I'm starting a new blog: Learn Spanish with me! It's going to be about my process of learning Spanish. For today, there's a little about a proverb, "Every pig has its Saint Martin."

"Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know." Michel de Montaigne

Having flirted with conlangs for a few days, I think I'll work instead on becoming truly bilingual in Spanish. (I took a little French in college and spent a semester in France, but my French is no better than mi pobre Español, and it's a long drive to Quebec from Tucson, so Spanish wins.)

Also, French is a beautiful language with a great culture, but it's not even in the world's top ten, where Spanish is giving English a tough run for the number two slot.

Since I'm giving up on conlangs for now, here's an excellent reason to make Spanish the world's auxlang: It's much easier to learn than Chinese or English.

According to The language revolution by David Crystal, Spanish is the world's fastest-growing mother tongue.

Here are the top 11 Most Widely Spoken Languages (1996)

Rank,	Countries2	Population3
language		(in millions)
1. Chinese, Mandarin	Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, Singapore, S. Africa, Taiwan, Thailand	1120
2. English	Australia, Belize, Botswana, Brunei, Cameroon, Canada, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, India, Ireland, Israel, Lesotho, Liberia, Malaysia, Micronesia, Namibia, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Somalia, S. Africa, Suriname, Swaziland, Tonga, U.K., U.S., Vanuatu, Zimbabwe, many Caribbean states, Zambia.	480
3. Spanish	Algeria, Andorra, Argentina, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Rep., Ecuador, El Salvador, Eq. Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Niger, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Spain, Togo, Tunisia, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela.	332
4. Arabic	Egypt, Sudan, ALgeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Lybia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, UAE, Oman, Iraq, Lebanon	235
5. Bengali	Bangladesh, India, Singapore	189
6. Hindi	India, Nepal, Singapore, S. Africa, Uganda	182
7. Russian	Belarus, China, Estonia, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Mongolia, Russia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, U.S., Uzbekistan	180
8. Portuguese	Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, France, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe	170
9. Japanese	Japan, Singapore, Taiwan	125
10. German	Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Czech Rep., Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Paraguay, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland	98
11. Chinese, Wu	China	77.2

I was just in a shop and I heard a song which I assumed was a Christmas song. I mean it's the 21st December, and all the other songs were Christmas songs. I hadn't heard this one before, and it wasn't horrible on first hearing, fairly pleasant tune, which puts it well up on most Christmas songs I haven't heard before. It started off with the night wind telling a little lamb there was a star, the little lamb told a shepherd boy there was a song, the shepherd boy told the mighty king there was a child -- and I thought hang on, it was the kings who told Herod, not the shepherd, but OK -- and then:

Said the king to the people everywhere,
"Listen to what I say!
Pray for peace, people, everywhere,
Listen to what I say!
The Child, the Child sleeping in the night
He will bring us goodness and light,
He will bring us goodness and light."

What is this about, the conversion of Norway? Krishna and Arjuna? Siddhartha? Some story from Papua New Guinea? An alternate history song? I mean fine if it is, but... it isn't.

How can anybody get this story wrong, my goodness that's not at all what the mighty king said in the story of Jesus, the mighty king Herod said "Send the soldiers, kill the baby" and the soldiers got there on December 28th, Feast of the Holy Innocents and killed all the babies in Bethlehem while Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus fled to Egypt.

Yes, it would have been much nicer in the version in the song, especially for all the other babies in Bethlehem and their parents, but nice is not what it's about. It would make a fairly interesting alternate history, too.

My objection to this is not religious -- I've mentioned before that Christianity is my ancestral culture religion but I don't believe in it. My objection is to getting the story wrong. There are any number of ways to tell a story, and any number of things you can change when you re-tell it, but you can't tell lies. You have to be true to the truth of the story you're telling, whether it's the nativity or Cinderella.

Mondo, English subtitles from Enrique Andrés on Vimeo.

