TURIN AND KIEV.

This CBC News story made me quite happy:

This is a tale of two cities — or, rather, of two cities' names. And it reveals how we sometimes have a dickens of a time spelling foreign nouns in English.

The story begins many months ago, when the CBC was preparing to broadcast the Summer Olympics from Athens. Like a relay runner sprinting toward the baton pass, we glanced ahead to the next Games in 2006.

Our announcers and writers would inevitably refer to the host city in Italy. And it quickly became clear that a decision was needed for a smooth handover.

Some people were calling the 2006 Winter Games the Torino Olympics. Others opted for the Turin Olympics.

Neither was actually wrong, unless you happen to publish or broadcast in Italian. But which was right for us?

Torino, of course, is the name that Italians use for this ancient city in the country's northwest. Most of the English-speaking world, however, knows the community as Turin. The host city itself puts Torino on all official documents, including those issued in English, and some media outlets have adopted this term as well. A researcher with CBC Sports, Suzanne Blake, conducted a survey during the summer and found that NBC had chosen Torino while the BBC and Canadian Press had picked Turin. Our staff was divided.

When CBC.ca was asked for its views, I suggested the corporation use Turin, largely because it's the name most Canadians recognize — just as Venezia is called Venice. I also pointed out that we refer to the 1960 Olympics as the Rome, not the Roma, Games, even though the latter is the hometown choice.

In fact, if you look carefully at Canada's sole medal that year – a silver in men's rowing – you'll see ROMA MCMLX on the front.

But that inscription doesn't make the English label "Rome Olympics" wrong. Put another way, we must consider more than logos, posters and other printed material to determine the language we use for our audience.

A colleague who runs CBC Sports Online, Andrew Lundy, also voted for Turin — slyly noting that if the International Olympic Committee endorses Turin as the acceptable French version, this was a chance for linguistic unity in Canada.

In the end, the head of CBC News, Tony Burman, and the head of CBC Sports, Nancy Lee, made a final ruling for all the English service's journalists working in radio, television and on the web. We found ourselves on the road to Turin because that's the most familiar name. Arrivederci confusion. Hello consistency.

The rest of the story concerns an equally sensible decision to prefer Kiev over Kyiv: "We still write Peter the Great not 'Pyotr,' for example, and Rachmaninoff instead of 'Rakhmaninov.'" As regular readers of this blog know, I'm all for traditional English spellings.

Thanks for the link go to Jonathan Crowe.

POETRY TRANSLATION CENTRE.

An excellent place to investigate non-European poetry:

The Poetry Translation Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies was established in February 2004 thanks to a generous grant from the Arts Council, London and support from SOAS. The Centre will concentrate on translating contemporary poetry from non-European languages into English to the highest literary standards through a series of innovative collaborations between leading international poets and poets based in the UK...

The Poetry Translation Centre was founded by the poet Sarah Maguire. It developed out of the poetry translation workshops she has been leading at SOAS since February 2002. The workshops, attended by a committed and enthusiastic group of participants from within and outside SOAS, have been an enormous success: in the space of two years, poems have been translated into English from Arabic, Hindi, Spanish, Somali, Chinese, Sylheti, Korean, Assamese, Farsi, Amharic, Urdu, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish, German and Bengali.

Literary translation in general is a marginalized art form in the UK, but the translation from non-European languages is virtually ignored. For example, the six main poetry translation prizes awarded via the British Centre for Literary Translation each year are all exclusively devoted to European languages. This state of affairs is radically out of step with current developments in contemporary British society. The 2001 Census shows that nearly one in ten people define themselves as coming from an ethnic minority, the bulk of whom are from non-European backgrounds. Their remarkable literary cultures are almost completely disregarded by the British literary establishment. As a result, opportunities are lost to gain insights into their histories, societies and subjective experiences, awareness which is becoming increasingly vital given the current tensions within the UK, especially in relation to refugee communities...

This lack of interest in the rich poetic traditions of non-European cultures is stultifying contemporary British poetry much of which, currently, is very inward looking. Like any other literary tradition, English poetry has always thrived and developed through translation, from Chaucer's version of The Romance of the Rose to the overwhelming influence on contemporary poets and readers of the Penguin Modern European Poets series in the 1970s. Purely for the sake of poetry in English, it is vital that non-European poetry be widely translated, understood and appreciated. Contemporary British poetry urgently needs to absorb the fresh perspectives and formal innovations of non-European poetry. How far would Modernist poetry have developed if Ezra Pound (who didn't speak a word of Chinese) hadn't become fascinated by Fenellosa's versions of early Chinese poetry?

Each language has a page of linguistic description (eg, Somali), and the sidebar lists the poets whose works in that language are included; each poet's page (eg, Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac 'Gaarriye') has a biography, and the sidebar lists the individual poems, which always have the original text and a translation (on separate pages, sometimes with both literal and "final" versions) and sometimes (as in the case of Fal Galbeed) have an audio file as well. Many thanks to Anne for the link!

EXPLICITY.

