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. . . language list
euskara {basque} magyar {hungarian} nederlands/vlaams {dutch} sami suomi
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other links : i ii iii
Can you translate the next 300 words into
Hindi, or
Korean?;
if so, please contact me
and there will be rejoicing.
2002 Q1 & Q2
...............................................................................................................................................................
February 28th;
Finished another old book I was 3/4 through.
Steven Pinker's
'Words and Rules'
takes us into the heart of his own
specialism, which is grammar, mainly regular and irregular verbs in English
and German. This can be a surprise if you've previously
read him chattily discussing evolutionary
roots of human thought in general, cheerily introducing us to other people's
research.
He explains how people with different brain conditions make revealingly
different kinds of mistake with "wug tests" [tests to put endings on
invented nonsense words], giving us clues about how those languages
distinguish regular and irregular [Pinker supports Twain, perhaps German
exceptions do outnumber German rules by some counts!], and how our brains do
the same. The book gives an excellent feel for the austere precision needed
for real science - one question at a time, carefully chosen to give one
clear answer either way. By the end, he is claiming
Wittgenstein's "family resemblance" argument is a fresh view of the classes
of things we pick out in reality from Aristotle's defined types. Though the
idea that classes of resembling families have 'prototype' [he means
'archetype', I think] members sounds like a bit of a slip. Bluejays are
more essentially 'birdy' [for Euro-American experimental subjects?
surprise, surprise...] than cockatoos or penguins. Wouldn't that depend
where your particular culture stood along a spectrum of
resembling, overlapping categories? Is a Wittgensteinian
fuzzy category any more than an Aristotelian category where
a couple of other Aristotelian categories pop up unusually close by?
More interesting, he suggests that far from mistakes like 'buyed' and
'thinked' revealing something distinctive about children's brains, these
typical children's mistakes shaped the very language - the other way
round. They may have helped, he says, decide which verbs kept which endings
and which dropped out of the irregular clan, being regularised [and very
occasionally going the other way] by each new generation of children's
& other new learners' errors over the centuries.
Despite its big ideas about how we categorise the world, the book's
thin air of high-altitude cognitive research is a bit overbracing.
Nagging doubts lurk. Is it really possible to deduce so much about
the evolution of the brain from the difference between German s plurals and
German n plurals? Isn't
MIT the institution that rode much of its
reputation on the detailed do-ability of strong
artificial intelligence? If some
things are understood according to rules, and some case by case, so what?
And shouldn't this kind of linguist learn a few more languages before they
start looking for this kind of brain-culture fit?
February 27th;
Finished my old copy of
Jared Diamond's book about "the last 13,000 years"
of human history. When, early on in
'Guns, Germs and Steel',
Diamond claims that he has many friends from Papua
New Guinea who are brighter than he is, we tend to believe him. There is a
slightly plodding quality to his prose and thinking, but this may have been
vital for him to develop such a broad, well-argued book and carry it
through without getting carried away by his own cleverness. After all,
Charles Darwin, possibly the greatest thinker ever, modestly but perhaps
accurately described himself as slow at working things out. Other kinds of
intellect may be quick to seize on certain features and spin too much
theory out of too little, instead of letting the evidence mount in all its
rich detail, gradually coming into an unhurried focus of its own.
Diamond's argument goes like this: chance factors left Eurasians in the
Fertile Crescent
[Mesopotamia, Sumeria - between the Tigris and Euphrates]
with more plant species and more big animals suitable for domestication,
than any other region of the world at that time, 10 to 20 thousand years
ago. These plant crops and husbanded animals then did two things. They
allowed the people of the Fertile Crescent to evolve organised,
city-dwelling, dense populations with the spare manpower to develop
full-time armies, toolmakers creating things like wheels and written
language, and the need and means to expand and take their skills and
devices further afield. But the domestic animals did more - they allowed
several unpleasant diseases to cross over and mutuate into epidemics that
could infect the humans living so closely with their pigs, buffalo, horses
and dogs. This would become important several thousand years later when
populations of Western Asia and Europe met other races on other continents
such as Australia and the Americas, and the germs they carried [but by then
were immune to themselves] killed most of the native Australians and
Americans they met. The failure of peoples on other continents to
domesticate large numbers of domestic animal species [or when they did,
such as woolly llamas in the Andes, to live closely enough with them to
catch their diseases and evolve immunity to those diseases] left them with
very few deadly diseases to infect invading Europeans with in turn. Diamond
suggests convincingly that sheer lack of suitable and easy-to-domesticate
large animals on other continents stopped other societies from evolving
sufficiently big and rich agricultural economies, and from catching and
then becoming immune to, sufficient numbers of virulent crossover epidemics
with which to conquer the world.
