Monday, 30 December 2013

landschaft

Last week on the radio I listened to a report that was really more of a sad fable, entitled “The Last Cow” about a village in the Swabian region and the decision of the last rancher there to ironically buy the farm and retire with no heirs to take over the family business, purportedly run since Roman times. The German title for the report (Der Letztes Kรผh) sounded like “the last coup” but the German word for coup d'etat or blow is the funner word Putsch.

It was a tragic narrative, since such a choice looks like it cannot be undone and abandoning agriculture is not something that one can recapture later on, and recounting personal memories of the slow disassembly and compartmentalisation of the community over the lifetimes of the people being interviewed. Though the end result is obvious—houses becoming things unto themselves and independent of any neighbourly infrastructure or else given up for convenience and opportunity, it is unclear what the anchorage is for these small villages. Beyond one farmer's nostalgia, which nonetheless establishes very true facts about the condition of such withering communities, there was formerly a brewery that incentivized young people to remain as well as all the supporting infrastructure, schools and churches. While it is a patent fact for the moment that Germany's agricultural bounty can still provide a lot—weekly markets and even supermarkets able to satisfy most needs produced locally, and a surplus, Bavaria, for instance, has still seen its agricultural experts halved within the past decade. It's hard to say what lesson that this sort of fable, repeated too often, is giving.

Saturday, 14 December 2013

chuchotage or gesticulation

Often, when available, I switch on the closed-captions while, watching movies in German because sometimes the being able to read the words as well make it easier to understand above accents and fast speech—and the text-version of the dialogue is sometimes simplified and leaves out slang and Englisch terminology. Also, when watching the nightly news, viewers respect the tolling bells that proceed the nationally syndicated programme like BBC watchers not daring to interrupt the pips that usher in the top of the hour, though all broadcasts are moderated by the same anchors, I like to watch the public stations that feature a sign-language interpreter—just to see how animated they are, when to my perspective they're just miming the news but trust that they are conveying volumes.

I was disappointed to learn how the interpreter commissioned for the occasion of the state funeral for Nelson Mandela was signing absolute gibberish, and not just because it was a solemn event but also was an insult to the hearing-impaired and the skill of those that know how to communicate in this medium—as it is not a form of communication dependent on its spoken equivalent and requires translation and there is no universal sign language, whether by other non-verbal forms or formal digital-speaking itself. It's a pathetic display and I'm glad it was revealed, because such an honour is not on the same level as lip-syncing or being a part of a choir and mouthing the word watermelon (because from the audience's point of view, that enunciation could be just about anything) because you don't know the piece. There's a pretty funny super-cut of the lampoons, however, to be found at the link.

Friday, 26 July 2013

cognation or parts-of-speech

A discussion with a linguist on the radio about the tendency not just for minority and endangered languages and dialects not only to cannibalise terminology from overpowering and domineering tongues with a colonial-metropolitan status, incorporating more and more elements of English (the lingua franca), but also of the cannibalism of so-called killer languages.

Beyond encroachment and influence and the convergence and separate goings of languages, which is something evolving while grammar and purity play an assertive game of catch-up, the greater threat to idioms and identity (since the conduits of thought are not always easy work for an interpreter or translator and surely differently formed according to one's native speech) was encapsulated by an older term called glottophagie (a French professor Jean-Louis Calvert coined the word in 1974 after anthropophagy, human cannibalism) that describes the death of a language through the loss of allegiance and functional literacy. Pressure in whatever form to abandon part of one's heritage does not, I think, serve to enhance communication or understanding.

Sunday, 10 February 2013

fauxcabulary

The always entertaining Bob Canada’s Blog World presents another instalment of pharmaceutical barrel-scrapings for names from word-like formations not yet claimed by others in the trade, which sound deceptively like sophisticated vocabulary terms. The marketing departments for the drug companies seem to be reaching but I guess the possibilities are bottomless. My favourites, all names of real medicine, clinically tested and surely introduced to focus-groups to see how they liked the name, used in a sentence is:
Intuniv (Adjective.) Someone who easily grasps situations. “Joan was very intuniv and immediately sensed that her blind date was a repellent troll.”

