THE NEW SAPPHO.

Back when I first heard about the new Sappho poem (or, to be more accurate, filled-out version of Lobel-Page's fragment 58) I said I'd love to see the Greek; now, thanks to serendipity (and I'm very happy to report that Chris is back and blogging up a storm), I can reproduce it here:

῎Υμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν ἰ]ο̣κ[ό]λ̣πων
κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες,
σπουδάσδετε καὶ τὰ]ν̣ φιλἀοιδον
λιγύραν χελύνναν·

ἔμοι δ᾽ἄπαλον πρίν] π̣οτ᾽ [ἔ]ο̣ντα
χρόα γῆρας ἤδη
ἐπέλλαβε, λεῦκαι δ’ ἐγ]ένοντο
τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν·

βάρυς δέ μ’ ὀ [θ]ῦμο̣ς̣ πεπόηται, γόνα
δ’ [ο]ὐ φέροισι,
τὰ δή ποτα λαίψηρ’ ἔον ὄρχησθ’ ἴσα
νεβρίοισι.

τὰ <μὲν> στεναχίσδω θαμέως· ἀλλὰ τί
κεν ποείην;
ἀγήραον ἄνθρωπον ἔοντ᾽ οὐ δύνατον
γένεσθαι

καὶ γἀρ π̣[ο]τ̣α̣ Τίθωνον ἔφαντο
βροδόπαχυν Αὔων
ἔρωι φ̣ . . α̣θ̣ε̣ισαν βάμεν’ εἰς
ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισα[ν,

ἔοντα̣ [κ]ά̣λ̣ο̣ν καὶ νέον, ἀλλ’
αὖτον ὔμως ἔμαρψε
χρόνωι π̣ό̣λ̣ι̣ο̣ν̣ γῆρας, ἔχ[ο]
ν̣τ’ ἀθανάταν ἄκοιτιν.

Martin West's translation:

[You for] the fragrant-blossomed Muses’ lovely gifts
[be zealous,] girls, [and the] clear melodious lyre:

[but my once tender] body old age now
[has seized;] my hair’s turned [white] instead of dark;

my heart’s grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.

This state I oft bemoan; but what’s to do?
Not to grow old, being human, there’s no way.

Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world’s end,

handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o’ertook him, husband of immortal wife.

(Via Sauvage Noble.)

LSA BLOGGING.

I've been awash in nostalgia reading Angelo's reports on the LSA Institute at Sauvage Noble (1.1, 1.2, 1.3); ah for the days of splashing around in long-dead Anatolian languages and Tocharian transliteration! He reflects on "the basic nature of the divide between, e.g. Indo-Europeanists and 'historical' O[ptimality]T[heor]ists":

Traditional historical linguistics is concerned with getting the description down, establishing the data, i.e. answering the question “what were the changes?”, and post-generative historical linguistics is concerned with accounting for “how and why were the changes?”. The former can be impressionistic regarding “how and why”, and the latter can play fast and loose with the “what”... (It’s striking to see how sparse the traditional classes are vs. the post-generative ones, that there’re more of us attending their classes than the other way around, at least based on my schedule and who I recognize.)

As I said in his comments, a thousand times better to have solid facts with insufficient theory than brilliant theory with undependable facts. (And I regret to say I'm not at all surprised at his parenthetical remark.)

He has this nice remark on the Hittites:

I forgot to mention my favorite item of Hittite coolness: the Hittites were inclusive, open to other religions. Their capital Hatti was known as “Land of a Thousand Gods”. Not only this, but they believed gods must be worshipped in their own language. So the non-Hittite gods accommodated into the Hittite pantheon were worshipped in their respective non-Hittite languages, as textual remains indicate. A sensible policy that optimized the coexistence of conquerors and conquered.

CIBOLA.

Thanks to a recommendation by Abdul-Walid of Acerbia (soon, alas, to vanish into the dreamtime of the internet, not even archived [July 2 update: poof, it's gone!]) I have discovered Dave Bonta's epic poem Cibola, which he has been serializing on his blog Via Negativa since the start of this year; he's reached the penultimate of the 120 segments into which he's divided the poem, so you won't have a long wait for the conclusion. Being partial to a poem containing history, I visited out of curiosity to see what Dave was doing with the long form; I was hooked as soon as I saw the first epigraph, a snippet from the John William Johnson translation of a version of the Malian national epic of Sundiata (or as Johnson eccentrically renders it, "Son-Jara"):

Though a person find no gold,
Though he find no silver,
Should he find his freedom,
Then noble will he be.
A man of power is hard to find.

I've always been fascinated by the Malian epic, so this immediately drew me in, and the further epigraphs by William Blackwater and Wendell Berry further ensnared me, so that I was ready for Dave's own poetry, which begins:

This thing called a fetish embodies
what can never be touched.
Its odd contours—all lump & twist
& rag-end—are best kept out of view.
To see it exposed, you must assume
the burden of its origins, you must
give up some part of what makes you
you. Who now would choose
such displacement? It lives
in a buried season, carboniferous.
It is the solid shadow
we abandoned in the womb.

The poem is "a psychological/anthropological drama based on historical events: the 'discovery' in 1539 of an apparent Shangri-La somewhere in the mountains of present-day New Mexico by the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza and the 'black conquistador' Esteban, originally from Morocco and probably of Sahelian parentage and culture." You can get the historical background here; once you're hooked on the story, let yourself sink into Dave's complex and lively retelling. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

I can't resist, naturally, providing the original Malinke of the Johnson passage quoted above:

N'i mògò ma sanu sòrò,
N'i ma wòri sòrò,
N'i di ki yèrè sòrò
I kèra hòròn ye dè!
Sin-kula le sòrò man di.

PRATIQUE.

Another word that's new to me: pratique is "Clearance granted to a ship to proceed into port after compliance with health regulations or quarantine." The OED adds: "Especially used in connexion with the South of Europe"; from googling, this no longer seems to be the case. OED citations start with:
1609 W. BIDDULPH in T. Lavender Trav. (1612) 4 Zante. We staied ten daies in the rode of this city, before we could get Pratticke, that is: leaue to come amongst them, or to vse traffique with them.
and end with:
1897 Daily News 14 Jan. 3/5 The P. and O. steamer Nubia arrived in the Thames from Plymouth yesterday afternoon... Dr. Collingridge gave the ship pratique, and the yellow flag was then hauled down amid loud cheers.

As you can see from the first quote, it used to have an anglicized pronunciation (PRATT-ik), and that's the first one given by the OED, but apparently everyone now says pra-TEEK. What puzzled me was the word itself, but it seems practice (of which this is a variant) used to have a sense 'Dealings, negotiation, conference, intercourse' (1584 R. SCOT Discov. Witchcr. V. viii. 85 There was not any conference or practise betwixt them in this case), and this is a specialization of that use.

MANX AS SHE WAS SPOKE.

The Manx Language Samples Page has two samples of spoken Manx recorded over half a century ago; I was thinking of using the longer one (The Pig and the Parson [.wav file]) as a Language Quiz a la Language Log, but I figured the URL would give too much away. (Via Incoming Signals, which got it from my favorite medievalist, Lisa Spangenberg, in a Making Light thread that contains discussion of the revival of Manx along with much else).

