Great New Yorker article on a conlang

spotted here on Metafilter.

DuoLingo

Benny interviews the inventor of Captchas, who has come up with an intriguing-looking language-learning site.  I'm tempted to sign up for this; there is mention either in the video interview or the introductory video on the DuoLingo site (can't remember which) that they might be rolling out Chinese learning for English speakers this year.  This would be quite something.

The exact structure of the translation lessons doesn't seem to be spelt out explicitly on the DuoLingo site; it looks as though you have to sign up for further information, which is annoying.

Lists of kanji, and draw-and-recognise sites

Soon after posting yesterday I wondered why on earth I'd forgotten that there's a precomposed a-with-tilde at U+00E3, which reminded me to mention:

• Shapecatcher which lets you draw a Unicode character (not a Chinese/Japanese/Korean glyph, unfortunately), and it will try to match it to the right code point;
• Mouse Chinese Input Method - draw a Chinese character and it will try to recognize it and give translation/pronunciation;
• List of Jooyoo Kanji on Wikipedia: very useful if you remember characters by their Heisig names; you can click on a table heading to alter display order to by-number-of-strokes, which is useful for looking up unfamiliar kanji;
• Kanji Information on Jim Breen's site: lists of Heisig keywords, all 3007 Heisig kanji, old and new kanji shapes;
• Detexify, which allows you to draw anything and it will try to match it to a LaTeX symbol.

 

Men In Black

I had seen James Heisig, creator of the famous kanji-memorization technique, referred to a few times on the web with 'Fr' before his name, and a bit of digging confirms that he is indeed a Catholic priest, ordained in 1969 if this document is anything to go by, and a member of the Divine Word Missionaries (hence the SVD that sometimes appears after his name).  Given that the Heisig technique is one of the most-discussed learning methods for the Japanese language, it's odd that I've gone a few years mucking around with the language before discovering this rather basic biographical fact about the man.

On my to-read list at the moment is Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett, the story of the encounter between the author (a missionary) and the Pirahã, an Amazonian people with a language and worldview that have been argued about a hell of a lot over the years.  (See the tilde over the 'a' at the end there?  I went to the effort of finding out the Unicode point for a combining tilde, just to get the tribe's name right.  Don't say I never give you anything.)

Encyclopaedia Britannica

And so the Britannica print edition is dead.  I didn't actually use it much in the pre-Internet days; I was into radio, electronics, computing, maths and science, which EB never seemed good at.  I remember (I must have been about 15) looking up the definition of a tensor in the EB and being disappointed with the gnomic, incomprehensible little article there.  This would have been the fifteenth edition, a staple when I was a kid of any biggish library; this was the edition that notoriously mucked the reader around with its Propaedia, Micropaedia and Macropaedia sections that kept on telling you that better information might be available in a volume different to the one you'd just lugged off the shelf.

David Bellamy used always to be in the newspaper ads for the EB, testifying that his reading of it at home made up for his not getting much out of school.  Ads presumably aimed at well-off, benevolent parents; the advertising always talked up the educational benefits so as to convince prospective buyers that the volumes would be good value at any price.  One gathered from this that the price was actually very high.  In the mid-90s I was at an agricultural fair, of all places, where there were lots of tents full of people trying to sell stuff.  There was a Britannica salesman there.  He had a little flip-chart on his table, consisting of about half-a-dozen cardboard rectangles attached to a dinky triangular frame.  This was in the days before PowerPoint had conquered the world.  'Have You Considered The Benefits Of Owning A Great Encyclopaedia?' or something like that was on the first page, and probably the second page said something similarly-capitalized about how much my hypothetical kids would get out of my owning A Great Encyclopaedia, and etc etc etc.  He read out each little page, running his finger under the words as he (slowly) said them, as though addressing a cretin who needed reinforcement of the concepts via multiple channels.  Is this an actual sales technique that they're told to do, I asked myself?  If so it wasn't working.  I eventually interrupted his flip-chart usage to try to ask flat-out how much it cost, and I didn't get a straight answer, though he did imply that I probably wouldn't be able to afford it.