Joey Comeau (of the online comic A Softer World) composes strange cover letters for jobs he's seen advertised; this one is
To: Human resources, The University of Victoria
Re: Linguistics Professor

I am applying to the position for university linguistics professor with your university, because while my love is language, it is also worth noting that language's love is me, for real, and it isn't as strange as it sounds because I think you will agree that while the verb love requires an agent of a living nature, language fills that requirement nicely – living as it does in the hearts and souls of every man, woman, child, and seeing eye dog that wanders this earth with a song in masculine, feminine, or neuter's possessive pronoun's heart and mind, and I feel that working in your university program, teaching undergrads and graduate students would not be the hell that this description evokes, but instead an opportunity to teach a love of language to a world that has decided to hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate, and hey, have you ever stopped to think that explicity is a much nicer word than explicitness on all fronts, at every border, in every way I feel this is true, and because I sat down to write them out, about a dozen times each, I feel I can speak with authority, using definiteness, definity, and seriously –it's just nicer I think, spiritually, though I'm still working on this study to try and prove it through polling of students at my current university, even though they just sort of stare at me all slack jawed, drool making the mad dash for a pavement that couldn't help but offer more in the way of intellectual stimulation than the chasm that is the modern undergraduate mind, that couldn't help but challenge the drool in a way that no English composition course could hope to, not in a world where universities are just as willing to hire professors who prescribe standard grammars as truer languages as they are to grant doctorates to such nincompoops with nonsense in their heads, no hearts in their chests, making me wonder about, well, don't think I haven't noticed that explicity has that little red underline in my word processor, my computer's way of endorsing those effers and their effing prescriptions, their nasal voices preaching "no prepositions at the ends of sentences, unless you have to, no split infinitives, no run on whatever, no this, no that," and I sincerely believe that they've cheated on their significant others, like I bet they've heard someone say something hateful toward the speech patterns of foreigners just learning English, and laughed, like I bet they've used the word "ebonics" knowing full well the condescending, racist nature of the word itself, relishing that root, "ebony", smiling at their coworkers from the African studies department in the hall, all the while having to consciously refrain from asking "what is it that be the up?" in perfect imitation of the phonetic transcripts they've been reading about in little journals, hate rags, and maybe they've picked up on the careful lexical selections in my anonymous letters, in the casual threats I leave on their answering machines, and no I can't promise that I won't physically attack these people if you hire me, but I can promise you this, I will be the best linguistics professor you've ever had, the professor that students recommend to one another, the new hotness, the rad, and in dark corners my colleagues over in the department of "Standard English is the one true lord," will fear the truth I bring to their students, my anger, my explicity.

Joey Comeau

(Via anastasiav's MetaFilter post.)

SPICY LANGUAGE.

Or, in its own words, Langue sauce piquante: Le blog des correcteurs du Monde.fr: the blog of the proofreaders of Le Monde. If you know French, or are trying to learn, this is a great way to immerse yourself. A recent entry discussed the history of the multivalent word sacre (carrying both the positive and negative connotations of Latin sacer); another explains why you sometimes have to use the singular even when it seems you're talking about something plural. I have to say, though, that I'm not sure they properly understand the quaint sexist outcry "Va va voom!" (or, as they have it, "Va va voum !"), since they include it in an entry on onomatopeia; like the similar "Hubba hubba!" it's more a venting of primal emotion in assonant syllables than an attempt to represent a natural sound, like "oink." (Thanks to Mark for the link!)

HOW TO TALK SOUTHERN.

Roy Blount Jr. has a combined review (in last Sunday's NY Times Sunday Book Review) of The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (University of Tennessee Press, 2004), edited by Joseph S. Hall and Michael B. Montgomery, and Suddenly Southern: A Yankee's Guide to Living in Dixie (Fireside, 2004), by Maureen Duffin-Ward; he praises the former and eviscerates the latter, all the while tossing in handfuls of succulent dialectal expressions taken from the dictionary:

Under ''splunge,'' for instance, we read: ''She would fill the kittel to the crack with muddy water and splunge chips and leaves down deep into it with her hands and watch it close till she said it was done enough to eat.''... Under ''wonderly'' we read: ''I have been thinking what a wonderly sight it will be to sit by the fire and look at the snow through all them new glass winders!''

He expends a good deal of energy on Duffin-Ward's annoying contention that y'all is singular:

Recently I became aware of an airy new Southern lifestyle publication -- Y'all: The Magazine of Southern People -- out of Oxford, Miss., that might better be entitled Y'all: The Magazine That Doesn't Know What Its Own Name Means. In its premiere issue, Y'all declared that: '' 'Y'all' is singular. 'All y'all' is plural.'' That bit of blatant misinformation also appears in the ''Dixie Dictionary'' portion of ''Suddenly Southern.''

I don't know whether Y'all picked this up from Duffin-Ward or vice versa. She is not the first non-Southerner to insist that Southerners may call a single person ''y'all,'' but to my knowledge she is the first to declare categorically, in the face of everyday evidence and all philological authority, that it is always a single person we so address. But she isn't one to brook elucidation. With regard to the singularity of ''y'all,'' she writes: ''Southerners will beg to differ here. They insist that even though they use it to address one person, it implies plurality.''

Something -- either second-person-plural envy or hyperjocularity -- has affected Duffin-Ward's ear. People in the South do indeed sometimes seem to be addressing a single person as ''y'all.'' For instance, a restaurant patron might ask a waiter, ''What y'all got for dessert tonight?'' In that case ''y'all'' refers collectively to the folks who run the restaurant. No doubt the implication of plurality is hard for someone who didn't grow up with it to discern. It may even be that Duffin-Ward has heard a native speaker, in real life, violate deep-structure idiom by calling a single person ''y'all.'' That would be arguable grounds for saying that ''y'all'' is singular on occasion. But how can she have missed daily instances of people unmistakably addressing two or more people as ''y'all''? When a parent calls out to three kids, ''Y'all get in here out of the rain,'' does she think only one child is being summoned? (''All y'all'' is of course an extended plural: ''Y'all listen up! I mean all y'all.'' Often it is pronounced ''Aw yaw.'')

(I've italicized the magazine's name for clarity.) The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English sounds wonderful, and I expect I'll enjoy flipping through a copy in a library someday, but at $75 it's a tad rich for my own bookshelves.

(Thanks to Elias for kindly letting me use his computer during my Berkshires visit!)

ASHES TO ASHES.

