Stating The Obvious

I haven’t received any questions or complaints that would indicate confusion on the following point, but just as a precaution I want to clarify something to forestall any confusion arising in the future. What I want to clarify is this:

My blog is mine.

What I mean by that is that it is something I do on my own. I write it on my own time. I pay for it out of my own pocket. And the opinions that I express on it are mine.

My employer, Catholic Answers, does not give me time to blog. It does not pay for this blog. It does not ask for or give input concerning what I say on it (not even on this particular post, which I decided to write all on my own).

Consequently, when I blog I am writing purely in my capacity as a private individual, not as a representative of Catholic Answers.

For example, I might express opinions about political matters on my blog. I might even express opinions about particular political candidates. In so doing, I am speaking only for myself. Catholic Answers, as a non-profit corporation, does not take positions on political candidates or races.

Just wanted to clarify what should be obvious, in case anyone might potentially, hypothetically one day be confused about the matter.

Hope this helps!

Do I Need An Annulment?

This is a common question asked by a great many people. Often times they have heard that they might not need an annulment for various reasons (e.g., their prior wedding was outside the Catholic Church, it wasn’t a Christian wedding, it was done in a courthouse, one or both partners were not Catholics). Unfortunately, what they have heard is often incorrect.

Here is a simple list of questions to ask to determine whether an annulment is needed:

1) Does the person wish to get married or to possibly marry in the future?

2) Has the person attempted marriage before (meaning: has the person ever had anything that someone would regard as a wedding ceremony)?

3) Is the prior spouse still alive?

4) Is it the case that the Catholic Church has not yet investigated the marriage and found it to be null?

If the answer to all four of these questions is “yes” then the person needs an annulment.

These questions should be asked both for Catholics and non-Catholics, and they should be asked for each prior marriage the person has attempted.

The reasons that you sometimes hear suggested for why a person may not need an annulment do not actually mean that the person doesn’t need an annulment. More often, they are indicators that it will be easy to show that the marriage was null. For example, if a Catholic married outside the Church without a dispensation then the marriage was automatically null, and this will be easy to show when the annulment is sought. However, the annulment is still necessary.

In order to be faithful to Christ’s teachings on matrimony (Mark 10:2-12, see also Romans 7:2-3), the Church has a pastoral duty to investigate it whenever a person has attempted marriage and make sure that the person really is free to marry before giving that person permission to marry again. This investigation is commonly called the annulment process. It may be easy or hard to show nullity in a particular case, but the Church has a responsibility to Christ to investigate the matter.

The way to get the annulment process started is to call a local parish, explain that you would like to seek an annulment, and they can help you from there.

NOTE: There is one class of exception to the above. There are a few cases in which it is possible for a marriage to be dissolved. The most common such case is when two unbaptized people marry and then later one of them is baptized and the non-baptized partner will not continue living with the baptized partner (1 Cor. 7:12-15). However, even in cases such as this, where dissolution is technically possible, annulment is still generally the best way of handling the case. If you think such a case may apply in your situation, contact the marriage tribunal at your local Catholic diocese for further guidance.

Keyes to Obama: You Hold "The Slaveholder's Position"

Alan Keys, a conservative Catholic and Republican candidate for the Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate being contested this fall, laid into his rival, Barack Obama, accusing him of holding a position on abortion comparable to that of slaveowners regarding slaves. In both cases, a class of human beings is denied full humanity and then systematically exploited for the benefit of others.

According to the Associated Press story:

Up at dawn for a whirlwind round of broadcast interviews, the conservative former diplomat [Keyes] started his first full day of campaigning as the GOP candidate by saying Obama, a state senator from Chicago, had violated the principle that all men are created equal by voting against a bill that would have outlawed a form of late-term abortion.

Keyes said legalizing abortion deprives the unborn of their equal rights.

“I would still be picking cotton if the country’s moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence,” Keyes said. He said Obama “has broken and rejected those principles– he has taken the slaveholder’s position.”

The remarks underscore the uniqueness of this Senate race in which both candidates, one an outspoken conservative and the other a favorite of party liberals, are black.

