Languages, by cultural definition, seek standardisation and mass-adoption; the command of language is one axis on which the ability to participate in all what society has to offer revolves around. It’s to this domain of human culture that OnlyOneNativeSpeaker seeks to add parallelism, diversity and heterogeneity. It will do this by creating thousands of new artificial languages. Languages with deliberately just that: Only One Native Speaker.

A language is a collaborative effort to conceptualise place and time. At the most fundamental level languages reflect the environment of, and the social agreements between, the community it belongs to. The study of languages from other cultures is of direct important to us, as it shows us the boundaries of our own culture, and refutes claims of cultural universality.

OnlyOneNativeSpeaker excludes no possible line of enquiry. Every artificial language, independent of medium, origin and intent helps to display the horizon of possibility, in ourselves as well as in others. But creating a language from scratch is not the only option, finding languages where nobody did before: in crowds, in amoeba, or in the shape of rocks, is of equal interest to the scope of OnlyOneNativeSpeaker.

How can you participate in the Babylon bonanza that is called OnlyOneNativeSpeaker? That’s simple, develop a language! While doing that, send us an e-mail with a link to the website containing the purpose and details of your language. If necessary we can host this information for you. At the same time OnlyOneNativeSpeaker will try to facilitate the exchange of ideas between all people involved as far as language permits.

http://socialfiction.org/onlyone/

–Language Quotes–
“Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is”
George Steiner, 1975

“Thinking itself is in a language – in English, in Sanskrit, In Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationships and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of consciousness.”
Benjamin Lee Whorf

“Man acts as if he were the shaper and master of language, while it is language which remains the mistress of man. When this relation of dominance is inverted, man succumbs to strange contrivances… Language is the highest and everywhere the foremost of those assents which we human beings can never articulate solely out of our own means.”
Martin Heidegger, 1954

“If one could find the characters or symbols to express all our thoughts as cleanly and exactly as arithmetics expresses numbers, or as analytic geometry expresses lines, one could do the same as one can do with arithmetics and geometry, as much as they are subject to reasoning. This is because all investigations that depend on reasoning would take place through the transposition of these characters, and by a kind of calculus.”
Leibniz

“There is a kind of gossamer web, woven between the real things, and by this means the animals communicate. For purposes of communication they invent a symbolic language. Afterwards this language, used to excess, becomes a disease, and we get the curious phenomena of men explaining themselves by means of the gossamer web that connects them. Language becomes a disease in the hands of the counter-word mongers.”
T.E. Hulme, 1924

“In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolic language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if this new phenomena were the dim awaking of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature. It is still interesting as a word – a symbol”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from ‘Anima Poetae’, 1804

“Coleridge suggested before Freud, that a certain universal symbolic language might be employed in the “Night World”; and speculated that there were several levels of human dreaming. (See Notebooks III, 4409, “The Language of Dreams”.) Though sadly he never produced the systematic treatise “On Dreams , Vision, Ghosts, Witchcraft” promised in the Friend, my narrative shows him recording and carefully classifying various “genera and species” of them… ”
Richard Holmes in ‘Coleridge, Darker Reflections’, 1998

“Blake’s language evolved from an original state of pre-intentionality in which he intuited some sort of relationship between language and thought, to a conscious awareness of the fact of intentionality, through a reflexive analysis of the concept underlying the material language system, and culminating, ultimately, in what amounts to an attempt to create a new language system, through which he might apprehend the “ultimate” referent.”
http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeV/Reviews/Spector.html

“Language is fossil poetry”
Emerson

“The impression I get from TV snow images is that they may form a consistent language with a specific vocabulary of images due to limited parameters of TV (as opposed to structures of dreams) and the repetitiveness of images…”
Genesis P-Orridge, 1988

“There is for every thought a certain nice adaptation of words which none other could equal, and which, when a man has been so fortunate as to hit, he has attained, in that particular case, the perfection of language.”
James Boswell, 1791

From creative hotbeds to cultural slums
July 4, 2005

“A dagger through the art” … Nick Vickers at the Sir Hermann Black Gallery.
Photo: Natalie Boog

Artists see a dire future if student union fees are made voluntary, writes Sunanda Creagh.

One day, in the mid-’60s, a young David Williamson stumbled across the Melbourne University drama society.

“My first degree was mechanical engineering,” the playwright says. “But here were drama societies doing productions on campus, very good ones, that made me feel that engineering was not my permanent future.”

