"Grausamkeit ist das Heilmittel des verletzten Stolzes." [Nietzsche. Nachlass Fragmente Herbst 1881, 12.217] "Cruelty is the cure for wounded pride." When I lived in Bonn, my apartment was in a building just around the corner from where the Burschenschaft Frankonia, to which Nietzsche belonged
I'd swear I was looking at two different languages separated by several thousands of years in time, but what do I know. [via Laputan Logic] An adjunct professor of Basque Studies in Nevada is quoted in a newspaper article saying the usual, strange things about Basque, a European language isolate.
Gene research is helping clear up the mystery of the origins of the Basque people, a culture that apparently came out of East Africa 50,000 years ago and passed through the Middle East on the way to Western Europe, a University of Nevada researcher says.
That's one of the reasons when reviewing documents written in the ancient Sumerian language, "you would swear you are reading Basque," said Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, adjunct professor for the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.
[San Francisco Chronicle July 9, 2003, from AP]
As part of an unscientific experiment, I selected two texts, one in Sumerian and the other in Basque, so that readers of this blog could make their own comparison.
Some Sumerian, transliterated:
MAD 4:014=ZA 63 p.258f (ISN)~
1) 10.0.0 zu2-lum gur ku3-ta
2) u4 zu2-lum 1 ku3 gin2-a?
3) 0.3.2 al-ag2-ga2
4) USZ dumu sag-du5-ke4
5) USZ dumu sagi-mah-ra
6) ku3 10 ku3 gin2-sze3
7) i3-na-sum
8) ku3 aszag-ka sze aszag-bi
9) 30.0.0 sze gur ku3-ta gu2 ba-gar
10) mu sar-ka3-li2-LUGAL-ri2
11) lugal a-ga-de3{ki}-ka
12) USZ dumu sagi-mah
13) ME-an-ne2
-
14) dumu lugal-kalag-zi-pi
15) USZ dumu sag-du5-ka-ra? (SZE3)
16) in-da-pa
17) u4 buru14!-ka sze-zu 1 ku3 gin2 (GANA2)
18) 3.0.0 sze gur-ta 30.0.0 sze-pi gur
19) ga-ra-ag2]
20) in-na-du11? (AK)
21) inim-bi [al-til]?
(double line)
22) igi 1 nin-du11-ga
23) igi 1 lu2-[x]-x
24) igi 1 {d}en-lil2-[la2] nu-[kiri6[I. J. Gelb, "Sargonic texts in the Louvre Museum", Materials for the Assyrian Dictionary, no. 4, Chicago 1970]
Some Basque:
Kontuan izanik munduko askatasuna, justizia eta bakea giza familiako kide guztien berezko duintasunean eta eskubide berdin eta ukaezinetan oinarritzen direla;
Kontuan izanik giza eskubideak ez ezagutzearen eta gutxiestearen ondorioz, giza kontzientziari irain egiten dioten basakeriak gertatu izan direla; eta gizon-emakumeek, beldur eta gabezia orotik aske, hitz egiteko askatasuna eta sinesmen-askatasuna izango dituzten munduaren etorrera aldarrikatu dela gizakiaren helburu nagusi;
Kontuan izanik ezinbestekoa dela giza eskubideak zuzenbidezko erregimen batek babestea, gizakia-tirania eta zapalkuntzaren aurkako azken irtenbidea den matxinadara jo beharrean aurkitu ez dadin;
[Universal Declaration for Human Rights in Basque]
Some more texts in Akkadian and Neo-Sumerian.
"Genua, dieser entfärbte Süden." [Nietzsche. Nachlass Fragmente Herbst 1881, 12.3] This is from the same notebook that Nietzsche kept in Italy that contains the famous phrase, "ich habe meinen Regenschirm vergessen," that Derrida turned into a short book, Eperons , that I kept thinking of while reading Wittgenstein's Poker. "Genoa, this blanched south."