Thursday, 24 January 2013

fig leaf or bootsy collins

This day marks the anniversary of the assassination of the Roman emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus by a cohort commander and a group of dissatisfied members of the royal guard. The emperor was is more commonly known as Caligula, a nickname earned in his childhood while accompanying his father on field marches, scurrying to keep pace with the adults in his little boots. I am sure that was only earned posthumously. His removal from power makes the first known occasion in the history of the Empire that an emperor was removed from office by a grand collusion of the military and the Senate, and not the usual intrigue over succession by their own relatives.

Whether accounts of his exploits, deviancy and cruelty were wholly accurate or otherwise—victorious politicians get to write histories and not the deposed and surely there is some embellishment to make one’s predecessor more unpalatable and make the transition of power more acceptable in the eyes of the public: making a priest of his horse and threatening to promote him to Consul, pimping his sisters, torturing innocent bystanders out of boredom, &c. The list of crimes goes on, and no particular engineering project, campaign or public works attributed to his reign has much power to unsully that reputation. It would be hard to ever separate rumour and backbiting from the truth, but it does seem that Rome anointed no shortage of colourful statesmen and ambitious dynasties. Some one hundred fifty years prior to Caligua’s rule, there was a boy Caesar called Heliogabalus, who was accused of a host of eccentricities, decadent but not inhumane and a foot-note to the Major General’s song from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. If true and not fabricated as an on-going smear campaign against his memory, it is possible that later writers and opinion-formers only were holding neutral (and not the cause for regicide) chronicles up to their own standards of morality and deportment. Of course, the near or distant past is not a distorting plain of ill-repute in itself and many figures don’t need a relativistic or revisionist lens to be qualifiedly bad. I just hope that we are able to look beyond historical prejudice and perhaps unreliable narration, sift through the muck and tell the difference.

Sunday, 16 December 2012

magnificat or o du frรถhlich

The evening prayers of the last seven days of Advent, leading up to Christmas, in Western church traditions are punctuated with vocative calls and responses called the O Antiphons. The cycle begins on 17. December with O Sapientia (O Wisdom), then O Adonai (O Lord), and so one, dedicating the evening’s meditation to one aspect attributed to Jesus. The tradition was originally restricted to the cloister and each of the seven days was an occasion to exchange presents among the community, but later was made part of Christmas time celebrations.
This seems like a very nice and collected way to approach the holidays and properly wind down from all the jingle-pressure, and although the 21. December has garnered an awful reputation—though only, I think, for this year and not for very much longer, I do appreciate the fact that the chant or that night is O Oriens—o breaking of the day, splendor of the light eternal. Though we should fear not, we ought not, I think, to stammer along without any take-away. It is not necessarily something dodged or a saving grace, to reboot from dreary pessimism, but could still be an antiphon that days, no matter how limitless or numbered, are gifts and should not be taken for granted.

Monday, 10 December 2012

as plain as or party on the patio

A colleague from work and I were discussing the curious case of the Jarhesendflรผgelfigur (the end of the year figure with wings) which was the official term for a Christmas angel during East German times, which tolerated decorations but tried to remove the religious connotations from the holidays. My colleague shared another term that vied for acceptance first among German linguistic purists in the 1800s (and saw a bit of a revival among other purists to come later) called Gesichtserker, a face-porch, meant to replace the German word Nase for nose—though the notion that Nase was a “foreign” word was a misconception and Erker, an oriel window, was in fact a loan word from the French arquiรจre and this group of linguists wanted to eliminate such outside influences, like popularizing other awkward words like Stelldichein over rendezvous. Such a lexical shift never took hold. I found it really unbelievable and a bit apocryphal, like I am sure future generations will view episodes of the recent past of using words as ammunition, like freedom fries for French fries, over France’s (pommes frites are a Belgian invention) refusal to join in the Iraqi invasion.

