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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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November 25th; Wednesday. Finish 'Covid-19: The Great Reset'
November 23rd; Monday.
November 21st; Saturday. Andras returns from the monastery. I finish the curious book of Thackeray essays I found at the mobile book stall in the next street a couple of weeks ago. 'The Book of Snobs' is a compilation of weekly articles (humour about snobbery, unsurprisingly) written for one whole year in Punch magazine and published in book form in 1846. The dark flesh-coloured hardback I now have was republished in 1959 in Moscow by a Soviet Russian firm (The Foreign Languages Publishing House). I dearly wish I could read the 9-page introduction and the 33-page footnotes at the back in Cyrillic Russian, framing and explaining the document laid out in between the two (doubtless described as "bourgeois capitalist"). Hard not to admire the seriousness with which Russians, then and now, struggle to master foreign languages to the degree of familiarising themselves with (in 1959) 100-year-old texts like this. The text between preserves original typesetting, spelling, dotted with 9 or 10 partly-successful humorous drawings from the columns as they appeared, I assume. Would that we would study our own recent past with the reverential earnestness of those Soviet students. Imagine them stoically plodding through these foreign pieces of 1840s British humour and social observation. The occasional mysterious, or just-known, word or term gave it a haunting almost-foreign feel for me.
November 19th; Thursday. Press conference by Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, and other lawyers explain their Kraken US election cheating claims in more detail.
November 17th; Tuesday. Dave Brubeck's quartet supposedly playing Golden Brown, ++, 20 years before it was written. A set of sound snippets lovingly restitched on editing software, I guess.
November 15th; Sunday. A lady lawyer in her sixties (the attorney for General Flynn, an early victim of the 2016/17 Russian-hacker fabrication) has started rather lyrically threatening to "Release the Kraken." She says she has enormous quantities of testimony, affadavits etc, from witnesses seeing organised vote-tampering in the presidential election 12 days ago. My memory of krakens is pretty much limited to reading the John Wyndham novel (to mother's mild concern) when I was 8? 9?, right in my full-on sci-fi era.
November 13th; Friday. Vulpeck, putting jazz back into funk (am I allowed to say that?). Three seemingly, or partly, improvised tunes:
Disco Ulysees /
Dean Town /
Cory Wong. Much admired by some musicians I've met.
November 11th; Wednesday. An early Knower song, when the duo looked young and innocent: Things About You.
November 9th; Monday. Here is a looped mini-film of something hovering in the garden. One of the things you can make if you have the right 3D graphics software. A sort of rotating blossom made out of drinking straws.
November 7th; Saturday. Two trailers for films about contemporary art: a fairly high-budget-ish offering about a living artist and a collector, with what looks like might be good acting by Mick Jagger. That one's called The Burnt Orange Heresy. The second, recommended by Andras, is a film about a Swedish modern-art museum director called The Square.
November 5th; Thursday. Remember, remember, the fifth of November - gunpowder, treason, and plot.
November 3rd; Tuesday. USA population goes to vote on their traditional day. Always thought the Continental European habit of voting on Sunday implied that the post-French-Revolution republics subconsciously thought they'd replaced Christianity with their own modernised state worship.
November 1st; Sunday. Andras is puzzled I suggest visiting the (now nearby) candelit Day-of-the-Dead cemetery goings-on.
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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............................................................................................................................................................... October 31st; Saturday. Go to delicious extended lunch with Andras's big family (five siblings!) in a town just outside Budapest. The rest of the city celebrates the vulgar festival of Hallowe'en.
October 30th; Friday. How to build an artificial sun. Love that title.
October 28th; Wednesday. Already almost two weeks since the latest act of Islamist imperialism in France, the beheading of a schoolteacher.
October 26th; Monday. Media bygones: 3 terribly old tunes from The Byrds:
I See You /
It's No Use /
I Know My Rider.
October 24th; Saturday. Nice Samurai Jack clip where arch-villain sees a psychiatrist.
October 22nd; Thursday. A few days ago, I was in the 24-hour grocery near Andras's flat, and I tried to buy some disposable razors. The cheerful & alert gay guy on the till offers two types, one blue and one pink, telling me he's found the pink ones for women actually have better blades (quite believable). I say all right and decide to try the pink ones. 'YMCA' is playing on the shop's radio, and the large-shouldered security man starts humming along with the tune behind me. I glance back and he is good-naturedly catching my eye and also pointing out the unembarrassed camp shop assistant with his glances. Interestingly, we all seem to share the joke - everyone, including him, finds the situation funny.
October 20th; Tuesday. My brandy-coloured piss seems to be slowly returning to normal. Solar disc sun-spot-free for long stretches, here 28 days in late September.
October 18th; Sunday. Allegations on covid-19 return to the bioweapon theme.
October 16th; Friday. I realise for several days that my urine has been reddish-brown, the colour of madeira. There's no pain though - can I hope this is the last of the perhaps blood-stained fluid being gradually rinsed off my heart by the furosemide?
October 14th; Wednesday. Again up late watching films with Robin. The Korean film 'Snowpiercer', while visually impressive and stylish in several places, uses a disappointingly Marxist/Dickensian myth, boiling all society down to one long train cruelly segregated into classes that zooms across a frozen world, never stopping. Of course, the great liberating metaphor is revolution. Cartoonish.
October 12th; Monday. At some point during the afternoon as the radio in Robin's rural kitchen listens to classical music, I ask about the piece we're hearing as it rains outside? Robin, expertly spearing a cube of cheese on a knife point mutters something about "Northern European dickhead". Drawing on my dazzling knowledge of the classical canon, I question if by this he means Sibelius? Seems he does.
October 10th; Saturday. Human babies are evolving to not have wisdom teeth.
October 8th; Thursday. Handy map of pornstars per million people, from slightly unsettling 'Kafkadesk'. Interesting to see the two countries who lead.
October 6th; Tuesday. Up late watching old films with Robin on his television service. We see a 1950 American movie called 'Tripoli', relating the 1805 defeat of a North African slaving state, famously commemorated in the US Marines regimental anthem. There's a rather impressive scene where their overland camel train struggles through a ferocious sandstorm. A supposedly erotic moment where a military man challenges the copper-redheaded leading lady (mistress to the Arabian prince) to dance, since she is entered in the list as one of the "dancing girls", and is smitten, is possibly the part of the film that's most substantially dated. The music isn't right, the dancing isn't right, her build isn't right.
October 4th; Sunday. When you are forced to stay awake all night, desperate for sleep, for days in a row, random bits of once-entertaining film can be handy. So we have the original version of Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, along with a studio audience visibly bored to the point of disgust. The adorable moment in Galaxy Quest when aliens disturb the hungover Tim Allen, asleep on his sitting-room floor. And a review discussion about the unfairly forgotten early-1970s 'Organization' drama, long praised by the Nigel of Light.
October 2nd; Friday. After almost no sleep, get across the river again to the clinic to see Paul's cardiologist. He turns out to be a charming, intelligent man who has no patience with the face-mask hysteria over covid-19, doesn't wear a mask and is perfectly happy for me not to wear one either during our hour-long consultation. He reads through my blood test, takes electrical readings off my chest, and listens to my heartbeat with an ultrasonic microphone. At one point, as he runs the microphone up and down my side he murmurs quietly partly to himself, partly to me, almost tenderly, "Yes, it's an exhausted heart, very tired. But still - pumping quite well." Almost as if my heart was a person. In the afternoon I stumble around town, wearily realising I've mishandled the chore of actually buying the medications he's prescribed. The subsequent fifteen hours waiting to meet Marion at midday Saturday probably count as my longest night in a couple of decades.
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