blog « Sebastian Speaks

Lingua Ignota

POSTED 02-10-2010

On tour, I just had the privilege of some much needed reading time and I was able to breeze through Arika Okrent’s highly entertaining “In the Land of Invented Languages”. She spends long chapters on the curiously durable Esperanto, the bizarre but beautiful Blissymbolics, and the befuddling Loglan.
The first “invented” language though, was the work of Hildegard of Bingen, the noted Medieval Christian mystic. Meaning “Unknown Language” in Latin, Hildegard devised a vocabulary of about 1000 words, and a corresponding unique orthography of her own invention. With terms like “phazur” (grandfather) and “scirizin” (son), the language almost appears to be a mixture of Latin and German with a bit of Basque.
There has been speculation as to the possibility that Hildegard had designed the language for Utopian purposes, much as 19th century language inventors such as Esperanto’s Zamenhof. But the stronger likelihood is that she intended it to be a sort of secret language, perhaps for divine communication.

Ma’Aloula

POSTED 26-09-2010

This picturesque village, a little over an hour’s drive from Damascus, is one of the last villages on earth where Aramaic is spoken. While not a dead language per se, Aramaic is largely a liturgical tongue used by Arab Christians, although at the time of Christ it was the lingua franca of much of the Levant. The convent holds the remains of the early Christian saint Thecla, who was a contemporary of Paul.

Somali Vintage pop part 2

POSTED 18-09-2010

Love the drummer’s Vistalite set….

Big Brother’s Theme Park

POSTED 18-09-2010

The October War museum and memorial, commemorating Syria and Israel’s 1973 conflict (known in our circles as the Yom Kippur War), is a remarkable edifice of zero-context propaganda and kitsch brilliance. As befitting its stylistic dissonance, at least in comparison to the old quarter of Damascus, the memorial is pushed out to the fringes of the city. Paid for largely by the government of North Korea, the memorial boasts a series of mural paintings that are impressive in their scope and soulless in their composition, and the stern Soviet style sculptures that surround the building are much of the same. Most curious is the array of captured Israeli weaponry, simply arranged on the front lawn of the memorial like bizarre ornaments. Granted, most of the exhibits were in Arabic only, but the short film purporting to tell the story of the 1973 war was so transparent in its ideological agenda that even I could have driven a tank through it, American or Soviet made. Traveling in Vietnam I had noticed a lot of the same thing when it came to museums. When you don’t have free speech and you are brought up with only a steady diet of approved propaganda, you are presented history in a way that must be comfortably digestible and simplistic. Of course, I am not sure American school children are off any better, but at least my high school history teacher didn’t skip over the Trail of Tears or the Ludlow Massacre. I have my own issues with the question of Israel and the Palestinians, and I don’t support any group that believes they are entitled by history or some deity to a given chunk of land. That said, I am amazed at how the old, tired dichotomy of the Arab vs Israeli is beaten into the minds of people in this part of the world. This museum presents the creation of the state of Israel much like a sudden but natural travesty, an earthquake or flood. The political complexities that led up to 1948, not to mention the Holocaust and the flood of refugees it produced, are never acknowledged in Arab propaganda, because if they were they would take a lot of teeth out of the anti-Israel side of the dialectic. If we choose to be more honest about our own histories, it’s a lot harder to judge any one else’s as harshly. And hopefully it would force us to be a little more empathetic. All of us have been refugees at one time or the other, and most of us have been oppressors as well.

Damascus: the Old City

POSTED 18-09-2010

Damascus is a city so ancient and fabled that I almost feel as if my observations are inadequate, though they are honest. This is a place whose streets have seen thousands of years of travelers, pilgrims, invaders, holy men, merchants, scholars, and writers of every stripe. Mark Twain remarked in “Innocents Abroad” that “No recorded event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in existence to receive news of it.” I’m not sure that’s quite the case, but in three days of prowling the alleys of marketplaces, juice sellers, daunting mosques and serenely undisturbed churches, it did feel as if history had left much of Damascus to its own devices. The pulse of the city seemed to propel a body at once very ancient and very timeless, something that had struck me throughout my Syrian travels. Part of it was the fact that politics were a forbidden topic, and the Hafez regime has silenced not just dissent but religious activism of all kinds. Still, this governmental repression gave an ironic amount of breathing room for a fragile yet very boisterous form of cultural pluralism. On my first evening, I enjoyed a strong coffee in the shadows of the imposing Ummayad Mosque, disappearing into the throngs of Shiite pilgrims as I wound my way back to my hotel. Then as night grew later, I found refuge in a small one room tavern run by a pair of Christian brothers, chain smoking cigarettes and opening tops on long bottles of beer. The pictures of Bashar Assad and his father were everywhere to be sure, but their very ubiquity rendered them almost powerless to me, the causal traveler. Rather than a sense of Orwellian surveillance, the constant reminder of the heavy hand of the Assads engendered no more emotional response in me than would a cavalcade of suburban corporate logos, be they Starbucks or McDonald’s.