Robert Lane Greene

April 15, 2010

A conversation about Barack Obama’s nuclear security summit:

April 13, 2010

Barack Obama brings the world to Washington in an attempt to keep track of loose nuclear material

“Add to this the fact that multilateral arrangements like the American-led Proliferation Security Initiative are often seen by developing and non-aligned countries as tainted by an American-dominated security agenda, and Mr Obama might have just decided to throw up his hands in despair. Instead he has made a start, turning the goodwill generated from agreeing with Russia to reduce America’s stockpile of weapons into something real, thanks to Ukraine’s offer, before the non-proliferation treaty conference next month. Now all that remains is for Mr Obama to persuade nearly 30 other countries with stocks of highly enriched uranium, not to mention his own electorate, to do the same…“

April 9, 2010

Opponents of a bid by Muslim states to “protect religion” claim a small success

“IT DOES not happen often: Christian lobbyists, the sort who favour prayer in American classrooms and crucifixes in Italian ones, lining up on the same side as secularists who battle to curb religion’s role in the public square. But in both those camps there has been some quiet satisfaction after a recent vote at the United Nations. Not over the outcome, but over the slim margin of defeat…”

March 12, 2010

“OVER the weekend, I had a chat with Shirin Ebadi (pictured), Iran’s Nobel-prize-winning campaigner for women’s rights and democracy. I’d met her before, but a few things she said this time round surprised me. Perhaps the most interesting point from the perspective of American policy is that she simply does not think this government can or will negotiate nuclear issues in good faith with America…“

March 11, 2010

Congress reconsiders America’s official position on the Armenian genocide

“TWO questions faced an American congressional panel on Thursday March 5th as it considered the mass killings of Armenians during and after the first world war by forces of the Ottoman Empire. First, was it genocide? The historical debate is as hot, and unsettled, as ever. Armenians continue to insist that it was the first genocide of the twentieth century, while Turks call the killings merely part of the chaos of the break-up of empire.

But the second question on the minds of congressmen in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives was more urgent. What is more important, fidelity to history or concern for the present? …“

February 16, 2010

Barack Obama’s difficulties balancing hard diplomacy and human rights

“Mr Obama’s foreign-policy approach of seeking engagement with opponents such as Iran, in an effort to establish dialogue and more effective diplomatic channels, has made it harder for him to beat the human-rights drum loudly. But by failing to speak up about repression, the American leader risks being perceived as weak. His muted reaction to the rigged presidential elections in Iran and the violent repression that followed (and continues) has seemed deferential…“

January 26, 2010

Bigger languages are also simpler ones

“WHY do some languages drip with verb endings, declensions that show how a noun is used, and other grammatical bits and pieces, while others rely on word order and context? The former category tends to include languages spoken by small groups in isolated settings like the Amazon or New Guinea. The latter include such languages as English and Mandarin.

This fact has made scholars wonder if languages simplify as they spread. Researchers have wondered if second-language learning of such conquering languages as English have led them to shed grammatical baggage…“

December 27, 2009

In search of the world’s hardest language

Perhaps the “hardest” language studied by many Anglophones is Latin. In it, all nouns are marked for case, an ending that tells what function the word has in a sentence (subject, direct object, possessive and so on). There are six cases, and five different patterns for declining verbs into them. This system, and its many exceptions, made for years of classroom torture for many children. But it also gives Latin a flexibility of word order. If the subject is marked as a subject with an ending, it need not come at the beginning of a sentence. This ability made many scholars of bygone days admire Latin’s majesty—and admire themselves for mastering it. Knowing Latin (and Greek, which presents similar problems) was long the sign of an educated person.

Yet are Latin and Greek truly hard? These two genetic cousins of English, in the Indo-European language family, are child’s play compared with some. Languages tend to get “harder” the farther one moves from English and its relatives. Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall…

Twain’s joke about German gender shows that in most languages it often has little to do with physical sex. “Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”. To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them…”

(Read the whole thing.)

December 18, 2009