“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
Reviews for the King
Some reviews of Dave Eggers’s new novel, Hologram for the King, are starting to appear: Carolyn Kellogg writes that the story is accessibly though “elegantly told,” and Michiko Kakutani describes the prose as almost surprisingly “pared down” and “Hemingwayesque.”
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What Do Essay Prompts Mean to You?
You may have heard that Tufts University’s latest application forms use the term YOLO in one of their essay prompts. Herewith, a few more essay prompts, courtesy of Stacy Brook at The Hairpin.
Visible Men
Now is as good a time as there ever will be to go and check out the Art Institute of Chicago. A new exhibit, “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem,” combines the photography of Parks, who eventually went on to gain a measure of fame in the ’70s as a Hollywood movie director, and the writing of Ralph Ellison, in an attempt to offer a portrait of Harlem in the post-World War II years.
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Mississippi Music Issue
The Oxford American‘s thirteenth annual music issue is on shelves now, and it comes with a 27-track mix CD. This year, the OA folks have focused on Mississippi musicians. You can get a free sample on their website.
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Pork Problem
“First, catch your pig.” This is the beginning of Harper Lee’s recipe for cornbread, but it’s not the first time pork has preoccupied her writing. At The Paris Review, Sadie Stein examines the use of ham in Lee’s fiction.
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Traduttori traditori (“translators traitors”)
“As energy loss is an unavoidable fact of mechanics — no mechanism can be 100% efficient, and the best a designer can do is manage the loss as productively as possible — so translation loss is similarly unavoidable,” explains Mark Davie, who recently translated Galileo’s Selected Writings. But what if the “energy loss” isn’t a failure of the work’s translator so much as a failure of the organization commissioning (or failing to commission) the translation? What if, as is the case for much Arabic literature, “the process [of selecting works for translation] is based on a political consideration” that deprives Western readers of the best Arabic literary work?
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?