LANGUAGE GUESSER.

Maciej Cegłowski of Idle Words has created something called Languid (langu- ID, get it?):

I've set up a little web service for identifying language. If you paste in some text (the more the better), it will tell you what language it's in. Not rocket science, but perhaps useful to somebody.

There's an API for people who like to do things programatically.

Note that I'm logging all the queries, so you don't have to email me and say "I pasted BLAH and it gave me the wrong answer". But any other feedback is welcome.

Me, I pasted Inuit (the text string from my Last Samurai post) and it told me it was Cebuano; this perplexed me less when I saw that on the right of the Languid page is a vertical list of all the languages he's programmed into it, which includes Cebuano but not Inuit. Anyway, it's a lot of fun, and I thank Margaret Marks (of Transblawg) for alerting me to it (via this Blethers post).

SEXIST DECLENSION.

Just when you think you've seen everything:

Can sexist ideologies be reflected in inflectional classes? On the basis of a detailed discussion of the Russian a-declension, the present paper answers this question in the affirmative. More specifically the central claims are:

-- The a-declension reflects the Idealized Cognitive Models of "women as the second sex" and "woman as Madonna and whore".
-- Cognitive linguistics provides an adequate account for the category structure in terms of schematicity and metaphorical extension.

As Alexei, from whom I swiped this absurdity, says, it's "an abstract of a paper in what's called Cognitive Linguistics... Yes, the author is a man: Tore Nesset is a male professor at the University of Tromsø, Norway." He is "tempted to suppose this piece appeared in an April 1 issue of a linguistics journal," but I'm afraid it's just another example of academic silliness run amok.

JOHN DOE'S COUSINS.

From a wide-ranging Transblawg post on names of anonymous litigants:

Wilbur H. FRIEDMAN, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Thomas B. FERGUSON, Director, Department of Animal Control, a state actor, in his official and individual capacities; Brett Boe; Carla Coe; Donna Doe; Frank Foe; Grace Goe; Harry Hoe; State Actors, Advisors To Defendant Ferguson, In Their Official and Individual Capacities (identities currently unknown); Marta Moe; Norma Noe; Paula Poe; Ralph Roe; Sammy Soe; Tommy Toe; Private Individuals Who Conspired With the Foregoing State Actors (identities currently unknown); Roger W. Galvin, Chairman, Animal Matters Hearing Board; Vince Voe; William Woe; Xerxes Xoe; Members of the Animal Matters Hearing Board, State Actors, In Their Official and Individual Capacities (identities currently unknown), Defendants-Appellees

Xerxes Xoe?!

ENGLISH IN MALAY.

Jordan MacVay, a Canadian (or as he puts it "Caper, Bluenoser, Canuck, former Haligonian") living in Malaysia, discusses many things in his blog MACVAYSIA, some of them language-related; he has, for instance, an excellent post about the "invasion" of English words in Malay, sensibly pooh-poohing the doom-cryers and pointing out the usefulness of loanwords:

First of all, the 'purists' who decry the use of English words have to realize that stripping words of foreign origin out of Malay would leave it with hardly any words at all. One prominent historian has pointed out that only three Malay words are exclusively Malay: kayu (wood), batu (stone) and babi (pig). Another historian has added padi (rice field) and two or three other words to that list. So where the heck did all the other Malay words come from? Most Malay words came from other languages including (but not limited to) Sanskrit, Arabic, Javanese, Portuguese and, you guessed it, English. For many centuries Malays have had a flair for adopting foreign words and adapting them to suit their language needs. A closer look at the English words in the above list shows that while some of them are in their original English form (bank, hospital, hotel), this is only because their spelling suits Malay conventions of spelling and pronunciation. Other words are altered to reflect these conventions, and these alterations make the words uniquely Malay despite their English origins. This is the case of the word bajet, which has prompted some purists to question why the government didn't use the Malay term, anggaran belanja (at least I think that's the official term, I'll have to check a dictionary). The government has explained that the old term does not adequately express the exact meaning of a budget being tabled by the a government, so the English word has been adopted, albeit in a modified form. So who's to say bajet is not a Malay word? It serves a purpose, and now there it is.

I suspect the "three Malay words" thing is a rhetorical exaggeration, but the point is a good one. And for a fascinating example of just how useful borrowings can be, check out his followup post on English pronouns (yes, pronouns) in Malay!

VAPNYAR.

The latest New Yorker has a story by Lara Vapnyar; when I saw the name I guessed it was Indian, but it turns out to be Russian—or to be more accurate, from one of the many nationalities that were bundled into the USSR. My question is, which one? The name is not in any of my reference works, even Unbegaun's magnificent Russian Surnames, and its indecipherability is eating away at my composure. Is it Udmurt? Bashkir? Some remote Caucasian nationality? Google has failed me, but I have confidence in my readership.

UYEZWA NA?

Bill Poser at Language Log describes a project to translate Free Software into the eleven official languages of South Africa, giving the following excellent quote from an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail:

Dwayne Bailey hears the question all the time. "Why bother translating software into isiZulu?" people ask him. "Who needs it? English is the language of global business -- you'd be better off spending your energy teaching people English. To which Mr. Bailey replies, quite simply, "Izixhobo kufuneka zisebenzele abantu, hayi abantu izixhobo. Isoftware sisixhobo ngoko ke kumele sisebenzele abantu ngolwimi lwabo lwasemzini!

For translation, see Bill's post.

TALKIN' CAPE BRETON.

Cape Breton (French: île du Cap-Breton, Scottish Gaelic: Eilean Cheap Breatuinn, Mi'kmaq: U'namakika) is a linguistically complex place. Many Mi'kmaq (Micmac) still speak their Algonquian language; it's "the only area in the world - outside of Scotland itself - where Gaelic continues as a living language and culture" (the "grouping of people according to their place of origin in Scotland allowed for the transfer, whole and intact, of localized dialects, of music, song and dance traditions, and of patterns of religious adherence"); there's a community of Acadian French speakers ("When we speak about a cat we pronounce 'chat', but when we refer... to a mess or to a wad of chewing tobacco, we pronounce 'tchat'"); and of course there's the local variety of English, about which you can get a lively report here. A sample:

The plural of the word "you" is, of course, "youz". Thus, the phrase "Each of you appears to be quite intoxicated." becomes "Youz are all fuckin' right out of 'er." If a native Cape Breton is out of work, they are entitled to collect Unemployment Insurance. This is colloquially known as "The Pogey". Therefore: "Buddy got his pogey, picked up a few points of Keets and got right fuckin' out of 'er" is a very common local sentiment.

In Cape Breton it is customary to greet an acquaintance with a warm phrase. Often an inquiry wondering how the other person is faring is rendered as "What's goin' on, b'y?" In the fashion of so many cultures, the proper answer to this greeting is "What's goin' on?" Everyone else may safely be called "Buddy". An exchange of pleasantries between two strangers may begin with "Eh? Buddy." and be reciprocated with "Eh!"

