NEW YEAR: LOOKING BACK.

"To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness;—it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is—so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys—this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!—but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his life-long blindness and life-long disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the ecstasy—there goes another Faithful Failure!"

    —Robert Louis Stevenson (via wood s lot)

I wish the very best of new years to all my readers.

OPODELDOC.

I'm finally reading Gogol's Dead Souls in Russian, and a few pages into Chapter Four I encountered the following line (addressed by the cheerful scoundrel Nozdryov to the protagonist, Chichikov, who has just refused to join him because of pressing business):
— Ну вот уж и дело! уж и выдумал! Ах ты, Оподелдок Иванович!
Like much of Gogol's dialogue, this is more or less untranslatable, but the first two exclamations can be prosaically rendered "'Business'! You just made that up!" The last one, however, baffled me; word for word, it means "Oh you, Opodeldok Ivanovich!" Opodeldok was clearly not an actual Russian name, so I looked it up in my trusty Oxford dictionary (where it is listed under the more usual spelling оподельдок), and there it was—helpfully defined as "opodeldoc." I let out a bellow of rage at the perfidy of the lexicographers who had taken the easy way out, refusing to give the user the slightest actual help, requiring an additional trip to the OED. There I found:

opodeldoc, n.

Forms: 16 opodeldoch, oppodeltoch, 17-18 opodeldock, 17- opodeldoc, 18 opodeltoch; U.S. regional 18 appodell-dock, ophodelac, opodildoc, opydildock, 19- opadilldock, opedildoc, opedildock. [< post-classical Latin oppodeltoch (see quots. a1541), prob. coined by Paracelsus; perh. < ancient Greek opós vegetable juice (see OPIUM n.); for the ending, perh. cf. post-classical Latin nostoch NOSTOC ['A gelatinous mass consisting of filamentous colonies of cyanobacteria of the genus Nostoc... embedded in mucilage... The gelatinous mass was formerly believed to be an emanation of the stars: see star-jelly, etc'] n. Cf. French opodeldoch (dated 16th cent. in Robert Dict. Alphabétique et Analogique (1986); also as opodeltoch (1758)).
a1541 PARACELSUS Bertheonea (1603) 90 Descriptio oppodeltoch. {jup}. De quatuor seminibus incarnatiuis {ounce}f. Ceræ Colophoniæ ana {ounce}ij. Picis naualis {ounce}iij. Reduc in emplastrum. a1541 PARACELSUS Bertheonea (1603) 97 Descriptio oppodeltoch. {jup}. Colophoniæ lib.j. puluerum chelidoniæ, aranciarum ana {ounce}iiij. Visci de botin, quantum satis est ad incorporationem.]

†1. A medical plaster. Obs.

1646 SIR T. BROWNE Pseud. Epidemica II. iii. 73 The Opodeldoch and Attractivum of Paracelsus. 1656 tr. Paracelsus' Dispens. 305 Now you must apply the Oppodeltoch Plaister. 1658 W. JOHNSON tr. F. Würtz Surgeons Guid II. vi. 62 In case the Wound doth not bleed.. lay a Headplaister to it, after the manner of an Opodeldoch. 1733 J. ALLEYNE New Eng. Dispensatory 353/1 Emplastrum Opodeldoc. 1857 R. G. MAYNE Expos. Lexicon Med. Sci. (1860), Opodeltoch, the name of a plaster.. referred to by Paracelsus.

2. An alcoholic solution of soap (or oleic acid) and camphor with some added essential oils; soap liniment; (also) a preparation made from this, esp. by mixing with laudanum; now arch. In extended use: (U.S. regional) any medicine; alcohol.
Steer's opodeldoc, a soap liniment composed of soap, camphor, oils of marjoram and rosemary, alcohol, and ammonia solution.
Opodeldoc appeared in the 1722 Edinburgh Pharmacopœia (Pharmacopœia Coll. Reg. Medicorum Edinburgensis 134) as Unguentum opodeldoch; in the 1744 ed. (Pharmacopoeia Coll. Reg. Medicorum Edinburgensis 121) it is called ‘Balsamum Saponaceum, vulgò Oppodeltoch’, and in 1745 the London Pharmacopoeia (Plan New London Pharmacopœia 113) entered it under Linimentum Saponaceum (cf. quot. 1996).

[1650 Chymical Dict. Paracelsus, Oppodeltoch in Paracelsus is an ointment.] 1733 G. CHEYNE Eng. Malady II. xii. 243 Warm and active Oils and Ointments, especially the Opodeldoc. 1746 SIR A. WESTCOMB in Mrs. Delany's Autobiogr. & Corr. II. 440 Tell my aunt that I use oil of earthworms with opodeldoc to endeavour to dispel the lump. 1774 ‘J. COLLIER’ Musical Trav. 19 He rubbed it with opodeldock or arquebusade water. 1826 SCOTT Jrnl. 25 Dec. (1939) 295 By dint of abstinence and opodeldoc I passed a better night. 1830 in M. H. Gardiner & A. H. Gardiner Chron. Old Berkeley (1938) 310 Bought 1 vial of appodell-dock at 25 cents. 1842 R. H. BARHAM Black Mousquetaire in Ingoldsby Legends, Her delicate fingers are charred With the Steer's opodeldoc, joint oil, and goulard. 1842 Invoice in Mississippi Valley Hist. Rev. (1950) 37 455, 2 phials Liquid ophodelac whitwell. 1851 J. J. HOOPER Widow Rugby's Husband 91 He axed me if I had enny opydildock in the wagin box, that he could rub his side with. 1857 T. HUGHES Tom Brown's School Days I. vi. 126 Leaving East better for those few words than all the opodeldoc in England would have made him. 1890 Chambers's Encycl. VI. 644 Soap Liniment, or Opodeldoc, the constituents of which are soap, camphor, and spirits of rosemary. 1904 ‘O. HENRY’ Heart of West 33 Rub the place between your shoulder-blades with opodeldoc the same as ever. 1913 C. JOHNSON Highways & Byways Great Lakes (new ed.) 77 They went to town last night and took a little too much opedildoc. c1965 in Dict. Amer. Regional Eng. (1996) III. 890/2 A long time ago my husband.. would say whenever he had to take any medicine.. ‘Wall, I will take a little opadilldock.’ 1996 Martindale: Extra Pharmacopoeia (ed. 31) 2287/2 Soap Liniment has sometimes been known as Lin. Sap. and Opodeldoc.

