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. . . Languages & stuff
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dictionaries, translation
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endangered languages
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December 6th;
Thursday. The Guardian, bless its cotton socks, gives space to a Cambridge politics don who suggests 6-year-olds get the vote. I remember the SPS students.
December 4th;
Tuesday. First she was warned the EU would use the Ulster border trick. Now the Commons is onto May's deception (blocked by Safari?).
December 2nd;
Sunday. Some days chilly, some days quite mild. People in high-viz jackets (blocked by Safari?) seem to be rioting in Paris. Much of it seems to be
against
Teacher's (blocked by Safari?)
Pet.
But he shall rule like a Roman God!
November 30th;
Friday. Tasteful 'My New Vagina' confessional. Autonomous vehicles will lead to more sex in cars, say sex-in-cars boffins. Parasitologists claim cat owners more likely to be subs.
November 28th;
Wednesday. Science deniers: who hates evolution now?
November 26th;
Monday. Pro-EU sedition & hysteria continue.
November 24th;
Saturday. After we drive out, a fascinating evening in Robin's countryside kitchen, hearing goatherd Laszlo explaining his Bela-Hamvas-influenced worldview of ancient tradition, Christianity, the Great Chain of Being, and the transcendent. Only science disturbs his serene perspective.
November 22nd;
Thursday. Frizzy-blonde-haired Hungarian masseuse Icu is again in a room upstairs at the firm on Crypto Hill, easing back pain for whoever asks. I interpret for her when the petite high-profile investment-marketer Barbara from Switzerland, speaking only English & German, wants strained muscles in one arm eased. Icu needs some cream: for want of anything else I bring margarine from the fridge. Barbara cheerfully says it's absolutely fine - she'll wash it off later. I remark that everyone in the company is anxious to butter Barbara up but in the end it's Icu who actually does it. Barbara laughs heartily, and Icu, not following the joke, smiles earnestly.
November 20th;
Tuesday. Electricity back on in Michael's flat. About a fortnight ago he played me this interesting snatch of German Parliament with English subtitles.
The AfD woman is lucid, reasonable, not remotely 'extreme'. "Instead of humbly acknowledging the result of a democratic referendum in a partner country and asking if you were to blame, Brussels was at once united. An example must be made. Britain must be punished. That is your policy."
November 18th;
Sunday. I sleep another night on Film-Maker Jessica's sofa and we chat of this and that. World's largest skyscraper (more accurately a 'groundscraper' as someone points out) will dangle upside-down from an asteroid? Nifty!
November 16th;
Friday. Wake up in Robin's flat's spare room ready for a high-octane Friday. Typical word lengths in several languages: a handy chart.
November 14th;
Wednesday. Resource for taking on large organisations.
November 12th;
Monday. A week or two ago, I was walking through some woods, wet leaf mould aroma in the air and piles of vivid yellow or orange leaves sitting in mist under the frosty trees, when a car pulled past, the driver waving at me. It was a rather dishy business contact, and as she parked I walked round to her car door. I looked down into the car as we chatted. She was sitting in the driving seat batting long eyelashes, putting high-heeled shoes on for her office. This act forced her to squirm in her seat, her frock riding up her thighs to show lacy stocking tops for a few seconds before she casually brushed her skirt back down. A charming moment, strangely Victorian.
November 10th;
Saturday. Daily Mirror announces the End Times.
November 8th;
Thursday. A poetically horrible article: a woman explains why I no longer phone my mother. The New Left! Via Diane & Anthony.
November 6th;
Tuesday. More panpsychism: perhaps consciousness is a frequency effect?
November 4th;
Sunday. Based on observed acceleration, some astronomers suggest an alien light sail just passed through the solar system.
November 2nd;
Friday. Portugal, our oldest ally, breaking ranks with euroweasels?
Who can translate the next 300 words into
Korean or
Hindi?
Contact
us and there will be revelry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
But these five thousand languages may
also hold clues to the structure of the human mind. Subtle
differences and similarities
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.
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.
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 /
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............................................................................................................................................................... October 31st; Wednesday. A few days ago was at the pricey city-centre supermarket nearby in the evening. The pastry counter is not manned most of the time, so I call out "Good day!" in a hopeful voice, hoping someone in the back corridor the counter is linked to will hear. Another customer, a big-shouldered older Hungarian man in a long coat with twinkly humorous eyes, glances over and corrects me. He murmurs "Morning" with the object ending: "Reggelt". He's effectively saying "Good morning, you mean!", suggesting with one word the staff are all asleep. Not having heard him, the shop woman appears bristling. She glares at us blackly as he cheerfully asks for this and that pastry. She can feel he is genially mocking her, sharing some private joke with me. She's all the more livid for not quite being sure what the joke is. On the topic of jokes, a child at a school in England asks social media "Why is there a 30-year-old man in our maths class?" October 30th; Tuesday. Old 2017 article seriously suggests secret ballot should be abolished to stop people voting for Trump.
October 29th;
Monday. Perhaps one of the small, yet also big, changes over the last few months has been a switch on my part to grapefruit-flavoured toothpaste. No pricier than the normal kind. Not sure what the homeopathic bit does.
