Don’t forget to “like” the new Facebook page for Avian Bone Syndrome!

Links of interest mentioned in the episode:

• My photos of both lunar and solar eclipses
• Large format photography
• Ansel Adams’ zone systems
• Eli Pariser’s TED talk about the filter bubble
• The Filter Bubble book: Amazon.com – Amazon.co.uk – Amazon.it

First, I do not exist. The concept of a 13,700,000,000 year old being, capable of creating the entire Universe and its billions of galaxies, monitoring simultaneously the thoughts and actions of the 7 billion human beings on this planet is ludicrous. Grow a brain.

Second, if I did, I would have left you a book a little more consistent, timeless and independently verifiable than the collection of Iron Age Middle Eastern mythology you call the Bible. Hell, I bet you cannot tell me one thing about any of its authors, their credibility or their possible ulterior motives, yet you cite them for the most extraordinary of claims.

Thirdly, when I sent my “son” (whatever that means, given that I am god and do not mate) to Earth, he would have visited the Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Russians, sub-Saharan Africans, Australian Aboriginals, Mongolians, Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians and native Americans, not just a few Jews. He would also have exhibited a knowledge of something outside of the Iron Age Middle East.

Fourthly, I would not spend my time hiding, refusing to give any tangible evidence of my existence, and then punish those who are smart enough to draw the natural conclusion that I do not exist by burning them forever. That would make no sense to me, given that I am the one who withheld evidence of my existence in the first place.

Fifth, I would not care who you do or how you “do it”. I really wouldn’t. This would be of no interest to me, given that I can create Universes. Oh, the egos.

Sixth, I would have smited all evangelicals and fundamentalists long before this. You people drive me nuts. You are so small minded and yet you speak with such false authority. Many of you still believe in the talking snake nonsense from Genesis. I would kill all of you for that alone and burn you for an afternoon (burning forever is way too barbaric for me to even contemplate).

Seventh, the whole idea of members of one species on one planet surviving their own physical deaths to “be with me” is utter, mind-numbing nonsense. Grow up. You will die. Get over it. I did. Hell, at least you had a life. I never even existed in the first place.

Eighth, I do not read your minds, or “hear your prayers” as you euphemistically call it. There are 7 billion of you. Even if only 10% prayed once a day, that is 700,000,000 prayers. This works out at 8,000 prayers a second – every second of every day. Meanwhile I have to process the 100,000 of you who die every day between heaven and hell. Dwell on the sheer absurdity of that for a moment.

Finally, the only reason you even consider believing in me is because of where you were born. Had you been born in India, you would likely believe in the Hindu gods, if born in Tibet, you would be a Buddhist. Every culture that has ever existed has had its own god(s) and they always seem to favor that particular culture, its hopes, dreams and prejudices. What, do you think we all exist? If not, why only yours?

Look, let’s be honest with ourselves. There is no god. Believing in me was fine when you thought the World was young, flat and simple. Now we know how enormous, old and complex the Universe is.

Move on – get over me. I did.

God

(I didn’t write this; I found on the web, but I wholeheartedly agree.)

Latin, for instance, is usually deemed to be a dead language, but this is not the case. To begin with, Latin is still the official language of the Vatican, and while catholic functions have been in local languages since 1964, papal documents continue to be redacted in Latin to this day. Moreover, while there are no native Latin speakers, there are hundreds of millions of people whose native language is directly derived from Latin: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian; these are usually called “romance” or “neo-latin” languages. The word romance has unfortunately nothing to do with feelings, and is rather a reference to roman. Ancient Romans did, in fact, spread the usage of Latin around the world.

The evolution of languages is usually caused by their speakers’ movement across the globe: as populations mix, so do their languages. The best example of this is probably Romanian, whose name betrays a Latin origin even though it’s geographically distant from the area where its cousins are spoken. Indeed, the novice might find it surprising that Romanian is indeed a romance language, considering how the Balkan area separates its speakers’ pool from Western Europe, but linguistic evolution, like any other cultural trait, requires taking into account the bigger picture. The area then known as Dacia was inglobated by the Roman empire in 106 CE, but stayed a Roman province until until 271 CE, when the Goths conquered it. During those 165 years, vulgar Latin set its roots in the area, but was then polluted by subsequent linguistic interferences. Modern Romanian shows a striking mix of Latin and Slavic traits, the most immediate of which are postfix articles: EN lake, ES/PT/IT lago, FR lac, RO lac — EN the lake, ES el lago, PT o lago, IT il lago, FR le lac, RO lacul.

