MULTILINGUAL OVID.

The University of Virginia Library has put online a page of links to Ovid's Metamorphoses:

The first link directs users to a U.Va.-hosted version of the Latin text (apparently from Ehwald's edition, ca. 1904), while the second points users to five English translations by Golding, Sandys, Garth, Brookes More, and Kline, and to six earlier editions of the Latin, the last two in html-format (1509, 1518, 1540, 1582, 1820, and 1892). The Ehwald Latin text and the 17th-c. Garth paraphrase are cross-linked so that users may browse or search both texts together; via the "New Window" links at the start of each book, you may now browse the Latin with Sandys' 1632 verse and Kline's modern prose rendering as well. The fourth link on this page is to our growing archive of Renaissance pictorial and textual responses to Ovid's great poem, featuring several lavish cycles of Ovid illustrations and a wide range of ambitious Renaissance readings and reworkings in Latin, French, German, and English; click the icons and verse-links accessed through our Notes to view any text and image concurrently.

Once again the internet justifies its existence. (Via "thomas j wise"'s post at MetaFilter.)

CATALAN ONOMATOPOEIA.

The trilingual blog Buscaraons (entries in English, French, and Catalan—separately, not as translations of each other) has a series of entries (in English) on onomatopoeia in Catalan (scroll down to 24.11.03 Onomatopedic sounds in Catalan, then up to 25.11.03 To bark and to quack in Catalan and 27.11.03 More Catalan onomatopedia: to meow and to mow).

To purr is very interesting. The verb, when it refers to a cat or engine, is roncar. This verb also means to snore. So Catalans hear purring and snoring as identical sounds.

Via Cinderella Bloggerfeller.

CAVIAR.

I was looking at the book Caviar by the delightfully named Inga Saffron when I was stopped cold by an excursus on the etymology of the word caviar. She found the OED's etymology boring and confusing:

Of uncertain origin, found in Turkish as kha¯vya¯r; in Italian in 16th c. as caviale (whence 16th c. Fr. cavial, Sp. cavial, 16th c. Eng. cavialy), also as caviaro, whence Fr. and Pg. caviar. ('It has no root in Turkish, and has not the look of a Turkish word. Redhouse in his MS. Thesaurus marks it as Italian-Turkish, looking upon it as borrowed from Italian.' Prof. Ch. Rieu.)

and preferred the livelier approach of Demetrius J. Georgacas, a Greek scholar who (miracle of miracles!) thought that the word had to have a Greek source, despite the absence of any actual evidence.

Let's first dispose of caviar. The American Heritage Dictionary has a nice excursus on the origin of the word:

Word History: Although caviar might seem to be something quintessentially Russian, the word caviar is not, the native Russian term being ikra. Caviar first came into English in the 16th century, probably by way of French and Italian, which borrowed it from Turkish havyar. The source of the Turkish word is apparently an Iranian dialectal form related to the Persian word for "egg," kha¯yah, and this in turn goes back to the same Indo-European root that gives us the English words egg and oval. This rather exotic etymology is appropriate to a substance that is not to everyone's taste, giving rise to Shakespeare's famous phrase, " 'twas caviary to the general," the general public, that is.

So much for Georgacas. What fascinates me is the unwillingness to accept scientific etymologies, the need for a "good story" (although to me the passage of a word from an Iranian dialect to Turkish and thence to Western Europe seems like a great story), and this goes back to what I was talking about in The Language Wars: the need for mass exposure to basic linguistics courses, so that people will have a grasp of how languages change and will not be so drawn to acronyms and ripping yarns.

TEXAS ENGLISH.

A story in today's NY Times by Ralph Blumenthal reports on the research of linguists Jan Tillery and Guy Bailey, who are working on a National Geographic Society survey of Texas speech.

At the same time, the speech of rural and urban Texans is diverging, Dr. Bailey said. Texans in Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio are sounding more like other Americans and less like their fellow Texans in Iraan, Red Lick or Old Glory.

Indeed, Dr. Tillery and Dr. Bailey wrote in a recent paper called "Texas English," a new dialect of Southern American English may be emerging on the West Texas plains. It is not what a linguist might expect, they wrote, "but this is Texas, and things are just different here."

The changes are being tracked by researchers for the two San Antonio linguists, who are working with scholars from Oklahoma State University and West Texas A&M in Canyon, outside Amarillo, under the sponsorship of the National Geographic Society. They divided Texas into 116 squares and are interviewing four native Texans spanning four age groups— from the 20's to the 80's, in each...

Dr. Tillery and Dr. Bailey warned that it was possible to exaggerate the distinctiveness of Texas English because the state loomed so large in the popular imagination. Few speech elements here do not also appear elsewhere.

"Nevertheless," they wrote in their paper on Texas English, "in its mix of elements both from various dialects of English and from other languages, TXE is in fact somewhat different from other closely related varieties."

Perhaps the most striking finding, Dr. Tillery said, was the spread of the humble "y'all," ubiquitous in Texas as throughout the South. Y'all, once "you all" but now commonly reduced to a single word, sometimes even spelled "yall," is taking the country by storm, the couple reported in an article written with Tom Wikle of Oklahoma State University and published in 2000 in the Journal of English Linguistics. No one other word, it turns out, can do the job.

"Y'all" and "fixin' to" were also spreading fast among newcomers within the state, they said, particularly those who regard Texas fondly. Use of the flat `I,' they found, also correlated strikingly to a favorable view of Texas.

But they found some curious anomalies, as well.

One traditional feature of Texas and Southern speech — pronouncing the word "pen" like "pin," known as the pen/pin merger — is disappearing in the big Texas cities, while remaining common in rural areas, Dr. Tillery said. Texans in the prairie may shell out "tin cints," but not their metropolitan brethren...

Other idiosyncrasies have all but vanished over time. Texans for the most part no longer pray to the "Lard," replacing the "o" with an "a," or "warsh" their clothes. How the interloping "r" crept in remains an especially intriguing question, Dr. Bailey said. Trying to trace the peculiarity, he asked Texans to name the capital of the United States, often drawing the unhelpful answer "Austin."

The opposite syndrome, known as r-lessness, which renders "four" as "foah" in Texas and elsewhere, is easier to trace, Dr. Bailey said. In the early days of the republic, plantation owners sent their children to England for schooling. "They came back without the 'r,' " he said.

"The parents were saying, listen to this, this is something we have to have, so we'll all become r-less," he said. The craze went down the East Coast from Boston to Virginia (skipping Philadelphia, for some reason) and migrating selectively around the country.

Is this theory of the origin of r-dropping generally accepted?

(As for "No one other word, it turns out, can do the job"—what about youse?)

A brief summary of a Texas Monthly article on their research is here:

Our research is ongoing and we hope to find out why the Texas accent actually seems to be growing in use," said Tillery. "It seems more and more Texans are holding on to their heritage through language."

So far, their research has indentified the monophthongal (or flat) "i" as the key component of a Texas accent. This flattened vowel is the sound that makes "night" sound like "naht."

The full article requires registration (or the use of Google cache).

Update. As I suspected, the idea that r's were lost in English schools is nonsense; see Geoff Pullum's blast over at Language Log. See also Mark Liberman's followup, with its investigation of the allegedly Texan (19th-century) greeting "How does your copperosity sagaciate this morning?"

Further update. Mark Liberman has an entry quoting Guy Bailey's response to Mark's asking him about the article; as Mark says, "a combination of journalistic focus and editorial compression led to Guy being quoted in a way that doesn't accurately reflect what he knows and what he thinks." Read the entry for details (on the history of r-dropping). One thing that puzzled me: it was clear from Bailey's description of his talk with the reporter ("When asked about the origins of r-lessness in the U.S., I offered two or three different theories... The comment on fixin to was also part of a much longer explanation") that his extensive, learned remarks were bound to be inaccurately reported. I would have thought "well, academics aren't used to reporters," but he followed up with this:

One thing we as linguists probably need to do is to figure out how to make technical linguistic descriptions easily available to a public which has a more general education. Interestingly enough, as an administrator, I always try to give reporters sound bites that reflect the message UTSA wants communicated; as a linguist, I never do.

Well, why on earth not? Here you have a rare chance to educate the immense readership of the NY Times about some interesting bits of language history, and you bore the reporter with a complex series of alternative theories better suited for a seminar. Prepare those sound bites, linguists! "Dropped r's? They got 'em from slaves!" is just as colorful as the boarding-school theory, and has the added advantage of possibly being right.

THE LETTERS.

THE LETTERS

A is red E is black I is white
D is green U is blue those are the
colors of the letters

A and E are like the black dark night
when the sun is setting like a witch flying
on her broom with her cheeks hot like red
lava coming out of a volcano as black
rocks and ash come out

I is like at midnight you see white
ghosts around with your cheeks so pale
It comes out of the white paper in your book
that takes you to an adventure with
words

D is like the beach when there is seaweed
getting washed away. In the sea
you can see the reflections of the grassy
mountains that I might climb in
the future

U is like the river flowing in a
peaceful day the sky so blue as
the flowers by the river and the
ocean far away

A, E, I, D and U are like the world
of all colors compared together as the
red sun setting in the black night with
white ghosts and the green seaweed at the ocean
that is blue as the flowers by the
river

—Julia Mayhew (from Eagle's Wing)

(Happy Thanksgiving to Julia and anyone else who celebrates today!)

INDEX TRANSLATIONUM.

UNESCO publishes an Index Translationum on the web:

The Index Translationum is a list of books translated in the world, i.e. an international bibliography of translations. The data base contains cumulative bibliographical information on books translated and published in about one hundred of the UNESCO Member States since 1979 and totalling more than one 1,300.000 entries in all disciplines : literature, social and human sciences, natural and exact sciences, art, history and so forth. It is planned to update the work every quarter.

By publishing this list, to serve as a reference work, UNESCO provides the general public with an irreplaceable tool for making bibiographical inventories of translations on worldwide scale.

You can search it here. (Via Carob (not a blog).)

OBSCURE LANGUAGES ARE FUN.

