Bad language

I read this a while back on bbcnews

A group of French speakers in Japan are suing the governor of Tokyo after he described French as a failed language.

The 21 teachers and researchers are demanding compensation and an apology for the "insulting remarks" from Governor Shintaro Ishihara.

Mr Ishihara is accused of saying he was not surprised French did not qualify as an international language, as it was "a language which cannot count numbers".

The veteran politician is well-known for his outspoken comments.

He has previously drawn criticism for saying the Nanjing Massacre, in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese were slaughtered by Japanese troops in the 1930s, never happened.

Mr Ishihara is referring to the fact that French, not having simple words for seventy, eighty and ninety, has to resort to periphrasis to count between 69 and 100. Some numbers are quite challenging to give out over the telephone: 84 24 20 14 94 comes out as quatre vingt quatre vingt quatre vingt quatorze quatre vingt quatorze, which read fast comes out as 84 84 94 94.

French also has over the centuries suffered a process of phonetic attrition unparalleled in other European languages, so that an instruction to put a thermometer in the baby's armpit (dans l'aisselle) could be quite legitimately be misconstrued as meaning to put it in his stools (dans les selles). Only Tibetan to my knowledge has so many silent letters.

So Mr Ishihara's remarks appear justified - so long as he is not trying to imply that Japanese counts better than French and should therefore be an international language. Let's start at the very beginning (a very good place to start - in Julie Andrews's immortal words). "One day" in Japanese is ichinichi, and "one person" is hitori. Where is the word for one? We all know the word for "person" is hito. But counting upwards, we find that "two persons" is futari. Where did hito go?

"Two days" is futsuka and so fut means "two"? But "two portions" is nininmae (which is written as futari followed by the character mae). So where did fut go?

Or maybe ri means person? But "Three persons" are sannin, so where did ri go?

Confused? Counting in Japanese is a killer, and we only got as far as three.

In the seventh century Japanese was a primitive unwritten language possibly with Korean ancestry and phonetically not unlike Polynesian in its simplicity. It then had the misfortune to import the entire Chinese "alphabet" in order to write itself. But Chinese writing is not phonetic, and along with the characters of Chinese, came the words they represented. This huge influx of words already contained a mass of homonyms even when correctly pronounced with the right tonal distinctions; when adopted into the limited sound palette of Japanese the mass became an unnavigable ocean. Sixteen Chinese syllables: zang, sang, cang, cao, zao, suo, xiang, qiang, sao, zheng, song, zong, cong, zhuang, chuang, zeng and ceng, each with a possible four tones which helped you guess the meanings were reduced in Japanese to one sound: sô.

Right up until the twentieth century the Japanese muddled bravely along with the weight of this huge foreign vocabulary distorting their grammar and overloading their phonology, so they had to trace characters in the air to make themselves understood. And then came the American occupation. For the second time in Japanese history an entire (for them) unpronounceable vocabulary was imported wholesale, along with meanings which they could only grasp after their own fashion.

Without going so far as to say Japanese is a failed language, it might be instructive to make comparisons based on the amount of money and school time spent in each country on simply mastering reading and writing. Wouldn't some kids do better kicking ball?

Languages are the greatest shared creations of humanity. But languages, like bridges, evolve towards failure. Each bridge that doesn't collapse serves as an incitement to streamline the design and cut costs until...

Off with their heads!

So now they are talking about cutting off your Internet connection for downloading songs:

The notion of turning service providers into copyright cops has been gathering momentum since November, when Sarkozy announced the French plan, which was negotiated with the record industry and Internet providers. If the plan is approved in Parliament, service providers would cooperate with a new, independent authority to identify and warn pirates who could eventually face the cutoff of their Internet accounts.

It would contribute to more balanced discussion of this topic if Nicolas Sarkozy's wife's personal interest as a recording artist were to be declared. He is certainly not acting in the general interest of France, whose trade deficit with the USA would only increase if all pirating were to stop.

If his poppet's pockets are really in such dire need of additional lining, His Majesty should simply punish those who download Carla Bruni songs. The guillotine could be wheeled out of retirement for the purpose. Why cut off their Internet when you can cut off their heads? A romantic gesture indeed.

