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September 15th; Wednesday.
More details emerge of US
funding of coronavirus research in Wuhan.
September 13th; Monday. A
plausible motive for the curious new push to - quite unnecessarily -
vaccinate children.
September 11th; Saturday.
Barely 30 yards from Robin's front door, much of Andrassy avenue is shut down with parked police vans,
newly mounted overhead display screens, lines of chemical loos, metal crowd fences, and long white
ribbons marked 'Rendorseg - Police' in blue. This is all for tomorrow's visit by Francis the GloboPope,
as a waitress outside the downstairs bar explained with sneering contempt, in reply to my query,
two days ago. A Catholic friend told me a
few months back that the Jesuits swore on their foundation never to let one of their own become
pope (perhaps explaining why there has been no Jesuit pope until now).
September 9th; Thursday.
Are white feminists evil? A nice Unherd piece. Small birthday party in the science cave for Tam, with Annette, Dag,
Alja, and her sweet but jittery dog. Interesting how the pale shirt with pink and light blue checks, on
being in the bucket of dilute bleach I put it in some hours a few weeks ago, stubbornly keeps the off-yellow
background hue that makes it look not-quite-washed, but lost much of the dye meaning the checks
fade in and out of white. In places the blue lines have gone altogether yet the white's failed to become
clean-looking. You'd think that after a century and a half of bleaching and dyeing chemistry they might
have worked this stuff out by now.
September 7th; Tuesday.
This morning woke out of a vivid success dream where I was, with some companions, in a large rambling
building, part country house, part luxury hotel in some old city. One suite of rooms was haunted and
filled with disturbing magical power, which was not so much frightening as thrilling. To get there I got
into a lift which went vertically some floors and then horizontally down corridors and through rooms and
walls very quickly, rather like a cable car. Then vertically some more - these "sideways lifts" feature
in my dreams every few years, I notice. The suite of rooms was in some kind of tower overlooking from
high windows a forest in winter, and I found myself triumphant, empowered, raised to more
than health - "better than well" as the Americans say - as I clicked into
rest-refreshed wakefulness. Later in the day, finished reading a copy of
'Ideas of
the Great Philosophers', published half a century ago oddly enough by
Barnes & Noble, a chain of American bookshops. I suppose booksellers branching into publishing was quite
common once. The book uses a nice approach. Instead of touring in order through philosophers and centuries,
or looking at specific debates, it does both. Each chapter is a topic (such as free will versus
determinism), and the chapter starts with ancient thinkers, briskly touring through the Greeks, Late
Antiquity, the Mediaevals, Renaissance thinkers, Early Modern, German Enlightenment and up to the
late-19th/early-20th century figures (Russell and/or Pragmatists like Dewey in most chapters). Rather
refreshingly for this reader, I don't recall seeing Wittgenstein, nor any of the Existentialists
mentioned even once. The trick of making each philosopher italic on first mention in each chapter is
very helpful, and some thinkers who tend to get left out of historical overviews, such as
Herbart,
Schleiermacher, or
Anaxagoras, are here.
Herbert Spencer gets
quite a lot of mentions, and it's nice to see philosophers like
Hobbes
mentioned in non-political debates, not just in his classic discussion of the state.
There's a proper effort to separate out Fichte and
Schelling.
This is an excellent book, but there
are some strange slip-ups. A couple of thinkers, such as
William of Champeaux and
Roscelin, get italicised, full-status mentions in the body of the text, but are
missing from the detailed biographical notes at the back, which include almost everyone else.
September 5th; Sunday. Read
'Perspectiva:
A Nuremburg Renaissance Casket for the Marquesses of Lothian', which is a lavishly illustrated exhibition
catalogue, lusher than most books, that Robin got at some art show or auction house. The web has a lot of
excerpted
images of this casket, and other treasure boxes made by its maker, known simply
as The Master of Perspective, who had a workshop in Nuremburg during the 1560s. The period of the German
wunderkammer or cabinet of wonders was, it seems, exemplified by boxes to house valuables, themselves
richly worked and decorated, sometimes containing jewellery, sometimes scientific wonders such as
geological/biological/fossil curiosities. Pre-figuring Baconian science - the line was blurred between
collecting natural oddities and displaying decorative wealth. Containing wonders and each cabinet itself
sometimes constituting a wonder. The boxes made by the workshop in
Nuremburg appear to have had a very distinctive style, surfaces in and out decorated by inlaid marquetry,
mother-of-pearl and so on, almost invariably displaying what we might call
wireframe
polyhedra
shown in perspective (hence the master's name) along with scenes from well-known classical stories such as
Phyllis
humiliating Aristotle, an episode Nietzsche & Lou Salome might have been referring to in their
famous cart-pulling photograph.
September 3rd; Friday.
Up late, chatting with Robin. This
Leo Strauss book looks like something worth reading as soon as I can.
Strauss plausibly argues philosophers have always written in an 'esoteric'
code, partly disguising their message so as not to challenge political & moral assumptions of
their time head on.
September 1st; Wednesday.
'Afghanistan is where ideologies
go to die'.
