I'm reading From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe (as is Joel of Far Outliers, who posts some good quotes from the early chapters), and I ran across an intriguing word on page 55: "The cacophony of the monsoon gone, the music of the cold season worked up to a climax in the songs of birds both native and migratory, especially the scarlet minivets and the swallows." I looked it up in my smaller dictionaries and came up empty; finally the big Webster's informed me that it was a cuckoo shrike of Asiatic origin, etymology unknown. (They're colorful little fellows, as you can see here.) The only other dictionary I could find it in was, of course, the OED, whose entry reads in its entirety:
minivet ('mInIvIt). [Etym. obscure.] Any bird of the campophagine genus Pericrocotus.I find it very odd that a word that entered the English language in the mid-19th century has no etymology (an official word, as it were, and not a slang term); I can only surmise that the word is simultaneously obscure and banal-sounding enough that it has not attracted the attention of etymologists. (I assume "Mr. Blyth" is Edward Blyth, among other things curator of the zoological museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal; since he died in 1873, over thirty years before the relevant fascicle of the OED appeared, he wouldn't have been available for questioning, but he surely didn't make the word up out of thin air.)1862 Jerdon Birds of India I. 418 The Red Shrikes or Minivets (as Mr. Blyth has called them in the Museum Asiatic Society). 1862 Jerdon Birds of India 425, I have found this Minivet extensively spread throughout India. 187. Cassell's Nat. Hist. IV. 30 The Grey Minivet (Pericrocotus cinereus). 1880 A. R. Wallace Isl. Life iii. 44 The brilliant little minivets are almost equally universal.
One annoying feature of words like this, rare terms for things that are common in some other part of the world, is that it's very hard to find out what the translation is in languages where they're common. My standard example is fenugreek, which is ubiquitous in the cuisines of India and surrounding countries but which, because it's virtually unknown in English-speaking countries, is not to be found in the English half of bilingual dictionaries. Thanks to the internet, of course, we have the recourse of googling the scientific name (Trigonella foenum-graecum in the case of fenugreek) and hoping something will turn up in the language we want, but that's not exactly a reliable solution. The trouble is that a truly unabridged bilingual dictionary would cost more than anybody's willing to pay to create. Ah well.
According to this post at Desbladet (and if you can't trust Desbladet, what Angloscandiwegian prinsessor-obsessed scandal sheet can you trust?), Stanislaw Lem's novels have been translated into English pretty much exclusively via French versions. Furthermore, Faber & Faber likes it that way:
Solaris indeed has never been translated directly into English and Mr Lem is dissatisfied with the current translation. Whether this state of affairs will change remains an open question. The following quote from a letter from the Managing Director of the Publishing House Faber and Faber serves as an explanation: "With regard to Solaris, I am afraid that we would not currently be willing either to publish a new translation or to license one."Now, I am not a fan of Lem's (and no, I don't think I'd be a fan even if he were translated direct from the Polish—I'm allergic to that variety of heavy-handed, supercilious irony, and I dislike even more his contempt for all other science fiction writers), but this is ridiculous. I could understand, sort of, translating from the French if the original were in, say, Abkhaz, but can it possibly be that hard to find translators from Polish?
It is with great sadness that I report the death last Saturday of Larry Trask, who combined impeccable linguistic credentials with a fine writing style and a sense of humor not often encountered in academia. The obituary linked above is a fine tribute:
He was a popular teacher, generous with his time and knowledge to students and staff alike. His publications include many guides to ideas about language for the benefit of students and the serious general reader which are models of clarity and accuracy. This same desire for rigour informed his research. He was one of the world's foremost scholars of Basque, and he wrote a history of the language which is both outstanding in its own terms and a superb vindication of the methods of classical historical linguistics, of which he had also written a fine textbook. Larry's interests were wide, and he had recently been involved with the question of the origin of language in general and with the relation between different language families, as well as writing guides to Internet etiquette and punctuation. He wore his learning with real modesty and never sought the front of the stage he found himself on in the last eight years or so of his life, though he held his own there with distinction... The respect and love which Larry evoked in us are mixed with sadness and bitterness at the cruelty of his illness which robbed him of his speech and then broke his health bit by bit. We will deeply miss his part in our lives as a colleague and friend, and we will not forget that, true to himself, he was still entertaining us with comments on his reading emailed from his bed two days before he died.(Thanks to Tim May for the news.)
A nice summary of the history of the letter Q:
During the Old English period, we didn't use Q in English: we wrote, for example, CWICU for 'quick' and CWEN for 'queen' (Old English, like Latin, preferred C for the /k/-sound instead of K). But then the French-speaking Normans conquered England, interrupting the English literary tradition, and, when English once again began to be written after the Conquest, a number of French spelling conventions were introduced, including the business of always writing Q for the /k/-sound when the next letter was U. And we're still stuck with it.(Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)
I'm not surprised that a newspaper partly in Chinook Jargon was published in British Columbia a century ago, but I'm astonished it lasted for over thirty years; the University of Saskatchewan Library has acquired a run of it and is mounting an exhibition, and the corresponding web page has some great images.
U of S Library has just acquired one of the largest and most complete runs in existence of an important 19th century British Columbia newsletter, the Kamloops Wawa, published between 1891 and 1923. The Kamloops Wawa was a multi-lingual publication written in English, French and Chinook Jargon.(Via Bill Poser at Language Log, who provides additional information about the language and the shorthand it was written in.)The Wawa was published by the missionary Father Jean-Marie Raphael LeJeune out of the backroom of a church on the Kamloops reserve between 1891 and 1923. At its peak it had a distribution of 2000 copies per month, with a circulation that reached as far as Quebec and France. The newsletter is unusual for its time in that Le Jeune actively sought an Aboriginal audience and focused on local and national Native concerns. It is a very valuable and largely untapped source for scholarly research in History, Native Studies, Religious Studies, Linguistics and other disciplines.
Chinook Jargon is a "pidgin" language, a much simplified and easy-to-learn version of traditional Chinook, designed to allow communication between tribes speaking disparate languages and between First Nations people and Europeans. Its primary use was to facilitate trade, but Chinook Jargon was also employed at treaty negotiations. The Wawa featured both the longhand and the Duployan shorthand version of Chinook Jargon, with English and sometimes French translations, and also translations into other Aboriginal languages.
Another in the Marvels of the Internet series: the entire Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) and Scottish National Dictionary (SND) are now online and searchable under the rubric Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL). How many times have I wished I had easy access to those magnificent works of lexicography, especially when reading the magnificent Hugh MacDiarmid! I tested the DSL on the vocabulary in "The Eemis Stane" (quoted in the linked LH entry) and was somewhat disappointed to find that neither eemis nor how-dumb-deid was in there, but there was a nice entry for yowdendrift that actually quoted the poem:
YOWDENDRIFT ,n. Also youden-, ewden-, and reduced forms yown-, ¶ en-. Snowdrift, “snow or hail blown directly and forcibly from the heavens” (Abd., Kcd. 1825 Jam., s.v. Erd-drift; Bnff. 1944). See also Erd. Obs. exc. liter.The words I've bolded are linked to their definitions on the dictionary page. Very well done, and I thank wood s lot for bringing it to my attention.
*Abd. 1790 A. Shirrefs Poems 285:
To my Meg I bend my tour, Thro’ Ewden drift, or snawy-show’r.
*Abd. 1801 W. Beattie Parings (1873) 34:
The first thing meets him, is a dose Of styth endrift and hail.
*Ags. a.1823 G. Beattie Poems (1882) 199:
As choakin’ thick as yowden drift.
*Crm. 1834 H. Miller Scenes and Leg. 291:
I’ll be lost, I’m feared, in the yowndrift.
*Mry. 1852 A. Christie Mountain Strain 16:
At every shift, Like youden drift, The deals in dizens flew.
*Sc. 1925 H. McDiarmid Sangschaw 23:
An’ my eerie memories fa’ Like a yowdendrift.
*Bnff. 1927 E. S. Rae Hansel Fae Hame 18:
Antrin shooers o’ yowden drift.
*Sc. 1947 D. Young Braird o’ Thristles 12:
Skinklan pouther frae a licht yowden-drift o’ snaw.
[O.Sc. ewindrift, id., 1630. The first element is obscure, phs. ad. yowden, pa.p. of Yield, but the sense development is unexplained. Endrift may be a mistake for erd-drift. See also Stife, v., Stith, I.3.]
Mark of Alliterative has an entry about an interesting question asked by a student in his Old English class: does the use of the dual pronoun imply greater intimacy?
I wasn’t really sure how to answer this. Is the dual pronoun ever used to refer to two antagonists in Old English? I suppose one could say that the dual pronoun is sometimes used when the dual number of the referent is specifically regarded, not only because of intimacy. Sometimes the dual is conspicuous by its absence; for instance Adam and Eve are not refered to using dual pronouns in Ælfric’s translation of Genesis.I've studied some languages with duals, but never paid enough attention to the circumstances under which they were used to be able to answer the question; anybody have any thoughts on the subject?But what of other languages? I know that Old Norse also preserves the dual pronouns. What other languages do? Is there any special implication in the use of the dual in those languages (other than simply number)?
