There’s a good piece over at Progressive U arguing against Esperanto and the general ideal of a universal language that we could all speak without wearing a linguistic badge of national identification.

The EU uses both English and French as its official working languages, while the UN includes both of them as well as Chinese, Arabic, Russian and Spanish. While some point out that adopting a neutral language such as Esperanto throughout such international political organisations would both cut costs and reduce the sense of second-class-citizenship felt by those whose mother-tongues are not considered the primary languages of business…

…Even ‘neutral’ languages like Esperanto use the Latin alphabet and are based on Romance grammar rules. These do not reflect global diversity and can be especially difficult to learn for those whose languages do not use words or alphabets but rather characters like Chinese or Japanese…

Meaning is given to words by their cultural context rather than a dictionary definition. This means people from different cultures may use the same word to mean different things in different contexts, even when speaking the same language. Crucial cultural distinctions maybe overlooked if translation is no longer considered.

It’s years since I’ve made these, but it’s the last weekend of the month, the traditional time to bake for the office, so I thought I’d dig out the recipe.

170g (6oz) self raising flour
115g (4oz) caster sugar
85g (3oz) butter or margarine
115g (4oz) sultanas or raisins
4 tablespoons of condensed milk
Grated rind of a lemon (optional)

I’d recommend leaving out the lemon.

They are fairly easy to make, but you have to keep a close eye on them in the oven, as they’re a bit picky about how long they’re in.

Start by mixing the flour and sugar, and then mix in the butter, which should first be chopped into small pieces. When it is all well blended together, stir in the fruit and the condensed milk. At this point it should start to form into one mass, so you need to get your hands in and kneed it so that it sticks together.

Make small balls of the mixture, slightly smaller that golf balls, and flatten them slightly before placing them on a lightly greased (preferably with butter or margarine) baking sheet. You should get about 18 biscuits from the quantities above.

Put them into the oven at 180 degrees C (355 degrees F) for around 10 minutes, by which time they should have flattened slightly, spread slightly and browned slightly.

Remove them from the oven and lay out on a rack to cool.

Incidentally, they are called Sylvia’s biscuits because they were passed on by a woman called Sylvia, who was a friend of my grandmother. No doubt they have a proper name somewhere or other, but it’s been lost in the mists of time.

It’s not easy getting hold of Esperanto books. High street book stores don’t stock them, so you’re usually left to pick them up second hand, most often online. As such, you rarely get to try before you buy, but my small library is slowly building up.

I’ve just got hold of a copy of Step by Step in Esperanto by Montagu C Butler; a fourth edition, published in 1933.

It’s challenging, even from the outside. Produced by the British Esperanto Association it is, undeniably, a very complete work. However, it was produced at a time when publishing was less advanced, and as such its basic appearance – inside as well as out – can be off-putting, giving the impression that you must read much further through it than with the Teach Yourself book before you have a basic workable grounding in the language.

There are some nice touches, like a two-line poem that will help you remember that when a word closes off with two vowels, the stressed syllable will be the last vowel but one, even if in English we would usually run the vowels together into a single syllable:

Stress the vowel last but one
Then your accent is well done

The main failing for a modern audience, though, is that while Esperanto’s entirely regular structure means old and new words follow a common thread, English has moved on in the 70 years since its first publication, rendering some explanations initially confusing:

I- is like a sign-post pointing ‘I’ndefinately, nowhither in particular…

It is, however, a textually stimulating volume, full of small tricks that help you think of the structure of words in a very visual manner. When thinking of correlatives, it helps explain the beginnings of the various constituent parts by asking you to look at the shapes of the letters themselves. Following on from the ‘I’ example above,

I- is like a sign-post pointing ‘I’ndefinately, nowhither in particular; K-, a post pointing in three directions – Which shall I follow? T-, a post pointing in one definite direction – That one. The accent over C is like a family umbrella, sheltering every one, each, all, beneath it; the letter C itself is shaped like arms stretched out to embrace each and all.

This might not make much sense to anyone who has yet to get to grips with the correlatives, but it is an excellent system for remembering how you distinguish between fiendishly similar words like which one, that one, someone, no-one and everyone.

As such, this remains a worthwhile – and indeed recommended – purchase, but only as an accompaniment to another course book; most likely from the Teach Yourself Series (only available second hand). To tackle it as a primary learning text would be either brave or disheartening, but that should not put anyone off.

