Jottings...

Chronicon Mundi

2008-08-20T09:12:00.000+01:00

I am moving Jottings to a new blog entitled Chronicon Mundi.

Olympic Trickery

2008-08-13T06:02:00.000+01:00

The Financial Times comments:

The joy of sporting contests is that anything can happen. When you are a totalitarian state, however, this makes it risky to host them. The Chinese government has responded by trying to control every conceivable element of the Olympics, often by rather dubious means.

The stunning, widely used footage of firework “footprints” leading to the Olympic stadium during the opening ceremony was, it transpires, computer-generated. We now know why a film director was asked to run the event.

Lin Miaoke, the little girl who apparently sang the Chinese anthem, was in fact lip-synching to the voice of another little girl. A meeting involving a politburo member decided that although Yang Peiyi was the best singer, she was not pretty enough to take part in the ceremony. She should be heard, but not seen.

Then again, cheering crowds are being bused into stadia by the government, armed with noise-makers and decked in colourful attire to improve the leaden atmosphere inside. In some cases the visitors are taking the places of real fans, who have found themselves unable to buy tickets.

The reality is that the faults officials were trying to correct are not faults at all. No one would have complained that China had not followed its creeping barrage of fireworks with a helicopter. The little girl rejected as the face of the opening ceremony may have had imperfect teeth – but little girls usually do. And, we all know that not all Olympic sports are sell-outs.

Official obsessiveness was, of course, doomed to fail. The 10m air rifle competition was scheduled first so that China would win the first gold medal. But Katerina Emmons, a Czech, set a new world record and won while the Chinese competitor, Du Li, did rather badly.

Foreign companies often complain of Chinese counterfeiting, but the games are spectacular enough without fakery. Rather than announcing China’s arrival as a modern, dynamic country, they risk reinforcing the view that the Beijing government is comprised of control-freaks.

Six lines

2008-04-25T07:50:00.000+01:00

Show me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him.

Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme,
j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.

Attributed to Cardinal Richelieu

Things Chinese

2007-11-28T09:04:00.001+01:00

Lack of time (i.e., work) compels me to quit posting in this blog and to limit my occasional blogging to Things Chinese:

http://thingschinese.wordpress.com/

Paul

das wahre Antlitz des Menschen

2007-11-27T05:38:00.001+01:00

«Wer von klein auf Wohlstand genossen hat, dann aber in Not gerät, der wird, so glaube ich, im Verlauf dieser Erfahrung in die Lage versetzt, das wahre Antlitz des Menschen zu erkennen.»
Lu Xun

"Mit dem Erzähler und Essayisten Lu Xun auf der Suche nach einem modernen chinesischen Selbstverständnis..."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 24. November 2007

http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/startseite/der_konfuzianismus_als_kannibalismus_1.588808.html

Garnett's translations

2007-11-21T11:39:00.001+01:00

From Orlando Figes review of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's recently published translation of War and Peace:

No one did more to introduce the English-speaking world to Russian literature than Constance Garnett (1862– 1946), who translated into graceful late-Victorian prose seventy major Russian works, including seventeen volumes of Turgenev, thirteen volumes of Dostoevsky, six of Gogol, four of Tolstoy, six of Herzen, seventeen of Chekhov, and books by Goncharov and Ostrovsky. A friend of Garnett's, D.H. Lawrence, recalled her

sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. The pile would be this high...really almost up to her knees, and all magical.

She worked so fast that when she came across an awkward passage she would leave it out. She made mistakes. But her stylish prose, which made the Russian writers so accessible, and seemingly so close to the English sensibility, ensured that her translations would remain for many years the authoritative standard of how these writers ought to sound and feel. For the English-reading public, Russian literature was what Garnett made of it. As Joseph Conrad wrote in 1917, "Turgeniev for me is Constance Garnett and Constance Garnett is Turgeniev."

The Russians were not so impressed. Nabokov called her Gogol translations "dry and flat, and always unbearably demure."[4] Kornei Chukovsky accused her of smoothing out the idiosyncrasies of writers' styles so that "Dostoevsky comes in some strange way to resemble Turgenev":

In reading the original [of Notes from Underground], who does not feel the convulsions, the nervous trembling of Dostoevsky's style? It is expressed in convulsions of syntax, in a frenzied and somehow piercing diction where malicious irony is mixed with sorrow and despair. But with Constance Garnett it becomes a safe blandscript: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original.

Joseph Brodsky sniped that the "reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one. They're reading Constance Garnett."

For the rest of this review, see

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20810

I fought the Borg and the Borg won

2007-11-05T21:48:00.000+01:00

I wasn't planning to read the Harry Potter books for another ten years or so. But the other day Laura, who's seven and three quarters, started reading the first one to me and I'm hooked. We're on chapter three...

Empires of the World

2007-11-01T15:48:00.001+01:00

I've just finished reading Nicholas Ostler's monumental Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (Harper Collins, 2005). It's a magisterial introduction to the history of languages and to the history of the world through the prism of language. Unlike previous historical linguists, Ostler does not compare the structure of different languages with a view to reconstructing their past; instead, the compares the career of different languages: their social and political impact and staying power, as well as the reasons for their decline. "It is an approach, previously little explored, to understanding human societies." Much of what Ostler writes about Aramaic was completely new to me. I learned something from every page of this book, including the section on Chinese. In a review of the book, Robert Dessaix writes about the spread of Aramaic:

"Aramaic-speakers, for instance, who were nomads from northern Syria, simply swamped the Assyrian empire, which has been happily speaking Akkadian for 2,000 years, bringing with them a superior technology (always a plus): their alphabet, written on papyrus or leather, much handier than cuneiform on clay tablets.

In the 6th century BC the Persians found it practical to adopt Aramaic as their official language, so that by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt, he found the administration there communicating not in Egyptian but Aramaic, and even Ashoka in far-off India had inscriptions in Aramaic on his monuments.

No conquering armies from northern Syria, no settlement of foreign lands, just a bit of 'merger and acquisition' leading to bilingualism in the streets and offices and armies of the Middle East until hey presto! one day anyone who was anyone across half the known world, including eventually Jesus, and millions of nobodies at home as well (that's the important thing) was speaking and writing in an obscure nomadic dialect.

Arabic wiped Aramaic out eventually, of course, though invasion and the imposition of a unitary religion but, interestingly, it wiped out only related languages (as Aramaic, and even Egyptian were). It seems that invasion leaves unrelated languages intact and thriving (Persian, Malay, Turkish and so on in the case of Arabic) unless it's accompanied by massive migration and, ideally, a plague or two."
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s1461705.htm

Here's an interview with Ostler:

http://calitreview.com/2007/04/03/an-interview-with-linguist-nicholas-ostler/

Paul

Stepmother tongues

2007-11-01T08:38:00.001+01:00

Bint Battuta writes:

"I was taught – and I agree – that you should only translate into your mother tongue (assuming you are raised monolingual). I have occasionally translated into Arabic, but I always get the translation checked by a native speaker, and I always feel that what I have done lacks style; it might be grammatically correct, but there are no subtleties or nuances. Translation, particularly literary translation, is more than knowing the target language well, it is about cultural familiarity, about knowing the resonances and connotations words might have, being aware of what the readership will understand as well as what the writer intended. That deeper knowledge cannot be learnt from books.
………………

I can think of many great authors who have chosen to write in a language they have not learnt from birth. Samuel Beckett chose to write in French (after years of living in Paris), and Milan Kundera now does too (again after a long period of living in France). Then of course there was the extraordinary Joseph Conrad, for whom English was a fourth language (after Russian, Polish and French), mastered in his twenties. Bahrain has its own example in Ebrahim Al Arrayedh, who wrote extensively in Arabic, although he only learnt it as a teenager when he moved to Bahrain from India. The Saudi novelist Ahmed Abodehman writes in French. (Eleiva recently told me about Kapka Kassabova, a Bulgarian author who initially wrote a novel and some poetry in English just to practise the language – but won awards for them!)

Beckett turned to French because he felt in French he could write 'without style' – it made his writing very spare (and he translated most of his own works into English himself).

Is there a difference between living for a long time in country other to that of one's birth and choosing to write in the language of that culture (for whatever reason), and writing in another language while still surrounded by your mother tongue?"

For more, visit:

http://battutabahrain.blogspot.com/2007/10/stepmother-tongues.html

Che Guevara

2007-10-20T13:27:00.001+01:00

When I was a teenager I used to have a poster of Che Guevara on my wall. Even then, almost 30 years ago, I thought that Fidel Castro was a bloody dictator who threw dissidents and gays in prison and had orchestrated an ugly cult of personality, but that Che, who had died young, had been an idealist who would never have approved of the dictatorial turn the Cuban revolution took in the 1970s if not before. Last year, I enjoyed and was moved by the movie The Motorcycle Diaries.

Jacobo Machover, author of the recently published "La face cachée du Che," has convinced me that I should have known then that this was too good to be true. (I've read a lot about the Chinese revolution, starting with Simon Leys' Chinese Shadows, which I read in 1981, a year before I started studying Chinese. Reading Chinese history is, or ought to be, a good inoculation against political propaganda of any sort.). Machover argues persuasively that Che Guevara not only ordered the execution of hundreds of prisoners but personally murdered several with his own hands (or gun). Not surprisingly, the rightwing press, which has never been keen to write about the Pinochets and Videlas of this world, has lapped up this book.

From a Sunday Times review: <http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22428134-36235,00.html>

A prolific diarist, Guevara wrote vividly of his role as an executioner.

In one passage, he described the execution of Eutimio Guerra, a peasant and army guide. "I fired a .32-calibre bullet into the right hemisphere of his brain, which came out through his left temple," was Guevara's clinical description of the killing. "He moaned for a few moments, then died."

"I carried out a very summary inquiry and then the peasant Aristidio was executed," he wrote about another killing. "It is not possible to tolerate even the suspicion of treason."

Guevara found particularly "interesting" the case of one of his victims, a man who, just before being executed, penned a letter to his mother in which he acknowledged "the justice of the punishment that was being dealt out to him" and asked her "to be faithful to the revolution".

A couple of weeks ago, L'Express published a shocking article (shocking to me, still shocking, even after having read quite a bit about this recently):

http://www.lexpress.fr/info/monde/dossier/cuba/dossier.asp?ida=460199

An excerpt:

Luciano Medina, d'abord. A 81 ans, robuste, volubile et enjoué, il reste ce guajiro (paysan) qu'il fut au temps de la révolution quand il était le facteur personnel de Fidel Castro. Dans la sierra Maestra, en 1957 et 1958, c'est lui qui acheminait les messages du comandante en jefe à travers les lignes ennemies aux autres comandantes: Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos ou encore Ernesto «Che» Guevara. «C'est simple, je les ai tous connus», lance l'ex-coursier, dont la voix rocailleuse retentit dans le deux-pièces exigu de Miami (Floride) qu'il occupe depuis les années 1970. «Guevara? Il traitait mal les gens. Très mal», insiste Medina. Les deux hommes se sont fréquentés, deux mois durant, en avril-mai 1958, dans le campement de La Otilia, près de Las Minas de Bueycito. «Un jour que je lisais Sélection du Reader's Digest, peinard dans mon hamac, le Che, furieux, m'arrache la revue des mains et s'écrie: "Pas de journaux impérialistes ici! " Mais surtout, il tuait comme on avale un verre d'eau. Avec lui, c'était vite vu, vite réglé. Un matin, vers 9 heures, nous déboulons au Rancho Claro, une petite exploitation de café appartenant à un certain Juan Perez. Aussitôt, le Che accuse le fermier d'être un mouchard à la solde de la dictature de Batista. En réalité, le seul tort de ce pauvre homme était de dire haut et fort qu'il n'adhérait pas à la révolution.» Une heure plus tard, le malheureux caféiculteur est passé par les armes devant sa femme et ses trois enfants de 1, 3 et 4 ans. «Les voisins étaient traumatisés, indignés. Et nous, la troupe, nous étions écoeurés. Avec trois autres compañeros, nous avons ensuite quitté le Che pour rejoindre un autre campement.» A l'image de Juan Perez, 15 «traîtres», «mouchards», ou supposés tels, devaient pareillement être liquidés sur ordre de Guevara, entre 1957 et 1958. Et ce n'était qu'un début.

And another article in French:

http://www.stephane.info/show.php?code=che_guevara&lg=fr

Che Guevara staged public executions and carried out mock executions on prisoners. Having known Chileans who were tortured with mock executions (and many other ways), I'm ashamed I ever had a poster of Che Guevara on my wall.

Yesterday I heard an interview (in French) on Espace 2 with Jacobo Machover. He's what in Cuba they call a "gusano" but he's persuaded me that he is not making this stuff up and he's opened my eyes a bit wider (just as Simon Leys opened my eyes when I first started reading about China). Click on the link next to "JEUDI 18 OCTOBRE 2007" and above "L'image d'un malentendu" to hear the interview with him: <http://www.rsr.ch/espace-2/les-temps-qui-courent#jeudi>.

World Digital Library

2007-10-20T13:22:00.001+01:00

Source: Washington Post (10/18/07):
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702260.html>

Checking Out Tomorrow's Library

In Paris, an International Working Group Shows Off the Prototype For a
Multilingual 'Intellectual Cathedral' of Digitized Knowledge
By John Ward Anderson

PARIS, Oct. 17 -- As ideas go, they don't come much bigger: Digitize the
accumulated wisdom of humankind, catalogue it, and offer it for free on the
Internet in seven languages.

