2017 in Recap

I wrote a recap post in 2016, and while I feel no pressure to maintain any sort of annual tradition, the final days of 2017 find me in a contemplative state. Had I started writing this post in the beginning of December, it likely would have an entirely different tone. That post would certainly contain heavy doses of data science, supply chain, and politics. It might have espoused the breadth of America in my first full stateside year since 2010 and one where I visited 19 states + the district. As a travel blogger I'd find it fun to recount scrambling up the fiery red rocks of Utah's Arches National Park, viewing a solar eclipse in a private hilltop in the middle of Tennessee, waking up at 5am in the Newark train station, or having high expectations surpassed by the lovely town of Asheville, NC.

Instead, on December 5th, while on a work assignment trying to improve our aircraft engine manufacturing supply chain, I received a tap on my shoulder and was ushered into a video conference room. There I learned that my audit analytics team would be restructured into a centralized group and that I would be laid off. With GE going into full crisis mode, I had plenty of company. Suddenly I was hit with a flurry of emotions and realizations. I was not angry. My job with GE, though far from perfect was easily the best job I had ever had, and I had not been thinking of leaving. I had been so focused on trying to excel there that I hadn't given much thought to external options. In addition, in my struggle to find a regular rhythm in the US that satisfied me, I had focused most of my energies into work. Now I was suddenly faced with a clean slate and a mixture of emptiness and possibilities beckoned back.

I've been lucky in life in many ways, including finding careers I could be passionate about, twice. My first passion in sustainability proved to be more challenging than rewarding, but my switch towards data science ultimately rewarded me very well. I've found my skills to be in dizzying demand across all industries. They say timing is the most important thing in life and being a data scientist in Boston in 2017 is definitely good timing.

With the bare necessities of food and shelter able to be met, I nonetheless find myself incapable of enjoying this comfort. Inevitably, I gravitate towards trying to address higher questions of purpose. I believe this is a such a common angst of our generation, that any novel that professes to capture this zeitgeist must address this angst. Our generation is more educated about the world than any before it, with videos live streamed from conflict areas in Syria and Myanmar. At the same time, we are for obvious reasons part of the largest population the world has ever had, making each individual relatively less significant. The end result is that the population most aware of large problems is the one least equipped to affect them. (Rising tuition costs and stagnant wages are also contributing forces). In so many of my peers, I see the desire to help other people, the desire to be part of something larger than ourselves, to have a higher sense of purpose and place. With technology finding a way to bubble up stories of great deeds and causes to our surfaces, it is easier than ever to be inspired - or reminded of our inadequacies. The lives of many people I know revolve around making daily ends meet while occasionally re-calibrating to make sure they are on the path to fulfilling their long-term noble goals.

Repping Chewbacca and Ties Tuesday

Purpose can be a very deceptive motivational force. I had a firsthand lesson in this fallacy over the summer. Motivated by a small research task I was given at work, I ended up writing a 10 page memo on the future of GE and scheduling a meeting with my Senior Vice President and 6 executives to discuss. The weeks leading up to these were some of my most purposeful of the year, where I reached out to interview numerous contacts internally and externally and read as many industry papers on automation and AI as I possibly could. Running from meeting to meeting and editing the memo boosted me with adrenaline, because I really thought what I was doing might matter and influence some real change. At last though, timing was not my friend this time, and multiple crises came up the day of the meeting. My hour long meeting was reduced to 20 minutes and nothing got done. The lesson learned here is that purpose is not enough. If your ultimate goal is exacting positive change, the motivation to do so may not be the most correlating factor. It is easy to delude yourself into thinking your work is significant.

Half of the most international team I've been part of

At the same time I'm very aware that there are plenty of perfectly happy people that exist without any delusions of grandeur or goodwill. They know their jobs have, crudely speaking, no higher purpose, but are perfectly content to collect the paycheck and go home and be happy. I have no ill will, and likely some envy, towards people in this category. It is possible that those who have not given enough thought fleshing out their goals will hit a proverbial mid-life crisis, but I think there are plenty of people who will live through the ups and downs of life blissfully unencumbered by unachievable dreams. For better or worse, I am not able to join this group of people. It is possible that I was born this way, or raised this way, or influenced this way. My years in Asia definitely contributed  - I have seen too much poverty in Myanmar and too much pollution in China to sit quietly day after day at my first world office. I cannot go from an international workplace where conversations revolve around sharing cultural upbringings to any sort of regionally-limited commerce where conversations revolve around the Patriots and Massachusetts towns.

Thus in 2018 I know not be distracted by a false sense of purpose, but to hold true to my beliefs and core essentials.  This balance between pragmatism and idealism is a generational struggle which I believe many of my friends share. It is a struggle that does not get resolved quickly. Our problems are too large to be solved by willpower alone. Years of hard work and luck may not even be enough. In personal and practical terms, my pragmatic side believes I still need technical skills and business experience and my next job should help provide this. In idealistic terms, I know I need to keep exploring new countries because in my experience, travel inspires the best ideas. So stay tuned, 2018 promises to be very exciting. Happy New Years everyone!

The Experience of being a Native English Speaker

The origins of this blog post begins with me, a native English speaker who loves discussing linguistics, engaging in such conversations with an international crowd and getting peeved at English native speakers who so often put forth the same questions over and over again. Despite its leading global status, English is only the third most common mother tongue, trailing Mandarin and Spanish, with native speakers comprising 5% of the world.  The majority of the people in the world that speak English proficiently learned it as a foreign language - comprising up to 15% of the world.  In my annoyance at fellow Americans or Brits, I realized that there are many aspects of being a native English speaker, especially a monolingual one, that results in an experience atypical from most humans on planet earth.

