(2) A children's amusement in a dead language. Like, um, The Simpsons in Homeric Greek, maybe.>

I'm confused about the 'heat death' of language idea <Dom>.

I know that in physics 'heat death' is an idea related to the second law of thermodynamics which says that the entropy of a closed system which is not in equilibrium will increase over time and approach a maximum equilibrium point.

'heat death' is a bad thing because it would be an end state with no possible progression.

I'm intrigued as to how you are applying this idea to language. Do you envisage a time when all words mean the same thing and are therefore meaningless?

I'm not sure how far this law could be applied to language because language is a product of living things, and these tend to work against the second law of thermodynamics. For example, the increasing complexity of life forms.

It's an interesting idea though, I would like to hear more on it.

Cheers,

As is often the case. Give a man a *pen*, he'll like as not confuse it with a penis. We need not entertain notions of shape, niblocks, inkspurts, pious thoughts and ejaculations, or premature manuscript syndrome ... need we? Nope.

I had an ugly theory once (it was superseded by the chess theory, q.v.) to the effect that rape/masturbation fantasy was the ur-narrative, the primal form of storytelling. Somewhere deep in our Cro-Magnon past, a hairy not-quite-ape *imagined* what it'd be like to roger Griselda, his cavemate's daughter.

It's but an eyeblink from that action to classic realist fiction, epic verses, homeric simpsons, *chelovek v kino apparatom*, munchkins, DVD commentary, the death of the author, and 'Why I Want to Fork Ronald Reagan' (JG Ballard, 1968-69, The Atrocity Exhibition).

<Clinical studies of D-grade chessplayers (Elo equivalent <1200>) reveal that many entertained fantasies of playing against Reagan, and beating him with a Family Fork.

A typical game went:
White: Jo Traven Publick
Black: Ronald Reagan
*The White Location* in the 1980s...

1.e4 d5
2.Nc3 d4
3.Nd5 h5
4.Bc4 Qd7
5.Nf3 Nh6
6.d3 Rg8
7.Bxh6 gxh6
8.Qd2 e6 (??)
9.Nf6+

The <family fork> is so called because the White Knight simultaneously attacks the Black King, Queen and Rook: the *nuclear family*, the *Corpus Christi Weapons of Mass Discorporation Center*, and the Trinity Site, Alamagordo.

Subject's observed that Reagan's face embodied the features of all four relevant pieces: the Knight's equine solemnity; the Bishop's wounded ardor; the Queen's feminine deathliness; the King's passive power.

Actual assassination attempts such as the shooting by [*details suppressed under <Ballistic Silence Act 2009>*] were deemed 'clumsy' and 'inadequate' by a majority of mental patients. Many commented unfavorably on the scarred libido of the would-be assassin. In all cases, symbolic death and emasculation on a chessboard was seen as vastly superior.

Historians have noted that the <Los Alamos Ranch School>, taken over by the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had been attended in the 1930s by *two* famous American writers of ambivalent or downright unAmerican sexual tropisms: <Gore Vidal and William S Burroughs>.

Both hated it. But that didn't stop the symbolism of nuclear war from taking its course: any locus so conducive to faggotry had to be torn apart, atom by atom.>

Burroughs: "I don't care myself if the whole bleeding @#$%house goes up in chunks ..."

Just to be fair, nesspah?

The theory that the universe (post-inflation) is a struggle between the forces of Light (represented by chess) and Darkness (represented by rape fantasy narrative).

Unlike many Manichaean and Gnostic theories (eg Rocket Gnosticism: "a good rocket to take us to the stars, and a bad rocket for the world's suicide") this theory is not mathematically symmetrical.

Since chess is itself a struggle between dark and light ("And I am one of the few who can comprehend it in toto ... consider carefully which side you would rather be on" - Gerhardt Von Göll) the overall effect is hologrammatic.

Normally, Baburin is a super-solid middle-rank GM. He rarely loses, and has drawn with many elite GMs and beaten a few. When he does lose, it's often a long game: a crunch is almost unthinkable.

I wonder if chess has a sort of alpha-male syndrome, where even 'normal' GMs play over-cautiously against 2700+ opposition -- the way I play against a GM, and with similar results. A quick loss, where the loser's play seems unrecognizable.

Deffi. Hi. Is your Hindi anything as good as your English? Just how many languages do you speak, anyhow?

