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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 Skype = mark-griffith
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links /
languages? /
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July 14th
Friday. Bastille Day! Vive la Republique! Two authors point out that 1789 was in fact the dawn of modern fascism, not freedom. First, Our Man in Bucharest. Second, a writer on 1793's revolting mass murder of 300,000 royalists in the Vendee.
July 12th;
Wednesday. Monkey sues and bankrupts photographer.
July 10th;
Monday. Typography matters! Pakistani scandal hinges on Microsoft font.
July 8th;
Saturday. Geneticists encode some frames of film inside DNA.
July 6th;
Thursday. Heat here continues with the occasional rain storm. Students continue to randomly cancel. There's a vaccine for heroin now.
July 4th;
Tuesday. Unkind Canadian article skewers US national holiday.
July 2nd;
Sunday. Finish the book kindly lent me by Bullet last week: 'Where Are The Customers' Yachts?' by Fred Schwed, reprinted from the 1940s. A witty, effortless book about the impossibility of beating the stock-market odds, delivered with light humour, cartoons by Peter Arno (who died in 1968), beautifully blended with some genuinely useful finance tips.
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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June 30th;
Friday. Intriguing just how irritating other people's taste in music can be. Both the nearby cafes with WiFi suffer powerfully from the waitresses' liking for limp, moany ballads - played loud. Is there a cosmic law that people who get to decide the music played in any workplace are nearly always aesthetically handicapped? Odd, given how much music there is now out there to choose from. Perhaps relevant is that a talented physicist, just a short distance outside his field, is just another overconfident buffoon. Are there no all-rounders?
June 28th;
Wednesday. Over in end-of-the-world news, some people are suggesting a big volcano in Yellowstone Park might destroy most of North America soon. When they say "soon" they seem to mean "at some point next week".
June 26th;
Monday. The art reintegration I've been forecasting since sixth form. Modernism properly notices the tradition again: Nathan Coley. Kindly pointed out to me by Ewan.
June 24th;
Saturday. Hong Kong is being choked into irrelevance by Beijing's restrictions - cities get jealous too!
June 22nd;
Thursday. The CIA cared about Marxism, and this man cares about haircuts. A short, gentle film largely resting on the sheer charm of the barber.
June 20th;
Tuesday. Businessmen in the early-70s porn industry killing each other.
June 18th;
Sunday. Robin & I enjoy drinks and lunch with Agnes & Piers in the lovely grand apartment with high ceilings packed with paintings that the Colette crew filmed in on Thursday. Piers is the 3/4 English grandson of the Hungarian society painter who moved to London early last century but also built this imposing structure for himself in Budapest - Piers paints too. He was at the easel with palette in the corner of the big crowded room even during Thursday's shoot. That's while I, equipped with a beautiful but fiddly antique pre-WW1 camera, was struggling to act a society photographer somewhere in Paris in 1907. After that Robin & I meet a graphic designer and then go to a garden party where Bullet in good spirits accuses me of wanting to become DentaMan !, some kind of dentistry-themed Batman villain. In the same garden as night falls, Neil shares early memories of world snooker champions in Sheffield, and confesses his interest in trying Russian Pyramids, a game whose larger versions of snooker balls only fractionally fit into each pocket, making the whole thing rather harder.
June 16th;
Friday. A couple of days ago a student described the Notting Hill carnival in London as disappointing, with crappy amateurish costumes. Refreshing Hungarian candour. Today finish a book kindly lent to me by Paul: 'The Rise of Christian Europe' by Hugh Trevor-Roper. An excellent overview, both scholarly and crisp, of how Europe changed between about 500 AD to 1450 AD. He opens with the end of Late Antiquity and closes with the Portuguese expeditions of marine exploration planned by Henry the Navigator. He's careful to include the lulls and setbacks in the way Europe responds to challenges. The ways trends within Christianity interacted with social pressures and attacks by other forces are sketched out in clear prose without simplifying some subtle processes. Allows himself one Oxford man's tease at the expense of Cambridge. Especially interesting on the important changes between 1200 and 1300.
June 14th;
Wednesday. Britain's economy seems to be doing rather better than disasterist journalists claim. While drinking coffee with Tamas, we discuss eyesight. We move from contact lenses to that laser eye operation. From there onto the ancient Chinese method of using tiny silk pillows packed with rice powder worn during sleep to gently squash ovoid eyeballs back into spherical shape by miniscule degrees over hundreds of nights. Then the Bates Method. Then I ask aloud, surely there's something else? - and I suddenly imagine a varnish made out of the patient's own stem cells. It would form a safe, permanent build-up on the cornea, like a natural contact lens but fusing with the original cornea. Made out of the substance of the patient's own eyes - sounds a feasible research project to me.
June 12th;
Monday. Readable in very faint grey, the perils of the ever-growing 'administrative state'. In related news, the result of Comey testifying before Congress is we learn he wasn't actually investigating President Honey Monster after all.
June 10th;
Saturday. Last night Boardgame Orsolya told me how useless she found The Winged Headhunter, a rather odd recruitment page on Facebook it turns out I have already "liked". Still, a note of gritty realism in half-naked angel packing heat: this is indeed how human-resources staff in Hungary typically dress for work.
June 8th;
Thursday. Britain holds a general election.
June 6th;
Tuesday. Get back into town on a delayed train and just make it to see Zita at IKEA. Even after thick heat outside, chilly air-conditioning in her office is not so comfy either. After that Petra & I practise rhyming words.
Are robots going to steal our jobs? No surprises here. Once again it's only economists who don't fall headlong into another crock of nonsense.
June 4th;
Whit
Sunday.
I intend to wake at 12 noon at Robin's in the countryside. It is exactly 12:12 when a quite reasonable wasp (considering his colleague's recent fate) hovers and loops over my head and pillow in the studio, clearly urging me in a not-unfriendly way to pick up my sleepy head and engage with the day.
June 2nd;
Friday. At the low-fi local gym, shortly after I start fighting with the machines, a sylph-like brunette skips out of the dim, cool doorway into bright high morning light, swinging her large sports bag from one hand. A long mane of dark hair tumbles down her slim, lithe back as she trots off into the hot, sunlit distance. Three muscle-packed mastodons inside awkwardly swagger or stroll into the frame of the doorway to wistfully watch her go.
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