The Spire that Jude saw – no more obscure now

Long walks took me to the field below the green of which may only come after some six or seven centuries of watering.

The green you get may be after centuries of regular watering

Walking in the park in the afternoon  was a delight in itself. It was more like being in a resort.

I was nearing an Oak and at that moment, the following thought struck me – in a flash and not in a verbal way but the same way Sherlock Holmes shook hands with Watson for the first time and asked – ‘Coming from Afghanistan ?’ – later he explained to the awe-struck Doctor that t is making him think more as how did he deduce that rather than actually deducing it because it happened so fast.

” My dear reader, an University is nothing but a heritage resort with lots of interesting people having more or less a nice time. The living there is more or less living in the womb – you suddenly find yourself there, then you find yourself bound and things start to change. Then as you think things are fine and you have settled yourself, graduation-event comes and either naturally or forcibly you come out and face the world whose real light makes your eye red and you start crying for the lost world.

Wordsmith Unversity  - an online platform, some heritage resort, bring in the best of the dead and living, put some regulars and some porters ( web masters etc) and you get an University…

Too nostalgic about walking in green fields like above ?

Wait for the next bubble  - the student loan bubble to burst and these may be public domain material which can be rented…..

He made me aware of the point made by the geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza that the genetic tree and the linguistic tree have many impressive similarities, and would goad me into thinking more about these putative similarities.

True, DNA is the seed on which the genetic tree has grown, flourished and diversified. Likewise, word is the seed on which languages form, flourish and multiply. Just as genes are sequences of DNA and the collection of genes (the genome) identifies an organism, words, phrases, sentences, and grammar define language.

Just as organisms have evolved from an ancestor, languages too have evolved from an ancestral or “proto” language. Where and how did the ancestor of all Indo-European languages, or the proto-Indo-European, originate and diversify into German, Italian, Russian, Persian and Hindi, is a question on which there has been a controversy or war of words.

In this connection, Professor Krishnamurti would have been interested in a recent paper in the August 24, 2012 issue of Science by Dr. Quentin Atkinson and colleagues of the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Atkinson took the Cavalli-Sforza idea further and used the same statistical methods used in evolutionary biology to the study of the origin of Indo-European languages. In evolutionary biology, we start with sequences of the DNA molecule and analyse how they have changed and diversified to produce newer and individual species in time.

Alternately, and equally effectively, we can start with the DNA contents — the genomes — of a group of, say, mammals, and work back in evolutionary time and see at what point, or origin, they started diverging to produce, say dogs, cattle, apes and humans.

In linguistics we start with root words — actually ‘proto-words’, or cognates. These are the original words from which variations arise. For example the proto-Indo European word ‘mehter’ metamorphosed into ‘maa’ or ‘maata’ in Hindi, ‘ mutter’ in German, ‘mater’ in Latin, ‘mat’ in Russian or ‘mader’ in Persian.

Atkinson started with such cognate words and gave each of them the value of one. When the cognate is replaced by some other word, it got a value of zero. Using such a binary score, he used the same statistical method (called Bayesian phylogeographic approach) that was used earlier to investigate the origin of virus outbreaks from DNA sequence data.

Basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages were used to trace their origin or the root from where they diversified. His result: the proto-Indo-European language started in Anatolia, or ‘Asia Minor’, comprising much of Turkey.

Atkinson’s team writes in their Science paper: “we found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000-9500 years ago.”

Note two words in the above quotation, namely, ‘steppe’ and ‘agricultural’. First the latter; the distinguished British archaeologist Colin Renfrew had suggested already in 1987 that agriculture and language dispersal went together.

As hunter-gatherers settled down to become farming communities, a well-knit society was formed with more intimate interactions within and without. And as such communities moved, or formed in several locales, communications became active, and language started developing.

Other evidence suggests the start of agriculture in the Indo-European region to be Anatolia, and just about 9500-10,000 years ago. And farming is believed to have moved from this region, both westward and eastward. As farming communities formed, linguistic diversity did as well.

