Monday, 14 May 2018

the politics of statues

The German city where Karl Marx was born has accepted a statue of him - from the Chinese government:
Jay Doubleyou: karl marx at 200

Why is China doing this?
Western Leaders Amplify China's Propaganda For Karl Marx's Birthday
Xi Jinping’s take on communism offers alternative to decline of the West | This Week In Asia | South China Morning Post
Stick to Karl Marx’s true path, Xi Jinping tells China’s communists in speech to mark 200th birthday of ‘greatest thinker of modern times’ | South China Morning Post

In China, “there are two completely different voices in the debate” over the statue, said Zhu Dake, a cultural commentator and professor at Tongji University in Shanghai.

“One is that Germany is now a wholly capitalist state that has abandoned Marxism. Sending the statue is tantamount to sending his ideas back to try to reignite the spark of revolution,” he said in an interview.

“The other is that Marx’s theory of class struggle had a very negative effect on China,” he said. “Sending the statue is symbolically returning defective goods.”

Why Send Germany a Statue of Marx? The Chinese Have Some Ideas - The New York Times

The city of Bristol has been debating for some time what to do with a statue put up some time ago:
Jay Doubleyou: bristol and slavery

Why was this statue put up?
Residents Of Bristol, England, Grapple With Slave-Trading Past Of The City's Most Celebrated Figure : Parallels : NPR
Plaque marking slave trade victims to be put on statue of Edward Colston in Bristol - Bristol Live
Should we tear down the statues of slavers such as Edward Colston? | UK news | The Guardian

We are aware of the controversy over statues of American Civil War figures:
Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down Across the United States. Here’s a List. - The New York Times

The Confederate statue the resides outside the Pitt County courthouse has been called for removal following the events in Charlottesville, VA
Thomas WeybrechtFacebook Twitter

On Aug, 12, 2017, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia became the epicenter for national debate when a white supremacist rally took a violent turn. The gathering was originally organized to protest the decision to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, located in the city’s Emancipation Park. Ultimately, the rally resulted in the death of counter-protester, Heather Heyer and two Virginia state troopers, H. Jay Cullen and Berke M.M. Bates. Due to the events in Charlottesville, a lingering debate has been revitalized surrounding the ethics of statues constructed to honor confederate soldiers of the American Civil War. According to a 2016 Southern Poverty Law Center report, approximately 718 of these statues and monuments still stand across the United States. One such monument, erected in 1914, resides on the steps of the Pitt County Courthouse in Greenville, North Carolina.

A symbol of pride or racism? | Thehook | theeastcarolinian.com

Why were these statues built?
1,503 Confederate symbols are on display across America. Most are in the South. 179 are in majority black counties
Why Were Confederate Monuments Built? : NPR
Striking graphic reveals the construction of Confederate monuments peaked during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras
The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy - The Washington Post
Confederate Monuments History - Civil War Statues Were Built During Jim Crow
Why the fuss over Confederate statues? - BBC News
The Real Story Behind All Those Confederate Statues – Mother Jones

Here is a possible way out:
A museum of Confederate statues could help end the American Civil War

Meanwhile in the UK, these could be considered as 'icons':
Jay Doubleyou: english icons

And one 'icon' in particular is exciting a lot of debate:

As Historic England calls for a debate on knocking down Nelson's Column, DOMINIC SANDBROOK says the way such bodies constantly give in to the far Left is beneath contempt

By DOMINIC SANDBROOK FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 01:11, 18 April 2018 | UPDATED: 22:29, 18 April 2018

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We went on a family outing to London a few weeks ago to see the sights. Among our stops was, inevitably, Trafalgar Square, where the children peered up at the figure of Horatio, Lord Nelson, almost 170ft above the streets on his mighty granite column.

Few lives in our national history are more rousing than that of the vicar's son from Norfolk. Having lost an eye and an arm in the struggle against Napoleon's cruel tyranny, Nelson faced the fleets of France and Spain at Trafalgar in 1805 in a titanic showdown for control of the seas.