One last dividend from the Winchester book (which, thankfully, I've now finished)—a word I hadn't run across in the OED or anywhere else, and am very glad to know about:
drogulus ('drQgjUl@s). [Coined 'on the spur of the moment' by A. J. Ayer perh. by subconscious association with dragon + L. -ulus as in dracunculus.] An entity whose presence is unverifiable, because it has no physical effects. Also transf.
1957 A. J. Ayer in Edwards & Pap Mod. Introd. Philos. 608 Suppose I say 'There's a "drogulus" over there,' and you say 'What?' and I say 'Drogulus,' and you say 'What's a drogulus?' Well I say 'I can't describe what a drogulus is, because it's not the sort of thing you can see or touch, it has no physical effects of any kind, but it's a disembodied being.' 1959 L. S. Penrose in New Biol. XXVIII. 98, I had difficulty in finding a suitable name for the activated complexes produced in these experiments. On showing one of them to Professor A. J. Ayer, I inquired whether it perhaps might be a 'drogulus'... He replied that it was undoubtedly a 'drogulus'.
An interesting news story (sent to me by Kelly Nestruck—thanks, Kelly!)
Deaf signs ruled offensiveThe decision sparked controversy:Political correctness has caught up with sign language for deaf people. Gestures used to depict ethnic and religious minorities and homosexuals are being dropped because they are now deemed offensive.
The abandoned signs include "Jewish", in which a hand mimes a hooked nose; the sign for "gay", a flick of a limp wrist; and "Chinese", in which the index fingertips pull the eyes into a slant. Another dropped sign is that for "Indian", which is a finger pointing to an imaginary spot in the middle of a forehead.
The signs have been declared off-limits by the makers of Vee-TV, Britain's Channel 4 program for deaf people, for fear of being accused of racism and homophobia. Caroline O'Neill, a researcher at Vee-TV, explained: "We have a sign language monitor on the channel who checks that what we are doing is culturally appropriate."
Critics labelled the move as silly, saying that the producers were interfering with "deaf culture".Deaf people, presumably, work out their vocabulary without much reference to the decisions of Vee-TV, but I wonder what percentage of the population uses which signs.Polly Smith, the acting chairperson of the British Council for Disabled People, said the changes were a form of discrimination.
"The program makers at Channel 4 are interfering with deaf people's language, culture and view of society, and that is a form of discrimination," she said.
However, Ms O'Neill defended the move. She said that the program, launching its fourth series today, used modern alternative signs that were not offensive.
"Before, [the sign for Jewish] was connected to a stereotypical Jewish nose, but now it's a hand sign that mimics the shape of the menorah [a ceremonial candlestick used in Judaism]," she said.
The sign for "Indian" is now a mime of the triangular shape of the subcontinent; "Chinese" is the right hand travelling from the signer's heart across his chest horizontally, then down towards his hip, mimicking the tunic worn in China; and the sign for "gay" is an upright thumb on one hand in the palm of the other, wobbling from side to side...
Gail Armstrong recounts a variety of interactions between authors and translators, ranging from open hostility to endless love. (The former, of course, makes for better reading.) She opens with this classic quote: "When told by a reader that his stories read better in French, James Thurber replied, 'Yes, I tend to lose something in the original.'" I recommend the whole entry. And I have to say that if I, like Alan Bennett, were to receive these queries from my translator:
‘For a long time I used to go to bed early.’ This Proust quote, where?I would tell the publisher to find another translator.
Ivy-Compton-Burnett: who or what is that?
My favorite anecdote from my own professional career is when I had to use all my powers of persuasion to change a proposed Spanish translation of Christmas disease as "enfermedad de Navidad." (The disease was named for Stephen Christmas, who suffered from it.)
As much as I enjoy A.E. Housman's serious poetry, if I could only save one item from his collected works I'm afraid it would be his hilarious parody of old-fashioned translations, "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy." It turns out the Russian critic and translator M.L. Gasparov has rendered it into Russian, which makes me very happy; go to Avva's comment thread and scroll down to where it's quoted (it begins "О ты, прекраснокожанообутая/ Глава пришельца!")
Incidentally, anyone interested in Mandelshtam should read Gasparov's fascinating essay on the Slate Ode (what I've linked is the English summary, which is itself quite long; the Russian original is here). He considers it impossible to understand the poem without taking account of the history of its composition:
The fact of the matter is that, in the course of the development of the Ode, from one wording to another, its meaning changed almost to its opposite. At the beginning, the predominant concept, for Mandel’shtam, was “culture”, while towards the end it was “nature”. At the beginning, the predominant problem was the development of new poetry from old poetry, the preservation of cultural tradition; at the end it was the creation of new poetry independently of old poetry: directly from nature, from the elements. It is easy to see the connection of the above with the whole evolution of Mandel’shtam. “The early Mandel’shtam” is Acmeism, nostalgia for world culture, poems about cathedrals, Beethoven and Bach, the classicist poetics of literary allusions. “The later Mandel’shtam” is Conversation about Dante, the geological and biological imagery, the innovative poetics of unusual (almost surrealistic) word-combinations. The Slate Ode is 1923, it is the very turning-point from the earlier manner to the later, from the enthusiasm for culture to the enthusiasm for nature and the elements.
My frustrating reading of The Meaning of Everything has finally given me some pleasure. On page 205, Winchester describes how the recently coined word radium was omitted from the first edition of the OED and quotes a mock definition probably written by Frederick Sweatman (an editorial assistant) at the time:
Radium. [mod. L. radium (B. Balius Add. Lex. : not in DuCange). The orig. source is Preh.—Adami spadi, to dig;—Antediluv. randam (unconnected with PanArryan randan). Cognate with OH Has. mqdrq; Opj. rangtrum; MHGug. tsploshm; Mubr. dndrpq; Baby. daddums and N.Pol. rad are unconnected.] The unknown quantity. Math. Symbol x. Cf. Eureka.Not quite Flann O'Brien, but enjoyable tomfoolery.
Aristotle De. P.Q. LI.xx says it may be obtained by the excrement of a squint-eyed rat that has died of a broken heart buried 50 ft below the highest depths of the western ocean in a well-stopped tobacco tin, but Sir T. Browne says this is a vulgar error; he also refutes the story that it was dug in the air above Mt. Olympus by the ancients.
[Not in J., the Court Guide, or the Daily Mail Year Book before 1510.]
1669 Pepys Diary, 31 June, And so to bed. Found radium an excellent pick-me-up in the morning. 1873 Hymns A & M 2517 Thy walls are built of radium. 1600 Hakluyt's Voy. IV.21 The kyng was attired simply in a hat of silke and radium-umbrella.
I was glad to see this story (by Polly Curtis) from the Guardian:
A language is lost every two weeks, according to the head of a new centre for research into endangered languages, which is being launched today.People are increasingly choosing to teach their children more commonly used languages in a bid to help them gain work in later life, their research says. As a result half of the 6,500 languages spoken around the world are anticipated to disappear in the next century - a rate of one every fortnight.
The new centre for research into endangered languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, which is backed by £20m grant, is being launched today by the Princess Royal.
Researchers will use the money to record and archive endangered languages and look at ways of encouraging people to retain their indigenous languages.Thanks for the link go to Simon Ager of Omniglot.Professor Peter Austin director of the Endangered Languages Academic Project, said: "The main reason that languages are lost is that communities are switching to speaking other people's language - they adopt a language of a local area.
"Many people in east Africa are opting for Swahili; Indians in central and south America speak Spanish to their children to give them an economic advantage."
The professor, who himself speak three Australian aboriginal languages as well as two Indonesian dialects, English, some Japanese, German and Italian, added: "The tragedy is that although people may decide now that it's better to switch, in a generation or two, their children or grandchildren will regret that. We're trying to help people remain multi-lingual by adding languages rather than losing them."
Along with the endangered languages the centre aims to preserve large elements of the disappearing cultures. Archived material which Professor Austin has gathered so far includes interviews with the last known speaker of Jiwarli, a western Australian Aboriginal dialect, Jack Butler, who died in 1986.
If your ears register /ba/ and your eyes a mouth saying /ga/, you'll "hear" /da/. It's called the McGurk effect:
The most striking demonstration of the combined (bimodal) nature of speech understanding appeared by accident. Harry McGurk, a senior developmental psychologist at the University of Surrey in England, and his research assistant John MacDonald were studying how infants perceive speech during different periods of development. For example, they placed a videotape of a mother talking in one location while the sound of her voice played in another. For some reason, they asked their recording technician to create a videotape with the audio syllable "ba" dubbed onto a visual "ga." When they played the tape, McGurk and McDonald perceived "da." Confusion reigned until they realized that "da" resulted from a quirk in human perception, not an error on the technician's part. After testing children and adults with the dubbed tape, the psychologists reported this phenomenon in a 1976 paper humorously titled "Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices," a landmark in the field of human sensory integration. This audio-visual illusion has become known as the McGurk effect or McGurk illusion.Amazing. (Via Sally Thomason at Language Log.)
Who can resist specialized vocabulary? Not I. Absconding swarm, American foulbrood, Braula coeca, buff comb, Demaree ('the method of swarm control that separates the queen from most of the brood within the same hive'), supersedure ('a natural replacement of an established queen by a daughter in the same hive')—it's all here. (Via Incoming Signals.)
Update. Vernica at thinking while typing has a great list of bee-related links.
The Englisc List Website—A Forum for Composition in Old English is a treasure trove of material for people who want to use Old English, not just make their way through Beowulf with a glossary.
