[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• The Burgh Diaspora’s Jim Russell notes that Canadians don’t migrate that much within their country in response to economic stimuli.
• Collide-a-scape’s Keith Kloor wonders why an ostensibly pro-science city like Portland, Oregon, has taken fluoride out of its water.
• Geocurrents notes the rapid fall of fertility rates in Turkey and Iran.
• Itching in Eestimaa’s Palun wonders about future multilingualism in Estonia.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley wonders what would have become of Japanese admiral Isoruku Yamamoto had he lived to the end of the Second World War.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution disagrees with Paul Krugman on the prospects of the Portuguese economy.
• The Numerati’s Stephen Baker is conflicted about Flickr’s upgrading, not least since they make all his photos available to everyone.
• Strange Maps produces a map where the Dakotas were divided differently, west-east along the Missouri River.
• Van Waffle describes, with photos, how a picture of an exotic pigeon inspired a beautiful shawl.
• Window on Eurasia notes that Circassians are unhappy with Russia.
• Alexander Harrowell notes that once-progressive David Goodhart is now using the language of far-right fascists to describe migrants and immigration.

[LINK] “South Africa’s shifting language landscape”

Writing in The Daily Maverick, Rebecca Davis has an interesting long essay taking a look at the shifting roles of different languages in South Africa’s long history, and the way in which the differing positions of different languages has had significant real-world effects on the power and status of different groups. Even now, languages of European origin (English, Afrikaans) still predominate over African ones.

The idea that Afrikaans and English are no longer the sole province of white South Africans may makes for a sexy sound bite, but the truth is that this doesn’t represent a major shift in South African language use over the last decade, particularly when it comes to Afrikaans. The results of Census 2001 found that 13,3% of South Africans spoke Afrikaans at home, and by the time Census 2011 rolled around, this figure had risen only fractionally, to 13,5%.

The popularity of English as a home language has grown slightly more significantly, from 8,2% in 2001 to 9,6% in 2011, and this spurt has allowed English to move up a rung in the popularity chart. In 2001, English was tied for the fifth most spoken home language with Setswana, after isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans and Sepedi. By 2011, English was beating out both Sepedi and Setswana as the fourth most popular home language.

Possibly the more interesting finding, however, is the degree to which English is dominating the South African education system. Of the 12,2 million South African school pupils, just 850,000 (7%) speak English at home. But the SAIRR’s 2012 South Africa Survey, drawing on figures from the Department of Basic Education, found that 7,6 million of them (around 64%) wish to be taught in English. When it comes to Afrikaans, similarly, more pupils want to be taught in the language (11%) than speak it at home (9%), though it lags far behind English as a desired medium of instruction.

[. . . L]anguage has always been a thorny issue in a South African context, and pragmatism of this kind has often not been considered sufficient to swing the debate. For illustration of just how heated these issues can become, South Africans have never had to look further than 16 June 1976, when the spark that lit the tinder box that was the Soweto Riots was the decision taken by the National Party government that Afrikaans should be a compulsory medium of instruction in secondary schools within the Department of Basic Education. That day is a powerful reminder of the significance and centrality of language to national identity.

In South Africa today, English is not just dominant in the education system, but also as the language of power. IsiZulu may be spoken in the greatest number of South African homes, but it is English that is heard in the corridors of power. Parliamentary proceedings are carried out overwhelmingly in English; Hansard, the record of what is said in Parliament, is published in English; and all addresses of national importance – like the state of the nation address, or the annual budget speech – are given in English. This echoes the situation all over post-colonial Africa, where the official language of communication has generally been the language of the former colonial power (mainly English, French of Portuguese), even though knowledge of these languages may be minimal.

