THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TIMES.

Gather round, children; it's time once again to hurl insults at that bastion of smug insularity, the New York Times. In today's Metro section there's a touching story by Corey Kilgannon about a NYC doctor, Ian Zlotolow (a gold star, incidentally, to anyone who can explain to me the morphology of that name, which is clearly based somehow on Slavic zlat-/z(o)lot- 'gold'), who first treated and then adopted a boy from Sierra Leone. So far, so good, but in an attempt to dramatize the boy's change of surroundings, the reporter produces the following:

Early last year, Lansana spoke only his tribal dialect, Mende, and hoarded food in the house. He had never been to a city, watched television, flushed a toilet or taken a shower. He had never had a real change of clothing.

But once in New York, the boy picked up English quickly, and, with his magnetic personality, made friends just by walking down the block.... When some West African cabdrivers and a college professor engaged him in dialect, he ignored them.

His "tribal dialect"? Excuse me? Mende is a language, just like English and French and all those sophisticated languages spoken by Times reporters and the people they sip aperitifs with. It is, in fact, one of the two major languages of Sierra Leone (along with Temne), with around 1.5 million speakers; it's an offshoot of the great Mande family of West Africa, which was producing epics when the ancestors of most Times reporters were chomping on radishes and waiting for Chaucer to come along and give them a literature of their own. (Apologies to devotees of the Ancren Riwle and Layamon's Brut.) Tell you what, next time you interview Nelson Mandela, why don't you ask him to say a few words for you in his tribal dialect? I'll bet a good time will be had by all.

STANDS TO REASON.

My wife asked, out of the blue, "What does 'it stands to reason' mean? When you think about it, it doesn't make any sense." I thought about it, and sure enough, it didn't make any sense. So I did a little research and discovered that it's a reminder of an obsolete phrase "to stand to," meaning (in the OED's words) 'To submit oneself to, abide by (a trial, award); to obey, accede to, be bound by (another's judgement, decision, opinion, etc.).' So originally something "stood to (obeyed) reason" in the same way as a person "stood to a judgment"; when the verbal phrase was eroded by time, the cliché remained behind, a lone outcropping, as puzzling as one of the oddly shaped mesas of Coconino County.

Some examples of the earlier usage:

1584 LYLY Campaspe I. iii. 76 In kinges causes I will not stande to schollers arguments. 1616 A. CHAMPNEY A Treatise on the Vocation of Bishops 21 Such a Reformer is not bound to stand to the judgement of the Church. 1692 BENTLEY Boyle Lect. vi. 5 Will they not stand to the grand Verdict and Determination of the Universe? 1700 J. TYRRELL Hist. Eng. II. 889 The King summon'd [them] to appear.., and stand to the Law

BLOG UGLY?

The estimable Invisible Adjunct has an entry expressing her distaste for the word "blog." This is a distaste that many other people seem to share, but I'm at a loss to account for it. Phonetically, it's a perfectly standard English word, stop + liquid + vowel + stop; I fail to see how it's any uglier than, say, "block," "plug," or "log." To my mind, it's a clear improvement over "weblog," which is harder to use as a verb or combine with other words. It's a nice short English monosyllable. True, it's new, and the new always makes people nervous, but I would think the blogging community would embrace their very own novelty. At any rate, I wanted to get some feedback: any thoughts on why the word is disliked? If you dislike it, how do you feel about the comparison with the phonetically similar words I mentioned?

NO XHOSA, PLEASE, WE'RE WELSH.

I have absolutely no comment on this story, for which I have Maureen to thank (thanks, Maureen!):

Complaints have been made following the decision to strip Llanelli's Ysgol Dewi Sant of the top first prize in the under-12s choir competition.

The school won the contest at Margam Park, Port Talbot, singing a translation of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika (Lord Bless Africa) - the former Africa National Congress anthem which has now been incorporated into the national anthem of South Africa.

Most of the song was performed in Welsh, but one verse was sung in the original Xhosa.

Competition rules state that as Welsh is the offical language of the event, only Welsh can be used on stage.

Once organisers had been alerted to the "rule-breaking" performance, they decided to remove the award.

They said the performance was able to slip through the net as this particular competition did not go through the usual network of local and county eisteddfodau.

But headteacher Meirion Davies criticised the decision - saying the school had used a foreign language when they won a similar competition five years ago....

Urdd Chief Executive Jim O'Rourke said it might be possible in future years for some minority languages to be heard in eisteddfod competitions.

Earlier this year, a group Ysgol Penglais from Aberystwyth was removed from a county eisteddfod for using a verse in the Cornish language during their disco dancing.

ADJECTIVAL MEN, PREPOSITIONAL WOMEN.

A computer program can allegedly distinguish between male and female authors with 80% accuracy. If this can be independently verified, I guess you can't argue with success, but I'm deeply suspicious of anything that runs on this kind of fuel:

"Women have a more interactive style," said Shlomo Argamon, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago who developed the program. "They want to create a relationship between the writer and the reader."

Men, on the other hand, use more numbers, adjectives and determiners - words such as "the," "this" and "that" - because they apparently care more than women do about conveying specific information.

Uh huh. Anyway, read all about it in the Jewish World Review story (which I chose out of a bunch of identical ones from different newspapers because it has the URL of a site where you can examine Argamon's research); thanks to Laputan Logic for the story (he gives a link to The Age, but it's the same old applesauce).

Addendum. Related MetaFilter thread.

LANGUAGE PRIDE.

Neighbouring groups in Papua New Guinea had contact through intermarriage, trade and warfare, leading to a certain amount of bilingualism or competence in other dialects. A sizeable minority of New Guinean women have had the experience of being linguistic 'foreigners' in the village into which they have married.

'We might well ask why such contacts did not lead to a lessening of linguistic differences. A partial explanation probably lies in the fact that New Guineans often make use of other-language and other-dialect knowledge in rhetoric and verbal art, highlighting the known differences between their own and neighbouring speech varieties. It appears that contacts with and awareness of other languages have led not to levelling but to heightened consciousness of and pride in difference.'

Gillian Sankoff, The social life of language (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980) pp. 9-10, abridged

Quoted in Andrew Dalby, Dictionary of Languages (Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 491

Dalby points out that PNG "is linguistically the most complex region of the world. In mountainous, forested and swampy country, full of obstacles to travel, the languages of New Guinea have been developing and interacting for 40,000 years... It is a massive challenge to historical linguistics to trace language relationships that may date back 40,000 years or more. Genealogical trees have been drawn that link all the languages of New Guinea into a very few 'phyla', but for the present these all-embracing families are little more than blueprints for future research."

TEXAS GERMAN.

Turns out there's a 150-year-old German community in Texas that is in the final stages of assimilation; the Texas German Dialect Project is trying to record as much as possible of the dialect before it disappears for good. From a Daily Texan article by Lori Slaughenhoupt:

It all began when he was eating at a restaurant in Fredericksburg, Texas.

During lunch, Hans Boas, an assistant professor of Germanic Studies at the University, overheard a conversation that he quickly found would impact his life.

"People were sitting next to me speaking German, and I thought, 'Hey, what's going on?'" said Boas, who is from Gottingen, Germany. "When I got back to Austin, I went to the library, and there was all this stuff on Texas-German [dialect] from research done in the '50s and '60s."

After reading the research, Boas found that English, Spanish and German were once the primary languages spoken in Texas. He decided to research the dying Texas-German dialect before it was gone forever.

"What struck me about Texas-German was that after reading descriptions from the '50s and '60s, I realized that all of the sudden, it's different," Boas said. "In just 40 years, the sounds, grammar and word use has changed."

Although he knew funding for language-revival programs is often hard to obtain, Boas applied for a grant from the University. In September 2001, after receiving one from the dean of liberal arts, Boas founded the Texas German Dialect Project....

Germans settled in much of Central Texas after the 1840s. It was then that the Adelsverein, the Society of Noblemen — was organized in what is now Germany and encouraged thousands to go to Texas....

The American culture, which especially began to become incorporated after World War I in the 1920s and 1930s, is the reason Texas-German has not been passed to future generations, Boas said. The introduction of English-only laws after the world wars made it even more difficult for the German culture — especially the language — to be passed on....

"Texas has this rich history of culture in terms of language and, up until World War I, Texas was trilingual," Boas said. "What makes Texas so unique is that it is much more open toward cultures that are different. You don't see that in other states."

Thanks to Andrew Krug for the links!

SAPIR-WHORF AND TRANSLATABILITY IN AKAN.

A wide-ranging 1996 interview in which Kai Kresse, editor of polylog, talks with Kwasi Wiredu, a Ghanaian philosopher, contains a section in which issues relevant to both the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the possibility of translation are discussed in terms of Wiredu's native language, Akan (map):

Kresse: Here, of course, the crucial point is language; so it is the language, the words, the concepts of philosophy which you describe as having to be cleansed of colonial burden. Using a phrase of Ngugi, one could say that colonising the mind is what has happened, and the objective must now be the project of decolonizing the mind at all different levels. Ngugi has worked on doing that in literature, and your programme is to work on decolonizing philosophical thought. In both cases we can speak of a decolonization, a liberation of the language in which Africans think or express themselves.

This now raises several difficult issues, above all maybe the relativity of languages, which gravely affect philosophical concepts. For example, you have sketched out that in your language Akan the famous phrase of Descartes, »I think, therefore I am« (cogito ergo sum), would be unintelligible. My question now is: is this an unsolvable problem – because the start of philosophy is inevitably within the language which one speaks, in which one perceives the world and with which one constructs meaning in the world? Taking you as an example, an Akan who has studied in English and has thus learned to philosophize in English: doesn't there always remain a dilemma of the two options in which to philosophize? You could either philosophize in Akan or in English, but even upon the same issue that might be two different ways of philosophizing within yourself.

