On the Superiority of Pandas over all Felines … and um … ninjas of course

Still and quiet feline form,
In the sun, asleep and warm.
His tail is limp his
Whiskers drooped.
Man, what could make
This cat so pooped?

Bill Waterson

Gentle Panda, e’er so great,
Could you please elucidate,
That tiger which now looks all dead,
Why you hit him on the head?

Shanth

La Trama

Thanks to the friendly folks at zbb and google, I recently put together this translation of Borges’s story La Trama.

The original story is available here.

The translation:

The Plot

To his complete horror, Caesar, harassed at the foot of the statue by the daggers of his impatient friends, discovers among the blades and faces, that of Brutus, his protégé, perhaps his son, and no longer defends himself, exclaiming, “You too, my son!” Shakespeare and Quevedo record the pathetic shout.

Destiny is pleased by repetitions, variations, symmetries; nineteen centuries later, in the south of the province of Buenos Aires, a gaucho is attacked by other gauchos; whilst falling, he recognizes a godson of his, and says with vague recollection and mild surprise (these words must be heard, not read): “Pero, che!*” They kill him, and he does not realise that he dies so that a scene may be repeated.

THE END

* ¡Pero, che! -> ‘What the..? Hey!’

Still not sure what to make of it.

puzzled,
Shanth

Creolisation or Code switching?

“Tuné book padichi kar liya?”
X-SAMPA [tu:ne buk p@d`ici: k@r lIja]

A typical sentence, I’d use with my sister or some of my cousins, much to the chagrin of my parents, who had long given up on trying to persuade not to mix languages (basing this on their perhaps, true claim that the usage of such a mixture would render us incapable of mastering any one of them). To us this weird pidgin mixture of Hindi, Tamil & English was the closest, thing we had to a mother tongue, being Tamilians growing up in the Hindi belt. All communication with friends at home and school, was obviously in Hindi, yet somehow we always fell back on this creole for all communication among ourselves.

 

Now, what amazes me is how quickly, unintentionally, this language developed a sort of unwritten grammar of it’s own far more comprehensive than what I had expected. Some examples are:

• Pronouns are almost always from Hindi
• Case markers also from Hindi except for the Dative where we often used the Tamil -əkku
• Verbs almost always from Tamil though often inflected as in Hindi (or Hindi auxiliary verbs used alongwith them)

There are several more interesting features such as the strange usage of the English suffix -ify applied to Tamil verbs which were followed by a Hindi verb as in Tuné tani kudichi-fy kar liya?(tu:ne t@n`:i kud`icif@i: k@r lIja) to mean have you drunk water?

 

I’m not sure whether such a pidgin can be thought to have undergone a certain ammount of creolisation, considering that we started using this language at quite an early age. I think it would be highly unwise to try to linguistically analyse it any further purely from my memory, without hard data. Next time I go home, I’ll try to record some conversational data with my sister, to subject it to further analysis.

Later,
Shanth

On Language, Identity and Linguistic Chauvinism

I got to thinking today about what we mean by a national language? Does such a concept mean anything at all in a multicultural, multilingual nationa like ours? The whole issue started of with someone complaining that the posting of notices in regional languages rather that English is offensive because it excludes all people not knowing that particular language. Now, this again sparked of the age old debate of the Rashtrabhasha, which makes me wonder, what is the significance of Hindi in the National context? Sure, with around 40% of the nation speaking it as their first language and another 10% understanding the language it is by far the most spoken language in the country, and given that these figures are from the ‘91 census, I suppose that Bollywood & Doordarshan may have made Hindi speakers a small but definite majority, but is that reason enough to force the other half to learn the language?

 

Then there is the weirder question of what exactly is the status of English? Spoken by 11% of the nation according to the ‘91 census, definitely a larger figure today, and still growing. Left behind as the unwanted legacy of a foreign oppressor, unwanted and suspect, it has managed to cling on in the nation and now as we slowly realise that with the Internet, that this knowledge of English has turned out to be a boon with a lot of outsourcing and BPO, stuff English is only going to strengthen it’s hold on the nation. I think it is time we realised that English is as much an Indian language as any other and moved on to institutionalise this Indian English.

 

Methinks mine somnulence is making me very very incoherent now,
More on this later.

Shanth

On Random Thoughts in the Morning

The sunshine is gone,
Can Anyone drive away the:
The Cold Shivers of Death?

