ANOTHER HIATUS.

I know, I know, I just took a week off, but I'm going to do it again. I have some vacation time to use up, and the Republican convention seemed an excellent time to get out of town. So I'm going to Montreal tomorrow, spurred by Beth's mouth-watering reports on her visits there. I may visit an internet cafe, but don't expect to hear from me until next weekend. Explore the blogroll and archives and talk amongst yourselves while I see whether my rusty Parisian French is up to the challenge of québécois. A bientôt!

POLITICAL SLANG.

Grant Barrett, known to LH readers not only for Double-Tongued Word Wrester but for the splendid language puzzle he recently provided, has come out with a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in politics, Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang. It has up-to-the-minute terms like belligerati 'any belligerent person or group; (hence) as a group, pro-war commentators' (first used, apparently, by "Gordon" on Usenet on Mar. 16, 2000 with the quirky spelling belligeratti; it has since, inevitably, become the name of a blog), but also lovingly chronicles long-forgotten terms like blue-light 'a New England Federalist opposed to the War of 1812' and leg treasurer 'one who flees with stolen government funds':

1839 Ohio Repository (Canton) (Aug. 29) 2: Another Leg Treasurer, Owen Hamlin, entrusted by Mr. Dixon, Rail Road Commissioner, with a check for $11,600 on the State bank of Illinois, collected the money and Swartwouted.

Then there are words that go back into what (for these United States) can be considered the mists of antiquity and are still in circulation, such as war hawk, used in a high-Tory London periodical called The Rehearsal in 1708 and by Thomas Jefferson in a 1798 letter to Madison ("At present, the war hawks talk of septembrizing...") and still going strong in 1999 ("the policy wonk who would become the administration's fierce war hawk"). Furthermore, it has tasty and informative introductory essays on "Inside Baseball," "The -Gate to Scandal" (which ends with a list of dozens of such formations, from Abdulgate to Zippergate), "The Blogistan Lexicon," and other word-spawning phenomena.

(The Christian Science Monitor sidebar "Yo, vote!" quotes a selection of definitions from the book.)

From the Republican convention that begins tomorrow through the election in November, there's going to be a lot of politics to deal with, and this is the ideal lexicographical companion as you try to sort it all out. Well done, Grant!

WE HAVE NOT THE TIME.

"We have stopped reading, we have not the time. Our mind is solicited simultaneously from too many sides: it has to be spoken to quickly as it passes by. But there are things that cannot be said or understood in such haste, and these are the most important things for man. This accelerated movement, which makes coherent thought impossible, may alone be sufficient to weaken, and in the long run utterly to destroy, human reason."

That was said by Félicité Robert de Lamennais in his Mélanges religieux et philosophiques. In 1819.

(From whiskey river, courtesy of wood s lot.)

The original:

On ne lit plus, on n'a plus le temps. L'esprit est appelé à la fois de trop de côtés; il faut lui parler vite où il passe. Mais il y a des choses qui ne peuvent être dites, ni comprises si vite, et ce sont les plus importantes pour l'homme. Cette accélération de mouvement qui ne permet de rien enchaîner, de rien méditer, suffirait seule pour affaiblir et, à la longue, pour détruire entièrement la raison humaine.

DON'T FORGET PERRING'S HATS.

Peter Riis, proprietor of The New Companion and a "shameless and hardened belletrist," noticed the recent renaissance of hat-related posts here and sent me a link to a glorious advertisement he had posted a couple of years ago:

THE PRICE OF FRIENDSHIP.

"P ray observe me," quoth Brummel, while sipping his wine,
"E ver banish that horrible skullcap of thine.
R eform altogether that villainous Tile,
R esembling a bread-pan in fashion and style.
I must cut ye, egad! tho' feel hurt and all that--
N ever know any man in an infamous hat,
G et a chapeau of PERRING and place on thy sconce,
S uch a hat as can rivet my friendship at once.

"H e alone can supply, since old Dolman is dead,
A covering fit for a gentleman's head."
T hen repair to the Strand, only PERRING can show
S uch perfection of fashion, with prices so low.

8 to one are long odds, but I'll bet it that I
5 hundred new shapes can from PERRING supply.

S uiting contour and feature, complexion and height,
T he young and adult, the stout and the slight,
R emember his Hats, though resisting the weather,
A re as light as the Plume of an eider-down feather,
N o where else can ONE GUINEA such Beavers command,
D on't forget, PERRING's HATS, then, of 85, STRAND.

--From Leigh Hunt's London Journal, July 2, 1834.

Next time I am in London, I shall make sure to visit number 85, Strand, to acquire a chapeau for my sconce. If I am to be a Regency buck, I must endeavour to look the part.

NAME TABOOS.

If you've ever wondered how name taboos (refusing to say the name, or a word used in the name, of a deceased person) work in practice, read the illuminating post by Claire of Angargoon on the subject.

For Bardi people, the taboo is purely a respect issue and the length of time the name is tabooed depends on how close the relative was and how much respect. For example, when I was there in 2001 an old person died. The people I was working with didn't like her very much, and they were saying her name even before the funeral, in private. On the other hand, NI's brother had died in 1990 and she still wouldn't say his name, likewise her younger son who'd died in a car accident in 1994. The son's name was Douglas and at the time we were working on materials recorded by the missionary Wilf Douglas in the 1940s. I forgot to call him "Wilf the missionary" at one point and used his full name and NI looked like she'd been hit...

PIRAHA UPDATE.

Following up on the controversy discussed here, Geoff Pullum has posted (at Language Log) an extremely interesting letter he received from Dan Everett, who wrote the first full description of the Pirahã language (published in 1986). Geoff asked him to respond to "recent suggestions to the effect that Pirahã is just too strange to be true"; Everett says "It took me 27 years to work up the courage to say these things and I am still called a 'Borgesian fantasist' (and have been called much simpler things, like 'stupid')" and adds that linguists who were initially very skeptical came to agree with him after studying the language and people. His letter ends:

My own view then is that the case of Pirahã illustrates, perhaps as well as any example ever discussed in the literature, the kind of bi-directional causal relationship between language and culture that Boas and Sapir would have expected us to find.

There is a problem for universal grammar in all this, though. That is the non-trivial one of setting the boundary between culture, grammar, and cognition in light of examples like this where previous boundary lines have been shown to be potentially illusory.

I just left the Pirahãs a few days ago. They are oblivious to all of this attention, yet doing well as a people. However, I have heard the very disturbing news that an electric power company is thinking of using their river, the Maici, to generate power in some way. If any outside company enters their reserve (which I helped demarcate, with support from Cultural Survival, 20 years ago), this could be the end of the Pirahã people. So I hope that this attention on them right now can be used to generate some support for their survival. Examples like Pirahã illustrate very clearly the loss inherent to knowledge of our species, if such a language were to cease to exist without having been studied. It also shows, I hope, that some studies take a LONG time, perhaps the length of an entire career.

There are also links to drawings and a map.

ARMENIAN POETRY.

ArmenianHouse.org has a page on Armenian poetry: "Armenian Poetry and Armenian poets — works and biographies. Foreign poets about Armenia and Armenians." Unfortunately, most of the poems are only in Russian and sometimes Armenian, but there is a link to a page of Armenian poetry in translation. (Thanks to P. Kerim Friedman for the link.)

CHINESE "DIALECTS" AND WRITING.

There's an interesting thread at The Peking Duck that takes off from an article about "vanishing dialects and greater adoption of putonghua" and turns into a discussion of whether there is in fact a unified writing system in China. (My thanks for the link to afrophile, whose Africa-oriented blog is an excellent place to go for information and links about Darfur and other areas in the news.)

PUZZLE.

Grant Barrett sends along the following linguistic puzzler:

What language is this? Note that it is transcribed accurately from a first-quality source. There are no characters, words, or diacritics missing.

Mons. Tardini, ki sar sepisanya, sar un prelatyo ridela dal manyeros somyes epe bruskas, dal abord simpla e franka. Il pertenar al vatikana diplomatio dep 1938 e it derkar pratike dep is anyos, prime in kolabor kon Mons. Montini, doe sola dep lo namado d etun al arciveskado de Milan.

Grant is interested in the way people try to figure it out, so if you've got a reason for your guess, spell it out. If you know the answer for sure, please e-mail me rather than putting it in the comments; after someone has guessed correctly or I've decided to put an end to the torment, I'll post your name or moniker; let me know how you wish to be credited.

Update. We have a winner! Scott Martens writes: "It's Neo, an artificial language invented in the 30's by Arturo Alfandari." Well done, Scott, and you win a year's free subscription to Languagehat!

MORE HATS.

Hold onto Your Hats!: An exhibition about the history and meaning of hats and other headwear in Canada. Everything from Protection and Practicality to Hat Lore, with a Reading List and Annotated Bibliography. (Via plep.)

SAINT WHO?