John, the genial proprietor of the Discouraging Word, and I have been trading emails back and forth, mainly about long words in English. He is far more diligent than I at posting his excellent lexicographical observations as blog entries (two on 26 July and one on 28 July, no permalinks). I've been putting this entry off for several days now, until tracking down the reference that I vaguely alluded to in one of my emails (quoted in part at TDW). I had remembered running across honorificabilitudinitatibus for the first time after having been introduced to the second edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage by the librarian in high school. The word is first cited in Giovanni Balbi's late 13th century Latin dictionary Summa grammaticalis quæ vocatur Catholicon, first printed by Gutenberg or one of his school. I had a somewhat muddled memory of this word, most famously used in Love's Labours Lost, and had subsequently confused it with a humorous Churchillian quotation that used terminological inexactitude as a synonym for lie. (I now think that I ran across this word for the first time elsewhere.) A short entry on inexactitude in Fowler's Usage cross-referenced to a longer one on polysyllabic humour lead me finally to the entry on pedantic humour which in itself exhibits the tendency it ostensibly prohibits.
No essential distinction is intended between [pendantic humour] and polysyllabic humour; one or the other name is more appropriate to particular specimens, and the two headings are therefore useful for reference. But they are manifestations of the same impulse, and the few remarks needed may be made here for both. A warning is necessary, because we have all of us, except the abnormally stupid, been pedantic humourists in our own time. We spend much of our childhood picking up a vocabulary; we like to air our latest finds; we discover that our elders are tickled when we come out with a new name that they thought beyond us; we devote some pains to tickle them further, and there we are, pedants and polysyllabicisits all. The impulse is healthy for children, and nearly universal — which is just why warning is necessary; for among so many there will always be some who fail to realize that the clever habit applauded at home will make them insufferable abroad. Most of those who are capable of writing well enough to find readers do learn sooner or later that playful use of long or learned words is a one-sided game boring the reader more than it pleases the writer, that the impulse to it is a danger-signal — for there must be something wrong with what they are saying if it needs recommending by such puerilities — and that yielding to the impulse is a confession of failure. But now and then even an able writer will go on believing that the incongruity between simple things to be said and out-of-the-way words to say them in has a perennial charm. Perhaps it has for the reader who never outgrows hobbledehoyhood; but for the rest of us it is dreary indeed. It is possible that acquaintance with such labels as pedantic and polysyllabic humour may help to shorten the time it takes to cure a weakness incident to youth.
[Addendum 07/29/03: Google revealed another entry citing Fowler's pedantic humour]
I was wondering the other day what the French word for lurker is, and so I spun around the francophone parts of the web [via Google] and a couple of definitions pop up:
lurker: mateur — Utilisateur d'un groupe de discussion Usenet, se contentant de lire sans contribuer. Voir delurk, Usenet.
[Glossaire RIFF]Badaud (n. m.) ou Badaude (n. f.): Internaute inscrit dans un forum de discussion et qui lit les articles sans jamais en publier.
[Glossaire Internet]
So, badaud or mateur. A peak inside my ancient Cassell's (one hundred years old this year) gave some interesting, pre-Internet English glosses for badaud: "ninny, booby; gazer, lounger, idler; cockney." My slightly younger Petit Larousse offered: "Niais, qui regarde tout, admire tout et crois tout ce qu'on lui dit." (Cute word that niais.) Both Gamillscheg and Meyer-Lübke point to badaud being a Provençal loanword (sometime in the 16th century). The latter gives the Vulgar Latin reconstructed root as *batare (Schallwort) "den Mund aufmachen." Badaud is glossed in German, Maulaffe 'inquisitive person, nosy parker.' The OED gives Low German as the origin of the verb to lurk and connects it with a Swedish dialectal word for bumpkin, lurka. (Oh, and the French gloss, mateur, in the first definition has a more risqué connotation.) There's also a nice interference going on between badaud and baud 'bps'.
[Addendum: Of course, if I'd looked at Jez's list which I'd mentioned earlier, I'd have seen badaud and the Galician mirón.]
One thing I've been procrastinating on lately, is playing around with the CSS stylesheet for this blog. Ian, over at Desiderata, beat me to it. (Looks good, too.) I've never liked the column of archives, blogrolling, and stuff over on the right because when the entries become too short, the columns expands leftwards at the bottom. So, as a stopgap measure, I'm going to use one of the other stylesheets over at Movable Type that simply moves the column over to the left, and has even less color than the default stylesheet.
