Yoshiko McFarland says on her biography page:

Yoshiko was born in Osaka, Japan on Dec. 7th, 1941 as the 4th child and 2nd daughter of Masatake Mitsuhashi. Her father died as an army doctor before seeing her. Her first impressed memory was the view of burning Osaka at night with the sound of B29 fleets, sirens and bombs, and the ruins of the big town after the fire.
Her birthday was the day before Pearl Harbor Day in the Japanese calendar. But she had not had much chance to think about that deeply, because teachers for her generation avoided talking about the war. Later, when she had her eyes in the US, she realized her birthday was Pearl Harbor Day in the US, and how Americans feel about that day every year.
This shocked her, and it became the big reason to start to create the Earth Language. She agrees with the idea that Japan should never have big weapons nor fight a war for the sake of world peace. But she wondered what Japanese should do instead.
“We need to prepare rational tools instead of emotional weapons for keeping peace. We need to prepare a common background to feel that everybody on the earth is part of a single family” She couldn’t wait to put this idea into a concrete shape.

That concrete shape was Earth Language, a symbolic language with no spoken form. Her about page lists the usual reasons for creating a language for all mankind, and of course this will have no more success than any of the others (sorry, Esperantists), but it’s an interesting attempt and carried out with considerable detail. Anyway, better that people should spend their time constructing languages than blowing things up. You go, Yoshiko!

A Reuters story,”Turkey renames ‘foreign’ animals” (Fri Mar 4, 2005):

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey has renamed some animal species, saying foreign scientists opposed to its territorial integrity had chosen their former names with ill intent, the Environment Ministry has said.
A sheep species previously known as Ovis Armeniana was renamed Ovis Orientalis Anatolicus. A species of red fox was renamed as Vulpes Vulpes rather than Vulpes Vulpes Kurdistanica.
“Unfortunately there are many other species in Turkey which were named this way with ill intentions. This ill intent is so obvious that even species only found in our country were given names against Turkey’s unity,” the statement said.
The ministry said the animals’ new names had been chosen as result of scientific studies.

(Via Turkish Torque, “the first Turkish blog on the Internet by Ugur Akinci.”)

A year ago I had a post about the OED’s hunt for the earliest citations of words used in science fiction. Now there’s a snazzy new site for it, whose proprietor, Jesse Sheidlower, says:

For those interested: the Oxford English Dictionary Science Fiction project… has been redesigned and relaunched.
The biggest change is that the OED’s database of citations of SF words is now made (mostly) available via the website. The OED does not usually make its work available in this way, but OED has agreed to publicly open up this part of its database to acknowledge the great contribution volunteers have made to this project.
That means that if you contribute a cite, it’s viewable by everyone. Here’s a link with more information about the citations…
We are also adding quite a few new words: there is an internal list of pending words we have been maintaining and over the next few weeks many of those words will be moved to the main pages. This link… takes you to a list of the most recent additions.

I’m surprised that the earliest cite for “hard science fiction” is 1957 (P. Schuyler Miller in the February Astounding Science Fiction), and if I had access to my early-’50s copies of Astounding, Galaxy, and Fantasy and Science Fiction I’d be tempted to pore through the editorials and book reviews looking for antedates.

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I somehow have managed not to mention Andrew Joscelyne’s Blogos here (though I did mention Aristotle’s use of the word), so let me remedy the omission. From the About page:

Blogos puts the logos in the blogosphere. It covers language through multilinguality and translation, localization and global markets, individual skills and emerging technologies, enablers and barriers, knowledge and speculation. Primarily a tracker of news and views about the global language industry, it also explores fruitful links between new practices, language technologies and the world of ideas.