While some discussion is conducted in Old English, a lot of it is not; but activity on this list aims primarily to: 1) compose a message or an original text in Old English, 2) translate a modern or medieval text into Old English, 3) participate in ongoing projects devoted to the above, 4) comment on the contributions, 5) offer something new, 6) pose questions about grammar and vocabulary, 7) be tremendously entertaining while remaining relevant, or 8) just lurk and learn.I particularly like the New Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, whose most recent entry reads:
[Anno MMIV Hreðmonað]
- xix d: Ymb þisne dæg ymb Wala ceastre in Suð-Waziristan provinciam in Pakistane Pakistanes fyrd fohte wið beorgweargum ond Bin Ladenes heafodþegne, ond neah in Afghnistane Americisce fuhton wið Talibaniscum.
(Via the effervescent and irreplaceable ElizaD in Wordorigins.)
My reading life is one of disappointments these days. Having been badly let down by The Greek War of Independence, I'm now grinding my teeth over Simon Winchester's The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, which I got for Christmas and had been very much looking forward to reading. Mind you, I've only read the first chapter, so I haven't even begun the story of the OED and can't report on how well he tells it. But I can tell you the book is very poorly written.
This is particularly annoying because Winchester's reviews are nearly unanimous in their praise of his style: "fluent, eloquent" (Michael Glover, Financial Times), "Winchester writes with his customary colour and verve" (Anne Wroe, Sunday Telegraph), "Winchester is an extraordinarily graceful writer" (Lev Grossman, Time), &c &c. RALPH (The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities) called this book "impeccably written." So I expected that even if Winchester's grasp of the study of language turned out to be lacking (as of course it did), I would be carried along by that fluent, eloquent, graceful style. Reader, I was not.
I am going to get quite detailed, because it's the only way I can take my revenge for the ground teeth, so anyone with no appetite for dissection of sentences should stop now and wait for the next post.
The prologue begins with several pages about Derby Day of 1928 ("A great horse race on a sunny afternoon... All England, it is probably safe to say, languished that day in the careless blue-skies rapture of early summer, with little but pleasure... If these were rather carefree and prosperous times, for very many they were also cultured and learned times besides..."—you'd never know this was a period of intense class struggle in England, and Stanley Baldwin had crushed the miners' union just the previous year, but let it go, this isn't that kind of history) and continues with a rhapsody about the dinner held that evening at the Goldsmiths' Hall in London: "It was a dinner for 150... each one of whom was monumentally distinguished in achievement and standing... a stellar gathering of intellect, rarely either assembled or able to be assembled since"—"either assembled or able to be assembled"? what? let it go—"There were two bishops, three vice-chancellors, a dozen peers of the realm (including the Earls of Birkenhead, Elgin, Harrowby, and Crawford & Balcarres, the Viscount Davenport, the Lords Aldenham, Blanesburgh, Cecil, Percy, Queenborough, Wargrave, and Warrington of Clyffe), 27 knights of the realm..."—my eyes began glazing over, but I thought "OK, this is a British book aimed at Brits, and Brits love aristoporn the way Yanks love movie gossip, let it go"—concluding with a lengthy excerpt from Baldwin's speech celebrating the completion of the OED ("And all that was most suitably and appositely said by the Prime Minister..."). It all seemed like padding to me, but I reminded myself that people like a little scene-setting, and I turned to the first chapter with undiminished anticipation.
I zoomed through a few pages describing how the future England was settled by Celts, conquered by Romans, and invaded by Teutons, then was brought up short by the following footnote to the Old English word Englisc: "The -sc sound was pronounced as -sh." I read it and reread it, and still could make no sense of it. "The -sc sound was pronounced as -sh"? And what were those hyphens doing there? My brow began to furrow, and I thought that at the very least the book could have used more editing. On the next page, in the course of a brief mention of futhorc runes, he says "with th—known as the thorn—being elided into a single symbol"; again I was puzzled—it's the symbol that's known as thorn, not whatever he means by the "th being elided."
That was only an appetizer; it got worse. In discussing the many new words introduced during the Renaissance, he introduces a list with "sometimes the loveliness of the assemblages are just too beguiling to pass up"; aside from the failure in number accord ("the loveliness... is"), I have no idea what he thinks he means by "assemblages." In a footnote to the list of borrowings he says "The distance between two caravanserais—a day's travel, in other words—is known by the Turkish loanword menzil"; for one thing, the preferred spelling is manzil, for another it means not 'the distance between two caravanserais' but 'a halting-place; the distance between two halting-places, a stage,' and for a third it's not from Turkish but Arabic—all this according to the OED itself!
I don't want this to be any longer than it has to, and I respect the intelligence and literacy of my readers, so I will simply quote a series of sentences, putting in bold the bits that reveal bad style or plain idiocy and adding the occasional bracketed remark:
"Among those [Shakespeare] used, but he almost alone, were soilure, tortive, and vastidity, which mean, as one might expect, staining, twisted, and big." [Those are some vastidity words!]
"A glance at any map will suggest hundreds upon hundreds of constructions and imports that we now know to be more a part of today's English than they ever were of the native tongues where they were first born. Glasnost and perestroika, for example..."
[Talking about the fact that nobody had written an English dictionary before the seventeenth century:] "Nobody, it turned out, had ever bothered."
[Talking about Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus:] "The tiresome making of this book once exasperated the 'utterly profligate' Mrs Cooper so much that she tossed the entire manuscript into the fire—prompting her imperturbable husband simply to sigh wearily and begin compiling his book all over again." [Vas you dere, Sharlie?]
"But... neither Shakespeare, nor any of the other great writing minds of the day... had access to what all of us today would be certain that he would have wanted: the lexical convenience that went by the name that was invented in 1538, a dictionary." [Speak for yourself! And aside from that, the word dictionary is first attested in 1526 ("And so Peter Bercharius in his dictionary describeth it"), not 1538, and dictionarius or dictionarium had been used for centuries in Latin, so that the English word hardly needed to be "invented"; again, this information is right there in the OED.]
"He lists for their assistance words like bubulcitate, sacerdotall, archgrammacian, and attemptate—all of them extravagances now mercifully gone the way of the doublet, the ruff, and the periwig." [Sacerdotal is still a perfectly good word. Bubulcitate, by the way, is 'to do the office of a Bubulcus or Cowheard,' in case you were wondering.]
"The magisterially famous Dr Johnson..."
"The French have had their Académie Française, a body made up of the much-feared Forty Immortals..."
"On being accused, by a genteel society lady, of failing to include obscenities in [his dictionary, Dr Johnson] replied... 'Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers. I find, however, that you have been looking for them." [The lady was not "accusing" him but complimenting him. This is a very famous anecdote.]
[On the success of Noah Webster's dictionary:] "As a result the word Websterian—meaning 'invested with lexical authority'—rapidly entered the language..." [OED: Websterian (wEb'stI@rI@n), a.1 Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of Webster's Dictionary (see prec.) or any of its later versions or abridgements.]
"[The Philological Society's] first paper, which reportedly stimulated animated discussion among the members, was a classic of arcane enthusiasm: 'The dialects of the Papuan or Negrito race, scattered through the Australian and other Asiatic islands.'" [In other words, it was a paper on what we would now call the Austronesian languages. Those wacky, arcane philologists!]
"In the very early days a most curious parallelism developed between philology and, rather curiously it would seem today, the science of geology..."
"There were papers also on the complexity of some foreign tongues—on 'The Termination of the Numeral Eleven, Twelve and the equivalent forms in Lithuanian', for example, and a spirited piece on the Tushi language, which is (or was) apparently well known in the Caucasian hill town of Tzowa, and which might be regarded today as a somewhat tricky tongue for beginners, given that the Tushi for the number 1,000 is the sonorously complex form of words sac tqauziqa icaiqa. In June 1857, while the members were gamely pausing to learn Tushi counting (cha, si, xo, ahew pxi, jetx ...)..."
Ahahahaha! Those funny woggy languages with their silly, sonorous words for big numbers! Amazingly enough, we don't have to wonder idly if "the Tushi language" is still spoken in "Tzowa" (or Tsova as it's been transliterated for the last hundred years or so), this being the 21st century and not the 19th; the Ethnologue entry informs us that it's spoken by 2,500 to 3,000 people (and it's known as Bats these days). And we don't have to depend on crumbling old Society reports for lists of numbers, either, since Bats is on the Zompist list of "Numbers from 1 to 10 in Over 4500 Languages" in the Caucasian section, right under its fellow Nakh languages Chechen and Ingush; it turns out the first six numbers are ch=a, shi, qo, ='iw?, pxi, and jetx. Not that the differences in transliteration are particularly important, but checking the list against a modern reference might have saved him from omitting the comma between 'four' and 'five,' which makes "ahew pxi" look like a single number.
Picky, you say? Sure. But this is a book published by Oxford University Press about the OED; it celebrates the decades-long labors of some of the most dedicated and detail-oriented scholars ever assembled for one task. If it's not worth being picky about that, what in heaven's name is it worth being picky about?
Paul Goyette of locussolus has an interesting post on Microsoft's releasing Windows in Welsh and other languages:
The point here is that taking local cultural and political realities into account can be good business, and that's what's going on with Windows in Tamil or Welsh. When they put it in Lakota or Jaqaru, then we can talk about linguistic diversity...
