I'M DONE WORK.

A recent post by Anatoly (in Russian) sent me to this post at Ganesha's Scarf, which describes a phenomenon of Canadian speech of which I had been entirely ignorant:

Yesterday Libby informed me that for the past YEAR she has thought that I had some grammar problem because I kept saying I was done things… “I’m done work,” I’m done my sandwich,” I’m done Bossypants so now you can take it”, etc. Apparently she didn’t want to point it out lest she embarrass me, until the other day when she heard another Canadian interviewed who kept saying the same thing. (btw for everyone who has no clue what’s wrong with these quotes, apparently most people would say “I’m done with work” “I’m done with my sandwich” [...]

This blogpost is very likely the first website to write anything about the issue. All I’ve managed to find is a lot of arguing on various forums on whether it should be “I’m done dishes” or “I’m done with homework.” The forums confirm that this is Canadian and common to some parts of the East Coast – NJ, New Hampshire, Philadelphia.

READING NOTES ON RUSSIAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY.

Kenny Cargill has a relatively new blog on Russian history, culture, language, and literature ("I will also be discussing many readings from my M.A. thesis treating Fyodor Dostoevsky's significance as a public intellectual and journalist during the 1870s"); it's been around since August 2010, but there are only seven posts so far. The two most recent are a review of The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English, by Rachel May, which I got for Christmas and am looking forward to reading. I found this paragraph a little odd:

If readers could only become familiar with some translation theory, then perhaps they would be receptive to these more avant-garde translations. In particular, Lawrence Venuti in his The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation has contributed the notion of "abusive translation," meaning translation that deliberately subverts English stylistic conventions, in providing an academic framework in which to appreciate translations that privilege fidelity to the original text's linguistic structure over all other considerations. Such a technique is ultimately bound to contribute more to the literature of the target language: "If a work is worth translating, then it should not just slip unobtrusively into the target language. It should be allowed to stretch and challenge that language with the same vitality that its original possesses — possibly even a greater vitality, born of new linguistic and metaphorical contrasts" (8). The problem is, however, that most English-language critics and readers, and particularly those monolingual readers who have no way of understanding or appreciating how the target-language translation mimics the source-language text, will naturally privilege fluency, comprehensibility and even some stylistic normativity over experimentation.

SOME LINKS.

People have been sending me interesting links that I thought I'd pass on to y'all:

1) A Brief History of Blurbs, by Alan Levinovitz. You knew, of course, that the word blurb was coined in 1906 by Gelett Burgess, but did you know that quasi-blurbs (though not on the outside of books) can be traced back to ancient Rome and medieval Egypt, where authors and booksellers "were soliciting longer poems of praise (taqriz) from big-shot friends in the 1300s"? Read some truly loathsome examples of hyperbole, fakery, and shameless cronyism, and writhe in agony at the very idea of blaps and blovers.

2) If you read Russian, Mischa Gabowitsch has collected slogans of the current Russian demonstrations, at this blog, which features photos, links, and a corpus of hundreds of slogans in Russian and other languages, from Czech to Japanese. Mischa says, "It is part of a research project to document the role of the Internet in shaping the language of civil society in Russia."

3) Avery Morrow has an very interesting page about "The Undecipherable Poem, No. 9 of the Manyoshu." Not only has the poem never been deciphered, it's omitted by all English translators; it's not even in my heavy old 1940 Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai edition. I very much like the rendition "Wyrg gende acbire madentag wher myne Seko once stode, at the rootes of Itsukashi." (Via the latest post at No-sword, about poem #1 of the Man'yōshū, the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry.)

4) Aspiring young translators will want to know about the fourth annual Rossica Young Translators Award, which "is open to anyone who will be 24 or younger on the deadline for submissions, which is 15 March 2012. Entrants are required to translate 1 of 3 extracts from recent Russian novels." If you're interested, go here and download the brochure containing the extracts and terms and conditions.

ETYMOLOGY MAN.

xkcd presents: Etymology Man! As always, don't forget to read the mouseover text. (Thanks, Sven!)