The question is, does not the language problem have to be linked to the project of an intercultural dialogue, which, if it wants to be fair and open to all (i.e. on a level of real equality), it has, above all, to grant equality on the level of language? Could you sketch out possibilities of how the language problem in the project of such an intercultural dialogue could be surmounted?

Wiredu: You have put the problem very nicely, and it is an extremely important one.... What I try to show is that, even though human beings are different, for example, they have different languages, and they have different ways of conceptualizing some very important matters, still they are all simply featherless bipeds, and as featherless bipeds they are also subject to certain fundamental rules of reaction with the environment. And it is because of this that they can exchange ideas over everything, in philosophy, in (practical) ethics or whatever.

As we start, we must be aware of the differences: we must investigate the differences. But when we have brought the differences to attention, we can then work on cross-cultural evaluation.... And, indeed, in the programme of decolonization, I envisage two stages: first, to elicit the differences, but second, to use what I call the independent considerations, i.e. considerations that are independent of the peculiarities of a particular language or culture, to make cross-cultural evaluations.

So if you take the Cartesian example, "I think, therefore I am" (which is a very good one for these purposes), the reason why he is able to say sum, "I am", in the given context, is that in the language he is using there is something like the existential verb "to be" which can be used independently. In the Akan language there is no corresponding term representing this form of the word "to be". Now, there is no special problem about this. Because I am an Akan who understands English, I can see the correspondences nevertheless. So that in itself is not a problem at all.

But I understand why an Akan, thinking and speaking in her own language, will not say something like that. He or she does not have the words for that in Akan. You see, "I think" in my language is medwen or mesusu asem, meaning, etymologically "I measure", "I measure a matter". Now, if I try to construct something like Descartes' existential sum, it will be something like mewo, which is meaningless. (The apparent Akan equivalent would have to be something like mewo ho, which says "I am there", whose locative significance would be suicidal from the point of view of both the epistemology and the metaphysics of the cogito.) Thus here we have a difference of structure, but the run of thought itself can be understood by the Akan who bothers to learn Latin, English, French, German or related languages. If he bothers to learn those languages, he can also see what is going on in Descartes' sentence.

The way your language functions can predispose you to several ways of talking and, indeed, to several ways of reasoning. But we can, if we learn each other's language, see what is happening, and we will be able to sweep a lot of those translational things aside and argue on the main points. Now, if I want to take on Descartes, it is not going to be enough for me just to say that the concept of sum is not in my language, therefore the statement is nonsense. No! I would have to go further, to develop my argument in English (or the relevant language). I maintain that I can develop a critique in English which is aided by the tendencies that I start with in my Akan language. But that is just the beginning, it can never be the ending: it is, in fact, only the beginning of a never-ending procedure.

The next section, Going intercultural, going multilingual?, is also interesting:

Time is short in the world, so some people, some philosophers will probably remain in the same language. Those who are specially interested in intercultural philosophy, however, would probably want to be able to use other languages in philosophical thought, in particular, languages which are very different from their own. And then they could see what can be done in and through cross-cultural evaluations.

(Via wood s lot.)

SAVING CUNEIFORM DIGITALLY.

The LA Times has a nice story by Louise Roug about the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (a joint project of UCLA and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science), connecting it with the recent destruction in Iraq:

In a windowless office at UCLA's Kinsey Hall, professor Robert Englund is translating clay markings into bytes, turning one of the oldest forms of communication into one of the newest.

Englund and a few graduate students in the Department of Assyriology have undertaken an ambitious task: archiving the contents of cuneiform tablets scattered throughout the world. With the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, they are trying to create a centralized inventory of cuneiform for scholars, and — in the wake of the looting in Iraq — a tool for investigators....

Not surprisingly, one of the most important and extensive collections of cuneiform has long been in the possession of the National Museum of Iraq. Englund, a professor of Near Eastern language and culture who studied the collection on several visits before the Gulf War, estimates that it then contained more than 100,000 tablets and text fragments. (By comparison, the British Museum's cuneiform holdings, the largest single collection in the world, has 150,000 pieces.)

No one knows the fate of the Iraq museum's collection at this time. But Englund's database already includes images and texts of 3,300 tablets from the Baghdad museum, and he recently began to complete the cataloging work on another 3,500. Even though it's just a fraction of the total, it's a start in establishing what was in the museum. It may also be the only surviving record of those particular tablets....

The recent looting "has graphically shown the need to make images of these tablets," says Stephen Tinney, director of the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project, who calls the digital library "arguably the most important project in our field." Digital initiatives should be used "aggressively to buffer ourselves against natural or man-made catastrophes," he says. "What happened in the Iraq museum is really an object lesson in why it is important."

Thanks for the link, Gary!

READING THE EDDA.

Renee is doing a series of entries on the Old Norse heroic poem Völundarkvíða (Völundarkvitha, if you can't see the long i and edh; it means 'lay of Völundr'). She gives what she calls a multimedia presentation:

There will be 16 parts. Each part will include a cutout panel illustration, a portion of text and my translation. It will also have an mp3 file with my reading in Old Norse - it is not really dramatic, I am afraid... I have tried to keep close to what I perceive as Old Norse pronunciation; my interpretation may be quite off the mark, so I'd be happy to discuss this.

Here are Part One (Intro and stanzas 1-3) and Part Two (4-5); enjoy, and keep following the series!

ARABIC IN HATAY.

Joan Smith discusses the decline of spoken Arabic in the Turkish province of Hatay (formerly the Sanjak of Alexandretta, a part of Greater Syria in Ottoman times).

Although there are no official statistics on language use or on ethnic groups in Turkey, it is clear that in the province of Hatay (in the south, bordering Syria), most people are descended from Arabic speakers. Arabic entered the area as a result of the Arab conquests in the seventh century. Prior to this, the cities were Greek-speaking; people in surrounding areas spoke Aramaic. (Trimingham, 1979) The area first came under Turkish rule for a brief time at the end of the eleventh century, when Seljuks and Turkmen began eroding Byzantine control. Crusader rule followed.... The area subsequently came under Mameluke rule (from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries), then under Ottoman rule (from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries).... As part of Greater Syria, Hatay was still largely Arabic-speaking when it was annexed by the Turkish Republic in 1938.

Until annexation, Turkish and Arabic co-existed for centuries; under republican policies, however, the use of Arabic began to decline.

Smith's is one of a number of interesting articles on endangered languages (for example, Language Shift on the Kamchatka Peninsula, about the situation of Itelmen, and Gumbaynggirr, about the comeback of an Aboriginal language of New South Wales in Australia) in a special issue of Cultural Survival. (Via wood s lot.)

IRENICON.

The latest New Yorker has a brilliant review by James Wood of God's Secretaries : The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson that not only makes me want to read the book but introduces me to a fine word and a fine poem. The word comes about halfway through, as Wood is discussing King James's desire to "elide doctrinal differences"; he quotes Nicolson as follows: "This is the heart of the new Bible as an irenicon... an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace. It is the central mechanism of the translation, one of immense lexical subtlety, a deliberate carrying of multiple meanings beneath the surface of a single text." The OED defines "irenicon" (or, in the older spelling, "eirenicon") as "a proposal designed to promote peace, esp. in a church or between churches; a message of peace"; I like the word, and the way Nicolson defines it in context, very much.

The poem comes earlier in the review, as Wood is tracing the line of influence of the King James Bible in some surprising places, like Philip Larkin, "an English poet of decidedly secular leanings." I've never been a big fan of Larkin's (apart from everybody's pitch-black favorite, "This Be The Verse"), but the poem Wood quotes to illustrate Biblical echoes, "Cut Grass," is a gorgeous little lyric:

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

Aside from these incidental pleasures, the review provides one of the best concise summaries I've seen of exactly why the KJB is so great and will never be replaced:

The Hebrew texts in particular feature what have been called "key-words," words or phrases repeated and subtly modified in a passage, as a kind of threaded meaning. The English translators were sensitive watchers of these words, and the King James Bible is considered superlative for the pursuit of such threads. The scholars Robert Alter and Gerald Hammond have discussed the technique as it appears in II Samuel 3, in which the phrase “and he went in peace” undergoes a series of variations analogous to those of the original Hebrew:

And David sent Abner away; and he went in peace. And behold, the servants of David and Joab came from pursuing a troop, and brought in a great spoil with them: but Abner was not with David in Hebron; for he had sent him away, and he was gone in peace. When Joab and all the host that was with him were come, they told Joab, saying, Abner the son of Ner came to the king and he hath sent him away, and he is gone in peace. Then Joab came to the king, and said, What hast thou done? Behold, Abner came unto thee; why is it that thou hast sent him away, and he is quite gone?

Hammond notes that later versions of this passage, like the Jerusalem Bible and the New English Bible, smother the effect by varying their translations of the key-phrase too drastically.

Wood discusses the use of repetition further, then sums up: "So there is a one-word answer to the question of what the translators got right. It is music." Amen.

(You can read the first few paragraphs of the book here.)

THE LEADSET WEBSITE.

A glorious rant by Paul Ford on Ftrain, all about printed books and colophons and monkey grunts and McSweeney's abuse of ligatures. Many thanks to wood s lot for the link.

A brief excerpt:

How can something as alive as the digital feel so often moribund, so Victorianized? What happened to Ezra Pound's "Make it new"? It seems like the advice is the opposite: "Make it old," comfortable, similar, safe. Then blog it.

I am a man who loves colophons, and thus doomed. I am a man who loves Web sites, and the future is flush with possibilities....