This is also the weak point in his case, of course. He speculates briefly
on a might-have-been Bantu empire that, had it domesticated the rhinoceros
in Africa, could have stormed the gates of Rome as Hannibal's elephant
divisions failed to. I couldn't help wondering about the drives and needs
that led to the idea of domesticating large animals in the first place.
Diamond is keen to defend the losers so far in world history from any
charge of inadequacy, and so has to read backwards to conclude that there
just weren't enough suitable species in most places. If it turns out he and
similar researchers are right, this is brilliant genetic archeology. As
long as the genetic routes Fertile Crescent sheep, pigs etc took to become
domestic turn out to be shorter and simpler than the routes other
continents' animals didn't take - otherwise animal domestication in the
Near East is an effect being mistaken for a cause.
There is more of course. The shapes of continents helped to diffuse
animals, plants and ideas quicker on some than others. [East-west spread,
much more possible in Eurasia, allows species to stay in their latitude
zone, while north-south spread, as in South-East Asia and the Americas
would have needed plants or animals to move through tropical habitats where
they could not survive, so is much slower]. Writing helps ideas disseminate
and protects them against being forgotten, and the physical isolation of
the only New World society to independently develop writing [the Mayans]
stopped it from spreading and enabling cross-fertilisation with ideas from
the Aztecs and Incas. The Near East lost its own political lead to Europe
by creating an ecological dustbowl with overfarming [overfarming took
longer to damage high-rainfall Europe once Fertile Crescent ideas had
spread north and west]. And the crinkly geography of Europe stopped a
single political authority from closing down or reversing progressive ideas
the way frequently happened in China [and everywhere]. Diamond contrasts
China's steps backwards [like its retreat from what might have become
colonies in East Africa before Portugal's Vasco da Gama got there] with the steps
backwards of individual European rulers [Columbus got rejected by four
other countries before Spain agreed to fund his expedition west.] that
could not stop Europe advancing because Europe was fragmented. It's
tempting to use ecologists' term 'species pump' for the way a region like
Europe can be connected yet diverse enough to maximise innovation. The
spread of languages are vital clues to the spread of allied peoples and
lifestyles.
The book might have more impact if it was shorter, since fat, spine-splitting
paperbacks are hard to forgive, but it's clearly a very serious look at the
most important topic in history.
A 1960s Reading-University explanation
I once came across -
a division of the world into tropical slash-and-burn, 'dry-belt' intensive
irrigation, and temperate mixed grazing and arable land - still rings a
little truer to me, but both are part of the same massive and commendable
cross-cultural research. This older version is also a little more
convincing in it story of political culture emerging from soil type [dry
belt civilisations having cyclical histories, Magna Carta being a document
"which could only have emerged from mixed farming country"]. Both
approaches seem to overlook a lot of crucial questions though. Why did the
relentlessly-catalogued early city states of the Fertile Crescent not
notice and correct their own devastation of their soils in their tax
records extant over centuries? Why did Chinese traders not establish
intermediate bases between China and East Africa [for example on the
islands still sparsely populated when Europeans encountered them centuries
later] so as to defy the domestic politics restricting them? Why was Islam
so intellectually fruitful for its first couple of centuries and then so
stagnant? Why did wheels remain toys among the Incas? Why did some people
live more closely with their animals than others? Why should zebras be
harder to domesticate than brown horses? As the Phd students say, much
valuable work remains to be done.
February 26th;
Finished my mother's copy of 'Out of it' by
Stuart Walton,
described on the cover by
Julie Burchill as
"a brilliant writer". It's a book about drugs which aims to do something
different and really be a book about intoxication. Opening fizzily,
Walton aims to justify getting intoxicated, smashed, out of it, squiffy etc
as fun and worthwhile in its own right. He claims it does not need to be
justified as countercultural or inspiring philosophical insight or
subversive. Governments should let us do it because it feels good, and
children holding their breath and spinning themselves dizzy in playgrounds
show us altering our consciousness is a basic human desire.
