I’ve had an iPhone for a few months, and while it doesn’t quite do everything that I want — no Flash, no video recording, no laptop tethering, no BlueTooth file transfer — it does do a staggering array of wonderful things that I do like really rather a lot. 

One thing that had been annoying me though is that I couldn’t find how to make it allow me to type in a foreign language without constantly proposing English corrections, e.g. when I type je or ne in French, it always wanted to “correct” them to me. Worse, it then remembered the foreign words, and ceased suggesting corrections that I would have wanted when typing in English.

However, it turns out that if you use a foreign on-screen keyboard (enable one or more of them via Settings –> General –> International –> Keyboards), then the iPhone auto-corrects to the corresponding language. Switching between keyboards is a one-tap operation on the keyboard itself, and the space bar always shows you what the current keyboard is.

That certainly solves the problem if Apple provide a keyboard for your languages of choice, but what if they don’t? I regularly email/Tweet/etc. in Esperanto, which isn’t in Apple’s list. My solution, for now, is to enable a. n. other language — I’ve chosen Czech — and use that keyboard when I’m writing in Esperanto. It’s a bit painful to start with, as it tries to “correct” just about every word, but it quickly learns the most common words and starts making useful suggestions, and it stops my English and French dictionaries getting poluted with irrelevant foreign words.

So there you go. Hope that helps. Feel free to leave better solutions in comments.

The people at Wolfram|Alpha certainly seem to know how to kick up a hype storm, so I mosied over to see what it was all about.

To start with, I had trouble getting any response at all other than Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input, but finally I got somewhere when I entered “Esperanto”.

So, Wolfram|Alpha gives me concrete information rather than just pointers to pages for me to sift through, and it’s beautifully presented too. Trouble is, it’s complete bollocks.

In July, I’ll be attending this year’s World Congress of Esperanto, to which 1700 people have currently signed up. At the last one I attended, in 2005, I was joined by 2300 Esperanto speakers from 62 countries (out of a total of 2000 in the world, don’t forget); this is actually reckoned to be, in round figures, about 1% of the number of fluent speakers. There will be several dozen native speakers there too; I’ll be having a few beers with two of them the week before. And this year, 150 years since the birth of a certain Ludwik Łazarz Zamenhof, the Congress is to be held in Białystok, the hometown of both Dr Zamenhof and the international language that he initiated. Białystok is not in France.

I’m sure there’s some very clever computational wizardry going on at Wolfram|Alpha, but the traditional garbage in, garbage out rule clearly still applies.

A new CD by jazz artists Garry Dial and Terry Roche has just been released, containing jazz interpretations of numerous national anthems.

I mention it in passing because they’ve chosen to include La Espero, the Esperanto anthem. (Can’t call it a national anthem, because obviously the whole point is that it isn’t of any particular nation).

You can listen to clips and buy the album at CDbaby.com.

If you don’t already know it, you can hear a more traditional version of La Espero over at imeem.com.

Ĵus eldoniĝis en Usono KD-o de naciaj himnoj, en nekutima ĵaz-stilo, farita de Garry Dial kaj Terry Roche. Mi notas ĝin ĉi tie ĉar la kolekto inkluzivas La Esperon.

Ĉe CDbaby.com vi povas aŭskulti eltiraĵon de la himnoj kaj aĉeti la albumon.

Pli tradicia versio troviĝas ĉe imeem.com.

Après une pause de deux ans, pendant que j’ai grandi mon entreprise, j’ai continué mon travail avec mySociety, et j’ai eu deux enfants, je me relance dans mon blog. Sonnez les trompettes, tuez le veau gras, etc.

Post paŭzo de du jaroj dum kiam pligrandigis mian firmaon, daŭrigis mian volontulan laboron ĉe mySociety, havis du infanojn, kaj ekinstruis nian lingvon al pli ol 100 infanoj en du bazaj lernejoj, mi nun revikas mian dormantan blogon. Trumpetadu, buĉu la grasigitan bovidon, ktp.