I should have posted something about the death last month of Anthony Hecht; he's one of the poets who's helped me through the past few decades, not only by his reliable craftsmanship (a rare trait these days, shared with the too-little-appreciated Richard Wilbur) but by his dogged investigation of the darker side of human behavior (prompted by what he saw during World War Two, including both heavy fighting and the liberation of a concentration camp). But I had problems of my own and couldn't even begin to frame a post, so I let it go.

Now, reading the NY Times Sunday Book Review (this week a special Poetry Issue, though as my wife says most people will toss it out thinking it's a particularly cheesy advertising supplement with its hideous yellow-and-red cover), I come across an appreciation by David Yezzi that does a better job than I would have done:

He internalized the prosodic traditions of English the way a virtuoso violinist works a complex sequence of rhythm and pitch into muscle memory. The rest is making music. Hecht played fluently in any key: the minor organ tones of his Jamesian ''Venetian Vespers,'' the major-chord affirmations of the love poem ''Peripeteia,'' the sober procession of his canzone ''Terms,'' and ''The Dover Bitch,'' his buffo sendup of Matthew Arnold: ''And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me, / And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad / All over, etc., etc.' ''

Hecht's sumptuous verse earned him a reputation for accomplished formalism, but that, I think, says more about the free-verse age in which he wrote than about his sterling achievement. He was a poet who, like Thomas Hardy, could capture in the image of a barren landscape the specters of history.

Hecht's poems often layer biblical and classical themes over modern or even quotidian concerns, creating rich palimpsests at once immediate and broad-reaching in their implications. The binding of Isaac, for instance, becomes a resonant image in Hecht's war poetry. His keen dramas—a family held by a soldier at gunpoint, a tourist ripped off in Naples, a miscarriage—and his various personae reflect a poet attempting, as Hecht once said, to disguise himself. Yet the poet's impersonality never dulls emotion; it tempers it to heartbreaking effect...

Towards the end, Yezzi quotes Hecht's ''Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-seven'':

The dramatis personae of our lives
Dwindle and wizen; familiar boyhood shames,
The tribulations one somehow survives,
Rise smokily from propitiatory flames

Of our forgetfulness until we find
It becomes strangely easy to forgive
Even ourselves with this clouding of the mind,
This cinerous blur and smudge in which we live.

I was struck by the word cinerous: it clearly had something to do with ashes (Latin cinis, root ciner-), but what exactly did it mean? It's not in the OED, surprisingly, but Webster's Third International has it: 'a light bluish gray to light gray that is redder and darker than skimmed-milk white and very slightly redder than glaucous gray.' I'm sure that presents an exact image to someone familiar with color nomenclature, but for me it reduces to a blend of 'off-white' and 'light gray,' which I hope is good enough for Hecht's purposes. What caught my attention, though, was the entry a few lines above: cinereous 'gray tinged or shaded with black.' Now, I love the variety and depth of the English vocabulary, but this seemed excessive; who could possibly keep those two words apart, one meaning gray verging on white and the other gray tinged with black? To make matters worse, there's an alternate form cinereal defined as 'cinereous.' (I might add that the OED does have cinereous, defined as 'Of an ashy hue, ash-coloured, ashen-gray'—but what color are these ashes?) And to make matters worse, Aegypius monachus is known in English as both cinereous vulture and cinerous vulture. Sometimes it's all just too much, and nothing but poetry helps.

Incidentally, this may be my last post until Sunday; my laptop died and I'm leaving for Thanksgiving with the inlaws right after lunch. I wish a happy holiday to those of my readers who celebrate it, and may the cinerous blur and smudge in which we live spare all of us any unnecessary grief.

URDU POETRY.

The Urdu Poetry Archive collects ghazals and nazms (see Uma's Ghazal Page for a good introduction to the genre, and the Novice Nook at the Archive for more information):

Welcome to the Urdu Poetry Archive! Urdu poetry is like a vast ocean. Walking along its shores on the sands of time, I have gathered a few gems that I would like to share with you.

The ghazals and nazms in the Urdu poetry archive have been indexed alphabetically as well as by poet. As of 17th August, 2003 there are 1814 ghazals and nazms by 343 poets in the archive... The ghazals and nazms are written in transliterated Urdu (Urdu written in the English script).

Unfortunately, there are no English translations, but if you're adventurous you might try using the online Urdu-English dictionaries available at Urdu Poetry Resources (if you know any Persian much of the vocabulary will be familiar), and you might find some translations on the web if you google an author's name. (Via plep.)

KAMIKAZE.

I had always understood (as the etymologies in dictionaries told me) that the word kamikaze means 'divine wind' in Japanese, originally referred to the storms that hit the Mongol fleet in 1281 and saved Japan from invasion, and was later used to refer to Japanese suicide pilots during World War Two (the only sense in English). Now I learn (from Hippietrail) that this is misleading, that (according to feedback he's gotten on Wikipedia) in Japanese the reading kamikaze refers only to the thirteenth-century event and for the suicide pilots the same characters are read shinpū... except that others say the correct Japanese term is tokkōtai. (Relevant Wikipedia discussion threads here and here.) I'm hoping my readers who are knowledgeable about Japanese will chime in here with more information.

SOME JUST CALL IT WEBSTER.

A NY Times story by Pam Belluck discusses what is said to be the longest place name in the US, Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg in Massachusetts. There's a picture of a misspelled sign, lyrics from "The Lake Song" by Ethel Merman and Ray Bolger ("Oh, we took a walk one evening and we sat down on a log/ By Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg"), and an etymological excursus:

There is more consensus on the meaning of Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, but it turns out the consensus is wrong. In the 1920's, a reporter for The Webster Times, Lawrence J. Daly, wrote that it was a Nipmuck Indian word meaning "You fish on your side, I fish on my side and nobody fishes in the middle." That stuck even though Mr. Daly confessed repeatedly that he had made the whole thing up.

