Google Celebrates 150th Birthday of Zamenhof

You may notice that today Google has a little Esperanto flag. This is in celebration of the 150th birthday of L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of the language. Esperanto is a fascinating little language, and works as diverse as The Lord of the Rings and The Origin of Species have been translated into it. It was the first foreign language that I managed to get a good reading knowledge of, and still the only one that I can read without a dictionary by my side. Many people give up learning languages because they don't see themselves getting to the stage of doing something interesting, like reading a novel in it. My success in reading Esperanto led me to develop my reading knowledge of French and German and my interest in more obscure languages such as Jersey and Sorbian. Not to mention Volapuk!

Happy Origin Day!

Today, 150 years ago, the first edition of Darwin's Origin of Species was published in London. I actually just learned that today -- while there was a lot of noise about the 200th anniversary of his birth last February, I didn't hear much about this ahead of time, so no, I didn't schedule a party like I did for Darwin's/Lincoln's birthday. Not that this seems to be the most opportune time for a party, given the oddly large number of people who attended the last one who now are otherwise occupied being new parents...

So I guess everyone's responsible for their own entertainment on this one.

But I'll leave you with some interesting links at least.

1. Tired of the Origin's Victorian English? Read in in another language! Esperanto German French Spanish
2. How about the Origin as a graphic novel?
3. "Almost Like a Whale"/"Darwin's Ghost" This book, written by noted science popularizer Steve Jones, is an attempt to follow the structure of Darwin's Origin, but making adjustments to incorporate modern knowledge. While I'm a fan of the history of science and the value of primary sources, I understand that a lot of the difficulty in reading Darwin (besides his verbose Victorianisms) is that biology was a very different field in Darwin's day, both in terminology and outlook. Jones ably deals with this.
   

In the Land of Invented Languages

I promise that I'll return to science blogging soon, but I wanted to write something about a book I've just recently read -- Arika Okrent's "In The Land of Invented Languages". And after all, linguistics is a science, just not the one I generally write about.

Okrent is a trained linguist and it is interesting to see her take on constructed languages, which often get dismissive treatment in popular works on linguistics -- one senses than many linguists actually are proud to be ignorant of the subject, much as literary scholars often are about science fiction.

While Okrent gives an interesting historical overview of the subject, starting with such early works as Hildegard of Bingen's Lingua Ignota, her work really shines when she is describing the handful of modern constructed languages that have established user communities, albeit small ones: Esperanto, Lojban, Blissymbolics, and (yes) Klingon. Okrent not only has read up on these languages, but has learned their basics and attended conferences that these language communities held.

I realise that I'm somewhat of an ideal audience for such a book, as I am a guy who reads novels in Esperanto and who has tried (on and off again) to make headway into Lojban, but I think the book would also be of interest to those who have no contact with constructed languages. Okrent truly humanizes the people she meets -- even the much reviled Klingon speakers (whom, as Okrent notes, are stigmatized even among Trekkies).

Ralph Lewin's algal physiology papers in Esperanto

Ralph Lewin's interests intersect mine in two quite different ways. First of all, Lewin is a renowned marine microbiologist, and most of my current projects are marine as well. But secondly he is well known among fans (of which I am one) of the artificial language Esperanto, even being the co-author of a translation of "Winnie The Pooh" into the language. What I hadn't known until today was that Lewin had combined his interests in two papers from the early sixties: Difektita Aŭtotrofo de Mutaciita Chlamydomonas (Defective Autotrophy of Mutated Chlamydomonas) and La Enpreno de Strontio en Kokolitoforoj (The Takeup of Strontium in Cocolithophores). In both cases Lewin wrote papers which except for an English abstract, were entirely in Esperanto. And while it's true that Esperantists have organizations such as Akademio Internacia de la Sciencoj San-Marino that occasionally publish scientific reports in Esperanto, Lewin's papers were in a mainstream journal -- Plant & Cell Physiology. Makes me wonder what the neesperantistoj thought when they saw the papers...