When the UN controls the internet are they going to start locking out nations that dont subscribe to certain charters
Right. The UN is hardly known for its tough sanctions. Anything along these lines would have to pass through the security council, and the US is in it, as well as its major rivals. The rest of the world is better off avoiding the security council if they want to gang up on the US. Handing over "control" of the Internet to the UN is the most effective way of making sure it will never be put to effective use as an instrument of power politics.
But of course the reality is that countries can take this "control" away from the UN as easily as they can take it from the US. The Internet depends on voluntary cooperation. What really gives you a bargaining position is infrastructure and content, and the US has been losing market share in that area, and will lose even more in the future, simply because the rest of the world is catching up.
There is no property issue here. Taking "control" from the US is merely an issue of reconfiguring DNS in your own country: no goods are taken away from the US, its citizens, or its companies, and the permission of the US is not required. Neither is a democratic majority of the world population. The reason to bring this into the UN is to coordinate the operation.
What's next? The US complaining if countries X and Y decide not to trade oil to eachother anymore in US dollars, or if country Z decides not to use operating systems from a US company anymore? "Control over DNS" is not an entitlement. It's simply what happened when countries connected to the Internet and didn't fix a thing that wasn't broken. Since the US started talking about "cyber warfare" many countries started to realize that DNS as it works now is broken, at least from a military strategic point of view. It is not surprising that the countries most worried about it are exactly those that the US likes least.
Cars don't own the road. Bikes are traffic too. Also keep in mind the speed limit is the maximum permissible speed according to the law. That means if it is wet or dark or sunny or anything that impedes your driving ability the law says you MUST go slower, and in fact you may NEVER go faster regardless of the circumstances. I don't feel bad riding my bike on the roads, cars have to share even if they don't want to.
Well said. Here in Amsterdam, where there are lots of bicyclists, and lots of foreigners, compared to most of the Netherlands, bicyclists are not uncommonly killed by foreigners driving trucks or rental cars.
They fail to check in the mirror for bicyclists to their right side when they turn right because they simply never learned to, and are often simply unaware that bicyclists have the right of way when going straight ahead because they never thought about it. This is not even a specifically Dutch rule: certainly in the EU the bicyclists in principle rank as a "driver" on equal footing with motorized drivers in traffic rules.
In areas with few bicyclists biking is dangerous because drivers haven't learned to deal with it, and because it is dangerous there are few bicyclists. I have driven cars in most of western Europe. In my own experience bicyclists in most countries behave much more defensively than the traffic rules of the country suggests they should.
Anyway, it's just a matter of priorities: put tram lines or bus lanes in the middle of the major roads and spacious bicycle lanes with a clear color marking along the sides, all at the expense of car lanes. Teach people to give right of way to public transport and bicycles and to stay off those lanes, to only cross them when they can safely clear them. Soon the bus and bike will be faster and more convenient than the car in congested areas.
Folded cars only confirm that even people traveling only within the congested area insist on taking the space of a car. That's not very helpful.
What's your point? First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
The principle articulated here is usually called "separation of church and state" (quoting Jefferson) by those who value precision, and "freedom of religion" by those who don't, and simply means 1) no endorsement or support of a religion, and 2) no prohibition of its competitors, or of exercise of religion in general. When a state meets this ideal, it is a "secular" state. For democracies it turns out to be hard to establish a secular tradition, since politicians are constantly rewarded for attracting attention to their religion.
If you apply any kind of analytical model in a generic search engine like Google, you increase recall at the expense of precision, certainly for pages that don't explicitly encode their language. My big problem now with using search engines like Google is the ambiguity between last names (spears) and acronyms (owl) on the one hand, and normal words I am searching for. Applying morphological rules makes this problem even worse.
I once saw a demonstration of an experimental search engine for (Dutch) historical documents that, besides applying some morphological rules, also applied phonetic chain shifts and changes in orthography backwards. This works quite well for Dutch (orthography changes by government decree and, as the English Wikipedia article puts it, "Dutch orthography has the reputation of being particularly logical") and makes even Middle Dutch documents properly searchable. Of course it was applied to a specific corpus of old legal material.
Google is already quite mediocre at telling apart Dutch pages from pages in other northwestern European languages, and the more rules you add to generate alternative word forms, the crappier it will become as the number of alternative explanations for a certain word form increases and the search engine can no longer tell, based on its analytical model alone, whether a page with little text is for instance English, Dutch, or Danish.
On the basis of statistical argument it is obviously quite easy to decide that a page is more likely to be modern English than historical Dutch, and it is also statistically more likely that I am searching for Britney Spears than the plural of spear, but if Google goes to far with applying rules, at some point I will no longer be able to find the spear because of Spears.
This is less of a problem with languages that require a specific alphabet (which provides useful metadata), or with associated populations that are largely monolingual and mainly use software localized for their own market, than with languages like Dutch that make use of digraphs instead of diacritics, use any character set that includes a-z indiscrimately, and often use English-only software, or software with locale set to US English.
It's a good initiative. It's certainly more useful than sending starving pastoralists in the Sahel bags of food after their lifestock already died of starvation.
The One Cow per Child Project (OCPC) applauds this initiative. The One Cow per Child Project (OCPC) needs your charity donation to save children from cowlessness. For only $1 a day you can feed a cow and make a child happy! Thank you for your attention.
