Gender Matters

All too often, English-speaking students of European languages detest the "gender" (really noun class) systems of the language, and in seeking to dismiss that which they neither understand nor love, declare the system irrelevant. A system of noun classes, whether composed of three or fifteen sections, may be confusing to second-language learners, but the distinct features of a language are never irrelevant to its native speakers. Pope Benedict XVI's recent announcement about the use of condoms illustrates this point. The original book was written in German, the native tongue of the Pontiff, but translated into Italian. In the German, the word used to indicate rentboys and their ilk is "der Prostituierte", a masculine noun, but in Italian, "la prostituta", a femina noun. The use of the masculine noun in German led some to assume the Pope was referring solely to the members of the Theban Legion, while the Italian use suggests it applies to women alone (since Italian, true to its sensual nature has specific words for male companions). Although a quick glance at LEO reveals that the German masculine noun may encompass both genders, much to the dismay of the feminists and Riistoj, this error in understanding shows the distinctions which noun classes provide to their tongues.

(For those of you who must know, the Pope said his comments applied equally to the sexes, and condom use is merely a lesser evil than sentencing a fellow human being to a slow death through your own carelessness).

Camaldoli, Camaldola!

On Sunday, I met a monk, and not just a monk but a genuine hermit who had reentered the wicked world to write a book and share his knowledge with the world. This anchorite was a member of an obscure branch, the Camaldolese, of the Benedictine Order. This branch, about which I previously knew nothing, had been influenced by the Cluniac reforms, but did not take the step of forsaking their Benedictine brothers, as the Cistercians did. Though few in number, the members are filled with faith, if this monk was any indication. We had a pleasant chat about the desert fathers and eremitical training; the life of a hermit is one which cannot be assumed lightly or without much thought and prayer. It is not a life to which I aspire, but God calls us all in different ways!

O Pioneers!

While waiting for the Junior Woodchucks to organize themselves one Saturday morning, the tourists, joggers, and general vagabonds were passing by and descending to the Temple of Knowledge or entering San Francisco's sacred groves. One gentleman, however, of robust years stopped and seemed glad to see our merry band. His reason, however, was different from the usual one; he was not contemplating Scouts and Scouting, but rather the Young Pioneers the Communist doppelganger of Scouting. This gentleman grew up in East Germany, a thoroughly Communist state, and apparently missed the sight of uniformed patriotic youth. The differences between Pioneers and Boy Scouts were apparent in his misunderstanding of Scouts; or perhaps he was overlaying his experiences on a quite different program. His emphasis was on joyful and enthusiastic patriotism, rather more strongly than ever was said in our legion.

Most of my knowledge about Pioneers comes from two sources: a book on Scouting and similar programs throughout the world, my college Russian teachers, and (believe it or not) the Russian fantasy series Nightwatch. The emphasis on patriotism instilled in Young Pioneers (their uniforms are neat, but then Nazi uniforms look sharp also) is the self-same jingoism that the president demanded and the BSA refused during the war years of the 20th century. In other countries, such as the Maldives, the patriotic angle may come into play more; certainly, all these organizations, if well-run, contain an element of outdoorsmanship, and potential leadership.

I was too distracted by my duty in loco parentis to engage in extended conversation with the German gentleman, but it would be fascinating to hear from someone who actually was a member of the Young Pioneers.

West Saxon Side Story

After the Beowulf performance, I found myself doubting my memory about certain features of the Anglo-Saxon language (I dislike the term Old English, as it implies more comprehensibility than it ought). So I took myself to the library to refresh my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon grammar and phonology. The most peculiar feature of Anglo-Saxon, in comparison to other Germanic tongues, is something called "vowel breaking", which affects the already rounded vowels /ae/, /e/, and /i/. By virtue of this process, the aforementioned vowels gain a following schwa and the new spellings /ea/, /eo/, and /io/, orthographic sequences which contribute the written aesthetic of the Anglo-Saxon tongue and confound the poor freshman studying pre-Norman history.

After I had relearned the constructed pronunciation of these diphthongs, both short and long, it occurred to me the peculiar (to my ear) vowels of West Country English owe much to vowel breaking. West Country English derives from the West Saxon dialect of Anglo-Saxon and it was that dialect which had the greatest degree of vowel breaking. When I was at boarding school, I had many opportunities to hear the staff using their West Country dialect, which I did not understand but nonetheless did not hold in contempt. At that time, I knew little about it except that these dialects tended to give voice to the voiceless consonants at the beginnings of English words; thus "fox" comes from the main dialect of Middle English, but "vixen" (a female "fox") comes from the West Country.

