Die Börse Düsseldorf kürte derweil den Begriff "Bad Bank" zum Börsen-Unwort des Jahres. Es sei für das breitere Publikum schwer nachvollziehbar, dass eine offenbar schlechte Bank eine weitere "Bad Bank" gründe und dies eine gute Lösung für Probleme der Finanzkrise sein solle, erklärte die Börse. In eine "Bad Bank" kann ein Finanzinstitut Anlagen und Papiere auslagern, die ihren Wert verloren haben.

04.02.2010

Death of Boa Sr, last person fluent in the Bo language of the Andaman Islands, breaks link with 65,000-year-old culture

The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest cultures.

Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.

Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.

Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language.

"Her loss is not just the loss of the Great Andamanese community, it is a loss of several disciplines of studies put together, including anthropology, linguistics, history, psychology, and biology," Narayan Choudhary, a linguist of Jawaharlal Nehru University who was part of an Andaman research team, wrote on his webpage. "To me, Boa Sr epitomised a totality of humanity in all its hues and with a richness that is not to be found anywhere else."

The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are governed by India. The indigenous population has steadily collapsed since the island chain was colonised by British settlers in 1858 and used for most of the following 100 years as a colonial penal colony.

Tribes on some islands retained their distinct culture by dwelling deep in the forests and rebuffing would-be colonisers, missionaries and documentary makers with volleys of arrows. But the last vestiges of remoteness ended with the construction of trunk roads from the 1970s.

According to the NGO Survival International, the number of Great Andamanese has declined in the past 150 years from about 5,000 to 52. Alcoholism is rife among the survivors.

"The Great Andamanese were first massacred, then all but wiped out by paternalistic policies which left them ravaged by epidemics of disease, and robbed of their land and independence," said Survival International's director, Stephen Corry. "With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa's loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands."

Boa Sr appears to have been in good health until recently. During the Indian Ocean tsunami, she reportedly climbed a tree to escape the waves.

She told linguists afterwards that she had been forewarned. "We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us the Earth would part, don't run away or move."

FACE TO FACE

We live in a new linguistic world

PROF. DAVID CRYSTAL, OBE, is one of the world's foremost authorities on reference publishing and on language. He works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, editor, lecturer and broadcaster of international repute. He became known chiefly for his research work and academic career in English language studies, in such fields as intonation and stylistics, and in the application of linguistics to religious, educational and clinical contexts. Some of his recent books include, Shakespeare's Words (with his son Ben),

The Language Revolution and A Glossary of Netspeak and Textspeak.

In Chennai recently, his first port of call in a two-week India tour, Prof. Crystal, accompanied by his wife and business partner Hillary, dwelt extensively on the subjects dear to him — the future of languages, the internet, Shakespeare, his business company "Crystal Reference", his association with findout.tv, the David Crystal scholarship and the future ahead.

Excerpts from an exclusive interview with MURALI N. KRISHNASWAMY.

YOURS is an academic career that spans a few decades. You have written something like a 100 books, most language related, and are involved in research, TV productions and international organisations to name just a few of your other fields. Are you as excited by language now as you were when you started in the 1960s?

The answer has to be yes. And actually even more excited than I was in the 1960s. And the reason is so much has happened in the last 10 years that makes it a completely different linguistic world to live in this decade than in the previous ones. Now I wrote a book called Language Revolution which tried to express this concept of the excitement of what has been happening and it relates to three big trends that took place in the 1990s. The first was English became a global language and the first time that a language has become truly global, and for linguists this is very exciting because of what happens to a language when it becomes global. Nobody knows. There hasn't been one before. The second thing was the crisis affecting the languages of the world; half of them are so seriously endangered that they are likely to die out in the century. I don't know whether the right word is exciting, but that is certainly an enervating kind of discovery. And then the third thing was the arrival of the internet. And that has completely revolutionised all our previous concepts to do with language. So add these three arguments together and there is no more exciting time ever in the history of linguistics, I think.

At the 10th Linguapax Congress recently, you explained that "every two weeks, a language dies". In a way, since each language encapsulates a vision of the world, when it's gone, it's an incalculable loss ... you should also consider that 96 per cent of the world's languages are just spoken by four per cent of the people.

It was a very interesting conference on diversity, sustainability and peace. And people often ask, you know, why should we be worried about losing little languages in various parts of the world? And you have said correctly that every language is a vision of the world, and the more we can preserve of linguistic diversity, the better for the intellectual health of mankind. It is exactly the same argument as preserving the ecology of the world, the plants and the animals.

Perhaps in looking at a solution, apart from documentation, you spoke of how we need to look at youth, "where we need them to be convinced". Does it involve the issue of revitalisation too? I refer to the example of Wales, where there was even financial and legislative support.

That's right. It is a costly business, maintaining and preserving a language and documenting a language. In the short term it seems expensive. In the long term it is a great saving because if you don't do it, it is more expensive in the future. If you don't look after languages and the identities of the people who speak those languages, they will become dissatisfied. Look at various parts of the world, at the riots that have taken place. Here in India we know very well the movements to preserve local identities and languages have been stronger than in any other part of the world. If there's a riot somewhere with people wanting their language to be given respect, how much is that going to cost and how much would have been saved if that little bit of money had been put into the situation earlier? So yes, it is expensive.