A nice little page by Peter Hilton: "People find it odd that I deliberately learn small bits of obscure languages, so I thought I'd explain why." Short answer: to surprise people and make people smile, good things both. Found via MonkeyFilter, a sort of para-MetaFilter run by tracicle, who posted this along with many other excellent things.

MAT II.

Anybody who's interested in mat (Russian cursing) and can read Russian should head over to this thread, where Avva and friends discuss the fine distinctions among uyeban, uyobok, zayoba, and other lively terms of abuse.

"THE" + PLACE NAME.

I've just run across an interesting series of threads at LINGUIST List on the topic of place names with and without "the." It seems to have started with 3-892 (12 Nov 1992); I'll give the threads in sequence, with a striking quote from each. From the first:

The discussion of the English place name meaning 'hill hill hill' reminded me of some name trivia from the Los Angeles area. One concerns 'The La Brea Tar Pits'. I'm told 'La Brea' means 'the tar' in Spanish; if so, this name is actually 'the the tar tar pits'. And when the Angels baseball team was 'The Los Angeles Angels,' it was literally called 'the the angels angels.'

Then 3.904 (17 Nov 1992):

In regard to 'The La Brea Tar Pits' meaning 'the the tar tar pits', this reminds me of some Colorado forms I've seen: Table Mesa, i.e. 'table table'; Casa del El Dorado (about the best one can do with this is "sic"); and The El Rancho Ranch, i.e., 'the the ranch ranch', the last with the same embedding observed in The La Brea Tar Pits.

From 3.908 (18 Nov 1992):

There must be many examples of the local word for river being misunderstood as the name of a particular river by visiting geographers. There are numerous River Avons in England. One other case is the Chao Phraya River which runs through Bangkok; on some old maps this appears as the Menam, mae nam being the Thai for river.

From 3.914 (20 Nov 1992):

It is certainly true that Southern Californians use the definite article when referring to freeways ("the 405"). This doesn't seem to be the case in Northern California, however - at least with my relatives in the San Jose area. They think it is strange to use the definite article, as I think it is strange not to. My husband, a recent "immigrant" from N. to S. California actually seems to use "the" for S. Cal. freeways but not for the ones up north.

From 3.918 (21 Nov 1992):

In response to Michael Erickson's posting commenting on the fact that Bay Area folk refer to San Francisco as "The City": before moving to "The City" (San Francisco), I went to school in Rochester, NY, where many of the students were from New York City, "The City". Needless to say it got me for awhile hearing SF referred to as "The City" when to me that meant NYC. Well, I got over it.

(There's also an interesting discussion, too long to quote here, about what happened when the twin cities of Fort William and Port Arthur Ontario, known collectively as "The Lakehead," were almalgamated and a new name had to be chosen: "Lakehead" or "The Lakehead"?)

And the point where I came in, 3.932 (25 Nov 1992):

I'm afraid that the story about Istambul having been derived from 'is tim boli' is a hoax, although I have seen the story many places. The most obvious problem with it is explanation of the 'a' in Istambul (where the Greek phrase has an 'i'). It doesn't help to invoke Greek dialects (like Dorian) that had an a in the article, since they were not spoken in the relvant areas and certainly not at the relevant time. I don't have the details here (but can try to retrace them if somebody is interested), but I saw another etymology which claims to get the Turkish-internal facts right as well, and which derived Istambul from Konstandinupoli > Stanpuli > Stambuli > I + stambul (prothetic) which seems to make more sense. (Konstandinu[p]oli is the Modern Greek pronunciation of Constantinople.)
Of course, Istambul or Constantinople is still called 'i Poli', the city, by Greeks today. I also like the minimal pair politiko/s 'civil, political' with stress on the ultimate, vs. poli/tikos 'of the City, like in Constantinople' (often found on Greek tavern menus; [ante]penultimate stress).

Anybody have any thoughts on this last issue (or, of course, anything else)?

HUGH KENNER.

Hugh Kenner has died at 80. I'm not fond of literary criticism in general, but he was a master of the art, and his book The Pound Era should be read by anyone interested in American modernism. The NY Times obituary is too short, but has this nice sentence: "He wrote commandingly on everything from Irish poetry to geodesic math and Li'l Abner's pappy (Lucifer Ornamental Yokum), to the Heath/Zenith Z-100 computer (one of which he built for himself and then wrote the user's guide) and the animated cartoons of Chuck Jones." (Thanks to Eric for the link.) I'm sure there will be much longer appreciations in the days to come, and I look forward to reading them; meanwhile, here's a very good interview (with Harvey Blume):

HB: I also want to allude to your enthusiasm for the Internet.
HK: It begins again with not being afraid of technology. I got a computer way back; I built a Heathkit. I played with it and learned more and more things I could do. And then it what it got to making connections over telephone wires, that was very interesting also. And it made for communication around my impaired hearing.

HB: Say a little more about that, please.
HK: I lost most of my hearing at the age of five. Hearing aids couldn't do anything for me until I was in my forties. Hearing aid doctors didn't even understand deafness, they thought it was inattention. So I just became accustomed to a world in which I got on by understanding what people were probably saying. It's amazing how far that would take you. The nice thing about the Internet was that I didn't have to hear anything. I'm hearing you quite well on the telephone. We have a telephone with an amplifier. I'm hearing you fine. We have a good deal of technological help around me. I also have a wonderfully understanding wife, who knows when I'm not hearing.

HB: How did you come by the column you wrote for Byte Magazine, which in the 1980s, was the basic computer magazine? What was a literary critic doing in a magazine for engineers and hackers?
HK: They just asked me to do it, and I had a good time doing it. I would get a few books in the mail; they would sort of trickle in during the month, and then I would decide what to write the column about. I'm sorry Byte faded. What happened at the end is that they couldn't seem to survive on anything but endless reviews of new products, which is just like an expanded manufacturer's catalog. At that point, they told me they didn't need any more of my reviews.

There's also a fascinating interpretation of Waiting for Godot as a realistic portrayal of life in the French Resistance.

Another of Kenner's groundbreaking books was Dublin's Joyce, and I can't resist pointing out that the Columbia University Press web page misspells Ulysses not once but twice in two sentences:

One of the most important books ever written on Uylsses, Dublin's Joyce established Hugh Kenner as a significant modernist critic. This pathbreaking analysis presents Uylsses as a "bit of anti-matter that Joyce sent out to eat the world."

Insert grumpy rant about the decline of proofreading here.

Update. I just (February 2009) had to update the CUP link because they've redone their website... and they still have the misspellings!

THE WRINKLE-FOOTED CAR.

Sally Thomason at Language Log has an entry on Native American languages that resist borrowing words even for objects imported from the majority culture, like automobiles, for which the word in Montana Salish (also called Flathead and Kalispel-Pend d'Oreille) is p'ip'uyshn—literally, 'it has wrinkled feet.' Other Salishan languages use comparable formations; my guess would be that they were borrowed rather than independently created.

WEGGEBEIZT.

Paul Celan was born on this day in 1920. I thank Ramage for the reminder and for this poem:

WEGGEBEIZT vom
Strahlenwind deiner Sprache
das bunte Gerede des An-
erlebten — das hundert-
züngige Mein-
gedicht, das Genicht.

Aus-
gewirbelt,
frei
der Weg durch den menschen-
gestaltigen Schnee,
den Büßerschnee, zu
den gastlichen
Gletscherstuben und -tischen.

Tief
in der Zeitenschrunde,
beim
Wabeneis
wartet, ein Atemkristall,
dein unumstößliches
Zeugnis.

And the translation by John Felstiner:

Etched away by the
radiant wind of your speech,
the motley gossip of pseudo-
experience — the hundred-
tongued My-
poem, the Lie-noem.

Whirl-
winded,
free,
a path through human-
shaped snow,
through penitent cowl-ice, to
the glacier's
welcoming chambers and tables.

Deep
in the time crevasse,
by
honeycomb-ice
there waits, a Breathcrystal,
your unannullable
witness.

LANGUAGE COMIX.

Some language-related strips from Robert Balder's principled comic PartiallyClips:
Just keep talking, Mr. Billings...
Sweetie, stop making noises and look at the book, OK?
How do you do that thing where your mouthparts don't synch to your words?
Via the irrepressible Mark Liberman at the indispensable Language Log.

WRITER'S PALM

Reading a NY Times article by Shaila K. Dewan, I was brought up short by the first paragraph:

For more than a century, the fingerprint has been the quintessential piece of crime scene evidence. But fingerprints are only a tiny part of the story. All of a person's "friction ridged skin" is distinctively patterned: soles, palms and even the writer's palm, as the outer side of the hand is called.

The writer's palm? Never heard of it, neither had my dictionaries, and "the outer side of the hand" didn't make any sense to me. I googled "writer's palm" and only got 27 hits, many of which simply refer to the palm of a writer (so it's clearly not a very widespread term). I did, however, get two further definitions.

From a National Institute of Standards and Technology web page:

Larabee described the parts of the palm, emphasizing the importance of the "writers palm" which is the 4.45 cm (1.75 inch) by 12.7 cm (5.0 inch) area on the side of each palm opposite the thumb.

Not much better. But an IRS page has a nice clear definition: "The writer's palm is that area on the side of the palm which normally rests against the paper when writing." Isn't it interesting how much more informative a plain-language definition can be than an ostentatiously scientific one?

IRREPTITIOUS.

This wonderful word is the title of a new post at an Eudæmonist, and having looked it up I now know that it means (OED) 'Characterized by creeping in or having crept in, esp. into a text.'

1673 Castell Let. in Nichols Lit. Anecd. 18th C. IV. 695 The first [text] he illustrates, Esa. ix. 1 where all condemn πιε [pie] as irreptitious. 1680 H. Dodwell Two Lett. (1691) 7 Where it [this design] is irreptitious and by way of surprize. 1868 Contemp. Rev. IX. 283 Omit ουδαμως [oudamos] which contradicts Micah, and is irreptitious from preceding αιδου [aidou].

