Australia heads list of dying indigenous languages

Australia tops a new list of the world’s fasting dying languages, according to a report issued by National Geographic. The study identified five global hot spots where languages are vanishing and an area of northern Australia that includes NT and parts of Queensland and Western Australia is worst affected. The study found that all 231 spoken aboriginal tongues are considered endangered. These languages now rely on inter-generational exchanges to survive.

National Geographic met and interviewed the last remaining speakers of several aboriginal languages. These included the last three surviving speakers of Magati Ke (also called Marti Ke) in Wadeye, NT. Even more remarkably they discovered the last speaker of Amurdag (Amarag), which had been reported extinct 25 years ago. Charlie Mungulda could recall the language used by his father but had not used the language in nearly 50 years and remembered the words with difficulty.

But Australia is not the only trouble spot for language. The National Geographic study, known as Enduring Voices said that a language dies somewhere in the world every two weeks. It claims that by 2100, more than half of the planet’s 7,000 languages will disappear. With them will disappear a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and how the human brain works. Study co-director David Harrison of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania says the extinction rate of languages exceeds the extinction rate of species.

The study identified four other global hot spots for language extinction. They are central South America (Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia), eastern Siberia, the US and Canadian Pacific Northwest and Oklahoma. Bolivia alone has twice the language diversity of the nations of Europe combined. Oklahoma was established as Indian Territory in the early 1800s until land hungry settlers swallowed it up to create the state of Oklahoma in 1907. Descendants of more than 60 tribes make Oklahoma second only to California in Indian population.

According to the non-profit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages (who jointly sponsored the study with National Geographic) languages are abandoned when speakers think of them as socially inferior, backward, or economically stagnant. When these languages die, they take a vast repository of human knowledge with them. The current rapid decline of approximately one every two weeks appears to be unprecedented in human history.

The study found that the 83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world's population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world's people. The English language threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous languages of the Northwest Pacific plateau of North America, a region including British Columbia, Oregon and Washington. Only one person remains who can speak Siletz Dee-ni, the last of many languages once spoken on a reservation in Oregon. Meanwhile in Eastern Siberia, government policies have forced speakers of minority languages to use Russian.

Many languages have no written form, meaning that they are lost forever when their last speaker dies. Fellow co-director of the Enduring Voices project and director of Living Tongues, Gregory Anderson said languages usually trickle out of existence rather than abruptly disappearing. Harrison and Anderson have travelled the world to interview the last speakers of certain languages. "We'll start with a basic 100- or 200-word list. And then we'll go over each word with them again to make sure that we're transcribing it correctly, and try to repeat it to them," said Anderson. "And usually they'll burst out laughing at that point because we have hideously mispronounced it ... or make some word that sounds obscene to them. ... I did that in Australia, I'm afraid."

worthless words

Messing about with thesaurus and dictionary.

Lets start with some definitions.
Herpetology – thought this was just snakes but it is the study of reptiles and amphibians
Ophiology – this one is purely about snakes from the Greek “ophis” serpent.
Conchology – Not the study of shells as the name might suggest but instead gives us the lure of molluscs.
Malacology – Just like conchology, this is the study of molluscs. Not sure if there is a boundary between the conchologists and the malacologists.
Mycology – is this the study of me, the fungi? Everything you wanted to know about mushrooms. From Greek ‘myc’ fungus.
Gallinaceous – related to the study of domestic fowl.
Ophidian – the snaky one, ask the ophiologist.
Salientine – of frogs and toads, batrachian, anuran, aquiline, passerine
Vermicular – wormy, like vermicelli – the little worm.
Cervine is dearly deer-like.
Gallimawfry – a hodge-podge or a US hash dish made from leftovers.
Galligaskies – are 16th century hose or breeches (a metathetic variation on gregesque from Italian ‘all greghesa’ in the Greek manner.
Unlike the Irish Gallowglass (‘gall’ foreigner and ‘oglach’ volunteer).
Metathesis, by the way is a transposition of letters, syllables and sounds in a word. Cupid Stunts.
Polo is a Balti (Kashmiri) word. From the fierce Pathans (patented obviously, are there any other kind of Pathans?). A pollywog is a tadpole. A poltroon is a coward from the Italian ‘poltro’ lazy. Craven A. Panda is Nepalese but Pandanus is Malay. Pandemonium is Milton’s capital of Hell. Pon Demon Lum. Zeus gave Pandora a box containing all humanity’s ills.

