This seems to be a point of contention this week. Will elections be held in Iraq, as the current administration insists, in January, or will they have to be delayed? If they are held, will they be flawed? Are the insurgents in central Iraq trying to sabotage those elections?
To the first question, the administration says "yes, they will be held"; its opponents, and they are legion, say that this can't happen. On this one, I'd have to give the administration points. After all, elections have been held before under difficult conditions. The very first elections in the United States, a decade or more before we adopted the Constitution, were held when large parts of the country were still under enemy occupation. No reason Iraqis can't bear up to such adversity today at least as well as we could then.
To the second question, the administration says "no, they won't be flawed". This is nonsense. The question is not whether they will be flawed, but how badly they will be flawed. As General Abizaid said on Meet the Press yesterday: "I can't predict 100 percent that all areas will be available for complete, free, fair and peaceful elections. I assume that there will be certain areas of [Iraq] that will have to be fought over in order to have the elections take place." We ourselves are familiar with flawed elections (see, for example, the one that put the current president in office). All you can do is try (with apparently limited success) to ensure that the same flaws won't occur again, bear up with the idiots you've been saddled with for a limited amount of time (a practice that Americans have shown themselves good at ― we are, I think, a tolerant people when it comes to crooks being put in charge), and hope that the future will bring you something better. (1)
As to the third question, if you can believe Secretary of State Colin Powell, then yes. Powell is quoted today as saying: "They are determined to disrupt the election. They do not want the Iraqi people to vote for their own leaders in a free, democratic election." Despite his pathetic performance at the United Nations back in February, 2002, Powell remains probably the most trustworthy spokesman for our current administration ― though admittedly this is not saying much. Furthermore, the nature of the insurrection ― which is essentially Sunni Moslem in nature ― supports this. Iraq's population is something like 60% Shi'a Moslem; Sunnis may, with some justice, expect that a free election would produce a Shi'a government and, effectively, a Shi'a state in which Sunnis will be dealt the short end of the stick. It would not be surprising to find them battling not only against what they consider (correctly) to be an alien occupation force, but also against unbridled democracy in their own country. (2)
(1) You want to be careful, of course, that you are not stuck with a democratically-elected "president for life" or something like that. Cuba, which is nowhere near as awful a place as administrations of both political stripes have liked to pretend for going on half a century now, has had to live with the same "democratically-elected" ruler for that same period of time. One may be forgiven for assuming that, in such circumstances, "democracy" is more cosmetic than real.
(2) Genuine democracy is based on two pillars: "rule of the majority" and "rights of the minority". The first could be in place in Iraq tomorrow. The second is more problematic; with two and a quarter centuries of experience behind us, we in the United States have never done all that well in this field.
I like writing letters to the editor. Most of them are to my local paper (the West County Times of [west, of course] Contra Costa County, California) and have to do with politics, usually national. But fairly often I get a chance to react to some comment, somewhere in the world, about the international language Esperanto. I've had letters appear in places as disparate as New Zealand, Japan and Bahrain on this topic.
About a week ago, Deutsche Welle's web site in Germany put up some pages in Klingon (or, more accurately, tlHingan), the artificial language devised by linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek universe. This naturally led to a series of comments in the global press about how widely Klingon is known and used today, just as happened in the mid-nineties when there was a spate of articles (reaching as high as the front page of the Wall Street Journal about the Klingon Bible translation project). Far too often, such articles include some comment to the effect that "Esperantists must be gnashing their teeth in impotent rage over the importance of Klingon" or some such thing. See e.g. the January, 1994, article on the Klingon Bible translation project in the Albany, New York, Times-Union.
Just such an article appeared last week in The Irish Times, and I, of course, couldn't resist writing an answer. Here it is, for the interested (I've made two slight modifications to what I actually sent).
While I usually try to keep my letters short and sweet, there are enough points worth disputing ― or emphasizing ― in Shane Hegarty's article (Sep. 18) to make this one a bit longer than usual.Hegarty writes that Klingon "is ... the fastest-growing language in the galaxy." This is possibly true, in terms of percentage growth per year ― an artefact of very small number statistics. If a language is spoken by one person at the beginning of the year, and his wife learns to speak it with him during the year, then that language will indeed be "the fastest-growing language", having grown by 100% during that year.
How many people speak Klingon and how fast is it growing? In 1996, more than a decade after Okrand's The Klingon Dictionary was published, Gavin Edwards of Wired magazine quoted Dr. Lawrence Schoen, director of the Klingon Language Instute, as stating that "all the fluent Klingon speakers can comfortably go out to dinner together". An enthusiastic Klingonist recently informed me that the language has continued to grow since that time, but only slowly and linearly, so that there are about twice as many Klingon speakers as there were then ― in other words, all the competent Klingon speakers would now need two tables for supper, or perhaps a small banquet room.
Hegarty also writes of "a range of [Klingon] books". This "range" seems to cover about a dozen titles, half or more of them written by Marc Okrand, the linguist who designed the language under contract to Paramount. The list, incidentally, includes three literary works: two Shakespeare translations (Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing, mentioned by Hegarty) and a rewrite of the Gilgamesh epic. I will have something to say about these below. The Klingon Bible, which was much touted in the media in the mid-nineties, is conspicuous by its absence -- to the best of my knowledge the Bible translation project was never finished.
