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2003-05-02 17:59
No, but I've long been interested in
Portuguese, is it not? And this is a long weekend, and shaping up to
be a miserably wet one, so I should have time to learn Italian
and Portuguese, and finish off La pens�e sauvage and
get back up to speed with the Swedish (I got lent an Expressen colour
supplement edition of Henning "Hilarity" Mankell's jolly romp Den
Femte Kvinna, which I'm not especially anxious to read, having
little taste for such over-nuanced comedies of manners, but I can't
afford the loss of face that would result from returning it unread so
I suppose I'll just have to plough through it regardless) and cure
AIDS and cancer and stuff.
Or I could just go out and get drunk.
Whatever I do, though, I won't be back till Tuesday. Vi ses!
[Permalink]
2003-05-02 10:38
I'm just a bit ambivalent about Dansk Se
og H�r's coverage of prinsessan Madeleine.
I can't help feeling
that if God had wanted me to endorse this kind of relentless hounding
of prinsessor, however photogenic, by papparazzi he would have made
me German.
I think I'm going to have to convene the Desbladet Ethics Subcommittee
to make a ruling on future policy in such matters. (Whether or not
I'll be scouring all the retail outlets in town for the scurrilousest
of German sladdebladets this weekend is of course no concern of theirs, any more
than it is of yours. Just so that we're clear.)
[Permalink]
2003-05-02 09:53 (UTC+1)
The interesting new rule from yesterday's Syntax Extravaganza was to
use "som" directly after a question-word serving as the subject of a
subordinate clause; "Hon ville vet vad som hade h�nt." ("She
wanted to know what had happened.") As the gloss shows, nothing like
that happens in English, which makes it feel all impressively Grand
and Foreign to use it correctly.
A good proportion of my classmates claim to find "grammar" (i.e.,
syntax, but don't tell them I said so) difficult, and this is
reflected in their usage so it isn't just the terminology. Truly,
there are more kinds of person in the world than the kind of which I
am an example, and I really ought to make an effort to stop believing
that they're just pretending not to get it. (At the moment I try not
to show that I secretly think they're just pretending - I may be short
on empathy, but I do have some manners.)
In other news, Sweden is to hold a purely r�dgivande (advisory, which
I think I was told is the only kind they have)
folkomr�stning (referendum) on membership of the Euro ("euron",
pronounced like "evron") in September, and the hardy perennial of
Norway joining the EU is
back on
the agenda. If Sweden joined the Euro, it would certainly be a
substantial boost for its bid to host my foreseeable future -
I certainly want to adopt the Euro as my currency of choice
and yes it does matter.
In Italy, by the way, the standard transaction protocol holds that a
random price having been announced, the customer should then dig
through all available coinage in the hope of making a round(er) figure
of change. In the UK it's common to be asked "Have you got the 5p?"
if, say, a total comes to UKP 5.05, but in Italy they are just totally
about the "Have you got the 77 cents?" if it comes to EUR 2.77 which
certainly means you need to parse the spoken form of the number system
on the fly rather than just hold out a note, and you sure get down
with coinage in short order and this has been your cultural
observation for the day, thank you and we hope to see you again soon.
[Permalink]
2003-05-01 14:50 (UTC)
A sad
day; perhaps all the sadder for those who, unlike me, knew there
was such a thing in the first place.
The reason given by the Marknadsdomstolen court is that Wasa's round
crackerbread is not produced in the Dalarna region, home to the Mora
town.
The name, the court insisted, could give consumers the wrong
impression about the crackers' origins - despite Wasa's insistence
that this is a well-known brand name, not a regional accent which
hints at the crackers' origins.
Holy Indigenous Excellences, but I love this stuff (even if I don't
love the BBC's spelling of "smoergasbord"):
The legal battle over the Mora brand echoes similar European cases
fought over the rights to use the Parma ham, Champagne or Cheddar
Cheese brands.
There have definitely also been attempts (by "Belgians", if memory
serves) to have UK "chocolate" more accurately branded as "brown
stuff" (to say nothing of the Great British "sausage", which is widely
regarded as the correct amount), but those aren't place names.
Bring on the landmark "Yorkshire pudding" judgement, I say!
[Permalink]
2003-05-01 14:21 (UTC+1)
One of my favourite things in Norway, apart from the Areas of
Outstanding Natural Fjordage and all that, was the
zebra
crossing signs, but we were never formally introduced.
