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. . . Languages & stuff
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July 11th;
Thursday. Finish Paul's copy of the 1975 book 'Biology of God' by Alister Hardy. He was a marine biologist involved at an Oxford college with research into people's reports of religious experiences. Hardy proposes that some higher moral sense of togetherness (perhaps some richer kind of telepathic communication across a tribe) was of evolutionary advantage for early humans. He's quite careful and thoughtful in summing up various positions on science-versus-faith.
July 9th;
Tuesday. Interesting attempt to claim the great Tunisian historiographer Ibn Khaldun as an early economist centuries ahead of his time. Suggesting he anticipates both Smith and Keynes rather torpedoes the idea before it even gets going though. Still, I ought to check Khaldun myself.
July 7th;
Sunday. Brave firm reviews 3 ways (it says) to raise IQ. Not quite how I remember modafinil, but never mind.
July 5th;
Friday. Curious research result that immune cells, the little tinkers, invade brain tissue over time. This is not a good thing, say men with clipboards.
July 3rd;
Wednesday. 40 years on, China repeating Japan's Fifth Generation mistake.
July 1st;
Monday. The day (July 1st) one Hungarian colleague told me one year that summer was already over. Prizewinning example of looking on the bright side. Meanwhile, even a single exercise session helps brain cells.
June 29th;
Saturday. Finish a book from Robin's library: 'Wartime Writings 1939 - 1944' by Antoine Saint-Exupery, the French pilot and lyrical, almost mystical, author who never returned from his final mission flying over southern France in July 1944. A fascinating section from pages 106 to 116 shows his curious form of love for country, and how much it revolves around a kind of philosophy of joy, peace, and friendship. A memory of one occasion drinking outdoors in sunshine in a French village with a friend where they invited two bargemen (one German, one Dutch) to join them seems to glow in his memory as an emblem of happiness, a symbol of what it is the war is really for. The letter "to an American" that was published in LIFE magazine, where he is flying above France taking aerial photographs for the Allies while breathing oxygen bottled in New York, is a highlight showing how enchanting his writing could be. But his basic anxiety - what is civilisation? are we losing it? can we rebuild it? - comes through on every page. Even the "Pharoah's blocks" maths problem on pages 148 & 149, one of those he makes up to fill idle hours while grounded with an injury, is about reconstructing a relic of a lost civilisation. The book combines many of his private letters, diary entries, published articles, and a few letters and entries about him, written by others. There is an introduction for American readers by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, daughter of the pioneering aviator.
June 27th;
Thursday. Thoughtful review of a rather cross-sounding book called The Return of Race Science.
June 25th;
Tuesday. Pick up mended basketwork picnic-hamper thing from Wicker Man, two trolleybus stops behind IKEA.
June 23rd;
Sunday. Do some filming in a rather hot mock-up of a London taxi, being towed around central Budapest, acting my small part as a rude passenger ('Banker Dude' in the script). My task is to be sneeringly patronising to a rather fit, sleek black girl who is the taxi driver (a major character in the show), curtly demanding she turn off her Nigerian pop music. Which tune shall we use?
June 21st;
Friday. Longest day. Seemingly the long-running "yellow-jacket" protests across France have pushed Teacher's Pet into recklessly increased spending & debt. Driven slowly to rage over long years, it seems, a segment of rural France has now snapped and is determined to riot every weekend no matter what, like a sort of revived Vendee uprising.
June 19th;
Wednesday. Chatting late at a cafe with Michael, he tells me of black Africans' morbid dread of owls, and I have to check again who Holderlin shared his theological university dormitory with (Hegel & Schelling). I rant on about the misconceived Hegelian nature of the EU. We touch on Benetar and I find a rather startling review of the Cape Town philosopher's dismally nihilistic book 'Better Never To Have Been': "My girlfriend was on the fence about having an abortion so I picked up a copy of this here shit right here, had her read it and VOILA! Fetus Deletus! This shit is magic and I recommend all sexually active males retain a copy!"
June 17th;
Monday. Paul sends me a wonderful article on Spengler.
June 15th;
Saturday. Rather confusing train journey through summer heat (changing at four places on Hungary's Great Plain: Kiskunfelegyhaza, then Szentes, then Tiszafoldvar, then finally reaching Kunszentmarton to meet Gyuri. He's chuckling in his car as he finds me outside the station dancing around in the dusk, dodging mosquitoes). While on the train, I finish a book by a friend Miklos Molnar '33 Hungarian Histories', collecting short 600-word biographies of famous Hungarians he wrote for issues of Time Out magazine before it pulled out of the country. Written with a light touch, he gives an entertaining mix of lively historical characters, some famous, some not. Would have liked to see chapters on Denes Gabor and John von Neumann, but perhaps a second volume is planned? Thirsty at throughout the second train journey, I asked a cute but tubby woman ticket inspector why none of these stations seemed to have buffets or bars or even vending machines on such a hot day. She said "Because they don't", but at Szentes pops out of the staff office with two 1-litre mineral-water bottles, one for me, free of charge. The bottle is squat in shape but quite feminine, not unlike her.