I also make infrequent anonymous edits, always within my field of expertise, on relatively obscure subjects, sourced, and with a proper explanation on the discussion page, which are generally accepted. One of the problems I have with sourcing is that the sources I use are sometimes in another language than the Wikipedia entry I am making a edit to, making it difficult to verify.
An even bigger problem is the following: A legal-historical edit of mine was once reverted and questioned because it referred to journal articles reviewing historical evidence available in JSTOR (usually accessible to universities), and conflicted with "free" sources on the same concept. The "expert" could not access the articles. This was not a subject where you see opposing factions in historical literature: it was simply a case - one of many - of popular received history and modern academic history being at odds with each other. With popular received history I mean mainly historical speculations, or even historical fiction, by great writers (mostly 17th to early 20th century) on subjects they knew little about, like the classical and middle ages, that have entered public consciousness as historical fact. The problem here is that communis opinio leads to the wrong result: the sources people are most likely to be exposed to are simply wrong or misleading.
So the other big dilemma with "good faith" and well-researched entries for the editor/administrator should be: if this is at odds with what I (think I) know about the subject, who is right?
Yet, we shouldn't forget the ice age won't last forever;-)
That was my first thought when I read this: it's a new tactic by Big Oil to keep us addicted to fossil fuels, now that Big Al's propaganda campaign decided the climate change debate. They are aiming for a compromise: we must cut carbon emissions before 2200.
I don't think there is a relation between the size of communities and having a language authority. Most small languages don't have any form of language authority, not even a newspaper, that can make decisions on changing the language. French has a language authority. Anyway, Dutch orthography changed in 1804, 1883, 1934, 1947, 1996, and 2006: that's not every 5 years and it is orthography, not language. Even the pannekoek -> pannenkoek change does not change the word: same phonemes, same meaning, only added an n that is not pronounced.
Also, the way I pronounce English is already much closer to what a native speaker would do compared to how my parents pronounce English, a result of new technology (mass media) evening out global differences.
Your exposure is primarily to native English media. What if Dutch media switched to English, and you started speaking English inside the home? This would set a new standard for pronunciation, as most of your exposure would now be to others who make the same errors. I have a number of eastern European and Chinese colleagues at work who are an example of this phenomenon: we speak English to eachother all the time, and over time they tend to adopt some of our flaws because we outnumber them and there are no native speakers around.
American English itself is an example of this: most immigrants were not English, resulting, firstly, in a form of English that is pronounced differently, and secondly in a general relaxation of what is considered proper pronunciation of English.
You may be right, but for the wrong reason. It may be the case that we will be actually more exposed to media (Internet) than to other human beings in the future, and some (many?) people maybe already are. But this has little to do with Darwin and small, isolated communities. This has more to do with a Darwinesque survival of the most-used language constructs in the mind of the individual speaker, the original thesis of this topic.
Here in the Netherlands being "deported" in practice means being in detention centers indefinitely for many people since the countries of origin either refuse to accept them or give no diplomatic assurances they won't torture or kill them. The government is not being squeamish or anything: it for instance deported to Syria knowing that people may disappear there, because Syria did give assurances. Deporting them to Germany or Belgium because they passed through them doesn't really help since they can just take the train back. It's a fake solution unless the country of origin cooperates very well and the borders are really closed. Being on an island really helps.
Another compelling example is Bhutan, which scores really well, but has little natural economic advantages.
If it however were simply a matter of culture one wouldn't for instance expect to find Singapore in every top ten of least corrupt states. Surely similar cultures would have similar corruption scores, but many other countries that have Chinese and/or Malay culture (Malaysia, Indonesia, China) score considerably worse. North and western Europe are relatively unique as a contiguous block of countries with little corruption.
I have no doubt that bureacratic integrity or corruption become part of a culture, and can linger on for some generations even if the original circumstances that favoured corruption/integrity disappear, but it is not the sole cause. Wealth in itself is not a major cause. More important than wealth per se are factors like whether corruption pays, perceptions of the government and its legitimacy, and of national solidarity, and the sources and distribution of wealth.
Corruption pays if for instance the people paying the bribes can easily afford the bribe, and for the people receiving them it is a lot of money. The risk is low, and the incentive big. Western tourists in this sense help create a culture of corruption. Another example is rich people in poor countries paying a bribe to get a treatment in hospital or a phone line now instead of in 6 months like the other paupers.
North and western Europe are typical in having a relatively high degree of trust in the government and firmly entrenched bureaucratic traditions (betrayed for instance by the fact that many of the high performers remained monarchies even when the rest of Europe was violently overthrowing them: Bhutan is also a monarchy). Here bureaucratic integrity basically perpetuates itself culturally, since the aura of integrity is probably one of the motivations for a public service career choice. Besides that, small scale corruption hardly pays here: only for instance real estate developers etc. can afford significant enough incentives to tempt public servants.
Singaporeans all know their wealth depends on trade. Their location is their only natural asset, and competing slightly less good locations, for instance on the Sunda Strait, exist, so they must compete. A reputation for corruption would be a disaster for them. On the other hand in many other countries, where location or educated workforce is not an asset, the major source of GDP is having companies from other, more developed, countries pay for a concession to pump oil, mine diamonds, clear tropical forests, etc, while the majority of the population are subsistence farmers and are hardly involved in any economic activity with eachother. They may still be wealthy, if they have very valuable resources, but it is narrow income base that is to easy to monopolise.
