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. . . Languages & stuff
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endangered languages
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December 5th; Thursday. A cheerful talk about why cooking for yourself matters.
December 3rd; Tuesday. Got to the end of 'The Devil Rides Out' by Dennis Wheatley (an interesting interview with him here). A mid-1930s novel which marked Wheatley's first foray (he had already successfully published 3 or 4 other thrillers) into the supernatural. Greeted by critics at the time as "the best thing of its kind since Dracula", it was adapted for film, along with later novels of his like 'To The Devil a Daughter'. Although big handsome motor cars with style and horsepower are a feature of the tale, there is something also of the 1880s Holmes stories: chilly, foggy outdoor scenes contrast with stuffy interiors. The indoor scenes are cosily padded out with comfortable old furniture, cigars, cheroots, deferential servants, and some totally routine heavy drinking. Even young vigorous characters, for example, find it quite a testing ordeal to stay inside a pentacle for 12 hours without their usual refills of wine and brandy. An unspoken dread in the background of the novel is that there should be another great war in Europe. Published in 1934, the threat that the magical beastliness unleashed by the chief villain might bring forth again the horsemen of the apocalypse, is explicitly part of the plot. Both the love-interest characters are East European totty - the young almost-English wife of one of the thoroughly decent eggs is in fact a beautiful girl "brought out of Russia", while the other exotic lass "mixed up in" the dark arts is a Hungarian girl named after a moon goddess. She must be rescued in all senses of the word by Rex, the bluff good-hearted American chum of "The Duke", chief warrior against the forces of evil. Main message of the tale is Don't Look Into His Eyes!
December 1st; Sunday. One of those articles claiming hot baths are as good as exercise. Looking forward to professional athletes abandoning training for hot baths. Could this be any link to zero gravity killing cancer cells?
November 29th; Friday. Interesting article about luxury viewpoints. The idea is that political opinions are often a form of status display.
November 27th; Wednesday. An intriguing pair of articles one and two about the little-discussed White Helmets group, and now-dead MP Jo Cox's involvement with them.
November 25th; Monday. Finish 'Supernormal' by Dean Radin, more thought-provoking stuff about his experiments with quantum-anomalies and what he calls "micro-telekinesis".
November 23rd; Saturday. A 'Fresnel-Prism' lens seen in Labour leader Mr Corbyn's spectacles suggest he might in recent months have suffered a minor stroke.
November 21st; Thursday. Provocative set of short films alleges that Sumerians knew of the planets Uranus, Neptune, & Pluto only discovered by modern Europeans after the 1780s. Enjoyably, the film has lots of attractive close-up images of cuneiform-script tablets.
November 19th; Tuesday. Steady yourselves, citizens: Terence McKenna's darling yet also alarming "DMT elves" want the elite to kill us all?
November 17th; Sunday. Russian professor who routinely dresses as Napoleon found in river with severed limbs of ex-girlfriend in his knapsack.
November 15th; Friday. Swedish bombings in 2019 pass 100 explosions. Apparently gang wars between, er -- recent arrivals in the Scandinavian nation.
November 13th; Wednesday. At the cafe Art Dealer Tony introduced me to, the outdoor stretch of tables with the fat, arsey pigeons somehow a fortnight back became shorter. A single line of tables along the pavement extends between a large potted shrub and a cylindrical poster stand, and for a few seconds I couldn't work out what had changed. Then I realised the shrub had been moved to bring 6 or 7 tables down to just 4. Smoothly adapting to the cooler weather.
November 11th; Monday. Exciting test of my logistical skills. I catch the early bus from Tiszainoka (there are 3 or 4 a day only) to the next village, meet Seamstress Aranka who has done her stitching just as well but faster this time, get into the "centre" of Tiszakurt and follow directions from two affable locals to get a bus to Kecskemet, from where I get a train to Budapest's West Bahnhof, right by Dr D.'s office at the Supreme Court for our 11.30 lesson. Using the train loo to change into the government-office-compatible trousers that Aranka had mended felt vaguely bank-heist caper-ish in a low-budget sort of way.
November 9th; Saturday. Journey out to the Great Plain by train. Spend three hours consuming cider, coffee, and slices of Margharita in the pizzeria at Lakitelek station until darkness falls. After some explanation of what has gone wrong, the curvy barmaid's boyfriend Christopher kindly drives me across the plains where it mainly rains (at least tonight) to Robin's house at one end of Tiszainoka.
November 7th; Thursday. Policemen packing heat seal off Andrassy street for a visit by Turkey's Mr Erdogan (once described by Boris Johnson as the "wankerer from Ankara"). They try to stop me entering a building where I temporarily have a key to an apartment. I persuade them I'm actually sleeping there.
November 5th; Tuesday. Turns out that degree-educated pensioners are more gullible and easily defrauded than the rest. Suggests standards for access into higher education fell at least fifty years ago, roughly dated by the creation of that swathe of new universities like Essex, Sussex, Warwick, Southamption, Exeter etc.
November 2nd; Saturday. Interesting piece about how the 2nd attempt to impeach El Trumpo goes down in some US swing states.
