THE VALVE.

The Valve "is a literary weblog dedicated to the proposition that the function of the little magazine can follow this form. We mean to foster debate and circulation of ideas in literary studies and contiguous academic areas." All that's up right now is John Holbo's introductory post, but it's long and meaty and deserving of your attention. After a fine blast of Trilling:

From the democratic point of view, we must say that in a true democracy nothing should be done for the people. The writer who defines his audience by its limitations is indulging in the unforgivable arrogance. The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.

and an encomium to the "little magazine," he digs into the depressing subject of the publishing crisis in the humanities, and specifically the problem of too many academic monographs chasing too few readers. His prognosis is both plausible and heartening:

Humanists - particularly in overcrowded, monograph-ridden literary studies - should embrace e-publishing. No dibble-dabbling skeptical toes to see if the water is just right. 'Let's not be hasty' is not prudence but confusion or status anxiety ('everything the internet touches turns to crackpot'.) Which just needs to be gotten over. Let us hear no false dichotomy arguments to the effect that the book is still valuable. No one is proposing the things are to burn. It is a question of ratios. Electronic-to-paper will tip increasingly steeply in favor of the former. Good. Form should follow function. Academic publishing is supposed to get rarified stuff out to the few. Books that exist in editions of 200 are, well, rare books. Sprinkling the academic world's libraries with probably non-optimal assortments of (over-priced) rare books is not the best method of pairing these products with the rare readers. PDF or HTML, served up free online, makes more sense. (And searchable. And ready to be marked up and tagged in intelligent ways. Imagine if we had Thinkr, an academic-journalistic version of Flickr. An electronic environment in which academics could compose elegant bibliographic glass bead games, to guide colleagues to the good and warn them off the bad. How delightful! Just a thought.)...

If overproduction is inevitable, which I grant, the primary question is not how to fund it but how to ameliorate the damage it does us. (Having gone overboard by describing excess scholarship as 'effluent' I should probably add: producing things no one wants to read is perfectly harmless so long as these undesired things do not collectively block the road.) The question (I've asked it before) is how to overproduce with intellectual dignity? (See also, Tim Burke's reply to that post.)

The answer, I think, is that a supplement is needed to a pre-publication peer review process that inevitably hyper-produces hypertrophic 'conformist excellence within the heuristic contraints ...' The supplement should be a hyper-efficient post-publication peer review process that tells you what you might actually want to read.

A simple normative principle. Every scholarly book published in the humanities should be widely read, discussed and reviewed - should have it's own lively blog comment box, not to put too fine a point on it. Because any scholarly book incapable of rousing a modest measure of sustained, considerate, intelligent chat from a few dozen souls who specialize in that area shouldn't have been published as a book - i.e. after several years labor and an average production cost of $25,000. Turning the point around: any book worth that time and expense, that fails to be widely read, discussed and reviewed - that is not given its own blog comment box - has been dramatically failed by the academic culture in which it was so unfortunate as to be born.

His style is lively, his thoughts are provoking, I will be returning regularly to see what his co-valvulators come up with, and I wish this new creation every success.

BOOK MEME.

I don't usually do the meme thing, but I've succumbed before, and when Cassandra beckons, who am I to decline? So here goes.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?
Nabokov's Speak, Memory.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Don't think so. When I was at the age to have crushes, I was reading mainly science fiction, which back then wasn't in the crushworthy-character business.

The last book you bought is?
Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the "First" Emigration, by Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour (and I thank naxosaxur for bringing it to my attention in the comments to this post; I can't wait to read it!).

What are you currently reading?
A bunch of books about Russia in the exciting years before the 1917 revolution(s): Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia, 1880-1918, by Melissa Kirschke Stockdale (Milyukov knew fourteen modern languages in addition to Latin and Greek); A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890-1924, edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal and Martha Bohachevsky Chomiak; Blok's fiery essays of 1907-08 (collected in my handsome OLMA-Press edition of Blok); Voline's The Unknown Revolution—incidentally, I created the Wikipedia page for Volin (or Voline, in the French transliteration he used), an important figure who's been almost forgotten; Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924; and memoirs by Milyukov, Nina Berberova and her first husband Vladislav Khodasevich, and others.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:
I could actually be content with Beth's list:

1. The Iliad
2. Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz
3. Oxford Book of American Verse
4. Collected Works of William Shakespeare (we’re going for length and re-readability here)
5. A Bible (maybe) or The Book of Common Prayer

But I'd probably replace the Bible with a collected Pushkin, and the other selections would vary depending on my mood at the time of choosing. Also, I'd want an OED.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
I'm not. Let them get their own stick.

RIP ROBERT CREELEY.

I regret to report that Robert Creeley died this morning; I found out via Steve Silberman's MeFi post. I'll quote the poem that made such an impression on me when I first read it that I had to buy his Selected Poems:

Kore

As I was walking
  I came upon
chance walking
  the same road upon.

As I sat down
  by chance to move
later
  if and as I might,

light the wood was,
  light and green,
and what I saw
  before I had not seen.

It was a lady
  accompanied
by goat men
  leading her.

Her hair held earth.
  Her eyes were dark.
A double flute
  made her move.

"O love,
  where are you
leading
  me now?"

I expect wood s lot will have a memorial selection of links; look for it.

ROMAN LASER.

First, a story (from this Times piece by Ben Macintyre, which I found at Barista):

But there is one Roman delicacy even Jamie Oliver, our own Apicius, could not bring back to life. Laserpithium was a North African herb of indescribable deliciousness, akin to garlic, but far more tasty. The root, and its juice, was much favoured by Roman chefs; so much so that by around AD50, according to Patrick Faas, the culinary historian, it had been eaten to extinction and was thought to have disappeared altogether.

Then, in the time of Nero, a single plant was found deep in the Cyrenaic desert. If this lone seedling had been cultivated, then today we might still be enjoying Laserpithium with everything. Nero had other plans. The last surviving plant was dug up, shipped to Rome, and eaten by the emperor.

I don't know (though I'm sure one of my readers will) how much truth there is in the story, but I zeroed in on the word "Laserpithium," an ungainly word (made more ungainly by being pointlessly capitalized) that I had to investigate.

I pulled out my trusty Oxford Latin Dictionary and found this entry (omitting the citations):

lāserpīcium ~i(ī), n. lāserpītium. [app. from lac sirpicium, see LASER]
  1 Asafoetida.
  2 The plant which produces this, silphium.

Aha, good old silphium! Silphium, as the OED says, was

A plant of the Mediterranean region, yielding a gum-resin or juice much valued by the ancients as a condiment or medicine; the juice obtained from this plant, also called LASER¹.
The plant has been variously identified as Thapsia garganica or silphion, and Narthex silphium. It was largely cultivated for export at Cyrene on the north coast of Africa.

Now my attention turned to this mysterious "laser," which both the OLD and the OED wanted me to see. The OED calls it "A gum-resin mentioned by Roman writers; obtained from an umbelliferous plant called lāserpīcium or silphium"; the OLD entry is (again omitting citations):

lāser ~eris, n. lāsar. [app. altered and abbreviated from lac sirpicium (see LAC and SIRPE) owing to wrong analysis (piceus) and influenced by piper, siser, etc.]
  1 A strong-smelling resinous gum produced by the silphium plant, asafoetida.
  2 The plant which produces this, silphium.

So that clears everything up (and provides us with a bit of Latin folk etymology—piceus means 'pitchy, resinous'), except for the asafetida business. Is lāser/silphium simply asafetida? If so, 1) why is it said to have disappeared? and 2) why is it said to be "of indescribable deliciousness, akin to garlic, but far more tasty"? Have you ever been around asafetida? Believe me, the "fetid" isn't there by accident.