As a pendant to yesterday's name translation post, here's something that leaped out at me from George Packer's Letter from Athens in this week's New Yorker, which begins:

Omónia, in the heart of Athens, is a working-class district of six- and eight-story concrete high-rises built in the nineteen-sixties on the bones of old garden houses, in an enormous development scheme that Athenians now regret. Even with its streets festooned with colorful Olympic flags and its traffic thinned by newly constructed sections of the Athens metro, Omónia is dense and oppressive. This is where a good many of Greece’s new immigrants live or hang out—Albanians, South Asians, and, in the back streets and cafés around the Hotel Joker, off St. Konstantin Street, Iraqis.

In the first place, the accent on "Omónia" is strange, because he doesn't put accents on any other Greek names; later in the paragraph he refers to "Karaiskaki Stadium," not Karaiskáki. But what I want to talk about is "St. Konstantin Street." This is utterly bizarre. The normal way to render Greek "Odos Agiou Konstantinou" is "Agiou Konstantinou Street" (or, with nods to actual pronunciation, "Ayiou" and/or "Konstandinou"), which reproduces the Greek genitive form ('street of St. Constantine'). It's odd enough to want to translate the name (note that he doesn't translate Omónia to 'Concord'), but what's up with "St. Konstantin"? There's a Bulgarian resort called Sveti Konstantin that's sometimes called St. Konstantin in English, but why on earth would you translate Greek "Agios Konstantinos" into a Bulgarian form? In English, the only way to render the name of the Byzantine saint is St. Constantine. Where are those famous New Yorker fact checkers?

GOPNIK'S POINT.

Last week's New Yorker had a review article about World War One, "The Big One" (not online), by one of my favorite essayists, Adam Gopnik. I want to highlight one sentence that shows Gopnik's light touch with an allusion:

History does not offer lessons; its unique constellations of contingencies never repeat. But life does offer the same points, over and over again. A lesson is many-edged; a point has only one, but that one sharp.

This is a clever variation on Archilochus's line poll' oid' alopex, all' echinos hen mega 'The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one./ One good one' (Lattimore's translation), which served Isaiah Berlin (another of my favorite essayists) as the springboard for his famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox." I doubt many readers will have caught it, and it's certainly not necessary to understanding the passage; Gopnik must have done it primarily to please himself. I like that.

GOGUEULE.

Gôgueule: Google è walon (in Walloon). Pattavau l' twèle! (Thanks to David for the link.)

ON TRANSLATING NAMES 2

Last year I had a brief entry ON TRANSLATING NAMES (whose comment section degenerated lamentably and had to be closed); it's a subject that's long interested me, and I'm glad to report that there's a detailed discussion of it in a pair of articles (Part 1, Part 2) by Verónica Albin (a freelance medical translator and Lecturer in Spanish at the Center for the Study of Languages at Rice University). I'll quote a few paragraphs to whet your appetite:

Take the list of medieval European queens that another friend of mine compiled. The most popular names were Eleanor, Anne, Mary, and Elizabeth. The problem, he pointed out, was that these names changed according to what language you read them in. Thus a French queen named Aliénor first had to be distinguished from all the other French queens, past and present, who shared that name—and that was usually done by appending her provenance: Aliénor d'Aquitaine, for example. Yet in Spanish she would be known as Leonor de Aquitania, and in English as Eleanor of Aquitaine. To make matters worse, when she married Henry Plantagenet, she was then known as Eleanor of England—making it really hard for future generations to know that that Eleanor was not English, but French. If we take into consideration the fact that medieval queens, due largely to the perils of childbirth, rarely made it past their early twenties, and their husbands—who were likely named Henry, William, or Charles—remarried other Eleanors, Annes, Marys, and Elizabeths, we end up with a royal mess...

The use of articles is often thorny. We say the United States and the Netherlands in English; In Spanish, la Argentina (or, simply, Argentina) and El Uruguay (or Uruguay), but Chile never takes an article in Spanish; in Portuguese we say o Brasil and a Bolívia, but not o (or a) Portugal. Yet, for El Salvador, the article is always preserved in English as in Spanish. When Spanish-speakers travel, we keep the article for some countries, but not for others: al Japón, al Paraguay, al Senegal, but a México, a Portugal, a Chipre. There are no rules, just conventions. Ukrainians insist that their country be referred to in English as Ukraine, rather than the Ukraine, as a sign of their independence from Russia. It is worth noting that neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian language has a definite article. On the other hand, cities like la Habana, den Haag, o Rio de Janeiro, which have an article in their original names, may not have it when translated into another language...

The gender of cities can be more problematic. I remember seeing a sign in the French Riviera that read Le vieux Nice. As a Spanish-speaker who minored in Italian, I had always thought of Nice as feminine, especially since the Italian name of the city, Garibaldi's Nizza, is clearly feminine. In French, however, it is, at first glance, masculine. It was not until I checked in Le Petit Robert des noms propres that I realized it was deceptive, as the masculine adjective vieux modifies the implied quartier, not the city. It would seem that Nice is also feminine in French. I say 'seem' because according to Hanse-Blampain, Nouveau dictionnaire des difficultés du français moderne, in spite of the cited entry in Robert, there is no rule when it comes to the gender of cities. Under Genre des noms propres de villes, item 2, it states that authors often contradict themselves in a single article, but that the masculine seems to take precedence. It further adds that even amongst the best French writers one may find with equal frequency Rome est bâti and Rome est bâtie; Lyon est occupé and Lyon est occupée. It also states that when one refers not to the toponym, but to its inhabitants, the masculine is preferred, especially when used with tout: Tout Genève s'intéresse au débat; le Tout-Paris.

I noticed one mistake: "Texas also has Bexar County, a phonetic adaptation of the Spanish last name 'Béjar.'" Bexar isn't "a phonetic adaptation," it's the old Spanish spelling, with x for what is now written j (the same phenomenon is preserved in the name Mexico); if it were written phonetically, it would be Bear, because that's how Texans pronounce it.

I also take note of the following odd remark: "More than 20 years after the decree [mandating the use of pinyin for Chinese] no one calls Zhongguo by any other name than China..." Has anyone, even the Chinese government, seriously suggested we call the country Zhongguo in English? I certainly hope not.

(Via—who else?—aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

"PARADIGM SHIFTS" IN LINGUISTICS.

I've rarely been so happy to read a scientific paper as I was to read "A 'Paradigm Shift' in Finnish Linguistic Prehistory," by Merlijn de Smit. It's a takedown of one of the absurd nationalistic revampings of the "conventional paradigm" of linguistics (these people love Kuhn) that seem to be springing up everywhere these days, in this case "a hypothesis on the origins of the Finns and Finno-Ugric populations immensely popular, and raising great controversy, in Finland and Estonia." Like all such hypotheses, this involves throwing out the traditional ("old paradigm") family tree that is at the base of scientific historical linguistics and substituting various vague and untestable notions of relatedness and influence. I'll let you read the details in de Smit's lively paper, and will quote here only the following stirring paragraph, with every word of which I am in emphatic agreement:

Historical linguistics proper is not an empirical science in the sense that physics is - in which repeatable spatiotemporal occurrences are studied - but a discipline which strives to provide a picture of the past as plausible as possible, one in which the interpretations of the researcher play a vital role. This makes a strict methodology and in particular the conviction that it is historical reality we are after, not someone’s reality but reality itself, all the more necessary, since it is all too easy to slide in Von Däniken-like fantasism. Linguistic pseudoscience, invariably striving to paint a picture as glorious as possible of the past of whatever nation you belong to, has always existed, and always will - but during the last ten years in Finland and Estonia, it seems to have made a sustained push to the mainstream. One of the roots of the “new” paradigm in Finland and Estonia is epistemological relativism, the view of language families, and particularly the distinction between genetic transmission of languages and language contact, as epistemic constructs rather than existing in historical reality. And indeed, if “Finno-Ugric” is just a “theoretical construct” - why not talk about “Euro-languages” instead? Why indeed should one distinguish between recent loanwords from Swedish and shared etymological material with Hungarian if the game is no longer about testing hypotheses about linguistic prehistory, but about building up an appropriate national, historical identity in the age of the European Union? Thus, the methodology of historical linguistics has been abused to support an ahistorical, if not positively antihistorical, model of a Great and Glorious Past.

(Via wood s lot.)

WAR IS A FORCE.

I'm reading a powerful, important book that I can't with a clear conscience recommend. The book is War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges, a journalist who's been covering war zones since El Salvador in 1982 and has gotten fed up, and I have a hard time recommending it because reading it will give you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach and cause you to think even more poorly of humanity than you may already. You can read excerpts here and here and decide whether you're interested; I'll just present a few things of LH interest.

First is a striking collocation (from p. 77), the first time I've seen the alternate plurals of medium used in the same sentence, and nicely differentiated: "The destruction of culture sees the state or the group prosecuting the war take control of the two most important mediums that transmit information to the nation—the media and the schools." Since media has become specialized as "a collective term to refer not to the forms of communication themselves so much as the communities and institutions behind them" (AHD), the plural of the more general sense has to be mediums.

Here's a long quotation (pp. 33-34) about the artificial distinctions created between the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian "languages":

Spoken Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are of Slavic origin and have minor differences in syntax, pronunciation, and slang. The Croats and Bosnian Muslims use the Roman alphabet. The Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet. Otherwise the tongue they all speak is nearly the same.

