Saturday, 17 February 2007

Mother Language Day

This coming week, on 21st February, the UN will mark Mother Language Day with celebrations all over the world, and especially at the Paris Headquarters of UNESCO, of the benefits and satisfaction of preserving and valuing Mother Languages.

Mother Language Day is a plea to support the world's linguistic diversity. So many languages these days are under threat. But with determined action languages can be fostered and preserved. Here in Wales, for instance, the Welsh language which some might have predicted would by now have succumbed under the weight of English, is thriving with more learners and more speakers at every census.

In Ireland, thanks to government efforts, the ancient Irish language has been brought back from the brink of extinction. Irish is one of several Celtic languages that fall broadly into two families. In the Irish language family is Scots Gaelic, now in everyday use only among a few scattered Hebridean communities. Once it was widely spoken throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

Strangely the language of lowland Scotland was not English but Welsh - at least in the early days. The kingdom of Dalriada that extended as far as the Highland line as Welsh speaking and many place names in south west Scotland can trace a Welsh connection. Even Glasgow itself, most populous city in Scotland, has a Welsh name:
'glas cae' meaning 'blue meadow.'

Welsh belongs to the southern of the two great Celtic language families and shares a heritage with Breton (spoken in France), Cornish, which, as its name implies is (or used to be) spoken in Cornwall.

Friday, 9 February 2007

Women Leaders Face Sufficient Problems Without Being Superheroes

Being a contrary minded sort of person I often find myself challenging received wisdom of which there is a good deal these days in every breakfast newspaper. This week, my eye (and with it my questioning antennae), was caught by an article by Mary Ann Sieghart writing in the London Times. She is a great champion of women's causes and I have much sympathy with her viewpoints. In her column this week she invited her readers to engage in a flight of fancy - not a total fancy for there is a chance that it may happen - namely a G8 Summit in which three of the world leaders were women.

Angela Merkel has already become the first female Chancellor of Germany; Mary Ann Siegart now asked her readers to consider what might happen if Hillary Clinton secured the democratic nomination in the United States and later won the Presidency; while in France Ségolène Royal were to become Head of State after the elections there this spring. What a message this would send to women throughout the world.

Well, yes, but. Here the questioning antennae swing into action. Why would it be such a good thing? Yes, it would demonstrate that women can reach the highest echelons of power - but then this is already known. Women have been leading nations since time began. True, not in great numbers, but certainly in our modern age a girl growing up can aspire to lead her nation without difficulty. She might have to work hard but, as Dorothy Parker once quipped, "compared to men, women have to work twice as hard to be thought half as good. Fortunately this isn't difficult."

No, this isn't the real reason why the idea of more women in leadership positions is so seductive. It is something more, isn't it? Isn't it because we believe that women will bring a superior edge to government? That women will act in a softer, kinder more intuitive way, will be less confrontational and demanding, in short that feminine politics will be better politics?

This certainly is the received wisdom. But, really, ask yourselves, is this so? If it were the case wouldn't we women simply form ourselves into a political party? Certainly there are all kinds of specific issues in which women are mightily involved, and for understandable reasons, issues to do with health, children, the family and so on. But for the wider issues - do women take any different position on the Middle East, let's say, than men? For every woman who goes on a peace march there is another whose views are diametrically opposed. At the G8 would female leaders of Germany, the United States and France act any differently from their male rivals?

Does Mrs Merkel, or did Mrs Thatcher come to that, take decisions in any way noticeably different to that in which a man would have responded to the same challenges? Indeed there are considerable pressures on a woman to act in ways that prove she is not weak or soft or feminine and for this reason, perhaps, 'the female of the species is more deadly than the male,' as Rudyard Kipling wrote once.

Of course I welcome the fact that more women are reaching the highest circles of government, business and the professions, though the truth is that vast swathes of women in many countries remain locked by their gender into poverty, degradation and illiteracy. We must all work to improve the status of women everywhere. But let us not add to the challenges that women leaders already face by heaping expectations upon them and turning them into superheroes.

Posted by Fennie Somerville

Saturday, 3 February 2007

Listening to the Radio

As a child I used to listen a great deal to the radio. I loved listening especially in bed when the light had been turned out. My pride and joy was an ancient machine, what we called in those days a wireless. It had four great knobs for controlling the stations, which were listed in three illuminated columns - towns and cities that I had never heard of - from a great part of my known world.

Being so ancient it was worked by valves, great lamps in which the filaments glowed red hot, suffusing my bedroom with a warm glow as I lay there in the dark. I knew that somehow they made the sounds that came out of the grill on the front.

When I was very young I thought that some person or homunculus must be living in the cabinet and this accounted for the instructions about not tampering with the interior. A miraculous person, I thought, able to survive without food or water for long periods, small enough to live in a radio cabinet and possessed of a thousand voices and a miniature orchestra. And all for my benefit!

Later of course I learned about loudspeakers but the voices booming out of the set and filling the darkened room always gave me an electric tingle. Some sounds even remain with me to this day and when they flit across my mind in an idle moment I am transported back to my early childhood. Music on a Friday Night, the signature tune to a detective story and a radio play about global cooling.

Global cooling is not something that we here about very often these days. But in its way it must have been as terrifying - indeed more so - even than today's warnings of the world heating up. The story I remember was set in Greenland, I think, at the end of that period in the early Middle Ages when, for a reason that never seems satisfactorily to be explained, the world became almost as warm as it now is.

But then of course it suddenly got colder again - a lot colder. So cold in fact that in the middle of the seventeenth century the Thames froze each winter and fairs were held on the ice - a period that is now referred to by some as the 'little ice-age.'

It seems that all sorts of folk had migrated to Greenland, for some reason, during this warm period when the balmy weather allowed the growing of every kind of northern crop. Even vines were thought to grow there.

But then the winters became colder and the summers too. The snow fell earlier and earlier and melted later and later - until - and this is the bit that I remember from the radio - the mother of the family began to predict when the end would come. Something I think she had discovered in some early writing - one of the Icelandic sagas perhaps.

This was when the snow would fall but wouldn't all melt away, even in midsummer. So that when the snow fell again the following autumn it would be falling already on last year's snow. This, she said, would be the end. It wouldn't matter that the patch of unmelted snow might be no bigger than a pocket hankerchief, next year the snow cover would be larger and it would go on growing until all their fields and all their homes were obliterated beneath its great white blanket.

For some reason that image, painted by the radio in my darkened room, has remained with me to this day. And now, of course, we face the reverse problem. Not the snow refusing to melt, but the snow refusing to fall and what snow and ice there is melting away at breakneck speed.

Mountain glaciers around the world, so the UN is telling us have been melting these last few years one and a half times faster than they were in the 1990's. These glaciers are the sources for many rivers upon which people depend for drinking water, agriculture and industrial purposes.

Rather than being smothered in water by way of a great blanket of snow, we shall all be smothered in a threadbare covering of dust.

Posted by Fennie Somerville