General notes:
My current ranking is:
General notes:
My current ranking is:
General notes:
My current ranking is:
Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog calls for a celebration of ancient languages. I’m not sufficiently confident in the pronunciation of languages that are in any case no longer spoken to follow suggestions involving putting up videos, but I can certainly write about some of what I learned from Orrin Robinson’s book Old English and Its Closest Relatives.
( Germanic languages )Spell It Out: The Singular Story Of English Spelling, David Crystal, ISBN 978 1 84668 567 5
The bulk of this book (and for me most of the interest) is an account of how English spelling got the way it is today. Although superficially a mess, a lot of the steps from the (relatively) straightforward Anglo-Saxon conventions to the present made a reasonable amount of sense in the contexts in which they were made - but the composition of those steps yields a rather complex system, and the context has changed a lot.
For example, the C16th introduction of a silent b into debt wouldn’t have been particularly confusing in an age when many literate people knew Latin, but today most users of the language aren’t likely to have any idea why the word has such a bizarre spelling.
The historical chapters are divided up by quotes from various authors touching on spelling one way or another. The end of the book discusses how detailed knowledge of the history of spelling might be used to improve its teaching.
There aren’t any citations for the specific statements about the develop of English spelling, but there is a “further reading” section.
Well worth a look if you’re at all interested in the subject.
(A bit sketchy in places but if I don’t post it now I suspect I never will...)
( Books )Currently reading: very near the end of John Davies’ A History Of Wales, which I’m reasonably sure I bought in the shop attached to one of Wales’s numerous C13th castles. The author evidently loves his subject but easily avoids romanticising it. Voluminous, detailed and comprehensive.
Currently reading: Peter Mandelson’s autobiography, The Third Man. Thus far most interesting for its insight into 1980s internal Labour thinking, a critical prologue to the Blair years. So far it seems more thoughtful and convincing than Blair’s bio, but it’s early days yet.
Recently finished: (FSVO finished, since there’s more to come) I have also been reading Chew. Tony Chu gets psychic impressions from anything he eats … including murder victims, which since he’s a cop form a substantial portion of the people he meets. Gruesome but hugely fun.
Afgantsy: The Russians In Afghanistan 1979–89, Rodric Braithwaite
I didn’t really know much about the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and what I did know was, of course, very from much a Western viewpoint. Despite the British author this book presents a Soviet perspective.
There is a good chunk of narrative history here; if you want an overview of why the USSR went in and why it eventually gave up and left, there are surely worse places to start. Whether the KGB backed the original communist coup is left uncertain (people who ought to know deny it), but it did not do the USSR any favours; it badly destabilized the country. The initial Soviet reaction was not soldiers on the ground but advice and support for Taraki’s new regime, which they considered to be brutal and incompetent and with thoroughly counterproductive policies and methods. Matters came to a head when the internal power struggle among the Afghan communists resulted in a second coup. The Soviet reaction was to (equally violently) replace Amin’s government with one more to their taste, and put in (at its peak) over a hundred thousand troops in an attempt to put down the anti-communist rebellion.
In retrospect of course this was a disastrous error but it’s less clear what a realistic better policy would have been once the first coup had happened - staying out from the beginning would probably have resulted in an unstable, fundamentalist or American-backed regime on the southern border of the USSR, none of which will have been attractive prospects in Moscow.
Much of the book is concerned with the Soviet men and woman who served Afghanistan. There is an interesting section on the music and poetry composed by serving soldiers, for instance. Of more political significance are Anatoli Tkachev’s negotiations with Ahmed Shah Masud. At a lower level Alexander Kartsev’s experiences are an insight into the on-the-ground relations between the Soviet troops and the locals; at one point he is kidnapped to help out a mujahedin commander who has shot himself in the foot; later he persuades the same commander to release some prisoners he had been planning to kill.
In the end despite the fact that it “won all its major battles and never lost a post to the enemy” the Soviet army in Afghanistan withdrew in defeat; the current American campaign has largely the same goals and many of the same opponents, arguably making it a single conflict of three decades and counting. I can’t say this book offers a great deal of hope for the outcome.
Addendum to previous post: don’t get the electronic version; someone did an especially terrible job of converting it from paper. Faults include:
Most of this is, in principle, user-fixable but it’s a lot of work. I bought a second-hand paper copy.
