It was nice to wake up to sunshine again this morning. It’s hardly brilliantly warm sunny weather but at least the rain wasn’t lashing down on the window and I was able to go for a run along the sea front. There is still a lot of water around and more stormy showers are forecast.
Yesterday afternoon I braved the wind and took a walk along the beach to look at the waves.
There were some very determined fisherman out on the breakwater leading to the lighthouse.
Here’s a cartoon comment on modern childhood by the French cartoonist Sempé. People used to worry about television dominating children’s lives but maybe the cartoon needs adjusting now to reflect a generation brought up by mobile phone.
Jean-Jacques Sempé (17 August 1932 – 11 August 2022), among other things, created a series of children’s books, ‘Le Petit Nicolas’, with René Goscinny.
It seems he was always drawing, quite obsessively, as artists do. I read that he falsified his age to join the French army in 1950, since it was "the only place that would give me a job and a bed". There he would occasionally get into trouble for drawing while he was supposed to be keeping watch during guard duty. Upon being disciplined for one such occurrence, his real age was discovered and he was subsequently discharged. He then moved to Paris and began working with René Goscinny. Sempé spent most of his life in Paris's Saint-Germain-des-Prés district.
There you go. Illustration before AI.
Here’s a link to an article about Icelandic, a language spoken by only 350,000 people and apparently in danger of extinction in its own country as so many people read more in English than in their language. Extinction by AI it seems.
The former prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, fears that the Icelandic language could be wiped out in as little as a generation due to the sweeping rise of AI and encroaching English language dominance.
Compare the numbers with, for example, Galician. 2.4 million people apparently have some level of competence in Gallego. (That includes me but at a low level of competence. I understand it more than I speak it.). Even Basque, spoken in the Basque Country, which straddles the western most Pyrenees in adjacent parts of southwestern France and northern Spain, has more speakers than Icelandic, with 806,000 speakers, according to Wikipedia.
As with the Welsh language in Wales, there has been a longstanding campaign to keep Spain’s regional languages alive and kicking, sometimes a little too determinedly so perhaps. So surely it should be possible to save Icelandic.
Now I find myself wondering about regional languages in Italy. It took them a long time to stabilise what we now know as Italian all over the country. Do they also have schools that insist on some lessons being taught in Sicilian or Neapolitan dialect, for example. Am I even permitted to call them dialects? The Gallegos certainly don’t regard their language as a mere dialect! I must consult my Italian friends.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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