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.
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Mark Griffith, site administrator /
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October 31st; Thursday. Since it's the night before the day of the dead, the time when souls can pass more freely across the divide, here's a tribute to late great Saudi statesman Osama bin Laden.
October 29th;
Tuesday. Travel back to Budapest in the morning, and in our early-afternoon lesson Esoteric Veronica gives me a sleek new sports bag she is junking, plus a handsome flagon of schnapps she doesn't want. Men with clipboards say that space is made of zillions of tiny universes. Well obviously.
October 27th;
Sunday. Bela almost cuts his hand off with a hatchet while chopping wood. Zeno & his friend Judit take him to hospital to get the gash stitched up. Still oddly warm, with yellow sunshine out of the shadows. Last night Bela talked me through all the various Fives games.
October 25th;
Friday. Go with Robin to his rural fastness in Tiszainoka by train as darkness falls. We are driven to the house by Levente, a friend of Gyuri. We find Zeno the Alchemist and Bela both in high spirits. There is much hilarity. Teaching rats to drive toy cars apparently calms them down.
October 23rd;
Wednesday. Slightly oddly cited on physics-dot-org, thought-provoking study suggests married white women identify more with men than other married women.
October 21st;
Monday. Johnson sent three letters to the EU, as compelled by the Brussels-craven Commons, one asking for an extension but unsigned, another as a cover letter to that saying he was forced but doesn't agree with it, and a third saying he does not want an extension. Intriging move, perhaps plotted by the clearly sharp-minded Dominic Cummings?
October 19th; Saturday. Much excitement at Westminster where the first Saturday Commons sitting since the Falklands War should debate Boris Johnson's non-deal with the EU. Instead a motion by always-cuddly Oliver Letwin takes up the day.
October 17th; Thursday. White women more likely to vote for conservative parties?
October 15th; Tuesday. Recently I've discovered a very restful cafe/bar near Esoteric Veronica's office, where I can arrive early for her lesson and sit quietly with a range of elderly men. In general three are playing cards, with bartender as fourth man, over at one end of the room. A couple of tables are decorated with vinyl records under the sheet of glass, but only a couple, as if the idea ran out of material. Their WiFi password refers to the founding of Budapest's 9th district football club in 1899. After about three visits where I consume one coffee or two coffees and a water, the bartender seems to have decided I'm not such a bad person.
October 13th; Sunday. Over a coffee & a water outside the Ice Buffet place, read a short book lent to me by Robin, called 'Great Is God's Zoo' by Iris Masters Zwack. It would be unfair to give away the ending, but an extraordinary range of odd personal stories about meeting odd people is tied together in the final pages. The initial story conceit is that Zwack is practising her budding writing skills by befriending eccentric characters in her corner of New England: a weird taxi driver, a retarded girl who stacks fruit at the grocery, a New Age fitness trainer - they each get a chapter.
October 11th; Friday. Texan slideshow alleges removal of very hot year 1921 from US climate data to make the overall 20th-century trend upwards. Delicious BBC article on climate-change anxiety (the editorial art is specially special): a doctor writes. UCL researchers claim Britain is about to have a record cold winter.
October 9th; Wednesday. Guided by Michael A.'s friend Art Dealer Tony, I have started dropping in on the refreshingly cheap, vaguely communist-era Ice Buffet bar where coffee, water, and scones are still affordable. At their outside tables along the sunniest part of Petofi Sandor street, fat aggressive pigeons gang up on any person who tries to eat and drink alone. Often their beaks are smeared with the whipped cream of an abandoned pudding. The dove-shaped slatterns hop onto a table or chair but cleverly stay just inches out of any angry patron's arm swing. I'm going to have to buy a small water pistol and fill it with sharp-scented disinfectant.
October 7th; Monday. After visiting several textile shops across Hungary in the last month or two, must admit to being slightly downcast by the sheer vileness of the fabric patterns. Anything so straightoforward as (say) white polka dots on a solid colour, or blue and white stripes is completely absent. While I've long drawn comfort from the fact these retail outlets still exist in the quantities they used to in England, that there are still Hungarian women, old and young, making their own clothes, quite disheartening to find just now naff most - no all - of it is. If it's white, it's covered in frills and fussy detailing. If it's patterned, the pattern aspires to irregularity - five different widths of stripe in one fabric, for example. If there is a repeating motif, it's twee, cluttered, and too pale or too dark. Colours are selected from a rich palette of sickly yellows, anaemic browns, blood-piss reds, and those nasty blues and greens they use to make dangerous drug capsules look worrying. With relentless success, every pattern hits that magical sour spot of optimal ugliness.
October 5th; Saturday. Wall Street Journal article yesterday: growing numbers of girls attending college discover shortage of suitable men. Male author wonderfully tactful about women's focus on marrying "up".
October 3rd; Thursday. Devon farmer prepares for Brexit with Nazi-engineered giant cows. + interesting piece on craze for professional walking back in 1815.
October 1st; Tuesday. Military bod warns EU taking over Britain's armed forces.
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