Not everyone accepts this interpretation. Within hours of the Atkinson paper appearing online, a war of words started through emails and blogs. The other theory is that proto-Indo-European language originated in the Caspian region of West Asia, also termed the “steppe”. This is the treeless, grass-covered regions in South Eastern Europe and Asia.

It covers a vast area of cold central Asia on one hand — Ukraine, Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan (the Silk Route) and the tropical Indian and West Asian region on the other. Current theory about the origin of Indo-European languages is that the ‘proto’ or origin is off the Caspian Sea area. Here too, linguistic analysis is based on cognate words such as the sky god “dyeus” (“deva” here?), horse “ekwos” (“aswa”?), the cow “gwous” (gau?), and the date suggested is more like 6000 years ago. The belief here is that language spread not through farming or agriculture but through conquest — not by seed but by sword, and not by the hoe but by horsemen.

Telugu, spoken widely in Andhra Pradesh, on which the late Prof. B Krishnamurti researched in detail, is part of the Indo-European family. But the origin of Tamil, the language spoken by the southern neighbours, is still unclear.

It seems to have some relationship with, of all languages, Finnish, Hungarian and Basque. And Malayalam, which has commonality with Tamil, has several words common with Finnish; for example the words for basket (vatti in Malayalam, vatin in Finnish), flower (puu, puu), house (kudi, koti). Here then is a puzzle waiting to be resolved by the next generation Krishnamurti on the proto-Tamil/Malayalam language. That would be a fitting tribute to this outstanding scholar.

D. BALASUBRAMANIAN  - THE HINDU as reproduced by Dr. Matteo in his blog http://teachersandtranslators.wordpress.com/.

Dr. Matteo is a teacher in Wordsmith Unversity and takes courses on Online Teaching, Technology, Learning and Languages. He is a polymath, polyglot and having a great ability to teach.

Thoughts triggered by the post 

Let us imagine a box which has two input points – one takes sample of speech and another takes a small blood sample. You wait for 15-20 mts and a report gets generated which reads something like this (poetic license presumed)

 হেথায় আর্য়, হেখা অনার্য়, হেথায় দ্রাবিড় চীন                      (Come Aryans and so non-Aryans and Dravid and Chinese

শক-হূণ-দল-পাঠান মোগল এক দেহে হলো লীন                  Sakas, Huns, Pathan and Mogul – all merged into a single body sublime)

—————————————————–

আমার শোণিতে রয়েছে ধ্বনিতে তার বিচিত্র সুর                 And their strange music throbs in my blood and in my sound

The above is from Rabindranath Tagore’s – Bengal’s greatest poet and wordsmith’s poem ভারততীর্থ – The Indian Pilgrimage 

The imagined report cannot be written in a soul-satisfying and elevating form of truth but truth nevertheless  by any technology or machine or even by a normal mortal being.  A true poet and true lover of words is given that rarest but fragile gift – ‘Truth is Beauty/Beauty Truth’

For the rest, while confronted by such questions – origin of words and maker of words or users of words, – the speaker may be beautiful or even speaking beautifully and very intelligently but it is not the truth

Thank You Dr. Matteo and Mr. Balasubramaian

1. If your clients seem to be hell-bent upon certain technology and will turn away from you and the client in question is a core client, follow the beg, borrow, steal route to use that technology. If you find the technology obnoxious, make you technically a hate-crime offender and your tongue becomes like a sailor or you suffer from acid reflux at the mention of the ‘technology’, earn a profit margin of 0.001% and outsource to someone who enjoys working with this.

2. The Bank Loan Paradox : I shall assign the $ 500 project only if you can demonstrate you have $ 1000 worth software /technology.  Translation : This TRADOS project is best-fit for you except you have the software with you.  So what next ? The only subject that can help you is astrology. Yes – you have to predict now with so much factors and so many interwoven probabilities.  If you find that there is some astrological chance, buy the package. If no money or no training, see rule 1 above. Make profit margin the size of the radius of an electron.