Until
now. Well, Goddag, herr G�rman! Spookily, Sweden has a different
incarnation of herr G�rman, and the above-linked seems to hinge on a
debate about which of them is to be preferred, as the tide of
tolerance turns against the mysterious hatted man.
(In famously progressive and liberal Norway the legal right of Persons
Of Gender to cross roads by means of ambulatory locomotion has been
enshrined in the constitution since as long ago as 1973, but the
shamefully sexist sign has not kept pace.)
The long Spring evenings must be just flying past up there at the
North Pole, is it not?
[Permalink]
2003-05-01 11:45 (UTC+1)
It may be the first of May in calendar time, but back here in Blighty
holidays have the good manners to wait for the nearest Monday, so I'll
be skiving then rather than now. So much so, that it's the first
Swedish class after Easter tonight even if I can't find the folder
with all my stuff in it.
At least I'm done with the Paper From Hell, now. (I rewrote it pretty
much from scratch, and I had to bricolage up something resembling a
coherent narrative from a collection of apparently almost random
observations along the way.)
Finally, then, I can get on with some actual programming, and wonder
why a travel itinerary that sketches a UK-Utah-Philadelphia-UK
triangle appears to be destined to spend so much time in "Chicago",
which is none of those places, the last time I checked. (I still
secretly suspect that "Chicago", like "Canada" and "Belgium", is one
of those places that They just want you to think exist, curse
Them.)
[Permalink]
2003-04-30 13:49 (UTC+1)
(It's a girl, but not, of course, a prinsess.) Read
all about it.
I think a toast is in order, nonetheless. Huzzah!
[Permalink]
2003-04-30 08:51 (UTC+1)
Ever wanted to see a bunch of students getting all Bourbaki about the
group theoretical implications of Les structures �l�mentaires de
la parent�? If you have - and I know I have! -
it's
your lucky day.
They've done a pretty good job, considering the internal evidence that
they didn't know a whole lot of group theory when they started. I
read it last night (I know! Such a glamourous life!) and I was
wondering how to clean up the presentation, but it's not obvious. The
stumbling block is that you want to consider a group of permutations,
but some of the constraints are stated in terms of properties of the
permutations themselves, which breaks the abstraction barrier that
elements of groups are opaque.
Much more annoying than that, though, is that everything else I can
find on the relationship between structuralism and mathematics is a
bunch of humanitiesists sitting around Having Opinions. Sigh.
[Permalink]
2003-04-29 15:53 (UTC+1)
As you know, I'm not going to France, I'm going to Utah. This is
Deeply Wrong in astonishingly many ways, not the least of which is
having to disappoint Marie-Therese Smith, spokesperson for The French
Government Tourist Office in London, who says:
"Of course the British are welcome, French people can't imagine it any
differently," she emphasised.
"We have nothing against British or American people - French people
don't understand what the problem is."
The problem is I have to go to Utah, Marie-Terese, otherwise I'd have
my place long booked. You're not making this any easier!
[Permalink]
2003-04-29 13:54 (UTC+1)
Yes. We had "electrical testing" on my new and exciting floor of the
building (I have a view! Sort of.) this morning, which I thought
would be a barely perceptible non-interruptive thing that would be
well past over if I trolleyed in at half nine (that's half past
nine, for any Scandewegians in the readership).
No. It was an all morning infestation of persons who probably weren't
really all called Bert because that would be both confusing and
silly. And I had neither light nor power, so I just sat and read
La pens�e sauvage because I am a computer programmer by trade,
and when computer programmers are exiled from the world of electricity
they do not indulge in "design" (whatever that is), although they might
say they do if they are pretending to be Mission Focussed, they read a
nice pretentious book like the serious European intellectuals manqu�s
they are deep down, and wonder whether persons of the appropriate sex
would find them (even more, ahem) irrestible with a Luc Ferry
hairstyle and whether in these troubled times it would be wise to go
to a hairdresser and say "Make me look like a French Minister for
Education" even if you were armed with a picture, because hairdressers
(at least round here) are notorious for there Althusserian sympathies
and take an especially dim view of an ethic of individual
responsibility rooted in neo-Kantianism and hairdressers are
dangerous people to offend, even I know that much.
But I'm back now, even if I am behind (work) schedule again.
[Permalink]
2003-04-28 12:33 (UTC+1)
Occasionally I worry that there is a certain lack of synergy between
the frivolous prinsessor gossip and the eXtreme pRententiosity which
goes on here - so here's a double post to suit either taste.
