"China embraces nuclear future"

From the Washington Post:

"Under plans already announced, China intends to spend $50 billion to
build 32 nuclear plants by 2020. Some analysts say the country will
build 300 more by the middle of the century. That's not much less than
the generating power of all the nuclear plants in the world today.

By that point, the Chinese economy is expected to be the world's
largest, and the idea that it may get most of its electricity from
nuclear fission is being met with both optimism and concern. Nuclear
power plants, unlike those that run on fossil fuels, release few
greenhouse gases. But they produce waste that can be dangerously
radioactive for thousands of years.
...
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology report said China may have to
add as many as 200 nuclear power plants by 2050 to meet its needs.
Academics from China's leading technical university, Tsinghua
University, said the country might need more, equivalent to the output
of 300 plants.

In comparison, the United States has just more than 100 operating
nuclear plants. Nuclear power has effectively been on hold in the United
States since the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania,
but, with encouragement from the Bush administration, companies are
thinking about ordering new plants.
...
In the desert of Central Asia, China is planning its own version of
Yucca Mountain, albeit without serious opposition. Some local leaders
have protested the Beishan Mountain disposal project, but their concerns
have been muted.

The Beishan Mountains are a lonely outpost, with the closest permanent
residents more than 60 miles away. The only people who venture here are
nomadic Mongolian herdsmen with goats and camels. They move from one
small oasis to another in what is otherwise a desolate, gray desert for
hundreds of miles around. The only signs of the nuclear waste site to
come are the dark tents that scientists put up and take down as they
test rock layers to find the best place for disposal..."

Source: Washington Post, May 29, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/3c6fo6

Bendita bagunça

Marcelo Coelho escreve no seu blog:

"Quem reclama de ter uma mesa atulhada de papéis pode encontrar alívio
num livro recém-editado na Inglaterra, A Perfect Mess: the hidden
benefits of disorder, de Eric Abrahamson e David Freedman. "A desordem
cria conexões", dizem os autores, cujo livro foi resenhado por Andrew
Stark no Times Literary Supplement.

Já Umberto Eco, em Como se faz uma tese, recomendava que o velho
método de acumular anotações de leitura em fichas de cartolina fosse
bagunçado de vez em quando, embaralhando-se todas as fichas para ver se
alguma aproximação casual de dados rendia frutos. Num mundo
bagunçado, uma informação específica pode ser difícil de achar, mas
conexões se fazem mais naturalmente.

O resenhista do "TLS" argumenta, contudo, que a oposição hoje em
dia não é entre ordem e bagunça numa mesa, mas entre mundo real e
virtual. Podemos encontrar informações isoladas num computador com
facilidade, já que cada "ficha" que antigamente estava ordenada em
ordem alfabética numa caixinha hoje em dia é acessível de várias
formas, através de várias "entradas" diferentes no computador.
Acontece, diz o resenhista, que as conexões acidentais que fazíamos ao
remexer papéis em cima de uma mesa agora não se fazem mais no espaço,
e sim no tempo. Pulamos de um link a outro, vamos nos enfiando cada vez
mais fundo no labirinto das conexões estabelecidas por nós (ou pelos
outros), e o difícil é refazer o caminho de volta. As conexões, ou
links, se sucedem no tempo, e não numa realidade sinóptica.

No mundo bagunçado da mesa, defendido pelos autores, conexões são
iluminações instantâneas do gênio, enquanto informações isoladas
são difíceis de encontrar. No mundo virtual, informações são
instantâneas mas as conexões são difíceis de fazer. Ou fáceis
demais, na ida, e difíceis na volta: a bagunça na mesa, conclui Andrew
Stark, é substituída pela bagunça na cabeça.

É como se esquecêssemos, ao longo de qualquer pesquisa no google, a
pergunta original, enquanto outras vão surgindo na cabeça."

http://marcelocoelho.folha.blog.uol.com.br/
30/05/2007

吃素以阻止气候变暖?

"近日，有消息称，英国政府正在考虑鼓励全体国民
吃素，从而减少温室气体排放，减缓气候变暖进程。
最近，英国环境署官员给一个宣传素食主义和保护动
物的环保组织发送的电子邮件内容被曝光，邮件中提
到，素食主义能够给全球环境带来较大的益处，尤其
是在阻止全球气候变暖方面将起到非常大的作用。
...
此前，有专家指出，包括牛在内的牲畜养殖会带来大
量的甲烷等温室气体排放，其中，地球上的牛呼出的
甲烷占大气中甲烷总量的20%。据悉，牲畜排放的温室
气体包括甲烷和一氧化二氮等，这些气体产生的温室
效应远比二氧化碳要大。还有专家推算认为，全球温
室气体的排放量的18%来自家畜。"

来源: 世界科技报道 (日期：2007-05-29)

http://tech.icxo.com/htmlnews/2007/05/29/1138061.htm

Algerian surprise

"Women make up 70 percent of Algeria's lawyers and 60 percent of its
judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more
to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students
are women, university researchers say.
...
Although men still hold all of the formal levers of power and women
still make up only 20 percent of the work force, that is more than
twice their share a generation ago, and they seem to be taking over
the machinery of state as well.
...
The women are more religious than in previous generations, and more
modern, sociologists here said. Women cover their heads and drape
their bodies with traditional Islamic coverings. They pray. They go
to the mosque - and they work, often alongside men, once considered
taboo."

