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wsstandsfor · 3 years

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Character Chart - Alek Golubev

Character’s full name: Alexander Golubev [Yes, he has a Patronymic but the struggle is real to figure out the correct ending to Lyudovik of all names].

Reason or meaning of name: "Latinized form of the Greek name Ἀλέξανδρος (Alexandros), which meant 'defending men.' In Greek mythology this was another name of the hero Paris, and it also belongs to several characters in the New Testament. However, the most famous bearer was Alexander the Great, king of Macedon."

Character’s nickname: Alek

Birth date: 14 March 1975

[I know, I know, suddenly we’re in Peaky Blinders but please stay with me]

[Sometimes you have to sass the Wolf Spider Project Lead because The Boy is rather attached to you and your brother just died under Mysterious Circumstances]

Physical appearance:

Age: 35 (as of ‘vanishing’ in 2010)

How old does he/she appear: Mid 20s/Early 30s pre-vanishing. In the zone, he looks like he’s in his mid-50s when he’s really rescued in his early-40s.

Weight: -

Height: 5'8

Body build: Average

Shape of face: Rectangle

Eye color: Blue

Glasses or contacts: Farsighted. Wears glasses full-time after prison.

Skin tone: Pale

Distinguishing marks: Couple of moles on his chest, birthmark on his foot

Predominant features: Cheekbones, eyes

Hair color: Blond, turned white.

Type of hair: Some wave/curls

Hairstyle: Neat. Side part. Slicked back at times.

Usual fashion of dress: Suits, or business casual. Doesn't wear jeans or t-shirts unless he has to.

Favorite outfit: Navy striped suit.

Jewelry or accessories: Silver toned accessories. Simple bracelets or ring at times.

Family:

Mother: Natalia

Relationship with her: Good

Father: Lyudovik

Relationship with him: Complicated

Siblings: Bogdan (older half-brother through father)

Relationship with them: Good. There’s about a 20-year age gap between the two brothers so Bogdan was pretty much the Father for most of Alek’s young childhood.

Spouse: None

Children: None

Family Backstory:

Ludovik was the lawyer for an infamous Boss (Georgiy) of the Bratva. Bogdan was born during those days and became a bookkeeper for Georgiy when he grew up. When the group was broken up, Bogdan and Georgiy went to prison. Yes, Ludovik used his connections to get off scottfree, he's a dick. But it still wasn't a good look for his bastard son and friend being in prison. Dude got married to Tally a few years later and then Alek was born.

Bogdan was released from prison and helped raised Alek until Alek went off to boarding school. From there, he completed his military conscription, seeing action in Tajikistan and Chechnya. Life was turbulent, coming of age during the fall of the USSR. At least when he was 18, the ban on same-sex activity was lifted (please note heavy sarcasm. He’s been closeted his entire life, telling only his mother and best friend). Once he completed his military service, he went to law school, and worked at his Father's law practice. Pro bono work for LGBT human rights projects. Discreetly dated a few men. Life was as good as it could get for this very anxious man...

And then Department X knocked. Not to be like "It's a job offer he couldn't refuse" but. A lot of carrot, playing on duty to country. But a lot of stick, using his sexuality and family status against him. It just so happens the job involves taking care of a kindergartener. In Siberia. With Bogdan because this kindergartener needs a very calm guy to teach him things and a hardass who hates kids (except Alek as a kid) to teach him how to punch and hit people with a bat.

Alek, examining a picture of a tall 4 year old: Where are his parents?

Red Room Director: Not in his life.

Personality:

Good personality traits: Soft heart, wants to look out for those in need.

Bad personality traits: Compliant. Workaholic. Neurotic.

Mood character is most often in: Calm. Stressed, if he's got a big trial or the director is breathing down his neck.

Sense of humor: Dry. Doesn't usually have one.

Character’s greatest joy in life: When The Boy succeeds at doing a thing.

Character’s greatest fear: that he'll never get out from under his father's thumb/shadow. Or that he will. Because he won't know what to do with himself. Being outed is also a big concern.

What single event would most throw this character’s life into complete turmoil?: Being moved from being The Boy's handler to somewhere else in the Department. Or shot. Probably the death of his father.

Character is most at ease when: He's working or in court.

Most ill at ease when: Social events when he's not in the background

Enraged when: Something happens to The Boy. Ironically a strong sense of justice.

Depressed or sad when: See above

Priorities: Work, The Boy

Character’s soft spot: Bogdan, The Boy, and his Mother

Is this soft spot obvious to others?: Yes

Greatest strength: Brain, drive

Greatest vulnerability or weakness: Easily manipulated by his father

Biggest regret: Not getting out when he had the chance

Minor regret: Not calling Mother as often

Biggest accomplishment: Graduating law school

Minor accomplishment: Coming out to his mother 🎊

Past failures he/she would be embarrassed to have people know about: breaking up with his ex

Why?: thinks his family is too messed up and his boyfriend treated him like a muse without really trying to understand him. Also, it's Russia, he has to closet himself for the job.

Character’s darkest secret: [REDACTED]

Does anyone else know?: Yes

Goals:

Drives and motivations: He wound up at This Job because of government meddling but he’s determined to not do a bad job.

Immediate goals: Keep The Boy from causing trouble

Long term goals: Get out from his father's thumb. Ironically, he still can't, even in Siberia.

How the character plans to accomplish these goals: Basically, stay in Siberia and outlive his father.

Past:

Hometown: St. Petersburg

Type of childhood: Provided for. Doting mother and older brother. Let’s not think of the Father. Sent to boarding school at age 12.

Pets: Sunny, orange cat

First memory: Bogdan and him (age 3) going to see the boats for his birthday. It was a warm spring day and he got to ride on his shoulders.

Most important childhood memory: [REDACTED]

Childhood hero: Bogdan. Thought he was the coolest guy he ever met.

Dream job: Lawyer. Wanting to help people, seek justice. And then, that worked out poorly.

Education: Specialist degree in law

Religion: Russian Orthodox

Finances: Well off

Present:

Current location: Siberia

Currently living with: Alone-ish. Lives on-site. And then he’s in prison so he lives with a bunch of other prisoners.

Pets: "Does my brother or The Boy count? No?"

Religion: Agnostic

Occupation: Handler, formerly attorney, prisoner.

Finances: Well off, then poor.

Favorite:

Color: Navy

Least favorite color: Red

Music: classical, rock, Irish

Food: Soup

Literature: History

Form of entertainment: Reading

Mode of transportation: Car

Most prized possession: A painting from his ex-boyfriend

Habits:

Hobbies: Running

Plays a musical instrument?: Violin

Plays a sport?: No. Is a decent shot at the shooting range and can throw a punch.

How he/she would spend a rainy day: Working

Spending habits: Self-Controlled

Smokes: Previously

Drinks: Occasionally

Other drugs: Caffeine

What does he/she do too much of?: Work

What does he/she do too little of?: Relax

Extremely skilled at: His job

Extremely unskilled at: Being normal

Nervous tics: Touches his face, bites his nails, twitches

Usual body posture: Corporate power stance

Traits:

Optimist or pessimist?: Complex. Believes in the goodness of man but thinks the elite which he is a part of have it right

Introvert or extrovert?: Introvert

Daredevil or cautious?: Cautious

Logical or emotional?: Logical

Neat or Disorderly?: Neat, methodical

Prefers working or relaxing?: Working

Confident or unsure of himself/herself?: Confident, except around his father/doing regular life things

Animal lover?: Enjoys cats and the zoo

Self-perception:

How he/she feels about himself/herself: Not doing enough

One word the character would use to describe self: Neurotic

What does the character consider his/her best personality trait?: Smarts

What does the character consider his/her worst personality trait?: Wallflower

What does the character consider his/her best physical characteristic?: Eyes

What does the character consider his/her worst physical characteristic?: Body

How does the character think others perceive him/her: Meek or weird/twitchy

What would the character most like to change about himself/herself: Would rather not be in this family, have a normal life

Relationships with others:

Opinion of other people in general: People are good, the world is rotten

Does the character hide his/her true opinions and emotions from others?: Yes

Person character most hates: Father

Best friend(s): Timur

Love interest(s): Nikolay (ex, artist)

Person character goes to for advice: Timur or Mother

Person character feels responsible for or takes care of: The Boy, Bogdan

Person character feels shy or awkward around: Most people, lbr

Most important person in character’s life: Family, The Boy

#headcanons #alek golubev

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darringauthier · 5 years

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The Mansion (2017)

Genre: Horror/Comedy

Who’s In It: Marc Jarousseau, Nathalie Odzierejko, Vanessa Guide, Vincent Tirel, Jerome Niel, Ludovik Day, Lila Lacombe

Who Directed It: Tony T Datis

Plot: A band of students comes to celebrate the New Year in an old manor house isolated from everything. But soon after their arrival, strange events disrupt the atmosphere, before the party turns squarely to the nightmare.

Running Time: 100 Minutes

IMDB Score: 4.6

Why I Watched It: I’ll throw my hands up on this one, I heard some decent things about it but going in I thought it was more horror than comedy, I blame myself.

How I Watched It: Netflix Canada

Random Thoughts: So this is a France/Belgium film so yes I watched it with sub-titles. The film’s original title is Le manoir.

I have written this many times before but for my money the horror/comedy sub-genre is the hardest to pull off well, it’s the old problem if it’s too scary then the humor seems out of place and it’s it’s played more for laughs the horror just doesn’t land.

What I Liked: Sadly not a lot, not going to lie this just wasn’t for me, not the worst movie I’ve ever seen but it didn’t work on a ton of levels for me, so give me a second and let me try and write something positive. The Mansion it’s self is a decent setting, and the film is very weird and very European, this is not a cookie cutter Hollywood horror movie.

What I Didn’t Like: This film is maybe the text book case of why horror/comedies don’t often work, the film is not funny or scary bottom line and really we could end the review right here where the film really misses the boat for me is the humor it’s gross out and really dumb humor not built out of character but just really dumb forced situations. Some of the actors are fine but the characters are almost all terrible, they’re mostly unlikable and I know the plot summary says students but they’re like older 20′s early 30′s.

The film doesn’t know what it wants to be, it’s going for very dark humor cause to be honest where the film goes with a twist is very dark and doesn’t work with the over all tone of the film. The tone is another bad part of this film they go for a lighter silly tone but then when the killings start and things move more to horror the film keeps the same light tone. Also there’s a couple of characters so unlikable they’re hard to watch.

I have to also point out the direction is not great some scenes just go on way too long, they don’t work and they beat a dead house also the film is way too long, this should have been maybe 85 minutes. Also the twists don’t work. I’ll lastly complain about the horror/killings of the film, not filmed well and are really very boring.

Final Thoughts: Didn’t like this film at all and to be honest almost didn’t get through the whole thing but sadly I made it through and no it didn’t get any better.

