The British Museum's COMPASS collection of "around 5000 objects from the huge range of periods and cultures represented in the Museum" includes a nice feature called "Arabic Script: Mightier than the Sword":
A defining feature of Islamic civilization has been its widespread use of writing. Writing has a profound significance because Arabic was both the language of God's revelation to the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century AD and the script in which the Qur'an, the holy book of Muslims, was written down.It includes sections on script styles, calligraphy, objects with writing (I particularly like the Earthenware bowl with Kufic inscription), and others; Islam in China and the Malay Peninsula includes an amazing example of Arabic calligraphy done in Chinese style, with a brush. Thanks to plep for the link.The Arabic language spread geographically with Islam. It was generally learned alongside local languages but the Arabic script often displaced local scripts. It has been used to write many languages, including Persian in Iran and Urdu in India. It is now the most commonly written script after the Roman alphabet.
From very early on Arabic script also began to be used for its decorative potential. Islamic art has, as a result, rightly been described as a 'speaking art'. The objects in this tour have Arabic script inscribed upon them or are connected to the art of writing. Together they show the continuing importance of Arabic in the cultures of what we can broadly call the Islamic lands.
I don't know what to make of Juliette Blevins' ideas about language as an evolving system, not being an evolutionary anthropologist, but anything that "undermines a central tenet of modern Chomskyan linguistics: that Universal Grammar, an innate human cognitive capacity, plays a dominant role in shaping grammars" automatically awakens my interest, and I look forward to learning more about them. (Link via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)
I always thought this phrase was a Macaulay original, but Mark Liberman at Language Log traced it all the way back to 1783, in Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres:
I spoke formerly of a Climax in sound; a Climax in sense, when well carried on, is a figure which never fails to amplify strongly. The common example of this, is that noted passage in Cicero which every schoolboy knows: "Facinus est vincire civem Romanum; scelus verberare, prope parricidium, necare; quid dicam in crucem tollere."(The essential point about what "every schoolboy knows," of course, is that it must be something known only to graybeard academics.) Mark found this by means of Literature Online, "the world's largest cross-searchable database of literature and criticism"; I hope I can get access to it through either the NYPL or C/W MARS.
This site has the "four essential travel phrases" in "307 languages plus 33 additional dialects."
The phrases we thought every traveller should know are:I expected this to be as careless of accuracy as other such "funny phrase in many tongues" projects, but I was mistaken; the worst I've found to complain of so far is that in the Yiddish the word for beach should (I think) be breg yam rather than just yam (which means 'sea'); the Russian has accent marks over the words (never used except in children's primers), but that's a pretty minor fault. There are zillions of languages and dialects, many little-known and each scrupulously provided with its own script (Yiddish is given three, modern and traditional printed and cursive/handwritten), and it's a lot of fun. (Needless to say, you have to allow them some leeway when translating "Where is the bar?" into ancient languages!)Where is my room?
Where is the beach?
Where is the bar?
Don't touch me there!
Via Mithridates.
As lagniappe, here's a UTF-8 sampler that will allow you to see how versatile your browser is. Mine isn't displaying runes, Bengali, Mongolian script, or Tibetan, but handles everything else (including Georgian, Armenian, and Tamil) admirably.
While trying to look up something else in my big Russian-English dictionary, I happened on the entry Вирсавия [Virsaviya] f bib Bathsheba. Well, that's odd, thought I: Virsaviya doesn't sound much like Bathsheba (who was King David's wife and Solomon's mother, in case you're not up on your Bible references). I looked it up in my indispensible Dictionnaire Russe-Français (by N.P. Makaroff, Saint-Pétersbourg, 1908) and found it rendered as Bersabée, which is an older French version of Beersheba, which is an ancient site southwest of Jerusalem (the name means 'well of seven [lambs]') where Abraham spent a good deal of time. So which is it, the woman or the well? Turns out it's both, and Russian didn't invent the confusion but inherited it from Greek, where both are rendered in the Septuagint as Βηρσαβεε (/bhrsabee/ in the usual transcription where /h/ = eta, and pronounced by the Byzantines, and thus by the Russians, as /virsave/, giving Russian Virsaviya). The confusion was evidently borrowed by Latin as well, allowing Sir John Mandeville to produce the following supremely confused passage:
And when men pass this desert, in coming toward Jerusalem, they come to Bersabe [Beersheba], that was wont to be a full fair town and a delectable of Christian men; and yet there be some of their churches. In that town dwelled Abraham the patriarch, a long time. That town of Bersabe founded Bersabe [Bathsheba], the wife of Sir Uriah the Knight, on the which King David gat Solomen the Wise, that was king after David upon the twelve kindreds of Jerusalem and reigned forty year.So what I want to know is how the two Hebrew words, which are after all distinct even if fairly similar, one referring to a person and the other to a place, got rendered the same in Greek. And I would also like to know, though less urgently, where the stress is in the Russian word; Makaroff has virsAviya and the modern dictionary virsavIya.
By the way, in the course of all this I ran across this excellent site, which has the entire Bible (divided into chapters) with the text in Russian, English, and Greek (the Septuagint text for the Old Testament). I love the internet.
Palaeography: reading old handwriting, 1500 - 1800: A practical online tutorial
Palaeography is the study of old handwriting. This web tutorial will help you learn to read the handwriting found in documents written in English between 1500 and 1800.Start here.At first glance, many documents written at this time look illegible to the modern reader. By reading the practical tips and working through the documents in the Tutorial in order of difficulty, you will find that it becomes much easier to read old handwriting. You can find more documents on which to practice your skills in the further practice section.
I was reading Roger Angell's recent New Yorker reminiscence about his stepfather, E.B. White (known to his intimates as "Andy"), when I came to the following paragraph:
The other sentence-closer in the passage is “death,” and Andy must have ceased in time to be astonished at how often the theme and thought recurred in his writing. It runs all through his sweetly comical piece “Death of a Pig,” in which he tries ineffectually to deal with the crisis of a young pig of his who has stopped eating. Castor oil doesn’t help, nor does his own sense of “personal deterioration,” or the ministrations of Fred [his dachshund], who accompanies him on trips down the woodpath through the orchard to the pigyard, and also makes “many professional calls on his own.” The pig dies, nothing can be done about it, and it is the profusion of detail—his feeling the ears of the ailing pig “as you might put your hand on the forehead of a child,” and the “beautiful hole, five feet long, three feet wide, three feet deep” that is dug for the pig among alders and young hackmatacks, at the foot of an apple tree—that makes its death unsentimental and hard to bear.The word hackmatacks stopped me cold; from context it apparently referred to some kind of plant, but neither I nor my wife (a New Englander) was familiar with it. When I got home I checked my dictionaries and discovered that both Webster's and the OED said it was another word for the tamarack (Larix laricina). Case closed, one might think (except for the odd similarity of the two words)—but I checked the AHD just for completeness and found that that excellent dictionary identified it rather with the balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera), a tree of an entirely different genus. A competitive googling produced 755 hits for "hackmatack, larix" and only 342 for "hackmatack, populus," but that's not exactly a scientific way of deciding the matter. It seems odd to me that dictionaries cannot agree on the referent of this uncommon but well-established word; can anyone shed light on this?
A NY Times story by Nicholas Wood describes efforts to "restore" the "Bosnian language" to the Serbian region of Novi Pazar (1911 Britannica article), known in Serbo-Croatian (to use the accurate name of the language everyone in the region speaks) as the Sandžak and traditionally in English as the Sanjak (which is how you pronounce the Serbo-Croatian word). Wood does a suprisingly good job of separating nationalistic claims from reality and puncturing the idea of a separate language:
Since their country fractured, their culture and language has, too. Croatia, Bosnia, and even Montenegro have all sought to reassert traditional differences and distance themselves from Serbo-Croatian, a language some felt was too heavily dominated by Serbian.I have highlighted the crucial phrase (though of course "as much" should be "more"). Wood goes on to explain the political background:What were considered dialects until recently are now regarded as their own language. In fact, three "new" languages - possibly four, if one counts Montenegrin - have appeared, distinguished as much by national pride (and perhaps pronunciation) than any deep distinction in grammar.