"Algeria's quiet revolution: Gains by women," International Herald
Tribune, May 26, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/26/africa/algeria.1-62108.php

La chose la plus habituelle et la plus naturelle

Tirthankar Chandar dans Le Monde Diplomatique:

"Le premier roman indien en anglais date de 1864, mais le genre a
connu son véritable essor, à partir des années 1930, avec la
génération de R. K. Narayan, de Mulk Raj Anand et de Raja Rao, qui
ont donné naissance à une littérature originale. Ces pionniers des
lettres indo-anglaises ont fait date, car ils étaient les premiers à
comprendre que l'utilisation de l'anglais dans le contexte indien
n'allait pas de soi, et qu'il fallait écrire en gardant toujours à
l'esprit les statuts problématiques de l'anglais en Inde et de
l'écrivain anglophone. Dans la préface de son roman Kanthapura
(1938), dont le message reste d'actualité, Rao écrivait : « Nous
sommes condamnés à exprimer cette âme qui est la nôtre avec les mots
venus d'ailleurs. Il est difficile de rendre compte des nuances de
notre pensée et des silences qui meublent le processus de réflexion à
cause de cette incapacité que nous ressentons à les exprimer dans une
langue étrangère. »

Mais peut-on dire que l'anglais est une langue étrangère pour les
Indiens ? Pour Rushdie et ses condisciples, qui vont prendre d'assaut
au tournant des années 1980 la scène de l'anglophonie indienne
passablement endormie, la réponse est évidemment négative. Issus des
couches aisées de la société, ils ont presque tous fait leurs études
dans des écoles où l'anglais était la principale langue. Ils vivent
chez eux à la manière occidentale, tout en profitant de cette
ambiance de plurilinguisme dont parle l'écrivain vernaculaire
Ananthamurthy : « Nous vivons dans une ambiance de langues et
d'influences multiples, où que nous vivions en Inde. Cela est peut-
être particulièrement vrai si nous habitons dans une de ces villes
provinciales. Parler une langue à la maison, une autre dans la rue,
et encore une autre sur le lieu de travail, semble être la chose la
plus habituelle et la plus naturelle. » "

http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2007/03/CHANDA/14511

The pursuit of happiness

The British middle classes love to love the French and hate
themselves, which may explain why they've bought up half of France.
Here's Stuart Jeffries writing in the Guardian:

The biggest difference of all between France and l'outre-Manche (ie
the UK) or l'outre-Atlantique (ie the US) remains the pursuit of
sensual pleasure, a thing that the Anglo-Saxon business model seems
to have foolishly ignored. True, it is the American constitution that
makes formalistic reference to the "pursuit of happiness", but it is
the French nation that concentrates, and substantially, on pursuing
pleasure and then savouring it properly. They do not need to be
reminded by their constitution that they have a right to do so.

That cultivation of pleasure, so exotic for us and so contrary to how
we live in our ill-dressed, ill-groomed, fast-food fetishising,
sexually incompetent, binge-drinking culture, is why so many
foreigners are seduced by France...

There is something called making "le pont", which means that if a
national holiday falls in the middle of the week, French workers will
take off enough days before or after it to extend it all the way to
the nearest weekend.... And there is none of this American rubbish of
two weeks' leave a year in France either: Paris, in particular, is
massively depopulated from Bastille Day (July 14) until September as
the French head off for at least two months of well-earned eating,
drinking, romancing and dozing....

Then there are the extraordinary public services. Not only does
France have the fastest and most efficient trains in the world, but a
system of means-tested state childcare that even today makes me green
with envy. The poorest French parents can send their children to a
state-run creche from 8.30am to 6.30pm for free, while colleagues on
similar salaries to mine send their two toddlers to a creche at a
cost of €800 (£500) a month, which is inconceivable in Britain.
Partly as a result of this humane system, not only does France have
one of the highest birthrates in western Europe but also one of the
highest proportion of women in the workforce...

After his election to the Elysée on Sunday, Sarko, sounding not so
much like a Frenchman as a joyless Puritan stepping off the
Mayflower, grimly announced: "The French people have decided to break
with the ideas, behaviour and habits of the past. I will rehabilitate
work, merit and morals." Nicolas, baby, please don't! Please don't
take the belle out of la belle France. Please don't make yourselves
like us. You won't like it.

The Guardian, May 9, 2007

http://tinyurl.com/362ew3

"Amazing Achievement"

Jonathan Freedland in the New York Review of Books:

"One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush
administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those
who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches,
however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the
antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-
upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new
consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that
the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in
the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving
its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of
the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some
of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once
confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail
against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The
only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into
which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve..."

The New York Review of Books, June 14, 2007
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20251

Cursos de chino en España

Como cambian las cosas. Cuando empecé a aprender chino en la
universidad de Leeds en 1982, la sinología era un ramo exótico que no
se podía estudiar en España. Hoy por hoy, veintisiete universidades
españolas enseñan de la lengua china, muchas de ellas desde hace sólo
tres o cuatro años:

"Según la embajada de China en Madrid, en la actualidad cursan algún
estudio de chino en España unas 5.000 personas, incluidos los
residentes de aquel país.

Las alternativas son variadas: desde una licenciatura de estudios en
Asia Oriental, rama de chino, en universidades como las autónomas de
Madrid y Barcelona, Complutense, Pompeu i Fabra, Universidad de
Alicante o de Valencia, a cursos intensivos en academias
especializadas que en cinco meses permiten mantener una mínima
conversación.

