Peer Wandel Hansen has created a number of virtual keyboards:

Do you want to write the letters and scripts from around the world, then pick from the list below. The message you write can be included in Web-documents and Email without using Graphics or extras. Use the “keyboard” at the bottom of these pages and copy’n’paste the HTML codes to your Email or HTML program. Try my Multi Language Virtual Keyboard where I remap your US-keyboard to write some of these scripts. If you see a lot of ??? below, your browser is not supported.

The scripts are Arabic (العربية), Japanese (ひらがな, カタカナ), Greek (Αλφάβητο), Georgian (ქართული), Armenian (Հայերէն), Hebrew (ורמ – עברית), Korean (한국어를), Indian (Devnagari, देचनागऐ), Chinese (汉字练习纸), Russian (Кирилица), pan-Ēŭŗôpěąņ enhanced alphabet, Tamil (தமிழ), and Thai (ภาษไทย) (“Oh it bring back memories of spicy Siam. Words that are a great mystery to me and have looong word that become entire sentances.”). He’s extremely concerned (to the point of constant pop-up warnings) to let you know that it’s only guaranteed to work in Internet Explorer, but Firefox seems to be OK with it. (Via Mithridates.)

The new movie The Interpreter doesn’t sound very good (reviews use words like “bloated” and “hooey”), but the gimmick of an invented language, Ku, provided with grammar and vocabulary by an actual linguist can’t help but attract my interest; fortunately, Mark Liberman of Language Log has done the necessary spadework, and you can read all about it in his posts Ku? and Ku Two. A particularly useful find was this page, which explains the background and the associated culture, and says:

Although known as ‘Ku’ to foreigners, the actual language spoken by the Tobosa people of the fictional Democratic Republic of Matoba is indigenously known as Chitobuku, literally meaning ‘the language of the Tobosa people’. Ch’itoboku is the only surviving ancient Bantu language, and the Tobosa oral traditions indicate that ‘Ku’ is the root of modern Bantu languages spoken in contemporary sub Saharan Africa. The structure of Ch’toboku is characterised by its use of indicators to make up words. For example, ‘tobo’ is the root and ‘sa’ is the indicator for ‘they’. There is no gender distinction as in French, hence the word for ‘he’ or ‘she’ is the same, ‘a’. Verbosity is positively valued in Ch’toboku, and ordinary speech should approximate the elegance of poetry.

(Chi- is a variant of ki-, the class 7 noun prefix in Bantu, frequently used for the names of languages: ki-Swahili, chi-Nyanja.)

To celebrate the birthday of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, and perhaps to tweak him a little (he “wanted to be valued more as an American writer than a Russian one”), I’ll tell the story of how I came to realize what a wonderful Russian writer he was. It took me a little over a paragraph. I had decided (for reasons that escape me now) to read his early novel Zashchita Luzhina (translated as The Defense); Chapter 1 begins with a teasingly vague conversation between a couple who had been worrying about telling their son… something; the father says he took it well. Thank God, says the mother.

The next paragraph starts with the statement that that was a real relief, and continues: Все лето – быстрое дачное лето, состоящее в общем из трех запахов: сирень, сенокос, сухие листья – все лето они обсуждали вопрос… [Vsyo léto – býstroye dáchnoye leto, sostoyáshcheye v óbshchem iz tryókh zápakhov: sirén’, senokós, sukhíye líst’ya – vsyo leto oní obsuzhdáli voprós…: ‘The whole summer – the quick dacha summer, consisting on the whole of three smells: lilac, haymaking, dry leaves – the whole summer they had discussed the question…]. I was stopped in my tracks by the phrase set off by dashes; not only did the phrase siren’, senokos, sukhiye list’ya [lilac, haymaking, dry leaves] brilliantly sum up the experience of a summer in the country by means of three distinctive smells corresponding to the early, middle, and late parts of the season, but the phrase itself, with its seductive sibilants and perfectly placed vowels (soo-KHEE-ya LEES-tya), sank instantly into the memory like a lyric poem. I repeated it to myself, enjoying its taste on my tongue, and continued reading with the comfortable feeling that I was in the hands of a writer who would continually surprise and delight me. I was not disappointed.

