The website Литература (Literatura) is devoted to "the best literature resources of the Russian internet: electronic libraries, book reviews, literary competitions, and much else." They host the magazine Словесность (Slovesnost'), publish interviews, and—the feature I use most—have an amazing collection of poems by everyone from Margarita Aliger to Aleksandr Yashchin. I suppose most of my Russian-reading audience already knows about it, but there must be some who don't, and it's certainly worth highlighting on general principles. (I was inspired to do so by a post on Dave's Blogo Slovo, reminding me of what a wonderful resource it is.)
One of the drawbacks of knowing Russian is constantly hearing Russian names butchered by English speakers. It doesn't bother me so much to hear KROOSH-chef for Khrushchev; let's face it, khroo-SHCHOF is hard for English speakers to say. But when the correct form is as easy as the wrong one, I get annoyed. The artist Rodchenko isn't road-CHENko but ROAD-chenko. The director Kozintsev is KOH-zintsef. And the recently deceased mathematician Olga Ladyzhenskaya (more math details here) is lah-DEE-zhenskaya, not (as I just heard a radio announcer say) ladee-ZHEN-skaya.
Addendum. A native Russian speaker informs me in a comment that the family names Kozintsev and Ladyzhenski have has an alternate pronunciations with penultimate stress (koZINtsef, ladyZHENski), so I withdraw a large portion of my indignation; those particular people used the pronunciations I indicate, but if a native Russian speaker wouldn't automatically know how to pronounce the names, I can't really expect American announcers to (although it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that whoever's in charge of telling them how to say things might be able to use the same references I do to find out).
Further addendum. I happened to open my collection of Bella Akhmadulina at a poem called Цветений очерёдность (Tsvetenii ocheryodnost') 'Sequence of flowering' and found a mention of ладыжинский овраг (ladyzhinskii ovrag), the Ladyzhino ravine. This confirmed the stress and indicated that the family name is geographical in origin. [I learn from Tatyana that the name is not in fact geographical, but comes from lodyzhka 'ankle.'] And how do I know the name of the village is Ladyzhino rather than Ladyzhin or Ladyzhinka (both in southwestern Ukraine)? Because she's written a more recent poem, Окаём и луна (Okayom i luna) 'Nogoodnik and moon,' in a sequence of new poems published in Znamya 1999, No. 7, wherein she revisits the name (I quote the third, fifth, and half the eighth stanzas of a long poem):
Ему родней — околыш, околоток.
Воспомню, окаянью вопреки,
окно во снег и журавель–колодец
в Ладыжине, в деревне близ Оки...
Моей исповедальною зимою
стремглав одолевала я овраг
Ладыжинский, давно воспетый мною —
подобострастно, а не кое–как...
Что мне до них! От октября до мая
в Ладыжино мой силуэт сновал...
For kin he had a hatband and a precinct.
In spite of sinfulness I recollect
a window on the snow and a well-crane
in Ladyzhino, a village near the Oka...
In my confessional winter
headlong I conquered the ravine
of Ladyzhino, which I long since hymned —
obsequiously, but not carelessly...
What did they matter to me! From October to May
my silhouette rushed to Ladyzhino...
(Incidentally, in a former life I was a math major, but the kind of math Ladyzhenskaya did—partial differential equations, with a great deal of importance for fluid dynamics—was of absolutely no interest to me. All my life I've tried to avoid anything with practical applications.)
All right, this isn't exactly Nobel Prize material here, but what can I say, I'm a sucker for this brand of dumb humor: Beautiful Stuff has posted a Ridiculously Large List of Silly Names, with links to still more silly names at the bottom of the page. (I search in vain, however, for Claude Balls, author of The Tiger's Revenge.)
An attempted reconstruction of Merlin’s Charm of Making, from John Boorman’s film Excalibur. There's even a vocabulary, and the question is raised whether a Latin loanword would be appropriate at this early date. I love this stuff. (Via Incoming Signals.)
I've been asked to comment on the talking-parrot stories that have been bruited about Blogovia of late, and I've been putting it off because even I get tired of being a party-pooper all the time. Fortunately, Geoff Pullum has done it for me over at Language Log; I'll quote the heart of it and send you off to read the whole thing (if you're up for some pull-no-punches debunking):
I'm just appalled at the kind of ridiculous, credulous garbage that sails out into the media universe the moment anyone claims they have located a communicative animal. People seem to completely lose their critical faculties when a bird with a brain the size of a macadamia nut creaks out a few imitated syllables, or (we've seen this before, with Koko) a gorilla waves its hairy hand vaguely in the air in a way that its trainer thinks resembles the very sign she was expecting. What is going on? Are we so desperate for communication with other intelligences that we will throw away our own the moment some dumb creature gives us an imitative squawk or a hand sign?A horse is a horse...
Nota bene. I am very much enjoying the vigorous discussion in the comment thread. I do feel I should emphasize one thing: this post is not about animal communication or intelligence in general; Languagehat is agnostic about such matters. It is purely about the alleged ability of certain animals to learn and use the grammar of human languages. I realize that some species have their own complex systems of conveying meaning. I do not believe they can conjugate verbs.
Addendum. I have received the following e-mail:
I came across some comments on one of your archives (29 Jan 2004) that interested me. The discussion of the day was the N'kisi Project. Some of your discussion participants were bird owners; some were skeptics about a bird's ability to use language.So drop him a line if you have something to contribute.
My bird is shy and usually talks to me or when she is outside on her perch. I record her there. My macaw has an overwhelming variety of things she can say (words, phrases, sentences, and short topical discussions). I'm interested in communicating off line with those who may be interested in the abilities of a talking bird. I am working on an analysis of my bird's speech from a linguistic point of view. The only news story about my bird, Arielle, was carried a couple of years ago in the local paper.
The speech streams and the circumstances about her speech seem to reveal my macaw's thought patterns. Can you help me find people who might be inclined to help me? I am an independent (i.e., unpaid) researcher/writer-want-to-be.
Will you kindly request that people interested in carry forward with speech related topic about birds (including hard-to-understand speech) contact me at my e-mail address [mdaltonarielle@yahoo.com]. We need to get acquainted.
Thanks for your help.
Sincerely,
Michael Dalton
An Economist story starts with one of my favorite Monty Python scenes and the new Mel Gibson movie and proceeds (via a potted history of international Latin use) to Nuntii Latini, Latino Moderne, the Lexicon recentis latinitatis ('jazz' is iazensis musica to the Vatican), and "an American Carmelite priest, Reginald Foster, Latin's loudest advocate in the modern world." Fun and informative! (Sent to me by Jonathon Delacour, who promises he'll update the heart of things any day now.)
By the way, the title of "Latin's loudest advocate in the modern world" would be disputed by Luigi Miraglia, and anyone interested in these matters should read Rebecca Mead's long New Yorker article about him, "Latin Lover."
The comment thread to "Peaches in Cluj" is chock-full of fascinating historical and ethnographical detail, and I commend it to anyone with an interest in the minority populations of Eastern Europe. One comment in particular, by the learned and much-traveled zaelic, had a paragraph so interesting to me I'm posting it here as its own entry. I knew about the Armenians of Eastern Europe, but had never heard of Armeno-Kipchak, a term so obscure it gets only 29 Google hits. I've added links for the curious:
The Armenians entered in the late 1600 via the Ukraine and Volynia. There were already communities of them around the Black Sea but the Jelali Revolts in eastern Turkey around 1610 caused a flood of Anatolian Armenians to flee to the Ukraine, and thence to Moldavia (there are still some in Iasi and Suceava). Since Transylvania was a more peaceful choice in the 17th century, many moved there - a particularly corrupt Archbishop sold loyalty to the Austrians by accepting the authority of Rome but maintaining the rituals of the Armenian Church as specific Armenian Uniates. Armenian was basically only a liturgical language. The original Armenian emigrants spoke Armeno-Kipchak - basically Turkish vernacular but written in Armenian script - and today Armenian is only used in some church hymns, and I don't know if Father Fogojan is still in charge of things up in Gheorgheni but I think he is the only priest fluent in the language (he lived mosty of his life on the Armenian Church island in the Venice Lagoon.)
I am also going to quote this sentence from the entry on "Armenian rite" (the liturgical practices observed by both the Armenian Apostolic (Orthodox) Church and the Armenian Catholics) from Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of World Religions, because I love the sound of the Armenian titles so much:
For its worship services the Armenian rite is dependent upon such books as the Donatzuitz, the order of service; the Badarakamaduitz, the book containing all the prayers used by the priest; the Giashotz, the book of midday, containing the Epistle and Gospel readings for each day; and the Z'amagirq, the book of hours, containing the prayers and psalms of the seven daily offices, primarily matins, prime, and vespers.
