I'm continuing the translation I began in a recent entry of Kornei Chukovsky's comments on changes in Russian and generational reaction to them.
If the youth of those days [the 1840s] happened to use in conversation words unknown to earlier generations such as fakt [fact], rezul'tat [result], erunda [nonsense], solidarnost' [solidarity; joint responsibility], the representatives of those earlier generations declared that Russian speech suffered no small loss from such an influx of highly vulgar words."Where did this fakt come from?" asked the indignant Faddei Bulgarin in 1847. "What sort of word is that? A corruption."
Yakov Grot at the end of the [18]60s declared the newly appeared word vdokhnovlyat' [to inspire] "disgraceful."
Even such a word as nauchnyi [scientific] had to overcome considerable opposition from old-fashioned purists before it entered our speech as of right. Let us recall how struck Gogol was by the word in 1851. Until then he had never heard of it.(He gives examples of words that changed endings in succeeding generations, for instance tom 'volume':)Old men demanded that the word uchenyi [learned] be used instead: a learned book, a learned treatise. The word "scientific" seemed to them inadmissably vulgar...
Of course, the old men were wrong. [All these words] are now felt, by young and old alike, as perfectly regular, rooted words that no one could do without!
...I have been put into a quandary by new forms such as [end-stressed] vyborá (in place of vybory 'elections' [stressed on the first syllable]), dogovorá (in place of dogovóry 'agreements; treaties'), lektorá (in place of léktory 'lecturers'). I heard in them something devil-may-care, reckless, wild, rakish. In vain I told myself that the Russian literary language had long since legitimized such forms.
"Two hundred years ago," I told myself, "Lomonosov was already saying that Russians prefer the ending -a to the 'boring' -i."
If Chekhov, for example, had heard the word tomá, he would have thought the French composer Ambroise Thomas was being discussed...This seems to me an exemplary attitude towards language change on the part of someone sensitive to the nuances of usage and attached to the forms he grew up with, but aware of the necessity and inevitability of change. A man after my own heart.Each time, I came to the conclusion that it was useless to protest against these forms. I could get as agitated as I liked, but it was impossible not to see that here was a centuries-long, unstoppable process of the replacement of final unstressed -i by the strongly stressed ending -á.
...[In language] everything moves, everything flows, everything changes. And only the most naive purists maintain that language is something immovable, eternally congealed—not a turbulent stream, but a stagnant lake.
This word refers, in American English, to a type of sausage most commonly encountered as an extremely cheap lunchmeat (on which I survived in my early penniless days in NYC); it is pronounced the way the WWII-era exclamation derived from it is spelled: baloney. I just discovered that the corresponding Russian word болонья (bolon'ya), as in English a lower-case use of the Italian city name, means 'lightweight waterproof material; a raincoat made of such material.' Talk about your false friends!
A new blog, translation eXchange, was started in April by a group of translators (and they invite others to join). Their mission:
This is intended as a forum for those interested in translation (and more generally, in world affairs) to post and comment upon relevant articles and information. Anything from political subterfuge to book reviews. Let’s just talk translation.They've recently linked to reviews of translated books and an article by Sarah Enany from Egypt Today about a local prodution of Wilder's Our Town that is "a translation, not an adaptation: The play retains the original names, setting and even the same music. And this is a good thing, I believe, for two reasons. First, too many translations now are Egyptianized, and in a way it’s a shame. It’s good for Egyptian audiences to really see a piece of foreign culture every once in a while, without a language barrier."
A very promising site, brought to us courtesy of Transblawg.
"...of curious and interesting uses of the English language," the title of John Higgins's engaging site continues. It contains lists of minimal pairs, homophones, homographs, and much else, including a frequency count of the days of the week ("It seems that we talk about days of the week more than we write about them, and that we are more interested in the weekend than in weekdays, with Saturday, Sunday and Friday filling the top three places both in speech and in writing. It is interesting that Friday overtakes Saturday in speech but is a long way behind in writing"). Thanks to aldiboronti at WordOrigins for the link.
Rangachari Anand has an interesting entry on how South Indian names work:
South Indian names can be confusing. My "official" name on my passport is Rangachari Anand. However, my name is "officially" backwards! If you were to meet me on the street, I'd like you to call me "Anand".His blog contains "Essays and articles about IT and Indian English," and in the latter category is an entry about the word bifurcation:So then perhaps you might conclude that we write our family name first like the Koreans. But thats not the case either. Its actually a little more complicated...
Bifurcation is one my favorite words in the English language... It is certainly not a commonly used word in the West. Indians however, love this word and use it in common speech. If you were to ask for directions when traveling in India, it is very likely that the person giving you directions would say some thing like "when the road bifurcates, go right..."
The link comes from Nancy Gandhi of under the fire star, who's been posting great things since returning from self-imposed hiatus; her latest is a quote from Srikanth Reddy called "Corruption":
I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expectation extends over the entire psalm. Once I have begun, the words I have said remove themselves from expectation & are now held in memory while those yet to be said remain waiting in expectation. The present is a word for only those words which I am now saying. As I speak, the present moves across the length of the psalm, which I mark for you with my finger in the psalm book. The psalm is written in India ink, the oldest ink known to mankind. Every ink is made up of a color & a vehicle. With India ink, the color is carbon & the vehicle, water. Life on our planet is also composed of carbon & water. In the history of ink, which is rapidly coming to an end, the ancient world turns from the use of India ink to adopt sepia. Sepia is made from the octopus, the squid & the cuttlefish. One curious property of the cuttlefish is that, once dead, its body begins to glow. This mild phosphorescence reaches its greatest intensity a few days after death, then ebbs away as the body decays. You can read by this light.
Nancy Gandhi at under the fire star has a wonderful entry "Poems for the Rainy Season," quoting several poems from Sanskrit Poetry From Vidyakara's Treasury, translated by Daniel H. H. Ingalls; this one particularly appeals to me:
A cloth of darkness inlaid with fireflies;
flashes of lightning;
the mighty cloud mass guessed at from the roll of thunder;
a trumpeting of elephants;
an east wind scented by opening buds of ketaki,
and falling rain:
I know not how a man can bear the nights that hold all these,
when separated from his love.
The ketaki (Pandanus odoratissimus), a flowering tree called pandanus or screw pine in English, is also called kewra, kewda, keora, &c in India: "Kewra flowers have a sweet, perfumed odour that has a pleasant quality similar to rose flowers, but kewra is more fruity."
I've mentioned my fondness for the serial comma before (and quoted a wonderful example of the unfortunate results of omitting it: "The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector"), but I ran across a sentence in the NY Times Circuits section yesterday (in the story "Aiming for Hit Games, Films Come Up Short," by Seth Schiesel) that caused me real confusion: "On consoles, that means titans like Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo, Mario and Zelda, and relative newcomers like Grand Theft Auto and Halo." Because of the lack of a serial comma, it looks as if there were a game called "Mario and Zelda," and I initially assumed such was the case. But my obsessive editorial brain forced me to google it, and I discovered they were two separate games. This would have been clear if a comma had been placed after "Mario," as the gods of grammar intended.
As I mentioned in a recent entry, I just bought Kornei Chukovsky's Zhivoi kak zhizn': o russkom yazyke (Alive as life: on the Russian language), and I am so pleased by his opening paragraphs on language change that I am going to translate them here.
Anatolii Fedorovich Koni [1844-1927], Honorary Academician and famous lawyer, was, as is well known, the kindliest of men. He gladly forgave those around him all sorts of mistakes and weaknesses. But woe betide anyone who, while conversing with him, distorted or disfigured the Russian language. Koni fell upon such a person with impassioned detestation.His passion delighted me. And yet in his struggle for the purity of the language he often went too far. He insisted, for example, that the word obyazatel'no ['obligatorily, without fail,' from the verb obyazat' 'to oblige'] meant only 'obligingly, courteously.' But that meaning of the word has long since died out. Now, both in living speech and in literature, the word obyazatel'no has come to mean nepremenno ['without fail, certainly']. And that aroused the indignation of Academician Koni.
"Just imagine," he would say, clutching at his heart, "today I was walking along Spasskaya and I heard: 'On obyzatel'no nab'et tebe mordu!' ['He's definitely gonna smash your face in!'] How do you like that? One man tells another that someone is going to thrash him in a courteous manner!"
"But the word obyazatel'no doesn't mean 'courteous' any more," I tried to object, but Anatolii Fedorovich insisted on his point of view.He continues with more examples, and I may translate more of it later. Meanwhile, let me just say that his combination of awareness of the inevitability of change (and the comedy of young innovators turning into old prescriptivists) with resentment of the changes occurring in his own day is very close to my heart.Meanwhile, in the entire Soviet Union you won't find anyone for whom obyazatel'no means 'courteous.' Nowadays not everyone will understand what Aksakov meant when he said of a provincial doctor: "In his relations with us he acted obyazatel'no." But no one will be puzzled by, for instance, this couplet of Isakovskii's:
I kuda tebe zhelaetsya,
Obyazatel'no doidesh.['And wherever you want to go, you'll obyazatel'no get there.']
