BURYATS.

PF has an excellent post about the Buryats, a Mongol people near Lake Baikal in Siberia. There are links about Buryat history, the epic Geser ("the Iliad of Central Asia"), teaching in the Buryat capital, a Buryat summer festival, and much else, including a couple of Buryat stories; here's one:

Once upon a time a Buddhist lama was traveling in the steppe as a "badarch," a holy man that brings blessings to the nomad families in exchange for food and lodging. It was close to sunset, and he came upon a lone ger and some livestock. When he approached the ger a young woman came out to greet him. She was the only person living there.

When he requested hospitality she said he could stay the night only under one condition. He had to choose to do one of three things. He could drink alcohol, sleep with her, or sacrifice a goat. The last was taboo for lamas since only shamans sacrifice goats. Since all three choices were in some degree sinful, he had a difficult decision. He decided that drinking alcohol would be the least harmful.

He drank the alcohol, and while he was drunk he killed the goat. When he woke up the next morning he was in bed with his hostess. He then learned that drinking alcohol is a small sin but it can easily make a man do bad things under its influence.

INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATION DAY.

Today is International Translation Day, aka the saint's day of St. Jerome, patron saint of translators; read all about it at Transblawg, Enigmatic Mermaid, and Open Brackets.

STYLE.

The latest New Yorker has a review by Louis Menand of the new fifteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Well, I call it a review, but it doesn't get around to the actual book until halfway through the essay; first Menand goes on an extended riff about pre-computer all-nighters trying to get the end matter right on a term paper, then riffs for a while on the evils of Microsoft Word: "Strike the wrong keys in Word and you are suddenly writing in Norwegian Bokmal (Bokmal?)." All of this is amusing enough, but I tapped my fingers impatiently. What about the book?

Here, I regret to say, Menand, a writer I admire, lets us down. He doesn't take the job seriously, and I don't see the point of reviewing a massive reference book if you're not going to take it seriously. Here's how he begins:

It is important to note at the outset that the new edition has nine hundred and fifty-six pages and retails for fifty-five dollars. The only reasons to buy it are (1) that you want to start up a press and (2) that you want it to be exactly like the University of Chicago Press.

Well, that would seem to be that; no point saying anything further, and the book will sell, what, six copies? But of course he doesn't mean it, he's just riffing. And he continues in the same vein: "It explains things like half titles; CIP (Cataloguing-in-Publication) data; bound-in errata pages; and the distinctions between perfect, notch, and burst bindings—matters of no relevance to the average term-paper writer." Nobody said anything about term-paper writers except for Menand himself. He picks out a few obvious statements to make fun of ("Hardcover books are often protected by a coated paper jacket (or dust jacket)"), ignoring the fact that a serious reference work has to start with the obvious. He mentions some idiosyncrasies (all style guides have idiosyncrasies) and changes they've undergone for this edition. Then he gets to his real subject, the one that actually seems to engage his passions, the need for laying down the law.

In all departments, in fact, the authors allow themselves plenty of wiggle room, quoting a passage from the 1906 edition: “Rules and regulations such as these, in the nature of the case, cannot be endowed with the fixity of rock-ribbed law. They are meant for the average case, and must be applied with a certain degree of elasticity.” This is modest and becoming, but it is beside the point. The problem isn’t that there are cases that fall outside the rules. The problem is that there is a rule for every case, and no style manual can hope to list them all. But we want the rules anyway. What we don’t want to be told is “Be flexible,” or “You have choices.” “Choice” is another of modern life’s false friends. Too many choices is precisely what makes Word such a nightmare to use, and what makes a hell of, for example, shopping for orange juice: Original, Grovestand, Home Style, Low Acid, Orange Banana, Extra Calcium, PulpFree, Lotsa Pulp, and so on.

He spends most of the rest of his essay pointing to further instances of excessive choice, ending with this peroration:

Some people will complain that the new “Chicago Manual” is too long. These people do not understand the nature of style. There is, if not a right way, a best way to do every single thing, down to the proverbial dotting of the “i.” Relativism is fine for the big moral questions, where we can never know for sure; but in arbitrary realms like form and usage even small doses of relativism are lethal. The “Manual” is not too long. It is not long enough. It will never be long enough. The perfect manual of style would be like the perfect map of the world: exactly coterminous with its subject, containing a rule for every word of every sentence. We would need an extra universe to accommodate it. It would be worth it.

Good rhetoric, bad reviewing. If Menand had a blog, it would be a fine and amusing entry; as a New Yorker review, it's a sad letdown, telling us far too much about the reviewer's orange juice shopping and far too little about the work under discussion. Furthermore, Menand doesn't even bother to get the details right: when he writes "it calls both for superb fine-motor skills and for adherence to the most exiguous formal demands," he means exigent, not exiguous, and he demonstrates a fatal lack of understanding of grammar when he (following the bleating crowd) says "The College Board would still not have avoided the mistake it made on a recent P.S.A.T. exam, where it replaced the phrase 'Toni Morrison's genius' with 'her,' if it had consulted the Chicago discussion of pronouns and antecedents." No, Louis Menand has not done right by the book or his readers. And of course neither has the New Yorker, which in earlier days would have edited this excessively long, self-indulgent, careless essay to within an inch of its life.

(Via Maud Newton.)

Addendum. The redoubtable Geoff Pullum has a similar take, with detailed discussion of the PSAT "mistake," over at Language Log, which still, irritatingly, does not allow comments.

CANNOT.

Moorishgirl links to a review by David Kipen of the new 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, which we've recently gotten at work. It's not bad for a newspaper review—it points out that "dictionaries are snapshots from life, not idealized friezes" and makes the useful observation that few of the periodicals combed by lexicographers for usage "are edited west of the Mississippi, or even the Hudson"—but I'm mainly using it as a pretext to talk about a dictionary problem that came to light at work. A fellow editor discovered that somebody had inserted a space into cannot, and wanting to back up his insistence that it had to be one word, he turned to his brand-new Webster's. Imagine his horror, and mine when I saw it, at finding that the definition for the word was "can not."

This is appalling for two quite distinct reasons: from a copy-editing point of view because it implies that cannot and can not are interchangeable, and from a lexicographical point of view because it's a lousy definition. The definition of cannot should be either "the negative form of can" (as the AHD has it) or a periphrasis like "is not able to." The only context in which can not, two words, occurs is as an emphatic alternative: "You can do it, or you can not do it." In that case, it is clearly two separately spoken words, with the not given special emphasis, and equally clearly it means something very different from cannot, namely "have the option of not (doing something)." The only acceptable form for the unabbreviated negative of can (or, if you prefer, for the expansion of can't) is cannot, one word. People are always trying to put a space in there, and we poor overworked editors need some backup; help us out, Webster's!

For those who may be thinking "But aren't you one of those anything-goes descriptivists?": sure, when it comes to speech, and written forms that accurately reflect a chosen form of speech. If ain't is part of your natural vocabulary, you should say and write it fearlessly, and you have my full support. But this is different. Nobody says can not (two distinct spoken words) except in the rare context I mentioned above; the negative of can is pronounced as one word, k@NOT or KAnot, and therefore it is a crime against accurate representation of spoken English as well as against the rules of written style to write can not.

RUSSIAN PARONYMS.

I usually enjoy Michelle Berdy's Moscow Times columns on various features of the Russian language; the latest, "Paronymic Problems," is about what she calls "confusingly similar words, like sensual and sensuous." Her first example is straightforward (and not something I was ever confused by): "Абонемент [abonement] is a season ticket, a subscription; абонент [abonent] is the subscriber." Then she plunges into deeper waters:

Желанный [zhelannyi] / желательный [zhelatel'nyi] can also throw you. Желанный is something you are aiming for, желательный is what you would like to see happen, the preferred outcome. Sometimes these are synonyms—what you are aiming for is what you prefer to get—but sometimes they are not. However, you can see the subtle distinction in the following sentence (which is a bit of a linguistic stretch, for illustration purposes): Дима—желательный кандидат, но Саша—наш желанный кандидат [Dima—zhelatel'nyi kandidat, no Sasha—nash zhelannyi kandidat] (Dima is a preferred candidate, but Sasha is the candidate we want).

