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

Someone posted something in an offsite group which made me realise it was ages since I'd checked on the progress of some language research in which I'd previously been interested. As a result I found this site:

http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/dictionary/montgomery/s/s.htm

I chose that particular page for the link because of the wonky antenna/eye-stalk on T146 and the bad day which T57 seems to be having...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ._@o~ . . . . . . . . . _<@o¬

Does represent your current state better than T57 then?

This is me at the moment:

I hope that makes things clearer.

I don't think they have a glyph for all that at once!

Are these the kind of things you were looking at to find names for those kittens?

No - wrong language, wrong continent.

I have been interested in all sorts of languages for a long time and realised that now more and more stuff is on the internet I really ought to check on the progress of deciphering Mayan carvings. I've never made it to South America myself (though both I and my brother are interested). So I'm having to rely on other people to do the work.

The kittens are Siamese and their prospective owners decided that the closest appropriate language was Thai. My notes on Thai are unfortunately much more sketchy than for other languages and I don't even own a dictionary. It has been impossible to get an Icelandic dictionary outside of Iceland too, though I do have a simple book with a small vocabulary.

It's hard to be a foreign-travel archaeologist, anthropologist and linguist while being a hermit.

Thai. Oops. I'd forgotten.

I tried to get an Icelandic dictionary for a customer once. I suppose you must have seen it: it's the only one available in Britain. It's useless. We couldn't give the thing away.

Come to think of it, I don't recall you actually saying you live in Britain.

I find it hard to be a naturalist, explorer and journalist while not being disgustingly rich.

Might you ever visit South America?

"It's useless" - yes.

Apart from the people who say I'm on another planet, and not ruling out the possibility I might be from another planet, I live (in the most minimal sense of the word) in the UK.

I think some people manage to do those without being disgustingly rich - and possibly some hope to become disgustingly rich afterwards.

South America seems a bit scary most of the time - diseases and kidnappers featuring prominently.

I'd like to hack through jungles and scramble up mountains, but would require a heck of a lot of personal assistance. I couldn't even ride a llama at the moment. A chauffered helicopter would be ideal.

I have visited Jersey Zoo, mind you. That was an experience and a half! They even had aye-ayes there. Although, the cages were a lot more cage-like than I'd expected.

Kidnappers: not so prominent, surely, if one is careful? As for diseases, aren't most of them inoculatable? (I appreciate that travel is dangerous for you. I'm only speculating, here.)

I always wanted to travel by UFO - meaning my own personal protective bubble. I "designed" a few UFO's and bubble helicopters as a child. Later someone else really designed some helicopters that looked rather similar for better viewing. Although those ones have the advantage of existing and working, the rotor blades are a bit of a liability. A small UFO with anti-gravity and no bits sticking out would definitely be better. For going down inside temples I'd probably need a space suit though.

A space suit might not be such a bad idea, actually. And a SEF-protecting camper-van like the one in The Wild Thornberries (is that their name?). At least, until UFOs come down in price.

BTW, I found a gruesome book on Amazon today: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0600608581/ref=pd_sim_b_dp_2/202-5020089-7287859

They couldn't quite make it to the traditional 101 then.

I've heard that bat droppings are a good slug deterrent.

Going back to languages, you seem to favour the earlier ones over modern ones. Am I right?

I got myself a great little book on Egyptian Hieroglyphs, in order to decipher a friend's wallpaper. Sadly, she moved house before I'd got past a few basic cartouches. Still, I can write my name in them now.

I like ancient, modern, made-up and making them up myself. I like pictogram, syllable and letter types (again making up my own).

I'm not going to claim to be very good at very many of them though as it is only a relatively minor interest - enough to make me the family translator on holidays and occasionally useful at work.

I did the obvious ones at school - English French and German. I'd previously learned a small amount of Dutch, Spanish, Latin and Greek and more Italian for music. I researched Hebrew (ancient and modern), Arabic, some Indian ones, Chinese (again with some history), Japanese (had an informal tutor briefly), Egyptian, Russian (specifically to worry a tutor) and various others. The fake ones include Elvish and Klingon.

Languages interest me, too, and I invented my own as a child. Having had a rather cosmopolitan upbringing, I've picked up smatterings of a variety of languages, but I have real trouble actually using my knowledge in actual conversations with adults. I worry too much about my pronunciation and grammar.