But in Wales you had a 30-year programme.

Yes indeed. Wales is the success story of language revitalisation of the 20th Century really. All endangered languages have been going down. And so was Welsh. And then, thanks to a mixture of political activism and two language acts which were introduced by the British government to maintain the language plus some money. As a result, the number of people speaking Welsh is now going up, and very healthy the language is too. I mean you can't avoid it in Wales now. But it's the only success story in the Celtic languages at the moment. The Irish and the Scots languages are still in a very bad condition.

You have in Australia, for instance, the worry about corruption by American-English.

This is a question really about the way the English language is going. It's a question of dominance and ownership. In the beginning of course, English was owned by Britain and then America came along and the centre of gravity moved to the United States. And because America still has a reasonably powerful position in the world, American English still has quite a strong place too in everybody's minds. But when you add up all the speakers of English in the world and you reach a total of about 11/2 billion, even America is only a small dialect of world English — 250 million speakers in America, or something like that. I mean there are more speakers of English in India than there are in Britain and America combined. So when you actually look at the future of the language, then I think we will gradually see a lessening of the influence of American English and an evening out of other forms of English. It will become a more cosmopolitan language. It already is, I think.

What about the issue of language change? It seems to be a very touchy subject.

It is. People have a curious attitude about language change. Any living language has to change because it's people change. I also find it odd that the very people who make language-change are worried about it. It seems hopeless to me. But indeed there are a lot of worries. People think the way a language changes is always for the worse. But language hasn't changed for the worse or for the better. It just changes.

When people worry about their own language, and say that "our language is changing or deteriorating", well, changing it is, deteriorating it isn't. It's growing. It's adding extra richness to what was there before, and the evidence is to look at what happened to English. The English language over the last 1,000 years has borrowed words from 350 other languages. So that 80 per cent of the vocabulary of English is not Germanic, as you would expect it to be, but French, Latin, Spanish and Portuguese. And Indian languages have loaned words to English as well.

There could never have been Shakespeare without language change, because so much of the power of Shakespeare is in his use of vocabulary, of German, French, Latin origins, and of all the characters using the language at different levels. And that could not have happened if English had not brought in these words from other languages.

The Western media has often documented examples of how technology — electronic chatting and instant messaging — are smudging the lines between writing and speech.

Yes they certainly are, but I'd put it differently actually. I don't think it's smudging the lines, so much as adding a new medium. The traditional situation is that we have the written language and the spoken language and we now have computer mediated communication, or Netspeak, as I call it, as it's different from spoken language and written language. Spoken and written language still carry on. Those lines aren't still smudged.

With the internet, what's happened is that we have a new medium. Something that is completely different from anything that has been there before and so I wouldn't use the word smudging and I wouldn't say we have got a medium which is unlike speech and unlike writing because it uses new properties of language that do not exist in traditional speech and writing. The internet lacks simultaneous feedback. But in chat rooms, you can speak to many people simultaneously. You can speak to so many, and the language and its sequence that comes out is quite unlike what one sees in traditional languages. In emails you have this amazing phenomenon of email framing where you can get your email, cut and paste a paragraph, answer it, and the other person can answer that, and soon you get an amalgam of messages. That is again completely different from what you have been able to do with the written languages. The internet is not like written language either. Because, for a start, it is dynamic.

The fundamental building block of the internet is the hypertextlink. Click here and go there. There is no world wide web without the hypertextlink. In the written language, the closest we can get to a hyperlink is the footnote.

It makes this a new medium of communication, unlike speech and unlike writing, sharing some of the properties of speech and writing but making them a completely different world.

Electronic communication is not like writing too, in terms of enabling things that traditional writing could never do. How does one approach the field of internet linguistics, which you are looking at in your programme here? A case of `Nonce' and Nonsense?

As far as teaching the language is concerned and as far as children getting to grips with this new technology is concerned, it does make for a very different situation. People sometimes say that the internet is causing the written language to deteriorate, because they say "look at emails. They can be so casual".

A case of handwriting being marginalised by Netspeak?

Handwriting certainly, but even within the field of typing, what people notice is that you can send an email nowadays without capitalisation, punctuation. And so people say this is a disaster for the language, but what has happened is that emails introduced a new variety to a language. A variety where informality has been taken to extremes. It didn't exist before... it's a technology inspired informality of expression that didn't exist before. So the language has grown through the internet, with an extra dimension of language use being incorporated. Now, it isn't all like this. There is another argument here which is important at least for children. Perhaps for adults too. With internet language, because you are on your own when you are using the internet, as I mentioned earlier, there is no feedback, so I'm sending you a message. Now I have to make sure that I'm clear in my message. I have to think out how I have to express myself more precisely than I otherwise would in speech because if I get it wrong, we waste our time. Over the last five years, I have sensed a greater care being taken, greater precision in the formulation of email messages. So, on the whole, I think the internet is providing us with good language training here and the more I think we get used to the technology, I think the more it will sharpen our intellect as far as communication is concerned.

