I have been away from the blog for six days doing MA stuff, not very effectively; however, that is my problem. In looking over the last six days, I have been searching for items relating to language, words, writing and such stuff as dreams are made on. A few things have emerged of a linguistic nature.
Before embarking on the literary, one item I find I neglected was the 92nd birthday of Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, born on the 10th November 1919. He is a small arms designer, and on the 13th November 1947 he completed development of the AK-47 assault rifle. It is officially known as Автомат Калашникова (Avtomat Kalashnikova). There is hardly a country in the world that is not listed amongst the ‘users’ of the AK-47. The flag of Mozambique has it as an emblem on its flag crossed with a farmer’s hoe.
The 13th November 1940, was the birthday of Saul Aaron Kripke American philosopher and logician. Since the 1960s Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology and set theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape-recordings and privately circulated manuscripts. This seems to run through language theorists, Saussure and Austin are also known for their lectures, subsequently published by students. Kripke was the recipient of the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. A recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years.
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| Kripke |
“Language is a primary concern of analytic philosophers, particularly the use of language to express concepts and to refer to individuals. In Naming and Necessity, Kripke considers several questions that are important within analytic philosophy:
▪ How do names refer to things in the world? (the problem of intentionality)
▪ Are all statements that can be known a priori necessarily true, and are all statements that are known a posteriori contingently true?
▪ Do objects (including people) have any essential properties?
▪ What is the nature of identity?
How do natural kind terms refer and what do they mean?
In the first lecture, Kripke introduced a schematic semi-formal version of the kind of "theory of naming" he was criticising (1980:64–65). He began the second lecture by recapitulating the "theses" of this theory, together with the "noncircularity condition" he had discussed in closing the first lecture. Apparently, the theses and condition had been written up on a board for all to see. This text was reproduced, as quoted below, in the "lightly edited" transcript of 1980 (p. 71).
▪ To every name or designating expression 'X', there corresponds a cluster of properties, namely the family of those properties φ such that A believes 'φX'.
▪ One of the properties, or some conjointly, are believed by A to pick out some individual uniquely.
▪ If most, or a weighted most, of the φ's are satisfied by one unique object y, then y is the referent of 'X'.
▪ If the vote yields no unique object, 'X' does not refer.
▪ The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the φ's' is known a priori by the speaker.
▪ The statement, 'If X exists, then X has most of the φ's' expresses a necessary truth (in the idiolect of the speaker).
(C) For any successful theory, the account must not be circular. The properties which are used in the vote must not themselves involve the notion of reference in such a way that it is ultimately impossible to eliminate.”
The 14th November 1970 marks the day that the Soviet Union entered the ICAO (The International Civil Aviation Organisation) making Russian the fourth official language of organisation. The importance of such languages of organisation cannot be underestimated. In a paper on the Role of Language in Aviation Communications, Elizabeth Mathews, an ICAO Linguistic Consultant and member of the Proficiency Requirements in Common English Study Group (PRICESG) wrote:On March 27, 1977 583 people lost their lives in a runway collision in Spain. In January of 1990, 73 passengers and crewmembers were killed when a flight into New York’s John F Kennedy Airport ran out of fuel and crashed. December 1995: 164 people died when a 757 headed into Cali, Colombia turned off course and crashed into a mountain. And a 1996 midair collision over India killed 312 people.
Sadly, what these accidents have in common is that in each one accident investigators found that insufficient English language proficiency on the part of the flight crew or a controller had played a contributing role in the chain of events leading to the accident…
The International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, is the Specialized United Nations Agency charged with providing Standards governing all aspects of international aviation. In 1997, the ICAO Assembly, in an initiative from the State of India, reviewed the extent to which inadequate English language proficiency had been a causal factor in accidents and urged that this issue be considered with high priority.
To start, it will be useful to remind ourselves that there are three fundamental applications of language use in radiotelephony communications. When we talk about language issues in aviation with operational experts, there is often some confusion about the different roles of English use in aviation communications. It is useful to clarify. First, there is the correct use of ICAO phraseologies. Mis-communication can result from an incorrect use of phraseologies. (non-Standard ICAO phraseologies.) Secondly, proficiency in common, or plain language is important for safe radiotelephony communications. Early aviation communication specialists had hopes that the requirements of pilot and controller communications would be achieved once there was developed a “radiotelephony speech” based on a simplified English. Experience shows and safety experts and linguists agree that phraseologies alone, no matter how extensive, are not sufficient to adequately cover all of the potential situations that can arise from human communication, particularly, in aviation, for urgent or emergency situations.
So, the first role of language in communication is standardization on ICAO phraseologies and the correct use of those phraseologies. The second is proficiency in plain language, too.
Currently there are six official ICAO languages, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese, although English is the preferred language for international communications in aviation.
On the 15th November 1920, the League of Nations held its first assembly in Geneva. The League held its first council meeting in Paris on 16 January 1920, six days after the Versailles Treaty came into force. In November, the headquarters of the League was moved to Geneva, where the first General Assembly was held on 15 November 1920. Problems with languages were ever present.
The official languages of the League of Nations were French, English and Spanish (from 1920). The League considered adopting Esperanto as their working language and actively encouraging its use, but this proposal was never acted on. In 1921, Lord Robert Cecil proposed the introduction of Esperanto into state schools of member nations, and a report was commissioned.
When the report was presented two years later, it recommended the adoption of Cecil's idea, a proposal that 11 delegates accepted. The strongest opposition came from the French delegate, Gabriel Hanotaux, partially in order to protect French, which he argued was already the international language. As a result of such opposition, the recommendation was not accepted.
