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. . . Main links
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dictionaries, translation
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other links
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endangered languages
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language list
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to links pages [1]
[2] [3]
[4] / SMSek 36 20 586 4479-hez
A set of language resources in progress
links /
reviews /
languages? /
book /
@ /
artist /
sound /
screenplay
to link to an entry, just add the date, as in
http://www.otherlanguages.org/#2002august6th
May 22nd;
Esther takes me to see
Miriam's new Afro-beat band.
May 21st;
Young
Kristina
gets stern with me.
May 19th;
A harmonious lesson with Hussam. Later
Gordon
hosts.
May 17th;
Ryan meets me for coffee, gives me a photocopy of a
Rorty article
about postmodernism.
May 15th;
More classes,
this afternoon the friskiest yet.
May 13th;
Much better. Lots of sleep and my charming class show me around
their town in the sunshine.
May 11th;
On the lunchtime train to Austria with Friendly Owl [Catherine, I should say], Bob, Dave, & Maurice
to Austria ignoring studied rudeness of
MAV dining-car staff.
May 9th;
Tamas
kindly lets Robin, Istvan
and I in through the stage door to see his extreme fashion show, involving
mirrored-sunglasses-wearing models snipping audience members' sleeves with scissors,
Jelena dressed
in a birthday-cake fairy-godmother ballgown, and a platform-mounted foetus girl howling inside a
stocking bag. Highlights included pairs of models in ripped black underwear walking
very carefully because of being attached to each other by a black, concertina-ing trunk like those
over wedding-photographers' zoom lenses
[one pair joined at the mouth, one pair joined at the breast,
and one shimmying duo joined at the groin].
Most fetching was a gazelle-like mannequin in high heels and a revealing frame-like dome-skirt
cage decked in candles showing off her legs to excellent effect.
May 7th;
Presumably
this weblog,
A Flight Risk,
supposedly by a rich young heiress
fleeing an arranged marriage, is someone having a crack at
writing a suspense-filled, page-clicking novel in web-diary form.
Hooked?
May 5th;
It seems I am a
'Low-fidelity All-Star Hipster' with totally natural cool, and I know
all the words to
Kung Fu Fighting, reveals a
quiz uncovered by
parallax.
May 3rd;
Out in sun and cool breezes outside the kebab place, two Hungarian
alternative lads in
grubby checked shirts and dirty blonde dreadlocks are eating. I sit at
another table across from what looks like a strangely-shaped brown
rucksack on one of the white metal garden chairs. When it moves, I realise
it's a very large bird of prey with a leather hood over its head. A lot larger
than
Nina's Puppy,
the boys refer to it as a type of eagle. Wrapped in its
own enormous wings, like a brown Orson Welles cloak, it looked very big and
nasty, quite capable of pecking the eyes out of an unemployed translator
at a neighbouring table, were it unhooded and able to spot one. Then I notice
a second, smaller bird, only handbag-sized, perhaps a
hawk or kestrel, perched
on the edge of their table. Probably belonging to the smaller Hungarian male.
May 1st;
I pick up the things I left at
Vista from
Heather,
such as my handy guide to
Germany's parliament, then get over to Gordon's.
April 29th;
Nigel says
SARS
is a C disease. Here's
his handy Gulf security lexicon.
April 27th;
I went to
the gym.
Goodness.
April 25th;
After dark, genial Gordon introduces me to
Wayne,
a writer & photographer who studied Hungarian in London.
April 23rd;
Last twinge of shoulder pain as I wake up. Busy day. While teaching Kristina,
her mother Marina pops in, looking particularly swish in a striking gold top with
stylish gold and red slacks. Marina and I chat briefly about
Lenin's deal with the Okhrana,
and
Andropov's
role in helping his protege
Gorbachev
to power. Once she is out of
the room, exasperated young Kristina cries out in her almost-American accent
"That was SO boring!!" Her mother immediately shouts back in English from
the stairs outside
"It's not boring, Kristina, it's the history of your country!"
April 21st;
Seems
this man, Sina Motallebi
has just been arrested in Iran for keeping a weblog.
Via
samizdata and
Hossein Derakhshan.
April 19th;
Last night Jeremy and Robin picked me up from Lakitelek in the
Russian bike with sidecar.
We motor about in the dark.
After a lot of sleep, the
shoulder hurts less but still feels very weak. In car to Szentes
with Gyorgyi and 3 children, including a vigorously naughty Bela.
Jeremy achieves some kind of breakthrough fixing the 1968
motorbike
he describes as "a bit of a noiser". The puszta is flat, windy
and has reeds and bullrushes stretching for
miles in every direction.