The more a geographic area is conquered by different populations, the more intermixed the local language will become, as it draws from all of them. Even more fascinating than Romanian is Maltese, which inherits from Italian, Sicilian, English and Arabic. Written Maltese can look to the untrained eye like a mishmash of random letters. This is how the first article of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights looks like in Maltese:

Il-bnedmin kollha jitwieldu ħielsa u ugwali fid-dinjità u d-drittijiet. Huma mogħnija bir-raġuni u bil-kuxjenza u għandhom igibu ruħhom ma’ xulxin bi spirtu ta’ aħwa.

A recording can be found here (courtesy of Omniglot.) It definitely sounds more Arabic than anything else.

The fact that languages differ over time as the distance increases can be proven by Portuguese, specifically its Brazilian variety. Whereas European Portuguese is very similar to Spanish, to the point that they are almost mutually intelligible in writing, its South American counterpart is so different that some consider it to be an entirely different language, much more so than American English is to British English. The most striking structural distinction is that most Brazilian Portuguese dialects lost the second singular pronoun tu in favor of você (originally vossa mercê, ie. “your grace”, akin to Spanish usted), which is conjugated with third singular person verbs but is used informally. Interestingly, a similar pronoun, vos, is also used in several South American varieties of Spanish, especially those in areas geographically close to Brazil.

Languages generally evolve by simplification, as can easily be seen comparing the complex case system of Latin with modern romance languages, none of which use cases other than for pronouns. Moreover, language evolve under one’s own eyes. When I went to elementary school twenty years ago, the informal yet very common construction a me mi, as in a me mi piace was considered a serious mistake because it implied repeating the same thing twice. While it is not something that one would use in writing, it has become accepted in all but the most formal settings. (Note that the correspondent Spanish construction, a mí me gusta, actually requires the repetition.) A similar thing has happened in English: until a few decades ago, substituting whom (accusative) with who (nominative) in phrases such as I don’t know was considered bad practice; nowadays, it is standard English. Of course, phrases usually used as “whole blocks,” such as for whom the bell tolls or to whom it may concern, are likely to retain the original inflection for much longer. Sometimes the simplification is done by law, usually in the form of spelling reforms. This has recently happened with Greek in 1982 to drop its ancient polytonic orthography, and to German in 1996; the latter wasn’t exactly a smooth transition. Many reforms have been suggested for English, but none has ever been attempted. It is worth to remember this satyrical piece, attributed to Mark Twain, about how such a reform could be carried out over the course of at least two decades:

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or s, and likewise x would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which c would be retained would be the ch formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform w spelling, so that which and one would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish y replasing it with i and Iear 4 might fiks the g/j anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez c, y and x — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais ch, sh, and th rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

In some cases, languages do however indeed die without evolving, but a more correct term in this case is “extinction.” Most scholars consider a language to be extinct when it’s no longer used and there are no direct derivatives. Language extinction is closely linked with the story of populations as a whole, and almost always to catastrophic events such as genocide. For instance, Many Native American languages are now extinct, as the people who spoke them were killed during the colonization. The few survivors eventually stopped using them (or were too young and were never taught to speak them) and began using the language of the colonists. In some cases, if the pool of speakers is already small, there may be no push to teach it to other people and they may eventually die and take the language with them. This is the reason behind the attempt, in the recent years, to revive languages and dialects at a concrete risk of disappearing.

As we have seen, language defines culture and identity. When a language becomes extinct, the loss for humanity as a whole is much bigger than a set of grammar rules.

