[BRIEF NOTE] What Wikipedia has to say on Minitel

Recently, I was reading up on France's Minitel videotext network (official site, English-language Wikipedia, French-language wikipedia). Launched on a mass ascale on the early 1980s, the Minitel videotex network with its dumb terminals and smart servers with on to become so successful (if unexpectedly so) as to count as a great marketing success, surviving if diminished to this day despite the Internet's technical superiority. The Minitel is one of those great what-ifs about global telecommunications, the network that might well have repalced the World Wide Web if only France had been able to find markets for its technological export. Thinking along these lines, I was more than usually taken aback when I came across this in the English-language Wikipedia page on Minitel.

In 1994, a journalist looking for Pauline Réage, the author of the Story of O, found that she was commonly known as Dominique Aury, the name under which she worked as an editor at a major publishing house, Gallimard, and had published several "respectable" books. Aury was not in the white pages, but she was listed in the Minitel directory. The journalist called her and learned that she had found the right Dominique Aury. "Dominique Aury" is also a pseudonym as her real name is Anne Desclos.

Oh, ever agglutinative Wikipedia. What won't you come up with?

[LINK] "From Francafrique to Eurafrique with Sarkozy: Not Much of a Difference?"

I'm normally skeptical of the motivations of Turkish sources critical of France ever since Franco-Turkish relations broke down after France's recognition of the Armenian genocide earlier this decade, but Caglar Dolek's quite readable "From Francafrique to Eurafrique with Sarkozy: Not Much of a Difference?", published in the Journal of Turkish Weekly, does make good points about Sarkozy's Mediterranean Union plan. Dolek argues that, via the European Union, France is trying to move on from the nominally and cronyishpost-colonial web of ecionomic, political and military contacts known as "Francafrique" by bringing in the entire European Union into a much closer relationship the entire African continent, not only the Francophone countries.

After reading Nicholas Shaxson's Poisoned Wells, I'm quite willing to agree with Dolek that French motivations are far from pure and that this would add quite a few negatives, like substantial corruption and seret networks of powerful people, to the broader European political arena.. I also think that the realization of something like this plan is inevitable, if only because of the potential economic synergy between the two shores of the Mediterranean. At least the North African states like Morocco and Tunisia that have a passing chance of joining the European Union have a chance at avoiding the worst of this arrangement.

[REVIEW] La bataille des langues

The monthly Le Monde diplomatique (official website, English edition) is one of the first publications that I discovered online. Although it took me some time to discover that its decidedly left-wing and occasionally French/Euro-nationalist leanings could certainly bias its coverage, it still offers quite a few interesting articles for the critical reader.

Most recently, I was pleased to happen across the latest edition of Le monde diplomatique's Manière de voir bimonthly, La bataille des languges (The battle of languages). It's a very interesting collection of essays taken from the last two decades of the monthly, covering everything from the dominance of the English language to the intertwining of language identity with collective and individual identity, from proposed policies aimed at encouraging multilingualism in European society to language revival movements in Catalonia, Malta, and Québec. La batailles de langues is definitely

The one lacuna that interested me, and might be taken as diagnostic of Le monde diplomatique's approach, is that save in the sections relating to various linguistic normalization trends ((in the Arab world, in Paraguay with Guarani, and in the specific movements discussed above) and in some of the maps, it was only the situations of the major world languages that were talked about. English is spreading as a second language worldwide, not nearly so much as a mother tongue; major languages like French, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese with their hundreds of millions of speakers scattered around the world aren't seriously under threat, never mind Chinese or Hindi or Japanese. For that matter, while multilingualism is relatively expensive for smaller language groups, like the seven million Francophones in North America or the fewer than one million mother-tongue speakers of Estonian, these costs can be quite manageable with across the board state support. La bataille des langues manages to overlook almost entirely the large majority of world languages, almost all of which lack adequate state support (most First Nations languages in Canada, most Australian Aborigine languages, all of the regional languages of France), and which are on the verge of perishing. The bigger and more supported languages will survive, there's no serious question about that, but Mi'kMaq, Nenets, Yanomami and Jarawa seem to be all but doomed, and yet, thiis bimonthly doesn't touch on all these impending language deaths. That is an interesting lacuna.