"Word Map is mapping Australian regionalisms—words, phrases or expressions used by particular language groups." Click on "Map search" at the left and you'll get a map divided into regions; click on one to find words and phrases peculiar to it. There's also an A-Z list, and if you're a regional Australian you can add your own. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
Addendum. The comments contain an interesting query about the Kentucky dialect verb "gom" and possible etymologies.
I just heard an Italian say (in a news clip) "Questo documento rappresenta un escalation..." (the last word pronounced as in English). I would have thought that if the word were to be borrowed, it would be Italianized as escalazione. Do English words have the sort of cachet in Italian that French words have, or used to have, in English?
It seems to be slang week here at Languagehat; today, via the eternally prinsessor-smitten Des, the BBC's Le Français Cool. From the La bouffe/Nosh section:
La barbaque: Bad meat. Old slang word, the origins of which are uncertain. It may come from the Romanian word "berbec", lamb, that French soldiers brought back to France in 1855. But it may also be of Mexican-Caribbean origins, from the word barbecue. Again, French soldiers didn't really appreciate meat cooked that way but they brought the word back from Mexico in 1862. Anyway, whatever the exact origins of this word, nowadays it means meat of very poor quality.
It seems like only yesterday that I was posting about six months of Languagehat; time flies when you're having fun. I'd like to thank the same people I thanked then, as well as all the people who've commented or written since. I've had something like 43,000 unique visitors, more or less evenly divided between the old Blogspot site and the shiny new MT one; they come from 64 different countries (plus the Old Style Arpanet), including Mauritius, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, New Caledonia, and Brunei Darussalam (the top three foreign sources are Canada, Australia, and France). It's a cliche, but the internet really is bringing the world closer together.
One thing I'd like to emphasize. People occasionally apologize for intruding on my time or say they don't know enough to comment; I want to make it clear that I welcome everyone with an interest in the things I write about, whether they have any prior knowledge or not, and I love answering questions I get in e-mails—if your message comes at a busy time, I may take a while to get around to it, but I will answer it. And, of course, if you have an interesting link to pass along or a subject you'd like to hear about, let me know; I'm always on the lookout for new topics!
And we sit here...
there in the arena...
By the way, I'm posting a picture of my language bookshelves (or most of them; you can't see the bottom row, with the especially tall and heavy books, and the Russian and Greek books are in another bookcase) on my Languages page; if it's not there when you visit, keep checking back. And I'm hoping to put pictures of my hats on the Hats page before too long, as has more than once been requested. Here at Languagehat, we aim to please!
[Lament. I waited till 12:02 by the computer clock to save this entry so that it would be under July 31 (the anniversary date), but somehow MT thought it was five minutes earlier, so it's still under July 30. Time is the evil...]
All is well. I did not realize that you could edit the time of posting. Thanks, Dan and Songdog!
The Library of Congress is having an exhibition "Ancient Manuscripts from the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu":
These ancient manuscripts cover every aspect of human endeavor. The manuscripts are indicative of the high level of civilization attained by West Africans during the Middle Ages and provide irrefutable proof of a powerful African literary tradition. Scholars in the fields of Islamic Studies and African Studies believe that analysis of these texts will cause Islamic, West African, and World History to be reevaluated. These manuscripts, surviving from as long ago as the fourteenth century, are remarkable artifacts important to Malian and West African culture. The exhibited manuscripts date from the sixteenth to eighteenth century.Many sample pages can be seen here. (Thanks, Mike!)
A correspondent recently said this in the course of an e-mail to me: "I'm not asking you to piss in my pocket..." In context, it clearly meant "I'm not asking for compliments," but I found the phrase curious, to say the least. I looked it up in the invaluable Cassell Dictionary of Slang and found:
piss in someone's pocket, to phr. [1940s+] (Aus.) to curry favour, to be extremely close to someone, to ingratiate oneself.Now, I've always admired the Aussie way with language (see this recent post on slang), but this completely baffles me. In what context could the phrase "piss in my pocket" come to have such a meaning? Or is pissing considered a sign of respect and admiration Down Under? I am grateful in advance for any elucidation.
Luc Sante is always worth reading, and in the July 17 NYRB he has a particularly good review of Arthur Kempton's Boogaloo. Now, the word "boogaloo" to me vaguely recalls a dance craze of the mid-'60s, but apparently it is used more generally to refer to African-American popular music (since it's not in my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate or the AHD, I'm deprived of lexicographical backup). Sante says:
The boogaloo is, or was, one of the thousand dances the land was full of in the 1960s, enumerated in inventory songs such as James Brown's "There Was a Time" and the Isley Brothers' "Nobody But Me": the skate, the swim, the pony, the monkey, the camelwalk, the shing-a-ling. Arthur Kempton notes that it made its debut as the title of a million-selling but faintly remembered 1965 release by the Chicago duo Tom and Jerrio, a song that launched two major catch phrases of the era, "sock it to me" and "let it all hang out." The boogaloo outlasted many of its competitor dances, or at least its name did, even making the transition into Spanglish as bugalú.So my question is, are any of you familiar with the term in this wider sense, and if so, how would you delimit it? Does it really apply to anything since WWII? (I'm particularly hoping to hear from Avante Populi, a learned connoisseur of these matters.)Somewhere along the line, perhaps around the time most people forgot its steps, the name metamorphosed into a sweeping term that could encompass almost all of African-American popular music, or at least everything that has arisen since World War II. The names of styles, which embody novelty, date more quickly than the substance they describe. "Soul" now sounds antique; "R&B" can be applied to the works of Wynonie Harris in the late 1940s, or to those of Mary J. Blige fifty years later, but not much in between. But because "boogaloo" is a term transmitted more often orally than in writing, it has enjoyed an immunity to the flux of fashion.
Excursus on punctuation. In the course of the review, I was brought up short by this: "His third subject, Berry Gordy Jr., was a good-enough songwriter early in his career to have staked a claim to artistry..." I don't know whether Sante or a hamhanded copy editor is responsible for that hyphen, but it's so very wrong that it exemplifies the importance of proper punctuation. It's not just that it's unnecessary; there are, as anyone who has had to make such decisions knows, many places where a hyphen can be included or omitted with equal justification (although you then have to make the same decision every time you run into a parallel case). No, this hyphen is actively evil, because it implies a construction that turns out to be illusory, so that you then have to go back and reevaluate what you've already read. Normally, "good enough" implies a following preposition or conjunction: "good enough to eat," "good enough for government work," "good enough that no revision was needed." But on occasion it's used by itself, with the implication "[just] good enough [to get by, to serve the purpose, to pass the time]." How was the play? Oh... good enough. (Nichevo sebe, they say in Russian.) And if you were to use this attributively, you might use a hyphen to tell the reader not to expect that preposition or conjunction: I saw a good-enough play at the Barrymore last night. So when I started reading the sentence, that's how I interpreted it: Gordy was a good-enough songwriter [but that wasn't his real strength]. Then I reached "to have staked a claim to artistry" and realized that the phrase was used positively, not in that deprecatory "just-good-enough" way, and not only did I have to go back and reread, I've had to take up my time and yours with this wordy divagation. Bad, bad hyphen! Into the hell box with you!
This tour-de-force takes verses from the King James Bible and rearranges the letters to produce astonishingly apt equivalents. A couple of samples:
Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this. (Ecc. 7:10)Via Incoming Signals.Wish not, in unrest, for the quaint cheer of ancestry: no beauty was there. Chew on this tasty truth: these are the good old times.
If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter: for he that is higher than the highest regardeth; and there be higher than they. (Ecc. 8:1)
Ah, the evil Tenth District judge's rotten, and forgives not harm.
Ah, another higher one's joined in graft, and prevents the hope of the brave.