Incidentally, as I was turning this post over in my mind my wife said to me “Are you going to do a post on Nabokov, since it’s his birthday?” Memo to those who wish to preserve a facade of impenetrable mystery: do not get married.

“Book arson ‘a Taleban-style’ act,” by Subir Bhaumik of BBC News:

Officials of a prestigious library in India’s north-eastern state of Manipur say nearly 145,000 books have been destroyed in an arson attack.

Protesters demanding the introduction of Manipur’s ancient Mayek script set fire to the Central Library in Manipur’s capital Imphal on Wednesday.

Officials say many of Manipur’s most ancient texts were among the books destroyed by the fire.

The arsonists want the Mayek script to replace Bengali script in the state…

Earlier this month, Manipur’s vernacular newspaper editors agreed to print their broadsheets in both Bengali and Mayek scripts under pressure from Meelal and groups supporting them.

But the state government insists that it will only introduce Mayek gradually, because its sudden introduction could cause problems for a generation of Manipuris who are not familiar with the ancient script.

Analysts say that has upset Meelal and groups like the KCP. They say the library was burnt because almost all Manipuri books preserved in it were written in Bengali script.

I got this appalling story from qB at frizzyLogic, who points out that “when the Mayek script was replaced by the Bengali script in the 18th century it was accompanied by a mass-burning of books in the Mayek script. Or so says this site devoted to the Meitei Mayek script.” Tit for tat: the great motivator of human history.

I’ve just run across a wonderful blog called “Dick & Garlick: Notes on Indian English, Hinglish, Tamlish, Bonglish & other -lishes.” The last entry was on November 19, 2004; I hope that it’s simply having a nice rest rather than being defunct, because it’s a stylish, hilarious, and well-informed look at the forms of English spoken on the Indian subcontinent. The first entry that caught my eye was Hazaar fucked; hazaar (or more scientifically hazār) ‘thousand,’ a Persian loan word, has been combined with a widespread English participle to produce a memorably resonant phrase, the subject of the following quote from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August:

“Amazing mix, the English we speak. Hazaar fucked. Urdu and American,” Agastya laughed, “a thousand fucked, really fucked. I’m sure nowhere else could languages be mixed and spoken with such ease.” The slurred sounds of the comfortable tiredness of intoxication, “‘You look hazaar fucked, Marmaduke dear.’ ‘Yes, Dorothea, I’m afraid I do feel hazaar fucked’—see, doesn’t work”.

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My all-time favorite comment thread is this one, which was ignited by a post about a poem, “A Dish of Peaches in Cluj,” by Maria Benet (there’s a nice piece by Beth Ashley about her in the Marin Independent Journal). I am happy to report that the poem is included in her new collection, Mapmaker of Absences (published by Sixteen Rivers Press), a gorgeous book inside and out—even the table of contents is unusual and pleasing to the eye. You can read a couple of the poems at the book site; here’s a couple more. First, another poem about her native city:

Cluj
    after William Carlos Williams

Trunks by the door
blue and gold

obscured in dim light—
smell of dust—

Sun of early morning—
on the wood floor

a wood frame, the picture
missing, next to it

scissors are lying—and the
cavernous empty room

(That’s the first of “Three American-Style Studies of a Landscape Rendered Foreign,” the third of which is “Peaches in Cluj.”) Another:

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The poet Brian Kim Stefans, a favorite here at LH, has written a review of W.S. Graham’s New Collected Poems that makes me want to run out and buy it. I was not familiar with Graham, but this five-line snippet, all by itself, tells me I’m in the presence of a major talent:

Yesterday
I heard the telephone ringing deep
Down in a blue crevasse.
I did not answer it and could
Hardly bear to pass.

Read the longer excerpts quoted by Stefans and see what you think. (Warning: occasional use of Scots dialect. Also, there seems to have been an HTML glitch that caused a large chunk of the review to be repeated; when you finish the poem beginning “Who is that poor sea-scholar,” scroll down until you get past its second occurrence and begin reading at the next paragraph, “In general, Graham’s poems favor the cyclic over the linear…”)

(Via wood s lot, which I have to thank for pointing me to Stefans in the first place.)