As the result of some playful commentary over on Desiderata, I've been trying to come to terms with the concepts of Northern and Southern California, as opposed to the mythical states of North and South California. It's all just a matter of physical, cultural, and political geography. Objectively, splitting the state in half physically would involve drawing a line west to east beginning somewhere around Monterey on the coast over through Clovis and on to the Nevada border near Death Valley somewhere west of Beatty. AJ, up in Chico, thinks that Northern California ends somewhere north of Sonoma county. Another concept thrown around was Central California. This would run north from Sonoma county down south to San Luis Obispo. There are even some people up in the Far North have kept the idea of a separate state alive. I always felt that while Del Norte and Siskiyou had more to do with Southern Oregon than California, Modoc had closer ties to Northwestern Nevada. Back in the '60s, state senator Richard Dolwig of San Mateo, introduced a bill to split the state in two, with South California being those counties south of the Tehachapi mountains. I suppose we could just succeed from the Union and reconstitute the Bear Flag Republic. Being a Sonoman, I'd approve of that. Meanwhile, politically, now we have to vote on whether or not we want the sitting governor to remain sitting.
[Addendum 07/27/03: Ernie, over at little. yellow different. has a whole different take on the whole North-South California thing vis-a-vis the Bay Area. Good Old Gold Mountain / Saint Francis; brittle, brittle. As for famous Oaklanders there's, of course, no-there-there, Dirty Gurdy Stein. via Chicken or Beef?]
It started as a simple observation, over on Navire dot net, about the fashionable and unnecessary use of English by French bloggers, but then it descended in the appended commentary into a discussion of how "orthographe, SMS, anglicismes, créole, sont des symptômes d'une dégradation de la langue, j'y vois donc une certaine parenté." A bit harsh: creoles are a symptom of the degradation of language. And by language one means Parisian French, no doubt.
Peter Krouse has written a strange article based on the thoughts of Mac Watson, chairman of the Business division at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio. [via Universal Language via Language Hat] In essence, there are a lot of non-native speakers of English out there, and what they speak oftentimes sounds different from standard American English. Well, true enough, but … The article then mentions English as a second language (ESL), and says bluntly: "But the ESL version is simpler and without the slang and idioms that native speakers unconsciously use every day." Yeah, sure, and ESL doesn't use metaphor either. The article confuses near-pidgins (like "Chinglish") with "fractured English," and then mixes them up with ESL and American businessmen's English. The tortured logic and linguistics of this article are just too much for me. Yes, if I were trying to close a business deal with a non-native speaker of English whose command of the language was less than fluent, I would try my best to use simple sentence structure, a vocabulary limited by the subject of our discourse, and not too many idioms. But, if non-native English speakers say something that I don't understand, I doubt it has much to do with the simplicity of their ESL or with their choice of idioms, and more to do with faulty phonology, syntax, morphology, or perhaps literally translating idioms from their first language into English.
A couple of sites containing technical theatrical terminology. The first is in English and the second French. "Now where'd I put that cookie?"
[Fred Borzeix' francophone site via La Grande Rousse and the anglophone glossary via Google]
Never would've guessed it, but somebody has made a film based on at least some small part of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It's German, it's called Prüfstand 7, and it was directed by Robert Bramkamp. It's got everything: Wernher von Braun, General Dornberger, V2 rockets, KZ Mittelbau-Dora, etc. I'll have to get the DVD and watch it. Pynchon has a special place in my heart because he was a technical writer at Boeing in the early '60s who later made a name for himself as a brilliant author of quirky books. In 1997 while I was subscribed to the Pynchon-L list, one of Pynchon's ex-friends surfaced long enough to involve me and the rest of the list into a strange Internet experiment in collaborative fiction. A book was produced and two copies were mailed to me for my part in the weirdness.
[Addendum 07/21/03: Nice von Braun links: Redstone Arsenal and NASA.
Read my lips: "It ain't about the oil, stupid!" Maps and everything. Imagine Cheney et al. planning for the invasion of Iraq in March of 2001,and most importantly, the division of the spoils of war. [via Rafe Colburn's superb blog]
Well, the web has changed. No more Netscape, but this is a good thing. No new versions of Internet Explorer. How could that be a bad thing? What's wrong with an OS monopoly? No, no, no. Musings on epersonae. Tim Bray weighs in.