I generally have no interest in the cute coinages people keep coming up with, usually by blending two other words to achieve some strained and unnecessary meaning: beducation or whatever. Every once in a while, though, somebody invents a word that meets a hitherto unrealized need; such a word was Walpole's "serendipity" (first written down in a letter of January 28, 1754, exactly 250 years ago today!), and such a word (or prospective word) is "igry," invented by John Chaneski, Peter Gordon, Kevin West, and Francis Heaney some time back with the meaning 'painfully embarrassed for or uncomfortable about someone else's incredibly poor social behavior, or descriptive of such poor social behavior.' Heaney gives this example:
Like, say you're at a restaurant, and one of the people at your table summons the waiter by snapping their fingers. Watching this makes you die a little inside. You feel igry. (Or you might think, "What an igry thing to do.")In the Mark Liberman post at Language Log that introduced me to the word, Heaney expands as follows:
...when I see someone I respect writing about "reigning in one's impulses" or something, it does make me feel embarrassed for them, and it definitely generates a little of that dying-inside feeling that is the core of igriness. Limiting my definition to merely reactions to poor behavior might be too narrow. Like, here's another f'rinstance: watching the trailer to the new Ben Stiller movie makes me igry, not because the subject matter of the movie seems offensive, but because it just pains me so much that Ben Stiller keeps taking such embarrassing roles in crappy movies.I think the utility of this word is obvious. And I should mention that it will put paid to "the goddamn -gry riddle," which was in fact the impetus for the word's creation. Use it today!
Addendum. A comment by stripe in this MonkeyFilter thread refers to a problem I myself have with Heaney's definition:
The definition seems strained. Something somebody else does can "make you feel igry" but yet their action is "igry" as well? Adjectives aren't normally used this way: if somebody else does something 'dumb', it doesn't cause you to 'feel dumb'. There's probably a reason for this and the reason is that if you don't specify the causation of the 'igryness' you can't tell if it's caused by the person feeling it. It would be better to say somebody else's behavior 'is igrying' or 'igryifying' (probably the former) but how on earth do you pronounce them?I think the phrase "or descriptive of such poor social behavior" should be deleted, and the thought of the sloppily formed definition makes me a little igry.
Further addendum. Chuck Welch of BlogJazz contributes a haiku to the cause.
Today's NY Times has a funny article by Diana Jean Schemo about the problems people encounter offering misspelled items on eBay. It starts with a woman who had no luck trying to sell "chandaleer" earrings and continues:
Such is the eBay underworld of misspellers, where the clueless — and sometimes just careless — sell labtop computers, throwing knifes, Art Deko vases, camras, comferters and saphires.There is a pointed illustration of the perils of using Google as your spellchecker:They do get bidders, but rarely very many. Often the buyers are those who troll for spelling slip-ups, buying items on the cheap and selling them all over again on eBay, but with the right spelling and for the right price. John H. Green, a jeweler in Central Florida, is one of them.
Mr. Green once bought a box of gers for $2. They were gears for pocket watches, which he cleaned up and put back on the auction block with the right spelling. They sold for $200. "I've bought and sold stuff on eBay and Yahoo that I bought for next to nothing" because of poor spelling or vague descriptions, he said.
David Scroggins, who lives in Milwaukee, also searches for misspellings. His company provides entertainment for weddings and corporate events, and microphone systems for shows at Wisconsin's casinos. He has bought Hubbell electrical cords for a 10th of their usual cost by searching for Hubell and Hubbel. And he now operates his entire business by laptop computers, having bought three Compaqs for a pittance simply by asking for Compacts instead.
Ms. Marshall, who lives in Dallas, said she knew she was on shaky ground when she set out to spell chandelier. But instead of flipping through a dictionary, she did an Internet search for chandaleer and came up with 85 or so listings.Some people take misspellings into account when offering items for sale:She never guessed, she said, that results like that meant she was groping in the spelling wilderness. Chandelier, spelled right, turns up 715,000 times.
Warren Lieu of Houston, who was selling hunting and fishing knives on eBay recently, covered all the bases: his listing advertised every sort of alphabetic butchery, including knifes and knive.(Thanks to Bonnie for the link.)Mr. Lieu, a computer programmer, keeps a list of common misspellings, including labtop for laptop and Cusinart for Cuisinart.
His strategy of listing multiple spellings, he said, is based on his experience as a buyer. "I'm a bad speller myself," he said. So his mistakes in searching for items led him to realize that he could buy up bargains.
"I'd go ahead and deliberately misspell it when I searched for items," he said.
Jim Griffith, whose official title at eBay is dean of eBay education, teaches 40 to 50 seminars a year around the country. Although the auction house flags common misspellings online, Mr. Griffith said, the most common question he gets is, "When will eBay get a spell checker?" His answer? "You go to a store called a bookstore, and you buy something called a dictionary."
This week's New Yorker reprints the following correction from the International Herald Tribune:
Because of a translation error, an article in some editions Thursday misquoted Monica Frassoni, a member of the European Parliament, as comparing Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, to Attila the Hun. Frassoni, who represents a Belgian constituency but who spoke in Italian, said Berlusconi had arrived "alla guida dell'unione." This was translated as "at the tiller of the union" which was misheard as "Attila."
La Grande Rousse has an entry today on Webster's Online Dictionary: The Rosetta Edition. This remarkable (if somewhat annoying) site scrapes up huge quantities of information about virtually any string of conjoined letters you can find on the internet (check out the list of items beginning with aa), calling them all "words" and offering definitions (often from the 1913 edition of Webster's Unabridged), synonyms, crossword definitions, "commercial usages," images, quotations, usage frequency (telling you how often the word is used as what part of speech, although "midwife" is supposedly used as a noun 100.00% of the time, which is clearly untrue), "Frequency of Internet Expressions," "Modern Translations," "Ancestral Language Translations," "Bible Trace," "Matched Bible Translations," "Derivations & Misspellings," rhymes, "Alternative Orthography" (hexadecimal, Leonardo da Vinci, ASL, semaphore, Braille, &c, even including Arthur Conan Doyle's "dancing men"), "Bibliographic Items" (mostly media references and Amazon.com), and who knows what all. Much of this stuff is cute but useless; what's of primary interest to Languagehat, of course, is the translations, and I regret to say they are not to be depended on. You'd expect problems with a multivalent word like set or bow, so I tried whale, which seemed fairly straightforward, but here is the entirety of the Bulgarian entry:
???? ?? ??? ?? ?????? [hodya na lov za kitove], ????? [shibam] (beat, cut, drive, flog, lash, scourge, slash, swinge, switch), ??? [kit] (mastic, paste), ???? ??????? [neshto ogromno] (sockdolager), ??????????? [naperdashvam] (clobber, dress down, lace, lambaste, larrup, lather, paddle, pepper, skin, thrash), ??? [biya] (bang, beat, chime, club, curry, feeze, go, hammer, hide, hit, kill, knoll, lace, lather, lay, lick, maul, palpitate, peal, pelt, pulsate, pulse, ram, ramrod, ring, rough up, shoot, strike, swingle, thrash, thresh, wallop, welt, whip, whop, zap).There is exactly one useful translation here, kit, and there's no way to tell that's the one you want unless you know Bulgarian. The word for 'shit' in Danish is given as junk and the Dutch as shit; I don't know either language, but I have grave doubts about both alleged translations. For Russian it gives der'mo, which is one possibility but hardly the only one—the basic equivalent for the noun is govno and for the verb srat', neither of which seems to be known to this Webster's.
Speaking of which, why "Webster's"? As they say on their About page, "In no way (other than a common lexicographical heritage) is this project related to dictionaries bearing the trademark or name 'Merriam-Webster' (Merriam-Webster, Inc.)... Nor are we affiliated with other book publishers that have created printed or electronic dictionaries bearing the name of Webster." They begin their explanation:
We were originally interested in honoring Samuel Johnson, but after Black Adder (played by Rowan Atkinson and written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton) so brilliantly lampooned Dr. Johnson, we simply needed another name. Of course, the name of Johannes Gutenberg was already taken by the very worthwhile Project Gutenberg Electronic Public Library, and we did not want to cause any confusion. We were more than pleased to finally honor Noah Webster...But eventually they get around to what I presume is the true reason:
Webster's, often spelled Websters , has fallen into public use as a general word for "American English" or even "dictionary" when one is searching for a definition using Internet search engines. By naming the site and its URL with the term "Webster's", we stand a far greater chance of being found on the Internet, thus increasing the impact of this project. No apologies for this are given.And none are needed, but I hope they improve the product.
Oh, by the way: the rhymes for shit are given as "backseat, beat, beet, cheat, cleat, compete, complete, conceit, concrete, deceit, defeat, delete, deplete, discreet, discrete, downbeat, eat, effete, elite, excrete, feat, feet, fleet, greet, heat, incomplete, indiscreet, leet, Marguerite, meat, meet, mete, mistreat, neat, offbeat, peat, petite, pleat, receipt, repeat, replete, retreat, seat, secrete, Skeet, sleet, Street, suite, sweet, teat, treat, tweet, unseat, wheat." Something's clearly gone wrong here. And the synonyms are "lo, lo and behold! O! heyday! halloo! what! indeed! really! surely! humph! hem! good lack, good heavens, good gracious! Ye gods! good Lord! good grief! Holy cow! My word! Holy shit!, gad so! welladay! dear me! only think! lackadaisy! my stars, my goodness! gracious goodness! goodness gracious! mercy on us! heavens and earth! God bless me! bless us, bless my heart! odzookens! O gemini! adzooks! hoity-toity! strong! Heaven save the mark, bless the mark! can such things be! zounds! 'sdeath! what on earth, what in the world! who would have thought it!; (inexpectation); you don't say so! You're kidding!. No kidding? what do you say to that! nous verrons! how now! where am I?" All I can say is, gad so!
