h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>> Myself...I speak Esperanto like a native. <<


When I saw the word 'esperance' as part of an advertising phrase on the French part of the packaging of some consumer product this morning I suddenly realised I had no idea what it or Esperanto meant. I had to look it all up.

Apparently Esperanto comes from the psuedonym of its authour who called himself Doctor Esperanto or Doctor Hope but it has nothing to do with the Hopi indians or any other native or aboriginal group.

And esperance can mean more than just hope or aspiration. It can simply mean 'expectation'. So Dickens' "Great Expectations" would be 'Gros Esperanti' or some such...

~jwf~

PS:
And Tobin Esperance is the bass player for Papa Roach.

~jwf~

Myles of the little horses, Myles na Gopaleen, aka Flann O'Brien, or Brian O Nuallain. http://www.omnium.com/flann.html

One of the great writers in modern Irish (haven't got round to reading An Béal Bocht -- The Poor Mouth -- yet, but it's on the list).

I read The Poor Mouth in English, but it was written in Irish and probably loses in translation. If you ever suffered the Irish Educational System and had to read books such as an t-Oileánach or Peig, you will understand The Poor Mouth. I have a copy of it in Irish, but my Irish is not up to reading it.

Are you on for a Béal Bocht reading club of two?

I really don't think my command of Irish is up to it. My edition is written in a strange font, with roman letters except for the letters f and t. It uses dots over the letters for aspiration rather than a h after, and the t and d are special versions with no ascenders so that they will take the dots easily. I find this confusing as I grew up with the h's.

Ah, that's the difference between us. I grew up after the long s's and r's had been dropped, but still with the buailte and the half-uncial script.

Never fear! An Béal Bocht was reissued by Mercier Press last year and retails at a mere €8.88! I'll buy it, try it, and pass it on to you when I'm finished (promise).

My copy of 'The Complete Myles' is, of course, mainly in English...except for the odd curiosity of columns in Irish and Latin (One of the latter ends 'And fetch us two sharp knives to cut the foam off the porter!).

Flann O'Brien, it seems to me, provided clear evidence of the wide availability of psychedelic drugs in Ireland.

A German friend of mine is both a keen cyclist (upright, I'm afraid) and a fan (obsessive, rather) of electronica such as Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk (also cyclists) expounded the unification of humans and machines. I've pointed him towards the passage in 'The Third Policemen' about the exchange of molecules between bicycles and riders. 'I know many a man who has become mostly bicycle, and many a bicycle that exhibits human characteristics.'

(All of which is somewhat off-topic)

Ed,

Getting back to you about last Friday's question: comparing two languages to see if one's significantly harder than the other. From a neutral point of view, eg that of a Swahili speaker. Since Interlingua's made up, I've added Spanish

Interlingua - 25 different sounds, nearly all common in many languages; syllable complexity better than average, coordination easy; minimal inflectional morphology, simple derivational morphology, no gender; simple writing system which is completely phonetic.

Chinese - 33 sounds, some highly unusual, several being hard to distinguish; syllable complexity very low - coordination would be simple *but* it's a tonal language, so that's hard too; minimal inflectional morphology, little derivational morphology (officially none but that's bobbins), many genders (the functional equivalent thereof, that is - measure words); insaaaane writing system with cryptic orthography (there's Pinyin too: completely phonetic but deceptive).

Spanish - 33 sounds, quite easily distinguishable (c/z and d can cause problems); syllable complexity low, coordination not too hard; moderately hard but well codified inflectional morphology (tengo, tienes etc) that gets more complicated above intermediate level, averagely complex derivational morphology, two genders (about 95% predictable); simple writing system with near-foolproof orthography.

Hope that's enough to answer your question

Could you rate English on the same criteria for comparison?

Now why didn't I think of that

English - 43 different sounds, some rather unusual (eg th, dh, ir) - 20 vowels is a very high number: many are hard for learners to distinguish; syllable complexity quite high (on average) making coordination medium hard; little inflectional morphology, messy and therefore complicated derivational morphology, no gender; simple writing system with complex, unreliable orthography.

Did you know that children's brains have up to 50% more cells in them, to cope with learning language? Once the child reaches about 5 these cells die off, which explains why it is so difficult for adults to learn languages.

I read something similar once, about children's brains generating more alpha waves up to the age of 7 or so. Which is probably the other side of the same coin.

Hmm. Chopsticks are harder to manage than forks. But do the Chinese starve?

I nearly did when I lived there! That's what you get for having the lack of foresight to be a vegetarian in a carnivore's paradise

You can't compare the mild inconvenience of chopsticks with having to learn 3,000+ characters though. As there's no other way to do it, the Chinese are taught to learn characters by rote. Which means for example, according to a friend of mine, three months of writing 'yi' (one), a single horizontal stroke. From my experience of teaching Chinese students, this impinges on their entire way of thinking - they can't think outside the box.

>> ...they can't think outside the box. <<

But they make the most intriguing box puzzles that are near impossible to get inside. And secret drawers too.

~jwf~

On language learning:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1654996,00.html

Comments welcome on the writers opinions of Chinese.

Sharp observations nevertheless.

Like it.

>>As there's no other way to do it, the Chinese are taught to learn characters by rote. Which means for example, according to a friend of mine, three months of writing 'yi' (one), a single horizontal stroke. From my experience of teaching Chinese students, this impinges on their entire way of thinking - they can't think outside the box.

There's maybe a touch of neo-Whorffianism here. The hypothesis seems to be:
Difficult language -> Rigid teaching system -> Rigid thinking style.

However, I'd posit an alternative hypothesis:
Rigid social system -> Rigid teaching system.
That fits what we know about Chinese history and sociology, doesn't it?

But to explore it a bit further, can we think of some further comparisons between a culture's thinking style, social structure and language?

I suppose that Britain is commonly thought of as a creative and inventive society. Our main language is gloriously flexible, turning nouns into adjactives and verbs willy-nilly (although this inventiveness is at its peak in US English)and our orthography is so complex that we can't even agree on how to teach it. On the other hand, we have the reputation of being a hierarchical society, with at least an illusion of orderliness. We are also, of course, one of the most sexually repressed cultures on the planet.

Now German - a well ordered language with a straightforward, regular orthography. The three genders are confusing and have to be learnt by rote. But all this is consistent with the stereotypical Teutonic desire for ordered conformity. Plus, my observation is that Germans are good at compartmentalising: 'Now we are at work, so we will be humourless'; 'Now we are relaxing, so we can be a bit silly'; 'Now we are swimming and sunbathing in the nude, but there's nothing sexual about our nudity'; 'Now we are having sex and are far less inhibited than the British' (trust me ). But what creativity or inventiveness have they ever shown? Apart from Goethe and Schiller and most of the great composers of the 19thC and the Bessemer process and aniline dies and the internal combustion engine....

Italian society is quite the opposite. Their style of government amounts to scarcely organised anarchy. They're certainly an artistic and cultured nation. And their sexual insatiability is notorious. Their language? On the one hand it's pretty regular - and writing Italian poetry must be a doddle since everything rhymes - but on the other hand, in Italian society and literature, all of their many dialects seem to have equal weight. Even these days, literature seems to be written less in 'Italian', more in Friulian, Lombardian, Tuscan, etc. etc.

So...in short, I'm damned if I can see a clear pattern emerging here. I'm also wondering how a society whose creativity was so constrained by their language could have come up with paper, gunpowder, compasses, pasta, etc. etc. when Europeans were still running around in woad.

Any other comparisons between languages and grossly over-simplified stereotypical views of national cultures?

Now, the Finns...obviously a creative nation, what with all those elves tinkering away in Santa's workshop...