There are, of course, consequences to this if the majority of the population is not sufficiently fluent in the language of power. In Language in South Africa: The Role of Language in National Transformation (2002), University of Pretoria linguist Victor Webb makes the point that such languages can become substantial barriers to much of the population accessing their national rights and privileges, and also to accessing the country’s formal economy.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Behind the Numbers’ Carl Haub notes that several countries have seen their demographic transitions stall above replacement levels, notably post-Soviet countries but including outliers like Israel and Argentina.
• Beyond the Beyond’s Bruce Sterling describes the reception given to Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show in belle époque Europe.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster goes into detail about the implication of the discovery of hydrogen peroxide on Europa’s surface, and its implications for life in Europa’s oceans.
• Crooked Timber’s Chris Bertram argues that while Margaret Thatcher may have managed to Americanize the United Kingdom, she certainly didn’t make it more egalitarian or meritocratic.
• Daniel Drezner wonders if the collapse of China’s overextended financial sector could have implications for the future of the Chinese government.
• Eastern Approaches has three recent posts of note: one regarding political maneuvering around arrests in an increasingly autocratic Ukraine; one from Hungary describing the resignation of a deputy governor of the Bank of Hungary, Julia Király, over concerns that the Orbán government’s populism could threaten the country’s future; and one from the Czech Republic, about an almost pleasingly non-catastrophic transition from one president to another.
• False Steps’ Paul Drye goes into detail about the orbital mirror proposed by some people in Nazi Germany. It would have worked, but just have been impractical.
• Geocurrents links to a map of endangered languages around the world.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer notes that official Argentine statistics might understate levels of poverty, but also notes that levels of poverty have improved markedly over the past decade. Why bad statistics, then?
• Torontoist blogs about a new tool library in the neighbourhood of Parkdale.
• A report from Towleroad: apparently it’s possibly to identify who, in a same-sex relationship, is more likely to be a top than a bottom and vice versa, on average.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Geocurrents, Asya Pereltsvaig takes on the provocative, if apparently ill-founded, thesis that Ashkenazic Jews trace their ancestry to the medieval Khazars of the Russian steppe by taking a look at the structure of the Yiddish language.
• Language Hat claims that, with the advent of electronic communications which make them difficult to insert into text, diacritical marks are endangered in the Polish language. A campaign has been launched.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis links to an essay by feminist and historian Ruth Rosen wherein she states–basically–that early feminists didn’t think about campaigning against violence against women in the 1970s because violence against women was taken for granted as inevitable.
• British journalist Mark Simpson unearths a vintage article about Napster and the Internet and free culture from 2001 that’s still relevant today.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen links approvingly to a book, Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, that examines “Korean-Japanese relations, the early history of Korean industrialization, and the rise of industrial food, as well as the evolution of Korean food in recent times”. It does look interesting.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes a look at the ways in which the sex industry of New York City’s Times Square was an integral part of the neighbourhood, in photos and posters.
• Torontoist notes that City Council has just declared Toronto a sanctuary city, guaranteeing undocumented residents access to municipal services. More on this later.
• Eugene Volokh in a couple of posts (1, 2) starts speculating whether or not indigenous peoples in the New World would have seen European migrants as illegal immigrants and starts to head in problematic directions. Again, more later.
• John Scalzi at Whatever shares his love of libraries.
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble notes, via various sources, that Chechen refugees in the European Union are facing forced returns to their ever-problematic homeland.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• In a recent essay, Paul Belshaw writes about the often overlooked diversity of the different groups which contributed to the founding of modern Australia, whether Aborigines, the peoples of the British Isles, or Germans.
• The Burgh Diaspora notes that, attracted by a prosperous economy back home, many Brazilian immigrants in New England are returning.
• Eastern Approaches notes a controversial event in Kosovo: the publication of a book memorializing the dead of that disputed country.
• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh argues that despite export success, domestic demand in Spain has collapsed sufficiently to make economic recovery impossible.
• Geocurrents maps the strong regional identities of South Korea as expressed in the vote in last year’s presidential election.
• Sociology, the Global Sociology Blog suggests, is the science of “slow violence”, of bad things happening so quietly over such a long stretch of time as to obscure their existence (or the responsibility for said).
• Language Hat links approvingly to an essayist writing about the role of women in introducing language change, like “vocal fry”.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Erik Loomis writes more about the desperation of New England cod fishers. It looks so familiar.
• Peter Rukavina found the first use of the word “Internet” in Prince Edward Island’s legislative assembly (April 1996, in a speech by Premier Catherine Callbeck about the province’s new website).
• Concerns about the intrusion of the Latin alphabet into Cyrillic-using areas of the former Soviet Union are present at Window on Eurasia, whether we’re talking of the spread of Latin script and local norms generally in Belarus or concerns by Kazakh writers that switching that language’s script from Cyrillic to Latin could cut off Kazakh users from their language’s extensive past.

