5 ms·

Language and Poverty

Quinzel 3y ago
Such a great read. Thank you for sharing!
aiNohY6g 3y ago
The last paragraph is so true. Borrowed from the reference https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/poverty-is-a-quality-of-the-heart/ https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/poverty-is-a-quality-of-... : “Poverty is the quality of the heart that makes us relate to life, not as a property to be defended but as a gift to be shared. Poverty is the constant willingness to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward to new, unknown experiences. Poverty is the inner understanding that the hours, days, weeks, and years do not belong to us but are the gentle reminders of our call to give, not only love and work, but life itself, to those who follow us and will take our place. He or she who cares is invited to be poor, to strip himself or herself from the illusions of ownership, and to create some room for the person looking for a place to rest. The paradox of care is that poverty makes a good host. When our hands, heads, and hearts are filled with worries, concerns, and preoccupations, there can hardly be any place left for the stranger to feel at home.”
- boxed 3y ago
  That... goes just totally counter to my (admittedly limited) experience with the most impoverished people in Sweden: the Romanian Romani. They are not at all "[willing] to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward to new, unknown experiences", in fact the exact opposite. Part of what keeps them in extreme poverty is their cultural ideas of what it means to be Romani at at all. I would state the exact opposite: poverty is when you CANNOT "say good-bye to yesterday" because you are desperately trying to fix the problems/debt of yesterday even if it creates new problems/debt for tomorrow, because the alternative is starvation.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    > the most impoverished people in Sweden: the Romanian Romani They might not necessarily be from Romania. At least from my experience next door in Finland, it has been very common for the media to write about “beggars from Romania”, but if you actually chat with the Roma beggars on the street or the bottle-returners in front of you in the queue, often they come from Bulgaria instead. Yet for some reason Bulgaria never seems to get mentioned, perhaps due to the popular confusion of “Roma/Romani” and “Romania” even though the words are not actually historically related.
  - aiNohY6g 3y ago
    > "[willing] to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward > poverty is when you CANNOT "say good-bye to yesterday" Both are not exclusive. You're willing to yet you can't, and possibly feel trapped in a miserable existence that's not yours.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  I’m getting strong Mother Theresa vibes.
- graemep 3y ago
  That refers to voluntarily chosen poverty. There is a huge difference between that and poverty that is no deliberately chosen.
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    I think “chosen poverty” is a fraught notion. Cultural poverty perhaps, but poverty is, according to most useful definitions, an undesirable state.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> The popular notion of poverty is that it is a deficit, a state of not having enough material goods nor the means to acquire them. Yet scholars of development have identified for us that poverty is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. How lucky we are that "scholars have identified for us" what poverty is, so that we don't have to think about it for ourselves, not the lack of money, which would be easy to solve by giving money to the poor, but rather a "multi-dimensional phenomenon", which can only mean that it requires more scholarship to address.
- mistermann 3y ago
  If you have all the dimensions figured out I recommend you write up a white paper of the solution so humanity can get started with enthusiastic implementation.
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  OTOH, poverty is multidimensional in a way that simply giving money to the poor will not (because it cannot) solve. Which is not an argument against giving money to the poor, of course. My point is only that real scholarship on poverty and its many effects actually is useful for more than just academics’ job security. What the article said about identity and aspirational aspects of poverty rang absolutely true to me (aside from what I think was a too ham-handed attempt to shoehorn it under SIL’s language preservation stuff). Source: teacher in urban Title I public school. Indeed, I had some ninth graders identifying pieces of those very issues in a reflection thing I had them write that I just graded (e.g., one girl writing about seeing a connection between slavery and jokes/tropes that you often hear among black kids today about darker versus lighter skinned folks; like, yeah, those are rooted ultimately in theories and perceptions of the majority white society (beginning in the 1600s) about darkness of skin indexing mental and physical abilities in a fairly straightforward (if absurdly crude) way. And it gets filtered through and rooted in perceptions of fucking 14 year olds in this Year of Our Lord 2023 (though, again, not in some linear way; we’re talking about large-scale social and cultural conceptualizations that work themselves out over generational time-scales)).
  - walledstance 3y ago
dejj 3y ago
Being about language and defining expressions for traditional values in it, is there perhaps an identity relation between the poverty levels: - material, spiritual, civic, social identity, and social aspiration and the levels of soul in jewish Kabbalah: - Nefesh, Ruach, Neshama, Chaya, and Yechida?
wikozePlainT59 3y ago
I did a field trip for language preservation in the Amazon, it was so weird the difference between the will to preserve culture and language from insider and outsider vs the willingness to learn and be part of global culture and learn Spanish / English. Night lectures were given in evening school for traditional language and then later for English. They were all expecting to enhance they quality of life and situation by learning English and work with tourist. After 5 years they were just able to present themselves. They were stuck between the to world belonging to none and kept in this position it was very special.
samirillian 3y ago
Weird read, not sure what to make of it. Muddled between "everybody is poor in something" and "actually being poor is good". It's like corporate-speak mixed with woke-speak for Christian missionaries who get all their funding from USAID. Do not like these people.
- bluetomcat 3y ago
  In summary, it reads like "people struggling to get access to clean water are also linguistically-poor, which prevents them from reading scientific papers".
  - dejj 3y ago
    In a way, yes. When you apply Cuil-theory, it means “how many more levels of abstraction do you have to understand, to find an easy ~solution to~ description of your problem.” Somehow like category theory will enable you to solve your maths homework.
