[PHOTO] Some Pinks

Some Pinks
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I snapped this picture of what I think is one of the several hundred varieties of pinks on my way home one night, against a background of red cedar chips.

[LINK] Some Friday links

• Centauri Dreams speculates about the implications for SETI if most civilizations don't experience breakneck growth indefinitely but instead collapse, and highlights the discovery of a planet orbiting a star in the Andromeda Galaxy. (Yes, "!" to that second item.)


• Crooked Timber's John Quiggin argues that the growing prominence of pro-piracy groups, in Europe and elsewhere, might trigger new clashes over the topic of strong intellectual property rights.


• Over at Demography Matters, Aslak examines the demographics behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with fertility rates and migration rates and their implications and all.


• Edward Lucas examines some of the main differences between Western and Soviet views of the Second World War.


• Itching in Eestimaa examines Lithuania from the standpoint of an Estonian traveller.


• Language Hat links to a report in Le monde diplomatique on the strength of the reading public of the Malayalam language, spoken in Kerala.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money links to an argument suggesting that perhaps North Korea doesn't have all of Seoul within easy range of its artillery.


• At the Pagan Prattle, feorag links to a surprising number of religious-themed crochet projects.


• Noel Maurer points out that members of American ethnic minority groups who excel need not have assimilated.


• Strange Maps reproduces a Salazar-era map showing that Portugal was not a small country in the European context by superimposing its empire over a map of the European continent.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the growing discontent of Crimean Tatars with a Ukrainian government that hasn't been of much help in restoring their property rights and giving them secure tenure.

[LINK] "Latvia’s crisis: the Swedish factor"

At Open Democracy, Mats Engström writes about Sweden's heavy involvement in Latvia's economy, rooted in long-standing historical factors.

In a recent walk through Stockholm's Old Town, I noticed a window-display where a copper-engraved map from 1635 showed a Baltic region where Swedish possessions stretched all along the coastline. One of them is Livonia, a territory now divided between Latvia and Estonia, which spent decades (1629-1721) under the Swedish crown.

Indeed, Sweden has been a strong regional power in the Baltic Sea area for centuries. During the 17th century, it was military power that allowed kings and queens in Stockholm to rule Riga and other cities on the sea's eastern shore. Swedish power in the region passed to Russia after the battle of Poltava in 1709, but now - after its three states regained independence after the fall of the Soviet Union, then joined the European Union in 2004 - Sweden is back.

In global terms, Sweden does not qualify even to be part of the Group of Twenty (G20); but regionally, it exerts a large economic influence. Swedish banks dominate the financial markets of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - and exposed these countries' vulnerability as the financial crisis accelerated throughout 2008. In Latvia, for example, these banks' excessive and irresponsible lending fuelled unsustainable private consumption and property prices. Now, the economy is in freefall.

The problem with this heavy engagement, Engström argues, is that Sweden concentrated excessively on intergovernment and business links, neglecting Latvian civil society and so missing out on signs that perhaps all wasn't well.

[LINK] "Which languages for Europe?"

Daniele Archibugi's recent Open Democracy article "Which language for Europe?" tackles the question of how the European Parliament--and by implication, wider Europe--is to coalesce if it's becoming unmanageably multilingual.

More than half of Europe's citizens did not vote in the elections for the European Parliament, but the institution faces more challenges than those of credibility. One of the great challeges faced by the Parliament is the number of languages it uses: after the admission of Bulgaria and Romania these now total 23, practically one per European state. Etymologically, the word Parliament derives from a word actually meaning "speaking", but if the members of Parliament speak 23 different languages, what kind of Parliament can this be?

The European Parliament is not the only one to use several languages: the Belgian parliament, for instance, has two and the Swiss use four. However the MPs of these individual countries are able to understand one another without the need for interpreters. (Despite its tremendous linguistic diversity, India's parliament has only two official procedural languages - English and Hindi. If they feel unable to address the assembly in either of the two languages, members are allowed to speak in any of the country's nearly two dozen languages, with translation provided.) This is not so in the European Parliament: the work of the Assembly and the Committees entail the MPs being assisted by a team of interpreters. The possible language combinations have increased with the growing number of languages. You need a calculator to work out how many they are - 23*22 - a total of 506! This requires the help of 403 full time interpreters and several thousand external collaborators so that Euro MPs can speak and listen in their own language.

It is no easy task, even for the European Parliament, to find translators from Finnish to Greek, or from Portuguese to Bulgarian. However, Eurocracy is ingenious, and to reduce costs it uses double translation: those who speak less widely known languages are first translated into the principal languages (English, French or German) and then retranslated into all the other less common languages. One wonders how much the substance of the MPs speeches is altered by the second or third translation.

