Bionic stereotype perception: the ranting non-toddler
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Rush Limbaugh takes up where Rosie O'Donnell left off:
The weird impressive thing about this is (as Wikipedia explains):
Rush Limbaugh has described himself as being "100%, totally deaf".[47] In 2001, he was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune inner ear disease (AIED), which, in the span of three months, rendered his right ear completely deaf and left ear severely deaf. "I cannot hear television. I cannot hear music. I am, for all practical purposes, deaf – and it's happened in three months."[139] On December 19, 2001, doctors at the House Ear Clinic in Los Angeles were able to successfully restore a measure of his hearing through a surgical procedure known as a cochlear implant surgery. Limbaugh received a Clarion CII Bionic Ear.
[Update — According to James Fallows, President Obama was as surprised by the consecutive-interpretation arrangement as Rush Limbaugh was ("Language Screwup at the Hu-Obama Presser? Maybe Not", 1/19/2011).
I guess I should also note that Mr. Limbaugh's concern about the accuracy of the translation is clearly just a fake premise for some jokey ching-chonging, since a recording of the press conference is easy to find at whitehouse.gov, and he could easily enough have one of his assistants get someone he trusts to check the translation. Significant differences between what Hu said and how his official translator rendered his remarks would be a big story, but it's clear that Limbaugh's suspicions are not serious enough for him to instruct a minion to check.]
[Update #2 — A comparison of Hu with Limbaugh. Here's Hu's answer to a reporter's question (from 27:27 to 31:20 in the whitehouse.gov .mp3 and mp4 files):
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
And here's Rush Limbaugh's imitation, from the first clip embedded above — I think he's actually referring to exactly the cited answer from Hu:
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I can't say that I give El Rushbo very high marks for vocal impressions, at least in this case — in fact, his performance seems closer to the ranting toddler video that went viral a few months ago.]
[Update #3 — James Fallows discusses some actual translation errors at the new conference ("State Dinner, and the 'Language Screwup' That Was, or Wasn't", 1/20/2010).]
Update #4 — Steven Colbert's take:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Rush Limbaugh Speaks Chinese | ||||
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Linda said,
January 20, 2011 @ 9:43 am
I know what Limbaugh means when he says he can't hear Chinese as words and sentences. I can hear Welsh and Urdu as languages. I don't understand either but there is a rhythm that provides word and phrase breaks.
Recently I started watching BBC Alba, a television station in Scots Gaelic, for the music and sport programmes. And like Limbaugh with Chinese, I can't hear the language in it yet. It's starting to come through, but only slowly.
Mark P said,
January 20, 2011 @ 9:50 am
We already know that listening to Rush Limbaugh is a long bath in tepid, ignorant bigotry. He doesn't have to worry about offending his listeners because he knows his listeners. He doesn't even have to use clearly bigoted language all the time because his listeners know him.
Did you notice in the second clip that when he refers to Hu Jintau he "corrects" himself from "Chinese" leader to "Chicom" leader?
I was visiting a friend who was listening to Limbaugh when he was doing his show while essentially deaf. It was interesting to hear the mistakes he made as a result of not being able to hear himself. It's not immediately apparent how important it is to hear oneself speak in order not just to pronounce words correctly but to say the words you intend to say.
GeorgeW said,
January 20, 2011 @ 10:09 am
Admitting a bias against Limbaugh, I also hear an attitude about non-English speakers in these pieces in his mocking of another language. I wonder if 'Chicom' commentators mocked Obama's English when he was in China.
In spite of his hearing impairment, Limbaugh seems to pick up some of the tonal aspects of Chinese in his portrayal.
Dan Lufkin said,
January 20, 2011 @ 10:13 am
Was the matter of Limbaugh's hearing loss being due to, ahem, chemical causes ever settled?
[(myl) The rumors about that are apparently not credible.]
The cochlear implant certainly has a frequency response different from that of the natural cochlea and perhaps this contributes to his difficulty understanding a tonal language like Chinese.
[(myl) The problem is not so much frequency response as information content. His cochlear implant is a 16-channel device, substituting for a natural system with thousands of channels. Such systems provide extremely important help, but their limitations can be seen in this report from the manufacturer of CVC recognition results (for the sounds of one's own native language):
Subjects with normal hearing should score in the high 90's on this kind of "articulation index" task. The pitch of the voice should be well perceived, however, so the tonal aspects of Chinese are not a special problem. His problem with Chinese is that he doesn't know any Chinese.]
Interesting that he also can't distinguish between translation and sequential interpreting. Who indeed knows what those pesky interpreters are up to?
[(myl) He clearly does recognize that the interpretation is consecutive rather than simultaneous (or ever consecutive in small pieces). That's the source of his (apparently fake) concern that the translators are making stuff up.]
vanya said,
January 20, 2011 @ 11:11 am
"when he refers to Hu Jintau he "corrects" himself from "Chinese" leader to "Chicom" leader?"
Well, of course. The Chinese leader is Ma Ying-jeou.
phosphorious said,
January 20, 2011 @ 12:44 pm
Is it just me, or is Rush vaguely offended that there are people who speak a language he doesn't understand?