The real meaning, said Paul Macek, a historian in Webster, a community of about 17,000 just northwest of where Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts intersect, is "English knifemen and Nipmuck Indians at the boundary or neutral fishing place."

In case you were wondering, it is not the world's longest place name:

The honor goes to what the Guinness people call the "most scholarly transliteration" of the official name for Bangkok: krungthephphramahanakhon bowonratanakosin mahintharayuthaya mahadilokphiphobnovpharad radchataniburirom udomsantisug.

Oh, and if you want to say the lake's name out loud, it's not hard if you break it into three chunks: Chargoggagogg (char-GOG-agog) manchauggagogg (man-CHOG-agog) chaubunagungamaugg (chaw-bunna-GUNG-gamog). Kind of catchy, isn't it?

(Thanks to Bonnie for the link!)

THE GREAT VOWEL SHIFT.

The Great Vowel Shift: See and Hear the GVS, What Is the Great Vowel Shift?, Dialogue: Conservative and Advanced Speakers.

This dialogue does two things. First, it gives the listener four slices of time and shows how vowels would be pronounced in each of these periods. You can click on a time link and get text, sound, and phonetic transcription for the dialogue as it would have taken place in that time. You may also click on a word within the text and get pronunciations of that word (or a similar one) across time.

Second, the dialogue illustrates an important concept: the difference between conservative speakers and advanced speakers. In any community in the midst of a sound change, some speakers will have the new pronunciations while others will maintain older ones. Age may be the most important factor in determining which form a person will use--older people have older pronunciations, younger people have newer ones--but gender, education, geography, and other factors also affect individual speech. In our dialogue, Cole is the conservative speaker; Alice is the advanced speaker. Differences between their pronunciations can be seen most clearly in the word "name": in 1450-1550, Alice has [æ] in "name," while Cole has the older [a]; in 1550-1650, Alice has [e], while Cole has [æ]; and so on.

Important Note: This dialogue is not real. That is, we created it, and we did not worry about whether people would actually say these things in 1400 or 1650 or whenever. We tried not to include any egregious anachronisms, but we spent very little time checking to see if the morphology or syntax is representative of ME or MnE. This dialogue is designed for studying the changes in the long vowels and should not otherwise be taken as representative of the speech of any of the four time periods.

Via wood s lot.

UMBELLIFEROUS INFLORESCENCES.

Unable to sleep last night, I pulled out a little collection of Alexander Kushner (a wonderful St. Petersburg poet; here's a pdf file of his 2002 speech "Poetry and Freedom") and opened it at random to a poem whose first stanza is:

Skuchno, Gogol', zhit' na etom svete!
No poveet medom inogda
Ot pushistykh zontichnykh sotsvetii!
Chudno zhit' na svete, gospoda!

[It's tiresome, Gogol, to live in this world!
But sometimes there's a honeyed breeze
from the fluffy zontichnye sotsvetiya!
It's wonderful to live in the world, gentlemen!]

I didn't know the words I've left in italics, but it was clear from their roots they had something to do with umbrellas (zontik) and flowers (tsvet), and I was too sleepy to bother going downstairs to look them up. So today I did, and it turns out zontichnyi is 'umbelliferous' and sotsvetiye is 'inflorescence.' Neither meant anything to me, so I looked them up; an inflorescence is a characteristic pattern of flowers on a stem, and one of the several varieties is an umbrella-shaped form called umbelliferous.

So how do you translate that? In Russian, both are perfectly ordinary-sounding words, and even if the average Russian doesn't know exactly what a sotsvetiye is (I hope my Russian readers will enlighten me about this), it doesn't carry any of the forbidding "incomprehensible technical term" air of its English equivalent. Nabokov, of course, would have rendered the line "From the fluffy umbelliferous inflorescences," and quivered with pedantic joy as he did so; for the rest of us, that would risk clubbing the poem over the head with a hundred-ton hammer. But if you don't, how do you keep it from losing all specificity and becoming a banal reference to sweet-smelling flowers? Ah, the endless troubles of translation...

DON'T MAKE COMPARISONS.

Don't make comparisons: the living are incomparable.
I had come to terms with the flatness of the plains
with a sort of fond fear.
The curve of the sky was a disease to me.

I would turn and wait for some service or news
from my servant the air.
I would get ready for a journey
and sail along the arcs of travel that never began.

I am prepared to wander where there is more sky for me,
but the clear anguish will not let me go
away from the youthful hills of Voronezh
to the civilised hills, that I see so clearly in Tuscany.

    —Osip Mandelstam, 18 January 1937
tr. Richard McKane and Elizabeth McKane
(from The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937)

The Russian original:

Не сравнивай: живущий несравним.
С каким-то ласковым испугом
Я соглашался с равенством равнин,
И неба круг мне был недугом.

Я обращался к воздуху-слуге,
Ждал от него услуги или вести,
И собирался плыть, и плавал по дуге
Неначинающихся путешествий.

Где больше неба мне -- там я бродить готов,
И ясная тоска меня не отпускает
От молодых еще воронежских холмов
К всечеловеческим, яснеющим в Тоскане.

18 января 1937

(Interesting discussion of the poem's relation to Pushkin here.)

GOOGLE SCHOLAR.

This is probably all over the internet by now, but I just discovered (via MetaFilter) that Google has a beta search for scholarly publications called Google Scholar. I tried searching on Abkhaz and got 304 results; interestingly, the first page is mostly linguistic material, with the political stuff ("Ethno-Federalism and Civic State-Building Policies. Perspectives on the Georgian-Abkhaz Conflict," "The Georgian-Abkhaz Conflict in a Regional Context," &c) coming later. I've already turned up a paper on "Kartvelian substrate toponyms in Abkhazia" by T Gvantseladze and R Tchantouria (HTML, pdf) with fascinating information on local toponyms:

In this paper we discuss a specific Kartvelian model of toponyms, using names of plants without any affixes as toponyms. This model is observed almost all over the Georgian territory. It has been noted on the Abkhazian territory as well, but is not found in the Abkhaz language. We suggest that Sukhumi, Gagra and Tkvarcheli follow this model.

