MER/GUBERNATOR.

As a follow-up to my LITSEI/GIMNAZIYA post, another example (also from The Russian Language Today) of convergence of originally distinct terms:

The title of the head of city administration, previously predsedatel' gorodskogo soveta 'Chairman of the City Council', has been changed to mer 'mayor', a loan word [from French maire] which imparted a European flavour to the title of the city head. However, for some reason this was considered not to be good enough, and in 1995, in many towns, people found themselves electing not a mer but a gubernator 'Governor', a title dating back to the nineteenth century. This old name, exorcised in 1917, has now come full circle. In 1995 it caused some confusion among the population at large, because for many Russians casting their vote the word gubernator sounded outlandish and dated, and prompted a humorous reaction. The situation was all the stranger as there was no unified standard terminology: the head of the Moscow administration is called mer, while in St Petersburg the name of the same post is gubernator.

TWO YEARS OF LANGUAGEHAT.

Well, since my last anniversary post, the country list has almost doubled, now standing at around 120 (I may have mistakenly included a territory or two, but then I may have missed a name or two); hello Cambodia, Albania, Libya, and all the other far-flung dens of LH readers! A year ago France was the non-English-speaking country that turned up most frequently in the logs, but it's been overtaken by the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, and Sweden, with Poland hot on its heels. As always, I thank all those who read and comment on my entries; without the feedback, maintaining the blog would not be nearly as rewarding. In that connection I direct any readers who may have missed it to my entry Contacting Languagehat, and I emphasize you need not leave an e-mail address or any other personal information (aa, come back!). It's been a tremendous amount of fun (and educational to boot), and I hope to keep it up for a long time to come.

FURPHY.

Continuing my fascination with Aussie slang, I present my latest find (courtesy of Mark Liberman at Language Log): furphy.

furphy n. (pl. furphies) 1 a false report or rumour. 2 an absurd story. • adj. (furphier, furphiest) absurdly false, unbelievable: that’s the furphiest bit of news I ever heard.

This Ozword comes from the name of [John] Furphy, a blacksmith and general engineer, who went to Shepparton from Kyneton in 1871 and set up a foundry. John Furphy designed a galvanised iron water-cart on wheels and his firm, J. Furphy & Sons, manufactured them. Each cart had the name FURPHY written large on the body. So successful were these carts that during World War 1 the Department of the Army bought many Furphy carts to supply water to camps in Australia and especially to camps in Palestine, and Egypt.

And how did John Furphy’s name wind up meaning what it does? Go read the essay! (Which, by the way, is from Ozwords, an online periodical I should obviously keep an eye on.)

ICELANDIC POETRY SITE.

The Jónas Hallgrímsson: Selected Poetry and Prose website is one of the best of its kind I've seen. It has the original side by side with an English translation (which tries to match the formal qualities of the original, and I would have preferred a literal version as well), followed by commentary, sometimes quite copious. The Introduction says:

This Web site is intended to make available, through interactive technology, a wide range of materials that will enable interested persons to familiarize themselves with the work of the Icelandic poet and natural scientist Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807-1845) and to have at their fingertips resources contributing to an understanding and appreciation of that work. Jónas is generally acknowledged to be the most important and influential Icelandic poet of modern times. In addition he has a secure place in the annals of Icelandic science and of his country's cultural and political history.

I want to see sites like this for every major poet in every language!

Here's a short poem with its commentary (and a link to a recording):

Dalabóndinn í óþurrknum

Hví svo þrúðgu þú
þokuhlassi
súldanorn
um sveitir ekur?
Þér man eg offra
til árbóta
kú og konu
og kristindómi.

The Farmer in Wet Weather

Goddess of drizzle,
driving your big
cartloads of mist
across my fields!
Send me some sun
and I'll sacrifice
my cow --- my wife ---
my Christianity!

Date:
1826-8.

Form:
One fornyrðislag strophe.

Manuscript:
KG 31 b I , where it has the title "Dalabóndinn í óþurrknum" (facsimile KJH 4; image 197K).

First published:
1847 (A15; image 109K).

Sound recording:
Anton Helgi Jónsson reads "Dalabóndinn í óþurrknum." [0:26; 280K]

Commentary: Not surprisingly, the weather has always been a popular subject for verse in Iceland. The present poem is Jónas's earliest surviving "weather song" (veðurvísa). It suggests very amusingly --- and poignantly --- the desperation of Icelandic farmers, in the days before mechanized agriculture, when hay needed to keep their livestock alive over the winter lay rotting in the fields and there was no sunshine to dry it. The image of the "goddess of drizzle" (suldanorn) scattering mist across the fields contains a witty allusion to Icelandic agricultural practice. The prayer-format of the poem, and the ironic progression in its last two lines, may owe something to an Icelandic joke about a farmer who prayed to God about his wife, his mistress, and his horse: "Dear Lord, you can take Dæsa. But let Valka live. And if you kill Rauðka, you and me are through" (5Íþs 364).

Since the poem is an imaginative projection, a sort of miniature dramatic monologue, there seems little point in making guesses about when and where it was written.

(Via plep.)

HOBGOBLINS.

I was recently given (by pf and a fellow grammar gremlin) a copy of Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer's Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage, by Theodore M. Bernstein (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1971). I must admit when I saw the word "usage" my Pavlovian response was to shudder, but when I looked more closely I realized that far from promoting absurd shibboleths, the surprising Mr. Bernstein was debunking them, an activity always dear to my heart. A sample entry:

INSANE ASYLUM.

Says Bierce: "Obviously an asylum cannot be unsound in mind. Say asylum for the insane." Shall we, then, also banish foreign correspondent, madhouse (dating to 1687), dramatic critic, juvenile court, criminal lawyer, psychiatric clinic and civil engineer? To pose the question is to expose the ridiculousness of the objection. Adjectives are not always confined to a single narrow meaning. Many of them have coordinate meanings, such as characterized by, used by, designed for, derived from. It is one of the conveniences of English, and especially American English, that thoughts can be compressed into a couple of words instead of requiring elaborate phrases; thus, insane asylum rather than asylum for the insane. Of course, insane asylum is avoided these days for a quite different reason: It is too harsh, it does not meet the euphemistic requirement of the day. And so we are more likely to say mental hospital or home for the mentally disturbed.

So thanks, you goofy gremlins!

KAZAKH AND OTHER NAMES.

At first glance, a web page on Kazakh names might seem overspecialized for most people, but it has links to quite a few useful-looking name sites, some specialized (Russian, medieval Russian, medieval Mongol) and others general. (Thanks to frequent commenter zizka for inspiring the search that led to the site.)

