yet another sandwich-based theory of socioeconomic injustice

( on the dangers of typographical errors. )

Edited to note: this comment thread explains all further feelings I possess on the matter.

I don't really do New Year Gregorian Version, but happy 2012 nonetheless to those of you that do! May it bring happiness, joyful things, other etceteras to you. The good sort of etcetera.

[The obligatory Personal Take: 2011 was, despite some bright spots, actually possibly the worst year I can recall. I am glad to be rid of it. I am giving it the old one-or-two-fingered salute as we speak. The bird flieth. I use lots of profanity. And so on.

Things I would like in 2012, but will probably not get: the chance to live somewhere, put down roots, not have them ripped up again in a second. Have a home. Stay put. Stop using these disgusting sentence fragments. I can probably manage that last. But yes -- as it stands, I fear I'm going to be shiftless and rootless for a while longer. It's not nearly as freeing a feeling as they tell you, hey.]

Thank you all for reading. It's lovely to know and have known you. I hope I will continue to.

This, o Reader, is a second-person adventure. Congratulations! You have woken up this fine fluttering morning and decided that it is a good day to begin self-directed study of Kannada. I applaud you highly. Kannada, as you no doubt know given your worthy intent to study it, is a language spoken by about 50 million people (you make a note of this number, thanks to the prescient supposition -- or clumsy and indolent authorial diktat, more like -- that it will be an interesting one to know later), the vast majority of whom live in India, a country generally agreed to be sizeable and difficult to ignore. It has an extensive history and a substantial, influential literary canon. All this is terribly heartwarming and you consider taking a break to soak in the overwhelming emotion of it all. You do take a break to soak in the overwhelming emotion of it all. The possibility of learning this language is simply that exciting to you, now that you have fought your way through all the amassed ranks of languages you will not study at this time, or would have studied if you could -- but this narrative is about to give itself away.

You stop paying attention to the narrative, which is a conceit that should probably have been given up on several minutes ago. You attempt instead to search for suitable study materials. I give up for the most part on addressing the reader in the second person because this is quite honestly unbearably painful.

Right. So. Presumably, we'd like to obtain ourselves an English-language textbook on this language. I assume at this point that the hypothetical language-learner lives in a country in which one can easily obtain books, and has the financial means to do so. Here are the minimal criteria for 'textbook' that I am applying in this case:

1. Contains information about the language on a level at least slightly more complex than the language's equivalent of cat-bat-rat-hat


2. This information is plausibly accurate (i. e. it genuinely represents the language it claims to)


3. And not more than fifty years out of date


4. And not physically unreadable

If these criteria seem astonishingly lax to you -- well. Let us take a look at the results on Amazon.com, an online book retailer of some plausible standing (note: this is not to condone Amazon's business practices et cetera, but it is a reasonable representation of 'the state of book availability at the moment'):

( availability of materials on Amazon.com )

There are no books on Kannada available on Amazon.com that satisfy the conditions of 'written after 1900' and 'physically legible' simultaneously. (Aside: I don't think there's many that even satisfy one. I did purchase one of the books-written-before-1900, as an object lesson to use on the people who tried to tell me it was simple! to learn a language on one's own. Unlike some of the other books available, it could at least be read with a magnifying glass. Unfortunately, it could not be read without one. Also, I have no desire to speak like my great-grandmother. Or read quite frankly disgusting Orientalism in order to reach the two or three pages of relevant grammar.)

Fine. Fine! Maybe it's just Amazon. Flipkart is an Indian online-shopping service that has served me well in the past for books that cannot be found on Western websites. Perhaps they will do better?

...no, that is exactly the same set of results as Amazon. With if anything fewer warnings as to exactly what you are getting. (The one non-overlap Kannada Kurumba -- looks promising until one realises thanks to Amazon's page for the same book, the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. O-kay then. No.)

Is Kannada just an obscure little language that nobody cares about? Perhaps. But I find that a little difficult to reconcile with the fact that searching Amazon for 'Finnish', a language spoken by about six million people, one does not even need to fiddle around with categories or special searches in order to obtain, on the first page, 'Beginner's Finnish'; 'Say It In Finnish'; 'Finnish: An Essential Grammar'; and 'Teach Yourself Finnish'. (I mean no disrespect to Finnish here, it is a perfectly charming language with significant linguistic interest, and is in fact quite fun to learn. On the other hand, I am a little loath to classify it as more deserving of students than Kannada.) 'Finnish' under 'Education & Reference' gives us 10,906 results. That's an awful lot larger than 160. And most of the first 15 pages of results look relevant.

Swedish is spoken by 9 million people or so. Norwegian, 5. Danish, 6. If I were to say there were no English-language textbooks about any of them, would you even believe me?

Catalan: 11.5 million speakers in 2006, 1477 results under educational texts. Again, the first few pages look relevant, and as though a potential learner would have their pick of textbooks. Which would be readable. And have been written some time in the 20th century. Maybe even the 21st. (Modernity!)

Basque: about 700,000 native speakers in 2006, 728 results, I count at least 7 viable textbooks on the first page of them.

Icelandic. 300,000 native speakers. 1,007 results. Yes, they're real textbooks. Shock. Surprise.

I do not begrudge any of these languages their exposure and documentation. I am glad of it. But I want to know how it is that, for a language with 50 million speakers, a sizeable fraction of whom speak English, there can in 2011 be not a single useable English-language textbook readily available on the Internet. I am almost certain that someone, somewhere, has been turned down and informed that there was no demand for so ridiculous a book. This is painful, and this is absurd. (Kannada is not an Indian language in any significant danger of dying out. What about the languages that are? We can find the time to publish another six hundred monographs on the minutiae of Western-world English dialectal differences, apparently. But we cannot teach a language for which a well-established pedagogy exists.)

Please think about the society that allows this to be possible and does not even notice the vacuum left behind.

So apparently ( moan moan moan moan WHAT IS DO NOW )

YOUTUBE VIDEOS FOREVER THAT IS WHAT:

In the Blazingly Technically Competent Music Video With Angry Martial Arts And I Don't Even Fucking Know What Is Going On But That Doesn't Even Matter Because Seriously Dept., 윤미래 -- Get It In

In the Well This Is All Very Pretty Although Your Interpretation Of Iranian Languages Is Strange To Me But Perhaps That Is Just Me Dept., Zeb and Haniya (with Shantanu Moitra, Swanand Kirkire) -- Kya Khayal Hai

In the You Can Never Go Wrong With Interpretative Dance Dept., Daniel Cloud Campos - The Music Box

In the Cutest Little Catalonian Children Ever To Be Endearing Dept., L'Equip Petit, the best documentary about soccer FOOTBALL you will ever encounter;

In the Itzhak Perlman Plays Klezmer Dept., er, um, that would be Itzhak Perlman playing klezmer then wouldn't it oh bless

In the This Isn't Actually A Video But Whoa It Sounds Like Greece And Russia Got Confused Together, Possibly In A Bar Dept., Stani Mome Da Zaigras (artist unspecified woe and despair)


Internet! Kindly provide exciting music videos. Or cat pictures. SAVE ME FROM MYSEEEEEELF---