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. . . Language stuff
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September 1st;
We set off in bright sunshine. Martin detects a lobster pot dragging under the boat,
turns off the engine {no wind today either} and goes under with scuba gear and a fearsome-looking
knife to cut the rudder free. I stagger from side to side of the stationary boat as it rocks around.
I vomit over the side into exquisite green-blue water, feeling worse than I have all week.
Martin emerges from under the boat, lobster pot successfully detached, and we set off again,
pulling in five hours later at another
port, the one where we are to meet Wendy. The corner bar facing a row of palm trees and
the sea, right under the blue-painted stucco archway into the marina, buzzes with energy
and good-looking Spanish girls. As the sky goes dark I slowly recover from the day's nausea over
some lemonade beers and local snacks such as dates wrapped in bacon.
August 31st;
Medium day of motoring, since there's no wind today. We dock in a marina in
a
small town and we try an Indian restaurant
patronised by the local British-in-Spain, 'Pride of India'. Although the
restaurant is empty, excellent food. Martin does impressive Spanish, chatting to
coastguards and harbour masters on his walkie-talkie as we chug into ports each day.
August 29th;
More sailing. We anchor off somewhere, and take the dinghy into
a beach
by a town. Launching
a dinghy against surf turns out quite hard even with a friendly Spaniard helping us.
His children come up and say hello with appealing straightforwardness and lack of
self-consciousness while Daddy and Martin and I stumble around in the pebbles fighting
to push the dinghy out against breaking waves while starting the outboard motor.
Feel quite sea-sick much of day. Beautiful colours in the water, greenish light
turquoise near land, and a clear, pale-blue-ink colour out at sea.
In the quiet of the night when we are anchored at last
I read Martin's copy of
'Hegel:
A very Short Introduction' by Peter Singer of
'Animal
Liberation' fame. A very clear introduction
indeed. Singer sketches out Hegel's theory of history and social will in beautifully
crisp, careful sentences. I must read more by Singer. Perhaps even more by Hegel.
August 27th;
Wake up late, get to Sailing Club bar to find Martin chatting by Skype with video
with Szilvi in Budapest on his laptop. Tomorrow's World has finally arrived then.
In bright sun, a large military ship is parked alongside the
restaurant for a couple of days, bristling with radar dishes, and today, coloured
pennants, visible through the wall of glass just past our breakfast tables.
He orders me a curious
mixture of coffee and brandy - a sort of Iberian Irish coffee with more kick.
August 25th;
Flight to Alicante goes smoothly. Arrive at the airport slightly dazed, queue up
for bus to Murcia. Hot, relentless sun bakes every surface. Spaniards stand around
being relaxed with who they are. At the busstop, a pretty girl in sunglasses
stands motionless for about half an hour, an old man comes up, they speak and kiss
briefly, he goes, and then I see she is quietly sobbing behind her shades. I ask
if she is all right, she says yes thanks, so I leave her to her grief. Get bus to
Murcia. I wander round
their bus station swimming through the heat, then, twenty minutes before my 2nd bus,
the one from there to Cartagena, I realise my mobile phone must have slipped out of
my pocket. This contains the only record I have of how to
get to where Martin is in Cartagena. The bus ladies are very kind. We search the
bus - no luck. Then one bus lady phones my phone, and it turns out to have been
handed into the ticket office. Smiles & hugs all round. I get on the bus to
Cartagena, with still ten minutes to spare. Wander around Cartagena a bit, then
Martin meets me beside a submarine. There is
a big sailing race happening, and
we walk along the jetty lined with parked yachts. He points out various expensive,
stripped-down vessels built purely for strength, lightness, and speed.
August 23rd;
Meet Ray for a late breakfast at his studio, find Melanie in time to eat cakes
and discuss plasma, and experience nagging problems with
Vodafone, who don't seem
to want to turn the fifteen pounds I gave them into an internet connection.