I’ve just finished reading a whole book in a day and a half. I’m quite glad it rained too much to go out yesterday, although I’d have preferred to spend more than just a couple of hours in the sun this afternoon.

Still, it was an interesting exercise. I can’t reveal the title, and it’s not something I’d have chosen to read, but I was asked to step in and edit it at the last minute. The deadline is two weeks tomorrow, and I only finally got the raw copy yesterday lunchtime, so I wanted to get a good start on it, and at least be familiar with the text before launching into the next week of work.

For the most part it was fairly clean, although some sections did need more editing than others, and here and there I have yellow virtual stickies slapped over the top of more dubious chunks of copy and the bits where the author (who doesn’t know that companies are singular – my pet hate) outright contradicts himself.

They said they were after a ‘structural edit’, which means they wanted some of it moving around, and other bits excising altogether. There’s also some rewriting to be done, which I can start on now that I know where it’ll all fit, but I don’t think I’ll get my name on it anywhere. Perhaps I ought to hide some subliminal messages in there, aux kalkaj vortoj en alia lingva so I could flick straight to the relevant page in bookshops and prove to people that it really was me.

Then again, maybe not. It was pretty much guilted into it in the first place and don’t like to think what the consequences would be. I had turned the publisher down, you see, but his reply made me think again:

‘If not, will run hot bath and gently open wrists.’

An interesting story in the Yorkshire Post, about the National Conference taking place in Scarborough:

JUST like Latin, Esperanto is the supposedly dead language that won’t lie down. Hitler and Stalin tried to ban it. The internet helped to save it. Now it could be on the way to a school near you…

Esperanto was developed in the late 1870s and early 1880s in Warsaw, Poland, by Dr Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, who dreamed of a common language that could unite the world.
That was before two world wars and the years between, when many speakers died in Stalin’s purges and it was officially banned in Nazi Germany.

Since it selects the easiest parts of every language, Esperanto can be learned four or even 20 times faster than other tongues.

At present only a handful of schools teach Esperanto officially outside China, Hungary, and Bulgaria, leaving the majority to pick it up through books or correspondence courses. But now studies have confirmed children who learn Esperanto can then master another language faster and better. Pupils who spent a year learning Esperanto and then did three years of French did better those who studied French for four years.

It’s an interesting thought, and I can certainly see the merit. Since concentrating on learning it myself, I’ve certainly found my French improving greatly. It also sounds very nice; it’s a shame so few people speak it.

Looks like we’re going to get a fancy new theme park in London, 10 minutes’ walk from my desk, and just over the road from the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus:

A £7m sex theme park, which has no rides, is to open in London’s West End later this year.
Visitors to Amora – The Academy of Sex and Relationships at the Trocadero in Piccadilly, will pass through seven zones including Pleasure and Orgasm. You have to be aged 18 and over to get in and tickets will cost £15 for the attraction which opens on 7 September. (Via Scalloblog.)

No rides? Really? Not even of the most obvious pun-filled variety?

The BBC’s full story is here.

Fox News has a much less attractive take on the idea.

Backers say the London Academy of Sex and Relationships (search), due to open next spring, will not be a sleazy sex museum, but an educational multimedia attraction that will teach visitors to become better lovers and provide valuable information about disease and sexual problems.

That sounds a bit too educational and scary for most tourists, who would probably rather go to the Icelandic Phallological Museum.

Personally, I’d rather go to the Sexuality Park in Guangdong, China. It’s not easy to find any record online, but the Taipei Times has archived this snippet:

China’s largest adult-only sexuality museum and combined natural theme park opened in Guangdong Province, boasting such attractions as “penis-like” rocks and “vagina-like” caves, state press reported yesterday. The 2,400m2 sex museum is located not far from Hong Kong on Danxia Mountain near Shaoguan City, and is believed to be the biggest such museum in China, Xinhua news agency said. “Danxia Mountain is well-known for its special red physiognomy and called `a naked park’ for its penis-like big stone, vagina-like cave, rocks shaped like breasts and naked `sleeping beauty,’” the report said of the park. The mountain was listed on Feb. 13 as one of the “28 world geo-parks” by the United Nations cultural arm UNESCO, the report said.

Anything would be better than the Beautiful China park we had to endure on a press trip to Guangdong five or so years ago. A vast collection of miniature replicas of China’s most famous buildings, the only thing we recognised was the Great Wall of China, which had been so scaled down it looked more like something to edge a patio.

