“As a speaker of a small language, it can be alarming to hear the rapidly increasing influx of new words from a dominant force. Back in 2000, linguistics researcher Sylfest Lomheim caused upheaval by claiming the Norwegian language wouldn’t survive the next century. Is this the beginning of the end?” On the Anglicization of Norwegian.
Beginning of the End
McSweeney’s 2.0
Version 2 of McSweeney’s quirky iPhone app includes an ebookstore with custom-designed ebooks. “Whereas most ebooks have weird line breaks, stretched type and clunky fonts, ours are actually designed so they look just as they do in print – clean and beautiful.”
Miranda July’s Somebody
Miranda July – whose new novel, The First Bad Man, is due in January – has developed a smartphone app that “allows one person to deliver a message to another.” The kicker? Someone other than you will deliver the message verbally and in person. (Sounds like she’s probably due before Congress once again.)
Ich bin ein Berliner
The kind souls at NYRB Classics have nicely posted the first story from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, “Good Morning, Giantess!” on their Tumblr. The collection got a nice little write up in this weekend’s New York Times, too.
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Not a Title
In the first two lines of a piece in the latest New Yorker about the Alaskan poet Olena Kalytiak Davis, Dan Chiasson points out that her new book, The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems, has an undeniably excellent title. In describing her appeal, he says that her submissions to the canon are “anti-submissions,” by which he means that she actively rejects association with more famous poets. “Davis’s professed unworthiness is one of many tricky manifestations of her ambition,” he writes.
Reading from the Man Booker Shortlist
We recently announced the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. At Granta, you can read an excerpt from Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways, included on the list.
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Tarantino on Writing
Say what you want about Quentin Tarantino; the man thinks like a writer. You can hear him doing so out loud on the current episode of KCRW’s The Treatment, with Elvis Mitchell.
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Old English isn’t recognizable to most modern speakers. Heck, I once saw a girl post in Yahoo! Answers asking where she could find a video copy of a Charles Dickens novel because she couldn’t understand such “old” English. And that’s only a little over a century of linguistic evolution! Yet ,despite people like her, a lot of English speakers can still enjoy Robert Burns (even if they’re not a teensey bit Scottish) and William Shakespeare (who is a good deal older than Charles Dickens).
Point being: maybe day-to-day Norwegian will sound more Anglican. helpful in a “global village.” keep a good literary tradition and “classic” Norwegian will still be there.
Oh, and if it helps, the native Menominee language nearly went extinct in the mid-20th Century, with only two native speakers left. It’s now rebounded and probably has a few thousand speakers. How many Norwegian speakers are there?