On the Origins of Language

To develop a unique language, it's helpful to know what a language actually is. That's where I started, in the science classroom on the third floor of the King School.

After quickly taking down attendance, and introducing myself, the class, and Project Ellipsis, I gave the first instruction of my professional teaching career: talk like a caveman for five minutes. It turns out that five minutes really is a long time for a nonsense task, and students started getting bored, so I cut them off two minutes in to ask why I had them do it. No one had any idea, so thus began a brief discussion on the origins of language. We eventually got around to my main point, and the lesson of the day: phonemes.

In 2007, I had the privilege of being among the last students of Larry Johnson while he was at SMFA, taking a class called Word Games upon which many of my lessons for this unit were based. One of the first (if not the first) things Larry taught us about was the existence of phonemes, the smallest units of language. For those of you not in the know, a phoneme is a concept representing the smallest, most basic sound that can be made by the human vocal system. We concentrated on phonemes found in the English language, which you can find here. The rest of the day was spent deconstructing words into phonemes, and seeing if we could recombine the phonemes to make new words. This exercise was based off one I did with Larry - I deconstructed the word "exit" and used the phonemes to create common words (sit, zit, exist, ticks) and put them into a text-sound poem.

The end of class was spent attempting to read a text-sound poem by Larry called Voyage and discussing what exactly was going on. Homework was to come up with thirty random words, which would be assembled into a text-sound art poem the next day. This did not work so well, so I won't go into it.

Week Two of Tools for Communicating explored the development of the English language. While Larry had a class on this as well, I really have to give credit to my high school English teacher Michael Frost (no relation to Robert) for turning me on to Old English, and indeed I pulled a few pages out of Mr. Frost's teaching methods.

After a travesty of a condensed history of the Vikingss, the Normans, and Old English (a.k.a. Anglo-Saxon, or Englisc), we turned to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (which I read for Mr. Frost four years ago), which came into the world in Middle English. I read to them, in my best Shakespearian accent, the first ten lines of the Tales (transcribed into Modern English characters), then projected them along with Modern English translations:

1 Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
(When April with its sweet-smelling showers)
2 The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
(Has pierced the drought of March to the root,)
3 And bathed every veyne in swich licour
(And bathed every vein [of the plants] in such liquid)
4 Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
(By which power the flower is created;)
5 Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
(When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,)
6 Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
(In every wood and field has breathed life into)
7 The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
(The tender new leaves, and the young sun)
8 Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
(Has run half its course in Aries,)
9 And smale foweles maken melodye,
(And small fowls make melody,)
10 That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(Those that sleep all the night with open eyes)

Naturally, their minds were blown.

We then discussed the differences we saw between Middle and Modern English. I opened the next part of the lesson with a question: where does the word "ain't" come from?

Yes, it's a word.

This led us to the exercise of the day: thinking of a "future" English. As an example, I gave my impression of a near-future Bostonian English where 'R's literally didn't exist and every vowel became a pronounced short 'A' sound, which actually ended up sounding like a monotone Southern accent (think of the worst JFK impersonation you've ever heard). We then moved on to dialects.

The language studied at the King School is Mandarin Chinese, of which I happen to know a little from studying in Beijing for a few months. I know some Cantonese from growing up in a Cantonese-speaking family, as well as a few phrases in my maternal grandparents' Toyshanese dialect. Minds were again boggled as I presented the phrase "I eat dinner" in what sounded like three different languages. I asked students to guess how many dialects of English existed (I found there are two primary dialects - American and Queen's [British], with regional varieties falling under one of the two).

We got into these regional varieties as well, by discussing and impersonating accents. I myself speak naturally with a slight New England/Boston accent (it comes out more when I'm angry), which no one noticed until I began speaking with my best approximation of a "neutral" American accent ("TV English" as I like to call it).

By the time we finished our discussions, we were getting close to the bell, so I started giving out random scenarios off the top of my head ("If cats spoke English and took over the world, what will English sound like in a thousand years?") and had the class respond with random phrases.

In retrospect, I'm thinking that some of the text-sound art stuff was a little conceptually lofty for middle schoolers, although we didn't spend a lot of time head-scratching. Everyone had fun, though, which was encouraging for me as a first-time teacher.

Greetings and salutations!

Welcome to the Project Ellipsis blog, not to be confused with the Project Ellipsis Blog, which is someone else's personal blogger thing.

Project Ellipsis began as a project called "..." (pronounced "ellipsis"), which was part of a bigger public art project called the ArtForce! Cambridge Public Art Lab [http://www.artforcecambridge.org - I'm also the webmaster for this site!]. ArtForce! Cambridge was born out of the Site-Specific Installation class at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, taught by Mags Harries but mostly run by us. The Public Art Lab was our way of exploring and defining public art for ourselves, and included projects such as hula hoop dances to the fresh waters of Cambridge, MA, conversations with visitors to our space at the Cambridge Arts Council Gallery, guided hikes from Boston to Medford, MA, and more.

... was originally proposed as a series of workshops to be conducted with youth groups in Cambridge - these workshops would result in the creation of cajón drums that would be painted by the youth groups and installed on sidewalk corners at major intersections, where the public would be invited to sit down and drum across the street to each other. This idea lost steam and became an attempt to get citizens to signal across the Charles River to each other using flag semaphore and Morse codes. Eventually, the workshop idea came back.

In 2005, as a junior at Boston College High School, I got involved with a public art project at U/MASS Boston called "What's the Point?" facilitated by Wendy Baring-Gould with artists Gary Duehr and Cathy McLaurin [read more]. In the project, residents, professionals, and students living and working in the Columbia Point neighborhood engaged in a series of workshops to create a "point" about the area. These "points" were digitally printed onto aluminum sheets and installed in twelve "totem poles" around Columbia Point and remain standing today. Wendy had originally intended for the project to cycle every three years, but she moved on to other things.

In 2008, as a junior at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, I was reunited with Wendy at the Boston Center for the Arts on a visit to the Medicine Wheel installation (and, incidentally, I was part of a photo exhibition at Gary Duehr's Bromfield Gallery in Boston the previous summer) and was reinspired by What's the Point?

... became a series of workshops exploring forms of communication, such as the flag semaphore and Morse code I mentioned before, but also various sign languages, ideograms, body language, and more. The project would culminate in the creation of a complete language or languages unique to the city of Cambridge.

In December of 2009, fellow ArtForce! artist Lisa Silveria and I paid a visit to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School in Cambridge. Muna Bruce, then-electives department coordinator, had been wanting to work with SMFA students for a long time. She offered me the opportunity to run an elective class at the King School, which was a perfect venue to run my project (and incidentally, I am an art education major at the SMFA - I love teaching!). ... began on 23 February 2009, with a classroom of fifteen middle schoolers. The class I teach, called Tools for Communicating (ironically, due to miscommunication, it was officially written down as "Tools of Communication"), is still running until 19 June 2009, a month from now.

Project Ellipsis was retitled last May, mostly due to people not being able to pronounce "..." (and it looks funny on paper), but also due to the project's expansion. I have been offered the chance to run a similar project with the Friends of Alewife Reservation, who I came into contact via another ArtForce! Cambridge project, as well as a summer program in my hometown of Milton, MA. If I'm lucky, I'll be running it in the fall of 2009 as part of my Senior Projects thesis at SMFA, and the King School has offered to run Tools for Communicating again in the spring. If I'm really lucky, I'll get to display ephemera from the project at First Night Boston 2010.

This blog is my little place for reflection on the project, as well as your way of keeping track of what's going on. I'll tell you a little about myself in another post. (Hey, it's in the sidebar now!)

Thanks for reading!