Much is explained by the fact that Koni was by then old. He acted like most old men: he insisted on the norms of Russian speech as they existed in the time of his childhood and youth. Old men almost always think their children and grandchildren (especially the grandchildren) are disfiguring proper Russian speech.
I can easily imagine the grey-haired elder who in 1803 or 1805 angrily pounded his fist on the table when his grandchildren started chatting about razvitii uma i kharaktera ['development of mind and character'].
"Where did you come upon that intolerable razvitiye uma? You should say prozyabenie ['growth (of vegetation)]."...
A new epoch arrived. The former youths became fathers and grandfathers. And it was their turn to be indignant about the words that young people were bringing into use: darovityi ['gifted'], otchetlivyi ['distinct, intelligible'], golosovanie ['voting, suffrage'], chelovechnyi ['humane'], obshchestvennost' ['(the) public, public opinion'], khlyshch ['fop']. Now it seems to us that these words have existed in Russia from time out of mind and that we could never have done without them, but in the '30s and '40s of the last century they were novelty words with which the zealots of the purity of the language could not for a long time make their peace.
An exceedingly strange BBC News story: Spike Milligan wanted his gravestone to read "I told you I was ill," there was a long struggle with the Chichester Diocese, and they finally approved it... but only if it was written in Gaelic (Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite)! Can anyone explain this? (Thanks to Jeremy of READIN for the link.)
Mark Liberman at Language Log describes a construction that is both new and repellent to me, the use of "relative clauses with a present participle in place of a finite verb, whose subject is a partitive structure involving a relative pronoun." That's pretty indigestible, so let me give you some examples:
"Both of whom being influenced by Ellington, Rowles and Brown choose one Ellington tune for each of the two albums that comprise this two-CD set..."
"Ireland and Denmark, both of whom being heavily reliant on British trade, decided they would go wherever Britain went..."
"At present, personal injury cases are heard by many different Judges, some of whom having no experience in this field."
I share Mark's judgment that "every single one of these examples seems completely ungrammatical"; furthermore, even apart from questions of grammaticality, they are pointlessly wordy, since in every case the "of whom + participle" construction can be omitted with no alteration in meaning:
"Rowles and Brown, both influenced by..."
"Ireland and Denmark, both heavily reliant..."
"...many different Judges, some with no experience..."
But given the breadth of the examples Mark has googled up (and I'll add another one: "...do they spread the risk across more players, some of whom having lower capital reserves and security rating?"), it can't possibly be a chance convergence of individual mistakes; it's clearly a Phenomenon (and another example of how the internet is revolutionizing the study of language). So I'll do another LH poll: how many of you find the construction acceptable, whether or not you use it yourself?
Update. Mark has expanded on the subject in a new LL post, inter alia correcting one of my commenters' misapprehensions on the subject of eunuchs.
I've run into a couple of difficulties arising from my reading lately, and I thought I'd share them, since they affect more than the words in question.
1) This is what I think of as the "echelon" problem, because of a long and unfortunate tradition among translators from Russian of rendering the word eshelon 'special train' as "echelon," simply because that English word corresponds in form and etymology to the Russian one. They overlook the slight problem that the English word has no meaning even remotely corresponding to the Russian; it means 'a steplike troop formation; a level or grade in an organization or field of activity,' and nothing else—except to specialists in Soviet literature, who have absorbed this peculiar bit of translationese to the point that I have had a hard time convincing them that it exists nowhere else and that the "translation" should be retired forthwith. A similar problem came up yesterday in reading a Boris Akunin story called Strast' i dolg [Passion and duty], set in an alternate Russia which has revived tsardom, along with its Table of Ranks and all the rest of the imperial paraphernalia. The sentence in question reads: Pogibel' deistvitel'nogo tainogo sovetnika prishla nazavtra, na raute u angliiskogo poslannika sera Endryu Vuda: 'The ruin of the Active Privy Counselor came the next day, at a raut at the residence of the English ambassador Sir Andrew Wood.' The dictionary translation of the word raut is "rout." Now, this is a different case from eshelon because there actually is an English word rout meaning 'a fashionable gathering or assembly, a large evening party or reception,' but the word has been obsolete for over a century and it's unlikely anyone but a devotee of Victorian literature would be familiar with it. (Side note: I learn from the OED that there are in fact ten different routs, ranging from 'a company, assemblage, band, or troop of persons' to 'the act of searching, or of turning out something,' including the hapax 'some kind of horse': 1697 Vanbrugh Æsop i. iv. ii, Your Worship has six Coach-Horses,.. besides Pads, Routs, and Dog-Horses.) To render the word "rout" would be unconscionable—I would say "at a reception"—but I'll bet there are plenty of lazy translators who would do it.
2) I was reading a NY Times story yesterday called "Siberian Dam Generates Political Wrangle Over Power" when it occurred to me, not for the first time, to look up the Russian for 'dam.' The dictionary translation is plotina, but I can never remember it because I rarely see it in Russian texts. The story concerned the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam; I did a Russian search on the name and discovered the feminine gender is caused not by plotina but by GES, the Russian acronym for 'hydroelectric station.' That's why I can't remember plotina; what we call the Hoover Dam, the Russians would call the Hoover GES. GES does not mean 'dam,' but it is used where we use 'dam' in the usual contemporary context of large concrete structures for generating power. There must be other examples of this phenomenon—different terms used in similar contexts—but I can't think of any right at the moment. Anyway, it's an interesting test of a translator's skill; if you don't know the language well, you'll wind up using a dictionary definition rather than the situationally appropriate word.
I made the mistake of dropping by the Donnell Branch of the NYPL on my lunch hour, where I found five Russian books I couldn't resist in the sale bin. (The Donnell has the biggest foreign-language collection in the city, and they've been selling off chunks of it for years, presumably to make room for new books; I regret the depletion of the collection, but I've gotten a lot of good books for almost no money.) I got Arkadii Averchenko's Salat iz bulavok (Pin salad, a collection of short stories from the '20s: sample in translation here), Mark Aldanov's Portrety (Portraits) (a collection of historico-biographical essays from the '20s and '30s), Kornei Chukovsky's book on the Russian language Zhivoi kak zhizn' (Alive as life), Andrei Voznesensky's Antimiry (Antiworlds), and the journalist Feliks Medvedev's 1992 collection of interviews with famous Russians (including Iosif Brodskii, Sasha Sokolov, Nina Berberova, and Andrei Sinyavskii) Posle Rossii (After Russia). All of this for a grand total of $1.60.
I have to confess a longstanding prejudice against Gregory Rabassa, who's won just about every award he could win and is probably the translator whose name is most familiar to the general reader. I was reading Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch) and using Rabassa's translation to help me through the hard parts, and I began realizing Rabassa had misunderstood idioms, mistranslated words, even left out entire chunks of text. Of course no translator can escape the occasional lapse, and if he had been some unknown I would have been more inclined to forgive and forget, but this was the great Rabassa, and I was mightily disillusioned. Well, it turns out that was his first translation, and he hadn't even read the novel when he started translating it, so I guess I should let it go; at any rate, I look forward to reading his forthcoming book If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, discussed in an interview with Andrew Bast published in the NY Times Book Review.
"My thesis in the book is that translation is impossible," Mr. Rabassa said. "People expect reproduction, but you can't turn a baby chick into a duckling. The best you can do is get close to it."He certainly seems to have had a good life:
When he returned to the United States after spending time in Italy and Northern Africa, Mr. Rabassa lived on Morton Street, watched Charlie Parker play in Greenwich Village and wrote poetry. He studied for his master's in Spanish at Columbia, then, tired of the language, kept on with his studies but finished his doctorate in Portuguese. At a cocktail party Mr. Rabassa met an administrator at Queens College and he ended up being hired as a professor there...(Thanks go to Bonnie for the link.)In the case of Cortázar, Mr. Rabassa developed a relationship with him, and they became good friends, spending days and nights listening to 78's of Count Basie and Lester Young. Mr. Rabassa translated Luis Rafael Sánchez and lounged with him on the beaches of Puerto Rico. And after translating "Seven Serpents and Seven Moons" by Demetrio Aguilera-Malta, a former Ecuadorian ambassador to Mexico, he ended up with one of the author's paintings hanging on his apartment wall.
I am informed by wood s lot that today would have been Joseph Brodsky's 64th birthday. (How could he not have made it to 56? Unbelievable.) There you will find many excellent links; I am simply going to reproduce his own self-translation "Elegy."