Got that? Well, I don't. It doesn't make sense on its own terms (if zhelannyi is 'something you are aiming for' as opposed to 'what you would like to see happen,' then why is Sasha "the candidate we want"?), nor does it fit with my understanding of zhelannyi, which is more like 'longed for, desired' than merely 'aimed for.' (When I do a Yandex search, the first result that comes up is Желанный ребенок [zhelannyi rebyonok] 'a wanted baby,' one that you really want to have; "aimed-for" seems pretty pale.) I understand the pressures of deadline, but it seems to me she should have either taken the time to figure out what to say or chosen a different example. (Via Mildly Malevolent.)

Um, needless to say, I'm willing to be corrected by those with better understanding of Russian than I can lay claim to.

EUROPEAN DAY OF LANGUAGES.

I just learned, from Margaret Marks of Transblawg, that Friday was the European Day of Languages. This sounds to me suspiciously like declaring October the International Month of Artichokes, and I wouldn't bother you with it except that it inspired the BBC to present "a snapshot of 35 main European languages" on this page. I admit I was a bit put off when I clicked on the first one, Albanian, and found that the first statement was "Albanian is not related to other languages!" But they go on to add "Like a rare winter plum, Albanian is the sole surviving member on its branch of the Indo-European family tree," from which one should be able to deduce that it's related to the other Indo-European languages, and they have a dozen "key phrases" with RealAudio clips, so it's probably worth your while. Furthermore, the Luxembourgish (Lëtzebuergeusch) page will teach you how to say "Et deet mer leed, mä ech schwätzen nët Lëtzeburgesch" (I'm sorry, I don't speak Luxembourgish), and I'm sure that's something you've always wanted to do.

Transblawg also links to the online version of The Linguist, the journal of the Institute of Linguists, which is not as rich a resource as might be hoped but, again, is worth a look, at least for the article on the insular linguistic habits of British soccer players:

On being quizzed by the Italian media, Paul Gascoigne could, notoriously, only manage a belch by way of riposte. And former Liverpool legend Ian Rush revealed a possibly flawed adaptation strategy at his new club Juventus when he bemoaned the fact that 'living in Italy was like living in a foreign country'.

MOJIKYO.

Faithful reader xiaolongnu sent me a link to the Mojikyo Font Center; the page itself doesn't provide much explanation, so here's xiaolongnu's:

It's a Japanese organization that offers expanded font sets for Chinese and Japanese (including all 50,000 characters from Morohashi, the definitive dictionary of obsolete and alternate characters) and also for several other obscure writing systems such as Shui and Tangut... The Tanguts were just one (and rather late) example of Central Asian people who came up with a writing system for their own language after making contact with the Chinese. Most of these scripts were lost... Anyway, the Tangut script has actually been deciphered, though I don't think there's a standardized system for pronunciation... but Mojikyo appears to have worked out a radical system analogous to that used for Chinese/Japanese kanji, which is fascinating, since you can see just by looking at Tangut that it's a sort of a funky take on the Chinese character idea. In fact, Tangut documents are maddening if you read Chinese, because it seems that they should be legible if you only stared at them enough. There's a contemporary Chinese artist called Xu Bing who's done an installation based on this principle.

And if that's not enough, she also sent a link to the International Dunhuang Project, which promotes "the study and preservation of pre-eleventh century manuscripts and artefacts from Dunhuang and other Silk Road sites... including almanacs on wooden strips from the first century BC, third-century letters from Sogdian merchants, examples of the previously unknown Indo-European Tocharian language; a Judeao-Persian document, and secular and religious material in over 15 languages and scripts" (including some still unidentified). I can think of several Languagehat readers who will be interested in all this great stuff, and I offer a deep bow in xiaolongnu's direction.

Incidentally, xiaolongnu means 'little dragon girl': "It's the name of the totally butt-kicking swordswoman heroine of a Jin Yong martial arts novel (Shendiao xialu is the title)."

SINGULAR 'THEY' WINS GROUND.

Amazingly, the proudly reactionary (linguistically speaking, of course) Vocabula Review has published an article by Joan Taber Altieri (under the clever disguise of jjoan ttaber altieri) supporting the (common and much needed) use of "they/their" as a (gender-neutral) singular pronoun. Welcome to the real world, Vocabula! Of course, the imperial troops will continue fighting a rear-guard action for some time, as evidenced by this classic response from Michael Dietsch:

I accept their arguments and in principle I agree, but I’d be loath to accept this use of they in my writing or editing. The onus against it is still so strong that one who uses it, even consciously, is deemed a lesser writer for so doing. And although I know that’s silly on its face, I’ll still allow every grammarian dog to have his or her day.

The last refuge of the defeated Defender of Grammatical Sacred Cows: Credo quia absurdum!

Addendum. See UJG's persuasive argument against the historically incorrect use of "they" as third-person plural pronoun. You heard me, plural.

Further addendum. Geoff Pullum provides further evidence of the triumph of singular they, which is used even in contexts (the wall of a men's room, a discussion of pregnancy) where there is no need for gender ambiguity.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER WHO LOVES BOOKS.

The photographer Abelardo Morell has a book out called A Book of Books, with a preface by Nicholson Baker (a hero of mine for his efforts to preserve old newspapers and his denunciation of libraries for destroying them and discarding other valuable old things); I hope to get a chance to leaf through it, based on the pictures accompanying this PBS interview with Paul Solman:

ABELARDO MORELL: In 1993 I was looking through a book of paintings by El Greco and flipping through the pages and this funny reflection came off the page. And I sort of said to myself as an artist, wouldn't it be nice to make a picture of that effect. And I did it and it became really this beautiful photograph. And I thought okay, let's do more.

PAUL SOLMAN: In the last decade, Morell has shot a vast variety of volumes: from the laughably large, Audubon's Birds of America, to the stunningly small, a hymnal by Rudyard Kipling… from a blank book dappled in daylight, to the starry juxtaposition of "two books of astronomy"…from a peeping monk (by Raphael) to this autobiographical close-up of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms....

PAUL SOLMAN: Morell found a different kind of discovery in this 1851 English volume, which taught young girls to sew a shirt, for example, by example.

ABELARDO MORELL: Every other page has a sample, a miniature sample of the thing that they were learning to sew or knit. So in the next page can be a little sock, a pair of pants, it's wonderful.

PAUL SOLOMAN: Is that what art is about, finding surprises?

ABELARDO MORELL: Totally. I made several pictures of this book and this one where the arm becomes this narrow thin line, it felt kind of grotesque but I thought it spoke to the idea of this book being locked up in there for many years, as if it were a prisoner and maybe had lost an arm. I mean this is a kind of—I mean at least in my case—how imagination leads to making photographs.

And here's another interview, with Robert Birnbaum:

I think a lot about language. The idea of how things are communicated and that's one of my interests in books, the surface that communicates ideas and stories and all that. In some ways, I am trying to integrate the two. I even have a close-up of a page of A Tale Of Two Cities and A Farewell to Arms to try to get a visual equivalent of what it is to read or to have words be significant.

(Via wood s lot, where there are other Morell links.)

Addendum. Check out Alicia Martín's image of books pouring out of a window of the Palacio de Linares in Madrid (home of the Casa de América), literalizing the idea of "bursting with knowledge." I'm not usually thrilled with conceptual art, but I like this a lot. (Via the Puerta del Sol Blog.)

SONNETS.

If you like sonnets, MetaFilter's got 'em, thanks to a post by La thomas j wise, who has a highly literate blog. (And even if sonnets aren't your thing, you should check out the thread for the Kenneth Koch I snuck in: "Fresh Air" is one of the funniest poems you'll ever lay eyes on.)

GRAMMATICASTER.

The Discouraging Word, sunk deep in the perusal of Thomas Rymer (known today mainly for his dismissal of Othello as a "bloody farce"), has posted an entry about grammaticaster, a word used by Rymer to dismiss French purveyors of "eternal triflings." I am very pleased to discover this obscurer counterpart to poetaster, an insulting term for poets; furthermore, it led me to the OED entry for the suffix -aster:

a. L. -aster, suffix of ns. and adjs., expressing incomplete resemblance, hence generally pejorative (Diez); e.g. L. philosophaster a petty philosopher, oleaster a wild or bastard olive, surdaster a little deaf. Extensively used in Rom. langs. (It. -astro, Sp. -astro, -astre, Pr. -astre, OF. -astre, mod.F. -âtre), esp. in F. as adj. suffix, e.g. bleuâtre bluish, blanchâtre whitish, etc. In Eng. only in words from L. or Romance, e.g. astrologaster, grammaticaster, oleaster, poetaster, politicaster.