Rating: 3/10

#the mansion

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doedipus · 8 years

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Let’s Play Dungeons and Dragons: Introduction

So, I think I’m going to go ahead and post the D&D stuff I was talking about earlier. About three months into the campaign, I started keeping notes on each session. I’m thinking of releasing a session or so worth of notes regularly (probably a couple times a week) until I catch up with where we are now, and then just posting updates whenever major story beats wrap up (probably every 1-3 weeks. Sometimes boring things take a long time). Of course, there’s a very obvious problem with that idea: there’s three months of lore between the start of the campaign and when I started taking notes! Thankfully, one of the other players was taking care of that at the time, so I’m going to try to summarize it as best I can.

Let’s get started!

The story began in the town of Valen, a port city located on a peninsula off the southern Sword Coast of Faerun. Three adventurers, Lucas Valeroyant (played by Rich), a recent graduate from the arcane academy of Candlekeep, Ser Graham Broyer (played by Rich’s boyfriend Jake), a trans man who ran away from home and began travelling under his late brother’s name, and Rolen Amastacia (played by Ludovik), a disgraced elven noble and holy man, were summoned from their homelands to a tavern by a mutual friend, Rockseeker. The trio received a mysterious black box from the innkeeper, and were told to deliver it to Rockseeker himself in Waterdeep. The magnificent corvette The Spirit of Fire and her crew awaited them in the harbor, ready to set sail for adventure.

While in town, Lucas met Greg, a dancer at a local bar. Greg robbed him blind and fled. Later that night, some bandits make an attempt on their lives, and were revealed to be assassins. The inn they were staying at was burnt down shortly thereafter, and Graham identified the attackers as the Sisters of the Night, a cult of ne’er do wells bent on causing chaos in Faerun. The party tracks down and captures Greg before fleeing the city on the Spirit.

On the boat, they meet Escrima (Rap), a strange young man from Calimport who was involved with a cult worshipping a lovecraftian creature known only as MOTHER. The party was attacked by some cultists, including villain apparent Sister Elsa. They defeat the attackers handily, though the sister escaped to fight another day. Lucas and Rolen (and Rich and Ludo) began to butt heads frequently, and a rivalry between the two was formed both in and out of character.

In between sessions, Jake posted on /r/transgamers to recruit players, and I joined the gang.

The gang stopped over at Lucas’ alma mater, Candlekeep, to do some research about the Sisters. While there, they ran into Constanza de Catarina (Kim), a tiefling cultist masquerading as a human noblewoman gathering information about the Sisters for her own organization, and Coy (Max), a dragonborn Big Boss expy wandering the world after the dwarven complex he called home was sacked by an angry dragon. The pair quickly hooked up with the party, comparing notes, and running errands for the locals. Along the way, Lucas and Greg formed a close emotional bond. In the countryside, the gang ran into a giant army of drow, orcs, bugbears, gnolls, and Sisters dragging an adult dragon out of its cave and loading it aboard a massive airship.

The party eventually learned of a secret library below Candlekeep, and set about searching for it. After a dank journey through the partially submerged ruins below the academy, the gang found what they were looking for, and discovered the Sister’s master plan: resurrect their old leader, Overseer Minnia, and summon the demon god Yeenoghu into the material plane. They also found a handful of nifty magic items and a ton of funds, and promptly stole them, because adventurers are bastards.

Among the treasures was a key to a nearby portal to Sigil. Constanza, Graham, Rolen and Escrima accidentally triggered it, and were whisked off to the wild and dangerous city. They met a sapient rat hoard, known as US, and became involved with a murder mystery, meeting Narcovi, a dwarf working for Harmonnium, a guard force in the city, and eventually tracked down and nearly captured Sougad Lawshredder (known within the party as “crazy eyes”), a Believer of the Source who was trying to ascend to godhood by killing lawful folks across the outer planes. Sougad escaped, and Narcovi rewarded the party by helping them locate a portal back home.

Meanwhile, the opening of the portal triggered some sort of alarm in the Candlekeep security, and Coy and Lucas narrowly escaped through the use of a helm of teleportation and some potions of invisibility. They fled Candlekeep, sailing towards the province of Amn, where they believed their missing companions would likely turn up, if they ever did at all. Along the way, the crew encountered a band of slavers and rescued a child slave, Akim. The pair ascended a mountain outside the village of Amswater where a derelict gate was said to stand. Sure enough, the party popped out of the portal shortly after they arrived, and much rejoicing was had.

(Both of those sequences happened in separate sessions due to scheduling snafus. JP, our DM, is a fucking saint for even bothering to set up something like that)

While the gang caught up on the mountain, a company of drow, led by the Sisters sacked Amswater. The party pushed them back, and managed to rescue a couple of villagers from enslavement, though many others were killed in the battle, or carted away to the Underdark. The villagers, having nowhere else to go, boarded the Spirit of Fire with the party. Together, they stopped off at Athkatla, a nearby port city, and Constanza entrusted the refugees to the government there, explaining the situation in the countryside. This earned her the first of several legitimate noble titles that she didn't have to forge.

The adventurers set sail to Waterdeep at last. The sea voyage finally granted them some time to themselves, opportunities to get to know each other, and hone their skills. Graham and Constanza bonded over dragonchess, Escrima attempted to indoctrinate Graham into his cult, and Lucas taught Coy some minor spells in exchange for draconic lessons. Akim bonded with his savior, and essentially became Coy’s adopted child. Constanza established dominance over Escrima by cleaning his filthy ass off. Along the way, the crew captured and sort of tamed a live Wyvern, christened “Lupe,” who the adventurers tried desperately to find some use for besides venom milking.

Eventually, the gang arrived in Waterdeep and met with Rockseeker himself. The man was ostensibly a dwarf, but was quickly discovered to be something more, though the party couldn’t say exactly what. Rockseeker retrieved a parchment from the mysterious box, and explained that contained within it was a magical map that marked the locations of artifacts that could annihilate the Sisters for good... though, the map was encrypted, and the party was going to have to carry the map to Neverwinter, where a talented friend of Rockseeker’s could help them.

While in the city, the gang did much shopping and sleeping around, the latter of which clued them in on a plot to assassinate the Visible Lord of Waterdeep, John Merrow. Supposedly, the ambitious Lord Hier was planning on having him taken care of at an upcoming celebration at his estate. Coincindentally, Rockseeker had some invitations just lying around, so the party had an easy in.

However, the party was still a few days off, and the gang busied themselves with shopping and taking care of small jobs for the locals, as vagrants of their sort are want to do. They uncovered a small vampire infestation, but events conspired such that they never quite got to the bottom of it.

(Scheduling snafus raised their ugly heads again, and Rich ended up doing a solo session)

At this time, Lucas decided to go track down his old mentor from his student days, Gandalf (no relation to the lesser deity from LotR, we swear!) to see if he had any insight on the events that were unfolding, and possibly a way to get Candlekeep to forgive him for his tresspasses against them. He met up with an acquaintance from Candlekeep, Eva (played by Jake), a young lass who had at least one shrine dedicated to Lucas in her home. The two tracked down Gandalf, and, to their horror, discovered that he had become a necromancer, turning most of the town of Proskur into his thralls. The duo narrowly defeated him, though not before Gandalf murdered Eva and blasted a chunk of Lucas’ shoulder off. Eva’s soul found its way into Lucas’ body. Lucas returned to Waterdeep, thoroughly shaken. This is how JP likes to handle multiclassing, by the way.

Since Jake wasn't around to take notes for the session that weekend with the rest of the party, I ended up taking over that day. For whatever reason, Jake basically decided to let me handle the note taking thereafter, so that’s what the rest of this tale is going to look like.

I kind of have a pretty strong emotional connection to this group and campaign. They’re the first group of people I ever met who didn't previously know me as a dude or anything, and because my voice was one of the only things I’d worked on at the time, I was able to just be myself without all the other baggage for a couple hours every week. I didn't really talk about my being trans at all for quite a while, and I’ve been led to believe that I was basically stealth to them for the first couple months of play... though I eventually got more involved with the trans community on reddit, and more open about it in general.

The group was also really my first foray into the LGBT community in general. My impression of LGBT spaces and the people that inhabited them was pretty negative at the time. I just had the idea that everyone was super outgoing and boisterous theater club types, a class of person that I struggle to relate to and get along with. However these folks turned out to be pretty down to earth for the most part, and the realization that there were people like me who I could actually relate to and enjoy being around really opened my eyes.

#let's play #dungeons and dragons #d&d #d&d 5e

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biriyaa · 6 years

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دانلود فیلم The Mansion 2017

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منتشرکننده : فیلمستان

نام فیلم: The Mansion ژانر: کمدی، ترسناک کارگردان: Tony T. Datis ستارگان: Ludovik Day, Marc Jarousseau, Nathalie Odzierejko محصول کشور: فرانسه ، بلژیک سال انتشار: ۲۰۱۷ امتیاز: ۴٫۹ از ۱۰ مدت زمان: ۱۰۰ دقیقه

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jeroldlockettus · 7 years

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Why Learn Esperanto? (Special Feature)

An estimated 2 million people speak Esperanto worldwide. Around 1,000 are native speakers. (Photo: Philip Brewer / Flickr)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Why Learn Esperanto? (Special Feature).” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

A language invented in the 19th century, and meant to be universal, it never really caught on. So why does a group of Esperantists from around the world gather once a year to celebrate their bond?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

In our previous episode, we looked at the idea of a universal language. One candidate was Esperanto, a language invented in the 19th century by a Jewish ophthalmologist named Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof. Derived from various European roots, Esperanto was meant to be easy to learn and egalitarian. The idea was not for Esperanto to supersede existing languages.

Esther SCHOR: It would stand next to national languages and be a helping language to make bonds among people who were not like one another.

A noble goal, surely. But, alas, not quite attainable. At least not on the scale Zamenhof desired. However: as our producer Stephanie Tam learned, and as she explains in today’s special episode, there is a small global community of Esperantists who convene once a year to revel in their bond.

Christopher JOHNSON: Today you’re going to meet people who are taking time off of work, who are spending money to go and participate in this weird Esperantujo, as they call it — this weird Esperanto-land that only exists temporarily whenever all these weirdos meet together.

* * *

On today’s episode: our producer Stephanie Tam takes a trip deep into Esperanto-land.

Stephanie TAM: Estimates for how many people speak Esperanto range, but the Ethnologue, a comprehensive language database, cites 2 million speakers spanning 100 countries. Just 1,000 of those are native speakers, who grow up in Esperanto-speaking families and usually also speak 1 or 2 other national languages. The most famous of these is probably the billionaire financier George Soros. But for the vast majority — well, they might be the only Esperanto speakers in the area. So … why on earth learn it? I traveled to the Esperanto-USA National Congress to find out. For the past several years, it’s been held at William Peace University, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Lee MILLER: This is my fourth year here in Raleigh. As I was driving in from the west, we got to the first highway sign that said, “Raleigh: 55 miles.” I said, “It’s like coming home. It’s just like coming home! We’re almost there! This is so exciting! We’re there!”

