Prodding the tiger Please sir I didn t mean it The smoking was one o them joke thingies Descartes Whatever he was smoking I want some But the language thing wasn t tho it probably wasn t v competent either My understanding of language issues is nothing like yours But I do feel that there is no difference between languages and dialects except the issue of power interrelated with codifying the language And the language politics in Zimbabwe are complicated I think even more so than RSA South Africa as far as my puny knowledge goes has gone from appalling but simple language values to a situation where the politics and importance of language are openly discussed and the horrors of the past give a very clear marker of what to avoid Zimbabwe on this as on so many things Won t Talk about it if you ve ever doubted the value of the TRC take a look what happens when you don t have one Btw going direct to Mark is the right thing I ve been trying to get my head round your language stuff with the intention of passing it to him as there s no way I would trust myself to incorporate most of that without supervision from you both But the older bits keep getting submerged by the new and by trivial corrections to C11th philosophers which unaccountably go nuclear but that wasn t you Talking of which if I m still on your Christmas card list I got as far as Kgotla last night Yeh the entries would be pretty short to have separately when the meaning is related Was planning to check out the format for putting two distinct meanings on one page horiz line but actually now I think more I realise they might both be dic defs rather than WP articles Hmm Watch that space