Since there was, in essence, one language, the Serbs, Muslims and Croats each began to distort their own tongue to accommodate the myth of separateness. The Bosnian Muslims introduced Arabic words and Koranic expressions into the language. The Muslims during the war adopted words like shahid, or martyr, from Arabic, dropping the Serbian word junak. They began using Arabic expressions, like inshallah (God willing), marhaba (hello) and salam alekhum (peace be upon you).

Just as energetically the Croats swung the other way, dusting off words from the fifteenth century. The Croatian president at the time, Franjo Tudjman, took delight in inventing new terms. Croatian parliamentarians proposed passing a law that would levy fines and prison terms for those who use "words of foreign origin."

In Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, waiters and shop clerks would turn up their noses at patrons who used old "Serbian" phrases. The Education Ministry in Croatia told teachers to mark "non-Croatian" words on student papers as incorrect. The stampede to establish a "pure" Croatian language, led by a host of amateurs and politicians, resulted in chaos and rather bizarre linguistic twists.

There are two words in Serbo-Croatian, for example, for "one thousand." One of the words, tisuca, was not used by the Communist government that ruled the old Yugoslavia, which preferred hiljada, paradoxically, an archaic Croatian word. Hiljada, although more authentically Croatian, was discarded by Croatian nationalists; tisuca, perhaps because it was banned by the Communists, was in fashion...

The campaign soon included efforts to eradicate words borrowed from English, German, and French. President Tudjman dreamed up new tennis terms to replace English ones. International judges, forced to use the president's strange sports vocabulary at tennis tournaments, stumbled over the unfamiliar words, like the unwieldy word pripetavanje, difficult even for Croatians, which had to be used instead of "tiebreaker."

It reached a point of such confusion that Tudjman began to slip up. When he greeted President Clinton in Zagreb he used the Serbian version of the word happy, srecan, rather than sretan, deemed to be Croatian. The gaffe, broadcast live, was quickly edited out of later news reports on the state-controlled television.

(The c's in tisuca and srecan should have acute accents; it's a palatalized affricate, between the t of tune and the ch of cheap.)

Finally, a couple of literary quotes well worth repeating here. First (pp. 90-91), Auden's "Epitaph on a Tyrant":

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

And finally (p. 91), from Proust:

As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place.

(The original, from "Sur la lecture," his preface to a translation of Ruskin: "Tant que la lecture est pour nous l'initiatrice dont les clefs magiques nous ouvrent au fond de nous-mêmes la porte des demeures où nous n'aurions pas su pénétrer, son rôle dans notre vie est salutaire. Il devient dangereux au contraire quand, au lieu de nous éveiller à la vie personnelle de l'esprit, la lecture tend à se substituer à elle...")

THE SIMPLICITY OF THE DUTCHESS.

Geoff Pullum at Language Log has propounded an interesting conundrum, which I will repeat here both to propose my own (probably simplistic) solution and to remedy the deplorably renewed lack of comment function at the aforementioned group weblog. Geoff quotes the following sentence from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (in context here):

"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or if you'd like it put more simply— ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’ "

Geoff's question is whether the Dutchess's simplified/expanded sentence is grammatical; he says "After four or five careful attempts to make a judgment on this, I find I still can't decide."

I approach it as I used to approach math problems in my long-ago days as a math major, namely by stripping away extraneous material. The phrase "or might have been" is grammatically extraneous; the two occurrences of "not otherwise than" are logically extraneous, since "Be not otherwise than what you are" is logically equivalent to "Be what you are." We are left with "Never imagine yourself to be what it might appear to others that what you were was what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise." Now, "Never imagine yourself to be..." requires a nominal construction to follow it; that is to say, in order for the sentence to be grammatical "what it might appear to others that what you were was what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise" would have to be grammatically equivalent to "what you are not" or the like. It seems reasonably clear to me that this is not the case, or (if you'd like it put more simply) that the grammatical knot Mr. Carroll has constructed cannot be untangled without the use of a Gordian sword. But I am not so confident of this that I am not amenable to being corrected by readers whose analytic skills are not inferior to my own.

(Readers with a taste for inextricable tangles may wish to peruse my earlier entry BLACK HOLES OF SELF-CANCELLATION.)

CLEANING UP HATS.

In the course of a (distressing) NY Times article (by Greg Winter) about the increasing numbers of American students acting like jackasses abroad, the following puzzling locution occurs [NB: grammar fixed thanks to a comment by elck]:

"That will eliminate the student who goes to Australia and just hangs out on the beach and drinks beer," said David Macey, director of off-campus study at Middlebury. "It will probably clean up virtually all hats."

I have no idea what the sentence I've bolded means; can anyone inform me? For obvious reasons, I'm particularly interested in this usage. (Thanks to Bonnie for the link.)

Update. I think MollKW, in the comments, has cleaned up this hat:

The initial "t" of "that" was dropped as a typo (a common enough one, as Googling for "all hat" shows) and they ran a spelling/grammar check without being too careful about proofreading. Experiment shows that the grammar checker in Microsoft Word by default corrects "This will clean up virtually all hat" to "... virtually all hats".

QED, and bravo!

THE LANGUAGE OF IMAGE.

I finally got to see Visconti's Il gattopardo (The Leopard) for the first time in years (it was sold out last weekend, when my wife and I went into Manhattan to see it; see MISCONOSCENZA for links on novel and movie), and I was struck by its vindication of Pound's famous dictum that "the natural object is always the adequate symbol." The movie opens with an exterior shot of a grand villa; the camera slowly circles through the brilliant Sicilian light as it approaches and we begin to hear the sounds of a religious service from within. Then the camera enters a window, and we move into a dark room where people are sullenly listening to the thousandth repetition of the Ave Maria. After the Prince brings the proceedings to an abrupt end, he walks into another room; in the course of the following scene the words "È la rivoluzione!" [It's the revolution!] are spoken, and at that moment the Prince is standing in front of a tall narrow window through which a breeze pushes a filmy white curtain. The sudden incursion of light and air is the perfect image of revolution in the context of this man and this house, where the dark comfort of age-old aristocratic habit is about to be invaded by new people and new ideas—to which the Prince is drawn, as we cannot help being drawn by light and air. But Visconti is no Pollyanna about revolution; the next scene, not in the book, is an extended street battle for Palermo, with Garibaldi's redshirts frantically trying to drive out the royal troops. It's long, confused, brutal, full of smoke and noise and the anguished cries of women; we're left in no doubt as to what revolution means in practice. But the idea of it, the "breath of fresh air," is intoxicating and seductive.

Later we see the Prince in his observatory; much is made of his astronomy in the novel, but in the movie it's almost ignored except in this scene, where the sight of his telescopes, without a word being said about them, brings forcibly to the mind the idea that this man sees farther than those about him. There must be a thousand words about his comet-hunting in the book; this picture by itself has the impact of all of them.

Other things are lost, of course; when the Prince's hunting companion Don Ciccio tells him bitterly that his "no" vote in the Plebiscite was not counted, we miss the author's remark that "una parte della neghittosità, dell'acquiescenza per la quale durante i decenni seguenti se doveva vituperare la gente del Mezzogiorno, ebbe la propria origine nello stupido annullamento della prima espressione di libertà che a questo popolo si era mai presentata" [part of the sloth for which the South would be reproached in the coming decades had its origin in the stupid annulment of the first expression of freedom this people had ever been allowed] (the entire passage is here in Italian). Books and movies are different things, with different virtues. But a good director can use images to communicate directly and efficiently things that take a writer many words, even pages, if they can be said in words at all.

CYRILLIC IMPOSED IN TRANSDNIESTER.

In the Russian-ruled Transdniester sector of Moldova, authorities are cracking down on use of Latin script:

Now, the Transdniester authorities are cracking down on the last remnant of unregimented social life there: the Latin script. Last month, in the climax of a campaign to compel the exclusive use of the Cyrillic alphabet, authorities decreed the closure of the six surviving Latin-script Moldovan schools. The Soviet-style police have seized several by force, and is besieging several others. The OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities, Rolf Ekeus, coined an appropriate term in condemning this assault on schools: "linguistic cleansing".

Unfortunately, the OSCE has relegated to the High Commissioner’s office a problem which is not one of national minorities at all. Indeed, Moldovans form the absolute majority of the native population, with Ukrainians the second largest group, and Russians the third largest element.

Thanks go to afrophile for the link.

GERMAN SPELLING REFORM.

Everybody and all his brothers and sisters have e-mailed me with various links relating to the infamous German spelling reform and backslidings therefrom, with suggestions (ex- or implicit) that I should post about it. I know it's a natural LH topic, but somehow (the muggy weather?) I just haven't been able to bring myself to. It is therefore with considerable relief that I send you to Mark Liberman's compendium of links, which should tell you everything you need to know about die ganze Chose. Thanks for getting me off the hook, Mark—I owe you one! (My personal reaction is that government bodies should not be telling people how to write their own language, so I approve of the growing rebellion against the "reform.")

THE LACTATORY SCHOOL OF CRITICISM.