RUSSIAN BARDS.

Frequent commenter Tatyana has written a brilliant summary of the history of the Russian musical movement known as KSP in Russian, which she calls "the bard scene." The most familiar name to Americans is probably that of Bulat Okudjava, but there are many more, and the scene comes from various sources, notably the prison camps:

It started in the late 50's, after survivors from Northern and Siberian camps started to trickle back to populated parts of the country. Very few of them could write like Solzhenitsyn or Varlaam Shalamov, but many more could sing prison songs. The so-called blatnye pesni were written by career criminals, and songs based on the experience of the camps were written by political prisoners, but in form resembled the former (sometimes even using the same melody).

Society's attitudes towards prisoners changed during the "Thaw" years of the 1960’s. Political "ZK" (inmates), who were previously considered "the enemies of the People," became human again. Suddenly Pushkin's line about "mercy to the fallen" was quoted in Pravda; public debates about "physicists vs. lyricists" filled the arenas with audiences. And the first shy voices of social and political dissent started to appear semi-publicly...

She ends with a splendid account of her own visit to a slet, or festival, of the Bard Club of the East Coast; read and enjoy. (Via The Russian Dilettante.)

DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY.

Via wood s lot, Garth Kemerling's Dictionary of Philosophical Terms and Names:

This is a concise guide to technical terms and personal names often encountered in the study of philosophy. What you will find here naturally reflects my own philosophical interests and convictions, but everything is meant to be clear, accurate, and fair, a reliable source of information on Western philosophy for a broad audience... Although the entries are often brief, many include links to electronic texts and to more detailed discussions on this site or in other on-line resources...

A sample entry, for aporia:

Greek term for a difficulty or puzzle (literally, "with no pathway"). Aristotle commonly used this term to signify a group of individually plausible but collectively inconsistent statements. The reconciliation of such statements by considering alternative solutions, he supposed, is the chief business of philosophy.

Also see PP.

POETRY TRANSLATION IN CANADA.

According to a Zachariah Wells column in maisonneuve, Canada is suffering from a lack of poetry translated from foreign tongues into English.

As renowned poet and translator A. F. Moritz put it to me, “If you don’t bring over the most central speech of a people, its poetry, you’ve denied its essential humanness access to the pith of the culture into which you are supposedly welcoming it. You’ve denied the most important contribution it can make to the basic ethos of its new home and the native place of its future children. And you’ve blocked the greatest contribution it can make to the ongoing health and intelligence and development of Canada and of English and French.” Moritz notes that “this nation is a-crawl with literarily talented and ambitious people who have native access to literally hundreds of languages.” Why, then, is this bonanza of talent not translating into more activity?...

Understandably, Friesen finds it a frustrating state of affairs: “There is good work in Canada, and there is good work outside of Canada. They need to meet each other, and our readers have to be educated into being less insular. I don’t know how to do that, except to get the funding and tour foreign poets here with their translated books. The books, by themselves, tend to get lost. I mean, it’s amazing we don’t do this. We need to learn about other cultures, other literatures, more directly than through social study courses in school. We need to read their work and meet them, write articles about them, etc. And they need to read ours.” He adds that “exchanges with Nordic countries seem natural” in Canada because of linguistic roots common to both English and Scandinavian languages...

Kitty Lewis of Brick Books recently told Toronto’s Eye Weekly that Brick would not have been able to publish Immigrant Blues had it not come to them already translated by Simic’s ex-wife, adding, “We just don’t have the resources” to pay translators. For his part, Simic says in the same article, “It’s a pity we are not open to the world.” More than that, it’s a shame.

(Via wood s lot.)

LITSEI/GIMNAZIYA.

I've been slowly working my way through The Russian Language Today, by Larissa Ryazanova-Clarke and Terence Wade—an excellent and detailed discussion of the changes in Russian since 1917—and have gotten to the section on "The restoration of pre-Soviet lexis in the cultural sphere," which contains this analysis of the histories and current situations of the terms litsei (ultimately from Latin lyceum and Greek lykeion, the name of Aristotle's school) and gimnaziya (ultimately from Latin gymnasium and Greek gymnasion, a place for exercising):

The renaming of educational establishments has reached mammoth proportions. Here, as in many other spheres of contemporary Russian life, a change in nomenclature symbolises rejection of the past and a new beginning in social life. Schools now often reject the traditional term shkola 'school', a word which for some is associated with the Soviet educational system. The words gimnaziya and litsei, from pre-Revolutionary schooling, are perceived as more prestigious and attracting more interest in the educational establishments in question. As critics observe, however, a change of words on a school sign does not necessarily reflect modifications in content or educational method...

The word gimnaziya is of Greek origin, but came into Russian through German and Polish. In the nineteenth century gimnaziya meant 'high school'. The name was not confined to one particular type of school, thus the klassicheskaya gimnaziya 'classical high school' concentrated on classical languages and humanities, while the real'naya gimnaziya 'real (modern) high school' placed more emphasis on natural sciences and vocational disciplines.

The word litsei, althouth it derives directly from French lycée, also originated in Greek. In Russian, the word referred to 'a secondary or tertiary educational establishment for privileged boys'. The word is closely associated for Russian speakers with the life of A.S. Pushkin, who received his education in the most famous Lycée of all in Tsarskoe Selo. The word litsei has become a symbol of liberal thought, enlightenment and the bonds of friendship.

Since the differential semantic properties of these words are not clearly defined in modern Russian, they are of considerable interest as words which have no referent, i.e. no class of objects which they and they alone refer to. Even so, these words have strong connotations, since they are symptomatic of a return to traditional, humanistic values in education and the prestige of new (albeit restored) names...

(I've replaced the book's Cyrillic with transliteration for the benefit of non-Russian-speaking readers.) The phrase "words which have no referent" is overstated, but the situation of words which used to have distinct meanings and now are more or less interchangeable is an interesting one.

LITERAL-MINDED.

A new (since June) linguistics blog, by Neal Whitman: Literal-minded. He has an interesting series of posts about his son's early difficulties with the l sound. (He also guest-posts at The Volokh Conspiracy.) Via Tenser, said the Tensor.

EARLY SOVIET CHILDREN'S BOOKS.

The Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill University Libraries maintains a website for their exhibition on Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era:

The present exhibition in the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of the McGill University Libraries draws on an important collection of more than 350 Soviet children's books published in the 1920s and 30s and which are remarkable for their original aesthetic quality, linguistic variety and thematic diversity. Dynamic constructivist typography utilized the expressive quality of the stocky, 'architectural' azbuka, the Russian alphabet. Diagonal layouts introduced a simultaneous representation of contents and often used photomontage as a succinct expression of the narrative text. The emblematic use of red and black as dominant colours linked the children's material closely to the publishing output at large. Since more than 100 nationalities live within the fifteen former republics of the USSR, the variety of languages in which children's books were published is nothing short of astonishing. While Russian was the official language of the Union, children's books published in Ukrainian, Uzbek, Tartar, Kazakh, Azerbaidzhani, Armenian, Georgian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, lakutian, Nanaian and other languages are well represented in the McGill collection.

I am naturally particularly interested in the language section, which I wish were larger; furthermore, they don't identify the language of this one, obviously in one of the romanized Turkic alphabets of the '20s... but which? I can't find "Ofo" in any of my reference books, but desperate googling has turned up "Nathershina, F. A. 1992. Rukhi khazinalar: Asylykul, Dim, Orshak buiy bashqorttarynyng fol'klory. Ofo: Bashqortostan Respublikahy Mathaniat Ministerstvohy, Respublika khalyq izhady uthage, 76 pp., bibliog., music" in this bibliography, so I'm assuming it's Bashkir until better evidence comes along. [Fine detective work from entangledbank in the comments has shown that "Ofo" is the Bashkir equivalent of Russian Ufa, the name of the capital of Bashkortostan, so this is indeed a Bashkir book.]

(Via MeFi and MoFi.)

SAUNTER.

The word saunter, like many others, can't be traced back very far (AHD: Probably from Middle English santren, to muse), but of course that doesn't stop people from trying, and this word has a particularly enjoyable pseudo-etymology, discussed in the following typically piquant passage from one of the stories in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Martians (a book I recommend to anyone who likes thoughtful, human-oriented science fiction):

Long walks around Odessa at the end of the day. Aimless, without destination, except perhaps for an evening rendezvous with Maya, down on the corniche. Sauntering through the streets and alleyways. Sax liked Thoreau's explanation for the word saunter: from à la Saint[e] Terre, describing pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. There goes a Saint[e] Terrer, a saunterer, a Holy Lander. But it was a false etymology, apparently spread from a book called Country Words, by S. and E. Ray, 1691. Although since the origins of the word were obscure, it might in fact be the true story.

Sax would have liked to be sure about that, one way or the other. It made the word itself a problem to mull over. But as he sauntered Odessa thinking about it, he did not see how the matter could be investigated any further, the etymologists having been thorough. The past was resistant to research.

The second paragraph expresses quite well one of the reasons I got out of historical linguistics. The past is, indeed, resistant to research. After a century or two of philological hypotheses, there's not much further you can go into the history of most words, and picking over the remaining obscurities is not as rewarding as it might be.

I have a couple of questions related to this passage. I find the use of saunter with a direct object ("But as he sauntered Odessa thinking about it...") odd but not unacceptable; does anybody else have a reaction to it?

And does anyone know if there is actually a "Country Words, by S. and E. Ray, 1691"? I turn up only this suspiciously similar title (from this bookseller's catalog; I've bolded the similar bits):

Ray, John. (1627-1705) A Collection of English Words Not Generally used, with their Significations and Original, in two Alphabetical Catalogues, The One Of such as are proper to the Northern, the other to the Southern Counties. With An Account of the preparing and refining such Metals and minerals as are gotten in England. The Second Edition, augmented with many hundreds of Words, Observations, Letters &c. By John Ray; Fellow of the Royal Society.

London: Printed for Christopher Wilkinson, at the Black Boy [sic] over against S. Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet, 1691.

...Ray was a remarkable man whose additions to natural history are immense and in this particular book, the subjects that he treats are equally remarkable. In the preface, Ray reports that after the first edition of his work was published, he received several catalogues of obscure northern and southern words from several learned friends, and notes that he has greatly augmented these sections with the help of these new catalogues. The preface is followed by a list of “North Country Words,” each with its meaning and etymology. This section is followed by “South and East Country Words,” similarly defined, and “A Catalogue of Local Words parallel’d with British or Welsh,” arranged in parallel columns, “A Catalogue of North Country Words,” the “Glossarium Northanhymbricum,” the next section, most intriguing, is “An Account of some Errors and Defects in our English Alphabet, Orthography, and Manner of Spelling,” in which Ray complains about the use of the final “e” used at the end of English words to indicate a hard vowel sound in the preceding vowel when the two are separated by a consonant. He suggests that this practice leads foreigners and children to expect to pronounce an “eee” sound at the end of such words. [Words like smoke, as opposed to smock.] Ray also complains about problems with spelling, shedding light on a problem that seems so apparent to modern readers in all English works of this period, the spelling is highly erratic. He also makes numerous specific descriptions of the pronunciations of many words. Many modern scholars often wonder about the way that seventeenth century people pronounced words. Much can be deduced on that subject by reading this section. In the post-script section we find “Some Observations made and communicated by Mr. Francis Brokesby, concerning the Dialect, and various Pronunciation of Words in the East Riding of Yorkshire.”

I'm assuming this was distorted either by Robinson or his source to "Country Words, by S. and E. Ray," but it would be nice to know for sure.

JAPANESE LINKS.

In response to a commenter's query on this thread, I googled my way to this page of Japanese learning resources (part of the Zozenawayone site); there are all sorts of goodies there, but the one that first struck me was this:

Into this void comes the Japanese-English Dictionary Server, an online database with kanji, kana, slang, names, technical jargon, and about eighty different ways to show the results. (This is important if your computer isn't set up to display Japanese.) The dictionary even includes idiomatic phrases, though they're run together with no spaces between the words (so hotoke no kao mo sando, "to try the patience of a saint," appears as "hotokenokaomosando"). And to gild the lily, the site loads quickly and is rarely down.

And I'm glad the Zozenawayone author shares my fondness for the Living Language Common Usage Dictionary, which is indeed "surprisingly in-depth for a small dictionary."

CARRUTH ON HIS LANGUAGE.

Hayden Carruth, as I've said before (hi, Moira!), is one of my favorite American poets; tonight I was reading my wife a poem of his called "Vermont" (1975, available in Collected Longer Poems) and came across these lines (towards the end), which I thought I'd share with y'all:

What is the difference, now at last, between
the contemporary and the archaic? I
say "drawed" for "drew" and "deef" for "deaf" and still
use "shall" and "shan't" in ordinary conversation
like any good Vermonter, and sometimes too
I write "thou" for "you." So am I therefore
dead? That will come soon enough. Meanwhile
my language is mine, I insist on it,
a living language as long as it is spoken
by living men and women naturally,
as long as it is used.