The first phase of that simple yet outlandishly ambitious dream is about a
year away from being realized, according to a group of international
librarians, computer technicians and U.N. officials who unveiled a prototype
for the project, called the World Digital Library, in Paris on Wednesday.

Its creators see it as the ultimate multilingual, multicultural tool for
researching and retrieving information about knowledge and creativity from
any era or place. The WDL Web site (http://www.worlddigitallibrary.org) will
provide access to original documents, films, maps, photographs, manuscripts,
musical scores and recordings, architectural drawings and other primary
resources through a variety of search methods.

"The capacity to search in the various ways that will be possible in the
World Digital Library will promote all kinds of cross-cultural perspectives
and understanding," said James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who
proposed the project two years ago. The ability to cross-reference
information pulled from "the deep memories" of cultures is "an exciting
frontier possibility for the world," he said in an interview.

"In essence, what they are doing is building an intellectual cathedral, and
it may never get finished," said Paul Saffo, a long-time Silicon Valley
technology forecaster. "But this is a good effort even if it fails, because
it is going to inspire a lot of other efforts, and if it succeeds it will be
a wonderful resource."

"The challenges here aren't technological," Saffo said. Financial hurdles
might be considerable, and the project could be criticized as too grandiose,
or its model might be considered too closed. But all those problems will
probably be resolved, he said. "For me, the issue is the will to make it
happen. The people involved in this -- will they really see this through?"

With entrenched interests starting to gain control of the Internet, he
added, "it seems like the right thing at the right time, and the most
important thing is that we try to do it."

The prototype introduced Wednesday allowed searches by time, geographical
location, topic and format, with the ability to narrow results by limiting
them to books, photographs, movies or recordings. For written materials, the
same content was simultaneously available in seven languages, and expert
analysis by site "curators" was either translated or available in subtitles.

"If you really, truly want to understand and respect other cultures, you
have to be able to access their materials in their own languages," said
Ismail Serageldin, head of Egypt's Bibliotheca Alexandrina, one of the
partners in the project. A key goal of the WDL is to make the site
user-friendly and widely available, he said, to help break down the digital
divide between rich and poor countries.

The different search techniques permit a user to retrieve information for
certain years and countries, so that in addition to being able to browse the
collected knowledge of the world in the 1400s, for instance, a user could
also limit a search to a topic such as art in Egypt and China in the 3rd
century B.C.

Similarly, a user could specify a medium -- for example, only photographs
from New York and Paris in the 1920s.

"The memory of different cultures is preserved in different ways,"
Billington explained. "This is an attempt to take the defining primary
documents of a culture" and make them interactive with other cultures, he
said.

The site "has an enormous educational potential," Billington said, noting
that its content is being designed particularly with children in mind. "It
has the capacity both to inspire respect for other cultures and their
histories and stories, but at the same time to establish critical thinking."

The WDL is being developed by the Library of Congress in partnership with
the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), which officials said would broaden the program's reach and appeal.

The general model for the WDL is the Library of Congress's National Digital
Library Program, which was launched in the mid-1990s. That program's
flagship is the American Memory Web site ( http://www.memory.loc.gov), which
offers 11 million digital files culled from U.S. historical records -- from
the Declaration of Independence and Civil War photographs to early Thomas
Edison movies and recordings of interviews with former slaves.

Billington said the United States was offering its experiences in creating
American Memory as a guide to help the 190 other member states of UNESCO
explore and digitally archive their own national and cultural memories for
the WDL. The site will be accessible in the six official languages of the
United Nations (English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Arabic) plus
Portuguese.

The WDL will begin offering content on its site in late 2008 or early 2009,
Billington said, with the ability to "rapidly ramp up" as countries digitize
their archives and make them available. The site will have a few hundred
thousand items to begin with, officials said.

The Library of Congress holdings, which include millions of items from
around the world, will form the backbone of the initial WDL collection, with
other digital content provided by six other libraries, including the
national libraries of Egypt, Brazil and Russia.

The start-up cost of American Memory was $60 million, about $45 million of
which came from private sponsors. WDL officials could not estimate how much
it would cost to fully fund the creation of their site, but they said they
hoped much of the money would come from private sources. Google gave $3
million to launch the project and develop the prototype displayed Wednesday.

The United States has often been criticized, particularly here in France and
in the developing world, for its dominance of the Internet and for the
global spread of its culture. But WDL officials called the project an
example of how the United States could use its vast resources and know-how
to bridge those differences.

"This is the best counter to that view of the U.S. . . . muscling its way in
and forcing other countries to do what it wants," said Serageldin, the
Egyptian library head. "The Library of Congress is the biggest library in
the world by far, and it has stretched out its hand to invite partners from
all over the world to participate. This is a wonderful way to show how true
U.S. leadership is being exercised by a great cultural institution and
bringing about a wonderful reaction from everybody."

Reaper

2007-10-12T05:35:00.001+01:00

I've just heard on American National Public Radio that most of the fixed-wing US Air Force missions currently flown over Iraq are unmanned and controlled by pilots at an air base in Las Vegas. In a few weeks, the Air Force will deploy its first generation of unmanned bombers. The plane is appositely called "Reaper" and its payload of bombs will be dropped over Iraq and other countries by pilots sitting at desks in Nevada.

Brave new world.

"Being bilingual protects brain"

2007-09-18T15:12:00.000+01:00

BBC News Reports:

Being bilingual 'protects brain'

Being fluent in two languages may help to keep the brain sharper for longer, a study suggests.

Researchers from York University in Canada carried out tests on 104 people between the ages of 30 and 88.

They found that those who were fluent in two languages rather than just one were sharper mentally.

Writing in the journal of Psychology and Ageing, they said being bilingual may protect against mental decline in old age.

Previous studies have shown that keeping the brain active can protect against senile dementia.

Research has shown that people who play musical instruments, dance or read regularly may be less likely to develop the condition.

Other activities like doing crosswords or playing board games may also help.

Language skills

This latest study appears to back up the theory that language skills also have a protective effect.

Dr Ellen Bialystok and colleagues at York University assessed the cognitive skills of all those involved in the study using a variety of widely recognised tests.

They tested their vocabulary skills, their non-verbal reasoning ability and their reaction time.

Half of the volunteers came from Canada and spoke only English. The other half came from India and were fluent in both English and Tamil.

The volunteers had similar backgrounds in the sense that they were all educated to degree level and were all middle class.

The researchers found that the people who were fluent in English and Tamil responded faster than those who were fluent in just English. This applied to all age groups.

The researchers also found that the bilingual volunteers were much less likely to suffer from the mental decline associated with old age.

"The bilinguals were more efficient at all ages tested and showed a slower rate of decline for some processes with aging," they said.

"It appears...that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses."

The UK's Alzheimer's Society welcomed the study.

"These findings, that early development of second language may improve a specific aspect of cognitive function in later life, are very interesting," said Professor Clive Ballard, its director of research.

"It is a possibility that the acquisition of a second language in early childhood may influence the process of the development of neuronal circuits.

"However, the results of this particular study need to be interpreted cautiously as they were comparing groups of individual of different nationalities, educated in different systems.

"It is also well recognised that education in general can bestow benefits on cognitive function in later life."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/3794479.stm

Published: 2004/06/15 23:37:41 GMT

Eating and reading

2007-09-14T12:43:00.001+01:00

The Language Hat (www.languagehat.com) quotes the following blog entry from the New York Times:

"Eating and reading is almost (if not more) enjoyable in restaurants than it is at home – thank god for restaurant bars, and tables for one. Who hasn't, on occasion, while stuck at a table with someone you had nothing to say to, gazed with envy at the guy sitting alone at a restaurant bar, happily stuffing his face and getting sauce on his new issue of The Economist?

Some restaurants are better - in terms of reading and the solo eater - than others. I'll never forget the time, back in the mid-90s, when I was traveling for a story and ate dinner alone at a good, small restaurant in Savannah, Ga.

I don't remember what I ordered. But I do recall that the headwaiter, when he saw I was by myself, brought over a tray of magazines - The New Yorker, Business Week, The Atlantic Monthly - and asked if I'd like to read one while I ate.

Yes, I said. Yes, I would.

I've never seen this act of grace and kindness repeated in any other restaurant - although these days I'm not foolish enough to enter one alone without something to read."

One of the comments reads:

"Same for me. Eating alone is not a sufficient occupation. Many a time did I fall asleep at my mother's breast, I'm told, simply because I hadn't learned how to read yet.

And yes, I, too, sometimes read while walking.

Posted by David Marjanović at September 13"

über das Sprachregime des Kapitalismus

2007-09-12T17:21:00.001+01:00

„Es ist pervers"

Urs Widmer im Interview mit WirtschaftsWoche

Der Schweizer Schriftsteller Urs Widmer über das Sprachregime des Kapitalismus und die Unterwerfungslust der Manager.

WirtschaftsWoche: Herr Widmer, Sie behaupten, die Sprache des Kapitalismus habe „präfaschistische Beiklänge". Wie kommen Sie darauf?

Durch meine Untersuchungen über die Sprache des Faschismus und die deutsche Literatur nach 1945, also die Generation Heinrich Bölls. Deren Anspruch war es, sprachlich bei null anzufangen. Das stellte sich, wie ich merkte, als unmöglich heraus. Die Schriftsteller hatten keine andere Sprache zur Verfügung, als die, die sie im Faschismus erlernt hatten, und es dauerte Jahrzehnte, bis das Deutsche wieder jene Biegsamkeit zurückerhielt, auf die der Schriftsteller für seine Arbeit angewiesen ist. Jenes Minimum an Naivität, ohne die keine Poesie möglich ist. Und kein Leben.

Was hat das mit der Sprache der Ökonomie zu tun?

Alle Diktaturen, gipfelnd im Faschismus, suchen sprachliche Eindeutigkeit. Genau darin ist ihnen die Sprache der Ökonomie verwandt: Sie sucht nach eindeutigen Regelungen und gängelt das Sprachverhalten, freilich nicht durch Anordnung, sondern durch stilles gegenseitiges Abgleichen. Und sie hat eine Eigenschaft, die für alle korrupten Sprachen charakteristisch ist: Sie ist durch und durch euphemistisch. Sie setzt den Begriff an die Stelle der Wirklichkeit. Schon der Begriff „freie Marktwirtschaft" wirkt da wie Hohn.

Sie meinen, die Marktwirtschaft sei alles andere als frei?

Verstehen Sie mich nicht falsch. Ich behaupte keineswegs, die Wirtschaftswelt sei faschistisch. Aber die „Power" von heute erinnert verdächtig an die „Kraft" von damals. Die Sieger, die Tüchtigen, Kompetitiven und Gesunden setzen auf Sieger, und ich habe den Verdacht, dass sie in den Nicht-so-Gesunden und weniger Kompetitiven unwertes Leben sehen. „Lead, follow or get out of the way", so hat es ein hochrangiger Manager gesagt.

Und – was heißt das?

Das heißt, dass wir heute einerseits in einigermaßen funktionierenden Demokratien leben, in denen andererseits eine Ökonomie gedeiht, die die Menschen auf die kriegerischen Ideale des Kampfes und der Härte, des Vitalismus und des Funktionierens, der Disziplin und des Gehorsams einschwört. Ich wundere mich immer wieder, dass die gleichen Leute, die sich als mündige Bürger verstehen, sich schier widerstandlos Tag für Tag in eine Arbeitswelt begeben, in der nichts oder kaum etwas demokratisch geregelt ist. Am wenigsten die Verteilung des erwirtschafteten Geldes.

Sie kritisieren die Eindimensionalität der ökonomischen Sprache und ihre normierende Kraft. Was steckt dahinter?

Macht. Wer Macht anstrebt, muss Gefolgschaft und Konformität erzeugen. Dazu ist die Sprache hervorragend geeignet. Der eindeutige, formalisierte Jargon der globalisierten Wirtschaft hat etwas ungemein Beruhigendes, er suggeriert, dass man eine festumrissene Aufgabe, ein definiertes Ziel und eine klare Funktion, kurz: dass man die Wirklichkeit im Griff hat. Nur: Der Area Sales Manager wird ein Weilchen lang stolz auf seinen bedeutsamen Job sein, aber er kann sich bald nicht mehr verhehlen, dass er wie eh und je mit seinen Staubsaugern loszieht und von unwilligen Hausfrauen die Tür vor der Nase zugeknallt bekommt...

Warum wurde der Code der Wirtschaft mächtiger als beispielweise der von Parteien und Kirchen?

Jede Gruppe hat ihren Code, auch wir Literaten haben einen. Nun kann man mit den Mustern, die man verwendet, identisch oder weniger identisch sein. Ich habe das Glück, in einem Beruf zu arbeiten, wo die Anpassungszwänge nicht so stark sind. In der Wirtschaftswelt, wo der Anpassungsdruck gewaltig ist, liefern sich immer mehr Menschen dem herrschenden Code aus – eben weil er herrscht. Sie suchen geradezu das, was man früher entfremdetes Leben nannte. Der Code ist so etwas wie ein rhetorischer Mitgliedsausweis: Wenn ich ihn drauf habe, bin ich dabei. Wenn nicht, habe ich nicht einmal eine Chance ins Vorzimmer zu treten, weil schon der Portier merkt: Was will denn der hier?

Der Jargon als Eintrittskarte?

