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. . . Languages & stuff
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dictionaries, translation
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other links
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endangered languages
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July 25th; Sunday.
A little snatch of dancing
in the future. In a glass bubble at the bottom of the sea - as imagined in 1966, in German.
July 23rd; Friday.
Back helping Californian filmmaker Jessica - we're assembling the height-adjustable standing desk with
its little motors. Her new flat is small but lovely with not only a small balcony front and back but even access
to a shared roof terrace. Hearing jets and seeing helicopters overhead towing flags from one balcony, we
rush up to the roof last week clutching a bottle of water each. We plump down into folding chairs each,
and Jessica frowns up at the now-silent cloudy sky declaring
"Come on, planes, entertain us!" Other sayings from Chairman J in recent days
include
"So I ask the cards what the obstacles are to me writing this screenplay so I can cry myself to
sleep tonight?", not to mention
"I've got better eyesight than you because I paid for it!"
or even
"Hinduism is a video game, right? You come back on different levels, you get different skills and
weapons." Full in with the Bostrom/Musk view we're in a simulation is her conclusion that
"The aliens are the maintenance workers for the video game."
July 21st; Wednesday.
Robin's exhibition at the
Magyar Muhely Galeria opens. Afterwards Jessica & I repair to the comedy show at Sean's bar presented by Dave, where
the funniest and most professional of the stand-up comics, Gruber, berates me from the stage for not getting vaccinated.
July 19th; Monday.
Two bits of quite aggressive club music from 'Labrinth':
Mount Everest /
Still Don't Know My Name.
July 17th; Saturday. Two quaint bits of amateur
research: one about the life of a 19th-century Nordic fisherman who claimed he had travelled into
a hollow earth, and got committed to
an insane asylum as a result / the other about how Biblical descriptions of
angels are not at all as we imagine.
July 15th; Thursday. A co-founder of the
Wikipedia website says the mass-edited encyclopaedia is
no longer trustworthy.
July 13th; Tuesday.
A charming version of 'Season
of the Witch'. Julie Driscoll's eye makeup very much of its time.
The haunting melody still suffers from that jarring contrast with
weak lyrics like "pick up every stitch". Such a lame rhyme for "witch".
July 11th; Sunday.
ANC infighting in South Africa seems to be
getting
worse.
July 9th; Friday. A
radio show about the
extraordinary affair in the late 60s & early 70s of Colin Turnbull and the Mbuti versus the Ik. The
African tribe the Ik were, in his bigoted judgement (during a devastating famine, of all things),
"the most selfish people on earth", as described in his book
'The
Mountain People'. Very interesting programme, clarifying just
what's so strange about anthropology and the people who do it. It was clear that Turnbull had
a childish personal fantasy about an innocent Garden of Eden of early human societies in Africa
(cf 'The Forest
People', the Mbuti), partly based on hatred of his native England. The Ik ruined the
Mbuti-fuelled delusion for him, and he reacted with the
rage of a jilted lover. Mind you, the BBC narrator Syed is himself
a bit suspect. In this short spot he misleadingly describes the 1973 hostage standoff that led to the phrase
'Stockholm Syndrome'. He explains how the phrase misrepresents what happened, while himself misrepresenting what
happened. Another item about Brexit reveals him as part of the BBC news-distortion consensus.
July 7th; Wednesday.
Finish a curious book from 2012 lent to me by a friend. It's called
'Proof of
Heaven', wherein an
American neurosurgeon relates how he fell into a dangerous coma for seven days, his brain not only
shut down but measurably & observedly shut down, yet meanwhile subjectively experiencing visions of heaven,
higher realms etc. The surgeon who fell ill changed from being a materialistic science believer to someone
convinced love is the basic force of the physical universe.
July 5th; Monday.
Slightly shouty but interesting article about the 2020
election scam.
July 3rd; Saturday. Astonishing.
People allowed in shops and on public transport without the stupid paper hospital masks. A rule
which should never have been imposed in the first place and did only harm finally vanishes after
over a year. Incredible they got away with this, not to mention the censorship and the lies.