From Transblawg I learn of the word udal; in the OED's words, udal land or lands are "land(s) in Orkney or Shetland held by the old native form of freehold tenure." The word is the "Orkney and Shetland form of Norw. odal, odel, ONor. óthal odal," and odal is defined as "Land held in absolute ownership without service or acknowledgement of any superior, as among the early Teutonic peoples; esp. such an estate among the Scandinavian peoples, or in Orkney and Shetland (where the usual form of the word is udal, q.v.)"—it's related to German edel 'noble.' Some islanders are highly upset about the usurpation of udal law by Scottish feudal law, and you can read all about it at their website; me, I just like the word. It's so much handier than allodial.
The NY Times tried to get a little too sophisticated in the headline of today's story by Elaine Sciolino about a government-sponsored attempt to promote doggie bags for unfinished wine in French restaurants. The headline reads "Garçon! The Check, Please, and Wrap Up the Bordelais!" I don't know if the headline writer thought "bordelais" was a classy synonym for "bordeaux" (if so, "claret" would have been a better choice), but as far as I can tell, its only use in English (in French it's an adjective meaning 'of or pertaining to the city of Bordeaux or the adjacent region) is as the name for a breed of cattle. If that's what the writer was thinking of, it would require quite a bag.
Every once in a while I get a notice from Half.com that something on my wish list has become available in the price range I set; rarely have I been happier to get such a notice than when they told me the Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (published at $65) was available for $20.98 from Labyrinth Books. (No longer, I'm afraid, but maybe another batch will come on the market.) I mention it here not to gloat, but to urge those of my readers who are Nabokov fans (I know there are more than a few) to seek it out at their local library. It's an absolute treasure trove, almost 800 pages of scholarly articles on every imaginable subject: each of his major works, "Style," "Teaching," "Translation and Self-Translation," and a series on "Nabokov and..." (Bely, Bergson, Blok, Chateaubriand, and over a dozen other writers). And there's a comprehensive index, so that you can follow a single topic through all the articles, not to mention a detailed chronology and bibliography. Here's a tidbit from the chapter on translation, by the wonderfully named Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour:
The translation [of Onegin] alone is almost useless to the monolingual reader of English. At most, it is a "version," which the theoretician of translation André Lefevre argues must no more be called a "translation" than should a "free imitation." What Nabokov has made is, as he himself boasted, a crib, a pony, an aid to less-than-complete bilinguals who need help in working with the original. Nabokov revised this pony several times to make it still more "ideally interlinear and unreadable" (SL, 482). Because it was not meant to stand alone, it should, as Boyd says, actually have been printed as an interlinear with the original Russian. For as George Steiner has observed, however faithful an "interlinear" may be in principle, in practice it is not a translation but "a contingent lexicon."Perfectly true, and I've never understood how people can take Nabokov's later, extremist, theories on translation seriously. His example should be warning enough.
Jeremy Osner of READIN has brought to my attention a remarkable site called The Modern Word, "the Web’s largest site devoted to exploring twentieth-century experimental literature." It's run by Allen Ruch ("though I generally go by my nickname of the Quail"), and I'll let him explain further:
The Modern Word is a large site, and one that’s been through many changes since its inception. It began in 1995 as The Libyrinth, a portmanteau word coined to represent the two common themes I felt ran through much modern literature – the Library and the Labyrinth... After five years of growing as the Libyrinth, the site was re-dedicated in May 2000 as The Modern Word, its borders greatly expanded but dedicated to the same goal – to celebrate and explore the works of these amazing authors, from the past metamorphoses of Kafka to the Ecos of the future.
Authors are reviewed for inclusion by our Literary Advisory Board, who work closely with the Editorial Director to ensure a quality slate of authors who meet our “libyrinthian” standards. And though the writers featured here are primarily considered “postmodern,” we try not to limit our selection to any specific literary school, circle, or movement. Essentially, for an author to be considered for the site, his or her writing should not only be of sufficient literary quality, but significantly touch upon one or more of the following elements:I'm surprised they don't mention Nabokov, but I trust he's one of the "many others." Anyway, the site is multifarious. Enjoy.1. A use of language that calls upon the reader to break through the barriers of normal syntax and linguistics, acting as an invitation to probe the text and explore the space beyond the words themselves.
2. A tendency to allow consensual reality to relax or even dissolve; this may range from occasional hallucinatory prose to magical realism to outright fantasy.
3. A density of style that is multi-layered with allusions to both the body of work itself and the vast and eternal library of work beyond its pages – an awareness of the eternal human dialogue, so to speak.James Joyce was the first author to be featured, followed by Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka. Future authors under consideration include William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and many others. We are also considering the addition of poets and playwrights such as Octavio Paz, T.S. Eliot, and Tom Stoppard, to name a few.
Maria Benet of alembic has a wonderful post describing her experiences growing up in communist Romania in a Hungarian-speaking family, where "we dreamt of travel the way Odysseus dreamt of going home. Though our borders were closed and we were shipwrecked, the world was still wide open to us in words."
The sirens—dictionaries, primers, novels—perched on the shelves of our small bookcase, sang and lilted of enchanted sunny islands in the subjunctive of French, echoed of the cobblestoned meandering paths of German compound nouns, and spoke in clipped tones of the bright, jagged cliffs of English verbs that stood like wardens holding off the invasion of maudlin latinates.Read the whole thing, finishing off with her lovely poem "A Dish of Peaches in Cluj," which begins:Our passage through these worlds of words was slow and required a great deal of effort, though we traveled light and weather was never an issue. But, back then, we had time and we had plenty of energy—for we had few possessions to care for, and the exercise of effort seemed the only right to free speech left to us.
So we ventured, back and forth, between the languages, whispering words from one or the other to crack open the doors to a bit of fresh air and to another view...
A peach is sweeter than any otherThe name of the Transylvanian town is Cluj in Rumanian (currently the official language), Kolozsvár in Hungarian (the official language under the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and Klausenburg in German (the main language of many Eastern European cities until the triumph of nationalism). And if you're wondering about the url of her blog, ashladle.org, it's from a Celan poem which she quotes at the bottom of her About page.
If its taste is the sun of years, the idea
Of a peach, extravagant and plump
Staked to the tongue—The peach was on a branch, the branch was
From a tree, and the tree grew
In a town that had a name
In three languages...
[First sentence of post edited for accuracy thanks to the acute eye of Michael Farris in the comments.]
Update, April 2005. I am happy to report that Gheorghe Funar was defeated in last year's election; I have no idea whether the new mayor of Cluj, Emil Boc, is or is not a barf-bag.
I just learned of the (hypothetical) existence of the (alleged) language Koguryo (or Goguryeo), perhaps spoken in the first millenium C.E. around the Korean/Chinese border. The LINGUIST List description says:
A possible language once spoken in NE China (Liaoning), Manchuria, and Korea, 1st century to mid-8th century A.D. The earliest solid historical reference to the Koguryo people (1st century A.D.) has them in the Liao-hsi area (now part of Liaoning province, northeast of Tientsin) of China. The evidence for this language lies almost solely in toponyms rather than texts, and is thus unreliable. The Archaic Koguryo corpus dates to the third and fourth century A.D. and consists of about a dozen identifiable lexemes recorded in Chinese historical and geographical accounts of the Koguryo kingdom. The Old Koguryo corpus, largely dating to the seventh and eighth centuries, consists of over a hundred lexemes found in the form of glossed toponyms, plus a small number of words recorded in Chinese historical and geographical accounts. The language, if real, may be related to Japanese...(Via T. Carter at Lifechanges ... Delayed.)
Steven of The Sneeze has begun "a gathering of international obnoxia":
We all grew up reciting irritating rhymes. Some of us grew up primarily on the receiving end of them. Good times.He invites submissions:A few years ago, it occurred to me that these funny little bits of kid comedy must exist in every language all around the world, so I decided they must be collected.
Do you have a great obnoxious rhyme from outside the U.S.? Send it here for the next update! [sneezesteve@aol.com]And here's a sample from Japan:
Just be sure to include:
1) The rhyme's originating country
2) The rhyme in the original language
3) The direct english translation
Tan Tan Tanuki no kintama waA worthy project indeed; my thanks to MrBaliHai for the link.
Kaze mo nai no ni
Bura bura buraEnglish Translation:
The Rac- Rac- Raccoon's testicles are,
Despite there being no wind blowing,
Swaying, swaying, swaying
Avva links to a wonderful quatrain at Yulkar's journal about the rapid change the Russian language is experiencing back in the (former) USSR (or, as the cliche has it, one-sixth of the earth's surface, though Avva in a subsequent entry suggests that that's a considerable overestimation). Needless to say, the sentiment can be felt by anyone who's lived long enough to feel that their language is being hijacked by those damn kids. Here's my rough-and-ready translation, which doesn't do the original justice; the latter follows in transcription, because I can't get the Cyrillic to paste in correctly. You can, of course, see it by following the link.
