{"id":1164,"date":"2006-07-22T23:33:49","date_gmt":"2006-07-23T02:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1164"},"modified":"2006-07-22T23:51:52","modified_gmt":"2006-07-23T02:51:52","slug":"i-have-a-bakhara-on-my-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1164","title":{"rendered":"I have a bakhara on my head"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcap\">T<\/span>his afternoon, Alfons forwarded a couple of pictures of the <a href=\"http:\/\/strncpy.org\/Photos\/Anti%20War%20Protest\/index.html\">Anti-war demonstration in Amsterdam<\/a> he ran into today (for him that will be yesterday)<sup>1<\/sup>. I ended up making a joke about the possibility of intelligence services monitoring these kind of demonstrations:\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"quote\"><strong>Me:<\/strong> Yes, that is one. There&#8217;s actually an RFID tag under his bakhara.<br \/>\n<strong>Alfons:<\/strong> WTF is a bakhara? You mean like <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Baklava\">baklava<\/a>?<br \/>\n<strong>Me:<\/strong> I don&#8217;t know. I made up that word.\n<\/p>\n<p>Guess what. Bakhara is actually a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/List_of_places_in_Afghanistan\">place in Afghanistan<\/a>. And it&#8217;s also a <a href=\"http:\/\/bakhara.org\/\">MUD<\/a> (<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/MUD\">what is a MUD?<\/a>). If you think of it, the chance of making up unique words is getting smaller by the day, if we assume that (any) language is constantly evolving with the day, or even, by the minute. We still have a long way to go though: Officially English only has around <a href=\"http:\/\/hypertextbook.com\/facts\/2001\/JohnnyLing.shtml\">500,000 words<\/a>. In case we run out of words, I propose the following &#8216;fixes&#8217;:\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Start charging people for new words. People hate paying for something that they consider to be &#8216;free&#8217;. Heck, <em>privatize<\/em> the English language! Let it compete with other insignificant languages. Let the market decide which language is going to be the dominant language. And if English becomes too hard to maintain, we can always <em>outsource<\/em> it.\n<\/li>\n<li> Recycle old words (Imagine the word &#8216;president&#8217; being recycled. Or &#8216;War&#8217;.)\n<\/li>\n<li> Expand the alphabet with extra letters or, like the Chinese, introduce <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Logogram\">&#8216;logograms&#8217;<\/a>. Of course in the English language we would call them &#8216;cartoons&#8217;.\n<\/li>\n<li> Remove vowels from words. <span style=\"background-color: black;\">I<\/span>m<span style=\"background-color: black;\">a<\/span>g<span style=\"background-color: black;\">i<\/span>n<span style=\"background-color: black;\">e<\/span> th<span style=\"background-color: black;\">e<\/span> <span style=\"background-color: black;\">e<\/span>xtr<span style=\"background-color: black;\">a<\/span> <span style=\"background-color: black;\">a<\/span>m<span style=\"background-color: black;\">ou<\/span>nt <span style=\"background-color: black;\">o<\/span>f n<span style=\"background-color: black;\">e<\/span>w w<span style=\"background-color: black;\">o<\/span>rds! (See also <a href=\"http:\/\/the-internationalist.blogspot.com\/2006\/07\/day-two.html\">The Internationalist<\/a> for some words of wisdom).\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I suggest we start with the privatizing part. Better yet, let&#8217;s call the process of privatizing languages <em>&#8216;prvtze&#8217;<\/em>.\n<\/p>\n<p><small><sup>1<\/sup> This was supposed to be a subnote. I&#8217;m not going to tell you what I was going to write here.<br \/>\n<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This afternoon, Alfons forwarded a couple of pictures of the Anti-war demonstration in Amsterdam he ran into today (for him that will be yesterday)1. I ended up making a joke about the possibility of intelligence services monitoring these kind of &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/?p=1164\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hoogervorst.ca\/arthur\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}