Obama, who has been basking in national celebrity since delivering the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, suggested Keyes is outside the moderate mainstream of state Republicans.

Asked specifically about the phrase “slaveholder’s position,” Obama said Keyes “should look to members of his own party to see if that’s appropriate if he’s going to use that kind of language.”

Faced with the Keyes onslaught, Obama was ambiguous on the number of times he would meet Keyes in debate:

Obama said Monday that there would be “a sufficient number of debates” between himself and Keyes– both men are Harvard-educated, polished debaters– but not the seven such clashes he had promised [former senate candidate Jack] Ryan.

IMPACTING HARD.

Keyes to Obama: You Hold “The Slaveholder’s Position”

Alan Keys, a conservative Catholic and Republican candidate for the Illinois seat in the U.S. Senate being contested this fall, laid into his rival, Barack Obama, accusing him of holding a position on abortion comparable to that of slaveowners regarding slaves. In both cases, a class of human beings is denied full humanity and then systematically exploited for the benefit of others.

According to the Associated Press story:

Up at dawn for a whirlwind round of broadcast interviews, the conservative former diplomat [Keyes] started his first full day of campaigning as the GOP candidate by saying Obama, a state senator from Chicago, had violated the principle that all men are created equal by voting against a bill that would have outlawed a form of late-term abortion.

Keyes said legalizing abortion deprives the unborn of their equal rights.

“I would still be picking cotton if the country’s moral principles had not been shaped by the Declaration of Independence,” Keyes said. He said Obama “has broken and rejected those principles– he has taken the slaveholder’s position.”

The remarks underscore the uniqueness of this Senate race in which both candidates, one an outspoken conservative and the other a favorite of party liberals, are black.

Obama, who has been basking in national celebrity since delivering the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, suggested Keyes is outside the moderate mainstream of state Republicans.

Asked specifically about the phrase “slaveholder’s position,” Obama said Keyes “should look to members of his own party to see if that’s appropriate if he’s going to use that kind of language.”

Faced with the Keyes onslaught, Obama was ambiguous on the number of times he would meet Keyes in debate:

Obama said Monday that there would be “a sufficient number of debates” between himself and Keyes– both men are Harvard-educated, polished debaters– but not the seven such clashes he had promised [former senate candidate Jack] Ryan.

IMPACTING HARD.

Good News For Catholics Trying To Conceive

Here’s an article by Matt Abbott on a new method seeking to help couples who are having difficulty conceiving.

The new method is billed as strictly in conformity with Catholic moral teaching (whereas so many fertility therapies are not).

Let’s hope it is as advertised and that it helps many couples end the heartbreak of infertility!

Bad News For Fundamentalist Mormons

Here’s an interesting story about what looks to be an impending crackdown on a polygamous Mormon offshoot that straddles the Arizona-Utah border.

I’m not happy about the editorial’s use of the word “cult”–a term I generally don’t favor because it’s basically a term of disparagement that you can apply to anyone you don’t like. In this case the article seems to consider a “cult” to be any religious group that displays “disregard for civil rights” (which could easily be applied to Catholics and Christians in general if homosexual marriage is regarded as something that is or should be a civil right).

Nevertheless, I’m heartened to see that it looks like a long-delayed legal crackdown on the group may be in motion.

The editorial also contains interesting insights into the psychological effects of polygamy, including the fact that young men tend to get driven away, as they would provide competition for the older men who want to take multiple wives. That’s something you’d expect: Since humans have an approximately fifty-fifty gender ratio, for some men to take multiple wives, other men must be denied them. The men most likely to be able to take multiple wives will be those with more power and money, who by nature will tend to be older. Eliminating the competition is one of the best ways to ensure that they get what they want.

Unexpected Pimsleur Praise Report

Ray mentioned that after starting Pimsleur Cantonese he quickly had occasion to use it after a Cantonese Mass when a woman started speaking to him in it.

I just had a similar unexpected experience.