They derive the name of Sukhumi from "a Svan word denoting a plant (singular form), cf. Svan cxum/cxƒm/cxwim, Georg. cxem-la, Megr.-cxem-ur-i/cxim-ur-i, Laz cxem-ur-i/m-cxeb-r-i." I love this stuff, and I love Google Scholar already. For a more balanced view by librarians (Shirl Kennedy and Gary Price), see Resource Shelf.

FRENCH IN THE NEW YORKER.

Jane Kramer's New Yorker article "Taking the Veil," about the French law (Article 141-5-1 of Law No. 2004-228) forbidding conspicuous religious symbols in public schools (not online), has a couple of problems dealing with French that I thought were worth mentioning here. First is the odd quote on p. 64, claiming that Chirac called the veil "the siege of a politics of Islamization." The first noun clearly represents the French word siège, which in most contexts (and certainly this one) means 'seat, locus'; I can't imagine how this mistranslation got past the editorial staff of one of America's most prestigious magazines—as written, it doesn't even mean anything. The other glitch is a quote from a feminist lawyer named Linda Weil-Curiel, who says (according to the magazine) "I'll take Chirac, with all his casseroles, because his position on [the veil] has been, well, noble." Casseroles? I've packed up my French slang dictionaries, so I can't look it up, but I shouldn't need to; the New Yorker shouldn't be using any foreign slang whose meaning is neither known to every literate English-speaker nor obvious from context. Tsk, is all I can say. That and: can anyone tell me what casseroles means in this context?

JULIA'S BACK.

Julia Mayhew, whose poetry blog Eagle's Wing had been inactive since May, has begun posting poems again, making me (and other fans) very happy. Her latest:

HOW TREE TRUNKS BECAME BROWN

There used to be
only one tree.
There was a storm.
It was so muddy the
water was brown
and the tree drank
it and it turned
brown because of
the muddy water.

LANGUAGE QUIZ.

Language Log has a tradition of "guess the language" challenges, but the answers are usually posted the next day, which doesn't give much time for working on them; the latest will be up for a week at least, which should allow more people to get in on the fun. So if trying to figure out overheard languages is your thing, go on over there and listen to the three mp3 files and see what you can come up with. I've got a general idea, but I'll have to refine my guess when I have more leisure (today has been taken up with househunting). Tally-ho!

Update. If anyone's been trying to solve this, the answer is available here; it fits with my general guess, but I don't think I would have been able to come up with the specific language.

COMPUTERS IN AFRICA.

A NY Times article by Marc Lacey, "Using a New Language in Africa to Save Dying Ones," tosses together a mishmash of vaguely related topics and tries to make them cohere; fortunately, I don't have to bother going over it in detail, because Mark Liberman of Language Log has already done so. His summary:

Lacey (the article's author) does start out by talking about "[making] computers more accessible to Africans who happen not to know English, French or the other major languages that have been programmed into the world's desktops". So he may have in mind facilitating a new kind of computer-mediated literacy training among those who don't know English or French. Or maybe he's thinking about bringing interaction with networked computers to people who are not literate at all, using images and speech technology. Those are both interesting ideas, but it's odd to write as if the way to to accomplish such things is to put African languages on an equal footing with English or French in the use of Microsoft Office. Mix in references to endangered languages, text messaging in Amharic, machine translation among English, Afrikaans and Sotho, problems of borrowed vs. created technical vocabulary; stir well; and bake till done.

The ingredients here include preservation and documentation of Africa's hundreds of endangered languages; full localization of software for Africa's dozens of large local languages; methods for input, display and editing of Africa's many orthographies that require (simple forms of) complex rendering; the role of computers in promoting literacy in local languages; language standardization and the development of technical vocabulary; linguistic nationalism among the languages within African countries, nearly all of which are multilingual; and the relationship the major international languages, which in Africa mainly means English and French, though Arabic is also relevant in some areas. These are all important problems, with subtle and complicated relationships among themselves and with other economic, political and technical questions. There are analogous issues in most other areas of the world. I hope that this article means that the NYT editors have developed an interest in these questions, and will continue the discussion in a more careful way at some point in the future.

Bill Poser has a related post on localizing computer software, and I recently posted on SMS in Ethiopia.

MULTILINGUAL CLOCK.

Take a look at this very attractive timepiece, created by Bob Harris:

I actually just kinda made it for myself as a reminder that the rest of the world is big and has been around a long time, something to keep the current mess in perspective. The characters are in Greek, Arabic, Mandarin, Cherokee, Babylonian, ASL, English, Mayan, Hindi, Roman, Thai, and Ethiopian, in that order.

Thanks to Derryl Murphy for the link!

THE BAFFLING STRUGGLE FOR CULTURE.

I had meant to blog this back in March, when it appeared in the NY Times, but forgot; fortunately, it was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, where it is still online, so I can tell you about it now, complete with link. A review by Geoffrey Wheatcroft of The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans includes the following biting remarks on translation:

Writing in a self-confident tone, Evans has a few quirks, like translating every turn of phrase, even those in common currency.

There may be something to be said for rendering Führer as "leader," but the baffling "struggle for culture" turns out to refer not to some worthy artistic aspirations but to what is well-known in English and German as the Kulturkampf, Bismarck's repressive campaign against the Roman Catholic Church. And to translate the names of newspapers - Frankfurt News for Frankfurter Zeitung, Berlin Daily News-Sheet for Berliner Tageblatt, Racial Observer for Völkischer Beobachter - is just silly. At one point Evans cites a contemporary article from The New York Times. A German historian might well do the same, but he would call it The New York Times, and not translate it into Die Neuyorker Zeiten.