English's emergence as the continent's lingua franca (yes, irony) is probably the only solution; English's only European competitors, German and French, are regional languages, at best rating second or third behind English. The formal adoption of English does entail significant risks, granted.

Will English become the single official language of the European Parliament, defeating its many diplomatic resisters? After all, English is already the most popular second language in the world as well as in Europe (see Eurobarometer, Europeans and their Languages, February 2006). But it is one thing to use English in business, tourism and education, and quite another to grant a special political privilege to the language of one of the 27 member countries. To ask the Euro MPs to speak a foreign language would enormously restrict the number of those eligible for election. There would be a risk of creating an assembly of technocrats that is distant from the people's needs. And certainly it does not help that English is also the language of an EU member state with a large density of euro-skeptics and which has not adopted the European currency.

But the march of English as lingua franca is difficult to stop. Even in the Swiss Parliament it is increasingly common to hear MPs of the French and German cantons communicating in English.

Archibugi suggests that having English be a mandatory subject in European schools might be the best way to bring an English-using Europe closer to ordinary people.

[REVIEW] Andrew Robinson, Lost Languages

Some times ago, james_nicoll asked what got people interested in steampunk ("Pretty pretty brassworks?" he asked "An English boot, stamping on the face of humanity forever?"). For me, as I've written in the past, my interest in steampunk-type scenarios comes mainly from my interest in the unexpected congruencies between past and present informational environments, in the possibility that the world could have been more information-dense, that there would have been more left of the world for us, if only things went differently. The ultimate insofar as this sort of thing is what Wikipedia calls undeciphered writing systems, the dozens of different scripts--alphabetic, pictographic, and otherwise--used by peoples far back in the past which contain information of some sort that's unknown to us. These scripts could contain almost anything, from the powerful epic of Gilgamesh revealed once Sumerian cuneiform was deciphered to the mundane palace records found to be encoded in Mycenean Greece's Linear B once it was decrypted in the early 1950s. We just don't know. The recent controversy over whether or not the Indus script associated with the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization actually was a script--Asia Times and Language Hat have each covered the new squabbles emerging over a this claim--

That's why I'm so impressed by Andrew Robinson's Lost Languages (McGraw-Hill 2002). A pleasantly thick tome that thoroughly examines efforts to decipher different scripts. Lost Languages's examinations follow a fairly consistent pattern, presenting a script in its historical context, identifying possible links with other scripts and language, then going on to identify leading figures in the decipherment efforts and their particular theories. Robinson starts by examining three recently deciphered scripts--the Linear B script used to encode pre-Homeric Greek and the hieroglyphic scripts of the Mayans and Egyptians--to give his readers an idea as to the processes involved, in the process introducing us to the necessarily and brilliantly iconoclastic thinking of the people ultimately responsible for breaking the codes (Linear B's Michael Ventris , Mayan script's Yuri Knorozov, the Egyptian hieroglyphs' Jean-François Champollion). Once the reader has been sufficiently briefed, Robinson plunges into the unknown scripts. They're a wonderfully mixed bunch. Some, like Linear A, have areas of overlap with other scripts but describe mysterious languages; some, like the Indus Valley and proto-Elamite scripts, describe languages that are at best known only speculatively spoken in civilizations long extinct; some, like the rongorongo of Easter Island, represent languages still spoken but lack anyone who could read them. Some scripts might well not be scripts at all, in place of representing living languages serving instead as stamp iconography or as accounting notations. Some, like the spectacularly enigmatic Phaistos Disc, are simply impossible to decipher. Yes, Robinson does point out repeatedly that undeciphered scripts regularly attract all manner of crackpots: Hindu nationalists who claim that the Indus script gave rise to the alphabets of the Mediterranean; New Age writers who say that the Phaistos Disc contains information on interplanetary navigation; and so on. The crackpots are almost as entertaining as the competent scholars.

Superlatively thoroughness is always good, but more importantly Lost Languages was a pleasure to read, Robinson's writing wonderfully muscular writing style existing alongside the well-formatted illustrative graphics which place Lost Languages firmly in the realm of popular literature. The great virtue of Robinson's book is that it takes a relatively obscure subject and popularizes it, making it a readable and enjoyable book for the masses who aren't well-versed in this field while not sacrificing its intellectual rigour. Lost Languages is a book that deserves to be widely read by anyone interested in how previous civilizations stored their information in the distant past and how researchers today are trying to recover that information which remains stubbornly encrypted.