One of the ways I believe our quality of life has improved since the onset of the internet age is that we now have easy access to all sorts of bloggers and vloggers now sharing their views on what matters to them. Like with fire, or any other powerful entity, how you spend your time in front of a computer screen has to be properly managed. Fire can burn you; it can also heat your soup. Dumb blogs can bore the bejeezuz out of you or lull you into closing down your brain; good ones can further your lifelong quest for new information and greater understanding. And you don't need to go to a library, a lecture hall, or a public debate to take these new things in. All you need is an internet connection and a monitor to watch things on.
Covid has been a perfect nightmare for a lot of active people, but for me it was a turning point. I realized immediately, now that Netflix and Amazon Prime can provide you with more movies than you can realistically take in, that I could easily become an even bigger couch potato than I already was. I could also bewail the fact that I (and everybody else) had become housebound. But I could just as easily do something about becoming more selective about what I take in. Faced with the opportunity to select from among an almost infinite amount of new information, I soon found myself shutting down movies I once might have watched to the end, searching for ever more reliable sources of news, and renewing my faith in the human race by watching world-class classical musical performance after another. I could also sit and allow to parade through my living space an astonishing array of young people with magnificent minds and keep myself from falling into despair over America's dumbed down embrace of fascism and the destruction of the planet, and focus regularly on a plethora of pick-me-up bits of evidence that all was not lost, that there are young people out there who might just keep us from going under. I began to take serious note of possibilities I had not seen before. Or seen but not paid much attention to. I don't believe in any gods, but if I did, their name would be YouTube.
Let me mention just two examples of whiz kids who have provided me with endless hours of education and entertainment. There are so many more. And I know my interests are parochial and that what turns me on may not turn you on. But let me show you mine, and invite you to show me yours.
Here's just a few:
1. One is a gay couple in Nova Scotia who have decided they want to live off the grid. They travelled for a time in a camper, but then settled down in the woods north of Halifax and built a geodesic dome to live in, cleared the land, brought in solar panels, built a garden and generally went about making a life for themselves while waiting (two years now) to be able to build a permanent home out of shipping containers. They have a huge following and post a fascinating update on their accomplishments every Sunday. I always look forward to Sunday for two reasons: The Sunday New York Times and Tyler and Todd.
2. Another is a recent Oxford university graduate in philosophy and theology named Alex J. O'Connor. He runs a blog he calls Cosmic Skeptic in which he advocates for a greater understanding of atheism (as opposed to being an evangelist for atheism itself), for animal welfare and for vegetarianism, and is, in my view, a powerful argument for going to university to not merely get a degree in philosophy, but to become a philosopher in practice. His videos have been viewed 50 million times and he has 450,000 subscribers, including yours truly.
Alex has a steel-trap mind and I couldn't do him justice. If you have time and the inclination, you can jump in anywhere and hear what he has to say.
There are so many more, cooking shows, political discussion groups, debating clubs. But I'd like to focus for the rest of this space on one guy in particular. He is perhaps not as impressive in the same way as Alex O'Connor, but he's somebody who nonetheless blew me out of the water as I began to see the extent of things of which he was capable. I'm talking about somebody named Shawn.
Shawn is a mystery. Whether by design or simply because I haven't done all my homework, I can't be sure. I have not been able to find out his full name, nor where he comes from. His blog name reveals the fact that he has a good sense of humor - and I always associate humor with intelligence; call it a prejudice, but I think you have to be smart to be funny. He goes by "imshawngetoffmylawn." The name has nothing to do (that I can see) with what he does. He is just about the most amazing polyglot I've ever come across. And he's so damned young! God knows what he's going to be capable of as the years go by.
I started out with his trashing of the Hebrew alphabet. He tells us he's been speaking the language most of his life, which led me to assume, once I saw his Russian and English were also native, or near-native, that he must be among the many Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel, and then moved on to life in an English-speaking country. He can't write Hebrew, he says, and that would fit with his having left as a child. Click here for a taste of that video (or, of course, the whole thing.)
Shawn has a magnificent obsession. He wants to support the efforts to bring dead languages back to life, as in the case of Cornish, and keep endangered languages from disappearing. The reasoning is the same as the effort to maintain plant and animal species. (I just heard that one in 8 species on earth is at risk of distinction.) The argument runs like this: It's not just human beings that should be treasured but especially the diversity that exists among human beings and all life species as well. We never know, for example, when a plant species goes extinct, whether we've lost a chance to develop a cure for all kinds of diseases by medicines yet to be discovered. And when it comes to human language, anybody familiar with how differently the world is constructed in the mindsets of speakers of diverse languages will understand what a loss of a human language means to the richness of human civilization. And if you're familiar with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis you know the theory that the world you are able to take in is to some degree directly affected by the language you speak, because that language determines what it is
you focus on.