I expect this to be read, in English, by both native and non-native speakers. Even though native English speakers on a whole are far from misunderstood, hopefully this post will still shed light on just why we ask such silly questions and be interesting to both native and non-native readers alike.

1. English monolinguals don't understand what it is like to have another closely related language
There is no living language closely related to English anywhere near the point of mutually intelligibility.  As a result, most English monolinguals have a hard time understanding the mere concept of mutual intelligibility ("What do you mean you can understand it but not speak it?"). Many of the world's languages are part of dialect continuums, where languages slowly vary through a geographic span, with neighboring languages within the continuum mutually intelligible, even if the end nodes are not. This is why most Polish speakers can understand Russian, or Thai speakers understand Lao etc. Even when related languages are not mutually intelligible, there may be so many structural grammatical similarities and shared words that the barrier to language acquisition is not so steep. As a result, an Italian-native speaker could reasonably learn French in 100-150 hours*, a number simply not possible for monolingual English speakers (outside of gifted savants). The Foreign Service Institute, which trains US State Department Officials, gives estimates for the number of hours it takes to train Americans to proficiency in various languages. The lowest numbers are 575 hours for most Romance and Germanic languages, and the highest are 2200 hours for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

There actually are/were some other "Anglic" languages, including the extinct Yola and the difficult to classify Scots. There are also many English accents that might not be easy for other English speakers to comprehend. Learning to understand these accents might take some time, but it is not nearly the same as learning another language.

So why is there no living close relative? Geography, plain and simple. When the Angles crossed over the English Channel in the 5th-7th centuries from modern day Denmark/Germany, they separated themselves from the dialect continuum on mainland Europe. Over a thousand years later, the closest relatives on the mainland, Frisian (a dying language in the Netherlands), Dutch and German are all quite different from English. The Norman invasion of 1066 and subsequent French conquest of England also dramatically influenced what would become modern English. Despite the plethora of loanwords that came from French (and Latin), English is still a Germanic and not a Romance language, so it's still not simple for English speakers to absorb the genders and conjugations in French.

Within the British Isles there was some further divergent language evolution. Geographic impasses like islands and mountains can over time lead to neighbors speaking mutually incomprehensible languages. But English only had 1000 or so years to spread out over a relatively small landmass. Technology may have further reduced variation, as Britain was at the forefront of the printing press and the industrial revolution, propelling the spread and standarization of language. So while there definitely were regional differences, some like Yola (spoken near Wexford, Ireland) that were so different they could be classified as another language, many of these differences ultimately converged or died out.

While there are other languages around the world without a closely related language, including Japanese, Korean, Hungarian etc., the majority of humans grow up speaking a language with mutually intelligible relatives.

*La tua personale esperienza potrebbe essere diversa

2. There are so many people learning it. 
Over a billion and growing. You'll see different numbers for something so hard to measure, but there is a consensus that there are far more second language speakers of English than the 350 million or so native speakers. Spanish in contrast, has less than 100 million second language speakers. English is not alone in the high proportion of second language speakers - French and Swahili and Hindi are spoken mainly by second language speakers - but it's in the rare camp among the world's 6000+ languages. The billion number seems low to me. It seems like everywhere one travels, someone knows a bit of English.

The effect here is that often when Americans try to learn a foreign language, even in a foreign language, they encounter many people who want to practice English and already speak English better than the American speaks their native language. That actually adds a degree of difficulty to the language acquisition process. A Scottish person I met said that while learning French, when speaking English he would make his Scottish accent as thick as possible so that people would prefer to talk to him in French.

3. Native English speakers very rarely engage in conversations where both speakers are speaking in second languages
Ok this header is a mouthful, so reread it and hear me out. This one is best understood in the converse - non-native English speakers are nearly guaranteed to have an experience where they communicate in English to someone else who is also a non-native speaker. French people speaking to Germans, Koreans conversing with Filipinos, Egyptians talking to Kenyans - there is nothing fantastical about these dialogues taking place in English. It is a daily rite of our global economy.

For native English speakers, this is a rarity, even those who learn other languages. How often does an American who speaks German come across someone who is not a native German speaker, but speaks German better than they speak English? Maybe in parts of Central Europe, but it's a rarity.  So sure, learners of Spanish may find it useful in Brazil, and learners of French in Algeria and learners of Mandarin in Xinjiang. But from my conversations, many Americans who know a foreign language well have literally never had this experience, whereas every non-Native English speaker I've ever met has had this experience.

Lastly, I'd add that this is not just a neat trivial notion. Conversations where both speakers are handicapped can be really interesting - both speakers may find themselves grappling for the right word and journeying together towards it. Humor and sarcasm get tricky when relative cultural markers are thrown off by the neutral language setting. Enough practice in these settings can greatly improve one's general communication skills. This is a significant aspect of the human experience that someone may never experience simply by being born in an English speaking country.

4. There are many second language varieties of English
Every language spanning more than a village will have its accents, but few languages have the global and political baggage of English. One result of this is that full populations have gone from speaking their own language to creating a unique variety of English. This occurred with Gaelic languages in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, with Bantu languages across Eastern and Southern Africa, and the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages in South Asia. The English accents spoken in these areas have their roots in second language acquisition, and many grammatical and phonetic traits remain, even amongst modern native English users who do not speak the substrate language. For example, many people in Ireland who do not speak Irish pronounce the "th" in "think" as a dental "t" like "tink". This example embodies an interesting linguistic greyzone - the speaker appears to have phonetic rules from another language interfering with their pronunciation of English, but the speaker does not speak any other language.

You may find similar manifestations of this phenomenon across the Spanish-speaking, Arabic-speaking or Chinese-speaking worlds, but arguably not to the same extent as in English.

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In conclusion, the prevalence of English throughout our globe today does not make it a boring subject. To the contrary it has led to some consequences, which I hope that you agree with me, are absolutely fascinating.