Vocabulary differs here and there. The Serbs and Montenegrins also use the Cyrillic alphabet, while Bosnians and Croatians use the Latin alphabet. But many people read both.
Still, before the war, Yugoslavs most everywhere in the country could understand each other. The same holds true through the region today. There is in fact probably less difference in spoken language and accent between and a Sarajevan and a Belgrader than between a Londoner and Glaswegian.
Introduction of the classes is seen as a victory for the mountainous region's Muslim minority, which argues that the local language was eroded by the education system and bureaucracy in Belgrade, which were dominated by Orthodox Serbs who speak a different dialect with its own accent.Sounds like the locals who are neither politicians nor bureaucrats have a pretty sensible attitude towards the whole thing. To me, it's as if the mayor of New York mandated classes to teach people "Dutch English" in an attempt to restore the traditional dialect of the city before it was corrupted."Language defines the identity of a people," said Zekerija Dugopoljac, the director of education for the Bosnian National Council, the official body that represents Muslim Slavs in Serbia and Montenegro. "Having the Bosnian language brings recognition to a people who have lived in Serbia and Montenegro for centuries."
The lessons, which have the approval of the Serbian Education Ministry, are intended to comply with European law allowing minorities to be taught their own language. But Serbian nationalists oppose the classes, which they see as a first step toward a separatist movement. The ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party has called for the education minister to step down.
Such moves are closely watched in this region, one of Serbia's most ethnically diverse. The Sandzak managed to escape the ethnic conflicts of the 1990's that took place just across its boundaries in Bosnia and Kosovo. Muslims here say they are keen not to alarm their Serb neighbors. Others appear confused about the need for the classes.
"I speak Serbian," said Nedzat Zenunovic, a 23-year-old Muslim who works in an Internet cafe. "Bosnians speak Bosnian. We don't live in Sarajevo, we live here."
A straw poll in the cafe revealed that several people had difficulty in giving any name to the language they spoke.
"It's Serbo-Montenegrin!" quipped a young student, smiling. Serbo-Montenegrin is not a recognized language.
I can't post about Novi Pazar without quoting one of my favorite bits from Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow:
This lymphatic monster had once blocked the distinguished pharynx of Lord Blatherard Osmo, who at the time occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office, an obscure penance for the previous century of British policy on the Eastern Question, for on this obscure sanjak had once hinged the entire fate of Europe:If only Lord Osmo could have lived to see the quiet reappearance of his obscure area of responsibility into the limelight of the News from Europe!Nobody knows-where, it is-on-the-map,
Who'd ever think-it, could start-such-a-flap?
Each Montenegran, and Serbian too,
Waitin' for some-thing, right outa the blue—oh honey
Pack up my Glad-stone, 'n' brush off my suit,
And then light me up my bigfat, cigar—
If ya want my address, it's
That O-ri-ent Express,
To the san-jak of No-vi Pa-zar!...It is taking up so much of his time he's begun to neglect Novi Pazar, and F.O. is worried. In the thirties balance-of-power thinking was still quite strong, the diplomats were all down with Balkanosis, spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firm's plastic surgeons ... their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by which they all knew each other.
Novi Pazar, anyhow, was still a croix mystique on the palm of Europe, and F.O. finally decided to go to the Firm for help. The Firm knew just the man...
But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm. Months passed, World War II started, years passed, nothing was heard from Novi Pazar. Pirate Prentice had saved Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men dreamed of, giddy in their beds with its grandeur—though not from World War II, of course. But by then, the Firm was allowing Pirate only tiny homeopathic doses of peace, just enough to keep his defenses up, but not enough for it to poison him.
(Thanks to Bonnie for the link.)
Bruce Byfield has a brilliant analysis of the origins of, and problems with, prescriptivism called "Tech Writers, Grammar, and the Prescriptive Attitude." I urge anyone interested in the topic to read it; I'll just quote a bit that I particularly want to emphasize:
Writing well, as George Orwell observes in "Politics and the English Language," "has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax." If it did, then two centuries of prescriptive grammar in the classroom should have resulted in higher standards of writing. Yet there is no evidence that the language is used more skillfully in 2001 than in 1750. The truth is that, prescriptive grammar and effective use of English have almost no connection. A passage can meet the highest prescriptive standards and still convey little if its thoughts are not clearly expressed or organized. Conversely, a passage can have several grammatical mistakes per line and still be comprehensible and informative. Prescriptive grammars are interesting as a first attempt to approach the subject of language, but today they are as useless to writers as they are to linguists. So long as writers have a basic competence in English, prescriptive grammar is largely a distraction that keeps them from focusing on the needs of their work.There's nothing wrong with following the "rules" if you enjoy playing that game (or if it's required by the publication you're writing for), but it has nothing to do with the quality of your writing, which is (or should be) paramount. I also recommend Jean Hollis Weber's fine piece on the proper focus of editing, "Escape From the Grammar Trap."
Thanks to aldiboronti of Wordorigins.org for the link to Echo Tan's blog X Reverie, where I first saw these articles posted, and to suchi in the comments below for the proper attribution.
In the course of a serial savaging of Strunk and White, first Mark Liberman and then Geoff Pullum analyze the prescriptivist pair's strange insistence that "however" must not come at the beginning of a sentence; Mark then extends the analysis to other adverbs and suggests that there may have been "a large-scale change in adverb-placement fashions at the end of the 19th century." Most interesting. And the investigation involves an extremely useful link: the Hyper-Concordance of the Victorian Literary Studies Archive, covering a wide range of authors.
My wife brought me the Provider Directory (online search form here) sent us by Health New England, open to the index by languages, which she knew would interest me. (You can consult the "Languages Spoken" pull-down menu on the search form linked above.) I was impressed by the fact that there were doctors listed under such unexpected languages as Armenian, Cebuano, Kannada, and Yoruba, and pleased to see there were two listed as being able to use Sign Language (presumably ASL). Then I started noticing some strange entries. "Ukraine" for Ukrainian was a minor glitch, but what were "Pakistani" and "Indian" supposed to mean? (Ethnologue lists 69 languages for Pakistan, 387 for India.) There were separate entries for "Persian" and "Farsi," and not just for cross-referencing convenience, either: there were five doctors listed under the latter and only one (a different one) under the former. But the worst was "Hebrew (Yiddish)." What the...? Not only are those completely different languages, it's unlikely that many doctors are competent in both—certainly here in New England. I suspect most of those listed speak Hebrew, with a few having picked up Yiddish either as mamaloshen at home or as an elective in college; in any case, lumping them together seems completely insane. (Also, I can't help but wonder how many patients still arrive at the doctor's expecting to describe their symptoms in Yiddish.)
Incidentally, I turned up this list of Yiddish sites, including blogs; I am glad to learn that "The number of sites featuring Yiddish grows daily and sorting through them all takes time and patience." (Via The Head Heeb.)
It is not given to many men to introduce a new word into the language. He claimed he got it from an editor, but he claimed a lot of things. All I know is that nobody ever wrote like that before, and lots of people have since tried and made fools of themselves, and now it's all over.
Farewell and mahalo, Hunter.
(A good collection of Hunter Thompson links at Incoming Signals.)
No, that's not a typo, it means 'become rich' in Hittite, and caelestis at Sauvage Noble has a delightful post on why it's his favorite Hittite word; read the whole thing if you enjoy Indo-European puns.
