Another Facebook “friend” request from a foaf I’ve never heard of. This one appears to be a scientist, in a field of which I approve, and we have six “friends” in common – or five, not counting one of his peers whom I accepted as a “friend” because of his reputation though we’ve had no direct contact.

Though it’s not obvious what I could possibly lose by it, I’m a bit suspicious of any stranger who’d seek to be linked with a nobody like me.

Friday I happened to pass a bookstore (believe it or not!) and found A Gateway to Sindarin by David Salo. It’s a few years old now; I wonder how I missed it.

After overviews of the history and writing systems, there’s a list of 248 sound-shifts from proto-Elvish to Common Eldarin to Lindarin (Telerin) to Old Sindarin to Middle Sindarin to Classical Sindarin to the Third Age and various dialects. Wow. The accedence paradigms are surprisingly complete, though Salo remarks that no second-person verb endings are attested (he used a reasonable analogy to invent them).

Criticisms: Breaking up the word list into common words and three lists of proper nouns (echoing the index to LotR) is a strange choice. I would like to see some discussion of Salo’s methodology.

— My handle on Wikipedia and a few other places is Tamfang, intended to mean copper beard. The first root is attested only (so far as I know) in an early version of The Chaining of Melko. The canonical words for copper (according to Salo) are urun (metal) and rust (color), but these don’t appeal to me; so I postulate that a form related to tambe survived in some language east of the Misty Mountains.

All of the Cyrillic spam I see has Moscow phone numbers (495). How come no one in the rest of the Slavic Orthodox world is getting in on the game?

Next day: What d’ya know: I got one with (3435), which may be Sverdlovsk.

My hearing is just poor enough that I usually turn the subtitles on when I play a DVD; I could mostly do without the help, but it’s good to have when someone mumbles. It’s often clear that whoever made the subtitles did not have access to the script. A phrase in a foreign language almost always shows up as “[speaking foreign language]” (or, if we’re lucky, “[Speaking Italian]”).

So it’s a pleasant surprise that the subtitles of Schindler’s List are in English, German, Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew — though the Polish diacritics are missing, and the transliterations of Hebrew and Yiddish appear to be nonstandard.

Years ago, in a Usenet thread about Lincoln’s unconstitutional reconquest of the South, someone asked me (I paraphrase): “As a descendant of slaves, why should I prefer to live in that alternate history where the CSA continued to keep slaves after 1865?”

I had no answer then, but one has recently occurred to me:

For several reasons I believe that slavery was more likely to end if secession was successful than if the secession had never happened. If the end of slavery were not tied to a tremendous grudge of blood and devastation, might not social equality come sooner even if formal liberation came later?

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Since Somalia’s state collapsed in 1991, life expectancy has increased by two years, vaccination rates have increased, deaths from measles have dropped by close to a third, telephones and radios have multiplied . . .

I wish I’d said that:

The golden apple in Somalia is the expectation that there will soon be a central government. As long as there is that expectation, the clans must fight over who will control it.

(Wait, I did say something like that, circa twenty years ago, about Lebanon.)

Most of the article (cited by Perry Metzger) is about the traditional system of law.