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July 28th;
Small hours of the morning, listen to Melvyn Bragg's radio show, this time about
Abelard
& Heloise. Hadn't realised that Abelard was such a major
logician, or that Heloise knew Greek & Hebrew much better than him. This
morning I woke out of a dream where I am chatting in a library with a charming
grey-haired woman who is a historian of 14th and 15th century Paris. Yesterday
I woke out of a dream where I was at a congress of cartoonists somewhere. A few
days ago, I woke out of a wonderfully detailed dream about clans, gangs, heraldry,
and families through history. Curious.
July 26th;
A friend in a reading group contributes to
this legal weblog.
July 24th;
Much cooler this morning - which is odd, since my three thermometers say it
is still 82 Farenheit. I only needed the electric fan for 15 minutes last night,
but I have it in reserve for when serious heat returns. In case Gentle Reader
is wondering why it took me this long to buy one, I should say I never found
heat difficult to take before. I also got extremely ill in the summer of 2001
from a panning fan in an office repeatedly chilling the sweat on my neck, so
have been rather wary of mechanical cooling devices since.
July 22nd;
Adorable little
metallic
hedgehog photo via
Nicolas:
it's a cheese grater!
July 20th;
Strange
rash up my arms. The heat? No itching, but looks a bit alarming.
July 18th;
Song found by Jessica: a
nice reworking.
July 16th;
Finish off the shortened-length-version
Karinthy work.
Getting a sense of the aerobics instructors and their styles. Zsuzsa is young & perky,
with a steely edge to her routines. Kinga is pretty, supple, fleet of foot, and enjoys
us not quite being able to keep up with her. Anita seems older, calmer, and steadier,
though still rigorous. Only the dreaded Trixi, tomorrow, remains untried. The girls at
the desk told me clearly that Trixi is the most severe & demanding, at least in the
step aerobics sessions. I have been warned.
July 14th;
Rather wearying heat continues. Above
85 Farenheit indoors, day & night.
July 12th;
It's so warm here in Budapest that I buy three cheapo thermometers at a
bargain shop. All three of them claim it is between 82 and 84 degrees
Farenheit day and night, so I pop one in the fridge and it goes down to freezing,
suggesting they are working after all. I go to the Toastmasters meeting and pay
homage in my 7-minute talk to schoolteacher Reverend Berry's knowledge of the
Indian subcontinent.
In particular the way he told me when I stopped him in a queue for lunch in the
late 70s and asked him about Indira Gandhi's arrest for corruption that
"India cannot do without her - she'll be back in power within
three years" and how when our class challenged him to say
in the first week of January 1980 how Afghanistan would go, he confidently
stated "the Afghans will defeat the Soviet Union and
it will take them ten
years to do it, the same length of time it took them to defeat us."
July 10th;
I probably ought to print out
Primavera
on foamboard.
July 8th;
Seems that Snoop Dogg tried to rent
Liechtenstein. Ah, what a lad.
July 6th;
In the morning, Szilvi comes to pick up some boat bits for Martin, so she can
take them to him in Sardinia in a few days. In the
mid-afternoon, Dorina appears
in cool turquoise
& crisp white to take me to a restful studenty bar run by barefoot Russians one
tramstop away from my flat.
July 4th;
After the gym I pass, on the other side of the street, a small family group.
The man is carrying a seven-foot model tree, its bark painted in red & black stripes
for realism, along with blue foliage. Yesterday had an
oddly
gentle, weightless mood turning into sweet, sharp dreams.
July 2nd;
Meet Peter the Pianist, an old acquaintance of Marion & Paul, at
Guildhall. He kindly
gives me half an hour of his time, and we briefly chat about music, changing
fashions, and languages - out beside a sunlit oblong pond full of reeds
facing what is apparently the City of London School for Girls. Later in the
day go with Mystery Friend 2 & Exotic Girl 1 to see a Romanian film at a
cinema on Curzon street as part of a Romanian film festival. This film,
'Police,
Adjective', hard to do justice to in print, is about
the painstaking investigation by a detective in a small town of a couple of
teenage boys who smoke hashish. The deadpan humour slowly builds up until
the painfully funny scene near the end. As a man interviewing the director,
Corneliu Porumboiu, on stage afterwards observes, he deliberately breaks
several golden rules of cinema, such as "show, don't tell". A sort of
sarcastic Tarkovsky, revelling in the wonderful dullness of life
in the Eastern Bloc.
