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. . . Language stuff
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dictionaries, translation
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endangered languages
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to links pages [1]
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July 19th;
Sunday. Read a short book lent to me by Troy & Zsandi: 'Body Talk Access', a cheery introductory manual to a kind of energy healing system devised by an Australian man called John Veltheim. Strangely hard to find a review of that text or any mention of it as a text. Everyone links me to a video instead.
July 18th;
Saturday. Last night, Friday, I set off rather late for a party in Buda. Troy had instructed me to get the bus 102 from the Southern Rail Terminus, and I'd found the bus route in my decade-plus-old spiral-bound street atlas. But it is old, so I checked with the two ticket inspectors at the top of the escalator at the metro station. Oh no, they both said very firmly, nowhere near here. Seemingly sincere, they insist the 102 bus route was right the other side of town, the other side of the river. I show them the old 102 route on my street map where I want to go. Ah well if it's Swabian Hill I want then I need the 39. I placidly explain it isn't Swabian Hill I want to go to though (the other end of the page), and we repair to the giant wall map at the escalator exit. We are way past winding-up-passenger territory when one man reverts to telling me how to get to Swabian Hill and I start to wonder if he's had a bang on the head. As we stand together at the giant wall map I say again I'm hoping the 102 bus is this side of town after all. I look at the blown-up inset map of just streets around the railway station while he peers at the other map lower down where the street names are much smaller. Finding the 102 bus stop clearly marked in the inset map, I go for the tactful option. I already can visualise where the bus stop is, but just to check I ask if the street named in the inset map is where I think it is? Oh yes, they both cheerfully answer with slightly blank faces, really not like two men making fun of someone. We part on good terms. The bus stop is there about 100 yards away from them, and a 102 bus arrives 3 minutes after I get there. The bus charges up into the Buda hills, thick leafy trees so heavy with foliage that on some streets they join together over the top and block out the night sky. People on the bus itself are helpful. A man with a bald patch, steel-grey hair bound in a ponytail, and a vaguely abstract-patterned short-sleeved shirt (the sort of design that used to cover seats on National Express coaches & British airport departure lounges) is very kind and makes sure when we get off together that I know where the right street is. Troy and his girlfriend Zsandi are out walking their bouncy puppy Romeo and looking for me. They kindly ply me with tasty food at their house: we watch a couple of intriguing videos on a laptop, including this one from as-yet-undiscovered Bond villain actor Thomas Myers, here explaining the human body is held together in a flexible robust way with a mix of tensile and compressive parts. On the night tram home I meet a group of revellers who have just finished a term at a French business school in town I hadn't heard of. I keep telling them it's woefully out of date, but two of the girls seem almost hypnotised by a short reference book I got 2nd-hand: 'Coopers & Lybrand Guide to Financial Instruments' from the mid-1990s by Donald Brooks and Robert Hertz. It details and risk-rates the early forms of some of those mortgage debt instruments before they went wrong in 2008. I finish this rather dry text today, Saturday, and there is an innocent pleasure to reading about such exotically-named objects as heaven-and-hell bonds, circuses, kitchen-sink bonds, or bunny bonds. I'd forgotten Asian options averaged the strike price. The two girls on the tram last night celebrating finishing some business course gave the impression of never having touched something not a college textbook, but I might be wrong.
July 16th;
Thursday. Two of William Blake's angels.
July 14th;
Tuesday. The day France commemorates a street mob in 1789 killing several people to storm a near-empty fortress to free 7 prisoners, none of whom were political dissidents. I stay up late to finish the book Julia gave me last Wednesday. By Dave Eggers, 'The Circle' is a vaguely dystopian novel set in the present. Like all good dystopias, it shows how horror (such as the French Revolution) emerges from utopianism. It's about a girl called Mae (perhaps some kind of play on "me" and "may") who moves to California and gets a job in a huge cultish internet firm called The Circle. This creepy organisation is clearly meant to blend Google, Facebook, perhaps Twitter (but mainly Google) with its vast ambitions and maniacal zeal to "set information free." A quiet Scientology joke buried in the back third of the story adds to the creepiness. While the characters are a bit thin, and one or two plot twists are predictable, others aren't, the yarn is compelling, and the warning is vivid. It's meant as a parable: it captures the self-righteous US belief in salvation by technology with disturbing accuracy. During a conversation with student Akos earlier today he defended the idea of self-steering aeroplanes and cars, even if no-one understands in detail how they work, as long as the statistics turn out safer. I offered in return Weizenbaum's argument from the 1970s that some things ought to be done by humans as a matter of principle, even if it entails more mistakes. The book later that night echoes our chat. Eggers in 'The Circle' stumbles a little because he both wants to write about right now, and yet also about a dark near-future outcome. This means that some things are overstated for the sake of the moral, making the fit with today a bit unrealistic. The idea that the internet might be (as it is) moderately stocked with people arguing against invasion of privacy and against the idolatry of data is not given proper space. So the book fails to explain fully how those stick-in-the-mud fogey types get outmanoeuvred. Still chilling though. A convincing portrayal of priggish techno-utopians who tolerate no dissent. Because anyone who doesn't buy their creed "just doesn't get it."