3. I have observed, working  as an employee in some of the very vaunted hi-tech organizations a bunch of loose facts and yes, they are loose . Let us call, with your permission  this as Worsmith’s Taxonomy on Technology 

a. Some people like the haunting options, pop-up box, coloured panes, nested stuff, 21 save options, side, front, back windows / dancing figures and they quickly find the essentials from the frill.

b. Some people find the same people as some kind of demi-god and the respect is so much that they pay huge money to these people.

c. Some evade

d. Some are defiant and fight a losing battle as the people in (a) and (b) now go to a nice working relationship and constitute 70% of the space and are not interested for the status-quo to be broken or even disturbed.

So these four kind of creatures survive in the eco-system though occasional mutations do occur.

4. Technology quite often destroys common sense : Let us take the example of a very well used technology/software/ platform called TRADOS. Why was TRADOS discovered ? To tell that it is useful, invention, development etc. is  as same as saying that Newton discovered the law of gravitation by looking at an apple’s fall because he found out that discovering this law will be a great benefit to science. All these software, technology and platform came because of 2 fundamental reasons – a. standardization and b. cost optimization. Who in the world need and value these things ? Large Companies.  These simple, very legal, honest interests later on were confused into technological development, innovation etc. Words unless handled by a translator does not cost money, you see and no dictionary has ever asked for a fee !

5. Now, just to show-off that I am a bona-fide MBA, I shall do some MBA-speak.  There are three kinds of users of any new technology (whatever interest might have spawned them) – 1. Early Adopters 2. Cautious 3. Followers and 4. Laggards. The first group are those people who are just amazing for those who are 2-3 steps removed in the chain. Cautious people are very un-reliable and may move sideways. Followers are very stable and since we started hunting outside our caves in Hominid Innovation Centre in Neantherdal Central Business District  with stones and javelin to the recent Facebook followers, things are same. Laggards are very strange and they quite often seem to be the most-intelligent one – take some 2 decades more or less. In 1998, I brought 1 kg gold while early adopters brought stocks in Silicon Valley companies. I was a certified, bona-fide and real laggard. Two decades later and may be another decade later, 1 kg gold might need a truckload of banknotes (any bank) as exchange fee.

6. One of the interesting ‘missing links’ is almost complete absence of any ‘theory of technology’. We have theories of almost everything but while I graduated as a telecom engineer in 1996, there was no such topic taught and I checked and found that there is still none. Remarkable ? Isn’t it ?

7. Since there is none, anyone can propose one and so shall I – in a sketchy manner but very general. Technology means ‘way of doing things.’ This way is not necessarily improved or advanced. It is also an intractable problem to tell whether its advanced or not-advanced if we take into account ‘all factors’ and make time sufficiently large. For example – internal combustion engine. Now to run this technology, there is a global military and economic crisis. Internet – easy to work but information anxiety is causing stress and health hazard.

Conclusion 

1. If you are technologically challenged, please try to understand this asap and tie-up with one who does.

2. It is a common knowledge that if a person has one of the sense organs limitation, some others or more become extra-normal. Blind people develop hyper level of sense of  touch or sound. Try to find out which sense of yours has hyper-ed

3. If this is business development and marketing, communication and de-stressing qualities, recline in a chair and find the best technology manipulators. You will need them and will be able to afford them.

4. Technology manipulators are highly almost morbidly prone to flattery and submission. Never cross-examine them when what they say don’t make sense. Always tell them how unfair the world is in under-recognizing them. Never ask why things behave stupidly.  Never ask why there are simpler methods to do something. Only say, at opportune moments and subtly – You are great !

Foreign brings exotic and no one wants to make an exotic thing a routine or daily affair.

But learning a foreign language is exactly like this : to make a foreign thing highly  intimate.