Partridge (pardix Gr.) is a gallinaceous gamebird. Parturient is in labour, passerine is an order of perching birds. More than half of all birds are in this category (qv Pale Fire). Latin ‘passerinus’ of a sparrow. Sparrowgrass is colloquial asparagus. The sparrow itself is pugnacious, a weaverbird, a finch, a pest. An Icelandic “sporr”.

A spat is a quarrel is an old spit is a gaiter is an oyster-spawn. A gaiter is a covering for ankle and instep worn over the shoe. Good-King-Henry is an erect perennial herb. A veronica is the “face of Christ” or a speedwell (sundarium) or a matador’s pass swinging the cape in front of the bull while immobile.

Sodarium is a handkerchief unlike a sudatorium which is a hot-air bath of inducing sweating. Turdine pertains to thrushes not shit though a ‘turd strangler’ is a plumber. A psalterium is the omasum or manyplies (because the folds of the omasum are likened to the leaves of a book). The omasum is the third stomach of a ruminant hidden between the reticulum and the abomasum (the fourth or true stomach).

The psalter is a book containing psalms for liturgical or devotional use. Maraschino is a cherry liqueur with almond flavour from 'marasca' an Italian word for the European cherry tree. Sodom was an ancient Dead Sea city destroyed by fire from heaven because of its inhabitants’ wickedness.

Ganymede is a Jovian moon (the largest moon in the solar system), and is also a young waiter or a young male homosexual – a catamite. Ganymede himself was a Trojan youth carried off by Zeus to be his lover and ‘cupbearer’. Crossruff is a bridge play in which each hand of the partnership trumps a different suit.

A cumshaw is a tip in Chinese ports. Cupboard love is inspired by considerations of material gain. The curate’s egg is good in parts. Erysipelas is an infectious disease of the mucous membranes. Erubescent is blushing. Ohmigod. Yahweh, Elohim, Tetragrammaton. Krishna. Deva. Bel Marduk. Red Tezcatlipoca. Quetzalcoatl. Huitzilopochtli.

Theriomorphic means having the form of beasts. Gentlemen can be Hidalgos (low) and Caballeros (high). Callithempians have vague religious belief. Boyars are Prussian gentry and Junkers are Russian aristocracy. Gossypol is a pigment of cottonseed oil and an experiment in male contraception.

Walpurgisnacht (Mayday eve night of German witches and the feastday of St Walpurga) is missing between walnut (foreign nut) and walrus (the horse whale). Buffleheads are ducks, duxes are leaders. Keel is a fatal disease of domestic ducks as well as a quantity of coal or a ship’s supporting beam or a ship itself or a ridge or a red ochre used to mark sheep.

Jays, joints, currawongs and cuckoo-shrikes, white-winged cloughs, corvine (crow-like) cinnabar (mercuric sulphide). Dingo ate my Babylon. The cordon bleu is a sky blue ribbon worn as a badge by the highest order French Bourbon knights, somehow transferred to cookery. Dubbo is stupid, just ask Patrick White in ‘Riders in the Chariot’. Splice the mainbrace means to issue a tot of rum to a ships crew or to invite an assembly to have a drink of quodlibet (‘what pleases’).

What pleases for a complex problem which arises in the study of philosophy or theology, or that of harridans, hags and harpies?

Bellybutton

Omphalos is the Greek word for navel.

According to the ancient Greeks, Zeus sent out two eagles to fly across the world to meet at its center, the "navel" of the world. Omphalos stones to denote this point were erected in several areas surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, the most famous of those was at the oracle in Delphi.