July 12th;
Sunday. Waitresses in the cafe playing this oldie. What white pony? Pop lyrics can be puzzling.
July 10th;
Friday. Here are 6 experiences which can change your personality. Very interesting they lead with organ donation.
July 8th;
Wednesday. After yesterday's haircut, the sticky warmth continues. Today meet Julia and Ben - home from boarding school - for a coffee at Mammut shopping centre. Back near my flat in the evening, the girls in the cafe try to be pleasant but with electric fans fighting a losing battle against blood-temperature heat everyone's smile is a little bleak. A small squarky dog that seems to belong to the Persian cafe owner has a particularly piercing bark.
July 6th;
Monday. Greece's Dr V speaks.
July 4th;
Saturday. The girls in the cafe are tuned to a radio station which has spoken Dutch and plays lots of reggae. More buzzing in the sky. A lovely map shows north and south Americans what country is directly the other side of the sea. So for example, New York is round about the latitude of Portugal, and Virginia is already at the height of Morocco.
July 2nd;
Thursday. Very warm & sticky. My Wifi playing up again. How to cleanse the soil in your vegetable patch of heavy metals.
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; Tuesday. Marco informs me via Facebook there's a brand of chalk that maths lecturers apparently love. Meanwhile, back in my glamorous libertine life sticking some bits of cardboard together, as you do, reminded me how the oafs at this Hungarian glue company deserve a mention for their poor design passed off on children. Soft squidgy plastic bottle has a tendency to pop the dispenser right off blurping half the glue contents onto whatever you're working on. Akos & I work out during a lesson several ways we could cut screw threads onto the barrel of a bolt if we had to. June 29th; Monday. Amazon are now paying their machine-book-writing serfs by page turned,
June 28th;
Sunday. Soothing mix: 'Loop of Love' from Dr Heinz Funkenpumpe, who warns "None of the tracks on this channel are for sale or onward distribution as Dr Heinz does not support dastardly acts of commercial piracy." Well said, sir.
June 26th;
Friday. Over the last week there was the gust of breeze in the bathroom one Monday night (while I was watching a video of some fake telekinesis) that smashed a glass jar into tiny smithereens on the tiled floor I walk on in bare feet (picking all these up with great care took half an hour or so), several days of drilling in the wall or ceiling from a flat above, and separate cafe chats with Henry & Troy involving puppies, smartphones, espresso coffees, and sunshine. The drill in the wall of a nearby flat sounds sometimes like a dentist's drill inside a giant mouth, and sometimes like the noise of a wolf-sized bluebottle trapped in a wardrobe. I've started to imagine a flat somewhere in this white-walled modernist block where one wall is completely encrusted with pictures, hooks, and coathangers, cluttered & jumbled on top of each other like a voodoo shrine. Meanwhile, a design student has made a tap that sprays water in pretty patterns.
June 24th;
Wednesday. I have a powerful revelation in a shopping-centre cafe, then chat more about time travel with young Lorinc in his lesson (I hope he hasn't been building anything), and then read two short books for French children by Henri, illustrated by his wife Camelia. Or perhaps they were written to complement Camelia's pictures. 'La petite etoile qui ne savait pas compter 1, 2, 3' & 'Le moulin a vent et le moulin a eau' both strike a note of serious whimsy.
June 22nd;
Monday. Back in Abruzzo, Giorgia, who's an architect, kindly introduces me online to her multi-faceted English-speaking friend Marco. Marco has worked on high-speed trading software. He & I agree on a surprising range of things, including flows of cash on financial exchanges. He urges me to read Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, especially his book on 'liquid modernity'.