Ein mit sich selbst identischer, kraftvoller Geist wird sich nie den Forderungen des Jargons beugen. Man begegnet solchen Köpfen durchaus auch in der Wirtschaft, gerade in den sogenannten oberen Etagen. Novartis-Chef Daniel Vasella oder Herr Ackermann von der Deutschen Bank sind gewiss gescheit genug, nicht allzu häufig in die Falle der gewollten Spracharmut zu tappen. Doch wird die differenzierte Intelligenz nicht dazu genutzt, sich gegen das potemkinsche Sprachverhalten der Wirtschaft zu wehren. Im Gegenteil: Der Siegeszug des Jargons ist dort ausdrücklich gewollt. Schließlich geht es, eben, um Macht. Der Jargon wird in den oberen Etagen also besser durchschaut als in den unteren?

Ja. Es ist wirklich merkwürdig, dass er am eilfertigsten von den – nennen wir sie mal so – Fußtruppen gesprochen wird. Wir Menschen haben die fatale Neigung, uns mit den Siegern zu identifizieren, mit einem als aggressiv erlebten Vorbild. Gerade die, die auf der Leiter des Erfolgs nur eine oder zwei Stufen hochzuklettern vermochten, sprechen auf eine oft tragikomische Art diese Siegersprache. Als gäbe es gar keine andere. Sie haben keine andere. Ihre eigene Hochzeit nennen sie dann eine Win-Win-Situation.

Wie ist dieser Jargon in die Wirtschaftswelt eingedrungen?

Die Täter haben keine Namen. „Es" war es. Beginnend mit Ludwig Erhard und dem Wirtschaftswunder ist „es" geschehen, und viele Leute waren beteiligt. Im Unterschied zum Faschismus, in dem es Täter gibt und eine Sprache, die von diesen Tätern manipuliert wurde, hat die Sprache in einer Demokratie die Chance, ihr eigenes Leben zu entwickeln. In der Vielfältigkeit einer Demokratie ist es schwieriger, der Sprache die Ambivalenz auszutreiben. Sie stößt das eine aus, wehrt das andere ab und nimmt ein drittes auf. Die Sprache tut also, was sie tut, sie mendelt sich nach darwinistischen Prinzipien durch. Es gibt keinen Schuldigen und keine Schuld. Aber wer auf die reichen Möglichkeiten der Sprache verzichtet, verarmt auch sonst.

In Ihrem Theaterstück „Top Dogs" haben Sie das sprachlose Wirtschaftspersonal schon vor ein paar Jahren auftreten lassen. Woher bezogen Sie Ihr Material?

Aus Interviews in Outplacement-Firmen. Und ich habe mich eine Zeit lang als Abendhobby in die einschlägigen Bars gesetzt, wo die Herren der mittleren Etage sich entspannen. In gewissem Sinn haben meine Manager die Groteske mitgeschrieben; die Unerschütterlichen und auch die, die nach zwei Whiskys ihrem Gegenüber Geständnisse machen wollten und auch im Privatesten ihre Sprachklischees nicht loswurden. Die Ambivalenz, die den Menschen erst definiert, ist in ihrem Sprechen systematisch ausgeschaltet.

Sie meinen, auf der einen Seite stehe der Schriftsteller, der den Leser verunsichert, und auf der anderen Seite die Wirtschaft, die eine Sprache der Bestätigung spricht?

Ja, wir sind gewiss Antipoden. Die Dichter geben keine Antworten, sondern stellen Fragen. Sie sind immer mit der Tatsache beschäftigt, dass eine Sache mindestens zwei Seiten hat. Es gibt keine guten Menschen und keinen bösen Menschen, es gibt in all unserem Tun immer auch sein Gegenteil. Ambivalenz. – Jetzt sehen Sie sich die Börsenberichterstattung im Fernsehen an. Alles eindeutig. Alles richtig. Alles sytemnotwendig. Es ist pervers.

Pervers?

Weil die TV-Ökonomen mit heiligen Ernst von Dingen reden, die vollkommen fiktiv sind. Sie liefern Spielkasinoberichte, tun aber so, als sprächen sie aus den Heilszentren dieser Welt. – In der Tat hat die Börse durchaus religiöse Rituale. Sie ist so etwas wie eine Kirche ohne einen Gott der alten Art. Es gibt Priester (die TV-Kommentare sind ihre Predigten), die Börsenkardinäle, die Finanzpäpste...

Sie übertreiben. Uns fällt bei der Börsenberichterstattung nur robuste Zuversicht auf.

Sie scherzen. Dieser Optimismus im Dienst der Sache kommt mir wie das Pfeifen im Wald vor. Wir sind bereit, alles, auch das Absurdeste zu glauben, wenn es nur unsere Ängste bannt. Die hysterische Selbstbejahung der Wirtschaft rührt gerade daher, dass das System in Wirklichkeit aufs äußerste gefährdet ist. Denn niemand weiß, wie viel Geld es überhaupt auf Erden gibt, wo es ist und was es dort tut. Man weiß es kaum vom eigenen Geld.

Können wir die Wahrheit nicht vertragen? Oder ist der Optimismus nur dazu da, sich selbst ständig neu zu beglaubigen?

Um das alles auszuhalten, muss man ganz schön viel weghalluzinieren. Und es ist dann nach Feierabend nicht einfach, das zu sein, was man gern wäre.

Was wären die Menschen denn gern?

Sie wären gern bei sich, was sonst? Bei sich selbst zu sein, das fällt einem in der mittleren Etage einer Großbank schwer. Naja, man verdient 8000 Euro, fährt ein schönes Auto, zweimal im Jahr in Urlaub…

Okay, jetzt werden sie ironisch. Aber im Ernst: Wollen Sie mir weismachen, dass man sich als Mitarbeiter identisch fühlen und herzlich freuen kann, wenn der Arbeitgeber seinen Quartalsgewinn zum achten Mal in Folge gesteigert hat? Nein, das geht nicht auf. Ein Arbeits-Ich und ein Feierabend-Ich, wie soll das gehen? Künstler sind darum immer auch solche, die gar nicht wissen, ob sie gerade arbeiten oder nicht. Wir arbeiten immer oder nie.

Könnte es sein, dass in Ihrer Einstellung zur Wirtschaft und Ihrer Sprache eine grundsätzliche Abneigung gegen den Homo oeconomicus steckt?

Mag sein, obwohl mein Sozialneid gering ist, denn ich verdiene gut.

Das meinen wir nicht, uns geht es um das Verhältnis des Schriftstellers zur Denkweise der Wirtschaft und zu ihrem Habitus.

Naja, natürlich, da spielt sicher auch meine persönliche Geschichte mit. Ich komme aus einem bürgerlichen Haus, Bücher statt Geld, mein Vater war Kommunist, dann, ab etwa 1950, ein kritischer Beobachter aller Politik, auch der linken. Ich war dann in den späteren Sechzigerjahren der deutschen Linken nahe. Das hinterlässt natürlich Spuren im Denken, bis heute. Ich möchte politisch teilhaben an dieser Gesellschaft.

Also auch dabei sein, wenn es um den Zugang zur Macht geht.

Künstlern geht es selten um Macht. Es geht um Freiheiten. Aber wir halten uns oft nolens volens in der Nähe des Geldes auf, in der Nähe der Macht. Wir haben keine sauberen Hände. Aber wir haben immerhin die Chance, dem beschädigten Leben den Spiegel vorzuhalten. Diese Chance nutze ich.

So wie das Establishment sich Künstler hält, die sie in ihren heiligen Hallen ausstellen lässt, so hält es sich also auch den Urs Widmer als Narren vom Dienst…

Schön wär's.

…und in Ihren subventionierten Theatern lässt es Stücke wie „Top Dogs" spielen…

Also erstens ist es für einen Maler nicht ehrenrührig, wenn er von der UBS oder der Deutschen Bank gesammelt wird. Zweitens habe auch ich schon einmal beim Züricher Rotary-Club einen Vortrag gehalten. Am Paradeplatz, wo sonst. Im Publikum saß zusammengenommen Privatvermögen von geschätzten zwei Milliarden Euro. Zur Belohnung bekam ich zwei Flaschen mittelprächtigen Weins.

Kann die Literatur Menschen, die sich im Netz der Arbeitswelt verheddert haben, eine lebensöffnende Perspektive bieten?

Das kann sie, ja, sie kann den Menschen das Angebot einer Ursprünglichkeit der zweiten Art machen. Die erste Ursprünglichkeit, die nicht kulturell vermittelte, ist eine Fiktion, von der zu träumen dennoch schön ist. Wie die nackten Göttinnen und Götter Griechenlands auf den weißen Uferfelsen saßen und in unendlicher Muße übers tiefblaue Meer hinsahen...

Es gibt Leute, die behaupten, man bräuchte die Literatur nicht – eben weil sie keine Eindeutigkeit herzustellen vermag.

An diese Leute sei die Frage gerichtet: Wieso denn ist die Wirtschaftswelt emotional so karg? Dermaßen spracharm? – Ihr gegenüber steht eine Literatur, die von der Sprache des Mainstreams schon deshalb abweicht, weil die Dichter gar nicht anders können. Literatur ist Sprachabweichung.

Weshalb sie sich ständig der Gefahr aussetzt, nicht verstanden zu werden – und nicht verstanden werden zu wollen.

Es gibt Dichter, die so sehr vom Mainstream abweichen, dass man sie nicht mehr versteht. Der späte Hölderlin. Diese Dichter sind in unseren Augen dann verrückt. Ver-rückt. Es geht also in der Literatur darum, die rechte Balance zwischen Sprachabweichung und gelingender Kommunikation zu finden. Wir wollen ja schließlich verstanden werden. Pathetisch gesagt: Es ist für eine Gesellschaft überlebenswichtig, dass jemand ihr ihre Geschichten erzählt. Sei es in Büchern oder in Filmen, Bildern, Fotografien, Musikstücken – Geschichten müssen sein.

Warum? Weil sie uns eine Ahnung von unseren verpassten Möglichkeiten vermitteln? Weil sie uns weh tun?

Sicher auch das. Vor allem aber, weil sie Trost spenden. Du bist nicht allein mit deinen lichten und eben auch schwarzen Gedanken und Gefühlen. Und Geschichten zeigen, dass die Sprache der Ökonomie die Sprache der wirklichen Welt nie endgültig in den Griff bekommen kann.

[09.09.2007] dieter.schnaas@wiwo.de, christopher.schwarz

Aus der WirtschaftsWoche 37/2007.

http://www.wiwo.de/pswiwo/fn/ww2/sfn/buildww/id/124/id/303817/fm/0/SH/0/depot/0/

"macho" kanji and "feminine" hiragana

2007-09-02T19:31:00.001+01:00

The Japan Times, Sunday, Aug. 26, 2007

"It's ladies first now in Japanese love hotels"

By DONALD RICHIE
JAPANESE LOVE HOTELS: A Cultural History, by Sarah Chaplin. London/New York: Routledge, 2007, 242 pp. with photos, figures and tables, £85 (cloth)

The love-hotel industry is one of Japan's most profitable. It accounts for more than ¥4 trillion a year, a figure nearly four times than that of the profit of Toyota Motors, double that of the anime market, and a trillion yen more than the annual takings of the Japan Racing Association.

Supporting this are 30,000 love hotels nationwide providing places for the 500 million visits that take place each year. Some 1,370,000 couples use a love hotel daily (1 percent of the total population of 127 million people on any given day), and one research project has calculated that half of all sex in Japan takes place in a love hotel, and that consequently a large part of the country's offspring is conceived in one.

This is because a large percentage of the patrons are married to each other. It has been estimated that customers fall into three categories: married, just dating, and adulterous. Their demands, however, are all the same — couples (married to each other or not) seeking space dedicated to sexual intimacy on a short-term basis, away from their crowded, nosy homes.

Other countries have their love-hotel equivalents — South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines — but these are not often of the same caliber as Japan's. Here the love-hotel establishment is not only geared to provide security and quiet, but also to create an atmosphere that is romantic (even fantastic), as other-worldly as Disneyland but at the same time stuffed with various handy gadgets.

Love-hotel excesses are well known, though now less evident since the 1985 revision to the Law Regulating Businesses Affecting Public Morals. This put an end to the large mirrors and big, round dendo (electric) beds that moved of their own accord. The contemporary love hotel is now much more kawaii (cute) than kinky.
Among the the reasons offered for this is that there has been something of a power shift in love-hotel choice. It used to be the male half that decided. Back then the places had hopeful macho monikers — Empire, Rex, King. Then the female half began to choose. Love hotels started calling themselves "fashion hotels" or "boutique hotels," and began to have lavish lobbies with theme-shops, colors like beige and lavender, and decor like Laura Ashley.

This change can be documented in the Meguro Emperor (still in Meguro), which began in 1973 as a he-man fort before it slowly metamorphosed into a romantic Disneyland castle. The interior has been several times revised to segue from male- to female-friendly. Even the name has changed. It is now Gallery Hotel.

In most love hotels "macho" kanji has been replaced by "feminine" hiragana, trendy katakana or, more often, romaji, that romanized script that carries no male/female associations at all.

The fashion hotel has grown ultra discrete (no one sees you once you are inside; in fashion motels, your license plates are hidden and there are no windows) and the erotic becomes the exotic, the risky becomes riskless, and the bed is seen as more trophy than taboo.

In her learned and entertaining book on the anthropology of the love hotel Sarah Chaplin follows the ups and downs of her subject and is particularly good in connecting its changes with those within the larger public. From the hovels of the late 1950s, almost entirely associated with adultery and prostitution, we have proceeded to the present pleasure palaces of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and almost everywhere else.

The entrances of such places used to resemble those of public toilets (a bafflement that allowed entry but discouraged voyeurism, and which one critic called "a purely pragmatic answer to a basic physical need.") Not now. Privacy otherwise ensured, we scan the modish room-menu, take a look around the shop and note the brand-name goods for sale, and then proceed to a bedroom in all ways more lavish than our own.