NIEDECKER ON THE DANUBE.

As a huge fan of Lorine Niedecker, I'm happy to report that Carlos has posted three of her poems at Halfway down the Danube; here's one:

Consider at the outset:
to be thin for thought
or thick cream blossomy

Many things are better
flavored with bacon

Sweet Life, My love:
didn't you ever try
this delicacy—the marrow
in the bone?

And don't be afraid
to pour wine over cabbage

Of which Carlos says: "It nicely encapsulates the Wisconsin philosophy of life. (Especially the fourth and fifth lines.)"

That's the first poem in her 1964 collection Homemade/Handmade Poems (and was the first poem in each of the literally handmade booklets she sent to Cid Corman, Louis Zukofsky, and Jonathan Williams from which the collection was compiled); I can't resist adding the second one:

Ah your face
but it's whether
you can keep me warm

DRAY/DREY.

I just discovered that a squirrel's nest is called a dray (4,160 Google hits) or drey (826). (Oddly, there are a lot more images under the "drey" spelling.) The OED has the word ("Origin unknown"), but neither the AHD nor Merriam-Webster does (though of course they have the 'cart or wagon' word). I just wanted to share the information.

AGAPE.

An essay by J. M. Tyree on "Henry Thoreau, William Gaddis, and the Buried History of an Epigraph" (found via the invaluable wood s lot) reminded me of the clever (annoyingly clever, if you will) title of Gaddis's last novel, Agapē Agape, in which

the first word is the Hellenistic Greek term for the early Christian love-communion. The participants were to greet one another, according to St. Paul, with “an holy kiss.” Originally, this was an open-mouthed mutual breathing, in which one “inspired” the Holy Spirit from the lips of another believer... But in the fallen state that Gaddis links to modern life, one is often merely “agape” when one opens one's mouth, whether in sexual kissing, talking, or, as Tabbi suggests, the slack-jawed response to mass-entertainment culture and mechanized art... So little, after all—a mere Greek accent—separates the false cognates agape and agape.

Now, I don't know what the last sentence means (accent as in "accent mark"?—but there is none in English—or as in "Southern accent"?—but presumably nobody but a few first-generation Greek-Americans says the English word with a Greek accent), but that's not what interests me. [I should have checked the actual title of the book, which has a macron over the first e to represent Greek ēta. This is still not a "Greek accent" but at least I know what he means.] What I want to know is how you pronounce the first agapē, the word for "Christian love" (or however you want to define it). I've always put the stress on the second syllable, ə-GAH-pay, and this is the first pronunciation given in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary; I assume the stress derives from the accented syllable in the Greek (which was a stress, not pitch, accent by New Testament times). The second pronunciation given has the stress on the first syllable: AH-gə-pay. The only pronunciation given in the OED also stresses the first syllable (which derives from the tradition of pronouncing Greek words as if they were Latin, with the stress on the antepenult if the penult is short), but it is anglicized to AG-ə-pee (first syllable rhyming with bag). So, assuming you ever use the word in speech, how do you say it (please mention which country you're from)? And (a separate question) which do you think fits better in the title: ə-GAH-pay ə-GAYP, AH-gə-pay ə-GAYP, or AG-ə-pee ə-GAYP? (I don't suppose anybody knows how Gaddis pronounced the word, but if you do, please share.)

ON BEING A BERLINER.

Thanks to a Transblawg post linking to this article, we now have confirmation of what I always thought concerning the famous Kennedy speech:

Linguist Jürgen Eichhoff, writing in the academic journal Monatshefte, confirms there was no flub on Kennedy's part. "'Ich bin ein Berliner' is not only correct," he says, "but the one and only correct way of expressing in German what the President intended to say."

An actual resident of Berlin would say, in proper German, "Ich bin Berliner." But that wouldn't have been the correct thing for Kennedy to say. The indefinite article "ein" is added to a statement like this, Eichhoff explains, to express a metaphorical identification between subject and predicate. In fact, "ein" is required in a sentence such as this unless the speaker wants to be taken literally.

For example, the German sentences "Er ist Politiker" and "Er ist ein Politiker" both mean "He is a politician," but they're understood by German speakers as different statements. The first means, more exactly, "He is (literally) a politician." The second means "He is (like) a politician." You would say of George W. Bush, "Er ist Politiker." But you would say of an organizationally astute coworker, "Er ist ein Politiker."

So let's hear no more of this "jelly doughnut" nonsense.

NOOTKA DICTIONARY.

John Stonham, a Canadian-born linguist based at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, has just published the first dictionary of the group of languages known in English as Nootka (the tribe apparently chose the name Nuuchahnulth, which means 'along the mountains,' for themselves in 1981). The press release says:

Publication of the 537-page dictionary, which will be used to support the teaching of Native Americans the language of their ancestors, will give hope to those who have expressed concern about the death of many of the world’s minority languages, largely caused by economic globalisation and increased social mobility.

Today, only two to three hundred people can speak Nuuchahnulth, and most of these are aged over 60 years. There are also few written records, and experts predict it could die out in one generation if action is not taken to preserve it.

Nuuchahnulth has three basic vowels, there are 40 consonants and it has a very complex sound structure when spoken.

Dr Stonham incorporated 20-years experience of researching and writing about Nuuchahnulth into his dictionary, as well as the fieldwork materials of the linguist and anthropologist, Edward Sapir, which spans 1910-1924.

His team of researchers used a computer programme to analyse Sapir’s extraordinarily detailed notes, and the resulting database consists of approximately 150,000 words of the language...

Nuuchahnulth referrs to around 15 languages, but some have disappeared since 1900 and the remainder are all on the verge of extinction. Each language has distinct differences in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, which are acknowledged in the dictionary.

Dr Stonham, who hails from Montreal, added: “They are some of the most morphologically complex languages, which is what initially attracted me to them more than 20-years ago.

You can see a pdf file containing extracts from the dictionary here; the words are cee?iy 'be secluded in the house observing taboos, so as not to spoil a hunter's luck,' kampuu?c'is 'high rubber boots' (?u?uuyiihši?aλma ?u?uuiihma kampuu?c'is 'he sang for high rubber boots'), nuuniiqa 'speak to one whom one happens to meet,' quu?as 'person; Nootka' (na?aack^wi q^wayac'iik ?uuk^wil quuquu?as 'wolves understood what humans were saying'), t'aat'aaqsapa 'speak Aht or Nuuchahnulth; speak true or straight,' and t'ih 'wipe the tears from one's eyes with the back of one's hand' (I've substituted for the special symbols as best I could, but h should have a dot underneath: ḥ, if that comes out right). And you can see a regular webpage with an extract from what was then "the forthcoming Nuuchahnulth dictionary," with words beginning with k'- (eg, k'in'a 'herring guts').

The Queen Bee, from whose excellent blog I got this information, adds the following quote from Stonham's personal page:

On the personal side, I am a journeyman sheetmetal worker, a black belt in Kodokan Judo, a licensed welder, an NCCP level 2 coach, and I've raised and shown dogs (Akitas - I still have one, Bok-Soon) to champion level in the conformation ring. I've taught in three different fields (judo, my trade, and linguistics), in three (sort of 4) languages, in four countries, in five different universities, and I love what I do.

Impressive!

SAIKAM.

