Bright stars...

There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark.

- Hannah Szenes, 1921 - 1944

I liked the quote as I read it, but it was even more moving when I looked at the dates of the person who wrote it.

I just finished reading the autobiographic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and this made me think of it. She was writing about the early 1980s in Iran. And Zlata's Diary, which I read long ago, but it made an impression. Bad times, and so much worse elsewhere, too - Afghanistan, Somalia.

We need all the bright lights we can find.

(no subject)

I got this from tudorpot:

You Are a Traditional Christmas Tree

For a good Christmas, you don't have to re-invent the wheel. You already have traditions, foods, and special things you bring out every year.

What Christmas Tree Are You?

Blogthings: Free Quizzes for Everyone

Languages...

A few days ago I was talking about languages here and now found an article in The Economist about that very subject: whether some languages are more difficult than others to learn, and, if so, which ones. And the general question of comparing them. Tongue twisters: In search of the world’s hardest language. This goes a little beyond the Mario Pei sorts of things I read in my student days. Good quotes from it:

• "spelling is ancillary to a language’s real complexity; English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled."
  
• "German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why 'a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has'. (Mädchen is neuter, whereas Steckrübe is feminine.)"
  
• "Mandarin, the biggest language in the Chinese family, has four tones, so that what sounds just like 'ma' in English has four distinct sounds, and meanings.... Cantonese has six tones, and Min Chinese dialects seven or eight. One tone can also affect neighbouring tones' pronunciation through a series of complex rules.
  
• "!Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet)."
  
• "Latin’s six cases cower in comparison with Estonian’s 14, which include inessive, elative, adessive, abessive, and the system is riddled with irregularities and exceptions."
  
• "To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them."
  
• "Take 'we'. In Kwaio, spoken in the Solomon Islands, 'we' has two forms: “me and you” and 'me and someone else (but not you)'. And Kwaio has not just singular and plural, but dual and paucal too. While English gets by with just 'we', Kwaio has 'we two', 'we few' and 'we many'. [Presumably each taking a different verb in each conjugation?] Each of these has two forms, one inclusive ('we including you') and one exclusive."
  
• [In] Berik, a language of New Guinea.... Verbs have endings, often obligatory, that tell what time of day something happened; telbener means '[he] drinks in the evening'. Where verbs take objects, an ending will tell their size: kitobana means 'gives three large objects to a man in the sunlight.'

Then the article talks about the Universalists like Chosmky, who belive with Noam Chomsky, that there are basic patterns for all languages because of the way the mind works, and those who belive like Benjamin Lee Whorf, who believe that language conditions the way we see the world. I am a confirmed Chomskyite, though I hope no one tries to make me prove it. And I'd rather not even try to master a language that will put a lump on my larynx.

The article concludes that the most difficult language in the world is Tuyuca, and I'm not going to try to describe it, because even just reading about it has made my head spin. It sounds impossible, but I suppose, if you learn to speak it as an infant, it's a breeze.

Maybe.

Decisions...

It's a hard decision giving up a regular paycheck, medical insurance, and other perks for the unpredictability of being on your own. But I have found if you truly love something, people can sense it. Doors open. Paths appear (though not always paved, especially in the beginning). As Emerson said, "Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen." - Anu Garg

Spending Christmas in the snow...

From Livejournal's Writer's Block: Do you long for snow during the winter holidays? Would you prefer to spend your holidays in the tropics or in a winter wonderland?

Well, I've nothing against the tropics, but I'm also not drawn to the tropics, either. Not int he least. Other people go to Cuba and Florida Jamaica, but I choose Orkney and Durham and Paris for my travels. I'm not fond of heat, and when I travel it's to see places I love (mostly in Europe) and friends and events. Next month will be my first trip ever to the Caribbean. So, by default, it's obvious that my choice would be to spend Christmas in a Winter Wonderland. A few choice memories of Christmas in the past:

• Being in England as a student, and spending Christmas at my cousin's place in Somerset. She had two young children who were terrific, and an old thatched cottage, with roses growing on the wall outside. On Christmas afternoon it snowed, and we all went out on skis. Not much snow by Canadian standards, but pretty. I admired the larch trees: they didn't lose their leaves.
  
  
• When I was three, we had a Christmas without snow. I got a toy truck as a Christmas present, and played with it in the mud in the back yard, in my snowsuit.
  
  
• It often snows on Christmas Eve, and I remember walking to the Christmas Eve Candlelight service at Trinity Anglican Church on Bank Street, not far from where my parents lived when I was an undergraduate. There were huge beautiful snowflakes that caught the light and drifted as they fell.
  
  
• At the age of twelve, we spent Christmas with my grandfather in the mountains of Arizona. We saw snow on the Texas desert as the train went through.
  

Looking at the stats...

Has anyone but me been looking at their LJ stats?

I've always assumed that, generally speaking, the number of comments I get reflect the number of people who look at any of my LJ posts, plus an irregular number who read but don't comment on any given day. I assume most of these will be from my friends pages, which in turn, I assume, would potentially exceed the number of people on my flist. But that might be illusory, since many people on my flist have faded away and don't post any more. Who also, I assume, aren't reading.

So what surprises me on the stats is the number of non-LJ people who look at my pages. Numbers often exceeding LJ people reading things.

One reaction is to think: Whee! People are reading me!

My next thought is to wonder why.

The Vinyl Cafe...

Another great show at the National Arts Centre tonight: A Vinyl Cafe Christmas with Stuart McLean. Stuart McLean has one of my favourite shows on CBC Radio, Vinyl Cafe.

He did four stories:

• In which Dave, at a Christmas party, accidentally pours the alcohol into the kids' eggnog instead of the adults';
  
  
• In which Dave is envious of his neighbour Ted's $12,000 bicycle;
  
  
• Stuart McLeans' story of his first job as a journalist in a small town in Saskatchewan, where he had to spend Christmas working, and so couldn't go home for Christmas that year;
  
  
• A story of how Dave's daughter Stephanie fell in love with books, when a copy of The Encyclopedia of Forgotten Places was sent to their home anonymously at Christmas.

Even better, there was great music from Jill Barber (whose CD Chances I own and love) and Matt Anderson, whose singing of Blue Christmas and O Holy Night was wonderful. The first song he sang was this one, So Gone Now. And Jill Barber sang her title song Chances, as well as doing a wonderful version of I'll Be Home for Christmas.

Before the show, maaseru and I went to Daly's (at the Westin) and had a lovely meal. One of those 'couldn't do it too often but it was worth every penny' meals. Mine was tomato-basil soup, braised duck with stir-fried veggies and noodles, and sortilège crème brulée. I didn't know what sortilège meant and had to ask the waitress. Maple brandy, she said. Well. Learn something every day. I had it with coffee. Delicious. It was nice too that, sitting by windows in Daly's, we had a gorgeous view of the National Arts Centre with its Christmas lights along the canal.

Here's an example of a Vinyl Cafe story.