[LINK] “How to Save a Dying Language”

Ariel Sabar‘s article in the latest issue of Smithsonian, “How to Save a Dying Language”, documenting the efforts of linguist Geoffrey Khan to record samples of the Aramaic language before it disappears as a living language, is a bit misnamed. Khan isn’t revitalizing the language so much as he is documenting the way that it is currently spoken, by a fast-aging diaspora of Christians from the Middle East scattered across the world.

It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus.

The linguist, Geoffrey Khan of the University of Cambridge, was nominally in town to give a speech at Northwestern University, in Evanston. But he had another agenda: Chicago’s northern suburbs are home to tens of thousands of Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Christians driven from their Middle Eastern homelands by persecution and war. The Windy City is a heady place for one of the world’s foremost scholars of modern Aramaic, a man bent on documenting all of its dialects before the language—once the tongue of empires—follows its last speakers to the grave.

The tax preparer, Elias Bet-shmuel, a thickset man with a shiny pate, was a local Assyrian who had offered to be our sherpa. When he burst into the lobby of Khan’s hotel that morning, he announced the stops on our two-day trek in the confidential tone of a smuggler inventorying the contents of a shipment.

“I got Shaqlanaye, I have Bebednaye.” He was listing immigrant families by the names of the northern Iraqi villages whose dialects they spoke. Several of the families, it turned out, were Bet-shmuel’s clients.

As Bet-shmuel threaded his Infiniti sedan toward the nearby town of Niles, Illinois, Khan, a rangy 55-year-old, said he was on safari for speakers of “pure” dialects: Aramaic as preserved in villages, before speakers left for big, polyglot cities or, worse, new countries. This usually meant elderly folk who had lived the better part of their lives in mountain enclaves in Iraq, Syria, Iran or Turkey. “The less education the better,” Khan said. “When people come together in towns, even in Chicago, the dialects get mixed. When people get married, the husband’s and wife’s dialects converge.”

We turned onto a grid of neighborhood streets, and Bet-shmuel announced the day’s first stop: a 70-year-old widow from Bebede who had come to Chicago just a decade earlier. “She is a housewife with an elementary education. No English.”

Khan beamed. “I fall in love with these old ladies,” he said.

Go, read.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bruce Sterling, at Beyond the Beyond, takes a look at the applications of statistical analysis to the study of literature. (Apparently Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott were hugely influential.)
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster describes the latest on the nascent planetary system of TW Hydrae, a very young orange dwarf two hundred light-years away.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that the current informal global structures charged with managing international finances are actually working well.
• Eastern Approaches argues that anti-Americanism specifically, and xenophobia more commonly, is becoming normative in Russia, as demonstrated by recent laws passed covering everything from adoption to the mass media.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Scott Lemieux notes the irony of torture advocate Alan Dershowitz criticizing a conference on the Israeli occupation held in a New York City college as immoral.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen notes ads funded by the British government in Bulgaria and Romania actively trying to discourage potential migrants.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín points out the problems with the evangelical Christian campaigns against the sex trade, suggesting that they often fail to pick up on vital nuances (like, say, what the women involved actually want).
• At New APPS Blog, the threats against the conference mentioned at Lawyers, Guns and Money above–held at Brooklyn College–are detailed, and a call to support the college made.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that the plan by Uzbekistan’s government to shift the official script from Cyrillic to Latin will discourage reading generally and hit the provinces hard.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Dan Hirschman, Budding Sociologist, takes issue with Michael Shermer’s claim that the left is as anti-science as the right.
• Daniel Drezner strongly disagrees with the contention of Roger Cohen that American diplomacy is impossible. It’s simply more complicated than before, with more and more transparent actors.</li
• Far Outliers compares policies towards indigenous languages in the early Spanish and English empires, noting that in Spanish territories native languages like Nahuatl and Quechua were promoted for evangelism’s sake while in New England English was pushed on the indigenous populations.
• At A Fistful of Euros, Alex Harrowell notes the ongoing capital shortage in central Europe and has a news roundup from the region.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan reviews two books on the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, noting that it was as much achieved through fiat on the part of the elites as it was through mass conversions.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Scott Lemieux makes the point that arguably worse than Lance Armstrong’s cheating was the fact that he treated people who pointed out his cheating viciously.
• Strange Maps introduces its readers to the five types of territorial morphology of states.
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble has three posts about policing the fringes of the Russian ethnos, starting with the desire of some inhabitants of the Russian-populated province of Stavropol in the largely non-Russian North Caucasus Federal District to gain status as a Russian republic, to charges of treason levied against a Pomor activist fron a distinctive Russian subgrouping on the White Sea to controversy surrounding Cossack patrols.