Who can translate the next 300 words into
Korean or
Hindi?
Contact
me 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 more than 5,000 languages 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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June 30th;
Wednesday. Meet Nigel of Darkness for lunch at railway station in Manchester,
and find he is going down to London today too. We pick the same train, find it
is delayed by "a person on track", and eventually catch a train where we share
a table with a bubbly physics presenter who works in both plasma physics and
science
television, and also a wry Belfast business manager at a major law firm.
The law-firm lady is very sympathetic and patient as I root hopelessly in my
bag balanced on her lap for things I mispacked. Why is everything on British
trains so small & squashed? Because we didn't go with
Brunel's 7-foot gauge, that's why. Straight
off train meet my IP
lawyer Sarah for a green tea, and take some useful notes. From there on to a
French bar near Charing X Road where I meet some lovely people along with
Mystery Friend 2. At one point he insists we repair to a strange karaoke bar
where instead of humiliating ourselves in front of strangers {surely the main
idea?} eight of us rent a room with deep red walls. I give a passable
rendition of a
Sugababes track, and Mystery Friend puts much spirit into
'Suspicious
Minds'. Exotic Girl 1 & Maria from Serbia reveal hidden reserves of energy &
groovesomeness.
June 28th;
Struggle bagging up mass of old ivy & weeds in the tiny back yard, cause of the
helpful Environmental Waste order that forced me back to Britain at this convenient
moment. Resprain my ankle just when it was finally healing. Super.
Neighbour who saved mother's life offers to do some plastering round the house. Monday.
June 26th;
Repair to local London pub with Mystery Friend 2, where we watch half of
USA versus
Ghana, the first match I see.
June 24th;
Have late lunch with niece Emily near
her workplace,
and hand over the African stool and a few of mother's garments.
June 22nd;
Man drives
skip over to house. More clearing.
June 20th;
Sunday. Toil quite successfully all day. Finally, we learn what England needs to
play better football: more
cat shit.
June 18th;
Gardening woman fails to come to the house at 1.30 when she promised.
Radio & people around still annoyingly fixated on
World
Cup. Haven't they noticed we always get knocked out early on?
June 16th;
Visit the Nigel of Darkness in Manchester and see his Magnificent Machine in its
garden shed. He kindly lends me a wireless dongle. We visit the
3 showroom in town together
to make it work with my Apple, which Nigel refers to as The Gay Lava Lamp.
June 14th;
Wake up drenched in curiously vivid, detailed, calm overview of traditional forms
of theatre as related to pageantry. Laid out in my head in the form of an illustrated
book. Much as I hate spraining an ankle, there is something rather wonderful to feel
my body gradually healing itself ...day by day slowly returning to full power & health.
Things to be grateful for: never having suffered a
pollen allergy. Slightly glum flight
to Manchester, where John kindly meets me in the new Control Britain where he is not
allowed to stop a car outside the terminal building for even 5 seconds but must search
for me in the paying carpark instead. We meet at a petrol station.
June 12th;
Marguerite comes back from her gruelling week-long
what-to-do-if-you're-kidnapped course in Britain. She tells me about it over a
pizza. Country house, ex-SAS types,
guns, mud, being thumped, having a hood on your head all afternoon, the usual.
Apparently the imaginary country was called Hostilia - on the border of
Genitalia, of course. Marguerite, a perhaps sheltered liberal lawyer lass from
Chicago, is well impressed by her new discovery: the hunkiness of fit soldiers.
Memorable quotes: "The English are such an odd mixture of the European and the
civilised," and the intriguing
"Political
Correctness is now a marker for social status in the US." Ankle still weak,
still limping.
June 10th;
What kind of musical performance thrills Google programmers? Answer:
this.