One of the few flaws of the Pimsleur sets is that they don’t come with a vocabulary list, and sometimes I’m not 100% sure I’ve heard the word correctly on the CDs. Thus, whenever I’m working a Pimsleur set, I go out and buy a cheap-o phrasebook/dictionary to look up the spellings of words for confirmation. (Dover has a really good line of $4 phrasebook/dictionaries).

Tonight I went to the bookstore to get an inexpensive Japanese phrasebook/dictionary, and I couldn’t resist buying a few additional language books (e.g., a Japanese grammar, an Indonesian phrasebook, a Filipino [Tagalog] phrasebook). When I got to the checkout counter, a big, Hawaiian-shirted, Hawaiian-looking salesperson named Max looked at the books I was buying and asked if I was going to be traveling in Southeast Asia.

I said: “Naw, I’m just learning their languages.”

At which point he asked–in Japanese–if I understood Japanese.

I replied that I understand a little Japanese, and I apparently said it fluidly enough that his eyes got a little big (his surprise probably magnified by my customary cowboy attire) and he said, continuing in Japanese, that I was quite good.

I replied that I was not very good (the customary thing to say when given such a compliment in Japanese), and then added, switching to English, that I’m just starting out. He said, in English, that he was still impressed.

After paying for the books, we switched back to Japanese and I thanked him politely and we bade each other farewell.

So there you have it: proof of the effectiveness of the Pimsleur Method! Just 24 hours after starting to study Japanese and after only two half-hour lessons I successfully held my first unplanned, real-world conversation in the language. Yee-haw!

Just a Skosh of Ketchup

Given my previous post, you’ve no doubt encountered the word “skosh,” meaning “a little bit.” As in:

PERSON 1: Do you want some ketchup for your hotdog?

PERSON 2: Just a skosh.

You may never have encountered the word in writing, but you likely know it in its spoken form skosh.

What you probably don’t know is its origin: It’s Japanese.

In my previous post, I gave you what you needed to decode several Japanese words. One of them was skoshi, which is a popular contraction of sukoshi, which means “a little bit,” and that is where we get “skosh” (however you spell it).

That takes care of the word skosh. But what about ketchup?

It turns out, ketchup isn’t either an English word or a Japanese word. It’s a Malay word–that is, a word from Malaysia.

In Malaysia they make a sauce for food that is called kechap, and this sauce is remarkably similar to what we in the West call ketchup (not completely similar; it’s somewhat different from ketchup). That’s where the name comes from.

So what do I want on my hotdog (in a low-carb bun)?

Just a skosh of ketchup.

Nihonggo Ga Skoshi Wakarimas!

Was in the bookstore today and couldn’t resist picking up a starter pack for Pimsleur Japanese. Had been thinking about getting one since I’ve been going to the Mitsuwa Market lately to get Japanese low-carb noodles and have had a need to ask basic questions of salespeople who aren’t always totally fluent in English.

As soon as I got back to my pickup, I eagerly popped the first lesson into my CD player and heard the following conversation (NOTE: all spellings are phoenetic, and there are other ways to say the same things):

MAN: Sumima-sen, Aygo ga wakarimas ka?

WOMAN: Iyeh, wakarimas-sen. Nihonggo ga wakarimas ka?

MAN: Hai, skoshi wakarimas.

WOMAN: Anata wa Amerikajin dess ka?

MAN: Hai, watashi wa Amerikajin dess.

The CD then started to teach me what I needed to understand this conversation, starting with sumima-sen. I knew immediately what this would mean: “Excuse me.” That’s the first thing you get taught in every Pimsleur langauge course, for a very good reason: You’ll need it a lot!–both to start conversations with people and to apologize for the mistakes that you (as a beginner) will make at first.

You keep learning for the next twenty or so minutes, and then they play the conversation that you heard at the beginning over again. Suddenly, you realize that you understand everything being said in the conversation. Translated, it’s:

MAN: Excuse me, do you understand English?

WOMAN: No, I don’t understand it. Do you understand Japanese?

MAN: Yes, I understand a little.

WOMAN: Are you an American?