OK, I can't resist quoting the ending as well:

The name of our green mountain is from French,
but sometimes, ungallicly, we twist it, saying
Vêrmont with the stress up front. We intend
no harm and only characteristic disrespect.
Once when I heard it I was struck by how
the name might be divided differently,
Vermont, the Worm of Being. We are torn
here in this place that is our now between
its beauty and its depravity. The beauty
is mostly old, our mountains and our farms,
and the depravity is mostly new.
We don't hate it exactly, being not
the hate-conceiving kind, but we despair.
God, we despair! — Vermont's protracted gloom,
our end-of-the-winter desolation, April
in our cold hearts. From this we make ourselves,
remake ourselves each moment, stronger, harder,
with our own beauty. Yes, our great green mountain
is the worm of being, long and irregular,
twined lengthwise through our state, our place, our now.
Meanwhile we dream of other sunnier places.
Myself, I'm going down next month to look
at a house I know of in New Mexico.

PUNCTUATION HELL.

A story by Peter Landesman in the July 11 NY Times Magazine begins:

On Dec. 14 of last year, just hours after being hauled out of a hole in the ground by American forces, Saddam Hussein received his first visitors as a prisoner of war: two Americans, L. Paul Bremer III, at the time the top United States administrator in Iraq, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the commander of American-led forces in Iraq; and four prominent Iraqis—Mowaffak al-Rubaie, then a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and now Iraq's national security adviser; Adnan Pachachi, the foreign minister of Iraq before Hussein's reign; Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite representative; and Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress.

Aside from being about as far from a grab-you-by-the-lapels opener as can be imagined, this sentence is an object lesson in the problems of proper punctuation. Amid that forest of commas and semicolons, with a colon and a dash thrown in for good measure, one stands out as wrong.

The first semicolon should be a comma. The structure is "two Americans, A and B, and four Iraqis"; the fact that A and B are each followed by phrases in apposition set off by commas does not change the fact that the comma before the "A and B" phrase requires a subsequent comma to complete the pattern. But a comma there would make for awkward reading, you say? Of course it would; the entire sentence is awkward, and if I were editing copy at the Times I would have drawn a big red X over the whole thing and scrawled in the margin: Rewrite!

SPOONER'S DAY.

It’s Spooner’s Day! Grab your binoculars and let's go word botching! (Via wood s lot.)

THE AMPERSAND.

To quote aldiboronti, from whose Wordorigins thread I swiped this link:

Lovely page from Adobe on the historical development of the ampersand, from the ligature of ET or et to the & of today, with illustrations of various stages, the earliest being a ligature from Pompeian graffiti dated 79AD.

A wonderfully exhaustive treatment of this relic of ancient times.

Addendum. See the wide-ranging discussion of the use of ampersands in poetry going on at Dave Bonta's Via Negativa.

EVERY WAY BUT ONE.

I've just discovered another language blog, Every Way but One, authored by Russell: "Student of linguistics. Student in Japan." There's a lot of good material about Japan and the Japanese language; I was particularly taken with the post English Readings for (Japanese) Chinese Characters, which describes a truly weird onomastic development:

The original name for [an army base in Miyazaki Prefecture] was pronounced shin-den-baru (new-paddy-field). But the current pronunciation is nyuu-ta-baru. That is, the first character, which means new, is now being pronounced with the (Japanese rendition of the) English word. (Oh, and for some other reason the second character now has a native Japanese reading instead of a Chinese reading...not sure why that is - generally the S[ino-]J[apanese] readings go just as fine with foreign words as they do with other SJ morphemes).

ONLINE SANSKRIT DICTIONARY.

The Online Sanskrit Dictionary "cannot be a substitute for a good printed Sanskrit-English dictionary. However, we anticipate this to aid a student of Sanskrit in the on-line world." I can't vouch for its accuracy (and the quality of the English in the introduction doesn't inspire confidence), but it's a handy quick reference. (Via Incoming Signals.)

HOW TO READ A TRANSLATION.

Lawrence Venuti has a good essay, "How to Read a Translation," in the July Words Without Borders.

The foreign language is the first thing to go, the very sound and order of the words, and along with them all the resonance and allusiveness that they carry for the native reader. Simultaneously, merely by choosing words from another language, the translator adds an entirely new set of resonances and allusions designed to imitate the foreign text while making it comprehensible to a culturally different reader. These additional meanings may occasionally result from an actual insertion for clarity. But they in fact inhere in every choice that the translator makes, even when the translation sticks closely to the foreign words and conforms to current dictionary definitions. The translator must somehow control the unavoidable release of meanings that work only in the translating language. Apart from threatening to derail the project of imitation, these meanings always risk transforming what is foreign into something too familiar or simply irrelevant. The loss in translation remains invisible to any reader who doesn’t undertake a careful comparison to the foreign text—i.e., most of us. The gain is everywhere apparent, although only if the reader looks.

But usually we don’t look. Publishers, copy editors, reviewers have trained us, in effect, to value translations with the utmost fluency, an easy readability that makes them appear untranslated, giving the illusory impression that we are reading the original. We typically become aware of the translation only when we run across a bump on its surface, an unfamiliar word, an error in usage, a confused meaning that may seem unintentionally comical...

There are telling examples from Margaret Jull Costa’s version of The Man of Feeling by the Spanish novelist Javier Marías as well as other translations, and some more general remarks like the following:

Some languages and literatures are particularly undertranslated today. Take Arabic. Little Arabic writing is available in English, much less than Hebrew writing, for instance, undermining any effort to gauge the cultural impact of social and political developments in the Middle East. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz deserves to be ranked among the most fascinating Arabic writers, but to regard him as the literary spokesman for the Arab world is undoubtedly a mistake. Mahfouz should be read alongside his countryman Abdel Hakim Qasim, whose Rites of Assent (translated by Peter Theroux) combines modernist techniques with Qur’anic allusions to interrogate Islamic fundamentalism, the forced conversion of an Egyptian Copt under the aegis of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qasim might then be juxtaposed to Sayed Kashua, whose Hebrew novel Dancing Arabs (in Miriam Shlesinger’s translation) incisively depicts the identity crisis of an Arab Israeli who, although raised in a family of militant anti-Zionists, tries to pass among Jews. Sometimes, to gain a broader view of the cultural situations that translation leaves behind, a reader must venture into neighboring languages and territories.