Metrolingua (m j klein's fine language blog) has an entry on Saikam,

which is "the first online Thai-Japanese/Japanese-Thai dictionary development project initiated by The Association of Thai Professionals in Japan (ATPIJ) and became a research project at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in 1999. Saikam has a unique feature which allows both users and developers to access the database across the Internet. Dictionary data can be accessed and updated at the same time."

But wait, there's something there for us non-Thai speakers: a kanji dictionary. And get this--you don’t have to type in hiragana to get the kanji; you can type in the romaji reading for a character, the stroke count, and frequency, and it will give you a selection of corresponding kanji! And it will also give you compounds. This is really helpful if you need to look up something but don’t have the ability to type out hiragana (as seems to be the case on PC's)...

It seems like they're hoping to have both English and Thai translations of the compounds, so if you want to provide English translations and have time to kill, you can contact the admins of the site.

A nice find.

ABECEDARIA.

Suzanne E. McCarthy has started a blog called abecedaria; in her post " Why Abecedaria?" she says:

I could have called this The Writing Sytem Blog but it seemed a little too presumptuous. What about the Glyph-based Input Blog - a little too much like a bee in the bonnet.

I want to write about writing systems as concrete realities with a physical organization, something that can be seen, felt, and perceived in the most tangible way... I guess abecedaria is about characters in a writing system being primarily glyphs and secondarily abstract codepoints.

She has a whole range of fascinating posts on Chinese, Tamil, Japanese, Caroline Islands Script, and all manner of script-related topics, even unto Alaric Alexander Watts' once well-known hyper-alliterative poem "The Siege of Belgrade" ("An Austrian army, awfully arrayed..."), which she links with a touching memory of her grandfather. Welcome!

THAI FICTION IN TRANSLATION.

Marcel Barang has the noble goal of translating and publicizing modern Thai prose literature via his website (English and French versions). In the preface to his anthology The 20 Best Novels of Thailand, he explains why much Thai literature is not very good by Western standards ("Too many Thai novels, I found, are dripping with honey and rosy beyond belief") and why there is so little available in translation. And at the bottom of the Menu page, there is a link to the Thai On-Line Library - Bitext Corpus maintained by Doug Cooper, which has parallel translations:

The Thai Bitext Corpus is a collection of Thai and (mostly) English parallel translations or bitexts. The complete library can be searched for usage examples, or individual texts can be read in a variety of layouts. Bitext searches allow either Thai or any available second language (L2), and use an extended AltaVista 'advanced match' syntax.

(Via Plep.)

YUPIK WHISTLING.

NPR's All Things Considered has done a show on whistling language in Alaska (you can listen to it at the linked page):

Alaska is home to at least 20 Alaska native languages plus countless individual dialects. It's also home to whistling as dialogue. The Yupik Eskimos and their Russian cousins have long practiced this form of communication. Alaska Public Radio's Gabriel Spitzer reports.

I wish they had broadcast some actual St. Lawrence Yupik as well as the whistled versions, but it's only a four-minute segment, and it's a lot of fun just the way it is. Thanks for the link go to Songdog, who reminds me I've posted about whistling talk in the Canary Islands.

INDETERMINACY.

Eddie Kohler has, as one of his many online projects, Indeterminacy. From the About page:

John Cage was an American composer, Zen buddhist, and mushroom eater. He was also a writer: this site is about his paragraph-long stories—anecdotes, thoughts, and jokes. As a lecture, or as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham dance, he would read them aloud, speaking quickly or slowly as the stories required so that one story was read per minute.

This site archives 186 of those stories. Each story is spaced out, as if it were being read aloud, to fill a fixed area. If you like, you can also read them aloud at a rate of one a minute.

I got this from wood s lot, and I'm going to quote the same one quoted there, for what should be good and obvious reasons:

I    never    had    a     hat,
                never
    wore    one,
        but    recently
was    given    a    brown     suede
    duck-hunting    hat.
                The
    moment    I     put    it
on        I    realized
  I    was    starved     for    a
    hat.
              I    kept
it    warm    by    putting
  it    on    my    head.

      I    made    plans    to
    wear    it    especially
when    I    was    going    to
    do    any    thinking.

        Somewhere    in
Virginia,
        I    lost    my    hat.

MALAY PRONOUNS.

Over at aprendiz de todo, Prentiss Riddle discusses the complex set of pronouns given in Sir Richard Winstedt's Colloquial Malay (Singapore, 1957):

...there are not only separate sets of pronouns for different combinations of social ranks, but a distinct set reserved just for addressing ethnic Chinese. Shades of John Wilkins! No wonder Winstedt goes on to say that "Malays shun the use of personal pronouns"—although the practice he describes of substituting nouns representing rank, title or metaphorical family relationship seems just as complex.

I'd write this off as a quaint and obsolete colonialism but linguablogger Jordan Macvay reports that the situation today isn't much simpler. In fact he notes with surprise that many Malays have started borrowing the English I and you so as not to have to commit to one of the social relationships encoded in their own pronouns.

Jordan's post is long and extremely interesting; an excerpt:

The problem is that Malay has too many available pronouns to choose from. When referring to oneself, a Malay speaker will generally have two pronouns to choose from: saya and aku. Both mean the same thing, but aku is seen as more informal and is used only with family and close friends (whereas in the Indonesian form of the language aku is the standard first person singular pronoun). When addressing another person, there is a dizzying array of choices. When speaking in the second person singular a Malay speaker must choose between awak (used for a spouse, close family members or friends, children and someone below you in age or, less frequently nowadays, in social status), anda (more formal, mostly used in advertising and on signs as in the French vous), engkau (used with close friends and family members; I often hear this shortened to kau or even ko), the seldom used kamu (which I think is actually supposed to be second person plural but is sometimes used in the singular, although I could be confusing Malay and Indonesian here; I usually only see it in TV subtitles) and a large number of other forms of address such as abang/kakak (basically big brother/sister, used to address someone slightly older than yourself, usually one's actual brother/sister or perhaps even husband, but often used to address strangers slightly older than yourself, especially at shops or markets), adik (little brother/sister, used to address someone younger; encik/cik (Mr./Ms.), pak cik/mak cik (uncle/aunty, used to address someone much older than yourself), tuan/puan (Mr./Mrs., a form of address often used for police and other officers, male or female, and also generally for married women) and a few others. Then there are the endless titles such as Tengku, Tuanku, Tun, Tan Sri, Datuk, Datin, Datuk Seri, Datin Seri, Putera, Puteri, and many others, which are used to directly address someone who is considered royalty or who has been conferred a non-hereditary title by a Sultan.

I'm particularly interested in the distinctions between Malaysian and Indonesian, which I lazily tend to think of as pretty much the same.

Update. See now Lameen's post at Jabal al-Lughat.

POETRY BY HEART.

Geoff Nunberg is the LH house linguist not just because of his scholarship but because he's able to put it at the service of a wider view of language and the world. His latest Fresh Air commentary is about learning poetry by heart, which he agrees with me in thinking a useful practise that should be revived (as Poetry is trying to do). He ends with the following passionate peroration:

If you think you can understand poems without feeling them in your body, you're apt to treat them as no more than pretty op-ed pieces—you wind up teaching kids to value "The Road Not Taken" as merely a piece of sage advice about making difficult decisions.