The Daily Star reprints Keki Daruwala's "engaging account—originally a talk delivered at Internationale Literaturtage in 1988 at Erlangen, West Germany and which he said was 'a cursory attempt to explain to a German (and international) audience what Indian poetry in English was all about'—of his own ongoing tussle, and delight, with the English language"; it describes the progress of his encounter with the language of the former colonial power, beginning with his father's library and continuing in various schools (at one of which he was mocked for speaking more correct English than his classmates):

The next threshold was crossed when one encountered boys from public schools. These were situated in the mountain sanctuaries of Murree and Simla and Nainital. The boys wore blue blazers and school neckties. Their speech was more clipped, their smiles more condescending. They even spoke their Hindustani with an anglicized accent. They could hardly pronounce the names of the towns they lived in. Nainithal, as it is pronounced in Hindustani, got twisted to 'Nainitoll'. And they used slang. It was old slang of course, shipped some three decades ago, which had got lost on the seas, then lay rotting on the docks like dry fish, till it was dispatched by steam rail and later on mule back to those public schools in the mountains. But the fact is that they used slang and if you did not latch on to a phrase, you were held in contempt.

And then came my first conversation with an Englishman. He had to repeat himself three times to make himself understood. What an exotic accent, I thought. Why couldn't the fellow speak English as she ought to be spoken?

No other trauma intervened for the next fifteen years or so. Then as one started publishing poetry in English, critics shook their heads in disapproval. Yes, fiction, essays, articles, even pornography one could write in English, they said (though nothing like Punjabi for robust abuse). But poetry was another cup of tea. You could write it only in a language you had imbibed with mother's milk. This line of argument gave rise to what I chose to call the Lactatory School of Literary Criticism. Another august body called the Royal School of Dreamy Criticism asked me if I dreamt in English. The trouble was I dreamt in images mostly and seldom in language. My dreams were often silent movies. When once in a while, they did turn into Talkies, they were like me, multi-lingual...

He goes on to describe the problems of using subcontinental English for poetry:

Admitted that the Indian has his own way with English syntax, but it is no way comparable to the Caribbean patois. The Indian way of speaking English is to mix the languages—half a sentence in English and the other tattered half in Hindi or Marathi or Bengali. Writing in that manner could bring on numerous problems. Pidgin is fine but a half-Hindi-half-English amalgam becomes impractical.

The whole essay is well worth your while. And I quite like his poetry; here's the end of "Requiem For a Hawk":

...The small bustard is clever, he knows the kestrel
is aloft, dawn-sniffing; manoeuvres with half-wing flaps
and evades both hawk and the printer's devil.

Not so the Great Indian bustard (poor bugger,
often mispronounced), he can't cope with the attack.
He flies in the hawk's shadow, till falling shadow
and hawk meet rasping on his back.

You don't need effort here, you merely descend
when dogs flush out the game, and if it lunges
for cover, the Sheikh himself will bend

and serve you the bird. But it's dusk and the Sheikh claps;
low whistles follow; the trainer looks up and cries
as if speaking to Allah. The falcons fall
into a lowering gyre and leave the skies.

The dark hood falls and obscures the view.
As the scrub returns to its solitude and crickets,
accept, as token, this requiem for you.

My thanks to Grant Barrett for the link.

Addendum. See Bemsha Swing for examples and counterexamples of "lactatory criticism."

YAKUZA JAPANESE.

Introduction to Yakuza Japanese:

If you've ever watched Japanese gangster movies, or had the misfortune of running into a yakuza in person, you know they speak a seemingly incomprehensible form of Japanese. As outcasts and deviants from society, gangsters have their own language with a unique and specialized vocabulary suited to their organizational culture and occupation. Yakuza Japanese runs the gamut from honorifics to epithets, with major regional variations. This webpage is designed as a primer to gangster Japanese, as used in movies, focusing on the Kansai (Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto) and Tokyo varieties. Kansai dialect is important to organized crime, as the nation’s largest syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi is headquartered in Kobe...

Yakuza vocabulary is characterized by colorful and euphemistic words. Many words are obscure in meaning or come from Korean or Chinese words. This slang makes it difficult for ordinary Japanese or police to understand what yakuza are saying, and reinforces the separateness of yakuza from society. Yakuza movies tend to use only the most common slang so as to give the dialogue an authentic air, but not baffle the viewers. For real underground Japanese, read Peter Constatine's Japanese Slang Uncensored.

Via plep.

PIRAHA AND WHORF.

A study just published in Science (scroll down to "Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia; Peter Gordon; Published online August 19 2004; 10.1126/science.1094492"—linked article and abstract only available to subscribers; brief Scientific American story, longer Science Daily piece) attempts to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in terms of number:

During the late 1930s, amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf posed the theory that language can determine the nature and content of thought. But are there concepts in one culture that people of another culture simply cannot understand because their language has no words for it?

No one has ever definitively answered that question, but new findings by Dr. Peter Gordon, a bio-behavioral scientist at Teachers College, Columbia University, strongly support a "yes" answer. Gordon has spent the past several years studying the Pirahã, an isolated Amazon tribe of fewer than 200 people, whose language contains no words for numbers beyond "one," "two" and "many." Even the Piraha word for "one" appears to refer to "roughly one" or a small quantity, as opposed to the exact connotation of singleness in other languages.

What these experiments show, according to Gordon, is how having the right linguistic resources can carve out one's reality. "Whorf says that language divides the world into different categories," Gordon said. "Whether one language chooses to distinguish one thing versus another affects how an individual perceives reality."

When given numerical tasks by Gordon in which they were asked to match small sets of objects in varying configurations, adult members of the tribe responded accurately with up to two or three items, but their performance declined when challenged with eight to 10 items, and dropped to zero with larger sets of objects. The only exception to this performance was with tasks involving unevenly spaced objects. Here, the performance of participants deteriorated as the number of items increased to 6 items. Yet for sets of 7 to 10 objects, performance was near perfect. Though these tasks were designed to be more difficult, Gordon hypothesizes that the uneven spacing allowed subjects to perceive the items as smaller "chunks" of 2 or 3 items that they could then match to corresponding groups.

According to the study, performance by the Piraha was poor for set sizes above 2 or 3, but it was not random. "Pirahã participants were actually trying very hard to get the answers correct, and they clearly understood the tasks," Gordon said. Participants showed evidence of using methods of estimation and chunking to guess at quantities in larger set sizes. On average, they performed about as well as college students engaged in more complex numerical estimation tasks. Their skill levels were similar to those in pre-linguistic infants, monkeys, birds and rodents, and appeared to correlate to recent brain imaging studies indicating a different sort of numerical competence that seems to be immune to numerical language deprivation. Interestingly, Gordon noted, while Pirahã adults had difficulty learning larger numbers, Piraha children did not.

There's more at the Science Daily story linked above; thanks to Mike for the tip! [And see Mark Liberman's Language Log post for more details.]

By the way, there's more interesting stuff on Piraha here in relation to their neighbors the Wari and "a heretofore undocumented grammatical sound... rendered as tp~ and pronounced as the t consonant sound followed immediately by what linguists call a 'bilabial trill,' which sounds like a person releasing air between vibrating lips in imitation of a snorting horse -- or flatulence." And here is a brief description of the language, which "is phonologically the simplest language known, having just ten phonemes, one fewer than in Rotokas."

ALPHABETS OF EUROPE.

Michael Everson, previously discussed here and here, has a page on The Alphabets of Europe:

The main function of these pages is to present a catalogue of European alphabets. The characters which are, and in some cases were, used to write each of the languages of Europe (as far as it has been possible to find information on them), are included here. Some of Europe’s languages (particularly in the Caucasus) still have no tradition of writing, though other information on such languages is provided here when it is available. Likewise, some languages have used, or continue to use, one or more than one writing system, which may also be reflected here.

The Genetic index of languages goes from Maltese (Afro-Asiatic) to Moksha (Finno-Ugric), the Alphabetic index from Abaza to Yiddish; all language pages are pdf files. (Via the amazing aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

THE RETURN OF NEPHELOKOKKYGIA.

Christopher Culver is back from his summer travels and after a difficult transition to Wordpress is back to regular posting on Nephelokokkygia, "the classical and Indo-European philology weblog." His latest post, Bulgarian’s interesting verbs, describes the horrors awaiting the student of Bulgarian:

One of the best resources for Bulgarian on the WWW is Katina Bontcheva’s Elementary On-Line Bulgarian Grammar (note that it is still a work in progress). She introduces verbs with this charming metaphor:

So far I would like to believe that the grammar of Bulgarian was neither difficult nor challenging for most of the foreigners that have chosen to study Bulgarian. Apart from the verb, all the other part-of-speech classes in Bulgarian could be compared to planets within the solar system of Bulgarian grammar. Unfortunately, the verbal system of Bulgarian should be compared to nothing less but a galaxy. However, you have to master the verbal system of Bulgarian if you want to master Bulgarian, as the predicate is in the core of the communication, and the verb is the core of the predicate. It is of little consolation to be reminded that in other languages that have declination you have to master the declination as well. The richness and the complexity of the verbal system in Bulgarian is a complete “compensation” for the simplicity of its nominal system.

So, let’s take a deep breath and face the beast!