Hegarty informs us that "in 1999 the Modern Language Association announced that there were more fluent speakers of Klingon than there were of the Najavo language in the US." Hegarty should be careful not to confuse the Modern Language Association, which is a legitimate organization, with the on-line satirical newspaper The Onion, which invented this story as a joke, and is probably quite proud of the fact that it has since become an urban legend.
Hegarty mentions the "Department of Human Services in Multnomah University" (this is, in fact, Multnomah County, state of Oregon in the northwestern United States; there is no Multnomah University). Multnomah County's advertisement for a Klingon interpreter lasted about two weeks before the department rescinded the advertisement, apparently realizing that no one in Multnomah County (or anywhere else) spoke Klingon as an only language.
Finally, Hegarty states that "It's enough to make speakers of Esperanto - the famous, but largely unsuccessful, invented language - curse in multi-lingual desperation." Hegarty is apparently unaware of the fact that Klingon's current "reputation" has largely been built on the backs of speakers of Esperanto. Both Shakespeare translations into Klingon were the work of an Esperanto speaker (Prof. Nick Nicholas ― you can read some of his poetry originally written in Esperanto here). The above-mentioned Bible translation project was initiated by a couple of Esperanto speakers, one of whom now maintains the web site of the Klingon Language Institute (where one can find the Institute's explanatory page in Esperanto). The eleven-lesson free postal course in Klingon was devised on the basis of a similar Esperanto course by an Esperanto speaker.
As far as number of speakers is concerned, the two languages don't seem to be very comparable. By comparison with Klingon's small banquet room, "Ethnologue" quotes a figure of two million Esperanto speakers. Pictures would seem to bear out this difference. Hegarty mentions the annual Klingon get-togethers; I saw pictures of a couple of these at the Klingon Language Institute site two or three years ago, and wondered what all the shouting was about (a dozen people or thereabouts). By comparison, at the end of July the Universala Espereanto-Asocio held its annual "World Esperanto Congress" in Beijing, with more than two thousand participants ― and this is only one of several hundred global, multinational or regional conferences held using Esperanto every year, albeit the largest. Hegarty mentions Klingon speakers "in about 40 countries"; I don't know how many countries have Esperanto speakers, but the minimum has to be 115-120 (the number of countries in which the Universala Esperanto-Asocio has members).
I promised to mention something about Shakespeare and Gilgamesh at this point. I don't know whether Much Ado About Nothing has been translated into Esperanto, but Hamlet first appeared in the language in 1894 (that early translation remains more popular than a second translation published in the 1960s). Many other of Shakespeare's plays have appeared in Esperanto guise, most recently Henry V in translation by Prof. Humphrey Tonkin. The Gilgamesh epic was translated (or rewritten) by a Hungarian author of Esperanto poetry some decades ago. The complete Esperanto Bible first appeared on the market in the early 1920s; the most recent edition has added the so-called Deuterocanonical Books. Simply put, the total number of literary works published in Esperanto every month is greater than all the books published in or about Klingon since its inception two decades ago. So -- what do we have to curse about?
If you want to compare facility, use and number of speakers of Klingon and Esperanto, let me recommend to you a letter, written in 1999, by Dr. Mark Mandel, known in the Klingon-speaking world as Commander Marke'm. You can find it here. Enjoy!
I should add here what I think of Klingon. It is a marvellous creation, when you look at what it was created for, much more well-considered and well-devised than, for instance, Alien Nation's "Tenctonese". Those who have actually learned the language, however great or small their numbers, have engaged in a very worthwhile undertaking ― the more so since it now appears that bilingual individuals tend to live healthier and longer than monolinguals. It has contributed much to the Star Trek universe (which, however, now looks to be in the process of running down). (1) But as a language for human communication, it has several problems, notably a very eccentric phonology. While lots of people have bought The Klingon Dictionary, (2) it is not clear that very many of them have actually learned even the basics of the language. So let's leave Klingon where it belongs ― as a worthwhile part of the Star Trek universe, but not as a linguistic panacea here in the real world.
(1) It is not terribly original, however. The practice of actually using alien languages in science-fiction films ― if we overlook the enigmatic "Klaatu barada nikto" in the 1950s film The Day the Earth Stood Still ― really started with Star Wars and Han Solo's multilingual conversation with Greedo in that Mos Eisley cantina.
(2) When I last looked, the Dictionary had sold about 1/8 as many copies as there are, according to Ethnologue, speakers of Esperanto in the world. That figure might conceivably have doubled by now.
Today is September 11, the third anniversary of the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
I just saw a commercial on TV for an upcoming special on this, the greatest catastrophe that ever struck America.
It would have been more impressive if they hadn't run it in a break between two parts of The Blue and the Gray, a dramatization of a four-year Civil War. In that war, for instance, 23,000 Americans died on the field before the church at Shiloh in a single battle. In absolute terms, that's almost eight times as many people as died on September 11. In proportional terms ― remember that the population of the U.S. at that time was around 60 million ― that's about forty times as devastating as September 11. And that was just one battle, albeit a big one.