My excellent correspondent Michael V. (gratias ago!) has directed me to the red-light room at the back of Zdravko Batzarov's Orbis Latinus site, namely Forbidden Latin Language. If you're planning to read the seamier Latin authors, or if you've simply always had a yen to know how to say 'to force someone to perform receptive male oral sex' in the language of Cicero, pay it a visit. Just pull your collar up and your hat down, and tell Gaius I sent you. (But don't trust it implicitly; the word "vomerm" should read vomer, and there may be other errors.)
Thomas More's daughter Margaret More Roper, trained in the classics, not only wrote in Greek and Latin but translated from those languages; you can read about her instant emendation of a difficult passage from St. Cyprian in this entry at the marvelous Eudæmonist—where you will also read about Margaret's daughter Mary:
This gentlewoman verie handsomlie translated the Eccliesiasticall historie of Eusebius out of Greeke into Latyn, and after into English yet extant, to the shame of the hereticall [translation] of Meridith Hanmer … She translated the Historie of Socrates, Theodoretus, Sozomenus and Euagrius. Theis of her modestie [she] caused to be suppressed. She also translated a treatiese of her grandfather, Sir Thomas, made vpon passion; and so elegantlie and so eloquentlie hath penned it that a man would thinke it were originallie written in the English tongue by Sir Thomas hym selfe.
A tip from Des led me to a promising site devoted to the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. Unfortunately, it promises more than it delivers; only five of the projected 22 lessons are online, but those include an excellent one on Phonology, Orthography, Accent, and Syllable Structure. So if you've ever wondered how those exotic-looking words are pronounced (Xochitl, anyone?), here's your chance to find out. (There is also this site, with the modest title "Inadequate Nahuatl Lessons"; it describes the classical language in a distinctly less rigorous way, but on the other hand it covers more ground, so makes a useful supplement. It's accompanied by an "Inadequate Nahuatl Reference Grammar," which presumably goes into more detail.) There's a short glossary here, and a map showing where the language is now spoken here.
According to a NY Times story by Norimitsu Onishi, the age-old patterns of hierarchy in Japanese society and language are beginning to weaken:
Many Japanese companies, traditionally divided rigidly by age and seniority, have dropped the use of titles to create a more open — and, they hope, competitive — culture.The long economic slump has forced companies to abandon seniority in favor of performance, upsetting the traditional order. This has led to confusion in the use of titles as well as honorific language, experts say.
The shift also mirrors profound changes in Japanese society, experts say. Equality-minded parents no longer emphasize honorific language to their children, and most schools no longer expect children to use honorific language to their teachers. As a result, young Japanese have a poor command of honorific language and do not feel compelled to use it.
"There's confusion and embarrassment," said Rika Oshima, the 43-year-old president of Speaking Essay, a school that instructs new employees on the use of honorific language. "Junior staffers aren't strict about using respectful forms to their bosses, whereas bosses want their staffers to use respectful forms to them, but bosses cannot say that."Of course, all this may be journalistic exaggeration of a passing trend, but if it's real it's a significant development.What is clear is that the use of honorific language, called keigo, to elevate a person or humble oneself, has especially fallen out of use among young Japanese.
Japanese, perhaps more than any other language, has long taken account of social standing. While French speakers must decide between the familiar "tu" and the formal "vous" in addressing someone in the second person, in Japanese, there are many ways to say I or you, calibrated by age, circumstance, gender, social position and other factors. Verb endings, adjectives and entire words also shift according to the situation.
Mistakes have been deadly. In 1975, two workers, Kunihiro Fukuda, 30, and Tomohiko Okabe, 27, were having a drink in a Tokyo bar, according to magazine reports at the time. Although Mr. Okabe was younger, he had entered the company first and had taken to addressing his colleague in a manner usually reserved for someone younger, calling him Fukuda instead of Fukuda-san. Mr. Fukuda protested. But Mr. Okabe said, "What's wrong if a senior guy calls his junior in this way?" Enraged, Mr. Fukuda grabbed his colleague by the neck and beat him to death, the magazines reported...
Fumio Inoue, a professor of linguistics at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, said honorifics began with the nobility a millennium ago. At first, they were strictly based on social hierarchy, but after World War II and the democratization of Japanese society, they began to be used according to the level of intimacy between speakers.
For many older Japanese, the decline of the honorific form amounted to losing the deep beauty of their language and the coarsening of the social culture.
"In the past, Japanese children were taught well at home to elevate men and their elders," said Mr. Kubota, the factory manager. "Here in Hiroshima, because we are in the country, some of the old ways remain. But in Tokyo, it's chaos."
Here's an essay that analyzes people's ability to use keigo properly:
Surprisingly, 65% of all the people that cooperated said they "are not using proper keigo." Majority of the people answered that either kindergarten and elementary school or junior high school should teach keigo. 70% had trouble using kenjogo. The impression of people who cannot use proper keigo was "rude and impolite" at 28%, "not well educated" at 24%, and "do not mind" at 20%. More than half of the correspondents had negative feelings toward those who could not use keigo properly.And here's an interesting account of the history of the -masu verbal ending and its place in the system of honorifics.In the quiz on sonkeigo, 40% achieved to answer more than two answers correctly. On the next quiz, 70% had trouble mixing up kenjogo and sonkeigo, which is a mistake common to many Japanese people. Also, many people had trouble using teineigo or sonkeigo for their family members.
In this paper, I have presented how the mis-usage of keigo can embarrass the listener, damage a relationship, be wrongly interpreted, or embarrass the speaker him/herself. I have also pointed out how a large body of Japanese people can't use this complex system of keigo properly, and therefore, most of them feel they want to improve it. Although there are various types of mistakes in using keigo, we all know that language change over a period of time, so making a definite conclusion about which usage is right or wrong is very difficult. Moreover, reaction and evaluation differ depending on who the listener is. Some people think that the mis-usage of keigo does not bother them, as long as they can feel that the speaker is talking and acting with respect.
The NITLE Blog Census has a page listing the languages used (or apparently used: "our algorithm decides what language a blog is in by looking at the text content, and not at any language attributes in the markup") in the 1,449,515 weblogs they've indexed. English, unsurprisingly, is far in the lead, but below that things get interesting; in particular, I find it hard to believe Russian is so far down the list. (Via the Sidelights column of Electrolite.)
An Idler's Glossary: an annotated lexicon of words for the theory and practice of non-working. As usual with such things, distrust the etymologies ("Laggard is how the Norwegians say it"—no it's not) but enjoy the brio.
apathetic: Because of his supine position and air of detachment, the idler is too often accused—by "serious," "committed," and "active" persons—of being apathetic. As used to mean "without feeling or emotion," it would better be applied to those unfortunate souls who, precisely because they haven't dropped out of society, have been (to quote Philip K. Dick) "androidized." If, however, it's supposed to mean "lacking interest or concern," we should note that the idler is deeply concerned with, and interested in, following his own subjective pathos, through self-potentiation.(Via wood s lot.)
In a recent NYRB review by P.N. Furbank of the Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne occurs the following sentence: "Her edition forms a physically very pretty book, with a charming and inventive use of civilité type." Of course I immediately wanted to know what the typeface looked like and, if possible, why it was so named. The latter is explained here:
Civilité, designed by the prolific typographer Herman Zapf, is based on the typeface Granjon, of 1928, which in turn was a revival of the types of Robert Granjon, who flourished in Paris, Rome and Antwerp in the late-sixteenth century. Robert Granjon is renowned for his caractères de civilité, letterforms based on a graceful French handwriting and intended as a French version of the Italian italic hand.You can see a nice sample here (I trust everyone recognizes the Latin text). And if you're really interested, there's a book: Civilité types, by Harry Carter and H. D. L. Vervliet (The Oxford Bibliographical Society, Oxford Univ. Press, 1966).
A paper (pdf; cached version here) by Roger Billerey analyzes some of the difficulties involved in trying to render Wodehouse's stylistic idiosyncrasies into French. Skip the first couple of pages if, like me (and like Gail Armstrong, from whom I got the link) you are more interested in discussions that (in Gail's words) "offer concrete and meaty examples of the thrill and distress of it all" than in maunderings about theory.
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining? An interesting set of dialect terms; needless to say, I welcome contributions from other languages (this is not the sort of thing it's easy to find in a dictionary). In Russian, for instance, it's gribnoi dozhd'—'mushroom rain.' Via Drum & Bass & Eggs & Flour .
Addendum. T. Carter of Lifechanges ... Delayed provides a link to the LINGUISTList post on this subject from five years ago; it has a great many expressions, most with the original language (though not, alas, the Georgian). Many thanks, T.!
As of Friday, digitized versions of the British Library's first editions of Chaucer are online, as described in this BBC News story:
Internet users will be able from Friday to view the first editions of The Canterbury Tales online rather than having to visit the British Library where the original versions are kept...(Via Mirabilis.ca.)It is hoped the digitisation of the volume on the 603rd anniversary of its author's death will make it easier for scholars and the public to access it.
A team from Keio University in Tokyo, the project's sponsor, have photographed the work into 1,300 high-definition images which have been put on the web.
Kristian Jensen, head of Western European Printed Collections at the British Library, said: "This project follows the library's successful digitisation of its two copies of the Gutenberg Bible, a site which received one million hits in its first six months.
"This is the beauty of digitisation, to take something of great intellectual value which is rare and fragile, and make it available to anyone and everyone."
Today is the first day of Ramadan, and Nancy Gandhi reminds us that in the Indian subcontinent it's known as Ramzan. So I thought I'd explain the d/z variation, for those who (as is quite natural) find it confusing.
The Arabic letter Daad (I'm using D for the sound normally written as d with a dot underneath) represents one of the "emphatic" consonants peculiar to the language; I won't try to describe their articulation in detail (especially since I have no confidence in my ability to pronounce them correctly), but they involve retraction of the tongue and pharyngealization, and this particular one is so difficult for foreigners to produce that Arabs sometimes call themselves "the people of the (letter) Daad." In most of the Arab world it is a stop, but in Iraq it is a fricative, like the /th/ of the (but with "emphasis"). Since it was from Iraq that Persia was conquered, the Persians borrowed this letter (like the other voiced fricatives of Arabic) as /z/, and since it was via Persia that the Turks and Indians received Islam (and along with it the Arabic language), words with Arabic D are represented in the Turkic languages and in Hindi/Urdu with z. Thus the names Zia (as in General Zia ul-Haq) for Arabic Dia and Reza for Arabic RiDa, and thus ramazan (Turkish) and ramzan (Hindi/Urdu) for Arabic ramaDaan. And a Ramadan mubarak to all my Muslim readers!