...I should mention here that there is a helpful overview of the verb system which shows all forms for the verb ‘to write’. (But I don’t think HTML forms were meant to be used in that way!) Notice the rather depressing quotation at the top of the page: "The verb is the elephant of Bulgarian grammar." — A. Teodorov-Balan.

The problem is that Bulgarian retains the aorist and imperfect of Proto-Slavonic, a quality shared only by Macedonian and Sorbian. This alone adds a ton of extra forms for the student to memorise. Bontcheva’s figure of 3,000 is perhaps excessive, other sources claim 236 forms for an imperfective verb.

Welcome back, Chris!

MIDRASH.

Midrash is a particular form of Torah commentary, often involving excruciatingly detailed verbal analysis and what might appear to be far-fetched comparisons (based on anagrams, numerology, and the like); for examples relating to the Aqedah (the story of Abraham's interrupted sacrifice of Isaac), see here and here. Even if, like me, you're not religious, it can be a lot of fun if you enjoy a good argument. Exquisite Corpse has an essay by David Schwartz that serves as a lively introduction to the discipline. It quotes a guy named Ben Bag Bag and has punchlines like "R. Pappa turns out to have rejected Rab's opinion... before Rab rendered an opinion!" But beyond the fun and games, midrash has wider implications, summarized nicely by Schwarz:

Belonging to an argumentative tradition teaches not only that learning occurs through interaction, but that the consequences of learning ought to be further action. Bickering over minute points, rousing criticism, and arguing is a form of saying: "I like what you are saying. Give me more information. Convince me." If, indeed, Eleazar needs Yonatan, or Hillel needs Shammai, the criticism of the Israelites (or their leaders as representatives of the people) is a sign of God's need for the debating sages. Were it not for the criticism, the give and take, there would be no Tanach, and no Torah. There would be, to use the rabbis' circumlocution, no wisdom.

(Via wood s lot.)

A WELSH COURSE.

Mark Nodine has put online the beginning of A Welsh Course; since the page was last updated over a year ago, he may have given up on it, but what's there is still useful:

This course is one suitable for beginners. The main emphasis of the course is in developing conversational skills in Welsh as it is currently spoken (as contrasted with teaching the forms needed for understanding literary Welsh). The material is an indirect descendent of the Cymraeg Byw movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This course does not assume a general proficiency in learning languages, nor any previous background in Welsh. The course is also developed in such a way that it can be distributed either through an ASCII medium wrapped as a setext, or made available in HTML on the World Wide Web.

There's a good section on "How To Look Words Up in the Dictionary," among other things. (Via plep.)

HATS ARE COMING BACK!

According to the NY Times Fashion & Style section. Just thought you'd want to know. Now stop complaining that I don't post enough about hats. (And don't miss the slide show linked in the right column.) Thanks to commenter Going Dotty in Kansas for the link!

Addendum. At the top of today's wood s lot is a glorious William Heick photograph of a crowd of men wearing hats in 1951; that's the culture I was born into, and I see no reason not to try to keep it going.

OEDILF UPDATE.

The OEDILF project of defining all English words by means of limericks (see my earlier entry) has moved to its own domain, oedilf.com, as announced by its creator, Chris J. Strolin, in a comment on this thread; Strolin adds:

Any and all lovers of the English language are welcomed to check out our new site particularly if your name is choatime, Clankus Maximus, Don Levey, Elizabeth, evinrude, fiercecupcake, Giles, Hazelsinger, Hilary Ann, indigofaerie, JB Segal, Karner Blue, LadyBeth, LizH, markmywords48, mechaieh, murlach, musik, Peter Sheil, q, Robot Johnny, slabgorb, or Valrus. All these individuals either posted limericks or otherwise expressed interest in our project while we were on the Wordcraft site and we've since lost contact with them. Wordcraft PMs went out with no luck. Posting limericks over there, technically, gave us the OK to use them on oedilf.com but I'd really like to do this up right and get them register.

So sharpen your Nantucket quills and join in the fun.

LOWLANDS LANGUAGES.

Lowlands-L is a "discussion list for people who share an interest in the languages & cultures of the Lowlands":

"Lowlands languages" are those Germanic languages that developed in the “Lowlands": the low-lying areas adjacent to the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. These are primarily Dutch, Zeelandic (Zeeuws, West Flemish), Frisian, Limburgish and Low Saxon (Low German). Also included are those languages that descended from autochtonous Lowlands languages and are used elsewhere; for example, Afrikaans, Lowlands-based emigrant languages, pidgins and creoles, and also English and Scots. “Lowlands cultures” are those cultures that utilize Lowlands languages or are clearly derived from such cultures.

Lowlands-L is dedicated to discussion, exchange and dissemination of information as well as to networking among persons who have certain interests in common;

Lowlands-L is a moderated discussion group, not a 'chat room';

Lowlands-L does not focus on one specific language or culture but on a group of closely related linguistic and cultural varieties (which does not include German, North Germanic and Celtic);

Persons who study one or more of these language varieties are likely to benefit from supplementary information and resources shared on Lowlands-L. However, Lowlands-L does not offer actual language courses, nor is it intended to serve as a substitute for regular, structured language teaching...

Via aldiboronti on Wordorigins.

KOONTZ ON SIOUXAN LANGUAGES.

John Koontz, a linguist at the University of Colorado, has a website full of information about Siouan and Other Native American Languages, with a particularly interesting page about etymologies (including Kemosabe and Tonto, an entry that manages to cite both Aeschylus and the publication glitches of the Eastern Ojibwa-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary). The beginning of the Nebraska entry will give you an idea of the level of detail:

The state is named for the Platte River, which is called in Omaha-Ponca NiNbdhaska (=khe) '(the) Platte River'; literally '(the) Flatwater', or in Ioway-Otoe N^iNbraske (or, more recently, -brahke or -brat^ke) [all with the same meaning].

My suspicion is that the actual source was Ioway-Otoe. This comes from two factors. First, during much of the later 1700s and 1800s, the Otoe were situated at the mouth of the Platte, in a position to present their own name for the stream to visitors. Second, Nebraska looks to me like a collapsed syllable spelling Ne-bras-ka, probably intended to represent what I would write as in the Lewis & Clark Phonetic Alphabet (LCPA) as Nee-BROSS-kay. That is, I suspect "ka" was intended to represent phonetic (NetSiouan) /ke/, not /ka/ (LCPA kay, not kah), and that would have to be the Ioway-Otoe version. My feeling is that real phonetic /ka/ would have been written "kar," cf. "Mahar" (this really is a Lewis & Clark spelling) for UmaNhaN 'Omaha' or "kah." The Dhegiha languages retain ska from *ska (LCPA skah) in final position while Ioway-Otoe converts it to ske (LCPA sk ay).

Once the word was written as a lump "Nebraska" and subjected to pronunciation by English speakers who hadn't heard the original, the final syllable was changed to phonetic (NetSiouan) /ka/ (LCPA kah), or, actually, /k/ (LCPA kuh). In the same way the initial "ne" acquired a lax (short) e (LCPA neh) or schwa (LCPA nuh) pronunciation instead of i (LCPA ee) (long e in English terms) pronunciation, and the medial a in -bras- was fronted to the low front a of American cat (instead of the low central a of American father).

Of course, early popular transcriptions are incredibly imprecise, and I don't have any information on the early history of the word in English. Maybe final "ka" did represent phonetic /ka/ (LCPA kah), in which case, it would have to be a Dhegiha form something like the Omaha-Ponca version that was the source. In fact, with this word any of the Dhegiha languages would produce pretty much the same effect on English ears. While Omaha-Ponca would seem the most likely suspect because the Omaha and Ponca were conveniently nearby, the Kansa and Osage were also originally both below the Platte along the Missouri and their languages are also plausible sources for the names of major tributaries upstream...

Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.

THE HAZY YON.

I was a Pogo fan as a child and remain one to this day; as far as I'm concerned, Walt Kelly was one of the great American humorists (and unlike most such, he did not lose his sense of humor when politics intruded). One of the things I've always loved is his gift for nonsense verse, and since Songdog has sent me a couple such from a book he borrowed from the library (I Go Pogo, 1952), I thought I'd share them with you. First, the palindromic:

Smile, wavering wings
Above rains pour,
While hopefully sings
Love of shorn shore
Shore shorn of love
Sings hopefully while
Pour rains above,
Wings wavering, smile.

Secondly, the mystical, à la Churchy LaFemme:

How pierceful grows the hazy yon!
How myrtle petaled thou!
For spring hath sprung the cyclotron,
How high browse thou, brown cow?

Addendum. An AskMeFi thread provides a couple of excellent jingles for Chooly Wummys ("They're gristle to your mill!"), with pistol shots added by Albert Alligator.

NGUGI WA THIONG'O.

I've been meaning for some time to do an entry about Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan writer who turned his back on a successful career writing in English in order to write exclusively in his native Gikuyu (interview; introduction and excerpts from his book Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986). Now I discover, via a post by Hurree at Kitabkhana, that less than two weeks after returning to Kenya following more than two decades in exile, he and his wife were brutally attacked in their own home by a gang of gunmen. It's not clear whether the attack had anything to do with his writing, but I can't help thinking that his call for free debate in Africa did not meet with universal approval.