I was about seven or eight years old when I learned Burns's "Scots wha' hae' wi' Wallace bled" from my dad. I had absolutely no idea what the poem was about or even what half the words meant. But I learned something else—how verse can become a physical presence, in Robert Pinsky's words, which "operates at the borderland of body and mind."

That's an experience that you can only live fully when the poem comes from within rather than from the page in front of you. I like the way the Victorianist Catherine Robson put this: "When we don't learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes… of its own incessant beat."

I was greatly amused, though, when he slipped one past whoever monitors Fresh Air for decency:

Unless you're one of those freaks of nature who can soak this stuff up effortlessly, most of what you've got left of the poems you've learned is only snips and snatches—"My heart aches, and a something something pains my sense"; "I will arise and go now, and go to whatchamacallit"; "Ta tum ta tum, your mum and dad/They may not mean to but they do."

That last quote is the opening of perhaps the best-known English poem of the last few decades, Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse"; I can't imagine that anybody who's once heard or read the line "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" could possibly half-remember it as "Ta tum ta tum, your mum and dad."

Addendum 1. Dick & Garlick discusses the "Babu English" verb by-heart 'learn by rote memorization.'

Addendum 2. Mark Liberman is "slightly surprised" at my reaction to Nunberg's sly half-quote: "the FCC has no regulations against on-air quotations whose (unread) context includes forbidden words." I'm sure that's true, but I wasn't talking about FCC regs so much as the general concern for suitability that prevails at NPR; I can't imagine Frank Deford or Cokie Roberts alluding, even obliquely, to the word fuck.

KAFKA BLOG.

Following in the footsteps of Ray Davis's posting of Barbellionblog (not to mention Phil Gyford and Pepys' Diary), Paul Kerschen of Metameat has begun putting Kafka's diaries online in blog form (German version here). On the About page he says:

Because many entries cannot be precisely dated, I have forgone the usual convention of placing a date above each entry. Kafka's dates, when noted, appear in the body of the text. The German text is that provided by the Kafka Project. Entries appear in reverse order on the main page, in their original order on the archive pages. Ideally a new entry will appear every day, although longer entries may take more time.

On his own blog he says:

So I have decided to do something very presumptuous, and have reached into the recent literary past in order to turn one of its pillars into my ideal blogger. He doesn't link to things. He doesn't tell you about his day—or if he does, it's not an account of his day that would be recognizable to anyone else who was around. He's not trying to impress anyone. He has no interest in convincing you through argument. Often his entries completely lose any diaristic quality and become a rehearsal space; we get to see him testing out scenes and sentences, sometimes for possible inclusion in longer work, sometimes for their own sake. Its final sentence, which will not appear online for a long time, is Auch du hast Waffen—you too have weapons. That is the overall dramatic arc: the author's sustained attempt to master a frightening world by rendering it into language. It is white-hot.

Meet Franz Kafka's blog. It will be there when you need it.

And the top post at the moment reads as follows:

Today, for instance, I was rude three times, once to a conductor, once to someone introduced to me—so there were only 2, but they pain me like a stomachache. Coming from anyone else it would have been rude; how much more so coming from me. So I went outside myself, struggled in the air, in the fog and the irritation that no one had noticed that even with my companions I had committed the rudeness as a rudeness, that I had to commit it, had to carry the true expression, the responsibility; but the worst was when one of my acquaintances took the rudeness not as a sign of character but as character itself, drew my attention to the rudeness and admired it. Why do I not stay within myself? Though now I say to myself: look, the world lets you strike it, the conductor and the man you were introduced to kept calm, the latter even said goodbye as you went off. But that means nothing. You can achieve nothing when you fail yourself, but what else do you miss in your own circle? To this speech I answer only: even I would rather suffer blows inside the circle than strike blows myself outside of it, but where the hell is this circle—for a while, yes, I saw it lying on the earth, as if squirted out with chalk, but now it just hangs like this around me, it doesn’t even hang at all.

(Via wood s lot.)

BOOKWORM.

Radio station KCRW has a regular feature called "Bookworm" in which authors are interviewed about their work; the half-hour shows are available online, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll find something of interest. I was delighted to hear the talk (audio link) with Jonathan Williams (thanks, Andie!), and there's also a link to excerpts from his new collection Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems. And there are interviews with Ian McEwan, Roberto Calasso, Susan Sontag, August Kleinzahler, Orhan Pamuk, William Gass, Alex Garland, Octavia Butler, Robert Creeley, W. G. Sebald, Walter Mosley... Well, you get the idea. Lots of good stuff.

DES CHAPEAUX.

Pita's hat blog. It's nothing but hats... and it's in French! Need I say more? Check out this 1935 cover—there's a whole novella in that image. Or this wide-eyed and perhaps a bit complacent gaze from 1900: little does she know what the century to come will bring, the sad retreat from hat-wearing being the least of it. And men are not entirely neglected. (Mille remerciements to Derryl Murphy of Cold Ground!)

BIBLE TRANSLATION BLOG.

Wayne Leman's Better Bibles Blog is dedicated to "improving English Bible translations" not so much in terms of accurately rendering the sense of the original (though of course that's important to him) but in terms of rendering it into good, effective English, a goal he finds many current translations fall short of. When I ran across his blog, I was afraid Wayne was concerned about the sort of thing people often mean when they say "good English" (sentences ending with prepositions, split infinitives, that sort of nonsense), but I'm happy to report that's not the case:

I am not a prescriptive linguist (that is, someone who tells people how they should speak and write). Rather, I am a descriptive linguist, someone who observes how people actually speak and write. I observe, as do many others, that the majority of English speakers continue to use subject-verb agreement, so in a published book, especially one as important as the Bible, I feel it is important to point out when there is lack of subject-verb agreement. Similarly, there are a number of other language "rules" (or "principles") that fluent English speakers and writers follow that I believe should be followed in a book intended to be in quality literary English—at least they should be followed until there is a sufficient consensus (a large majority) among English speakers that those rules need to be changed...

I believe people have and should have linguistic choices. I do not think that "language police" should tell us how to speak, regardless of how well intentioned they are. I do think it is appropriate for English teachers to explain to their students what the current consensus is for usage of various linguistic forms. A teacher can explain that "If you want to be hired for some jobs, you need to be able to speak and write in a dialect that is approved of by the administrators of that company." But no one should ever tell people that they are "dumb" or "social rejects" if they speak a certain way.

Amen to that! (I'm a King James man myself, but that's because I read the Bible as a literary masterpiece, not as the urgent communication it must be to a believing Christian.)

BBC WORDHUNT.

Your language needs you!

Did you eat a balti before 1984 or have a mullet before 1994? And do you know how they got their names?

In conjunction with a major forthcoming BBC2 series, the OED invites you to hunt for words and help rewrite 'the greatest book in the English language'.

250 years after Dr Johnson wrote his celebrated dictionary with the aid of just six helpers, the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary have teamed up to appeal to the nation to help solve some of the most intriguing recent word mysteries in the language.

The OED seeks to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language—currently 600,000 in the OED and counting—and of every separate meaning of every word. Quite a task! The fifty words on the OED's BBC Wordhunt appeal list all have a date next to them—corresponding to the earliest evidence the dictionary currently has for that word or phrase. Can you trump that? If so the BBC wants to hear from you.

