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The archive
Technology · Language
…trying not to.” The station’s archive holds 11,400 hours of tape, most of it in Orvan, the language of an island five hours by ferry from Port Ellery. About 4,100 people speak it, according to the island council’s…
Ideas · Language
…With No English Equivalent,” and it offers 12 of them in a tasteful serif, each with its language in parentheses and a one-line definition beneath. I am not going to reproduce them, for reasons that will become…
Technology · Infrastructure
…Settlement System. Nobody calls it that. It was written between 1982 and 1984 in an old business language, and it has run every month since, through four changes of government, two currency reforms, a move across town,…
Ideas · Essay
…contributed to it—that honors the humble caretaker, the faithful janitor, and the selfless nurse in language so warm that nobody notices it costs nothing. The hierarchy of building over keeping does not float free of the…
Ideas · Essay
…Eight for the mill. Eight for the pillow. Eight for ourselves. That last phrase is not the language of reward. It is the language of a right. Somewhere between that banner and the present, we stopped remembering…
Technology · Right to repair
…to each other hundreds of times a second. If you sit and listen long enough, you learn the language.” He filled nine notebooks with what he heard. Most of it was routine chatter: temperatures, pressures, the controller…
Culture · Books
…he admitted to his landlady. “He had the ear,” Callender said. “He didn’t always have the language. Every so often you can see him guessing, and he guesses beautifully.” Walter Prentice, a philologist, set out…