Margaret Marks of Transblawg has an entry explaining a few of the basic rules of IKEA's often bizarre-sounding product names; if you read German, you can go to her source, an article in Stern, and find out much more. Or you can just play the IKEA game.
An e-mail from the always thoughtful and thought-provoking gentleman who goes (for reasons best known to himself) by the sobriquet "dungbeetle" around these parts has reminded me of the story of "Lord" Timothy Dexter, who among his many eccentricities (you can read about them here and, in a more censorious 19th-century version, here), published a booklet called A Pickle for the Knowing Ones full of the wisdom he wished to impart from his haphazard but financially successful life:
Not only did the content of his booklet cause readers to shake their heads, so did the format. As the quotes above show, Lord Timothy's spelling was atrocious, and he had no use for punctuation. After the first printing sold out, he amended the second edition. He inserted a page of punctuation marks at the end with the note: "Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops I put in a Nuf here and thay may peper and solt it as they plese"
Incidentally, he is mentioned towards the end of an amusing and amazingly sensible article, "A Dissolving View of Punctuation" by Wendell Phillips Garrison, first published in the August 1906 issue of The Atlantic:
Either some light has been shed on the principles of punctuation by studying the diversity of good usage, or else my readers may envy Lord Timothy Dexter's, who were bid to pepper and salt as they chose. This ignoramus, in bunching his points at the end of his book, intimated two truths—one, that punctuation is, to a large extent at least, a personal matter; the other that punctuation may be good without being scientific.
A new paper, "Last Writing: Script Obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica" by Stephen Houston, John Baines, and Jerrold Cooper (published in the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History), sounds fascinating; a Washington Post story by Guy Gugliotta says:
When a system of writing begins to die, people probably don't even notice at first. Maybe the culture that spawned it loses its vitality, and the script decays along with it. Maybe the scribes or priests decide that most ordinary people aren't able to learn it, so they don't teach it.
Or a new, simpler system may show up—an alphabet, perhaps—that can be easily learned by aggressive upstarts who don't speak the old language and don't care to learn its fancy pictographic forms.The story has interesting details on the history of all three scripts and is well worth reading in full; this tidbit particularly struck me: "Greek became Egypt's official language during the Hellenistic period, and the Romans discriminated against indigenous nobles by taxing those who didn't speak it: 'This was a body blow,' said Cambridge's Baines." There's nothing new under the sun. (Again via Taccuino di traduzione; I'm feeling lazy today, so I'm just swiping all her links. Grazie, BebaManno!)Or perhaps invaders take over. They decide the old language is an inconvenience, the old culture is mumbo jumbo and the script that serves it is subversive. The scribes are shunned, discredited and, if they persist, obliterated.
In the first study of its kind, three experts in the study of written language have described the common characteristics that caused three famous scripts—ancient Egyptian, Middle Eastern cuneiform and pre-Columbian Mayan—to disappear.
"Thousands of languages have come and gone, and we've studied that process for years," said Brigham Young University archaeologist Stephen D. Houston, the study's Maya specialist. "But throughout history, maybe 100 writing systems have ever existed. We should know more about why they disappear."
The collaboration among Houston, University of Cambridge Egyptologist John Baines and Assyriologist Jerrold S. Cooper of Johns Hopkins University began at a meeting that Houston hosted earlier this year to discuss the origins of writing. What resulted was "Last Writing," an essay on script death published recently in the British journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. Its basic conclusion: Writing systems die when those who use them restrict access to them.
"The sociological and cultural dimension is crucial," Houston said. "Successful systems don't have these prohibitions. Once there's this perception that the writing is only for this function or that function, script death is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy."
An amusing article by Michele A. Berdy in the Moscow Times about funny-sounding place names (a river Gryazukha 'Mudhole,' a town Starye Chervi 'Old Worms,' and the like); some of the "meanings" should be taken with a certain amount of salt, but it's a fun read. I might not link it here, though, except that the last village she mentions is Да-Да (Da-Da). (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
An article by Nora Boustany in today's Washington Post tells the story of the remarkable man, Michael Chyet, who's compiled the first serious Kurdish-English dictionary:
Michael L. Chyet, 46, has studied more than 30 languages, delving into the marvels of cultural and oral histories with the zeal of an explorer marching into uncharted territory. For the past 18 years, he has labored quietly but passionately to produce the most comprehensive Kurdish-English dictionary ever written.
In his 847-page volume, words are written in Roman and Arabic scripts but explained in English and illustrated with sentences from literary texts. The work, recently published by Yale University Press, will help diplomats, soldiers, relief workers and businessmen venturing into Iraq, Turkey, Iran and other parts of the world where Kurds have wandered and settled.Sounds like what Ludo from The Last Samurai might have grown up to be, doesn't he? Many thanks to Richard Buchholz for sending me the link. (And here's hoping Yale puts out a paperback edition.)"My work has nothing to do with politics or governments," he said. "I am worried about the future of this language, and I am hoping to help standardize it.
"I had a vision for Kurdish. Kurds are people who have internalized all the hatred against them for years. This is what drew me to the Kurds. As a Jew and a gay man, I identified. I love the language and I don't want it to die. Kurdish is not dead, but it needs to be modernized. For many decades Turks failed to kill the language. Now we are at the point where Kurds will be responsible if it dies out."
When Chyet was a child, he complained that school was boring, and his father, the late Stanley F. Chyet, a poet, historian and rabbi, became concerned. A psychologist suggested that the 6-year-old boy attend a private school where classes were taught in English and Hebrew.
When he was 12, he spent six weeks on vacation in Israel. When he returned home to Cincinnati, Chyet stumbled across a variety of books written in other languages in his attic. The books had once belonged to his grandfather and great uncles, who had immigrated to Boston from western Ukraine at the turn of the century. Within a year, he was reading German, Spanish, Yiddish and French and figuring out Russian. He then attended an Anglican church school to study Arabic.
Chyet returned to Israel and spent time on a kibbutz in 1976. He also visited Palestinian Christian villages.
At age 18, he read a description of a Kurdish folk dance, which opened up a new vista for him of a people and culture he had never known existed, he said.
In 1980, upon returning home, Chyet received a bachelor's degree in Arabic from UCLA.
From 1980 to '82 he lived in a Palestinian area as part of an intercultural project called Buds for Peace in which school principals, teachers and children interacted. During that time, over endless cups of coffee and tea, Chyet learned new Arabic expressions such as "your mother-in-law loves you," a saying used to welcome a guest when fresh bread was just being ripped off the walls of an oven or a pungent stew was ready to serve, or just to point out a lucky coincidence.
For recreation, he went to a kibbutz to pursue his other hobby, folk dancing. There, he befriended Kurdish Jews who had emigrated from Iran. They spoke neo-Aramaic, which is neither Arabic nor Hebrew but has borrowings from Turkish and Kurdish. Aramaic is the language Jesus spoke.
In 1985, Chyet earned a master's degree in Near Eastern Studies and Folklore from the University of California at Berkeley. His father and a professor encouraged him to pursue his interest in the Kurdish language: "My boy, this is virgin territory. You be the one to discover and explore the Kurdish language," Chyet said he was told by Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology and folklore at Berkeley.
"This has been the result," Chyet said, pointing to his dictionary.
I like to read the corrections in the NY Times; the vast majority deal with ridiculously minor errors in people's names or job titles, but occasionally there's something more substantial. Today we have:
An article on Aug. 20 about the mystery writer Martha Grimes and her new novel about the publishing industry, "Foul Matter," misstated the meaning of the publishing term used as the book's title. "Foul Matter" refers to the edited manuscript and proofs of a book that have been superseded by revised or corrected versions or by the final printed work. It is not a term for an unedited manuscript.In other words, once the corrections have been made on a proof (or galley) it becomes the foul proof (or galley, not that anybody uses galleys anymore). You'd think the NY Times would have known that in the first place, wouldn't you?
Another reader might find it absurd that James Fenton spends the bulk of his NYRB review of Robert Lowell: Collected Poems nitpicking the annotations; I, on the other hand, am delighted. Anyone can rhapsodize about Lowell's verse, but it takes dedication, an eye for detail, and a well-stocked mind to go through the footnotes as Fenton has—and, as it happens, I love footnotes. I've spent much of my life trying to understand things foreign to my experience, and I long ago learned the value of a well-annotated text. This, alas, does not appear to be one.