The omphalos hypothesis was named after the title of an 1857 book, Omphalos by Philip Henry Gosse. In this book Gosse argued that in order for the world to be "functional", God must have created the Earth with mountains, canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with hair, fingernails and navels, and that therefore no evidence we can see of the presumed age of the earth and universe can be taken as reliable.

The idea has seen some revival in the twentieth century by some modern creationists, who have extended the argument to light that appears to originate in far-off stars and galaxies, although many other creationists reject this explanation and also cantankerously believe that Adam and Eve had no navels.

Bertrand Russell, influenced by Gosse, discussed the ramifications of such a theory in his 1921 work, The Analysis of Mind, stating:

"There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that 'remembered' a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago."

Jorge Luis Borges, in his 1940 work, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, describes a fictional world in which some essentially follow as a religious belief a philosophy much like Russell's discussion on the logical extreme of Gosse's theory:

"One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present memory."

Last Thursdayism (sometimes Last Tuesdayism or Last Wednesdayism) is a whimsical version of omphalism. It is the idea that the world was created last Thursday, but with the appearance of age: people's memories, history books, fossils, light already on the way from distant stars, and so forth.

This parody has been taken further, with claims that the Universe was created Last Thursday by Queen Maeve the housecat, who would destroy the world Next Thursday, keeping a Heaven of sorts for those who were nice to cats and damning evildoers to the Hell of the the never-cleaned Eternal Litterbox.

Such navel gazing is probably no more illogical a belief than the complex modelling required to show that the Big Bang created time and space. Though admittedly, we are still eagerly awaiting the mathematical proofs for omphalism and its derivatives.

Shambles

Was watching Liverpool lose badly to Benfica the other night.

Liverpool’s performance was described correctly by the match commentator as ‘shambolic’. I suddenly needed to find out the etymology of this word. It means, as I expected, ‘completely disorganised, chaotic (cf the interaction of the headless chooks that comprised the Liverpool forward line) and, cutting to the chase, ‘it is irregularly formed from shambles', a 20th century concoction.

Among shambles' meanings I then found out, are a place where animals are slaughtered (or any place of execution) and also as a British dialect word meaning a row of covered stalls where goods (meat, originally) are bought and sold. Such as the street known as The Shambles (pictured) in York, England.

Shambles is a venerable old word dating back to the 14th century. The shambles was the table used by vendors and earlier Old English ‘sceamal’ was a stool from the Latin ‘scamullum’ which meant a small bench.

Here was a word with a rich tradition from the workplace. It went from a bench to a table to a market place to an execution site to a mess to bad tactics. It all adds up. To ‘shamble’ means to walk awkwardly comes from the same root, in this case the shamble legs of the table most closely resembled the gait of the unsteady meat vendors.

Or Liverpool strikers.

nowt as queer as Polk

Arthur Scargill’s father, according to Arthur Scargill, according to the Sunday Times, according to the Penguin Writers manual, according to Woolly Days, read the dictionary every day in order to learn a new word.

This is excellent advice.

More good advice from the manual is to immediately put the word to use.

So here goes, let’s take a dip into the dictionary.

Casually landing on the 'po' page, a po-faced Woolly Days discovers that a powan, for example, is a freshwater whitefish (Coreogonus Clupeoides) which lives in Scottish lakes.

A fish of the same name is a type of vendace which are also whitefish. Powan is a Scottish variation on the word ‘pollen’ which is the whitefish that live in Northern Irish lakes.

Pollen comes from the Old Irish word ‘poll’ which means lake. Having nothing to do with whitefish is the word ‘pollard’ which is an animal such sheep or deer which have had their horns or antlers removed.

Pollard comes from the Old German word for ‘head’. A Bombay duck, as I found out in a trivia contest last night, is also a fish, a lizard fish found in the Arabian Sea and is often served as an accompaniment to Indian curries so our preferred answer ‘food dish’ was actually correct in a secondary sense.

Working backwards from the various pollwords, the dictionary states that James Polk was the 11th US president serving between 1845 and 1849 (the year of his death).

Texas and California were added to the union during his watch as was territory now included in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon.

