THE FIRST IDEA.

The First Idea, by Stanley I. Greenspan and Stuart G. Shanker, has the subtitle "How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans," and that's pretty much what it's about. I opened it at the bookstore with a sinking feeling of "here we go again," but was surprised to find that their ideas seemed pretty sensible. As I said in my MetaFilter post, "I don't think we'll ever know where language came from, but this sounds like a more fruitful line of thinking than Chomsky's deus ex machina 'language gene' mutation." Certainly the sections on child development will be of interest to anyone who has a child (or, er, a stepgrandson). The Christian Science Monitor review gives an idea of the authors' approach, with a handy summary ("The Ascent of Human Thinking") at the end.

THE SEDUCTION OF RANDOM COMPARISON.

Bill Poser at Language Log has a wonderful post laying out the basics of historical linguistics that should be required reading for anyone even thinking about pontificating on the field, and it should be memorized by anyone actually working in it. I want to single out here a quote from Georg von der Gabelentz's Die Sprachwissenschaft (1901) which is as pertinent today as it was when he wrote it:

It is terribly seductive to roam the world of languages comparing words from them at random and then to bestow upon scholarship a series of newly discovered relationships. Very many stupidities also result from this; for the most urgent discoverers have unmethodical minds. He who, endowed with a good memory for words, has gone through a couple of dozen languages from different parts of the Earth, - he need not at all have studied them -, finds familiar forms everywhere. And if he records them, investigates them, tests intelligently whether the indications pan out, he does only what is right. Only logically correct thought belongs here, and where it is not absent from the outset then he gladly gets lost in the giddiness of the mania of discovery. Thus it went, as we saw, with the great Bopp, when he sought to assign Caucasian and Malayan languages to the Indo-European language family. Fortune had decreed him a curious fate. It was, to have to prove the correctness of his principles twice, first positively through his magnificent main work, which is based on them, then, negatively, by coming to grief as soon as he was unfaithful to them... Languages are different because sound change has taken different paths. But it has gone its way consistently hither and thither; therefore Order reigns in differentiation, not Chaos. Language comparison without comparison of sounds is irresponsible game-playing.

Poser provides the German original, and also links to a pdf file of his and Lyle Campbell's paper "Indo-European Practice and Historical Methodology," which I commend to your attention if you're interested in more details. The fight against sloppiness is endless but must continually be fought.

GRANDVILLAGESKI.

I'm reading Russia, by Donald Mackenzie Wallace, an indispensable text for any English-speaker who wishes to understand the country in tsarist times (there were three editions, in 1877, 1905, and 1912; I'm reading an abridgment of the last, but the 1905 is online here and here); I wish to present here an amusing anecdote from near the start of Chapter IV:

According to this custom, when a boy enters the seminary he receives from the Bishop a new family name. The name may be Bogoslafski, from a word signifying "Theology," or Bogolubof, "the love of God," or some similar term; or it may be derived from the name of the boy’s native village, or from any other word which the Bishop thinks fit to choose. I know of one instance where a Bishop chose two French words for the purpose. He had intended to call the boy Velikoselski, after his native place, Velikoe Seló, which means "big village"; but finding that there was already a Velikoselski in the seminary, and being in a facetious frame of mind, he called the new comer Grandvillageski—a word that may perhaps sorely puzzle some philologist of the future.

Aside from the story, I had not realized priests were given new family names, and I thought it was interesting enough to pass along.

GOTHIC REQUIRED.

Last year I reported on James Murray's letter of application to the British Museum Library, which did not get the future editor of the OED a job despite his acquaintance with "the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a lesser degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal, & various dialects... Dutch ..., Flemish, German, Danish... Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic... Celtic... Sclavonic... Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit... Hebrew and Syriac... to a less degree... Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phenician." Now I find the following remarkable passage in an obituary quoted in a Transblawg post: "He could have aspired to a professorial chair—after all, he had even written on word formation in Gothic, an extinct language, mastery of which was once deemed essential to academic preferment in London..." So we learn that Gothic, though clearly not sufficient (vide supra), was a necessary job qualification in the Good Old Days! Ah, to have lived in those times, when philology was valued as the Queen of Sciences...

By the way, Margaret finishes her post with this splendid correction:

In case anyone else looks at the obituary, there is an error in the use of italics: 'His translation of Beton appeared as Concrete with Dent' should read 'His translation of Beton appeared as Concrete, published by Dent'.

Concrete with Dent: now, there's an intriguing title!

LANGUAGE IN CENTRAL ASIA.

Mark Liberman of Language Log has taken my post on the names for the capital of Kyrgyzstan and run with it. After a brief post focusing on a recipe for kumiss (which is what you make with a bishkek), he quoted a series of passages from Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (a wonderful book, which these tastes make me want to reread) dealing with the "mad scavenger" Tchitcherine, sent to Seven Rivers country (south of Lake Balkhash: Semirechye in Russian, Zhetysu in Kazakh) "to give the tribesmen out here, this far out, an alphabet." Madness ensues:

There is a crisis over which kind of g to use in the word "stenography." There is a lot of emotional attachment to the word around here. Tchitcherine one morning finds all the pencils in his conference room have mysteriously vanished. In revenge, he and Radnichny sneak in Blobadjian's conference room next night with hacksaws, files and torches, and reform the alphabet on his typewriter. It is some fun in the morning. Blobadjian runs around in a prolonged screaming fit. Tchitcherine's in conference, meeting's called to order, CRASH! two dozen linguists and bureaucrats go toppling over on their ass. ... Could Radnichny be a double agent?

Now, in an effort to get to the historical truth behind Pynchon's fireworks, he gives us a post presenting the history of language reform in Central Asia, as told in Mark Dickens's 1989 paper "Soviet Language Policy in Central Asia." I won't summarize it here; go and read the whole sordid saga, and be grateful you weren't trying to become literate in that part of the world in the 1930s.

THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH MOVEMENT.

At last, the solution to all the wearisome arguments over "good" and "bad" English! The Original English Movement is here to rescue us:

For decades descriptive linguists and professional prescriptivists—technical writers, editors, and English teachers—have been at war. As most linguists know all too well, the prescriptivists say that descriptivism is at best a weak philosophy of usage, and at worst an invitation to grammatical chaos. However, too many prescriptivists maintain what is, to descriptivists, an illogical position: language should not change—or at least not until all the opponents of a particular change are long dead.

All that is about to end!

Never again must we argue about whether singular they is an aberration or a useful and much-needed dialectal "innovation", legitimized by a centuries-long history.

Never again will we discuss the logic of the prohibition against splitting infinitives, asking whether "to go boldly" sounds stupid, or whether traditions in translating Biblical Greek and Latin should have any sway over modern usage.

Never again need we fear to ask who the bell tolls for, or for whom the bell tolls, or where prepositions really belong, or whether the case system of English is dead yet.

The Original English Movement seeks to resolve this conflict and end this struggle by fully embracing the notion that English should not change—not now, not in the future, not even in the past.

Our goal is to bring forth a new body, The Academy of The English Language, whose function is to preside over the correctness of the English Language in the Americas and the British Commonwealth. And by speaking of the English Language, we mean the real, Original English Language—that used by the Anglo-Saxons a thousand years ago to tell the story of Beowulf.

You can send financial support to their World Headquarters and Main Mead Hall ("For reasons of orthographic purity, we prefer to accept donations in Icelandic krona"); I trust all upholders of True English will join this brave cause, and I expect William Safire's next column to be in Anglo-Saxon. (Link via wood s lot.)

To help you get started, here's a list of computer terms in Old English.

JAVELINA.

Once again the NY Times has increased my vocabulary. A story about a small New Mexico town describes its current state of decay: "And these days, more animals than people can be found wandering the streets. Quail, javelinas and the occasional mountain lion strut through empty cul-de-sacs..." Quail and mountain lions I know, but javelinas were new to me. It turns out javelina (pronounced hah-v@-LEE-n@) is a synonym for collared peccary and has an interesting etymology:

Alteration of Spanish jabalina, feminine of jabalí, jabalín, wild boar, from Arabic (hinzir) jabal, mountain (swine), from jabal, mountain; see gbl in Semitic roots.

