Web explorations

There are a number of innovative websites I would like to explore (more).

Freebase, they extract information from Wikipedia
Remember the Milk, it uses Google Gears for online and offline task management
Multiply, this might be a good place to start a group language blog

Endangered status of Irish, immersion schools

I am reading Andrew Carnie's rather pessimistic analysis of the continuing language shift away from Irish, despite it's high political and educational status and the enormous resources available. He says "We as linguists know, but the revivalists in Ireland did not, that language is acquired, rather than learned." If language is a habit more than a body of knowledge, it needs to be acquired through interactive experience in the language, not by suffering through being taught at by some less-than-competent teacher.

In the language situation in the Philippines, we need to look at English language acquisition as a family effort, achieved with the support environment of an immersion program. I would design a program for a typical large elementary school with 1800 students (300 a grade level, or 6-7 sections in first grade). There will be only one immersion class in the first grade, and for the parents to get their kids in, they have to volunteer one adult family member for a certain number of hours per month, let us say ten. Some will be trained as teachers aides during the summer, and the best will help the assigned teacher to handle subsections of 8-15 children, so the (two teacher aides at a time) so that the teacher can focus on giving quality time to a group of 20-30 students. The section must have access to 10 computers. They three subsections will undertake English language use activities 2-3 hours every day. Once a school can demonstrate a successful outcome with a Immersion English section, they will be allowed to expand to additional sections as resources allow. They can also introduce Filipino immersion sections, perhaps starting grades 3 or 4 for children whose English skills are already satisfactory.

Returning to Irish, it is possible that things have gotten better since 1996. I don't know if it is enough to reverse the language shift, but the prospects are arguably better than Hawaiian if not as good as Welsh.

Carnie mentions the suggestions from Hindley's also pessimistic study that there is a need to revive monolingual Irish communities. I have a counter suggestion, that some of the Gaeltacht areas become no-English areas by encouraging another European community language (French, German and Spanish are good candidates). These areas are all tourist areas, so they are equipping locals to provide services to European tourists (and retirees) who can be encouraged to visit. This means the popular mass media will shift to the target European language, and that education will stop teaching English or using English reference books. The target European language is available as a good substitute anyway. English can be taught as a foreign language starting in high school, young people will pick it up naturally if they live outside the Gaeltacht. In fact, they will be encouraged to get foreign travel experience in countries using their target language, through Erasmus or other EU programs.

A policy of no-English areas could focus on those intermediate Gaeltacht communities where Irish is no longer a majority language, but the shift to English is not yet complete. The neighboring English-shifted Gaeltacht communities would be encouraged to adopt the target language, without completely banning English (perhaps their continuing Gaeltacht status would depend on success in the target language). The rationale is so that the language-shifted communities would have less of an attractor effect of the neighboring under-pressure communities, where interaction could in principle happen in the target European language instead of in English.

relating lists of Chinese radicals

I am interested in combining four lists:

1. The 214 Kangxi radicals
2. The 170 bushous in Ann's 5-volume Cracking Chinese Puzzles
3. The 188 radicals in the Oxford Chinese-English dictionary
4. The unified radical chart used in recent mainland China dictionaries, with 201 radicals and 59 subsidiary radicals; I have a copy from Daniel Kane's The Chinese Language: Its History and Current Usage
5. The 226 radicals in Chinese Character Fast Finder by Laurence Matthews (I have the Simplified Character edition), which is taken from the Hanying Cidian ('A Chinese-English Dictionary'), Commercial Press, Beijing 1978.
   

A logical place to start would be the chart Unicode codepoints for the the Kangxi radicals on Wikipedia.

I would like to compile a list of regular phonetic families. These are clusters of characters containing identical phonetic components where the pronunciation is identical down to tone (nuclear family) of up to initial-and-rime (extended family).