Since Chaplin is an academic, a number of authorities are evoked and acknowledged, but her style remains lively and readable. Remarking on the dispatch necessary of those cleaning the room and changing the sheets in the five minutes after an occupancy, she quotes that one might liken the process to a pit crew of a Formula One racing team's.

Here then is everything you would want to know about one of Japan's most significant architectural achievements, one which is also certainly its most lucrative.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/print/fb20070826dr.html

eine verdammte Fleißarbeit

2007-08-27T04:45:00.001+01:00

Jongleur mit Wörtern
Deutschlandfunk, 22.08.2007

Der Indogermanistik-Student Sebastian Heine beherrscht knapp 35 Sprachen
Von Martin Koch

Wer in Deutschland mehr als drei Sprachen fließend spricht, gilt bereits als Ausnahmetalent. Der Bonner Student Sebastian Heine übertrumpft dieses Maß um das Zehnfache. Als sein Erfolgsrezept nennt er schlicht Fleiß und den regelmäßigen aktiven Sprachgebrauch.

"Mein Geliebter opferte sich fürs Vaterland, aus dem Haar der Locken webe ich ihm das Leichentuch."

Wenn Sebastian Heine paschtunische Gedichte rezitiert, verklärt sich der Blick des 22-Jährigen:

"Das Pashto ist süß, gleichzeitig sehr herb. Das Pashto kann unglaublich feinfühlig sein und andererseits sehr hart und männlich, das Pashto lebt, es schreit, es weint, es freut sich, es stöhnt, es stirbt."

Pashto ist seine Lieblingssprache: Und das will wirklich was heißen, denn alles in allem spricht Sebastian Heine etwa 35 Sprachen: Altpersisch, Sogdisch, Sakisch, Aramäisch - die Liste ließe sich noch lange fortsetzen. Das beeindruckt viele, doch der schlanke Mann mit den braunen Locken wehrt sich gegen zuviel Ehrfurcht: Er sei zwar ein Exot, aber auf keinen Fall ein Genie:

"Es ist nicht das Ingeniöse, das man das einfach so kann, es ist der Fleiß, die Arbeit. Ich sitze jeden Tag Stunden über diesen Sprachen, jeden Tag wiederhol' ich die Grammatik, jeden Tag lern' ich Vokabeln, ich treffe jeden Tag diese Menschen und über die Sprache im aktiven Gebrauch, es ist einfach eine verdammte Fleißarbeit."

Schon als 15-Jähriger las Sebastian Heine im Schulunterricht Homer im Original. Als er hörte, dass Griechisch eng mit Sanskrit verwandt sei, lernte er auch diese Sprache. In der Folgezeit tauchte der Sohn eines Historikers immer tiefer ein in die Welt der Sprachwissenschaft - und berichtet begeistert von unerwarteten Zusammenhängen:

"Konzepte, wie wir sie in den althochdeutschen Merseburger Zaubersprüchen finden: Das ist ein Spruch, wo es heißt Bein zu Bein, Blut zu Blut, können wir verknüpfen mit Zaubersprüchen in Griechenland und im alten Indien. Ein Konzept wie in den Merseburger Zaubersprüchen gab es also aufgrund des Sprachvergleiches vermutlich schon in der neolithischen Zeit!"

Dass er schon damals nur Wenige für seine Passion begeistern konnte, machte Sebastian Heine nichts aus. Jahr für Jahr lernte er drei bis vier Sprachen aus dem Nahen und Mittleren Osten hinzu. Das fand er spannender als Diskobesuche mit seinen Klassenkameraden. Auch bei seinen Kommilitoninnen und Kommilitonen gilt der gebürtige Thüringer als schräger Vogel (oder sympathischer Kauz?). Doch er ist glücklich, wenn er jeden Tag für Stunden in der Bibliothek Sprachen studieren kann. Und danach beginnt der andere Teil seines Studentenlebens:

"Ich verbringe Tage, Stunden mit Paschtunen, Persern, ich ziehe mit Menschen, die hier wohnen, die hier heimisch geworden sind, um die Häuser. Stellen Sie sich mal vor, Sie leben ganz normal, feiern Partys, treffen Menschen, erleben interessante Dinge, aber eben nicht auf Deutsch, sondern auf Pashto, Persisch oder Urdu."

Äußerlich unterscheidet sich Sebastian Heine von seinen paschtunischen Freunden vor allem dadurch, dass er zu jeder Gelegenheit einen Anzug trägt. Aus ästhetischen Gründen, wie er sagt. Allerdings: Eine kleine Annäherung an das Erscheinungsbild der Paschtunen sprießt, wenn auch noch etwas zaghaft, in seinem Gesicht.

"Diese Parodie auf einen Bart?! Ja, ich gebe zu, ich habe ihn mir ein bisschen stehenlassen mit dem bescheidenen Ergebnis, wie sie jetzt sehen, als kleine Reminiszenz, ja."

Über seine Zukunft macht sich der 22-Jährige viele Gedanken. Kein Wunder, hat er doch gerade seine Magisterarbeit abgegeben. Mit seinen Sprachkenntnissen hätte er angesichts der aktuellen Lage in Afghanistan beim Militär oder in Wirtschaftskonzernen sicher beste Chancen, doch Sebastian Heine will sich seine Unabhängigkeit als Forscher bewahren. Ende des Jahres wird er erstmal als Stipendiat der Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes nach London gehen, um an der renommierten School of Oriental and African Studies seinen Doktor zu machen. Und was danach kommt - dafür hat er schon einen ganz persönlichen Wunschzettel:

"Afghanistan wäre mein geheimer Traum, weil die Arbeit, die es dort zu tun gilt, rein wissenschaftlicher Art, die Dialekte aufzuarbeiten, die Sprachen, über die es noch keine Grammatiken gibt, ihre Geschichten, Märchen, Sagen, Dichtung, das wäre unglaublich reizvoll. Und so Gott will, 'Inshallah', wie meine Paschtunen sagen würden, ändert sich die Situation in der Zukunft und es ergibt sich eine Chance."

http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendungen/campus/661053/

Between sixteen and three-and-twenty

2007-08-23T06:47:00.001+01:00

"I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting," says the Shepherd in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale.

In an article on English yoofery (to coin a word), the Economist comments, "It is true that more teenage British wenches are got with child than other European ones, and that British teenagers are unusually prone to taking drugs, fighting, venereal disease and boozing..."; and "there is something else peculiar to British families, at least among Europeans—an oddity that is especially salient at this time of year. Visitors to piazzas or plazas are likely to see several generations of continental families happily talking, eating and even dancing together. British children, by contrast, spend relatively little time with their parents, and not only because the parents aren't around: many see fraternising with them in public as a fate worse than a mobile phone without a camera. Meanwhile, as that senior policeman complained this week, many British parents, whether there are one or two of them, seem indifferent to their children's antics, or incurious about them. Since the clubs and churches that once thrust them together have withered, unrelated youngsters and older people don't talk much either."

A caveat. The Economist also says, "But few who drink or smoke pot graduate to knife crime. Many do none of these things; most are better-off and better-educated than ever."

http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9653083

Reto–Romaans

2007-08-21T15:18:00.001+01:00

Kunsttaal moet Reto–Romaans redden

GENEVE (ANP) – In tientallen gemeenten in het Zwitserse kanton Graubünden stappen de scholen maandag over van onderwijs in hun plaatselijke Reto–Romaanse dialect op de kunstmatige Reto–Romaanse standaardtaal, het Rumantsch Grischun. Op die manier moet de Reto–Romaanse taal tegen uitsterven worden beschermd.

Dit meldde de krant Tribune de Genève donderdag. Reto–Romaans is –naast Duits, Frans en Italiaans– de vierde officiële taal van Zwitserland, maar wordt nog maar door 35.000 mensen gesproken. Daarnaast is de taal, die verwant is aan Ladinisch en Friulisch in Italië, in verschillende Alpenvalleien versplinterd in vijf dialecten: Surselvisch, Sutselvisch, Surmeirisch, Vallader en Puter.

Het gebruik van het in de jaren '80 'gemaakte' Rumantsch Grischun, dat door niemand als moedertaal wordt gesproken, is echter omstreden. De recente beslissing om de nieuwslezers op radio en tv Rumantsch Grischun te laten spreken, stuit op verzet. Tot nu toe sprak iedereen op de radio zijn eigen dialect.

Reformatorisch Dagblad, 16-08-2007

http://www.refdag.nl/artikel/1312540/Kunsttaal+moet+Reto%96Romaans+redden.html

Road Trip

2007-08-12T12:46:00.001+01:00

I'm off on a road trip to the south of France and the north of Spain with Véronique, Laura, and Yin the dog.

Annie Oakley

2007-08-07T07:34:00.001+01:00

From A New Dictionary of Eponyms (OUP):

An Annie Oakley is a complimentary ticket to a theater. The ticket has holes punched in it to prevent its exchange for cash at the box office. This oddity came about in an unusual way.

Annie Oakley (1860–1926), born in Darke County, Ohio, was the stage name for Phoebe Anne Oakley Mozee. Annie was probably the greatest female sharpshooter ever. She got her professional start when, at the urging of friends, she entered a shooting match in Cincinnati pitting Frank E. Butler, a vaudeville marksman, against all comers. Butler gave no thought to this fifteen-year-old girl who dared compete with him. But upon seeing Annie's first shot, he paid strict attention. She won the contest, and a husband to boot, for Butler and Annie fell in love and were married. They then began a vaudeville tour as a trick-shooting team.

The Butlers joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show in 1885, but it was Annie who became the star attraction. She remained as the rifle sharpshooter for forty years. She thrilled audiences with her expert marksmanship and dazzled them with her trick shooting. In one of her outstanding feats, she would flip a playing card into the air, usually a five of hearts, and shoot the pips out of it.

But what, you might ask, has that to do with a free ticket? Circus performers were reminded of their meal tickets by the riddled playing cards, because their meal tickets were punched every time they bought a meal. Hence they came to call their tickets "Annie Oakleys." The idea of a punched card caught on, so that today a complimentary ticket to a show, a meal, or a pass on a railway has Annie Oakley holes.

Annie Oakley needed no encomiums during her forty years with the Wild West Show, but she was given one, nevertheless, by Sitting Bull, who labeled her "Little Sure Shot." In more recent times Ethel Merman, the star of Annie Get Your Gun, popularized Annie Oakley once again, making her for today's generation a "big shot."

Source:
"Annie Oakley" A New Dictionary of Eponyms. Morton S. Freeman. Oxford University Press, 1997.

In a New York bar

2007-08-05T19:08:00.001+01:00

A letter to the Guardian, July 21, 2007:

SIR – One example of a subtle message being more effective than a loud government health warning is found in New York ("None so deaf as those that will not hear", June 23rd). Bars across the city display a plaque with the standard boilerplate that "Alcohol during pregnancy causes birth defects." In one establishment the message has been rendered brutally effective by a patron who has scrawled underneath, "Just look around."

Brigg Reilley
Albuquerque

MITOPENCOURSEWARE

2007-08-04T05:05:00.001+01:00

Here's a gold mine from MIT:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/index.htm

MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based electronic publishing initiative funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation , MIT, and generous support of the Ab Initio software company.

MIT OCW's goals are to:

Provide free, searchable access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.

Extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the "opencourseware" concept.

MIT OCW would not be possible without the support and generosity of the MIT faculty who choose to share their research, pedagogy, and knowledge to benefit others. We expect MIT OCW to reach a steady - though never static - state by 2008. Between now and then, we will publish the materials from virtually all of MIT's undergraduate and graduate courses.

We will be continually evaluating the Access, Use, and Impact of MIT OCW. With 1,550 courses published as of November 1, 2006, we are still in a learning stage of this MIT initiative and we will benefit enormously from your feedback, as we strive to make MIT OCW as rich and useful as possible for our users.

Visit:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/index.htm

Harsh and guttural

2007-07-12T05:41:00.001+01:00

A New York Times reader who calls himself "rrrrbyrnes" writes of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth:

"...I had an unfortunate problem with what I perceived to be a harsh presentation of the Spanish language. It seemed to harsh and gutteral. This must be a problem with me - I don't see Spanish language movies often. But it nevertheless grated."

How anyone could think that Spanish, and particularly the Spanish spoken in this film, is harsh and gutteral (or guttural, for that matter), is a mystery to me. The New York Times' review can be read here:

http://tinyurl.com/yvgfbg

In a wonderful interview (about much more than movies) on NPR last year (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7031354), Guillermo del Toro said that the title of the film was changed in English because American viewers don't know what a faun is.

Critics around the world have praised this violent and disturbing and beautiful film. I wonder if it would have been stronger, and less graphically violent, if it has been told _entirely_ from the perspective of Ofelia. Her escape from fascist Spain into her dark fantasy world would have been just as powerful, if not more so. But it is a great movie nonetheless. It's certainly the most violent movie I've watched all the way through (over the years, I've stopped watching many violent movies half way through).

Behind bars

2007-07-10T10:35:00.001+01:00

"Today, almost 7 million people are under the supervision of the U.S. correctional system, and roughly 2.2 million Americans live behind bars. In 2001, the United States spent a record $167 billion on its criminal
justice system, which equals 7 percent of all government spending on state and local levels, and is roughly as much as is expended on health care and hospitals."

