I'm basically going to repost here an entry from No-sword, because it's an interesting question that I'm completely incompetent to answer, and I thought perhaps some of my more theoretically inclined readers might have some interesting comments:
Japanese is considered to have SOV word order and topic-comment sentence structure. So one uncontroversial way for a man to casually say, for example, "I don't understand English" is俺は英語が分からないBut in spoken Japanese, it's very common to hear something like this (note that the particles (wa and ga) have been dropped and wakaranai slurs into wakannai; these are uncontroversial changes):
ore wa eigo ga wakaranai
I (topic) English (subject) be-understood-NOT
"As for me, English is not understood"
= "I don't understand English"英語分かんない、俺
eigo wakannai, ore
English be-understood-NOT, I
The interesting thing about this sentence is the pronoun tacked on the end. This is unique to spoken Japanese (although of course you see it in some written Japanese that closely mimics spoken Japanese). The opinion in most official grammars is that nothing is supposed to come after a sentence's main verb except for particles, like yo for emphasis or ka for interrogation.Like Diane in Matt's comment thread, I immediately thought of the colloquial French construction "J'sais pas, moi," but in that case the pronoun is left in its normal position but repeated for emphasis at the end, an easier deviation to explain.So my first question is, do we interpret this as an 俺、英語分かんない in which the comment (英語分かんない) has been emphasised by moving it up to before the topic (俺)? "Comment-fronting"?
Or is it considered a pro-dropped 英語分かんない (a well-formed sentence if you overlook the missing が) to which a specification of the topic (俺) has been attached as an afterthought?
Or does it depend on context? Or is it something entirely different? Or impossible to determine?
Coming soon to a venue near you: Miguel de Cervantes will be promoting Don Quixote! (Thanks to Brecht for the tip.)
Addendum. It occurs to me that Harper-Collins will probably be taking this embarrassing page offline at some point, so I should reproduce it here for the benefit of posterity:
Miguel de Cervantes Events
Bookstore Appearances
No Events in this category.
Libraries, Museums, Fairs, Others
Wednesday, May 11, 2005 06:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman
MUNK CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES/Talk and roundtable discussion
Munk Centre, Campbell Conference Centre, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto
Tuesday, May 17, 2005 06:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote
QUEEN SOFIA SPANISH INSTITUTE/Discussion and Signing
684 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021
Friday, June 03, 2005 06:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote
INSTITUTO CERVANTES/Panel Discussion on Don Quixote
211-215 East 49 Street, New York, NY 10017
Thursday, June 23, 2005 07:00 PM
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote
FREE LIBRARY OF PHILADELPHIA/Montgomery Auditorium
1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103
On TV
No Events in this category.
On the Radio
No Events in this category.
In Print
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
GLOBE & MAIL
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Cervantes, Miguel de, will be promoting Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
EDMONTON JOURNAL
Wagiman (or Wageman) is a nearly extinct language of northern Australia; the Wagiman online dictionary is a nicely done site that provides lexical and other information. The Introduction says:
Wagiman is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in Australia's Northern Territory. At the moment there are about ten people who speak Wagiman, mostly old people. Wagiman belongs to what linguists call the non-Pama-Nyungan language family. Within that family, it appears to fall into the Gunwinyguan language group, but it is not closely related to any other Aboriginal languages.Ten speakers and "several" dialects! Now, that's what I call stubborn diversity. (Via Plep.)There are several dialects of Wagiman, with the most prominent distinction being between matjjin no-roh-ma 'light language' and matjjin gu-nawutj-jan 'heavy language'. Helen Liddy and Lenny Liddy speak light language, and Lulu Martin, Paddy Huddlestone and Clara McMahon speak heavy language. There is not all that much difference, and no Wagiman speakers have any trouble understanding one another.
Thanks to a comment by ben wolfson, I present you with the preview for a forthcoming linguistic thriller:
"CHOMSKY"Go on, read the whole thing, you know you want to. But don't blame me, blame Stephen Will Tanner, who is solely responsible. I'd better provide the disclaimer in case you need it before you reach the end:
THE MOTION PICTUREAnnouncer: The English Language is about to E*X*P*L*O*D*E!
No refuge is safe from linguistic peril!
Mom: Here, I brought up "Gravity's Rainbow" for a goodnight story.
Kid: Aw, Mom! Why did you bring that book I don't want to be read to out of up for?
Mom: Aiiiiieeee! My brane is melting!Announcer: A secret government agency must find a new ally...
MIB: Mr. Chomsky? We need your help with a linguistic crisis.
I'm with intelligence....
MOST OF THE JOKES IN THIS POST WERE BOTH OBSCURE AND TENUOUS. THEREFORE, WE ARE PROVIDING PHONE "HUMOR TECH-SUPPORT".((ring))((ring))((ring))((ring))*click*
This is 1-800-KIB-OLUV. If you do not understand an acronym,
press 1 now. If you are having trouble with a running gag, press 2.
If you need support on pre-1993 jokes, press 3. Harry Claude Cat's
posts are Not Funny, so if you are calling about them, please hang up
now.Woody Allen: And if I wanted a girl to explain Chomsky to me?
Woman: It'd cost you.
In an effort to find out something about the Isaurians and their language (a vain effort, and if anybody knows anything beyond "warlike" and "unknown" I'd appreciate hearing about it) I ran across Vassil Karloukovski's Page, with its many Bulgarian-related links; what particularly attracted my attention was the section devoted to The Language of the Huns, Chapter IX of O. Maenchen-Helfen's The World of the Huns (University of California Press, 1973). I'll quote the meaty passage on Etymologies:
We must be prepared to meet among the names borne by Huns Germanic, Latin, and (as a result of the long and close contact with the Alans) also Iranian names. Attempts to force all Hunnic names into one linguistic group are a priori doomed to failure."Let no one," warned Jordanes, "who is ignorant cavil at the fact that the tribes of men use many names, the Sarmatians from the Germans and the Goths frequently from the Huns." Tutizar was a Goth and Ragnaris a Hun, but Tutizar is not a Gothic name and Ragnaris is Germanic. The Byzantine generals who in 493 fought against the Isaurians were Apsikal, a Goth, and Sigizan and Zolban, commanders of the Hun auxiliaries. Apsikal is not a Gothic but a Hunnic name; Sigizan might be Germanic. Mundius, a man of Attilanic descent, had a son by the name of Mauricius; his grandson Theudimundus bore a Germanic name. Patricius, Ardabur, and Herminiricus were not a Roman, an Alan, and a German as the names would indicate, but brothers, the sons of Aspar and his Gothic wife. There are many such cases in the fifth and sixth centuries. Sometimes a man is known under two names, belonging to two different tongues. Or he has a name compounded of elements of two languages. There are instances of what seem to be double names; actually one is the personal name, the other a title. Among the Hun names, some might well be designations of rank. It is, I believe, generally agreed that the titles of the steppe peoples do not reflect the nationality of their bearers. A kan, kagan, or bagatur may be a Mongol, a Turk, a Bulgar; he may be practically anything.
The names of the Danube Bulgars offer an illustration of the pitfalls into which scholars are likely to stumble when they approach the complex problems of the migration period with their eyes fixed on etymologies. In spite of the labor spent on the explanation of Bulgarian names since the thirties of the past century, there is hardly one whose etymology has been definitely established. The name Bulgar itself is an example. What does it mean? Are the Bulgars "the Mixed ones" or "the Rebels?" Pelliot was inclined to the latter interpretation but thought it possible that bulgar meant les trouveurs. The Turkish etymology was challenged by Detschev; he assumed that Bulgar was the name given to the descendants of the Attilanic Huns by the Gepids and Ostrogoths and took it for Germanic, meaning homo pugnax. Still another non-Turkish etymology has been suggested by Keramopoulos. He takes Bulgarii to be burgaroi, Roman mercenaries garrisoned in the burgi along the limes. Without accepting this etymology, I would like to point out that in the second half of the sixth century a group of Huns who had found refuge in the empire were known as fossatisii. Fossatum is the military camp.I love that "sometimes biased by pan-Turkism"; yeah, I'd say that someone who derives shogun from the Qarluq title sagun may have a teeny little bias somewhere. I'm not sure how far one can trust his "profound erudition."In addition to the objective difficulties, subjective ones bedevil some scholars. Turkologists are likely to find Turks everywhere; Germanic scholars discover Germans in unlikely places. Convinced that all proto-Bulgarians spoke Turkish, Németh offered an attractive Turkish etymology of Asparuch; other Turkologists explained the name in a different, perhaps less convincing way. Now it has turned out that Asparuch is an Iranian name. Validi Togan, a scholar of profound erudition but sometimes biased by pan-Turkism, derived shogun, Sino-Japanese for chiang chün, "general," from the Qarluq title sagun. Pro-Germanic bias led Schönfeld to maintain, in disregard of all chronology, that the Moors took over Vandalic names.
In view of the difficulties concerning the study of Hun names—the inexactness inherent in transcriptions, the morphological changes which many names must have undergone, the ever present possibility that the names were Gothicized, the wide margin of error in the manuscript tradition—in view of all these one cannot help marveling at the boldness with which the problem of the Hunnish language has been and still is being attacked.
(I expect this post to be of particular interest to John Emerson, who has cited Maenchen-Helfen in his post "The Steppe Barbarians in Eurasia.")
In this week's New Yorker there's an article by Elizabeth Kolbert called "The Climate of Man—II." (It's not now online, as is the first part of the three-part series.) It's very interesting, but I had to get over my initial disappointment that it wasn't about Akkad, since that's what it begins by talking about. What concerns me here is a phrase in the third sentence of the piece: "Sargon—Sharru-kin, in the language of Akkadian—means 'true king'; almost certainly, though, he was a usurper." My initial reaction (aside from a reflexive grumble about falling editorial standards) was that the un-English phrase "the language of Akkadian" was a garden-variety confusion between "the Akkadian language" and "the language of Akkad": she wrote one, half-changed it to the other, and no editor caught it (mutter, grumble). But it occurred to me that it might be taken as parallel to "the island of Manhattan," and it also occurred to me that this might be an example of the increasing lag between the state of my own dialect and the ever-changing state of the language as she is spoke. So I'll ask the Varied Reader: does the phrase "the language of Akkadian" sound acceptable?
Randy Cohen proposes an idea that appeals to me: "a literary map of Manhattan—not of its authors' haunts but those of their characters."
I began thinking about this map years ago while reading Don DeLillo's ''Great Jones Street.'' Bucky Wunderlick gazes out the window of his ''small crowded room'' at the firehouse across the street. I realized: there's only one firehouse on that street and few buildings that contain tiny apartments rather than commercial lofts. I know where Bucky Wunderlick lives. Or would live if he existed. He's got to be at No. 35. Knowing this made walking around the neighborhood like walking through the novel. But I walked without a map. Shouldn't there be a map of imaginary New Yorkers?He gives a number of examples of fictional locations, both exact and vague, and "can imagine maps of Brooklyn, Chicago, London and more." (There is a certain amount of this in The Atlas of Literature by Malcolm Bradbury, but it covers too many areas and centuries to have much detail on any one place.) He says "Since nobody is widely enough read—I'm not widely enough read—to know the haunts and houses, the offices and bars and subway stops of so diverse a population, I appeal to Book Review readers to send in their favorites"; the address is bookmap@nytimes.com.It would be a lush literary landscape—the house on Washington Square where Catherine Sloper waited and yearned, the coffee shops where the characters of Ralph Ellison and Isaac Bashevis Singer quarreled and kibbitzed, the offices where John Cheever's people spent their days, the clubs where Jay McInerney's creatures wasted their nights, the East 70's and Upper West Side avenues where the Glass family bickered (Salinger gives several addresses), downtown where Ishmael wandered the docks.
Update. The website is up.
For a good summary of the pronunciation of h in classical and ecclesiastical Latin, see Geoff Pullum's self-flagellating post in yesterday's Language Log. And don't miss his touching peroration:
This morning in Language Log Plaza little knots of staff writers are talking to each other in low voices and then breaking off when I come by. When I go into our coffee shop, the Latté Linguistica, people get theirs to go so that they won't have to talk to me; they rush off, or pretend to be looking down into their coffee cup as if they thought they'd seen a bug drop in there... I'm being ostracized. I made a remark on Language Log without checking it out yesterday. And today I am the lowest form of linguistic slime. I am no better than a BBC science reporter.I am probably not going to be here very much longer. The call will come to present myself in the Big Office where MYL sits, and I will be introduced to the security guard who will help me carry the things from my desk to the front door. Then they will shut down my email account and scrub the hard disk on my desktop machine in preparation for handing it to the new staffer who will replace me...
