2003-02-28 14:59 (UTC)

All time is unredeemable.

It bothers me sometimes that I learn about major figures of 20th century intellectual life as often from obituaries as any other source. This time, it's Maurice Blanchot:

Maurice Blanchot was probably the least-read yet most influential French writer of the postwar era. Reclusive to a degree, shunning all public appearances, refusing even to be photographed (though once snapped unawares), he nevertheless played a decisive part in the transformation of the literary and philosophical landscape of France in the second half of the 20th century. He had no disciples, his readers were invited to act as if he did not exist, yet no writer can have devoted himself more selflessly to the simple intimacy of friendship, from which much of his influence stemmed.

Is there an authoritative list of canonically important people who aren't dead yet, so that I can get ahead of the curve for once?

[link via wood s lot]

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2003-02-28 10:48 (UTC)

Is there room in there for a little one?

From Aftonbladet's editorial today:

Tony Blair har, det �r alla �verens om, argumenterat v�l och f� ifr�gas�tter hans personliga �vertygelse. Fast den h�r g�ngen fungerar inte hans moralismer. Varf�r krig just nu, n�r vapeninspekt�rerna noterar vissa framg�ngar? Varf�r denna kritikl�sa allians med USA mot de ledande europeiska l�nderna? Blair och l�ngt mindre hans nerv�se utrikesminister Jack Straw har trov�rdiga svar. G�ng p� g�ng upprepade de att "Saddam inte avv�pnat p� tolv �r". Faktum �r att vapeninspekt�rerna under perioden fram till 1998 f�rst�rde mer av irakiska vapen �n vad USA:s bombkrig f�rm�dde under Gulfkriget.
[...]
Tony Blair v�djar g�ng p� g�ng efter solidaritet med Iraks folk och om moralisk r�ttr�dighet.

I en enk�t i Guardian ger matematikern Michael Atiyah honom det brittiska svaret: "Jag �r g�rna med om att hj�lpa irakierna men jag skulle f�redra att inte f�rst d�da dem."

[Tony Blair has, everyone agrees, argued well and few question his personal conviction. Though this time his moralising isn't working. Why war just now, when weapon inspectors note some successes? Why this beyond-criticism alliance with the USA against the leading European countries? Blair, and much less his nervous foreign minister Jack Straw, have believable answers. Time after time they repeated that "Saddam hasn't disarmed for twelve years". The fact is that weaponsinspectors in the period up to 1998 destroyed more of Iraq's weapons than the USA's bombing campaign in the Gulf War managed.

Tony Blair appeals time after time for solidarity with Iraq's people and on moral righteousness(?).

In a poll in the Guardian the mathematician [Sir] Michael Atiyah gave him the British answer: "I'm all for helping the Iraqi's but I should prefer not to kill them first. "]

Not only are their politics sound, but they gave the last word to a mathematician and everything, hip hip hoorah!

Aftonbladet on the net gets more hits than all its competitors put together, and it is the biggest selling newspaper in the Nordic countries (just ahead of Helsinki Sanomat, if you're wondering) and quite right, too.

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2003-02-27 13:58 (UTC)

"Chinese grammar is still in the process of being perfected."

Could someone let me know when they've finished, please? We von Bladets are very fastidious about our grammar, don'cha know.

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2003-02-27 11:08 (UTC)

All gone quiet

I've slept a lot for the last couple of nights, with the result that my mind is unusually clear. Unfortunately, that's "clear" as in uncontaminated with stuff rather than "clear" as in lucid.

I'm also still yawning.

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2003-02-26 15:30 (UTC)

Nynorsk Navigator (Not!)

So, Torill notes that Opera can do interfaces in Nynorsk, it being Norwegish in the first place anyway, and so I check and my ancient 5.1 doesn't, whereupon I go and get a new one, and then another new one because I need the qt libraries statically linked and I install it on my own personal swerver (called maelstrom, although that's not my fault) and tell it to install in /usr/local which is what I mount on my actual machine and fire it up and

the only language available in the Linux version 6.11 is English, so be warned.

No, I don't know any Nynorsk, why do you ask?

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2003-02-26 10:39 (UTC)

Is snowver yet.

Sn�kaos in Tel-Aviv? The mind boggles, but Aftonbladet has pictures.

Den stora motorv�gen ner till Tel Aviv var st�ngd, liksom skolor, universitet, aff�rer och myndigheter i Jerusalem och m�nga andra st�der. Det g�llde �ven palestinska st�der som Hebron och Ramallah.

[The big motorway down to Tel Aviv was shut, as were schools, Universities, shops, businesses and government offices in Jerusalem and many other cities. Palestinian cities such as Hebron and Ramallah were also affected.]

What next, sn�kaos in the Sahara? The world's gone mad, I tell you, quite mad.

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2003-02-26 10:04 (UTC)

Romanes eunt domum

[Monty Python with parallel Swedish translation? A��ee! All praise Shub-Internet!]

- And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land?
- Well, said Gabriel, it's partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change.
- And haven't you your own language to keep in touch with - Irish? asked Miss Ivors.
- Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.
"The Dead", James Joyce

When I hear the word "tradition" I reach for my laser pistol: I am not an avatar of my ancestors.

Europe can be a very depressing place sometimes.