In this kind of economy the "American dream" is to be the guy that decides who gets the concession to mine or cut, or one of his cronies, and if the state also has different ethnic factions (i.e. lack of national solidarity) you have a recipe for rampant bribery, nepotism, cronyism, etc as the currently ruling ethnic faction tries to transfer as much wealth as they can to their own ethnic group before they are thrown out and the process starts again.
This intuitively feels wrong to me. Do you have a source for this? Language constructs don't behave like finches in my opinion. The adoption of English by large numbers of non-native speakers over the last centuries would typically favour increased variety in phonology and introduction of loan words due to substrate interference. Compare the development of Latin into the Romance languages.
I don't buy the statement about English and Dutch. The number of Romance loan words is for instance much lower than in English (see Wikipedia, article on Dutch). As far as speech and grammar are involved, Wikipedia states the following in the 'History of Dutch' article: "Linguistically speaking, Dutch has evolved little since the late 16th century; differences in speech are considered to be negligible especially when comparing the older form with modern regional accents. Grammar has been somewhat simplified though, but a great deal of the grammar lost in contemporary Dutch is preserved in many much-used expressions dating back to or before that time." The only thing that changes slower in English would seem to be orthography, but that can be simply explained with the fact that Dutch has a hyperactive language authority that defines what correct Dutch is, and English doesn't. Written Dutch from the 1500s onwards is largely similar to modern Dutch, barring some consistently applied orthographic changes in the last decades. No huge changes there if you look past the spelling. There is also a recent influx of English loan words, but this has little to do with the size of language communities per se. German never had a big influence, despite its size, and neither did English before television and Internet.
And Dutch is obviously not even a good example of a small isolated community, considering its location, population size, economy, and widespread multilingualism. Would you also claim that, let's say, Icelandic changes more than English or Dutch because Iceland is a smaller community?
If the Internet would turn the world into one big English speaking community, English would probably get completely remodeled in the process. If I, as a former speaker of Dutch, would start to speak English to my 1 year old child (who in reality starts crying if I have visitors who don't speak Dutch), he will start making the same phonological errors that I, and the other around him, make when speaking English like, most noticeably, excessive terminal devoicing. Exposure to correct phonology on television will not remedy that. Italians will make a mess of the determiners and excessively voice terminals, etc. The end result will be that English accepts all these things as correct varieties of English since we have all become native speakers, and the dominant phonology will probably be the one derived from Chinese.
Something else may happen that would help English to resist change, at least as a written language: it might become a secondary, and mostly written, lingua franca instead of replacing other languages. This is likely to happen, but has little to do with Darwin's finches. This is a conscious choice on the part of its speakers to use English as a communication device with people far away, and not with your own family.
I had the same thought: dictionaries and spell checkers certainly change the equation.
I am also pretty sure that occurrence, however low frequency, in the (early 17th century) standard bible text has been a near guarantee against change for the last centuries for my language.
Also a factor is the recent arrival of recorded speech that could very well have an impact on how people speak and write for generations to come.
The golden standard for speaking appears to be 1950s news readers and politicians here. This point of reference would have been impossible without recorded speech.
This is different for languages that have a language authority: if there is a standard, there is also an objective way to measure performance of speakers relative to this standard. And obviously, if you can educate native speakers in the use of their own language, you may have an implicit standard. And even if you have the standard, it surprisingly isn't necessarily the most important prestige dialect, and the standard is not always modeled on a living prestige dialect.
The standard for Dutch (basically derived from "biblical Dutch") for instance apparently takes a lot of input from Dutch from Brussels, Belgium, in the 16th century, but Brussels has changed into a French-speaking city in the following centuries, and this prestige dialect is now very dead. Now the dialects in certain rural areas around the major cities in the Netherlands are considered the closed matches to the standard, but these have no special prestige.
The printing press was a major incentive to standardise spelling
Certainly, but the major reason that early middle ages writing is completely incomprehensible as opposed to late medieval writing may be simply that there was no idea of orthography or language education at all for commoner's languages in the early middle ages. The first written sources may have been almost as incomprehensible then. The major incentive to write comprehensibly is having readers.
The tiny percentage of the population that was literate only had an education in writing Latin: they apparently made up an orthography on the spot when for some reason they wanted to write down something in a commoner's language.
This is certainly for some of the first fragments of continental germanic languages. Hardly any pair of early sources use the same orthography, even when they were written in the same age and place. The same author often doesn't use the same orthography for, for instance, roots of the same verb, and in some cases cannot even correctly mark word boundaries, which makes one suspect that the author had little knowledge of the language he was writing down, which may be a third language for him used only for simple communication with the natives. More specifically: some of the first authors of germanic languages may be for instance French clerics, educated in Latin, who write something down for the illiterate natives they work for. The West Franconian sentence in the (latin) Salic Law is a typical example.
The printing press is the next step: it creates standard languages and orthographies for larger areas as publishers define their markets.
The League Against Democracy *wants* you to think that democratic political parties make a farce out of democratic elections themselves. Its members spread FUD, volunteer for campaigns and polling stations, they run as candidates, they even *win* occasionally and wreck the system from the inside, they give blowjobs to honest politicians, basically anything that furthers the cause of destroying the demon of democracy.