In case you're interested, peccary is (in the words of Webster's Third New International) "of Cariban origin; akin to Chayma paquera, Apalai pakira."

Do not be deceived, incidentally, by the popular etymology given at pages like this: "They are called Javelina because of their razor-sharp tusks, Spanish for javelin or spear." Remember, buy your etymologies only from authorized vendors! Use of amateur etymologies can invalidate your warranty and may cause public embarrassment.

SYNTAX IN BARDI.

In the course of an explanation of site changes, Anggarrgoon presents a most interesting explanation of a bit of Bardi grammar:

"look like" or "resemble" is irrganbala, it's a noun, it's inalienably possessed, it's (understandably) obligatorily plural. It is also one of very few words to take the "spouse" suffix -milj. I call it a "spouse" suffix because it marks "appropriate" pairs, e.g. iilamilj, a dog and its mate. irrganbalamilj, though, means "they look like each other". I can't remember an etymology, if I ever found one, but it bears a suspicious resemblance to the word for track, footprints, niinbil or niinbal (which would be what we'd expect for the singular, from ni-ganbala, which I think would have to be reconstructed as *niganbila to make the vowels turn out right.) Not to be confused with niyambal, niimbal 'foot, footprints'. n doesn't normally assimilate to b.

I have to say, much as I enjoy explaining the role of coincidence to people convinced two similar-sounding words must be related, even I find it hard to believe niinbal and niimbal, both meaning 'footprints,' are unrelated. Not saying it ain't so, just pointing out that I'm not immune to the natural human craving to connect similar things.

BISHKEK/PISHPEK.

A comment thread at pf has inspired me to deal with the vexed question of the various names for the capital of Kyrgyzstan. From 1926 to 1991 it was Frunze, which is not problematic (except for the Kyrgyz—see below), Frunze being the name of a local boy who became a Soviet general. But before that it was called Pishpek and now it is Bishkek; what is the relationship between these amusingly assonant names? Let's go to E.M. Pospelov, Geograficheskie nazvaniya mira (my translation):

Founded in 1878 as a settlement [selenie] on the site of the former Kokand fortress Pishpek, which in 1926 was renamed Frunze after the Soviet party and military leader M.V. Frunze (1885-1925). But since there is no sound f in the Kyrgyz language and successive consonants at the start of a word are not allowed, the inhabitants pronounced the name Purunze. After Kyrgyzia achieved independence, the question of renaming the capital arose. It turned out that the etymology of the indigenous name Pishpek was unknown; the nearest Kyrgyz word was bishkek 'whisk with which kumiss is stirred.' To what extent this piece of household equipment [eta khozyaistvennaya prinadlezhnost'] might be linked with the name of the fortress is unclear, but in 1991 Bishkek was adopted as the new name of the capital.

I love dry wit in reference works.

I can't resist quoting the anecdote (from jj, a friend of pf's) that gave rise to the comments:

I left New York for Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, on Wednesday night. At the counter, the check-in agent asked me, "Where is Bishkek?"

"In Kyrgyzstan."

"Where’s that?"

"In Central Asia, near Kazkhstan, Uzbekistan and China."

"I’ve never heard of that."

She passed me to another agent. He checked me in, then announced, "Your bags are checked through to Frankfurt."

"To Frankfurt? I’m not going to Frankfurt."

"Yes, Frankfurt," he said, looking at the FRU on the luggage tags.

"You must mean Frunze," I said, "the old name for Bishkek. I’m going to Bishkek."

He looked more carefully and realized his mistake. "I don’t think I’ve ever checked anyone in to Bishkek before," he said. "I’ll have to go home and look that one up on a map."

Addendum. In case anybody's wondering why Kyrgyz were unable to pronounce the name of a local boy, Frunze (a variant of Frunza) isn't a Kyrgyz name but a Romanian one—in Romanian, it means 'leaf' (cf French frondaison).

Update. See this post for further Central Asian linguistic fun.

ORHAN VELI.

A very interesting essay by Murat Nemet-Nejat, "Orhan Veli Kanik: Translating Clarity," begins by describing Orhan Veli Kanik's unfinished poem, "The Parade of Love," which "was found wrapped around his toothbrush after his death," gives a brief account of his life and early death (in 1950), and proceeds to the main point: Veli's poetry and its place in modern Turkish literature:

Orhan Veli Kanik's poetry strikes one with its ordinariness and the aggressiveness of this ordinariness. His poetry is a mixture of daily life, streetwise humor and an undercurrent of lyricism... He is a poet of moment-to-moment experience, being in love, being bored, being sad, joking, casual musings... On one level, Veli's poems are an investigation of the meaning of reality. Short, neutral, full of everyday details, they constitute a sustained meditation on William Carlos Williams' "red wheel/barrow."

Of special interest here is Nemet-Nejat's description of various Middle Eastern literary traditions:

Middle Eastern languages, specifically Arabic and Persian, bear a historical burden. The written and spoken languages have for a long time been divided. Most of the literature exists in written form. One may study Arabic literature for years and still not understand spoken Arabic. If Arabs want to understand their literature, they have to learn a special vocabulary. To a lesser extent, the same is true of Persian.

This division exists in Turkish as well, but with one big difference. Turkish also has a tradition of poetry written in the vernacular. Since the beginning of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish has had two independent literary currents. One is that of court poetry. This polished literature, which continued until the end of the 19th century, was based on Persian and Arabic models and used a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic vocabulary. This language, called Ottoman, is different from modern spoken Turkish. One has to study Ottoman separately to understand a 19th century Ottoman poem.

The vernacular current still coexisted for centuries. It is a folk poetry that encompasses major poets like Yunus Emre and Pir Sultan Abdal. These poets, who lived in the 13th and 16th centuries respectively, are comprehensible without any special study...

From the middle of the 19th century on, Turkish society and Turkish poets expressed a need for reform by turning to the West, but in literature, they saw the necessity for change only in subject matter. Their language remained Ottoman. It wasn't until the reforms of Kemal Ataturk, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, that the transformation in Turkish poetry took place; then, it occurred very quickly. The speed was due to the presence of a strong folk tradition in Turkish...

Orhan Veli's colloquialism is radical and transcends the middle class from which he also came. It is an attack on language. His people are low-level civil servants (many poor but few utterly dispossessed) coping with daily life. Surprisingly, there are very few slang expressions in his work, that is to say, very little that belongs only to a sub-culture. His colloquialism is central, classical. In its pared-down naturalness, its selection of the most immediate cadences, it is also abstract. It's due to the particular nature of Veli's colloquialism, I believe, and despite the relative narrowness of his subject matter, that his poetry remains fresh, continuously contemporary. In this respect he shares the virtues of major folk poets like Yunus Emre, Pir Sultan Abdal and Karacaoglan.

He sounds a bit like a Turkish equivalent of Paul Blackburn, of whom I am very fond.

(Via wood s lot, where you will find other Orhan Veli links and poems.)

CROSSPATCH.

A NY Times article by Charlie LeDuff taught me a new word: "The bodies are then sent to the Frye Chapel and Mortuary in Brawley and tended by Francis Frye, an 86-year-old crosspatch." My first assumption was that the word I've bolded was some arcane job description, but it turns out it means 'a peevish, irascible person; a grouch' (AHD). I like this word a lot, and intend to use it as a self-description when I get the chance: "Don't mind me; I'm just an old crosspatch."

THEY.

I'm not sure what to say about this AP story, except to point out the remarkable sentence I've bolded, in which "they" has a singular referent:

BRANSON, Mo. - A Branson man has put a face to the anonymous references people often make to "they" by changing his name to just that: "They." The former Andrew Wilson, a 43-year-old self-employed inventor, was granted legal permission last week by a circuit judge to change his name. It's just They, no surname. He also has changed his driver's license to reflect his new name.

They said he did it for humor to address the common reference to "they." "'They do this,' or 'They're to blame for that.' Who is this 'they' everyone talks about? 'They' accomplish such great things. Somebody had to take responsibility," he said.

Now, his friends are getting used to his new name. "They call up and say, 'Is They there?'"

He acknowledged the name could drive grammarians crazy.