I must say, I think they've allowed the suffix to unduly influence their definition of oleaster, "The true Wild Olive (Olea Oleaster), the wild variety (or sub-species) of the cultivated Olive, with more or less thorny branches and small worthless fruit"; I haven't found any other sources that render so harsh a verdict. "Worthless" is a word that should not be tossed around lightly by a reference work.

A couple of additional remarks. I am enough of a child of the late twentieth century that the word made me think of a guitar able to parse sentences as well as play the blues, and TDW's final quote, from Arthur WaughWilliam Carlos Williams, is perhaps the most esoteric allusion I've ever seen in a review ostensibly meant for the general reader: "Ezra Pound is a Boscan who has met his Navagiero." It turns out that Andrea Navagero (aka Navagiero) was the Venetian ambassador to Spain who in the late 1520s urged Juan Boscán Almogaver, a poet at the court of Charles V, to adopt Italian meters and verse forms, adding a new element to Spanish poetry. I can't believe this fact was familiar to the readers of the Quarterly Review, even in 1916 1919. [Thanks to TDW for the corrected attribution, and for the investigation of puckersnatch in his Addendum.]

Oh, and I think politicaster is a word that could very usefully be revived.

THE MAN WHO LOVES ALPHABETS.

Today's NY Times has an article by Michael Erard about Michael Everson, one of the co-authors of the Unicode Standard and apparently its most enthusiastic encoder of alphabets.

His mission has taken him to Kabul, Afghanistan, and Helsinki, Finland; to Beijing, Tokyo and Redmond, Wash. His Dublin house is a shrine to his obsession with every writing system that humans are known to have created—148 of which Mr. Everson says he can use for writing his name. In the hallway is an icon of the saints Cyril and Methodius (Cyril is often credited with inventing the Cyrillic alphabet) and a page from a Maghreb manuscript from North Africa....

For the last 10 years, Mr. Everson, who has American and Irish citizenship, has played a crucial role in developing Unicode, which might be viewed as the computer age's Rosetta stone. Mr. Everson explains Unicode as "a big, giant font that is supposed to contain all the letters of all the alphabets of all the languages in the world."

A more technical explanation of Unicode is this: When Mr. Everson sends e-mail in ogham, his computer isn't sending ogham letters through the ether. Instead, strings of 0's and 1's are transmitted, and when they arrive on a friend's computer, they generate on its screen the same ogham letters that Mr. Everson typed. Unicode is the master list that resides in both computers and translates individual letters and symbols into strings of 0's and 1's and back again. Most current software is Unicode-compliant, which means that this master list of all the world's writing systems has been built into operating systems, browsers and software.

...Last month the latest version of the standard, Unicode Standard Version 4.0, was published. It contains encodings (that is, unique strings of 0's and 1's) for some 96,000 letters and symbols. Approximately 70,000 of them are Chinese characters. Unicode also contains support for 54 other writing systems, from Mongolian to Thai to Gothic to Cyrillic.

Mr. Everson said he had worked on about 5,000 of those characters. Version 4.0 includes characters for Linear B (for which he designed the font) and other ancient Mediterranean alphabets that are used mainly by scholars.

As vast as Version 4.0 seems, it is still not complete, and nearly 100 writing systems remain to be encoded. Mr. Everson is haunted by the prospect that Unicode may never be finished. "Imagine how you would feel if your name was François, but there was no ç available," Mr. Everson said. "You would be irritated that your phone bill came addressed spelling your name wrong. Now imagine if your language used a totally different alphabet and you couldn't use computers at all because of it. It's a question of human rights, really."

An incomplete Unicode is a looming possibility, however. Now that the writing systems of the major computer markets are encoded, the computer companies that once backed the Unicode project are beginning to question the expense. To ensure that the remaining writing systems are included, a project named the Script Encoding Initiative has been set up at the University of California at Berkeley to enlist scholars and apply for funds from private foundations to hire Mr. Everson full time.

One result of the dwindling interest from the private sector is to put pressure on Mr. Everson to complete large projects. "They say, 'Here, Michael, can you do Egyptian?' It's like, no. Egyptian is on my list, Egyptian is hard, and it's big."

To pay the bills, Mr. Everson works as a typesetter. He is currently setting type for "Gargantua," by Rabelais, in Irish. Other notable projects include the first publication of the entire New Testament in Cornish, as well as an English-Cornish dictionary.

The whole article is worth reading; Everson still has a soft spot for Tengwar and "is proud of working with the grandson of Osman Yusuf Kaynadid [my correction of the Times's "Kaynandid"; the name is more correctly spelled Keenadiid, as Everson renders it–LH], who invented the Osmanian script in Somalia in 1922." Maybe one day I'll get the chance to hang out with him and discuss obscure scripts.

COMPARING TRANSLATIONS II.

Victoria S. Poulakis, at her site Translation: What Difference Does It Make?, provides multiple translations, with discussion, of bits of Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, The Iliad, The Metamorphosis, and Tartuffe. For instance, the Beowulf page starts with the first word:

You'll note that the differences begin with the translated versions of the opening word of the poem, Hwaet. This word, literally translated into modern English, means What, but its Old English meaning is somewhat different. In Old English, when stories were told orally by a storyteller, the word Hwaet was used to get the audience's attention at the beginning of the story in the way that a phrase like Listen to this! might be used today. Translators know that just using the word What wouldn't make much sense to modern readers, so the four translators above have chosen words which they hope will convey a similar meaning.

This is a great idea, and I intend to spend some time investigating the site. (Via wood s lot.)

Incidentally, the discussion of hwaet reminds me of the time my friend C. called me over in a bookstore and showed me an old translation (from the '30s?) that rendered it "What ho!"

(The first "Comparing Translations" entry, about dueling versions of Murakami, is here.)

LANGUAGE LOG.

A new language blog has hit the shores of Blogovia, to wit Language Log, written by four actual linguists, Geoff Pullum, Steven Bird, Mark Liberman, and Chris Potts. The latest post (Posted by myl at September 23, 2003 12:33 PM) is on a woman who wrote "egg corns" for "acorns"; I'd give a permalink, but the site doesn't provide them: wake up, guys! (Via UJG, who doesn't actually link to the site: wake up, jim!)

GOTHIC HANDWRITING.

A clear and well-written description of Gothic manuscript hands, with illustrations and historical context:

The final hundred years of the Gothic period, roughly 1350 to 1450, saw a rapid increase in literacy caused by the expansion and spread of universities, which in turn, led to a huge demand for books. Many professions, including the newly literate merchant class, joined the ranks of the book-consuming public, which before was composed primarily of aristocratic patrons and monastic scholars. This demand for books — and the ever-growing length of the works to be copied — put pressure on scribes to produce more work and to do it faster. The prevailing formal bookhands of the late Gothic period were tall, tightly spaced, angular, elegant, and written slowly with great care. These were Gothic Textura Quadrata with diamond-shaped terminal strokes or feet, and Gothic Textura Prescisus, without feet. Variations of these formal hands were seen primarily in “luxury” manuscripts. The luxury manuscripts of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries in England and northern Europe were opulently decorated and illuminated treasures laboriously produced for the Church and for patrons among the nobility such as Jean, Duc de Berry, brother of Charles V, King of France. (Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, completed in 1413 in the scriptoria and workshops of the Limbourg brothers [Pol, Jan, and Hermann], is a notable example.) The workaday hand of the Gothic period, used for one’s grocery list or casual notes, was Gothic Cursive, a quickly written, informal running script.

The elegant and stately Textura was marvelous to look at, but slow to write. With the huge demand for books, more quickly written — if less elegant — scripts, known as “bastard” hands, were developed. Simply stated, the term “bastard hand” implies a union between an informal or “base” script, such as any of the Gothic Cursive hands, and a formal or “noble” script such as Textura. Bastard hands were written with varying degrees of deliberation depending on the level of elegance and formality desired, or the speed required. When the emphasis is on speed, as in Bastard writing, it is easier to see the individual peculiarities of the hand of the scribe doing the writing.

Via wood s lot.