The poet Robert Kelly has been quoted on LH before; here are his thoughts on the main focus of this blog:
Sermon on Language(Via wood s lot.)This - I mean whatever comes to mind when you read this - is an organization - from the proto-Greek organ-grindo, "the music swells, the monkey dances"- dedicated to enshrining reality deep in the heart of itself. Its code name is Language, and it was invented a war or two ago - actually during the Second Gobi War, the one that ended the paleolothic - to con- fer on sunlight such blessings as "It is sunning," or "The sun is raining," or "Shine happens," according to the by-laws of your local lodge. For individual languages - like Basque or Xhosa or Cantonese or French - are in fact created and sustained as lodges of the ancient freemasonic society of Speakers, the ones with Language on their side, the so-called humans. All other societies -and every form of society- is subsidiary to this, this elegant and persuasive artifact which self-embeds its rules and by-laws at once in every member who pays the dues of breath - what we call speaking. You do not have to think very long or hard to learn that all mysteries are ensconced in language and extractable from language, and that obedience to the intricacies of language in turn reveals the exact astro-dynamic efflorescent energy of place and circumstance we nickname Truth. The con- juncture. The lock. The habit the heart wears in the market, the song it hums in the bathroom, the text encoded in its midnight snores. Language is astrology indoors, it is the moon in the bed- room and the sun in your pocket, its rules are your rules and there is hardly a rumor - though there is a rumor - of anyone disobedient to its prescriptions. Timid Nietzsche and meek Blake followed its laws like lambs, and Lenin lay down with De Maistre to graze on public language. Only the one - there was one - who woke up to the sleep of named things ever broke the lodge law and got away with it. All the way away. Faint- ing, we follow.
Robert Kelly
20 April 1993.
While we wait for La grande rousse to return from hiatus (or, as she puts it, activités carnetières limitées), there is consolation in the form of Les Amoureux du français, a language blog run by Fabienne Couturier, an editor at La Presse, and Paul Roux, "conseiller et chroniqueur linguistique." This week they discuss "Les mots en «oune»"—a category peculiar to Québec. To whet your appetite, the list starts off with three sexy items:
Bizoune : pénis (se dit aussi « zoune »)Thanks to Beth of The Cassandra Pages for the tip!
Foufoune : fesse
Noune : vulve
"Divan" is one of the most complicated words I know. The American Heritage Dictionary gives the following definitions:
1. A long backless sofa, especially one set with pillows against a wall.The OED adds the meaning 'a room having one side entirely open towards a court, garden, river, or other prospect' and expands on the fourth sense as follows: "A Persian name for a collection of poems (Persian, Arabic, Hindustani, Turkish); spec. a series of poems by one author, the rimes of which usually run through the whole alphabet. [From the original sense ‘collection of written sheets’, perh. influenced by later uses of the word.]" And speaking of "original sense," check out the etymology:
2. a. A counting room, tribunal, or public audience room in Muslim countries. b. The seat used by an administrator when holding audience. c. A government bureau or council chamber.
3. A coffeehouse or smoking room.
4. A book of poems, especially one written in Arabic or Persian by a single author.
A word originally Persian, dēvān, now dīwān, in Arabic pronounced dīwān, diwān; in Turkish divān, whence in many European langs., It. divano, Sp., Pg., F. divan. Originally, in early use, a brochure, or fascicle of written leaves or sheets, hence a collection of poems, also a muster-roll or register (of soldiers, persons, accounts, taxes, etc.); a military pay-book, an account-book; an office of accounts, a custom-house; a tribunal of revenue or of justice; a court; a council of state, senate; a council-chamber, a (cushioned) bench. The East Indian form and use of the word is given under DEWAN. Another European form, older than divan, and app. directly from Arabic, is It. dovana, doana, now dogana, F. douane (in 15th c. douwaine), custom-house: see DOUANE.For a more discursive collection of definitions, with 19th-century stabs at etymology, see the Hobson-Jobson entry. The mix of senses is so confusing that when I asked the proprietors of an excellent Lebanese restaurant in Astoria called Al Dewan (long defunct, I'm afraid) why it was so named, they muttered and fumfered and couldn't come up with anything convincing. (To my mind, it was clearly named with the 'poetry collection' sense in view, since the window displayed a plaster model of an open book with the name inscribed calligraphically, but when I drew their attention to this, they shrugged—I'm guessing whoever named the place and ordered the plaster book was no longer around, and nobody else knew.)
And where does the Persian word come from, you ask? The AHD says:
Persian dīwān, place of assembly, roster, probably from Old Iranian *dipivahanam, document house : Old Persian dip-, writing, document (from Akkadian tuppu, tablet, letter, from Sumerian dub) + Old Persian vahanam, house; see wes-1 in Indo-European roots.I hope that's correct, because there aren't many words in English that go back to Sumerian (tunic and chiton are two more; according to AHD they go back via Akkadian kitû, kita’um, 'flax, linen' to Sumerian gada, gida).
The reason I'm telling you all this is to give you the background for appreciating the amusing error made in this article (Google cache; the original story has gone 404) by Ana Keshelashvili:
Revaz Baramidze looked in amazement at the crowd of people gathered in Parnassus, Tbilisi's newest bookstore. The store's two rooms were so tightly packed that it was difficult to move around, and more people stood outside waiting to get in.Now, you also have to know that a famous collection of Goethe's was called West-östlicher Divan, translated as West-Eastern Divan. I strongly suspect that Mr. Kotetishvili (described here as "an incredibly dignified translator of persian poetry") gave his book the same title in Georgian. But Ms. Keshelashvili looked up Georgian დივანი (divani) in her Georgian-English dictionary, found "sofa," and the rest was history."What do I see, so many young people and everybody came to buy a book. I can't predict, but it seems to me that we are turning back to reading literature," said Baramidze, professor of literature at Tbilisi State University.
That cold but sunny winter afternoon, Vakhushti Kotetishvili was seated at a small desk in the downstairs room, signing copies of his newly published collection "East-West Sofa."...
I'd feel worse about making public fun of Ms. Keshelashvili if she hadn't publicly identified me as David Foster Wallace in her master's thesis, "Patterns of Self-Expression and Impression Management in Blogs" (pdf; Google cache here). Check out #104 in APPENDIX A: LIST OF BLOGS ANALYZED.
Addendum. See now dahween and divan at Balashon, which (among other things) explains the origin of Chicken Divan (mentioned in the thread below).
I'm not adding it to the blogroll because I don't read Chinese, but those of you who do might want to check out Linguistics Paradise, a blog by 冬:
Linguistics Paradise 開淌大吉Update (Sept. 16, 2006). Well, that's sad: it's gone now. 牛冬, if you see this, please let me know if you have a new site and I'll link it! (Write to languagehat AT gmail DOT com; I'm closing comments on this thread because of spam.)對語言學的那種出於本性的熱愛與天賦，是涕淌創辦Linguistics Paradise的原始衝動。我選擇了MSN上的個人空間，是為了能讓更多人有意或無意地來到這裏。在這裏，你們會讀到我在語言學上學習過程的觀察、記錄與思考。涕淌會盡全部能力把這個專欄辦好！也歡迎大家常來捧場或是與我交流。涕淌知道在大多數人眼裏，Linguistics是一門枯燥異常的學科，希望 Linguistics Paradise會改變你們的成見！
To those English speakers who have come to Linguitics Paradise, I express my sincere appreciation. As a college student majoring in geography, I also show great interest in linguistics. That's why I wanted to originate this blog. Born and brought up in China, I speak poor English compared with my mother tongue. Therefore, most of the articles will be posted in Chinese. However, I will add an English summary to every blog. I hope you like this place: Linguistics Paradise!
The Loggernaut Reading Series presents an interview with Ammiel Alcalay, scholar, critic, translator and poet/prose writer and a favorite here at LH (1, 2, 3, 4), in which he has a lot to say about his past ["Boston, Gloucester (where we went for part of the summer and counted amongst family friends Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini), and later Cape Cod (where I lived for several years working in trucking and automotive stuff), did leave some very indelible marks on my sense of place, landscape, light, speech patterns - the textures of everything deeply familiar. Not to mention the Red Sox, which could the subject of a whole other interview"], the value of the local and genuine ["When I was a kid there was a wonderful guy named Mr. Chase who would paint our house. He also worked on the Boston & Maine, I can't remember whether as a brakeman or an engineer, but I do remember that I would fake any and every possible kind of illness so I could stay home from school and hang around with Mr. Chase, carrying his bucket of spackle, watching him work the walls and listening to him tell stories"], and translation ["I think there's a lot of mystification in translation. For me, an essential element has to do with the choice of the materials and figuring out ways to somehow insulate or attempt to insulate the fate of the text. In other words, can you figure out ways to build in some of the resistances that the text might have presented to its readers in the original in its new context"], among other things. I'm particularly intrigued by what he says about not translating:
This idea of NOT translating has become increasingly important to me. As I said before, now that we've entered a kind of post-NAFTA world, along with the post 9/11 idea that it might not be a bad thing to be informed about other parts of the world, all kinds of people are ready to step in as speculators, in some sense panning for the gold of some unknown potential Nobel Prize winner by suddenly becoming interested in all kinds of previously obscure literatures. I think of Thoreau's wonderful line that goes something to the effect of, if a man comes to your door trying to help, turn around and run. While there are a lot of good intentions out there now and some very valuable work being done, I remain deeply skeptical and suspicious about how translation continues to be done in this country. We get solitary literary works, removed from any context, and often this only helps to buttress and reconstitute the privileged ideas of art and the literary artifact in our own tradition, removing texts from social, political, economic, historical and spiritual contexts. So we get the one or several great novels of a writer or the book of selected poems without the letters, biographies, literary histories, politics, gossip, and everything else that embeds a text in a particular time and place.And I'm excited by his description of what he's up to now:
For many years I found myself questioning this "Americanness" as against some other sense of history or collectivity that I centered around the Mediterranean and that I explored deeply but, in coming back more strongly to myself as a poet rooted in this language, I have come to see these writers with ever more resonant layers from which I feel there is always more to learn. Moreover, because of the ways in which I familiarized myself with layers of the Mediterranean, I've come to see these poets as just one recent manifestation of the incredibly complex history of this continent. These are concerns that I'm actively engaged in now - my current project is an attempt to write something akin to After Jews & Arabs but about North America; an in-depth geographical, cultural, intellectual mapping going back to its earliest inhabitants, through the settlers to our present condition, all the while using the poets as a filter for ways we might apprehend or lay knowledge out.Now, that's a book I want to read. (Via wood s lot.)
According to Jan Maksimiuk's article "An Unclaimed Creative Potential or the Belarusians in the Bialystok Region as a Trilingual People," the almost 50,000 ethnic Belarusians living in eastern Poland are divided into two groups. About a fifth are litsviny ('Lithuanians': see below), who are rapidly being polonized; thus "the future of the Belarusian minority in Poland will be increasingly shaped by its padlashy demographic component," ie, the "Podlasian Belarusians (padlashy in the Belarusian language), who live in the centre and south of Podlasie Province."
In their everyday life padlashy use a language that is markedly different from the Belarusian literary language and its dialectal variants used by litsviny, that is, Belarusians living in the northern part of Podlasie Province. However, the language of padlashy, which is much closer to the Ukrainian than the Belarusian literary standard in terms of its phonetic and morphologic characteristics, has not become a decisive factor for the padlashys' ethnic self-determination...Maksimiuk goes on to discuss efforts to standardize this language (which I think would better be called Padlashy, but never mind) and propagate it in written form; he links to a sample of the language, written in a Latin script (since "the circle of active users of the Cyrillic script among Belarusians in the Bialystok region is unavoidably shrinking"). Those who focus on the benefits of widely spoken languages will doubtless deprecate this effort to establish a tiny one of no practical use; personally, I welcome it. Let a thousand tongues flourish! (Via digenis.org; I should mention, in case it's not obvious, that the j in Svoja mova is pronounced as in Polish or German—in English orthography it would be "svoya.")Belarusian as a language of domestic communication was declared by 39,900 people in Podlasie Province (82 percent of the total number of Belarusians in the province). This means that approximately 30,000 Belarusians belonging to the padlashy group officially identified their domestic language as Belarusian. From a "political" or an "emotional" point of view, this was a fully justifiable step. However, linguists and some others may have some justifiable arguments against such an identification, as well. The point is that in reality the Belarusians in the Bialystok region are a trilingual community — apart from Polish and Belarusian (or its dialectal variants), the overwhelming majority of them also speak a third language (or its local dialect), which has so far not been given any generally accepted name. This actual trilingualism of Belarusians in the Bialystok region was not registered by the 2002 census (at least, no such census data have been made public).
