infundibulum

I started a category on Wikipedia: Category:Earliest known manuscripts by language. I’m not terribly happy with the phrasing of that, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. Anyway, it seems to have struck a chord as there have been daily additions since the addition.

As you might expect, there are some arguable cases, but IMHO, the discussion about which particular documents belong in the category and which are on the periphery is the whole point.

CITIZEN-TIMES.com: High-tech language lessons from tribe

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will use a federal grant to buy hand-held computers that translate English into Cherokee.

The computers, called Phraselators and made by Maryland-based VoxTec International, will help the tribe teach members how to speak Cherokee.

The Phraselator is a small hand-held translation device. In the articles I’ve read about the device, it’s mostly been used in combat (if I recall correctly it was first developed for the military). It’s nice to see it being used in a language preservation situation.

With about 20,000 speakers, Tsalagi, the Cherokee Language, is one of the most-spoken Native American languages.

You know, we here at Infundibulum, or rather, ME here at Infundibulum, well, we, I, you know what I mean… attempt to run a respectable operation.

I mean, we don’t go for the cheap joke around here.

Very often.

But sometimes man, it’s irresistible.

Now please, tell me, was that really the only spelling they could come up with to try to render the pronunciation of Albert Pujols’s last name?

Nay, we think not.

Somebody was feeling kind of second grade at ESPN.com, methinks.

Thanks for pointing that out, there, Amy.

Māori Queen Te Atairangikaahu passed away yesterday in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand. She helped to promote the Te Reo Māori (the Māori language) during her forty year reign.

Maori Queen worked for youth

Maori used to be dying language, but as patron of the Kohanga Reo movement, Dame Te Ata made Maori proud to speak their mother tongue.

The message from children at the marae: “It’s cool to korero!”

The Kōhanga reo (”language nest”) program which the Queen helped to promote has been quite a successful in helping to create a new generation of Māori speakers (and as a result it’s been emulated in Hawaiian punana leo).

The word “kōrero,” which our young interviewee used, means “to speak” or “to talk.” (There’s a very nice language learning website called Kōrero Māori.)

Here’s another obituary at the L.A. Times, and a lovely photo of her coronation in 1966.

August is Philippine Languages Month in the Philippines.

Speaking in tongues–Pilipino-style

This overview has some interesting Tagalog Pilipino Filipino words thrown in. (I think that’s the current term for the national language… you know what? It’s complicated. )

For instance:

IT is not Linggo ng Wika; it’s Buwan ng Wika. It’s not Abakada and Tagalog; it’s ABCD and Pilipino. It’s no longer Taglish as a language borrowed and corrupted; it’s now translation and code switching as proof of comprehension and multilingual mastery. It’s more than just stodgy textbooks and formal oratorical balagtasan; it’s also a celebration of comic-book lore and street corner kwentuhan. It’s no longer Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa; it’s now Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa ay Buwan ng mga Wika sa Pilipinas.

Ricardo Nolasco of the Philippine Languages Commission (whaddya know, they have a wiki) has some more background on that last pair of phrases:

Nolasco explains, “Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa ay Buwan ng mga Wika sa Pilipinas is a pitch for linguistic diversity. Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa was the slogan during the martial-law regime and that promoted dangerous ideas such as that having many languages was disadvantageous to the country—and that’s not correct.”

With a bit of digging I discovered that Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa means “One nation, One spirit.” It was the motto from the bad old days of the Marcos government. (And more amusingly, perhaps, it recently resurfaced in the name of the wacky Eddie Gil’s Partido Isang Bansa Isang Diwa. He promised to “make every Filipino a millionaire within one hundred days” of being elected. That didn’t work out! (Unfortunately!).)

Haven’t managed to decipher the first, more agreeable phrase that Nolasco mentions, but buwan is “month,” wikang pambansa is “national language,” and wika sa Pilipinas is (I think) “languages of the Philippines.” So I’m guessing the whole thing means something like “The Month of the National Language and (All?) the Languages of the Philippines”?

It would also be fun to know what the languages on that poster are, specifically.

While wandering around the Technorati “Language” tag, I ran across a blog called café salemba, which gives us some insight into the politics of language in Indonesia.

I don’t know much about that neck of the woods myself, linguistically, except that Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are very similar languages indeed.

According to an article that Café Salemba points to, there is a movement afoot in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei to promote the use of Malay in the face of increasing use of English, Chinese, and Arabic. (The article seems to have been moved, but also it’s also available here, and there’s a followup article here ).

I think Café Salemba is right to disregard, and even mock, the idea that government can effectively legislate how language is used:

People communicate, regardless of what language they are using. As long as you understand what I mean and I understand what you mean, we’re fine. Misunderstandings might arise, but that’s how language develop in the first place.

That is to say, language is like market. It is supposed to be free. Non-imposed, non-enforced. It grows as people need it. Let people choose how they communicate. There were times when people thought they could impose some new words. And they failed. Umberto Eco told us a story about it. The Italian fascists tried to force people to say “mescita” instead of “bar”. They failed.

It’s just not possible to prevent people from using a particular language. One needn’t look further than the Indonesian Ministry of Education website to detect the influence of borrowings from English: struktur, statistik, kalender, program, publikasi, web mail, profil, nonformal, nasional, e-government, award, workshop…. Heck, the ministry itself is called the Departemen Pendidikan Nasional Republik Indonesia. Call me crazy, but that looks like a four out of five borrowing ratio…

But even so, it’s not quite true to say that governments can have no linguistic influence in the long run — they can and they do. If you compare, for instance, the history of the African countries of Kenya and Tanzania, it’s quite clear that the heavy hand of the Tanzanian government effectively positioned Swahili as the language of the country, whereas in Kenya, English is still widely understood and used.

So there’s at least one key place where imposing a language can play a critical role in shaping the linguistic future of a country: schools.

icWales - Assembly to dump Welsh

What?

Now, Free Ways to Do Desktop Work on the Web - New York Times

Where is Microsoft, the software giant, in all this? Interesting question. It is expected that Microsoft will offer a similar product via its Net-centric Office Live and Windows Live initiatives, which convert the desktop to the Web top. It may be a tough choice for the company, because it faces the dilemma of cannibalizing its own products or letting someone else take a bite out of them.

When I read that I was surprised to see “Web top” written as two words; it’s clearly intended to be analogous to “desktop.”

“webtop application” already gets a fair number of Google hits.

So, how long is it before we see “phonetop” or “celltop” or perhaps (ickily) “PDAtop” applications?

Place your bets.

I’m sorry, Esperanto world, but I can only laugh when I discover that “bird flu” comes out as “birda gripo” in Esperanto.

OH NO, THE DREADED BIRDA GRIPO.

Right, thank you for reading my immature blog post.