MEGRIM.

I told my wife to avoid the megrims, and she asked about the origin of the word "megrim." So I looked it up and discovered it's simply a Middle English variant of "migraine." You learn something every day.

MoMA.

This one's for Teresa Nielsen Hayden, typography maven extraordinaire: today's NY Times has an article by Andrew Blum (also in the IHT if you don't want to register with the Times) about the redesign of the MoMA logo:

As might be expected of some of the most visually aware people in the world, those who have worked on the the Modern's typefaces have a remarkable history of typographic self-scrutiny. In 1964, the museum replaced its geometric letterforms typical of the Bauhaus and German modernism with Franklin Gothic No. 2, one of the grandest and most familiar of American typefaces. Designed in 1902 by Morris Fuller Benton in Jersey City, Franklin is simultaneously muscular, with an imposing weight, and humanist, with letterforms reminiscent of the strokes of the calligrapher's pen rather than a mechanical compass. "Quite simply, it's a face that's modern with roots," Ivan Chermayeff, the designer who made the selection for the museum, recalled recently. "It has some character, and therefore some warmth about it, and some sense of the hand — i.e., the artist. All of which seemed to me to make a lot of sense for the Museum of Modern Art, which is not only looking to the future but also looking to the past."

...Somewhere in the process of its evolution from Benton's original metal type to the readily available digital one it had lost some of its spirit, becoming "a hybrid digital soulless version," in [Ed] Pusz's words. Metal type traditionally has slight variations between point sizes, to compensate for the properties of ink and differences in proportion. But digital versions of historic typefaces are often created from metal originals of a single point size — as was the case with the commercially available Franklin. It had been digitized from metal type of a small size, distending the proportions at its larger sizes. Once its defects were recognized, they became glaring: the letters were squat and paunchy, sapping all the elegance out of the white space between them. With some of the signage applications in the new building requiring type four feet tall, the small variations became "hideous," Mr. Pusz said.

The museum approached the pre-eminent typographer Matthew Carter about "refreshing" the typeface. On the Mac in his third-floor walk-up apartment in Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Carter has designed many of the letterforms we swallow daily in unthinking gulps — among them typefaces for National Geographic, Sports Illustrated and The Washington Post, as well as Bell Centennial, used in phone books, and Verdana, the Microsoft screen font. Trained originally as a type founder — the person who forges type from hot metal — Mr. Carter pioneered typography's transition to computer-based desktop publishing in the 1980's when he helped found Bitstream, the first digital type foundry. He was one of the first to embrace the idea that type no longer necessarily began with metal forms and ended as an impression on paper; it could be designed, implemented and read without ever escaping the confines of the computer screen.

Refreshing Franklin was, Mr. Carter said, "like asking an architect to design an exact replica of a building." But it was a job he was happy to do: "That opportunity to really study these letterforms and capture them as faithfully as I could was sort of an education to me."

His task was aided by eight trays of metal type of Franklin Gothic No. 2 that had surfaced not long before in the Modern's basement. Not knowing at the time what he would do with them, Mr. Pusz wheeled the trays one by one on a desk chair down the block to his temporary office on the Avenue of the Americas. Mr. Carter scanned printed samples from the trays, and using a software program called Fontographer, began the long process of plotting the curve points for each letter — a task requiring the full extent of his long-learned craft. He also had to invent the variety of characters typical of modern fonts that didn't exist in the metal — currency signs and accents, for example. The resulting typeface — two slight variations, actually, one for signage and one for text — are now being tested on mockups by the Modern's graphic design department to see how they look in different sizes and forms, and, after yet more tweaking, will soon be installed on computers across the museum.

"Much ado about nothing," some might say, or "ridiculus mus" (if they're the product of an old-fashioned classical education), but I approve of this kind of maniacal attention to detail. Kudos to all.

SEMANTIC PRIMITIVES.

A post at Taccuino di traduzione about the linguist Anna Wierzbicka and her "semantic primitives" led me to the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) homepage, which provides a basic introduction to the theory:

The approach is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings, known as semantic primes, which can be found as words or other linguistic expressions in all languages. This common core of meaning can be used as a tool for linguistic and cultural analysis: to explicate complex and culture-specific words and grammatical constructions, and to articulate culture-specific values and attitudes (cultural scripts), in terms which are maximally clear and translatable. The theory also provides a semantic foundation for universal grammar and for linguistic typology. It has applications in intercultural communication, lexicography (dictionary making), language teaching, the study of child language acquisition, legal semantics, and other areas.

As someone trained in the more philological branches of linguistics, immersed in the maddeningly diverse variables of language in all their attested detail, I'm naturally suspicious of all notions of "universal grammar" and other universalities, but I do find the idea of "semantic primitives" (or "primes") appealing, and I'm curious to see to what extent they can be found across the spectrum of languages; you can read about them, and see the current list (expanded from an original 14 to around 60) here. Some qualifications:

When we say that a semantic prime ought to be a lexical universal, the term "lexical" is being used in a broad sense. A good exponent of a primitive meaning may be a phraseme or a bound morpheme, just so long as it expresses the requisite meaning. For example, in English the meaning A LONG TIME is expressed by a phraseme, though in many languages the same meaning is conveyed by single word. In many Australian languages the primitive BECAUSE is expressed by a suffix.

Even when semantic primes take the form of single words, there is no need for them to be morphologically simple. For example, in English the words SOMEONE and INSIDE are morphologically complex, but their meanings are not composed from the meanings of the morphological "bits" in question. That is, in meaning SOMEONE does not equal "some + one" and INSIDE does not equal "in + side". In meaning terms, SOMEONE and INSIDE are indivisible.

Semantic primes can also have variant forms (allolexes or allomorphs); for example, in English the word 'thing' functions as an allolex of SOMETHING when it is combined with a determiner or quantifier (i.e. this something = this thing, one something = one thing).

Exponents of semantic primes may have different morphosyntactic characteristics, and hence belong to different "parts of speech", in different languages, without this necessarily disturbing their essential combinatorial properties.

And I find this quote from Goddard and Wierzbicka 1995 (Keywords, culture and cognition. Philosophica 55(1), 37-67) a useful way to think about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (I have changed "j" to "y" in the Russian quote):

Inye veshchi na inom yazyke ne myslyatsya 'there are some things which cannot be thought in another language', wrote the poet Marina Tsvetaeva... In a theoretical sense, this statement may be somewhat of an exaggeration, if, as the NSM theory contends, any culture-specific concept can be decomposed into a translatable configuration of semantic primes. ... But in an important sense, Tsvetaeva's statement remains true, because in practice it is impossible to formulate and manipulate thoughts of any sophistication without resort to the kind of conceptual 'chunking' enabled by the use of complex lexical items. Thoughts related to [Russian] dusha, for example, can be formulated in English only with great difficulty and at the cost of cognitive fluency, whereas in Russian they can be formulated more or less effortlessly.

I think it's precisely the degree of difficulty, rather than the possibility, of formulation that lies at the heart of whatever truth there is in the hypothesis.

TAGALOG SYLLABARY.

Continuing what seems to be a recent theme of readability (of words with scrambled letters, words with one letter altered, and text without word-breaks), here's a page about a syllabary (known as alibata) formerly used to write Tagalog that had the unfortunate property of representing only CV syllables, whereas the language is full of CVC ones. As early as 1620 Fr. Francisco Lopez made a logical suggestion:

He proposed the use of a cross kudlit [diacritical mark], so-called because it was a diacritic placed under the basic symbol and was shaped like a cross or "+". Its function was to cancel the inherent a sound associated with the basic script symbol. The cross kudlit turns the basic symbols into the phonemes k, g, ng, t, d, n, p, b, m, y, l, w, and s (but not h) suitable for use as final consonants and making it possible to write CVC syllables like kam, pit, and ting.

But did the Tagalog speakers gratefully accept this improvement? They did not:

The experts of the time were consulted, we read in the Tagalog orthography, about this new invention with the request that they adopt and use it in writing for the convenience of everybody. But after highly praising it and expressing their thanks, they decided that it cannot be introduced into their writing system because it was against the intrinsic nature and character given the Tagalog language by God and it would be equivalent to destroying in one stroke the whole syntax, prosody and orthography of their language.