The noun, by the way, is irreption, which my print OED marks with a dagger as obsolete (at that point having been last attested in 1649) but which is a living word in the online edition thanks to several 20th-century uses:

1926 G. W. S. Friedrichsen Gothic Version of Gospels 190 Previous to this there had been casual but continued irreptions from the Old Latin. [p.]249 The Gothic reading could.. be explained as a corruption due to the irreption of some parallel or reminiscent passage. 1974 Encounter Feb. 54/1 A protection against casual and deplorable irreptions creeping into the language.

And that last quote leads us right back to the Language
Wars...

THE LANGUAGE WARS.

A month ago, Robert Hartwell Fiske, editor and publisher of The Vocabula Review, very kindly sent me a link to a new article, "Making Peace in the Language Wars" by Bryan A. Garner. I told Fiske I was definitely going to write about it, and he must be thinking (if he remembers it at all) that I'm completely feckless. Well, I'm not (not completely, anyway); I am a procrastinator, but it's mainly that the subject kept expanding in my mind and I wasn't quite sure how to deal with it. Now, prodded by a recent discussion of who can be called a linguist and a NY Times article that won't stay online free for long (and I'm afraid the Garner piece is now available only to subscribers—mea culpa!), I'm finally getting around to it. Warning: this entry will be long and full of ambivalence.

If Garner's name sounds familiar, it may be because his book A Dictionary of Modern American Usage was the pretext for David Foster Wallace's notorious Harper's screed "Present Tense," wherein he tried manfully to demolish the citadel of scientific linguistics using his patented arsenal of whimsy, faux-plebeian rhetoric, rambling footnotes, and willful distortion. (For more detail, see my own screed at the bottom of my Languages page.) Garner, like Wallace, wants to present himself as the honest broker, bringing both sides together in a ring-dance of reconciliation; in fact, both of them are dyed-in-the-wool prescriptivists whose contempt for science is continually breaking through. Here's a representative passage from Garner:

In other words, the spirit of the day demands that you not think critically — or at least not think ill — of anyone else's use of language. If you believe in good grammar and linguistic sensitivity, you're the problem. And there is a large, powerful contingent in higher education today — larger and more powerful than ever before — trying to eradicate any thoughts about good and bad grammar, correct and incorrect word choices, effective and ineffective style.

Of course this "large, powerful contingent" consists of linguists and those inspired by them, and he names names:

Yet several linguists assert, essentially, that there is no right and wrong in language. Consider what one well-known linguist, Robert A. Hall, Jr., famously said: "There is no such thing as good and bad (or correct and incorrect, grammatical and ungrammatical, right and wrong) in language. ... A dictionary or grammar is not as good an authority for your speech as the way you yourself speak." Some of the better theorists in the mid-twentieth century rejected this extremism. Here, for example, is how Max Black responded:

"This extreme position ... involves a confusion between investigating rules (or standards, norms) and prescribing or laying down such rules. Let us grant that a linguist, qua theoretical and dispassionate scientist, is not in the business of telling people how to talk; it by no means follows that the speakers he is studying are free from rules which ought to be recorded in any faithful and accurate report of their practices. A student of law is not a legislator; but it would be a gross fallacy to argue that therefore there can be no right or wrong in legal matters."

But he's not totally blinded by prejudice; he's willing to admit the failings of the home team:

Describers have always tried to amass linguistic evidence — the more the better. Prescribers are often content to issue their opinions ex cathedra. In fact, inadequate consideration of linguistic evidence has traditionally been the prescribers' greatest vulnerability.

Here's his proposed division of labor:

Prescribers should be free to advocate a realistic level of linguistic tidiness — without being molested for it — even as the describers are free to describe the mess all around them. If the prescribers have moderate success, then the describers should simply describe those successes. Education entailing normative values has always been a part of literate society. Why should it suddenly stop merely because describers see this kind of education as meddling with natural forces?

Meanwhile, prescribers need to be realistic. They can't expect perfection or permanence, and they must bow to universal usage. But when an expression is in transition — when only part of the population has adopted a new usage that seems genuinely undesirable — prescribers should be allowed, within reason, to stigmatize it. There's no reason to tolerate wreckless driving in place of reckless driving. Or wasteband in place of waistband. Or corollary when misused for correlation. Multiply these things by 10,000, and you have an idea of what we're dealing with. There are legitimate objections to the slippage based not just on widespread confusion but also on imprecision of thought, on the spread of linguistic uncertainty, on the etymological disembodiment of words, and on decaying standards generally.

As a matter of fact, I'm not entirely averse to such a division. It's quite true that most linguists are not interested in "good usage" or competent to decide it, and I believe there is such a thing and it's worth cultivating. Ideally, linguists would describe the attested facts of language and style experts would build on their evidence to make recommendations about which usages should be preferred.

The problem is that the mavens, the likes of Bryan A. Garner and David Foster Wallace, don't really believe that linguists know what they're talking about—don't, in fact, understand what scientific linguistics is or how it works. This is the gaping hole in the division-of-labor idea. It is as if the people who drew up recommendations for healthy diet and lifestyle held doctors at arm's length and accused them of not accepting the idea of right and wrong in diet. Ideally, students would be exposed to introductory linguistics classes at an early age so that they would have a basic grasp of language variety, language change, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and would know how to distinguish valuable inheritances from invented myths. Instead, people swallow whatever some self-designated expert decides says, and we get nonsense like the alleged misuse of such. From Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage (valuable precisely because it carefully investigates the historical facts before making recommendations), s.v. "such":

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries a few commentators managed to puzzle themselves about the word order in constructions like these:

...said that he never remembered such a severe winter as this —Jane Austen, letter, 17 Jan. 1809

...but such a dismal Sight I never saw —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe,1719

They convinced themselves that such in this construction must be a misuse for so. They were wrong and nobody believes it is a misuse any more, but since the subject had been started, almost nobody was willing to forget it, which they should have. The 20th-century focus was on the use of such as an intensive, as in "He's such a nice boy" and "She has such beautiful manners." The assertion is that this use of such is informal and not to be used in formal writing... The tortured reasoning of the 18th- and 19th-century pundits was irrelevant, and the 20th-century concerns are unnecessary. You need not worry about adverbial such at all.

Even worse than deciding that a perfectly good usage is wrong is confusing people about words that, left to themselves, they have no problem using; again from the Concise Dictionary of English Usage, s.v. "between": "Actually, the enormous amount of ink spilled in the explication of the subtleties of between and among has been largely a waste; it is difficult for a native speaker of English who is not distracted by irrelevant considerations to misuse the two words."

So for the time being we must depend upon people with both linguistic training and a sense of style; this is a niche I try to fill here at Languagehat, and it is part of what linguist John McWhorter is trying to do with his new book Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, discussed in the NY Times article (by Emily Eakin) I mentioned earlier:

Mr. McWhorter, 38, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a policy research group in New York City, is hardly the first to complain about Americans' brazen disregard for their native tongue. But unlike many others, he says the problem is not an epidemic of bad grammar.

As a linguist, he says, he knows that grammatical rules are arbitrary and that in casual conversation people have never abided by them. Rather, he argues, the fault lies with the collapse of the distinction between the written and the oral. Where formal, well-honed English was once de rigueur in public life, he argues, it has all but disappeared, supplanted by the indifferent cadences of speech and ultimately impairing our ability to think.

Now, I suspect that McWhorter is exaggerating, and I certainly deplore the tired "blame the '60s" approach, but he has the background and the chops to make the case. If more deplorers were like him, I would be more inclined to pay attention.

As for the "who's a linguist" question: with understanding of even the basic elements of linguistic science as rare as it is, I award the title to anyone who has a good grasp of them, just as we call anyone who knows how to use a telescope and a star chart and spends time at it an astronomer, regardless of their day job. This is, of course, a thoroughly self-serving definition, because it means that yes, Virginia, I am a linguist.

I will doubtless have more to say about these matters, but it's late, I'm tired of writing, and you're doubtless even more tired of reading me if you've made it this far. So let's call it a day, and I'll deal with any issues that may be brought up in the comments.

ANJELA DUVAL AND CANNYLINGUIST.

The Breton poet Anjela Duval has a nifty trilingual site dedicated to her, including over 500 poems in Breton and almost a hundred translated into English as well as articles in English, French, and Breton. Via cannylinguist, a brand-new linguablog: welcome!

ORFE.

As I enter the home stretch of Piers Brandon's The Dark Valley (regarding which, see Jonathon's latest post, Preaching to the converted) I have run across a word heretofore unknown to me. Discussing Churchill's extravagent renovation of his country house, Chartwell, Brandon says: "He created lakes, dams, waterfalls, fish-ponds, treating his black swans, golden orfe and other creatures with anthropomorphic indulgence." An orfe is clearly a "creature," but what kind? A fish, as it turns out, or in the words of the OED "A golden yellow variety of the ide (Leuciscus idus), long domesticated in Germany, acclimatized in England in the 19th c." Not to be confused with the ancient word orf 'cattle' (last used in the 14th century), and still less with orf 'A virus disease of sheep, cattle, and goats, characterized by a secondary infection with the bacillus Fusiformis necrophorus [now known as Fusobacterium necrophorum], which causes ulcers and scabs in and around the mouth and on the feet or other parts of the body; also called scabby mouth, contagious ecthyma, or contagious pustular dermatitis.'

EVASIVE TRANSCRIPTION.

From Sarah Brett-Smith's 1980 conference paper "Speech Made Visible: The Irregular as a System of Meaning" (published 1984; abstract here):

Bamana methods for transcribing the spoken word... cannot be clear... [To] fulfill their purpose they must evade linguistic systematization and the socially (perhaps even politically) disruptive possibility of mass communication by introducing aberrant visual symbols which prevent immediate comprehension. Like the spoken, the transcribed word must remain indistinct and allusive; knowledge may thus rest secure in the shadowy realm of the aged or the exceptionally gifted.

MORE ON SAPIR/WHORF.