[(myl) I certainly don't get that from these clips. In the first one, he's annoyed at Fox for failing to provide simultaneous translation of Hu's answers to questions. In the second one, he graduates to speculating that "the translator could be making it all up" (though why this is more likely with one approach to translation rather than another isn't clear to me), and then he drifts off into discussing how "I found myself trying to write down what Hu Jintao was saying in Chinese — phonetically", which actually suggests a certain amount of interest in the foreign language that the lack of simultaneous translation is exposing him to.]
S. Norman said,
January 20, 2011 @ 3:16 pm
A bit off topic, but he also uses 'gyp' in the first clip
Twitter Trackbacks for Language Log » Bionic stereotype perception [upenn.edu] on Topsy.com said,
January 20, 2011 @ 3:27 pm
[…] Language Log » Bionic stereotype perception languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2913 – view page – cached January 20, 2011 @ 8:42 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Psychology of […]
Mark P said,
January 20, 2011 @ 3:42 pm
@S.Norman – At first I thought the point of the post was his use of "gyp" in the first clip.
Mr Fnortner said,
January 20, 2011 @ 3:54 pm
I'm sure I'll be promptly corrected, but I thought I knew that barbarian, and barbarism, derived from a Greek word that was imitative. That is, the Greeks used an onomatopoetic expression like bar-bar-bar to imitate the sound or the language of (what we could call barbaric) people whose language they did not know and, I presume, did not respect. The sound eventually became the word for the foreign others. This is probably not the first time in history that corny language imitation was used to denigrate another people–not that this justifies Mr. Limbaugh, only makes him not unique, and suggests that it is a universal human trait.
Victor Mair said,
January 20, 2011 @ 8:12 pm
At one point, it sounds very much as if Mr. Limbaugh says JINGJI ("economics"), a word he might well have picked up from imitating President Hu.
Seriously, though, here are some gems of wisdom heard around the LL water cooler this morning:
=====
Why not just take this as an occasion to talk with a straight face about the difficulty of "hearing" foreign phonetics, and consequently of untalented adults' attempts being much like babies' first attempts at speech (I know this slanders babies, but might be a vehicle for an appropriate swipe at his ignorance?).
On the babytalk side you might point out that reduplicating CV syllables (e.g., "fa-fa" for flower, etc.) are what youngest babies do when first attempting the native tongue (whatever it may be), that these kinds of simplification reappear here in most linguistically naive adults, e.g., R.L., but the effect paradoxically is to liken themselves to babies, rather than to their intended targets.
Mark P said,
January 20, 2011 @ 8:38 pm
I have been told that Germans consider Americans to be hyper-rhotic, and that some try to sound like Americans by saying "arr arr arr" (pronounced pretty much like a drawn-out letter R).
Victor Mair said,
January 20, 2011 @ 11:18 pm
When I was in the Peace Corps in Nepal, the street urchins (who knew no English) would sometimes try to imitate the way English speech sounded to them. It usually went something like this: "Whuh whoo whi whe wha whee…."
Adara said,
January 21, 2011 @ 12:09 am
That last recording was embarrassing to listen to. I didn't realise that RL's audience now consists of racist schoolchildren.
maidhc said,
January 21, 2011 @ 1:58 am
Spike Milligan used to imitate an American accent by going "hern hern hern" with a rhotic R.
I happened to see a show by comedian Russell Peters recently, and he did a bit about the sound of Asian languages in which he claimed that Chinese sounded like chopping up vegetables. I couldn't find it on YouTube, although there are a lot of his other accent-based routines on there.
Russell Peters pretending to speak Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, etc. does a decent job of picking up the sound of those languages, and he is very popular with young Asian immigrants. Unlike Rush Limbaugh, I expect.
Victor Mair said,
January 21, 2011 @ 6:55 am
My son can listen to a conversation between speakers of practically any other language, and, after about a few minutes, can begin to produce his own series of nonsense syllables and "words" that sounds quite like the real language to which he was listening.
Michel Strickmann, the late Berkeley Sinologist, could speak English with the accent of dozens of other languages (Turkic [he sometimes called himself "Strickturk"], German, French, Russian, Hindi, Japanese, Mandarin, etc.).
In both cases (that of my son speaking pseudo-Hindi, pseudo-Vietnamese, and so forth, and that of Michel Strickmann speaking English with a heavy Turkic, French, or other accent), the effect is uncanny.
Seonachan said,
January 21, 2011 @ 10:34 am
Stephen Colbert's response:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/371736/january-20-2011/rush-limbaugh-speaks-chinese
rau said,
January 21, 2011 @ 11:05 am
MarkP – ignoring your previous assertion that Limbaugh is, by definition, bigoted, you may want to know that the word you heard as "gyp" is actually broadcastese for "J.I.P.," short for "Joined In Progress." Meaning the Limbaugh show has tapped into the live event (the press conference) after it had already begun.
Mark P said,
January 21, 2011 @ 12:34 pm
rau, upon review, I see that JIP makes more sense. Why he would use that term in his show escapes me.
In a previous LL post about Limbaugh I commented that his show does not necessarily indicate that he is a bigot, but that he clearly panders to the bigotry of his audience. I stand by that statement.
Dan Parvaz said,
January 23, 2011 @ 5:07 am
I'm still scratching my head over the fact that El Flushbo has never heard consecutive interpretation when foreign dignitaries are involved in a press conference. His ching-chong-Chinaman bit, OTOH, I could have predicted the week before, had I cared.