Mount Royal Oui

     As at least some of you know, I am spending most of this month in Montreal as part of my Off-Campus Duty Assignment (my university’s god-awful euphemism for sabbatical).  I am being hosted at Concordia University by my wonderful colleague and friend Diane Poulin-Dubois.   This is only my second OCDA in my 23 years at Arkansas (though we can apply for one every 7 years).   For those of you who are non-academics, sabbaticals are intended to free professors from their more quotidian academic duties (i.e. teaching, administrative, and committee work) so they may focus intently on their scholarly and/or creative endeavors.  Often sabbaticals involve trips away from home for collaboration with other scholars, visits to museums, libraries, or other institutions that have resources unavailable at one’s home institution.   There is also the benefit of just “getting out of Dodge”—a change of context can do wonders for the intellect.   As part of getting my intellectual flame re-kindled, I am starting this blog as both a way to share my experiences here (the travelogue) and reflect in less formal ways on the issues that I am currently thinking about in my scholarly work (the psychologue).   Here goes.

     Travelogue:   I took a roundabout route from Fayetteville to Montreal, stopping for one last trip at the family homestead in New Jersey to help my parents finish packing for their move to Florida and then in Poughkeepsie, NY to visit my daughter Talia at Vassar (I may write about these in a future post).  I then took the Amtrak Adirondack train here, which was a long but very comfortable trip.  Here in Montreal, I have an apartment in an ideal location just west of the Concordia downtown and McGill campuses.  I can take a free shuttle to the Concordia Loyola campus where my office is, and can walk or Metro to just about anywhere in the city.   I have already found my go-to coffee shop (Café Myriade) among a dozen within 4 blocks of my place, and the food and beverage choices are, in the non-hyperbolic sense, too numerous to mention here.   Yes, I will report on the gastronomic aspects of my trip as well!

     Friday afternoon was mild and muggy so I made the required tourist trip up Mount Royal.  For those of you who haven’t been here, the main business district of Montreal sits between the St. Lawrence River to the southeast and three ‘hills’ just about a couple of kilometers northwest of the river.   The tallest (233 m.) and most famous of these is Mount Royal (Mont Réal, comprennez-vous?).   With the fall colors nearing their peak, it was a beautiful walk, as these pictures should show.  

 Mount Royal Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who is also responsible for Central Park in New York.   You can walk, bike, or roller ski up the broad and gently graded Olmsted Road or take the more direct route on the stairs and paths through the woods up the hill.  I did a combination of the two. It had been about 20 years since I had been to the summit on foot.   The park and the chalet at the summit are cleaner and in much better shape than I remember and the view, well, is spectacular.   Though my old iPhone camera doesn’t show it through the humid air, from here I could see the first tall peaks of the Green Mountains in Vermont across the vast St. Lawrence valley.    For reference, my apartment is about two kilometers southwest of this spot.   I took the long way back past Le Croix de Mount Royal (not all that different from the Mount Sequoyah cross at home!).   I estimate I walked between 6 and 7 miles on the excursion.

Psychologue:  Montreal is intellectual porn for someone interested in language and cognition.   It is a multilingual city, and not only French and English.   I’ve already heard (and identified) Mandarin, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, and Farsi, and have heard (and not identified) at least that many other languages.  In the café where I am sitting now, there are groups speaking several languages among themselves, often code-switching (i.e. changing languages) in the middle of a conversation.  I hear children, students, and visitors attempting to speak a language other than their native language with varying degrees of success.   At most places of business in this area, someone will greet you in either French or English, and depending how you respond will either continue with the language of the greeting or switch to the language of your response.   It’s a nice, implicit negotiation.   I will be heading to the more strictly francophone areas of the city later this weekend and we’ll see how that goes.

One of the topics I am currently studying is how children come to understand that not all information is conventional and/or public and that some information is, for lack of a better term at the moment, what I am calling privileged.  There are several proposals out there that argue that children are prepared to learn information from others via verbal interactions (as opposed to through direct perceptual observation).  Most notably, the Hungarian team of Gergely Csibra and Georgy Gergely (yes, that's Gregory Csibra and George Gregory in English)  have called this type of learning ‘Natural Pedagogy’ and they argue that via the parallel evolution of mind and culture, not only are children prepared to learn from verbal interactions but they are prepared to treat the information learned via such interactions as conventional, that is to say, that it is information that one can expect all members of your community to know (names for common objects, rules of games, etc.).  This is beneficial to kids because this sort of information isn’t necessarily transparent; there’s no way to tell just by looking at an animal that it is a dog, or un chien, or uno perro.  Similarly, non-observable (at least not directly observable) scientific phenomenon (the existence and behavior of microbes, the speed of sound) and spiritual/religious phenomena (prayer, the afterlife) MUST almost always be learned via the pedagogical route.  If information is learned as conventional, then not only should children believe that others know that knowledge but, in addition, that such information is free to pass on to other members of the community.

However, not all information learned from others is conventional or public in this sense and, as such, we should neither expect others to know such information nor should we feel free to pass that information on willy-nilly.  Obviously this includes things such as secrets and surprises, but how about that juicy piece of gossip you just overheard, or the latest unsubstantiated tweet or Faceburban myth, or a unique family tradition, or a wikileak?  Under what circumstances do we, should we, or can we share this information with others?    Can or should information ever be restricted?  Can information or ideas be owned in the same sense that a car can be owned?   What marks information as being shareable or not shareable?

Well, maybe language does.   The couple next to me in this café are speaking Mandarin and I think they, quite reasonably, expect that the Anglo guy sitting next to them wearing a Vassar ballcap doesn’t have a clue about what they’re saying and, in that sense, their conversation is privileged between them at this place and point in time. But what if I, despite my appearance, had studied Mandarin or had worked in Shanghai and understood every or most words they said?   If they were sitting in a café in Beijing, surely they would understand that their conversation was not privileged, and if they wanted to keep their conversation private, they would need to speak sotto voce or whatever the Mandarin equivalent of that would be.

I had an experience yesterday that illustrates how we expect language to be, in some cases, a privileged code.  As many of you know, I was a French major and though I’m not fluent any more, I understand and speak the language assez bien, merci, though this Quebecois accent is a bit of a challenge.  I needed to go to my apartment building manager’s office to complete some business and to inform the management of some problems with my unit.   I said bonjour, and then introduced myself (in English) as we had not yet met except via email and phone.   When I explained the issues with my apartment, the manager and her assistant addressed me in English and then, in what they thought was a privileged conversation that I understood almost completely, spoke to each other.  I responded in French with what I thought the solution to my issues ought to be, they both looked at me with astonishment.  The manager, une vraie Quebecoise around 60  said, in heavily accented English, “Oh, shit.”  

I was moved to a different unit immediately.