June 13th;
Thursday. Last 2 or days suddenly hot & sticky, like a classic Budapest summer. Japanese Buddhist shrine unveils robot goddess of mercy.
June 11th;
Tuesday. Crossing the Danube by bus east to west via Margit Bridge, and to our left an enormous yolky orange crane thing towers at least 40 feet above the bridge from a barge on the river. Must be there to haul up the wreck of the small boatload of South Korean tourists pushed underwater by a bigger ship several nights ago, dragged upriver some distance and rammed into the mud just under the bridge. In the afternoon I finish a book from Michael's late wife, 'The Aesthetic Adventure', by William Gaunt. It traces the century of "art for art's sake" from the second decade of the 19th century to the second decade of the 20th century in principally England and France. A good summary, breezing through Baudelaire, Whistler, Swinburne, Walter Pater, Walter Sickert, slowly building to a kind of climax with Beardsley and Wilde. Every page enjoyable to read.
June 9th;
Sunday. The strange death of Labour England?
June 7th;
Friday. That Brazilian cover of Fool on the Hill. More Brazilian music from back then: Panis et circenses.
June 5th;
Wednesday. Nice article: learning about life from Mick McManus.
June 3rd;
Monday. Weather is still cloudy, rainy, chilly. New moon.
June 1st;
Saturday. Men with clipboards model human cells as circuit boards.
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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............................................................................................................................................................... May 31st; Friday. Interesting revelations about the Swedish teenage girl who used publicity to bully Britain's government into declaring a "climate emergency".
May 30th;
Thursday. Men who try too hard to make themselves look good for the chicks, can in the process make themselves sterile, boffins warn.
May 28th;
Tuesday. We keep on getting chilly, rainy days. About three days of grey British-style weather for each day of warm sunshine. Famed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh back in 2017 briefs one of our contributors on the CIA's bogus 2016 claims that Russians hacked the DNC e-mail servers here.
May 26th;
Sunday. Thoughts on the importance of Hegel Jargon for the left.
May 24th;
Friday. El Trumpo announces counter-censorship measure. Crossing the Great Plain today by train in high afternoon, assorted cloud shapes stand seemingly completely still in blue skies: The Squirrel; The Clenched Fist; The Spanish Galleon.
May 22nd;
Wednesday. Michael finds charming interview with English historian David Starkey. Meanwhile, Mervyn King, former Bank of England governor, says a no-deal Brexit wouldn't be so bad after all. Quelle surprise, mes braves.
May 20th;
Monday. Jupiter's Great Red Spot now unravelling like an old pullover.
May 18th;
Saturday. Why natural resources aren't natural. Controversial!
May 16th;
Thursday. One of our contributors fears impending US/Iran war.
May 14th;
Tuesday. First green/white necks of basil seedlings nudge above the soil. After some straining and awkwardness in the kitchen (you always find out it's a two-man, four-hand job after the point of no return), I manage to get the two neon-tube cases reattached under the kitchen cabinet. Extra light radically changes mood in kitchen. Piece about naughty data-tweaking to make the global-warming case look plausible. Forbes also doubts renewables.
May 12th;
Sunday. Flat so quiet that a wet shirt dripping onto the bath tap handle creates a pinging noise
rather like a doorbell ringing somewhere distant in the building. Memories of the banshee.
May 10th;
Friday. Buy seeds and plant them in six tiny pots in Michael's flat. Sweden's noble renewable-energy targets are harming the country.
May 8th;
Wednesday. Mass deaths in Chinese pig population: some version of Ebola.
May 6th;
Monday. Sleep 12 hours. Roger Scruton, recently denounced as 'Islamophobic' is in fact a friend of Islam, says Telegraph. Also my memory of his book 'West and the Rest'.
May 4th;
Saturday. Last night caught a late train into the countryside to Robin's, by a different route to Kunszentmarton. Because of this, have to change trains at the oversized white concrete 1960s station at Szolnok, with its long bleak, harshly-lit tunnel connecting all the platforms. Looking for a snack and a drink in the main building, at about 9pm I approach one sandwich counter. There I am confronted by a tall, leggy creature of perhaps 20 with ash-blonde-dyed hair tumbling down her back to brush a perfect bottom. She has a push-up bra under a tight shirt, a slim midriff with a jewelled pin in her exposed belly button, implausibly tight shiny black leggings (with large white capital letters written round the elasticated waistband) showing the shape of her alarmingly well-shaped hips & thighs. There's some sparkly dust sprinkled casually across her cheekbones. She's smiling, almost grinning broadly, lit up with happiness at her own glossy good looks. A macho male hovers at the counter, hypnotised, possibly the boyfriend gruffly guarding his glittering prize. I'm not quite tongue-tied, but am startled to find myself only just able to ask for some chocolate and a tin of Hell energy drink. An hour later, kind Gyuri picks me up in the darkness at Kunszentmarton station.
May 2nd;
Thursday. No, not now we aren't: last night slept 2 hours. Overview of Chinese/US relations.
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