Well, I guess his friend Craig Erickson said it best: "Not only is he making a statement about his name, but he's messing with the entire English language."

(Thanks to Bonnie for the tip!)

HYAKUNIN-ISSHU.

A Hundred Verses from Old Japan (the Hyakunin-isshu), translated by William N. Porter [1909]:

This is a collection of 100 specimens of Japanese Tanka poetry collected in the 13th Century C.E., with some of the poems dating back to the 7th Centry. Tanka is a 31 syllable format in the pattern 5-7-5-7-7. Most of these poems were written about the time of the Norman Conquest and display a sophistication that western literature would not achieve for a long time thereafter. These little gems are on themes such as nature, the round of the seasons, the impermanence of life, and the vicissitudes of love. There are obvious Buddhist and Shinto influences throughout. Porter's notes put the poems into a cultural and historical context. Each poem is illustrated in this edition with an 18th century Japanese woodcut by an anonymous illustrator... In this text I have put the Japanese, English and the notes on one virtual page per poem, and supplied page numbers for the apparatus.

A fine web presentation (by John Bruno Hare) of a fine (if antiquated) translation-cum-annotation. (Via wood s lot.)

A sample:

THE RETIRED EMPEROR YOZEI

YOZEI IN

Tsukuba ne no
Mine yori otsuru
Mina no kawa
Koi zo tsumorite
Fuchi to nari nuru.

THE Mina stream comes tumbling down
From Mount Tsukuba's height;
Strong as my love, it leaps into
A pool as black as night
With overwhelming might.

It was a frequent custom in the old days for the Emperors of Japan to retire into the church or private life, when circumstances demanded it. The Emperor Yôzei, who was only nine years of age when he came to the throne, went out of his mind, and was forced by Mototsune Fujiwara to retire; he reigned A.D. 877-884, and did not die till the year 949. The verse was addressed to the Princess Tsuridono-no-Miko. Mount Tsukuba (2,925 feet high) and the River Mina are in the Province of Hitachi.

Koi here means the dark colour of the water from its depth, but it also means his love, and is to be understood both ways. Note also mine, a mountain peak, and Mina, the name of the river.

TITCHY.

I have just learned that titch (or tich) is a UK colloquialism meaning 'a very small person or amount,' with an associated adjective titchy. (It is apparently derived from one "Little Tich," a music-hall comedian of a century ago who stood only four feet high; the "Tich" is by way of ironic contrast with Arthur Orton, the gigantic "Titchborne Claimant" in the celebrated impersonation case of the 1870s.) I am glad to know this, but the way in which I learned it infuriated me: I had occasion to look up the Russian word mákhon'kii and found it defined, in the authoritative Oxford Russian Dictionary, as "titchy." Just that. Now, how in the hell am I supposed to know what "titchy" means? It's not in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate; fortunately, I have the Cassell Concise on hand, and was able to find out. But I consider it the height of chauvinism and irresponsibility to use parochial definitions like that in a dictionary that is intended to serve the entire English-speaking world. (And yes, I would consider it just as bad if a US-based dictionary used local colloquialisms as definitions.)

SERVICES IN MODERN GREEK.

It might seem normal these days for church services to be conducted in the language the congregation actually speaks, but it's a big step in Greece, where the church has stuck to the New Testament Koine of two thousand years ago. According to a Kathimerini article:

Worried that worshippers cannot understand services, Archbishop Christodoulos, head of the Church of Greece, has instructed churches in the Athens area to start conducting New Testament readings in Modern Greek later this month, a report said yesterday.

Until now, the New Testament has been read in the original Hellenistic “Koine” or common language, a version of Greek spoken from the late fourth century BC to fifth century AD. Christodoulos is anxious that the young especially do not understand this form of Greek and cannot follow services, according to the Eleftheros Typos daily.

In a major step for a Church that clings to its traditions, the archbishop received approval from the Holy Synod to start a pilot scheme in Athenian churches on September 19 which will see New Testament texts read in the original language before they are read again in Modern Greek.

Let's hope it doesn't cause riots.

(Thanks for the link, Dimitris!)

Incidentally, in researching this post I ran across a Wikipedia article on "Greeklish," the online writing of Greek in Latin characters. Who knew it was so complicated?

RUSSIAN NAMES REDUX.

I've complained about misaccenting of Russian (and other) names before, and I'm happy to see a similar complaint at Language Log (by guest blogger Barbara Partee):

All through the television coverage of US Open tennis tournament this year, the names of many of the Russian women tennis players were pronounced incorrectly. I recently hunted around on the Internet for anything I could find about it, and found this article by Neil Schmidt in the Cincinnati Enquirer (August 18). The article includes a pronunciation guide, which is taken directly from the WTA's own pronunciation guide.

Amazingly, more than half the names are listed with the stress on the wrong syllable...

The kicker is that "the WTA stands by its pronunciation guide" and suggests that "many players might adopt Americanized pronunciations when they speak with foreign reporters." A shame if true; it's not really any harder to say sha-RAH-pava than "Sha-ra-POH-vuh," and why wouldn't you want your name said correctly?

Let me take this occasion to once more recommend Say How? A Pronunciation Guide to Names of Public Figures, even though none of the mistakes I mentioned have been fixed. Foreign stuff they're iffy on, but the English-language names seem accurate.

TRANSLATING ESSEX GIRLS.

The Guardian has excerpts from the correspondence between Scarlett Thomas, author of Going Out (in which "twentysomethings languish in the suburban wastelands of Essex, engaging the world primarily through e-mail, the Internet, and American sitcoms and movies") and her Russian translator, Den(n)is Borisov. I would have preferred it if they'd cut out most of the chitchat ("My dog is called Dreamer") and focused on the translation questions, but there are enough of the latter to make it an interesting read; I learned almost as much as Borisov:

Yes, a Cortina is a Ford. Now the context. Essex is known in the UK as being a place where working-class people live, often people who have moved out of the slummier areas of London. Essex Girl jokes started in the 80s, and specifically focused on young working-class girls. In that sense, "Essex girl" really means "working-class girl". At the time the jokes started, the Cortina was the kind of car that people in Essex would have. Kind of trashy and cheap but maybe aspirational for people in Romford or Southend. In the UK, as everywhere else, I guess, different cars have different meanings. So a Cortina is a working-class" sort of car, the Volvo is the "sensible" family car, often associated with people who don't like taking risks. The old-style BMWs are drug-dealers' cars. The Porsche is the stockbroker's car. The Mondeo is the travelling salesman's car.

(Via Naked Translations.)

PROSHOOT.

Today's NY Times has an article (by Stacy Albin) called "You Say Prosciutto, I Say Pro-SHOOT, and Purists Cringe." I had hopes for this article; the local variant of Italian spoken in New York and New Jersey (I don't know if it extends to other parts of the Northeast) has always fascinated me, and I'd love to see a good analysis of it. But this being the Times, my hopes were not particularly high, and they were not fulfilled. As was to be expected, the article nods in the direction of actual linguistics ("In fact, in some parts of Italy, the dropping of final vowels is common") but basically wallows in the lowest sort of purist chauvinism ("As for the linguistically challenged, who mangle 'prosciutto'..."). Anyway, here are some excerpts:

Ann Gustafson can discuss food - especially Italian food. She spent many days in the Bronx with her Sicilian grandmother, Sebastiana Ceraolo, learning how to cook with mozzarella. Only Mrs. Gustafson did not call it "mozzarella.'' She said "mozzarell.''

Wrong?

Not to many New Yorkers or New Jerseyans. (Doesn't Tony Soprano drop his final vowels?) Not to some vendors at the annual Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy this week. But it makes Italian teachers, the purists who love the language just as Dante wrote it, wince.

They suffer prosciutto (pro-SHOOT-toe) becoming pro-SHOOT, calzone (cal-TSO-nay) becoming cal-ZONE and pasta e fagioli (PAH-stah eh faj-YOH-lee) becoming pasta fasul (fa-ZOOL)...

Neither grandma nor anyone in her neighborhood, the Morris Park section of the Bronx, which had a large enclave of Italian immigrants, ever challenged Mrs. Gustafson's pronunciation. And neither did the Italian butcher who pronounced his final vowels.

