Web Monitor
16:49 UK time, Thursday, 29 October 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: a diamond geezer, the Cult of the Somewhat Delayed and the linguist against languages.
• The recession is hitting everyone in different ways. Rapper :
"I buy diamonds on a very regular basis, but now I am selling my old stuff before I get something new. These are times when you learn about the value of money."
• the premium paid to get films and books as soon as they are released is unnecessary. He's suggesting the Cult of the Somewhat Delayed:
"It seems to me that the best way to instantly raise your standard of living is to live in the past. If you subsist entirely on two-year-old entertainment, and the corresponding two-year-old technology used to power it, you're cutting your fun budget in half, freeing up that money for more exciting expenditures like parking meters and postage... It is our fervent hope that all of you filthy unbelievers will respect our money-saving way of life, just as we respect your right to provide us with cheap entertainment. We just want to be left alone, and we hope you and the upcoming Clinton administration understand that."
• Why bother saving languages? Linguist John McWhorter was once assigned the task of teaching Native Americans their ancestral language. that the work that goes into learning a language is almost never worth the effort:
"Bookstore shelves groan under the weight of countless foreign-language self-teaching sets that are about as useful as the tonics and elixirs that passed as medicine a century ago and leave their students with anaemic vocabularies and paltry grammar that are of little use in real conversation.
Even with good instruction, it is fiendishly difficult to learn any new language well, at least after about the age of 15. Yet the going idea among linguists and anthropologists is that we must keep as many languages alive as possible, and that the death of each one is another step on a treadmill toward humankind's cultural oblivion. This accounted for the melancholy tone, for example, of the obituaries for the Eyak language of southern Alaska last year when its last speaker died.
... As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one? We must consider the question in its pure, logical essence, apart from particular associations with English and its history. Notice, for example, how the discomfort with the prospect in itself eases when you imagine the world's language being, say, Eyak."
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