More recently, it also occurred to me that the perennial problem of English-speakers learning a Continental tongue, that is, the ubiquitous admonition of teachers and textbooks to pronounce long vowels as "pure" rather than with the characteristic semi-vocalic glide of the Englishman, may have its origin in vowel breaking. Although West Saxon exhibited the greatest degree of vowel breaking, none of the Anglo-Saxon dialects lacked it. This is speculation, however, and I do not presume to have evidence sufficient for a conference presentation.

Shadow Caitlin

Recently, I went to a new science fiction book club, for which I had read Robert J. Sawyer's WWW:Wake, whose human protagonist is a blind teenage girl. Although the book itself was mediocre, I found the assertiveness of the blind girl to be realistic, even while her genius was not. The world of blindness is filled with dangers, ranging from the annoying to the deadly, and those who must navigate such a world often develop superb analytical skills. They also often develop an assertiveness bordering on rudeness, since most sighted people have never had consider the challenges the blind face. As my uncle once told me (in more colorful terms than I dare post here), you can't put one over on a blind person; reading non-visual cues is a way of survival.

The genius of the protagonist did irritate me slightly. Although all teenagers, at least part of the time, think that they are the smartest person on Earth, the tendency for any computer-savvy teen in a work of fiction to be a genius is absurd. The temporal exigencies of television programs mandate a facile ease with computing, but a written book need not bow to that god. Perhaps this is a example of Clarke's Law, not between men and godlike aliens, but between author and much younger character?

Hwaet!: Review of Beowulf

Sometimes I forget how blessed I am to live in the Bay Area, with its plethora of theatrical options. On Friday night, I went with L. to Beowulf. I had planned to meet up with a fellow member of the SF Language Lovers Meetup group, but the exigencies of getting to the theater prevented this. The performer, Benjamin Bagby (whose name makes me think of the Hobbit), sat on a spare stage. A screen with supertitles hung over him; I am not sure which translation he had chosen. The performance was abbreviated to 90 minutes, since a full retelling of Beowulf would require the time my ancestors only had in the miserable wet winters. Bagby's voice was resonant and varied according to character and timbre of conversation - this is not an easy task while maintaining the metrics of epic poetry. Bagby took frequent breaks to refresh his throat, but the pauses were well worth the results. As Bagby continued to recite, I began to recognize more words without reference to the supertitles; this task was made easier by my familiarity with the plot. The performance was old-fashioned story-telling at its best.

Election Day

Today is election day. I have already voted, but some reflections on voting are in order. Voting is both a privilege and a duty. The deprivation of voting privileges in circumstances were others do not suffer the same disability is painful, especially when the decisions affect you. Think back to your childhood: were there not times when your parents overruled your desires? Were you not frustrated by this? This denial of will, however, is appropriate for parents, since the child is not wise enough to make an informed choice. It is no accident that many systems which lack elections invoke the parental model of governance. The Little Father of Russia brooked no subordination.

If the right to vote is granted to the people, then they are not political children, but political adults. The inventors of democracy, the Athenians, understood this: our word "idiot" comes from the term for a citizen who refused to participate in the affairs of the city. As political adults, it is the duty of citizens to be as informed as possible about the decisions of this election cycle. This reason, along with the possibility of fraud, is why I do not support same day registration. The ballot, especially that of California, is complex, so I would give dispensation if someone did not vote for every position and proposition, as long as the ones on which the citizen voted are ones about which the citizen has informed himself as best he can.

The confluence of events, or one might say, my wyrd, has conspired that on the very day I am attending a reconstructed live performance of Beowulf, I learned about St. Chad, who is the alleged patron of elections. Ever dutiful in my pursuit of truth, even at the cost of a delightful pun, I looked into this matter. According to truthorfiction.com, there is no patron saint of elections, which is suitable: elections, after all, in the hands of God, preferably via the High Priest using the Urim and Thummim. Saint Chad, or Ceadda, however, is a real person, probably the youngest brother of Cedd (also sanctified), Cynibil, and Caelin. The alliteration of the names is an Anglo-Saxon practice, but their etymology is Celtic, suggesting a mixture of (presumably aristocratic) Celtic blood into the Anglo-Saxon ruling class. All four brothers were ordained, and two (Ceadda and Cedd) became bishops. While the careers of the brothers bishop is worthy of note, the more important data here is the two domains of the paternally-connected patron saints. Ceadda became the patron saint of astronomy, while Cedd became the patron saint of interpreters. The vagaries of English diachronics ensured some confusion between the two, and either could be construed as Chad (note the later spelling), patron saint of elections.

