[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes that the Toronto Eaton Centre is set to be subtly renamed.
• Centauri Dreams notes the absence of evidence for extragalactic supercivilizations.
• The Dragon’s Gaze observes a new observatory that should be able to detect Earth-like worlds around red dwarfs and links to a paper describing how dwarf planets can heat Kuiper belts.
• The Dragon’s Tales notes evidence suggesting the solar system could have ejected a gas giant, notes Canada is on the verge of buying French Mistrals, and looks at a blockade of Crimea by Crimean Tatars and right-wing Ukrainian nationalists.
• Language Hat links to John McWhorter’s history of Aramaic.
• Language Log looks at the controversy in South Korea on using Chinese characters in education.
• Languages of the World looks at how different languages address god.
• The Planetary Society Blog notes the current state of our knowledge and planning for Uranus and Neptune.
• pollotenchegg maps language identity in early Soviet Ukraine.
• The Power and the Money speculates as to why Russia is in Syria, and comes up with little that is reassuring.
• The Russian Demographics Blog notes statistics on Muslim pilgrimages to Mecca.
• Spacing Toronto suggests that an answer to the Gardiner East can be found in the rail corridor.
• Window on Eurasia looks at the Russian deployment in Syria, speculates about future intentions in Central Asia and actual issues with Belarus, and suggests a turn to China will not help Asian Russia.
• Zero Geogrpahy maps the generation of academic knowledge.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Crooked Timber continues its immigration and open borders symposium, wondering about the European Union.
• The Dragon’s Gaze links to a paper suggesting that brown dwarfs will also form planets out of their discs.
• The Dragon’s Tales tracks the Ukrainian conflict.
• Eastern Approaches notes that, despite continued warm feelings for the United States, Poland is now becoming concerned with its affairs as a European power.
• Language Hat notes how for many Russians in the 19th century, Francophilia was seen as a shame, a betrayal.
• At Language of the World, Asya Perelstvaig notes efforts among some local Christian Arabs to revive the Aramaic language.
• James Nicoll of More Words, Deeper Hole reviews fondly the Joan Vinge classic novel Psion.
• At the Planetary Society Blog, Bill Dunford shares photos of the tracks of Mars rovers taken by the rovers themselves.
• Steve Munro links to John Lorinc’s series of articles at Spacing on the neglect of transit to the benefit of talking in Scarborough.
• Towleroad notes a recent meeting held in Vienna, funded by a Russian oligarch, aimed at fighting gays.
• Window on Eurasia notes the role played by Facebook in coordinating recent anti-government protests in Abkhazia and observes fears for the Crimean Tatars among scholars.

[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.