Bebo parolas en Esperanto

Both via the Blogo

Learn NOT to speak Esperanto is an amusing rant about Esperanto's shortcomings. Worth reading just for the introduction. And the appendix about sexism is also good. I wonder if the same writer has said anything about Mondlango.

Life is meaningless and full of pain.

I saw this one coming. Three missed field goals will always come back and bite you in the ass.

Great D, but Mark still has a lot of maturing to do.

With the Colts and the Bengals yet to come, I think we can kiss the playoffs goodbye.

And I'm not feeling good about the Giants game tomorrow either.

Esperanto, born in the 1870s, had problems that quickly became obvious. Its inventer, Zamenhof, reluctantly proposed revisions in 1894 that his followers rejected. It's a shame they did: Esperanto might have grown from Old Esperanto to Middle Esperanto to Modern Esperanto in a few decades, and we would all be learning Esperanto in elementary school today.

Esperanto's problems include an alphabet with unique characters and a gendered grammar that, if you're charitable, is quaintly old-fashioned but, if you're blunt, is sexist. I can't imagine it being accepted as an International auxiliary language (IAL) without addressing those flaws.

Alas, Esperantists may have killed all hope of progress for Esperanto in 1905 with a declaration that stated, among other things, that the basis of the language should remain the Fundamento de Esperanto ("Foundation of Esperanto", a group of early works by Zamenhof), which is to be binding forever: nobody has the right to make changes to it.

Esperantists today seem to be divided between Raumists (who promote Esperanto as a language and culture deserving of respect for its own sake) and Finkavists (who promote Zamenhof's dream of Esperanto as the world's IAL).

Because conservatives blocked reform of Esperanto, IAL liberals moved their allegiance to  Ido, a major tweaking of Esperanto that still has advocates. But many Ido supporters moved on to Interlingua, which takes a different approach (see Comparison between Esperanto and Interlingua). From Interlingua's Wikipedia page:

...its vocabulary, grammar and other characteristics are largely derived from natural languages. Interlingua was developed to combine a simple, mostly regular grammar with a vocabulary common to the widest possible range of languages, making it unusually easy to learn, at least for those whose native languages were sources of Interlingua's vocabulary and grammar. Conversely, it is used as a rapid introduction to many natural languages. Interlingua is also unusual for being immediately understandable to hundreds of millions of people who speak a Romance language.

Interlingua would be a great IAL for Europeans, Quebecers, and Central and South Americans, but it's not so useful for Asians, Africans, and English-speakers because it's not as simple as Esperanto, Ido, or Mondlango (the best proposal for an IAL today, IMHO).

Strongly recommended reading: History of Esperanto, a short Wikipedia article that has some charming details about Zaminhof, and a little about Hitler, Stalin, and the Cold War U.S.A. being suspicious of IAL supporters.

A link for Emma: Interlingua and the Man From U.N.C.L.E.

ETA: Robb Kvasnak and His Argument For Esperanto

Tickled pink to be included in Paul Cornell's The 12 Blogs of Christmas (#6: "So What Are You Doing This Christmas?") -
my answer squeezed in between Lois Bujold's & Charles Stross' (dear autopope), a nice place to be!

What we will actually be doing on Dec. 24th is unpacking bags from our current trip: We're on Sanibel Island with my family, unwinding & communing & enjoying the fact that it is not icy and blustery (though I do miss the way the City shuts down under severe weather, and everything gets magical). We barely made it - not because of the snow, but the NYC traffic! We actually did miss our flight out on Thurs. night - first time that's ever happened, though Delia is always convinced it will - imagine, if you will, a white-knuckle taxi ride every time! But when we still hadn't gotten across the TriBoro 40 minutes before takeoff, I phoned NWA & admitted defeat, and they booked us (yes, with appropriate penalties, but not too heartstopping) on a flight the next morning. So we went to this great little place I know ("Hotel Chateau Riverside"), and made popcorn and watched Harry Potter & the Amazingly Dim Adults, and set the alarm.

I hate having to pay the Stupidity Tax (- Who knew we should have left 2 hrs to get to LaGuardia at rush hour before Xmas?), but sometimes you just gotta. At least you get infrastructure & services.