YOU CAN BE IN THE OED!

Or your citation can, at any rate. Read the How to contribute page and fill out a submission form, and if you've actually managed to sniff out a truffle their professional hounds have missed, you may have the satisfaction of seeing your find, first online and eventually in the next edition. Furthermore, you can see your name online if you give them a proper citation for one of the unidentified quotations from Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, which shouldn't be too hard; just wade through, say, William Derham's Physico-Theology: Or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, From his Works of Creation. Being the Substance of Sexteen Sermons Preached in St. Mary-le-Bow Church, London, At the Honourable Mr. Boyle's Lectures, 1711, and 1712 keeping an eagle eye out for the seven needed quotations (for example, "In a scarcity in Silesia a rumour was spread of its raining millet-seed; but it was found to be only the seeds of the ivy-leaved speedwell, or small henbit"). Send in the citation and they'll fade the quotation on the page and add your name in parenthesis, immortalized as a... well, I think they should revive the old Byzantine title of logothete for this purpose.

Furthermore, you can chat with Jesse Sheidlower, the Principal North American Editor of the dictionary, Monday night via A.Word.A.Day (this information courtesy of Ryan at Linguistiblog).

BRODSKY AND RESTAURANTS.

A discussion of Russian writers (in Russian) by Evgeny Rein, a poet who sat at Akhmatova's feet and was a mentor to Joseph Brodsky, contains the following fascinating (to me, anyway) paragraph:

Brodsky hated restaurants—he didn't know how to behave in them, and he preferred cheap snack places where he felt sure of himself. In a restaurant the waiters gave him the willies, he felt like everybody was staring suspiciously at him and laughing at him, guessing that he didn't have any money. All the more because he often got taken out to restaurants. And even though nobody begrudged the money they spent on him, he took it very hard and didn't want to always be a sponger and a parasite. But then years later when I visited him in America, he'd become a real restaurant hound. The pricier the restaurant, the more eagerly he went there. Obviously, he'd changed places in life—or rather, he'd gotten one.

For Russian readers, here's the original:

А рестораны Бродский ненавидел -- не умел себя в них вести, и всему предпочитал пельменную, шашлычную, рюмочную, где чувствовал себя уверенно. В ресторане он комплексовал по поводу официантов, ему казалось, что все смотрят на него с подозрением и подсмеиваются, догадываясь, что денег у него нет. Тем более что часто он ходил в ресторан за чужие деньги. И хотя никто на него денег не жалел, он это очень переживал и не хотел быть вечным нахлебником и приживалой. Но потом, через годы, когда я посетил его в Америке, он стал человеком сугубо ресторанным. Чем дороже ресторан, тем охотнее он туда шел. По-видимому, поменялось место в жизни. Вернее, он его получил.

REVIVAL OF REGIONAL LANGUAGES.

Jonathan Crowe of mcwetboy.com sent me a link to this Globe and Mail article, "Rebirth of dialects mirrors new regionalism" by Doug Saunders.

France spent much of the 20th century trying to eliminate the minority languages that were spoken by half its population 100 years ago. But now, France is experiencing a renaissance of interest in its regions and their languages, foods and customs. Not just Breton, but also Alsatian, Basque, Catalan, Corsican, Flemish and Provençal.

Find out about Breizh-Cola, among other things. Thanks, Jonathan! (And anyone interested in maps should investigate his excellent Map Room.)

TURKISH ORAL NARRATIVES.

A fantastic Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative from the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University, courtesy of Renee. There are Narratives, Music, Epics (Alpamysh, Dede Korkut, Manas, you name it), and much more, mostly in pdf or mp3 files. Enjoy.

THE FANTASY OF UNDERSTANDING.

I'm slowly working my way through Ammiel Alcalay's After Jews and Arabs, and I've run across a couple of quotations that not only rhyme with each other but enter into a useful dialog with the recent controversy over translation, in which the complete review raised hackles by objecting to the whole concept. I've tried to make the case that they were simply pointing out the fallacy of thinking you've made real contact with a work of literature by reading a translation, but these quotations put the issue in a larger context.

The first is from David Antin's 1984 book-length poem tuning (a long excerpt of which is online here). Antin (who was studying Arabic) had gotten into a conversation in French with an Egyptian who had just seen the same Egyptian movie that he had, and then had to translate for a third party who joined the conversation and spoke neither French nor Arabic; Antin reflects of the fact that although he'd understood all the words that had been spoken to him, "i also knew i was not even close to an understanding   of what he meant by 'england' or 'france'   as he was not even close to what the american had understood as the 'united states' and 'russia'." Then comes the following passage:

            i was
beginning to arrive at a notion of how far we might be from
  each other and what sort of distance we might have to travel
          i would
like to contribute to human not understanding     i would like
  to slow down the fantasy and illusion of understanding     so
    that we could inspect the way and the pace at which we are
  approaching or leaving other people     and see how far away
they are     and whether there is any reason or prospect for
      reaching them     because one thing that's been promoted
      endlessly in this world is the fantasy of understanding the
    notion that it is always possible     desirable     and costs
      nothing

A view from the other side of the barrier is provided by Jean Said Makdisi in her Beirut Fragments, in which she describes what it was like for those who stayed in Beirut during the civil war of the '70s and '80s, when most sensible people had fled:

Those who are outside looking in see only the war. For us, there are people, friends, life, activity, production, commitments, a profound intensity of meaning. It is these things that have given us the strength to coninue, even when we are filled with doubt, for they reassert themselves during and after every battle....

We have paid a heavy price for this community. Let those who would comment lightly on us beware: We are unforgiving judges of those who have not shared our experiences. We are like a secret society. We have our own language; we recognize signs that no one else does...

This brings to mind Anna Akhmatova's famous poem, written towards the end of the terrible Russian Civil War, which begins (in Hemschemeyer's translation):

I am not with those who abandoned their land
To the lacerations of the enemy.
I am deaf to their coarse flattery,
I won't give them my songs.

I want to listen to the words of people who have had very different experiences, I want very much to understand what they have to say... but not quickly. You're fooling yourself if you think you can understand too quickly, or too well.

EGYPTIAN ARMENIANS.

Via Jonathan Edelstein at The Head Heeb, a fascinating Al-Ahram supplement on the Armenian minority in Egypt. To steal Jonathan's summary:

In the 1940s, this community numbered as many as 100,000 members, most of whom arrived as refugees from the Turkish genocide of 1915-17. During the Nasser era, however, they suffered from the same expropriation and punitive measures that affected the Greek and Jewish communities. The Egyptian Armenians, who live mostly in Alexandria and Cairo, are undergoing something of a resurgence today, but they number fewer than 6000.

The supplement includes several articles, one of which, "Little Armenia" by Fayza Hassan, includes this paragraph on the dialect of the community:

The difference in dialects is often mentioned by Armenians who have visited Armenia. Aida Ostayan, who has been directing the Armenian programme on Radio Cairo for 30 years, explains: "The Armenians of Armenia were under Persian and Russian influence; they are the Eastern Armenians. We, on the other hand, lived in the Ottoman provinces and our roots are more European." Ostayan herself was born in Aleppo. "The language is really the same, but there are differences in accent (as in Egyptian Arabic and Lebanese for instance), and words have been borrowed from one or the other culture, which sometimes lead to confusion," she says.

I once visited the Armenian quarter of Aleppo and heard an Armenian priest chant from the Bible: quite an experience. Must learn Armenian one of these days...

THE ORIGIN OF LITHUANIAN.

An excellent article by William Schmalstieg called "The Origin of the Lithuanian Language" is actually much more comprehensive, giving a good account of how the comparative method works in the case of Indo-European. Highly recommended. (Found in a comment by George Vaitkunas in the comments to this Open Brackets entry. Thanks, George!)

GLANAGE HAUT.

That is a French anagram, and what I like to think of as a main purpose (it means 'high gleaning'), of Languagehat. Construct your own Gallic anagrams here (courtesy of La grande rousse).

Incidentally, there's a wonderful movie called Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (English version "The Gleaners and I") that I urge everyone to see if they can. Enjoyable and thought-provoking.

"LIKE" BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Anyone interested in the use of "like" as a discourse marker ("He was like, 'No way!'") might want to investigate this bibliography (found at P. Kerim Friedman's academic blog; his general site is here, and apparently you have to click on "Academic" under "My Other Blogs" in the left column—the URL is the same).

Addendum. There is a discussion going on at Avva about the closest Russian equivalent of "like," with Anatoly plumping for так (tak, 'so') or такой (takoi, 'such') and others preferring типа (tipa, 'of the type'); older generations would have used мол (mol).

DON'T SHOOT THE TRANSLATOR.

A war, or at least a brushfire, has broken out in a corner of Blogovia over the issue of translation. It was started by the naughty folks at the complete review, who vented some spleen about the whole idea of translation. To put it in a nutshell, as they did: "We hate translation." This (understandably) annoyed the translator Gail Armstrong (of Open Brackets), who responded in an entry called "Incomplete":

In two critiques, one of Robert Wechsler’s book, Performing without a stage – The art of literary translation and the other of William Gass’s Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, we’re instructed in, well, very little aside from and the reviewers’ propensity for self-indulgence and cliché:

We still prefer strictly literal translations, trying to mirror the original, and we’ll take a footnote explaining an unclear meaning over a more suitable but not literal translation of a word or sentiment any time.

This has been said many times before but I still don’t buy it. While the stance has merit, and would give all inveterate pedants a chubby, a novel rife with footnotes is not conducive to pleasurable reading. Eyes flicking back and forth between text and footnotes is a chore, and destroys the flow of the narrative. (Footnotes are like subtitles: annoyingly irresistible.)

