Author Archives: Scott Martens

About Scott Martens

Scott is a US-raised Canadian living in Brussels with his American wife. His political background is well to the left of centre, even for Europe, and is very interested in immigration, cultural integration and language policy issues. He is presently working against a deadline on his doctorate in computational linguistics and is on hiatus. Wrote Pedantry, also on hiatus.

Beware of Greeks bearing scripts

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According to today’s Guardian, a recently rediscovered (and to some degree reconstructed) Aeschylus play about the Trojan War is to be performed by the Cypriot national theatre company.

Aeschylus’ take on the Trojan War took the form of a trilogy of dramas of which only Agamemnon was thought to have survived. Out of 90-some plays Aeschylus is thought to have written, only seven survived into the modern age. Most of the texts were lost in the torching of the Library at Alexandria. However, apparently partial copies of this play, Achilles, were retrieved from a mummy’s coffin in Egypt. It seems that mummies were frequently packed in loose paper and somebody used a copy of the play with their dearly departed.

I would think this to be the longest period between performances of a play in theatre history.

The whole thing brings to mind the image of some future archeologist rediscovering the lost works of L. Ron Hubbard by digging through boxes of unwanted Christmas presents, but that’s just me…

Bush looks ready to blow EU off on steel

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George Bush has apparently just announced that he will decide whether to lift steel tariffs “within a reasonable period of time.” He’s been offered an easy way out by Pascal Lamy, according to the Washington Post. He can simply declare, as Lamy has, that the US steel industry has restructured, the policy succeded, and now the tariffs can be dropped.

If Internet gambling was legal, I’d put €10 on “a reasonable time” meaning the third week of November, 2004.

98% of French children would go to school even ifh children would go to school even if they didn’t have to they didn’t have to

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I got into trouble some time ago for suggesting that school might be better if it wasn’t mandatory. I suggested that those who would never go to school if the law didn’t force them to were the ones who weren’t getting much out of it now. This was greeted with more opposition, I think, than the time I suggested that the death of disco was the work of a conspiracy led by Lee Atwater.

So, I note with some amusement that TNS-Sofres, a French polling company, has done a survey of students, parents, and teachers attitudes towards the French school system. This survey was highlighted in yesterday’s La Croix and you can download their conclusions here (en fran?ais, bien s?r)
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The price of monolingualism

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A few months ago on my other blog, I made a point about how the costs of multilingualism have to be set against the costs of monolingualism. It seems certain quarters of the CIA and the American Republican party agree with me, according to today’s New York Times.

C.I.A. Needs to Learn Arabic, House Committee Leader Says

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The importance of economic integration (and some investment advice)

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In the comments to one of the posts below, I raised the point that America’s prosperity owes a great deal more to its economic integration rather than to any particular shared value system, and that this was part of logic behind the founding of the EU. I want to demonstrate exactly how important a point that can be by using my own line of work as an example.

I work for a medium-sized Belgian translation firm. We have a handful of full-time staff and some 200 freelance translators who take work from us. Our freelancers can and do take work from other sources, what we do is mostly dealing with clients. Like all good middlemen, we make it possible for businesses to negotiate a single price for their translation work and we act as an insurance policy. Avoiding the middleman may sometimes cost less, but if your freelance translator is sick or busy and you have a deadline to deal with, you have to scramble to find a substitute. If you deal with us, we have many translators on tap and someone will always take your work. Few firms – only a few very large ones – still keep in-house translators. Translators generally agree to charge us less than they would charge clients directly because we can bring them a great deal of work, and we take away the cost of billing and accounting. We charge customers a bit more because we simplify billing and guarantee schedules. This is pretty much how modern translation firms operate.
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The people you meet on the plane

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You sometimes meet interesting people flying across the Atlantic, and this trip has to just about take the cake for it. On the way from Minneapolis to Amsterdam yesterday morning, my flight was carrying a group of Amish bound for Zurich.

Now, the Amish are perhaps another institution Americans are more familiar with then Europeans. They are not very large in number, but they have enough media presence that most people know who they are. The Amish are a Protestant religious group who, beyond just ordinary adherence to their faith, also live moderately segragated lives from the American mainstream. They speak a southern German dialect commonly but inaccurately called “Pennsylvania Dutch.” They wear a particular style of clothing, the men tend to wear long beards but not mustaches, and the women dress very conservatively and wear small bonnets, as commanded by Paul in the New Testament. They also don’t drive cars and restrict their access to quite a few other modern conveniences.

The Amish are widely seen as more isolated from the world than they really are, and their society is a great deal less idyllic than it is made out to be. Since I’m ethnically Mennonite (a related but more mainstream faith) and spent my college years in a heavily Amish area, I have a bit more experience with them than the average American and I can assure you that the Amish are good deal more connected to the world than they are made out to be. Quite a few leave their communities and join more mainstram life. There are drug problems, and I gather domesitic violence and child abuse are not rare. They are not subsistence farmers; they sell their crops for cash, put the money in banks and buy food at grocery stores. Apparently, roller blades are very fashionable in Amish communities right now, and I remember seeing a lot of horses and buggies at Taco Bell on Sunday afternoon.

Anyway, why would they be travelling to Zurich, and what does this have to do with Europe?
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Europe hors l’Europe

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Since I’m on the subject of things extra-European today, I note that Le Monde is reporting that there will be a referendum in Guadéloupe and Martinique in December over changing the status and government structure of France’s Caribbean colonies. France has a tradition of being a very centralised state, but the last 20 years or so have seen the end of the old regime. Powers are now devolved to regional governments, and the DOM-TOM’s are increasingly autonomous. Corsica’s little set-back recently is, I suspect, just a speedbump in the decline of the centralised French state.

What I would like to propose is the idea that maybe there needs to be some debate on the status of Europe’s extra-European areas as whole.
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Life outside of Europe

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So, today I’m blogging from Idaho where I’m visiting the in-laws. This is the first time I’ve been back in the States long enough for the place to feel foreign since decamping off to Belgium a couple years ago. Actually, the strangest part of this trip has been the feeling of being in a foreign country, even though it’s a country that I’ve spent almost half my life in.

Some of that could be Idaho. I’ve lived in California, Colorado, Indiana and New Jersey, and this is a bit like Colorado. Of course, I haven’t lived in Colorado in 20 years. But, considering that I’ve spent most of this trip either working on a white paper for my employer or planted in front of basic cable, I have to at least consider the possibility that Idaho isn’t really the problem.

[Warning: This post is long and will contain extensive references to life in America. The Americans will probably all get it. You may not.]
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Number 2 in line for the Dutch throne resigns

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I’m going to get a reputation for never putting up very serious stuff on this blog if I keep posting this sort of thing, but here goes.

So, I’m watching the coverage on Nederland 1 of today’s announcement from Prince Johan. It seems that, like his older brother, the number two prince of the Netherlands also has a penchant for falling for the wrong woman. Mabel Wisse Smit – a career UN human rights worker – may or may not have had a relationship with murdered gangster and suspected drug smuggler Klaas Bruinsma sometime in the distant past.
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