Via wood s lot.

ETYMOLOGIC.

The creators of Etymologic! call it "the toughest word game on the web," and for all I know they may be right.

In this etymology game you'll be presented with 10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to solve; in each case the word or phrase is highlighted in bold, and a number of possible answers will be presented. You need to choose the correct answer to score a point for that question. Beware! The false answers will often also seem quite plausible, and some of the true answers are hard to believe, but we have documentation!

I was pretty smug after the first two, which gave me no trouble, but the next two stumped me, and I sweated out my 8/10. Mind you, I'm not sure they're always on firm ground with their etymologies, but the quibbles are minor; if you like this sort of thing, you'll love this. I got it from Avva, who got 10 out of 10 on his first try, damn him; furthermore, in his comment thread someone (in the course of an argument about the supposed origin of French bistro(t) from Russian bystro 'quickly') linked to the Trésor de la langue française informatisé (TLF), a fantastic resource for French lexicography.

PHIN.

PhiN. Philologie im Netz "is a journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies."

It publishes articles and reviews within an interdisciplinary framework. The PhiN "Forum" is open to shorter statements, discussions, dialogues, and interviews. Contributions are welcome from all areas of the field. PhiN is published on the internet four times a year, in January, April, July, and October. Viewing, downloading, or printing material from PhiN issues is free... Contributions are accepted generally in English, French, German, and Spanish. All articles should be preceeded by a short (10 lines) abstract in English.

In practice almost all articles seem to be in German (and often without an abstract), but there is interesting material in English, like Ferid Chekili's "The Position of the Postverbal Subject and Agreement Asymmetries in Arabic." (Via wood s lot.)

WORDS AT THE CBC.

The CBC website has a section called Words: Woe & Wonder that contains lively and sensible essays on all sorts of language-related issues, for instance an excellent discussion of why many news organizations prefer to refer to the ex-dictator of Iraq as "Saddam" rather than "Hussein" (short answer: "Hussein" is the first name of the man's father, not a family name, and virtually everyone in Iraq knows him as "Saddam" and not "Hussein"). The most recent is Quibbling over Quotes, which begins by defending the shorter noun "quote" (just as good as "quotation," but used in different contexts) and continues with various related matters; I especially liked their catching the NY Times (my favorite whipping boy) in an incorrect correction:

When Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969, everyone back on Earth heard the following crackle over their televisions and radios:

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

...When Armstrong got back home and saw the mission transcript (as well as some newspaper and magazine coverage of his adventure), he told reporters that he had been misquoted.

NASA concluded the "a" got lost in atmospheric static, the official record was changed and many news organizations ran a correction, including the New York Times on page 20 of its July 31, 1969, edition. After pointing out that Armstrong had requested the revision, the paper embraced the extra word without qualification: "Inserting the omitted article makes a slight but significant change in the meaning of Mr. Armstrong's words, which should read: 'That's one small step for a man, one giant step for mankind.'"

Wait a minute. Small step, giant step? Is this right? Nope. It turns out that while publishing a five-paragraph correction outlining why an "a" was being added to a line that will be cited for generations, the Times turned "giant leap" into "giant step" by mistake. A slight stumble, to some. An astronomical bungle, to others.

Via MetaFilter.

GREEKING HARRY POTTER.

I wouldn't normally bother to note the translation of the first Harry Potter book into Greek, but the translator has written an interesting essay describing how he did it.

My intention was to recreate a version of the book which would make sense to a Greek from any era up to the 4th century AD who had managed by some magical process (such as would only be taught only to very advanced students at Hogwarts!) to reach the 21st century. Objects and ideas would be unfamiliar - but once he'd got used to his new surroundings, the book would make complete sense. So I thought it was very important to have this time-travelling Greek in mind at all times, and continually ask myself "would that have any meaning for him? what would he make of that?" In other words a cultural transposition is involved, not just finding the words.

Courtesy of Tom Phillips.

HIATUS.

Language hat is going to spend the next week in California. Regular blogging will resume July 18; in the interim, I urge you to visit the excellent sites blogrolled at right, and (for those of you in climates resembling that of New York) drink plenty of fluids and stay in the shade.

Update. Well, I'm back, after a stay in sunny Santa Barbara (my 89-year-old dad is doing reasonably well, thanks), a return flight that ran into momentary turbulence causing me to splash some wine on my wife's jumper (the airline offered to pay for the cleaning), a tension-racked ride on the express bus to Grand Central (we arrived just in time to catch the 11:02 and avoid an hour's wait for the midnight train), and a taxi to the house around 12:30 this morning (fortunately our bodies, still on Pacific time, thought it was only 9:30). People were speaking Russian and French, two of my favorite languages, on the plane, so I was happy, and it had rained here during the week we were gone, so my wife the gardener was happy. And here I am.

PHILOLOGOS

Once again aldiboronti, in his usual place of business at Wordorigins, comes up with a great link: the Philologos column at the Forward. Aldi cites the column on the Hebrew word for 'ladybug,' parat Moshe rabbenu (literally 'Moses' cow'), which quotes quite a few European terms for that useful insect (mangling the Russian bozh'ya korovka as bozha kapovka, so use with caution), and I enjoyed the detailed investigation of the etymology of Yiddish shmergl 'emery,' which traces it back to Latin smericulum and Greek smaragdos 'emerald'; I think the bald assertion that the latter is borrowed from Sanskrit marakata goes beyond the evidence, but this is, after all, a newspaper column, not a linguistic journal. Most enjoyable.

GOTHAM.

A story by David Dunlap in today's NY Times [link improved thanks to Des] discusses the Gotham typeface used for the Freedom Tower cornerstone:

It could have been imperial Trajan. Or elegant Bodoni. Or generic Helvetica. But the search for the ideal typeface to be inscribed on the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site ended simply, in Gotham.

Gov. George E. Pataki said in his Fourth of July cornerstone speech that the 20-ton block came from the Adirondacks, "the bedrock of our state." He did not note that its 26 words were set in a typeface steeped in local origin, developed four years ago at the Hoefler Type Foundry in the Cable Building, at Broadway and Houston Street, by Tobias Frere-Jones, a native New Yorker.

The typeface, Gotham, deliberately evokes the blocky, no-nonsense, unselfconscious architectural lettering that dominated the streetscape from the 1930's through the 1960's in building names, neon signs, hand-lettered advertisements and lithographed posters.