Polk was what was called a Jacksonian Democrat, he was house leader under Andrew Jackson and speaker during the Van Buren administration. He defeated Henry Clay in a close election in 1844. During his regime he settled an Oregon border dispute with Britain, he fought the Mexican War and restored the Independent Treasury System. His poor health prevented him from running for a second term and he died shortly after retirement.

There was no time for him to enter an old Polk's home. Sorry about that.

I’m ok, you’re okay

The metamorphosis of o.k. is one of the success stories of international language.

This flexible little word is a "sentence substitute", to give it its correct grammatical title.

It is an American creation of the 19th century. It quickly and easily became accepted in international English and thence to almost every other spoken language in the world.

C’est ok, n’est-ce pas? Its etymology is shrouded in legend.

Theories range from nicknames or someone’s initials, an adaptation of a non-English place name (eg ‘aux cayes’) or from the initials of a jokey alteration (o)ll (k)orrect.

It is that last most banal of explanations that find most favour with scholars with a hint of one the former explanations to bolster it. The story goes that in the early 1800s, young university students in Harvard and Yale took to writing ‘oll korrect’ and ‘oll wright’ as a long running, if not particularly funny, joke.

The sayings became contracted to their initials and although ‘ow’ never really took off, "ok’ quickly gathered pace. It was helped considerably by Martin Van Buren’s unsuccessful presidential campaign of 1840. Van Buren’s nickname was ‘Old Knickerbockers’ conveniently shortened to "ok". It first made its way into print in March 1839 in the Boston Morning Post.

The phrase has never looked back since. It is a simple but clearly versatile word and can mean agreeable (is everything ok?), satisfactory (an ok outcome), somewhere between mediocre and satisfactory (it wasn't great but it was ok), in working order (does the pen work ok?), correct (your answer is ok), safe (he was in a car crash but is ok), healthy (how are you? I'm ok).

No wonder so many other languages have appropriated it. Are you ok with that?

Okie-dokie.