On the creation of new rarely updated blogs

I realised that the more work I have to do, the more I tend to waste my time. As a corollary of the above statement, the fact that I have to complete a lab Report today means that I up and started a quizzing blog : African or European. Well anyway, check it out if you either have time, or are into quizzing, and let me know.

On webcomics and a weird sense of humour

Reading this post on George’s Blog led me to thinking that it might be a good idea to post the list of webcomics on my own regular list. So here goes:

• PX! or PandaXpress is as the creators themselves put it, “a story about a girl and her Panda”. It’s a hilariously funny webcomic, which begins with a large number of seemingly unrelated story threads which reminds me of snoopy’s It was a dark and stormy night … The artwork is splendid and script funny in a quirky kind of way. It’s at #1 on my webcomic list
• Piled Higher and Deeper is a nice webcomic about PhD grads, that pretty much everyon in college or at least those planning for a PhD have heard of, nice humour and decent artwork. The artist, Jorge Cham also started a strip entitled Jenny Jetpack about the life of a young preteen girl in a Jetsons-like future, but that project seems to have fizzled out after the first few strips.
• One Over Zero any comic which starts with the disclaimer “I fully endorse whatever nonsense happens to come up here” has gotta be interesting. This was one of the first comics to base itself on the central idea of breaking the fourth wall. An interesting comic about philosophy, existence, the nature of knowledge and suchlike stuff, without getting too boring. Truly an internet-age classic.
• Questionable Content as George puts it “follows the life and adventures (?) of Marten Reed, his AnthroPC PintSize (kinda like a robot) and his various friends”. It deal a lot on US pop stereotypes, it’s getting a bit repetitive and predicatble nowadays but still pretty entertaining. Another pretty similar(but older) comic Something Positive was the first webcomic I started following, though It got boring after a year or so.
• Casey and Andy, Another webcomic I recently discovered, which totally rocks. The artwork is pretty bad, but the storyline and the perfect mix of science-relegion-scifi-fantasy more than makes up for that. It’s the tale of the adventures of two mad-scientists/programmers one of whom is dating a female Satan(she has many forms), a police officer, styled after holmes, who knows everything except bovine dentistry, which he’s currently learning, and many other psychotic characters.
• Hell’s Corners, Another truly weird comic about a geeky guy who dies, goes to hell, and find out it’s totally different from what anyone led him to expect. A nice take on Dante’s Inferno. [it's updated pretty irregularly nowadays, but it's worth reading the archives at least]
• Jellaby A really cute story about a young girl and her monster, by the same guys who brought you Salamander Dream.
• Copper A comic worth checking out simply for the stellar artwork. The author Kazu, is the main guy who brought out the Flight anthologies. Made all the more fun by the fact that the content is extremely good as well. It’s basically about the boy Copper, and his dog Fred and somehow reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes, only with the roles reversed.
• With Gusto an interesting site, with funny captions on a lot of 70s/80s style artwork.
• The Dark Him, a nice parody of noir comics/graphic novels. Very witty in a macabre sort of way
• Passages for Lost Clouds is a collection of really weird surreal sketches, which is somehow beautiful in a poetic way
• 55 word stories, an iteresting idea. Write a story in 55 words.

Some more interesting Web Comics that I’m too lazy to write descriptions of, definitely worth checking out though:

• Return to Sender
• Beneath the Leaves: Nice Artwork
• l i t t l e t r e e s
• Alpha-Shade: Superb artwork
• Reman Mythology
• MegaTokyo: Comes highly recomended
• 9thElsewhere.com
• Dinosaur Comics

Some comics/manga related to the game of Go

• Hikaru-No-Go
• Making Life by Justin Carmical
• Almost Sente

That’s all for now folks, visit again for more enlightenment.
Feel free to drop by any other interesting Comics in comments

Thus it Begins

Science (and maybe life) is like a game of Go. Each move is not an isolated local happening but a part of the greater pattern, a pattern which is slowly taking us towards tengen, The Origin of the Heaven.What does that have to do with this blog you ask? Well, nothing much, except that what may seem to you to be a bunch of unrelated nonsensical posts to you, dear reader, are in fact part of an elaborate complex pattern weaving, a rich tapestry which only they who have acheived Satori can perceive.

[Republished from blogspot]