To join the word hunt, you might find an earlier appearance of the word in a book or a magazine, in a movie script, a fanzine, or even in unpublished papers or letter or a post-marked postcard. It might appear first online or in a sound recording. The most important thing is that it can be dated. Send your evidence to the BBC (email wordhunt@bbc.co.uk) and it might feature in the big series coming to BBC2 next year.

A worthy cause; I'm presuming that "the nation" is a misprint for "all English-speaking people." (Via Dick & Garlick.)

PIE VERBS AND STRESS.

Piotr Gąsiorowski, who studied electronics and computer science at Warsaw Polytechnic from 1978 till 1984 and then, disappointed with "what computer science was like in Poland in those ancient times," became a historical linguist instead, has put online some essays about Proto-Indo-European, notably one on stress and one on the verb system. While full of good meaty information, they're written in such a way that readers without specialized training should be able to follow along, and with a sense of humor, always welcome in what can be a dry field: "I don’t know if any speaker of PIE ever said ‘O yoke’ to a yoke. I suppose the potential vocative would have received initial stress if it had occurred to anyone to use it." (Via ilani ilani.)

THE BACKSTROKE OF THE WEST.

I haven't seen Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith yet, and I'm not sure I need to now that I've seen these screenshots of a bootleg DVD with English subtitles retranslating the Chinese translation used in the version copied. As jeremy (who bought the DVD and posted the screenshots) says, "amazingly enough, the beginning scroll is mistranslated even though the words are right there on the screen." And the title Revenge of the Sith becomes "The backstroke of the west" (I can only assume that Sith got rendered as xi 'west'). I'll let you discover the rest yourself, but I can't resist noting that "Jedi Council" becomes "Presbyterian Church." (Via MetaFilter.)

Addendum. This seems a good place to mention that I just found a site that has an accurate translation of "All your base are belong to us" (which, it turns out, should really be "Thanks to the cooperation of the UN forces, all of your bases now belong to CATS").

ABECEDARIUM.

Abecedarium is the Guild of Book Workers' biennial exhibit for 1998/99; it shows a collection of modern books on the theme of the alphabet. Some of them are beautiful, some linguistically pleasing, some you wish you could touch. (Via wood s lot.)

FRANKGUM.

A correspondent writes:

...here's an interesting word, not found in the OED, which I came across in the lyrics of the old sea song "Rant and Roar," specifically one of the Newfoundland versions.

"I went to a dance one night at Fox Harbour;
there were plenty of girls, so nice as you'd wish;
There was one pretty maiden a-chawin' of frankgum
just like a young kitten a-gnawing fresh fish."

The OED doesn't have "frankgum" but the meaning is clearly "spruce gum," since "frankincense" can also refer to spruce gum or other related resins, and if "frank-incense" then why not "frank-gum?" Still, I wonder if your distinguished readership has ever encountered this usage.

(You can find the full lyrics here; the word also turns up here under "Cuts": "probably cuttin' frankgum off a junk or something like that.") So, distinguished readers: anybody know this word?

THE MOST COMMON CHARACTERS.

Patrick Hassel Zein has a pageful of links on the Chinese language, many of which look useful and/or interesting, but the one I want to highlight here is The most common Chinese characters in order of frequency. Boy, I wish I'd had this available when I was trying to learn Chinese; he explains:

The list was created using statistic list of Chinese characters and a number of thick dictionaries. All characters are presented in falling statistical order. Pronunciations are specified according to Pinyin and for some characters a number of different possible pronunciations are given. Examples of common words are given for most characters, however with no guarantee that all the most common words are listed or that the given examples are particularly common words. Some of the listed pronunciations for some characters are less used than other pronunciations for the same character, and in those cases translations and examples may lack. Some additional comments are given.

The first character is 的, of which he says:

[de] ; 我的 wǒde my; 高的 gāode high, tall; 是的 shìde that's it, that's right; 是...的 shì...de one who...; 他是说汉语的. Tā shì shuō Hànyǔde. He is one who speaks Chinese.
[dì] 目的 mùdì goal
[dí] true, real; 的确 díquè certainly

(Via No-sword.)

OKH BLYA!

The excellent Russian-Israeli blogger Avva has a great story about a taxi ride with a driver he'd used several times before: "Judging by his face and Hebrew, a typical sabra (native Israeli), an Ashkenazi, about 45... He tells me he lived in America a long time; sometimes he switches to quite good English." They had just exited from a tunnel and were behind a car that refused to move; the driver was turning into the next lane to pass when a bus shot out of the tunnel and sped past in that very lane. "The driver leans on the brake with all his strength and hollers" a stream of Russian obscenity, "without any accent whatsoever." (I won't bother reproducing the mat because anyone who could read it might as well read Avva's whole entry—it's short and funny.) As one commenter said, "It's always like that—we speak in one language, switch to another, and curse in Russian." I have to say that Russian is the best language for cursing I know, bar none.

KAMUSI PROJECT.

In the process of researching my post on the multilingual ad (and let's not slack off, people—there are words yet to be identified—kawi, bukola, yemashala...) I ran across the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary (aka the Kamusi Project, kamusi being Swahili for 'dictionary').

The Internet Living Swahili Dictionary is a collaborative work by people all over the world. Together we are working to establish new dictionaries of the Swahili language - Kiswahili - both within Swahili and between Swahili and English. We are preparing print-based dictionaries and multi-media Swahili learning applications, all accessible to you through this home page. We invite you to become a contributing editor - help refine our lexicon by using our unique Edit Engine. Swahili is the most widely spoken African language, with more than 50 million speakers in East Africa and Central Africa, particularly in Tanzania (including Zanzibar) and Kenya. We suggest that first-time visitors to the Kamusi Project take a few minutes to read through our page of Frequently Asked Questions.

I once got my Swahili to the point that I could read a simple newspaper story; this resource tempts me to renew my acquaintance.

NAME THAT LANGUAGE!

Frequent correspondent Laurent sent me a most interesting advertisement, in which the letters of the word "Chevron" are made up of the words for 'energy' in a bunch of languages. I can identify most of them by using dictionaries and/or Google, but there are some I can't. Here's the image (click for large version):

And here's what I've got so far, starting with the words making up the letter C; if anyone can fill in any blanks, I will be much obliged:

ŋsī - ?

ஆற்றல் [arral] - Tamil

energy - English

ngolo - Kikongo? (according to this site, "NGOLO means energy, force, power. Moyo means life/spirit in the Kikongo language.")

শক্তি [shokti] - Bengali

nukiorneq - Greenlandic

amaanda - a South African language

orka - Icelandic (I believe this is related to English work)

エネルギー [enérugii] - Japanese (obviously borrowed from German, because if it were from English it would be enaaji)

ພະລັງ? [pa:la:ng] - Lao

brændstof - Danish [actually means 'fuel' -- tsk]

kawi - Swahili?

enerhiya - Hiligaynon (a language of the Philippines; a commenter adds that it could also be Tagalog or any other Philippine language)

енергия [energiya] - Bulgarian

enerģija - Latvian

pūngao - Maori

energji - Albanian

energie - Dutch, Afrikaans, Czech, Romanian

emandla - Swazi (Swati, siSwati)

fuinneamh - Irish (pronounced something like FWINN-ya, if you were wondering)

enerji - Turkish (j is as in French, like the s of leisure, and the word is borrowed from French, unless of course it's from Sumerian)

bukola - ?