La treintena de universidades que imparten cursos de chino en España,
contabilizadas por la Embajada de China, ofrecen una amplia oferta de
cursos postgrado, máster, o diplomas, que se suman a los que se
obtienen en las escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas de ciudades como
Madrid, Barcelona, Castellón, Valencia y Alicante."

www.actualidad.terra.es, 26-05-2007
http://tinyurl.com/2y7ssw

Remembering the Mutiny

Writing in the Guardian, William Dalrymple remembers and draws
lessons from the Indian Mutiny of 1857:

... Events reached a climax on September 14 1857, when British forces
attacked the besieged city. They proceeded to massacre not only the
rebel sepoys and jihadis, but also the ordinary citizens of the
Mughal capital. In one neighbourhood alone, Kucha Chelan, 1,400
unarmed citizens were cut down. Delhi, a sophisticated city of half a
million souls, was left an empty ruin.

The emperor was put on trial and charged, quite inaccurately, with
being behind a Muslim conspiracy to subvert the empire stretching
from Mecca and Iran to Delhi's Red Fort. Contrary to evidence that
the uprising broke out first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys,
the prosecutor argued that "to Musalman intrigues and Mahommedan
conspiracy we may mainly attribute the dreadful calamities of 1857".
Like some of the ideas propelling recent adventures in the east, this
was a ridiculous and bigoted oversimplification of a more complex
reality. For, as today, western politicians found it easier to blame
"Muslim fanaticism" for the bloodshed they had unleashed than to
examine the effects of their own foreign policies. Western
politicians were apt to cast their opponents in the role of
"incarnate fiends", conflating armed resistance to invasion and
occupation with "pure evil".

Yet the lessons of 1857 are very clear. No one likes people of a
different faith conquering them, or force-feeding them improving
ideas at the point of a bayonet. The British in 1857 discovered what
the US and Israel are learning now, that nothing so easily
radicalises a people against them, or so undermines the moderate
aspect of Islam, as aggressive western intrusion in the east. The
histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have,
after all, long been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a
curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of all three
Abrahamic faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each
other's prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the
lifeblood of the others.

The Guardian, Thursday May 10, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2076320,00.html

Chinese in British secondary schools

From yesterday's Independent:

Schools import China's teachers for lessons in 'language of tomorrow'
By Richard Garner, Education Editor

All the country's 250 specialist language schools have been told by a
government adviser that they should put Mandarin on the curriculum as
"the language of tomorrow".

Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies
Trust, said it should be seen as the key language for future
generations to learn - replacing European languages.

The trust, which represents 90 per cent of England's 2,950 state
secondary schools, has clinched a deal with the Chinese government,
which will send 200 teachers a year over to the UK to teach Mandarin
in schools. Pupil exchanges are also being arranged, Sir Cyril
revealed at a meeting of the Commons Select Committee on Education
yesterday.

He told MPs: "I want all language colleges to be teaching Mandarin.
It is a strategic world language. The difficulty in the past has been
getting Chinese teachers. However, exchanges between our schools and
Chinese schools will help to change that. We learn from them and they
learn from us."

...

The Independent, May 24, 2007
http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article2578493.ece

Lessons for grownups

Laura has read Le Petit Prince with Véronique in French, because
French is their language. Yesterday, we picked up Kathrine Woods'
English translation of The Little Prince, which I read in Spanish
when I was eight or nine. As everyone remembers, there are many
lessons for grownups in this book. The first one is to look
carefully. Drawing Number Two is not a picture of a hat, but of a boa
constrictor. In Chapter 4, there's another important lesson for
grownups:

"I have serious reason to believe that the planet from which the
little prince came is the asteroid known as B-612.

This asteroid has only once been seen through the telescope. That was
by a Turkish astronomer, in 1909.

On making his discovery, the astronomer had presented it to the
International Astronomical Congress, in a great demonstration. But he
was in Turkish costume, and so nobody would believe what he said.

Grown-ups are like that...

Fortunately, however, for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish
dictator made a law that his subjects, under pain of death, should
change to European costume. So in 1920 the astronomer gave his
demonstration all over again, dressed with impressive style and
elegance. And this time everybody accepted his report."

Photos

Many thanks to Alainna on the Rosetta discussion list for pointing me
to these photographs of these beautiful 7000-8000-year-old Chinese
characters (ideograms? graphs?):

http://news.sohu.com/20070520/n250119721.shtml
http://scitech.people.com.cn/GB/5757494.html
http://www.xjbs.com.cn/cgi-bin/GInfo.dll?DispInfo&w=xjbs&nid=397487

Vieux de 7 à 8000 ans

"Les archéologues chinois disent avoir découvert plus de 2 000
idéogrammes vieux de 7 à 8000 ans, antérieurs de 3 000 ans aux
précédents textes découverts et estimés comme étant l'origine des
caractères chinois modernes.

Les idéogrammes apparaissent sur des sculptures rupestres à Damaidi,
dans la montagne du Nord (Beishan) de la Région autonome hui du
Ningxia ; ils couvrent près de 450 km² avec plus de 10 000 sculptures
préhistoriques.

Auparavant, les savants pensaient que les caractères chinois les plus
anciens figuraient dans les inscriptions vieilles de 3 000 ans sur os
et carapaces de tortues, et dans les inscriptions datant de 4 500 ans
sur poteries, toutes découvertes dans la province centrale du Henan,
l'un des berceaux de la civilisation chinoise."