This last is via jb's MonkeyFilter thread, where you can find more links in the comments.

MORE BOREDOM.

As a followup to my earlier entry on the construction "boring of the task" and the Language Log entries by Mark Liberman linked therein, Mark has posted Horror and boredom in Castile, a summary of Christopher J. Pountain's paper "The Castilian reflexes of ABHORRERE/ABHORRESCERE: a case-study in valency":

The basic observation is that Latin abhorrere started out meaning "to shrink back from, have an aversion for, shudder at, abhor", but one of the Spanish descendents, aburrir, wound up meaning "to bore". So not only did the meaning change, but also the "valency" (in the sense of which verbal arguments go where). "I abhor you" turned into "you bore me".

The original paper has several useful diagrams showing semantic ranges, and Mark reproduces the one showing the historical development in Castilian.

I would also like to second the recommendation in Mark's more recent post for Pountain's book (coauthored with R. E. Batchelor) Using Spanish: A Guide to Contemporary Usage. It's part of a Cambridge series (of which I also have the German volume by Martin Durrell), and it's extremely well done, with lists of "misleading similarities," fields of meaning, complex verbal expressions, and the like, all with careful attention to register and geographical restrictions. (I assume, by the way, that Pountain rhymes with fountain, but if anyone knows for sure, please comment.)

THE ERISTIC GENITIVE OF EURO.

I have previously reported on a contretemps over whether the plural of euro should have an s; now comes a brouhaha over inflected forms. According to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the News-Telegraph:

Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Slovenia, and Malta triggered the rare linguistic showdown by refusing to accept the established usage in translations of the European constitution, calling it inelegant, inaccurate, or even gibberish in their languages.

They have all agreed to use the harmonised "euro" form on future notes and coins when they join the monetary union, but that was not good enough for Brussels.

All official EU texts must be spelt the same way even if it makes no sense in the Baltic languages.

The biggest headache is for the 3.5 million people of Lithuania, who would normally write euras, eurue, eura, euru, eure, eurai, eurams, eurus, eurais and eurose, depending on the word's function in a sentence. The genitive in particular has caused tempers to fray.

In a letter to the Dutch EU presidency, the Lithuanian government insisted: "The non-inflective form of the term euro is unacceptable to the Lithuanian language."

The Dutch offered a compromise yesterday that would insist on the "euro" spelling for all official EU texts such as the constitution, but let states vary usage in national documents provided the first three letters are "eur". This is not much help to Latvia, where the word begins with "eir".

That story is dated Oct. 13; I have not seen a resolution to this pressing issue, and I await the outcome with bated breath.

(Thanks for the link, Paul!)

A LUPPOLO OF THE HIP.

I know, I know, reverse Babelfish translations are old hat, but this one I find irresistible, so just this once... Surely everybody's familiar with the classic 1979 Sugarhill Gang hit "Rapper's Delight"? "I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie/ to the hip hip hop, a you dont stop/ the rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie/ to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat..." Well, the folks at Shtick! sent it off to Italy and back (linguistically speaking), and they got this: "I have said a luppolo of the hip, hippie to the hippie, the hip, hip a luppolo and not arrested, one cliff it/ To the boogie of explosion of explosion as an example on the jump the boogie, to rhythm of the boogie, the beat..." It goes on and on, and it's very funny. Via Boing Boing, and I thank Songdog for the tip.

THE PHILOLOGICAL BOMBER.

From the World Briefing in today's NY Times:

GEORGIA: DEVICE EXPLODES IN CAPITAL An explosive device went off in Tbilisi, the capital, news agencies reported, near a monument for soldiers who died in the 1990's conflict with the separatist region of Abkhazia, over which tensions continue to run high. No one was injured. The Security Ministry said that a letter addressed to President Mikhail Saakashvili was found but that its contents were not yet known because it was composed in ancient Georgian.     Sophia Kishkovsky (NYT)

KEEPING IT SIMPLE.

Judith Shulevitz's NY Times review of The Five Books of Moses: A Translation With Commentary by Robert Alter not only raves about the book ("Alter's magisterial translation deserves to become the version in which many future generations encounter this strange and inexhaustible book"), it goes into the kind of detail that whets my appetite:

What Alter does with the Bible instead [of allocating bits to "J" and other presumed authors] is read it, with erudition and rigor and respect for the intelligence of the editor or editors who stitched it together, and — most thrillingly — with the keenest receptivity to its darker undertones.

In the case of the binding of Isaac, for instance, Alter not only accepts a previous translator's substitution of "cleaver" for the "knife" of the King James version but also changes "slay" (as in, "Abraham took the knife to slay his son") to "slaughter." Moreover, in his notes, he points out that although this particular Hebrew verb for "bound" (as in, "Abraham bound Isaac his son") occurs only this once in biblical Hebrew, making its meaning uncertain, we can nonetheless take a hint from the fact that when the word reappears in rabbinic Hebrew it refers specifically to the trussing up of animals. Alter's translation thus suggests a dimension of this eerie tale we would probably have overlooked: that of editorial comment. The biblical author, by using words more suited to butchery than ritual sacrifice, lets us know that he is as horrified as we are at the brutality of the act that God has asked Abraham to commit.

Translators often win praise for their attention to nuance, but in the case of the Hebrew Bible subtlety has hurt more than it has helped. Biblical Hebrew has an unusually small vocabulary clustered around an even smaller number of three-letter roots, most of them denoting concrete actions or things, and the Bible achieves its mimetic effects partly through the skillful repetition of these few vivid words. The translators who gave us the King James version appear more or less to have understood this, but many 20th-century English-language translators have not. In their desire to convey shades of meaning brought out by different contexts or, perhaps, to compensate for what they perceived as the primitiveness of the ancient language, they replaced biblical Hebrew's restricted, earthy lexicon with a broad and varied set of often abstract terms.

Not Alter. As he explains in his introduction — an essay that would be worth reading even if it didn't accompany this book — the Hebrew of the Bible is, in his view, a closed system with a coherent literary logic, "a conventionally delimited language, roughly analogous in this respect to the French of the neoclassical theater," though plain-spoken where neoclassical French is lofty. Alter's translation puts into practice his belief that the rules of biblical style require it to reiterate, artfully, within scenes and from scene to scene, a set of "key words," a term Alter derives from Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who in an epic labor that took nearly 40 years to complete, rendered the Hebrew Bible into a beautifully Hebraicized German. Key words, as Alter has explained elsewhere, clue the reader in to what's at stake in a particular story, serving either as "the chief means of thematic exposition" within episodes or as connective tissue between them.