ऊर्जा [ūrjā] - Hindi

энергетика [energetika] - Russian

matla - Sotho (from googling I find it used in Southern Sotho and Tswana)

ენერგია [energia] - Georgian

توانائی [tavāna'i] - Persian (Many thanks to Tim May for providing the Unicode for me to copy; he adds: "Online dictionaries return "توانايي", though, which gets a lot more hits, and so does "توانائي" and "توانايى". The first one looks like it's what it says in the advert, though.")

قوت [quvat] - Pushtu? (also could represent Dari quvvat)

ឋាមពល [tha:ma'pɔl] - Khmer/Cambodian

Energie - German

能源 [néngyuán] - Chinese

күч [küch] - Kyrgyz (common Turkic word; cf Turkish güç)

energía - Spanish

شکتی [shakti] - Urdu

makasi - Lingala?

umfutho - ? (Obviously a language related to Zulu, but doesn't mean 'energy' in Zulu as far as I can tell)

බලය [balaya] - Sinhala

эрчим хүч [erchim khüch] - Mongolian

에너지 [eneoji] - Korean

energia - Portuguese, Catalan, Polish, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Basque

maatla - a South African language (Pedi?)

énergie - French

nishati - Swahili?

hinya - Kikuyu??

енергія [energiya] - Ukrainian

พลังงาน [phalaŋŋaan] - Thai

ingufu - Kinyarwanda

אנרגיה [energyah] - Hebrew

simba - ? (Unfortunately, the very well known Swahili word simba 'lion' pretty much makes Google useless here)

amandla - Zulu (It's under -andla if you ever have to look it up in a Zulu dictionary)

energija - Lithuanian, Slovene, Croatian (or, if you're old-fashioned, Serbo-Croatian)

ενέργεια [enéryia] - Greek

енергетски извор - Macedonian

inirjia - Aymara?

pachamamaq - Quechua

yana qori unun - ?? (I don't even know if this is one, two, or three entries, but none of the words occurs separately)

energi - Norwegian, Swedish (also Danish, which is represented by brændstof)

pissens - Kreyol (Haitian Creole, from French puissance)

buka - ?

tenaga kerja - Indonesian

năng lượng - Vietnamese (a loan from Chinese 能量[nengliang])

daya - Malay

hery - Malagasy (Curiously, final i is always written y in Malagasy)

Ենէրգիա [energia] - Armenian

طاقه [Taaqa] - Arabic

enegiýa - Turkmen (?)

mbaretekue - Guarani

mphamvu - Chichewa

yemashala - ?

enerġija - Maltese

agbara - Yoruba

THEODOLITE.

In my last entry the word theodolite cropped up in the OED's definition of circumferentor; I got curious about its etymology and looked it up, only to find:

Origin unknown... The name, alike in the Latinized form theodelitus and the vernacular theodelite (subseq. -dolite), originated in England, and is not known in French and German until the 19th c. Its first user, and probable inventor, L. or T. Digges, has left no account of its composition, as to which various futile conjectures, incompatible with its early history and use, have been offered; such is the notion that it arose in some way out of alhidada or its corruption athelida occurring in Bourne's Treasure for Travailers 1578, which an examination of the works of Digges and Bourne, where both words occur in their proper senses, shows to be absurd. Theodelite has the look of a formation from Greek; can it have been (like many modern names of inventions) an unscholarly formation from θεαομαι [theaomai] ‘I view’ or θεω [theo] ‘behold’ and δηλος [dēl-os] ‘visible, clear, manifest’, with a meaningless termination?

Dammit, if people are going to invent words, the least they can do is let us know where they got the materials!

Oh, in case you were wondering, a theodolite is "A portable surveying instrument, originally for measuring horizontal angles, and consisting essentially of a planisphere or horizontal graduated circular plate, with an alidad or index bearing sights; subsequently variously elaborated with a telescope instead of sights, a compass, level, vernier, micrometer, and other accessories, and now often with the addition of a vertical circle or arc for the measurement of angles of altitude or depression."

MORE PYNCHONIAN VOCAB.

Continuing on with Mason & Dixon, I have followed the Durham lad Jeremiah Dixon into the local "Ale-Grotto of terrible Reputation" the Cudgel and Throck, where he is reluctantly drinking with his old teacher William Emerson and the Jesuit Fr. Christopher Maire, who is trying to recruit him to work for the Society, perhaps in China. Here is a snippet of their conversation:

"Ye'd find nothing like this in China, Jeremiah, Lad," cries Emerson.

"Mr. Dixon," declares the Jesuit, "at present, owing to the pernicious Cult of Feng Shui, you would find it a Surveyor's Bad Dream,— nowhere may a Geometer encounter an honest 360-Degree Circle,— rather, incomprehensibly and perversely, in willful denial of God's Disposition of Time and Space, preferring 365 and a Quarter."

"That being the number of Days in a year, what Human Surveyor, down here upon the Earth, would reject thah',— each Day a single, perfect Chinese Degree,— were 360 not vastly more convenient, of course, to figure with? Surely God, being Omniscient, has little trouble with either...? all the Log Tables right there in His Nob, doesn't he,—" Dixon, having been out tramping over the Fields and Fells for the past few weeks, with Table and Circumferentor, still enjoying a certain orthogonal Momentum, "and 365 and a quarter seems the sort of Division Jesuits might embrace,— the discomfort of all that extra calculation...? sort of mental Cilice, perhaps...?"

"Oh dear," Emerson's voice echoing within his Ale-can.

One of the pleasures of the book for me is looking up unknown words, and there are two of them in this passage. A circumferentor is, according to the OED: "Surveying. An instrument consisting of a flat brass bar with sights at the ends and a circular brass box in the middle, containing a magnetic needle, which plays over a graduated circle; the whole being supported on a staff or tripod. (Now commonly superseded by the THEODOLITE.)" And cilice (pronounced SILL-iss, from Latin cilicium 'Cilician') is "Hair-cloth; a rough garment made of hair-cloth, generally worn as a penitential robe." Or so says the OED—but the Mason & Dixon glossary says "Jesuit chastity belt, a wire girdle with sharp metallic points to irritate the skin," backing it up with a quotation from an anti-Opus Dei website, of whose trustworthiness I cannot judge, so I'll stick with the OED for now.

Incidentally, you may be thinking (as I did) that the reference to Feng Shui is one of Pynchon's beloved anachronisms, like having Dixon talk about Ley-Lines (the ley, "the supposed line of a prehistoric track in a straight line usually from hilltop to hilltop with identifying points such as ponds, mounds, etc., marking its route," being a bit of lunacy invented in the 1920s), but no, it turns out the OED's first citation is from as far back as 1797: "The greater part of the Chinese are of the opinion that all the happiness and misfortunes of life depend upon the fong-choui" (Encycl. Brit. IV. 679/1), so it's not inconceivable a well-traveled Jesuit could have bandied the word about a generation earlier.

And this just for Eliza: a few paragraphs later Dixon refers to himself as an "old Geordie aslog thro' the clarts"—clarts being, as I expect she knows, a northern dialect term for "sticky or claggy dirt, mud, filth."