Recent posts I’m glad not to have missed are The 40 language dash, about people who learn lots and lots of languages (and touching upon “the intriguing subject of the glosserotics of multilingual love affairs in history”), and The French disconnection, a discussion of “Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s call to resist Google’s plan to digitize a number of (U.S.) library holdings” on the grounds that this would somehow “be partial and informed by an ‘American’ point of view.” I am in complete agreement with his conclusion:

But for Jeanneney, if digitization is indeed financed by the tax payer, it ensures that culture escapes the consumer-sensitive rankings of a search engine such as Google. His idea would be to federate Europeans in an act of resistance against the hyperpower of Google rankings, and maintain that famous “multipolar” world, wherein other options prevail beyond the profit motive. The irony here is that the French would probably seek to dominate a European ranking of digitized culture in just the same way the Americans are criticized for dominating the rankings at global cultural level.

Reducing the perceived hyperpower of Google is best achieved by people power working with Google – multilingualizing it, multiculturalizing it, forcing it to handle a greater diversity of needs. It is unlikely that resistance is best served by inventing yet another Euro search engine with, inevitably, government backing.

Matt of No-sword has a post, typically both informative and hilarious, about a squabble over a Donald Ritchie review of The Tower of London: Tales of Victorian London, by Natsume Soseki, translated and introduced by Damian Flanagan. Matt quotes a couple of magisterially dismissive remarks by Ritchie like “The value of the present collection is in the fact that even if it is negligible the author is not, and thus all information is welcome” and adds:

Sort of “yes, yes, throw it on the Souseki pile”, which you have to admit is understandable, given that he’s spent his entire career introducing Japanese culture to English-speaking audiences. He must be getting sick of the early modern Japanese canon by now, particularly its minor outlying works. (Even by inconceivably major authors.)

He then quotes a couple of letters sent to the Japan Times in response to the review, one of which, from Flanagan himself (“His words’ minced:unminced ratio is very small”), complains about Ritchie’s allegedly mistranslated bits of Souseki, whereupon our indefatigable blogger digs up the actual Souseki bits in Japanese. I wish he had gone on to give his opinion of the translations, since I’m certainly in no position to do so, but it’s interesting stuff anyway.

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Justin B Rye has a Primer In SF Xenolinguistics: after a rundown of the silly pseudo-alien names favored by the less serious-minded sf writers, he says:

If you’re the kind of person who read the Silmarillion just for the linguistic appendices (No? Oh, well, it’s only me then), you’d probably prefer your SF languages not to be quite like the ones lampooned above. So what’s the alternative? Well, I suppose you could use the Simpsons Manoeuvre – to quote Kang: “No, actually I’m speaking Rigellian. By an astonishing coincidence our two languages are exactly the same!” But to the best of my knowledge, only Star Trek has ever had the nerve to offer this excuse with a straight face (see eg “Bread and Circuses”)… so if that’s out, you’re left having to imagine a real alien language. What could that be like?

Well, there are plenty of ways in which alien languages could be extremely unearthly…

As you can see, the man has a sense of humor, but he knows his stuff. This becomes even clearer in his companion page on Futurese: The American Language in 3000 AD, in which he lovingly shepherds English through a thousand years worth of sound changes, coming up with the following set of versions of Aelfric:

1000 AD: Wé cildra biddaþ þé, éalá láréow, þæt þú tæ’ce ús sprecan rihte, forþám ungelæ’rede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecaþ…
2000 AD: We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly…
3000 AD: ZA kiad w’-exùn ya tijuh, da ya-gAr’-eduketan zA da wa-tAgan lidla, kaz ‘ban iagnaran an wa-tAg kurrap…
Tremendous fun for anyone with the slightest degree of sf fandom.

I had run across this earlier but forgotten about it, so I was glad to be reminded today by Kattullus’s excellent MeFi post, which also links to a college course in “Extraterrestrial Language”!

The following is a public service announcement. I just read “Very Bad News,” a review (of books on collapse and catastrophe by Jared Diamond and Richard A. Posner) by Clifford Geertz, and while I was mildly perturbed by the idea that civilization might collapse or the world be destroyed, what really got my goat was the following sentence: “On the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, two scarred and impoverished third-world societies, Franco-African Haiti and Spanish-Indian Dominica, offer, side by side, a study in contrasts…” Now, I know Geertz is a great anthropologist, and I know his specialty is Southeast Asia and North Africa, but really, this is pathetic, and shows how ignorant Americans (exemplified here by both Geertz and the crack editorial staff of the NYRB) are of the Caribbean (and Latin America in general). So: the eastern half of Hispaniola is the Dominican Republic. Several hundred miles to the east (and a bit south) is Dominica (pronounced dom-i-NEE-ca), which is an entirely different country. Sheesh.

