June 6 - English vs Language Families

We in the English-speaking group don't think about other language families.  English seems to be dominant in so many areas that we might not even think about other languages. How many language families are there?  There are 141 language families and 7,111 living human languages within the 141 different families.   Membership of languages is established by comparative linguistics.  Just like plants - they are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship.  We also don't think about which is the most-spoken language.  That's because English is dominant in many communications.  It's 983 million speakers fall behind Mandarin Chinese with 1.1 billion speakers.  Next is Hinustani at 544 million.  Another retrieval says that there are 1.121 billion speakers of English and 1.107 billion speakers of Chinese.  Or perhaps there are as many as 1.5 billion using English to some extent.  The native English speakers number 375 million. What would the scenario be like if Chinese surpassed English in Global speakers?  How would that change things?   When I worked in computers, the universal language for comments and descriptions is English - computer code is required to have English descriptors.  I worked on a project where the software was developed in Morocco and it was written in French, so it would not be allowed in a government department given it failed this mandatory requirement.  I wonder how many fields and professions require English for similar things. I would think that STEM would be the area that requires a common set of standards and practises.  The Oxford-Royale.co.uk side says this is the case - 80% of scientific texts are written in English.  Academia, Online businesses, Tourism, Diplomacy, management consultancy and finally Finance are the top areas that require good English.  So I guess that covers a lot of jobs around the world. Look at the 'trunk' on this bonsai azalea at Longwood.

May 25 - Left and Right

Left and Right have been hijacked in Google and now retrieve left and right wing politics. One has to look for relative direction to find left and right.   I repeated the search and there's some 'smarts' in Google that now retrieves both concepts.  I knew they were watching me. So in relation to my question about direction, Wikipedia says that: "In situations where a common frame of reference is needed, it is common to use an egocentric view."  I had thought of left and right simply.  I find there are many paragraphs in Wikipedia on this.     I was drawn to the paragraph on Geometry of the natural environment: "The right-hand rule is one common way to relate the three principal directions. For many years a fundamental question in physics was whether a left-hand rule would be equivalent. Many natural structures, including human bodies, follow a certain "handedness", but it was widely assumed that nature did not distinguish the two possibilities. This changed with the discovery of parity violations in particle physics. If a sample of cobalt-60 atoms is magnetized so that they spin counterclockwise around some axis, the beta radiation resulting from their nuclear decay will be preferentially directed opposite that axis. Since counter-clockwise may be defined in terms of up, forward, and right, this experiment unambiguously differentiates left from right using only natural elements: if they were reversed, or the atoms spun clockwise, the radiation would follow the spin axis instead of being opposite to it." This means there is proof of the right-hand rule in nature. There are human cultures with no words denoting the egocentric directions. We use backwards, forwards, up, down and left, right.  They might say "move a bit to the east".   Betterphoto tells me that one of my images won second place in the landscape category.  Here it is - a picture from Winterthur a few years ago.  No azaleas blooming so beautifully this year.

And Now Here's Glenn: So You Want to Write a Fugue

Today's entry comes from Wikipedia and is our Canadian contribution to Bach through our own genius Glenn Gould.  So You Want to Write a Fugue? is a satirical composition for four voices and string quartet or four voices and piano accompaniment. It was composed by the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould and was a final piece for the television show The Anatomy of Fugue, which was broadcast on March 4, 1963 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The work is the result of Gould’s intense study of the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, in particular Bach's late work The Art of Fugue, excerpts of which Gould had recorded in 1962. Structurally the piece is modeled on just such a Bach Fugue. The text, however, was written on the subject "So you want to write a fugue?" Both the text and the music are parodies of the rules and compositional techniques of the genre, as well as the relationship between intellectual methods and artistic intuition in the creative process (e.g., "Just forget the rules, and write one"). Lyrically, the 5-minute piece concludes tongue-in-cheek with the decision to "write a fugue right now!" The piece contains numerous quotes from various works of classical music, including the famous sequence of notes B-A-C-H, the Second Brandenburg Concerto by J. S. Bach, Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, and Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (altered from major mode to minor). "So you want to write a fugue? You've got the urge to write a fugue You've got the nerve to write a fugue So go ahead and write a fugue that we can sing Pay no heed to what we've told you Give no mind to what we've told you Just forget all that we've told you And the theory that you've read For the only way to write one Is just to plunge right in and write one So just forget the rules and write one Have a try, yes, try to write a fugue So just ignore the rules and try And the fun of it will get you And the joy of it will fetch you It's a pleasure that is bound to satisfy So why not have a try? You'll decide that John Sebastian Must have been a very personable guy But never be clever for the sake of being clever For a canon in inversion is a dangerous diversion And a bit of augmentation is a serious temptation While a stretto diminution is an obvious solution Never be clever for the sake of being clever For the sake of showing off It's rather awesome, isn't it? And when you've finished writing it I think you'll find a great joy in it (hope so) Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained, they say But still it is rather hard to start Well, let us try Right now? (yes, why not) We're going to write a fugue We're going to write a good one We're going to write a fugue right now! Here's the YouTube of Glenn Gould and the performance:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s4TKOaUZ7c We enjoy the preview of Spring in pictures today.