The organization (if you want to call it that) has a cell structure: its members don't know eachother and have no way of recognizing eachother. They may be running against eachother. They may be giving eachother blowjobs...
The Netherlands Indies are the same thing as the Dutch East Indies, right?
Nederlands-Indië, also often referred to in English as Dutch East Indies, which sounds like an anachronism to me. The Dutch East Indies dates from the time (pre-Napoleonic era) when it was distinguished by the Dutch from its nearby colonies on the Indian subcontinent (lost in 1815) and the islands in the west indies in the Americas which were known as Netherlands Antilles in 1940.
I don't buy into that conspiracy theory.
Me neither. The people in the colonial administration intentionally provoked an attack on themselves and where a bit disappointed when it turned out they were basically standing alone because the US was not ready. Besides that they felt they had specifically warned the US for the Pearl Harbor attack, and they were already wary of US attitude towards the colonial empires. Fertile grounds for suspicions of Roosevelt's motives.
Probably Roosevelt simply felt that he could not admit that he knew the boycott would lead to attack by taking warnings seriously and preparing the navy. The operation was optimized for public opinion effect, not for minimizing military damage.
The US had threaten to prevent Japan's further expansion into the Pacific, and the US repeatedly denied any sort of conference to negotiate any sort of peace that would enable the Empire of Japan to gather much needed resources to fuel their war machine. I doubt US leaders knew that 2000 lives would be lost from taunting Japan into an attack, but I do not doubt that they were aware that Japan would attack so they could move into Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, etc for the industrial resources they had. (I forget the names of these places during the War, the names are new)
You mean the Netherlands Indies (Indonesia) and French Indochina (in Southeast Asia). Singapore belonged to the British Empire. Retelling it from the Dutch historical perspective:
Before WWII the Netherlands and Japan traditionally had a cordial relationship, even to the point of the US refusing, even after the Netherlands in Europe was occupied by the Nazis, to sell weapons to the Netherlands because a Netherlands-Japan alliance was a potential threat to the American Phillipines etc. The Netherlands Indies and the US were the major exporters of oil to Japan, and the Netherlands Indies was its major source of metals and rubber. The Netherlands Indies was also its major export market. Japan has no appreciable resources of its own as is generally known.
After early 1940 the Netherlands and France were occupied, and Britain was obviously otherwise engaged, making their colonies sitting ducks, and Japan and the US the only relevant powers in the area.
The Netherlands and Britain had good reason to try to induce Japan into a war with the US since this would give Roosevelt an excuse to proclaim war on the Nazis. The method was simple: Japan was to be convinced that there was a defence alliance between the European colonies and the US, and when Roosevelt at some point started an oil boycott against Japan the Netherlands Indies immediately followed, leaving Japan without oil imports and just a few weeks to react before oil supplies ran out.
We know the result: Japan struck at Pearl Harbor first and then started an attack in the direction of the Netherlands Indies oil refineries.
There are a few mysteries: 1) was the US goverment an active participant in the attempt to draw the US into the war, a passive accomplice, or was it simply naive? 2) What was the point of concentrating US forces in Hawaii?
On the second point which has in the past given rise to conspiracy theories in the Netherlands: The Dutch and British obviously wanted the US to take on Japan before it conquered colonies, as they realized that getting colonies back from the US could turn out to be a problem. In the case of the Dutch the loss of the Netherlands Indies effectively made it irrelevant as a partner to the other allies as it losts its resources, its last industry, and its last military units (including its fleet which was lost in the battle of the Java sea). So their preferred scenario was obviously that the US would concentrate their forces in the Phillipines and succesfully defend it.
The most obvious explanation is that Roosevelt correctly evaluated Japan's military strength, felt the US was unable to handle a surprise attack, and incorrectly believed he moved the most important assets out of harm's way by putting them in Hawaii.
The conspiracy theory is that Roosevelt coordinated the whole thing, and, besides fooling US public opinion into thinking that Japan attacked them out of the blue, also intentionally sacrificed part of his fleet to let the Japanese overrun the European colonial empires so that they could be dismantled by the US.
The crescent was adopted from the Sassanid empire as a sort of symbol of imperial authority, just like the many eagles in European heraldry were copied from the Roman empire.
non-English language presence on the Web is growing at a faster pace than English
The discussion we see here in the comments is mixing up two things: many tiny languages are going extinct, but probably not because of English or Chinese, or any putative lingua franca, but largely because of the ongoing consolidation of national languages and regional languages.
The use of English as a lingua franca is less off a threat to small languages than mobility of speakers between language areas and marriages between speakers of different languages. As long as English is something you speak outside the house it will remain a second language. Only a similar language you speak outside the house enters the house because it is normative.
There are now also a number of new consolidated regional languages, particularly in Europe, with a recently invented orthography, their own wikipedia, etc. In the process of consolidation language differences disappear to get the required market size. This is bad for historical linguistics but not for language diversity per se.
I agree English is not very suitable, and not particularly succesful, as a lingua franca, but it seems we are stuck with it as long as Hollywood doesn't make esperanto movies.
Slashdot Mirror
When the UN controls the internet are they going to start locking out nations that dont subscribe to certain charters
Right. The UN is hardly known for its tough sanctions. Anything along these lines would have to pass through the security council, and the US is in it, as well as its major rivals. The rest of the world is better off avoiding the security council if they want to gang up on the US. Handing over "control" of the Internet to the UN is the most effective way of making sure it will never be put to effective use as an instrument of power politics.
