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September 23rd; Wednesday.
After another uncomfortable night unable to breathe whenever lying down, I potter (stagger) into the village of Paty at 8am. The morning sun is warm & cheering. Go there hoping to find a pharmacist, perhaps a doctor, and succeed in finding both. Both are very kind. Each in turn thinks I have some kind of acute allergic asthma, not an infection, which is good news. Buy anti-asthma mouth spray and some pills.
Online friend Alison suggests the US is in the grip of a well-funded off-the-shelf 'Color Revolution' (see here for a general guide as to how to mount one) aiming to enforce regime change through street violence. She points out that in the three cases of George Floyd, Kyle Rittenhouse, and Breonna Taylor, not all, but almost all, the major mass-media outlets consistently misreported details of the resulting deaths used to justify riots, almost as if working to a common script.
September 22nd; Tuesday. I have to cancel several meetings in town because of last night. Euro zone looking as weak as I feel.
September 21st; Monday. Teach in town during day, but up much of night unsuccessfully trying to vomit. I'm going to have to consult a doctor somehow but (rather pathetically) don't feel I even have the energy to find one.
September 20th; Sunday. I seem to be pretty ill. Quite worrying.
September 19th; Saturday. A couple of interesting-looking publishers:
Zero Books &
Repeater Books.
September 18th; Friday. Sleepless, unwell in small hours, finish the archly-titled 'Buy-ology' by Martin Lindstrom. Even while buying it with Andras on Monday, I mused out loud if the third blurb promise, the one that really hooked me, would ever get answered? "Why does the scent of melons help sell electronic products?" Of course, it never was answered, just mentioned towards the end. What a cheat.
Lindstrom graciously thanks his editor/ghost-writer Peter Smith on the second page of the acknowledgements at the back, if not on the cover. The book is subtitled 'How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy Is Wrong' a claim which really isn't true. This is mainly old news. It reminded me strongly of Vance Packard's 'Hidden Persuaders' book from --- 1957? And despite the new research (Lindstrom uses brain scanners in labs to analyse consumer volunteers' thinking), the feel of the book is almost exactly the same. Of course, Lindstrom makes money doing this research for big firms, so he spends huge swathes of this quite slim book talking about his ethical vision and his dislike of manipulative advertising (even though manipulative advertising is clearly his life work). This leads to weird closing sections in each chapter where he outlines how good & exciting all this research is when we have just read for ourselves that it gives corporations and governments yet more power over individuals. There is also a lot of that dreadful So-here-I-am-in-a-clinic-in-Vienna-Austria-surrounded-by-beeping-machines guff larded onto every chapter to fill space. Essentially, there are four supposed "surprises": 1. cigarette health warnings actually stimulate smokers' cravings / 2. scent and sound are often more powerful than visual cues / 3. bans on smoking promotions enabled tobacco firms to learn how to advertise without even mentioning their names, brands, or products / 4. Brand loyalty hits the same part of the brain as religious identity. I seem to remember Packard covering all four of those at some or other depth, ooh, half a century ago. Now you don't need to read this book.
September 17th; Thursday. I seem to be rather dramatically sick. Difficulty breathing. Nice radio discussion about Plato's Symposium.
September 16th; Wednesday. Though still tired and vaguely ill, manage to do two sets of lessons over the phone. Don't take a dog's friendship for granted!
September 15th; Tuesday. Shorter, odder set of quotes by Plotinus student Porphyry.
September 14th; Monday. Snack with Andras & Eszter and buy a paperback 2nd-hand book from a book stall newly parked near his flat just behind Keleti.
September 13th; Sunday. Wonderfully lofty set of Plotinus quotes.
September 12th; Saturday. A few wealthy folk are doing well.
September 11th; Friday. Lawyers acting for the policemen who were arresting George Floyd when he died now claim to have footage showing Floyd putting a lethal dose of fentanyl in his mouth seconds before arrest.
September 10th; Thursday. A little bit of extra seismic activity around the Yellowstone Lake area in the US: one of the earth's megavolcano threats.
September 9th; Wednesday. US medical results authority quietly concedes that only 6% of COVID-19 deaths had no other fatal conditions. So 150,000+ US deaths suddenly becomes 9,000 deaths.
September 8th; Tuesday. Now here's an image I can use.
September 7th; Monday. Strange liquidy antigravity thing.
September 6th; Sunday. Paganism in Lithuania: looks intriguing.
September 5th; Saturday. Very impressive bit of deep-faking: Adolf & Joseph bring us Video Killed The Radio Star.
September 4th; Friday. Thoughtful critique of 'Critical Theory'.
September 3rd; Thursday. Fascinating claim that Europe took the lead in world civilisation because early Church marriage rules damaged clan kinship structures.