Gaius Publius, over on Counter Punch, has written a provocative moral indictment on the citizenry of the US of A. [via wood s lot]
So are the American people just stupid ("addled" as one commentator puts it), or is something else going on? Unless you really believe that Americans are less smart than the whole rest of the world — in fact, are less smart than you yourself (such an elitist thought!) — one can't help but consider the other conclusion, that things are exactly as most people want them, and if the facts are in the way, then goodbye facts.
In other words, one must consider that not only are the press and whistle-blower announcements swimming up the stream of Bushist damage control; they also swim up the stream of what the public, or a good part of it, wants and is determined to believe.
There are times when my hard-earned cynicism in the face of political reality fails me.
Language Hat, always on to a good story, has an entry referring to a BBC story [via Incoming Signals] on how the British invented lasagna. Without descending into the politics of food (e.g., did the Genoese bring back pasta from the court of Genghis Khan 40 years before the Venetian Marco Polo), here's what some of the reference books have to say about lasagna:
lasagna sf. [da un lat. volg. lasania, da làsanium, marmitta] larghi nastri di pasta sfoglia: un piatto di lasagne al forno || accr. || N. fettucina, nastrino, pappardella, tagliatella, macheroni, vermicelli.
[Fernando Palazzi. 1939 [1979]. Novissimo Dizionario della Lingua Italiana, p. 742]
4917. *lasania "eine Art Nudeln" (zu lasanum "Kochgeschirr")
It. lasagna (> südfrz. lazanho, sp. lasaña) "Krapfen". — Ablt.: tosk. lasagnolu, comel. laðané, ðalané "Nudelholz" Merlo, MIL 23, 287. Trotz südfrz. lausan nicht zu lausia 4946 oder zu einem ohnehin nicht annehmbaren *LAVA "Stein" Nigra, AGl. 14, 287.
[W. Meyer-Lübke. 1935. Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch]
The etymology for lozen (older form loseyn) the OED suggests that it is perhaps from the OFr loseigne, a variant of losange 'lozenge'. Lewis & Short define a lasanum as a utensil, perhaps for cooking, or a chamber utensil or closestool. Liddell & Scott define lasâna as (1) a trivet or stand for a pot, and (2) a nightstool. Lozenge seems to be connected to a Celtic loanword for some kind of stone.
Dave over at Chicken or Beef is trying to craft a linguist's geek code, and he's soliciting help from the linguo-blogosphere. Let's all pitch in.
Carole Desbarats / Jean Paul Gorce: "Croyez-vous que l'oeuvre de Jean-Luc Godard ait exercé une influence sur votre propre travail ou encore sur votre imaginaire?"
Jacques Derrida: "Pas la moindre influence, à ma connaissance. Pardon pour la brièveté et la sincérité brutale de la réponse. Si le temps et les forces m'en étaient donnés, je dirais peut-être davantage, mais je n'en suis même pas sûr."
[Carole Desbarats & Jean Paul Gorce, eds., L'effet Godard. Paris: Milan 1989, p. 102/110; via Derrida Online, via wood s lot's happy birthday, JD]
Maybe it was because of his earlier, more bourgeois films ...
Translation:
Carole Desbarats / Jean Paul Gorce: "Do you believe that the work of Jean-Luc Godard has exercised an influence on your own work or else on your imagination?"
Jacques Derrida: "Not the least influence. Excuse the brevity and brutal sincerity of the reply. Perhaps given the time and the forces, I might say more, but I am not so sure about that."
Ray Davis over at Bellona Times adds another log to the (phon)aesthetics of bloggery.
That root shame being "weblog," the primal misnomer, which trespassed on the established and necessary term "web log" (where we find HTTP stats) and only applied to a small subset of exemplars. (Like, captains don't board ship to annotate other captains' logs, nor do their logs crossreference each other.)
What we write — what's-new catalogers, fiskers, diarists, critics, and poets alike — are web journals. Journals: as in magazine, as in zine, as in newspaper, as in pamphlets, as in ledger, as in notebook. On the web: as in short, with links, with the flexibility to support established readers (reverse chronological order) and random readers (findable, searchable) and chatty readers (comments, email, trackback).