I like the appreciation (even if muted) for the King James, which will always be my favorite version, and the comparison with the restricted vocabulary of French classicism, and I especially like the preference for rendering the same word or phrase the same way whenever it makes sense: that's the only way to bring across the growing web of associations that characterizes any great work of literature.

FRICATIVES.

Martin of bloghead (if that is indeed the blogtitle; it may be "monochrome mondrian") ruminates about stops and fricatives in English, Spanish, and Hebrew. Interesting stuff, but is it true that Modern Hebrew turns /t/ into [θ] after vowels ("'Ruth' is pronounced [ruθ]")? I never heard that. (Via pf, who is back from moving-induced hiatus and linking away like a madman.)

BORING.

Reading a NY Times Magazine article by Scott Anderson (reproduced here) about the dreadful situation in western Sudan, I was stopped in my tracks by the following sentence: "Pulling a stack of business cards from the pocket of his white robe, he read off a dizzying list of initials — W.H.O., W.F.P., I.R.C. — before boring of the task and setting them aside." Boring of the task? This doesn't sound to me like a marginal or dialectal usage, it sounds completely ungrammatical, but if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's not to trust my own judgments about acceptability. So: do any of you think this is an acceptable equivalent for "becoming bored with the task"? Would you write or say it yourself?

Addendum. See Mark Liberman's statistical investigation at Language Log, wherein he unleashes his famed Google-fu and winds up continuing to agree with me that the construction just ain't right, and his comparative and etymological discussion, titillatingly titled "Etymology porn."

WORDS OF THE YEAR.

A Guardian story by David Ward lists 101 buzzwords, one for each year from 1904 to 2004, as given by Susie Dent in her new book Larpers and Shroomers: The Language Report. It's UK-oriented (or should I say -orientated?), so there are entries like whizzo (1905), tiddly-om-pom-pom (1909), naff all (1977), and OK yah (1985); furthermore, the years given are not (as one would expect) the year in which a given word was especially inescapable but the first year for which the OED has a citation (for gene, 1911: W. Johannsen in Amer. Naturalist XLV. 132, I have proposed the terms ‘gene’ and ‘genotype’.. to be used in the science of genetics). With those caveats in mind, the list is a lot of fun, and educational too—who knew hip went back to 1904? (G. V. Hobart Jim Hickey i. 15 At this rate it'll take about 629 shows to get us to Jersey City, are you hip?) Thanks to Nick Jainschigg for the tip!

THE AMBIENCE OF WORDS.

Beth of Cassandra Pages has been doing a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4) about her father-in-law, born in 1911 in Ottoman Syria and now in a retirement home in Montreal Vermont. The whole series is remarkable, humane and honest and deeply moving, but I want to call your attention to the latest post, which begins and ends with the teaching of Arabic (I'm quoting about half the entry):

“I may have a new Arabic student,” my father-in-law told us, after dinner. “It’s a woman. She called up other day and said she had heard that I teach. She’s coming next week.” He has one regular student who studies with him each Wednesday, and another student who is “on leave”: he’s a minister who is currently in the Sudan doing relief work.

“Grandpa, how would you explain to someone how to pronounce an ‘ayn’?” M. asked. “Is it different than a glottal stop in Hebrew?

“Oh yes,” he said, “In Arabic you have to open your throat and…” he demonstrated, and asked her to repeat; he demonstrated again, a little smugly; he loves being able to do things that are difficult for us...

...“How do you begin teaching Arabic to someone?” M. asked. She has studied more of the language than any of us, and readily testifies to how difficult it is.

“I begin by trying to explain the ambience of the words,” he said. We all looked perplexed. “You see,” he said, “every word in Arabic is surrounded by meaning; it refers to a whole constellation of experiences that are particular to that world, to that way of life…All of that is contained within the language.”

“Take the word ‘happiness’,” M. said.

“What is happiness to an Arab?” he countered. “That is where you have to start. You have to see the desert, smell the bougainvillea…” He shut his eyes and began to recite two couplets in Arabic; it was beautiful.

“al Moutanabbi,” he said, opening his eyes. He raised his hand and punctuated each noun in the air as he translated:

Horses, and nights, and the desert know me –
and the sword, the spear, paper, and the pen.

“Wonderful!” He shook his head, smiling with pleasure. “He was quite the fellow. A great poet, and a warrior too. His caravan was attacked by bandits and he was going to flee, but one of his companions reminded him of these lines he had written, and challenged him.” He growled, shaking the words like a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf: “‘Aren’t you also a fighter who praised the sword and the spear?’ So he rode into the battle – and was killed.” He grinned, and shrugged: c'est la vie.

He shut his eyes and recited the Arabic again. I watched the bones of his thinning face move as he spoke; his voice was a strong as ever, and his silken white hair curled at the back of his neck. The three of us exchanged astonished glances. For us, the remarkable moment was becoming fixed in time and space and memory - but he was flying, gone somewhere we'd never been.

I wish I had the privilege of knowing this man; I'm glad I have the privilege of knowing Beth.

Incidentally, the poem by al-Mutanabbi provides the title for Night & Horses & the Desert, An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature by Robert Irwin, author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion, a wonderful book; the anthology too sounds well worth having.

I HAVE A HAT!

Songdog sent me this comic, which I just had to share with all and sundry.

A PERSONAL NOTE.

We interrupt the flow of language-related material to bring you a brief report on Big Changes at Casa Languagehat and a solicitation of suggestions. Without going into pointless detail, my job has gone downhill in the depressing way that corporate jobs do, and I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. We're thinking more and more of distancing ourselves from the rat race: selling this house, buying a much cheaper one outside the NYC catchment basin (it's the ease of commuting to the city that makes these river towns so pricy), and living a less stressful life, if possible working out of our home. So if anyone has ideas about how an overeducated polymath with many years of editorial experience might try earning a living while avoiding the clutches of the Cosmodemonic Corporation, your thoughts are most welcome. Is it possible to make decent money doing editing at home? Researching? Translating? I will, of course, be investigating these questions myself, but what's the point of having a diverse crowd of good-hearted readers if you can't draw on their variegated experiences once in a while? Suggestions of a general nature ("have you considered sheep-shearing?") can go in the comments; specific contacts ("call 555-1234 and ask for Nicolae") should be sent to languagehat AT yahoo DOT com.

THE ONTOLOGY OF NARRATIVE.

Another quote that struck me, this time from Andre Bazin via Matt Zoller Seitz in NY Press:

...I found myself trying to recall an Andre Bazin observation. When I got home, I found it in Bazin's What is Cinema? Vol. II. In Umberto D., writes Bazin, "The narrative unit is not the episode, the event, the sudden turn of events, or the character of its protagonists; it is the succession of concrete instants of life, no one of which can be said to be more important than another, for their ontological equality destroys drama at its very basis."

