There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. Finally, there are known knowns that should remain unknown, that is to say, creepy things we know that we wish we didn’t.

-Rumster

- From Dealbreaker

The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.

At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month in Garifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.

And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows, is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.

“My wife is from Java, and my children were born in Jakarta — they don’t associate with the Mamuju,” he said. “I don’t read books in Mamuju. They don’t publish any. I only speak Mamuju when I go back or when I talk to my brother on the telephone.”

These are not just some of the languages that make New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world. They are part of a remarkable trove of endangered tongues that have taken root in New York — languages born in every corner of the globe and now more commonly heard in various corners of New York than anywhere else.

While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages — far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 census forms.

“It is the capital of language density in the world,” said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “We’re sitting in an endangerment hot spot where we are surrounded by languages that are not going to be around even in 20 or 30 years.”

In an effort to keep those voices alive, Professor Kaufman has helped start a project, the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach them to compatriots.

“It’s hard to use a word like preserve with a language,” said Robert Holman, who teaches at Columbia and New York Universities and is working with Professor Kaufman on the alliance. “It’s not like putting jelly in a jar. A language is used. Language is consciousness. Everybody wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.”

With national languages and English encroaching on the linguistic isolation of remote islands and villages, New York has become a Babel in reverse — a magnet for immigrants and their languages.

New York is such a rich laboratory for languages on the decline that the City University Graduate Center is organizing an endangered-languages program. “The quickening pace of language endangerment and extinction is viewed by many linguists as a direct consequence of globalization,” said Juliette Blevins, a distinguished linguist hired by City University to start the program.

In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan); Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands); Irish Gaelic; Kashubian (from Poland); indigenous Mexican languages; Pennsylvania Dutch; Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland); Romany (from the Balkans); and Yiddish.

Researchers plan to canvass a tiny Afghan neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, for Ormuri, which is believed to be spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Endangered Language Alliance will apply field techniques usually employed in exotic and remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant ethnic enclaves.

“Nobody had gone from area to area looking for endangered languages in New York City spoken by immigrant populations,” Professor Kaufman said.

The United Nations keeps an atlas of languages facing extinction, and U.N. experts as well as linguists generally agree that a language will probably disappear in a generation or two when the population of native speakers is both too small and in decline. Language attrition has also been hastened by war, ethnic cleansing and compulsory schooling in a national tongue.

Over the decades in the secluded northeastern Istrian Peninsula along the Adriatic Sea, Croatian began to replace Vlashki, spoken by the Istrians, what is described as Europe’s smallest surviving ethnic group. But after Istrians began immigrating to Queens, many to escape grinding poverty, they largely abandoned Croatian and returned to speaking Vlashki.

“Whole villages were emptied,” said Valnea Smilovic, 59, who came to the United States in the 1960s with her parents and her brother and sister. “Most of us are here now in this country.”

Mrs. Smilovic still speaks in Vlashki with her mother, 92, who knows little English, as well as her siblings. “Not too much, though,” Mrs. Smilovic said, because her husband speaks only Croatian and her son, who was born in the United States, speaks English and a smattering of Croatian.

“Do I worry that our culture is getting lost?” Mrs. Smilovic asked. “As I get older, I’m thinking more about stuff like that. Most of the older people die away and the language dies with them.”

Several years ago, one of her cousins, Zvjezdana Vrzic, an Istrian-born adjunct professor of linguistics at New York University, organized a meeting in Queens about preserving Vlashki. She was stunned by the turnout of about 100 people.

“A language reflects a singular nature of a people speaking it,” said Professor Vrzic, who recently published an audio Vlashki phrasebook and is working on an online Vlashki-Croatian-English dictionary.

Istro-Romanian is classified by Unesco as severely endangered, and Professor Vrzic said she believed that the several hundred native speakers who live in Queens outnumbered those in Istria. “Nobody tried to teach it to me,” she said. “It was not thought of as something valuable, something you wanted to carry on to another generation.”

