And... I'm a Geek

So, today I was in the middle of showing a group of students how to limit a search in Medline (via Ovid) for use in their Pharmacy Honours research project when I suddenly noticed that you can now limit to results in Esperanto.

This makes Medline (via Ovid) the second major database I know of that will give Esperanto as a language option (Proquest is the other one).

I may have stopped briefly in the middle of my class to indulge in a small happy dance and an exclamation of "Oooh!"

They may have been so used to my saying crazy stupid things just to keep their attention that they didn't even bat an eyelid.

I can't help but wonder how much medical research is written in Esperanto.  Near as I can figure out, most of the research conducted in Esperanto is also about Esperanto.

I'd love to know what the major areas of Esperanta medical research might be, so I can try a search.  I have a feeling that if I just start looking for my "normal" search tests, like "constraint induced movement therapy" or "rotator-cuff injuries in overarm sports" I might just be wasting my time.  It's a bit like googlewacking, I guess - searching for random things just to see if you actually get a result.

Now, if it was Interlingua, on the other hand, I know I'd at least get some articles about spectroscopy...

Ooooh!  I've just discovered Medline (via Ovid) also offers Interlingua as an option...

Curso, kurso

This is a little bit brilliant:

http://www.interlingua.com/an/curso (Curso de interlingua pro comenciantes/Course in Interlingua for beginners)

The genius behind this course decided to make each lesson fit on a single A4 sheet of paper.  Most of the time it's even just one side of the page.  This makes it perfect for breakfast reading, or for those moments where you want to do something kind of intelligent, but not very taxing.

It's text-heavy in a good way, too.  Each page has a few paragraphs and a bit of vocabulary, so that you spend most of your ten minutes reading the language.  Then there are a couple of grammar points to note, and a handful of exercises to do.  The design is simple, but enjoyably so.

I have a few suggestions for improvement, though.  The vocabulary should be compiled at the end in summary - like the grammar points are.  The current vocabulary sheet just tells you which lesson glosses the word in question, when it would be so much nicer if it would lay out the word and some variations (like conjugating the verbs).  It would also be nice if the vocabulary in each lesson was listed either alphabetically or in order of appearance.  At the moment, it's neither.

If I could, I'd change the lessons' vocabulary to "proper" order of appearance (it's mostly order of appearance, but not exactly) and then have the whole list assembled in alphabetical order at the end.

It would also be nice if you could download the whole thing at once, instead of having each page as a separate file - that way you could have the thing as a "proper" eBook (and shorten the time spent downloading the course considerably).

I'd love to have something similar in Esperanto to accompany Kurso de Esperanto - just like I'd love to have something like Kurso to accompany Curso de Interlingua.  Somewhere between the two of them is a very comfortable way to ease yourself into the first steps of learning a language.

I still haven't found any introduction to a language that's quite as good as the Easy German/French/Spanish books published by Usborne (although I still liked their earlier incarnation as Learn German/French/Spanish).  Nicole Irvine's basic concept was quite fantastic.  I just wish someone made a DVD of the thing - that would be awesome.  Also, a version for Estonian.

There are dozens of great little courses and programmes out there where the creators/designers are getting little things so very right.  It's a shame we can't suck them all into lovely multi-format introductions to every language.

How not to study for a Linguistics exam

"Oh, my god, Becky - look at her pants
they're so big - they're like one of those grandma undies
Why do grandmas wear those pants
They only wear them because they totally can't wear g-strings
I mean, her pants
They're just so big
I can't believe they're so full
They're just out there
I mean, they're just gross
Look, they're just so... big"

I like big smalls and I cannot lie
You other women can't deny
With your derriere in big underwear
You have a comfy, fully clothed bum...

I'm starting to think I might be easily distracted...

So, as a result of reading "In the Land of Invented Languages" by Okrent (so much to like, and yet... Oh, well, that's for another post), I felt like looking a little further into Interlingua.

The irony of it is that I wasn't terribly interested in Interlingua until I realised Okrent hadn't given any examples of the language in her book.  She'd shown snippets of most of the languages that had warranted a few paragraphs, but not Interlingua.  I noticed she had touched on a bit of the history, but hardly told us anything about the language at all.

So, I looked it up (well, I *am* a librarian)...

And now I'm thinking that Interlingua is pretty cool, and probably worth learning.  I had figured one auxiliary language was probably enough, and Esperanto is the biggest ship in that fleet, but now I see that Interlingua has a lot going for it.