Its chief inspiration, in fact, were the letters spelling out PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL over the terminal's Eighth Avenue doors. So the circle comes to a close, since the trade center site is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey...

Michael Gericke, a partner in the Pentagram studio, which designed the cornerstone with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects of the Freedom Tower, said Gotham "didn't look like something that was created yesterday and would be gone tomorrow."

"It seems like it's part of the larger urban environment," he said. "It seems, in a way, that it's always been there."

Another Pentagram partner, Michael Bierut, likened Gotham to the Manhattan street grid. "It doesn't show individual authorship," he said, "but it shows a character you wouldn't find anywhere else."

The letters that are Gotham's progenitors—BAR, PIER 40, DINER, PRIMARY SCHOOL 142—appear almost as if they had not been designed at all. The strokes have a uniform width. The forms, like the circular O's, seem to have been dictated by pure geometry. There are no embellishments like serifs and spurs, barbs and beaks.

Mr. Frere-Jones, 33, who grew up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and Brooklyn Heights, found himself drawn to these forms. And he had the chance to explore them in 2000, when Hoefler was commissioned by GQ magazine to design a new font. In 2002, after a period in which GQ had the exclusive right to use Gotham, it was made more widely available. It now comes in 16 varieties...

Ann Harakawa, a principal in the Two Twelve Associates design firm, whose office at 90 West Street was destroyed on 9/11, said the typeface was simple, legible and, given its New York provenance, very apt. "The idea of it being slightly ambiguous is interesting," she said, "because no one has any idea of what's going to come."

TRANSLATING CURSES.

Avva has an enlightening discussion (in Russian) of the difficulties involved in translating English bad language into Russian; his basic complaint is that when it's done at all (Russian official culture is much more prudish than American) it's done too literally. His suggestion is that fuck (as an expletive) and fucking (in its common use as a general modifier: "that fucking [cat/movie/refrigerator/whatever]") should be replaced by the equally common blyad' (literally 'whore'), inserted in the nearest available slot in the sentence. He feels, and I agree, that the lack of grammatical and semantic equivalence is more than made up for by comparable power and ubiquity.

A commenter suggested the adjective form blyadskii to replace fucking, prompting Avva to produce this finely honed lexicographical analysis:

It can work, but not very often. "Fucking [whatever]" often conveys merely a feeling of irritation and dissatisfaction, not necessarily strongly focused on an object. "Blyadskii [whatever]," it seems to me, lays more stress on the blyadskii (inherently bad) nature of the given object. Blyadskii is a more single-purpose and sharply negative word. This is probably connected with the fact that fucking can have a neutral or even a positive sense ("Gotta love this fucking town, man!"). Blyad'/blya too can be used in relation to neutral or even positive objects/people, simply as reinforcement, to show the heat of one's emotion, or even as a "parasite word" [at the moment, can't think how to properly translate slovo-parazit; the sense is something like 'filler']. This is not the case with blyadskii.

Russian translators take note.

MEYERS ONLINE.

Meyers Konversations-Lexikon was a German encyclopaedia comparable to the Britannica, and the entirety of the fourth edition (1888-1889) is online, all 16 volumes and 16,000 pages. You can browse the volumes here or use the search page. For users of German, this is a great resource.

RUSSIAN LEGACY.

The Russian Legacy website ("We seek to preserve and promote the study of Russian history, culture and language") has a poetry section with pages for a couple dozen poets, each having poems in facing Russian and English versions. (Via wood s lot.)

LINGUISTIC ATLAS OF THE WORLD.

The Linguistic Atlas of the World is a clever idea: each country is labeled with its name in its own language and writing system. I've already found one glitch (on the Asia map, Kazakhstan is labeled "Qazaq" rather than Qazaqstan, the official name being Qazaqstan Respublikasy), so I wouldn't use it to settle bets, but it's a lot of fun. (Via AskMetaFilter.)

ARABIC BY VIDEO GAME.

An article by Margaret Wertheim in today's NY Times describes a program for teaching soldiers to speak Arabic by playing a video game, an excellent idea:

In a dusty valley in southern Lebanon, "Sgt. John Smith" of the Special Forces scans the scene in front of him. Ahead is a village known as Talle. His immediate mission: to find out who the local headman is and make his way to that house.

All discussions with the villagers will have to be conducted in Arabic, and Sergeant Smith must comport himself with the utmost awareness of local customs so as not to arouse hostility. If successful, he will be paving the way for the rest of his unit to begin reconstruction work in the village.

Sergeant Smith is not a real soldier, but the leading character in a video game being developed at the University of Southern California's School of Engineering as a tool for teaching soldiers to speak Arabic. Both the game's environment and the characters who populate it have a high degree of realism, in an effort to simulate the kinds of situations troops will face in the Middle East.

It sounds like an excellent idea, and the article does a good job of describing the system (and some of the issues that come up: "Dr. Johnson noted that one of the first things many users have to learn is simply to say thank you. 'Most video gamers are not used to saying thank you in the context of a game,' he said"). But a couple of things struck me, one by its strangeness and the other by its [semi-]idiocy. The sentence after the introduction quoted above reads: "Talle is modeled on an actual Lebanese village, while the game's characters are driven by artificial-intelligence software that enables them to behave autonomously and react realistically to Sergeant Smith." A Lebanese village? As the article later says, "Arabic dialects differ considerably by region," and the Arabic of Lebanon is very different from that of Iraq, which would presumably be of more use in the, um, current situation.

[[cy? After describing the basics of the program, the article cautiously continues: "No one is going to be able to read Omar Khayyam after this training..." Now, I can't be quite as scathing as I'd like to be, because Omar did, in fact, write many of his works on mathematics and physics in Arabic. But you know and I know that Ms Wertheim wasn't thinking of those works, of whose existence I'll bet a nickel she's blissfully unaware. To the English-speaking world, Omar Khayyam is the author of the Rubaiyat, and those poems are written in Persian. So no, no one is going to be able to read Omar Khayyam after this training, no matter how good it is. [A commenter points out that Ms Wertheim has written books on mathematics and physics and thus is probably in fact aware, whether blissfully or not, that Omar wrote in Arabic. Fair point. But it's still dumb to use his name in this context, because hardly anyone who reads the article will associate him with anything but the poetry. Hmph.]

SUDA/SUIDAS.