One of the best art exhibitions I saw in the '90s was The Glory of Byzantium at the Met (March 11 - July 6, 1997); I went back as often as I could, dragging everyone I knew. It covered the period from 843 to 1261, and they managed to get superb artworks from places that had never before allowed works to travel. Today they've opened the long-anticipated sequel, Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557):
The importance of the era is primarily demonstrated through the arts created for the Orthodox church and for the churches of other East Christian states that aspired to be the heirs to the empire’s power. The impact of its culture on the Islamic world and the Latin-speaking West is also explored—especially the influence of the Christian East on the development of the Renaissance.Read more about it in this NY Times story, and if you're anywhere near the city in the next few months (it runs runs through July 4) you'll want to make sure you don't miss it.
In connection with the exhibition, a major symposium on "Byzantium: Faith and Power" will be held at the Metropolitan Museum from Friday, April 16, to Sunday, April 18. The event will include scholarly presentations and a concluding performance. For more information, call 212-570-3710 or email lectures@metmuseum.org.
Oh, and many of the items are in Greek and various Slavic languages. Just so you don't think this is turning into an artblog or something.
In an early LH post I trotted out my favorite example of coincidence in language:
...even though English and Persian are related languages, and even though Persian "bad" means the same thing as English "bad" and is pronounced almost identically, there is no historical connection whatever.Imagine my joy at discovering an entire webpage of such coincidences, from Arabic/Mongolian akh 'brother' to Japanese yabanjin 'person from the wilderness'/Turkish yabanci 'person from the wilderness.' For lagniappe there's a table of "Yin/Yang reversals," eg Catalan alt 'high'/Turkish alt 'low.' I'm certainly not vouching for the accuracy of all the forms, but it's a great idea, and I applaud Yahyá M for putting so much work into it! (If anybody notices any howlers, I'd appreciate hearing about them.)
I told my wife a joke my Sanskrit professor was very fond of and she just about fell out of her chair laughing, so I thought I'd pass it along to you, since it has aspects of clear linguistic interest. After all, my posts have been on the serious side lately, and we all deserve a break. But I have to warn you, although this joke contains no dirty words, it is likely to offend the easily offended. If you are among that group, I beg you not to click on the "Continue reading..." link. If not, continue reading!
The host of a party sees a new guest looking around uncertainly, and being a good host, he immediately goes up and introduces himself. She responds in kind, telling him that her name is Hermione Fluck. He tries to keep the shock off his face, realizing that the poor woman has doubtless had to bear a lifetime's worth of crude jokes, and simply says "It's nice to meet you, Hermione." Wanting to make sure she doesn't feel left out, he takes her over to a group chatting in the corner and says "Hey, everybody, I'd like you to meet someone. Her name is Hermione Crunt."
A tantalizing entry at Renee's Glosses.net recounts in summary fashion the sad tale of Maksim Grek (Maximus the Greek), brought to Russia in the early 16th century to translate religious manuscripts and then imprisoned for years for allegedly corrupting the text; Renee says, "When one reads these translations, the most visible evidence of Maksim's non-Slavic origin is prepositions: from time to time Maxim uses a calque translation from Greek rather than the correct Russian preposition." (Incidentally, the preface to Meletii Smotryts'kyi's Hrammatika slavianskaia [Slavonic Grammar] (Moscow, 1648) "includes passages attributed to Maximus the Greek." Thus I shoehorn in a mention of the excellent website of the Ucrainica at Harvard exhibition, with reproductions of all sorts of old books.)
Renee's post inspired Margaret Marks of Transblawg to post her own prepositional entry, including a set of test sentences calling for you to fill in the correct preposition. (As an American, I don't want any preposition at all in "4. to make money from dealing ….. heroin.")
Through a comment on an earlier entry I've discovered a blog called Romanika, started in January by "a college student with a passion for the Romance Languages/Linguistics." He not only has a passion for the languages, he has the kind of eye and ear for detail that is impossible to learn and makes him an invaluable source for all sorts of fascinating stuff that had escaped my notice. In his "first true entry," he discusses the social implications of the voseo (use of vos as a general second-person singular pronoun) in Central America, contrasting it at the end of the entry with the Argentine use I'm familiar with (where it is used freely at all levels of society as a proud mark of Argentineness). In his next entry he describes the difference between attitudes toward the short forms of the verb estar 'to be' in Portuguese and Spanish:
I had noticed that in Brazil syncopated forms of the verb «estar» (to be) are used. This occurs especially in the present and preterit, i.e.: [present tou for estou, tás for estás, &c; preterit tava for estava, tavas for estavas, &c]Since then he's discussed rhotacism in Venezuela (eg «\er negro\» for el negro 'the black one'), leísmo in Madrid (the use of the indirect pronoun as a direct object), and Occitan/Provençal, among other things. I absolutely love this stuff, and am delighted to have found the site.At one time, I thought that these forms were solely found in Brazil. However, they are just as much used in Portugal. In both countries, the syncopated forms are the spoken norm. In the written form, they are non-standard. On writing on the internet, more times than not, one finds the shortened forms. In both sides of the Atlantic, these forms have gotten much social acceptance. They are used by all people, in all levels of society. This is confirmed by Vero, who, in our letters and internet conversations, always uses these forms. She says that even her professors at school do this; that only the language purists use the 'standard' forms. That is, in both countries, the spoken standard is already that of the syncopated forms. It is not socially marked, except in highly formal situations. That is, the action of using the 'standard' forms in a normal conversation will give one an image of being pedantic...
This is interesting because this is not the case in Spanish. In this language, one finds too the syncopated forms of the verb «estar», in pretty much the same way: with «es-» removed. However, here, it is socially disregarded. One will find people who say «toy, tás, tá» for standard «estoy, estás, está», but will be socially marked. While in Portuguese songs, particularly from Brazil, I find all the time «tô» for «estou», I have never found so in Spanish ones, «toy» for «estoy». In Spanish, these same scheme might be accepted in certain regions, enclaves where it is used. But outside there, it will have a taste of regional and sub-standard, or even, ignorant and rural.
A Wordorigins thread asked about the origin of the phrase "Latin America," and both a rant by a Peruvian diplomat turned up by the indefatigable aldiboronti and a geography message-board post by Yaïves Ferland ("professional researcher" at the Land Law Lab of the Center for research in Geomatics, Université Laval) that I googled up give similar explanations; I will quote the Peruvian, Dr. Pedro de Mesones:
["Latin America", "Latin American" and "Latin" ("Latino") were] created by the French when Napoleon III made Maximilian Emperor of Mexico (1863-1867). The terms were a product of France's ambitious, imperialistic desire to establish its power in the American Hemisphere, while taking advantage of the revolutionary cries for independence then echoing throughout the Spanish colonies of Central and South America. The French wished to erase the idea of "Hispanic America" and replace the term with a name which would epitomize France's ubiquity. After considering the political implications of the times, the French decided against the name "Francoamerica" out of fear that it might boomerang. So they chose the name "Latin America" under the pretext that Spaniards, also, came from the Roman world and, therefore, were included in the Latin Concept, which had given origin to France's culture as well. And the French dreamed of Paris as the capital of their "Latin America."Does anybody know if any of this is true?
An idiotic list of alleged mispronunciations compiled by someone going by the alias "Dr. Language" has been making the rounds of the internet, and now that it's turned up on MetaFilter as well, I guess I'll bite the bullet and blog the thing. I may as well simplify my life by just reproducing the heart of my MeFi comment:
Even for those who believe in the concept of "mispronunciation" (by native speakers), this list is useless, because its few worthwhile nuggets (words whose "wrong" pronunciations will actually make many people think less of you: Calvary, escape, et cetera, &c) are easily found elsewhere and are drowned in a sea of natural variants whose subtle difference easily escapes notice (acrosst, barbituate, cannidate), perfectly normal dialectal forms (aks, bob wire, bidness), bullshit forms reminiscent of those "Kids say the darndest things!" pseudo-mistakes some people e-mail lists of (Old-timer's disease, a blessing in the skies, Carpool tunnel syndrome—this is the title of a book, and it's a deliberate pun, for Chrissake!, Heineken remover—which they as good as admit is bullshit, &c &c), and (most annoying of all) perfectly good pronunciations that "Dr. Language" (if he has a doctorate in linguistics, I'm a neurosurgeon!) doesn't happen to like: "close" for clothes, "diptheria," duck tape (not only is it almost impossible to pronounce both t's audibly in "duct tape," but as kozad points out, duck tape is the original form!), herb with silent h- (this is completely insane), long-lived with short i, "mawv" for mauve, often with the -t-, "parlament" (this one leaves me speechless—the word comes from Anglo-French parlament, the -i- is purely graphic, and as far as I know nobody on either side of the Atlantic pronounces it; does Dr. Language also recommend pronouncing the -c- in Connecticut?), persnickety (not only do they admit they're being ridiculous, they make a laughably erroneous comment, "It is a Scottish nonce word to which U.S. speakers have added a spurious [s]"—a nonce word, which they seem to think means 'dialect word' or something, is actually a word invented for a single occasion—remember, kids, you can't spell "nonce" without "once"!)... Well, you get my drift. Oh, and they're wrong about card shark too; see the American Heritage Dictionary definition of shark: "2. A person regarded as ruthless, greedy, or dishonest; A vicious usurer. 3. Slang A person unusually skilled in a particular activity: a card shark."