I’ve been reading Old English and Its Closest Relatives by Orrin Robinson. This is a survey of a variety of Germanic languages from the past couple of millennia, starting with a general overview and then proceeding to chapters on individual languages, starting with Gothic. The reader is soon invited to attempt translation of some sample texts, with the assistance of a glossary and some grammatical notes.
Gothic is the oldest of the languages discussed, giving it the greatest time distance from the modern English that I’m familiar with. However, it is also closest to the assumed common ancestor of all Germanic languages, giving it less time to accumulate unique features. It’s also the most geographically distant, having been spoken as far east as modern Ukraine, though its ultimate origins may lie in ancient Scandinavia.
There are plenty of cognates to be spotted, both with English and more distant languages. A good example would be 𐌷𐌰𐌱𐌰𐌽 haban “to have”, which is related to modern German haben (see comments for discussion re Latin habeo). Another good example is 𐌷𐌰𐌿𐍃𐌾𐌰𐌽 hausjan “to hear”; this is related not only to “hear” (there’s a /z/ > /r/ sound shift in west Germanic languages) but also to “acoustic” (Greek not having the /k/ > /x/ sound shift of Grimm’s Law). There are plenty of other examples, and they did help somewhat with the translation.
Indicating verb tense by a vowel change is common in Gothic. For example, 𐌵𐌹𐌸𐌰𐌽 qiþan “to say”, becomes 𐌵𐌰𐌸 qaþ in the past tense - “(he) said” (or “quoth”; 𐌵 is pronounced /kʷ/.) One class of verbs, though, gets its past tense by a process called reduplication. For instance, 𐍃𐌰𐌹𐌰𐌽 saian “to sow” becomes 𐍃𐌰𐌹𐍃𐍉 saiso “(he) sowed”.
The language is heavily inflected (at least compared to what I’m used to). Nouns and adjectives inflect for number and case; moreover adjectives have two parallel systems, the weak and strong declensions, with the choice depending on the presence or absence of a definite article. Verbs are worse still: not only do they inflect for mood, person and number but the present and preterite participles (analogous to English “driving” and “driven” respectively) are adjectives, thereby dragging all of the complexity of that class into the verbal system. And yet despite all this, there is no future tense, meaning that the present has to do double-duty.
More charmingly, at least from the perspective of my particular obsessions, it has a dual: 𐌽𐌹𐌼𐌰 nima “I take”, 𐌽𐌹𐌼𐍉𐍃 nimos “we two take”, 𐌽𐌹𐌼𐌰𐌼 nimam “we take”.
Putting all of the above together meant that the translations felt a bit more like actual translation and less like looking up words in a glossary and rearranging until they made sense in English. I’ve since moved onto the chapter on Old Norse, and while it does have some grammatical information it is somewhat less detailed, making the translation effort somewhat less rewarding. Still, I’m less than half way through it.
(If your browser doesn’t display the Gothic characters used in this article, they look like this.)
Visigothic Spain, Roger Collins, ISBN 0-631-18185-7
( Review )The Origins Of France, Edward James, ISBN 0-333-27052-5
( Review )Montaillou, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, ISBN 0-14-00-5471-5
Montaillou is a village in southwestern France. In the early 14th century many of its inhabitants were Cathars - a variety of Christian heresy - and as such came to the attention of the Inquisition. What makes it particularly special is that the written record of the resulting interrogations, made under the aegis of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers and later Pope Benedict XII, survives to this day. The book at hand is a study of that record and its subjects.
( Read more... )Coders At Work, Peter Seibel, ISBN 987-1-4302-1948-4
This is a collection of interviews with well known and successful programmers. Many of the names were already familiar to me (Knuth, Thompson, Zawinski, …) but others were new to me - though given the descriptions of their achievements, they are by no means out of place.
( Read more... )Cables From Kabul by Sherard Cowper-Coles (ISBN 978-0-00-743203-5).
( Review )I recently read The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor by William Langewiesche.
After a bit of WWII-era history the book spend a while discussing the ease or otherwise of producing a non-state nuclear bomb. (If he is right then) there is some reason for hope (though not complacency) here; while security on HEU stocks appears to be very poor in places, there remain substantial difficulties for a non-state group attempting to acquire it and turning it into a usable weapon. The weakest link is presented as border security; the author’s prescription is to cut a deal with the people who control smuggling routes (primarily used for drugs, fuel, etc).