A few fading foreign languages have also found niches in New York and the country. In northern New Jersey, Neo-Aramaic, rooted in the language of Jesus and the Talmud, is still spoken by Syrian immigrants and is taught at Syriac Orthodox churches in Paramus and Teaneck.

The Rev. Eli Shabo speaks Neo-Aramaic at home, and his children do, too, but only “because I’m their teacher,” he said.

Will their children carry on the language? “If they marry another person of Syriac background, they may,” Father Shabo said. “If they marry an American, I’d say no.”

And on Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few hundred people around the world. One of them, Dakhil Shooshtary, 76, a retired jeweler who settled on Long Island from Iran 45 years ago, is compiling a Mandaic dictionary.

For Professor Kaufman, the quest for speakers of disappearing languages has sometimes involved serendipity. After making a fruitless trip in 2006 to Indonesia to find speakers of Mamuju, he attended a family wedding two years ago in Queens. Mr. Husain happened to be sitting next to him. Wasting no time, he has videotaped Mr. Husain speaking in his native tongue.

“This is maybe the first time that anyone has recorded a video of the language being spoken,” said Professor Kaufman, who founded a Manhattan research center, the Urban Field Station for Linguistic Research, two years ago.

He has also recruited Daowd I. Salih, 45, a refugee from Darfur who lives in New Jersey and is a personal care assistant at a home for the elderly, to teach Massalit, a tribal language, to a linguistic class at New York University. They are meticulously creating a Massalit lexicography to codify grammar, definitions and pronunciations.

“Language is identity,” said Mr. Salih, who has been in the United States for a decade. “So many African tribes in Darfur lost their languages. This is the land of opportunity, so these students can help us write this language instead of losing it.”

Speakers of Garifuna, which is being displaced in Central America by Spanish and English, are striving to keep it alive in their New York neighborhoods. Regular classes have sprouted at the Yurumein House Cultural Center in the Bronx, and also in Brooklyn, where James Lovell, a public school music teacher, leads a small Garifuna class at the Biko Transformation Center in East Bushwick.

Mr. Lovell, who came to New York from Belize in 1990, said his oldest children, 21-year-old twin boys, do not speak Garifuna. “They can get along speaking Spanish or English, so there’s no need to as far as they’re concerned,” he said, adding that many compatriots feel “they will get nowhere with their Garifuna culture, so they decide to assimilate.”

But as he witnessed his language fading among his friends and his family, Mr. Lovell decided to expose his younger children to their native culture. Mostly through simple bilingual songs that he accompanies with gusto on his guitar, he is teaching his two younger daughters, Jamie, 11, and Jazelle, 7, and their friends.

“Whenever they leave the house or go to school, they’re speaking English,” Mr. Lovell said. “Here, I teach them their history, Garifuna history. I teach them the songs, and through the songs, I explain to them what it’s saying. It’s going to give them a sense of self, to know themselves. The fact that they’re speaking the language is empowerment in itself.”

He despaired of the “weakness of mind that ran in his family” and felt as though he could achieve little more than admiration of the accomplishments others made in the sciences.

Ironically it was what he termed “the salvation of study” which allowed him to temporarily escape his gloomy moods. Much like Darwin I often find work to be the only thing that makes life bearable. Darwin elucidates on the “clarifying forces” of depression in his autobiography stating “pain or suffering of any kind, if long continued, causes depressions and lessens the power of action, yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.”

Over the course of the last year I have come to understand, just as Darwin did, that it is loneliness, sorrow and pain which guides us, pushes us toward those pursuits or actions which are ultimately most beneficial to us.

In this way, darkness becomes a guiding light.

William Styron described depression as a gray drizzle of horror, a storm of murk.

Despite its prevalence there exists an intriguing paradox of depression. For those who have experienced the darkness of the mind, the obsessions we develop over our pain become overpowering, causing us to retreat from virtually every facet of our lives. Unable to sleep our bodies become more and more fatigued and we soon lose the desire to eat. Sex rarely crosses our minds which increasingly focuses on death.