There are certain words that carry an intrinsic judgment about the truth value of what they describe. You can say that A says, or alleges, or thinks that B is a crook without implying anything about B, but if you say A discovers B is a crook, you are calling B a crook yourself. In Larissa MacFarquhar's "The Movie Lover," a New Yorker profile of Quentin Tarantino, she has the following to say about his early days:
Before Tarantino began making movies, one of his heroes was Jean-Luc Godard. He loved Godard's unusual shots—the long takes, the long, long closeups. Even though he has now outgrown Godard...Cut! OK, you can say "he has now moved on to other influences" or (if you wish to make him look like an idiot) "he feels he has outgrown Godard," but to say "he has now outgrown Godard" is to reveal yourself as an idiot. It's like saying someone has "outgrown" Shakespeare or Picasso. T'fu, t'fu, t'fu (to use the expressive Russian expectorative interjection).
Addendum. Jim of UJG responds with a nice Godard quote.
I just came across a word new to me, namely yardang, 'a sharp, irregular ridge of sand or the like, lying in the direction of the prevailing wind in exposed desert regions and formed by erosion by the wind of adjacent less resistant material' (OED). Naturally, I wanted to know the etymology of this exotic-sounding word, and the OED did not disappoint: "a. Turk., abl. of yar steep bank, precipice." Now, the Turkish ablative ending is -dan/den (to fall from a cliff is yardan uçmak), so I presume by "Turk." they mean Turkic, and the -dang ending is from some other Turkic language, a supposition reinforced by the first citation:
1904 S. Hedin Sci. Results Journey in Central Asia I. xxvii. 439 At intervals furrows or trenches in the clay subsoil, called jardangs, traced between long elevations or ridges, crop up amongst the dunes.
So we're dealing with a Central Asian language. But as far as I can tell, the ablative ending is -dan in Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, and Turkmen, and according to this page in The Turkic Languages by Lars Johanson (thank you, Amazon text search!) the Proto-Turkic ablative ending was *-dAn. So is the -ng a mistake by Hedin, picked up by everyone else from him, or is there some dialect that has it?
(I fully realize the recondite nature of this question and the unlikelihood that anyone out there will know the answer, but it never hurts to try, and besides, I wanted an excuse to publicize the word. Isn't it fun to say? Yardang! Oh, and I got it from this page, via the irreplaceable plep.)
The NY Times moves to Cheltenham for all headlines, replacing "the mix of faces that has been featured on page one beginning as early as the late 1800's and which has remained unchanged since 1976." (Thanks to Chris for the news; let me take this opportunity to pass on, with regret, the news that his blog Polyglut is resigning from the linguablog community and will concentrate on "issues touching politics and religion, especially their intersection.")
Also, in Cheshire Dave's Behind the Typeface series: the story of Cooper Black. (A movie; Flash required, and make sure your sound is on.) Via Planned Obsolescence.
Addendum. You can see a side-by-side comparison of the Times typefaces here. (Via More than you can stick a shake at.)
This article by William O. Beeman (Department of Anthropology, Brown University) fuels my worst suspicions about anthropologists' shaky grasp of the concepts of linguistics; the first two sentences indicate a distilled confusion such as is rarely achieved: "One of the bedrock principles of linguistic analysis since the nineteenth century has been the principle of the regularity of cognate borrowing. It forms the basis of the 'comparative method' not only in linguistics, but in all of social science." A little later comes a paragraph with a more expansive form of the confusion:
However, there is a limited, but powerful countervailing tendency in language behavior—words that absolutely resist borrowing even from their closest linguistic relatives. These words seem to be coined anew by each population group. Because we expect cognate borrowing as a norm, it is surprising when we encounter these fascinating examples. It makes us wonder about the cultural processes that govern the development of communication systems, and the functional differences between segments of vocabulary.
This leads into his main point, the often-observed fact that most languages, even closely related ones, have entirely different words for 'butterfly.' He then lists all those he has collected, which is what makes the page worth linking to. Ignore the miasma and enjoy the variety of (often semi-onomatopoeic) words, to which I will add cipelebesha (Bemba), balanbaalis (Somali), ekiwojjolo (Luganda), ihe n'efe-efe or uru baba (Igbo), lolo (Malagasy), vannatti pucchi (Tamil), titernig (West Armenian), peperuga (Kalderash Romanes ["Gypsy"]), fepule or minni or tirtirk (Kurmanji Kurdish), metelik (Ukrainian), palomma (Neapolitan Italian), kubelek (Tatar), kapalak (Uzbek), göpölök (Kyrgyz) (notice the interesting variations among these three and Turkish kelebek), khovagan (Tuvinian), pepela (Georgian), polla (Chechen). A few corrections: according to my Basque dictionary, the first word should be tximeleta (rather than txipilota), the Hausa word is malam-bude-littafi (first and last a's long), and the Latvian word is taurinš (not tauriųš); furthermore, there is no such language as "Senegalese" (anybody know what language lupe lupe is from?). And a couple of alternative Zulu terms: ijubajubane and itwabitwabi. What fun!
For further amusement, I reproduce here the last thing on the page, a footnote quoting a mind-bogglingly lunatic theory of "universal word derivation" that Prof. Beeman apparently takes seriously:
2. However, Isaac Mozeson, author of The Word, a treatise on common word origins, contributed this commentary based on his own theories of universal word derivation:(Via wood s lot.)I had in my "PYRALIDID" entry (appendix A) the PR Greek, the PPL Latin, the Malay PPL and the Nahuatl PPL terms for butterfly. All should be influenced by Hebrew PaR PaR (butterfly) and the PR root of PiRPooR (to twitch). I am grateful for the Tagalog paruparo, and would like to credit the contributor. As for the Paiwan/Taiwan term, two phonemes are at work. One, kali, could be like Hebrew KAL (light, swift), and the other is a duplicated dungudungul, which appears to be a nasalized DIGDAIG (Hebrew for the tickle-like wavering motion of DAG (fish) and DeGel (flag). Needless to say, TICKle itself is a form of this Daled-Gimel root from Edensprach. Lastly, the Autronesian KUPO root could be a form of Ayin-Peh, KHuPh (to fly—see "AVIATE" in THE WORD, p. 26).
Never heard of it, but there's a book about it, and it sounds like it could be interesting. (Via Road to Surfdom, who also links to an anticipation-raising article about the new Patrick O'Brian movie, for those who are as addicted as I am to his magnificent novels.)
C'est une langue belle... is a new blog dedicated to the distinctive features of québécois. If you read French, it's well worth your while. (Thanks for the tip, saeedik!)
And while we're on the subject of blogs: Laputan Logic has a new, de-Bloggered site! Well done, John.
An amusing and perhaps useful list of occupations, some of which have merely shifted in usage (ADMINISTRATOR - directed the affairs of another) and some of which have sunk into deep oblivion are still in use, unbeknownst to me until I read my comments (AGISTER - official of the Royal Forests or in the New Forest it is the title for the one in charge of the ponies). There's no indication of where or when these were in use (some are medieval, some clearly twentieth-century), but that's what dictionaries are for. My favorite so far: BADGER - licensed pauper who wore a badge with the letter P on it and could only work in a defined area. (Via MetaFilter.)
From Helen Brown's latest Telegraph diary entry:
A new guide to English published this month by Oxford University Press reveals that writers' names are edging their way into the vernacular in the most unexpected ways. According to The Language Report, by Susie Dent, "Seamus Heaney" is now rhyming slang for "bikini".(Via Maud Newton.)
Now, it occurs to me that rhyming slang usually drops the actual rhyming word, leaving the connection mysterious to the uninitiated: thus china plate = 'mate' was quickly reduced to china. If this happens here, the word for 'bikini' will be seamus, pronounced exactly like shamus 'private eye,' leading to yet more trans-Atlantic misunderstanding and adding to the lexicon available to hard-boiled mystery writers: "The shamus was leering at the seamus on the sheila selling sea-shells by the seashore..."
The good people at Amazon have indexed the full text of 120,000 books (with, presumably, more to come) and they are searchable through the regular search box. I just did a search on the name of an obscure Ethiopian battle and got several pages from books talking about it—books I'd never have known about. This is an amazing development, and I look forward to becoming hopelessly addicted to it. (Via a MetaFilter post.)
Addendum. I hadn't even thought of this, but Mo Nickles comments on its value for lexicography:
As a lexicographer, I find this to be an amazing, beat-all citation resource. A good deal of dictionary-making is about verifying usage, which involves finding it in context, usually in printed matter. While the British National Corpus and the American National Corpus (just released!) are fine for this, they only include about 10 percent of each of the works included in the corpus, and those works are thousands but still, relatively few over all. The ANC is only 10 million words. It really isn't enough: it's but an electron on the molecule in a drop of a wave of an ocean. The problem with finding citations on Google (excepting Google News) has always been the signal-to-noise ratio. Here, with Amazon, we largely have professionally edited texts, meaning if the word is in there, it's probably not a typo (although it could be an OCR artifact).
Update. The NY Times has an article by Lisa Guernsey on the subject. An excerpt:
Mr. Smith... had spent futile hours trying to recall the title or author of a pulp novel that he had read more than 10 years ago. All he could remember, he said, was that it was an action adventure set in Antarctica. He had tried Google. He had browsed catalogs of titles and authors. He had nearly given up."But today," he wrote in an entry on his blog (www.nonfamous.com) two weeks ago, "I searched for 'antarctica seal marines invisibility' (yes, the book did touch on all these plot points!) and found 'Ice Station' as the sixth search result. Brilliant!"
The redoubtable Geoff Nunberg has investigated the word fascist in his latest "Fresh Air" commentary and has interesting things to say about the reasons it gets used very differently in American and Europe. (Via Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufrey.)
I am happy to report that Vladimir Vladimirovich agreed with me on the transcendent merits of Exercices de style:
Queneau's Exercices de style is a thrilling masterpiece and, in fact, one of the greatest stories in French literature. I am also very fond of Queneau's Zazie, and I remember some excellent essays he published in Nouvelle revue française.This satisfying quote comes from a series of Nabokov interview snippets put online by Maud Newton, to whom I express my gratitude. And if you know French and haven't yet read the book, you owe it to yourself to do so. You don't need to devote a continuous chunk of time to it; just read a few variations, savor them, and put it down until you need another dose. Trust me, you won't regret it.
The Discouraging Word provides a typically thoroughgoing investigation into the slang term "thank-you-ma'am," meaning a pothole—a term that was new to me, so I suspect it's regional or antiquated. TDW also goes into the expanded "wham, bam..." form, which leads to all sorts of unsavory matters. Enjoy.
Addendum. The term "thank-you-ma'am" is apparently current in Texas and New England (thanks, Bonnie!). Anywhere else?