I'll have to agree with him on the unfortunate namespace collision with HTTP logs, but perhaps that's why blog developed. Who knows? I'm holding out for bjourn, rhymes with churn, although it sounds too much like Bajoran in rapid speech.
[More links at Semantics etc.]
The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity call for VP Cheney's resignation. [via rc3 dot org]
Also: nur derjenige vergleichende sprachforscher, welcher aus dem hypothesentrüben dunstkreis der werkstätte, in der man die indogermanischen grundformen schmiedet, einmal heraustritt in die klare luft der greifbaren wirklichkeit und gegenwart, um hier sich belehrung zu holen über das, was ihn die graue theorie nimmer erkennen lässt, und nur derjenige, welcher sich für immer lossagt von jener früherhin weit verbreiteten, aber auch jetzt noch auszutreffenden forschungsweise, nach der man die sprache nur auf dem papier betrachtet, alles in terminologie, formelwesen und grammatischen schematismus aufgeben lässt und das wesen der erscheinungen immer schon dann ergründet zu haben glaubt, wenn man einen namen für die sache ausfindig gemacht hat: — nur der kann zu einer richtigen vorstellung von der lebens- und umbildungsweise der sprachformen gelangen und diejenigen methodischen principien gewinnen, ohne welche man überhaupt bei sprachgeschichtlichen forschungen keine glaubwürdigen resultate erreichen kann und ohne welche im besonderen ein vordringen in die hinter der historischen sprachüberlieferung zurückliegenden zeiträume einer meerfahrt ohne compass gleicht.
[Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann. 1878. Morphologische Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen, pp. ix-x]
Translation by W P Lehmann. (Thanks to John Hardy.)
Therefore: only that comparative linguist who for once emerges from the hypotheses-beclouded atmosphere of the workshop in which the original Indo-European forms are forced, and steps into the clear air of tangible reality and of the present in order to get information about those things which gray theory can never reveal to him, and only he who renounces forever that formerly widespread but still used method of investigation according to which people observe language only on paper and resolve everything into terminology, systems of rules, and grammatical formalism and believe they have then fathomed the essence of the phenomena when they have devised a name for a thing — only he can arrive at a correct idea of the way in which linguistic forms live and change, and only he can acquire those methodological principles without which no credible results can be obtained at all in investigations in historical linguistics and without which any penetration into the periods of the past which lie behind the historical tradition of a language is like a sea voyage without a compass.
"Mathematics is a language." At this moment in time, the cited page contains three quotations on why mathematics should be regarded as a language. My knee-jerk reaction, and it's just that I'm afraid, is that mathematics is not a language in say the way that English is a language. Why? Well, if English and mathematics were languages, you could translate texts between them. You can use English (or any other natural language) to write mathematics and about mathematics, but I don't see you translating, except in some cranky manner, a book — any book — written in a natural language into mathematics. Another thought: is mathematics langue or parole? If the former, are there any examples of the latter? Why do mathematicians bother with natural language at all? No, the mapping between language and mathematics is more complicated than that which can be expressed by the copula. An interesting site nonetheless.
[via the Cut the Knot site, via a thread on L S Vygotsky, via a Language Hat entry on language and cognition]
Jeremy Smith at Jezblog has started a glossary listing blog terms in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician, although he's willing to add other languages. [via Grimoire d'une chercheuse en herbe]
Dave Lindorff has written an article on some "new" terms to memorize for use during the current conflict in Iraq. (I see he's a fellow member of the National Writers Union.) Everything old is new again.
It's a rare time when linguistics and politics intersect on this blog, but now's the time. Ari Fleischer seems to have rewritten the rules of logical argumentation.
I think the American people continue to express their support for ridding the world of Saddam Hussein based on just cause, knowing that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons that were unaccounted for that we're still confident we'll find. I think the burden is on those people who think he didn't have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.