"Silly" is perhaps too mild; I prefer "bizarre." Just another example of the havoc wreaked by the inflated egos of overbearing writers who refuse to listen to their editors.

TEXTING IN GE'EZ.

An allAfrica.com article by Ayenew Haileselassie* explains how the syllabary used in Ethiopia, with its more than 300 characters, has been adapted for use on mobile phones:

Ge'ez evokes the ancient and the religious, the chanting of priests in long robes; parchment manuscripts and gold and silver crosses of the old days. The Ge'ez alphabet, also known as the Ethiopic writing system, has always been a source of pride for Ethiopians whose country happens to be the only African country with its own alphabet. Nonetheless it has been regarded as a drawback to the assimilation of information and communication technology with its ungainly 300 plus characters.

From the old typewriter to the new computer and the newer mobile phones, everything has worked with the 26 letters of the English alphabet, consisting of 10 times less characters than its Ge'ez counterpart.

Nothing is a debacle to imaginative souls. Ethiopia will not have to discard its literary tradition to embrace modern information technology.

Young Ethiopian researchers at the Addis Abeba University are making sure the numerous characters of the Ethiopic writing system are only a challenge to be overcome, not a hindrance to its slow but sure integration into the information era. Actually, they stated boldly in their research that the "Ethiopic writing system has now entered the wireless revolution."...

Thanks to John Hardy of Laputan Logic for the link.)

*The name Haile Selassie, incidentally, means 'Holy Trinity' or 'Power of Trinity' in Amharic

PRONUNCIATION QUIZ.

Herewith two words whose pronunciation is not obvious; one is known to me, the other is not. I'll start with the latter.

1) A spadia is "a strip just wider than a column, overlapping the front page" of a newspaper or magazine (according to Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Village Voice—scroll down to "Times does strip tease"). I have never seen it anywhere else and have no idea how it's said; can anyone familiar with publishing terminology enlighten me? (I'm guessing SPAY-dee-a, but I can think of at least three other possibilities.)

2) A crosne (or crosnes) is a Chinese artichoke (Labiatae Stachys sieboldii Miq., also called chorogi or knotroot). I guessed the pronunciation (correctly) before looking it up; you may wish to do the same before peeking inside for the answer.

It's pronounced just like the word crone, being named for the French town Crosne. And chorogi, a Japanese word, has the stress on the first syllable, if you were wondering. (There's a rather unappetizing picture here.)

THE END OF THE WORLD.

Longtime readers will know of my great fondness for the writing of Adam Gopnik; as I have said, he has been the main reason I keep subscribing to The New Yorker, and his absence from its pages recently (apart from the occasional squib) is one reason I'm letting my subscription lapse. For the time being I'm still receiving issues, though, which is good, because the latest contains a new Paris Journal by Gopnik, "The End of the World" (not online). The apocalyptic title refers to the recent scandal involving Le Monde ('The World'), the most influential newspaper in France. As Gopnik says:

It is hard to adequately explain what Le Monde means to France. People say that it is like the Times in New York, but the Times seems, in comparison, modest in its ambitions. The Times, like certain pagan gods, claims only omnipresence: it is everywhere and sees all. Le Monde, like the God of the Old Testament, claims omnipresence and omniscience: it sees all, knows everything, and is always right.

I won't go into the newspaper's troubles, but I will pay homage to Gopnik's inimitable way with English prose.

Gopnik begins by explaining that Le Monde appears in the early afternoon of the day before its cover date; thus when you read the paper on Monday, you are being spoken to with the voice of Tuesday:

Even news that has not yet taken place is thus imbued with a note of calming retrospective hindsight. The postdating of actuality is typical of Le Monde's loft and what was, for a long time, its serenity.

The unexpected word loft startled me; then I envisioned a golf ball (closely covered with type) soaring, hanging, taking in an overview of the surroundings while lesser orbs hurtled in their nervous eagerness directly at me, finally descending magisterially onto my coffee table, ready to give me its considered view. "Loft": le mot juste.

In the course of describing the paper's areas of coverage, he says: "On Fridays (that is, Thursdays), the paper does what is, by New York standards, a fairly cursory job of covering food and restaurants, perhaps for the same reason that the Times does a fairly cursory job of covering pigeons: they are just too familiar to notice much." A strained analogy? Perhaps, but I don't care; the brio wins me over.

And this analysis of why the top men at the paper were so stung by the accusations includes a great example of an "English idiom" invented by Frenchmen:

Yet the irritant for the subjects of the assault lay in details of supposed bullying and alleged meanness. Indictments accuse, but it is details that vilify. Plenel [the executive editor] was shown harassing small, independent journalists who he thought might beat him to the Jospin-outing punch... Minc [the board chairman], Péan and Cohen suggested, had been comically out of his depth in a business venture in Belgium. (He was, they write, in what they imagine is an English idiom, "too clever by oath.")

If I notice Gopnik's byline with any frequency in future issues, I suppose I'll have to send them my money after all.

VERBAL BRAINZAP.

According to a Nature story:

Connecting a battery across the front of the head can boost verbal skills, says a team from the US National Institutes of Health.

A current of two thousandths of an ampere (a fraction of that needed to power a digital watch) applied for 20 minutes is enough to produce a significant improvement, according to data presented this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in San Diego. And apart from an itchy sensation around the scalp electrode, subjects in the trials reported no side-effects...

The volunteers were asked to name as many words as possible beginning with a particular letter. Given around 90 seconds, most people get around 20 words. But when Iyer administered the current, her volunteers were able to name around 20% more words than controls, who had the electrodes attached but no current delivered. A smaller current of one thousandth of an amp had no effect.