I have been preparing for this evening's live performance of Beowulf by rereading passages from my glossed text of Beowulf. A glossed text is anathema to serious scholars, but has certain advantages. The reader is more engaged in the text than he would be when distracted by paragraph 11.17 of the grammar or technical terms. A glossed text might work better when the reader already knows the story. The glosses in this edition do not resolve the kennings, but rather allow the reader to familiarize himself with the typical components. The actual plot of Beowulf is spare, so much of the beauty of the poem is in the style. The constant variation of components for indicating the same item is a vehicle of poetic utility, but I do wonder if it is not the ancestor of some modern English style. Could the admonition of high school English teachers that one should not use the same word for the same concept multiple times in a row owe some of its force to the love of inventive language seen throughout classic English literature?

People's Republic of Parasitism

In the course of my daily wanderings, I acquired a New Amsterdam Times. The international section contained an article on the latest shipment of food and aid to North Korea from the South.

The amount of food is paltry compared to the needs of the country, but the international implications disturb me. Ordinarily, I would extol feeding the hungry as a virtue, but the discord between the North Korean philosophy of juche and the begging of the North Korean government is stark. The Kim dynasty uses foreign aid as a way to propagate its regime while claiming self-sufficiency. Although the Christian aid groups behind the food delivery have noble hearts, the North Korean distribution mechanisms ensure that the food will go to those whose loyalty matters rather than those who are the hungriest. The suggestion of localized distribution is ananathema to a regime which believes in power and half-hearted Potemkin villages. Clothe the peasants, not the emperor!

A Poem

Westfield dome on Friday night
Near the Playstation exhibit
Fools dancing to neon lights
To Mama Commerce is the profit.

Unto the Third Generation

In light of Kim Jong-Eun's promotion to four-star general and official heir apparent (as official as it's going to get, anyway) and the simultaneous promotion of his aunt, I started thinking about the inherent stability of hereditary tyrannies, of which the government of North Korea is an excellent example, and remain skeptical about the duration of the regime. Regencies are dangerous times for any dynasty, and military support during such times can be a destabilizing force. On the other hand, the North Korea military is in a favored position, so it might contribute to a stable regime.

The history of tyrannies, however, does not inspire optimism. Most tyrannies collapse in the third generation if they have not already been overthrown. There is no chance that the North Korean populace will rebel - in fact North Korea reminds me of Apokalyps - but power struggles are possible even within a one-policy state. The economic structure of the country is so damaged that I suspect it will collapse quickly and messily when the final straw is loaded.

The Doors of Perception

Oct. 21, 2010:
One of the items in the paper today (yes, I still occasionally read the dead tree daily) is the announcement that archaeologists have discovered . what may be the oldest door in Europe. The Methuselan mahogany is estimated at five thousand years old, and hails from Switzerland. The locale of the find is not surprising, since the lakes of the Helvetian Republic have revealed many archaeological treasures. The chief archaeologist, Niels Bleicher, describes the antediluvian door in somewhat effusive terms. Certainly, the door must have been sturdy to weather five millennia of environmental abuse, but I do wonder: how much of the description of ancient artifacts is in self-defense. I prefer stairs to cellar doors, and would hesitate to dismiss an artefact as insignificant due to its basic utility, but hoi polloi might well say, "Who cares? It's just a door, even if it is well-made." Yet it is the simple things of a culture that tell you the most: individually wrapped slices of synthetic cheese and unbiquitous redundant and downright insulting instructions tell you more about American culture than the the abstract of an ivory tower thesis on trash. The facile dismissal of ordinary things, although the result of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, can lead to an equally erroneous reaction of overstatement. The archaeologists, in counteracting the public dismissal, place a greater emphasis than is warranted on their discovery. Although this reaction is not restricted to antiquarians (since everyone who believes in reincarnation wants to be a king, not a catamite), it seems that the more "ordinary" the object, the greater is this tendency.