Include chess, music & accountancy if you wish: they have structure, and you can use them to swear. Therefore they are languages.

<Dark Side of the Ruy> I was stuck for a while today with no inputs coming in ... just the score of a dull game between two 1800-2000 players, with minor errors on both sides. Having no engine, and nothing better to do, I spent an hour or so analyzing it like a GM game.

Since I'm still a Spanish Virgin -- my 'understanding' of the Ruy goes about as far as grasping that there are open and closed versions, and a gambit invented by Marshall which is still alive and well -- I had no way of properly assessing this game, which began:

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Qf6 ... I don't even know if this has a name, but I spent some time playing with it. Since I've never seen it before (and I don't totally avoid *watching* Ruys) it can't be very common. This suggests that it's bad.

In fact, White has a raft of plausible moves: 4.0-0, 4.c3, 4.Nc3, 4.d3, 4.d4, 4.Bxc6 etc, depending how crazy one wants to be. Black has a potential attack plan with ...Bc5, ...Ne7, ...h6, ...Bg4, ...0-0-0 etc -- if he could manage to play them. But he never gets the chance. I plumped for the solid but vicious 4.Nc3 for white, with 5.Nd5 coming up unless prevented. Then white plays 0-0, c3, d4, with a strong advantage.

Bxc6 is generally wrong. On move 4, 4.Bxc6 Qxc6 5.Nxe5 Qxe4+ 6.Qe2 Qxe2+ seems OK for black. The game I found also featured the Bxc6 exchange, wrongly.

It went 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Qf6 4.Nc3 Bc5 5.Nd5 Qd6 ... and now 6.c3 gives White a tangible advantage, but 6.Bxc6? was played instead. Approximate equality ensued, and a game that meandered around, swapping the initiative a few times until White eventually won. Not as a result of his opening play, though.

Does anyone know if this ...Qf6 nonsense has a name? Has anyone grown-up ever played it? usw.

"Just for sixteen vestal pawnstorms
All emerging from the swamp
And although my eyes were blinded
I had a foe to stomp ..."
(A Whiter Shade of LSB)

<Accounting> is the language of my trade much to my credit

my husband is a <Tamilian> who speaks it in its pristine form where its almost devoid of any Sanskrit influence

my Hindi is functional though due to my school curriculum I can read and write in Hindi too

having lived and studied in Bangalore my <Kannada> is fairly good, considering I had to study the language upto my Bachelor's degree (though I was not single at the time)

I studied a few levels of French but did not complete my diplome, I blame the Winawer for that one

Exactly. Very exactly exact, in fact. You could almost be quoting me -- I used very similar language in the original 'short story', published in a Gollancz anthology way back in the 1980s.

It's nonsense, as you also observed. But this is a 'short story' on the borderline of storydom: what Ballard (an influence - and also, ahem, judge in the story competition where I was a prizewinner) called 'the fictional floor' -- it has very liitle narrative, only one (unnamed) 'live' character and another (unnamed) dead one who might not exist.

One big chunk of it is a shaggy dog story, an elaborate setup for a pun. Another chunk is a pseudo-scientific report. And most of the remainder is dodgy connective tissue, and a few jokes which meant something in the 1980s. I also describe various techie actions - 'keying in and sending a report down the line' (written before I'd heard of e-mail) and 'electronic maps with continuous screen update' (ditto) which make it *almost* like the early 21st century, but not quite.

You'd have to read it. This can be arranged. One 'point' is that, under conditions where language has been bleached of meaning, essentially meaningless stories like this one proliferate.

And the 'moral' is that, since planetary catastrophe is inevitable, we should use the remaining time to kill the pain.

This is where it diverges furthest from 'reality'. In the story, this suggestion is 'taken seriously in some quarters'. In reality, no politician would dare suggest that the best response to climate change is free opiates for the doomed masses.

Maybe it's like the word 'cretin'. It originally meant 'Christian'. Then, via the sense "a simple christian soul" it wound up meaning moron.

Follows. Not that all Xtians are idiots or any such thought: just that this is the crabwise way language changes -- not like the neologisms that dribble thru typical sci-fi.

William Gibson is an exception. His characters, some of them, grasp patterns intuitively. Language, chess, moire fields, Bertalanffy systems, usw.

Right. Good ♘, Bad ♗ ... alea iacta est.