Can she knit?

Come back Genghis, all is forgiven!

Chinese cannot be blamed for believing what they have been taught to believe - among other things that the biggest "rogue" of all, whose huge portrait still hangs in Tiananmen Square, was only 30% wrong. This was the man who was responsible for 70 million deaths. Had he been 100% wrong he could have wiped out half of the Chinese population of the time!

Now here's something else they won't teach in Chinese classrooms. The period when Tibet is supposed to have been "part" of China, is also the period when China was part of a Mongol, then a Manchu, Empire. So if one applies the Chinese government's own specious historical arguments to the true facts, Tibet should be returned to Mongolia.

By the same token, Algeria should still be a French département, and as for Ireland... time was when Gay Byrne could joke "we should apologise to the Queen and ask her to take us back." Wouldn't wash these days, though.

One dog starts them all barking.

(From iht.com): Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, published commentary Sunday accusing Pelosi of ignoring the violence caused by the Tibetan rioters.

" 'Human rights police' like Pelosi are habitually bad tempered and ungenerous when it comes to China, refusing to check their facts and find out the truth of the case," it said.

Surely even such a misinformed "news" service as Xinhua must have heard rumours that Tibet has been closed to outsiders, rendering it impossible for Ms Pelosi to check into a hotel let alone the facts. But while she is in Dharamsala she could help the Chinese leaders by sniffing around to see if they really have jackals in monk's robes, and how this unlikely disguise helps them steal chickens.

The Chinese themselves have a saying which goes "若要人不知，除非己莫为" (ruò yào rén bù zhī，chú fēi jǐ mò wéi) which boils down to saying: "if you don’t want others to know about it, don’t do it." So all we can do is assume that if they got something to hide, they must be doing it.

Unfortunately, a century of turmoil has turned China, once thought of as the cradle of "Oriental philosophy" and birthplace of wise sayings and homely advice such as the above, into a place where anger is held in respect. A place where it is considered statesmanlike for leaders to indulge in paranoid rants and name-calling. And where it is de rigueur for everyone else to follow suit. The Chinese have another older expression which could describe a modern propaganda campaign: "吠形吠声" (fèixíng-fèishēng) meaning: when one dog barks at a shadow all the others join in.

So it's refreshing to read in the same article that: A group of prominent Chinese intellectuals has circulated a petition urging the government to stop what it has called a "one-sided" propaganda campaign and initiate direct dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

Let's see where that gets them.

Some of you might want to check out this guy's website http://www.throughanexilelens.org

Popinjay Art

Without going into arguments about the meaning of art, it would not be too wide of the mark to say that to succeed in today's Contemporary Art market, just two things are necessary. They are: to (1) get noticed and (2) have cred.

To achieve (1) it would be sufficient to ride down the main street in Teheran dressed as Lady Godiva. This gets you noticed, but only in places like Teheran. In the rest of the world, in places where big bucks are being spent on art, the problem facing artists and gallery owners alike is how do you get noticed when people are no longer surprised by any antics?

In today's climate, the feverish and highly publicised competition between Sotheby's and Christie's provides some kind of answer. Get sky high prices for your work and people will pay attention. The mechanism for doing this is quite simple and involves gallery stooges bidding up a sample of an artist's work in return for a kickback from the gallery of most of the price paid. Naturally, because of a cynical public, it only works in tandem with a cred building operation, in which art critics play a vital and equally well remunerated role.

Which brings us to (2). Cred works as long as you have a credulous pool of punters. Lady Godiva will have an uphill task persuading the Teheran morals police that she was making an artistic statement. This may be partly due to her lack of a real message, but I put my money on her apprehenders' limited credulity. Some would call this a lack of culture, but who is right? In the cultural capitals of the world, how much investor credulity is the work of high prices? Time was when exhibition catalogues featured paragraphs of turgid prose, which the artist himself couldn't understand, let alone his poor mother, devoted to puffing up the artist's message. But today, to get credibility, it is enough for a gallery (or for Damien Hurst) to put its money where its mouth is. With enough money, the message part can be left blank.