Fenton introduces the subject by saying:
These editors are very keen to tell us things we might well know or easily look up: the meanings of vino rosso, Dummkopf, hors de combat, bête noire, in ovo, coup de théâtre. They inform us that Boulder is in Colorado.... they tell us that Fraülein [sic] means a young woman. So they clearly do not expect us to have been out and about very much. In which case it follows that, in the same poem, they ought to let us know that the English Garden is, rather surprisingly, the main park in central Munich.The editors do not explain the background of the burning of the city, very important to the poem. And not only do they not regularize punctuation or spelling, they do not even explain Lowell's errors:
If he had been careful he would have written "homo homini lupus," not "homo lupus homini." He would have written "Sturm und Drang" rather than "sturm und drang"—but then, would he ever have described an acquaintance as comical "in the manner of the crusading sturm und drang liberal scholars in second year German novels"? What precisely does this description connote? If the editors know, why don't they tell us? If Lowell is both misusing and misspelling the German term, they should quietly inform us, and we can then move on.They also fail to explain the ultramontane connotations of the title "Beyond the Alps," the epithet "our black classic" for Paris, the borrowing of a line from Empson (who borrowed it from Anita Loos), the fact that Sir Walter Raleigh was a poet (and thus a presumed stand-in for Lowell), the source of the Sappho poems used in "Three Letters to Anaktoria," and many other things. But they do "explain" that the Parthenon honors Minerva (sic), who was born from the head of Zeus (sic). Fenton says, "In the end, one falls back, defeated. It is too depressing to go on."
Now, you can say that he's being picky, that the poetry is what matters. And so it is—but if I'm going to add a weighty, expensive volume like this to my already groaning shelves, I have to trust the editors (Frank Bidart and David Gewanter), and after Fenton's evisceration I cannot. There is nothing I despise more in an editor than plodding annotation of what the reader can be expected to know (and sloppy annotation at that) and not of what the reader needs explained. How can such editors be trusted to make the right decisions about the text of the poems? I shall not be buying this book.
Anthony's comment on the Whale Cloth Press thread led me back to the Dada Manifesto, written by Hugo Ball in 1916. I hadn't read it in years, and it struck me how fresh it still is, so I thought I'd present it here for your dadadelectation—in my own translation, since the ones available online are awful, giving no sense of the brio of the original. There seem to be two versions circulating on the internet; I'll give a translation of the short version because, well, it's shorter; for comparison (if you read German), here's the longer one (pdf; here's the HTML cache).
Dada is a new direction in art. You can tell this because up to now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It's awfully simple. In French it means "hobbyhorse." In German: "addio," "get off my back," "see you later!" In Romanian: "Absolutely, you're right, that's it. Yeah, really, let's do it." And so forth.A few notes on the translation. I've taken more liberties than I would have with a less dadaish text; notably, I've rendered "Aalige und Journalige" as "infernalish and journalish," because the rhyme seemed more important to me than the literal meaning of the rare word "aalig" ('eely'). Same thing with "Das Wort, das Wort, das Weh gerade an diesem Ort," where the last half means 'the woe right here' (or 'exactly in this place') but I chose to preserve the rhyme instead. The word "allerwerteste" looks like it means 'most worthy' but in actual usage means only 'rump, posterior'; it's a pity to lose the ghost-meaning 'most worthy evangelists,' but given a choice between a real rump and a ghost honorific, I have to go with the former. I linked Rubiner because I'm sure of the identification; I'm not quite as sure that Korrodi is Eduard Korrodi (1885-1955), long-time editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and besides I couldn't find a good page to link to. I have no idea who Anastasius Lilienstein might be. Oh, and note the pun of Johann Fox-gang Goethe, instead of Wolf-gang. Silly, silly dada!An international word. Only a word, and the word as movement. It's simply awful. If you make it into a direction in art, that must mean you want to get rid of complications. Dada psychology, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and you, most honored poets, who have always composed with words but never composed the word itself. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada you friends and alsopoets, posterior evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m'dada, dada mhm' dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.
How do you achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How do you become famous? By saying dada. With noble attitude and fine deportment. Until you go crazy, until you pass out. How can you get rid of everything infernalish and journalish, everything nice and neat, everything priggish and brutish and foppish? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the point, dada is the world's best lily-milk soap. Dada Herr Rubiner, dada Herr Korrodi, dada Herr Anastasius Lilienstein.
Which is to say: the hospitality of the Swiss is to be valued above all things, and in aesthetics what matters is the norm.
I'm reading poems that intend nothing less than to do without language. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe, Dada Stendhal. Dada Buddha, Dalai Lama, Dada m'dada, Dada m'dada, Dada mhm' dada. What matters is connection, and first interrupting it a little. I don't want words that other people have invented. All the words have been invented by other people. I want my own nonsense, and the corresponding vowels and consonants along with it. If the vibration is seven cubits long, I want words that fit it, seven cubits long. Herr Schulze's words are only two and a half centimeters long.
So now you can clearly see how articulated language develops. I just let the sounds fall where they may. Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Ow, oy, oo. You shouldn't let too many words show up. A verse is an opportunity to get by without words and without language as far as possible. This accursed language, it sticks to dirt like stockbrokers' hands that have worn down coins. I want the word where it stops and where it starts.
When each thing has its word, the word itself has become a thing. Why can't a tree be called pluplusch, and pluplubasch when it's been raining? And why does it have to be called anything at all? The word, the word, the woe's the worst you ever heard, the word, gentlemen, is a first-class public concern.
As an example of the kind of thing with which he would have scandalized the public on such an occasion, read his sound-poem (Lautgedicht) "Karawane."
If anyone whose German is better than mine has a quarrel with the translation, I beseech you to let me know; I'm willing and eager to improve it. (And if anyone wants to reproduce the translation elsewhere, feel free, but I'd appreciate it if you'd accompany it with "translated by Language Hat.")
Language poetry isn't my favorite style, but Whale Cloth Press has done a terrific job of putting it online, with two books by Kit Robinson (check out the varied presentations of the poems from Windows, with mouseover texts for certain stanzas of "All Fours" and the gorgeous gray background for "Speaking Peoples") and Robert Grenier's Sentences, which Ron Silliman (from whom this link comes) considers one of American poetry's "essential texts." He singles out for notice a poem that reads, in its entirety:
JOEYou may find that a bit too simple, but here's Ron's take on it:
JOE
One could hardly find, or even imagine, a simpler text, yet it undermines everything people know or, worse, have learned, about titles, repetition, rhyme, naming, immanence. If we read it as challenging the status of the title, then on a second level it is the most completely rhymed poem conceivable. & vice versa. As language, this is actually quite beautiful in a plainspoken manner, the two words hovering without ever resolving into a static balance, never fully title & text, nor call & response, neither the hierarchy of naming nor parataxis of rhyme.
And here's a passage I like, from Robinson's "Speaking Peoples":
what left fissures in the lives of the English
speaking peoples? Slowly they came
to discover the secret call of every creature
in the forest, the signature of each leaf
and stepped about on a plain of high grasses
where birds were. Above us the sun
follows perfectly, by force of habit. Years
a shell game. Low clouds part to reveal a grid
water in a coke bottle with sprinkler top
memory planted their feet in the dance
box step. Courtship parallels slope of roof
hair on the back of your neck. Song
praise plaint truth struggle hustle settlement
of all we've known. Notes stride in
the throat, walk with me. A clip-
on tie is wrought. Any city afterlife
can come south on the color, no.
Tunes on end, rhythm solves the puzzle, space
no product masters can conquer. Meaning thrives
this time, a lack bemoaned by those
who follow old scripts to the letter. Change is
upon the land...
Theresa Nielsen Hayden has a post about a blog called Copy editing, damnit that purports to be the source of all wisdom concerning style: "Listen to me, I know style and how to use it." The annoyingly smug tone of that sentence is the second thing that strikes one; the first, thanks to the mile-high type face, is the solecism in the blog's name (as Theresa points out, "he’s misspelled it... ‘damn it’ if two words, ‘dammit’ if one"). One might get used to those things if the entries were well written and accurate; alas, they are neither: it's a series of sub-Safire snippets on ancient red herrings like "most unique," "mail is a noun, male is an adjective," and "runner-ups." None of this has anything to do with real style; these are the shibboleths of a certain breed of green-eyeshaded, mossbacked Perry Whites of concern only to the unfortunates who still submit copy to them. Here's a sample of the misbegotten conflation of grammar and presumed logic:
It's not "a couple pieces," or "a couple million." "Couple" is a noun meaning "two items." Therefore, if you have a couple of something, you have to say you have a "couple of" something. It's simple grammar.I truly feel sorry for people who try to make the unruly productions of the human language instinct conform to the rules of logic. It's a hopeless quest, and one that can drive its acolytes mad: I once had a colleague of this bent who, confronted with the fact that French used "double negatives" quite successfully, responded "Then the French are wrong!"