August 30th; Monday.
Finish Tam's tutorial book, English-language version, 'Technical Modeling with
OpenSCAD', written with lots of examples, handy tips,
clear diagrams in sunflower yellow, and a jolly tone which I can now recognise as Tam's voice.
Other reviewers are positive too, and there are a few
excerpted illustrations
on
the
web.
Have not yet done the exercises - the usual bit readers of how-to books leave out, including this
reader - but I'm at least imagining practical implementation.
August 28th; Saturday.
Over at Filmmaker Jessica's for a lovely dinner. She introduces me finally to the Rick & Morty show, including
the famous where-are-my-testicles?
episode Andras recommended me last year. I feel I've leapfrogged South Park and Family Guy
and am now updated on ironic cartoon shows for grown-ups.
August 26th; Thursday.
Most years the whole of August is stiflingly warm, and then cooler autumnal weather begins, almost
like clockwork, on either August 20th or
the day after. This year cooler weather and some rain started 10 days ahead.
Warm and cool days intermingled up until the Istvan/Stephen coronation holiday.
August 24th; Tuesday.
Article from last month about
leftists rewriting Spanish history,
specifically rewriting the massacres that led up to General Franco's putsch against and war
against the left-of-centre government that ruled for several months in 1936.
August 22nd; Sunday.
A Hungarian
documentary I might be editing the subtitles of - dark and absurd by turns - about
some mass murders in Budapest's 12th district during World War 2. It hinges on a commemorative statue
(of a mythical bird, the turul, a bit like a Hungarian version of the phoenix) five decades later put
very close to the site of the murders. Astonishing to say, the plaque under the big bird listed
the names of both some victims and some perpetrators of those murders who then died elsewhere.
It generated a bitter political quarrel which still rumbles on today. The central tragi-comic character
is the 12th-district mayor, who
August 20th; Friday.
Several of my students refer to today as
Hungary's birthday - which is a sweet way to describe it.
It commemorates the crowning of King (also Saint) Stephen, the country's first Christian king, in 1000 AD.
Rather lovely firework display along the riverbanks which I watch from Jessica's rooftop with Jessica & her
friend Andrea.
August 18th; Wednesday. Over at
Filmmaker Jessica to watch the film 'Predestination' on her big screen. A 2014
movie about time travel which Jessica convincingly argues is really about loneliness.
August 16th; Monday.
Thorough piece on Edward Said's invented exile - seemingly from next month. Plus (also from next month) a
fascinating article on Marcuse by Anthony Daniels.
August 14th; Saturday.
Surprisingly hasty
US withdrawal from Afghanistan gets people finally criticising Sleepy Joe.
August 12th; Thursday.
Interesting claim: Detroit vote-processing computers are
connected online.
August 10th; Tuesday.
Interesting 6-month-old February article claiming mortality from covid-19 in Israel is multiples
higher
among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated.
August 8th; Sunday.
More on French demonstrations against
covid-19 passes being compulsory to go to a cafe or restaurant.
August 6th; Friday.
Last night slept 13 hours. Probably needed that. Today finish Robin's copy of Norman Stone's
'Turkey:
A Short History'. Stone tidily skips through ten centuries,
revealing along the way
(he worked happily for many years at a Turkish university) that he likes the people and their
civilisation. Stone's command of some of the region's languages seems good.
His particular concern to explain the Armenian genocide as the result of
provocative Armenian nationalism seems to miss a crucial point though. Whether the Turks
should have been there in the first place, and how the Eastern Roman Empire might have
developed absent several centuries of predatory wars by Islam is left unexamined. The ethnic
cleansing of Muslims out of Crete or the rest of Greece - as soon as the Ottomans were
sufficiently weak to make it possible - is narrated rather as if it had been a constructive idea
for them to overrun the Balkan peninsula in the first place. Instead we shift quite soon
to the viewpoint where Islam is the de facto empire of the region, and the historian is instead
asking why did that by-then peaceful empire have to be dismantled? Byzantium can be
weak and corrupt and in need of new management, but not a thousand years later the descendents
of the Seljuk Turks when it's their turn to be attacked and broken up?
August 4th; Wednesday. A
Public Domain Review article about
James
Bell Pettigrew's wonderfully eccentric - and gorgeously illustrated - 1908 ideas about 'spiralism'.
August 2nd; Monday. Unusual electronics
account on Instagram everyone should have a
look at.
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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............................................................................................................................................................... July 31st; Saturday. Our Man in Bucharest recommends an Unherd piece suggesting parallels between the USSR in the 1980s and the US now. July 30th; Friday. Because her glasses already remind me a bit of the cartoon, I've been urging Filmmaker Jessica to buy black-framed spectacles and pumpkin-orange polo-necked pullover so she can properly dress up as Velma from Scoobie Doo.