Ah, neither are the high, mighty Supreme Court potentates fit to help.
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
I came late to John Ashbery (as to Cecil Taylor); for years I read him impatiently when I came across his work, convinced he was putting something over on everyone. The older I get, the more I appreciate his light touch, his circuitous paths, his refusal to pander to our craving for the obvious. I am told by wood s lot that it's his birthday, so: happy birthday, John Ashbery, and thanks for all the reticence.
A Kel Richards article maintains that "Aussie English remains resilient, vigorous and lively" despite incursions from America. There are references to all sorts of interesting usages (eg, "grouse" as a general term of approval, comparable to "cool" or "awesome," which according to the superb Cassell Dictionary of Slang goes back to the '20s or '30s), and I'm sure he's right about the robust health of slang Down Under; he is, however, seriously delusional if he believes this:
We might pick up some expressions from the Americans, but they also learn some from us. Americans seem to have picked up "no worries", "aggro", "bludge", "U-ey" and other Aussie idioms.It's true that "U-ey" (or "U-ie") is frequently used here for 'U-turn' (I hadn't realized it was originally Australian, but Cassell says this as well); I've never heard any of the others from the lips of an American, and I have no idea what "bludge" means. But let's check Cassell... aha: to bludge is to evade one's responsibilities; loaf about, idle; cadge, scrounge. You learn something every day. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
Addendum. I've purchased The Australian Oxford Paperback Dictionary (Second Edition), which should help with these matters; for instance, below grouse 'very good of its kind' is:
Grout, Wally (Arthur Theodore Wallace) (1927-67), Australian test cricketer. °your Wally Grout colloq. your shout (i.e. your turn to pay for the next round of drinks).Admirably informative.
Further addendum. I have recently discovered the Aussie equivalent of "screw," the verb "to root"; this bit of dialog perfectly illustrates its place in the language:
"It's *making love*, Steph."(Via puzzling.org.)
"'Making love' my hairy bum!"
Mum and Steph on 'rooting' vs 'making love', the eternal question.
Via Plep, the Native American Religions section of the Internet Sacred Text Archive includes a fair number of cultures; most are only in translation, but there are originals included in texts for Cherokee, Navajo (both Washington Matthews books), and Haida. (There may be others; I didn't try every link.)
Via Desbladet, an extremely interesting LINGUIST List discussion of the popular idea that various phonological changes in languages (notably the Castilian ceceo /thetheo/ and the French uvular r) were the result of a royal speech impediment that spread throughout the population. I was rather surprised that this (to me, clearly ludicrous) idea was taken so seriously, but the discussion that followed is full of great details about the history of uvular r (written R in linguistic usage) in French and German, as well as tidbits about Soviet officials imitating Brezhnev's and Gorbachov's southern-dialect fricative pronunciation of [g], Indonesian government officials imitating Suharto's Javanese-influenced pronunciation of the verbal suffix {kan} with schwa instead of [a], and the like. A sample:
It seems quite well-documented that the uvular pronunciation developed first as a stigmatized feature among the Parisian lower class, the apical r being general at that time. This was still the case at the end of the 19th century where this pronunciation was called "parler gras" 'to speak fat' and the R, "r grasseyé" (the pronunciation [gRa] itself, with low back [a], examplifying the feature in question)... Anyway, during the Revolution when it was important for the former upper classes to keep a very low profile, and often to go into hiding, many people started to use the R in an effort to try to blend with the common people... Later the pronunciation of a rather weak uvular fricative became general in Paris and also spread to other urban areas (where it might have been adopted first by local revolutionaries), but the reinstated royal court and the old aristocracy, especially the ones who had emigrated to escape the revolution, clung to the apical r, as did most of the country people. It is only in the 20th century that R has become standard, but many older people especially in rural areas still use r.I had no idea that the uvular R took so long to become standard. The whole piece is well worth your while.
A reader's e-mail got me digging around for an online version of the Tao Te Ching (or, if you prefer, Dao De Jing), and I wound up at an amazing site, Zhongwen.com: Chinese Characters and Culture. Its primary focus is on the characters:
Alone among modern languages, Chinese integrates both meaning and pronunciation information in its characters. Zhongwen.com deciphers this rich information to help students understand, appreciate and remember Chinese characters, one of humanity's greatest and most enduring cultural achievements...But along with the dictionary and the lists of dynasties, surnames, names of Chinese-Americans (if you've ever wondered about the characters for Connie Chung, Michelle Kwan, I.M. Pei, or Yo-Yo Ma, here's where you can find them), and the like, it has a Readings section with not only the Dao De Jing but the Analects of Confucius, the 300 Tang Poems, Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman, and other classic texts (not to mention speeches by Deng Xiaoping and Bill Clinton [!]). A tremendous amount of work has obviously gone into this site, which is a treasure-trove to set alongside the Russian ones I blogged yesterday; it's been quite a weekend for foreign literature here at Languagehat.EVERY CHARACTER on this site is "CLICKABLE".
Click to see its definition, etymology, and relation to other characters.
Click on "+" to hear it, see it drawn, and see its entry in other dictionaries.
William Safire's column today is neither so idiotic as to require yet another Safire-flogging nor so informative as to be cited for its own sake (it's a routine investigation into the history of the phrase "tipping point"), but it uses a spelling variant that leapt out at me and sent me running to the dictionaries. In the course of trying to find a replacement for the now overused phrase, he says: "Turning point? Not a lot of bezazz, and it does not express the idea of the straw that breaks the camel's back..." Bezazz! I knew the word "pizzazz" had variants, as befits such an irrepressibly slangy term, but I hadn't seen this one. Merriam-Webster gives only "pizazz" as an alternate, while American Heritage allows you to simplify either of the z clusters, but neither offers a version in b-. Then I tried the OED, and bingo: "Also bezaz, bezazz, bizzazz, pazazz, pazzazz, pezazz, pizazz, pizzaz." Now there's generosity for you; in fact, I wonder whether there is any entry for which they offer more variants. The curious thing, though, is that all the citations with initial b- seem to be British:
1964 New Statesman 28 Aug. 291/1 A Shakespeare one [sc. exhibition].. with most of its bezazz—pop art, wire sculpture, giant beefeaters—left by the Avon. 1965 Sunday Times (Colour Suppl.) 16 May 12/1 She.. still wears trousers frequently. ‘I don't really feel happy in bezazz.’ 1968 Daily Tel. 24 Dec. 8/4 Miss [Ginger] Rogers has ‘bezazz’, as was obvious from the number of reporters and photographers clustering round her. But Mr. Marshall.. claimed it should be ‘pezazz’, derived from American TV commercials and meaning something like effervescence.The last one is particularly interesting, implying as it does a difference between U.K. and U.S. usage. I'm hoping The Discouraging Word will get on the case and turn up further information. (This entry can, by the way, be considered a bookend to a previous one on a rare variant spelling for "flibbertigibbet.")
I have occasionally made offhand remarks indicating my dislike for Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories and, still worse, his effect on the field, but I have not had the heart to go into detail; I'm worn out from all the arguing I did about him back when I was an actual linguist (now, I just play one on the internet). Fortunately, my procrastination has paid off (as it so often does), and Scott Martens has done the job for me. I direct anyone who wants to know exactly how wrong and destructive Chomsky has been to go forthwith to Pedantry and scroll down to "Friday, July 25, 2003: My carefully considered and well earned aversion to Noam Chomsky" (I won't even try to provide a permalink, Blogger being what it is). Quick summary: "His principles ultimately produced nothing, and may well have set linguistics back decades. The day will come when his legacy is compared to Skinner's, and when historians of the social sciences will debate which one ultimately caused the most damage." But there's much, much more.
Addendum. Scott expands on the subject in the comments to this entry.
