Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues, by Ross Perlin. In general, this is a good book. I really mean that. The languages the author highlights are unique, interesting, and sadly on the way out. Seke, Wakhi, Yiddish, N'ko, Nahuatl, and Lenape. The reader learns about these languages in the chapters in part III. (Part II covers NYC, an also interesting section of the book.)
The author is a co-director at the Endangered Language Alliance. I gave money to them or the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages; I can't remember which. Anyway, they do good work. You can find them on Youtube as well if you want to hear some of these languages spoken.
I read the Kindle version of it and in one instance (Seke, as evidenced by Rasmina), the font for the language didn't show. And one example from N'ko was such a small font I barely saw it. But otherwise the Kindle version was good. I'd buy a hardback copy of this because I love language books but the author is such an outspoken liberal and a dishonest one at that, that I don't want this book in my house.
Yes, eugenics was horrible. But it was not the sphere of only one political party.
Even when “eugenics” was [a] word known in every household it was hardly the property of any political party.1
With little access beyond Google, I was able to find several references in academic journals that discuss both parties' guilt in the U.S. eugenics movement. I'd think a PhD author would be fairer and do his homework.
Same with immigration quotas. Yet the author felt the need to mention a Senator by name (149), because he was a Republican. But when mentioning the "Asiatic barred zone" (149) he forgets to mention that it was passed by a Congress that was majority Democrat in both chambers. Vetoed by a Democrat prez (Wilson) but then both chambers overturned the veto. He mentions the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, which dumped the 1924 Act limiting immigration, but he fails to mention that even in a Democrat-majority House and Senate, not all Democrats agreed; only 74% of Democrats voted for the bill while 85% of Republicans did. But that doesn't fit his agenda.
The author obviously has issues. He must have tried to get data from Facebook and Tencent (whatever that is) related to these obscure languages and been denied:
The billionaire lords of Facebook and Tencent, who could care less, are the only outsiders with fraught potential access to this accidental archive. (194)
He mentions NAFTA affecting the Mexican economy by bringing "the price of corn and other crops crashing down, forcing farmers off their land" (367) but fails to mention that President Clinton signed it into law.
And all his Trump derangement. Multiple mentions, especially in the final part where he is begging the reader for money to support ELA.
Fiercely anti-immigrant politics of a sort not seen in a century drove the rise of Donald Trump... (442)
...the string of emergencies that began with Trump's election is 2016 is far from over... (444)
...owners have become ever more of a political force since the Yemeni bodega strike of 2017, which protested the Muslim travel ban. (451)
Get over yourself. Wanting to protect the sovereignty of your country is not anti-immigrant. And for all that's holy, it wasn't a Muslim travel ban. Executive Order 13769 was a temporary ban on citizens from six nations with known Islamic terrorism ties. That's six countries out of 49 that are majority Muslim. And I think it lasted like two months.
Like in many things (mostly Hollywood, but also in charities), why would you denigrate half your potential audience, or in this case, half your possible charity sources? (And with conservatives giving more to charity than liberals2, maybe know your audience.)
Again, the part of the book where he talked about the language map of NYC and the individuals and their languages (RIP, Karen) were great. Everything else, bleck.
1 Lombardo PA. Republicans, Democrats, & Doctors: The Lawmakers Who Wrote Sterilization Laws. J Law Med Ethics. 2023;51(1):123-130. doi: 10.1017/jme.2023.47. Epub 2023 May 25. PMID: 37226752; PMCID: PMC10209985.
2 Yang Y, Liu P. Are conservatives more charitable than liberals in the U.S.? A meta-analysis of political ideology and charitable giving. Soc Sci Res. 2021 Sep;99:102598. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2021.102598. Epub 2021 Jun 16. PMID: 34429211.
No comments:
Post a Comment