The University of Groningen Department of Linguistics is in the midst of a project, The Voices of Tundra and Taiga, that will last until June 2005 and "contribute to the strengthening and revitalization of different small indigenous languages of the Russian North, including Nenets, Nivkh, Khanty, Mansi and others." It is described in detail in the paper "Voices of Tundra and Taiga—Endangered Languages in Russia on the Internet"; here is the summary from the website:
The topic of this project is the study of endangered arctic languages and cultures of the Russian Federation, which must be described rapidly before they become extinct. This research is in the fortunate position that our earlier work on the reconstruction technology for old sound recordings found in archives in St. Petersburg has made it possible to compare languages still spoken in the proposed research area to the same languages as they were spoken more than half a century ago. These sound recordings consist of spoken language, folksongs, fairy tales etc., among others in Siberian languages.I very much look forward to seeing the results when they're online. (Via an entry at pf's blog, which has many good Yakut links as well.)In the proposed project we shall apply the developed techniques to some of the disappearing minority languages and cultures of Russia: Nivkh and Orok on Sakhalin and Yukagir and Tungus languages in Yakutia. Our aim is to set up a phono- and video-library of recorded stories, and of the folklore, singing and oral traditions of the peoples of Sakhalin and Yakutia. For this purpose the existing sound recordings in the archives of Sakhalin and Yakutia will be used together with the results of new fieldwork expeditions. The data will be added to the existing archive material in St. Petersburg and part of it will be made available on the Internet and/or CD-ROM.
Uncle Jazzbeau's Gallimaufrey discusses movies that feature linguists as prominent characters. If you have suggestions to add to the list, I'm sure he'd be glad to see them.
And while we're on the subject of linguists and translators, Margaret Marks of Transblawg has an entry on the FBI’s need for Arabic speakers and the low acceptance rate.
By the way, I should mention that the Languagehattery is beginning the long and painful process of moving out of New York City to (we hope) a beautiful Hudson River town, so blogging and correspondence may be slower than usual as I try to absorb the minutiae of interest rates, points, fees, and other arcana. Ancient Egyptian is easier, I tell you.
Update. We got the house!
One of the more annoying nomenclature problems in the world of language is that of the Tai (sometimes called "Thai") language family, whose most prominent member is Thai (sometimes called "Tai"). The two English words are both from the self-designation of T(h)ai-speakers; the orthographic distinction is basically a convenient device to differentiate language and family, although it also reflects the fact that the name is pronounced in some languages with an aspirated t and in some with an unaspirated one.
But even if we have the family name straight, what are the main languages included in the Tai family? George L. Campbell's Concise Compendium of the World's Languages gives a nice, compact answer: "[Thai] is the most important member of the Tai family which also includes Lao, Shan, and Yuan." I nodded my head at Lao and Shan and shook it in bewilderment when I hit Yuan. I knew of no such language. I went to Andrew Dalby's Dictionary of Languages and found:
The South-western division includes the two best known, Thai or Siamese, spoken in central Thailand, and Lao of Laos and north-eastern Thailand. A continuum of dialects in areas to the north of these begins with Ahom, an extinct language of the Indian state of Assam, and Shan; it continues eastwards with Lanna Thai and ends with the minority languages of Laos and Vietnam usually known as Black Tai, Red Tai and White Tai.(I pause for the inevitable black-tie jokes.) No help here. So I went to the "Tai Languages" chapter of The World's Major Languages and read the more detailed description there:
Southwestern, including Ahom (extinct), Khamti, Tai Nuea (Chinese Shan, Dehong Dai), Tai Long (Shan), Khuen, Tai Lue (Xishuangbanna Dai), Kam Muang (Tai Yuan, Northern Thai), Thai (Siamese, Central Thai), Southern Thai, Lao (Lao dialects in Thailand are also called "Northeastern Thai"), White Tai, Tai Dam (Black Tai), Red Tai and several other languages...At first my eyes glazed over, then I buckled down and focused—and I saw it: Tai Yuan, a parenthetical variant of "Kam Muang." I'd never heard of the latter, but the other parenthetical variant, "Northern Thai," was familiar to me; Dalby had an entry on it under the rubric "Lanna Thai, Khün and Lü." And sure enough, The entry begins "The Lanna or Tai Yuan language of northern Thailand..." So we have our Top Four: Thai, spoken by about 25 million people; Lao, spoken by 15 million; Lanna/Yuan/Northern Thai, spoken by 6,500,000; and Shan, spoken by 3 million. (The Northern Tai [n.b.] language Zhuang may be spoken by over 10 million people in southern China, but it's hard to tell because the Zhuang people, in Dalby's words, "have not, historically, been anxious to project a distinct ethnic identity. They wanted to be Chinese—and Chinese they have largely become.")
If you'd like to see where these languages are located, there's a map about halfway down this page; unfortunately, although a number of minor languages are shown, neither Northern/Lanna Thai nor Southern Thai (spoken near the Malaysian border) is there. Such are the perils of investigating one of the least studied of the major language families.
A post of Caterina's reminded me of one of my favorite Byzantines, John Tzetzes (c.1110-c.1180), a poor boy (of ethnic Georgian background) who scrabbled his way to a precarious position in Constantinopolitan literary society and wrote an enormous amount, valuable to scholars for its copious quotations from otherwise lost works. The Byzantinist Robert Browning says:
Born in Constantinople of a family that had seen better days, he received a good education and obtained a post as secretary to a provincial governor. But he was soon dismissed as a result of some adventure involving the governor's wife, and worked for some time as a secretary in Constantinople. For most of the rest of his life he gained a poor livelihood by teaching and writing, though for a time he enjoyed the patronage of a lady of the imperial family, and had the sons of distinguished men as his pupils... Tzetzes was a very erudite man, and at the same time as vain and touchy as a child. Reduced by poverty to selling his library, he relied a great deal on his extraordinary memory, of which he was very proud; but it often let him down.Another great Byzantinist, Alexander Kazhdan (editor of the magnificent Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium), gives this piquant description of his writing in his Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (I trust the referents of those his's are clear):
His intimacy with antiquity is best reflected in his correspondence, which he annotated with a long series of epigrams, creating a previously unexampled literary form. In these epistles, which are addressed both to real and to fictitious people, Tzetzes treated personal concerns and contemporary problems along with details of Hellenic culture. For example, he described his stay in an apartment badly in need of repair. The tenant in the rooms above was a priest who, in addition to having too many children, kept swine; they rained dirt and urine down on the poor writer. This prosaic fact, however, is framed by a series of classical images; for instance, the priest, according to Tzetzes, had fewer children than Priamus or Danaos or Egypt..., but they were more numerous than those of Niobe or Amphion; the children and the swine are contrasted with the cavalry of Xerxes: the horses of Xerxes dried up streams, whereas Tzetzes' cohabitants brought forth navigable rivers... These epigrams as a whole form the so-called Histories, an immense poem without any noticeable structure, in which Tzetzes treated everything from history and geography to myths and monuments. He seems to have simply enjoyed the queer tinkling of strange names.As do I, as do I. And that brings us to the main reason for my featuring Tzetzes in Languagehat, his boast about his own linguistic abilities in the epilog to his Theogony (quoting again from Change in Byzantine Culture):
One finds me Scythian among Scythians, Latin among Latins,Aside from the unfortunate display of typical medieval anti-Semitism, this is a delightful passage, and I must admit to a guilty fondness for the imprecation "bezek unto your khothar."
And among any other tribe a member of that folk.
When I embrace a Scythian I accost him in such a way:
"Good day, my lady, good day, my lord:
Salamalek alti, salamalek altugep."
And also to Persians I speak in Persian:
"Good day, my brother, how are you? Where are you from, my friend?
Asan khais kuruparza khaneazar kharandasi?"
To a Latin I speak in the Latin language:
"Welcome, my lord, welcome, my brother:
Bene venesti, domine, bene venesti, frater.
Wherefrom are you, from which theme [province] do you come?
Unde es et de quale provincia venesti?
How have you come, brother, to this city?
Quomodo, frater, venesti in istan civitatem?
On foot, on horse, by sea? Do you wish to stay?
Pezos, caballarius, per mare? Vis morare?"
To Alans I say in their tongue:
"Good day, my lord, my archontissa, where are you from?
Tapankhas mesfili khsina korthi kanda," and so on.
If an Alan lady has a priest as a boyfriend, she will hear such words:
"Do not be ashamed, my lady; let the priest marry you [to mounin sou ['your cunt'–LH]].
To farnetz kintzi mesfili kaitz fua saunge."
Arabs, since they are Arabs, I address in Arabic:
"Where do you dwell, where are you from, my lady? My lord, good day to you.
Alentamor menende siti mule sepakha."
And also I welcome the Ros according to their habits:
"Be healthy, brother, sister, good day to you.
Sdraste, brate, sestritza," and I say "dobra deni."
To Jews I say in a proper manner in Hebrew:
"You blind house devoted to magic, you mouth, a chasm engulfing flies,
memakomene beth fagi beelzebul timaie,
You stony Jew, the Lord has come, lightning be upon your head.
Eber ergam, maran atha, bezek unto your khothar."
So I talk with all of them in a proper and befitting way;
I know the skill of the best management."
The Ecotone theme for this biweek, Place Names, has inspired Nancy Gandhi of Under the Fire Star (which is six months old today—congratulations!) to an excellent entry on Madras/Chennai and its places:
Living in an ex-colony, I've discovered, means that place-names are highly mutable. The funniest example came during the Vietnam War, when the American Consulate in Calcutta went to sleep on Harrington Street and woke up on Ho Chi Minh Sarani—a little joke played on the Americans by the Communist government of the state of West Bengal, which continues to this day. (There's a useful page here with old and new names for Calcutta streets—I wish there were one for Chennai.)Personally, I wish sites like the "old and new names" one were available for every major city. And I wish governments would stop messing around with the names people are used to (or, failing that, I wish people would stubbornly stick with the old names). Place names are as much our collective heritage as any other part of language.The city where I live was called Madras for 350 years, since the British cobbled it together from a number of existing villages. (It survived long enough to give America a fabric called 'bleeding madras,' in the sixties of the last century.) In 1996, some local politicians decided that Madras was a 'colonial' name, and should be replaced with a 'real' Tamil name, Chennai. Ironically, the writer Shashi Tharoor has some scathing things to say (this is the cached version—couldn't get the original) about the name and the decision. It seems that Chennai was originally Chennappa-pattinam, a settlement named after a local Telugu (not Tamil) chieftain. Local historian S. Muthiah thinks that, if the name had to be changed at all—he opposed it—it should have been changed to Mylapore, the largest of the existing villages brought within the city limits. Mylapore was an ancient seaport, which sent traders and culture-bearers across the sea to Southeast Asia. However, the city's residents were not asked for their opinions, and here we are in Chennai....
Addendum. The Tharoor article is online here.