About a year has passed. I've returned to the place of battle,
to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings from a subtle
lift of a surprised eyebrow, or perhaps from a razor blade
—wings, now the shade of early twilight, now of stale bad blood.Now the place is abuzz with trading in your ankles' remnants, bronzes
of sunburnt breastplates, dying laughter, bruises,
rumors of fresh reserves, memories of high treason,
laundered banners with imprints of the many who since have risen.All's overgrown with people. A ruin's a rather stubborn
architectural style. And the heart's distinction from a pitch-black cavern
isn't that great; not great enough to fear
that we may collide again like blind eggs somewhere.At sunrise, when nobody stares at one's face, I often
set out on foot to a monument cast in molten
lengthy bad dreams. And it says on the plinth "Commander
in chief." But it reads "in grief," or "in brief," or "in going under."(1985)
(If anyone can give me a link to the original Russian, I will add it here.)
I'm used to seeing words used oddly or wrongly; almost always, I can figure out what the writer meant to say, but in this brief New Yorker review of The Lucky Ones, by Rachel Cusk, I am at a loss:
The women in these five linked vignettes are all connected to a journalist named Serena Porter, either personally or as readers of the weekly column she writes about her family life. While they struggle to understand their painful and awkward responses to lovers and children, she spins the raw material of motherhood and marriage into witty and topical dispatches. Of course, much of what Serena writes is factitious, both in its details (she freely appropriates an acquaintance’s experience as her own) and in the breezy complacency that it projects; Cusk seems to suggest that our true thoughts about love and family defy articulation. Such is her gift for capturing women’s psychology and their sense of their place in the world that the novel achieves what Serena’s column cannot: a fresh and compassionate portrait of a generation’s feelings about motherhood.(Emphasis added.) I don't think factitious can mean 'artificial' in the context of that sentence, but I have no idea what it might be intended to mean. Suggestions?
Addendum. I was going to do a companion entry about a bizarre usage by (of all people) Susan Sontag in her essay "Regarding the Torture of Others" in Sunday's NY Times Magazine: "An erotic life is, for more and more people, that whither can be captured in digital photographs and on video"—but the offending "whither" has already been changed to "which" in the online version, so it was a simple typo, hardly worth the blogging except to lament for the thousandth time the execrable standards of proofreading now prevailing at the Newspaper of Record.
The most comprehensive interspecies dictionary available in paperback!
Over 5,000 references, 80,000 translations and hundreds of new expressions! Contains usage notes to avoid being bitten, and slang signals on a wide variety of subjects. Contains examples to show how sounds are used... Edges treated with bitter apple to deter chewing.The sample page contains entries such as:
And there are carefully researched etymologies, for example for a word meaning 'That's my pea!':
From high classic Rattus [1.75 million BCE]: eeeee, mine; + ee-e, small round; + ee-ee; give me, 2nd person singular, imperative mood of ee-e-e, to give, v.t.Clearly a major advance in lexicography! (Via Language Log.)
The redoubtable Michael Everson has created a page called "Gach uile rud faoi Ogham ar an Líon/Every Ogham thing on the Web" that includes General links, Scholarly links, Standardization links, Font links, Pagan links, Commercial links, and Other links. Enjoy the cornucopia!
(Via wood s lot.)
I have learned from a Mark Liberman post at Language Log that there is a noun reveal meaning (according to the AHD)
The part of the side of a window or door opening that is between the outer surface of a wall and the window or door frame. b. The whole side of such an opening; the jamb. 2. The framework of a motor vehicle window.or, in the (perhaps clearer) words of the OED,
A side of an opening or recess which is at right angles to the face of the work; esp. the vertical side of a doorway or window-opening between the door- or window-frame and the arris ['the sharp edge formed by the angular contact of two plane or curved surfaces'].That's interesting enough, but what's amazing is that it has nothing to do with the verb reveal (which is related to veil); it's from a totally different (and obsolete) verb revale 'to lower, bring down,' which is related to vale and valley. As Mark says, Live and learn.
Anyone who enjoyed my earlier post on the way Japanese conjugates verbs made from borrowed words, based on one at No-Sword, will want to read his new entry "More unusual Japanese verbs." One of his tidbits:
gomakasu -- means "misrepresent (in a deceptive way)", and again, has ateji that mean "mis-bewitch-style" + s + u. The origin story is great, though:He explains ateji thus:gomadouran ("sesame seed bags [or cases]" -- not ateji here, these characters reflect etymology) were a kind of, uh, sesame seed candy, hollow on the inside. (Hence "bag" or "case", I suppose.) They quickly became known by the more direct name gomakashi ("sesame seed candy").
This word then came to have a figurative meaning: something which has an appetising exterior, but nothing inside; and then, the abstract idea of misrepresenting something in this way. gomakasu the verb was a back-formation, because gomakashi sounds the nominalised form of such a verb.
Once this verb had been born, ateji were used to write it -- maybe because of a desire to pun, maybe because the first person to write it down wasn't aware of the etymology.
So, to summarise: we have inaccurate S-J ateji used to write a verb which is a back-formation from a legitimate S-J word.
Best half-S-J verb ever.
ateji might be translated as "characters that hit the target". It's kind of hard to pin down a definition, but it basically refers to kanji used to write words which are not, etymologically, related to those kanji. Sometimes the kanji are used for their phonetic value, and sometimes the kanji are used for their meanings (and given entirely new phonetic values). What is important is the absence of an etymological link.He ends with the following teaser: "Tune in next time for the final instalment: Japanese stems + non-Japanese endings!"For example, the ten of tempura (<- tenpura) is often written with the kanji for heaven, ten, even though the word itself comes from Portuguese and obviously has nothing to do with the Chinese word for heaven. That's ateji in action.
An English analogy might be spelling television "tell-a-vision": the sounds are there, and the meaning is kind of acceptable, but Greek tele- has nothing to do with Germanic tell.
Incidentally, hiragana and katakana (the two Japanese syllabic character sets) both derive from standardised ateji sets, representing sound only. Their present forms are simplifications (hiragana) or selected parts (katakana) of the original kanji.
You know, I thought I had this Iraq thing pretty much figured out, after reading The Shi'is of Iraq, most of Charles Tripp's A History of Iraq, and innumerable newspaper and magazine stories. Sunni Kurds in the north (riven by internal dissension), Sunni Arabs in the center, Shi'i Arabs in the south (long oppressed, some "swamp Arabs" in reed huts dating from Sumerian times), Baghdad a mixture of everything, Jews formerly an ancient and important element of the population but expelled after the foundation of Israel. Oh, and some Turkomans up north. Then I got to page 151 of Tripp and found this description of the megalomaniac dictator du jour (the jour being the late '50s and early '60s), General 'Abd al-Karim Qasim (aka Kassem): "Qasim... came from a modest background and from a family which was more representative of the diversity of Iraq's varied population than that of most of his brother officers (his father was a Sunni Arab from Baghdad, but his mother was a Faili (Shi'i) Kurd)."
Faili? I searched my Islamic reference works in vain; Google, as so often, saved the day, and I am here to report that "The area around Kirkuk and south to Khanaqin is the preserve of the Faili Kurds, who, unlike the majority of Kurds, are Shias." They have had a rough time of it (deported in the early '70s and again, much more brutally and extensively, in 1980), and needless to say they have their own website. From the latter we learn, concerning the origin of the name:
The Faili (Fayli or Pahli) Kurds are an integral part of the great Kurdish people and they speak the Kurdish language in the Laurie and Laki (dialect) accent. The roots of the Faili Kurds go back to the Indo-Aryan (Europeans) immigrants of the first millennium BC...Take that for what it's worth. At any rate, Iraq, like the world in general, is a complicated place. I just thought you'd want to know.As for the name of (Faili), there is more than one explanation. In his book (The lexicon of countries, in Arabic Mujam al-Buldan) Yaqout Al-Hamawi mentions in 13th century that the Failis are those who reside the mountains separating Iran and Iraq. In addition, that they are as huge as elephants, the word fil means elephant in Arabic. Another explanation goes to a different direction as it says that the name belong to the ruler of the mentioned area. The historical fact on the root of the name of the Pahli is fully clear. As M.R. Izady notes in his book (The Kurds: A Concise Handbook, London, 1992) the territory inhabited by the Faili, Pahli, Fayli Kurds was known as "Pahla" meaning Parthia since the 3rd century AD. The Arabic texts recorded the name as FAHLA or BAHLA, Arabic lacks the letter "P" from Fahla and it has since then evolved to Faila and later Faili.
The Brown Italian Studies department has created a bilingual online version of Boccaccio's Decamerone that has been expanding since its beginnings ten years ago and particularly since it was awarded a two-year grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1999.