From Juergen Martschukat's H-Law review of Marie Gottschalk's The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Sanskrit

2007-07-06T06:54:00.001+01:00

The Christian Science Monitor reports that spoken Sanskrit is enjoying a big revival both in India and among Indian expatriates in the United States, mainly thanks to the "efforts of a private group, Samskrita Bharati, headquartered in New Delhi. The volunteer-based group's mission: Bring the pan-Indian language back to the mainstream and lay the groundwork for a cultural renaissance."

Some excerpts from the CSM article:

There were many reasons for the decline of Sanskrit," says Chamu Krishna Shastry, who founded Samskrita Bharati in 1981, "but one of the foremost was the unimaginative way it was taught since [British] colonial times." Later, in a newly democratic India, the language associated with upper-caste Brahmin priests held little appeal to the masses. The present movement to revive Sanskrit aims to teach the "language of the gods" to anyone who cares to learn it.
...
In 25 years, an estimated 7 million people have attended spoken Sanskrit classes offered by Samskrita Bharati in India and abroad, says Shastry. There are 250 full-time volunteers and 5,000 part-time teachers in the United States and India, and their numbers are growing.

Samskrita Bharati has chapters in 26 of India's 28 states. There are also groups in such places as San Jose, Calif.; Seattle; Pittsburgh; Buffalo, N.Y.; Dallas; San Diego; and Chicago. Requests are coming in from other US cities as well.

Source:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0705/p14s02-lihc.html?page=1

Sie trägt alles

2007-07-02T19:13:00.001+01:00

Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung (30. Juni) über die neue Zürcher Bibel und die Kulturgeschichte früherer Bibelübersetzungen:

Sie [die Zürcher Bibel] markierte schon bei ihrem ersten Erscheinen 1531 einen Einschnitt, indem sie sich - unaufgeregter und sprachlich weniger ambitioniert als die Bibelübersetzung Luthers - als Gemeinschaftsarbeit von hochmotivierten, im Hebräischen und Griechischen versierten Theologen präsentierte. Seit einigen Tagen liegt die Zürcher Bibel in einer neu erarbeiteten Übersetzung vor, die jene von 1931 ersetzt. Sie ist noch untadeliger geworden, als sie schon war; ihr Deutsch, genau auf der Spur des hebräischen und griechischen Urtextes, ist wunderbar klar.
...
Die deutschsprachigen Kulturen stellten im Rahmen der Übersetzungsgeschichte der Bibel einen Sonderfall dar. Auch in karolingischer Zeit, da die Missionierung der germanischen Stämme sich der Volkssprache zu bedienen begann, galt die deutsche (sprich: fränkische) Sprache als ungehobelt, grobschlächtig und feinerer Ausdrucksnuancen unfähig. Dass sie das Monopol der drei «heiligen» Sprachen Hebräisch, Griechisch und Latein durchbrechen und selbst Trägerin der Heilsbotschaft werden könnte, schien undenkbar.

Einem anonymen Autor des 9. Jahrhunderts allerdings gelang es, das Undenkbare zu denken. In einem wichtigen Text - «De vocatione gentium» («Über die Berufung aller Völker») - hielt er fest, dass Gott nicht nur wegen der Sünden der Menschen Mensch geworden sei, sondern auch, um deren «erbärmliche Sprache» («propter lamentabilem vocem humanam») - in diesem Fall das Deutsche - zu retten: «Denn Gott liess sich um des Menschen und seiner erbärmlichen Sprache willen barmherzig herab, als er vom Himmel zur Erde kam, um menschliche Gestalt anzunehmen, Leiden zu ertragen und den Tod zu dulden.» - Damit war die deutsche Sprache legitimiert, im Interesse einer alle Völker umfassenden Mission, die Heilsbotschaft zu verkünden.
...
Die Inständigkeit der Texte jedenfalls hat die Jahrhunderte überdauert. Man höre das Hohelied der Liebe nach 1. Kor. 13, 4-6 in der Fassung, wie sie im schon zitierten Text «De vocatione gentium» aus dem 9. Jahrhundert eindrücklich erklingt: «Gotes minni dultic ist, / Frumasam ist, / Nist apultic, / Ni zaplait sih, / Ni habet achust, / Nist ghiri, / Ni sohhit, daz ira ist, / Ni bismerot, / Ni denchit ubiles, / Ni frauuuit sih ubar unreht, / Frauuuit sih ubar uuarnissu. / Dultic ist gauuisso diu gotes minni, huuanta siu ira uuidarmuoti ebano gatregit.»

In der neuen Übersetzung der Zürcher Bibel 2007 heisst das: «Die Liebe hat den langen Atem, gütig ist die Liebe, sie eifert nicht. Die Liebe prahlt nicht, sie bläht sich nicht auf, sie ist nicht taktlos, sie sucht nicht das Ihre, sie lässt sich nicht zum Zorn reizen, sie rechnet das Böse nicht an, sie freut sich nicht über das Unrecht, sie freut sich mit an der Wahrheit. Sie trägt alles, sie glaubt alles, sie hofft alles, sie erduldet alles.»

Quelle:

http://www.nzz.ch/2007/06/30/li/articleFAPYA.html

200 Proof

2007-06-29T11:35:00.001+01:00

"Almost half of working-age men in Russia who die are killed by alcohol abuse, according to a new medical study which says the country's males die in excessive numbers not just because they drink lots of vodka but because they also consume products containing alcohol, such as eau de cologne, antiseptics and medicinal tinctures. Some products contain 95% alcohol by volume, equating to 200 proof."

That's from a recent Guardian article, which also says that in 2004 Russia's life expectancy was 59 years for men and 72 for women. Due to the low life expectancy and birthrate, the population in Russia is falling by 700,000 a year.

The Guardian, June 15, 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2103841,00.html

Are native English speakers better English teachers?

2007-06-27T10:40:00.001+01:00

Scott Sommer writes in his Taiwan blog:

"There is no place in the world with a high standard of English as a foreign language where a majority, or even a lot, of the teaching is done by foreign teachers.

Think of a few places you know where there's a high standard of English? It should be easy because there are a lot of them: places like Holland, Belgium, The Philippines, Switzerland, Sweden, to name a few. Not a single one of these countries has a significant number of foreign teachers. Probably every single one of those European and South American businessmen you know who speak flawless English was taught by a local teacher. The Filipino, Indian, and Malaysian students at you school were all taught by local teachers.

I know, I know, Dutch is very similar to English, and in the Philippines and India, English is the language of the professional class. Things like this make it much, much easier to learn a language. But not only is this not particularly true in some of the places where English is best spoken, but it's not even particularly important. What is important is that there are plenty of places where having been taught by a properly trained local teacher is not a significant handicap.

Let's look at the flip-side of this problem. Have foreign teachers made a big impact in the places where they are widely used? In Japan, virtually every school in the country is provided by either the JET program or other locally developed programs with a foreign teacher. The next largest foreign teacher programs are Korea and Taiwan. All of these countries are notorious for the poor standard of their English compared with, for example, Scandinavian countries. In fact, if you look at it this way, it's the countries with the worst record that have the most foreign teachers.

There are many excellent foreign teachers who have made a big difference to their students. But that's not the point. My point is that there is no place on Earth where English is spoken widely as a foreign language where most, or even a lot, of the teaching is done by foreign teachers. Being taught by competent and skilled local teachers will never be a disadvantage to a learner."

I would quibble with Scott that the standard of English in Switzerland is high (mainly because the Swiss have traditionally learned one or two of the four official languages as second and third languages in school). But other than that his point is well taken.

Source:

http://scottsommers.blogs.com/taiwanweblog/2007/06/are-native-spea.html

Immunity

2007-06-19T17:34:00.001+01:00

The Observer recently published an extraordinary article about sex workers in Kenya who are immune to AIDS. A few excerpts:

...Agnes has, in effect, a callus: the first time she was exposed to the virus, her body produced enough killer T cells to fight it off. This part isn't unique - the body of every person who is exposed to HIV mounts some level of response, and sometimes manages to fight it off; a single exposure does not guarantee infection. But Agnes's body, it seems, not only produced sufficient and strong enough cells to fight the virus off the first time, it then produced a whole raft of those killer Ts, flooding her system with guardians whose sole brief was to keep an eye out for cells infected with HIV. The infected cells have a distinct pattern of little bumps on them, called epitopes, which act like a red rose in the lapel as far as the killer Ts are concerned, letting them know just which cells they want to hunt down. Then every subsequent time - probably thousands of times - that HIV got into Agnes's body, her killer T cells drove it back. A person does not normally maintain a large number of killer T cells for a long period - just long enough to kill something off, then production drops. But in Agnes, fairly constant exposure to HIV kept her killer T cell count high.

This conclusion was reinforced when Plummer and his team noticed that women who take a 'sex break' - who make a trip home to the village for a few weeks, or save up a little money and leave sex work for a while to try selling shoes instead, or hook up with a regular who keeps them in cash for a year or two - were far more likely to get infected, almost immediately, if they returned to sex work, even though previously they had had years of apparent immunity. On the break, their bodies stopped making the killer T cells, leaving them vulnerable again...

From the moment it became clear that Agnes and a handful of other women in Majengo - about 100 to date - really could fight off the virus, the researchers in Nairobi hoped that their biology would hold the secret of an HIV vaccine. Soon a team from Oxford University was at work on a vaccine that used the epitopes (the tell-tale bumps on infected cells) that triggered Agnes's killer Ts. They hoped it would provoke other people's bodies to produce killer T cells in the same way that the real virus appeared to trigger production in the sex workers. Trials began in Nairobi in 2001, and a second trial was mounted by Pontiano Kaleebu and his colleagues in Entebbe a couple of years later. But despite high hopes, the Oxford vaccine didn't cause that explosion of killer T cells. And so it was back to the painstaking work of trying to figure out the secret of Agnes's immunity. 'Sometimes a vaccine feels impossibly far away,' sighed Keith Fowke. 'All our knowledge about these HIV-resistant people is interesting and I feel it's important... but it is frustrating.'
...
Today, the research strategy in Majengo revolves around intense study of Agnes and the other resistant women (who make up about five per cent of the cohort at any one time), from analysing their genome to breaking down the chemical components of the mucosal membranes in their vaginas, in an effort to figure out what may be protecting them. So far researchers have not found anything present in 100 per cent of the women, so it may be that the protection comes from multiple overlapping factors, including some that are genetic. There is a strong family correlation - people related to an HIV-resistant woman seem to be half as likely to get infected as people who are not related.

Agnes is aware that she is a fascinating specimen. 'Most of the people have been very interested in me,' she said matter-of-factly. But she has no understanding of the biological basis for her HIV resistance. 'No one has told me,' she said with a shrug. She gets good, free health care at the clinic for the occasional sexually transmitted infection and also for respiratory infections which plague residents of the polluted slum. So she is happy to give them her blood a couple of times a year, and to enjoy a sense of contributing something to her community.

But Agnes's survival has served to highlight a disquieting aspect of this research. She has come to the clinic for more than 20 years. In that time, more than $22m in scientific grant money has flowed through the project, and many of the researchers have earned reputations as the top experts in their fields. Yet Agnes and a handful of other women are still selling sex, to an average of eight clients a day, still for a dollar or two each time - although they say they would like nothing more than to get out of sex work. When I asked her what she would like to do instead, Agnes's broad face lit up. 'Any kind of job I could do. I could be a cleaner or anything. But it's very difficult to get a job - you have to know somebody to get a job.' And Agnes said she doesn't know anybody who could help. With only limited literacy after three years of primary school, and no other skills, Agnes said she sees no other options. 'It's embarrassing, this profession,' she said. She refuses to discuss what she does for a living with her children, although she is sure they know. 'I've never told them what I do, but I think they can see it. I think they know what I'm doing is not good but they know I do it to provide for them.'

Agnes's frustration with her life in sex work raises troubling ethical questions about research, the kind that bedevil investigations into Aids vaccines, prevention technologies and treatment, all of which, by definition, involve large groups of poor Africans, the people most at risk. What obligation does a researcher such as Plummer have to the women who have given him their blood for 20 years? What does this project owe Agnes?
...
Agnes's mysterious immune system has garnered her considerable fame in the world of Aids, but little else. She lives a life almost totally unchanged from her first days in umalaya 30 years ago. 'I can buy our daily food out of what I earn, and that's all,' she told me as we sat in the shade of her bustling alley. 'I don't feel famous. It's only that my problems push me to do sex work. If I could find something else, I would.'

The Observer, Sunday May 27, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/aids/story/0,,2089312,00.html

Plant-based diets

2007-06-18T17:50:00.001+01:00

The Orlando Sentinel reports:

"Studies have shown that people on plant-based diets tend to have significantly lower cancer rates than those on meat-based diets, according to a Cancer Project [a U.S. nonprofit health organization] handbook...

People in rural Asia and Africa, for example, where traditional diets are based on rice or grains and a mix of starchy vegetables, fruits and beans, generally avoid cancer, according to the handbook. When it does strike, they are more likely to survive.

Studies have also shown that diets rich in meat, dairy products, fried foods and even vegetable oils boost hormones such as estrogen, which is linked to breast cancer in women, and testosterone, which researchers suspect plays a role in prostate cancer in men, the handbook reports.

These hormone levels fall significantly in both men and women when they reduce the amount of fat in their diets.

If you're looking to trim fat, though, simply cutting beef and switching to low-fat dairy products won't do, Renideo said. Though the percentage of calories from fat is higher in beef than it is in chicken or fish, the difference is slight. The leanest beef, for example, derives nearly a third of its calories from fat, according to the Cancer Project, while white meat chicken and tuna derive nearly a quarter of their calories from fat.

And dairy products -- even fat-free or low-fat -- play a role in cancer growth as well, according to the Cancer Project. Studies have shown, for example, that drinking milk raises the levels of insulinlike growth factor in the bloodstream. IGF-I, the handbook says, is a powerful stimulus for cancer cell growth."