A DREAMER OF WORDS.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.
- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, 1960

Via wood s lot, where you will find a number of Bachelard links. I don't really know anything about him, but I like this quote a lot. (There's a long section from the French original, La Poétique de la Rêverie, here.)

THE POETRY OF THE INEFFABLE.

Dick Davis's On Not Translating Hafez is perhaps the best thing I've ever read on the differences between poetic traditions and the implications of such differences for translation. I've read a fair amount of Persian poetry (almost always in translation), and Davis helps me understand both the unaccustomed pleasures it affords and the vague embarrassment it can produce. He moves from specific examples ("Only in Persian will the pun in the medieval poet Mas’ud Sa’d’s line 'Nalam bedel chu nai man andar hesar-e nai' be evocative: the pun is on the word nai, which means a reed, and by extension a reed flute, and also alludes to the name of a fortress used as a prison") to broader distinctions:

A subdivision of this mystical problem is the set of ideas metaphorically expressed in Persian poetry by wine, drunkenness, the opposition of the rend (approximately “libertine”) and the zahed (“ascetic”), and so forth. None of these notions have any force whatsoever in the Western literary tradition. It would never occur to a Western poet to express the forbidden intoxications of mysticism by alluding to the forbidden intoxications of wine, for the simple fact that the intoxications of wine have never (if we exclude the brief and local moment of prohibition in the United States) been forbidden in the West. The whole topos of winebibbing and the flouting of sober outward convention, so dear to Persian Sufi poetry, can seem in earlier translators’ work to be little more than a kind of rowdy undergraduate hijinks, and in more recent versions it can take on the ethos of Haight-Ashbury in the late sixties. But in both cases the deeper resonances of the topos are not obvious for a Western audience: they have to be explained—and to explain a resonance is like explaining a joke; when the explanation is over, no one laughs, except out of pained politeness, and no one is moved.

And he brings in comparisons to other art forms with brilliant effect:

The semantic separateness of each line within an overall mono-rhymed structure produces an artifact not unlike that of a musical theme and variations: each line is a discrete variation that is nevertheless tied closely to the overall theme, which is usually stated most succinctly in the opening or closing line. The mono-rhyme formally confirms that we always in a sense end where we begin, that psychological “development” from one stage to another is not, normally, what is being attempted or presented. This is not at all to derogate from the aesthetic authority of the poems, and I would not wish a reader to think that this is what I am implying. One has only to think of the overwhelming pathos and power of a piece like Bach’s C-minor passacaglia, or the poignancy of the return of the opening theme at the end of his Goldberg Variations, to recognize how artistically effective such a form, and such devices operating within the form, can be. Many of Hafez’s ghazals can certainly provide an equivalent and equally profound aesthetic experience.

If you have any interest in Persian poetry or the general issue of how cultural and literary traditions can hinder translation, I highly recommend this essay.

(Via wood s lot, which however links to a different version of the piece with at least one gap in the text that renders it locally incomprehensible.)

Addendum. This week's New Yorker has a poem by Edward Hirsch, "Self-Portrait," that nicely exemplifies the difference between the English-language and Persian poetic traditions. It starts off using a quintessentially Persian strategy of parallel couplets, with similar structures and no obvious development:

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

But look how it ends:

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

That's about as goal-oriented as you can get.

LANGUAGE IN THE NEWS.

A couple of news items of linguistic interest:

1) The NY Times yesterday had an interesting article by Michael Erard about kids' slips of the tongue:

"Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin," the three little pigs taunted the big bad wolf. When Anna Van Valin was 4 years old, she pronounced the phrase "not by the chair of my hinny hin hin" and unwittingly advanced the study of children's language when she did.

Anna's talk was often observed. Her mother, Dr. Jeri Jaeger, is a linguist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who collects the speech slips that children make in order to understand how they learn language. For two decades Dr. Jaeger has collected data wherever she found available children...

...Dr. Jaeger said: "Many parents get freaked out and think their child is making mistakes. But these slips of the tongue are entirely normal. In fact, they show that a child is acquiring language as they should be."

2) BBC News says Learning languages 'boosts brain':

Researchers from University College London studied the brains of 105 people - 80 of whom were bilingual.

They found learning other languages altered grey matter - the area of the brain which processes information - in the same way exercise builds muscles.

People who learned a second language at a younger age were also more likely to have more advanced grey matter than those who learned later, the team said...

Makes a good follow-up to the native-speaker/second-language thread. (And thanks to my favorite Kansas correspondent for sending me the story!)

MULTILINGUAL AESOP.

AESOPICA.NET: Aesop's Fables Online presents "1418 English fables, 646 Latin fables and 780 Greek fables (translations provided), as well as links to French (La Fontaine) and Spanish," in the words of aldiboronti at Wordorigins, who once more has dug up treasure from the midden heap that is the internet. The Perry index lists all the fables; clicking on any one of them (eg, Perry 1: Eagle and Fox) gets you links to all available versions. Do you know how long I've been looking for Aesop in Greek? Thanks yet again, aldi!

BAD GUYS.

This sentence from Mark Liberman's (very interesting) Language Log post on the history of sentence diagramming (which I, like Mark, had to learn as a lad) is a good example of why I dislike the culture of MIT linguistics (the linguistics itself is a whole other issue): "And there was not a great deal of respect for earlier traditions of analysis—the required 'History of Linguistics' course at MIT was familiarly known as 'Bad Guys'."

Here at LH, those pre-Chomsky linguists are known as the Good Guys.

KROPOTKIN ON "PEASANTS' TALK."

As a follow-up to my earlier Kropotkin entry, I want to quote another section (Russian here) from the Corps of Pages chapter, this time on talking with peasants:

Later, when we were spreading socialist doctrines amongst the peasants, I could not but wonder why some of my friends, who had received a seemingly far more democratic education than myself, did not know how to talk to the peasants or to the factory workers from the country. They tried to imitate the "peasants' talk" by introducing a profusion of so-called "popular phrases," but they only rendered themselves the more incomprehensible.

Nothing of the sort is needed, either in talking to peasants or in writing for them. The Great Russian peasant perfectly well understands the educated man's talk, provided it is not stuffed with words taken from foreign languages. What the peasant does not understand is abstract notions when they are not illustrated by concrete examples. But my experience is that when you speak to the Russian peasant plainly, and start from concrete facts,—and the same is true with regard to village folk of all nationalities,—there is no generalization from the whole world of science, social or natural, which cannot be conveyed to a man of average intelligence, if you yourself understand it concretely. The chief difference between the educated and the uneducated man is, I should say, that the latter is not able to follow a chain of conclusions. He grasps the first of them, and maybe the second, but he gets tired at the third, if he does not see what you are driving at. But how often do we meet the same difficulty in educated people.

How often indeed.

