Language

Embracing the Challenge

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 15:03:19 +0000

Embracing the Challenge Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/16/2020 - 09:03

Christie Sounart

Edna Ma (EPOBio’99; MD’03) has worked in the Los Angeles area as a private practice anesthesiologist since 2007. The mother of two children also is author of two bilingual children’s books, Travel, Learn and See, featuring English, Mandarin and pinyin and inspired by her son Dean and his best friend Ethan, who met in a Mandarin immersion school.

Have you always been a writer?

No! At CU, I basically lived in the EPO biology building in Dr. Anne Bekoff’s lab. But I like being creative. Writing became that creative outlet.

Are Ethan and Dean fluent in mandarin?

Yes — the real Ethan started learning Mandarin and Spanish when he was two years old. Dean’s first language is Mandarin, which he speaks with his immediate family. Both the boys are enrolled in Mandarin immersion programs in Los Angeles.

What was the moment of inspiration for you to write a bilingual children’s book?

I really wanted to read to my children in Chinese but couldn’t find any books I could read with my limited literacy in Mandarin. Most Chinese children's books are published in Taiwan or China but are entirely in Mandarin. There are very few books written in English, Chinese characters and pinyin. I also observed how easily the children clicked. They naturally gravitated to each other.

I saw writing my own book as a multifaceted solution to my problems. I could write the books parents were looking to buy. I could also improve my own Mandarin literacy and spotlight the beautiful friendships forming at the multilingual school my children attended.

Since you aren’t fluent in Mandarin, how were you able to ensure the Mandarin language was correct?

This has been a challenge! Actually, I took my first Mandarin class as a college freshman at CU. Since then, I make deliberate efforts and I’m not too embarrassed to speak, even in my terrible accent. Some of these efforts include volunteering at my children’s school and watching Netflix in Mandarin.

How did you decide on art for the books?

Growing up, I was drawn toward the watercolor style of the original Winnie the Pooh and Curious George. The illustrator I work with brings back that nostalgic feeling I am hoping to capture and bring to today’s children.

How do you find time to write?

Currently, I write this during the coronavirus pandemic and my children have been home from school for months. On days I am in the operating room, I leave for work at 6 a.m. But on days I’m not administering anesthesia, I wake at 5 a.m. to squeeze in an hour of work before I am on mom duty. The process is slow, but like the quote, “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence,” I’m slowly hollowing out that stone and making a figurative sculpture!

Do your ideas flow easily for you?

Sometimes. The challenging part is honing down the idea into a story. Children have short attention spans, so to tell a story in a compact fashion requires lots of editing and revisions.

Will you continue to write bilingual books?

As long as there is a market for them, I will write. So far the feedback has been great. Because of social media, I have discovered a community of Chinese American authors writing bilingual children’s books. This is reassuring that there is indeed an audience. I also hope my books are discovered by native Chinese speakers wishing to teach their children English.

What does your career as an anesthesiologist mean to you, especially during this pandemic?

Anesthesiologists are at one of the highest risks for contracting the coronavirus doing patient care. This is due to the degree of contact to the airway during patient care, operating the ventilators and ensuring the patients’ vital signs are stable. We are the critical care physicians of the operating room, and are the physicians that safely insert the breathing tube during the few precious minutes you’re not breathing.

Until recently, anesthesiologists were the proverbial wizards behind the curtain and the general public really had little understand of our roles in the operating rooms or ICUs.

You were on both Survivor and Shark Tank. What were your key takeaways from those experiences?

The experiences taught me that I had more courage and resilience to overcome things I feared. I wanted to quit Survivor; it was a physically and mentally tough game. Eventually, I was voted off the island. And on Shark Tank, I did not get a deal with the TV investors. I shared my “failures” with millions of people and I survived the process! New challenges no longer seem as intimidating.

What else do you like to do?

I would love to see my books become an animated series. Anyone who has learned a foreign language knows that language is learned by seeing, hearing and experiences. What better way than an animated series.

As for reality TV, I’m up for any challenge! Amazing Race? Do you know anyone I could pair with?

Condensed and edited.

Photos courtesy Edna Ma

Edna Ma has worked in the Los Angeles area as a private practice anesthesiologist since 2007. The mother of two children also is author of two bilingual children’s books featuring English, Mandarin and pinyin.

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Podcast: The Dead Sea Scrolls

Anonymous — Tue, 01 May 2018 21:58:01 +0000

Podcast: The Dead Sea Scrolls Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/01/2018 - 15:58

Eric Gershon

[soundcloud width="100%" height="300" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/437866647&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true"][/soundcloud]

In this installment of our new podcast, “Coloradan on the Radio,” ��񱦵� scholar Samuel Boyd gives the scoop on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known documents relating to the Bible, some of which are on display now at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Sam also talks about a band he once played in called the Dead Sea Trolls — and how he managed to learn 26 ancient languages.