I have taught Sylheti once – to a New Yorker who was going to marry a Sylheti speaking bride in London quite informally and from that teaching, I learnt more than the student perhaps :

1. Crush and demolish the ‘foreign’, ‘exotic’ aspect completely. 

2. As soon as your student has learnt to identify the symbols / sounds of the language, introduce samples of the poetry and highest level of prose in that language. No one but a true poet has tamed a language better. Learn from the master. A true poet of any language, of any historical period will always touch the very organ of language inside us – the sixth sense.  An example

Per me si va na La Citta dolente 

Lasciate Ogni Speranza voi ch’entrate

The above is in Italian and from her greatest wordsmith. I read this when I was eight years old and did not understand anything. I don’t understand anything now as an Italian native speaker does. But I still remember the sway of the tongue and something inside me thirty years back as it does today. I ‘knew’ what these 2 lines mean by now but the experience of the first ‘sway’ still remains fresh.

Poetry appeals to us in a process which intelligence can never comprehend.

3. Drop the step-wise approach which is superfluous for the truly interested and a refuge for not so truly interested.

4. Be conservative with dictionary consulting – Massive amount of patient reading will imprint the meaning of word with context and without context. Once that level is reached, mastery is within reach – what to speak of fluency

5. Mediate on that language, culture – watch lips movement of people.

6. Consider yourself an espionage agent and any error will be punishable by death

7. If you have skipped grammar of your native language in school, work on your grammar. Grammar is the nuts and bolts of any language and they are needed for all languages. Grammar means rules of the game and if you ignore rules, how will you excel in the game ?

8. Passion is infectious – find a passionate teacher.  A very passionate teacher will make your heart pierced and the language will be grafted there. It will beat with your heart.

9. Remember – what is the time to learn a native language ? One year after birth.

10. When you find yourself in a maze or in a blind alley, remember : all learning is painful. There is no royal road for language just there was none for Plato’s academy 20 centuries back.  Our birth is so painful and we ignore it because we don’t remember.

Learning a new language is giving your mind another birth. Birth pangs are painful. Bear it.

As I write this, I sit in my parlour-cum-study-cum-office-cum-napcorner-library and sleeping place and watch west overlooking a huge body of water shaded by tropical trees. It has rained heavily today morning and the sun is demure and little bashful. A very delicate shade is darkening over the green and I see birds returning north after a days work or no-work.

Since I live below my means and live in an area within the no mean  city of Calcutta where the adjective ‘posh’, ‘affluent’, ‘swank’, ‘sprawling’ do not apply and so I live without any debt to service – either for the living place or for my ego for for the satisfaction of illusory people.

I sat with a vacant mind overlooking the scene in mood Englishmen call pensive and Bengali gentlemen call উদাসী – I was thinking of many such evenings of my youth’s summer spent inside hermetically sealed and  fluorescent etherized control rooms, cubicles and conference chambers. I had been forced to put my mind into issues and problems having little personal interest to me except some vague connection with my monthly ATM top-up.

A Bengali poet Buddhadeb Basu once captured this lack of interest in a nice epigram : Suppose someone says that let us build a ship and that ship will carry you across seven seas – from the port of Cambay to the Red Sea and the still north west to the pillars or Heracles and then we might take the same route which Ulysses took and we might even hear the Calypso singing in the sunless cavern in some moonlight night. Instead, we are told : build the ship and you will be given meat, potatoes, drink and a place to rest.

The Bengal sun was dropping now, to be rising somewhere else and a soft darkness was making the yellow of the leaves sharper, a bird was calling her mate from a tree, from distant comes kids playing football and the thud and still far away an aircraft moving West for other shores.

I sit and watch the scene and its dark now and lights are visible far away. There are sounds of conch-shells that announce the on-set of sandhya or juncture of the day and night and some housewife greets her and the conch-shell sound signifies auspiciousness.

In my whole life as an employee, I never knew this existed

This is my perk as a freelancer. In spite of many sadness and lack that this choice of life carries, this perk is invaluable.

I realize this only now – having paid a great price – whole of my youth’s summer to realize it.

But – No regrets !

I shall like to observe certain aspects of this ‘cycle’ from a distance.

Our electrical A.C power comes in the form of cycles – one cycle in 1/50th or 1/60th second. Due to the cycle runs very fast and we have limitation in detecting change beyond a certain level (1/10th to be exact) , we don’t detect our bulbs blinking or our TV screens becoming on and off.

