the inuktitut alphabet

reprinted from omniglot.com, one of my favorite sites

Origin
The Inuktitut syllabary was adapted from the Cree syllabary in the late 19th century by John Horden and E. A. Watkins, missionaries from England. Edmund Peck promoted the use of the syllabary across the Canadian Arctic, and also translated the bible into Inuktitut, and wrote an Eskimo Grammar and an Eskimo-English Dictionary.

In 1976 the Language Commission of the Inuit Cultural Institute approved approved two standardized writing systems for Inuktitut in Canada: one using the syllabary and the other using the Latin alphabet.

Today the Inuktitut syllabary, which is known as titirausiq nutaaq (ᑎᑎᕋᐅᓯᖅ ᓄᑕᐊᖅ) or qaniujaaqpait (ᖃᓂᐅᔮᖅᐸᐃᑦ), is used mainly in Canada, especially in the territory of Nunavut (ᓄᓇᕗᑦ), the population of which is 85% Inuit, and in Nunavik (ᓄᓇᕕᒃ), Quebec. The Latin alphabet, known as qaliujaaqpait is used in other parts of Canada, Alaska and Greenland, while in Siberia the Cyrillic alphabet is used.

Notable features
Type of writing system: syllabary.
Writing direction: left to right in horizontal lines.
The Inuktitut syllabary consists of a small number of basis signs, the vowel sound attached to each one depends on their orientation.
Used to write
Inuktitut, an Eskimo-Aleut language spoken in Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Siberia by about 65,000 people. There is in fact a dialect continumum of Inuktitut dialects across the Arctic with varying degress of mutually intelligibility between them.

The language is used in schools and local government to some extent. It is also used on the radio and TV. In 2007 a new policy was introduced that will require senior government officials to speak Inuktitut by 2008. This requirement will eventually be extended of other officials.

today's toynbee tidbit

"The spirit of nationality is a sour ferment of the new wine of Democracy in the old bottles of tribalism."

holidays in the hermit kingdom

I have known people who have traveled to North Korea (no Americans of course) and for a while I had entertained this tiny country as a fantasy travel destination, it arguably being the most isolated chunk of geography on the Earth. A place where history had not ground to a halt, but where the common narrative thread simply broke off from the rest of the world half a century ago. South Korea was a western style democracy with all the trappings of a manic capitalist nation, good and bad. North Korea was a "hermit kingdom" sealed, militarized, and combining a messiah like worship of the "dear leader" Kim Ill Sung with a Marxist worker state ethic into one of the more peculiar cosmologies in history. Even now little is know about the land above the 49th parallel, although horrific reports of mass starvation and political prisons emerge from time to time, sometimes from the handful of courageous defectors who manage to escape south. Still, in a country with no advertising, no internet access, no cell phones, no media outlets save for the government controlled radio and television, generations of North Koreans are being born with literally no idea of what the outside world is like. It's a terrifying example of just how efficient an authoritarian regime can be when it sets about to completely dominate its populace, psychologically and economically. Hannah Arendt defined the difference between autocracy and totalitarianism as the need for a totalitarian state to control every aspect of its people's lives, culturally and spiritually, while in an autocracy the only divisions that ultimately mattered were class structures. North Korea to me exemplifies this as much as any nation in history alongside Khmer Rouge era Cambodia and Nazi Germany.
The so called "Korean Friendship Association" is a peculiar outfit run by amateur bedroom Stalinist Alejandro Cao de Benos de Les y Perez. Cao de Benos is a Vonnegut worthy character: he is a portly twenty-something IT consultant from Spain who has reinvented himself as a person of importance by serving as North Korea's de facto web master. Not only does he operate the country's "official" web page, he sponsors Pyongyang sanctioned group trips to North Korea through the Friendship Association. (Americans are not allowed of course, with North Korea being perhpas the only nation on Earth where simply holding an American passport is enough to prevent your admission.) Of course, Cao de Benos has been feted by Kim Jong's regime as a valuable asset, and he takes it quite seriously, squeezing into a military outfit, acting the role of celebrity, and frequently being given to histrionics on his message board. One quite amusing thread I stumbled upon a couple of years ago found various newsgroup members debating whether or not the movie "Team America" was blasphemous to the Dear Leader and should be boycotted. One savvy blogger claimed that in fact the movie was much more a satire on "America's imperialist and capitalist ambitions" and therefore kosher viewing.
It would all be quite hilarious were it not for the fact that Kim Jong Il is a psychotic dictator who avidly watches American television shows and imports champagne and thousands of dvds to his palace, while most of his people outside of the capital city starve to death, and where even an off hand joke about his personage or a doubt of his divine appointment as God on Earth is enough to get you carted away to a modern day gulag. Still, if my conscience and wallet could cope, I would be fascinated by a trip to the most remote corner of Earth.

whoops apocalypse

"Protect and Survive" was a series of public service films produced in the 1960s by the British government. The "duck and cover" mentality of the time was that a nuclear war could be won in some context, and thus governments around the world attempted to inform their populations as to methods of surviving such an attack and its aftermath. I'm fascinated by these kinds of instructional propaganda films, and some of the best were edited into the framework of the chilling documentary "Atomic Cafe". There is a Strangelove tone to this rhetoric, the chilling pragmatism of men like Herman Kahn who wrote about a "winnable" nuclear exchange, and this kind of propaganda which tried to prepare people for the unthinkable. It's a long way from Peter Watkin's "War Game" which was banned immediately by the BBC and which attempted to show in a mock documentary style just how grim the aftermath of a nuclear attack on a British town would be.

secret museum of mankind

A classic tome of ethnography, The Secret Museum of Mankind collects hundreds of early twentieth century portraits from all around the world. Head hunters, shepherds, shamans, priests, farmers, bullfighters. From saharan Africa to Basque Spain, it's a mystifying portal into a submerged past. The edition I posses has no copyright information nor does it credit an author. Who were the photographers/writers behind this? Some of you may have heard the magnificent cd series Yazoo put out under this moniker; it's named in honor of the book but it's a fitting audio companion, scratchy seventy eight recordings from the 1920s. If you see a copy of this book, buy it with haste. I know it's been reissued but don't have any information on it.

barbara plays the steel

When I was a kid growing up in Nashville, Barbara Mandrell had a side line business involving a chain of one hour photo development shops. This was before such a concept, the one hour photo, had established itself in the american conscience as a necessary convenience rather than exotic new luxury. But the lady had it all, not just business acumen. She was a country star and had a singing group with her sisters. Never realized just how hot of a steel player she was. Sneaky Pete and Lloyd Green never had the movie star looks anyway. Now I will have to go trawling for footage of Karen Carpenter drum solos (she did edge out Bonham in a "best rock drummer" poll sometime in the mid seventies but it may have been Tiger Beat. Still.....) I miss the Christmas lights at Twitty City, but this is the kind of thing that can make anyone miss what Nashville used to be.

For which we are grateful