GLOSSARY OF LINGUISTIC TERMS.

From SIL's LinguaLinks Library, the Glossary of linguistic terms: "This is a living glossary, and suggestions are welcome for additions or corrections." Useful. (Via Incoming Signals.)

THE CRACK.

We're all familiar with the expression "the crack of dawn"; I, for one, was not acquainted with the recent variant "the butt-crack of dawn," and I can't say I'm the better for having been introduced to it. But esthetics have no place in science, and if you wish to pursue an investigation of this phenomenon, you will direct yourself to Geoff Pullum's initial announcement and Mark Liberman's follow-up in Language Log.

Yes, I know esthetics do have a place in science—in fact, I believe some famous scientist said that the correct theory is always the most esthetically pleasing—but I needed a little inaccurate rhetoric for my sentence. These things happen.

BALLAD BY OPPEN.

Having touted George Oppen in my previous entry, I realized I'd never posted any of his poetry and decided to remedy the omission. Here's the last poem in his great book Of Being Numerous (I presume the fifth line refers to Swan's Island, Maine; the poem was originally published in Poetry, December 1967):

BALLAD

Astrolabes and lexicons
Once in the great houses—

A poor lobsterman

Met by chance
On Swan's Island

Where he was born
We saw the old farmhouse

Propped and leaning on its hilltop
On that island
Where the ferry runs

A poor lobsterman

His teeth were bad

He drove us over that island
In an old car

A well-spoken man

Hardly real
As he knew in those rough fields

Lobster pots and their gear
Smelling of salt

The rocks outlived the classicists,
The rocks and the lobstermen's huts

And the sights of the island
The ledges in the rough sea seen from the road

And the harbor
And the post office

Difficult to know what one means
—to be serious and to know what one means—

An island
Has a public quality

His wife in the front seat

In a soft dress
Such as poor women wear

She took it that we came—
I don't know how to say, she said—

Not for anything we did, she said,
Mildly, 'from God'. She said

What I like more than anything
Is to visit other islands...

GROUNDBREAKING POETRY BOOKS.

The Academy of American Poets has selected "31 groundbreaking books of poetry"; I was looking down the list and nodding (yup, the usual suspects, all good stuff but no surprises here) when I hit Of Being Numerous by George Oppen (1968). Any list that includes the unjustly neglected Oppen is worth posting about, so here 'tis. (Via Ramage.)

THE END OF BASEBALL IN FRENCH.

Another goodie via Derryl Murphy, "Expos' move marks end of baseball era in French," by Christopher J. Chipello of The Wall Street Journal:

For more than three decades, Jacques Doucet was the French-language radio voice of Major League Baseball.

Many Montreal baby boomers grew up listening to his mellifluous descriptions of lanceurs staring into home plate, frappeurs swinging for the fences and voltigeurs tracking down fly balls at la piste d'avertissement, or warning track.

But the Expos migrated south and started playing this spring as the Washington Nationals -- the first move by a major-league team since the Washington Senators became the Texas Rangers 33 years earlier. That meant the disappearance of big-league baseball in French from North American airwaves.

Mr. Doucet and other announcers from the Expos' early days were more than just broadcasters. They also helped hone modern French baseball lingo, polishing terminology that had been adapted from English over the course of a century.

A 1935 French-English lexicon put out by the Societe du Parler francais au Canada rendered the game, literally if awkwardly, as jeu de balle aux buts, and featured such quaint translations as batteur risque-tout (literally, daredevil batter) for "slugger" and gardien de but, (goalkeeper) for "baseman."

In 1969, the Expos' first season, the brewery sponsoring the team hosted a symposium for journalists and commentators to hash out terminology for le baseball. The recommendations included such colorful and enduring turns of phrase as balle papillon (butterfly ball) for "knuckleball" and vol-au-sol (theft at the ground) for "shoestring catch."

But in a game of tactical nuance and long pauses, it often fell to the radio play-by-play men to figure out how best to paint word pictures in respectable French. Over the decades, Mr. Doucet, a former newspaper reporter who switched to broadcasting in 1972, became the acknowledged master of that art.

When Mr. Doucet described infielders moving to serrer les lignes de demarcation in the late innings of a close game, listeners would envision the players hugging the foul lines to guard against an extra-base hit. And if a frappeur de puissance (as sluggers are now known) hit a fleche (an "arrow," or line drive) into the right-center field allee, listeners held their breath to hear whether the coureur (base-runner) would round third base and file vers le marbre (dash toward the "marble," or home plate).

Mr. Doucet, "created the perfect words" to bring the action to life, says Jean Lapointe, a popular Quebec entertainer who is now a member of Canada's Senate. "The quality of his language in French was incredible," says Mr. Lapointe, who used to have aides record games during his stage performances so he could listen to them later...

A wonderful piece of nostalgia, both baseball and linguistic.

Incidentally, there's a tornado watch over the Berkshires for the next hour, so if the house gets reduced to a pile of bricks, there may be a delay in posting...

Update. No tornado, just a rainstorm. And I was all prepared to blog from the cellar, too.

SAFIRE RETRACTS!

Back in April I took William Safire to task for peddling the nonexistent "Russian word" razbliuto (and I'm happy to report that that post is now the #1 Google hit for razbliuto, so seekers will find the information they need); his latest column ends with the following plangent paragraph:

In an article on the need to steal words from other languages to fill our vocabu-gap, I noted references to razbliuto, ''a feeling a person has for someone he or she once loved but no longer feels the same way about.'' It came to me from some Russian speakers but generated a dozen letters from others who insist that the word does not exist. These nyet-sayers are joined by the two experts I consulted, Austin and Patera at McGill. Others write that the word my original sources must have had in mind is the verb razliubit, which means simply ''to stop loving.''

Now, I don't believe for a second that "Russian speakers" told him this word exists (and in fact in his original column he said he got it from Christopher Moore's book In Other Words), but it's mildly impressive that he's taking the trouble to correct himself. Two cheers for Bill!

BARBAROUS SPEAKING.

You may or may not know that the verb atone comes from the phrase at one (it originally meant 'to be reconciled'); now that you do (if you didn't before), it may strike you as strange that the "one" part is pronounced so differently from the number. Well, that's the "correct" pronunciation; the one for the number has undergone a dialectal shift that also produced /wət/ for oat, although the latter has stayed dialectal. And the OED says: "The orthoepist C. Cooper (Grammatica (1685)) draws attention to the latter development when he describes the pronunciations wun for ‘one’ and wuts for ‘oats’ as ‘barbarous speaking.’" So there you have it: those who dutifully obey the dicta of modern orthoepists of the Safire variety should immediately cease using the barbarous pronunciation that has so unfortunately overtaken the word one. What matter if no one understands you? A small price to pay for knowing your usage is unimpeachable!

BUDGE/VERSE.

Derryl Murphy, a writer and editor who lives in Prince George, BC, and writes the blog Cold Ground, has a post about a couple of curious usages he's noticed among the kids of his neighborhood:

It's now proper to tell kids who jump the queue not to budge. Don't budge in line. Hey, no budging.

Also, when teams face each other in a sporting event, or when there is any other sort of contest, it's now Us verse Them. I versed him shooting hoops today. We'll verse the Lions in soccer tomorrow.