LANGUAGE TECH REVIEWS.

Jeff Allen's new web page aims at providing links to existing evaluations/reviews of language technology:

This is a list of review articles concerning translation software and systems, content authoring tools, and translation project management tools. It also includes information about the evaluation of translation system text output, authoring and translation tool tutorials / training, translation assessment, etc.

INTRODUCTION TO LATEX.

No, not the rubbery emulsion, the typesetting program LaTeX. Christopher Culver, proprietor of the late and much-lamented classical weblog Nephelokokkygia, says "I retained on my personal website the introductions to LaTeX, which I am sure many former readers will be happy about." I am glad to have the opportunity to link to his introduction for classicists ("LaTeX is incredibly useful for the classicist, for it supports, among many other languages, Latin and Greek, and even provides the correct hyphenation of text in those languages") [and for Slavicists]; I hope many readers will find them useful.

MULTILINGUAL VEGETARIANISM.

A list of Vegetarian Phrases In Other Languages, via Incoming Signals, where you will find an unhinged rant about it:

I imagine it must be very important to have those phrases handy in that part of the world since the phrasebook gives so many options for making your wishes known. Perhaps they have a habit of forcing fish on the unwary traveler, and only a quick response will stop them. Perhaps just at the very last second, before they cram the fish down your throat, live and wriggling, according to their custom. But they will understand. They will sigh dejectedly...

The Russian sentences are given in a virtually unintelligible transcription, which may be a good thing, considering the in-your-face wording of "Yah lyublyu gihvahtnihh poehtahmuh yah nye yem eeh (I love animals, so I don't eat them)." Might be more sensible to just ask for potatoes and skip the propaganda.

SAUVAGE NOBLE.

Angelo Mercado, a doctoral student in Indo-European studies at UCLA, has a blog called sauvage noble ("an austronesian’s adventures in altertumswissenschaft and indogermanistik") that makes me nostalgic for my graduate days spent rummaging in old books in foreign languages. I wish in particular to call attention to his post on the two Indo-European roots meaning 'fart,' *perd- and *pesd-, which contains this excellent quote from J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth:

Indeed, it is bizarre recompense to the scholar struggling to determine whether the Proto-Indo-Europeans were acquainted with some extremely diagnostic item of material culture only to find that they were far more obliging in passing on to us no less than two words for ‘breaking wind’.

I should add that he gives all the forms derived from each root (from Rix's Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben), in case that's a further attraction.

NATIVE SPEAKER.

My friend John and I are having a friendly disagreement, and I'm enlisting you all in its resolution. He was surprised to find that I defined "native speaker" as someone who learned a language from infancy; for him, it describes competence, not biography. I asked him how, then, he would distinguish "native" from "fluent"; he asked me how (without inquiring about biography) I would be able to tell whether someone was or was not a native speaker. He said it was a technical linguistic term and should have an operational definition (like me, he is a former linguistics grad student); I said it was an ordinary-language term and did in fact include the biographical component, whether he approved or not. He claimed that it was used his way in the linguistic literature; I pointed out that neither of us had been reading the linguistic literature for nigh on thirty years. I said I'd throw the question open to my readership, and he said he looked forward to the results. Rather than get tangled in detailed definitions, we agreed to use his father as a test case: he spoke only Arabic until he was six, then went to American schools and quickly became a fluent speaker, indistinguishable from someone who learned English from birth. So: is John's father a native speaker of English? Comments, please. I am interested in everyone's response, but please indicate if you are a professional linguist, since we want insight into the technical usage as well as the everyday one.

Although I want your first impression, in the extended entry I provide some food for thought and discussion.

There is an online piece directly addressing this issue, Who is a native speaker and what is it they speak? by Robin Turner, but he puts me off with his occasional sloppiness: "...Max Heinrich's oft-quoted (e.g. Chambers, 1995:214) tongue-in-cheek definition: 'A language is a dialect with its own army and navy'" (it was Max Weinreich); "Hokkien and Cantonese, for example, are probably regarded as dialects of Chinese not because they are mutually intelligible (which they are to only a very limited degree), but because their speakers share a similar culture, and were for most of their history part of the same state (even though they are not now; Hokkien is largely spoken in Taiwan)" (utterly absurd: there are around 50 million speakers of Min ("Hokkien") Chinese, less than a third of whom are in Taiwan). Nevertheless, he provides some useful discussion, and I'll quote a fair amount:

One way to avoid the "native speaker" trap is to speak of "native speaker competence". Natives of a community have native speaker competence, more or less by definition (Hymes, 1972c; Fishman, 1972a:49). On the other hand, non-natives may also acquire native, or near-native competence.

The first problem with the competence idea is the by now familiar one of circular definition. Native speaker competence can be broadly defined as the ability to conform to the set of linguistic and sociolinguistic expectations of a particular speech community. As we have seen, the notion of a speech community implies members by whose linguistic behaviour the community is defined, so unless we possess a definition of "native speaker" which is not related to competence, we are back where we started. If, on the other hand, we do possess such a definition, sociolinguistic competence is, to use Aristotelian terms, an accidental rather than an essential property of a native speaker...

A more promising approach comes, perhaps surprisingly, from the generative school. If we ignore communicative competence and concentrate on the narrower notion of linguistic competence proposed by Chomsky (1965, 1986), we can make use of the critical period hypothesis, first proposed by Lenneberg (1976). According to this view, the syntax of a language is acquired rapidly and effortlessly by young children, but not by adults; hence there is a "critical period" for language acquisition. A reasonable "rule of thumb" definition of "native speaker" might thus be someone who acquired the language during this critical period; a language acquired later would thus be a second, non-native language, irrespective of the ethnic or speech community the speaker is a nominal member of.

Here, however, he comes close to John's approach:

For peripheral "native speakers" there appears to be a kind of Turing test in operation; if a "central" native speaker (i.e. close to the prototype) cannot tell the difference between the speech of that person and that of another "central" native speaker, that person may be regarded as a native speaker.

His conclusion makes sense to me, overly wordy though it is:

Having shown that terms such as "language" and "native speaker" are somewhat vague and fuzzy around the edges, the question arises of whether, as linguists, sociolinguists or language educators, we should abandon them and search for more precise terms. I would suggest that this is not only unnecessary, but also impracticable. Alternatives to "language" and "native speaker" such as "speech community" and "member of a speech community" are, as we have seen, equally problematic, since they take their terms of reference from the original offending concepts.

What we can do is define terms more precisely for the field of discourse in which we are working. There is nothing wrong in saying "For the purposes of this study I shall take the term 'native speaker' to mean X." Thus the native speaker of the grammarian would be different from the native speaker of the sociolinguist or the educationalist. This could lead in each case to various prototypical criteria being elevated to the status of "essential properties", in order to create a clearly-bounded and uniform set. In practice this is what all sciences do to an extent; what a botanist means by "fruit" is close to what the rest of mean by the word, but it is so defined that everything is either "fruit" or "not fruit", and no "fruit" is more "fruity" than another. The question of what is really "fruit" does not arise, and should not arise with "native speaker" either.