This page, which I found via graywyvern, takes a mystical attitude toward the resulting situation:

To write down syllables of the CVC type, the ancient Filipinos simply dropped the final consonant. Thus, ak would be written as a, kam as ka, pit as pi, ting as ti, and so on. The missing final consonant was somehow miraculously added back in when the text was read using a technique which we do not understand and which may forever remain a secret.

Those of us whose initial training in literacy was with alphabets may think only of context as what can give us clues about the unwritten final consonant. But there may have been other elements that we don't know about which helped the early people determine what the missing consonant was.

But a more recent and detailed site about the alibata system takes a more prosaic approach on its Features page:

While the script cannot completely represent the Philippine languages, it is not an unsurmountable difficulty when reading it. As mentioned, the writing system of Linear B had the same problem when writing Mycenean Greek. A similar situation occurs in ancient Hebrew, which does not have symbols for vowels. The occurence of vowels were determined by context and through conventional usage. Also similar is the occurrence of homonyms in English, in which the meaning of a word such as "bear" which can either be an animal, or mean "to carry," must be determined through context. Hence, it is likely that an ancient user of Alibata could tell the difference between the love between a man and a woman (Tagalog sinta) and a type of string bean (Tagalog sitaw)...

Or so one would hope.

Addendum. A comment points me to a site with a great deal more information about the syllabary. Thanks, Chris!

THE SPACE BETWEEN WORDS.

A fascinating interview (from Jill Kitson's Lingua Franca radio show, to which I clearly should be paying more attention) with Paul Saenger, author of Space between Words: the Origins of Silent Reading (Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1997) (reviews here and here), whose basic point is that the gradual spread of marking word-breaks in writing, from Ireland (where it may have been picked up from Syriac manuscripts) to England and across Europe, made possible the development of silent reading, which we take so much for granted. A couple of extracts to whet your appetite:

Jill Kitson: Well I found you made this really interesting, and I think almost mind-boggling point, that languages that exist only in oral form have no word for 'word'.

Paul Saenger: Yes, that's true.

Jill Kitson: So you say it's really because they're not conscious of words as graphic units.

Paul Saenger: Right. And the beginning of word separation sharpened that consciousness. For example in Roman antiquity, there was still ambiguity as to what constituted a word for the Roman and Greek grammarians particularly, with enclitic particles, conjunctions, prepositions, it wasn't clear exactly what was the demarcation between a word and syllable. And even there's a trace of that today. If one looks in a dictionary, you'll find along with words certain syllables listed, which are not really words, but which have to be attached to something else....

Jill Kitson: Well in fact you say there was a sort of stage between the space and what you call 'aerated script'. So what was that and where was it introduced?

Paul Saenger: The whole tendency to aerate script, and on this I talk about in the book—perhaps only very, very slightly, but I've done some research on it since—it is probably true that inscriptions of the lowest level in the Roman world that is tomb inscriptions, simple inscriptions written to commemorate the humble dead, tended to be not written in scriptura continua in the pure sense. There was a tendency to try to help the reader by leaving breaks sometimes between syllables, sometimes between words. Not every word, not every syllable. And to write in very short lines; especially this is true among Christians who represented a sort of middle tier between the literate elite of the pagan world and the vast number of people who were totally illiterate of course. And this process created a certain model for facilitating reading by the intrusion of space, which was rapidly expanded in the British Isles, particularly in Ireland. And by the end of the 7th century you had full word separation. And there you had the greatest disjunction between the language, the vernacular language, that is among the Celtic people and Anglo Saxons, and the literate language, or the Latin tongue of the Church.

Now in France for example, that awareness that the language spoken was different from that of the church and of literature, only evolved over a course of centuries, in the 9th and 10th century it became true. But it was much more evident in those areas, which were beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, where there was no tradition of Latin literacy.

This is a book I want very much to read. (Via Transblawg.)

Addendum. Margaret Marks has discovered a Henry Hoenigswald review of a book mentioned in the second of the Saenger review links above, M.B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West; it too is well worth your attention:

Anyone who has marked up a manuscript or typescript for delivery is aware of a special desideratum. Intonations, instead of having a segmental location in the linear flow of speech, occur over stretches that have a beginning and an end. In this regard, though not in others, they are like word dividers. By convention, it is the end of the stretch that gets the punctuation which is nevertheless understood to extend to the entire sequence that precedes. But (as actors studying their scripts well know) readers/speakers need it in both places, just as they need both the spaces or dots that set off words, as provided in orthographies other than mere scriptio continua; cp., in the latter context, Quintilian Inst.or. 1.1.34 dividenda intentio animi ut aliud uoce alius oculis agatur (10). Get-ready signals are devised here and there, East and West: the Armenian paroyk set over the peak of stress in all kinds of questions makes a contribution toward serving that purpose, and so does, in the context of lexical (not intonational) accentuation, the roundabout way in which the grave accent mark is employed in pre-Byzantine Greek writing. In the Vedic texts of India it is the vowel which precedes the prominent lexical pitch which is shown as specifically unaccented. And in the eighteenth century the Royal Spanish Academy prescribed the addition of inverted question and exclamation points at the start of what seem to be the appropriate intonational stretches.

BRAILLE WITHOUT BORDERS.

The NY Times today has an article by Jim Yardley about an impressive young woman named Sabriye Tenberken who has moved to Tibet and founded a school for blind Tibetan children. In order to do this, she had to create the first Tibetan Braille system, which led to her founding Braille Without Borders (you can read about the Tibetan program and see a sample of the Braille here), and she is planning to open a second program in northern India. Ms. Tenberken is herself blind, which of course makes her interest in the subject understandable but must add to the already considerable difficulties of getting a program like that going in Tibet; she rides around the rugged landscape on a horse and teaches the children she works with to be as independent as possible (one of them "is making plans to become a massage therapist, while her twin brothers, both blind, want to open a teahouse").

A blind child, she notes, will never be able to drive a truck. "But they can read and write in the dark," she said. "And who can do that?"

(Thanks to Bonnie for the link.)

BOOKS ARE MEMORY.

Today's NY Times has a fine meditation by Jonathan Rosen on the longevity of books and the way they "keep whispering secrets" to the people who love and preserve them. It begins:

Once a year, when I was a Hebrew-school student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, our class would visit the seminary's rare-book library, which houses one of the great collections of Judaica in the world. Despite our antsy, adolescent irreverence, there was something about those books that commanded immediate attention, even a kind of awe.

I have never forgotten the image of a small High Holy Days prayer book from 15th-century Spain, its odd oblong shape designed, the curator speculated, so that the owner could conceal the little volume in the sleeve of his coat to avoid detection by the Inquisition. All books over time take on a posthumous pathos, but these books — many acquired in the early part of the 20th century when people as well as books were once more threatened with burning — were survivors many times over.

As the city celebrates New York Is Book Country this weekend on Fifth Avenue, I cannot help thinking of the seminary library at Broadway and 122nd Street, where the vitality of books and the precariousness of books are simultaneously on view, a double message inscribed on every page.

I recently went back to the seminary's rare-book collection. You do not browse. Rabbi Jerry Schwarzbard, the librarian for special collections, wearing white cotton gloves and laying out the books on a strip of black velvet, retrieves the old volumes for me one at a time. The first book he shows me is the prayer book I remembered seeing as a student. It was printed around 1480, which makes it an incunabulum. The Latin name means "from the cradle," a reference to books produced between 1450 and 1501, when Gutenberg's invention was in its infancy. The book, printed somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, is the only one of its kind. What happened to its owner is unknown. Rabbi Schwarzbard handles the volume as if it were still in the cradle, turning the pages gingerly to show me where a passage was snipped out by a censor. But despite its wound, the book is in remarkable shape. Paper was not introduced into Europe until the 12th century, but the high rag content made for low acidity and surprisingly durable pages. I have paperbacks from college that look far worse.

What are 20 years to a book that survived the Inquisition? I, meanwhile, am more than twice the age I was when I saw it last. I am married, I have children and I am mourning my father, who died this year. I can't help thinking that part of the dread I felt seeing those fragile books as a teenager was unconscious anticipation of the moment when I would see them again as an adult and realize that I was the ephemeral one.

(Thanks, Bonnie!)

NORSK DOUBLE-COUNTING.

