He's a fine chair

I love pointing out that German's think chairs are masculine while the Italians think they are feminine.

I don't know why, but I am fascinated by the fact that these two languages which are, essentially, right next to each other would have different views on the "gender" of that thing you sit on.

Yes, I still think having a "gender" for an inanimate object is daft, and I think every language that does so is somehow inferior to the languages that don't (English, Estonian, Esperanto...) but I'm also interested to know why they chose that gender for that object.

I know several studies have been done of several tribal languages with grammatical genders that have determined the they actually see these inanimate objects as having masculine or feminine characteristics. For example, there's one (I think in the Papua region) in which everything large is "he" and everything small is "she".

I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that all languages with grammatical genders are making "value judgments" about those objects that they call masculine or feminine.

What is it that the Germans see in a chair that makes them think "that's a fine, manly chair"?  What is it the Italians would see in the same chair that would make them think "she's far to feminine to be manly"?

What is the point of difference between these two cultures that makes them interpret the same object as endowed with different gender traits?

Study

This photo is one in a series I like to call "Inefficient Methods to Study for an Exam".

Wondermark

I got a "shout out" recently (http://wondermark.com/book-sketches-from-today/) so I thought I'd shout back.

David Malki ! of Wondermark has a new book out.  It's the latest collection of Wondermarkian madness, with a heavy focus on the fantastic critters that frequently pop-up.

I'm getting a copy sent to me for free, so I probably won't be buying one myself - but that's no reason why you can't buy one for your own edification.

Head over to the Wondermark website to find more details, and read a few of the comics to get a feeling for what you would be in for if you bought the book.  Here, at random, are two of my favourites:

http://wondermark.com/442/

http://wondermark.com/238/

Call me a geek if you wish, but one of the things I love most about the one with the ninjas (apart from the ninjas on unicycles) is the correct number agreement in the third panel.

Things to do *In* Ingham...

...are apparently light on the ground.

Having just come back from a 6 week holiday, I'm planning to go to Ingham for a weekend to "take a break".  Actually, it's for my mother, who doesn't go for short breaks on her own, but wouldn't mind getting out of town for a bit during her holidays.

I like the Ingham region, and have often visited for one reason or another, but I've never actually stayed in the town itself.  I usually end up staying in one of the satellite communities, like Lucinda, Forest Beach or Taylors Beach.  This time we thought it would be interesting to stay in Ingham itself, and see the town "properly" for a change.

Only problem is, no one is willing to admit there's anything in the town worth seeing.  You look for any list of attractions for Ingham, and they'll all list the beaches and national parks that are located nearby.

What can you do in Ingham?  You can drive half-an-hour south to a waterfall.  You can travel twenty minutes west to a national park campsite.  You can travel fifteen minutes east to a beach.  The town itself is, apparently, only worth visiting during one of the two festivals they run each year - and even then most sites don't mention the second festival...

Oddly, the Tyto wetlands doesn't even get a mention on most websites, even though it is, by rights, a "must see" for any bird watchers who might be travelling through the area - and it happens to be in town.  The mausoleums at the cemeteries get mentioned more often than the Tyto park complex.

But... surely there are things in the town itself?  People live there, and I expect they do stuff.  Parks, gardens, bowls clubs, golf clubs... these things are all located *in* the town proper.  There's a cinema, there's a gallery (of sorts) - I think they still have cafes and shops...

Surely someone can come up with a list of things to do and see in the town itself?  Sure, it might not be the kind of thing that will rock your world, but why not plug the butcher who makes traditional Sicilian sausages (my uncle insists we buy him some every time we drive through the town)?  Why not promote the craft guild thingy?  Or the winery that makes booze out of tropical fruits* (although I must admit I don't know if they still have a shop in Ingham)?

Heck, you could easily put together a "picnic" list of things to buy from local shops, and then recommend places to go barbecue them.  That would be a fun thing to do, and it wouldn't take too much imagination.

Why not find a cafe that sells the best lemon meringue pie or a bakery which makes the best neenish tarts and say "while visiting Ingham, make sure you stop in at the such-and-such bakery to try the award winning neenish tarts"?

It's a town of just under 5000 people, and the nearest "big town" for nearby communities like Halifax and Abergowrie.  Surely people in the region come into Ingham occasionally to do stuff, rather than everybody going out of town to get their kicks.

So, my challenge to the good folk of Ingham is this:  tell us what we can do in your town.  It can't be that hard.