Здарова!
Короче, последнее время на "одном очень уважаемом ресурсе" было много срачей вокруг Go: хороший-плохой, нужен-ненужен, много сравнивали с питоном, много сравнивали с растом, divan0 даже додумался перевести высер «Go vs Haskell» ну и в таком ключе. Я тоже долгое время участвовал в этих срачах, принимая посменно сторону «фанов» языка и сторону оппозиции, но в конце-концов допер, в чем фокус. Сегодня немного потупил у дивана в посте и понял, что Go нужен для того, чтобы проектировать robust software. Я не знаю, как правильно перевести это слово на русский, но это скорее всего что-то вроде «надежный». Так вот, Go сделали, потому что гуглу нужен был инструмент для написания надежного кода. На самом деле не сколько гуглу, сколько Робу Пайку, который последние две декады, как минумум, одержим идеей сделать сишку с каналами и зелеными потоками. Так получилось, что Роб Пайк попал в нормальную компашку с другими штрихами из Bell Labs, крутейшим Russ Cox, Фицпатриком и т.д. Этим ребятам несложно было убедить гугл, что им нужен новый язык и вобщем-то, бабосики они на него выбили.

Ну, тут все понятно, давайте послушаем слова самого Роба Пайка:

Фишка в том, что наши программисты гуглеры, а не ученые. Это обычно молодые, только выпустившиеся пацаны, которые возможно выучили Java, возможно даже C/C++ и может быть Python. Они не в состоянии понимать пробздетый язык, но мы все равно хотим, чтобы они делали хороший софт. Таким образом, мы даем им легкопонимаемый язык, к которому они быстро привыкнут.

(The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.)

А теперь давайте попытаемся понять, что же он имел ввиду. Если грубо говоря, то он сказал, что в гугле работают не самые умные ребята («не способные понимать крутой язык»), так что они придумали такой язык, который просто невозможно не понять. Это на самом деле очень круто для менеджмента. Посудите: можно нанять 100 посредственных программистов, дать им в руки Go и эта армия обезьян будет генерить вам много «неплохого» и очень даже поддерживаемого кода! Go это фантастический инструмент для менеджмента, лучше не придумать: моментально заганяем всех программистов в рамки go-fmt (никто не сможет пропихнуть свой стиль форматирования), забираем у них любые абстракции сложнее интерфейса и получается такой конвеер кода, в котором developer is just another brick in the wall. По-моему, очень круто! Ну, программистам скорее всего такой расклад не очень понравится — мало кто любит быть винтиком в системе.

Так вот, Go нужен корпорациям. Если у вас в компании работает много людей, большие проекты и все такое, то Go это идеальный вариант! Но для того, чтобы понять, действительно ли вам нужен Go, надо разобраться ЗАЧЕМ его все-таки стоит использовать.

Go изначально язык, который сделали в гугле, чтобы студенты могли придти и писать код для навороченной сетевой инфраструктуры гугла. Тут можно сформировать своеобразный rule of thumb: "Если ты не пишешь софт для сети, консольную утилиту или хайлоад бэкенд, то Go тебе скорее всего не нужен". Тем не менее, полно народу продолжает писать софт на Go ради собственно говоря, самого Go.

Go стоит учить в любом случае.
Во-первых, потому что это как два пальца обоссать — проще язык сложно придумать. В Go очень мало грамматик и абстракций, освоить его можно на начальном уровне за выходные. Конечно же, в языке есть полно дырок и «ловушек для лошпетов», о которых я писал в своей последней статье, но они довольно быстро резолвятся.
Во-вторых, потому что Go так или иначе очень глубоко проникнет в наши жизни. За последний год на гитхабе было написано ооочень много проектов на Go, все больше и больше корпораций подсаживаются на него и т.д. Иметь такой популярный инструмент в запасе всегда хорошо, как не крути. Вдруг тебя с работы выгонят и совершенно случайно упадет классный оффер на должность Go программиста. А тут фигасе и ты подходишь.

Christmas turkey recipe

Directions:
Preheat oven to 200°C.
Tie turkey legs with kitchen string.
Pour oil into roasting pan. Place the turkey into the pan. Rub turkey with oil, then add wine and stock.

Cover with foil and roast 20 minutes per 500g, a total of 2 hours 40 minutes. Every half an hour remove foil and baste turkey with juices, then replace oil. Remove foil for 30 minutes to brown the breast.

The turkey breast is cooked when juices run clear (not pink) after inserting a skewer into the thickest part. Carve off the legs, wrap the rest of the turkey in two layers of foil and set aside while finishing cooking the legs.

Increase the oven temperature to 200°C and cook the legs for another 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, scoop out the stuffing, prepare the gravy and finish other vegetables.

To make gravy, scoop away excess fat from the pan juices, add 2 tablespoons plain flour and stir to combine.

Add any juices that have seeped from the resting turkey, more wine and chicken stock if necessary, stir until thickened slightly.