Over at Language Log, John McWhorter discusses the idea that the kinds of polysemy encountered in "indigenous" languages are somehow deep and philosophically interesting, much more so than our denatured English:

Abley listens to a Mohawk speaker talking about the word KA'NIKONRIIO, "righteousness." The speaker says "You have different words. Something that is nice. Something coming very close to—sometimes used as a word for—law. The fact of KA'NIKONRIIO is also—beautiful. Or good. So goodness and the law are the same." Abley muses "I had the impression that a three-hour philosophy seminar had just been compressed into a couple of minutes."

Abley's intentions are good, but I can't help wanting to ask him "OK—explain precisely how the semantic range of that word will illuminate your life, and/or please delineate for me just how you would construct a seminar on KA'NIKONRIIO that would stand alongside one on Kant?"

He shows comparably interesting semantic ranges in English, and says "what is mere polysemy in English is not a philosophy seminar in Mohawk. It's just polysemy." This, of course, is in part an attack on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which takes polysemy as evidence of irreducible differences in the way speakers of different languages view the world.

Mark Liberman follows up with a post making an astute observation about change in linguistic fashion:

In the first half of the 20th century, most linguists were friendly to the idea that different languages divide the world up in fundamentally different ways. In the second half of the 20th century, most linguists became deeply hostile to that same notion. The primary motivation in both cases was the same: respect for "the other."

For anthropologically-minded linguists after Boas, who saw language as a cultural artifact, this respect meant examining other languages and cultures carefully, on their own terms, without European preconceptions. Being open to finding out that things might be very different, in content as well as in form. Even things that look the same may be deeply different, as Whorf argued about Hopi.

For generative linguists after Chomsky, who saw language as an instinct with a universal biological substrate, this same respect led to the view that all people and all languages are basically the same. Even things that look deeply different must turn out to be the same, if you analyze them the right way. At least, anything important about language (and language use) must be that way.

As he says, linguists tend to get really worked up about this. Like him, I find "most efforts of both kinds unsatisfying" and wish more substantive work would get done, and I look forward to reading the papers he links to and "wholeheartedly recommends."

MEN AND WOMEN.

I'm cheating here, because this doesn't really have anything to do with language (except insofar as it emphasizes that the word sexism still has a referent). But Jeanne has such a great post at Body and Soul that I can't resist pointing to it and saying "Go, read, and think about this stuff." The story she tells, and the stories it sparks off in her commenters, build up a picture of how families are affected by war, sexism, and other disasters, and the amazing resilience some women have shown. As Jeanne says:

Somewhere in those bits of stories, there's evidence of deep-rooted sexism in this society, and a moral about what constricted opportunity does to women and, indirectly, to men. But it's far from a simple morality play of bad men and suffering women—although I could easily shape it into that if I wanted to. (My mother's friend wanted to, and did.) It isn't a story about the powerful and the powerless. Looking back on those people's lives, I can't see anyone really having any power.

And that's the way sexism works as often as not. Lots of hurt people, and no one to blame.

Furthermore, she has followed up with an equally wonderful post about Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul, the subject of a lawsuit and (consequently) a great deal of press, the latter by and large positioning the story as one of an intrepid Western reporter versus a medieval, repressive Afghan man (one of the subjects of her book, and her host while she was there) trying to stifle her free expression. Jeanne has a very different, and more interesting, take on it.

Tiresome caveat: Yes, I'm aware women are also capable of behaving very badly and men are capable of behaving well. This isn't about that, and comments that go on too long emphasizing it will be suspected of protesting too much.

HARD TRUTHS ABOUT TRANSLATION.

John O’Brien has an essay in Context 14 asking the question "Why are there so few literary translations published each year in the United States,and what can be done about this cultural travesty?" His answer (and as always I welcome comments from readers better able than I to evaluate it) is that translations wind up costing publishers a fair amount of money ($15,000 to $25,000 according to him), and the only realistic way to change things is for foreign governments to subsidize them:

Foreign governments should significantly subsidize the translation and publication of literary books from their languages into English. If France, for instance, designated as little as one million dollars annually for literary translations (translation costs, plus all the other expenses I’ve cited above), that would result in at least forty works—perhaps as many as sixty—of French literature being translated. And let’s assume the Germans, Italians, Swedes, Belgians, Spaniards (who have an interesting practice, I should point out, of awarding small translation subsidies that they then never pay for!), Portuguese, Austrians, Swiss, and Russians did the same; that would be 400 translations per year. And at that level of support and through marketing ingenuity made possible by that support, readership problems begin to diminish; there may never be an enormous readership for foreign literature in the United States, but five to ten thousand people starts to seem plausible, even if the books have to be given away to libraries and classrooms. And these numbers mean a total potential reading audience of two to four million each year.

But not only don’t foreign governments like this solution, they do not even like helping an American publisher or editor travel to their countries to find books to be translated. A strange national pride seems to emerge when such requests are made, and the national pride dictates that Americans should be humbled by the opportunity to spend a few thousand dollars to travel to their countries in order to find books on which they can then lose thousands and thousands of more dollars. In short, foreign government officials, as well as publishers, have made an art out of moaning, and this moan apparently for them takes the place of the literary art that never makes its way to the United States.

(Via Mildly Malevolent.)

GINKGO BILOBA.

I never gave much thought to the gingko, or ginkgo (the latter, unintuitive though it is, is apparently the preferred spelling); I had no idea it was the subject of a well-known Goethe poem or that it was so widespread. Everything you might want to know can be found at Cor Kwant's obsessive gingko site, The Ginkgo Pages. In particular, I direct your attention to The name, a somewhat scattershot page with the names of the plant in various languages, not to mention that Goethe poem (at the bottom). Oh, and the site itself is available in five languages. (Via Frizzy Logic.)

A caveat (and I'm sure others could be made): the name page says

Ginkgo : from the Chinese (later also Japanese) word Ginkyo meaning "silver apricot" (gin=silver, kyo=apricot). This term is thought to come from a romanized version for the Chinese ideograph Yin Hsing (Xing).

Ginkyo is not a Chinese word at all; as the AHD says:

Probably from ginkoo, an artificial or mistaken Sino-Japanese reading of the Chinese characters for ginkgo : Japanese gin, silver (from Middle Chinese ngin) + Japanese koo, kyoo, apricot (from Middle Chinese).

MULTILINGUAL HARRY.

Lifechanges ... Delayed has a great list of 50 foreign titles of the first Harry Potter book; I'm happy to say that my new work iMac with OSX renders everything except the Georgian. There's an amazing range of languages, even Plattdeutsch (Harry Potter un de Wunnersteen). Enjoy (and test your browser).

MERE.

The latest of Mark Lieberman's series of posts on the language of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels discusses the usage and history of the word mere; he ends by quoting a Catullus drinking poem (demanding unmixed [merus, or "mere" in the old sense] Falernian wine), which in turn led me to this page on ancient Italian wine varieties, which has a most useful map (scroll down) of denominazioni (not yet controllate) c. 100 BC.

LOUIS DUDEK.

I had not been familiar with the work of the Canadian poet, publisher, and "literary activist" Louis Dudek; I thank wood s lot for introducing me to him. Here's an obituary, and here's a poem:

As language. . .

As language. . .Silence is also a language.
When there is no order in heaven
we make what we make
by luck, or strength,
or the composition of desire.
Power grows
like vegetation,
and there are no preferences under heaven.

I do not know why a leaf should be of less worth
than a Vatican,
or why builders care.
The mathematical stones recite their logic
of cruelty and despair—
we arose to gratify some searchless reason
shaping the empty air.

LANGUAGE IN O'BRIAN.

Mark Liberman of Language Log is starting "a small series of posts about linguistic aspects of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels"; so far there has been one on "linking which" and one on "Words, foods, characters." Anyone interested in the novels (which should include everyone who likes the combination of well-written English and a well-told story) should avail themself of A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O'Brian's Seafaring Tales, by Dean King, John B. Hattendorf, and J. Worth Estes; Mark's posts complement it excellently.

SILBO GOMERO.

A charming story (by Sarah Andrews of AP) about a language of whistles:

Juan Cabello takes pride in not using a cell phone or the Internet to communicate. Instead, he puckers up and whistles.

Cabello is a "silbador," until recently a dying breed on tiny, mountainous La Gomera, one of Spain's Canary Islands off West Africa. Like his father and grandfather before him, Cabello, 50, knows "Silbo Gomero," a language that's whistled, not spoken, and can be heard more than two miles away.

This chirpy brand of chatter is thought to have come over with early African settlers 2,500 years ago. Now, educators are working hard to save it from extinction by making schoolchildren study it up to age 14.

Silbo — the word comes from Spanish verb silbar, meaning to whistle — features four "vowels" and four "consonants" that can be strung together to form more than 4,000 words. It sounds just like bird conversation and Cabello says it has plenty of uses.

"I use it for everything: to call to my wife, to tell my kids something, to find a friend if we get lost in a crowd," Cabello said.

In fact, he makes a living off Silbo, performing daily exhibitions at a restaurant on this island of 147 square miles and 19,000 people.

The story includes a link to an mp3 file of a whistled conversation.

Update. You can now (Aug. 2007) see a video describing the island of Gomera entirely in Silbo (!) at this page. Thanks, Jeremy!

REVIVING PASSAMAQUODDY.

An interesting story by Katie Zezima in today's NY Times: Allen Sockabasin is trying to revive Passamaquoddy, the rapidly vanishing language of his tribe.

...Fewer than 600 people in the Passamaquoddys' indigenous land — eastern Maine and the adjacent region of Canada — now speak Passamaquoddy or Maliseet, a dialect. And of those who do, fewer still can pray in the language, in part because most prayers were taught their ancestors in either Latin or English, by the Jesuits and the Anglicans who followed.

The 58-year-old Mr. Sockabasin is trying to change all that. Having previously recorded his translations of songs and poems from English to Passamaquoddy (pronounced pass-eh-meh-KWAD-ee), he is now translating the rosary and recording it on compact discs that he plans to distribute to schools and churches in eastern Maine and the adjoining Canadian province, New Brunswick. The project is the first in which the prayers have been translated into the native language, professionally recorded (in a local studio) and distributed.

Most of those who still speak Passamaquoddy at all are aging, now over 50. Some tribal members say the language is dying out because many parents simply want their children to learn English so that they can pursue education and better jobs, and so leave rural Maine.