But of course the reality is that countries can take this "control" away from the UN as easily as they can take it from the US. The Internet depends on voluntary cooperation. What really gives you a bargaining position is infrastructure and content, and the US has been losing market share in that area, and will lose even more in the future, simply because the rest of the world is catching up.
There is no property issue here. Taking "control" from the US is merely an issue of reconfiguring DNS in your own country: no goods are taken away from the US, its citizens, or its companies, and the permission of the US is not required. Neither is a democratic majority of the world population. The reason to bring this into the UN is to coordinate the operation.
What's next? The US complaining if countries X and Y decide not to trade oil to eachother anymore in US dollars, or if country Z decides not to use operating systems from a US company anymore? "Control over DNS" is not an entitlement. It's simply what happened when countries connected to the Internet and didn't fix a thing that wasn't broken. Since the US started talking about "cyber warfare" many countries started to realize that DNS as it works now is broken, at least from a military strategic point of view. It is not surprising that the countries most worried about it are exactly those that the US likes least.
Cars don't own the road. Bikes are traffic too. Also keep in mind the speed limit is the maximum permissible speed according to the law. That means if it is wet or dark or sunny or anything that impedes your driving ability the law says you MUST go slower, and in fact you may NEVER go faster regardless of the circumstances. I don't feel bad riding my bike on the roads, cars have to share even if they don't want to.
Well said. Here in Amsterdam, where there are lots of bicyclists, and lots of foreigners, compared to most of the Netherlands, bicyclists are not uncommonly killed by foreigners driving trucks or rental cars.
They fail to check in the mirror for bicyclists to their right side when they turn right because they simply never learned to, and are often simply unaware that bicyclists have the right of way when going straight ahead because they never thought about it. This is not even a specifically Dutch rule: certainly in the EU the bicyclists in principle rank as a "driver" on equal footing with motorized drivers in traffic rules.
In areas with few bicyclists biking is dangerous because drivers haven't learned to deal with it, and because it is dangerous there are few bicyclists. I have driven cars in most of western Europe. In my own experience bicyclists in most countries behave much more defensively than the traffic rules of the country suggests they should.
Anyway, it's just a matter of priorities: put tram lines or bus lanes in the middle of the major roads and spacious bicycle lanes with a clear color marking along the sides, all at the expense of car lanes. Teach people to give right of way to public transport and bicycles and to stay off those lanes, to only cross them when they can safely clear them. Soon the bus and bike will be faster and more convenient than the car in congested areas.
Folded cars only confirm that even people traveling only within the congested area insist on taking the space of a car. That's not very helpful.
I imagine that I will teach my 10 months old son my prejudices later, just like I am teaching him right now not to torture the cat.
What's your point? First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
The principle articulated here is usually called "separation of church and state" (quoting Jefferson) by those who value precision, and "freedom of religion" by those who don't, and simply means 1) no endorsement or support of a religion, and 2) no prohibition of its competitors, or of exercise of religion in general. When a state meets this ideal, it is a "secular" state. For democracies it turns out to be hard to establish a secular tradition, since politicians are constantly rewarded for attracting attention to their religion.
If you apply any kind of analytical model in a generic search engine like Google, you increase recall at the expense of precision, certainly for pages that don't explicitly encode their language. My big problem now with using search engines like Google is the ambiguity between last names (spears) and acronyms (owl) on the one hand, and normal words I am searching for. Applying morphological rules makes this problem even worse.
I once saw a demonstration of an experimental search engine for (Dutch) historical documents that, besides applying some morphological rules, also applied phonetic chain shifts and changes in orthography backwards. This works quite well for Dutch (orthography changes by government decree and, as the English Wikipedia article puts it, "Dutch orthography has the reputation of being particularly logical") and makes even Middle Dutch documents properly searchable. Of course it was applied to a specific corpus of old legal material.
Google is already quite mediocre at telling apart Dutch pages from pages in other northwestern European languages, and the more rules you add to generate alternative word forms, the crappier it will become as the number of alternative explanations for a certain word form increases and the search engine can no longer tell, based on its analytical model alone, whether a page with little text is for instance English, Dutch, or Danish.
On the basis of statistical argument it is obviously quite easy to decide that a page is more likely to be modern English than historical Dutch, and it is also statistically more likely that I am searching for Britney Spears than the plural of spear, but if Google goes to far with applying rules, at some point I will no longer be able to find the spear because of Spears.
This is less of a problem with languages that require a specific alphabet (which provides useful metadata), or with associated populations that are largely monolingual and mainly use software localized for their own market, than with languages like Dutch that make use of digraphs instead of diacritics, use any character set that includes a-z indiscrimately, and often use English-only software, or software with locale set to US English.
It's a good initiative. It's certainly more useful than sending starving pastoralists in the Sahel bags of food after their lifestock already died of starvation.
The One Cow per Child Project (OCPC) applauds this initiative. The One Cow per Child Project
(OCPC) needs your charity donation to save children from cowlessness. For only $1 a day you
can feed a cow and make a child happy! Thank you for your attention.
Well, it's definitely a breakthrough in the War on Optimism.
