen earth.
Maybe it will all be covered
   in a final shroud, but then
The snow settles,
   and as it melts into the soil beneath
   it also brings back footsteps planted a season ago
   brave strolls in zero and below
   a step that slipped and stayed in ice.
The snow remembers its walks
   the way the grass never will
                  once it reappears.

Penny's Picture and Civil Rights

The March 18^th OFF THE PAGE interview with Gurdon Brewster about “No Turning Back” and his experience with Reverends Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta brought back memories of the 1950s and 60s “civil rights era” (that time and the drive for racial justice and equality has never really had a simple name). The resistance and controversy coming around centennial of the Civil War was framed as another conflict between North and South – although the nation would soon learn that racial equality wasn’t really a regional matter. But the segregated South, with its complicated social codes, could be shocking to those who didn’t grow up there, as it was to Gurdon Brewster. I spent some years in the South during that time and regularly felt consternation and the corrupting privilege of being on the “whites only” side of the color line.

While the immersion into a segregated society would be painful and humiliating to an African-American from the North who had never confronted it directly (the case of Emmett Till being the most infamous example), it could also be a shock to a white person. That’s how a college classmate of mine I’ll call Penny became an emblem of the nation’s racial conflict.

Penny and her friends from Long Island were on their high school senior class trip to Washington, DC – an excursion that was once as much a part of completing the high school years as the prom and the class ring – when a side trip was arranged to Richmond, Virginia. Their bus didn’t have bathroom facilities on board, so by the time Penny and her classmates arrived in the Capital of the Confederacy he first stop had to be the ladies’ room. She ran into the terminal and thought she had found the rest room when she noticed a sign beside the door: COLORED LADIES.

Penny stopped and looked around, her face revealing a pain that wasn’t simply physical. Just at that moment a photographer from Life Magazine working on a story about segregation snapped her picture and the following week she appeared in million of copies as an image of America’s discomfort.

Getting on Off the Page

Whenever anyone asks about an appearance on OFF THE PAGE one of my first questions is, “Do you [or the author you’re representing] have a phone number starting with 607?”  I’m not necessarily looking for contact information at that point but it’s the quickest way to determine who is a “regional author”.  WSKG Radio’s primary coverage area fairly duplicates the 607 area code, albeit with some spillover into 315, 845, 585 and – not limiting ourselves to New York State – Pennsylvania’s five-seventy.

Occasionally I’ll go beyond the Southern Tier and adjacent lands if a book or author is of special regional interest, but otherwise I’m simply looking for well-written fiction and non-fiction, poetry and history and anything else created by a writer from our region.  Sometimes the most important activity going on in a community is happening in solitude and in one person’s mind.  We’ve discovered an abundance of good writing here in these hills.

One question I regularly receive is, “Do you read the entire book for an OFF THE PAGE interview?”  I certainly do, usually with a speedy re-read just before the broadcast.  There are some people who think you can get the idea of both style and substance by reading only the first and last chapters, but that seems to me like simply eating the crackers without the cheese in the middle.

A book can be itself an object of beauty, but there’s an old saying about not judging a book by its cover and it is literally true.  Some of the best books I’ve seen lately were cheaply printed and bound, perhaps by the author himself.  That should not detract from interest in the writing within.

An increasing number of authors choose to self-publish, often because they simply don’t want to take the time to hassle with agents and publishers.  Especially at the beginning of a writing career DIY publishing is a sure way to get into print.  But it may be more difficult to get into the bookstores, or even on-line sellers, especially if someone has written an especially personal book or one that deals with their own community.  That should make such a book all the more relevant to the WSKG audience, for it means that on OFF THE PAGE you’re regularly learning about a first edition right from the person who wrote it, and possibly published it.

These days even well-established publishing houses are turning to print-on-demand and the invention of the e-book has made it possible for anyone to get their words into distribution.  OFF THE PAGE will continue to concentrate on the content and quality of books by authors in our part of the country, how their mind and spirit was conveyed to us, with less concern about the system that made it happen.

Thank you for joining us

One of the important habits we’re supposed to adopt early in life is verbal etiquette.  So if a person says, “how do you do”, you respond with “pleased to meet you” or just a simple “hello”, not “how do I do what?”  When somebody sneezes, you should observe ancient practice and say “God bless you!” or cheerfully wish them good health in German with a “gesundheit!”, which sounds sort of like a sneeze itself.  And of course, when someone says “thank you” say, “you’re welcome.”  It’s just polite.

So what are you supposed to say when you’ve been interviewed on the radio and the interviewer expresses appreciation for your time and words of wisdom? Current practice seems to indicate that the interviewee must end the conversation with the words,“Thank you for having me.”

That expression turns up most of the time at the conclusion of radio interviews (less so on television, for some reason). It suggests that the guest is grateful for the opportunity to expound for a few moments in the mass media, time which could have just as easily been bestowed upon someone else.  The phrase is a relative of “thank you for taking my call” which turns up regularly on phone-in programs, spoken by a listener who apparently didn’t expect to get through.

But as a way of saying “you’re welcome”, “thank you for having me” implies a function of the media beyond the control of the person who actually gave substance to the past few minutes of airtime.

I’m not sure how that expression got started.  Some years ago I heard a radio interview with comedian and songwriter Alan Sherman.  In conclusion, the interviewer expressed appreciation for having him on the show, to which Sherman replied, “I enjoyed being had.”

So what’s the smoothest way to avoid sounding snookered, dependent or otherwise taken in?  (Smoothness is a high virtue in broadcasting). “You’re welcome” still suffices and shows good breeding.  “It was my pleasure” can be gracious even as one appears to be boasting,“I got more out of this than you did.” “That’s okay” is, well, okay.  For complete honesty an interviewee could react to a final thanks with, “Was that it?  Are we out of time?  You never asked me about my trip to the Brazilian rain forest where I composed this beautiful song about my friend Lucrezia and the Eskimo children that we rescued from the hands of unscrupulous advertisers…”

Thank you for reading me.