For as long as I've been interested in the classics (which is a very long time), I've been intrigued by the medieval compilation known traditionally as "Suidas" but more properly, apparently, as the Suda (which is apparently a Latin word for 'fortress'); I kept seeing it quoted for bits of arcane information and points of grammar. Now I discover (thanks to the terrier-like industry of aldiboronti at Wordorigins) that it's been online since January 1998, with more and more of its entries translated and annotated by its corps of volunteers. The About page says:

Although the Suda defies easy categorization it is without question one of the most remarkable extant of Byzantine Greek scholarship. The Suda was compiled probably in the latter half of the tenth century and certainly no later than 1000 CE, but its exact date is unknown, as is the identity of its compiler or compilers. Even the exact meaning of its title is obscure; it now seems most likely that suda is actually a Latin loan-word meaning "fortress," a fitting title for a work whose purpose was to preserve and protect samples of ancient learning and literature. This was one of the primary goals of Byzantine scholarship in the tenth century; rather than creating new knowledge and areas of study, the scholars of that era labored to preserve the legacy of the past, and the Suda is one of the culminating achievements of "the encyclopedism of the tenth century." Now, after yet another millennium has passed, we are revisiting the still-valuable work of these anonymous Byzantine scholars and preparing it for new media and new centuries of readers.

The Suda's more than thirty thousand entries of names, terms, and phrases are arranged in simple alphabetical order, so that grammatical points and philosophical concepts intermingle with biographies of ancient authors and quotations from ancient texts. According to N. G. Wilson, the Suda represents a "significant stage in the evolution of this type of reference book," since it "incorporates a mass of articles that are intended to be informative rather than lexicographical, and the result is a cross between a dictionary and an encyclopedia..."

Despite its importance, the Suda has never been translated into a modern language. This means that access to this crucial source of information on the ancient world has been effectively limited to those who know ancient Greek...

However, many of the entries in the Suda would be very difficult for non-specialists to understand, even in translation. This is where the need for annotation comes into play. Hypertextual glosses helps students who are unfamiliar with such direct evidence properly to contextualize it, while their direct confrontation with a tenth-century view of the ancient world provides insight into the processes and preconceptions of classical scholarship and the methods and materials of modern scholars' interpretations.

Here's an example of an entry whose bare four words of original text would be almost useless without the annotation:

Headword: Aiolopôlos
Adler number: alphaiota,251
Translated headword: with piebald (or swift-circling) ponies
Vetting Status: high
Translation:
    Having multicoloured horses.
Greek Original:
    Aiolopôlos: poikilous hippous echôn.
Note:

This epithet is used only of the Phrygians (Homer, Iliad 3.185 = 2.798a, a papyrus fragment, and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 137). They were famous for their horses, as was, of course, the Trojan plain, where they were a gift of Zeus in payment for Ganymede, cf. E. Delebecque, Le Cheval dans l’Iliade (Paris,1951) esp. 27-30. In the Iliad the ill-fated Asius of Arisbe (Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos 1.1398-1400) was inordinately proud of his horses and chariot (12.96-173, 13.384-401), as was the Trojan Pandarus (5.192-204). We cannot tell which of their possible characteristics is described by this compound adjective: they were piebald in colour or some other variegation; they were good at turning, i.e. exceptionally nimble in circling the enemy (cf. the native Americans in the Indian Wars); their motion in pulling the chariot was undulant; the undulating motion of their galloping feet was particularly swift; a mass of horses was a mass of different colours. On a Linear B tablet from Cnossos either a stallion or a bull is named a3-wo-ro, probably “Piebald” or “Roan” from his colour (cf. alphaiota 252 note). See alphaiota 253 for these meanings of ai)o/los.
Keywords: daily life; definition; epic; geography; zoology
Translated by: Robert Dyer on 27 February 2003@05:44:03.
Vetted by:
David Whitehead (added keyword; cosmetics) on 27 February 2003@08:14:22

Incidentally, in my search for the putative Latin word meaning 'fortress' I ran across a page (the glossary to a History of Venice by Tommaso Salmon Scozzese) that gives 18th-century Italian proper nouns, including the equivalents of Greek place names (one of which is "Souda, fortress on a little islet not far from Canea," which is why it turned up in my search)—a serendipitous pleasure for a lover of alternate place names like myself.

CARL RAKOSI.

Seeing Michael Carlson's Guardian obituary of Carl Rakosi, who died June 25, linked at wood s lot reminded me that I somehow let his passing go unremarked here, and I thought I'd remedy that now. The first paragraph of the obit situates him well:

Only one degree of separation links Carl Rakosi, who has died aged 100, with the poets of Victorian England, and that link is Ezra Pound. Rakosi made his mark in the Objectivist issue of Poetry magazine, in 1931, as a Pound protégé. But Rakosi and his fellow poets, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky, were already moving past Pound's modernism, which seemed to them almost as moribund as the tradition it was trying to overthrow.

(I note with sadness the omission of Lorine Niedecker among those names, where she certainly belongs; I am also surprised to learn that Rakosi legally changed his name to the less "ethnic-sounding" Callman Rawley after the publication of his first book in 1941, and the obit published in his home-town paper, the Star-Tribune, is titled "Callman Rawley, poet, dies"—if I'd opened up the paper and seen that, I'd have had no idea who they were talking about.)

One of my valued possessions is a copy of that 1941 Selected Poems (New Directions), from which I will quote a short poem, "To My First Born":

I felt your foot below your mother's breast
and said, "I am your provider,
let us get to know each other.
You have made me write a poem
and wake the neighbors with my shouting
until they cry, 'What does he
think he is, the god of love'?"

(Incidentally, the last page of the book mentions, among other forthcoming publications, A New Group of Poems by John Berryman, Selected Passages from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, The Dry Season by Malcolm Cowley, A New Group of Poems by Dylan Thomas, An Anthology of Modern Mexican Poetry, Translations from the Russian of Boris Pasternak, Some Poems of Robert Herrick, A New Group of Poems by Robert Penn Warren, and Translations from Pushkin and Lermontov by Vladimir Nabokov. It's easy to forget how important James Laughlin was to American culture.)

Shanna Compton, in her post "So long, Carl Rakosi," quotes a longer poem, "A Journey Away," which I highly recommend; the third part begins:

You were traveling through Delos
when the end came.
On the esplanade at Cannes
the awnings suddenly
went black before me.
I was carried to the belvedere
of Villa Policastro.
In the evening
in the sight of blood and bandages
I lay there like a dressed fowl...