  - bratbag 3y ago
    Being linguistically poor reduces your options for sourcing solutions to your problems, or understanding how to stop them being problems in the first place. There may be methods of accessing clean water that are totally outside their traditional or contextual experience, which they have no hope of accessing or evaluating due to linguistic limitations. Even the idea that there may be options outside of the traditional and immediate, may be something they had not thought of due to linguistic limitations.
boxed 3y ago
To me it seems like they are taking a word "poverty" that we mostly agree on and then try to define it so everyone is confused. This isn't a helpful approach imo. If there are other ways to suffer, maybe use another word?
tkellogg 3y ago
Hard to read that and not hear him alluding to the fact that most of the United States is monolingual, and thus linguistically poor. Rural US also frequently exhibits the identity poverty that he talks about. He never explicitly mentions it. I think there's something to this, needs more thought.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Technological poverty is two gold iPhones one in each back pocket of a pair of $300 bedazzled bleached jeans. It's possible to be surrounded by very expensive convenient magic, drowning in it, yet to own nothing and be subject to abject fealty and dependence. If one lacks the "digital literacy" (or whatever name we give empowering language that opens wide horizons) then like Palahniuk says, your stuff ends up owning you.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wolframhempel 3y ago
This article makes such a crucial point. There are many entrepreneurs and other successful people that set out to do good in the world. And that's laudable and to be encouraged. But unfortunately, they project their own mindset onto others. "Surely, they are all aspiring entrepreneurs at heart. If only they had access to resources, they'd go ahead and prosper." - And so a lot of anti-poverty initiatives focus on things like micro-credits, mentorship and training that facilitates and unlocks an existing drive towards entrepreneurship. But what if that drive simply isn't there? What if the hopelessness is inter-generational and deeply embedded into the culture? No amount of external help and support will unlock something, that doesn't exist in the first place. This article describes this well. First - you must change the mindset towards the notion that - with hard work, skill and determination - one's fate can be improved. Only than will the improvement enabling measures take hold.
- immibis 3y ago
  Even worse: What if the drive of "I can improve this" doesn't exist because they actually can't improve this? Then changing the mindset won't help.
  - wolframhempel 3y ago
    Not sure there is anything that just "can't be improved" no matter what. Of course, things can be incredibly hard - but even in the poorest regions under the most extrusive of governments, there are ways to carve out niches.
    - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
      Which often involve drugs and gang violence. That's not rhetoric. There's ample evidence linking poverty and inequality with crime. The reasons are complex, but it's not hard to suspect that crime is the most accessible and rewarding career choice when other options aren't available. Crime is risky, but the rewards are immediate and obvious. Businesses and self-employment are riskier financially and less risky personally, but the rewards are more distant. Entrepreneurial mentoring schemes - for example - will always struggle to fix problems that are rooted in aggressive economic apartheid.
boringuser2 3y ago
All the claims made in this post feel incredibly tenuous. One thing I dislike about this type of "scholarship" is that the author will just confidently assert a concept via moral preening without actually bothering to try and rigorously substantiate it.
- calrain 3y ago
  They are a Christian organization after all...
  - boringuser2 3y ago
    Ironically I personally find this type of writing more representative of social "science", likely because I am more familiar with that discourse than Christian discourse.
black_puppydog 3y ago
Wow this reminds me so much of a novel I read a few months ago: > Loss of identity and loss of the ability to foresee and aspire to a better future are rarely identified as issues that need special attention. It is to these faces of poverty that the discipline of linguistics has particular relevance. > Identity poverty and aspirational poverty are inextricably connected with the role of language and its uses as a creator and marker of identity. The Duncan reference they give is from 2008, but the novel I'm thinking of is Ismael Kadare's "The Traitor's Niche" from 1978. It's a parable for the Albanian-Soviet split. In it there's a harrowing description of the techniques used by the Ottoman empire to suppress rebellion in their provinces. They aim exactly to extinguish the peoples' language first and foremost, introducing a sort of primitive language, in order to preclude the very possibility of formulating a thought that can distinguish future from present or past. In this "eternal moment", the idea that tomorrow could be different from today, or that yesterday might have been different, doesn't even enter people's mind. Of course it bears strong resemblance to Orwell, but for some reason (maybe Kadare's amazing prose) it really gave me shivers and stuck with me. I've been meaning to write an English language review of the book because I didn't find one so far that really does it justice. Highly recommended in any case! Side note: I did a cursory web search to see whether the techniques Kadare ascribes to the Ottomans have any grounding in reality but came up empty. If anyone has sources to substantiate them or knows for sure that this was not the case, I'd be super interested. :)
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Trained linguist here, with a great deal of time spent in the Western Balkans, proficiency in Albanian, BCMS, and Aromanian, and familiarity with the specialist literature on the diachrony and sociolinguistics of the region. The only Kadade work I’ve read was Kronikë në gur, so I’m not entirely sure what he wrote in your story. However, what you describe sounds like total fantasy. There is a literary genre where the author takes some actual historical regime and ascribes completely fantastical traits to it. A prominent example is Milorad Pavić’s The Dictionary of the Khazars. So, I can only assume Kadare was doing the same. The Ottoman Empire actually had very little detrimental impact on Balkan languages. There was language shift to Turkish among a few urban elites, but most of the Albanian population was rural and so continued speaking Albanian, Greek, South Slavic, or Aromanian just like they always had. Both Turkish and the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund have rich tense systems (richer than that of English), and no one has ever had any difficulty expressing past versus present versus future.