Our further considerations will be devoted to this third language of those Polish Belarusians who belong to the group of padlashy. Since this vernacular has no generally accepted name among its users, we will tentatively call it Svoja mova (literally: one's own language) or Svoja for short, proceeding from the fact that when you ask padlashy what language they speak at home, the most frequent answer will be this: We speak our own language (po-našomu or po-svojomu).
The term litsviny or "Lithuanians" harks back to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita); Elena Gapova has an interesting discussion of "Belarusian Identity and Its Mythologies":
Adam Mickiewicz, the creator of the Polish literary canon, began his poem "Pan Tadeusz" with the exclamation, "Litwo! Ojczyzno moja!" [text corrected -- LH] (Oh, Lithuania, my fatherland). Written in Polish, these words were addressed to the territory he was born in, called Litwa (Lithuania), where people for centuries were called "Litsviny" and spoke what we now think of as Belarusian. Another work by Mickiewicz, Dziady ("Forefathers' Eve"), is based on local folklore and tales that peasants retained among themselves, and several Belarusian literati insist that Mickiewicz is, basically, "our" poet and that he (among many other pillars of Polish spirit) was aware of his Belarusian (Litvan) cultural roots.Addendum. For the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its relation to modern Belarus and its language, see the discussion in this comment thread.Now these lands are in Belarus, while the city of Vilnius (Wilno), which all XX century Belarusian intellectuals have considered their spiritual capital (the first Belarusian books were published there more than 400 years ago, and the first newspaper at the turn of the century), but also where one of the oldest Polish universities was founded by Jesuits, is now the capital of Lithuania... [...].
In 1569 Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (of which Belarusians think as "their" state, and Lithuanians as their, and Poles also can have a say in the controversy, and even Russians sometimes put their three cents in) signed the Lublin Union, a treaty against Moscow which is considered the end of Belarusian statehood. Since that year, at different times in history, the territory or its parts were incorporated into different states. Tsarist Russia regarded the region as North-West Province, a distant outpost, while for Poland Belarus and Lithuania were the Eastern Borderland (Kresy Wschodnie) facing what was seen as a huge Asian kingdom... Quite often Belarusians mention their country's location in the geographical center of Europe as a matter of some special pride. Intellectuals view their land between Poland and Russia, on the borderline of two great cultural worlds, as a bridge between Orthodoxy and Catholicism (Belarus may be the only country in the world where both Catholic and Orthodox Christmas, Easter and All Saints Days are official holidays); between Byzantine and European political traditions, as "a unique place in the context of European cultural space, where the world of Slavia Orthodoxa meets with the world of Slavia Romana -- and with the Baltic world as well". Most European nations are probably unaware of Belarusian claims to the heart of their continent, and make their own claims and live in their own very different geographies. Simple folks, however, would have rather blurred ideas about their belonging. Quite often peasants or petty traders were not sure of the name by which to call themselves: they were neither Russians nor Poles (who could also be a different social status) nor Jews (who were of a different religion), while the medieval name of Litsviny or Litvans (related to the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania) went out of use by the eighteenth century or was referred to Lithuanians (very different ethnically). For a number of historical, political and cultural reasons, words "Belarus" and "Belarusian" are rather late and ambiguous coinages, and this fact had (and still has) political repercussions. As a way to still have a name, simple folk called themselves "tuteishyja", which literally means "from here", unable to define in any other way who they were and, probably, not very much interested in an identity defined as a "national belonging". A 1931 newspaper article (published in Western Belarus, then part of Poland) devoted to the life and work of the turn-of the-century poetess Alaiza Pashkewich explained to the readers who they were by demonstrating how the poetess came to recognize her belonging:
(she) finally understood that the person who speaks as here - he, in fact, speaks Belarusian and, hence, he is Belarusian. From that moment all hesitation about what nation (people) to belong to were over for her.Evidently, the search for the historically true and uncontested Belarusianness is too problematic, while with time the "tuteishyja" phenomenon took on the shape of a regional culture, a mythological construct and an ideal. In 1922 Belarusian greatest poet Yanka Kupala authored a play, "Tuteishyja", with Western Scholar and Eastern Scholar among the characters. They make their appearance several times to discuss (one in Polish, the other in Russian, both of which are understandable for the Belarusian audience) how to scientifically classify the people around them. It is self-evident, one would say in Polish, they are an uncivilized off-spring of the Western Slavic group and their language is of Polish origin. It is absolutely clear, the other would say in Russian, they are just spoilt Russians and their language is Eastern Slavic and they belong with us. Meanwhile German troops (it is 1918) occupy the city, and dwellers have to think how to co-exist with still new power...
Peer Wandel Hansen has created a number of virtual keyboards:
Do you want to write the letters and scripts from around the world, then pick from the list below. The message you write can be included in Web-documents and Email without using Graphics or extras. Use the “keyboard” at the bottom of these pages and copy'n'paste the HTML codes to your Email or HTML program. Try my Multi Language Virtual Keyboard where I remap your US-keyboard to write some of these scripts. If you see a lot of ??? below, your browser is not supported.The scripts are Arabic (العربية), Japanese (ひらがな, カタカナ), Greek (Αλφάβητο), Georgian (ქართული), Armenian (Հայերէն), Hebrew (ורמ - עברית), Korean (한국어를), Indian (Devnagari, देचनागऐ), Chinese (汉字练习纸), Russian (Кирилица), pan-Ēŭŗôpěąņ enhanced alphabet, Tamil (தமிழ), and Thai (ภาษไทย) ("Oh it bring back memories of spicy Siam. Words that are a great mystery to me and have looong word that become entire sentances."). He's extremely concerned (to the point of constant pop-up warnings) to let you know that it's only guaranteed to work in Internet Explorer, but Firefox seems to be OK with it. (Via Mithridates.)
The new movie The Interpreter doesn't sound very good (reviews use words like "bloated" and "hooey"), but the gimmick of an invented language, Ku, provided with grammar and vocabulary by an actual linguist can't help but attract my interest; fortunately, Mark Liberman of Language Log has done the necessary spadework, and you can read all about it in his posts Ku? and Ku Two. A particularly useful find was this page, which explains the background and the associated culture, and says:
Although known as 'Ku' to foreigners, the actual language spoken by the Tobosa people of the fictional Democratic Republic of Matoba is indigenously known as Chitobuku, literally meaning 'the language of the Tobosa people'. Ch'itoboku is the only surviving ancient Bantu language, and the Tobosa oral traditions indicate that 'Ku' is the root of modern Bantu languages spoken in contemporary sub Saharan Africa. The structure of Ch'toboku is characterised by its use of indicators to make up words. For example, 'tobo' is the root and 'sa' is the indicator for 'they'. There is no gender distinction as in French, hence the word for 'he' or 'she' is the same, 'a'. Verbosity is positively valued in Ch'toboku, and ordinary speech should approximate the elegance of poetry.(Chi- is a variant of ki-, the class 7 noun prefix in Bantu, frequently used for the names of languages: ki-Swahili, chi-Nyanja.)
To celebrate the birthday of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, and perhaps to tweak him a little (he "wanted to be valued more as an American writer than a Russian one"), I'll tell the story of how I came to realize what a wonderful Russian writer he was. It took me a little over a paragraph. I had decided (for reasons that escape me now) to read his early novel Zashchita Luzhina (translated as The Defense); Chapter 1 begins with a teasingly vague conversation between a couple who had been worrying about telling their son... something; the father says he took it well. Thank God, says the mother.
The next paragraph starts with the statement that that was a real relief, and continues: Все лето – быстрое дачное лето, состоящее в общем из трех запахов: сирень, сенокос, сухие листья – все лето они обсуждали вопрос... [Vsyo léto – býstroye dáchnoye leto, sostoyáshcheye v óbshchem iz tryókh zápakhov: sirén', senokós, sukhíye líst'ya – vsyo leto oní obsuzhdáli voprós...: 'The whole summer – the quick dacha summer, consisting on the whole of three smells: lilac, haymaking, dry leaves – the whole summer they had discussed the question...]. I was stopped in my tracks by the phrase set off by dashes; not only did the phrase siren', senokos, sukhiye list'ya [lilac, haymaking, dry leaves] brilliantly sum up the experience of a summer in the country by means of three distinctive smells corresponding to the early, middle, and late parts of the season, but the phrase itself, with its seductive sibilants and perfectly placed vowels (soo-KHEE-ya LEES-tya), sank instantly into the memory like a lyric poem. I repeated it to myself, enjoying its taste on my tongue, and continued reading with the comfortable feeling that I was in the hands of a writer who would continually surprise and delight me. I was not disappointed.
Incidentally, as I was turning this post over in my mind my wife said to me "Are you going to do a post on Nabokov, since it's his birthday?" Memo to those who wish to preserve a facade of impenetrable mystery: do not get married.
"Book arson 'a Taleban-style' act," by Subir Bhaumik of BBC News:
Officials of a prestigious library in India's north-eastern state of Manipur say nearly 145,000 books have been destroyed in an arson attack.Protesters demanding the introduction of Manipur's ancient Mayek script set fire to the Central Library in Manipur's capital Imphal on Wednesday.
Officials say many of Manipur's most ancient texts were among the books destroyed by the fire.
The arsonists want the Mayek script to replace Bengali script in the state...
Earlier this month, Manipur's vernacular newspaper editors agreed to print their broadsheets in both Bengali and Mayek scripts under pressure from Meelal and groups supporting them.I got this appalling story from qB at frizzyLogic, who points out that "when the Mayek script was replaced by the Bengali script in the 18th century it was accompanied by a mass-burning of books in the Mayek script. Or so says this site devoted to the Meitei Mayek script." Tit for tat: the great motivator of human history.But the state government insists that it will only introduce Mayek gradually, because its sudden introduction could cause problems for a generation of Manipuris who are not familiar with the ancient script.
Analysts say that has upset Meelal and groups like the KCP. They say the library was burnt because almost all Manipuri books preserved in it were written in Bengali script.
I've just run across a wonderful blog called "Dick & Garlick: Notes on Indian English, Hinglish, Tamlish, Bonglish & other -lishes." The last entry was on November 19, 2004; I hope that it's simply having a nice rest rather than being defunct, because it's a stylish, hilarious, and well-informed look at the forms of English spoken on the Indian subcontinent. The first entry that caught my eye was Hazaar fucked; hazaar (or more scientifically hazār) 'thousand,' a Persian loan word, has been combined with a widespread English participle to produce a memorably resonant phrase, the subject of the following quote from Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August:
"Amazing mix, the English we speak. Hazaar fucked. Urdu and American," Agastya laughed, "a thousand fucked, really fucked. I'm sure nowhere else could languages be mixed and spoken with such ease." The slurred sounds of the comfortable tiredness of intoxication, "'You look hazaar fucked, Marmaduke dear.' 'Yes, Dorothea, I'm afraid I do feel hazaar fucked'—see, doesn't work".
There are also great entries on alur dosh ("a colourful Bengali phrase that translates as 'the fault of the testicles'"), words for toadies ("I know about toady-bachchas and hukkabardars, but what on earth is a jholichuk? A quick Internet search suggests this is a derogatory term for Sikhs who collaborated with the Raj, but I haven't found a proper definition or explanation of the word's origin"), MLA Pesarattu ("MLA stands for 'Member of the Legislative Assembly'... the MLA is all-powerful in Andhra Pradesh in ways we cannot imagine... In fact, there may be an element of satire involved in naming a jumbo dosa an MLA dosa, a dig at the politican's voracious greed"), and the phrase "something black in the lentils" meaning 'there's something fishy going on' (for some reason I can't link to the post, but it's dated November 16, 2004). R Devraj, if you're listening, please come back—Blogistan has need of you!