According to a National Post story by Paul Brent:
General Motor's plans to rechristen the Canadian-built Buick Regal passenger car as the Buick LaCrosse have hit a snag: In Québécois youth culture, the word is slang for masturbation, among other things.U.S. focus groups said the name lends the car a sophisticated European air, but the world's largest automaker discovered in focus groups in Quebec that it generated giggles among young participants.
"I speak French as taught in Switzerland and as taught in France, I spent three years in Paris functioning in the French system, and I thought I knew every expression existing in the French language for self-gratification, including the crudest ones known to man," said a GM vice-chairman...
Stew Low, a GM Canada spokesman, said in Quebec youth culture the word is a slang term "that means a couple of things, either to masturbate or 'I just got screwed,' or 'I just got taken.'"Sure enough, Le Dictionnaire québécois says:
Songdog has alerted me (via e-mail) to the synonymity of two words whose existence had hitherto been unknown to me: gennel and snicket. They both mean 'alley between houses'; the OED entries are:
gennel, ginnel ('dZEn@l, 'dZIn@l; elsewhere 'gIn@l). dial. A long narrow passage between houses, either roofed or unroofed.1669 Manch. Ct. Leet Rec. (1887) V. 98 Wm Jackson hath made a Doore into A Ginnell belongeinge to Edmo Heywood. A. 1804 J. Mather Songs (1862) 33 in Sheffield Gloss. s.v., When Sancho was a raw-boned whelp And lived in yonder jennel. 1855 Waugh Lanc. Life (1857) 111 Through th' ginnel, an' up th' steps.
snicket ('snIkIt). north. dial. A narrow passage between houses, an alley-way.So here we have, as far as I can see, exact synonyms to set beside furze and gorse.1898 B. Kirkby Lakeland Words 136 Snicket, a narrow passage between buildings. 1947 I. Brown Say the Word 65 We have vennels, gunnels, and snickets in our northern towns. 1957 R. Hoggart Uses of Literacy i. ii. 52 Street after regular street of shoddily uniform houses intersected by a dark pattern of ginnels and snickets (alleyways) and courts. 1968 B. Hines Kestrel for Knave 31 He cut down a snicket between two houses, out into the fields. 1981 J. Stubbs Ironmaster xx. 276 We are cramming poor people into ginnels and snickets and foetid courts.
Incidentally, I apologize for the disappearance of recent entries and comments between yesterday evening and this afternoon; it was the result of a server change by my hosting service. Thanks to Songdog's dependable expertise and selfless efforts on this blog's behalf, everything has been restored, with the minor glitch that the restored comments are all dated "October 17, 2003 01:38 PM."
The mail section of the latest New Yorker is entirely taken up with responses to the recent Erofeyev article on mat. I will reproduce here what is, hands down, the best letter-to-the-editor I have ever read (from a Languagehat standpoint, that is). Warning: it is chock-full of both filthy language and Indo-European reconstructions!
Erofeyev, in his essay on mat, relies in some cases on folk etymologies that have been called into question by academic scholarship. For example, he connects yebat' ("to fuck") and bit' ("to beat"). But the root of yebat' is *yebh-, with cognates in Sanskrit yábhati ("he fucks") and probably Greek oipho ("I fuck"). The verb bit' ("to beat, hit, strike") and its derivatives, in contrast, are ultimately traced back to *bheiH-, and can be compared with the Avestan biiente ("they fight, beat"), the Old Irish -bith ("was struck"), and the German das Beil ("hatchet"). Likewise, the Russian word pizda ("cunt") is probably related not to pisat' ("to piss") but to bzdet' ("to fart"), both linked to earlier *pezd- ("to break wind") and cognate with Greek bdéô (from earlier bzdéô) and Latin pêdô, as suggested in Pokorny's authoritative etymological dictionary. Although the word mat is, as Erofeyev notes, commonly associated with Russian mat' ("mother") because of the ubiquitous yob tvoyu mat' ("fuck you," lit. "fucked your mother"), there is no unequivocal (or even convincing) etymology for this word. Folk etymologies have cultural resonance, of course. But mat is, in fact, serious business.Indo-European, represent! If I'd known the New Yorker would one day publish a letter like this, I might have stuck it out and gotten the PhD.
Michael S. Flier
Professor of Ukrainian Philology
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.
A couple of quibbles: there should be an asterisk before the form bzdéô (unless they have a source unknown to me attesting the form), and I don't grasp the subtle semantics involved in differentiating "to fart" and "to break wind." But never mind that. Bravo Prof. Flier, bravo The New Yorker!
The knowledgeable commentator who goes by the sobriquet Baloney has linked to an excellent essay On Translation by James Atlas, originally published in 1973 in the first issue of Poetry Nation (the entire run of which is online, along with a couple of dozen other magazines, at the amazing new poetry magazines archive). I'll give a couple of excerpts to whet your appetite and send you off to read the whole thing. On the great poet Yves Bonnefoy (who introduced me to the glories of twentieth-century French poetry, and whose gorgeously opaque off-classical poems I would never dare try to translate):
This [a text in which his native language appears foreign to the English reader] is what all translation should strive to accomplish: the creation of a language which mimes the character of the original, even as it invents linguistic modalities unavailable to that language in its common use and structure. I recently heard a reading by Yves Bonnefoy where he provided his own translations, insisting that no English translator, however competent in French, could reproduce either the cadence or intent of the poems. Bonnefoy’s command of English was unexceptional, and his accent rendered the English versions incomprehensible at times, but what could be heard through the translations was a radical diction that owed little to either language. Because the poem Bonnefoy devised wasn’t obligated to be plausible in English, it was released from those restraints which impose themselves on such a developed language, and so could become a new text, situated somewhere between English and French.
And on two short, "untranslatable" poems (I've corrected a couple of scanning errors in the Celan):
Here, too, there are two reciprocal terms: the tendency to compose a work in such a way that no translation is possible, the motivation being to reveal those properties in language which are irreducible, and have no other name. This has been the situation with poets like Celan and Ungaretti, whose lives in our disastrous epoch led them to the liminal, exasperated language evident in their work, untranslatable because their experience itself remains untranslatable, and has to be related in a half-articulate language. To cite two simple examples, Ungaretti’s famous Mattina, reads:M’illumino
d’immensoand Celan’s Einmal:
Eins und Unendlich,
vernichtet,
ichten.Ingeborg Bachmann, in Enzensberger’s Museum, has translated Ungaretti’s poem as ‘Ich erleuchte mich/ durch Unermessliches’, which carries over the shape of the original, even if the cadence and music are lost; Patrick Creagh, who translated the Penguin edition, quoted the poem in his introduction, but only to demonstrate its ‘untranslatable’ nature. In Celan’s case, Michael Hamburger has given a sensitive account of how he came to translate, with Celan’s own intervention ‘ichten’ as ‘ied’; Hamburger’s version reads:
One and infinite,
annihilated,
ied.Joachim Neugroschel, Celan’s American translator, rendered this as ‘dieing,/ were I’ing’. Both pose adequate solutions, articulating the word within a word that Celan invented, where the ‘I’ serves as a verb. But whether or not these two fragments can be reconstructed in English, their essence lies in the rhyme, which a translation can only replace or imitate; embedded in their own grammar, these poems, like exiles in a remote land, suffer when forced to live in some other language.
An exhibit at the Library of Congress examines
the vibrant, incredibly moving human exchanges that took place between the priests of the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska and Native Alaskans, during the years 1794 to about 1915. These remarkable priests, intrepid heroes such as the Russian "giant" Ioann Veniaminov and the Creole Iakov Netsvetov, were not merely essential to the success of the colony established by the Russian American Company in 1784, they were also the agents through which much of the culture and languages of Native Alaskans were preserved. Only in recent years has the magnitude of their achievement been recognized—and most appropriately during this 200th anniversary of the founding of the first Orthodox mission in North America in 1794.This is a very interesting topic in general; what I am focusing on here is the page Preserving Native Languages, which points out:
Among the most enduring legacies of Russian America are the works written and published in Native Alaskan languages: translations of Christian texts, dictionaries of Native words, grammars, primers, and prayer books... Soon after the founding of Russian America, attempts were made to learn Native languages. As early as 1805 Nikolai Resanov [sic—should be Rezanov; he had a famous love affair in San Francisco] of the Russian American Company compiled a dictionary of some 1200 words in six Native Alaskan languages. The greatest proponent of multilingualism was Father Ioann Veniaminov. He created an alphabet for the Aleut language, and, with the help of the Aleut Toien (Chief) Ivan Pan'kov, wrote and published in 1834 an Aleut catechism, the first book published in an Alaskan Native language.There are links to images of pamphlets, books, and even (for some reason) an 1847 performance evaluation of Innokentii Shaiashnikov (I only wish it were better reproduced so that I could try to read it). Many thanks to the indefatigable plep for posting this.As Bishop Innokentii, Veniaminov encouraged the study of Tlingit and a variety of Aleut-Eskimo dialects such as Atkan and Central Yup'ik, most successfully through his Creole protege, the priest Iakov Netsvetov. The latter, in turn, trained other Native and Creole priests such as Innokentii Shaiashnikov and Lavrentii Salamatov, who continued his work well into the American period.
Yet another book I'll have to read. Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber has a delightful review of what sounds like a delightful book, Hazel K. Bell’s Indexers and Indexes in Fact and Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2001). Henry says:
An index, if it’s done properly, is an art form in itself. Index entries may range from terse one-liners, which tell a story in a few words, to great wobbling extravagances of quasi-related incongruities and oddities, piled untidily on one another like Pelion upon Ossa. And Bell’s book has them all. Brief nuggets of information (from the index to Sir Thomas Browne’s work comes the irrestistible ‘cabbage, Cato’s chief diet’). Indexes composed by the author to savage his enemies. Indexes composed by enemies of the author in order to denigrate and belittle the author and his work. Index as forms of intellectual slash and burn. As forms of art. Index items which are miniature novels in themselves. Und so weiter.
I can't resist quoting one of his examples; there are more, and don't miss the comment thread!
From the index of de Quincey’s Collected Writings(Via Mildly Malevolent.)Coffee, atrocious in England.
Cookery, English, the rudest of barbarous devices.
Dogs in Greece, a nuisance.
Leibnitz, died partly from fear of not being murdered.
Muffins, eating, a cause of suicide.
Music, English obtuseness to good.
Rhinoceros, first sale of a
Servants, England the paradise of household
Spitting, the art of
Toothache, that terrific curse.
For years I've lugged around the massive, reassuring bulk of Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar, occasionally looking up the odd hieroglyph but never getting serious about the language. I think the main reason is my discomfort at not knowing how to pronounce the words; Egyptological practise is to insert e when a vowel is called for (except next to the consonants corresponding to Arabic alif and 'ayin, when a is used), but this is pure convention, and we have no idea how the words actually sounded. (It's as if we wrote English without vowels, and later generations read this sentence "Tese se fe we werete negeleshe...")