Such a great read. Thank you for sharing!

The last paragraph is so true. Borrowed from the reference https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/poverty-is-a-quality-of-the-heart/ https://henrinouwen.org/meditations/poverty-is-a-quality-of-... : “Poverty is the quality of the heart that makes us relate to life, not as a property to be defended but as a gift to be shared. Poverty is the constant willingness to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward to new, unknown experiences. Poverty is the inner understanding that the hours, days, weeks, and years do not belong to us but are the gentle reminders of our call to give, not only love and work, but life itself, to those who follow us and will take our place. He or she who cares is invited to be poor, to strip himself or herself from the illusions of ownership, and to create some room for the person looking for a place to rest. The paradox of care is that poverty makes a good host. When our hands, heads, and hearts are filled with worries, concerns, and preoccupations, there can hardly be any place left for the stranger to feel at home.”

boxed 3y ago
That... goes just totally counter to my (admittedly limited) experience with the most impoverished people in Sweden: the Romanian Romani. They are not at all "[willing] to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward to new, unknown experiences", in fact the exact opposite. Part of what keeps them in extreme poverty is their cultural ideas of what it means to be Romani at at all. I would state the exact opposite: poverty is when you CANNOT "say good-bye to yesterday" because you are desperately trying to fix the problems/debt of yesterday even if it creates new problems/debt for tomorrow, because the alternative is starvation.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > the most impoverished people in Sweden: the Romanian Romani They might not necessarily be from Romania. At least from my experience next door in Finland, it has been very common for the media to write about “beggars from Romania”, but if you actually chat with the Roma beggars on the street or the bottle-returners in front of you in the queue, often they come from Bulgaria instead. Yet for some reason Bulgaria never seems to get mentioned, perhaps due to the popular confusion of “Roma/Romani” and “Romania” even though the words are not actually historically related.
- aiNohY6g 3y ago
  > "[willing] to say good-bye to yesterday and move forward > poverty is when you CANNOT "say good-bye to yesterday" Both are not exclusive. You're willing to yet you can't, and possibly feel trapped in a miserable existence that's not yours.
avgcorrection 3y ago
I’m getting strong Mother Theresa vibes.
graemep 3y ago
That refers to voluntarily chosen poverty. There is a huge difference between that and poverty that is no deliberately chosen.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  I think “chosen poverty” is a fraught notion. Cultural poverty perhaps, but poverty is, according to most useful definitions, an undesirable state.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> The popular notion of poverty is that it is a deficit, a state of not having enough material goods nor the means to acquire them. Yet scholars of development have identified for us that poverty is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. How lucky we are that "scholars have identified for us" what poverty is, so that we don't have to think about it for ourselves, not the lack of money, which would be easy to solve by giving money to the poor, but rather a "multi-dimensional phenomenon", which can only mean that it requires more scholarship to address.