But I'm not here to beat up on the anonymous author of "Copy editing, damnit" (as Lynn says, "I don't care if it's your real name or not; just give me something to call you"), I'm here to point you to the comment thread at Theresa's post, which is full of delightful comebacks by fellow grammar lovers and editors. My favorite sequence so far: "Am I the only one to notice (tsk, tsk!) that this guy also doesn't believe in the use of the serial comma? (Said lack of use is, of course, the cause of the current fall of Western Civilization, As We Know It.)" followed by "::applauds by wiggling fingerbones::" followed by "Serial comma? Nancy's favorite example of the importance of that little comma comes from a book that was honestly dedicated: To my parents, Ayn Rand and God" followed by:
The "God and Ayn Rand" serial comma thing is possibly apocryphal, but there's one along the same lines that Rob Hansen spotted in the TV listings of The Times:I, too, applaud by wiggling fingerbones. (Oh, and there's also a sequence about a word, "sinople," that can mean both 'red' and 'green.' You learn something every day.)Planet Ustinov - Monday, C4, 8pm
By train, plane and sedan chair, Peter Ustinov retraces a journey made by Mark Twain a century ago. The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.
Via the newly returned Grande Rousse (was she in the same province of Hiatus as Renee, I wonder?), a wide-ranging but spotty site on French language resources. Checking their book section under Etymology, I found several items that did not seem to have much if anything to do with the subject and none specifically devoted to it; looking around, they seem to focus pretty much entirely on traditional Académie-style works, ignoring scientific linguistics. But if the former is what you're interested in, there's a lot of it. And in the internet-links section, I found a nice little guide to French typographical style (though I wish they were a bit more expansive on the subject of capitalization in titles, which has always confused me).
Addendum. La Rousse has very kindly sent me links to two sites that offer exhaustive explanations of capitalization in titles, which I was quite right to be confused by. The sites are here and here, and I will try to summarize their wisdom:
1. Basic rule: first word cap, others l.c.
On ne badine pas avec l'amour
2. But if the first word is the definite article, both it and the following noun are cap.
Les Mains sales, Les Liaisons dangereuses
3. But if there is an adjective before the noun, both it and the noun are cap.
Le Grand Écart, Le Petit Chaperon rouge
4. BUT (in case the above seems too straightforward) if the title is composed of "noms coordonnés" or if it is (in the more elaborate wording of the second link) "formé sur le procédé de la symétrie – termes en opposition ou en parallèle," both coordinate nouns are cap.
Le Corbeau et le Renard, La Belle et la Bête, Le Rouge et le Noir, Paul et ses Amis
There will be a test.
I tried to resist, I really did—I know I have a book problem—but I couldn't resist at least looking at a book with the title Error and the Academic Self, and the table of contents was irresistible:
Introduction: The Pursuit of Error: Philology, Rhetoric, and the History of Scholarship
1. Errata: Mistakes and Masters in the Early Modern Book
2. Sublime Philology: An Elegy for Anglo-Saxon Studies
3. My Casaubon: The Novel of Scholarship and Victorian Philology
4. Ardent Etymologies: American Rhetorical Philology, from Adams to de Man
5. Making Mimesis: Exile, Errancy, and Erich Auerbach
Epilogue: Forbidden Planet and the Terrors of Philology
Every other word pushes one of my buttons, and the third chapter turns out to concern the OED as much as George Eliot. And when I turned to Seth Lerer's Introduction and found that it began:
I do not think I have ever published anything that did not have an error in it. Typos have crept in and escaped proofreading. Miscitations and mistranslations have refused correction. Facts and judgments have, at times, seemed almost willfully in opposition to empirical evidence or received opinion...Well, I was hooked. I've spent most of my adult life getting paid to correct errors, I find their weedlike ineradicability fascinating, and the idea that they were responsible for the birth of modern scholarship was something I had to explore. So I sighed and reached for my wallet.
That seems to be the motto of the Indonesian government, which is considering making foreign residents take Indonesian language exams, according to this Sydney Morning Herald story by Matthew Moore:
About 30,000 expatriates who live in Indonesia could soon find themselves swotting for language exams if the Ministry of National Education gets its way and begins testing all present and future foreign workers and students.In a country where many foreigners get by with big smiles, phrase-book greetings and the locals' knowledge of English, the plan to award each of them a standardised Indonesian-language score out of 900 might seem ambitious.
But the ministry's language centre is geared up for the task. It wants to strengthen Indonesian as an international tongue and make it easier for foreigners to communicate with locals....
Although the Government has yet to sign off on the plan, the fees for each test, which range between $30 and $40, have been set and the bank account where the money should be sent is already open.But don't worry!
The head of the language centre, Dendy Sugono, said if foreigners fail the test they will not be kicked out of the country: they will just have to go away and study.So this is not about forcing people to learn Indonesian, it's yet another disguised tax. I doubt it'll go through (I imagine the people who control vital foreign investment will make their feelings clear), but I give it points for ingenuity. All together now: Maaf, saya tidak bisa bicara bahasa Indonesia (Sorry, I don't speak Indonesian)!His centre will offer them courses, for a fee, and there will be no restrictions on the number of times a student can attempt a test. Ten times would be no problem, although at 135 minutes a test that could prove wearing.
(Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
The Shor language, with a disastrous history (outlined here) that apparently doomed it to extinction, seems to be making a comeback according to an article by Charles Carlson. (Via Morfablog.)
Much more about the Shors is available here.
"An extraordinary contempt for the word, or what might even be called a loathing for the word has seized humanity. Confidence in the notion that human beings are capable of persuading one another with words and language has vanished in the most radical sense. Everything associated with parlare has taken on negative connotations. Parliaments are corrupted by their own disgust with parliamentary activities in general, and when conferences are convened somewhere the participants gather in an atmosphere of scorn and skepticism. Knowledge of the impossibility of communication has become too pronounced. Everyone knows that everyone else speaks a different language and lives in entirely different value systems, and that every people is trapped in its own system of values. Indeed, this is true not just for every person, but for every profession as well. The businessman can't persuade the military man, nor the military man the businessman. The engineer doesn't understand the worker; or rather, they understand each other only in so far as each of them concedes to the other the right to bring all means within their power to bear, to ruthlessly use their system of values to their own advantage, to break any contract necessary in order to crush and overrun their opponent. Never before, at least not in the history of Western Europe, has the world admitted with such honesty and openness... that the word is of absolutely no use, and further, that it is no longer even worth the effort to pursue understanding.... Silence weighs heavily on the world.... A mute silence reigns between people and between groups of people, and it is the silence of murder.
"But in spite of this muteness the world is full of voices. They aren't the voices of assertion and rejoinder, however. Rather, they are simply voices, screaming chaotically... over each other, drowning each other out, a simultaneous hullabaloo of language and opinions being spoken past each other, interrupted only by the rather mechanical and unceremonious sounds of dull church services, rendered banal and destroyed by the earthly noise. It is the terrifying noise of a silence that accompanies murder,... a muteness that is audible, but is no longer language. Rather, these disjointed cries make up components of language.... And in this silence they are merely eruptions—eruptions of anxiety, eruptions of desperation, eruptions of courage."
From Hermann Broch's essay "Reflections on the Zeitgeist," available in a different translation (titled "The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age") in a collection called Geist and Zeitgeist. It was written in 1934.
The excerpt above (translated by Daniel Slager) is, by the way, used as the introduction to the first issue of AUTODAFE, The Journal of the International Parliament of Writers, which has published two issues (some of the contents available here) and is about to come out with a combined n°3-4 (2003): "This issue attempts to provide an overview of the new dangers weighing on literature and thought, the unprecedented forms that censure and propaganda are wearing today, as well as the new means and networks of intellectual, literary and linguistic resistance..." Highly recommended.
Renee is back, from both Israel and Hiatus, with a monochrome design and a half-dozen new entries (including one about a guy with a box that would make me jealous if my shelves weren't already groaning).