But my resistance has been overcome. The other day at the Strand I saw a copy of How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Step-By-Step Guide to Teach Yourself by Mark Collier and Bill Manley and was smitten. Compact, attractively produced, with quite a few photographs of texts alongside the typeset ones, it makes you want to pick it up and start studying. And that's just what I did.
However, I'm still bothered by the pronunciation problem. I know it's basically insoluble, but I've found some intriguing information here, and if anybody out there can recommend useful reading on the topic, or indeed on anything having to do with the Egyptian language (anything recent and rigorous, I mean—I'm not interested in the thoroughly outmoded work of E.A. Wallis Budge), I will be most grateful.
Andrew Krug has very kindly sent me a link to the Radio Free Europe North Caucasus languages service, which has archived RealAudio broadcasts in Chechen, Circassian, and Avar (not to mention Russian). I'm listening to the Circassian now; the only thing I recognize is "Adyghe Respublika" (adyghe being the self-designation for the languages called by foreigners Adyge and Kabardian/Circassian), but it's fascinating to hear—it doesn't sound anything like I had imagined.
Kabardian is famous for allegedly having only one vowel, but as this site says:
One striking feature of NWC [North-West Caucasian] is that the languages are very rich in consonants and very poor in vowels. In fact it is sometimes said that Kabardian has "only one vowel". This is not actually true, but the peculiar phonology of the NWC languages makes it to some degree justifiable.
Quislibet has rendered into Latin a fragment of a currently popular song whose title line is rendered by Q as "domina mea exstat a tergo!" (My mistress stands out behind!). And, as I would have hoped, his efforts have been followed up by Zach Powell in Greek. (Via MetaFilter.)
Incidentally, all this reminds me of a book I saw in the Strand and almost bought: Global Pop, Local Language, edited by Harris M. Berger and Michael Thomas Carroll, which "examines how performers and audiences from a wide range of cultures deal with the issue of language choice and dialect in popular music." But it doesn't have a single essay on rap in classical languages.
I registered a complaint about this phenomenon when I came across it in a translation of a wonderful book called Ali and Nino; now I find it again in a translation of Sorstalanság (Fateless) by Imre Kertész (as quoted in the NYRB review by István Deák):
I made the surprising discovery that Jews don't have just one language, namely Hebrew, as I had believed. I slowly gathered that their question was "Reds di jiddis, reds di jiddis, reds di jiddis?" [Do you speak Yiddish?] The boys and I answered "Nein."(The protagonist is a 14-year-old boy who, like the author, has just arrived in Auschwitz as a totally assimilated Hungarian Jew and discovered how alien he is to his fellow inmates.) In Hungarian, j is pronounced like English y and s is pronounced like English sh, so a Hungarian would read the repeated phrase as /redsh di yiddish/. An English speaker, however, would read it as /reds di jiddis/, although context would provide a clue that the mysterious "jiddis" was actually Yiddish. My question is, why on earth would a translator not render such things in a way that makes sense to the target audience?
Interestingly, later in the review the following passage occurs:
They reject his attempts to curry favor because he speaks no Yiddish: "'Di bist nisht ka Yid, d'bist a sheygets' [You are not a Jew, you are a goy]... That was a rather strange feeling, because, after all, I was among Jews in a concentration camp."When I read this, I was struck by the very different transliteration; if it were rendered along the lines of the first quote, the Yiddish would read "Di biszt nist ka jid, d'biszt a sejgec." Then I looked at the footnote and found:
Because the translators omitted the Yiddish quote from the English version, I use here the quote in the original Hungarian as it might appear in an English-language text.[Emphasis added.] So Deák, a Hungarian, has the sense to retransliterate for English-speakers; why don't the translators of the book, Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson? Do any of you translators out there have thoughts on this?
Alaric Radosh is studying Chinese; besides the Chinese blog he uses to practice (brave man!), he's started an English one in which he discusses techniques of language learning that have worked for him. I recommend it to anyone trying to learn a foreign language. (Via Brainysmurf.)
One remark in his very first post, "Suggestions for New Bloggers in Chinese as a Foreign Language," astonished me: "Don't worry too much about making mistakes in your Chinese posts. Your Chinese readers will enjoy pointing them out to you and 'helping' you with corrections." What I would have given to have native speakers correct me when I was trying to learn Mandarin in Taiwan! But nobody would; it was all "You speak our language so well!" I guess there's not so much concern over saving your face when it's a long-distance blog relationship. Lucky Alaric.
The NY Times Sunday Book Review includes a William F. Buckley review of Simon Winchester's new book about the OED, The Meaning of Everything. It's worth reading both for the tidbits (Cambridge turned the dictionary down—"the largest wrong decision in publishing history") and Buckley's prose (pleasant if hardly vigorous), but I'm citing it here for James Murray's letter of application to the British Museum Library, which had turned him down ten years before the Philological Society of London began looking for a dictionary editor in 1875:
I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favourite pursuit during the whole of my life, and I possess a general acquaintance with the languages & literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes—not indeed to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that I possess that general lexical & structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge only a matter of a little application. With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a lesser degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal, & various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, German, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phenician to the point where it is left by Genesius.Genesius (the name of a tenth-century Byzantine historian) is a mistake for Gesenius; doubtless that is why Murray didn't get the job. Well, that or his lack of a college degree. At any rate, it all turned out well in the end.
Here's the introduction to a long and mesmerizing poem by Robert Kelly, written ten years ago as "preliminary meditations towards the Osnabrueck conference on language and identity":
Given:
When he saw the shape of the cloud
over the monastery dining hall
a foreign word came quickly [ko.mong]
to his nearby mind,O yes
it is the words
who are the aliens
oyez oyez
they have lived here with us
nearer than mitochondria
they moved into our brains and altered
our minds over millennia
Harappa, oyez, Sumeria.
Every language
is a foreign language,
an invasion
from outside of space.
The poem is full of lines I couldn't resist reading out loud: "Examine, traveler, and sit still"; "philology alone is good for you"; "wild carrots, clover, ragweed, poetry"; "and you call this a Protestant?" I don't know what it all adds up to, but then neither does Kelly:
I had a themeBut it's about language as much as anything, and I enjoyed it and hope you will too.
but lost it in Los Angeles
when a pregnant lady with a lisp
looked me in the eye
I came to it via a link at Mark Woods' invaluable wood s lot, which has recently celebrated its third blogaversary and which—for one day only!—is renamed ::: woods' lot ::: in response to an irritable request for greater specificity by Eliot Gelwan of Follow Me Here, who complains about Mark's self-effacing posting habits and his links to "the solipsism, self-indulgence, and preciousness in some of the postmodern discourse which Mark favors" but can't stay away, any more than the rest of us. (Today, for example, besides a couple of Kelly links he features a Walter Benjamin quote with illustrative picture, an anti–Columbus Day story from Counterpunch, the story of "Howl", an essay by Michael Cronin on "the position of translation in the context of the relationship between technology and culture," a paper by Reuven Tsur called "Aspects of Cognitive Poetics," and much else, beginning and ending with wonderful poems by Wallace Stevens. If you haven't already bookmarked it, now's the time.) Many more anniversaries and obscurities, Mark!
Oh, and I suspect "ko mong" is Vietnamese but don't have the appropriate dictionaries with me at work, so if anyone knows what it means please say so.
Addendum. Doesn't appear to be Vietnamese; if it were, of course, it would be co-mong, but there doesn't seem to be such a word with any of the possible variants of o. (There is a Mong-Co 'Mongolia,' but that's not much help.)
Yes, I go on and on and on about it (and I'm not even including my bouts of Safire-bashing), but dammit, it's a scandal that the Newspaper of Record is so smugly ignorant about language. They wouldn't permit a news story to leave the impression that protons and neutrons are pretty much the same thing, but look at these excerpts from today's story "Mongolians and Koreans: Twins With Minimal Sibling Rivalry" by James Brooke (I've put the more idiotic bits in bold):
Mongolians and Koreans are ethnically related peoples cut off by centuries of history. In the 13th century, Mongolians swept across China and down the Korean peninsula, and were on the brink of invading Japan until several naval disasters changed their minds.Mongolia's occupation of Korea left linguistic affinities, shared genes and wild horse herds, known to this day as Mongolians, on the South Korean island of Cheju, the staging base for the frustrated invasion of Japan.... On an ethnic level, Koreans and Mongolians are like fraternal twins.
Kim Sung Chul, a South Korean pastor who has been here three years, said, "We look the same; our skin is the same; our grammar structure is the same."...So what have we learned? Mongolians and Koreans are "like fraternal twins," and their languages are so closely related it takes hardly any work to learn one if you know the other, sort of like Spanish and Portuguese. All of which is balderdash. The ethnic stuff presumably means that the Mongols interjected a few genes into the Korean pool during their stay, which is doubtless true but basically meaningless—they did the same everywhere they went, as do all conquering armies, without substantially affecting the local ethnicity. And the language stuff means that some people consider Korean part of the Altaic language family. Ethnologue is conservative (as am I), and includes only Mongolian, Tungusic, and Turkic languages in Altaic; it's possible that Korean is related (which would of course have nothing to do with "Mongolia's occupation of Korea"), but as Andrew Dalby puts it, "If so, it must have separated from the remainder of the family many thousands of years ago"—which means that any obvious traces have long been effaced, and it's no easier for a Korean to learn Mongolian than, say, Chinese. Here, I'll put the numbers from one to ten side by side and you tell me if they look related."After two years, Koreans can speak Mongolian," said Kim Wan Jin, a translator who is one of the roughly 1,000 Koreans who have moved here in the last five years. "But it is even easier for Mongolian people to learn Korean."
However, this investigation did lead me to one of the best 404 pages I've ever seen; it starts "404 Вам будет удача" [you will have good luck/fortune] and goes on (in Russian)
This page is good luck. The good luck has gone around the whole world. Karl Rodriguez [Карл Родригес] put http://sundukov.narod.ru/ышьздуюреьд instead of http://sundukov.narod.ru/simple.html into the address bar of his browser and wound up here. Petya Solomkin got the name of a site that had been closed down, and he too wound up at this page. Afterwards they all had good luck. It won't pass you by either.So I'm sharing it with you all!If you got to the Happiness Page from a Yandex link, share this joy with ten friends.
...Except that I just double-checked the 404 link and discovered it's entirely different now: fairly normal, except that it ends И помните: вы это не читали. [And remember: you didn't read this.] I guess they have a number of different pages for you to hit upon. If you read Russian, go there and see what you get!
Stephen Dilks provides insight into Beckett's career and relationship with Joyce through a detailed exagmination of this short passage from Finnegans Wake:
...the farther back we manage to wiggle the more we need the loan of a lens to see as much as the hen saw. Tip. You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? You says: It is a puling sample jungle of woods. You most shouts out: Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means. Gee up, girly! The quad gospellers may own the targum but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne.(Via wood s lot.)