Since the project's inception, it has made substantial progress. There are now well over 300 documents and dozens of images, all designed to provide our visitors with an easily navigable site and abundant information related to the study of Boccaccio's masterpiece. Though the project was originally produced as a multimedia resource for students here at Brown, it soon became apparent that teachers and students around the world were benefiting from its materials . In response to this demand, we began a series of improvements and additions which, we hope, will make it even more useful to a wide range of users. This expansion is of course an endless endeavor and we depend upon the feedback of our visitors to guide us in the project's growth.The basic element is the text (whether you choose the original Italian or the century-old English translation, you can click on the paragraph number to get the corresponding section in the other language); alongside it, they have created a cast of characters (the "brigata"); sections on history, society, religion, and other background areas; a collection of maps (hyperlinked so that if you click on, say, Paris you get not only maps from the medieval and later periods but links to related portions of the text); a section of links to relevant resources (including similar projects such as the Canterbury Tales, the Confessions of Augustine, and others, including the mysterious Zifar or Libro del cauallero de Dios, "generally held to be Castile's earliest original work of prose fiction," of which I had never heard), and much else. A remarkable site, whose discovery I owe to a MetaFilter thread by conservative controversialist hama7.
Geoff Pullum at Language Log is encouraged, and so am I, by the news that "based on Fall 2002 enrollments in courses as compared to Fall 1998 all languages shot up, especially the less commonly taught ones, and some are up by very substantial factors indeed." He gives percentages ranging from American Sign Language (432%) to Spanish (14%) and adds "It's true that Russian was hardly up at all (half a percent); but every language was up, and the aggregate percentage enrollment increase was 17%." Good news indeed.
A 2001 interview with W. G. Sebald (put online by the New Yorker) makes me want to read his work (which I have still not gotten around to); this paragraph, in particular, resonates strongly with my own feelings about how to navigate life:
But I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was done in a random, haphazard fashion. The more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way—in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is looking for. I think that, as I've always had dogs, I've learned from them how to do this. So you then have a small amount of material and you accumulate things, and it grows, and one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things. If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they'll connect up. But they'll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn't, in terms of writing something new, very productive. You have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn't done before. That's how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you.His thoughts on coincidence are also right up my alley:
Yes. I think it's this whole business of coincidence, which is very prominent in my writing. I hope it's not obtrusive. But, you know, it does come up in the first book, in "Vertigo," a good deal. I don't particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or Jungian theories about the subject. I find those rather tedious. But it seemed to me an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. You meet somebody who has the same birthday as you—the odds are one in three hundred and sixty-five, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person then immediately this takes on more . . . and so we build on it, and I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of our creed, all constructions, even the technological worlds, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, when there isn't, as we all know.(Via wood s lot.)
Jim at Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey is doing a wonderful thing: he's transliterating and translating a famous poem by the Yiddish poet H. Leivick called Der volf (The Wolf). In his introductory post he provides this quote from Sol Liptzin’s A History of Yiddish Literature to describe it:
In another long poem, The Wolf (Der Volf, 1920), Leivick has a rabbi arise from a mound of ashes as the sole survivor of a masacred Jewish community. Looking about him the rabbi sees neither victims nor victors. The victims have perished and the victors have moved on. Only ashes, smoldering chimneys, and uncanny silence surround him. He burrows in the mound to find the limbs of the perished Jews so that he could bury them in the Jewish cemetery. In vain! Nought is left of them but coal and ashes. When night descends upon the ravished, deserted town, the Rabbi creeps away to the forest and is gradually transformed into a werewolf. Later on, when Jews expelled from other communities, find their way to this town and seek to rebuild the devastated houses and the synagogue of which only bare walls remain standing, they ask the rabbi, when he reappears, to resume religious services. But he insists that the ruins be retained as a memorial for his dead generation and that the synagogue be not rebuilt. He himself does not want to live on. He howls as a wolf through the nights and terrorizes the new inhabitants. On Yom Kippur he invades the synagogue as a werewolf and finds release from his suffering when he is beaten to death. Then the newcomers need no longer fear this last survivor whose existence was bound up with murdered generation. They can resume the reconstruction of a new communal life. This poem was regarded, after the Hitler catastrophe, not as Leivick’s reaction to Petlura’s pogroms but as a prophetic vision of the later and greater extermination of Jews by their Christian neighbors.He has now put online Part 1 of his translation, which begins:
... and it was on the third morning,Go read it, and roll the original around in your mouth even if you don't know Yiddish ("... un es iz geven oyfn dritn frimorgn,/ ven di zun iz oyfgegangen in mizreykh-zayt")—it's amazing stuff, and I'm eagerly awaiting further installments of Jim's excellent version.
when the sun arose in the East
there remained in the whole town not a trace.
And the sun climbed higher and higher,
until it had come to the middle of the sky,
and its rays met with the rabbi’s eyes.And the rabbi was lying on a mountain of ash and stones
with a ravenous mouth and staring pupils,
and in his soul there was silence and darkness and nothing more.
Leivick had quite a life, according to this biography; the following bit particularly struck me:
During the years when he achieved worldwide fame as a poet and his works were translated into many languages, Leyvik worked as a wallpaper hanger in New York. As a contemporary poet observed: "Many of us saw him striding in New York's streets with rolls of wallpaper in one hand and with a brush and a bucket of paste in the other." In 1932 Leyvik was forced to stop work and spend four years in the Spivak sanatorium for tuberculosis in Denver, Colorado. There he created some of his best, almost untranslatable poems, achieving a certain lucid serenity and writing, among other things, a beautiful sequel of "Songs of Abelard to Heloise" and a cycle of poems on Spinoza (the idol of Yiddish intellectuals).Makes me wish I could read Yiddish. (Technically, I can, with a great deal of effort, but in practice I'm not going to without the kind of crutches Jim is so generously providing.)
According to Michele A. Berdy in a Moscow Times article, Putin "owes his great popularity with the Russian public to the way he speaks. He's the first Russian president who sounds like the guy next door."
His are not the folksy inaccuracies of Mikhail Gorbachev (ложьте for положите), the verbal tics of Boris Yeltsin (Понимаешь? You know?) or the malapropisms of Viktor Chernomyrdin (Мы всегда можем уметь—We can always be able). And it's not that Putin's speech is crude (though it can be salty), street-tough (though cop-talk sneaks in) or inappropriate (though it comes close). But it is plain-talking, straight, down-to-earth Russian. He calls it like he sees it.She gives many examples, well worth reading if you know any Russian. (Via Taccuino di traduzione.)
Will Baude at Crescat Sententia introduces a post on Bolling v Sharpe, "a school segregation case that—like Brown—turns 50 today," with a wonderful quote from a Stoppard play, Professional Foul. The scene "takes place during a presentation at a conference of philosophers in Prague. An English gentleman is speaking about the philosophy of language, and interpreters are gamely translating his remarks into French, German, and Czech for the benefit of the non-English-speaking philosophers present."
Stone: 'You eat well,' says Mary to John. 'You cook well,' says John to Mary. We know that when Mary says, 'You eat well', she does not mean that John eats skilfully. Just as we know that when John says, 'You cook well', he does not mean Mary cooks abundantly. . . No problems there. But I ask you to imagine a competition when what is being judged is table manners. (Insert French interpreter's box—interior.)
Interpreter: ... bonne tenue à table ...
Stone: John enters this competition and afterwards Mary says, 'Well, you certainly ate well!' Now Mary seems to be saying that John ate skilfully—with refinement. And again, I ask you to imagine a competition where the amount of food eaten is taken into account along with refinement of table manners. Now Mary says to John, 'Well, you didn't eat very well, but at least you ate well.'
Interpreter: Alors, vous n'avez pas bien mangé ... mais ... (All Interpreters baffled by this.)
Incidentally, in the course of researching the correct manner of citing legal cases (italics, except for the v) I ran across the following admonition from an Australian site:
In speech the "v" is never said as "vee" or "versus" In a civil action the "v" is said as "and" while in criminal cases "v" is said as "against".Does anybody know if this is also true in the American legal system?
I came across a reference to the Nawab of Oudh, wondered what exactly a nawab was, and thought "this is exactly the sort of thing Hobson-Jobson specializes in." So I looked it up, and it wasn't there. "It has to be there," thought I, and tried possible alternate spellings: newab? nuwab? Nothing. Flipping through the book, I found it—under NABOB. Well, of course! In theory, I knew nabob was from nawab, but they occur in such different contexts and are pronounced so differently it's hard to keep it in my head. Anyway, let Hobson-Jobson tell the story:
NABÓB (p. 610) , s. Port. Nababo, and Fr. Nabab, from Hind. Nawab, which is the Ar. pl. of sing. Nayab (see NAIB), 'a deputy,' and was applied in a singular sense* to a delegate of the supreme chief, viz. to a Viceroy or chief Governor under the Great Mogul, e.g. the Nawab of Surat, the Nawab of Oudh, the Nawab of Arcot, the Nawab Nazim of Bengal. From this use it became a title of rank without necessarily having any office attached. It is now a title occasionally conferred, like a peerage, on Mahommedan gentlemen of distinetion and good service, as Rai and Raja are upon Hindus.There are, of course, the usual raft of citations, which are half the fun of H-J.Nabob is used in two ways: (a) simply as a corruption and representative of Nawab. We get it direct from the Port. nababo, see quotation from Bluteau below. (b) It began to be applied in the 18th century, when the transactions of Clive made the epithet familiar in England, to Anglo-Indians who returned with fortunes from the East; and Foote's play of 'The Nabob' (Nabob) (1768) aided in giving general currency to the word in this sense.