mistermann 3y ago
If you have all the dimensions figured out I recommend you write up a white paper of the solution so humanity can get started with enthusiastic implementation.
dmvdoug 3y ago
OTOH, poverty is multidimensional in a way that simply giving money to the poor will not (because it cannot) solve. Which is not an argument against giving money to the poor, of course. My point is only that real scholarship on poverty and its many effects actually is useful for more than just academics’ job security. What the article said about identity and aspirational aspects of poverty rang absolutely true to me (aside from what I think was a too ham-handed attempt to shoehorn it under SIL’s language preservation stuff). Source: teacher in urban Title I public school. Indeed, I had some ninth graders identifying pieces of those very issues in a reflection thing I had them write that I just graded (e.g., one girl writing about seeing a connection between slavery and jokes/tropes that you often hear among black kids today about darker versus lighter skinned folks; like, yeah, those are rooted ultimately in theories and perceptions of the majority white society (beginning in the 1600s) about darkness of skin indexing mental and physical abilities in a fairly straightforward (if absurdly crude) way. And it gets filtered through and rooted in perceptions of fucking 14 year olds in this Year of Our Lord 2023 (though, again, not in some linear way; we’re talking about large-scale social and cultural conceptualizations that work themselves out over generational time-scales)).
- walledstance 3y ago

dejj 3y ago

Being about language and defining expressions for traditional values in it, is there perhaps an identity relation between the poverty levels: - material, spiritual, civic, social identity, and social aspiration and the levels of soul in jewish Kabbalah: - Nefesh, Ruach, Neshama, Chaya, and Yechida?

wikozePlainT59 3y ago

I did a field trip for language preservation in the Amazon, it was so weird the difference between the will to preserve culture and language from insider and outsider vs the willingness to learn and be part of global culture and learn Spanish / English. Night lectures were given in evening school for traditional language and then later for English. They were all expecting to enhance they quality of life and situation by learning English and work with tourist. After 5 years they were just able to present themselves. They were stuck between the to world belonging to none and kept in this position it was very special.

samirillian 3y ago

Weird read, not sure what to make of it. Muddled between "everybody is poor in something" and "actually being poor is good". It's like corporate-speak mixed with woke-speak for Christian missionaries who get all their funding from USAID. Do not like these people.

bluetomcat 3y ago
In summary, it reads like "people struggling to get access to clean water are also linguistically-poor, which prevents them from reading scientific papers".
- dejj 3y ago
  In a way, yes. When you apply Cuil-theory, it means “how many more levels of abstraction do you have to understand, to find an easy ~solution to~ description of your problem.” Somehow like category theory will enable you to solve your maths homework.
- bratbag 3y ago
  Being linguistically poor reduces your options for sourcing solutions to your problems, or understanding how to stop them being problems in the first place. There may be methods of accessing clean water that are totally outside their traditional or contextual experience, which they have no hope of accessing or evaluating due to linguistic limitations. Even the idea that there may be options outside of the traditional and immediate, may be something they had not thought of due to linguistic limitations.

boxed 3y ago

To me it seems like they are taking a word "poverty" that we mostly agree on and then try to define it so everyone is confused. This isn't a helpful approach imo. If there are other ways to suffer, maybe use another word?

tkellogg 3y ago

Hard to read that and not hear him alluding to the fact that most of the United States is monolingual, and thus linguistically poor. Rural US also frequently exhibits the identity poverty that he talks about. He never explicitly mentions it. I think there's something to this, needs more thought.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Technological poverty is two gold iPhones one in each back pocket of a pair of $300 bedazzled bleached jeans. It's possible to be surrounded by very expensive convenient magic, drowning in it, yet to own nothing and be subject to abject fealty and dependence. If one lacks the "digital literacy" (or whatever name we give empowering language that opens wide horizons) then like Palahniuk says, your stuff ends up owning you.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wolframhempel 3y ago

