Having recently posted about the AHD's extension of the etymology of "ginger" back to Dravidian, I am now equally delighted to have them trace "souk" back beyond the obvious Arabic to Aramaic shuqa 'street, market,' from Akkadian suqu 'street.' And of course, bless their little hearts, they provide the protoform in their Semitic appendix. Thanks to The Discouraging Word for alerting me to this!
Andrew Krug, responding to my recent (and not very serious) query about Ladino blogs, has come up with the next best thing: a Ladino newspaper online. Well, actually a newspaper for the Sephardic community of Turkey, mainly in Turkish, but with a column in Ladino (in Latin characters). Thanks, Andrew!
(Other Ladino links here, and see my entry on Sefarad.)
So I was reading the Sunday paper and came across Ron Rosenbaum's description of the infamous "Salic law speech" at the start of Shakespear's Henry V and the way in which a director can use it to establish his approach to the whole play. Henry is thinking of invading France and wants the blessing of the Church; he calls in the Archbishop of Canterbury and asks him to explain "Why the Law Salique, that they have in France,/ Or should or should not bar us in our claim." The Archbishop, doubtless thrilled to have a willing royal ear for the kind of detailed historico-legal exegesis which usually sends his auditors running for the transepts, begins "Then hear me, gracious sovereign, and you peers..." and continues for a mind-numbing (or enthralling, according to taste) sixty lines unraveling the tangled history of the kings of France, full of peppy bits like "In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant" and "Of Blithild, which was daughter to King Clothair." It can be played as farce or as conspiracy, or even straight. At this point Rosenbaum says:
The fact that those who take the Salic law sequence seriously need blackboards and placards on easels accompanied by illustrations to make sense of it doesn't necessarily mean that it's nonsense. Read closely, the speech is a kind of spiraling black hole of self-cancellation.This made me put down the paper and furrow my brow. A spiraling black hole of self-cancellation... what did that remind me of? Ah yes, of course, Finnegans Wake. (This recognition was a result not so much of my fondness for Joyce, extreme though it is, as of my youthful immersion in science fiction, believe it or not—in this instance James Blish's A Case of Conscience.)
On page 572 of Finnegans Wake Joyce interrupts the stream of dreamtime worldspeech for the one passage of straightforward (not to say clinical) English in the book. It begins:
Honuphrius is a concupiscent exservicemajor who makes dishonest propositions to all. He is considered to have committed, invoking droit d'oreiller, simple infidelities with Felicia, a virgin, and to be practising for unnatural coits with Eugenius and Jeremias, two or three philadelphians...and continues with a complex explication of the manifold immoral interrelationships among a group of people we have not met before and shall not meet again. At the end comes the simple question, "Has he hegemony and shall she submit?" This parallels nicely the King's question at the end of the Salic Law speech, "May I with right and conscience make this claim?"
Blish's protagonist, Father Ruiz-Sanchez, expends much anguish of mind and soul on the first question. The Archbishop, per contra, has a ready answer to the second, which boils down to "Sure!" But he has been bought off by the king's favorable attitude to the quashing of a parliamentary bill imposing confiscatory tax rates, so we can hardly take his reply as representing an honest resolution of the problem. In fact, the passages that lead up to the questions are both of them spiraling black holes of self-cancellation, and I think it's fair to say that both cases remain open. Therefore, any readers sending in a detailed analysis of both, with clear and convincing answers to both questions, will receive a certificate proclaiming them Doctor Philosophiae, Divinitatis, et Legis Salicae and a letter authorizing them to resolve any and all of life's problems, by writ of Languagehat University. Or, if you prefer, you could always propound a fresh Gordian knot, your own case of conscience, and let it inspire plays, novels, or at the very least blog entries.
A funny, if inadequate, essay on Spanish swearing, via Avva. (I say "inadequate" because, although it basically concerns itself with the swearing of Spain, it includes a digression on the Argentine variety; this, although accurate as far as it goes, might lead unwary readers to suppose that they now have at least an overview of the international situation, whereas in fact swearing varies richly from country to country, as might be expected, and the most striking fact about Argentine swearing—the replacement of joder by cojer, which in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world is the common verb for 'take'—is not even mentioned.)
I somehow missed wood s lot yesterday, and now I find that he consecrated the day in large measure to one of my favorite modernist poets, Blaise Cendrars (self-chosen name; he was born Frédéric-Louis Sauser). He wrote quite a bit, but the poem you need to know (if you don't already) is Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France ("Trans-Siberian Prose and Little Jeanne from France"), which reflects his trip across Russia during the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905) and the Russian Revolution of 1905; a full translation by Ekaterina Likhtik is online here, beginning:
I was in my adolescence at the timeThe original French is here (or, in a more elaborate version where you proceed from section to section by clicking on pictures, here), and you can see an image of the exceedingly rare first edition (multicolored, printed on a single sheet of paper that unfolded is two meters long) here. The whole last century is contained therein. All aboard!
Scarcely sixteen and already I no longer remembered my childhoodI was 16,000 leagues from my birthplace
I was in Moscow, in the city of a thousand and three belfries and seven railroad stations
And they weren't enough for me, the seven railroad stations and the thousand and three towers
For my adolescence was so blazing and so mad
That my heart burned in turns as the temple of Epheseus, or as Red Square in Moscow
When the sun sinks.
And my eyes shone upon the ancient routes
And I was already such a bad poet
That I didn't know how to go all the way to the end.The Kremlin was like an immense Tatar cake
Crusted with gold,
With great almonds of cathedrals all done in white
And the honeyed gold of the bells…An old monk was reading to me the legend of Novgorod
I was thirsty
And I was deciphering cuneiform characters
Then, suddenly, the pigeons of the Holy Spirit soared above the square...
I had known that the complicated etymology of the word "ginger" took it back to the Indian subcontinent; it's from Middle English gingivere, borrowed (like Old English gingifer, which may itself be a source of the Middle English word) from Old French gingivre, which is from Medieval Latin gingiber, from Latin zingiberi, from Greek zingiberis, from a Middle Indic form (my Ayto Dictionary of Word Origins says "Prakrit singabera") akin to Pali singiveram, which has been said to come from Sanskrit s'rngaveram, a compound of s'rngam 'horn' + vera- 'body' (supposedly applied to ginger because of the shape of the root). But I learn from the American Heritage Dictionary that the Middle Indic form is "from Dravidian : akin to Tamil iñci, ginger (of southeast Asian origin) + Tamil ver, root." Now, although I Am Not a Dravidianist, I happen to know that the South Dravidian languages, including Tamil, lost Proto-Dravidian *c- (e.g. il 'not be' from *cil-, iy- 'give' from *ciy-, aRu 'six' from *caRu), so I wonder if the protoform was *cinci-, which would account for the initial s- in the Middle Indic form. In any event, I am pleased to see a Dravidian etymology for an English word. Nancy, this one's for you!
If this isn't complicated enough already, the OED adds: "Other forms of this widely diffused word are Arab. zanjabil (already in the Koran); MDu. gengber (from Sp. or Pg.) whence Du. gember; also (with loss of the initial consonant as in Ger. enzian from L. gentina) MHG. ingewer (Ger. ingwer), MLG. engewer, Da. ingefær, Sw. ingefära." And I myself will add that the Russian word, imbir', is borrowed from German (perhaps via Polish).
Anyone with a flair for the lyric might mosey on over to Open Brackets and try their hand at Englishing this little will-o'-the-wisp by Victor Hugo:
On douteMy attempt is in the comment section there, as are a growing number of others. What have you got to lose?
La nuit ...
J'écoute:
Tout fuit,
Tout passe;
L'espace
Efface
Le bruit.