September 2nd; Wednesday. Interesting piece with photos from journalist who went round several US states interviewing people whose businesses were burned down in largely unreported riots.
September 1st; Tuesday. The decimal-point error it very much looked like at the time, that caused the COVID-19 hysteria.
Recent weblog entries
continued:
Who can translate the next 300 words into
Korean or
Hindi?
Contact
us and there will be revelry.
Languages dying out each week
- who cares?
We do - otherlanguages.org is gradually building a reference resource for over five thousand linguistic minorities and stateless languages worldwide.
Thousands of unique language communities are becoming extinct. Out of the world's five to six thousand languages, we hardly know what we're losing, what literatures, philosophies, ways of thinking, are disappearing right now.
So?
We may soon regret the extinction of thousands of entire linguistic cultures even more than we regret the needless extinction of many animals and plants.
The planet is increasingly dominated by a handful of major-language monocultures like Mandarin
Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, Portuguese,
English, Swahili, Russian, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, Bengali - all
beautiful and fascinating languages.
But so are the 5,000 others.
These are groups of people?
Linguistic minorities are communities of ordinary people whose native tongue is not their country's main official language. Swedish speakers in Finland, French speakers in Canada, Hungarian speakers in Slovakia - and hundreds more - are linguistic minorities.
And totally stateless languages are the native languages of some of the world's most intriguing, little-known, cultures. Like the Lapps inside the Arctic Circle, the Sards in Sardinia, Ainus in Japan. Cherokee in the US, Scots
Gaelic in Britain, Friesian in the Netherlands, Zulu in South Africa.
There are only a couple of hundred recognised sovereign states and territories, so 5,000 languages - more depending on how you count - are the native tongues of linguistically stateless people.
How could I help?
You don't need to learn an endangered
language - any more than go to live in the rainforest to help slow its destruction.
A good start is to just tell friends
about websites like this.
Broader public interest makes it easier
for linguists to raise funds and organise people to learn these languages while there's time.
That's right. There are people who love languages and are happy to learn them on behalf of the rest of us, but they need support, just like zoologists, botanists, or historians.
Fewer languages still sounds good to me
Depends what you think languages are for. They're not just a tool for business. We never said you should learn three or four thousand rare languages - or even one. And which ones we make children learn in school, or whether we should force children to learn languages at all, is another question.
Typical scene in a European city;
Chances are, folk here speak some sort of foreign
language *5
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A century ago - before we understood ecology, and when we cared less about wilderness, most educated people would have laughed at the idea of worrying about plants or animals going extinct. Now we understand how important species diversity is for our own futures, we are more humble, and more worried.
In the same way, linguistic triumphalism by English-speakers who hated studying foreign grammar at school is dangerously ignorant as well as arrogant. Few of us know what we are losing, week by week.
How many people realise these languages have scientific value?
Scientific value?
You can think of these languages across the planet as beautiful cathedrals or precious archeological sites we are watching being destroyed. That should be motive enough.
But these five thousand languages may also hold clues to the structure of the human mind. Subtle differences and similarities
Wireless radio can be a great comfort to those unable
to leave the textbooks in which they live *6
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between languages are helping archeologists and anthropologists to understand what happened in the hundreds of centuries of human history before written history. And that is one of our best chances of understanding how human brains developed over the thousands of centuries leading up to that.
Study of the mind and study of language go hand in hand these days. The world's most marginal languages are actually precious jigsaw pieces from an overall picture of who we are and how our species thinks and evolves. Every tiny language adds another brightly-coloured clue to this academic detective story.
Yet researchers have hardly started sifting through this
tantalising evidence, and language extinction is washing it away right in
front of us.
And worst of all, most people have no idea that there is this
fantastic profusion of cultures across our world, let alone that
they are in danger of extinction. Even just more people learning that
there are still five thousand living languages in the world today (most
of us would answer five hundred or fifty) is already a huge help.
We English-speakers hardly notice English - it's like air for us.
But every other language is also an atmosphere for an entire cultural world,
and each of these worlds has people whose home it is. Each language encapsulates a unique way of talking and thinking about life. Just try some time in a foreign prison, being forced to cope in another language, and you'll realise how much your own language is your identity. That's true for everyone.
Minority languages are a
human-rights issue?
One of the most basic.
Dozens of millions of people worldwide suffer persecution from national governments for speaking their mother tongue - in their own motherland.
Many 'ethnic' feuds puzzling to
outsiders had as their basis an attempt to destroy a linguistic community.
Would the Northern Ireland dispute be quite so bitter if we
English had not so nearly stamped out the Irish Gaelic language, for
example? Almost nowhere in the world does a language community as
small as the few thousand Rheto-Romanic speakers - the fourth
official language of Switzerland - get the protection of a national
government. Next time you see some Swiss Francs, check both sides of the
banknote.
