half-life or aire du nucléaire

Astoundingly, just a mere thirty kilometers outside of Paris, there is an abandoned nuclear testing grounds. Environmentalists have ventured, illegally, into this mothballed military facility and found few hot-spots, happily. Considering, however, the intensity and age of these experiments, one is nonetheless given pause to wonder whether Nature has not actually cleaned up the area but just managed to dilute it well enough to register as inconsequential. Or rather, has the dust and ash settled and is circulating over suburbia and the tourist haunts beyond?

sandboxed or pen and ink

I am sure that all good zoo-keepers strive to make a stimulating environment for their inmates and charges and not just for the gawking throngs of visitors, but I think this initiative by an aquarium in Brighton-by-the-Sea, courtesy of Nag on the Lake, has to be a pretty unique example of outreach.

Appreciating the intelligence, visual-acuity and dexterity of its resident octopi, care-takers have installed a series of still-lives, an ensemble of objects to be rearranged and composed so the cephalopods can make their own artistic state- ments—even if it is in human-terms. That is a big improvement over sunken castles and shipwrecks and ambiance. What do you think? Do your pets—even your silently circling ones, have an unexpressed talent—for the lack of the right medium?

ketchup, catsup—apfel, appel or fractured fairy tales

The introduction and promotion of the idea of a shared Indo-European parent tongue, as opposed to the commonly-held belief that linguistic similarities came through borrowing and mixing, was nothing short of revolutionary to the understanding of languages—much like the ideas of plate-tectonics and even the theory of evolution that were being developing around the same time, and like the former, is kind of difficult to imagine a world where these facts did not seem obvious or at least worth the inquiry.

As keen as the idea was, however, not much was done with it in Imperial India and it was another conflict that pushed the proto-language to the next level. The rampage of Napoleon’s armies through Europe saw the dissolution and restructuring of the Holy Roman Empire—which was a virtual patchwork of petty-kingdoms, secular and ecclesiastic states that vied for turf and imperial immediacy, and there was no truly aligned national identity, unlike the case in France—which was a well-defined sovereign unit. In this Kleinstaateri, there was no Germany or German citizen, with people subjects of places like the Kingdom of Prussia, the Free City of Aachen or the County of Nassau-Orange-Usingen-Dillenburg. With the invasion and subsequent occupation, however, a sense of nationalism developed out of rebellion to French cultural incursion and the fragmented lands behind their shared heritage and language. Heir to this political environment and growing fascination for tradition and custom and with his brother Wilhelm was more focused on gathering and classifying folk-tales, Jacob Grimm began exhaustive studies of the Germanic languages and dialects in comparison to Europe’s romance languages.
The outcome of these efforts could be described as a sort of linguistic periodicity: known as Grimm’s Laws, the philologist demonstrated that apparently unrelated words, did in fact have a shared lineage—which could be revealed through shifts in the sounds of letters that transformed in fixed and predictable ways. After more refinements, Grimm not only showed that there were cognates across the different branches in the spectra of speech, but further created a series of protocols that could be reversed in order to reconstruct something of what the original parent word was. As Sir Jones noticed in Calcutta, a p-sound tended to change into an f-sound and Grimm codified more of such transformations, such as t- to th-, as from the Sanskrit त्रेता, Greek τρίτος, Celtic trydydd, and Russian третий all turning to the Old Saxon thriddio or English third, or the k-/q-sound embedded in the Latin languages changing to an w-/h-sound—which makes qué, qui and quod seem less foreign compared to what, why, and whom (was, wie und wem), or—another example—the c-/k-sound shifting towards an h-sound, like from canis to hound (Hund), cornus (as in Cornucopia, horn of plenty) to horn (Horn) and even, with multiple sound shifts occurring within the words, centum (as in century, Jahrhundert) becoming hundred. Grimm limited his research to the Germanic branches of the Indo-European family, but kindred linguists went on to discover parallel rules for other languages.
The rigour that results by applying the laws of each branch of European and Asian languages to a word allows researchers with some certainty the ability to reconstruct its ancient roots. Not only was this Ur-language resurrected by the folklorist, storyteller but by better understanding how the sounds migrated and what remained relatively familiar-sounding (our core vocabulary, those words that defy change because they are what’s most important and universal, and of course, what was named was what they knew, lending insight into where and how they lived), those ancient people who spoke it millennia ago were also resuscitated.  The French infiltration was also shown to be one in the same for the natives. 

intershop oder deutsch-deutsche grenze

As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, there’s an array of tributes and retrospectives worth checking out. I am reminded of one small artefact that I found a few years ago at a flea market. This cancelled East German passport is only marked with the endorsement that allows the bearer unrestricted transit into the so-called Neue Bundesländer (it is still probably a little dig to keep the distinction of a West Berlin, which was a national peculiar). It is a little sad that someone’s grandmother never got the chance for further travel, as there are no other stamps, but maybe she threw out this one for a new passport of the united Germany.

nine dragons

Via the ever-engrossing maker of fine hyper-text products, Kottke, comes an interesting glimpse at the former Chinese enclave of Kowloon Walled-City in the former British exclave of Hong Kong.