Payvand means 'joining, link, connection' in Farsi; it is also the name of an excellent website that promotes the Persian internet. It has news, stichomancy (or Sortes Hafezianae if you prefer; in Farsi it's faal-e Haafez), HTML help, a web directory, and (closest to my heart) a page of books, a couple of which I have and most of which I want to read. One that immediately caught my eye is The Poetry of Nizami Ganjavi: Knowledge, Love, and Rhetoric, a collection of essays edited by Kamran Talattof et al; Nizami is one of the great figures of Persian literature. From an online bio:
Only a handful of his qasidahs ("odes") and ghazals ("lyrics") have survived; his reputation rests on his great Khamseh ("The Quintuplet"), a pentalogy of poems written in masnavi verse form (rhymed couplets) and totaling 30,000 couplets. Drawing inspiration from the Persian epic poets Ferdowsi and Sana'i, he proved himself the first great dramatic poet of Persian literature. The first poem in the pentology is the didactic poem Makhzan al-asrar (The Treasury of Mysteries), the second the romantic epic Khosrow o-Shirin ("Khosrow and Shirin"). The third is his rendition of a well-known story in Islamic folklore, Leyli o-Mejnun (The Story of Leyla and Majnun). The fourth poem, Haft paykar (The Seven Beauties), is considered his masterwork. The final poem in the pentalogy is the Sikandar or Eskandar-nameh ("Book of Alexander the Great"; Eng. trans. of part I, The Sikander Nama), a philosophical portrait of Alexander.You can see illuminated manuscript pages of Nizami here, here, and here (click on the image at the left).
Thanks for the link to Beth at Cassandra Pages!
I could have sworn this moldy hipsterism was a Beat saying, dating back certainly no earlier than the late '40s, but it turns out it was used as the title of a song in Pal Joey in 1940, meaning it dates back at least to the '30s. Now I'm wondering how far back it goes, and in what social circle it was coined. Anybody know?
Alisa, at Alisa in Wonderland, says in this entry: "This blog is in Yiddish, and it provides an extesive linkage to other sites in and on Yiddish, as well as to some other blogs in Yiddish. I hope it can disprove the common wisdom that this is a dying language." Mind you, I can't see it, any more than I could the Vedic site in the previous entry; I guess this is my day for taking things on faith. But I like the idea of Yiddish blogs so much I had to tell the world about them. (Now, are there any Ladino blogs?)
If you've ever had a yen to hear the Vedas chanted, there are eighteen hours of it available at vedamu.org, not to mention Sanskrit texts of the Vedas with commentary by Sayanacharya. I'm taking this on faith because I can't actually access the site at the moment, but here's a story about it, and it's recommended by Nancy at under the fire star, so my faith is strong.
[Comments closed due to spam.]
That's my condition this week; I have no idea where it came from, and it turns out we don't know where the word comes from either (OED: "Relationship to other Teutonic roots is uncertain, and no outside cognates have been traced"). At any rate, I have not the mental energy to come up with a clever and enlightening entry, so here's one of my favorite short Charles Reznikoff poems (and I must immediately qualify this by saying that most Reznikoff poems are quite long):
TE DEUM
Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.
Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.
(From Inscriptions 1944 -1956.)
Diglossia is a situation in which one form of a language (the H variety) is used for formal purposes (writing, speeches, &c.) and another (L) is used for conversation (and is rarely if ever written down); a typical example is Arabic in those countries where a dialect of it is the vernacular. The classic article is by Charles Ferguson (1959), but much work has been done since, and Nancy Gandhi has turned up a useful summary by Harold F. Schiffman. A couple of points:
Difference between Diglossia and Standard-with-dialects. In diglossia, no-one speaks the H-variety as a mother tongue, only the L-variety. In the Standard-with-dialects situation, some speakers speak H as a mother tongue, while others speak L-varieties as a mother tongue and acquire H as a second system.What engenders diglossia and under what conditions.
(a) Existence of an ancient or prestigious literature, composed in the H-variety, which the linguistic culture wishes to preserve as such.
(b) Literacy is usually a condition, but is usually restricted to a small elite. When conditions require universal literacy in H, pedagogical problems ensue.
(c) Diglossias do not spring up overnight; they take time to develop
These three factors, perhaps linked with religion, make diglossia extremely stable in Arabic and other linguistic cultures such as South Asia.
I might add that Nancy owns a book on the subject that I will have to scour the library for; it sounds very interesting. And that means I'll wind up delving into Tamil, for which at least I have a Tamil-Russian dictionary.
In the nature
of flesh, these clown gods
are words, blown
in the winters, thou
windows, lacking
sun.
In the nature,
of ideas, in the nature of
words, these
clown gods are
winter. Are blown
thru our windows.
The flesh
& bone
of the season. Each
dead thing
hustled
across the pavement. Each
dead word
drowned
in a winter wind. Are
in the nature
of flesh. These
liars, clown
gods
–Amiri Baraka (from Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note)
(I'm a bit under the weather, and the weather's lousy.)
According to this article by Jonathan Duffy at BBC News Online, Google is taking vigorous legal action to keep people from listing "google" as a lower-case vocabulary item; their fear is, of course, that their trademark will go the way of escalator, pogo, gunk, heroin, and tabloid.
Paul McFedries, who runs the lexicography site Word Spy, received a stiffly worded letter from the firm after he added "google" to his online lexicon.At the end of the article comes this interesting twist:The company asked him to delete the definition or revise it to take account of the "trade mark status of Google". He opted for the latter.
Google's problem is one of the paradoxes of having a runaway successful brand. The bigger it gets, the more it becomes part of everyday English language and less a brand in its own right.
Just as we talk about "hoovering" instead of vacuuming, people have started to say "google" to mean search. The word has become an eponym.
In Britain people may feel they want to seize the opportunity for free speech while they still can. The verb "to google" has yet to take off on this side of the Atlantic, but it seems Brits could use it with impunity for the time being, says Liz Ward.I imagine that in the near future dictionaries will follow Word Spy's lead and include a note about the legal status of the word:That's because in Europe, at least, Google's trade mark is still pending.
google (GOO.gul) v. To search for information on the Web, particularly by using the Google search engine; to search the Web for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. (Note that Google™ is a trademark identifying the search technology and services of Google Technologies Inc.)(Thanks for the tip, Maureen! Oh, and I'd like to take this opportunity to note that Google™ is a trademark identifying the search technology and services of Google Technologies Inc. And I'd also like to point out that my Google™ hits have dropped to almost nothing since I switched from Blogger to MT. Could this have anything to do with the fact that Google™ bought Blogger? You be the judge.)
Anyone interested in Russian poetry will want to bookmark the site From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Poetry.
The aim of this innovative project is to provide an intelligently chosen, well-translated, and comprehensive anthology of Russian poetry from its beginnings in the 18th century to the contemporary scene. The anthology breaks new ground the in study and appreciation of Russian poetry by including multimedia elements that would have been impossible in any other format:• Facing texts of Russian originals and English translations of 200 poems that broadly represent more than 225 years of Russian poetry.
• 38 detailed resource pages on the various poets containing extensive biographical information, bibliographies, and links. For many of these poets, russianpoetry.net is the only English-language source of information on the Internet.
• 75+ previously unavailable archival recordings of poetry performed by Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Esenin, Bunin, and others. When recordings by the poets themselves are not available, the site contains performances by leading Russian actors or musical renditions of the works.
• 400+ illustrations of authors, monuments, and manuscript versions of many poems.
• A search engine that enables free-text and Boolean searches of the collection.
To hear Mandelshtam, Akhmatova, and Pasternak reading their own poetry is an amazing experience. (The Mandelshtam recordings are hampered by both the very primitive sound—they sound like Edison cylinders—and by the author's bardic reciting technique, which takes getting used to, but really, who cares? I had no idea such recordings even existed.)
An older edition of the BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English is available online; as the introduction says:
The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English gives essential grammatical and lexical recurrent word combinations, often called collocations; when necessary, it provides definitions, paraphrases, and Usage Notes....(Via Avva.)Much of the material provided in this Dictionary has never before been published. This material is of vital importance to those learners of English who are native speakers of other languages. Heretofore, they have had no source that would consistently indicate, for example, which verbs are used with which nouns; they could not find in any existing dictionary such collocations as call an alert, lay down a barrage, hatch a conspiracy, impose an embargo, roll a hoop, draw up a list, administer an oath, enter (make) a plea, crack a smile, punch a time clock, inflict a wound, etc. This Dictionary provides such collocations; in order to enable the user of the Dictionary to find them quickly and easily, they are given in the entries for the nouns.