What do us Brits smell of? I’d not really thought about it before, but according to a story in yesterday’s Telegraph, it’s After Eight mints.

A perfume maker in a small town in Germany has put together a smelling tour of all the nations in the World Cup, with the different smells featuring on different lamp posts.

‘We were going to give England the smell of tea,’ said Ernst-Adolf Hinrichs, a retired perfume maker who has created the smells tour. ‘But then we assigned green tea to Japan, and so England got the After Eight, a cult symbol of Englishness for Germans.’

Quite apart from the fact After Eights are Swiss, I’ve not eaten one in years. They’re made by Nestle, whose products I generally don’t buy.

They picked flat packed furniture as the smell for Sweden.

Niall Cook at PR firm Hill & Knowlton, has written a piece for its corporate online mag, Ampersand, about using blogs as PR outlets. It’s a bit light on practical advice, which is probably reserved for in-house briefings, although he does say:

…anyone who treats a [blogging] community as an ‘audience’ will quickly be in trouble and the natural urge to ‘control,’ ‘target,’ or ‘infiltrate’ blogs must be resisted. Attempts to do so will simply enrage these citizen journalists and the resulting fallout will provide perfect fodder for mainstream media. If you are more concerned about losing control than you are about communicating your position, then give it a miss – at least until you acknowledge that you have never really controlled your message – you’ve only controlled its distribution.

I’d question whether there is such a thing as a blogging ‘community’ beyond the tiny clique of high-hitting American bloggers that link in an endless circle to one another, or whether bloggers are citizen journalists, but his closing point is disarmingly honest: you have never really controlled your message, only its distribution.

I’d argue that in reality it’s controlled even less than that. PR firms may send out their clients’ releases, but only to the press (or blogs). They then go through a second tier of filtering and quality control before they make it to the page, and the next stage of distribution.

At that point it’s out of both the PR and the hack’s hands. The ultimate filter is the reader. They’re the ones who chose whether the message reaches its intended destination: their mind, where it may or may not be translated into a desire to buy, the ultimate measure of a PR campaign’s success.

That relies on a snappy headline or a striking image, which is why it amazes me that so many releases are so clumsy and long-winded, and clearly written to impress the bill-paying client rather than the time-pressed hack, or indeed the so-called blogging ‘community’.

The full article can be found here.

You can find some weird and wonderful things on eBay. Hunting for anything Esperanto, hoping to turn up some old course books, I found someone selling an all-audio course on CD. It’s a single CD of just four 10-minute sessions, the first three of which are sounds of the sea. The description went on:

The final audio track on this Subliminal CD, Track 4, is our brand-new ULTRASONIC ULTRA-SILENT SUBLIMINAL TRACK. When you play this track, you will not hear anything at all. No ocean soundscape like in the other subliminal tracks. Just pure silence!

While you will not consciously hear anything, you are still being exposed to an extremely powerful stream of ultrasonic subliminal messages. The subliminal content has been modulated to extremely high carrier frequencies.

They say you can tell it’s not just dead air if you play it through a computer-based player, in which case you’ll see the spectrum visualisation. How you’re supposed to know whether that’s the spectrum of someone explaining that La viroj estas antaux la hundejo, though, I don’t really know.

Lunch with Vinnie today, where she outlined how the BBC’s disability site, Ouch, conducted a survey to see how offended disabled and non-disabled people felt about a range of words used to describe people with a disability.

The usual range of spastic, cripple, mong and window-licker came up from both camps, but the one thing it proved more than anything else was how hyper-sensitive the non-disabled respondents were compared to those who described themselves as having a disability. While the latter group found spastic the most offensive term on offer, only 15.1% objected, as opposed to the 21.5% of non-disabled who objected to retard, the 19.6% who were offended by window licker, the 19.2% who complained about spastic, and the 15.7% who thought mong was the most offensive term you could use.

In comparison, only 5.8% of disabled respondents complained about mong, and 5.3% about window-licker.

However, while only 0.9% of able-bodied participants thought wheelchair-bound was offensive, a far greater number of disabled people – 6.3% – thought it was an offensive term, perhaps because it defines a person in reference to an external factor rather than a physical trait.

Unfortunately the poll didn’t reveal the term that disabled respondents would prefer to hear in more common use, but it is certainly worth remembering that both wheelchair-bound and handicapped (and the horrific ‘special’) are far more offensive to disabled people than they are to the disabled bodied speakers who may be using those terms.

The full comparison can be found here.