Beijing Information, 22 mai 2007

http://www.bjinformation.com/fawen2006/2007-21/200721-ds7.htm

New Art from China

The Saatchi Gallery's online collection of new art from China:

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/new_art_from-china.htm

Deutsches entdeutscht

Schweizer Publizist Roger de Weck schreibt im Spiegel:

Wer Deutschland lobt, der stört. Nur den Ausländern ist es zur Not
gestattet, die Bundesrepublik zu bewundern, ihnen wird diese
Charakterschwäche verziehen. Ein Franzose, der keine Komplimente
macht, ist kein Franzose. Wohingegen der Deutsche, der ein Kompliment
wagt, bereits als Schleimer gilt. So nehme ich mir die Freiheit des
Fremden heraus, Gutes zu sagen. Und dass ich mehr Gallier als Germane
bin, nämlich Französischschweizer, mag als mildernder Umstand
durchgehen.
...
Ist es ein Kompliment zu sagen, dass Deutschland davon profitiert,
weniger deutsch zu sein? Der sprachkundige, mobile Teil des
Nachwuchses studiert gern im Ausland und erschließt mit Rucksack oder
Businesstrolley fremde Welten. In Musik, Literatur und Film vermengt
sich Hiesiges und Fremdes. Die hybride Kultur zählt zu den saftigen
Früchten der Globalisierung, sie hat den Schwung des Regisseurs Fatih
Akin ("Gegen die Wand") oder des Autoren Feridun Zaimoglu ("Zwölf
Gramm Glück"). Parallelgesellschaft hin, Rütli-Schule her - die
Zuwanderer haben ihre Wahlheimat mehr entkrampft als verkrampft.
Befreiend ist das neue Verständnis von Staatsbürgerschaft, der
überfällige Abschied vom germanischen Blutrecht der Abstammung: eine
stille Revolution an der Jahrtausendwende. Überall wirkt ein
zwangloser Patriotismus, der allzu Deutsches entdeutscht.

Aus der europaweit grassierenden Fremdenfeindlichkeit erwächst in der
Bundesrepublik - anders als in meiner Schweizer Heimat - keine
Volkspartei mit einem Wähleranteil von 27 Prozent. In sieben von neun
Nachbarstaaten Deutschlands haben Rechtspopulisten die Politik
verrohen lassen. Glücklich das Land, dem es erspart bleibt, in
jahrelanger Mühe Jean-Marie Le Pen und Jörg Haider abzuhalftern,
Christoph Blocher und Pia Kjærsgaard im Zaum zu halten. Und was in
Deutschland die Neonazis treiben, ist eine widerliche Marginalie,
mehr nicht.

Der Spiegel, 20. Mai 2007
http://tinyurl.com/2fr6qm

The Case for Literature

From the Philadelphia Inquirer review of Gao Xingjian's The Case for
Literature (translated by Mabel Lee):

Gao's signature credo remains that writers should live "without
isms," the title of one of his essay collections. By a life without
isms, Gao, an atheist by conviction and pragmatist by bent, means a
humane, tolerant acceptance of life's uncertainty coupled with joy in
life itself. The writer without isms "opposes totalitarian
dictatorship but also opposes the inflation of the self to the status
of God or Superman." (Gao hates Nietzsche's egoistical vision of man,
and he denounces the German philosopher as much as he does political
suppression of the individual.)

Gao frames his position as a human-rights issue. "To be without
isms," he writes, "is the minimum right of a human being," the core
of "intellectual freedom," a "form of resistance against death by a
life that is full of vitality."

Literature, consequently, "has no duty to the masses," has "nothing
to do with politics," and "can only be the voice of an individual."
Imagine that frail young man who stood before the tank in Tiananmen
Square to be a writer, and you pretty much have Gao's view.

Literature for Gao comes from "the surging of blood in the writer's
own heart." It is "subservient to nothing but truth" and "has no
taboos." Once "literature is contrived as the hymn of a nation, the
flag of a race, the mouthpiece of a political party or the voice of a
class or group," it is nothing but "propaganda." Gao advocates what
he calls "cold literature," a literature in which observation "is
superior to and loftier than judgment."

...

Particularly eye-opening here to a non-Chinese reader will be the
essay titled "The Modern Chinese Language and Literary Creation." In
it, Gao declares that a second problem afflicts modern Chinese
literature beyond its stultification by "isms." In his view, the
"Europeanization of the Chinese language," through compound words and
convoluted syntax, has made it "intolerable" and "unreadable." Gao
seeks, instead, "a pure form of modern Chinese."

Carlin Romano, "Chinese laureate a literary Olympian," Philadelphia
Inquirer, May 20, 2007

http://tinyurl.com/2xvts2

To not have an accent...

Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet writes about his two languages in the
Washington Post:

For the record: I don't believe in translations; there is, I've
concluded, no such thing. There are only adaptations that compress or
expand or sift a whole culture into another, while trying to retain
its shine.
...

Here's how it happened: English is my real language. Better said, my
mother tongue. It's the first language I ever spoke. You see, I used
to speak in that perfect Valley English of Encino, Calif. But then I
returned (went for the first time, actually) to Chile, the country of
my parents. I didn't know Spanish at all and was just starting puberty
-- a bad time to be an immigrant. We went south on vacation and never
came back. I had to learn Spanish fast.

Then I noticed something.

In Chile, I was a gringo. To be American in a continent where
Americans are regarded as bullies, imperialists and fast-food cowboys
was not what a young boy wanted to be, but there was no doubt about
it: In this new language with its puzzling accents and weird letter ñ,
I had an accent. I quickly realized that when you write, there is no
such thing as an accent. So I guess I became a writer not because I
wanted to tell stories -- I became one in order to survive, fit in.

To not have an accent.

But before I became a writer, I had to become Chilean, and, to be a
Chilean, I had to conquer the language, excel in it. Not just the
written one, but the spoken one, too. Along the way, I met people with
accents. Older people. A Jewish grandmother of a friend in California
spoke with a thicker accent than Henry Kissinger. In Chile, I bumped
into an old Lithuanian who, after 50 years, spoke as if he had arrived
yesterday.