2010 Canoe Trip

NOTE: This should have preceeded the post on camping in the redwoods.

Last weekend I went the annual canoe trip with the Junior Woodchucks. This account is of necessity redacted and changed to protect the names and identities of the (sometimes not so) innocent. Sadly, there are no postable pictures, even ones of yours truly. The Russian river was its usual temperature and color (warm and slightly green), and the contingent of Woodcraft Indians was smaller than I would have liked. This year, however, lacked the swarming invertebrates of last year's trip. Luch was absurdly early, as usual, but that's the boys' call, not mine. The pullout for the canoes was a little too narrow and steep, and there was not quite enough shade. I pulled some water from the river, trusting in my iodine tablets.

In many spots along the river, there was choice: overhanging bushes where thhe current ran, or shadeless shallows where it did not. Fortunately, I had recently and finally disentangled my broad-brimmed hat (not a petasos, sadly) from my travel wallet, which had had remained in such condition since my return from the western Mediterranean, so the spiders in the bushes did not get in my hair.

There were the usual mishaps characteristic of a river trip, but my new dry bag held up admirably. I did not witness every rescue and recovery on the trip, but the two incidents in which I was involved were resolved satisfactorily. In the former case, all the equipment was recovered, and soon the spirit of the unfortunate pair recovered as well. The latter case was harder, since it involved a swift current and large branch; more than one person lost their grip during the operation and had to fight their way back upstream, but eventually the canoe was freed from the embrace of water and wood.

Some other campers had rather unsportingly taken some of our spots when we returned to our campsite next to the Pomo general store, but I suppose some people just don't have a sense of fair play. In any case, we adapted and consolidated and still had enough table for our food groups. The campfire that night was short, since the skits were done according to food group rather than patrol. Everybody already knew the traditional songs, so I was not as creative as I could have been, but I hope I made up for that on Tuesday.

On Sunday morning, we did not continue down the river, as we once did, but we did have a Scout's Own by the river bank. The seating was uncomfortable, but we had a nice discussion of the wildlife we saw on the trip, led by our own Daniel Carter. A stone skipping contest followed the Scout's Own. The swarming insects through which the stones were bouncing had a peculiar obsession with purely vertical movement which still baffles me.

Merks and Turks

The integration crisis in Europe is continuing, both in France and Germany. The absurd and arbitrary nature of French clothing "restriction" has already been covered in this blog, but the most striking recent comment came from Germany's Angela Merkel, who claimed that the Turks in Germany must assimilate to Germany's Christian culture. The failure of assimilation or cultural synthesis is not in doubt, but what was most astonishing was this: that she claimed Germany's culture was Christian. Everything I have experienced and read about European culture suggests that Germany is not Christian, but secular. The Swiss incident earlier this year involving the minarets reinforces this impression. The French, of course, have turned secularism into a religion, although they have mellowed a little since the days of the Revolutionary calendar.

Recently I had a discussion with a friend, who is very religious and seeks the same. One of the attitudes which drives her batty is "culturally religious", in which the alleged member of a particular religion or sect does not hold the associated beliefs, but even ignores the practices. One cannot look into another heart, but one can examine the deeds.

When Merkel refers to German Christianity, she is using "Christianity" as code for "secularism". Although this secularism does not mesh well with the radicalizing form of Islam which the previously rather secular Turks have adopted, using the term "Christianity" is facile misdirection and as intellectually dishonest as American preachers who use "Christianity" as a term for the insidious "Gospel of Wealth".

Redwood Grove Camping

There's nothing quite like a redwood grove for camping. It might be a bit dark beneath the giants (even the new growth), but the canopy provides the closest thing to a good roof that you'll find in the wild. The sparse ground covering is a blessing when you are clearing the area for your ground cloth, and the patches of redwood duff, if you can find them, are delightfully soft. Redwoods, however, feed off the fog, so make sure you have good rain gear!

Beginner's Assyrian

My New Year's resolution is preceeding in fits and starts (sometimes precipitated by my absent-minded professor habit of forgetting where my books are, and sometimes by the plethora of projects on which I am working) but I have begun Beginners' Assyrian, trusting in the similarities to Biblical Hebrew to give me a leg up, not under any illusion that the differences would present challenges.

The first challenge, of course, was the gross mismatch between the radical-based Semitic morphology of the Assyrian language and the determinative- and syllable-based orthography of cuneiform. One of the motivations for the adoption, if not creation, of the Semitic writing system (I suspect) was this mismatch. It was as if the problem with English transcription and translation in both Chinese and Japanese were combined!

