Word: spokenness
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...foresight to include the word “frustration” itself (any student of Russian history knows it is a fairly important word). But I remind myself that Russian isn’t as bad as Mandarin, for example, which has a writing system divorced from its spoken language. That is like having the text of “Fiddler on the Roof” sung to “Cats.” It makes no sense...
...later dismay, as Montgomery Scott, level-headed chief engineer of Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise; in Redmond, Washington. With his exasperated Scottish burr ("We've got nuh powrrr, Cap'n!"), he repeatedly saved the ship from disasters, but the famous line "Beam me up, Scotty" was actually never spoken exactly that way on the original show...
...Sadly, it is not hard to predict the outcome. The tendency to homogeneity is as irresistible as gravity. We see it in the world's languages: from a rough total of 6,000 spoken today, linguists fear half will disappear within the next generation; 90% will be gone by the end of this century. And with each tongue that is silenced, every dance that is forgotten, every song and headdress design that slips from tribal memory, we sense that part of humanity's common heritage is lost...
...later dismay, as Montgomery Scott, level-headed chief engineer of Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise; in Redmond, Wash. With his exasperated Scottish burr ("We've got nuh powrrr, Cap'n!"), he saved the ship from repeated disasters, but the famous line "Beam me up, Scotty" was actually never spoken exactly that way on the original show...
...once given a key to paradise,? says my Iranian guide, Mehrdad, a bearish, soft-spoken man who translates Italian essayists and teaches English in Tehran, ?It was made in China, of plastic. The mullahs told us that the key would open the door to a golden palace with hundreds of rooms and a beautiful virgin in each room. You see, we were facing certain death - the Iraqis had poison gas.? Like hundreds of thousands of young conscripts in the Iran-Iraq war, Mehrdad was destined for a suicidal human-wave charge on the Iraqi lines. He was spared only...