Now, this being Languagehat, I'll have to talk about his name, which is Hungarian in origin; the Hungarians spell it Rákosi and pronounce it RAH-koh-shee. (And that's how I pronounce it to myself, since I don't know how the poet said it; if any of my readers do, I beg them to let me know in the comments.) It's an adjective derived from the name of the Rákospatak (Rákos Brook), which flows through Pest into the Danube and was formerly surrounded by open land. (My 1905 Baedeker's Austria-Hungary says "The Hungarian diets from the 10th to the 14th cent. were held in the open air in the Rákosfeld, an extensive plain to the N. of the town, where 100,000 men are said frequently to have assembled on these occasions"; note the ambiguity introduced by the absurd attempt to avoid splitting the infinitive.) It is named for the crayfish (rák) that inhabited it; rák is a 14th-century borrowing from Slavic rak (of uncertain etymology), and both words also mean 'cancer' (from Latin cancer, whose primary meaning is 'crab').

I'll end, for no particular reason, with this quote from János Arany's mid-19th-century epic poem Toldi: "Toward nightfall he saw the Castle of Buda, and before the sun sank he reached the famous and glorious fields of Rákos."

MODERNIZING ARABIC.

Xavier of Buscaraons sent me a link to a brief but interesting post at kaleboel:

Cherif El-Shoubashy, first under-secretary for foreign cultural relations and president of the Cairo International Film Festival, has published a book called something like Long Live Arabic, Down With Sibawayh, Sibawayh being the Persian, Basra-trained linguist who, in al-Kitab, provided Arabic grammar with its tablets of stone. That was back in the eighth century, and El-Shoubashy's point is that since the written language has changed considerably since then, since first millennium grammar is offputting to students, and since 81% of Muslims don't speak Arabic anyway, it would be rational to contemplate reform.

I'm guessing the proposal is unlikely to go anywhere; at any rate, there's more available (if you read Spanish) here.

FOOLSCAP.

A NY Times essay by John F. Burns (in today's "Week in Review" section) includes the following sentence/paragraph:

Before the court, at that instant, 25 years almost to the week after he seized power in Baghdad, stood Saddam Hussein al-Majid al-Tikriti, the man who awarded himself titles of honor and glory to fill a foolscap page; the man who launched, or in some measure provoked, three disastrous wars; the man whose legacy runs to countless mass graves, and to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, his very name synonymous, across much of the world, with a totalitarianism that turned the Iraqi state into a machinery of torture and death.

Now, that's quite a parade of indignant rhetoric, but what caught my attention was foolscap and the phrase that contains it: "...who awarded himself titles of honor and glory to fill a foolscap page." To me, this means unequivocally that he awarded himself those titles in order to fill up a literal foolscap page, a "long folio writing- or printing-paper" in the words of the OED, which seems improbable, on grounds of both motivation and culture (do they really use foolscap in Iraq?). I suppose you can make the assumption that he meant to write (or did write, and was betrayed by editorial or typographical gremlins) "enough titles... to fill a foolscap page," but still, why foolscap? I can only conclude that Saddam's record of war, butchery, and torture wasn't enough for Burns, who felt he had to get a little dig in by implying the man was a fool to boot. I would remind him that a telling restraint is generally more powerful than scattershot (and purely etymological) insults.

In case you're wondering, yes, foolscap (the paper) is derived from the fool's headgear; the OED's definition 2 is "The device of a 'fool's cap' used as a watermark for paper," and definition 3 (the "long folio" one quoted above) goes on to say "A document of 1714, shown to us by Mr. R. B. Prosser, is written on paper bearing the fool's cap watermark."

SYLLABLES.

Des von Bladet has an interesting and (as always) amusing meditation on the nature of syllables and the counting thereof and what it all adds up to ("what have you accomplished that is distinguishable from not having accomplished anything?"). If the sentence "A word like ts'ktskwts' 'he arrived' could be analyzed as having no syllables (since it has no vowels), or up to 5 or 6, depending on whether obstruents are considered syllabic and whether all consonants are analyzed as part of the syllable" makes your blood race faster, by all means go read the rest.

ETYMOLOGIE.

Or, to give the site its full name, Etymologie, Étymologie, Etymology / __ Welt, World, Le Monde / Sprachen der Länder. It's a collection of language links, with descriptions in German or English, followed by a (very incomplete) list of countries and their languages. I'm too bushed to investigate it much, having spent the day traipsing around Manhattan and the Met (last weekend of the Byzantine exhibition) with PF and a mutual friend (and much of the evening rooting on the Mets against the Yankees), but it looks worthwhile.

Incidentally, I'd like to thank everyone who wished me a happy birthday. My wife gave me a much-needed new Panama (as well as cooking me a delicious curry dinner); one of these days I really have to get around to adding pictures to my Hats page. And next Saturday I'll be heading to California for my dad's birthday (his 89th -- way to go, Dad!), so there will be a week's hiatus, just like last year. You have been warned.

FROM BEE TO GAZETTE.

Tatyana, an always welcome contributor here at LH, has sent me a link to a very funny discussion (in Russian) of the decline of Russian newspaper names, from the lively variety of the early days (eg, Severnaya pchela 'Northern Bee') to the monotony of today's News and Gazette (and of course the omnipresent Pravda 'Truth') in every town. The author, Olga Lukas, compares this to a class she was in once with three Olyas (besides herself) and two Smirnovs, in which the poor physics teacher would say "Smirnov to the blackboard -- no, not that one, not Masha but Olya -- not that Olya, dammit, not Kuznetsova, the other one..." There was also a girl with the unique name of Nurlana, admired for her unordinariness. "It would be better if there were more Nurlanas among newspapers, and fewer Olyas." And there's a great riff on a drunk locating himself by his town paper that I'm not even going to try to reproduce.

KING GUBU.

In a sort of raucous melange of my recent posts Braw and witty (the Scotticizing of Aristophanes) and Patapoufs! Anthropophages! (the comic use of French puns and insults), I bring you King Gubu, the Irishization by Tom Quinn of Alfred Jarry's scandalous 1896 play Ubu Roi, whose famous opening exclamation "Merdre!" and the following lines are rendered:

Mister Gubu - Gobshites!

Missus Gubu - Oh, would you ever whist with yur Gubu-ulations, Mister Gubu, ya big eejit ya!

Mister Gubu - Ooh! Ooh! Careful now! Don't have me to do ya in now, Missus Gubu!

Missus Gubu - It isn't me ya should be doin' in, Mister Gubu, it's another fellow altogether.

Mister Gubu - Green shite, m'dam, I don't understand a word yur saying.

Braw and witty stuff, to be sure! (Via wood s lot.)