October 27th;
Saturday. A couple of weeks ago, before Michael's return from South Africa, curious noises sometimes echoed round the empty flat at night. Many times I woke up convinced someone else was in the other room, only slowly realising that creaking floorboards and sounds of footsteps were from other flats up through the ceiling or nearby on this floor. For several days a Russian couple with an enormous blonde-haired toddler boy they clearly adored were in the next-door apartment. I still have trouble guessing children's ages but this could have been a vastly-enlarged child of 14 or 15 months or a very placid, infant-like 2-year-old. I met him one day with his happy parents and tried to greet the good-looking child. Huge Baby regarded me in silence with regal calm, almost princely indifference. Sometimes that week through the wall I'd hear him saying isolated syllables at different times of day or night, not urgent or angry or whining. Rather than that, he would pronounce firm, clear opinions on new things he encountered each day in the world around him, declaiming: "Boof!", "Zhu?", "Gnn!", "Fimp?", "Zubzub". It was like Adam naming the animals.
October 25th;
Thursday. Back on the crypto hill where, after climbing upwards a thick fog appears two bus stops from the end, as if a cloud is sitting precisely on top of the leafy Normafa mount. I step out into it, the closest thing to Scotch mist I've seen outside Scotland: a mass of tiny hovering raindrops wandering around looking for things to wet.
October 23rd;
Tuesday. Hungary commemorates the mass demonstrations in 1956 that intimidated Soviet military divisions into leaving the country for a fortnight. Robin throws a small party to mark the day. Some policemen try to make me pay to enter his street, but an older officer realises I'm not lying and escorts me to the door of Robin's building. The small party themed around cheese and sausages takes advantage of him having a balcony about fifty yards from where Viktor Orban speaks to the crowd just outside the old secret-police torture chambers. After the historic moment has passed and we can concentrate on eating and drinking, I read some Tarot spreads for Makeda & Erika.
October 21st;
Sunday. Some natter about how we now have assassination markets.
October 19th;
Friday. Intriguing fringe-science moment from online contact Dave. Today bringing you Exotic Vacuum Object Generation.
October 17th;
Wednesday. Clever new thin lens.
October 15th;
Monday. Curious, plausible claim that power harms people's brains.
October 13th;
Saturday. Not so much sex with the cow as the miniature horse detail that struck me.
October 11th;
Thursday. Discussion of BBC climate-crisis bias.
October 9th;
Tuesday. Finished the Erle Stanley Gardner book I bought secondhand in the ugly sunken 1960s disc of concrete shops next to the Southern Railway Station last week. Doubly interesting because it is a mid-1960s British Penguin paperback in good condition with a price in shillings and pence (not cover shown!), and (although I'm sure I read at least one Erle Stanley Gardner sleuthing thriller while chugging through my mother's detective-novel collection) it was a mystery featuring his lawyer hero Perry Mason. I don't believe I ever read a Perry Mason story before. That name's overlaid in my memory by snatches of some 1960s TV series about that character, as a sort of silver-haired solid-chested smoothie moving in the world of commercial jet airlines and chunky desk phones with buttons. I can remember as a boy being startled to find, after watching Roger Moore on black-and-white television as 'The Saint' flirting with sexily sinister girls in mini-skirts, and then borrowing some of the stories from the public library, that Charteris was writing them in the 1930s, then a vanished age of antique strangeness for me. The actual written stories often visited tweedy, wood-panelled gentlemen's clubs, and felt halfway back to Sherlock Holmes. Likewise I now find Perry Mason is a prewar literary character. This book originally written around 1938, features people travelling back from Hawai'i on a cruise ship, a journey with at least one night at sea. Most of the English seems almost normal, with the exceptions of one or two passages of slang. That's when it's suddenly clear that nothing goes out of fashion faster than fashion. For example, on page 18: "Oh, she's a kick. She's an observing kid, and chuck full of life. She's modern, impatient of all sham and pretence, and isn't too affected to show enthusiasm. She's as full of bounce as a rubber ball." 'Observing' instead of 'observant' particularly jumps out. Meanwhile, nowadays using the word 'affected' itself sounds like an affectation. From boyhood I have the dim memory, perhaps not him, of reading that Gardner was once put by his publisher in a department-store window prewar with a chair and desk pounding away on a manual typewriter to produce his latest detective novel under the curious eyes of passing shoppers on the street. The puzzle is nicely worked out, but I had the sense in a few places that he'd learned how to write books very quickly. Not quite on autopilot, but something close.
October 7th;
Sunday. Inspiring story: a black teenager from a poor home locates the richest bit of London, and goes up and down streets ringing doorbells, politely asking people there how they got wealthy and what he should do to be like them.
October 5th;
Friday. Seems many people still haven't seen the famous Russian menstrual-hygiene ad.
October 3rd;
Wednesday. With sandpaper & lemon juice, have almost got the stain out of Michael's wooden parquet floor caused by a rubbish bag sitting there and leaking during the 18 nights I was locked out of his flat. The mild fever, coughing, slight snuffle I've had about 2 weeks, soon after getting back into the flat and replacing the broken lock now got me, Gentle Reader might be relieved to learn, to shift off the floor onto the bed, and interrupt the cold-bath regimen.
October 1st;
Monday. Still only a few weeks ago in late August, was still so hot that I was sometimes going in the middle of the night for an extra cold bath in Michael's bathroom. The bath is half-concealed in a sort of slot at the back, where if no lights are switched on, it's possible to have a bath lit only by the ghostly blue glow of the idling water boiler's pilot flame or signal lamp. Yet during the day, the unlit bathroom looks completely black.
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