"The Italians - they don't correct," Mrs. Gustafson, 34, said. "They're not like the French, who will correct you."

Stefano Albertini, who is the director of New York University's Italian cultural center, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, agreed. "Generally speaking, Italians are rather grateful to anyone who speaks in Italian," he said. "They think Italian comes in so many varieties and accents."

In fact, in some parts of Italy, the dropping of final vowels is common. Restaurantgoers and food shoppers in the United States ended up imitating southern and northern dialects, where speakers often do not speak their endings, Professor Albertini said.

Liliana Dussi, a retired New York district director for the Berlitz language schools, said many first- and second-generation Italians whose ancestors immigrated to the United States before World War I were informally taught Italian expressions and the names of food, some of which has ended up part of everyday language in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

And Gregory Pell, an assistant professor at Hofstra University who teaches Italian, said that because of the way double consonants were spoken, such as the double "t" in manicotti, Americans might not clearly hear the last "ee" sound. When New Yorkers drop their endings, he said, "it's become a new word and its own version."

Professor Albertini, speaking from an educated, native Italian's perspective, said "it makes us cringe sometimes at the beginning, but we get used to it."

Ms. Dussi said that she did hear some lovely Italian spoken in New York, which she attributed to widespread use of computerized language lessons and an emphasis on education. American universities teach the standardized version, which is based on 13th-century Florentine vernacular and pronunciations.

And only once in her 20 years in working for Berlitz did a student specifically ask to learn a dialect, Ms. Dussi said. That student worked as an agent for the F.B.I. and wanted to speak like a Sicilian.

To correct that last misapprehension, Sicilian is not a dialect but a separate language (Ethnologue, Wikipedia). And here's a good description of the various forms of Venetan, many of which drop final vowels (paron 'owner, boss' for Standard Italian padrone).

Anyway, if you know of a good study of New York (Proshoot) Italian, please let me know!

Update. Mark Liberman has a response from Stefano Taschini at Language Log; I was very happy to learn the linguistic provenance of "pastafazool":

Gallo-italic dialects (Lombardo, Piemontese, Emiliano, and, in particular, Bolognese), have a rather different phonology from standard Italian. In these dialects many words end in a consonant but they cannot be seen as an apocope of an Italian word. The "fasul" [fa'zu:l] , common to Gallo-italic dialects, Veneto and Friulano, is not immediately reconducted to the Italian "fagioli" [fa'??li] (Pasta e fagioli is a typical northern dish).

CALVIN.

Having previously paid my respects to my other favorite comic strip, I wish now to do the same for Calvin & Hobbes. I am moved to do this by my discovery (via Incoming Signals) of an enthusiastic web page called, with simplicity and accuracy, "25 Great Calvin & Hobbes Strips." You probably already know the strip, and if you don't an introduction is only a click away, so I won't say anything other than that I desperately wish Bill Watterson would start doing it again. The "25 Great Strips" page is wildly enthusiastic (and rather insulting to other comics), but its excesses are those of love and therefore forgivable. And it includes the one with the punch line "You know what's the rage this year? ...Hats." So I can't resist posting it.

But you'd better go there fairly soon, because it could well go the way of "Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's." Copyright is a harsh mistress.

WHERE PRESCRIPTIVISM LEADS.

According to a Guardian article by Giles Tremlett, Gabriel García Márquez has been barred from the International Congress of the Spanish Language for "making trouble" by saying things like "Spelling, that terror visited on human beings from the cradle onwards, should be pensioned off." Magdalena Faillace, Argentina's secretary of state for culture, who is hosting the meeting, "told Spain's El Pais newspaper that it was the academies of language which had insisted the Colombian Nobel winner be banned"; the Real Academia denies responsibility. Whatever the details, the banning of a great author shows what happens when you allow prescriptivists actual power over events. Let them write their querulous plaints about how everything is going to hell in a handbasket if they must, but languages are (as always) in the hands of those who use them, and prosper best when they benefit from the attentions of writers who use them particularly well, by which I do not mean academicians. (Link via wood s lot.)

Update. The latest story at El Pais indicates that the Argentine government has invited García Márquez after all; it's unclear whether he'll accept.

And yes, I realize the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot and it doesn't matter a damn whether Gabo is at the stupid Congress or not, but it gives you an idea of what might happen if Academies had actual power.

NICARAGUAN SIGN LANGUAGE.

A sign language developed by children at a school in Managua, Nicaragua, over the last 35 years and studied by a Barnard team led by Ann Senghas has been in the news recently (Barnard press release, BBC News, New Scientist, NPR audio; also, from five years ago, a long NY Times Magazine story with photos), and a number of people have sent me links (thanks Bonnie, Eve, and whoever I'm forgetting!). The Wikipedia entry has a good summary of events:

Following the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the newly installed Nicaraguan Government had hundreds of deaf students enrolled in two Managua schools. Initially, the education officials adopted "finger spelling," using simple signs to limn the alphabets of spoken languages. The result was a complete failure, because most students did not even grasp the concept of words, never having been exposed either to spoken or to written language. The children remained linguistically disconnected from their teachers.

Initially, the students could only use crude gestural signs developed within their own families, but once the students were placed together, they began to build on one another's signs. While the inexperienced teachers found it hard to understand their students, the children had no problem communicating with each other. A new language had begun to bloom. Within just a few generations, a mature language with rules and grammar was born.

The Sandinista officials asked for help from outside scholars. After the linguists finally decoded the children's creation, Nicaraguan Sign Language became a classical case of modern linguistics. Some linguists see what happened in Managua as proof that language acquisition is hard-wired inside the human brain. "The Nicaraguan case is absolutely unique in history," Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, maintains. "We've been able to see how it is that children — not adults — generate language, and we have been able to record it happening in great scientific detail. And it's the first and only time that we've actually seen a language being created out of thin air."

In order to protect the language, some researchers are interested in restricting access of these young NSL users to other forms of sign language (e.g. American Sign Language). Others argue that this is an unethical restriction of their freedom of movement.

I don't have anything in particular to say about this other than that it's extremely interesting, but you can find a discussion at MetaFilter (as well as a brief but intense complaint about the BBC story at Language Geek; why hasn't Language Log weighed in?).

Update. The Sept. 21 Science section of the NY Times has a good summary by Nicholas Wade (sorry, I can't seem to get a blogsafe link, so it will expire in a week):

The children have been studied principally by Dr. Judy Kegl, a linguist at the University of Southern Maine, and by Dr. Ann Senghas, a cognitive scientist at Columbia University. In the latest study, published in the current issue of Science, Dr. Senghas shows that the younger children have now decomposed certain gestures into smaller component signs. A hearing person asked to mime a standard story about a cat waddling down a street will make a single gesture, a downward spiral motion of the hand. But the deaf children have developed two different signs to use in its place. They first sign a circle for the rolling motion and then a straight line for the direction of movement.

This requires more signing, but the two signs can be used in combination with others to express different concepts. The development is of interest to linguists because it captures a principal quality of human language - discrete elements usable in different combinations - in contrast to the one sound, one meaning of animal communication. "The regularity she documents here - mapping discrete aspects of the world onto discrete word choices - is one of the most distinctive properties of human language," said Dr. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard.

When people with no common language are thrown into contact, they often develop an ad hoc language known to linguists as a pidgin, usually derived from one of the parent languages. Pidgins are rudimentary systems with minimal grammar and utterances of the "Me Tarzan, you Jane" variety. But in a generation or two the pidgins acquire grammar and somehow become upgraded into what linguists call creoles.

Though many new languages have been created by the pidgin-creole route, the Nicaraguan situation is unique, Dr. Senghas said, because its starting point was not a complex language but ordinary gestures. From this raw material, the deaf children appear to be spontaneously fabricating the elements of language. Sign languages can possess all the properties of language, including grammar, and differ only in conveying meaning by signs instead of speech.

Until now, children's specific contribution to language has been hard to define because they end up speaking like their parents. By inventing a new language from scratch, the Nicaraguan children afford linguists the chance to identify children's role in language creation. Dr. Senghas's work shows "that children can give the language certain regularities instead of merely extracting them" from their parents' speech, Dr. Pinker said...