Anyone who has ever worked in a bookstore will nod ruefully while reading George Orwell's little reminiscence "Bookshop Memories." The names of the popular authors have changed since 1936 (as have some aspects of the situation; Orwell thought that "The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman"), but much is immutable. And the sad conclusion is still applicable:
But the real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro. There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl’s Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.(Via wood s lot.)
Back in May of last year, Mark Liberman of Language Log had a post which began by asserting that Abu Ghraib means 'father of the raven' (literally speaking, although the abu form in Arabic is so common and multivalent I'd be tempted to go with 'Place of Ravens' instead). Then on Monday he posted a correction, saying that Tim Buckwalter had told him it was rather the diminutive of ghariib 'strange,' while the dimunitive of ghuraab 'crow, raven' ought to be ghurayyib.
Now he has a further discussion of the matter, with more information on the formation of Arabic diminutives than you can shake a small stick at... and yet there's still no resolution. Frankly, I find it hard to believe Iraqis don't know whether Abu Ghraib is named after ravens, the west, or strangeness, assuming of course there is some sort of morphological differentiation in the diminutives. Does anybody know any Iraqis they can ask? The uncertainty is killing me, and perhaps Mark as well.
A Washington Post article by David A. Fahrenthold discusses the slow decline of the Chesapeake Bay way of speaking:
Years ago, before the watermen had to become bus drivers and the crab shanties were replaced by new red-brick houses, everybody on St. George Island knew about the arster, the kitchen and the sun dog.The arster, of course, was a bivalve—called an "oyster" by some people—often found here at the remote south end of St. Mary's County. "The kitchen" was a spot in the Chesapeake Bay where arsters were caught. And a "sun dog" was a haze that portended bad weather, a sign it was time to leave the kitchen and head home.
These words were part of the island's local dialect, one of many distinctive ways of speaking that grew up over the centuries in isolated areas across the bay.
But now, like many of the other dialects, St. George-ese is fading. Many of the watermen who spoke it have left, and in their place are newcomers from the Washington suburbs and elsewhere...
Linguists are careful to stress that there is not one single Chesapeake Bay dialect but rather a vast array of accents and vocabularies.I wonder if this reaction has any chance of actually preserving the dialect for a significant amount of time?There are distinctively southern speakers, like Tidewater Virginians who say "kyar" when they mean "car." Further north are the residents of "Bawlmer, Merlin," and along the Eastern Shore, in isolated waterman's communities, people turn "wife" into "wuife."
But to the west of this cacophony, there is Washington—a demographic behemoth, breaker of dialects.
Almost 50 percent of the region's residents were born in a state other than the one where they live, which is more than other big cities and close to twice the national average. Linguistically, that means "nobody really has any idea what Washington, D.C., is," said David Bowie, a linguistics professor at the University of Central Florida...
So far, there's been no comprehensive linguistic study of the bay's dialects to see if they're all facing the same fate as Southern Maryland speech. But changes have been noted by old-timers and local historians across the area.
Northern Neck native W. Tayloe Murphy Jr.—the Virginia secretary of natural resources—said residents used to say they lived "in" the Northern Neck. Now, he said, many say "on," as outsiders do.
In Delaware, historian Russ McCabe said he's seen the decline of "among-ye," which was that state's rare way of saying "y'all." One of the few times he's heard it recently was at a church in Gumboro, in south Delaware.
"This older fella looked at me and [said], 'Are among-ye going to stay for supper?' " said McCabe, who works for the state public archives. "I had a moment there, a twinge of almost sadness, because I hadn't heard that in 20 years."...
The most prominent exception to these changes is Smith Island, Md., a marshy place with about 360 residents, reachable only by ferry.
Here, with a brogue that's been steeped in decades of isolation, Smith Islanders render house as "hace" and brown as "brain." They use words that are relics of the British English used by American colonists, such as "progging"—which means to poke around the marshes looking for arrowheads.
University researchers were surprised recently to find that young Smith Islanders actually have a stronger accent than their parents. The researchers and islanders said they believe the change was a conscious attempt to assert the island's culture in the face of declining catches and rising water levels.
(Thanks to Joe Tomei for the link.)
Thanks to Céline of Naked Translations, I've learned a new French expression: découvrir le pot aux roses, which she says means 'to find out what's going on' and my Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French by René James Hérail and Edwin A. Lovatt defines as 'to stumble on a bit of scandal.' It's apparently often misunderstood as "poteau rose," so Chris Waigl of serendipity is using poteaux roses as a French equivalent of "eggcorns" (first sighted here) for the purposes of her eggcorn database. (If any of my Russian readers know of a Russian word or phrase that's sometimes replaced by a semantically clearer, though historically incorrect, version, like "eggcorn" for acorn or "poteau rose" for pot aux roses, please mention it in the comments.)
The interesting thing about découvrir le pot aux roses is that it's not at all clear how the expression came about. For one thing, roses are not grown in pots, and there is no such thing as a pot aux roses in other contexts (hence the eggcorn potential). One theory is that the reference was originally to rose in the sense of 'rouge,' which makes perfect sense of the expression, since it would mean "discovering the secret of what you thought had been a woman's natural beauty"; alas, as Francparler.com points out, the expression has always had roses, plural, so that won't wash. There's further discussion at the entry in the dictionary at the excellent Langue française site ("Dépannage en français, difficultés, (bon) usage, syntaxe, orthographe, vocabulaire, étymologie, débats et dossiers thématiques"—I love their epigraph « C'est quand les accents graves tournent ŕ l'aigu que les sourcils sont en accent circonflexe. »).
The Hérail-Lovatt book, by the way, says "Few expressions containing the word pot have literal meanings. Most, like se manier le pot: to 'put one's skates on', to hurry up and en avoir plein le pot: to be fed-up, are figurative derivations." The listed meanings are 'arse, bum, behind'; 'luck, good fortune'; 'drink, alcoholic beverage'; and 'pot, kitty, pool of money staked at cards'; these are followed by phrases like faire son pot 'to make one's pile, amass a tidy sum of money,' pot de colle 'limpet-bore, tenacious button-holer,' and tourner autour du pot 'to beat about the bush, to tackle a problem or a situation in a dilly-dally manner'; the last of these is découvrir le pot aux roses, followed by the useful note "Because of a possible hiatus, the 't' in pot is pronounced as a liaison in colloquial contexts." An exemplary book (note that most definitions include both a colloquial equivalent and a literal explanation), which any reader of French literature (not to mention l'internet!) should have at hand.
Mark Liberman at Language Log has a post about an interesting problem of interpretation. He quotes Bill Clement on the cancellation of the NHL season: "It is such a day of squander and a day of waste that anybody involved in both sides should be ashamed of who they are right now." After establishing that squander is a valid, if infrequent, noun, he points out the strange (to him and to me, anyway) use of "anybody involved in both sides":
When he says "anybody involved in both sides", Clement clearly means that all the participants, regardless of which side they're on, should be ashamed of their fatal unwillingness to compromise. He's not slamming fence-sitters or double agents -- he's not even suggesting that any members of these categories exist. The negotiation between the NHL owners and the players' union has been a polarizing dispute, and if there is any individual who's consequentially involved with both sides at once, he's keeping a low profile.I have the same reaction as Mark, but clearly some people use the construction unselfconsciously—see his post for examples found by googling. So, how do you all feel about this? Does the quoted usage seem wrong, borderline, or perfectly OK?However, when I read this, I first interpreted "anybody involved on [sic; Clement said "in"] both sides" as referring to people with split allegiance.
So the question is, did Clement make a mistake in saying this? Or did I make a mistake in understanding it? Or do we speak slightly different dialects of English?