The bulk of the book, however, concerns the activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used stolen European designs and more-or-less legitimately ordered components to create Pakistan’s Uranium enrichment program. In Langewiesche’s account, Khan puts surprisingly little effort into hiding what he is doing - he gets away with it due to the supine nature of his targets - for instance when a Dutch colleague at FDO reported his suspicions he was told not to stir up trouble. A similar pattern holds when he puts together the centrifuge program: although occasionally he used front companies, “generally he or his agents simply went out and bought the stuff”.
For all that Kahn’s program is depicted as a massive failure of intelligence and export control by western Europe, especially Germany, it is also held to be inevitable; the manufacture of nuclear weapons is primarily an exercise in engineering, not research, and a government that wants them is going to get them sooner or later. Kahn’s spying and his network of suppliers, much as his subsequent sale of Pakistan’s nuclear technology to other countries, was ultimately no more than a shortcut. The notion that Kahn acted alone in his proliferation activities is dismissed as a transparent lie.
If Kahn is the villain of the piece, the hero is journalist Mark Hibbs, who spent many years joining dots and exploiting high-level contacts to bring the story into the public domain (albeit in publications that most would find obscure). Intelligence services knew more and earlier - but of course, they don’t publish at all.
The last word is given to Mubashir Hassan, a former finance minister of Pakistan:
“But you cannot have a world order in which you have five or eight nuclear-weapons states on the one hand, and the rest of the international community on the other. There are many places like Pakistan, poor countries which have legitimate security concerns - every bit as legitimate as yours. And you ask them to address those concerns without nuclear weapons, while you have nuclear weapons and you have everything else? It is not a question of what is fair, or right or wrong. It is simply not going to work.”
The Histories is the (only known) work of one Herodotus, and comprises three main elements: the nature and people of the world (as Herodotus understood it), the origins of war between Greece and Persia, and an account of those wars.
The first of these is concentrated in the early parts of the work. I’ve already mentioned the curious Egyptian mortgage laws. Much of it is interesting; some of it may be true. (It’s probably safe to dismiss the gold-digging giant ants as fictitious!) Indeed,Herodotus often expresses scepticism although it must be said that on occasion it plays him false:
After all, Libya is demonstrably surrounded by water, except for the bit of it that forms the boundary with Asia. King Necho of Egypt was the first to discover this, as far as we know; after he abandoned the digging of the canal from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf, his next project was to dispatch ships with Phoenician crews with instructions to return via the Pillars of Heracles into the northern sea and so back to Egypt. So the Phoenicians set out from the Red Sea and sailed into the sea to the south. Every autumn they, they would come ashore, cultivate whatever bit of Libya they had reached in their voyage, and wait for harvest-time; then, when they had gathered in their crops, they would put to sea again. Consequently it was over two years before they rounded the Pillars of Heracles and arrived back in Egypt. They made a claim which I personally do not believe, although someone else might - that as they were sailing around Libya they had the sun on their right.
Of course, their claim would be correct. One might reasonably be sceptical of their claim to have circumnavigated Africa, but their story about the sun does not support the doubts.
Many words, too, are spent on the history of the Achaemenid (i.e. Persian) Empire - an ancient precusor of modern Iran. Herodotus covers Cyrus’s rise to power, his conquests, and his death in central Asia; followed by the actions of his successors and the eventual turn of their attention across the Aegean.
The latter part is, largely without interruption, an account of the conlict in Greece, culminating in the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea. As the notes to the translation indicate Herodotus’s account is highly partial, even within the Greek side. However in places it is very detailed - the author was almost certainly getting his information directly from the people who were there on the day.
As an aside, Pheidippides’s athletics are even more excessive here than in the traditional 26-mile version: he arrives in Sparta a day after leaving Athens, well over a hundred miles away! He does however have the advantage of meeting the god Pan along the way - although this is something else Herodotus seems sceptical about.
Moreover, I couldn’t help but notice that this translation uses the name Philippides for this famous runner and mentions in the notes that Pheidippides (which is closer to the name I was originally familiar with) appears “in some manuscripts, but the name is very rare”. But it seems to me that this could be not simply a copying error, but rather the effect of the same sound shift as between Odysseus and Ulysses?
So much for Philippides. The work is full of digressions, varying from single paragraphs to multiple pages themselves containing further nested digressions. I don’t know what a modern editor would make of it! It works well, however.
The story ends with the ejection of Xerxes’s armies from Greece. Over a century later the Greeks were to take the revenge on Persia, conquering it under Alexander. I think this would have fit well into Herodotus’s worldview: Persia’s ascent could only be the precursor to its fall.
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