IRISH MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYZER.

This nifty tool takes Irish input and spits out dictionary definitions and morphological analysis of each word; it will also provide all other forms of the words if you ask it to. I should add that this is Modern Irish we're talking about; if you tried to do it for Old Irish the computer would probably shriek, gibber, and die. (Via ilani ilani.)

LOVE—AND THE PHILOSOPHER.

Dennis Des Chene, a philosopher at Washington University, has a blog Philosophical Fortnights (note the admirable URL); a recent post made me very happy. First off, the cover of Marie Corelli's novel attracts me as it did him:

On my way to Coleridge the other day I couldn’t help but notice the work whose front cover you see here. Could I resist? Of course not. It was that emdash between ‘love’ and ‘philosopher’. I have a soft spot for eccentric punctuation.

Then there's the fact that the heroine of the book "is the daughter of a rich old man who with the Philosopher’s help is completing his lifework, The Deterioration of Language Invariably Perceived as a Precursor to the Decadence of Civilization." And the icing on the cake is that Corelli's own use of language is so dreadful:

Simply because even the million do not know “how” to read. Moreover, it is very difficult to make them learn. They have neither the skill nor the patience to study beautiful thoughts expressed in beautiful language. They want to “rush” something through. Whether poem, play or novel, it must be “rushed through” and done with. […] They have time for motoring, cycling, card-playing, racing, betting, hockey and golf,—anything in short which does not directly appeal to the intellectual faculties,—but for real reading, they can neither make leisure, nor acquire aptitude.

This vague, sieve-like quality of brain and general inability to comprehend or retain imprssions of character or events, which is becoming so common among modern so-called “readers” of books, can but make things very difficult for authors who seek to contribute something of their utmost and best to the world of literature.

Tu quoque, sweet Marie!

MENDACIOUS, YET ALSO IGNORANT.

My wife asked if she should turn off the radio yesterday morning while we were listening to NPR's Weekend Edition; I said no, the stimulation of hollering at the radio was good for me. What occasioned my high blood pressure and her solicitude was an interview with James Cochrane, a former editor at Penguin Books who's written the latest in an endless series of interchangeable English-is-going-to-hell books, with entries on all the usual suspects: disinterested/uninterested, comprised/composed, free gift, you know the drill. What particularly got my goat, however, was an especially ill-informed rant about may and might; alas, just as I was composing my own rant in response, my site (for mysterious reasons) used up its bandwidth allotment for the month and I was unable to post. Now I don't have to compose a detailed analysis of the man's idiocy, because Geoff Pullum ("Q: Is James Cochran, then, nothing but a mendacious pontificating old windbag? A: Yes, it would appear that he is an utter fraud.") and Arnold Zwicky ("he's also ignorant, lazy, and self-important") have done it for me. Thanks, Language Log! And don't anybody buy that book, or I'll have to smack you upside the head.

HIGH-TECH DICTIONARY.

The Business & High-Tech Dictionary Project is a promising new online lexicon:

This project got its start with the realization that there are no web sites that focus on the etymology and usage of business and high-tech jargon terms. There are many business jargon glossary sites, but none that apply rigorous lexicographic standards to the subject.

The world of business, and particularly high-tech business, is fertile ground for neologisms and catch phrases. General and slang dictionaries do not cover many of these terms, either because they are used in too limited a context or because they appear faster than print dictionaries can react. The internet is the ideal medium for capturing these terms and describing how they are used. Not only can a web site respond to new terms and phrases much faster than a print source, but it can also rely on a web of contributors to expand the dictionary and provide citations of usage.

As they say, it's "very much a work in progress," and you can help it grow: go to the Contribute page, read the criteria, and fill out the form.

A sample that gives a sense of how useful (and entertaining) the project can be:

bug, n.

Definition: an error or fault in hardware or software

Etymology: Apparently coined by someone in Thomas Edison's lab; from the insect, probably because it is annoying and difficult to remove. The belief that the term stems from a 1947 incident (see citation) where computer pioneer Grace Hopper found a moth in the Harvard Mark II computer is incorrect. The term predates this incident by almost 70 years.

Last Updated: 13 March 2005

1878 T.EDISON, Josephson's Edison, p. 198 (in HDAS) "Bugs"—as such little faults and difficulties are called—show themselves and months of anxious watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success...is reached.

1889 PALL MALL GAZETTE, 11 Mar., p. 1/1 (in OED) Mr. Edison, I was informed, had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his phonograph—an expression for solving a difficulty, and implying that some imaginary insect has secreted itself inside and is causing all the trouble.

1909 WARE, Pass. English, p. 53 (in HDAS) The phraseology of Edison, to judge from his day-book records, is synthetic, strongly descriptive, and quaint...A "bug" is a difficulty which appears insurmountable to the staff. To the master it is "an ugly insect that lives on the lazy and can and must be killed."

1917, NEW YORK TIMES, 14 Nov., p. 9 Some "bugs," as defects or eccentricities are known, have developed, but up until this time all such are minor matters requiring no delay in the quantity production of engines.

1937, NEW YORK TIMES, 22 Jul., p. 27 "No building code or any code of that kind can be drawn up without bugs, defects or jokers," [La Guardia] commented. "The only thing to do with this code is to try it and be ready to amend it as soon as the bugs, defects and jokers appear. It is exactly like the airplane motor which looked perfect on the drafting board and which will not fly."

1945 [1947?—LH], Mark II Log Book, Naval Museum, Naval Surface Warfare Center, 9 Sep. (in Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 3, No. 3, July 1981, pp. 285-286) Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found.

1958 Engineering, 14 Mar., p. 336/2 (in OED) The seven-and-a-half years..was not an excessive time to..get the ‘bugs’ out of a new system of that kind.

1961, NEW YORK TIMES, 19 Feb., p. 213 In the past few months there has been a disturbing number (or, depending on one's point of view, an encouraging number) of "bugs" reported among the country's ever-increasing machine population.

1970, NEW YORK TIMES, 22 Nov., p. 71 But City Clerk George Edwards assured the critics that the "bugs" were worked out of the system and that, come November, it would finally begin to pay off

1981 USENET: net.news, 25 Aug. Sorry folks - my fault. There was a bug in our rmail program, causing it to core dump in certain cases involving arpanet mail. I claim to have fixed it—let me know of future strangeness.

1999, LOS ANGELES TIMES, 18 Sep.,
p. 1 Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned Friday that "fear-induced" reactions by consumers and businesses to the 2000 computer glitch present a bigger challenge to the economy than the millennium bug itself.

2005 USENET: comp.sys.mac.system,
9 Mar. Is there some timeout value for rsh which can be changed, or is this a bug? Has anyone else had this problem and found a workaround?

THE FIRST LITHUANIAN BOOK.

A satisfyingly comprehensive page on the first Lithuanian book, Martynas Mažvydas's 1547 Catechism, or to be more precise Catechismusa prasty Szadei, Makslas skaitima raschta yr giesmes del kriksczianistes bei del berneliu iaunu nauiey sugulditas... At this page you can read the Foreword (in verse) and even hear the first two lines read aloud, and here is a lengthy discussion of the book (by Leonardas Vytautas Gerulaitis, from Lituanus). All this comes via the ever-industrious Mithridates, who has also put up some excellent links on Kyrgyz in two posts (1, 2).