Via the always interesting Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufry, an entry about the dialect of Liguria, "that tight, cramped little province — whence my father's family came — jammed up between the sea and the mountains, stretched out between France and Pisa." The dialect is called zeneize (="genovese"); apparently the term ligure 'Ligurian' is used largely in connection with antiquity, and there is not even a corresponding word in the dialect. At any rate, he links to two websites exclusively written in the dialect and has an Addendum about the name Baciccia, which is extremely common in the region and has turned up in American Spanish thanks to the many Genoese immigrants (in Argentina bachicha is both an insulting term for Italians and a slang word meaning 'simpleton'). A tip of the hat to Jim, who makes Uncle Jazzbeau dance.
Incidentally, his previous entry consists of a nice Montale quote about seeing the coastal part of the region, the Cinque Terre, from windows in a train tunnel.
The June 9 entry at Panchayat, The Imam and I: An Argument in the Qasbah, presents as sharp a picture of the divide in today's world and the way it affects the way people talk with each other as I've read in a long time. The entry's author, Conrad Barwa, quotes a difficult conversation Amitav Ghosh had with an angry imam; I urge you to read the whole thing, but here's the conclusion:
I was crushed as I walked away; it seemed to me that the Imam and I had participated in our own final defeat, in the dissolution of centuries of dialogue that had linked us; we had demonstrated the irreversible triumph of the language that has usurped all the others in which people once discussed their differences. We had acknowledged that it was no longer possible to speak as any one of the thousands of travellers who had crossed the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages might have done; of things that were good, or right or willed by God; it would have been merely absurd for either of us to use those words, for they belonged to a dismantled rung on the ascending ladder of Development. To make ourselves understood, we had both resorted, I, a student of the social and ‘humane’ sciences, and he an old fashioned village Imam, to the very terms that world leaders and statesmen use at great global conferences, the universal, irresistible metaphysic of modern meaning; he said to me in effect: ‘You ought not to do what you do, because otherwise you will not have guns and tanks and bombs.’ It was the only language we had been able to discover in common. I felt myself a conspirator in the betrayal of the history that had led me to Egypt, a witness to the extermination of a world of accommodations that I had believed to be still alive and in some measure still retrievable.(Link via Path of the Paddle.)
Update: It turns out the conversation is an excerpt from Ghosh's book In an Antique Land, which I've been meaning to read for years but haven't gotten to yet; thanks to Conrad Barwa and Ikram Saeed for their e-mails, and I have edited my intro above accordingly.
This excellent site presents the Great Isaiah Scroll of the Qumran community, showing a photographic plate of each column of the scroll with a line-by-line translation and a detailed analysis of physical characteristics and textual variants.
My comments on each page about the scroll are meant to help you to get to know about the scroll and the technical differences between it and the received text. It is not meant to be a commentary on the book of Isaiah. If you can read Hebrew it will enhance your study of the scroll greatly, but it is not necessary to read Hebrew to gain some insight into what the Scroll is like and to understand its importance.... The critical comments are meant for beginning and intermediate students. Advanced students will also find things of interest on these pages, but this is not to be considered a "scholar's" work.A good place to start is the introductory page, which describes the physical condition of the scroll and the editorial markings and (for those who know some Hebrew) the peculiarities of the language.
I found the site via PaleoJudaica, "a blog on ancient ('paleo-') Judaism ('Judaica') and its historical and literary context from roughly the beginning of the Second Temple period (late 500s B.C.E.) to the rise of Islam (early 600s C.E.)," which has all manner of interesting information. It's run by Dr. James R. Davila ("please call me Jim"), a Lecturer in Early Jewish Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Well done, Jim!
From Enslin's 1978 book-length poem Ranger (Volume I), the start of section XIII:
How difficult it is!Some short Enslin poems here.
How strange to break in
on the self on those sections
of self that lie buried
but so vulnerable
that a footstep above them,
on loose-packed detritus,
hurts to the quick,
and makes life of
pain—that it lives—
at all lives.
So I have heard of one more—
perhaps the first woman
I knew as a woman—
gone away, and now dead.
We speak briefly
of the dead,
as if we no longer wanted
to think of them,
but their presence is
none the less—
living in some other place.
We stay with them.
Addendum. wood s lot has posted much more Enslin, all excellent. Go and enjoy.
A trilingual journal called Trans went in search of some triple romance... No, no, no, this isn't Limerickhat. Let's start over. Trans is an "Internet journal for cultural sciences" that's published simultaneously in German, English, and French. A lot of the material is outside my sphere of interest, but there are enough special issues like "Nation, Language and Literature" and "Multilingualism, Transnationality, Cultural Sciences" that I'm going to bookmark it. (Courtesy of wood s lot.)
Via this MetaFilter thread, the latest quarterly update of the Oxford English Dictionary is now available. First comes the range of entries must-necessity; if you scroll down below that list, you get the new subordinate entries, the out-of-sequence new entries "from across the alphabet" (includes 0800 number, Amandebele, bazillion, bitch-slap, Brigadoon, and everybody's favorite buggeration, just to sample the first two letters; it ends wonga, yapunyah, Zorb, zorbing), out-of-sequence subordinate entries, and finally new meanings for old words. I'd just like to express my abject worship of the OED, in case I haven't yet. It goes from strength to strength. (Of course, in the beginning Oxford was reluctant to spend a shilling on it, but we'll let bygones be bygones until the next time they do something to seriously annoy me.)
This book looks like it would be of interest to a lot of Languagehat readers (including me):
Though it is difficult enough to write well in one’s native tongue, an extraordinary group of authors has written enduring poetry and prose in a second, third, or even fourth language. Switching Languages is the first anthology in which translingual authors from throughout the world examine their experiences writing in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one. Driven by factors as varied as migration, imperialism, a quest for verisimilitude, and a desire to assert artistic autonomy, translingualism has a long and brilliant history.If anybody has seen the actual book, please give an appraisal!In Switching Languages, Steven G. Kellman brings together several notable authors from the past one hundred years who discuss their personal translingual experiences and their take on a general phenomenon that has not received the attention it deserves. Contributors to the book include Chinua Achebe, Julia Alvarez, Mary Antin, Elias Canetti, Rosario Ferré, Ha Jin, Salman Rushdie, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Ilan Stavans. They offer vivid testimony to the challenges and achievements of literary translingualism.
Over at this Public Address there's an entry investigating the history of words beginning "porno-," in the course of which the following nugget is unearthed from the OED:
[pornialIt's amusing not only that the august Century (1889-91) inserted this Freudian slip, but also that the Funk & Wagnalls (1893-95) swiped it and got caught. Crime doesn't pay!
(in Cent. Dict. and Funk's Standard Dict.), a spurious word, due to a misreading or misprint of primal.
An online grammar of Algerian Darja by Lameen Souag: "Darja is the term most commonly used in North Africa to refer to the local dialect of Arabic/language developed from Arabic (depending on your political viewpoint)." A well-done site for a fascinating dialect (or language); the section on Evolution from Classical to Darja begins with a list of specific changes ("Daad becomes Daa'," "Final and initial short vowels disappear," &c.) and ends:
A lot of the sound changes can be summarized as: pronounce Fusha in a Berber accent (or at least a non-Kabyle Berber accent), which is presumably how Darja originated. The phonological inventories of Darja and many Berber dialects are practically identical, in particular the vowel system and the labialization, although the spirantization typical of Berber does not appear.He also has a useful User's Guide to Algeria's Languages. Thanks to Lameen for the information, and to Jackson Ninly at The Melon Colonie for the link.
An impressive gallery of the many and varied ways Japanese give typographical expression to emotions ("Looking uncomfotable and he wants to leave"), personalities ("Am I pretty?"), actions ("Two people holding glasses and saying 'Cherrs' Giving a toast"), and existential states ("Someone wearing sunglasses and with a scar on his face, so he is...who?"). Via Anita Rowland.
.
Sometimes I am (not to put too fine a point upon it) an idiot. I recently expressed wild enthusiasm for the online version of Platts without ever noticing that at the top of the Platts page was the rubric Digital Dictionaries of South Asia. Today, in order to make a point in a comment, I Googled "Hobson-Jobson" and was directed to this page; this time I did notice the rubric, clicked on it, and was taken here. I boggled. My friends, I'm here to tell you that the good people at The South Asia Language and Area Center at University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the Triangle South Asia Consortium in North Carolina are putting online every major dictionary available for their area of focus.
