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. . . Languages & stuff
intro page in
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dictionaries, translation
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other links
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endangered languages
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to links pages [1]
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/ phone texts to +36 20 583 7334
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links /
languages? /
pins
April 12th;
Friday. Drive out with Robin into the Great Plain after dark.
April 10th;
Wednesday. Further Dr Moreau news from one of our contributors: human genes make monkeys brighter.
April 8th;
Monday. Another climatologist says global warming is spin.
April 6th;
Saturday. As I've predicted for years, WiFi-blocking home decor is now a thing: anti-WiFi paint. Oh, and self-healing concrete.
April 4th;
Thursday. I don't think I'd be thrilled to learn my music repelled insects.
April 2nd;
Tuesday. More claims that vegans risk mental illness.
March 31st;
Sunday. A moment to reflect on treason: Whitehall agin Brexit.
March 29th;
Friday. Euroweasels delay today's planned exit from EU in move of very doubtful legality (to put it kindly). Becoming increasingly clear from Parliament that most most of Britain's MPs don't understand law, economics, history, or politics.
March 27th;
Wednesday. Got to stop saying "cyclist": another evil word. Turns out people can sense magnetic fields though, so that's nice.
March 25th;
Monday. EU goes whole distance with ill-conceived copyright law. 15 MEPs now say they were tricked into voting for it by committee-craft jiggerypokery with the voting list.
March 23rd;
Saturday. Sleep 14 hours. Already by midnight last night, the catfish had the bath to itself. Several times in the night I heard the eerie sound of the heavy catfish sploshing right out of and back into the water next door, flipping over perhaps. Truly a beast of the night, straight out of a Hughes poem, prowls around the bath even while taking up half its length. I explore the attic and retrieve several of my items. Kasper arrives and Zeno the Alchemist gives the two boys a lesson in gutting a fish (the one that floated sideways yesterday) showing them the different organs on the smaller kitchen table.
March 21st;
Thursday. Some women are going on "birth strike" because they believe in global-warming armageddon.
March 19th;
Tuesday. Another of those on-and-on-and-on tunes: "Ltj" and Hot Groovy 014. 14th in a series of 999, presumably.
March 17th;
Sunday. US army says robot tanks really
nothing to worry about.
March 15th;
Friday. Finish a book kindly lent to me by Paul: 'Fifty Key Medieval Thinkers'. Well-organised, brisk, and with an excellent introductory essay, this handy guide takes the reader through a thousand-year range of thinkers, largely theologians in the Western Church. What is perhaps lost is a little subtlety in explaining their ideas. If the book had given an extra half page on 12 to 15 of the figures, people like Abelard, Duns Scotus, Nicolas de Cusa, it could have been really good. But someone always has a complaint about a compendium like this - never possible to do both breadth and depth.
March 13th;
Wednesday. US government accidentally sends journalist weird mind-control documents. Meanwhile, interesting lecture from someone who claims he investigated the curious killing of Jo Cox that so nearly swung the 2016 Brexit vote the other way. In other news, crystal meth now social drug of choice in North Korea.
March 11th;
Monday. How French Revolution got the modern death-camp era started.
March 9th;
Saturday. Perky sounds of the swinging Orient: Yali Yali by 70s singer Nese Karabocek remixed, and Turkey's dancer Didem, looking sweet in 2011. Note vital quorum of Moustachioed Men in Suits.
March 7th;
Thursday. Surveyor says Welsh border in wrong place since 1880s.
March 5th;
Tuesday. The EU's finest hacks hunt down hidden crimes: Europe's Glass Eel Mafia and its "subtle emergence". "Open get-away cars"!
March 3rd; Sunday. Japanese firm makes headpieces to help terrify your pet. Flynn Effect now reversing, claim IQ-ologists. Research shows women ignored in films.
March 1st;
Friday. The Register worries about El Trumpo & Huawei.
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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............................................................................................................................................................... February 28th; Thursday. Michael arrives back from magical kingdom of Wakanda. Sadly, some of the old romantic folk skills such as filing seem to be dying out.
February 27th;
Wednesday. Asha Puthli spacing out again.
February 25th;
Monday. Pop over to Robin's flat, natter with Bela & Letty.
French law now to use Parent 1 & Parent 2. No more mama/papa nonsense.
February 23rd;
Saturday. Brain snooping on the way.
February 21st;
Thursday. Euro currency's bail-out frailties.
February 19th;
Tuesday. EU copyright "law" augurs chaos and confinement.
February 17th;
Sunday. AI creates fake people. New face, every click.
February 15th;
Friday. Apparently face-recognition software gets sexes wrong.
February 13th;
Wednesday. Feeling a bit like Secret Santa - what's the equivalent? Undercover Valentine?
February 11th;
Monday. Mild weather very much with a feel of spring. A quick reminder of how wonderfully odd Japan is.
February 9th;
Saturday. Rather sad confirmation from Finland: free money means people don't work. Just as the dismal science predicts.
February 7th;
Thursday. German woman's love affair with aeroplane.
February 5th;
Tuesday. A few days ago the cute little lift in the office on Crypto Hill was restored to operation. It broke down a fortnight before Christmas. Now once again, papered inside with cocktail-cabinet cigar-box veneer, it can connect the four floors. It chugs up and down, through the barely noticeable central column of the seemingly endless spiral stairs of cappuccino-coloured marble slabs, like a covert coffin. It claims to fit four people. Two adults can just about share this lift without becoming sexually intimate. Two more adults would have to be circus acrobats pinned across the ceiling. A notice in magical-kingdom English on the ground floor sternly enjoins users not to "jiggle or make smoke", and to take care with the "fixenings", among other poetic prohibitions.
February 3rd;
Sunday. Rather lovely snow phenomenon seen in Wiltshire.
February 1st;
Friday. Find myself trudging around the 14th district trying to find an audition, mistakenly going to two of Katalin's old offices before finding the newest one. Walking along Rona street under cloudy skies (a street one building's porter insists has a bus route along it, but doesn't) was strangely interesting. I kept being reminded of slightly bleak bits of suburban Manchester such as Princess Parkway when rain seemed imminent. New gates, low buildings, random strips of grass all had this odd suggestion of some alternative reality humming, shimmering just beneath the surface of things. Banal surroundings peculiarly infused with transcendent freshness. I get to the audition, Katalin is very kind about my lateness. We read through it but I can sense not a role I'll get.
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