It's easy to see why this remarkable word caught on; its magniloquent pseudo-onomatopoeia was catnip to the linguistic sense of nineteenth-century America, with its love of sonorous rodomontade, and it seems to have been preserved in regional dialects until fairly recently (and perhaps survives to this day—anybody know?). At any rate, I'm glad to have discovered it, and I hope you will be too. If only I knew what the hell Gogol meant by "Opodeldok Ivanovich," my joy would be complete.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go rub some opodeldoc on my aching shoulder.

THE FUTURE OF IRISH.

Having studied both Old and Modern Irish (the later with the amazing Micheal O'Siadhail, poet and scholar) and visited the Gaeltacht of Connemara, I am very interested in the fate of the language, and was glad to see a brief but authoritative report in Language Log by Jim McCloskey of UC Santa Cruz, "one of the foremost experts in the world on the modern Irish language," courtesy of Geoff Pullum:

I think that talk of a ‘rebound’ for the language is misplaced, but I do not equate that position with pessimism. The situation is a complex and fluid one, but largely it seems to me that things are on the same trajectory that they have been on for several decades (with a couple of interesting changes). By which I mean that the traditional Irish-using communities (the Gaeltachtai/) continue to shrink and the language continues to retreat in those communities. Nobody that I know who is involved in those communities is optimistic about their future as Irish-speaking communities (though lots of other good things are happening to them and in them).

The observers I trust most (friends and colleagues engaged in intense fieldwork in Gaeltacht communities) maintain that the process of normal acquisition (for Irish) ceased in most areas in the middle 70's, and it is now increasingly difficult to find people younger than about 30 who control traditional Gaeltacht Irish. If you walk along a road in a Gaeltacht area and try to listen for the language being used by groups of teenagers and children by themselves, it is always (in my recent experience) English. Someone I know who is the principal of a primary school in the Donegal Gaeltacht reported that of the 22 children who entered his school at the beginning of the current year, only two had, in his judgment, sufficient Irish.

So traditional Gaeltacht Irish will almost certainly cease to exist in the next 30 years or so.

But what is unique in the Irish situation, I think, has been the creation of a second language community now many times larger than the traditional Gaeltacht communities (I think that 100,000 is a reasonable estimate for the size of this community). And being a part of that community is a lively and engaging business...

There is a great range of varieties called `Irish' in use in this community. People like me speak a close approximation of traditional Gaeltacht Irish and there are people who speak new urban calques, heavily influenced by English in every way. For the communities of children growing up around Irish-medium schools in urban centres it may be right to speak of pidginization and creolization (along with a lot of clever inter-language play like the recent ‘cad-ever’). Many teenagers are thoroughly bidialectal, switching easily from the version of Gaeltacht Irish they have from their parents to the new urban varieties in use among their peers.

It will be interesting to see what happens to these varieties when the model of Gaeltacht Irish becomes a memory, but one thing that is clear is that this community is not going to fade away just because the Gaeltacht fades away.

It will be sad to return to the Aran Islands (if I ever do) and no longer hear the easy chatter in Irish all around me, with never a word of English, but I'm glad to learn the language is unlikely to die out.

BOLLYWOOD LANGUAGE.

David Boyk's vivid webpage Bollywood for the Skeptical presents a CD's worth of Indian movie-pop hits (and if you think you don't like Indian pop music, check out the rockin' "Ina Meena Dika" [mp3] from the 1957 movie Aasha) along with a brief introduction to the genre, but what brings it to LH is the section on language:

Before Independence in 1947, a lot [of] people in the North actually spoke a related dialect called Hindustani, which was written in Arabic script regardless of religious community. Incidentally, a common mistake is for people to refer to Hindi as "Indian," implying that there's only one Indian language, but "Hindustani" really just means "Indian" - "Hindustan" and "Bharat" being the most common names for the country, other than "India." Since Independence, though, most Muslims speak Urdu, which is written with the Arabic alphabet in a slanting style called Nastaliq. Urdu speakers are proud of Nastaliq, since they feel that Urdu is one of the most beautiful languages in the world and this way of writing is more beautiful than the flat way they write in the Middle East. I think they're right, too - it's one of the most graceful writing styles...

Urdu and Hindi, though, aren't that different. In theory, Urdu is more Persianized and Hindi is more Sanskritized, and literary Urdu definitely is that way, and the government and media speak Sanskritized Hindi. But really, most people speak Hindi that's more or less Persified depending on their community and fairly heavily influenced by English, but never as Sanskritized as Hindi on the TV news. There are differences in dialect, like how Urdu speakers will say "sar" for the English "head" and Hindi speakers will say "sir," but most people will prefer to say "university" instead of "vishwavidhyalya," which is what you're supposed to say in "real" Hindi. And there are regional dialects, too. Northerners will often pronounce "vegetables" as "sabzi," which is the way you say it in Farsi and Urdu, and Southerners will usually say "sabji," because "z" is one of the sounds that Hindi doesn't have. Given that it's not always obvious what the difference is between Urdu and Hindi, it's actually more accurate to say that Bollywood movies are in Urdu, mostly because it's considered more beautiful than Hindi. Religion, which is the ostensible difference between the dialects, is a tricky thing in movies, because nowadays, moviemakers often try not to offend anyone - although other times, they're complete demagogues. Sometimes people seem to switch religions during the course of a movie, but even when a character is obviously Hindu, she'll often speak Urdu, or especially sing it, for beauty. Also, my friend Daniel, who helped me with this page, told me that after Independence, when the film industry was starting, "Muslims were those who wrote poetry and songs and went to courtesans, and these courtly cultured people shifted to film after the nawaabs lost money. And the langauge of education was Urdu, so the screenwriters all spoke and had their entire education in Urdu. Therefore, it was only natural for them to write in Urdu. Also, a 'respectable' Hindu would not act in a film."

Obviously a highly simplified discussion, but a useful basic orientation (here's a little more on Hindi/Urdu, and here's the Omniglot page on the Urdu writing system), and I hadn't known about the Muslim/Urdu influence on the film industry. (Thanks to Songdog for the link!)

TIDAL WAVE.

You've probably seen many references to "tsunamis, often incorrectly referred to as 'tidal waves.'" Claire at Anggarrgoon points out that this is an odd thing to be persnickety about:

I'm not sure why people eschew opacity in this particular compound; there are plenty of phrases and compounds with tenuous relationships to their components. Bowl and board, for instance, has little to do with planks of wood (but was less opaque when "board" meant "table"), bridegrooms have nothing to do with horses, and never have done, koala bears aren't bears but try telling a marketing manager that, etc etc.

(But what is "bowl and board"?)

Addendum. I just heard an expert interviewed on NPR refer to "the tidal wave."