Though there are many creoles, the transition from pidgin to creole has rarely, if ever, been captured in real time, though it has been reconstructed to some extent by interviewing older people. The Nicaraguan children are a living laboratory of language generation. Dr. Senghas, who has been visiting their school every year since 1990, said she had noticed how the signs for numbers have developed. Originally the children represented "20" by flicking the fingers of both hands in the air twice. But this cumbersome sign has been replaced with a form that can now be signed with one hand. The children don't care that the new sign doesn't look like a 20, Dr. Senghas said; they just want a symbol that can be signed fast.

SHASHLYK.

The Russian equivalent of shish kebab is shashlyk (more commonly spelled shashlik in English); it comes from the Caucasus, and I once had it on a Caucasian mountainside after waiting for an entire wedding party to be served, by which time I was so hungry I couldn't tell you if it was any good. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about a cat.

Many years ago—well, fifteen years ago, as it turns out—my then wife and I decided to adopt one of a litter of kittens a friend had found on the street. She decided Shashlyk would be an excellent name for him, and he grew up to be a lean, agile, gray-furred adolescent, friendly to all comers and constantly seeking out new ways to sneak outside and explore the forbidden territory of the Astoria streets. I missed him after the divorce, and took pleasure in imagining his further adventures. Now word comes from my ex that the thread of his life has been cut: he had been depressed and refusing to eat, "a pile of skin and bones, unhappy and clearly uncomfortable," and it's finally all over. I hate to think of him that way, and I find it hard even to imagine him as an old cat; to me he'll forever be the gray streak caught out of the corner of my eye flowing impossibly straight up a cabinet, or chasing his tail with endless enthusiasm, or staring wide-eyed at an invisible Martian in the corner, or sitting quietly in a kitchen drawer. Goodbye, kiddo; you were a good companion, even if you did stick those claws a little deeper into my thigh than was strictly necessary from time to time.

WORDFUL.

Wordful is a new language site from Australia whose creator says:

Words. How I love 'em. This is where I'll share my love for word histories, names and anything else wordy that pops into my head.

This is obviously a good premise for a website, and he's already turned up some wonderful stuff, like morkin:

I saw a dead possum on the road this morning. The poor morkin.

Morkin is an obsolete word meaning “A beast that has died of disease or by mischance.” ... What a great word!

(The etymology I have elided is a little off; the OED says: "Anglo-Norman mortekine, morticine and Middle French morticine carrion... < post-classical Latin morticinum carrion..., use as noun of neuter of classical Latin morticinus (of an animal) that has died a natural death, prob. < mort-, mors death...," with the ending perhaps influenced by words like firkin, napkin, &c.)

I can't resist adding the last item in the OED entry, the (obsolete and rare) compound morkin-gnoff 'a miser': 1602 W. Basse Sword & Buckler sig. Biij, A morkin-gnoffe that.. Sits carping how t'advance his shapelesse brood.

One interesting feature of the site is "Todays Website Name," which provides a word or phrase that might be suitable for someone's website; today's is subslice.

Welcome to Blogovia!

Update. It's August 2006, and the site has been dead for who knows how long. Sigh.

THIS IS JUST TO SAY.

Today's wood s lot is entirely devoted to William Carlos Williams, who thoroughly deserves the tribute; I urge you to visit and check out the many links. Here I will merely quote the last of his nuggets, a parody by that funniest of poets, Kenneth Koch, of one of everybody's favorite WCW poems:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
Kenneth Koch

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

ON THE TRAIN.

After a long and stressful day at work yesterday I finally took the 9:02 out of Grand Central, settled into my preferred seat (next to the mid-car open area, where I like to stand or pace when I tire of sitting), and pulled out the Aleksandr Grin story I was reading (thanks, Tatyana!). A young brunette in a black dress settled in across the aisle, leaned against the window and extended herself over both seats, pulled out her cell phone and address book, and started making calls. When I realized she was not speaking English, I automatically began trying to identify the language. A few Slavic-sounding words or syllables—da, ale, chem—made me think it might be something West Slavic, but the closer I listened the more at sea I was. Suddenly I realized I was hearing glottalized consonants, and my whole frame of reference shifted: surely it couldn't be... Georgian? But it was; as soon as I listened with that in mind, I couldn't understand why I hadn't known it at once. If I'd been in Brighton Beach, I probably would have, but what are the odds of hearing Georgian on the Hudson Line train to Beacon?

The funny thing was that the more I listened, the more of my long-forgotten Georgian began surfacing. Modi, that means 'come,' doesn't it? And vitsi is 'I know,' ara is 'no' (I'll never forget the first time I heard a Georgian say ar vitsi [AHR-wits(i)] and thought "He just said 'I don't know'!"—ah, the joy of test-driving a language you've been learning), akhali is 'new'... I had hoped to exchange a few words with her, but I never got the chance; she talked nonstop until she got off at Ossining. I wonder how much of it would have come back if I'd been able to listen to her for a few hours? Memory is a strange business.

RENAISSANCE BOOKS ONLINE.

Greg Lindahl's home page links (under "Publishing") to a series of Renaissance books he's hosting, including a couple of dictionaries, Cotgrave's A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (and its associated proverbs) and Florio's Italian/English Dictionary, both from 1611; there are also books on fencing, dancing, music, and needlework, among others. In case you were wondering, Lindahl's motivation has to do with the Society for Creative Anachronism, whose adherents go to a great deal of trouble to achieve authenticity. (Via misteraitch's MetaFilter post.)

DAYS OF THE WEEK.

This website describes "Days of the Week in Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese":

There's something friendly and familiar about the names of the days of the week in English and other Western European languages. Each has its quirks (the Romance languages use Roman gods, the Germanic languages use Germanic gods, Spanish and Italian use 'Sabbath' instead of 'Saturday') but with a bit of background they fall into an interesting but reassuring pattern.

Not so Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese (CJV), which seem completely alien. Chinese and Vietnamese simply count the days of the week; Japanese uses a strange collection of elemental names reminiscent of primitive religion. Given that Chinese and Vietnamese can't even agree which day to count from, the three languages seem to have little to do with each other, let alone the languages of Europe.

But this appearance is deceptive. A little delving reveals a much more complex picture that is every bit as fascinating as the languages of the West. Ironically, Japanese and Vietnamese turn out to be more faithful to traditional Western concepts of the week than modern English is.

It also has a comprehensive link section, which includes material on the Western systems. (Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

KINDERGARTNER.

Reading the NY Times Magazine story "The Lessons of Classroom 506" by Lisa Belkin, I was taken aback by this: "As a kindergartner, Valente was the only disabled child in her grade..." (my emphasis). It would never have occurred to me to say anything but "kindergartener," but I looked it up in Webster's Collegiate and sure enough, the one preserving German morphology is the preferred spelling. So I present this as a public service for those in my former condition of ignorance, and while I'm at it I'll mention that someone who runs a restaurant is a restaurateur, something that always seems to flummox people. (He's a "restorator" because he runs a place that does the restoring.)

While I'm at it, another fun fact I learned not so long ago is that the word for the art of being a midwife, "midwifery," is normatively pronounced with a short second i: mid-WIFF-(e)ry. (It's the same process that shortens the vowels in "Christmas" and "Michaelmas.") There, now you're fully equipped for whatever life throws at you.

UNDERRATED POETS.

Alan DeNiro's Taverner's Koans, "a one-room schoolhouse of experimental poetics," has a Gallery of Underrated Poets that's well worth exploring (as I could tell instantly from the fact that it included Lorine Niedecker). I'm not sure John Clare and Stephen Crane can be considered underrated, but I'm not going to quibble, since I've already discovered the wonderful Melvin Tolson and I've barely begun digging. Here's a snippet from Tolson's The Harlem Gallery (1965):

The Harlem Gallery, an Afric pepper bird,
awakes me at a people's dusk of dawn.
The age altars its image, a dog's hind leg,
and hazards the moment of truth in pawn.
The Lord of the House of Flies,
jaundiced-eyed, synapses purled,
writes before the tumultuous canvas,
The Second of May—
by Goya:
the dagger of Madrid
vs.
the scimitar of Murat.
In Africa, in Asia, on the Day
of Barricades, alarm birds bedevil the Great White World,
a Buridan's ass—not Balaam's—between no oats and hay.