Sarah Maguire, the London poet who founded the Poetry Translation Centre, has an article on translation in the Poetry Review; she focuses on one of my own touchstones of the translator's art, Pound's Cathay:
Why is Cathay so compelling? Firstly, it exists, in its own right, as a collection of great poems in English. Published in 1915, the poems are, as Kenner points out, "among the most durable responses to World War I. They say, as so much of Pound's work says, that all this has happened before and continually happens." But what of the poems as translations? How "faithful" to their sources are they? How "Chinese"? It's generally admitted that Cathay is full of "mistakes". It's hardly to be expected otherwise, given the misreadings made by the Japanese professors instructing Fenollosa, whose notes Pound often found difficult to decipher. However, what may be taken as Pound's "mistranslations" are, as Kenner argues, "deflections undertaken with open eyes . . . . The main deviations from orthodoxy represent deliberate decisions of a man who was inventing a new kind of English poem and picking up hints where he could find them". Pound's loyalties, it seems, were to English poetry, not to accurately representing Chinese poetry.
Debates about translation have been raging since the Romans, and, crudely, they all come down to the same decision: whether to "domesticate" the translation or to "foreignise" it. In other words, as a translator you have to take a decision - a decision which is as much ethical as it is aesthetic - as to whether your translation should be as close as possible to a poem in English, or whether it should clearly announce its different, foreign qualities. As Friedrich Schleiermacher summarised it in 1813 (in the most influential essay written on translation in the nineteenth century), "Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader". Pound, one might then conclude, given his stated priorities, was concerned with domestication, with "moving the writer toward the reader". Yet a close examination of the poems in Cathay indicates that, yes, these are quite wonderful poems in English, but also that they announce their foreign status very clearly indeed...That's only part of a thoughtful discussion of what makes translations worthwhile; I recommend the whole thing, as well as what Maguire rightly calls "one of the most beautiful poems in English written last century."In 1928, T.S. Eliot claimed that "Chinese poetry, as we know it to-day, is something invented by Ezra Pound". How is it possible that an American poet who knew no Chinese can be said to have invented "Chinese" poetry? George Steiner has argued that "Pound can imitate and persuade with utmost economy not because he or his reader know so much but because both concur in knowing so little". In other words, Pound's "China" is an Orientalist fake, an exotic invention lapped up by readers seduced by a lazy Chinoiserie. However, a number of Chinese scholars have agreed that "Pound's versions seem to come nearer to the real qualities of Chinese poetry"; and that this is because "he recognized the importance of the culturally distant and unfamiliar". In fact, it turns out that Pound didn't "know so little" after all. Although it's true that, in 1915, he had just begun actively to engage with Chinese literature, this marked the start of a profound, life-long, commitment that had fascinating antecedents in his childhood in Philadelphia. Both Pound's parents had contacts with Christian missionaries in China; they owned Chinese objects and works of art; and, of all American cities, it was Philadelphia which at that time was "at the center of America's response to the Orient." By the time Fenollosa's notebooks fell into his hands, Pound was steeped in Chinese art and profoundly curious about the radically different world it represented. What Ming Xie and other Chinese commentators point out is that, even by the time of Cathay, Pound grasped "the paradigmatic frame of an entire culture".
In short, what makes Cathay the most important translation into English in the past one hundred years is that Pound successfully "domesticates" and simultaneously "foreignises" these poems. In Schleiermacher's terms, he both takes the writer to the reader and he takes the reader to the writer. Added to this, the qualities of directness, simplicity and vividness in Cathay, and the unobtrusive, delicate music of the lines, have had an extraordinarily profound impact on the ways in which it is possible to write poems in English. It was Pound's recognition of "the importance of the culturally distant and unfamiliar" that made this revolution in English poetry possible.
(Via wood s lot.)
A story by James Brooke (originally in the New York Times, but linked here from the International Herald Tribune website) discusses the increasing prominence of English in Mongolia, until recently under the sway of Russia and its language:
"We are looking at Singapore as a model," Tsakhia Elbegdorj, Mongolia's prime minister, said in an interview, his own American English honed at graduate school at Harvard University. "We see English not only as a way of communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world."Camel herders may not yet refer to each other as "dude," but Mongolia, thousands of kilometers from the nearest English-speaking nation, is a reflection of the steady march of English as a world language...
The rush toward English in Mongolia has not been without its bumps. After taking office after the elections here in June, Elbegdorj shocked Mongolians by announcing that it would become a bilingual nation, with English as the second language.I'm surprised that "it is hard to find a Mongolian under 40 who speaks better than broken Russian," but I guess it makes sense. Oh, and I highly recommend The Story of the Weeping Camel.For Mongolians still debating whether to jettison the Cyrillic alphabet imposed by Stalin in 1941, this was too much, too fast.
Later, on his bilingual English-Mongolian Web site, the prime minister fine-tuned his program, drawing up a national curriculum designed to make English replace Russian next September as the primary foreign language taught here.
Still, as fast as Elbegdorj wants the Mongolian government to proceed, the state is merely catching up with the private sector...
With schools easing the way, English is penetrating Ulan Bator through the electronic media: bilingual Mongolian Web sites, cellphones with bilingual text messaging, cable television packages with English language news and movie channels and radio repeaters that broadcast Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corporation on FM frequencies. At Mongolian International University, all classes are in English. English is so popular that Mormon missionaries here offer free lessons as a way to attract potential converts.
Increased international tourism and a growing number of resident foreigners explain some moves, like the two English-language newspapers here and the growing numbers of bilingual store signs and restaurant menus. During the first eight months of 2004, international tourist arrivals were up 54 percent; visits by Americans doubled, a rise partly fueled by the movie "The Story of the Weeping Camel," a documentary set in Mongolia.
Foreign arrivals were up across the board, with the exception of Russians, who experienced a 9.5 percent drop. Their decrease reflects a wider decline here of Russian influence and the Russian language. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian was universally taught here and was required for admission to university in Mongolia.
"Russia is going downhill very fast," said Tom Dyer, a 28-year-old Australian who teaches at the Lotus Children's Center, the orphanage where Urantsetseg was describing the shark family.
Russia, leery of immigration from Asia, has imposed visa requirements on Mongolians. China does not. Today, it is hard to find a Mongolian under 40 who speaks better than broken Russian.
Within a decade, Mongolia is expected to convert the nation's written language from Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet.
For a trading people famed for straddling the east-west Silk Road, Mongolians have long been linguists, often learning multiple languages.
But for many of Mongolia's young people, English is viewed as hip and universal.
Stopped on a sidewalk on a snowy afternoon here, Amarsanaa Bazargarid, a 20-year-old management student at Mongolian Technical University, said optimistically: "I'd like English be our official second language. Mongolians would be comfortable in any country. Russian was our second official language, but it wasn't very useful."
With official encouragement, the U.S. Embassy, the British Embassy, and a private Swiss group have all opened their own English language reading rooms here in the last 18 months.
"If there is a shortcut to development it is English," Munh-Orgil Tsend, Mongolia's foreign minister, said in an interview, speaking American English, also honed at Harvard. "Parents understand that, kids understand that."
"We want to come up with solid, workable, financially backable plan to introduce English from early level all the way up to highest level," the minister added.
After attempting during the 1990s to retrain about half of Mongolia's 1,400 Russian language teachers to teach English, Mongolia now is embarking on a program to attract hundreds of qualified teachers from around the world to teach here. "I need 2,000 English teachers," said Puntsag Tsagaan, Mongolia's minister of education, culture and science. A graduate of a Soviet university, he laboriously explained in English that Mongolia hoped to attract English teachers, not only from Britain and North America, but from India, Singapore and Malaysia.
Tsagaan spins an optimistic vision of Mongolia's bilingual future. "If we combine our academic knowledge with the English language, we can do outsourcing here, just like Bangalore," he said.
