“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
Your Local Heroes
Thanks to the generosity of Daniel Handler, the American Library Association has launched the Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity. The prize will award $3,000 and an “odd, symbolic object” of Handler’s choosing to a librarian who “has faced adversity with integrity and dignity intact.” (h/t The Paris Review)
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The 250
You may not have known that Thomas Jefferson – author of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. President, founder of the University of Virginia – also found time to amass the largest contemporary collection of books in North America. For sixteen years, The Library of Congress has been trying to track down copies of the final 250 listed in Jefferson’s collection.
“It’s a process that doesn’t stop.”
An in depth interview with Chris Andrews on the subject of translating Roberto Bolaño and César Aira.
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Pride and Fiscal Prudence
According to the BBC, Jane Austen will replace Charles Darwin on the Bank of England’s new £10 notes.
I Ain’t Sayin’ Eustace Tilley is a Gold-Digger…
Apropos of our popular “Open Letter to Kanye West,” may we recommend the “Shouts & Murmurs in this week’s New Yorker? “I have more than a million [Facebook] fans,” writes a certain unnamed narrator. “Do you know how many fans Books have? Twenty-five thousand seven hundred and sixty-four.”
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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?