Sometimes a Roscius as tragedian,
sometimes a Kean as clown,
without Sir Henry's flap to shield my neck,
I travel, from oasis to oasis, man's Saharic up-and-down.

(Via wood s lot.)

NATSUGUSA.

Jonathan Mayhew at Bemsha Swing presents fourteen ways of looking at a Basho haiku and concludes that "the best version is probably the sum total or average of all these"; Mark Liberman at Language Log adds Bill Poser's analysis of the original Japanese; Hugh Bygott at moments... discusses the syntax of the poem (is it a PAN string?) and suggests that it works as a continuation of a Tu Fu poem; Paul MacNeil mentions the historical context. If you prefer German versions, there are seven of them here. Much ado about seventeen syllables, and a lot of fun!

HUNGARIAN LITERATURE ONLINE.

A nice site showcasing Hungarian literature in English translation, with pages on authors and their works; I haven't had time to delve very far into it, but I'm intrigued by Orsolya Karafiáth, "a vamp and a poet of great formal talent in one person," who "writes post-postmodern poems with romantic, sometimes sentimental and melodramatic overtones." Here's "fission":

i cannot choose your touching any more
the touchings we have left are without truth
moments off-guard - what are we touching for
you gave me up and now i give up too
instead i rather choose your distantness
while still your distantness will seek me out
as an exchange please take my distantness
you've yielded me i too am yielding now
i opt for your regard whatever cold
forgiving aspects your regard may show
you too want my regard for after all
you've let me go and now i too let go
      there's no lovelier split no easier one
      give up while i too still am giving up

Oh, and there's an "Online Dictionary" search box on the upper right that gives quite impressive results. (Via wood s lot; therein is also found a link to The Hungarian Quarterly, "Central Europe's best English-language journal.")

SHIH SHIH.

The great linguist Chao Yuen-Ren once wrote an essay in Chinese using only words which (in Mandarin) would be transliterated as shih (using Wade-Giles; shi in pinyin). You can see the text in characters and two transliterations, read the translation ("A poet by the name of Shih Shih living in a stone den was fond of lions..."), and hear both Mandarin and Cantonese readings here (in Cantonese, of course, the words do not all have the same consonants and vowels). It's really quite a tour de force. (Thanks for the link go to P. Kerim Friedman, who got it from Muninn.)

Addendum. See also Suzanne McCarthy's discussion of Chao's thoughts on reading Chinese, with copious quotes.

BLACK ENGLISH.

This article by Robert A. Leonard is as good a summary of how Black English should be viewed as any I've seen:

Any professional linguist will tell you that, as a language system of communication, black English and standard English are equal, in the same way that French and Greek and Chinese and English are all equal. They do things differently, but there is no factual way to say one is better than the other...

But if black English is not deficient, why do so many people believe it is? Because black Americans have a history of powerlessness. And every society I know worldwide looks down on the speech of the powerless. We learn this attitude unconsciously when we learn the million and one rules and beliefs of our society. Most of what we know we learn without being explicitly taught — by observation and deduction.

And Leonard goes on to describe this wonderful experiment:

Texas researcher Frederick Williams asked white student teachers to watch videotapes and rate black, Mexican-American and white Anglo children on whether their English was standard and how fluently they spoke. The white children scored highest. But the videotapes were specially done. Even though the visuals showed different children, there was only one voice track: standard English. Stereotypes were stronger than reality.

That should be taught to everyone as early as possible in the educational process; it might help avoid a lot of ignorant prejudice.

Many thanks to Ted Harlan for the link!

I can't resist quoting part of Leonard's bio:

Dr. Robert A. Leonard is Professor of Linguistics at Hofstra University. His specialty is Forensic Linguistics as applied to U.S. law. He directs the Linguistics Program, and is also Professor of Swahili... In the arts, Dr. Leonard co-founded and led the rock group Sha Na Na and as bass and lead singer performed at the Woodstock Festival, the Fillmores East and West, on television's Tonight Show, and in the Academy Award-winning Woodstock movie.

Who said linguists were boring?

CHESS WORDS.

Another specialized multilingual site: Chess Pieces in Different Languages, the creation of Ari Luiro. Not only are the words for 'chess,' 'check,' and the pieces given in 64 languages, but there's a nice historical introduction, piece by piece:

Words for chess queen in European languages are generally feminine, with a few exception. But outside Europe the chess queens usually don't have gender or the piece is masculine. The Arabic firz or firzān (counsellor) was never translated into a European language although it was adopted. For example the Italians call the queen as donna (woman) or more common regina (queen in Italian). A Latin manuscript preserved in the Einsiedeln Monastery in Switzerland (997 AD) contains the first recorded mention of the chess queen (regina). In French usage reine 'queen' replaced fierce or fierge (from the Arabic fers) during the 14th century; during the next century reine was replaced by the word dame... Chess-players may have borrowed the word dame from the game of draughts. The transition from dame to queen would be natural, a desire to pair the central pieces...

Luiro's native tongue is Finnish, so the English is a little awkward in places, but the information is great. And the languages are arranged more or less by family (though Finnish takes pride of place), so that you can compare, say, all the Turkic names; surprisingly, the words for 'rook' vary tremendously: Turkish kale, Azerbaijani top, Uzbek ruh, Tatar lad'ja (borrowed from Russian), Chuvash tura, Tuvin terge. Thanks, as so often, to aldiboronti at Wordorigins for the link.

SHAKESPEARE QUARTOS ONLINE.

The British Museum has put online its "93 copies of the 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642." At the Comparing the texts page:

You can view the British Library’s copies of Shakespeare quartos separately or you can compare any two copies.

If you choose to see one copy at a time, you will get two pages on the screen as you would if you had the book open in front of you. To read the text you may have to enlarge the image by clicking on it or using the enlarge icon...

You can also compare the text of any two of the 93 copies. To do this, select a copy from the ‘View one copy’ drop down lists on the left hand search form above. Then select another copy from the ‘Compare with another text’ drop down lists on the right hand search form above. Even different copies of the same edition may not be exactly the same, because of the way the quartos were printed.

If you choose to compare two copies, you will see one page from each side by side...

It's absolutely amazing to be able to flip through the 1603 First Quarto of Hamlet and read it as easily as if you had the book in your hand (if the museum would let you hold it). (BBC news story here, courtesy of xsjsx at Wordorigins.)

NUMBER SYSTEMS.

TAKASUGI Shinji ("surname first - Japanese way") has, alongside a Teach Yourself Japanese site and a number of Japanese-language ones (all linked from his home page), a fascinating Number Systems of the World page that includes 60 languages, ranked in order of complexity. At the top is Nimbia (a dialect of the Nigerian Chadic language Gwandara), which uses a duodecimal system (gwom 10, kwada 11, tuni 12, tuni mbe da [12 and 1] 13, tuni mbe bi [12 and 2] 14; gume kwada ni kwada [(12 x 11) and 11, using a different word for 'twelve'] 143, wo [12²] 144); at the bottom is Tongan ("Tongan has definitely the simplest number system in the world": eleven is 1,1; ninety-nine is 9,9; &c), with many interesting languages along the way (including Polari!). (Via MzB at AskMeFi.)

[Dumb typo fixed due to vigilance of eagle-eyed correspondent: thanks, John!]

WORD RECOGNITION.

The Science of Word Recognition, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma, by Kevin Larson, discusses in detail "the history of why psychologists moved from a word shape model of word recognition to a letter recognition model." The conclusion:

Given that all the reading research psychologists I know support some version of the parallel letter recognition model of reading, how is it that all the typographers I know say that we read by matching whole word shapes? It appears to be a grand misunderstanding. The paper by Bouma that is most frequently cited does not support a word shape model of reading...

Word shape is no longer a viable model of word recognition. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognize a word’s component letters, then use that visual information to recognize a word. In addition to perceptual information, we also use contextual information to help recognize words during ordinary reading, but that has no bearing on the word shape versus parallel letter recognition debate. It is hopefully clear that the readability and legibility of a typeface should not be evaluated on its ability to generate a good bouma shape.