I used to talk Quenya with a sweetheart I'd met in the roleplaying club at school. I also had a dyslexic long-distance love, who found it easier to type letters if they were in a Klingon font.

Greek and Latin don't half help me understand English better! In many ways, though, I wish we still spoke Anglo-Saxon. The grammar made a lot more sense, and poetry-writing would be a heck of a lot easier, because word-order was pretty irrelevant.

The one language I really can't be bothered with is Welsh. It's a beautiful language, but I'm fed up to the back teeth with the attitude of the Pro-Welsh lobby.

I was very pleased to have an etymological English dictionary as a child which gave all the derivations. My vocabulary for other languages (poor memory - at least by my own standards!) has always been more of an issue than grammar.

I prepared a pictorial crib sheet for my parents for China (simple things they might need). However, I surprised one of the local guides by correcting him on a translation - he had got the components of one Chinese word the wrong way round and agreed with me once I'd pointed it out. Despite my limited vocab quite a lot of it came up by coincidence. So I'm sure the guides thought I knew more than I did.

I went around with the locals a fair bit. We got on quite well, though in one place they initially mistook me for a Russian (probably the foreigners most often seen in that region). I deserted the rest of the English tour group quite a bit. They kept saying stupid and insulting things like not being able to spot the guides in a crowd because all the chinese people looked alike. The guides went back to base and got little flags with the travel company logo made up to wave overhead - the darlings.

The Welsh thing is all political. There never was a single Welsh language. There were scattered variations on other languages among the previous tribes. The deliberate lie of it all annoys one of my Welsh friends. The language as it is now was invented relatively recently as a largely political statement. Welsh people were forced to learn and speak it though.

We still are forced to learn and speak it. It gets crammed down our throats. It's virtually impossible to get a job here without some knowledge of it. And even now, nobody is agreed on which form of Welsh is the correct one. There's a North-South split of opinion, and books often get published in two different versions, to please everyone. It all gets tied up in racism against the English, of which there is a great deal here. There's still a lot of resentment about the fact that you invaded us a few thousand years ago. The Victorian English are also loathed, despite the fact that they're responsible for most of our culture. Here, they're remembered mainly for the Welsh Not, a wooden collar worn by Welsh schoolchildren caught speaking their own language. Now we have the English Not, though it's not recognised as such.

Oops. Gone off on one again!

I could learn to love my native language. The poetry forms are particularly elegant. But I don't like having things forced upon me.

Got to go now. I will return to expound upon Chinese tour guides another time.

Hi, SEF. Did you have a good Christmas? Mine was excellent.



Here's my promised exposition on your tour guides.

Many people have physical characteristics peculiar to their culture. The elements we focus on in order to recognise a face are likely to be culture-dependant because of this. I can't but imagine that there is a great difference between what, say, a French person would call a long nose and what a Chinese person would call a long nose. If someone has spent very little time with people of other cultures, of course they'll find it difficult at first to differentiate between their faces. Some have better pattern-recognition skills than others. I expect yours are better than most, considering your hobbies. For some people, it may be that a holiday comprises insufficient time for them to learn a new set of cues. The fact that those guides were good-humoured enough to get flags to wave about suggests that they understood this.



I've been wondering lately about the relationships between the different ways in which the brain manipulates information. Can I do a little experiment on you the next time we're both logged on at the same time? A couple of little thought exercises, it is; no electrodes or test tubes or anything.

"pattern-recognition skills"

That rather depends on what you mean. I'm actually rather bad at humans. I put it down to my skills being conscious rather than subconscious. Everyone else has subconsciously programmed pattern recognition over which they have very little control - what they regard as instinct because they don't comprehend what is taking place. So they are much better at their local cultural things that I am. I don't seem to do much of this subconscious stuff which means I don't have the "instincts" of an "expert" in anything but am much more adaptable in being able to almost immediately program myself to near expert level in anything. So to me the Chinese looked as different (or as similar!) as the Europeans did. That also goes for silly things the alleged experts on TV say, like: "all these lemurs look the same to you whereas a baby can tell them apart" - ie I'm more in the position of the baby.