I have already said that language is the foundation of human culture. It is, however, more than that. Language is one of the very few “inner traits” that define the different ethnic groups, that is traits not immediately visually discernible when seeing someone new. Everybody can tell if somebody has a similar ethnic background: Caucasian people look different than African people, or Asian people. Yet, while is it true that a Swedish will probably look different than an Italian, it will be virtually impossible to discern a Spanish and a Portuguese just by looking at them.

Groups defined by a common language

In such cases, and especially when populations mix due to varying borders over the course of history, language effectively define the identity of populations. Not surprising, many stereotypes are based on making fun of how a foreign language sounds and how immigrants speak the local language: in Italy, Asians are often mocked by replacing /r/ with /l/, an obvious reference to the Japanese liquid consonant. More often than not, this is done in good spirit, as is the inevitable attempt to have foreigners pronounce words that contain sounds that they are not familiar with. When in the UK, my group caused immense frustration in the activity leader who tried to pronounce “biglietto.” This is all usually done in good spirit today, yet in war times a similar technique has been used as a way to detect potential spies.

Sometimes, even in the modern day, a language is used as a common trait by a group and used to differentiate given group by others. Such is the case of Catalunya, which succeeded in having a top-level domain, .cat, to be made available for websites in Catalan. While this is not uncommon nowadays, with “content-based” top-level domains such as .museum and .aero, it is the first time that a language has been awarded one.

Another case for political unrest that is mostly visible through language is the current state of affairs in Belgium. The country is divided in two main parts: French-speaking Walloon and Dutch-speaking Flanders. The country has been struggling to have a strong government since 2007, and while there are deeper cultural and economic differences between the two areas, language is by all means the most prominent and immediate one.

In Northern Italy, homophobic, xenophobic and wannabe-secessionist political group Lega Nord insists that local dialects be taught in schools and used as official languages in public offices, also to mark a clear distinction between the North and the South of the country, and possibly to make it harder for immigrants to integrate, as they would have to pass a dialect test before being granted the permission to dwell in a given town.

It is interesting to note that immigrants from the same area of the world often tend to form clusters. Prime examples of these are the numerous “Chinatowns” and “Little Italy” neighborhoods. This happens not only to get the immediate support that derives from kinship; it is also a way to retain the group’s original culture. How long this lasts is debatable; it is a fact immigrants today are able to keep up with their origins more than immigrants could do just a few decades ago. To this day, respect for foreign cultures is more widespread, as is the ability to stay in touch with the motherland. Back in the day, it was not uncommon for second-generation immigrants to only have a basic knowledge of the family’s native language, even though the accent that came from their first-generation immigrant parents stayed for several more generations, and in some cases it became a distinguishing trait of the specific local group (see for instance the Brooklyn accent.) This kind of accent usually has a much stronger connotation of pride for its speakers compared to “standard” ones such as the Boston dialect.

In other cases, a social class might lay claim on its speech, slang and accent as a way to differentiate itself from the upper, “snob” classes; see for instance the Cockney speech.

Groups within a language

Group identity can, however, also be claimed within a language. Black people, for instance, have been historically referred to by white people using words that had a strong negative connotation, the most common of which is negro. While the origin of the word is not offensive by itself (it simply means “black” in Spanish), it started carrying a negative meaning by the way it was used. Moreover, as the word found its way to different languages and dialects, variations of it appeared; what is interesting is that today the more phonetic transcription nigger or nigga is considered somewhat more offensive than negro.

In any case, modern usage has led to unusual workarounds to be politically correct. Most non-blacks might use the phrase African-American, which of course only applies to black people born in the Americas. In the United Kingdom such phrase would make no sense, and consequently the word black is used without worry, in part because black slavery, or slavery of any groups for that matter, was not as widespread in the UK. (The situation in India, however, was quite different: the possessions of the East India Company was notably exempted from the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.) The race for political correctness in North America about the words used to refer to black people has been exploited for humorous purposes by many comedians, usually replacing black with African-American in unrelated phrases such as “black Friday.”