Back in January I bought (and posted about) The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature; now I've found a companion volume, American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni, also edited by Marc Shell (whose take on the role of language in political conflict should be of interest to Scott Martens). Here's Harvard's description:
If ever there was a polyglot place on the globe (other than the Tower of Babel), America between 1750 and 1850 was it. Here three continents—North America, Africa, and Europe—met and spoke not as one, but in Amerindian and African languages, in German and English, Spanish, French, and Dutch. How this prodigious multilingualism lost its voice in the making of the American canon and in everyday American linguistic practice is the problem American Babel approaches from a variety of angles. Looking at the first Arabic-language African-American slave narrative, at quirks of translation in Greek-American bilingual books, and at the strategies of Yiddish women poets and Welsh-American dramatists, contributors show how linguistic resistance opposes the imperative of linguistic assimilation. They address matters of literary authority in Irish Gaelic writing, Creole novels, and the multiple voices of the Zuni storyteller; and in essays on Haitian, Welsh, Spanish, and Chinese literatures, they trace the relationship between domestic nationalism and immigrant internationalism, between domestic citizenship and immigrant ethnicity.That "Creole novel" is Alfred Mercier's L'Habitation Saint-Ybars (1881) (available online here), which is "perhaps the only systematically bilingual novel in American literature... Mercier does something very simple and very rare: he makes his characters speak the languages he judges they would have used. When he judges that his characters would have spoken Louisiana Standard French (LSF), they speak it. When he judges they would have spoken Louisiana French Creole (LFC), they speak that." And there's Ludwig von Reizenstein's Die Geheimnisse von New-Orleans (now available in English), and a meditation on Hawai'ian pidgin, and all manner of good things. And it ends with "'Prized His Mouth Open': Mark Twain's The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County in English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More, by Patient, Unremunerated Toil," by the editor himself, who begins: "It's no accident that I, Marc Shell (born Meyer Selechonek), come to the problems of bilingualism with which the essay that follows—and much of the work of Mark Twain—deals. I was born in Montreal in 1947... and raised in Quebec, where questions of politics and language go hand in hand." Along with Twain, he quotes "quebecois superfrog Robert Charlebois," whose "Frog Song" has the refrain:
You're a frog I'm a frog Kiss me,And so we circle back, by a commodius vicus of recirculation, to macaronic poetry.
And I'll turn into a prince suddenly
Donne moé des peanuts
J'm'en va t'chanter Alouette sans fausse note.
I'm trying to figure out how to say the name of the poet Thomas Carew (more poems here). Chris Whent on the wonderful WBAI program Here Of A Sunday Morning (which I highly recommend to anyone in the New York area) says "kerry," and that's the pronunciation given in Daniel Jones and the Oxford Companion to English Literature, but the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary insists on ka-ROO (like the great baseball player Rod Carew), specifically for Thomas. Does anyone out there know how specialists in Renaissance music and poetry say it?
Incidentally, the name is Welsh; it's simply the plural (caerau) of caer 'fort.'
I found this long, strange poem by Norman Dubie by googling the phrase "history of the ampersand"; I got to Section One of Book of the Jewel Worm and blinked in amazement. The stanza that prompted the Google hit was striking enough:
His history of the ampersandBut the more I scrolled around, the more striking it got, from the prologue:
as clear Sanskrit drool. His idea of the dead
borrowed from calculus and polkas.
I dreamt of wild horses bathing in white water again.to a lot of stuff about the Khandro and Whitman and Dickinson and the Plain of Jars and... well, I don't really know how to describe it, and it's only part of a much larger work that's not yet completed ("The Book of Crying Kanglings | coming November 2003"), and it's based on some weird fantasy of future Buddhism ("This futurist poem enjoys the broken narration of its hero, Paul Ekajati, an amateur mathematician who once taught the Calculus on our moon. He is now an exhausted buddhist Vajramaster living in a small village at the Bakavi Lake Mining Colony on Mars. The year is 2277." –from the Preface), but for some reason it appeals to me. Your mileage may vary.
One stood and ate the salmon like a bear.
What of the Wishbone Pulsar, those cooling wicks
of the dark mother, lodged
deep in the throat of Cygnus; the merchants' charcoal-
ballasted ships crossing the dead cluster district...
I have to preserve this example of inadvertent verbal creativeness before it vanishes from the internet (I found it here but by the time you click on it I'm sure it will be fixed):
Small b DetonatesandI particularly like the term "Brititory." Thanks for the alert, Bonnie!By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:17 a.m. ETNo gility for t inside Newry's main bus depot. Irish Republican Army dissidents continue to mount ocbombings in opposition to the 1998 peace accord for Northern Ireland, a Brititory.
Authorities were alerted caught fire, suggesting that the homemade device inside had malfunctioned. Bughters didnurce was a small bthey were dousing the blaze. Shnel hs bhe firef po
Addendum. But wait, there's more!
I don't know if this rash of garbled stories is somehow related to the computer worms and viruses that have been going around, but this one (also AP, also found by Bonnie) is even better:
3 - Run HR xhl(Aaron Guiel's Thre Off Joe Mays in Fifth Ift"Gutered the game"... "Jeremy Affelclosed"... "threen the thirdook"... this is wonderful, wonderful stuff. And in conclusion, may I say: screproval!By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:51 p.m. ETGutered the game wo hits in his last 18 at-bats, went 2-fos City atayed withif theicago Whx in the AL Central race.
Luis Rivas homered for Minnesota, which fell 2 1/2 games back.
After Jeremy Affelclosed Friday's win withect innity's bullpen again refused to budge.
D.J. Carrco (5attered three hits over four innings after starter Jose Lima was removedke MacDougached thetting Rivas to ground into a double play for his 26th save in 33 chances.
The Royals improved to 11-7 against the te being outs3-84. The two teams play again Sunday afternoon for the final time this season.
Lct was purchased from Triple-Omaha on June 15, left with a lead despite giving up 10 hits over four innings and 69 pitches.
Caut to start the fifth -- costing Lima a chance at his first victory since July 27.
The Twins stranded five runners in the first three in ad didn't score in tz led off with a double and moved up on a balk.
After Shon Stewart t to third, Joe Randa made a diving snag of Rivas' liner and in the same motion slapped his glove on the bag to complete the The Twins had four straight hits in the first -- Rivas homered and Ley drove in Doug Mientkiewicz w and threen the thirdook a 3-0 lead when Jones drove iMatthew LeCroy with a smash to center.
Lima has given up nine runs in eight innings -- since spendi But Mayanez oopup, k out Ken Harvey ansprinted off the mound with a 3-1 lead as the crowd of 37,782 -- the Twins' third-largest this year -- screproval.
s, though, roared back in the fifth when Guiel homered to right-center field, his 11th, with two ont. Mays gave
up seven hits and four runsgs while stuthree, and Grant Balfour finishr shutout innings. Notes:@ Rivas has four hits in seven careerainst Lima. ... The Re 42-1 whenee runs or less. ... Minnesota's Torii Hunter is 0-s series and has two hits his l 23 at-bats.
Jim at UJG has an entry on the charming Renaissance genre of mixed-language poetry (vernacular words mixed into Latin verse) known as "macaronic" (after the Macaroneae by Tifi Odasi of Padua, c 1490). But the style, if not the name, goes much further back; it was very popular among the wandering medieval poets, who loved to mix Arabic, Spanish, Provençal, French, English, and other languages, depending on their audience and experience. (The Andalusian zajal, for instance, consisted of colloquial Arabic verses with Spanish words inserted.)
Here are a couple of examples, drawn from Robert Briffault's The Troubadours.
A celuy que pluys eyme en monde,And this quatrain (Harleyan, 2253):
of alle tho that I have found,
Carissima,
saluz od treye amour,
with grace and joye and alle honour,
Dulcissima.Sachez bien, pleysant et beele,
that I am right in good heele,
Laus Christo!
et mon amour doné vous ay.
and also thine owene night and day
in cisto.–Camb. Gg. iv, 27; Chambers and Sidgewick, Early English Lyrics, VIII, early XVth century.
Scripsi haec carmina in tabulis,Incidentally, if you google "macaronic poetry" the first hit is a Bosna Forum article by Amila Buturovic called "Macaronic Verse in Ottoman Bosnia and the Incitement to Multivocality" (the direct link doesn't work—here's the Google cache); it discusses the history and theory of the topic, with special reference to Bosnia, but sadly gives only one small example:
Mon hostel est en mi la vile de Paris,
may I sugge namore, so wel me is;
yet I deye for love of hire, duel hit ys.
ElifBut it begins with a delightful anecdote:
Elif-eldi nijjet geldi,
primakni se duso meni.
Da ja kazem elif tebi,
ti si tanka, elif motka
tu je osnov, tu je potka.[Alif
Alif is in hand (?) and intention here,
come closer to me, my sweet.
Let me say alif to you:
alif is a stick, and you are thin
that's the basis, that's the trick.]
One Saturday morning as the cottage country north of Toronto awoke to a temporary ice age, my three-year old daughter broke its frigid stillness outdoors by resorting to a polyglot description: "Mommy," she said, "çok je zima outside." Put in plain English it meant, "Mommy, it is very cold outside".Enchanted by her linguistic economy and multivocality, I found myself face to face with a set of questions raised by her spontaneous leap through three languages - English, Turkish, and Bosnian - which captured with such candor her impressions.