When they talk, in the Great One-Sixth, I can still
Almost understand what they say,
But the language-bearers are bearing the language
Farther and farther away.
Ya, ostavshikhsya tam, na odnoi shestoi,
Pochti ponimayu poka,
No vsyo dal'she unosyat yazyk ot menya
Nositeli yazyka.
Harry Mathews is the only American member of Oulipo; you can read about his life and work in a lengthy LRB review by Mark Ford. He wrote an essay called "Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese," which was first presented at the French Institute in London in October, 1996, as the third of the St. Jerome lectures, a series devoted to the topic of translation, and it is full of suggestive passages, beginning with the opening fantasia about Ernest Botherby, "the scholar who founded the Australian school of ethno-linguistics," and his discovery of two New Guinean tribes, the Ohos and the Uhas. I will not spoil the punch line by trying to boil it down here; instead I will quote a few later passages that bear on translation:
A Frenchman says, "Je suis français;" an American says, "I'm American." "I'm French" and "Je suis américain" strike us as accurate translations. But are they? A Frenchman who asserts that he is French invokes willy-nilly a communal past of social, cultural, even conceptual evolution, one that transcends the mere legality of citizenship. But the fact of citizenship is what is paramount to most Americans, who probably feel, rightly or wrongly, that history is theirs to invent. The two national identities are radically different, and claims to them cannot be usefully translated in a way that will bridge this gap.One more thing: both Mathews and the LRB reviewer refer to Carpaccio's "Vision of St. Augustine," which contains the titular Maltese. You will want to see the painting; here it is.I suggest that this gap extends into the remotest corners of the two languages. Elle s'est levée de bonne heure means "She arose early," but in expectation of different breakfasts and waking from dreams in another guise. This does not mean that it's wrong to translate plain statements in a plain way, only that it is worth remembering that such translations tell us what writers say and not who they are...
So can the Oulipo help translators in their delicate task?
The Oulipo certainly can't help in an obvious way. Unless he wanted to sabotage his employer, an editor would be mad to employ an Oulipian as a translator.
A few samples will show why. As our source text, let's take a famous line from Racine's Phèdre:
C'est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée.
The literal sense—please be charitable—is, "Here is Venus unreservedly fastened to her prey."
First translation: I saw Alice jump highest—I, on silly crutches. Explanation: a rule of measure has been applied to the original. Each of its words is replaced by another word having the same number of letters.
Second translation: "Don't tell anyone what we've learned until you're out in the street. Then shout it out, and when that one-horse carriage passes by, create a general pandemonium." Explanation: the sound of the original has been imitated as closely as possible—C'est Vénus tout entiére à sa proie attachée / Save our news, toot, and share as uproar at a shay—and the results expanded into a narrative fragment. (Let me give you an example of a sound translation from English to French, Marcel Benabou's transformation of "A thing of beauty is a joy forever": Ah, singe débotté, / Hisse un jouet fort et vert—"O unshod monkey, raise a stout green toy!")...
Simplistically described, translation means converting a text in a source language into its replica in a target language. Both translators and readers know what happens when this process is incomplete: the translator becomes so transfixed by the source text that when he shifts to his native tongue he drags along not only what should be kept of the original but much more—foreign phrasing, word order, even words. The results hang uncomfortably somewhere between the two languages, and a brutal effort is needed to move them the rest of the way.
I learned how to avoid this pitfall. When I translate, I begin by studying the original text until I understand it thoroughly. Then, knowing that I can say anything I understand, no matter how awkwardly, I say what I have now understood and write down my words. I imagine myself talking to a friend across the table to make sure the words I use are ones I naturally speak. It makes no difference if what I write is shambling or coarse or much too long. What I need is not elegance but natural, late-twentieth-century American vernacular. Translating the opening sentence of Proust—Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure—I might write down: When I was a kid, it took me years to get my parents to let me even stay up till nine. (This is actually mid-twentieth century vernacular; but that's where I'm from, and it's what I might say.)...
I feel I've been selfish in enjoying pf's amazingly vivid reports on his wanderings in Siberia, most recently from Aginsk to Mirny to Suntar to Yakutsk, all by myself, and I've decided to let you all in on the pleasure. He's not on any institutionally sponsored tour by plane and train; no, he's doing it on his own hook, hitching rides from one godforsaken backwoods town to another, and is used to being the only foreigner people have seen (though, astonishingly, there are apparently two other Americans in Suntar). Here he is giving a quick, exhausted report on the latest leg of the journey:
I'd like to give a travel update, but I'm a bit boshed. Twenty-eight hours in a car. No, not in a car after all, in fact in an ex-military van with three iron couches welded in the back, but I got to sit in the front. Next to the guy with one tooth in his upper jaw. And that one yellow, and almost entirely naked, like a little tusk bending out of his gums. Behind the sparking wires under the dashboard. And I got to hop in the driver's seat to open the door for him whenever he got out to make the fifty-kopeck offering he made at every county line, since the outside door-handle had fallen off sometime in between now and 1982, which was when it was made, he told me, in the first spontaneous communication he made directly to me, not through an interpreter. I also got to sit in front of the guy who sat behind me, naturally, who with unnaturally stinky breath kept pawing me and asking me how I was in a language which was clearly not one of his first two, and wanting to know a thousand other things, and only thinking of the words to say them in just as I was drifting off to sleep, which I'd like to do now, but duty calls.But don't think this is totally off-topic; he gives a lot of attention to language. From the entry of Wednesday 14 January:
There’s a lot of Ukranian accents up here. They say h for g and put the stress in funny places, and enunciate funnily. It’s perpetually interesting to me, how little regional variation there is in Russian. Russians all insist there are dialects in Russian, but take Buryat for example – Aginsk Buryats have to speak Russian to Irkutsk Buryats to be understood, since in Buryat there’s too little comprehension and too many false friends between the dialects. Nothing of the kind to fear, for your Russian speaker...Keep going back in the archives—there are ghost stories, poems, and little vignettes like "You've heard of people sticking their tongues to metallic things. Well, I just stuck my tongue to my moustache trying to lick frozen beer off it." And wish him well as he makes his precarious way eastward.Or take French, I totally can’t understand people from the south-east. There’s one rap group (is it IAM? or the other group that isn’t MC Solaar? I forget) from Marseille I have to read the text along with in order to understand. And English, you can come up with your own examples. The mythical Russian ‘o’ dialects (which pronounce unstressed ‘o’ as ‘o’ instead of ‘a’) and ‘a’ dialects (which pronounce stressed ‘o’ as ‘a’ instead of ‘o’), that’s pretty weak stuff, in comparison with real dialects. And plus I’ve never met anyone who окает or акает, and probably never will.
The only Russian I’ve had difficulty understanding is that of those Buryats who grew up in villages where education and administration were all done in Buryat. Which would make it not dialectical variety at fault, but just a Buryat-Mongol accent in Russian.
And I’m reading Sologub’s the Little Demon (мелкий is a good word – it means, of things that come in groups, small, like chunks of bread or kopecks), and it’s excellent. I’ve never read a satire that didn’t give you somebody you had to like. Here, even the people who aren’t flagrant sinners are really stupid. Cynicism unbounded.
Speaking of books, I read Nabokov’s Kamera Obskura - I think it’s called Laughter in the Dark in English – in two days after New Years. That, combined with this, that the cab driver, when I explained I was from America, asked, “So you were studying there, or what?”, means I don’t have to feel bad about leaving Russia: mission accomplished.
A Deborah Tannen article from the Washington Post mixes together several vaguely related topics: the fact that people in some regions talk more quickly than those in others, the stereotypes and misunderstandings that result, and the tendency of tv shows to have actors read lines ever faster (with resulting problems of understanding for the audience). She then tosses in a totally unrelated (and by now stale) topic, IM-speak ("'You' becomes 'u,' and 'lol' is understood to mean 'your message is making me laugh out loud'"—u don't say!). But Tannen is always worth reading, and she throws in a good anecdote about the slow-talking folk from Häme. (Thanks to Dave Bonta for the link.)
I can't believe I've been wearing hats for thirty years and I just now found out about the Hat Dictionary. From agal ("modern Arab head-dress. Consists of a scarf wound around the head and held in place by its own fringes tucked into the roll"—from Arabic 'iqâl; actually it's the band that keeps the scarf, or keffiyeh, in position) to zucchetto ("skull-cap worn by Roman Catholic clergy"—from the same Italian root as zucchini, by the way), it's all here, with many illustrations. I'd double-check anything exotic (given the misunderstanding of agal), but it's an excellent reference, and I am grateful to Michelle of Random (but not really) for posting it.
Margaret Marks's entry "Pronouncing English words in German texts" reminds me of something I've been meaning to blog for a while. I'm reading Anton Gill's book A Dance Between Flames: Berlin Between the Wars (which I recommend to anyone interested in Weimar Germany), and on p. 127 I came across the following quote (a reminiscence by Curt Riess):
A frenzy for dancing seized the city. People made music everywhere, people danced everywhere. And people were interested in spending, not saving: inflation had taught them the futility of saving. All modern pop music was called 'yats', which is how we pronounced 'jazz', and there was hardly a street without its night-club, however small—six tables would be enough. Free Love spiraled upwards. Cocaine became fashionable—all the hotel and restaurant lavatory attendants sold it... Homosexuality was so trendy that some pretended to be, who were not...Among the interesting features of this passage, the one I want to call attention to here is the pronunciation of Jazz. I believe it is now pronounced more or less as in English; does anyone know when the change happened? (The change from a nativized pronunciation to one more faithful to the original is similar to that from CAL-is to ca-LAY for Calais in English.)