Didn't accents ever go away? Was this a sort of curse for leaving home?

I worked hard, did my best to erase the English from my head, heart
and tongue. Eventually, I succeeded. I began to talk in perfect
Chilean, and, as an unexpected side-effect, I began to write, think
and dream in what people down here call "the language of Cervantes."

Am I bilingual?

Not at all. I only wish. I'm unable to translate myself, and I'm very
bad and slow at translating others.

Do I know English?

Yes. Some people believe there is such a thing as bilingualism. I have
my serious doubts. One can speak, even write in different languages,
but one of them must dominate. And in my case, by now, it's Spanish. I
am a Spanish-language author and, more important, a Chilean. In the
United States now, I have an accent. I stumble on spelling and, though
I may talk all day in English, at the end of the day, I will need to
revisit things in Spanish.
...
For me, English is a lost paradise. A place I don't associate with
books or loss or loneliness or violence. As you can guess, I've had a
rougher time in Spanish, which, of course, is neither the language's
nor the country's fault. It has everything to do with timing. I
transformed myself into a Spanish-speaking person at exactly the time
when I began to grow and things around me began to crumble. So English
remains there, far away, and yet close, untouched, unblemished --
smelling of sprinklers, Slurpees, summer sweat and the aqua-blue
chlorine of swimming pools that perfume the California night.

By Alberto Fuguet
The Washington Post, May 13, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/2jv5gj

Indian languages in Canada

According to a new report, "Langues autochtones au Canada : nouvelles
tendances et perspectives sur l'acquisition d'une langue seconde,"
fewer and fewer Canadian Indians, or First Nations people as they are
known in Canada, speak the language of their grandparents at home.
Between 1996 and 2001, the percentage of Indians who spoke an Indian
language dropped from 29% to 24%. In a note of optimism, the report
says that the number of Indians who had studied an Indian language as
a second language in school actually went up a little. My guess is
that this optimism is misplaced, because few people learn a second
language to any degree of fluency unless they use it every day either
at home or at work. If Canadian Indian languages are not spoken at
home, they will probably go the way of the dodo.

Source:

"Déclin de la transmission des langues maternelles autochtones,"
Presse Canadienne, 15 mai 2007.

http://tinyurl.com/2pnf4n

For Whom the Booth Tolls

"Few motorists in any country brighten at the sight of tollbooths
ahead. In China, which is building more toll roads than any other
country in the world, legions of drivers are trying almost anything
to avoid them. On a highway two miles from Chen Village, vehicles
must stop at this toll station. To avoid paying, drivers often detour
through the village. In Chongqing, a sprawling municipality in
central China, so many owners of private cars and trucks are using
fraudulent toll-exempt military plates that one toll highway has
estimated its annual losses at roughly 10 million yuan, or $1.2
million. In March a driver outfitted his vehicle like an ambulance,
with flashing lights and an emergency response phone number painted
on the side. He then raced through a highway tollbooth as if rushing
to a hospital, until the police arrested him.
...
By 2020, if all goes as planned, China will have completed almost
53,000 miles of expressways, a network roughly equivalent to the
Interstate System in the United States. China considers expressways
crucial to maintaining its economic growth and developing its western
and interior provinces. But the cost is so exorbitant that China is
financing much of the system with tolls that are, by Chinese
standards, pricey.
...
A recent World Bank report on China's highway construction program
found that the toll roads were charging roughly the same as the
German toll system - about 25 cents a mile for trucks - despite far
lower incomes in China."

Source: New York Times, May 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/16/world/asia/16tolls.html

Mustard and even alcohol

"To compile a dictionary, you have to bear the loneliness and resist
various temptations... Many partners gave it up for more lucrative
posts, some went abroad, some started their own businesses and some
died out of devotion to the creation of the dictionary," says Lu
Gusun, editor-in-chief of a recently published 4,203-page English-
Chinese Dictionary.

The Shanghai Daily comments, "As for Lu, he used coffee, cigarettes,
mustard and even alcohol to sustain his fighting spirit. He promised
not to go abroad, publish books or take any part-time teaching jobs
until the dictionary was complete."

http://tinyurl.com/2uxzll

Twenty-Four Dynastic Histories

Three years ago, Xinhua News reported the publication of the Twenty-
Four Dynastic Histories (二十四史) by Hanyu Dacidian Chubanshe
(汉语大词典出版社) in a bilingual parallel-text edition in
classical Chinese and modern Chinese. Two hundred scholars worked for
13 years on the translation of the original 3213 volumes, comprising
more than 40 million Chinese characters. Amazon sells this edition,
entitled 二十四史全译, for 9,408 yuan (900 euros).

I wonder if this is the biggest translation project ever undertaken.

See:

http://tinyurl.com/33yvvn
http://news.jxnews.com.cn/system/2003/12/23/000583537.shtml

Remembering Wm. T. de Bary

One of my favorite blogs is Andrew Field's Shanghai Journal. Here's a
snippet from an entry entitled "What Wm. T. de Bary Has Taught Me":

"My fondest memory of Dr. de Bary, and the one that is imprinted most
deeply in my mind, is when he brought out a scroll during his lecture
on Neo-Confucianism for our East Asian Civ class. The scroll,
written in beautiful Chinese calligraphy by a friend of his (if I
recall rightly), contained the word ren 仁， perhaps the most
important term in the Confucian lexicon. The term has been
translated as 'humaneness' 'humanity' and 'benevolence,' and
expresses the proper relationship between two human beings. It is
fundamental to all Confucian thinking. Why I remember this episode
fondly is that when presenting the scroll, he paused and looked at it
with such complete admiration, his eyes lit up and his face broke
into a broad smile. Then he returned to his stern, grandfatherly
countenance and resumed his lecture."