*Dozy says (2nd ed. 323) that the plural form has been adopted by mistake. Wilson says 'honorifically.' Possibly in this and other like cases it came from popular misunderstanding of the Arabic plurals. So we have omra, i.e. umara, pl. of amir used singularly and forming a plural umrayan. (See also OMLAH and MEHAUL.)
I'm going to make an entry of a comment by the Queen Bee, whose wide knowledge of things African is always a welcome contribution to this site, on an earlier post, because it's so interesting it deserves the spotlight:
Another example [of poetry based on a technique of double meaning] is the Malawian poet Jack Mapanje. It was only when the second edition of his book of poems Of Chameleons and Gods appeared that he was arrested. It is thought that it took that long for the authorities to unpick the layers of meaning for which his poems were so popular in Malawi, but which were hidden beneath a relatively innocuous facade. There is an interesting discussion of it here.I was particularly struck by this case because Mapanje is not only a poet but a linguist:
He was co-founder of the Linguistics Association for SADC Universities (LASU), a forum for sharing and exchanging knowledge and research in linguistics amongst the staff and students in the ten universities of Africa south of the Sahara. He was imprisoned for three and a half years by dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, essentially for his poetry, and now lives in the city of York, England, with his family.I would like to read his poetry, not least because I love his book titles; how can you resist The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison or The Last of the Sweet Bananas?Jack has published three books of poetry: Of Chameleons and Gods (H.E.B, 1981), The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (H.E.B, 1993) and Skipping Without Ropes (Bloodaxe Books, 1998). He has co-edited Oral Poetry from Africa: an anthology (Longmans, 1983), Summer Fires: New Poetry of Modern Africa (H.E.B, 1983), The African Writers’ Handbook (African Book Collective, 1999). He has recently edited Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (H.E.B, 2002). The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems, is to be published by Bloodaxe Books by Spring 2004. His prison memoir tentatively titled 'The Whispers We Shared' will appear by 2005.
Ludwig Kabanow from Berlin was so upset by a visit to a concentration camp near Gdansk, Poland, that he threw away his passport and said he did not want to speak German again. This story comes to us courtesy of kaleboel, who says "I haven't yet encountered a language so permeated by hate that I couldn't contemplate using it (with the possible exception of Visual Basic)."
I've been cleaning up infestations of comment spam, and I've started simply closing comments on the infected threads as the simplest prophylactic. I regret this, because I do like seeing fresh comments pop up on old posts, but such is life. However, should you wish to post a comment on a closed thread, you can simply put it on the latest one with a note saying "intended for such-and-such post" and I'll be glad to transfer it there. (Insert scathing comment about spammers here; I'm too tired to think of a good one. I'm off to bed.)
The site with 30,000 language links, created by Crystal Jones and Robert Behar Casiraghi. Lots of stuff here, including the Daisy Stories: parallel-text stories in languages from Afrikaans to Turkish. (Via wood s lot.)
I'm afraid this is only fun for those who know Russian, but if you go here you will see a random card from the catalog of the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. I got:
Elenskii, Nikolai Oktavievich, 1868-1939.
Aèroplan "Molniya." Komediya v 4-kh d. N.O. Elenskago. [SPb] tip. t-
va "Ekateringofskoye pechatnoye delo", [1910].
I love the fact that it's in the old orthography, that it's a play
about an airplane from 1910, and that the name Oktavievich has been
corrected (some sharp-eyed person like me changed a soft sign to an i). Somebody should do this for an American library... except, of course, we don't use library cards any more. (Thanks to frequent commenter Tatyana for calling my attention to the Avva entry from which the card game comes.)
Margaret Marks of Transblawg, who brought us news of the unappealing term "brain up," has a further report on quasi-English words as used in Germany. If you think you know what Bodybag means, you're probably wrong.
I was recently asked by a correspondent to explain why so many sports teams, not to mention a famous brand of condoms, use the name "Trojans" when the original Trojans were, not to put too fine a point on it, losers. I happened upon a Crooked Timber post by Belle Waring on this very subject, with comments both humorous and enlightening. These, I think, provide the answer:
Actually, I think ophelia has pointed us to the real answer, which is that history is written by the winners, and in the Classical world, the Romans were, ultimately, the winners. And so their ancestor-worship of the Trojans led to a lot of pro-Troy literature (and the sickening disparagement of the character of that wiliest — not sneakiest — of the Achaeans).And another comment mentioned Andrew Erskine's Troy between Greece and Rome, which I now want to read.
The second key is that Roman lit was a bigger early influence on the Christian tradition than Greek — remember, the works of Homer were unknown in the west until, what, 15something? Post-Roman Western culture developed its view of the Trojans under the prejudices of the Romans.
So in a sense, the guesses above about Troy being the ultimate victor were right, but not because people take the long view. A future civilization would take very different views of Native Americans depending on which era’s literature on the topic survived….
Posted by JRoth · May 10, 2004 06:07 PMThe Hellenistic and Roman periods produced almost exclusively “Trojans were good, Achaeans were bad” versions of the Trojan War even before the Roman “New Troy” meme became dominant, with this carrying over into the mediaeval and Renaissance periods (consider even Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where nobody’s particularly attractive but Hector and the Trojans are still better than the Greeks).
In Britain, where the same tradition derived the first Britons from Brutus — vide Layamon’s Brut and Geoffrey of Monmouth — the trend was even more strongly in favour of the positive view of Trojans.
Hector was considered one of the Nine Worthies of the world.
If I had been a reasonably wellinformed person choosing a name back near the turn of the century, the positive connotations of “Trojan” would have made it a reasonable choice.
I don’t know about the condoms … that seems almost as irrational as naming a car after Cressida.
Posted by james · May 10, 2004 06:40 PM
A striking quote from Alexander von Humboldt:
It is to be supposed that the last family of Atures did not die out until a long time afterwards: since at Maypures - bizarrely - there still survives an old parrot that nobody, say the natives, can understand, because it speaks only the language of the Atures.(From Ramage.)
There's a very nice collection of images of Oxyrhynchus papyri from an Ashmolean exhibition online at Oxyrhynchus: A City and its Texts, "celebrating a hundred years of publication of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri." "Daily Life" has everything from an invitation to a feast to an order to arrest a Christian; "Scribes and Scholars" has bits of authors from Sappho and Hesiod to the Hellenistic era. Fragmentary as they are, these scraps give us a picture of how the authors we read in modern books with word breaks and bound pages looked to people a couple of millennia ago. Via wood s lot. (Jim at UJG mentioned it last year, but I somehow didn't pick up on it.)
The brief introduction to qene by Gebre Eyasus Gorfu is a detailed description of "an Ethiopian style of speech, where one says one thing while implying a different meaning at the same time and in the same sentence."
Qene can usually be expressed in a poetic form or in a prose, containing the two parts of sem and werk (wax and gold), all within the same expression. The wax and gold analogy comes from the craft of the goldsmith during the making of jewelry. The image is first formed in wax, because wax is soft and pliable to carve. The wax is then covered with clay, plaster, or porcelain, which hardens. When the molten gold is poured into the plaster or clay, the wax melts away, leaving the gold, with the desired image. Thus, encrypting a hidden message in Qene is an ancient art of creating more than one meaning, where the apparent wax and the hidden, gold, are intertwined in the same sentence.It's a tradition going back to the fifth century, and was used against Ian Smith of Rhodesia in the '60s:
That was when a certain Ethiopian cleric took up his Begena to express the following Amharic Qene in a song, as a form of solidarity with the people:I recommend the whole article, and I thank Pat Hall for the link.Ian Smith Teseyeme alu Kesiss
Be Englizu papas
Ejun zerega le-nechochu...
Meskelun le-tkurochu...The Qene is hidden in the word meskel. It means cross: the cross on which Jesus was hanged, or the symbol of a cross priests usually carry, and would often use when blessing the people. But the same word, without any changes in stress, also means: to hang with a rope. The meaning of the poem then becomes clear:
Ian Smith
Was appointed a priest
By the English Bishop (Ex Prime Minister Harold Wilson)
He stretched out his hand to the whites,
And his cross/his hangings to the blacks...
Mark Liberman of Language Log has a very suggestive entry about the disfluency of the Wolof elite, as described in Judith Irvine's "Wolof Noun Classification: The Social Setting of Divergent Change" (Language in Society, 7: 37-64 (1978)), at least as he remembers it:
...upwardly mobile men among the Wolof nobility cultivate inarticulateness as a sign of status. They make morphological errors—for example simplifying the Wolof system of noun-class indicators by moving nouns into the default category, as a child or a beginning adult learner might do—and they may even develop a speech impediment. If I remember right, men who rise in traditional Wolof society show these changes over the period of their life from youth to middle age, while less successful members of their cohort stay as glib and morphologically correct as ever.He correlates this with the famed verbal skills of the griot class, "who are the lineage genealogists, musicians, and general carriers of gossip" and "serve as spokesmen for important members of the high-status group."