June 20th;
Saturday. On Thursday night, joined Robin & Sara for a lovely evening meal in the Budapest flat with Sara's friends Elena & Giorgia. All three Italian signorinas are school friends. We chatted & looked up birth charts. Today I journey by train to Lakitelek for a fine late lunch at Robin's where Giorgia & Elena (codename: Topolina) have been joined by their chum Walid. All four are from what looks like a paradise-like region of central eastern Italy called Abruzzo. Some photos suggest it's almost a miniature Tibet, splendidly isolated and tucked away "in plain sight" as some people say these days. They're all wonderfully cheerful, optimistic, and interested in life. We stay up very late: 2 of their 3 Tarot spreads look remarkable.
June 18th;
Thursday. Not only are French girls now (apparently) dyeing their armpit hair, they've started attaching tassels & hair-extensions to them. Do we like?
June 16th;
Tuesday. Back in the Big Pogacsa, the heat has moderated a little. Here's how Scooby Doo's strange bunch of teenage friends would have dressed in (almost) each decade of the 20th century. Always oddly nostalgic, the blended-1950s/60s/70s krypto-Enid-Blyton Californian surfer-dude/beatnik/quasi-hippies here try out costumes from six of the other seven decades. Nice bit of magazine art, though 1900-to-1910 is mysteriously missing.
June 14th;
Sunday. Here's a nice little 15-minute chat about whether left-wing people do more or less denying of science than other groups: the thoughtful Jonathan Haidt again. In the countryside, after finding the studio last night buzzing with so many insects that they combined into a kind of wavering shrill chorus fit for a horror movie, I took across a half-bottle of alcohol-and-sugar-laced warm water with the surface tension broken by washing-up liquid. This concoction indeed tempted about a score of them to their doom but the multitudes of others made me decide to relocate to sleep in the library over in the main house. When it's very warm at night, falling asleep is different somehow. More like succumbing to some kind of drug than just dozing off. This evening one of those odd almost silent electrical storms happened. So far away on the Great Plain that there is no sound of thunder, yet wheeling round all the corners of the horizon, without rain, as if Robin's land is a kind of magical zone that storms steer clear of. And though far away enough to be mostly silent, close enough to cut off the internet, make the lights in the house dip & dim, and to create an odd kind of charged alerted thrill just under the skin.
June 12th;
Friday. Mild heat stroke, I think. Three cold baths in one day, but still struggle a bit to pack and get on train to Kunszentmarton. For the first time I change in a small town called Szajol, which has a surprisingly large and new-looking railway station that has no shop or bar where anyone could buy a drink or a sandwich. The train carriage is bathed in sun. Worried about getting off at the right place I ask a large box-shaped passenger how we could be where we seem to be. He replies we are running about 25 minutes late and this is normal. But I reply that when I travel on the other line trains are on time. Yes, he answers with placid friendliness, that line is good. On this line, 25 minutes behind schedule is absolutely standard. Some Hungarians rather enjoy calmly noting the inefficiency around them like this. Robin & Sara meet me at Kunszentmarton. I'm pathetically limp from the warmth of the day.
June 10th;
Wednesday. Turns out the well-known fact that more infant boys die than girls is wrong.
June 8th;
Monday. One thing about staying up all night is that you get to hear the dawn chorus. What I never noticed in earlier years was how clearly defined it is. It seems to last about 20 minutes, on and off, like a whole lot of songbirds clocking in for an early shift, or announcing their presence to teacher during morning registration. Before I always felt strangely moved, mildly panicked but also excited to be up that early or that late. The emotional power of the occasion and my sense of being inside my own emotions stopped me from actually taking note of how long it lasts or when it starts: it seemed then to be something I was intermingled with.
June 6th;
Saturday. Strange dreams continue. Well, not exactly strange so much as intense, detailed, not quite mine. Somehow they feel like I've tuned into unfamiliar radio stations. Even when they contain details of my life or memories noticeably mine, it's like they are remakes or cover versions. Pieces of my mind incorporated into someone else's novel.
June 4th;
Thursday. Coriander seedlings rise out of their two tiny pots. Neighbouring four mini-pots of basil also getting busy. Boardgame Orsolya mentions a new collaborator in Singapore. Exchange quizzical amused glances with an ex-girlfriend I pass just outside the nearby cinema perhaps yesterday? / More internet-stuff-into-real-stuff news. Meet both Troy (with his puppy Romeo) & Tamas for coffee outdoors in late-afternoon sunshine.
June 2nd;
Tuesday. Full moon. The chocolate-science study was a hoax (tee hee)!
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