TAM: That’s Lee Miller, a 65-year-old Texan and former sign language interpreter and nurse. He learned Esperanto at 16; now, he teaches it in his retirement. He and another Esperantist picked me up from the airport and drove me to campus.

MILLER: And I really have that sense of excitement. I know the place. We know the staff at the university now, and they know us, “Oh, it’s the Esperanto people. We’re glad to have you back!” And we’re glad to be back.

Stephanie TAM: You know that something interesting and sweet is happening when you feel that you’re returning home to a place that you only visit once a year.

MILLER: I know. It’s not really home, but these are people who are important to me. I don’t know if you know the old musical “Brigadoon.” It was about a little village in the Irish countryside that only appeared one day a year and there is a love story connected with it. But sometimes I have the sense that our summer Esperanto gatherings are a little bit like that. We go away, for most of the year, and then during a week or two, we come back. We get together and we have face-to-face interactions. It is very sweet — sweet is a good word for it.

TAM: A lot of Esperantists describe their community as a kind of family — somewhat ironic, as the joke among Esperantists is that many spouses don’t share the language; so, their actual, everyday family might not know Esperanto at all. And yet …

MILLER: If I were in a group like this and I needed somebody to hold my wallet, with all my money in it, I would hand it to an Esperanto speaker in full confidence that whenever I came back, they would hand it back to me and my money would still be in it. I have that level of confidence and trust in the people I know.

TAM: The National Congress is a combination of socializing, workshops, and seminars — and a dose of admin meetings about running the USA association. This year, there were about 70 attendees, with guests flying in from Canada, the Netherlands, and elsewhere — and about 1,000 streaming from Facebook Live. For the past several years, the National Congress has been followed by an 8-day Esperanto summer course, where people can learn the language; this year, they had 58 students. Both events are held at William Peace — a fitting home for a language born with the goal of world unity. That internal idea of Esperanto, or what Esperantists call “la interna ideo” (pardon my accent), was originally rooted in Jewish universalism and remains a connecting thread. But humans being the fickle, creative creatures that they are, it’s been adapted throughout history for some very different ends …

SCHOR: The history of Esperanto involves socialists in the early 1920s, who wanted to use Esperanto to further the goals of socialism.

TAM: That’s Esther Schor, English professor and Esperanto scholar at Princeton University. We spoke a few weeks before the Congress.

SCHOR: It involves Bolshevism. The Soviets embraced Esperanto for a period of time in until they changed their minds and shot the Esperantists in 1938. There was a very short-lived Nazi Esperanto movement. Esperanto has been used for a number of other kinds of causes — for pacifism, for green consciousness, etc.

TAM: This year’s keynote speaker was Humphrey Tonkin, an English professor at the University of Hartford and former president of the Universal Esperanto Association. His speech highlighted what he considers the unjust dominance of English today. But he also recalled the original, founding principles of the language. He delivered the speech in Esperanto, and gave me an English translation afterward:

Humphrey TONKIN: Zamenhof emphasized that, first and foremost, we are human beings, and only secondarily members of particular nations or peoples or languages. If appealing to what is best in humanity rather than reinforcing what divides us is idealistic or utopian, I suppose we must plead guilty. But, if using what brings us together to talk about and celebrate what makes us all different, is a rational approach to our divided world then Esperanto seems to me to make a great deal of sense. I know what you, here in Raleigh at this gathering of Esperanto speakers, think: Esperanto works and you’re going to keep on using it and convincing others to do the same.

TAM: Despite that common, “internal idea” — whether you want to call it utopianism, universalism, etc — I discovered that people come to Esperanto for all sorts of reasons. Some are polyglots who just love learning languages; others are programmer types who appreciate its logic. And then there are those with a sense of adventure…

Orlando RAOLA: I’m originally from Cuba, where I also was part of the Esperanto movement. In real life, I work as a professor of chemistry in Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa, California.

TAM: That’s Orlando Raola, who recently finished his six-year term as President of Esperanto-USA.

RAOLA: Having been born in an island, and being an islander by nature, I always had this great curiosity: what is beyond the sea? What is the world out there? I understood early that the only way to communicate with humans is through language, and I was interested in many different cultures.

TAM: That said, his fascination with the world beyond didn’t lead him straight to Esperanto …

RAOLA: I was always fascinated by the culture of Nordic countries, especially Sweden. I once wrote a letter to the Swedish Institute — it’s a Swedish institution that disseminates Swedish culture outside Sweden. I sent them a letter: “I want to learn this language, I want to get to know about this culture.” A few months later, I got a big package with everything you need to know to learn Swedish — dictionaries, cassettes, courses for learning language, reading material. It was a big box! I said, “This is a very difficult language. I’m going to spend how many years learn[ing] this? Then, I will be able to communicate with a very tiny sliver of mankind!” I am very interested in the culture, but I am [also interested] in the culture of Japan, Hungary, and of China! Do I have time to learn all of these languages? No, there won’t be time. When I tried to go through it — that day, that’s the day I became an Esperantist.

TAM: So for some people, learning Esperanto is a way to follow their cultural curiosity. For others, though, there are war stories:

Maria MURPHY: My name is Maria Murphy. I am retired, have two wonderful boys and four wonderful grandchildren. It takes a special person to be really devoted Esperanto follower. It happened to me. I’m the one!

TAM: She’s a petite grandma with a cheeky smile, astoundingly upbeat given her past.

MURPHY: I grew up in Warsaw. You could call me a Holocaust survivor. I’m from [a] Jewish family that everybody was killed. Apparently I was a quiet baby, and I was constantly eating at mommy’s breast, so I was not crying. People were suffocating babies if they start crying.

TAM: After the war, she and her mother left Poland.

MURPHY: We decided to immigrate to Israel, and on the way we stopped in France and Italy. As a very young girl, I pick up those languages pretty quickly on the street. I felt that people should be able to talk to each other — no matter where you are. Here, eight,nine year old girl. I had this strong experience — every country, every day I spoke different language. There should be a better way.

TAM: For Murphy, that better way was Esperanto, which she stumbled upon as a teenager. She and her mother had returned to Poland, and she came across an ad for an Esperanto Club:

MURPHY: You see at that time, I didn’t have really [a] society. I didn’t have any place that I felt I belong to, because most of the Polish people are very strong Catholic. So when I found group of people meeting twice a week, having wonderful discussion, drinking good coffee, eating good cake, and there were young people — it was very natural to become a part of it.

TAM: Murphy would actually meet her husband through Esperanto. Which brings us to another reason that people join the community: the love stories. Joel and Ĵenja Amis, were a Cold War couple who also met through Esperanto. Ĵenja’s from Ukraine; Joel from Atlanta. They had both applied for the same job, an editor position for an Esperanto magazine based in the Netherlands but operated remotely. Ĵenja snagged the top position:

Ĵenja AMIS: I asked, “Who was this other candidate?” It was some guy from the U.S. I ask, “Can you send me his resume?” Well, I was looking at it. “I like this guy. He looks so intelligent. I’ll try to hire him to be my assistant.”

Joel AMIS: You didn’t have a photo, it was just on paper — just to be clear. We worked together for like a year and a half or so before we ever met in person.

TAM: Work aside, they insist there’s a more fundamental way Esperanto connected them …

Ĵ. AMIS: Esperanto, it’s not just the language. It’s almost like a value system.

J. AMIS: I would agree. When I look back at the person I was in my early teens, before I became an Esperantist, I don’t really recognize that person anymore. I grew up as a Christian, and I still am. But my approach is much different. At first, it was just a linguistic interest, like a game. I didn’t have anyone locally to speak to. The Esperanto community brought me into contact with people that I wouldn’t have had contact with otherwise. I had pen pals in Eastern Europe or wherever, these places that were so far away from me culturally. It almost sounds evangelical to talk about it like that, but for me, at least, it was the catalyst that changed the course of my life. Maybe, if I hadn’t learned Esperanto, I might just be in Georgia, in a small town, not having traveled or anything like that. When I grew up, I heard that that the Soviet Union wanted to drop bombs on us, and this is the enemy, and she heard …

Ĵ. AMIS: Similar story, the other way around.

J. AMIS: How do we get to being married from that point, growing up in such different places — a different mindset? For both of us, Esperanto was that catalyst. What we have in the Esperanto community is a microcosm for what could be, or what should be. This community that spans languages, political ideologies, religions, races, on a small scale, this is the world that Zamenhof dreamed of.

TAM: Talking with Esperantists, I felt like I was interacting with an epic metaphor: linguistic communication as human community. The notion that a universal language could create world peace seemed too romantic — what about civil wars, where both parties shared the language? But at the same time, it was clear there was something special going on: Miller, Amis, Murphy, and these other Esperantists had used this language to create a kind of small-scale utopia. Up next, we get into pragmatics. Could Esperanto, for instance, save the European Union a lot of money in education costs?

CHARTERS: He concluded that actually it would be cheaper to have Esperanto play that intermediary role.

TAM: We discover how travel in this small-scale utopia works …

Ĵ. AMIS: Basically, you just show up and they usually give you a key to their homes.

TAM: And we ask: could that sense of trust and community be retained if the microcosm were scaled up?

JOHNSON: If Esperanto were to become a universal language, things like this would die …

* * *

TAM: For all its idealism, Esperanto also has a deeply pragmatic side. It was designed to be easy to learn and, in a word, efficient. Which makes it a language that appeals not only to dreamers, activists, and ambassadors, but also … economists:

Duncan CHARTERS: There’s a professor at the University of Geneva who studied this, Francois Grin. Actually, the French government asked him to make a study of language cost in Europe.

TAM: That’s Duncan Charters, professor of languages and cultures at Principia College in Missouri, where he teaches Spanish.

CHARTERS: And he concluded that actually it would be cheaper to have Esperanto play that intermediary role.

TAM: How much cheaper? Back in 2005, Grin calculated that substituting the high cost of learning English with the low cost of Esperanto in non-English speaking countries could save the E.U. upwards of 25 billion euros annually.

CHARTERS: The French government wasn’t looking for that answer, but, actually, that was a very good point. The cost of learning of Esperanto is less just because it’s so much quicker.

TAM: … How much quicker? Well, obviously, ease of language learning depends on all kinds of factors: natural ability, age of acquisition, regular practice … But one study with a sample of Francophone children found that just 150 hours of Esperantic education resulted in the same level of proficiency as 1,000 hours of Italian, 1,500 hours of English, and 2,000 hours of German — making Esperanto an average of 10 times faster to learn than these natural languages. So what makes it so much faster and easier to learn?

Ruth KEVESS-COHEN: There are 16 basic rules of the language. For example, every noun ends in the letter “o.” Every adjective ends in the letter “a.” Every infinitive ends in the letter “i.” The future, present, and past have totally regular endings. There’s no need to learn any conjugations — they don’t exist in Esperanto.