Happy holidays to all, esp those who are enjoying the storm!

I mentioned a little while ago that "Three Twilight Tales", my short story from Firebirds Soaring is going to appear in the Strahan and the Horton Year's Best volumes.

I've now found out that Escape to Other Worlds With Science Fiction, which appeared on Tor.com and which is set in the US in the Small Change universe, is going to appear in the Dozois Year's Best. This is incredibly cool, partly because I very seldom write short stories and therefore it's lovely to have two different ones in three different Year's Best anthologies, and partly because I've been buying the Dozois anthologies every year for at least twenty years. So appearing in that is extra exciting because it feels... canonical. Also, in addition to whatever I get paid, I'll save the money I'd otherwise have spent on buying it.

So that makes me feel all happy and bouncy.

Yesterday, Z made the exact same joke that I made in this post in 2003. "I don't know much about Art... except about the time he went off to Egypt and bought a bunch of papyruses," he said.

Also, he spontaneously made carandol's pun where I say "We need [something we happen to need]" and the response is "No, we knead bread."

Then there's a thing I read on the back of a matchbox when I was a kid. (Can you imagine being desperate enough for things to read that you'd read the back of a matchbox? Or if you did that it would have anything worth remembering?) The joke was two people on a pier. One says "Isn't it windy? The second says "No, I think it's Thursday." The first replies "So am I, let's have a cup of tea." I told Z this joke when he was a child of an age to appreciate it, and he took to it, and so occasionally when it's windy (though not usually windy enough that you can't hear what the other person's saying) and one of us remarks on it the other will respond with "No I think it's Thursday" and so on. The thing is that both his girlfriend and rysmiel have picked this up -- it's odd to think of this little bit of a matchbox joke lasting so well and gaining a wider audience after so long. You never know what people will remember, and take up. I imagine someone paid to write matchbox jokes and having six to do before knocking-off time scribbling that one down and being mildly pleased when it passed muster and was printed and never imagining that more than thirty years later it would be appreciated by a new generation. I mean it's not Shakespeare or Douglas Adams, it was only a matchbox.

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist is doing one of their famous contests, for two Advanced Reading Copies of SUICIDE KINGS signed by all of the contributors.

For details as to how to enter, go to

http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2009/12/win-autographed-advance-reading-copy-of.html

Good luck to all.

Since writing L.L. Zamenhof: Who He Was, Why He's on Google and Homaranismo and conlangs, I've gotten a bit obsessed about language as a way to world peace. I always thought Esperanto was cool, but its time had passed. I'm not so sure of that now, but I think Mondlango should be the focus of all fans of a worldwide second language, and its time is now. Here's why:

1. The world is in transition between two world languages, English and Chinese. Both are very hard for non-native speakers to learn (and not all that easy for native speakers who believe there is a "correct" form of their language). This is a perfect time to push for an alternative that's far, far easier to learn than either.

2. Mondlango was created primarily by Chinese thinkers who built on Esperanto (a primarily European conlang) while recognizing the importance and usefulness of English in the world today. It is the most international conlang that I know of.

The "official"* Mondlango site is a good place to start your googling.

* From here:

Strictly speaking, in the realm of Monda, there are founders and followers, but there is no creator. Most vocabularies in Monda are not arbitrarily created, but are derived from the Indo-European language family (especially from English ). Zamenhof , being the author of Esperanto, was also the vanguard of Monda. Monda was born in July 2002. The major founder of Monda is HeYafu, the other founders are Wangli, Qijiaqin, Luoxinxing, Arbsemo, Kulturo, Chenruihua , Zangyuhai, Niyundong, Zhaozhonghua, Oscar Mifsud , David Curtis , Dominique Kuster , Matthew Martin, J Duke and Daniel Carrera.

ETA:



The language challenge -- facing up to reality

Is there any evidence that "hate crime" laws are effective?