Tribal elders tried to preserve Passamaquoddy orally through the years, but English often seeped in, tainting it. Linguists have studied the language since the 1970's, but members of the tribe say they have not benefited from the research, which has for the most part been scholarly and, they say, not focused on helping Indian communities.

So they have started their own programs, at schools and community centers. The prayer project, however, is the most moving, they say.

One tribal member, Brenda Commander, who for three years has run a language program in the Indian community of Houlton, Me., said she first heard a prayer in Passamaquoddy last year, at a funeral. The words took on a different meaning. "I just can't even describe it," Ms. Commander said. "I felt inspired. It made me really emotional."...

Mr. Sockabasin works with the aid of a computer program that reads back written text. He types letters that he believes will translate orally to Passamaquoddy. Then, when the computer speaks them back to him, he tinkers with those that sound awry to his ear, and tries again. Once a rough translation is complete, he takes the printed word, reads it aloud and adds correct inflections. Once an accurate translation is complete, he records it.

He also teaches the language to anyone who is interested in learning it. "If I can teach a computer how to sound out a Passamaquoddy word," he said, "I certainly can teach native children how to sound the words."

I suppose there's not much chance of reversing the language's decline, but I'm always glad to see people giving it their best shot. A language is a terrible thing to waste.

DROOGS.

Michele Berdy's latest Moscow Times column is about Russian terms for friendship and the levels of relationship they imply. (Via Mildly Malevolent.)

LANGUAGE = DISEASE?

Mark Liberman's latest post at Language Log reads, in its entirety:

Mark Mandel's home page includes this aphorism, attributed to Lynne Murphy:

"Asking a linguist how many languages (s)he speaks is like asking a doctor how many diseases (s)he has."

I think I don't agree, but I'm not sure why not. Maybe I don't like to think of a language as being analogous to a disease, pace William S. Burroughs and Laurie Anderson :-).

I have a couple of problems with this.

The first is that it seems to me a stupid aphorism, and I don't see why Mark has such trouble figuring out why he doesn't agree with it. Asking a linguist how many diseases he speaks may be vaguely analogous to asking a doctor how many diseases she has studied, but in no sense can a linguist's speaking a language be considered analogous to a doctor's having a disease. Leaving aside the silliness of the language/disease equation, linguists aquire languages as part of their professional arsenal (unless of course they're Chomskyites, in which case they study their navels instead); a doctor getting sick is just like anyone else getting sick, aside from the mild irony of the situation. The statement is the sort of thing that pops into one's head around 2 a.m. in a dorm room or bar, and is best left in that setting, where muzzy tributes like "Wow, man!" can be offered without the inconvenient disruption of analytical thought.

You may have noticed the shifting pronouns used for the protagonists in my version of the story above; they are not my invention, but are present in the version on Mandel's page, cited as Mark's source:

"Asking a linguist (language scientist) how many languages he speaks is like asking a doctor how many diseases she has." (Lynne Murphy)

Which is the second problem. Yo! Mark! When you put something in quotation marks, it's supposed to be quoted—no silent paraphrasing allowed.

POETRY JOURNALS AND ANCRENE WHATEVER.

wood s lot features a couple of interesting multilingual journals:

Tambou/Tambour, Revue trilingue haïtienne d’études politiques et littéraires / Revi ayisyen an twa lang sou keksyon politik e literè / Trilingual Haitian Journal of political and literary studies.

Transference, an Italian/English journal of comparative poetry, edited from Oxford by Erminia Passannanti (the subject of many links at ::: wood s lot ::: today); its Novecento [20th Century] page features many authors, both Italian and English-language, with copious quotes and translations.

He also links to an excellent online edition of the Ancrene Wisse (when did this stop being known as Ancren(e) Riwle, the name I'm used to?):

Ancrene Wisse, a Middle English 'rule' or 'guide' for female recluses, was composed in the West Midlands in the early thirteenth century... The work draws on a wide variety of sources: the Church Fathers, particularly Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great; later monastic writers, particularly Bernard of Clairvaux and Aelred of Rievaulx (whose Latin rule for anchoresses, De Institutione inclusarum, c. 1160, is an important source); and the pastoral manuals and preaching aids developed in the Paris schools during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries... Ancrene Wisse is clearly the work of a highly-educated author, but it does not assume an equally highly-educated audience; although both French and Latin versions survive, it seems to have been composed originally in Middle English, and most of the Latin it contains, apart from the prayers and hymns which would have formed part of the anchoresses' daily routine, is translated or glossed.

Posted by languagehat at 11:13 AM | Comments (1)

OLD NORSE FOR BEGINNERS.

Haukur Thorgeirsson has a website devoted to the study of Old Norse, and it looks quite good. Along with the lessons he has sections on pronunciation (standard and alternative), runes, links, and other related matters, not to mention a few Old Norse cartoons. Here's his discussion of "Old Norse? Which Old Norse?":

The term Old Norse refers to the language spoken in Scandinavia and Scandinavian settlements from about 800 to about 1350. It should be obvious that it was not exactly the same language over a vast area and 550 years. It is usually split into two groups, which are then split into two dialects.

            West Norse                           East Norse
Old Icelandic Old Norwegian   Old Danish Old Swedish

Of all these, the dialect which preserved the most interesting literature is Old Icelandic. This course will teach Old Icelandic from the 13th century; when such works as Heimskringla and the Edda were composed. The spelling of Old Icelandic words is normalised to the accepted standard. When texts that are not from the 13th century are quoted we will still use the same spelling.

The term 'Old Norse' is sometimes used to mean specifically what we here call 'West Norse' or what we here call 'Old Icelandic'. It is sometimes applied to Icelandic up to the 16th century.

Via GR Burgess's Old Norse Page (itself worth a look), via mirabilis.ca

ON THE UP-AND-UP.

What does that expression mean to you? Until a minute ago, I wouldn't have thought there was any doubt about it: Merriam-Webster's says "up-and-up an honest or respectable course—used in the phrase on the up-and-up," and that's how I've always heard it used. But now, thanks to Geoff Nunberg (via jim), I find that a great many people think it means 'on the increase,' or 'improving,' as in "Hong Kong's trade is on the up and up." Nunberg was as suprised as I am, and he gives this striking example:

Out of curiosity, I sent a question about the item to a discussion group that's peopled by dialectologists and other devotees of word-lore. I had a note back from someone in Berkeley who told me that he was surprised to hear that "on the up and up" could be used to mean "on the increase." But when he asked his wife about it, she said that for her that was the only thing it could mean —she never knew it could mean "on the level." And what made it odder still was that they've been married for more than twenty years and both grew up in Southern California.

I had this image of the two of them sitting at the breakfast table. He asks "Is your brother's new business on the up-and-up?" and she says, "No, but he's making do." And they go on like that with neither of them ever realizing that they're talking at cross-purposes. Deborah Tannen, call your office.

He gives further examples of expressions whose "disparate meanings can live side-by-side without anybody seeming to notice"; as always, he's worth reading in full.

DEAR BUNNY.

The Paris Review has put bits of its 50th Anniversary Issue online, but what particularly attracted me on the main page was a teaser for "Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Friendship and the Feud," a selection from the 2,000 pages of correspondence between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. A sample:

WILSON

Tell me: Why do you think that Hamlet has always been so popular on the stage in the English-speaking countries? Of course it’s good but this can’t be the reason. Several of Shakespeare’s other plays ought to be more dramatically effective. It’s true that it gives the star a fat part, but there must be something more to it than this. Do give me the benefit of your opinion on this matter.

NABOKOV

There are several reasons why Hamlet, even in the hideous garbled versions current on the stage, should be attractive both to the caviar eater and the groundling: (1) everybody likes to see a ghost on the stage; (2) kings and queens are also attractive; (3) the number and variety of lethal arrangements are unsurpassed and thus most pleasing—(a) murder by mistake, (b) poison (in dumb show), (c) suicide, (d) bathing and tree climbing casualty, (e) duel, (f) again poison—and other attractions backstage.

KOELSCH.

The site of the Akademie för uns kölsche Sproch [Academy of our Cologne dialect] uses frames, so I can't link to (for instance) the Kölsches Wörterbuch page with its "Deutsch -> Kölsch" search box, but if you have any interest in German dialects it's a treasure trove. (In case you're wondering, the local name for the city, Köln in standard German, is Kölle.) Here's a sample paragraph in Kölsch (also called Ripuarisch):

Baal fängk ald widder de Weihnachtszigg aan. Dot Üür Famillich un Fründe räächziggig en kölsche Chressdags-e-Kaat schecke. Oder dot Üch us dä ungerscheedliche Kaate vun Kölle en passende erussöke. Mer bemöhe uns jo ald ärg, immer mih Kaate zesamme ze stelle för Üch, domet Ehr och en große Uswahl hatt. Trotzdäm sin mer jet knapp an Kaate. Mer wollte jo för all Gelägeheite Kaate met passende Bildcher aanbeede, vür allem ävver Kaate vun Kölle vun fröher un vun hügg.

Via Jim at UJG, who links to it in the course of a discussion of Carnival in Cologne (which begins on November 11); he ends his post with Alaaf!, which is not in the Akademie's online dictionary; I found another online lexicon, but it just calls it an Ausruf ('interjection'). Wat soll et bedügge, Jim?

Addendum, Jim has a full explanation, taken from Prof. Dr. Adam Wrede's Neuer kölnischer Sprachschatz, "the Cologne equivalent of the OED."

FRAKTUR.

What Does This Blasted Thing Say?, by Walt Vogdes, is a useful guide to the old German Fraktur alphabet, with special attention to easily confused letters. It arose from "questions asked in the Beer Stein Forum, especially those trying to identify a regimental stein," but you don't need to be a member of the American Beer Drinker's Party to enjoy it. (Via Apothecary's Drawer Weblog.)

Addendum. A commenter has pointed out an excellent site on German handwriting (Suetterlin). I've never been any good at reading it; at least now I have somewhere to go for help.

BROKEN ENGLISH.