RIP MILOSZ.

Czeslaw Milosz, one of the few unquestioned giants of world poetry remaining from the last century, died today at his home in Krakow. I don't have anything useful to say about him except that he speaks to me directly and is one of those rare poets who seem undiminished by translation (I say "seem" because I can't read him in Polish), so I'll just quote a couple of poems from New and Collected Poems.

GOOD NIGHT

No duties. I don't have to be profound.
I don't have to be artistically perfect.
Or sublime. Or edifying.
I just wander. I say: "You were running,
That's fine. It was the thing to do."
And now the music of the worlds transforms me.
My planet enters a different house.
Trees and lawns become more distinct.
Philosophies one after another go out.
Everything is lighter yet not less odd.
Sauces, wine vintages, dishes of meat.
We talk a little of district fairs,
Of travels in a covered wagon with a cloud of dust behind,
Of how rivers once were, what the scent of calamus is.
That's better than examining one's private dreams.
And meanwhile it has arrived. It's here, invisible.
Who can guess how it got here, everywhere.
Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.
Buona notte. Ciao. Farewell.

(from Provinces, 1991)

And a prose poem from This (2000):

In advanced age, my health worsening, I woke up in the middle of the night, and experienced a feeling of happiness so intense and perfect that in all my life I had only felt its premonition. And there was no reason for it. It didn't obliterate consciousness; the past which I carried was there, together with my grief. And it was suddenly included, was a necessary part of the whole. As if a voice were repeating: "You can stop worrying now; everything happened just as it had to. You did what was assigned to you, and you are not required anymore to think of what happened long ago." The peace I felt was a closing of accounts and was connected with the thought of death. The happiness on this side was like an announcement of the other side. I realized that this was an undeserved gift and I could not grasp by what grace it was bestowed on me.

Thanks to Bonnie, who gave me the news, for sharing my love of Milosz.

Addendum. The NY Times has published a serviceable obituary by Raymoond H. Anderson, but it seems not to have been updated in a while; the last paragraph says "Ecco Press gathered a half-century of his work in 'The Collected Poems 1931-1987.' In it is a 1986 poem called 'And Yet the Books,'..." but Ecco's New and Collected Poems has been out for three years now (and yes, the poem Anderson quotes is still in it).

EUROPEAN CITY NAMES.

An excellent List of European cities with alternative names [Margaret of Transblawg has brought it to my attention that it's also a Wikipedia entry, which is probably the original]:

Most cities in Europe have alternative names in different languages. Some cities have also undergone name changes for political or other reasons. This article attempts to give all known alternative names for all major European cities. It also includes some smaller towns that are important because of their location or history.

For the purposes of this article, Europe includes Turkey, Cyprus and all the republics of the former Soviet Union. A number of important Mediterranean Basin cities are also included.

I absolutely love such lists, and this one seems thorough and accurate. Some interesting entries:

Chişinău: Chişinău (Moldovan/Romanian), Kešenev (Yiddish), Kischinew (German), Kishinjov - Кишинёв (Russian), Kīšīnāw (Arabic), Kišineu (Bulgarian), Kišiněv (Czech), Kišinjev (Serbian), Kišiňov (Slovak), Kisinyov (Hungarian), Kiszyniów (Polish), Kyšyniv (Ukrainian)

Cologne: Colonia (Italian, Spanish), Colónia (Portuguese), Keln (Serbian), Kelnas (Lithianian), Keulen (Dutch), Kjol'n (Russian, Ukrainian), Kolín nad Rýnem (Czech), Kolín nad Rýnom (Slovak), Kölle (Kölsch [local dialect]), Köln (Finnish, German, Turkish), Kolonía (Greek), Kolonia (Polish)

Geneva: Cenevre (Turkish), Ginebra (Catalan, Romanian, Spanish), Geneve (Finnish), Genève (French), Genf (German), Ginevra (Italian), Genevra (Romansh), Genewa (Polish), Genebra (Portuguese), Geneve / Genève (Dutch), Jinīf (Arabic), Yenévi (Greek), Ženeva (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Ukrainian)

Mainz: Mohuč (Czech, Slovak), Mayence (French), Magonza (Italian), Moguncja (Polish), Mogúncia (Portuguese), Majnc (Serbian), Määnz (local dialect), Meenz (former local dialect)

Venice: al-Bunduqīya (Arabic), Venecija (Bulgarian, Croatian, Serbian, Russian, Ukrainian), Venècia (Catalan), Benetke (Slovene), Benátky (Czech, Slovak), Venedig (Danish, German, Swedish), Venetië (Dutch), Venetsia (Finnish), Venise (French), Venetía (Greek), Velence (Hungarian), Venezia (Italian), Wenecja (Polish), Veneza (Portuguese), Veneţia (Romanian), Venecia (Spanish), Venedik (Turkish), Vinitsia (Yiddish)

Vienna: Beč (Croatian, Serbian), Bécs (Hungarian), Dunaj (Slovene), Fienna (Welsh), Vena (Russian, Ukrainian), Vīne (Latvian), Vídeň (Czech), Viedeň (Slovak), Viena (Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian), Vienna (Italian), Vienne (French), Viénni (Greek), Vin (Yiddish), Viyana (Turkish), Wenen (Dutch), Wiedeń (Polish), Wien (Finnish, German)

(Via vicente at Pepys' Diary.)

VOX POPULI.

God of the Machine has a fine language rant ("'The people' cannot take English back, never having surrendered it in the first place"); furthermore, the first comment in the thread (by that loquacious fellow Anon) is a fervent recommendation for one of my own favorite language books:

You remind me of Jim Quinn's American Tongue and Cheek. I've never seen a better case made for American English as a living breathing thing and not the dead set of rules pushed by language mavens like Safire and Edwin Newman (Remember him?). Quinn wrote with just the light touch such an argument requires. Sad to see the book is out of print, while Safire keeps rolling along.

(Thanks, Tatyana!)

SPANISH SONNETS.

The Golden Age Spanish Sonnets site has a collection of sonnets with English translations and explanations of allusions:

At this point I have 109 sonnets with translations posted. I have also included some links to other web sites... Bibliographies for each poet are now available... A general index of mythological links, as well as links to specific mythological allusions in the sonnets, has also been posted... Visitors to this site are invited to submit their own translations and/or commentary.

(Via Plep.)

MISCONOSCENZA.

I'm reading Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard (in the translation by Archibald Colquhoun, whose ancient Scottish surname is pronounced ca-HOON), and I was taken aback by the phrase I've bolded in the following sentence (p. 99 of my Harvill paperback):

These were just the years when novels were helping to form those literary myths which still dominate European minds today; but in Sicily, partly because of its traditional impermeability to anything new, partly because of the general ignorance of any language whatsoever, partly also, it must be said, because of a vexatious Bourbon censorship working through the Customs, no one had heard of Dickens, Eliot, Sand, Flaubert, or even Dumas.

Surely Tomasi di Lampedusa, who had a great affection for Sicilian speech, wasn't saying the locals didn't know any language, even their own? Fortunately I had borrowed the Italian novel from the Donnell Branch, with its magnificent foreign-language collection, so I was able to compare the original, where the phrase in question reads "la diffusa misconoscenza di qualsiasi lingua." My Oxford Italian Dictionary says misconoscere means to 'not appreciate,' so I would think the phrase should be translated more along the lines of "the widespread lack of appreciation for languages in general." But I will be happy to hear from readers who actually know Italian (BebaManno?). [A reader suggests that 'ignorance' may in fact be correct and that "qualsiasi lingua" here implies languages other than Italian, so that the translation needs only to change "any language" to "any other languages."]

I'm reading the novel in preparation for the restored version of Visconti's magnificent movie that starts tomorrow at the Film Forum; movie lovers who live in the New York area owe it to themselves to see it. It runs for two weeks, so you have no excuse.

Incidentally, anyone with a love for historic maps will be as glad as I was to discover the Historic Maps: Garibaldi's Conquest of Sicily page, particularly the very nice map of Palermo at the time of Garibaldi's entrance (May 27, 1860). (If you live in NYC, the Map Division of the Research Library has a magnificent 1835 map that identifies virtually every building in the central city, which they will copy for you for a mere $5.00.)

Addendum. I've just discovered the Parco Letterario Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a fascinating but frustrating site; its Palermo page links to a detailed discussion of the geography of Lampedusa's Palermo, with details of all significant palaces, accompanied by a map with red numbers next to significant buildings... but nothing to link the numbers with the text, and so far as I can tell no way to discover where the buildings mentioned in the text are on the map! But I will persevere, no matter how many maps I have to consult before I solve the puzzle. (Also, there's a treasure trove of photographs of historic buildings of Palermo, and other Sicilian cities, here.)

GOING DOWN IN THE MIDDLE OF TOWN.

This may be the perfect rock-and-roll song:

1 2 3 4 go!
I'm going down in the middle of town
you're going up in the middle of town
It's all so sad 'cause we're all going to Hell.
Oh oh oh uh uh uh
I am talking
you are yelling
he is fighting
no one's listening.
Oh oh oh uh uh uh.
My song is dying
No one's coming
But now everyone is coming
it's louder it's noisier
now the song is over so bye and thanks for coming.