*They had a "snake bite" wine made from lime juice and chilli.  I bought some for my grandmother and she hated it.  Mind you, she tried to drink it like regular wine, even though I warned her it might be a bad idea.

Lingvon

I've been allowing myself to be distracted by Esperanto lately.  

Some readers may be aware of the fact that I find the existence of Esperanto highly amusing.  I don't know why, but the concept just tickles my fancy.  Also, the word.  I love saying "Esperanto".  It's one of those words that feel good in the mouth, if you know what I mean.

I have been known to bring Esperanto into a conversation just because I felt like saying the word.  I had the opportunity to tell a couple of Americans and a German about it's existence at my language course in Estonia, so that livened up the meet-and-greet.  They thought it was an interesting concept, too, even if they couldn't quite understand why it would actually be a thing.  The Greek girl knew what I was talking about, though, and she was more derisive.  She was, however, impressed when I mentioned that there were groups of people who spoke Esperanto as one of their first languages (always in conjunction with a "real" language - from what I've read, no one has been crazy enough to create a completely Esperanta community where all children speak nothing but Esperanto for the first few years).

I was thoroughly impressed when I discovered that ProQuest gives people the option to limit their searches to find articles written in Esperanto.  Sadly, the only journal articles written in Esperanto are more or less about Esperanto (and language in general), so if you were hoping to find Esperanta articles about rotator-cuff injuries or baseball, you would be largely out of luck...

However, while I've been fascinated by the existence of Esperanto (and quite fond of saying the word) for years, until I went to the Esperanto museum in Vienna I had never actually looked at the language or the historical/cultural space that it fills.  

To be honest, I've always regarded Esperanto as being, well, useless.

Let's face it, English actually is what Esperanto wanted to be (except for the cultural neutrality thing), and while the number of people who speak Esperanto is roughly equivalent to the number of people who speak Estonian, there isn't really any place on Earth one can go where speaking Esperanto will help you buy a loaf of bread if you are lost and alone in a small town.  At least Estonian is highly useful in Estonia.  

Also, Esperanto seems to be such a dilettante language.  It’s not something you learn to survive – you learn it because you’re educated and are privileged enough to be able to learn a language you don’t need “on the street”.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if you found that anyone who actually speaks Esperanto also speaks English, French, German or Spanish - so why learn Esperanto when you would be better served by one of the big four?

Sure, Esperanto has a large community of users all over the world who love it, defend it, gather together to speak it, translate works of great literature into it, and write poetry in it… but the same could be said of Klingon. 

Should Hamlet in Esperanto really be seen in a different light to Hamlet in Klingon?

Standing in the Esperanto museum I was struck by two things:  1) the language is actually quite interesting from a linguistic point of view, and 2) it’s not a language so much as a pseudo-religious movement.

Firstly, the language:  Apparently there’s some evidence that learning Esperanto can be a useful stepping stone to learning more complicated languages.  The structure is simple and easy to pick up, and it draws attention to the way a language works.  In theory, after learning Esperanto, language learners are better positioned to understand what they are doing when learning another language.

The language does seem remarkable easy to absorb.  I’ve spent less than two hours looking at it, and I already know how to alter a word to mark it as a nominative or accusative noun, an adjective or an adverb – after three years I still struggle doing this in Estonian.  Yet it’s also vaguely Finno-Ugric in the way you attach prefixes and suffixes to create a wide variety of words from the same basic root. 

I am mildly concerned by the weird positive-negative thing it has going.  The word for cold is “malvarma”, which literally means “not warm” – just like the word for short (“mallonga”) means “not long”.  The word for hot, “varmega”, means something like “significantly warm”.  I don’t know why, but I feel like “not warm” is an insufficient way to express “cold”.  If someone asks you what the water is like, and you say “not warm”, that wouldn’t really have the same level of warning as “cold”.

Anyway, the language is kind of interesting, and possibly more useful to me, personally, than Italian (for example).

As for my comment that it is a pseudo-religious movement?  Well, it’s kind of like the Scouts, actually – a group of people engaging in activities that are meant to make the world a better place and getting together for regular camps and conferences.  The history of the language is steeped in a concept that the world can be a wonderful, apolitical place where people speak to each other in neutral languages with no cultural baggage and share things and live in harmony.  A place where people talk to each other instead of fighting.  A place where peace and co-operation reign.