TAM: That’s Ruth Kevess-Cohen, a geriatrics doctor in Maryland. In Esperanto, she goes by her middle name. In her spare time, she helped develop an Esperanto course for the online language site Duolingo … which she used to try and teach me Esperanto:

KEVESS-COHEN: This is lesson one of the Duolingo course, which starts out showing some pictures. Which of these is man?

TAM: I see a picture of a man with “viro.” I’m going to click that one.

DUOLINGO: La viro.

KEVESS-COHEN: By putting your finger here, you can see what it is. The word “la” means “the.” Just like in English, “the” is “la.” There’s no plural form.

TAM: There is no conjugation with that? “La” is always “the?”

KEVESS-COHEN: Right.

TAM: Okay, that is a commonality with English that makes it simpler than French.

KEVESS-COHEN: So to say, “I speak,” we say, “mi parolas.” Mi parolas Esperanton. Kaj vi, ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?

TAM: Mi parolas —

KEVESS-COHEN: Parolas.

TAM: Parolas Esperanton. That’s an “on,” is that the ending for a noun?

KEVESS-COHEN: “O” is the ending for a noun, and we add the “n” because it’s a direct object.

TAM: So Zamenhof originally wrote up 16 rules for the language, a couple of which you just heard — nouns end in “o,” direct objects in “n” — and every word is phonetic. He also compiled 900 roots derived mostly from Romance languages, which Esperantists then built into a rich vocabulary:

SCHOR: Users have taken these roots, which are very flexible and made words for new occasions, for new moments, for new technologies.

TAM: Esther Schor, Princeton Esperanto scholar again —

SCHOR: For example, the word for a cellphone is “poŝtelefono.” It’s a pocket phone. The word for a smartphone is “lerta fono,” a smart phone, literally. But I know an Esperantist who refers to his smartphone as “kromcerbo,” which means a spare brain. There’s a lot of wit. There’s a lot of invention. There’s a lot of play involved in coining words.

TAM: Duncan Charters also argues that Esperanto — in addition to being efficient and inventive — can serve as a gateway language:

CHARTERS: The good thing about it is once someone gets into a language that has enabled them to communicate with people around the world, they then want to learn other languages — a natural consequence. Then it’s not so much of an effort and a struggle to get students interested. It becomes more natural — just as in Europe, people much more naturally learn other languages because they’ve had a practical experience with the ones that they’ve learned.

TAM: Okay, but … practical experience? How does that work, if Esperantists may not even be able to find other people nearby to speak the language?

SCHOR: There is a system called “Pasporta Servo,” which means passport service, and it’s a network of Esperantists who agreed to host visiting Esperantists, usually young people, for up to three nights free of charge. There’s an enormous degree of trust in this Esperanto world. The word on the street is you arrive and someone hands you their car keys and goes to work.

TAM: As it turns out, Esperantists were practicing couchsurfing before it became a thing. Pasporta Servo started in 1974 as a small print booklet listing 39 hosts; it’s since moved online, and the latest edition contains 974 hosts from 81 countries. Again and again, I’d hear these kinds of stories from Esperantists who had traveled all over the world:

MURPHY: I don’t know if you realize that almost in every country there is Esperanto club, and it has been happening [for] 130 years. If you like the world, then it’s your oyster.

RAOLA: I got to know what [it’s like] living inside a Japanese family for two months, talk to them, eat their food, and go with them to places.

CHARTERS: I’ve traveled quite a bit in Spanish-speaking countries using Esperanto contacts. I’ve always found that those are the ones that really get me into the culture more …

David DOUGHERTY: I went to Kazakhstan this past year. This guy, his friend Vyacheslav, and his friend drove me 300 kilometers in a whole day touring some ancient historical sites. That was pretty amazing …

RAOLA: I have been to so many places, met so many people, have so many friends with which I feel at home, always contacting Esperantists everywhere. Yes, whatever curiosity of the islander-beyond-the-sea has been satisfied.

TAM: Do you feel like the Esperantists are exceptionally helpful and have that bond with you because it’s a niche community that you select into, as opposed to English being more common?

JOHNSON: That definitely helps.

TAM: That’s Christopher Johnson, a 29-year-old software engineer from North Carolina.

JOHNSON: It almost takes a naïve idealism to believe in Esperanto, or at least in that idea that you can make the world a better place by speaking a language. If you’re dedicated enough to learn this language and spend your time on it, you have to have that similar idealism. We have to have things in common. The other nice thing is there’s no real Esperanto-land where you can go. I don’t think I would have ever met somebody from Cuba without Esperanto. But it just naturally happened because you start meeting people in this small community, and people come from all over the world to kinda visit these things.

TAM: Yeah. I am curious about how you think through the tension between what seems to be this transcendent international aspect of Esperanto that reaches out and is very open to people and attracting more people to Esperanto, and the potential that if it actually continued spreading, that you wouldn’t actually have that sweet community anymore.

RAOLA: Sure, sharp question… I do understand that if Esperanto begins to become much larger in society that some of the selling points of today will vanish.

JOHNSON: Yes, I would not give my car keys to everyone. If Esperanto were to become a universal language, the negatives would be that things like this would die — the Landaj Kongresoj… Why would people want to travel miles and miles to meet other Esperantists if you can easily find them everywhere?

TAM: I found it fascinating that even this most idealistic language could be as much a boundary as a bridge — and that its ability to bridge might even require boundaries to create social trust between Esperantists. But then again, if Esperanto has survived through self selection, decade after decade, into this paradoxically idealistic and pragmatic language … then maybe its universality could only result from a world in which people universally chose to become idealistic and pragmatic. And who knows, maybe in that world, we could trust strangers with our home and car keys.

SCHOR: The strength of Esperanto is not in numbers. The strength of Esperanto is in its continuity over 130 years, without being passed down from generation to generation, without having money, without having armies. There it is. It’s really remarkably beautiful.

TAM: For now, despite stirrings of excitement about the uptick of Esperanto, very few in the community really believe that the day Zamenhof dreamed of — “La Fina Venko,” or “The Final Victory” — will be coming anytime in the near future. But in the meantime, those who learn it today have created a quirky, Brigadoonish family of visionaries … and for all its unworldliness, Esperanto is considered the world’s most successful invented language. Still, in some ways, the story of Esperanto teaches us as much about what makes a language fail as succeed: the power of, well, power, politics, and economics …

Michael GORDIN: The cases where someone has actually tried to construct a fair and ostensibly neutral form, things like Esperanto are widely treated as ridiculous or implausible.

TAM: That’s Michael Gordin, a historian at Princeton University. He’s studied the brief use of Esperanto for scientific communication in the early 1900s.

GORDIN: Even those people who try to come up with something calmer and kinder don’t often get rewards commensurate with that.

TAM: But it also, perhaps, raises some questions about our world. What does it say about us, that we find a language that combines peace and pragmatism ridiculous or implausible? And … could it be that idealism just might be rational?

RAOLA: The world, humankind, does not act very rationally. I teach chemistry, as I said, and I tell my students, “If people were rational, don’t you think that we should have long before adopted [the] general international system of units everywhere?” But we don’t. We still measure things in gallons and yards and feet. In that sense, it might not be in its short term that Esperanto, a rational solution for international communication, becomes the language of choice. But the important thing, what I always consider to be the goal of the movement, is keep it alive, keep it functioning, keep it suitable for expression of everything the human has expressed. Because maybe — I don’t know when, but when and if mankind finds itself ready for it, we need to have it alive. We need to have it ready. You can’t say, “Now we’re going to create it.” No, no, no. “Here it is. Take it. It’s yours.”

That was Stephanie Tam reporting from the curiously pragmatic and idealistic world of modern-day Esperanto.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez; the music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. A very special thanks to our intern Kent McDonald, and all those at the Esperanto Congress who assisted our efforts, including Derek Roff, Lee Miller, and Chuck Mays. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected].

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Yevgeniya (Ĵenja) Amis, Marketing Analyst at the National Film Board of Canada.

Joel Amis, student at Montreal Diocesan Theological College.

Duncan Charters, professor of languages and cultures at Principia College.

David Dougherty, customer service representative at Montgomery County, Maryland.

Michael Gordin, professor of history at Princeton University

Christopher Johnson, software engineer at Microsoft.

Ruth Kevess-Cohen, doctor at Cameron Medical Group.

Lee Miller, retired sign language interpreter and nurse.

Maria Murphy, retired family physician.

Orlando Raola, professor of chemistry at Santa Rosa Junior College.

Esther Schor, professor of english at Princeton University.

Humphrey Tonkin, professor of english at the University of Hartford.

RESOURCES

Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language by Esther Schor (Metropolitan Books, 2016).

Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World by Keith Brown and Sarah Ogilvie (Elsevier Language, 2008).

Dangerous Language — Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin by Ulrich Lins (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

The Economics of the Multilingual Workplace by François Grin, Claudio Sfreddo and François Vaillancourt (Routledge, 2010).

“L’enseignement des Langues É’trangères comme Politique Publique,” François Grin (2005).

Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language by Roberto Garvía (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

“Regularizing the Regular: The Phenomenon of Overregularization in Esperanto-speaking Children,” Renato Corsetti, Maria Antonietta Pinto and Maria Tolomeo (2004).

EXTRA

Esperantic Studies Foundation.

Esperanto-USA.

“Is Learning a Foreign Language Really Worth It?” Freakonomics Radio (2014).

North American Summer Esperanto Institute.

“Why Don’t We All Speak the Same Language? (Earth 2.0 Series),” Freakonomics Radio (2017).

“What Would Be the Best Universal Language? (Earth 2.0 Series),” Freakonomics Radio (2017).

The post Why Learn Esperanto? (Special Feature) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-learn-esperanto-special-feature/

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docrotten · 7 years

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Le Manoir (Fantasia, 2017) - by Paul Cardullo - Gruesome Magazine

Paul Cardullo talks to Doc Rotten about the French horror-comedy from the Fantasia International Film Festival called The Mansion (Le Manior, 2017). The film is directed by Tony T. Datis and features Marc Jarousseau, Nathalie Odzierejko, and Ludovik Day. Paul discusses the pacing and humor of the film explaining how the film grows on you as the humor - which is often lost in translation - improves during its bloody third act. Check out the review below and let us know what you think!

The Mansion (Le Manior, 2017) [usr 3.5]

Synopsis: A band of students comes to celebrate the New Year in an old manor house isolated from everything. But soon after their arrival, strange events disrupt the atmosphere, before the party turns squarely to the nightmare.

Director: Tony T. Datis

Writers: Bernardo Barilli, Bernardo Barilli, Dominique Gauriaud, Marc Jarousseau,Jurij Prette

Cast: Marc Jarousseau, Nathalie Odzierejko, Ludovik Day, Jérôme Niel,Yvick Letexier, Vincent Tirel, Vanessa Guide, Delphine Baril, Baptiste Lorber, Lila Lacombe, Willy Denzey, José Garcia

Check out this episode!