Iyer says more work needs to be done to explain the effect, but she speculates that the current changes the electrical properties of brain cells in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region through which it passes. She believes that the cells fire off signals more easily after the current has gone by. That would make the brain area, a region involved in word generation, generally more active, she suggests.

Very interesting, but I think I'll stick to my unaided verbality, thanks. (A tip of the hat to Songdog for the link.)

RIP DAVID SHULMAN.

Yesterday the NY Times had an obituary (by Douglas Martin) for a man I'd never heard of but who was well known to the editors of the OED:

David Shulman, a self-described Sherlock Holmes of Americanisms who dug through obscure, often crumbling publications to hunt down the first use of thousands of words, died on Oct. 30 at Victory Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn. He was 91 and lived in Brooklyn...

Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, said Mr. Shulman contributed uncountable early usages to the 20-volume lexicon. "All very good stuff," Mr. Sheidlower said.

"What David did was read through the sort of things most people don't read," he added, mentioning yellowing editions of The National Police Gazette.

Mr. Sheidlower said only a few contributors were more prolific and fewer still possessed Mr. Shulman's knack for sending usable material. His name appeared in the front matter to O.E.D.'s epochal second edition, each of the Addition Series volumes, and is currently on the Web...

Gerald Cohen, professor of foreign languages at the University of Missouri, Rolla... said Mr. Shulman's most pioneering effort concerned the term "hot dog." He found the word was college slang before it was a sausage, paving the way for deeper investigation. A book on hot dog's glossarial provenance will appear this year under the names of Mr. Shulman, Mr. Cohen and Barry Popick.

Dr. Cohen said Mr. Shulman obliterated a big impediment to finding the origins of the word jazz by proving it was on a 1919 record, not the 1909 version of the same disk. (Other scholars traced first use of the term to the baseball columns of Scoop Gleeson in the San Francisco Bulletin in 1913.)

Mr. Cohen said that Mr. Shulman was first to challenge that "shyster" derived from a lawyer named Scheuster. Others, particularly Roger Mohovich, then traced the etymology to 1843-1844. "Shyster" turned out to be a Yiddish corruption of a German vulgarism meaning a crooked lawyer.

A few points:

1) What is meant by "and is currently on the Web"? In a trivial sense, of course, his name is on the Web because the Times has put it there (though he presumably had at least a mention or two before he died). I suspect, however, Martin means "and in the online edition." The whole sentence is poorly constructed.

2) The Times has misspelled the name of Barry Popik, who is probably New York's best-known wordsleuth. I don't have to chide them for this, because I'm quite sure Mr. Popik did a bang-up job of it about five seconds after the obit appeared. (From his page on "hot dog": "In 2001, the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (www.hot-dog.org) officially admitted that the TAD story is a myth. My name is on the web site as Barry Popick. The myth still gets told by lazy newspaper reporters and writers who do not know how to search the web, or who use old, outdated materials.")

3) The "German vulgarism" is Scheisser, literally 'shitter.' When will the Times give up its increasingly absurd struggle against verbal impropriety? Even maidens don't have maidenly blushes any more, Times. Join the 21st century.

WORDGUMBO.

Wordgumbo is a remarkable site that collects lexicons for all sorts of languages:

A 'gumbo' is a spicy okra-based stew, it also means a particular kind of mud; it is one of the few Bantu (African) words that has become part of the English language, itself a gumbo of a language.

The site is primarily an archive of public domain and redistributable language learning resources. We are also developing special content for the site which will be of interest to language learners, travelers, linguists, and other language aficionados.

There are many sites on the Internet with interactive dictionaries and language learning aids; there are also several freeware dictionary/flashcard programs with extensive vocabulary sets. However, in most cases, these sites shroud their data sets in binary or database formats. At Wordgumbo we've done the hard work of converting these data sets into flat files and posting them in one convenient archive, organized by language family.

There are word lists for the major Indo-European languages as well as a number of other families: Afroasiatic, Austronesian, Dravidian, Niger-Kordofanian, and so on. My thanks to Logomacy for drawing my attention to this excellent resource.

LEST HE FORGETS.

The English subjunctive is dead. (Via avva.)

ONLY ONE NATIVE SPEAKER.

This comes under the heading of "weird but interesting." The mysterious folks at socialfiction.org have created the site OnlyOneNativeSpeaker ("the collaborative Babylon bonanza"):

Languages, by cultural definition, seek standardisation and mass-adoption; the command of language is one axis on which the ability to participate in all what society has to offer revolves around. It's to this domain of human culture that OnlyOneNativeSpeaker seeks to add parallelism, diversity and heterogeneity. It will do this by creating thousands of new artificial languages. Languages with deliberately just that: Only One Native Speaker.

A language is a collaborative effort to conceptualise place and time. At the most fundamental level languages reflect the environment of, and the social agreements between, the community it belongs to. The study of languages from other cultures is of direct important to us, as it shows us the boundaries of our own culture, and refutes claims of cultural universality.

OnlyOneNativeSpeaker excludes no possible line of enquiry. Every artificial language, independent of medium, origin and intent helps to display the horizon of possibility, in ourselves as well as in others. But creating a language from scratch is not the only option, finding languages where nobody did before: in crowds, in amoeba, or in the shape of rocks, is of equal interest to the scope of OnlyOneNativeSpeaker.

How can you participate in the Babylon bonanza that is called OnlyOneNativeSpeaker? That's simple, develop a language! While doing that, send us an e-mail with a link to the website containing the purpose and details of your language. If necessary we can host this information for you. At the same time OnlyOneNativeSpeaker will try to facilitate the exchange of ideas between all people involved as far as language permits.