My all-time favorite comment thread is this one, which was ignited by a post about a poem, "A Dish of Peaches in Cluj," by Maria Benet (there's a nice piece by Beth Ashley about her in the Marin Independent Journal). I am happy to report that the poem is included in her new collection, Mapmaker of Absences (published by Sixteen Rivers Press), a gorgeous book inside and out—even the table of contents is unusual and pleasing to the eye. You can read a couple of the poems at the book site; here's a couple more. First, another poem about her native city:
Cluj(That's the first of "Three American-Style Studies of a Landscape Rendered Foreign," the third of which is "Peaches in Cluj.") Another:after William Carlos Williams
Trunks by the door
blue and goldobscured in dim light—
smell of dust—Sun of early morning—
on the wood floora wood frame, the picture
missing, next to itscissors are lying—and the
cavernous empty room
Odysseus, HomeI want to quote more—"Half an Hour" ("The poet Cavafy knew this kind of alchemy..."), "An Italian Romance" ("This time, I know you are taken/ by the wind in the olive trees..."), the "Ghazal" from which the title is taken ("Memory, the mapmaker of absences, tracing/ vanishing steps—the fugitive friend, a burden...")—but I'd wind up quoting the whole book; you'll just have to buy it to get the full dose of formal pleasure mixed with lived emotion and exact perception. Trust me, you won't regret it.He finds her in the garden,
shears in gloved hands,
doing something to roses
he does not remember planting.When he tells her it's over,
the long hours, the daily commute,
she drops the shears: "Never mind,
we'll fix the house, or take up golf."
A confusion of roses, a scented
Greek chorus, comes apart at her feet.Like a great empty hall,
the garden is silent,
the clamor of voices quelled.
He picks up the fallen shears,
she gathers the roses. They stand
apart and overcome by longing.
The poet Brian Kim Stefans, a favorite here at LH, has written a review of W.S. Graham's New Collected Poems that makes me want to run out and buy it. I was not familiar with Graham, but this five-line snippet, all by itself, tells me I'm in the presence of a major talent:
YesterdayRead the longer excerpts quoted by Stefans and see what you think. (Warning: occasional use of Scots dialect. Also, there seems to have been an HTML glitch that caused a large chunk of the review to be repeated; when you finish the poem beginning "Who is that poor sea-scholar," scroll down until you get past its second occurrence and begin reading at the next paragraph, "In general, Graham’s poems favor the cyclic over the linear...")
I heard the telephone ringing deep
Down in a blue crevasse.
I did not answer it and could
Hardly bear to pass.
(Via wood s lot, which I have to thank for pointing me to Stefans in the first place.)
Christopher Culver has written an impassioned essay, "Why Esperanto Suppresses Language Diversity", about why he has withdrawn from the Esperanto movement. Basically, his point is that despite its rhetoric about supporting language diversity, the movement is actually interested only in supporting Esperanto use, and in practice works to suppress diversity as exemplified by the use of other languages. He says:
Esperanto is so strongly obligatory that its use is expected among any two Esperantists even if they speak the same native language. The act of using one's native language with an Esperantist of the same mother tongue, referred to with the Esperanto neologism krokodilado, is one of the great taboos of the Esperanto movement and generally invites a scolding from other members of the movement.He also says that "in sheltering them entirely from the local language, congresses give participants no true contact with the host country." An interesting take on a movement I don't know much about, and I'll be curious to see what better-informed readers have to say.The argument may arise that people attend congresses for the sake of practicing Esperanto and therefore it is inappropriate to speak other languages. The first response is that, provided that they understand one another, it is never inappropriate for two people to speak the native language of one or the other, for to do otherwise is to rule out any true cultural exchange. A second response is that Esperantists cannot be expected to limit this insistence on Esperanto to congresses, for many Esperantists look to congresses as ideal environments. Many times have I heard some Esperantist say "How I wish the whole world were like an Esperanto congress!" The norms of congresses, including the censure of the use of any language other than Esperanto, would serve as models for all international communications, as well as for communication in international contexts between two people of the same native language.
Chris Tessone passed on to me the information that version 4.1.0 of the Unicode Standard has been published.
The following complete scripts have been added in Unicode 4.1.0:To celebrate the occasion, R.M.Cleminson, Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Portsmouth, has prepared a new edition of the Budapest Glagolitic Fragments, fully Unicode-compliant; having downloaded the font he provides, I can now see the Glagolitic in all its weird glory, and if the idea appeals to you, you can do the same.* New Tai Lue (U+1980..U+19DF)
* Buginese (U+1A00..U+1A1F)
* Glagolitic (U+2C00..U+2C5F)
* Coptic (U+2C80..U+2CFF)
* Tifinagh (U+2D30..U+2D7F)
* Syloti Nagri (U+A800..U+A82F)
* Old Persian (U+103A0..U+103DF)
* Kharoshthi (U+10A00..U+10A5F)
Here's a chunk of it, just so I can have the pleasure of seeing it on LH:
ⰰⰴⱏⰻⰽⱁⱍⰾⱁⰲⱑⰽ҃ⱏⱄⰻⱈⱁⱋⰵⱅⱏⱃⰰⰸⱁⱃⰻⱅ
ⰻⰸⰰⰽⱁⱀⱏⰿⰰⱀⰰⱄⱅⱏⰻⱃⱏⱄⰽⰻ:ⰻⰶⰵ
ⱅⱏⰻⱆⱄⱅⰰⰲⰻ჻Ⱃⰵⱍⰵⰶⰵⰻⰳⱆⰿⱏⱀⱏ
ⰽⰰⰽⱁⱈⱁⱋⰵⱅⱏⱃⰰⰸⱁⱃⰻⱅⰻⰸⰰⰽⱁⱀⱏ
In a sense, it's unfair to blame William Safire for the false information he purveys in today's column, since he's taking it directly from a published book (by a linguist, no less) rather than making it up or vaguely recalling something somebody once told him. But I'm going to blame him anyway, because if he took more trouble to check his sources, he wouldn't be so prone to these embarrassing gaffes. The one that gets my goat today is a nonexistent "Russian word" that's been spreading across the internet like kudzu for years and that Safire has doubtless given vigorous new life to: "razbliuto, ros-blee-OO-toe, 'a feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but no longer feels the same way about.'" Safire is quoting Christopher Moore's In Other Words, a collection of "words and phrases that are impossible to translate neatly into English." [I have deleted a lazy and unfair comment on Moore; now that I am working on a similar book myself, I realize how impossible it is to control every item, and it is clear to me that Moore was the victim, not the perpetrator. My apologies, sir!] In this case, Moore clearly picked up the "word" from another such book (they must be popular, because they keep getting published), I suspect Howard Rheingold's 1988 They Have a Word for It, where it appears as "razbliuto (Russian): the feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but now does not." Rheingold (who "writes on subjects involving science, technology and computers") has the elementary decency to say where he got his entries, and this one comes from J. Bryan III's 1986 Hodgepodge. There the trail goes cold, since I don't have a copy of that "literate, lifelong miscellany, illuminated with flashes of comedy and rue" (if any readers can get their hands on one, please let me know if Bryan provides a source), but it doesn't really matter. The origin is not as important as the basic fact that (listen up, now) there is no such Russian word. When I bought Rheingold's book I was charmed by the definition but found the word impossible to analyze (the prefix raz- 'dis-, un-' made sense, but the rest didn't), and it was not in my dictionaries; as I've acquired more and better dictionaries, my suspicion grew into a certainty, and has been confirmed by a very funny thread at the group blog dirty.ru, where a member posted the following back in January:
Уважаемые носители русского языка, знаете ли вы, что в этом языке, оказывается, есть волшебное слово razbliuto? Существительное, произносится как [ros–bli:–u:–to]. Согласно буржуйским справочникам по труднопереводимым словам, значает чувство по утраченной любви. И судя по огромному количеству ссылок, которые выдаёт Гугл на соответствующий запрос, весь мир об этом знает. Ну кроме нас, носителей языка.Which is to say
Dear bearers of the Russian language, did you know that in this language it seems there's a magical word razbliuto? A noun, it's pronounced [ros–bli:–u:–to]. According to bourgeois reference books on hard-to-translate words, it means the feeling of lost love. And judging from the immense quantity of links Google returns when given the corresponding query, the entire world knows about it. Well, except for us, the bearers of the language.The commenters came to the consensus that it was probably a participial form of the verb razlyubit' 'to stop loving, not love any more' mixed up with the extremely common swear word blyad' 'whore'; my favorite comment was "'Разблюто' — это когда тебе разбили сердце, и ты после этого очень сильно напился, до тошноты. Вот тогда в организме все разблюто." ["Razbliuto" — that's when your heart is broken, and afterwards you get drunk to the point of nausea. And then your organism gets all razblyuto.] (The commenter is playing on the verb blevat' 'to puke,' 3rd singular present blyuyet.)
Now, I don't know about you, but for me "untranslatable words" fall into the same category as "cute things kids say" and "stupid laws": they're funny/touching/outrageous only as long as they're real. If I actually hear a kid say something cute, I enjoy it and may even repeat it; if I see a list of such sayings, it leaves me cold because I know they're mostly invented by adults. And if I know this particular word is bogus, how can I trust the other examples, like "Chinese gagung (ga-GUNG), 'bare branches,' defined by Moore as 'the men who are unlikely to marry or to have families because of the skewed sex ratios'" or "Arabic taarradhin (TAH-rah-deen), [which] suggests the resolution of a conflict that involves no humiliation: our closest definition is 'a win-win outcome'"? The answer is, I can't, and it annoys me.
I don't want to leave the impression that that's the only idiocy in the article. The last bit I quoted is followed by this:
Many foreign languages are difficult for the Japanese to learn because their language is written vertically. They have come up with the phrase yoko ("horizontal") meshi ("boiled rice"), meaning ''a meal eaten sideways.'' Yoko meshi evokes the stress that comes from trying to make oneself understood in a foreign language.Hey, buddy, check out the website of Asahi Shimbun, say, and get back to me about that "vertical writing." You're stuck in the Meiji era; the Japanese have long since moved on. I don't know if foreign languages are in fact difficult for the Japanese to learn, but if so, you're going to have to come up with another explanation.
Addendum. According to this site (which I found via Елизавета's comment below), the "word" originated in the '60s TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E.! A commenter there speculates that the word intended was разлюблено (razlyubleno 'fallen out of love') but there was a typo in the script. I suppose we'll never know if that's how it happened, but if anyone can provide an actual citation from the show, I'll be eternally grateful!
Update: Dima Rubinstein joins the fun.
Further update: zmjezhd of epea pteroenta does some research in his post "razbliuto [sic]" and discovers that the entry in Hodgepodge reads as follows (under "Words we need in English"):
razliubito (Russian): the feeling you have for someone you once loved, but now no more.
So Bryan III's slight error of razliubito for razliubit' gets magnified by Rheingold and (as zmjezhd says) "ripples out across the decades."
I'm having a hard time believing this is real, but April 1st was a long time ago:
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure—a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.This is stunning—it will rewrite the history of classical and post-classical literature and provide work for generations of scholars. My own excitement was roused especially by word of "a large and particularly significant paragraph of text from the Elegies, by Archilochos, a Greek poet of the 7th century BC." Archilochus (or Arkhilokhos, if you want to be Hellenic about it) has always been one of my favorite poets, and I still remember the thrill of the discovery thirty years ago of another substantial fragment; as soon as I got hold of a text (it took longer in those pre-internet days) I stayed up most of the night working on a translation. I can't wait to see this one, not to mention all the other newly found masterpieces, once known by heart to every person of culture but long since forgotten. And I'm also looking forward to the "lesser work—the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day." (Via Mithridates.)Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.
A few months ago I had a post on "Uncleftish Beholding," a Poul Anderson piece written entirely in words of Germanic origin. You can see the crazed nineteenth-century origin of this idea at Inscape & Outlandishness, a LiveJournal post that opens with a fusillade from William Barnes's An Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878):
Some of the small word-endings end themselves with a dead breath-penning... [These] seem to betoken, mostly, an ending or shortening or lessening, in time or shape... of their body-words... Flap, flip, a quick flying; heap, hop, hip, small highenings or humps; pop out, to poke out quickly; clap the hands, to close them quickly; stub, a small stump; wallop, to wallow or well (roll) lightly... We may think that we have two very fine words in envelope and develop, whereas they seem to be nothing better than the Teutonic inwallop and unwallop....It continues with a description of Barnes ("Barnes's passion was the rootedness of English, its power to create ungrafted words, of its own thorny and inalienable stock. A quickset tongue, hedge-English: tough and insular, flowering and thorny..."), Joseph Wright (author of the English Dialect Dictionary), and others, including my man Charles Montagu Doughty, whose one-of-a-kind masterpiece, Travels in Arabia Deserta, deserves more readers than it has. The post ends with a list of Barnes's suggested word-equivalents in purified English:
abrade, To forfray, forfret.(Via Making Light.)
absorb, Forsoak.
accelerate, To onquicken.
accessary, A bykeeper, deedmate.
adulation, Flaundering, glavering.
adverb, An under-markword.
adversative, Thwartsome.
alienate, To unfrienden.
allegory, A forlikening.
altercation, A brangling...