Please, I beg you: do not go to quacks like this for information about language! If you want to know how a word is pronounced or what it means, go to a dictionary—that's what they're for, and they're compiled by people who spend their lives studying this stuff for real, not passionate amateurs with websites.
Addendum. See the interesting thread at Crooked Timber.
The Japanese Writing Tutor "is meant to help students of Japanese practice their writing skills. By following along with the motion of several animated GIF files, you can hone your writing skills, making your katakana, hiragana, and kanji more legible."
When I first began learning Japanese, I found that among all of the other difficulties, writing posed special challenges. Not the least of these challenges was the fact that when writing Japanese characters, you must follow a specific order and direction of the strokes in order to be understood by a native reader of Japanese. Several times when trying to communicate through writing, I was met with blank looks of incomprehension, because what to me looked like the character for "water" looked to the average Japanese person like a scribbled mess.Any book that deals with Japanese writing (two I have found immensely useful are Reading Japanese by Jorden and Chaplin, and Essential Kanji by P. G. O'Neill) will indicate stroke order, but I feel that a static representation doesn't really create much of an impression. Anything that I learned was quickly forgotten, and I was back to drawing kuchi as a circle.
With that in mind, I've constructed a series of animated GIF files that will lead you through how to write each character. Each image is like a brief cartoon on an endless loop. You will first see a large representation of the character on question, then watch as a brush draws the character on paper. Your job is to mimic the movement of the brush with pen or pencil on paper. Practice each character until you feel comfortable and natural drawing it. Just choose a subset below (katakana, hiragana, or kanji) and begin. Please note if your web browser does not support animated GIFs, this page won't be of much use to you.Via wood s lot.
I fear my infatuation with David Brewer has thoroughly cooled. I'm well over halfway through The Greek War of Independence, and what was at first a trickle of annoyance has become a torrent of bile. I'll begin with an apparently innocuous factor: accents.
One of the things that attracted me to the book when I first saw it in a store was the fact that all Greek names were provided with accents. I don't understand why this is so rarely done; word accents are as important in Greek as in, say, Spanish, for which they're routinely reproduced in English text; they're written in Greek itself (unlike in Russian, which is some excuse for the fact that the stress is so rarely marked in transliterated Russian words); and in this computer age it should be no problem to put acute accents over vowels. Nevertheless, they are almost always ignored for Greek, and I considered it a high recommendation that Brewer took the trouble to add them.
But already on page 4 I noticed an anomaly: the name of what was once the grandest cathedral in Christendom and is still the most famous building in Istanbul was given as Áyia Sofía. This is mixing apples and oranges; the katharévousa (archaizing) form of the name is Ayía Sofía, the demotic (colloquial) form Áyia Sofiá (whence Turkish Ayasofya; the traditional Anglicized version is Hagia Sophia). But that seemed like nitpicking even to me, and I moved on. Then on page 11 I came across Naoússa for what should have been Náoussa—and not once but twice, so it wasn't a typo. I knitted my brow, but moved on. On page 26 one of the founders of the Philikí Etería was given as Tsákalov when I was pretty sure it was actually Tsakálof, but... maybe I was wrong. (I wasn't.)
Soon, though, it was impossible to keep making excuses: the accents were a mess. "Salóna, modern Amphíssa" should be "Sálona, modern Ámphissa." Armátolos ('local law-enforcer hired by the Ottoman government') was given in place of the correct armatolós, Ellínikon for ellinikón. and Lévkas for Levkás (demotic Levkáda, the island then known as Ayia Mávra or Santa Maura). And I was noticing something else as well. Aside from the accent problem, "Salóna, modern Amphíssa" is exemplary; a historical text should give the name used at the time of the events and add the modern name to orient the reader. Brewer does this a few times; by and large, however, he simply uses the modern names, however anachronistic: Lamía for what at the time was called Zitoúni, Agrínion for Vrakhóri, Tripolis (no accent!) for the Peloponnesian center famous at the time as Tripolitzá. Like Tripolis, Navplion is given throughout without an accent (which is on the first syllable); back then it was called Anápli by the Greeks, Anabolu by the Turks, and frequently Napoli by Europeans who did not insist on classical nomenclature. Brewer calls the large island east of Attica and Boeotia "Évvia," which is unlikely to be intelligible to readers who think of it as Euboea and which was not used at the time (Greeks called it Égripos and Europeans Negropont). The height of absurdity is reached when at one point he talks about the Alamána River and at another about the "Sperchíos" (should be Sperkhiós) without appearing to recognize that these are the old and new names for the same river.
I admit I'm peculiarly sensitive to nomenclature, and these things probably do not matter to the average reader. But to my mind they are symptomatic of a larger problem. I began realizing this in the chapter "Revolt along the Danube," about the abortive invasion of Moldavia and Wallachia (modern Romania, then ruled by Greeks on behalf of the Ottoman Empire) that heralded the War of Independence. Here's the passage that set off the warning bells:
In Wallachia intrigue was rife. The governor, Alexander Soútsos..., was gravely ill..., and in January 1822 on his deathbed set up a caretaker government of native nobles or boyars. These saw this interregnum as an opportunity to establish Wallachian rights, in particular the right to be governed by a native prince rather than a phanariot Greek. To this end they sent at the end of January one of the government's military commanders, Theodore Vladimirescu, into western Wallachia, ostensibly to put down disturbances there, but in fact with instructions to create a disturbance of his own, aimed at inciting the local inhabitants and boyars against the phanariot Greeks. Vladimirescu's private motive, however, was to make himself prince of an independent Wallachia. His game was thus a double one from the start, and its increasing deceptions finally undid him. Of a different stamp was another of the Bucharest commanders, Iorgáki Olimpiótis. Thomas Gordon... described Iorgáki as 'distinguished for prudence, valour, and patriotism, and enthusiastically wedded to the principles of the Hetoeria...'This is absurdly Boy's Own and hellenocentric, more suitable to schoolchildren than readers of history. On the one hand, we have the greasy native playing a double game and out for himself, whose "increasing deceptions finally undid him"; on the other, a patriotic and principled member of the club, who would doubtless have distinguished himself on the playing fields of Eton had he only had the good fortune to be born British. The denouement of this little morality play is equally broadly drawn:
[The governor of Moldavia] fled with his family across the Pruth into Bessarabia. It is hard to see him as anything other than a fair-weather friend of the Etería. A further problem was the questionable conduct of Vladimirescu, who, as Ipsilántis learnt from intercepted despatches, was now negotiating with the Turks, offering them military help in return for the coveted governorship of Wallachia.Trying to save one's family is being a "fair-weather friend," and a Romanian trying to rule Romanians in place of a bunch of hated rapacious Greeks is "questionable conduct"! Brewer seems to take a certain pleasure in reporting how Vladimirescu was seized and "butchered" by the momentarily triumphant Greeks. The whole invasion is summed up with far better perspective in this short paragraph of Richard Clogg's excellent A Concise History of Greece:
Ypsilantis also hoped to take advantage of the concurrent uprising, led by Tudor Vladimirescu, of the Romanian inhabitants of the Principalities [Wallachia and Moldavia] against the native boyars, or notables. But the Romanians showed no greater enthusiasm than did the Serbs and Bulgars for making common cause with the Greeks, whom they identified with the oppressive rule of the Phanariot hospodars. Following the defeat of his ragged army at the hands of the Ottoman forces at the Battle of Dragatsani in June 1821, Ypsilantis was forced to flee into Habsburg territory and the invasion petered out.And there is a far more detailed discussion in Barbara Jelavich's History of the Balkans, which I cannot recommend highly enough; she has the amazing ability to write scholarly history that is as readable as a novel. Here is a bit of her discussion of Vladimirescu:
Although Vladimirescu himself tried to make a distinction between the "good" boyars who supported his movement and the others, the peasants, who joined him in thousands, were not so discriminating. They burned houses and barns, and they looted the boyar estates. A true social revolution was in progress. Vladimirescu formed an army, called the People's Assembly, whose basis was the group of six hundred pandours who had come to his support at once.This is real history, giving you a sense of the complexity of the situation and the motives of the various actors without attempting to pass judgment. Brewer is a cheerleader, and a careless one at that. I won't go into detail about the two chapters devoted to Byron, an object of obsession to the British both then and now but so peripheral to events he's not even mentioned by Makriyannis in his memoirs of the war; Brewer's loving depiction of Byron's love life, correspondence, raffish friends, and impetuous decision-making set in high relief his cursory descriptions of the Greeks involved in the war, and make it plain that for all the jacket copy about "certain to be the standard history for many years to come," this is yet another in an endless series of slapdash, Britocentric popular histories, full of flashing swords and treachery and glorious patriotism but sadly deficient in accuracy, either in overall perspective or in the small matter of accents.Vladimirescu's movement, it will be noted, was not directed against the Porte [the Ottoman government]. He and his supporters called upon the suzerain power to restore "old conditions"—in other words, to return to the days before the Phanariot Greek rule. Vladimirescu also appealed to the Ottoman government to investigate the conditions in the Principalities and to remedy the sufferings of the people. Throughout this period he remained in touch with the Ottoman agents and with the pashas in command of the Danube forts.
