2002-08-19 11:03

In which Madeleine gets a day job

No kidding.

Colour me startled.

2002-08-16 13:36 (UTC+1)

The Uses of Usage

Browsing in the bookshop as a respite from my editing chores, I noticed with pleasure a new paperback edition of Fowler's original Modern English Usage. Soon afterwards in the second-hand section I noticed with delight a cheaper hardback copy, with the pages lovingly pre-yellowed, which has now begun a new life on my desk.

In common with all right-thinking people I loathe and detest usage mavens, but Fowler (like Strunk and White) is a masterful stylist meditating on style, and that can never be bad. Curmudgeonly, old-fashioned and wildly opinionated, the original Fowler is still one of the necessities - and the pleasures - of civilised life.

Even now his opinion on how to pronounce French words in English differs from mine only in being much better expressed:

Display of superior knowledge is as great a vulgarity as display of superior wealth - greater, indeed, inasmuch as knowledge should tend more definitely than wealth towards discretion & good manners. That is the guiding principle alike in the using & and in the pronouncing of French words in English writing and talk. To use French words that your reader or hearer does not know or does not fully understand, to pronounce them as if you were one of the select few to whom French is second nature when he is not of those few (& it is ten thousand to one that neither you nor he will be so), is inconsiderate and rude.

Comprenez?

2002-08-16 09:54 (UTC+1)

This is being hit on the head, arguments are next door

An idiot columnist in the Independent writes:

I speak French, German and Italian to the point where I can read novels in those languages without a dictionary, but make occasional mistakes in conversation and have an obvious English accent. [...] Everyone will know exactly what I mean - I've read Proust from beginning to end in French, and still Parisian waiters take one look at me and give me the menu in English.

Oh, for Heaven's sake! What was the Fallacy of Minute Distinctions again, Henry? Oh yes:

The second fallacy is that minute distinctions of sound can be disregarded - or, in other words, that a bad pronounciation does not matter.

Plus ï¿œa change, eh, innit? What our idiot has apparently overlooked is that the same folk myth that holds that British people can't learn languages also holds that even when they've studied them to an advanced reading level, they are unable to open their mouths abroad without provoking bewildered hilarity.

I don't think he's doing much to refute this view, do you?

The impetus for me to revive my French came when I went to Nice and I found myself needing to use it. In all the time I have spent in France (none of it in Paris, admittedly) I have never found it difficult to find people who find my execrable French preferable to the use of English. Quite the reverse, in fact.

(Incidentally, the discussion at Metafilter is exactly what you would expect from a bunch of monoglot Americans, which in this instance arguably makes it relevant if your pain threshold is up to it.)

2002-08-15 13:44 (UTC+1)

Blood and souls (and gossip).

There are only really two groups of people who are serious about getting languages learned; missionaries and the military.

See if you can guess which of these is being described in this NYT article (annoying and annoying are still valid as magic words (and more)):

Life at language boot camp begins and ends on a foreign note. Students attend classes from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., take a 90-minute break for physical-fitness training and then log another two to three hours a night in homework. Classes usually range from 6 to 10 students and are taught by two instructors who rarely speak English in class.

Gleep! Whoever they are (did you guess, huh, did you?) these people are clearly very serious indeed.

It is now about a month until my own Swedish classes resume - I get two hours tuition (with a break for coffee) once a week, and perhaps the same again in official homework. Surprisingly, though, it does seem to be working, although this is very much the scenic route by comparison.

At least, this is what surprises me - other people are more usually surprised that I have never actually been to Sweden and that I seem to be mostly preoccupied with gossip about Princesses as both a means and an end to language learning.

In fact that's pretty much the only generally applicable thing I know about language learning - you have to find something you really really want to read or understand, and leverage it for all it's worth - great works of French literature have gathered dust on my shelves for years, but Malmberg's book on phonetics, like Doucet's on phonology before it, was finished in a couple of weeks.

The Icelandic sagas are one of the great glories of European literature, of course, but when the time comes (and it will come) for me to study Icelandic it'll be DV's sviï¿œsljï¿œs section that does the heavy lifting.

I'm tempted to use Icelandic also as a testbed for my theory that the phonetics of a language can best be learned from purely textual sources (this is an exaggeration of what I really believe, of course, but I really do think people are far too hung-up on tapes); Icelandic is a relatively easy language to avoid exposure to, after all, but sanity will probably prevail before then.