I'd love to have heard the New York Dolls or the Minutemen perform that in their heyday; I can imagine it done in either of their very different styles.

I should add that I've normalized the spelling; you can see the original at Derryl Murphy's Cold Ground entry—it was written by his 8-year-old son Aidan.

THE BENCH.

Reading yesterday's NY Times story "New Generation of Leaders Is Emerging for Al Qaeda," by David Johnston and David E. Sanger, I was brought up short by the end of the third paragraph:

"They're a little bit of both,'' one official said, describing Al Qaeda's new midlevel structure. "Some who have been around and some who have stepped up. They're reaching for their bench.''

Reaching for their bench? I flailed around desperately for possible meanings (benchmark?) before realizing it was a baseball metaphor. And if I, who have been a baseball fan since the days when the Washington Senators played in long-vanished Griffith Stadium with its oddly shaped right field, didn't get it at first, what hope do non-Americans have? So I thought it behooved me to explain the reference.

Every ballpark has two areas called "dugouts," one for the home team and one for the visitors, where those players not on the field at the moment congregate and containing benches where they can sit and converse or simply spit tobacco (or rather, in these health-conscious days, often sunflower seeds) when they are not standing at the railing cursing the umpires. By a simple enough process of metonymy, those players who are in the dugout and are available to be substituted for one of the nine in the game at any given time are called "the bench," leading to expressions such as "their bench is depleted" (the team doesn't have many players left as possible substitutes) and "he'll be going to the bench" (the manager will be putting a new player in). I trust the sentence from the news story is now clear.

Incidentally, The Language of Baseball is a good source for all your baseball-term needs.

LINGUISTIC MUTATION.

David at It's Ablaut Time has an excellent and thought-provoking post suggesting that

the role of mistaken inferences in adding diversity to the linguistic pool is essentially analogous to the role of mutations in adding diversity to the genetic pool... In both cases, the mistransmission of a code adds to a pool of choices from which other factors (environmental factors/learnability) differentially select. The take-home message is that even optimizing changes in language are a product of our inability to completely understand one another.

I particularly like this passage: "While languages obviously serve as media of communcation, they are in many ways ill-suited to this task. Grammars are too complex, too byzantine, too intricate, and indeed too beautiful, to be optimal codes for communcation." Yes, exactly, and for many of us it is precisely the intricate, byzantine bits that are a primary attraction. I've never been able to work up any interest in Esperanto and the other simplified languages, despite their theoretical value for easy communication, because they're too damn boring. If I can't have irregular verbs, I'd rather grunt and point.

ADMINICLE.

While looking for something entirely different in the Cassell Concise Dictionary, I ran across the word adminicle, defined as:
1 an aid, support. 2 (Sc. Law) corroborative evidence, esp. of the contents of a missing document.
I particularly like the OED's last citation:
1872 Daily News 2 Oct. 5 Floriculture and other adminicles of civilisation.
Pure essence of Victorian Latinity! The adjective, of course, is adminicular ('auxiliary, corroborative'), which I intend to use whenever maximum obfuscation is a desideratum.

Update. Margaret of Transblawg has done some follow-up research on this irresistible word.

IT'S ABLAUT TIME.

David Mortensen, a Berkeley grad student in linguistics (who works on STEDT, the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Project, which must be fascinating) has started a blog with the clever title It's Ablaut Time. While I'm glad to see linguistics blogs of all sorts, I'm particularly partial to those that specialize in my old stomping ground of historical linguistics, and there are precious few of those, so a warm welcome and tip of the Language Hat, David!

One of his less technical entries:

Language is bluffing

It strikes me that a huge number of insights into linguistic phenomena can be dervied from a few relatively simple propositions. One of these is the observation that language is a code employed only by code-breakers: that none of us knows the language we speak as a fully explicit system. Instead, we bluff our way through, filling in the gaps in our knowledge of the code with an inference here and a leap of logic there. This capacity to extrapolate from the known to the unknown is, in essense, grammar. If these inferences follow naturally enough from the parts of the code everyone around us agrees upon, they are incorporated into it. If they don't follow at all from shared knowledge of the code, we come off looking inarticulate. The interesting thing is that the parts of the code we all agree upon were, at some point in the past, somebody's bluff.

SEARCHING THE BNC.

The British National Corpus is a very large (over 100 million words) corpus of modern English, both spoken and written, and you can search it for free (you get 50 random hits, with context and sources). (Via Ramage.)

W.G. SEBALD.

I'm reading Sebald's The Emigrants (a birthday gift from my wife) and have gotten (along with much literary pleasure -- Michael Hulse's translation reads as if the book was originally written in English, a very rare effect) a couple of new words, both (oddly) on p. 152 of the New Directions paperback. The first is candlewick: "....she in a pink dressing gown that was made of a material found only in the bedrooms of the English lower classes and is unaccountably called candlewick." The OED has it (s.v. candle-wick), but offers no suggestion as to the origin of the name, so "unaccountably" is the mot juste. The second is passe-partout: "Inscribed on the slightly foxed passe-partout... were the words: Gracie Irlam, Urmston nr Manchester, 17 May 1944." This, according to the OED, is "an ornamental mat or plate of cardboard or the like, having the centre cut out so as to receive a photograph, drawing, or engraving, to which when framed it serves as a mount or border. Hence passe-partout frame, a frame ready made with such a mount for reception of photographs, etc... A kind of adhesive tape or paper used for framing photographs and for other purposes." The phrase "slightly foxed" suggests to me that the second of these definitions is meant. I'm guessing that both words are identical in the German original, but I would be grateful if a reader with access to it would let me know.

I would also be grateful if anyone can identify for me the "hollegrasch coins" mentioned on page 199; hollegrasch gets no Google hits (and is not in my coin books), so it may be a typo or it may be an incredibly obscure coin. Whoso knows, let them speak.

THE VERNACULAR BODY.

I commend to everyone's attention The Vernacular Body, a recently (re)born blog full of spirited response to life and art. There are wonderful posts on war (I really must read Chris Hedges), Fahrenheit 9-11 (I had the same reaction to the mother's grief), laupes (I think I may be one), and other deep subjects, but I'm going to quote a fluffy little entry, as lightweight as a souffle, because I love it so:

Separable noun

During our recent trip to Saratoga Springs, K. and I took a turn in one of the beautiful old neighborhoods on a brisk summer afternoon. On a side street, coming towards us on the same sidewalk, was the very picture of familial serenity: a group consisting of a young Chinese couple, a little baby in a stroller, and an elderly lady (grandmama, no doubt).

It was a little gusty out, and as we passed by them, the doting father was draping a windbreaker jacket over his toddler's shoulders.

"Here," the young papa was heard to say to his son, "this will help you break wind."

SIDNEY MORGENBESSER.

Columbia University philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser died last weekend; he was best known for his response to J. L. Austin, "who noted that it was peculiar that although there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, no example existed where two positives expressed a negative. In a dismissive voice, Morgenbesser replied from the audience, 'Yeah, yeah…'" I've quoted the anecdote (whose punchline I've also heard as "Yeah, right") from Gary Shapiro's obituary in the New York Sun, where you will find many other "Sidney stories" ("asked about Mao Tse Tung’s view of the law of non-contradiction, Morgenbesser replied, 'I do and do not agree.' Asked why there is something rather than nothing, he replied, 'Even if there were nothing, you’d still be complaining!'''). I would have enjoyed taking a class from him. (Via Mark Liberman at Language Log, who adds still more stories and links.)

Addendum. Shapiro has a new Sun piece about a Columbia gathering to remember Morgenbesser, with plenty more good stories:

Aesthetician Arthur Danto, who got to know Morgenbesser in 1952, recalled one imperturbable scholar making the distinction that a religious man never doubts but a philosopher doubts.

Turning to Mr. Danto, Morgenbesser said sotto voce, "The Lubavitcher Rebbe has had more doubts in a single night than that man has had in his entire life."

Thanks, Gary!

ANGLO-FRENCH.

I quickly weary of long theoretical treatises, but I never tire of reading detailed histories of the forms and usages of vocabulary items, and many such are available at W. Rothwell's Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub. I discovered this through a reference to his "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo-French" in a Wordorigins thread (by the indefatigable aldiboronti, who I should make a Contributing Editor to LH); checking the "Hub" link at the top, I discovered the mother lode, whose original purpose was "to support the preparation of a substantially revised and greatly expanded edition of the Anglo Norman Dictionary, whose first edition was published between 1977 and 1992 by the MHRA." Besides the Articles on Anglo-Norman Topics (so far all by Rothwell), there are Anglo-Norman Source Texts:

As part of the ANH project, this site will progressively place on-line the source materials on which the Anglo-Norman Dictionary draws, to the extent that project resources and copyright considerations allow. These primary texts will be accessible and searchable in their own right, but beyond that, wherever the dictionary cites them, it also will be possible to follow up the references directly from within the dictionary entry concerned.

