Diacritiques

A new group blog, a “Community Euroblog”, as they call it: Viewropa. It is beautifully designed, multilingual (English posts dominate, but when you register, you can set your preferred interface language), and pursues a worthy goal:

… to provide a space for informed, intelligent presentation and civilised discussion of European issues, news and events

Via Madame Martin, a new group blog in French that I found via Language Hat.

And I had hoped that this sort of, er, innovation would remain a UK-only phenomenon, as far as Europe is concerned. But no, the British are exporting their services to the German land (federal state) of Hesse, which is getting Germany’s first partially privatised prison. It’s not as if north of the Channel some people hadn’t already discovered that privatisation isn’t a panacea against state spending. German law doesn’t allow for private companies to fulfill all the duties that come with running a prison. Yet, says my inner cynic. And you wonder why some of us are despairing over the EU.

To spell out why I feel so strongly about this: There are two main reasons. First, the state (some Americans prefer the term “government”) has a monopoly on the use of force, and reserves itself the right to punish; this creates an obligation to assume the dirty work that punishment entails. Second, while some private companies will obviously benefit from the existence of the prison service (at the very least, suppliers, building contractors and the like), I believe that creating an economic incentive for, on the one hand, raising the number of inmates, and on the other hand, employing/keeping them in a way that generates a profit is an unhealty (and morally questionable) approach.

P.S.: I couldn’t resist to point to this.

Edit: I just discovered that the Netherlands does it, too.

Mark Liberman at Language Log has posted a second transcribe-and-guess-the-language quiz. I believe most readers of this blog interested in this sort of question, so you probably know this already. As one of those who got the first one right, I couldn’t resist of course. (More seriously, though, it’s an excellent exercise.)

I have followed my new fondness of wikis and used first my local one, then my new (and still quite empty) online wiki to work progressively on my solution. To be fair, my brother and I conferred a bit on Jabber: he was surprisingly enthusiastic, and provided support and his remarks.

Now, the wiki page (which has a timestamp) won’t be changed (spelling errors and all) until Mark has come out with the solution.

Once the work was as complete as it’s likely to get, I did have a look to find out whether caelestis at sauvage noble might have taken up the challenge, too. It turns out he has — I swear, I didn’t change a letter of my wiki post after looking, and won’t.

Caelestis’ transcription and mine are reasonably similar. He transcribes some sounds as a where I opt for an (open) o, and he might be right. Especially if the language is Somali or a close relative. His morphological analysis is more sophisticated than mine. He rejects Somali, however, on grounds of prosody. I’m not so sure about that. Somali is supposed to have tonal accent (caelestis calls it “pitch accent” for the samples), which is a point in favour. Still, I’m far from convinced myself.

Edit: My certainty level, which has been rising over the day after listening to the Somali recordings on this site (via caelestis) , has just taken another hike. Thanks to my dear brother, who doesn’t have a web presence yet (even though his sister has been nagging). Mark Liberman’s tantalizing “European Event” immediately made me think of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s murder — but I failed to see the in reality obvious connection to Somalia: His film Submission about violence against women, which is said to contain a harsh criticism of Islam, was written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and now a liberal (ie conservative) member of parliament in the Netherlands. Letters containing death threats against her were pinned to his body with a knife.

Update: The mystery language was indeed Somali. I have updated the documentation of my efforts on the wiki — conclusions and general remarks added.

US elections provide us with our four-yearly dose of US geography. Some sites have published maps that are more interesting and illuminating than the standard state-by-state red-and-blue ones. Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber has posted a county-by-county map that comes from (Associated Press via) USA Today . His post is a bit terse because the […]

Well, the fat lady hasn’t sung yet, officially. A friend on irc, on the other hand, says she’s singing right as I type this. Or he? What’s the appropriate pronoun gender for a fat lady who is neither fat nor a lady? Be that as it may, even though there’s no much doubt that, barring […]

We’re way behind schedule as indicated on various election guides/cheat sheets. Not that I feel like going to bed. Still, why is it that the US with all their high-brow electoral technology (optical scanners at least, voting computers in many cases), which ought to give instant readouts as soon as the polls close, take at […]

The big US election day is, where I live, technically over, and the first states are about to close their polling stations. This is about the worst day it could have happened: my ADSL connection is down and has been for over ten hours now. DSLAM non joignable (unreachable) says my ISP’s network status page. […]

… to birthday girl Lisa (in German), my niece, who is six today. I haven’t been able to see her in years, which makes me sad (except for today, of course). On the pictures I’ve been getting, she looks joyful and boisterous, and I am just happy about that .

First of all, I was right, and so was caelestis at (or le?) sauvage noble: the mystery language is Romansh. It is interesting to look at the differences between our approaches. Caelestis writes in his comment section: For the record, I should state that all I went on was the MP3, the exercise having […]

Which file extension are you? I’m an .rpm: You have a nice package. You can be useful, but your many variations sometimes make you tough to find. You aren’t apt to get jealous. Surprisingly accurate for such a random collection of questions. The only problem with it, I’m using Debian Linux, so .deb would […]