2002-08-15 11:25

Bladetology

Norwegian Se og Hï¿œr (tack, Laurel) is pretty trashy - more National Enquirer than Hello!. It's easy to read, too, which is good, but it's strange to feel written down to in a language I don't actually even know.

All of the pictures are accompanied by colourful blobs with captions for the hard of thinking. Here's one:

Mette-Marit funklet [shone] selv om himmelen var grￜ og regntung.

She was in a sparkly top, you see. By this time I had acclimatised to the point that I was slightly disappointed that the sky was not in shot - I felt, a trifle petulantly, that unreasonable demands were being made on my inferential skills.

Anyway, Se og Hï¿œr doesn't know anything that hasn't been exhaustively reported elsewhere and the Court isn't playing:

Slottet pￜ sin side ￜnsker ikke ￜ kommentere ryktene angￜende Mette-Marit eventuelle svangerskap.

Further updates as the situation warrants.

That's as I feel it warrants, of course. If there's any trouble I might just start doing daily coverage of VG's daily coverage of Mette-Marit. Today she went on a boat. A boat, yes.

2002-08-14 18:16

Science fiction: crap, very crap or something else altogether?

Esther's robust defence of Space Opera deserves a considered response, but I haven't got one. Instead here's a rant about Science Fiction, called "The Science Fiction Rant".

I gave up admitting to liking Science Fiction when it turned out that I was the only person who thought that it meant the "Cosmonaut of Inner Space" angle of Ballard and Burroughs, the delinquent structuralist romps of Pynchon and the heretical hermeneutics of Borges.

Star Wars is not science fiction in any sense I could begin to consider interesting. I don't care how many bloody spaceships you put in, it's still about wizards and magic swords and Ancient Cosmic Wisdom. Frankly, I think Moorcock handles the Eternal Champion riffing better than this (and fantasy in general better than Tolkien, for that matter).

I saw Star Wars, once, when I was six and it had just came out. It didn't make anywhere near the impression on me that The Black Hole did a couple of years later by claiming that the galaxy was destined to be consumed by a giant black hole - an end not only to individual people (I was eight, and mortality was not news by then) but to absolutely all traces of our civilisation. That was new, and that was science fiction.

(I still haven't seen The Empire Strikes Back. I did see Return of the Jedi, though: Ewoks!? I rest my case.)

Star Trek isn't science fiction, either. Think about it: the contrived moral dilemmas; the barely two-dimensional characterisation; the unspeakable dialogue - it's Iris Murdoch In Space, and just as tiresome and unnecessary as its terrestrial counterpart.

What makes science fiction (as I define it) thrilling is that it takes it for granted that the world could be Other Than It Is, and that it takes this seriously. The "science" bit is just there so that we know we're not really doing theology, even when with Borges we often seem to be.

A lesser controversialist might concede that it's perverse to insist on using the term Science Fiction for the literature of cognitive jouissance that I have spent so much of my life seeking out, but I'm having none of that. It was Science Fiction when I came across Asimov's Psycho-history, and The Black Hole's astonishing nihilism - and it's the same thrill I get from Barthes' Mythologies, Borges's heresies, Nietzsche's critique of metaphysics, or for that matter the mathematical study of the geometry of infinite dimensional spaces.

It's the rest of you who've completely missed the point with your warp drives and your spaceships and your Magic Bloody Swords. T'chah!

[Here's a permalink - Flame on, Varied Reader, flame on. ]

2002-08-14 13:11 (UTC+1)

Really really works. Sort of.

I've come in without my sophisticated cybernetic prostheses (i.e., my notebooks) today, I'm afraid.

To tide you over, though, I can offer you a Faroese newspaper, Dimmalï¿œtting.

Or alternatively, you could try Sosialurin, which at least doesn't pop up windows telling me to change my browser. (Sigh.)

Both of them want you to register and log in, though. (Deep sigh.)

Apparently it's still 1998 out there in the rugged, windswept North Atlantic...

2002-08-14 11:20

Desbladet pro

Via mymarkup.net comes this Megnut article on how blogging can go pro. The idea is that instead of writing about our breakfasts and stuff, Evil Big Media would pay us to write stuff that facilitated preserving their dastardly hegemony.

Needless to say, I'm all for it. According to the detailed market research which I have just invented there's a huge market for kungligskvaller among people who would lose face if they admitted to knowing anything at all about the subject.