Field also quotes one of de Bary's observations on Neo-Confucianism:

"As I said earlier, Buddhism was a missionary religion; its spiritual
drive and zeal naturally fit the expansionist movement Reischauer
describes. But Confucianism had no such proselytizing aim or
apostolic mission, and one might wonder how it could generate a
comparable elan. The answer, I believe, lies not only in recognizing
the difference between Neo-Confucianism and Buddhism, but in seeing
how the third stage of East Asian civilization differed from the
second. In short, this was not an expansionist phase, but one
distinguished rather by the degree of its intensive internal
development--economically, socially, and culturally. In this
situation, with less scope for missionaries and cultural emissaries
than for teachers, scholars, and officials, Neo-Confucianism
furnished the most plausible rationale for East Asian civilizations
preoccupied with their own inner development--self-centered in the
positive sense of being inner-directed, conservative of their
energies, and concentrated in their efforts. To my mind, Neo-
Confucianism is also the key to understanding how later on, in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the inward-looking civilizations
of East Asia would appear to the expansionist West to be ingrown,
self-contented, smug, and isolationist, while the West would seem to
East Asians the very embodiment of uncontrolled aggressiveness--power
on the loose, bound to no moral or spiritual center."

Wm. T. de Bary, East Asian Civilization: A Dialogue in Five Stages,
Harvard U. Press, 1988, p. 44.

Andrew Field:
http://tinyurl.com/34rmfl
http://shanghaijournal.squarespace.com/

Degeneration of language

For as long as records go back, people have complained about the
degeneration of the language used in their own time. Feelings about
what is 'clean' and what is 'dirty' in language are universal, and
humankind would have to change beyond all recognition before these
urges to control and clean up the language disappeared. An integral
part of the language behaviour of every human group is the desire to
constrain and manage language, and to purge it of unwanted elements:
bad grammar, sloppy pronunciation, newfangled words, vulgar
colloquialisms, unwanted jargon and, of course, foreign items. Next
to the shamans are the self-appointed arbiters of linguistic
goodness: ordinary language users who follow the ritual, and taboo
those words and constructions they see as 'unorderly' and outside the
boundaries of what is good and proper.

Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Forbidden Words: Taboo and the
Censoring of Language (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 124.

Quoted by Language Hat:

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002745.php#more

Wolfgang Kubin on contemporary Chinese writers

Wolfgang Kubin, professor of sinology at Bonn University, criticizes
contemporary Chinese writers in an interview with Nanfengchuang
magazine:

中国当代文学是很有问题的，首先应该承认，然后我
们可以再客观地谈中国还有不少好的作家。大部分人
不是作家，是骗子或者其他什么。他们觉得文学可以
玩，玩够了不成功的话，可以下海赚钱去。1980年代
一批很重要的作家，现在什么都不写。
...
1980年代好多作品也许过时了，但还可以谈一谈，而
1990年代之后的作品都有很大的问题。现在很多中国
作家，内容关注爆炸性、刺激性，所以记者注意到他
们。比方说，几年以前，中国一对夫妇写《中国农民
调查》，他们拿了柏林一个非常高的奖金，但他们的
语言和思想乱七八糟。中国当代文学的问题是，只要
某一部作品被禁止或遭到政府的批评，那么就认为他
们是好作家。他们根本不从文学本身来看作品，问题
在这。作品可能与政治有一定关系，当然这不绝对。
语言还是最重要的。
...
我觉得文学不是技术，而是艺术。同时，文学是刻苦
的工作，和你们记者的工作一样。一个中国作家写小
说，1个月到3个月之内，可以写完一部小说，德国作
家一年最多写100页，说明他一天只能写一页中的一部
分，中国作家不会这样做。诗人是另外一回事，中国
一些诗人也许会一个星期写一首诗，但中国的散文、
小说作家不会这样做，他们盲目自信。

http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/4c947449010008uc

More bang for their buck

From a text I'm translating this morning:

"Taiwan boasts a unique combination of low consultation and treatment
fees and easy access to doctors in teaching hospitals. Huang Fu-yuan
notes that in Taiwan a single deductible outpatient consultation fee
comes to approximately NT$200, compared to more than NT$1,000 in
Japan and more than NT$2,000 in the USA. Taiwanese patients get more
bang for their buck.

診療費便宜、教授級醫生輕易可見更是絕無僅有。黃
富源指出，在台灣門診一次的自負額約200元台幣，和
日本上千元台幣、美國二千多台幣相比，實在「俗又
大碗」。"

Needless to say, Japan and Taiwan have national health insurance
systems; the USA doesn't.

C-sections in Asia

The International Herald Tribune reports an epidemic of C-sections
for non-medical reasons across East Asia:

"Once considered a procedure reserved for emergencies or high-risk
pregnancies, Caesareans are now commonly planned for a variety of non-
medical reasons, including fear of labor pain, convenience for the
doctor and the patient, and astrology.

In a region that lives by time-is-money production schedules at
footwear and computer chip factories, the elective Caesarean brings
clockwork and clinical tidiness to one of humankind's most stubbornly
unpredictable processes.

Meanwhile, medical advances that have made the procedure safer and
more routine have also, paradoxically, helped reinforce age-old
superstitions. Couples in Chinese-influenced cultures have long tried
to time births for auspicious years. Now, many can refine their
choice to the day and minute.