A caveat: after sixteen paragraphs, you will reach the sentence "There was some more stuff I was going to say about Cambodia." You can stop there, unless you're particularly interested in the still-simmering argument over exactly what Uncle Noam said about the Khmer Rouge 25 years ago and whether it was justified given what was known at the time. As Scott says, "There's something about that country that seems to drive its students mad."
Again via Avva, an online corpus of transcribed French conversations:
The French corpus is currently comprised of 51 hours of spoken French recorded in Paris, Grenoble, Monpellier and Avignon. We are in the process of transcribing this data and so far we have five texts available on-line. Soon we hope to post more texts as well as ethnographic information about the speakers and the speech situations. The twenty-seven texts below are comprised of approximately 119,000 words total.Invaluable for anyone wanting to research French as she is actually spoke.
I mean, sure there's a lot of Pushkin online, but I just discovered (via a comment in Avva) the mother lode: the entire 10-volume edition, with bad language supplied in angle brackets (it's never printed in Russian editions, thanks to lingering prudery), the originals of things he wrote in French (linked to Russian translations), very reader-friendly format... bless this newfangled internet!
And I've just hit the "rvb" link and discovered it's only part of an online library that includes full editions of Dostoevsky (15 volumes), Derzhavin, and Khlebnikov, not to mention works by Bely, Remizov, and others, as well as Gnedich's 1829 translation of the Iliad. It may well be that every other Russian-reading person in the universe has long known of this resource—it wouldn't be the first time I've been behind the curve—but I'm very glad I finally caught up.
Addendum. Anatoly, in the comments, sent me to another Russsian literature site that has more material, including the 16-volume edition of Pushkin used by scholars. Unfortunately, it uses an annoying frames interface, so I can only link to the main Pushkin page; to get to the edition you have to click on the + next to Произведения Пушкина on the left, then on the + by Собрания сочинений Пушкина, then on the one by Полное собрание сочинений в шестнадцати томах. — 1937—1959, at which point you get the list of volumes. Furthermore, the alphabetical index is a text file, so if you're looking for a particular poem you have to go to the index, find the page number, then go back to (say) Volume Two and estimate where that page number would be in the list of entries. Contrast with the RVB site above, where the index has links that take you right to the desired work. But it's still good to have all this stuff online.
Further addendum. This site has all of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, &c. in transcription. Most useful.
There's a fascinating discussion at the site I Love Everything (with which I was previously unfamiliar, but whose name definitely appeals to me) that began with the question "How do the deaf interpret rhyme?" Along with some understandable defensiveness from deaf people interpreting it as implying they should value rhyme in some way, it became a very interesting exchange of ideas; this in particular brings up things I had never thought about and would like to know more about:
There are entirely different patterns by which poetry & narrative are constructed in the deaf community. A deaf person can of course read conventional poetry, with rhyme and all that, but it tends not to carry the same weight or interest that sign-specific stories & poetry do.This gives me the sense of an entire cultural world about which I know nothing, like when I first began to realize the riches of Persian civilization. So many worlds, so little time—how can people ever get bored?There is an enormously rich "oral" tradition (ie, carried on exclusively through signing and not written down) in the deaf community that is pretty much entirely unknown to the hearing world. I recently wrote a screenplay for an animated program for deaf children my ex is producing for p b s. I wrote the scenario, which was then translated into ASL by her and by the deaf actors doing improvisations (they filmed it in rotoscope). My original script almost completely vanished, since the puns and jokes and signifiers and the interesting patterns they can be put into are so hugely different from written speech.
The deaf world is really a self-sustaining alternate universe, with its own cultural codes and achievements. Hearing-based formal elements, like rhyme, are largely irrelevant to them and it's a common mistake (one I used to make as well; I'm not trying to scold you) to assume they value, or should value, the same things we do.
-- chester (goth_casua...), July 25th, 2003
A useful little article by Michele A. Berdy from the Moscow Times (once again via the excellent Taccuino di traduzione).
Via Taccuino di traduzione, a multilingual online course for translators; here's the English version. From Translation studies - part one:
English-speaking researchers call it "translation studies" or, familiarly, TS. In this way, they have coined a locution untranslatable into nearly any other language, untranslatable, at least, without creating an important loss. The main problem comes with the word "studies", which in languages other than English is not always translatable simply using the plural of a word translating "study". However, a science called "translation studies" is undoubtedly a scientific endeavor related to translation.The section Proper names translation (I take this opportunity to note that the English on the site is frequently faulty, a bad self-advertisement) has an interesting discussion of foreign renderings (or misrenderings) of the name "Gorki Park" as the title of Martin Cruz Smith's (excellent) novel (Italian: Gorky Park; French: Gorki Parc [!]; Danish: Gorkij Park; Finnish, properly, Gorkin puisto).Frenchmen use the term traductologie. Berman wrote in 1985:
The awareness of translation experiences, as distinct from all objectifying knowledge not within its framework (as dealt with by linguistics, compared literature, poetics) is what I call traductologie.Some translation researchers and some translators, including those translating from French, think that "traductologie" is a swearword, not meaning literally that it is obscene, alluding instead to its disagreeable aesthetic taste. Not every translation researcher would be glad to print "traductologist" on her business card, even if we cannot deny that the construction of this word follows widely accepted criteria.Germans prefer another solution. Maybe at a first glance you could think it is a rather long word: they call this discipline Übersetzungwissenschaft, that is to say "translation science", stressing in a still stronger way that they believe in the scientific character of their endeavor, which is obviously welcome.
Russians, offer another alternative, with a similar process of word composition, speak about perevodovédenie, which however does not mean exactly "translation science", because "science" - and "discipline" - is usually expressed by the word nauka. Védenie is something between competence and awareness. It has an old Indo-European root: in Sanskrit, we find the word vida, meaning "knowledge". Russians are lucky, because with the suffix -védenie they solve many terminology problems: literaturovédenie, for example, means "literary theory", "narratology", and many other similar disciplines.
In Italy many terms are used: traduttologia, scienza della traduzione, teoria e storia della traduzione, an old and obsolete denomination implying a nonexisting distinction between translation theory and practice, recalling linguistics applied to translation problems.
Olympia Morata (1526-55) was a remarkable woman who was educated in the ducal court of Ferrara, fell out of favor, and left with her husband for his home town of Schweinfurt in 1550; they were forced by the wars of religion to flee in 1554 to Heidelberg, where she died the following year. In her short life she became known as a great scholar and writer, admired all across Europe (by those who did not revile her as a "Calvinist Amazon") and an inspiration to all women scholars. A new book, The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic, edited and translated by Holt N. Parker, presents all of her writings that survive (most were lost in the siege of Schweinfurt) along with an introduction that is, amazingly, both erudite and compellingly readable. On her marriage:
Thus far, Morata's life follows a pattern common to many of the learned women of early modern Europe: a brief burst of erudition, which enjoyed masculine encouragement only as long as the scholar remained a young girl. Once she became older, no longer merely a curiosity for display but a potential disturbance to the order of things, she was married off, and her talents absorbed in child rearing and domesticity.And on her Latinity:Two things made Morata's story different. One is the extraordinary nature of her talents and her determination to pursue her study of "divine letters" despite circumstances far more horrific than mere disfavor at court. The other was the nature of her marriage and her husband. It was at this bleak period of her life, when she had lost her father, her childhood friend, and her position at court, that she found a partner in a marriage that seemed to both husband and wife to be literally made in heaven: "He has also given me as a bride to a man who greatly enjoys my studies"... Andreas Grunthler was a relative of Johannes Sinapius's and a brilliant medical student, deeply learned in Greek... In him Morata found what the "silly women" and men of the first Dialogue had declared impossible, "a man who would prefer you to be educated than to be rich."