Probably the best place to start is the article aldi sent me to, from which I will quote enough bits to whet your appetite (if you have an appetite for this stuff):

That the Norman Conquest profoundly affected the vocabulary of English is no new discovery, but the precise nature of that transformation has so far been only imperfectly examined and its implications for the study of English etymology only partially understood. Up to the present time there has been no unequivocal acknowledgement that as a result of the events of 1066 there can be no rectilinear approach to the history of English as there is to the history of French. The French language can be taken back in a straight line without any breaks from the present day to The Strasbourg Oaths of 842. At no time during this whole period was the langue d'oil ousted in the northern half of the country from its position as the spoken and written language of the kings and nobles, the judiciary, the Church, the national and local administrations or the mercantile class. Dialectal variations were not lacking, but all were dialects of the langue d'oil, what has become modern French. The only rival to French was the Latin used as a formal language of record, but never as a vernacular. In England the situation was vastly different. For some three centuries after the Conquest all the literate classes used French, both spoken and written, very often alongside their native English: a Romance language overlaid the original Germanic one. Written French was especially important in medieval England as being a principal language of record - alongside British Latin - so that the sheer volume of surviving documentary evidence in Anglo-French for this period is overwhelmingly greater than that left behind in English, especially up to the late fourteenth century. No less important than the quantity of Anglo-French is the the breadth of its use. Although scholarly attention has focused largely on its literary productions from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the later non-literary works are arguably of geater importance for the development of English culture as a whole. The law, from Parliament down to the lower courts, the administration of government at national and local level, the commercial and financial framework of the country, all worked through French rather than English. What is more, French was used extensively for all the arts and sciences long before English. This penetration of French into the whole fabric of civilization in medieval England means that the study of English etymology cannot safely confine itself to tracing words back to a cut-off point in Middle English, or even to making a leap across the Channel in search of a 'borrowing' from medieval French in order to reach the origin of English terms. The Middle English Dictionary reveals on virtually every page the massive and very obvious debt owed by English to French: less obviously, however, it also reveals that this debt was not built up by 'borrowing' in the conventional sense and that in literally thousands of cases forms and meanings were adopted (not 'borrowed') into English from insular, as opposed to continental French. The relationship of Anglo-French with Middle English was one of merger, not of borrowing, as a direct result of the bilingualism of the literate classes in medieval England. Terms were adopted often unchanged, sometimes in translation - 'hot-foot' (chaut pas), 'beforehand' (avant main), 'behindhand' (ariere main), 'send for' (mander pur) etc. - but always as part and parcel of a living language in daily use in England, not as isolated, static units of a foreign language borrowed from across the Channel...

The failure of scholars to appreciate fully the importance of Anglo-French in the making of the English lexis extends from individual words right up into whole areas of the culture of medieval England. For example, for the authorities on English etymology 'troglodyte' is adapted from the Latin and first attested in the middle of the sixteenth century - an example, one might be tempted to conclude, of the well-known re-birth of scientific interest in many fields that characterized this period. However, the term is found in French, only thinly disguised, in a Cambridge manuscript that may date from the late twelfth century and that has been available in published form for nearly seventy years. The adaptation of the word from the Latin took place in England some three and a half centuries before the date given by the authorities, but it was taken into the vernacular of the literate laity - French - not English. This example shows that a more measured approach may perhaps be called for when contrasting the 'darkness' of the Middle Ages with the 'light' of the Renaissance. Similarly, the noun 'crescent' is recorded in a twelfth-century Anglo-French medical work centuries before being attested in English and wrongly ascribed by the authorities to continental French. Again, the 'spaniel' and the 'terrier' are both found in Anglo-French before appearing in Middle English, indicating that their names are not borrowed directly from continental French. Only the MED, however, amongst the English authorities refers to Anglo-French in connection with these words, and only for 'spaniel'. Another simple example is the humble 'dandelion', said by the authorities to be first found in English in the sixteenth century and to be an adaptation of the French dent-de-lion. Yet Godefroy's sole example of dandelyon (IX, Comp. 304b) comes from the Englishman Palsgrave, a dating which clearly refutes the claim that the sixteenth-century English word is 'adapted' from continental French. Even the authoritative Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch cannot be relied on in this case, with its rather desperate claim that the form comes wahrscheinlich from Lyon in the fourteenth century. Once again, the neglected Anglo-French has new evidence to offer. On p.99 of his Plant Names of Medieval England (Cambridge, 1989) Tony Hunt gives numerous examples of the word in various spellings in both Anglo-French and Middle English going back to the late thirteenth century, with others of roughly similar date in his Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1990), pp.317 and 324. Both these fundamental research books provide a wealth of new linguistic evidence across the whole spectrum of botanical and medical terminology that must inevitably lead to a far-reaching revision of attitudes towards the degree of knowledge possessed by doctors/herbalists in the Middle Ages, towards the vocabulary of Anglo-French through which much of their teaching was transmitted and, consequently, towards the importance of Anglo-French in the historical development of both French and English. In this area historical linguistics still offers a great deal of scope for basic research...

A more complicated case is presented by the English verbs 'to hack,' 'to hash', and the nouns 'hash' and 'haggis', whose relationship the authorities find confusing. Indeed, the origin of 'haggis' is usually said to be unknown, and connections with the French hachiz 'hash' are denied. If, however, we bring some Anglo-French and Middle English evidence to bear on the question, a different picture emerges. Whilst the new OED still persists in deriving 'to hack' from Germanic sources, without any mention of French, the Middle English Dictionary is nearer the mark in attributing it to 'O.F.' (but not 'A.F.', as it should). Amongst the quotations in the OED is one from a book of cookery recipes dated c.1440 in the sense of 'to cut up into small pieces', i.e. 'to hash'. The MED takes this sense back in time to c.1325, but still without any mention of Anglo-French. Yet in an Anglo-French medical text from the second half of the twelfth century a mixture of herbs is to be hachez sur un ais ('chopped up on a board'), an expression repeated a little farther on. About a century later a verse recipe for staunching blood from a wound recommends that: 'Le ortie menuement hagee En eisil fort seit destempree' ('Finely chopped nettle should be soaked in strong vinegar'). The form of the verb here - hagee - is worth noting in view of the OED's form 'to hag'. As for the assertion that the origin of 'haggis' is unknown, the clear refutation of this has been in print for close on a century and a half in the first edition of one of the manuscripts of the Anglo-French Treatise of Walter of Biblesworth, with a reminder being printed from another manuscript in 1929...

The danger of failing to appreciate the true nature of the linguistic situation in medieval England, however, goes beyond individual words, doublets and faux amis. Without an understanding of insular French, English scholars are liable to go badly astray in assessing the history of whole areas of their native language. French cooking has long enjoyed a high reputation, but authorities are not agreed as to when it first came into prominence in England. Dr. Burchfield writes that: 'The culinary revolution, and the importation of French vocabulary into English society, scarcely preceded the eighteenth century'. Professor Hughes, in his Words in Time, would move the date of this 'culinary revolution' back to the fifteenth century (p.43), but both these dates accord ill with two recently-published thirteenth-century culinary collections in Anglo-French, which contain sufficient new terms and new techniques specific to England, as the editors emphasize, to show that an important advance in this area of domestic science had taken place centuries before. This is hardly surprising in the light of the close connections of all kinds between medieval France and England. False chronology leads to another serious error of cultural interpretation when Professor Hughes refers on p.60 to our modern meaning of 'courtesy' being recorded c.1513 and deriving 'from the pragmatic Renaissance ethos of self-improvement, evidenced in the publication of numerous courtesy-books.' Without waiting for the Renaissance, this type of book, written in Anglo-French, had been currently in use by the educated classes in England from the first half of the thirteenth century.

I find myself wanting to quote more and more, but I'll desist. This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I'd stuck with historical linguistics.

LUKOIL, THE GREEN DOOR, AND IT.

Three items of interest from Sunday's New York Times Magazine:

1) From a very interesting Peter Maass article on Vagit Alekperov, the president of Lukoil and a living example of How to Get Rich Without Getting Tossed in Jail by Putin, I learned the kind of thing I'm always looking to learn, namely where the company name comes from: "The company combined three of the largest fields of the Soviet oil industry -- Langepas, Urai and Kogalym -- as well as several refineries, and its name derives from the first letter of each field." (The name always sounded funny to me, because luk means 'onion' in Russian.)

2) William Safire's column is actually informative without being obnoxious; he investigates various occurrences of the phrase "(behind) the green door" (including the movie -- ah, '70s memories!), ending with a link to an online collection of O. Henry stories, among which is a delightful tale of adventure called "The Green Door."

3) An article by John Hodgman on the fantasy writer Susanna Clarke contains the following sentence: "When we were shown the preserved cat that was said to have been found in the pub's wall, where it had been bricked in generations before to ward off evil spirits, Clarke pointed out that in East Anglia, it would have been far more likely to find a horse's head: 'Horse magic had much more of a hold there.'" Does anyone else find the second "it" as awkward as I do?

LINGUINI BONGOLE.

That's the special of the day I saw on a menu board as I walked up Lexington Ave. today. I would like to think this meant the pasta was served by bongo-playing beatnik waiters, but I'm afraid the explana