Successive Covid-19 lockdowns in France have given budding writers the time to finally work on that idea for a novel or to polish up an old manuscript languishing in a drawer. As a result, publishers are overwhelmed. Before the pandemic, Gallimard received around 30 manuscripts a day; now they receive around 50. - Yahoo!
New research by a British linguistic anthropologist, Gordon Whittaker, is revealing for the first time that the Aztecs' hieroglyphic writing system was one of the most sophisticated scripts that humanity has ever produced. - The Independent (UK)
There are two fundamental problems with Esperanto as a genuinely global lingua franca. One is that, while it was intended to be have grammar simple and intuitive enough to be mastered quickly, Esperanto is really only intuitive for speakers of European languages; its grammar is alien to native speakers of, for instance, Chinese, Arabic, Yoruba, or Tamil. The other...
Frank Siebert’s writing system was an obstacle for people who were eager to learn the language. “It was a giant pain for everyone,” he said. “Why did this white guy come in and introduce such a nonintuitive alphabet? It was really off-putting. Like, ‘This is the language my grandmother spoke, and now there’s all this technical stuff I have...
To be fair, James Daunt was not at all as self-aggrandizing as that headline suggests when he spoke to the Independent Book Publishers Association last week. But he did say that the long-troubled chain has been hanging on despite the pandemic, and that B&N has used the lull in business to start making in earnest the changes that Daunt...
"For readers still thawing from a year in isolation, two questions in poem are especially prescient: 'How to start again? How to wake up?'" - Los Angeles Times
We're all looking for something - solitude, connection to nature, an escape from our houses and apartments - and so, publishing is providing us with many (many) nature memoirs. But where to start? Check out this heavily annotated list. - LitHub
"I think poetry has a social function but it’s a relatively complicated and subtle one, which is to say, the reason that we have art is, in a sense, to increase human happiness. It does that, essentially, on an individual level. A work of art awakens you. It awakens you to the possibilities of your own potential. It takes...
The natural world has always been a key subject of Japanese verse, and there's even an established body of words — kigo — that categorize various phenomena by season and thereby evoke particular emotions. For instance, referring to a typhoon in a poem is supposed to anchor it in the autumn. But Japan, like many other places, is now...
"Eleven years after publishing its first collection of the finest up-and-coming authors in Spanish, Granta magazine is releasing a second volume that brings together 25 writers aged under 35 and now at work on four continents. The list includes 11 female writers and 14 male writers from Spain, Nicaragua, Cuba, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Equatorial Guinea, Chile, Puerto...
On the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, near Lake Superior in the northwestern corner of the state, is a K-8 school called Waadookodaading ("a place where people help each other"), where Ojibwe children are taught, in their ancestral language, a curriculum that combines federal and state educational requirements with traditional culture. For instance, the kids study biology using fish they've...
My desired output for this language is graphical based. I originally envisioned it as a kind of “Processing for Indigenous Languages”. Where the output is generative and graphic. The generative aspect is crucial in the representation of the Indigenous worldview, because when the program ends whatever display was generated is destroyed (comes to end of life). - Esoteric Codes
So what can Hemingway tell us about what American writers owe to Hemingway? Whatever that debt is, it’s a lot, according to the various writers and literary scholars who appear as talking heads in the documentary, but they (Edna O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Mario Vargas Llosa) are fairly long in the tooth, and few young fiction writers would now claim...
" Hyman's collection now stands at around 150,000 editions of roughly 5,000 titles. They form the bulk of HYMAG, a dedicated magazine library housed in a former factory in Woolwich, south-east London. It's an overwhelming sight. … It is not just the words that are important, Mr. Hyman stresses, but what surrounds them: the advertisements, the page layouts, the...
Today, our world has over 7,000 languages, each with its own words and particular grammar. These languages are so mindbogglingly different that you might think, “anything goes!” But in reality, there are countless possibilities in sound patterns and grammars that never occur. - The Conversation