We just have time for a fragment of a mini-fiction:

"The Xtians in Guantanamo interrogated him in pairs, one each from the CIA and the Inquisition. They had the old <good episcopus, bad episcopus> routine down pat. "Think about your wife" said the good episcopus, "and your children, and your immortal soul". "I have no wife" he replied. "No children and no immortal soul that I know of."

The bad bishop cut in brusque as a Basque dictionary. "When you've been flayed", he says, "your flesh is meat. Like that Satyr -- Marsyas, wasn't it? We have CCTV footage of you buying a vial of centaur's blood from him. Now, why would a feller like you want stuff like that?"

"It dissolves faith", he replied. On hearing this, the bishops put aside their hats and their differences and ejaculated together. "Get thee behind me, Santa", they gasped.

*As Themselves*

Pieter van't Groenweg
Baron Pierre Loin de Smaragdine
Pyotr Preczeleny
Dol Choroksaek Bang Beop
Pedro de Fuera Verde
Peadar Glasthart

I would be very grateful if you shared a copy of your story with me.

Please email me at

jablo1965@yahoo.com

Given the affects of mobile phones and TXT speak on language, you may yet be proven right!

Apologies if that's a stupid patronising insensitive remark. Like saying "Wow, you speak English!" to an Irish person. Actually, what tends to happen here is surprise that there is such a thing as an Irish language at all, then confusion as to why everyone doesn't use it.

There is a deep unspoken [sic] prejudice: in trying to learn any foreign language as an adult, we strive for perfect pronunciation. Very few even come close. But if, say, I moved to Berlin then the ideal would be to speak Berliner Deutsch.

But if we move to another part of the English-speaking world we're supposed to keep our accent. Minor adjustment for clarity is OK, but one is expected to hang onto some quality of one's 'native' tongue -- to bark with the bark god gave us. Woof!

So if I move to Toronto or Sydney and speak perfect Trawnian or Sinny then I'm a sell-out & a linguistic apostate ...

but I forgot, I do know perfect Algebraic, Descriptive and FEN,

not to mention Rybka, HIARCS, Zappa and Toga

I can do a perfect Zappa :)

the thing is in a city like Bangalore among the urban middle class there are people from all over India who have settled here so English acts as a sort of common medium especially in the South

The brothers William and Henry, their cousins Jesse and Frank, plus James Brown (x 512) and Sweet Baby James & Barclay James Harvest, usw

I have a nephew named James but I don't consider him a member of the human species yet. At his age, two, I was not only reading, but madly contorting my body into letter shapes.

Yes, folks. I invented Yoga. I invented semaphore. I invented writing. And I introduced the Latin slphabet to the Khazars while convincing them to convert to Judaism.

As I said at the time:

<What I like is that quite clearly isn't sci-fi at all, but an (all too brief) delving into an interesting mind - talkin' apocalyptic junkie blues... It's the sort of thing that I would have been incapable of writing, not because I wouldn't want to, but because I'm a sensitive soul and would just get incredibly depressed halfway through and start to cry. In the hands of a poncey twat like myself, Entropanto would have been an ugly uninteresting mess; in yours, it's still ugly but it's incredibly interesting indeed.>

This probably make most sense to those, like myself, who tend not to use stimuli, preferring instead to scramble for the punchline* in amongst a steady of stream of repressed cartoon violence and real-life trauma. And then they become one and the same - seamlessly, in fact, because they've always *been* one and the same. John Crowe Ransom nailed it: 'Images of the invaded mind / being as the monsters in your dreams'.

You know how it is. Ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, ex-tensions of man; balloon breasts & handpumps, drunken chiropody, bad bishops, manga rape & bowls of fruit; epilators, oscillators, alligators, Cheshire cats, Lou Reed & the girl next door. Each introduced to the cojoined milkman who, depending on his mood, may leave one or all a few full-fat pints.

A final thought - do such cock-tales, then, stand up as the only biologically imperative form of storytelling? Ya gotta come, rain or shine. Our good friend Eyal can probably pass judgement on whether this constitutes an open ended narrative or not.

You've triggered my Suttles complex again. Dunc once tried the Incredible Defence (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Qe7) against Matulovic. He lost, but the idea still appeals to me quite a lot. The point is that the queen vacates the d8 square for the knight, which in turn allows c7-c6, booting the bishop.