The second challenge was the Assyrian reduction of the proto-Semitic consonants under the influence of Sumerian, which possessed a radically different morphology. I had thought the non-pronounciation of 'aleph and 'ayin in Modern Hebrew (which I had been using as my model for pronouncing Biblical Hebrew) created enough difficulties. Assyrian, on the other hand, witnessed the collapse of six proto-Semitic consonants (and waw) into near-indistinguishable phonological effects. Since Assyrian is a Semitic language, however, the tridical structure applies, even if two of the consonants are so weak as so to disappear entirely!

The third challenge was the tendency towards vowel harmony in Assyrian, which appeared also in its sister dialect of Babylonian. Sumerian had vowel harmony, possibly mitigated by tonal differences, but even Hebrew shows evidence of morphologically-specific vowel harmony. Babylonian was the language that replaced Sumerian in that language's ancient heartland, aand thus experienced the greatest level of vowel harmony (although not to the extent that it destroyed the typical Semitic structure), and Hebrew experienced a very low level, but the effect on Assyrian lay between the two. One has to wonder how much of the vowel harmony within the Assyrian Empire was the result of the infamous deportation policies, which mixed many tribes who spoke similar Semitic tongues; thus they shared structural similarities but not necessarily vowels.

Take Me To The Stars

The discovery of a another new planet around Gliese 581, just a score of light-years away from terra firma, shot my mood through the roof. The hyperbole of the astronomer making the announcement (assuming that the journalist did not strategically edit the quote) may be forgiven, since it is tremendously exciting news. The interested public, however, does need a reminder that most life is not on the human scale, and that Kal-El's homeworld probably wasn't in the greatest shape before it exploded.

The casual dismissal of planets unsuitable for sustained human existence, under which category most of the Gliese planets fall, distresses me and strikes me as ridiculously anthropocentric. Already in our system there are worlds covered in ice which may have life in hidden oceans, and if so, it won't be humanoid. Even if such planets lack life until a contaminated probe burrows into their subglacial depths, and even if the worlds of Gliese 581 lack any life, the study of these worlds is valuable in itself. If humanity ever does escape Earth's gravity well, it would be useful to know what sort of resources exist in the great beyond - any interstellar colony would only have what was in the system, after all. Even if humanity remains within the SOlar System and eventually dies out as the nineteenth race on Neptune, study of other worlds would inform us about geology, chemistry, and meteorology. Too bad teleportation is still at the sub-atomic stage!

Snakes, Sinners, and Saints

It's Sunday, so it seemed appropriate that I study the "original language" on this day. I figure the Almighty wouldn't mind if I studied some Hebrew in order to read the words of his book. I am close enough to the end of Ross' "Introducing Biblical Hebrew" that all the reading exercises are taken from the Good Book (in this case, Gen. 2:15-24 at the end of Lesson 49). The repetition of roots in Hebrew oratory seems less absurd than the equivalent King James English. Is this the result of the diversity of forms in Hebrew compared to the paucity of English? Another benefit of reading the passages in Hebrew is the clear identification of prose from verse. This distinction is sometimes lost in the translations into other languages, and prose and poetry often do not fit well into the other genre.

The grammatical form du jour is the Qal passive (herein exemplified by לֻקֳחָה), which the Rabbinic Scholars appear not to have believed to exist, since the standard passive form corresponding to the Qal is the Niph'al. The vocalization for the Qal passive is identical to the Pu'al, but who knows if that's how David would have pronounced it?

On other news, I have moved my "Learn Maltese: Why Not?" (the real title of the book) and its accompanying workbook up to Tahoe. This does not exempt me from including it in my New Year's resolution, but shifts it to next summer's segment of the project. I re-read the grammar sections of the book and understood much more clearly after spending so much of my summer learning Biblical Hebrew.

The Tahoe Tongue: Phonology and Orthography

I wrote this post about half a year ago, so my knowledge of the Washo language and its current state was considerably less, but the sentiments expressed herein remain authentic.

Several years ago, on one of my many visits to the Watson Cabin in Tahoe City, I bought a slim book labeled Beginning Washo, the language of the indigenous tribe which used to camp in summer around Lake Tahoe (in those days, only white people would be crazy enough to live there in winter). I went through the exercises, although too hastily to absorb them. I am afraid that is a common fault of mine, and one of the reason I discuss Washoe here is to pace myself.