Marco Schuffelen has a "Linguistics for Laypeople" page featuring Germanic material, especially Schuffelen's native Dutch; besides a very interesting collection of Hebrew words that entered Dutch via Yiddish (occasionally quite different in meaning from parallel forms in English, eg gotspe 'insolent brutality' vs chutzpah), there is the excellent Dutch Pronounced!, which gives mp3 files for just about any Dutch name you might want to hear: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Pieter Bruegel, Huygens, Van Leeuwenhoek, Pim Fortuyn, Guus Hiddink, Edsger Dijkstra, Johan Cruyff, Max Euwe, 's Gravenhage, Waterloo... There are even names not borne by Dutchmen that you might be curious to hear a Dutchman say: Roosevelt, Van Buren, Richard Posthumus. A useful service indeed, considering the difficulty of correctly pronouncing Dutch vowels (even with this aid, I despair of ever getting the -uy- diphthong right). Thanks for the Hebrew/Dutch link go to the always worthwhile Taccuino di traduzione.
That's how we should be pronouncing apostrophe, according to the OED: "It ought to be of three syllables in Eng. as in French, but has been ignorantly confused with the prec. word"—the prec. word being apostrophe 'A figure of speech, by which a speaker or writer suddenly stops in his discourse, and turns to address pointedly some person or thing, either present or absent; an exclamatory address.' The name of the punctuation mark, you see, is not from Greek/Latin apostrophê (which would justify the extra syllable) but (via French apostrophe—three syllables!) from Latin apostrophus, itself from Greek (hê) apóstrophos (sc. prosôdia the accent) ‘of turning away, or elision.’ So there's no earthly reason to say "apostro-fee," and yet we do anyway, perverse creatures that we are. Why don't all the preservers of the purity of English take up this cause, now that they realize the error of everyone's ways? I'd like to hear William F. Buckley lean back in his inimitable way and denounce "the illiterate use of apostroffs in plurals."
But of course that's a fantasy; the preservers ignore the ahistorical pronunciation and focus on that damnable plural use. In fact, according to the latest lament for the apostrophe, a Telegraph article by Matt Born, the "'greengrocer's apostrophe'—so-called because of shopkeepers' propensity to display signs for 'pear's' or 'banana's'" is the object of ever-increasing angst; it's spreading so fast that "it threatens to undermine what has long been a strict rule of grammar." Worst of all, "over time it may become acceptable." I leave to the imagination the horrors that such an outcome would unleash upon an already suffering world.
But wait: what does the OED say in small type, there at the end of definition 2 ("The sign (') used to indicate the omission of a letter or letters... and as a sign of the modern English genitive or possessive case")? It says... it says...
In the latter case, it originally marked merely the omission of e in writing, as in fox's, James's, and was equally common in the nominative plural, esp. of proper names and foreign words (as folio's = folioes); it was gradually disused in the latter, and extended to all possessives, even where e had not been previously written, as in man's, children's, conscience' sake. [Emphasis added.]Why, that means that the apostrophe was originally, and thus properly, used in the plural; those greengrocers are right, and the Apostrophe Protection Society is wrong! Surely the Williams (Buckley and Safire) and the other preservers will lay off the ancient plural apostrophe and begin working on excising that excrescent final syllable. (OED citations and links to article and Society courtesy of The Discouraging Word, which should not be held responsible for the puckishly antinomian stance taken by this website.)
I'm reading Pushkin's Povesti pokoinogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin), and towards the end of the first story, Vystrel (The Shot), an aristocrat is recounting an episode from his past and says, "Pyat' let tomu nazad ya zhenilsya. - Pervyj mesyac, the honey-moon, provel ya zdes'..." (Five years ago I got married. - The first month, the honeymoon, I spent here...) The phrase "the honey-moon" is in English in the original. It's quite striking to me that a story written in Russian in 1830 would use the English word; I would have thought that if a foreignism were wanted, it would have been the French lune de miel. Is this an idiosyncrasy of Pushkin's, or does it reflect something about the history of the word or the concept? I will have to look into it further.
Scott Martens at Pedantry is reading the book Language Rights and Political Theory; having posted a detailed summary of the book, he's now written a long critique with suggestions on how to make a better case for linguistic diversity, focusing on the economic value of second-language education for speakers of dominant languages. He promises a follow-up later in the week that "will cover a different normative political theory, one derived in large part from child development theory rather than traditional political or economic principles." If you have any interest in this stuff, go thither and read.
At Deccan College in Pune (Poona) they've been working on a massive Sanskrit-English dictionary since 1948—and are still on the letter A. It's true they don't have computers ("'We’re hoping for computers in one or two years,' said Kshirsagar, not sounding very hopeful"), but that still seems awfully slow, and "political pressure is growing to finish the project." You can read all about it here. Me, I'm perfectly happy with my Monier-Williams, and there's a fair amount of lexical material on the web (including a search function for Monier-Williams), but more power to them. I just wish they wouldn't say things like "The language is agonizingly complex and after 40 years even Bhatta can seldom just open a book and understand it." After a couple of semesters of Sanskrit you can read it pretty well; of course there are authors who delight in using rare words and elaborate constructions, as there are in most cultures, but the language is no more "agonizingly complex" than any other. (Thanks to Gail Armstrong for the link... and happy anniversary!)
Ozhegov is the basic Russian reference dictionary, and it is available on the web in various forms, here for example, complete with italic and bold text when called for... and a plethora of ads. Now it is available in a simple text file at Moshkow: no fancy typography, but no ads and easy to consult. Many thanks to Anatoly for the link.
I was just down at St. Mark's Bookshop picking up the latest LRB (recommended by Beth); taking a gander at the new releases, I saw a book by Mark Abley, Spoken Here, that I restrained myself only with difficulty from taking right to the cash register. From the publisher's site (linked above):
Languages are beautiful, astoundingly complex, living things. And like the many animals in danger of extinction, languages can be threatened when they lack the room to stretch and grow. In fact, of the six thousand languages in the world today, only six hundred may survive the next century. In Spoken Here, journalist Mark Abley takes us on a world tour — from the Arctic Circle to the outback of Australia — to track obscure languages and reveal their beauty and the devotion of those who work to save them.Scroll down the linked page for an interview with the author (the supposedly extinct Manx is apparently alive and well) and a Glossary of Threatened Languages (Provençal: Branda li moustacho en quaucun: to stare defiantly at someone; literally, 'to wag his mustache'). Being a cheap bastard (I buy so many books I have to be) I will wait, impatiently, for the paperback to shell out for this, but if anyone needs a gift idea...Abley is passionate about two things: traveling to remote places and seeking out rarities in danger of being lost. He combines his two passions in Spoken Here. At the age of forty-five, he left the security of home and job to embark on a quixotic quest to track language gems before they disappear completely. On his travels, Abley gives us glimpses of fascinating people and their languages:
• one of the last two speakers of an Australian language, whose tribal taboos forbid him to talk to the other
• people who believe that violence is the only way to save a tongue
• a Yiddish novelist who writes for an audience that may not exist
• the Amazonian language last spoken by a parrot
• the Caucasian language with no vowels
• a South Asian language whose innumerable verbs include gobray (to fall into a well unknowingly) and onsra (to love for the last time).Abley also highlights languages that can be found closer to home: Yiddish in Brooklyn and Montreal, Yuchi in Oklahoma, and Mohawk in New York and Quebec. Along the way he reveals delicious linguistic oddities and shows us what is lost when one of the world's six thousand tongues dies — an irreplaceable worldview and a wealth of practical knowledge. He also examines the forces, from pop culture to creoles to global politics, that threaten these languages. Spoken Here is a singular travelogue, a compelling case for linguistic diversity, and a treasure trove for anyone who loves any language.
A compelling discussion of why there's no such thing as a "bilingual subject expert" and why it's best to do a translation yourself if possible, certainly if it involves patents and you may wind up being grilled about it on oath. An interesting tidbit:
According to the European Patent Office, about one million patents are issued every year on this planet, and about one-third of them are patents in Japanese. Japanese scientists, inventors, and patent lawyers have one great advantage over their counterparts in this country: they can usually read patents in English, while their counterparts almost never read Japanese.(Via the Enigmatic Mermaid, who sadly doesn't seem to have much time for blogging these days.)
The Anglican Book of Common Prayer in various versions, including ones in Welsh, Scots Gaelic, and Hawaiian. (Unfortunately, although the Scots Gaelic page mentions an "already-existing Irish Gaelic BCP" the latter does not seem to be available.) Via Polyglut.