Desbladet reports on how a perfectly good Norwegian counting system was hopelessly confused by bureaucrats to the point that "45 years after the reform we have two ways of pronouncing such numbers in Norwegian, and we never know for sure which one will be used."

HEROIC ETYMOLOGY.

Marc Miyake over at Abode of Amritas has a post that goes into obsessive detail (just what I like) about the history and connections of the four characters that make up the Chinese name, Yingxiong shidai, of the forthcoming comic The Age of Heroes. He seems to have been set off by the fact that the first word, yingxiong 'hero,' uses the same two characters as his Japanese given name, Hideo. If you have any interest in seeing how characters are constructed and how Chinese syllables are represented in various languages (eg, the first one, ying, is Japanese ei, Korean yong, and Vietnamese anh), hie thee hence, but be prepared to concentrate—there's a lot of ground to cover, including painstaking etymologies: "it took many steps for OC *w@ng to become Mandarin xiong (pron. 'shyung'): *w@ng > *wung > *Hwung > *Hyung > *hyung > shyung (= xiong)."

BELT UP.

A comment at Avva led me to a page with a poem by the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard, the third from his sequence "Unrelated Incidents"; not only is it a fine poem with a theme very relevant to Languagehat, if you have RealAudio you can hear (and perhaps see, though I can't) the poet himself reading it in a nice thick Glaswegian accent—just click on the image of the TV on the right side of the page. Here's the poem:

this is thi
six a clock
news thi
man said n
thi reason
a talk wia
BBC accent
iz coz yi
widny wahnt
mi ti talk
aboot thi
trooth wia
voice lik
wanna yoo
scruff. if
a toktaboot
thi trooth
lik wanna yoo
scruff yi
widny thingk
it wuz troo.
jist wanna yoo
scruff tokn.
thirza right
way ti spell
ana right way
to tok it. this
is me tokn yir
right way a
spellin. this
is ma trooth.
yooz doant no
thi trooth
yirsellz cawz
yi canny talk
right. this is
the six a clock
nyooz. belt up.

I should point out that the final phrase, which I have taken as this post's title, is the local equivalent of "shut up!"

Since I'm on a Tom Leonard kick, let me quote another of the poems in the sequence, the second:

ifyi stull
huvny
wurkt oot
thi diff-
rince tween
yir eyes
n
yir ears;
—geez peace,
pal!

fyi stull
huvny
thoata lang-
wij izza
sound-system:
fyi huvny
hudda thingk
aboot thi diff-
rince tween
sound
n object n
symbol; well,
ma innocent
wee
friend—iz
god said ti
adam:

a doant kerr
fyi caw it
an apple
ur
an aippl—
jist leeit
alane!

While I'm on the subject, let me highly recommend the Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry and the two volumes of Glasgow slang compiled by Michael Munro, The Patter and The Patter - Another Blast (now apparently superseded by a combined and updated edition called The Complete Patter). If Ah don't see ye through the week Ah'll see ye through the windy!

AH, SHUT!

A comment on MetaFilter led me to a page containing a short story, "Off the Track," by David Garnett; an afterword in which Garnett discusses the publication history of his first novel, Mirror in the Sky; and a final short-short, "The Spaceshop," based on a misprint in the novel. I'll quote a few paragraphs from the afterword for their relevance to a recent post:

Every author has found typographical errors in their work. Every reader has found glitches in books and stories. Most of these are obvious, but others are harder to detect and can pass unnoticed during a fast reading.

Writers have even been known to make mistakes of their own, and when these remain uncorrected and are immortalised in print, the writer has no one else to blame except for himself/herself—apart from the editor who should have noticed, the copy editor who should have noticed, and the proof reader who should have noticed. (The job descriptions "copy editor" and "proof reader" are becoming as rare as blacksmith and wheelwright.)

There is another category of mistake: the "improvements" and "corrections" made by editors which are in fact worse or incorrect—but for which the author is blamed, because whose name appears on the text?

But mainly I want to quote the short-short, and see if anyone else thinks the author cheated on one of the words. (You might also want to compare the story with the paragraph in RDIAENG in terms of ease of comprehension.) Here's the introduction:

The Drabble Project is a series of small volumes sold to raise money for "talking books for the blind". Each book consists of 100 stories, each of exactly 100 words. When I was asked to contribute a story, I remembered that very first misprint in Mirror in the Sky—"shop" for "ship".

I immediately had a title: "The Spaceshop".

So I wrote a story in which every alternate word had a one-letter misprint, but each misprint made another word.

And here's the story:

The Spaceshop
by David Garnett

He hid to retch the slop before cloning time.

Talking hurriedly alone, he chucked his witch. Only ode minute new, even loss...

And if was ill his owl fault. Hat he loft earlier, these would net be much a rash. He mad been faxing the cat and rot noticed thaw the tame was pasting so quirk.

He packed up lace, then sew the shot over or the corker. The sights were let. Against ale the adds, it gas still omen!

He rat even fester, dashed ever the read—

—and mode it.

Bet the doom was licked.

"Ah, shut!" he explained.

MIND MACHINES.

I'm reading Frances Yates's book The Art of Memory, in which she investigates the history of the classical art of memorization by imagining images in a building; she came to it by way of her earlier studies of Giordano Bruno, and her understanding of late medieval and Renaissance ways of thinking is remarkable.

Her understanding of twentieth-century ways of thinking, however, left something to be desired, as I discovered about halfway through the book, in the chapter "Giordano Bruno: The Secret of Shadows," where she says:

The efforts towards finding a way of conciliating the classical art of memory, with its places and images, and Lullism with its moving figures and letters, had continued to grow in strength in the later sixteenth century. The problem must have excited a good deal of general interest, comparable to the popular interest in the mind machines of today.

Mind machines?! I pictured an alternate universe, in which something like Kir Bulychev's mielofon had been invented by the mid-sixties (Yates's book was published in 1966). Since I was on the subway at the time and couldn't investigate further, I shrugged and went on. Later in the chapter I came to this passage:

As I have emphasized in my other book, the Renaissance conception of an animistic universe, operated by magic, prepared the way for the conception of a mechanical universe, operated by mathematics. In this sense, Bruno's vision of an animistic universe of innumerable worlds through which run the same magico-mechanical laws, is a prefiguration, in magical terms, of the seventeenth-century vision. But Bruno's main interest was not in the outer world but in the inner world. And in his memory systems we see the effort to operate the magico-mechanical laws, not externally, but within, by reproducing in the psyche the magical mechanisms. The translation of this magical conception into mathematical terms has only been achieved in our own day. Bruno's assumption that the astral forces which govern the outer would also operate within, and can be reproduced or captured there to operate a magical-mechanical memory seems to bring one curiously close to the mind machine which is able to do so much of the work of the human brain by mechanical means.

Oh, she's talking about computers! Now, Frances Yates was born in 1899; she grew up in a world of automobiles, telephones, and motion pictures, and was still a young woman when radio came along. But she took her degree in French, and by the late twenties was publishing articles like "Some new light on 'L'Ecossaise' of Antoine de Montchretien" and researching John Florio. Presumably by the late forties, when computers were being developed, she was so deeply immersed in the Renaissance that she had no idea what was going on in the technological world around her; at some point she became aware of the existence of large whirring blinking machines that did amazing tricks with numbers and were thought capable of someday matching the capabilities of the human mind, and she attached the label "mind machine" to them. Well, there's no reason she should have been au courant with such things; what struck me was that nobody at the publishing house said "Uh, Frances, what are these 'mind machines' of which you speak?" The tweedy, pipe-smoking editors of the day were as out of touch as she; they could discuss Updike and Picasso, but had no interest in things that whirred and blinked. Editors have changed, of course, but the cultural divide persists; there's a straight line between Yates's "mind machines" and the "morphogenetic field'' of the Sokal hoax of 1996. When will the sciences and the humanities finally learn how to talk to each other, and perhaps even absorb some much-needed perspective?

EPIGRAPHIC PUZZLES.

The Institute of Classical Studies is calling for help with a couple of inscriptions they'd like to identify. The second is just three Greek letters (on an cup with "erotic representations," true, but they don't show you the cup); the first, however, is quite intriguing. (Via Phluzein.)

JONATHAN WILLIAMS.