“Coloradan on the Radio” is produced in partnership with Radio 1190, ��񱦵�’s campus station.

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To Speak Arapaho

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 21:08:51 +0000

To Speak Arapaho Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/01/2018 - 14:08

Amanda Clark

��񱦵� scholars are helping to rescue the Arapaho language, once a major tongue in the Great Plains region, from near extinction.

Part of the Algonquian family of languages, Arapaho has fewer than 200 living speakers and no fluent speakers under the age of 60.

For the past 15 years, CU linguistics professor Andrew Cowell, and more recently doctoral student Irina Wagner (Anth, Ling’14; MLing’14), have collected and documented many hours of oral histories, stories and conversations from Native American elders in Wyoming and Oklahoma. Their work has blossomed into the Arapaho Language Project — a website providing language learners with tools for incorporating Arapaho into their everyday lives.

“In reality, for the language reclamation to work, young parents should be speaking it,” said Wagner, who’s been on the project since 2014. She’s working on a dissertation that explores how Arapaho grammar helps its speakers complain about other people without naming them directly.

But with so few speakers and scarce other resources available, the language project can help fill the void, she said.

Initially established in 2003 with a grant from the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, the expanded website now contains a variety of resources, including an Arapaho-English dictionary, pronunciation guides and bilingual curriculum materials. It also features Native American stories, prayers and name lists.

Find audio clips of spoken Arapaho on the Arapaho Language Project website.

Additional clips are available on the ��񱦵� Today website.

��񱦵� scholars are helping to rescue the Arapaho language from near extinction.

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Better than Babel

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 09:57:00 +0000

Better than Babel Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/01/2017 - 03:57

Eric Gershon

Like millions of Americans before him and after, Samuel Boyd took high school Spanish.

Since then, he’s learned some other foreign languages, bringing his total, at last count, to 26, including dialects — and he’s got room in his head for more.

“I started to learn Sumerian but had some scheduling conflicts,” said the 38-year-old ��񱦵� professor, referring to a language spoken about 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, now part of Iraq. “I’d like to come back to it.”

Nearly all Boyd’s languages are “dead” — no longer spoken, except as a scholarly exercise. Few use the Roman alphabet (the ABCs).

But they’re all key tools in his work as a professional student of the Bible, the Western world’s most famous book.

Reading the languages of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures that produced it some 2,500 years ago helps him assess subtleties lost in translation. It also allows him to decipher contemporaneous records that illuminate context and meaning.

Boyd's cover band, The Dead Sea Trolls, nodded cheekily to the scholarly life ahead of him.

Guiding this work are two endlessly ponderable questions: “What is the Bible, and what are we supposed to use it for?”

These are not questions with final answers.

But meticulous study of the literary and archaeological evidence left by biblical cultures informs current understanding of what the Bible’s authors meant to convey. This shapes how people interpret and act on those messages now.

"I'm not here to convert anybody out of or into a particular religious tradition,” Boyd said. “I’m here to help people think critically.”

Boyd first grew interested in ancient languages while working as a currency derivatives analyst at a big bank in Charlotte, N.C. It was the early 2000s and he was fresh out of college.

Inspired by debates about religious fanaticism after the Sept. 11 attacks, by his upbringing in the heavily Christian American South and by a childhood obsession with Indiana Jones, he enrolled in an online course in ancient Greek. He wanted to read the New Testament as it was first written.

Greek sucked him in.

Professor Samuel Boyd knows 26 foreign languages, including dialects. A sample:

Hebrew
Greek
Akkadian
Hittite
Syriac
Aramaic
Ge'ez
Phoenician
Ugaritic
Moabite
Classical Arabic

“I’ve got the bug,” Boyd told his bosses at the bank, where he also played guitar in a cover band called The Dead Sea Trolls, a cheeky nod to the latent interests that led to a new life.

Within 18 months he’d left finance and begun a master’s program focused on extinct languages. He added more as a PhD student.

Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic came after ancient Greek, then Ugaritic and some modern languages, German and French, which he also reads better than he speaks.

Eventually Boyd picked up Akkadian, Syriac and Classical Ethiopic (also known as Ge’ez), as well as Phoenician, Moabite and Hittite, among about a dozen others.

He even helped identify and decipher a lost Aramaic dialect inscribed on a nearly 3,000-year-old monument discovered in Turkey.