JAPANESE CALLIGRAPHY

The Tokyo National Museum has a gorgeous online calligraphy collection; I'm not sure what distinguishes the Books & Documents from, say, the Ancient Superb Writings in Japan, but it doesn't really matter—it's all good. Enjoy. (Via Plep.)

NEW LANGUAGE BLOGS.

Bridget Samuels has a blog, ilani ilani, with the enticing description "Putting the 'sin' back in syntax and the 'ho' back in phonology." Recent posts are on protosyntax and snowglobes (or whatever you call them). And in her first post she says this about the blog's name: "The title comes from the Hittite expression for step by step, which perhaps explains the cuneiform background and the little pointy-headed figurine dude in the corner."

I discovered her via Christopher Culver's new Безѹмниѥ [Bezumnie], and anyone who remembers his former blog Nephelokokkygia will be as delighted as I am that he's returned to blogging. In his Welcome post he says:

A year ago I managed a weblog called Nephelokokkygia, charting my interest in comparative Indo-European linguistics. I later took it down, feeling that I would be speaking too authoritatively for an undergraduate student, and frequently finding I had little to write about. Immediately afterward, however, my studies began to give me much more to think about, and I decided to see training in comparative Indo-European linguistics as a stepping-stone to comparative Uralic linguistics. Encouraged by some acquaintances, I have decided to set up a new blog. Безѹмниѥ (Old Church Slavonic for ‘Ignorance’ but the root of the Russian word for ‘Insanity’) will serve as a record of my progress as I have gotten way over my head in a field bent on maddening and impoverishing me.

Finally, Heidi Harley's HeiDeas (ie, "Heidi's") describes itself as "Linguistics, science, books, movies, cartoons, whathaveyou," but so far the focus is on linguistics, with recent posts on the phrase grand theft auto and Longer-than-your-average-compound compounds, the latter ending with a truly magnificent picture of a "run you over horse."

Welcome, all!

CHUKAR.

So I finally got a copy of the new 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, and in flipping through it I happened on the unfamiliar word chukar. It represents a rather handsome partridge, Alectoris chukar, but what caught my attention were the pronunciation and etymology:
chukar \'chə-kər also chə-'kär\ [Hindi cakor & Urdu chakor]

My immediate reactions were:
1) The preferred pronunciation sounds exactly like chukker 'one of the periods of play in a polo match' and doesn't go with the etymology. What's going on?
2) "Hindi cakor & Urdu chakor"? Those are the same word; you're just using two different language names and transcription systems! What's going on?

I went back to the 9th and 10th editions of the dictionary and found an interesting sequence:

9th:
chukar partridge \chə-'kär\ [Hindi cakor]

10th:
chukar \'chə-kər also chə-'kär\ [Hindi cakor]

So here's what I think. In between the 9th (1987) and 10th (1993) editions, the M-W lexicographers discovered that the people who had imported the bird into the western US called it simply "chukar," not "chukar partridge," and furthermore pronounced it in a completely anglicized form, not knowing or caring that that made it a homophone of some polo term. So far so good. But then somebody decided that it wasn't fair to say it was from Hindi, since it was borrowed at a time (two hundred years ago) when there was no clear separation between what we now call "Hindi" and "Urdu," both of them being cultural variants of the local lingua franca then called "Hindustani." This makes perfect sense. But then, instead of calling the etymon "Hindi-Urdu cakor" or "Hindustani cakor," they invented a completely spurious distinction between what look to the untutored eye like two different preforms, apparently because their transcription system for Hindi uses c for the unaspirated \ch\ (presumably using ch for the aspirated consonant), whereas the one for Urdu uses ch for the same phoneme (and presumably chh for the aspirated one). I'm sorry, but this just won't do. If you get a result like that, it's time to revisit your theories of transcription, etymology, or entry writing.

Incidentally, the AHD gives only the etymological pronunciation (chuh-KAHR), which I'm guessing is out of date for American use (or why would M-W have changed it?), but a simpler and better etymology: Hindi cakor, from Sanskrit cakorah.

I'll finish with the charming definition found in Platt's Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English:

cakor S[anskrit] चकोर ćakor, s.m. The Bartavelle or Greek partridge, Perdix rufa, or Tetrao rufus (fabled to subsist upon moon-beams, and to eat fire at the full moon).

APOPHENIA.

I've discovered an excellent new word, apophenia, described here:

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger)...

According to Brugger, "The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity ... apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin."...

In statistics, apophenia is called a Type I error, seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist. It is highly probable that the apparent significance of many unusual experiences and phenomena are due to apophenia, e.g., ghosts and hauntings, EVP, numerology, the Bible code, anomalous cognition, ganzfeld "hits", most forms of divination, the prophecies of Nostradamus, remote viewing, and a host of other paranormal and supernatural experiences and phenomena.

I presume the word (which has not yet made it into the OED) is based on Greek apophaino 'show forth, display' and thus represents a hypothetical *apophainia (the actual Greek derived nouns are apophansis and apophasis), so that the proper UK spelling would be "apophaenia" (though googling that form turns up only a page from a Russian medical dictionary giving it as the etymon of Russian apofeniya; a nice question is whether that can be considered a correct etymology).

Anyone curious about why this word should appeal so to me may consult my entries on Coincidence and More coincidence. Probability theory is extremely unintuitive for us poor Homo sapiens, doomed to see meaning in every damn thing.

ROTOR.

Warning: Do not click on this link if you are subject to motion sickness; it's an unsettling experience anyway. Simon Whitechapel has created a font in which each letter is constantly moving:

Rotor is an experimental script created to realize the concept of letters that literally move on the “page”. It consists of seventeen minimal pairs of graphemes in which the members of each pair are identical except for the way they move: unvoiced consonants and the first member of the pairs m n, w y, l r, h j, q x, a o, “. :”, “, ;”, “ ‘ ’ ”, and “! ?” turn clockwise, voiced consonants and the second member of the pairs turn anti-clockwise (c rocks first clockwise, then anti-clockwise). Of the remaining graphemes, e turns a vertical figure-of-eight and u a horizontal one, and i alone, consisting of two “zoophors” turning clockwise, is unambiguous when at rest.

While I admire the ingenuity, I cannot bring myself to regard this as a Good Thing. (Via No-sword.)

TRANSLATING SHKLOVSKY.

Joan Neuberger's home page (which I searched out because I was so impressed by her book Hooliganism) has a very useful series of links, mostly relating to Russia; one of them is to Sher's Russian Web, which contains (among many other things) Benjamin Sher's piece "Nature vs. Art: A Note on Translating Shklovsky." This goes into considerable detail about two translations of a single paragraph from Viktor Shklovsky's famous essay „Искусство как прием“ ['Art as technique/device']:

"And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs..."

There are two current translations of this key passage from Shklovsky's masterpiece, one in Lemon and Reis's Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (p.4), which includes the opening chapter from [Theory of Prose] and the other in my complete translation of Shklovsky's Theory of Prose (p.6).

The reader may wonder which version is "closer" to the original text, Lemon and Reis's or mine. Well, the answer is: neither one. After looking at the passage carefully and retracing my mental steps, I've come to the inescapable conclusion that neither Lemon and Reis nor I are in actual fact close to the text.

Why?

Because this excerpt, at least, cannot be translated head-on. It can only be approached through the back door of "interpretation." It is a veritable quagmire of elusive, shifting terminology.

There is only one way to translate a passage like this one and that is by interpreting it in terms of the translator's implicit schema or set of preconceptions.