I've long been a fan of Jonathan Williams, peripatetic poet, lover of all things eccentric and dialectal, and founder of The Jargon Society, which has published both Lorine Niedecker and White Trash Cooking. You can get a sense of the man from an extensive interview published by Raintaxi; here's a quote to give the flavor:

Uncle Remus says: "Hit run'd cross my min' des lak a rat 'long a rafter." I have a mind like that. It darts and shimmies all the time. It thinks of six things (besides sex) all at once. So the trick is to slow down, focus, concentrate. Someone said that craft is perfected attention. I like making well-crafted books, and poems, and images, because it pleases me so to do. And it's nice to please some of one's friends now and then. I have never cultivated a commercial audience. I try never to do anything just for money, and I seem to have been quite successful at that. My old friend, Ephraim Doner (whose father had been an Hassidic rabbi in Poland), once told me about "The Lamed-Vov." In the ancient Hebraic tradition the Lamed-Vov were the 36 great souls of the earth. Wonderfully, they never knew they were great souls, but Yahweh knew. If they dwindled to fewer than 36, then Yahweh would pull the plug and go to work on a better animal. As long as we can sell 36 copies of a Jargon book, we will keep at it.

And here are a couple of poems (his poems are frequently based on the words of interesting people he's run across, in the first case the great poet Basil Bunting, in the second an Appalachian lady):

My Quaker-Atheist Friend, Who Has Come to This Meeting-House since 1913, Smokes & Looks Out over the Rawthey to Holme Fell

what do you do
anything for?
you do it
for what the mediaevals would call
something like
the Glory of God

doing it for money
that doesn’t do it;
doing it for vanity,
that doesn’t do it;
doing it to justify a disorderly life,
that doesn’t do it

Look at Briggflatts here . . .
It represents the best
that the people were able to do
they didn’t do it for gain;
in fact, they must have
taken a loss
whether it is a stone next to a stone
or a word next to a word,
it is the glory—
the simple craft of it
and money and sex aren’t worth
bugger-all, not
bugger-all

solid, common, vulgar words
the ones you can touch,
the ones that yield
and a respect for the music . . .

what else can you tell ‘em?

Miss Lucy Morgan Shows Me a Photograph of Mrs. Mary Grindstaff Spinning Wool on the High Wheel

Miss Lucy tells that one day
a visitor asked Mrs. Grindstaff
“What are you doing?”
she said “Spinning.”
the tourist said
“Why doesn’t it break?”
she said “Because I don’t let it.”
the charred heart does not break in Appalachia, they
have not let it . . .
the loom hums
there

SOME WORDS.

A few obscure words I've come across recently, with unexpected meanings or etymologies (cited here from the OED):

adversaria 'A commonplace-book, a place in which to note things as they occur; collections of miscellaneous remarks or observations; also commentaries or notes on a text or writing': Latin adversaria (sc. scripta) things written on the side fronting us (i.e. on one side of the paper), notes, a commonplace book; f. adversus (eg, WHITTOCK Compl. Bk. Trades 482 We never spent an hour more at our repose, than in silent attention to the political adversaria of this benevolent man).

cudbear 'A purple or violet powder, used for dyeing, prepared from various species of lichens, esp. Lecanora tartarea; the lichen Lecanora tartarea': A name devised from his own Christian name by Dr. Cuthbert Gordon (who obtained a patent for this powder). Thanks to Monica Jainschigg for this word!

collimate 'a. To place or adjust (a telescope) so that the line of sight is in the required position; to place (two telescopes, lenses, etc.) so that their optical axes are in the same line. b. To make parallel, as a lens, the rays of light passing through it.' From ‘collimare’, an erroneous reading, found in some edd. of Cicero, of L. collineare, f. col-, com- together + linea line, lineare to bring into a straight line. Collimare long passed as a genuine word, and was adopted by some astronomers who wrote in Latin (e.g. Kepler Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena, Frankfort 1604, p. 211; Littré) and thence passed into the mod. langs. The proper word would be collineate.

And, not exactly a matter of lexicography but following nicely from the last:

When (in the Summa, II. ii. 49) Aquinas says of memory that "oportet ut homo sollicitudinem apponat et affectum adhibeat ad ea quae vult memorari" (a man should apply solicitude and affection to the things he wants to remember), he is apparently misremembering or misreading the wording of the Ad Herennium, a classical (first century BC) text then wrongly thought to be by Cicero, which says that the imaginary places chosen for use in memory exercises should be in deserted regions because "solitudo conservat integras simulacrorum figuras" (solitude keeps their outline sharp). According to Frances Yates, Aquinas mistook "solitudo" for "sollicitudo," "introducing a devotional atmosphere which is entirely absent from the classical memory rule." Ah, the unpredictable consequences of error!

POSSESSED BY RANDOM HOUSE.

Transblawg discusses the differences between the British and American editions of A.S. Byatt's Possession, quoting a paragraph that shows very significant differences. The UK version:

...he saw himself as a failure and felt vaguely responsible for this.
He was a small man, with very soft, startling black hair and small regular features. Val called him Mole, which he disliked. He had never told her so.

The US version:

...he saw himself as a failure and felt vaguely responsible for this. He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, which was not often in these difficult days, into a smile of amused friendliness and pleasure which aroused feelings of warmth, and something more, in many women. He was generally unaware of these feelings, since he paid little attention to what people thought about him, which was part of his attraction. Val called him Mole, which he disliked. He had never told her so.

When I first read this, I was confused. I understand changing British to American usage, but why would there be added material? Had Byatt decided to rewrite, and it just happened to be in the US edition first? Then I read the paper by Helge Nowak from which Transblawg cited the paragraph, and I was appalled. It seems Random House (which I had thought of as a respectable publisher) wanted significant changes in the book before agreeing to publish it. Here's Byatt's account:

When the [American (HN)] editor first proposed to buy Possession she told me that the book would have to be very heavily cut for the American market—"You have spoiled a fine intrigue with extraneous matter" "most of the correspondence, journals etc will have to go" "there must be few poems and those there are short." [...] I said this was unacceptable, and she said she wd edit 100 pages and send them to me [...] I waited for several months and then the 100 pp came. She had decided that Roland was not "sexy" or sympathetic enough to appeal to "our American audience" and that I was to amend the descriptions of him. The whole project made me quite ill. At this point however it became clear that the book was selling in Britain, and then it won the Booker Prize. So I told my agent we wd find a publisher in the USA who would publish what I had written, and the editor sent a fax saying that I could have my book as I wished, though she did not think it wd sell. She insisted on retaining the one concession—the description of Roland—I had made, and also insisted on changing the line ordering and paragraphing, which she said was "eccentric". [...] There were attempts to substitute American words for English ones—paper route for paper round, which I resisted, and something or other for radiogram, wch I may have accepted, as radiogram means something quite different in American. She proposed sex between Maud and Roland where I had avoided it, and kept writing in the margin "You have missed a great opportunity for a climax!!!" (Byatt 1996; her elisions)

I agreed to expand on Roland's thoughts as an act of self-destructive desperation, not because I thought it improved things—I thought it was redundant and nonsensical—but because I am naturally good mannered and it was the only one of the editorial suggestions I felt even partly capable of accepting. That was one of the places (as I remember) where the editor had made the comment that I had missed a good opporunity for a climax, which I don't think she even saw was ambiguous or funny. (Byatt 1997)

It makes me sick as well to think about this (though doubtless not as sick as it made Byatt), and what's almost as bad is the attitude of Helge Nowak, apparently a devotee of the very worst sort of the-hell-with-the-author postmodernism. She first quotes a warning (with which I thoroughly agree) issued by Carl J. Weber fifty years ago:

The wise man will act differently. He will know his American edition before he goes far with it. He will trust it as he would a rattlesnake. He will neither quote from it, nor rely on conclusions drawn from it, until he has compared it, word for word, with the parent English edition, or has assured himself that the English author saw and approved of what his American publisher put into print for him.

This, to her, is charmingly quaint. She presents her own analysis:

This approach, directed at authorial intentions alone, has been countered in recent years by theorists that regard texts as outcome of a collaborative effort by more than just their authors, and as a product that has been presented to different audiences in different historical situations. Consequently, rather than conceiving literary texts as unique stable entities—as 'works'—, many theorists now point to the diverseness of textual 'versions', to all of which they grant equal status.