"Plant-based diet wages war against cancer"
Orlando Sentinel, May 27, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/36cpw4

Things Chinese

2007-06-14T05:39:00.000+01:00

Since most of what I read is about China and Taiwan, I'm mainly going to blog at Things Chinese, which focuses on that universe.

"Let a Million Surnames Bloom"

2007-06-13T19:20:00.001+01:00

"With most of the 1.3 billion people in China sharing just 100 surnames, the
Public Security Ministry is considering rules that would combine both
parents' family names to prevent so much duplication, state news outlets
said. So few names by so many often sows confusion and must presumably
hamper police work. 'By adopting both parents' names, 1.28 million new
surnames will be added,' the Xinhua News Agency said."

New York Times, June 13, 2007

The Book of the Hundred Family names (百家姓), compiled during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), listed 408 single-syllable surnames and 30 double-syllable surnames. The introduction of more than a million surnames would be something of a cultural revolution. I don't see it happening.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/world/asia/13briefs-names.html

Bananas

2007-06-12T05:01:00.001+01:00

My daughter Laura, who's seven, prefers Max Havelaar bananas, which
happen to be organic and fair trade, to Chiquita Bananas' bananas,
which are tasteless. In an article about Max Havelaar, Time magazine
wrote in 2005, "The name may not be as globally familiar as Dole or
Chiquita, and has only been on shelves since 1998. Yet in Switzerland it
has a remarkable 78% brand recognition rate and every second banana sold
now bears a Max Havelaar label — probably the highest penetration of
any fair-trade product in the world."

In Coop and Migros, Switzerland's biggest supermarket chains, Max
Havelaar bananas are always numbered "1" on the scales used by buyers.
My guess is that their name recognition is higher than 78% by now. There
is another reason not to buy Chiquita. Kyle de Beausset, a Harvard
student who writes the Immigration Orange blog, reports that Chiquita
has been forced to admit to funding right-wing paramilitary groups in
Colombia:

<http://immigration.campustap.com/blog/entry/view.aspx?Iid=158956>

Harrumph

2007-06-11T19:43:00.001+01:00

I've lost count of the number of letters I've written and never sent. Here's an unsent letter to the editor of The Independent:

I wonder what you have to do to be Beijing correspondent for The Independent. In an article about (of all things) education published a few days ago, Clifford Coonan informed his readers:

"Education has been highly competitive in China ever since the
philosopher Confucius helped formulate the exam system for public
service in the T'ang dynasty AD618 to 907."

Speaking of "public service" instead of the civil service or bureaucracy in the context of imperial China is careless. Spelling Tang "T'ang" shows that Coonan hasn't learned the difference between the pinyin transliteration system (preferred by everyone these days, including himself in the rest of his article and The Independent in general) and the old Wade-Giles system. And saying that Confucius was around during the Tang although the proverbial school child could have told him that Confucius died in 479 B.C. shows that Coonan didn't read the first few pages of his Lonely Planet Guide.

Harrumph,
Paul Frank
Huemoz
Switzerland

P.S. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2631527.ece

Forgetting June 4

2007-06-10T06:14:00.001+01:00

This Reuters report indicates that it's possible to work for a Chinese
newspaper and have no idea what happened on June 4, 1989:

"A newspaper in southwest China has fired three of its editors over
an advertisement saluting mothers of protesters killed in the 1989
Tiananmen Square crackdown, a source with knowledge of the gaffe said on
Thursday....

Li Zhaojun, deputy editor-in-chief of the Chengdu Evening News in
Sichuan's provincial capital Chengdu, and two other members of the
tabloid's editorial office had been dismissed, the source told Reuters
requesting anonymity...

On the 18th anniversary of the crackdown on Monday, the lower right
corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News ran a tiny ad reading:
'Paying tribute to the strong[-willed] mothers of June 4 victims.'...

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post said on Wednesday a young female
clerk allowed the tribute to be published because she had never heard of
the crackdown....

She phoned back the person who placed the ad to ask what June 4 meant
and he told her it was the date of a mining disaster, the Post said.

It was unclear if the man who placed the advertisement had been
arrested.

The man also tried to place the same advertisement with two other
Chengdu newspapers, the source said.

'Staff at the other two newspapers also did not know what June 4 was,
but they phoned and asked their superiors and he walked away,' the
source told Reuters.

The Communist Party has banned references to the crackdown in state
media, the Internet and books as part of a whitewash campaign, meaning
most young Chinese are ignorant of the events...."

Reuters in The Globe and Mail, June 7, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/yohuvb

Bibel in gerechter Sprache

2007-06-09T11:03:00.001+01:00

Das Bremer Sprachblog über die jüngst veröffentlichte Bibel in
gerechter Sprache:

"Die taz berichtet über die Bibel in gerechter Sprache, die im letzten
Jahr erschienen ist und deren vierte Auflage bevorsteht.
Presseschauwürdig ist das Übersetzungskonzept der gerechten Bibel:

>Die „Bibel in gerechter Sprache" hat drei fundamentale
>Übersetzungsprinzipien: Sie soll geschlechtergerecht formuliert sein,
>die Ergebnisse des jüdisch-christlichen Dialogs berücksichtigen und
>soziale Gerechtigkeit voranbringen.

Das ist schon ein sehr offenherziger Fall von „Was nicht passt, wird
passend gemacht". Eigentlich ist es ja die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,
einen zielsprachlichen Text zu schaffen, der den Inhalt des Originals
möglichst genau wiedergibt. Damit das gelingen kann, müssen natürlich
unterschiedliche Rahmenbedingungen in der Ursprungs- und der Zielkultur
berücksichtigt werden: wenn es Hintergrundwissen gibt, das bei den
Lesern des Originals als selbstverständlich vorausgesetzt werden kann,
das aber von den Lesern der Zielkultur nicht geteilt wird, muss dieses
Wissen in der Übersetzung mit vermittelt werden. Dadurch ist jede
Übersetzung natürlich ein Stück weit auch eine Interpretation des
Originals. Trotzdem: die Anpassung an die Bedürfnisse der Zielkultur
darf nicht so weit gehen, dass Unterschiede zwischen Ursprungs- und
Zielkultur einfach weggewischt werden. Sonst müsste man aus den Sklaven
in „Onkel Toms Hütte" tarifvertraglich bezahlte Angestellte machen
und aus den Frauen in der „Geschichte der Dienerin" Leihmütter, die
aus Idealismus kinderlosen Paaren helfen wollen."

http://tinyurl.com/3crqvf

Pelando la Cebolla

2007-06-08T04:52:00.001+01:00

En la prensa alemana no he leído una reseña más mordaz y acertada, ni
siquiera los comentarios cáusticos de Der Spiegel, que lo que escribe
Agapito Maestre sobre el último libro de Günter Grass:

"...La metáfora de la cebolla de la memoria, que al ser pelada revela
verdades que hacen llorar, no deslumbra precisamente por su sutileza.
Porque más que hacernos llorar, insisto, nos encandila su fibra
poética, hasta caer en la sensiblería de quien confunde el trabajo de
la memoria con el de la imaginación. Poético, sí; pero muchas otras
veces no es ni espléndido ni impactante. La narración está llena de
frases hechas, obviedades y expresiones trilladas. Todo está
edulcorado. Cuenta muchas cosas, pero le faltan muchas más. Es el gran
límite de esta confesión.

Cuenta Grass su vida, especialmente de los 12 a los 32 años, cuando
publica El tambor de hojalata, a través de un ejercicio literario que
consiste en ir pelando artísticamente la primera capa de la cebolla. De
ahí sale a veces un libro hermoso, a veces un recuento de melancolías
de la vieja Europa en crisis. Magníficas descripciones de la madre y de
la intensa relación materno-filial, relatos magníficos sobre los
compañeros de colegio y reencuentros felices a finales de los 80. Pero
nunca hallaremos la crítica histórica, menos todavía la autocrítica
impía que se anunciaba en las prepublicaciones. Tampoco la crítica a
una educación que lo llevó a militar en las filas del nazismo.

Nunca me ha gustado cómo juega Grass el juego entre deudas (Schulden) y
culpa (Schuld). Es tramposo, porque sólo revela intención, mala fe,
pero nunca se atreve en su obra, no hablo de sus declaraciones
ideológicas, a pasarle a contrapelo el cepillo a la historia, al modo
benjaminiano. Su trampa, engaño o añagaza estética me resulta
insoportable, sobre todo si pensamos en un hombre con tantos recursos
literarios como tiene él. Recurrir a la imaginación para hacer un
ejercicio de memoria, de reconstrucción crítica del pasado, es
sustituir la literatura, la gran literatura como racionalidad pública,
por la censura o la autocensura; y, lo que es peor, el arte, la
literatura, sale tocado de este híbrido, a veces monstruoso y a veces
bello, entre la imaginación y el memorialismo.

Muchas cosas importantes hay en esta obra, pero yo destaco los recuerdos
de su madre y, por supuesto, pero eso ya no es mérito de Grass, la gran
traducción, debida a ese gran escritor que es Miguel Sáenz."

Agapito Maestre, "Grass no es Mann", Libros, 7 de junio de 2007
http://libros.libertaddigital.com/articulo.php/1276233487

"Nucular" in British English

2007-06-07T16:03:00.003+01:00

Is the "nucular" pronunciation of nuclear gaining ground in the UK?
I've heard it three times in as many months from British speakers on BBC
radio. I heard it again on the June 6 edition of "BBC Radio News Pod"
(though in this last instance it was subtle and fast enough that I may
have misheard). I used to assume that "nucular" was an uneducated
pronunciation in the United States, but that was just an uneducated
assumption. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter (who served as an officer
on a United States Navy experimental nuclear submarine), Bill Clinton,
and George W. Bush have all used this pronunciation. Wikipedia has a
good entry on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucular

And Geoff Nunberg's "Going Nucular":

http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/nucular.html

Nicolas Bouvier

2007-06-06T19:42:00.001+01:00

The Guardian on a new English translation of Nicolas Bouvier's The Way
of the World (L'usage du monde):

"You probably haven't heard of Swiss-born Nicolas Bouvier if you live in
the UK. Yet across the Channel he is as influential as Jack Kerouac and
Bruce Chatwin, a cult travel writer whose books sell by the pallet-load,
even though he died more than a decade ago. Yet this month's new
publication of The Way of the World is the most important event in
travel literature this year.

As a child Bouvier's reading of RL Stevenson, Jules Verne and Jack
London made him impatient for the world. He recalled at the age of eight
'tracing the course of the Yukon with my thumbnail in the butter on my
toast'. His father encouraged him to travel and in 1953, without waiting
for the result of his degree, he left bourgeois Switzerland with no
intention of returning. In a small, slow Fiat, he and his friend Thierry
Vernet - whose stark illustrations are reproduced in this handsome Eland
edition - travelled across Europe and Asia over nineteen unforgettable
months, pausing in Belgrade, Istanbul, Tabriz and Quetta to paint, write
and wait tables, taking longer than Marco Polo - as Bouvier proudly
pointed out - to reach Japan.

Along the road no sensational, headline-grabbing event befell them. They
were not attacked by Baluch bandits or held hostage by an Afghan
warlord. They did not climb the Hindu Kush in search of lost treasure.
Instead they journeyed humbly, honestly and in near-poverty, failing to
get jobs in Turkey, dossing down in a provincial prison in Iran,
teaching French in Tehran to raise funds, and finding sanctuary in
Quetta in a bar run by a distracted, kindly ex-Welsh Guards officer with
'an air of something both luminous and shattered'.

Ten years in the writing, The Way of the World is a masterpiece which
elevates the mundane to the memorable and captures the thrill of two
passionate and curious young men discovering both the world and
themselves. Racy and meditative, romantic and realistic, the book is as
brilliant as Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, but with its
erudition more lightly worn and as alive as Kerouac's On the Road,
though without a whisper of self-aggrandisement. The words of this
wandering poet have been lovingly and effusively rendered into English
by Robyn Marsack, his translator.

On every page a gem or two glitters, and the accumulation of colour,
detail and inspired metaphor produce an intensely hypnotic effect. Take
for example the description of young prostitutes in a Belgrade café who
had 'lovely, smooth, tanned knees, a bit dirty when they had just come
in from practising their trade on a nearby embankment, and well-defined
cheekbones where the blood throbbed like a drum'. Or the dancer who,
inclining his head 'listening to the keyboard as though it were a
stream'. Or the time spent on the road brewing tea and sharing
cigarettes, in the rare moments when intimacy borders on the divine. 'I
dropped this wonderful moment into the bottom of my memory, like a
sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again. The bedrock of
existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say and
think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a
transcendent power that is more serene than love.'

Martin Amis once wrote that young poets are forever taunted by subjects
which are no longer possible to write about in this ironic age: 'evening
skies, good looks, anything at all to do with love'. The fact that The
Way of the World is 40 years old works in its favour, coming fresh to
most English readers from a less cynical time. Through that distance
Bouvier enables us to rise above faddish celebrity and the sterility of
domestic despair, to remember that the world is a beautiful place and to
rejoice in humanity. He writes, 'Travelling outgrows its motives. It
soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but
soon it is making you – or unmaking you.' If you read any travel book
this year – or indeed in the next forty years – this should be it.