He goes on to give the two translations (as well as a "literal" version); I'll add the original Russian here:

И вот для того, чтобы вернуть ощущение жизни, почувствовать вещи, для того, чтобы делать камень каменным, существует то, что называется искусством. Целью искусства является дать ощущение вещи, как видение, а не как узнавание; приемом искусства является прием „остранения“ вещей и прием затрудненной формы, увеличивающий трудность и долготу восприятия, так как воспринимательный процесс в искусстве самоцелен и должен быть продлен; искусство есть способ пережить деланье веща, а сделанное в искусстве не важно.

I'm dubious about some of his ideas, particularly that delan'e is "a possible misprint or variant for delanie" (I'm curious to know what Russian readers make of his insistence that "I cannot imagine that Shklovsky, in the context of enstrangement (ostranenie, itself a verbal noun, that is, the act of enstranging) would ever speak of 'experiencing a made thing' [delan'e, a substantive]"—the implication that delanie is any less a substantive is of course absurd), but I love this sort of picking of linguistic nits.

As it happens, Katerina Clark, in her Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, translates the crucial phrases (and provides some context) in the course of introducing Shklovsky; I'll highlight in bold the parts that correspond to Sher's translation:

Russian Formalism in some senses began with a lecture by Shklovsky entitled "The Place of Futurism in the History of Language," delivered when he was still a young student, on December 23, 1913, at the Stray Dog Cabaret, a center of theatrical experimentation. A later essay by Shklovsky that makes similar points, "Art as Technique" (Iskusstvo kak priyëm, 1915-1916), the de facto manifesto of early Formalism, contains a quintessential account of the first premise of perceptual millenarianism. Here Shklovsky quotes a passage from Tolstoy's diary of 1897 in which the writer remarks how it is often the case that with a routine task such as dusting the room one cannot recall whether one has dusted the divan or not. If one has dusted it but forgotten about it, it is as if the act had not occurred, so little has it impinged on one's consciousness. Indeed, Tolstoy concludes, "If for many people an entire complex life passes by unconsciously, it is as if this life had not been." Shklovsky goes on to say that "art exists in order to recover the sense of life, in order to feel objects, to make the stone stoney"... Shklovsky, like the Futurist artists and so many other avant-gardists of his time, gives the ability to "see" an object or word absolute priority. He draws a distinction between "seeing" (videnie) and "recognizing" (uznavanie), the latter being what happens when a word or object has been routinized: "Once objects have been perceived several times one begins to perceive them by recognition: an object stands before us, we know about it, but we do not see it." He labels such a predicament "automatization" (avtomatizatsiya), and he provides a solution for it, a technique he calls "making strange" or "defamiliarization" (ostranenie). This technique involves taking things out of their context as a means of seeing them and "using an impeded [zatrudnënnaya] form that increases the degree of difficulty and the length of perception, for the process of perception in art is self-valuable and must be prolonged; art is a means for experiencing the making [delan'ye] of an object, and what is made [sdelannoye] in art is not important."

As Sher says, "A volume could be written about translating this passage alone."

(Incidentally, this appears to be Sher's translation of the full essay.)

KIRKYARD.

A silent conquering army,
The island dead,
Column on column, each with a stone banner
Raised over his head.

A green wave full of fish
Drifted far
In wavering westering ebb-drawn shoals beyond
Sinker or star.

A labyrinth of celled
And waxen pain.
Yet I come to the honeycomb often, to sip the finished
Fragrance of men.

    —George Mackay Brown

WHERE ARE YOUR NON-FICTION NOVELS?

I don't know how many of my readers have worked in bookstores, but I've served time in a number of them, and I can join Ed Brisson, the creator of this comic strip, in asserting: "It's all true, folks!"

JAPANESE NAMES.

Butterflyblue has a great post on Japanese family names. Did you know (to take one startling fact) that Japan has more such a large number of different surnames than any other country in the world (about 120,000)? I'll let you discover various piquant examples in situ, but I can't resist quoting the final paragraph:

Yes, in the Heian period and after, it was common to use "Kuso" ['shit' -- LH] in names, which means just what you think it means. The famous poet "Kinotsurayuki," who wrote the Tosa Diaries, is a notable example. His birth name was "Ako Kuso," which means "my child...shit." Amazing that a man with this kind of name grew up to be successful in life. Nor is he an isolated case. Names like "Kusoko" and "Oguso" were in vogue among the nobility. The book explains that this has to do with the belief in the god of the toilet. Since the toilet god keeps you healthy, it stands to reason he would be helpful in rearing a healthy child. This seems very out of place in the Japan of today, but it persists in a small way in the superstition that a pregnant woman should keep her bathroom clean if she wants to have a beautiful baby.

(Via No-sword.)

Addendum. Mark Liberman points out in the comments, and in more detail in this Language Log post, that the U.S. has far more surnames. Of course, in a sense it's an unfair comparison, because the U.S. has surnames from just about every ethnic/linguistic group in the world, but butterflyblue's statement is clearly incorrect as it stands.

IRISH-SPEAKING SAUSAGE DOG.

In my never-ending quest to bring you the latest, hottest language news, herewith a BBC news story about a new animated television series:

Colin & Cumberland is an introduction to the Irish language through television, radio and online.

Launched on Monday, the website is is aimed at giving 18-40 year olds a taster of the Irish language.

The television programmes encourage the viewer to learn some key Irish phrases.

Cumberland, an Irish speaking sausage dog, is sidekick to Colin, a DJ on an Irish radio station despite the fact he cannot speak the language...

"The project is aimed primarily at viewers who have found the idea of learning a whole new language a bit daunting before," said Kieran Hegarty, BBC Northern Ireland Head of Interative & Learning...

"This is not a structured language course. The content is elementary - greetings, ordering drinks, asking personal questions and so on.

"The website's language content is graded and progresses from single words and phrases to more structured patterns.

They're going to be doing this for Scots Gaelic and Welsh as well. Sounds like fun, even if it doesn't bring about a massive language revival.

(Via Mithridates.)

HOOLIGAN.

I knew the etymology of this word was disputed ("Hooley's gang"? the Irish name Hooligan? Houlihan?), but I hadn't realized how suddenly it sprang on the scene. The OED says "The word first appears in print in daily newspaper police-court reports in the summer of 1898," and the first few citations are all from that year (the first two being from the Daily News: 26 July 5/1 It is no wonder.. that Hooligan gangs are bred in these vile, miasmatic byways; 8 Aug. 9/3 The constable said the prisoner belonged to a gang of young roughs, calling themselves ‘Hooligans’). Furthermore, the borrowing khuligan first appeared in Russian that very year, "introduced... in 1898 by I. V. Shklovskii in one of the monthly columns about life in England that he wrote for Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian Wealth) under the pen name Dioneo"; I take this information from Chapter 1 of Joan Neuberger's Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914, where a footnote adds the exact reference:“Iz Anglii,” Russkoe bogatstvo 9 (September 1898): 128ff. By 1900-01 khuligan was widely used to describe the gangs of young toughs who were frightening respectable citizens all over Russia, and it has never fallen out of favor since.

ETYMOLOGY FOR EVERYONE.

A new book, Word Origins ... and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone by Anatoly Liberman, should help dispel some myths about how words arise. Its publisher, Oxford University Press, says:

Word Origins is the only guide to the science and process of etymology for the layperson. This funny, charming, and conversational book not only tells the known origins of hundreds of words, but also shows how their origins were determined. Liberman, an internationall acclaimed etymologist, takes the reader by the hand and explains the many ways that English words can be made, and the many ways in which etymologists try to unearth the origins of words.