But outside exceptional countries like
Switzerland or the Netherlands, speakers of non-official
languages have a much less protected experience.
Speakers of minority languages are often seen as a threat by both the governments and the other residents of the countries where they were born, grew up, and try to live ordinary lives.
They experience discrimination in the job and education markets of their homelands, often having no choice but to pursue education in the major language of the host state: a deliberate government policy usually aimed at gradually absorbing them into the majority culture of that country.
Mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow, of course *7
|
Most governments are privately gleeful each time another small
separate culture within their borders is snuffed out by a dwindling
population or a deliberately centralising education system.
The United Nations is no help. It is an association of a couple of hundred sovereign states based on exclusive control of territory, almost all of them anxious to smother any distinct group or tradition that in any way might blur or smudge the hard-won borders around those pieces of territory.
The usual approach by sovereign states is to deny their linguistic minorities even exist.
::
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact at
otherlanguages.org
back up to top of page
*1 image from , with thanks
*2 "Al-Araby" in written
Arabic
(read more)
*3 "What?" in American Sign
Language; image from , with thanks
*4 "Big" in written
Chinese
(read more); image from , with
thanks
*5 image from , with
thanks
*6 image from , with
thanks
*7 image from
'B?ume', with thanks to
Bruno P. Kramer,
and Franckh-Kosmos Verlag
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August 31st; Monday. 'University professor' photographs fairies and 'scientist' images 'multi-dimensional beings'. Both men look suitably non-mainstream.
August 30th; Sunday. New theory links atheism & emotional suppression.
August 29th; Saturday. Via Alison, how to mount your own 'Colo[u]r Revolution'.
August 28th; Friday. Swim almost a mile at one of the pools on the island in the Danube and then some mild weight training. Foolishly forget I might burn my shoulders and back doing breast-stroke lengths under a hot sun. Haven't swum I think even once for possibly two years. The Hajos Alfred pool has switched to the strange fake plastic wristwatches with a magnetic code for opening your clothes locker, a system several of the hot mineral baths have had for a decade or more. Quasi-swimming-pool-worthy remix of You're My Lover by someone or other.
August 27th; Thursday. NY Times comes daringly close to suggesting that China deceived the world about COVID-19 via co-ordinated Twitter storms.
August 26th; Wednesday. Someone's remix of someone else's remix of Live Without Your Love, Calvin Harris something something.
August 25th; Tuesday. 2017 Statistics piece: British quango says Muhammad not in fact England's most popular name now for newly-born baby boys. Except, yes it is.
August 24th; Monday. Detailed piece argues COVID-19 made almost no difference in England & Wales total mortality.
August 23rd; Sunday. Spiked discuss the 'culture war'.
August 22nd; Saturday. Two erudite articles on Islamic politics from the Hoover Institution:
There is no Shia awakening and
Trouble in the Shi'ite Crescent.
August 21st; Friday. Razor-sharp old Dmitri from Paris no longer dresses like an airline pilot when he works as a DJ. Has he lost his way a little? Lugubrious, almost depressing chill tune.
August 20th;
Thursday. Big Wild's perky tune
Venice Venture.
August 19th;
Wednesday. Sleep 13 hours. Recovering from cold I must have had yesterday - why I felt so odd at Lake Balaton. Friend cites old Neil Diamond song, the cheery Cherry Cherry: making songwriting sound super simple.
August 18th;
Tuesday. On the morning train to see Dr D. at his holiday home at the other end of Lake Balaton, I finish a book lent me (or perhaps given?) by Esther V., 'Madonna of the Sleeping Cars' by Maurice Dekobra. Though I started this earlier than the wittier Szerb Pendragon novel, a similar era (late 1920s rather than early 1930s) and a similar vintage: fascination by some Continental author (or his readership) with the snobbish mysteries of Celtic Britain and the aristocrats therein. Rather than a Welsh noble, this book is centred on a Scots noblewoman, and rather than told through the eyes of a wandering Hungarian scholar, Dekobra's book is told through the eyes of a French aristocrat fallen on hard times. He is gallantly platonic friend and loyal companion to the Madonna, and some of the action takes place on long-distance luxury trains, as one might hope. Intriguing to see how this book was translated into
several
languages from the original French, not just into English.