[Ari Fleicher, 07/09/03 press briefing]
Jim over on Everything Burns thinks it depends on what "is" means. I think it has more to do with what the antecedent for "they" is. The WMD-doubters? The WMD? Something else? Fleischer goes on to qualify:
We know he had them in the '90s, he used them. So just because they haven't yet been found doesn't mean they didn't exist. The burden is on the critics to explain where the weapons of mass destruction are. If they think they were destroyed, the burden is on them to explain when he destroyed them and where he destroyed them.
No, we didn't know he had them in the '90s, and therein lies the Bush regime's burden of proof.
[Addendum 07/12/03: Ian over at Desiderata has his take on Humpty Dumpty Fleischer semantics]
Ipse dixit Dear Abby [via epersonae: Snapping Links II]
The written word takes on a life of its own and never dies — particularly in cyberspace. That is why it's important that a person carefully consider what he or she is posting before making it public. I cannot urge people strongly enough to remember that on the Internet there is no such thing as an eraser. The messages live on and on for all to see.
Ms Van Buren goes on to illustrate the horrors of writing online with an IT professional's laundry list of what people type, do, and visit online at the company where he works. I'd never imagined that there was an eraser in meatspace either. One should be careful about what one says, does, or writes.
The Making of a Physicist: A Talk with Murray Gell-Mann [via Arts & Letters Daily]
Uncharacteristically, I discussed my application to Yale with my father, who asked, "What were you thinking of putting down?" I said, "Whatever would be appropriate for archaeology or linguistics, or both, because those are the things I'm most enthusiastic about. I'm also interested in natural history and exploration." He said, "You'll starve!" After all, this was 1944 and his experiences with the Depression were still quite fresh in his mind; we were still living in genteel poverty. He could have quit his job as the vault custodian in a bank and taken a position during the war that would have utilized his talents — his skill in mathematics, for example — but he didn't want to take the risk of changing jobs. He felt that after the war he would regret it, so he stayed where he was. This meant that we really didn't have any spare money at all.
I asked him, "What would you suggest?" He mentioned engineering, to which I replied, "I'd rather starve. If I designed anything it would fall apart." And sure enough when I took an aptitude test a year later I was advised to take up nearly anything but engineering. Then my father suggested, "Why don't we compromise — on physics?"
Interesting bit in the article about his first wife, archaeologist J. Margaret Dow, and her connection with the discovery of Linear B tablets. As for the coining of the term quark, I'd always heard that Gell-Mann got it from Joyce, but there are some who say this is apocryphal:
Did Murray Gell-Mann take the word 'quark' from James Joyce? This origin, as related by Thomas Jones (LRB, 24 August [2000]), may be apocryphal. But if Finnegans Wake is indeed the source, there arise two questions: where did Joyce get the word, and how should it be pronounced? As an old German word still in use, the masculine noun, Quark, has the meaning: 'curd(s)'; and, figuratively: 'trifle', 'trash', 'filth', 'slime'. In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles, conversing with God in the 'Prologue in Heaven', says contemptuously about humans: 'In jedem Quark begräbt er Seine Nase.'
[Paul Pfalzner, letter to the London Review of Books, vol. 22, no. 18]
Gail Armstrong over on Open Brackets has a nice entry commenting on the alleged decline of French as a world language and language policy in general.
While it went on to be a relatively reasoned piece, if read hastily, in the title — Last 'adieu' to French as world language? — and throughout there are inferences that French is on the verge of extinction, threatened with cannibalisation and fatal bastardization by English. (Qualifying the English language with words like "prestigious" instead of the more apt "practical" is just baiting.)
France's many regional languages were killed by an appalling national policy that forbade their teaching in schools, and this is one of the (most tragic) ways that languages die. They don't die merely from the influence of another language. On the contrary: a language's ability to adapt and transform itself ensures its continued vitality.
How very strange. My recent entry on Waning Nostalgia mentioned Tim Maroney, one of the first netizens I knew by name back in the late '80s. Today skimming through my blog roll, I came upon news that Mr Maroney passed away last week. And, he'd been blogging, too. [via Disinformation via Everything Burns by happenstance really] Ah, well, rest in peace.
Over at Blogalization in an entry on Lingua Franca I ran across a language I'd never heard of before: Portunhol. Described as a pidgin, it's the portmanteau word you get if you cross Portugês and Espanhol. I remember an Intro Russian professor telling me once how his Polish students always sounded like they were speaking Polish with a stage Russian accent. Me? Je parle française comme une vache espagnole.