So let's hear it for ranters, I say.
Shawn is a polyglot and he may be a good linguist as well - many polyglots get seriously into linguistics sooner or later. I'm not sure about the extent of his linguistic knowledge. But there's no doubt he's an exceptional whiz kid when it comes to mastering languages. He's got this great thing going with his followers where he gets them to pick a language for him to learn and he then goes at it intensely for a couple weeks and shows off his knowledge and his proficiency. Mind-boggling what he accomplishes this way.
But let me finish my speculation on his mystery identity.
But here's what I've been able to surmise from watching the videos I can find under his name.
I discovered that he speaks near native English, Russian, and Hebrew early on, so my first guess was that he must be a Russian Jew who found his way to Israel and then to North America. I then noted that his Russian, like his English, is near-native, but not-native, and that led me to think he may have been raised in one of the non-Russian countries of the former Soviet Union, maybe the Balkans. I then discovered a vlog he did in Latvian in which he says he grew up there but is not Latvian. He obviously speaks Latvian either natively or near-natively, to add to the pile.
Here is a video of his about the Latgalian language, the language spoken by many in Eastern Latvia, aka Livonia
He's got a great sense of humor, evidenced by his videos where he speaks English, Russian, Hebrew and Latvian in various foreign accents.
Here he is speaking Hebrew, which he claims as one of his native languages.
And here he is speaking Hebrew with various foreign accents. He needs to get together with Trevor Noah.
And here he is showing off his ability to read the UN Declaration of Human Rights preamble in all identifiable Slavic languages: . Not too many people could pull that off.
And here he is showing off his ability in another fashion - counting to 100 with each number in a different language from all previous ones. Here he's just show-boating, but when you got it, flaunt it, I say.
My ears really perked up when I saw him take on a bit of Nova Scotia history, as well, because I have Nova Scotia roots, and am familiar with the Mi'kmaq Indians, the aboriginals of the Maritime Provinces. Mi'kmaq is an Eastern Algonquin language and Shawn talks about the Mi'kmaq interaction with the speakers of Algonquin and the Pidgin language that ensued.
If you want a more thorough linguistic take on that example of languages in contact, as well as a bit of history of the French expulsion from Nova Scotia, check out this blogger, "History with Hilbert"
And if you want to hear the sound of Mi'kmaq, here is a young lady singing the Beatles song, Blackbird, in Mi'kmaq.
And while we're on the topic of Nova Scotia, my memory of the Gaelic-speaking priests from St. Francis Xavier University who came to visit me when I was stranded at the age of 16 in a hospital in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, was jogged. Here Shawn takes up the topic of "Canadian Gaelic," and he is, of course, talking about these wonderful men I knew as a kid:
Here he is discussing the Keres language. A linguistic isolate (like Basque), that is a language with no connection to any other language on the planet.
And Breton.
And Cornish.
I mentioned his sense of humor. Here it is again as he points out, with barely hidden glee, that "I speak English" in Chinook is "Naika wawa Kinchotsh wawa." naika = "I"; wawa = both "speak" and "language"; and Kinchotsh (King George) = English. And - how's this for an ironic tidbit of interest only to advocates of keeping endangered languages alive - the Chinook jargon (it doesn't even have the standing of a language, but is referred to only as a jargon) was once a widely spoken lingua franca in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington and British Columbia), used in trading, in court proceedings and elsewhere, but at its peak, in 1870, according to Shawn, it was spoken by no more than an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 people. And here's Shawn being gleeful again when he points out that there was a textbook published in 2018 for Chinook Jargon, titled La Chinuka Interlingvo Per Esperanto, which, if your Esperanto is up to snuff, is The Chinook Jargon, in Esperanto.
When they took away our language, they took away our ability to think in our own way.
Clare Swan, a Dena'ina elder in 1985 (and I doubt she had any idea who Whorf was.)
Kind of sums it up.
And speaking of polyglots interested in language maintenance, here's an interesting tale about a French guy who decided to make the preservation of Eyak his life's work.
And the Dena'ina language of Alaska. It's worth noting in passing that the Dena'ina language of Alaska has been shown to have a linguistic connection with Navajo and Apache. So there, those of you looking to prove Uncle Henry came over from Russia millions of years ago by walking across the Bering Strait.
Did you know? - bet you didn't, but now you do - that if there is a field of study on the Latgalian (Livonian) language called - wait for it - Latgalistics. And if you decided to pursue it, that would make you a Latgalistician.
Moving on...
Here's his report on Estonian.
I won't go on. There is much more, if languages are your shtick. And if you're tired of this messed-up world and find it encouraging, as I did, to come across young people with the kind of skills we all wish we had, a way of seeing a bit of hope for the future, Shawn-of-unkown-origins will be a treat.
If you ever do discover his roots, do let me know, will you?
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