(Via The Argus, where Nathan adds "I can’t tell you how happy I would be if English education in Inner Asia improved to the point that 'dude' replaced 'fuck you' as a friendly greeting.")
For as long as Adnan Khashoggi has been in the news (over three decades now), his last name has niggled at me: what kind of name is it, and how is it pronounced? Now, reading a book by Said K. Aburish (interview) called The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (a book full of mistakes and bad English that doesn't appear to have been edited at all, but there's so little non-sycophantic material out there about Saudi Arabia that his gossip and unverifiable assertions are at least a useful counterweight), I find the following in Chapter 9, "Servants of the Crown": "It would seem that the only thing people in the West do not know about Adnan Khashoggi is how to pronounce his name properly. A hard 'g' is followed by a soft 'g': Khashog-ji." (The next paragraph begins: "Khashoggi is a Turkoman, another non-Saudi son of one of Ibn Saud's doctors...") So I'm glad to know how it's pronounced, and I'm somewhat enlightened about its formation (-ji, or -ci in the current orthography, is the Turkish suffix for 'person who...,' as seen in the name Saatchi, originally 'watchmaker' from Arabic-Turkish saat 'hour, time; watch, clock'; I note that there are people who spell their name Khashogji), but I'm still mystified about the base element. I've checked my Persian dictionaries for anything resembling khashog (the g rules out Arabic and the kh eliminates Turkish) but have come up empty. Any suggestions?
Addendum. Having been informed that the base element is a Turco-Persian word for 'spoon' (kaşık in Turkish, qashoq in Persian, both from Old Turkish qashuq), I looked up kaşık in my Langenscheidt pocket dictionary and discovered that the following entry was:
kaşıkçıkuşu pelican.
Now, kuş is 'bird,' so 'pelican' in Turkish is "spoonerbird." Or, if you prefer, "Khashoggi bird." Just thought I'd pass that along.
The Varieties of English site (maintained by the Anthropology Department of the University of Arizona) is an ongoing project to describe various English dialects; some links take you to a "we're working on this" page, but the Canadian English section is well filled out and quite interesting:
Canadian English, for all its speakers, is an under-described variety of English. In popular dialectological literature it is often given little acknowledgement as a distinct and homogeneous variety, save for a paragraph or two dedicated to oddities of Canadian spelling and the fading use of British-sounding lexical items like chesterfield, serviette, and zed.(Via mj klein of Metrolingua, a blog on "language discussion and expression.")There is a small body of scholarly research that suggests that if there is such a thing as a Canadian English, all its unique characteristics are being lost... To the contrary, this site's discussion of Canadian phonology identifies at least four other characteristics not included in Woods' study, all of which remain robust in Canadian speech. The other sections offer further insight into the character of Canadian English.
Addendum. A nice supplement: Wikipedia's List of dialects of the English language. (Via Plep.)
The genesis of this entry goes back almost six years, to April 29, 1999 (I can tell you the date because I kept the sales slip to use as a bookmark, as is my wont), when at one of my periodic visits to the sale cart on the third (foreign-language) floor of the Donnell I found a book by Boris Khazanov called Нагльфар в океане времен (Nagl'far v okeane vremen, 'Naglfar in the ocean of time'). I'd never heard of Khazanov (it turns out his real name is Gennadii Moiseevich Faibusovich, he was born in 1928, did some time in the Gulag, studied medicine, and emigrated to Germany in 1982, where he's written a bunch of stories and novels), but the book was part of the Альфа - фантастика [Alpha-Fantasy] series and had an attractive Chagall-ripoff cover... and there was that mysterious word "Naglfar." I flipped through the book but couldn't find out what it meant or if it was someone's name (in fact, I couldn't find any reference to it at all), but it clearly wasn't Russian and it had a certain consonantal grandeur whose pull I couldn't deny, sort of like the Georgian words (t'k'bili, gmadlobt) I always enjoy startling people with. I figured the book was easily worth the 25 cents they were asking and added it to my stack.
Fast-forward to this weekend. I was reading Nicholson Baker to assuage the misery of my wife (who's picked up, alas, the cold I had just put down); halfway through "Clip Art" (an essay about nail clippers and clipped nails that originally appeared in the Nov. 7, 1994 New Yorker) I reached the following paragraph:
But the most troubling feature of Stephen King's assessment of my alleged "nail paring" of a novel is his apparent belief that a bookish toe- or fingernail scrap can be justifiably brushed off as meaningless. Last September, Allen Ginsberg sold a bag of his beard hair to Stanford. Surely Mr. King ought to be saving for the ages whatever gnarled relics he clips or pares? And the Master Spellbinder, of all people, should be able to detect the secret terrors, the moans of the severed but unquiet soul, that reside in these disjecta. Think of the fearful Norse ship of the apocalypse, Naglfar, made of dead men's nails, which will break loose from its moorings during the Monstrous Winter, when the Wolf has swallowed the Sun—"a warning," in Brian Branston's retelling, "that if a man dies with his nails unshorn he is adding greatly to the materials for Naglfar (a thing both gods and men would be slow to do)." Gertrude Jobes's mythological dictionary cites a related Finno-Ugric tradition in which the Evil One collects any Sunday nail parings and "with them builds the boat for transporting the dead." Lithuanian folklore contends (per Stith Thompson) that "from the parings of man's nails devils make little caps for themselves."...Well before I got to Gertrude Jobes and Stith Thompson, I broke off my reading and startled my sleepy wife with the outcry (as mysterious to her as the name had previously been to me) "Naglfar!" I explained to her the background, and after I finished the essay and she drifted off to sleep I dashed to my study, where the chaos of unboxing has subsided to the point that I can actually find many of the books I want, and I dug out the Khazanov novel from behind a volume of Dovlatov. This time I discovered what I had missed in my original hasty ruffling of the pages: at the very start, among the epigraphs (between Tacitus and "Россия – игра природы, а не ума," attributed to Бесы [Besy, Dostoevsky's The Devils] but slightly misquoted if this text's "Россия есть игра природы, но не ума" a third of the way through Chapter II is to be trusted), is a longish quote from the Younger Edda, the very passage summarized by Baker in the above paragraph! And—Урла-лап! Курла-ла!—I've found an online bilingual (Old Norse/Russian) version of the Edda! It's a different Russian translation than the one Khazanov uses, so I won't bother quoting it, but here's the original (from Chapter 51, "Frá ragnarökum"):
Ţá mćlti Gangleri: 'Hver tíđendi eru at segja frá um ragnarökr? Ţess hef ek eigi fyrr heyrt getit.'The oldest reference to the story, however, is in the Elder Edda's first section, Völuspá (probably 10th century); here's a bilingual (Norse/English this time) version of stanza 50:Hárr segir: 'Mikil tíđendi eru ţađan at segja ok mörg, ţau in fyrstu, at vetr sá kemr, er kallađr er fimbulvetr. Ţá drífr snćr ór öllum áttum. Frost eru ţá mikil ok vindar hvassir. Ekki nýtr sólar. Ţeir vetr fara ţrír saman ok ekki sumar milli, en áđr ganga svá ađrir ţrír vetr, at ţá er um alla veröld orrostur miklar...
Ţá verđr ţat, er mikil tíđendi ţykkja, at úlfrinn gleypir sólina, ok ţykkir mönnum ţat mikit mein. Ţá tekr annarr úlfrinn tunglit, ok gerir sá ok mikit ógagn. Stjörnurnar hverfa af himninum. Ţá er ok ţat til tíđenda, at svá skelfr jörđ öll ok björg, at viđir losna ór jörđu upp, en björgin hrynja, en fjötrar allir ok bönd brotna ok slitna. Ţá verđr Fenrisúlfr lauss. Ţá geysist hafit á löndin, fyrir ţví at ţá snýst Miđgarđsormr í jötunmóđ ok sćkir upp á landit. Ţá verđr ok ţat, at Naglfar losnar, skip ţat, er svá heitr. Ţat er gert af nöglum dauđra manna, ok er ţat fyrir ţví varnanar vert, ef mađr deyr međ óskornum nöglum, at sá mađr eykr mikit efni til skipsins Naglfars, er gođin ok menn vildi seint, at gert yrđi. En í ţessum sćvargang flýtur Naglfar.