They add "For the past seventeen years, he has been working on a new etymological dictionary of English," and I certainly look forward to seeing the finished product; meanwhile, I'll have to check out his book, which Grant Barrett was kind enough to mention in a comment to this entry (he linked to Nathan Bierma's Chicago Tribune review, apparently part of Bierma's regular On Language column—I'm glad to know somebody other than Safire has one!

Addendum. Thanks to a comment by The Cataloger, I learn that Bierma has a blog.

Update (Oct. 2009). I regret to report that Bierma's column ended last year; the last one I can find is dated September 23, 2008.

JAPANESE ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY.

Matt of No-Sword has posted about the new Nihongogen Daijiten, the 'Big Dictionary of Japanese Etymology.' If I knew Japanese, I would definitely want this book, but I'm disappointed by Matt's description:

The Nihongogen Daijiten is an attempt to solve or at least neutralise [the problem of different etymologies in different dictionaries] by bringing everyone's ideas together in one place, from the carefully backed-up linguistic arguments to crazy stuff some drunk guy wrote down centuries ago.

So, for example, if you look up "Fuji" (as in the mountain), you can see the commonly heard explanation that it derives from the Ainu word huchi, meaning "God of Fire", but also these other theories:

* It evolved from ho-de (火出, "fire comes out")
* It's a shortened version of kefuri-shigeshi (煙茂し, "smoke grows")
* It's a shortened version of fu-ji-na (吹息穴, "hole that breathes out")

... and it comes down to which source you want to trust the most. (Sometimes the editors add a note weighing in on one side, or proposing an entirely different derivation, but this too is scrupulously identified as editorial comment.)

As I said in Matt's comments, I consider it an abdication of the responsibility of an etymologist to simply present a bunch of ideas, some clearly wacko, and let the reader sort them out. If you have to give them all, present the one or two you think plausible in regular type and the rest in small type in a separate paragraph. But at least the groundwork has been laid for someone to come along and do it right.

STIMULATING CONVERSATION.

Ray Davis at Pseudopodium has a thought-provoking post about weblogging as conversation:

Writing helps me suspend disbelief in persistent community. Writing helps me prolong the hope of shared pleasure and cooperative knowledge. If the intoxication's weaker, so is the hangover.

If T. V. and I are right that weblogging can approximate, more closely than any other form, our ideal of written conversation, then we can expect that weblogging will expose, more painfully than any other form, the costs and contradictions of that ideal.

But so long as we just keep reminding ourselves it doesn't matter, I guess it'll be OK. As the poet sang, or, more precisely, as the poet painted backwards in varnish on a hand-hammered and polished copper plate, relief-etched in acid, pressed in multiple pigments, hand-painted, and then sold a few copies of over the next three decades:

If thought is life
And strength & breath;
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

That's Blake, and here's an image of the plate so lovingly invoked. And here's a bit of Montaigne quoted by Ray that resonates strongly with me:

I know by experience this sort of nature that cannot bear vehement and laborious premeditation. If it doesn't go along gaily and freely, it goes nowhere worth going. We say of certain works that they smell of oil and the lamp, because of a certain harshness and roughness that labor imprints on productions in which it has a large part. But besides this, the anxiety to do well, and the tension of straining too intently on one's work, put the soul on the rack, break it, and make it impotent; as happens with water, which because of the very pressure of its violence and abundance cannot find a way out of an open bottle-neck.

It is no less peculiar to the kind of temperament I am speaking of, that it wants to be stimulated: not shaken and stung by such strong passions as Cassius' anger (for that emotion would be too violent); not shocked; but roused and warmed up by external, present, and accidental stimuli. If it goes along all by itself, it does nothing but drag and languish. Agitation is its very life and grace.

I have little control over myself and my moods. Chance has more power here than I. The occasion, the company, the very sound of my voice, draw more from my mind than I find in it when I sound it and use it by myself. Thus its speech is better than its writings, if there can be choice where there is no value.

Original:

Je cognois, par experience, cette condition de nature, qui ne peut soustenir une vehemente premeditation et laborieuse. Si elle ne va gayement et librement, elle ne va rien qui vaille. Nous disons d'aucuns ouvrages qu'ils puent l'huyle et la lampe, pour certaine aspreté et rudesse que le travail imprime en ceux où il a grande part. Mais, outre cela, la solicitude de bien faire, et cette contention de l'ame trop bandée et trop tendue à son entreprise, la met au rouet, la rompt, et l'empesche, ainsi qu'il advient à l'eau qui, par force de se presser de sa violence et abondance, ne peut trouver issue en un goulet ouvert. En cette condition de nature, de quoy je parle, il y a quant et quant aussi cela, qu'elle demande à estre non pas esbranlée et piquée par ces passions fortes, comme la colere de Cassius (car ce mouvement seroit trop aspre), elle veut estre non pas secouée, mais solicitée; elle veut estre eschaufée et reveillée par les occasions estrangeres, presentes et fortuites. Si elle va toute seule, elle ne fait que trainer et languir. L'agitation est sa vie et sa grace. Je ne me tiens pas bien en ma possession et disposition. Le hasard y a plus de droict que moy. L'occasion, la compaignie, le branle mesme de ma voix, tire plus de mon esprit, que je n'y trouve lors que je le sonde et employe à part moy. Ainsi les paroles en valent mieux que les escripts, s'il y peut avoir chois où il n'y a point de pris.

(Essais, Livre 1, Chapitre 10, "Du Parler Prompt ou Tardif," translated here as "Of Ready or Slow Speech.")

Link to Pseudopodium via wood s lot.

MADNESS.

Among the small library of books on Russian history I'm weaving between like a bee among blossoms is Orlando Figes's massive A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution : 1891-1924, where on page 81 I found the following passage in a section on enforced Russianization:

But if forbidding [Polish] high-school students to speak in Polish was merely harsh (at least they had learned to speak in Russian), to do the same to railway porters (most of whom had never learned Russian, which as 'public officials' they were ordered to speak) was to enter into the cruelly surreal. This was not the only act of bureaucratic madness. In 1907 the medical committee in Kiev Province refused to allow cholera epidemic notices to be published in Ukrainian with the result that many of the peasants, who could not read Russian, died from drinking infected water.

And there are people who want to enforce similar English-only policies in the United States. Forward into the cruelly surreal, comrades!

BLACK HUNDREDS.

While reading The Russian City between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (bless UCal Press and its free online books!), I ran across the following sentence in Chapter 3: "One of Chicherin's supporters, angry at the refusal of the duma to vote a protest motion after the mayor's resignation, blamed the petty bourgeois 'black hundreds' (that is, reactionaries) of the third curia for this failure"; the footnote attributed the quote to S. A. Muromtsev, "Moskovskaia duma," Vestnik Evropy (February 1885). This astonished me, because I had never before seen any indication that the term (черносотенцы, chernosotentsy, in Russian) predated the twentieth century. Walter Laqueur, in his book Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia, says "A Russian conservative-nationalist party in Russia emerged only around the turn of the last century... [Earlier such groups] did not amount to much... This changed only with the appearance of the 'Black Hundred' at the time of tsarism's acute crisis in 1904-1905." Does anybody have any information that might explain Muromtsev's use twenty years earlier?

Addendum. Roman, in the comments below, kindly directed my attention to this article by V.V. Vinogradov, which outlines the history of the phrase. In early Russia one meaning of chernyi 'black' was 'subject to taxation'; hence, for example, a chernaya sloboda was a settlement not exempt from taxation. A sotnya was originally a military group of a hundred men, but the word was later applied to various groups, in this context taxpaying shopkeepers and other small businessmen. By the nineteenth century the term had gone out of use, but it was revived in the latter half of the century as an ironic name for the more conservative of the "petty bourgeois" members of municipal legislatures, who were seen as obstructing progressive measures. From there it was an easy step to apply it to the most reactionary elements, the type who were likely to participate in or support pogroms; this had taken place by the beginning of the twentieth century. Muromtsev, therefore, was using it in the earlier (obstructionist) sense. Thanks, Roman!