How times change.  I now own a nice 1950 edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 15 alphabetical volumes plus World Survey volume, which I picked up from a charity shop for the price of a large round of drinks.  It looks good on the shelf and smells nice and leathery but I have to admit it doesn't get read very much.  I love the idea of books that set out to do something very specific; with language textbooks I'm always keen to see that the author has a specific end in mind, whether it be conversational confidence, fluent reading ability, or just tourist-level survival level in the language.  I want some evidence that the author has thought about what he's going to achieve.  With encyclopaedias, I like to see how much of the world the editors have set out to encompass.  I have a three-volume German set of Duden volumes from the 60s that betray fascination with machinery, processes, things that work; the Larousse French volumes are full of technical terms for old-fashioned things such as the sails of three-masted ships and bits of steam engines.  Reading an encyclopaedia from cover to cover is a routine sort of stunt but reading one in a foreign language would probably be very educational, and would leave you with a hell of a lot of arcane vocabulary at the end of it.  I've never done this, of course.

The famous 1911 Britannica is online now at various places, and I spent an hour or two today looking at the volumes that were available at OpenLibrary.  I do worry about the digitization of knowledge and the danger that everything we know might get clobbered by a Carrington Event, but there's no going back to the old days, and I wouldn't really want to anyway.

The gender of the TARDIS

Via, a glorious video of the construction of a foldable and transportable TARDIS by a talented young German lady.  She refers to the TARDIS as 'she', for which there is extensive precedent in the series (I remember Fourth Doctor calling the TARDIS 'old girl' early in the Ian Marter novelization of The Ribos Operation, just after Romana had cut a hole in the console).  And the TARDIS is a ship, and ships are female.  Still, this was enough to send me to the Wikipedia entry to see what gender the TARDIS has in languages other than English.  A few of the languages that have TARDIS articles:

•     Català - El TARDIS (M)
•     Česky - "Byla ukradena z Gallifrey" means 'it was stolen from Gallifrey', I think, with 'byla' having a feminine preterite ending; hence (F)
•     Deutsch - Die TARDIS (F)
•     Español - La TARDIS (F)
•     Français - Le TARDIS (M)
•     Italiano - Il TARDIS (M)
•     Русский - " ТАРДИС вернулась" is 'the TARDIS returned', I think, with feminine preterite reflexive-verb ending.  (F)

I've always vaguely wondered how newly-coined or newly-imported words get assigned a gender in those languages where gender can't be inferred from the word's ending...  Interesting how Spanish has TARDIS as M whereas Catalan, French and Italian have it as F.

Polyglottery

Interesting article here.  (Via).  Always good to see that there are others whose primary interest in languages is being able to read them rather than to speak them.  This may be The Wrong Way To Look At Language Learning but it's my attitude, mostly.

Still around

Still here, but not posting very much as haven't had the time or the energy to do much language-related stuff over the last month.  I hope that early in the New Year I'll gain enough momentum to post more regularly on Japanese-related topics.  And perhaps I'll redesign this rather ugly blog.

Wishing you all a happy and healthy Heisei 24!

Language learning and gender

That quote from Miller in the last post, where he referred to the student of Japanese as 'he', got me wondering what the gender disparity is among students of Japanese.  Many more women than men study foreign languages at degree level in the UK—I think this table (PDF) says that about 18,000 women got a foreign language undergrad degree and only about 8,000 men.  [Edit: these are undergraduate awards of all types for 2008/9.]  But what of Japanese specifically?  A big black mark to both HESA and UCAS for having such awful Excel-dominated websites, and a special award to UCAS for making you download an executable in order to get a dataset (no thank you), and for having a rubbishy enquiry engine that only works in IE.  So the short answer is I still don't know.  Japanese has a geeky fanboyish reputation, so will that mean more men than you'd otherwise expect?  I'll report if I manage to find out.  (I was looking for undergraduate figures as I thought that would be the most useful proxy for 'serious' learners and was under the misapprehension that UCAS and HESA would have useful web interfaces; I've looked at the JLPT site but can't see any breakdown of results by gender there.)