So one of the symbols of high status is hiring someone to speak on your behalf; and skill in speaking comes to have low status, rather like skill in typing once had, back when it was something that only secretaries and journalists did.A fascinating concept, and it may explain why American politicians seem to make a point of mispronouncing foreign names. They're above all that.
The A. Richard Diebold Center for Indo-European Language and Culture has a section of Early Indo-European Languages Online that features material on Latin, Classical Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Classical Armenian, and Old Iranian.
...Grammars published as introductions to the early languages are produced on the pattern of those designed for instruction of secondary school students. They were expected to take eight years of Latin, six of Greek and then move to the study of Sanskrit and other less widely studied languages like Old Slavic, Armenian, and Avestan. Under curricula of today, few scholars find such a course of study acceptable.Many thanks to Nephelokokkygia for this resource.Moreover, the important ability with respect to these languages is that of reading texts, with or without the help of translations. The online introductions in Early Indo-European Languages Online are designed to provide such ability. In this series, texts that in themselves are valuable for literary and historical as well as linguistic purposes are briefly introduced, glossed word-by-word, accompanied by grammatical descriptions, and followed by a complete glossary. For example, the third through fifth units of the introduction to Latin contain Julius Caesar's descriptions of the early Germanic people, which we assume from our reading of Herodotus and other early historians might also apply to the Indo-European peoples several millennia earlier. Other texts are important selections of literature, such as the opening lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Still others are important theological texts.
From The Morning News, The Non-Expert on the importance of editing.
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week Andrew Womack illustrates, exhibits, and displays how proper editing makes English all that more the understandable.Read the rest, even at the risk of never being able to construct a decent English sentence again. (Via Language Log.)Question: Gotta English question for you. Sometimes I see ‘hat, mittens, and gloves’ and sometimes I see ‘hat, mittens and gloves.’ I learnt it the first way, but which one’s right? I’m no editor. – Jim
Answer: The importance of writing at all is, of course always in question, especially for the recent rise of television, online, and blogging but the importance of consistent style in writing should, never be underesteemed. It’s using the common words in a consistent way which makes understanding others possible. If I say to one person, ‘This means this’, and then say to another person, ‘This means that, than the communication between us has become broken.
So who do we turn to? In times of we’re needed help? For a steady, understood usage and spelling of words & phrases that acts as the platform for which readers can comprehend—whats being said? without having to overanalyse it but just getting it, right?
The editor thats who!!
I just discovered the weird and wonderful glossary of the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve. The upside is that it has all sorts of great tidbits of information; the downside is that you have no idea how much faith to put in it. For instance, here's the second half of the entry for viz:
Viz. is an abbreviation of the Latin adverb videlicet, which originally meant something like "clearly,'' and came from the expression videre licet, meaning "to be able to see.'' You may ask: 'where does the z come from?' What z? Oh! That z. The one in the abbreviation. Well, this may be hard to believe, but back in the Middle Ages, before the time when life started to get hectic, books were reproduced by hand. Even monks, who have centuries to work, would get writer's cramp, so they would come to another long and frequently-appearing word like videlicet, peer down towards the end of it and think: 'everyone knows what the word is.' Like good sports they'd start out to write it, but by the time they'd written v i they would begin to LOSE HEART, so they'd just sort of write a squiggle that looks like a resistor in a circuit diagram, except that those things didn't exist yet. Instead, they saw that it resembled a z (especially a script z), so they got into the habit of writing v i z .Now, videre licet doesn't mean 'to be able to see,' it means 'it is permitted to see' (viz, 'you can [clearly] see'); is his description of the monks' abbreviation equally sloppy? I don't know, but it's fun.
I found the glossary via Avva, who links to its entry on Voltaire:
The phraseFor the rest of the lengthy story, visit the link; Avva adds that the allegedly actual Voltaire quotation "Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write" does not in fact come from "a 6 February 1770 letter to M. le Riche"—in fact, there's no more evidence for its authenticity at this point than there is for the famous line. Quote-hunting is a difficult business.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it''
is widely attributed to Voltaire, but cannot be found in his writings. With good reason. The phrase was invented by a later author as an epitome of his attitude.It appeared in The Friends of Voltaire (1906), written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall under the pseudonym S[tephen] G. Tallentyre...
A pleasant little story about a confiscated knife in the Metropolitan Diary section of today's NY Times includes the following line: "I put the knife in the envelope and gave it to her, thinking full well I'd never see it again." My first reaction was that "thinking full well" was just plain wrong, probably the result of sloppy editing (first writing "knowing," then changing the word without noticing that the phrase no longer worked). But googling finds a small corpus of "think full well" ("If you think full well that what you are doing is any different...") and "thinking full well" ("I went home thinking full well that we had gotten there in time"), so it clearly is part of some people's idiolects. Thus today's Languagehat Poll: does this usage seem to you wrong, marginal, or perfectly good?
Addendum. According to a comment by Annie (of the very nice Catalogue Blog), this is a common Lallans usage in the West Coast of Scotland; "the nearest approximation I could give in standard English would be 'I believe almost to the point of certainty.' However, that would only be an approximation, just as 'slimy, depressing, drizzly weather' is an approximation for 'driech.'" Thank goodness for dialects; they keep the language from settling into boring predictability.
According to a Telegraph story by Kim Willsher, "a French author has produced what he claims is the first book with no verbs."
Perhaps inevitably, critics have commented unfavourably on the lack of action in Michel Thaler's work, The Train from Nowhere, which runs to 233 pages. Instead of action, lengthy passages are filled with florid adjectives in a series of vitriolic portraits of dislikeable passengers on a train...The author, a doctor of literature who admits that "Thaler" is a pseudonym, and who has not previously written books under the name, said it was liberating to write without verbs, which he describes as "invaders, dictators, and usurpers of our literature".
"My book is a revolution in the history of literature. It is the first book of its kind. It's daring, modern and is to literature what the great Dada and Surrealist movements were to art," said Mr Thaler, an eccentric who refuses to reveal his real name or age, beyond admitting to being in his sixties.I'm a Perec fan, but this doesn't sound like my cup of tea. Very French, though... (Via The Discouraging Word.)"The verb is like a weed in a field of flowers," he said. "You have to get rid of it to allow the flowers to grow and flourish.
"I am like a car driver who has smashed the windscreen so he cannot see into the future, smashed the rear-view mirror so he cannot see the past, and is travelling in the present."
Mr Thaler says that he hopes Le Train de Nulle Part, which costs ?20 (£14) will be translated into English.
In France, with its long and distinguished literary heritage, the reading public is struggling to fathom whether the work is any more than an exercise in semantics and strangled grammar.
It remains to be seen whether Mr Thaler's book grows to be as admired as La Disparition (The Disappearance), which Georges Perec wrote in 1969 without using the letter "e". Mr Perec, who tried to expand literature by borrowing formal patterns from other disciplines such as mathematics and chess, followed it up with Les Revenantes [sic—actually Les Revenentes, as a commenter pointed out] (The Ghosts), in which the only vowel he used was "e".
Addendum. Don't miss Geoff Pullum's verbless post at Language Log.
Thanks to a comment by PF at MonkeyFilter, I've discovered this amazing Concordance Text Search of Joyce's works. You can, for instance, enter "ahem" and discover that it occurs once in Finnegans Wake, in the line:
484.29: ahem ! Anglicey: Eggs squawfish lean yoe nun feed marecurious.
Tidings of great joy into our nevertoolatetolove box!
A thread from last year had some very interesting comments from speakers of Neo-Aramaic, but as far as I know they are all Christian. I recently ran across a book in the library called The Jews of Kurdistan and discovered there was a whole population of Jewish speakers of what they called Targum, most of whom are now in Israel. The book didn't have much about the language, but I found a nice site on Jewish Aramaic and discovered a reference to Yona Sabar's A Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dictionary, so I thought I'd pass it along.
Sara of storytelling has two posts on an interesting topic: when writing historical fiction (as she does), how far should you go in making the language realistic for the time described? The first, "Avoiding language anachronisms," poses the basic problem:
The novelist has to find the balance between historical accuracy and the reader's comfort level. There are extremes. On one end you might say that accuracy is everything, and damn the reader's comfort; at the other, you might toss concerns about language accuracy out the window, and operate much in the way of Star Trek, where everybody understands everybody else, regardless of species or background...I thoroughly agree with the last bit, and I'm comfortable with damning the reader's comfort, even in the context of her second post, "How to be right, and alienate your reader," which discusses her exception to the general rule:The problem with lexical anachronisms is that they potentially destroy the fictive trance you work so hard to establish for your reader. It's like ice water on the back of your neck on a hot day; you can't not notice.