Trevor of Kalebeul has created a language blog aggregator he calls Langwich sandwich, explained as "syndicated language-related blogs for my lunchtime perusal." He adds:
Feeds update every hour. Comments and automatic registration work, should anyone so desire. I’ll make it pretty and a bit more functional some other time, like never.(Via Naked Translations.)
There's something oddly compelling about the word simurgh; it sounds exotic and wondrous, and when you find out (at an early age, if you're lucky) that it's "an immortal bird that nests in the branches of the Tree of Knowledge" and "is known to take children into its nest to nurse them or foster them," the name seems somehow fitting. Now, the OED says Persian sīmurgh is from "Pahlavi sīn (Av. saēna, Skr. çyena) eagle + murgh bird," but the first syllable sounds like the Persian word sī 'thirty,' a coincidence that led to one of the masterpieces of world literature, Fariduddin Attar's Mantiq at-tayr or Conference of the Birds, available in many translations. I have the Penguin edition translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, who summarize the story in their Introduction as follows:
The birds of the world gather together to seek a king. They are told by the hoopoe that they have a king—the Simorgh—but that he lives far away and the journey to him is hazardous. The birds are at first enthusiastic to begin their search, but when they realize how difficult the journey will be they start to make excuses... [In the end the thirty who persevere] are finally admitted and find that the Simorgh they have sought is none other than themselves. The moment depends on a pun—only thirty (si) birds (morgh) are left at the end of the Way, and the si morgh meet the Simorgh, the goal of their quest.Attar's work has been an inspiration for artists both classic and modern, not to mention a great jazz record by Dave Holland, and the simurgh inspired a great MonkeyFilter post by the quidnunc kid, which I urge you to visit for many more links, including some gorgeous illustrations and a long and involving Mandean tale about the bird's visit to the noble king Hirmiz Shah.
I just discovered the Collation of language names page on the OED site; created to help users deal with the plethora of varying abbreviations used in the days before they decided to simply give all language names in full, it's a staggering demonstration of the number of languages to which reference must be made in fully describing English. (I was amused on the A page to see that the second item was "Aboriginal"; I assume that referred to any of the native langugages of Australia, and that it's long since been retired in favor of actual language names. Oh dear, and a few lines below that is "African"—I hope that was retired a long time ago.)
Beth at Cassandra Pages has posted an entry that does an excellent job of recounting the kinds of interactions that can defeat us when we're trying to operate in a second language, and the way it makes us feel:
“It doesn’t matter how long I live here or how hard I try,” I said to myself, miserably, “I’ll never master this language completely, and I will never, ever fit in...."I know exactly how she feels, and there's a certain relief mixed in with my chagrin that I'm no longer living in a city where I always had the opportunity to actually practice my languages. It's so much easier just to read them.As I thought about it more, I decided that it wasn’t so much an inability to make myself understood – for I’m pretty good at that, using language or not – as it was not being able to understand others, and how humiliated I feel when they instantly switch to English, or turn their backs – whether the gesture is real or only felt. The switching, I’ve found, is often Canadian politeness, and most people will continue in French if you tell them you’re trying to learn and improve. I recognized that discomfiture was also coming from a bruised ego. I am not only a word person, and someone who wants to communicate and know other people, but I’m an over-achiever, and I can’t stand feeling stupid or unaccomplished, especially in this sphere.
Addendum. Compare La Coquette's adventures in French, courtesy of Tatyana in the comments below.
Here's why the OED is so great. Four times a year, they issue a list of new and updated entries; the latest, from March, is called "ovest to Papua New Guinean." Naturally, I looked up "ovest," thinking that it might be a borrowing of the Italian word for 'west' (Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho!, for instance, is Verso ovest in Italian), but no: it's a dialectal word for 'acorns and oak mast.' It's the modern form (with an excrescent, or epenthetic, -s- from somewhere or other, perhaps harvest) of the Old English ofet 'fruit' (spelled obet in early glosses), which is related to German Obst. The Old English poem known as Genesis B has a line "Adam, frea min, þis ofet is swa swete" [Adam, my lord/master/husband, this fruit is so sweet], and the 14th-century Ayenbite of Inwit has this rendition of a famous line of the Ave Maria: "Y-blissed þou ine wymmen, and y-blissed þet ouet of þine wombe." After the 14th century it goes underground for half a millennium, reappearing as a dialect word from Hampshire:
1866 R. D. BLACKMORE Cradock Nowell (1883) xxxi. 176 The hogs skittered home from the ovest. 1871 J. R. WISE New Forest 183 in W. H. Cope Gloss. Hampshire Words 65 The mast and acorns of the oak are collectively known as the turn-out or ovest.Now, this word was not unknown to the first edition of the OED, but there it was entered under "ovet. Obs. exc. dial. (ovest)"; in the century since then (the fascicle Outjet-Ozyat appeared in January 1904) they not only added the second dialect citation, they decided (quite rightly) that it should be entered under the modern spelling. Furthermore, they dug up the derived word ovesting and added that as a new entry:
Eng. regional (Hampshire). Now rare.When they issue their quarterly announcements, press attention is always focused on the new and exciting words: in this case, say, OxyContin, Ozzie and Harriet, P2P, and Palm Pilot, as well as the out-of-sequence aloo chaat, Beantown, cool Britannia, Deadhead, and Dogme (though I myself am particularly fond of Disgusted 'Originally as a self-designation: a member of the public who writes anonymously to a newspaper expressing outrage about a particular issue. Hence more widely: a person who is vocal and indignant in his or her opposition to something' and pace tanti viri dixerim 'with due respect to so eminent a man'). But the inclusion of new and exciting words is a matter of canny self-promotion as well as lexicography; every dictionary trumpets its hot-off-the-presses innovations (many of which wither on the vine and are quietly dropped from future editions). The OED isn't going to get any publicity or financial reward from improving the entry for an obscure dialectal word; they do it purely because they're committed to documenting the language and its history as thoroughly as possible, and I love them for it.
The action of feeding on acorns and mast.
1903 Eng. Dial. Dict. IV. 393/2 Pigs may be turned out only by those who have the right, and by them only in the legal Ovesting or Pawnage months—that is to say, from September 25th to November 22nd, when the acorn and beech mast have fallen to the ground of their over-ripeness. 1906 A. MARSHALL Richard Baldock iii. 28 Sometimes a drove of black pigs would cross his path, fussily intent on their ovesting.
I've just discovered that the Edward G.Seidensticker translation of Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji) is online. I don't know what the deal is, since the book is still in print and less than thirty years old, but if you have a hankering to read a thousand-page classic online, here's your chance, if you can finish it before it gets yanked. (And if you want the whole text on a single web page—well, you can have that too. The internet is large and generous.) And I found a nice page of Genji links originally compiled for a class.
So then it occurred to me that the original Japanese text must be online, and of course it is, doubtless in many places, and this is old hat to you Japanese experts out there, but it knocked me out to find this site, which not only has the original text and a modernized version but a romanized (romaji) one as well, and will display all three at once (in parallel frames) if you wish to compare them. And it turns out to be part of the Japanese Text Initiative. a collaboration of the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center and the University of Pittsburgh East Asian Library to "make texts of classical Japanese literature available on the World Wide Web"; just take a look at all the texts they have from the premodern and modern periods. Amazing. I really should learn the language. But I can make use of the texts anyway, after a fashion, thanks to POPjisyo.
Anyway, I got started on all this because of a wonderful site that has photographs of all the places mentioned in the novel, a link I got from the equally wonderful Plep.
The first line in the original, modern, and transliterated versions:
いづれの御時にか、女御、更衣あまたさぶらひたまひけるなかに、いとやむごとなき際にはあらぬが、すぐれて時めきたまふありけり。
どの帝の御代のことであったか、女御や更衣たちが大勢お仕えなさっていたなかに、たいして高貴な身分ではないで、きわだって御寵愛をあつめていらっしゃる方があった。
Idure no ohom-toki ni ka, nyougo, kaui amata saburahi tamahi keru naka ni, ito yamgotonaki kiha ni ha ara nu ga, sugurete tokimeki tamahu ari keri.
My wife discovered Edmund Hogan's 1910 Onomasticon Goedelicum: locorum et tribuum Hiberniae et Scotiae: an index, with identifications, to the Gaelic names of places and tribes online and of course shared it with me; I poked around and discovered it was posted by the Locus project, which aims "to produce a new Historical Dictionary of Irish placenames and tribal names to replace Fr Edmund Hogan's Onomasticon Goedelicum." (They "would like to appeal to anyone who has new or additional information on any placename, whether cited by Hogan or not, to make this information available.") And from their list of links I got to the Scottish Place-Name Society, which "exists for the support of all aspects of toponymic studies in Scotland, and in particular the work of the Scottish Place-Name Database at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Edinburgh." Two worthy projects, and this lover of place names wishes them well.
I was listening to the Writer's Almanac this morning and it closed with a Donald Hall poem I very much liked, so I thought I'd share it with you:
The Old PilotHe discovers himself on an old airfield.
He thinks he was there before,
but rain has washed out the lettering of a sign.
A single biplane, all struts and wires,
stands in the long grass and wildflowers.
He pulls himself into the narrow cockpit
although his muscles are stiff
and sits like an egg in a nest of canvas.
He sees that the machine gun has rusted.
The glass over the instruments
has broken, and the red arrows are gone
from his gas gauge and his altimeter.
When he looks up, his propeller is turning,
although no one was there to snap it.
He lets out the throttle. The engine catches
and the propeller spins into the wind.
He bumps over holes in the grass,
and he remembers to pull back on the stick.
He rises from the land in a high bounce
which gets higher, and suddenly he is flying again.
He feels the old fear, and rising over the fields
the old gratitude. In the distance, circling
in a beam of late sun like birds migrating,
there are the wings of a thousand biplanes.
Grant Barrett, project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, writes to say they're looking for letters of support from users of the existing two volumes of the dictionary: "Editing is currently underway for the final two volumes (in the P-Z range) with Volume III tentatively scheduled for release in 2006. Just a few lines about how you use the dictionary would be enough. You can send them to him directly at grant.barrett@oup.com."
Come on, people, I know you love this magnificent work as much as I do (if you're not acquainted with it, seek it out at your local library and discover its riches); slang has often been documented haphazardly, but never with the kind of rigor and thoroughness on display in the two handsome volumes already produced. Let the folks at Oxford know you appreciate their picking it up from the half-finished oblivion to which Random House had consigned it!
The Japan 2001 Waka Website is "a site devoted to the many types of classical Japanese poetry."
During the course of the Japan 2001 Festival we built up a collection of 2001 poems here, covering approximately the first thousand years of poetry in Japan. The poems appear in the original Japanese, transcribed into the Roman alphabet (Romanised) and translated into English. They are accompanied by commentary and background material to fill in the blanks on the world the Old Japanese poets lived in, their beliefs and society.I love this sort of thing, and look forward to seeing much more of it as the internet expands.
Here's the first poem, from the Kojiki, "'The Records of Ancient Matters', a volume composed at some point in the late seventh century which recounts Japan's mythological beginnings and the history of the Imperial line" (I'm omitting the characters):
yatipokö nöThe end links to a pop-up box that says: "The final three lines betray the song's oral origins, most likely being a formula spoken/sung by the reciter to assert that this was the form in which the song had been handed down to them."
kamï nö mikötö pa
yasimakuni
Tuma makikanete
töpotöposi
kosi nö kuni ni
sakasime wo
ari tö kikasite
kupasime wo
ari tö kikosite
sayobapi ni
aritatasi
yobapi ni
arikayopase
tati ga wo mö
imada tökazute
ösupi wo mö
imada tökaneba
wotöme nö
nasu ya itato wo
ösuburapi
wa ka tatasereba
piködurapi
wa ka tatasereba
awoyama ni
nuye pa nakinu
sa no tu töri
kigisi pa töyömu
nipa tu töri
kake pa naku
uretaku mö
nakunaru töri ka
könö töri mö
utiyamekösene
isitapu ya
amepasedukapi
kötö nö
katarigötö mö
kö wo ba
Eight Thousand Spears,
The mighty god,
In the Eightfold Island land
Could not take a wife.
Afar, afar
In the land of Koshi
A clever maiden
Lived, he heard;
A most singular maiden
Lived there, he heard.
A'courting
Did he go.
Courting
Back and forth.
His sword belt
Not undone,
His cloak, too,
Not unfastened,
At the maiden's
Door, wherein she slept,
He hammers,
'While I've stood here
Knocking over and over,
While I've stood here,
In the mountains green,
The ground thrush has sung;
The birds of the fields,
The pheasants are calling;
The bird of the garden,
The cockerel, crows.