Part the 1st: Scholarly/Pretentious
A Guardian
review of
a book on S�ren Kierkegaard's influence on America
(roughly, a bunch of people eventually read Sartre and went on to have
exactly no significant impact on anything):
University students of my era, the late 1960s, would not be caught in
a caf� without a copy of Walter Kaufmann's anthology, Existentialism:
From Dostoevsky to Sartre. We all wrestled with our own finitude,
tried to accept the tragic limitations presented to us by this thing
called "life", and were aware that we must act in order to define
ourselves. We must also confront evil head-on. The problem was, as
Sartre noted in 1950, "evil is not an American concept".
Part the 2nd: Prinsessor
Yes. Now we've got rid of the pretentious persons, you can choose
between a headscarfed Kronprinsessan Vickan protesting for the
right of French Muslim women to wear headscarves in school visiting
a Russian church (Aftonbladet), a VG version which
puts more of an emphasis on the vodka "tasting", and an Expressen account
of her li'l sister, the irrepressible Madeleine, strutting her royal
stuff in exclusive Spanish nightspots till all hours of the morning.
Spanish hours of the day do not map easily onto those of Northerner
Europe, though, and anyway. (The firm of Google & Bots, Ltd. has
brought me a great many visitors today, though, apparently wishing to read
about this "story", and we are nothing if not eager to please at the
'bladet, oh yes.)
[Permalink]
2003-04-28 09:55 (UTC+1)
Language
Hat is doing linguistic relativism, and has pointers on to others
in this round of discussion thereof. And I've just recently read
Jakobson's essay on Boas's view of grammar, which makes some remarks
which I wish to publically consider relevant. First, the quote from
Boas. (The article was written in English, but I only have the French
translation of Jakobson's Essais de linguistique g�n�rale, and
I'm supplying my own back-translations as a concession for the hard of
Frenching.)
Quand nous disons: The man killed the bull, nous entendons
qu'un homme unique et d�fini a tu�, dans le pass�, un tareau unique et
d�fini. Il ne nous est pas possible d'exprimer cette exp�rience de
telle mani�re qu'un doubte subsiste sur le fait qu'il s'agit d'une
personne d�finie ou de plusiers personnes (ou taureux), du pr�sent ou
du pass�. Nous avons � choisir parmi les aspects, et l'un ou l'autre
doit �tre choisi.
[When we say "The man killed the bull", we understand that a unique
and definite man has killed, in the past, a unique and definite bull.
It is not possible for us to express this is event in such a way that
doubt remains whether it concerns one definite person or several
persons (or bulls), or the present or the past. We must choose
between these options, and one or the other must be chosen.]
Now, my weak form of the Linguistic Irrelevance principle holds that a
locutor having in mind an event (of humanly-agented bovicide, for
example) and the intention to locute thereof to zero or more locutees
will be able to make all such choices as the language of
locution requires.
Now imagine the utterance in the auditor. The auditor cannot avoid
knowing the things that were explicitly required to have been included
in the utterance, but is at liberty to infer, guess, ask (albeit
without guarantee of answer) or not care about the things that didn't
have to be and weren't included in the utterance, noting that things
can of course be included in the utterance lexically that were not
grammatically required, as Jakobson also remarks:
[L]a vrai diff�rence entre les langues ne r�side pas dans ce qu'elles
peuvent ou ne peuvent pas exprimer, mais dans ce que les locuteurs
doivent ou ne doivent pas exprimer.
[T]he real difference between languages lies not in what they can or
can't express but in what speakers must or need not express.
(You will counter that we can certainly ersatz up a he or she, for
example, where we want or need to be uninformative, but this is a kind
of conspicuous and explicit uninformativeness which is quite different
from simply not having to say.)
Now imagine the utterance in the hands of a translator. Things that
have to be said in the target language but could be (and were) omitted
in the source language have to be filled in, and some of the things
that were filled will draw to much attention if added lexically and
must be omitted (but which?!), and such parts of the utterance that
deliberately exploit omissions in the framework of the source language
(there are, for example, languages that simply don't allow English
weaseling of the "Mistakes were made." kind and would insist on
"Someone made mistakes." which begs the question in a rather
unfortunate way) will have to be filled in. But the Linguistic
Irrelevance principle holds that a translator with timely access to
the original locutor can, if the latter is willing, find out the
things left unexpressed in the original language but required for the
target language. This is a much weaker hypothesis than "Mentalese" -
I don't want to postulate anything at all about how information is
stored in the mind, I just need the banal observation that it is, and
the equal mundane fact that people can answer questions about an
event.