Not really relevant, but an interesting nugget from Forbes, claiming Anthony Fauci was
2019's best-paid US federal employee.
July 1st; Thursday.
To buy a 2nd tube of relaxant gel for the still pulled muscles in my back, I go to three pharmacists
in a row, all of which are closed. A woman passerby outside the third explains to me that Hungary has a
national
holiday today in honour of
Ignaz Semmelweis, the man who drew a map of beds in a Vienna hospital ward to chart
which end of the room most women were dying of childbed fever (thus showing that doctors were carrying
infections in by not washing their hands). Meaning that most pharmacies have today off. Useful.
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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............................................................................................................................................................... June 30th; Wednesday. Three more radio discussions. In the last couple of years, they seem to have improved again. Piers Plowman (where strangely, though the talk is fascinating and the scholars are erudite, all three of them seem unable to stop saying "kind of" and "sort of", sometimes twice in a sentence) / Mary Astell (an early feminist, also a Tory, who mocked the hypocrisy of male "liberal" philosophers who bullied their wives) / and the decisive 1217 Battle of Lincoln. In the morning, I help Jessica move out of her flat to her friend Izabella's, and in the afternoon have a long leisurely chat with Victoria where we speak of cabbages & kings, set the world to rights, and so on.
June 29th; Tuesday.
Feast of Peter & Paul. Never remember this being mentioned at school. Several good articles
from Our Man in Bucharest:
1991 now looks Edwardian /
Covid-19, Global warming, communism /
Mazzini the Globalist /
War in 1939.
June 27th; Sunday.
Just two more days to go until the
Feast
of Peter & Paul.
June 25th; Friday.
Yesterday, spritzers after dark with Robin &
Jodi the tailor.
June 23rd; Wednesday. Yes,
citizens, it is
World Typewriter Day.
Strawberry Full Moon. John
McAfee is
found dead in a Spanish prison cell.
June 21st; Monday.
Longest day. On a street in sunny Buda, I trip over a rumple in the tar-macadam and fall full-length -
amazingly without any cuts or scrapes. I
just roll
as I hit the pavement. About an hour later in another part of the Big Pogacsa I black out
and collapse outside a shop, Lidl's at Blaha. One moment I'm leaning
against the door frame outside feeling dizzy, the next on the ground looking up at 5 or 6 concerned
Hungarian passers-by. One elderly lady insists I drink from her water bottle.
June 19th; Saturday.
Victoria & I move (quite simple with only two bags each) from one managed flat to
another, walking from just outside to just inside the 'nagy korut' or big crescent.
Several days in a row now weather is warm & sticky.
June 17th; Thursday.
Brexit healing the UK economy, surprise, surprise.
June 15th; Tuesday. Kind Edina
picks me up at Kunszentmarton station. She is busy on deadline for her big academic project closing
tonight.
June 13th; Sunday.
December 2020 article about something suspiciously called the
"trusted news initiative".
June 11th; Friday.
New maverick theory says a big magnetic event is signalling a strong new sunspot cycle
(not a weak cycle coming up that many astronomers are forecasting).
June 9th; Wednesday.
A 1919
book cover with a price in real money.
June 7th; Monday.
The Creepy Line: film
describing Google & Facebook news narrative manipulation.
June 5th; Saturday.
Once again in the Big Pogacsa. Picked up cash in hot sun on Csepel Island, briefly said hello
to Cardiologist Akos at the clinic. I was wrong about spring suddenly being upon us. This is
perhaps the third genuinely hot day during weeks of rain & cloudiness since the false dawn of
February. And it's June now. Global warming of course.
June 3rd; Thursday.
Vanese directs me to an interesting-looking writer (& gardener) who seems to be
an
admirer of Rudolf Steiner, Johann Goethe, and Homeric Greece.
June 1st;
Tuesday. The rearguard action to keep denying that the covid-19 virus escaped from
the Wuhan bioweapons lab now starts to crumble. Nicholas Wade in Unherd weighs up the
wet-market theory
versus the obvious, and here describes how Wuhan scientists grew covid in humanised mice.
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