The first name that caught my eye was Steingass. Once I had found Platts online, I began wishing that someone would publish Steingass the same way; it's the classic Persian-English dictionary, full of obscure words and usages often tossed together in a blender ("par, Past, elapsed; heretofore; last year; a bit, a piece; a skin, a tanned hide; flight") and, as my beloved Gaffarov (Persidsko-russkii slovar', 1914-28) says, not based reliably on either authentic Persian texts or actual conversational usage, but indispensable all the same. I've often looked longingly at it in libraries and the Librairie de France in Rockefeller Center (ridiculously overpriced—I never buy anything there—but a great place to gawk at dictionaries), but could never afford it (it'll set you back over a hundred dollars). Suddenly, there it was, the whole thing online for free. I should point out that it can be maddening to use, especially online; for instance, if you're looking for pur 'full' you will come up empty—there is no such listing, even though there are plenty of compounds, e.g., pur-a-pur, 'Filled to the brim, quite full.' You have to go to par 'A wing; a feather; a leaf; the arm from the collar-bone to the tip of the finger; the sails or paddles of a mill; a side, skirt, or margin; leaf of a tree; light, ray; (imp. of paridan, in comp.) flying' and look down past all the compounds of that word until you get to "pur, Full; laden, charged; complete; much, very; too much, too." It's written the same in Perso-Arabic script, you see, so it's part of the same entry. Which is particularly ridiculous since, as they demurely admit at the bottom of the seach page, "Perso-Arabic script is not yet displaying." (Speaking of which, in case you're wondering at the two different citations for par quoted above, the first has long a and is thus written differently, with an alif. This points up another problem with using the online transliteration: you can't tell the length of vowels. They really should be using a more informative transliteration, like the one explained here.) But details, details... the important thing is that all that information is right there at my fingertips, and at yours.
And beyond the books already online, they're working on still more: for you Sanskrit fans, for instance, they're encoding Macdonell and Monier-Williams and negotiating license agreements for Apte. Here's their statement of purpose:
For each of the twenty-six modern literary languages of South Asia, a panel of language experts identified key dictionaries currently in print and selected at least one multilingual dictionary for each language. For the more frequently taught languages, a monolingual dictionary also has been chosen. After identifying the best available resources, the chosen dictionaries have been converted to digital formats. The results of this conversion are available to readers through this site on the World Wide Web, by means of standard file transfer protocol, or by compact disc. There is no charge for access via the Internet and the compact discs are available for the cost of duplication and mailing.Bless their little hearts!
And now, as a reward for those who have slogged through this long and technical post, a pair of tidbits:
1) From my battered old 1970 edition of Webster's Biographical Dictionary, the following magnificent name (discovered in a vain search for Steingass): "Alidius Warmoldus Lambertus Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, 1888– . Dutch diplomat and administrator." Alidius has since passed on, but his many-barreled name survives to awe future generations.
2) No-sword has been on a roll. Read his latest (06-14) entry "The shirt" and then scroll down to "Awesome baboon article" (06-12). You'll laugh till you cry.
Who said that famous saying? (Via Avva.)
2007 update. Since I just had trouble getting to the site, I think I'll quote some excerpts here in case it becomes unreachable:
- To cut to the chase, there is no author to whom the exact phrase cited
above can be attributed with confidence. It is apparently post-classical,
but it has classical antecedents, as we shall see.....
ROBERT KNAPP (a early modernist at Reed, not the Berkeley expert on Rmn.
Spain) wrote on the FICINO list: "Chadwyck-Healy's PL turns up one
hit on the proverb, in Joannes Murmellius and Rodulphus Agricola's
commentary on Boethius, Book III, Prose VII: 'Tristes vero esse]
Voluptati moerorem succedere cum norunt omnes, tum maxime libidinosi:
nam, teste philosopho, omne animal a coitu triste est. Seneca Lucilio:
Voluptates praecipue exstirpa, inter res vilisimas habe, quae latronum
more in hoc nos amplectuntur, ut strangulent. Aristotelis, teste
Valerio Maximo, utilissimum est praeceptum, ut voluptates abeuntes
consideremus, quas quidem sic ostendendo [Co.. 1014B] minuit; fessas
enim poenitentiaeque plenas animis nostris subjicit, quominus cupide
repetantur.' But this only takes us to the late 15th century." [True,
but the passage does explicitly attribute the key phrase to Aristotle---
"teste philosopho."]
- EDWIN RABBIE on the FICINO list made the shortest contribution to
the twin threads, but perhaps it is the closest to hitting the bull's-
eye: "Latin translation of Ps.-Aristotle, Problems 955 a 23."
[In English the translation of this passage would be: "After sexual
intercourse most men are rather depressed, but those who emit much
waste product with the semen are more cheerful." I don't have the med.
Latin trans. of Aristotle within reach. Also, it will be noted that
"Aristotle" was talking specifically about men, not "omnia animalia."
But I humbly suspect that this is about as close as we're going to get.]
On my way to see The Last Bolshevik at Anthology Film Archives, which is having a Chris Marker retrospective, I stopped off at St. Mark's Bookshop, where I ran into jonmc (who's been in the throes of moving—he may wind up in my neighborhood—and is looking at the possibility of root canal, so he hasn't been at his most jovial lately, but was in good spirits when I met him, possibly because he was buying this book, which is absolutely gorgeous) and found two items I absolutely had to buy: a nice Chatto & Windus edition of Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai (a kid who learns Greek at four and Hebrew, Arabic, and Japanese at five, grows up with The Seven Samurai as a source of role models, and carries around a copy of Njal's Saga—how could I resist?) and the May issue of Magazine littéraire, devoted to "écrivains de Saint-Pétersbourg."
The movie was brilliant, with interviews of people who'd known the Soviet director Aleksandr Medvedkin and clips from his movies (many of which had been thought lost); the central conundrum was how Medvedkin, a true believer in Communism but a determinedly independent artist, had managed to get through the '30s without losing either his faith or his life. (One opinion, expressed with a loving smile, was that he simply wasn't that bright.) There was amazing, chilling footage of Soviet labor camps and of the vile Vishinsky presiding over the show trials, spitting out the names of alleged spies and saboteurs. No matter how much I read about that time and place, I don't think I can have any real sense of what it was like to live through; whatever the defects of contemporary America, I'm grateful to be here.
After the movie I walked up Second Avenue towards the subway, passing Ukrainian signs that recalled the Ukrainian titles I'd just seen in one of Medvedkin's "train films"; in the subway station I saw a woman who could have stepped out of one of his kolkhoz dramas, full-featured, rosy-cheeked, waving her arm in a passionate gesture as she pointed towards the shining future; on the train home a girl reminded me strongly of someone I was in love with before she was born, the same combination of eager laughter and a firm-set jaw that implied deep reserves of willfulness and determination. I feared a little for the young man she was with.
The learned and daedal Eudaemonist, in a comment to a previous entry, has linked to a funny and saddening Letter from Yale (printable version here), in which novelist Helena Echlin eviscerates the Yale graduate program in English. She begins:
I am sitting in a windowless conference room. The walls are lined with sets of leather-bound books with gold-lettered spines. 'The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism,' a young man is saying. He pauses for a long time. Underneath the table, one leg is twisted around the other. A stretch of gaunt white ankle shows between trouser and sock. 'In order to approach participating in.' He pauses again, his body knotted like a balloon creature made by a children’s entertainer. Finally, in one rush: 'The unity which is no longer accessible.' My fellow students utter a long soft gasp, as if at a particularly beautiful firework.'Brilliant,' says the professor. 'Very finely put. But I didn’t quite understand it. Could you repeat it?' I write the sentence down in my notebook, like everyone else in the seminar. The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism before it can approach participating in the unity which is no longer accessible. When I have pieced it together, I realise he is talking nonsense. I am struck by the thought that literary criticism – at least as it is practised here – is a hoax.