My point is that when people are punting on stuff just because they see its price going up, you have what is called a bubble. And when the bubble pops, as it invariably does, all your cred goes down the drain along with your moolah. A white canvas with nine knife slashes which was once a statement of wealth, and may once have caused a stir at some dimly remembered exhibition, loses that meaning when prices plunge, and becomes a symbol of gullibility. At least a nice Gauguin on the wall will comfort you until the dunners arrive, but a perspex box of flies will not even serve to settle your debts. Creditors are notoriously conservative in their tastes, which, in a way, explains how they became creditors.

For those dreamers who think the market will be there to bail them out I say this: the large auction houses' practice of guaranteed sale prices, like all insurances, only serves to incite buyers - who will be future sellers - to greater recklessness, and is a safety mechanism they can ill afford to offer in a bear market.

J.K.Galbraith's A Short History of Financial Euphoria neatly describes the mechanisms behind the seventeenth century tulip bubble, lest you forget. It should be required reading for those who believe we have moved on from those years. It is as short as its title promises and should be re-read at least once every two years.

One day, I would like to talk about art, as I have a soft spot for real paintings, as a visit to my online gallery will surely show.

The rape of Changchun

So there was a bit less hoohah this year about the famous Rape of Nanking (or Nanjing). The Herald Tribune's Eamonn Fingleton writes: "For observers of Sino-Japanese relations the big news in the past week has been that there has been no news. Although last Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the notorious Nanking massacre, political activists in both Japan and China have been notable - so far at least - for their restraint.

"Given that the massacre, which began on Dec. 13, 1937, and continued for six weeks, was one of the worst atrocities in military history, the Chinese people would be forgiven for expressing their feelings in less muted terms."

Prize-winning Chinese writer Xu Zhigeng estimates the dead at over 300,000 dead. Maybe he won the prize for making the highest guess. Other estimates are as much as 50% lower. Wherever the truth lies, it was a sad chapter in history.

Almost as sad, in fact, as a similar massacre ordered eleven years later by a Chinese general, Lin Biao, presumably (according to Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's version of events) at the behest of that arch Malthusian, Mao Zedong. Lin's actual words used on May 30th 1948 were "turn Changchun into a city of death". This was achieved by blocking all food going into the city and refusing exit to anyone, man, woman or infant in arms. Towards the end of the five-month-long agony, starving mothers were coming out to offer their babes to the soldiers who barred their exit, while begging to be killed themselves. Changchun's mayor's estimate was of 170,000 survivors out of an initial population of half a million, a higher death toll than even the highest estimate of the Nanjing massacre.

While this horror story was unfolding, I was being born in a pleasant town on England's south coast in a thunderstorm. So should I have a beef? It all comes down to the luck of the draw.

Changchun is a fairly featureless North-Eastern Chinese provincial capital city whipped by blizzards in the winter and sandstorms in the summer. Its pride is an international sculpture park intended to offset in some small measure the drabness and boredom of the place. I have only met two people connected with the city. One was a girl who was born and bred there and came to France to study. I asked her if there was a siege museum in her town similar to the one in Nanking and she didn't know what I was talking about. The other was a young gay American who had been paid $17,000 US to marry the daughter of a wealthy Changchun family to help her get the hell out of the country.

This shows that the Chinese Boss Party is capable when it so wishes, of tastefully burying memories along with the dead, and therefore the lack of fuss about Nanking should come as no surprise. As for those whose memories could not be erased, and whose faith in their country might have been shaken by the siege, some were able quietly to save up enough cash to buy a Green Card for their progeny, to avoid that most terrible of fates, extirpation of the family line, should the wind ever start blowing the other way again.

The good news is that tourists are once again welcome in Changchun. One online travelguide mentions tea shops and pubs and exotic flavours. For lovers of history the Jilin Provincial Museum exhibits glorious stories of Chinese heroes during the Anti-Japanese War (1937 - 1945).

And for those of you who find history a big yawn, you can't knock the genteel attractions of Bournemouth. As its name implies, a great place to be born.

Brainteaser

Having been advised that my blog needed livening up with some pictorial content, I decided to go one further and give you a little brainteaser. The image below contains three types of bloodsucking animals. Can you name the one hiding in the middle?