Commentary Magazine has put online a 1969 exchange between Noam Chomsky, Lionel Abel, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. I highly recommend Schlesinger's initial salvo at Chomsky. It is a bit tiresome, but that's typical of effective Chomsky criticism. Schlesinger is required to quote lengthy passages from a Truman speech to put selectively-quoted words back into context, but he spices up the substantive criticism with some good jibes at Chomsky's intellectual honesty. It's really a lot of fun.
(hat tip)
Anyone interested in reading the actual work the pope was quoting from last year can find a (possibly bootleg) version of Manuel II Palaeologus's Interview with a Persian at this French website.
Based on a quick skim, it's an engaging read. Unlike much modern interreligious dialogue, the participants here trade barbs and insults with each other while debating the real differences between their faiths. They acknowledge a shared, absolute morality which they each appeal to, while making essentially pragmatic points in their own support.
Something about this New York Times Magazine article on British genetics set off my bogosity alarm. Think of your smoke detector when you're making blackened catfish.
Dr. Oppenheimer’s population history of the British Isles relies not only on genetic data but also on the dating of language changes by methods developed by geneticists. These are not generally accepted by historical linguists, who long ago developed but largely rejected a dating method known as glottochronology. Geneticists have recently plunged into the field, arguing that linguists have been too pessimistic and that advanced statistical methods developed for dating genes can also be applied to languages.Dr. Oppenheimer has relied on work by Peter Forster, a geneticist at Anglia Ruskin University, to argue that Celtic is a much more ancient language than supposed, and that Celtic speakers could have brought knowledge of agriculture to Ireland, where it first appeared. He also adopts Dr. Forster’s argument, based on a statistical analysis of vocabulary, that English is an ancient, fourth branch of the Germanic language tree, and was spoken in England before the Roman invasion.
[snip]
Germanic is usually assumed to have split into three branches: West Germanic, which includes German and Dutch; East Germanic, the language of the Goths and Vandals; and North Germanic, consisting of the Scandinavian languages. Dr. Forster’s analysis shows English is not an offshoot of West Germanic, as usually assumed, but is a branch independent of the other three, which also implies a greater antiquity. Germanic split into its four branches some 2,000 to 6,000 years ago, Dr. Forster estimates.
Historians have usually assumed that Celtic was spoken throughout Britain when the Romans arrived. But Dr. Oppenheimer argues that the absence of Celtic place names in England — words for places are particularly durable — makes this unlikely.
If anyone can explain to me why the sections I highlighted make sense, I'd appreciate it.
A few months ago I figured I'd try to pick up Yiddish. I've grown much less ambitious in the past year or so, figured the language wouldn't be too hard for someone already familiar with German and Hebrew. In fact, I figured I'd skip some of the simple stuff by buying a Yiddish text in German. Saves time, right?
Salomo Birnbaum's Die Jiddische Sprache (1974) is a product of a nation grappling with the war. Much of the book concerns itself with linguistic questions that are essentially political in nature. "Was aber bedeutet Volksgeist?" is not the sort of thing you see in most grammars.
While I'm disappointed in Die Jiddische Sprache as a tool for teaching myself Yiddish, the digressions and ruminations are fascinating. In the introductory page on das Umschriftalphabet, justifying Birnbaum's unfortunate choice to transliterate Yiddish into Latin characters, he starts by answering a question that had never occured to me:
Yiddish is written with Hebrew letters. The fact that it is materially a Germanic (i.e. Indo-European) language does not imply that the Hebrew (i.e. Semitic) alphabet is unsuitable for the purpose — completely apart from the fact that the alphabets used for German and the majority of the Indo-European languages are from the same Semitic source.*
* Latin letters actually stand much closer to the paleo-semitic alphabet than do the Hebrew. In Hebrew, no one sign is identical to the paleo-semitic equivalent, but this is the case with almost half of the Latin alphabet. H, L, O, Q, and Z are the same; with A, E, K, and N only the direction is different; and with D, M, and T the difference is so small that the connection is evident at first sight.
(My translation. Original below the fold.)
Jiddisch wird mit hebräischen Buchstaben geschrieben. Daß es stofflich eine germanische, also indogermanische, Sprache ist, bedeutet nicht, daß das hebräische, also semitische, Alphabet für diesen Zweck ungeeignet ist — ganz abgesehen davon, daß der Ursprung der für die germanischen und die meisten indogermanischen Sprachen benutzten Alphabete ja auch semitisch ist.*
Run by Phyllis Schlafly's kid. Where you want to go if the Bible is your authority on dinosaurs.