UNCLEFTISH BEHOLDING.

Dinesh sent me a link to an online version of Poul Anderson's essay "Uncleftish Beholding," a discussion of atomic theory that "shows what English would look like if it were purged of its non-Germanic words, and used German-style compounds instead of borrowings to express new concepts." It begins:

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

The underlying kinds of stuff are the firststuffs, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

I'm pretty sure I'd seen it before, in my sf-fan days, but it was great to have it available, and I was even more delighted when I found it posted by José Beltrán Escavy, this time paired with a pair of short speeches by professor Xenophon Zolotas at meetings of the International Bank using only words of Greek origin (apart from the necessary connectives):

I eulogize the archons of the Panethnic Numismatic Thesaurus and the Ecumenical Trapeza for the orthodoxy of their axioms, methods and policies, although there is an episode of cacophony of the Trapeza with Hellas.

With enthusiasm we dialogue and synagonize at the synods of our didymous Organizations in which polymorphous economic ideas and dogmas are analyzed and synthesized.

Our critical problems such as the numismatic plethora generate some agony and melancholy. This phenomenon is characteristic of our epoch...

The other languages one could use as a basis for such texts are Latin and French, and I imagine someone has done so.

GINGER(LY).

Geoff Nunberg has a post at Language Log on the word gingerly: a NY Times story on Falluja included the statement "it was a gingerly first step," which pleased him by its proper use of gingerly as an adjective [thanks to Tim May for catching my original misstatement!]; then he had second thoughts about his idea of proper use:

Maybe I should throw in the towel on this one, I thought, but then began to wonder whether there was ever actually a towel for me to be holding in the first place.

In defense of the usage, gingerly began its life as an adverb. It was formed from the adjective ginger, "dainty or delicate," and the OED gives citations of its use as an adverb right up to the end of the 19th century -- the adjectival use appeared in the 16th century. And unlike most other adjectives in -ly, like friendly or portly, gingerly has an adverbial meaning, so that it can only apply to nominals denoting actions (like "step" in Ekholm and Schmidt's article); otherwise it requires a clumsy periphrasis like "in a gingerly way." Moreover, Merriam-Webster's exhaustive Dictionary of English Usage gives no indication that anybody has ever objected to the use of the word as an adverb.

But the adjective ginger has been obsolete for a long time, and it's notable that nobody is tempted to back-form it anew, as in "his ginger handling of the question," which is what you'd expect if the adverbial gingerly were really analyzed as composed of the root ginger plus the derivational suffix -ly.

What we seem to have here, rather, is a haplology (or "haplogy," as some linguists can't resist calling it), the process which gave us Latin nutrix in place of the predicted *nutritrix and which leads people to say missippi instead of mississippi. Gingerly is just the way the mental lexicon's gingerlyly comes out on the tongue or the page. That's natural enough, but there's something to be said for insisting that the word be used as an adjective, as one of the small obeisances we make to the capriciousness of grammar.

(Followup here: it seems people do in fact use the back-formation ginger as an adjective, though not very often.) While I love the capriciousness of grammar, I think this battle has been lost, tradition giving way to convenience.

IN PRAISE OF THE TIMES.

Since I frequently have occasion to lambast the NY Times here, I take pleasure in patting them on the back when they do something right: in this case, gracing their year-end Week in Review section with essays by Languagehat's house lexicographer, Grant Barrett ("Glossary"), and one of my favorite linguists, Geoff Nunberg ("Faith"). The whole issue is focused on words and has a lot of interesting items, but I particularly recommend those two.

From a non-lexicographical article, Gina Kolata's "Winter Is Flu Season, but Maybe It Doesn't Have to Be," I excerpt this grammatically interesting Q&A:

So, increasingly, scientists are asking: Why must we endure an epidemic every year?

The answer, said Dr. M. Elizabeth Halloran, a statistician at Emory University, is, "Maybe we don't."

That mismatch of "why must we"/"we don't [have to]" may be an editing glitch, but it may also reflect a linguistic confusion I've heard in speech: we seem to mentally translate "must" to the more colloquial "have to" for the purposes of negation (since the traditional negative of "we must" is the unintuitive "we needn't"), and rather than say the full "we don't have to" we elide the "have to" just as if the question had been "Why do we have to endure an epidemic?"

NARTS FOR CHRISTMAS.

I got a number of excellent things for Christmas (including a Boris Barnet double feature I can't wait to see), but the one I want to babble about here is a gift from my lovely and generous wife: Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs, assembled, translated, and annotated by John Colarusso. I recently posted about the Narts, and apparently the enthusiasm with which I discussed them at that time convinced her that the book would be greatly appreciated, as indeed it is. Not only does it have 92 stories from among those of the peoples mentioned in the title, it has an appendix with specimen texts in Kabardian East Circassian, Bzhedukh West Circassian (Adyghey), Ubykh, Abaza (Tapanta Dialect) ("Northern Abkhaz"), and Bzyb Abkhaz. Each text is preceded by a complete phonemic inventory of the language and a page or so of linguistic description; each line of the text is given first in a broader transcription, then in a word-by-word phonemic transcription that separates and translates each morpheme, then a complete translation is given (more literal than the one in the body of the book). I'll obviously have to work through Colarusso's A Grammar of the Kabardian Language; in the meantime I'll have fun playing with the detailed analysis here. I'm already very pleased by a bit of information from the Abaza section:

Abaza and Abkhaz questions are very unusual in that they choose rightward question movement; that is, the interrogative pronoun appears at the end of the verb, and since the verb is usually the last word of the phrase, these wh-words, as they are called, appear phrase finally. Most linguists do not believe that such question formation exists, but lines 15, 16, and 103 offer clear examples.

I'm all in favor of anything that discomfits proponents of alleged universals.

Colarusso does a lot of comparison, both mythological and linguistic. Some of his etymologies seem plausible: Georgian tamada 'toastmaster' from Circassian t^haamáta, perhaps originally 'father of the gods'; the name of General Ermolov (who conquered part of the Caucasus for Tsar Alexander I) from Circassian yarmáhl 'Armenian' (though I'll have to check Unbegaun to see if there's a more convincing etymology). Others seem pretty dubious: Greek Maeotis 'Azov Sea' from Circassian miwit^ha (I've replaced Colarusso's schwas with is for ease of transcription). But it's all food for thought, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Incidentally, I discovered while looking at the Amazon entry for the book that Amazon now has a citation page that list all the items in a books bibliography for which they have listings; if you click on any of the links, you can find other books that list that item in their bibliography. Interesting and potentially useful.