A Blogalization translation of an interview with Lia Wyler, the Brazilian translator of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; she talks about the book and about translating generally.
I try to use words from all over Brazil, which at first may not seem to make sense, but if you look more closely, you'll see that there's a certain logic to it. For example, Hermione's cat is called Bichento, a word that seems invented but which in fact is found in the dictionary. In Ceara, it's a word signifying a person with crooked, bowed legs. In the original, the name of the cat is Crookshanks, which means, literally, "crooked legs." Another reason I chose this name was that it has a sound similar to bichano, a term used to refer to cats here in Brazil. So for me, calling Hermione's cat Bichento seemed like the perfect solution, but another translator might have arrived at a completely different, and no less valid, solution.(Via Transblawg.)
A useful Moscow Times article by Michelle Berdy explaining how Russians describe various types of cooking and food (an area in which dictionaries are notoriously lax). Via Taccuino di traduzione.
It seems sleep improves our ability to learn words (and presumably other things). An article in Science Daily says:
Scientists at the University of Chicago have demonstrated that sleeping has an important and previously unrecognized impact on improving people's ability to learn language.
Researchers find that ability of students to retain knowledge about words is improved by sleep, even when the students seemed to forget some of what they learned during the day before the next night's sleep. This paper, "Consolidation During Sleep of Perceptual Learning of Spoken Language," is being published in the Thursday, Oct. 9 issue of the journal Nature. The paper was prepared by researcher Kimberly Fenn, Howard Nusbaum, Professor of Psychology, and Daniel Margoliash, Professor in Organismal Biology and Anatomy.(Via mirabilis.ca.)"Sleep has at least two separate effects on learning," the authors write. "Sleep consolidates memories, protecting them against subsequent interference or decay. Sleep also appears to 'recover' or restore memories." [...]
Although the study dealt specifically with word learning, the findings may be relevant to other learning, Nusbaum said. "We have known that people learn better if they learn smaller bits of information over a period of days rather than all at once. This research could show how sleep helps us retain what we learn."
The Prague Post has an article by Courtney Powell featuring five literary translators on the art of turning written Czech into readable English. Robert Wechsler on working with an author: "Sometimes authors are pains in the ass; sometimes they're extremely helpful; sometimes they couldn't care less. Generally, I don't think an author's personality or feelings about his work are all that important to translating it. ... Often it's best to disregard the author's personality, because his writing is the best part of him." (Via Blogo Slovo.)
I'm not a great fan of literary criticism; I don't oppose it in theory, but I consider it automatically subsidiary to actual literature (which of course places me firmly in the reactionary camp, sorry about that), and in general I'd rather be reading actual literature. I have less than no interest in criticism that purports to show that a poem gives aid and comfort to colonialist patriarchy or the like. However, I have a weakness for criticism that addresses and illuminates the working materials of literature: in the case of poetry, rhyme, meter, length of lines, enjambment, and the other tools in the poet's kit. Barry Scherr has written just such an article, "False Starts: A Note on Brodsky's Poetics" in Toronto Slavic Quarterly No. 5. Brodsky is quoted only in Russian, but I think the analysis is sufficiently interesting that even if you don't know Russian you may find it worth reading. An excerpt:
The link between rhythmic breaks and the endings of poems turns out to be a special case within a larger phenomenon, which was first described by Barbara Herrnstein Smith in her now classic study, Poetic Closure. She noted that repetition is an "anti-closural" force; thus the rhymed couplet that appears at the end of the English sonnet helps achieve a sense of closure in significant degree by its sharp distinction from the series of quatrains that precedes it. Beginning, like Kholshevnikov, with a study of stanzaic structure, she goes on to examine numerous features that help impart a sense of closure - thematic, structural, and formal. Her point is not just that poets can and do employ a wide variety of devices to create closure, but that the failure to establish that sense leaves a poem unresolved and ultimately less successful.(Via PF.)For all the influence of her book, and despite the almost parallel appearance of Kholshevnikov's article, studies of closure have been far less common in the Russian tradition than they have in the West. Not surprisingly, therefore, Western scholars have contributed most to the recent examination of closure in Russian poetry. Ian Lilly, in a study devoted to two-quatrain lyric verse from the Russian, German and English traditions, has analyzed the dual role of the second stanza in these short works. As in longer poems, the second quatrain needs to establish the repetition that distinguishes stanzaic verse. However, it is also the final stanza and therefore at the same time has to create a sense of closure, a task that it carries out through the methods of imbalance and contrast.
It had never occurred to me to wonder how Braille worked in Chinese, but now I know:
Chinese braille is based on a phonetic representation of the sounds of the language. There are no braille signs for individual Chinese inkprint characters, only for sounds.... As with all other braille codes, Chinese braille is read from left to right - whatever the direction of any inkprint original.There are tables of signs and a couple of examples with characters for comparison. (Via Brainysmurf.)As a rule, in the inkprint one syllable is represented by one character. The same syllable in braille is written with one, two or three signs. There are three categories of these braille signs.
* initials: the consonants that are only found at the beginning of a syllable.
* finals: vowels (n, ng and r at the end of a syllable are not really consonants)
* tones: signs that indicate the tone of the word
Dirk Elzinga is looking for published analyses of the choice between comparatives and superlatives using -er and -est and those using more and most:
It has been stated that the choice is based on the prosody of the adjective, such that adjective bases which fit within a single trochaic foot are more likely to show morphological comparatives and superlatives, while adjectives which do not fit within that template will show syntactic comparatives and superlatives. Can anyone point me to relevant literature? I have thus far only been able to find informal or "in passing" references to the prosodic nature of adjective inflection in English, and I would appreciate being able to look at a fuller treatment of the problem.If anyone knows, please inform Rosanne (from whom I got this) as well; she's interested in these matters.
Incidentally, Elzinga gives synthetic forms for obtuse ("obtuse; more obtuse, most obtuse"), whereas Merriam-Webster's Collegiate gives obtuser, -est; I find my linguistic intuition is no help here.
Alex(ei) at The Russian Dilettante has an interesting question:
...the names of a few major Russian authors are clearly non-Russian in origin, so that transliterating them from Russian into English mechanically, according to the standard rules (assuming their existence), does not seem the best method. Should we write Gertsen or Hertzen; Fet or Foeth; Khodasevich or Chodasiewicz; Blok or Bloch; Mandelshtam or Mandelstam; Shvarts or Schwartz?I'll add Gippius or Hippius, Veller or Weller, Dombrovski or Dabrowski (which should have an ogonek on the a to make it nasal), and Okudzhava or Okujava. Personally, I use the Russianized forms (though I sometimes slip and write Mandelstam), but I welcome all ideas on the subject.
And while we're on Russian names, let me mention the hypothesis that Putin is a byform of the ancient aristocratic name Putyatin of the Tver district (like Pnin of Repnin); in the words of Pravda, "this means that Vladimir Putin is related to nearly all the royal families of Europe."
It's Lorine Niedecker day over at wood s lot, with a couple of poems and some good links, including one that explained something I hadn't understood. This article by Jim Higgins is about "Lorine Niedecker: A Centenary Celebration," a three-day program of panel discussions, readings, tours and performances that begins Thursday in Milwaukee:
Dozens of writers, scholars and presenters will join the 100-plus registered participants. Special guests include Cid Corman, a poet, publisher and longtime Niedecker friend; Michael Ondaatje, a novelist ("The English Patient"), poet and filmmaker; and Anne Waldman, a popular poet and performer who's associated with both the Beats and the New York School poets.But it starts off with a wonderful little Niedecker poem called "Poet's Work":
GrandfatherIt then says, "That word 'condensery' - a place where condensed or evaporated milk is made - suggests both Niedecker's Wisconsin home and her process of creating through concision." And here I vaguely supposed she had made it up! I should have known better; she's the most concrete of poets, not given to flights of lexical fancy. Now, of course, the poem makes more sense: "layoff" was a very real threat at a Wisconsin condensery. And if you're curious as to what a condensery looks like, here's a Carnation Condensery c1925.
advised me:
Learn a tradeI learned
to sit at desk
and condenseNo layoff
from this
condensery
Addendum. The Electronic Poetry Center has put online a nice selection of Niedecker's poems. (Again via wood s lot.)
William Z. Shetter, a "retired university professor of foreign language and linguistics" and author of Dutch: An Essential Grammar, has been adding two "mini-essays" about language per month [thanks, Anatoly!] to his site since Oct. 1, 1998, ranging from English grammar to grammatical devices in many languages to languages in history and many other topics. His essay on Chinese Turkestan, for example, starts with a reminder that there's more to Asia than you might think, goes on to describe the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China (formerly known as East Turkestan), lists the three main language families of the area (Sinitic, Tibeto-Burman, and Turkic), focuses in on Uyghur (the main Turkic language), and delves into the history (recapping the discovery of Tokharian). Lots of interesting material, and I'm impressed that he's been keeping it up for five years!
(Via the Enigmatic Mermaid, who also has a post about the Brazilian singer/composer Chico Buarque's new novel Budapeste, in the Merm's words "an excellent novel whose backbone is the fascination with a foreign language. This protagonist will go any lengths to learn it." I can only hope it gets translated soon! The only other reference I've found to it in English is at Skloog's Bloogs, where you can see photos of the book and the comment "Maybe just because I'm deep into reading Budapest from Chico Buarque... That book is SO great...")
Another day, another peculiar Times lead. Today it's a story by Neil MacFarquhar on Arab reaction to the bombing of Syria that begins: "Behind a seemingly calm facade, with Damascus toothless to respond militarily to the deepest Israeli air raid in Syria in three decades, the Arab world was reeling..." Surely "toothless" cannot be used in this way? Syria is toothless, fine; Syria is helpless to respond, fine; but "toothless to"? Again, I welcome the response of Languagehat readers.
In the Spring 1999 issue of the SEEFA Journal (now Folklorica), Halina Weiss has an article on the Russian children's taunting verse form known as draznilka. Some excerpts:
The draznilka is a short, humorous verse used by children to tease, taunt and play pranks on other children (and only rarely on adults). The origins of the draznilka are rooted in adult folklore—in the ancient tradition of nicknames and in traditional taunting rhymes and songs used in wedding ceremonies... Pavel Shein wrote that children's humorous verse (he called it pribautka) constituted the most authentic examples of children's folklore, since the child and not the adult was the creator and performer. Shein's description of the draznilka is still useful today:[The draznilka is] a pribautka, which mischievous small children use to poke fun at each other and at adults, making fun of their names, ... their station and ... their physical shortcomings, as well as their non-Russian origins and so on, often without even having any reason, just for the love of word-play.