Morata and Grunthler were married sometime in late 1549 or early 1550, and Olympia composed a Greek poem for the occasion... The letters and all the testimony of their friends paint a picture of a remarkable marriage. It was clearly a love match... Her letters to him are deeply moving and remind us (if we need reminding) that in the Renaissance, Latin was a living language, so much so that a learned German married to a learned Italian might well conduct their loves and lives in it. Their marriage was conceived by the couple themselves as a match between equals, and looked upon by their friends as such...
Her Latin is simply splendid. She ranks as one of the great stylists in an age of talent. Her prose is a flexible instrument, always correct but capable of ranging from the most formal (for example, in her letters to Vergerio) to the most conversational (for example, in her dialogues and her letters to her husband). Her writing is deep-dyed in classical literature. She lightly tossed off allusions, which she expected her equally learned readers to catch. I have attempted to note in passing only the more obvious ones. I have doubtless missed many others.I will take the word of Prof. Parker (whom I have known for many years) for her Latin, not one of my favorite languages, but I can vouch for her excellent Greek. I will limit myself to quoting one poem, her defiant "To Eutychus Pontanus Gallus," followed by Parker's translation (I have transliterated the Greek, silently emending one typo):
oupote men xumpâsin eni phresin hêndane tautoThe original can be seen here (poem at top left), along with all her original texts, at Boris Körkel's Morata website (in German).
koupote pâsin ison Zeus paredôke noon.
hippodamos Kastôr, pux d' ên agathos Polydeukês,
ekgonos ex tautês ornithos amphoteros.
kagô men thêlus gegauia ta thêluka leipon
nêmata, kerkidion, stêmona, kai kalathous.
Mousaôn d' agamai leimôna ton anthemoenta
Parnassou th' hilarous tou dilophoio khorous.
allai terpontai men isos alloisi gunaikes.
tauta de moi kudos. tauta de kharmosunê.Never did the same thing please the hearts of all,
and never did Zeus grant the same mind to all.
Castor is a horse-tamer, but Polydeuces is good with his fist,
both the offspring of the same bird.
And I, though born female, have left feminine things,
yarn, shuttle, loom-threads, and work-baskets.
I admire the flowery meadow of the Muses,
and the pleasant choruses of twin-peaked Parnassus.
Other women perhaps delight in other things.
These are my glory, these my delight.
The dubbed versions of Hollywood films created by Dmitry Puchkov—known as Senior Police Detective Goblin, or Goblin for short—are much sought after by connoisseurs of Russian swearing, according to this story in the Moscow Times.
Damn, shoot, darn, hell.But he doesn't limit himself to translation in the strict sense:Watch the standard Russian translation of Guy Ritchie's 2001 crime caper "Snatch" and you'd think that these are the foulest words known to gangsters in London's criminal underworld.
But watch Dmitry Puchkov's Russian translation of the same film and you'll hear an array of expletives that would make a sailor blush. Puchkov even changed the Russian title—"Bolshoi Kush," or "Big Score"—to an extremely crude, if justifiably accurate, variant: "Spizdili."
While sex and violence are accepted components of Russian movies, profanity is still a major taboo. Puchkov's unique obscenity-laden translations of English-language movies have made him one of the hottest commodities on Russia's gigantic pirate movie market.
By far, the Goblin films most in demand are Puchkov's farcical translations of the first two "Lord of the Rings" films. He has translated the first film, "The Fellowship of the Ring," as "Bratva i Koltso," or "The Posse and the Ring," and the second film, "Two Towers," as "Dve Sorvanniye Bashni," or "Two Toppled Towers," a play on a Russian expression meaning to go crazy.He is, needless to say, likely to be sued, and he admits his activities "may come to an end soon, assuming a studio doesn't decide to hire him to translate the movies for which it has legal distribution rights." I just hope I get a chance to experience the fruits of his genius. (Thanks to Taccuino di traduzione, the new translation blog of Isabella Massardo, for the link.)Puchkov sets J.R.R. Tolkien's tale in Russia and re-christens several characters with comical Russified names. For example, Frodo Baggins is renamed Fyodor Sumkin (from the Russian word sumka, or bag), and Gollum is renamed Goly, the Russian word for "naked."
The films feature some obscene banter, conversations about newly built McDonald's restaurants and a soundtrack including songs from Tatu and Zemfira, among others.
Update. See this digenis.org post for further developments (as of May 2005).
That's the name of a new blog by Brian Lennon, a Ph.D candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. So far he's written caustically literate posts about the idea that Americans should be learning English as a second language, the "abysmal linguistic incompetence of U.S. intelligence services," the QWERTYUIOP keyboard, Scots slang, and other topics. Welcome to Upper Blogovia, sir!
Addendum. UJG has delivered a further smackdown to the ESL story.
Margaret Marks, of the excellent legal translation blog Transblawg, has posted an appeal on behalf of Peter Griffin's bilingual edition of the Catalan novel Tocats pel foc (Touched by Fire) by Manuel de Pedrolo. Apparently the novel has received practically no advertising, and the remaining 500 or so copies may be pulped unless it starts selling. It's a little pricey ($29.95), but if you know anyone interested in Catalan literature and/or bilingual editions you'd be doing a mitzvah to tell them about it.
While I'm sending you to Transblawg, let me also mention the post Bavarian dialect dying out / Das Bairische stirbt aus, which discusses the decay of German regional dialects:
In the 1970s, the use of dialect was discouraged in schools because it was believed to hinder education. Now it appears that speaking dialect and writing standard German makes people express themselves more flexibly and makes it easier for them to learn a foreign language.
Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom
Men loved wholly beyond wisdom
Have the staff without the banner.
Like a fire in a dry thicket
Rising within women's eyes
Is the love men must return.
Heart, so subtle now, and trembling,
What a marvel to be wise,
To love never in this manner!
To be quiet in the fern
Like a thing gone dead and still,
Listening to the prisoned cricket
Shake its terrible, dissembling
Music in the granite hill.
And, because I like Louise Bogan so much, another:
Several Voices Out of a CloudAnd, OK, just one more, frequently misquoted online:Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom
and wherever deserved.Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless
And it isn't for you.
Solitary Observation Brought Back From A Sojourn In HellAt midnight tears
Run into your ears.
More Bogan here.
Marjorie Perloff devotes a long essay in Jacket 14 to teasing out the implications of what is on its face a strange statement of Wittgenstein's:
Ich glaube meine Stellung zur Philosophie dadurch zusammengefaßt zu haben, indem ich sagte: Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten. Daraus muß sich, scheint mir, ergeben, wie weit mein Denken der Gegenwart, Zukunft, oder der Vergangenheit angehört. Denn ich habe mich damit auch als einen bekannt, der nicht ganz kann, was er zu können wünscht.(Another analysis of this passage occurs in the final section, "The End of Philosophy," of a Doro Franck essay on style; Franck translates the last sentence more accurately as "For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do [my emphasis].") Perloff begins with a fascinating discussion of the problems involved in translating a line of Rilke:I think I summed up my position on philosophy when I said that philosophy really should be written only as a form of poetry. From this it should be clear to what extent my thinking belongs to the present, the future, or the past. For with this assertion, I have also revealed myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to do.
–Culture and Value, 1933-34
We usually think of the 'poetic' as that which cannot fully translate, that which is uniquely embedded in its particular language. The poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke is a case in point. The opening line of the Duino Elegies —She follows this with a discussion of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's translation of William Carlos Williams’s "Between Walls"; only then does she begin considering Wittgenstein. She finishes with two highly unliteral versions of the Rilke poem, the second of which begins: "I hate this place. If I were to throw a fit, who/ among the seven thousand starlets in Hollywood/ would give a flying fuck?" Much food for thought throughout.Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus den Engel Ordnungen? —
has been translated into English literally dozens of times, but, as William Gass points out in his recent Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, none of the translations seem satisfactory. Here are a few examples:
J. B. Leishman (1930) —
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the
angelic orders?A. J. Poulin (1977) —
And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic orders?