[LI. Then said Gangleri: "What tidings are to be told concerning the Weird of the Gods? Never before have I heard aught said of this." Hárr answered: "Great tidings are to be told of it, and much. The first is this, that there shall come that winter which is called the Awful Winter: in that time snow shall drive from all quarters; frosts shall be great then, and winds sharp; there shall be no virtue in the sun. Those winters shall proceed three in succession, and no summer between; but first shall come three other winters, such that over all the world there shall be mighty battles...
Then shall happen what seems great tidings: the Wolf shall swallow the sun; and this shall seem to men a great harm. Then the other wolf shall seize the moon, and he also shall work great ruin; the stars shall vanish from the heavens. Then shall come to pass these tidings also: all the earth shall tremble so, and the crags, that trees shall be torn up from the earth, and the crags fall to ruin; and all fetters and bonds shall be broken and rent. Then shall Fenris-Wolf get loose; then the sea shall gush forth upon the land, because the Midgard Serpent stirs in giant wrath and advances up onto the land. Then that too shall happen, that Naglfar shall be loosened, the ship which is so named. (It is made of dead men's nails; wherefore a warning is desirable, that if a man die with unshorn nails, that man adds much material to the ship Naglfar, which gods and men were fain to have finished late.) Yet in this sea-flood Naglfar shall float...
—A.G. Brodeur's 1916 translation]
Hrymr ekr austan,So that's more than you ever wanted to know about any number of things. And my wife says that if we ever get the dog we've been wanting and he turns out to be difficult and bad-tempered, we should name him Naglfar.
hefisk lind fyrir,
snýsk Jörmungandr
í jötunmóđi.
Ormr knýr unnir,
en ari hlakkar,
slítr nái Niđfölr,
Naglfar losnar.Hrym travels from the east,
he holds a shield,
Jörmungand writhes
in an huge rage.
The serpent beats the waves,
and the eagle shrieks,
pale-beaked it tears the corpses,
and Naglfar breaks loose.
Here's a nice little joke (from Martin Kramer, quoting Charles Issawi) that depends on asymmetrical linguistic patterning (semantics not matching up with morphology) for its impact:
A Western orientalist goes to Egypt, and strikes up a conversation in Arabic with his taxi driver. The poor driver, after straining to understand his passenger, plaintively asks him how he came to know Arabic. Ana mustashriq! the orientalist answers proudly. In reply to which, the taxi driver mutters: Wa'ana mustaghrib...If, like me, you need the joke explained (though I did figure out that mustashriq was 'orientalist'), hie yourself over to Language Log, where Mark Liberman does the honors.
I suspect many of my readers will have no more problem than I do relating to yesterday's NY Times story by Carole Braden about Kathie Coblentz, a cataloguer at the New York Public Library, and how she deals with her own large collection of books. (I couldn't get a blogsafe link, so this one will expire next week.)
Her 16 bookcases - about 214 running feet - reveal no deference to John Dewey and his decimal system and varying degrees of respect for the alphabetical-by-author rule. Indeed, it seems she has grouped her books less by subject than by country of origin. Dust-free and with carefully cracked spines (a sign that books have been read, or at least leafed through), the books in Ms. Coblentz's library are navigable to no one but her.Nice to hear, since in my latest attempt at cramming too many books into too few shelves one bookcase has books on Greece and the Greek language followed by books on Central Asia and Iran followed by travel books. I think many of us can also relate to this anecdote (sparked by her recommendation on how to weed out a collection): "Nicholas Basbanes... confessed that he regularly gives books to charity sales, then drops by to rummage and buys back his own donations." And of direct LH relevance is this: "Grouped by country of origin - Ms. Coblentz speaks or reads 10 languages - the collection includes 12 shelves of classic German literature and 14 of Swedish mysteries.""Your system doesn't have to be logical, it just has to work for you," said Ms. Coblentz...
Some of her rules I can only dream about following, since they would necessitate far more bookcases than I possess: "She never packs shelves tightly (strains the bindings) and does not 'double shelve,' or stack rows behind rows (keeps books from breathing and triggers looking-for-Goethe-in-a-haystack syndrome)." On the other hand, I've never heard my books breathing, and the bindings seem to have survived decades of tight packing. Another rule I suppose I could follow, but I'll just take the risk of warping, since separation by size is just too weird for me:
To avoid the warping that results when tall books are interspersed with short ones, Ms. Coblentz has subdivided her categories by size, ranked 1 to 5; 1 is devoted to diminutive books including some Swedish tails, travel guides and comics.And look: the piece even has a typo for our amusement!
A new (or revived?) site called Mithridates features posts on a multilingual 404 page (Wuhloss, man, de page yuh lookin for ent here!! -- Bajan; Siidan du söökkää e int hää meera. -- South Helsinki Swedish; Awan ditan. -- Ilokano), rabbit language, the first book printed for a Finnish audience, and a Thai page on the original Mithridates, among other language-related posts. (For instance, I can't read this website, or even verify that it is in fact about Udmurt poetry, but this post says so, and that's good enough for me. Udmurt poetry! Who can resist?) So welcome, or welcome back, O spiritual descendent of Pontic rulers and/or A.E. Housman, and keep bringing those tasty links.
The bibliographical database of linguistics:
The BLonline database provides bibliographical references to scholarly publications on all branches of linguistics and all the languages of the world, irrespective of language or place of publication. The database contains all entries of the printed volumes of Bibliographie Linguistique/Linguistic Bibliography for the years 1993-2000 and an increasing number of more recent references.(Via wood s lot.)
I didn't actually watch the Super Bowl the other night (I care almost nothing about football), but out of some vestigial loyalty to family tradition I checked in on it now and then, and I happened to see an exciting moment at the end of the second quarter. It was a touchdown pass from New England quarterback Tom Brady to David Givens, described by Kevin Hench thus:
This was a clinic in read and recognition as Brady went through his progressions, surveying all the way from one side of the field to the other before finding Givens at the right edge of the end zone. Philly corner Lito Sheppard got caught leaking toward the middle just as Brady located Givens and delivered a perfect strike for the Patriots' first touchdown.And here's what the TV announcer said of Givens as the replay was being shown: "He had nowhere to really else go."
That is perhaps the single most astonishing sentence I've heard a native speaker of English utter (in terms of grammaticality, I hasten to add); it's so bizarre I had to retype it because I automatically moved the "really" as I was copying it. By comparison, the Murray Chass sentence I analyzed here is a model of construction. There are two words independently misplaced: "else" should come immediately after "nowhere," and "really" should... well, really, it could go almost anywhere other than where it is and make better sense. But the latter is less of a problem—if you delete "else," you get "He had nowhere to really go," which any copy editor would emend to "He really had nowhere to go" but which is a plausible verbal bumble of the kind we all find ourselves making. It's the "else" that baffles me, and I'd love to hear one of the Language Log mavens or other linguabloggers try to account for how it got there. This is the kind of thing that makes me very skeptical of efforts to derive sentences from little NP-VP nodules that get lexical items inserted before being extruded from the assembly line and out of our mouths.
Update. Language Logger Mark Liberman takes up my challenge and does a bang-up job; I think his conclusion makes perfect sense:
The announcer started to put together the simple cliche "He had nowhere else to go" (689 whG). He decided to modify else with really: "He had nowhere really else to go". Then in the excitement of the moment, his sequential preferences ("nowhere to", "to really") pulled "really else" over past "to".(And "mavens" wasn't a dig, honest, just the aftereffect of reading too much Safire!)