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2003-02-25 13:26 (UTC)

New Horizons in Linguistics, John Lyons (Ed.), Pelican, 1970

The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again

1970, the year this book was published, was also the year of my birth. Whether or not you therefore consider it as a Festschrift in my honour probably depends on whether or not you happen to be me, but I could hardly ignore it. Long out of print, it is none the less a staple of charity shops and (at least in the UK) is not hard to come by, although you may find yourself paying more than the 10 shillings/50 new pence of the cover price (decimalisation was also introduced in 1970, and I defy you to prove it wasn't also in my honour).

Sadly, considering the circumstances, I don't like the book very much. Far too many of the chapters are devoted to speculative outlines of what a theory might, one day, look like. 1970 was a strange time in linguistics, anyway; the whole book is dominated by the shadow of Chomsky (c. 1965) and everyone feels obliged to be exhibiting opinions about deep structure. (The best is the psycholinguistic chapter which rather pointedly fails to find any evidence for its psychological reality.) There are generative semanticists (the first of many groups of heretics that the Chomskian programme would produce) lurking intermittently off-stage, but they never get a speaking role.

Pretty much the only article I really like is Halliday's one on the semantics/syntax interface, which actually discusses some linguistically interesting phenomena in English. In particular, sentences like:

1. The sergeant led the recruits
2. The sergeant marched the recruits
3. The sergeant trained the recruits.

The first works fine as a subject/object sentence, but the second doesn't - the recruits are doing the marching, and the third could go either way. He analyses this in terms of ergativity (for which I can't find a good summary) - in each sentence "the recruits" has the role of "affected" by the action, and "in general, the affected is the goal [ie, object - des] in a transitive and the actor [ie, subject] in an intransitive clause." Compare (also his examples) "The ball bounced" and "John bounced the ball".

Whether his analysis is definitive or not, this is a fun new thing I hadn't thought about. So, march, lads, march! All together now:

And when they were up they were up,
And when they were down they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

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2003-02-25 09:38 (UTC)

All human life is therein

Wherein? Inside entirely paralysed bodies, sometimes. There's an article in this week's (tree) New Scientist on the Thought Translation Device that enables communication for such patients as can master the voluntary control of brainwaves so that they can be picked up by scalp-mounted electrodes. And then, of course, there's the problem - familiar to any blogger - of what to say:

For one female patient they designed a project where she writes her biography and emails it to other patients and gets feedback from them. "Not a lot, once or twice a month, but that is so rewarding that she decided to continue living," he says. Beforehand she hadn't seen any point.

"Another male patient just likes to watch nude girls," he says. So they designed him an email programme whereby he can look at naked ladies as often as he likes. That, Birbaumer says, keeps him alive. [...]

The first question one young woman askes when she had learned to use the TTD was, "Why do I wear such an ugly shirt?"

Experiments with electrodes, drills, monkeys and motor cortexes have shown that considerably faster interfaces are possible, but Birbaumer's patients are having none of it:

"They say, 'well, I prefer sluggish, slow communication and no hole in my head,'" he says.

Bah! Igor, put the drill away while the journalists are here.

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2003-02-24 14:59 (UTC)

Spring alert

If anyone wants me, I'll be out gambolling. Friskily, yet, I shouldn't be surprised.

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2003-02-24 10:30

[BR] Learn Latin, Peter Jones

So, I wanted a language in which morphology is rich enough that word order is flexible, and I have what was once a Latin O-level rusting away in the wastelands of my mind. And I also had this book lying around in case it came in handy.

So I read it (yes, the whole thing - I am geek, hear me obsess!) over the weekend, and it's OK, if you can stand the tone. (It was originally serialised as a column in the very Conservative Telegraph, and I am very much not a natural Telegraph reader.) The first chapter announces:

You begin by learning one-sixth of all you need to know about the Latin verb.

Good, regular language, Latin.

Except when it isn't, but that's all good, too:

The fact is that there is no way of being certain what the stem of any 3rd decl. noun is. You just have to learn it. But we are Latinists. We like discipline and knowing things. No wishy-washy guesswork for us.

These are entirely typical samples, so don't say I didn't warn you. And, of course, it's grammar rich and vocabulary poor in the glorious tradition of paradigm-packed Latin courses. (I've seen a lot worse in that respect, mind.) It does work up to reading some bits of Catallus, the Bayeux tapestry, Carmina Burana and the Vulgate Bible, though, and at least the first of these is worth reading. It ends with a long (but discontinous) chunk of John chapters 19 and 20, and this is the only occasion on which answers are omitted in favour of instructions to consult your Bible, which is probably a whole lot easier to do if you actually have one, I shouldn't wonder.

Since I now know more Latin than at any time since the early '80's, it's tempting to do what I did with French and work up to a reasonable reading knowledge of the language. There are a great many languages I would rather know than Latin, of course, but with most of them it would be more than a weekend's work to be reading lumps of the literature so Latin it is.

Is there anything worth reading in Latin apart from Catallus? They made us read such a pile of toss when I was a kid you wouldn't believe it, and don't get me started on Virgil. (Yes, Russian has inflections and some serious literature, I know that, but I don't have a head start with Russian, so it would be a huge amount of work.)

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