Chris (at Polyglut) vehemently agreed with her, and the complete reviewers posted a long response to her strictures, accepting a point or two but standing firmly by their rant. The whole discussion is extremely interesting, and I hope other translators (Merm?) and users of translations will weigh in.

Addendum. Gertrude Stein puts in her two cents:

As we took our places at the table—and certainly before we had been fortified by coffee and cognac—Gertrude turned on Bob and said, "Where have you been, Hutchins, and what have you been doing?" A little weary at the end of the day, Bob was taken aback by the abruptness and forcefulness of the attack (the energy Gertrude exuded in a small room hit one like Niagara Falls). Bob replied, as briefly and effortlessly as possible, "Miss Stein, Mr. Adler and I have been teaching the great books." Gertrude pounced on him again and with even more vigor. "Don't call me Miss Stein," she said; "call me Gertrude Stein. What are the great books?" Bob tried to explain the basic educational idea in reading and discussing great books with college students, but he kept forgetting how she insisted upon being addressed, and so he was forever being interrupted by Gertrude's peremptory injunction "Don't call me Miss Stein; call me Getrude Stein."

At one point I decided to come to Bob's rescue by going downstairs to my briefcase and getting out the list of the great books. I showed it to her. She scanned the list quickly and just as quickly asked, "Do you read these books in their original languages or in English translations?" Hutchins explained that our freshman [University of Chicago] students did not have competence in Greek and Latin or Italian and French, and were finding it difficult enough to read the books in English. This infuriated Miss Stein, I mean Gertrude Stein. She laid it down as an unchallengeable axiom that great literature was essentially untranslatable. Hutchins and I then tried to argue with her, pointing out that we were concerned mainly with the ideas that were to be found in the great books. She might be right, we admitted; fine writing suffers in translation, but idea somehow transcend the particular language in which they are first expressed.

(From Mortimer Adler's recollections, quoted at tenderbutton.com, of a 1930's dinner party given by Robert Hutchins and his wife Maude for the great Gertrude.)

My take on it is contained in a comment on Chris's blog, which I will reproduce here:

...I think both you and Gail are taking the good folks at the complete review way too seriously. They're not advocating destruction of all translations, for heaven's sake, they're just making a point: translations, even the best, are pale reflections of an original and should never be taken as equivalent, or even adequate. There are plenty of places where you can get reasoned discussion of translation issues and evaluations of particular translations; surely there's room in the world for one voice crying out in the wilderness that translation is per se an evil. Yes, of course, a necessary evil, what would we do without it, but everyone else hammers on the "necessary" and goes on from there; these guys are stuck on the "evil," and I think that's a valid bee to have in one's bonnet. Again, they're doing no harm, they're just expressing their cranky opinion, and isn't that what the internet is all about?

Oh, and I'm a big fan of footnotes in translations; the more the better. Chacun à son goût.*

*Everyone has the gout.

FALSE DAWN.

Via Road to Surfdom (thanks, Tim!), a thought-provoking Letter to the Editor (of the Washington Post):

Saturday, May 17, 2003; Page A24

As part of its propaganda effort in Iraq, the reconstruction office is establishing a newspaper called al Sabah, which is translated as "the dawn" ["U.S. to Take Its Message to Iraqi Airwaves," news story, May 11]. In fact, al sabah means "the morning"; the word for "dawn" is fajr. This is well known even among Muslims who don't speak Arabic, because a chapter in the Koran is called "al Fajr," and the first prayer of the day is the fajr, or dawn, prayer.

So morning, dawn—what's the difference? Well, al Sabah also happens to be the name of the Kuwaiti royal family, as every Iraqi probably knows. News reports indicate that Iraqis already believe that Kuwaitis were behind the looting of their museums. Now they may be likely to believe that this new newspaper is sponsored by Kuwait.

Is that really the impression the reconstruction office wants to convey in this delicate political situation?

UMM ABDULLAH
Kuwait City

For readers of my Arabic Names entry, Umm Abdullah is a kunya meaning 'mother of Abdullah.' (Incidentally, Umm Kulthoum is apparently the singer's given name rather than a kunya; I assume she was named after the Prophet's daughter of that name, which means 'mother of plump cheeks.' But if anyone out there knows more, please enlighten me.)

MIAO SONGS AND STORIES.

Some time back I posted an entry about the people called Hmong in the U.S. and Miao in most other places. I've discovered a great site that has Miao mythical and historical narratives and songs both in translation and in the Miao syllabary with interlinear literal translations (pdf files). Anyone interested in the hill cultures of Southeast Asia should pay it a visit.

HOW THE BALKANS GOT BALKANIZED.

Via Laputan Logic, an informative 1993 essay by E. A. Hammel on "Demography and the Origins of the Yugoslav Civil War," which discusses the ethnographic, linguistic, and religious history of the Balkans and finishes with some interesting speculations about empire and nationalism:

In this microcosm I see lessons for us in the interpretation of anthropological history. The first lesson is that imperial adventures make a difference. The process of ethnic cleansing begins when cultural and especially religious homogeneity is required to ensure political obedience. This first lesson is certainly obvious after the historical formation of the state, but may have been important before it, as well. The second lesson is that all of this was less of a problem before Johann Gottfried Herder and especially in the Balkans before Woodrow Wilson, in his pursuit of a particular imperialist adventure, namely the incapacitation of the German Reich, legitimized the ethnic nation-state and confused its creation with democracy. Democracy, free markets, ethnic self-determination, and general well being continue to be confused. What is missing in the historical picture since about 1800 is the idea of citizenship by right of residence rather than by right of blood or the adoption of the symbols of blood kinship. What we see now as the cultural results of the migrational streams that are themselves started by imperialist adventures are the twin pressures of expulsion and conformity, the choice for populations to convert or flee. It is hard to think of an anthropological subject during the last 6,000 years that was isolated from imperialist machinations, beginning with the emergence of city states in the Near East. The difference today is only in the level of the armament. The underlying processes are the same.

GREEK AND LATIN TEXTS.

Textkit is a language learning site which provides Greek and Latin grammars, reading material, classical e-books and other learning resources. (Via Avva.)

NUMEN AND GENDER POLITICS.

The Berkshire Eagle has an article today that goes into more detail about translation from Latin than any newspaper article I've seen in a long time. It seems that the motto of the town of Pittsfield (as well of Pittsburgh), "Benigno Numine," has been translated by St. Joseph's Central High School Latin teacher Kathleen Canning as "Under Protection of the Goddess." The paper quotes her as saying that

benignus has masculine, feminine and nongender endings, and that "benigno" is the "neuter form" of the noun.

Because both words in the city motto contain endings with no specific gender, they could be used to refer to a "goddess," Canning said.

I'll be charitable here and assume the reference to the adjective benignus as a noun is the paper's mistake and not Canning's, but the idea of translating numen as "Goddess" is just silly, I don't care what they told her in civics class. The story goes on to say that "Mary C. Quirk, who teaches Latin at Miss Hall's School, found 17 possible translations for the city motto, ranging from 'propitious divine will' to 'with kind-hearted favor or approval (of the gods),' to 'with benign power,' to 'by beneficent authority'"; any of them would be a great deal better. (Thanks for the tip, Leslie!)

WEEDY.

Fred Clark of Slacktivist reports on the new parenthood of a pair of grackles nesting in his apartment building, and in the course of his report he quotes (from David Quammen) a use of the word "weedy" that I am unfamiliar with (and that does not appear in any of my dictionaries, including the OED):

What do fire ants, zebra mussels, Asian gypsy moths, tamarisk trees, maleleuca trees, kudzu, Mediterranean fruit flies, boll weevils and water hyacinths have in common with crab-eating macaques or Nile perch? Answer: They're weedy species, in the sense that animals as well as plants can be weedy. What that implies is a constellation of characteristics: They reproduce quickly, disperse widely when given a chance, tolerate a fairly broad range of habitat conditions, take hold in strange places, succeed especially in disturbed ecosystems, and resist eradication once they're established. They are scrappers, generalists, opportunists. They tend to thrive in human-dominated terrain because in crucial ways they resemble Homo sapiens: aggressive, versatile, prolific, and ready to travel.

I like that much better than the usual metaphorical extension of the word: "Unhealthily tall and thin; lanky and wanting physical vigour; also, weakly, of poor physique. Also without reference to physical qualities: feeble, half-hearted, weak; lacking firmness or strength." (OED) I hope it becomes widespread.

I also like very much the conclusion of Fred's post:

These brand new common grackles—like the human tenant from whom they are subletting—may do little to enhance biodiversity, but that's not the whole point either.

What are grackles for? Grackles grackle, ad majorem gloriam dei. This lot of them is grackling nicely, and I find them uncommonly delightful.

FOUR-KANJI SAYINGS.

When I was living in Taiwan I became familiar with the "four-character idioms" (chengyu) the Chinese love to toss into conversations. (A selection involving animals, with the related stories, can be found in this article from Chinese Monthly; scroll down past the Chinese text for the English version.) Now I learn, via No-sword, that similar idioms occur in Japanese, where they are called yojijukugo; see this article in the Japan Times's Kanji Clinic. At the end is a collection of such sayings from both Japanese and Chinese.

NE SORGA, SNOTOR GUMA!

Which is to say, Sorrow not, sage! I borrow the alliterative words of the worthy Beowulf to welcome Songdog and Renee to the ranks of the officially sage; congratulations to both of you on well-deserved master's degrees. You may now be addressed as "snotor guma" on any and all occasions.

GREEK-SPEAKING ITALIAN JEWS.