Sad it might be but,
You calling birds
You birds you,
I wish you'd stop,
You rowdy
Messengers of the skies!'
The words,
The spoken words
Are like this.Kojiki 2
(Via wood s lot.)
I just learned a new word, and I rather wish I hadn't. Reading an interview with Mahmood Mamdani, an Indo-Ugandan scholar who's currently Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University and has written what sounds like a very interesting book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, I hit the following rough patch:
I do acknowledge the importance of the nativist critique that calls for a fuller grasp of historicity, but one also needs to understand its weakness, because its sense of historicity is compromised by its search for authenticity. The point is not to just to sidestep the nativist critique but to sublate it, in the manner in which Engels understood sublating Hegel in his critique of Ludwig Feuerbach; to take into consideration that which is relevant, effective and forceful in the critique but at the same time to break away from its preoccupation with origins and authenticity.That's classic High Academic dialect, but I was able to hack my way through most of it; the verb "sublate," however, defeated me. It turns out that, although it has been used by logicians to mean simply 'deny,' it has a more specific meaning: 'to negate or eliminate (as an element in a dialectic process) but preserve as a partial element in a synthesis,' in the admirably clear words of Merriam-Webster. I say "admirably clear" because the OED throws up its hands and says simply "see quots. 1865." You want to see quots. 1865? Here they are:
1865 J. H. STIRLING Secret of Hegel I. 354 Nothing passes over into Being, but Being equally sublates itself, is a passing over into Nothing, Ceasing-to-be. They sublate not themselves mutually, not the one the other externally; but each sublates itself in itself, and is in its own self the contrary of itself. Ibid. 357 A thing is sublated, resolved, only so far as it has gone into unity with its opposite.Got that? Me neither. The Secret of Hegel could remain a secret forever with explanations like that. But why "sublate"? Here the OED is more forthcoming: "rendering G. aufheben, used by Hegel as having the opposite meanings of ‘destroy’ and ‘preserve.’" And yes, aufheben is a many-splendored word; the basic meaning is 'pick up' (heb es auf 'pick it up!'), but it also means 'keep, put aside,' 'abolish, do away with,' 'raise, lift' (eg, a blockade), and 'offset, make up for.' So if you're translating dear old Hegel, how do you render it in English, given that English does not have a word with that particular combination of senses?
Well, there are several approaches. You could keep the down-to-earth, colloquial nature of the word and render it "pick up," letting the reader get used to the specialized usage and forcing future writers to say "to pick it up, in the Hegelian sense." Or you could keep the sense of the word in context, giving up on the basic-vocabulary aspect; you could, for instance, render it "supersede," which I think conveys the meaning well enough. But James Hutchison Stirling (for I assume it was he who set English Hegelianism on this contorted course: "his style, though often striking, is so marked by the influence of Carlyle, and he so resolutely declines to conform to ordinary standards of systematic exposition, that his work is almost as difficult as the original which it is intended to illuminate") chooses to reach into the grab-bag of Latinity he doubtless picked up at Glasgow University and pulls out sublate (from sublatum, the past participle of tollo 'pick up'), a verb that will convey absolutely nothing to the average reader and thus is catnip to a certain type of scholarly mind. It's the same mentality that chose to render Freud's Besetzung by "cathexis," Fehlleistung by "parapraxis," and Ich by "ego." I wish translators would make the reader's comprehension their main goal rather than seize the opportunity to show off their classical education.
Morfablog has a wonderful post (most unusually including an English explanation—Morfablog, being a Welsh blog, is normally in Welsh) about one of those embarrassing e-mail mishaps. It seems Hedd Gwynfor of the Welsh Language Society "sends an email to Wales@new.labour.org.uk asking some fairly general questions about Welsh Labour’s commitment to the Welsh language. Since Wales is, on paper at least, a bilingual country, Hedd writes the email in his native language. He doesn’t provide a translation." The e-mail reads:
Beth yw polisi y Blaid Lafur ar yr iaith Gymraeg yn yr etholiadau Seneddol yma? Ydy’r Blaid Lafur yn cefnogi’r alwad dros Ddeddf Iaith Newydd?Which Morfablog is kind enough to translate for those of us who aren't Welsh and thus shouldn't (unlike the Welsh Labour Party) be expected to understand it:
What is the Labour Party’s policy on the Welsh language in these Parlimentary elections? Does the Labour Party support the call for a new Welsh Language Act?The woman who got the e-mail couldn't make head nor tail of it, and composed the following touching message:
Hi Dave,Unfortunately, she sent it right back to Hedd Gwynfor, who promptly posted it to maes-e.com, a Welsh language bulletin board. Hilarity ensued... or I presume it did, not having the Welsh myself. But Morfablog thinks it's pretty funny, and so do I. (Thanks to Songdog for alerting me to this.)I have it on good authority (as I cant understand a word of it myself!!!) that this e-mail is asking what we think about using the Welsh Language in Wales or something like that.
Thanks.
Karen Bradbury - Administrator
Welsh Labour
The Ancient Library tells the visitor:
You've reached the first stirrings of a major new classics resource. So far, we're mostly testing the engine and working on architecture. Don't be fooled; this is going to be a major site in the near future, including:They already have the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology by William Smith (1867), the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities by William Smith (1870), the Dictionary of Classical Antiquities by Oskar Seyffert (1894) (a guide to the ancient world, with 716 pages, 2,630 entries and over 450 illustrations), and the Classical Gazetteer by William Hazlitt (1851) (a dictionary of some 14,000 ancient Greek and Roman places), as well as a number of other works like the Manual of Greek Literature by Charles Anthon (1853) (a survey of Greek literature and authors all the way to the fall of Constantinople; excellent coverage of obscure authors), and they're creating a Wiki Classical Dictionary (WCD) that "is to the Oxford Classical Dictionary what Wikipedia is to the Encyclopedia Britannica." A promising beginning, and I look forward to its further development. (Via Sauvage Noble.)* Scanned secondary works, including classical dictionaries, histories, grammars and other classics books.
* A large collection of primary texts, both scanned and in HTML text. All primary sources will allow Wiki-style commentary.
* A "Wiki Classical Dictionary" users can edit, similar in some respects to Wikipedia.
* Community mechanisms, including forums for classicists and others interested in the ancient world to interact.
Is this on the level? It looks like an April Fool's joke—a site in simplifyed speling for "pêrsone ki on dê z’inkapasité intélêktuêl" (peepul hoo are not so brite)—but it's part of the official site of the city of Montreal/la Ville de Montréal, so I guess it's real. But I can't help but think it's ill advised; it reminds me of the "Rezedents Rights & Rispansabilities" brochure (pdf of actual document) published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development some years ago and quickly withdrawn because of the ruckus it caused (see the Straight Dope summary). I mean, really—check out the page for the "Bibliotêk":
Il i a dê bibliotêk[Thair are liberries in lotsa naberhuds of Montréal.
dan bokou de kartié de Montréal .Il fo t'avouar une kart d’aboné
pour anprunté dê livr
dan lê bibliotêk de Montréal .Pour avouar une kart
demandé o kontouar de la bibliotêk
de votr kartié ...
If people are gratefully making use of this, I stand corrected. But it looks to me like politikul corektnus run wild. And as Koant of Madame Martin, from whom I got this, says: "I fail to see how this alternative spelling is any simpler than the usual one."
Deep in south Poland is a town called Wilamowice. Like many towns in Poland, it has a German name as well, in this case Wilmesau. But this town has a third name, Wymysau, in a dialect of German spoken only there, Wymysojer. So obscure is this dialect (even Ethnologue ignores it) that Avva suspected that the Wikipedia article about it might be a clever fiction, along with Florian Biesik, who was said to have written poetry in it in the 19th century. But no, apparently it's genuine; there are at least two scholarly articles and a book about it. So I guess we can accept this lullaby (from the Wikipedia article) as genuine as well:
Śtöf duy buwła fest!My only remaining question is whether there's any relation between this town and the great scholar Enno Friedrich Wichard Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, editor of Philologische Untersuchungen for 45 years, author of a famous attack on Nietzsche as well as many critical works on Greek history and literature, and creator of the immortal epigram (on hack philologists) "Einmal heisst keinmal und zweimal heisst immer." ['Once means never and twice means always'—in other words, if a form occurs once, they ignore it; if it occurs twice, they assume it's regular.]
Skumma frmdy gest,
Skumma muma ana fettyn,
Z’ brennia nysła ana epułn,
Śtöf duy Jasiu fest!
Sleep, my boy, soundly!
Foreign guests are coming,
Aunts and uncles are coming,
Bringing nuts and apples,
Sleep Johnny sound!
Edward Tregear's Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary (1891), the work which made him a Fellow of the French Academy (according to this reference site, which misspells his name and thus is perhaps not entirely trustworthy), has been put online by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (which has put many other books online, including all 50 volumes of the Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War). From Tregear's preface:
Regarding the Maori speech of New Zealand as but a dialect of the great Polynesian language, the Author has attempted to organize and show in a concise manner the existing related forms common to New Zealand and the Polynesian Islands. Several attempts have been made to produce a Comparative Polynesian Dictionary, but so gigantic was the labour, so enormous the mass of material, that the compilers have shrunk back appalled in the initiatory stages of the work, and all that remains of their efforts has been a few imperfect and unreliable pages of vocabulary scattered here and there through books treating of the Malayan and Pacific Islands. The present work is, at all events, continuous and sustained; it does not pretend to be a dictionary of Polynesian, but to present to the reader those Polynesian words which are related to the Maori dialect; using the word Maori (i.e., Polynesian, “native,” “indigenous”) in the restricted sense familiar to Europeans, as applying to the Maori people of New Zealand...Many thanks to Stephen Judd, who called my attention to this work in a comment on an earlier entry.No small proportion of the labour expended upon this work was exerted in providing examples of the use of words, both in Maori and Polynesian. Many thousands of lines from old poems, traditions, and ancient proverbs have been quoted. The examples might more easily have been given by the construction of sentences showing the use of the particular words, but, rejecting made-up examples as being in practice always open to adverse criticism, preference has been given to passages by well-known authors, where the words can be verified and the context consulted...
Although the dictionary relates to the classification of Polynesian dialects proper, Malay, Melanesian, and Micronesian vocabularies have also furnished comparatives.
Incidentally, the above-linked reference site also says that in 1891 Tregear became "the first secretary of Labour in the world," and gives this pleasing anecdote:
During the 1913 waterfront & general strike, Edward sided with the strikers against the farmers' constabulary recruited by Massey. Union historian Herbert Roth wrote, "There are those who remember him during the 1913 strike standing with blazing eyes in Cuba Street [Wellington] and shaking his fists at the mounted 'specials' shouting; 'Go home! Go home, you ---------- scabs!'"
I have previously declared my undying love for Pogo and his creator, Walt Kelly, and that thread unearthed a slew of readers who felt the same way, quoting Pogetry by the furlong: "The moon is a madness," "Once you were two," "Oh, roar a roar for Nora," "The Keen and the Quing," "I was stirrin' up a stirrup cup," and more! more! Now I discover a fellow acolyte in Neddie of By Neddie Jingo!, whose post Greetings from Fort Mudge not only reproduces Pogo cartoons, record covers, and campaign buttons and quotes a long stretch of dichotomous dialogue between Howland Owl and Churchy La Femme (Owl: "Mine is got the ingrediments of scintillating scientific achievement inherent in it." Churchy: "Mine is too! It got the ungreedy minks of single-eightin' sinus siftin' an' cheese mints inherited too!"), it not only provides the full text of the toponymophilic "Go Go Pogo" ("From Caravan Diego, Waco and Oswego..."), it links to an mp3 of Walt himself belting it out with (in Neddie's mot juste) gusto. Tweedle de he go she go we go me go Pogo!
(Via BatesLine.)
Google has introduced yet another great feature:
What's an "iwi"? What does "spiel" mean? Google Definitions is one example of how we work to make the world's information more accessible: ask us what a word means, and we'll try our best to get a good variety of definitions from all corners of the Web. So I'm happy to say that a handy feature just got handier; as of this week, Google Definitions is multilingual, and is indexing more sources than ever. Enjoy the peace of mind of knowing that the definition of voip is just one click away.I got this via Margaret Marks at Transblawg; she says "What was interesting to me was the etymology of Bratwurst," and I too was surprised to learn the first syllable is from Brät 'meat without waste' rather than braten 'to fry/roast.'