Stephen Cohn (1989) —
Who, if I cried out, would hear me — among the ranked Angels?
Gass is very critical of these, but his own is, to my ear, no better:
Who if I cried, would hear me among the Dominions of Angels?
The difficulty, as I have suggested elsewhere, is that English syntax does not allow for the dramatic suspension of Wer, wenn ich schriee... and that the noun phrase Engel Ordnungen, which in German puts the stress, both phonically and semantically, on the angels themselves rather than their orders or hierarchies or dominions, defies effective translation. Moreover, Rilke’s line contains the crucial and heavily stressed word denn (literally 'then'), which here has the force of 'Well, then' or, in contemporary idiom, 'So,' as in 'So, who would hear me if I cried out...?' But the translators cited above seem not to know what to do with denn and hence lose the immediacy of the question. Then, too, denn rhymes with wenn as well as the first two syllables of den Engel, creating a dense sonic network inevitably lost in translation.
The Eudaemonist has a downright TDW-like investigation of the variant spelling "flippertigibbet" (found by her first in the "rotten poetaster" Joyce Kilmer). And while you're visiting, don't miss her commentary on Seth Lerer's Error and the Academic Self (downright Housman-like in its irritable insistence on accuracy) and her succinct demolition of an idiot reviewer ("Uh, Mr. Reviewer, sir? Socrates drinking the poison? Uh, that was submission to the mob...").
Via Avva (who adds a Russian translation), this comparison (at Mike Snider's Formal Blog) of Baudelaire's "Correspondances" ("La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers...") with English versions by Bly, Howard, and Wilbur. I must say I'm disappointed in Richard Wilbur, who's one of my favorite formalist poets but who I think does a terrible job here ("fresh as a child's caress"??).
Today I went to Brighton Beach for the first time in months to pick up a copy of Dmitrii Bykov's new novel Orfografiya (publisher's page, in Russian; if it's unavailable, here's the Google cache). As soon as I read the review by Nikita Eliseev, I knew I had to have it; not only is it a historical novel about a period I'm fascinated by (the Russian Revolution and civil war), it focuses on the orthographic reform of 1918! (In the alternative history of the novel, the Bolsheviks abolish orthography rather than reforming it.) Indeed, the main character's name is Yat', the name of a prerevolutionary letter that was eliminated by the reform (and replaced by e). Other main characters are writers of the time, like Gorkii and Khodasevich. OK, it's almost 700 pages long and the author calls it an "opera in three acts," which in other circumstances would put me off, but this I can't resist.
Ray's comment on this post led me to this entry at snarkout, which in turn led me to first the Scél Mucci Mic Dathó (Story of Mac Dathó's Pig), which was our main text in Old Irish class many years ago, and then the entire Táin Bó Cúalnge (Cattle-Raid of Cooley), both of them in parallel Irish and English. The stories are great, and for anyone interested in the Irish language having the bilingual edition online is absolutely wonderful.
From Dale Keiger I have learned simultaneously of Jacobsen's existence and her passing. He quotes a very nice poem called "The Wind in the Sunporch"; here's the only other work of hers I've been able to find online (from the Baltimore section of Poetry in Motion):
from Of PairsI'd say she deserves further investigation.The mockingbirds, that pair, arrive,
one, and the other; glossily perch,
respond, respond, branch to branch.
One stops, and flies. The other flies.
Arrives, dips, in a blur of wings,
lights, is joined. Sings. Sings.Actually, there are birds galore:
bowlegged blackbirds brassy as crows;
elegant ibises with inelegant cows;
hummingbirds' stutter on air;
tilted over the sea, a man-of-war
in a long arc without a feather's stir.
I was never a great fan of Shapiro's, but today I ran across a wonderful couplet from his poem "Hospital":
Kings have lain here and fabulous small JewsFor that, I'll forgive a substantial quantity of polemical ranting.
And actresses whose legs were always news.
Incidentally, I ran across it in the epigraph to this novel; I haven't read Epstein, but I have to like anybody who had the wit to pick up that phrase, which makes for an unforgettable title.
Via Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufry comes this glossary of blogging terms in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Galician, and German; Jez solicits your suggestions for additions and improvements. On the French front, La grande rousse not only links to Lexicoblogue, she has her own extensive (and, of course, fastidiously selected) list (en français, bien entendu). And speaking of French, this Globe and Mail story suggests the French are turning to Quebec for internet terminology, which should please La rousse (to be distinguished from Larousse):
Quebec has come to the rescue of its linguistic cousins in France, where the heirs of Molière have been left lost for words in the hunt for Gallic versions of some common terms on the Internet.Rejected terms include pourriel for 'spam' and clavardage for 'chat'; Ms. Desmoulière says "The language in Quebec is slightly more familiar than ours." (Thanks to Jonathan Crowe of mcwetboy.com.)The guardians of the French language, galled by the remorseless encroachment of English words into everyday usage, have been scratching their heads for the best part of a decade in search of French-sounding alternatives for such words as "e-mail," "spam" and "chat."
Now, almost 10 years after plugged-in Quebec adopted it, France has embraced courriel as an official translation for "e-mail," a Net-friendly version of the clumsy courrier électronique that authorities had been trying to enforce.
"It turns out that courriel went down well here and has started being used, so we've made the abbreviation official," said Florence Desmoulière of the Culture Ministry's official division that helps coin new words.
The use of courriel is obligatory for French public servants.
But France's language gurus have turned up their collective nose at some of Quebec's other offerings....
Incoming Signals links to a BBC story hyping a medieval recipe for what is alleged to be lasagna. There are a number of interesting things about the recipe, but before we get to that, a couple of reflections on the story, a typical heavy-breathing and -handed example of silly-season journalism. Here's the start:
Britain lays claim to lasagneFirst off, it's interesting that the Brits say (or rather write) "lasagne" where we Yanks have "lasagna"; anybody know the history behind the divergence? (Yes, I know one is singular and the other plural in Italian, but both sides of the Atlantic use the plural "spaghetti," to take a parallel example.) And what's the Canadian usage? Second, I think Apicius would have something to say about the absurd "first cookery book ever written" claim. And finally, the only reason to mention meat and tomatoes (not present in the recipe) is to hype the "lasagna" story (which seems to be based mainly on the chance resemblance of the word to "loseyn").Italy may be a land of lazy lunches and sun-kissed siestas, but challenge its reputation for home-grown cuisine at your peril.
With the Battle of Parma Ham not two months over the nation is facing an even more audacious claim.
Lasagne is British.
It's so British the court of Richard II was making it in the 14th Century and most likely serving it up to ravenous knights in oak-panelled banqueting halls.
The claim has been made by researchers studying a medieval cookbook, The Forme of Cury, in the British Museum.
A spokesman for the Berkeley Castle medieval festival, with whom the experts were working, said: "I defy anyone to disprove it because it appeared in the first cookery book ever written."...
The recipe book does not mention meat - a staple of a good lasagne.
And such an early use of tomatoes in food would have had medieval cooks spluttering into their espressos.
But it does describe making a base of pasta and laying cheese over the top.
It calls this "loseyns", which is apparently pronounced "lasan", although it fails to mention whether it should be followed with a sweet tiramasu and a glass of Amaretto.