An article by Andrée Brooks in today's NY Times discussing the excavation of long-forgotten Jewish settlements (the Jews were expelled from southern Italy in the 16th century) contains the following remarkable information:

What is striking is that the inscriptions on the burial slabs found to date are almost totally in Greek. There is little or no Hebrew. When Hebrew is used, the characters mostly spell out Greek or Latin words. Both Greek and Latin were commonly used in that part of Italy at the time. This suggests an assimilated life for the Jews who may have lived here outside Venosa between the third and seventh centuries A.D. "Our Jews were not separated from everyone else in those early centuries," said Dr. Cesare Colafemmina, visiting professor of Hebrew and Hebraic literature at the University of Calabria.

The Jewish Encyclopedia article on "Greek language and the Jews" assembles information about post-classical knowledge of Greek in a section called "In Later Times," saying "Shabbethai Donnolo had a Greek education, and so to a certain extent had Nathan of Rome; the author of the Ahimaaz Chronicle often refers to the Greek-speaking Jews of southern Italy." Let me just add, as a fan of weird dialects, that I wish at least some remnants of the former Magna Graecia of southern Italy had survived to the present.

ARABIC NAMES.

Having had occasion (in the comments to The Fall of Otrar) to refer to al-Khwarizmi's nisba, I thought it might be a good idea to provide a reference for those interested in getting a basic idea of how Arabic names work (so that, for instance, they will realize why Gamal Abd al-Nasir should not be abbreviated as "Nasser," though it's too late to correct that particular mistake).

Basically, a traditional Arabic name given in full consists of the kunya ('father/mother of X'), the ism (the actual given name, e.g. Muhammad or Abdullah), the nasab ('son/daughter of Y'), the nisba (an adjective indicating one's place of origin, religion, or some other identifier), and one or more laqabs (nicknames to provide further identification), in that order. To use Annemarie Schimmel's example, the name Abu'l-Mahasin Yusuf ibn Abi Yusuf Ya'qub al-Makki al-Hanbali al-Zayyat means "Yusuf, father of al-Mahasin, son of Abu Yusuf Ya'qub [note that Ya'qub is identified as father of Yusuf], from Mecca, belonging to the Hanbali school of religious jurisprudence, the oilman." Unfortunately for the outsider, people can be referred to by any part of this string (except, usually, the ism, since given names are too common to be of much use); if there is a conventional name by which the person is traditionally known, it is called the 'urf ('custom'). So our friend Yusuf might be generally known as Abu'l-Mahasin or al-Zayyat (the other laqabs being too common themselves to identify him). The great philosopher Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdullah ibn Sina is known as ibn Sina (hence "Avicenna") or Abu Ali ibn Sina (in Persian he is Bu-Ali Sina). An excellent quick overview (based on Jere L. Bacharach's A Middle East Studies Handbook) can be found here.

Now, one thing to bear in mind is that the kunya is such a basic element, so popular a means to refer to people, that one is usually given even to people who have no children, or without reference to whatever children they might have. Thus an enemy of the Prophet was known as Abu Lahab 'father of flame,' and the ninth-century caliph al-Mamun granted a Christian physician who had treated him successfully the kunya Abu 'Isa 'father of Jesus' (which was quite an honor, and also offensive to some theologians, since Jesus had no human father). Another thing I want to emphasize is that names like Abdullah 'slave of Allah,' Abd al-Rahman 'slave of the Merciful One' are units; there is no such name as "Abdul," and the last part should not be snipped off as a separate name—hence my earlier strictures about abbreviating Abd al-Nasir 'slave of the Victorious One' as "Nasser." (In that case, an earlier ism has become a family name; family names, being a recent development in the Arabic world, can come from any of the elements. And I'll mention here that the Hussein of Saddam Hussein is not a family name but the name of Saddam's father; the traditional formulation would be Saddam ibn Hussein.)

Names like Jalal and Jamal are modern abbreviations of earlier Jalal-al-din 'greatness of the faith' and Jamal-al-din 'beauty of the faith,' which were originally honorifics. To quote Annemarie Schimmel,

This type of name has developed out of the official honorary titles, the khitab, which were given to leading men of state and religion to emphasize their rank and dignity. Originally they were composed of an impressive noun plus ad-daula, 'the state', which could then be enlarged to ad-daula wa'd-din, like Izz ad-daula wa'd-din, 'Glory of state and religion'.... After 1200, compounds with ad-din became part and parcel of the name, the person's qualities or rank notwithstanding.

And while I'm at it, I'd just like to point out another thing that irritates me: Al Sa'ud (the ruling family and eponym of Saudi Arabia) is not "al-Sa'ud"; in this case, al is not the article but a word for 'family,' and the a is long. Hence it should be given a capital letter and pronounced with its own stress, and the -l should not be assimilated to the following s- as happens with the article (thus al-Sa'ati 'the watchmaker' is pronounced as-Sa'ati; incidentally, the famous name Saatchi is the Turkish equivalent of this).

More detail can be found in this little book (pdf file), Arabic Nomenclature by A.F.L. Beeston (Oxford, 1971), which packs a great deal of information into eight pages. And those who want a wide-ranging survey should find a copy of Annemarie Schimmel's Islamic Names : An Introduction, a compendious book with only 83 pages of text (plus notes, bibliography, several indexes, and a glossary) from which I have quoted liberally above.

I'll finish up with a quatrain by al-Khwarizmi, the very man whose nisba set off this whole entry:

What do I care that the Abbasides have thrown open the gates of kunyas and laqabs?
They have conferred honorifics on a man whom their ancestors would not have made doorkeeper of their privy!
This caliph of ours has few dirhams in his hands—
So he lavishes honorifics on people.

PUTDOWN OF THE DAY.

Des, over at Desbladet, takes time off from his princessor to deliver the following killing blow:

Monsieur Soutet has published work on languages as diverse as Old French, medieval French, Renaissance French and contemporary French, and it certainly shows.

He's responding to the following asseveration on the part of the learned M. Soutet:

Dans le quotidien de son expérience, l'homme ne vit la pluralité linguistique ni comme un problème métaphysique, ni comme un scandale existentiel, mais, plus banalement, comme une entrave à la libre communication et au développement des échanges.

[In everyday experience linguistic diversity isn't experienced either as a metaphysical problem or as an existential scandal, but, more mundanely, as a hindrance to free communication and the development of exchanges.]

O. Soutet, Linguistique

RICHARD CADDEL.

From "5 Career Moves Negotiated In The Dark On A Back Step In Northern Europe" (2000):

Pavier

This heavy slab. Our memory,
tone of our plant life trained
to go round it. Beat
it out and we pulse

together, it's a wonder
we don't rave daily. Whack!
Whack! go another's
psychotic dreams, the sad

sky path we all must walk.
Light goes, it does, now, so
stars show, us under them,
breathing, apart, blessed.

Richard Caddel was in a long line of excellent, obscure poets of the northeast of England, the old Northumbria celebrated by his teacher Basil Bunting. I was aware of him because of the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre he helped establish; thanks to wood s lot, I have discovered his own poetry, which I intend to investigate further. Caddel died of leukemia on April 1. From a memoir by Tony Baker:

Snails were bound to appeal to him: they move slowly — as he did, for he rarely enjoyed good health having been handed asthma and a fragile frame at birth — they do all with seeming deliberation and live along the margins of open spaces where their own fragile frames offer protection against most things except brute force. They’re emblematic of that affinity with borders and border creatures that Caddel made a primary political and aesthetic concern in his writing. It’s not by accident that his work has been translated, not into the more likely European languages, but principally into Czech, Estonian, Lithuanian, Polish and Dutch, regions either linguistically enclosed by more dominant tongues or sited on the frontier between an east and a west where local cultures have a long history of vulnerability to distant, dominant forces.
It’s the same affinity that allowed Caddel to identify with, and make his home in, the north-east; or more specifically that reduced part of the old Northumbria which approaches the Borders — the land extending from Lindisfarne, through the dales and hills as they fall into Cumbria. Born in Bedford in 1949 and brought up in Gillingham, he came to Newcastle as a student in 1968, studied music, english and history, subsequently qualifying as a librarian, and never again left the region. His meeting with Basil Bunting, who was the university’s poetry fellow at the time, was perhaps decisive in forging his links with the north east, for Bunting was not only an inspiring teacher whose poetic methods of musical economy were perfectly suited to Caddel’s natural inclinations; he was also a determined champion of what became a central concern in Caddel’s own writing, 'the local'. If this contact ultimately led to one of Caddel’s most enduring contributions to the north-east — his editions of Bunting’s Uncollected Poems in 1991, Complete Poems in 1993 and his part in the establishment of the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre at Durham, of which he remained a director to his death — Caddel was always wary of too much talk of 'influence'. He was aware that for the traditions of 'the local' to mean anything — and he would have applied this to any version of the local, whether that constructed by his friends and fellow-writers on the European frontiers or that of Lorine Niedecker, whose writing he loved, on the shores of Lake Superior — then it had to be part of 'a living, evolving tradition, or it’s nothing'.

THE US RIKE U!

I just ran across this delightful title while looking for something else: Dishonest Broker: The Us Rike U Usraek & Palentine.

I think Powell's needs a proofreader.

In case you're wondering, the subtitle is supposed to be "The US Role in Israel and Palestine."

SIMLIN.

U.S. A species of squash having a scalloped edge. [Alteration of SIMNEL.] 1785 T. JEFFERSON Notes Virginia vi. 68 Cymlings. Cucurbita verrucosa. 1981 Farmstead Mag. Winter 41/1 Common pumpkins are actually a form of the same plant from which has also been developed vegetable marrows, cymlings, or cymlins (also spelled simlins), summer crookneck squashes, and yellow-flowered gourds.