Addendum. Some Ossetian versions here (courtesy of Mithridates).

BUNTING COMPLETE.

A number of readers responded favorably to the Basil Bunting poem I reproduced recently, so I thought I'd pass along the word that his Complete Poems has been published by New Directions; it was edited by the late Richard Caddel, whom I memorialized here. I guarantee that no poetry lover will regret the purchase of a volume of Bunting.

TOM & JERRY IN CHINESE.

A Los Angeles Times story by Christopher Bodeen describes the efforts of the Chinese government to suppress the so-called "dialects" (actually separate languages spoken by millions of people: Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka, &c) in a surprising context: Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Dubbed into regional Chinese dialects, the warring cat and mouse have been huge TV hits — and a good way to pass home-grown culture down to the younger generation, programmers say.

Not so fast, says the central government up north in Beijing, which for decades has promoted standard Mandarin as the only Chinese language worthy of the airwaves. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has ordered an end to broadcasting in dialect, saying kids should be raised in a "favorable linguistic environment."

The move has put Tom and Jerry — or "Cat and Mouse," as the show is called here — at the center of a long-running debate about how to maintain national cohesion amid a linguistic sea of highly distinct regional accents, dialects and wholly separate language groups.

"As an artist, I think dialect should be preserved as a part of local culture," said Zhang Dingguo, deputy director of the Shanghai People's Comedy Troupe, which does Tom and Jerry in Shanghainese.

"Schools don't allow Shanghainese to be spoken, and now TV doesn't either. It looks like Shanghai comedy will be dying out," he added...

Promotion of Mandarin — known here as "putonghua," or "common tongue" — began in the 1920s and became policy in 1955, six years after the communists seized power. Its use has been encouraged through an unending series of social campaigns, including the current one featuring TV presenter Wang Xiaoya on billboards exhorting Shanghainese to "speak Mandarin … be a modern person."

In the latest campaign, Shanghai city officials are being required to attend classes on perfecting their pronunciation, schools are nominating contestants in citywide Mandarin speech contests, and foreigners are being invited to Mandarin classes.

Totally distinct from Chinese, the languages of minority groups such as Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians are officially recognized and taught in schools. Important documents are translated into major minority tongues and four of them — Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur and Zhuang — appear on Chinese bank notes....

In places like Guangzhou and Shanghai, prevalence of the local dialect helps exclude outsiders from social networks that are key to securing good jobs and entry to better schools. Outsiders say it smacks of bigotry.

"If you want to find a good job and be a success in Shanghai, you have to speak Shanghainese. Even if you do, they can pick you out by your accent and discriminate against you," said Steven Li, an accounting student flying home to the western city of Chongqing.

Preservation, not exclusion, was the purpose of Tom and Jerry in dialect, said Zhang, the producer.

"You've got Shanghainese kids who can't even speak Shanghainese," he said. "I have friends who've moved to Shanghai and want to learn the language to better integrate into local society.

"Isn't watching TV easier than studying textbooks?"

Zhang cites semi-legal Shanghainese broadcasting that pops up on local radio as evidence of continued demand for dialect programming. For now, Tom and Jerry will continue in Shanghainese on video, along with other versions in close to a dozen dialects.

Oddy enough, Tom and Jerry didn't speak in the original cartoons, so the dialect versions give them voices they never had.

Any regular reader of LH will be unsurprised to hear that I deplore the efforts at suppression and the Jacobin arrogance that produces them. Everyone should be able to speak, write, and watch cartoons in their native language without let or hindrance.

(Thanks for the link, Andrew!)

Incidentally, in looking for a link on "Jacobin," I found a page from a Chinese site with an English essay on federalism in which parts of quoted French words are occasionally replaced by Chinese characters, eg "Du principe f閐閞atif" and "De la D閙ocracie en Amerique." Very odd!

DENGLISH.

A New York Times story by Richard Bernstein describes the confusing mixture of English and German in today's Germany:

Not long ago, Lufthansa, the airline, made a bit of news when it changed its slogan from "There's No Better Way to Fly," in English, to the German, "Alles für diesen Moment," or "Everything for This Moment."

What was the German national airline doing with an English slogan aimed at its German clientele in the first place? Who knows really? But whatever it was doing, many companies in Germany have used English, or some mishmash of German and English - the not very beautiful term for this is Denglish, a combination of Deutsch and English - to appeal to their German customers.

Now, as the Lufthansa example illustrates, there are some signs of a reversal, or, at least, the German press has reported on a few other companies reverting to the language that the population of this country actually speaks. The chain of perfume shops called Douglas (a German company, pronounced DOO-glahss) went from "Come in and find out," to "Douglas macht das Leben schöner," or "Douglas makes life more beautiful."...

A private company in Hanover, Satelliten Media Design, in conjunction with Hanover University, keeps track of one key aspect of the entire mixed language phenomenon, annually tabulating the 100 words most used in German advertising. In the 1980's, only one English word made the list. The word, a bit improbably, was "fit." By 2004, there were 23 English words on the chart.

The first four words are still German - wir (meaning we), Sie (you), mehr (more) and Leben (life). In fifth place is the English "your," followed farther down the list by world, life, business, with, power, people, better, more, solutions and 13 more.

The article has lots more examples, along with some speculation as to why English words are so popular ("English is hipper and quicker in general"). Thanks to Douglas for the link!

For more on Denglish, see Transblawg (also here and here).

ON BELIEVING WHAT WE'RE TOLD.

The medievalist historian who writes the blog Blitztoire has an entry, "Du positivisme historique à la critique des blogs" [From historical positivism to the criticism of blogs], in which he quotes a trenchant passage he ran across in Introduction aux études historiques (1898) by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos:

La tendance spontanée de l'homme est d'ajouter foi aux affirmations et de les reproduire, sans même les distinguer nettement de ses propres observations. Dans la vie de tous les jours, n'acceptons-nous pas indifféremment, sans vérification d'aucune sorte, des on-dit, des renseignements anonymes et sans garantie, toutes sortes de "documents" de médiocre ou de mauvais aloi ? Il faut une raison spéciale pour prendre la peine d'examiner la provenance et la valeur d'un document sur l'histoire d'hier; autrement, s'il n'est pas invraisemblable jusqu'au scandale, et tant qu'il n'est pas contredit, nous l'absorbons, nous nous y tenons, nous le colportons, en l'embellissant au besoin. Tout homme sincère reconnaîtra qu'un violent effort est nécessaire pour secouer l'ignavia critica, cette forme si répandue de lâcheté intellectuelle; que cet effort doit être constamment répété, et qu'il s'accompagne souvent d'une véritable souffrance.