The Japanese Page has all sorts of resources for learning Japanese; I was particularly taken with the Gogen - Word Origins page:
折り紙つき origami tsuki(Via plep.)Meaning: something very nice; certified to be good
Example: このレストランのピザは、折り紙つきのおいしさです。
kono resutoran no piza wa, origami tsuki no oishisa desu.
this-restaurant-'s-pizza-as for-guarantee-'s-tastiness-is.
I guarantee you'll love the pizza in this restaurant.Origin: It actually has nothing to do with origami. This 'origami' actually refers to an official document certifying the authenticity of a sword (刀の鑑定書 katana no kanteisho). The tsuki means the sword comes with this guaranteed certificate. This paper was folded and thus called 'ori' (to fold) 'kami' (paper). It is now used to refer to objects in general.
Again via Stilicho, the IPA Phonetic Symbol Typer. As Dan says: Nɒt hæf bæd!
There's no point my going on about what a great writer Bellow was; if this is news to you, go read him. But the hullabaloo about his death has led me to a couple of odd mysteries. For one thing, nobody knows when he was born. For somebody born in a Montreal suburb in the twentieth century, this strikes me as unusual. The NY Times obituary says "his birthdate is listed as either June or July 10, 1915, though his lawyer, Mr. Pozen, said yesterday that Mr. Bellow customarily celebrated in June. (Immigrant Jews at that time tended to be careless about the Christian calendar, and the records are inconclusive.)" So he was either a day or a month older than my father.
The other mystery, of more pressing interest to me, is about names. The Times obit calls his father Abram and says nothing about the original family name, which I had always assumed was Belov (stressed on the second syllable). But James Atlas's biography calls the father Abraham Belo (adding that "the family called him" Abram) and says "Belo—the name derives from byelo, 'white' in Russian—became, through a Halifax customs official's haphazard transliteration, Bellow." Atlas is clearly no Russian scholar (the word for white is belyi, or byelyi if you want to represent the prerevolutionary yat' by ye), but you'd think he'd get the family name right, particularly when -ov is such a common ending that the bare -o stands out like a sore thumb. Does anybody know anything more about this? (Incidentally, the novelist was born Solomon, "known as Shloime or Shloimke and later as Saul," in Atlas's words, and his uncles later "added an -s to their surname, modeling themselves after Charlie Bellows, a well-known Chicago criminal lawyer who had once been the Bellows' neighbor. They pronounced it Bellus.")
Something else I wonder about is whether Bellow knew Russian; it's not clear from Atlas's account:
His parents spoke to each other in Russian and Yiddish; he and his three siblings spoke English and Yiddish at home; on the streets of Montreal they spoke French, and in public school they spoke English. "I didn't even know they were different languages," Bellow wrote.Atlas several times refers to his reverence for Russian literature and emphasis on his own Russian roots; in the '50s he aquired a "habit of addressing his friends with patronymics ('Dear Yevgeny Pavlovitch')"—but none of this proves anything except affinity.
I can't resist adding that Bellow was celebrated in Chicago socialist circles in the '30s for a Yiddish version of T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; Atlas quotes the lines
In tsimer vu di vayber zenen
Redt men fun Karl Marx und Lenin
[In the room where the women go
they talk of Marx and Lenin]
and
Ikh ver alt, ikh ver alt,
Un mayn pupik vert mir kalt.
[I grow old, I grow old,
and my belly button grows cold.]
Also, when he was told Thomas Edison was an anti-Semite, he replied "That's why Jews light candles." Alevasholem.
Addendum. There's a fine appreciation by Ian McEwan in the April 7 NY Times; a taste:
Bellow lovers often evoke a certain dog, barking forlornly in Bucharest during the long night of the Soviet domination of Romania. It is overheard by an American visitor, Dean Corde, the typically dreamy Bellovian hero of "The Dean's December," who imagines these sounds as a protest against the narrowness of canine understanding, and a plea: "For God's sake, open the universe a little more!" We approve of that observation because we are, in a sense, that dog, and Saul Bellow, our master, heard us and obliged.
A hilarious/depressing post by the excellent Dan Hartung (about censorship of the comic strip Get Fuzzy) in his blog Stilicho ("a barbarian in the civilized world"—you know Stilicho, right?) led me to an investigation of the least respectable of the various meanings of the word beaver, which of course led me to the OED, where I discovered that the first citation of this meaning was:
1927 Immortalia 166 She took off her clothes From her head to her toes, And a voice at the keyhole yelled, ‘Beaver!’
(The next, from 1939, is from—wait for it—Finnegans Wake.) I did a little more investigation and discovered that Immortalia: An Anthology of American Ballads, Sailors' Songs, Cowboy Songs, College Songs, Parodies, Limericks, and other humorous verses and doggerel is online, each edition lovingly photographed and the entire contents reproduced by John Mehlberg (who would like to hear from you if you happen to have a copy of one of the printings he knows of but has not seen). My hat is off to him, and you can see the actual limerick cited by the OED (number LIV, on page 166) here. (Um, not safe for work, in case you hadn't figured that out.)
I haven't lambasted William Safire for a while now, and after his recent "Kifaya!", helpfully describing the meaning ('enough!'), usage (political protest), pronunciation, and even derivation (quoting Hans Wehr's Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic) of the titular exclamation, I was feeling downright charitable towards him. But no longer. His latest column, called "Putin/Poutine," is a nasty piece of work, spreading what he must know are lies in the service of an animus against the French that I thought was passé by now even among the most fervent conservatives.
His column makes two simple points:
1) The French spelling Poutine for the president of Russia "is pronounced poo-TEEN," which is not how the Russians say it ("POO-tyeen").
2) The reason for this is that they're trying to avoid the spelling Putin, which "would be pronounced as putain in French -- that is, sounding close to pew-TANH [-- which] means 'prostitute; whore.'"
Point 1 is true; point 2, the entire raison d'être for his column, is ridiculous. He must know perfectly well that Poutine is the only possible way to write the name in French, that there's a standard way to render Russian names in French (Lénine, Staline, Khrouchtchev) and they're simply following it. He must also know that the French can't possibly pronounce it à la russe (unless, of course, they study Russian) because they don't have a stress accent; stress aside, they do a better job than Americans do, with our alveolar t and reduced unstressed i. I hold no brief for Putin, a nasty piece of work himself, and anybody who wants to make fun of him has my blessing (perhaps by comparing him to québecois poutine, which Safire mentions only parenthetically, to "head off a torrent of e-mail from Quebec"). But his column is supposed to be about language, not politics, and even by his own standards I'd say he's disgraced himself.
A Japan Times article by Roger Pulvers has fun with the notion, dear to people in Japan, that Japanese is "the most difficult language in the world":
No sooner had I closed my umbrella and entered the cab than the driver peered at me in the rearview mirror and said, in Japanese: "You're not a Japanese are you."So far, so amusing, but Pulvers goes on to say:"No, I'm not," I replied.
"Oh. Japanese is the most difficult language to speak in the world, you know. Isn't it?"
Well, for the 15-minute ride home I strove to persuade my driver that this, in fact, did not seem to be the case. I pointed out the fiendish difficulties of the languages that I had studied in my life, Russian and, particularly, Polish being much more complicated in grammar and pronunciation, at least for a native speaker of English, than Japanese. I finished my discourse as we rounded the corner by my house.
"I mean, Polish, for instance, has elaborate case endings for adjectives, and even has a special one for the nominative plural of male animate nouns!"
Having listened attentively to my passionate, if pedantic, foray into the esoterica of comparative linguistics, the driver stopped the cab by my front gate, turned his head around to me and smiled broadly.
"Well, anyway," he said, "Japanese is still the most difficult language in the world!"
Japanese, of the languages that I know, is actually the easiest spoken language to master.This is just silly. Leaving aside the pauses, a cute but irrelevant distraction, the idea that a simple morphology means a simple language is ridiculous. Complexity is to be found in many areas of a language, and if morphology is simple I guarantee you syntax and other aspects pick up the slack. In the case of Japanese, speaking the language is rendered notoriously difficult by the necessity of choosing a politeness register before you can even formulate a sentence; this is one reason Japanese exchange business cards immediately, so they can see the other person's title and decide which verb form to use. (Say tabechatta to your boss and you might be out of a job.) I don't mind oversimplification in the service of a good joke, but the idea he's trying to promulgate is just as pernicious as the one he's making fun of.For one thing, the number of words used in daily life is small compared to, say, English. Nuances in English are added by expressing an emotion with the use of any number of different words, incorporating layer upon layer of subtle meaning by dipping into what is an enormous chest of verbal riches. In Japanese, subtleties are added with the use of a variety of endings. When you get to the end of a sentence you can vary the tone, register and emphasis of what you say by using one or more of a number of word and sentence endings. These endings are not hard to master. The result is that a non-native can be very expressive and articulate in Japanese without having to learn thousands of words -- in the case of English, words that came from Anglo-Saxon, Latin and the many other languages that have enriched its vocabulary.
And, you can pause, mumble, leave out core elements of sentences, even punctuate dialogue with long silences and still speak excellent Japanese! The other languages that I am familiar with do not allow for the huge pregnant pauses and embarrassing elipses that allow valuable thinking time for non-native beginners. What is considered an acceptable pause in Japanese, often giving the impression of profundity, would be taken for pure prevarication in English.
Verbs are generally the horror element of language learning. In English they are irregular, with auxiliary verbs and the conditional to make matters worse. Slavic languages have the perfective and the imperfective, not to mention so-called verbs of motion. (You need a different verb for "to go" depending on whether you are walking or riding in something.) Japanese verbs are a cinch. Just change the ending of the verb's stem to get everything from "I eat" to "I ate," "I didn't eat," "I wouldn't have eaten," "I didn't want to eat," "even if I didn't want to eat" and "Sorry but I went and ate it," which is tabechatta. Easy as pie.
More examples can be found in the comment section to Bridget's ilani ilani post, where I got the link.
Chapati Mystery (a blog by Sepoy, "a doctoral candidate in History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations department at the University of Chicago") has a great post about the history of the word termagant 'a quarrelsome, scolding woman; a shrew.' The OED says "Name of an imaginary deity held in mediæval Christendom to be worshipped by Muslims," which is interesting in and of itself, but the question is, where did the name come from? Sepoy investigates various proposed solutions, all more or less unsatisfactory (ta-rabbi-l-ka'bati 'by the Lord of Ka'aba'??); we'll probably never know the answer, but this sort of quest makes us very happy here at Chateau Languagehat.
Having gotten back to reading Dead Souls, I hit another mysterious word, гальбик [gal'bik], which is not in any of my dictionaries. From the context (Этот, братец, и в гальбик, и в банчишку, и во все что хочешь [That guy will play galbik, bank, whatever you want], a few pages into Chapter 4) it's obviously a game of chance, but which? (I'm not the only one who wonders; Vasili Utkin, a soccer broadcaster with a passion for literature, says in an interview: "моя самая любимая книга - “Мертвые души”... Если бы я нашел описание игры в “гальбик”, думаю, что один из интересов студенческой поры для меня был бы удовлетворен." [My favorite book is Dead Souls... If I could find a description of the game of "galbik," I think my curiosity of student days would be satisfied.]) Both Andrew MacAndrew, whose translation I have at hand, and D.J. Hogarth, whose version is online, give up and render it "faro," which provides only a vague equivalent (the Russian word for that is faraon). The only hint I found by googling (and Yandexing) was that the same Russian word was used to translate passe-dix in Chapter 32, "Un diner de procureur," of Dumas's Les Trois mousquetaires: "plumer quelque peu les jeunes clercs en leur apprenant la bassette, le passe-dix et le lansquenet dans leurs plus fines pratiques"—as this translation has it, "to pluck the clerks a little by teaching them bassette, passedix, and lansquenet." According to the OED the corresponding English word is "passage":
IV. [The passing or exceeding of ten = It. passa-dieci, F. passe-dix, i.e. pass-ten.]The 1680 quote gives a concise and plausible description of the game, which is a good thing, because the only online description, endlessly copied (eg, at Wikipedia) from The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims, Vol. II by Andrew Steinmetz Esq, says:15. An obsolete game at dice: see quot. 1680.