The first hundred pages are very readable, like listening to someone
quite clever, full of black coffee [a drug he discusses with respect] and
wittily in full flow, but the book starts to disappoint soon enough. Signs
of something disquieting are there early on - showoff vocabulary {'ukase'
and 'purblind' on one page do make him sound a bit "redbrick parvenu", as he
describes himself at one point}. Likewise the long, tonkety-tonk sentences
with more style than substance. Concerns mount when
the second hundred pages recite all the same historical dates, names and
anecdotes that were in the first hundred, only in a different order. I got
that eerie unease you get when you notice an intelligent loved one begin to
repeat themselves and think in circles. It comes as no surprise when Stuart
proudly refers to teenage years spent speeding on uppers, and by the middle
of the book he sounds not just repetitious but bad-tempered too. The
overall argument remains vague, though spikily sure of itself from sentence
to sentence, and starts to get maudlin, as a sloppy chapter at the end
introduces some famous artists who liked to get chemically silly, and
perhaps were inspired by chemicals too. Constantly on the guard against
exposing himself too much, Walton is careful to be even-handedly snide
about everyone - prohibitionists, prudes, junkies, millennial drug nutters
like Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary. But despite this cynical
objectivity shuffle, blurted declamations like "Janice Joplin's death
left a gaping hole in rock culture" give him away rather, and leave the overall
book not so much out of it as all over the place. Janice Joplin, Billie
Holiday, Coleridge and De Quincy apparently belong together because in a
book about getting high you've got to have a bit about artist types,
haven't you? By the time you reach this sentence on page 262, you're
relieved to be getting near the end:
"Taking a step back, we might see this projective relationship with the
profligacy of the celebrities come to resemble, through the curvature of
historical relativity, that other such relationship between the great and
obscure in classical times."
We might indeed, Stuart. But if you laid off the uppers a little, your book
about drugs being fun might have been more fun for readers too. A pub bore
by any other name is still a pub bore.
February 25th;
I take mother's computer to
Halifax to
ask why
it feels poorly.
February 24th;
I revisit the Internet cafe inside Halifax food market.
February 23rd;
Quiet day reading & chatting.
February 22nd;
Quiet day chatting & reading.
February 21st;
Locate Internet cafe in Hebden Bridge,
a village rich in hippie
health-food shops selling dense brown buns, yet with none selling proper creamcakes.
February 20th;
Arrive in The Village
after a drive through afternoon sunlit mist with Ed, and meet mother, who has her central heating
turned up to East-European levels of hotness. I try to identify
a
cactus vigorously enjoying her oven-like
bathroom while all other plants in there wilt & die, but cannot find it in her
plant-spotting books. Sleep.
February 19th;
Robin's and Kate's friend John gives me a lift to
Victoria station,
and I am too tired to ask which African language
was spoken on my right during the coach trip to Yorkshire.
National
Express drivers still sneer at
customers - he greets me by angrily snapping that there are "no vacant seats", so I must
apologetically reassure him I already have a ticket. Of course it later becomes clear
that there were over 10 vacant seats for the whole trip.
Once in
Bradford I meet Ed and catch up on his
poetry books, as he plies me with food.
February 18th;
I meet Jules. After walking two delightfully fluffy dogs he knows from a nearby block
of council flats, Jules sweetly lets me use the Internet from his office/home where I meet Kay.
Then Kate returns and takes me to her club for a beer in her open-top
car Ziggy [which has just passed its
MOT],
tells me about public relations and how her immediate future looks. Later
she cooks chicken for Robin, myself and Constantine. Constantine seems mellow and thoughtful.
February 17th;
After our brief meeting
on the ferry with the stimulating young Mr Maddo selling newspapers and paperback novels
[and his large, alert waiter colleague scrutinising all tables at once, crumb by crumb], Robin and I drive fast through
Kent by night. We listen to Robin's old tape of a
Joy Division concert through the countryside, and a club-music radio
station
["You are listening to The Good Stuff Now, yeh"]
once we get into the streets of South London. Kindly Kate
awaits us in
Battersea with pasta and tea, and we gaze into her giant wall-sized sitting-room mirror. I tell her this is not
good Feng Shui. We sleep.
After we get up, I have an odd experience while shopping with Kate in
a branch of a
supermarket chain.
All the labels are in English, and I find this strangely worrying. In the evening
we watch television. Restoring a 1950s
Blackpool tram and
then an episode of
'The
Commander'.
February 16th;
Breakfast with the family, including Johannes's daughter Florina and her sister,
who greet us from an
upper window decked in reflective accessories. Fabrizio from Milan throws snowballs.
Then a midday walk in the snowy hills with Andreas
and Fabrizio. After a late start across
Luxembourg &
Belgium we make it to
Dunkirk for the 11.30pm lorry-drivers' ferry service.
February 15th;
Puedi sees us off with lots of help, and after a long day driving, Robin & I make it
by midnight to the schloss near Luxembourg where Johannes and Andreas live with their
parents. Andreas hospitably plies us with
plum schnapps as we watch a German-dubbed
Bond movie into the small hours.