(Translation below.) He applies this to the uncritical transmission in blogs of anything found on the internet, but it's something well worth bearing in mind in general. (Via Madame Martin.)

Man's spontaneous tendency is to give credence to assertions and reproduce them, without even distinguishing them clearly from his own observations. In everyday life, do we not accept indiscriminately, without any sort of verification, rumors, anonymous and unverified reports, all sorts of "documents" of little or no worth? We need a special reason to take the trouble to examine the provenance and value of a document about what happened yesterday; otherwise, if it is not unlikely to the point of scandal, and as long as no one contradicts it, we take it in and hold on to it, we peddle it ourselves, embellishing it if need be. Every honest man will admit that a violent effort is necessary to shake off ignavia critica [critical laziness], that so widespread form of intellectual cowardice; that this effort must be constantly repeated, and that it is often accompanied by real suffering.

HISTORIC LANGUAGE COMMUNITIES.

A correspondent has proposed an interesting question:

I am trying to find out about communities in the US/Canada that have historically been non-English speaking and are still hanging on to their native tongue (no matter how tenuous that grip may be). For languages like French, German, or Sorbian, this is easy enough using Ethnologue or the Census data—because immigration from those language groups dried up many years ago, any community that still speaks one of them must be "historic". However, for tongues like Russian, Spanish, Chinese, or Japanese, it's impossible to distinguish which are the areas of historical usage, and which are just full of recent immigrants. Do you know any resources on the internet that could help me out?

Just by way of clarification:

1.) For the purposes of this research, I am not interested in languages that are native to North America.
2.) By historic, I mean any place that a.) has been speaking that language since at least the 19th century, and b.) where the language maintenance is the result of it being handed down in that community, rather than a result of continual immigration of people of that tongue. For example, even though San Francisco would be considered a historically Chinese-speaking city, I am not interested in it because it continues to attract Chinese-speaking immigrants. However, I would be interested in a place where Chinese people came in the 19th century, the immigration from China dried up, but the language has been maintained.

So: any suggestions?

SEAMY

In the course of conversation my wife happened to use the word "seamy," and it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why the word means what it does. There's no obvious connection between sleaze and seams. Well, it turns out this is one word that really does derive from Shakespeare (most words allegedly coined by the Big Shake are simply words for which he happens to provide the first citation in the OED); he has Emilia say (in Othello, Act IV Scene 2):
"O, fie upon them! Some such squire he was
That turn'd your wit the seamy side without,
And made you to suspect me with the Moor."

Hence the OED's definition reads: "Having a seam or suture; characterized by seams. seamy side, lit. the under side of a garment, etc. on which the rough edges of the seams are visible; fig. [after Shakes.] the worst, most degraded or the roughest side (of life, character, etc.)." It was still an allusion rather than a cliche in the mid-19th century:
1859 Sat. Rev. 2 Apr. 403/1 He appreciated to a considerable extent, what we may perhaps venture to call the seamy side of human affairs.
But by the end of the century it was taken for granted:
1899 H. A. Dobson Paladin of Philanthropy vi. 146 The knowledge of the seamy side of letters.

NO, IT'S NOT A VERB.

Language Log has been the site of an ongoing debate between linguists who think it's a perfectly normal use of metaphor to say, eg, "faith is a verb" (Geoff Nunberg) and linguists who think that, on the contrary, it displays an egregious and potentially harmful misunderstanding of grammatical categories (Mark Lieberman, Geoff Pullum). Now Geoff Nunberg switches sides, and I (having been on the fence, waiting to see a convincing argument) have to go along with him. "X is a verb" is not just a cliched metaphor:

In a piece I wrote a few years ago for American Lawyer, I mentioned a decision by a Florida district court in a patent infringement case that turned crucially on the claim that the decoder key to a cable TV subscriber box was "not subject to revision or change." The court concluded that subject was used in the claim "as a verb (in the passive tense)," and identified the relevant dictionary sense as "to cause to undergo," as in "He wouldn't subject himself to any inconvenience." And on that basis, the court ruled that "not subject to change" meant that the decoder key could be changed but would not be changed. (See TV/COM International v. MediaOne of Greater Florida, No. 3:00-cv-1045-J-21HTS (M.D. Fla. Aug. 1, 2001)).

Judicial incompetence doesn't come much grosser than that: it's fair to say that someone who doesn't know how to read a dictionary entry has no business adjudicating cases that call for interpretation of language -- which is to say, damn near all of them. But courts are full of judges who have no more knowledge of grammar and meaning than the half-remembered dicta they learned at the end of Sister Petra's ruler. Let's by all means continue to flog these things, even at the risk of sounding like pedants.

I find myself forced to agree.

A FUNNY STORY.

Geoff Pullum has a hilarious entry at Language Log about a Menachem Begin speech in his Classical Hebrew and the reaction to it by a working-class audience that spoke the colloquial "street" Hebrew of the Jerusalem area, in particular a 12-year-old Amos Oz. Enjoy.

LEXILOGOS.

The magnificent Lexilogos site links to all manner of reference works involving language: family names, etymology, place names, slang, and much else, usually starting with French and continuing with a scattering of other languages. To give just one example, check out this online dictionary of French family names; here's the etymology of De Gaulle (from the Dawance-Decroix page):

Apparemment, il s'agit de la francisation d'un nom flamand, De Walle, qui signifie sans doute le Wallon (= l'étranger, celui qui n'appartient pas au peuple germanique, du vieux-haut-allemand walah = étranger, également à l'origine des toponymes Gaule et Galles). A noter l'existence du patronyme Waulle dans le Pas-de-Calais. Autre possibilité : walle = mur, fossé.

(Via Carnet de Zénon.)

COLLINS WORD EXCHANGE.

Collins has a site they call the Word Exchange:

Is there a word or phrase you would love to see in the dictionary?

Well, now's your chance as Collins Word Exchange revolutionises the way words are collected and enter the dictionary - throwing open the doors of language research and recording to embrace words from anybody and everybody!

At Collins Word Exchange not only can you search... the Collins English Dictionary, texting abbreviations, internet links and SCRABBLE® scores, access a wealth of advice on grammar and usage, and test your language skills, but you can also add your own words to the dictionary.

It couldn't be easier to get your new words online - just register on the site, suggest a word for inclusion, enjoy the discussion as other users battle over its validity, and wait for your word to be added to the Living Dictionary. You'll be contributing to a fantastic and ever-growing online resource and may even see your word entering the next edition of the Collins English Dictionary.