Ought
Why can’t we buy from ourselves
Those leaves and loaves
That left us free from responsibility
And uncertain agility
Uncommon dying,
practice the part
Expert de-liars
Cannon conundrum
Nigger on a promise or a problem
Narcissus by the rye and slang
Equal spelled out by Warsaw
Worship sought out by sexagent sinners
One in ten, none of aught.
Burning man we thought we’d never lose
Cosmos surge and commons urge
Daily champion of the hours bread
Craft work machine of fashion
Cruelly exposed and ashen
12 hours a bed and batten
Thems finest hours of deepest day
That slip away and never know
The light that let them go
Scribbling cripple
Cripped and cribbed
Leg and limbed
Heart and hibbed
On the castle road
Scan the navy yard
Back from a russia once belong
Svengali tiger terror
loosened from the oblong glare of space
And muck into the mouey of themselm disease
Count severe is sev ten overboard
Bubbly in water with polished man and truth
Left to lug the lifts and tows
Under the scissors where nobody mows
Elephant grise eminence
Fulcrum at Asia Minor
Istanbul recapitalises international islam
The new sofia with the old silver
Walking the plank of two cultures
Where the sign in the park scaffolds scarfing
A hemispheric haimes
corruption of sculpture
The new driving force of Europe will again emerge
From Granada’s electric shadow
opal skin conmen in constant tin Opels
days of saladins lampooned
conquest buried deep in the hatchet is the anger of gold
and fondness for survival is in the cauldron of dreams
Where mosquitoes bites are bestest boar, it seems
Leninist fundamental gods with a fondness for margarita
Listening to yoyo’s balalaika
Whirling nerdishly
Undeniannihilating chilli
And fivetimes silly
fixing the clock to their new jerusalem
In Saudi greed unpleasant land between us
Handpainted funky ecru medinas
Worth rial dollars in hard currency
five to the petrokelly
A sound gone wonky in cliumphing ember.
Say it with numbers
Polygraphic obsolenity
Register with regularity
Sandwiched between two wipes of a hum
Fed to the hungry hoards
And left to lie in substance what the universe will
mostly vanish in atro
Specialist vatican sellers
Squelletin board by slithered assassins
Mama look who sat in the watching
Endangered by dwindling influence
Potato safari, good timing two-suited
Benobo balbriggan
Crushed by iterramus the camp follower
Re-invent and vested in the harness of luck
Was blinded by a refusal to care about the what
Both died a death for each dread nought
anguish in uberbeenshire
Borne on the firth of July,
With the sausage packed and exported
In practice unsacred
God is on the lam
Feeding the need with buckets of speed
Curling home bruise and hookers with hookahs
None of them lookers
Ferra terra ignoramus
Fella Let me tell ya.
When they found out they were not lame anymore
They rose and blew the house down with the compression and anger
And achieved local prominence with hardened features
Creeping up with the endowed jones
Well-rounded in danish temptations
Sharing the accommodation
Pulverised the plural community
With pesticidal mortars
Proanzac prosaic trouser-pressed powders
Shirty spots unter den linen
Hurt bacchanalien
Dirt-drifted oars in coalsigns spit
Siroccosure sockamamy
Curds slip by in belted ovals
Tesselated, noise abated firkin gas
Gormen guilden guns aghast and rosen
Measly medal count is mynah business
Clock crocodile obey the ten metre penalty rules
And the limit that everybody fools
Is crushed by tidal time, twice a day and packing
With the daemon of Athens, and the glory of Rome
Act the part of the hand of the father of
The Viking Vietcong and the brilliant Korea
Musha where have ya been, mussabejayen
mothballed in closet follicle
where you re-invent yourself in fluent boorjwa
tired of fighting
and looking for places placid
pills pious and paid for
uppers and sundowners
damaged goods and secret services
bonnie and clytemnestra
hail and hollow and schucked to the west
making mercies out of small kindnesses,
lava louche, prairie dogma
fed by rate-prayers in the veldt.
Lizard is the rodent of the pastor
And commit the terrible offence of existing before the powers
Of Christ can save you.
O multiple value jam
Sliced innbox of spam
Ingrate fell short of housed holes
Rather than defied lack of gravity
And the parfumerie was a poolhall short of a creamery
Freedom to the words
Gathering ghosts and fingergarden posts
With a release form graduation
Peckaninny sepulchre pillowplayers
Discuss stevedore highways that pillory the sea
Chandlers raise sun kind of havoc
Aeroflot jetsam with bobbing lifebelt
Squeak squoke squawking
Riffing rogers kinghit cowpersons
Mount misery milo tower of power
Self seeking silo high barrel of hey
Crane signals crashsite ahead
Avoided by a lure-a-poopin
Daffodil deadlies are darkest driffids
Weeping wallow wycliffe jeremiad
In janus we trust
Maxiomatic
If trust we must
Suddenly Vega or bust
Sun criminal inflation
Dwelt in mindsucccoured muscles
by loveboot persuasion is echoed
Rhyming eye for detail
Salome Streetsmart
Smiles here.
As it curled out of the shadows
And slid under the door
It seemed defused
snot abused
the influenza
end o' story

The Gauntlet

Versatile yokes, them gauntlet things.

They can be thrown down or run. Though a closer study of the dictionary tells me that they are entirely different words.

The first meaning of gauntlet (or gantlet) is a medieval armoured leather glove – handy to be wearing one (or two) of them late at night in the city. It is also a heavy glove with a long cuff. This is the gauntlet that can be thrown down and, naturally enough, picked up again. A challenge issued and accepted. It comes from the Old French ‘gantelet’ now the modern French ‘les gantes’ (gloves) which is in fact of Germanic origin.

The second gauntlet is a type of punishment where the victim is forced to run between two rows of men (and the perpetrators were always men) who strike at him (and the victim is always male) when he passes. Military types are fond of this type of ritual sadism. That is why it is run, it must bloody well hurt. By inference the phrase spread to mean the suffering of the slings and arrows of any sort of ordeal or even criticism.

The original word was ‘gantlope’ (a section of railway where two tracks overlap). The gantlope contracted to gantlet and the modern spelling fell under the influence of other steel glove-like meaning of gauntlet. The gantlope, by the way, comes from the Swedish ‘gatlopp’ – the passageway. Thus do words merge and elide.