Opening the battle with the signal 'England expects that every man will do his duty', Nelson steered his fleet to a glorious victory, only to be cut down by a French sniper on the deck of HMS Victory. As he breathed his last, the battle was won and Britain was saved.

The watchdog group responsible for protecting Britain's history has sparked a storm of criticism after posting a message suggesting Nelson's Column should be bulldozed

'The way bodies constantly give in to far Left is beneath contempt' | Daily Mail Online

Here's are a couple of videos:
Nelson's Column Toppled By Wrecking Ball in Historic England Graphic - Guido Fawkes Guido Fawkes
Nelson's Column - Leftie wanting to tear down Trafalgar Square statue is shut down | UK | News | Express.co.uk

Why was the statue put up?
Is Britain's keeping of Nelson's Column morally similar to the Confederates’ keeping the statue of Robert E. Lee? - Quora
Nelson's Column - Wikipedia
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Tuesday, 8 May 2018

the eu has no plans to downgrade the use of english after brexit

So, even though the UK intends to leave the EU, English will still be one of the working languages:

EU has no plans to downgrade use of English after Brexit

Despite jokes from Juncker, small print in proposed 2021-27 EU budget confirms position

Jennifer Rankin in Brussels

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The European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, said he had been joking when he said English was losing its importance in Europe. Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA

The EU’s executive body has no plans to downgrade the use of English after Brexit, despite occasional barbs that the language would be less significant in Europe when the UK leaves the bloc.

Buried in the small print of the European commission’s proposed budget for 2021-27 is confirmation that it has no intention to reduce the use of English in its meetings or documents.

“The withdrawal of the United Kingdom will result in a limited reorientation of some functions within the administration, but the scope of activities will not change,” the section on EU administration says. “Translation and interpretation services in the English language will also remain unaffected.”

The European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, said last year that English was losing its importance in Europe, although he later said he had been joking. “The French were happy. The British, I had a shitstorm coming from the other side of the Channel,” he told students in his native Luxembourg in October.

Rumours that Brexit negotiations would be conducted exclusively in French also appear to have been a joke at the expense of the British, who are among the least likely in the EU to speak various languages.

Only 5% of GCSE-age students were studying two or more foreign languages in 2015, compared with an EU average of 59%. Only Greek students were less likely to take languages than the British.

When the UK leaves the EU in 2019, only 1% of the EU population - in Ireland and Malta - will be living in countries where English is an official language.

The EU has 24 official languages, making 552 combinations of language pairings, allowing each to be translated into 23 others.

Only three, however, are classed as working languages - English, French and German. English has been used more widely used than French since Sweden, Finland and Austria joined the EU in 1995, bringing in more speakers of English as a second language. The dominance of English became entrenched when central and eastern European countries joined in the mid-2000.

France is keen to restore the pre-eminence of its language, but is fighting a constant battle. Its EU ambassador walked out of a meeting last week when officials decided to use an English-only translation of the budget proposal.

• This article was amended on 8 May 2017. An earlier version referred to Ireland and Malta as “countries where English is the official language”; it is an official language in both.

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karl marx at 200

Shold the birthplace of Karl Marx be putting up a statue to him - as gifted by the Chinese?
Karl Marx 200th anniversary: The world is finally ready for Marxism as capitalism reaches the tipping point | The Independent
Karl Marx statue from China adds to German angst - BBC News
China’s huge celebrations of Karl Marx are not really about Marxism – Quartz

If we ignore what it practitioners claim to be 'Marxist' then:
Karl Marx 200th anniversary: The world is finally ready for Marxism as capitalism reaches the tipping point

Here' a little video on some of his ideas:
Karl Marx is a titan of terror whose communist ideology murdered millions | Daily Mail Online

And another:

Karl Marx on Alienation - YouTube

But then Marx's ideas are everywhere:
'The way bodies constantly give in to far Left is beneath contempt' | Daily Mail Online
The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook review – intellectual snobs beware | Books | The Guardian
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Monday, 7 May 2018

how new words are born

Some very interesting articles on language from Andy Bodle in the Guardian:
Andy Bodle | The Guardian

This was from a couple of years ago:

How new words are born

Andy Bodle

English speakers already have over a million words at our disposal – so why are we adding 1,000 new ones a year to the lexicon? And how?

