Bob bothers a guy who does cool stuff for UNESCO

Dear Professor Tapani Salminen,

I e-bothered you some years ago to thank you for the Endangered Languges site. To me it is the most fascinating website in all Cyberspace, and perhaps, in a world of very sad things, the saddest website in Cyberspace. Please make sure it lives in Cyberspace forever.

You wrote me back more fascinating things. You wrote me about how the evolution of languages can be Lamarckian, not just Darwinian. I have been thinking about that ever since.

Anyway, I am e-bothering you again. But this time I want to give you something that you may find valuable.

Switzerland, right now, this weekend, is voting OUI or NON or JA or NEIN or SI or NO on the Schengen / Dublin Treaty. (You are European, you know what this is. I am American, I am clueless.)

But as you can imagine, this vote is enormously controversial. It strikes at the heart of the Swiss' beloved historical Neutrality.

So, this weekend, and maybe for a few days after Sunday, everywhere in Switzerland are huge roadside billboards:

OUI! JA GEA! NON NON OUI! NEIN SI NA SI NO! NO NON NEIN!!! OUI OUI! NEIN GEA!!!!!

Did you notice the GEA and the NA? This weekend only, somewhere in Europe, they are on billboards and they are 5 meters high.

My Schweitzerdeutsches friend in CH says

(1.) he has no digital camera and

(2.) the Romansch Canton is 200 km from him.

He is my friend, but he is hopeless and useless. And I am in America. Frustrated.

Also I so very much want, in this order:

OUI JA

(and also, of course,

JA OUI )

Well. Your site is a serious academic UNESCO site. And I, obviously, am a Strange Art Clown from the USA. (Actually I am a minor obscure well-regarded novelist / romaniste / bucheschreiber, and when I need money, my old racket, newspaper journalism.)

But maybe the Endangered Languages site could use just a little image art. Not, exactly, "for fun." There is No Fun in the dying of these wonderful languages. I am a Jew and in our correspondence we talked about the extinct Jewish languages of Europe that I had never even known existed.

But, for your office wall, or perhaps as a very appropriate and respectful thing on your website, you could post a photograph of

GAE!!! NA!!! NA!!! NA!!! GEA!!! etc.

... visual evidence of the last loud scream of an endangered European language.

If you make the phone call and find the Romansch who has the digital camera and you get very lucky in the next day or two (before they take all the billboards down), please send copies of results to the Strange American Art Clown (and well-regarded novelist, also when hungry, the journalist).

I have a new blog, Vleeptron, and Europeans who read it, and I, talk about this strange billboard forest in Switzerland this week, and we talk about your site, and make jokes behind your back about you (I hope you laugh at my jokes, but much more I hope my jokes do not offend you, I admire you and your work so very much) at:

http://vleeptron.blogspot.com/2005/06/urgent-message-to-nostrapatspubus.html

Vleeptron has "salty language" (does that translate well into Suomi?) ... English words and phrases usually spoken by English-speaking sailors and Army sergeants, not in polite social circles. What can I say? I was a newspaper journalist for many years, and we are not allowed to participate in polite social circles.

But I try to make Vleeptron a feast for the educated and curious mind. If you click and read, please let me know if I have in some small way succeeded in this, or if I have been an abysmal failure. Best of all: Leave A Comment. Make me very proud and honored. Already we have the playwright from Lisboa, the university teacher from Lisboa, the guy without the digital camera in CH -- and even the fellow who claims to be an Endangered Frisian, from Syld, DE. He and I are having the most wonderful e-mail correspondence about Frisian, and a few days ago he sent me the "Frisian News," one page in the local newspaper which is in modern Frisian of that region one day a week. (My wife says it looks a little like Old Norse to her, she is the scholar of Beowulf.)

Please let me know if you want The Frisian Weekly News, I would be thrilled to send it to you. (Maybe a good recipe in Frisian ...)

Oh, if you get those GAE NA or OUI JA photos by some miracle ... I am sorry my CH friend is so hopeless.

Admiring you and your most important and fascinating work,

Bob Merkin

Northampton Massachusetts USA

(also Planet Vleeptron)

P.S. If you run into Andy McCoy or any other surviving members of Hanoi Rocks, could you get me their autograph? Tell them an American fan (and USA Army veteran of Vietnam War) says hi.