Next time we drive past Maastricht, we are going to take a look at Selexyz Dominicanen. There’s an article in the Guardian architecture section about this book shop in a converted church, and it looks spectacular. The architects were Merkx + Girod, and the photo above is from their website..
A British publisher, Self Made Hero, has brought out a series of Shakespeare’s plays as manga comics with abridged texts in the original Shakesperian English. A second publisher, Classic Comics, has gone a step further, producing full colour comics in different versions. You can get them as abridged versions which use the original text, in modern English or in modern English for slow readers (i.e. with much less text).
I have seen several of Shakespeare’s plays in both English and German, and was suprised to discover that I much prefer to see them in German. Why? Because here when the plays are performed, the language is usually modern German. I understand that much, much better than Shakespearian English. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the comics are a big hit, especially with anyone having to study the plays as part of an English course.
Paul Baker has produced an aLPHaBeT 26 font which can be used if you agree with Bradbury Thompson’s idea that children are hindered in learning to read because they have to learn different symbols for capital and lower-case letters.
On the other hand, a recent study in the UK points to support at home being the main factor in how well children do at school. So perhaps it might be better to focus on getting parents to spend more time with their kids and show more interest in their school work, rather than introducing them to an artificial alphabet.
Ruth and I like listening to Ben and Marina’s Spanish podcasts in Notes from Spain, so I decided to buy the book he published last year about how he came to live in Spain. It seems to have become a collecter’s item – we looked on Amazon.co.uk:
It’s listed on the German site at 89 Euro. Not bad for a book which costs around 10 Euro at the list price!
Fortunately, it is in stock for 10 Euro at Lulu.com, so buy several copies and sell the surplus ones on Amazon:
You can find a nice collection some of his works online here and his own website here.
I’ve just read When smoke ran like water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution by Devra Davis. Its a real eye-opener about how industry distorts and manipulates evidence about the effects of pollution in an effort to keep their liabilities as low as possible and profits as high as possible.
Of course, an obvious example in Germany is the recent lobbying by the tabacco industry to avoid having a blanket ban on smoking in public places imposed by the government. Here, as in other countries and in other industries, the tabacco industry funds apparently independent research groups to produce reports which either play down the destructive effects of their products or emphasise the negative aspects that a ban may result in. Another common practice is to fund “independent” scientists who criticize and discredit research and those individuals working on that research, something which has actually ruined careers of scientists whose work conflicts with the marketing goals of industry.
What I did find interesting is that this sort of manipulative behaviour goes back a long way.
For example, as far back as the 1930’s, the American automotive industry (including GM, Goodyear, Firestone, Mack Truck and several other companies) started buying up and shutting down railway networks and replacing them with bus services. By the 1950’s they had shut down and motorized more than 900 of the 1200 electric railway transit systems in the USA. In 1947 GM and 9 further corporate co-defendants were convicted on a charge of monopolizing the sale of motor buses… and fined the princely sum of $5000, or the price of two small cars! No wonder cities like Los Angeles are today completely dependent on motor vehicles for transportation.
If you are interested in how industry manipulates politics and the markets to get its way, this book is well worth reading.
An altogether more entertaining site (than Wordie, mentioned in the previous post) is Retrofuture, which, takes me back to my childhood, reading “Eagle” comics with series such as Dan Dare, set in the future, and articles on technology – such as the Concorde, refrigerated cargo ships and satellite launchers.
Unfortunately, the predictions in Eagle and those collected in Retrofuture were often far from what actually developed, but that’s what makes them such good fun to look back on.
Spotted on Andy Budd’s weblog:
I always thought the books displayed cover out at bookshops were done so because the staff liked the books or they were good sellers. It wasn’t until I dipped my toes in the publishing world that I found out you actually have to pay for your books to be presented this way.
Well, that’s news to me too. I like his idea which follows on from that – support your favourite authors by turning their books cover out when you see their books in bookshops!
I must admit that I am not the world’s best speller by a long margin. And English is worse than most other languages, because many words have friends, who sound identical but mean something completely different. For example, bear and bare. And which is that gland, that older men sometimes have problems with – the prostate or the prostrate? If you’re wracking your brains, maybe you need to browse Paul Brians’ Common Errors in English Useage, or perhaps buy a copy.
I have been reading one book since Christmas. I have just finished it now. I normally read a thick novel in a couple of days to a week or so, so you might suspect that the book isn’t really interesting me. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book, The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer, is one of the classic textbooks for linguistic students. It was published in 1944 and is still in print.
It’s a fascinating look at how the European languages have evolved over the last one or two thousand years comparing their grammar and vocabulary to each other as well as to Latin, Greek, and Chinese. The European languages are grouped into two main groups – the Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese) and the Teutonic languages (English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch), which Bodmer analyses and compares. English has been heavily influenced by French, as a result of the Norman conquest of England in 1066, so in fact it straddles both groups. He also takes a look at their ancestors: Old English (which is very close to modern Icelandic), Middle High German, Latin and Greek; and contrasts them with other languages such as Finnish, Chinese, and Russian. He also looks at the strengths and weaknesses of some of the artificial languages that have been proposed in the past, such as Esperanto, Interlingua or Novial.
Bodmer also looks at how the different aspects of a language make it easier or more difficult to learn. And points out that many textbooks (even today, over 60 years later) don’t make learning easy, by focusing on details of grammar and vocabulary that really are not necessary to master if you only want to be able to communicate effectively. For example, he includes word lists of about 1000 words for each language, which if learnt, will cover the essential vocabulary to allow one to express most ideas – the lists include as few synonyms as possible and the words necessary to allow you to explain the words you don’t know! I’m intending to have a close look at the Spanish list, and try to the learn those words I haven’t come across yet.
It’s not light reading, which is why it’s taken me so long to read, but if you are interested in languages, it is a “must” to read. What does make the book so enjoyable to read, is that Bodmer has a dry sense of humour which shines through often. For example, he is of the opinion that Russian is horribly complex and irregular, so:
...It is therefore impossible to give the reader who wishes to learn Russian any good advice except to take the precaution of being born and brought up in Russia…