Academics

Macedonian custom says that if you’re an unmarried man or woman and you’re at a large dinner party where chairs are packed all around a table, you must not sit at a corner. This will give you bad luck with marriage and prevent you from finding a husband or wife. No one could explain to me what the reasoning was behind it. I assume that if you’re married, the dangerous effects of corner sitting are blunted.

Unrelated: my mentor and the supervisor for my research, Prof. Victor Friedman, just had a Macedonian translation of his works published, including his dissertation The Grammatical Categories of the Macedonian Indicative, which in 1977 was the first book on the modern, standard Macedonian language to be published in the United States. The book was promoted with a presentation at the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, an old socialist-era building that manages to be surprisingly beautiful on the inside. The hall was packed with representatives of MAAS, professors from the university, students and colleagues of his, the media, and the government.

Among the government-related people attending was the first president of independent Macedonia, Kiro Gligorov. He successfully negotiated the withdrawal of the Yugoslav National Army from Macedonia, an extremely important accomplishment, as it kept Macedonia out of the horrific Yugoslav Wars that had ravaged Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. On their way out, the (at that point) mostly Serbian army stripped the country of all weapons and military hardware they could take. They went so far as to detach faucets and sinks for the scrap metal. This left Macedonia in an extremely vulnerable position (with Greece engaging in an illegal economic blockade). That the country made it through this period intact and without violence is a testament to his negotiating skill. He also survived an attempted assassination by carbomb that left him blind in one eye, killed his driver, and injured others. The perpetrators have not been discovered to this day.

So it was a great honor when Prof. Friedman introduced me to him at the presentation. We did nothing more than exchange greetings, but Prof. Friedman hopes to give me the opportunity to talk with him more at some later time. It would be an incredible opportunity.

I visited a Macedonian friend of mine in the hospital today, the same hospital I was in one night for an infection. He fell and broke his tailbone while I was in the US and I found out when I got back. The poor guy is completely laid-out. He can’t move. No paralysis, thank gods, but they don’t know yet whether they’re going to have to operate or not, and until then he has to stay in the trauma ward of the state hospital.

I wasn’t keen to go back there, on account of my less than pleasant experience last time (no fault of the doctors or nurses–the place is just creepy), but I wanted to relieve P’s boredom and help out any way I could, so I just had to man up. I thought it would take me a while to find him. The place is a labyrinth. Hallways shrink and expand unpredictably, there are turns at random, signs are haphazard and ad hoc. Luckily though I know how to ask for what I’m looking for now and he was on the first floor, so I reached his room without any headaches. The staff just let me walk in without signing or checking at a front desk.

He was sharing a room with four other patients, the lot of them with broken limbs. He was glad to see me and we talked for about a half hour, though I had some trouble understanding his Macedonian because he was speaking gruff on account of the pain. The other patients would occasionally interrupt to ask me to do something for them–to close a window or to get fill a cup with water or to get the nurse. P looked cared for, though not in the best of states. It’s the holes in the linens that get to me. Obviously having a few holes in the bedsheets is not going to compromise your health, but I take it as a token of an unhygenic state. The hygiene that’s vital to a patient’s health in a hospital, though, can’t be seen. For all I know, the state hospital here in Macedonia is cleaner than some American hospitals in regards to the bacterial and viral hygiene that matters. After all, nobody here is dying of salmonella poisoning due to gross failure of the regulatory authorities.

In any case, while I’ve got a rather unpleasant cold right now (too much time on airplanes this past week), I can be grateful I haven’t got it as bad as P. When I left, it was especially nice to walk in the spring sunshine. For now, I can do that anytime I want.

On a completely different note and to end with some better news, I finished my graduate school interviews last week. I was accepted to UCSB, Stanford (provisionally), and Berkeley for their linguistics programs. After visiting all three programs and I decided to go to Berkeley, but there was some added excitement at the last moment when I found out that Berkeley’s department had nominated me for a university-wide funding competition. Winners receive a five-year scholarship and work/study package from the Graduate Division and I had won. So not only will I get to work with students and professors who share my passion and peculiar interests in linguistics, but I’ll also be able to do so without worrying about how I’m going to pay tuition and living expenses. Without the help of my thesis advisor Prof. Victor Friedman and other professors both here in Macedonia and at the University of Chicago, I never would have been able to get this far, so I’m extremely grateful to them.

Though my disapproval of climates that don’t receive at least a few feet of snow a year is well-known, I’m still looking forward to exploring the Bay Area.