I'm not entirely sure what the point is, but at least one of the languages, SASXSEK, seems carefully thought out and seriously intended (even if ultimately futile, like most such attempts):

The goal of SASXSEK is to construct a language which is easier for the world to pronounce, with a much simpler grammar, and a small, easy to learn, but powerful core vocabulary from which other words can be formed. SASXSEK has no consonant clusters, which makes pronunciation easy. A one-to-one relationship between spelling and pronunciation using a simple 18-letter alphabet consisting of phonetic units which are already known, or could easily be learned by almost anyone. The grammar is simple. The lexicon is small enough to be easy to learn, but a powerful set of suffixes and the ability to build compound words give the ability to express more complex ideas.

And yes, it's simpler than Esperanto.

(Thanks, Wilfried!)

ERARD, LAKOFF, AND A BLOGGER UNMASKED.

Linguist George Lakoff has been in the news lately for his insights into the cognitive frames we use to understand reality—and for the use to which he has put his theories in political consulting. Michael Erard, a reporter for the Texas Observer, wrote a piece three years ago, "Metaphor and Myth," that does a good job of presenting Lakoff's ideas and political activity; now he has another one, "Frame Wars," that compares Lakoff to conservative consultant Frank Luntz and towards the end quotes "one of the more thorough critiques of Lakoff that combines conservative thought with language expertise" by Justin Busch, better known to Languagehat readers as Semantic Compositions. In fact, it was being interviewed by Erard that led the erstwhile SC to drop his mask and reveal himself: "My name is Justin Busch, and I'm a computational linguist at Science Applications International Corporation..."; you can read his extended critique of Lakoff in the posts linked here. And for a very brief overview of cognitive linguistics, see the page on the subject at the fascinating Foamy custard site: "Foamy custard aims to explore the areas where folklore, mytholology, cultural studies and related disciplines come together." (Thanks for the foamy tip, Mike!)

MEDIEVAL SLAVIC MANUSCRIPTS.

Tatiana Nikolova-Houston, a doctoral student in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, works with medieval Slavic manuscripts and has created a couple of excellent websites. One is Slavic Medieval Treasures from Bulgaria:

This web site provides textual materials and graphic images dedicated to the development of the production of Slavic medieval manuscripts. The images on this site belong to the manuscript collection of the Historical and Archival Church Institute (HACI) in Sofia, Bulgaria; most of them from the 15th to 17th centuries.

Here, you will find information about: Development of book production in medieval Bulgaria; Major decorative elements of medieval manuscripts; Major decorative styles of manuscripts; Gospel books and their decoration; Other manuscript decoration.

More recently, she has created Byzantine Medieval Hypertexts:

Yes, the idea of hypertexts from the Middle Ages sounds absurd. We think of the Middle Ages as a time of rampant illiteracy and premature death. We remember stories of monks meticulously scribing away in Latin to preserve the heritage of Western civilization against the onslaught of the barbarian hoards, but we tend to forget that the Renaissance was conceived and transmitted to the West through Byzantine monks meticulously scribing away in Greek and Slavic scripts under far greater pressure from the Eastern invasion.

The information on this website presents the theory of hypertext and its medieval application in Byzantine manuscripts, using examples from the Theodore Psalter, a manuscript created in 1066 in the Stoudious monastery near Constantinople. Hypertextuality in this case manifests as a complex interaction between the text and the illustrations in the manuscript and the text as it relates to other manuscripts and its historical context.

(Via plep.)

MADAME MARTIN.

Koant (a Breton name, incidentally) has created a French-language community blog, Madame Martin, on the model of MetaFilter and MonkeyFilter (of which he is a member); it's only been around for a few weeks, which means that (if you're francophone) you can get in on the ground floor and become a Founding Member with a nice low user number, as well as enjoying discussions of the news of the day and the Best of the Web. Ca vaut le détour!

REPORTED.

Bakhtin was particularly interested in the use of "reported speech" [chuzháya rech']—that is, citation—in medieval literature, where "the borders between another's and one's own speech ere fragile, ambivalent, and frequently convoluted and confused."

Um, that was by Solomon Volkov, from his St. Petersburg : A Cultural History. Except for the bracketed part; that was by me. I don't know where the Bakhtin quotes are from—Volkov doesn't footnote them.

But it doesn't really matter, does it?

NATIVE AMERICAN LANGUAGES.

The useful Native Languages of the Americas site compiles as many links as they can find:

We are a small non-profit organization dedicated to the survival of Native American languages, particularly through the use of Internet technology. Our website is not beautiful. Probably, it never will be. But this site has inner beauty, for it is, or will be, a compendium of online materials about more than 800 indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere and the people that speak them.

I'm particularly taken with their faq page, linked on the front page from the question "Why aren't there any links about how American Indian languages are descended from Ancient Egyptian?" Their discussion of this issue includes a very good chart explaining how languages are grouped into families and the role of coincidence:

As you can probably see even from this small amount of data, English is related to Dutch and German; Hebrew is related to Arabic and Maltese; and Ojibwe is related to Algonquin and Cree. On the other hand, if I had taken only the English word "seven" and the Hebrew word "sheva," maybe I could have convinced you English was related to Hebrew. And if I had shown you only Hebrew "shalosh" and Arabic "thalatha," you might not have noticed they were related.

(Via plep.)

PIRAHA AND MUNDURUKU.

I have previously written about the Pirahã and the issues raised by their lack of number words (update here); Mark Liberman has now posted at Language Log an extensive collection of links and analysis about them and the Mundurukú, another Amazonian tribe whose language (part of the Tupí family) has words only for 1, 2, 3, and 4, with pogbi 'hand' being used for 'five or so' and everything else being 'some' or 'many.' Mark's MetaFilter post contains more links and discussion; my favorite bit from Brian Butterworth's Guardian story is: "...even in the range of their vocabulary, the Munduruku are approximate - 'ebadipdip' is typically used for four, but also used for three, five and six." I just love that word ebadipdip; if it were part of my language, I'd use it for as many numbers as I could.