...

At St. Paul's hospital in Hong Kong, where the Caesarean rate is
about 70 percent, couples are charged extra if they select a time of
birth between midnight and 7:30 a.m.

...

Doctors and hospitals alike have a financial incentive to perform
Caesareans, especially at private hospitals. At Phayathai 3, a
"Caesarean package" - four days and three nights in a private
hospital room - costs 41,900 baht, or about $1,200. That is 40
percent more expensive than the typical vaginal birth."

"Asia's rise in Caesarean sections? It's in the stars," International
Herald Tribune, May 9, 2007

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/09/news/birth.php

Orhan Pamuk im Spiegel-Gespräch

SPIEGEL: Welche Rolle spielt für Sie der Islam?

Pamuk: Ich finde es grässlich, dass wir Türken immer zuerst unter dem
Aspekt des Islam gesehen werden. Ich werde ständig nach der Religion
gefragt und fast immer mit einem negativen Unterton, der mich wütend
macht. Es stimmt, die Mehrzahl meiner Landsleute sind Muslime. Aber
wenn Sie mein Land wirklich verstehen wollen, müssen Sie dessen
Geschichte sehen und unsere stete Orientierung nach Europa. Es gibt
geradezu eine Hassliebe der Türken zur europäischen Kultur. Die
Türkei ist ein Teil Europas.

SPIEGEL: Fühlen Sie sich auch als Europäer, wenn Sie in Paris an der
Universität Vorlesungen halten oder in Deutschland auf Lesereise sind?

Pamuk: Mit dem Nationalbewusstsein ist das schon wundersam: Außerhalb
der Türkei fühle ich mich viel türkischer als in Istanbul. Wenn ich
dann zu Hause bin, tritt meine europäische Seite deutlicher hervor.
Das nehmen meine Gegner, allen voran die türkischen Nationalisten,
dann zum Vorwand, mich anzugreifen. Das empört mich umso mehr, weil
sich kaum jemand mit unserer Kultur umfassender beschäftigt hat als
ich in meinen Büchern. Aber mit meiner westlichen Ausrichtung, meiner
Liebe zu europäischer Literatur und Lebensart sitze ich zwischen
allen Stühlen.
...
SPIEGEL: Seit Ihrem Prozess haben Sie sich seltener politisch
geäußert. Früher haben Sie die politische Rolle eines Schriftstellers
stärker betont.

Pamuk: Es ist eine Sache, sich zu Politik zu äußern, den Mund
aufzumachen, wenn man wütend ist über eine Entwicklung. Zensur darf
es nie geben, man muss alles sagen können. Aber ich wehre mich
dagegen, mir Politik aufzwingen zu lassen. In den vergangenen zwei
Jahren gab es viel zu viel Politik in meinem Leben. Ich glaube sehr
an die moralische Verantwortung des Autors. Aber zuerst hat er die
Pflicht, gute Bücher zu schreiben.

Der Spiegel, 30. April 2007
http://www.spiegel.de/dertag/pda/avantgo/artikel/0,1958,480224,00.html

Flying chickens and jumping dogs

Translating a text about trying to get children to take their
medicine, I just came across the expression 雞飛狗跳
(jīfēigǒutiào), which means a big commotion, a mess, chaos. A
literal reading would be chickens flying and dogs leaping. Looking at
the characters, I can almost see flying chickens and jumping dogs in
a small courtyard.

A bright mirror

I do love the Chinese language. Here's a nice Chinese saying I
just came across:

明鏡所以照形，往事所以知今
Míngjìng suǒ yǐ zhào xíng; gǔ shì suǒ yǐ zhī jīn.

Just as a bright mirror can be used to reflect images, past events
can be used to understand (or know) the present.

The locus classicus of this saying is the Records of Later Han (後
漢書) compiled by Fan Ye (范曄, 398-445) in the 5th century AD.

Here's the gloss given in the 國語辭典 dictionary:

(諺語)比喻鑑往足以知今。後漢書˙卷十七˙馮異傳：
愚聞明鏡所以照形，往事所以知今。昔微子去殷而入
周，項伯畔楚而歸漢……彼皆畏天知今，睹存亡之
符，見廢興之事，故能成功於一時，垂業於萬世也。

Películas

En su blog cinematográfico, Nacho Vigalondo dice "Me lo paso mejor
leyéndoles a ustedes acerca de las películas que viendo las películas
en sí. O al menos la creciente pereza que me da ver cine de estreno
se compensa con el cada ver mayor interés que me produce leer las
reacciones que levantan en ustedes películas como Spiderman 3.
Película que es muy complicado que vea. Ya odié a muerte la segunda.
Y sé a ciencia cierta que las críticas que hacen ustedes son más
interesantes, cortas y baratas."

http://blogs.elpais.com/nachovigalondo/2007/05/cultura_del_ret.html

A mi me ocurre exactamente lo mismo. He leído con mucho interés
varios ensayos críticos sobre la última película de Mel Gibson,
Apocalypto, y no tengo la más mínima intención de verla. Ya hice ese
error con The Passion of the Christ, que vi un año después del
estreno. No gracias.