Most Russian collections of the draznilka present a special problem. They rely heavily on early sources from the nineteenth century, which means that they draw almost exclusively on material collected from villages and the provinces. Soviet collections also tend to favor traditional sources of folklore, the village and provincial towns, and underrepresent large urban centers. Moreover, the draznilka created pedagogical and philosophical problems for Soviet scholars; the crude language and obvious delight children took in inflicting pain on their chosen victims seemed to point to the amoral nature of children. Vinogradov, addressing this very issue in his writing, pointed out that children's taunts were likely to be more direct and more painful because young children do not use irony to attenuate the attack and because children are more prone than adults to use crude language. Nevertheless, he insisted on unflinching honesty and faithful recording of children's behavior in their natural environment; he also was against the elision of scatological references and obscenities from children's speech and the use of dots to replace phrases or ideas offensive to adults...There are many examples, often with cultural contexts that add a great deal.The draznilka can cover a rather wide range of aggressive behavior: from mild, friendly ribbing to "ritualized taunts" between competing groups of children (similar to the African-American "dozens") to grievous insults that serve as a prelude to physical violence. Teasing, or a "license to joke," is based on a "joking relationship" between two individuals (or groups); it can be interpreted as a symbolic inversion of a real message. A teasing draznilka tends to bridge the distance between two players and to emphasize equality between them. A teasing draznilka directed at two friends acknowledges the strong bond between them and can be interpreted as a positive statement:
Boba s Kokoi,
Koka c Boboi—
parni udalye:
Boba—kuritsa slepaia,
Koka—miska supovaia,
Boba—angel, Boba—bog
i izodrannyi sapog.Boba and Koka
Koka and Boba
are brave lads.
Boba is blind as a bat,
Koka is like a soup bowl,
Boba is like an angel, Boba is like God
and a worn out boot....The draznilka has a strong rhythmic structure and regular beats. Although many collectors refer to the draznilka as a ditty (pesenka), Vinogradov describes it as "choral poetry". He points out that children discriminate between chanted texts that rely on precise meter and rhythm, such as counting rhymes, and texts that are executed in a sing-song, such as the draznilka. It is not unusual to find irregularities in the rhythm and meter of the draznilka that would not be tolerated in counting-out rhymes. However a child singing or reciting a draznilka in a sing-song will readily make up for missing beats by adding a syllable or lengthening a vowel. Group performance—chanting in unison—is an important component of taunts, as are special gestures, rhythmic movements and the skipping or hopping that frequently accompany the draznilka.
And finally, as has been demonstrated, the draznilka cannot exist without rhyme. Rhyme binds together absurd combinations and "underscores the unreal, made-up and ludicrous [shutovskogo] elements in the text." In addition to playing a crucial role in the structure of the draznilka, rhyme acts both as a conservative force, and as a dynamic device, the very feature that allows a child to adapt a shop-worn expression to a particular situation within formulaic constraints. The efficacy of an adult joke depends on delivery and timing. In the draznilka, rhyme plays a similar role; it is what makes a draznilka work. "Zhid parkhatyi" (lousy Jew) is a common insult, but it takes a rhyme to turn it into a draznilka: "Zhyd parkhatyi/Nomer piatyi," which is realized here as a rhymed couplet. An acquaintance, a redhead, remembers the following taunt as the one that caused her the most pain: "Ryzhaia psina, bez benzina!" (Red-head dog/bitch, without gasoline). She could understand the first part, but "why 'bez benzina'?" she asked plaintively. Indeed, her tormentor effectively used the rhyme to bring together two semantically unrelated phrases. The unexpected combination and the rhyme heightened both the humor and the derision and increased the pain.
Incidentally, in googling "Halina Weiss" I discovered a book (in which she has an article) that looks to be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Russian culture: The Russian Context: The Culture behind the Language, from Slavica. From the Foreword by Barry Scherr:
.... the ability to comprehend what one reads or hears requires a knowledge not just of the language, but of cultural referents called forth by various words and phrases [images, and sounds]. The 'Russian context' ... is infinitely rich and varied; in a way it may be even more difficult to become 'fluent' in a language's context than in the language itself, but this volume will provide readers with an excellent start.There are articles on poetry, prose, children's literature, proverbs, Theater in Language, Music and Dance, Art and the Language of Russian Culture, Popular Entertainment, Geography, Government and Language, and Science as Language, as well as various appendices, including one on Finding Russian Content on the Internet. (Via Plep.)
The US team has been knocked out of the World Cup by Germany, which is a shame but not within the purview of Languagehat. The lead of the NY Times story by Jere Longman, however, is:
There will be no repeat title for the United States in the Women's World Cup, no tense championship match, no engaging penalty-kick shootout, no additional validating moment for the women's sports movement that has billowed over the past three decades.Now, it's true that one definition of "billow" is 'to surge,' but this usage doesn't work for me or the people I just tried it on here in my weekend retreat. Does it work for anybody out there, or should Ms Longman have written "surged" or "exploded" or "shot up like a startled grouse" or the like?
Transblawg provides follow-ups on a couple of stories mentioned earlier here on Languagehat. In July, I described Peter Griffin's struggles to save his bilingual edition of the Catalan novel Tocats pel foc (Touched by Fire) by Manuel de Pedrolo from being pulped; I am happy to report that he has ransomed 490 copies and is selling them at half price. And the silly business of "how many euro?" has been much ameliorated by an updated EU style guide: "Always use figures with units of measurement denoted by symbols or abbreviations: - EUR 50 or fifty euros." Nice to be able to pass on some good news.
Archipelago magazine has published one of the best things I've seen online in some time, An Leabhar Mòr: The Great Book of Gaelic. To quote the Introduction by Malcolm Maclean:
One of our planet’s 6,500 languages becomes extinct every two weeks and the total number of languages is likely to halve in the coming century. Language death is now of global significance and sustaining language diversity will be one of the paramount cultural challenges of the 21st century. If more artists recognise this acceleration in language death as an appropriate subject for literature, drama, music, visual art and as yet uncategorised artforms, then the issue will come alive in the minds of the general public. The Leabhar Mòr is a modest, but significant and optimistic, step in that direction.
At the first meeting of the full editorial team at the Glasgow home of MP Brian Wilson in June 1999, the selection process for both the poets and the artists was hammered out. The literary panel aimed to select 25 Scottish and 25 Irish poets, and to invite them to provide one poem of their own and to nominate one other, giving – in all – 100 poems. Following extensive discussion, however, it was finally decided that 15 Scots and 15 Irish poets would each provide one poem of their own and nominate two others, giving a total of 90 poems. The remaining ten poems were nominated by other writers with an intimate knowledge of Gaelic poetry. They were all asked to nominate their preferred translation.You can see a list of the poems (with thumbnails of the art) here. The main page features a quote from Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean), whose Reothairt is contraigh: taghadh de dhain 1932-72 (Spring tide and neap tide: selected poems 1932-72) introduced me to the glories of Scots Gaelic poetry:Consequently, the Leabhar Mòr is not a conventional anthology, with all the gravitas that that implies, but a collection of favourite poems that inevitably omits some important poets. The Leabhar Mòr makes no pretence of being comprehensive or balanced, but offers a poet’s and artist’s insight into Gaelic poetry, and so may be more human, more inclusive and more unpredictable. Each poet is represented once and the 100 poems come from almost every century between the 6th and 21st. An impossible feat for most other European languages, including English.
The visual artists were selected on the basis of 50 percent by nomination and 50 percent by open submission. Key individuals with a knowledge of the visual arts and of the Gaelic communities were asked to propose artists on the understanding that at least two of their nominations would be invited to contribute. Advertisements placed in the arts and Gaelic press in both countries invited open-entry submissions from artists interested in the project. The difficult task of selecting the final 100 artists took place in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin and in a hotel ballroom in the Western Isles in early 2001. The consistently high quality of the finished artwork confirms the good judgment of our Scots and Irish visual arts panels.
an fhéile(Via wood s lot.)
Nach do reub an cuan,
Nach do mhill mìle bliadhna;
Buaidh a’ Ghàidheil buan.… the humanity
That the sea did not tear,
That a thousand years did not spoil:
The quality of the Gael permanent.
Jonathon Delacour has figured out what's going on with the Sino-Japanese variant character he couldn't find or display, and he shares his findings in his latest post. I would have made it an addendum to my earlier post on the subect, but I liked this quote so much I decided to give it its own entry: "I was able to find Kafu’s boku on my Windows PC with the aid of the Mojikyo Character Map because the Mojikyo Institute regards Chinese characters as 'a very important cultural asset of the human race' and—like Apple—is committed to making that wonderful variety of characters widely available." I thoroughly agree about the cultural importance of characters, which is why I'm so torn about the issue of romanizing Chinese; from a practical point of view the arguments for it are unassailable, but there will be a real cultural loss, even though the characters will still be there for those who wish to devote the necessary years to learning them. Sometimes I feel like a one-man culture war.
Addendum. OK, ignore my tossed-off, oversimplified, and unduly provocative formulation and go straight to Eric Lien's detailed analysis of the problems and possibilities of simplified spelling systems for Chinese. (Romanization is probably not a good idea.) As always, I'm grateful to have readers who have given more thought to a subject than I have.
Further addendum. Jim of UJG has been following up on the topic, with a post on Chinese and another on Hmong. The first quotes the marvelously named Wi-vun Taiffalo Chiung's "Old Taiwanese saying" Hanji na thak e-bat chhui-chhiu to phah si-kat ('You cannot understand all the Han characters even if you studied until you could tie your beard into a knot'); googling Taiffalo led me to his paper Romanization and Language Planning in Taiwan, which discusses the early (Dutch) romanization system "Sinkang writing" and the late-19th-century Peh-oe-ji romanization, revived by the Taibun movement in the 1980s. You can read more about Taiwanese (Holo or Hoklo, a variant of the Amoy dialect of Southern Min Chinese) here, and there's even a Wikipedia in Taiwanese.
Or learn it along with him at his blog:
My name is Justin Zamora, and I am learning Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church. I created this site in order to learn more about the language. Since my knowledge of Russian is limited and there are few English-language resources for learning Church Slavonic, I decided that having a web site where I could put my notes and ask questions was the most practical way to increase my knowledge of Church Slavonic.He's got very useful tables and explanations, and he lets you know where he doesn't have the info; in the Diacritics section, for instance, he says of the kavyka "This mark is quite rare. It comes in pairs and appears to act as some kind of a delimiter. I have no idea what it means." (If you do, let him know.) He has a section of Grammatical Analyses of texts and one of Quizzes and Tools. Lots of fun. (Via PF.)
