Plant-based diets

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

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"

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

From the Washington Post:

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

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

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

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

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

Bendita bagunça

Marcelo Coelho escreve no seu blog:

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

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

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

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

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

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

吃素以阻止气候变暖?

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

来源: 世界科技报道 (日期：2007-05-29)

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

Algerian surprise

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

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

La chose la plus habituelle et la plus naturelle

Tirthankar Chandar dans Le Monde Diplomatique:

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

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

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

The pursuit of happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Guardian, May 9, 2007

http://tinyurl.com/362ew3

"Amazing Achievement"

Jonathan Freedland in the New York Review of Books:

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

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

Cursos de chino en España

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering the Mutiny

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese in British secondary schools

From yesterday's Independent:

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

Lessons for grownups

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

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

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

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

Grown-ups are like that...

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

Photos

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

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

Vieux de 7 à 8000 ans

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

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

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

Beijing Information, 22 mai 2007

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

New Art from China

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

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

Deutsches entdeutscht

Schweizer Publizist Roger de Weck schreibt im Spiegel:

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

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

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

The Case for Literature

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

http://tinyurl.com/2xvts2

To not have an accent...

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

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

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

Then I noticed something.

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

To not have an accent.

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

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

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

Am I bilingual?

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

Do I know English?

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

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

Indian languages in Canada

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

Source:

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

http://tinyurl.com/2pnf4n