Originally purposed as a garrison to oversee salt trade, the property remained nominally under Chinese control when the territory was leased to the British but the matter of administration was disputed, with the compound by turns becoming depopulated and abandoned, and eventually transforming into a den of iniquity and refuge for thieves, beholden to no authority. Prior to its demolition in 1993, Kowloon Wall-City housed an amazing thirty-three thousand residents, living vertically stratified in an urban environment of their own design. Somewhat covertly, just before being razed, a group of architects and civil-engineers from Japan had thoroughly documented and photographed the place, including detailed cross-cut and cut-away schema, illustrating the resourcefulness of the denizens and economy of dimensions.

light-rail or calvin cycle

The intrepid Atlas Obscura shares an innovative idea from an engineering firm called the Cloud Collective, hailing from Denmark, which aims to filter the air and sequester carbon dioxide more or less at its source. Like the temporaty installation featured in Geneva, the design group hopes to mount pumps and transparent tubes to house algae in an urban setting. The scheme aims not only to clean the air but the inventors also hope to smartly utilize the by-products, spinning the algae into foodstuffs, cosmetics and even fuel.

ephemeral or fascinating rhythm

Though I am certain that this template does not apply to every individual, this short article from EarthSky, via the Presurfer, about circadian rhythms does provide a pretty insightful illustration about how one’s biological clock can get easily thrown out of whack and physiological cues could quickly start to stack-up. Although the clock is an analogy that’s constantly adjusting its time due to the give and take of one’s environment to keep everything in sync, it is not just an extended metaphor but an expression of the incredible chemistry that orients us to our daily lives.

wanderwörter or all the tea in china

Though linguistics had been an acknowledged and structured discipline for quite some time, most scholars believed that noted similarities among families of languages—specifically between the Romance languages, derived from Latin, and the Germanic languages—came about through borrowing and commerce with the Roman Empire.

Albeit the theory was not completely original, as monks and missionaries had suggested the connection before, it was not until hyperglot and Orientalist Sir William Jones came to Calcutta to preside as a magistrate. The United Kingdom did not originally have colonial designs on the sub-continent, content to reap tax revenue from chartered companies to facilitate trade and administer themselves. This arrangement held, in European eyes, attracting healthy competition from other seafaring powers until the fall of the Moghul Empire, who tolerated these franchises. The situation became untenable for the Dutch and other players and soon only Britain and France were vying for dominance in India—still however, only in a commercial capacity, and the two nations raised armies, recruited from the local population, and entered into an expensive, protracted war. The Seven Years War as it was known in Europe and Asia or the French-Indian (Native Americans) as it was known in North American has the distinction of being the first world war, spanning four continents, and not only provided the impetus for Britain to formerly annex India but also led to the American Revolutionary War and the secession of those thirteen colonies. In order for the British East India Company to recover financially from its war with its French counterpart, the UK relaxed tariffs on tea and other goods for export but made up for the losses by transferring the burden to the western reaches of the empire in the form of duties imposed under the Tea Act. In the 1770s, Britain appointed its first governor-general, William Hastings, a fair-minded individual who respected the sub-continent’s cultures and heritage and believed that Indians ought to be allowed to retain their native institutions and Britain should only act as overseers and arbiters with minimal interference. The court system and codices of Hindu and Islamic law presented the highest linguistic and cultural hurdle. As the West had Latin as the static and universal language of academics and legal matters, India too had texts, terms and conventions—a body of Sanskrit writing to draw from.

Officers of the courts were unable to easily reach a middle-ground, lacking not just the language but also the historical context and means for interpretation. English judges had to rely on pandits, translator-advocates and source of the English term punditry, who could be selective with their elucidation in order to skew justice one way or another. Sir Jones’ prodigious love of learning and background made him a prime candidate to sit at the Supreme Court (though his elevation was called into question over sympathies for the rebels in America and relationship with the traitorous Benjamin Franklin) and find a solution to the possible miscarriage of justice. Studying the ancient Sanskrit texts, Jones began to see connections that echoed through the ages and in many tongues. Similarities that were buried and could not be explained by the notion of proximity and borrowing began to show themselves. Root words, disguised by shifting sounds but shared among seemingly disparate languages, pointed to a common ancestry, whereas before thought to have unrelated origins. The English word foot seemed to have a separate etymology from the Latin pod, ped or the Greek pus—since English especially tends to fold back on itself, with footprint, podiatrist (Fußspezialist) and pedestrian (Fußganger), but the words become convergent in Sanskrit, suggesting an undiscovered common-tongue. Jones called this forgotten yet very much thriving hypothetical language Aryan, the denonym of a noble people and as the Roman name for the eastern part of Persia the source of the name of the Iranian nation—though in modern times, linguists are more partial to the term proto-Indo-European language, the word Aryan having been infused with other connotations.