Friday, 23 November 2012

leftovers or turkey in the straw

Did you know that the turkey got its name in English, at least, because early explorers and settlers in its native New World range mistook it for an already known African complement?
Not realising that the birds were distinct species (albeit, they do look very much alike, like mistaking a pheasant for a quail or crocodile for an alligator), they named it with standing convention for the guinea fowl—a so-called turkey since the birds came to Europe through the ports of Ottoman Turkey. Similarly, in the Turkish language, the American turkey is called Hindi, based on the idea that the exotic poultry comes from the Hindu Kush mountains, sticking to Christopher Columbus’ original mission to reach India by sailing westward but not knowing there were unexpected lands in between.  Also, in French, the bird is called Dinde—that is, a contraction of poule d'Inde.

Thursday, 22 November 2012

the abiding place or ัั€ะตะดะธะทะต́ะผัŒะต

Some months ago, I remembered, a contributing curator for the panoply of pasts real and imagined, the Retronaut, re-discovered and introduced a wonderful illustrated Russian edition of The Hobbit (ะฅะพะฑะฑะธั‚) from 1976. It is interesting how despite the difference in the way the characters are interpreted (I suppose all readers had their own formative images on how the figures ought to look), they are instantly recognizable and impart the same exciting scenes without having to puzzle anything out, like the lands depicted on this map of Middle Earth that don’t require a legend.


Friday, 16 November 2012

narrhalla u. prunksitz

I have experienced and even participated in quite a few Karnival or Faschings events over the years, dressing up and watching the parades in Wรผrzburg and Kรถln. Rhenish traditions in western and northern Germany are distinct from the tenor and scope of the celebrations in Frankish Swabia and Bavaria but the party and pageantry are executed in the same spirit.

Customs in Mainz and the Rhein corridor were articulated in their present form in the nineteenth century, partially in protest to successive French and Prussian foreign rule, and the occupying governments were lampooned (the allegory was pretty transparent) with floats and monarchs of the Carnival court. The Free States did not have the same cause for gripes but have equally elaborate spectacles that invert everyday conventions—Narren are fools, jesters while Walhalla is the memorial honouring important figures of the German Sprachraum, especially in the week leading up to Lent. I don’t quite grasp, however, how this period becomes a Fifth Season. The party mood is not continuous—and I imagine would be hard to sustain, and is broken up by the solemn calendar days of Christmas. It just seems strange that the long celebration goes dormant and into hibernation, crossing the weave and warp of colder weather and other occasions, and then come back to life at the end, as Winter is dissipating. Maybe to wedge another season into the year enables that transition, relieved in restraint, once the long and dark season is showing signs of moving on.

Thursday, 15 November 2012

ancien of days

French flea markets (car-boot sales, marchรฉ aux puces) have definitely been something to see for the local provenance and assizes.

Shopping at a distance under any cir- cumstances has its own imbalanace of peculiarities as well. Browsing offers from France, however—replete with the same descriptions and caveats translated by familiarity, becomes a very sophisticated venture. There are false friends and faux cognates that take on a buffering quality, especially to foreign ears. The rather gimmicky stock-phrases are politely abolished with a single vide poche or tres chic. One technique that is encountered quite often, rendered in English, is the “lost wax” casting method for bronzes. Whenever I read it, I want to ask if this forgotten art was practiced by extra-terrestrial flea-market-goers. Could it be ancient aliens? I am sure there’s the equivalent in other languages too but it’s refreshing to go about in ignorance and peace without such touts and taglines.

Tuesday, 13 November 2012

infinitive and aorist

Oxford American Dictionary recently announced its word of the year for those English-speakers across the pond, honouring the decades old graphics format developed by CompuServe yet seemingly reinvented, rediscovered GIF as a very superlative verb. A curious coincidentally too, I thought, having really just discovered the format myself. The internet has created a ready forum for such looping animation, and I’m thinking not just as illustrative but also as wish-fulfillment of three-dimensional newspapers and holographic emissaries as seen on film. Meanwhile, the UK Oxford Direction and German linguistic authorities went a different route with their (Un)words, demonstrating like-mindedness: crowning as the words of the year omnishambles and shit-storm, respectively.