The Guardian, 6 June 2007

For the whole article, go to:
http://tinyurl.com/2z9p84

Force them to learn English

2007-06-04T17:41:00.001+01:00

Geoffrey Pullum writes in the Language Log:

In Australia the Indigenous Affairs minister, Mal Brough, declared on
May 24 that "he was considering a plan to restrict welfare payments to
aboriginal parents in order to force their children to attend school and
learn English." As if the linguistically fascinating but severely
endangered Australian languages were not under enough threat already.
Brough is concerned that there are some aborigines in isolated areas who
"can only speak their own language, which perhaps is only known to 200,
300 or 400 other people." Quite: these languages are at the lower
threshold of size with respect to having a sustainable populations of
speakers. So his idea is to cut their welfare for not learning the
language of the dominant majority. Will Australia never change?...

More here:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004567.html#more

My own view is that everyone in Australia would benefit from learning
English but _forcing_ Aboriginals to do so, and threatening to cut off
welfare payments to poor people who don't speak English, is outrageous.

Ihr Kleines und Großes

2007-06-02T17:22:00.001+01:00

Zhuangzi (365 - 290 v. Chr.) schrieb:

"Sie sagen: Ein guter Mensch wirft (auf andere Menschen) keinen zu
strengen Blick. Sie machen die Dinge nicht zur Voraussetzung der eigenen
Person. Sie halten das nicht für nützlich gegenüber der Welt. Sie
halten nach außen am Verbot von Angriffskriegen und an der Abschaffung
der Waffen fest, nach innen an der Besonnenheit gegenüber den
Leidenschaften. Das ist ihr Kleines und Großes, ihr Feines und Grobes."

Deutsch von Karl Albert und Hua Xue

曰："君子不为苛察，不以身假物。"以为无益于天下
者，明之不如己也。以禁攻寝兵为外，以情欲寡浅为
内。其小大精粗，其行适至是而止。

"China embraces nuclear future"

2007-05-31T14:49:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-30T20:32:00.001+01:00

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?

2007-05-30T10:59:00.001+01:00

"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

2007-05-29T19:03:00.001+01:00

"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

2007-05-29T04:48:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-28T18:43:00.001+01:00

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"

2007-05-28T11:28:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-27T07:59:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-26T08:49:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-25T14:10:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-24T07:03:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-24T06:49:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-24T04:49:00.001+01:00

"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

2007-05-23T09:17:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-21T19:20:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-21T06:49:00.001+01:00

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...

2007-05-20T14:57:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-19T14:39:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-17T06:13:00.001+01:00

"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

2007-05-16T12:54:00.001+01:00

"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

2007-05-16T08:02:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-15T19:58:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-14T17:54:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-12T09:32:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-12T07:31:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-11T11:56:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-10T07:52:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-10T04:52:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-08T08:14:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-07T16:27:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-05T18:52:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-04T15:12:00.001+01:00

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.

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

2007-05-01T16:37:00.001+01:00

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

Illiteracy in China

2007-04-29T18:57:00.001+01:00

From the Washington Post:

Illiteracy is increasing in China, despite a 50-year-old campaign to
stamp it out and a declaration by the government in 2000 that it had
been nearly eradicated. The reasons are complex, from the cost of a
rural education to the growing appeal of migrant work that draws
Chinese away from classrooms and toward far-off cities.

In many cases, as in this farming hamlet in China's southern Guizhou
province, villagers whose education ended in elementary school have
simply forgotten basic skills.

From 2000 to 2005, the number of illiterate Chinese adults jumped by
33 percent, from 87 million to 116 million, the state-run China Daily
reported this month. The newspaper noted that even before the
increase, China's illiterate population had accounted for 11.3
percent of the world's total.
...
Literacy in China is defined according to an exam taken in fourth
grade. Even if villagers pass that exam, they frequently do not
pursue further education. Having no reason to read and write, many
forget the skills. This is especially true of ethnic minorities,
rural women and young dropouts, according to researchers.
...
Farmers are expected to learn at least 1,500 characters, according to
state education regulations. Urban residents should master 2,000.
Teachers in Beijing often tell students they need to know 3,000
characters to read a newspaper. College graduates are tested on 7,000
characters or more.

lliteracy Jumps in China, Despite 50-Year Campaign to Eradicate It
Washington Post, April 27, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/2dft4d

That openeth the window...

2007-04-28T07:57:00.001+01:00

In this morning's Guardian, Jennie Erdal writes about the art of
literary translation. A few snippets from the article:

In discussing translation, you often find yourself looking for
metaphors, as if translation can't quite be itself and nothing else.
Even 400 years ago, the men who translated the King James Bible into
the common language of the people relied heavily on metaphor.

Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that
breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside
the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth
the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.
(From the preface "The Translators to the Reader")

In more recent times, practitioners of the art have talked in terms
of "transplanting" - taking something living from one soil and
setting it in another - or, more prosaically, "importing foreign
goods". Others have compared it to a musical or theatrical
performance, with the translator as conductor or stage director,
working with the original score or script. Umberto Eco, in an image
that will strike a chord with those working at the sharp end,
describes translation as "a process of negotiation" - a three-way
transaction "with the ghost of a distant author, with the disturbing
presence of the foreign text, and with the phantom of the reader".

Anthea Bell (who has given us Max Sebald, ETA Hoffmann and Asterix
the Gaul in English) has plumped for a different image: the
translator as tightrope walker. And when you read her translations,
you can sense her cool nerve, her skill and courage during what is
sometimes a precarious balancing act that could go wrong at any
moment. Bell has also talked of "spinning an illusion", the illusion
being that the reader is reading the real thing - that is to say, the
author's original work, not some imitation of it. This is the ideal:
that the translated work should read as easily as the original, while
still remaining true to the author's vision and the spirit of the
writing. Yet this is no easy task, particularly between languages
that belong to different groups.

Translation is sometimes thought of as an imitative process, but in
fact it is much more inventive and imaginative. Quite often there is
no exact equivalence between languages, and sometimes English simply
cannot tolerate certain aspects of the original, at least not without
irony or some other modifying factor. Humour is a notoriously
difficult area - what is funny in one language can look simply inept
or embarrassing in another. Puns, double entendres, malapropisms,
indeed any kind of wordplay - these are all hard to transport safely.

Certain languages are also much richer in sound than our own. In
Japanese, the sound of a word often imitates its meaning, but this
(so I am told) goes way beyond the onomatopoeic miaows, cuckoos and
kerplunks that we have in English. In Japanese, practically the whole
of the natural world - the changing seasons, the different kinds of
rain and wind, the clouds, the sun and the stars - are all
represented by sound. Thus hyu-hyu is a light wind, pyu-pyu blows a
bit stronger and byu-byu stronger still. The English translator is
able to get round this with the help of breezes and gales, but the
music is lost. More strikingly still, the Japanese also use sound
patterns to express their emotional lives: they smile niko-niko, they
weep shiku-shiku and they retch muka-muka. Even the best translators
will struggle to render this subtlety into English.

In Russian, the problems are different. It is such a dense,
elliptical language that sometimes what is only implied in a tightly
packed phrase has to be made more explicit in a longer English
sentence. A single verb in Russian can be a complete sentence,
telling us not only who is doing it, and whether the doer is male or
female, but also whether the activity has been completed or is still
going on. In Anna Karenina, Prince Oblonsky says to a dinner guest:
Prikazhetye, krasnovo? - meaning (literally) "Order, red?" From the
word endings, we know that Oblonsky is asking: "Will you give me the
order to pour out some red wine for you?" This is usually translated
as "Will you have some red wine?" - conveying the sense, but in no
way matching or retaining the ellipsis.
...

Translators are often naturally diffident, used to being in the
background. In many cases, they have colluded in their own
invisibility - I certainly did at one time. They often display a
sense of uncertainty, perhaps because what they do is in some sense
provisional. Translation is a process; even when the work is done, it
is never finished. Translators know they must never overwhelm or
compete with the author, but they know, too, that the author's whole
identity is bound up with the way the words are placed on the page.
Literary translation, when it is done well, is also therefore a
supreme act of empathy...

Jennie Erdal, "Let there be light," The Guardian, Saturday April 28,
2007
http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329795379-110738,00.html

More on the Guanghe Theater

2007-04-27T19:40:00.001+01:00

Richard Spencer, The Daily Telegraph's China Correspondent, sheds
some light on the Guanghe Theater story in his blog:
"Now I confess I was surprised that I hadn't heard of the Guanghe
Theatre, if it was so famous a landmark, but the stories did point
out that it had been closed for several years, since before I first
came here. But this picture provides another explanation: it wasn't a
famous old landmark after all. A bit of research, and this is what we
discover: the Ming dynasty theatre burned down and was rebuilt in
Qing times, a couple of hundred years back. Well, that's OK, ditto
the Forbidden City. But then the Qing version started to fall down
(after Mei Lanfang started to sing there), and in the general
cultural vandalism that afflicted Beijing in early Maoist times, when
the city walls were also pulled down, it was bulldozed and replaced
with the current perfect example of Soviet-style pebble-dash
modernist concrete."

Spencer writes, "I've occasionally commented on how it is that while
the so-called 'mainstream western media' are accused of demonising
China, it's often actually China itself that is demonising China."

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/richardspencer/apr2007/

chinaheirlooms.htm

Bringing down the curtain

2007-04-27T16:57:00.001+01:00

"The fat lady is about to sing for Beijing's oldest opera house.
China's unstoppable long march to progress is bringing down the
curtain on the Beijing Opera stage at the Guanghe tea house, which
dates from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) but has fallen victim to a
growing Chinese fascination with Broadway shows. The Guanghe theatre
is famous as the venue where the Beijing Opera master Mei Lanfang
launched his career at just 10 years of age, more than a century ago.
[...] We intend to build a modern, professional venue like those on
Broadway in the United States, where regular shows are offered all
year round, and high-end performances can take place,' Ma Dekai, a
construction chief at the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture, told
Xinhua news agency..."

The Independent, April 26, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2486640.ece

Small talk

2007-04-26T05:11:00.000+01:00

Hermione Lee writes:

In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional
writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning "trivial discourse."
Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast,
aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel
as "a book about nothing," or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn
the everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed
prose possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H.
Lawrence believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how
to live and understand our lives and those of others. The novel's
entanglement in "the prose of the world" can also be its
justification and its pride. The novel's virtue, it has often been
argued, lies in its egalitarianism, its very commonplaceness.

Hermione Lee, "Storms Over the Novel," The New York Review of Books,
vol. 54, no. 8, May 10, 2007.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20172

"Trivial discourse" is a good translation of xiaoshuo (小說), but a
more literal one is "small talk." To Zhuangzi, a xiaoshuo was an anecdote.

The Four Languages of "Mandarin"

2007-04-25T12:51:00.001+01:00

Robert M. Sanders, "The Four Languages of 'Mandarin'," Sino-Platonic
Papers, 4 (November 1987), is available here:

http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp004_mandarin_chinese.html
http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp004_mandarin_chinese.pdf
Here's how it begins:

Many hours have been spent at scholarly meetings and many pages of
academic writing have been expended discussing what is to be
considered acceptable Mandarin. Very often these discussions
degenerate into simplistic and narrow-minded statements such as
"That's not the way we say it in …!" or "We had better ask someone
from Peking." Objectively speaking, these disagreements on style
reflect a less-than-rigorous definition of which type of Mandarin
each party is referring to. Because there has been a failure by all
concerned to define fully the linguistic and socio-linguistic
parameters of their assumed language(s), Mandarin oranges are often
unwittingly being compared with Mandarin apples. This paper is a
preliminary attempt to articulate the fundamental differences
distinguishing four major language types subsumed under the single
English heading 'Mandarin'. Though the Chinese terms putonghua/guoyu,
guanhua, and difanghua help to accentuate the conceptual distinctions
distinguishing our four types of Mandarin, it is arguable that even
Chinese scholars are not immune from confusing one language with
another.

Sanders goes on to indentify and discuss what he calls

Idealized Mandarin
Imperial Mandarin
Geographical Mandarin
Local Mandarin

Thanks to Pinyin News for this blog entry:

http://pinyin.info/news/2007/mandarins-four-languages/

Gross National Happiness

2007-04-25T12:28:00.001+01:00

"Gross national happiness includes criteria like equity, good
government and harmony with nature. It apparently does not include
harmony with the 100,000 ethnic Nepalis who fled Bhutan after a royal
crackdown on their agitation for democratic rights and have
languished since 1990 in refugee camps in Nepal."

"Line Up and Pick a Dragon: Bhutan Learns to Vote," New York Times,
April 24, 2007.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/24/world/asia/24bhutan.html

Homecoming

2007-04-22T11:39:00.001+01:00

Young when I left, I now return old
My accent unchanged, my hair much thinned;
None of the children know who I am,
With smiles they ask, "Sir, where are you from?"

He Zhizhang (659-744), "Occasional Lines Upon Returning to My Homeland"

少小離家老大回
鄉音無改鬢毛衰
兒童相見不相識
笑問客從何處來

賀知章, "回鄉偶書"

English translation quoted in Geremie Barme, An Artistic Exile: A
Life of Feng Zikai (1898-1975), University of California Press, 2002,
p. 345.

Why we read history

2007-04-22T07:14:00.001+01:00

Garrison Keillor wrote a couple of days ago:

"It is invigorating to realize you've been dead wrong about
something. That's why we read history. It's an antidote to smug self-
righteousness, which makes us insufferable. You learn about this from
books. I can't think of any movie or song that changed my mind about
anything, but books of history certainly have. You sit down and read
about the temperance movement of 19th century America, which brought
about Prohibition, which you always thought was a foolish attempt by
blue-nosed puritans to repress bonhomie, which was the view of the
satirists of the 1920s, but there is another point of view: The
temperance cause was a protest movement by women who, having been
shut out of higher education and relegated to menial jobs, were
economically dependent on men and therefore terribly vulnerable to a
man's alcoholism. The temperance crusader Carrie Nation, famous for
busting up saloons with a hatchet, was the wife of a raging alcoholic
who had destroyed her life. The Women's Christian Temperance Union,
which you had thought of as a joke, has certain heroic dimensions and
helped pave the way for women's suffrage."