MAN: Yes, I am an American.

Of course, I’d know what it says even without the lesson. Every Pimsleur set starts with the same conversation adapated to whatever language you’re learning. So far, I’ve been through this same conversation in (modern) Hebrew, (modern) Greek, (Syrian) Arabic, (Mandarin) Chinese, Spanish, German, and maybe one or two others. Whenever I start a new Pimsleur course, I have a nostalgic “I’m home” and “Here we go again” feeling because of the initial conversation.

It’s a handy little conversation to know. The things that get said are things that you’ll need to know how to say and understand in the new language.

The genius of Pimsleur language courses is that they tell you want you most need to know first and start you directly on how to speak conversationally, without memorizing lots of grammar and paradigms first. How many other language programs do you know that will have you understanding complete, if short, conversations like this one in less than thirty minutes?

I’m looking forward to trying my hand at Pimsleur Japanese. Every language has its own genius, and Japanese will be interesting. Unlike some Asian languages (e.g., Chinese, Vietnamese), it does not have an extensive tonal system. The main tone we have in English is raising our voice at the end of a sentence to form a question, but in Chinese virtually every word has a normal, high, rising, falling, or dipsy-doodle tone that functions basically like an extra consonant in the word and completely changes its meaning. It’s part of what gives Chinese English-speakers their musical accent, but it’s so hard for English-speakers to master that when I first started studying Mandarin I had trouble distinguishing individual words out of the stream of sound and tone. Fortunately, Japanese is like English in that it rarely uses tones. That will make it easier.

Another thing that will make it easier is that Japanese (like Chinese) is not a heavily inflected language. That means that the words don’t change their forms as often as in some languages (like Latin, which has a bugbear system of inflection for nouns, or Arabic, which has a bugbear system of inflection for verbs). Japanese is a low-inflection language so, for example, it doesn’t normally distinguish singular nouns from plural nouns. For example, the word jidosha can mean either “car” or “cars.” Thus there are no plural endings to memorize.

Also–as in Latin–there are no articles (a, an, the) to memorize, so jidosha can mean “car,” “a car,” “the car,” “cars,” “some cars,” “the cars.”

The bugbear for Japanese will be its word order. Japanese is what linguists call a “head-last” language, where as English is a “head-first” language. This concept is a little hard to explain (it has to do with where you put the most grammatically important part of a phrase), but the upshot is that the word order in Japanese often will be backwards of what English word order will be. Other times, it will seem pretty scrambled from an English perspective.

But that’s part of the fun! I’m trying, over the course of time, to try learning one of every major kind of language. Studying Mandarin, for example, helped give me some exposure to a tonal language. Studying Japanese will help give me some exposure to a head-last language. Ultimately, I want to get around to aggultinating languages like Swahili or some of the American Indian languages, which have monster huge verbs that can encode all of the information of a whole sentence in just the verb. (Klingon is another agglutinating language.)

Isn’t it cool how God designed the human faculty for language?

Fortunately, in Pimsleur, you don’t need to know or learn all the grammar I just described. You get the grammar you need by osmosis from conversation–the same way you did when you learned English as a baby (or whatever you learned as a baby)–without having to study a grammar book.

In the end, it’s pretty simple. In fact, I bet that you can use just the information from the Japanese and English conversations above to figure out what the title of the post means. Here’s a clue in case you need more help (the stuff in parentheses represent what the untranslatable particles ga, ka, and wa mean):

MAN: Excuse me, English (<--subject) understand (question)?

WOMAN: No, understand not. Japanese (<--subject) understand (question)?

MAN: Yes, a little understand.

WOMAN: You (predicate–>) American are (question)?

MAN: Yes, I (predicate–>) American am.

Armed with this knowledge, can you translate the title of this post?

IRONIC NOTE: After I left the bookstore, I discovered that the main kind of Japanese low-carb noodles are now available at the ordinary Vons grocery store across the street from me. Sheesh! Well, it won’t dampen my interest in Japanese. Languages are cool, and there’s still all those other Japanese low-carb products to get at Mitsuwa.