I have a friend who used to visit West Africa regularly and spoke a fluent version of French which served him excellently in Dakar and points east but got him looked at oddly by persons familiar only with the French of the Hexagon. La Grande Rousse has linked to a couple of sites with expressions current in Burkina Faso (though I'd love to see a more extensive analysis of the dialect): Un peu de mooré (scroll down to Quelques expressions locales) and Parler français à Bobo-Dioulasso au Burkina Faso (with .wav files). C'est niak! Bon, y a pas le feu, j'vais chosiner.
If your French is up to it you should read La Rousse's ardent entry "Parce que je suis tombée dedans quand j'étais petite..." in which she reminisces about her word-soaked childhood: À l'école primaire, les enfants me regardaient d'un air bizarre et les copains, copines, me reprochaient « d'utiliser de grands mots ! » It resonated with me, and doubtless will with many of you.
I confess I'm not familiar with the Canadian poet E.J. Pratt, but Sandra Djwa is putting online "a fully annotated edition of the poetry of E.J. Pratt, incorporating all completed versions of every poem, linked to scanned-in images of every page of every version."
The Complete Poems will ultimately include some 200 poems, and will be mounted on the World Wide Web. Discussions are currently underway with the University of Toronto Press concerning the publication of a new print edition, to be keyed to the hypertext edition: it will contain a single version of each poem and minimal scholarly apparatus (a brief introduction, a glossary, no textual notes). The hypertext edition of the poems will eventually be linked to a hypertext edition of the letters, edited by David G. Pitt, Professor Emeritus, Memorial University and Elizabeth Popham, Professor of English Literature at Trent University.It's very well done, and I hope will serve as a model for similar projects. (Via wood s lot.)
Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature gives some of the weirder etymologies of species names:
Aegrotocatellus Adrian and Edgecombe, 1995 (trilobite) Latin for "sick puppy".
Brachyanax thelestrephones Evenhuis, 1981 (fly) The name translates from Greek to "little chief nipple twister".
Campsicnemius charliechaplini Evenhuis, 1996 (dolichopodid fly) "Etymology: This species is named in honor of the great silent movie comedian, Charlie Chaplin, because of the curious tendency of this fly to die with its midlegs in a bandy-legged position."
Bangiomorpha pubescens Butterfield, 2000 (fossil red alga) The fossil shows the first recorded sex act, 1.2 billion years ago. The "bang" in the name was intended as a euphamism for sex.
(Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)
The Journal of Specialised Translation has just put its first issue online, with some interesting-sounding articles (Non-literary in the Light of Literary Translation; On the Pragmatics of Translating Multilingual Texts; Subtitling: the long journey to academic acknowledgement), all available in either HTML or pdf format. I hope it sticks around. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
In a comment on the previous entry, Joel of Far Outliers mentioned a post he'd done on acronyms in Chinese and other Asian languages that were influenced by Chinese:
In Chinese, for instance, acronyms are composed of the initial syllabic characters of (usually) two-syllable words. So, Peking (= Beijing) University, or Beijing Daxue [lit. 'NorthCapital BigSchool'] becomes Beida [lit. 'NorthBig']. In Korean, Korea University, or Koryo Taehak [lit. 'HighBeautiful BigSchool'] becomes Kodae [lit. 'HighBig']. In Japanese, it's a bit more complicated. Chinese characters can be pronounced not just in their Chinese loan forms, but as native Japanese words that mean (more or less) the same thing... So the acronym for Hiroshima University, or Hiroshima Daigaku [lit. 'WideIsland BigSchool'] becomes HiroDai [lit. 'WideBig']. The name Hiroshima is native Japanese (the Sino-Japanese pronunciation would be Koutou = Ch. Guangdao), but Daigaku is borrowed [= Ch. Daxue].He goes on to give examples from Indonesian and Vietnamese (which uses initial letters, like English, rather than combining initial syllables). I would direct the interested reader to my own entry on the phrase gung ho, which has its origin in precisely this form of abbreviation.
A side issue: the remark "Daigaku is borrowed [= Ch. Daxue]" is presumably true, but I wish there were a site where one could easily learn which common words were borrowed one way and which the other—a great many words relating to modern phenomena were coined in Japan and then borrowed into Chinese via the characters, for example Japanese denwa 'telephone,' borrowed into Chinese as dianhua. (There's an interesting discussion here, which unfortunately gets sidetracked by a pointless argument over whether the formation of the Japanese word is important.)
1. An excellent list of names for special characters, for example ! = "exclamation (mark), (ex)clam, excl, wow, hey, boing, bang, shout, yell, shriek, pling, factorial, ball-bat, smash, cuss, store, potion&, not*+, dammit*" (in my proofreading days, we mostly said "bang"). Don't miss the explananations at the bottom of the page:
& donald duck: from the Danish "Anders And", which means "Donald Duck"(Via Transblawg.)
* Nathan Hale: "I have but one asterisk for my country."
2. In a recent Avva post he mentions how Bill Murray has aged since Den' surka, which I realized must be Groundhog Day. I looked up surók and found it defined in Oxford as 'marmot.' In this case, Katzner was more helpful, giving 'marmot; woodchuck; ground hog.' In picky editor mode I must remark that groundhog is one word and that this entry is an excellent example of why definitions should employ commas as well as semicolons, in this case between the last two items, because woodchuck and groundhog refer to the same animal, Marmota monax (as you can see from the genus, the animal, under whatever name, is a member of the marmot family). I admit I have a hard time remembering this fact, because I am familiar only with the words, not with the actual creatures, and the words are tied to completely different contexts (like dove and pigeon): "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck" and the groundhog seeing its shadow, respectively. Here's the Regional Note from the American Heritage definition:
The woodchuck goes by several names in the United States. The most famous of these is groundhog, under which name all the legends about the animal's hibernation have accrued. In the Appalachian Mountains the woodchuck is known as a whistle pig. The word woodchuck is probably a folk etymology of a New England Algonquian word—that is, English-speaking settlers "translated" the Indian word into a compound of two words that made sense to them in light of the animal's habitat.I will end my discussion of this subject by remarking that the Russian word that started me off on this zoological excursus, surók, is probably onomatopoeic in origin and thus the equivalent of whistle pig.
3. In perusing the American Heritage I happened on the word lumma, an Armenian coin (a hundred of them make up a dram). This word has been around, and gotten banged up in the process: "Armenian lumay, small coin, from Syriac lumâ, from Greek nomos, noummos, custom, current coin." The change from n-m to l-m is called "dissimilation" (changing one of two sounds to make them less similar, in this case changing the first nasal to a liquid), and it's a common phenomenon; as a matter of fact, if it hadn't happened in Syriac first, it could have happened within Armenian—compare holm 'wind' (with l-m) and Greek anemos (with the original n-m). And they said that semester of Classical Armenian would never be of any use to me!
The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), a part of the Library of Congress, has a page called Say How? A Pronunciation Guide to Names of Public Figures that is based on an excellent idea:
Say How? was born at the Library of Congress Talking Books for the Blind Recording Studio, where pronunciation of words and names borders on obsession. We found that one area was conspicuously missing from all of our many dictionaries and pronunciation guides: names of lesser known and contemporary public figures. Reference works tend to favor the famous and the dead. So at our Studio we began compiling a file of 3 x 5 cards with names of people prominent and obscure, past and present, in the fields of entertainment, politics, sports, literature, science, crime, fashion, medicine, law - anyone, in short, who's name could possibly turn up in a book...
Our sources are many; personal knowledge, publishers and authors, print references, foreign embassies, archival film, radio airchecks, etc. Endless media monitoring, from the Olympics to talk shows to Court TV, has proved invaluable. And yes, some sources are more trustworthy than others. Attention must be paid. But the major source, whenever available, must be the person him/herself. For instance, the surname Moreno is commonly said as either mor-EEN-o or mor-AIN-o, but Rita Moreno pronounces her name mor-ENN-o. And despite the spelling, Brett Favre says his name is pronounced FARV. So FARV it is, and mor-ENN-o it is, and that's that.So says Ray Hagen, compiler of the list, and I applaud his ambition and his principles. The problem is that the list has errors, of both spelling and pronunciation, that make it somewhat unreliable. The pronunciation has gotten an intrusive -l- in "Abadia, Jorge (HÔR-há ä-bäl-DÉ-ä); the spelling has faltered in "Abeywardebe, Harsha" (it should be Abeywardena, which is reflected in the pronunciation); I find it hard to believe there is a silent -a in Adeshina (given as ä-DÁ-shin). One of the most glaring offenders is "Sacirbey, Muhamed (SHÄK-Common usage, a useful standard with conversational speech, becomes less useful when applied to people's names. Most people pronounce Chico Marx's first name as CHEEK-o, but Groucho always said CHICK-o. Most people say DEZZ-ie Arnaz, but Lucille Ball always said DESS-ie. I'll go with Groucho and Lucy. Do you say EEL-ya Kazan? Many do, but Elia says ee-LEE-ya. And Louis Armstrong has gone on record as preferring to be called Louis, so no matter how many millions call him Louie, it's Louis here...
