7 September 2022. Nature | Work
How languages create different understandings of the natural world // Hybrid workers do work better.
Welcome back to Just Two Things, after my break. I try to publish this newsletter daily, three times a week, but don’t always succeed. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. A reminder that if you don’t see Just Two Things in your inbox, it might have been routed to your spam filter.
But first, a service announcement. I’ve been doing this almost five days a week format on Just Do Things for a year and a half now, and for a year’s worth of postings—this is #365. But I’m going to have to cut back a bit while I do some other writing, since I need to carve the time to do that from somewhere. The plan going forwards is that—typically—there will be a pair of pieces on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday (sometimes Saturday). If there are updates or comments, I’ll slot those in on Tuesday and Thursday, and these shorter posts will be marked with an asterisk.
1: Language, land and nature
It’s a commonplace that every time a language dies, so also dies a different way for us to see and understand the world, especially the natural world. But it’s less common to come across an article that tries to explain the ways in which this happens.
Philippa Bayley and Neville Gabie, and others, have an article in Terralingua that explains how this works by looking at some actual examples from a range of different endangered languages. Bayley is a scientist, Gabie an artist, who came to this issue by different routes.
Living-Language-Land came alive with two questions: How can we create a platform for the knowledge and experiences of minority and endangered language holders so that their words reach new audiences? And how can we reflect on and share the powerful strategies for sustainable living that these languages reveal to help look afresh at our environmental crisis?
The Loving-Language-Land project shared 26 words ahead of COP26. The article includes five words from different languages, linked by a commentary from a project collaborator, the Innu activist Missinak Kameltoutasset (Marie-Émilie Lacroix).
We all learned the mother tongue of our family when we were toddlers, but only very few of us looked for the deeper meaning of that language and realized its importance in influencing our lives. To undertake this search is to embark on an exceptional journey that can transform our entire lives. This is a journey I have experienced in investigating the words of my own language, Nehluen.
(The Innu regions. Map by Noahedits via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Nehluen is used throughout the Innu communities in the province of Québec, Canada, from the southwestern region of Lac-Saint-Jean to the northeastern coast of Labrador.
The Innu alphabet is based on eleven consonants and seven vowels. It is a complex language for a new student to learn, but also very rewarding because it is so pictorial. The words represent more than a simple concept; they create a picture, a scene, animate a thought, define a precise action linking it with the environment. The Innu words are very exact, descriptive, and full of life.
One of the features of language and thought within Innu is that a human and their environment are not dissoluble. Different versions of the word ‘we’ underline the different relationships between the person and their world:
If I wanted to speak of a “we” that includes both me and (singular or plural) you, then I would use tshinanu. The prefix tshi– corresponds to “you” in all its forms. If I wanted to speak about “we,” but in a way that is excluding you (whether singular or plural), I would say nińan (with the accent on the second “n”). Tshinanu — the inclusive form of we — invites sharing, community life. There are no fences in the word tshinanu. It is a collective “we,” an open hand extended to others, inviting them to be a part of the circle... This word brings the land, the animals, the plants, and the people into a mutual relationship within the same pronoun.
As with many other cultures, the language also defines different types of relationships to the land:
To speak of the area in Québec inhabited by the Innu peoples, we use the word Nitassinan, “our land,” which also speaks to our inside land, our roots. For the traditional land of our families in the bush we say nutshimit. It represents the land of silence, the inside discourse, the place of personal discovery, without any pressure.
And this relationship with the land that is encoded in the language means, conversely, that the language loses some of its power when Innu people are distanced from the land, and therefore from their identity:
It means a loss of living roots, like becoming a stranger to him/herself. As a result, the words, loaded with context, lose their bearings in the new environment. There is no more silence, there are no roots. It is exactly this kind of broken bond, this deep wound that best describes placing Indigenous Peoples in reserves and residential schools, and healing will only be found by a return to the tradition.
The researchers hope that Living-Langauge-Land can become “an inspirational tool” for educators, students, researchers, and creatives to engage with a diversity of perspectives and worldviews.
Here are a couple of the other words in the article:
Siwa
Pond; lake; adult woman’s vagina
Language: Mysk Kubun
Region: Central Colombia
Contributor: Comunidad Muisca CONA, Pedagogías Ancestrales
From the waters emerged Mother Bachué, who gave birth to our people and taught us how to live well in our territory. The waters sing stories; siwa speaks to us and reminds us of the humidity of our first vessel, our mother’s womb.
(The 'James Denyer' coble fishing boat, Cullercoats. Photo by Andrew Curtis, CC BY-SA 2.0, via geograph.org.uk/p/1633856)
Coble
A traditional open wooden fishing boat built without a keel
Language: Northumbrian Coastal speech
Region: Northumbrian Coast, United Kingdom
Contributors: Katrina Porteous and Northumbrian fisher families
Coble is more than just a boat. Built by eye, without a plan, its lines evolved over centuries for sail, to respond economically to the wind and local sea conditions.
Each coble brought human lives into direct, daily contact with powerful, unpredictable forces of nature.
Thanks to John Thackara for alerting me to this piece.
2: It turns out that hybrid workers do work better
There’s been a lot of opinion since the pandemic on the best mix for hybrid work, much of it uninformed, so it makes a change to see some actual research. Interestingly, this was a piece of field research that included an analysis of thousands of emails. It was written up in Harvard Working Knowledge.
I’ve just written this up from the short Working Knowledge write up, but the full paper is also online.
(Morning at a BRAC school in Bangladesh. Image: Conor Ashleigh for AusAid, CC BY 2.0)
The research method is worth noting. It involved 130 HR managers at a Bangladeshi organisation, BRAC, which is the largest non-governmental organisation in the world, with 35,000 employees and $1 billion in revenues. Over a nine week period—involving 35 working days—they analysed every email sent by members of this group:
The researchers studied employee emails and attachments before and during a nine-week period using machine learning and textual analysis. They supplemented their email analysis with qualitative surveys of the employees involved in the study and their respective managers.
They were also able to assign members of the research group to work in or out of the office, on a random basis, and they split them into three groups,
based on how they split their time between the home and office. The mostly-at-home group went to the office up to eight days during the study period. Hybrid workers spent nine to 14 days at the office, and the mostly in-office cohort worked more than 15 days in the office.
Satisfaction was assessed by the workers themselves, and effectiveness assessed by supervisors, across a series of metrics. The number of emails sent was used as a metric, although to this reader the differences here seem trivial (and it may not be a great metric).
In all three categories—number of emails sent, work-from-home satisfaction, and quality of work product—the hybrid group members outranked their peers...
A more interesting measure was the range of people that emails were sent to.
hybrid work is associated with a 58 percent increase in the number of unique email recipients compared to those mostly working from home, a metric that indicates that workers in the hybrid category had broader intraorganizational email networks... Workers in the hybrid category also produced more novel emails and email attachments, with novelty measured using text and machine learning methods.
The lead researcher, Prithwiraj Choudhury, concludes that the workers in the middle group got ‘the greatest benefit of flexibility without having the costs of isolation from your coworkers’, while business outcomes from this group were also strongest.
It’s one study in one company, so more research is needed. But the outcomes are consistent with other research on flexible work done by Choudhury, across a number of organisations:
His research points to a highly productive, happier work world where flexibility could become the rule rather than the exception. He cites Indian technology giant TCS, which recently announced that employees need to be in the office only 25 percent of the time—and the days may differ from group to group.
Of course, evidence probably won’t stop particular CEOs from claiming that having workers in the office all the time is more productive, rather than admitting that it’s about control.
j2t#365
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