For my part, I like to think that in most situations it's just good common sense to avoid language that is exclusionary or biased... First, in historical terms, it's sometimes impossible to use the right historical lexical items because your readers—those of them who don't know the language history, and even those who do—would find it so disturbing that they'd lose track of the story. You can have a nasty antagonist use any kind of slur and get away with it, but you can't have a protagonist use any of the eighteenth century terms for natives of Africa without causing real problems for your reader. Nor can you simply use modern day terms, because they will stand out like proverbial sore thumbs.Personally, I would be willing to write off readers who couldn't handle "the eighteenth century terms for natives of Africa"; if their sensibilities are that tender, they shouldn't be reading about the past (and shouldn't go visit most of the world). But I recognize that that's an extremist position, and as a straight white male American I'm doubtless less susceptible to the power of disparaging language than most.
Today, wood s lot wishes Gary Snyder a happy birthday and provides the usual feast of links, beginning with a marvelous poem, "Why I Take Good Care Of My Macintosh Computer" ("Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon/ Because it jumps like a skittish horse/ and sometimes throws me/ Because it is pokey when cold..."), which I would quote in full except that I was plunged into a nostalgic reverie by a much older poem, "Riprap," which I have known ever since it served as the epigraph for my high school literary magazine (and if you ever dig up a copy of that, I'm gonna have to neuralize ya), and I'm going to quote it instead:
RiprapOh, all right, here's another:Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
CivilizationThere are also some good Pynchon links and this philosophy paper on "Language and Meaning." It can't be very good philosophy because I can understand most of it, but I'm mentioning it here anyway because I like its central statement so much:Those are the people who do complicated things.
they'll grab us by the thousands
and put us to work.World's going to hell, with all these
villages and trails.
Wild duck flocks aren't
what they used to be.
Aurochs grow rare.Fetch me my feathers and amber
Usage is right. Usage wins. All language is folk language. All language is slang.You tell 'em, John Gregg!
I've linked to AncientScripts.com in passing, but having seen it posted on MetaFilter I thought it might be a good idea to give it its own entry. I'm not sure why it's got "ancient" in its name, since it has all sorts of writing systems, ancient and modern, but who cares: it's a very useful compendium. More power to Lawrence K Lo, who's been expanding it since 1996!
A dear friend of mine used to love the exclamation "O altitudo!" for its undoubted phonesthetic magnificence, having encountered it in Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (1643):
IX. As for those wingy Mysteries in Divinity, and airy subtleties in Religion, which have unhing'd the brains of better heads, they never stretched the Pia Mater of mine. Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith; the deepest Mysteries ours contains have not only been illustrated, but maintained, by Syllogism and the rule of Reason. I love to lose my self in a mystery, to pursue my Reason to an O altitudo!It recently occurred to me to wonder where Browne got it, and having found out (no thanks to Bartlett's, which most uncharacteristically doesn't trace it to its source) I thought I'd share it with you. It's from Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Chapter 11, verse 33 in the Vulgate: o altitudo divitiarum sapientiae et scientiae Dei! quam inconprehensibilia sunt iudicia eius et investigabiles viae eius! Or, in the words of the Authorized Version: "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!" Noble rhetoric, whatever one thinks of the subject.
John Ashbery just keeps getting better and better. I was stopped in my tracks while trying to race through the March 25 issue of the NYRB by this magnificent poem:
IGNORANCE OF THE LAW IS NO EXCUSEWe were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine.
We drove downtown to see our neighbors. None of them were home.
We nestled in yards the municipality had created,
reminisced about other, different places—
but were they? Hadn't we known it all before?In vineyards where the bee's hymn drowns the monotony,
we slept for peace, joining in the great run.
He came up to me.
It was all as it had been,
except for the weight of the present,
that scuttled the pact we had made with heaven.
In truth there was no cause for rejoicing,
nor need to turn around, either.
We were lost just by standing,
listening to the hum of wires overhead.We mourned that meritocracy which, wildly vibrant,
had kept food on the table and milk in the glass.
In skid-row, slapdash style
we walked back to the original rock crystal he had become,
all concern, all fears for us.
We went down gently
to the bottom-most step. There you can grieve and breathe,
rinse your possessions in the chilly spring.
Only beware the bears and wolves that frequent it
and the shadow that comes when you expect dawn.
Ashbery has spent his life mastering the English sentence as a vehicle for poetry. His verse relies not on meter but on syntax and diction, and he has reached the point where he can do whatever he wants with them. What he wants is no longer to amuse and perplex but to communicate a mature sense of lacrima rerum. Not that he avoided serious topics before, but consider an early poem like "Our Youth":
...This is confident in its sleight of hand, now you see it now you see something entirely different, like Art Tatum at the piano. It dazzles, but it does not move. Now he deploys his arsenal with a quiet majesty that reminds me more of, say, John Lewis in his later years. Listen to the sixth line:
The dead puppies turn us back on love.Where we are. Sometimes
The brick arches led to a room like a bubble, that broke when you entered it
And sometimes to a fallen leaf.
We got crazy with emotion, showing how much we knew.The Arabs took us. We knew
The dead horses. We were discovering coffee,
How it is to be drunk hot, with bare feet
In Canada. And the immortal music of ChopinWhich we had been discovering for several months
Since we were fourteen years old. And coffee grounds,
And the wonder of hands, and the wonder of the day
When the child discovers her first dead hand...
No-sword has an entry about the way Japanese conjugates verbs made from borrowed words. My favorites:
guguru -- corresponds to the (pace Google's legal department) English verb "to Google", appears in the title of some new books and magazine articles (sometimes in a variant form, guuguru, which is homophonous with the Japanese pronunciation of "Google" itself, but written differently -- the verb has the final ru is in hiragana for the reason given above), and inspired this post.Addendum. See The Tensor's post for further details on this.homoru -- that's the homo of "homosexual", so the verb means "to be homosexual/engage in homosexual acts [male ones]". I first encountered this in a book by MURAKAMI Ryuu and puzzled over it for a few seconds, then almost died laughing when I realised what it meant. There's a corresponding verb for females, too (I checked) -- rezuru (from "rezubian", the Japanese pronunciation), and even a porno movie series called Rezure! -- that's the imperative form!
A recent post at Laputan Logic describes the results of the excavations near Jiroft in the province of Kerman in south-eastern Iran.
Geographically situated between, and contemporary with, the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, this was a literate society whose material culture was influential over a very wide area. Its pottery dating from the middle of the third millennium BC has been found in sites as widely separated as Syria and India and as far north-east as the Oxus river in modern day Uzbekistan (the so-called Bactrian-Margiana Archaeological Complex or BMAC).It is, of course, the word literate that grabbed my attention, but I haven't been able to find any details about the inscriptions. I suppose they'll turn out to be as indecipherable as those of the Indus Valley civilization—which may not even be linguistic in nature (pdf file)—but hope springs eternal for a brand-new ancient language.
Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages "present solid information on (currently) 117 different spice plants."
Emphasis is on their usage in ethnic cuisines, particularly in Asia; furthermore, I discuss the history, chemical constituents and etymology of their names. Last but not least, there are numerous photos featuring the live plants or the dried spices.The entry on coriander, for example, has the name in 60 different languages. Nice pictures, too. (Via MetaFilter.)
Gary Shteyngart has an enjoyable essay in The Threepenny Review called "Mother Tongue," about his attachment to his native Russian and the slow process by which he took up English while living in a house "Russian down to the last buckwheat kernel of kasha."
Vladimir Girshkin, the struggling young immigrant hero of my first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, shares a few characteristics with me, notably his penchant for counting money in Russian, which, according to the book, is "the language of longing, of homeland and Mother, his money-counting language." And also, I might add, the language of fear. When the ATM coughs outs a bushel of cash or I am trying to perform a magic trick with my checkbook, trying to glean something from nothing, I leave English behind. American dollars, the lack of which constitutes an immigrant's most elemental fright, are denominated entirely in the Russian language. And so with shaking hands, the fictional Vladimir Girshkin and the all-too-real Gary Shteyngart count a short stack of greenbacks, a record of our worth and accomplishment in our adopted land: "Vosemdesyat dollarov...Sto dollarov...Sto-dvadtsat' dollarov..."(Once again viaMany of my dreams are also dreamt in Russian, especially those infused with terror. There's one, for instance, where I emerge into a sepia-toned Manhattan, its skyscrapers covered by the chitinous shells of massive insects with water-bug antennae waving menacingly from their roofs. "What has happened?" I ask an unmistakably American passer-by, a pretty young woman in a middle-class pullover.
"Nichevo," she answers in Russian ("it's nothing"), with a bored Slavic shrug of the shoulders, just as I notice a pair of insect-like mandibles protruding from the base of her jaw. And I wake up whispering bozhe moi, bozhe moi. My God, my God.