Williamson credits his career change to his university theatre experiences but fears future artists might not be so lucky. If the Federal Government’s voluntary student unionism bill is passed, Williamson says, campus societies such as the one that changed his life will not have the funding to operate – and that will ripple through the arts community and affect generations to come.

Every year, students pay a compulsory union fee, which varies between $100 and $500, depending on the campus. Student-run bodies use the money to pay for services such as food and bar subsidies, sporting grounds, advocacy services, galleries and campus sport and arts clubs. A proportion is also used to fund political pursuits, including campaigns against higher university fees.

The Government says students who never use these services or don’t join campus clubs shouldn’t be forced to pay for them, and has drafted a bill to make the fee voluntary. The Coalition has pushed for this change for decades. Now it controls the Senate, it finally seems likely.

Williamson has signed a petition that labels voluntary unionism “a dagger through the art”. The petition was published in newspapers across Australia. Among the 200 signatories were Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush and Donald Horne.

The tone of the petition is sombre: “Our universities run the risk of becoming cultural slums and a national disgrace if financial support for arts and culture is removed. The impact will be dire now and into the future.”

John Bell, the founder of the Bell Shakespeare Company, also signed on. “It was fantastic, it was the making of me,” he says of his university drama society. He rattles off an impressive list of friends who flowered through union-funded clubs. Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Leo Schofield, Clive James and Laurie Oakes are among them.

“If it hadn’t been for [campus clubs], none of us would have realised our potential. It was that hothouse incubation that made us who we are.”

Penelope Benton, from the College of Fine Arts students association, says the visual arts will also suffer. Grants will dry up. Transport services to help students truck their work to and from galleries will go. And the campus gallery, Kudos, will probably lose its annual $69,000 funding, forcing students to exhibit off-campus. “The average cost for an external gallery varies between $400 and $1200 for artist-run spaces. They are the cheap ones, not including commercial spaces.”

Many artists hold their first exhibitions in campus galleries, which are stepping stones to bigger galleries. It’s a role Nick Vickers, the curator of Sydney University’s Sir Hermann Black gallery, has long recognised.

“One of our main collection policies is to support the work of emerging artists – those people who are between one and five years out of art school,” he says. “Ten years ago I put on exhibitions of work from people like Shaun Gladwell, Wendy Sharpe, Brett McMahon – people who have since gone on to win Samstag [scholarships] and other awards.”

If student union fees are made voluntary, Vickers expects the gallery will close and awards such as the Blake Prize for Religious Art and the Freedman Foundation Awards will go.

And it won’t affect just future artists, but Australia’s future art appreciators. “If students are used to living with artworks, it’s a demystification process. There has to be a provision for the future generation, not just of artists but also art collectors. If we lose these people, we will lose the art industry.”

The Federal Government, however, says this is panic over nothing – if students want to fund campus organisations, they will.

“What the Government is determined to do is to see that Australian university students have a choice about whether they join the student union when they enrol at university,” says the Education Minister, Brendan Nelson. “Under no circumstances will there be a law preventing that. I encourage students to join cultural, political and other organisations on campuses, but under no circumstances should they be forced.”

But Vickers says students won’t realise that, as with taxes, a little from everybody means a lot for everyone. “Who’s going to voluntarily pay for anything? You or I wouldn’t voluntarily pay our taxes but we might like our medical to be taken care of.”

Even within the Coalition there is concern over the effect of the voluntary student unionism legislation.

The Nationals’ Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce expects only 10 per cent of students will elect to pay a fee, and sporting grounds and campus clubs will be the first to go.

“At a child-care facility, there’s a place where they learn and a place where they play,” he says. “At a school, there’s a place where they learn and a place where they can play. Why should university be different?”

The buzz about Beethoven

By Norman Lebrecht / June 29, 2005
  
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Somewhere within the recesses of the virtual BBC they are still crunching the numbers, unable to believe their magnitude. When the first five symphonies of Beethoven went on-line in the opening week of this month, the Radio 3 website registered 657,399 individual downloads, a figure so immense it exceeded the annual sales of any classical record label and should, by rights, have qualified each of the symphonies for a slot in Top of the Pops.

Last night the BBC let loose the second tranche ?from Pastoral to Choral symphonies ?amid growing confidence that the demand for free Beethoven will cross the million mark, transforming the future of musical dissemination. As a responsible public organisation, the BBC is offering to share its data with the rest of the musical community but the analysis so far is tantalisingly inchoate.

