Back when I took Sanskrit, our professor mentioned other related languages in the Indo-European language family, and my interest was piqued. I picked up a copy of Baldi’s book on IE languages, and one of the ones that came up that I had never heard of was Tocharian, a language with some documentary evidence in Central Asia. A guy from my class actually ended up taking Tocharian, masochist that he is. I always wanted to learn more, but was too lazy to do the painful linguistics paper reading until this essay came to my attention. It’s worth a skim, just to learn something about ancient Central Asia, a subject which is rarely dealt with in general history courses.
Tag Archives: History
I read dead people!
Another juicy link via MetaFilter, this time on famous wills made available by the Public Record Office in the UK. The site is very slow, and you also have to pay to read all of them except for William Shakespeare’s. Who, by the way, had terrible handwriting. I know someone in the Classics department here who has to take a class in reading manuscripts — that’s a skill that would come in handy right about now.
the battle of algiers
I’ve been meaning to write about a movie I saw recently, The Battle of Algiers, at the Castro Theatre. I took the day off to go to San Francisco because I really needed a break, and saw this movie with my friend Sarah after munching on some cheap sushi. When it came out in 1966 in France it was censored, and the reviews called it “the most controversial French film of all time,” a distinction which I felt may have been deserved. It tells a story of the independence/resistance movement in French Algeria and how the French responded. The action of the film is eerily familiar in today’s world of suicide attacks and vicious retaliation.
The film opens with the French Army raiding the hideout of Ali La Pointe in the Casbah. It then flashes back to the beginnings of the resistance and how Ali joined in after being imprisoned for attacking some French kids. Within a few minutes we are shown a prisoner being led to the guillotine (yes, they still used the guillotine, even in 1956), shouting “allahu akbar” and other inflammatory statements. The resistance was an Islamic movement — through violence and intimidation they sought to end prostitution and substance abuse in the Casbah.
The French decide to bring in the military to deal with the insurrection. Headed up by Colonel Mathieu, a hero of the French Resistance in WWII, his eloquent if terse justification for the brutal techniques used by the military helps to temper the anti-French bias in the film:
The problem is: the NLF wants us to leave Algeria and we want to remain. Now, it seems to me that, despite varying shades of opinion, you all agree that we must remain. When the rebellion first began, there were not even shades of opinion. All the newspapers, even the left-wing ones wanted the rebellion suppressed. And we were sent here for this very reason. And we are neither madmen nor sadists, gentlemen. Those who call us fascists today, forget the contribution that many of us made to the Resistance. Those who call us Nazis, do not know that among us there are survivors of Dachau and Buchenwald. We are soldiers and our only duty is to win. Therefore, to be precise, I would now like to ask you a question: Should France remain in Algeria? If you answer “yes,” then you must accept all the necessary consequences.
I don’t think I agree with his argument here, but he poses the problem as one of having your cake and eating it too, which I think it a fundamental problem in the process of releasing an Empire. They showed this film to US soldiers before they went to Iraq, perhaps to prepare them for techniques of resistance that would be used against them. I find the analogy imperfect. In Iraq, we there to establish a new empire, not to preserve the existing regieme. It seems hard to draw the parallels, because I doubt the majority of the Iraqi people really hate the occupying force with as much passion as the ghetto-ized Algerians hated the French. Of course, I’m not there, so I can’t be sure of this.
The movie is eerily documentary-like, although not one frame of documentary footage was used, according to the advertisements. It is in this, its verité uninterrupted by the tricks of the cinema, that the power of the film truly lies. A film entirely shot hand-held to give the impression of immediacy seems fake to me because my memories of things are not as jerky or grainy. Here we get a combination of narrow shots in the tight alleys and multistoried houses of the Casbah as well as panoramas from the rooftops that are clearly constructed but don’t feel fake or over-edited.
The film is certainly more powerful today because of the current climate of Islamic intifadas and the techniques of bombing cafes, buses, ambulances, and so on. The historicization of these themes works both on the level of Brecht to distance us from them and judge the more objectively, but also reminds us viscerally of how little some things have changed in the last 50 years.
The screenplay is freely available, which is where I got the quote. It does not appear to be available on DVD, but if you still have a VCR you can probably rent it from your local not-Blockbuster store.
π day
It was pointed out to me that yesterday was π Day (3/14), which only works if you use the American system of dates, month/day/year, rather than the resolution scale model of day/month/year used by everyone else it seems. A bunch of Berkeley students decided to celebrate by chalking some few hundred digits of π on the sidewalk, extending from the math building north to the engineering buildings. It came as a surprise to some that I found it not very reminiscent of MIT. I’m not sure exactly what made it ring false. Perhaps it was too cute, or not esoteric enough. Perhaps it was the fact that you couldn’t possibly chalk the digits of π into the sidewalk at MIT in the middle of March since there might be snow on the ground, as opposed to the currently sunny and 82 degree weather in Berkeley. But whatever it was, it felt silly and just the thing for the week before Spring Break.
Oh, and happy Ides of March everyone. Make sure to warn your local emperor.
middle chulym
I’ve always been fascinated with linguistics and different languages. I’m sure many kids invent their own language or secret writing system. I wish I could find mine, I seem to remember it being really cool. The fact that there are so many different natural spoken languages is amazing to me, far more than are even written down. I read today in Science Now (non-free reg. required) that:
Scholars have found a previously unrecorded language spoken by Siberians living along the Chulym River, 450 kilometers north of Western Mongolia. Known locally as “Ös,” it has also been provisionally termed “Middle Chulym.” The language is thought to belong to the Siberian Turkic family of languages, which are very different from Slavic languages like Russian.
The full article is here if you have a subscription. I think Ös is a much better name than Middle Chulym, but whatever the language is, I think it’s incredible that these people have been living peaceably in Siberia without anyone noticing they speak an entirely different language.
The article goes on to talk about Russian linguists’ early studies of these languages (in the Communist era) that were politically motivated to erase the ethnic heritage of groups living in Siberia. This policy was also extended to Mongolia, where they outlawed the writing of Mongolian in its traditional script. They only started teaching the script again in 1994, with limited success, according to a friend of mine who spent a year there teaching English. However, it does make for some pretty wicked looking tattoos.
more than projections
Le Monde Diplomatique has a number of interesting maps available. The introduction is a nice short essay on cartography and the politics of mapmaking, and then there are a series of maps, some more confusing than others. I’m sure Edward Tufte would have some critiques. But all in all, it’s pretty informative and a good read. LMD is a pretty lefty publication, so it’s naturally got its bias, but they do a good job of covering stories that are missed by the “mainstream” press.
An Ergodic Walk 