I also make infrequent anonymous edits, always within my field of expertise, on relatively obscure subjects, sourced, and with a proper explanation on the discussion page, which are generally accepted. One of the problems I have with sourcing is that the sources I use are sometimes in another language than the Wikipedia entry I am making a edit to, making it difficult to verify.
An even bigger problem is the following: A legal-historical edit of mine was once reverted and questioned because it referred to journal articles reviewing historical evidence available in JSTOR (usually accessible to universities), and conflicted with "free" sources on the same concept. The "expert" could not access the articles. This was not a subject where you see opposing factions in historical literature: it was simply a case - one of many - of popular received history and modern academic history being at odds with each other. With popular received history I mean mainly historical speculations, or even historical fiction, by great writers (mostly 17th to early 20th century) on subjects they knew little about, like the classical and middle ages, that have entered public consciousness as historical fact. The problem here is that communis opinio leads to the wrong result: the sources people are most likely to be exposed to are simply wrong or misleading.
So the other big dilemma with "good faith" and well-researched entries for the editor/administrator should be: if this is at odds with what I (think I) know about the subject, who is right?
Yet, we shouldn't forget the ice age won't last forever ;-)
That was my first thought when I read this: it's a new tactic by Big Oil to keep us addicted to fossil fuels, now that Big Al's propaganda campaign decided the climate change debate. They are aiming for a compromise: we must cut carbon emissions before 2200.
Most of us are descended from the best and brightest who escaped the shitty hell of other nations...
That's nothing. Most of us Europeans are descended from Brutus of Troy, Jesus's child with Mary Magdalene, Charlemagne, and the lost tribe of Israel.
I don't think there is a relation between the size of communities and having a language authority. Most small languages don't have any form of language authority, not even a newspaper, that can make decisions on changing the language. French has a language authority. Anyway, Dutch orthography changed in 1804, 1883, 1934, 1947, 1996, and 2006: that's not every 5 years and it is orthography, not language. Even the pannekoek -> pannenkoek change does not change the word: same phonemes, same meaning, only added an n that is not pronounced.
Also, the way I pronounce English is already much closer to what a native speaker would do compared to how my parents pronounce English, a result of new technology (mass media) evening out global differences.
Your exposure is primarily to native English media. What if Dutch media switched to English, and you started speaking English inside the home? This would set a new standard for pronunciation, as most of your exposure would now be to others who make the same errors. I have a number of eastern European and Chinese colleagues at work who are an example of this phenomenon: we speak English to eachother all the time, and over time they tend to adopt some of our flaws because we outnumber them and there are no native speakers around.
American English itself is an example of this: most immigrants were not English, resulting, firstly, in a form of English that is pronounced differently, and secondly in a general relaxation of what is considered proper pronunciation of English.
You may be right, but for the wrong reason. It may be the case that we will be actually more exposed to media (Internet) than to other human beings in the future, and some (many?) people maybe already are. But this has little to do with Darwin and small, isolated communities. This has more to do with a Darwinesque survival of the most-used language constructs in the mind of the individual speaker, the original thesis of this topic.
Here in the Netherlands being "deported" in practice means being in detention centers indefinitely for many people since the countries of origin either refuse to accept them or give no diplomatic assurances they won't torture or kill them. The government is not being squeamish or anything: it for instance deported to Syria knowing that people may disappear there, because Syria did give assurances. Deporting them to Germany or Belgium because they passed through them doesn't really help since they can just take the train back. It's a fake solution unless the country of origin cooperates very well and the borders are really closed. Being on an island really helps.
Another compelling example is Bhutan, which scores really well, but has little natural economic advantages.
If it however were simply a matter of culture one wouldn't for instance expect to find Singapore in every top ten of least corrupt states. Surely similar cultures would have similar corruption scores, but many other countries that have Chinese and/or Malay culture (Malaysia, Indonesia, China) score considerably worse. North and western Europe are relatively unique as a contiguous block of countries with little corruption.
I have no doubt that bureacratic integrity or corruption become part of a culture, and can linger on for some generations even if the original circumstances that favoured corruption/integrity disappear, but it is not the sole cause. Wealth in itself is not a major cause. More important than wealth per se are factors like whether corruption pays, perceptions of the government and its legitimacy, and of national solidarity, and the sources and distribution of wealth.
Corruption pays if for instance the people paying the bribes can easily afford the bribe, and for the people receiving them it is a lot of money. The risk is low, and the incentive big. Western tourists in this sense help create a culture of corruption. Another example is rich people in poor countries paying a bribe to get a treatment in hospital or a phone line now instead of in 6 months like the other paupers.
North and western Europe are typical in having a relatively high degree of trust in the government and firmly entrenched bureaucratic traditions (betrayed for instance by the fact that many of the high performers remained monarchies even when the rest of Europe was violently overthrowing them: Bhutan is also a monarchy). Here bureaucratic integrity basically perpetuates itself culturally, since the aura of integrity is probably one of the motivations for a public service career choice. Besides that, small scale corruption hardly pays here: only for instance real estate developers etc. can afford significant enough incentives to tempt public servants.
Singaporeans all know their wealth depends on trade. Their location is their only natural asset, and competing slightly less good locations, for instance on the Sunda Strait, exist, so they must compete. A reputation for corruption would be a disaster for them. On the other hand in many other countries, where location or educated workforce is not an asset, the major source of GDP is having companies from other, more developed, countries pay for a concession to pump oil, mine diamonds, clear tropical forests, etc, while the majority of the population are subsistence farmers and are hardly involved in any economic activity with eachother. They may still be wealthy, if they have very valuable resources, but it is narrow income base that is to easy to monopolise.
