Globish

That “English” has become the predominant language around the world might seem to us, lazing around on the west coast of North America, as a truism.  But Robert McCrum and other watchers of the cultural milieu have noticed something far more subtle.  The language they see as taking over is called “Globish”, a de-politicized non-Anglo Saxon version of English with a basic vocabulary of about 1,500 words.  McCrum quotes Times journalist Ben McIntyre who

waiting for a flight from Delhi, had overheard a conversation between a Spanish UN peacekeeper and an Indian soldier. “The Indian spoke no Spanish; the Spaniard spoke no Punjabi. Yet they understood one another easily. The language they spoke was a highly simplified form of English, without grammar or structure, but perfectly comprehensible, to them and to me.  Only now,” he concluded, “do I realise that they were speaking ‘Globish’, the newest and most widely spoken language in the world.”

McCrum traces the history:

British English had enjoyed global supremacy throughout the 19th century in the days of empire. Then, broadly speaking, its power and influence had passed to the Americans in the 20th century (through the agency of two world wars). After that, during the cold war, Anglo-American culture and values became as much part of global consciousness as the combustion engine. From 1945 to 1989, hardly a transaction in the modern world was innocent of English in some form – but its scope was always limited by its troubled association with British imperialism and the pax Americana. Now that seemed to be all in the past … Things had changed … English language and culture were becoming decoupled from their contentious heritage, disassociated from post-colonial trauma.

McCrum concludes that “the emergence of English as a global communications phenomenon which can celebrate a real independence from its Anglo-American roots is potentially decisive”, especially on the Internet.  Interesting stuff.

I Didn’t Mean To Do It. It Is A Disease!

Charles O’Byrne is the top aide to New York Governor David A. Paterson.  He is being forced to resign because he didn’t file his income taxes between 2001 and 2005.  His defence?  According to his lawyer, Richard Kestenbaum, Mr O’Byrne suffered from “late filing syndrome“.  No, I’m serious.

They even have an “academic” tome to support them. In 1994, an article titled ” ‘Failure to File’ Syndrome: Legal and Medical Perspectives,” was published in the New York Law Journal by Eliott Silverman, a lawyer, and Dr. Stephen J. Coleman, a practicing psychiatrist.

“These people are not evading their taxes for personal gain,” the authors conclude. “Rather, they are suffering from a psychological condition that makes them unable to function normally.” In an interview, Dr. Coleman acknowledged that the affliction had not been recognized as an official syndrome, but he said he had treated 25 to 30 patients for it over the years. Most of them were lawyers, he said, including tax lawyers. “It really is a subset of obsessive compulsive disorder with people who have serious procrastination,” Dr. Coleman said. “You still see it. I think it is still quite valid today in a subset of people who are well-educated and know better, but put off dealing with their personal business.”

Money can’t buy you love, they say.  But it can sure buy you some fancy justifications.

Muons For Mayans

OK, I’m excited.  Particle physics and archaeology are coming together to investigate Mayan mounds, most of which have not been excavated.  No-one really knows what is inside these impressive structures.  But now, scientists working with muon detectors are coming to help.

The first major experiment of the Maya Muon Group will bridge the disciplines of physics and archeology. The particle detectors and related systems are designed specifically to explore ruins of a Maya pyramid in collaboration with colleagues at the UT Mesoamerican Archaeological Laboratory. The Maya Muon Group will travel to La Milpa in northwest Belize to make discoveries about “Structure 1” – a jungle-covered mound covering an unexplored Maya ruin.

Pointing out that dense materials block more muons, Patel explains that a muon detector can actually detect rooms, spaces, and caves inside what seems to be solid:  A detector next to a Maya pyramid, for example, will see fewer particles coming from the direction of the structure than from other angles: a muon “shadow.” And if a part of that pyramid is less dense than expected – containing an open space for, say, a royal burial – it will have less of a shadow. Count enough muons that have passed through the pyramid over the course of several months, and they will form an image of its internal structure, just like light makes an image on film. Then combine the images from three or four devices and a 3-D reconstruction of the pyramid’s guts will take shape.