So, the Swedish version of Elle or Cosmo should pay me to write my flippant and irreverent coverage, for just these people, and every few months I'd write them an article for the print magazine that had pretensions to pretensiousness but was really just an ego massage for the buzzword compliant.

I could apply Lï¿œvi-Strauss's theory of exogamy and kinship structures to evaluate the shift from marrying off spare princesses (and princes) to foreign princes (and princesses) to letting them marry commoners (2000 words and a big photo of Mette-Marit) or do "Madeleine and the problematics of pleasure and privelege," perhaps (1500 words and another big photo).

Give them the gossip for free, you see, but charge them to be told that it's OK to like it - that's a business model, that is. My people stand ready to talk to your people...

2002-08-13 16:45 (UTC+1)

The Dim Shepherd.

From Matthew Chapter 25:

32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

When I was dividing trajectories into those that left the bay via the open ocean and those that came close to the shore (where data is contaminated) I called the two categories sheep and goats. (This is work, by the way, just hum along.)

And then, of course, I forgot which was which. Oops.

2002-08-13 13:20 (UTC+1)

Skrivsvï¿œrigheter

What a marvellous word skrivsvï¿œrigheter is. It means, of course, writing difficulties and, together with its little friend lï¿œssvï¿œrigheter, it means dyslexia.

It turns out that our Vickan is dyslexic :

Fï¿œrr tyckte jag att jag var dum och trï¿œg, sï¿œger kronprinsessan.

Desbladet is thus inspired to introduce a new occasional series, Things The Court Physician Was Never Going To Say.

Number 1:

No, your daughter isn't dyslexic, Mr and Mrs King - she's just a bit dim.

Interestingly, the King himself, prins Carl Philip and prinsess Madeleine are all also a bit dim dyslexic.

2002-08-13 10:02 (UTC+1)

Why we need a Blogme manifesto

The cricket having now ended in a thrilling draw, I can devote to you once more my full attention.

First, I have some linkage to clear out: The Guardian's tour of European novels continues with Iceland and the Baltics. Apparently we should all read Laxness, but I'm more tempted by Steinunn Sigurdadï¿œttir, who apparently writes in French and says:

I write a lot about the light in Iceland. It is the light of Iceland that is the most remarkable thing, the ever-changing light.

Meanwhile, in honour of the universally recommended Henning Mankell I've dug up this old Guardian article where he says

I can confess to you I was supposed to write a 10th Wallander novel. But I never finished it, because I detested what was in it so much. I threw it out, I burned it page by page. It caused too much pain. I have to think of the child inside me, too.

Oh dear. What about the light, though, Henning, huh?

Also the BBC has an article on Moscow written by someone who actually likes it! This is pretty much a first for Desbladet - even my Lenigrad-lovin' sister has nothing good to say about Moscow.

I'm still not going, though.

2002-08-12 14:55 (UTC+1)

No comment

I replaced some unclear prose in the new paper with pseudocode.

Then my boss suggested adding comments. Since I couldn't see anything that wasn't self-explanatory, I've almost certainly overdone it.

I'm no longer convinced this is a net win.

2002-08-12 11:08 (UTC+1)

We don't like cricket - we love it!

Yesterday on Test Match Special (now available also to Foreign Persons by the magic of InterWebNetNessHood) there was much debate over whether certain plants were petunias or Busy Lizzies.

Test cricket - the full five-day game - is the only sport I can really take seriously, at least partly because it is clearly impossible to take it seriously. I spent much of the weekend listening to the match on the radio, and now I'm listening to the final day's coverage at work.

Since at any given moment in a cricket match there's a pretty good chance nothing in particular is going on - even when the weather permits play at all, and the game is often suspended for rain or "bad light" - radio commentators over the years have become adept at making their own entertainment.

Birds (three swallows just flew past, I'm told), cakes (sent in by admirers), obscure trivia (yesterday saw England's eighth highest ninth-wicket partnership) and even unusually coloured buses are all grist to the commentators' mill.

Even if you don't know your short fine leg from your silly mid on this is clearly terrific entertainment, and having it available on the 'Net removes one of the last barriers to my living abroad.

2002-08-12 10:49

How you say - Hurrah!

The heir to the Rausing Tetrapak(TM) fortune is giving 20 million UKP to field linguistics projects on languages threatened with extinction.

Nifty!