After a pause of  a couple of years while I built up my business, continued my work with mySociety, had a couple of kids and so on, I’m bringing my blog out of its hibernation. Sound the trumpets, slaughter the fatted calf, etc.

Encore une fois, on cite les sondages Eurobaromètre comme “preuve” de la compétence linguistique extraordinaire des citoyens européens, cette fois-ci dans l’article La discordance des langues, par Thomas Ferenczi apparu hier (article © Le Monde).

Notez bien le mot sondage dans la paragraphe ci-dessus — pas étude, ni recherche, mais sondage. En gros, on demande aux gens, “Est-ce que vous parlez anglais ?” et on note le nombre de réponses positives.

Sortez dans la rue en France — pays riche, voisin du Royaume Uni — et lancez une conversation en anglais avec les passants. Est-ce que vous trouvez vraiment que presqu’un sur deux est tout à fait à l’aise à discuter en anglais ? Ce n’est pas mon expérience personnelle.

Contrairement à M. Ferenczi, qui trouve que “Les avantages de cette situation [la dominance de l'anglais comme langue internationale] sont évidents”, le rapport L’enseignement des langues étrangères comme politique publique du Haut Conseil pour l’évaluation de l’éducation y trouve beaucoup de problèmes, aux niveaux finance, égalité, justice, et autres. Et notez bien le mot rapport, établi suite aux recherches détaillés sur les faits tels qu’ils sont, pas un sondage pour trouver l’opinion des gens sur eux-mêmes.

Je viens de lire un très bon article entitré L’Europe a-t-elle besoin d’une langue commune ? L’auteur de l’article a bien recherché sont sujet, et présente de manière très équilibé la langue Espéranto et des arguments pour et contre son utilisation comme solution à cet éventuel besoin.

Rien de plus à dire à ce propos, sauf : prenez le temps de le lire !

http://www.taurillon.org/L-Europe-a-t-elle-besoin-d-une

It was the Global Voices summit in London (Dec. 2005) that inspired me to start blogging. I attended the summit to mention Esperanto to people, as one way to breach the huge language barriers that block the free flow of information between peoples, countries and continents.

As the Esperanto-language blogosphere keeps on growing, it has had a mention or two on Global Voices in the intervening ten months, with the latest (“A trip through Esperanto-land“) appearing today. Hopefully, on Esperanto Day this year (December 15th) a good number of blogs across the world will be posting bilingually about language issues.

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As I said at the summit last year, I believe the use of English as an international language to be ultimately incompatible with the aims of Global Voices. The use of any national language in an international role blesses the native speakers of that language with a large, perpetual, but often overlooked advantage over the other 90-odd percent of the global population — hardly conducive to a free, two-way flow of information between all world citizens, when participation in most countries is restricted to a small, highly educated elite, and even then only as second-class participants behind the native speakers (in terms of power of expression, ease of participation and risk of looking foolish through making mistakes).

The fact that English also happens to be the language of the USA also makes many people uncomfortable. Without getting into a debate about US foreign policy, I don’t think it’s too contentious to say that the US is currently regarded by many across the world as at least in some way threatening — some would go further and say “bullying”, “aggressive”, and worse — and having their language imposed in international relations is, I believe, resented by many.

However, even accepting all of the above, it’s undeniably true that many more people speak at least some English today than any other language, and that situation’s not going to change this month or next. Given that as a starting point, it would be somewhat foolish and counter-productive for any international project to do anything rash like banning its use on purely idealistic grounds. We have to start from somewhere.

Looking to the future though: translation certainly has a valuable place, but it is famously labour-intensive; English as a second language will undoubtedly play a large role for some time to come, possibly being threatened by Spanish and/or Chinese in the not-too-distant future; but Esperanto is also a solution that is currently in use on all continents, has a growing number of speakers and readers, and presents a much more egalitarian, neutral (not to mention significantly easier to master) complement to national languages.