Thanks massively for the snippets of linguistic information. I had a tutor once, a former Oxford don who called such items 'gobbets' -- I was never sure if this was a technical term or a private in-joke at somebody's expense. He did that kind of thing a lot.

He tutored me in Anglo-Saxon and Hiberno-English Philology, a fine 19th century subject which acted as a corrective to my unwholesome interest in technology.

One time, I was late for a class because I had just published and edited -- and had been out on the campus trying to sell copies of -- an underground-ish magazine called *Alice* (think rabbit holes & 'go ask Alice'). I didn't expect the august members of the English faculty to know about this. But the Prof, as usual, was ahead of me.

As I flustered my way to a chair, he held up a copy of the offending zine. "Gerry" he said wearily, "What would the Skibbereen Eagle make of this?"

That little query has so many concealed weapons that I couldn't begin to explicate them. Suffice to say that the Skibbereen Eagle was a 19th century provincial newspaper, which announced in the 1880s that it was "keeping its eye" on the Tsar of Russia. This line got picked up by other papers and cropped up in a debate in the House of Commons, Westminster.

I'm not sure whether the Eagle's infamous Eye stood for provincial pomposity & chaps getting above their proper station in life, or if it was meant to show how even the remotest fringes of the Empire had the interests of Her Majesty's Dominions at heart. Them's fightin' words, as our colonial cousins in Deseret or Boot Hill would say.

Oh, and my family then lived in the area where the Eagle was published. A fact known to the Prof, natch. A very erudite knife in the ribs, all in all.

The waspy bitchiness of academic life - especially in English Language & Literature Departments - was one reason I subsequently escaped, and ran away to be a film critic.

I just quit half my job, btw. Or, since I don't actually have a 'job', I agreed with a certain paper that I would <cease & desist> from writing a weekly column I've been doing for the last ten years, more or less.

It's a big chunk of my income down the plug-hole, and I've heard there's some kind of depro-recession thing out there and 'work' is hard to come by, but I don't give a family fork.

It had become hell, writing it. I feel incredibly free for the first time in years.

Money? Oh, as you know perfectly well, there are always ways to make money, even with my particular set of useless talents.

Enough of that ... but I'll be back to you on Tamil, Kannada, etc. Am I correct in thinking that Hindi is actually very like Urdu, but kept distinct for obvious political reasons?

I'm interested in cases where languages diverge artificially. There used to be an entity called Serbo-Croatian, but now there are two (or more) languages, Serbian and Croatian, flying apart as fast as their little adverbs can carry them.

Ditto Czech and Slovakian, though they were more distinct pre-split. And all the Scandinavian languages would be regarded as dialects of a single tongue in other parts of the world, such as China. As <Dave B Stardust> almost sang:

"I'm a mess without/
My little Serbo-Croat/
Wake up in the morning and find/
She took the early boat ...."

This is actually happening, for real ... last Saturday at 7.00am I arrived for a 7.30 train and had to join a 'stand-by queue' while those with online bookings boarded ... they let us sweat/swear/weep for a while, told us that the next train was all booked out as well ... then added an extra carriage at 07.28 and let us on ...

So I have this image of a tiny station with just one guy still working there -- like in WS Gilbert's song ...

<His hair was weedy, his beard was long, And weedy and long was he,
And I heard this wight on the shore recite,
In a singular minor key:

"Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig.">

Hmm. Well, we won't go there, for various reasons, including anthropophagy and onomastics...

Back to our railway guy. He cracks under the strain. First he thinks he might be Jesus Christ, but regulations don't allow the hairstyle and you can't check tickets with stigmata. So he does Napoleon for a while, but gives up when some local wag calls him a 'Corsican arse-bandit'. So finally he figures out that he's Hamlet.

He dresses in black, grabs a convenient human skull from the waiting room - it's usually got a few to spare, often still lying beneath their erstwhile owners' bowler hats. And he climbs onto the station roof and starts to orate. "Alas! Poor Yorick! ... The bling and barrows of outrageous fortune ..."

"What's he doing?" asks a commuter who had optimistically arrived to catch a train.

"Him?" says a figure in the waiting room, a pin-striped skeleton with a half-finished copy of a Times crossword puzzle from 1958.

"Him? The chap with the head? I believe he worked here in some supervisory capacity. But even so..."

There is a pause while the pompous bag of bones draws breath in its long-vanished lungs.