A nice idea, and I've already learned the word galactico.

ALL THE CANTS THEY PEDDLE.

All the cants they peddle
bellow entangled,
teeth for knots and
each other's ankles,
to become stipendiary
in any wallow;
crow or weasel
each to his fellow.

Yet even these,
even these might
listen as crags
listen to light
and pause, uncertain
of the next beat,
each dancer alone
with his foolhardy feet.

    Basil Bunting, 1969

PERILS OF THE RUSSIAN BIBLE.

Geoffrey Hosking, in his superb Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917, describes an early-nineteenth-century attempt to produce a Russian-language Bible:

An integral part of Alexander's concept was the idea of making the scriptures available to all the peoples of the empire in their various languages. For this purpose he encouraged the establishment of the Imperial Russian Bible Society in December 1812, as a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society, to undertake the work of translation, publication and distribution... The extent and coverage of the Society's work is demonstrated by the fact that in its first year it published or bought and distributed 37,700 New Testaments and 22,500 complete Bibles in Church Slavonic, French, German, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Armenian, Georgian, Kalmyk and Tatar. For the purpose it set up new printing presses and imaginatively used retail outlets, such as apothecaries' shops, which had never previously been used for selling books. By 1821 the New Testament and Prayer Book were starting to appear in modern Russian.

Significantly, the language which aroused the greatest opposition when it came to translation was none other than Russian itself. The Bible existed in a Church Slavonic version, and many churchmen felt that only the Slavonic tongue, consecrated by ancient usage, possessed the dignity to convey adequately the meaning of the scriptures. The Society's view, on the contrary, was that the Slavonic text was readily understood only by those who had been brought up on it since childhood, and that it was therefore unsuitable for evangelism. At Alexander's express wish, work was started on a translation into modern Russian, in order 'to give Russians the means of reading the word of God in their native Russian tongue, which is more comprehensible to them than the Slavonic language in which the scriptures have hitherto been published.'

From the outset, some Orthodox clergymen had opposed the Society's activities... The resistance reached its apogee in 1824 with a denunciation of the Society by the abbot of the Iur'ev Monastery in [Novgorod], Arkhimandrit Fotii... In a memorandum presented personally to the Emperor, Fotii warned of certain 'Illuminists' — Freemasons — who were plotting to install a new worldwide religion, having first destroyed 'all empires, churches, religions, civil laws and all order'. The Bible Society, he maintained, was preparing the way for this revolution...

Alexander was certainly susceptible to Fotii's insinuations... In the last years of his life, [his fears of sedition] were intensified by the growth of secret societies inside Russia. He naturally associated them with the societies in Germany, Italy and Spain which threatened European peace and stability as guaranteed by his cherished Holy Alliance... He had hoped that the Bible Society would arm the ordinary people against atheism and sedition. Now he was being warned that, on the contrary, the Bible Society was part of the conspiracy... In the event, he drew back from actually closing down the Bible Society, but he dismissed Golitsyn as head of it, replacing him with the irreproachably Orthodox Metropolitan of [Saint Petersburg], Seraphim...

He also appointed to the Ministry of Education... Admiral Shishkov, the principal protagonist of Church Slavonic. Shishkov lost no time in putting pressure on Seraphim to stop the Russian publication of the Bible. 'What! Who among us does not understand the divine service? Only he who has broken with his fatherland and forgotten his own tongue... And can this supposed necessity [of publishing the Bible in modern Russian] do other than degrade the Holy Scriptures and thus implant heresies and schisms?'

Seraphim did not take much persuading. Publication of the catechism and the scriptures in 'the vernacular' (prostoe narechie) was terminated... Remarkably but characteristically, the continued publication of the scriptures in other 'vernacular' languages did not bother the Orthodox hierarchy, but the Holy Synod ordered the burning of thousands of copies of the Pentateuch, which were already being printed in Russian.

The halting of the Russian Bible was fateful. It delayed by a fatal half-century the moment when ordinary Russians could have access to the scriptures in a language which they could read and study with ease. Peter the Great had carried through a kind of Protestant revolution in the church, but a dangerously incomplete one, since it had never been supplemented by mass reading of the scriptures among the population. Without that the domination of the state within the church always threatened to hollow out its spiritual life. The situation had been created where the postman hero of Leskov's story Odnodum (The One-Track Mind) could be seen as a laughable and possibly dangerous eccentric merely because he was in the habit of regularly reading the Bible for himself.

The Archimandrite's attitude is still maintained in some Orthodox quarters; this page on the Elder Nilus says "Archimandrite Photius of the Yuriev Monastery... passed into history as a true confessor who battled with the enemies of the Orthodox Church: the Protestants, Masons and the 'ecumenists' of that time - the Bible Society." And you can get a different perspective (from a Jehovah's Witness point of view) on the history of the Russian Bible here.

THE BEAUTY OF 'THEY.'

Geoff Pullum has an excellent Language Log post analyzing a quoted passage in which the speaker moves between she and they while talking about the same person. I love his summary:

There is a subtle and beautiful system here. It is not to be dismissed with the idiotic sexist authoritarianism of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (p. 60: "Do not use they... Use the singular pronoun... he").

A TASTE OF RIBEIRO.

John Emerson has put online (at Idiocentrism) a transcription and translation of a few passages from what sounds like a remarkable book, the sixteenth-century Portuguese Menina e Moça. Here is Emerson's description:

The main narrator is doubly exiled, first from her childhood home, and then from the place where she was raised. Seemingly abandoned by her lover, she has come to a lonely place to live out her few remaining years. There she meets another exile, a mysterious older woman who refuses to tell her own tragic story but lets slip that it concerns her son. Most of the book consists of stories which the mystery woman had heard from her father and which she retells to the first narrator — stories of events happening at the desolate place of their exile, which had once been inhabited by noble knights and their ladies, of whom the relics were still occasionally uncovered by the simple shepherdesses who now inhabited the land.

The second narrator might be a ghost (the supernatural is evident throughout), and it is even possible that she and everything she says are projections of the first narrator’s disturbed mind: “In a strange way, I was transported to a place where my own pain was reenacted before my eyes in others' lives”. The stories told by the second narrator are also all stories of doomed exiles, and when one character (Aonia) seems to end up attaining a mediocre happiness, that is not treated as a happy ending — and the first narrator occasionally reflects that she herself seems to be seeking and insisting on unhappiness, rather than trying to avoid it.

