Links for Later 8-21-17

1. It's eclipse day.
2. When your son becomes a Buddhist monk in Thailand.
3. Get yourself a pair of elf ears. Maybe a whole-elf makeover. Why not?
4. The joys of Classics with the Perseus site.

Michel Thomas On Resisting The Lure Of Surrender

Michel Thomas, the language teacher, was in his teens when he escaped the Nazis and joined first the French Resistance and then the US Army. In this interview with the BBC, he describes seeing people being loaded onto cattle cars to be taken away to concentration camps. He also describes that he felt at one point when he had been sentenced to death, as if Nature had reached out to embrace him and calm him in preparation for death, and that only by resisting that welcoming embrace was he able to survive.



Previously: Michel Thomas, The Language Master, a documentary about Thomas's teaching methods.

All Verbs

 from Wikipedia's copula article:

In Siouan languages like Lakota, in principle almost all words — according to their structure — are verbs. So not only (transitive, intransitive and so-called 'stative') verbs but even nouns often behave like verbs and do not need to have copulas.
For example, the word wičháša refers to a man, and the verb "to-be-a-man" is expressed as wimáčhaša/winíčhaša/wičháša (I am/you are/he is a man). Yet there also is a copula héčha (to be a ...) that in most cases is used: wičháša hemáčha/heníčha/héčha (I am/you are/he is a man).
In order to express the statement "I am a doctor of profession," one has to say pezuta wičháša hemáčha. But, in order to express that that person is THE doctor (say, that had been phoned to help), one must use another copula iyé (to be the one): pežúta wičháša (kiŋ) miyé yeló (medicine-man DEF ART I-am-the-one MALE ASSERT).
In order to refer to space (e.g., Robert is in the house), various verbs are used, e.g., yaŋkÁ (lit.: to sit) for humans, or háŋ/hé (to stand upright) for inanimate objects of a certain shape. "Robert is in the house" could be translated as Robert thimáhel yaŋké (yeló), whereas "there's one restaurant next to the gas station" translates as "owótethipi wígli-oínažiŋ kiŋ hél isákhib waŋ hé".

Lakota also has men's and women's spoken language versions. What a delightful language.

Everything is delightful about Joshua Foer's profile of John Quijada, who invented a "precise" and "concise" language called Ithkuil. The language attracts the attention of some very strange Russians and a Ukranian right-wing terrorist, who initially think Foer is a spy from the Pentagon. The language is quite complex, requiring a very long time to formulate sentences, even for Quijada, making it challenging for daily use.

In the original version of Ithkuil, the word Ithkuil literally means “hypothetical representation of a language,” which reflects the fact that it was never meant to be casually spoken. It was an attempt to demonstrate what language could be, not what it should be. “The idea of Ithkuil is to convey deeper levels of human cognition than are usually conveyed in human language,” Quijada told me. For example, the phrase “characteristic of a single component among the synergistic amalgamation of things” is a single adjective: oicaštik’.

If that word looks as though it required extreme acts of tonsillar gymnastics to produce, it is because no sound or syllable is wasted in Ithkuil. Every language has its own phonemic inventory, or library of sounds, from which a speaker can string together words. Consonant-poor Hawaiian has just thirteen phonemes. English has around forty-two, depending on dialect. In order to pack as much meaning as possible into each word, Ithkuil has fifty-eight phonemes. The original version of the language included a repertoire of grunts, wheezes, and hacks that are borrowed from some of the world’s most obscure tongues. One particular hard-to-make clicklike sound, a voiceless uvular ejective affricate, has been found in only a few other languages, including the Caucasian language Ubykh, whose last native speaker died in 1992.

Links for Later

1. The death of ROE
2. Sculptures made from bicycle chains
3. The 147 interconnected companies that run the economy
4. Nenets, a pair of rare Uralic languages with ten or more grammatical moods, the only word of which (other than "Nenets") to be adopted in English is the word "parka"