Thus the OED (I've selected two of their many quotations); my native dictionaries, Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage, let me down in the matter of this native-born word, which I ran across in the following Lorine Niedecker poem (part of her "Thomas Jefferson" series, presumably based on his writings):

Hamilton and the bankers
would make my country Carthage

I am abandoning the rich—
their dinner parties—

I shall eat my simlins
with the class of science

or not at all
Next year the last of labors

among conflicting parties
Then my family

we shall sow our cabbages
together

SOUNDS LIKE A PARODY.

But it's not. From Odd things in Pitt's libraries, this title:

Ashanti Proverbs: The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People translated from the original with grammatical and anthropological notes by R. Sutherland Rattray, published by The Clarendon Press (Oxford), 1916.

Occasionally it's good to be reminded what the good old days were actually like. I've found an online discussion of Rattray and his book:

The unfortunate subtitle which he eventually chose for his collection was The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People. He chose it very much under the influence of Marett, whose special subject was the evolution of ethics out of primitive religion, and it was not meant to sound as derogatory as it does now, but it expresses quite accurately the central purpose of his book.

Oddly, Rattray says in his Author's Note:

These few words the present writer has felt in duty bound to say, lest the reader, astonished at the words of wisdom which are now to follow, refuse to credit that a “savage” or “primitive” people could possibly have possessed the rude philosophers, theologians, moralists, naturalists, and even, it will be seen, philologists, which many of these proverbs prove them to have had among them.

Which goes to show the astonishing capacity of the human mind for doublethink, and should make us wonder what unexamined contradictions we ourselves are harboring.

KLINGON INTERPRETER [NOT] NEEDED.

[Addendum: This story is, of course, too silly to be fully true. They're not looking for Klingon interpreters. See actual story here, thanks to notna in the comments. It's a good story, though.]

[Further addendum: Well, it's no longer true at all. According to today's NY Times story "Search for Klingon Interpreter Called Off," Multnomah County has delisted Klingon following the flood of delighted publicity: "'It was a mistake, and a result of an overzealous attempt to ensure that our safety net systems can respond to all customers and clients,' Multnomah County chair Diane Linn said in a news release." Thanks for the tip, Bonnie!]

From SFGate.com:

Star Trek fans fluent in Klingon take note -- there's a job opening in Oregon for you.

The fictional language of the popular TV and movie science fiction series is one of about 55 languages needed by the office that treats mental health patients in metropolitan Multnomah County.

"We have to provide information in all the languages our clients speak," said Jerry Jelusich, a procurement specialist for the county Department of Human Services, which serves about 60,000 mental health clients.

County research has shown that Klingon has gone from being a fictional tongue to what many people -- and not just fans -- consider a complete language, with its own grammar, syntax and vocabulary.

If a patient speaks only Klingon, the county is obligated to respond with a Klingon interpreter....

I think any comment of mine would be superfluous. (Via Polyglut.)

THE LANGUAGE OF BLOGS.

Stephanie Nilsson, a grad student at Umeå University, describes her theory of how blogs combine aspects of spoken and written forms of communication. Interesting, as is the site in general if the social side of blogging is a subject that matters to you.

LORINE NIEDECKER.

I finally got Niedecker's Collected Works (Jenny Penberthy's introduction here, Jane Augustine's review here), and I'm thrilled: it was one of the biggest gaps in my poetry collection. To celebrate, two poems, the first submitted to Poetry in 1936 and the second submitted to New Directions in 1970, both unsuccessfully (so take heart, rejected poets). Both are simple, rhythmic poems; both are deeply weird and beautiful.

When do we live again Ann,
when dirt flies high
in wheeling time
and the lights of their eyes see ours.
For if it's true
we're the dung of the earth
and they the flowers
from stock that's running out
they need to be planted over.

They'll never know
the weeping diff'rence, Ann,
when the whole world laughs again.

  *  *  *

Nursery Rhyme
        As I nurse my pump

The greatest plumber
  in all the town
from Montgomery Ward
rode a Cadillac carriage
    by marriage
and visited my pump

A sensitive pump
    said he
that has at times a proper
    balance
  of water, air
and poetry

THE FALL OF OTRAR.

Tuesday evening I saw a movie from Kazakstan called The Fall of Otrar. I had wanted to see it for some time, since it deals with a time and place of intense interest to me, Central Asia in the early 13th century, at the beginning of Genghis Khan's conquests. In 1218 most of what's now northeastern Iran, northern Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan was ruled by the Khwarezmshah Muhammad, who had expanded Khwarezm (or Khorezm) from its base south of the Aral Sea into a substantial empire. Then he was foolish enough to provoke Genghis, who at that point simply wanted to trade with him; within a couple of years he was dead and his empire was ravaged by the Mongols in one of the most brutal episodes of world history. This story (summarized nicely here, and there's an interesting sidelight on clothing here) is the focus of the movie, which personalizes it by focusing on a (presumably invented) Kipchak scout named Unzhu who spends seven years as a commander under Genghis learning everything he can, comes back to Khwarezm to warn the ruler about the Mongol peril, gets tortured as a spy, and escapes; by the time he's proved right, it's too late. Anyway, the movie is long and relentlessly violent, but it's in Kazakh (with bits of Mongol and Chinese), so I considered my time well spent. And let me take this opportunity to remind NYC-area readers that the Films from Along the Silk Road: Central Asian Cinema festival is just under way at Lincoln Center and will be going on all month.

Of course, it would have been nice if Khwarezmian had been spoken at least by the court (many of the underlings and military were Turks by this time, and Kazakh is a reasonable substitute for their dialect), but since it's been extinct for centuries, I'll give them a pass on that.

LIGATURES.

That title works in both English and French, which is good, because this link (via La grande rousse) is about French—specifically, the character œ. (If you can't see it correctly, it's an o and e jammed together.) The title of the little essay is "What do you call the character œ?" and the answer is "digramme soudé oe" 'joined [literally 'soldered'] digraph oe,' or more colloquially "e dans l'o" 'e in the o.' The heart of the essay:

D'un point de vue typographique, la soudure de deux ou plusieurs lettres en un seul caractère est appelée ligature. Par exemple, le caractère & (l'esperluette) est une ligature représentant sous une forme stylisée les deux lettres du mot et.... La ligature œ est quant à elle une ligature "linguistique" ou "orthographique", dans la mesure où, en français, elle est obligatoire pour certains mots (cœur) et interdite pour d'autres (coexister), peu importe la police de caractères utilisée.

From a typographical point of view, the joining of two or more letters in a single character is called a "ligature." For example, the character & (the ampersand) is a ligature representing in stylized form the two letters of the [Latin] word et ['and'].... The ligature œ is a "linguistic" or "orthographic" one, inasmuch as in French it is required in certain words (cœur) and forbidden in others (coexister), whatever font is used.

It finishes with a nod towards the ancient rivals across the Channel/Manche: "Mentionnons pour terminer les noms anglais de ces deux caractères : œ est appelé ethel (ou œthel) tandis que æ est appelé aesc (ou æsc, ou ash)." In English, they say, the œ is called ethel and the æ ash. Now you know.

Incidentally, note the use of la police in the sense of 'font, set of type'; it's new to me. As Anatoly says, no day without a word (ни дня без слова).

LEVANTINE CULTURE I.

I've just started what promises to be a slow and fascinating read, Ammiel Alcalay's After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. I have long been interested in the "Levant" as an archaic term (for the eastern Mediterranean lands) that still carries a freight of complicated meanings, and Alcalay disentangles many of its forgotten legacies and relates them to the present and the medieval past. I have a feeling I'm going to be making a number of entries based on the book as I read it; at the moment I'll just say that any book that mentions Osip Mandelstam, one of my favorite poets, on the second page and Janet Abu-Lughod, one of my favorite historians (for her book Before European Hegemony), on the third is catnip to this Languagecat. And when I found a reference to Ella Shohat at OneMansOpinion (an interesting blog I discovered through Stavros), I somehow knew she'd be in the book, and sure enough, there she was.

I'll quote a paragraph that will give you an idea of the treasures hidden in After Jews and Arabs:

The examples [of ignored writers] abound: a major figure like Eliyahu Eliachar (a witness, participant, and astute observer who lived through the Ottoman, British mandatory, and Israeli state periods), in addition to not being translated, is not even mentioned, for example, in Stillman's The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times. The important work of Ya'aquob [Yaakov, father of A.B.] Yehoshua, particularly his six-volume Childhood in Old Jerusalem, has not appeared in English translation. The exuberant and carnivalesque work of Albert Cohen (a Sephardic equivalent of Isaac Bashevis Singer), though once translated, remains out of print. The French works of Shmuel Trigano, perhaps the most important contemporary Jewish thinker after Emmanuel Lévinas, have not been translated into either English or Hebrew. The work of Jacqueline Kahanoff, an Egyptian who studied in New York before moving to Beersheba, ironically remains in print only in Hebrew, despite the fact that she wrote in English. Shime'on Ballas, an important Israeli novelist and scholar of Arabic literature originally from Baghdad and now living in Tel Aviv, depicts a milieu even more unimaginable to conventional expectations than that of Sami Mikhael [whose novels deal "in a highly personal way with the complex relations between Jews and Arabs within the Communist Party in both Iraq and Israel"]. From his first novel, The Transit Camp (1964), to his most recent, The Other One (1991), Ballas has forged a possibility unusual for Hebrew fiction, that of the internal exile attempting to reenact the political complexities of a surrounding world that has been declared forbidden territory. Another younger untranslated playwright and novelist, Yitshak Gormezano Goren, has also depicted a world beyond the reach of constructed assumptions about Jewish life in the Arab world. His novels, set in Alexandria and then Israel, dissect the dissolution of Jewish middle-class life in Egypt and the resultant shock of running aground in the promised land. The work of Samir Naqqash remains, perhaps, the most difficult to classify and the least accessible. Also from Baghdad (like Shime'on Ballas and Sami Mikhael), Naqqash refused to make the transition from Arabic to Hebrew. The only important Jewish writer still writing in Arabic (though one can only hope not the last), Naqqash's work is better known and more available in Cairo and Morocco than Tel Aviv or New York. The recalcitrant response to such work is due, in part, to the very fact that the experience of these writers—transformed into art—disrupts many of the convenient assumptions about the world they come from as well as about the ability of "natives" to speak for themselves.