In this kind of economy the "American dream" is to be the guy that decides who gets the concession to mine or cut, or one of his cronies, and if the state also has different ethnic factions (i.e. lack of national solidarity) you have a recipe for rampant bribery, nepotism, cronyism, etc as the currently ruling ethnic faction tries to transfer as much wealth as they can to their own ethnic group before they are thrown out and the process starts again.
This intuitively feels wrong to me. Do you have a source for this? Language constructs don't behave like finches in my opinion. The adoption of English by large numbers of non-native speakers over the last centuries would typically favour increased variety in phonology and introduction of loan words due to substrate interference. Compare the development of Latin into the Romance languages.
I don't buy the statement about English and Dutch. The number of Romance loan words is for instance much lower than in English (see Wikipedia, article on Dutch). As far as speech and grammar are involved, Wikipedia states the following in the 'History of Dutch' article: "Linguistically speaking, Dutch has evolved little since the late 16th century; differences in speech are considered to be negligible especially when comparing the older form with modern regional accents. Grammar has been somewhat simplified though, but a great deal of the grammar lost in contemporary Dutch is preserved in many much-used expressions dating back to or before that time." The only thing that changes slower in English would seem to be orthography, but that can be simply explained with the fact that Dutch has a hyperactive language authority that defines what correct Dutch is, and English doesn't. Written Dutch from the 1500s onwards is largely similar to modern Dutch, barring some consistently applied orthographic changes in the last decades. No huge changes there if you look past the spelling. There is also a recent influx of English loan words, but this has little to do with the size of language communities per se. German never had a big influence, despite its size, and neither did English before television and Internet.
And Dutch is obviously not even a good example of a small isolated community, considering its location, population size, economy, and widespread multilingualism. Would you also claim that, let's say, Icelandic changes more than English or Dutch because Iceland is a smaller community?
If the Internet would turn the world into one big English speaking community, English would probably get completely remodeled in the process. If I, as a former speaker of Dutch, would start to speak English to my 1 year old child (who in reality starts crying if I have visitors who don't speak Dutch), he will start making the same phonological errors that I, and the other around him, make when speaking English like, most noticeably, excessive terminal devoicing. Exposure to correct phonology on television will not remedy that. Italians will make a mess of the determiners and excessively voice terminals, etc. The end result will be that English accepts all these things as correct varieties of English since we have all become native speakers, and the dominant phonology will probably be the one derived from Chinese.
Something else may happen that would help English to resist change, at least as a written language: it might become a secondary, and mostly written, lingua franca instead of replacing other languages. This is likely to happen, but has little to do with Darwin's finches. This is a conscious choice on the part of its speakers to use English as a communication device with people far away, and not with your own family.
I had the same thought: dictionaries and spell checkers certainly change the equation.
I am also pretty sure that occurrence, however low frequency, in the (early 17th century) standard bible text has been a near guarantee against change for the last centuries for my language.
Also a factor is the recent arrival of recorded speech that could very well have an impact on how people speak and write for generations to come.
The golden standard for speaking appears to be 1950s news readers and politicians here. This point of reference would have been impossible without recorded speech.
This is different for languages that have a language authority: if there is a standard, there is also an objective way to measure performance of speakers relative to this standard. And obviously, if you can educate native speakers in the use of their own language, you may have an implicit standard. And even if you have the standard, it surprisingly isn't necessarily the most important prestige dialect, and the standard is not always modeled on a living prestige dialect.
The standard for Dutch (basically derived from "biblical Dutch") for instance apparently takes a lot of input from Dutch from Brussels, Belgium, in the 16th century, but Brussels has changed into a French-speaking city in the following centuries, and this prestige dialect is now very dead. Now the dialects in certain rural areas around the major cities in the Netherlands are considered the closed matches to the standard, but these have no special prestige.
The printing press was a major incentive to standardise spelling
Certainly, but the major reason that early middle ages writing is completely incomprehensible as opposed to late medieval writing may be simply that there was no idea of orthography or language education at all for commoner's languages in the early middle ages. The first written sources may have been almost as incomprehensible then. The major incentive to write comprehensibly is having readers.
The tiny percentage of the population that was literate only had an education in writing Latin: they apparently made up an orthography on the spot when for some reason they wanted to write down something in a commoner's language.
This is certainly for some of the first fragments of continental germanic languages. Hardly any pair of early sources use the same orthography, even when they were written in the same age and place. The same author often doesn't use the same orthography for, for instance, roots of the same verb, and in some cases cannot even correctly mark word boundaries, which makes one suspect that the author had little knowledge of the language he was writing down, which may be a third language for him used only for simple communication with the natives. More specifically: some of the first authors of germanic languages may be for instance French clerics, educated in Latin, who write something down for the illiterate natives they work for. The West Franconian sentence in the (latin) Salic Law is a typical example.
The printing press is the next step: it creates standard languages and orthographies for larger areas as publishers define their markets.
If you can find non-democratic states that actually works for the average Joe without the risk of being shot or imprisoned you can tell us...
Vatican City.
