LUMIERE.

I occasionally run across clippings I tucked into books years ago, and I just found one that had a quote so marvelous I had to share it with you all. A Scott Kraft piece on the Lumière brothers in the Los Angeles Times of Dec. 24, 1995 (on the occasion of the centennial of their first public exhibition of films to a paying audience) included this sentence:

The Lumière brothers have a special place in the hearts of the French, who now use the word lumière to mean "light."

MICASE.

The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English is the product of a research project begun in 1997 to answer these questions:
· What are the characteristics of contemporary academic speech—its grammar, its vocabulary, its functions and purposes, its fluencies and dysfluencies?
· Are these characteristics different for different academic disciplines and for different classes of speakers?
The History page says:

The goal of the first phase of the project was to record and transcribe close to 200 hours (approximately 1.8 million words) of academic speech from across the university. In June 2001, we finished the recording goal, with over 190 total hours recorded. In April 2002, we completed transcribing and proofreading all the transcripts... This search engine is notable for the large number of speaker and speech-event categories that can be selected. The search engine has increased in popularity each year since its launch, approaching as many as 140,000 hits in 2006.

The ELI committed resources to MICASE for a series of interlocking reasons. First, there was originally no database of this kind available. Second, we strongly suspected that once we examined the corpus for recurrent grammatical and phraseological patterns, we would find many divergences from those described in current grammar and vocabulary books, which have largely relied on introspection or on features of written texts. MICASE will thus provide authentic material in sufficient quantity to redefine our concepts of academic speech. Third, we eventually hope to be able to track generalized changes in speech patterns as people gain experience of university culture. (Although we know quite a lot about how academic writing evolves as students progress, our current perceptions of speech changes within academic cultures are largely anecdotal.) Fourth, with all this new information, we—and others elsewhere—will be in a better position to develop more appropriate ESL and English for Academic Purpose teaching and testing materials, and to evaluate how best to incorporate corpus work into EAP programs.

MUSEUM OF CHARACTERS.

Anyang, one of the ancient capitals of China, is now home to the National Museum of Chinese Written Language, as reported in a story by Xing Daiqi:

According to Xinhua, the museum, with an initial investment of 400 million yuan ($58 million), covers an area of 54,000 square meters. A combination of the old and new, the building has drawn inspiration from palaces of the Shang Dynasty (C. 1600-1100BC) and post-modern architecture. The five-story facility has a striking embossed golden roof and grand red columns.[...]

Divided into eight exhibition halls, the museum illustrates the history and evolution of Chinese characters through different dynasties and various ethnic groups in China.

BROTHER-IN-LAW.

Is the husband of your wife's sister your brother-in-law?

I would have said "no" and been pretty sure I was reflecting standard usage, but it turns out I would have been wrong. Bill Poser at the Log has a post about this, sparked by "a news item in which men in this situation (one of whom is accused of trying to hire an assassin to kill the other) were described as brothers-in-law"; he was surprised to see it, because to him "there is no named relationship" between such men. I agreed with him, but he and I are in a distinct minority; most of the (so far) 74 comments say things like (to take the first two) "I use brother-in-law in that context, as does my wife" and "It never occurred to me not to use 'brother-in-law' to refer to my wife's sister's husband." I thought perhaps it was a generational thing, since Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary has the definition "broadly : the husband of one's spouse's sister," whereas the entry in the newest (eleventh) edition drops the "broadly" and just includes "the husband of one's spouse's sister" as one of the basic senses, but I asked my wife and she has no problem with the broad sense. Furthermore, in the Log thread, Jerry Friedman (November 20, 2009 @ 3:14 am) said, "This has come up on alt.usage.english a few times, and the results are much like those here—everything from people who've never heard the extended sense to people who thought everyone used it. I don't recall any regional pattern ever showing up."

So I thought I'd ask you all the question I began with; you might add, for scientific purposes, where you're from (or, if different, what dialect you speak), and (if, of course, you feel like it) your approximate age.

GABO AND THE DICTIONARY.

Someone at MetaFilter linked to "In the Shadow of the Patriarch," a long, long New Republic article by Enrique Krauze on "Gabriel García Márquez and the demons of his time." I'll confess up front that I've only read the first of its nine pages, and furthermore that I may very well not get any farther; I've enjoyed most of the García Márquez I've read, but I've already read more than I really need about his life, times, and politics. However, the article begins with a reflection on his relations with the dictionary, which seemed like obvious LH material:

Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied.

