Footnotes to a Conversation, April 22, 2024
“The secret of good old-age is none other than an honest pact with solitude.” – Gabriel Garcia Márquez
The Authenticity of Words
I have so much respect for the time and thought authors give to choosing the words and sentence structure of their books. Translation is a fine art: can it be replaced by AI? I can see the apparent logic of combining AI and a human translator (known as post-editing), but I can also see the flaws.
“There are concerns that post-editing can create ‘a lot more work’ for translators, who have to carefully compare texts to catch misreadings and ‘poor or unidiomatic’ style. ‘Colleagues who have done this kind of post-editing work say that it requires a far higher degree of attention, because the AI generated text often reads so plausibly’.” [The Guardian]
Vulture Cultures
In ancient Egypt, vultures were associated with life and birth as well as death; the Egyptian word for mother used the vulture hieroglyph. After the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, the animal symbols of the two regions, the vulture and the cobra, became synonymous with the pharaohs.
“Vultures get little in the way of love, and that has had profound ecological and public health effects … The more scientists learn about vultures, the more we understand how vital they are to ecosystems and to us. If we are going to protect them—and allow them to continue protecting us—we will need to shift our perspective on vultures. We can choose to heed the lessons of traditions that revered these birds, leaving our fear and hatred for them in the past, where they belong.” [JSTOR Daily]
The 27th Letter
“In Old English, the ampersand, '&', was considered the 27th letter of the alphabet. Children reciting the alphabet in school would chant 'per se', Latin for 'by itself', after letters that were words in themselves: 'A per se A, I per se I', etc, and also '& per se &'. This 'and per se and' eventually became mangled to 'ampersand'. The symbol & was Roman shorthand for 'et', 'and'.” [Susie Dent]
Footnotes to a Conversation is a weekly Monday feature covering an assortment of topics that I’ve come across in the preceding week – books, art, travel, food, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I also post occasional articles on other dates, including frequent book reviews and travel tales.
If you share my love of nature, check out EcoFriendly West, an online publication encouraging environmental initiatives in Western Canada, and Nature Companion, a free nature app for Canada’s four western provinces.