In the course of a post discussing his choice of Thunderbird as his e-mail client because it could handle Korean, Jonathon Delacour wondered why Korean (unlike Chinese and Japanese) couldn't be entered in transcription:
I’m used to simply typing romaji to enter Japanese (and it took ten seconds or so to suss out pinyin) so I thought I’d be able to type ch’an maek?chu?ruIn the comments, dda made an interesting point about Korean consonants that seems a convincing explanation of the keyboard problem:l chu?se?yo (“I’d like a cold beer, please”) on my English keyboard—just as I’d type bi¯ru o itadakitai’n desu ga in romaji—and that the IME would convert the hanglish to Hangul. But the only way I could enter Korean was by referring to this keyboard map. Maybe someone can tell me where I’m going astray.
The problem also is that even today, Koreans of the lower social classes can't read latin characters. Spelling isn't the forte of the overall spelling population either; if you've been to Korea, you've seen mispelled words and other abominations...While this is partly a consequence of the close-mindedness of the country, it is mainly a linguistic problem: consonants can have two to four distinct values, depending on their position in a word.
For instance, ? can be pronounced t,d,tt,t'. An initial is always unvoiced. Plosives between two vowels are voiced. Etc... Spelling a foreign name is excruciatingly difficult. My given name, Didier, always comes out wrong. Same for my family name, which has two B's. There's always a P, a T, plus some other typos. So I can't imagine how they could type in Korean in romanisation!
A prose poem by Julia:
THE SUMMER VACATIONSI like that girl's style.When people go to summer vacation in Europe there are languages. A month or two ago I went to Spain. They can have different cultures. Maybe there would be a king and queen in Spain and not in the United States. You walk and see. I like the museums. A great time it is.
I have already mentioned Forthright's Phrontistery, a compilation of "word lists on various topics"; today on MetaFilter there was a post by adamrice about a section of the site I had missed, the Compendium of Lost Words, "400 of the rarest modern English words—in fact, ones that have been entirely absent from the Internet, including all online dictionaries, until now." It's more fun than useful, since being absent from the internet is a pretty arbitrary distinction, but it is fun, as is the entire site.
This is the best book ever written.
OK, OK, I'm not thirteen any more, and besides if the protagonists of the book ever heard me say such a thing they'd give me a look it doesn't bear thinking about. So I'll be grown-up and simply say it's a book that could have been composed with me in mind, and perhaps the book I most wish I had written. Now, DeWitt can write as gripping a piece of plot as (say) William Goldman (whose Magic I literally could not put down when I opened it idly in a bookstore while waiting for a bus; I had to read the whole thing before leaving the store, since I couldn't afford to buy it), and she (cleverly) demonstrates this in the Prologue to the book, to ensnare the prospective reader. But that's not why I'm head over heels in love with this book (though it is certainly a recommendation). Here, let me show you. The first chapter ("Do Samurai Speak Penguin Japanese?") begins:
There are 60 million people in Britain. There are 200 million in America. (Can that be right?) How many millions of English-speakers other nations might add to the total I cannot even guess. I would be willing to bet, though, that in all those hundreds of millions not more than 50, at the outside, have read A. Roemer, Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik (Leipzig, 1912), a work untranslated from its native German and destined to remain so till the end of time.Now, I can completely understand a prospective reader's closing the book with a shudder at this point, thinking "How did this thing get published?" For that matter, I'm not sure how it did get published; I'm just grateful. But my own thoughts on reading the passage were: is there such a book? (I don't know, but there was an A. Roemer, who edited Aristotle's Ars rhetorica in 1898); would Athetesen be "atheteses" in English? (the answer is yes, pronounced ath-e-TEE-seez, and the singular is athetesis); what does Brachfeld mean? ('fallow field'); yes, that's just what it's like trying to read a real text in a language you've barely begun studying! And I turned the pages with increasing fervor.I joined the tiny band in 1985. I was 23.
The first sentence of this little-known work runs as follows:
Es ist wirklich Brach- und Neufeld, welches der Verfasser mit der Bearbeitung dieses Themas betreten und durchpflügt hat, so sonderbar auch diese Behauptung im ersten Augenblick klingen mag.
I had taught myself German out of Teach Yourself German, and I recognised several words in this sentence at once:
It is truly something and something which the something with the something of this something has something and something, so something also this something might something at first something.
I deciphered the rest of the sentence by looking up the words Brachfeld, Neufeld, Verfasser, Bearbeitung, Themas, betreten, durchpflügt, sonderbar, Behauptung, Augenblick and klingen in Langenscheidt's German-English dictionary.
I mentioned in an earlier entry that it's about "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," and all that's true, but it only scratches the surface. The text has Greek and Japanese (both transliterated and in the original), a detailed excursus on the "waw consecutive" in Hebrew, a grammatical analysis of Iliad 17.441-449 (used for a most improbable purpose), a passage with a great deal of Inuit (AtaneK George silatudlartuinalungilaK angijomiglo suliaKarpaklune...), a detailed analysis of some Japanese dialogue from The Seven Samurai, and the sentence "He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men." Plus a mystery and a couple of good tales of derring-do. I could go on, but by now you're either running off to read the book or running for the hills. I'll add only that I was so immersed in the book that when jonmc saw me in the subway the other day he had to literally tap on the book to get my attention, and yesterday I was reading it on the last (Queens) segment of the three-mile hike home from a suddenly powerless Midtown (took me almost two hours to get home to my relieved wife and a much-needed shower)—it kept me entirely incognizant of my aching feet. Thank you, Helen DeWitt.
Incidentally, in the course of researching this entry I came across this Beginning Philology site; while focused on Chinese, it has useful general material.
Addendum. A commenter at Avva's post on the book links to this interesting page at Dagbladet, where DeWitt responds to readers' questions. I'm glad to say, by the way, that I've inspired Anatoly (proprietor of Avva) to read the book; that makes three, along with Eudaemonist (see comments below) and Chris. Ms. DeWitt, I want a kickback... or at least an autograph.
Further addendum. I should add that, although for obvious reasons I've emphasized the linguistic aspect, the book in no way depends on knowing all those languages for its effect; almost everything is translated, certainly everything that might be important. Think of the Greek words and Japanese characters as a garnish on the dish, there for visual impact and not necessarily to be eaten (though it's really quite tasty). I do want to emphasize, though, that her English sentences are constructed very carefully; if you read them at a normal pace, listening (so to speak) as you go, you will hear them with the proper emphasis and will follow the train of thought, but if you try to speed-read you may miss something. She respects her readers, an increasingly rare trait. But I promise you'll enjoy the book even if your only language is English. (I shudder to think of what versions in other languages will look like if the translators don't take their time and do it right.)
By the way, if you google "the last samurai" the first umpteen hits are for some forthcoming Tom Cruise movie. I expect this means that if a movie ever gets made from the DeWitt book they'll have to change the name; I just hope they don't come up with something stupid. But surely anyone with the daring and intelligence to want to film it in the first place wouldn't disfigure it with a stupid title. Surely? Don't call me Shirley!
One last thing (for now): at one point the novel gets into bathyspheres and we are introduced to William Beebe (1877 - 1962), who went down in one in 1934 and wrote what is apparently a fine book about the experience, Half Mile Down. I googled him and turned up a detailed biographical page that is well worth your while; the guy led an amazing life. He was married to two women, but my Webster's Biographical Dictionary mentions only the second, the author Elswyth Thane, whom he married when he was fifty and she twenty-seven (they did not live together, and it might be interesting to read her book about the marriage, Reluctant Farmer). It does not mention his first marriage to Mary Blair Rice, even though it has a substantial entry for her (under her later married name of Blair Niles)—doubtless because they had a bitter divorce in 1913 that was public and scandalous (the New York Times headline read "Naturalist Was Cruel"), and Webster's thought it best to sweep the whole unpleasant business under the carpet. Those were more decorous times.
Elsewhere in Blogovia: Kathleen Fitzpatrick at Planned Obsolescence has an interesting take on the book.
And: Isabella Massardo at Taccuino di traduzione followed my advice, bought the book, and fell in love with it. The same could happen to you!
German-related links from all over:
1) A list of grammatical terms, with each Latinate term followed by a native one and one or more examples: Adverb / Umstandswort / dort, heute, dabei so. (From UJG.)
2) The Gesellschaft zur Stärkung der Verben (Society for the Strengthening of Verbs), which promotes the extension of the strong verb (like English "sing, sang, sung" as opposed to "walk, walked") to as many areas as possible, creating conjugations like "knirschen, knorsch, knürsche, geknorschen" or "schweifen, schwoff, schwiffe, geschwiffen." The latest entry is a suggestion that the same process be applied to English, with the example "invite, invote, invitten." (Also from UJG, who got it from Transblawg.)