Saturday, 10 November 2012

(ad)mirality or pรซrkthyes

Philology and the classifications of grammar were naturally invented long after languages developed and drifted apart and are imperfect disciplines trying to fit foreign tongues to a framework of rules whose theory and practice maybe go unnoticed to native speakers. Constantly struggling to translate and parsing my own words, I think I have gained an appreciation for mood and tense and try not to take such parts of speech for granted.
English has managed to shed the need for most conjugation and only has a limited spectrum of grammatical cases, exclusively constructed by other means than declension, while many others rely on a linguistic quadriga of the not unfamiliar nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases to express ownership, location, motion, agency and action.

Still other highly inflected languages, like Finnish, Basque, Turkish or Hungarian, use a dozen or more cases to express subtleties and precision in a wealth of mincing ways: a changed suffix can denote reversion, privation, association, similitude, coming-into-being, frequency, number, affinity and whereabouts. It is hard to imagine what kind of dialogue it took to impart these elements in an exacting and scientific way from a native speaker to a foreigner and what sort of media were available to bridge the linguistic gap. What’s mostly rendered in English as a prepositional phrase—across the room, in the company of strangers—can be summarily expressed by changing the endings. Include verbal moods and the situation becomes more complex.
Whereas in English mood is caught up in wishes—“if and only”—in other cases can even be used to master the tone of sarcasm and surprise. That is quite amazing and that its counterparts recognized in other tongues impressive, I think.  Albanian (Shqip) and a few others admit of mirativity and alter verb endings to express admiration, shock or disdain in an otherwise non-nuanced declaration. This sense exists, of course, and one could assume that there are many routes of getting to astonishment outside of punctuation, a shrill or droll tone or context but I wonder how those distinctions were ever translated and categorized. It must have been quite a revelation to first get the difference between “ai flet shqip” (he speaks Albanian) and “ai fliske shqip” (he surprisingly speaks Albanian or apparently he speaks Albanian or yeah—he speaks Albanian). Translation quickly becomes a lost cause without the art of interpretation and the admission that correspondence does not always have direct correspondence.

Thursday, 1 November 2012

holiday cavalcade: memento mori and yakety sax

Although November seems brimming already with holidays and observances, beginning with All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day, Armistice Day and the American traditions of election day, Veterans’ Day and Thanksgiving, and the beginning of the season of Carnival—plus the general preparation and planning for celebrations to follow, which team up like some festive Voltron to really fill one’s calendar, the peripatetic and always interesting Mental Floss complements the month with fifteen alternate and off-beat anniversaries and fests.
On the coat-tails of Halloween and Dรญa de los Muertos, there is a rather morbid but necessary invocation on 2 November for one to draft his or her own epitaph, since that’s a part of estate planning more enduring than one’s will—what’s on one’s tombstone and by what pith and consequence one is remembered. The anniversary of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, and awakening of the curse, by British archaeologist Howard Carter comes on 4 November, with the tumultuous remembrance of Guy Fawkes Night coming right afterwards. Later, on 14 November, as two more sort of macabre reminder, it is the US public-service announcement call to take back one’s unused and unneeded prescription medications to the pharmacy to prevent misuse, also possibly a cue to reassess one’s health and whether the meds are working, and it is the United Nations’ World Diabetes awareness day. To lighten the mood a bit, there are the interstitial anniversaries of the invention of the saxophone by Adolphe Sax on 6 November and following on 7 November another challenge one’s embrasure with International Tongue Twister Day. See the complete list at Mental Floss, but the month ends with day honouring Mars, the red planet—as our cosmological neighbour and not as a ruling-house or as the god of war, who already has a month named in his honour. What other holidays and occasions can you think of that are vying for attention during this time and might be a refreshing distraction from the mainstream holiday-hustle?

Sunday, 28 October 2012

in season: butternut-salmon lasagna

There was a bit of confusion, mincing terms, when it came to identifying a Butternut squash (Birnenkรผrbis, “pear-squash”) distinct from a pumpkin (Kรผrbis) and the gourds (Winterkรผrbis) and the weirder varieties of bumpy and pie-faced squashes used to decorate stoops and storefronts for Autumn. Kรผrbisse are more generic (and diverse) than I thought, referring to any member of the Cucurbita family, native to Central America and separate from their European analogues of beets and turnips, including zucchinis and cucumbers, but once that was cleared up, we were ready to try something new.
For this dish to serve 3 to 4, one will need:

  • A medium casserole dish
  • A large Butternut squash, enough to get 1½ pounds from (600 – 750 grams), minus the skin and seeds (a slender squash, as compared to a dumpy one with wider squash hips tends to have less seeds) 
  • A bit of butter, flour (about 4 tablespoons each) and salt and pepper and fresh dill (chopped) and nutmeg (Muskat) for seasoning
  • 1 cup (250 ml) of cream
  • 2 cups (500 ml) of vegetable stock or bullion 
  • A 9 oz (250 g) package of smoked salmon (fresh or from the refrigerated section)
  • About 7 oz (200 g) of grated cheese (gouda or mozzarella) 
  • A 4 oz (about 100 g) package of lasagna pasta 
  • A large onion

Begin by shelling the squash and removing the seeds, and then slice the squash into small cubes and set aside.
Pre-heat the oven to 400° F (200°C). Peel and dice up the onion, frying it in a large pan until glassy in some butter over medium heat. Add a few pinches of flour to the pan (about a tablespoon in all) then pour in the broth and the cream, reducing the heat, and add the graded cheese, seasonings and garnish with the bundle of dill. Mix and leave on low heat for around five minutes. Take the uncooked lasagna noodles and arrange in layers in a casserole dish (grease with a bit of butter) apportioning slices of the salmon, squash and a dousing of the sauce, three layers deep. Pour the remaining sauce over the top, spinkling a bit more cheese over it, and allow to bake for about 45 minutes. Enjoy with a fine Moscato white wine.

Saturday, 27 October 2012

in sextus novembris

Reflecting on the upcoming and rather secularized celebrations of Guy Fawkes Night, commemorating the foiled Gunpowder Plot of the Fifth of November where the triggerman Guy Fawkes is burned in effigy, it is curious how in some four centuries of historical memory documenting revelry, sentiment and celebration, we witness perhaps the process of transposition and myth-making. The many hypotheses regarding Christianity supplanting pagan feasts with their own holidays in order to ease the tradition, like All Saints’ Day and Halloween for Nordic and Celtic Samhain or Christmas for Roman Saturnalia, cannot be tested and accounts are only implicit and worked backwards.

From the evolution of children making and parading straw men (guys—the word entered the English language because of Guy Fawkes) to burn, the excuses for partying, the waxing and waning of traditions to the modern day trappings and personae of anonymity and disestablish- mentarianism. A roundly reviled character has been elevated and romanced as a folk-hero, but as a charitable abstract of their original motives, to return the monarchy to a Catholic throne and stop the persecution and punitive taxation of recalcitrant Catholics. Such movements, I think, would not like to swap one dominating authority for another, nor order for chaos neither. The celebratory mood may have been co-opted or evolved convergent with the close lying customs of Halloween and poses a strange puzzle to unravel, despite being faithfully recorded. This year there is quite a bit of healthy competition, with the election, as to what day might be the scariest. The choice of symbols is often a bit ironic, I think, like the Alamo where the Texan freedom fighters lost and their ranks decimated or the sign of the Cross. This year, on the eve of the presidential elections of the United States, there are some vague and unclaimed threats to kidnap and ransom the executive and legislative branches until the government is returned to the people. I only fear that the plotters’ ambitions will be forgot and the aftermath celebrated as another reason to brag and to continue girding ourselves against all threats--real, imagined and opportunely rebuffed.

Wednesday, 24 October 2012

consider yourself part of the furniture

Before living in Germany, I had never heard the word Stammtisch, although the phenomenon and culture of a table for regulars, a salon-society, and a designated meeting point, a reserved spot, for networking and politicking, like the word, had been long since an established fixture of many societies. That term sounded very formal, like holding court, and maybe that made me seek out a less down-to-earth translation or equivalent. It comes under other names, too, of course, including the cracker-barrel or Coffee-Klatch, which surely has German origins too, and all the different words with differing connotations of hierarchical sophistication. Cafes, guesthouses, inns (Gaststรคtte) and pubs usually distinguished the gathering point for their regulars with a special ceremonial ashtray or a table flag (Wimpel). Mostly the get-together has been sublimated in the form of a virtual presence, but in some places the tradition continues unbroken.

