helau! helau! helau! oder elfter-elfter

By chance I found myself just across the Rhine in the city of Mainz, and was caught up in the thronging crowds and pushed towards Schillerplatz, where hundreds of spectators, many in costume, had gathered to watch the Lord Mayor usher in the so-called Fifth Season (fünfte Jahreszeit) of Fasching. The countdown started just seconds before the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, and singing and cheers followed before a series of speeches, mostly wishes for good health in this time of abundance and abandon that lasts until Ash Wednesday and references to the friendly rivalry with Wiesbaden on the other side of the river, delivered by the prominent personalities assembled on the balcony of the Osteiner Hof above.
It was fun to watch and shout with the merry-makers, some already using this get-together as a chance to plan and coordinate what they would do for the closing parade that would take place in early Spring on what is called Rosamontag, just a couple days before the onset of Lent, and sort of felt like the time I was in Times Square to see the ball drop. I did wonder though about the timing and placement of the whole opening ceremony, with it coinciding with Armistice Day, which is not generally commemorated in Germany but what with the so-called Schicktsalstag a couple of days prior left sacrosanct, but eleven (Elf) became associated with the Rhenish carnival traditions as a lucky number as it was also an initialism of the rallying cry of the French Revolution of egalité, liberté, fraternité, where the trappings of the season and festivities came from in the first place.

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.