All we know for certain is that the symphonies reached a new audience of I-pod users, presumed to be under 20s, many of whom knew nothing of Beethoven beyond the name. This can be deduced from the fact that the first two symphonies, the least significant in the canon, drew the highest number of downloads ?well over 150,000 each – while the benchmark Eroica mustered the fewest, just below 90,000.

There were shoals of emails to the Radio 3 message board from first-timers, some of whom were anxious to be assured that they had taped a symphony right through to the end. Others appealed plaintively for the relay to be renewed, having missed the week-long deadline to download.

There is clearly a demand for more ?so much so that such commercial download sites as I-tunes and Napster have linked up to the BBC뭩 output and some have launched Beethoven promotions of their own. There is a web buzz about Beethoven that could never have been achieved by plastic and terrestrial means of communication.

What this means is that we have crossed a portal into a new era from which there is no return. Broadcasting by the old methods of tall transmitters and small transistors belongs to the 20th century. The post-industrial broadcast user demands audio and video programmes that are streamed over extended periods and available, the world over, for instant download and possible retention as part of a private collection.

The legal protections for this expansion are finally in place with the ruling this week by the US Supreme Court that file-sharing ?the free exchange of music and movies among individual enthusiasts ?is illegal at source and can be choked off by prosecuting the software makers. 멌onsumers are going to have to get used to paying for their music, period,?sighed Wayne Grosso, one of the founders of the Grokster file-swapping network. The music industry have acclaimed the judgement as the most important in decades. It can now stop penalising innocent teens in their bedrooms and go for the geeks who make the stealing systems.

The BBC stayed on the right side of the music industry by limiting download time for Beethoven to a week and restricting it by contractual terms of use to personal consumption (there are, of course, limitless risks of mass piracy once the music is downloaded in tiger Asian countries). The success of its experiment provides the glimmer of a future model for the music industry ?a model similar to the strategy of newspapers that give away freesheets and poly-wrapped gifts in order to nurture regular buying habits. Apart from a few label dinosaurs, there is more excitement in the music industry than depression at the BBC뭩 remarkable breakthrough.

As for artistic quality, from what I have heard so far, Gianandrea Noseda뭩 freeloads with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra hold their own with most boxes that can be found in shops. The recorded Beethoven cycle has been the cornerstone of every classical record collection since Arturo Toscanini뭩 dominant performances on American radio in 1939. Recorded in a dim acoustic with poor microphone placements, their monolithic exactitude and irresistible propulsion became the touchstone for maestros and music lovers alike, unmatched until Herbert von Karajan in 1962 produced a stereo set in Berlin that combined immaculate orchestral sound and studio technology with structural certainty of an almost irrefutable order.

Noseda, Italian-born and in his early forties, admits to the combined influence of Toscanini and Karajan, but as a man of modern times he has assimilated other streams of thought. He knows, for instance, the quicker speeds of period-instrument leaders such as Christopher Hogwood and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, as well as the illuminating alterations to be found within new scholarly editions of the scores.

In the old-world record industry, a Beethoven cycle was the highest accolade that could be granted to a maestro. Not all of them crossed the hurdle of credibility. Remainder bins in record stores burst with dreary repetitions ?Muti, Menuhin, Masur and many more. Even Simon Rattle, whose set with the Vienna Philharmonic appeared to great fanfares in 2002, gave a less convincing account of a cleaned-up score than the veteran David Zinman, who recorded the same edition in Zurich.

Noseda will have covered all these trends and discarded them before conducting a bright, dashingly fast run of the symphonies in Manchester, nicely played by the BBC Philharmonic if not indelibly memorable for individual passage work. The Pastoral, which I뭭e just clocked, is a Mayday frolic, rippling with bucolic pleasures and untroubled by assumptions of prior familiarity. It is very much a new-listeners-start-here kind of performance, and all the more enjoyable for refusing to look over its shoulder at the daunting trail of past interpretations. This is the starting point of a new medium, not a checkpost for cognoscenti ?though experts will not fail to admire Noseda뭩 elegant way with andante phrasing.

So what happens next? By this time next week, the BBC will have a database of more than a million Beethoven users, a resource that can be applied intelligently to build a new global audience for classical music ?mostly home listeners, but some might well be enticed to an occasional concert.

Before Christmas, Radio 3 will embark on a Bach jamboree, some of which will go on-line for downloads. Other broadcasters must compete, or fade out. The world is changing before our astonished ears. I have heard the future, and it could work.