Jolly Hunter

Just playing with SoundCloud to see what can be done.  The following clip is a reading of "Jolly Hunter" by Charles Causely.

Slightly Foxed

I have previously mentioned my habit of subscribing to journals and magazines for a year to see if they are interesting enough to sustain my attention, and the fact that most of the time I end up wondering why I bothered.

There are various things that turn up in my mail box (my actual mail box) which produce a reaction much like this:

"Oh!  I have mail!  Oh.  It's only that."

Slightly Foxed is different. The fourth issue of my subscription turned up in my mail box a couple of weeks ago, and I felt happy for the rest of the day.

Have you ever had something arrive in the mail that actually made you clap your hands and say "Oh, good!"? Well that's what Slightly Foxed does for me.

I discovered this wonderful magazine by dint of a piece of paper that fell out of a copy of Literature Review, which I bought when I was trying to find Good Reading in a news agency that didn't have it.

I often find reading about books is much more achievable than reading the books themselves. Good Reading is a nice bit of fluff that's great for finding out what books are out there. Literature Review is like the book reviews you find in the "boffin" section of the Weekend papers - can be good, but can be a bit like hard work.

Slightly Foxed is just a nice read. It's a collection of essays about reading. The contributors talk about a book or an author or a movement that touched them in some way. Any given topic about books seems to be fair game. How Wind in the Willows shaped someone's childhood; What it was like running a subscription library out of a department store; what one particular series of out-of-print mountaineering books has to offer a reader lucky enough to find them...

The contributors are novelists, magazine editors, reporters, librarians... People from all over the place, and they are all writing about something they find quite interesting. This makes for a wonderfully eclectic collection of articles.  While I must admit that I don't read all of the articles immediately, I find I've usually read the entire issue by the time the next one arrives in my mail box.

The journal is run out of a bookshop in London - one that has taken to reprinting out of print books as well as their own quarterly collection of essays.  I expect I'll probably have to visit that shop if I ever go to London...

Oh, and the magazine is just lovely, physically. They use a buff coloured paper stock that feels wonderfully smooth to touch - and my first issue came tied up in a ribbon (seriously). You feel like these people really love books - not only the content, but also the form.

Slightly Foxed has become one of the few journals I have subscribed to for a second year - and, in a real first, I've actually bought a book as a result of reading one of the reviews.  A real book.  Brand new.  In hardcover.  It cost money.  This is not something I usually do.

I would happily recommend this publication to anyone who likes reading - especially if they like discovering works they've never heard of before.  It's a bit like sitting down with a group of bookish friends and asking the question "have you read any good books recently?"

A Fantastic Language

I’ve been looking more closely at Esperanto lately, and I must admit it is a fascinating thing to look at.

When you look at what it was meant to be and the concept behind it, you realise the language is absolutely fantastic, in almost every sense of the word.

The idea – or, rather, ideal – of the language was that everyone in the world would learn it as a second language.  Everyone would, therefore, have at least two languages to use:  their own, and Esperanto.  You could know other languages if you wanted to, but you would be able to communicate with everyone in the world through the shared medium of Esperanto.

Esperanto – a planned language that is intentionally simple, making it more accessible to everyone.  Esperanto – a neutral language that belongs to no one country, so it doesn’t carry any political or cultural baggage.  Esperanto – a language that subtly teaches you how languages work, so that learning further languages becomes easier.  Esperanto – a language that is always and forever a Second Language, so that everyone is in the same boat of having acquired it as a language learner, and no one has the advantage of knowing it as their first language.

Esperanto – which is really fun to say.  I enjoy putting it into random conversations, just because the word feels good rolling off the tongue.  Try it – you’ll feel almost smarter and just a little bit exotic.

Esperanto – a constructed language acting as a free and accessible communication tool, to enable us all to talk as equals and discuss things like rational human beings, rather than going to war or something equally silly.  An idea so powerful that the Nazis felt the need to ban it.

It’s fantastic, in that it is both a wonderful idea and a complete fantasy.

There are a few problems with Esperanto, which get in the way of reaching the ideal.

For one thing, far from everyone learning the language, very few people actually do learn it.  As second languages go, it is mildly more useful than Welsh… but not much.

Then there’s the matter of neutrality.  While it may be politically free of baggage, it isn’t culturally so.  It is a European language – and, significantly, an educated one.  Almost all Esperantists have, or can probably get, a higher education.  If you tried telling a farmer in rural China that a language spoken by European scientists was free of cultural baggage, he would probably tell you that you were wrong.

And while the language might be intentionally simple and useful as a language learning tool (studies have shown that learners in Taiwan find Esperanto easier to learn than English, and English easier to learn after learning Esperanto), it really is a gateway drug to Indo-European languages.  Learning Esperanto won’t really help you with Korean to the same extent that it would help with English or German.

And as for the part where it’s always and forever a Second Language?  Well, that’s not strictly true.  There are actually people who speak it as a first language.

For a planned language that has been around for less than 150 years and failed to take off as a form of diplomatic communication, Esperanto has been surprisingly successful as a family language.  Members of the Esperanto community meet, marry and use the language around the house – which results in their children growing up bilingual or trilingual, with Esperanto as one of their “native” languages. 

The really interesting thing about this phenomenon is that it gives the language more “cred” with the average man on the street.  I’ve had conversations with people who sneered at the very thought of an artificially constructed language until I mentioned the native speakers – and suddenly they took it a little more seriously.  Most people (myself included, until recently) completely miss the point of a constructed language, thinking it’s somehow in competition with “real” languages, or a game rather than a tool.

I’ve just read a very interesting article by Sabine Fiedler (doi: 10.1075/lplp.36.1.04fie) in which she points out that native speakers are confusing the issue when it comes to the role Esperanto is meant to play and it’s worth as a language in general.  In it, she also asks whether the rise of English as an International Language (EIL) means we should stop letting native English speakers decide what is and isn’t right for English.  It’s the first time I’ve ever really stopped to question the way we assume the native speakers are the be-all and end-all of a language. 

Is there an international standard of every language that should be determined by the people using the language as a co-operative tool, rather than the people who grew up with it?

And has EIL completely taken over from what Esperanto was meant to be?  Is there hope for the grand vision of the language yet?

Maybe.  “Esperanto” means “hope” after all…