I read Mystery Friend 2's copy of
'Das
Kapital: a biography' by Francis Wheen, a
short and readable tale both of how long it took Marx to write the book, and what
the book says in Wheen's view. Wheen portrays Marx's pomposity and obsessive
procrastination comically, but also makes a case for Marx as a visionary, literary
thinker with a unique grasp of the power of capital, a sort of all-entangling
organism of almost unstoppable power. Wheen seems unaware that the English socialist
Thomas Hodgskin
had the idea that profit was theft from labour two decades before Marx. It slowly becomes
clear that Wheen, like Marx, doesn't really understand economics. As he cobbles together his
pseudo-science, the fact that people with power cruelly use people without power is greeted
by Marx as a symptom of a new and unique force, when it is really just a sad old fact about
human nature. His ideas about profit are wholly confused. Marx and Wheen both seem unable
to grasp that their belief that labour is compressed into production and somehow stolen by
the mark-up {the only thing that makes any trade possible} is at least as occult and mystical
as belief in spoon-bending. Marx proposes, though fails to realise he proposes, a kind of
alternative pricing system to measure real value which would somehow replace the two-party
price-haggling we have now. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but my memory of reading a large chunk
of Das Kapital was of encountering a rambling polemic by someone struggling to
grasp and analyse a topic substantially beyond him. This might explain
why Marx was so appalling with money in his own life - Wheen reveals that at one
point he is being paid four pounds a week in the mid-19th century by a New York
newspaper, a huge amount of money at the time. Marx's inability to manage his
personal finances despite high income like this and the loyal largesse of Engels casts
very strong doubts on the profundity of the insights into money & economics he credits
himself with. No wonder he wasted a year feuding with a German academic sharp
enough to call Marx a charlatan - that accusation must have been unnervingly close
to the bone. Marx emerges as a kind of crank social theorist. His theory posits a self-sustaining
conspiracy without conscious conspirators so as to make it sound more serious, like a force of
nature or history, a sort of social geology. This is an intellectually upmarket
version of the widespread belief in 1840s and 1850s Europe that secret societies like
the freemasons steered politics: literally antisemitism for pseuds. Wheen dismisses Samuelson's
point that Marx was wrong on the absolute immiseration of the proletariat by digging
out a line from Kapital justifying that Marx actually meant relative immiseration
of the proletariat. Like the notion of relative poverty: a much more comfortable
position for embattled left-wingers to defend. Yet he fails to notice that this is
false too, and that the proletariat has vastly improved its relative as well as
absolute position since Marx designated himself a prophet of imminent disaster a
century and a half ago. Recent revivals in inequality relate less to now well-paid
proletarians than to increases in earnings gaps between big capitalists and small
capitalists, alongside the gap between well-paid proletarians and less well-paid
proletarians. It's hard to claim they show working-class immiseration, even in the reduced
version modern socialists retreat to. The fact that people work much longer hours
now than in the 1970s is taken by Wheen as confirmation that Marx was right all
along, not as confirmation that proletarian earning power is now sufficiently high
that many people believe they can enrich themselves by voluntarily doing extra paid
employment {or that the arrival of personal computers in the 1980s was the early beginnings
of wage-earners purchasing productive machinery with their enlarged wages}. Worrying to
see that Marx's failure to understand what savings and profits generated by machinery are
lingers on. It even strikes a moderately bright person like Wheen as rational and
completely unlike the paranoid, conspiratorial mood of the 1970s {Wheen's other book
I'm reading}. The paranoia of the 1970s and since that Wheen mocks is
the clearest sign I can think of that Marxist mumbo jumbo has infected all of us.
August 21st;
Last day of packing before travel. I print a packing list, sensible boy that I am.
Then pizzafication with Marguerite
& Kati.
August 19th;
I've finally had it with
this
printer. It was so obvious from his secretary's voice that
he was never going to phone me back, even though I've been waiting 7 days to talk
to him, and he's been sitting on my 400 pound deposit for weeks. Unwind a little
with Franc after dark after a second class with Annamari - amusingly
shrunk from 12 students on Tuesday to 5 students tonight. Not just me who thought
she was tough then.
August 17th;
Extended lunch with Marion, after my first
morning swim in ages.
August 15th;
British Gas still stubbornly pretend I owe
them money. In fact they owe me money. Total lack of shame, these sly
utilities. Even when I catch them out lying they then concoct a new
story claiming I owe them money. They insisted their 2009 estimate was a real reading
while claiming the real inspection one of their meter readers did on June 19th
this year was an estimate. Surprise, surprise, this was because the June reading
showed that their bills are 1300 kW hours too high.
August 13th;
At last, send in text and cover to printer in England. Suddenly feel free. Lula
sends me links to some wonderfully raucous sixties songs by
The Pretty Things and
The Spencer Davis Group. I weakly
reply with Larry & The Blue Notes
and The Misunderstood.
In the early evening I finish a short book by Paul Krugman, titled
'Development,
Geography, and Economic Theory' adapted from a 1992 lecture
series. Krugman argues in favour of mathematical models in economics, saying that
people who think they do better economics by avoiding models usually overlook the
mistakes in their own thinking that a rigorous model would have forced them to
confront. Better some kind of simplified, imperfect model than no model at all.