He asks "Is it a Prince George thing?" and I'm curious too: is anybody familiar with either of these innovations?

PARADICSOM.

On page 195 of Mason & Dixon, Pynchon writes: "Thro' the Efforts of Count Paradicsom, in any Case, a Band of these Aliens the Size of a Regiment, were presently arriv'd in Gloucestershire." Noting that the M&D index of references has not managed to find anything helpful to say about this in the eight years the book has been available for study, I thought I'd better point out here that paradicsom is the Hungarian word for both 'paradise' and (more commonly these days) 'tomato' (the latter comestible used to be called paradicsomalma 'paradise apple' until the mid-19th century). Since the Count was referred to just a few paragraphs earlier as "an Hungarian Intermediary," this should not have been too hard to figure out.

Incidentally, the paragraph just prior to the Count's appearance is interesting from a linguistic standpoint:

His Lordship, as Mason relates, requir'd a People who liv'd in quite another relation to Time,— one that did not, like our own, hold at its heart the terror of Time's passage,— far more preferably, Indifference to it, pure and transparent as possible. The Verbs of their language no more possessing tenses, than their Nouns Case-Endings,— for these People remain'd as careless of Sequences in Time as disengaged from Subjects, Objects, Possession, or indeed anything which might among Englishmen require a Preposition.

LAST WORDS.

I'm sorry to be so late with this—you've only got another day to get this week's New Yorker—but it has a moving piece by Elizabeth Kolbert, "Last Words," about the Eyak tribe of Alaska and the last native speaker of their language, Marie Smith Jones:

When I asked her how she felt about [being the last speaker], she said, "How would you feel if your baby died? If someone asked you, 'What was it like to see it lying in the cradle?' So think about that before you ask that kind of a question."

(One interesting point about the article is that it reproduces the scientific transcription of Eyak, which has things like an x with a dot under it.)

Update. Marie Smith died on January 21, 2008.

PLEXITY.

Still reading Mason & Dixon, and I've hit the following passage:

Below them the lamps were coming on in the Taverns, the wind was shaking the Plantations of bare Trees, the River ceasing to reflect, as it began to absorb, the last light of the Day. They were out in Greenwich Park, walking near Lord Chesterfield's House,— the Autumn was well advanced, the trees gone to Pen-Strokes and Shadows in crippl'd Plexity, bath'd in the declining light. A keen Wind flow'd about them. Down the Hill-side, light in colors of the Hearth was transmitted by window-panes more and less optickally true. Hounds bark'd in the Forest.

The word "plexity" stopped me cold. It's not in the OED or the big Webster's, it's not from a Latin *plexitas (-plex is only a suffix in Latin) and thus is not a plausible 18th-century formation, and the only modern use of it I can turn up is a sociological one that seems extremely unlikely to be relevant here: "Plexity refers to the type of transactions that we are involved in with other people. If, for example, Tom only ever plays squash with Barbara, the relationship would be considered a uniplex one. If however, Tom and Barbara lived, worked and socialised together it would be a multiplex one." (From "Language, Society and Power" by Rachael-Anne Knight: .doc file, HTML.) So what's going on here? Is it simply a nonce abbreviation for complexity, or something more... significant?

Addendum. The word occurs again on p. 505: "Yet aloft, in Map-space, origins, destinations, any Termini, hardly seem to matter,—one can apprehend all at once the entire plexity of possible journeys, set as one is above Distance, above Time itself."

JABAL AL-LUGHAT.

A couple of years ago I linked to Lameen Souag's Grammar of Algerian Darja; now I'm delighted to report he's started a language blog, Jabal al-Lughat, which means 'mountain of languages' in Arabic. Both his posts to date are extremely interesting: one is on the N'Ko alphabet invented by Soulemayne Kante in 1949 for the Manding languages Malinke, Bambara, Dyula and their dialects (Lameen explains "N'Ko is an old Manding term, meaning 'I say' in each of the mutually comprehensible Manding languages... and hence traditionally used as a general term to cover Manding"), and the other is on Rastafarian "blin'ty," which they substitute for city:

The people of the city, from a Rasta perspective, are "Babylon"; they don't see the truth, so why should the word "city" contain the sound of "see"? (In a Jamaican pronunciation, anyway...) Rather, they substitute the more appropriate syllable "blind"...

Ahlan wa sahlan!

SIX MONTHS OF IDIOCENTRISM.

John Emerson has been running Idiocentrism for six months now, and has taken stock of his goals and successes. He writes:

Idiocentrism is not a blog—I write very few topical or personal posts. I use this site to self-publish the fruit of about 43 years of study and thought. (Think of me as a freelance pamphleteer). This is my main publication forum, though I'm always willing to write for pay, and is also my only institutional affiliation.

My long-term plan is to publish 2000 words a week for ten years, if I live that long. (I'm on track). This will add up to more than a million words, and I hope for perhaps a fifth of what I publish to be of enduring value...

He's one of the most original and wide-ranging thinkers out there, and doing it without any institutional support. (He says, and I agree with him, that "the university has a negative effect on independent scholarship.") So drop by and show him some love, why doncha? And if you know how to get an RSS feed set up, he'd like to hear from you.

THE PARTICULATE RULE.

In case you've ever wondered whether to keep the particle "de" when referring to a person of Frenchness, here's the answer (courtesy of this thread at the newly resuscitated Wordorigins):

The rule is this - a "de" attached to a single-syllable name stays no matter what. Anything longer, and removal of the honorific means removal of the "de".

So you read de Gaulle's books, but you peruse Tocqueville's works - and Villepin's, as the minister is also an author.

And "de", by the way, is NEVER capitalised.

Just for the record, the new prime minister's full name is Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin. (It took me years to fully absorb the idea that Dominique could be a man's name; when I was a kid I was quite confused by the Singing Nun's "Dominique, nique, nique" and its references to "he.")

ALBANIAN LITERATURE.

Robert Elsie's Albanian authors in translation:

This web site contains the largest selection of Albanian literature ever to have appeared in English translation. It comprises a wide range of Albanian authors from past and present, including writers from Albania, Kosova and the Albanian diaspora. These translations are the fruits of over twenty years of research in the field of Albanian studies. Some were published, but most of them appear here for the first time.

Compared to other Balkan literatures, very little Albanian writing has ever been translated into English... The scarcity of translations of Albanian literature has, thus, nothing to do with a lack of quality in the original (although there are admittedly many works of dubious merit which would be better left untranslated), but simply rather with a lack of literary translators from Albanian into English. It is to be hoped that the situation will improve in the future.

In the meanwhile I trust that these modest translations of mine will provide some stimulus.

An excellent idea, and I hope it does something to raise the profile of Albanian literature. (Via the irreplaceable Plep.)

A point of information: although the more familiar Serbo-Croatian name Kosovo has the stress on the first syllable, the Albanian term Kosova has the stress on the middle syllable (ko-SO-va).

DICK & GARLICK IS BACK!

I'm delighted to report that R. Devraj, whose marvelous blog Dick & Garlick I discovered a while back, has picked up where he left off back in November, with posts on the dismissive term vernac, the "hybrid French-Tamil expression" bonjour maa, and other goodies. Welcome back, and stick around!