Now, there's also all the gubbins of connotations, where (British)
English "bull" includes a sense of "Stroppy picnic wrecker", French
"taureau" includes a sense of "tartare on the hoof, yum yum" and
Spanish (whatever) includes a sense of "mortal, but probably doomed,
enemy of toreador", and the puns and the sense of play and the sound
symbolism and the poetry - which play more of a part in everyday
discourse than is always recognised - and things can get seriously out
of hand.
Poets are particularly keen to stress the connotational and
sound-nuanced differences between languages, but that's because the
deep voodoo of such things is their bread and butter - in the next
essay in the volume, on linguistics and poetics, Jakobson quotes with
approval Val�ry's remark definition of poetry as "a prolonged
hesitation between sound and meaning". Telling a poet that languages
are pretty much interchangeable for most purposes is like telling a
lover that his belov�d is a woman like any other (mutatis mutandis ad
libertum with the genders, of course) - you can reasonably expect
vigorous dissent, but you are equally reasonably entitled to roll your
eyes.
Probably the most depressing thing about post-Jakobsonian linguistics
is the shallowness of its philosophical foundations. Chomsky's
version of Descartes looks very much like a caricature adapted to
annoy behaviourists as much as possible, and Lakoff's rejection of
Cartesian dualism looks even more like an act of Oedipal spite towards
Chomsky (although I am far more sympathetic to his Merleau-Pontyism -
I love Descartes, but Chomsky's version is pretty weird). Certainly,
it makes no sense at all to discuss the relationship of language to
culture without talking to anthropologists (American Linguistics is
traditionally a subfield of anthropology, and Boas and Sapir did
substantial field work).
So, I'm back on the L�vi-Strauss (La pens�e sauvage, again) and
then I'm going to go on to Ricoeur to get my phenomenology all
hermeneuticised up, and then I might have something more to say
about this stuff. In the meantime, why not read Alex Golub, a genuine
anthropologist, what has lived with proper savages and everything, who
is already all hermeneutical and that. (Plus, he's funnier than
Pinker, too.)
(No Whorfs were abused in the making of this post, for
once.)
[Permalink]
2003-04-25 12:39 (UTC)
The Norwegian royal family has finally lost its
rag and sued a German gossip rag over its treatment of the lovely
Kronprinsess Mette-Marit. (They seem to have invented an abortion,
presumably to explain the absence of any babies from the pregnancies
they are in the habit of inventing, which is substantially more
ingenious than it is endearing.)
Today's sequel may or
may not add content to this, but it has a good picture.
I have a post with actual content to write, but I have a deadline
today also, so it'll have to wait. In the meantime, I would like to
boldly and unrepentently remind any passing Norwegish lawyers that my
coverage of the media's coverage of Mette-Marit has always taken her
side, has made no outrageous claims of it's own, and that besides that
I'm not rich enough to be worth suing...
(Oh, and douze lunes is
blogging up a storm on English and French media, so you should go read
that if you want content. I guarantee to be tiresomely pretentious
and verbose next week, if you can hold out till then.
Oh, and did you know that that Famous Belgian Audrey Hepburn made her
screen debut in Le N�erlandais en sept le�ons? They ought to
dust that thing off, they're be a stampede to learn Dutch, at least if
everyone was me. [Via Point de Vue, which is very educational, so
there.] UPDATE: Maus found a video clip, hoorah!)
[Permalink]
2003-04-24 15:18
Passing by Aftonbladet, they had an
article by John Pilger
ranting (in
a good way) about the war:
Om, som Milan Kundera skrev, "m�nniskans kamp mot makten �r minnets
kamp mot gl�mskan", d� f�r vi inte gl�mma. Vi f�r inte gl�mma Bushs
och Blairs l�gner om massf�rst�relsevapen vilka, som Hans Blix nu
s�ger, byggde p� "fabricerade bevis"
And although I couldn't remember exactly who Pilger was I figured he
probably didn't write it in Swedish, so I looked around and found that
the original (now in the Independent's pay archive but available here) had
been differently localised:
If, as Milan Kundera wrote, "the struggle of people against power is
the struggle of memory against forgetting", then we must not
forget. We must not forget Blair's lies about weapons of mass
destruction which, as Hans Blix now says, were based on "fabricated
evidence". We must not forget his callous attempts to deny that an
American missile killed 62 people in a Baghdad market. And we must not
forget the reason for the bloodbath. Last September, in announcing its
National Security Strategy, Bush served notice that America intended
to dominate the world by force. Iraq was indeed the "test case". The
rest was a charade.