Interlingua was created by a committee of language people who had the job of evaluating the currently existing auxiliary languages and finding the best one.  Instead they just made their own.  It's based on Latin and Greek roots common for most of the Romance languages - which is kind of like Esperanto, only where Esperanto has tried to "spread the love" when it comes to borrowing from other languages and then install a structure that is unique to Esperanto, Interlingua is almost an updated Latin.

This means that if you speak one of the Romance languages (or you've had a lot of exposure to English words from Latin roots), you have a good chance of picking up Interlingua really quickly.  It also means that, if you learn Interlingua, you have a fighting chance of being understood by some passing peasant in the back streets of Italy, Spain, Portugal or Peru.  The language is different to the language spoken in all of these countries, but close enough that you could probably come to an understanding as long as everyone was speaking slowly.

Esperanto seems less "I'm lost, can you help me?" useful than Interlingua, in this regard.  Then again, if you are wondering around the back roads of Europe and trying to find the key to your hotel, I honestly don't know if "Io ha perdite mi clave!" or "Mi perdis mian ŝlosilon!" is going to get you more assistance.  It depends on how far North or West you are, I suppose.

I am still quite taken with the way Esperanto is structured, too.  I love the table of correlatives (I have them on a mug (actually, three mugs (long story))).  And I like the patterns it follows.  I haven't looked far enough into Interlingua, but I know it is trying to be less "artificial", so it is less likely to have that rigidly-consistent-even-when-it's-slightly-ridiculous thing going on.

Yet, I can't help but wonder which of the two languages would be the pick of the crop, if they were equal in all other regards.  They aren't.  Not by a long shot.  Esperanto has enough speakers to populate a (very) small country (Liechtenstein, for example), while Interlingua doesn't have enough speakers to populate a small town.  A hamlet, maybe.  Esperanto has a large body of texts and a large network of connections.  Interlingua has a tiny fraction of that.  Oh, and Esperanto has over 125 years of use behind it, while Interlingua is just over 50 years old.

Still, I can't help but feel learning Interlingua would be totally worth it if I ever decided to travel in Western Europe again (or South America, for that matter) - if for no other reason than it would be a better foundation for learning Italian, Spanish, French or Portuguese.

So, right now I kind of want to learn both.

I think I just heard my Estonian text books whimper.

The best shape of my life

Speaking of body builders, I've caught myself flexing in the mirror a few times lately.

 I have muscles now. It's very strange.

Over the past four years I've overhauled my lifestyle and now I do things like exercise and eat vegetables (actually, I always ate vegetables, but my vegetable-to-nonvegetable ratio has shifted in favour of vegetables).  This proved to be quite a useful thing to do, as I was around 98kg at the time of my cousin's wedding, but last year I got down to 75kg.  It took me over four years to do it, but I think I'm less likely to suddenly put it all back on again.

Since taking up fencing, I've decided I may as well throw my hat into the "sporty" ring at take a stab at being athletic.

As a result, I've developed a bit of muscle definition.  It's quite pleasing, I must say.  It's a lovely little buzz to be able to look in the mirror and see improvements (much better than always seeing something that needs improving).  I'm now 73kg and a respectable amount of that is muscle mass.  My "goal" is 70kg, and I suspect I might make it.

I had a weird thought the other day - I look more like myself now than I have for decades.

I've always hated photos of myself, because they never looked like me.  The version of me that I had in my head did not match the version of me I saw in the photo.

It seems like a strange thing to say, but I feel like I stopped looking like myself after the age of 9 or 10.  If you compared a photo of me at the age of six to a photo at the age of 10, you would be forgiven for thinking the older kid was the uglier, fatter, kind-of-stupid-looking cousin of the younger one.

I can see pictures of myself from when I was a little kid and think "that was me", but for the past twenty years I've looked at pictures of myself and thought "No, that can't be right - I don't feel anywhere near as stupid as that person looks..."

But for the past year or so I've actually seen myself in photos.  I've looked at recent photos and seen the grown up version of the younger kid - the one that looked like me.

And, strangely, I actually feel a bit sharper, too.  A bit more clear-headed and capable of noticing things than I have been for years.  It's like I walked into a fog when I was ten, and I've only recently walked out the other side of it.

I went for a walk on my 33rd birthday and realised that a) I'm in the best shape of my life, and b) I'm probably going to get better before I get worse.

That's a pretty good place to be.

The best shape of his life...?

Earlier in January, I was browsing through the magazines in the sports section of my local newsagent when I noticed a familiar face on the cover of Ironman.

My first thought was "Hey, Michael O'Hearn is still kicking around!"  Which was promptly followed by "What has he done to himself?"  As he was actually featured in an article, not just gracing the cover, I flicked over to see it was titled something like "The Best Shape of His Life".