Having disposed of the BBC, let's get to the recipe. Incoming Signals kindly adds a link to a facsimile of the recipe itself, with which you can compare the Project Gutenberg version (the entire book; search on "loseyns," and note that the superscript p, q, r, s in the facsimile are footnotes from the 1780 printing, not medieval abbreviations):
Loseyns. XX II. IX.A little glossary: do 'put'; payn-demayn 'good white bread' [AF. pain demeine, med.L. panis dominicus 'lord's bread']; foyles 'leaves' (ie, of the paste/pasta); seethe 'boil'; chese ruayn 'Rouen (?) cheese' (the OED is no help on "ruayn," but this site says "Autumn cheese, made after the cattle had fed on the second growth. This was apparently a semi-soft cheese, but not as soft as a ripe modern Brie... It appears to be the same cheese that in France today is called fromage de gaing"); i-sode 'boiled' (past participle of "seethe," replaced by "sodden"); hoole 'whole, intact'; mizt 'mightest' (the z is clearly a misunderstanding of the medieval yogh symbol, but the lack of the second-person ending surprises me—perhaps a superscript symbol was left out of the printed version?). You notice I've omitted the word "loseyns," which is the crux of the matter. What was a loseyn? The OED has it s.v. "lozen," under definition 1: "Cookery. ? A thin cake of pastry. Obs." The only citations are:Take gode broth and do in an erthen pot, take flour of payndemayn and
make therof past with water. and make therof thynne foyles as paper
with a roller, drye it harde and seeth it in broth take Chese ruayn
grated and lay it in disshes with powdour douce. and lay theron
loseyns isode as hoole as thou mizt. and above powdour and chese,
and so twyse or thryse, & serue it forth.
?c1390 Form of Cury (1780) 21 Take obleys other wafrous [wafrons] in stede of lozeyns and cowche in dysshes. Ibid. 46, 61, 62. c1420 Liber Cocorum (1862) 40 Lay ther in thy loseyns abofe the chese with wynne.. those loysyns er harde to make in fay.(That last sentence is remarkably modern-sounding, once you realize fay = faith: "Damn, those lozens are hard to make!") I can't say the definition impresses me; "thin cake of pastry" simply doesn't match the recipe. "Layered dish of pasta and cheese" is more like it. And I don't think it's necessarily the same word as the later "losan, losen, lozen" meaning 'lozenge' with which they lump it.
So what about the book itself, The Form of Cury? No, that's not an amazingly early "curry": cury is an old work for 'cooking' or 'cooked food' [OF. queuerie 'cookery, kitchen,' f. keu, queu, coeu: L. coquus, cocus 'cook']. And the whole thing is online in facsimile as well as the Gutenberg transcription. Lovers of medieval cooking as well as Middle English should rejoice.
Addendum. UJG has done some excellent etymological spadework on "lasagna."
The NY Times has decided once again to clamber aboard their spavined, cross-eyed nag and charge creakily into battle with the windmills of linguistics. The lead article in today's science section is "Early Voices: The Leap to Language," by Nicholas Wade, a long, long attempt to construct a coherent narrative about the prehistory of language based on misunderstood scraps of interviews and floating ideas. I just can't bring myself to go into full deconstructive mode (for that, try here and here), so I'll just offer a supercondensed version of the article:
"...birds... leaf-cutting ants... crows... chimpanzees... of interest to almost everyone, with the curious exception of linguists... many linguists have avoided the subject because of the influence of Noam Chomsky... few firm facts... conflicting views... new research... new clues... even linguists have grudgingly begun to join in the discussion... !Kung... click languages... clicks may have... clicks... possible hint... may be... some profound change... Though some archaeologists dispute... Dr. Richard Klein of Stanford argues that... he suggests... most likely... was perhaps... it is surely reasonable to suppose... seems to have... Vervet monkeys... eagles, leopards, snakes and baboons... Chimpanzees... Dr. Bickerton developed the idea... must have preceded... he argued... Dr. Bickerton has argued... may have been... he suggests... he believes... would have had to... would have... Dr. Michael Corballis, a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, believes... Chimpanzees... He believes... may have... many concede... may both have played some role... must have had... It is easy to see in a general way... might create... Dr. Dunbar believes... Dr. Steven Pinker... disputes... likely... might seem... Some linguists have argued... Other linguists have said... gene... gene... genes... seems to have taken place... what seems to be... genes... genes... Dr. Chomsky... Dr. Chomsky... Dr. Chomsky... a set of propositions... may have been... could have developed... could involve... Dr. Chomsky rejects the notion... Dr. Chomsky... Dr. Chomsky... brilliant... rabid... somewhere..."
There you have it. It all has to do with birds, chimpanzees, and Chomsky, and not much to do with those damn linguists, who can't even get their act together.
(Thanks to y2karl and Bonnie for pointing me to the article.)
The Discouraging Word carries out lexicographical investigations of those three words (surely linked here for the first time) with its usual vigor and enthusiasm; scroll down to the relevant headings. (TDW is a proudly nineteenth-century blog: impeccable style, no permalinks.) Readers with ornitho-etymological ambitions can try answering the question there posed (s.v. "owly"): how did owls come to be associated with grumpiness?
I myself have a question about the movie-industry use of "vigorish" exemplified in this quote:
The companies are not in any way stealing from the picture-makers. They have to have built-in vigorishes—or else they'd go broke. Who pays for the 21 million dollars lost on The Sorcerer? The Studio!This does not seem to fit under either of the dictionary definitions, 'percentage taken by a bookie or the house on a bet' or 'interest, especially excessive interest, paid to a moneylender.' Anybody have information on the movie definition and how it developed?
(You can leave suggestions here, since TDW has no comment function either. Please don't anybody tell them Queen Victoria has passed on, at least not without hiding the laudanum first.)
Addendum. TDW also discusses the word "natch," for which (in the Scots sense 'incision, notch') Anatoly supplies a delightful Burns quote in the comments.
Avva has linked a site with three poems by Wislawa Szymborska, the first two with the Polish original accompanied by a translation into English and several into Russian, the last only in Polish and Russian. It's a good opportunity to at least get a sense of what the originals are like, and of course if you know Russian it's a feast of multiple translations.
Here's a sample—Polish (without diacritics) and English—from Avva's entry:
Dwie malpy BrueglaTak wyglada moj wielki maturalny sen:
siedza w oknie dwie malpy przykute lancuchem,
za oknem fruwa niebo
i kapie sie morze.Zdaje z historii ludzi.
Jakam sie i brne.Malpa wpatrzona we mnie, ironicznie slucha,
druga niby to drzemie —
a kiedy po pytaniu nastaje milczenie,
podpowiada mi
cichym brzakaniem lancucha.TWO MONKEYS BY BRUEGHEL
I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing —
and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.Translation by Magnus Y. Krynski, Robert A. Maguire
I've finally gotten around to the June 5 issue of the LRB, and in a Paul Laity review of a biography of George Steer, a war correspondent of the 1930s, found an excellent story about Evelyn Waugh. Steer and Waugh were both in Ethiopia for the Italian invasion of 1935; Steer, like most journalists, was against the Italians, while Waugh (predictably enough) took the imperialist side. Laity says:
But then Waugh was a hopelessly unsuccessful reporter. (He did send one significant cable to the Mail, informing the editor that the Italian minister in Addis was withdrawing his staff—a sign that the invasion was imminent. To keep the story from competitive colleagues, however, he sent it in Latin, and a puzzled subeditor in London was still trying to work out what it meant when the fighting began.)Had he been working for the Times, of course, he wouldn't have had this problem, but Steer had beaten him out for that job.
Addendum. I should add, for curious non-Latinists, that the title of this entry is line 850 of Seneca's Oedipus (spoken by the impatient eponymous king, who is about to learn distressing facts about his ancestry) and means 'Why do you look for words? Truth hates delay'; the latter hemistich is used by Denis Dutton as the motto of his Arts & Letters Daily.
A fascinating MetaFilter thread (started by the ever-inquiring y2karl) on the theories of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky. Lots of good links and food for thought.