(Thanks to P. Kerim Friedman for the link, and my congratulations to him for being the #1 Google hit for "kerim"!)

SNOEK AND SALOMI.

I posted the following on Wordorigins yesterday:

In a (delightful) New Yorker article focused mainly on a South African friend's quenchless craving for snoek ("He thinks about fried snoek and grilled snoek and dried snoek and snoek made into pâté..."), Calvin Trillin brings up another culinary item, using a word of whose existence I can find no other trace:

"I took advantage of the stop to buy something I’d come across on a previous trip to Cape Town, a dosa-like object called a “salomey”—a sort of pancake filled with, in this case, chicken and potato. Jeffrey, who had never heard of a salomey, loved it. I told him to consider it a gift—not that particular salomey but the whole concept of salomies."

I was immediately suspicious because of the aberrant plural salomies; the plural of salomey should be salomeys. The fact that Google knows the word only as a given name (apart from this article) [this turns out not to be true] heightened my suspicion, and it's not in any of my dictionaries (no, not even the Afrikaans one). I no longer trust the magazine's once legendary fact-checkers. So: anybody know this word, or the dish in question under a name that might reasonably be mistaken for this?

One of the good folks at Wordorigins (thanks, Dutchtoo!) discovered that it was a Malay dish in origin and the usual spelling is salomi (cf this post, which refers to "a salomi, the original wrap of roti or flatbread filled with your choice of curry and salad"—and if your interest in food is wide-ranging, you'll want to check out the blog, Kitsch'n'Zinc: Culinary musings from Cape Town), so I thought I'd ask my readers if anybody knew the etymology of the word. (Myself, I'd like a good salomi, but I'll pass on the snoek; I don't eat any sort of seafood.)

MOLDOVAN/ROMANIAN.

This seems to be Nicholas Whyte day at LH; not only did he provide the wonderful McDonald's language quiz, he had earlier forwarded me an article (which I just read -- I've been slowly catching up with my inbox) on the language brawl in Moldavia, where some people want to speak Romanian and others Moldavian, despite the fact that they're the same language. The original TOL article (by Vitalie Dogaru) is not accessible unless you subscribe, but happily it's been reproduced at LINGUIST-LIST. Here's the gist of it:

The reason for this proliferation of ambiguities is highlighted in the conflict that produced the title Our Language Day. After 1989, when Moldova was still part of the Soviet Union, it was called Our Romanian Language Day to celebrate the decision, on 31 August 1989, to proclaim Romanian Moldova's official language. Then, in 1994, three years after gaining independence, the country's second freely elected parliament stated that the state language was "Moldovan." The word "Romanian" was subsequently removed from the name of the holiday.

Linguists across the world are, though, in agreement: "Moldovan" is Romanian. Since the linguistic battle over the nature of Moldovan Romanian began in 1994, numerous international conferences, symposia, and workshops have demonstrated that, linguistically, there is no distinctly Moldovan language. There are no longer conferences on the issue. For academics, the issue has been resolved.

But not so for the Moldovan government and many Moldovans. For them, naming the language of the country's ethnic majority is more than a matter of linguistics. The persistent question "Is our language Moldovan or Romanian?" has been mirrored in the paradoxical existence of publications written in the same language but which, below their title, carry the tagline "periodical in Romanian" or "periodical in Moldovan."

And in the bookshops, a Moldovan-Romanian dictionary (the equivalent of an English-American dictionary) has become a bestseller, though as a curiosity rather than as an academic work. (The academic credibility of the dictionary were, in passing, undermined when Vasile Stati, its author, was unable to explain the meaning of a short story written by a talkshow host using only the distinctively "Moldovan" words taken from the dictionary.) In the classroom, the United Nations Development Program, which was trying to promote Romanian-language courses among ethnic minorities, two years ago tried to sidestep the problem by saying that its courses were taught in "the language that unifies us."

You'll have to read the complete article to learn the political background to all this, but I think the linguistic absurdity is quite striking all by itself. (Incidentally, the LINGUIST-LIST version has had the apostrophes and quotes stripped out; I've restored them from the e-mailed article.)

THE LANGUAGES OF MCDONALDS.

This is the most fun I've had in ages. Nicholas Whyte explains:

This set of pages was inspired by a visit to McDonald's in May 2004. Along with our son's Happy Meal, we got a small playstation-type game where you have to help a monkey catch bananas as they fall from the sky. I was amused to note that the instructions came in no fewer than 34 languages, spoken in and around Europe . It occurred to me that even without speaking a word of some of these languages, it is possible to work out what they are from their unique spelling peculiarities, and as we munched away I scribbled down my guesses.

Then I thought, why not see if other people find this an interesting process? So I've drawn up this interactive quiz - no scores, just the intellectual challenge at each stage of knowing how many guesses it took you to get the right answer.

In my hubris I thought I'd ace it, but it turned out I have a hard time distinguishing among the Scandinavian languages (despite my half-Norwegian bloodline). So it's been a learning experience for me, and I hope it will be for you. Avanti! (Via Crooked Timber.)

GREEK GRAMMAR.

Greek Grammar on the Web is a website run by Marc Huys (apparently since 1999) that gives "a listing of web sites on ancient Greek language and grammar, combined with a description of the contents and a personal appreciation... Apart from being inevitably somewhat subjective, this appreciation is given from a scholarly as well as a didactic point of view." The Advanced Study section, for example, links to Greek Prose Style ("excellent web site presenting the contents of a course taught at the City University of New York... in Greek prose style and prose composition. Via these pages you can access directly more than 90% of the materials contained in the 200-page workbook which Hansen produced for the course"), pdf files on historical phonology ("containing a concise survey of the historical evolution of vowels, diphthongs and consonants from Indo-European to Ancient Greek") and Greek voice (by Carl Conrad, "distinguished classicist at Washington University of St. Louis... In it he confronts fundamental misconceptions governing the traditional teaching of the voices in Ancient Greek"), and other useful sources. (Via wood s lot.)

THE ARAB WORLD.

Politics, Language and Cultures of the Arab World is a new blog by miladus whose title admirably describes its ambit; its latest entries are on Maps of the Islamic world and Arabic Culture Through its Language and Literature, the latter on an interesting-sounding book by Muhammed Haran Bakalla that "covers the linguistic origins of Arabic dialects and history, and includes chapters on Arab linguistic scholarship and the development of the Arabic script" as well as "all aspects of Arabic literature, from pre-Islamic poetry to major Arab literary figures such as Al-Mutana[bb]i, Bashar [does anybody know who this is?], and Al-M[a]'arri, from the Arabian Nights to modern Arab poetesses, from proverbs to literary criticism." (Thanks to PF for the link.)

MICRONESIAN ORTHOGRAPHY.

Joel at Far Outliers has two posts on a very interesting subject: what is the best way to write a language? Specifically, should you stick to the "scientific" method of one symbol per phoneme, or should you use a "messier" method that may suit the speakers better? I have long thought that "one symbol per phoneme" was a needless goal that has resulted in excessively elaborate alphabets, frequently requiring special symbols that make it difficult to write the language using normal keyboards and printers, and Joel agrees:

People could write fewer vowels and consonants than would be optimal in isolation, while relying instead on sentential, semantic, or social context to reduce ambiguity. But this approach would make linguists feel rather less useful.

See his posts on Marshallese Spelling Reforms and Yapese Spelling Reform: "That Damn Q!":

A simpler, underspecified writing system would allow more Yapese to write their own language without having to run everything by someone with sufficient linguistic training to understand the New Orthography. It would take literacy out of the hands of experts and give it back to the people who need it most.

AMHERST.