April 17th;
Wonderful dinner at
Jim
and Julia's with Gordon,
Diane and friends. I drink far
too much wine.
April 15th;
Intense, melatonin-fuelled dreams continue.
April 13th;
Morning coffee with
David and
visiting poet Antony.
Pineapple milkshake with
Diane in brilliant sunshine. Later a
Tarot reading
from Elysia while Tamas plays background guitar in his yellow cardigan and
rustles up a quick supper. I draw
the Hermit and
the Priestess three times in
succession. Later at
Kultiplex
with Jim and friends.
Hungarian avant-garde artists have the look down to perfection
{stubbly, tired - wearing loose, unzipped, retro sports wear in muddy browns &
greys, with the occasional stripe of washed-out blue or faded acid green} but aren't
very good at the actual art. We retire to Castro's, where Bill, a
graph theorist,
kindly works out the odds for me of drawing the same two cards in 3
separate draws {7, 5, 5} from a
22-card pack, the
Major Arcana.
It's not that unlikely, around 1 in 18 - since
any two of the first 7 could have been the pair occurring again in the 2nd draw.
April 11th;
By day, Kristina's father, a wary, muscular man who makes
holographic security tags in Ukraine, gives me a lift. Eszter mentions
her parents' website.
April 9th;
Robin and I explore Jeremy's excellent garage on Filler utca, and Jeremy shows us his
April 7th;
Worried by my backpain postings, kindly
Rob
recommends me his physio, and
points to a
twin-primes
{...(17 19), (29 31)...}
'breakthrough' story.
I don't want to be ignorantly unappreciative of these men's
painstaking work, but where's the punchline? Are
there infinitely many prime pairs or not? Are clearcut proofs hopeless now?
Oh, and still hurts, but much better thanks.
April 5th;
Excellent. Now I have a vivid backache. Finally have found a
true
kindred spirit. "I was thirsty and went
to the kitchen to get a glass of water."
April 3rd;
Exhausted after teaching & rushing all day yesterday. Met Bob, who had found a
Hungarian anti-European
Union poster.
April 1st;
The headcold digs in and shows stubborn resistance. I'm alarmed to learn
the deadline for that
Swedish
business-plan competition is within
hours.
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 /
contact@otherlanguages.org
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March 31st;
Dinner with Bob. I contact
Weekly Standard.
March 30th;
As often, last week's cat-allergy asthma blends smoothly into a thick
head cold. Is my immune system hoaxing itself? Or dinner with
Gordon last night?
March 28th;
After 12 hours' sleep I
feel quite reasonable.
March 26th;
A pretty busy day. We go for lunch with Assunta, a famed friend of
Robin from his Berlin
days, in her garden just outside Vienna. A curry and a very friendly dog.
Then we coffee with ex-gourmet-chef journalist Severin and his young Danish wife Majken
in the
Palm
House,
a sort of mini Crystal Palace full of 30-foot-tall palm trees.
Then we join Oliver, his gorgeous sisters Eva & Vilma, and mother for dinner with Oliver's
colleague Angelika & her computerist boyfriend Thomas.
March 24th;
Lunch with Finky, who alarms the Polish au pair by taking Puedi's children onto the garage roof,
followed by a trip to help Puedi ferry rubbish from Elka's house to a municipal recycling place.
In the evening I find
easyinternetcafe is
not actually easy at all {no staff, so blocked sites undeblockable},
then a stimulating drink with Florian and
Clarissa,
who works with glass artists like
Brian Clarke.
March 22nd;
A long drive to Munich. After Puedi chats with us into the small
hours, I drift asleep at 5.30am in a room
full of toys where a giant fluffy green
M&M;
character watches over me from behind a red and yellow
hammock.
March 20th;
After a relaxed start, Robin and I wander around
Cologne. Alice, a painter of natural skies and
treetops, takes us to an exhibition called
´
March 18th;
Welcomed by Kate last night, today once again Jules
helps out and puts me in touch with Ben. Then I meet
Billy the linguist in person at the Festival Hall for
a herbal tea! Every bit as mellow yet precise as his
weblog suggests. I buy the DNA special print edition
of New Scientist, get back to Kate´s, and she, Robin
and Amir are relaxing.
March 16th;
Also rich in black and white line drawings, mother's 1962 copy of
T.H. Savory's
'Zoology'
in the Teach Yourself Books series - back when they had the stern,
wasplike yellow and black covers, was an odd read. On one hand enjoyable to find
an old-fashioned straight-into-the-action book starting with single-celled
microbes and going from there. On the other hand, a slightly fuller glossary of
zoology terms might have helped. Unapologetically taxonomic.