Transblawg has an entry about the secret language used in the German village of Frammersbach; the "language, known as Welschen, is probably hundreds of years old and was started by traders who didn’t want their agreements to be understood by others." The interest lies not so much in the rather simple-minded form of Pig Latin used ("take the consonants from the beginning of a word and put them at the end, followed by an ä") as in the fact that there are "a large number of similar secret ‘languages’ used in Germany"—and presumably elsewhere. There must be studies on this subject; I wonder how much deformation of the standard language or dialect is necessary to make sure outsiders don't understand you?
A Eurozine article by Mischa Gabowitsch examines the problems of Russian translation.
To the casual observer, almost fifteen years after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Communist regime, the Russian translation market may seem to be booming. Indeed, according to the statistics of the Association of German Booksellers, Russia has been among the top ten buyers of rights on translations of German books for most of the past decade; and the Russian State Statistics Committee tells us that in 2001, translations made up about a third of all fiction titles published in the Russian Federation (though, in 2002, they only accounted for just over 13 per cent of the total number of copies of fiction and non-fiction titles.)There is an interesting analysis of finances, transportation problems, and "cultural accessibility." I am bothered, though, by this attack on an author I'm very fond of:Translation, however, is of course much more than a market. It is a skill, an organised activity, and ideally a process of cultural synthesis and creativity. Concerning all of these aspects, translation is in a wretched state in contemporary Russia. In order to understand why, we first need to consider the status and role of translation in the Soviet Union, all the more so since critics of the low level of most literary translations done nowadays sometimes look back to a reputed 'golden era' of translation...
The overwhelming majority of translations published in Russia today are of execrable quality. Words and whole sentences are routinely mistranslated, names are misspelled, and translators' or editors' notes on difficult passages, even when they exist, are often simply wrong. This state of affairs is due to a number of factors, some of which are rooted in the Soviet heritage. There are still very few people who have spent sufficient time abroad to have gained proper knowledge of a foreign language. While there is now a considerable Russian diaspora in countries such as Germany and the United States, few Russians manage to master their new language and not forget their mother tongue, let alone keep up with the break-neck speed of transformation of the Russian that is spoken, and written, in Russia. And even among the truly bilingual, only very few are prepared to work as translators into Russian for fees that are ridiculously low by Western standards.
This paves the way for those Russian authors who look to foreign countries mainly to enhance their prestige at home, or to gain symbolic capital abroad by acting as self-styled representatives of Russian culture where there is no-one to disclaim their simplistic and cliché-ridden generalisations. Tatyana Tolstaya, a well-known writer who spent many years in America, is an example of a 'biased cultural translator' who likes to write ironically and pejoratively about Russian exceptionalism while in the United States, but happily engages in West-bashing back in Russia and sees no harm in promoting extreme nationalist writers in a TV show she co-anchors.Does anybody know how much truth there is in this?
(Via wood s lot.)
This fine site has everything you're likely to want to know about lingua franca (Wikipedia), "a mixed language... [formerly] used for communication throughout the Middle East." The Prefatory Note says:
I am happy to present the fourth edition of the Lingua Franca Website... A transcript of a valuable lecture delivered on April 22, 2002 by Professor Roberto Rossetti at the University of Nantes, France, has been included. Of particular interest are the Bibliography and Chronologies [1, 2] which follow his lecture, and are given a separate listing on the Index. Even individuals who do not read French readily will be able to make good use of these careful listings. Some additional texts have been added and annotated.A brief sample:A new section called “Conversazioni” contains materials received from colleagues which I have slightly annotated and edited. It seems to me that these may give encouragement to younger researchers to expand our knowledge of this area, and also demonstrate how the Internet can increase knowledge. As King Solomon said: Iron sharpeneth iron; and a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.
“Spagnoli venir … boum boum … andar; Inglis venir … boum boum bezef … andar; Francés venir … tru tru tru … chapar.”
'The Spaniards came, cannonaded, and left. The English came, cannonaded heavily, and left. The French came, blew their bugles, and captured [Algiers].'
(I can't remember where I found this link; if you sent it to me, let me know and I'll provide credit.)
Frequent commenter Tatyana sent me a link to this "Brief Dictionary of Medieval Bulgarian Geographical Names and Expressions"—something of a misnomer, since this long and detailed list can hardly be called "brief." The question is, what is its status? It's associated with the "Djagfar Tarihi," about which this page says:
There is much controversy and resistance to the publication of the "Djagfar Tarihi" annals. The leading allegations are that the compilation was composed by an office of the Russian NKVD/KGB/FSB at an undefined time with a purpose of splitting the Türkic ethnic groups into opposing camps, that it was written by an unknown person claiming to be only a savior of the annals, that it is a false compilation with no historical merit, that Ibragim Mohammed-Karimovich Nigmatullin is an unknown fictional personality.The site doesn't refute any of these "allegations"; it simply goes on to take the validity of the document for granted:In support of these allegations there is no known systematic study addressing the authen[ti]city of the compilation, no known systematic review and study of the materials...
"Djagfar Tarihi" (“History by Djagfar”) is the only known assembly of ancient Bulgarian annals that reached us. As many other Bulgarian sources, "Djagfar Tarihi" has a difficult and tragical history.Does anybody know if this is true, or even plausible? Claire, you read medieval Turkic stuff—any enlightenment to shed? I don't want to immerse myself too deeply in the geographical stuff (which I love) if it's going to turn out to be a hoax.The collection [was] compiled in 1680 under the order of the leader of the Bulgarian liberation movement, seid Djagfar, by the secretary of his office in the eastern part of Bulgaria, Bashkorostan, by the name of Iman..., including in the collection the most valuable Bulgarian annals: “Gazi-Bardj Tarihi” (1229-1246) by Gazi-Bardj, “Rightful Way, or Pious acts of Bulgarian Sheikhs” (1483) by Mohammed-Amin, “Kazan Tarihi” (1551) by Mohamedyar Bu-Ürgan, “Sheikh-Gali Kitaby” (1605) by Ish-Mohammed and some others...
A Since no translation can quite capture the particular poeticity of Akhmatova's verse, the best solution may be a bilingual edition (we have one in Kunitz, and in Hemschemeyer's two-volume edition of the Complete Poems); I wish Anderson had given us one, framed by her very fine and useful biographical narrative, as well as her commentaries. As it stands, the problematic translation is not saved by the elaborate apparatus of critical essays, notes, and appendices. Indeed, the "critical" essays tend toward running commentary and explication rather than any serious analysis of poetic form. The assumption seems to be that these late, great poems need no justification and that, in the case of Poem Without a Hero, Akhmatova's epic sweep and Pushkinian irony are self-evident. Anderson's focus, accordingly, is on sources and influences, on biographical reference and allusion.
As literary criticism, then, The Word That Causes Death's Defeat is unremarkable. But the compelling story of Akhmatova's life—and of her astonishing modernist poems, still so little known in the West—makes this a curiously appealing book: a collage testament, so to speak, to the workings of poetic power.I like Poem Without a Hero better than Perloff seems to, but I agree with her about the relative merits of the translations she excerpts (though all are hideously inadequate), and it's an interesting read.
Also: The Places of Anna Akhmatova. (Both links via wood s lot.)