The League Against Democracy *wants* you to think that democratic political parties make a farce out of democratic elections themselves. Its members spread FUD, volunteer for campaigns and polling stations, they run as candidates, they even *win* occasionally and wreck the system from the inside, they give blowjobs to honest politicians, basically anything that furthers the cause of destroying the demon of democracy.
The organization (if you want to call it that) has a cell structure: its members don't know eachother and have no way of recognizing eachother. They may be running against eachother. They may be giving eachother blowjobs...
The Netherlands Indies are the same thing as the Dutch East Indies, right?
Nederlands-Indië, also often referred to in English as Dutch East Indies, which sounds like an anachronism to me. The Dutch East Indies dates from the time (pre-Napoleonic era) when it was distinguished by the Dutch from its nearby colonies on the Indian subcontinent (lost in 1815) and the islands in the west indies in the Americas which were known as Netherlands Antilles in 1940.
I don't buy into that conspiracy theory.
Me neither. The people in the colonial administration intentionally provoked an attack on themselves and where a bit disappointed when it turned out they were basically standing alone because the US was not ready. Besides that they felt they had specifically warned the US for the Pearl Harbor attack, and they were already wary of US attitude towards the colonial empires. Fertile grounds for suspicions of Roosevelt's motives.
Probably Roosevelt simply felt that he could not admit that he knew the boycott would lead to attack by taking warnings seriously and preparing the navy. The operation was optimized for public opinion effect, not for minimizing military damage.
The US had threaten to prevent Japan's further expansion into the Pacific, and the US repeatedly denied any sort of conference to negotiate any sort of peace that would enable the Empire of Japan to gather much needed resources to fuel their war machine. I doubt US leaders knew that 2000 lives would be lost from taunting Japan into an attack, but I do not doubt that they were aware that Japan would attack so they could move into Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, etc for the industrial resources they had. (I forget the names of these places during the War, the names are new)
You mean the Netherlands Indies (Indonesia) and French Indochina (in Southeast Asia). Singapore belonged to the British Empire. Retelling it from the Dutch historical perspective:
Before WWII the Netherlands and Japan traditionally had a cordial relationship, even to the point of the US refusing, even after the Netherlands in Europe was occupied by the Nazis, to sell weapons to the Netherlands because a Netherlands-Japan alliance was a potential threat to the American Phillipines etc. The Netherlands Indies and the US were the major exporters of oil to Japan, and the Netherlands Indies was its major source of metals and rubber. The Netherlands Indies was also its major export market. Japan has no appreciable resources of its own as is generally known.
After early 1940 the Netherlands and France were occupied, and Britain was obviously otherwise engaged, making their colonies sitting ducks, and Japan and the US the only relevant powers in the area.
The Netherlands and Britain had good reason to try to induce Japan into a war with the US since this would give Roosevelt an excuse to proclaim war on the Nazis. The method was simple: Japan was to be convinced that there was a defence alliance between the European colonies and the US, and when Roosevelt at some point started an oil boycott against Japan the Netherlands Indies immediately followed, leaving Japan without oil imports and just a few weeks to react before oil supplies ran out.
We know the result: Japan struck at Pearl Harbor first and then started an attack in the direction of the Netherlands Indies oil refineries.
There are a few mysteries: 1) was the US goverment an active participant in the attempt to draw the US into the war, a passive accomplice, or was it simply naive? 2) What was the point of concentrating US forces in Hawaii?
On the second point which has in the past given rise to conspiracy theories in the Netherlands: The Dutch and British obviously wanted the US to take on Japan before it conquered colonies, as they realized that getting colonies back from the US could turn out to be a problem. In the case of the Dutch the loss of the Netherlands Indies effectively made it irrelevant as a partner to the other allies as it losts its resources, its last industry, and its last military units (including its fleet which was lost in the battle of the Java sea). So their preferred scenario was obviously that the US would concentrate their forces in the Phillipines and succesfully defend it.
The most obvious explanation is that Roosevelt correctly evaluated Japan's military strength, felt the US was unable to handle a surprise attack, and incorrectly believed he moved the most important assets out of harm's way by putting them in Hawaii.
The conspiracy theory is that Roosevelt coordinated the whole thing, and, besides fooling US public opinion into thinking that Japan attacked them out of the blue, also intentionally sacrificed part of his fleet to let the Japanese overrun the European colonial empires so that they could be dismantled by the US.
The crescent was adopted from the Sassanid empire as a sort of symbol of imperial authority, just like the many eagles in European heraldry were copied from the Roman empire.
non-English language presence on the Web is growing at a faster pace than English
The discussion we see here in the comments is mixing up two things: many tiny languages are going extinct, but probably not because of English or Chinese, or any putative lingua franca, but largely because of the ongoing consolidation of national languages and regional languages.
The use of English as a lingua franca is less off a threat to small languages than mobility of speakers between language areas and marriages between speakers of different languages. As long as English is something you speak outside the house it will remain a second language. Only a similar language you speak outside the house enters the house because it is normative.
There are now also a number of new consolidated regional languages, particularly in Europe, with a recently invented orthography, their own wikipedia, etc. In the process of consolidation language differences disappear to get the required market size. This is bad for historical linguistics but not for language diversity per se.
I agree English is not very suitable, and not particularly succesful, as a lingua franca, but it seems we are stuck with it as long as Hollywood doesn't make esperanto movies.