So a cycle’s  effect  depends on the frequency of the cycle with respect to our perception to register change.

Let us consider a freelancer having a kind of a feast or famine cycle and peak income is X-peak. Let us also consider that the cycle is stable and in a year, let us see what is the effective income. The effective income is  1.41 * X-peak

We can draw some conclusions from this analysis :

a. You feast cycle’s peak is critical. The higher these peaks are, effective income is higher

b. While you have a peak, save so that these savings once spread in the famine cycle will still have the peak higher even though famine cycle will pull the average downward

c. Live below your means.

The last lesson does not need any mathematics to understand.

The last lesson, if you can internalize and practice with discipline will make you a giant among commoners.

I am not a specialist translator. I am speaking for myself only now – I think a specialist translator is a boring line of work. It is as if a freelance translator has a single client and single subject and then I conclude that this is more of an employee role rather than a freelancer.

Again, as per me, you can be a specialist translator of any (which also means all fields) field if you can have the following traits, attributes and practices

Poetic Attitude: The sound of a typewriter or that of a keyboard does not excite anything to a common man but for a poet, they are always creating complete wholes. So goes T.S Eliot – paraphrased. The poetic mind not only touches different things but make everything it touches something like itself. Hence a poetic mind is never a stranger for any discipline. Poetry is that which illuminates the countenance of all true sciences – the defense of poetry by one of her most imperious lovers – PB Shelley has spoken truth here, beautifully.

Curiosity without agenda: The reward of curiosity is curiosity itself. So is love in the purest sense. London’s greatest freelancer – Sherlock Holmes went on record telling that his case was his reward. Rest, including visits from Premier, some ring or thousand pounds as expense and a personal payment from a Bank Director – all are side-effects.

Dis-interested Reading: One of the vices of our age on the steroid of optimization and focused specialism does not produce and nor respects a Mycroft Holmes who was more or less a specialist with the specialism as omniscience. The whole European Renaissance has a fascinating collage of specialists with widest area of dis-interested students. Think of Leonardo. Dis-interested reading alone can blur the line between common and special for you. Everything ends in a Book. Or a kindle if you please.

Wasted Time: Wasted time is not waste of time – so goes Bertrand Russell and this is very important for a translator. A translator is a writer although many don’t understand it or don’t even own it. Writing in any language wastes time. How? Language is the grossest interface of mind and music being the subtlest and poetry somewhere in between and prose always in transit between the coarsest (politician’s and celebrity talk) and subtlest (greatest novels – It was the best of times / It was the worst of times…) Mind is non-localized unlike body and to grip and command mind wastes energy and time. This honourable rather than the barbarians preaching us to look at life like an elance cracker !

Nothing new under the sun and the wheel is turning To a sufficiently tutored and disciplined mind; there is nothing new – really. So nothing special. A shallow mind is first deceived, then controlled and finally abused by any novelty or newness just like a small fish makes a tea cup tremble. A deep mind on the other hand always chants neti, neti (Not this, Not this) as Vedanta teaches us. It amuses itself by any novelty but is not controlled by it. A deep mind uses method of first principles and reduces all novelty into those basic principles. With curiosity, dis-interested reading and poetic mind working in tandem make everything clear, vaguely imprint of something known and then intimate.

Don’t try to be a specialist. Make omniscience as your specialism

This task is mostly intuitive as I learnt but there are some objective indicators as well. I am only noting the directly and immediately verifiable credentials:

Membership: A serious professional who earns his bread and butter will sleep the crowd where the clients are. This is one of the first signs. Paid memberships tell investment on the part of the freelancer.

No of Years: If you find someone 5 years as a paid member, it tells clearly that the freelancer is having work and has also continued to invest. He /she is looking for projects and engagement and is not finding when the job and holiday will match. You are dealing with a full timer.

Feedback: This confirms without any doubt now that the freelancer has work and some sample sources and what they say. People with name and contact have trusted this person and so can we.