I just learned a new and very useful word: pareidolia. In the words of the Skeptic's Dictionary:
Pareidolia is a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct. For example, in the discolorations of a burnt tortilla one sees the face of Jesus Christ. Or one sees the image of Mother Theresa or Ronald Reagan in a cinnamon bun or the face of a man in the moon.Those are, I believe, the most common contexts in which the phenomenon crops up: religion and astronomy. I learned the word from astronomer Philip Plait, who's sick of this sort of thing, especially as put forward by Richard Hoagland:
He's had enough of Hoagland's assertions that NASA is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial life, that the infamous Face on Mars was built by sentient aliens and, of late, that otherworldly machine parts are embedded in the red planet's dirt.Read the article if you enjoy a good debunking; you will also enjoy Plait's account of a vision of Lenin in his shower. (Via xvarenah.)
Margaret Marks has a fascinating entry explaining that the translation of the "Suntory scene" in Lost in Translation has a crucial error in the director's first speech to Bill Murray: "As if you are Bogie in Casablanca, saying, 'Cheers to you guys,'" should read "...saying, 'Here's looking at you, kid!'" After discussing the "brilliant translation" of the Casablanca line into Japanese, she moves on to the much-praised, exceedingly famous translation into German, "Schau mir in die Augen, Kleines," which she considers "condescending, self-centred, jokey, and completely lacking in romance." I have to agree with her.
It's particularly amusing, by the way, that the director's line immediately before turning to Bill Murray is:
DIRECTOR (in Japanese to the interpreter): The translation is very important, O.K.? The translation.
And it's interesting that the film's title is apparently not translated into German ("Schlechtes Dolmetschen in Lost in Translation"). Is it common practice not to translate English-language titles? Or was this one considered peculiarly untranslatable?
Reading about Yanase Naoki's translation of Finnegans Wake into Japanese makes me wish I knew the language:
To get an idea of how Yanase has added his wordplay to Joyce's, look at the first word, "riverrun." Yanase has emulated Joyce here by creating a new Japanese word composed of the kanji for "river" and "run." However, the pronunciation of this kanji compound (indicated as sensou by the furigana above it) is also a homonym of the word for "war." Yanase explains that war and conflict are recurring themes throughout Finnegans Wake—from the Fall of Adam and Eve to the present. But sensou can also mean "ship window," an image linked to the river...Via No-sword:
The legendary Japanese translation of Finnegans Wake was released in cheap paperback format and nobody told me. I had to find out via a bookstore display in honour of St Patrick's day. That hurts, Japan.He goes on to give a brief description of the first thunder word (which he helpfully transliterates).Anyway, I found it. After I came to, I bolted to the cashier and bought all three volumes instantly, partly because I want to reward YANASE Naoki (or his estate. I don't know.) for his complete freaking insanity, God bless him, and partly because, damn, it's Finnegans Wake in Japanese, yo.
Incidentally, my first link (for the translation) is part of a site, Japanese in the Age of Technology, that looks extremely useful for anyone trying to learn the language or just interested in how it's been adapted to the computer age, with brilliant use of Shockwave Flash: the WaPro section, for example, shows you how text was input on the first Japanese word processor. And when I have time I want to fully investigate the section on The Encyclopedia.
A couple of recent items in the Newspaper of Record:
1) An Iraqi-American named Saad D. Abulhab has invented a simplified Arabic alphabet that he says is easier to learn, with bidirectional letters. Weird but interesting. (Via Mirabilis.ca.)
2) It's Gray and Atkinson again. Since historical linguists are mulishly reluctant to push their investigations back beyond the limits allowed by actual evidence, biologists are doing it for them. Indo-European, it turns out, is very very old, and was spoken by farmers who... oh, the hell with it. I just can't go through this again. Life is short, and crackpottery is long. (Hey, look at that cracked pot—it must be... Indo-European!)
Addendum. The redoubtable Bill Poser has addressed both these stories at Language Log: A New Arabic Alphabet? and Nicholas Wade on Gray and Atkinson.
On Sunday's NY Times Op-Ed page, there was an essay on Putin and Russia by Simon Sebag Montefiore that's somewhat muddled in general (he says we shouldn't be upset that Russia is run by the KGB because it always has been and that's the way the Russians like it); what I want to foreground here, though, is a particular sentence that gave me a merry laugh: "There are few words in Russian for the Western concept of 'law,' but there are legions of words for connections, helping people from one's neck of the woods." Geoff Pullum has been trying for decades to stamp out the myth of the Eskimo words for snow, and he'll get even more of a laugh out of this. But this is a lot easier to rip apart than the classic model (how many of us, after all, have access to an Inuit dictionary?). For one thing, Russian, like most European languages, has two words for "the Western concept of law": one for 'a law' (a binding rule of society, enforced by a controlling authority), in this case zakon, and one for law as the whole body of such rules and that body as an object of study, in this case pravo, which is... let's see... one more word than English itself has, meaning Russia must be twice as legal a culture as any English-speaking one. For another, there are indeed a number of words for connections... or influence... or "pull"... or string-pulling... or protection... or contacts... well, you get the idea. That poor meme is panting and sweating, but it just can't drag the load up the Hill of Significance.
Scott Martens at Pedantry is asking:
BTW - any readers out there who are experts in Salishan languages? I'm trying to find out which Salishan languages, if any, still have a reasonably healthy speaking community (e.g., spoken in most households in at least one place and has at least some speakers under the age of 10.) Ethnologue suggests that the answer is none.If anybody has an answer, pop over there and tell him, will ya? He's good folks and deserves to know.
The White Queen's Dictionary of One-Letter Words, from
a per se [a] means "a by itself makes the word a."
to
Z a medieval Roman numeral for 2,000.
When the White Queen of Looking Glass fame bragged that she could read words of one letter, she beseeched Alice not to be discouraged, promising "You'll come to it in time." Indeed, the Queen's one letter word vocabulary was more comprehensive than one might first assume.(Via Incoming Signals.)A word is any letter or group of letters which has meaning and is used as a unit of language.
So even though there are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, they stand for over seven hundred distinct units of meaning.
Last Sunday's NY Times Book Review had a rave review by Adam Goodheart (appropriate name) of Graham Robb's Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. The sentence that leaped out at me was:
The top-hatted and whiskered worthies of Victoria's reign had, it turns out, as rich a vocabulary for describing gays and lesbians as we do, ranging from street slang to medical jargon: margeries, mollies, ganymedes, chestnut-gatherers, ''little Jesuses,'' inverts, unisexuals, androphiles, normosexuals, parisexuals, ghaseligs, Uranians.I was at least vaguely familiar with about half of these, and some of the rest seemed fairly transparent (though if anyone knows what's going on with "normosexual" and "chestnut-gatherer" I would be glad to hear it). What particularly struck me was the word "ghaselig"; not only had I never seen it, I had no idea how to pronounce it.
None of my reference books had it, so I googled, getting an online text of Heine's Die Bäder von Lucca (The Baths of Lucca) in which the word seemed to be used in a pejorative sense. Perusing the page I discovered that the word Ghasel (modern German Gasel 'ghazal') and its derivatives (Ghaselendichter, Ghaselchen) were omnipresent in an extended putdown of a poetaster called Count Platen, involving pointed imputations of homosexuality:
In der Tat, er ist mehr ein Mann von Steiß als ein Mann von Kopf, der Name Mann überhaupt paßt nicht für ihn, seine Liebe hat einen passiv pythagoreischen Charakter, er ist in seinen Gedichten ein Pathikos, er ist ein Weib, und zwar ein Weib, das sich an gleich Weibischem ergötzt, er ist gleichsam eine männliche Tribade. (In fact, he is more a man of the buttocks than a man of the head, the name 'man' doesn't suit him at all, his love has a passive Pythagorean character, he is a pathic in his verses, he is a woman, and indeed a woman who takes delight in what is equally womanish, he is so to speak a male lesbian.)What had ghazals, poems in a Persian verse form popular in early-nineteenth-century Germany, to do with all this? Well, in a ghazal, the love-object is traditionally referred to as masculine. I have no idea who besides Heine used the adjective ghaselig, or how it wound up in a list of English terminology, but at least my mystery was solved: it's pronounced ga-ZELL-ik. And if anyone is curious as to why Heine was so unpleasant about Count von Platen, it's all laid out in this page on Heine, which I have summarized in a Wordorigins thread. (Even briefer summary: Heine was a liberal; Platen was a reactionary who got him censored and eventually driven into exile.) Heine made the memorable remark that "Count Platen might be a poet, if he had lived in another time and if, besides that, he were also somebody other than himself."
At last I have a good excuse to someday read through my vast archive of science fiction magazines from the '50s and '60s: the OED is hunting for the earliest citations of sf words.
This page is a pilot effort for the Oxford English Dictionary, in which the words associated with a special field of interest are collected so that knowledgeable aficionados can help the OED find useful examples of these words. This, our first project, is science fiction literature.Man, when I was 14 I would gladly have devoted every waking moment to this cause! (Via Mark Liberman at Language Log; see also this OED News article by Jesse Sheidlower.)The OED aims to include all words that are frequently used in any field, and attempts to find the earliest example of every sense of every word it includes. For SF the OED needs earlier examples of terms it already includes, early examples of terms that have been slated for future inclusion, and any examples of terms that have not yet caught the editors' attention but are common in SF. Words used infrequently, words associated chiefly with a single author, or words so specialized that they are found only in a single subgenre, are not high priorities for inclusion.