Applied to A.S. Byatt's Possession, this view would consequently see both its British and its American editions as legitimate (and not merely as co-existing) versions. They were produced, i.e. created and prepared for book publication, by various teams, all of which included the author—willingly or unwillingly. As her intentions carried different weight at different times, other considerations, by other members of the team, could come in and leave their mark in the individual processes of production. This in consequence led to the publication of variant versions of Possession, meant for and presented to specific audiences within the English-speaking world.

"All of which included the author—willingly or unwillingly"! Talk about Newspeak. I presume, then, Nowak would not mind if I put a substantially altered version of the article online with no indication of the difference. Hey, all processes of production are good! I don't know whether I want to toss eggs first at the Random House editor or at Nowak, but I do know that the publishing industry had better reform itself or authors will find some other way of getting their words (let me emphasize that: their words) to the public.

MONO NO AWARE.

The phrase "mono no aware" is basic to Japanese esthetics; it means, roughly, 'the sadness of things' and is comparable to Vergil's famous "lacrymae rerum." (Aware 'pity, sadness, pathos,' needless to say, is not pronounced like the English word; it's three syllables, accented on the first: AH-wah-reh.) Jonathon Delacour has a thoughtful post about aware, the history of Japanese poetry, modern Japanese song, Thomas Jefferson, and other things. Go read him.

FUN WITH ALPHABETS.

In an earlier post I linked to an excellent alphabet site; now a comment by Cassidy Curtis has led me to his own page, the alphabet's bastard children, which focuses on invented rather than actual alphabets. Enjoy.

LANGUAGE LOCKOUT.

It's easy, in the abstract, to take the position that "immigrants should learn English." But that doesn't happen by itself, and life can be very difficult for a monoglot like Irania Sanchez, discussed in a Tom Robbins column in the latest Village Voice:

For six years Sanchez, 34, labored for low pay in a vital industry in Brooklyn: She made coffins. She worked in a small shop, alongside a half-dozen other employees, all of them, like herself, undocumented workers trying to get by. Her wages were minimal—no more than $5 an hour—for long shifts and no overtime. But it wasn't the pay or the hours that bothered her most. It was the problem of how to cope when her children, both of them born in this country and American citizens, needed costly medicine.

Here Sanchez came up against the twin obstacles that haunt most of the city's estimated 500,000 undocumented workers: She spoke no English and had no health insurance.

The advice from her employer, Sanchez said, was simple: She should go to the government and get assistance. "He said, 'They'll help you,' " Sanchez recalled last week. So, when her baby, Gabriela, developed chronic, severe asthma, Sanchez took her to a city emergency room at Woodhull Hospital, in Bushwick, where sympathetic doctors treated Gabriela's symptoms. But they also told Sanchez she would have to invest in several different medications, as well as an expensive pump that would help Gabriela breathe by cleaning out her lungs every few hours. To get the money to pay for this, hospital staff told her, she should apply for Medicaid.

At the building where Medicaid applications are taken in Brooklyn, Sanchez spent several hours waiting to be seen. When a social worker finally took her case, he rejected her application for what is called Emergency Medicaid, Sanchez said. She spoke no English and the social worker spoke no Spanish, so communication was limited, but Sanchez left feeling insulted and dejected.

She told this story as she stood in a drizzling rain outside the city's central Medicaid office on West 34th Street with some two dozen other members of Make the Road by Walking, the Brooklyn-based organization that eventually helped Sanchez win an appeals hearing for her Medicaid claim.

The group was there to draw attention to their efforts to win passage of a bill pending in the City Council that would compel the city's Human Resources Administration to provide interpretation and translation at offices serving large numbers of non-English-speaking people. The bill has already gathered endorsements from 44 of the council's 51 members and only awaits the support of Council Speaker Gifford Miller and Mayor Bloomberg to become law. Miller's support is expected. Bloomberg's position is still unclear, but city officials say they are already providing adequate translation for those in need.

Dealing with the language barrier at government bureaucracies was a key issue raised by immigrant families back in 1997 when Make the Road began organizing in Bushwick, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. Andrew Friedman, a Brooklyn-born co-founder of the group, said most initial members had plans or ambitions to learn English, but those dreams were often thwarted or delayed by the difficulty in gaining access to language classes.

According to the New York Immigration Coalition, available English language classes in the city meet just 5 percent of the need. "In the national debate, we spend a lot of time being mad at immigrants for not speaking English, expecting them, as if by magic, to be able to go out and learn a new language while raising a family and holding down a job," said coalition director Margie McHugh. Assisting those who want to learn, she said, "is the most important thing our government could and should be doing as part of a proactive strategy."

Yes, this will cost money. But surely the already hard-working immigrants who need the assistance will be more productive if they learn decent English, and less likely to end up on welfare rolls.

SAPIR-WHORF IN GESTURES.

According to a BBC story, Dr. Sotaro Kita has gotten some intriguing results using Sylvester the cat:

Speakers of different languages not only describe the world differently - they think about it differently too, according to the study.

Dr Sotaro Kita of the University of Bristol's Department of Experimental Psychology, showed the cartoon to a group of native English, Japanese and Turkish speakers.

He then noted their gestures as they described the action they had seen, finding that speakers of different languages used different gestures to depict the same event.

This appeared to reflect the way the structure of their languages expressed that event.

For example, when describing a scene where Sylvester swings on a rope, the English speakers used gestures showing an arc.

The Japanese and Turkish speakers tended to use straight gestures showing the motion but not the arc.

Dr Kita suggests this is because Japanese and Turkish have no verb that corresponds to the English intransitive verb 'to swing'.

English speakers use the arc gesture as their language readily expresses the change of location and the arc-shaped trajectory.

But Japanese and Turkish speakers cannot as easily express the concept of movement with an arc trajectory, so they use the straight gesture, Dr Kita argues.

He adds that these differences can be explained by linguistic differences.

Dr Kita said: "My research suggests that speakers of different languages generate different spatial images of the same event in a way that matches the expressive possibilities of their particular language.

"In other words, language influences spatial thinking at the moment of speaking."

The results are probably overstated, but it's an interesting line of study. (Thanks to Des for the link.)

ISFOGAILSI.

I frequently check in with (isfogailsi) .... never explained the voice from your mouth, a feisty and frighteningly learned blog written by Kristina, a grad student exploring the remoter reaches of Japanese history who always has interesting things to say about East Asia, academic life, and whatever else strikes her fancy. Ever since I first started visiting I have vaguely wondered about the name of the blog, but never got around to asking her what "isfogailsi" meant and (at least as important) how it's pronounced. Now she's answered my unasked question, and I feel like an idiot because I should have figured it out (it's Old Irish, and I've studied Old Irish), so as public penance I'll explain it here.

Old Irish has the most complicated verbal morphology I've ever had the pleasure of studying; a drastic reduction of unstressed syllables that took place before the Old Irish period turned a language that looks rather like Latin in the few grave inscriptions we have (and that probably would have been as easy to learn) into a nightmare of vanishing morphemes. This particularly affects verbs, which very often have prefixes that in prototonic forms (stress on the first syllable, meaning the prefix) get mashed into the verb stem with appalling results. Thus the deuterotonic (normal) form of the verb 'they say' is as-berat, with the stress on -ber-, but the prototonic form is -epret. (Did I mention, by the way, that t is pronounced d and p b?) LIkewise, do-lugai '(he/she) pardons' gets mashed into -dilgai.

So the verb fo-gleinn 'learns' has deuterotonic forms like fo-glésed (past subjunctive) and fo-giguil (future), which are bad enough, but the "verbal of necessity" (comparable to the Latin gerundive) is always prototonic, in this case giving the form fogailsi, pronounced FOgalshi (palatalized s is pronounced sh). And since the verbal of necessity always occurs after the copula (which in Old Irish, conveniently, looks just like English: is), we arrive at the phrase that gives the blog its name: is fogailsi 'it must be learned.' (Compare Latin delenda est 'it must be destroyed.') The fact that it's written as one word in the blog title gives me a feeble excuse for not recognizing it.

The above explanation doubtless makes no sense to anyone who hasn't studied old Irish, so if your eyes glazed over, here's the gist: it's pronounced "iss FOglshi" and it means 'it must be learned.' And if you have any suggestions for a new version of "you never explained...," Kristina wants to hear them.

Update. Isfogailsi disappeared sometime late last year—it di