The first version, French and Romantic, is dramatic and showy with idealistic portents of honour. It is also symbolistic and potentially deadly (if the challenge is answered and the gauntlet is picked up.)

The second version German and Teutonic, is immediate and ritualistic and also highly painful. Yet far less consequential perhaps is the railway version to the silk gloved. The Teutons cause harm but it could be an initiation rite which once done means you are accepted into the fold. The French version is an incitement to hatred which could lead all the way to the graveyard. The sting and power of words is paramount. Achtung, s'il vous plait!

A to Abalone

CED QED
My Collins English Dictionary is old and cranky: some 1791 pages, a 1992 vintage, weather beaten and shorn of its cover from a decade and more of constant use. Page 1 takes me from A to Abalone. I think of this as I read The Meaning of Everything the story of the 68 year making of the original Oxford English Dictionary, the last part of which was published in 1928. Simon Winchester’s tale entertainingly talks about the major contributors James Murray, Henry Bradley, Chevenix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, Frederick Furnivell and others. They all contributed to this colossal encyclopaedic compendium of the history of the English language. In my own slimline CED page 1 we see several ‘a’s (roads, musical notes, area, chemical mass numbers & blood types among others) onto the ‘aa’ which is a Hawaiian volcanic rock. The aardvark and aardwolf are wonderfully present as they were in the OED despite the wolfish howls of protest from editors who thought the words weren’t English. The abacus traces back to the Hebrew word for dust (‘abhaj’) and unto dust it will surely return. We have cities in Switzerland, Denmark and Iran (Aarau, Aarhus and Abidan), we have bibles and devils (Aaron and Abaddon) and the abalone is also called an ear shell and is an 19th century word of unknown American Spanish origin.



Fair Game
Why are crystal balls so dirty?
They get so little business
in their shabby tents
there’s no future in it
there’s no furniture in it
in this land of magical ikeas

Happy Zamenhof day

Portreto de la majstro Ludovic Lazarus...

The telegraph and telephone have made of the world a whispering gallery. Or as they say in Esperanto "Telegrafio kaj telefonio kreis el la mondo flustrogalerion".

Today Dec 15 is Zamenhof Day so named for the birthday of L.L.Zamenhof, (1859-1917) the founder of the Esperanto language. Zamenhofa Taga to you. Zamenhof was born of Jewish stock in Bialystok in the Russian Empire (now in Poland). His native languages were Russian and Yiddish, but he also spoke Polish and German fluently. Later he learned French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and English, and he also had an interest in Italian, Spanish and Lithuanian. Interestingly, he is considered a god by the Oomoto religion. A Japanese Shinto-offshoot religion devoted to all things Esperanto, apparently.

Zamenhof made attempts to create an international language with a grammar that was very rich, but also very complex. He decided that the international language must have a relatively simple grammar with a wide use of suffixes to make new forms of the words. Esperanto was the result. Linguists describe it as "a language lexically predominantly romanic, morphologically intensively agglutinative and to a certain degree isolating in character". It has the five vowels of Spanish and Swahili and 23 consonants. There are approximately two million speakers worldwide of which one thousand are native Esperanto speakers.

The most famous living native speaker is probably George Soros, the American financier. Soros's father is Esperanto writer Tivador Soros. And the word Soros (to which the Jewish family changed its name in 1936) is the future tense of the verb 'to soar' in Esperanto. The family was in Hungary after the war and George Soros escaped to the west by participating in an Esperanto Youth Congress.

Viva Zamenhof!

Mathamusician
why was I completely beaten by the rhythm
one sentence split out 13 times in this prism?
I was suspicious of this faker’s dozen
I could not stop my head from buzzing
I counted them out of their draughty shelves
but my numeric music was a staccato of twelves
how had I one less beat
with which to make ends meet?
as my brain tumbled full of rocks
I pondered on this little paradox
I died of pleasure and went straight to heaven
as I counted 2 notes for the syllables of eleven