The page was started under the guidance of Mike Christie, an OED volunteer, and Sue Surova, a freelance researcher for the OED. It is now chiefly maintained by Jeff Prucher and Malcolm Farmer. The idea started when Sue posted a message on a discussion group looking for early examples of the SF usage of mutant 'a person with freakish appearance or abnormal abilities as a result of a genetic mutation'. The earliest example the OED had for this sense was 1954; OED editors knew the word must have been used earlier. A 1938 example was quickly found, and a plan for further research was formed.
Rereading a well-loved thread made me nostalgic for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which reminded me of one of my favorite bizarre toponymic equivalences: the Hungarian name for the capital of Austria, whose other names (Wien, Vienna, &c) derive from Latin Vindobona, is Bécs. Does anybody happen to know the etymology of that word? And (for extra bonus points) does anybody know the history of the Hungarian spelling cs for the sound spelled ch in English? The answer to one or both questions may lie hidden somewhere in the thousands of books so laboriously transported to this new house, but I'm going to be out most of the day doing more practical things, so I'm hoping I'll return and find the answers have magically appeared here.
Peter Culley of mosses from an old manse pointed me to Zukofsky poems in Basque, translated by Anton Garikano. I hope one day to learn Basque, at which point I will be able to appreciate these versions; knowing little about the language and nothing about the poetic tradition, I have to take it on faith that
Kanta berri honen lerroak ez dira ezerproduces to the attuned ear an effect even remotely similar to the lovely
Baizik doinu bat ezereza betetzen guztiz
Harrizko bihurtua mutu baino gogorrago
Doinuaren irudia lerroari eusten.
The lines of this new song are nothing
But a tune making the nothing full
Stonelike become more hard than silent
The tune's image holding in the line.
SC, who had "held a rather dyspeptic view" of artificial languages (in particular Klingon) and the people who study them, had his eyes opened by exchanges with Rachel Shallit of a tear in the fabric of spacetime and Qov, proprietress of bo logh (one of two Klingon blogs I know of, the other being jIqel's Journal); his discussion of Why SC likes fictional languages now is well worth reading.
Antti Leppänen's Korea-oriented blog Hunjangûi karûch'im has a post on a proposal to change the Chinese character of the river flowing through Seoul from [han4] to [han2] so that Han'gang would be [han2][jiang1] instead of [han4][jiang1]. It's a followup to an earlier post on "a "Committee on the name of Seoul in Chinese"..., which is planning a new Chinese name for Seoul. (Yes, that's Koreans designing a new term for the Chinese language.)" Fascinating stuff to me, with my interest in place names.
If you're curious about the name of Antti's blog, he explains:
Hunjang is a village teacher or schoolmaster in the old Korea, teaching Chinese characters and Confucian classics in a sôdang, village school. The name of the blog, hunjangûi karûch'im, means "village schoolmaster's teachings."(There's a picture of a hunjang on the right of the header atop his blog.) I'm reminded of Gertrude Stein's famous description of Ezra Pound as a "village explainer," a phrase that would make a fine blog title.
And if you're interested in studying Korean, there's a great deal of information available at studying the korean language, Kelly Youngberg's blog.
Thoughts of a translator, by Joan Tate:
"But what do you do?" he asked. I propped the book I was translating on to the plate-holder and rattled off a paragraph in English, demonstrating the magical removal of my endless misprints. There was a silence. The Manager pointed at the book and said: "That's Swedish, is it?" "Yes," I said. "Someone else has written it. I put it into English. Then it is published in this country or America. I get paid to do that." Another silence. Then he pointed at the screen. "That's English. I can see that." There was another long pause, while the other two in my tiny room apparently held their breath. Then the Manager said: "But how does it work?"Via wood s lot.You tell me. I don't know either...
When you read a book, a whole mass of words, ideas, action, characters, turns of events, descriptions, dialogue, narrative, etc passes into your mind. You don't think. You absorb it. When translating, all you have in front of you is the book. Something inside the mind transcribes it into the language that is sitting in the very marrow of your bones. I could no more translate into Swedish than fly.
That's the (transliterated) title of a relatively new blog described by its creator, Christopher Culver, as "dedicated to classical philology and broader issues of comparative Indo-European philology." Sounds promising... but so far there have only been three posts (since September!), so here's hoping there will be many more; additional I-E on the internet can only be a good thing. (If you're curious about the name, which translates to 'Cloudcuckooland,' you can read about it here.)
In the December 18, 2003 issue of the NYRB (yes, I'm way behind), I've run across two sad reminders of the Decline of Standards. In Robert Gottlieb's "Duse Plays the Palace" (reviewing Eleonora Duse by Helen Sheehy), he says of the performance that won Duse her first acclaim, playing Juliet in Verona at the age of fourteen, "Among Duse's biographers, only William Weaver is dog-in-the-mangerish enough to suggest that the Giulietta e Romeo in which Eleonora found grace that day may not have been Shakespeare's but a version by a Veronese..." (emphasis added). Now, if Weaver had withheld a document he wasn't planning to use himself from other biographers, he would have been a dog in the manger; as it is, you can call him unromantic or clear-eyed, but you can't call him "dog-in-the-mangerish."
Then in John Bayley's "Chameleon Genius" (reviewing Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon) Bayley explains the name Gannibal (taken by Pushkin's African great-grandfather) thus: "'G' substitutes for a nonexistent preliminary Russian 'H'—Russians during the war referred to the German dictator as 'Gitler.'" One can excuse the irrelevant "preliminary" by reflecting that there's no reason for NYRB editors to know there simply is no h in Russian, but really, couldn't someone have asked the question "How did Russians refer to Hitler before and after the war?"
Ernest Miller (a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale), responding to the post Klingon is Copyrighted at BoingBoing, asks:
However, can you really copyright a language? You can copyright a dictionary, certainly, but can you copyright grammar? I'm not sure you can copyright grammar at all, since it is a set of rules regarding word usage. Grammar is an idea, that can probably only be expressed in a fairly limited number of ways, even if fanciful.His remarks about "grammar" clearly indicate he's never taken a linguistics class (and probably never studied anything more exotic than French) [nb: this is intended as a snipe at the American educational system, not at Mr. Miller], but I think his general point is valid: it doesn't make sense to copyright a language. I wonder if Margaret Marks will have any thoughts on this? (Thanks to Songdog for the link.)Additionally, each Klingon word would seem to be too short to qualify as copyrightable individually. I don't think that a list of words in a dictionary format would be copyrightable under Feist. So, I'm not sure at all how one could copyright a language. The individual descriptions of the words might be copyrightable, but as long as they aren't exact copies, the idea/expression dichotomy should provide only limited copyright protection to Paramount.
There's a word you're probably not familiar with unless you're an Ornette Coleman fan; it's his own invention to express his theory of music as information, and his account is not all that comprehensible:
Harmolodic is a noun. A name used as a transmitter for communicating information.But hey, he's a composer, not a lexicographer. At any rate, I love his music, and thought I'd celebrate him on his birthday (prompted by the always hip wood s lot).Communicating the equal access of information for multiple expression.
Harmolodic applied to the five senses. As altered information equal to their own perception...
The five senses work in concert and respond instantly to information concerning the Body, like sound responds to music.
In the twenty first century, music and language will become homogenous in sound where the ethnical tongues will remain the same. Melody, composition, improvisors, styles in their present form will become Harmolodic according to each one's own concept.
While I'm broadcasting from the Vanguard (and I note with pleasure that's the #8 Google hit for the word), I have to mention something that startled the hell out of me yesterday evening. As I was getting on the Metro-North train that would shortly whisk me home along the gorgeous Hudson River, I glanced over at the train across the platform, whose cars had the names of river towns in large block letters on the sides. One said OSSINING, another COLD SPRING. In between, a car's legend read simply, inexplicably, and joyously THELONIOUS MONK.
Rev. William Fulco, a Jesuit priest and professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University, was the lucky fellow who got the call to translate and subtitle Mel Gibson's new flick. According to a Chicago Tribune story by Nathan Bierma:
Fulco left Greek out of "The Passion," substituting Latin in occasional cases where Greek might have been used. He also made mostly imperceptible distinctions between the elegant Latin of Pilate and the crude Latin of soldiers, thanks to an X-rated source he found on his shelf."I tracked down some obscene graffiti from Roman army camps," Fulco said. "Somebody who knows Latin really well, their ears will fall off. We didn't subtitle those words."
Fulco even confessed to some linguistic mischief.
"Here and there I put in playful things which nobody will know. There's one scene where Caiaphas turns to his cohorts and says something in Aramaic. The subtitle says, 'You take care of it.' He's actually saying, 'Take care of my laundry.'"Well, yes, that's true. And I guess the paragraph about "mistakes" may explain the lack of comprehension of Chaldean viewers. But one has to wonder about Fulco's insurability now that he's confessed to the liberties he took with this holiest of scripts ("It is as it was"). Cursing? Laundry? One has to wonder whether a bolt of lightning or an enraged Mel will get him first. (Via Mirabilis.ca.)Other linguistic tricks of Fulco's serve a function in the script.
For example, he incorporated deliberate dialogue errors in the scenes where the Roman soldiers, speaking Aramaic, are shouting to Jewish crowds, who respond in Latin. To illustrate the groups' inability to communicate with each other, each side speaks with incorrect pronunciations and word endings.