July 29th; Thursday. Jessica & I watch on her
Netflix account a film
neither of us had seen yet, last year's 'Uncut Gems'. She mentions the cinema rule
that once a gun has been shown on camera, it has to be used before the end of the drama. She also mentions that her
trusted screenwriting teacher said Adam Sandler had been robbed of a Best Actor Oscar for his lead
role in this film as a manic diamond merchant. He didn't even get nominated. Nonetheless his performance is darkly
compelling, and the Safdie Brothers (makers of 'Good Time' which Robin & I watched one night about 18 months ago) had been trying to
reach Sandler to show him this script for ten years.
This
interview shows just how different Sandler looks when he's not playing the role.
July 27th; Tuesday.
A Dijon family-law judge has been dismissed for
offering his 12-year-old daughter online for sex.
July 25th; Sunday.
A little snatch of dancing
in the future. In a glass bubble at the bottom of the sea - as imagined in 1966, in German.
July 23rd; Friday.
Back helping Californian filmmaker Jessica - we're assembling the height-adjustable standing desk with
its little motors. Her new flat is small but lovely with not only a small balcony front and back but even access
to a shared roof terrace. Hearing jets and seeing helicopters overhead towing flags from one balcony, we
rush up to the roof last week clutching a bottle of water each. We plump down into folding chairs each,
and Jessica frowns up at the now-silent cloudy sky declaring
"Come on, planes, entertain us!" Other sayings from Chairman J in recent days
include
"So I ask the cards what the obstacles are to me writing this screenplay so I can cry myself to
sleep tonight?", not to mention
"I've got better eyesight than you because I paid for it!"
or even
"Hinduism is a video game, right? You come back on different levels, you get different skills and
weapons." Full in with the Bostrom/Musk view we're in a simulation is her conclusion that
"The aliens are the maintenance workers for the video game."
July 21st; Wednesday.
Robin's exhibition at the
Magyar Muhely Galeria opens. Afterwards Jessica & I repair to the comedy show at Sean's bar presented by Dave, where
the funniest and most professional of the stand-up comics, Gruber, berates me from the stage for not getting vaccinated.
July 19th; Monday.
Two bits of quite aggressive club music from 'Labrinth':
Mount Everest /
Still Don't Know My Name.
July 17th; Saturday. Two quaint bits of amateur
research: one about the life of a 19th-century Nordic fisherman who claimed he had travelled into
a hollow earth, and got committed to
an insane asylum as a result / the other about how Biblical descriptions of
angels are not at all as we imagine.
July 15th; Thursday. A co-founder of the
Wikipedia website says the mass-edited encyclopaedia is
no longer trustworthy.
July 13th; Tuesday.
A charming version of 'Season
of the Witch'. Julie Driscoll's eye makeup very much of its time.
The haunting melody still suffers from that jarring contrast with
weak lyrics like "pick up every stitch". Such a lame rhyme for "witch".
July 11th; Sunday.
ANC infighting in South Africa seems to be
getting
worse.
July 9th; Friday. A
radio show about the
extraordinary affair in the late 60s & early 70s of Colin Turnbull and the Mbuti versus the Ik. The
African tribe the Ik were, in his bigoted judgement (during a devastating famine, of all things),
"the most selfish people on earth", as described in his book
'The
Mountain People'. Very interesting programme, clarifying just
what's so strange about anthropology and the people who do it. It was clear that Turnbull had
a childish personal fantasy about an innocent Garden of Eden of early human societies in Africa
(cf 'The Forest
People', the Mbuti), partly based on hatred of his native England. The Ik ruined the
Mbuti-fuelled delusion for him, and he reacted with the
rage of a jilted lover. Mind you, the BBC narrator Syed is himself
a bit suspect. In this short spot he misleadingly describes the 1973 hostage standoff that led to the phrase
'Stockholm Syndrome'. He explains how the phrase misrepresents what happened, while himself misrepresenting what
happened. Another item about Brexit reveals him as part of the BBC news-distortion consensus.
July 7th; Wednesday.
Finish a curious book from 2012 lent to me by a friend. It's called
'Proof of
Heaven', wherein an
American neurosurgeon relates how he fell into a dangerous coma for seven days, his brain not only
shut down but measurably & observedly shut down, yet meanwhile subjectively experiencing visions of heaven,
higher realms etc. The surgeon who fell ill changed from being a materialistic science believer to someone
convinced love is the basic force of the physical universe.
July 5th; Monday.
Slightly shouty but interesting article about the 2020
election scam.
July 3rd; Saturday. Astonishing.
People allowed in shops and on public transport without the stupid paper hospital masks. A rule
which should never have been imposed in the first place and did only harm finally vanishes after
over a year. Incredible they got away with this, not to mention the censorship and the lies.
Not really relevant, but an interesting nugget from Forbes, claiming Anthony Fauci was
2019's best-paid US federal employee.
July 1st; Thursday.
To buy a 2nd tube of relaxant gel for the still pulled muscles in my back, I go to three pharmacists
in a row, all of which are closed. A woman passerby outside the third explains to me that Hungary has a
national
holiday today in honour of
Ignaz Semmelweis, the man who drew a map of beds in a Vienna hospital ward to chart
which end of the room most women were dying of childbed fever (thus showing that doctors were carrying
infections in by not washing their hands). Meaning that most pharmacies have today off. Useful.
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