Christopher Culver has written an impassioned essay, “Why Esperanto Suppresses Language Diversity”, about why he has withdrawn from the Esperanto movement. Basically, his point is that despite its rhetoric about supporting language diversity, the movement is actually interested only in supporting Esperanto use, and in practice works to suppress diversity as exemplified by the use of other languages. He says:

Esperanto is so strongly obligatory that its use is expected among any two Esperantists even if they speak the same native language. The act of using one’s native language with an Esperantist of the same mother tongue, referred to with the Esperanto neologism krokodilado, is one of the great taboos of the Esperanto movement and generally invites a scolding from other members of the movement.
The argument may arise that people attend congresses for the sake of practicing Esperanto and therefore it is inappropriate to speak other languages. The first response is that, provided that they understand one another, it is never inappropriate for two people to speak the native language of one or the other, for to do otherwise is to rule out any true cultural exchange. A second response is that Esperantists cannot be expected to limit this insistence on Esperanto to congresses, for many Esperantists look to congresses as ideal environments. Many times have I heard some Esperantist say “How I wish the whole world were like an Esperanto congress!” The norms of congresses, including the censure of the use of any language other than Esperanto, would serve as models for all international communications, as well as for communication in international contexts between two people of the same native language.

He also says that “in sheltering them entirely from the local language, congresses give participants no true contact with the host country.” An interesting take on a movement I don’t know much about, and I’ll be curious to see what better-informed readers have to say.

Chris Tessone passed on to me the information that version 4.1.0 of the Unicode Standard has been published.

The following complete scripts have been added in Unicode 4.1.0:
* New Tai Lue (U+1980..U+19DF)
* Buginese (U+1A00..U+1A1F)
* Glagolitic (U+2C00..U+2C5F)
* Coptic (U+2C80..U+2CFF)
* Tifinagh (U+2D30..U+2D7F)
* Syloti Nagri (U+A800..U+A82F)
* Old Persian (U+103A0..U+103DF)
* Kharoshthi (U+10A00..U+10A5F)

To celebrate the occasion, R.M.Cleminson, Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Portsmouth, has prepared a new edition of the Budapest Glagolitic Fragments, fully Unicode-compliant; having downloaded the font he provides, I can now see the Glagolitic in all its weird glory, and if the idea appeals to you, you can do the same.

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In a sense, it’s unfair to blame William Safire for the false information he purveys in today’s column, since he’s taking it directly from a published book (by a linguist, no less) rather than making it up or vaguely recalling something somebody once told him. But I’m going to blame him anyway, because if he took more trouble to check his sources, he wouldn’t be so prone to these embarrassing gaffes. The one that gets my goat today is a nonexistent “Russian word” that’s been spreading across the internet like kudzu for years and that Safire has doubtless given vigorous new life to: “razbliuto, ros-blee-OO-toe, ‘a feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but no longer feels the same way about.'” Safire is quoting Christopher Moore’s In Other Words, a collection of “words and phrases that are impossible to translate neatly into English.” [I have deleted a lazy and unfair comment on Moore; now that I am working on a similar book myself, I realize how impossible it is to control every item, and it is clear to me that Moore was the victim, not the perpetrator. My apologies, sir!] In this case, Moore clearly picked up the “word” from another such book (they must be popular, because they keep getting published), I suspect Howard Rheingold’s 1988 They Have a Word for It, where it appears as “razbliuto (Russian): the feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but now does not.” Rheingold (who “writes on subjects involving science, technology and computers”) has the elementary decency to say where he got his entries, and this one comes from J. Bryan III’s 1986 Hodgepodge. There the trail goes cold, since I don’t have a copy of that “literate, lifelong miscellany, illuminated with flashes of comedy and rue” (if any readers can get their hands on one, please let me know if Bryan provides a source), but it doesn’t really matter. The origin is not as important as the basic fact that (listen up, now) there is no such Russian word. When I bought Rheingold’s book I was charmed by the definition but found the word impossible to analyze (the prefix raz- ‘dis-, un-‘ made sense, but the rest didn’t), and it was not in my dictionaries; as I’ve acquired more and better dictionaries, my suspicion grew into a certainty, and has been confirmed by a very funny thread at the group blog dirty.ru, where a member posted the following back in January:

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