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Comments

One of the many recent additions to the Oxford English Dictionary. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

As dictionary publishers never tire of reminding us, our language is growing. Not content with the million or so words they already have at their disposal, English speakers are adding new ones at the rate of around 1,000 a year. Recent dictionary debutants include blog, grok, crowdfunding, hackathon, airball, e-marketing, sudoku, twerk and Brexit.

But these represent just a sliver of the tip of the iceberg. According to Global Language Monitor, around 5,400 new words are created every year; it’s only the 1,000 or so deemed to be in sufficiently widespread use that make it into print. Who invents these words, and how? What rules govern their formation? And what determines whether they catch on?

Shakespeare is often held up as a master neologist, because at least 500 words (including critic, swagger, lonely and hint) first appear in his works – but we have no way of knowing whether he personally invented them or was just transcribing things he’d picked up elsewhere.

It’s generally agreed that the most prolific minter of words was John Milton, who gave us 630 coinages, including lovelorn, fragrance and pandemonium. Geoffrey Chaucer (universe, approach), Ben Jonson (rant, petulant), John Donne (self-preservation, valediction) and Sir Thomas More (atonement, anticipate) lag behind. It should come as no great surprise that writers are behind many of our lexical innovations. But the fact is, we have no idea who to credit for most of our lexicon.

If our knowledge of the who is limited, we have a rather fuller understanding of the how. All new words are created by one of 13 mechanisms:

1 Derivation
The commonest method of creating a new word is to add a prefix or suffix to an existing one. Hence realisation (1610s), democratise (1798), detonator (1822), preteen (1926), hyperlink (1987) and monogamish (2011).

2 Back formation
The inverse of the above: the creation of a new root word by the removal of a phantom affix. The noun sleaze, for example, was back-formed from “sleazy” in about 1967. A similar process brought about pea, liaise, enthuse, aggress and donate. Some linguists propose a separate category for lexicalisation, the turning of an affix into a word (ism, ology, teen), but it’s really just a type of back formation.

3 Compounding
The juxtaposition of two existing words. Typically, compound words begin life as separate entities, then get hitched with a hyphen, and eventually become a single unit. It’s mostly nouns that are formed this way (fiddlestick, claptrap, carbon dating, bailout), but words from other classes can be smooshed together too: into (preposition), nobody (pronoun), daydream (verb), awe-inspiring, environmentally friendly (adjectives).

4 Repurposing
Taking a word from one context and applying it to another. Thus the crane, meaning lifting machine, got its name from the long-necked bird, and the computer mouse was named after the long-tailed animal.

5 Conversion
Taking a word from one word class and transplanting it to another. The word giantwas for a long time just a noun, meaning a creature of enormous size, until the early 15th century, when people began using it as an adjective. Thanks to social media, a similar fate has recently befallen friend, which can now serve as a verb as well as a noun (“Why didn’t you friend me?”).

6 Eponyms
Words named after a person or place. You may recognise Alzheimer’s, atlas, cheddar, alsatian, diesel, sandwich, mentor, svengali, wellington and boycott as eponyms – but did you know that gun, dunce, bigot, bugger, cretin, currant, hooligan, marmalade, maudlin, maverick, panic, silhouette, syphilis, tawdry, doggerel, doily and sideburns are too? (The issue of whether, and for how long, to retain the capital letters on eponyms is a thorny one.)

7 Abbreviations
An increasingly popular method. There are three main subtypes: clippings, acronyms and initialisms. Some words that you might not have known started out longer are pram (perambulator), taxi/cab (both from taximeter cabriolet), mob (mobile vulgus), goodbye (God be with you), berk (Berkshire Hunt), rifle (rifled pistol), canter (Canterbury gallop), curio (curiosity), van (caravan), sport (disport), wig (periwig), laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus), and trump (triumph. Although it’s worth noting that there’s another, unrelated sense of trump: to fabricate, as in “trumped-up charge”).