Una película que sí quisiera ver es Killer of Sheep de Charles
Burnett, a la cual John Powers le dedicó un bello homenaje en NPR
hace unos días:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10004616

Japans Kolonialpolitik in Korea

NZZ Artikel über Japans Kolonialpolitik in Korea:

"Ab 1938 wurde die koreanische Sprache ganz verboten. Die Koreaner
sollten nicht nur im öffentlichen Raum Japanisch sprechen, sondern
auch innerhalb der Familie. Nachdem Japanisch mit dem Beginn der
Kolonialisierung 1910 als Nationalsprache eingeführt worden war,
wurde Koreanisch ohnehin immer mehr an den Rand gedrängt. Nun aber
wurden sogar kleine Kinder, die auf dem Schulhof miteinander
koreanisch sprachen, hart bestraft. Kinder sollten ausserdem melden,
wenn die Familie zu Hause koreanisch sprach. Die Gedankenpolizei war
überall.

Eine andere Massnahme, genannt «Changssi- gaemyong», brachte die
Koreaner zur Verzweiflung. Alle sollten ihre koreanischen Namen in
japanische umwandeln und diese eintragen lassen. Die Massnahme wurde
Ende 1939 beschlossen und sollte ab Februar 1940 innerhalb von nur
sechs Monaten in die Tat umgesetzt werden. Die Kolonialregierung
liess verlautbaren, diese Aktion werde auf Wunsch der Koreaner
durchgeführt und sei ein Angebot an sie, endlich so zu werden wie die
Japaner. Wenn aber überhaupt etwas Heiliges für die Koreaner
existiert, dann die Ahnenlinie und damit der von Ahnen
weitergereichte Familienname.

Um sein Ziel durchzusetzen, musste Japan deshalb folgende Druckmittel
anwenden: Personen mit koreanischen Namen erhielten keine
Lebensmittelkarten, ohne die man nicht überleben konnte; Kinder mit
koreanischen Namen schulte man nicht ein oder versetzte sie nicht in
die nächste Klasse; Postsendungen mit koreanischen Namen wurden nicht
weiterbefördert; Ämter nahmen keine Anträge von Personen mit
koreanischen Namen entgegen. Koreaner mit alten Namen erhielten keine
Arbeit, und diejenigen Koreaner, die Arbeit hatten, wurden ohne
Namensänderung entlassen. In den ersten drei Monaten waren nur 7,6
Prozent der Koreaner dem Befehl gefolgt, aber im August hatten 79,3
Prozent ihre Namen geändert, nachdem die Zwänge unerträglich geworden
waren. Viele Koreaner begingen Selbstmord. Hinzu kamen die erzwungene
Teilnahme am täglichen Shinto-Ritual und die Verbeugung gegen Osten,
wo der göttliche Kaiser residierte, bei allen möglichen Anlässen.
Alle mussten ständig eine Formel aufsagen, eine Art Treuegelöbnis dem
Kaiser gegenüber. Es folgten Zwangsrekrutierungen und Arbeitszwang,
etwa in Bergwerken oder als «Trostfrauen»."

5. Mai 2007, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

http://www.nzz.ch/2007/05/05/li/articleEB906.print.html

Muckrackers for hire

Washington Post China correspondent Edward Cody writes:

"a new kind of journalism...is emerging in response to the Chinese
Communist Party's suffocating censorship of newspapers, radio and
television. With no more investment than computer and a taste for
taking risks, several dozen Web-based investigative journalists have
set up sites and started advertising their willingness -- for a price
-- to look into scandals that traditional reporters cannot touch.

Official censorship still protects authorities, including corrupt
authorities, more than two decades after China launched itself on a
path to reform. In a society that is swiftly modernizing, the
security-conscious Communist Party continues to fear, and filter, the
spread of information.

Official censorship still protects authorities, including corrupt
authorities, more than two decades after China launched itself on a
path to reform. In a society that is swiftly modernizing, the
security-conscious Communist Party continues to fear, and filter, the
spread of information.

Although censorship is imposed at all levels of the party and
government, much of it is self-inflicted by editors who are afraid of
losing their jobs and are regularly coached by party officials on
what to publish or broadcast.

The emerging Internet journalists for hire, however, have no jobs to
protect; they are self-employed. And although the freedom is greater,
the returns are meager. Xu said he has earned a little less than
$4,000 since starting up 10 months ago. In addition, he has to pay
two employees. To supplement his income and help support his two
children, he recently found a day job at Democracy and Legal System
magazine.

Xu and Li Xinde, another Web reporter for hire, said they take fees
from those who can afford to pay but also investigate for free if
victims cannot raise any money. Often they ask only for their
expenses, such as plane fare and hotel costs, they said....

Party censorship also extends to the Internet, which is policed by an
elaborate computer system and an army of snoops who monitor what
Chinese people read and say online. But that censorship comes after
the fact; it can only monitor what has been posted. Web condottieri
such as Xu and Li may get bounced off the Internet, but only after
their articles reach the public and get passed around. If one site is
blocked, they quickly start up another.

Xu, who has been sued for defamation by one group of officials, said
he takes care in his articles to attack only the misdeeds of corrupt
local officials and not the government in general. He has studied
law, he said, to avoid getting into trouble with the police in the
cat-and-mouse game he is forced to play...."

"China's Muckrakers for Hire Deliver Exposés With Impact," Washington
Post, May 2, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/2q3uvx

German universities

According to Die Zeit, all of Germany's universities combined have
quite a bit less money to spend on two million students than one
(admittedly loaded) American university:

"Harvard, die älteste und reichste Universität Amerikas, protzt mit
einem Stiftungskapital von 29 Milliarden Dollar. Im Verhältnis zur
deutschen Hochschullandschaft eine stattliche Summe: Die 376
Hochschulen besitzen so gut wie gar kein Vermögen und dürfen im Jahr
14 Milliarden Euro für rund zwei Millionen Studenten ausgeben."

Die Zeit, April 30, 2007
http://www.zeit.de/campus/online/2007/18/harvard-hungertuch