Gets most impressive at around 12 and a half minutes, even
if this is Circus Britain. Nathan Lee & Beardyman.
June 8th;
Visit Regina at the office to see how the first 11 chapters look.
Tasty burger & beer dinner at Martin's. Martin is temporarily back from
Sicily,
tanned. Eszter, Thomas, Marcsi, Edit arrive later on during a long evening.
On the night bus home I find a mobile phone left on a seat, and at home I use
a key & a pen to rather painstakingly pick out the tiny letters on the screen so as to
send a phone text to ten friends of the phone loser. A Reka replies at once and
we arrange to meet in the morning.
June 6th;
Warm sunshine all day long, so of course I am trapped indoors with my sprained
ankle, editing away at least. Marguerite kindly brings over some food before
catching her flight. Just when I was giving up a bit on
artsandletters,
some good articles:
assassins,
ordinary
Brits, and a
poignant
piece where a mathematician called Joel Cohen valiently attempts to compare
a Housman poem from
'Shropshire Lad' to an elegant inequality about sums of
minimums of pairs of numbers drawn from a list of natural numbers and a list of
non-negative real numbers {proved by Zbaganu}. He really tries, and if you
can sometimes read a short line of algebra without falling on the floor
chewing your own tongue out, he makes quite a goodish case that there
are strong formal similarities, insofar as a poem about youth,
age, and loss can even be compared to an elegant result about sums of minimums.
Cohen and a colleague generalised this result to a whole set of surprising
inequalities which really look quite lovely if you like that sort of thing.
However, Cohen's attempt to evangelise for the aesthetic charms of
his subject is heart-rendingly sabotaged by a dreadful typo. This mangles the
inequality in its first citation and must have radically slashed the number of
poetry-loving readers he took with him into the second half of the article.
In fact, the mysterious {to me, at least} variable x_i appears unexplained
no less than three times along with an x_j. Since no x is ever defined, but
much is made of the a, b symmetry where... "The symbols
in the left lobe are exactly the same as the symbols in the right lobe but the
letters a and b appear in different order; this is chiasmus in the broad sense.
In the right lobe, (a, b, b, a) is an example of chiasmus in the strict sense
as the sequence (a, b) is repeated in reverse order (b, a)."
...it's pretty clear it should have been b_i and b_j, not x. There's another
typo in the middle of his numerical example too. Anyway, at least the
sub-editors didn't cripple the poor man's sensitive {and persuasive} analysis
of the Housman poem, the way they did the maths result he took such pains to
explain to non-specialists. "With rue my heart is laden /
For golden friends I had, / For many a rose-lipt maiden / And many a lightfoot lad. /
By brooks too broad for leaping / The lightfoot boys are laid; / The rose-lipt
girls are sleeping / In fields where roses fade." The piece
has two goals, to show that mathematicians can enjoy and appreciate literature,
and to show that literature types can enjoy and appreciate maths, and goal 1
succeeds pretty well. Shame, because without the sub-editors' mistakes, the
hugely more ambitious goal 2 might have had a chance as well.
June 4th;
Henry sends me a nice piece of
Dutch
humour about English sport, and Dorina & Kumar
a 1960s
song which might go well in the
Joan
Littlewood film I keep musing over.
Would be about the first run of lifelong communist Littlewood's 1963 stage musical
'Oh
What a Lovely War!' that so successfully cemented today's mythical view of
World War One into the British public imagination. If
'1990'
billed itself as "'1984' plus six" this would be
"Antonioni's
'Blow-Up' minus three".
June 2nd;
Mend sofa leg. Might even Steven Pinker be starting to grasp the obvious
dimness of Noam Chomsky's untestable non-theory about
"innate grammar engines"?
Based on the non-mystery of children's not very impressive acquisition
of their first language, plus Chomsky's deeply unpersuasive
generalisations out of English & German. Lunch with Martin. I give him
the animal syringe with needle kit and he gives me
some electronic kitchen scales. I weigh my own scales with them and
my home-made balance with pans appears to be weightless. Odd.
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