Yes, yes, old news (and the essay itself is several years old—as usual, I'm the last to know), but you won't often see it so well presented. And she doesn't stop with the easy target; she moves on to the reasons for the appalling obfuscation, which are part and parcel of the larger crisis in academia:
But the problem also has its roots in the crisis in the job market. Research done by the Modern Language Association indicates that fewer than half of those who earned PhDs in English in the United States between 1990 and 1995 found full-time tenure-track positions teaching English within a year of receiving their degrees. The number entering English PhD programs has risen rapidly – between 1952 and 1972 it escalated from 333 to 1,365. Now the number is in the thousands. The market for PhDs is saturated.She nails the obscene groveling in which professors wallow ("At Yale, professors are revered. I am accustomed to calling my teachers by their first names, but in graduate school I learned to call them 'Professor' – even when they are not, in fact, professors") and offers sensible recommendations:Faculties have begun to rely increasingly on part-time lecturers and on graduate teaching assistants, instead of offering full-time positions. Professor Ruth Yeazell warns us what to expect: though Yale has cut its graduate numbers, even those who have been admitted will have to fight hard for jobs....
In seminars, it is now impossible to have an interesting discussion because each student there is struggling so hard to impress the professor. No one listens or responds to other comments. They are too intent on framing what they will say next.
As the number of PhD's increases, and as theses crowd onto library shelves, there is increasingly less new ground to cover. There are now more than a thousand articles on the Wife of Bath’s Tale alone. Yet tenure-track positions are still awarded for original articles and theses. As a result, the young man who delighted in the joy of analysis decides to write a dissertation on the image of the pin factory in the work of Adam Smith – its significance and influence. I leave without finishing my PhD.
Professors do not deserve this kind of worship. Why don’t we give all great teachers the same admiration and pay, whether they work in graduate departments, colleges or even in high schools? The number of people doing PhDs should be cut to a fraction of its current size. The people who put so much into PhDs should do a general MA, then hone their teaching skills for high school students and for college undergraduates.... And among those few who do do PhDs, there should be room for generalists as well as specialists. The concise introduction and the extensive survey should be rewarded, as well as the occasional dissertation on Wordsworth’s thumbnail or Shakespeare’s big toe.Until changes are made, as she says, "Yale will continue to be the place where language goes to die."
I do have a bone to pick with Ms. Echlin. In her quest for a striking analogy, she hits on this (doubtless succumbing to Orwell's irresistible appeal to Brits looking to score points):
In Keep the Aspidistra Flying Orwell’s hero takes up a career in advertising and makes his fortune with the marketing of PPP, Pedic Perspiration Powder. Smelly feet do exist of course, but do we really need to combat the problem with a medical powder?I'm afraid this says more about the English than about criticism. Bad teeth do exist of course, but do we really need to combat the problem with visits to dentists? Bad conditions at clinics and life-threatening waits for medical care do exist of course, but do we really need to combat the problem with reform of the health service? The monarchy is a ridiculous institution that eats up public resources for no discernable gain, but... well, you get the point. Yes, Helena, it is indeed a good idea to do something about smelly feet.
You can hear one of the great German poems of the last century, "Todesfuge" (bilingual text here), read by the author himself here and (in RealAudio, along with his recordings of other poems) here (thanks, Baloney!). It's quite an experience. Link via Cinderella Bloggerfeller, who also has an amusing riff on the alleged difference between Romanian and its Soviet offshoot Moldavian (Thursday, June 12, 2003, ROMANIAN AND MOLDAVIAN AGAIN; permalinks are, of course, bloggered).
I just ran across an article by Shashi Tharoor lambasting the 1996 change of Madras's name to the allegedly more Tamil Chennai. As long-time readers know, I am skeptical of such changes in general (tradition being more appealing to me than nationalism), and the absurd details of this one delight me:
Not to be outdone, the chauvinist government in Madras renamed the state of Madras as Tamil Nadu - "homeland of the Tamils" - and decided that the city of Madras too would be rebaptized.On a serious note, it seems to me outrageous that such a sweeping change can be rammed through by a single politician; shouldn't the residents of a place have some say in what it's called?The chief minister had been informed that "Madras" was actually a Portuguese coinage, derived either from a trader named Madeiros or a prince called Madrie - just as Bombay came from the Portuguese "Bom Bahia," or "good bay."
"Madras is not a Tamil name," announced the chief minister to justify his decision to rename the city Chennai. As with Bombay, name recognition - Madras kerchiefs, Madras jackets - went by the board as "Chennai" was adopted without serious debate.
Worse, however, the chief minister had overlooked the weight of evidence that Madras was indeed a Tamil name. It was derived, alternative theories go, from the name of a local fisherman, Madarasan; or from the local Muslim religious schools, madrasas; or from madhu-ras, from the Tamil word for honey.
Still worse, he had also overlooked the embarrassing fact that "Chennai" was not, as he had asserted, of Tamil origin.
It came from the name of Chennappa Naicker, the Rajah of Chandragiri, who granted the British the right to trade on the coast - and who was a Telugu speaker from what is today a different Indian state, Andhra Pradesh.
So bad history is worse lexicology, but in India it is good politics....
I have finally gotten most of the way through the March 7 TLS (yes, I know, why do you think I don't subscribe? it's bad enough when I just pick up the occasional issue) and found a very interesting essay by Emily Wilson about the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. She focuses on the venom with which so many BMCR reviewers attack the books under discussion, and her suggested explanations resonate strongly (for me, at any rate) with the discussion of the sorrows of the toilers in academic vineyards that's been taking place at Baraita (here and here, inter alia), Caveat Lector (go to her grad school category, start with "What he said" on 26 Februarii 2003, and work your way down towards the present), Wealth Bondage (here, with many forceful comments), Frogs and Ravens, and the Invisible Adjunct (passim, and thank goodness she's back online!). Here's the heart of it:
There are two possible explanations for the large numbers of hatchet-jobs. First, too many academic books are being published, not all of which are first-rate. The pressures of Research Assessment Exercises and Tenure Review encourage aspiring academics to churn out too many words, too fast, without enough time for real research and, even more importantly, real contemplation. This is a problem which affects all humanities departments at the moment, not just classical studies. If anything, the number of utterly pointless books published in Classics seems lower than in some other disciplines; but that may be my own prejudice. If one accepts this explanation, one may be grateful to BMCR for working so relentlessly to purge the academic body of error and to reassure the readers that most of the books they do not read are not worth reading.So... any thoughts?But the proportion of negative reviews in BMCR seems significantly higher than in comparable publications, such as Classical Review. This suggests a second explanation: that the dismissive tone of BMCR may have as much to do with editorial policy as with the state of the classical studies. The majority of reviews seem to be written, not by big-name senior scholars, but by graduate students, junior professors and adjuncts, who hope to boost their publication records. I say "seem", because there are no contributors' notes and it is difficult to trace many of the names. A publication in which people of all academic ranks can find a voice may sound more egalitarian than the journals where one sees the same names over and over again. But less senior people are likely to write harsh reviews, not only because of the idealistic brutality of youth, but also because the structure of contemporary academia tempts those at the bottom to trample on their peers and to suck up to their more advanced colleagues. A junior academic or graduate student writing for BMCR can show off his or her scholarly credentials by pointing out the errors in someone else's first book; books by well-known figures are much more likely to be treated with respect.
Incidentally, the current issue of the TLS features a number of language-related pieces, including Susan Sontag's "Babel Now" ("I shall argue that a proper consideration of the art of literary translation is essentially a claim for the value of literature itself"), Michael Pinto-Duschinsky's "The EU - all in the translation" ("EU officials and parliamentarians are shielded from the trials of Babel because they have bevies of translators. Anyone able to translate from Latvian into Greek or from Slovenian into Finnish is assured of a prosperous livelihood in the Brussels bureaucracy. For ordinary folk, the absence of any agreement to use one or two common languages will prove a high barrier"), and Mary Beard on Roman bilingualism (not, alas, online). Take a look before they're taken down and replaced by the next issue.
A useful site that allows you to look up words in the (excellent) Collins bilingual dictionaries for Spanish, German, Italian, and French. Thanks to Songdog for the link!