I'll drink to that.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/20/opinion/edkeillor.php

42,000 miles

2007-04-20T04:49:00.001+01:00

The international press has made much of the new 710-mile rail line
to Lhasa, which crosses mountain passes at more than 16,400 feet. But
as the Independent noted yesterday, China has only 42,000 miles of
railroad lines, compared to 132,000 miles in the United States.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2461401.ece

E-mail and the lonely crowd

2007-04-19T16:24:00.001+01:00

"Don't get me wrong. E-mail is great. It has vastly expanded my
social horizons. Twenty years ago I rarely spoke by phone to more
than five people in a day. Now I often send e-mail to dozens of
people a day. I have so many friends! Um, can you remind me of their
names? Of course, it works both ways. My many e-mail 'friends' also
have many 'friends,' and I'm just one of them. So they can't afford
to treat me like a friend - reliably acknowledging my existence, that
sort of thing. So questions arise. Is Joe - who once answered e-mail
promptly but has fallen silent - mad at me? Or has my social status,
in Joe's view, dropped a bit, so I'm not quite worth his time? And if
the latter: Who the hell does Joe think he is? [...] With the time
you don't spend worrying about Joe, you can crank out e-mail to Jim,
Sally and Sue. And efficiency is what e-mail is about, right? By
ending the need to coordinate schedules, it lets us interact with
lots of people - and interact along such narrow channels that we skip
the bother of getting to know an entire human being. It's an old
story. Technological change makes society more efficient and less
personal. We know more people more shallowly."

Robert Wright, International Herald Tribune, April 17, 2007
www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/17/opinion/edwright.php

Heart, mind, and soul

2007-04-16T08:52:00.001+01:00

In his book on translation and Chinese literature, Eugene Chen Eoyang
writes:

Take, for example, the simple and familiar distinction of "heart" and
"mind." Perhaps since Galen, these two organs have been characterized
in the West as the "feeling" organ and the "thinking" organ. Modern
anatomy would seem to corroborate this specialization of function.
Chinese, on the other hand, uses the same word xin for "heart" and
"mind." Far from posing problems of exposition, there may be
something in a fusing together, not to say confusion so much as a
conflation, of the two notions; for with most acts of conation,
determination, will, perception, sensibility, the faculties of both
thinking and feeling are engaged: it is usually difficult to
determine the proportion of reason to emotion in the effusions of
xin, "heart-mind." "To think with the heart," and "to feel with the
mind," are distinctions in English that might be suggestive; in
Chinese, they would be equivalent and tautologous.

Or, to take a converse example, consider the concept of "soul" in
English: usually contrasted with the corporeal essence, with "body,"
the soul exists concurrently with the body when it is alive (either
in the same place or in different places, if one accepts certain
notions of telekinesis and mind transport), and it survives the body
after death, to wander the earth, or to enter heaven, hell, or
purgatory, or to begin a new reincarnation (depending on whether one
believes in ghosts, Christianity, or Buddhism). In Chinese, however,
there are two souls: po 魄 and hun 魄. The corporeal soul, the po,
stays with the body, and it dies with the body: it might be likened
to the vital force, the spirit of a person, his "élan vital," as
Henri Bergson might say. But there is another soul, the hun, which is
not bound to the flesh and which can roam at some distance from the
body. One trope of Chinese poetry is the transport, across vast
distances, of the hun to visit friends in dreams. If the distance is
considerable, this is usually taken to be an indication of a person's
death, since the hun is conceived of being able to roam further than
a regional distance only with the death of the body, and only when
separated from the po. A famous stanza, by one poet in the Tang
dynasty who encountered another poet in his dreams, expressing
concern that the friend may be dead, since his hun seems so
wideranging, exploits this belief:

Old friend, you appeared in a dream.
It shows you have long been in my thoughts.
Perhaps it was not your living soul:
The way's too far, it couldn't be done.

End of quote.

Eugene Chen Eoyang, The Transparent Eye: Reflections on Translation,
Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics (University of Hawaii
Press, 1993), pp. 317-318.

The poem is Du Fu's "Dreaming of Li Bai." Du Fu lived from 712 to
770; Li Bai from 701 to762.

Cities are the "greenest" of all places

2007-04-15T08:32:00.001+01:00

Next time I feel tempted to pat myself on the back for buying
organic, locally grown food and fair trade products and driving a
small car a few times a week, I'd better remember that I live
in a big, 250-year old house in the mountains, and that on a per
capita basis, cities use less energy than the inhabited countrysides
of North America and Europe. Or so I learn from an article by Douglas
Foy and Robert Healy in the Boston Globe:

"This may come as a surprise to those who think of environmental
issues largely in the context of wild places and open spaces. Cities,
often congested, dense, and enormous consumers of resources, would
not be the place one might first turn for environmental solutions. In
fact, cities are inherently the 'greenest' of all places. They are
much more efficient in their use of energy, water and land than
suburbs. They provide transportation services in a remarkably
equitable and democratic fashion... New York City, for example, is
the most energy efficient place in America. Yes, it houses 8.2
million citizens and uses an enormous amount of energy to do so. Its
electrical load, more than 12,000 megawatts, is as large as all of
Massachusetts. Yet because the buildings are dense and thus more
efficiently heated and cooled, and because 85 percent of all trips in
Manhattan are on foot, bike or transit, New York City uses
dramatically less energy to serve each of its citizens than does a
state like Massachusetts. Indeed, it uses less energy, on a per
capita basis, than any state in America."

"Cities Are the Answer," Boston Globe/International Herald Tribune,
April 11, 2007.

www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/11/opinion/edfoy.php

Literary Translation

2007-04-13T19:10:00.001+01:00

I find that the best place to listen CBC's The Best of Ideas is the
kitchen, while fixing supper. Last night I heard an entertaining item
on literary translation:

"Barbara Nichol discusses literary translation with some of its most
gifted practitioners."

Listen to Part 1:

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20070402_1888.mp3

Part 2:

http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20070409_1889.mp3

Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-12T10:38:00.001+01:00

The morning papers say that Kurt Vonnegut has died.

Vonnegut once wrote of his uncle Alex, who was educated at Harvard,
"I am eternally grateful to him, and indirectly to what Harvard used
to be, I suppose, for my knack of finding in great books, some of
them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no
matter what else might be going on." Timequake (Berkley Trade, 1998),
p. 182.

I miss the days way back when I read Vonnegut's very funny books,
some of them great, because they gave me reason enough to feel
honored to be alive, no matter what else was going on.

How Taiwan Became Chinese

2007-04-09T05:56:00.001+01:00

Tonio Andrade argues in a new book that the Dutch are responsible for
the sinification of Taiwan:

"Intensive Chinese colonization began abruptly in the 1630s, shortly
after the Dutch East India Company established a trading port on
Taiwan. The Dutch realized that their port's hinterlands could
produce rice and sugar for export, but they were unable to persuade
Taiwan's aborigines to raise crops for sale -- most were content to
plant just enough for themselves and their families. The colonists
considered importing European settlers, but the idea was rejected by
their superiors in the Netherlands. So they settled instead on a more
unusual plan: encourage Chinese immigration. The Dutch offered tax
breaks and free land to Chinese colonists, using their powerful
military to protect pioneers from aboriginal assault... In this way
the company created a calculable economic and social environment,
making Taiwan a safe place for Chinese to move to and invest in,
whether they were poor peasants or rich entrepreneurs. People from
the province of Fujian, just across the Taiwan Strait, began pouring
into the colony, which grew and prospered, becoming, in essence, a
Chinese settlement under Dutch rule. The colony's revenues were drawn
almost entirely from Chinese settlers, through taxes, tolls, and
licenses. As one Dutch governor put it, 'The Chinese are the only
bees on Formosa that give honey.' "

Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese, Columbia University Press,
2007, quoted in a Salon.com article by Andrew Leonard:

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/04/05/taiwan_china/index.html

Eostre

2007-04-08T06:14:00.001+01:00

The history of Easter celebrations in America parallels the
controversies surrounding Christmas. Puritan sects viewed Easter
dimly, as a holiday that smacked of popery. Until the mid-nineteenth
century, only certain Protestants and the relatively small handful of
Catholics in America venerated Easter as a religious feast. American
folk observations of Easter (the name derives from an Anglo-Saxon
goddess of fertility or spring, Eostre, whose sign was the rabbit),
however, date back to the eighteenth century and greatly influence
contemporary celebrations. The Pennsylvania Dutch imported the
Oschter Haws, or Easter Hare, who delivered colored eggs to good
children (or rabbit pellets to the naughty) who put out their hats
for a "nest." By the early nineteenth century, entire Pennsylvania
Dutch villages would turn out with gaily decorated Easter eggs to
play games, including egg-eating contests and "picking" eggs, in
which young gladiators would butt eggs until one competitor's egg
broke. For good health, the Pennsylvania Dutch ate wild greens,
especially dandelion, on Maundy Thursday. They gathered eggs laid on
Good Friday for consumption on Easter, for use in folk medicine, or
as talismans against evil spirits. A favorite Pennsylvania Dutch
Easter bread depicts a rabbit in the preposterous posture of laying
an egg. By the later nineteenth century, most Protestant groups had
eased their opposition to Easter...
Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2004.

Portuguese

2007-04-07T08:41:00.001+01:00

Gregory Rabassa is well-known for his fine translations of the novels
of Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and especially Gabriel García
Marquez. But he also translates from Portuguese. In his highly
entertaining memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and its
Discontents (2005), he confesses:

"At risk of offending or dismaying many friends who speak Spanish, I
must admit here and now that I prefer Portuguese, especially in the
Brazilian oral mode with all its unique sounds and rhythms. Some of
the sounds, like the open O and the dark L, are closer to Slavic
noises than to those of other Romance languages."

"As I have noted, Portuguese, and most especially the Brazilian
variety, is eminently supple, matching English in this respect,
unlike French and Spanish, and therefore it renders translation
equally free and easy, less restricted. With Spanish I have to walk
that narrow line between tight and loose structure, careful not to
betray one language or the other. With Portuguese I can let myself
go, in a manner of speaking, careful to avoid the other vicissitudes
involved."

Bad Apple

2007-04-06T11:40:00.001+01:00

As a Mac user, I was disppointed to read in yesterday's Independent
that Greenpeace has rated Apple the worst among major electronics
firms for its environmental policies. In a survey of 14 major
companies, the manufacturer of the Mac, the Powerbook, and the iPod
was put bottom of the list for its policies on the elimination of
toxic substances and recycling. Surprisingly, the first place on the
list was the Chinese PC maker Lenovo, which displaced Nokia.

Chongqing

2007-04-06T07:08:00.001+01:00

The International Herald Tribune (April 5) reports that Chongqing in
Sichuan province has 4.1 million people living in the city proper
but when its surrounding areas are considered, it's home to more
than 31 million, which makes it the largest population center in
China. Chongqing's annual GDP per capita is $1,363, which isn't
particularly impressive when you think about it. Last year, U.S. GDP
per capita was $43,500.

Classic

2007-04-05T09:53:00.001+01:00

Legge noted that the Latin word textus and the Chinese term jing
[classic] both etymologically refer to the idea of "thought woven
into writing"—that is, the fabric of ancient thought is given
special authority and classical weight by being written down and
systematized by a great mind or author.
Norman Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's
Oriental Pilgrimage (University of California Press, 2002), p. 428.

The Chinese character is 經, which originally meant "warp in a loom,"
and possibly was a picture of a loom.

In the middle of the night

2007-04-05T09:34:00.001+01:00

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the
night to write."

This is often attributed to Saul Bellow, but I'd like to know where
and when he said it.

Despite the peculiarities of their language

2007-04-04T13:32:00.001+01:00

There's a curious passage in Jonathan Spence's To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620-1960. When Peter Parker, an American missionary doctor, was about to set sail for China in 1832, "he discovered that despite the peculiarities of their language 'the Chinese understand each other perfectly well' and that thanks to the labors of Morrison and Remusat in compiling dictionaries and grammars the 'auxiliary means are not now wanting for those who are desirous of learning this curious idiom.' " Parker spent many years in China working as a surgeon and learning Chinese. Spence writes that by 1844, Caleb Cushing, first minister plenipotentiary from the United States to China, made Parker secretary and interpreter to the United States Mission, though Parker could still not write Chinese documents and had to rely on a Chinese assistant to take down dictation and, I'm guessing, correct his mistakes and polish his language.

Names are a graveyard of words

2007-04-04T11:58:00.000+01:00

Last week's Der Spiegel had an article about a "Namensforscher," a scholar who investigates the origin and life of personal names, named Jürgen Udolph, who says rather poetically that the ca. one million German names are a graveyard of words, a "Friedhof der Wörter." Words live, evolve, and die, but they sometimes they live on in names. Friedrich Schiller and Otto Schilly had cross-eyed ancestors ("schielende Vorfahren"). Heidi Klum's name comes from "klamm," which used to mean humble or miserable.

You're soaking in it

2007-04-03T10:08:00.000+01:00

As Marcuse pointed out, there is such a thing as totalitarian democracy, and to quote an old detergent commercial, "You're soaking in it."
The Village Voice, March 30, 2007