From Inference Review:
Douglas Hofstadter
is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished
Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana
University, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Wacky Jabber
A sweetish suite of machine translations of a pseudo-Swedish paragraph concocted on a whim by this essay’s author.
I have a pretty long history with Sweden and its language. Actually, until 1961, when I was 16, I’d never given any thought to Sweden at all, but everything shifted on a dime when my Dad shared the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics. That December, our family flew to Stockholm for the ceremonies and it was unforgettable. Not only were the solemn, yet deeply joyous, festivities a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, but I was powerfully struck by the classic European beauty of Stockholm in the midst of that romantically dark and snowy Scandinavian winter—such a clean and sophisticated city with its old-fashioned trams, its glittering neon signs, its colorful store windows, its elegant ladies and gentlemen, and, last but not least, its strange, alien language.
When, one day in the Grand Hôtel, which certainly lived up to its name, our family first laid eyes on my Dad’s Nobel diploma, colorfully and exquisitely hand-calligraphed in Swedish, I tried to make some sense of the citation—“För hans banbrytande undersökningar över elektronspridningen mot atomkärnor och därvid gjorda upptäckter rörande nuckleonernas struktur”—but I couldn’t do much with it. Although I knew a weensy bit of German, I didn’t know a word of any of its cousin languages, such as Swedish. And yet I instantly noticed something that looked odd; a tiny little thing that, to my eye, stuck out like a sore thumb. Even if you know zero Swedish, I urge you to try to spot the spot that was an eyesore to me. Hint: it’s just one word toward the end. And by the way, in English, what those italicized words mean is this: “For his pathbreaking investigations of electron-scattering from atomic nuclei, and for his discoveries, made thereby, concerning the structure of nucleons.”
Okay, I’ll reveal what made me scratch my head. I knew my Dad’s research was all about atomic nuclei and their constituents—nucleons—and I was pretty sure that the Swedish word for “nucleon” wouldn’t have a “ck” in it, but either just a “k” or a “c.” I didn’t know what the final five letters of “nuckleonernas” meant, but that was irrelevant. So, in a mixture of worry and befuddlement, I pointed out this questionable spelling to my parents, who of course didn’t know what to make of it either. Later I asked some Swedes and found out that my intuition had been right; the calligrapher had simply made a blunder. It should have said “nukleonernas struktur”—literally, “the nucleons’ structure”—with just a “k,” not a “ck.” So, amusingly enough, my Dad’s Nobel diploma has a special distinction, making it very rare, like a postage stamp with a misprint.
Well, that was my first tiny brush with the Swedish language.
In 1965, I was living in London with my parents and sister for a few months. I was feeling restless and, for various reasons, I got the urge to go to Sweden. I had a couple of acquaintances in the old university town of Lund, in southern Sweden, near Malmö, so I contacted them and they urged me to come. And so I did, in early January of 1966. I wound up living in a student dormitory in Lund for about three months and loving it immensely. I made some lifelong friends during that time: Ingemar Börjesson, Birgitta Ohlsson, and Bengt Olle Bengtsson. With them all, I of course spoke English, but from the very start I tried to learn to speak Swedish. I quickly found the language exceedingly alluring, with its curious tonal lilt and its very striking initial consonant-clusters—such as “kv,” “gj,” and “stj”—and of course its unique letters “å” and “Å.” But nearly everyone’s English ran rings around my attempts at Swedish, so it was very hard to get my foot, or even my toe, in the door. One day, however, by luck I met a young Swedish woman on my floor of the dormitory who was very timid about speaking English. She tolerated my stumblings-about in Swedish, so somehow a few conversations with her became min tå in the door, and then they became min fot in the door. After a while I found a few other Swedes who were willing to speak Swedish with me, and from there on I was off and running.
That spring, I moved to Stockholm and lived in various places, mostly amongst students, and became close to the Lawaczeck family, who lived in the Stockholm suburb of Kungsängen. Even after all these years I’m still friends with Yvonne (“Mon”) Lawaczeck Seifert. And with the Lawaczecks I spoke almost exclusively Swedish all the time, and that gave a huge boost to my Swedish. However, I lived in Sweden for only six months total during that year abroad, and in the late summer of 1966 I returned to America to go to graduate school. And with that, my love affair with the Swedish language—or at least my first love affair with it—was over, alas.
It was only in 2016—exactly fifty years later!—that I came back seriously to Sweden and its language. What turned the trick was a tempting invitation I received to participate in a small symposium that June in Stockholm, called “The Limitations of Scientific Knowledge.” My old memories of Stockholm and of course of Swedish were so vivid that I couldn’t resist accepting....
....MUCH MORE
Maybe not so much profit but the good Professor does seem to be having a grand old time.