And I thought I was a cosmopolite because I'd read Abdelrahman Munif! I deeply envy anyone able to toss off a paragraph like that, and I wish I could read all of those authors. In the meantime, I look forward to reading more of Alcalay; I'm still on the Introduction.

Addendum. Description of an Alcalay reading here.

BIL RUH, BIL DAM

I've been wanting to know for some time exactly what those Iraqi crowds were chanting in the days of Saddam (remember back then?); all I could make out was dam 'blood' (and of course "Saddam"). Then I went here and found, among much else worth your attention, this:

“bil rooh, bil daam nafdeek ya saddam” – we will sacrifice our soul and blood for saddam.

Which is a roundabout way of saying: Salam Pax is back. I'm much relieved, and catching up on recent Baghdad life. (Thanks for the link to Graham at MetaFilter.)

Interestingly, the saying goes back at least to 1967, though then it exalted an earlier pair of Arab leaders; from this reminiscence of Jerusalem:

The June 1967 War started when I was eleven. The days preceding it were filled with wild rejoicing. Many people took to the streets, overjoyed by the moves of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's president, which included ordering the United Nations Emergency Forces to withdraw from the Sinai and closing the Straits of Tiran, and King Hussein's signing of a defense pact with Nasser. They shouted: "'Ashaa Hussein wa Nasser" ("Long Live Hussein and Nasser"), "Bil ruh bil dam nafdikuma ya Nasser wa Hussein" ("We sacrifice our spirit and blood for you, Nasser and Hussein")...

BILINGUAL RUMI.

Via Beth, this "Persian with Rumi" page with its small but excellent collection of bilingual quatrains, transliterated and with glossaries. (Minor annoyance: not only are the translations by A.J. Arberry fusty, they don't even reproduce the AABA rhyme scheme; why?) A sample:

Ruba'ie #6

As the essence that is mine to the all pervading sea,
Turneth, all my atoms shine in sublime resplendency.
On the road of Love, behold! like a candle I do blaze,
That one moment may enfold all the moments of my days.

Ân-vaqt ke bahr-é kôll shavad zât marâ,
rûshan ghardad jamâl-é zarrât marâ.
z-ân mî-sûzam chô sham'a tâ dar rah-é éshq,
yek vaqt shavad jômleh-é awqât marâ.

Vocabulary

Ân-vaqt = at the time
bahr = sea
shavad = became, happened
zât = essence
marâ = mine
rûshan ghardad = will be shined, will be enlightened
jamâl = charm, beauty
zarrât = atoms (plural form), zarreh (singular form).
mî-sûzam = I do blaze
sham'a = candle
éshq = love
yek vaqt = one moment
awqât = moments (plural form) for vaqt

BELGIAN ARISTOCRACY.

This is totally frivolous, but it's about all I'm up for today, and let's face it, I'm a sucker for unusual names. Via the prinsessor-smitten Des, herewith some of the proud products of Flemish-Walloon mixed blue-blood marriages:

Astrid Pouppez de Ketteris de Hollaeken
la baronne Laetitia de Villenfagne de Vogelsanck
la comtesse Céline d'Arschot Schoonhoven

I should add, however, that Des's favorite is non-Belgian, "the splendiciously named Gioia Sardagna von Neuberg e Hohenstein Ferrari." Now imagine a butler intoning those names, one after another, as a parade of magnificoes enters your country house for a shooting party...

SOWING LANGUAGES.

Well, it's my bounden duty to tell you about the latest theory of language spread, but I'm damned if I know what to say. According to an article by Nicholas Wade in today's NY Times, Jared Diamond of the University of California at Los Angeles and Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University in Canberra are claiming that the world's languages were spread by agriculture.

The premise is that when humans lived as hunters and gatherers, their populations were small, because wild game and berries can support only so many people. But after an agriculture system was devised, populations expanded, displacing the hunter-gatherers around them and taking their language with them.

On this theory, whatever language happened to be spoken in a region where a crop plant was domesticated expanded along with the farmers who spoke it.

Even if the farmers interbred with the hunter-gatherers whose land they took over, genes can mix, but languages cannot. So the hunter-gatherers would in many cases have adopted the farmers' language. That is why languages "record these processes of demographic expansion more clearly than the genes," Dr. Bellwood said.

Aside from the usual Times quota of misstatements (Bantu is not the same thing as Niger-Congo) and presentation of hypotheses as fact ("The founder language [of Austronesian] was spoken by rice growers in southern China"), the piece—and I presume the original Science article—is full of "may have" and other warning signals. Cautionary voices are left till almost the end of the article ("Dr. Christopher Ehret of U.C.L.A., an expert in the history of African languages, said the authors had overstated the role of agriculture in explaining the pattern of language distribution"). Neither of the authors is a linguist (Diamond is a physiologist, Bellwood an archaeologist), and they naturally accept whatever linguistic theories best fit the story they want to tell. But my main reaction is: so? This theory is not blatantly silly, like the genetic click one the Times was excited about a few weeks ago (they seem to have forgotten all about it, since they mention "the Khoisan, or click-language speakers" without reference to their unique genetic heritage), but there's no way of knowing how true it is, and what good is yet another unprovable theory? Call me small-minded, but I'd rather have one honest fact pried from the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the world than a dozen ambitious but untestable hypotheses.

THE TRUTH ABOUT ALMOST DYING.

The May Harper's contains an unsettling essay by Mark Slouka called "Arrow and Wound" [perhaps available here]. After an allusion to a visitor's seeing the aged Tolstoy "scoop a double handful of violets from the wet earth, breathe in their aroma with a kind of ecstasy, then let them fall carelessly at his feet," Slouka describes in richly imagined detail (based, of course, on Dostoevsky's own account) the experience a young Dostoevsky underwent when with of his fellow subversives he underwent a mock execution that shook him to the core and changed him into the wrathful conservative we are familiar with. He then describes a parallel experience that befell the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert, who was seized by the Germans after the Prague revolt that began exactly 58 years ago and taken out to be shot. Seifert claimed in his book Všecky krásy světa [All the Beauties of the Earth] that while waiting to be shot he had no remarkable thoughts; he found a little bread and cheese in a pocket and shared it with a friend, he looked at a public toilet in the distance and remembered an obscene picture of a woman someone had drawn in it that had fascinated him as a boy, he wondered what people who weren't being executed were having for lunch. After it was over, he forgot all about it, and didn't think of it again for years.

"Whose version do we believe?" Slouka asks. "I suspect that the romantics among us (as well as the more conventionally and narrowly devout) side with Dostoevsky. And perhaps the rest of us do as well. How could a person not be touched, altered, by such an experience?... What of Seifert, then? Do we write off his amnesia as denial, debunk him with a pinch of Freud?... I think not. To do so, it seems to me, would be to assume that consciousness can be teased apart from its retelling, which it cannot.... It is also to forget a more intriguing and complicated truth: that we in some measure shape the events that befall us just as surely as we are shaped by them."

He now goes in a direction that I will not reveal, since it would spoil a beautifully prepared surprise for those who read the full essay (which I hope you will; the issue is still on the stands). At the conclusion, he returns to his main theme:

Every retelling is inevitably a distortion, but that does not mean it is without value. We can't help but tell the truth. Although we will never know what Dostoevsky experienced that December morning in Semenovsky Square, we can, from his retelling, with its particular fingerprint of stresses and omissions, learn a great deal about him. Although we will never know what Jaroslav Seifert really thought or felt standing against that wall (although he himself may no longer know—indeed, may never have known), we can see, with perfect clarity, what he wants us to believe he thought or felt. Nothing reveals us as clearly as our attempt to shape the past. Retrospection is, by definition, reflexive.

What our inadvertent self-portrait reveals, if we study it closely enough, is that our consciousness, rather than being shaped by a particular event, predated it. That we were, in a sense, anticipating it. That, to recall Kafka's haunting insight, "the arrows fit exactly into the wounds" for which they were intended. Dostoevsky experienced what he did in Semenovsky Square because he was Dostoevsky. Because he already carried inside him, like a patient wound, the "cursed questions" he would seek to answer the rest of his life. Seifert, the poet of the quotidian and the small, thought about the things he did because he was Jaroslav Seifert, the man who, thirty-five years later, would write a book called All the Beauties of the Earth. Because, like Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, he gathered the things of this life, and let them fall at his feet. The experience, in other words, was already prepared for him by the time he got there. As it is, to some extent, for all of us.

