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. . . Languages & stuff
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endangered languages
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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 Gardener book 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.
September 29th;
Saturday. World's youngest billionaire is a human tax dodge?
September 27th;
Thursday. Back at the crypto start-up in the Buda Hills I visited on Tuesday (where I saw the first fire of the year burning in a hearth) in their large rambling sunlit villa, furniture still being moved around and assembled.
September 25th;
Tuesday. Prize-winning dog gets excited watching footage of her own competition performance.
September 23rd;
Sunday. Flashback to flying kittens playing metal in Viking outfits. Masterful use of limited resources.
September 21st;
Friday. A few Linux developers getting cross about gender/identity politics. World might fall apart etc.
September 19th;
Wednesday. Facebook to use some kind of "AI" to detect videos that are fake but look plausible. Expect discomfort when the first bit of official footage fails this test. Schrodinger's Cat gets a new story line.
September 17th;
Monday. Up early with Tim & Erika, sitting in dressing gowns on their back patio or deck, as the Americans would say, watching the early warm sun on their garden and a wheeling group of birds in the sky. The group seems to be slowly growing from around 15 birds to 30 birds over the quarter hour we watch, perhaps assembling a team for a big migratory journey. Phone a locksmith that has been recommended by a friend of a relative of Erika, and amazingly an appointment for 3pm today is arranged. Until now locksmiths either said they couldn't do it, "might" be able to days hence, or just didn't call back. When afternoon comes, it takes the two men about 15 minutes to drill through the lock. After several smaller bits fail, in the end they resort to a massive two-handed tool about the size of a vacuum cleaner. Giant yellow sparks spray out of the lock like a firework display. They instal a nice new lock with a smooth, firm turning action. The cash I have on me is just enough. After 18 nights locked out, repeatedly washing one shirt and one pair of trousers, I'm back into Michael's flat. An odd episode, stressful but also strangely like a holiday from being me. Here's an attempt to use Occam's Razor to decide if there's a God. Not too convincing. A bit like Anselm's proof backwards.
September 15th;
Saturday. Finish a book I find at Tim's, 'Beauty', by Roger Scruton. He relies heavily on Kant to bring harmonious order, personality, and beauty together. He skips over evolutionary psychology a little quickly, considering it has a lot of information about how and why we find certain people beautiful, but Scruton is after bigger fish. He sees beauty as both a kind of fitting in and a kind of invitation to appreciate the individual in the general. Nicely presented, but the argument's readability disguises its subtlety a bit.
September 13th;
Thursday. Curious piece about how high-speed Chinese rail might have been a huge mistake.
September 11th;
Tuesday. This Teacher's Pet speech might be important.
September 9th;
Sunday. Rather like the look of this book. A probably tongue-in-cheek discussion of theology using game theory.
September 7th;
Friday. Men have better sex with emotionally-unstable women? Did they correct for hot/crazy correlation though?
September 5th;
Wednesday. Machine to
type one-handed. Is it nifty?
September 3rd;
Monday. Interesting article about director of 1st three James Bond films, and his links to
'Agent Zigzag'. Still staying at Robin's on Csengery waiting for money to come through for locksmith to open Michael's door across town.
September 1st;
Saturday. London busstop ads attack Israel.
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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............................................................................................................................................................... August 31st; Friday. In more racist news, turns out haggises are English.
August 30th;
Thursday. At 8 in the morning, Zeno the Alchemist insists I must replace the door even though the paint is still soft, so we mount it on the hinges back inside the house, smearing and scraping the once mirror finish. Then I return to Budapest with morning train, teach twice, and find I cannot get into Michael's flat. The increasingly awkward
upper lock finally (after some weeks of getting stiffer and stiffer) refuses to co-operate. I spend an hour and a half trying to get in, then walk over to welcoming Robin a mile off, happy to see me even in extremis.
August 28th;
Tuesday. Paint both sides of door. Visit seamstress in next village with shirts to be mended. By a ridiculous piece of bad luck, miss meeting Edina in Kunszentmarton. My pocket watch is one hour behind, and Robin's kitchen clock oddly also one hour behind: I go to meet her exactly 1 hour too late.
August 26th;
Sunday. Travel down to countryside to paint door.
August 24th;
Friday. Chinese banking crisis still threatens.
August 22nd;
Wednesday. Quasi-Dennettish article about consciousness.
August 20th;
Monday. AI calls for a religion, as if it wasn't one already.
August 18th;
Saturday. Wonderful image for that horrid thing: the headache.
August 16th;
Thursday. More magical thinking about strong AI.
August 14th;
Tuesday. Perhaps reversing ageing will help the Pussy Church?
August 12th;
Sunday. Physically weak men more often left wing.
August 10th;
Friday. Summer heat still quite formidable, after dark too. Air thick like suet. Go to supermarket about 9pm. Three girls making flutey noises in French come in after me dressed in black shorts and black tops, the un peu sportif, un peu sexy look. I glance them over in what's probably a very ungallant stare, turn round and try again to understand the corner cabinet's strange array of lactose-free cheeses. Suddenly there's a slight extra warmth all down one side. I become aware that the prettiest of the three is precisely next to me, as in less than half an inch from touching, glancing over the same shelves in a vaguely aloof, scientific way. To do this she's somehow crossed about twenty feet of empty shopfloor in a second - it's almost occult, as if I suffered a time slip or black out. I spend the standard two-second window of opportunity pushing lactose and cheese out of my thoughts and pulling up my in-head French-language-remark menu display, by which time she glides off past the cucumbers, radiating cool, disinterested curiosity about other food items. Shaking this odd moment out of my heat-addled mind, I choose some purchases, passing a different lass, boyfriend in tow, leggy with lustrous mid-brown hair cascading down her back like a waterfall. I get into the massive double queue this shop has stretching down two aisles every night from about 7pm to closing at 10pm, a double tube of customers feeding six tills, three along each side wall, resembling a great intestine. After only a few minutes, get to a till, and as I pay for my items literally feel the leggy lass, nowhere to be seen seconds ago, manifesting next to me. The small golden hairs of her bare arm are brushing my bare arm. She's chosen the next till in such a way to squeeze her whole length into a desk gap just a millimetre away from my body, and her boyfriend is the far side of her talking to the cashier. Pesky aftershave.
August 8th;
Wednesday. A chance to hear some ancient Greek music.
August 6th;
Monday. For the first time since the last century I buy and drink a can of Vimto. Remember the pop group I saw performing at college and one of their songs went "He's the man turning water into Vimto", thought they were good, went up to the bass guitarist afterwards to tell him, and he said that just that afternoon before their gig they'd decided to split up. Is that Vimto for me? Surprisingly pleasant taste.
August 4th;
Saturday. Man in Texas steals baby shark in pram.
August 2nd;
Thursday. Apparently earth's longest maintained set of temperature records, the 'Central England Temperature' dataset goes back to the late 1650s.
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