This article makes such a crucial point. There are many entrepreneurs and other successful people that set out to do good in the world. And that's laudable and to be encouraged. But unfortunately, they project their own mindset onto others. "Surely, they are all aspiring entrepreneurs at heart. If only they had access to resources, they'd go ahead and prosper." - And so a lot of anti-poverty initiatives focus on things like micro-credits, mentorship and training that facilitates and unlocks an existing drive towards entrepreneurship. But what if that drive simply isn't there? What if the hopelessness is inter-generational and deeply embedded into the culture? No amount of external help and support will unlock something, that doesn't exist in the first place. This article describes this well. First - you must change the mindset towards the notion that - with hard work, skill and determination - one's fate can be improved. Only than will the improvement enabling measures take hold.

immibis 3y ago
Even worse: What if the drive of "I can improve this" doesn't exist because they actually can't improve this? Then changing the mindset won't help.
- wolframhempel 3y ago
  Not sure there is anything that just "can't be improved" no matter what. Of course, things can be incredibly hard - but even in the poorest regions under the most extrusive of governments, there are ways to carve out niches.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    Which often involve drugs and gang violence. That's not rhetoric. There's ample evidence linking poverty and inequality with crime. The reasons are complex, but it's not hard to suspect that crime is the most accessible and rewarding career choice when other options aren't available. Crime is risky, but the rewards are immediate and obvious. Businesses and self-employment are riskier financially and less risky personally, but the rewards are more distant. Entrepreneurial mentoring schemes - for example - will always struggle to fix problems that are rooted in aggressive economic apartheid.

boringuser2 3y ago

All the claims made in this post feel incredibly tenuous. One thing I dislike about this type of "scholarship" is that the author will just confidently assert a concept via moral preening without actually bothering to try and rigorously substantiate it.

calrain 3y ago
They are a Christian organization after all...
- boringuser2 3y ago
  Ironically I personally find this type of writing more representative of social "science", likely because I am more familiar with that discourse than Christian discourse.

black_puppydog 3y ago

Wow this reminds me so much of a novel I read a few months ago: > Loss of identity and loss of the ability to foresee and aspire to a better future are rarely identified as issues that need special attention. It is to these faces of poverty that the discipline of linguistics has particular relevance. > Identity poverty and aspirational poverty are inextricably connected with the role of language and its uses as a creator and marker of identity. The Duncan reference they give is from 2008, but the novel I'm thinking of is Ismael Kadare's "The Traitor's Niche" from 1978. It's a parable for the Albanian-Soviet split. In it there's a harrowing description of the techniques used by the Ottoman empire to suppress rebellion in their provinces. They aim exactly to extinguish the peoples' language first and foremost, introducing a sort of primitive language, in order to preclude the very possibility of formulating a thought that can distinguish future from present or past. In this "eternal moment", the idea that tomorrow could be different from today, or that yesterday might have been different, doesn't even enter people's mind. Of course it bears strong resemblance to Orwell, but for some reason (maybe Kadare's amazing prose) it really gave me shivers and stuck with me. I've been meaning to write an English language review of the book because I didn't find one so far that really does it justice. Highly recommended in any case! Side note: I did a cursory web search to see whether the techniques Kadare ascribes to the Ottomans have any grounding in reality but came up empty. If anyone has sources to substantiate them or knows for sure that this was not the case, I'd be super interested. :)

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Trained linguist here, with a great deal of time spent in the Western Balkans, proficiency in Albanian, BCMS, and Aromanian, and familiarity with the specialist literature on the diachrony and sociolinguistics of the region. The only Kadade work I’ve read was Kronikë në gur, so I’m not entirely sure what he wrote in your story. However, what you describe sounds like total fantasy. There is a literary genre where the author takes some actual historical regime and ascribes completely fantastical traits to it. A prominent example is Milorad Pavić’s The Dictionary of the Khazars. So, I can only assume Kadare was doing the same. The Ottoman Empire actually had very little detrimental impact on Balkan languages. There was language shift to Turkish among a few urban elites, but most of the Albanian population was rural and so continued speaking Albanian, Greek, South Slavic, or Aromanian just like they always had. Both Turkish and the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund have rich tense systems (richer than that of English), and no one has ever had any difficulty expressing past versus present versus future.