[LINK] “Lithuanian identity and the riddle of General Lucjan Želigowski”

The English-language edition of Lithuanian news portal 15min.lt features an interview with Lithuanian historian Šarūnas Liekis, examining the controversial person of Polish general Lucjan Želigowski. In 1920, Želigowski staged a coup that led to the annexation of Vilnius–now the Lithuanian capital, at the time part of a largely Polish-populated region–into Second Republic Poland. Liekis suggests that Želigowski was acting as a Lithuanian–the only dispute related to questions of identity. Was Lithuania the nation-state of the ethnic Lithuanians, or was Lithuania inheritor of the multiethnic (and largely Polish-speaking) Grand Duchy of Lithuania federated with Poland?

- Želigowski’s name still sounds odious to Lithuanian ears, since it is associated with the loss of Vilnius in 1920. Who is this man and what was his connection to Lithuania?

- Želigowski’s was an old family coming from Ashmyany (currently part of Belarus), its roots go back to the 16th century. An entry from 1623 in Lithuanian chronicles reads: “Jakob Želigowski from Kimbor estate came with a horse, armour, helmet, and harquebus.”

Želigowski’s father Gustav, brothers Jan and Juzef participated in the 1863-1864 uprising. His uncle Edvard Želigowski was arrested for joining the Dalevski brothers’ patriotic youth group in Lithuania – the tsar had outlawed the organization and persecuted its members.

In other words, Želigowski did not come out of the blue, he was not from Silesia, Berlin, or Stockholm – he came from here. His fate is comparable to that of thousands of descendants of Polish and Lithuanian nobility who had to choose one or the other nationality in modern times.

Želigowski was a professional military officer at the tsar’s army. He studied military sciences in a Junker school in Riga, graduated in 1888, and later continued his service in the tsar’s army. He chose the military to escape poverty.

He participate in the Russo-Japanese war and World War One. He was already leading a division in 1917. He was on the White side in Russian civil war, fought in Southern Russia and Crimea. After that he led the 4th Polish rifle regiment, formed of soldiers that came from territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, crossed Romania and joined Poland’s army. He fought in Ukraine with the Polish regiment.

[. . .]

One could say that younger officers, born around 1890, tended to choose service in the Lithuanian army. Older ones chose Poland because their formative years, their socialization happened in a Polophone culture, within the ideology of Lithuanian-Polish nobility. They thought it was natural to choose Poland rather than the new non-historic ethnic Lithuania built on the peasant culture.

Another example – the Inavauskai brothers who chose different Belarusian, Polish, and Lithuanian nationalities. Tadas Ivanauskas, Lithuanian biologist who set up a zoology museum in Kaunas, had a son, Jerzy, who fought with the Armia Krajowa during World War Two.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the import, or lack thereof, of Azealia Banks’ Twitter fight

Azealia Banks, the talented rapper whose brilliant song “212″ was a summer anthem and contributed guest vocals to (among others) the Scissor Sisters’ track “Shady Love”, got into a lot of trouble over a fight on Twitter.

One of the biggest gay advocacy organisations in the US has criticised Azealia Banks for her use of a homophobic slur. Banks, who called blogger Perez Hilton “a messy faggot”, had initially refused to retract the remark: “Really not as moved by this ‘f word’ thing as u all want me to be,” she wrote. “I meant what I meant.” She did, however, say sorry: “My most sincere apologies to anyone who was indirectly offended by my foul language.”