Not till I finish what I came here to do first though!

It’s time to give an update on what I’ve been up to.

I sent a revised and expanded version of my thesis based on research I’ve been doing here off for publication around Christmas. The review process can take up to six months, assuming they even accept it, so it will be off my plate for a while. In the meantime, I’ve been aiming to collect my own data about the particular grammatical phenomenon I’m interested in.

My initial, unformed plan was to simply record some conversations in Macedonian between native speakers and play them back later for transcription, hoping I’d hit paydirt. But the structure I’m looking for is rare enough that this sort of amoeba approach to data gathering wouldn’t guarantee me much success for the amount of work involved.

On the recommendation of one of the professors I spoke with at UCSB, Prof. Carol Genetti, I decided to do an elicitation instead. She had had some success with writing a text in English containing contextual triggers that would elicit the structure she was looking for and then having bilingual informants first translate the text into the target language, then tell the story of the text without reference to either the original or their translation.

This sounded appropriate for what I’m interested in, especially because it might help me firm up my conclusions about the register differences between the standard and the spoken language in regards to this grammatical structure and thus help me explain why it’s so rare in writing. However, I needed the correct contextual triggers.

Truth is, I have only the vaguest idea what those would be. Since I don’t have a native’s intuition about what kind of sentences in Macedonian I’d like to turn out, I don’t know what kind of sentences in English to input. My own knowledge puts me in the wrong direction for attacking the problem.

So that left me back at square one, without any of my own examples of this particular grammatical pattern. Then I remembered that several months back a professor in the United States, Prof. George Mitrevski, had offered me access to his ongoing Macedonian corpus project.

Only problem is that those texts are in raw, untagged, unencoded form. I had to download the 368 texts by hand and reencode them into something readable on a Mac and then group them into manageable chunks. That required me to supplement my very limited command line and scripting knowledge with a lot of google searching and FAQ reading.

Then I needed to do the search itself. This grammatical structure involves the combination of two sets of a couple grammatical particles in a certain order together in one sentence. They both had to be there, and they had to be in the right order and without certain other features like prepositions that would muddy the results. That sort of search can’t really be done with your standard “text in a searchbox and a wildcard here or there,” so I also had to brush up on regular expressions. Advantage of regular expressions: they let you do incredibly precise, efficient searches. Disadvantage of regular expressions: well… just take a look at my latest revision of the algorithm…

Not every readable, is it? Everything in regular expressions is tight, like a fine-tuned watch. If you have every punctuation mark, every little period and paranthesis and backslash in the right place, then the thing ticks away and returns you the dozen sentences you wanted out of several hundred thousand. One typo though and the thing explodes.

Explodes!

Okay, not that dramatic, it simply doesn’t work, but if you’ve been hacking away for hours at a stream of punctuation marks that would make even the most obscene cartoon character blush, you might want to make something explode.

Anyway, my regular expression works, with occasional fine-tuning to reduce false positives. But because the corpus is raw, brute force selection and subtraction only gets me so far. After that, the computer hands the task over to me. So I’ve been sitting and reading sentences, mostly ruling them out as irrelevant. The corpus is a 1.8 gigabyte text file. Even with the severe pruning that the search algorithm does for me, that’s a lot of reading.

Much of the text so far has been gathered from transcriptions of Macedonian government debates. I am becoming uncomfortably familiar with local parliamentary rhetoric. And I’m torn between feeling exhausted with this busywork and lazy because I’m sitting in front of the computer all day, instead of IN THE FIELD gathering DATA from THE LOCALS like a REAL SOCIAL SCIENTIST.

But, fingers crossed, I’ll come away from this with a much more refined idea of exactly what I’m looking for and how to find it.

Balkanalysis has a very good interview with my research supervisor and mentor, Prof. Victor Friedman, on Macedonian language and identity, especially in relation to Greece. If you want the meat-and-potatoes of the conflict, that interview is an excellent place to start.

And, coincidentally, I also am acquainted with the guy who did the interview, Chris Deliso, so consider that a double endorsement.

University classes here have taken some getting used to.

The initial hurdle was managing to find the classes at all. Organization at Ss. Kyril and Methodius seems haphazard at the best of times. Professors negotiate class times with students, with both locations and hours subject to change (sometimes multiple times) even weeks into the semester. Combine this with the language barrier and an infamiliarity with the various European university-specific terms for things roughly equivalent to ‘lectures,’ ‘labs,’ ’seminars,’ and ‘optional sessions’ and I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time more than once.