The book is outspokenly feminist — the older woman blames most of women's troubles on men, and especially on men’s devotion to the pursuit of honor in war. Menina e moça's author of record is a man, Bernardim Ribeiro, but it has been speculated that his name has been appropriated to provide cover for a female author. In the book there are passages describing events which were unlikely to be part of male experience — a woman dying in childbirth, the womenfolk spinning, weaving and telling tales during the long winter nights, and a young girl's first stirrings of love. My conjecture is that perhaps whoever wrote the story built it around the two poetic pieces by Ribeiro which are included in the text, and that as a result the whole book has been ascribed to him.

What it reminds me of is The Saragossa Manuscript, the 1813 Chinese-box novel written in French by Polish aristocrat and eccentric Jan Potocki, made into an amazing movie (Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie, directed by Wojciech Has) in 1964. Any Portuguese-speakers out there inspired to try a full translation?

HAYNT.

Bob Becker has put online a useful resource for pre-war Jewish life in Eastern Europe:

Chaim Finkelstein was the last editor of Haynt, the Jewish newspaper in Warsaw, Poland, before the Holocaust. His book, Haynt: A Jewish Newspaper, chronicles the history of Jewish life in Poland between 1908 and 1939. It contains articles from the leading writers on the world.

Haynt: A Jewish Newspaper was published in Israel in Yiddish, but never in English. This website makes Haynt: A Jewish Newspaper available to Yiddish readers and seeks volunteers to translate a few pages each... As I receive these translations, I will add them to this website and credit the translators for their contribution. All translations will be in the public domain.

So any Yiddish-speakers who'd like to contribute to such a project can go try their hand. (Via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey; haynt, incidentally, is Yiddish for 'today.')

WHEN FRENCH PREFERS ENGLISH.

Céline of Naked Translations has an amusing post about her difficulties trying to translate English into French and being told that her versions are too... French:

Coordinator: "Please write your ideas on the flip-chart."
Céline: "Veuillez noter vos idées sur le… le…"

What's flip-chart in French?? Don't panic, don't panic.

"Le… le…"

19 pairs of eyes are on me. I can feel drops of sweat slowing running down my cold forehead.

"Le… le…"

"TABLEAU DE CONFÉRENCE!", I finally blurt out, a bit too loudly. I'm sure I can hear a crowd cheering and chanting my name in the distance.

French client: "Tableau de conférence? C'est marrant, nous on dit paperboard." (That's funny, we say paperboard).

I tell you, next time I can't think of the proper way of saying something in French, I'll just come out with a ridiculous made-up English word instead of risking brain meltdown.

There's also a good story about translating "environmental stewardship," and some thoughts on context.

ZHWJ'S CHINESE BLOGS.

From a comment in a previous entry I found a couple of very interesting blogs by zhwj: 化　境　神　思 (litserial) and Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy (both are in English, despite the name of the first, though with frequent use of Chinese). The first began with an introduction to "a short memoir called Journey to the West 西游记 by the American educated psychologist Shen Youqian 沈有乾," which zhwj is translating in installments; the most recent entry is about onomatopoeia in a Chinese translation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The newest post in the sf blog is a discussion of the Chinese terms for fantasy, science fiction, and the like, with many quotes and examples. Both sites are highly recommended.

GRATICULE.

I have just learned (via a MetaFilter post) the word graticule, which is obscure enough that it's not in the American Heritage Dictionary. The OED defines it thus:

1. A design or plan divided into squares to facilitate its proportionate enlargement or reduction; the style or pattern of such a division.

1887 GEN. WALKER in Encycl. Brit. XXII. 714/1 The graticule is sometimes rectangular, sometimes spherical, sometimes a combination of both.. Spherical graticules are constructed in various ways.

2. A transparent plate or cell bearing a grid, cross-wire, or scale, designed to be used with an optical instrument or cathode-ray oscilloscope for the purpose of positioning, measuring, or counting objects in the field of view; the scale, grid, etc., on such a plate. Hence graticuled ppl. a., fitted with a graticule.

1914 Handbk. Artill. Instrum. 42 In front of the eye-piece is fixed.. a diaphragm, with spider's web graticules attached to it. 1919 Trans. Opt. Soc. XX. 277 Generally the graticules are on glass and it is usual to refer to the complete discs or plates with the measuring scales or marks on them, as ‘graticules’. Ibid. 286 Graticuled binoculars are not used much for peace purposes. [...] 1971 Physics Bull. July 398/2 A graduation line is centred in the microscope eyepiece graticule.

If one were to be classically accurate, it should be "craticule"; the etymology is:
a. F. graticule, ad. med.L. grâtîcula, for crâtîcula gridiron, dim. of crâtis hurdle.

For meaning 2, the word reticle is also used; the words are unconnected, this one being from a diminutive of rête 'net.'

CENSORSHIP IN CHINESE MSN SPACES.

A Boing Boing post describes the "curious censorship and intellectual property details of Microsoft's new blogging tool MSN Spaces" as they affect Chinese sites; I was particularly struck by this (from Weizhong Yang in Taipei, Taiwan):

We found that the Traditional Chinese MSN Spaces censored words such as oral sex, anal sex and so on, by the way, they censored two important and common used words which make us feel unbelievable.

One is a word pronounced as cao which means fucking sometimes, however, it also means operating, handling, exercising or practicing, and there was a famous king/hero/tyrant in about the second century called Cao Cao. Therefore you cannot set certain derivations of that word (for instance Cao Cao and Yang Xiu, which is a famous traditional Chinese drama play) as the title of your MSN Space.

I can attest that Cao Cao (traditional transliteration Tsao Tsao) is an extremely famous figure in Chinese history, and it's absurd that his name is censored because of homonymy! (Thanks to Songdog for the link.)

THE LANGUAGE FEED.

The Language Feed is a completely not-for-profit and free web site and email announcement list. Every Friday, the Language Feed is updated with the latest news stories found around the web that pertain to language and linguistics. Articles are selected with two criteria in mind - does this article have something to do with language? And does this article interest Sally? That's it.

"Sally" is Sally Morrison, and she's created a very useful website, which I found via Jessica Rett's links page.

BRINGING BACK HAWAIIAN.

The December 10 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long piece by Richard Monastersky on Hawaiian professors who are trying to make sure Hawai'i's native language survives (the link will only last about five days):

On the first day of "Hawaiian Studies 474," a dozen students line up just inside a classroom doorway, open their mouths in unison, and breathe life into an ailing culture.

Under a bank of fluorescent lights, young men and women wearing T-shirts and shorts chant an old Hawaiian poem asking permission to enter a place of learning.

"Kūnihi ka mauna i ka la'i ē," they intone without stopping for breath, voices blending in a melody that hovers around a single ancient note.