Geoff Pullum, one of the jolly crew over at LanguageLog, has an entry discussing this quote from a younger, as yet ungubernatorial Arnold Schwarzenegger: "I threw up many times while I'm working out. But it doesn't matter. It was worth it." Geoff says the use of present rather than past in "I'm working out" is not broken English: "A small departure from idiomatic standard English, and a use of tense that would be grammatical in some languages... What Schwarzenegger said was not all that far from grammaticality." Leaving aside the distraction of what would be grammatical in other languages (that way lies madness), do any of my readers agree with Geoff that the first quoted sentence is "a small departure from idiomatic standard English"? I don't know how to measure distance from grammaticality, but I do know that I would automatically judge anyone who spoke that sentence not to be a native speaker of English, and isn't that what "broken English" means?

WIKTIONARY.

Pat tells me about an offshoot of Wikipedia called the Wiktionary, "a collaborative project to produce a free multilingual dictionary in every language, with meanings, etymologies and pronunciations... We started on December 12, 2002 and already have 22143 entries in the English version. Anyone can edit any definition; log in is optional. See the Wiktionary FAQ for more information about the project, and the help page for information on how to use and contribute to Wiktionary." Pat points to the entry for 'butterfly,' which has words in languages from Aja-Gbe to Zulu, and adds:

Good fun. Also, it has Unicode support, which is a great thing, and it's under one of those wacky GNU documentation licenses, so there are no worries about copyright—anyone can do as they wish with the content.

So have fun, everyone.

One thing that annoys me: the box at the upper left-hand corner has the word "Wiktionary" followed by a dictionary-style pronunciation, which is (without the IPA symbols) WIKshunree—in other words, it's based on the British pronunciation of "dictionary." Surely it would be better to do without a pronunciation than be that parochial. (And no, I don't think I can edit it. It's a logo.)

CHINESE NEWSPAPERS IN NYC.

Today's NY Times has a long article by Joseph Berger about the competition among the Chinese-language newspapers of New York; it's worth reading if you're interested in the subject, but I cite it here for this paragraph about format:

With more readers comfortable in English, the newspapers have revised their format, printing Chinese text horizontally, from left to right, rather than vertically, from top to bottom. That allows them to insert English phrases like "early decision" or "the official preppy handbook" into articles. (Reporters use English keyboards, writing Chinese characters by typing in a phonetic version of a Chinese word; this brings up a menu of possible Chinese characters.)

THE LANGUAGE OF AUTHORITY.

The latest New Yorker has an article by Jane Kramer, "All He Surveys: Silvio Berlusconi’s monopoly on Italy" (unfortunately not online), that contains this striking quote from anthropologist Mariella Pandolfi:

Pandolfi says that, for her, the great irony of Italian politics is that all the likely candidates of the center-left... speak an Italian that's elegant but completely incomprehensible and elitist. "It's the language of the priests, the courts, the language of authority,... whereas the language that unites Italy today is Berlusconi's television language. His grammar is dreadful. He gets the subjunctive wrong. Give him three seconds on television and he makes four mistakes. But you discover that everybody loves his mistakes. That's his power."

(Article link added courtesy of Maurizio in the comments.)

AN ATTEMPT AT PHYLOGENETICS.

Peter Forster and Alfred Toth, two geneticists who know nothing about linguistics, have written a paper, "Toward a phylogenetic chronology of ancient Gaulish, Celtic, and Indo-European," that purports to redraw the family tree of Indo-European, regroup the Celtic languages, and establish far earlier dates for the break-up of PIE and the split of Insular from Continental Celtic. Fortunately, the world will not have to rewrite its textbooks; Larry Trask has done such a thorough job of trashing their methods in LINGUIST List that if there is any justice the names of the perpetrators will never be heard of again outside their specialty. A sample:

What they do is to appeal to an unexplained and wholly subjective notion of "similarity". Two items are assigned to the same state if the authors judge them to be similar, but to different states if the authors judge them to be dissimilar. Let's see what that means in practice.

Latin filia 'daughter' and its Spanish descendant hija are assigned to different states, because the authors judge tham to be dissimilar. But the Gaulish inflected form teuo- 'to gods' and the Scottish Gaelic prepositional phrase do dhiadhan are assigned to the same state, because the authors judge them to be similar. Why are they similar?

Breton forn 'oven' is assigned to the same state as Spanish horno, but to a different state from Irish sorn. Italian e 'and' is assigned to a different state from its Spanish cognate y, but to the same state as the unrelated Basque . (Spanish y has a positional variant e, but apparently that doesn't matter.) On the other hand, the Gaulish genitive suffix -i is assigned to the same state as Greek -ou. So, /i/ resembles /u/ but not /e/. How do the authors come by these remarkable insights?

Normally, an overt suffix is counted as different from zero suffix. However, Latin feminine -a is assigned to the same state as French e, even though in Parisian French that orthographic -e is purely decorative, and the suffix is zero.

I could go on in this vein, but you get the idea. There is no rhyme or reason in the assignment of states, and the authors' procedure is as capricious as it is unexplained.

At this point, the work under discussion abandons the discipline of linguistics altogether, and in fact it ceases to be anything recognizable as serious scholarship. Linguistics cannot be done in terms of subjective notions of similarity. This is the kind of sludge we see in those lurid articles claiming to have reconstructed "Proto-World", and in those delightful Websites announcing "Latvian—the key to all languages".

Via Mark Liberman of Language Log, who also links to a credulous review in American Scientist Online which he deconstructs himself. And I should add that the NY Times fell for this nonsense back in July, which is what alerted the LINGUIST List folks to it.

UNGREEK.

Tired of using lorem ipsum for your dummy text? The good folks at toolbot.com have created a generator that "gives you the option of several different source texts from which you can generate greeking." You can choose Jane Eyre, the Constitution, the Song of Solomon, Lao Tze, or (if greeked English isn't enough for you) the Esperantists' Manifesto, the libretto of Aida, or the GNU Public License in Swedish, among others. Here's a sample based on the Rubaiyat:

One knows but still the vine her ancient ruby yields and still. Divine tomorrow's tangle to the winds resign and lose. Vessel of a more ungainly make they sneer at. Oh make haste would you that spangle of existence spend about the secret? The temple lost outright oh thou who didst. Twisted tendril as a snare a blessing we should use it should we! The desert's dusty face lighting a little hour or two is gone, it as wind along the waste I know not whither willynilly blowing what without asking, fansy in an after rage destroy none answer'd this but after silence spake a vessel, shadowshow play'd in a box whose candle! My being let the sufi flout of my base metal may be filed, khayyam and leave the lot.

(Via wood s lot.)

PERSIAN.

Tara Bahrampour has an article in the latest New Yorker on the Iranian community in Los Angeles that includes the following enlightening quote:

In L.A., especially during the hostage crisis, many Iranians began to refer to themselves as "Persian." (As one man explained, "You think of Iran, you think of crazy mullahs; you think of Persia, you think of Persian carpets, Persian cats. Which would you rather be associated with?"

Makes sense.

BLOGGERFELLER BLOGS AGAIN.

Cinderella Bloggerfeller is back from hiatus, with a very enlightening entry on Azerbaijan and a very funny one on Google's "Did you mean...?" feature.

Addendum. On the latter, see now Mark Lieberman's analysis in Language Log.

RUSSIA AT THE NYPL.

I have spent two lunch hours at the Russia Engages the World, 1453-1825 exhibit at the New York Public Library, and hope to spend more; anyone who will be in NYC between now and next May (the exhibit was supposed to run from October 3, 2003 to January 31, 2004, but has been extended) should make a point of visiting it if they have any interest in Russia. The first section, by itself in a room off to the left as you face the main exhibit room, is about the period of relative isolation from the fall of Constantinople through the reign of Ivan IV (ending in 1584); the highlights here (from my bookish point of view) are copies of what were probably the first books ever printed in Muscovy, the Evangelie [Gospels] (Moscow, c. 1564) and the Apostol [Acts of the Apostles] (Moscow: Ivan Fedorov and Petr Mstislavets, 1564). (There are also a beautifully illuminated 15th-century manuscript Evangelie and a mid-17th-century copy of a Byzantine icon in a gorgeously jeweled oklad [frame], among many other items.)

In the main exhibit room are sections on Russia's encounter with Asia (I'm not sure why a "list of imperial edicts issued by Emperors Shun-zhi (1638–1661) and Kang-xi (1654–1722) of China" is there, but it's written in Manchu, so I was happy to see it), Peter and Petersburg (including the first dictionary printed in Russia, Leksikon treiazychnyi, sirech’ Rechenii slavenskikh, ellinogrecheskiikh i latinskikh sokrovishche [A Trilingual Dictionary, that is, A Treasury of Slavonic, Greek, and Latin Words] (Moscow: [Pechatnyi Dvor], 1704), and a 1707 safe-conduct letter signed by Peter the Great—it's really something to see his confidently scrawled Petr), and a half-dozen more, with too many treasures to even give a quick summary of. I will mention (to entice that element of my readership whose taste sinks below the Parnassian) that there is an X-rated "erotic watercolor" showing Catherine the Great being pleasured by a vigorous Prince Potemkin (with feelthy quatrains in the margins).

A couple of questions for anyone who might know: why, in the Plan stolichnago goroda Sanktpeterburga [Plan of the Capital City of St. Petersburg] of 1753, do the bs look almost exactly like the ps (like Greek pis), except that the latter have a tiny little turned-up end on the right leg? I've never seen that before. And in the Opyt zhivopisnago puteshestviia po Severnoi Amerike [An Illustrated Description of a Picturesque Journey Through North America] by Pavel Petrovich Svin’in (St. Petersburg: F. Drekhsler, 1815), the USA is called Soedinyonnye Amerikanskie Oblasti; when did the word shtaty come into use for 'states'?

Finally, a quatrain from the Histoire de la vie, du règne, et du détrônement d’Iwan III. [i.e., VI] empereur de Russie [A History of the Life, Reign, and Dethronement of Ivan VI, Emperor of Russia] (London, 1766):

A la Postérité

Que direz-vous, races futures,
Si quelque fois un vrai discours
Vous récite les aventures
De nos abominables jours?