One of the many forgotten figures featured in Alcalay's After Jews and Arabs is Yehuda al-Harizi, whose Tahkemoni, a translation of al-Hariri's Maqamat (The Assemblies), became (according to Alcalay) "the first object of al-Harizi's often boundless pride," a pride fully evident in this excerpt:
Now many of those that slept in the soil of folly awoke and they made the chariots of their tongues race through the road of song. They planned to translate the book of this Arab Hariri from the Arabic tongue into the Sacred Tongue, Hebrew, and they came in prosaic garments to serve in the sanctuary of the muse. And when they came forth equipped for the battle of poetry, they could only take as spoils one out of the fifty [sections]. For by the power of the metaphors of the book they were dismayed and terrified, and at the sound of its thunders and hailstones they perished and were exterminated, and the hail came down upon them and they died...Until I arose and wrought its armor. I translated the whole book with fitting prose and poems like pearls, pure and salty.
He tempers his pride at being the first complete translator of the masterwork with this lament:
Now when I had fulfilled their desire and had translated the book, I forsook my home and I wandered on roads, I sailed on ships, I crossed seas. I fled form the West and I shone in the East. And I saw that I had done foolishly and my iniquity was greater than I could bear in having neglected to compose a book of our own poetry, as though the word of the living God were not among us. I had hastened to keep the vineyard of strangers, but mine own vineyard I had not kept.I imagine most translators know the feeling. I endeared myself to Robert Fitzgerald once by asking him to sign not a copy of his famous Odyssey translation but rather a selection of his own poetry. He said grumpily "I didn't know anybody read this stuff" as he scribbled, but he couldn't suppress the smile.
Thanks to a MetaFilter thread of dhartung's, I've discovered the online version of Zoëga's Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Not a classic work of lexicography like Platts, but a useful one, and I've been wanting a copy for quite a while. Chalk another one up for the internet.
An amazing collection of links related to Hindi and Urdu; I've just scraped the surface and have already found a pearl beyond price: an online version of Platts's great Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English. It's one of the classic works of lexicography, and I waited for years before finding an affordable copy at the Strand; now you can access it at no cost, and you don't even need to download fonts—it provides transliterated entries as well. And the language-and-literature page is just part of Prof. Frances Pritchett's website, which has pages for maps (check out this map of Ottoman Constantinople, which gives alternate Greek names for everything and identifies Topkapi Palace as the "New Seraglio"), South Asian Islam, art and architecture, and much more, including her mother's page on the Igbo (Ibo) language! A deep bow in the direction of Nancy Gandhi, from whom comes this cornucopia.
Somewhere on the site (it's so varied I've already gotten lost in it) I found a collection of anecdotes from Akbar-Birbal joke books; none of them are what I'd call rib-ticklers, but here's one with linguistic interest:
One day Akbar Badshah was fishing by the edge of the river. And someone from somewhere had presented to the king some honey by way of a formal gift. The king was licking it. Birbar went out from the king's presence. On the road, some Muslims who were very respected and venerable, and were on their way to pay obeisance to the king, inquired from Birbar, "What is His Auspicious Majesty doing?" Birbar said, "He is babbling nonsense (jhak marta hai) by the riverbank, and licking up dung." Those Muslims were very much displeased....The Badshah said, "In fact he did not lie, but told the truth. For I was hunting (=marna) fish, and fish in the Shastr are called 'jhak.' And as for honey, it is well known that it is the dung of honeybees, thus I was licking it. So don't be displeased."
I wanted to alert everyone that today is International Plep Day. If you haven't already, go visit plep and enjoy the pleply links! (Via MetaFilter.)
I was curious about the origin of the name Chenoweth, and a quick Googling turned up the information that it was Cornish for 'new house.' I looked it up in my copy of T.F.G. Dexter's Cornish Names and there it was, Chynoweth (stressed on the -no-), from ti (chy) 'house' (cf. Irish ti(gh)) and nowyth 'new' (cf. Irish nua). But I am rarely content with a quick Googling, and a little further investigation turned up the website Cornish Surnames. It's an amateur effort and carries the charming caveat:
The etymology of surnames is not an exact science, there may be errors on these pages, the definitions come from books by Richard Stephen Charnock, G. Pawley White, T. F. G. Dexter, J. Bannister, Henry Jenner, Nicholas Williams, R. Morton Nance and many more. Some names may have multiple meanings, and I would love to hear from you if you have others I have missed.But it's well worth browsing through, and a lot easier to access than the obscure books it draws on.
Nancy Gandhi at under the fire star makes note of an interesting word used in Indian English:
to prepone - example: The Friday meeting has been preponed to Thursday morning. (This word is succinct and useful. It deserves a place in English languages everywhere. I urge everyone who reads this to adopt it and help it grow.)I agree with her. And through an entry in The Atlantic's "Word Fugitives" archives, we learn:
The word 'prepone' is found in The New Oxford Dictionary of English, published 1998. It is listed as being Indian (from India) and is defined as: to bring forward to an earlier date or time. Example given: The publication date has been preponed from July to June.So there we have it: the word is listed in a dictionary, it's well formed, and it's unquestionably useful; I hereby welcome it to the English vocabulary!
I'm still reading the Ammiel Alcalay book (see Levantine Culture I), and have just come across the following passage, a nice counterpoint to the preceding Xenophobia entry:
Examples of the persistence of the Arabic element in Hebrew poetry abound. In Egypt, for instance, the Laylat al-Tawhid (the custom of studying the Torah on the eve of the ancient New Year) assumed a particular form. Hebrew liturgical poems were sung to Egyptian tunes before being translated, verse by verse, into Arabic. The climactic text—all in Arabic and recited at midnight—contained many Islamic formulas. Beginning with the Muslim invocation (B'ism Allah al-Rahman al-Rahim), it invoked the ninety-nine divine attributes in the Sufi manner and used Koranic epithets for biblical figures: Abraham as al-Khalil, Aaron as al-Imam and Moses as Rasul Allah. Kept intact as long as there was an active Jewish community in Egypt—until, in fact, the period during which Jabès emigrated—this solemn service that "renders the heart and fills the soul with terror" seems to have been originated by the Nagid Avraham, son of Maimonides. Remarkably enough, the ceremony has continued in the Egyptian Jewish community of Brooklyn, where even during the Gulf War Egyptian musicians (former members of Umm Kulthum's orchestra) shared the stage with rabbis and cantors as they celebrated the ancient expressions of common unity.
A few pages later:
Many of the most important poets remain completely out of print while even classical Andalusian poets like Samuel Hanagid, Yehuda Halevi, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, and Moses Ibn Ezra can only be gotten whole in expensive scholarly editions. Dozens of poets and thousands of poems remain in manuscript, within the vocabulary of a few specialized scholars, remote from most readers of poetry and completely beyond the scope of even an imaginable curriculum. The revision of such a curriculum in Israel, even more radically than in the case of Europe, would entail an unequivocal recognition of the centrality of Arabic—in all its nuances—for the formulation of a great part of modern Jewish thought and culture.
According to this post by the Enigmatic Mermaid, the Brazilian Senate is considering a bill for the "protection, promotion, defense, and use" of the Portuguese language: requirements for use in public communications, replacement of loan words, you know the drill. When will we grow up and move beyond this kind of idiocy? Borrowing is healthy; look at English! Besides, the bill has left the Merm's "nerves too frayed for blogging." Stop this madness at once!
Incidentally, the direct link is probably bloggered, and the Mermaid, bizarrely, has no date indicators, only time of day, so you may find the entry hard to find once it slips down a bit. Desculpe.
I am a lady bug and I
hope I look pretty and
I hope no kids will
trap me to keep being
locked up in something
because I have no idea
what the thing they lock
me up in is called and I am
so sorry it's dinner time
good evening I have to go.
I absolutely love the way the changes in thought are mirrored by the shifts in rhythm, and the way the last line provides as firm a musical farewell as any of Beethoven's insistent tonic chords. Brava, Julia!
A story in the Hindustan Times discusses the effect of "e-governance" on the information technology market in India.
"The local language software market in India, which was merely half a million dollars worth three years ago, is expected to grow manifold and will approximately be to the tune of $64 million by 2005," says Frost and Sullivan director, Aditya Sapru....(Thanks to fieldmethods.net for the link.)Pointing out that only five per cent of the total Indian population could read or write in English language, Sapru says: "if any e-governance initiative in this country has to succeed, then majority of the communication has to take place in a language common people understand."...
[MAIT executive director Vinnie] Mehta says [the consortium on innovation and language technology (COIL-tech)], which was formed last year to drive benefits of IT to vernacular languages, will provide a platform for development of computing standards and also encourage collaborative research and development in multilingual computing.
