(b)logophile

From a talk I attended recently (slightly paraphrased, I was slow off the mark writing the quote down): > Orson Welles, > Brave New World, anybody read that > book? They have a ministry redefining language so that people can’t talk about political > concepts like going to war. I was slow off the mark [...]

I had the rather surreal experience this afternoon of being woken up by the warning cries of (if I remember correctly) a putty nose monkey. No, I haven’t been travelling in Cameroon. Nor was I at the zoo. I was at a workshop on language evolution.

Here’s an idea for the new media folk: how about a map of the linguistic connections around the world? Not sure quite how the visualisation would work, but it’s inspired by this Shirky article, which reinterprets proximity in terms of linguistic connection. In the next century, as countries increasingly trade more in information than hard [...]