Fascinating stuff.  The article at BLDGBLOG goes much further and is well worth the read.

Listening To Mayan And Protecting Quechua

The work of making the Mayan language, as found on their numerous buildings and monuments, available to researchers today has been one of the triumphs of linguistic and anthropological research.  Success has only come in the last couple of decades, but the output of completed and ongoing projects has been immense.

It was a thrill, therefore, to fall over the Nova site supporting their TV show’s look at the decipherment of Mayan.   If you follow the link to the Interactive Feature, you can actually hear the Mayan language of a stela dedication spoken while the English translation of each glyph is discussed in brief but fascinating detail.

It is quickly being forgotten that less than twenty years ago, we did not have the technology to make this research available to any but a limited few researchers.  We need to keep reminding ourselves about how lucky we are.

Further south, in the lands of the Inca, Demetrio Tupac Yupanqui’s new translation of “Don Quixote” into Quechua is helping to boost the once-imperial language that had fallen on hard times.

Once the lingua franca of the Inca empire, Quechua has long been in decline. But thanks to Tupac Yupanqui and others, Quechua, which remains the most widely spoken indigenous language in the Americas, is winning some new respect. Tupac Yupanqui’s elegant translation of a major portion of “Don Quixote” has been celebrated as a pioneering development for Quechua, which in many far-flung areas remains an oral language. While the Incas spoke Quechua, they had no written alphabet, leaving perplexed archaeologists to wonder how they managed to assemble and run an empire without writing.

Both Google and Microsft have versions in Quechua, and the current government in Bolivia is trying to make fluency in Quechua a condition of civil service advancement.  It might well survive.

The World Atlas of Language Structures

I have mentioned before that languages are an important interest of mine. Now we have an extraordinary linguistic resource online — the World Atlas of Language Structures.

The database covers more than 2,500 languages by up to 140+ structural and familial criteria. The content is displayed in text and maps serving as a rich body of data visualizations. We are lucky to have such work made available to us, and I greatly appreciate the effort.

A Little Learning Is An Expensive Thing

The origin and dispersal of language(s) is one of the most fascinating of those cultural beginnings that fascinate me.  It was no surprise, therefore, for me to thoroughly enjoy “The Land East of The Asterisk“, Wendy Doniger’s long review of M.L. West’s “Indoeuropean Poetry and Myth” which she calls “surely the definitive book on Indo-European language and religion.”

I was so intrigued that I actually went to Amazon to see how much I could get the book for.  $116!!  We have a great library system in Vancouver, but it is hard to expect them to keep every possible niche interest book.  So, absent access to a university library somehow, most of us are priced out of this knowledge.  We have to make do with mere glances, through reviews and citations.  Annoying at times.

Lists of Words

I have always loved writing, words, languages. It is one of the great joys of my life that the final chapter of my working life is as a professional writer. I remember with the clarity of the senile the day in 1960 I first discovered Roget’s Thesaurus. It was a moment of sheer ecstasy for a 10-year old boy with undiagnosed OCD and an over-developed love for words. Pages of words. Lists of words. Lists of words in clever categories. Words referring back to other words. I spent several months reading it from front to back. To hell with God, this was heaven.

This nostalgic torrent was unleashed through the agency of Jonathan Yardley’s review of Joshua Kendall’s biography of Peter Mark Roget. From the review I was fascinated to learn that the Thesaurus for Roget was a form of therapy for depression.

“As a boy, he stumbled upon a remarkable discovery — that compiling lists of words could provide solace, no matter what misfortunes might befall him. He was particularly fond of cataloguing the objects, both animate and inanimate, in his environment. As an adult, he kept returning to the classification of words and concepts. Immersion in the nuances of language could invariably both energize him and keep his persistent anxiety at bay.”

I’m sure I know exactly how he felt.