February 14th;
At a birthday party for her daughter, Fuffi introduces us to Axel, Loretta, Antonia,
Patrick, Linus and Yo, many of whom attend a
Rudolf
Steiner school.
February 13th;
Coffee with Robin's Greek artist friend
Thrafia. After we meet friendly
art-history
enthusiasts at a restaurant with rather strict waiters,
Puedi introduces us later to Googoo, Clemy and another Florian. Googoo and Robin
both know
Rula Lenska quite well, it emerges.
February 12th;
We leave Vienna and arrive in
Munich.
After a couple of hours driving in circles round
her suburb, we meet the delightful Puedi. Florian joins us for a
Bavarian dinner.
February 11th;
Robin appears. I
pack, we have a late breakfast and leave town. Vilma's
mother and Oliver welcome us to Vienna for the night.
February 10th;
Suddenly my frustration boils over again. Quite a while since that last
happened, thank goodness.
David alerts me to the remarkable
languageremoval site.
Hands up anyone who understands this one.
February 9th;
Went to the domino-carpeted
Art'Otel with
Paul and David for a European-Union-themed get-together
with salty snacks. The guest speaker correctly guesses most people in the audience are Hungarian,
and encouragingly tells them the
EU is the stabilising cause of the last fifty years of peace and
prosperity {rather than being one fragile and unfortunate result of it}.
February 8th;
Out very late with Gordon. We meet perky Judy and Karen in a cinnamon-scented bar {themed
around white rabbits wearing dark glasses}, staffed by Kati, a cheerful party lass. I leave
my folder in the Sark bar, our 2nd stopoff, but kindly
Istvan guards it until I returned there all distraught
{after two hours in stopoff 3, the hideous Sixtus}. Gordon makes pasta at four
in the morning and he and I talk about Britain introducing free national-health-service-style
access to lawyers and accountants -- say 12 hours a year per voter.
February 7th;
Was Friday worthwhile? I mark an essay with lots of
colour-coded pencil corrections and
my student gets even more depressed.
February 6th;
The vivacious Esther skips by for a coffee. Obviously you all knew that 'terror'
is the 4000th commonest word in English, but
this Hong Kong page
has some odder standings.
Preparing work for The Student, I learned that 'Skyros' {4519th commonest word
in English} and 'Deegan' {4521st commonest}, with 22
mentions each in a database of just over a million words, are commoner
than 'dishes' {4613th}, 'urgent' {4623rd}, 'ugly' {4628th}, 'enjoyment' {4638th},
'theirs' {4639th}, each with 21 mentions. And it goes on. Slightly flawed database?
Look yourself if you don't believe me.
Since you asked, this list closes with 'ham' {4998th}, 'label' {4999th}, 'ladder' {5000th},
and 'dreamed' {5001st} with 19 mentions each.
February 5th;
I teach the bubbly Nastasia and the patient, wise Kristina [who is currently keenly
devouring
'Northern Lights'
by Philip Pullman, despite
the Spectator's
grave misgivings about the book].
February 4th;
Some hours enjoyably suspended disbelief, hanging around in
cinema cafes
and
Arab restaurants, being
slowly mesmerised by the doe-eyed Zsuzsa.
February 3rd;
A mellow chat with
Tim and
Gordon about
world affairs
over beer & pasta.
February 2nd;
On account of
having
painted my key again,
I lock myself out, so have to go and
spend the night on hospitable
Rob's floor. A bit embarrassing, citizens.
February 1st;
Ryan leaves detailed phone message on
'nekezni'. He reckons it should
have no definite conjugation [the conjugation
locals misname 'targyas' {'taking an object'},
though Magyar verbs in the indefinite {alanyi} can take objects too],
and that should make the 3rd singular 'nekezik'.
January 31st;
Mother's birthday today. I should be there.
With Ryan went to a new cafe for a cherry milkshake. Perhaps the biggest collection
of ugly art I've seen in Budapest for a while, which is really saying something.
Ryan mentioned his Hungarian teacher jokingly calling
Magyar's lack of a verb for "to have" a handicap. A
little giggly from being in one room with so much hideous junk,
I made a verb for them. Since they use the "nekem van / there is for me ; neked van
/ there is for you..." form, I hit on "nekezni".
We came up with 2 conjugations. The stony-
faced Hungarian waiter-owner managed of course to leave large glass-sharp splinters of
broken cherry stone in my milkshake. Since I know about local catering
by now, I deftly detected & removed the shards without swallowing any.
In a typical Hungarian effort at a pun, the cafe has the proud name of "Bog' art
Cafe". Yes, the art is Bog.
-
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact@otherlanguages.org
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