I suppose both sides in the Truth in Blogging debate can find ammunition here. The adherents of "alibis and consistent lies" can point to "We can't help but tell the truth" and say "You see, that's what I'm trying to tell you: it doesn't matter how 'accurate' my words are, they tell the truth about me and how I see the world." I, on the other hand, am struck by the extreme nature of the experience described by such different people with such different attitudes towards it, and I am intensely interested in how the experience of knowing you're about to die is described by someone who was there, who felt it, and the fact that different people felt different things simply adds to the interest. I don't believe you can accurately imagine such an experience, any more than you can imagine combat or giving birth without having been there. True, most things that bloggers write about are far less extreme in nature, but it still makes a difference to me whether you are writing from knowledge or from imagination. I have no desire to constrain what people write about, and I can thoroughly enjoy a completely invented description (I've written them myself); all I ask is that you give me some hint so I can know what I'm reading and respond accordingly. There is a difference between fiction and history, despite the easy and fashionable contempt of some who consider themselves above such petty concerns.

LANGUAGEHAT AS POEM.

I usually resist these fads that sweep Blogovia at regular intervals, but I can't resist Rob's Amazing Poem Generator. Put in your URL, getcher poem. Here's mine; I may adopt "herewith a clue about these matters" as the official LH motto. Or perhaps "Posted by consulting the late Stan Brakhage." (Via wood s lot.)

languagehat at IMDB
Linguistics Minority
Languages of
LANGUAGE. resources: Your
French up to the later
films were mostly psychodramas Desistfilm,
54 , those made during
his work incorporating and
right. Some
new Companion Open Brackets Pedantry
A ruminative philosophical meditation spoken over
the TIMES might stretching here Posted
by consulting the late Stan Brakhage OBIT. 1
YINGZI AND mildly irritated to illustrate
the of this brilliant Zompist site Archives
May 01,
PM | Comments 4 April 2003 March 2003
SWADESH LISTS. The following
adjacent entries, with
the
correct
for a visual reference; herewith a clue
about these matters.

YINGZI AND "GUNG HO".

John Hardy's comment in my latest Sapir-Whorf thread led me to this brilliant article (on the brilliant Zompist site) on how English could be written with a character system; if you don't know how the Chinese writing system works (which you probably don't if you haven't studied it), read about "yingzi" and you'll learn the basics.

One example from the article leads me to a brief etymological excursus:

"One way would be to use hanzi directly, as the Japanese do.... Chinese and Japanese borrowings could be written using the original hanzi, e.g. 'gung-ho' would be [Chinese characters]." Now, he doesn't explain "gung ho" further, but most dictionaries give it as Chinese for 'work together.' It's not that simple. To quote the always quotable American Heritage Dictionary:

Earlier Gung Ho, motto of certain U.S. Marine forces in Asia during World War II, from Chinese (Mandarin) gonghé, to work together (short for gongyèhézuòshè, Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society) : gong, work + hé, together.

Most of us are not aware of it today, but the word gung ho has been in English only since 1942 and is one of the many words that entered the language as a result of World War II. It comes from Mandarin Chinese gonghé, “to work together,” which was used as a motto by the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society. Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson (1896–1947) borrowed the motto as a moniker for meetings in which problems were discussed and worked out; the motto caught on among his Marines (the famous “Carlson's Raiders”), who began calling themselves the “Gung Ho Battalion.” From there eager individuals began to be referred to as gung ho.

However, this is not quite correct. There is no "Chinese gonghé, to work together"; gonghé is purely an abbreviation for the full name gongyèhézuòshè, and corresponds exactly to the equivalent English abbreviation Indusco. So what Carlson's Raiders were actually yelling as they charged the enemy was "Indusco!" Inspiring, no?

M. TRUDEAU EST EN ROGNE.

Today's Doonesbury is a brilliant example of language as politics. I found it at Pedantry, but his permalinks are bloggered, so you can either go there and look for the top entry on Sunday, May 04 or visit the Doonesbury link and go to the same date. (If your French isn't up to snuff, try here.)

BRAKHAGE OBIT.

An excellent appreciation of the late Stan Brakhage by Steve Anker (Dean of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts) in the new Film Comment.

Brakhage was part of America's first generation of independent filmmakers who practiced filmmaking throughout their entire lives. His own role within this larger endeavor was to fight for the filmmaker as poetic visionary artist, equal to and in frequent dialogue with the traditional arts, and this insistence on defining himself foremost as an artist galvanized thousands of filmmakers and students over the decades. Although it is impossible to divide his work neatly into periods, the earliest films were mostly quasi-narrative "psychodramas" (Desistfilm, 54), those made during his middle years were largely centered on his family life (Scenes From Under Childhood, 67-70), and the later films increasingly explored what he called "hypnogogic" vision (Chartres Series, 94), frequently reducing all imagery to non-representational essences, much as abstract painters had done over the past century. His work made bridges between film and poetry by learning from the rhythms and mythos of Pound, Stein, Creeley, and Duncan; music through the structures of Bach, Webern, and Feldman, painting through the expressive gestures of De Kooning and Pollock, and collage through the material sensitivity of Cornell (with whom he collaborated on several films in the Fifties). Sometimes drawn to grand statements, he was most eloquent when dealing with the humility and fragility of human existence: his 30-film 8mm Song cycle, epic in scope but small in scale, remains possibly his most intimate work, incorporating and elevating the understanding of traditional "home movies" to the status of art.

...the main reasons Brakhage's films are still little known remain the same as when he first emerged and was briefly embraced during the Sixties: in contrast with the seductive high-glitz tactility of Matthew Barney or the chic philosophizing and clever conceptualizations of Bill Viola, both of whom have been totally embraced by the high-art collector culture, all of Brakhage's values - the core of his aesthetics - exist to resist being handily consumed and canonized. Brakhage celebrates life in all its sprawling dimensions, embracing even its blemishes and uncertainties, and this remains as distant from society's ideals as ever.

SAPIR-WHORF AND THE TIMES

I have already discussed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, admitting that I don't have the faintest idea whether it's true or not but hoping for research that might do more to answer the question than the ex cathedra statements of linguists. Imagine my surprise when the NY Times tries to settle the question by consulting the ex cathedra statements of linguists—in this case, one particular linguist, the media's current darling, Steven Pinker. Now, Pinker is a smart guy (and a brilliant self-promoter, not that there's anything wrong with that), but he subscribes to a linguistic theory that holds that all languages are essentially cosmetic variants, identical below the surface. Regardless of whether you think that's plausible or not (regular readers of this site will know that I come down on the "not" side), to ask an adherent of it to judge the validity of Sapir-Whorf is like asking an atheist to judge the validity of the Pope's infallibility. The Times might (I'm stretching here) ask an atheist for an opinion, but certainly wouldn't allow it to carry their implicit imprimatur, as they do with Pinker. But this is no surprise; the surprise would be if the newspaper that employs William Safire as its language guru suddenly got a clue about these matters.

By the way, the main focus of the Times article is not Sapir-Whorf but a book that's just come out, The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity by William C. Hannas, "a linguist who speaks 12 languages and works as a senior officer at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service." Mr. Hannas (to adopt the Times's immutable form of reference—they legendarily referred to the singer Meat Loaf as "Mr. Loaf") claims that Asian science has suffered because the main Asian languages are written in "character-based rather than alphabetic" systems. (Note to the Times: "character-based writing system" is not the same thing as "syllabary.") According to him (if the Times summary is correct), "because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity." This seems unlikely to me. What is likely, though it goes unmentioned in the article, is that the writing systems based on characters, which take much more time and effort to learn than alphabets, hamper literacy in general, and if China (to take the biggest country involved) switched over completely to pinyin romanization, literacy rates would skyrocket (true literacy, not the minimal ability China's official statistics are based on) and there would be a much larger base of potential scientists and inventors. But don't hold your breath; there's a lot of cultural capital invested in those beautiful, inefficient characters.

NEW WORDS.

I've been turning my attention to the gorgeous illustrations in my new American Heritage Dictionary and in the process have acquired some new vocabulary items, which will stick with me better for having been learned with a visual reference; herewith a sample (with simplified definitions and links to online images):
umiak 'large skin-on-wood boat'
tole 'painted metalware'
mutton snapper 'a snapper of the western Atlantic'
emergence 'outgrowth of plant tissue, e.g. a thorn'
anoa 'small Philippine buffalo'
sennit 'braided cordage' [etymology unknown, by the way]
Rayonism 'a variant of Futurism, with rays' (I like the fact that of the two actual Rayonists, AHD chooses to illustrate the less famous, Natalia Goncharova, rather than her boyfriend Larionov)
In every case, the illustration in the dictionary is better than anything I could find online. It's that kind of book.

A side note: I was amused and mildly irritated to see the following adjacent entries, with pronunciations as noted:
Olekma (o-LEK-m@) (a river of eastern Russia)
Olenek (ol-en-YOK, @-l@-NYOK) (a river of northeast Russia)
Now, it's never easy to decide how authentic to be in giving pronunciations of obscure foreign place names, but why give the correct -yo- for the last -e- of Olenek and not for the -e- of Olekma (@-LYOK-m@)?

Addendum. Maureen Brian informs me that this site gives an etymology "from seven and knit" for "sennit." I suppose it can't be relied on too heavily, since the word was originally "sinnet" and the OED simply says "A nautical term of obscure origin," but it's an interesting speculation. Thanks, Maureen!

THE FIRST OF MAY.

I am not about to reproduce here the vulgar little ditty with which this entry is, regrettably, concerned. I know that my readership is largely composed of persons of refined sensibilities who would, if not swoon, certainly raise their eyebrows in a fashion that I'm not sure I could bear. I urge such persons to ignore this ignoble entry. Others, however—those of you who (like my ignoble self) have not attained to a respectable spiritual level—should go here, read the rhyme beginning "Hooray, hooray," and let me know in the comments whether you're familiar with it, and if so whether the words are the ones you know. Myself, I have (to my shame) delighted in it for thirty years or so, but I have always said "starts today," which of course makes for a better rhythm. Ahem. That is all.