Years ago scores of US pencil manufacturers were competing for your business.  The big four were: Dixon Crucible Co., Eagle Pencil Co., Eberhard Faber and the American Lead Pencil Co. Beneath these Goliath’s of the pencil industry were a lot of smaller firms trying to get some of the market share.  One of those smaller outfits was Musgrave Pencil Co. whose operation was nestled amongst the red cedars of Shelbyville, TN. Musgrave Pencil Co. was founded by Colonel James Musgrave in 1905. Mr. Musgrave was in the sawmill business and when a huge lot of old, weathered red cedar fencing came available he snapped it up with the idea of turning it all into pencils. So, off to the sawmill the fencing went and out of that spawned his pencil making empire that has now stretched past 100 years.  Shelbyville would eventually be declared “Pencil City, U.S.A.”  At one point there were 6 pencil manufacturers just in Bedford County, TN alone.  Besides the old machinery that Musgrave uses to churn out their pencils they also continue to make their own pencil boxes next door to their pencil factory.  They are also one of two US pencil manufacturers with production history pre-dating 1920 who still trace current ownership to descendants of company founders. General Pencil Co. in NJ is the other one.

When we were developing our new, smaller hand-stitched journal we designed it with “locking loops” so you could slide a pencil or pen through the loops to hold it shut.  We do a lot of sketching so we felt a pencil was appropriate.  After some research Musgrave proved to have all the elements we were after.  They offer silver ferrules when most pencil companies only offer gold, they could print on hex shaped pencils, and, more importantly, they are one of the last pencil companies in the US that offer old style line-type embossed foil printing (not just flat printing.)  This gives the pencil a vintage look.

Study a vintage pencil sometime and you will notice line-type embossed foil printing in multiple fonts and type sizes + unique ferrules and erasers. Many of these older pencils are little works of art and like Bullet Pencils, lunch boxes, match books and tape measures of the past, pencils represent yet another basic commodity that used to be made with pride and have amazing detail.  Sadly, there are very few pencil makers in the USA, like Musgrave, who are still willing to take the time to make something the customer wants and takes great pride in doing it.  Dont’ take my word for it, give Robin, in their art dept, a call.  She will make sure you get what you are after and not nail you on high minimums + her Southern hospitality is refreshing.  If you are in the market for your own custom pencils be sure to get her to send you a catalog and some samples because their web-site does not show their complete range.

View the full posting with photos at http://selectism.com/columns/chrisbray/

By ComBoost – plein écran – albums – tirage photo – livres photos
]]> http://irowport.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/diaporamas-irowport-sur-comboost-partage-de-photos-et-cra%c2%a9ation-de-diaporamas-pour-blogs-et-sites-web-avec-albums-pdf-moda%c2%a8le-vignettes/feed/ 0 irowport diaporama photos comboost http://irowport.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/missing-france/ http://irowport.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/missing-france/#comments Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:28:20 +0000 irowport http://irowport.wordpress.com/?p=32 Lire la suite →]]> Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou growest
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Abandonment, estrangement, insecurity during childhood, adolescence and adulthood; disease, melancholy and death during old age seem to be central to human experience world wide. This is especially true in countries that are ravaged by wars, internal conflict and external aggression. Many have said and noted that Iran is a land where melancholy and sadness are celebrated, and rejoiced. Poets and writers from Persia have taken inspiration from the loneliness of existence, the pain of breathing and comfort that death provides, like a soothing balm.

After the revolution, Persian artists have continued to produce internationally acclaimed works of traditional art, digital art, film and music.

Ali Ettehad’s performance piece “Purdahs of Silence” captures this lonliness of existence that is pervasive not just in Iran but in much of the middle east not  through his performance which is flanked on either side by  two stunning purdahs (screen print on silk with embroidery).