There's a curious bit of post-ironic performance art qua minimalist website whose URL is shooting around the blogosphere.
I can name 20 people from my old school class who aren't in Google. I can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of webcrawling. I can go into a bar and hear stories Usenet hasn't come close to in its 22 years of waffle. "Oh but what about the stuff you CAN get on the web?" the netheads say. But they're missing the point.
I can walk to my local public library, and I often do, but the number of foreign and academic journals available there is nil. So, it's off to the NRLF or Doe library at Cal. I also enjoy talking with people, face to face, something else I can't do online, though, I can send email and chat with people from all over the world. I also buy books, both to read and to keep. The web is just another tool I have to get at information. It's neither the only tool nor is it infallible, but it's a good and useful one. Of course, the website mentioned above could be a joke, but its tone is just a shade too brittle.
Some loose odds and ends:
The original entry on Blogalization concerns the recent victory of the nationalist Dansk Folkeparti replacing "the usual set of small centrist parties as the party that decides the balance of power in parliament." (See the party's site for an English translation of their political platform.)
As for the French term, I suppose it's too much to ask for that we anglophones borrow the term, or we could coin the word bloggard.
Translation:
Carnaille: Individual or a group of individuals who pollutes the blogosphere with uncalled for, disagreeable, and useless comments. A carnaille often finds pleasure in deforming somebody else's discourse. The carnaille is to the blogosphere what the troll is to news groups and electronic lists. [Cf. canaille 'scoundrel']
Kai von Fintel over on Semantics etc. has posted an entry of links on whether Incans used quipu (or khipu) to record their language, Quechua (or Qheshwa). Khipus are basically knots tied in strings and for a long time they were dismissed as a numeric system and not a "writing" system. Quechua has the most speakers of any Native American language (I would have thought that was Maya), and a quick search to determine how khipu should be pronounced led me to the conclusion that I need to do some more research. Here's a quick overview of Qheshwa phonology. My guess at this point is that the kh in khipu is a (post-)velar stop, but I suppose it depends on which dialect the Spanish borrowed the word from.
Well, it's happened again. Over the past couple of entries I've typed before thinking or didn't think while typing or some such. Anyway, the result has been that I've typed things that were contradictory to the gist of my argument. Oh, well. I've already blamed the heat and the times, but now I suppose I should just blame myself. When I first started blogging, I was quite careful about editing my entries before finally posting them, but lately … I just don't know. And now a bunch of my favorite blogs are going or have gone on vacation. Well, this should allow me more time to edit.
Those slyboots at Musclefish passed along a link to this dictionary of dirty words. It seems that one of those quintessential British anal stage comics, Viz, was somehow involved. It always comes as a shock to one who made his humorous bones on Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python that there was another darker strain of English humor out there.
Just what I've been looking for. [via Ben Hammersley via Marc Canter] While writing about the new Echo initiative, Clay Shirky at Corante digs deep into the quiddity of blog, wiki, Usenet, and email lists, with a healthy dollop on the politics of syndication specs, the cult of personality, and la politique des auteurs. A bloggy must-read.
Language Hat's entry on Larry Trask and Miladus' Bouhours quotation on French got me to thinking about what Marina Yaguello calls les fous de langage. I have to chuckle whenever I run across a book like Chinese and Sumerian by Charles Ball [1851?-1924] or happen upon any number of folks suggesting that Lithuanian or Sanskrit is the origin of all languages. For example, Edo Nyland, a retired Canadian forester, is convinced that Saharan (of which Basque is a present-day survival) is the origin of most languages. You decide. Of course, the prince of the lunatic lovers of language has to be Jean-Pierre Brisset [1837-1923] who through the vigorous use of puns proved that the origin of human language was frogs. There's a good write-up of Brisset in Jean-Jacques Lecercle's The Violence of Language.
Dr Harold F. Schiffman, Professor of Dravidian Linguistics and Culture at University of Pennsylvania, teaches a class on language policy and has some nice resources online thereto. He's included a link to the Consortium for Language Policy and Planning pages with more resources and links.