2004 was the year I discovered body building.  I didn't actually take up body building (as photographic evidence will attest) - I just suddenly became aware of it as something beyond "body builders look weird".  I had developed a strong interest in 1960s Italian Sword and Sandal flicks (Hercules Unchained, Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World, that sort of thing) as well as Tarzan films, and it turns out that a lot of the actors involved in these films (well, the ones who played the leading men, at any rate) were from the American "body culture" scene.  The good old "Muscle Beach" set.

Now, these fine fellows (Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott, to name a couple of my favourites) looked pretty darn muscle-y, but they didn't look like the steroidal monstrosities I had previously associated with body building.  I investigated further, and worked out that the "look" I didn't like in body builders was actually quite recent in the world of body sculpture.  The "classic" body builders of the 50s and 60s looked quite all right, really.

At about the same time I found the short fan film World's Finest, which starred Michael O'Hearn as Superman and Clark Bartram as Batman.  I thought these two men also looked "not completely ludicrous".  They weren't covered with straining, snaking veins trying to escape skin that looked like oiled-up sandpaper.  They didn't look like (to borrow a phrase) "a condom full of walnuts".

When I knew you could still get body builders who looked like this:

I got it.

I realised that body building - or, rather, "body sculpting" - wasn't just about building bigger muscles "no matter what" and constantly pushing beyond the levels of normal human muscle mass. There was an element of "art" to it because the people involved could aim for a particular kind of physique, rather than just constantly trying to be bigger.

It was like when I realised I didn't hate all abstract art - I hated certain styles of abstract art.  Other styles were brilliant.  I don't think all body builders look like they've completely forgotten what human beings are supposed to look like, just a certain style of body builders.  Mike O'Hearn was one of the people that made me realise there were different "looks", and some weren't half bad.

Well, now he looks like this:

The pictures in the article showed a lot more "definition", as they say.  He looks... well he looks like the other guys.  The ones I didn't like.  It's like Dylan going electric.  He's sold out, man.  He's jumped on the "bigger is always better" bandwagon, when I liked him for being more balanced and refined than the other guys.

The article was all about how he's in the best shape of his life, and it doesn't matter what age you are, you can still be bigger, more cut, more ripped - kick it up another notch, find the reason to push harder and heavier...

But, dammit, I liked the shape he had ten years ago. I think he looked better when he was going for quality rather than . "Best shape of his life"? I guess that's subjective.

...if You Do...

Late last year I bought a T-Shirt that says "I'll Learn Esperanto if You Do".  I actually have three of them now, but I only bought one.  Long story.

Anyway, I bought this T-Shirt because I thought it was a fine joke.  The point of Esperanto is that we all agree to learn it for the sake of communicating with other people.  No one has to learn it - no one needs to learn it.  It's just something you choose to do, which only really works if other people choose to do it, too.

However, I recently learnt that there's a deeper level to the joke on my shirt.  When Zamenhof first published his little book trying to convince people to take up a brand-new language, he put something in it:  a form people could sign and return, promising that they would learn the language if 10 million other people agreed to learn it as well.  Right from the very beginning there was an "I'll learn it if you do" challenge built into the language.

According to Okrent, less than a thousand people sent the form back (actually, I seriously doubt the book - which was only published in Russian at the time - would have been printed in a big enough run for ten million forms to even exist...) but that's still around a thousand people who were willing to say "Sure, I'll learn it if someone else does".

And that's how Esperanto works.  That's how any constructed or planned language works - a bunch of people all agree to learn it and speak it, and - hey presto - there's a language.  Without people agreeing to speak it, it's just an academic activity.

I'm reading Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages at the moment, and thoroughly enjoying it.  However, I do have one niggling complaint.  Okrent writes like an apologist who has forgotten what an apologist does.  Instead of saying: "hey, this deserves to be given some respect because it is terribly interesting", she seems to be saying "I'm only looking at this because it's quite interesting, but please don't think I personally have any connection to these people apart from scientific curiosity (I wouldn't want you to think I was weird, or anything)".

I don't know, there's just something about the way she writes that makes it seem like she's desperately hoping she can enjoy the same things the nerds enjoy without getting stuck eating lunch with the nerds every day.

Or, occasionally, it seems more like she's desperately hoping she can enjoy the same things the nerds enjoy without losing the opportunity to laugh at the nerds for enjoying such nerdy things.

There's always something vaguely sad about someone who has to qualify "I'm interested in this" with "but I'm not one of those people who are interested in this".