1426 LYDG. De. Guil. Pilgr. 11194 And affter pleyn at the merellys, Now at the dees, in my yong age, Bothe at hassard & passage. 1522 World & Child in Hazl. Dodsley I. 266 And then we will with lombards at passage play. 1598 FLORIO, Passa dieci, a game at dice called passage or aboue ten. 1602 2nd Pt. Return fr. Parnass. Prol. 12 You that knowe what it is to play at primero, or passage. 1680 COTTON Compl. Gamester 119 Passage is a Game at dice to be played at but by two, and it is performed with three Dice. The Caster throws continually till he hath thrown Dubblets under ten, and then he is out and loseth; or Dubblets above ten, and then he passeth and wins. 1739-40 Act 13 Geo. II, c. 19 §9 A certain game called Passage is now daily practiced and carried on, to the ruin and impoverishment of many of his Majesty's subjects. 1755 Mem. Capt. P. Drake II. xvi. 262, [1740] The Games of Rowly Powly and Passage.. all these Games were suppressed by Parliament, and, on severe Penalties, not to be played after the 25th of March 1745.
It is played with three dice. There is always a banker, and the number of players is unlimited. Each gamester holds the box by turns, and the other players follow his chance; every time he throws a point UNDER ten he, as well as the other players, loses the entire stakes, which go to the banker. Every time he throws a point ABOVE ten (or PASSES TEN--whence the name of the game), the banker must double the player's stakes and the stakes of all those who have risked their money on the same chance. When the game is played by many together, each gamester is banker in his turn.Which makes it sound as if it's impossible to win unless you're the banker.
Now, of course it's entirely possible that the Russian translator of the Dumas book picked "galbik" as a vague equivalent of "passe-dix" in the same way as the English translators of Gogol used "faro" for "galbik," but that's the only clue I've found except for the parenthetical expansion in this etymological article (about one of the many Russian expressions for 'get drunk') by V.V. Vinogradov; in a list of card games, he has гальбик (гальбцвельф)—gal'bik (gal'btsvel'f). The expanded form is obviously a Russified form of a hypothetical German Halbzwölf, which would mean 'half-twelve,' but it's not in my dictionaries and doesn't relate in any obvious way to the game, so a fat lot of help that is.
I have reported on politically inspired place-name changing in India; now it's the turn of South Africa and Ireland. It seems the former country's capital, Pretoria, is being renamed Tshwane, adding to a list of similar changes that includes, for instance, Pietersburg changing to Polokwane a few years ago. While I understand the desire to eliminate names associated with the apartheid government, in this case it seems like there must be better ways to spend the billion-plus rand the change is expected to cost. Of linguistic interest is the fact that the -h- represents aspiration, so the new name is basically pronounced "Tswane," although I'm sure most English-speakers will use the /sh/ sound because of the spelling. Also, it's not at all clear what the meaning of the new name is. The Hindustan Times story says:
Pretoria was named after Andries Pretorius, who settled here with the so-called "Voortrekkers" (front trekkers) a vanguard of Boers who left the Cape colony with ox-wagons in the 1830s and the second group to live in the area.So that's two possible meanings right there (though I'm not clear on what "symbolizing the motto" means); the page "Meanings of place names in South Africa" quotes a government website as saying:The first were Nguni-speakers, known as the Ndebele who named the place Tshwane, which means "Little Ape". The word Tshwane is said to symbolise the chief's motto -- "we are the same."
The name Tshwane comes to us from Chief Mushi, who settled in the Pretoria area about 100 years before the arrival of the Voortrekkers in the early 1800s. Chief Mushi and his tribe had moved from Zululand and first settled at Mokgapane (Mooiplaas, east of Pretoria). He later moved from Mooiplaas to what is now the Pretoria area, on the banks of the Tshwane River, named after his son Tshwane (today called the Apies River). Tshwane is the authentic African name for Pretoria. Also interesting is that the word tshwane means "we are the same" or "we are one because we live together".No ape here, just the "motto." My problem is that I can't find any of these meanings in my Zulu dictionary; the only similar entry is -tshwana, meaning the Tswana tribe or its characteristics or language. Can anybody provide more information? (Eliza?)
Elsewhere on the political-topography front, Ireland has "enacted a law outlawing English in road signs and official maps on much of the nation's western coast, where many people speak Gaelic."
Locals concede the switch will confuse foreigners in an area that depends heavily on tourism, but they say it's the price of patriotism...Thanks to to Gauteng for the South African story and to Mark Swofford of Pinyin for the Irish tip.On the breathtakingly beautiful Dingle peninsula in northwest County Kerry, signs with English spellings were taken down weeks ago, even in cases where the English versions remain popular in local parlance. Local villages still principally known as Ballydavid, Castlegregory and Ventry are now called only Baile na nGall, Caislean Ghriaire and Ceann Tra...
Another impact of the law is that, for many places, the government has settled eons of argument about what the locality's real Gaelic name should be. Some villages and smaller rural entities called "townlands" have had rival spellings — and even totally competing names.
The town of Mountcharles in northwest County Donegal, for instance, has often been known in its straight Gaelic translation "Moin Searlas," but the government-approved list rejects this in favor of a more medieval name "Tamhnach an tSalainn," pronounced as "townuck awn tallan" and meaning "hill of salt."
The much-loved folklorist and teacher Alan Dundes died this week; the San Francisco Chronicle obit says:
Renowned UC Berkeley folklorist Alan Dundes died Wednesday from an apparent heart attack suffered while teaching a graduate seminar on campus.(Here is the UC Berkeley press release, with more details about his life and career and a good picture of him smiling behind a monstrous pile of papers, and here is the MetaFilter thread about him.) Renee, who was in his seminar, asked me to post this because she's taken Glosses.net offline; my deepest sympathies to her and to everyone who knew Dundes, and I hope she will forgive my expressing the hope that at some point she revives Glosses, which has always been one of my favorite blogs and was an inspiration for this one.Dundes, 70, an internationally known figure whose enthusiasm and rigorous scholarship established folklore as a full-fledged academic discipline, died on the way to the Alta Bates-Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, campus officials said.
"Everybody's in shock," said the head archivist at Cal's Folklore Archive, Kelly Revak, her voice breaking as she passed the phone to a colleague.
He collapsed shortly before 4:30 p.m. while conducting a graduate seminar on folklore theory and techniques in Giannini Hall, campus officials said. Ten students are enrolled in the class.
A table of Simpsons characters with the versions of their names used in Latin America and Spain—which are often completely different. (Examples: Sideshow Bob is Bob Patiño in the Americas and Actor Secundario Bob in Iberia; Itchy and Scratchy are Tommy y Daly and Rasca y Pica respectively.) A major exception: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon is the same wherever you go. (The list is provided by Interlens en sus manos, where you will also find a tribute to Hatt Baby.)
This interview with Dmitri Gorbuntsov, the editor of a new edition of Dostoevsky, more complete and accurate than any previous (according to him), reminded me of a question that's been plaguing me for some years, ever since I saw a previous more-accurate-than-ever edition of Dostoevsky (or it may have been a volume of this one). But first let me quote an interesting passage, Gorbuntsov's response to a question about differences from an earlier edition:
The Academy's complete edition of the works of Dostoevsky, of which Soviet literary criticism was so proud, left something to be desired in terms of completeness. It contains many kon"yunkturnye [politically motivated] emendations that conflict with shades of meaning of the author's orthography and punctuation. It's only fair to say that they started correcting Dostoyevsky even before Soviet times, [in fact] right after his death. During his life that was almost impossible to do. When Dostoyevsky discovered interference with his text, he handed out tongue-lashings that the proofreaders and make-up men who dealt with him remembered for the rest of their lives. If in defending some correction or other they mentioned grammar, Dostoyevsky took sharp exception—every author (he'd say) has his own style and grammar, and other people's rules have nothing to do with him.
For Dostoyevsky, according to Vladimir Zakharov, punctuation was intonational and intuitive. His punctuation marks are signs of the author's intonation, the author's rhythm. Reading Dostoyevsky's texts in accordance with his punctuation marks, the professor is convinced, is no different from reading a composer's score in accordance with the notes. Unlike many of his colleagues, Dostoyevsky fully utilized the artistic possibilities of italics, capital letters, accent marks. His italics are expressive, creating a distinctive esthetic tuning fork in accordance with which the reader must interpret his works. But his capital letters are rationalistic, bringing out hierarchical relations in the text. It can not infrequently be observed that in the course of a single sentence Dostoyevsky writes the same word now with a capital letter, now with a small one. For example, the word Bog ['God'] meaning the Most High, in the Christian sense, he always writes with a capital letter, but in a pagan or heretical sense with a small one. The abolition of the spelling of God with a capital letter in Soviet editions led to a loss of the meaning Dostoyevsky had attached to it. Therefore, according to the scientific editor of the edition, the editorial collective did everything to ensure that readers received the genuine Dostoyevsky, "cleansed" of later layers of emendations, kon"yunkturnye [social?], grammatical, and political, and with the author's orthography fully restored.I thoroughly approve, and am surprised such an approach has not been taken earlier.
(If anyone can explain to me the sense of конъюнктурный in this passage, I will be most grateful; my dictionaries give only the senses 'short-term, cyclical' and 'opportunistic, time-serving, mercenary-minded, advantage-seeking,' but it seems to have some specialized meaning here that I'm not getting.) [In the comments, Tatyana has explained that it refers generally to socio-political conditions and specifically to the necessity to follow the Party line and check with those who enforced it.]
Now, about that question. The preface to the volume I saw in the old Victor Kamkin bookstore in Manhattan (if I recall correctly, it was an edition of Crime and Punishment) discussed the history of Russian punctuation in the late nineteenth century, explaining that the change (deplorable, in my view) from an intuitive system of the kind Dostoyevsky used to the rule-based system familiar to all modern readers was due to a single person, whose name I remember as being monosyllabic and of German origin: Korff? Gets? Shtumpf? Anyway, I have been unable to google up anything relevant, and I appeal to the knowledge and research skills of my readers. I have more than once tried to discuss the subject, and I would dearly love to be able to name the man responsible for the change (and read more about it).
Update. The answer turns out to be Grot.
A couple of interesting stories from the New York Times. I can't get a blogsafe link for the first, so it may disappear in a few days:
Composing the Work an Ill-Fated Poet Never Began, by Alan Riding, describes a new book about (and by) Marina Tsvetayeva:
Now, in a new book published [in Paris], Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-born French philosopher and literary critic, believes he has found a way of introducing Tsvetayeva to a larger public outside Russia. In "Vivre Dans le Feu: Confessions" (Éditions Robert Laffont), or "Living in Fire: Confessions," Mr. Todorov has organized extracts from nine volumes of her letters, notes and diaries into what he calls the autobiography she never wrote.That's a book I'd like to read. The other story is about the new breed of young, hip lexicographers: In Land of Lexicons, Having the Last Word, by Strawberry Saroyan (no, that's not an April Fool's joke, it's her name). It focuses on Erin McKean, 33, editor in chief of the Oxford American Dictionary, but features others as well:"When I first read the material in Russian, I thought it was amazing, but also a bit difficult to follow," Mr. Todorov said in an interview, "because when you take all this writing, it's not a finished work. So I decided to carry out a labor of love, to compose a book that Marina had already written so that anyone could read the confessions of one of the great writers of the past century."
They include Steve Kleinedler, 38, who is second in command at American Heritage and has a phonetic vowel chart tattooed across his back; Grant Barrett, 34, project editor of The Historical Dictionary of American Slang, whom Ms. McKean describes as looking as if he'd just as soon fix a car as edit a dictionary; and Peter Sokolowski, 35, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster and a professional trumpet player. Jesse Sheidlower, 36, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, is best known among the group so far, partly because he is also editor of "The F-Word," a history of that vulgar term's use in English. He is known for his bespoke English suits, too...The whole article is interesting, and it's always good to see Grant Barrett getting some press.Sidney I. Landau, a former editor of Cambridge Dictionaries and the author of "Dictionaries: The Art And Craft of Lexicography" (and at 71, a member of an older generation), said a shift in people's interests had also played a part. "In the early part of the 20th century, science and technology were very big in terms of marketing dictionaries, and they'd make claims about having 8,000 words dealing with electricity or mechanics," he explained. But now, he added, "I think there has been a shift in terms of recognizing the importance of youth culture and slang." In other words, people like Mr. Barrett, who marvels at a term like "ghetto pass," which refers to street credibility for nonblacks, are in demand. He can trace its mainstream usage back to the hip-hop artist Ice Cube in 1991.
John Morse, the publisher and president of Merriam-Webster, said many young lexicographers had a natural social aptitude that helped them rise in the field. "I think if you go back 20 or 30 years, dictionary editors kind of sat in their office, did what they were supposed to do," he said. "But what we realized - at least what I realized about 10 years ago - is that we needed to put a public face on dictionaries. Editors needed to be engaging with the public. And I think that activity is something younger editors stepped up to." Ms. McKean often appears on public radio talking about words, and she has been dubbed "America's lexicographical sweetheart" by National Public Radio's program "Talk of the Nation."
