How English might evolve

All languages evolve, even French, despite the efforts of the Acadámie 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.

View out of our windows

Ruth is in the UK at the moment for a few days, so these pictures are mainly to show her how much snow (and sleet and hail) we have had since she left on Sunday!

Snow in Schmitten 2008-03-25

More snow…

And it was good job she flew into Heathrow and not London City (with its short runway surrounded by water and buildings), me thinks:

(YouTube Link via vowe dot net)

Rostock

We visited a friend in Rostock from Thursday until today. It is a really lovely town – it has been nicely renovated since the reunification in the early 1990′s and is a very pleasant place to live. The historical building style uses bricks very effectively – and many of the modern buildings in the town center are also brick-built and blend in with the traditional buildings, as you can see in the case of the building on the left below.
Buildings in the pedestrian area of Rostock
One of the trademarks of Rostock is Warnemünde Lighthouse on the promenade (below), built in 1897. Next to it you can see on the left, a model of the sun, which is part of a scale representation of the solar system, which stretches about 6 km down the beach and includes plaques for each planet, showing the planet to the same scale and at the scale distance from the sun.
Lighthouse and “sun” in Rostock

Viral marketing?

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.

We’ve tidied up the site

Last week we had a bill from a company for over 1500 Euro for the use of a small (approx. 120 x 80 pixel) image that they claim they own the copyright for. We’ve engaged a lawyer specialized on IP (intellectual property) rights to defend our corner. IP disputes are NOT covered by legal insurance (Rechtsschutzversicherung) in Germany, by the way. No insurance company will cover it because of the potential size of the risk.

The use of the picture was not on this site, but I’ve taken the invoice as a sign that I need to be more careful than I have been about using images from, for example, news sites when I link to a story that I comment on here. I can’t afford unsolicited 4-figure invoices and the associated legal fees. I’ve removed some pictures taken from other sites that I have linked to, and removed a few postings altogether.

New toy

ScanSnap S850M
This is amazingly good value for money. I bought a Fujitsu Siemens SnapScan S510M this week.

The scanner is small, as you can see in the photo, where it is sitting next to the Mac Mini. When it’s not in use, it’s even smaller as the sheet feeder and the paper tray for the scanned documents both fold up flush with the body of the scanner. Folding it up switches it off, conversely unfolding it switches it back on.

ScanSnap closed up

It scans 18 pages / minute, double-sided at 300 pixels/inch, cost me 377 Euro and generates documents in JPEG or PDF format. It comes with Abbyy Fineprint, which means that you can perform OCR (optical character recognition) on the scanned documents as part of the scan workflow.

The really beautiful thing is that the software for the scanner automatically recognizes whether documents are in color or black and white and switches to the appropriate scanning mode automatically, and also recognizes whether paper is printed on one or both sides. Blank sides can be automatically deleted from the scanned document.

On my limited experience and experimenting of the last couple of days, I can only say that I wish I’d bought this a long time ago – it saves so much time compared to scanning manually (using a Canon Lide 80) or using a Brother multi-function scanner/printer/fax, which could only handle single-sided documents and was much slower than the ScanSnap.

If you don’t have a Mac, you can still enjoy the advantages of the ScanSnap – there is a model available without an “M” at the end of the name which is designed to work PCs. In fact, the PC model is somewhat cheaper, and can be upgraded free of charge to work with the Mac by following these steps.

Unusual cars

Before you order a new BMW 3 series or a Chelsea Tractor take a look at the vehicles on offer on Cin-King’s web site. I think you will agree they are truly unique – unlike the more common run-of-the-mill mass produced premium products:
Slim Jim
If you are not convinced by the Slim Jim’s stunning looks, then consider the advantages of its seating arrangement:
Slim Jim seats
And don’t forget to check out the vehicle accessories on their site at the same time!

(Found though a full page advert in this week’s Autobild)