In print, a name must be spelled correctly. This is the oral/aural equivalent.
Say How? is meant to be an ongoing project, with errors corrected and new names added regularly. In fact, we eagerly solicit any and all contributions and corrections. Please send all such information to: hagenray@earthlink.net.I will use it with pleasure, relying more on the American entries than the foreign ones, and will send in corrections as they occur to me. (Via Incoming Signals.)
Ever wondered why LAX has that X or why O'Hare International Airport in Chicago is ORD? The answers to these and many other questions can be found on this page. (Courtesy of rdr in Ask MetaFilter.)
A bit belated, but last Sunday's Safire column is still online, so I'll make a couple of comments. First off, the column is called "Janus Strikes Again" because he is under the impression that the phrase "stay the course" is, like sanction ('approval' or 'punishment') and oversight ("either 'watchful care' or 'silly mistake'," to use his glosses), capable of being its own antonym. He begins with its fashionable current use:
"I was able to assure them,'' President Bush said after his Thanksgiving visit to the U.S. troops at Baghdad airport, ''that we were going to stay the course and get the job done.'' A few weeks before, Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, told the press that those attacking our forces were ''trying to sow fear and chaos so that we do not stay the course.'' (Tony Blair, the British prime minister, prefers ''see through to the end'' and ''stick with it.'')He traces this back to the 1870s (The Times of London, 1879: ''Jockeys who have ridden him think he cannot stay the course''; an 1873 New York Times account about Dartmouth's crew: ''All question as to their staying the course was set at rest''), then springs his trap:
But wait—are we going off the semantic track? Zimmer notes that ''before this period, citations for stay the course invariably have the countervailing sense of 'to stop or check the course (of something).''' He offers up Edgar Allan Poe, in his 1835 ''Arabesque'' tale ''King Pest the First'': ''But it lay not in the power of images, or sensations . . . to stay the course of men.''What he's missing here is that the two uses can never be confused, even without semantic context, because they are different grammatical constructions. The older sense always occurs with an explicit reference to the person or thing whose course is being stayed: stay his course, or the course of the act of limitations. The modern sense, by contrast, cannot so occur; it is always "stay the course" tout court. You can call these twin usages, but not a single two-faced one.From then on back, it's arresting all the way. The meaning of stay when associated with course meant ''stop.'' John Baker, a lawyer in Washington, sent in an 1802 citation from a South Carolina case insisting that ''the suspending acts operated only to interrupt and stay the course of the act of limitations.'' The English dramatist and poet Christopher Marlowe noted in 1588 how his tragic character Dr. Faustus turned back: ''Hee stayed his course, and so returned home.''
And one more thing. Regular readers will know that I deplore picking on people for violating so-called "rules of grammar" trumped up by frustrated Latinists and based not on the facts of English usage but on some imagined logic or consistency. Violating the true rules of English is another, and rarer, matter; it's not common simply because those rules are ingrained in us long before we pick up a grammar book, and we follow them automatically. Thus it is of some interest that William Safire, the Grammar Guru, blatantly violates the English verbal system in this sentence:
Even before 1591, when William Lambarde complained that his client had been ''baited, and bitten with libels and slanders that be not actionable,'' that word has meant ''subject to an action at law,'' legalese for ''you have just furnished me grounds for a lawsuit.''The basic fact about the "present perfect" tense (has meant) is that it must be tied, explicitly or implicitly, to the present moment, whereas the simple past is tied to the past. You can say either "I went to Paris" or "I have been to Paris," but in the former case you're setting the trip at some past time, unmentioned but none the less definite; in the latter you're positing it as a fact about your present state: it doesn't matter when you went, the point is that you are someone who has been there. If this all sounds unclear, there is a very simple test—if the time of the event is mentioned, the simple past must be used. You can only say "In 1995 I went to Paris," not "have been." This is a very common mistake among those who learn English as a second language, but the distinction is second nature to English speakers, the vast majority of whom would be unable to explain to you why they use one form or the other. In this case, the phrase "before 1591" cuts the tie to the present and requires the use of the simple past: before 1591 the word meant ''subject to an action at law." Now, I am not chastising Safire for making a mistake in verb use; precisely because it is a mistake almost impossible for an English speaker to make spontaneously, I am certain that it is the result of sloppy editing (he started, perhaps, with "Since before 1591... that word has meant," then decided "since before" was awkward and changed it to "even before" without reading the sentence over to make sure it still worked). (Another, more banal, example of poor editing is the earlier sentence "The meaning of stay when associated with course meant 'stop' [bold added].) What I find interesting is that he would probably be less embarrassed about breaking this, a real rule of the language, than about breaking one of the factitious ones his Gotcha Gang is always rubbing his nose in, precisely because he can't explain why this is wrong, whereas the fake ones have clear reasons (which is why people make them up and believe them). There's a lesson in there somewhere.
In 1988, Lorenzo Thomas (not the Civil War general, the poet) delivered a lecture as part of the Poetry Project's Symposium "Poetry of Everyday Life"; here it is, courtesy of wood s lot (where you will find much more of Thomas in the Jan. 14 entry). A few excerpts:
The relationship between poetic diction and the vernacular utterances of everyday life is adversarial and parasitic in both directions. Poets become poets because we, this happy breed, have—through dint of genius—figured out an alternative to the "Shucks, I cudda had a V-8" syndrome. We live in an age of growing illiteracy in a nation determined to destroy regional dialects and accents and impose a bland least-common-denominator "standard," "broadcast," or "edited" American-English on its inhabitants. Curiously, "English as an official language" is the project of a political regime that prates about a philosophy of government decentralization and non-intrusion into citizens' lives. In any case, I am here to say that poetry is not and cannot be vernacular expression.
No matter what it may pretend to be—and pretend is the signal word—poetry is, by definition, heightened speech. It is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, not dimly unpremeditated slips-of-tongue around the water-cooler. When poetry attempts to depict "everyday life" it is either ventriloquy (and often ironic) or documentary (and usually polemical and satiric)...Pound and Williams are not old fogies to me, but of course I'm an old fogy myself; "to document and celebrate the variety of the American quotidian" is a goal worth pursuing in the face of the bland least-common-denominator "standard."Poetry that attempts to depict "everyday life" is really a critical examination of (1) the relationship of candor and premeditated performance, (2) traditions of discourse, and (3) where you live. Williams' Paterson and Pound's Cantos approach dailiness in a polar relationship. One man's ephemera is another man's civilization. Yet both Pound and Williams, to many of us, are old fogies rummaging in attics: and "everyday life" to some folks is the possible visit to Attica.
Once again, Amiri Baraka pointed out long ago that "the view from the bottom of the hill" is not the same as the view from the top, but that those at the bottom had been sold on the concept that "God don't ever change." Right or wrong, that really doesn't matter. What does matter is understanding that, in this country, "everyday life" depends on who you are and where you really live. "English as our official language" aside, dailiness is various and if poetry can do anything about it, it is to document and celebrate the variety of the American quotidian.
Mark Liberman at Language Log has alerted the world to the appearance of Semantic Compositions, whose aim is "to expose and hopefully popularize some of the ideas to come out of theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as related disciplines like computer science and psychology." While the author was mistaken in his initial assumption that he was striking out into uncharted territory in creating a linguistics blog, it's good to have a fellow traveler in these realms. Welcome, SC!
This book [here's the site of the US distributor, thanks to John McChesney-Young in the comments] teaches Latin entirely through the medium of the language itself—a common idea for modern languages that should work just as well for ancient ones.
Part I, Familia Romana, covers the essentials of Latin grammar and a basic vocabulary of some 1500 words. The 35 chapters (capitula) form a sequence of events in the life of a Roman family in the 2nd century A.D. Each chapter is divided into 3 or 4 lessons (lectiones) and consists of several text pages followed by a grammar section and three exercises, pensa. At the end of the volume there is a survey of inflexions, a Roman calendar, and a word index, Index vocabulorum.
In Part II, Roma Aeterna, the subject is Roman history as told by the Romans themselves. It opens with a description of the city of Rome on a historical background. This is followed by a prose version of Vergil's Aeneid I-IV, with crucial passages in the original, and Livy’s Book I supplemented with extracts from Ovid. At first Livy’s prose is gently adapted, but the main part of the book contains unadapted texts by Livy, Gellius, Nepos, Sallust, Cicero, and Horace.The sample pages seem well done. (Via Avva.)
An article on the decline in the use of Finnish among emigrant communities abroad. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
Having received a complaint about the style of my last entry, I herewith provide various alternatives in the hope that one or more may be found suitable.