Later, "there's an exchange where Pilate addresses Jesus in Aramaic, and Jesus answers in Latin. It's kind of a nifty little symbolic thing: Jesus is going to beat him at his own game," Fulco said. "One line [in that exchange] I kind of enjoyed is when Jesus says, 'My power is given from above, otherwise my followers would not have allowed this.' That's [spoken in] the pluperfect subjunctive."...
For the relatively few Middle Eastern Christians who still speak Aramaic, "The Passion" may sound riddled with mistakes—spurring Fulco to point out, "modern Aramaic dialects are as different [from ancient ones] as Chaucer and modern English."
Still, now that the movie is in general release, Fulco fully expects to get an earful about his use of languages.
"We linguists are a crazy bunch," he said. "The more obscure the language, the more people try to prove their territory worthwhile and say, by God, we're going to sniff out errors."
Two takes (via wood s lot):
In The Joys of Euro-lish, British MP Paul Flynn expresses his dismay over the "new language evolving in European forums" where a lowest-common-denominator English is the coin of discourse:
The prospect is bleak but inevitable. Eurolish is incurably regressive. Europeans will speak to Europeans in a... turgid verbiage that dulls the brains and enfeebles inspiration. Stripped of invective and passion, no poetry will ever be written in Eurolish. On the other hand it’s unlikely that anyone will ever declare war in it.In response, netlexblogger has a more upbeat attitude in The fun of Eurolish as a second language:
The imperious necessity in which we find ourselves of mastering a common language at the age of globalisation is so obvious that the culture making it possible is often disregarded, which is certainly regrettable, but inevitable.The reason is that the British language fails to convey our national vernacular experience. Idiomatic expressions that make perfect sense to people who grew up speaking English can be bewildering to someone who grew up speaking another language.
It is likely that Euro-English will evolve in the way described by Paul Flynn, from academic english to a common "lingua anglica".
But once the English language has fallen from the etheral atmosphere of immemorial purity into flattened pidgin expurged from the affects which could possibly mislead the translator, newcomers to English could well "creolize" Euro-English.
They would filter their own foreigness through language-independent skills, establishing new lines of communication with other cultural groups.
As words, expressions and gestures that mean one thing in a given culture may mean something else in another culture, they would forge their own language codes and rules of behaviour.
Eurolish will contribute to give birth to a new sociabilty, because just as institutions, language can give speakers a sense of belonging to the group.
This is one of the more Villonesque poems I've seen recently:
Goddamn the Empty Sky
by Violeta ParraGoddamn the empty sky
and the stars at night
goddamn the ripply bright
stream as it goes by
goddamn the way stones lie
on dirt or on the street
goddamn the oven's heat
goddamn the laws
of time the way they cheat
my pain's as bad as that.Goddamn the mountain chain
the Andes and the Coast
goddamn Mister the most
and least amount of rain
also crazy and sane
and candor and deceit
goddamn what smells so sweet
because my luck is out
goddamn the lack of doubt
what's messy and what's neat
my pain's as bad as that.
Goddamn the SpringIt's a loose but lively translation (from here; oddly, there's a similar but significantly different version here) of a song by the Chilean composer and lyricist Violeta Parra (1917-1967), sister of physicist/poet Nicanor Parra; I wish I knew the name of the translator, but it's not mentioned at any of the sites that quote the poem (translators get no respect). If anybody knows, tell me and I'll add it here.
with its plants in blossom
and the color of Autumn
goddamn the whole damn thing
birds on the wing
goddamn them more and more
'cause I'm really done for
goddamn Winter to bits
along with Summer's tricks
goddamn the saint and whore
my pain's as bad as that.Goddamn getting on your feet
for the stars and stripes
goddamn symbols of all types
Venus and Main Street
and the canary's tweet
the planets and their motions
the earth with its erosions
because my soul is sore
goddamn the ports and shores
of the enormous oceans
my pain's as bad as that.Goddamn the moon and weather
desert and river bed
goddamnit for the dead
and the living together
the bird with all its feathers
is such a goddamn mess
schools, places to confess
I tell you what I'm sick of
goddamn that one word love
with all its nastiness
my pain's as bad as that.So goddamn the number eight
eleven nine and four
choir boys and monsignors
preachers and men of state
goddamn them it's too late
free man and prisoner
soft voice and quarreler
I damn them every week
in Spanish and in Greek
thanks to a two-timer
my pain's as bad as that.
Here are the first couple of stanzas of the original:
Maldigo del alto cielo, la estrella con su reflejo,
maldigo los azulejos de éste y los del arroyuelo,
maldigo del bajo suelo la piedra con sus contornos
maldigo el fuego del horno porque mi alma está de luto.Maldigo los estatutos del tiempo, con su bochorno,
¡Cuánto será mi dolor!Maldigo la cordillera de los Andes y de la costa,
maldigo toda la angosta y larga faja de tierra,
también la paz y la guerra, lo franco y lo veleidoso
y tambien lo perfumoso por que mi anhelo está muerto.Maldigo todo lo falso y lo cierto con lo dudoso,
¡Cuánto será mi dolor!
When I was recently at the NYPL's Russia Engages the World exhibit, I noticed a book by Dimitrie Cantemir (Kantemir), Voivode of Moldavia (1673–1723), identified on the label (and in the catalog) as Kniga sistema, ili Sostoianie mukhammedanskiia religii [A Book of Rules; or, The System of the Muhammedan Religion], St. Petersburg: Sanktpiterburgskaia Tipografiia, 1722. But the title page of the book itself didn't say sistema (the modern Russian word) but systima. Now, it's reasonable to represent the first vowel, the old Slavic letter izhitsa (the last item on this page), by i, which is its sound, but the second vowel was clearly i and not e, and the whole word was just as clearly borrowed directly from Greek σύστημα (pronounced sístima since the early Byzantine period). So what I'm hoping one of my learned Russian readers can tell me is: was Cantemir's usage unique to him, or was the word first borrowed as sístima and then reborrowed (presumably from French) as sistéma? If the latter, when did the change take place? Dahl and Vasmer only give the modern version.
As threatened, I have begun reading David Brewer's The Greek War of Independence, and I was taken aback on page 29 to read the following sentence: "Indeed when Skouphas tried in the early days to enlist some of the rich merchants of Moscow [in the incipient Philiki Eteria revolutionary society], they sent him packing 'with rude and barbaric jeering' and called him an uncouth oik." Oik?! The American Heritage Dictionary was no help, but the OED came through:
oick, oik (OIk). slang. [Etym. obscure.] Depreciatory schoolboy word for a member of another school; an unpopular or disliked fellow-pupil. Also gen., an obnoxious or unpleasant person; in weakened senses, a 'nit-wit', a 'clot'. Hence 'oikish a., unpleasant, crude; 'oickman (see quot. 1925). 1925 Dict. Bootham Slang, Hoick,.. spit. Oick,.. to spit; abbreviated form of 'oickman'. Oickman,..labourer, shopkeeper, etc.; also a disparaging term. 1933 A. G. Macdonell England, their England vi. 95 Those privately educated oicks are a pretty grisly set of oicks. Grocers' sons and oicks and what not. 1935 'N. Blake' Question of Proof x. 189 Smithers is such an oick. 1940 M. Marples Public School Slang 31 Oik, hoik: very widely used and of some age; at Cheltenham (1897) it meant simply a working man, but at Christ's Hospital (1885) it implied someone who spoke Cockney, and at Bootham (1925) someone who spoke with a Yorkshire accent. 1940 M. Dickens Mariana iv. 109 The old Oik mentioned it over a couple of whiskeys. 1946 G. Hackforth-Jones Sixteen Bells 260 Come to think of it he must have been a bit of an oik when he worked at Bullingham & Messer. That crack about long hair was well merited. 1957 F. King Widow i. v. 63 He and Cooper had fought a battle with three 'oiks'—this was apparently school slang for the boys of the town. 1958 B. Goolden Ships of Youth vii. 162, I only need my cap on back to front to look the complete oick. 1959 W. Camp Ruling Passion xvi. 126 Who's that incredibly uncouth and oikish man? 1966 'K. Nicholson' Hook, Line & Sinker viii. 95 So glad you got here before the oicks. 1968 Melody Maker 30 Nov. 24/5 Old Stinks from the third stream said: 'I say you oik, the Beach Boys latest is fab gear.' 1975 Listener 16 Jan. 83/1 The rigmarole about the flat was patent set-dressing, just to impress us oiks. 1975 Times 7 Aug. 7/7 His [sc. Oswald Mosley's] angels, a gang of gullible and bloodthirsty oiks.. would come pretty far down the roster of hell's legions.An interesting word, but I'm dubious about the likelihood of its having been used as an insult by the merchants of Moscow 200 years ago. And doesn't the alleged 1968 quote 'I say you oik, the Beach Boys latest is fab gear' involve an unlikely mixture of generational slangs?
The Eudæmonist's latest post sent me to a review of David Roessel's In Byron's Shadow: Modern Greece in the English and American Imagination that got me interested in that book; the review's mention of the Dilessi murders of 1870 (Δήλεσι [Dílesi] being a coastal town in eastern Boeotia where British and Italian tourists were killed by brigands) sent me off on a research binge that brought me to a brief but far-ranging article by David Brewer (whose book The Greek War of Independence I own and am eager to r