From Don DeLillo's Underworld, via wood s lot:
A single seraphic word.You can examine the word with a click, tracing its origins, development, earliest known use, its passage between languages, and you can summon the word in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Arabic, in a thousand languages and dialects living and dead, and locate literary citations, and follow the word through the tunnelled underworld of its ancestral roots ...
And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggy-back races on the weedy lawn, and it's your voice you hear, essentially, under the Glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in your room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measure of experience in a random glance, the monk's candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardour of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it's only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive—a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.
Peace.
Everybody remembers that iconic moment when Helen Keller learned to sign W-A-T-E-R while her hand was under the pump; I presume most, like me, assumed that Anne Sullivan had given her her first exposure to language. But Kerim Friedman, at Keywords, informs me (quoting a NY Times review by William H. Calvin) that "Helen Keller had meningitis when she was 19 months old. Why is this so important? Because,
... she probably had 19 months of normal exposure to language... (by 18 months, some children start to express structured sentences, showing that they had been understanding them even earlier). So she probably soft-wired her brain for structured stuff like syntax before losing sight and sound."Makes sense to me; now that I think about it, it's implausible that she could have acquired her excellent command of English if she hadn't been exposed to language early on.
A new linguistics blog, The X-Bar, has an entry describing an odd reaction by students to the sentence "The man killed the boy mercilessly with the knife": to wit, some found it ambiguous. What possible ambiguity is there, you ask? "The readings included one in which the man was the killer, and another in which the boy was." Rosanne (the blogtender) ventures some suggestions to explain the latter, highly perverse, reading; my own (offered free, gratis, and at no additional cost) is that the study of Chomskyan linguistics can thoroughly pervert one's sense of one's native language. Give those students a few more years and they'll be colorlessly green and sleeping furiously. (Of course, I'm so distant from Chomskyland that I have no idea what "The X-Bar" refers to, so take my obiter dicta cum grano salis.)
Addendum. Rosanne has edited her entry, and the ambiguity is not quite so crazed now, although still perverse: "That should be two readings varying as to who had the knife, the man or the boy." Jim of UJG gestures toward an explanation of the x-bar thing (and asks "why don't linguists say bar-x instead of x-bar?"); he also quotes another violent sample sentence. Pulp Linguistics!
A rich and wide-ranging article by María Rosa Menocal, one of the heroes of Ammiel Alcalay's ongoing investigations into the ancient culture of the Mediterranean that was the common property of Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike before the cultural fencing-in and shutting-off of later centuries produced separation and historical oblivion. I guarantee you will learn things you didn't know about that period almost a millennium ago, with its very different patterns of sharing and influence. Some excerpts:
Throughout medieval Europe Arabic had a far more powerful impact on the transformation and shaping of culture than most narratives of our history reveal. This was true not only in Spain, where Arabic was the lingua franca of educated people of all three religions for many centuries, but far beyond. The new and often revolutionary cultures of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe were often provoked or shaped by an Arabic culture that traveled throughout Europe in many guises, in translations of a hundred varieties, in attitudes about culture, or in songs that were sung and heard and then played again in a different language. It would even be fair to say that European culture from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries is a culture of translation whose monuments are not only new texts in a new language but, no less, the memory of the older language and civilization....Via wood s lot.Translation was at the heart of a great deal of the vigor of early Islamic culture, and although I cannot do it much justice here it is necessary to begin with an evocation of the remarkable translation projects of the seventh through ninth centuries for which the Abbasids are justly famous. While the Umayyads of both Damascus and Cordoba were culturally voracious and syncretistic, it was not they but the Abbasids of Baghdad—and in Baghdad—who sponsored the astonishing multigenerational project to translate major portions of the Greek philosophical and scientific canon without which, arguably, much of that canon might have been permanently lost. This establishment of a scientific and philosophical tradition is far more complex and deeply engrained in Islamic culture than the word "translation" conveys, since these texts ended up in Cordoba's libraries—and later Toledo's, and thus Paris's and Bologna's—because they became so central to a tradition of commentary and exegesis. This powerful intellectual and overtly rational tradition is iconic of this chapter in the history of Islamic culture: imperial in its capacity to both absorb and internalize and recycle so many of the cultures it encountered. It also plays a crucial role in making the culture of Arabic so much more than Islamic, and thus ultimately so accessible to Christians and Jews, beginning with those who worked in the incomparable libraries of Cordoba, which were legendary throughout Europe already during Umayyad times.
But Cordoba, unlike Baghdad, had no culture of translation at all, and the Cordobans themselves could not read Greek. They didn't have to, and in fact by the time they got those texts they were already a part of a scholarly tradition that lived in Arabic. It also never seems to have occurred to anyone in Cordoba to translate anything into Latin. And why should they have? Every civilized person—including the Jews and Christians who were citizens of Cordoba—could of course read Arabic, and the uncivilized people who lived to the north, beyond the mountains, well, after all, it was up to them to come and learn Arabic if they wanted to be able to read real philosophy or if they were curious about how astrolabes could so radically alter navigation. And a handful did. But mostly they did not....
This great cultural revolution—the vernacular revolution that would establish the new languages of Europe as the legitimate languages for high culture, lyric poetry first and foremost—began in the Iberian peninsula in the eleventh century, in an astonishing combination of political maelstrom and cultural flourishing. The political story is itself quite revealing, since the caliphate was succeeded by a number of city-states, the Muluk at-Tawaif, which were at great odds with each other and competing, often ferociously, for the succession to Cordoba, a competition to some extent political and military, but just as ferociously cultural. But now there is a Christian dimension to all of this, since some of the Christian kingdoms to the north—both to the east and to the west—enter this competition for the Cordoban succession. It is in this competition that Toledo comes out on top and thus begins its translation enterprise. This is in many ways a moment shockingly—for us anyway—nonideological, quite different from how we have come to imagine this age of "crusade" or "reconquista": any given battle in the eleventh century was far more likely to be between two Islamic Taifas than between an Islamic and a Christian one. The most decisive political events of the eleventh century, leading up to the taking of Toledo, were the murder of Sancho of Castile, a political assassination most likely engineered by his brother Alfonso VI, and the assassination of the great al-Mamun of Toledo, probably engineered by his rivals in Seville. But there is far more than mere lack of true ideological division here, there is also a shared cultural universe. At the end of the day all those Christian and Muslim warriors and kings were all likely to be interested in listening to the same thing, the whole range of new Andalusian songs that were the rage throughout the peninsula—and the Jews too are a vital part of this remarkable picture....
The case of the new Hebrew poetry is perhaps the clearest and worth dwelling on. The Andalusian Jews had long been not only Arabophone but comfortably a part of the literate elite, and what the complexities of Arabic letters and especially poetry revealed to them was a universe of poetic and linguistic tolerance. At some very profound level a pious Jew could unashamedly recite a pre-Islamic ode or a homoerotic poem because a pious Muslim could. Poetry and piety were not to be confused with each other, and this was at the heart of the great power of Arabic as a literary culture (and at the heart, too, of Alvarus's lament that young Christian men were in love with Arabic poetry). The new Hebrew poetry was thus born not out of "translation" in any conventional way but out of that intimate understanding, gleaned directly from the use of Arabic as a religious and a secular poetic language, and born not in the comfort of Jewish society of Umayyad Caliphate but rather in the exile of the Taifas. There, for the first time in a thousand years, Hebrew was brought out of the confines of the synagogue and made as versatile as the Arabic that was the native language of the Andalusian Jewish community and, almost miraculously, it was once again used as the language of a vibrant and living poetry. Listen to that voice as it has been rendered by one of the master translators of that new Hebrew in our own time, Peter Cole:
I'd give everything I own for that fawn who betrayed me—
my love for him locked in my heart.
He said to the rising moon:
"You see how I shine and dare to be seen?"
And the circle was set in the sky like a pearl in a dark girl's hand...
Addendum. Don't miss the exploration of Cordoba's history and architecture (with gorgeous pix) over at Laputan Logic—scroll down until you hit the title Cordoba and the boxed "olé." John is mulishly refusing to move to MT, so permalinks are only a distant rumor.
This amazing site calls itself an Etymological Database Project and says:
The main goal of the project is to join efforts in the research of long range connections between established linguistic families of the world. Internet is a brilliant way to combine our attempts and to build up a commonly accessible database of roots, or etyma reconstructed for the World's major (and minor) linguistic stocks.As regular readers of Languagehat know, I'm deeply skeptical of attempts to connect all the world's languages into one big happy family, but I have nothing but praise for this project. I haven't really started investigating it yet, but the idea of a site joining etymological databases of North Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, Yenisseian, Chinese and Chinese Dialects, Altaic, Chukchee-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, Semitic, Bahnar, North Khoisan, South Khoisan, and Central Khoisan has me salivating. This link is from the invaluable PF, who explains:Every person or organization interested in this noble task is invited to join.
Let's say you know the Tibetan word a~khrog-pa, to roar, rush. You enter in the word here, and you get this page, which gives you the protoform *r[a:]kw|, which meant noise or roar, and words from the same root in Chinese, Burmese, Kachin, Lushei, Lepcha and Kiranti, along with their meanings.Neat, yes!Or let's say if you know the turkic root *bora-, in the Turkish word for north wind (bora(k)) and the Kazakh word to snow heavily (bora-), you look it up in the the Turkic database, and it gives you the conjectured proto-Altaic root of the word (*po> u, to snow or rain) and the parallel roots in other Altaic language groups. In Mongolian languages, the root is *borug|a, meaning 1) heavy rain or 2) to snow or sleet; In Middle Mongolian the word was boro'an, in Khalka (Mongolian Mongolian) it's 1) boro:(n) for heavy rain and 2) burgana- for snow or sleet, in Buryat it's 1) boro: 2) burga- and so on. And you get the same for the Tungus group, for the Turkic group (of course), and for Japanese and Korean! Neat, no?
Linguist David Crystal has some interesting thoughts on dictionaries (doubtless not uninfluenced by the fact that he serves on the advisory committee for the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). He says, for instance, that you should buy new dictionaries "as often as you change your car... I would never rely on a dictionary if it's more than five years old."
According to Crystal, English vocabulary is developing faster than other areas of the language. The latest Longman edition contains about 3,000 additions since the previous one, which was released in 1995."English itself has borrowed words from almost every other language in the world," said Crystal, who refers to the English language as "a vacuum cleaner of languages."
Stopping the process of globalization would be the only way to stop English words from influencing local languages, Crystal said. He said that people should realize that "when you borrow words from another language, it adds to the expressive richness of your own language, giving a dimension which the language did not have before."He finishes up with some thoughts on text-messagisms like "C U l8r," which he seems to view with a kindly eye. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)Therefore, he recommended taking advantage of what he called "the typhoon of vocabulary," pointing out, however, "You have to be in control of the language all the time."
"In schools and in universities," he said, "tell the child... what's happening to the language. Get them to talk about the language."