RIP Dan O'Bannon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Og_YsaXt4&feature=related

He'll be best remembered for ALIEN, but DARK STAR has a fond place in my heart as well. I hope somewhere he's surfing down like a meteor as "Benson, Arizona" plays on the cosmic soundtrack.

Though there probably is something in this that gun buffs don't know: Why Do Rappers Hold Their Guns Sideways?

 A friend who's been on LJ for a good while is unable to leave a comment on my LJ. My current settings are for anyone to comment, and anonymous commenters to be screened. I've never banned anyone and don't even know where to look to see if he got accidentally banned somehow.

If you can't comment here, email me at gmail, where I'm shetterly. My LJ Fu is very weak. Sorry 'bout that!

ETA: I found where banning happens. I banned a spammer once, but its name is nothing like huladavid 's.

All I Want for Christmas Is... Jews -Faux Mariah Carey has a surprisingly profound insight: "They may have killed our savior; that's not the best behavior. That's okay, he rose three days later." Any Christian who ever heard, "They killed Jesus," should've answered, "What kind of crazy talk is that? Jesus lives."

Actually, they should've answered that the Romans caught, tried, and crucified Jesus, but faith is not about facts--it's not even about the facts offered in a faith's favorite text.

Heading off to Sanibel tonight for the Annual Winter Visit with Ellen's folks. Historically, internet access has been spotty there--which is actually a Good Thing, given my current FaceBook and LJ-reading habits. If I can, I'll post a review of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which we saw over the weekend and loved. If I can't, I'll write it there and post it when I get home on the 23rd. And I'll write. I've been struggling, piecing together hours here and hours there--making progress, but very slowly and with no sense of continuity. So my mission (which I've decided to accept) is to: 1) Get something like a zero draft of "The Mystery (or possibly Ghost) of Cwmlech Manor" (because "The Ghost in the Machine," although a much snappier title, is a total spoiler). 2) Get the proposal for The Dragon of Wall Street in shape to send to My Board of Advisors and Plot Doctors. 3) Read a couple of mss I've long promised to comment on. If I read the mss on the plane, this is a reasonable number of things to do (consonant with, you know, actually interacting with Ellen's family, who I like very much and enjoy interacting with) in 4 full days without messing around with email and LJ and so on. And yes, I'll tell you whether I did them or not when I get back.

From Stand up for “christmas”?

Let’s start rating companies on whether they DO Christ-like things, rather than on whether the under-paid clerk says “Merry Christmas” as you’re checking out.

Away with your noisy hymns of praise! I will not listen to the music of your harps. Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice, an endless river of righteous living. ~ Amos 5:23-24

The godly care about the rights of the poor; the wicked don’t care at all. ~ Proverbs 5:7

Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you. ~James 1:27

You know what offends me? It’s not whether someone says “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas”. It’s when I read that L.L. Bean, Pier 1, and Walmart are known to be actively and intentionally using slave labor in their products. I don’t give a shit how many “Merry Christmas” signs they have in their store, as if that makes one flying fuck’s worth of difference when they are participating in the enslavement of women, men, and children who are created in the image of God. Focus on the Family gives them 12-14% offensive ratings, and 52-71% friendly ratings. No mention of child slavery. No mention of beating or firing workers trying to unionize to protect themselves. No mention of the workers who have died at the factory making the cheap furniture you bought at Ikea. How does “Standing for Christmas” have ANYTHING to do with Christ?

Truly He taught us to love one another
His law is love and his gospel is peace.
Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother.
and in his name all oppression shall cease.
~ “O Holy Night”, Placide Cappeau de Roquemaure, 1847

The sent me looking for a good version of "O Holy Night." I found Weezer's, but I like this better:

Pass the current bill. Start on the next one in January.

Slouching Toward Health Care Reform asks two essential questions: "Why hasn't Reid forced much of the bill into reconciliation, requiring only 51 votes? Why has the President been so cowed?"

Anonymous giver, thank you! This means I'll go back to cross-posting everything from my main blog to LJ. So if you're currently following my LJ feed, itsallonething, please follow willshetterly instead, where I'll be sure to see your comments.