Pointing out that COIL-tech has already developed font standards for seven Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Malayalam, he says the deficiencies in the Unicode with regard to supporting Indian languages have also been taken up with the International Unicode Consortium and would be resolved soon.
An interesting reminiscence in The Threepenny Review by Bernard Malamud's daughter Janna; this excerpt expresses the basic dilemma of the artist:
As with the quandary between the Shakespeare play and the baby, I think Dad struggled mightily with this dilemma of ruthlessness. How much should you allow yourself to pain, or harm, or simply not take care of the people around you in the service of art-making? Jude’s cry to Arabella, “have a little pity on the creature,” could have been my father’s central moral tenet.Characteristically, the one time I met Malamud (in New Haven, circa 1980) I asked him about the pronunciation of his name: did the family say me-LAH-med, as in Yiddish? He laughed and said it had doubtless been that way in the old country, but in America the family said MA-lamud. I nodded, satisfied. I suppose I could have asked about the morality of the artist, but then I'd be Moralhat, wouldn't I? And he wouldn't have been able to give as satisfying an answer. (Link via the invaluable wood s lot.)
I note, by the way, that Russians say ma-LAH-mud, which parallels their a-ZI-mov for Isaac Asimov and BER-lin for Irving Berlin. Interesting what gets localized and what doesn't.
I apologize for being late with this—the link will probably expire tomorrow—but I didn't want to let go without comment one of the few entirely sensible things the NY Times has published on language; no surprise, given that it's by Geoffrey Nunberg, whom I have previously praised. It's called "The Bloody Crossroads of Grammar and Politics" and it should be the final word on the idiotic controversy over the College Board sentence "Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured." Nunberg discusses the alleged rule that would make the sentence incorrect, and says:
The assumption behind the rule is that a pronoun has to be of the same part of speech as its antecedent. Since possessives are adjectives, the reasoning goes, they can't be followed by pronouns, even if the resulting sentence is perfectly clear.And while I am (however reluctantly) praising the Times, I may as well mention Safire's May 18 column "a.k.a. Abu," in which he actually provides information I'd been wondering about: the relationship of the new Palestinian prime minister's name, Mahmoud Abbas, and his kunya, Abu Mazen. Safire says:If you accept that logic, you'll eschew sentences like "Napoleon's fame preceded him" (rewrite as "His fame preceded Napoleon"). In fact you'll have to take a red pencil to just about all of the great works of English literature, starting with Shakespeare and the King James Bible ("And Joseph's master took him, and put him into the prison"). The construction shows up in Dickens and Thackeray, not to mention H. W. Fowler's "Modern English Usage" and Strunk and White's "Elements of Style." ("The writer's colleagues . . . have greatly helped him in the preparation of his manuscript.") And it's pervasive not just in The New York Times and The New Yorker, but in the pages of The Weekly Standard, not excluding Mr. Skinner's own column. ("It may be Bush's utter lack of self-doubt that his detractors hate most about him.")
The ubiquity of those examples ought to put us on our guard — maybe the English language knows something that the usage writers don't. In fact the rule in question is a perfect example of muddy grammatical thinking.For one thing, possessives like "Mary's" aren't adjectives; they're what linguists call determiner phrases. (If you doubt that, try substituting "Mary's" for the adjective "happy" in sentences like "The child looks happy" or "We saw only healthy and happy children.")
And if a nonpossessive pronoun can't have a possessive antecedent, logic should dictate that things can't work the other way around, either — if you're going to throw out "Hamlet's mother loved him," then why accept "Hamlet loved his mother"? That's an awful lot to throw over the side in the name of consistency.
Mr. Abbas also has what is called in Arabic a kunya, a nickname that most often refers specifically to one's offspring. Abbas's kunya begins with Abu (which means ''father,'' akin to the Aramaic abba) and ends with Mazen, which was the name of his eldest son, who died last year. Mohammed Sawaie, professor of Arabic at the University of Virginia, tells me that the name suggests muzn, which can mean ''white cloud'' or ''water,'' both happy sights in an arid area. It may also call to mind the name of an ancient Arab tribe known for its bravery, the Banu Mazin....Just what I wanted to know. He goes on to add, usefully:
If an Arab man has no son, he may be called familiarly by Abu followed by the name of his father, or grandfather, as a substitute until he has a son, on the assumption that he will name his future son after his father. Or he may adopt a nom de guerre, as Yasir Arafat, who has no son, apparently did with Abu Ammaar, unless this was an indication that he intended to name a son Ammaar or Ammar. Abu Ammaar as a cognomen for Yasir may be an example of a traditional, ''fossilized'' kunya like Abu Khalil, which means ''friend of God'' and is applied to anyone named Ibrahim (in Hebrew, Avraham).The only thing he's omitted is that 'Ammar (second a long) means 'long-lived' and is related to the names 'Umar, 'Amr, and 'Amir.
P. Kerim Friedman has a good post deconstructing a NY Times article by David Berreby that attacks the whole concept of trying to preserve languages. My favorite sentence: "He fails to grasp that the process of language death only seems natural if you accept the power inequalities that cause it in the first place." Well said, Kerim! (Karen Chung tried to get a discussion of the article going on LINGUISTList, but it didn't get very far.)
Via The Discouraging Word comes word of the discovery of the "oldest writing in English": four runes on a brooch. Since we can't even be sure it's English, I'm dubious about the historical importance of the find, but here's the start of the Daily Telegraph story by Paul Stokes:
What is believed to be the oldest form of writing in English ever found has been uncovered in an Anglo-Saxon burial ground. It is in the form of four runes representing the letters N, E, I and M scratched on the back of a bronze brooch from around AD650. The six inch cruciform brooch is among one million artefacts recovered from a site at West Heslerton, near Malton, North Yorks, since work began there in 1978. Dominic Powlesland, the archaeologist leading the excavation team, said: "This could well be the earliest example of written English we know of.And we should bear in mind the following warning from Hugh R. Whinfrey in his article on runic inscriptions:"Only one or two other runic inscriptions from around this period have been found, but this is either the earliest or one of them. We have no idea what the letters mean, except that it would have been something in early English.
"Whether it is a charm of some form, a person's initials or the first letters of a phrase is something only future research will be able to determine. It was obviously something treasured by its owner as it had been carefully repaired."
The most tenuous aspect of using the runestones as historical evidence is taking the absence or scarcity of them as supporting evidence to a hypothesis. Considering the millennium or so since their construction, many have been doubtlessly lost forever. A crude estimate made with liberally unrealistic assumptions concerning early English runic inscriptions yields a guess that at most one per cent of the objects actually inscribed are known to scholars today.
If you're worried about confusing those words, read this post (illustrated!) at Dr. Weevil and you need never fear embarrassment again.
The latest entry at The Discouraging Word, "The koan of the meshuggeneh," has this to say about the etymology of koan: "Koan comes straight from the Japanese, from ko, public, and an, variously defined by our usual dictionary sources as "matter, material for thought" (OED, AH) and "proposition" (M-W)." It bothered me that the second definition was so vague, and even more that the word was only traced back to Japanese when it was clearly a Sino-Japanese loan word—I expect dictionaries to be more precise these days. So I did a little research and discovered that the original Chinese word, gongan (kung-an for you unreconstructed Wade-Gilesians), meant 'legal case'; it's composed of gong 'public' and an '(legal) case, records' (the links go to the characters, with translations and renditions in Cantonese, Hakka, Minnan, Wu, and Sino-korean as well; I take this opportunity to bow reverently in the direction of the online Chinese character dictionary, one of the best language resources on the net).
A more detailed description comes from this site:
In ancient China, the koan (Chinese: gongan) was an official document that handed down an important judgment, a final determination of truth and falsehood. Adapting and subverting this notion, Zen (Chinese: Chan) Masters to this day make use of all sorts of stories, problems and situations, the more shocking the better, in order to cultivate their students' awareness. The method usually consists of a question and an enigmatic answer. It is believed that such answers arise from the mysterious, irrational or paradoxical nature of truth. Only an apparently illogical answer can reveal it.This may be old hat to any Zen masters among you, but it was new to me. And if anyone knows how and when the semantic shift occurred, please share.