More recently, I decided to redo the exercises (there are only twenty-two, after all) slowly and thoroughly, so that I would know the native language of the basin where I spend so much time. My conscience is rather severe about white men learning Native American tongues, especially when the tribe is still extant (as several members of  my favored fraternity know), but all the data I could find on Washo indicated that it was a moribund language. "Moribund" in linguistics, means that a language will soon lack native speakers (the tribe itself still exists). The only website I could find on the Washo language did mention a training camp for the youngsters of the tribe, but it dates from 2000, and the precedents for attempted language revival are extremely depressing. I would rather know something about the language really spoken at Lake Tahoe rather than pretend it never existed.

Another reason I want to learn some Washo properly has to do with the mythology of the Tahoe basin. When I was a child, I was under the impression that there were no native people of the basin, since the Washo, and the same-named lake were clearly in Nevada, and they had only come up in summer. Some of this perception was perhaps due to my custom of spending summers there and winters in San Francisco. The lack of a native mythology bothered me, so I composed some myths about the origins of crawdads and minnows based on the landscape of my summer home. I found the alleged native stories from the mid-20th century Tahoe City World un-credible as authentic stories, as well as patronizing.

When I was quite a bit older, I learned of some of the genuine traditional tales of the Washo, which I appreciated greatly, but I did not become inspired until I found Beginning Washo. My Classical training has taught me about the tight connection of language and culture, and I would not have received a Classics degree if I were not fascinated with language structure.

Solresol

Solresol is an invented language of the 19th century based on the seven notes of the C major scale, although in principle one could use any seven-note scale. This may seem an odd origin for an a priori system, unless one realizes that the inventor, one Francois Sudre, a French patriot, had developed it for military communications before the invention of the telegraph. This musical origin explains the use of relative length and stress in determining gender and plurality, and the profoundly non-anthropic use of a pause after every word. Sudre, a native French speaker, was still bound by the gender and number constraints of his mother tongue. Sudre's musical language was deemed brilliant, but unusable by the French military, which devastated the patriot. Since his system rested on the use of seven distinct units, there was no restriction in principle to the realm of music or speech. Sudre developed Solresol formats based on noise, touch, color and other media. All this creativity took place before Gallatin and the invention of Braille, so a communication system for the blind, the deaf, and the mute was a pressing concern for creators of invented languages or those who serves the disadvantaged communities. Whereas previous a priori languages had categorized concepts in a tree familiar to present-day biology students, Sudre used a series of notes or repetition of the same note to indicate the categories. Since Solresol had to be spoken as well as played and sung, the words were monophonic rather than polyphonic. Solresol suffered from this characteristic flaw of logical languages: the systematic categorization of concepts result in similar concepts sounding too similiar in phonology. This, in fact, may have been one of the reasons for the French military's rejection of Solresol. For some years, Sudre toured Europe promoting his language, but the audiences tended to view Solresol as an ingenious parlor trick rather than a valid method of communication.

Solresol enjoyed a brief popularity at the end of the 19th century, but then died out. Its infamy among those who are interested in logical and creative languages stems from its inherent bizarreness, while other, more conventional spoken systems have been forgotten. The Esperanto Wikipedia, naturally, has an extensive article on it. I suspect it was more tolerable to hear in the days when every cultured person was expected to play an instrument or sing. I suspect there were severe constraints on its flexibility and ability to create new vocabulary, but the current resources I can find on Solresol are so meager it is hard to be sure. There is a grammar (http://mozai.com/writing/not_mine/solresol/sorsoeng.htm), but the dictionary is missing, and somehow I doubt that the early 20th-century Paris address is still valid. I have watched an extraordinary video of the balcony scene in Solresol
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK9lspk0hAM )
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf83Z1rUMCo&feature=related )
and the band Melomane has a song called Solresol
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPISqn7VfNY )
, although the song is neither in Solresol nor, I suspect, translatable into it due to the presence of of flats and sharps in the song. The most famous, if unnoticed, use of Solresol in modern media is its use as the language of the aliens in Encounters of the Third Kind
( http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=encounters+of+the+third+kind ).
This seems to be an homage to the use of Esperanto as a non-descript human language in films set "abroad", and explains why the notes at the end have the feel of a language, despite their brevity.