Don't blame me. Blame the giver.

P.S. Posts from my main blog are automatically forwarded to FaceBook (willshetterly) and Twitter (willshetterly).

Will

As we continue trying to get rid of Stuff we don't have room for in our apartment, Ellen experiences anguish over the fate of a very battered comforter (which once had matching curtains made of sheets, sewn by her late grandmother, sniff!):

- I know; but it's my last link with the past....

- Honey, you still have many links with the past.

(Would that be the overflowing endless boxes of papers & books & T-shirts & ....?)

Not having a basement or an attic truly sucks.

We were supposed to have an electricity outage this morning for Hydro Quebec to do some work. I arranged to go over to Z's for breakfast. When I got there, his electricity was out along the whole street -- entirely unplanned by anyone. In addition, mine didn't go out after all, they're going to do whatever it was on Friday instead. Z and I went out for breakfast muttering about irony.

It's snowing, and the piled snow on rooftops is the same colour as the sky, making it look as if there's no dividing line. The Olympic Tower, which is normally very visible from Z's street, was just barely distinguishable as a very slightly different shade of white, or whiter shade of pale. There's no wind, so the trees are all limned with snow and the fir trees look as if they're posing for a recitation of "How lovely are your branches". It's very very pretty, but very easy to miss it while trudging through it because you have to watch your footing and therefore your feet.

My awesome Caterpillar boots are beginning their eighth winter and are as solid and well-made as ever. They are a marvel of engineering and design and far and away the best footwear I have ever had. Women's footwear is generally designed to fall apart after a few months of regular wear, as if everyone has thirty pairs of shoes and only wears any given pair a handful of times. I think I've bought eight pairs of sandals in that same nine years, and they've had much less hard wear as summer isn't as rough on them as winter is on the boots. Caterpillar are amazing, long may they go on designing hardwearing earthmoving equipment and boots.

Tor.com posts recently:
Foolproof Holiday Gift Books. The prose version of the poem I posted here yesterday.
What has gone before? How I hate summaries at the beginning of books, with interesting comments by people pointing out ways in which they are better than some of the alternatives.
The Viscount of Adrilankha -- I did all three volumes as one post so that I can have 17 Dragaera posts altogether. This is mad, because I'd have got paid three times as much for three posts, but anyway.
(If you want to comment on any of these, please do it there, not here.)

In other reading, Marge Piercy's new poetry collection The Crooked Inheritance. It's weird to read new anti-war poems from her, I mean ones about ongoing war. I'm so familiar with her anti-Vietnam poems, and Vietnam is history to me. It's just weird. Some lovely poems generally, including one great one about pesto with a surprise ending.

Dozens of books, grouped by theme, to help gift shoppers find just the right book for the readers on their lists Montreal Gazette, Saturday December 12th 2009.

Books, yet, you remember those things
rectangular and full of words
we used to choke on them in school?
My friends don't want them,
but you can't choose your relations
and how much less your partner's family
(though why I have to buy for them I don't know)
December, honestly,
the shops are all heaving,
I'd become a Jew in December
if it wasn't for bacon,
look at the length of this list
and in the snow too!

So this is a godsend,
letting me know what to buy
for geeky cousin Kevin
and weird Auntie Jo
I can duck into that book shop
(only in December!)
but handy in big piles by the door,
and they're an easy shape to wrap, of course,
though I can't think why they like them:
A Book of Christmas Miracles
The Secret Life of Grace Kelly
Canada's Olympic History
Diet Secrets of the Stars.

It was a good day to be wearing green in the NFL.

The Jets won their morning game convincingly, even with Mark Sanchez nursing his knees back in New York City and Kellen Clemens playing abysmally in his stead. Hardly mattered. Gang Green's running game was hitting, and the defense played lights out. Of course, they were in Tampa Bay playing this year's Bucs, so it hardly counted. Josh Freeman, the heralded Bucs rookie QB, looked just awful, but maybe some of that was Rex Ryan's D. Still, these Bucs are so bad they ought to make them go back and wear the creamsicle uniforms until they start playing better.