STANDARD LANGUAGE EXAMPLES.

The Tensor has a very interesting post illustrating one of the occupational hazards of linguistics: the limited pool of standard examples used to demonstrate linguistic phenomena. If you've had any exposure to this sort of thing, think of a language with a very small repertoire of phonemes. Yup, that's the one. Take his quiz for more:

For each question, your answer should be the first example that pops into your head. I predict that, although our answers won't agree every time, with much greater than chance frequency, you'll pick the same language I did. My answer follows each question on the same line in the background color—select the line to see it.

I got 15 of the 23 languages; in this case, that's not a sign of how knowledgeable I am but of how unimaginative linguistic education is (and how unchanging—my grad classes were 30 years ago). His conclusion:

I can think of a solution, but it's hard: learn more "exotic" languages, specialize in language families beyond the familiar (I think we've got Indo-European covered at this point), and fer chrissake stop using English as a source of examples. Did I say "hard"? Maybe I should have said "unrealistic"—I have to admit that I'm not ready to abandon the use of examples from my native language—but a real effort to stay away from the standard example languages can only lead us to a broader perspective and a better basis for cross-linguistic generalizations.

POPJISYO.

The remarkable site called POPjisyo.com describes itself as "a web based pop-up dictionary for Japanese, Chinese, Korean and other languages." I found it via mj klein of Metrolingua (an excellent language-oriented site), who says:

What you do is paste in Japanese words in a text box to look up both the meaning and the correct reading of the word, plus the correct reading of the individual kanji. For instance, if you see a word that contains two or more kanji (such as 国連）but don't know the correct reading, just type in the kanji, press "Word Lookup" and it will provide the meaning of the word. Plus, when you move the cursor over each kanji, it will give you all the readings and meanings of each one (like a dictionary).

But that's not all--you can also create your own study list. All you do is double click on the word, and it will add it to your list, and every time you go back to the site, your list is sitting there, waiting for you. And, if that's not impressive enough, you can email your study list to yourself! I have at least 50 words on my list, which is also sitting in my email inbox.

You can also create a bookmarklet that will allow you to go to, say, a Japanese site and find the meaning of any word by holding the cursor over it. Amazing.

EARTH LANGUAGE.

Yoshiko McFarland says on her biography page:

Yoshiko was born in Osaka, Japan on Dec. 7th, 1941 as the 4th child and 2nd daughter of Masatake Mitsuhashi. Her father died as an army doctor before seeing her. Her first impressed memory was the view of burning Osaka at night with the sound of B29 fleets, sirens and bombs, and the ruins of the big town after the fire.

Her birthday was the day before Pearl Harbor Day in the Japanese calendar. But she had not had much chance to think about that deeply, because teachers for her generation avoided talking about the war. Later, when she had her eyes in the US, she realized her birthday was Pearl Harbor Day in the US, and how Americans feel about that day every year.

This shocked her, and it became the big reason to start to create the Earth Language. She agrees with the idea that Japan should never have big weapons nor fight a war for the sake of world peace. But she wondered what Japanese should do instead.

"We need to prepare rational tools instead of emotional weapons for keeping peace. We need to prepare a common background to feel that everybody on the earth is part of a single family" She couldn't wait to put this idea into a concrete shape.

That concrete shape was Earth Language, a symbolic language with no spoken form. Her about page lists the usual reasons for creating a language for all mankind, and of course this will have no more success than any of the others (sorry, Esperantists), but it's an interesting attempt and carried out with considerable detail. Anyway, better that people should spend their time constructing languages than blowing things up. You go, Yoshiko!

NO COMMENT.

A Reuters story,"Turkey renames 'foreign' animals" (Fri Mar 4, 2005):

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey has renamed some animal species, saying foreign scientists opposed to its territorial integrity had chosen their former names with ill intent, the Environment Ministry has said.

A sheep species previously known as Ovis Armeniana was renamed Ovis Orientalis Anatolicus. A species of red fox was renamed as Vulpes Vulpes rather than Vulpes Vulpes Kurdistanica.

"Unfortunately there are many other species in Turkey which were named this way with ill intentions. This ill intent is so obvious that even species only found in our country were given names against Turkey's unity," the statement said.

The ministry said the animals' new names had been chosen as result of scientific studies.

(Via Turkish Torque, "the first Turkish blog on the Internet by Ugur Akinci.")

OED SF UPDATE.

A year ago I had a post about the OED's hunt for the earliest citations of words used in science fiction. Now there's a snazzy new site for it, whose proprietor, Jesse Sheidlower, says:

For those interested: the Oxford English Dictionary Science Fiction project... has been redesigned and relaunched.

The biggest change is that the OED's database of citations of SF words is now made (mostly) available via the website. The OED does not usually make its work available in this way, but OED has agreed to publicly open up this part of its database to acknowledge the great contribution volunteers have made to this project.

That means that if you contribute a cite, it's viewable by everyone. Here's a link with more information about the citations...

We are also adding quite a few new words: there is an internal list of pending words we have been maintaining and over the next few weeks many of those words will be moved to the main pages. This link... takes you to a list of the most recent additions.

I'm surprised that the earliest cite for "hard science fiction" is 1957 (P. Schuyler Miller in the February Astounding Science Fiction), and if I had access to my early-'50s copies of Astounding, Galaxy, and Fantasy and Science Fiction I'd be tempted to pore through the editorials and book reviews looking for antedates.

Links and Sheidlower quote courtesy of Mark Liberman at Language Log.

BLOGOS.

I somehow have managed not to mention Andrew Joscelyne's Blogos here (though I did mention Aristotle's use of the word), so let me remedy the omission. From the About page:

Blogos puts the logos in the blogosphere. It covers language through multilinguality and translation, localization and global markets, individual skills and emerging technologies, enablers and barriers, knowledge and speculation. Primarily a tracker of news and views about the global language industry, it also explores fruitful links between new practices, language technologies and the world of ideas.

Recent posts I'm glad not to have missed are The 40 language dash, about people who learn lots and lots of languages (and touching upon "the intriguing subject of the glosserotics of multilingual love affairs in history"), and The French disconnection, a discussion of "Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s call to resist Google’s plan to digitize a number of (U.S.) library holdings" on the grounds that this would somehow "be partial and informed by an ‘American’ point of view." I am in complete agreement with his conclusion:

But for Jeanneney, if digitization is indeed financed by the tax payer, it ensures that culture escapes the consumer-sensitive rankings of a search engine such as Google. His idea would be to federate Europeans in an act of resistance against the hyperpower of Google rankings, and maintain that famous “multipolar” world, wherein other options prevail beyond the profit motive. The irony here is that the French would probably seek to dominate a European ranking of digitized culture in just the same way the Americans are criticized for dominating the rankings at global cultural level.

Reducing the perceived hyperpower of Google is best achieved by people power working with Google – multilingualizing it, multiculturalizing it, forcing it to handle a greater diversity of needs. It is unlikely that resistance is best served by inventing yet another Euro search engine with, inevitably, government backing.

TRANSLATION FRACAS, UNMINCED.