Anywhere in the world, if a grandfather presents his grandson with a dictionary, he is giving him a great instrument of knowledge; but Colombia was not just anywhere. It was a republic of grammarians. During the youth of García Márquez’s grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía, who was born in 1864 and died in 1936, a number of presidents and government ministers—almost all of them lawyers from the conservative camp—published dictionaries, language textbooks, and treatises (in prose and verse) on orthology, orthography, philology, lexicography, meter, prosody, and Castilian grammar. Malcolm Deas, a scholar of Colombian history who has studied this singular phenomenon, claims that the obsession with language that was expressed by the cultivation of these sciences—their practitioners, Deas notes, insisted on calling them "sciences"—had its origin in the urge for continuity with the cultural heritage of Spain. By claiming "Spain’s eternal presence in the language," Colombians sought to possess its traditions, its history, its classic authors, its Latin roots. This appropriation, preceded by the foundation in 1871 of the Colombian Academy of Language, the first offshoot in America of the Royal Spanish Academy, was one of the keys to the long period of conservative hegemony—it lasted from 1886 to 1930—in Colombian political history.

Continue reading "GABO AND THE DICTIONARY."

Posted by languagehat at 08:19 PM | Comments (18)

VOLTA.

Volta: A Multilingual Anthology "contains seventy-five poems in seventy-five languages. Seventy-four of these poems are translations of one poem, the seventy-fifth." You can read the English poem (the original) at wood s lot for November 18, 2009, where I got the link; it and all the translations (in, among many others, Maltese, Mongolian, Nepali, Nigerian Pidgin, North Eastern English, and Norwegian) are available in pdf form via the first link. Here's an etymological passage from the long introduction by the poem's author, Richard Berengarten:

The title ‘Volta’ itself comes from Modern Greek. The noun βόλτα is a noun meaning ‘turn’ and also ‘walk’, ‘stroll’. The Greek expression πάμε βόλτα [pame volta] means literally *let’s go a turn,⁶ i.e. ‘let’s take a turn,’ ‘let’s go for a walk/ stroll,’ ‘let’s stretch our legs.’ The word βόλτα is also used to mean, more precisely, ‘evening promenade’, βραδινή βόλτα [vrathini volta]. The custom of the evening promenade is expressed in Italian by the word passeggiata and in Serbian, Czech and Slovak by the common word korzo. During certain hours of the early evening, around dusk, everyone in the town who might feel like going for a walk takes a saunter or stroll up and down the main street. The custom used to exist in widely different cultures, including for example, in Portugal. A version of it exists among Jewish communities on the Sabbath.⁷

The idea of ‘turning’ is embedded in the Modern Greek word and usage: βόλτα is a word of Latin origin (volgere [actually volvere—LH], to turn). So a volta in this sense is a ‘turn’, up and down and back again, in the pleasurable presence of an indeterminate number of other people who, for whatever reasons of their own, happen to be engaged in the same activity. The word volta also exists in Catalan, Galician and Portuguese, and is cognate with Spanish vuelta.⁸ In all these Romance languages the word has the primary idea of ‘turn’, ‘return’, and more or less the same idiomatic meaning of ‘taking a turn’ as in Greek.

Continue reading "VOLTA."

Posted by languagehat at 10:24 AM | Comments (114)

DELL HYMES, RIP.

I just read in Sally Thomason's post at Language Log that Dell Hymes died in his sleep last Friday. I do not have a particular interest in his area of specialization, the languages of the Pacific Northwest, but his work in linguistic anthropology combined brilliance in both elements of that term with a remarkable sensitivity to literary and artistic qualities in oral texts, and I am extremely fond of his book "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. A brief passage from its opening essay, "Some North Pacific Coast Poems: A Problem in Anthropological Philology," will give an idea of what he thought needed to be corrected in his chosen field:

On the one hand, some of those who concern themselves with the materials of verbal art assert or assume the irrelevance of linguistic control and analysis to their interpretive interest. Contrary to the experience and standards of scholarship in other fields, the style, content, structure, and functioning of texts seem to be declared "translated" (in the theological sense of the metaphor as well as the linguistic) bodily from their original verbal integument, and available for interpretation without it. Original texts are even declared in a scholarly review in the pages of the American Anthropologist to be of concern only to linguists — as if only linguists would mourn the loss of the original texts of Homer or the Bible! On the other hand, those who undertake linguistic description too often pursue it without effective concern for other students of the American Indian, or such fields as comparative poetics, to which American Indian studies should contribute.

TY AND VY, THEN AND NOW.

Anatoly makes a very interesting point about change in Russian usage since the nineteenth century (Russian below the cut):

On of the things that strikes me in Anna Karenina (which I'm rereading) is how ty [intimate 'you'] and vy [polite 'you'] work in comparison to now. Naturally, there's a different sense of distance, and naturally, there's intimacy[1], but what sticks in my memory is something else—that you can return from ty to vy, as Dolly and Oblonsky do when they quarrel. It's as if the passage from vy to ty is like a peg pressed on a stretched-out piece of rubber; all you have to do is let go of it, and immediately you return to the realm of vy. But in the Russian that is native to me, that doesn't happen; once you pass over to the intimate ty with someone, you never return, whatever happens: quarrel, divorce, burning hatred, it doesn't matter.

[1]"Forgive my having come, but I could not pass the day without seeing you [using vy forms]," he continued in French, as he always did, avoiding the vy that was impossibly cold between them and the ty that was dangerous in Russian.