Kalena Silva, a professor of Hawaiian language and studies at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, asks his students to repeat the entrance poem several times before he chants a response, ending in a drawn-out tremolo that fades to silence. Then he begins his traditional-hula class, starting with a lecture on the history of the dance.

As he asks questions, tells jokes, and keeps the students engaged, not a word of English passes his lips. This upper-level course, like others offered by the department, is taught entirely in the Hawaiian language...

Teaching in Hawaiian was actually forbidden by state law—until 1986! The article describes the efforts to repeal the law and establish Hawaiian-language schools:

The nonprofit group created its first preschool, on the island of Kaua'i, to serve a small community of Hawaiian speakers from the nearby island of Ni'ihau. That privately owned island has a population of some 200 people, who, to this day, use Hawaiian as their first language. The second Pūnana Leo, in Hilo, attracted families like that of Mr. [William (Pila)] Wilson and Ms. [Kauanoe] Kamanā, second-language learners rearing their children in Hawaiian.

When it was time for their son to enter kindergarten, Ms. Kamanā and Mr. Wilson started one of those, too, without authorization from the state. (A longstanding Hawaiian law prohibited educators from teaching in the native language.) They were prepared to go to jail for their actions. But they managed to get the law changed and to establish a full elementary school. Then came a laboratory school for middle and high school, called Nāwahi, which is run jointly by their college, the nonprofit corporation, and the state department of education.

Their efforts extend far beyond the usual activities of college professors. "We had to train the teachers and change the law," says Mr. Wilson. "We had to make the curricular materials, and we even had to create words for things that hadn't existed in the lives of the older people." They brought Hawaiian into the modern world by inventing words such as huna hohoki, for neutron, and wikiō, for video.

Their efforts are bearing fruit:

"We're finally at the graduate level, at the truly academic level," says Mr. Silva. Hawaiians have watched for decades as non-native scholars studied Hawaiian historical documents indirectly through translations.

But now, students fluent in the language are starting to mine the hundreds of thousands of historical sources written in Hawaiian. "We are able to look at Hawaiian cultural material in our own language," he says. "It gives us added weight and insight into this material."

Nonetheless, the academic advances are only a small step toward the professors' main goal of bringing Hawaiian back into people's lives. "I'm looking forward to a time—I'm not sure I'll see it in my lifetime—when there is a large enough community of speakers" to sustain the language, says Mr. Silva, while driving on the outskirts of Hilo.

Linguists estimate that it might take as many as 100,000 speakers to put Hawaiian on that solid a foundation. Only about 5,000 or 6,000 speak the language now, but schools and colleges are training more every year, says Mr. Silva as he pulls into the parking lot at Nāwahi, where faculty members and students are, day by day, resurrecting the language of Kamehameha.

"We're not there yet," Mr. Silva says. "But maybe in 50 years."

At the end of the article is a little tutorial on Hawaiian words:

aloha (ah-LOH-ha): Accent falls on the syllable "loh" instead of others.

Hawai'i (ha-VIE ee or ha-WHY ee): The correct spelling uses an 'okino.

Mā'noa (MAH-NO-ah): The kahakō over the first "a" elongates that vowel, and the second syllable is stressed.

mu'umu'u (moo oo-MOO oo): a type of dress, often mispronounced as "moo-moo."

O'ahu (o AH hoo): The glottal stop is often left out.

Geoff Pullum, from whose Language Log post I got the link, says there are two spelling errors among the seven Hawaiian words, one of them "a spelling that couldn't possibly be right for a Hawai‘ian word for phonological reasons"; the first person who sends him both words (email to pullum at the ucsc site in the edu domain) "will win a free cup of coffee at the book exhibit at the LSA meeting from me personally." Act now; supplies are limited!

THE RUINS OF ROME.

John Emerson, at Idiocentrism (scroll down below "Samuel Butler on Rat-traps"), discusses "The Ruins of Rome," a poem by "a little-known Latin humanist, Ianus [Janus] Vitalis of Palermo." He says:

At the link I have posted the versions by Bellay, Quevedo, Cohen, Pound, Spenser, Sęp-Szarzyński, Alex Ingber (from Quevedo), and an unknown translator's English version of Sęp-Szarzyński. It can be seen that the translators allowed themselves quite a bit of freedom in the way they set up the clinching lines -- for example, they address the poem variously to "the stranger", "the pilgrim", "the traveller", and "the newcomer".

The one version that Googling has not been able to find -- not so oddly, really -- is the Latin original by the almost-unknown Vitalis. All I have so far are these fragments:

….Aspice murorum moles, paeruptaque saxa
Obrutaque norrenti vesta theatra situ:
Haec sunt Roma. Viden velut ipsa cadavera taritae
Urbis adhuc spirent imperiosa minas?....

Disce hinc quid possit fortuna: immota labascunt
Et quae perpetuo sunt agitata manent.

So I'm asking my vast readership to help me find the rest of the poem. And if you can find more versions in more languages, send them by and I'll post them too.

I hereby transmit his quest (and his offer) to my own readership; any Vitalis experts out there?

PORTOBELLO.

I've been familiar with (and enjoyed) the big, meaty mushrooms called portobello for years, and I had assumed that that was, well, their name. But I just read the entry in the invaluable Food Lover's Companion, which begins:

An extremely large, dark brown mushroom that is simply the fully mature form of the cremino, which in turn is a variation of the common cultivated white mushroom. The name "portobello" began to be used in the 1980s as a brilliant marketing ploy to popularize an unglamorous mushroom that, more often than not, had to be disposed of because growers couldn't sell them.

Apparently it's also called portabella; either way, the origin is unknown—and the word itself is still unknown to the OED. Surely the 1980s are recent enough that it should be possible to pinpoint the creation of the term?

Update. See now the Wordorigins thread on this topic, and the chapter excerpt linked from it; lots of interesting leads, still nothing definitive. How can an etymology be completely unrecoverable after only two decades?

Update (1/6/2007): See now Portabello redux, with the new OED entry and a suggested etymology.

I should add that there is an entry portobello in the OED, but it doesn't seem mushroom-related:

? A kind of game resembling billiards.

1777 HOWARD Prisons Eng. 26 Gaming in various forms is very frequent: cards, dice, skittles, Missisippi and Portobello tables, billiards, fives, tennis, &c. Ibid. 198 One can scarcely ever enter the walls [of the King's Bench Prison] without seeing parties at skittles, missisippi, portobello, tennis, fives, &c.

Posted by languagehat at 08:20 PM | Comments (27)