infundibulum

Mostly I post here now.

Extreeeeeeemly random.

Words? Not so much.

An interesting piece at the Asia Times Onlines:

Emperor Hu’s new clothes for Africa

The whole China-in-Africa thing is hard for me to get my head around. On the one hand, investment is the best medicine for Africa. On the other hand, well, Darfur.

I guess saying “China is footing the bill for Darfur” would be deliberately provocative, so, “China is footing the bill for Darfur.”

We’ll see, I guess.

To translate weird things into Esperanto.

Should Killing Be Merely a Mouse Click Away?

This is an article about how people hunt over the internet. (Aim the gun with your mouse, kill.)

My opinion: it’s noxious.

And I love how the “traditional” hunter tries to come off as some kind of nature-loving boyscout.

Gary Harpole, an Illinois hunter who figures he has killed 100 deer, most with a bow, said the practice “takes away from what hunting really is all about: getting outdoors, experiencing nature.”

“To me, 90 percent of hunting is the experience, 10 percent is the harvest,” said Harpole, who runs a hunter’s lodge at his rural home. Bagging a buck by computer, he said, “is a lazy way of hunting.”

I will never understand people who try to justify hunting as a sport.

What hunting is all really about: getting outdoors, experiencing nature, and then killing it.

Awesome.

Is it just me, or have the words heh and hehe (or sometimes heheh) acquired different nuances?

Sometimes, I will type “heh” in a chat, and then think “wait, ‘heh’ will come across as sarcastic,” and then I’ll type “hehe” instead.

Dear lazyweb, am I insane?

A while back I happened to meet a couple people who spoke Xhosa (at a Starbucks, heh). So as is my wont I talked them into teaching me a couple phrases… the only one I was able to remember was Hamba kahle, which means something like “au revoir” or “goodbye” or something.

On a lark I stuck “Xhosa” and “Isixhosa” (which is Xhosa for Xhosa, heh) into Youtube’s search engine, and I found a couple of videos that are interesting to compare.

Now, Xhosa is well known for being a click language. If you’ve never heard such a language you will upon watching these videos, it’s neat to hear.

The first is a tourist guide:

The second is a news report, considerably longer:

The thing that stands out for me is how there are far more clicks in the tour guide’s speech than what you hear in the news report. I imagine that he chose something that’s more or less a “tongue twister”, because it’s fun for the tourists to hear all the clicks.

But judging by how many clicks you hear on average in the news report (far fewer), it seems that this gives an incorrect impression of what the language really sounds like.

An additional bit of evidence for this is the fact that a commenter on Youtube says that the tour guide had used just the same phrase on a previous tour — it probably wasn’t just run of the mill speech.

But whatever, cool to hear.

Eh, this week, anyway.

The word in question, of course, being “fora“.

Tlingit, which should be pronounced something like “Klinkit” according to Wikipedia , is a Na-Dené language spoken in what is now Alaska and British Columbia (same family as Navajo, how about that?) .

That’s a long way from Stratford-on-Avon, but you can go see a version of Macbeth in Tlingit this month at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC:

Perseverance to Do ‘Macbeth’ in Tlingit

But this time the 12-member cast, whose ages range from 15 to 42, has agreed to perform most of the play in Tlingit (pronounced klink-it).

“It’s like running a marathon, without training for it,” said actor Ishmael Hope, who plays Malcolm, the son of King Duncan who is killed by Macbeth. “But we’re doing the work to make it happen.

“None of us is going to sound like a fluent speaker, because no matter how meticulous we are, it’s a difficult language. But we’ll still be able to convey meaning.”

Apparently the actors don’t really “understand” their lines, except insofar as they understand their English equivalents:

“It takes 10 times longer to learn just one line,” said Waid, who plays Macbeth and has performed Shakespeare in theaters worldwide with various production groups since he was a teenager. “As far as the structure of the language and the grammar, it’s still a mystery.”

That’s kind of weird… but when you’re dealing with a languages that has very few fluent speakers, the “publicity” aspect of a project like this is arguably at least as important as the “preservation” aspect. I imagine it would be almost impossible to put a big production like this together exclusively with fluent speakers. How many Tlingit speakers are actors, after all.

I wonder if they will be publishing the text in some form for Tlingit learners.

Some rummaging about for stuff about Tlingit turned up TroubledRaven.com, a site by Lance Twitchell, who is the language consultant for the DC performance and mentioned in the article. He has some nice materials on Tlingit: Lingit X’einaxh’.