Tom at digenis.org has an entry quoting the cover story, "The Soul of Kazakhstan," from the May/June 2003 issue (not yet online) of Saudi Aramco World. The article is apparently excerpted from a picture book of the same name, with essays by Alma Kunanbay and photos by Wayne Eastep (a selection of the latter can be seen at the book's website); it includes many facets of Kazakh life, but what interests us here is the material on the Kazakh "art of the word." To quote Tom:
Kunanbay also mentions the Kazakh belief that words can hold a special, magical power. In the Kazakh language and culture there is a concept called 'art of the word' which refers to 'clever, flowery speech loaded with metaphors, proverbs, and allegory.'Sounds like it would fit right into the Rothenbergs' Symposium of the Whole, and I'd like to know more about it. [Mistaken hypothesis deleted thanks to a comment by Dctr.]The zenith of this belief is the aytis, a musical-poetic duel between two epic singers (called akin) before a large, knowledgeable audience. Kunanbay says:
The language forms in an aytis are so complex, and the nuances and associations so arcane, that a meaningful translation to another language is virtually impossible. There is a tremendous variety of aytis within Kazakh poetic culture: qiz ben zhigit aytisi, for example, is a verbal duel between a girl and a boy; din aytisi is a verbal duel about religion; zhumbaq aytisi, a verbal duel with riddles; aqindar aytisi, a verbal duel between bards; and so on.
Outside of poetic duels, it appears Kazakh, like the other Central Asian languages, is not faring well in the media; see this article by Aleksandr Khamagayev (pdf; HTML cache here); the issue of Media Insight Central Asia to which the article is an introduction can be accessed via the Cimera publications site—just click on Media Insight Central Asia under Publications at the left, then Archive MICA 2002 (English version), then MICA Nr. 27 / August 2002. If there's a more direct way, avoiding the damn frames, I don't know it.
Language hat is going to spend the next week in California. Regular blogging will resume July 13; in the interim, I urge you to visit the excellent sites blogrolled at right, and (for those of you in climates resembling that of New York) drink plenty of fluids and stay in the shade.
Update. I'm back, and I thank you all for your various bon voyages.
Avva has posted a complete transcription of Jonathan Ree's essay "Being foreign is different" (Times Literary Supplement, 6/9/96), one of the most interesting things I've read lately on translation. The text is without italics or accents, but it's generally easy enough to see where they should be; for one section which their absence renders incomprehensible, he provides an accented version, and I will add italics:
Take, for example, the celebrated essay "La Différence", in which Derrida tried to open out the concept of difference by comparing the French différer with Greek diapherein, Latin differre, and differieren in German. As everyone must know by now, Derrida dramatized his point by coining the non-word différance, spelled with an "a", alongside the ordinary French word différence, spelled with an "e". And since the two forms are pronounced the same, they made a nice illustration of Derrida's point about writing not being a depiction of speech; manifestly, the difference between différance and différence could be seen but not heard.As it happens, it is easy to reproduce this effect in English. Différance can be transliterated as "differance" with an "a", yielding an English non-word which sounds the same as the ordinary English word "difference", thus translating Derrida's device perfectly. This was the solution adopted in David Allison's translation, published in 1973. But a decade later, Alan Bass produced a new version, which opted to leave différance in French. This crazy translation took off, just at the time when Derrida was becoming a cult author in English, and as a result thousands of English-speaking Derrideans were left floundering for a French pronunciation of différance, apparently under the impression that they were being loyal to its quintessential Frenchness. Unluckily for them, though, différance was not a French concept at all, and - by making the difference between differance and "difference" audible, all too audible - the Derrideans were not only missing Derrida's point, but spoiling it too. It was as if the translator, rather than helping us engage with ideas and argue over them, preferred to fetishize their foreignness and turn us into dazzled spectators of an exotic scene.
The essay is full of fascinating examples, and I urge you to read it. Here's another sample to whet your appetite:
Philosophy is obsessed with words; but the words that interest it are not the fancy aristocrats of language, nor yet its specialized technicians: they are its swarming universal proletarians - terms like "time" and "unfairness", "good" and "ugly", "truth" and "lies". And it is these dog-ordinary terms, in their ordinary elusive precision, that set philosophical translators their hardest tasks.The biggest problem is the verb "to be". It is not just that ideas of being are organized differently in different languages, and cannot be exactly superimposed on each other. It is that each European linguistic form has a long inheritance of past philosophical translations wrapped up inside it. Thus German and French discussions of Sein or être are linked together not only as presumed translations of each other, but also as successors of the Latin esse, which in its turn translates the Greek einai. But they cannot pass straight into English, where the infinitive is never used as a noun: the closest equivalent is the gerund "being". On the other hand, esse, Sein and être have also been used as translations of [Greek] to on, for which "being" is a far better equivalent. In that sense, translating the German, French and Latin infinitives by the English gerund could be regarded as an improvement on the original: it recaptures something of a Greek concept that is lost in its Latin, French and German translations.
Posted by languagehat at 09:04 AM | Comments (11)
I do love a well-used word. In a report on the Chinese Three Gorges Dam project and the consequent flooding of fields and villages in this week's New Yorker, Peter Hessler says of a fellow building a fishing boat:
Huang is shirtless, a skinny, square-jawed man with efficient ropelike muscles. Later, when I ask if he’s worried about the boat’s not being tested before the water rises, he gives me the slightly annoyed look of a shipwright hassled by diluvian reporters. Huang Zongming is a righteous man, and he knows that his boat will float.Well played, sir! Deucedly well played!
And, speaking of words, there's a lexicographical examination of "blandishment" over at The Discouraging Word today (no permalinks).
I was reading a recent issue of the LRB and came to "Mohocks," by Liam McIlvanney, a review of The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era by David Finkelstein. I almost skipped it because, really, who cares?—but my omnivorous reading habits kicked in and I plunged ahead. I'm glad I did, because otherwise I wouldn't have learned about the Noctes Ambrosianae, a series of mostly imaginary conversations between the Edinburgh wits of the 1820s that were a regular feature of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. McIlvanney describes them as follows:
Wilson's dialogues are... an astonishing repository of literary Scots, particularly in the speeches of the [Ettrick] Shepherd [James Hogg], those unpredictable and extravagant vernacular riffs. Since the 17th century, Scots has been (in David Craig's useful phrase) a 'reductive idiom', a way of undercutting Latinate English, and we get a lot of this in the Noctes... But we also get lengthy, vertiginously inventive passages in which the Scots tongue is put through its paces in a manner almost without parallel in 19th-century writing. The Scots of the Noctes is a language not merely of pawky humour and vituperation, but of philosophical speculation, impressionistic description, political oratory, sentimental rhapsody, critical pronouncement, religious devotion. In short, it is a language fit for all purposes, and if he did nothing else in his long and varied career, Wilson composed, as Cockburn noted, 'the best Scotch that has been written in modern times'.So I'm hoping somebody will put it, or at least a good sample of it, online. (There is actually a searchable archive of Blackwood's here, but alas only for 1843-1863, well after the years of the Ambrosianae—named, incidentally, for a real Edinburgh tavern, Ambrose's of Picardy Place, where they were set.)
By the way, I urge anyone with the slightest fondness for the kind of theological weirdness exploited by, say, Hawthorne to read Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner; you can even do so online. It's a real hoot, and at the same time sends a shudder down the spine.