There is a book on the subject, The Native Speaker: Multilingual Perspectives, edited by Rajendra Singh, which might be illuminating although it sounds terrifyingly jargon-filled:

In today's multilingual world, an understanding of the notion "native speaker" has assumed immense importance for linguistic theorizing. The Native Speaker is a volume of original essays addressing this most fundamental of questions in the contemporary study of language. The distinguished contributors focus essentially on the origins of the concepts "native speaker" and also present psycho- and neurolinguistics perspectives in their assessment. Several empirically rich case studies form India, Singapore, and Africa are used to illustrate the structure of languages and the politics involved in the "nativization" and "othering" of varieties and dialects of speech. Social empowerment through language purity and linguistic corruption are related problematics which also receive attention. The emphasis is not merely on cognitive issues but on socio-historical ones as well. This volume will generate a serious debate regarding the origins and identity of the "native speaker." Academics and practitioners of linguistics, sociolinguistics, sociology, and psycholinguistics will find this book of interest.

I'll close with the words of the Father of American Linguistics, Leonard Bloomfield, from Chapter 3 of his great work Language (a good chunk of which I am thrilled to find online): "The first language a human being learns to speak is his native language; he is a native speaker of this language." So in its classic period, linguistics used my definition (as does, for what it's worth, the Wikipedia). But I await vox populi.

HISTORY OF KANNADA.

Kannada (Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia) is one of the main Dravidian languages of southern India, and there's an interesting history of Kannada literature online:

Kannada is the language predominant in the state of Karnataka in India. It is also the language that we, the Kamats are most familiar with. To mark the celebration of the World Millennium Kannada Conference (held in September 2000 in Houston), I asked my mother Dr. Jyotsna Kamat, a passionate student of ancient Kannada literature to trace the History of the Kannada Language for a special feature at Kamat's Potpourri.

(Via Plep.)

KROPOTKIN ON FAUST.

I don't know why it's taken me so long to get around to reading Kropotkin's Memoirs of a Revolutionist; he's been one of my heroes for many years. At any rate, it's finally worked its way to the top of my pile, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it—he gives a picture of the Russia he grew up in that is both unsparing and loving, and his descriptions of people are masterful. I'm currently reading the long chapter on his studies at the Corps of Pages, and I wanted to share his vivid description of the impact Goethe's Faust made on him:

Toward the end of the winter I asked Herr Becker to lend me a copy of Goethe's "Faust." I had read it in a Russian translation; I had also read Turguéneff's beautiful novel, "Faust"; and I now longed to read the great work in the original. "You will understand nothing in it; it is too philosophical," Becker said, with his gentle smile; but he brought me, nevertheless, a little square book, with the pages yellowed by age, containing the immortal drama. He little knew the unfathomable joy that that small square book gave me. I drank in the sense and the music of every line of it, beginning with the very first verses of the ideally beautiful dedication, and soon knew full pages by heart. Faust's monologue in the forest, and especially the lines in which he speaks of his understanding of nature, —

        "Thou
Not only cold, amazed acquaintance yield'st,
But grantest that in her profoundest breast
I gaze, as in the bosom of a friend," —

simply put me in ecstasy, and till now it has retained its power over me. Every verse gradually became a dear friend. And then, is there a higher æsthetic delight than to read poetry in a language which one does not yet quite thoroughly understand? The whole is veiled with a sort of slight haze, which admirably suits poetry. Words, the trivial meanings of which, when one knows the language colloquially, sometimes interfere with the poetical image they are intended to convey, retain but their subtle, elevated sense; while the music of the poetry is only the more strongly impressed upon the ear.

There's obviously a certain amount of 19th-century Romantic blather here, but the remarks on reading "poetry in a language which one does not yet quite thoroughly understand" are very true, and express one reason poetry has been one of the main gates through which I've entered foreign languages.

The Goethe passage is from the Forest and Cavern section (here translated by George Madison Priest); the original is:

        Nicht
Kalt staunenden Besuch erlaubst du nur,
Vergönnest mir, in ihre tiefe Brust
Wie in den Busen eines Freunds zu schauen.

And the Kropotkin passage in Russian is:

К концу зимы я попросил Беккера дать мне «Фауст». Я уже читал его в русском переводе; прочитал я также чудную тургеневскую повесть «Фауста» и теперь жаждал узнать великое произведение в подлиннике.

— Вы ничего не поймете в нем, сказал мне Беккер с доброй улыбкой, — слишком философское произведе­ние. — Тем не менее он принес мне маленькую квадрат­ную книжечку с пожелтевшими от времени страницами. Философия Фауста и музыка стиха захватили меня все­цело. Начал я с прекрасного, возвышенного посвяще­ния и скоро знал целые страницы наизусть. Монолог Фауста в лесу приводил меня в экстаз, в особенности те стихи, в которых он говорил о понимании природы:

Erhabner Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles,
Warum ich bat Du hast mir nicht umsonst.
Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet… etc.

(Могучий дух, ты все мне, все доставил,
О чем просил я. Не напрасно мне
Твой лик явил ты в пламенном сиянье.
Ты дал мне в царство чудную природу,
Познать ее, вкусить мне силы дал…
Ты показал мне ряд создании жизни,
Ты научил меня собратий видеть
В волнах, и в воздухе, и в тихой роще.)

И теперь еще это место производит на меня сильное впечатление. Каждый стих постепенно стал для меня до­рогим другом. Есть ли более высокое эстетическое на­слаждение, чем чтение стихов на не совсем хорошо зна­комом языке? Все покрывается тогда своего рода легкой дымкой, которая так подобает поэзии. Те слова, которые, когда мы знаем разговорный язык, режут наше ухо не­соответствием с передаваемым образом, сохраняют свой тонкий, возвышенный смысл. Музыкальность стиха осо­бенно улавливается.

ELIZABETH BISHOP.

      NORTH HAVEN

    In Memoriam: Robert Lowell

I can make out the rigging of a schooner
a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky
no clouds except for one long, carded horse's tail.

The islands haven't shifted since last summer,
even if I like to pretend they have—
drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,
a little north, a little south, or sidewise—
and that they're free within the blue frontiers of bay.

This month our favorite one is full of flowers:
buttercups, red clover, purple vetch,
hackweed still burning, daisies pied, eyebright,
the fragrant bedstraw's incandescent stars,
and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.

The goldfinches are back, or others like them,
and the white-throated sparrow's five-note song,
pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes.
Nature repeats herself, or almost does:
repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.

Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first "discovered girls"
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had "such fun," you said, that classic summer.
("Fun"—it always seemed to leave you at a loss...)

You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue...And now—you've left
for good. You can't derange, or rearrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

More Bishop poems here (allow me to nod at "Exchanging Hats"), as well as at wood s lot, which has now been providing thought-provoking and joy-inspiring links for four years ("the fourth anniversary of my meanderings here in the department of gluage and scissorology"): congratulations, and keep up the good work!

THE JEALOUS PHILOLOGIST.

For some time I've been tempted by The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith, so I was interested to read Sarah Lyall's article about him in today's NY Times. My interest cranked up several notches when I read this description of one of the two new books he's working on:

The first, to be published in December by Anchor, features the pompous Prof. Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld of the Institute of Romance Philology in Regensburg, Germany, the author of "Portuguese Irregular Verbs" and a man consumed by jealousy and suspicion.

Now, that's my kind of protagonist!

AN ARAB CHAMPOLLION?

Okasha El Daly, a London-based Egyptologist who teaches at Birkbeck College, claims (according to a Guardian story by Robin McKie) that "hieroglyphs had been decoded hundreds of years earlier [before Jean-François Champollion] - by an Arabic alchemist, Abu Bakr Ahmad Ibn Wahshiyah:

But now it is claimed that Champollion had been beaten by Arabian scholars who, eight centuries earlier, had twigged that sounds were crucial to their decoding. 'For two and half centuries, the study of ancient Egypt has been dominated by a Euro-centric view that virtually ignored Arabic scholarship,' said El Daly. 'I felt that was quite unjustified.'

An expert in both ancient Egypt and ancient Arabic scripts, El Daly spent seven years chasing down Arabic manuscripts in private collections around the world in a bid to find evidence that Arab scholars had unlocked the secrets of the hieroglyph. He eventually found it in the work of the ninth-century alchemist, Ibn Wahshiyah. 'I compared his studies with those of modern scholars and realised that he understood completely what hieroglyphs were saying.'

(There is also a Reuters story [link to the Daily News of Pakistan].) Now, I'm sure El Daly is a fine Egyptologist, but it seems clear to me that he allowed his animus against Eurocentrism to overwhelm his critical faculties; he was determined to find evidence, so of course he did. Everything I have read about the medieval Islamic world and its attitude towards the pre-Islamic past suggests to me the extreme unlikelihood of the kind of patient and open-minded approach necessary to this kind of decipherment; at most, Ibn Wahshiyya(h) and his fellow scholars proposed that the hieroglyphs were phonetic symbols like the alphabets they knew, but this is meaningless without actually decoding the system and learning which were phonetic and which ideographic and what the meanings were—such proposals were made before Champollion by Europeans, and they are quite rightly forgotten.

Besides, the guy doesn't seem to have been the most scrupulous of scholars. The History of Islamic Science website has the following entry:

IBN WAHSHIYA
Abu Bakr Ahmed (or Mohammed) ibn Ali ibn al-Wahshiya al-Kaldani or al-Nabati. Born in Iraq of a Nabataean family, flourished about the end of the third century H., i. e., before 912. Alchemist. Author of alchemistic and occult writings (quoted in the Fihrist). He wrote c. 904 the so-called "Nabataean agriculture" (Kitab al-falaha al-nabatiya), an alleged translation from ancient Babylonian sources, the purpose of which was to extol the Babylonian-Aramean-Syrian civilization (or more simply the "old" civilization before the hegira) against that of the conquering Arabs. It contains valuable information on agriculture and superstitions.
This forgery became famous because the great Russian orientalist Khvolson was entirely deceived by it. Of course, Ibn Wahshiya was as unable to read the cuneiform texts as the Egyptian Arabs the hieroglyphic.
Fihrist (311-312, 358).

(Emphasis added.) Via Mirabilis.ca.

HISTORICAL LATIN GRAMMAR ONLINE.

Michael Weiss of Cornell University has put online (at his homepage) an Outline of the Comparative Grammar of Latin:

My goal in putting together this outline is modest. I hope to provide the English-speaking/reading student with an up-to-date, reliable, introduction to the historical and comparative phonology and morphology of Latin... The outline is divided into 41 lessons of 5 to 10 pages in length. With a moderate amount of haste, the whole course may be completed in one semester.

I encourage anyone to download these outlines for teaching or learning purposes. They are obviously not intended as works of scholarship and should not be quoted as such. Comments, and corrections, which will be appreciated, may be sent to mlw36@cornell.edu

It's unfortunate that the chapters are in pdf format (which makes them annoying to access and impossible to quote easily), but I understand the reason: when you're using lots of Greek and other specialized type, it's best not to risk the vagaries of HTML. Anyway, it's an invaluable resource and worth the slight effort. To give just one example of the riches contained within, the chapter on Etruscan (pdf) has a nice detailed analysis of a bilingual inscription, with scrupulous descriptions of alternate views.

There are the usual errors endemic to unedited text; from the "Stress Laryngeal" chapter (pdf):
"the accent system was fundamental transformed"
"There is only one change, which may require..." (for "change that")
"the Grammarian prescribe that"
But I'm sure over time these, as well as whatever other problems may be lurking, will be weeded out.

(Via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey.)

BEAT THE JUDGE.

To quote Andrew Zangrilli, from whose Blogbook post I took this list:

Do you have a good vocabulary? Prove it, smarty.

Test your knowledge against the vocab champ, Judge Selya of the First Circuit.

The following word list was gathered from his recent decisions. How many can you define?

Algid
Decurtate
Dehors
Exigible
Encincture
Asseverational
Chiaroscuro
Solatium
Isthmian
Anent
Sockdolager
Nonce
Purlieu
Gallimaufry
Perscrutation
Longiloquent
Integument
Asthenic

Scoring
0-2: dunce
3-5: average
6-11: whiz kid
12-18: 2 smart

I got only one totally wrong (the first -- Brother Auger, my seventh-grade Latin teacher, would be very disappointed in me); one other was close enough for government work if not for legal scrutiny. But I had to check the OED several times to make sure my instincts were right. These are, by and large, words you'll never have a use for (unless you're Judge Selya), but it's always fun to stretch one's vocabulary. (Via Transblawg.)