Still, I fear, a good question.

MORE TRANSLATION BLOGS.

Transblawg alerts us to the existence of Carob (not a blog), with its Carob : Translating category, and Translation 'n Stuff, "a new personal blog on all things related to translation."

LEARNING FROM LUPIN.

Emeth at Canticlysm has a marvelous description [2005: now at her new blog] of how she learned Japanese in an unbalanced but thoroughly enjoyable way:

When I was twelve, my mother bought me a mystery novel, Kiganjo, about a French gentleman robber named Lupin. It was a long series of books, translated from French to Japanese, about a handsome, dashing nobleman, a genius at disguises, who went around solving mysteries, robbing rich bad guys, and helping people.

At the time, I couldn't read much Japanese (the 100 letters of the alphabet and about 100 kanji). It took me several hours to read the first couple pages, but I was drawn into the story. I read the book for hours and hours every day, looking up every word I couldn't read, which was about every other word. By the end of the week, I finished reading my first “real” book in Japanese and had fallen completely in love with Lupin. I begged her to buy the next book, read it in about 3 days, and the next, and the next. By the time I finished about 20, I was reading one volume a day, starting in the morning, and finishing it in the evening. (I was able to do this because I didn't do any formal study for about 4 years, but that's a different story.)

For a while, my Japanese vocabulary was very unbalanced. I didn't know how to say the most basic everyday things, but I did know how to describe how a person could be bludgeoned to death in a secret underground passage under ancient castle ruins.

Mama and Papa realized they would be buying a book a day for who knew how long, and we just moved to a new place near a library, so I began an intense relationship with the mystery section at the library. Over the next year and a half, I read at least one mystery a day, and finished reading the entire section (over 400 books), learning about 2500 kanji. I kept going back to my favourite character, Lupin, and ended up reading through the 36-volume series three times.

Now that's what I call effective study technique, fitting very well with Alaric Radosh's suggestions discussed here earlier.

AN IDIOTIC REMARK.

From an interview with Vendela Vida, author of a first novel called And Now You Can Go:

I do like the idea of there not being any design on the book jacket and just reading every book in the same font.

Via La Muselivre, an excellent French literary blog (je veux dire carnet) whose creator was so enraged by this that she stopped reading the interview, thereby missing this delightful exchange:

RB: It is getting tedious. I was engaged in one of those weblog threads and somebody called me a nitwit.

VV: [shouts] Don't read it! Don't go on line!

Somebody called him a nitwit! The horror, the horror! The barbarians are at the gates!

HILARY MANTEL.

Hilary Mantel, an excellent writer, is the subject of a review by Joyce Carol Oates (not an excellent writer) in the Oct. 23 NYRB; from it I pluck two excerpts from Mantel's memoir Giving Up the Ghost to show why I like her so much. In the first she is responding to Orwell's "good prose is like a windowpane":

Persiflage is my nom de guerre.... I stray away from the beaten path of plain words into the meadow of extravagant simile: angels, ogres, doughnut-shaped holes. And as for transparency—windowpanes undressed are a sign of poverty, aren't they? How about some nice net curtains, so I can look out but you can't see in?... Besides, windowpane prose is no guarantee of truthfulness. Some deceptive sights are seen through glass, and the best liars tell lies in plain words.

The second needs no annotation:

Writing about your past is like blundering through your house with the lights fused, a hand flailing for points of reference. You locate the stolid wardrobe, and its door swings open at your touch, opening on the cavern of darkness within. Your hand touches glass, you think it is a mirror, but it is the window. There are obstacles to bump and trip you, but what is more disconcerting is a sudden empty space, where you can't find a handhold and you know that you are stranded in the dark.

The first section of the book, about her early childhood, is online here. Enjoy.

INDIAN SUMMER.

Having just heard for the first time that a true Indian summer has to be preceded by a freeze, I did a little googling and found this page, which contains detailed investigations of the phenomenon itself and of the possible origins of its name (which goes back at least to a letter by St. John de Crevecoeur dated "German-flats, 17 Janvier, 1778"). The consensus definition:

It is an abnormally warm and dry weather period, varying in length, that comes in the autumn time of the year, usually in October or November, and only after the first killing frost/freeze. There may be several occurrences of Indian Summer in a fall season or none at all.

SPAM FROM SLAVOJ ZIZEK.

This jeu d'esprit from John & Belle Have a Blog (via Making Light) had me laughing helplessly:

Zizek's critical writings are the academic equivalent of Nigerian scam spam. (Think about it: the urgency; the dangled carrot of impossible utopian returns; the diddling stick of bold, risky, radical ALL CAPS action to be taken NOW; the exceeding verbal awkwardness due to greedily flailing, failing grasp of English; notable vagueness concerning just those salient points one would think most in need of clear explanation and exposition.)

Imagine a world in which you didn't have to subscribe to certain top literary studies journals. What if their contents just showed up in your in-box every day? (Spam-guards would give you warnings like: 'this mail looks like it would be publishable in Critical Inquiry. Delete now?)

Sir,

VIRTUALLY REAL ANTI-LATE CAPITAL PROPOSAL

I am erratically to be pleasuring you from behind this urgent proposal, affective immediately, irrespective of that I make entirely no argument in person or out, nor determining validity of hereafter to follow hermeneutical proposal.

Self-control and domination converge in the distinction between THREE elements: the author of the spam, the recipient who (has to) obey the spam, AND the spam's EXECUTION/EXECUTOR - the one who mass-mails the spam and in whom Lacan discerns the contours of the Sadean executioner/torturer. The problem is not the identity of the spam's author and recipient: they effectively ARE the same, the emailed subject effectively IS autonomous in the sense of obeying his/her OWN spam.

In your already accepting of this unprecedented intervention, this "fundamental fantasy". Is this not Deleuzian-Lacanian? The exemplary case of this sphincter-loosening is, anti-essentially, you leaping of faith into confidence in the roots of our misapprehension of all your ideological accounts eternally in time.

Kierkegaardian teleological suspension of the ethics of fiduciary-Kantian duties: only impossible returns is worth the risk! No mercy, teaches St. Paul! Together we recover this profit of Lenin's teachings.

As Frederik Jameson has masterfully demonstrated; as Foucault interrogated, Jesus Christ crucified, Lenin attempted and Heidegger may have had some glimmer: for you to transfer largely, generously, rhizomatically, for to impersonally avoid needlessly hegemonic interpenetrations of irrelevant authorities.

Pleasure to transmit your affects and perceptions impersonally to my account, to follow imminently.

Hoping this finds you a cyborg,

Slavoj Zizek

TRANSLATING MAGIC.

Jerome Rothenberg's site UbuWeb includes, among many other interesting-sounding articles, an excerpt from Bronislaw Malinowski's The Language of Magic and Gardening (Coral Gardens and Their Magic, volume 2), which discusses the peculiar use of words in magic spells and the problems involved in translating them:

If the main principle of magical belief is that words exercise power in virture of their primeval mysterious connexion with some aspect of reality, them obviously we must not expect the words of Trobriand magic to act in virtue of their ordinary colloquial meaning. A spell is believed to be a primeval text which somehow came into being side by side with animals and plants, with winds and waves, with human disease, human courage and human frailty. Why should such words be as the words of common speech? They are not uttered to carry ordinary information from man to man, or to give advice or an order. The natives might naturally expect all such words to be very mysterious and far removed from ordinary speech. And so they are to a large extent, but by no means completely. We shall see that spells are astoundingly significant and translatable and we shall also see why this is so.

But the fact remains that unless the reader is forewarned that a great deal of the vocabulary of magic, its grammar and its prosody, falls into line with the deeply ingrained belief that magical speech must be cast in another mould, because it is derived from other sources and produces different effects from ordinary speeech, he will constantly be at cross-purposes with the principles according to which the translation of magical utterance has to proceed. If the ordinary criteria of grammar, logic and consistency were applied, the translator would find himself hopelessly bogged by Trobriand magic.

Take the very first formula, for example. This is a direct address to ancestral spirits—a man-to-man communication we might say; hence in parts it is lucid and grammatical. And then comes the sentence: 'Vikita, Iyavata, their myth head is.' After much consultation with informants and etymological research in their company, I had to conclude that in no sense can these words be set equivalent to any ordinary prose sentence. The meaning of the magical expression is simply the intrinsic effect which, in native belief, it exerts on the spirits and indirectly on the fertility of the soil. The commentaries of the natives, however, reveal the mythological references connected with the names Vikita and Iyavata. Those who are versed in the magical tradition of this spell can interpret the significance of these words and tell us why they are ritually effective.

In what way, then, can we translate such a jumble of words, meaningless in the ordinary sense? The words are supposed to exercise a mystical effect sui generis on an aspect of reality. This belief is due to certain properties and associations of these words. They can therefore be translated in one sense and in one sense only: we must show what effect they are believed to produce, and marshal all the linguistic data available to show how and why they produce this effect.

To take another example, the exordium of the most important spell:

Vatuvi, vatuvi, vatuvi, vatuvi. Vitumaga, i-maga.
Vatuvi, vatuvi, vatuvi, vatuvi. Vitulola, i-lola.

The better one knows the Trobriand language the clearer it becomes that these words are not words of ordinary speech. As actually recited in the spell they are pronounced according to a special phonology, in a sing-song, with their own rhythm and with numerically grouped repetitions. The word vatuvi is not a grammatical form ever found in ordinary speech. The compounds vitulola, vitumaga, are again weird and unusual; in a way, nonsense words. Words like vatuvi or the root lola are clipped; but there are other words which are compounded, built up, developed...