At the same time, he appears to regret the false starts in postwar
development economics and economic geography that were caused by (a) those
economists' inability to create a proper mathematical model for their insights,
and (b) other economists' unwillingness to look at any new theory without a
quantitative model underlying it. He uses two interesting metaphors. Maps of Africa
went from being messily, vaguely, partly right when the interior was filled with hearsay
about reported rivers, but as cartography got more rigorous & sceptical over evidence,
the effect was to actually empty the interior of Africa, and through the 18th century
the maps got blanker before filling up again with better-researched data. Likewise, as
meteorology went from folk science to proper science, there was a hiatus of a century
or so as folk wisdom about clouds was neglected in favour of exact measurements, only
for later meteorologists to re-examine the old folk myths and find that in fact shapes
of clouds predict the coming weather very well. Obviously the maps better favour his
argument that the development of economics unfortunately led to neglect of folksier
ideas until the mathematical substructure was ready to refound them systematically, since
maps represent things that stay the same and can wait to be rediscovered. With weather
he is already treading on thinner ice, and the extension to economics, where people's
beliefs about economic clouds and winds actually form part of the substance of those
clouds and winds, looks more tenuous still. Though the main thrust of this early-90s
book seems innocently sensible and rational, in retrospect this might be seen as a
pre-Black-&-Scholes-failure book. The Black & Scholes options-pricing model was admired
by financiers and academics, but proved extraordinarily wrong by events a couple of years
after they won the Nobel Prize for it. Theirs looks very much like a case where having
some kind of numerically testable and theory-supported quantitative model most certainly
was worse than having no model at all. However even if these lectures and this book
come from before derivatives pricing fell apart, Krugman's text might have warned
a few acute readers. Across the sunlit uplands of clearcut model-design, one or
two hints of academic hauteur glint in his authorial voice. Krugman shifts
from showing emotional attachment to sheer tidiness {"And yet
what a difference a clean model makes." on page 86, or
"The von Thunen model ...is a beautiful thing."
on page 53, repeated almost word for word twelve pages later}, to patronising {"No - the moral of my tale is nowhere near that easy."
page 65}, and on to sneering sarcasm {"Are you sure
you really have such deep insights that you are better off turning your back on the
cumulative discourse among generally intelligent people that is modern economics? But
of course you are."} In being transformed from lectures into book,
about thirty footnotes in the course of the text would have been a very good idea,
giving short summaries and definitions of ideas and terms he refers to, instead of
the 5 or 6 paragraphs of non-helpful notes on pages 109-110.
August 11th;
Rather alarming statistics website,
ticking away...
August 9th;
Finish Yates book {with its strange cover art showing two cardboard boxes} on
'Giordano
Bruno & the Hermetic Tradition'. This is a careful
excavation of all the peculiar ideas in the mix at the start of the 17th century and
the dawn of modern quantitative science. Yates convincingly shows that Bruno, a
Dominican from Naples, was burned alive at the stake in 1600 not for supporting
Copernican astronomy and not for suggesting an infinite universe of other planets
{though he did both}. Rather he was executed for
advocating a return to Egyptian magic, and enthusiastically promoting Cabalism,
Hermeticism, and a kind of sun-centred astrological cult in Italy, France, England,
and Germany. Yates reveals Bruno's hostility to maths, and shows he mainly supported
Copernicus's heliocentric system because he identified the sun as The One of
neo-Platonic mysticism. She argues that the wrong turn of Renaissance reverence
for the writings attributed to Hermes
Trismegistus {wrongly thought until textual analysis by the scholar Casaubon in
1614 to be of greater antiquity than Plato or Jesus} helped turn scholars' attention
to the direct study of nature. That is to say, a craze for nature magic among
Renaissance magi paved the way for the rise of mechanical experimentation. The era closes
with Marin
Mersenne's struggles in the 1620s to remove magic from serious discussion. This was a
far cry from the strange intellectual ferment among southern Italy's Dominicans in the
1550s and 60s that Yates detects. Younger than Bruno by twenty years {sometimes they were
even in the same prisons for a few overlapping weeks, unknown to each other} came another
Dominican, Tomasso
Campanella. He actually led a popular revolution in 1599 in southern Italy
to try {and fail} to throw out the Spanish rulers of the south and set up
a 'City of the Sun' in Calabria, a Utopian pantheistic/semi-Christian city state
along Hermetic lines. The mood shifts and Europe becomes cooler, more rational.
Descartes himself shifts from a
vaguely occultist, Rosicrucian outlook in a couple of years to becoming more interested
in strictly mathematical modelling of nature. Yet even in this increasingly uncongenial
new age, Campanella somehow stays alive, surviving prison and torture. He keeps reshaping
his peculiar Sun-City mysticism, very similar to Bruno's in many details. He lives long
enough to die a natural death at the French court where he has managed to talk his way
into Cardinal
Richelieu's team. In his last days, Campanella is recommending Richelieu and anyone
who will listen that when he grows up the boy who will be Louis XIV should be hailed as the
"Sun King".
August 7th;
Pasta with Marguerite and her adorable dog Emma. She tells me of one US trial judge
who reprimanded a woman in court for wearing red shoes, and when she wore them
again the next day sent her down for contempt. Meanwhile,
this must be why the Met
shot Menezes 7 times in the head.
It's hard to be sure these days.
August 5th;
Intriguing language-learning
method.
August 3rd;
Proofread book more. Some striking photos of
flowers
seen by X-ray. Eerie, delicate.
August 1st;
Proofread book.
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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July 30th;
Keen reader Josh inspired by my sunburnt-slots-in-envelopes post to
send me pinhole photos of months
& months of the sun crossing the sky.
Two Economist articles on rich & poor. Seems
rich folk really are meaner
than poor folk and giving
your possessions away to the destitute makes your life difficult.
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". Like a
sarcastic Tarkovsky, revelling in the sweet dullness of Eastern Bloc life.
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