(They both then move onto the charming novelty of the Free World's
"Nuke first, think later (if there is a later)" strategy.)
Incidentally, Milan Kundera, the celebrated originally-Czech writer
who now holds French citizenship, has written exclusively
in French since 1995.
[Permalink]
2003-04-24 10:12 (UTC+1)
Out of print for ages,
The
Unix-Hater's Handbook is now online at last (big pdf file), hoorah!
The original Unix remains a classic of elegant design, but NFS and
X-windows [sic] are pig's ears of kludgy drek, and don't be telling me
that they aren't "really" part of the Unix experience of today. Both
receive here the kicking they so richly deserve. Some brilliant
technical writing, too:
Thus, when the manifestation of the divine spirit, binmail, attempts
to create a mailbox on a remote server on a monotheistic Unix, it will
be able to invoke the divine change-owner command so as to make it
profane enough for you to touch it without spontaneously combusting
and having your eternal soul damned to hell. On a polytheistic Unix,
the divine binmail isn't divine so your mail file gets created by
"nobody" and when binmail invokes the divine change-owwner command, it
is returned an error code which it forgets to check, knowing that it
is, in fact, infallible.
[Ian Horswill on interactions between NFS and binmail (p. 291)]
Hail to thee, blithe binmail!
[Permalink]
2003-04-23 13:02 (UTC+1)
Is it actually heresy, or still just treason, to oppose FDRUSAian
foreign policy? It's remarkable just how many devout drinkers of the
Sacred Kool-Aid of Truth and Justice(TM) there do seem to be on
Usenet, for example, but the British people (sigh) seem to have
swallowed more than their fair share of it, too. ("Our boys" won
something! It's almost as good as football!)
Meanwhile, here's some top-quality deadpan comedy from
the BBC
news site:
Since the war the [FDR]US[A] has deployed its own teams to look for banned
weapons, which it cited as the key reason for launching war, but so
far there are no reports of any being found.
Not only that, but when in Italy I saw Americans brazenly insisting on
ordering cappuccinos in the afternoon. Clearly, the
metropolitan fringe of decadent reprobates, rootless cosmopolitans and
moral degenerates (hoorah!) that I have mostly encountered cannot be
considered to be representative of the FDRUSA as a whole.
The next stop on my travel itinerary, hilariously, is Utah. Are there
a lot of rootless cosmopolitans in Utah, would you happen to know?
[Topic via that rootlessest of cosmopolitans, Anna K, of course.]
[Permalink]
2003-04-23 10:47 (UTC+1)
Time and motion
I'm in the middle of an office move, and nothing is working at the moment. Later...
2003-04-22 15:34
via
blogalization, an electronic edition of Mr Proust's massively magnificent
monsterpiece, �
la recherche du temps perdu, with the full Moncrieff and only some
of the French original, but three volumes should keep you off the
streets for a while I would have thought.
(Full disclosure: I haven't yet read Proust in any language - I'm
waiting for the proverbial rainy decade.)
[Permalink]
2003-04-22 10:23 (UTC+1)
I did the whole Easter memeage thing last year.
I will remark only that the University is once again taking an extra
day off, and that I am once again not.
While I was away, a second-hand bookshop caught me unawares by opening
on Easter Sunday (is this really legal?) and not letting me leave
without becoming the proud new owner of
A Fortnight in Venice by Gordon Cooper from 1958, when it was
still helpful to recommend persons to "make personal application for a
passport to any local office of the Ministry of Labour and National
Service."
I almost wish I were still young and arrogant enough to pursue funding
for an academic study of old travel guides - there's no shortage of
things to be learned - and I still quiver with delighted anticipation
at the thought of one day finding the French or German equivalent of
Mr Cooper's sensitivity and tact:
Try, however, to avoid the months of July and August, when the
probable heat and the dense groups make sightseeing a rather tiring
business. Many of these groups, by the way, are German, and they
often are noisy and jarring.
No context is provided for the following baffling advice:
A final tip for men: Have your hair cut before leaving home.
In fact, I have not had my hair cut for a year or so - who knows how
much more rewarding my brief stay might have been had I but known this
tip?
[Permalink]
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