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soundtracktracklist · 7 years

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Le Manoir Soundtrack

Le Manoir Soundtrack by #Freaks #LeManoir #film #comedy #soundtrack #tracklist #Gaumont #horror #FilmScores #Music

Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (OST) from the movie Le Manoir (2017). Music composed by Freaks. Source: Le Manoir Movie Style: Original Soundtrack (Bande originale du film) Music by Freaks Label: Gaumont Release Date: June 23, 2017 (Digital) Le Manoir is a 2017 French comedy horror film directed by Tony T. Datis, starring – Marc Jarousseau, Nathalie Odzierejko, Ludovik Day, Yvick…

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#Freaks #Le Manoir #movie #soundtrack

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desdeabajox · 7 years

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From Fantasia 2017: "Le Manoir" (The Mansion)

From Fantasia 2017: “Le Manoir” (The Mansion)

Screened recently at the Fantasia International Film Festival and coming from France, we just saw “Le Manoir” (The Mansion), a comedy/slasher film where we meet a group of students reunited on a secluded mansion, with the goal of celebrating the arrival of the new year with alcohol, drugs and sex (or at least that is what some of them hope). As the hours fly by, we see that this colorful group…

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#Baptiste Lorber #Delphine Baril #Fantasia #Fantasia 2017 #Fantasia International Film Festival #Jérôme Niel #José Garcia #Le Manoir #Lila Lacombe #Ludovik Day #Marc Jarousseau #Nathalie Odzierejko #Vanessa Guide #Vincent Tirel #Willy Denzey #Yvick Letexier

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doedipus · 8 years

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LP D&D: Your Reward is the Satisfaction of a Job Well Done

Between sessions, Ludovik and Rich’s longstanding rivalry came to a head, and Ludovik decided to leave. Thankfully, the group was able to work things out like adults, and the separation happened pretty cleanly. To this day, I don’t really get what was going on between them, but I guess everything worked itself out in the end, so whatever. I’m just glad the saga didn’t turn into the kind of clusterfuck people on /tg/ like to talk about.

At the beginning of the session, Rap was playing around with a voice changer for whatever reason. Apparently, one of the presets sounded enough like me that nobody could tell the difference. Am I truly a unique person, with my own wants and needs, or am I some sort of construct off an assembly line, an excitation in the Kim field no different than any other? Is there some hidden land of Kims deep in the woods, where we could find solace from the often terrifying and confusing non-Kim world, free to swear like sailors, nurse our wounds, and watch Neil Breen movies long into the night?

...Uh, that took a weird turn. Content under the break.

Merrow thanks the party for saving his life

Hier is arrested

Graham lays hands on Esmeralda

Nudge nudge, wink wink

Coy attempts to locate the body of the gnoll shaman, but is unable to

Coy retrieves a handful of the coins the sisters use to communicate

Escrima and Graham try and retrieve some lost equipment

The ship and estate are on fire, so the gang decides to bounce

They make it back home without incident

Lucas wants barkeep to get him the strongest drink on the multiverse

Coy goes to say hi to Akim

Akim thinks the explosions are the hypest

Coy wishes him a happy birthday

Akim thinks her hugs are better now

The players think about that too much

Graham hangs out with Frederick, his squire

He breaks the news of Osric’s death

Graham declares himself “duke”

Fred reminds him that “those of the fairer sex” aren’t in the line of succession

Graham suggests they consider his uncle, then

The alcohol is strong, and everyone is completely smashed

Except Coy, since she was away for the first round

“Did I ever tell you about the time I rescued Esmeralda from a dragon?”

Coy orders a round of coffee for the party so they can sober up

And then orders a round for herself

She’s a little buzzed, but not like the others

“Coy, I love you, I don’t care what your hair looks like, I don’t care if you cut your hair, you’re a beautiful butterfly... creature...”

Greg has a personal crisis

He starts his routine in the pond

GregnLucas ERP in the pond

Coy pulls them out so they don’t drown

Connie has an epic battle with the stairs, and loses

The next morning afternoon, the party wakes up, and is hungover

Except Graham, because paladin or something

Thankfully, Rocky keeps potions of restoration in the attic

Coy stays in “bed” for some short rests

There’s some mail

One letter is from Rolen

He says that the hallucinations he’d been having have gotten to be too much, and he is heading to mithril hall to search for his ex //Honestly, the most disappointing thing about the whole OOC situation was that we never got to figure out what that stomach spider bullshit was going to go

One is for Coy

That will she altered turns up. Apparently she’s owed some inheritance. The attorneys want her to drop in //During the vampire subplot, Coy found some victims dead in their apartment. She also found their will, and wrote herself in

One is from the sheriff’s office, for Lucas

They are grateful for our help

They’ve found out what happened to his brother

Lucas runs off to check it out

Graham gets a letter from Merrow

It’s about Hier’s trial

Hey Coy, what’s that in your pocket? //Coy stole a pendant off a noble later revealed to be Merrow a couple sessions back for no particular reason

Is that Merrow’s?

Coy says she’ll commit seppuku before telling

It might be a good idea to get it back to him somehow

Connie gets a letter too

It’s from her parents, Ida & Ingo Cooper

It’s been circulating for a while

Ingo has died. Ida wants her to come to the funeral. It’s in Neverwinter

Apparently, they’re waiting for her to get there

Lucas goes to Castle Waterdeep

On the broom

He’s broken a law, is he stupid?

But I saved the ci-

WATERDEEP IS A CITY OF LAWS, NOT OF MEN

Lucas tries to rules-lawyer his way out of a 500 gp fine

WATERDEEP IS A CITY OF LAWS, NOT OF MEN

Saving cops isn’t worth edgyLucas’ time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WRrAeQqVs8

The gang catches up to him

Graham asks for a copy of the paperwork

Coy tries to steal the money back

Despite a poor sleight of hand roll, she gets 800 gp

Graham and Lucas have a brief heart-to-heart

They’re the only original party members left

Coy totally didn’t steal that money back

She becomes inspired again

She gets pissed at Lucas for fucking up pronouns

Before they get to the sheriff’s office, they pass by the attorney’s office

Coy decides to pop in

She says something offensive to the gnomes that work there about their tiny baby arms

Coy signs some paperwork, and obtains a winery estate, and a house.

Winery is in Baldur’s Gate

House is in Waterdeep

They arrive at the castle

Vigo is happy to see the gang

He has a report on Lucas’ brother.

He was wounded in the raid of Mossstone

He was later redeployed to the front lines again

Apparently the sisters’ army has sacked Athkatla

Lucas wants a flying license

It’s 1000 gp

Gotta take tests and stuff

Lucas no longer wants a flying license

The gang remembers that they only have like 5kgp, and decide to confront Rockseeker about it

Rocky congratulates us of our victory

But he reminds us that they remain a threat

He predicts that they will throw everything they have against the city soon

Connie tells Rocky about the coins //Soldiers in the Sisters’ army carry coins that their superiors communicate through

Apparently, they’re stones of sending

Rocky says they’re short range only. Lame!

He says he can reset them to work for the party, so that’s cool

He tells us that we’re to participate in the trial of Lord Hier, and shouldn’t leave town yet

Lucas wants cash

Rocky is reluctant to pay up

He points us towards Merrow

Lucas breaks the news of Gandalf’s death to the party

Lucas says that he killed him

Necromancy, torture, I had to do it, pushed into lava

Angered with their lack of compensation, the gang decides to go see Merrow

Of course we have an appointment! Who do you take us for?!

Someone who doesn’t have an appointment, duh

Graham just tells the guards who we are

The guards are “a little bit pissed off, having to like, do things”

Merrow’s assistant says he’s busy, and we should wait a while

The anteroom is pretty nice, though, so it’s okay

Coffee and pastries are served

He wants a DEAL

Connie gets promoted to LORD OF WATERDEEP HOLY SHIT

Representing Athkatla, of course

You know, since she’s been a lord from there for like two weeks

Merrow offers us 500 gp

He wants Graham to serve as a judge during Hier’s trial

Merrow assures Lucas that the matter of Beydale will be addressed soon

Kim reminds the party about the black shield of blackness //A suspicious magic item from before my time.

It’s a +3 shield! Holy cow!

PVP!

Coy is brandishing her sword, and accidentally makes a swing at Lucas

It goes straight through Lucas’ leg

He pulls it out, spraying leg viscera all over the ground

Lucas cures wounds

He’s not giving the sword back

Shopping ensues

As per usual, the party gets in a fight with a shopkeeper for not having good enough wares //We should’ve waited until Connie could go the the dark assembly the Waterdeep city council meeting to pass a “more expensive stuff” bill

Max wants to learn minor illusion, and JP says it’s gonna be tough

Connie goes to get her clothes fixed.

It’s gonna be a week

The gang visits Coy’s new house

It’s a little bit of a wreck

The bed’s still gross

Coy wants to set Akim up there with a tutor/nanny

He’s looking for Julie Andrews

Or Dick Van Dyke

Probably that guy

She spends a few days looking for a suitable caretaker

Coy leaves him in Waterdeep with Rich, the tutor

Akim is ecstatic about the house

He gets his own room!

He can store all his toys

Like his ragdoll, and, uh,

That’s kind of it, actually

It’s name is “Alfie”

Coy thinks about getting him some new toys

“Will you be my mom, Coy”

Coy gives him a noncommittal answer

Rich the tutor gets 7 gp per month

Coy decides to take the displacer cub with her to train

Akim is devastated

Constanza sends a letter back to her folks detailing her situation

She also summons Paz, the slithering metal gear reference //It’s a tsuchinoko

During the ritual, she has a vision of her parents finding her as a baby, and also some commotion

Lucas and Graham resume shopping

Lucas orders a suit of medium armor with Graham’s help

They head to a jeweler next, to look for a decent wedding/engagement/whatever ring for LucasnGreg

Coy gets some daggers/throwing knives

Graham goes looking for a bag of holding

A shady street vendor approaches him

It’s 1kgp

It’s covered in blood

Graham doesn’t want to know where he got it from

He buys it, and the guy runs off

Coy goes to sell the shield

The shopkeeper isn’t buying that the shield is magical

Coy offers to demonstrate it

The shopkeeper is convinced, and pays 300 gp

Lucas wants some Lupe venom

Escrima is gatekeeping her “precious fluids”

They get half a vial of venom

Graham attunes to the shield

Lucas tests out sending to talk to everyone he knows

He gets no reply from his parents

He recalls that Baldur’s Gate uses anti-magic materials in prisons. Oh no!