The Jets are still in the playoff hunt, but just barely. They pretty much have to win out, and with the Colts and the Bengals on their schedule, I think that's unlikely. And next week they have to beat Atlanta, who have a bad record but gave the Saints all they could handle today.

Green Bay won as well. Another "green" team.

And, sadly, this evening the midnight green Iggles of Philadelphia defeated my Giants in a heartbreaker. All the talking heads are saying what a great game it was. Pfui. It was an EXCITING game, yes. The G-Men came out stumbling and spotted the Iggles to a two touchdown lead, then battled back for the rest of the game. Every time they closed the gap to one score the Eagles would get punch in another one and widen it again. Finally the Giants managed to take a one-point lead at 31-30... only to have the Eagles get a long TD on the very first play after the kickoff. The scoring continued after that, and finally ended 45-38 in favor of Philadelphia. The Giants racked up a ridiculous number of passing yards, and both teams left points on the board. McNabb missed one wide-open receiver who was streaking downfield for what should have been a certain touchdown, receiver Mario Manningham of the G-Men had two endzone receptions disallowed for having one foot out of bounds, and his fellow wideout Hakeem Nicks had a couple of TD passes bounce off his hands. There was also a Giants linebacker who dropped what would have been a certain pick-six served up by McNabb. It too bounced off his hands. (And weirdly, it wasn't a pass after all, but a forward fumble, but after our LB dropped it players on both teams just ignored the live ball lying there on the grass). There were fumbles, a punt return for a TD, an freaky pass broken up by an Eagle that caromed off his thigh into the hands of the Giants tight end... lots of crazy, colorful, thrilling stuff. Both teams played hard.

But a great game? Pfui. For fans like me, who appreciate defense, it was far from that. Neither team brought their defense, from what I saw. The Giants certainly proved themselves unable to stop the Eagles. After ranking as the best defense in the NFL at season's start, our D has fallen apart. Especially the pass rush. McNabb had all day back there. Eli played one of the best games I have ever seen him play -- his stats were off the charts, and would have been obscene if Manningham could have stayed in bounds and Nicks could have caught the balls that were bouncing off him -- despite the fact that he was under pressure every snap. McNabb, on the other hand, could have filled out and filed his tax return in the pocket on a couple of those plays. What the hell happened to the Giants' fearsome pass rush? We have the same players as last year and the year before. With added depth; by rights we should be better. But Bill Sheridan, our new defensive coordinator, does not have them playing the same agressive attacking style that Spags did last year, that has made a world of difference. Sheridan needs to go. I want my Big Blue D back. I like winning games 13-10 much more than losing them 45-38.

Oddly, despite the loss, the Giants may still have a better chance of making the playoffs than the Jets do, provided the Cowboys continue their traditional December collapse. But I am not holding my breath. Next week's game against the Redskins has the look of a classic trap game. After getting up emotionally for the big games against Dallas and Phillie, the Giants are all too likely to suffer a bad letdown against the Skins and get upset, which would effectively end their season. I've seen it happen before. And Washinton is better than its record. And even if they get past the Skins, the Vikings are waiting at season's end. The only silver lining in the clouds over the Meadowlands is the fact that the Giants own the tiebreakers over the Cowboys, so if both teams finish with the same record, New York goes to the playoffs and Dallas stays home. But right now Dallas is a game up.

Life is magical... but full of pain.

If anyone had told me at the beginning of the year that in less than ten months I'd be making things like this



I'd have laughed at them. Or maybe not; but I would definitely have laughed if they'd told me by the end of the year I'd not only own one of these




but would have learned to operate and bought one of these



Happy birthday to me.

Those of us who know Emma, or have read her work, or heard her sing, think this is a very, very fine day, because we are all ecstatic to know there is a her in the world.

I can think of many national holidays that could be replaced by a celebration of the existence of Emma Bull.

Originally published at Words Words Words. Please leave any comments there.