Even made into at least
two
films. This was also an early spy novel, and the Amazon page writes "Alan Furst fans will note that train passengers in his bestselling thrillers are often observed reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars. It's a smart detail: First published in 1927, the book was one of the twentieth century's first massive bestsellers, selling over 15 million copies worldwide." Fascinating to keep finding how rich the past is - to never have even heard, until a few weeks ago, of a book that sold 15 million copies between the wars. Put into English by Neal Wainwright, I found only one sure translation mistake, 'receipt' instead of 'recipe', but it's an enjoyable read. Some parts felt a little stilted, but hard to know if that's a cultural shift or the loss of some flair in the original text once no longer in French. Aristocrats-versus-Bolsheviks, stylish high-spenders struggling to survive the new austerity, and a central character who is elegant yet racy, perhaps even "modern" (beautiful blue-blooded ladies are allowed to sleep around) - it's just about possible to see why readers found it so exciting and up-to-date at the time.
Dr D. shows me round Balatongyorok, including his vineyard and wine cellar, and we see warning lights flashing at the edge of the lake telling boats a storm is coming. He tells me something terrible I'd never heard - the lake is dangerous because it's shallow. He says if a storm whips up waves, instead of being big heaving rolls, they are small and full of spray, making them dangerous to swim in. He mentions a recent storm near his harbour (last year?) where eight male students were on a boat that got into trouble. One of them, a young championship swimmer, struck out for the shore to get help, not realising that in the two or three feet above the storm-lashed water the air was full of water droplets and water vapour. So this powerful, experienced swimmer literally drowned with his head above water - he was asphyxiated by the water vapour in the air he was breathing, and died before reaching shore.
August 17th;
Monday. Intriguing claim: Face masks make you stupid.
August 16th;
Sunday. Bouncy tune from Parov Stelar called Number One MC. The cover art shows a pretty girl wearing some sort of breastplate that looks part-typewriter/part-disassembled-oboe. The looping chords take the Sugar Rush approach to making a pop song, bridging back and forth between two different bits of upbeat melody.
August 15th;
Saturday. Only around March did I notice the zip tags on the knapsack I got as a present on Christmas Eve from my kind student Edina. Each tag is a black rubber capital M with a scribbled white italic TV on the right leg. Sudden recognition takes me back to the early 1990s, when the decade-old the MTV channel still seemed almost fresh. Just before the internet brushed it aside.
August 14th;
Friday. Mises website again on COVID-19 panic's political subtext.
August 13th;
Thursday. The myth of pervasive misogyny and a woman who found her
female-only TV production firm mired in women-manager bitch fights.
August 12th;
Wednesday. Spectator points out how exaggerated the COVID-19 threat has been, and a Swedish doctor shares his anecdotal experience.
August 11th;
Tuesday. Global elites hint COVID-19 controls might stay forever.
August 10th;
Monday. Two lawyers who threw a Molotov cocktail into a police car, defended rather cloyingly in long-form article.
August 9th;
Sunday. Choosing the name "Fuckpony" suggests some kind of male anxiety to me (they are from Berlin), but anyway, here is:
I'm Burning Inside /
Fall Into Me /
Bongo Porn /
Ride the Pony /
Get Pony.
August 8th;
Saturday. Forbes article from May suggests that deaths caused by the COVID-19 curfews will hugely outweigh deaths from the disease itself.
August 7th;
Friday. Rhythm Scholar's extended remix of Andre Previn's Executive Party track from 1970s film 'Rollerball'. Meanwhile, wild boar steals naked German man's laptop bag, naked German man gives chase, and recaptures bag.
August 6th;
Thursday. Important, clearly-written Mises website article puts COVID-19 response in context of Davos-founder Klaus Schwab's 'Great Reset'.
August 5th;
Wednesday. Three more songs by Unknown Mortal Orchestra:
American Guilt /
First World Problem /
Not in Love We're Just High.
August 4th;
Tuesday. Three songs from the rhythmically inventive (but badly named) Unknown Mortal Orchestra:
Little Blu House /
Can't Keep Checking My Phone /
Thought Ballune.
August 3rd;
Monday. Finish a delightfully entertaining book borrowed from Irish Michael, 'The Pendragon Legend' by Antal Szerb, translated into English by Len Rix. This is a lively and archly-written 1930s parody of gothic novels of the time. Originally in Hungarian, the central character and narrator is an eccentric Hungarian scholar adrift in London, invited to the mysterious castle of a nobleman in Wales. All the cliches and tropes of the Country House Ghost Story of the time are wittily included: my favourite were the gelatinous translucent-white deep-sea creatures condemned to blob around in giant dimly-lit tanks of water on one floor of the nobleman's home, being killed and revived in ghoulish scientific experiments. The jolly-hockeysticks German sportswoman, the rogueish Irish adventurer, the deranged local vicar, the evil-yet-hauntingly-beautiful heiress - all the elements are in place. Here's a rather hostile review, but headed by a nice photo of Szerb from the time.
August 2nd;
Sunday. Why 'The Woke' won't debate with others.
August 1st;
Saturday. Intriguing article compares faeries and aliens flying UFOs.
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