Week 36: Northern Wrap
A new options paper from AP4D, the European Domestic Violence Conference in Reykjavik, and the laziness of English.
I’m currently in Reykjavík, and have had limited time to dedicate to this week’s newsletter. But there’s a few little things of note to bring to your attention.
The first is at Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue we have just released a new options paper titled: What Does It Look Like For Australia To Be A…Partner For Infrastructure With the Pacific and Southeast Asia.
Both the Pacific and Southeast Asia have significant infrastructure deficits and unique geographic conditions that make the delivery of both infrastructure and essential services difficult. Australia’s role as a responsible neighbour is to work with countries in the region to help overcome these deficits. Our paper brought together input from Australian experts in the development, diplomacy and defence communities – all with unique perspectives – to find a consensus set of principles that should inform Australia’s approach to regional infrastructure investment.
In Reykjavík this forthcoming week the European Conference on Domestic Violence is being held. As part of the conference a large cohort of academics working on family court issues are in town. In particular there is currently a worldwide study taking place – organised by academics at the University of Ottawa – that is specifically looking at the way the legal ruse of “parental alienation” has captured family courts throughout the world, and how it is specifically used in a variety of different countries.
This is offering me the opportunity to meet with people who I have only previously engaged with online, and people whose serious academic research has been invaluable to my own writing on these issues. It is an honour to know many of these people who work tirelessly for the safety of children and women, often against massive institutional hurdles.
On this week’s HARDtalk programme on the BBC was the Swedish foreign minister, Tobias Billström. The televised version of the programme goes out tomorrow, but the audio has already been on the World Service.
It is a very interesting discussion about Sweden’s current foreign policy dilemmas and decisions, and how these intersect with some of the Sweden’s current domestic problems. In particular the recent burnings of the Koran, and the knock-on effects these stupid and provocative acts are creating (plus Russia’s influence in exploiting these divisions).
Yet listening to the programme I became frustrated by one – maybe pedantic – thing. This is the host’s refusal to pronounce Swedish names correctly. In the Swedish alphabet the letters å ä and ö are all separate letters. The accents above what we would see as regular Roman letters are not there simply for decoration. They significantly change the pronunciation of the letter.
For one of the BBC’s flagship programmes – a programme that does rigorous background research (and has a team of researchers) – to be so inattentive with pronunciation is pretty offensive.
If I can be frank, there’s a laziness to English spelling that is kind of pathetic. All these sounds exist in English (as well as æ, which is incredibly common), but we instead just use bog-standard Roman letters for a wider variety of sounds. This gives the use of English vowels absolutely no consistency – and it must be a nightmare to learn. Requiring rote learning, rather phonetically sounding a word out.
For exampled water should be spelt wåter, and near where I’m staying in Reykjavik there’s a burger placed called Börger – which makes far more phonetic sense. English’s abandonment of the letters used Icelandic - ð (the th sound in the and that) and þ (the th sound in things and through) is also incredibly disappointing.
The limited use of letters in English also means that dialects of English are all spelt the same, even though they are pronounced very differently. Vowel shifts are the main difference between Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. When I get the train across to Copenhagen for example, the language changes on the bridge and train in Swedish tåg becomes tog in Danish. It would be far more interesting if, say, task was spelt tæsk or banana banæna in American English (as they’re pronounced). However, I suspect the tendencies towards standardisation and reductionism within English will prevent this from ever happening.
There’s no playlist this week. But over on my music blog – Lunch Hour Pops – this week I wrote about two forgotten earnest pop gems from 1999.