Reply Interval: Depending on the time-zone, if you don’t receive any reply of your query for a project in 2-3 hours, there are concerns that the freelancer may not be full-time freelancers or he checks his emails too infrequently, his connectivity is poor. Note carefully what he/she writes in the mail if reply comes after 2-3 hours. If this is the norm for a person to reply an email, consider what will happen when  you will ask when the project will be delivered – an hour before deadline

Rate: There is no law on rate but empirical knowledge helps. If the rate is too low, chances are high that the freelancer has less information (assuming a quality one) about market, poor quality, part-timer and doing for some extra-cash or extra-ambition, front for some other group or anything else. If the rate is too high, the freelancer may be specialized, may be using rate as a deterrent or repellent (many linguists do this when the client is new or has nothing to generate confidence – a risky one) or the freelancer might be a part-timer and the earning does not really matter.

Very low rate is risky because the freelancer does not have much to gain if the relationship/engagement does not grow in future.

 Very low rate is risky because the freelancer does not have much to lose if the relationship/engagement does not grow in future.

 Finally, a freelancer’s reply/first communication itself will tell many things which you can only learn from experience.

A professional freelancer will most likely provide you answers of these ‘challenges’ and you will have a feeling that you are in safe-hands.

That feeling is completely subjective – in the heart, although your head has processed the above steps and many others previously.

As for myself, I consider my first client – a medium sized agency the most valuable friend and venture investor I shall ever come across.

I shall try to examine how does your ‘first client’ lock can happen, following tips as how to make that probability tending to à 1, from something closer to à zero

1. Unless you are offering a cure for cancer or how to transmute copper utensils into gold by a magic potion or something of this category, your type of offer has been offered n number of times to the client and she/he has an informed expectation boundary.

There should be something – some component that should have something that will demand your client’s attention. This may be anything – the message, the medium, the price, the claim, the exoticness, the personalization, the envelope with post mark, the paper, your signature, the roundness of your seal, the image of your signature, the way you have typeset, the time you have sent and in effect – anything. Be different but not so different to be shocking.

 b.     Proof of concept and hopeful expectation. You should be clear in no uncertain terms that you are a fresh talent, new and nothing to have as a solid professional experience. But you have done some work – pro bono, charity, your own fancy anything. Showcase. Then ask for testing you and write with humility but not in weakness. Every business, without exception has a first client event. You are not alone

Be truthful and brutally honest. Don’t try to show some work which smells as if cooked-up. Ask for a dummy project. Show your willingness to prove yourself. And if you find opportunity in your conversation, tell that they are going to have a transformative role in your life – professional and personal. Everyone likes to be a hero of any drama. The drama of Life included.

 c.      Don’t throw your pearls before the swine – so taught Lord Jesus and the precept is valid always. This precept is the foundation of the concept of segment which controls everything in marketing. Do research on your prospects. Dig deep and deeper to find out as much as you can find out about your prospect. This will ensure that you knock the right door and also that your knuckles don’t get frustrated.

Law of Segment is merciless and is sub-rational. If you are offering a diamond worth millions to a one year old child and a red toy worth $ 10, the chances are high that the child will pick the toy. He is unaware that 1, 00,000 toys are packed inside the diamond.  Similarly, if you are offering gold to blacksmith for selling his clients, your gold will not be sold as it should be. The problem is neither with you, nor the gold, nor the ‘client’ but not obeying the law of segment. A prediction 

•  If your first client has a high sanction of the Law of segment, you shall have the client for a very very long time.
• If your first client has a low sanction of the Law of segment, you shall not be able to have this client in your portfolio for a long time.

 Finally, if you are interested to be in a position to command, first learn how to obey. If you are really passionate to make it great for you in freelancer space, be humble and ready to be taught. Please note that your prospects are teaching you – their refusal, their comments, their words of acknowledgement and even by their silence.

I had written a book – From Wage Earner to Life-Designer in a story form but essentially describing the same theme. If you are an aspirant freelancer and need some experiential guide-map, please let me know and I shall send the e-book to you.