While I have your attention, I am puzzled by the term "affectus" in the following sentence from Russia's Alternative Prose, by Robert Porter (Berg, 1994): "It would be difficult to find a more authentic-sounding amalgam of half-digested official propaganda, perfunctory reading, emotional confusion and popular bigotry than Irina's outpourings here - she sounds like the Soviet equivalent of an affectus-cum-aficionado of the British gutter press." The word, if it can be called that in English, isn't in the OED or any other dictionary I have access to, and I'm afraid Etymology Man isn't of much help, since the Latin word affectus has too many meanings (as a noun, 'mental state; strong feeling; physical condition; influence; eagerness; sympathy, affection; purpose; attitude,' and as an adjective 'endowed with; disposed; (harmfully) affected, impaired; related (to), connected (with); emotional') and it's not clear which if any might be intended. If anyone has any helpful suggestions, I'm all ears. (If it matters, "she" is the protagonist of Viktor Erofeev's Russian Beauty.)

THRUMCAP.

My wife and I are on the seventh of the Aubrey-Maturin books, The Surgeon's Mate (which means we're eating them up at a rate of almost one a month—see this post for the start of the voyage—and will have finished the series sometime in the spring of 2013, and what will we do then?), and when I read the start of Chapter Three, "The Diligence tided it down the long harbour during the night, and before daybreak she was clear of the Little Thrumcap," of course I had to know where and what the Little Thrumcap was. The Nova Scotia Pilot provides the answer [text below the cut for those who can't see the Google Books image]:

But another question remained: what's a thrumcap? Here we turn to the OED and find "Thrum... A short piece of waste thread or yarn...; pl. or collect. sing. odds and ends of thread... thrum cap, a cap made of thrums." You can see a couple of illustrations (including one from the movie Master and Commander!) here, as well as read "The Ballad of the Caps" ("The Saylors with their Thrums do stand/ On higher place than all the land").

Oh, and here's a splendid painting, "H.M.S. Shannon Leading Her Prize the American Frigate Chesapeake into Halifax Harbour," in case you too are a devotee of O'Brian and would enjoy seeing such a thing.

BRONEVOY, STIERLITZ THOUGHT.

I've recently discovered (via Sashura) Olga Kagan's new blog The Fun of Language and the Language of Fun, which has only been in existence for a week; the Welcome post says "This blog will be devoted to various exciting topics that are related to language, and I am planning to begin with two more specific topics – animal communication and humor." I'm not all that interested in animal communication, but I do enjoy humor, and yesterday's post, Homonymy in Russian Jokes about Stierlitz, is very funny indeed if you know Russian. If you don't, she explains the jokes for you, but as she says, "when a joke based on homonymy is translated and then explained, the result is not funny at all." But in general, her posts don't require knowledge of other languages; Polysemy in Winnie-the-Pooh and Other Stories, the follow-up to the homonymy post, is a good example. In any case, welcome to the blogosphere, Olga!

ONE MEMENTO MORI, TWO MEMENTO MORI.

I try not to be shocked by what to me are glaring errors of usage in print, soothing myself with the reflection that times have changed, no one studies the classical languages any more, and you can't tie the present to the millstone of the past. And yet it bothered me exceedingly when I read, in Christopher Benfey's review of several books about Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, the sentence "Her skulls are not mementi mori but resurrections." It's true that the plurals of Italian words in -o end in -i, but memento is not an Italian word, it is the singular imperative of the Latin verb meminisse 'to remember' (memento mori means 'remember [that you are going] to die'), and the plural of the phrase in English is the same as the singular. I am pleased to see that the online version of the article has corrected the sentence ("Her skulls are not memento mori but resurrections"); I imagine some harried copyeditor was responsible for the error, since Benfey, the author, is a professor of English. At any rate, this post is a public service announcement, written in the hope that others may be dissuaded from making the same mistake. (N.b.: The word memento by itself is from the same Latin imperative, but the plural is mementos, and that's OK, because it's a single word and inevitably became anglicized. Phrases are different.)

AND SO A GOES TO HEAVEN.

A post at bradshaw of the future investigates the Gloucestershire epicene pronoun ou, which "derives from Middle English a, which in turn derives from Old English he 'he' and heo 'she'":

So was Middle English a really an epicene pronoun? Well, we have examples of it from Trevisa standing for both "he" and "she", as in these cites from the OED [...] It's in Shakespeare too. Here Hamlet is talking about Polonius.

1604 Shakespeare Hamlet iii. iii. 73 Now might I doe it, but now a is a praying, And now Ile doo't, and so a goes to heauen.

Modern versions have

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I'll do't. And so he goes to heaven;

But there seems to be a difference between a and singular they. In the examples above, the antecedents have known genders. Singular they is usually not used when the gender of the antecedent is known. What I'd like to know is: can Middle English a (or Gloucester ou) be used when the gender of the antecedent is unknown or irrelevant?