His brother and his buddy are okay, though

Lucas teaches Coy minor illusion, in exchange for more draconic later

Coy gives Akim a hand crossbow. It’s giant and dangerous

The warehouse roof is finished //We wanted to have the roof of Lupe’s hangar open on the off chance we could use her for something

As are the other orders we placed

Summons for Hier’s trial arrives

Items are recovered from Rolen’s room

Connie is to be at peaktop aerie at midnight for confirmation as a lady of waterdeep

Connie asks the whole party to accompany her

Merrow arrives in a carriage to take the party to the aerie

Merrow reminds the party that only the lords are supposed to speak

But they can appoint an assistant that can whisper to the lord

She appoints Graham

Apparently, Rocky is a lord. This surprises nobody

A lord asks where Catarina is

A nat 20 convinces them that she’s not full of crap //In-universe, “Catarina” is a kingdom in a children’s book Connie used to like. “Constanza de Catarina” is not actually her given name. She just made it up because it sounded cool and foreign.

They seem to like that the party saved Amswater

All except one lord vote to confirm

What a bitch!

Connie suggests they move to retake Beydale

Some lords agree

Rockseeker throws some shade over the sisters of dawn incident

If the army secures Esmeralton, they’ll move for Beydale

Other topics of discussion include

Increase the number of garbage collectors

A motion to increase taxes on magic shops gets shot down

50k soldiers are to be drafted to the war in the south

Merrow talks about Hier’s trial

Meetings are monthly, but not mandatory

The party gets some winter clothes

During the week, Escrima handled Lupe. She seems trained!

Greg is grateful for Connie’s assistance at the council meeting

He’s also disappointed that Lucas is gonna have to leave again

Lucas suggests that he try and pick up bard-ing

The gang gets a message from Narcovi saying that they couldn’t find crazy eyes’ body

Jake had moving stuff to do, so the session was called there.

#Let's Play #dungeons and dragons #d&d #d&d 5e

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jeroldlockettus · 7 years

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What Would Be the Best Universal Language? (Earth 2.0 Series)

Around 7,000 languages are spoken on Earth 1.0. (Photo: Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “What Would Be the Best Universal Language? (Earth 2.0 Series).” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

We explore votes for English, Indonesian, and … Esperanto! The search for a common language goes back millennia, but so much still gets lost in translation. Will technology finally solve that?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

In our previous episode, we talked about living under the ancient curse of the Tower of Babel.

Esther SCHOR: The curse of Babel is an existential condition in which we live every day. We use language to communicate, but we cannot rely on it to make ourselves understood.

We can’t always rely on it because …

John McWHORTER: Well, we have 7,000 languages.

Seven thousand languages? We learned about the many costs associated with this linguistic diversity — financial costs, psychic costs, even war:

Shlomo WEBER: Many people died in the war, which, in fact, easily could have been avoided.

And we learned that linguistic diversity has plenty of benefits too:

Lera BORODITSKY: There are certainly claims about types of thinking that become very hard without language — or become unlikely without language.

Those are some of the things we know about language here on Earth 1.0. But today’s episode is part of our Earth 2.0 series, in which we imagine we could reboot the planet and do some optimizing — or at least some tidying up. So, if we were starting over …

Maria Luisa MACIEIRA [French]: Si on devait tout recommencer à zéro…

Kew PARK [Korean]: … t시 시작한다면…

Isabela CABRAL [Brazilian Portuguese]: Se fossemos começar de novo …

Dhari ALJUTAILI [Arabic]:… أحسن طريقة لكل الناس على الأرض انهم…

CABRAL [Brazilian Portuguese]: para todos na Terra se comunicarem uns com os outros?

PARK [Korean]: 가장 좋은 방법은 무엇일까요?

… what would be the best way for everyone on Earth to be able to communicate with one another?

* * *

In the future, human-to-human communication may be so different that it’ll render our mission today moot. Between auto-translation and artificial intelligence and maybe even mind-melding, will anything ever get lost in translation? Maybe; maybe not. But — that’s the future. Let’s talk about language on Earth 2.0 using the tools and knowledge at our disposal today. If we could start from scratch, what would that look like?

Michael GORDIN: If we did this from scratch it would be a very surprising outcome.

That’s Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton.

GORDIN: And who knows how it would work without the path dependency of previous empires, current economic structures, our current modes of transportation and media and communication? It would be very interesting to see how that would shake out.

Okay, let’s start with a couple basic questions. Number one: should we consider — please don’t throw things at me — should we consider having one common language?

BORODITSKY: I would be wary of thinking of common language as the solution to perfect communication …

Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego.

BORODITSKY: … because we already have [a] common language and that doesn’t lead to perfect communication.

McWHORTER: You would need oddly a language that had a lot less in it than many people would expect.

John McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia; he’s also an author and host of the Lexicon Valley podcast.

McWHORTER: You want it to be something that’s maximally easy for all of the world’s language speakers to use. You could have a universal language where tense was largely left to context, as it is in a great many of the world’s normal languages. You certainly wouldn’t have anything like grammatical gender. The vocabulary could be quite rich. That would be fun, but the grammar would be something where you could pick it up in a week.

Stephen J. DUBNER: I’m curious to know the degree to which language generally is utilitarian, like, “I want to pick up that thing,” or transactional, “I want that thing from you.” or romantic, or relationship, or gossip, or lying, and so on. And I’m just curious how a linguist might think about that.

McWHORTER: Language is more than questions, commands, and certainly more than just naked statements. Real language is about communication and charting feelings, telling people new things and that means that a language is a whole lot more than just nouns, verbs, and adjectives. If somebody says, “Oh, she’s totally going to call you,” that “totally” means, “you and I both know that other people think she isn’t going to call, but we have reason to think that she is.” We are full of things like that.

Okay, this leads to question number two: if there were a universal language, should it be a pre-existing one, or an invented one? English, while hardly universal, has of course become a very powerful language.

McWHORTER: What makes this regrettable to many, and quite understandably, is that English was the vehicle of a rapaciously imperial power and now America is the main driver.

So any pre-existing language will come with baggage, with lots of votes for and against. Does this mean we’d be better off inventing a new one? Apparently, some Facebook bots recently gave it a try.

CBS NEWS: According to several reports, Facebook’s artificial intelligence researchers had to shut down two chatbots after they developed a strange English shorthand.

A shorthand that its human creators couldn’t understand. As it happens, the dream of inventing a universal language has long been pursued by scholars, priests, even — as you’ll hear — by an ophthalmologist.

SCHOR: The history of language invention, which goes back millennia, has to do with reversing the curse of Babel.

Esther Schor is a professor of English at Princeton.

SCHOR: In other words, to return the world to a single language of perfect understanding. For some language inventors, this was imagined to be God’s own language and the language of divine truth.

In the 13th century, for instance, Ramon Llull, a Majorcan philosopher with Franciscan ties, sought to create the perfect language for channeling “the Truth,” and converting people to Christianity.

SCHOR: He created a formula for generating propositions from letters and words. He felt that some of them would be propositions to which an infidel would, of necessity, have to consent. But Llull’s truth was not the Truth, or at least it didn’t seem like the truth to the Saracens who eventually murdered him.

A few centuries later, the German philosopher Leibniz— an admirer of Llull’s, by the way — tried to build a language based on logic.

SCHOR: Leibniz’s idea was to represent propositions by numbers and he would reason by getting the ratio of one proposition to another and calculate an answer. Again, we have the idea of a language of logic without words.

And in the 19th century, a Jewish ophthalmologist named Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof created a language both idealistic and pragmatic.

L. L. Zamenhof, or Doktoro Esperanto, invented Esperanto in 1887. (Photo: Wikimedia)

SCHOR: It’s called Esperanto because that was his pseudonym, Doktoro Esperanto, which means the hopeful one. He brags in this initial pamphlet that you can learn it in an afternoon and that it’s fun. So it was supposed to be easy to learn and easy to pronounce.

Esperanto was derived from various European roots. Zamenhof’s idea was not to have Esperanto displace other languages.

SCHOR: He called it a helping language or an auxiliary language. It would stand next to national languages and be a helping language to make bonds among people who were not like one another.

Zamenhof was a universalist …

SCHOR: But he was also a universalist who understood what it meant to have warm feelings for one’s people. Esperanto was to somehow reconcile those two things — to try to breed in us these feelings of attachment for other people who were really quite unlike us.

The larger goal of Esperanto was nothing less than world peace.

SCHOR: He knew that language could be a wall between ethnicities, but that it could also be a bridge. That was his motivation — to build a language that would be a bridge among ethnicities. He modeled it on the teaching of Hillel. “Do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you.” Hillel was a 1st-century rabbi, so it had a very Jewish cast to it.

This did not help Esperanto’s cause. As Esther Schor told us: “[A]nti-Semitism changed the fortunes of Esperanto when the French demanded that Zamenhof shear away its religious ideology.” Hitler and Stalin would also reject Esperanto. Regardless: if you remove its religious and utopian components, what’s left, Esther Schor says, is a language with some substantial benefits over many other languages, whether existing or invented.

SCHOR: What he wanted was maximal flexibility and simplicity. For one thing, the verbs are all regular in Esperanto. He wanted a language that was egalitarian and neutral. He didn’t want people to be disadvantaged because they weren’t a native speaker. He speaks very movingly about what it’s like to try to speak a language that’s not your own. He talks about his pulse racing and his palms sweating. It’s an experience I’ve had. Perhaps you have had it also.

Ruth KEVESS-COHEN: Esperanto is a lot easier to learn than other languages because it has very regular rules and very regular grammar.

That’s Ruth Kevess-Cohen. She helped develop an online Esperanto course for the language site Duolingo.

KEVESS-COHEN: You find that it’s taking you a lot less time than you thought to learn the language. Here’s a sentence in Esperanto. “Mi estas knabo” — “I am a boy.” There is no “a” in Esperanto. “Knabo” you can see is a noun because it has an ‘o’ at the end. Every noun ends in the letter ‘o,’ every adjective ends in the letter ‘a.’ Every verb in the present ends in ‘as,’ So you already know that “estas” is “am,” “are.” It’s the same. There’s no conjugation of that.

We spoke with Kevess-Cohen at this year’s Esperanto-USA National Congress — or Landa Kongreso, as you say it in Esperanto. Our producer Stephanie Tam spent a couple days there. You’ll hear about that in an upcoming special episode. You may be surprised to learn that Esperanto is still spoken. Esther Schor again:

SCHOR: These days, the most informed estimates I hear are several hundred thousand people speak Esperanto. The strength of Esperanto is not in numbers. The strength of Esperanto is in its continuity over 130 years in 62 countries, from generation to generation, without being passed down from generation to generation.

Still, for all its thoughtfulness and pragmatism, Esperanto never got anywhere close to its intended universal status — what Esperantists refer to as “La Fina Venko,” the “Final Victory.” Why not?

SCHOR: I can answer that by looking at what does look like a universal language in our world, which is English. What looked like a universal language in Zamenhof’s day was French. Both French and English were propelled into the world by commerce and armies, and Esperanto had neither of those.

GORDIN: In order to keep a language constant enough so that it can function as a global, universal language, the way English is functioning now, you need to have a global communications infrastructure that standardizes dialects and pronunciations.