Once I actually got to the classes, I encountered two extremes of teaching. One was simple dictation. The class remains dead silent while the professor lectures, or sometimes just reads from a book, and takes down his or her every word. There’s no participation involved. Students don’t seem to be able to clarify any points they missed or take any opportunities to test their understanding. Evaluation depends on reciting back what was dictated verbatim. It is, at the very least, dull.

The other extreme, which I’ve found both more informative and more frustrating, is an extremely open, collegial style. Professors interact with students like they were having a conversation. A loud conversation. A yelled conversation, really, since there are usually almost a dozen side conversations at nearly yelling volume going on at the same time. Students drift in and out of participation with the main lecture, often turning to their friends to start talking about something else. Occasionally, everyone’s engaged by a particular question, but this leads them to all yell out answers at the same time. Since Macedonians are not reticent about raising their voices, this can be nearly deafening. Professors have difficulty commanding everyone’s attention, and I’ve yet to experience a silent classroom. Turn-taking does not really occur.

All the chaos means that students sometimes show only nominal involvement with the proceedings. Almost no Macedonian ever shuts off his or her cellphone, whether in a meeting, at a concert, or at a lecture. And I’m already used to Macedonians interrupting any occasion to answer a cellphone. There does not seem to be a strong social pressure against this. Nonetheless, I was still aghast to see Macedonian students more than once not only let their cellphones go off loudly in class, but then answer them and start to hold a conversation. To be fair, with all the noise this doesn’t really make that much of a difference, but to me, that shows a serious lack of respect for the professor that I wouldn’t expect at the university level.

Some of my American friends here have pointed out to me that I may be seeing this from a rarified perspective. I went to strict Catholic schools for first through twelth grade and to a university famous for its dedication and rigour at the upper education level. I’m sure there are plenty of classrooms in the States where students answer their cellphones in the middle of a lecture too (or at least try to). But still, we are not talking about high school classes, where you’re still dealing with teenagers and all the social malfunction that implies, or lectures with several hundred people in them, where the professor might not even be able to see you. These classes I’m in tend toward twenty or thirty students, maximum.

I am reacting to limited data, it’s true. I’ve only attended three different classes. I don’t know what the teaching style is like outside the Philological Faculty (although I know that the conference paper presenting style of Macedonian professors in several different fields tends toward “Sit at the podium, read straight off your paper, and never ever make eye contact”). The status quo doesn’t seem to engender all that much rage or angst among either the professors or the students. And I certainly can’t generalize some of the disrespect or disinterest I’ve seen to all Macedonian students. There have been plenty of times when some student in the class has made an attempt to quiet the others in response to the professor’s frustration. The loud, boisterous quality of the discussions tends to marginalize girls in the classes, but it’s kind of cool to see such unrestrained disagreement. The loudest person wins out, but the professor still has the authority to correct wrong statements.

So it’s a dynamic whose complexities I’m coming to recognize. Still, I think a little more learning would go on if there was a little less fashion-magazine reading/food eating/conversation holding in the classroom. I’m rather stodgy about education. Get off my lawn!

I can only really describe my first day at my Macedonian university as sensory overload.

After meeting for drinks and a late dinner with a good friend of my mentor’s, a professor who teaches Macedonian to Albanian students at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, I finally found my route into the university system. Up until now I’ve been at a loss as to how I was going to find classes and register for them. I have a host professor, but she is very busy, and in any case there is a limited amount she could do for me. The Macedonian university system is vastly different from the American, both on paper and in practice. While I was panicking about classes officially starting on October 1st (and no registration or course plan in my hands), the fact is that classes do not actually begin for at least a week, if not several. The professors need to negotiate with each other and with students about where and when they are held. There does not seem to be a central registrar who carves these things down digitally for some administrative system like with American universities. None of it is decided before the beginning of the new school year. Anything planned beforehand would be subject to change anyway in the apparent chaos of the first month of the Fall semester. In other words, I was worrying about things like “missing deadlines” or “failing to get registered” with no relevant translation into Macedonian.