On the 16th November 534 a second and final revision of the Codex Justinianus was published.
The Corpus Juris (or Iuris) Civilis ("Body of Civil Law") is the modern name for a collection of fundamental works in jurisprudence, issued from 529 to 534 by order of Justinian I, Eastern Roman Emperor. It is also sometimes referred to as the Code of Justinian, although this name belongs more properly to the part titled Codex.The work as planned had three parts: the Code (Codex) is a compilation, by selection and extraction, of imperial enactments to date; the Digest or Pandects (the Latin title contains both Digesta and Pandectae) is an encyclopedia composed of mostly brief extracts from the writings of Roman jurists; and the Institutes (Institutiones) is a student textbook, mainly introducing the Code although it has important conceptual elements that are less developed in the Code or the Digest. All three parts, even the textbook, were given force of law. They were intended to be, together, the sole source of law; reference to any other source, including the original texts from which the Code and the Digest had been taken, was forbidden. Nonetheless, Justinian found himself having to enact further laws and today these are counted as a fourth part of the Corpus, the Novellae Constitutiones (Novels, literally New Laws).
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death on the 16th November. He was incarcerated on 23 April 1849 for being part of the liberal intellectual group the Petrashevsky Circle. Tsar Nicholas I, after seeing the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, was harsh on any type of underground organization, which he felt could put autocracy in jeopardy. On the16th November 1849, Dostoyevsky, along with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, was sentenced to death. After a mock execution, in which he and other members of the group stood outside in freezing weather waiting to be shot by a firing squad, Dostoyevsky's sentence was commuted to four years of exile with hard labour at a katorga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia. Later, Dostoyevsky described his years of suffering to his brother, as being, "shut up in a coffin." His book The House of the Dead emerged from his exile. Dostoyevsky was released from prison in 1854, and was required to serve in the Siberian Regiment. He spent the following five years as a private (and later lieutenant) in the Regiment's Seventh Line Battalion at a fort in what is now Kazakhstan.
On the 17th November 1967, another literary figure was sent to prison. French author Régis Debray was sentenced to 30 years in Bolivia. Born in Paris, Régis Debray studied at the École Normale Supérieure under Louis Althusser, and became "agrégé de philosophie” in 1965. In the late 1960s he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Havana in Cuba, and became an associate of Che Guevara in Bolivia. He wrote the book Revolution in the Revolution? which analysed the tactical and strategic doctrines then prevailing among militant socialist movements in Latin America, and acted as a handbook for guerrilla warfare that supplemented Guevara's own manual on the subject. It was published by Maspero in Paris in 1967 and in the same year in New York (Monthly Review Press and Grove), Montevideo (Sandino), Milan (Feltrinelli) and Munich (Trikont). Guevara was captured in Bolivia early in October, 1967; on April 20, 1967, Debray had been arrested in the small town of Muyupampa, also in Bolivia. Convicted of having been part of Guevara's guerrilla group, Debray on 17 November was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was released in 1970 after an international campaign for his release which included Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, General Charles de Gaulle and Pope Paul VI. He sought refuge in Chile, where he wrote The Chilean Revolution (1972) after interviews with Salvador Allende. Debray returned to France in 1973 following the coup by Pinochet in Chile. He is best known for médiologie.Mediology [from the french word "médiologie", first coined and introduced in French as "médiologie" by the French intellectual Régis Debray in the "Teachers, Writers, Celebrities" section of his book Le pouvoir intellectuel en France, (Editions Ramsay, 1979)] “broadly indicates a wide-ranging method for the analysis of cultural transmission in society and across societies, a method which challenges the conventional idea that 'technology is not culture'. The mediological method pays specific attention to the role of organisations and technical innovations, and the ways in which these can ensure the potency of cultural transmission - and thus the transformation of ideas into a civilisation worldview capable of sustained action.”
On the 17th November 1947 in Hollywood California, The Screen Actors Guild implemented an anti-Communist loyalty oath. The president of SAG at the time – future United States President Ronald Reagan – also known to the FBI as Confidential Informant "T-10", testified before the committee but never publicly named names. Instead, according to an FBI memorandum in 1947: "T-10 advised Special Agent [name deleted] that he has been made a member of a committee headed by Mayer, the purpose of which is allegedly is to 'purge' the motion-picture industry of Communist party members, which committee was an outgrowth of the Thomas committee hearings in Washington and subsequent meetings . . . He felt that lacking a definite stand on the part of the government, it would be very difficult for any committee of motion-picture people to conduct any type of cleansing of their own household". Subsequently a climate of fear, enhanced by the threat of detention under the provisions of the McCarran Internal Security Act, permeated the film industry. Ronald Reagan, acting president since March 10, is elected Guild president on November 16. Within a month, his wife, board member Jane Wyman, asks for a separation. On 17th November, 1947, the Screen Actors Guild voted to force its officers to take a "non-communist" pledge. Jane Wyman clearly couldn’t deal with Ronny’s politics.
The 18th November has a variety of items, including the 72nd birthday of Margaret Eleanor Atwood, born 18 November 1939. Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist, she is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; best known for her work as a novelist, she is also a poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age.
It was also on the 18th November 1926 that George Bernard Shaw refused to accept the money for his Nobel Prize, saying, "I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize", and on the 18th November 1865, Mark Twain’s short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was published in the New York Saturday Press. In it, the narrator retells a story he heard from a bartender, Simon Wheeler, about the gambler Jim Smiley. Twain describes him:
"If he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he is bet you how long it would take him to get to—to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road."
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