After leaving Montreal (with regret), we drove down through Vermont and visited Amherst, Massachusetts, where I finally got to see Emily Dickinson's house. But first (the earliest tour was at 1 PM) I dropped in at the excellent Amherst Books, where I couldn't resist buying Krazy & Ignatz 1925-1926, a wonderful Fantagraphics reprint of a year's worth of George Herriman's Krazy Kat comics. Now, I'm going to make a wild leap here, and those of you with sensitive constitutions may want to skip ahead to the next paragraph, but I think Dickinson has far more in common with Herriman than with the lady poets she's usually compared to (Sappho, say, not that we actually know anything about Sappho). Dickinson is perhaps America's greatest pure poet (in the sense that she has no interest in propagandizing for religious or political sects or in telling stories) and Herriman is without question America's greatest pure comic-strip artist (in the sense that he has no interest in writing for the market or in telling stories); her self-limitation to an apparently simple hymn form for her verse is as striking as his self-limitation to an apparently simple triangular structure for his strips (Ignatz heaves a brick at Krazy and is chastised by Officer Pupp), and both have been condescended to for these alleged faults, which in fact allowed them to refine their art and bring it to unmatched levels. The difference, of course—apart from medium, gender, era, and other trivia—is that Herriman found outside support and Dickinson did not. I quote from Bill Blackbeard's introduction to the Fantagraphics book:

[Herriman's detractors] claimed (and claim) that the theme of Ignatz hitting Krazy with a brick was tiresome and that they could not understand most of the jokes; worst of all, they saw nothing engaging (i.e., cute) about the characters, as should damned well be the case with a funny animal strip. They were alienated. And because of this they could get angry and write blistering letters to the feature editors of the newspapers concerned. Most of these seemingly nervy journals were titles in the national chain commandeered by William Randolph Hearst, the fierce young publisher who ardently admired Krazy Kat, and who had to constantly fight with his editors, who begged for permission to drop the irritating strip. They claimed that they received endless letters about this mystifying comic, which they had difficulties in answering since they found it mystifying themselves. The letters went unanswered and Hearst's edict prevailed; the kat comic stayed in his papers over the decades.

Whatever Hearst's faults may have been, America (hell, the world) owes him a debt of gratitude for this. And I invite you to imagine the difference it would have made if there had been such a figure for Dickinson—if Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to take the obvious example, had had the quirk of taste that would have allowed him to be enthusiastic about her poetry instead of dumping cold water on her (not to mention Whitman: "It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards") and to promote her with vigor and with the utter indifference to contrary opinion that Hearst showed. If American poets had been exposed to that blast of radically compressed language and imagery, those infinitely varied subtle rhythms, in the middle of the 19th century rather than decades later, perhaps two generations would not have wasted their time imitating Longfellow, Tennyson, et al, and the violent efforts of Ezra Pound to wrest American poetry from its long snooze in the 1910s would not have been needed. At any rate, she would certainly have been happier. Not to find reciprocated and continuing love is an all too common human lot; for a great poet not to find appropriate response to her greatness is a much rarer, and perhaps more tragic, fate.

To give an idea of Herriman's inimitable way with language, I'll quote the beginning of the Feb. 1, 1925 strip, whose first panel shows Ignatz and Pupp standing before a looming (and lovingly detailed) cliff:

There be kliffs in Kaibito wherein a thousand echoes dwell and "Ignatz" is getting a right, & left ear full of information about it, from "Officer Pupp."

[I] But why, "Officer Pupp" when I yodel, or yell a yoohoo, these cliffs answer me back - is there some one among them doing it?

[P] Fool "Mouse", there is no one there - it is but the sound of your own voice bouncing back at you - an echo - a mere matter of acoustics - if you know what I mean.

[I] Never have I thought it possible for "sound" to bounce back - is there not an element of mystery about it all?

[P] And yet it is but "sound" bouncing back, fool - "acoustics" lie behind it all - no "mystery" as it seems to your dull mind.

[I] I have a neat notion, "Officer Pupp" of tossing this "brick" at yon cliff to see if it too would bounce back, an "echo" - as would a yodel, or a yoohoo -

[P] It is no mean desire, "Mouse", I must say - and I would urge strongly that you attempt the experiment - it were safer for your own welfare that you toss that "brick" at a cliff than at the noble noodle of that amiable "Krazy Kat" - and at the same time I deem it a not unworthy assay in "acoustics" - yeh-h-

Incidentally, E. E. Cummings' "A Foreword to Krazy" is one of many Cummings links at yesterday's wood s lot; I must point out that the poet did not spell his name with lower-case initials, and did not want others to do so)

Getting back to Dickinson, we were lucky enough in our tour of the house (and the adjoining one, The Evergreens, where her brother Austin and his wife Sue, one of Emily's unreciprocated loves, lived and grew apart and suffered tragedy, the growing misery of the household still felt amid the gloom and mold) to have as our guide the very knowledgeable historian Ruth Owen Jones, who has published an article (described here) suggesting that Dickinson's Master letters, copies of three letters to some unknown beloved, were intended for William Smith Clark, in a contemporary's description "personally and socially attractive, a brilliant talker, a good listener too... the life of the social circle, the faculty meeting, the gathering at the corner of the streets, the legislative hall or the popular assembly"; Jones says "He was cocky, a bit conceited, yet a good listener, a gentle, sensitive, and educated man, a man who encouraged the women in his life to use their minds, and a man who was an aspiring writer himself... Emily's Master figure was a person who knew and loved flowers, unusual for a man in the 1860s... The only other men besides Prof. Clark that Emily Dickinson knew who adored flowers were the nearly deaf Professor Tuckerman, and T.W. Higginson, and she knew Higginson only after April 1862, after she had written the Master letters." (Jones pointed out in the course of the tour that the beginning of Dickinson's famous 1870 meeting with Higginson, which involved her holding out two day lilies and saying "These are my introduction," is not as odd or crazy as it has sometimes been made out to be, since she knew Higginson was an amateur of botany and expected him to appreciate the flowers she had grown in her conservatory.) I look forward to Jones's forthcoming book.

To provide a linguistic hook for this long entry: Amherst is pronounced Ammerst (the h is silent), and Mount Holyoke (where Emily studied for a year) is HO(L)E-yoke, with the l barely audible in local pronunciation.

MONTREAL 2.

First off, I want to thank everyone who left informative comments on my Hiatus post. (I should add that wolfangel was quite correct that people would often switch to English when they heard I wasn't a native speaker, but I got a fair amount of French conversation in anyway.) I learned the word dépanneur 'convenience store'; I heard the affricated d and t; I did not notice the tense/lax vowels or the -tu questions; I did notice the contractions (chais &c) and a feature nobody mentioned in the comments, the raising of nasalized vowels: vent sounded almost like vin (with /æ/ as in hat), and vin had a high [e] and sounded diphthongized ([veiN]) -- in fact, one guy said matin so that it struck my ears as [matiN]. In general, men spoke with heavier dialect than women, and some of them were virtually incomprehensible.

We spent our time mostly in the francophone area north and east of our hotel, so we dealt with a lot of French-speakers, but all of them were willing to accommodate my non-francophone wife except for one Metro ticket-seller who answered her "Do you speak English?" with a brusque "Non." People seemed by and large bilingual; a striking example of this occurred during our dinner at the (very good) Bistro Côté Soleil on rue St-Denis, when we sat next to two women, the younger probably a grad student in art and the older perhaps her faculty advisor. The younger spoke almost entirely in French and the older almost entirely in English, but they clearly understood each other perfectly and occasionally dropped into the other's language (both had fairly heavy accents). Other people switched back and forth in the course of a few sentences. I've been in many multilingual cities and some with a very widespread minority language (often Spanish in the US), but never one where two languages met on such equal terms. Whatever contortions Québec has had to go through to get where it is today, I'm impressed with the result.

MONTREAL 1.

I'm too tired to get into the linguistic aspects of my visit, but I want to thank Beth and J. for welcoming us, pouring good wine into us, and making such good conversation that we hated to leave; I also hated to have to make such a short appearance at the Yulblog meeting of Montreal bloggers, particularly since the first person I met there was Zénon and I would have loved to have the chance to talk more with him. He's as interesting in person as his blog, which presents all manner of things: philosophy, art, poetry, and (yes) language (Mots français d'origine gauloise). In general, we found Montreal a wonderful city and hope to be able to spend much more time there. More details to follow.

DE RETOUR.

Just a quick note to say I'm back after an action-packed vacation; I feel as if I'd been away for two weeks rather than five and a half days. I'll be writing at some length about my visits to Montreal and Amherst, but first I have to despam my poor abused blog. Sorry about the infestation (though it seems to have amused some of you -- it's an ill wind, &c &c).