Michael Gordin again.

GORDIN: You need to have a global entertainment industry that produces books with standard spelling, and a pattern of accents that are considered acceptable, or that mark different classes or regional identities, and that constant reinforcement requires an infrastructure.

It’s something we don’t think about — at least I’d never thought about it — but there’s a lot of upkeep associated with language.

GORDIN: When classical Chinese was being used as a lingua franca for a very broad region — it was used in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam as the language of written communication — a very strict civil-service exam system privileged learning the language to precision. That stabilized that language. To a certain extent the Anglophone entertainment publication and media industry, as well as the scientific institutions, stabilize a certain kind of global English now.

Gordin points to another factor that would make it hard to install a universal language: the nature of language itself.

GORDIN: The reason why I think you can’t just blanket install and say, “OK, everybody is going to learn Esperanto,” is because people will experiment and mess with the language. They’ll change it.

Which, by the way, is how we got to where we are today.

McWHORTER: Well, we have 7,000 languages.

John McWhorter, from Columbia.

McWHORTER: And language is inherently changeable not because change is swell but because as you use a language over time and you pass it on to new generations, brains tend to start hearing things slightly differently than they were produced and after a while, you start producing them that way. That is as inherent to language as it is inherent for clouds to change their shapes. It isn’t that that happens to some languages and not others. That’s how human speech goes.

DUBNER: All right, so imagine in our thought experiment now that we’ve got Earth 2.0. You’ve got seven, eight billion people. Let’s say we want to give everybody the most prosperity and opportunity and equity that’s possible. We make you the Chief, let’s say, Communications Adviser of Earth 2.0. We give you the task of writing the plan, the blueprint for creating from scratch our new language systems and institutions. What would that blueprint look like?

McWHORTER: I would say that an ideal, in the future, is that everybody in the world can communicate in one language, that people have another language that they use with their ingroup, and that we have as many of those languages as possible. I don’t think that it’s going to be another six thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine, ever. But there does need to be one language that everybody uses so that as many people in the world as possible can take advantage of economic benefits, such as they are.

WEBER: I would go with a global language on some higher level …

That’s Shlomo Weber, an economist who studies language.

WEBER: … but still keeping the local language for everybody, because sensibilities of the people [are] a very important thing.

DUBNER: Let’s say this Earth 2.0 experiment, just to be a little more realistic, that we’re still working with the resources we’ve got. In other words, the languages that exist now would still exist. English obviously has a big head start, but it obviously also comes with a lot of baggage, right? People learn English because it’s useful, but English has a history of colonialism and domination and so on. Would picking a language like English just doom it to failure?

WEBER: I don’t know. Most of the languages, maybe except Chinese, have the history of domination too.

DUBNER: Does that mean you’re nominating Chinese because they took the Middle Kingdom route and they never really tried?

WEBER: Definitely would be one of the leading languages. Absolutely. But we could have chosen six or seven. To choose one, it’s a very difficult thing. Of course, the colonial legacy of English is questionable. But it’s true for so many others — the history of Russian language, of Japanese, of French, of German, Turkish empire had also its ups and downs. But given our circumstances … English. A reluctant vote for English.

McWHORTER: I almost wish that there was some reason that everybody had to learn colloquial Indonesian. It’s the only language I’ve ever encountered where you can learn a whole bunch of words and, even though you’re going to sound like an idiot, you can get an awful lot done. You don’t sound nearly as much like an idiot stringing together your Lonely Planet words in many parts of Indonesia. There’s no such thing as the moon being a girl and a boat being a boy. None of those things that make languages hard to learn. Really — almost none! I thought this should be the world’s universal language. Indonesian is one of those languages, like English, which has been learned by so many different people speaking so many different languages that it’s relatively user-friendly as languages go.

DUBNER: You’ve argued that isolation in a language breeds complexity. Considering that English is the least isolated language there is these days — it’s everywhere — does that necessarily mean that it will or is becoming less complex, to make it accessible to newer users all over the world?

McWHORTER: It doesn’t mean that but only because this business of languages being more complex when they’re isolated, and becoming simpler when they’re spoken by a lot of adults, is largely something that happens before widespread literacy. English didn’t become relatively user-friendly because of the Bosnian cabdriver in New York. It happened when Scandinavian Vikings flooded Britain and learned bad old English but were dominant enough that generations started speaking the way they did. That became the language. You and I, right now, are speaking really crappy old English. And we feel fine about it.

DUBNER: Speak for yourself. I feel I’ve been pretty literate today. See, I didn’t use the right word for literate. Literate is written, right? I can’t even think of the right word for what I’m trying to say. What do you call it when I’m being …

McWHORTER: Articulate, I suppose.

DUBNER: Articulate. I couldn’t even come up with that. That’s how bad … I know you’re right. I just proved your point. You know what that was? That was Muphry’s Law. Do you know Muphry’s Law?

McWHORTER: No, what’s that?

DUBNER: Muphry’s law is whenever you try to correct someone’s mistake, you make an additional mistake.

McWHORTER: I didn’t know there was a name for that.

DUBNER: There is because our language is so rich, of course …

MCWHORTER: It is exactly that.

As rich as our language may be, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Coming up after the break: let’s say we bit the bullet and went with English as our universal language. How could it be made more accessible and equitable?

McWHORTER: Easy, magic wand: something that we must get rid of is linguistic prescriptivism.

And: let’s not overlook how much technology is already changing our communication.

GORDIN: It’s not going to be a Babel fish that you stick in your ear and will translate everything immediately. But it does improve the possibilities of translating roughly between language groups.

* * *

On Earth 2.0, it might be nice if all seven-plus billion of us spoke one shared language — and then, as John McWhorter suggested …

McWHORTER: … and then people have another language that they use with their ingroup and that we have as many of those languages as possible.

This, McWhorter says, is pretty close to the way a lot of people already communicate.

McWHORTER: If you think about the typical person who speaks Arabic, for example. They almost certainly speak two different languages. There is the Arabic that we would learn in a book, and then there’s Moroccan Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, Libyan Arabic. Those are completely different languages from Standard Arabic — different basic words, different grammatical constructions. You grow up speaking your Libyan Arabic — that’s mommy’s language. Then, when you go to school, you learn something that often I’ve heard people from these countries also call Arabic and that’s this other language. That happened because of history, because of cultural history in the case of Arabic, the Quran. The religious unity of the nations has a lot to do with it, but ideally nobody would have to go to school to “learn Arabic.” That is going on in many South Asian countries. It’s what a typical African often has to go through. Or if you’re Sicilian, you speak Sicilian. You go to school and you learn Italian.

Okay, fine but then there’s the task of selecting the universal language. Michael Gordin of Princeton:

GORDIN: Even if we picked a universal language that was neutral, politics being what it is — and I doubt this could be engineered away — we’d find ways to particularize the previously general.

McWHORTER: It’d be interesting if there was some sort of academy that were designed to keep people from making it more complicated …

DUBNER: I love that the linguist is coming up with The Academy to Keep Language from Becoming More Complicated. You guys are the ones that have contributed, obviously, to the way we think about language as so complicated.

McWHORTER: See, we contain multitudes.

It might be helpful to look at some of the countries that already use formulas calling for two or three languages.

WEBER: The Indians, actually. In some other countries, in Nigeria, Kazakhstan. They tried to implement this formula.

The economist Shlomo Weber.

WEBER: They tried to combine all these things. Every child has to study his own language, English, and the language of the other part of the country. Everything beautiful. You bring national cohesiveness, you bring efficiency through English, and you still sustain your individual languages, your individual attachments, your identification. But it didn’t work, because the people didn’t accept this formula. Why didn’t [they] accept it? Because their attachment to home language was much stronger than doing anything else.

DUBNER: I thought that Kazakhstan worked better than, let’s say, India or Nigeria. What did Kazakhstan do, or what happened there that made it work better?

WEBER: They have a strong government there. But in the case of Kazakhstan, I think the people were convinced that this is right way to go. In Kazakhstan, with its oil and gas resources, English is very important to be a part of the international community. Of course, [the] Kazakh language is important, it’s their own language, but they also recognize that for [the] cohesiveness of the country, Russian is an important language.

DUBNER: But you’re also suggesting that authoritarianism is handy if you want to get everybody to speak the three languages, yeah? Because democracy is a little sloppier.

WEBER: A little sloppy in this regard, right. Some other advantages, but not that.

To be fair, there are a lot of differences between Kazakhstan and India. India is much larger, much more diverse. Even so, says Michael Gordin …

GORDIN: You have to give people a reason to want to engage with the language. The energy required to learn a language is high enough that you really have to work on the motivation. The constructed languages and the natural languages provide lots of examples of the importance of that.

OK, so how do you get people to engage with a language? As we’ve seen on Earth 1.0, most of the big, legacy languages come with a lot of baggage — cultural baggage at least; more likely, colonialist baggage. So what would happen if we chose English as the new universal language? I mean, with 1.5 billion speakers, it’s already 20 percent of the way there. What would you do to make English truly accessible to everyone, especially non-native speakers?

McWHORTER: Something that we must get rid of is linguistic prescriptivism, and by that, I mean that we live with an idea that some ways of speaking a language are bad, broken, and some ways aren’t. It’s all based on myths. That’s not to say that in a formal situation you can get up and say, “Billy and me went to the store.”

GORDIN: In the 19th century, the standard by which people had to know a language, a foreign language that wasn’t their own — so let’s for the moment pretend like everybody in the world speaks French, English, or German. You had to be really fluent in one of those three but only pretty competent in the others. A much weaker level of fluency. The French person didn’t have to know a lot of English but they had to be able, with a dictionary, to puzzle their way through a scientific article. You could relax the assumption that everything has to be perfect grammar-book English and just allow the publication of rougher English in a variety of forms, without this obsessive copyediting. That would be fairer.

McWHORTER: There are some kinds of English that would be so difficult for anybody else to understand that maybe there would have to be some adjustment. But schematically, the idea that most people in most nations have to learn a form of what they speak that requires effort to master — that’s crummy.

GORDIN: You could imagine subsidizing global English education. Another fair option is to say, “No, we actually really like the highly-readable, clean English.” You could charge slightly higher page fees for native speakers of English that would subsidize copy-editing for non-native speakers of English.

SCHOR: The most important thing would be to provide incentives for linguistic innovation, or for bringing language and the arts together, for bringing language and engineering together. This would have to come from some organization or donors, of course. But that’s as much of an institution as I would like to imagine negotiating language in Earth 2.0.

WEBER: I would like to have peace on this planet and then to approach those things.

DUBNER: What do you think would be a better way for everyone in the world to learn English? I’m especially curious to know, as an economist, what you think is the R.O.I. on an education dollar versus an entertainment dollar. In other words, would it be better just to have all Hollywood movies distributed globally for free? Would that be the best way for people to learn English?