Esperanto speakers are embracers of an ideal.  They’re a club in which the members have chosen their own language and culture – and it is an oddly optimistic one.  They write books, plays and poetry, and happily forget that Esperanto will never be quite what Zammenhof was hoping for.  But, it is good that they don’t lose hope.  The very word “Esperanto” means “hope”, after all...  

muzeoj

I arrived in Vienna on a Monday afternoon, overdue for lunch and simply over Catholic churches and galleries full of Graeco-Roman art and "Old Masters".  I thought I'd like to see something different for a change, so I somehow managed to find myself in a Catholic church that very afternoon and a museum full of Graeco-Roman art and paintings by "Old Masters" the next day.  These things happen.

The Church was calling me, actually.  There I was, wondering around the streets thinking, "Hey!  I'm in Vienna!  I wonder if I'll recognise anything from Inspector Rex?" when I saw a domed roof in a gap between the buildings.  I was sure I had seen that roof before, so I went to find it.  Karlskirche.  It might have been that dome I'd seen before or another (Vienna was full of interesting roofs), but I was tired and looking for something to do that wouldn't take me too far away from my hotel...

I was a bit dubious about paying for entrance to a church, but I've done it before (I know the fee can help to maintain the building, and if they're going to have thousands of people traipse through the door for non-church-attendance reasons, they may as well get something out of it).  I always wonder how anyone joins a congregation in a church that charges entrance fees.  What happens if you're new in town and just want to come along to the mass?  I was willing to pay my dues as a tourist, though... at least, until I noticed that the church was under construction.

"What a rip-off!"  I thought, "Charging full price when there's a whopping big scaffold blocking the interior view of the dome!"  Then I noticed the church actually wasn't under construction after all - the whopping big scaffold was a semi-impermanent feature.  It was supporting a lift that could take people up to the platform that was blocking the view of the dome from the ground.

My first reaction was to be cranky about it (the scaffold was ugly, and I didn't like the fact that you couldn't see the dome at all if you happened to be afraid of heights).  Then I remembered that I'm not afraid of heights myself, so I went up the lift to look at the dome.  It was quite an experience to get that close to the roof, actually.  It's a close-up and personal view of something that is normally seen from very far away.  I still think the scaffold was ugly, though...

The next day, determined to see something different, I caught the U-Bahn to Museumsquartier and made my way to the Natural History Museum... Only to find out it didn't open on Tuesdays.  That'll teach me to read opening hours on brochures (maybe).  I hadn't intended to visit the Art History Museum.  I was trying to take a break from such things.  However, it was located conveniently close to the museum I couldn't see that day...

In the end I spent just over five hours in the Art History Museum.  Then I noticed my ticket also gave me entrance to another campus of the museum that contained historical weapons and musical instruments.  Fortunately, the woman in the information desk told me I could go there tomorrow, so I happily went back to look at the Egyptian section a second time.  Afterwards I wandered down a street and found myself in the centre of town, just in time to spend the evening window shopping.

The next day I hit the second part of the museum first thing in the morning (well, 10am - it turns out nothing really opens at 9am, so turning up then was a bit of a misjudgement).  I thought I'd be more interested in the instruments, but the rooms full of armour and weapons were quite a highlight.  I may or may not have attempted a substitutiary locomotion spell.  It didn't work (while I was there, at any rate).

Then it was on to the National Library... which was a huge disappointment.  I had seen pictures of the hall - one of the most famous library interiors in the world - and had been particularly looking to seeing it.  They had a temporary display mounted on particularly obnoxious white boards, which ruined every single view of the hall.  There was no where you could look without seeing the display instead of the hall.  I was so infuriated that I actually asked for the opportunity to write a complaint (and someone else patiently waited for me to finish so they could write one, too).

I stormed off to see the Esperanto Museum with anger burning in my heart.  Fortunately, the Esperanto Museum made me feel better... although I realised afterwards that I would have been disappointed with it if I hadn't been so annoyed by the library hall.  It was actually a pretty low-impact affair.  I could think of a number of changes that could make it more information rich (and object rich) than it was.  I left the museum with quite a number of questions and a strong desire to buy a basic "here's what Esperanto looks like" book - but the museum was such a small affair that it didn't have a giftshop attached.

The Esperanto Museum was located in the same building as the Globe Museum, which seemed odd at first, but after reading the information in the EM I realised there was a bit of a "global" theme happening.  I was quite addicted to maps when I was younger (I still love them), and it was interesting to see how the globe has changed over the years.  I thought the two museums in the same building could have supported a small giftshop.  It wouldn't be too difficult to have a few globes and a couple of reprint Esperanto posters for sale...