A NY Times article by Nicholas Wade describes "a signing system that spontaneously developed in an isolated Bedouin village":
The language, known as Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, is used in a village of some 3,500 people in the Negev desert of Israel. They are descendants of a single founder, who arrived 200 years ago from Egypt and married a local woman. Two of the couple's five sons were deaf, as are about 150 members of the community today.The article goes on to make comparisons with Nicaraguan Sign Language (see my entry for a couple of excellent comments by Leila Monaghan) and makes some dubious assertions about the implications for "innate grammatical machinery"; see Mark Liberman's Language Log post for appropriate skepticism (focused on the reporter, not Mark Aronoff, the quoted linguist). My thanks to dinesh rao for the link!The clan has long been known to geneticists, but only now have linguists studied its sign language. A team led by Dr. Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa says in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today that the Bedouin sign language developed spontaneously and without outside influence. It is not related to Israeli or Jordanian sign languages, and its word order differs from that of the spoken languages of the region.
Felicity Rash conducted "research into linguistic politeness in German-speaking Switzerland (GSS) and into one type of politeness in particular, namely the speech acts of greeting and leave-taking denoted by the German verb grüssen" and reported on the results in "Linguistic Politeness and Greeting Rituals in German-speaking Switzerland" (in Linguistik online):
Greeting "properly" in GSS involves more than merely saying grüezi and adieu. Just as with the formal and informal pronouns of address, Sie and du respectively, levels of formality are strictly observed: thus grüezi (grüess-ech in western regions) is generally accompanied by Herr/Frau + family name; salü/sali, hoi, hallo, tschau + first name are informal greetings, and are used more by young people than old. Leave-taking formulae include ade/adieu or uf widerluege for people with whom one is on formal terms, and tschau, tschüss, salü/sali for people with whom one has an informal relationship. Both initial and terminal formulae are often followed by mitenand or zäme (both meaning 'together') if two or more people are greeted. A greeting is generally accompanied by a hand-shake or, when close friends greet, kisses on alternate cheeks (usually three). Leave-taking formulae are frequently accompanied by other pleasantries, such as schöne Tag [have a nice day], schöne Namittag [have a nice afternoon], schönen Aabig/Aabe/Obe [have a nice evening], schöne Fiirtig/Fiiraabig [have a good day/evening off], schöns Wochenend [have a good weekend], schöni Fäschttäg [Happy Christmas], schöni Wienachte/Oschtere [Happy Christmas/Easter], e guets neus Jahr/guete Rutsch [Happy New Year]; en Schöne [have a nice one] is considered uncouth by some people. Such good wishes are generally answered with danke/merci gliichfalls [thank you and the same to you]; indeed many of my informants stressed the importance of this particular formula.All of my adult informants used a selection of the above formulae and most agreed that it is never enough to just say grüezi to a person one knows: one should always mention the interlocutor's name and it is usually possible to say something topical, even if it is only in recognition of the time of day, as in schöne Namittag. Many informants felt it polite to offer a Gelegenheitsgruss or an Arbeitsgruss if the other person was obviously occupied with a specific task (see section 2.2.xii-xiv below). Otherwise wie gaht's/goht's [how are you], with initial greetings, or schlaf guet [sleep well], with leave-taking, make suitable adjuncts to the basic formulae. One informant told me that in the canton of Wallis it is usual to say gueten Aabe/Obe from 1.00 p.m. onwards. In all other regions the evening begins much later, from about 5.00 p.m. or when the working day has ended...
Many people from both urban and rural areas stressed the differences in greeting habits between people from the different environments: many town-dwellers claimed: 'Auf dem Land grüsst man mehr als in der Stadt' [People who live in the country greet more than those who live in towns], and village-dwellers said: 'In der Stadt wird nicht gegrüsst' [People in towns don't greet one another]. In fact, the rural/urban difference is chiefly a matter of whether or not one greets strangers: wherever one is it is normal to greet a person one knows, but in rural areas of Switzerland, as in Britain and many other countries, one is more likely to greet strangers if one encounters them on a country walk or in a small village. Hanna Hinnen points out another fundamental feature of greeting conventions in rural areas: inter-family feuds in small villages are more acute than in towns, and they can often continue for years. In her study of the village of Feldis in Graubünden, Hinnen reports on families who have not greeted one another for ten years or more. She tells of one child who would be told at the meal table whom she was allowed to greet and whom she should ignore: 'Mein Vater sagte jeweils am Tisch, wen man grüssen durfte und wen nicht. Manchmal durfte man dann einen plötzlich nicht mehr grüssen. Das gab so ein Sippengefühl, das durfte nicht gebrochen werden' [My father would tell us at meal times whom we were allowed to greet and whom not. Sometimes we were suddenly told not to greet a person. There were family bonds that one was not allowed to break]. (Hinnen 2001: 173).Interesting stuff. (Via Transblawg.)Comparisons were made with other countries. America is seen as a land where people ask after a person's wellbeing without necessarily being interested in the answer: in Switzerland, apparently, people really want to know the answer when they ask: 'Wie geht es Dir?' [How are you?]. Italians were recognized by two informants as more open and genuine than the Swiss. Finally, as one nun remarked, God is disappearing from greeting formulae in Switzerland but not in Germany: 'In Deutschland sagt man noch Grüss Gott' [in Germany they still say Grüss Gott]...
From akuaku, a most enjoyable Russian limerick:
Говорят, что у нас на Урале(Via Avva. The slang term vint for 'hard drive' is apparently from Winchester, "the name of one of the first popular hard disk drive technologies developed by IBM in 1973.")
Деревянный компьютер собрали.
Без гвоздей, топором!
Винт, модем, сидиром!
Мышь живую в сарае поймали.Govoryat chto u nas na Urale
Derevyannyi kompyuter sobrali.
Bez gvozdei, toporom!
Vint, modem, sidirom!
Mysh' zhivuyu v sarae poimali.The brilliant version by frequent commenter Noetica (a literal translation is in the extended entry):
They made in the Urals, it's said,
A PC that's wooden, instead.
With no nails, just an axe,
And with cheap hardware hacks -
Like the mouse, which they caught in the shed.
Literal translation:
They say that in the Urals
they've assembled a wooden computer.
Without nails, using an axe!
Hard drive, modem, CD-ROM!
The mouse they caught alive in the barn.
This flashy website (created as a companion to, and presumably teaser for, Ellen Lupton's book of the same name) tells you pretty much anything you want to know about the basics of typography. (Via MetaFilter.)
Sunday's Safire column on the word vegan, in among the labored puns and vaguely relevant references, actually gives me a bit of useful information. I'd always wondered how to pronounce the word, having heard VAY-gan and VEE-gan more or less equally; now I know how the creator of the word, Donald Watson, intends it to be said. Safire ends his piece:
My problem with vegan, now affirmatively used as self-description by roughly two million Americans, is its pronunciation. Does the first syllable sound like the vedge in vegetable, with the soft g? Or is it pronounced like the name sci-fi writers have given the blue-skinned aliens from far-off Vega: VEE-gans or VAY-gans?I even (miracle of miracles) agree with his conclusion: I wouldn't follow the creator's preferred usage if English speakers had settled on another one, but since they haven't, it pleases me to go along with the crotchety geezer (Watson, that is, not Safire).For this we turn to the word's coiner: ''The pronunciation is VEE-gan,'' Watson told Vegetarians in Paradise, a Los Angeles-based Web site, last year, ''not vay-gan, veggan or veejan.'' He chooses the ee sound followed by a hard g. That's decisive but not definitive; some lexicographers differ, and pronunciation will ultimately be determined by the majority of users.
I'll go along with the coiner's pronunciation of VEE-gan. He's a charmingly crotchety geezer who began as a vegetarian. ''When my older brother and younger sister joined me as vegetarians, nonsmokers, teetotalers and conscientious objectors,'' Watson says, ''my mother said she felt like a hen that had hatched a clutch of duck eggs.'' He obviously inherited her feel for language. I'm a carnivore myself — an animal that delights in eating other animals — but won't treat this guy like a fad-diet freak: Watson has a major coinage under his belt, and he's a spry 94.