Fortunately, my mentor and his friends were generous with their time and attention and steered me into the best courses for my path of research. I’ll be taking first-year Macedonian for native Albanian speakers and second-year Albanian for native Macedonian speakers. This way I’ll have practice with both my target languages and with their respective speakers. This all happened through a series of negotations and meetings strung across hallways, offices, atriums and cafés, with me handed off like a football from one group to the next. It is probably the most intense period of Macedonian-speaking I’ve yet encountered, a straight four hours of explaining my research, settling on my language level, and trying to keep up with discussions of university politics. A lot of the time was spent in the fog-like shroud of the cigarette smoke in the faculty lounge. I was the only student in there, surrounded by professors who were speaking to me familiarly and equitably. I was acutely conscious of how unusual a privilege the professors were extending me in doing so, since there is normally a rather higher barrier of formality and distance between Macedonian students and professors than in the US. I was determined to demonstrate I understood and appreciated the favor they were doing me. At peak attention trying to keep track of and participate in the conversations weaving in and out of Macedonian and Albanian, hyperaware of my marked status, buzzed from the second-hand nicotine of the professors’ endless cigarettes, and overcaffeinated from the constantly flowing coffee, I felt like somebody was cranking a key in my back to wind me up till I burst a spring.

Things didn’t really let up after that. I went to one of the first Albanian classes with one of the professors, where he immediately had me introduce myself in front of everyone in the room. He joked that, “I hope you’ll all protect him this year” and there was a chorus of jokes that “Of course we’ll protect him! He’s like one of three guys in a class with thirty girls!” I was so wired that I didn’t even feel any of the normal nervousness that would accompany standing in front of people to speak a foreign language. Class ended quickly and a group of girls sort of tackled me with helpfulness, sitting me down for more coffee and showering me with tips about the university system and friendly questions about my background. By the time I got home to the apartment, I was talking so quickly in Macedonian that K noticed immediately. A little while later, I utterly crashed and collapsed into bed.

If every day at the university is like this, it won’t be long before I’m either fluent in Macedonian or I have a brain hemorrhage!

I’ve returned to Ohrid for a few days to attend the International Congress of Slavists, being held in Macedonia for the first time in the Congress’s fourteen year history. There are an enormous number of people here, representing every Slavic-speaking country as well as other countries with Slavic specialists. That means not only academic powerhouse countries, like the U.S., but also countries you might not expect: Japan, Finland, India, Kazakhstan.

I’m not really here for the lectures, though I’ll be attending a few. The problem is that I’m more of a Balkanist than a Slavist. Macedonian is the only Slavic language I speak, and that only at an intermediate level. So while lectures in Macedonian are hit or miss for me, lectures in all of the other Slavic languages flight right over my head and all the way up into the nosebleed rows. I haven’t mastered the Slavic Esperanto that prevails in circumstances like these.

Nonetheless, I managed to have a halting conversation with a Slovenian woman while I was helping her navigate the somewhat treacherous path between the conference hotels in the dark. And there was a moment when I was part of a discussion about Slavic dialects in northern Greece among conversants speaking French, English, and Macedonian, sometimes switching from one to the next mid-sentence. Call me the nerd that I am, but these are the times when I just go starry-eyed in wonderment at the beauty of language—its utility, its variety, all the nuances you can catch with it. There is something stressful about being addressed in, say, Belorussian and having to bridge a totally unfamiliar language through a foreign one to finally reach my native comprehension. But there’s also something adventurous about it. It’s bushwacking through mental thickets. It’s hard, but rewarding work.

No beauty goes unchallenged though. The reporting on this congress in the Macedonian press has ignored the vast, but dull domination of international accord and focused on the one dramatic, exciting bit of conflict. The Greek delegation didn’t come. Apparently, they refused. No one expected this. There was no warning until it was reported in Utrinski Vesnik a few days before the start of the congress—it was reported almost as if the Greek delegation themselves weren’t aware that they were refusing to come. But as it turned out, they didn’t come, an absence which feeds into the howling political storm over the use of the name “Macedonia.” At one of the lectures, a discussion about minority language rights in Greece grew heated, and of course the reporters where immediately there to interview the attendees. You might say they were poking and prodding. My Macedonian professors expect this theme to override all other coverage of the conference. No one knows exactly why the Greeks didn’t come. There might have been political pressure, they might have been trying to make a statement, or they might have simply feared they would run up against a hostile reception. If the lattermost is true, the way this congress will be covered certainly won’t allay those worries.

But all of that is just swirling rumor. It doesn’t really have any direct bearing on me. I’m just here networking, meeting professors I know either through classes or by reputation. And that’s been entirely pleasant and informative. It was more than worth the trip.