3) Langenscheidts Konversationsbuch English-Deutsch
This wonderful entry at Deuce of Clubs gives samples of such conversation-stoppers from the phrase book as:
Ich verabscheue den Geist der Unduldsamkeit, der diese Sekt beherrscht.
"I detest the spirit of intolerance by which this sect is dominated."
Bitte hören Sie sofort auf, so zu tanzen.
"Please stop this kind of dancing at once."
Ich habe die meisten un[s]erer Reste für die Suppe verwendet. Ich gebe ihr daher lieber keinen Namen.
"I have used most of our leftovers for the soup. I therefore hesitate to give it a name."
And everybody's favorite:
Humanitäre Gesichtspunkte werden wohl stets den militärischen Notwendigkeiten weichen müssen.
"Humanitarian considerations will probably always have to yield to military necessities."
(From Des.)
4) False Friends between German and English
Besides the obvious (Gift/poison, &c), there is a useful (if short) list of loan words for which German has kept the form but shifted the meaning:
Slipper slip-on shoe
Smoking dinner jacket
Dress sports shirt/jersey; strip
Boy hotel bellhop
Oldtimer veteran car
Textbuch songbook or script
(I have omitted a couple which are false for Brits but not Yanks; this link is courtesy of Kai von Fintel, who adds Beamer for multimedia or data projector and Handy for cellphone.)
The speech accent archive has 264 speech samples of people from many linguistic backgrounds reading the same paragraph.
The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different english speakers. It allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. The speech accent archive demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech.Via MetaFilter.
The paragraph is:
Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.
The site Worthless Word For The Day features, as you might expect, a word each day, with explanations (on the money from what I've seen) of meaning and etymology as well as illustrative quotes. What do they mean by "worthless"? Here's their explanation:
1. obscure, abstruse and/or recondite word, especially one not falling into the following categories: medical terms, foreign monetary units, foreign units of measure, legal terms, or professional jargon of any type.2. obscure, abstruse and/or recondite word, including such falling into the following categories, if deemed to be appropriately ludicrous: medical terms, foreign monetary units, foreign units of measure, legal terms, or professional jargon of any type.
Some recent entries:
scribblative [rare] pertaining to scribbling
sharoosed [Newf. dial] taken aback, surprised; (also) disappointed, disgusted
rumpy-pumpy [Brit/Austral, humorous] sexual activity
isepiptesis (eye-sep-e(p)-tee'-sis) [rare] a line on a map or chart connecting localitites reached at one date by different individuals of a species of migratory bird (an isochronal line)
And today's word is:
esne [obs. except Hist.] OE designation of a member of the lowest class; laborer: serf
Fun and educational! (Found at Shoepal, who also links to a site called Word Detective, with long and amusing investigations of odd words and phrases.)
I was reading a TLS review of a book about Darwin's researches into barnacles (see, I told you I'd read anything, but you didn't believe me) and it occurred to me that I didn't know the etymology of the word "barnacle." Well, after much investigation, I still don't, but nobody else does either; the OED says all that can be said, which isn't much: "ME. bernekke, bernake, identical with OF. bernaque, med.L. bernaca, berneka... Ulterior history unknown." However, there is much more to be said about the more recent history of the word, and the American Heritage says it well:
The word barnacle is known from as far back as the early 13th century. At that time it did not refer to the crustacean, as it does nowadays, but rather to a species of waterfowl presently known as the barnacle goose; more than 300 years went by before barnacle was used to refer to the crustacean. One might well wonder what the connection between these two creatures is. The answer lies in natural history. Until fairly recent times, it was widely believed that certain animals were engendered spontaneously from particular substances. Maggots, for instance, were believed to be generated from rotting meat. The barnacle goose breeds in the Arctic, a fact not known for a long time; since no one ever witnessed the bird breeding, it was thought to be spontaneously generated from trees along the shore, or from rotting wood. Wood that has been in the ocean for any length of time is often dotted with barnacles, and it was natural for people to believe that the crustaceans were also engendered directly from the wood, like the geese. In fact, as different as the two creatures might appear to us, they share a similar trait: barnacles have long feathery cirri that are reminiscent of a bird's plumage. This led one writer in 1678 to comment on the "multitudes of little Shells; having within them little Birds perfectly shap'd, supposed to be Barnacles [that is, barnacle geese]." In popular conception the two creatures were thus closely linked. Over time the crustacean became the central referent of the word, and the bird was called the barnacle goose for clarity, making barnacle goose an early example of what we now call a retronym.Isn't that interesting?
What's annoying is that the Oxford Russian Dictionary, in a fit of Oxonian antiquarianism, ignores the modern meaning and defines barnacle as morskaya utochka [literally 'little sea duck']. You have to go elsewhere, say to Katzner, to find that barnacle in the modern sense is usonogii rak ['whiskerfoot crawfish']. Furthermore, Katzner gives a different Russian equivalent of the old avian sense: beloshchokaya kazarka ['whitecheeked brant goose']. (Kenneth Katzner, I regret to say, died on May 25 of this year.)
Oh, I almost forgot—there's an entirely different word "barnacle," 'a kind of powerful bit or twitch for the mouth of horse or ass, used to restrain a restive animal; later, spec. an instrument consisting of two branches joined by a hinge, placed on the nose of a horse, if he has to be coerced into quietness when being shoed or surgically operated upon' (in the words of the OED), with its own entirely different obscure etymology: "ME. bernak, a. OF. bernac ‘camus’; of which bernacle seems to be a dim. form." Fortunately, this word has sunk quietly into the dusty recesses of the English vocabulary and you can forget all about it.
For those of you unfamiliar with The Exile, it's a sort of Moscow-based bastard son of The Weekly World News and Hunter S. Thompson; their "In Brief" section tosses in a goodly dollop of The Onion. If you'll go to this one and scroll down to the last entry, "Russia Language Richer," you'll find a perfect distillation of the kind of idiocy purveyed by linguistic nationalists the world over:
The Russian language is richer than the English language, according to a report issued by a panel of Russian experts.The sad thing is that so many people would read such a parody about their own language without ever realizing they were being mocked. (Via Mildly Malevolent.)Russian is more expressive and has many more words which have different meanings, whereas English is more direct and simple....
The study also cited the fact that "everyone knows this." The report will be officially published as soon as certain last-minute technical difficulties are overcome.
Robert Hartwell Fiske indites yet another indictment of that frightful thing, the Modern Dictionary. You know: bad words oust good, decline of literacy, what are we coming to. The usual. I wouldn't bother you with it except that it inspired a sensible post over at CalPundit, who is one of those rare people able to simultaneously regret a change and accept the pointlessness of further whining:
I would certainly vote against "alright," for example, but am willing to concede my decades-long battle against it because, after all, it's been a decades-long battle and I seem to have lostAnd the comment section is full of good healthy debate (in which, needless to say, I could not resist participating). Thanks for the link, Jeremy!
This amazing collection of links to sites on Russia, the former Soviet republics, and Eastern Europe is a cornucopia so copious I've only begun to scratch the surface. It's divided into categories: General, Journalism, Institutions for Research and Exchange, Culture, Politics & Economics, Ethnicity & History, Society & Life, and Others; each category row is divided into regional columns: General, Russia, Siberia & Far East, Central Eurasia, Eastern Europe, Others. The site was created by the Slavic Research Centre of Hokkaido University, Japan, and brought to my attention by wood s lot.
A varied selection of ways to say "Man, it's hot" in all sorts of languages. Some are pedestrian: Ham meod! (Hebrew) It is very hot! Shaub ilyom (Arabic) Warm today isn't it. Others are more imaginative: Dukhota takaya, tolko venikov ne khvatayet! (Russian) It's so stuffy, the only thing that's missing is the birch twigs! Zew gai bae la! (Hong Kong Chinese) Chicken leg is burning! And of course the Scots are not content with anything banal: Ahm pure mankey wi' the heat oot there! (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
Or so said a German court in ruling that a translator was entitled to the higher rate he had been promised for an urgent translation by the Dortmund public prosecutor’s office. After the fact, the prosecutor’s office wanted to pay him a lower rate; the court said it was all right in theory to break the agreement (!), but the higher rate should apply in this case because Latin-American Spanish is harder to translate than Castilian (!!). On the other hand, the court decided that spaces should be left out of the count because they "are not part of a system of graphic signs that are used for the purpose of human communication" (sie nicht zu einem System graphischer Zeichen, die zum Zweck menschlicher Kommunikation verwendet werden, gehören); supply as many exclamation marks as you like. This fine specimen of judicial bizarrerie comes courtesy of Margaret Marks.
