"Speaking Native Language"

By -
I am not one to shout "cultural imperialism" at the drop of a hat. But nature documentaries drive me nuts: pretty much every person who is not from a first-world country speaks something called "native language" in the closed-captioning system. French people speak French, and German people speak German... but even people from the Faroe Islands speak Faroese, a language that is used by only 70,000 people!

Meanwhile, in Assam, the elephant herders speak... "native language." Dear documentary captioner, let me venture a guess that they might be speaking... maybe... Assamese?! That wasn't that hard, was it? You could bother figuring out that the egg hunters on the Faroe Islands speak Faroese... but Assamese, a language with roughly 200 times the speakers, that was too hard to look up?

Comments

  1. Karl Heintz11:52 AM

    Why are you watching nature documentaries if they drive you up the wall?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah5:25 PM

      I was sinking down the wall!

      But seriously, lots of nice scenery, shots of animals, and occasional interesting facts.

      Delete
  2. Ken B3:33 PM

    I for one am perfectly fine with subtitles over Frenchmen, saying “Speaking failed beta version of English” .

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more