I must admit that, by then, I was a bit museumed out.  So I took a tram to the end of the line (I like a bit of random trammage) and found myself at a large park.  All in all, not a bad couple of days.

Quote of the Day: Klingon

"Klingon speakers, those who have devoted themselves to the study of a language invented for the Star Trek franchise, inhabit the lowest possible rung on the geek ladder. Dungeons & Dragons players, ham radio operators, robot engineers, computer programmers, comic book collectors— they all look down on Klingon speakers. Even the most ardent Star Trek fanatics, the Trekkies, who dress up in costume every day, who can recite scripts of entire episodes, who collect Star Trek paraphernalia with mad devotion, consider Klingon speakers beneath them."

Okrent, Arika. In the Land of Invented Languages.
Westminster, MD, USA: Spiegel & Grau, 2010. p 3.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/jcu/Doc?id=10386233&ppg=13
Copyright © 2010. Spiegel & Grau. All rights reserved.

Stephen

Stephen asked me to help him right a small biography, so here's the best one I could come up with in my current state of consciousness:

Stephen was orphaned at a young age as a result of a terrible accident involving an ice-cream scoop and a decommissioned submarine - the details of which are still classified by the Swiss Navy.  He was raised by walruses on the islands off the coast of Vanuatu, and ate a diet consisting almost entirely of fish until, at the age of 14, he left to join the foreign legion.  Since then he has been horribly allergic to seafood and can only eat seal meat if it is prepared with peanut butter.  After several years serving as a peace-keeper in the war-torn country of New Zealand, he retrained as a helicopter pilot, but an incident with the Mafia led to his being place in the witness protection programme.  He now works as a librarian in an undisclosed location, under the name of "Irvin Farnsworthy".

Terra Nullis

Ma olen tagasi Austraalias.

Back in "The Land of the Long White Cloud"... Oh, no, sorry, that's New Zealand.  Australia is "The Land of the Long Weekend".  I get those two confused sometimes.

Australians do like their long weekends.  We like our public holidays so much we're actually celebrating the Queen's Birthday twice this year.  I discovered yesterday that I'm working on that particular long weekend, which is fair enough because I had the last Queen's Birthday free.

The past few days have involved far too much sitting.  Apart from sitting for approximately 23 hours for the plane flights home, I'm now back in my house (where I sit too much because it's a habit) and my workplace (where I sit too much because my workstations are designed to encourage it).  I've been spending the past six weeks on my feet more often because I've been out more.

Granted, I had two weeks when I sat in a class room for several hours a day, and two weeks where I sat in a bus for several hours a day, but I spent more time standing or walking overall.  Particularly the last two weeks, in Italy and Vienna.

The Italians have developed an interesting relationship to sitting down.  People who own places where one might sit (like a cafe) have worked out they can charge extra for the privilege.  If you buy your food "take-away" or eat standing at the counter, it costs less than if you sit at a table.  So, most Italians eat standing up if they can.  There also seem to be hardly any places to sit in public places like train stations.  It's like charging people for sitting has lead to a culture where everyone stands as a matter of course.

In Vienna I was just constantly walking around and looking at things.  One day I got back to my hotel after 9pm, and realised that I had only sat down for an hour the whole day.  That was 11 hours on my feet.  I ate lunch sitting but had dinner from a hot-dog stand, and I always stand on subways so I don't vague off and forget what station I'm looking for...

No wonder I managed to lose weight even though my diet included far more pastries and ice-creams than usual.

I've been in a bit of a daze since coming home.  I'd like to blame it on the jetlag, but it started to kick in before I left Europe.  I couldn't shake the feeling that I knew where I was as long as I was moving.  I suspected I would start feeling lost the minute I had to stand still (or sit, as the case may be).

I've been feeling a bit grey and uncertain about life, the universe and everything since January, when I came to the realisation that it was time for me to move on, but I had no idea what I want to move on to.

I still want to work as a librarian, and I want to study, and logically I want to find work as a librarian that gives me time to study...  But the question "where?" is a rather large one, and it's only slightly distracting me from "what?" and "why?"

I feel like my life has morphed into that moment when you walk into a room to get something, but you can't remember what it was.  I have a sense that I should be moving towards something, but all I can identify are the things I want to move away from.

I want to go somewhere, rather than just somewhere else.  The last few times I moved it was because I wanted or needed to move away from where I was.  I want to move to something this time.  I want to feel as if I've found something I want for a change.

Trouble is, I don't know what I want.