A very interesting aspect of ethnic and social groups targeted by offensive words is that, over the course of times, members of such groups take on the usage of the same words to refer to one another, in a linguistic phenomenon called reappropriation. This does not mean that the words is decontextualized and cleared for usage by anyone; on the contrary, those who do not belong to the group are discouraged even more from using it. In addition to the original offensive connotation, the now-reappropriated word carries the additional implication that the outsider is mocking both the group and the group’s usage of the word itself. Words that have been reappropriated include most racial and sexual slurs, but can also include words such as nerd or geek. In some cases, some words achieve enough “grammar strength” to be declined: for instance, the word guido (originally used to refer to working-class Italian immigrants in the NY area, from the first name Guido that was probably common at the time) has given birth to the female version guidette.

It is worth noting that members of one group are sometimes allowed to use reappropriated words belonging to other groups or even joking about them, without necessarily sparking harsh reactions from members of the “target” groups. This is clearly visible in Russell Peters’ stand-up comedy. Being the son of first-generation Indian immigrants in Canada, he defines himself as being brown and jokes about how different ethnic groups and their languages are perceived by one another, playing with and effectively demolishing common stereotypes. It is very likely that the same lines would cause controversy if they were uttered by a white man (especially those about Arabs), proving that linguistic reappropriation, and ultimately language, can change the way we relate to one another.

Culture could not exist without language, and not only because we wouldn’t be able to share it with one another. Animals, lacking full languages, are only able to communicate simple pieces of information: there is food over there; a predator is approaching; I am ready to mate. Contrary to popular belief, they do not chit-chat with one another; they are simply relaying basic information. A cat might indicate to one of its kind that it is happy, but will not seek a full conversation with its fellow. They lack the body parts to do so, and are therefore unable to conceive any higher form of communication. This is not unlinke people who are blind from birth: not having ever seen colors, they simply don’t know what color is. It’s an entirely abstract concept to them, much like every human fails to grasp the concept of a fourth dimension. (I strongly recommend reading Edwin A. Abbott’s “Flatland” to get a better idea of the problem.)

Without language, we wouldn’t have any literature, or math, or philosophy, or religions, or politics, or engineering. If we weren’t able to fully communicate and share our thoughts with others, we would be forever stuck in an environment without being able to improve it. Chimpanzees are the most intelligent animals. They are very similar to us, and do have remarkable communication skills compared to most animals, and they are able to use tools. Yet they are not able to do more than what they do. They have no push for innovation. For instance, there are no reports of wild chimpanzees ever attempting to build anything that wasn’t directly targeted at obtaining food. If a chimpanzee had a “human-like” idea, it wouldn’t be able to share it with its fellows, and for all intents and purposes, it would be as if it had not had it. Moreover, we wouldn’t even know, because non-verbal communication has strict limits. Sign language works in humans because we have the innate ability to communicate extensively, and it could be said that muteness is a statistical error: the instinct to communicate is still there. On the other hand, chimpanzees who were taught the sign language were only able to express comparatively simple thoughts.

It would therefore be naïve to limit the idea of language to spoken word, or to a set of grammar rules, or even to a writing system. Language, in itself, is a much broader concept: it’s a foundation upon which we build everything. We are humans not because we have opposable thumbs, or because we walk while standing up. Our very humanity exists because we are able to think about abstract concepts, and we can do that because we have the potential for language.

The basis of such theory is that, since the problem stems from a gap on the lower left side of the phone, it is more likely for left-handed people to trigger it. That may be, but there are many people who are generally right-handed, yet prefer to do things with their left hands. I do, for instance.

I often hold my phone in my left hand in order to use my right hand to navigate it, especially when pinching to zoom. I am also left-eared: for some reason, holding any phone to my right ear feels very innatural to me. Of course, that leads to holding the headset with my left hand, which has the added benefit of leaving my right, dominant hand free. I also open bottles by holding them with my right hand and unscrewing the cap with my left hand, and I bring my left eye to the viewfinder of my reflex camera. On the other hand (pun not absolutely intended), I cannot write with my left hand at all, at least not with a pen: I fare much better using my left index finger on a misty window.

Most of you probably do the same. There is nothing like complete right-handedness and complete left-handedness… or complete ambidexterity, for that matter.