8 Loanwords
Foreign speakers often complain that their language is being overrun with borrowings from English. But the fact is, English itself is a voracious word thief; linguist David Crystal reckons it’s half-inched words from at least 350 languages. Most words are borrowed from French, Latin and Greek; some of the more exotic provenances are Flemish (hunk), Romany (cushty), Portuguese (fetish), Nahuatl (tomato – via Spanish), Tahitian (tattoo), Russian (mammoth), Mayan (shark), Gaelic (slogan), Japanese (tycoon), West Turkic (horde), Walloon (rabbit) and Polynesian (taboo). Calques (flea market, brainwashing, loan word) are translations of borrowings.

9 Onomatopeia
The creation of a word by imitation of the sound it is supposed to make. Plop, ow, barf, cuckoo, bunch, bump and midge all originated this way.

10 Reduplication
The repetition, or near-repetition, of a word or sound. To this method we owe the likes of flip-flop, goody-goody, boo-boo, helter-skelter, picnic, claptrap, hanky-panky, hurly-burly, lovey-dovey, higgledy-piggledy, tom-tom, hip hop and cray-cray. (Willy-nilly, though, came to us via a contraction of “Will he, nill he”.)

11 Nonce words
Words pulled out of thin air, bearing little relation to any existing form. Confirmed examples are few and far between, but include quark (Murray Gell-Mann), bling (unknown) and fleek (Vine celebrity Kayla Newman).

12 Error
Misspellings, mishearings, mispronunciations and mistranscriptions rarely produce new words in their own right, but often lead to new forms in conjunction with other mechanisms. Scramble, for example, seems to have originated as a variant of scrabble; but over time, the two forms have taken on different meanings, so one word has now become two. Similarly, the words shit and science, thanks to a long sequence of shifts and errors, are both ultimately derived from the same root. And the now defunct word helpmeet, or helpmate, is the result of a Biblical boo-boo. In the King James version, the Latin adjutorium simile sibi was rendered as “an help meet for him” – that is, “a helper suitable for him”. Later editors, less familiar with the archaic sense of meet, took the phrase to be a word, and began hyphenating help-meet.

13 Portmanteaus
Compounding with a twist. Take one word, remove an arbitrary portion of it, then put in its place either a whole word, or a similarly clipped one. Thus were born sitcom, paratroops, internet, gazunder and sexting. (Note: some linguists call this process blending and reserve the term portmanteau for a particular subtype of blend. But since Lewis Carroll, who devised this sense of portmanteau, specifically defined it as having the broader meaning, I’m going to use the terms willy-nilly.)

Some words came about via a combination of methods: yuppie is the result of initialism ((y)oung and (up)wardly mobile) plus derivation (+ -ie); berk is a clipped eponym (Berkshire hunt); cop, in the sense of police officer, is an abbreviation of a derivation (copper derives from the northern British dialect verb cop, meaning to catch); and snarl-up is a conversion (verb to noun) of a compound (snarl + up).

The popularity of the various methods has waxed and waned through the ages. For long periods (1100-1500 and 1650-1900), borrowings from French were in vogue. In the 19th century, loanwords from Indian languages (bangle, bungalow, cot, juggernaut, jungle, loot, shampoo, thug) were the cat’s pyjamas. There was even a brief onslaught from Dutch and Flemish.

In the 20th century, quite a few newbies were generated by derivation, using the -ie (and -y) suffix: talkies, freebie, foodie, hippy, roomie, rookie, roofie, Munchie, Smartie, Crunchie, Furby, scrunchie. Abbreviations, though, were the preferred MO, perhaps because of the necessity in wartime of delivering your message ASAP. The passion for initialisms seems to be wearing off, perhaps because things have got a little confusing; PC, for example, can now mean politically correct, police constable, per cent, personal computer, parsec, post cibum, peace corps, postcard, professional corporation or printed circuit.

But today, when it comes to word formation, there’s only one player in town: the portmanteau. Is this a bodacious development – or a disastrophe? I’ll get the debate rolling tomorrow.

Twitter: @AndyBodle

• This article was amended on 8 February 2016 to remove an incorrect reference to Oxford Dictionaries Online.

How new words are born | Media | The Guardian
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Jay Doubleyou