I cannot resist posting the following links; the second is of obvious linguistic relevance, and the first is just so damn funny I have to share it. But they are rough and knotty and deal with scandalous or salacious material. Readers of delicate sensibilities should pass over this entire entry. You have been warned.
1. A John Dolan review of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, a rehab memoir. Anyone who knows the Exile and its evil ways will not be surprised to hear that it begins "This is the worst thing I’ve ever read" and then takes off the gloves. It gets down and dirty. It may well be unfair. But I really can't bring myself to care when it includes passages like this:
Walking on a trail outside the clinic, Frey names and capitalizes everything: “Trail,” “Tree,” “Animals.” Then he sees a lower-case “bird.” I was offended for our feathered friend. Why don’t the birds get their caps like everybody else?I warn you, however, that the review contains Bad Language and Worse Attitudes.But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a “fat otter”: “There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.”
Now, can anyone tell me what a “fat otter with a flat, armored tail” actually is? That’s right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the “large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch” would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!
2. The second link contains almost nothing but Bad Language. It is, in fact, an immensely long and learned discussion of what must be considered (in the U.S., at any rate) the Worst Word in the English Language. (Damn, I've picked up James Frey's Capital Abuse Habit.) No, not the f-word, which we hear so often only the most reclusive and old-fashioned could possibly be shocked by it, but the c-word. It is A Cultural History of C*nt (the namby-pamby asterisk being mine, not the author's—an attempt to avoid misdirected Google hits). It begins with an etymological excursus to which, frankly, you should not pay much attention ("The 'cu' prefix of 'cunnus' has long associations with femininity.... Eric Partridge discusses the 'quintessential femineity' [Partridge, 1937/1961] of 'cu', and James McDonald explains that this word/sound, or an equivalent such as 'ku', 'existed in a common Germanic language over two thousand years ago.") and proceeds to a fascinating history of the usage of the word. Here is one of the few bits I can actually quote without resorting to more asterisks; it's also as funny as the Frey review:
...when John Spellar MP made a speech in the House of Commons: "[he tried to say] 'We recognise that these cuts in the defence medical services had gone too far,' but he inserted an unwanted letter 'n' in the word 'cuts'. It still made perfect sense."The author is Matthew Hunt (yes, it rhymes), and the piece is headed "Dissertation"; it has a long enough bibliography that it may actually be one. At any rate, enjoy it if you dare!
Credits: the first link is via No-Sword Sieve (2003-06-04, bottom), the second via Stavros. Thanks, guys!
There is a much-cited aphorism in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army"; I think I had seen it attributed to Max Weinreich, but I did not know that he originally wrote it in Yiddish as "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot" ['A language is a dialect with an army and a navy'] in the article "Der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt" ("Yivo" and the problems of our time) in the periodical Yivo-bleter 25.1 [1945]. Now I do, thanks to a page of the Danish Babel site, which includes all manner of good things, such as How to Say "Merry Christmas (and a Happy New Year)" in 300 Languages, the Yiddish version of which is given as "A freylikhn geburtstog funem goyishn meshiakh, un a git yor," though I have to wonder under what circumstances this sentence has ever been spoken. (I suggest skipping down past the ordering by word for 'Christmas' to the list by language family, which is preceded by a large USORTEREDE.)
Addendum. Jim at UJG has added a paragraph with new information, including this page with further details on the quote ("Weinreich attributes this formulation to a young man who came to his lectures, and he decided, 'I must bring to a large audience this wonderful formulation of the social fate of Yiddish.'"). All praise to Jim!
I discovered the Weinreich quote via this entry at Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufry, but I had to Google to get the citation. All praise to Google!
John Hardy has a magnificent entry at Laputan Logic, explaining in more detail than I've ever seen how "Arabic" numbers evolved. I won't bother trying to permalink, just scroll down to Tuesday, June 03 (and down past the "Fun with numbers" box, depending on your tolerance for whimsy); as usual, he has lavish and highly informative illustrations. (Warning: the page is slow to load.)
Before going off to the Guggenheim to meet the visiting Juliet after her immersion in Matthew Barney and sweep her from the sterile Upper East Side to the lively East Village for dinner (ah, the life of a New York City blogger!), I rummaged through her archives and came across this site dedicated to Anna Akhmatova, which includes a short video clip of her reading. (I also found this moving reminiscence of James Tiptree, Jr., the first thing I've read that gives me any sense of why she—that's right, she—killed her husband and herself in 1987.)
The Discouraging Word today has an entry about the lexical item "defugalty." Not only am I unfamiliar with it, so are all my dictionaries, and yet it exists—barely. Google turns up half a dozen examples, all of them using it as if it were a pre-existing word, not something that needs to be defined. Here are the contexts:
1. "As I was reading Mr. Norr's article about the situation here at JSC, I noticed an interesting defugalty. Mr. Garman pointed out that the difference between platforms was only a few hundred dollars. I noticed he forgot that this was a 'per platform' cost."
2. "I must be one of those complaining nitpicky, whining people who go to any length to imagine or try to trump up some ailment or defugalty. Chicken Little syndrome."
3. "The pork checkoff defugalty had both winners and losers. Opponents wanted an end to the checkoff, but USDA says it will continue."
4. "But, to his surprise, he found two white families, by the names of Fulbright and Campbell, already there and arguing over possession of the spring.... Springfield History records the defugalty between Fulbright and Campbell but omits mention of Samuel Martin in connection with the spring."
5. "I went on the school board in 1929. I didn't file for the election. Someone else put my name in;I think it was either Van Buren or Westhoff. Mrs. Sando and Mrs. Ravenscraft were both on the boardand were fighting.... It seems there was always some sort of 'defugalty.'"
6. "Again...I am truly sorry you're having this luck. I am here! While I was out (Okla.) I called the office every day and spoke to everyone there. Maybe you're dialing the wrong extensions. Mine won't work when I'm not there.... Sorry about the defugalty...but I received and aswered 50+ phone calls and 350 e-mails in the past 5-6 days."
I think we can dismiss out of hand the speculation by TDW's correspondent that the word (if we can call it a word) is derived from "fugue." My Sprachgefühl tells me it's a deformation of "difficulty"; compare the substitution of "definootly" for "definitely" (HDAS, Vol. I, p. 576). But we need data, citations, research! Anybody have any?
I thought the antiquity of blogging was common knowledge (among those with a decent education, needless to say), but Dorothea has insisted that I make an entry of this, so here 'tis; observe and learn. From Aristotle's attack on the Pythagoreans in the Metaphysics:
All the same, as we have said, the causes and principles which they describe are capable of application to the remoter class of websites (topoi tou histou) as well, and indeed are better fitted to these. But as to how there are to be updates, if all that is premissed is the Linked and the Unlinked, and Present and Past, they do not even hint; nor how, without updates and change, there can be generation and destruction, or the activities of the links which traverse the web. And further, assuming that it be granted to them or proved by them that blogs (blogoi) are composed of these factors, yet how is it to be explained that some are lesser, and others greater? For in their premisses and statements they are speaking just as much about virtual as about mathematical objects; and this is why they have made no mention of markups (anasemeia) or links or other similar phenomena, because, I presume, they have no separate explanation of virtual things. Again, how are we to understand that number and the modifications of number are the causes of all being and updating, both in the beginning and now, and at the same time that there is no other number than the number of which the universe is composed? Because when they make out that Opinion and News are in such and such a region, and a little above or below them Controversy and Disharmony or Flames, and when they state as proof of this that each of these abstractions is a number; and that also in this region there is already a plurality of the magnitudes composed of number, inasmuch as these modifications of number correspond to these several regions,—is the number which we must understand each of these abstractions to be the same number which is present in the virtual universe, or another kind of number?
At this point he goes off into an excursus about number and never really gets back to blogs, but I think we have a pretty good analysis there. I might also point out that in Greek blogos is phonesthetically related to phlox, phlogos 'flame,' which gives rise to an entirely different set of responses and analogies. As I told Moira, I hope they covered all this at St. John's; young people these days don't even seem to realize that the Greeks had blogs.
Harry Hoijer's Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache texts, with analysis, have been put online:
The Electronic publication of Ha
