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. . . Languages & stuff
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dictionaries, translation
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endangered languages
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to links pages [1]
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January 10th; Friday. Apparently those tiny water-bear things can freeze into some kind of glass. / Light sometimes comes out of people's eyes, horror-movie style?
January 8th; Wednesday. A claim that unvaccinated Amish children don't get certain diseases. Though since they're socially isolated from epidemics and live lives low on stress, they might not be the best of control groups.
January 6th; Monday. Much talk about how Australian bushfires are the fault of manmade global warming. Another
view
is they are the fault of
environmentalists (or perhaps just mentalists) who believe in manmade global warming, and have forced policy changes on logging
and clearing
dry
undergrowth
over the
last few
decades.
January 4th; Saturday. Again go with Greek Michael to the nearby Indochinese soup restaurant. Place still full of well-presented fillies. Here's an interesting and clear piece about the alliance of Islam & leftism.
January 2nd; Thursday. Much of the day we sit around the hearth, though there is an exciting mid-afternoon shopping trip to Kunszentmarton. Same night Andras & Denes cook a Hungarian dish for dinner and then drive back to town, giving me a lift. It seems that, even though they both slept last night in the only heated room at Robin's (its cosy grate heaped with glowing logs), the rural freshness was too much at least for Denes. Is modernism finally sinking?
December 31st; New Year's Eve. Bela & I alone. I discover that the brown-paper-bag-and-ironing-board trick works. I vaguely recall my mother doing this, or perhaps talking about having once done it. Bela is fascinated as I iron through hot brown paper and the splashed wax stains on my nice soft black pullover lift right out hey presto. He asks do I think anyone elsewhere on earth is ironing out wax stains as New Year begins? My rather boring thought is if our time zone has 500 million+ people in it, there might well be a hundred or more folk tackling wax marks with irons and brown paper right now on this longitude. The wonder of large numbers.
December 29th; Sunday. Robin & I watch 'Les Biches' (also known as 'Bad Girls'). Have been meaning to watch this for a few years now, not quite having the stomach to check out any of Chabrol's more blood-splattered films. Lots of buried psychological conflict between two steely beauties. All set in luxurious haute-bourgeois hipster France around 1968. Lacking subtitles, we didn't really follow the subtleties well with our very rusty French. Quite fresh, simple cinematography, not unlike some 1970s TV dramas. Clear, compelling opening credits and first scene.
December 27th; Friday. Robin & I watch 'Baby Driver'. The director for over a decade wanted to make his pop video with the same concept into a full-length film. Finally he got the chance, and the result is nothing if not slick. Many scenes were shot & edited to fit round the soundtrack, rather than the other way round. The whole idea is a clever piece of identification fantasy. As so often, the trailer gives away much of what the film has to offer, and there is a definite loss of discipline halfway into the story. Towards the end, parts are cartoonish, and something goes wrong. The other bank robbers are too butch or villainous, for one thing.
December 25th; Christmas Day. Short, dark, sleep. Augustine & free will.
December 23rd; Monday. Possible forgotten influence on Edward Hopper.
December 21st; Saturday. Slightly dizzying photographs of Persian mosque ceilings.
December 19th; Thursday. Doctors euthanising patients to harvest organs? Hilarious to recall pompous medics angrily telling me such a thing was impossible.
December 17th; Tuesday. Interview with US Navy pilot who filmed a UFO he charmingly dubs the Tic Tac.
December 15th; Sunday. Naked Mexican hero painted on perky horse: patriots irate.
December 13th; Friday. Exit polls turn into proper counts and it emerges that the Tories did well and Labour did very badly. The only seat in the entire country won (as opposed to held) by Labour is wealthy London suburb Putney. Oddly enough the Putney Debates in 1647 saw the emergence of a kind of radical 'left' inside the Parliamentarians' New Model Army. A sort of prefiguring of the famous 1944 mock Parliament organised by British soldiers at Cairo, late in WW2.
December 11th; Wednesday. Warning on sexual morality - long essay, thoughtful.
December 9th; Monday. Charming, plausible American fraudster on a radio show. His style in interview eloquently shows how he did it.
December 7th; Saturday. Man claims his farts kill or repel mosquitoes.
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?
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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............................................................................................................................................................... November 30th; Saturday. Historian suggests the origins of Islam were different than we believe. Late in the evening, finish 'Meetings With Remarkable Men' by Gurdjeff, which I've been meaning to read since school. That was after enjoying Colin Wilson's account of him (I think called 'The War Against Sleep') from the public library. There are many warnings about this book, claiming it's an invented autobiography filled with fairy stories, and so on, but it's loosely plausible. For one thing, none of the men are really that remarkable. There are signs that this is a storyteller spinning yarns (the account of crossing the Gobi Desert during a sandstorm on stilts is sweet), but also that Gurdjeff wasn't really a writer. I got more the impression of a gifted talker and raconteur fairly randomly writing down some of his more successful tales. The spell in a monastery somewhere in Central Asia run by the "World Brotherhood" is left hanging oddly, as if it cannot be resolved because the prewar cult leader's own project (codenamed 'The Work') needs to be seen to follow from it. One of Gurdjeff's followers in his growing private sect at this time was P.J. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins. 'The Work' involved a quasi-religious fusion of dance & movement therapy. In the closing pages, this is casually prefigured at that mysterious monastery's "dancing priestess" training, as if to make the guru's own 1920s venture at Fontainebleau a live epilogue to this vague, open-ended book. Towards the end, started wondering how much Paulo Coelho was trying for something similar.
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.
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