Thus all magical verbiage shows a very considerable coefficient of weirdness, strangeness and unusualness. The better we know the Trobriand language the more clearly and immediately can we distinguish magic from ordinary speech. The most grammatical and least emphatically chanted spell differs from the forms of ordinary address. Most magic, moreover, is chanted in a sing-song which makes it from the outset profoundly different from ordinary utterances. The wording of magic is correlated with a very complicated dogmatic system, with theories about the primeval mystical power of words, about mythological influences, about the faint co-operation of ancestral spirits and, much more important, about the sympathetic influence of animals, plants, natural forces and objects. Unless a competent commentator is secured who, in each specific case, will interpret the elements of weirdness, the allusions, the personal names or the magical pseudonyms, it is impossible to translate magic. Moreover, as a comparison of the various formulae has shown us, there has developed a body of linguistic practice—use of metaphor, opposition, repetition, negative comparison, imperative and question with answer—which, though not developed into any explicit doctrine, makes the language of magic specific, unusual, quaint.

(Via wood s lot.)

"AND HE HATH SOWN..."

and he hath sown pese benes
and such things as those

he hath made the dounghill
something less then it was

—Jonathan Williams

OBSCURE WORDS.

Sheila complains in a Star Lines post that:

Famous SF writers love tossing around obscure words.  The more obscure, the better, too; as if knowing a word no one has used since the 18th century or is only applicable if you're translating a passage from a Dead Sea Scroll makes them Special.

The word that so upset her? Luddite. Now, there's no shame in not knowing the word, but it's not particularly uncommon, let alone "obscure"; I've known it as long as I can remember, and so have most of the people who commented on the entry (including Lynn, from whom I got the link). What particularly struck me was the idea of a writer complaining about the use of a word she didn't know. Personally, I'm always grateful when I run across unknown words; the wordhoard can never be too full.

Update. Further discussion at Byzantium Shores and Reflections in d minor (which also has a post on big words in general).

IE AND EG ARE NOT FRENCH.

You might think that ie and eg, being abbreviations for the Latin phrases id est and exempli gratia respectively, would be acceptable in French, which is simply Very Late Latin. You would be wrong. The French style site Points de langue has a page on the topic, pointing out that French already has perfectly good, and transparent, abbreviations "« c.-à-d. », qui se prononce « c'est-à-dire »" and "« p. ex.", qui se prononce « par exemple »." Why import two others, along with the controversies over how to write them (with or without spaces and periods) and the uncertainty over how to pronounce them (in English, "eye ee" and "ee gee" or "that is" and "for example")? The answer, apparently, is "pour paraître dans le goût anglo-saxon." La Grande Rousse, from whom I got the link (and who is back from hiatus, hurray!) is standing, as always, on the barricades, trying to stem the anglocentric tide.

HOMERIC SINGING.

Georg Danek and Stefan Hagel have developed a technique of singing the Homeric epics; their web page summarizes their theories, gives references, and (most importantly) links to a short WAV-File (Od. 8, 267-273, 811KB) and a longer MP3 file (Od. 8, 267-299, 2.4 MB) of Demodokos's song (Greek, English), from which you can judge the esthetic appeal of their reconstructions (since there's no way to judge accuracy). Personally, I find them quite attractive, though it sounds like they might pall over the long run unless they were played with more variation or sung with more brio. (Via wood s lot.)

RATAFIA.

The latest NY Times Sunday Magazine has a lively article by Jonathan Reynolds about a Scottish food historian named Alan Davidson, author of the Oxford Companion to Food. The story of how he became a food expert is intriguing (his wife asked him about the varieties of fish in Tunis, where they were living, and he couldn't find anything in print, so he started investigating: "I found the whole business of identification of fish quite interesting"), and there are some nice quotes—eg, on the Jerusalem artichoke:

By 1621, the writer John Goodyer, revising Gerard's Herbal, was writing: 'which way soever they be dressed and eaten, they stir and cause a filthy loathsome stinking wind within the body, thereby causing the belly to be pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine than men.'

But what inspired me to post an entry about it is this:

So do we need to know the three meanings of ''ratafia'' (it's a liqueur; it's a macaroonlike cookie; it's an essence of almond), the proper way to clean a potentially lethal blowfish (wear gloves; cut off the head and tail and dorsal fin; peel back the skin like a glove) and the meaning of poubelles de table (the dustbin for picking up detritus from the table)?

If it's written with Davidsonian elan, yes.

I was only vaguely aware of ratafia, and am glad to have the meanings laid out for me. But I can only confirm two of them from independent sources; the OED says:
1 A cordial or liqueur flavoured with certain fruits or their kernels, usually almonds or peach-, apricot-, and cherry-kernels. Now applied esp. to a type of aperitif made from grape-juice and brandy.
2 A kind of cake or biscuit having the flavour of ratafia, or made to be eaten along with it.
[a. Fr. ratafia (17th c., Boileau), †ratafiat, of unknown origin (see Littré for conjectures).]

And the American Heritage:
1 A sweet cordial flavored with fruit kernels or almonds.
2 A biscuit flavored with ratafia.
[French, perhaps of West Indian Creole origin.]

But I suppose I'll take Mr. Davidson's word for the essence of almond. He seems to know this sort of thing.

GAIMAN ON US/UK TRANSLATION.

Margaret Marks of Transblawg posts about a Neil Gaiman interview in which he discusses differences between American and British editions of his books (scroll down to 6) As a Brit living in the US I feel very aware of... - by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) if you want to skip the other questions); Margaret quotes a very amusing anecdote about changing flat, and here are a few more paragraphs:

I'll happily change words when they mean different things—a pavement in the UK is what an American would call the sidewalk, while the pavement in the US is what Brit would regard as the road. If I have a girl bleeding on the pavement in the US edition, the meaning has changed, so I'm happy to move her to the sidewalk.

A phrase like "It's all a bit of a pantomime," would mean something very different in the US to the UK—and not in a way that would make a reader stop and realise that English Panto is a long way from "mime".

The first time it happened was with Terry Pratchett, when the US editor wanted us to explain things like Firelighters and English Currency in Good Omens, but we had so much fun with all the extra footnotes and things they crept back into the UK edition. So the Gollancz first edition hardback has fewer footnotes and a slightly darker plot than the current paperback versions on either side of the Atlantic. There were other differences—Terry changed my Cheers joke to a Golden Girls joke, because he didn't watch Cheers but quite liked the Golden Girls, and I changed my demons dance like the English band in the Eurovision Song Contest line to one about demons dancing like a white band on Soul Train because I suspected Eurovision Song Contests gags might not play in Des Moines.

Stardust I worked hard to keep the same—even down to the spelling of grey. The UK edition of American Gods isn't the same as the US edition—partly because I got the galley proofs back a week apart and I was fairly punctilious about making sure that the US version contained as few anglicisms as possible, but much less bothered if the occasional stray "car park" instead of "parking lot" crept into the UK text.

WORDS VS REALITY.

Juliet at Eclogues (who seems to have recovered from her spam-induced silence, hurray!) posts on a theme that has been much on my mind of late (thanks to a book Jonathon sent me, about which I hope to post before hell freezes over).

Shklovsky, from Art and Device (1917): "A work of art is the sum total of all s[t]ylistic devices employed in it."

Trotsky, from Literature and Revolution, published 7 years later in 1924: "The Formalists show a fast ripening religiousness. They are followers of St. John. They believe that 'In the Beginning was the Word'. But we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed, its phonetic shadow."

Which comes first, the deed or the word? Which is the shadow? And can art dominate reality? See her entry for more thought-provoking quotes.

Addendum. This stanza from a Les Murray poem ("The Edgeless") found at Ramage seems to fit here:

Where does talk come from? The two ask each other
over teacups. – From the same place as the world.
We have got the word and we don’t understand it.
It is like too much. – So we made up a word of our own
as much like nothing else as possible
and gave it to the machines. It made them grow –
And now we can’t see the limits of that word either.

ECO ON TRANSLATION.

The Guardian has an excerpt from Umberto Eco's new book Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation; I heartily agree with the opening sentence, "I frequently feel irritated when I read essays on the theory of translation that, even though brilliant and perceptive, do not provide enough examples," and I am pleased that most of the extract is taken up with the proper use in translations of the Italian word topo, which can mean both 'mouse' and 'rat.' The link comes via the always interesting Open Brackets, whose entry Echo goes on to quote various reviews of the new Proust translation, finishing up with a hilariously snide comment by Alain de Botton and a nicely dry retort by Gail (the blogatrice).

DEPRECATING.

The latest New Yorker includes a "Talk of the Town" piece by one Field Maloney, Princeton '97, who presumably represents the best and brightest of today's twentysomethings. The piece, about two University of Arkansas biology professors who won a National Science Foundation grant to catalogue slime-mold species, contains the sentence "Stephenson, who is sixty, is tall and deprecating." What I'm hoping happened here is that Maloney wrote "self-deprecating" and the prefix dropped out somewhere in the process of getting from manuscript to print; this says terrible things about the new New Yorker's editing standards, but lets the author off the hook. My suspicion, however, is that the sentence was written as printed, and that nobody from author on down took the trouble to reflect that "deprecating" by itself means nothing at all. Either way, it's yet another sign that Standards Have Fallen.

And while I have your attention, trot on over to The Discouraging Word and read about an even more egregious misuse from the NY Times ("Google recently started wheedling down a long list of investment banks..."); it's under "Google: wheedler extraordinaire?" (posted Saturday, November 1, 2003).

Addendum. Well, this will teach me to go off half-cocked, without bothering to do my usual fastidious lexicographical search. It turns out deprecating is indeed a word, even if it had never previously come to my attention; the OED says "deprecating... That deprecates or expresses disapproval or disavowal; deprecatory." Mea culpa, and particular apologies to David Manley, whose initial comment I dismissed with a flip remark rather than doing a little research to see if he might be right. (I won't apologize to the New Yorker, which should have edited it anyway; in context, it certainly doesn't seem to mean what it ought to, and I think "self-deprecating" is what was intended.)

Update. The Discouraging Word goes into the issue in detail, concluding:

The very brief Talk format, admittedly, does not allow for deep characterization, but hundreds of writers before Maloney have been able to cut to the core of the characters they sketch without getting tangled up in overly witty turns of phrase. Maloney goes for knowing complexity with "amiable drill sergeant" but ends up only with jumbled contradiction. As a result, none of us know quite what deprecating means. But, as languagehat points out, we do know it's used poorly.