Telegraphic:
REPORT OF DEBATE WHETHER NECESSARY LEARN LANGUAGES AND WHETHER NONINDOEUROPEAN HARDER STOP REALITY OF REALITY ASSUMED STOP
Mathematical:
Let e = the energy required to learn language L to degree of fluency x and E = the energy saved by employing L to degree of fluency x. If E – e > 0, there is positive utility to learning L.Ernie:Let A be the set of all languages and B the set of languages related historically to language X. Prove that e (as defined) is less for a language in B than for one in A – B.
The two men sat there in the dark. The younger man was a little red in the face. He watched the lights of the cars going by but his mind seemed to be on something else.Bill:
"I'm going to learn French," he said abruptly.
"Why?"
"Never mind why. It'll come in handy." He beckoned the waiter over and ordered another brandy.
The older man set his pipe on the table.
"Just as well you're not learning Japanese."
The other man thought this over.
"Why's that?"
"No relation to English. Hell of a lot tougher."
"How do you know that?"
"I know."
The younger man looked baffled.
"Ah, none of it's real anyhow."
"Sure it is." He took another puff from the cooling pipe. "Sure it is."
Finally his remorse and his rage quieted, and his wild rapt angry voice no longer pounded irresistibly upon all who came in contact with him. He walked tirelessly over the countryside, over the ancient hills with their bloodsoaked soil, and when he reached the top of a hill he would look far off in the distance and strain to make out whether if he kept walking in that direction he might reach another land, one where the blood was less or was buried deeper, and he asked himself whether he might start anew, make a new life for himself in another land where people didn't even speak his language, and wondered whether at his age he could learn another, whether he might accustom himself to the unfathomable difference of a way of talking that had nothing in common with his own, spoken by people who had never had any truck with the inexhaustible grief layered by history over the black earth that swallowed up his footsteps as though they were as unreal as his unfulfilled hopes.Russian novel:
The two men waiting for the train at the ramshackle station deep in N— province were not unknown to each other, but rarely had occasion to converse. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Passatizhin was a collegiate secretary, the only man of rank within a score of versts of the provincial town; even in Nizhnii Novgorod or Tver, to say nothing of Petersburg itself, he would have been ignored as too low-ranking to be worth even glancing at, but in these backwoods regions he was almost unapproachably respectable. The other man, Sergei Prokhorovich Ploskogubtsev, was a minor landowner whose estate manager robbed him at every opportunity and whose few serfs could never be bothered to gather crops, preferring to lie about drinking and blaspheming. He longed for the civilized conversation he imagined was to be found in the great cities of the Empire; he was only going a few stops himself, to the provincial capital to arrange another mortgage, and envied the collegiate secretary, who was traveling all the way to Petersburg. He took advantage of their momentary status as fellow travelers to open a conversation."Tell me, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, what do you make of the, er, I mean to say, the state of things? In general, that is to say?" He felt obscurely that he might have come up with a more promising question, but was too agitated by his own daring to worry further. Fortunately, the collegiate secretary did not seem offended, and immediately turned to him and replied.
"Vous voyez, mon cher Serge, que dans notre pauvre Russie tout est tardif, personne ne sait même de quoi on parle en Varsovie ou Copenhague; Paris ou Londres, c'est une autre planète. Moi, je censure le manque de connaissance de langues de la part de la population; il faut qu'on apprenne l'anglais, l'allemand, et bien entendu le français dans toutes les écoles de la Russie, et—pourquoi pas?—le tatare et le toungouse aussi; bien que ce ne soient pas des langues civilisées, elles diffèrent tellement à l'égard de l'histoire et de la structure qu'elles élevraient nos esprits et nous feraient vraiment capable de n'importe quoi."
Sergei Prokhorovich nodded glumly and remained silent. He had not understood a single word.
Desbladet, a frequent purveyor of language nougats in between bouts of prinsessor-worship, has today (after one fit of the latter) published two excellent packets of the former (gift-wrapped, as always, and I'm sure he'll be glad to add a personalized card should you wish to send one or both to the Someone of your choice). The first (in point of time, though the second in descending order on the vertical axis, counting from the top of the page—damn these confusing modern devices!) describes a discussion going on among "the nicer sort of Engleesh rightwing nutjob" about whether it booteth one to attempt learning the sort of jabber that foreigners (inexplicably) use to communicate among themselves; this is chock-full of quotey goodness and will be found under the rubric "If you learn Forren, you'll end up talking to Forreners, mark my words!" The second, or uppermost—known to its friends and creditors as "Language me harder!"—discusses the burning question of "whether native speakers of (say) an Indo-Yoorpean language find it significantly easier to learn another Indo-Yoorpean language as opposed to a language from another family"; the far-flung Des finds evidence that this supposition, besides being intuitively attractive, may in fact be "true" (although we all know "objective" "truth" is at bottom a con game benefiting the Powers that Be, a sort of epistemological three-card monte; for the sake of discussion, however, we will pretend that the world exists and spite both Berkeley and Deconstruction).
Or, the Problem with Dictionaries. Yesterday it occurred to me (in the context of trying to extract a stubborn light fixture from the ceiling) to wonder what the Russian for 'pliers' was. I had the feeling I'd looked it up before, and sure enough when I turned to my workhorse, the Oxford Russian Dictionary, I recognized the alternatives I found there: shchiptsy and kleshchi. Now, shchiptsy is defined in the Russian-English section as 'tongs, pincers, pliers; forceps,' while kleshchi is 'pincers, tongs.' You see the problem: neither unambiguously means 'pliers,' and there was no way to decide which was the better alternative, so I hadn't bothered associating either with the English word. This time I decided to delve deeper. I checked my Harper-Collins Russian Dictionary, and lo and behold, there was an entirely different word, ploskogubtsy. This immediately looked convincing, since it literally means 'flat little pincers,' but now I had three candidates. I looked up ploskogubtsy in Ozhegov (my basic Russian-Russian dictionary) and found it defined as 'kleshchi [pincers] with flat grasping surfaces,' which was what I wanted. But I was left with questions. Was ploskogubtsy a relatively new word that had achieved popularity since the Oxford was compiled, or was it a relatively technical term used by mechanics but not by ordinary people, who would just say "Hand me the kleshchi"? And how can one know such things? Ideally, there should be better indications of usage in bilingual dictionaries, but I suppose that might push the cost of production up beyond the break-even point. Anyway, I hope one of my Russian-speaking readers will let me know if ploskogubtsy is the right word to be storing in my long-term memory.
There's an amusing story by Randy Kennedy in yesterday's NY Times about the excruciatingly extended end credits in today's movies (the credits for Return of the King lasted over nine and a half minutes!); I'm posting it here for the final exchange in the discussion with Rick Sparr:
Since he has been in the movie business for so long, one last question was asked of him. Does he know what a second second assistant director does?Anyone curious about what it means can visit the Film Crew and Set Terms list at IT Hustler.com; as it happens, a second second assistant director is "Assistant to the Second A.D. In England, is known as the 3rd A.D., which is probably less confusing unless you're a 2nd 2nd. ""It really doesn't matter to us," Mr. Sparr answered. "If it comes from legal and it's the way they want it, that's all we care about. We don't care what it means."
Every once in a while the question "Canada goose or Canadian goose?" is used as yet another pedantic shibboleth, and I am pleased to find a birding page by Lisa Shea that addresses the issue with good sense and as scientific an attitude as any linguist could ask:
The vast majority of English speaking people call the goose that is large and has a black head—Branta canadensis—a Canadian Goose. However, its original name was a CANADA Goose.In Canada, by the way, francophones call it bernache du Canada. (Via a typically thorough and well-informed comment by Dan Hartung.)Remember, the official name for any bird is its Latin name. So the "real" name for this creature is Branta canadensis. That's because the bird probably has 200 different names in 200 different languages, based on its colors, its sounds, its habitat or many other reasons. Birds get named after people, after habits, after all sorts of things. The Latin name is the same around the world for that bird.
So it's true that at one point in time the Branta canadensis was called a Canada Goose, because it was often seen flying towards Canada and living there. You could now just as easily call it a North American Goose since it is found all over North America and lives just about anywhere. It has adapted to live all across the US and into Mexico too.
So over the years, the name has changed to be Canadian Goose in English. Just like people in the 1600s used to call pumpkins "Pompions" and call vegetables "potherbs", we have changed what we typically call the Branta canadensis to Canadian Goose.
Lord Worcestercleucch (pronounced WOOS-ter-CLOO), despite the handicap of being fictional ("The Marquess of Worcestercleucch, the St. Merion family, Cherryton Park, Merion Manor, Dussex, Lorset, and all associated titles, histories, and houses are completely fictional creations"), has produced a useful guide to the pronunciation of the grander English country houses. Some are disappointingly straightforward, but any list that starts with Alnwick (ANN-ick) and Althorp (ALL-trup) is clearly not without its pleasures. Enjoy. (Sent by a correspondent of wide knowledge and quirky humour who has seen many cities and learned the minds of men.)