Scholars of the Bible tend to know many languages — often half a dozen or so, according to Jeffrey Stackert, one of Boyd’s graduate school professors at the University of Chicago. It’s really the only way to do the job. Stackert himself knows 12, including dialects.

But even among his peers and mentors, Boyd stands out.

Two big questions guide his work: "What is the Bible and what are we supposed to use it for?"

“This level of language competence is pretty uncommon,” said Stackert, who called Boyd “a natural” who “combines a remarkable memory with a keen interest and indefatigable drive.”

Boyd candidly noted another secret to his success: Many languages in his repertoire are related.

Phoenician, Hebrew and Moabite, for example, belong to the northwest Semitic language family and share many common features, including certain characters used to form words and convey ideas, aspects of grammar and some vocabulary. Punic and Ammonite, once spoken in North Africa and what is now Jordan, respectively, in turn resemble Moabite.

In a Western context, this is like someone knowing Italian and Spanish and adding Portuguese or French — other Romance languages.

Still, it takes a lot of study, and Boyd spent years heads-down.

It helped that “I was a single guy” during graduate school, he said.

Now married with children, Boyd emerged as an uncommon talent whose linguistic abilities make him a versatile scholar.

“He is able to address complex research questions that span significant time, geography and culture and that require considering a number of different types of evidence in ways that few scholars can,” Stackert said.

Sometimes the dictionary is wrong.

At home at night, Boyd reads Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are aloud to his children in Hebrew.

Despite his linguistic aptitude, Boyd doesn’t consider himself a hyperpolyglot — a person who speaks lots oflanguages. (Zaid Fazah of Lebanon claims to read and speak about 60.)

“Texts are my thing,” he said.

Predictably, Boyd's office shelves all but sag with dictionaries, which he consults freely — and skeptically.

“Sometimes, the dictionary might be wrong," he said.

Illustrations by Michael Waraska

Samuel Boyd has a way with languages.

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Campus News Briefs – Fall 2016

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:00:00 +0000

Campus News Briefs – Fall 2016 Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/01/2016 - 00:00

Digits

CU's ATLAS Institute

Creative and curious engineering

Blow Things Up Lab

Two

Research labs: Playful Computing and Interactive Robotics

1,200

Students in Technology, Arts and Media program

Percent of ATLAS students are women

One

Drone-flying cage

Years since Roser ATLAS Center opened

A Tree Grows In... The Office

No one will need to water this office plant: A team of CU students recently designed and built a work space around a live linden tree in Boulder’s Central Park.

The modular structure — made of wood and metal and open to the sky — measures 450 square feet and has benches, workstations and a deck. The temporary building is not attached to the tree and will be moved periodically.

The undertaking, part of the Tree X Office project, which aims to modify the human relationship to nature, gave third-year environmental design students soup-to-nuts design, permitting and construction experience.

More of the story is available at www.colorado.edu/news.

Heard Around Campus

Jupiter is the biggest, baddest planet."

— Planetary scientist Fran Bagenal of CU Boulder, anticipating the arrival of NASA’s Juno spacecraft at Jupiter in July, a mission she and others at CU aided.

How Do You Say...?

Name an ancient language, the chances are good that Samuel Boyd can read it: In all, the CU professor knows 23, counting dialects.

“If someone wants to travel with me to Finland, I’m useless,” Boyd, a scholar of the Bible, told the online Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine. “But if you ever want me to translate ancient Phoenician, I can help.”

An assistant professor of religious studies, Boyd also has advanced reading knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Babylonian, to mention a few, as well as Classical Ethiopic, also called Ge’ez.

“I was obsessed with Indiana Jones as a kid, so once I started to learn one ancient language,” he said, “I got hooked.”

On and around campus

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Fall 2016

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Language

Embracing the Challenge

Have you always been a writer?

Are Ethan and Dean fluent in mandarin?

What was the moment of inspiration for you to write a bilingual children’s book?

Since you aren’t fluent in Mandarin, how were you able to ensure the Mandarin language was correct?

How did you decide on art for the books?

How do you find time to write?

Do your ideas flow easily for you?

Will you continue to write bilingual books?

What does your career as an anesthesiologist mean to you, especially during this pandemic?

You were on both Survivor and Shark Tank. What were your key takeaways from those experiences?

What else do you like to do?

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Podcast: The Dead Sea Scrolls

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To Speak Arapaho

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Better than Babel

Professor Samuel Boyd knows 26 foreign languages, including dialects. A sample:

Off

Campus News Briefs – Fall 2016

Digits

CU's ATLAS Institute

A Tree Grows In... The Office

Heard Around Campus

How Do You Say...?

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