Here's the first paragraph of Chapter 5, page 51:
March 15th;
Robert Kaplan's
book about the history of zero
from the library was interesting,
and has lots of charming black and white drawings taken from historical sources.
A double page of herb-like plant drawings showing the evolution of various
modern words for zero, nil, nought etc is a treat.
Disguising his strong views with lots of cheerful wit, he comes down quite firmly
on the idea that the zero-and-place-value system was not [as usually claimed]
an Indian 6th or 7th century AD innovation, but actually was something they got
from more secretive Greeks in a roundabout way in the late Hellenic period.
'The Nothing that is', like
Adrian Woolfson's book,
rather indulges its own
sense of the lyrical, but with much better judged humour, and a lighter touch.
The point where an Old English author from 1300 is quoted to explain
Knuth's
notation for
Ramsey numbers
is a typical moment. Even where,
later in the book, Kaplan keeps the whimsy pedal pressed fairly close to the
floor, you're still left wishing you'd had him as a maths teacher, instead
of the grey-faced dullards we all actually got.
March 13th;
Finish the
Hebden Bridge Library copy of
Adrian Woolfson's
'Life without genes'
around midnight. Compelling in parts, deeply annoying in others. An initial
foray into various kinds of increasingly-large toy hypermarkets, culminating in
the awesomely-sized 'Toy Space' is clever. Woolfson uses Toy Space
[a planet-sized shop containing all possible toys, once made, to be made, and
that can be made, ever] to explain the idea of Gene Space, a vast collection
of kits of all the possible permutations of DNA-codings and perhaps other codings
too. Woolfson's obvious debt to Borges' more crisply expressed
'Library
of Babel' image - a combinatoric collection of all possible strings of printed characters,
so all possible books, containing all actual books as a tiny subset -
is vaguely alluded to later, but not really acknowledged.
March 11th;
I finish Peter's copy of
'The Figure in the Landscape' by John Dixon Hunt.
A very smooth, but quite bewildering read. Bewildering largely because it's about
18th-century English poetry, landscape gardening and landscape painting,
and I know next to nothing about any of the three. Towards the end,
the scraps of things I half-recall of
Alexander Pope,
Capability Brown, or Thomas Gainsborough
all started fitting a bit better into bigger changes of fashion and beliefs.
Like any new subject area, a bit of a slippery ice wall at
first. Probably starts to take shape more after 3 or 4 books.
March 9th;
I wade through the Sunday newspapers.
The
Observer Magazine has an article about art curators who are
"iconoclastic"
[i.e. break pictures]. What's wrong
with simple words like 'bold'?
March 7th;
So, I'll put links here to wherever I stick it, but the brief outline of my
view is that Searle's
Chinese Room argument is just as deeply flawed as the
artificial-intelligence community claim, essentially assuming what it seeks to
show {the specialness of first-person consciousness}, but that Searle's
philosophical instincts are still in the right direction. Inverting Turing's
simulation test, so as to claim that even a perfect simulator [a person locked
in a room full of rulebooks for turning Chinese writing into English writing]
is still not a real intelligence, is bold of Searle. He attacks Turing's
simulated-thinking-is-as-good-as-real-thinking case apparently at its strongest
point. But the room-bound nature of the Chinese Room [like the Turing Test]
"pumps" Searle's intuition
just like everyone else's, and stops both detractors and proponents of machine
intelligence from seeing the real issue, which is autonomy. The
Robot Reply seems
to get close, but is just cladding the Chinese Room in a moving shell. Both Searle
and his opponents, AI defenders like
Daniel Dennett,
have got it upside down. [Though Dennett got very close, worrying about what
he called
'cognitive wheels' and the AI
'frame problem' -
but notice how in his very 2nd sentence "Its only task was to fend
for itself." the design assumption subtly smothers any autonomy assumption before it
could even get started.]
Bodies are not vehicles or add-ons for intelligences. Rather, intelligences are
subordinate features of bodies,
serving higher-level animal needs like food, survival, sex. No system built
into a box, even a moving box, is going to be intelligent, because both
the consciousness defenders
[like
March 5th;
The second day I bump into Peter on the approach to
Hebden Bridge, again wearing
a yellow flower in his buttonhole.
March 3rd;
Sent article to editor at Loaded.
March 1st;
Meet Ed for
a drink in Halifax.
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