Eurodicautom is the European Commission's "multilingual term bank."
When it was first set up in 1973 the development team drew upon the know-how and lexicographic material of two other tools available to Commission translators: Dicautom, a phrasal automatic dictionary launched in 1964, and Euroterm, a translation dictionary developed in 1962-68. The four original languages of Eurodicautom were Dutch, French, German and Italian, to which Danish and English were added in 1973, Greek in 1981, Portuguese and Spanish in 1986, and Finnish and Swedish in 1995. Latin is also present.(Via wood s lotAlthough originally developed to meet the needs of in-house translators, Eurodicautom soon became useful to other Commission staff and was later adopted by linguists in other European institutions. Today it is an invaluable tool for translators, interpreters, terminologists and other linguists worldwide over the Internet, where it records a daily average of 120.000 enquiries...
Entries are classified into 48 subject fields (ranging from medicine to public administration). A typical entry contains the term itself and its synonyms, together with definitions, explanatory notes, references, etc. At present the term bank contains about five and a half million entries (terms and abbreviations), subdivided into more than 800 collections.
I'm not sure how you're meant to use it—clarity isn't a strong point of the European Commission—but what I do is put a word in the query box, click "Terms" under "Display," click "Select all" under "Target language," and unclick English. If I put in "stag beetle," I get:
DE [German]Pretty nifty. I must say, ekoxe doesn't look very Swedish, but the beetle must be pretty well thought of by Swedes, because there's a QUALITY HOTEL EKOXE in Linköping. And for many more "stag beetle" terms, see Maria Fremlin's Vernacular and dialect names of Stag Beetles (Lucanus cervus) in various countries, from which you will learn that the Swedish name is ek 'oak' + oxe 'bull'; you will also find well over a dozen German names, the last of which is the cognate Eichochs.
(1) TERM Feuerschroeter
(2) TERM HirschkaeferEL [Greek]
(1) TERM ??????? ? ?????? [lekanos o kervos]ES [Spanish]
(1) TERM ciervo volanteFI [Finnish]
(1) TERM tammihärkäFR [French]
(1) TERM cerf-volantIT [Italian]
(1) TERM cervo volanteLA [Latin]
(1) TERM Lucanus cervusNL [Dutch]
(1) TERM vliegend hertSV [Swedish]
(1) TERM ekoxe
The Patrin Web Journal is a website on the Romani people and their culture.
Patrin is more than a collection of links. Indeed, we intend to place more original material on our pages. But the links that are here should be viewed as doorways to how the rest of the world views the Romani people. In visiting these links a picture should start forming, a picture that shows little has changed to improve the social and legal conditions of the Romani people.I particularly like the fact that the front page contains not one but two versions of the welcome message in Romanes, complete with stress marks for easier pronunciation; I trust zaelic will drop by to tell us which dialects they are. There is a glossary, an essay on language, and a Romanichal word list (I particularly like bístering mush 'judge, magistrate'), among much other material.
If you're wondering about the name, patrin is the Romanes word for 'leaf'; the site's glossary says:
Patrin (or pateran, pyaytrin, or sikaimasko). Marker used by traveling Roma to tell others of directions, also used for passing on news using prearranged signals. Also, a leaf or page (Romanes).
Oxford has digitized and placed online long runs of the Annual Register (1758-78), Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1843-63), Gentleman's Magazine (1731-50), Notes and Queries (1849-69), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1757-77), and The Builder (1843-52). (Via MonkeyFilter.)
Well, there used to be more news at Akropolis World News; now it's mainly essays—the site's author, Catalan classicist J. Coderch, has just finished a series on "Burned libraries along History" (sic) and is beginning one on "Finland in WWII." But if you click on the "Former News" button (it's a damn Flash site, so I don't know how to link to individual pages) you can get nice Attic versions of stories like "The Who play again after 21 years" (Hoi Tines meta eikosi kai hen etê palin diskon kharattousin). Lots of fun for anyone who ever studied Greek! (Via Nephelokokkygia.)
My Odyssean friend who often goes by the sobriquet "dung beattle" when commenting here has sent me a link to a charming site called Talk Tidy: The Online Home of Wenglish, based on two books by John Edwards:
John Edwards has made his lifetime study, the peculiarities of the Welsh/English dialect. He named this dialectical oddity "Wenglish" and recorded it as it is spoken, mainly in the valleys and townships of South Wales (that's OLD South Wales for our antipodean visitors).A few samples:The original books Talk Tidy, and More Talk Tidy, were written in 1985 and 1986 respectively and published by D. Brown & sons Ltd, Bridgend, Glamorgan S. Wales, UK. Unfortunately, both books are now out of print.
Ach-a-fi
An expression of disgust as in "You should 'ave seen the state 'e was in, ach-a-fi!"
Against
A translation of the Welsh 'yn erbyn', meaning 'by the time' as in "Against I'd washed the dishes, there was no time to clean the house".
Ages: Frages/'issages
'Frages' is Wenglish for 'for ages' and 'issages' is the Wenglish equivalent of 'this ages': "I haven't seen you frages.", or "I haven't been to the pictures 'issages.".
Anch/Ansh
A bite, or taste, as in, "Give us an anch of your apple will you?"
Aye-aye
(a) The single 'aye' is Wenglish for 'yes'. The double form is often used as a greeting or as a reply to 'shw mai?', 'awright?', or 'hi-ya?' (b) Affirmative or most positive confirmation, as in "Well aye-aye mun, he's right enough there you know!"
"Stepgrandfather" doesn't appear to be an official word (at least it's not in any of my dictionaries), but it's what I am as of yesterday afternoon, and a very proud one too. You can see the little fellow here; it was a new and wonderful experience to hold something that small and fresh and alive in my arms and know that it would grow up to be a quirky individual like the rest of us. (And born on the first of May—what good fortune!) I look forward to getting to know him.
There are a few hundred Google hits for "stepgrandfather"; my favorite is from this Arkansan parody of Midnight's Children:
On the wedding day my stepgrandfather Oxford Davis gave my stepfather a wad of chewing tobacco, a baseball bat autographed by members of the Arkansas Reds, a pair of jumper cables, a thirty-dollar Bible, an album entitled Johnny Cash: The Cheatin' Songs (a native son of Kingsland, 50 miles to the south, whom my stepgrandfather worked alongside with in the fields as a young man and never tired of endlessly repeating his stories about him and Johnny in their younger days, most of which started with: "I tell you, one night me and Johnny got so drunk...". My stepgrandfather still keeps in his safebox the guitar pick that Johnny poked a man's eye out with in a barfight, "just to watch him bleed", in Fordyce, 1952.I'll strive to be that cool a stepgrandpa, though minus the chewing tobacco.
It occurs to me, by the way, that languages can be divided into those that have convenient prefixes (like English step-, German Stief-, and French beau-) with which new forms like "stepgrandfather" can be constructed and those that don't. Russian, for instance, has otchim 'stepfather' and machekha 'stepmother' (stress on the first syllable in both); those are great words, but you tell me how I'm supposed to construct one on that model! (The primary words are otets 'father' and mat' 'mother.')
Joel of Far Outliers has a thought-provoking post discussing the question "Why are there so many writing systems in India and and so few in China?" He describes a 1994 article by Victor H. Mair from the Journal of Asian Studies:
The premise of Victor H. Mair's wide-ranging article is that written Chinese emerged not as transcribed speech, but rather as a special, radically shortened cipher with its own grammatical and expressive conventions. He calls this written form Literary Sinitic (LS) and finds the disparity between it and any form of spoken Chinese, which he refers to under the general heading of Vernacular Sinitic (VS), is of a wholly different nature than the contrast between written Latin and any modern written or spoken Romance language. Indeed, he argues, Literary Sinitic remained incapable of serving as a means of recording spoken Chinese or any other language. Thus, for Mair, the question becomes: How did vernacular written forms emerge in a milieu in which Literary Sinitic dominated intellectual life? He finds the earliest instances of written Vernacular Sinitic occur typically in Buddhist texts. He believes the Buddhist emphasis on teaching through the local dialect (desa bhasa) was a major impetus for the development of written vernacular, but concludes it is difficult to determine exactly which aspects of Buddhism had the greatest influence on the slow maturation of written Vernacular Sinitic.This provides a convincing answer to an interesting question. Mair goes on to say that the Manchus' proclamation of kuo-yü [= guoyu, Mandarin] as the official written language of the nation "marked the formal end of the multimillennial separation between book language (shu-mien-yü [= shumianyu]) and spoken language (k'ou-yü [= kouyu]) in China."
Addendum. Be sure and read xiaolongnu's extremely interesting comment about the chain of spoken translators sometimes required in order to render sutras into Chinese, resulting in translations that "read more like the transcripts of lectures -- complete with reports of the audience response -- than like the translations of written texts."