An amusing little quiz at The Volokh Conspiracy:
In English, the names of most European countries are at least related to their names in the native tongue, e.g., France/France, Ireland/Eire, Russia/Rossiya. Which European countries have English names that have virtually nothing to do with their local names?See the link for his definition of Europe (basically, it excludes the Caucasus, which is reasonable) and, of course, for his answers, which are also the ones that I came up with (give or take a little hairsplitting, and what's the fun of such a quiz without hairsplitting?). Thanks to Stephen Laniel for the link.
This impressive (and complicated) site "uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make distinctive features of early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek... The Greek texts in the Chicago Homer are derived from the electronic texts used in the Perseus Project." Read Using the Chicago Homer, Understanding the Chicago Homer, and A Tutorial: What Can You Do with the Chicago Homer? (can't link to 'em: frames; just scroll down past ENTER and click the links), and you're good to go. (Thanks, Kenny!)
There's a tempest in a verre d'eau going on in a corner of the Francophone sector of Blogovia over the issue of whether it is Franco-patriotic for a native speaker of French to blog in English; specifically, François Nonnenmacher of padawan.info has been taken to task for doing so. In a funny and impassioned entry, Non, je ne suis pas un traître, he defends himself, finding particularly outrageous the complaint that by blogging in English rather than French he marginalizes himself. The comment section is lively and admirably civilized, and those who can handle French should pay it a visit. Myself, I am acutely conscious of my position as willy-nilly a purveyor of the hyperlangue du jour, so I am only going to say two things about it. The first is that I believe everyone should blog in whatever language(s) they feel comfortable blogging in; the second is that "Bin fuck alors !" is one of the most wonderful sentences I've seen in ages. (Thanks for the link go, as so often, to Jim at UJG.)
Oh, and the title of my entry is the first half of an old wheeze by Alfred de Musset; it continues: "...pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse." So put down the verre d'eau, say I, and bring out the gros rouge! Which reminds me: la Grande Rousse has, as you might expect, something to say on the subject.
Mikhail Viesel has done an online version of Natalya Stavrovskaya's translation of Italo Calvino's Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities). Although most of the site is accessible only for Russian-speakers, the explanation page is available in English: "...Invisible cities online is oriented primarily not towards representing the text per se (as in Pale Fire), nor to its studies and analysis (as Decameron Web), but towards the creation of a complete esthetical impression. In other words, it ought to be treated as an art-project: not to study Calvino's work, but to delight in it." Besides the intrinsic interest of the description, there are links to other, similar projects. (Via Avva.)
A paper by Rolf Herwig on "The Interrelation between Adverbs of Manner and Adverbs of Degree"; Herwig investigates the use of mild(ly), sad(ly), and warm(ly) in a large corpus, concentrating on the degree to which each has been "delexicalized" (come to be used as a simple intensifier). Near the beginning there is an interesting discussion of perceptions of language change:
Changes in language use or even in the language system, if noticed as currently on-going by the language users at all, is rarely seen as an objective, unavoidable, general feature of language. Due to the social nature of language, change is usually connected with value judgements on the social or moral integrity of those who apply new forms or meanings. Examples of this tradition of complaint against innovations in language can be found in the past as well as in the present...Via wood s lot.In BORST's famous essay on degree adverbs (1902), the writer finds an explanation for the need for subtle differentiations of DEGREE which shows what we today would call an elitist position: The common people's judgement lacks the ability to go beyond simply accepting or opposing an idea. It takes convention and etiquette to reach a certain hyperculture of expression and apply meaning nuances. In the common people's language, adverbs of quality are therefore degraded (!) to mere expressions of quantity, such as awfully good, frightfully glad (BORST 1902, 3; 22/23).
A new study, as reported by BBC News, concludes that "people who speak Mandarin Chinese use both sides of their brain to understand the language," as compared to "English-language speakers who only need to use one side of their brain." Interesting if true; I'll await further research before drawing any exciting conclusions. I'm not impressed by the idiotic quote "Native English speakers, for example, find it extraordinarily difficult to learn Mandarin." (Thanks, Ron!)
I've always loved the word "loosestrife," without having a mental picture of the actual plant (sadly often the case with me and plant names). Now I have two. I'm visiting my wife's family in the Berkshires (the wooded hilly region of western Massachusetts), and I was told that the attractive purple flowers fringing the pond were purple loosestrife, an invasive species that "now poses a serious threat to native emergent vegetation in shallowwater marshes" throughout the northeast. And when I asked what the pretty clusters of small white flowers in a vase were, I was told they were gooseneck loosestrife. Gooseneck loosestrife! Isn't that a wonderful phrase? I've been mumbling it to myself ever since. (And they do look astonishingly like the heads of geese.)
Addendum. Incidentally, "loosestrife" is an interesting word; it pretends to be a translation of lysimachia, but that Greek word is actually derived from a personal name, Lysimachus (or Lysimakhos if you're into that sort of thing).
There is a translation of "Oedipus Rex" into Solomon Island Pijin, and according to the web site "Bikman Edipusu" has been staged in Honiara at least twice. Now that's a cultural gap to cross; wonder how it goes over? (Thanks to Alan for the link.)
1) The Discouraging Word recounts the experience of listening to the letters-from-listeners section of All Things Considered concerning the pronunciation of "schism," which I myself also heard. Like the good folks at TDW, I was pleased that ATC stood up for their use of skizem and justified it with the relevant usage note at the American Heritage Dictionary. I myself unthinkingly said skizem until I read somewhere that it was a grave solecism to say anything but sizem; I adopted that ecclesiastico-British version until I realized it was false to current American usage, and am now trying to reprogram myself. It's damnably hard to know how to say words that are not in common use.
2) Last night, Geoffrey Nunberg's language segment of Fresh Air was on dictionary illustrations (a subject recently covered here). Mr. Nunberg came out in favor of the photographs used in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, while admitting his parti pris as a contributor to the dictionary. The odd thing is that when he said "Julia Cameron did photographic illustrations for Tennyson's 'Idylls of the King,'" he pronounced "idyll" the old British way, IDD-l, whereas the only pronunciation given in the AHD entry is the American one, EYE-dl. I can only surmise that he was influenced by a Brit at a tender age.
3) On the other hand, I was appalled, when viewing last night's PBS special on the Spartans, to find that the host, Bettany Hughes, a "specialist in classical and ancient history," couldn't pronounce any of the proper names properly. As a linguist, I believe in the native pronunciation of native speakers, but that doesn't apply in the case of ancient Greek names, which are not normally spoken except in classics departments, where there is a long tradition that everyone who deals in these matters is used to and depends on. This tradition Ms. Hughes was apparently ignorant of; she said "YOU-ro-tas" for the river Eurotas (you-ROW-tas) and me-SEH-nian for Messenian (me-SEE-nian) and tha-NAH-tos for thanatos 'death' (THA-natos) and os-TRAH-ka for ostraka 'potsherds (used in ostracism)' (OS-traka) and (this was particularly aggravating) TER-tee-us for the poet Tyrtaeus (ter-TEE-us)—I was racking my brains trying to figure out how a Spartan poet could have had a Latin name (Tertius). Sometimes there is a right way and a wrong way, dammit.
Via wood s lot, this selection of "short narrative works in German from the late 18th to the end of the 19th centuries, featuring verified texts from documented editions and, whenever possible, English translations." Goethe, Schiller, Hofmann, Kleist, the Brothers Grimm, and more.
I'm looking forward to seeing the new (15th) edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, even though Chicago isn't the style bible where I work. A NY Times story by Dinitia Smith lays out some of the changes (aside from the inevitably extended coverage of web addresses):
¶Capital letters. The old manual recommended using small capitals in some cases, like AM and PM. But it is difficult for writers on a word processor to switch from regular size capitals to smaller. "In the new edition we now prefer lower case a.m. and p.m., with periods in between," Ms. Samen said, "and we are saying small caps are an alternative."As a linguist (ret'd), I welcome the approval given to sentences beginning with "and" or "but" (a study apparently showed that 10% of "sentences in first-rate writing" so begin). And as an editor I am delighted that they are retaining the time-honored en dash (–), however much Jim at UJG may deplore it. Sorry, my friend, but some things are sacred.¶Ordinal numbers. The Manual used to prefer 3d and 2d, but it is now O.K. to use 2nd and 3rd, "like the rest of the world," Ms. Samen pointed out.
¶Dates. Previous editions recommended the British style: 1 July 2003. Now one can write them "the way everybody does it in real life," Ms. Samen said: July 1, 2003.
Do you vaguely wonder how well you remember a language you half-learned a while back? Try the Proficiency Tests provided by Transparent Language. They're not very hard (I got 97/150, or 64%, on Latin, a language I was gettin
