For years I had been haunted by the fear that the Junior Ganymede club book, with all the dynamite it contained, would get into the wrong hands, and the hands it had got into couldn’t have been more the sort of hands you would have wished it hadn’t.

Wodehouse[1], of course. Pure bliss!

1. Much obliged, Jeeves

And I did this by my Lord’s command, who, I thank him, did of himself think of doing it to do me a kindness, for he writ a letter himself to him, thanking him for his kindness to me.

Na, dann ist ja alles klar …

Außerdem: Ich habe mich in einem Irrgarten aus Wenn-Dann-Abfragen verlaufen und ein Softwarepaket an zwei Stellen repariert, aber gleichzeitig an drei anderen kaputtgemacht. Bis die Reparatur dann getestet war, ging es schon stark auf acht zu. Naja, wer früh nach Hause will, sollte im Fenster mit den Build-Resultaten vielleicht ganz bis nach rechts scrollen. Dann sähe man nämlich die roten Balken.

Und: Während ich auf den Buildservice warte, bereite ich diesen Blogeintrag in einem TextEdit-Fenster vor. Das Programm mag aber den Satzanfang Naja nicht und ersetzt ihn automatisch durch Anja. Zum Glück kann man das abschalten.

Und zu guter Letzt: Der neue Mandelbulb-Film ist fertig. Es hat ein paar Wochen gedauert, ihn zu berechnen; aber für glatte Kanten und eine höhere Framerate hat ich der Aufwand gelohnt.

Linguist John McWhorter has written an article about the variety of human languages and its expected development. Nowadays, there are about 6000 languages spoken, but only about a tenth of these is expected to make it into the next century.

Personally, the author does not enjoy this prospect, but he does not see an objective disadvantage if a large number of languages should die out. This proposition may be debated, but the argument put forth in the article are pretty convincing. There is another statement that puzzles me, however:

Perhaps a future lies before us in which English will be a sort of global tongue while people continue to speak about 600 other languages among themselves. English already is a de facto universal language

A world using English as Lingua Franca appears time an again, sometimes as  (positive) utopia, sometimes presented in a more negative way. But how realistic is this scenario? I will grant that English does take this role in my life (both personal and professional) whenever my native German cannot be used.

However, this is just a very small part of the world — Europe and America are just a very small part, since more than half of humanity live in Asia. If there really is a universal language one day, who knows which one will win?

Moreover, some of the advantages of English McWhorter gives are a bit subjective — verb conjugation is quite simple, indeed, an learners rarely complain about the absent genders, either. On the other hand, English spelling and pronunciation are incredibly complex — offhand, I cannot think about any othere language (bare galic) that uses the latin alphabet verwendet and still employs a similarly strange spelling.

I shall conclude with a little anecdote concerning the idea of a lingua franca: a few days ago, I had to co-ordinate something with two colleagues. Unfortunately, there was no language all of us would have shared; this despite the fact that each of us could talk to every other member of our little team. Thus, we used three different languages (English,German, and Polish) and explained everything important twice so all of us understood.

Although this concept is only partly realised in Finnish, it may yield impressive results, as in today’s Word of the Day:

päämääränään

That is as their goal.

I found this one in the translation of The Lord of the Rings, shortly before Helm’s Deep.

So hat Dennis die Programmiersprache C erfunden. Außerdem hat er noch einen guten Teil von Unix erfunden, aber das ist eine andere Geschichte. Ein paar Jahre später hat Bjarne C++ erfunden. C++ ist ein bißchen seltsam: einerseits ist es ein einfaches Werkzeug für Leute, die sich beim Arbeiten die Hände dreckig machen (low level, sagt der Programmierer), wie C es ist: so etwas wie ein Hammer oder eine Zange; andererseits bringt es eine Menge fortschrittliches Zeugs mit: wie ein Industrieroboter vielleicht.

Kein Wunder, daß es da Ungereimtheiten gibt. Wer sich mit C++ auskennt, der findet bei yosefk eine sehr unterhaltsame Zusammenstellung dieser Ungereimtheiten.

[Edit: Typo]

A bit over two years ago, I started a series of photographs: one picture a month, depicting a typical scenery, and having some relation to its Finnish name.

It wasn’t until September last year that I took the second picture, and this is number three: February is helmikuu, or pearl moon.

By the way, the Latin name (and, therefore, the English one) means cleaning month.