Update. Geertz apologizes for the error.

Natashka’s interesting new blog Dunglish features unfortunate attempts by Dutch-speakers to write things in English. Recent entries have highlighted the Small Talk Eating House,” a sign that says “Beware of pickpockets. Please hang your vallues on the hook,” and an advertising campaign whose slogan, “More drinking, less thinking,” is intended to oppose booze! Lots of fun if you enjoy this sort of thing, as who doesn’t?

Courtesy of Mithridates, this vital update on the Nepali royal language:

Nepal’s king has his own type of language like the ‘King’s English’ in Britain. There has been a noticeable change in the King’s language in recent times. The royal family members of Nepal are addressed by the people with some specific words like: ‘maushuph’[he/him or she/her] ‘gari+baksyo’ [did], gari+baksanechha [will do], sukala [sleep], bhuja [lunch or meal] jyunar [eat food], darshan+bhet [seeing, meeting] etc. These terms are only used if one has to address the royal family members.
Before the restoration of democracy in 1990, general public, except for King’s relatives, were not entitled to use the King’s Nepali. Nowadays, general people in urban areas copy King’s Nepali and speak in a kind of fashion. But there is restriction for the general public to formally or publicly speak this language for themselves. Instead, political leaders as well as others do not hesitate to address the king or the royal family members in general terms with media or others like: woha [him], garnu+bhayo [did], bhet [seeing, meeting]. But they must use the King’s Nepali when they are to speak in front of the king or any formal programs.

See the Mithridates entry for more links on Nepali.

One of my favorite radio events each day is The Writers Almanac, with its beautiful theme music, its rundown of writers’ birthdays, and Garrison Keillor’s mellifluous reading of a poem (and my thanks to WAMC for running it twice every morning, doubling my chances of catching it). Today’s poem was “Writing,” by Howard Nemerov, which begins:

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice…

I was enjoying it, even if I didn’t feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, when a reference caught my ear:

…The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger’s to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the ‘Slender Gold.’

Who was this emperor Hui Tsung? Being the type who can’t simply accept such things as part of the poetic tapestry, I went to my reference books and discovered an unhappy tale. Hui Tsung, or Huizong as he is known in this pinyincentric world, should never have been an emperor. I’ll let the Columbia Encyclopedia tell the tale:

Politically he was a rather ineffectual ruler, but he was said to have devoted all his spare time to painting and to the reorganization of the Imperial Academy of Painting. Through his encouragement, art collecting came into vogue during his reign. The emperor himself was an accomplished artist, specializing in delicately colored bird-and-flower paintings. There are also many such paintings by others that have his seals and signatures—affixed by the emperor to signify his approval of the work of artists who laboriously copied his own paintings. Most of these works show intimate, detailed studies of nature, executed in a refined, sensitive, and meticulous manner. He abdicated in 1125 when his attempts to buy off the advancing Jurchens failed. In 1126 the Northern Sung capital at Kaifeng was overrun by the Jurchens, and he was captured together with the new emperor and taken to Manchuria, where he died in captivity.

I opened Pound’s Cantos, as I often do when I’m investigating Chinese history, to see what that mad magpie might have had to say about the matter in the Chinese cantos; in this case there was only the disappointing half-line “HOEÏ went taozer.” But this was shortly followed by the pleasing passage

…The tartar lord
      wanted an alphabet
by name Akouta, ordered a written tongue for Kin tartars

—which brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to the topic of writing.

(For “Akouta” see the Wikipedia entry on the Jin (Chin) Dynasty, whose first ruler, Jin Taizu, had the given name of Aguda.)