Addendum. Since I'm linking to this bit of japery on the part of the Tensor, I'd better append the real definitions, so as not to contribute to the Veil of Ignorance:

Algid - cold
Decurtate - to cut short
Dehors - outside
Exigible - that may be demanded
Encincture - to girdle
Asseverational - like a solemn affirmation
Chiaroscuro - interplay of light and shade/dark
Solatium - compensation (law: 'sum of money paid, over and above the actual damages, as a solace for injured feelings')
Isthmian - situated on or forming an isthmus (in particular, belonging to the Isthmus of Corinth; esp. in "Isthmian games")
Anent - regarding, concerning
Sockdolager - decisive blow or answer; something outstanding
Nonce - current occasion, time being
Purlieu - place where one has the right to range at large, or which one habitually frequents, a haunt; outskirts
Gallimaufry - heterogeneous mixture, confused jumble
Perscrutation - thorough investigation, careful scrutiny
Longiloquent - (given to) speaking at great length
Integument - (natural) covering (skin, shell, husk, rind, etc)
Asthenic - weak

(Note: these are mostly not full definitions—that's what dictionaries are for—just quick approximations that will give you the basic idea and will hopefully be easier to remember, should you wish to do such a thing.)

A couple of the etymologies are particularly interesting. Here's anent(OED):

The form-history of this wd. presents several points not fully explained; the primitive form is the OE. phrase on efen, on efn, on emn, with the dative = 'on even (ground) with, on a level with,' whence later side by side with, beside, face to face with, opposite, against, towards, in view of, etc.; cogn. w. OS. an eban, MHG. eneben, neben, and (with phonetic -t) nebent. In Eng. also a final -t had been developed by 1200, interchanging with -d, perhaps by form-assoc. with some other word. At the same time this extended form occurs with final -e and -es, after datival and genitival words like on-bute(n, on-eanes. Following the latter class also, the final -s became in 14th c. -st, giving anentist, anentst, anenst, as the midl. form, in literary use in 17th c., and still dialectal. The north preserved the earlier anent, still common in north. dial., and in literary and legal Scotch, whence not unfrequent in literary Eng. during the present [ie, 19th!] century. The early form anende may have been influenced by the prec. phr. AN-END; anont, anond(e, are not explained. The development of meaning is largely parallel to that of again, against.

And here's purlieu:

Exemplified in 1482 in the form purlew(e, app. an erroneous alteration of purley, syncopated from puraley, the natural Eng. spelling (cf. alley, city, army) in the 15th c. of AF. puralé, -alée, taken in its transferred sense (PURALÉ 2).
For the history of puralé, -alee (purale) in English between c1330 and 1482 written evidence is wanting; in Anglo-Fr. legal documents it continued to be written puralé, poralee (examples of which, of 1370-78, in the sense 'purlieu' appear under PURALÉ 2); but, as an English word, it would naturally become puraley, puraly ('pur@le, 'pur@li), and easily be syncopated to purley, purly, as still seen in the 16th c. and later, esp. in the comb. purleyman, which shows that this was the pronunciation even after the spelling was changed. Purlew may have originated in a scribal error, or as a pseudo-etymological spelling, erroneously associating the word with lew, leu, LIEU, place; app. it did not appear in law Fr. till later, when it was prob. taken over from Eng., and Gallicized as purlieu: see quot. 1574 [1574 in J. Dyer Reports (1592) 327 En le manor dun Fortescue de S. adjoynont al dit chace, come en le purlieu del chase.. le libertie del purlieu remayna unextincted].

BOOTYLICIOUS OED.

James Kilpatrick explains how the word bootylicious ('sexually attractive, sexy; shapely'), apparently new to him despite its ubiquity over the last decade, entered the OED, a canonization that filled him with horror ("I asked, 'The booty-what?' I cried, 'C'mon, Don!' I said, quietly, 'Aaargh!'"). He draws a veil over the dirty bits ("does not qualify for quotation in a family newspaper"), but Nicole provides the full Monty at her excellent copy-editing blog A Capital Idea.

My favorite of the OED citations:
2001 Sunday Herald (Glasgow) 20 Dec. (Mag.) 29 (caption) It's Hogmanay, time to party and look bootylicious for the Bells.

GLOSSAIRE FRANCO-CANADIEN.

The Glossaire franco-canadien et vocabulaire de locutions vicieuses usitées au Canada is a Project Gutenberg reprint of an 1880 book by Oscar Dunn explaining, and frequently deploring, the local form of French. Anyone interested in the subject should find it useful and occasionally amusing; my favorite entry so far is:

U. Il est grand temps pour nous d'apprendre que l'u diffère de l' i, et que le premier jour de la semaine est lundi, non pas lindzi, V. D.

'It is high time that we learned that u is different from i, and that the first day of the week is lundi, not lindzi; see D.' The D entry is:

D. On serait tenté de dire que le d n'existe pas dans la langue franco-canadienne, car, dans la prononciation, nous remplaçons cette lettre par une autre qui renferme un son sifflant et que l'on pourrait indiquer par dz. Bien peu de personnes au Canada prononcent correctement le verbe dire. Nous prononçons dzire. Cet accent passe inaperçu chez nous, mais écorche l'oreille de l'étranger. C'est dans les écoles primaires qu'il nous faut commencer à le combattre.

'One might be tempted to say that d does not exist in Canadian French, because in pronunciation we replace this letter with another which includes a sibilant and which one might indicate by dz. Very few Canadians pronounce the verb dire ['to say'] correctly; we say dzire. This accent passes unnoticed among us, but grates on the ears of foreigners. We should begin combatting this in primary school.' (Via wood s lot.)

HATCHET JOBS CATCHING ON.

I'm glad to see Grant Barrett's new book, Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Slang, getting play in today's NY Times. It's featured in Slang Only a Velcroid Would Love (by Tom Kuntz) in the Week in Review section:

Those seriously concerned with the vitality of our wonky Beltway blather may want to skip the next agriculture-subsidy roundtable to train their bifocals on "Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of Political Slang," edited by Grant Barrett (Oxford, 2004).

There, with some imagination, you can freshen your lexicon with some forgotten or fairly obscure, but nevertheless serviceable, bits of political argot. Impress your fellow sheeple!

Actorvist A politically involved actor. (Also, raptivist, the hip-hop version.)

Bafflegab Confusing or unintelligible speech, doublespeak...

And William Safire's "Battleground" column quotes Barrett extensively on the phrases red state/blue state and swing voters.

WALLACE STEVENS.

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Wallace Stevens, so I'll give you a taste of one of my favorite 20th-century poems, "Sunday Morning," and send you here for the rest:

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

So happy birthday, Wallace (and Bonnie to boot)! And there's much more Stevens at today's wood s lot.

LES DERIVATIONS.

As a pendant to my recent post on historical linguistics, here's a charming epigram by the 17th-century poet Jacques de Cailly (also known anagrammatically as d'Aceilly):

Les Dérivations

Alfana vient d'equus sans doute,
Mais il faut avouer aussi
Qu'en venant de là jusqu'ici
Il a bien changé sur la route.

('[The Spanish word] alfana comes from [Latin] equus, no doubt, but one must admit that in getting from there to here it has changed quite a bit along the way.' The alleged derivation, proposed by Gilles Ménage, is of course entirely spurious.)