Matt of No-sword has a post, typically both informative and hilarious, about a squabble over a Donald Ritchie review of The Tower of London: Tales of Victorian London, by Natsume Soseki, translated and introduced by Damian Flanagan. Matt quotes a couple of magisterially dismissive remarks by Ritchie like "The value of the present collection is in the fact that even if it is negligible the author is not, and thus all information is welcome" and adds:

Sort of "yes, yes, throw it on the Souseki pile", which you have to admit is understandable, given that he's spent his entire career introducing Japanese culture to English-speaking audiences. He must be getting sick of the early modern Japanese canon by now, particularly its minor outlying works. (Even by inconceivably major authors.)

He then quotes a couple of letters sent to the Japan Times in response to the review, one of which, from Flanagan himself ("His words' minced:unminced ratio is very small"), complains about Ritchie's allegedly mistranslated bits of Souseki, whereupon our indefatigable blogger digs up the actual Souseki bits in Japanese. I wish he had gone on to give his opinion of the translations, since I'm certainly in no position to do so, but it's interesting stuff anyway.

Incidentally, Matt's doing a freewheeling translation (blog-style, with the latest entry at the top) of Souseki's famous Botchan, finding himself dissatisfied with the existing ones. He promises that it "won't be a polished, balanced translation" and intends to finish it by the end of March; should be a good read.

XENOLINGUISTICS AND FUTURESE.

Justin B Rye has a Primer In SF Xenolinguistics: after a rundown of the silly pseudo-alien names favored by the less serious-minded sf writers, he says:

If you're the kind of person who read the Silmarillion just for the linguistic appendices (No? Oh, well, it's only me then), you'd probably prefer your SF languages not to be quite like the ones lampooned above. So what's the alternative? Well, I suppose you could use the Simpsons Manoeuvre - to quote Kang: "No, actually I'm speaking Rigellian. By an astonishing coincidence our two languages are exactly the same!" But to the best of my knowledge, only Star Trek has ever had the nerve to offer this excuse with a straight face (see eg "Bread and Circuses")... so if that's out, you're left having to imagine a real alien language. What could that be like?

Well, there are plenty of ways in which alien languages could be extremely unearthly...

As you can see, the man has a sense of humor, but he knows his stuff. This becomes even clearer in his companion page on Futurese: The American Language in 3000 AD, in which he lovingly shepherds English through a thousand years worth of sound changes, coming up with the following set of versions of Aelfric:

1000 AD: Wé cildra biddaþ þé, éalá láréow, þæt þú tæ'ce ús sprecan rihte, forþám ungelæ'rede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecaþ...
2000 AD: We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly...
3000 AD: ZA kiad w'-exùn ya tijuh, da ya-gAr'-eduketan zA da wa-tAgan lidla, kaz 'ban iagnaran an wa-tAg kurrap...

Tremendous fun for anyone with the slightest degree of sf fandom.

I had run across this earlier but forgotten about it, so I was glad to be reminded today by Kattullus's excellent MeFi post, which also links to a college course in "Extraterrestrial Language"!

DOMINICA.

The following is a public service announcement. I just read "Very Bad News," a review (of books on collapse and catastrophe by Jared Diamond and Richard A. Posner) by Clifford Geertz, and while I was mildly perturbed by the idea that civilization might collapse or the world be destroyed, what really got my goat was the following sentence: "On the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, two scarred and impoverished third-world societies, Franco-African Haiti and Spanish-Indian Dominica, offer, side by side, a study in contrasts..." Now, I know Geertz is a great anthropologist, and I know his specialty is Southeast Asia and North Africa, but really, this is pathetic, and shows how ignorant Americans (exemplified here by both Geertz and the crack editorial staff of the NYRB) are of the Caribbean (and Latin America in general). So: the eastern half of Hispaniola is the Dominican Republic. Several hundred miles to the east (and a bit south) is Dominica (pronounced dom-i-NEE-ca), which is an entirely different country. Sheesh.

Update. Geertz apologizes for the error.

DUNGLISH.

Natashka's interesting new blog Dunglish features unfortunate attempts by Dutch-speakers to write things in English. Recent entries have highlighted the Small Talk Eating House," a sign that says "Beware of pickpockets. Please hang your vallues on the hook," and an advertising campaign whose slogan, "More drinking, less thinking," is intended to oppose booze! Lots of fun if you enjoy this sort of thing, as who doesn't?

TALKING TO THE KING OF NEPAL.

Courtesy of Mithridates, this vital update on the Nepali royal language:

Nepal’s king has his own type of language like the ‘King’s English’ in Britain. There has been a noticeable change in the King’s language in recent times. The royal family members of Nepal are addressed by the people with some specific words like: ‘maushuph’[he/him or she/her] ‘gari+baksyo’ [did], gari+baksanechha [will do], sukala [sleep], bhuja [lunch or meal] jyunar [eat food], darshan+bhet [seeing, meeting] etc. These terms are only used if one has to address the royal family members.

Before the restoration of democracy in 1990, general public, except for King’s relatives, were not entitled to use the King’s Nepali. Nowadays, general people in urban areas copy King’s Nepali and speak in a kind of fashion. But there is restriction for the general public to formally or publicly speak this language for themselves. Instead, political leaders as well as others do not hesitate to address the king or the royal family members in general terms with media or others like: woha [him], garnu+bhayo [did], bhet [seeing, meeting]. But they must use the King’s Nepali when they are to speak in front of the king or any formal programs.

See the Mithridates entry for more links on Nepali.

NEMEROV AND HUI TSUNG.

One of my favorite radio events each day is The Writers Almanac, with its beautiful theme music, its rundown of writers' birthdays, and Garrison Keillor's mellifluous reading of a poem (and my thanks to WAMC for running it twice every morning, doubling my chances of catching it). Today's poem was "Writing," by Howard Nemerov, which begins:

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice...

I was enjoying it, even if I didn't feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, when a reference caught my ear:

...The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.'

Who was this emperor Hui Tsung? Being the type who can't simply accept such things as part of the poetic tapestry, I went to my reference books and discovered an unhappy tale. Hui Tsung, or Huizong as he is known in this pinyincentric world, should never have been an emperor. I'll let the Columbia Encyclopedia tell the tale:

Politically he was a rather ineffectual ruler, but he was said to have devoted all his spare time to painting and to the reorganization of the Imperial Academy of Painting. Through his encouragement, art collecting came into vogue during his reign. The emperor himself was an accomplished artist, specializing in delicately colored bird-and-flower paintings. There are also many such paintings by others that have his seals and signatures—affixed by the emperor to signify his approval of the work of artists who laboriously copied his own paintings. Most of these works show intimate, detailed studies of nature, executed in a refined, sensitive, and meticulous manner. He abdicated in 1125 when his attempts to buy off the advancing Jurchens failed. In 1126 the Northern Sung capital at Kaifeng was overrun by the Jurchens, and he was captured together with the new emperor and taken to Manchuria, where he died in captivity.

I opened Pound's Cantos, as I often do when I'm investigating Chinese history, to see what that mad magpie might have had to say about the matter in the Chinese cantos; in this case there was only the disappointing half-line "HOEÏ went taozer." But this was shortly followed by the pleasing passage

...The tartar lord
      wanted an alphabet
by name Akouta, ordered a written tongue for Kin tartars

—which brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to the topic of writing.

(For "Akouta" see the Wikipedia entry on the Jin (Chin) Dynasty, whose first ruler, Jin Taizu, had the given name of Aguda.)

DEVON DIALECT.

Ow be knackin' vore?

John Germon was born and raised in the Devon stannary town of Ashburton. He attended both the Primary and "The Big School" and has a keen interest in local dialect...