The Economist, while not a linguistics journal, does far better with language stories than the NY Times (which I have repeatedly lambasted in this space). Case in point: their Jan. 8 article on David Gil, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (no credit given to the writer, unfortunately). The Times dealt with the issue last May, and I had to whack them again for their sloppiness; the Economist may not settle the question, but they report on Gil's theories with intelligence and a basic grasp of what's involved:
Dr Gil has been studying Riau for the past 12 years. Initially, he says, he struggled with the language, despite being fluent in standard Indonesian. However, a breakthrough came when he realised that what he had been thinking of as different parts of speech were, in fact, grammatically the same. For example, the phrase “the chicken is eating” translates into colloquial Riau as “ayam makan”. Literally, this is “chicken eat”. But the same pair of words also have meanings as diverse as “the chicken is making somebody eat”, or “somebody is eating where the chicken is”. There are, he says, no modifiers that distinguish the tenses of verbs. Nor are there modifiers for nouns that distinguish the definite from the indefinite (“the”, as opposed to “a”). Indeed, there are no features in Riau Indonesian that distinguish nouns from verbs. These categories, he says, are imposed because the languages that western linguists are familiar with have them.This sort of observation flies in the face of conventional wisdom about what language is. Most linguists are influenced by the work of Noam Chomsky—in particular, his theory of “deep grammar”. According to Dr Chomsky, people are born with a sort of linguistic template in their brains. This is a set of rules that allows children to learn a language quickly, but also imposes constraints and structure on what is learnt. Evidence in support of this theory includes the tendency of children to make systematic mistakes which indicate a tendency to impose rules on what turn out to be grammatical exceptions (eg, “I dided it” instead of “I did it”). There is also the ability of the children of migrant workers to invent new languages known as creoles out of the grammatically incoherent pidgin spoken by their parents. Exactly what the deep grammar consists of is still not clear, but a basic distinction between nouns and verbs would probably be one of its minimum requirements.
Dr Gil contends, however, that there is a risk of unconscious bias leading to the conclusion that a particular sort of grammar exists in an unfamiliar language. That is because it is easier for linguists to discover extra features in foreign languages—for example tones that change the meaning of words, which are common in Indonesian but do not exist in European languages—than to realise that elements which are taken for granted in a linguist's native language may be absent from another. Despite the best intentions, he says, there is a tendency to fit languages into a mould. And since most linguists are westerners, that mould is usually an Indo-European language from the West.The story goes on to describe an intriguing experiment Gil, in collaboration with Lera Boroditsky, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is carrying out to test Sapir-Whorf; I'll be interested to see what they come up with. (Via Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day.)It need not, however, be a modern language. Dr Gil's point about bias is well illustrated by the history of the study of the world's most widely spoken tongue. Many of the people who developed modern linguistics had had an education in Latin and Greek. As a consequence, English was often described until well into the 20th century as having six different noun cases, because Latin has six....
The difficulty is compounded if a linguist is not fluent in the language he is studying. The process of linguistic fieldwork is a painstaking one, fraught with pitfalls. Its mainstay is the use of “informants” who tell linguists, in interviews and on paper, about their language. Unfortunately, these informants tend to be better-educated than their fellows, and are often fluent in more than one language. This, in conjunction with the comparatively formal setting of an interview (even if it is done in as basic a location as possible), can systematically distort the results. While such interviews are an unavoidable, and essential, part of the process, Dr Gil has also resorted to various ruses in his attempts to elicit linguistic information. In one of them, he would sit by the ferry terminal on Batam, an Indonesian island near Singapore, with sketches of fish doing different things. He then struck up conversations with shoeshine boys hanging around the dock, hoping that the boys would describe what the fish were doing in a relaxed, colloquial manner.
The experiment, though, was not entirely successful: when the boys realised his intention, they began to speak more formally. This experience, says Dr Gil, illustrates the difficulties of collecting authentic information about the ways in which people speak. But those differences, whether or not they reflect the absence of a Chomskian deep grammar, might be relevant not just to language, but to the very way in which people think.
Update. Mark Liberman has an interesting take on this over at Language Log.
According to an article by Jennifer Jacobson in The Chronicle of Higher Education, some people are seriously annoyed by colons in titles:
Brenda Wineapple wants to cut out the academy's colon. She has had trouble doing so herself, even in the titles of her own books. Indeed, it is unlikely that a top-notch gastroenterologist or grammarian could help her achieve her aim."I hate colons," says Ms. Wineapple, a professor of modern literature and historical studies at Union College, in New York. Her second book, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1996; reprinted by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), is not supposed to have a colon. She wrote the title without one. "Nobody can handle that," she says. So "anyone who ever talks about the book puts it on."
According to the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press), "a colon introduces an element or a series of elements illustrating or amplifying what has preceded the colon." But it also advises that when referring to a book, in text and in bibliographies, a colon should be placed between a title and a subtitle, regardless of how they appear on the title page.Me, I agree with Lippincott both that colons have been around forever and that they're not in themselves a problem. They're a part of academic titles, just as tuxedos are a part of awards ceremonies. I just wish they'd do something about the turgid writing between the covers.Douglas Armato considers the "title: subtitle" arrangement the norm in his business. "The traditional university-press titling protocol is the interesting title that grabs your attention, followed by what is the real title of the book, which is what comes after the colon," says Mr. Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press. Increasingly, authors are forced to use subtitles as publishers put out more books on the same topics. The most obvious titles are already taken, he says.
"We've gone through several campaigns to eliminate subtitles entirely, and we're sort of intermittently vigilant about them," he says.
Carrie M. Mullen, the press's executive editor, says that she and her staff try to make titles sound snappier, unique, and a little more straightforward. "We discuss titles a lot with authors," she says. "They get attached to a certain title. It's sometimes hard to back them off it and get them to see how they read it is not necessarily how everyone will read it."
Searches—and the increased attention that they might generate—also play a role. "Sometimes you really need that exact information in the subtitle because all the searches people do on Amazon and everywhere else are dependent on pretty precise words in the subtitle," Mr. Armato says.
Colons became the standard in academic publishing roughly 20 years ago, according to Mr. Armato. It had "something to do with the point when you started attracting broader audiences to university-press books."...
Many academic publishers say that the colon is neither new nor a nuisance. "I've been around forever, close to 40 years, and as far as I can remember, there have always been a lot of colons in academic publishing," says Walter H. Lippincott, director of Princeton University Press. "It's not the colon that's a problem. It's whether the title is clunky or not."
"It could be worse. We could be publishing book titles that have semicolons in the titles," says Kate Douglas Torrey, director of the University of North Carolina Press...
Meanwhile, Willis G. Regier is displeased that more scholars are putting colons in chapter titles. "It makes absolutely no sense in a table of contents," says Mr. Regier, director of the University of Illinois Press. "We're doing our best to resist it."...
He also bemoans the increase in the number of books that have not only a title and subtitle but also another subtitle. There's this "assumption that the title needs to tell you everything that's in the book, that it needs to be something like a mini-abstract." He says it's a reversion to an 18th-century practice in which books had lengthy titles and subtitles. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, originally titled Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships, is an example...
One colon in the title, Chicago's Ms. Samen says, is acceptable. Two are not. "Sometimes the qualifiers that follow the colon become so specialized that it becomes hard to figure out what the book is about unless you're an expert yourself," she says.
Colon devotees and debunkers do agree on one thing: The punctuation mark makes a lousy first impression. Colons themselves hardly ever appear on book covers. Typically, a smaller typeface denotes the subtitle. Professors rarely demand that publishers print the actual colons because—like two blemishes on the forehead of a teenager—everyone agrees they're ugly.
(Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
It's time once again to help out a seeker on Ask MetaFilter, namely greengrl, who says:
I've just started studying Hebrew (the class has a focus on "Biblical Hebrew"), and I'm looking for some additional resources outside of class. Does anyone know of software, internet sites, or books that might be helpful in learning a language so different from English? So far the class hasn't been too bad, but I'd like to do additional learning at home.I'm quite sure my readership will have some good suggestions. (When I studied Biblical Hebrew, I used the wretched Teach Yourself, so I'm not much use here.)
A Guardian story by Kirsty Scott reports on a truly nutty decision by the Foreign Office:
The Scottish burr may often prove incomprehensible to English ears, but the Foreign Office apparently considers the accent so impenetrable that it has rejected a Russian student's application to study in Scotland on the grounds that she might not understand the language.It emerged in the Scottish parliament yesterday that UK Visas, a joint operation manned in Britain by the Home Office and overseas by Foreign Office staff, had used the excuse to deny the young woman a 12-week visa to study the English language in Scotland last summer.
Among the reasons for her rejection was one which said: "Given that you state you will need to resit your English exam in November, you cannot satisfactorily explain why you have chosen to attend an English course in Scotland rather than your other options of Oxford or Cambridge, where you should face less difficulty understanding a regional accent."I'll say. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)The blunder was uncovered by the Scottish National party, who informed the first minister, Jack McConnell, at Holyrood yesterday. The SNP leader, John Swinney, urged Mr McConnell, who recently launched a drive to bring more immigrants to Scotland, to condemn "that type of attitude of institutional discrimination".
Mr McConnell promised he would look into it.
A Foreign Office spokesman admitted it was "an error".
I've always wanted to read Gilbert Seldes's famous 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts (whose chapter on Krazy Kat was the first serious critical appraisal of comic strips) and am glad to discover it's online, where I can dip into it at leisure, a chapter at a time. I've just