WEBER: It could be the case. Once again, [the] example of India, Bollywood movies have contributed to [the] tremendous development of Hind[i] …The language was not spoken very widely in India, before the development of Bollywood.

DUBNER: Maybe even five years from now a technology like movies will seem very old-fashioned because there may be technology that’s essentially instant and perfect translation from any language to any language, right?

WEBER: Of course, technology will play a part.

GORDIN: Machine translation, I think, will never be perfect. It’s not going to be a Babel fish that you stick in your ear and will translate everything immediately. But it does improve the possibilities of translating roughly between language groups.

“It’s not going to be a Babel fish” — the Babel fish is from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by the way — “that you stick in your ear and will translate everything immediately.” Maybe not — but maybe. A New York startup called Waverly Labs has been working on a Babel fish-like earbud that’ll do live translation. They say they’ve already taken in $5 million in pre-orders. There’s also the rapidly developing Google Translate and Skype Translator. And it’s not just major languages that benefit from the digital revolution.

SCHOR: I don’t think there’s any doubt that technology has been a great boon to Esperanto …

Esther Schor again.

SCHOR … and I know many Esperantists, especially in the United States, who essentially live their Esperantic lives online. Some of them Skype, some of them do it on Facebook. LERNU.net has several hundred thousand registered users and there’s also Duolingo, which in the past two years since its inception, it has signed on about a million people into the Esperanto course, which is really amazing and marvelous.

But overall, the internet is dominated by what John McWhorter calls the big-dude languages, especially English. Google searches in English return roughly four times more results than Arabic searches; 95% of Wikipedia concepts are represented in fewer than six languages. There is of course no guarantee that this march toward English hegemony continues. History shows us that language is inherently mutable. So what can we assume about the future of language?

GORDON: Since we’re not changing the biology of humans, we can assume a couple of things …

Michael Gordin, the historian of science from Princeton.

GORDIN: … that people will learn languages; that they’ll learn them pretty well when they’re kids; and that languages won’t stay stable. If you want a more broadly-communicative, more inclusive infrastructure, you should focus on training children while they’re young and still able to learn multiple different languages and keeping them straight. In the 19th century, in Bohemia, the Czech region of the Habsburg Empire, it was quite common for neighboring peasant villages, one of which was predominantly German-speaking and one of which was predominantly Czech-speaking, to send kids to be educated in the other town. That way the kid would know both languages. Leveraging the way children can soak up languages almost effortlessly, to create a more dense web of people who understand each other’s languages, would improve some aspects of the system.

But here’s the thing. However judiciously we might draw up the best course of language for Earth 2.0, the original blueprint is unlikely to hold. Language evolves, it diverges; it constantly sparks its own offshoots. Consider a recent group of languages that were created from scratch.

Brian KERNIGHAN: Computer languages are very definitely created. And so somebody sits down and says, “this is the way we want to have our language work.”

Brian Kernighan is a computer-science professor at Princeton. He used to work at Bell Labs, the famous incubator of various operating systems and coding languages. Kernighan himself worked on the UNIX o.s. and the languages AWK and AMPL. The first major programming languages were invented in the late 1950s.

KERNIGHAN: The first high-level languages, I would say, would fundamentally be Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, and a language called ALGOL — which was in some sense more an academic exercise.

These languages were built for different tasks:

KERNIGHAN: Like scientific and engineering computation, which was FORTRAN; or business computation, which was COBOL; or even educational computation, if you like, which was BASIC. They’re definitely created for a purpose as opposed to being a natural process. On the other hand, once they’re created, then there’s a pressure for them to evolve.

Just a few years later, in 1961 …

KERNIGHAN: In 1961, a professional journal called Communications of the ACM in their January issue had a cover piece of art, which showed a schematic version of the Tower of Babel. It listed on that probably 200 programming languages. The message was, “Boy, there’s a lot of programming languages.”

Today, there are at least 1,500 programming languages.

KERNIGHAN: Do we need that many languages? Of course not. Do we use that many languages? Actually, no. The repertoire of most journeymen programmers is probably half a dozen to a dozen or something like that.

The parallel between programming languages and natural languages is not perfect, but still striking. A new language costs time, effort, and money to create, to learn, to maintain. Why, then, has there been so much growth?

KERNIGHAN: People are trying to write bigger programs, and they’re trying, often, to address programming problems. That is, taking on tasks that were not part of the original. Therefore the language evolves because the environment in which it lives is changing, the resources that are available for programmers — that is, hardware resources — are changing, and the desires of the people who write programs change as well.

GORDIN: Or an optimist would say developing into varieties of pronunciations and accents display the diversity of who we are.

Michael Gordin, speaking now about natural languages.

GORDIN: That process we’ve seen over world history many times: things fragment, then they coalesce, and then they fragment, and they coalesce again. Part of that has to do with tribal tendencies. Part of it has to do with a love of experimentation, regional loyalty, something that sounds aesthetically interesting. You could end up with something like a guy writing a poem in the late medieval period in the Tuscan dialect, Dante, producing a standard for a language by the act of his particularity.

This kind of change can create chaos. But: it’s also a hallmark of being human — a dissatisfaction with the status quo; a desire to experiment, to build, to adapt to changing circumstances.

BORODITSKY: We’re champions in the animal world at creating our own niches, taking the environment that we’re given, and then radically transforming it to suit our needs.

That’s the cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky.

BORODITSKY: And we do this with language as well.

And what is Boroditsky’s vision for language on Earth 2.0?

BORODITSKY: My emphasis would be on preserving diversity and preserving flexibility — making things really easy to learn and really adaptable to environment — rather than focusing on making something that is exactly the same and common across everyone. I don’t know that we can judge that we now have the best solution, and we should just build it right in. I’d still want people to learn lots of things through cultural transmission and adjust to their environment, the way that we do so well as humans. In some ways, becoming more aware of the relationship that we have with language is the thing that helps communication — more than simply trying to build one system.

It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that just about everyone we’ve heard from in this series on language has been … an academic. They, like all tribes, have their own dialects and sublanguages. Which is often not all that decipherable to the rest of us. I asked Shlomo Weber about this. He’s an economist.

WEBER: At the moment, I’m the director of the New Economic School in Moscow.

DUBNER: I have to tell you. I love academia. I love academics. I love the research you do. But my one big complaint is this: the way that you academics communicate to the rest of us, to the non-academics, is terrible. I understand these are areas of technical expertise but this strikes me as its own little Tower of Babel, where there are academic researchers all over the world doing this amazing and valuable research — which by the way is often funded by us, the taxpayers. And yet, we can’t really participate in it because of the way that you all communicate. I’m curious to know if we can’t solve the language or communication problem globally, if we could at least address this problem.

WEBER: Believe me, Stephen, I agree with you. I am doing my small part. I tried to write in newspapers, I go on television to talk about general things and not using the language. But it comes back to economics. There are incentives, and the incentives are not to go to tell you about this research. There is nothing in my incentive mechanism, what [my] university or community offers me, to go to talk to people who are interested in some simplified version of this research. For this, you really need to grow as an individual and to understand that, indeed, the research is supported by your dollars.

DUBNER: I will say this: honestly, as much as I complain about the gap, I’m grateful for it because I wouldn’t have a job if you guys communicated directly to people. Basically, I am the translator. So keep doing what you’re doing, Shlomo.

WEBER: Thank you. And you, Stephen, keep doing what you’re doing.

Coming up next time …

MACIEIRA [Brazilian Portuguese]: Isso vem no próximo episódio.

IVANOV [Russian]: Это будет в следующем выпуске.

Anisa SILVIANA [Bahasa Indonesia]: Yang akan datang selanjutnya.

Justin CHOW [Mandarin]: 在下一集.

Rendell de KORT [Papiamento]: … sigi proximo.

Larry Summers is a Harvard economics professor but he’s also a former president of Harvard, a former Secretary of the Treasury, and he was the chief White House economist under Obama when the Great Recession hit. What was that like?

SUMMERS: It was a very tense time. We would meet with the President each morning and talk about what was happening.

Summers gives himself and his team a crisis grade:

SUMMERS: While battlefield medicine’s never perfect, I think you’d have to say that the approach we chose was effective.

Summers also sort-of admits a past policy mistake.

SUMMERS: Perhaps, given what happened, you can say it was a mistake.

Summers also reveals — big surprise — that he is not a fan of the current White House.

SUMMERS: It’s the disregard for ascertainable fact and disregard for analysis of the consequences of policy actions.

That’s next time …

MACIEIRA [French]: Ca, ça viendra dans le prochain épisode …

MUSTAK [Bahasa Malaysia]: Episod seterusnya dalam Radio Freakonomics.

SCHOR [Esperanto]: Tiu venas venontfoje ĉe Freakonomics Radio.

Also: look for our upcoming special episode, with producer Stephanie Tam, about modern-day Esperanto. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez; we had help this week from Sam Bair. Special thanks to our intern Kent McDonald — and to the many listeners who contributed their voices, and their languages, to this episode. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via e-mail at [email protected].

Kim LE [Vietnamese]: Xin cảm ơn rất nhiều.

Hagit SALTZBERG [Hebrew]: תודה רבה

SILVIANA [Bahasa Indonesia]: Terima kasih.

ALJUTAILI [Arabic]: شكراً جزيلاً

MACIEIRA [Brazilian Portuguese]: Muito obrigada.

Mara DAJVSKIS [Latvian]: Liels paldies.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Lera Boroditsky, associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego.

Michael Gordin, professor of science history at Princeton University.

Brian Kernighan, computer science professor at Princeton University.

Ruth Kevess-Cohen, doctor at Cameron Medical Group.

John McWhorter, associate professor of slavic languages and linguistics at Columbia University, and host of Lexicon Valley at Slate.

Esther Schor, professor of english at Princeton University.

Shlomo Weber, director of the New Economic School.

RESOURCES

Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language by Esther Schor (Metropolitan Books, 2016).

Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research by Scott Montgomery and David Crystal (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

The Evolution of Language by W. Tecumseh Fitch (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language by Dean Falk (Basic Books, 2009).

How Many Languages Do We Need?: The Economics of Linguistic Diversity by Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber (Princeton University Press, 2011).

“How Language Shapes Thought,” by Lera Boroditsky, Scientific American (2011).

“Linguistic Distance: A Quantitative Measure of the Distance Between English and Other Languages,” Barry Chiswick and Paul Miller (2004).

Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English by Michael Gordin (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

The Story of Human Language, Part 1 by John McWhorter (Teaching Company, 2004).

“What is Universal in Event Perception? Comparing English and Indonesian Speakers,” Lera Boroditsky, Wendy Ham, and Michael Ramscar (2002).

“Why Academics Stink at Writing,” Steven Pinker, The Chronicle Review (September 26, 2014).

EXTRA

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Del Rey, 1995).

The post What Would Be the Best Universal Language? (Earth 2.0 Series) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/best-universal-language/

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