Saturday, 13 October 2012

verรฐlaun, iad duais, the prize, o prรฉmio, el premio, el premi, ar priz, le prix, de prijs, den prรคis, der prisen, premija, den prisen, i priset, palkinto, auhind, der preis, il premio, prรฆmium, il premju, lu premiu, w nagroda, a dรญj, cena, รงmimi, premiul, ฯ„ฮฑ ฮฒฯฮฑฮฒฮตฮฏฮฑ, ะฟั€ัะผั–ั

It is a great honour to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, along with 502 million fellow Europeans, and I believe in the congratulatory and admonishing spirit of the committee’s unanimous decision. Individuals surely take on the burden and potential of promoting harmony, too, and there are worthy and magnanimous individuals out there working in the public and struggling in the shadows to those ends, but awards en masse, neither slights for the other nominees nor anodyne and over-cautious, are not without precedent, like when the prize was given to Doctors without Borders (Mรฉdecins sans Frontiรจrs, ร„rzte ohne Grenzen) or Great Britain conferring the George Cross collectively to the people of Malta for gallantry during World War II.

Cumulatively, the people of Europe and not just their ombudsmen and institutions have realized peace, progress and understanding while preserving and even sharpening individual culture and heritage in just scant decades from a landscape of conflict and autocracy. Conspicuous heroism is sometimes hard to see in the glare of everyday daylight. This is a feat that should not go unrecognized and the prize is not diluted by bureaucracy as an instrument of reconciliation and cooperation that goes by an institutional name, but rather, I believe, serves as an important nudge that everyone, regulators and citizens and those associates and cadets branches and those waiting in the wings alike, should try to live up to what’s been bestowed on and inherited and be not distracted from the course by threats that divide and diminish.

Friday, 12 October 2012

t9 or sui generis

Although not quite in contention as laureate material for its sometimes frustrating poetry, the chain of developments—from Pennsylvania 6-5000 to telephony for the hearing impaired to text-messaging—that led to predictive text, T9 technology, I think, deserves acknowledgement.
At first, I didn’t care to have my lines stepped on or my sentences completed when tapping out a little telegram, plus the fact that nimbleness of digits come with practice on any keyboard, but once I got more accustomed to the interface and being able to switch languages, I started to enjoy it, even appreciate it. Another interesting aspect is the strange word puzzles, poems by substitution that come out of the sequence of numbers, at first as broad suggestions and then narrowed down, like from gone, hone, home, hoof, goof, hood, to good. This transforming vocabulary do not quite make anagrams (Anagramme) but have a similar feel and I think the hidden relationships of neighbouring words that pop up are surprising and probably reveals something about the spacing and arrangement of the alphabet and the dimensions of language, as both disambiguations adapt.

Wednesday, 10 October 2012

swimlanes

I wonder if a flowchart ever really simplified a human decision-making process, or whether such diagrams always instigated a little aversion and defeat at first glance, regardless of content. Such a tool may be fit for representing, in terms of a more natural language, the input/output of computer programming but I think the collection of conditions and operators presented is just another layer shrouding instinct or bias in many cases. Flow diagrams provide a framework for solving algorithms, which computers can become very good at, but are not exhaustive or predictive of every contingency and are probably best at making snarls, choke-points more apparent.
Humans, I believe, are more apt to respond to a proof or a concrete and universal rule, rather than a passably effective way to work something out. While we are not always afforded the luxury of hard and fast laws for guidance and improvisation is called upon, but I do not think that the absence of established rules calls for the creation of provisional systems that either beggar our worse judgment or second-guess real leadership and such a method is not a substitute for an authentic imperative or thorough reasoning.
Once a system or method gets complicated enough, and I believe such code sketched out in long hand would quickly become too complex for human navigators, it becomes fairly convincing.
The people who design such charts are also fairly keen on the credibility of their work-product, and it can become problematic when inventors get too proud over their schemes and throughput. It’s scary to think that such guidelines (the branching off of process charts is called a swimlane), which is the deft guesswork and approximation of machines and field manuals, might be held not to the same rigour and standards as something inviolate and accepted without question.