The offensive remark came at the end of a week that saw two relative peers, rappers Banks and Angel Haze, lashing out at each other in a pair of diss tracks. Hilton took Haze’s side in the fight, prompting Banks to get ugly. “@PerezHilton lol what a messy faggot you are,” she tweeted.

After Hilton and other observers decried Banks’s language, she became indignant. “A faggot is not a homosexual male. A faggot is any male who acts like a female. There’s a BIG difference,” she wrote. “As a bisexual person I knew what I meant when I used that word … When I said acts like a female I should’ve said acts like a cunt.” Her only apology was appended with a “lol”.

That’s when the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Glaad) entered the fray. Despite having hailed Banks as a “notable coming-out story”, it condemned her use of the f-word. “Regardless of [Azealia's] intent or her personal definition … there are gay kids who follow her on Twitter who hear this word in an entirely different context,” wrote associate director Matt Kane. “This word is used almost universally by bullies, often as part of a larger verbal or physical assault. This word hurts those kids, no matter what Banks meant by it.”

Reports on gossip websites suggested that the remarks may have led to Banks being dropped by her US label Interscope. However a spokesman for the rapper denied this was the case, saying: “Azealia Banks is currently in the studio recording her debut album, which will be released this year through Interscope in the US and Polydor in the UK.”

I agree with the sentiments Keo Nozari’s Huffington Post article.

GLAAD is obviously an important organization in battling true homophobia and celebrating those who encourage gay equality. But when they involve themselves in things of this nature they diminish their considerable cache. We can’t be outraged when a 34-year-old gay man who built his career on bullying is in turn ‘bullied’ by a 21-year-old bisexual woman employing his same methods. It was, after all, just in June 2009 that Hilton himself called will.i.am a “f*****” to his face. Defending Hilton is the equivalent of coming to defend sextape-made-me-famous Kim Kardashian if she claimed to be a victim of someone showing her some porn.

Hilton has talked a lot of his intention to change his tone online this past year, including an Oprah appearance on her “Life Class” show along with Deepak Chopra. Many had hoped this was a genuine shift in consciousness for him. However, would Winfrey and Chopra have conducted themselves like this, inserting themselves into a rapper’s cat fight? Would they then have tweeted other celebrities to attempt to involve them, claim victimhood and escalate the feud? An argument could be made this type of bad behavior is far more detrimental to gay people than Azealia’s actual use of a gay slur.

One celebrity who chose to run to Hilton’s defense — and to the tune of great irony — was Scissor Sister’s frontman Jake Shears. He tweeted: “Oh yeah. ‘F*****.’ Totally cool. Give me a fucking break.” Yet Shears himself somehow found the word fine to use in his own song “Step Aside a Man”? Sure the context is different, but he’s still choosing to propagate the ugly and hurtful word himself (even if it’s under the guise of ‘reclaiming’ the word). It’s equally sad to see him so easily throw his collaborator under the bus. (Banks guested on an album track of his just last year.)

Oddly enough, the only voice of reason to chime into the argument was the notoriously snarky Gawker. In Rich Juzwiak’s piece, he clearly makes a case that while Banks is reckless, she is no homophobe. But it’s a sad day when Gawker is the voice of reason in the gay community.

The teachable moment here isn’t ‘sensitizing’ Banks or for that matter Hilton to the error of their ways. They are likely not to change because these types of feuds are hallmarks in their careers. Instead, it’s about the need for gay people and their organizations to learn to pick their battles. “Ladies, play nice,” would have been a far more appropriate comment for GLAAD to make for the level of maturity these folks are acting from. It’s like when a foul-mouthed drag queen makes an inappropriate aside, you’re not meant to get ‘offended’ by what they say. As Bill Maher argued brilliantly in a New York Times Op-ed piece last year, America gets ‘offended’ way too easily. He suggests we need to learn instead to co-exist with each other and people that have different opinions that we do. And in this spirit of co-existing, the gay community needs some sober, mature, thoughtful leaders who are able to transcend the silliness that the far too often permeates gay life and get on with the real issues.

You?