Addendum. The Scribe has taken note of my call for online Noctes and has posted some at The Discouraging Word under the rubric (le mot juste—it's red) "Dogs and skating in the Noctes." Even the few excerpts there show amazing range, from the casual ("It's lang sin' I've drank sae muckle sawt water at ae sittin'—at ae soomin', I mean—as I hae dune, sir, sin' that Steam-boat gaed by. She does indeed kick up a deevil o' a rumpus.") to the exalted:
But the mystery o' life canna gang out like the pluff o' a cawnle. Perhaps the verra bit bonny glitterin' insecks that we ca' ephemeral, because they dance out but ae single day, never dee, but keep for ever and aye openin' and shuttin' their wings in mony million atmospheres, and may do sae through a' eternity. The universe is aiblins wide eneuch.Many thanks for the prompt satisfaction!
Des is not a man who sees an Augean stable and wanders off whistling; he has decided to take on "Serious Writers who have succumbed to the urge to Hold Opinions about languages," and his first installment, in which he whacks Mihály Komis about the head and shoulders for suggesting that Hungarians should learn German rather than English, is now available for your delectation.
Via Avva comes this Guardian piece by John Simpson, chief editor of the OED, who picks his favourite words with unusual origins. I myself particularly like #8:
to curry favour is a common idiom which embraces two linguistic 'fossils' as well as a cultural misunderstanding. The 'currying' here does not refer to the addition of spices to a dish but to the act of rubbing down a horse with a brush or comb. The idiom derives from the French 'estriller fauvel', 'to curry the chestnut horse', the horse in question, Fauvel, being a character in the French tale the 'Roman de Fauvel' (1310). In the story Fauvel, like Reynard the Fox, represents hypocrisy and duplicity. In English the unfamiliar 'Fauvel' was gradually replaced by the similar-sounding 'favour' in an idiom that came to mean 'to seek to win favour, to ingratiate oneself'. As is the case with many fossilized idioms, the fact that the transformation of 'Favel' to 'favour' made nonsense of the verb 'curry' in the context did nothing to deter usage.It's interesting to learn that hobbit "has since turned up in one of those 19th-century folklore journals, in a list of long-forgotten words for fairy-folk or little people"; when will they get around to adding this to the online OED entry?
Larry Trask, who made a prior Languagehat appearance in this entry, has a useful Basque page, prefaced with the following pointed caveat:
But please note: I do not want to hear about the following:(Thanks to Vidiot for the link.)Your latest proof that Basque is related to Iberian / Etruscan / Pictish / Sumerian / Minoan / Tibetan / Isthmus Zapotec / Martian
Your discovery that Basque is the secret key to understanding the Ogam inscriptions / the Phaistos disc / the Easter Island carvings / the Egyptian Book of the Dead / the Qabbala / the prophecies of Nostradamus / your PC manual / the movements of the New York Stock Exchange
Your belief that Basque is the ancestral language of all humankind / a remnant of the speech of lost Atlantis / the language of the vanished civilization of Antarctica / evidence of visitors from Proxima Centauri
Addendum. Thanks to Pat of fieldmethods.net for this excellent interview with Trask; I was sad to read at the end: "Illness has robbed him of his voice, so that this interview had to be conducted entirely by email."
As it happens, yesterday was a day of, shall we say, personal chronological significance, and my lovely wife gave me several presents, mainly books. (As she put it, "You don't need more books, of course, but... you need more books.") One of these was a book I recently posted about, Switching Languages, "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." I am, of course, delighted to have it (and Summer in Baden-Baden and Life Along the Silk Road) and am very much looking forward to reading it. Another source of delight: not only is my wife lovely and generous, but she reads my blog.
Coincidentally, today's NY Times has an article very relevant to the book, about two Americans who have made careers in Argentina, writing in Spanish:
Mr. Johansen is not the only American enjoying artistic success here after having cast his lot with this country in crisis. A highly praised novel published in Argentina recently is "Flores de un Solo Día," or "Flowers of a Single Day," by Anna Kazumi Stahl, a Louisiana native, also 39, who first arrived here 15 years ago not speaking a word of Spanish, and now, like Mr. Johansen, writes in that language....I might as well admit that I bought myself A Concordance to the Poems of Osip Mandelstam and John Crowley's The Translator. We're just going to have to get a house with a lot of room for bookcases.Critics have traditionally argued that Spanish, more so than English, lends itself to a florid vocabulary and to ornate sentences. But Ms. Stahl said she finds it to be exactly the opposite: "Perhaps because I am a Southern writer" in English, she said, she is more direct and disciplined and less flamboyant, "cautious, with short sentences," when she switches to Spanish.
"Like any good Southerner, I get attached to the words and all the resonances and so everything gets a little bit embroidered," she said.
Writing in Spanish, on the other hand, "took everything away from me except primary colors," she explained, adding, "It's not that I was necessarily working on a smaller canvas than in English, but I was working with fewer elements, and therefore every stroke had to be a stroke that counted."...
Mr. Johansen, in contrast, considers himself truly bilingual and writes lyrics in English and Spanish, sometimes bouncing from one language to the other in the same song and tossing off puns as if they were party favors. But he finds it difficult to explain how he decides to pair a song with a language.
"Usually a melody or a line of a lyric will come," he said, "but beyond that I really don't know how it happens. I always say that some day I'd like to learn a foreign language, like French or Portuguese, because the two languages, English and Spanish, are really just one for me."
Oh, and a shout-out to the monkey-lovin' folks at 9622.net; thanks for the good wishes!
Regular readers will know that I often have occasion to berate the hapless William Safire, whose love for the English language is passionate but lamentably short on genuine knowledge. Today, however, reading him has filled me with joy, for he has brought me good tidings. The magnificent Historical Dictionary of American Slang, edited by Jonathan Lighter, was dropped by its original publisher, Random House, after two volumes in an appalling demonstration of obsession with profit to the exclusion of all other factors. (They might have considered the example of the OED, which was similarly seen by Oxford as a sure money-loser in the beginning; since then, of course, it has been a bonanza for OUP.) But salvation is announced in Safire's Sunday column:
Best lexical news of all to word lovers is the salvation of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang. The first two volumes of this projected tetralogy (that's Standard English for four volumes) were published by Random House and opened a window on America's cultural heritage. The ambitious project, brainchild of Jonathan Lighter at the University of Tennessee, was a godsend to all of us in the language dodge. But Random House, which is not a philanthropy, saw no profit in finishing it. We panicked; would slang scholarship stop dead at the letter O?Safire also announces the imminent publication of the 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate, which would be my lead story on another day—I'm very much looking forward to seeing it. But the revival of the HDAS is genuinely historic; my thanks to the NEH, Oxford, and the good Mr. Safire.The National Endowment for the Humanities popped with a grant of $325,000 over two years to keep Lighter slaving away like a modern-day Sir James Murray, and Oxford University Press picked up the challenge. The Brits, just as they did in Iraq, came through for the U.S.
''The N.E.H. grant helps subvent it,'' reports Casper Grathwohl, reference editor at Oxford, ''and we're now working out the contract with Random House.'' (The verb subvent, ''to come to the help of,'' is listed as ''obsolete, rare'' in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it defines the noun subvention as ''a grant from government . . . in support of an enterprise of public importance,'' which this nearly abandoned history surely is.) Jesse Sheidlower, who was Lighter's editor at Random House, is now principal North American editor of the O.E.D. and will work with the great lexicographer again.
''We want to build a whole online slang project with this at its core,'' Grathwohl says, ''a slang resource center and living language project.'' He envisions a ''slang watch'' and a yearbook of ''the best American slang of 2004, that sort of thing. By being able to finish this work, Oxford will play a pivotal role in documenting the way Americans speak.'' Why? The British lexie subvented me easily: ''Slang is the sexiest part of a language.''
(I'd like to leave matters there, really I would. But I can't resist taking a cheap parting shot. You see that parenthetical sentence up there, starting "The verb subvent..."? See halfway through, where it says "but it defines"? That "it" is meant to refer to the OED, but in fact its grammatical referent is "the verb subvent." Sorry, Bill.)