“spanish”

It was interesting stumbling upon Jorge Wagensberg^ELZR in Daniel C. Dennett’s Freedom to Choose^AM. Interesting because Dennett quotes exactly that one aphorism^ELZR from Wagensberg’s book^ELZR I never could give any sense whatsoever—proof that you can never outrun your ignorance.

But also interesting because googling for the article where he coined the phrase I found out Wagensberg just published a new book of aphorisms: A mas como, menos por que. What is more, here’s an (Spanish) essay of his, selecting and commenting his 11 favorite aphorisms. Wonderful!

The article, btw, I found.. But it’s $32 and I’m currently bitching about the price. “Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life…”^WP

I doubt someone would find this too useful but I smiled today when I found about the guess YubNub command. You feed it text, it gulps the language it’s in. A great way to showcase YubNub’s open-ended fun, courtesy of Xerox research. It would have been a godsend when I was dealing with Imagery’s multilingual rush (Oh, how GMail angered me then! Smart enough to correctly spellcheck anything I gave her, yet coyly keeping the language name to herself!). Hope I need it again soon.

For all of you that aren’t on the YubNub wagon yet, you can play with it here—but it won’t be even half as much fun ;).

And since we already seem to be on a language landslide, some months ago I found out playing with Google Translate that when you translate a website from Chinese to English (which is currently beta), you can hover on a sentence to get the original Chinese fragment in a quick popup. Mighty cool. All the more impressive a feature coming from a website. (Now let’s only hope they plan to add it to the other language pairs too…)

Final language tidbit: translate “Hello, how are you?” to Spanish with Google. Your immediate response is “¿Hola, cómo eres?,” sucking the life out of even the hardiest machine-translation enthusiast.

I enjoyed a birria^WP orgy this Sunday at El Chololo, a popular restaurant near Chapala^WP, and just as I was entering the bathroom two brown, impossibly small indian kids were chasing each other out of it. The (slightly) bigger one yelled to his mate: ”Kevin, ‘perame!” (“Kevin, wait for me!”).

I think it was a moment to amber, because surprised as I was of the Irish name having found its way into this beautiful brown boy, beacon of a brown new world, my surprise was really at how Mexican it sounded, how accustomed I had become to hearing such Anglo-Saxon names (Celtic Brian is very popular too) in young Mexican children.

Wikipedia has become such a taken-for-granted, basic building-block (on the web and beyond) that I’ve taken a special hatred for the unwieldy, clumsy “Wikipedia article” epithet and similar unhappy permutations. I need more of the short sweetness English is known for: “email”, “web”, “net”, “blog”, “post”, “podcast”, “inbox”, or “feed”. Language is the ultimate interface (to steal an ALA title) and shortness does make a difference.

I tried “article” and “wiki-article” but both are hopelessly general. Then I thought of being grammatically incorrect and use wikipedia for articles themselves—similar to the way we use email for the email address, the actual message, and the act of sending it: “email me an email at my email”—but it just won’t do. It doesn’t feel right. Wikipedia is so huge that the brutal metonymy^WP feels jarring. Port-manteaus^WP were tried, but neither wikipedicle nor wicle struck any fancy.

The only path that proved fruitful was twisted back-formation. Wikipedia comes, of course, from encyclopedia, which in turn comes from the Greek phrase enkuklios paideia, often translated as “general education.” Paideia is a nice, short Greek word that means education and that is itself a derivation of pais, child. It’s perfect (with a slight respelling).

I propose we call a Wikipedia article a pedia. It’s short, has a nice ring to it, has meaning (“a pedia is a document for learning”), is memorable, and has a semantic link with Wikipedia (the uninitiated might think it a contraction and that’d be okay too). With even the pettiest pedia gradually refining into a massive, referenced survey (take the optimistic leap with me for the sake of argument), wouldn’t it be beautiful and inspiring if we could whisperingly call them “documents-for-learning”?

Did you know “thruthiness” has a pedia?

Si te gustan los refranes la mitad de lo que a mi me gustan no te pierdas la version en linea del Refranero Mexicano de Herón Pérez Martínez. Es una joya. (La version impresa tambien es muy buena y la consigues a unos 130 pesos en la Jose Luisa o directamente en fce.com.mx.)

Ha tanto que no leia un cumplido de esta altura!

Here’s a quick stab of a translation, though it makes it absolutely no justice:

Today, in what I’m sure is an increasingly common occurrence to everyone, I was uncertain on a subtle language question and I googled it. The interesting thing was that I didn’t do that to get somewhere, to find any particular webpage, I only cared about the result numbers.

You see, I wasn’t sure whether you wrote “that’s a clever move of their part” or “that’s a clever move on their part.” Prepositions are one of the nastiest, most irrational things in every language. In Spanish you would use the equivalent of “of” in the equivalent expression and I’m guessing that’s what led me astray.

The worst thing is that dictionaries are no help at all in this regard, they just throw at you an impossibly long chain of usage cases. Enter Google. All it took to answer my question was a quick google for ”on their part” and one for ”of their part” (quotes included!). The first query had 2,820,000 results, the second 146,000. The winner was clear, my question was settled.

But it was unnerving. The web has swallowed our language with all its subtleties—it ought to make for one heck of a primeval soup. Don’t you get this feeling every so often that Google is this close to being able to do true translation? This close to understanding? This close to speaking? Do you think it’s not hearing us right now?

The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.

You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”

I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.

A pesar de sus terriblemente anacronistas definiciones y su interfaz decimononica, el diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española es utilisimo y le agradezco sinceramente a la Real Academia que lo tenga en linea gratuitamente. Aclarado eso, el pet peeve que me mueve hoy a escribir sobre ella es su extraña fijacion con los acentos. A pesar de que dispone, sensatamente, de una busqueda por aproximacion que me permite buscar palabras sin tener que escribir acentos, me restrega siempre en la cara el no haberlos escritos. Por ejemplo, si yo busco “redaccion”, me manda a una pagina de redireccionamiento en la que me dice que “La palabra redaccion no está registrada en el Diccionario.” y procede a darme una larga lista de un link, obviamente, “redacción”. Es decir, me fuerza a aceptar conscientemente una opcion que se da, de sobra, por entendido. Parecera poco y hasta me rei la primera que lo vi pero ya por la sexagesima vez que ocurre empieza a perder lo gracioso.

Claro que quizas todo sea solo pesimo usability design de su parte, pero conociendo a la Academia lo dudo, a mi me huele a pura mala leche linguistica, a esa sabida preferencia real-academica de la prescripcion sobre la descripcion.