John is chairman of the Ashburton Devon Dialect Club and has compiled this A-Z. If you want to know how to pronounce the words in a true Devon accent, just click on the link and John will read them out to you.

Via Plep.

EFNE TO SECGENNE.

As a followup to this post:

þys is efne to secgenne

Ic æt
þa pluman
þe wæron
þære iscieste

and þe
þu eallmæst cuþice
hordodest
for morgenmete

Forgief me
hie wæron smæcclice
swa swete
and swa cealde

This gem is from Hwæt!: a little Old English anthology of American modernist poetry, translated and edited by Peter Glassgold (which I will obviously have to find a copy of); it was quoted by a commenter in a wonderful thread at Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light. Don't read the comments until you've at least tried to identify the Old English texts in the post!

There are some wonderful things in the comments, too; for instance, John Emerson (whose erudite and fanciful comments frequently grace this site as well) provides some modern Icelandic equivalents for place names:

Scarborough (England) = Skörðuborg

Istanbul = Tyrkjagarður (Mikligarður -- old name)

Dardanelles = Hellusund

Bosporus = Sjávíðarsund

These come from a site that tries to provide (mostly invented) Icelandic equivalents for every place name! ("The hyperpurists of the ‘Nýyrðasmiðja’ regard the total icelandicization of all existing geographical names as an ultimate necessity. We are not ashamed to go this far...")

Oh, and all of this has led me to the online version of Bosworth and Toller's 1898 Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Splendid, hwæt?

AUGUSTINE ONLINE.

While reading The Beacon at Alexandria by Gillian Bradshaw (I'm a sucker for historical novels) it occurred to me that the book's heroine Charis was the same age as Augustine of Hippo, both being around sixteen in 371, when the novel opens (Charis in Ephesus and Augustine in Carthage), so I pulled out the copy of the Confessions that I'd had for years and never read (the Penguin edition translated by the unfortunately named R.S. Pine-Coffin, about whom there is no information either in the book or online). Naturally, I wanted to compare it with the Latin original, and a moment's googling produced the mother lode: the 1992 edition, with commentary, by James J. O'Donnell (who has a new biography of Augustine coming out next month).

Each book of the text has a link to introductory commentary on that book, and each section of the text has a link to detailed comments on the section. Links within the commentary connect not only to the section of text directly being annotated, but also to other parts of the text and commentary. Footnotes in the commentary appear at the end of each book; the footnote numbers are links from the commentary text to the footnote and from the footnote text back to the commentary. Where possible, links have been provided to the texts of classical works and Biblical passages cited in the commentary. Links at the end of each book of the text and commentary allow navigation to the next book or the previous one of text, commentary, or both together.

Just in the commentary on the bit of Book I I've read so far, O'Donnell has cited T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Durrell (Justine: 'Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?'), and Wittgenstein, so the scholarship is not of the dry-as-dust variety. It's amazing to me that such a recent edition is freely available, and I thought I'd pass it along.

I have to say, I'm disappointed to find that Augustine disliked the Greek language: "quid autem erat causae cur graecas litteras oderam, quibus puerulus imbuebar?" (Pusey: "But why did I so much hate the Greek, which I studied as a boy?")

WHERE IS THE IMPRIMATUR?

The library blog It's All Good (or rather its 15th-century avatar Bibliotheca Ephemeris) has scored a real coup: an interview with an abbot who has returned in high dudgeon from Mainz, where he visited Johannes Gutenberg:

BE: Abbot Michael, can you please tell us what you discovered?
AM: This upstart Gutenberg claims he has created a device to allow ink to be directly applied to paper, without the intervention of a scribe! He has adopted a wine press, of all things, and places tiny pieces of wood on the face of the press, slathers ink all over the wood, and then presses the letters to the paper. He claims he can turn out dozens of pages a day this way.
BE: But you do not seem to be impressed.
AM: It is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. This is not a dignified scriptorium, where monks illuminate manuscripts with leaf and ink. No, this is brute force work, simply dedicated to speedily turning out books. Can you tell me what civilized person would want this?

I was particularly moved by this plaintive outcry:

This is the worst part. ANYONE can set this type. Words can be changed by the typesetter, and who would be able to tell the difference? Do the typesetters require years of seminary training, an understanding of Greek, Latin, and Aramaic, and proper supervision by the hierarchy? No! And anything at all can be distributed like this. Where is the imprimatur, the nihil obstat? This will require the establishment of new institutions to prevent heresy from being introduced, to prevent the children and the feeble-minded from being misled.

(Thanks to Mark Liberman at Language Log for the link.)

THE LANGUAGE GUY.

A new blog, The Language Guy, describes itself as "Commentary on how language is used and abused in advertising, politics, the law, and other areas of public life. You can think of it as a linguistic self defense course in which you and I prepare ourselves to do battle with the forces of linguistic evil." The author, Mike Geis, says of himself:

After receiving a B. A. in philosphy from Rice University, I moved on to M.I.T. where modern theoretical linguistics was brought into being by Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, and others. After receiving my Ph.D., I worked at the University of Illinois for five years and then left to teach and do research at The Ohio State University until I retired in 1995. Perhaps because of my early interest in philosophy, I switched my focus from theoretical linguistics to more humanistic pursuits, applying what I had learned as a theortical linguist to such areas as advertising, politics, journalism, the law, and conversation. I wrote "The Language of Television Advertising," "The Language of Politics," and "Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction." I also wrote and consulted on linguistic issues arising in such legal domains as trademark law, deceptive advertising, and jury instructions in death penalty cases.

An interesting background, and it promises to be an interesting blog; it started off with an entry on what linguistics is and why people study it, and has continued with analyses of forms of speech like "I don't mean to X" (which is invariably followed by doing precisely X). Welcome to Blogovia, Mike!

(Via the indefatigable aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)

MA FI HADA.

Any Arabic speakers out there willing to do me a favor? I would very much like a translation of the lyrics of the song "Ma fi hada" (I've put the Arabic in the extended entry, copied from here). A transliteration would be nice, too, but I realize that's extra work, and I can work it out between the Arabic writing and an audio file if I have to. Anyway, any assistance will be deeply appreciated.

ما في حدا لا تندهي ما في حدا
عتم و طريق و طير طاير عالهدا
بابن مسكر و العشب غطى الدراج
شو قولكن صاروا صدى؟
مع مين بدك ترجعي بعتم الطريق
لا شاعلة نارن و لا عندك رفيق
يا ريت ضوينا القنديل العتيق بالقنطرة
يمكن حدا كان اهتدى و ما في حدا
يا قلب اخرتا معك تعبتني
شو بك دخلك صرت هيك و شو بني
ياريتني سجرة على مطل الدنيي
و جيرانها غير السما و غير المدى ما في حدا

CAJUN FRENCH.

The Department of French Studies of Louisiana State University has a web page called Un glossaire cadien-anglais/A Cajun French-English Glossary:

A number of resources exist for those looking for Cajun French vocabulary, but all of them pose problems for LSU students in Cajun French because they are either too regional in scope, too inconsistent in spelling, or too theoretical in approach for beginning students. Therefore, in response to our students' expressed need for a basic vocabulary resource, we are in the process of building a glossary...

As they emphasize, it's a work in progress, but it's already very useful, especially since they've added audio files to many entries. The unofficial nature of the language is clear from an entry like this:

cacher-faite (n.m.) [KAH SHEH FET] hide and go seek game. [A preferred spelling has not been established. Variant spellings include: cachez-fête, caché-faite, cache-et-fête, etc.]

(Via Mithridates, where you will find other Cajun resources, like the Kreyol Lwiziyen site, which has a short English-Creole glossary.)