Keys Corner

All languages evolve, even French, despite the efforts of the Académie Française to freeze their language. If you are interested in how languages have evolved in the past, then take a look at The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer, which despite having been written over 60 years ago is still one of the best books on the evolution of languages. In fact, by showing how modern languages have evolved from common roots, it can also help spot patterns that help learning a new language.

There’s an interesting short article in today’s Daily Mail about how English is likely to evolve in the coming decades. (It summarizes a more detailed – and more interesting – article in the New Scientist [subscription required to read the full article]). The people pushing the evolution will probably be non-native speakers – those using English as a second language. There are well over a billion non-native English speakers today, compared with around 320 million native speakers, and they will drive a simplification of the language:

... As the new language takes over, “the” will become “ze”,
“friend” will be “frien” and the phrase “he talks” will become “he talk”...

However, this doesn’t mean that more people will be able to use this simplified English to communicate with each other, as at the same time the local variations that exist today will continue to exist and evolve too, resulting in increasing fragmentation into regional dialects. This is what happened to Latin, when between AD 300 and AD 800 it evolved into Italian, French and Spanish. Interestingly, the New Scientist suggests that what may function as the “glue” between the different dialects is scientific and technical writing, as well as worldwide media. This is what has happened with Arabic, which has many local spoken dialects, united by the literary Arabic of the Koran.

According to AutoBild, the full-page advertisement they ran a couple of weeks ago for Cin King was viral marketing for a German car manufacturer.

Normally, viral marketing increases in brand awareness by getting people talking about or linking to the ads. I’m not sure how running ads for cars nothing like the ones you manufacture and also not mentioning your name in the ads is supposed to do that. Although AutoBild did name the company sponsoring the ads, I don’t think they really want to be named, so you can do your own research to find out who they are. I’m keeping my mouth shut here.

Unfortunately, the Brits don’t write communiques like these any more - if they ever did:

Dear Citizens of America,

In view of your failure to elect a competent President and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately.

Her Sovereign Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories (except Kansas, which she does not fancy), as from Monday next…

(Found in a comment on vowe dot net)

The British education system has been hopeless at teaching foreign languages for years and the number of pupils taking a foreign language at school has dropped by around 10% since the government in its wisdom decided to make it optional to study languages in school last year. Now, the BBC reports that:

Oral tests could be dropped from language GCSEs because they are “too stressful”, according to a report…

...Shadow schools secretary Michael Gove told the Sunday Telegraph: “After being told they could get a pass without writing a word in a foreign language, now pupils are being told they can pass without speaking it.

“Once again, this government is moving the goalposts on examinations and instead of proper rigour we have got a watering down of standards.”

Don’t they realize the main point of learning a language – apart from latin, perhaps – is to be able to use it to speak to people?

While I was at University, I had the chance to work in Umeå in northern Sweden for 13 weeks, which was long enough to get a taste for learning about a different culture and to find learning a foreign language actually useful. Although I did pick up enough Swedish to get by, it has been dormant for about 35 years now and I had never realized there is a system to how many of IKEA’s products are named – for example:

• Sofas, coffee tables, bookshelves, media storage and doorknobs are named after places in Sweden (Klippan, Malmö)
• Chairs and desks are Swedish men’s names (Roger, Joel)
• Beds, wardrobes and hall furniture after places in Norway (Tromsö, Hopen)
• Carpets after places in Denmark (Egeby)

For a little more information on the naming system and how it came about, visit today’s Guardian.

And the heading for this post? It means “Do you speak IKEA?”.

Bookpedia – you can also, of course display the catalog as a list!
Until now I have for many years used Readerware to catalog our (1100+) books and (800 or so) CDs, and Delicious Library to catalog our much smaller collection of DVDs.

The rational behind that was that Readerware is cross-platform (Windows, Palm, Linux and Mac) and we could upload our catalogs to our Palm devices, and it can scan the barcodes from the books and CDs using a cheap barcode reader which they supply with the software and then look up the barcode in various internet databases (including Amazon) to create records which include cover art, reviews, authors, titles and other information about each one.

I chose to use Delicious Library because although it was only available for the Mac, it accessed a larger number of databases to find the DVDs, and I quickly discovered that depending on the combination of languages and sub-titles (which differ in the different countries), often DVDs available in Germany or Spain were not found in the Amazon stores in the UK or USA because they had different UPCs (universal product codes). So a wide range of databases increases the chance of finding a DVD via it’s barcode. Delicious Library can also scan the bar codes, but it uses the Mac’s iSight to do it, rather than needing a barcode reader.

This weekend, however, I have exported all three databases as excel files and imported them into Bruji’s excellent products: DVDpedia, Bookpedia and CDpedia. These are cheaper to license than the products that I have been using and recommending up until now, and offer more extensive import / export functions, which is good if you want to make lists of your collections available to others. The programs only run on Macs, but that is fine for me, and we can read Excel files on our phones, so the lack of support for Palm or other PDAs is no problem. They all allow barcodes to be scanned using an iSight. The main advantage, however, is the larger number of databases on the web which the software can read to retrieve the item descriptions – not only a large number of Amazon sites, but also more exotic sites, such as Casa del libro to retrieve the increasing number of Spanish books we are buying and which we need to catalog. If you have a Mac: recommended.

Merriam-Webster has named the word of the year for 2007: w00t!

If you need an explanation of the meaning, they are kind enough to provide one here.

Bought DVDs drive me nuts already with the unskippable beginning where the film company warns you that copying or broadcasting the DVD is illegal. But things can get worse – IBM has patented a way to stop the films periodically and disable the DVD controls, forcing you to watch canned adverts:

...15 minutes or so into the movie—right as the action is building to a crescendo—the movie fades to a commercial. For the next minute, you’re forced to watch the commercial as the fast-forward button has suddenly stopped working. The unhappy experience is repeated two or three more times before the movie ends…

I can’t think of a better inducement to load ripped films from the internet to view instead.

The Pope has blasted Europeans for being selfish and not having enough children, in a sermon at the 850-year-old Austrian pilgrimage site of Mariazell… ...The pontiff had denounced abortion upon arriving in Austria on Friday as the “very opposite” of human rights…

Isn’t over 6.6 billion people on this planet enough? In 1950 the world population was 2.5 billion. Reducing, or at least managing the world population would be one of the most effective ways to reduce the rate of climate change in the longer term.

We visited the Documenta 12 in Kassel yesterday – with high expectations. The show is only held every 5 years, and when we last went, we spent two days there and could have spent longer. This time, I have to say that we agree with the arts correspondent of the Daily Telegraph: The worst art show ever.

I admit we didn’t visit everything. After just over three hours, having visited two of the main exhibition areas, we came home. The two pictures here are a couple of things we did like. The one above is by Lukas Duwenhögger and is called The Celestial Teapot – a large decorative tea pot with arms for the handle and spout, on top of a tower which is reminiscent of the supports for a long-gone British seaside pier. It is a memorial for Nazism’s homosexual victims.

The other exhibit was of 1001 antique Qing dynasty (1644-1911) chairs, which were scattered around the whole exhibition, for visitors to rest on. The whimsical chairs don’t look as if they would be very comfortable, but many of them were – especially if you are Ruth’s size, as I presume the majority of Chinese are!